I am driven nearly to blind rage by people who insist on sending you issues as emails and just keep piling more emails on the same thread. For the love of everything decent learn to use a mother FUCKING ticket system.

Just had another developer tell the team that the requirements “contradicted” his implementation. I think, if you’ll let me check my fuckstick-to-English dictionary… yeah, that just means “I did it wrong and I don’t feel like fixing it.”

Just found a file where they had needed to write in a way to assign a discount to an order based on a code redeem. They did it by manually checking “if SESSION.DISCOUNT_CODE is set, discount = hardcoded_integer”…. Over 100 times.

Love it when you go “which dumbass wrote this”, check git blame, and it was you.

Let me tell you a story about an independent contractor who was just told the reason I don’t have enough information to build, deploy, access, or test the software I was brought on to maintain…

is that the previous developer is holding all documentation essentially “hostage” in an attempt to squeeze more payment out of the client. What the tap-dancing shit have I gotten myself in to.

When you're doing bounds checking on an array and type "i" instead of "j", so it refers to completely the wrong index >>>>>

Things I've only thought since becoming a freelancer:
How to politely phrase "b*tch better have my money" in an email after nearly a month of waiting on an invoice.

So far this basically describes my experience as a freelancer.

Somebody out there please tell me why I'm uploading a 17 MB file and PHP isn't showing a $_FILES array? It's just not there. I've set the max post limit and the max upload limit to 128 MB. The files are going to get way bigger than this. Why does this server like hurting me?

Anybody familiar with mod_rewrite? I'm trying to map, for example, something like http://website.com?foo=bar&baz=bin to something like http://website.com/bar/bin. I'm pretty sure its doable but I'm having a terrible time getting it to work.

So I'm working on this project in Django, right, and I've used it a lot. I love it, personally, I enjoy using it, it's great. And when I run it locally, it all works like a dream. Nothing is wrong, all behavior is as expected, all of that. Then I deploy it and let me tell you it is a DIFFERENT story. The same source code, same versions of Python and Django and what have you, same urlconf, but the thing DOESN'T WORK. Like most of it is fine. But posting an update to a database object throws a 404 (!!!works on the development server!!!), resetting passwords just sends you back to the index page (you get the email and the 'we just sent you an email' page on the development server). I think something is out to get me. I'm being haunted.

We're trying to use Oracle databases in Visual Studio. They won't install the Oracle developer tools on my system. Life has lost all meaning. I'm floating in an endless void where the only sensations are confusion and the vague sense that someone is stepping on my stomach

My CS (theoretical foundations of computer science, specifically) professor is currently teaching regular expressions... Has been for three weeks. Same thing over and over. All of his examples involve using regular expressions to parse HTML. He just told us to write a script (using Perl-style regex) that would recursively find and follow link tags in various websites. Just... no...

So my friend and I wrote a fully functioning dialect of Brainfuck. The twist? Every command is an emoji.
http://emotifuck.rs/

