So... A random morning moment:
(c - Cient, m - me)

C: Help!!! Our users are complaining that our website is not working as intended!!! This is crucial!!!!
M: What's the problem? What is not working?
C: EVERYTHING!!!! FIX IT!!!!
M: Could you be more specific...?
C: Look at the bugsnag - it has all the errrors!!!
M: *looks there - no errors* - But... It has no errors...
C: Okay, so client told me he's using Galaxy SII - does that ring a bell?
M: *thinks that I'm fucked* - Asks, which browser?
C: Why do you need it? It's a browser after all...
M: Yeah but not all browsers are the same and I need type and version to investigate...
C: It's Samsung default browser... Last updated 2012 January.
M: Well, tell that user to update the browser, the site is working fine on newer versions...
C: No, you update it.
M: Browser?!
C: Yes, what else?!
M: Of course, I'll fly 3000 kilometres to press UPDATE button on clients phone...
C: Well, he's not doing it himself - he's afraid!
M: Well, that is his problem. Site is working fine for other users with newer browsers.
C: But... He's a client
M: I get it but he's a client that uses 6 years old browser and tries to visit our website. Don't you remember that we ditched IE support on your behalf for the same reason?!
C: Oh... I see... Can you make something that it works with 2005 browsers?
M: Of course... *evil laugh starts* I'll make the website work on EVERY single device EVER - make it plain text.
C: Are you joking?
M: Are you?

----

And since then, we ditched the actual need for supporting users with old browsers that don't update to modern standards... Feels great!

People are posting their setups so I thought I'd post this.

It's a 2012 MacBook Pro, 13 inch. I put 16GB ram and some solid state in there just so it gets the job done.

When I was a freshman in high school, my dad saw something in me that he believed in (and I didn't). He decided to put his money where his heart was. He told me that he would go out and buy me a computer, and I wouldn't have to pay him back, if I would work hard at programming to pay for my own college.

His investment payed off. I just graduated high school and started a job last week that will get me through college debt-free through the gap year that I'm taking. This machine's getting a little old, but it means a lot to me. It reminds me that my dad believed in me even when I didn't. 🖖🏼

Just saw this comment in our code:

// TODO: think of a better way to do this

Committed June 12, 2012

TFFW you regret the decision of using “truecrypt” on a hard drive back in 2012......... and then forgetting the key...

Dear Indian Companies,

Why do you hire for a role and then say: "We dont have that role but then we want you to grow up to be a Generalist"!

6 years as a build, release and SCM guy at Moto and Nokia back then, I shifted to this big Indian IT corp coz Nokia was shutting down...

A week into my orientation (which is a crazy weirdness inducing ritual in and of itself), the new manager I'm supposed to be working with comes up and says- "Here's the code repo, there are 2 open jQuery issues, fix them!"

I'm not really sure what to say at this point because jQuery is nice and all but thats not who I am.. I'm the infra / DevOps guy. And this is circa 2012 when DevOps as a term was just hotting up...

Tell me to setup a multi-stage pipeline and automated test cycles, I'll do it drunk, but oh no! bug fixing on a jQuery script? Noooo!!!!! I just dont have the chops for it.

So long story short, I get reported to HR for insubordination - Yeah, Go Figure!

Cue: HR meeting
HR: You wont work?
Me: I cant work on jQuery. I am a sysadmin / devops guy... Give me a project that involves those skills and I'll work.
HR: But we hired you to work on jQuery.
Me: But you did not mention jQuery / UI / UX in the job description - Pulls up email and shows JD for interview which says Symbian, Build, Release, Configuration Management but NOT jQuery.
HR: ....
Me: :-/
HR: But we want you to be a generalist.
Me: #wtf
HR: We want an engineer to be able to do anything he is tasked with!
Me: Can I know my last working date here?

And thats how my career at a glorious IT corporation just went poof!

When I think back on it, I feel good that I chose to do what I wanted to get better at and what I loved working on...

And this is the problem with IT companies in our country - They play with people's aspirations and passions... To the point that all thats left of a software engineer is the looking forward to pay day so he can start the damn cycle all over again.

Worst dev team failure I've experienced?

One of several.

Around 2012, a team of devs were tasked to convert a ASPX service to WCF that had one responsibility, returning product data (description, price, availability, etc...simple stuff)
No complex searching, just pass the ID, you get the response.

I was the original developer of the ASPX service, which API was an XML request and returned an XML response. The 'powers-that-be' decided anything XML was evil and had to be purged from the planet. If this thought bubble popped up over your head "Wait a sec...doesn't WCF transmit everything via SOAP, which is XML?", yes, but in their minds SOAP wasn't XML. That's not the worst WTF of this story.

The team, 3 developers, 2 DBAs, network administrators, several web developers, worked on the conversion for about 9 months using the Waterfall method (3~5 months was mostly in meetings and very basic prototyping) and using a test-first approach (their own flavor of TDD). The 'go live' day was to occur at 3:00AM and mandatory that nearly the entire department be on-sight (including the department VP) and available to help troubleshoot any system issues.

3:00AM - Teams start their deployments
3:05AM - Thousands and thousands of errors from all kinds of sources (web exceptions, database exceptions, server exceptions, etc), site goes down, teams roll everything back.

3:30AM - The primary developer remembered he made a last minute change to a stored procedure parameter that hadn't been pushed to production, which caused a side-affect across several layers of their stack.

4:00AM - The developer found his bug, but the manager decided it would be better if everyone went home and get a fresh look at the problem at 8:00AM (yes, he expected everyone to be back in the office at 8:00AM).

About a month later, the team scheduled another 3:00AM deployment (VP was present again), confident that introducing mocking into their testing pipeline would fix any database related errors.

3:00AM - Team starts their deployments.
3:30AM - No major errors, things seem to be going well. High fives, cheers..manager tells everyone to head home.
3:35AM - Site crashes, like white page, no response from the servers kind of crash. Resetting IIS on the servers works, but only for around 10 minutes or so.
4:00AM - Team rolls back, manager is clearly pissed at this point, "Nobody is going fucking home until we figure this out!!"
6:00AM - Diagnostics found the WCF client was causing the server to run out of resources, with a mix of clogging up server bandwidth, and a sprinkle of N+1 scaling problem. Manager lets everyone go home, but be back in the office at 8:00AM to develop a plan so this *never* happens again.

About 2 months later, a 'real' development+integration environment (previously, any+all integration tests were on the developer's machine) and the team scheduled a 6:00AM deployment, but at a much, much smaller scale with just the 3 development team members.

Why? Because the manager 'froze' changes to the ASPX service, the web team still needed various enhancements, so they bypassed the service (not using the ASPX service at all) and wrote their own SQL scripts that hit the database directly and utilized AppFabric/Velocity caching to allow the site to scale. There were only a couple client application using the ASPX service that needed to be converted, so deploying at 6:00AM gave everyone a couple of hours before users got into the office. Service deployed, worked like a champ.

A week later the VP schedules a celebration for the successful migration to WCF. Pizza, cake, the works. The 3 team members received awards (and a envelope, which probably equaled some $$$) and the entire team received a custom Benchmade pocket knife to remember this project's success. Myself and several others just stared at each other, not knowing what to say.

Later, my manager pulls several of us into a conference room
Me: "What the hell? This is one of the biggest failures I've been apart of. We got rewarded for thousands and thousands of dollars of wasted time."
<others expressed the same and expletive sediments>
Mgr: "I know..I know...but that's the story we have to stick with. If the company realizes what a fucking mess this is, we could all be fired."
Me: "What?!! All of us?!"
Mgr: "Well, shit rolls downhill. Dept-Mgr-John is ready to fire anyone he felt could make him look bad, which is why I pulled you guys in here. The other sheep out there will go along with anything he says and more than happy to throw you under the bus. Keep your head down until this blows over. Say nothing."

FUCKING HELL
My sister has that Vaio laptop from 2012 and she wanted me to "clean it up"... You get the deal. I ran the bios and booted it up from my external SSD setup so I don't have to bother with her bloody Windows fucking 7. When I'm finished deleting some garbage she managed to accumulate on her disk I wanted to switch back to Windows to properly uninstall bloatware she had. AND THEN OT FUCKING STRUCK ME. Can't load bios. F keys don't do shit. Delete doesn't either. The bloody "ASSIST" button is as useless as always. Since the computer is so slow I'm gonna waste a whole day trying to fix it and in the end she will be like: "oh, it took you so long!". Why Vaio, why can't you just get over the fact that some people actually use BIOS and make it somehow ACCESSIBLE? It's the same shit every time I try to do anything with that laptop. I'm always getting shit on from Sony as if I paid them to fuck me. One last time. VAIO, FUCK YOU.

I am a back-end developer, never suggested otherwise. My company is a firm of 50 people and owner hired a web designer to code our website. And it got hacked. Badly. So boss tells me to check if I can fix it. I take a look at the PHP and boy, written in PHP3, copy paste code from all over the place, hell the admin panel is a clone from a 2012 tutorial, nothing that remotely stares at the DB is checked for SQL, and now he wants me to design a new website, rewrite everything in PHP7 and had the balls to say "I know it's not your job, but it's a job, so do it"

Hesitated for a while before posting this, as I don't like to whine in public but this should be therapeutical

Beware, it's a #longread

Years ago, I thought about how cool it'd be to have conversation-based interactive fiction on my phone. I remember showing early prototypes to my ex in 2012. It took me over 2 years to build up the courage to make it my priority and to take time off. FictionBurgers.com was born.

A few weeks in, a friend of mine forwarded me a link to Lifeline. I was devastated. I literally spent 2 days cursing my past self for not making a move sooner.

I soldiered on, worked 7 months straight on it. Now the tech is 90-95% finished, content is maybe 60% finished and I just... gave up. Every other week now, similar projects are popping up. I'm under-staffed and under-financed compared to them. Beyond the entertainment space, "conversation-based" is hot stuff in 2016, and I still can't seem to know what to do with what I have.

I feel like I had this fantastic opportunity and squandered it, which makes me miserable.

Anyway, just so you get some cheese with my whine, here are a few lessons I learned the hard way:

Lesson #1 : Don't go it alone. I thought I could hack it, and for over 7 months, I did. But sooner or later, shit gets to you, it's just human. That's when you need someone; just so that their highs compensate your lows and vice versa. Most of the actual writing was done by a freelancer (and he did AMAZING WORK, especially considering that I couldn't pay him much) but it's not the same as a partner, who's invested same as you.

Lesson #1.5 : Complementary skills. Just like my fiction project failed because I was missing a writer partner, my fallback plan of getting into conversational tech hit the skids for lack of a bizdev partner. It's great to stick among devs when ranting, but you need to mingle with a variety of people. Some of them are actually ok, y'know :)

Lesson #2 : Lean Startup, MVP. Google those terms if you're not familiar with them. My mistake here (after MVPing the shit out of the tech) was to let my content goal run amok : what made my app superior to the competition (or so I reasoned) was that it would allow for conversations with multiple characters! So I started plotting a story... with 9 characters. Not 2 or 3. NINE FREAKING CHARACTERS! Branching conversations with 9 characters is the stuff of nightmare -- and is the main reason I gave up.

Lesson #3 : Know your reasons. I wasted some much time early on, zig-zaging between objectives:
"I'm just indulging myself"
"No, I really want it to be a project that pays off"
"Nah, it's just a learning opportunity"
"Damn, why is it bothering me so much that someone else is doing the same thing ?"
"Doesn't matter, I just mine finished"
"What a waste of time !!"
etc etc
And it's still a problem now that I'm trying to figure out what to do!

So anyway, that's my story, thanks for readin'
Check out chatty.im/player/sugar-wars if you want to test the most advance version.

Also, I've also tagged this #startupfail, if any of you fine people want to share the lessons you've dearly paid to learn!

Hello there, just couple of words about PHP. I've been develop on PHP more than 10 years, I've seen it all 3,4,5,{6},7. Yes PHP was not good in terms of engineering and patterns, but it was simple, it was the most simple language for web to start those days. It was simple as you put code into file, upload it via FTP and it works. No java servlets, no unix consoles, no nothing, just shared hosting account was enough to host site, or even application with database. As database everybody used to have mysql, again because its simple to start and easy to maintain. So PHP+MySQL became industry standard on Web during 00-2012, and continues in some way.
You can write HTML and logic inside single file, within php code, even more single file may content few pages, or even kind of framework. That simplicity and agility sticks everybody who wants to develop sites with PHP.
This is pretty much about why it is so popular.

Each good or wannabe PHP developer in an early days write its own framework or library (like in javascript this days because of nodejs)

Imagine that PHP has hadn't have package manager, developers used to have host packages on their own sites, then various packages catalog sites created, and then finally composer. A gazillions of php code had spread over internet, without any kind of dependency control. To include libraries to your projects you have to just write include, or require. Some developers do it better than others.

