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Fuck today was weird.
Today I received almost half a million on my bank account. 😯
Someone changed the ancient cryptic billing system. My user account at work has id 32 in the database, and the dev referenced the size of the creditor id instead of the of the value of the ids itself, and they're u32 ints... So ALL the money moving through our platform was accidentally transferred to my associated bank account.
For all the unit tests we have, this bug tumbled right through.
And no one at finances thought a transfer that big, to a backend dev they know by name, was suspicious — with almost no money going to other creditors...
That worries me a bit. The fact that this shit can happen, even at high test coverage, just because someone mindlessly did a wrong autocomplete or something.
Of course I will send it back... after two weeks and a few hundred € of interest.12 -
Manager: We need to setup the security in the Mexico server
Dev: You mean that 3rd party firewall add on?
Manager: Yes
Dev: And set up the billing on the Mexico account?
Manager: Yes
Dev: lol, sure thing I’ll create the ticket
Manager: What’s so funny?
Dev: Nothing
Ticket: Build wall and get Mexico to pay for it.15 -
Python. Changed a function to return a tuple instead of one value in some database code. Tests pass, gets deployed, everything works. End of the month comes. Suddenly, we get a report that we're draining people's bank accounts and credit cards.
It turns out there was an untested bit of code inside the billing process that used this function. It used the function that was changed. To make matters worse, when the exception was thrown, the billing had already completed successfully, and due to another unrelated bug it would retry despite this.
So, needless to say, type safety and good unit tests are things I prioritize nowadays.7 -
I have a lot of interesting code snippets from some kind of inhouse CRM/billing software, but for now let's look at this very useful PHP function.
4 -
So today our CFO stepped into IT and angrily proclaimed someone using tech@ e-mail and fake name is defrauding company funds buying themselves... "used female lingerie with extra virgin juice" (sic!).
I work for an IPSP, we handle finance for commercial services (think PayPal but smaller). One of our clients is a big platform where girls can sell items like bath water, used socks and more. CFO demanded our admins found out who and when connected to that website, what URLs and so on.
As mentioned, said platform is pretty big, hence, from time to time we help them with their service when they ask us to, that's why we have a tech@ account. Last month there was a minor issue with one of the banks, someone fixed it and, as per usual, made a small payment of €1 topping up the account wallet to make sure everything works. It was an intern whose will to live is still strong and unencumbered with experience so she jokingly wrote "panties juice, extra virgin" in the payment note. What she *didn't know*, however, is that admins on that platform used the very same account to test new billing system they've implemented and our CFO received an invoice.9 -
RANT Incoming
Not necessarily dev related but I need to get this off my chest.
So a bit of a backstory. I had to stay late from school the other day and ended up having to take an Uber home. The ride was fine lady was nice. Everything seems to be going well and there were no signs of any payment failure.
Then yesterday, I had to stay late again. I never said that I had an outstanding balance on my account. Apparently Uber was having problems charging my Android pay account.
So I ended up being stuck at school for like 3 hours. Great!😑
So I emailed Uber when I got home. And this is when I started pulling my hair out. I don't know how many replies I had, but each time I had to tell them that I was not using a prepaid card.
This was one of my replies:
"I'm sorry, are you real? If you are, here is a quick summary of the issue. I am using ANDROID PAY with my CHASE DEBIT CARD. Not, NOT, NOT a prepaid card. I happen to know that CHASE DEBIT CARD(which is the card I use, in case you have already forgotten) works with uber because MY FATHER USES THE EXACT SAME TYPE OF CARD with uber. He uses a CHASE DEBIT CARD(again I use that same type of card as well). So by using LOGIC I am able to deduce that a CHASE DEBIT CARD is in fact compatible. AGAIN THIS IS NOT A PREPAID CARD!!! If the card is incompatible, WHY DOES THE APP ALLOW BE TO ADD IT?!?! Also in response to your last email... Because I am using Android pay, do you really think that an ANDROID would be able to use APPLE pay? Also Google wallet is DISCONTINUED! Finally, PayPal DOES NOT CONNECT TO UBER. Returns a "Server Error." So please stop wasting my time with generic help solutions. Believe me, I have already googled my issue, and nothing comes up. That is why I contacted Uber. I want my driver to be paid, and, uber had made it SO painful with unhelpful "Solutions" to problems that don't even APPLY TO MY ISSUE. No not even mention PREPAID cards in your reply or I will consider you a robot built by monkeys banging their heads on a keyboard. Uber HAS my VALID payment information, USE IT! If there is a phone number I can call, please, enlighten me"
And the response was:
"Thanks for reaching out with this.
Happy to help with this issue you are having.
After reviewing your I can see that the only payment method associated with your account is an ANDROID PAY card and it is also a prepaid card. Some cards and methods are not compatible with our billing processes and can't be used with Uber. This includes prepaid cards."
So I concluded that they are monkeys.
Then Uber banned me from logging into my account because I didn't pay.
So now it is impossible for me to pay because I can't do anything with my account.
Now they want my SSN and a bunch of other shit that I won't give them.
I told them that they were being illogical, and I got the exact same response about the prepaid bullshit.
So I sent them this photo as a goodbye.
I get my driver's licence next weekend, so I won't need Uber anymore. YAY!
Also mind grammatical errors, I talked it in and am to lazy to proofread
13 -
I once woke up to a $65k invoice from AWS and almost puked in my pants.
2 years ago I was cycling through freelancers on upwork to find a decent candidate. I guess i hired the wrong guy because even after revoking access, they got into my AWS account and spun up 1000's of ec2 instances in multiple locations.
I was a newly wed and feared for my life. How do I tell my wife I gota pay $65k with barely any savings.
I contacted AWS. And they started off by saying "we see some suspicious activity on your account, don't worry, we will handle it". I was like "yehhh cuz I've been paying pennies for the last couple of years. No way I can rake up a bill like that."
Since I was going through so many devs, it was impossible to figure out who. But even if I did find out, what am I gona do. I'm just a code monkey.14 -
my story so far
Hey guys. i just wantes to share my story becoming something i think is like a dev.
I was always interested in solving problems. my grandfather has a company with a bit over a 100 employees. one day i decided to start working there. he needed someone to build up the erp system (mostly maintenance). about a month after i started he decided to get a new erp system because the one he had would not fill his needs. not knowing how big this got i told him that i want to build it up. from getting the orders over production with machines to billing.
he agreed. after a short time we knew that even this new system does not fullfill our needs. but it was so damn expensive. i told my grandfather: trust me, i am handling this. no further costs. and i started to learn programming. i learned night and day (visual basics.net, sql, c#). since then i wrote about 8 additional modules for the system in coorperation with the users. today, 3 years later we are far ahead our market in terms of transparency and information flow. i worked very hard for this and it is a great feeling to see that the things i do help my colleagues and are used.
i never learned this stuff in school and i know that i cannot tell that i am a professional programmer.
but when someone asks me i tell them i am a programmer because my solutions work and i think i deserve to call me that.
thanks for reading :)4 -
"The customers of our webshop are able to change their billing address... We don't want our customers to be able to do that."
(in a few months with the new general European data protection regulation I need to code it in again, so I just removed the html...)5 -
After returning back from the company we were purchasing a new phone system (hardware+software, $100K+, kind of a big deal)
VP: “I need the new phone system software integration for our CRM by next week. I need to demo the system for the other VPs”
Me: “No problem. Were you able to get their API like I asked?”
VP: “Salesman didn’t know for sure what that was, but he said all the developer software documentation is on their site.”
Me: “Did he give you a URL? Their main site is all marketing mumbo-jumbo. I assume there is another one specific for developers.”
VP: “Yea, he might have said something, but I don’t understand why you need it. The salesman said the integration would be seamless. He showed me several demos.”
Me: “No, I mean I need to know, is the API a full client install? a simple dll? is this going to be a web service integration? How will I know what to program against?”
VP: “I think I heard him say something about COM? Does that sound like an API?”
Me: “It’s a start. Did he provide you anything, a disk, a flash drive, anything with the software?”
VP: “No, only thing he told me was our CRM integration would be seamless and our development team would have no problems.”
Me: “OK..OK…I get it…he’s a salesman. Is there an 1-800 number I can call? A technical support email address? Anyone technical I can reach out to?”
VP: “Probably, but I don’t understand what the problem is. I need the CRM integrated by next week. I gave the other VPs a promise we would get it done. I do not break promises.”
Me: “Wait…when are we installing the new system?”
VP: “Well, the purchase order will be cut at the end of the month’s billing cycle, the company has about a two month turnaround time to deliver and install the hardware, so maybe 3 months from now? Are you going to be able to have the integration ready for next week?”
