HR sent around updated contracts asking everyone to sign them since the company changed its name, fair enough.

In the contract it stated "Your normal place of work will be X" - only X was many miles away, and I'd never worked there, never planned too. Assumed it was a mistake, sent it back. HR refused to change it, stating that the "normal place of work does not need to be the place where you normally work."

A lot of back and forth entailed, I refused to sign, I was reprimanded for not doing so, I was asked what my problem was as it made no material difference, and then I eventually replied with:

"Angela, I'm refusing to sign this as it's factually incorrect. No further explanation is required. I'll maybe consider signing this if you sign a piece of paper declaring you believe the moon is made of cheese, and you're the cow the milk came from to make it."

A very strongly worded email came back about how this was going on my record, I needed to offer a formal apology, etc. - all cc'd to my manager. I replied back, again copying my manager in, stating that this was ok, as I couldn't remain at a company who forced employees to sign dodgy contracts anyway.

Problem was (for them), I was a *massive* single point of failure for them at this point owing to some others leaving with no handover - hence I knew I wasn't going to be the casualty here. My manager flipped the lid at HR, got the CEO involved on threat of *him* leaving, and the whole thing massively blew up. Happy ending in that the HR person in question was fired, everyone else's contracts also had to be redone (I assumed everyone else just signed without looking which is worrying), and I actually got a pay rise out of it when higher ups realised the massive single point of failure I was.

But damn, I would've walked over crap like that. Walked pretty soon after anyway!

Me: "Hmm. I should center this image."

img {
align-self: center;
}

CSS: "LOL, no. Intuitively, as a first logical guess at forgotten CSS syntax, that seems like what you ought to type. But this world makes no sense and my creator was a sadist. Here's what you actually need to do."

img {
clear: both;
display: block;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
float: none;
}

So I just spent the last few hours trying to get an intro of given Wikipedia articles into my Telegram bot. It turns out that Wikipedia does have an API! But unfortunately it's born as a retard.

First I looked at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API and almost thought that that was a Wikipedia article about API's. I almost skipped right over it on the search results (and it turns out that I should've). Upon opening and reading that, I found a shitload of endpoints that frankly I didn't give a shit about. Come on Wikipedia, just give me the fucking data to read out.

Ctrl-F in that page and I find a tiny little link to https://mediawiki.org/wiki/... which is basically what I needed. There's an example that.. gets the data in XML form. Because JSON is clearly too much to ask for. Are you fucking braindead Wikipedia? If my application was able to parse XML/HTML/whatevers, that would be called a browser. With all due respect but I'm not gonna embed a fucking web browser in a bot. I'll leave that to the Electron "devs" that prefer raping my RAM instead.

OK so after that I found on third-party documentation (always a good sign when that's more useful, isn't it) that it does support JSON. Retardpedia just doesn't use it by default. In fact in the example query that was a parameter that wasn't even in there. Not including something crucial like that surely is a good way to let people know the feature is there. Massive kudos to you Wikipedia.. but not really. But a parameter that was in there - for fucking CORS - that was in there by default and broke the whole goddamn thing unless I REMOVED it. Yeah because CORS is so useful in a goddamn fucking API.

So I finally get to a functioning JSON response, now all that's left is parsing it. Again, I only care about the content on the page. So I curl the endpoint and trim off the bits I don't need with jq... I was left with this monstrosity.

curl "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php/...=*" | jq -r '.query.pages[0].revisions[0].slots.main.content'

Just how far can you nest your JSON Wikipedia? Are you trying to find the limits of jq or something here?!

And THEN.. as an icing on the cake, the result doesn't quite look like JSON, nor does it really look like XML, but it has elements of both. I had no idea what to make of this, especially before I had a chance to look at the exact structured output of that command above (if you just pipe into jq without arguments it's much less readable).

Then a friend of mine mentioned Wikitext. Turns out that Wikipedia's API is not only retarded, even the goddamn output is. What the fuck is Wikitext even? It's the Apple of wikis apparently. Only Wikipedia uses it.

And apparently I'm not the only one who found Wikipedia's API.. irritating to say the least. See e.g. https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/...

Needless to say, my bot will not be getting Wikipedia integration at this point. I've seen enough. How about you make your API not retarded first Wikipedia? And hopefully this rant saves someone else the time required to wade through this clusterfuck.