So what we have ? A lots of code, no repositories, zip archives with libraries, no dependency control.
Project that uses that kind of code are still alive even today, they are solid hose of cards, and unmaintainable of course.

And main question that I'm trying to answer is Why PHP is not good ?
- First is amount of legacy code which people copy and pasted into their project, spread it even more like a virus.
- Lack of industry standards at the beginning lead to a lots of bad practices among developers. PHP code usually smells.
open source php projects in early days was developed in same conditions so even in phpbb, phpnuke, wordpress, drupal used to have a lot of bad practices in their codebase. So php developers usually not study by another library, instead they write their own frameworks/libraries.
- "It works", - there are no strong business demands, on web development, again because lack of standards, and concerns.
This three things are basically same, they linked to each other and summarize of answer of why PHP have strong smells and everybody yelling against it.

Whats is with PHP nowadays ? Of course PHP today is more influenced by good practice of webdev. Composer, Zend, Laravel, Yii, Symphony and language it self became more adult so to say, but developers...

People who never tried anything except PHP are usually weaker in programming and ecosystem knowledge than people who tried something else, python, perl, ruby, c for instance.

Summary

PHP as any other programming language is a tool. Each tool has its own task. Consider this and your task requirements and PHP can be just good enough solution.
"PHP is shit" - usually you heard that from people who never write strong applications on PHP and haven't used any good tools like Symphony or Laravel.
Cheap developers, - the bigger community, the more chance to hire cheap developers, and more chance to get bad code. That can be applied on any other language.
PHP has professionals developers, usually they have not only php on scope.

That's all folks, this is very brief, I am not covering php usage early days in details, but this is good enough to understand the point.

Enjoy.

Thought of this but no one would truly get it anywhere else...

Family myFamily = new Family();
myFamily.add("husband", "Sept 2011");
myFamily.add("wife", "Sept 2011");
myFamily.add("cat", "July 2012");
myFamily.add("child", "August 2019");

Two things:

a) getting into development at all

b) selling my bitcoins in 2012

When a Coursera course is way better than the one offered by your university…
A university student's rant...

I study Electrical and Computer Engineering and during the first semester of the second year I selected an optional course: Web Programming. It was believed among students that the course would be really easy, and it was. All the student had to do was build a very simple website using HTML, CSS and a few line of JS. A website containing three or four pages all of which had to be validated using a markup validation service.

Yeah, sure, I passed the course just like everyone else who bothered enough to spend an hour or two working on the project. Oh, I almost forgot! We had an one-hour workshop on Dreamweaver!
So, by that point, everybody was a front-end developer, right?!

That happened over three years ago, and because of that course web-development didn’t impress me…

Thankfully, the last few months I’ve became interested in Web Development, and I’ve been reading some articles, spending time on smashing magazine, making some progress on FreeCodeCamp and taking relevant courses on Coursera!
In fact, a few days ago I completed the Coursera course “HTML, CSS and Javascript for Web Developers”.
Oh boy, the things I didn’t know that I didn’t know…

<sarcasm>Did you know there was a term called “responsive design” and that there are frameworks like bootstrap?</sarcasm>
Well, I d i d n ’ t k n o w ! ! ! (even though I had taken the university’s course).

I understand that bootstrap was introduced in 2011 and I took the university course in late 2012, but by that time, bootstrap was quite popular and also there were other frameworks available before bootstrap that could have been included in the course! (even today, there is no reference in responsive design in the university’s course).
In just five weeks the coursera course managed to teach me more, in a more organized and meaningful way than my university’s course in a whole semester!

When I started the coursera course I shared it with a friend of mine. His response: “yeah, sure, but web development is pretty easy… I didn’t spend much time to complete that project three years ago!”

That course three years ago gave birth to misconceptions in students' minds that web development is easy! Yeah, sure, it can be easy to built a simple, non responsive, non interactive website! But that's not how the world works nowadays , right?!

A few months ago, in the early days of August, I attended Flock, the Fedora community conference. During a break I spent some time speaking with a Red Hat employee about student internships. He told me, and I paraphrase: “We know that students don’t have a solid background and that they haven’t learned in the university what we need them to!”

Currently I’m planning to apply for a front-end developer internship position here in Greece.
Yesterday I wrote my CV, added university courses relevant to that position and listed coursera courses under independent coursework… While writing those I made these thoughts…

What if that course 3 years ago was as good as the coursera course… all the things I’d know by now…

!code

I literally cannot get this computer to boot from ANYTHING other than its hard drive.

I want to boot from a usb flash drive, but the bios doesn't support that. it supports standard and 120mb floppies, ZIP drives, usb floppies, usb cd drives, etc. but not a generic USB drive. You'd think the bios developers would have heard of them back in 2012, but they also refer to Windows as "window os", so who knows.

I changed the boot order multiple times to include everything that might possibly include a usb flash drive, and then just tried all of the other options as well. No luck. Everything just booted straight to Windows.

Okay, that's not exactly unexpected, so I found a boot manager that allows booting to usb drives, and burned that to a cd. I made sure the boot order included "CDDRIVE" first (and "USB-CD" second just to be sure), and tried again. The bios refused to boot from the cd because it's in a cd/dvd drive, and cd drives are VASTLY different beasts than dvd drives, apparently. Like, it didn't even ask the drive to spin up! It just booted straight into Windows.

After a few more reboots (and quite a few middle fingers), my dvd drive magically appeared in the list of allowed boot devices. Why did it just show up now? No clue :/ I'm just happy it's there.

So, I pick that, save and exit, and wait for my shiny new boot manager to pop up. The cursor flashes a bit, moves around, and flashes some more. Then Windows starts loading.

what the crap? why?

So this time I disable booting from the hard drive altogether. In fact, I disable everything except the dvd drive, because screw this, and save/restart for the twelfth time.

Windows greets me.
Again.

What the hell?

At this point I'm tempted to unplug the friggin' drive. If Windows still greets me after that, I'm just going to check myself into an asylum and call it a life.

But seriously.
Either the boot manager in question is triple-faulting and the bios is transparently failing-over to the previous boot config (Windows), or said boot manager is just like "yolo!" and picks Windows anyway.

If a different boot manager doesn't work, I'm totally out of ideas.

Edit: disabling HD boot entirely and removing the boot manager cd also results in Windows loading. It's like the bios is completely ignoring my settings. :/

In 2012 my parents bought a new cordless phone with base station for their home. Worked fine.
Unless sometimes, nobody was reachable - mostly, when they weren't home - of course nobody would answer the phone.
Finally I called them one day, and mom answered the phon - "Hi, we are going to the mall now, when will you come ... bzz" - beep beep. Nothing until I came home.
They just came back from the mall, when I arrived. And mom said - this phone won't work - and took the cordless phone out of her bag, which she took to the mall ... yes. mom - that's no mobile ... I had to explain.

Cute Girl: So you're like a computer guy, right?

Me in 2012: Yeah, I do some programming and...

Cute Girl: Ok *walks away*

Me in 2012: ........wait, come back! Don't go! I'll fix your printer for you! Or hack your friend's fb. Or make this cool app that you maybe have an idea for..? Don't leeeeeav...ah nvm, she's gone.

I love this beauty.

MacBook Pro Mid-2012

😍

THE WORST PRANK ATTEMPT

If i remember true, it was 2012. april fool day..

me and my co-worker (we were the founders) decided to fool our members (we had a script's unofficial support forum). so, we did the plan. we register another account on march and wrote a few useful messages with it. help guys with that fake account (named as Root).

on fool day, we move the site to hidden folder (but didnt backup it) and added an index file as "hi, i am Root. you know me who am i. i hacked this site and deleted all dbs. cya later" (in turkish of course)

and we sit our chairs, began the watch our messages from facebook,skype,whatsapp etc..

we act like we are in trouble and we cant solve the problem.
at the same time, one of the our crew, decided to help us :D
so, he contact with our server's management crew. they dont know the fool too :)

server management looked up the situation without try to contact with me or my co. and we got an email from server like that
"hello tilkibey and impack, we just realized your site is hacked. so we delete your all ftp and db for safety. please contact with us asap"

we shocked and contact with them, explain the truths and request the recover our site (because we though they backup site before deleting all things). but they didnt backup it :(

so, we recover our last backup which is got nearly 10 days ago :(

//Let it be known that on May 25th, 2012, a single missing semicolon on the below line caused nearly eight hours of confusion and grief.

My school just tried to hinder my revision for finals now. They've denied me access just today of SSHing into my home computer. Vim & a filesystem is soo much better than pen and paper.

So I went up to the sysadmin about this. His response: "We're not allowing it any more". That's it - no reason. Now let's just hope that the sysadmin was dumb enough to only block port 22, not my IP address, so I can just pick another port to expose at home. To be honest, I was surprised that he even knew what SSH was. I mean, sure, they're hired as sysadmins, so they should probably know that stuff, but the sysadmins in my school are fucking brain dead.

For one, they used to block Google, and every other HTTPS site on their WiFi network because of an invalid certificate. Now it's even more difficult to access google as you need to know the proxy settings.

They switched over to forcing me to remote desktop to access my files at home, instead of the old, faster, better shared web folder (Windows server 2012 please help).

But the worst of it includes apparently having no password on their SQL server, STORING FUCKING PASSWORDS IN PLAIN TEXT allowing someone to hijack my session, and just leaving a file unprotected with a shit load of people's names, parents, and home addresses. That's some super sketchy illegal shit.

So if you sysadmins happen to be reading this on devRant, INSTEAD OF WASTING YOUR FUCKING TIME BLOCKING MORE WEBSITES THAN THEIR ARE LIVING HUMANS, HOW ABOUT TRY UPPING YOUR SECURITY, PASSWORDS LIKE "", "", and "gryph0n" ARE SHIT - MAKE IT BETTER SO US STUDENTS CAN ACTUALLY BROWSE MORE FREELY - I THINK I WANT TO PASS, NOT HAVE EVERY OTHER THING BLOCKED.

Thankfully I'm leaving this school in 3 weeks after my last exam. Sure, I could stay on with this "highly reputable" school, but I don't want to be fucking lied to about computer studies, I don't want to have to workaround your shitty methods of blocking. As far as I can tell, half of the reputation is from cheating. The students and sysadmins shouldn't have to have an arms race between circumventing restrictions and blocking those circumventions. Just make your shit work for once.

**On second thought, actually keep it like that. Most of the people I see in the school are c***s anyway - they deserve to have half of everything they try to do censored. I won't be around to care soon.**

Building a business can hamper one's development urges!

I have been building stuff since 2008. Took my first job in 2012, won a hackathon at Yahoo right after that. Got an amazing team to work with! Our team converted the hacked product into a proper product using Django and AngularJS. Those were the fun days. At that time AngularJS had just come out and I was under the dilemma to use Angular, Ember or backbone. But with all this came the responsibility to build a business out of our product. It didn't happen eventually though.

So I moved on to cure my entrepreneural itch and went on to start up an e-commerce startup along with my day job. It started getting good traction and I finally left my day job to focus completely on it. It's a sticker marketplace and I had to focus a lot on the actual physical product, improve the quality, tackle business development and stuff etc. In all this, my habit of creating stuff with code kind of got the back seat. Everyday, I see such exciting technologies come up and I want to try them out. I have been itching to create a native app using react native. Try to build a skill for Amazon Alexa.

On one side I am happy that I have been able to build a brand and become the largest sticker marketplace in India providing super awesome reusable stickers, but on the other hand, managing the business on a daily basis is killing the developer in me :(

Does anyone else building a business which involves a physical product also face a similar problem? I think I should just take up weekend hackathon type problems and try to solve them using the technologies I want to learn. Example, I have been meaning to build an app for our company. I think I will start with that!

I have been following devRant for quite sometime now and it has been awesome. Finally, signed up and ranted today! 😊😊

New spin on the Manager / Dev format!

Recuiter: WE NEED AN ABSOLUTE NODE EXPERT, NODE NODE NODE, WE LOVE NODE! WHAT IS YOUR NODE EXPERIENCE?!?!

Dev: Well I've had exposure to it since it was nearly new, all the way back in 2012, and since my professional career started about 7 years ago I've used it fairly often on a per-project basis.

Recruiter: WELL HAVE YOU BEEN USING IT DAILY FOR THE PAST 5 YEARS!?!

Dev: Well no, as I said I've used it for specific projects... anyway, there are these things called weekends...

Recruiter: WELL WE ONLY WANT NODE ZOMBIES SO SORRY.

Dev: Thanks for reaching out and wasting my time.