So before today, I'd never used GoDaddy before. Not even once. My supervisor walks in and happily informs me that I'm going to be adding photos to a website that she does editing for. Okay, fine, that's stupidly easy. What I did not realize, however, is that this entire website had been built using GoDaddy's site builder, and if you're not familiar with it, thank whatever gods you worship that you've dodged that bullet. I hardly want to go wandering around somebody else's web hosting, so I search about for a bit praying that there's SOME semblance of a normal text editor someplace, because text editors make me happy and all, and find very little on the regular site. Already not thrilled. So I figure, how bad is this site editor? Really, how bad can it possibly be?
Oh, you poor misguided son of a -
Anyway, I go in and look at the site. Slideshows everywhere, nothing is aligned correctly, it's a web designer's nightmare. Thankfully, I'm not a web designer, so I press on and reorganize a little bit. I try slapping a new slideshow on their, and discover that unlike the way it SHOULD work, elements do not move to allow for other elements, they just sit there and let you throw things on top of them. I stare at my neatly-stacked slideshows for a second in utter disbelief, knowing but not really accepting that I'm going to need to take every last one of those slideshow elements and slide those little so-and-so's down by hand. ....why? Who designed this? Who decided that was a good idea? I do some Googling to see if there's anything out there to make this less horrid, and lo and behold I find a GoDaddy page about their FTP file manager! It's under web/classic hosting, which apparently means it's deprecated because I spent the next ten minutes hunting around for the "web hosting" link those chicken-lickers were so proud of and it's nowhere to be found.
Alright, so they want to do this the hard way.
At this point I'm screaming internally and PRAYING that I'm just being stupid and not seeing anything to make it easi-
No, not even easier. Just less stupid. This website builder makes no sense. It's like hiring a contractor to build a bridge and handing him a box of Legos and a banana.
So I do more googling and find instructions on getting to the file manager. FINALLY. The first step is find "Hosting" under "My Products." I rush over to My Products joyfully, hoping I can get this stupid website up and running reasonably quickly, and...!
There's no hosting tab.
No button.
Not even a little hard-to-see link. At this point my brain is screaming. WHY would you give me a website builder but absolutely no way to actually write the website? Do people actually use this thing? I mean, I get it if they want to make it nice and accessible for people to make websites without overwhelming them with HTML but if they know how to edit the website and they don't want your help, why would you force me in to this? Why? Then it occurred to me that maybe the organization just hasn't ever had a web developer in it, ever, or at least not one who was willing to help out with the website, so they purposefully signed up for hosting that deprived them of any kind of HTML editor. Then on top of all of that, I noticed that on the home page, which had been edited by someone else long before I ever looked at it, ALSO had one of these stupid slideshows that I had to reorganize by hand, and some sad, angry little man had put in one of the photos sideways. It was SIDEWAYS. Just sitting there on its side, the photo's occupants staring at me with sad eyes begging me to turn them facing up again. I sat there and stared at a badly-designed website in a questionably-designed editor. And I wondered. I wondered who put this all together, and I wondered why *I* was the one doing it, when I work for a university and the website was for some beach homeowner's association. And I wondered if this job was a task that my supervisor had agreed to do and just passed off onto an office monkey. And I wept bitter tears at the realization that I am that office monkey.

Went to an introductory session for the new version of the lousy CMS my organization uses and on the second slide of the presentation WRITTEN BY THE BIG BRITCHES OF THE IT DEPARTMENT they informed us that the CMS removes the necessity to learn languages for web programming like HTML, CSS, and Java. My first thought is "huh why would I need Java for... wait..." You could see the thoughts crossing my mind.
"Wait a minute... Who writes Java applets anymore? Java isn't.... but what if... no... they wouldn't..."
For the holy love of Bill, YOU ARE THE IT DEPARTMENT. Please don't tell me you misguided cactus-heads just mixed up JavaScript and Java on an official document you're using in presentations for everyone using the system? It hardly did anything to inspire overwhelming confidence. And even if it was handled by somebody whose entire job is to write PowerPoints for these things, who reviewed this thing? Dilbert's boss? And that wasnt even the only soul-scorching error. Sweet mother of Tux, people, I'm a student using your system, your professional presentations shouldn't make me cringe.

So far I've been pretty lucky... except for the code some of my professors at uni used in their assignments. A couple of them had this horrid habit of giving you a horribly-written, out-of-date (we're talking these chuckle heads used the same code for years on end and wondered why it didn't work on new versions of Java), messy source file with "fill in the blanks" sections like it was some kind of Java Mad Libs book. One of them had an entire jarchive of data structures we were required to use that he'd written in the '90s and NEVER UPDATED. Another one had a script he'd written for his own specialized assembly macro preprocessor that he'd been using without update for who even knows how long. Now, we were using one of those goofy virtual machines with its own simplified assembly language, and we were on the fourth version of the program. This guy'd written his macro processor in Java for the second version, never updated his Java source, only provided a barely-working .bat script for running it, even though the department's official preference was a *nix environment, and implemented this horrid "pretty-printer" that had a regrettable little habit of eating code. You heard that right. You'd run build.bat and it'd expand your macros then send it over to the pretty-printer which would very infrequently just replace the existing program file with an empty file. When we brought it to his attention, he goes "...huh. never happened to me." and proceeded to use the very same set of programs for the next three semesters, even when the assembly simulator was updated again. I heard wails of anguish from the poor sad souls that came after me as their macro processor created program files with deprecated operations, their pretty printer printed out beautiful, perfectly-organized empty files, and the professor responded to every second of a student begging for an updated version with "...huh. never happened to me." I never saw a single bug reported to either of those professors even acknowledged, let alone fixed. Some of the Java Mad Libs were the same ones they'd started using when they first switched the curriculum from Ada to Java. Thankfully after my first year I escaped into the bliss of the next three years, which were full of *nix and C and beauty.