Me: “If we won’t see any of the hardware for 3 months, what exactly am I integrating with?”
VP: “That API you wanted or whatever it is. COM…yea, it’s COM. I was told the integration would be seamless and our developers would have no problem. I don’t understand why you can’t simply write the code to make it work. Getting the hardware installed is going to be the hardest part.”
Me: “OK, so I have no documentation, we have no hardware, no software, and no idea what this ‘seamless integration’ means. I’m afraid there isn’t anything I can do right now. ”
VP: “Fine!...I’ll just have to tell the other VPs you were not able to execute the seamless integration with the CRM.”
Which he did. When the hardware+software was finally installed, they hired consultants (because I “failed”). I think the bill was in the $50K range to perform the ‘integration’ which consisted of Excel spreadsheets (no kidding). When approached with the primary CRM integration, the team needed our API documentation, a year’s development time and $300K. I was pissed off enough, and I had the API documentation, I was able to get the basic CRM integration within 3 days. When an agent receives a call, I look up the # in our database, auto-fill the form with the customer info, etc. Easy stuff when you have the documentation.
The basics worked and the VP was congratulated by ‘saving’ the company $300K. May or may not have been bonuses involved, rumors still out on that one, but I didn't see em'. Later my manager told me the VP was really ticked that I performed the integration ‘behind his back’, but because it was a success, he couldn’t fire me.10 -
Fuck you gas company for back billing me 1500...I don't need you...built my own heating system...and with my managed pdu I can switch on remotely so its warm when I get home...so you can shove your heating app up your arse as well
11 -
I hate GoDaddy, we all hate GoDaddy. We know this. I had VPS running a single site that was there for 8 years and only hanging on there for a few business reasons. It was to move this past May to another server, then June, then July ... continually waiting for the final phase to pass so I can move it. Backups running nightly to a separate GoDaddy FTP server ... for 8 years. All good for 8 years. Our company gets a new credit card ... I'm away and forget to update it with GoDaddy ... billing fails 3 times and they delete EVERTHING. No care about being a good customer for 8 years (14 total with other servers), no phone call, no nothing. Poof, gone. Now, I know I should have transferred backups locally or, at the very least, somewhere else. I just never expected this type of treatment. FUCK GODADDY!12
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Just got my Christmas present from Shopify:
You have 45 days to integrate with our new Billing API or lose your app on our app store.
Because I just LOVE dropping everything to deal with yet another mandatory Shopify change. Have you guys not heard of backwards compatibility?
My coworker just spent *weeks* getting our app approved, including submitting an obscene amount of information and multiple live reviews and now they're threatening to remove our listing from their app store if we don't adopt their new API by the end of January, requiring a complete re-submission and review to get it back on.
This is apparently a completely normal way to do business to Shopify.4 -
First junior software dev job, asked what I wanted for hourly pay, replied “I need at least $13/hour to survive.” (This is in US, 2007, I was almost done with Bachelor in CS, single mom with two little kids, was also in the army national guard at the time)
I grew up poor, and was very ignorant about salary negotiations. So of course they offered $13/hour. I accepted, thinking it must be fair, and was glad to be making more than minimum wage. Six months in, I’m doing the same work as their devs with 2-4 years experience, find out they are billing clients $100/hour for my work. Then, to top it off, the COO makes a joke in a meeting about how it’s not a big deal for their “technical assistant” to be doing lackey work because he’s only paid $13. Fuuuuuuuuck. That comment still makes my blood boil.
I had a nice manager at the time that explained how salary negotiations worked, but I still think it’s lame as hell. I ended up getting put on salary, $50k/year, after threatening to leave.7 -
I have 0 up votes, and I seriously need those stickers. To happy coding to find something to rant about. Love to read other peoples rants though... ;)2
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Client declined to allow billing over the weekend, demanded I work 20 hours. Task will be mysteriously blocked or delayed for the next two days as a result.6
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GoodGuy BroCow
Senoir problem
2years back
Senoir dev was assigned to make a webapp for billing
Dude uses dreamviewer and writes code like a bitch
Phpmysqljqueryhtml whole thing mixed very badly and undocumented
His function name format fun_1()
a simple update cost him a day,
Told him to use brackets atleast and also a framework ,guy denies
Days go by
He learns a lot of stuffs from me ,like how to use inspect in chrome lol, how to use sqlite for small projects , and orm and frameworks.
He used to pin his mistakes on me, so that boss gets angry on me
Then i quit the job
2 years went by
Now he is unemployed, nobody wants a 24 year old plain php coder and template editing web developer
Anyway I hired him, he was my first senior, whatever he did,it didnt matter to me, bcoz i remember
the days we spent on the same hall right next to each other coding in php,
days we brainstormed to fix a div
Also the days we ate lunch and breakfast together6 -
People here seriously write billing systems in Excel and expect me to fix it when something goes wrong...
how about no...3 -
My personal AWS account just got suspended and it was the most terrifying thing ever.
It's back up now and reactivated once I paid up. Just a bounced payment on an old account caused it but for any of you out there who have this fear this what happens:
1. Amazon email you with reminders every few days.
2. The emails change to give a shut off date.
3. Your account is then locked after that date.
4. If you want imminent attention you have to pay $49 to talk to them.
Bonus tip : go to their billing page on your account, this isn't locked and allows you to pay up without paying the support fee.
Good luck!4 -
I broke into hotels WiFi. So here's the setup
They have a main router (TP-Link) which they use for official purposes then they connected the main router to a Microtik router for guests.
I got a glimpse of the software they use for accomodation, billing etc. It runs on php stack maybe MySQL too and some ip can't remember now. I can use wireshark to sniff the packets. Basically should I tell the office of this hotel about the security? Or just let it go.
P.S: Guys you know I'm visiting my gf but I've got some time for myself as she had something to do. So you know I'm not using my laptop when I'm with her.13 -
First rant!
The first time I got in touch with programming was when I was about 14 years old. I started a private server for a game called Maplestory (yeah you know it, I know you do) and had one of the most popular servers.
Topping all the rankings of best servers, getting lots and lots of traffic...
Anyway, I started modding the game and implement new features and quests. Right until my father saw our bandwidth. Because the server was running on my computer in my own bedroom 24/7 and blowing nice hot air in my room.
Our bandwidth limit was reached in just a couple days in to the next billing cycle and had to shut everything down from that point. And this happened a few times.
I was devastated shutting it down but learned so much from it. And it introduced me to programming.
Up till now, I'm almost graduating in computer science, already have 2 companies that are willing to hire me, and probably even going to work with my dad on a huge app soon2 -
Spent the last days trying to reach paypal tech support, hung on the phone across the globe, with people at paypal CS, who weren't even familiar with their own terminology, read tons of VERY 'straightforward' documentation and it kept me up two nights straight.
ALL because I REFUSED to believe that it is like I understood it between the lines that I read.
Today I got my answer. You can create Billing Plans (rules on which you'll base your subscriptions, i.e. amount, intervals, duration..) ONLY over the rest api, and only when a customer purchases a first subscription, you're able to EDIT the plan on Paypal dashboard!
What fuckery is that!? You have a edit form, but you can not provide a create form?! TY paypal for making me build a whole billing plan manager for usually a one time transaction per website.
I AM SENDING YOU MY PHONE BILL.1 -
I email our CFO in January about an overcharge I noticed on an invoice, something we've been paying $120 a month for, not using, and never used the service. I suggested we contact the vendor and request the charge be removed and try for a credit.
Fast forward 2 months, vendor emails me to let me know that the service is being cancelled and they wanted to give me a heads up that I'll need to find another provider. I decide to go ahead and email back telling them that we haven't ever used the service and we shouldn't be paying for it. After 30 minutes on the phone I got the charge removed and got our account credited for the last 12 months.
Now to figure out how to word it to the boss without making it seem like I'm trying to throw the CFO under the bus for not doing his job.1 -
Sins? I don't want to keep you up all night, so here are some highlights.
Fucking with clients and employers who fuck with me first, or waste my time.
Occasionally not documenting my code (I'm actually pretty good about this), then bitching about poorly documented code.
Honestly wishing other people in the office would *actually* explode, or die engulfed in flames.
Working drunk and/or stoned.
Getting pissed off when I have to do something in a stupid way, or use a workflow that I don't like.
Seriously fucking up out of either arrogance or stupidity, then blaming it on something else.
Zoning out, skipping work, or sleeping in and billing for it (see sin #1).
