Boss: Hey! I know you just got everything working on that new project. But good news: I have a repo you can clone and we can work together. So just clone that and look at my changes, find something that’s broken, and work away. Oh, I also modified everything to use HTTPS locally. HTTP won’t work anymore. Alright, I’m off on vacation! Ciao!

… and that’s the story of how I spent a day and a half fighting with NPM, Brew, setting up a new CA and self-signed cert, and getting passenger to work with it. The good news is that I can connect locally via 443. The bad news is all assets use http and are thus blocked for being mixed-content. And idk how to fix it. Joy!

Not mentioned: npx removing a required package every time I run it, version mismatches, and the usual NPM problems.

DEI QA: “For step 2 should the checkbox be checked? Or uncheck ?”

… Step 2 of my testing steps reads: “Check it [the checkbox], save it, reload it. The box should still be checked. Repeat to uncheck it, just to be pedantic, then leave it off so we can test the existing behavior.”

🤦🏻‍♀️

DEI QA: “The payment_method_identifier will be in api callback logs if `Return payment method identifier in auth/confirmation callbacks` is checked?”

🤦🏻‍♀️

Me: it does what it says on the tin.

DEI QA: “BTW its a `tin`.”
DEI QA: “In Canada its `Taxpayer Identification Number`”

🤦🏻‍♀️

Fuck Cypress. It’s a fucking goddamn pile of diseased garbage. Its design decisions actively fight against you, its methods don’t work, it’s unreliable as fuck, and it intentionally keeps stale state so your tests fuck with one another — and that even fucks up its own interface so nothing fucking works.

It’s like stepping into the shower and expecting clean water, but instead it’s just some obese guy with diarrhea shitting in your hair, and then getting all indignant that you’re upset about it.

If you consider using Cypress for something, find another project.

Here’s to a hopefully better 2024!

Let’s all tell our bitchface thundercunt micromanagers to fuck off, find better employ elsewhere, and finally make progress on that side project that was our world several months ago.

And if the world continues going absolutely mental, may all of you find a peaceful meadow away from everyone and build yourselves wonderful little cottages.

To be honest with you, I’ve never had a bad experience with PHP.

Yes, it’s “dirty” compared to something like Haskell, but it’s not a bad thing. Dirty things usually bring simplicity and allow implementing the intended case super quickly, at the cost of breaking apart at scale. There are no bad tools, there are wrong tools for the job.

Premature optimization is the root of all evil. The more I launch new projects for me/other companies, the more I come to the realization that the vast majority of the projects out there will never see scale. They will be proven non-viable/impractical and deemed obsolete way before they outgrow the $20 VPS they were hosted on.

Sometimes (all the time, really) launching quickly like there is no tomorrow is the most viable business strategy. If (yes, “if”, not “when”) your project outgrows PHP and gets to the point when PHPs abstraction model is the bottleneck, you’ll have the money to rewrite the project in any language out there, trust me.

As someone said on biking subreddit to a person that asked how to buy the newest super-aero helmet, “if the aerodynamics of the old helmet is what holds you back, someone will be sending you the new one for free”.

Late adapter to chatGPT but damn does that thing save me hours of googling shit or writing out boilerplate. I NEVER use it to solve specific non general problems but for writing tedious enums or getting me out of analysis paralysis gpt is my fucking man. And yeah I’m a century late, might as well praise high speed internet while at it lol

Russia took the second place in the list of the most corrupt countries, because we paid the bribe not to take the first.

I spend my days in front of a screen working on a product that will be used by other people working in front of a screen, themselves working for other people working in front of a screen

end of rant

Get off my swap!!!

I was inside a BLA landmine factory. They use special chalk-like sulfur-infused concrete for shells — it is THE most painful thing to have under your skin. Their only goal is to maximize the pain of their victims.

Adobe didn’t buy Figma after all.
https://theverge.com/2023/12/...

Performance using docker sucks. Are they even trying?

With docker 134 seconds. Without docker 7 seconds.

Docker do better.

So I've received a link to Figma for the new mobile app from our designer. It looks great and all but...