Recruiter: ...

Dev: ...

God recruiters are like robots, don't they understand senior-level engineers are language agnostic?

I never understood the appeal of Steve Jobs to other people, and had never bought an Apple product until about six years ago.

However, after buying a couple of Macbooks - including ones, circa 2012/2013, on eBay - it's very obvious that the quality has shrivelled into oblivion after his passing.

If I was to credit him with one thing, Jobs was the ultimate QA guru with long lasting products as his top priority.

Now, Apple sells glue machines and Steve Jobs would be clean slating the entire list of employees - from the top, down - if he was alive to notice how little the company seemed to care about what he had planted as the seed, many years ago.

This is me trying to code. Year 2012, I was 11. 1024x768 screen, Windows XP, slowest internet connection ever. Android 4.1 was the latest trend, toolbars were also cool apparently.

So I booted up this "very exciting, bleeding edge project" that my boss so delicately forced me to volunteer for. This is what I see:

FATAL ERROR
The internal calendar ended on Dec. 21, 2012.

... The Mayans. The Mayans built the system.

I was fresh out of college, love Java and looking for a job.

Well, after exact 1 month I sucked the reality. I found an Ad for a designer and got selected. Point is I mention my qualification in high school because I was feeling bad to disclose my higher degree for such a job.

I worked for 6 months there and every day was like working as the covert operative. I always knew I can write an automated script for all that daily shit. But for the sake of the landlord rent, I kept quiet. (I literally care for his children, I was the only source of income)

Then, my friend that day 16-Sep-2012 I wrote a program to do all the repetitive thing I used to do.
My boss found out and I expose my self as Spiderman do to Jen, Sir! I am a Programmer.

Sadly it was, no surprise to him. He said, on your first day I found out that you are not high school. Because with such accuracy only a graduate can do such level of the job.

He praised me and motivated me, my first non-technical master.

My first job was actually nontechnical - I was 18 years old and sold premium office furniture for a small store in Munich.
I did code in my free time though (PHP/JS mostly, had a litte browsergame back then - those were the days), so when my boss approached me and asked me whether I liked to take over a coding project, I agreed to the idea.

Little did I know at the time: I was supposed to work with a web agency the boss had contracted to build their online shop. Only that he had no plan or anything, he basically told them "build me an online shop like abc(a major competitor of ours at the time)"

He employed another sales lady who was supposed to manage the shop (that didn't exist yet). In the end, I think 80% of her job was to keep me from killing my boss.

As you can imagine, with this huuuuge amout of planning and these exact visions of what was supposed to be, things went south fast and far. So far that I could visit my fellow flightless birds down in the Penguin's republic of Antarctica and still need to go further.

Well... When my boss started suing the web agency, I was... ahem, asked to take over. Dumb as I was, I did - I was a PHP kid and thought that Magento, being written in PHP, would be easy to master. If you know Magento, you know that was maybe the wrongest thing I ever said.

Fast forward 3 very exhausting months, the thing was online. Not all of it worked yet, but it was online and fairly secure.

I did next to everything myself, administrating the CentOS box the shop was running on, its (own) e-mail server, the web server, all the coding required for the shop (can you spell 12 hour day for 8 hour pay?)

3 further months later, my life basically was a wreck, I dragged myself to work, the only thing I looked forward being the motorcycle ride home. The system worked though.

Mind you, I was still, at the time, working with three major customers, doing deskside support and some admin (Win Server 2008R2 at the time) - because, to quote my boss, "We could not afford a full time developer and we don't need one".

I think i stopped coding in my free time, the one hobby I used to love more than anything on the world, somewhere Decemerish 2012. I dropped out of the open source projects I was in, quit working on my browser game and let everything slide.

I didn't even care to renew the domains and servers for it, I just let it die without notice.

The little free time I had, I spent playing video games and getting drunk/high.

December 2013, 1.5 years on the job, I reached my breaking point and just left, called in sick at least a week per month because I just could not see this fucking place anymore.

I looked for another job outside of ALL of what I did before. No more Magento, no more sales, no more PHP. I didn't have to look for long, despite what I thought of my skills.

In February 2014, I told my boss that I quit. It was still seven months until my new job started, but I wanted him to know early so we could migrate and find a replacement.

The search for said replacement started in June 2014. I had considerably less work in the months before, looks like he got the hint.

In August 2014, my replacement arrived and I got him started.

I found a job, which I am still in, and still happy about after almost half a decade, at a local, medium sized ISP as a software dev and IT security guy. Got a proper training with a certificate and everything now.

My replacement lasted two months, he was external and never really did his job - the site, which until I had quit, had a total of 3 days downtime for 3 YEARS (they were the hoster's fault, not mine), was down for an entire month and he could not even tell why.

HIS followup was kicked after taking two weeks to familiarize himself with the project. Well, I think that two weeks is not even barely enough to familiarize yourself with nearly three years of work, but my boss gave him two days.

In 2016, the shop was replaced with another one. Different shop system, different OS, different CI. I don't know why and I can't say I give a damn.

Almost all the people that worked at the company back with me have left for greener pastures, taking their customers (and revenue) with them.

As for my boss' comments, instructions and lines: THAT might not be safe for work. Or kids. Or humans in general. And there wouldn't be much left if you put it through a language filter...

Moral of the story: No, it's not a bad thing to leave a place if you're mistreated there. Don't mistake loyalty with stupidity!

And, to quote one of my favourite Bands: "Nothing matters when the pain is all but gone" (Tragedy + Time by Rise Against).

Am I a machochistic fuck?
This sunday I had the glorious idea to fix a not-so-recent Wordpress website for a friend.
Imagine an upgrade from 3.3.2 to 4.9.8! (and PHP 5.5.old to 7.2.new

Oh boy. I thought it was impossible, because the site uses a free theme from 2012 and had some other plugins installed.
But what kind of developer am I, if I give up so easily?

I forced XAMPP to run PHP 5.6.stoneage in order to let me debug this thing. After some fixing in different files, I was able to get the admin panel back, disabled some plugins and then overwrote the installation with WP 4.9.8. After firing up the admin panel I had to fix 20 differend PHP files in the plugins.

Finally! After the plugins were updated, all worked again.
Except for the backend part of this free crappy theme. It uses an old version of JQuery UI widgets with custom mods.
I've done enough for today so I let it be like this. I'm not in the mood to load a second JQuery version.

This is something I'll never forget.

I'm a senior UI engineer. I was working at a digital agency at the time and got tasked with refactoring and improving an existing interface from a well known delivery company.

I open the code and what do I find? Indentation. But not in the normal sense. The indentation only went forward, randomly returning a bunch of tabs back in the middle of the file a few times, but never returning to its initial level after closing a tag or function, both on HTML and JS.

Let that sink in for a minute and try to imagine what it does to your editor with word wrapping (1 letter columns), and without (absurd horizontal scrolling).

Using Sublime at the time, ctrl+shift+P, reindent. Everything magically falls beautifully into place. Refactor the application, clean up the code, document it, package it and send it back (zip files as they didn't want to provide version control access, yay).

The next day, we get a very angry call from the client saying that their team is completely lost. I prove to the project manager that my code is up to scratch, running fine, no errors, tested, good performance. He returns to the client and proves that it's all correct (good PM with decent tech knowledge).

The client responds with "Yeah, the code is running, but our team uses tabs for version control and now we lost all versioning!".

Bear in mind this was in 2012, git was around for 7 years then, and SVN and Mercury much longer.

I then finally understood the randomness of the tabs. The code would go a bunch of tabs back when it went back to a previous version, everything above were additions or modifications that joined seamlessly with the previous version before, with no way to know when and so on.

I immediately told the PM that was absurd, he agreed, and told the client we wouldn't be reindenting everything back for them according to the original file.

All in all, it wasn't a bad experience due to a competent PM, but it left a bad taste in my mouth to know companies have teams that are that incompetent, and that no one thought to stop and say "hey, this may cause issues down the line".

I’ve learned JavaScript in 2012, and after a few years of C++, C, Java and Python, I am seriously coming back to js. And oooh boi, things have changed. Back in the day 😅, jquery was the coolest lib ever, Nodejs was a new wild beast (v0.7.0). Kids these days don’t really how lucky they are.

So I just received an email from a developer, saying my client hired him to take care of their website from now on. This client counted on me since 2012, so I felt a little... Betrayed. Even though this client was not big and a little difficult.

It's weird. I am trying to transition to something better in my professional life, but I'm not feeling confident of what I'm doing. Sometimes I feel my professional life is ruining. Uncertainty sucks.

Additionally, my desktop decided to stop working today and won't turn on. Oh well.

As a developer, I constantly feel like I'm lagging behind.

Long rant incoming.

Whenever I join a new company or team, I always feel like I'm the worst developer there. No matter how much studying I do, it never seems to be enough.

Feeling inadequate is nothing new for me, I've been struggling with a severe inferiority complex for most of my life. But starting a career as a developer launched that shit into overdrive.

About 10 years ago, I started my college education as a developer. At first things were fine, I felt equal to my peers. It lasted about a day or two, until I saw a guy working on a website in notepad. Nothing too special of course, but back then as a guy whose scripting experience did not go much farther than modifying some .ini files, it blew my mind. It went downhill from there.

What followed were several stressful, yet strangely enjoyable, years in college where I constantly felt like I was lagging behind, even though my grades were acceptable. On top of college stress, I had a number of setbacks, including the fallout of divorcing parents, childhood pets, family and friends dying, little to no money coming in and my mother being in a coma for a few weeks. She's fine now, thankfully.

Through hard work, a bit of luck, and a girlfriend who helped me to study, I managed to graduate college in 2012 and found a starter job as an Asp.Net developer.
My knowledge on the topic was limited, but it was a good learning experience, I had a good mentor and some great colleagues. To teach myself, I launched a programming tutorial channel. All in all, life was good. I had a steady income, a relationship that was already going for a few years, some good friends and I was learning a lot.

Then, 3 months in, I got diagnosed with cancer.

This ruined pretty much everything I had built up so far. I spend the next 6 months in a hospital, going through very rough chemo.

When I got back to working again, my previous Asp.Net position had been (understandably) given to another colleague. While I was grateful to the company that I could come back after such a long absence, the only position available was that of a junior database manager. Not something I studied for and not something I wanted to do each day neither.

Because I was grateful for the company's support, I kept working there for another 12 - 18 months. It didn't go well. The number of times I was able to do C# jobs can be counted on both hands, while new hires got the assignments, I regularly begged my PM for.

On top of that, the stress and anxiety that going through cancer brings comes AFTER the treatment. During the treatment, the only important things were surviving and spending my potentially last days as best as I could. Those months working was spent mostly living in fear and having to come to terms with the fact that my own body tried to kill me. It caused me severe anger issues which in time cost me my relationship and some friendships.

Keeping up to date was hard in these times. I was not honing my developer skills and studying was not something I'd regularly do. 'Why spend all this time working if tomorrow the cancer might come back?'

After much soul-searching, I quit that job and pursued a career in consultancy. At first things went well. There was not a lot to do so I could do a lot of self-study. A month went by like that. Then another. Then about 4 months into the new job, still no work was there to be done. My motivation quickly dwindled.

To recuperate the costs, the company had me do shit jobs which had little to nothing to do with coding like creating labels or writing blogs. Zero coding experience required. Although I was getting a lot of self-study done, my amount of field experience remained pretty much zip.

My prayers asking for work must have been heard because suddenly the sales department started finding clients for me. Unfortunately, as salespeople do, they looked only at my theoretical years of experience, most of which were spent in a hospital or not doing .Net related tasks.
Ka-ching. Here's a developer with four years of experience. Have fun.

Those jobs never went well. My lack of experience was always an issue, no matter how many times I told the salespeople not to exaggerate my experience. In the end, I ended up resigning there too.

After all the issues a consultancy job brings, I went out to find a job I actually wanted to do. I found a .Net job in an area little traffic. I even warned them during my intake that my experience was limited, and I did my very best every day that I worked here.

It didn't help. I still feel like the worst developer on the team, even superseded by someone who took photography in college. Now on Monday, they want me to come in earlier for a talk.

Should I just quit being a developer? I really want to make this work, but it seems like every turn I take, every choice I make, stuff just won't improve. Any suggestions on how I can get out of this psychological hell?

I am using a 2012 MacBook pro now, but I am thinking about switching to Linux (Ubuntu) or Windows before university. What do you recommend?

So, the company I’m working for is finally merging with its sister company. That means budget for upgrading our infrastructure. And guess who volunteered to be in charge of it, and future sysops. That’s me.

Previously we haven’t had anything close to a sysops, and our servers has been neglected and never updated nor upgraded since 2012. We even had a Windows Server 2012 running with rdp wide open...