But my greatest sin? That honor's got to go to becoming a developer in the first place.
I wasn't always a professional asshole, but I fucking am now.1 -
EoS1: This is the continuation of my previous rant, "The Ballad of The Six Witchers and The Undocumented Java Tool". Catch the first part here: https://devrant.com/rants/5009817/...
The Undocumented Java Tool, created by Those Who Came Before to fight the great battles of the past, is a swift beast. It reaches systems unknown and impacts many processes, unbeknownst even to said processes' masters. All from within it's lair, a foggy Windows Server swamp of moldy data streams and boggy flows.
One of The Six Witchers, the Wild One, scouted ahead to map the input and output data streams of the Unmapped Data Swamp. Accompanied only by his animal familiars, NetCat and WireShark.
Two others, bold and adventurous, raised their decompiling blades against the Undocumented Java Tool beast itself, to uncover it's data processing secrets.
Another of the witchers, of dark complexion and smooth speak, followed the data upstream to find where the fuck the limited excel sheets that feeds The Beast comes from, since it's handlers only know that "every other day a new one appears on this shared active directory location". WTF do people often have NPC-levels of unawareness about their own fucking jobs?!?!
The other witchers left to tend to the Burn-Rate Bonfire, for The Sprint is dark and full of terrors, and some bigwigs always manage to shoehorn their whims/unrelated stories into a otherwise lean sprint.
At the dawn of the new year, the witchers reconvened. "The Beast breathes a currency conversion API" - said The Wild One - "And it's claws and fangs strike mostly at two independent JIRA clusters, sometimes upserting issues. It uses a company-deprecated API to send emails. We're in deep shit."
"I've found The Source of Fucking Excel Sheets" - said the smooth witcher - "It is The Temple of Cash-Flow, where the priests weave the Tapestry of Transactions. Our Fucking Excel Sheets are but a snapshot of the latest updates on the balance of some billing accounts. I spoke with one of the priestesses, and she told me that The Oracle (DB) would be able to provide us with The Data directly, if we were to learn the way of the ODBC and the Query"
"We stroke at the beast" - said the bold and adventurous witchers, now deserving of the bragging rights to be called The Butchers of Jarfile - "It is actually fewer than twenty classes and modules. Most are API-drivers. And less than 40% of the code is ever even fucking used! We found fucking JIRA API tokens and URIs hard-coded. And it is all synchronous and monolithic - no wonder it takes almost 20 hours to run a single fucking excel sheet".
Together, the witchers figured out that each new billing account were morphed by The Beast into a new JIRA issue, if none was open yet for it. Transactions were used to update the outstanding balance on the issues regarding the billing accounts. The currency conversion API was used too often, and it's purpose was only to give a rough estimate of the total balance in each Jira issue in USD, since each issue could have transactions in several currencies. The Beast would consume the Excel sheet, do some cryptic transformations on it, and for each resulting line access the currency API and upsert a JIRA issue. The secrets of those transformations were still hidden from the witchers. When and why would The Beast send emails, was still a mistery.
As the Witchers Council approached an end and all were armed with knowledge and information, they decided on the next steps.
The Wild Witcher, known in every tavern in the land and by the sea, would create a connector to The Red Port of Redis, where every currency conversion is already updated by other processes and can be quickly retrieved inside the VPC. The Greenhorn Witcher is to follow him and build an offline process to update balances in JIRA issues.
The Butchers of Jarfile were to build The Juggler, an automation that should be able to receive a parquet file with an insertion plan and asynchronously update the JIRA API with scores of concurrent requests.
The Smooth Witcher, proud of his new lead, was to build The Oracle Watch, an order that would guard the Oracle (DB) at the Temple of Cash-Flow and report every qualifying transaction to parquet files in AWS S3. The Data would then be pushed to cross The Event Bridge into The Cluster of Sparks and Storms.
This Witcher Who Writes is to ride the Elephant of Hadoop into The Cluster of Sparks an Storms, to weave the signs of Map and Reduce and with speed and precision transform The Data into The Insertion Plan.
However, how exactly is The Data to be transformed is not yet known.
Will the Witchers be able to build The Data's New Path? Will they figure out the mysterious transformation? Will they discover the Undocumented Java Tool's secrets on notifying customers and aggregating data?
This story is still afoot. Only the future will tell, and I will keep you posted.6 -
So, a few months back my mother had some issues with her windows 10 box not being able to do proper backups to a backup partition. At the same time I was pulling insane hours at work and writing on a eBook on commission for a guy, besides having small kids with on and off flu and shit.
Needless to say, I didn't have time to look at the backup issues. Well, even though my mom is one of those dogs you can't teach new tricks, she has always been resourceful enough to get help with things.
This time she picked up the phone and called Microsoft Support, got some guys to remote in and take a look. They messed around a bit and said they were done.
She phoned me up later that day to tell me how proud she was of herself for doing that. Of course, she skipped telling me the important bit about she actually calling them, rather describing it as "Microsoft was just on my computer and fixed it".
You can imagine my immediate reaction, cold sweat running down my back, adrenalin rushing in as I dug through the details of what had happened.
A few days later she calls me up again and tells me the problem is back, and we agree that even though the MS dudes was not able to fix it at first, she should try again, as she had a ticket to reference.
The next attempt by MS actually fried her partitions, and apparently they had f-ed up trying to delete and recreate the backup partition.
That's not the worst of it though. Since they fried her disk, her computer crashed and naturally the remoting won't work. In our country, they have no people on the ground to do hands on help, and they didn't have a partner near by. Her not having a win 10 usb stick, nor a spare computer to make one, she was in a surreal predicament.
She was also quite pissed, and pissed off mums are not to be messed with. She managed to get Microsoft to agree to cover the costs of a non-partner to visit her to fix the problems, and using her as the middle man, they made an agreement with the 3rd-party tech support company.
After the box was fixed though, some more issues arose... regarding billing. The 3rd-party tech support was unable to get in contact with the person at MS that was going to sign off on the bill, and again using my mom as the middle man, it was agreed that my mom, as the customer, was to be reimbursed for the bill to the 3rd-party.
Guess what... 3 months went by, with weekly follow-ups and nagging from my mom, and still no money...
At this time, I had time to help her, and after some digging and borderline stalking, we managed to get the phone numbers of some of the higher ups in my country, and she started calling them directly.
After talking to a couple who refused to help, she reached the Vice President of the country branch, and was finally able to talk to someone who gave a shit.
Still took over a month more to actually get the money, but now she had someone who actually gave her statuses, receipts and ETAs.
FUCK!4 -
Last Monday I bought an iPhone as a little music player, and just to see how iOS works or doesn't work.. which arguments against Apple are valid, which aren't etc. And at a price point of €60 for a secondhand SE I figured, why not. And needless to say I've jailbroken it shortly after.
Initially setting up the iPhone when coming from fairly unrestricted Android ended up being quite a chore. I just wanted to use this thing as a music player, so how would you do it..?
Well you first have to set up the phone, iCloud account and whatnot, yada yada... Asks for an email address and flat out rejects your email address if it's got "apple" in it, catch-all email servers be damned I guess. So I chose ishit at my domain instead, much better. Address information for billing.. just bullshit that, give it some nulls. Phone number.. well I guess I could just give it a secondary SIM card's number.
So now the phone has been set up, more or less. To get music on it was quite a maze solving experience in its own right. There's some stuff about it on the Debian and Arch Wikis but it's fairly outdated. From the iPhone itself you can install VLC and use its app directory, which I'll get back to later. Then from e.g. Safari, download any music file.. which it downloads to iCloud.. Think Different I guess. Go to your iCloud and pull it into the iPhone for real this time. Now you can share the file to your VLC app, at which point it initializes a database for that particular app.
The databases / app storage can be considered equivalent to the /data directories for applications in Android, minus /sdcard. There is little to no shared storage between apps, most stuff works through sharing from one app to another.
Now you can connect the iPhone to your computer and see a mount point for your pictures, and one for your documents. In that documents mount point, there are directories for each app, which you can just drag files into. For some reason the AFC protocol just hangs up when you try to delete files from your computer however... Think Different?
Anyway, the music has been put on it. Such features, what a nugget! It's less bad than I thought, but still pretty fucked up.
At that point I was fairly dejected and that didn't get better with an update from iOS 14.1 to iOS 14.3. Turns out that Apple in its nannying galore now turns down the volume to 50% every half an hour or so, "for hearing safety" and "EU regulations" that don't exist. Saying that I was fuming and wanting to smack this piece of shit into the wall would be an understatement. And even among the iSheep, I found very few people that thought this is fine. Though despite all that, there were still some. I have no idea what it would take to make those people finally reconsider.. maybe Tim Cook himself shoving an iPhone up their ass, or maybe they'd be honored that Tim Cook noticed them even then... But I digress.