Each fucking piece of text is styled independently. Half of the cards in the layout are simple rounded rectangles, the other half are some components with a gradient. Icons are a mix of vector graphics and line elements. Even buttons aren't components. Consistence anyone? Please?

And now comes the best part. How am I even supposed to reach half of the screens? There are four variants of a screen with very similar functionality, but only a single button in the main screen which would at least remotely correspond to one of them. The guy who invented the wirescreens just kept adding things which would be nice to have in the final app, without revising it and making clear use case flows out of it?

After a few days of implementing this clusterfuck of a design, I have finally settled on a consistent set of font and element themes. Just please use components in Figma. You are paid to work in this tool which can make it super easy for the developer AND for you as well to make the design come to life, so why don't you learn to use it?

At least the designer is a nice guy, but god, could he learn to use his single tool?

I almost died of hypothermia as a kid. My drunk grandpa went out to drink even more with his friends, forgetting about me and leaving the stroller with me sleeping out there on the street. It was negative forty-two degrees Celsius. I was one year old.
I made it, but developed an awful pneumonia. By some kind of miracle, I made it again, but at the expense of becoming a really weak kid. I had two more pneumonias during high school, plus one case of sinusitis.
Told my grandma I got ear pain in the morning. We went to our local clinic. The doctor there said I have to be hospitalized RIGHT NOW, otherwise it might turn into a life-threatening meningitis. By the time we’re in the hospital, the pain is already unbearable. My vision becomes blurry and dark, I hear my pulse in my head, I lose the sense of time. At that point I’m laying on the hospital bed, motionless, quietly sobbing while the terrible pain is swallowing me, a tiny kid, whole.
I’ll never forget the sound of a sinusitis needle crushing through a porous bone inside my head. A glass worth of pus rushing out. The pain immediately going away.
All that because of one man addicted to alcohol. This is why I don’t drink.

Thanks, devRant, for invaluable lessons on how to handle online harassment. Now I have better chances of not making an internet punching bag out of myself when I’m famous.

This fucking guy create a mess of a code, more than a spaghetti code, a clusterfuck of shit untested spaghetti code, and the project is actually getting well, our customer is getting bigger but everytime there is something to be added, its a fucking pain to add, and when something breaks, almost every thin breaks, and the shitty guy who wrote this code is quitting and its fucking up to me to clean up all the fucking mess, fucking asshole.

DOCUMENT AND TEST YOUR CODE KID, DONT BE A FUCKING SPAGHETTI PROGRAMMER

Everyone has a great story about writing their first line of code when they were under 15 years old, except for me. I got my first computer at a young age, around 11, thanks to my dad's friend who brought the computer along with some CD-ROMs of Tom and Jerry and GTA Vice City. (By the way, I had to wait ages for the game to load, and I was very happy when it finally did.) I spent my childhood playing games. You guys are lucky to have found someone who encouraged you to learn to code. I didn't have internet at that time

nothing will be done, because nothing is clearly defined

lol

🤡

So I was looking into phone app development again (as you do) and I'm working on a simple QoL app for me and my SO that will help us automate some home management and finances stuff. Naturally I delved down the rabbit hole deep and wanted to have push notifications so we don't have to check the app periodically to know when certain things happen... Oh boy... Why is mobile development so convoluted, especially if you don't want to rely on Google Services...

It seems that the most accepted way of doing this is Firebase (FCM). Well me being me, I refuse to use google services for this and I prefer self hosted solutions (for data privacy reasons) which eliminates most products out there.

It also didn't help that my framework of choice is Flutter/Dart, because fuck Android Studio and the insane buggy XML stuff and fuck Android and it's constantly changing APIs...

Well In the end I decided on a rather simple solution and self hosted an AMQP service (RabbitMQ in my case, as I have some experience with it already) and implemented a foreground service in android platform specific code on top of my flutter project to kickstart it and made my phone a queue listener... This now means I can push notifications from my server to the Messaging Queue and it will be pushed into my App automatically!

One thing I found out on this journey was that Android now kills most background services and enforces foreground services to have a visible notification in the status drawer... which I actually approve of. It's a bit annoying that you can start a reliable background service, but I'm absolutely on-board with long running processes started by my apps are constantly visible...

