My dad found a phone a few weeks ago and asked me what he should do with it. Knowing how much it hurts to lose personal data, I said I could try to find the owner and send it back.

My first attempt was to search through the files on the SD card in order to find an identifying document (CV, bill, address...) but there were only family pictures.

My second attempt was to unlock the phone and check the information about the owner and the accounts linked to it. But for this to be possible adb has to be enabled. Good thing is that that particular brand shows an option for activating adb on the recovery menu.

But then, it's Android Oreo and I haven't found a way to lift the lock pattern. I thought I could bruteforce it over the shell (as I found there could be about 1300 possibilities for 2 to 5 point patterns), but there is the same attempt throttling as on the screen so that would take ages.

Finally, I found the owner in the most "social" way : The phone was displaying the weather for a particular place. It turns out that there are only 3K inhabitants in that city, si I thought that a big enough Facebook group might help me find the owner. So I posted a message on a 500 people FB group dedicated to this city with a selfie of the owner : someone identified her within 20 minutes.

Mission accomplished 😎

Comprehensive HTTP Status Codes 😂

How developers deal with someone else's code!
Fixing bugs after bugs and it goes on.

A customer once wanted buttons that would close the mask in an interface where the only way to close the mask was to click a default "OK" button. 🤔

So in the end we implemented a script on the customer's buttons that would send a calculated number of multiple keypresses of tab, tab, tab and finally enter on the default button. 🤑

It is still running in production and I will never ever touch it again! 😁

If I run into a problem with code or a configuration of some kind, like a good little programmer, I Google it.

One of two things will happen:

1) I quickly find the answer to my problem.

or

2) After hours of searching, I can't find anything about my problem. At all. I change the search phrasing, adjust the advanced search settings, read all the somewhat related but still unrelated articles. Nothing.

If #1 happens, awesome, life is great, thanks Internet!

If #2 happens, it's because of one of two things:

1) I am the first person in the world to stumble upon this issue. Quick! To the Blog Cave!

2) I AM TOO STUPID TO BE DOING WHAT I AM TRYING TO DO BECAUSE MY MISTAKE IS SO UNBELIEVABLY DUMB THAT NO ONE HAS BOTHERED NOR WILL BOTHER TO WRITE ABOUT IT, ANYWHERE, EVER. I LOOK AT MY WORK AGAIN FOR THE 100TH TIME AND FINALLY REALIZE MY EMBARRASSING NOOBERY.

2.1 is a unicorn. 2.1's happen to other people.

I am dealing with a 2.2.

Client: Why is this not working?

Me: Because the feature expect a...

Client: I sure hope you won’t expect your client to want to know all these teach behind this feature, as a client, I just expect it to work.

Me: Ok...

Client: So why isn’t it working now? WHY?

Me: 🤦🏽‍♂️

Client: I need a response!

Me: It is not working because...

Client: Stop telling me logics!! I just want it to work. Why isn’t it working...

Me: It is not working because I fucked up. It will work after I fix it.

Client: Why isn’t it working though... I don’t understand why...

Me: Just let me fix it and it will work...

Client: Why can’t you tell me why... it’s not good communication... (hangs up)

Fellow Dev: the clients are requesting a gallery on their website with functioning modals.

Me: okay cool

So for the record, I'm new to front-end and I've got quite a lot to learn in JavaScript.

*I googled as much as I could and I made a proper functioning gallery in 2 full days of coding*

Him: okay, so this is great but they aren't really digging it.

Me: *sigh* yes, so what do they want?

Him: have you seen how an image opens in Google images? Like you click on one, the image opens while the rest of the content shifts down?

Me: um... Yeah?

Him: yeah, so they want that.

Me: ... *Scoops the web trying to figure out how Google does it*. Dude, I can't find anything close to it and I've still got a lot to learn. Idk how to do it.

Him: well, you're being paid for that. So, you better do it.

Me: 1000Rs ( approx. 14.58$ ) isn't called "being paid". Gimme a break here.

Him: You're a novice rn.

Me: why don't you do it?

Him: I'm your boss.

*Sigh* (he indeed is my boss)

Him: deal with it.

Me: FU........C.....*suddenly I realized how it's done* OH OH OH OH I just got it, I just got it!

(I actually make something like that)

*Lol yay*

That's just my best story of a fight. Lol.

One of my older servers just went down. It's been hacked. How do I know this you ask? Is it mining bitcoin?

No - windows event viewer has no errors in the logs for the last 48 hours.

Oh shit

I don't have permission to read this...

lol 😂😂😂

Duplex: Hi, Umm... Can I book 3 seats on Wednesday?

Restaurant: Sure! And what time is it?

Duplex: Yeah, Oh, I'd like it at NullPointer Exception if it's possible.

Restaurant: Invalid parameter "NullPointer Exception" restarting program...

Software requirements

When client give requirement.

It's not a dev quiting but my brother who worked in parcel delivery at that time.
He was hired on a temporary contract but promissed from the beginning and in every discussion they had, that he'll get a permanent position after 6 moth, if his work is good.