And then, then it really started to take off because I finally ended up jailbreaking the thing. Many people think that it's only third-party apps, but that is far from true. It is equivalent to rooting, and you do get access to a Unix root account by doing it. The way you do it is usually a bootkit, which in a desktop's ring model would be a negative ring. The access level is extremely high.
So you can root it, great. What use is that in a locked down system where there's nothing available..? Aha, that's where the next thing comes in, 2 actually. Cydia has an OpenSSH server in it, and it just binds to port 22 and supports all of OpenSSH's known goodness. All of it, I'm using ed25519 keys and a CA to log into my phone! Fuck yea boi, what a nugget! This is better than Android even! And it doesn't end there.. there's a second thing it has up its sleeve. This thing has an apt package manager in it, which is easily equivalent to what Termux offers, at the system level! You can install not just common CLI applications, but even graphical apps from Cydia over the network!
Without a jailbreak, I would say that iOS is pretty fucking terrible and if you care about modding, you shouldn't use it. But jailbroken, fufu.. this thing trades many blows with Android in the modding scene. I've said it before, but what a nugget!8 -
Ok, this is my first post here...and I came here to rant - I had heard about this place, but I guess I just hadn't had a bad enough day...until today...the day I found my ec2 instance was playing hide and seek with me. I just found out that my aws billing dashboard is going to swoosh 2000rs (30$) out of my wallet. Imagine ranting about this to a layperson... ok anyway, I had taken a t2-medium (my first one ever) for a hackathon and I was just playing with the regions I guess and it somehow ended up in the ohio region. I had given IAM access to some of my teammates and they were using it. We were supposed to shutdown the instance after 1 day. The next day I check the dashboard (for N.Virginia - which is the default) and I see no running instances. I thought ok my teammates must've turned it off and I left it at that. A month after the hackathon, I login today and I have this jaw-dropping moment. I now have to pay 30$ for nothing!
2 -
Amazon's AWS support sent me an email about a request to support that I sent to billing, saying they sent it to billing. They then said they couldn't help.
I just need them to stop billing me for things I no longer use!2 -
I really don't like billing time for things I am not really sure how to do and need time to educate myself on. This happens more often than my wallet is comfortable with and I spend more time learning than making money. How do you go about staying in an estimate or fixed budget when something comes up that you don't know anything about?7
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In a meeting yesterday working through our WebAPI coding standards, starting from File -> New project..etc..etc.. and ironing out some of the left-or-right decisions so we can have a consistent coding style, working in a meeting room with an overhead projector and sharing keyboard around with one another.
Then we hit the routing 'rules' in the WebApiConfig, "api/{controller}/{id}"…
DevMgr: "Do we need the 'api' prefix? It seems redundant."
Ralph: "Yes it's needed. Prefixing the controllers with 'api' is industry best practice. Otherwise, how is anyone to know it's a web api"
Prancer: "Yea, it's part of the REST standard."
Me: "I don't think so. That is only part of the Asp.Net routing rule. We can put anything we want or take anything out."
DevMgr: "Yea, it looks silly. All the new services are going to be business process specific."
Ralph: "That's how everyone does it. It's kind of the point of why REST services are called WebApi"
Prancer: "What's the point of doing any of this work if we're not going to follow industry standards."
Me: "I understand if the service is part of larger web site, but we're developing standalone services. Prefixing routes with 'api' is redundant. I mean who are these 'everyone' you're talking about?"
<ralph rolls his eyes>
Ralph: "Lets see …uhhh… Netflix?. They're kinda a big deal."
Me: "Like I said, it's an integral part of their site and the services they provide. That's fine. I'm talking about the 12 other 3rd party services we integrate with. None of them have 'api' on any of their routes."
Prancer: "We're talking about serious web services."
Me: "Last time I checked, UPS is a big and serious service."
Ralph: "Their services are a fracking joke" – he didn't say fracking.
Me: "Our payroll system, our billing system, billion dollar companies, didn't have '/api' prefix anywhere. Heck, even that free faxing service we used for a while was a dead-simple routing path."
<I take the keyboard away from Ralph, remove the 'api' from the route.>
Me: "There. Done. Now, lets talk about error handling.."
Rest of the meeting Ralph and Prancer don't say much of anything, arms crossed…I swear Ralph looked like he was going to cry.
This morning I catch my boss…
Me: "What did you think of the meeting? I thought Ralph was going to take a swing at me when I took the keyboard away from him."
DevMgr: "Oh yes…I almost laughed out loud….blows my freaking mind how worked up people get about crap that doesn't matter. Api..or not…who the frack cares. Just make it consistent"
Me: "Exactly…I didn't care either way, but I enjoyed calling out that nonsense."
DevMgr: "Yes..waaay too much."
If I didn't call them on their BS and the 'standard' allowed to continue, I can bet my paycheck when the subject comes up in a few months (another mgr asks 'isn't this api prefix redundant?') Ralph and Prancer will be the first to say "Yea, its stupid. We fought really hard to remove it from the standard...its not our fault...its <insert scapegoat> fault." -
Things that make you regret you are not a normal grunt in any other fucking job outside of software development...
Few years back we had the biggest customer ever close to signing contact with us (b2b). They had a CRM they wanted to connect to our CRM because their users didn't want to use IE with ActiveX anymore, the old software was a fucking RDP over IE to a server behind a VPN.
Boss brags how we can implement every API on Earth with our team and gets the contract signed. Technically not a lie but we agreed on a company meeting a few month prior to not implement each API for every customer but expose one ourselves because we had enough big customers on that one software to not want 100+ unique API connectors in our code.
So we apparently agreed to not only build our side of the API but also pay 2/3 of the bill of the other company for implement their shitty excuse of an API...
Fast forward a few month, talking to the other companies dev daily to get their API up and running, our part is long done. Finally get things set up and data flows... suddenly shit hits the fan. That shitty excuse of CRM can't expose the created and modified timestamps to the API. Webhooks never got implement and now we have no way of knowing which data changed because their side is completely passive.
Fast forward to a few weeks back. Still no solution. Shit is running, barely. Data inconsistency is low because everyone knows they should never change things in the old CRM because the changes might not be synced. (Only one indictor is a custom modified date on the main customer data that only updates if the main data was changed but there are 20+ different possible subsets. Can't get changes in subsets detected, like ever)
One fucking grunt updated 129 customer-profiles in the old CRM. Nothing was synced.
They still use the old shit for billing.
Their it-crowd-guy calls me up:
"Sorry but we need to generate the bills tomorrow and there seems to be some kind of desynchronization between the databases"
No shit? Someone did exactly what we told you not to do and now that one thing we warned you about happened but now it's our fault? Use the fucking force sync button we built for that purpose and that purpose alone. It will only take 7 days because that fucking SOAP API is slow as fuck and you have millions of datasets to sync...
Fml I might just try and jump out the window, sounds like a lot of fun in days like this.
tl;dr never implant against dynamics ax aif soap API if you want to keep some basic level of sanity2 -
Let's talk about the cargo cult of N-factor authentication. It's not some magic security dust you can just sprinkle onto your app "for security purposes".
I once had a client who had a client who I did server maintenance for. Every month I was scheduled to go to the site, stick my fingerprint in their scanner, which would then display my recorded face prominently on their screens, have my name and purpose verified by the contact person, and only then would the guards let me in.
HAHA no of course not. On top of all of that, they ask for a company ID and will not let me in without one.
Because after all, I can easily forge my face, fingerprints, on-site client contact, appointment, and approval. But printing out and laminating a company ID is impossible.
---
With apologies to my "first best friend" in High School, I've forgotten which of the dozens of canonicalisations of which of your nicknames I've put in as my answer to your security question. I've also forgotten if I actually listed you as my first best friend, or my dog - which would actually be more accurate - and actually which dog, as there are times in my High School life that there were more tails than humans in the house.
I have not forgotten these out of spite, but simply because I have also forgotten which of the dozen services of this prominent bullshit computer company I actually signed up for way back in college, which itself has been more than a decade ago. That I actually apparently already signed up for the service before actually eludes me, because in fact, I have no love for their myriad products.
What I have NOT forgotten is my "end of the universe"-grade password, or email, or full legal name and the ability to demonstrate a clear line of continuity of my identity from wherever that was to now.
