This ... Makes me saddd

While writing code...

D: “Did the attackers exfiltrate any data?”

M: “I can’t say for sure, but most likely based on—”

D: “—but did you find any undeniable evidence of it?”

M: “Keep in mind that the absence of evidence isn’t necessarily evidence of absence. There was very limited logging to begin with and the attacker erased artifacts and logs.”

D: “If there’s no evidence, then there was no exfiltration.”

M: “If a business doesn’t have cameras on its front door and then gets robbed, it can’t claim there was no robbery just because they didn’t video-record it.”

D: “That’s a poor analogy. Nothing’s missing here. I couldn’t care less if a robber made a *copy* of my money. That isn’t robbery.”

M: “... If the Titanic really hit an iceberg, then how come no pieces of an iceberg were ever found in the wreckage?”

Big event. Massive traffic in production, so we were monitoring all night.

I was in a room with 2 devs of my team, a marketting girl, my boss and a designer... chilling.

Suddenly the production is down.

Boss: production is down, anyone can check?
Me: already on it
Dev1: it looks ok for me
Dev2: me too
Me: wait what? Impossible everything is down
Dev1: oh I refreshed the page it's not working
Me: don't stay on the page refreshing it like you are fucking monkeys. Give me useful intel or be quiet.
Market girl: is it working?
...
Guys is it working?
...
Hello?
Me: Not yet we are looking. Don't distract me.
Boss: client called us. They want it online now.
Dev1&2: he's looking
... 1 min later...
Boss: is it working?
Boss: is it working?
Boss: is it working?
Me: SHUT THE FUCK FOR FUCKING ONE SECOND. ALL OF YOU, OUT NOW. YOU ARE FUCKING MONKEYS WHO CAN'T DO SHIT. IF YOU CAN'T HELP JUST SHUT YOUR DAMN SHITHOLE. DEVS, LOOK WITH ME. MARKET GIRL PREPARE A FUCKING POST-MORTEM MAIL. BOSS GET THE CLIENT ON THE PHONE AND STALE. DO. YOUR. FUCKING. JOBS.

That's how I ended up screaming at everyone... the rest of the night went in complete silence and I fixed the issue 2min after the got quiet or busy.

It's never a good sign when a team lead writes code like this

I just love going through the code review gauntlet doing maintenance work, don’t you?

(“boyscout rule” = “leave it better than you found it”)

Worst Person you Interviewed?

I interview many developers at my company. Today, I interviewed someone who seemed fairly qualified. Then I spotted a large gap I his resume. When I enquirer about the gap, he disclosed that he had served prison time for pedophilia. He further disclosed that as a condition of his release, he had to be supervised when using a computer.

As we are a gov/medical company, we are not allowed to hire people with a criminal record. He begged me but I told him that it was again company policy. I felt sorry for him not finding any work and being forced to beg, but I also had a knot in my stomach over the details his crime that he elaborated on.

Anyway, he scored 0 out of 10 on my interview scale.

Right after him, I interviewed another developer who seemed great on paper but when I proved further, he didn’t know jack about JavaScript, despite his resume show him to be a “jQuery expert”!

So, I asked him what he does in his spare time and how me keeps his development skill/knowledge up to date. He said:

“...no, I don’t study this shit in my spare time... I’m not a facking need!!!”

I stopped the interview right there. I might sware here on DV, but it my office I keep it civil & professional. So I certainly do not appreciate it when a diaper wearing, snotty nosed, junior wanker swares in my offices to merely protect his willful ignorance and shows pathetic pride instead of humility. That interview comes to an end immediately!

The pedo got a 0 out of 10, but this brat scored a -5 out of 10!!!

I have so many interview stories I could tell you...

#fml

Was working and decided to go get a drink so I Took my headphones off.
Just in time to hear a colleague say: (in Dutch it sounds better) Beste Bob, krijg de tering.

English equivilant: dear bob, go fuck yourself.

Giggled hard 😆

We had a Commodore64. My dad used to be an electrical engineer and had programs on it for calculations, but sometimes I was allowed to play games on it.

When my mother passed away (late 80s, I was 7), I closed up completely. I didn't speak, locked myself into my room, skipped school to read in the library. My dad was a lovely caring man, but he was suffering from a mental disease, so he couldn't really handle the situation either.

A few weeks after the funeral, on my birthday, the C64 was set up in my bedroom, with the "programmers reference guide" on my desk. I stayed up late every night to read it and try the examples, thought about those programs while in school. I memorized the addresses of the sound and sprite buffers, learnt how programs were managed in memory and stored on the casette.

I worked on my own games, got lost in the stories I was writing, mostly scifi/fantasy RPGs. I bought 2764 eproms and soldered custom cartridges so I could store my finished work safely.

