May IE burn in hell.

One time I was trying to get something positioned properly, and it worked on all browsers except IE. There was this little gap between two divs and I couldn't get rid of it. In desperation after hours of troubleshooting and lots of CSS attempts with no solution, I removed the whitespace from between the two divs in the HTML:

<div>...</div>
<div>...</div>

to:

<div>...</div><div>...</div>

And voila! No more gap when looking at the rendered page.

FML I hate you, IE.

One of our existing clients who used to pay for two of our products but now only pays for one just called us. The one he canceled is a loss prevention product that tracks internal theft in stores. He canceled it because he didn't feel it was worth it.

Now, he's calling us from a police station because he's trying to press charges against one of his managers because they were presumably stealing from him.

"Hey I need to know how many times this person stole from me over the last few months and I need to know it now because I'm at the police station."

With just a few clicks that would be an easy figure to retrieve for him had he not canceled our product.

My stance is he can get lost. I don't even think he sees the irony of canceling because "it isn't worth it" and then "asap" needing the data that the "worthless" product provides. Of course, he wants it without reactivating the subscription.

Unbelievable.

With luck like this I'll be buying a lottery ticket next.

The same thing I do every year, Pinky.

Try to take over the world!

Not exactly vacation, but there was this nice-to-have feature in our application that I coded up in the hospital after my wife gave birth to our son. I wrote it during the downtime while they were both sleeping.

When I hit the endpoint from Postman it works. When I hit the endpoint from my application that pushes data to the endpoint it doesn't work, returning a 404 status code. I KNOW the endpoint is there and operational and that both Postman and my application have the same endpoint configured, letter for letter.

So lost. So confused. What the hell is going on.

I decide to install Fiddler to monitor the traffic to see if I can see anything helpful.

I initiate the request again from the application and immediately see that the request size is huge. BAM. It immediately hits me, the payload to the endpoint is too big and the server is "rejecting" it with a 404. I post a smaller request with the application and it works fine.

Yay, saved by Fiddler.

Why does the endpoint default to 404 in such scenarios. The definition of 404: "the client was able to communicate with a given server, but the server could not find what was requested"

In my case, the 404 returned was a red herring. I understand that the substatus code gives more information on why the 404 was returned, in my case the request size being too big, but 404 in general feels like the wrong status code to return because the endpoint IS there. It made me troubleshoot the wrong thing.

Thanks, IIS.

Satisfying commit.

Not a coding test, but:

Them: So you are interviewing for a programmer opening. Do you like programming?

Me: yes.

Them: do you make logos?

Me: ...I can...?

Them: good because you won't always be writing code here.

Me: I'm out.

Hours lost.

Visual Studio test adapter was failing out during the discover phase of the tests with a stack overflow exception, but that's all the information it gave me. The tests simply would not run.

Hunting through the code line by line, I eventually find this.

WHY IS THIS ALLOWED TO COMPILE

At my first job, I got tired of having to type a user name and password every time I debugged the web application. Thinking I was clever, I put in a hack so that if you launched the application with the query string "?user=Administrator" it would log you in as the administrator. So much typing saved!

A couple days after the next release, I realized it shipped like that. In absolute horror, I walked into my boss' office, closed the door, and told him the tale of my mistake.

He just looked back at me, and after a moment or two said, "Loose lips sink ships."

And that was it.

Will you just behave, dammit.

-Me wrestling with CSS

Vacation starting tomorrow! I'm going to BlizzCon! How much do you want to bet I will be roped into doing some emergency work while I'm there??

A recent project actually taught me how HORRIBLY STUPID it is to store large bodies of text in a SQL Server database. There were millions of records with pages of compressed text each.

More and more text records pile on every single day. Needless to say it was becoming super slow and backups were taking WAY too long.

After refactoring them out as compressed files to disk storage (I love you, micro-services) and dropping them completely from the database, the backup size went from 90gb to 3gb!

It's not every day you get to see a dramatic result like that from a refactor.

Lesson learned, and yes it was quite cool.

Notifications are not being sent from github to slack. Ok. Looks like that legacy slack github integration that has been telling us its no longer supported for months has finally been deactivated.

Fine. I'll cave and upgrade all 45 of our repos to the new integration.

Thousands of clicks later, finally done.

*but wait*

"Notifications still don't work?"

That's when I saw this notice on github.

FML I want my hour back.

I see it evolving the same way it always has done. The technology will keep changing for the better and the best stuff will emerge on top.

You have a choice to fight the current of new technology that is always flowing by learning and adapting to what comes. If you don't, and you stay stagnant with your chosen tech and skill level, the current will eventually carry away your relevance.

It's natural selection. You have to fight or die.

(I wrote most of this as a comment in reply about Microsoft buying GitHub on another rant but decided to move it here because it is rant worthy. Also, no, I'm not a Microsoft employee nor do I have any Microsoft stock).

Microsoft buying GitHub makes sense. They contribute more to the open source community on GitHub than any other company. (Side note, they also contribute/have contributed to the Linux Kernel).

Steve Ballmer isn't running the show anymore. Because of that, we have awesome things like:

* Visual Studio Code - Completely free and powerful light weight IDE for coding in just about any script or language. This IDE is also open source, hosted on GitHub. It can be installed on Win/Mac/Linux.