Because of previous security screwups in the past, this prominent bullshit company has forced its users to activate its second, third, and Nth factors. A possibly decade-old security question; a phone number long lost; whatever - before you can use your account.
Note: not "view sensitive data" about the account, like full name, billing address, and contact info. Not "change settings" of the account, such as changing account info, email, etc. Apparently all those are the lowest tier of security meant to be protected by mere "end of the universe"-grade passwords and a second factor such as email, which itself is likely to be sold by a company that also cargo cults N-factor auth. For REAL hard info, let's ask the guy who we just showed the address to "What street he lived in" and a couple others.
Explaining this to the company's support hotline is an exercise in...
"It's for your security."
"It's not. You're just locking me out of my account. I can show you a government ID corroborating all the other account info."
"But we can't, for security."
"It's not security. Get me your boss."
...
"It's for security."8 -
Another day, another dollar. Well, a dollar for me... About 3000 dollars for the people billing me out to this place.1
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The billing system on an enterprise project that I've inherited is a nightmare. The client complained that an aged receivable was being reported as 31-60 days overdue when it should be 0-30 days overdue. I checked the system, and discovered that an account had multiple invoices. One was due in May and one was due in July. The system took a large payment, fully paid the invoice due in July, and partially paid the invoice due in May. That seems wrong.
I checked the code and confirmed my suspicion. The system is ordering open invoices by their creation date, not their due date. The invoice due in May was created after the first invoice, but had a much smaller window to pay. I'll bet anything the original coder assumed all invoices would have the same window to pay. -
Firts social hacking ever 😁😁😁
In the bus at the end of the day
Me:(fake phonecall to Bell)ho you offert me a 10go of data per months for 30$ ! Wow
Guy in bus: he call is phone company and give all is Private information in the bus to have a better deal.
Me: poke him and say "you know now i can create accounts on your billing address for free"
Guy: Holy shit man you are right i need to take care.
Me: now change all you password contains what you publicly said.
Me: have a good day 😋3 -
My foolishness of giving into an almost impossible dream seems to be finally setting in.
So the client, who is also my relative is launching an hotel. He wanted a website for the hotel with booking facility. The budget was plenty for that requirement and I was okay. In my calculations 20% of the proposed budget seemed fair to charge.
Few months in, it turns out he now wants a hotel booking platform where other hotels can also be listed. The reasoning was he wants to avoid the commissions charged by popular booking sites and also feature his own hotel in the booking platform that was about to be build.
I was skeptical about his intentions and my skills in developing it. I was also concerned whether he understood the responsibilities and overhead costs of running such a platform. He talked like it'll be fine. I calculated my billing to about 50% of the budget. I left the other 50% intentionally because I knew it would need for keeping up the site.
Time goes by, i am now 90% into completion of the new requirement.
Few weeks ago, i had informed about server pricing and I quoted a starting price of $15 per month. He seemed quite shocked. His reaction shocked me too and I got concerned whether I would even get rest of the payment ( already got 10% of proposed budget ) as advance.
Just few days ago, he now has a new requirement. He wants to show the hotel pricing from the booking site in Google Maps search. I tried to understand him that those are Ads and I was pretty sure price of running those ads are beyond his budget and probably negate any savings he is trying to make by competing popular booking platforms. Signing up for Hotel Ads as a booking platform is quite challenging. I don't think it'll happen.
I am now concerned he might bail on the project, so I have not informed yet. I just hope I get paid for the work I done and I'll inform then. :P
Anyways, the journey of it's development was quite insightful and challenging experience. I fell in love with a language I knew existed but never really bothered about and a framework whose only thing I knew was that it's name sounded cool to say.5 -
After the 4th time of being reminded to log all possible hours, including those for which I’m mostly researching and not producing code or deliverables, I’m finally just doing it. I hate billing for low impact activities. A) Because I’m slow at everything and B) If I were the client I’d be pissed that I got charged 2 hours for what amounted to 10 minutes of actual coding and launching the feature.3
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Guys I am facing a dilemma and i want to hear your opinions.
The background story:
I am completely self taught, currently i am learning something totally unrelated to programming at the uni. Maybe one day when i've finished that shit I will apply somwhere for a job as a developer. Until that the self education continues.
I've recently finished a big sideproject. I've rewritten my father's old shitty joomla company website from scratch with complete cms and integrated stockkeeping and billing features. After some minor fixes it is working perfectly and honestly I am kind of proud of myself. Now that I have some free time available i need something to work on again.
TL;DR - Here comes the question:
Should I broaden my knowledge in webdev even more (there is much room for improvement and i am starting to get the grasp of it) or start digging into game developement (which is my dream for ages although i didn't have the courage to dive into it until now)?
I have project ideas for both but simply can't decide. :/
I am appreciate your time for reading && telling your opinion on this.7 -
Being on vacation and getting calls from the office.. The whole point of vacation is getting away from everything for a little while to recharge.
That's fine, I'm billing that time.. just wish they could figure some of this shit out on their own. -
Well after having a major sense of humour failure last week https://devrant.com/rants/1365062/...
My company has an internal application that is used for billing clients and customers. There are several versions.
Starting next week the consultant who wrote this and I will be sitting down together for about 2 hours or so twice a week to start going through the code stuff etc.
I already have a job to start testing a new version this program, and this version is going to be handed over to me and will be my baby.
Things are starting to look up, I’m still trying to get them to swap my PC for a laptop though, so I can do work from home etc. -
Worst prod scenario experienced - on site in small African country working on CRM/billing system my colleague was testing some new SQL and after finishing decided to drop and recreate the DB. She thinks the process is very slow and suddenly realizes she is dropping the prod DB. In a panic she shuts down the system and starts doing a restore from tape, but is so stressed out she writes "tar cv" instead of "tar xv" and overwrites the backup with the broken DB. Took a while to clean that one up...2
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Saw a user session where user put in email address in card billing address. Is the UX bad or just a single stupid user, since this is the first time it happened.1
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We use a open-source business management software (incl. crm, e-commerce, billing, accounting, warehouse, ...) that is highly customizable.
Previously we had "Company A" that customized it for my company. It was very expensive so they hired something to do the same but cheaper & inhouse. The codebase that "Company A" has written was terrible (confirmed by CTO & the new colleague").
Then the CFO wanted functionality A. Colleague said that this will take 2 weeks to implement. One week later, it was no longer needed & functionality B was now mandatory. Rinse & Repeat.
The CFO: "Why is nothing ever gonna get finished" or "why is the quality so bad?"
So they hired another person for the same position. This person has more experience so it costs them a lot more... And suddenly, everything works well
They contacted a few months later a consultant that analyzed the company. The consultant asked (for good reason) why such a small company has 2 people maintaining the in-house BM software. And suddenly, they wanted to get rid of the worst person. <enter my previous rant>
He is thrown out. Now the head of Operations wants to remove that software because it was not "sexy" enough (her words). So they introduced a glorified spreadsheet with less functionality. That new colleague was offered to take the lead on that project... And thus he fled to another company.
That project failed and now everyone is fired... And they hired back "Company A" to maintain that BM project.4 -
GitLab, why do you don't want to have my money? I just wanted to pay for GitLab Bronze to enable Pull Mirroring. The problem is that I cannot register for billing without having a company. GitLab, I am a single private person. I am not a company! Why do I have to fill out these form fields? So if you don't want to have my money, then you will not get it.4
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I found some billing information in a sharepoint folder for a contract I am on. I make 3.25% of the amount the customer pays and my boss makes 28%. No way does she work that much harder than we do on any of our contracts. There are several people that make way more than I do who send emails and manage jira. The core of the business is building software yet developers get paid less than email jockeys.
I can see that we only have 67 employees and 6 developers. The rest are contractors. I'm tempted to share this with the other 5 full time developers but I may bring the company down because contractually the company has to have a regular full-time developer assigned to each contract's SoW even if they aren't full time allocated. What should I do? I'm on at least five different SoWs.6 -
I feel like contractor companies are crazy overfunded at the moment..
They keep hiring more people to put on the invoices but everyone seems to be working at 50 capacity at most...
I understand that clients rather overpay contractors than hiring people themselves that they don't need anymore in a few months and can't easily get rid of but dude.. I'd gladly do the job of 3 contractors for twice my salary in this current climate.
Not to mention that the amount of hiring brings lots of underqualified engineers with it.3 -
For higher grade software development it should be mandatory to understand the big picture of problems...
If you are working for a online shop, you might want to ask marketing, what they want to sell, before they do it
You might want to ask billing, what customers buy, before you spend time on unnecessary features
You want to ask billing and legals, how they do fraud detection and you want to get the it security fellows on board too.