When I was 12 my dad disappeared, was found, and hospitalized with lost memory. I slipped through the cracks of child protection, felt responsible to take care of the house and pay the bills. After a year I got picked up and placed in foster care in a strict Christian family who disallowed the use of computers.

I ran away when I was 13, rented a student apartment using my orphanage checks (about €800/m), got a bunch of new and recycled computers on which I installed Debian, and learnt many new programming languages (C/C++, Haskell, JS, PHP, etc). My apartment mates joked about the 12 CRT monitors in my room, but I loved playing around with experimental networking setups. I tried to keep a low profile and attended high school, often faking my dad's signatures.

After a little over a year I was picked up by child protection again. My dad was living on his own again, partly recovered, and in front of a judge he agreed to be provisory legal guardian, despite his condition. I was ruled to be legally an adult at the age of 15, and got to keep living in the student flat (nation-wide foster parent shortage played a role).

OK, so this sounds like a sobstory. It isn't. I fondly remember my mom, my dad is doing pretty well, enjoying his old age together with an nice woman in some communal landhouse place.

I had a bit of a downturn from age 18-22 or so, lots of drugs and partying. Maybe I just needed to do that. I never finished any school (not even high school), but managed to build a relatively good career. My mom was a biochemist and left me a lot of books, and I started out as lab analyst for a pharma company, later went into phytogenetics, then aerospace (QA/NDT), and later back to pure programming again.

Computers helped me through a tough childhood.

They awakened a passion for creative writing, for math, for science as a whole. I'm a bit messed up, a bit of a survivalist, but currently quite happy and content with my life.

I try to keep reminding people around me, especially those who have just become parents, that you might feel like your kids need a perfect childhood, worrying about social development, dragging them to soccer matches and expensive schools...

But the most important part is to just love them, even if (or especially when) life is harsh and imperfect. Show them you love them with small gestures, and give their dreams the chance to flourish using any of the little resources you have available.

Q: How long did the loop take?

A: For a while

Another dev on my team just got a new machine. Before he came in today I made two separate USB installers and left him these notes.

I grew up poor. First time I saw a computer face to face was when I was 11 years old. Back then any other references to computers came through media. I genuinely believed that hacking was as seen on TV, didn't even question 2 idiots 1 keyboard and thought it was genius to unplug a computer during "an attack"

Fact is I arrived in this country when I was 11. By the time I had my first laptop I was around 13-14, as you can imagine it went really poorly for someone who was just awarded a machine of never-ending stories and entertainment with absolute fear that a single mistake can cause everything to crash and burn. Heck, I remember when I went to Vodafone and someone recommended Firefox, it was such a novelty back then, heh.

I didn't understand computers. My IT lessons were replaced to work on my dialect, but truth be told it was an awful waste of time. I've learned more from forums than I ever learned from any English teacher. I just sat there twidling my thumbs in agitation.

With no concept of what IT industry entitles (my idea of programming was cubicles and call centres), I never had a slightest clue programming could be for me. I always thought of myself closer to engineering or physics type, but that never really drew my interests. So I dwelled in depression thinking I'm broken. Useless. That there was no calling for me.

I'm 22. For the past year I dipped in and out of programming, it still felt like such black magic.vLast month or so the spell dispelled and I finally feel like my eyes have been opened. I've spent the past 3 days sitting in front of my computer learning or actively programming, with occasional dips into DevRant reading your stories, frustrations and victories and I truly feel at home.

In retrospect I feel like I made the right decision for not chasing any mathematical/physics/engineering degrees, while certainly a goal of mine, I feel like I'd be miserable in those communities. They're closer to hobbies, really.

I guess what I wanted to say is thank you. Thank you DevRant for being the spark in my null future and giving me a sense of purpose and belonging. For the first time I feel like I can make it, like there was hope somewhere over the horizon.

I told my husband that High Hefner died last week and he responded with:

So, there’s a job vacancy at the PlayBoy mansion?

Men!

I see a lot of people with stickers on their laptops and I was wondering... anyone else removes every sticker from theirs? Even the original ones like intel or nvidia etc? I always found that a laptop looks "cleaner" without any stickers at all...

Two unit tests, no integration tests.

Lecturer I am a TA for said AT LEAST twice that the summaries should be executive summaries. With introduction, supporting paragraphs, and a conclusion while explaining the assignment in class.

Notice the plural form of paragraphs. WHY THE HOLY HELL am I grading papers that are a paragraph, or don't progress fluidly. Or look like a 4th grader wrote them instead of a college student about to graduate????

It's not that hard.
And if i have to send one more email repeating the requirements one more time including "yes, i will deduct points for bad grammar" the class is getting DDoSed. Idgaf. This is university, people. You should know this. Can confirm i write executive summaries regularly. Bosses want updates.

