Me: chooses English for language, French for keyboard (because that's what my keyboard happens to be), speaks Dutch natively

Windows: oh great! You've told me to display everything in Windows in English. So I'll just show you the Windows store in Dutch, French and English (edit, and Russian in one of the Store tabs, for God knows why), all at once! Because who cares about your language settings anyway, right. You appear to be from Belgium from your IP, so obviously you speak both of these languages despite your personal preferences. Additionally, have some Candy Crush Soda Saga that you've never asked for.

And the application that you wanted to install - Ubuntu? Fuck you, you can't install it, for "reasons" that we've conveniently put in French, because you obviously speak that, right.

HOW ABOUT YOU FUCKING GO FUCK YOURSELF, MICROSOFT?!

"yes, sir, we block ftp and ssh connections from outside the benelux (shortcut for: belgium/netherlands/luxembourg, didn't say this part but it's a very widely known term here)"

"if you allow connections from INSIDE the benelux, why can't I connect from Germany, eh?!?!"

💀😶

Arriving at the Hague very soon, can't wait to see all the dutch devvies and the Belgium one!

We'll keep ranting about this :)

The cleaning lady saga continues yet again..

Here in Belgium, cleaning ladies are paid with cheques. All fine and dandy, and apparently the parent organization (Sodexo) even migrated to digital cheques. Amazing!!!

If only they did it properly.

Just now I received an email with my login data.
Login: ${FIRSTNAME}${FIRST2CHARSOFLASTNAME}
Password: I won't reveal the amount of characters.. but it's not even hex. It's just uppercase letters, and far from what I'd deem even remotely secure. Hopefully I'll be able to change that shitty password shortly, and not get it mailed back, even when I ask for recovery. Guess I'll have to check that later - the person who made that account was pretty incompetent when it comes to tech after all. Don't ask me why they did it instead of me. I honestly don't really know either.

With that said, this is a government organization after all... Can I really expect them to hash their passwords?

*looks for jobs in system administration*

For our client in $location we're looking for a Network and System Administrator ... to manage our local IT infrastructure (so far so good) ... that's Microsoft-based.

Fuck that company.

*looks further*

Requirements: deployment and maintenance of servers, backups and storage, updates, yada yada.. fine with me.
yOU wiLl mAiNtAiN WanBLowS sUrVaR sYsTeMs

Fuck that company too.

Does anyone here in Belgium even work with fucking Linux servers?! Or should I really relocate to the Netherlands to get something decent?!!

Oh Christ.. just been looking for hosting companies here in Belgium to look for sysadmin positions.. one of the fucking companies posted this: "we provide Uptime-as-a-Service"

The fucking cringe!!! Uptime as a service! Everything including the only fucking job a hoster has, keeping shit up and running.. as a service.. fuck!

Closing the week with a beer from Belgium!

!dev && rant
Temperature causing temper!!!

Summer 2009...
Me: Dad, can me and sis go swim in the pool?
Dad: No son, you can only swim if it's 25°C or higher.
Which in practice meant that we could only swim a few days each summer. Average in Belgium used to be about 21°C.

Spring 2019, my younger siblings...
Little sis: Mom, can we go swim in the pool?
Mom: Lol sure, it's only April but it's already way hot enough.. and during summer it'll be too hot to do the work on setting up the pool anyway.

Winter 2029, in Antarctica...
Me, to my children: During my old days my children, we had this thing called snow!! And we lived in the wasteland that used to be the glorious Europe, back when it was still habitable.. you should've seen it, now it's a desert, but back then it was awesome!
My children: Mum!! He's acting senile again, and talking about things that don't exist!!!

Coming to the crux of the problem right now, fuck me.. I'm tired as fuck but can't sleep because already in the fucking spring, my house is too fucking hot to be able to sleep without sweating like a pig!!!
AaaaaAAAAA 😣

First Qwerty-keyboard ever here. This is weird. Why does Belgium have to use Azerty as a standard? It's so stupid.

