An entirely typical exchange at work:

PM: How long would it take to build an application that collates Gubblefluffs and exports them as a PDF?

ME: Hard to say. What’s a Gubblefluff?

PM: Nothing complex. Its basically an object with some stuff in.

ME: Erm, okay. So I’ll define a Gubblefluff object plus methods to add edit and delete, then for each Gubblefluff have it write a line to a PDF.

PM: It will need to email that PDF to somebody.

ME: Okay, cool. “Gubblefluffs-by-email” should take about a day.

6 hours later…

ME: I’ve done Gubblefluffs-to-pdf, I’m not clear on what’s in a Gubblefluff but I’ve made it flexible so it can take almost anything.

PM: No, a Gubblefluff can ONLY be one of 4 Snigglefingers plus a timestamp and some JSON.

ME: What? Right. Okay. What’s a Snigglefinger?

PM: (sighs) A Snigglefinger is the collection of relevant Babelsets.

ME: Babelsets?

PM: Yeah, a user can have any number of Babelsets but they must correspond to one of the four types of Snigglefingers.

ME: There are users!?

PM: Of course!

ME: But I’ve not coded anything for users.

PM: Shit. I’ve told the client they can have it today. How long to add in users?

ME: And Babelsets, and Snigglefingers and the new Gubblefluff rules?

PM: Yeah.

6 days later…

ME: This is done now. It’s a beast but it works. Who should it email the PDFs to?

PM: Client X, plus cc to Y and bcc to Z.

ME: What? It doesn't support CC and BCC!

1 hour later…

ME: This is done. I’ve tested it and sent you a copy of the PDF it generates.

PM: Okay thanks. Is the cron running daily?

ME: What cron?

…

ME: Okay, so the cron’s running once a day at 8pm.

PM: Oh, it’ll need to be at 3:15pm. That’s when we’ve told the client they’ll get it.

ME: Right. I’ll change it...

PM: Also, the PDF you sent me looks nothing like the visual.

ME: What visual?
...

Tinder experience so far

Girl: "hey, what do you do?"

Me: "im a programmer"

Girl:

Me: "and you?"

Girl:

Me: "... hello?"

*Suddenly unmatch*

Where has this been my whole life 😂

One time a company I worked for tried to fuck me over and not pay me the referral fee that was promised for referring an employee. They hired the person I referred for a position that was advertised as having a referral fee paid after 6 months.

After the 6 months were up, I went in to HR to ask when I could expect to see the money, and they said “oh, you’re not eligible to receive the referral bonus because we hired so and so as a contractor (full-time) instead of an actual full-time employee.” And I was like... fuck that shit, they never mentioned that to me and I didn’t burn a referral lead so they could hire the person as a contractor and avoid paying me the advertised fee. I was absolutely livid and couldn’t believe it after I had been expecting this money for 6 months.

I felt cheated and none of my colleagues at the company could believe they’d stoop so low to not pay a highly-valued employee an advertised referral bonus. I had lots of battles with management over it, and eventually ended up with a portion of the promised fee, but not the whole thing.

Lets all help them share their startup

My dumb CEO just hired an even dumber CTO. The new CTO asked me the following questions...

1. What is GitHub?

2. What is JSON?

3. What’s an array?

4. What is Get and what is Post?

5. When an iPhone is offline, can it call an API on our server to tell us it’s offline?

6. I know you’ve spent 11 month the writing this backend in PHP but can you change it to Java now?
Me: Why?
Dumb CTO: Because it’s better.
Me: How?
Dumb CTO: because it is.

7. I know you’ve started to rewrite this codebase I Java but can you convert it to Node.JS now?
Me: Why?
Dumb CTO: Because Facebook uses it.

8. What is MySQL? Why aren’t you using a database instead?

9. What does NULL mean?

Somehow, I doubt that asshole is remotely qualified for the job.

Fakin shyt for brains.

Linux 🙌

What it's like to be a network engineer...translated into normal people speak

User: I think we are having a major road issue.

Me: What? No, I just checked, the roads are fine. I was actually just on the roads.

User: No, I’m pretty sure the roads are down because I’m not getting pizzas.

Me: Everything else on the roads is fine. What do you mean you aren’t getting pizzas?