I love Django. I really do. It's been fun to work with, and wrestle with, and beat my head over repeatedly. I really have enjoyed it. But why in the name of all that is even remotely holy must the URL documentation be so spotty? I finally did get my URL behavior to work, but now that I've created a view function for deleting objects in one of the models, the URL for the editing function breaks. All you do is click "edit" and it brings up this nice little form where you can edit the database entry by querying its ID number and then you can save that ModelForm and everything is fine. So the url scheme is http://foo.com/bar/edit/3/
Should work. Used to work. I swear it used to work, I pulled up an older commit and it works like a charm. Deleting works with that same url scheme.
http://foo.com/bar/delete/3/
deletes the object with id=3 no problem. The two URL schemes in urls.py match perfectly (except one says delete obviously).
But now something has gone and gotten ROYALLY derailed because every time I run that function, that CLEARLY PRESENT 3 is being passed as None. I thought, oh, maybe I rearranged the arguments and am passing in the wrong ID. Nope. Okay, so what if I mixed up the regex on the url? Nope. Matches. WHERE ARE YOU GETTING NONE FROM? I mean, I realize that's the default, but I'M PASSING AN ARGUMENT in.
{% url 'namespace:edit' id=object.id %}
breaks horribly whereas
{% url 'namespace:delete' id= object.id %} deletes the object just fine. Why, Django? We've been wrestling with this for hours. Give me a sign. Tell me what you want from me. I'll give it to you. I will. I promise.

I have succeeded in my duty as a friend.

"Gentoo is literally Cthulhu." - Me

Roses are red,
Lilies are orange.
Fuck PHP.

"Nah, branching is too complicated, I'll just create an entire new git. It's faster."

Relationships and gaming on Linux have a lot in common. When it works, it's glorious, though it has its quirks. When it doesn't... You let it drive you mad until you decide that the compatibility issues just aren't worth the effort anymore.

Today is the day that I dive back into teaching myself Rust because I can.

Got some livecoding going on this is great.

Today's rant: JavaScript's type system.

I realized halfway through that I can't happily call JavaScript a "programming language" so just assume
alias programming="scripting"

I'm sure it's not actually as frustrating as it seems to me. Thing is, I'm used to either statically-typed languages or dynamically-typed languages that actually make sense. If I were to try to add an integer to something I'd forgotten was a string in Python, it'd immediately tell me "look, buddy, do you want me to treat this as a concatenation or an addition? I have no idea the way you've got this written." I've found that mistakes are a common thing with dynamic typing. Maybe I'm just not experienced enough yet, maybe it's really as stupid as it looks. JavaScript just goes "hey look I'm gonna tack all of these guys together and make a weird franken-string like '$NaN34.$&' because that's absolutely what we want here!" Then I run my webpage and instead of a nice numeric total like I wanted, good old JavaScript just went "Yep, I have no idea what I'm doing here I'm just gonna drop this here and pretend it's right." Now absolutely I do not expect my programming language to make correct assumptions and read my mind, otherwise JavaScript would be programming me and not the other way around. But it could at least let me know that I had incompatible types going on rather than just shamelessly going along with what it's doing. Good GRIEF, man, some of the idiosyncrasies of the EMCAScript language definition itself just make me want to punch a horse.

If literally anything in our system stops working the supervisor's immediate response, regardless of whether it makes sense or not is to tell us to clear the browser cache. There are circumstances where that drives me absolutely up a wall.

GitHub is not doing good at the moment.

NULL and '/0' are two different things. NULL is a null pointer. '/0' is a null byte. C handles those two differently enough to introduce some interesting issues. Helped a friend debug his code, execvp() was freaking out because he had tried to terminate his argv array with a null byte instead of a null pointer. As far as the system was concerned, that doesn't mean anything more than "oh look there's no string here." Big big difference.

Decided to start writing an operating system from scratch with a friend for the absolute hell of it. I'm excited, but also terrified.