2010: haha yeah I use StackOverflow too
2011: SO, amirite?
2012: omg SO servers are down
2013: am engineer and I use SO to remember how to eat and breathe
2014: guys, what if SO was down. CODEPOCALYPSE!
2015: I use SO and have imposter syndrome
2016: omg, git checkout this SO meme on /r/programmerhumor
2017: I'd rather skin my mother alive than have SO dowb
2018: Stack fucking Overflow... like.. what if... you... can't... use it... in an interview...
2019: check my twitter @paresh, tons of SO references with barely intelligible english

just fucking drop dead, pieces of shit...

The ups and downs of a corporate database developer job:

Ups: Great pay and benefits, advancement opportunities, job security.

Downs: Windows 7, Office 2012, Oracle DB 11 release 1 (2008)... not exactly a cutting edge environment.

I was looking around to do some stuff with wireshark and I stumbled across a forum question from a 2012 in which someone actually replied with the people from the future in mind.

God bless you shearn89 🫡
Youre a real one

And to those that reply "I found the solution thx" and don't post it: eat a dick

Fucking Apple... my MacBook Pro committed suicide upgrading from High Sierra to Mojave, had to wipe the drive. After much trouble resetting my Apple ID (put the password AND the two-factor code in the password field.. who the fuck thought that up), it tells me Mojave isn't compatible with this computer.

... fine, it's a 2012 machine I can respect that, but you blew away my system to upgrade THIS WAS YOUR IDEA NOT MINE...

...and so I just try to update to El Capitan or something because I'm on FUCKING OSX LION now (swirling galaxy, so sparkle, such stars)

...and the App Store won't let me. Why?

"Software Update Required"

"To make changes to your payment information, you need to upgrade your Mac to the latest version of macOS."

just.

wow.

Google: buys Android
Makes tons of $ from Ads
Meanwhile 7 year old bugs
Are still not fixed

A bug reported in 2012: recently created files are not visible when using MTP protocol.

Guess what? I still have this bug on my 2017 phone, like many other people.
Probably has something to do with file cache.

Because obviously 7 years is not enough to fix a stupid bug. Especially when Google is busy implementing all the other features nobody asked for except marketing department

During my first internship, my boss had me build a social network type of platform for doctors, all by myself, using Drupal 7. I was like 'aw yeah sure!'...*sigh* younger me...

While I was working there, he didn't have any particular input on the project other that the occasional brainstorming session, where he would tell me things that big firms do (Facebook, Twitter etc.) that should be implemented. It was 2012 so you can imagine that many standard concepts of today, were making their first appearance back then.

I remember that he was sitting on his desk, a little further next to mine, watching a video about how to treat your employees like mine-digging goblins, in a way that would bring profit to the company. He didn't notice that the volume was loud enough and that I could hear what the video said. Still to this day, that moment was one of the most awkward experiences I had in any workspace.

Well the project turned out to be a really well-built prototype and then canceled because reality hit me and I left after my internship ended, even though he told me that he wanted to hire me and have me work on the project full-time.

So happy to have been there, just to learn to avoid people and places like that in the future, it really paid off (seriously, this is the type of stuff that you have to experience in order to armor up in the future).

Happy birthday, Dr. Nabil Ali!

Today’s Google Doodle celebrates Egyptian pioneer of Arabic language computing, Dr. Nabil Ali, on his 82nd birthday. Dr. Nabil Ali’s innovations in the field of computational linguistics propelled the Arab world into the Information Age by creating programs that enabled computers to understand Arabic in digital form.

Dr. Nabil Ali was born in Cairo on this day in 1938. Expressing an interest in art at a young age, Mohamed was inspired to apply his creative passion for visual aesthetics to the world of engineering. After obtaining his PhD in Aeronautical Engineering at Cairo University, he spent over 20 years working as an engineer with the Egyptian Air Force, as well as with various computer and electronics companies throughout the world.

For Dr. Nabil Ali, digitization of Arabic, with its complex linguistic rules and morphology, was a way to connect Arabic speakers with the world.

Over the course of his career, Dr. Nabil Ali published a number of papers, books, and technical reports in support of the developments he was making in the field of computational linguistics. His work won him several awards, including the prestigious Saudi Arabian award, the King Faisal Prize, in 2012—recognizing his pioneering contributions to the Arabic Language and Literature.

Easy - in 2012 got the best paying position possible for my specialty (SharePoint) in my country, and 2 years later the company transitioned away from relying on Microsoft stack, so I've been made redundant.

Found a job in another country, and decided to make a permanent move. My girlfriend at the time was brave enough and followed me. We got married there, and then both worked for the same company, then moved countries again because we could, but continued to work remote for the same company, then she dumped me, and I decided to stay put where I was geographically and happy to say since have found a wonderful partner and life is pretty swell (still working for that original company, 8 years and counting)

So yeah. Work impact.

My first job was when I started my apprenticeship in 2012 - I was really shy, 15 years old and couldn't talk to strangers. So couldn't the guy who started the apprenticeship with me. We've got a simple contact form to program, he did the php part, I did the html part. We were supposed to talk together but we both didn't so it was pretty enerving for our boss lol. After three years we finally started to talk and we are still working together for the same boss, even after the apprenticeship - I think he's happy that we are finally talking lol

Reasons why I hate the hospital I work for...

1. NO fucking budget, for fuck sakes our telecom system is still running Merlin Magix. (I’ve been working on getting the trunk and everything to at least push FreePBX out... Configuration configuration.) but, that requires a decent server to host said system... But guess what? We’ve still got a few servers online that are running server 2012 r2. NO FUCKING BUDGET.

2. Training. They don’t have the budget to send me to training, but the doctors here are rolling in Mercedes... Must be fucking nice.

3. I have 5 f-I-v-e job descriptions. I’m a bio medical technician, network admin, system admin, programmer, and help desk... I fucked up allowing them to know I program.

4. On call 365 days a year. That’s nice and all, but when I’ve got shit to do and the nearest Walmart is an hour away I don’t want a call from Louis “oh the printer has a jam” FUCK OFF LOUIS! Get the paper out, we’ve been over this, I believe in you!

5. Some of the FUCKING (l)users.... You wouldn’t imagine some of the calls I receive, some of my favorite being late late “Hey *anonyops* I know it’s late but we’re needing a chair moved from one room to the other.” FUCK YOU YOU CHEEKY FUCKING CUNT.

The only reason I’m still here is my direct supervisor and a hand full of people that I’ve grown to love. Also, because any computer related job here is either outsourced or filled by a YouTubing god. - reason 1 why I started my own business. Supply and demand.

Rural Kansas Hospitals = shit, inb4 thanks —insert president to blame—

Just finished my Arch install on a 2012-13 MacBook Pro. Loving it so far.

Operation PiBM 5150 XT is continuing this morning!

Raspberry Pi B+ 900mhz
Raspbian Pixel Linux
LG 21:9 2560x1080 monitor
HDMI cable
/boot/config.txt updated for 21:9 monitor
Nyko PS3 USB Compact Flash / SD Reader
4gb CF card as HDD in 5150
4.77mhz IBM 5150 in like new condition
CGA Graphics and Monitor
Late 2012 Macbook Pro
HyperTerm app
USB to DB/25 (RS-232) serial adapter
Devrant Sticker

"always think of a bug as a feature"

-Someone I used to know in a hckathon, 2012, colorized, minified

I gave up on investing $2000 in Bitcoin back in 2011.

While my friend invested $10 at the same time and sold the Bitcoins in 2012.

Sad life.

NOT saving the world in 2019. I already did that in 2012 when the Maya calendar ended and wasn't being thanked - on the contrary, people said "haha look, nothing happened".

not really a rant;
But I am a real fan of sci-fi stuff, and yesterday I tried star citizen for the first time (been backer since 2012).
I have not slept yet

One day when i'm working in starbucks enjoying my coffee and music. suddenly random stranger came to me and ask what am i working on, so i told him i was working on my website project. and my first thought was this guy apparently a developer too, and turns out i need to drop that away as far as i can. since he said he using VS-Code (what i use) since 2012 -_-.

Back in 2006 I built a custom CMS for golf membership/community to manage tournament listings and registrations along with club news and social calendars. In 2008 I migrated that to Drupal 6 and continued to grow the site from there. Come 2010 I was raising flags about moving to Drupal 7. No. 2011, I recommend the move. No. 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 ...no, no, no. 2016 they complain that the site is old and they want more "management" capability (they had tons a capability). The get sold by some wizbang company and the fancy dancy CMS. I have to hear how great it is bla bla bla. That is until they start to use it. Turns out, it's not a CMS by any stretch of the imagination. They need to know HTML and a page's content in a single blob field. And content can't be repurposed across the site. I now just sit back and laugh at their pain.

Been asked if we can make a few "minor tweaks" to a Visual Basic 6.0 application last worked on in 2013.

I haven't coded in Visual Basic in approximately 20 years, the project can't be opened in Visual Studio 2012 or above and the code I've seen is a dumpster fire.

Please send help.

To all the Java Teams that died during the fucking Mobile Civil War, We salute you!

1. Millionaire 2011
2. Splinter Cell: Double Agent
3. Dragon Ball Z Saiyan Fighters
4. Moto Girls
5. 24 Special Ops
6. Thor: The Dark World
7. Kung Fu Panda
8. Worms 2011: Armageddon
9. Asphalt 4: Elite Racing
10. Resident Evil - The Missions
11. Ghost Recon: Future Soldier
12. Spider-Man 3
13. Need for Speed - Undercover 3D
14. Contra 4
15. Rambo on Fire
16. Fast and Furious 6 
17. Counter Strike 3D
18. Men in Black 3
19. X–Men Origins: Wolverine
20. WWE Legends of Wrestlemania 3D
21. 3D Fight Night: Round 4
22. 3D Ultimate Rally Championships
23. Assassin's Creed
24. Zuma
24. Die Hard 4
25. 3D WWE Smackdown Vs RAW 2009
26. Prince of Persia 3: The Two Thrones
27. 3D Fight Night: Round 3
28. Super Mario Bros
29. Bruce Lee - Iron Fist 3D
30. Naruto Adventure: A New Apprentice
31. FIFA 2011
32. James Cameron's Avatar
33. Racing 2: The Real Car Experience
34. King Kong
35. Gangstar City
36. Iron Man 3
37. XIII 2: Covert Identity
38. 4x4 Extreme Rally 3D
39. Real Football Manager 2013
40. Splinter Cell: Conviction
41. 2008 Real Football 3D
42. Assassin's Creed 2
43. Hummer 3D
44. American Gangster
45. Real Football 2009
46. 3D Football: Real Madrid 2010
47. Xtreme Dirt Bike
48. Tekken Mobile
49. A Good Day to Die Hard
50. The Amazing Spider-Man 2
51. Asphalt 3: Street Rules 3D
52. GTA IV Mobile
53. 3D Contr Terrorism
54. Real Football 2015
55. The Amazing Spider-Man
56. Contra 4 (2009)
57. Mortal Kombat 3D
58. Bad Girls
59. Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood
60. Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 3D
61. God of War
62. PES 2009 (Pro Evolution Soccer)
63. Ultimate Street Football
64. Assassin's Creed: Revelations
65. Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands
66. 3D Super taxi driver
67. Gangstar 2: Kings of LA
68. Asphalt 6: Adrenaline
69. Assassin's Creed III
70. Danger Dash
71. Real Football 2014
72. Gangstar - Crime City
73. Gangstar 3: Miami Vindication
74. Modern Combat 4: Zero Hour
75. Zuma's Revenge!

We know you guys did your best but the world is a fucking shit hole. We still remember your hard work!

76. Mission Impossible 3
77. Gangstar Rio: City of Saints (I guess these were your last days at work. Well-done guys!)
78. Real Football 2010
79. Real Football 2011 (Real Soccer)
80. Real Football 2012
81. PES 2011 (Pro Evolution Soccer) 
82. Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 (My Favorite)
83. And those missing the list.

WE SALUTE YOU ALL!!! ∠(^ー^)

Windows 10 Anniversary update removes and actively prevents reinstallion of Cisco VPN client. Yeah, I know it EOL'd in 2012 but do you think the owners of the remote network cares about that. Thanks a lot, Microsoft. 😡

TL;DR C# has changed quite a bit since the last time I used it.

So I'm working on a personal project, it's written in C#. When I needed to run a task on a separate thread. It has been years since the last time I worked with C#, so I googled it.

Me: "Async? Await? Task? This looks pretty fucking useful. When was this added?"

*Googles a bit*
Return .NET 4.5 in 2012. Current version 4.7.1.

Me: "What?! Last time I checked they were still in .NET 4. Shit!"