Long story short, I love reinventing all the wheels, especially if it's for free and private... And I also went to sleep at 2AM again because this took longer that I'd like to tune... but it works, and it's google free...

I'm thinking of trying to package this up as a flutter module later, but first I want to do testing on battery life and the general life cycle of the service. RabbitMQ says they have the client library optimized for long-lasting connections and it should be just using a tcp socket, which should pretty much be what all the push notification services are doing anyway. I'm also not completely satisfied with how the permanent notification looks.. it isn't collapsible like some of the other ones from other apps and it's about 2 lines high instead of single line... which is something quite annoying and I'm struggling to find any relevant docs on how this is done other than possible making a custom Notification Style... but I just can't believe that everyone is doing that.. there must be a built-in somewhere -_-... Ugh Android is hell...

Anyway, if any android devs here have some hints, tips and tricks on how to handle this type of background/foreground process stuff and I'm doing something wrong let me know, cause googling this shit is a nightmare too!

A column of some Soviet newspaper. Top to bottom:

The Atheist’s Page
“The oldest profession”
(Ukrainian tale)

Three people argued over whose profession was the oldest. One of them said:
— Surgeons: without them, god wouldn’t have pulled Adam’s rib out to make Eve.
— Engineers, — the other one interrupted him. — Without them, god wouldn’t have made light.
The third one thought for a while and said:
— No, mine’s older: in the beginning there was darkness, and who spreads darkness? I do!

The third one was a priest.

I find goals for developers to be pure busy work and almost impossible set meaningful ones.

You can't set ticket based goals, because one ticket may take a week or an hour. You can't really set learning goals, because how do you measure 'learning Svelte'? And if that was your goal, what'd be the point of the outcome?

You can set goals like, ensure all tickets have at least one unit test... but then you get tickets that need to get out yesterday and you get people knocking on your door while you're trying to create meaningful tests.

But we often have a meeting to teach everyone how to set goals, then we have to sit and invent goals that satisfy someone in the org, then twist our usual daily work into some BS about how we're working towards the goals in 1:1s and then the whole thing is forgotten by H2, if not sooner. Just to be resurrected in Jan/Feb of next year.

Time to be back here again!

How did the community change in the
*counts fingers*
3 years I have missed?

I’m getting really tired of all these junior-turn-senior devs who can’t write simple code asking ChatGPT to solve everything for them.

I’m having to untangle everything from bizarre organization/flow to obvious gotchas / missed edge cases to ridiculously long math chains (that could be 1/10th the length), or — and I feel so dirty for this — resorting to asking ChatGPT wtf it was thinking when it obviously wrote some of these monstrosities. Which it gets wrong much of the time.

“ALL HAIL CHATGPT!” Proclaims the head of Engineering. “IT’S OUR PRODUCTIVITY SAVIOR! LEVERAGING AI WILL LET US OUTPERFORM THE ENTIRE INDUSTRY!”

Jesus fucking christ.

just today we've got a mail from my uni; no attendance lectures until the first of may, everything will be kept online; the lectures would have started 2 weeks earlier but due to the continious (but so far safe and low) spread of the virus my university made that decision. I have two exams to attend in ~2 weeks; they will be taking place but we'll be split into several rooms if we're more than 50 people. that's all I know so far... oh and we can't enter the bus at the front but have to enter through the other doors in the back; which already ended up with seeing people wanting to enter the bus but the doors kept closed until they realised they had to go to the other doors. interesting at least.

My company hasn’t made any major changes yet.

a world fair has been postponed straight to the autum holidays leaving my wife all alone with the kids. can't skip being a speaker.

My mother teaches in a language school, and one of the students was diagnosed. Later, two other students from other groups were also diagnosed. Right now the teachers are trying to put a consensual quarantine in place, but they aren't very keen on that.

@dfox can we extend the wk199 topic a week longer please?

Home setup
Simple MBA and stuff

In the office I had the dashboard with coronachan stats and the map on the huge tv but the HR told me to stop that 😭