!dev

I wanted to take small loan from bank I am loyal customer for 15 years to speed up things by month. I decided to pay money for it.
They have some online form for it and I filled it.

So what happened next ?
I got call to confirm every input I filled (heard keyboard typing every time I answered question).
I asked how long I will wait and got response that it will take couple of hours, max 2 days.

Just received another call 10 days later that they need documents to prove my income.

They got 15 years history of every operation and it looks like it means nothing.

I said to person I will earn this money faster then I get it from them so at this point this conversation is just waste of my time.

It’s 10 days left till end of month and I think it will be easier to just wait or ask friend for a favor.

Yet another reason to say fuck banks.
Time is money.

TLDR;
Side project update.

Made simple nlp library in python and published it’s first version to open source.
Now I can feed it with parsed pdf text.
See rant https://devrant.com/rants/2192388/...

Why ?
Cause during reading book about nltk I couldn’t find simple extendible way to provide support for polish language and I wanted to abstract stemming, word normalization, tokenizer etc. so I can provide ex. different conditions for separate text files and don’t write much code what is an asset when you work solo.

It’s about 12GB of pdf public accessible law data I am trying to handle ( at first ) which is about 35000 files from last 90 years.

So far I automated downloading web pages and pdf documents from them. Extracting data from web pages and saving it to database. Extracting text from pdf files. I have about 5-6 projects to do all of it above maybe at the end I will put it to some workflow manager like Luigi or just run it by cronjob.

First thing for website version 1.0 part is find correlation between all documents inside law text using nlp library by building custom conditions. Then just generate directory structure and html files with links between documents.

Website version 2.0 is already in my mind but it will be creepy to make it and will take at least 1-2 months and I want to publish fast.

I have some pdfs with only images instead of text and tesseract worked quite good with them so maybe I will try to process them when everything go live.

Learned a lot about pdf as now I know that font in pdf is not always providing unicode characters ( stupid form of obfuscation) so when you extract text you need to build glyph vector to text map for every font.
Pdf is full vector representation - just like svg - what is logic if you think a bit and know that some printers are running using postscript.

Let’s hope next update will be about flutter mobile app which started all of shit above. It’s almost ready ( except getting data from api I am trying to do and logo for release version ). It’s last piece of puzzle.

If can pick one it probably will be Fabrice Bellard.

Why ?
QEMU, FFmpeg

Anyway everyone who contribute to open source community deserves to be famous.

1. Start working in company that is celebrating something the same day you start new job.
2. Make sure they invite you.
3. Get drunk hard before event.
4. Puke on a CEO during his opening speech.

Mission accomplished you’re now a legend.

I prefer pair programming over code review.

After three weeks looking for decent pdf parser that will handle all documents I gathered for my project I decided to write my own.
All those I tried end up with more then 10% not correctly parsed pdfs or require to much coding.
I was sceptic so I waited another week debating if it’s good idea to do it and I said yes.

Spent 16 hours straight coding pdf document extraction library and command line tool based on pdf.js

Fuck, now when I open pdf I see opcodes instead of text.

Got two more hours until client planning meeting and then I go to sleep for a while.

Time to start testing this more deeply as I have about 60k ~ 20GB pdf documents to parse and then I need to build some dependency graph out of its text.

At least it’s more funny then making boring REST API for money.

People from movie studios !!!!!!
Bring me superheroes without pants back.

Fuck inheritance.

Looking for variables and methods in inheritance chain is like walking in Thailand and looking for a girl hooker on a street full of ladyboys.

You can find one but you never know.

!dev
Finished my last audiobook and decided to start listening to Kevin Hearne druid series audiobook yesterday.

It’s really nice story about old druid ( looking like 20 something ) living in modern times in Arizona. Lots of Celtic mythology and great humorous dialogues.
I really enjoy it.

Me vs Myself

I lack of consistency in my life.

Except job, I work on single project for more then four years now.

Besides that I struggle so much to finish things I started or do one thing everyday or even every week for more then one month.

Trying to improve myself but it’s so hard and I don’t know when and how I lost this whole consistency I had that made me good self thought developer. Some people said best they’ve seen but I think I have a lot to learn.

It’s not that I don’t want to continue doing things I started previous day but my narrative self is harassing me so much that I don’t have vital power left.

Whenever I try to fight back it makes me weak and I can’t get up from bed so I lay and wait.

Sometimes I lay whole day and just wait.

When I do nothing my narrative inner voice find me instantly 100 other interesting things to do that make me excited, like:

- let’s check mail - oh new <picks technology> framework let’s try it,
- let’s check news
- let’s see how much <picks something> cost because you want it, buy this thing or you’re gonna die
- go out with this <picks a girl> or you’re gonna die alone
- hey <picks something> is cool let’s see how it works
- hey this <picks some problem> is cooler then the one you’re working on,
- how about to call <picks someone>
- how about go out it’s nice outside
- let’s cook this thing today you need to go to grocery

I don’t know how I figured out I need do nothing and wait to fight myself and do what I started not what my narrative voice want me but I see whole slightly improving now and doing nothing helps a lot.

It makes me focus on things I really want to do not things that are just waste of time.

Anyway thanks if anyone got to the end of this stupid story.

Have a nice day. Keep dreaming.
Peace ✌🏽

Write email with meeting topics before meeting.
Send summary email to all attendees after meeting.

Yes I believe you’re Google and I will click that link.
I don’t care that IP from that you sent it to me is from some company in India.
Probably Google outsourced it’s email service there.

But wait why is this link pointing to Chinese website?
Ouch you provided some ip under A dns record so let me nmap it...
So there’s bunch of services you have there.
ftp, ssh, msrpc, netbios-ssn, snpp, microsoft-ds, sun-answerbook ...wait what ?
Let me curl that 8888 port.
Oh you have login / password form and it’s pagoda linux panel.
Wait a second I will read about it maybe some default login / password will work...

