What an absolute fucking disaster of a day. Strap in, folks; it's time for a bumpy ride!

I got a whole hour of work done today. The first hour of my morning because I went to work a bit early. Then people started complaining about Jenkins jobs failing on that one Jenkins server our team has been wanting to decom for two years but management won't let us force people to move to new servers. It's a single server with over four thousand projects, some of which run massive data processing jobs that last DAYS. The server was originally set up by people who have since quit, of course, and left it behind for my team to adopt with zero documentation.

Anyway, the 500GB disk is 100% full. The memory (all 64GB of it) is fully consumed by stuck jobs. We can't track down large old files to delete because du chokes on the workspace folder with thousands of subfolders with no Ram to spare. We decide to basically take a hacksaw to it, deleting the workspace for every job not currently in progress. This of course fucked up some really poorly-designed pipelines that relied on workspaces persisting between jobs, so we had to deal with complaints about that as well.

So we get the Jenkins server up and running again just in time for AWS to have a major incident affecting EC2 instance provisioning in our primary region. People keep bugging me to fix it, I keep telling them that it's Amazon's problem to solve, they wait a few minutes and ask me to fix it again. Emails flying back and forth until that was done.

Lunch time already. But the fun isn't over yet!

I get back to my desk to find out that new hires or people who got new Mac laptops recently can't even install our toolchain, because management has started handing out M1 Macs without telling us and all our tools are compiled solely for x86_64. That took some troubleshooting to even figure out what the problem was because the only error people got from homebrew was that the formula was empty when it clearly wasn't.

After figuring out that problem (but not fully solving it yet), one team starts complaining to us about a Github problem because we manage the github org. Except it's not a github problem and I already knew this because they are a Problem Team that uses some technical authoring software with Git integration but they only have even the barest understanding of what Git actually does. Turns out it's a Git problem. An update for Git was pushed out recently that patches a big bad vulnerability and the way it was patched causes problems because they're using Git wrong (multiple users accessing the same local repo on a samba share). It's a huge vulnerability so my entire conversation with them went sort of like:

"Please don't."
"We have to."
"Fine, here's a workaround, this will allow arbitrary code execution by anyone with physical or virtual access to this computer that you have sitting in an unlocked office somewhere."
"How do I run a Git command I don't use Git."

So that dealt with, I start taking a look at our toolchain, trying to figure out if I can easily just cross-compile it to arm64 for the M1 macbooks or if it will be a more involved fix. And I find all kinds of horrendous shit left behind by the people who wrote the tools that, naturally, they left for us to adopt when they quit over a year ago. I'm talking entire functions in a tool used by hundreds of people that were put in as a joke, poorly documented functions I am still trying to puzzle out, and exactly zero comments in the code and abbreviated function names like "gars", "snh", and "jgajawwawstai".

While I'm looking into that, the person from our team who is responsible for incident communication finally gets the AWS EC2 provisioning issue reported to IT Operations, who sent out an alert to affected users that should have gone out hours earlier.

Meanwhile, according to the health dashboard in AWS, the issue had already been resolved three hours before the communication went out and the ticket remains open at this moment, as far as I know.

I don't know why I am a programmer. I went into engineering because I wanted to make video games. I did controls engineering to make physical systems go vroom. Now I mainly write software to make specialized physical systems go vroom. When I was a kid this was not what I would have wanted to do with my life. My 10 year old version of me is standing over me looking down saying "Pathetic". I feel like I need to do something about this before I die.

I want to make a game system for RPGs that is similar to an authoring tool to allow me to make games with some very specific features. Think creation kit for arbitrary RPG games. I am thinking I could make the authoring tool a product as well. If people want to make their own games. But I also want to make moddable RPG games using the authoring tool. I want to give people the ability to mod the game. So I am struggling with how to allow modding and sell an authoring tool. License to distribute unique games? I dunno, maybe I will just keep it as a modding tool for the games I make. I feel like good quality games are moddable. I hardly want to play anything that isn't.

As much as we like being elitists for a lot of shit:

I can either set a client with their own admin interface for authoring their content on their sites, spend hours configuring the shit they need and then spend more time setting up everything for a lot of additional shit.

Or

I can set them up with the newer versions of wordpress, call it a day and still charge for maintenance or adding pages to their shit and charge as if i was coding and preparing everything from scratch even though i would tell them It really is no problem charging billed hours for something that takes me minutes.

I dunno about y'all, but I ain't about to neckbeard over shit. I severely believe the hate to be displaced in current iterations of the cms.

It’s late, and stupid RSpec has decided to only mock calls to a particular method in some specs but not in others.

`allow(object).to receive(:method).with(resource_arg).and_return(“some\ntext”)`

Works in a few specs, but not the rest. Why? Who the fuck knows. Probably some shared state between specs that isn’t supposed to happen.

HAHA JUST KIDDING

After refactoring my specs to use unique ‘resource’ names for each call because I’ve had shared state issues before.

and after refactoring my model code to remove a lot of now-unused dependency injection (because maybe it was mocking a different object than got passed in?)

Guess what?
When creating my mock objects, I forgot to link them together. That’s it. A 14-character change. And suddenly they all pass.

Asdjklfajg.
Time for bed.

Content authoring e-learning tool.

Any writers here that have tips on how to get started with writing?

I used to write a lot of stories as a kid, but nowadays I can never get my imagination started anymore. I guess you "just start", but I never know what to start writing about. Usually I write about my past and what I usually think about, but that often leads to nowhere or gets depressive.