If marketing and billing knows, that maintenance needs time and money, they can calculate with that. If security knows, that some fails will be catched, no matter if you fix it in software or not they can adapt their priorities.
You might want to know something about process optimisation... Factories of car parts have spent years on such problems - learn from them.2 -
Huge mistake on a customer billing procedure.
That procedure was generating a file for automatic billing requests from our customer bank to his customers banks.
That procedure was shifting the bank coordinates by one byte right making all payment requests invalid and rejected.
That month the customer got nothing from invoices (more or less 80k euros).
Side note; only one payment was accepted because the guy entering the invoice on the system shifted the bank coordinates by mistake, so the procedure fixed it.
:/ -
My biggest dev epiphany was also my dumbest one. We were working on a payment system for a roadside rescue company where an employee would register payments "in the field".
The challenge was automating input with typeahead and autocompletes in order to lessen the workload as manual input had to be an absolute minimum; this will be used by truck drivers/mechanics as they are trying to hurry to the next customer who has been waiting for 3 hours longer than we said we'd take.
We managed to make the invoice path first (customer has not paid, employee logs personalia needed for billing), but when it came to "paid on site" we almost upended the entire system trying to find a way to fetch user personalia outside of the invoice path.
Neither of us realized it during the days we were banging our heads against it. Realizing we don't need to make an invoice for a job that has been paid for was equal parts relief and utter embarrassment.
Probably my greatest lesson in how important it is to pull my head out of the code once in a while, and to ask myself what I'm trying to do and why. -
FIRE DRILL!!!!!
Customer who decided to deploy our system in the middle of their busiest time ... and kinda ad hoc-ed their ... human processes (not sure what to call it). Just to get by, and then sort of let things rot.
So last week they contact us and say "OMG some poor soul at this company was spending hours making spreadsheets to track what they were doing... and they keep fucking it up because it's nigh impossible to get right".
Real story, big shake up at the company, and someone said "lets look at our process" and they discovered "holy fuck we have this software but we're doing shit like it's the damned civil war".
This naturally raised questions about the competence of the folks we work with ... who chose our software, and thus our software.
So now we're flushing out all the stuff we asked the customer to figure out months ago that is usually done via a months long implementation / integration ... in a few days. Also ... I'm making some new things for them.
WEEEEEEEE
Granted, we're billing them like mad for this so no big deal really.1 -
apple you piece of shit just let me have xcode i dont want to make a stupid fucking account, so can you fuck off?
and why do you HAVE to have billing address information to create a fuckign account or am i a retard who cant figure out how to make a fuckign account without providing it because your UI is not retard proof enough
fuck u3 -
Coolest project was an order and billing solution for restaurants on Palm handhelds, written in C.
The cool thing was to completely develop the Bluetooth stack for communicating with printers for orders and bills.
This was the project to really teach me the diff between & and *.
Must have been around 2003, but I bet it's still running. -
A pm asked about a feature I was developing and I went on to show them what I got so far. Feature-wise almost finished, but it still needed to be polished and thoroughly tested, as such it wasn't merged yet. Weeks later - I couldn't finish it yet for unrelated reasons - there was great confusion about why the feature is not there as it had been billed to the customer already. So I gotta pull some sunshine out of my ass and bring it to the last release branch..1
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I was working for a small welder repair shop when they decided they needed to upgrade their office computer. I suggested a PC due to it being cost effective and compatibility with the billing software the office manager /owner's wife insisted on using. They decided on an expensive Mac setup and had to install Windows on it so the billing software would work. When I realized what they did, I asked what dumbass would pay 2,000 on a Mac setup only to use Windows and the wife said "me".3
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Talk with boss on phone about new billing page for split test.
Create new billing page.
Create split test
Launch.
Checking everything after a few hours. Notice the boss turned off the control on the split test so everything runs to new page. Noticed two other tests that he had turned off variations on also, so no tests are actually splitting, but they're all still eating up our paid clicks.
I'm glad I wasted time setting up the test and goals only for it to not be used.1 -
I used to work for a consultancy that specialised in a very niche area (I won't say what – this is traceable enough already!). We charged our clients a very high hourly rate, because demand and supply. All the time I'd get calls like the following:
"Please could you just make this small change to the deployment?"
"Yes, of course. You don't have any contract hours left, so I'll just forward you to our billing department so you can sort out the payment first"
"Ah okay, please can you tell us how to do it"
[Even if I explained it, you wouldn't be able to do it – that's why you're coming to us.]
"...or better yet, just do it as a quick fix outside of work?"
[So... work for no pay? No thanks.]
While my company always had my back on these requests (obviously, they wanted payment too), they were so frequent that I got sick of it.1 -
When integrating our system with a 3rd party company to use their billing system, we had a Hangouts chat so we could ask things about their documentation, API, etc...
Me: *explain the problem and how I tried to solve it without success, and proceed to ask 3 things*
*2h of silence*
3rd.p: Good Morning
Me: Good Morning
*another 2h of silence*
Me: ...and?
*1h of silence*
3rd.p: *answer randomly one of the questions*
Me: ok, and the other two questions?
*silence until the next day*
Me: ???
3rd.p: *answer one question and says that the other will never happen*
Me: but... I've just sent a request to your backend and it happened!!!
*2h of silence*
3rd.p: No, you are reading this wrong, we didn't respond that
Me: This is the endpoint i'm calling and the request's payload, send this to your backend.
*silence until the next day*
(and this continues to almost 2 months to complete the integration that should not need more than 1 week)3 -
Once upon a time we had to integrate our backend with the billing service of another company. They sent us a Swagger API Description, describing the payload they will send to us. Everything was ok, and we implemented it.
We told them our background was ready to run some tests, but they got some error. After some quick debug i asked for the actual payload they just sent to me.
The payload had different field types, different field names and non-nullable keys was explicitly coming as null.
THEY DIDN'T FOLLOW THEIR OWN SPECIFICATIONS! -
Google Cloud Services can't be used by private individuals in the EU because their billing system isn't customized for tax differences between companies and private individuals (it's the exact same tax, just named differently - and the doings for the service providers control drivers are different). How can Google miss that market?
Hello Amazon Glacier, hello AWS (maybe)...2 -
Friend: I have a idea that will make us millions!
Me: okay, what is it?
Friend: oh its very simple, what I need you to do is build a payment gateway that supports X billing platforms, Y security protocols, crash proof, blah blah blah... Should be done in a week right?1 -
I fucking hating working as a subcontractor (hopefully the right term). The interesting things are always given to locals and we just do the fucking day-to-day bugfixing shit.
And due to the fact that we are not in the same city, we are suspected to cheat on the billing just because I made some presentations for the company I'm directly working for (and for which I have an internal budget)
Just go Fuck yourself. Maybe some Indians want do the boring shit (no offense to India) -
Which one will be a better user experience ? A or B ?
0:
A ) user scrolls in the main activity for most of the features
B ) user selects very basic features in the main activity and finds the others in the sub menu
1:
A ) long text in one page
B ) shorter text in number of pages
2:
A ) brief walk through at the beginning
B ) very clear and detailed labels
C ) complete help section
3:
A ) separate rating section
B ) ask the user for rating every time till the user rates or presses dismiss
4:
A ) inappropriate billing
B ) show ad11 -
So, I recently started a new job as a "general" IT tech for someone my dad knows. He does insurance billing and everything is done manually (manually copying from pdfs to excel sheets, etc). A couple of weeks ago, I started developing a custom suite of software for automation of some parts of the processes + integration with the task management software we use. At this point, I feel like my boss is turning into a client. Is this a common occurrence? BTW, it's a small company (5 employees including him) and I'm the only person who does tech around here.1
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Please tell me what does a 11,300% increase mean on aws billing dashboard and am i fucked? So far the bill is 1.37$ and this is ONLY because of using NAT
10 -
Something messed up with my dR++ billing but I guess whatever, fuck it, this pmatform's doomed anyway 🤷4
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Just finished importing over 70,000 rows with a bunch of joins onto a data warehouse for billing purposes. all done thanks to SQL alchemy and python. I feel like a boss.2
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Billing by hourly rates is like getting paid by lines of code: the worst coders will get the highest scores.9
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Where to begin for writing à mobile payment API for m'y country (and countryside) ?
M'y wish IS to build a mobile payment API that would help everyone to pay online no matter what carrier the user 's subscribed to.
12 -
Ik was helping a friend and needed quick a dev environment. Great, github codespaces to the resque! Fast dev environment with vscode editor online running a debian container. Perfect. But then it happened: "You're at 100% of your included usage for this billing period. For more information, view your billing settings.".