I wish all open source desktop applications had the same combination of expert features and polish as Blender.

The state of FOSS applications for creating diagrams, DB management & ERD, drawing SVGs, editing video, slideshow presentations, document processing, etc -- Yeah just all of it seems to be either stuck in some 90's UX paradigm, or it's a basic-as-fuck Electron app with 12 buttons for toddlers.

I know... I know... it's FOSS, can't be entitled.

But there's a part of me that really wants to be.

Fuck it, I'm just going to be entitled.

FUCK YOU LAZY FOSS DEVS, GET YOUR FUCKING SHIT TOGETHER AND MAKE SOME MODERN APPS. THROW YOUR GTK TOOLKIT BULLSHIT IN THE TRASH, GO CHOKE ON YOUR RETARDED WINDOWS-95 THEMED TOOLBARS, AND START MOTHERFUCKING COMPETING. YOU'RE BEING SURPASSED BY VENDOR LOCKED $50/MONTH CLOUD ABOMINATIONS MADE FOR COKE SNORTING DIMWITS. DON'T GIVE ME THAT "BUT PEOPLE WORK ON IT FOR FREE" CRAP, IF BLENDER CAN MAKE A GREAT COMPETING PRODUCT THEN SO CAN YOU.

Ah, completely unjustified and unfair.

But it still feels really, REALLY great to get it off my chest.

Now that I have descended from my soapbox, I'll go drag my useless developer ass over to the nearest FOSS project and see how I can contribute to a slightly less depressing future.

"I'm a cook. I have a lot of experience... so, don't question me there - but I have this one question: I have some food. I need to make it hot. What library can I use to make hot? Please help. I'm on a deadline."

"Hell is other people's code." Jean-Paul Sartre

Most hated language features?

PL/SQL:
• it exists

XSLT:
• it also exists

PHP:
• it still exists.

VB:
• Significant parentheses: `subName` calls the subroutine, and `subName()` calls the subroutine and gets a return value. If you use the wrong invocation, it yells at you. Why!?
• For reasons unknown, you can only have `sleep` appear once per codebase. (So put it in a function!)

Ruby:
• It’s bloody easy to write code with absolute shit performance, and it kind of feels encouraged because of just how easy Ruby makes everything. Less critical thinking means worse performance, and Ruby’s blissful elegance encourages mental laziness.
• Minor: You cannot pass a hash as the first method parameter without enclosing it in parentheses, ex:`method({key: value})`. This is due to the ambiguous case between passing a hash argument and a (curly) block/proc (`method {|args| code}`). This could be remedied pretty easily with a little bit of look ahead.
• Minor: There is no `elsif` for `unless` (a negated if). Why? No reason given.

Python:
• no block endings, so nested code can be extremely difficult to follow.

Bash:
• The freaking syntax oh god why.

All languages:
• rand vs rand() vs Rand vs Rand() vs rnd vs RND vs random() vs random vs randInt() vs Math.random() vs Math.randInt() vs ...

GraphQL people: REST sucks because it causes unnecessary data fetching and extra requests.

Also GraphQL people: "PicoLooper - A <200 LOC 🤏 ninja-grade 🥷 bulletproof 🔫 solution for the n+1 request problem 🙅 made with love ❤️"

I still can't understand why people hate Javascript?

Client-side router entirely in CSS

You acting tough with juniors but you spit on your hotdog before eating it

I hired my first employee and hes starting on Monday! Can you give me some advices on how to onboard him smoothly and be a good boss?

Client: This new feature is not working on Internet Explorer.
Me: Do you have enough oxygen in the cave you are living in?

ON MONDAY

TL: Why the hell you require a month to integrate this engine?

Me: It will take that much time, can't help it.

TL: it can be done within a week.

Me: Then you do it.

TL: Ok I will show how it's done in a week.

ON FRIDAY

Me: What's the status on that integration?

TL: Oh yeah about that, you have to carry it ahead, I have some monitoring to do.

Me: Ok, give me the repository access, I will carry it ahead.

ME OPENS REPOSITORY.

There's only a new controller file with nothing it.

Request: Stackoverflow-like theme for devRant so I can chill and read rants on work while the rest of my colleagues believe I'm working/ investigating a bug

:)

I've noticed a weird bug with the Google Assistant swapping the scores when you ask it about sports.