"We'll fix that later!"

"Older versions are more stable"

The whole concept of LTS in development pisses me off.

Delayed upgrading, whether it's the language itself, dependencies or tooling, does just one thing: It makes future upgrading way more difficult, often to the point where the company eventually runs into this maintainability wall, and gets stuck in old, unsupported versions.

"But... stability!" — The tiny chance that the newer version has such serious stability regressions that it negatively impacts your own product doesn't weigh up against the clusterfuck you fall into if you push the task too far into the future.

You can relatively easily assess a new major language version using benchmarks and unit tests. Predicting the repercussions of staying on PHP 5.4 or Python 2.7 for another year, predicting the impact of upgrading the codebase later, that is almost impossible.

I'm not saying you should live on the bleeding edge in production, but as soon as a new stable version of a core technology is released, just fucking drop everything you're doing and port those deprecated methods!

"Hardcode it for now so the client can test it, then we'll fix it later."

Never fixed.

The plural of code is code, not codes.

That moment when the client is actually happy with your design. From the beginning.
And requests no changes.

My father while I was tinkering in the workshop :
"You see, I think you chose the wrong studies, you would have liked something else like material science a lot more."
At this moment my face took a question mark shape.
"Wait.. What? I mean... You know, I quit mechanical engineering to computer science, I actually made this decision because I thought it was better for me."
Him :
"But you will never have a good job in it. Material science for example is the booming industry, it's the future."
"What the... No, just no. Every year at my university several mechanical engineering students get thrown out because they can't even find an internship. Whereas most CS students find more than one and end up sharing job offers with their friends. And talk about an interesting job, in the mechanical domain everything already exists and it's just a matter of applying the same boring standards over and over again, when it's not just pure technician managing. In CS new technologies and tools appear regularly, keeping it interesting because evolution is hardly limited by real life physics, just by one's brain."

Pissed me off.

not universal, but works for me:

1. start listening to long video/podcast/talkshow i'm interested in

2. (optional) think about all the physical things i should do, such as cleaning the house, running errands, etc. conclude "nah, i'd rather stay at the computer".

3. open the project i'm working on, thinking "while i listen, i might as well muck about with this for a bit". the key is for the thought to be duration-indeterminate and non-commital, so it feels like an idea for a voluntary idle activity.

4. start mucking around with the project, starting with the simplest smallest tasks, to slowly shift my focus away from what i'm listening to, so it gradually becomes the background thing as the work gets into foreground of my concentration without me even noticing. this also naturally shifts me towards the more important and complicated tasks in the project

5. naturally lose track of time, realizing i've been working for 2 to 3 hours without break only after what i'm listening to ends (sometimes not even then)

6. at that point, take a break, stretch my legs, get some food, watch some 20-30 minute thing with full attention.

7. find a new long-form mostly audio thing to listen to, and go to step 4. repeat.

8. i found i can work like this 8 to sometimes 20 hours straight in a nice atmosphere, without feeling like i spent the time working with all the mental exhaustion it brings, instead it feeling like "i was listening to interesting/entertaining things and mucking around with some stuff on the side", with all the feeling of "i've been idling the whole time" except the work is actually done, or at least i made a progress. it feels almost like procrastinating except without the guilt because i can see i've done a lot through that time. kind of a good compromise between total procrastination and working your ass off into complete anxiety/depression

Dear people who complain about spending a whole night to find a tiny syntax error; Every time I read one of your rants, I feel like a part of me dies.

As a developer, your job is to create elegant optimized rivers of data, to puzzle with interesting algorithmic problems, to craft beautiful mappings from user input to computer storage and back.

You should strive to write code like a Michelangelo, not like a house painter.

You're arguing about indentation or getting annoyed by a project with braces on the same line as the method name. You're struggling with semicolons, misplaced braces or wrongly spelled keywords.

You're bitching about the medium of your paint, about the hardness of the marble -- when you should be lamenting the absence of your muse or the struggle to capture the essence of elegance in your work.

In other words:

Fix your fucking mindset, and fix your fucking tools. Don't fucking rant about your tabs and spaces. Stop fucking screaming how your bloated swiss-army-knife text editor is soooo much better than a purpose-built IDE, if it fails to draw something red and obnoxious around your fuck ups.

Thanks.

Application(s) that remind you to take care of your hands [more details]

Moment.js, because without it, formatting and converting JS Date objects to other timezones is a bitch

The customer told us that we have had a good momentum lately and that we need to keep it so that we can finish on time. What makes me frustrated is that what he perceives as "momentum" actually is increasing technical debt and overtime work...

When carpal tunnel limits your rantability ✊✊✊✊👊👊

USB in a nutshell

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." - Douglas Adams