User: I used to get pizzas when I ordered them, now I’m not getting them. It has to be a road issue.

Me: As I said, the roads are fine. Where are you getting pizzas from?

User: I’m not really sure. Can you check all places that deliver pizzas?

Me: No I don’t even know all the places that deliver pizza. You need to narrow it down.

User: I think it is Subway.

Me: Okay, I’ll check…No, I just looked and Subway doesn't deliver pizzas.

User: I’m pretty sure it is Subway. Can you just allow all food from Subway and we can see if pizza shows up?

Me: Sigh, fine I’ve allowed all food from Subway, but I don’t think that is the issue.

User: Yeah I’m still not getting pizza. Can you check the roads?

Me: It’s not the roads, the roads are fine. I’m pretty sure Subway isn’t the place.

User: Okay, I found it. It’s Papa Johns.

Me: Okay, I looked and Papa Johns does deliver pizza. Is it the local Papa Johns or one in a different town?

User: I don’t know. Can you allow pizza from all Papa Johns to me?

Me: No I can’t do that. Can you get me an address for Papa Johns?

User: No, I only know it as Papa Johns. Can you get me all the addresses of all Papa Johns and I’ll tell you if one of them is correct?

Me: No, I don’t have time for that. Okay, I looked at the local one and it looks like they have sent you pizza in the past and they are currently allowed to send you pizzas. Try ordering a pizza while I watch.

User: Yeah still no pizza. I’m guessing they are getting blocked at the freeway. Can you check the freeway to make sure they can get through?

Me: No, this is a local delivery. They aren't even using the freeway.

User: Okay, well then it has to be a road issue.

Me: No, the roads are fine. Okay, I just drove from the Papa Johns to the address they have on file for you and there is nothing there.

User: Hmm, wait we did move recently.

Me: Did you give your new address to Papa Johns?

User: No, I just thought they would be able to look me up by name.

Me: No they need your new address. What’s your new address?

User: I’m not really sure. Can you look it up?

Me: Sigh, give me a second…Okay, I found your address and gave it to Papa Johns. Try ordering a pizza now.

User: HEY! PIZZA JUST SHOWED UP!

Me: Okay, good.

User: (To everyone else they know) I apologize for the delay in the pizza but there was a major road issue that was preventing the pizza from getting to me. The network engineer has fixed the roads and we are able to get pizza again.

Me: But it wasn’t the roads…whatever.

User: Oh, can you also check on an issue where Chinese food isn’t getting to me? I think it may be a road issue

When you're not creative enough to make a post that would give you some stickers but you have a 3D printer...

A scammer called me today. They were saying that harmful files were moved to my computer and they needed to remove them. I don't think they are ever going to call me again.

S = scammer; M = me;

S: this is tech support we need access to your computer because we detected harmful files and need to remove them.
M: oh my! Hold on, let me go to my computer now. How can you access it?
S: we can just use RDP and delete the files. They are in a hidden folder that is encrypted so this Is the only way.
M: oh ok I believe you. Hm... it looks like my son only allows certain IP addresses to access our computers.. I don't know how to disable this so can you just email me your IP address?
S: Sure...

He then sends me his actual IP address... it doesn't even look like a proxy or VPN.

M: oh my I forgot that you need my password to login. It's really long and complicated... can I just email it to you?
S: Sure!!

I then tell him to hold on I have to find it that my "son" stored it somewhere.

At this time I'm taking a photo of my bare ass and attaching it to the email. I then say in the email "Please note what my job title is in my signature.. I just sent the FBI your name, phone number, email, and IP address. Please enjoy my bare ass, you'll see a lot of it in prison."

"You gave us bad code! We ran it and now production is DOWN! Join this bridgeline now and help us fix this!"

So, as the author of the code in question, I join the bridge... And what happens next, I will simply never forget.

First, a little backstory... Another team within our company needed some vendor client software installed and maintained across the enterprise. Multiple OSes (Linux, AIX, Solaris, HPUX, etc.), so packaging and consistent update methods were a a challenge. I wrote an entire set of utilities to install, update and generally maintain the software; intending all the time that this other team would eventually own the process and code. With this in mind, I wrote extensive documentation, and conducted a formal turnover / training season with the other team.