I can't access my source files anymore. Fuck, it was so much research5 -
“I can’t wait for all those breaking changes, mismatched package versions, new build tool configurations, virtual boxes, and CI setup!” ~ hourly billing
“Let’s use HTML.” ~ value pricing -
So related to my previous rant about monkeys:
https://devrant.io/rants/596563/...
I happened to come across an old PPTX I made for our company's "new goal" (~4 years old) for Engineering Excellence. (I was searching my PC for old evidence to resolve a dispute with health care provider... staffed by monkeys... that keeps billing me for random amounts even though I paid the correct amounts... 3 years ago)
https://drive.google.com/open/...
Thoughts?3 -
MICROSOFT IS SO EVIL! WHY WON'T YOU LET US DELETE OUR AZURE DETAILS?!
https://feedback.azure.com/forums/... -
Ordered myself a new laptop, paid extra for next day delivery before 10:30 (not cheap)
Get the tracking number and it looks like they have used my delivery address and billing postcode :/3 -
Looking for a credit card billing option another than PayPal.
Searched “React e commerce” and found
Snipcart...
I’m more familiar with node.js, React toolset, but only never managed eshop beside Wordpress wooCommerce.
Have any one used it before? Pro or cons?Or any alternatives?
Really appreciate your opinion 🙏
4 -
I'm trying to improve my email setup once again and need your advice. My idea is as follows:
- 2-5 users
- 1 (sub)domain per user with a catchall
- users need to be able to also send from <any>@<subdomain>.<domain>
- costs up to 1€ per user (without domain)
- provider & server not hosted in five eyes and reasonably privacy friendly
- supports standard protocols (IMAP, SMTP)
- reliable
- does not depend on me to manage it daily/weekly
- Billing/Payment for all accounts/domains at once would be nice-to-have, but not necessary
I registered a domain with wint.global the other day and I actually managed to get this to work, but unfortunately their hosting has been very underwhelming.. the server was unreachable for a few minutes yesterday not only once, but roughly once an hour, and I'd really rather be able to actually receive (and retrieve) my mail. Also their Plesk is quite slow. To be fair for their price it's more like I pay for the domain and get the hosting for free, but I digress..
I am also considering self hosting, but realistically that means running it on a VPS and keeping at secure and patched, which I'd rather outsource to a company who can afford someone to regularly read CVEs and keep things running. I don't really want to worry about maintaining servers when I'm on holiday for example and while an unpatched game server is an acceptable risk, I'd rather keep my email server on good shape.
So in the end the question is: Which provider can fulfill my email dreams?
My research so far:
1. Tutanota doesn't offer standard protocols. I get their reasons but that also makes me depended on their service/software, which I wouldn't like. Multiple domains only on the business plans.
2.With Migadu I could easily hit their limits of incoming mails if someone signs up for too many newsletters and I can't (and don't want to) micromanage that.
3. Strato: Unclear whether I can create mails for subdomains. Also I don't like the company for multiple reasons. However I can access a domains hosted there and could try...
4. united-domains: Unclear whether I can create mails for subdomains.
5. posteo: No custom domains allowed.
I'm getting tired.. *sigh*21 -
Hello everyone!
Since this is such a cool community with so many app devs, I though it would be cool to share with you all a project the company I work with its currently developing.
The name is appcoins, and it's a blockchain project that aims to solve 3 big problems that devs, users, Appstores and oems face everyday in the current apps ecosystem:
- the advertising: create a trustworthy advertise system for your apps, where you can actually invest money that will be spent on users that will use your apps; currently is a system where everyone is trying to fool everyone.
- Malware and Adware detection: create a system powered by the community to rank dev's apps, using a reputation system, and dispute by bidding. currently it's an unscalable system, with many detection flaws.
- In app billing (aka IAB): offer a new and easy way for users to buy cool things in your app, even if they don't have access to a credit card or other payment methods. Users will be rewarded by trying out your cool apps. Also opens the door for payments with crypto currencies in AppStores.
This is just a quick overall idea of the all project. If you're interested, checkout the website https://appcoins.io/
If you've any question or suggestion, let me know and I'll try to answer as best as I can, or redirect to my devRant coworkers.
Any feedback you may have, feel free to share it! This system is designed for us all devs, so your input is really appreciated.
Thank you all, and sorry for the long post. -
Hey fellow devs,
i finally did it! i applied as a junior dev in a software company for inHouse projects. the job interview is today in one week.
little background story for those of you who are just procastinating at this time:
i have started coding when i was in school. just little stuff - nothing special. after i finished school i edjucated in the business field (did not found the english word. something like office person or in our words "user").
after that my company changed the ERP System and i wanted to do that so badly. and i got that job. i worked my ass of to get that baby running. from entering the orders to production to shipping and billing, i made that all happen by myself. as we had some very specific requirements i also wrote applications myself. after about three quarters of a year we switched to the new system and it ran smoothly (company is producing windows and doors). i was so proud when the first windows were finished.
BUT there was one problem. I was alone. no second it person i could talk to. no one i could learn from and no one who could learn from me. i then decided to change the company. same product, same job - but within a team. It was a whole other experience. i really enjoy the exchange with my colleagues. we learn from each other and we solve problems together. we can rely on each other. As i worked there i also wrote applications for inHouse usage and i even launched my own first app (not related to company - private commercial project)
BUT there is one problem. I am still the only dev. so i try to code the lease i can at my current job so that the team still works and the whole system stays maintainable for everyone. I do not feel good holding back the desire to code something. so after two years (and with a lot of talks with my cousin) i finally applied for a job as a "real" developer.
I have no bachelor, so the invitation for the job interview made me so damn happy. i really hope that i can transmit my passion for this job and if everything fits that they take me.
The next rant will then be about the result of my job interview :)
PS: even if i do not get the job. i am proud of myself that i applied!
Thanks for reading, potato potato1 -
Fucking hate to explain basic shit to computer illiterate. Usually I don't mind, but right know I working on the project, want to automate one thing I need to do every morning, put two numbers to web page(I will explain details maybe in next rant). So I am only one who fix, buys computers, printer(for some problems I call for other repair man.). Generally speaking working as IT guy. Firm has like 50 computers, some of them has SCADA software. Some computers have Win 7, some win 8 and others win 10, can't upgrade those computers, not enough money(I can deal with this problem). And yes, computer buying is not the fastest, easiest thing too. Because is public firm, I need to do public buying(I don't know how to translate to english), and most of the time wins the lowest price, I am ok with that. But I can't on item specification write I want that model pc or it components. Example: I can't write I want intel processor, however I can write number of cores, frequency. But it's not that bad, usually i have template for all things I buy. One of the worst thing is this, our firm bought new bookkeeping software version, old version was using visual foxpro framework. Good thing I didn't initiate the purchase, because right know I would be jobless, not because I would be fired, but because our senior accountant would drive me crazy. In fact accountants drive me crazy, but I can handle it for now. As I wrote before our form has about 120 workers, major part of workers are old, like my parents age. (I am 28 btw. Mom is 55.). As you all know what happens if you say you work with computers. So our accountants are like 60 years old, got new program, don't know how to work with it, and they ask me how to do certain things. if I don't know how to I ask program's support, every question is like 90 Eur. So in short accountants expect I should know their work and how program works. If I try say something they don't like, they try to make my day hard. Next thing is our billing program. Man that worked before me done some payments import. And when I came everyone expect me to do that. Ok I did that because that people working with billing program would probably fuck it up. And I semi automated that, so I don't mind that much. Sometimes that program fucks up, like it happened yesterday, it send email invoices attachment without filename. Example: people got this attachment ".pdf"(no filename, only extension), And if you save it you need do OPEN WITH command and then select pdf reader or rename file (I don't know what easier). And surprise surprise our firm, customer support redirects all phone calls, emails to me. But I did explain to customer support what to say to people. Still they redirect it to me.
PS: This is my first job after school. I work as part time.
TL;DR Thinking my life, carrier choices. accountants are not the nicest people.8 -
Ok. I GIVE UP! ...for at least a couple hours...
I'm not a big believer in... well anything suitable to the literal definition of believe. But there's only so much 'wtf? How is this even possible?' and any answer u can come up with is nearly statistically impossible...
I am a neuro-atypical (and just extremely atypical even if i somehkw was neurotypical) being, based on logic, finely calculated statistical probability and the most raw data and as unbiased as realistically possible, algorithms and interpretation (usually recursive pattern recognition with several highly detailed historical sources.