I've got a bit of catching up to do.

I'm performing a pentest for my client.
So after scanning my client's network I understood they're using IIS 4.5 and windows server 2012 (or 2012 R2)
I know the systems are real old.
And there are known exploits for them.

The tricky part is I have to stay hidden and I only have my own credentials for logging in to the asp page. (Uploading a script is almost crossed cuz it will reveal my identity)
Also I have access to the local network with some of the other employees user/pass.

Any recommendation for exploiting and staying hidden at the same time ?

One more question : will exploits for newer versions work for the older ones necessarily?

I decided to learn Swift as I would like to make apps. So I installed swift and swift-jupyter in my Linux server after my 2012 iMac literally took 20 fucking minutes to compile `print("hello world")` in Playgrounds. Meanwhile, my server compiles python code in a swift jupyter notebook in seconds.

Guess what my old Windows 8.1 laptop and a Nintendo 64 have in common?

Neither have a goddamn fan or a CMOS battery!!! I shit you not, I opened up my old windows 8.1 computer from like 2012 and it did not have a fan. Instead it had a large piece of metal connected to a CPU as a heatsink. It also never had a CMOS battery since the solder pads have never been used.

Not being able to persuade the client that storing plain text passwords so that they can send them to their users when they forget them is not the best way to handle user accounts.

This happened in 2012 but it still hunts me like it was yesterday.

Before you all demand to ban me from devRant, I’d like to say that we impelemented an alternative (unpaid!) for this, but were requested to disable it.

Today, in the course of my job, I said...

FFS. I HATE WINDOWS.

It has begun.

Took me five minutes to ssh into the Linux EC2 and get the Jenkins agent installed, configured, and running. Half a fucking hour for Windows Server 2012.

1) Can't ssh to it, so I connect via AWS console... Which means I have to install MS Remote Desktop. WHATEVER. FINE. It's not like ssh is quick and easy or anything.

2) Can't just use the command line, run the .jar &, cntl-z, and bg then log off. Noooo. I have to install the unpacked binaries as a fucking SERVICE. FINE. WHATEVER.

I'm so glad we have a Windows guy that does most of this shit. I can't stand it.

Does anyone else find it super-confusing how Microsoft refers to SQL Server versions by both product year and version number?

For instance, we primarily use SQL Server 2012, 2014, and 2017, which are versions 11, 12, and 14 respectively.

The slight mismatch between the product year and the version number creates a lot of ambiguity. If someone refers to SQL Server "14," we always have to double-check: do you mean 14 as in version 14 as in 2017, or 14 as in 2014 as in version 12? Does SQL Server "12" mean 12 as in version 12 as in 2014, or 12 as in 2012 as in version 11? It's ridiculous!

I am a mechanical engineer first and my companies go to sysadmin second. So software developing isnt really my main field of expertise buuttt:

WHY IS SLOOPY SOFTWARE WRITING A VIABLE EXCUSE?

Story:
Yesterday i started to migrate some stuff from our old Win 2008 Server to the new 2016. Turns out there are some MS SQL Express Servers running. Quick check for what they are turns out that they are activly used. So far so good. For other reasons we have a new MSSQL 2017 Core Licence. So i thought, hey it would be nice to just move those 2012, 2008 and 2014 Express Servers to a real one that can use the entire machines capabilities.
After some try & error with exporting one of the softwares (where i had to elevate one the user rights to sysadmin for reasons) the entire system stopped working. I didnt deleted anything or changed anything! Well, i elevated user rights. After 2 hours of support call it turns out that the software stopped working cause i gave the database user sysadmin rights. I dont know enough about MSSQL to judge wether that is logical or not, but it sounds super illogical and i suspect sloopy software writing on the manufacturers part. One way or another, the excuse from the telephone support was "yeah, our software is a very fragile child"
Okay.
After i told all that my coworkers two of them were also "yeah, that is just how the [company] software is, you have to be careful with it"

Apparently it broke in the past for other minor stuff.
As an engineer i cannot build bridges that collapse when you use the left and the right lane at the same time. For an architect it isnt okay to build an house where the front door explodes when you open a window. It is not okay for a power tool to go out in a fireball when you accidently drill plastic with it. But for some weird reasons its socially acceptable for programs to be sloopy, buggy and only working under specific conditions. Since when is it okay for a car only to work when you know specific steps to make it run? Like, throwing your spare key in the gas tank, the kick the left wheel exactly three times and finally tapping the steering wheel 5 times left, 4 times right. What? That would be ridiculous? But that is exactly how that software works. You have to follow a specific step guide to make it work, EVERY TIME.

I. JUST. DONT. GET. IT

Just graduated university and got a high paying internship (well, high paying to someone whos never been paid) in my field of chemical engineering, feeling quite lucky

Cant wait to upgrade my PC, it was a beast when I built it in 2012 but nowadays running chrome and android studio is enough to make it commit suicide

Goals for 2019:
Publish my first android app
Learn web development
Become an AWS guru
Not spend all my income on PC parts

Ive watched a bunch of web development crashcourses/trends and (comming from desktop appplication development) omfg what a nightmare mess of confusing stuff but alas i shall prevail or die trying

I remember the first time working with a Windows 2012 R2 server.
Of some reason I couldn't open Windows Powershell as admin and asked another Dev what to do. His response? Try restarting the server.
Can you imagine the look on my face if I told you I only worked on Linux until that point. How can you seriously make a server OS that needs restarting at all? Is it just me or is that just fucking stupid?

you know what was fun?
Back in 2012, I started developing an app for the windowsphone (7 back then) which was basically an offline backup navigation for pilots with a few extras likr weather data for pre flight planning.

It was so cool doing all this back then, because there weren't many wp devs out there.

Microsoft even sent me 6 different phones (straight from Redmond) to play with (and keep them).

Those were the days 😀😀

Yesterday, microsoft showed me once again, what it means to "obey".

I tried to install Microsoft SQL Server 2012 on a virtual machine with OS Windows7.
The installation-center asked me to choose an installation-folder for SQL-Server.
No matter what, for any folder i had chosen for the installation, the setup replied with the errormessage "The installation-folder is invalid"

So i considered asking our platform-services team, whether they gave me administrative rights for the vm.
They did. I had full access to the components of my vm.

After a few days i finally recognized, that i had picked a wrong iso for the installation of sql server.

Instead of sql server 2012 + Service Pack 3, i picked sql server 2012 ServicePack 3.

So after all, Microsoft tried to tell me by showing the message "The installation-folder is invalid", that the setup weren't able to find an installation of Microsoft SQL Server 2012.

God damned!!1!

Before 2012, I always worked in cubicles and had weekly status meetings. In 2012 I moved to a big city and learnt there was something worse than cubes: the open work plan. Marketed as a way to increase coloration, the open work space is really just the result of real estate prices being expensive in cities and how desks are cheaper than 3-cube walls.

Up until 2013, we'd usually just have the weekly status meeting. Here are your tasks for the week. I'd do them at my own pace. Some days fast, some days slow, but they'd all get done by the end of the week and I'd proudly go down my list of stuff I had done.

Since then, it's all been "agile" and "stand-ups" every. fucking. day. The work is endless. A Product Owner once told me that stand ups weren't suppose to be status meetings; that you were only suppose to say if you're blocked or need help. But in every place I've worked at, they're daily status reports. You have to preform every day.

I really hate IT today more than ever. I miss the cube. I miss the weekly status reports. Today things are so high stress and higher paced and the work is endless. You can't even really pace yourself anymore.

Ooh... one I can participate in...

My dad was a Java developer, which primarily got me interested.

Back in early 2012, a favorite MMOG of mine shut down and I was interested in how it worked. I was 13 at the time. A friend of mine, on hearing of my interest, emailed me a bunch of links including Chris Pine's ruby tutorial and TheNewBoston.

From then on I tinkered a little with a bunch of different technologies, picked up a few programming books, and now we're here. I've made a little money as a Java developer and I'm working on an iOS game, but I'm still learning and tinkering with new technologies.

I Started in 2012 at 12 years old with Minecraft as an introduction to computer programming. I created a few of my own mods and released them to the forums. I think my name was "lilwillis2" if you want to look them up. Once I created mods, I got into game development. I used The Cherno's game programming tutorials and a few others on youtube. After having my fun with game Dev and the debt of College soon to come, I got into developing my own apps, which got me into using react-native. React native made me realize that I should probably try to stay up to date with the latest frameworks and languages, so that I can create a surpieror product in much less time. It also made me realize how quickly programming changes. Last year, before getting into react-native, I got a summer job using Django and mezzanine at a local company as a web developer and they want me to work there again this year, maybe even on a salary with a pay raise. I recently turned 18 and I already look at code I wrote a few months ago as crap 😂, but hey it means I'm improving quickly!

BTW, if anyone knows any tips on paying/saving for college, please do let me know!

n-

N A N I ? ? ? ? ?

my dad just upgraded our phone plan from like 100 miles away out of nowhere.

turns out with some weird discount it's only $20 more for unlimited than our old holdover-from-2012 plan of "8GB pool for all lines, but the last 4GB is 3G speeds"

shit

time to start theorycrafting a way to get around the "one device streaming at a time" limit

My first dev project. That is a toughie. Years ago (1998) I did some BASIC programming in HS. Then a few years after that (somwhere between 2002 and 2006) I did a lot of video game editing with hex editors and other tools to replace dialog to translate video games from Japanese to English, but there was not much coding there.

The first one I remember in recent times that involved any kind of coding was back in 2012/2013, there was a save state editor for Final Fantasy III on android (it didn't work for the iOS saves) but the editor was in Chinese. I ended up working with someone else to change it to English, so that others could use it easier. After that, I decided to code one from scratch for a different game.

I spent weeks working on it, and finally released a save editor for Final Fantasy Dimensions (I made sure it worked for both iOS and Android save files). It was my first great achievement, however it was way to many lines of code (I didn't know about loops or arrays back then, so I had a lot of repeating code). I eventually ended up making ones for Final Fantasy IV and VI, however those were never released to the public, as I had trouble getting the CRC to calculate properly every time.

This led me down the path I am now, going for my Bachelor's in IST with a specialization in Programming.

Not really a rant and not very random. More like a very short story.

So I didn't write any rant regarding the whole Microsoft GitHub topic. I don't like to judge stuff quickly. I participated in few threads though.

Another thing is I also don't use GitHub very much apart from giving 🌟 to repos as a bookmark. Have one hobby project there. That's all. So I don't worry that much. I'm that selfish and self concerned. :3

I was first introduced to version control system by learning how to use tortoisesvn around 2008. We had a group project and one of the guys was an experienced and amazing programmer unlike the rest of us. He was doing commercial projects while we were at our 1st and 2nd year. Uni had svn repo server. He taught us about tortoisesvn. He also had Basecamp and taught us how to use it as well. So that's how I learned the benefits of using versioning tools and project management tools. On side note, our uni didn't teach any of those in detail :3

After that project, I was hooked to use versioning tools. So until school kicked me out, I was able to use their svn server. When I was on my own, I had to ask Google for help. I found a new world. There are still free svn services that I can use with certain limited functions. That's not the new world; I found people saying how git is better than svn in various ways. It was around 2010,2011.

At first I was a bit reluctant to touch git because of all the commands in terminal approach. But then I found that there is tortoisegit. I still thank tortoisesvn creator for that. I'm a sucker for GUI tools. So then I also have to pick which git servers to use. Hell yeah, self hosted gitlab is the way to go man. Well that's what the internet said. So I listened. I got it up and running after numerous trial and error. I used it briefly. Then I came back to my country on 2012-2013; the land of kilobytes per minute (yes not second, minute).

My country's internet was improved only after 2016. So from 2013 to 2016, I did my best not to rely on internet. I wasn't able to afford a server at my less than 10 people, 12ft*50ft office. So I had to find alternative to gitlab which preferably run on windows. Found bonobo and it was alright. It worked. Well had crazy moments here and there when the PC running Bonobo got virus and stuff. But we managed. We survived. Then finally multi national Telecom corporates came to our country.

We got cheaper and faster mobile data, broadband and fiber plans. Finally I can visit pornhub ... sorry github. Github is good. I like it. But that doesn't mean I should share my ugly mutated projects to the rest of the world. I could keep using Bonobo but it has risks. So I had to think for an alternative. I remembered that gitlab didn't have cloud hosting service when I checked them out in the past. So I just looked into Bitbucket and happy with their free plans of 5 users and unlimited private repos. I am very very cheap and broke.

That's why I said I don't really care that much about the whole M$GitHub topic at the beginning. However due to that topic, I have visited GitLab website again and found out they have cloud hosting now and their free plan is unlimited users and unlimited repos. So hell yeah. Sorry BB. I am gonna move to cheaper and wider land.