So, fast forward to when the other team now owns my code, has been trained on how to use it, including (perhaps most importantly) how to send out updates when the vendor released upgrades to the agent software.

Now, this other team had the responsibility of releasing their first update since I gave them the process. Very simple upgrade process, already fully automated. What could have gone so horribly wrong? Did something the vendor supplied break their client?

I asked for the log files from the upgrade process. They sent them, and they looked... wrong. Very, very wrong.

Did you run the code I gave you to do this update?

"Yes, your code is broken - fix it! Production is down! Rabble, rabble, rabble!"

So, I go into our code management tool and review the _actual_ script they ran. Sure enough, it is my code... But something is very wrong.

More than 2/3rds of my code... has been commented out. The code is "there"... but has been commented out so it is not being executed. WT-actual-F?!

I question this on the bridge line. Silence. I insist someone explain what is going on. Is this a joke? Is this some kind of work version of candid camera?
Finally someone breaks the silence and explains.

And this, my friends, is the part I will never forget.

"We wanted to look through your code before we ran the update. When we looked at it, there was some stuff we didn't understand, so we commented that stuff out."

You... you didn't... understand... my some of the code... so you... you didn't ask me about it... you didn't try to actually figure out what it did... you... commented it OUT?!

"Right, we figured it was better to only run the parts we understood... But now we ran it and everything is broken and you need to fix your code."

I cannot repeat the things I said next, even here on devRant. Let's just say that call did not go well.

So, lesson learned? If you don't know what some code does? Just comment that shit out. Then blame the original author when it doesn't work.

You just cannot make this kind of stuff up.

Its time.

!rant. Sometimes, trolling your fam is a lot of fun.
Just today my sister asked me how to type the character ÷ on her keyboard. I told her to press : and the - key and then just move it like so.

: -
: -
: -
:-
÷

See? Ez pz. She actually tried it and just said 'i cant, it erases everything'. And then all of my other siblings kept ranting the same thing. I forgot we were in group chat. And now its full of : and - spams. And im just here laughing my ass out.

My last night:
- Had nothing much to work on.
- Opened a porn site to spend sometime.
- Clicked on some really good video.
- Realized full screen isn't working on the page.
- Fired up JS console, spent the next 30 minutes trying to get the video part full screen. Failed!
- Opened up Google & navigated through stackoverflow looking for the fix. Still couldn't do it.
- Cursed the website for having a bad design.
- Left the site.

Bad UI = No Fuck.

Best office prank: I was pretty young and naaive. Senior dev comes to me and says that it would be hilarious to slide a note under the women's bathroom door saying, "I know what you're doing in there". He says that the woman in there will think it's hilarious too. We work with her, she's very funny and laid back, so I go along with it, expecting to get a laugh. A few minutes go by and a different older women enters my cube. She's got the note! She works on the other side of the building so I don't know her too well but I can tell from the look on her face that she's pissed. I'm frozen with fear as my career flashes before my eyes.
I apologise perfusely and try to explain but she's not having it. After a while she goes back to her office not having accepted that it wasn't meant for her and that it was just a joke gone wrong. I spend the next two days apologizing every chance I get, hoping she won't go to HR. She remains stone cold until late on the second day. She couldn't take it anymore as her mouth reluctantly begins to crack a smile. At that point she drops the serious expression on her face and busts out laughing.

It turns out that the three of them planned the whole thing and executed flawlessly. I've never felt so relieved to be the butt of a joke.

When a disc drive's driver comes on a disc

Girl: we need to talk

Me: OK

Girl: you seem to have more time for your computer than me. I want to know how important I am to you.

Me: You are the number 1 in my life.

Girl: *smiles and hugs me*

Me: (thinking)...Just that I start counting from 0

And the most useless function of the year award goes to...

Every programmers dream convo

My friend told me stories about his colleague who's always against him.

One time, during their management meeting, that colleague suggested that they should have a suggestion box in the office.

So my friend proposed that they use Google forms. He presented how Google forms work and the majority got really impressed(except the colleague).

Naturally the colleague is against him, he said "this is not what I had in mind". He wanted to have an actual box and people write suggestions on paper and drop it in(suggesting the ancient way).