In the country of beer, Belgium, you can make a man jealous just by owning a couple of bottles of Orval, trappist beer.
There is a shortage of the beer so the abbey decided not to distribute it in super markets (It sometimes occurs, but not by default).
But yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, I struck FUCKING GOLD!

My fellow IT-er just posted this picture of him being on his way to where I am now. But as far as I know, this isn't "station0" city .. xD

Good question, what wasn't bad about 2020?

As far as good things go.. well, COVID-19 actually. Back in February the lockdown began in Belgium, and while many people got bored out of their minds, I actually became a lot more productive. So many projects started back then, and I got a lot better at programming because of it. Now I can confidently write most bash stuff without ever looking anything up. And the code is maintainable, on account of putting everything into functions. You can literally navigate the code just by looking at it. On older code I always had issues with that.

I'm very glad that essential travel even back then wasn't really restricted. Because my bank is retarded about online banking, I have to go to the bank every so often to check my balance. At the time I tended to do that late in the evening, when nobody else was outside and I had the entire town to myself. That was one of the travels considered essential. So I kept doing it and made that my biweekly walk. I really enjoyed that. Gets your mind off things.

Bad things would be the utter stupidity that the general public had shown me during that pandemic. Burning down 5G antennas and not even getting the right ones, toilet paper, 5G death beams in street lamps?! They even sent death threats to telco workers over sensationalist bullshit from what IIRC was just a random Twitch streamer. Those people should just fucking kill themselves, choke yourselves in that pile of toilet paper you got yourself and then called yourself financially challenged. You braindead fucking retards!

Another dev-related thing is the normalization of SJW terminology. Now even "blind playthrough" gets your ass banned on Twitch. I saw a tweet about a Twitch employee (I think) proudly saying that they implemented it. Most upvoted comment on it was from a blind person, asking why they did this and not made the Twitch app more friendly to use for blind users. They too thought this was bullshit. Yet it still got added in, and more and more people are starting to think that "this is fine". Hell even that "this is necessary".

What annoys me the most is that this mostly comes from the US, where around that time they laid their knee on George Floyd, and didn't fix their legal system at all. As a European it baffles me since we have many immigrants here (the Drumpf even called Belgium a hellhole over it) and we just don't give a shit about whether or not they are "truly Belgian". We just let them live their daily lives like everyone else. Imagine just not giving a shit. Imagine not bothering them, not with racism, not with reverse racism, not with anything. Just let them do their thing and that's it. Yet despite Belgium being one of the most inclusive countries in the fucking world, I still got called a racist many times for asking.. why did you implement this? Why this, and not tackling the problem at its actual and pretty fucking obvious core?

So all in all I can only hope that 2021 will get a little bit better. But that's the same thing I said in 2019, and it didn't quite come true.

When you don't test before release..

It's a thing you notice now and then here in Belgium...

Finally got some fruition out of my job hunting.. a publishing company wants to hire me. Only issue.. they're paying only ~€1k/m (before or after tax.. no idea.. and the tax on individuals here in Belgium definitely isn't any better) and that's even split between me and another guy I'd be collaborating with, and then there's some royalties. I can't pay shit with that. The argument being that it'll give me experience. #forexposure, #forexperience!!!

Well at least it's paid at all unlike internships I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I don’t know what the fuck is going on here in Limburg (province in Belgium) but companies seriously need to stop using Comic Sans

I see it on banners, trucks, flyers and just about everything .. it seriously triggers me 😩

Oh boy, this is gonna be good:

TL;DR: Digital bailiffs are vulnerable as fuck

So, apparently some debt has come back haunting me, it's a somewhat hefty clai and for the average employee this means a lot, it means a lot to me as well but currently things are looking better so i can pay it jsut like that. However, and this is where it's gonna get good:

The Bailiff sent their first contact by mail, on my company address instead of my personal one (its's important since the debt is on a personal record, not company's) but okay, whatever. So they send me a copy of their court appeal, claiming that "according to our data, you are debtor of this debt". with a URL to their portal with a USERNAME and a PASSWORD in cleartext to the message.
Okay, i thought we were passed sending creds in plaintext to people and use tokenized URL's for initiating a login (siilar to email verification links) but okay! Let's pretend we're a dumbfuck average joe sweating already from the bailiff claims and sweating already by attempting to use the computer for something useful instead of just social media junk, vidya and porn.