TL;DR : I am gonna move to GitLab because of their free plan.

Well well well.
Story time.

Since we are working from home for the past 4 months, I finally decided to install a Microsoft SQL server on my home server. (Mostly was using Azure)

My server is running Windows Server 2012 R2.
Tried installing SQL 2019 : fail, 2016 : Fail, 2012 : Fail. Some obscure message about some DLLs not being at right version. (And a warning that it is no recommended to install SQL server on domain controller, but I know, it is my home setup, not roduction)

“Ok fine, I’ll install it on my PC instead”. Windows 10 PC. NOPE. “Cannot install on a compressed drive”. Welp, wtf ? (Of course you cannot select destination install folder, I could’ve put it on another drive).

So here I am. Working 100% on Windows, installed Ubuntu server 20 LTS in Hyper-V, Installed Microsoft SQL server on it (BTW, install is very easy compared to windows). And that shit is working. And new “Terminal” app does support SSH out of box, no need to add Putty !

So as a Windows user, I needed Linux to make Microsoft SQL techno work.

Nothing will ever surprise me anymore. (BTW it’s fucking fast. I like SQL server on Linux)

I was walking in the cineplex after watching a movie today and saw an advertisement for "a digital loyalty card platform for retail outlets. Get loyalty cards on your phone!" being used by a big brand in my country.

The thing is, although not a terribly original idea, I first thought of developing a system/platform like this all the way back in 2012. I coded it, I advertised, I lobbied HARD; I poured my damn soul into this thing. Nobody accepted it. I scrapped it because I thought it was just not a good idea, only to see what is essentially a clone of it being shown off and lauded as a brand new innovative solution.

I won't lie, seeing that ad so prominently and proudly displayed really crushed me. I honestly don't know what makes their rendition better than mine, since mine did pretty much the same thing theirs does and my design chops are pretty much on par with theirs. I was rejected and I don't know why and that stings more than the countless other times my other ideas were shot down because of market mismatch, logistical flaws or just shortsightedness on the part of potential customers.

This isn't an invitation to a pity party, and I can't say there is a moral to this little anecdote, but I feel moved to share this experience with you guys.

Pick from it and learn what you will, I hope this falls under the eyes of the right person out there.

So I had a piece of software crash on me earlier today...

I think "No problem, this was built internally and I saw the source code somewhere around here. 👍"

Locate source code...6 folders ("Project--v1.0--stable-2012", "Project 1.0", "Project 2.0", and a few others like it). Took me 20 minutes just to figure out which folder was used to build the project/exe. Turns out, none of the above. 👎

Had these people never heard of source control before?! 😣

I really wonder what degree I would've been working towards now if I never got hooked into programming in 2012.

If I exploit ms server 2012 through a wifi hotspot , but logged in to someone else's account (assume it was sniffed) , and I do it using msfconsole connected to the tor with torify command , also I spoof my mac ,
will I stay 100% anonymous ?
If not , what can be done ?

In 2012 during a job interview I was asked how did you learn Photoshop. I said by creating memes. My answer failed because the interviewer didn't knew what was a meme so I took another approx 30 seconds to pitch what was a meme.

Found this snapshot of the state of webdevelopment in 2012 in one of my old self-study notes/blog drafts. What progress since! Do you remember?

!dev

fun fact: when the world made the switch to the Gregorian calendar in the 1500's, we lost about 8 years in translation, so technically, this is the year 2012.

not actually a coworker, but I had to take the place of this guy who made the whole websites layouts in tables. in 2012

So after the team have been digging through to work out why the app is spitting out errors it turns out that turning off developer mode clears the issue up.

This thing has been spitting out errors since its release in 2012 but the engine was handling it internally 🤣

AI so far....

2012: We can do more than 5 layers whoa
2013: It works on text too!
2014: Let’s build infras with frameworks & cloud compute
2015: AlphaGo! Singularity!
2016: Wait it’s racist & sexist
2017: Deepfakes scary
2018: No idea how it works
2019: Whatevs time to productize $$$
2020: ??

!rant from a support guy

I was tasked to migrate an Exchange 2003 server (yes, those are still used) for an upcoming Office 365 deployment. There are no direct upgrade path from one another, as far as we know

My task was to export PSTs from mailboxes. Great, a native tool exist for that in 2003 (exmerge). But only for less than 2 GB mailboxes because ANSI/Unicode! Half of our mailbox busts that limit. Oh, it seems Exchange 2007 has a PowerShell command for exporting to PST as well! But pre-SP3, that command relies on a local installation of Outlook on the server (DAFUQ), and has been superseded by another "standalone" powershell command. So I install a bogus Windows 2012 server only for that purpose, with Exchange Management Tools (which, by the way, is bundled with the Exchange installation setup and REQUIRES to have IIS installed on the target machine. Also, if you install ONLY the Exchange 2007 Management Tools and wish to uninstall them afterwards, you can't because the uninstaller wants me to select an Exchange Role to remove, which are all unchecked in my tools-only setup). Never worked, and Google-fu says that the newer Exchange 2007 New-MailboxExportRequest command seems to have removed Exchange 2003 support.

So i'm back to installing a pre-SP3 Exchange 2007. Then the older Export-Mailbox powershell command whines about 64bits and 32bit incompatiblity-- actually I ***HAVE*** to have the whole OS/software stack 32bit ONLY. Don't ask me why!

Some article I found says I could fire up an XP virtual machine for that, I go for Win 7 x86. "Sorry, Microsoft Exchange won't be installed on a workstation environment because reasons." All right then, let's go for an old Windows Server 2003 x86. Have you tried to boot this up in an Hyper-V environment where mouse and keyboard support for Windows Server 2003 are apparently optional? No keyboard AND mouse events sent to the guest machine at all.

* Sigh *, let's use a Windows Server 2008, but WATCH OUT! Microsoft has discontinued x86 support on their W2008 R2 release, so non-R2 for me. Even then, mouse event wasn't sent until I installed guest additions.

After all, export-mailbox ended up working, but that costed me two days of banging my head against the wall. (Oh, and I take internal calls inbetween as well...)

And that's why I aspire to be a programmer. Thank you for nothing, Microsoft!

Oh my dear internet,

FUCK THIS FUCKING SHIT
I AM SICK AND TIRED OF IT, WHO BUILT THIS HACKED TOGETHER ORWELLIAN SWAMP PIT?

Fuck the same fucking Envato template on every content page with 70 layers of sidebars, inline ads, popups, cookies and content shifting as if I was playing CATCH UP WITH YOUR FUCKING CONTENT.

FUCK the same fucking annual upselling 'plans' on every 7-day trial overengineered scam app that requires me to sign up for 1 fucking, falsely advertised task where my fucking password generator doesn't even recognize the input as a password field so I have to cmd+, to my FUCKING BABYLONIAN PASSWORD ARCHIVES PROMPTING ME FOR THE MASTER PASSWORD.
Thank god I can at least CREATE A BURNER CREDIT CARD THAT FREEZES ITSELF BECAUSE I CANNOT BE BOTHERED TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM YOUR FUCKING STEAMING CRAP.

FUCK every fucking step I take being recorded by our CYBERPUNK OVERLORDS REQUIRING ME to sign up for 5 different fucking privacy protection tools' annual plan or duct tape some open source shit onto my browser just for some BASIC PRIVACY WHILE TRYING TO NAVIGATE ALL THE OTHER 5000 annuals plan naval mines like A FUCKING FRENCH SUBMARINE IN 1940 GERMAN WATERS.

FUCK my walled garden scam ecosystem not being compatible with your walled garden scam ecosystem prompting me to reactivate my old SATANIC GOOGLE DON'T BE EVIL ACCOUNT from 2012 sending me on a DANTE ALIGHIERI STYLE ODYSSEY THROUGH THE 9 LAYERS OF PASSWORD RESET QUESTIONS, UNEXPECTED ERROR, 2FA MY PHONE DIED HELL to come out on the other side as a broken man.

Thank GOD I have your useless SUPPORT PAGE to aid with my signup problems that is actually just an FAQ with a hidden EASTER EGG HUNT for your support form CRISP AI BOT THAT IS ALSO 'currently experiencing high demand due to COVID' which is peculiar since that has been 3 years ago, but fortunately for you enabled you to fire ALL YOUR SUPPORT STAFF AND REPLACE IT WITH THIS BANNER.

I might as well just SCRAPE your fucking content, it'd be faster.

And although it is quite funny, FUCK THIS PAGE TOO for having me create another of 10.000 accounts to write this shit, where my browser firmly placed a newly created burner email into the PASSWORD FIELD.

I do not know how we managed to create something that is even more unwieldy than 56k DIAL-UPS, but I know that if this shit continues I'll have to train my own AGI to proudly interact with of all this STUPID SHIT on my behalf or I'll have to move into THE FUCKING MOUNTAINS AND LIVE WITH THE DEER.

Wrote this on another thread but wanted to do a full post on it.

What is a game?

I like to distinguish between 1. entertainment, 2. games, 3. fun.

both ideally are 'fun' (conveying a sense of immersion, flow, or pleasure).

a game is distinct (usually) from entertainment by the presence of interaction, but certain minimalists games have so little decision making, practice, or interaction-learning that in practice they're closer to entertainment.

theres also the issue of "interesting" interaction vs uninteresting ones. While in broad terms, it really comes down to the individual, in aggregate we can (usefully) say some things, by the utility, are either games or not. For example if having interaction were sufficient to make something a game, then light switches could become a game.

now supposed you added multiple switches and you had to hit a sequence to open a door. Now thats a sort of "game". So we see games are toys with goals.

Now what is a toy?

There are two varieties of toy: impromptu toys and intentional toys.

An impromptu toy is anything NOT intended primarily, by design, to induce pleasure or entertainment when interacted with. We'll call these "devices" or "toys" with a lowercase t.

"Toys", made with the intent of entertainment (primarily or secondarily) we'll label with an uppercase T.

Now whether something is used with the intent behind its own design (witness people using dildos, sex toys, as slapstick and gag items lol), or whether the designer achieves their intent with the toy or item is another matter entirely.

But what about more atmospheric games? What about idle games? Or clickers?

Take clickers. In the degenerate case of a single button and a number that increases, whats the difference between a clicker and a calculator? One is a device (calculator) turned into an impromptu toy and then a game by the user's intent and goal (larger number). The second, is a game proper, by the designers intent. In the degenerate case of a badly designed game it devolves into a really shitty calculator.

Likewise in the case of atmospheric games, in the degenerate case, they become mere cinematic entertainment with a glorified pause/play button.

Now while we could get into the definition of *play*, I'll only briefly get into it because there are a number of broad definitions. "Play" is loosely: freely structured (or structured) interaction with some sort of pleasure as either the primary or secondary object, with or without a goal, thats it. And by this definition you can play with a toy, you can play a game, you can play with a lightswitch, hell you can play with yourself.

This of course leaves out goals, the idea of "interesting decisions" or decision making, and a variety of other important elements.

But what makes a good game?

A lot of elements go into making a good game, and it's not a stretch to say that a good game is a totality of factors. At the core of all "good" games is a focus on mechanics, aesthetics, story, and technology. So we can already see that what makes a good game is less of an either-or-categorization and more like a rating or scale across categories of design elements.
Broadly, while aesthetics and atmosphere might be more important in games like Journey (2012) by Thatonegamecompany, for players of games like Rimworld the mechanics and interactions are going to be more important.

In fact going a little deeper, mechanics are usually (but not always) equivalent to interactions. And we see this dichtonomy arise when looking at games like Journey vs say, Dwarf Fortress. But, as an aside, is it possible to have atmospheric games that are also highly interactive or have a strong focus on mechanics? This is often what "realistic" (as opposed to *immersive*) games try to accomplish in design. Done poorly they instead lead to player frusteration, which depending on player type may or may not be pleasureable (witness 'hardcore' games whos difficulty and focus on do-overs is the fun the game is designed for, like roguelikes, and we'll get to that in a moment), but without the proper player base, leads to breaking player flow and immersion. One example of a badly designed game in the roguelike genre would be Early Access Stoneshard, where difficulty was more related to luck and chance than player skill or planning. A large part of this was because of a poorly designed stealth system, where picking off a single enemy alerted *all enemies* nearbye, who would then *stay* alerted until you changed maps, negating tactics that roguelike players enjoy and are used to resorting to. This is an important case worth examining because it shows how minor designer choices in mechanical design can radically alter the final quality of the game. Some games instead chose the cheaper route of managing player *perceptions* with a pregame note: Darkest Dungeons and Amnesia TDD are just two I can think of.

