Best DHCP server ever.

If Doctors Were Like Coders
(cross-posted from https://medium.com/@c09b6133a238/...)

Problem: The patient has a broken leg.

Solution:

1. Ask the patient to reproduce the exact scenario that resulted in the broken leg. Watch closely to see if the leg breaks again. Check for consistency by repeating the scenario a few more times.

2. Explain that this isn’t an intended use case for the leg, and besides, it only affects one person. Ask the patient if, all things considered, he really wants to prioritize his broken leg over your other work.

3. Point out that the patient’s other leg performs just fine under the same circumstances. Ask if he can use his other leg instead, at least as a workaround.

4. Attach several accelerometers to the broken leg and break it again. Stare at the data received from the accelerometers, then shrug and declare it useless.

5. Decide that the patient’s problem must be in his spleen. After all, that’s the only part of his body you don’t really understand.

6. Track down the people who created the patient. Ask them if he’s ever had spleen problems before. When they seem confused, explain that he has a broken leg. Ignore them when they tell you that the spleen they created could not possibly cause a broken leg.

7. Ask Google where a person’s spleen is. Spend half an hour reading the Wikipedia article on Splenomegaly.

8. Open the patient and grumble about how tightly-coupled his spleen and circulatory system are. Examine the spleen’s outer surface to see if there are any obvious problems. Inform him that several of his organs are very old and he should consider replacing them with something more modern.

9. Compare the spleen to some pictures of spleens online. If anything looks different, try to make it look the same.

10. Remove the spleen completely. See if the patient’s leg is still broken. If so, put the spleen back in.

11. Tell the patient that you’ve noticed his body is made almost entirely out of cellular tissue, whereas most bodies these days are made out of cardboard. Explain that cardboard is a lot easier for beginners to understand, it’s more forgiving of newbie mistakes, and it’s the tissue franca of the Internet. Ask if he’d like you to rebuild his body with cardboard. It will take you longer, but then his body would be future-proof and dead simple. He could probably even fix it himself the next time it breaks.

12. Spend some time exploring the lymph nodes in the patient’s abdominal cavity. Accidentally discover that if the patient’s leg is held immobile for six weeks, it gets better.

13. Charge the patient for six weeks of work.

Employer bans StackOverflow and Github but still wants me to develop stuff. Planning to quit.

This one time, a client wanted a complete overhaul of her website.

I asked her for the credentials to the VPS, She gave me some random crap to try, cause clearly the site hadn't been touched since 2003 (and boy was it fugly).

Me: Maam, these aren't the correct details.

She sends in more crap to try...2 days pass with this back and forth.

Client: "contact steve, he should have the login details"

Me: ****Calls Steve *****
Me: "Maam, he says the login details are in your mail"

Client: "well, I don't remember this fact. Steve handled everything.
Hack into the website and then reset it.

The Russians did not need login details to hack into America's system. So please, do what you have to do to get us moving."

No jokes...that was the exact crap that came out of her fingers

A client called

Client: Hello Mr. Can you come to our office today?

Me: Yes sure

In fews hours I was there

Client: Check this email we are getting every day

It was email from spammers who asking to redesigning their website because it was not responsive

Me: 🧐Thinking ‘valid point !’

Me: So what you need me to do for you then?

Client: We need you to redesign the site

Lol - thanks spammers for bringing in new client

Too true, too true...

About 10 years ago my wife and I were buying a house. We found out late that we needed a lot more cash than we had previously thought we needed, and the deadline to deliver it was just a few days away. After returning home from my full-time gig at about 6pm, I took a break for a bit and then worked all night on a job for a client to make up the extra money. When 7am rolled around I had just finished up. Then I went back to work at my full-time job, and later met with the client to present my work. It was roughly 27 hours at a keyboard for me. That effort made it possible for us to successfully buy our first home. If you want something badly enough, make it happen!

I'm browsing DevRant, giggling to myself, my girlfriend asks to see why I'm laughing,

I show her...
*Stares at it with a blank look on her face*
"I don't get it, explain it for me please"

I explain that: even if I explain it to her, she STILL wouldn't understand.

2 hours later she's made her first "Hello World" Java App so she can join DevRant 😂😂😂

My last internship (it was awesome). A programmer developed a vacation/free day request application for internal use.
Asked if I could test it for security.
The dev working on it thought that was a very good idea as he wasn't much into security and explained how the authentication process worked.
I immediately noticed a flaw just from his explanation. He said it was secure anyways (with an explanation but his way of thinking was wrong in this case). Asked if I was allowed to show him. He said he was intrigued by this so gave me a yes right away.

For the record, user levels were normal user, general admin and super admin (he was the only super admin).