Any ideas on how to start writing a story? Should I be more organized or should I just start with one thing (a character, a place, an event) and see where things go from there? Do you write by hand or on a computer?

Junior front end developer.

Interest in saas, js and jQuery,
1 year html5 and JavaScript, knowledge of image authoring (Photoshop)

Job is wordpress customisation.

18k... Degree in media required.

So you want a graphic designer for junior developer wage.. lol.

Is there a mockup/authoring system for linux that I can use to mockup gui interfaces? I want to be able to create pages of screens with button that link to other pages. I first want to use this to document out current app. Then I want to use it to create a new version so that others can review the approach I want to take.

I am first looking at libreoffice because you can draw primitives very easy. It has a scripting backend as well. I had used authoring systems years ago (20 years) on old black and white macs. I have not seen systems like that in a while. Searching for authoring systems for linux brings up a lot of web based ones. I don't want to mock it up on web if I can help it, but it could work if it did relative links to html files in the same directory. That way any browser would work.

I really just don't know what the state of the art tools used for this. Probably using terms I don't recognize.

HTML Writers Guidelines

When designing your web site you want to make the visiting experience as enjoyable as possible and at the same time make it so that if the site needs to be changed in any way, the changes are not too difficult to make. You want the look to be as appealing as possible for all browsers and also make the site accessible to users with disabilities. In order to accomplish all this there are some general guidelines when creating your HTML code.

1. The first thing that will really make your life easier is through the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) - CSS is used to maintain the look of the document such as the fonts, margins and color. HTML directly on the page is not a good choice to handle these aspects because if say, the font color you are using for certain paragraphs needs to be changed from blue to red, you would have to go in and change each color tag manually. By using CSS you can designate the color for each of those paragraphs just once in the CSS file. That way if you have to change the font color from blue to red you make one change instead of the countless number of changes you might have to make, especially if your web site contains hundreds of pages. This is a big time saver and a must for all professionally designed web sites.

2. Don't use the FONT tag directly in your HTML code - This becomes a problem when using some cheap authoring tools that try to mimic what a web page should look like by using excessive FONT tags and nbsp characters. These tools end up creating web pages that are impossible to keep maintained. There is a program you can use, if you've created one of these disaster pages, called the HTML Tidy Program which you can actually download here . This will clean up your code as well as possible.

3. You want your web pages readable to people who have disabilities - People who surf the Internet depend on speech synthesizers or Braille readers to interpret the text on the page. If your HTML markup is sloppy or isn't contained in CSS the software these people use to read pages have a difficult time in interpreting these pages. You should also include descriptions for each image on your page. Also, don't use server side image maps. If you are using tables you should include a summary of the table's structure and also associate table data with the correct headers. This gives non visual browsers a chance to follow the page as they go from one cell to another. And finally, for forms, make sure you include labels for form fields.

By following just these three guidelines you give your visitors, especially disabled visitors the best chance of having an enjoyable visit to your site while at the same time making it so that if you have to make changes to your site, those changes can be made easily and quickly.

I'm seeking opinions and thoughts on my predicament.

I have 2ish paths before me.
Next year I resume my studies in Science Communication and Computer Science in particiliar a bachelor of science, I have considered then doing master in managent or computer science.

1) I am able to have a income of about 800 AUD a fortnight (this is to support me during study without requiring work) plus extra from a part time job whilst I study for about 2 years. Throughout this time I would like to skill up in a variety of fields as immensley as possible.

2) I can accept a full time junior web developer job while I study, this job is with a great government research organisation which as a first FT job looks great on a resume, it is is project based work where I get given a project and code and pretty much complete it. The job is flexible, I can mostly work where-ever I want, at home, at a cafe, travelling. With maybe a meeting once a week. The pay is about 65kAUD a year.

Both options are very attractive options with each containing there own pros and cons. With the extra money I could learn more or use it to grow a business or do more.

However without the FT job I could still earn about 1-1.5k a fortnight for alot less time.

I am still discovering what to do in life, I'm very good at public speaking and would like to experience and learn more about lots of different things. My current knowledge is very broad from engineering to CS, graphic design, authoring, trade skills, Digitial design and more.

Ideally I would like to learn how to lead people, to make the world a better place and help people. Figuring out where my strengths lay and where to apply them is difficult as I am fascinated by so many things.

I worry about taking the FT job as it might detract from my studies and lead me to pursueing mostly only web development work as well as take up time that might be better spent on extra study or in a leadership position in a uni club.

The PT job is a IT Systems Technician in the Australian Defence Force.

Which is a interesting experience within itself, different from civilian life and also I would be learning about systems that I might have less experience with.

I have such broad interests in alot of fields that I don't seem to be focussed on select things or areas like other devs I've met, Science Communication is a versitile field, one of my professors expertise is on doctor who and it's role in science engagement, she has written books on it. Others are in public policy or directed podcasts or even made games. Despite my broad interests computer science was always a gield I did well in.

Any thoughts, opinions or questions are welcome.
I have a blog/portfolio I put my work and projects up if it helps people know more about me, you can find it at curiosityplace.wordpress.com

!rant

Let's say that you have (or had) a colleague that you utterly despise for whatever reason. Have you ever wrote convoluted or straight up spaghetti code on purpose just to make his/her life harder?

(I am aware that authoring bad code can bite you in the ass down the line, just curious to see if anyone ever went that far)