Why are job postings so bad?
Like, really. Why?

Here's four I found today, plus an interview with a trainwreck from last week.
(And these aren't even the worst I've found lately!)

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Ridiculous job posting #1:
* 5 years React and React Native experience -- the initial release of React Native was in May 2013, apparently. ~5.7 years ago.
* Masters degree in computer science.
* Write clean, maintainable code with tests.
* Be social and outgoing.

So: you must have either worked at Facebook or adopted and committed to both React and React Native basically immediately after release. You must also be in academia (with a masters!), and write clean and maintainable code, which... basically doesn't happen in academia. And on top of (and really: despite) all of this, you must also be a social butterfly! Good luck ~

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Ridiculous job posting #2:
* "We use Ruby on Rails"
* A few sentences later... "we love functional programming and write only functional code!"

Cue Inigo Montoya.

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Ridiculous job posting #3:
* 100% remote! Work from anywhere, any time zone!
* and following that: You must have at least 4 work hours overlap with your coworkers per day.
* two company-wide meetups per quarter! In fancy places like Peru and Tibet! ... TWO PER QUARTER!?

Let me paraphrase: "We like the entire team being remote, together."

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Ridiculous job posting #4:
* Actual title: "Developer (noun): Superhero poised to change the world (apply within)"
* Actual excerpt: "We know that headhunters are already beating down your door. All we want is the opportunity to earn our right to keep you every single day."
* Actual excerpt: "But alas. A dark and evil power is upon us. And this… ...is where you enter the story. You will be the Superman who is called upon to hammer the villains back into the abyss from whence they came."

I already applied to this company some time before (...surprisingly...) and found that the founder/boss is both an ex cowboy dev and... more than a bit of a loon. If that last part isn't obvious already? Sheesh. He should go write bad fantasy metal lyrics instead.

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Ridiculous interview:
* Service offered for free to customers
* PHP fanboy angrily asking only PHP questions despite the stack (Node+Vue) not even freaking including PHP! To be fair, he didn't know anything but PHP... so why (and how) is he working there?
* Actual admission: No testing suite, CI, or QA in place
* Actual admission: Testing sometimes happens in production due to tight deadlines
* Actual admission: Company serves ads and sells personally-identifiable customer information (with affiliate royalties!) to cover expenses
* Actual admission: Not looking for other monetization strategies; simply trying to scale their current break-even approach.

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I find more of these every time I look. It's insane.
Why can't people be sane and at least semi-intelligent?

My current project at work: purchase verification, aka anti-fraud.

It's been two weeks, and my boss is flipping out because it isn't done. A robust anti-fraud solution. in two weeks. And he thought one week was a little much.

like, fucking really?

There are companies whose entire service is helping combat fraud. and he wants this done in a bloody week?

What makes me laugh through my tears of frustration is that the company that moved into the previous office? Yep, anti-fraud. Their entire business model is providing anti-fraud services to other businesses. They even tried selling him on it when they moved in. Bossman sales guy turned it around and sold my freaking desk out from under me instead.

But like. They're a small company: they had 9 people when they moved in, and were looking to add three more, so a total of 12 people. (I totally considered jumping ship, but their stack was too different.)

So. Bossman wants me to replace 9-12 people and their entire business in a fucking week. Yeah.

"Oh, but it's just sms verification" says he. What he also wants is the ability to flag users as fraudulent, have sticky verifications so they can't bypass them by backing out, have email checks as well as sms, have deferred verification to allow collecting required info (e.g. phone number), verification fallback, lockouts, manual admin whitelisting, admin blacklisting, and different rules per merchant and rule groups for affiliates to apply to all of their merchants, and of course the ability to customize those merchant/affiliate anti-fraud rules. But he shortens this gigantic list to "I want sms verification," despite actually asking for all of the above. I don't want to know about the mental gymnastics and/or blindfolding required to equate the two, but he's nuts.

Yeah.
All of that.
In a goddamn week.

And I get chewed out when it isn't done? Fuck off.