Check comments for what I mean

Dude I want to ask you , It's possible for me to call myself as a software engineer if I always got a cancer when I try to create HTML template ? I'm suck as fuck on front-end, I can't even create a single HTML template even if you give me help with css framework. I don't know what to do with HTML and CSS, they're totally fucked up my life.

First they came for the atheists, and I didn't speak out - because I'm not an atheist

Then they came for the university teachers, and I didn't speak out - because I don't like universities

Then they came for the gamers, and I didn't speak out - because I don't play videogames

Then they came for Open Source and I didn't speak out - because "anyone can fork it"

Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak out for me

I know I butchered the poem and I'm not comparing our social situation to the Holocaust (obviously), but I think it kind of illustrates that silence and gradually giving up ideals like justice and meritocracy can end up badly.

I also encourage you to read the actual poem it's pretty nice and food for thought.

What profession would you say is most like software development? I'd love to be able to give people an idea of what I do, without making it sound like witchcraft...

MS-DOS is now open source.

https://github.com/Microsoft/...

Can anyone show me a good place to learn how to use vim?

Been googling and found nothing that's actually understandable

> When the intern claims that nginx is serving more request than apache

Recruiter: how many years of experience do you have?
Me : 4
Recruiter: the client wants someone with a minimum of 5 years
Me : okay then, let me know if anything else is available.
Recruiter: You can change your resume... just add a year.
Me : ???? No thanks
Recruiter: they’ll never know ... you can tell them later
Me : ....

You know the Microsoft guy who installed Chrome because Edge crashed.

Don't judge him that much!
The guys at Google use Microsoft's VSCode for their Firebase. Also they use Typescript.

Our company (if any) shouldn't determine the tools we use. I haven't used Edge, but they recently added full Css Grid support. I'm gonna give it a try for a week or two...

So, someone submitted a 'bug' to Mozilla.

As some of you may know, in the next year, the new mass surveillance law in the Netherlands is going into effect.

Another fun fact is that the dutch security agencies/government have their own CA (Certificate Authority) for SSL/TLS certificates.

The new law says that the AIVD (dutch NSA/GCHQ equivilant) is allowed to hack into systems through obtained certificates and also that they're allowed to INTERCEPT TRAFFIC THROUGH OBTAINED PRIVATE SSL/TLS KEYS.

So someone actually had the fucking balls to submit a fucking issue to Mozilla saying that the Dutch State certs shouldn't be accepted anymore when the new mass surveillance law gets into place.

This person deservers a fucking medal if you ask me.

So... I learnt a couple things today about C++ language which I didn’t know before...

1. float var = 5.9;
std::cout << ( var == 5.9 );

// shows 0 (false) coz of float and double thing... apparently, 5.9 isn’t automatically converted to float when compared to one 🤔

2. arr[ i ] == i[ arr ]

Well... I guess I now like my college 1% more from the previous % whatever that was 😊☺️

Went to hackathon
Earlier Thinking :- C language is father of all

Now :- Python is Godfather LOL ☺☺☺

How millionaires deal with laptops.

1. Buy a gaming laptop.
2. Install any OS.
3. Open IE11.
4. Place cursor in the new search bar in top right.
5. Type 4k wallpapers.
6. Download anything.
7. Open in MS Photos.
8. Right click, Set as > Wallpaper BG
9. Leave it in the corner.
10. Sell it at double 2 days later.

Short story time.

The last girl I dated was a proper geek. Like the kind of geek another geek wants. So one fine day she told me that she was making a greeting card for me. I was happy. After a few weeks she gave me the card and it was really cute. I loved it.

I reached home and received an email from her with a link in it. It was the link to a website she had made where each message from the card was deciphered to the real message.

DAAAAMNNN😱😱

That wasn't all. She didn't want the entire thing to be too easy. So the deciphered messages were password protected and I had to guess it.

Boss walked towards his office asking a coworker to do something.
Coworker replied that he'd like to but only the boss has the login codes or something like that.

Boss: ah right *walks to coworkers table* let me enter that stuff *starts typing*
Coworker: Maybe I'm running a keylogger 😏
Me: *exchanging funny eye contact with coworker* yeah maybe he is.... 😏
Boss: *looking back and forth at both our faces suspiciously*
Coworker: 😏😏😏
Me: 😏😏😏
Coworker: 😏😉
Me: 😏😆
Boss: 😐

*three of us laughing*

😆