Every meeting, the colleague complains a lot, and my friend provides techy and convenient solutions.

I've been slowly increasing the size of my tech manager's mouse cursor over the last month when he leaves his computer unlocked. It's about an inch tall now and he hasn't noticed yet. Everyone else in the office does and it's the best thing ever.

So there was an inspection from government for our bank's IT security. I gave a tour to our server and security systems. I threw all possible acronyms as much as I could remember. Inspector nodded and noted down never uttered a word.

Finally, he breaks his silence, looking at a device he points out and says "What's that ?"

I look at the device then stare at his face back again at the device and to his face I reply "That's AC, Air Conditioner".

Developer (master's degree, -bleeping- smart guy, no kidding) was bragging on how he made a piece of code 3x faster (with the usual pinch that the original dev was incompetent) and spent nearly 6 weeks working on it (wrote his own parallel-foreach library because Microsoft's parallel library was "too slow").
I was the original dev and he didn't know I had my own performance counters where I broke down each stack (database access, network I/O, and the code logic).
Average time was around 5ms (yes milliseconds) and worst case was around 10 seconds. His '3x improvement' was based on the worst test case, which improved by about a second. Showed our boss my graph (laughed out loud, said 'WTF', other curse words) and the dev hasn't spoken to me in weeks (I say 'hi' in the hall and he keeps walking)
Take that master's degree and high IQ and shove it.

A young guy I work with burst into tears today, I had no idea what happened so I tried to comfort him and ask what was up.

It appears his main client had gone nuts with him because they wanted him to make an internet toolbar (think Ask.com) and he politely informed them toolbars doesn't really exist anymore and it wouldn't work on things like modern browsers or mobile devices.

Being given a polite but honest opinion was obviously something the client wasn't used to and knowing the guy was a young and fairly inexperienced, they started throwing very personal insults and asking him exactly what he knows about things (a lot more than them).

So being the big, bold, handsome senior developer I am, I immediately phoned the client back and told them to either come speak to me face-to-face and apologise to him in person or we'd terminate there contract with immediate effect. They're coming down tomorrow...

So part my rant, part a rant on behalf of a young developer who did nothing wrong and was treated like shit, I think we've all been there.

We'll see how this goes! Who the hell wants a toolbar anyway?!

Tonight, I had the pleasure of being challenged to make a virus for a VM over at the awesome "virus aquarium": computernewb.com

I present to you the Eevee fork/bomb.
Tonight, was the first night where I've ever sat down and programmed in VBS. I had a lot of fun doing it too. Right now I'm aiming at corrupting taskkill, tskill, and shutdown for good measure. These are a few of the things that my buddy has pulled on me that has made it difficult for me to continue moving forward.

The other part is to create seperate .exe files that would run my the necessary script. Each of these .exe files will be unique such that it's more difficult to shut all of them down at once.

Despite the fact that this thing will quite literally break your computer, it's fun being challenged to think outside of the box. Quite literally. I've always been careful about what things I touched on a PC, but tonight was fun because I was basically unchained and allowed to run rampant.

As a computer geek I think it's good to let out your inner demon and see what havoc one could wreak.

Spent 2 hours last night (leaving an hour late) with the IT guy hunting down a problem that affected at least 12 other teams. It didn't crash the app, but did prevent MANY scripts from working, and thus nothing could be committed.
I found the culprit, made a solution, and posted in the email chain my solution. (it required a code review and a client-side update)
Someone responded asking for another dev to confirm my report. That dev did and them dumbed it down for those who can't understand programming talk. Then EVERY EMAIL after that thanked that dev for "fixing the root problem" and "solving their scripts".
And just now, the PO for the bug was replaced to that dev's team. (previously was my team's PO)

WHY THE FUCKIDY FUCK DO PEOPLE THINK THAT JUST BECAUSE YOU ARE A DEVELOPER THEN YOU CAN DO EVERY FUCKING THING IN A SNAP?!