So i click on the link (of course with noscript and network graph enabled and general security precautions) and UHOH, already a first red flag: The link redirects to a plain http site with NOT username and password: But other fields called OGM and dossiernumer AND it requires you to fill in your age???
Filling in the received username and password obviously does not work and when inspecting the page... oh boy!

This is a clusterfuck of javascript files that do horrible things, i'm no expert in frontend but nothing from the homebrewn stuff i inspect seems to be proper coding... Okay... Anyways, we keep pretending we're dumbasses and let's move on.

I ask for the seemingly "new" credentials and i receive new credentials again, no tokenized URL. okay.

Now Once i log in i get a horrible looking screen still made in the 90's or early 2000's which just contains: the claimaint, a pie chart in big red for amount unpaid, a box which allows you to write an - i suspect unsanitized - text block input field and... NO DATA! The bailiff STILL cannot show what the documents are as evidence for the claim!

Now we stop being the pretending dumbassery and inspect what's going on: A 'customer portal' that does not redirect to a secure webpage, credentials in plaintext and not even working, and the portal seems to have various calls to various domains i hardly seem to think they can be associated with bailiff operations, but more marketing and such... The portal does not show any of the - required by law - data supporting the claim, and it contains nothing in the user interface showing as such.
The portal is being developed by some company claiming to be "specialized in bailiff software" and oh boy oh boy..they're fucked because...

The GDPR requirements.. .they comply to none of them. And there is no way to request support nor to file a complaint nor to request access to the actual data. No DPO, no dedicated email addresses, nothing.

But this is really the ham: The amount on their portal as claimed debt is completely different from the one they came for today, for the sae benefactor! In Belgium, this is considered illegal and is reason enough to completely make the claim void. the siple reason is that it's unjust for the debtor to assess which amount he has to pay, and obviously bailiffs want to make the people pay the highest amount.

So, i sent the bailiff a business proposal to hire me as an expert to tackle these issues and even sent him a commercial bonus of a reduction of my consultancy fees with the amount of the bailiff claim! Not being sneery or angry, but a polite constructive proposal (which will be entirely to my benefit)

So, basically what i want to say is, when life gives you lemons, use your brain and start making lemonade, and with the rest create fertilizer and whatnot and sent it to the lemonthrower, and make him drink it and tell to you it was "yummy yummy i got my own lemons in my tummy"

So, instead of ranting and being angry and such... i simply sent an email to the bailiff, pointing out various issues (the ones

Doing dev work in Belgium in an office without air conditioning and a
room temperature of 38°C (100F).. just impossible to focus.. in the car I almost burnt my fingers using the steering wheel and gear stick. Some of you guys have had similar experiences (temp? Location?), for me it's a first..

As student in Belgium in computer science I finally become a freelancer !! I am now officially a developer who get paid for his job :D

I don't know if this is a problem only in Belgium or also in other countries but while I love Bluetooth for audio playback (headsets, speakers and everything) despite being extremely convoluted as a protocol.. FUCK Bluetooth keyboards.

Several of them I've tried. Several of them, from various brands. Pairing, setting the Belgian keyboard layout (which on that shitty Android 7.0 tablet that I want to use the fucking things with apparently has to be done *every fucking time you connect*, because reasons) all well. Except half the keys don't fucking map properly. A keymap, it doesn't get easier than that! How hard is it to make buttons map to the right keys!? They're literally fucking push buttons on a matrix! Seeing which points in the circuit make contact and sending that off to wherever it needs to go!

And to put the icing on the cake? USB keyboards with the same fucking layout settings work without any problems. So it's extremely likely that it's something in those shitty keyboards' controllers or Bluetooth going full rart on all of them.

Of course, Bluetooth being as convoluted as it is, manufacturers just copy each others' implementations of it if they can.. so there's that.

Can really nobody make a product halfway decent anymore before putting it on the market!?

