When my team mates server responds "Internal server Error" with a 200.

Where was this 6 years ago when I was learning shell.

https://explainshell.com/

Do you think is it worth buying macbook air or some other laptop for the same price? I know I can get better specs for that money but I dont game or do a lot of video editing so I Don't need a beast graphic card, I just need it for coding. What do you think?

Debugging explained

When someone starts giving suggestions for my code

Me:

Dad calls:
D: Hai, so, um, my pc's not booting up.
Me: So?
D: What do I do now?
M: You tried fixin' it?
D: That's why I'm calling you.
M: I'm 400km away from you. Does it do anything by pressing a power-on button?
D: No. But I touched it, it's really hot.
M: When was the last time you cleaned that shit up?
D: I have to clean it?
*PC is located at dusty environment at work. 5 years old and is being turned on 6 days a week*

Clean. Your. Pc.
Oh, and yeah, it overheated, burned the mbo, power suply, and cpu cooler stopped spinning.
It's like Satan threw a curse on a pc, and took a piss on it.
The best part? He's mad because I "never help him nor have time when he needs something to be fixed".
He can fix the PC in a pc shop that is across the street.

So, you doin' any better this week?

Other people: Macs have amazing build quality!

Me: https://youtube.com/watch/...

You know why i hate lenovo with a burning passion? Not because they make industrial waste and sell it. Not because they trick non tech people into buying their garbage. No, i hate them because their shitass laptops dont even fit in my rubbish bin.

Me looking at myself every time I write shit code

I am learning angular. As a beginner, I feel there is too much fiddling with this thing :-( ...anyway, I guess when you are used to it and understand why everything is the way it is it becomes normal and understandable.

Discord or Slack? 🤔

It's probable.

This is how a bug turns into a feature

There it is..😂

Stages of coding!

Le* developer's life

Wow, httpie is awesome! It's like postman, but for the command line, and better!

https://httpie.org

Kinda trendy nowadays

Nightmare. 😂

As a developer, sometimes you hammer away on some useless solo side project for a few weeks. Maybe a small game, a web interface for your home-built storage server, or an app to turn your living room lights on an off.

I often see these posts and graphs here about motivation, about a desire to conceive perfection. You want to create a self-hosted Spotify clone "but better", or you set out to make the best todo app for iOS ever written.

These rants and memes often highlight how you start with this incredible drive, how your code is perfectly clean when you begin. Then it all oscillates between states of panic and surprise, sweat, tears and euphoria, an end in a disillusioned stare at the tangled mess you created, to gather dust forever in some private repository.

Writing a physics engine from scratch was harder than you expected. You needed a lot of ugly code to get your admin panel working in Safari. Some other shiny idea came along, and you decided to bite, even though you feel a burning guilt about the ever growing pile of unfinished failures.

All I want to say is:

No time was lost.

This is how senior developers are born. You strengthen your brain, the calluses on your mind provide you with perseverance to solve problems. Even if (no, *especially* if) you gave up on your project.

Eventually, giving up is good, it's a sign of wisdom an flexibility to focus on the broader domain again.

One of the things I love about failures is how varied they tend to be, how they force you to start seeing overarching patterns.

You don't notice the things you take back from your failures, they slip back sticking to you, undetected.

You get intuitions for strengths and weaknesses in patterns. Whenever you're matching two sparse ordered indexed lists, there's this corner of your brain lighting up on how to do it efficiently. You realize it's not the ORMs which suck, it's the fundamental object-relational impedance mismatch existing in all languages which causes problems, and you feel your fingers tingling whenever you encounter its effects in the future, ready to dive in ever so slightly deeper.

You notice you can suddenly solve completely abstract data problems using the pathfinding logic from your failed game. You realize you can use vector calculations from your physics engine to compare similarities in psychological behavior. You never understood trigonometry in high school, but while building a a deficient robotic Arduino abomination it suddenly started making sense.

You're building intuitions, continuously. These intuitions are grooves which become deeper each time you encounter fundamental patterns. The more variation in environments and topics you expose yourself to, the more permanent these associations become.

Failure is inconsequential, failure even deserves respect, failure builds intuition about patterns. Every single epiphany about similarity in patterns is an incredible victory.

Please, for the love of code...

Start and fail as many projects as you can.

Why? Juuuust Why

True.....

Me after coding the whole night w/ 30-minute sleep.

concerned parent: if all your friends jumped off a bridge would you follow them?
machine learning algorithm: yes.

Yesterday, my employer promoted me to lead web developer.

I’m still the only web developer.

I know that feeling ...

Confessions of a Programmer

#1
If a client is an unbearable asshole during the initial communication, I look for every excuse to pad on the hours for the estimate to get paid more. If a client goes above and beyond in their douchbaggery, I tack on an additional $40/hour.

#2
Sometimes I will present an elaborate solution to a client, but really I'm just reading off the features of a plugin or library I'm going to download or buy after the call. Not because I can't build it myself, but because I'd rather spend more time on other/my own projects.

#3
Clients assume because I know one language, I know them all. Rather than turning down the work, I take a crash course to work in that language, or outsource the work and clean it up afterwards, whichever is more practical at the time.

#4
I use cPanel on a dedicated to manage our client websites. I'm not paid enough to bother with setting up everything manually.

#5
Certain projects I build have a 3-day backdoor built into it. If the client doesn't pay upon completion, a unique hash triggered as a GET variable deletes a core file in my work, rendering the work useless. If it wasn't triggered by the 4th day, the file allowing me to trigger this backdoor is removed. This is only used for clients where the project must be launched on their servers, or if there has been a previous issue collecting payment.

#6
I slip in the initial contract that all preceeding phone calls will be monitored and recorded, and that they acknowledge the recordings are admissable in court. This has saved me from losing money twice now.

#7
I have never used an IDE. (I know, I know, it's really inefficient and dumb, but I'm just more comfortable with Sublime. Plus I often find myself mobile and without my computer, so I have to program from my phone.)

#8
Each day resembles a betting spectacle of which work will be late, which will be rushed out and which will never see the light of day.

#9
I have used "sick" and "family emergency" as an excuse to just sleep in far more than I can count.

#10
When a client from hell crosses over the line in their conduct (such as getting very nasty and personal, or sending threats), I anonymously report them to the BBB and on RipOffReport.

Wow, what a fucking mess this sunday was.
My boss wrote me an email that one route of a RESTful API we wrote for a customer was not working anymore and puking back a status 500 with some error mentioning invalid UTF-8 characters.
Not one single person has had touched nor changed the code on production in some 6 months, so what the fuck could it be?

Phpunit did not give any errors (running only locally), the code had no syntax errors and the DB dump did not contain any invalid bytes (tested with a hex editor).

WHAT THE FUCK?!

OK so I started to comment out lines (all tested directly on production of course) until the error vanished.

Guess what was the culprit?
.
.
.
.
.
.
In the code (PHP) we used strftime(...) to get nice time strings. Of course we set the correct locale on the server, thus having months and days formatted in German.
So, in Geman there is this one mysterious month called "März" which contains an umlaut character.
Calling strftime generated the date with März in it, but the server locale was de_CH.iso-8859-1 and not fucking de_CH.utf8, so the "ä" was returned as 0xE4 instead of 0xC3A4 (valid UTF-8), which json_encode(...) did not want to swallow but instead threw an exception.

Trying to keep my code clean when once again changed requirements arrive

When you're hardcore full-stack