Fast forward 6 months. They had a meeting and told him how satisfied they where with his work so naturally he asked about the permanent contract. Fuckers acted suprise and shit. Claiming to never have said any of it. However as they are happy with him and so "generous", they offerd him another contract for 6 months and told him, they could talk about a permanent one after that period.

He kind of has a temprament, so he got up, fliped them the bird and called them lying assholes and went home. He didn't show for the time left on his contract.

The funny thing about it he worked for the swiss postal service (which is owned by the state) but not directly but through this.company providing temporary workers (which is cheaper for them as they get a shitty salary compared to a full time employee with all the benefits).

Wankers!

Nice thing though, the accounting department still sent him a christmas bonus (he quit somewhere around mai...)

TL;DR I want to watch videos faster.

Siraj Raval, a YouTuber who produces videos about artificial intelligence and the concepts behind it (not the buzz-shit-type 😜), once said in one of his videos that he learned to watch videos three times faster.
This man has truly changed my life in many ways.😯

I've started with watching videos with slight multipliers. Around half a year later I learned to watch videos with a multiplier between 1.75 and 2.5.
It's really incredible how much time one can save like this.

25min of free time? Let me just watch that 40min talk about event-driven programming real quick!

Don't do that with gameplays, series, anime and other types of videos 😏 you watch for entertainment because it kinda defies the concept of entertainment.

Link to the video: https://youtu.be/nxWfZP6eslM

Papa tutu tutu tu Wawa:
https://youtu.be/6PJIF_KNvqQ

The story of the $500,000,000 error.

In 1996, an unmanned Ariane 5 model rocket was launched by the European Space Agency.

Onboard was software written to analyze the horizontal velocity of the spacecraft. A conversion between a 64-bit floating point value and a 16-bit signed integer within this software ultimately caused an overflow error just forty seconds after launch, leading to a catastrophic failure of the spacecraft.

That day, $7 billion of development met it's match: a data type conversion.

*Bell rings*
*some dude holding a book*

“I thought you might me interested in discussing our lord and savior, blockchain”

Let's Encrypt and their free (wildcard) certificates. Simply great!

"You're gonna lose. BUG TIME"

teacher gives a question in a test : can you save a word document as a pdf.

me :Yes

teacher :that is wrong

me : shows her how to do it..

teacher : "oh well "

Seen as most devs listen to music while programming, I'm curious what music you listen to? Playlist are welcome too!

Something I refer to as the "Lost Cause Syndrome".

Basically you start working on a project enthusiastically with the resolution to write the best possible code. But either one (or some or all) of management, client and colleagues succeed in transforming the project into a comedy (or tragedy, depending on your outlook) of errors.

Then finally, one day you decide that the project is a lost cause and stop caring about it. You end up in a "Let's get this over with and get out of here" type of mindset without making any efforts to improve the situation.

I was told that I am too sensitive and afterwards a liability because I couldn’t concentrate in a working space where interns were constantly screaming, running around, hitting and farting each other, throwing shit around and playing games (instead of working)...

I was told by the HR person that “boys will be boys”...

I was joking with my colleague what is the best comment for this if hell.
And now my boss send me this 🤣🤣🤣

I had a secondary Gmail account with a really nice short nickname (from the early invite/alpha days), forwarded to another of my mailboxes. It had a weak password, leaked as part of one of the many database leaks.

Eventually I noticed some dude in Brazil started using my Gmail, and he changed the password — but I still got a copy of everything he did through the forwarding rule. I caught him bragging to a friend on how he cracked hashes and stole and sold email accounts and user details in bulk.

He used my account as his main email account. Over the years I saw more and more personal details getting through. Eventually I received a mail with a plaintext password... which he also used for a PayPal account, coupled to a Mastercard.

I used a local website to send him a giant expensive bouquet of flowers with a box of chocolates, using his own PayPal and the default shipping address.

I included a card:

"Congratulations on acquiring my Gmail account, even if I'm 7 years late. Thanks for letting me be such an integral part of your life, for letting me know who you are, what you buy, how much you earn, who your family and friends are and where you live. I've surprised your mother with a cruise ticket as you mentioned on Facebook how sorry you were that you forgot her birthday and couldn't buy her a nice present. She seems like a lovely woman. I've also made a $1000 donation in your name to the EFF, to celebrate our distant friendship"

!important, !important everywhere

Update on my job interviews:
I had four so far.
Got rejected from all of them.
The reason of most of them was that they would have to teach me too much.
I am applying as a junior.
What do they expect? Fucking Linus Torvalds or geohot?

It's really fascinating how managers can act surprised over a critical prod issue especially after the whole dev department warned them repeatedly.

Each month my department compiles a 4M row 150 column data table for compliance with a federal agency. Before submitting, we check it against about 400 rules.

The existing system was simply 400 queries that ran in sequence, table-scanning 4M rows each time, taking upwards of 6 hours, which is a huge bottleneck, especially if you have to make changes and rerun. Plus the output was rather one-dimensional.

I built a proper normalized database and created a sort of rules engine, running all 400 rules in one table scan. Not only does it complete in 30 minutes, but the reports generate automatically, and the results can be filtered on several dimensions to aid with root-cause analysis.

Management was pleased.