...but at some point statistical improbability and a collation of separate, yet relatively closely occuring events/circumstances makes logic, itself a primary suspect of corruption.
What was the breaking point that caused me to (temporarily) give up and tell logic to f off for a bit cuz maybe the illogical and mythical is the real logic, leaving me in a losing battle with 'the' fates?
Trying to get all my sourcing/purchase orders in/paid for/on the literal boats b4 end of the workday/week in china...
1st, had to drop a supplier cuz they have limited reps. When the one ive had 7+ years left, i got the aloof blonde girl societal trope of a rep... who for the 2nd time (despite the several very blunt complaints above her, incl me) she sent out a promotional update to the entire client list (ie, inherently competitors) as CC not BCC... over 200 business email accounts with tailored info of their sourcing.
2- totally diff company/ industry a former rep i was glad be rid of apparently just sfarted back for "awhile" as i needrf to restock/scale...apparently she forgot everything we discussed at length... lke if you want a chance on my business im not gonna be wasting time looking through your gui "mini store to then inquire about everything individually insead of a simple spreadsheet(which i print and put in a 3-ring binder rotating current catalogues in the same format i require everywhere)
3.dog was an ahole, my packed schedule got delayed and morphed.. a bunch of little bs thatd normally have no extra thought impact, hyperfocused forgetting one of my alarms til i realised my idiopathic fever was back and i didnt take/apply meds (pain/muscle relaxers mainly so despite this odd free time and needing to shower. I gotta sit on my rear, leg elevated/non-productive far 40min b4 i can shower (as functional legs and lack of syncope is almost a req to shower)
4. A new-ish rep of a company/factory i like/respect enough to not mention in relation... he makes invoice 1.. slight error thst was easily resolved...#2 was flawless... he goes to officially generate the contract(alibaba... verrrry simple with lots of extra explanation buttons). Price and all items match, its near workweek end so i was waiting for it so i could quickly pay/have it on the boat b4 it left and few fdav days are behind...
I put in card info, get to the 2 cbeck boxes (imo should be only 1 but whatever) asking if billing address is same ss delivery(its always default yes)... then i see a few lines in chinese (i can read enough for business negotiations... typical words/sentences innately look different than things like individual letters/address and postal indicators.) After a few loops of double checking, mentally trying to dismiss my i Intial judgement cuz it'd be too ridiculous... even resorted to google .... nope... initial wtf was spot on... recipient name/address was indeed the company(multi factory producer)i was purchasing a wholesale, via sea freight, bulk of products from.
Im pretty sure the system would've flagged it as an invalid contract within an hr... but seriously... ive been handling alibaba (and other) international sourcing since before high school(mainly small businesses i made sites/little tools for that found anything with a light up screen intimidating) and a purchase then shipment to the originating company/factory actually entered into a contract(the form is sooo simple)... im faced with ridiculously improbable obstacles actually existing and changing in such nonsensical statistically improbable ways so often that 1. I wouldn't trust a dr (or most humans) that didnt 1st assume i was crazy of some form...unfortunately im not, despite hkw much simpler and probable itd be 2. Id be super suspicious/converned if statistic norms were my norm for over a day.
But seriously wtf???
Someone give me some wisps of a frame of ref here... where's a typical 'fuck this, im out!' Breaking point?1 -
Got an email “Welcome to Amazon Web Services” to an old GMail account I no longer use. Seems genuine with no links to shady websites or anything. Does Amazon not verify email addresses or how does that happen?
Also, the mail says I have now 12 months of free tier access, so will they start billing me instead of the random fuck who signed up with my email address?3 -
Any subscription billing service is easy for start up, able to take visa payment directly, and works outside US?13
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Mail 1
"Dear client, due to aspects of licensing and billing in this case it is best if you license this image directly. Please let me know if that is fine with you and get in touch with the image agency to receive your license."
Mail 2
"Dear client, the image agency is waiting for your feedback in order to proceed with billing."
Mail 3
(Client)
"I thought this had been taken care of already?!"
Mail 4
"Dear Client,
No it has not, since we have been waiting for your action and you had not yet responded to this mail." -
What tools do you use to manage how much time you needed to get stuff done?
Any tool where I can stop time and also add things like had a meeting for 1h and so on.2 -
What would you do? Finished a mobile app project for a contract. Normally, I'd be off looking for another app project to work on, but the company I'm at asked me to write documents for an unrelated project. I hate writing docs, but I am billing $80/hr
Not near enough info to do much of any documentation , so waiting on answers. In the meanwhile, my email and phone are blowing up from recruiters looking for mobile app devs.
I can either work with recruiters to find a job I love or spend time muddling through creating documentation with little or no info.
What would you do? Collect a paycheck for shit you hate doing? Or just spend the time looking for something you do like to do? -
Had a customer billing due today, spent 2 hours trying to figure out why the Billingservice kept failing. Had an uncommited transaction on another laptop. Somebody kill me 😑
-
I need to change how payments are applied to invoices.
ApplyPolicyPayments() looks promising! Make changes to the method to look at the bills in order of the invoice due dates.
Run a test on the DEV environment, and the system is still exhibiting the same bug.
At this point, I wrote a quick logging plugin that I could attach to the DLL and start telling me what is going on.
Turns out, payments are actually applied in a method named BalancePolicy(). So what does ApplyPolicyPayments() do? It DOES apply payments to bills, but then just doesn't save the work. Having it commit the transactions breaks the billing system. FML. -
!rant
So, at this day I have two jobs as software engineer (I'm self thought). The first one with a friend from high school, a billing platform. The engineer he had flew to Canada and leave him with nothing, so I made one from scratch, I couldn't deliver on time and most of the clients he had moved to another services so the benefits of the deal I made with him ended being less than expected (there was a deadline set by our government as these clients are merchants and the Costa Rican IRS equivalent is moving everybody to electronic billing to mitigate tax evasion). The backend was done using Go, the front-end with React and MobX.
Then, the second job. I'm being staffed to a big outsourcing company for a North American business. The engineer team is small compared to the other departments and the people are really nice. Their stack is Python and React, I'm the only guy allowed to use a different editor than Neovim (Emacs in my case).
between the two I work 11 hours per day, and I'm satisfied with this.
This is way better than my old CS job at Amazon Spain where I couldn't use Emacs to have a decent text editing experience.
Thanks, Lord.2 -
Just discovered "git hours" (https://github.com/kimmobrunfeldt/...) and it's as simple as awesome! I'm gonna start using it in combination with RescueTime to check how accurate are my estimations... Any thoughts, suggestions or experiences on this, guys?
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So I was very bored this week and deceided to get my head wrapped around Kubernetes and the hype around it. After trying to get a cluster run on my old contano servers I almost lose my nerve and just went for DigitalOcean. Holy shit I am impressed by the service. 30 seconds TTL DNS, hourly rate billing and spinning a scaleable cluster in only minutes. I fell in love1
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how do you deal with permissions? more about giving user specific features with optional limitations. connectable to billing...
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Do you have some recommendations on server providers with hour based billing?
I wanr to run some simulations which need appr. 8 cores and 32gb of ram for one or two days and I don't want to rent a server a hole month or year for this.19 -
Just spoke to a Barclay card women to ask something about their gateway 😒
She didn't know about there own systems capabilities
If it couldn't do monthly billing it would be a terrible system! At least light years behind such systems as PayPal who are already behind.2 -
Fellow ranters I have a question.
Do any of you have experience of going from a consultant job to working as a developer for a product company, where the thing you're developing is the actual product and not just some side thing (like a infrastructure company having a website for example).
If so, how did the experiences differ from one another?
I'm considering switching positions to a SaaS company and I'm just wondering how much of all the consultant based BS that I'm constantly stressing over will be erased if I go there.
My biggest gripes about work in my few years of developing have been the lack of team work, really ill formed requirements, low knowledge of the codebase among coworkers and just badly written code bases.
I wonder how much of this stuff is just the nature of the work and how much could be traced back to developers pushing out shitty stuff due to hourly billing, people leaving several times a year.6 -
URGENT:
How an online supplier charge their clients with huge amount >40k monthly in an automated way ? ?
Context:
i am building a huge b2b international online service that will require clients to pay between 1000 usd to 400'000 usd per month.
The system is build on top of an e-payment api (stripe) that enable the system to work based on regular fully automated credit card authorization and capture system.
Everything works fine in dev mode. But when we will move to production, the amounts are so huge that they exceed the max limit of any-credit card, even the corporate's ones.
So that makes me wonder, how automated services (aws, gcp etc) charge huge invoices for their clients in an automated way without using credit cards...
Please help11
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