*Daily standup*

"What did you do yesterday?"

"Errr.... I appeared in 16 LinkedIn searches."

I've spent too much time online... I'm in a zoom meeting, I missed what someone said, reached to my keyboard to rewind then realised it was live... 🙈

What the fuck is this joke of an "event" for celebrating the 10th anniversary of this company...

I got a job. A job where I get to sit in front of a computer. I don't know what I'm doing yet... Developer is in the job title description. I'm scared. I'm excited. But most of all, I'm really glad that I get to stop stacking boxes for a living.

Something don't look right. 🤔

is it just me, or do some people just make life difficult for the fucking sake of making life difficult?

now, lets ignore the lack of sanitised data, lets also ignore the lack of prepared statements, and for the love of god... lets ignore some magic numbers, because I still don't know what they mean yet....

but why! why would you create an array, implode it, smash it into a database query on the fucking fly, instead of just adding the data into the query in the first place.... it's not like you were doing this right to begin with, but this... this is next level!

What if there was like a 1-2 day workshop that helped recruiters be more technically fluent? Like the basics of software development (not programming, but concepts and what engineers really do)?

The company a friend of mine works at ordered some CPUs. This is how they were delivered...

New project at work involving Google Nest Hubs, supervisor asks me to do the initial setup of one of them to start developing with it using its API.

I start looking throughout the documentation and realise that we need to setup a work google account in order to register the devices, pay a fee and only THEN be able to use Google's API for Smart Devices (damn, you, Google!). Supervisor is somewhat baffled by this, and in my head I'm also surprised by his reaction. I'd assume you'd research your devices before you buy them, right?

Later, he comes into the room I'm in (I'm still allowed to work on location), looks at the freshly setup Nest Hub, saying "wow, this sure is a much smaller screen than I was expecting". I mean, you did research these devices before you bought TWENTY of them. RIGHT?!

On my way to fight with this Google device-registration-API-thing now.

To be continued...

A UI its like a joke, if you have to explain it, its not good. =) =)

"Our code is self-documenting, we dont need comments" my fucking ass hole.

OK I can't deal with this user anymore.

This morning I get a text. "My laptop isn't getting emails anymore I'm not sure if this is why?" And attached is a screenshot of an email purporting to be from "The <company name> Team". Which isn't even close to the sort of language our small business uses in emails. This email says that his O365 password will soon be expiring and he needs to download the attached (.htm) file so he can keep his password. Never mind the fact that the grammar is awful, the "from" address is cheesy and our O365 passwords don't expire. He went ahead and, in his words, "Tried several of his passwords but none of them worked." This is the second time in less than a year that he's done this and I thought we were very clear that these emails are never real, but I'll deal with that later.

I quickly log into the O365 admin portal and reset his password to a randomly-generated one. I set this to be permanent since this isn't actually a password he should ever be needing to type. I call him up and explain to him that it was a phishing email and he essentially just gave some random people his credentials so I needed to reset them. I then help him log into Outlook on his PC with the new password. Once he's in, he says "so how do I reset this temporary password?" I tell him that no, this is his permanent password now and he doesn't need to remember it because he shouldn't ever need to be typing it anyway. He says "No no no that won't work I can't remember this." (I smile and nod to myself at this point -- THAT'S THE IDEA). But I tell him when he is in the office we will store the password in a password manager in case he ever needs to get to it. Long pause follows. "Can't I just set it back to what it was so I can remember it?"

RIP Adobe Flash

1996-2020

Someone on a C++ learning and help discord wanted to know why the following was causing issues.

char * get_some_data() {
char buffer[1000];
init_buffer(&buffer[0]);
return &buffer[0];
}

I told them they were returning a pointer to a stack allocated memory region. They were confused, didn't know what I was talking about.

I pointed them to two pretty decently written and succinct articles, the first about stack vs. heap, and the second describing the theory of ownership and lifetimes. I instructed to give them a read, and to try to understand them as best as possible, and to ping me with any questions. Then I promised to explain their exact issue.

Silence for maybe five minutes. They disregard the articles, post other code saying "maybe it's because of this...". I quickly pointed them back at their original code (the above) and said this is 100% an issue you're facing. "Have you read the articles?"

"Nope" they said, "I just skimmed through them, can you tell me what's wrong with my code?"

Someone else chimed in and said "you need to just use malloc()." In a C++ room, no less.

I said "@OtherGuy please don't blindly instruct people to allocate memory on the heap if they do not understand what the heap is. They need to understand the concepts and the problems before learning how C++ approaches the solution."

I was quickly PM'd by one of the server's mods and told that I was being unhelpful and that I needed to reconsider my tone.

Fuck this industry. I'm getting so sick of it.

"Tell it like it is, in a way they want to hear it." - Wihan Meerholz

I managed to get a group of people to use an open source and privacy respecting service instead of its proprietary (surveillance) competitors today.