Another one bites the dust.. JUNK!!! Every single goddamn one of them!

!rant ✓devrant-meetup

Met @condor irl today. He's the same weird guy as I feel at moments. Interests that don't interest people around us in any way..

Drank some beers, evidently called Belgium.
He came all the way to the town I work at.. kudos!

Talked about breadboards taking 230V via cables that aren't meant to take the voltage in any way.. Security implications in networks and online services, like Fb. Faraday's cage & how it works; and some other shit I swear I won't tell anyone about as you should be comfortable discussing it.

Quite interesting, I swear! (:

Now on the bus home, as I had to cut it short to get to some parental business... But I'm looking back on some positive social interaction, which I'll gladly re-do another time.

Condor, it was sure nice to meet ya. I'll come your way next time. That ~10eu for your transport will be equalled some day in the near future.

@FunkDelegate sorry it was badly timed and plaved, you'll join us soon enough! At least you saw decent ass! xD

Let's make it clear once and for all: 60% of Belgium is Dutch speaking. So stop setting my language automaticly to French because of my country! 😡

Whenever I encounter a website that does this, I tend to look for another site that either understands Accept-Language headers or knows the above fact.

Yes, I'm looking at you Ubisoft store! But there are many more of these !#@% websites out there!

Here are all the infos for this Friday night meeting:
- Friday 22/12
- 6PM
- Brussels Central station

Everybody's welcome ! :D

Competent software engineers are in high demand in Belgium. If you are looking for a workplace that treats devs as demi-Gods, relocate now.

Perks available to you are:
- working from home 2-5 days/ week.
- English at the workplace because the northern & southern parts don't speak each other's languages
- terrible rush hour traffic jams allowing you to flexibly choose your schedule as long as there is enough overlap
- pension & hospital insurance
- a company car (electric or fuel)
- ability to get away with any lack of soft skills as long as you're technically strong
- a competitive salary (2-4k/mo), even with almost half of it being eaten by taxes
- limited competition, because there's a sore lack of competent developers

Well well, this can't be right

@ train station Antwerp Berchem Belgium

Just started working as a student for a big tech company in Belgium. They only allow me to use dotnet core and the only thing I've never ever used is dotnet... Fml.
(any suggestions/tips are welcome)

I've never been to a job interview yet (most of the cunts here in Belgium work with Windows Server 🤮, and I'm still studying electronics), but given most of the submissions on this group rant, I think that I might very well have seriously overestimated interviewers! 😄

I will soon move to Belgium for a few months due to my wife's job and I will go back to Germany once in a while for a few weeks. Of course I'll need a computer and I can't take my tower back and forth all the time, thus I'll need something more mobile. Since most notebooks <1000€ are shit and I'll also need at least two external monitors, I went for a small (USFF) PC instead; for about 350€ I got a HP ProDesk 400 G5 with a i5-9500T, 8 GB RAM (to be upgraded), 256 GB NVME (also to be upgraded), B360 chipset. I would have liked a Ryzen, but then I could only get the predecessor with a 2400GE...

Hopefully Linux (Qubes OS in particular) will work fine.

Here is a story about 5 years of my life.
My studies had little to do with web. I did embedded systems (architecture and software) but quickly realized that I couldn't see myself living my life in my homecoutry and that my degree would be worth little to no more than shit elsewhere in the world. That was on my 3rd year in uni.
I liked coding so I decided to pursue computer science, then web development. For that, your degree mattered little.
From then on, when I wasn't in class I was doing some coding.
This allowed me to get short (2 months) internships in Mobile and web development, 4 in total.
Doing so I had made it so that my professors would allow me to do my graduation project in web and mobile dev. That project having ended, I secured a long (1year and a half) internship in Mumbai India doing web for a big consulting company. Having finished that I headed to Belgium for my current job. All with having no to little financial resources except what I could come up with.
"I'm proud of all the efforts it took to make it" is what I think sometimes but what is it that I made? I realized my first objective which is to be on the international job market, but now that I genuinely love software I realize that I didn't really make anything I can be proud of working as a consultant. And having worked on many things but not a lot on practically anything, it's getting hard to do something else.
I'm hoping for devranters insight on how I should proceed.