Go build me a goddamn 5m ft^2 castle out of basalt and marble using only your toothbrush and a rusty garden trowel, and have it done in a week. No outsourcing.

talk about ridiculous.

The strangest place I've ever coded... I woudn't say it was the strangest, but definitely the least expected?

The hospital's recovery room after my second child.

I was working at/in Hell at the time (see previous rants concerning API Guy and the asshole salesman CEO). Said salesman douchebag ceo bossman had no recollection of me being expecting, going to the hospital, or even why I was there (and if he did, he wouldn't have cared at all). He still insisted I work on his shit features because they were so important for his ever-so-important client and their new signups that they were going to do anyway. I loathe him so fucking much.

Anyway, the feature in question was pretty tiny: during the new client onboarding process, if the client came from a specific affiliate link, the frontpage should change to reflect that affiliate's branding -- different background, a custom header, etc. It was pretty easy to do, though I made certain he didn't know that. During an hour while everyone else was asleep (and while I wasn't passing out from exhaustion), I pulled out my macbook air and built his stupid feature next to my hours-hold newborn.

Did I get any appreciation for that? Sure! He showed appreciation by not yelling at me for a few days. But only because he thought the feature was difficult and that I got it done quickly, not because anything else was difficult. Asshole.

Yes, I told him several times before and several times more afterward. I don't know what goes though his head or how it even works, but it didn't seem like a big deal to him, and he kept forgetting, or maybe he just pretended to listen like he always did. Fucking asshole apparently never heard of maternity leave. I could rant and swear and curse and fume and rage about him for years 🤬 I can't believe I was so excited when I netted that job.

But anyway, building the feature was actually kind of relaxing. I organized and wrote the entire project myself, so working with it was a pleasure, and it was an easy change that I could abstract nicely and cleanly. I totally didn't mind doing it, and actually kind of enjoyed it. I just hated who I was doing it for, and that he didn't fucking care. Used and abused? absolutely. I hope he dies in the most painful, gruesome way possible. Spaghettification might not even be awful enough

Warning: long read....

I got a call this morning from a client who was panicking about not being able to login to his web panel.

So I went to the web panel and tried to login and was just redirected back to the login page. No errors or anything (at least visible on the page). Went looking for an error_log file and found it.

It turns out there was an error was showing: Disk quota exceeded.

So I went into the cPanel and checked, he used about 16GB out of 100GB and that got me confused. So I looked around and found out he was using about 510000/500000 inodes.

Went looking trough FTP to see where he has so many files and try and remove some.

Well it turns out that there were about 7 injected websites (warez, online casino, affiliate one etc) and a full hacking web panel on his FTP. After detailed analysis some who actually built the site (I just maintain some parts) made an upload form available to public with any checks on it. Meaning anyone could upload whatever they wanted and the form would allow it.

The worst part is that the client is not allowing us to secure the form with some sort of login or remove it completely (the best option) as it is not really needed but he uses it to upload some pdf catalogs or something.

TL; DR;
Old programmer created an upload form that was accessible to anyone on the web without adding any security or check as to see what kind of files was getting uploaded. Which lead to having maximum number on inodes used on server and client being unable to login.

Side note:
And ofc I had to go and fix the mess behind him again, even though he stopped working a long time ago and I started just recently and have been having nightmares of this project.

Girlfriend: So YouTubers/bloggers do this thing where they partner with brands and promote their items and give a promo code or promo links which you apply while you purchase the item which gives you a discount and they earn money through every purchase

Me: Yeah, I know. I'm a developer, I make those affiliate links

My hero.... This motherfucker client actually asked for an e-commerce affiliate website made by german devs for under 40€.

My prederred method of communication is over email.

A guy I've built an ecommerce platform and affiliate tracking for was sending me a lot of IMs. So I disabled Google chat. Then he started sending me texts to let me know he sent WhatsApp messages.

Last week he sent me a text to let me know to check WhatsApp. The message there was extremely vague and a minute later an actual email came in explaining the actual issue.

He's fucking with me right?

