Keep your SaaS, I got

Today on "fuck Firefox": elements with display: inline and position: relative completely mess up z-index and nested fixed / absolute positioned elements. It's a known bug, it has open issues on bugzilla since 2005, but still no fix. IE 8 can get it right, but not Firefox...

Why do people version their code like they're learning to count? 3.0.0, 3.0.1, ..., 3.0.9, 3.1.0, 3.1.1, ...

And then I'm sitting there with 50+ websites, wondering if updating a plugin from 3.6.5 to 3.6.6 will patch my bugs, or completely break everything because of syntax changes

God I fucking hate WordPress

Today I found out a single WooCommerce site is using 20% of database CPU (for comparison, 50 other sites use only 10% between them). Upon investigation it turns out that WooCommerce loads every single product in order to do the taxonomy count. Because the data is stored as PHP-serialised values in post meta, there's no way to do a decent "SELECT count() ... GROUP BY ...". And that code came straight from the WordPress devs, no more and no less...

Why we need meritocracy:

Someone stole my CC number and paid a bunch of spam ads on FB with it tonight. When I woke up and blocked it, there's been already 400€ worth of transactions done with it :(

But the real rant is that it took 3 fucking hours before I managed to get in contact with someone at FB who could actually help me. Fuck those AI chat bots & "Tenk yu kom agan" support guys!

Is there any free software / database / API which can be used for something like get_maliciousness_score(request_method, url) => [0..1]?

Huawei published an ad stating their Mate 20 Pro smartphone has been voted phone of the year 2018 in my country.

The only problem is the survey they refer to has been done by a completely unknown mobile news website. That site looks a lot like some DIY blog from 2010 (it even uses FB comments widget), and with 10 post per month it definitely doesn't get much traffic. Talk about integrity...

Turn in my thesis

Trying to delete a bunch of posts from my FB timeline. Why the fuck is there a 50 post limit? and why the hell do they have a 30s timeout, if their API is too slow to do it in sufficient time?

I'm curious, why do you guys seem to always put up with "I changed my mind, I need it by Friday" kind of requests? "I've pulled an all-nighter, because customer wanted it before the holidays" - didn't you agree to do it after the holidays? Did the customer come by with a bag of money for you to put away everything else for them? Even if you do get paid extra, do you really get that much more to make your suffering worth it?

*The interview wasn't off to a good start, as the recruiter forgot he invited me for an interview, so he just led me to some empty office after letting me wait for good 15 minutes. *

Them: Here, write some pseudocode to find a value in a tree.

Me (thinking): Interesting question; DFS / BFS would be really simple here, but nobody uses trees for that - perhaps I should ask about characteristics of the tree in question?

But before I realised, the interviewer already rushed out the office, so I just picked up my jacket and left...

So apparently using utf8 with LaTeX isn't enough to get € symbol working, I have to include two more packages for that (two, because one handles the character, and the other one makes it look "not weird"). How hard can it be to just use a single utf8 font, and have it work with whatever utf8 character you type in? And apparently there are at least 3 packages specifically for euro symbol - a certain XKCD comic comes to mind...

Python is a fucking joke. "Readability" disguised as 150+ magic methods and values. Virtual environments to hide shitty dependency management. Strings that may or may not act as comments. No correlation between package and module names - install Pillow; import PIL. **kwargs instead of options=dict(), because why separate function arguments from arbitrary extra data? And finally, the only way to have tkinter on Windows is to install IDLE, so that some fucktard can stick their shitty app right up yours ...

Dear Python linters, why can't any of you implement some actual linting features? Like, say, consistent use of single or double quotes? Or dict() vs {}? How about indenting nested function calls? Forcing list / set / dict literals as multiline? Trailing commas?

And while I'm at it, why can't you handle dependencies properly? Say, separating linter & linter plugins from the remaining dependencies in a way where I don't have to manually remove them from the requirements lockfile every time?

Why do people get an idea that Ctrl+Alt+[character] is a good combination for keyboard shortcuts? Just because your keyboard layout doesn't have a special character for Ctrl+Alt+Z, it doesn't mean other people don't! Did you ever stop to think that more than half buttons on your keyboard already have a Ctrl+Alt (~AltGr) binding, so maybe, just fucking maybe, other keyboard layouts could have that kind of bindings for other buttons as well? You've got 38 published works, you boast your years of experience, yet you can't fucking consider some basic real-world problems when working on a piece of software!

God I fucking hate people like these, with their PhDs and no actual hands-on experience, they're always so smug about their work and expect you to pay them millions, but fail to understand that details like those are why people pick you instead of some cheap student, and that's where their salary comes from.

User Ip Address is too long (maximum is 30 characters).

Okay, dear third-party API, I guess users with IPv6 don't deserve the service... And wtf is 30-char limit for an IP address, when IPv4 can be only 15 characters long, and IPv6 can be up to 39 characters? Did you calculate a weighted average of IP length to get that number?

Guess I'm doing lämp stack now 🤷‍♀️

Customer's idea of checking if hotel delivery is available:

IF ("Location name" CONTAINS "hotel delivery") THEN ...

Note it's a multilanguage site, so location name could be in either of about 30 languages...

A project I'm working on uses Elastic for internal monitoring and logs. The customer asked to access those logs - not something we'd normally do, but it's isolated from other things we use and there's no critical data there, so what the heck, let them have it.

Ever since, we're getting tons of questions like "There are tons of [insert random info message] all the time, do you have any plans to resolve them?" and it gets to the point where I'm just about ready to scream back "NO, SUZAN, BOOKING NOT COMPLETED MANS THE USER F###ING CANCELLED IT, IT'S NOT SOMETHING I CAN FIX IN THE CODE"

Edit: the customer's name isn't actually Suzan

Okay, so I'm developing a system for a global rent-a-car broker. Basically website + a bunch of third party APIs + analytics, it's been running in production for over 4 years now.

Anyway, we had to connect our system to an external rental insurance API, nothing too complicated, got it to production in a month and it seemed to work okay, except the insurance provider claimed they're not getting any analytics data, which was weird, because there were no errors with API calls, and customers had no problem with the insurance.

After going back and forth for a month, we finally figured what's going on: after each API request, the insurance provider expected us to send the exact same data to their analytics API, because for whatever dumb reason they were unable to internally log requests in their analytics database.

tl;dr: we're doing 2 API calls with the exact same data to different endpoints, because a large rent-a-car insurance provider can't log their own analytics data.

The way I learned new stuff

Customer: CSS is not loading on [specific phone model & browser], here's a screenshot

"Multiline strings can be used as block comments in Python." Except in some places, where your code will pretty much blow up without any errors, because instead of commenting out a portion of an array, you've just added one big string element. And there's no other way to make block comments. And after actually commenting out every single line, your version control won't know how to merge it anymore, because there are now 100 changed lines instead of 2.