Where are you coming from ? I'm coming from 127.0.0.1, just kidding, I'm from Belgium and you ?

In the Global Blockchain Congress currently taking place in Kolkata, India, 'IT' officials from PWC India and IBM India start their speaks right after a popular cryptography professor from Belgium and a Blockchain entrepreneur from Brazil.

Every word these 'IT officials' uttered showed how shallow and business minded the IT managers and marketers are.

The site for the Belgian informatics olympiad.

What happens if you have a German, a Belgium and an Indian locked in one room and you give them one fishstick and two forks?

TL;DR: work at the reference hospitals, we got precautions, no panic, we got this.

Well, currently my client is one of the reference hospitals in belgium in regards to coronavirus so they receive a lot of the infected patients. Although the general public is 'uneasy' to put it mildly, the IT department is not scared. We take our precautions, we already have safe working distances from each other. If the federal minister of health announces it, all non-medical or non-essential employees from the hospital will be either put on leave or work remote. Bottom line is: no panic. we got this!

My first internship was at a small startup in Belgium, we were 5 including me. Most of the time, we would all go to my boss's house for dinner and play rocket league then go back to work.

I was about 12 years old and I was in 2nd year of high school (here in Belgium high school is from 12 to 18 after which you go to college or university). During that year I befriended someone who was already very interested in computer stuff and things and he kind of set me off. Ever since he got me into IT I really never looked back. (he is still my friend by the way and I'm now in college)

Hi, please advise me on your best price/quality reseller of supermicro servers, no refurbished, preferrably germany cause they are cheaper compared in belgium...

In Belgium were I live it takes twice as much time to devRant than in France or in the US. You know why?

Belgium vs Sweden... but I hate soccer!!!! At least this made my day. #TousEnsemble

SpaceX fanboy here
I'd like tp print me a Starman mug
Anyone knows of services I could use in Belgium ?

Taking a leave for 14 days from work, just to use my vacation days, really messes with my biorhythm :D My day/night cycle shifted about 12 hours.. Programming during the night for a freelance project, sleeping 1-2 hours during the day just to rest my eyes a bit..

I'm from Belgium, but the second developer, on the project, is from San Francisco.. It's quiet nice to have someone to talk to about the development process when every one else I know is asleep.

I'm not made for a dayjob at a desk, I need to be at home, in my bed or at my own desk, choosing my own hours, just.. Working on projects with some music, some snacks,.. Much more productive that way than, instead, being forced to work from 9am to 6pm.. You can't force creativity or inspiration
.

I slept 9 hours this week, spread over 4 days... I'm not the most healthy person, I know :D

Someone's going to the DevDay in Mons next week ?

The cost of energy in the EU combined with 10% inflation (but not salary increase) has become crushing to the point offices and households shut off heating and use battery lamps and candles for light. Avg. Year total for energy is over 9000€ in Belgium! At this rate we will burn through our savings for basic utilities

I'm currently doing my college internship at a company where the working hours are from 8 am till 5 pm. I was suprised by the hours because it feels so long. I was wondering what hour do you guys work and does every company use these hours? I live in Belgium. I'm not sure how it is in other countries. Thanks!

So I came across this WiFi network in my village. And it's in Belgium...

Hey guys ! I need your help for something.

I'm a student in Belgium that will become self-employed as frontend+backend developer (during my free time)
In Belgium and as student I will have no charge.

What would be a good rate per hour ? Some already suggest me 30-40€/h but as I'm free of charge others suggest 25€/h

What do you think ?

You fucking fucktard! First, learn how to fucking read an email and secondly, I was referring to the fucking login issue you mentioned before, not the fucking logout issue!!! Serioursly!>!?!?!?! How the fuck do you function!

Fucking belgium fucktard!

!rant

I applied to a position for a Java position in Brussels. Having 7 yr experience in Java how much should I aim for? Keep in mind I don't work in Belgium currently

!rant

any Devranters at KIKK festival in Namur Belgium today?