* Visual Studio Community Edition: fully featured flagship IDE free for solo developers and students, can be installed on Win/Mac.

* Fully featured Sql Server running in a Docker container.

* .Net Core, which can be compiled to native binaries of Windows, MacOS AND Linux. You can't even do that with Java, you have to first have the JVM installed in order to run any kind of Java code on any of those operating systems. .Net Core is also an absolutely beautiful framework with so many features at your disposal.

...and more.

Yes, they've done bonehead things in the past but who/which company hasn't. Yes, they have Cortana. Yes, they force Bing on you when searching with Cortana (does anyone actually regularly use Cortana? Or Bing?). Yes, their operating system costs money. Yes, their malware-style Upgrade-to-Windows-10 tactics were evil and they admitted such. Yes, they brought ads and other unfortunate things to Skype. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't concerned about that Skype bit translating over into GitHub. BUT, the fact that so many of their employees use GitHub daily means they are dogfooding the platform, which is a positive thing.

Despite the flaws, from the perspective of a software engineer they really should be given a lot of credit for all these new directions they are moving in now. They directly aim to help and contribute to the developer community. Plus, Windows 10 is finally getting a dark theme! haha.

I think Microsoft buying GitHub makes a lot of sense. Of course do what you want about it, feel how you want about it, but casting the same ol' shade at them for anything they do seems a bit like automatic reflex more than anything else.

I'm bracing myself for the impending wave of angry hornets from the nest I just kicked. In all seriousness though, I welcome discussion on the topic even if you feel differently than I do. I'm not saying there's no reason to dislike them, just saying there are lots of new reasons to hate them less and/or appreciate what they are doing now.

"Close all the browser tabs" is the new "reboot the machine".

Figured I'd play around with Linux for the first time. I followed instructions to create bootable flash drive. I then proceeded to lose an hour just trying to get Ubuntu to do something after booting from it. The welcome UI becomes unresponsive every time.

Not writing unit tests.

Everyone reading this is guilty of it.

Anyone who says otherwise is lying.

!@#GDSGA!Q@#@

In my absolute lack of genius, I just lost way too much time finally realizing that in C# linq-to-objects removes duplicates when you use Union().

At one point I knew this, but I forgot about it because I never want duplicates, slowly forgetting what Union() was doing.

*This time* however, the duplicates are required and it all goes to crap without them.

Save me, Concat()!

You can run but you can't hide from noobery.

Blahb;asdfabnahsdfa.

The worst career choice I ever made was walking away from a six figure salary software development job with benefits to focus on the small startup I co-founded just a few years earlier. My wife and I had two small children at the time and my wife was also nearly 8 months pregnant with our third. It resulted in an approximate 70% reduction in income, prematurely cashed out 401k and loss of existing health insurance.

To be fair, it was also simultaneously the best career choice I ever made. Three years later I make more now than I originally walked away from. The raw roads of stress, anger, fear and complete uncertainty have aged both me and my wife at an accelerated rate but we have grown closer to each other than we would otherwise be. We have relied on each other, and she has been unbelievably supportive with all the late nights and required traveling. We discovered what we are capable of. In one day it will be October. In one day it will be the month that we finally pay off our last batch of credit card debt that resulted from that career choice.

I cannot recommend following in our footsteps as from where I’m sitting there are much better, more calculated ways of going about it. Logically, what we did was beyond stupid. Luckily for us, we were still young enough to not grasp the full magnitude of stupidity and we also refused to fail. It’s also crucial to have stellar business partners who are just as crazy and just as determined. We have all labored tremendously and we have each played critical roles in our success. The hard times of fear and uncertainty aren’t over. I don’t think they will ever be, to be honest. But, it sure has been one hell of a ride. I wouldn’t change a thing.

About 10 years ago my wife and I were buying a house. We found out late that we needed a lot more cash than we had previously thought we needed, and the deadline to deliver it was just a few days away. After returning home from my full-time gig at about 6pm, I took a break for a bit and then worked all night on a job for a client to make up the extra money. When 7am rolled around I had just finished up. Then I went back to work at my full-time job, and later met with the client to present my work. It was roughly 27 hours at a keyboard for me. That effort made it possible for us to successfully buy our first home. If you want something badly enough, make it happen!

It had been 13 days since I was last approached with a "great idea for an app".

Today, the counter resets to zero!

Go big or go home.

If you're going to bother to detect that my input is without hyphens, then you can certainly insert them for me too.

Yet another someone just contacted me about having a "great idea for an app".

That's a justified rant all by itself.

Early in my career I was assigned the task of implementing a 3D pie chart into our application that you could spin and rotate with your mouse. You know, because sometimes you want to see the sides and the back of a pie chart.

I'll put the words FUCK and MICROSOFT in that order and in the same rant. I'll be sure to get a lot of ++'s.

Had a scheduled call to interview a dev contractor. He told us any typing noise we hear is just him taking notes. Ok. After several questions the long awkward pauses, typing and furious mouse wheels make it evident he's a liar and looking up answers.

Still managed to tank the interview and wasted our time.

I sure hope that wasn't one of you guys.

Fried from working all day, not long after getting up and doing something else the itch returns.

Coding is a drug and we're all addicts.