It's maddening how few people working with the internet don't know anything about the protocols that make it work. Web work, especially, I spend far too much time explaining how status codes, methods, content-types etc work, how they're used and basic fundamental shit about how to do the job of someone building internet applications and consumable services.

The following has played out at more than one company:

App: "Hey api, I need some data"
API: "200 (plain text response message, content-type application/json, 'internal server error')"
App: *blows the fuck up

*msg service team*

Me: "Getting a 200 with a plaintext response containing an internal server exception"
Team: "Yeah, what's the problem?"
Me: "...200 means success, the message suggests 500. Either way, it should be one of the error codes. We use the status code to determine how the application processes the request. What do the logs say?"
Team: "Log says that the user wasn't signed in. Can you not read the response message and make a decision?"
Me: "That status for that is 401. And no, that would require us to know every message you have verbatim, in this case, it doesn't even deserialize and causes an exception because it's not actually json."
Team: "Why 401?"
Me: "It's the code for unauthorized. It tells us to redirect the user to the sign in experience"
Team: "We can't authorize until the user signs in"
Me: *angermatopoeia* "Just, trust me. If a user isn't logged in, return 401, if they don't have permissions you send 403"
Team: *googles SO* "Internet says we can use 500"
Me: "That's server error, it says something blew up with an unhandled exception on your end. You've already established it was an auth issue in the logs."
Team: "But there's an error, why doesn't that work?"
Me: "It's generic. It's like me messaging you and saying, "your service is broken". It doesn't give us any insight into what went wrong or *how* we should attempt to troubleshoot the error or where it occurred. You already know what's wrong, so just tell me with the status code."
Team: "But it's ok, right, 500? It's an error?"
Me: "It puts all the troubleshooting responsibility on your consumer to investigate the error at every level. A precise error code could potentially prevent us from bothering you at all."
Team: "How so?"
Me: "Send 401, we know that it's a login issue, 403, something is wrong with the request, 404 we're hitting an endpoint that doesn't exist, 503 we know that the service can't be reached for some reason, 504 means the service exists, but timed out at the gateway or service. In the worst case we're able to triage who needs to be involved to solve the issue, make sense?"
Team: "Oh, sounds cool, so how do we do that?"
Me: "That's down to your technology, your team will need to implement it. Most frameworks handle it out of the box for many cases."
Team: "Ah, ok. We'll send a 500, that sound easiest"
Me: *..l.. -__- ..l..* "Ok, let's get into the other 5 problems with this situation..."

Moral of the story: If this is you: learn the protocol you're utilizing, provide metadata, and stop treating your customers like shit.

function checkBrowser() {
if(browser == "Internet Explorer") {
print("I'm sorry, you have reached the 404 error page. Please use a different browser. Have a nice day.");
}
else {
print("Thank you for not using Internet Explorer");
}
}

Whenever something goes mainstream and becomes buzzword there are annoying consequences of it.

First, it’s harder to find anything meaningful about the topic.
Second, suddenly everyone is an expert and web search starts to show not related products like promo codes, stupid videos, tutorials for dumb.
Third, old content that was interesting is lost under pile of shit or gets deleted.

I feel like I’m living in middle ages and before I try to watch something interesting it’s deleted by Spanish inquisition and replaced by some crap.

Most of expert content I have in favorites is returning 404 and youtube videos are deleted or private so from some time I started to backup all content I read or watch and find interesting in public networks.

Fortunately I have couple of terabytes of storage to backup interesting topics but I’m not happy that I’m back to times when I was saving internet page to floppy disk to show it to my friend later.

What a fucking nightmare.

So, my internet (business class with a /28 ipv4 block) went out for 15-30min during the snowstorm yesterday.
Due to previous issues i wanted to be sure it was an actual outtage.
1st- login page got a error for unavailable resource.
2nd- their link to more info was this 404

I seriously need to find a more sane solution.

a friend of mine sent me some hobby drama and it reminded me of this innate fear I have that's difficult to explain and nor do I really know where it's from or how to describe it

honestly, fuck, I don't know how to describe it

because the issue is every time you do something good for the world, the world ends up vilifying you for it

I saw this when I was growing up and making mods for games, I'm seeing it now in this hobby drama to such a striking degree

this person outdid the community, became famed and god-like a figure due to their personal drive being different, and now... even the people describing the drama are editorializing them into a hated villain of the arc. I literally can't find their original posts, people just say rumoured things about them but won't link them which is super suspicious. even if they do link to a post of theirs the account is banned so I can't read the posts, the website link is 404, etc

the community quotes their backtalk to the person instead of what the person actually said and celebrates it and it's making my stomach churn

this feels like a hit job
then they make fun of this person for being "paranoid everyone is against them" um yeah you literally shit talk them, probably are making things up about them, vilifying them at literally every opportunity, trying to use cheap gotchas to feel superior... I'm starting to think this person is correct, and I want to read what they wrote instead (because of the few quotes they had actual insight into the hobby-sphere) but it seems like you've somehow scrubbed it off the internet, wtf?

I like building things but my fear is exactly this. I've done it in the past when I was little and in my experience if you build something people love, somehow it is a gateway to them mistreating you because they feel entitled to you. so why would you ever contribute to humanity if this is what happens? ever since I was a kid I wanted to keep these things to myself. fame is terrifying. does it even make sense? I can't even put it into words

it would be nice if you could do things and make humanity better but somehow by doing things you literally bring out the worst in them. and yeah, you can tank it and endure it, but it makes you ask why are you doing it if it's so evil onto them? why does this happen? it also frankly sucks, like who wants all this drama? you give people stuff and they spit in your face? that's just depressing. how are you to sleep at night, wrestling with that sort of community integration, doubting if that's your place in life, your purpose? why even? does it even make the world better, or are you making it worse by a chemical reaction of your existence combining with the masses generating vitriol fluids in the collective consciousness? it's just somehow so fucked up

Hi,

I'll be away for one week in a place without any Internet access.
Do you have any suggestions on books / docs I could download for that time?
I'd love to learn some more about web coding in that time so books about that would be great.