4 hour lesson. We have to set up a virtual machine with WIndows Server 2012 R2... Image broken. Now the teacher doesn't know what we could do and lets us do what we want.

Had to create an App in unstable Phonegap (2012) for all 4 platforms,
for our biggest Dubai based client for a Tech Event, within A WEEK :/

Forget Phonegap, I didn't even know JavaScript back then :|

That was the shittiest App I have ever created, still somehow got an appreciation mail :|

How to get answers on StackOverflow without getting attacked by ferocious developers:
1) Ask your question before 2012
2) Upload as many details as possible. (Send your entire PC by mail is reccomended)
3) Be as specific as possible. Just repeat your question indefinetly changing the wording a little bit.
4) Don't ask for code examples. If you ask stupid questions it's obvious you are an expert developer and know how to implement stuff... right?

Most importantly respond politely to all of these traditional stackoverflow answers:
"Did you at least google it?"
"You need to be more specific"
"We can't spoon feed you"
"You shouldn't do that thing that way, I personally prefere this way and nobody can change my mind"
"You don't have enough experience to do that thing, don't do it"

Today, my manager received a brand new Macbook pro with all its cool features while I am still stuck using an old Macbook pro (mid 2012 model). I always complained him about performance issues and all he did was to approve an OS upgrade (to Sierra). How does that even enable me to be productive? I am already running applications at the peak of the machine limits. Sometimes, the JVM crashes and other time Node.js runs out of heap space.

The manager is not a programmer. All he really does is attend online meetings, track and report to management, and write emails. Ideally, he would need a Mac Air or perhaps a Windows machine. I still wonder how did the company management allowed this. He is simply misusing his privileges as a manager and I can do nothing about it.

117 million LinkedIn emails and passwords from a 2012 hack just got posted online. :(

2012: What's a blockchain?
2018: INTRODUCING THE XBLOCKCHAIN

Back in 2005 while I was in grade 5.. I was given a computer assignment for MS Word. While opening word, I stumbled upon FrontPage, which was the first spark in my web Dev interest. That was the beginning, it was only 4 years later that simple web design was part of my computers class. That is where things really started. I began coding small websites. And in 2012, my school requested I make a small website for a school event. I did so using a free template xD

I started perfecting my skill in 2013 and have been learning different languages ever since. Got my first clients in the same year too, 2013.

Doing personal online shopping whilst waiting for code to compile (took about 10-15 min every time, just for the smallest code change).
This was a really slow Adobe Flex system which I hated. Actually glad I left because no sane company uses Flash, even in 2012.

That moment you find your C++ code from 2012 but you still feel like you know nothing after 8+ years coding. 😭
(Impostor syndrome is strong with this one! 😂)

Tomorrow I go back to work. It was one beautiful week of vacation after years without having one (since 2012) and the next one is comming up in 3 weeks. Man cannot wait. Started a small Spring Boot project with Vue.js as the front end and have been having a vlast with it (see what I did there) after considering many stacks.

Went through Python flask, ror, php lumen, php codeigniter, mean, Meteor, Sails and finally settled on Spring :) the front end was a tad harder since I am better with React and Angular but wanted to try something different. Cant wait till I continue with this.

buying a car is such an exhausting and depressing experience. i feel like being less of a man and somewhat blind right now.

I, a 24 year old guy, have never driven a car. afaik, we were poor, my city's public infrastructure is very good and cheap, and my family majorly never needed it.

6 years ago, i got my first 2 wheeler. i still didn't needed it but dad did, and so i learnt it a bit, was somewhat comfortable driving it on my own, gave a driving test, failed, nd forgot about it ( coz again, still not needed much). to this day this bit is true about me.

at that time my father had bought a few scooters before, so he had some experience, and we ended up buying a new one. currently that fella sits outside our home and my father uses it for supplies.

coming to 2023, i was/am thinking of buying a car. why? coz (1) car trips while sitting in the backseat have been super fun (2) people with cars tend to reach anywhere independently, and help others easily (3) my few friends have one and they are super smug about it and (4) i am starting a wfo job which requires 2 days of wfo and is 60km away from home (although train route with 3 interchanges is less time taking)

but WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK WHEN YOU *THINK* ABOUT BUYING A CAR!?

1. buy first or learn to drive first or get a driving license first?
getting a learner's permit is like filling a form; driving schools require no documents but money, and car sellers also do not want any complicated documents. so first step is easy for all.
HOWEVER, driving schools teach the very basics and are controlling your car for 90 % of the time. you can't learn without having your own car, but at the same time you can't buy new car just to *learn*, you will end up denting it.

2. the confusion around how to buy a car?
there are so many fucking parameters.

money being tha major 1 : old cars are coming from $800-$12000 new cars start at $8000 . my current budget is aroud 3-4k as I want to learn on it first with an expected usage of <1000 km per month

brand : there are literally 1000+ models whose base varients start at 8-9k and whose used version is available in my range. i have no idea how to choose.

year : in our country, a petrol car's registration expires in 15 years. cars from 2009 to 2012 are coming in my range but they are gonna expire in 1-4 year . not sure if its a deal breaker, as i plan to buy a new car later, but people are warning me about usage.

km driven : not 1 person is there who i talked to and told me to trust the kms on odometer. most of the cars i saw show 30-60,000kms driven but i am expecting them to be 5-7x more

cng/petrol : cng is cheaper, while petrol is better for engine life, from what i heard. I was inclined towards cng, but everyone i discussed adviced against this as those cars tend to have been driven for very long due to mileage efficiency.

engine power, cc, power steering, body... there are so many stuff that neither i know about and nor am i considering, which makes me more sad and scared of these deals. i have never bought anything without a proper research.

overall its the first time when i am feeling so much dependent on others and being an inefficient and inexperienced adult . my family once bought a used car 10 years ago, which was a total sham and got us to spend so much on it that we had to sell it for scrap in 3 months. It was a painful and nightmarish experience. i don't want that.

I've been working in web development and design since 2012 and, while I've worked with others in my field along the way, I've not forged any lasting friendships... maybe I'm just a shitty person? I've burned some bridges that's for sure. Anyway, it all boils down to: I have no one to bitch to when I want to stab someone in the abdomen over frustrations at my current job.

Enter devRant...

I'm coming up on the year anniversary at my new position and there is still a lot to take in. I replaced a "web guy" who had been doing it for 20 years. Anyway, his stuff is all a mess, and what's worse is that the problems I'm seeing stretch far beyond my own responsibilities. I'm in a group of "tech" people who have all been here for a decade or more, and they're almost all like the guy I replaced: set in their ways and years out of date.

There is one gentlemen who is managing a database application and each site links to his ASP (not .NET) pages. Each of these pages looks like the website they were linked from. He showed me how he achieves this and it's just insane - he uses a bunch of files (basically just text files) that make up different pieces of the page to recreate the look/feel of the website on this his server - just to serve the information from the database. God forbid the website changes 'cause then all his little files need to change.

When I suggested that I can just query the database myself and display all that information on the actual site instead of doing all these redundant steps, I get "I think we should stick with the way we've been doing it for now."

*stab stab stab*

I worked 2012-2016 for a big telco company in my country and there was this HTTPS webpage with an iframe rendering any url you passed over the ?url query param plus a header with the company's logo.

I was on a meeting with some friends in charge of social media and they found it for a user report.

Unbelievable 🤷🏻‍♂️ I remember I tried the page's url itself and it rendered a loop of the header with the company's logo 😂

Wish I'd not cashed out my btc in 2012

So.. I'm migrating a physical server to a virtual (Hyper-V) one.

The physical server is running Windows Server 2008 R2 with IIS6 and Windows SQL Server 2012.

I've set up a VM with Windows Server 2016, IIS10 and Windows SQL Server 2017.

I'm testing with just moving 1 db at a time (we have about 20, 1 per client running this software and a few others) and I've already imported all of the IIS sites.

So the database import and IIS import went smoothly and was surprisingly without hassle but now I'm trying to run the website that I imported the database for and it is throwing 503 Errors at me.
I've been trying to find out the cause but for some reason IIS isn't making any logs.
It's not any 64/32bit system problems (they're both x64) and I can't seem to find anything wrong with the imported config.

Anyone got any ideas?

Smartphone users in 2012: "Non-replaceable batteries need to be outlawed."

Politicians in 2027: "Were… were starting to think about it. Have some patience."

Politics in a nutshell.

!rant
Is it worth buying late 2011/2012 Macbook Pro for programming?

I read through my old 2012 onwards chat threads on Facebook Messenger and felt disgusted with my cringey teenager seld.

Imposter syndrome.
A question guys, I'm a web dev since 2012, started with php, then shifted to frontend, for 3 years my main was PHP and basic HTML CSS, in 2017 I shifted to / did courses on vuejs, angular and react (loved angular the most) also laravel. Have also dabbled a bit in python, for crawling and mining. The problem is I've never worked with a team or for a full fledged Dev company, so I'm unsure as to how to judge my growth and whether I'm moving in the right direction. I feel like I need a lot better understanding of Linux usage and server control, or should I learn nativescript etc.

What do you suggest? Should I simply look for a mentorship program, if yes any clue where?

The only one I can talk about is my final project back in 2012 when getting my bachelors at Full Sail University. You can check it out on youtube its for Restaurants. Came out pretty nice and the app was all built in as an web app and using HTML, CSS, jQuery, PhoneGap, xCode. Its a good alternative way to develop mobile apps without being a native app (which I don't know native mobile).

Today's a good day. Just replaced my old MacBook pro from 2012 with the newest one. Can't wait to work again with more horse power on the machine!

I have got a Lenovo B590 laptop windows 10 from 2012/2013.
It is some kind of default laptop(not fast af).

I NEVER saw the bluescreen. NEVER

c3r38r170_201 was my original nickname back in 2012. <3

The _201 was later removed because it was too long for some Minecraft servers.

Okay i need help
I am about to buy an mid 2012 MacBook pro with an ssd. I wish to place the ssd in the main bay and the stock hdd in the optical. All i want to know is that will it work, has anyone done it??

F Apple. I've got their touch-driven, motion-sensing, centimeter-thick, supercomputer (by 1990 standards) from 2012, and I can't fscking run Linux on it because my only official choices are the old iOS 7.0.0 over-the-air update and the newest iOS 9.3.5, and no one has published how to get root to either stupid OS so I can run an exploit on the stupid fucking boot loader.

Hands down, one of my seniors in my bachelor's degree. His name is Mohit.

He helped me out with course materials, gave me guidance on tech and emerging technologies, gave me books, video lectures, cheat-sheets u name it.

Guy is a massive nerd, he used to be holed up in his room for days. And oh yeah, he also wasn't shy with sharing his knowledge and internet downloaded data, which was a pretty massive deal in 2012 when internet and WiFi was crazy expensive.

Also, he would ask me what games I needed so he would download it for me and hand it out for free.

That guy is the reason I even chose tech industry to have a career in to begin with. Last I heard from him, he got fucked up by a girl and decided to move to Bangalore and start a company. That company has net-worth of $4.5 million so he's doing pretty well.

Drag-to-select in Samsung's "My Files" app is a disaster.

If you don't move your finger and stop dragging towards the top or bottom, it goes into "drag-and-drop" after one second. When you release your finger, it unselects everything, so you have to start over.

This is why every mobile file manager needs range selection. This means tapping two files, tapping a button, and everything inbetween is immediately selected.

This is similar to shift+click selection on desktop. We take this for granted since it has been a standard feature for three decades. But mobile apps still can't do this simple thing as of 2024.

"Drag-to-select" is better than individual selection, but comes nowhere close to real range selection. "Drag to select" is at best an ugly twin of full desktop-like range selection, but file manager developers can still get away with giving it the label of "mass selection".

ES File Explorer had this since at least 2012, yet billion-dollar Samsung and Google fail to implement this in their file managers.

So we used to build these awful "promotion" pages for a leading manufacturer in the area. Because the website was old as dirt, there was no CMS and everything was static html using Coldfusion for a few include files like for the nav and such.

Every year we would get a new project to tweak the promotion details a little, and change the year from 2011 to 2012, etc.

My predecessor put the digit "1" in an HTML file called year.html, then included it like:
"valid from January 1 though December 31, 201<cfinclude template="year.html">..."

Why? Just why? And if you're going to use include files, for Pete's sake at least use the proper .cfm file extension!

I'm currently taking a computer science degree (which sounds too fancy) at a school that has a really close relationship with a software company called "Unik". Now that makes a lot of sense given how it's a vocational university and all. Now one of the things they teach us for making GUIs is called Windows Forms, and it's really really shit. So shit that me and one of my mates has started to use something called WPF instead (which is like HTML in a lot of ways. And so much better.) How much better? Well we had a bigger project recently with 3 other people who had never programmed before, and their reaction? "It makes so much more sense."