Ok so maybe I just make a script to brute force it as you wanted to brute force my computer motherfucker.

A day without fuckup is a day lost.
I Love Fridays.

Today’s text chat:

Me walking near the river in the middle of nowhere with a cellphone.

frontend developer:
- I need image from test server. Can you provide me that image ? I need it for my local environment to fix something ( writes details of how to get an image ).

me:
- Can’t you go to test server website and get it by yourself ?

frontend developer:
- But this image is on canvas element.

me:
- Because frontend is drawing in on canvas so go to network tab and get the url.

frontend developer:
- Ah yes I can do that

I have such small talks all the fucking time. They accumulate when I go out to chill during the day.

1. Creativity - you can create anything from typing words and a little electricity - office programs, new medicines, predicting cancer from images, robots, planes, satellites, rockets that put people to the Moon or robots to Mars - all use machines programmed with code.

2. Challenge - some of the projects and algorithms are so complicated that full understanding of them is great challenge.

3. Freedom - you only need a laptop and internet and a bit of electricity and you can code from anywhere on Earth or if you’re Astronaut you can even code from space.

So I opened crunchbase newsletter like always to see what interesting is happening in IT.

Looks like app that allow people to send REST calls got investment of 50M.

The moment when you realize that simple UX and sending REST calls using desktop app can make you millions of dollars.

And I am tired again.

Digital transformation is pain in the ass, my customer migrated project management from self hosted jira to atlassian cloud.

Results:
I am finally able to login to this new amazing jira that looks completely different but still nothing is optimized to laptop screen so looks crap as before.

My issues are now assigned to not existing user.

At least I remember how to use basic JQL and reassign issues to me.

I feel bad to other team members.
Great waste of time.

Thanks apple.
Now I know what are requirements to publish application to app store.

Can’t wait for python 3.8 and pep-p572 Assignment expressions 👏👏

https://python.org/dev/peps/...

while chunk := file.read(1024):
process(chunk)

react-native

fuck you !!!

Deadline was 2-3 days for product launch and doing distributed transactions was not an opinion as it requires heavy modifications.

I was doing money transfer app between one transactional system and one not transactional system so the way I did it was :
1. transfer money from one system to my app that was using Akka STM ( software transactional memory)
2. try to transfer money to second system
3. transfer money back on failure

There was no database, no state only transactional log as installing database would require to much time and paper work.

Sometimes transfer back failed so we need to look back at logs and search for money, it was quite easy cause there was error and there were not so many failed transactions like this.
About one or two in a month and everyone accepted that.

I started to write some sort of reconciliation thread but then was assigned to other work and it worked like this for couple of years transferring couple millions worth of transactions.

Made parsers that are downloading and parsing 100 years of law data right now.

I am so happy I don’t have to read every document and just let computer do it for me.

That are great times we live in.

I started early in my childhood days, nobody had cellphone or internet here, my phone number was 3 digits long and my home country started to recover from 44 years of communism.

My first dev project was probably to copy game from newspaper to Atari 1300XE

Article listing was around 10 pages long and if you made mistake program didn’t run.
It took me a while I can’t remember how long but probably whole day and I was finally able to play it.

I don’t remember what was game about but later on I learned some BASIC from book and was able to color the screen and stuff like that.

I was about 6 years old.

I also remember that Atari computer had tape recorder where you put cassette to load game.
Some more complicated games were loading more then hour and you need to walk very carefully around or your walk can cause error and operation would fail.

Besides that there were national radio auditions about Atari where at the end they played code sound wave so you can record it on your cassette and then play software from radio on your Atari.

I never managed to do it cause I was living near military airport and pilots were practicing landing and starting above my home causing radio signal noise and breaking my software recoding.

I can probably say that highly accelerating plane could cause game loading problem and it’s not a joke.

Like we ever had a choice.

Not to study, get a job, gat a bank loan.

Following.
https://devrant.com/rants/2123585/...

AWS summit, speakers talking about technologies that amazon didn’t build but they provide on its cloud.
All about how it’s awesome to use those technologies on its cloud infrastructure.

Feeling like I’m on some bad advertising summit.

I heard docker, containers like 100s times already.

On one of the slides they claim that 85% of tensorflow workloads are on their cloud.
That’s powerful statement.

Looks like enterprises are all on the way to Oracle 2.0 called AWS.

On AWS summit Warsaw today.

I am being mentored all of my life.

Parents mentored me that I won’t get to that school and I should pick other one ( I got there where I wanted ).

Politicians mentor me to make me happier by taking more and more of money I earned ( I am not ).

Advertisers mentor me to buy their products cause those are best products in the world ( I buy cheaper versions produced in same factories by same people ).

My boss ( when I got one ) mentored me that everything is simple and could be done in 5 minutes. ( after reading some dummy article )

Coworkers are mentoring me everyday that it’s not their fault ( It definitely is ).

Telemarketers, emails, sms messages are mentoring me about my future, don’t miss that occasion, it’s best for your life ( No it’s not )

Celebrities are mentoring me how to live my life to become a successful person ( Yeah right, cause they known how to become one right after they were born ).

Now I see I am starting living in times where computer will start mentoring me how to live my life. ( Sometimes it already is )

What’s left is doctors start mentoring me about my illnesses and children ( if I ever have one ) mentoring me about how dumb I am.

Then I can finally peacefully die and don’t come back to this mentoring hell.

Google alerts apparently changed formatting or are leaking something.

Drinking good whiskey, listening to Chopin and birds singing, looking at moon.
I can do it for the rest of my life.

How ethical it is to send 1gb email with big picture with word “NO” in response to spam email that wants my agreement ?