Then yesterday he messaged me a random series of questions, some that could have easily been googled, that on a holiday while I'm out with my family, should have definitely been over email, because they weren't immediate issues. I actually pictured him drinking at a bbq when he was writing them.

I was about to quit this dude but I get some nice monthly bonuses.

I wanted to create a microcontroller website. It would feature simple circuits and microcontroller code to build things. The intent was to show absolute beginner concepts to people. Since I am older than the whipper snappers out there I thought I would have concept of some old man running the website.

I found cartoon artwork featuring an old man and I also got the domain oldmanmicro.com. I then created a bunch of pages featuring some really basic circuits. I setup an affiliate program with amazon to provide kits to people and embedded those into the website. This site was going to take a lot of creativity. I struggled with what to put on the site. This was going to take time. At this point I felt pretty good with my progress. It looked nice, the links were good, etc.

Then I did web search for oldmanmicro. I found my website in top hits. I also found something else... The 3rd or fourth hit down was some fucking old dude with a micro penis website. WTF! The worst possible combination of letters in my domain name produce this terrible experience. I was already struggling with content ideas, and this just demoralized my efforts. Thus ended the tale of the oldmanmicro.com. Perhaps the micro penis guy bought it, I don't know. I am afraid to look.

This was my very ignorant adventure with not researching a domain name thoroughly.

Manager signed up an affiliate last night to our affiliate tracking software around 11pm. I get an email at 10am asking why I don't have them added to our internal database yet.

"because I was sleeping n shit"

I also explained to him it's not mission critical because it takes 3-5 days before an affiliate will start sending traffic anyways.

definitely designing and building an affiliate platform including ad tracking , member sign-up, and content delivery for a porn company

Created an affiliate tracker / split test tracker / campaign tracker for my Laravel project in 1.5 days.

Not bad, not bad.

Now, should I offer it on github? Seems like I might be kicking myself in the balls if I did.

On the one hand, I don't have a lot of time atm, on the other, I'd love to meet fellow programmers who seek out and would want this, and perhaps contribute. Could lead to some great partnerships down the line..

Anyone have experience with this? Did it take a lot more time than you thought, did you meet other programmers and ended up collaborating on future projects?

Curious..

Just made some dollars via affiliate links in my old blog. Feeling awesome! 😂

Really want to start an amazon affiliate web page, or blog, or a monetized YouTube channel, or something to rake in some extra cash on the side, but... Overwhelmed by the realization that you gotta be damn good and knowledgeable to pull something like that off. Tried to make a web development series on YouTube once and was blown away by how little I was able to explain things without running into situations where I was clueless to some specific detail.

Digistore24 is a steaming pile of shit!

The whole product creation and purchase integration is covered by ugly smelling donkey shit. This whole dumb service is made by idiots.

The 'scripts' they provide to throw at your server for generic customer handling is a joke. Just a raw php mess. But nothing works and debugging this piece of shit is nearly impossible because they don't even provide a proper documentation on how they make the request to your machine.

🤬

Started developing a platform that helps companies build their own affiliate program and manage their partners, it is coded i nuxt and node, but halfway in the project I started losing the interest I had when I started it, it should be launched by mid 2020 but those past month I really haven’t touched it and I am wondering if I should invest anymore in it, altrough I really love the concept and design I implemented.

Had to add some affiliate JS with a fallback pixel. Put it between noscript tags since thats what the fallback is meant for.

Affiliate Guy: did you implement the fallback?
Me: Did you turn of javascript?
AG: I've just talked to our developers, they say we can't turn of javascript or something
Me: <headdesk>

Are these people retarded

Is there any affiliate networks for developers? I mean someone who gets projects for devs 🤔🤔🤔

Hello Mr. Internet,

I just wanted to ask if someone knows an "easy" solution for a Bitcoin Cashback system. We're using Amazon, Ebay & AWIN as affiliate Partners.

If you could build something like this, I would love to speak to you!

At the moment we're updating our DB (11 Million Products) and we'll include a better Search. Right after that we would like to add an Accountsystem + BTC Cashback.

I used DevRant back in 2016. Is someone out here?