Now what I find really fascinating is that whenever I stumble upon any job posting from Unik, they always seek developers who knows WPF.

I'm pretty happy that I've programmed since 2012 since this place seems really odd at times 😂

I really need to but a new laptop, my current 2012 MacBook Air with 4gb of ram can’t take the workload anymore. But it’s so hard to find a good alternative ! The new MacBook Pro sucks and it’s so fucking expensive (and I don’t want the silly touch bar). The competition isn’t much better, most laptops with the same quality doesn’t allow you to upgrade the ram and are about the same price range than the MacBook. Really , I miss the days we had good, affordable, upgradable choices (RIP MacBook Pro 2012).

My boss told me I have to update a ms access db that hasn't been touched since 2012... I know nothing about access or vb and I have no desire to learn that crap. But I leave for vacation on Friday so I just have to skate by until then.

I've been running Linux on my laptop natively for five months (since the 2nd week I got here). My boss and everyone on my team is okay with this. I've used Linux at the last three companies I've been at since 2012.

All I asked for was a Windows VM so I could use WebEx (which I did at my last job; used Win10 in Virtual box just to share my screen via x11vnc and reset my password occasionally). At my last job, they said Linux users were on their own, but they at least gave us a Windows ISO, license and ability to connect it to the domain. It was a west coast company, with 500 people in IT and several Linux users. The IT team at my current shop has known I've been running Linux for months.

Now the word has come down that I can't have Linux on my laptop and I need to put macos back on it (it's actually on there; just dual booting) for security or some shit. We have a massive deadline and project due in like two months and it would throw me off for several days if I needed to bring in and setup a personal laptop.

Fuck asking our worthless IT department for anything. I told the lead engineer I'd bring in my personal laptop before going back to Mac.

Been running (prob crawling) a project to consolidate lots of Windows 2003/sql 2005 servers on to Win/sql 2012. For various reasons, largely decisions around where to put the servers, it taken two years. We were going to run the dr test today prior to going live next week but the network in our backup dc just died!

Took C++ at community college, in 2012, just for fun. I've been programming ever since.

My company don't want to buy me a new computer: Im stuck with 2012 Dell. No kidding. And I am supposed to run 10+ docker containers all the time, plus java IDE.

Of course, I bought a new computer - by myself. Fuck my company. I don't have time for stupidity.

paying for windows is shit. I've a PC which i keep updated. it has corrupted the drives like 2 times in 3 years and the motherboard replaced twice cuz' the fucking BIOS update didn't take. I've a pirated windows 7 running on a PC that was bought in 2012, still no issues in 11 years. 11 fucking. Just lost 2 weeks of work 🥲.

I finally finished a website of a client where I‘m working on since 2012!!! WTF! I never hat such a client before. Sometimes I haven‘t heard anything from them 4 months then they called me, I changed some pictures a did a little bit of styling and then it took months again to get a feedback! To be honest, now 5 years later they need a redesign of their „new“ website.

The fun part of my job is showing off my age to make the point that they need to build new things in new technologies. Typical interaction goes something like this.

Person: When we started X project, we were using the state of the art technologies. We can just use that again.
Me: And when was that?
P: About 2012
Me: I was a freshman in high school.

Make sure your software does not lose data when improperly quit, and does not allow deletion without a proper confirmation dialogue.

I have experienced pre-installed voice recorder applications that leave behind an unsalvageable corrupt file if the smartphone shuts down due to running out of battery charge, or powers off due to battery undervoltage (as a result of an aged battery).

As often, third-party software beats pre-installed software, and the voice recorder "ASR" by "NLL apps" leaves behind a playable file when unexpectedly quit. Might be because it uses the OGG vorbis format rather than M4A or 3GP audio.

Also, the camera software of the Samsung Galaxy Pocket smartphone from 2012 (which was crap anyway) would discard a video file if the recording was quit through the "back" navigation key.
Perhaps this was done deliberately, but it is a terrible idea due to the possibility of accidents happening.

Some gallery software for Android lets the user delete photos and videos by swiping vertically. After this, a so-called "toast" notification appears with an undo button. If not responded to within seconds, or when tapping next to it due to stress, the photo or video is gone. This is, needless to say, terrible design.

8GB RAM DDR3 12800S PC3L 1600MHz Crucial SO-DIMM 8 GB Laptop

Is this model of ram good for MacBook Pro 2012 13"

Has anyone managed to install a Linux Distro over the Boot camp partition on a newer MacBook pro with touch bar? My old 2012 MBP had a tri-boot on it because it had Mint, Win10 and macOS living together in almost harmony. Now I have a 2017 MBP and I can't even get it to live boot from a USB (a type-C one at that! Because of the Nexus 5X I have lots of type-C accessories).

It's 2023 and smartphone vendors' pre-installed file managers are slooooooowly beginning to catch up with the functionality that the third-party ES File Explorer already had in 2012.

Samsung's latest file manager "My Files" finally has a draggable scroll bar, background file transfer (one can browse files while a transfer is running), drag-to-select (which is still not nearly as fast as the instant A-to-B range selection of ES File Explorer which simulates shift+click selection on desktop), and even staying in the current directory after tapping on "Copy" or "Move" rather than going to the starting directory!

And finally, when copying or moving files to a MicroSD card or a USB-OTG device, files' date and time attributes are not discarded and reset to now, but the original date and time of the files are retained! ES File Explorer could do that with root access.

Dear Samsung, couldn't you have thought of these simple things a decade ago and saved your users lots of headaches?

I'm using typescript and run mocha acceptance tests. I was confused as to why my tests were failing on the Jenkins albeit they passed locally just fine.

I couldn't find the error. Just after making a pause, implementing something else, I realized what the problem was:

As I renamed a folder from `fixtures` to `tapes` my test run on the Jenkins suddenly claimed to not find the files in `fixtures`. Yet in my code base there was no occurrence of the string `fixtures` anymore and then it hit me like a brick wall:

I have old transpiled files in my outDir, the `dist` folder on the jenkins! Locally, I make sure to run `git clean -fd` once in a while, so I never was hit by it it locally. Yet my jenkins had really old files in the `dist` folder. And just running `rm dist/* && tsc` fixed the entire ordeal.

Well, JavaScript is so 2012 and typescript is the new shit, yet transpiling the code can leave to some quite strong headaches.

Today was a productive day, learning a lot in python, making a REST API and almost done with user controller, and jwt tokens

Thanks to @gamingfail123 for his guidance :)

So I'm getting a new job in a legal software company and I wanted to ask your opinion on computers. I know many are very biased towards OSX and windows and prefer linux but I'm trying my luck lmao.

I'm currently on a late 2012 macbook pro and its starting to fizzle out on me.

Not a bit fan of the new macbooks because of dongles and no direct HDMI. I was wondering if the surface laptop 2 was any good compared? All the reviews online are basically paid to praise it and the reviews on reddit are polarized. I prefer laptops that are thin and in aluminum.

So I have this habit of copying all my family pics and kids videos onto portable hard disks. Have a 500GB Western Digital since 2012 and another WD 1TB since 2016.
Had one portable HDD failure before that back in 2010, but that contained only old projects code {when I didn't know git} .
So any advice you guys have for me on managing backups of these life memories? I mean I don't trust cloud storage - Google Drive, DropBox etc. And don't want any 3rd party poking into my stuff. That's why these items go straight from Camera to HDD.
What should I do to prepare for another failure? And is there any kind of RAID available in the form of portable solution?
Is it a good idea to change HDD every 5 years or so?

What web browser are you using?
"Internet explorer 2012"
.....going to translate that to ie10

I'm Beck at my parents home again and wanted to some a problem I'm having with FB "intelligent" aka dumb UI. But my motivation to code jus got thwarted bc VS 2012 is too old... and can't install the Nuget packages I need...

That thing, when you hear "the server room is dead, no-one can work today" across the office...

What? What's a server room? It's 2018. No cloud? :face_palm::skin-tone-4:

**[realises may have made a mistake in taking the job]**

#2012

Year 2012, me junior wanting C++ work. Got free internship at age 27 at that company. Did some minor C++ work. Collegue rejected me for work on very interesting C++ project. Yesterday, eight years later, he and I in different company he calls me and asks me to do C++ work, even arranges time for me to read Effective C++. In these eight years I did iOS Android and got pretty fed up with it. Yaaay bitch :)

The following is a genuine error from the runtime when you give apple a "nil" date:

2012-09-19 22:40:13.972 APPNAME [4923:907] * -[__NSCFCalendar components:fromDate:]: date cannot be nil

I mean really, what do you think that operation is supposed to mean with a nil date?

An exception has been avoided for now.

has anyone tries sieera with mid 2012 editon? little worried the progress bar is nt moving and I am very desparate to meet sirj

Anyone here replaced their MBP (Mid-2012) Non-retina's HDD to Raid0 SSD? How is it holding up? Planning to do this in a month

Which ons is less risky and which one Is most profitable to succeed ?

0- telling the admin you forgot your password and as he's logging in, sniff his password (you already placed sslstrip)

1- gain access to router using its vulnerabilities and redirect the traffic to a fake page and get the password.

2- exploiting smb port of admin's system and placing a krylogger or stealing his cookies if available

3- brute forcing admin password :/

4- pressing forgot password on admin account and staying close to him and sniff the SMS containing the otp using rtl-sdr (and of course you will be prompted to set a new password)

5- any other way .

Also the website itself is almost secure.
It is using iis 8.5 and windows server 2012
Only open ports are 80 and 443.

What's the best way to deal with constant dread? I deployed code after following every procedure, got every kind of thumbs up from QA and now it's my fault our 2012 admin site borked. Should I point out all the obvious flaws (again), or should I give up on our stagnant-ass developers and systems?

The fear of showing off anything new is crippling. I wrote up a Pyton API to hook into our current pipeline over lunch breaks but am worried if I even raise it as an option it'll just be cast aside and lost to time, regardless of business value.

What are the benefits of windows server 2012 over linux? I received a CD & key for free, but I can't decide if I should play around with it for a learning experience or gift it to someone who could actually use/need it for their work.

Hello, instead of my usual nihilistic fuckery, I actually have a question that you guys may be able to answer.
When uploading images in Chrome this morning I got the two prompts pictured below. One is in google voice, the other is in gmail. I searched online for answers but oddly enough there is nothing satisfactory.
The promp is 'upload failed server rejected.' This problem goes back as far as 2012, but today it happened to me for the first time. Thank you

Recently, my hardy MacBook Pro 2012 gave up the ghost. So I'm in the market for getting a new laptop. Which one(s) would you guys recommend given the following use cases I have planned? Listed in order of importance:

- Getting used to Linux. Eventually I plan on replacing my desktop PC's Windows install with Linux and would like to try some flavors on the laptop.
- Software development w/ Java (Spring), Android, Rust, Go, Node
- Music making
- General web browsing, heavy YouTube use
- A little bit of story writing

The pointless life of a prophet is such:

In 2012 when everyone was wondering if nibiru was gonna knock us off orbit or bring the Anunnaki to our door with evictions notices, I was wondering if New York City boroughs are going to float off into the ocean in eight years…. (I know that sounds incredibly specific at the same time isolated and random, but my sources are as most conspiracy theorists sources; YouTube and random…) and yet… wrong again…Covid…

Waaaiit… 🤔🤨😅don’t think about anymore connections.

Overheard this morning from a desperate developer trying to find credentials for an undocumented payment gateway: "I found a random email address for someone who was at some point our account manager in documentation from 2012. I emailed it."

windows server 2012 still preferred on 2016....

!rant

Not entirely Dev related so sorry 'bout that, but I have some form of vacation to spend, where I'll be at home working on my thesis project and preparing my last exam (wooo almost done with the shit). Since most of my friends are away for the holidays and I'm a huge fucking nerd and also somewhat a shitty weeb, can anyone suggest some anime related with tech or coding? I know of ghost in the shell but there are so many I don't know which might suit me. I kinda prefer modern/digitalised graphic styles (common in 2012+ animes to say). Also, girl-friendly to be able to watch them with my gf is a plus but not a necessity.

Plz give a suggestion

I want a laptop to develop programs with swift and Xcode.

I am considering MacBook Pro 13" 2012 non retina 4gb ram,500gb internal memory

I installed arch on a 2012 MacBook pro today, that was fun, learned a lot more about Linux. Now, I don't know which DE to use.
I would use KDE, but last time I used it(recently) it reset the desktop configuration upon every boot, wiping panels and stuff. I'm sick of GNOME and Cinnamon, and XFCE is eh. Maybe i3?
Leave suggestions!