The experience was good for everyone and I wouldn't be surprised if at least some people who participated will remember this good working FLOSS solution.

My work is done here for the day :)

'rona virus working from home thug life.

MS Teams, several people including my PM, my company's sales lead, and the top brass from the client.

Sharing my center monitor with some technical documents etc.

A wild messenger message appears from my wife with the contents, "I'm gonna come home for lunch and fuck you sideways."

I'd put the amount of time it took me to mouse up there and flick that thing off the screen at about 900 miliseconds.

How fucked (in addition to sideways) am I?

Tl;dr ~ Fucked my wife. Fucked my life.

Get enough sleep..

!rant

We just did a massive update to our prod db environment that would implicate damn near all system in our servers....on a friday.

Luckily for us, our DB is a badass rockstar mfking hero that was planning this shit for a little over a year with the assistance of yours truly as backup following the man's lead...and even then I didn't do SHIT

My boy did great, tested everything and the switch was effortless, fast (considering that it went on during working hours) and painless.

I salute my mfking dude, if i make my own company I am stealing this mfker. Homie speaks in SQL, homie was prolly there when SQL was invented and was already speaking in sql before shit was even set in spec, homie can take a glance at a huge db and already cast his opinion before looking at the design and architecture, homie was Data Science before data science was a thing.

Homie is my man crush on the number one spot putting mfking henry cavill on second place.

Homie wakes up and pisses greatness.

Homie is the man. Hope yall have the same mfking homie as I do

We do more than just pay you in exposure

So I migrated over to ja.stackoverflow.com, which is just the japanese version of stackoverflow, and realized how much different japanese devs are to the american ones Im used too.

On the standard StackOverflow I would see people argue and lots of questions would be downvoted. but on its japanese counterpart if you even ask for a little more context on a question they speak to you as if you were there boss. They also always say thank you sir at the end of their comment.

Im tempted to just keep google translate open and stay on ja.stackoverflow

I find it annoying when non-tech savvy people criticize the Parler devs for using AWS because "it's Amazon they had it coming", I don't know the devs or company behind that website, I've never used it, but wtf man do you have any idea what's involved in building, deploying and maintaining a platform like that or any other similar? ffs you would barely be able to write an HTML blog by yourself and you dare judge devs for using AWS. fuck off.

I agree with the sentiment, it sucks, if my platform was removed from AWS I probably would keep it that way because I don't have the money to afford the hardware nor am I somewhere that's readily available and that's what is really sad it would suck that just because Amazon doesn't like you or you don't have the influence to fight it you and your userbase can go fuck off. Very bad precedent, it is discouraging.

PM: Ok Android, i've reviewed the latest build, you are good to release. Waiting on iOS's build to test.

Me: ... are we not holding all builds until we hear back from backend about that bug?, as we likely have to change something on our side?

PM: Which bug?

Me: ... the only one we discussed yesterday in the team meeting.

PM: How many customers is it affecting?

Me: that we know of, one ... the CEO of our company

PM: oh that one, yeah were not doing that anymore.

Me: WHAT? i've been waiting all day / night to hear back. Why are we not doing this?

PM: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ... Everything is too messy at the minute anyway, the release plan is changing every day. Need to keep it back in line.

Me: ... the plan has changed exactly once. We had a plan at the start of last week for the last release, we changed it YESTERDAY to include 2 critical bug fixes. The only issue with the plan changing is nobody telling us these aren't bugs anymore

PM: We can discuss tomorrow in the team meeting.

CEO: oh hey guys, yeah we pulled that bug fix. Its not really a bug, more like a missing feature. No way it will get done before xmas. Going to live with the way it works for now and fix it properly next year.

Me: Ok, fair enough, but we really need to be told these decisions.

CEO: sure, sorry, didn't think anyone was blocked by this. What was the blocker?

Me: ..... you asked me yesterday to get this bug fix in the build ... you asked for the final build to be made today so we can go through the app store review. As we all discussed yesterday, today is kind of the last day we can really do this.

CEO: ok, its late, we can discuss this tomorrow in the team meeting.

Me: ..... ..... ..... ..... sure

So I'm tryna register for classes using my college's portal, and I click on "add/drop classes", and an entire Java stack trace gets dumped on my screen, with a warning at the bottom not to expose these errors to production in order not to let potential attackers know about how your backend works. I guess nobody at the college ever read that message.

*has a great company name idea*
*tries to register domain*
*domain taken*
*looks at whois*
*i already own it*
i don’t know how to feel

What happened to the warm welcome that new users received back in the day? Now when someone posts their first rant people bash on details and give them no chance. I remember posting half-dumb rants, but no one gave me shit for that. It takes time to grow into a community, you can't just expect people to behave identically to the rest. Makes me a bit disappointed to be fair.

We. Have. Learned. Nothing.

It's painful.

That feeling when your favourite function in the code is updated by another dev, only to make it look worse by adding tons of arguments ( T_T)

You have to assume mongodb didn't make it that far 😁