Wrote a quick thingy server side (one of my own servers/domains) for testing purposes.

Then I started.

Went from normal user to super admin (his account) through a combination of XSS and Session Hijacking within 15 seconds.

Explained him where he went wrong and he wrote a patch under my guidance 😃.

That felt so fucking awesome.

Prevention..

My manager doesn't get it.

okay, I promise.

:o didn't know it

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I present you the API I'm working with...

That's a pretty fucking useful error description right there.

502 Bad Gateway

10/10 marketing, tbh

The facts are quite accurate

Guess who just collapsed several lines of code and then spent 10min looking for them.

"If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution." - Robert Sewell

Its Friday, you all know what that means! ... Its results day for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

*audience: wwwwwwooooooooo!!!!*

We've had a bewildering array of candidates, lets remind ourselves:

- a psychopath that genuinely scared me a little
- a CEO I would take pleasure seeing in pain
- a pothead who mistook me for his drug dealer
- an unbelievable idiot
- an arrogant idiot obsessed with strings

Tough competition, but there can be only one ... *drum roll* ... the winner is ... none of them!

*audience: GASP!*
*audience member: what?*
*audience member: no way!*
*audience member: your fucking kidding me!*

Sir calm down! this is a day time show, no need for that ... let me explain, there is a winner ... but we've kept him till last and for a good reason

*audience: ooooohhhhh*

You see our final contestant and ultimate winner of this series is our good old friend "C", taking the letters of each of our previous contestants, that spells TRAGIC which is the only word to explain C.

*audience: laughs*

Oh I assure you its no laughing matter. C was with us for 6 whole months ... 6 excruciatingly painful months.

Backstory:

We needed someone with frontend, backend and experience with IoT devices, or raspberry PI's. We didn't think we'd get it all, but in walked an interviewee with web development experience, a tiny bit of Angular and his masters project was building a robot device that would change LED's depending on your facial expressions. PERFECT!!!

... oh to have a time machine

Working with C:

- He never actually did the tutorials I first set him on for Node.js and Angular 2+ because they were "too boring". I didn't find this out until some time later.

- The first project I had him work on was a small dashboard and backend, but he decided to use Angular 1 and a different database than what we were using because "for me, these are easier".

- He called that project done without testing / deploying it in the cloud, despite that being part of the ticket, because he didn't know how. Rather than tell or ask anyone ... he just didn't do it and moved on.

- As part of his first tech review I had to explain to him why he should be using if / else, rather than just if's.

- Despite his past experience building server applications and dashboards (4 years!), he never heard of a websocket, and it took a considerable amount of time to explain.

- When he used a node module to open a server socket, he sat staring at me like a deer caught in headlights completely unaware of how to use / test it was working. I again had to explain it and ultimately test it for him with a command line client.

- He didn't understand the need to leave logging inside an application to report errors. Because he used to ... I shit you not ... drive to his customers, plug into their server and debug their application using a debugger.

... props for using a debugger, but fuck me.

- Once, after an entire 2 days of tapping me on the shoulder every 15 mins for questions / issues, I had to stop and ask:

Me: "Have you googled it?"
C: "... eh, no"
Me: "can I ask why?"
C: "well, for me, I only google for something I don't know"
Me: "... well do you know what this error message means?"
C: "ah good point, i'll try this time"

... maybe he was A's stoner buddy?

- He burned through our free cloud usage allowance for a month, after 1 day, meaning he couldn't test anything else under his account. He left an application running, broadcasting a lot of data. Turns out the on / off button on the dashboard only worked for "on". He had been killing his terminal locally and didn't know how to "ctrl + c a cloud app" ... so left it running. His intention was to restart the app every time you are done using it ... but forgot.

- His issue with the previous one ... not any of his countless mistakes, not the lack of even trying to make the button work, no, no, not for C. C's issue is the cloud is "shit" for giving us such little allowances. (for the record in a month I had never used more than 5%).

- I had to explain environment variables and why they are necessary for passwords and tokens etc. He didn't know it wasn't ok to commit these into GitHub.

- At his project meetups with partners I had to repeatedly ask him to stop googling gifs and pay attention to the talks.

- He complained that we don't have 3 hour lunch breaks like his last place.

- He once copied and pasted the same function 450 times into a file as a load test ... are loops too mainstream nowadays?

You see C is our winner, because after 6 painful months (companies internal process / requirements) he actually achieved nothing. I really mean that, nothing. Every thing was so broken, so insecure / wide open, built without any kind of common sense or standards I had to delete it all and start again ... it took me 2 weeks.

I hope you've all enjoyed this series and will join me in praying for the return of my sanity ... I do miss it a lot.

Yours truly,
practiseSafeHex