THIS ENTIRE SUMMER I WORKED FOR THIS MIDGET OF A FUCK AND THE IDEA WAS TO MAINLY DEVELOP AN IOS APP FOR THEIR PRODUCT. THAT ONE APP TRANSLATED TO THREE SEPARATE APPS AND KEEP IN MIND THAT I AM THE ONLY DEVELOPER THEY HAVE SO I HAVE TO DEVELOP IT, TEST IT AND DOCUMENT IT!! AND WHAT'S EVEN WORSE IS HE KEEPS GIVING ME DESIGNS AT THE LAST MINUTE SO I ALWAYS END UP HAVING TO CREATE NEW PROJECTS ALL THE TIME. WHEN A WEEK PASSES BY WITHOUT ANY UPDATE HE AND HIS FUCKED UP BRAIN CELLS GATHER A MEETING WITH HIS 'DONALD TRUMP HANDS-SIZED' BALLS TO ASK ME, 'WHY ARE YOU TAKING SO LONG? THESE ARE JUST THREE BUTTONS ON THIS VIEW?' MOTHERFUCKING COCKSUCKER!! GO GET YOUR MOM TO DO THIS WORK THEN IF IT'S JUST THREE BUTTONS. TO HIM EVERYTHING IN IOS WHICH INCORPORATES A TAP IS A FUCKING BUTTON! BUTTON THIS! BUTTON THAT! AND IT'S NOT LIKE HE HAS SIMPLE DESIGNS..NO.NO.NO.NO. THIS ASSHOLE-SHAPED-HEAD MUGGET DESIGNS SHIT WHICH REQUIRES ME TO HAVE TO DRAW A UIVIEW AS THE SHAPE OF A HUMAN BODY AND HEART. THEN ASIDE FROM THAT, JUST BECAUSE MY RESUME SAYS I MINORED IN MATH AND APPLIED MATH, HE SENDS ME A PAPER THAT EXPLAINS MATHEMATICAL CONCEPTS OF DATA ANALYSIS THEN WANTS TO MEET WITH ME TO DISCUSS THE SUGGESTED METHODS THEN IMPLEMENT THEM. AT THIS POINT I HAD ALREADY IMPLEMENTED AN ALGO FOR COUNTING THE NUMBER OF STEPS THAT WAS WAY WAY WAY MORE ACCURATE THAN THE SHIT THEY HAD IN THEIR CONTROLLER..

SO AS I AM ABOUT TO FINISH IMPLEMENTING JUST THE INITIAL 5 VIEWS OF THIS 'FINAL' APP, HE SERIOUSLY WALKS IN AND TELLS ME, SO I'M STARTING TO WORRY THAT WE'LL NOT MEET THE AUGUST DEADLINE SO I'M THINKING MAYBE YOU SHOULD START SWITCHING BETWEEN DEVELOPMENT. WORK ON IOS FOR 4 HOURS THEN SWITCH TO ANDROID FOR THE REMAINDER OF THE TIME. OH AND UHH IF YOU FEEL LIKE TAKING THE IMAC WITH YOU TO WORK FROM HOME, THAT'S FINE AS WELL AND I'LL BE AVAILABLE IN THE WEEKENDS AS WELL. IT WAS AT THIS MOMENT THAT I REALLY REALLY HOPED I WERE GAY! LIKE 'NO LUBE' STYLE KINDA GAY!! OH BTW AT SOME POINT HE HAD ME PROGRAM ONE OF THEIR CONTROLLERS, AND WAS ASKING IF I COULD START RESEARCHING MEANS OF WRITING AN SDK FOR THEM.

KEEP IN MIND THAT I'M AN INTERN WITH ONE YEAR IOS DEV EXPERIENCE.. THEN HE WANTS ME TO ENTIRELY START LEARNING ANDROID AND GIVE HIM TWO VERSIONS OF THIS THIRD APP IN TWO WEEKS.

HE CAN GO SUCK HIS OWN DICK WHILE GETTING FINGER FUCKED BY A FORK WITH A BLUE WHALE'S 6FT LONG DICK UP HIS MOUTH.

*** that felt good ****

Not a rant, thought I'd share this here.
My 2 bestfriends and I are web developers and the three of us work for different companies and reside in different cities. So, I got these today and decided to fly over next month to where my bestfriends are currently residing to personally give them devrant stickers :)

Thanks devRant for this! You guys rock!