Conversation today...

Guy: "Hey I need a real quick script to pull some values out of an XML document...is that possible?"

Me: "Uh...yeah that's pretty simple if that's all it has to do."

Guy: "Ok excellent I'll send you some files and documentation."

Me: "Ok so is this like a one time use thing or do you need to parse multiple of these?"

Guy: "Actually it needs to run all the time, on this specific PC, watch directories for any files that are added, then generate a XLSX files of the values, and also log information to a database. Etc"

Me: "Oh that adds quite a bit of complexity from what you originally said. It's going to take more time."

Guy: "But you said it was easy."

Well fuck you...

If you are sending me data to use, DO NOT FUCKING SEND ME AN IMAGE FROM EXCEL.

Client: The webpage has been inaccessible all weekend!!

Me: Oh you mean the page you need to have a VPN connection to access?

Client: Yes that one!

Me: Are you connected to the VPN?

Client: Oh...no I'm not. *connects to VPN* Its working now.

Client: "This has been broken for weeks! Why is it still broken!?!?"

Me: "Did you tell anyone it was broken?"

Client: "Well...um...no..."

I may be good at my job, but I have not been able to (nor do I want to) develop mind-reading abilities. Now please fuck off (so that I can go fix it).

*random person stars my repo on Github*

Me: Fuck yes give me those stars!

*checks user's profile, has starred 40k repositories*

Me: Take that star back you whore.

Searched stackoverflow and found the exact issue I was having. The question is from 2014.

The accepted answer is a messy hack. Fuck.

The second answer is clean, clear, concise. It was posted 38 minutes ago.

Is this real life?

Company: Bobby you saved the company millions of dollars this year!!! Great job.

Me: So...how about that extra 2k per year raise.

Company: Um well it just doesn't seem to be in our budget this year.

PSA: Please don't dump 10GB of your personal photos on your company's shared drives. Especially dont have the photos include such things as nudes and pictures of your social security card.

-- kthx

"devRant has changed" "I'm so fed up with this site" "Its a bunch of hate and memes, it was so much better before"

A rebuttal.

devRant is approximately the same as it was when it was just a newborn. Remember the days of semicolon jokes being unironically funny?

Look at the top rants of all time, for fucks sake. #2 ever is:

"A different error message! Finally some progress!"

Posted three years ago. That's the second most upvoted rant in history (Remember, this was a "rant" because the joke/meme category didn't exist back then), it made it's way into the app store screenshots, and was a welcome post.

Now imagine that posted today. It would probably go over okay, in fairness, but it's certainly at risk of any number of pretentious pricks complaining about how this is "devRANT not 4chan" or how they had seen the joke before and it's a shitty repost.

And sure, the repost bullshit is fair. I'm not saying that all the reposts are good content. What I'm saying is devRant has always been full of reposts - they just weren't reposts in the early days. The quality of content is the same.

There's also the common misconception that your posts need to be directly related to tech to post on devRant. This is a myth propagated by 0 IQ heathens that don't read any further than the name of the application. Your posts can be anything that isn't prohibited, like porn, spam, and, importantly, politics (commonly overlooked rule)

"All the memes are just too much". Oh you poor fucking baby, let me pour you a healthy serving of pity juice. First of all, you can turn off the memes category, and while they will still find their way to your feed, the concentration will be much lower and it will once again be bearable for your pitiful, weak little soul. Do you seriously get annoyed that severely by shitty posts that you need to leave the app altogether, or do you just want the attention of being a "cool hipster that hates on xyz"?

"This place is just filled with hate! Why can't you just respect xyz technology, it isn't actually that bad!"

This is probably the most stupid fucking thing you could possibly ejaculate from your fingers into whatever device you are using to type. Welcome to devRant, we hate on shit. That's at our core. No, xyz technology ISN'T actually that bad, you're correct. But we're here to tear it apart because it probably has frustrated us in the past. I fucking hate JS because it was my first language and it confused the shit out of me. JS is a great language. But I still talk shit about it, and that's what we're here to do.

Like seriously, I know a lot of people post stuff they're proud of here, and then they're met with "Would be great if you didn't use xyz tech", and that hurts, but holy shit, this is devRant. If you're sensitive to criticism, or even just straight up being made fun of, don't post shit that you're proud of. You won't have a good time. It's just not what we do here.

Quick interlude before the conclusion, "My girlfriend dumped me after I named a class after her. She felt I treated her like an object." is also on the first page of all-time most popular posts.

In conclusion, devRant has not changed. Reposts have been a nuisance since day 0, and just because reposts look different these days doesn't mean the quality of content has decreased in any manner. The two main sources of your frustration are the volume of low-quality posts (Mind you, not the concentration of them, but the volume of them) and your own prejudices about the platform. You're looking back with rose-tinted glasses.

Here are some tips for a more enjoyable experience:

-Make sure you have the "Hide reposts" setting ENABLED in settings. Any posts marked as repost will be hidden in your feed, pulling down the concentration of low-quality posts.
-Keep to the algo sorting method. Obviously, algo is a bot, and there's still gonna be some shit content in there anyways, but if you're in recent, you are absolutely guaranteed to see low-quality posts. It's unfiltered.
-Keep in mind that what you consider a "quality" post is not what others consider a "quality" post. Just because you don't like memes doesn't mean memes are poor content. There are people here who have never seen the bobby tables comic. And they deserve the same experience we got when discovering dev humor.
-Don't be a prick. And if you cannot help yourself, leave. Ironically, you're making the site worse by complaining about how bad the site is. You can always come back if you aren't a prick anymore. And you can leave permanently if you choose as well.
-Downvote and move on. You're not doing anything but making yourself more aggravated by leaving a shitty comment about how shitty the shitty post is.
-Think critically. Obviously optional, and I know not many people like to use their brain when a phone is suspended between their hands, but if you want a better experience, remember to use your head and not to lose it.

That's an interesting name for a company..

I turned a 20 hour per month task into a 150ms database query.

I feel like a fucking super hero.

FYI my super hero name is ThreadPool (see past rant)

This seems accurate.

Manager: I need you to come up with a quick, temporary solution.

Me: Ok...but it will be kind of hackish and ugly.

Manager: Yes that's completely understandable.

Me: So again you say this is just temporary right?

Manager: Yes we will come up with a permanent solution soon.

*that was over a year ago and the "temporary" solution is not-so-temporary it seems*

*looks at data in database*

This float column seems wierd. The fractional parts are never above .59

*reality sets in*

Wtf the previous devs encoded whole minutes as hundredths. 1.25 = 1h 25 minutes.

Fuck me...no wonder the numbers weren't adding up correctly.

Why I hate case insensitive languages...

I get to sleep with the hot secretary...

i.e. my wife

We hired a developer and he has very minimal experience. I feel most of our conversations end up going something like this.

New Guy: I'm not sure how to do this obvious task and I'm incapable of searching Google.

Me: Give me your hand so I can hold it and walk you through the process of copying and pasting code from stack overflow.

New Guy: Ok...give you my hand...right...how do I do that?

FML

It is very hard to make me mad.

But if you imply I "didn't do anything" or that my job is "easy" because all I do is just ”sit in front of a computer” 9 to 10 hours a day then you can go fuck yourself.

I just almost shat myself.

I altered the wrong database table column...truncated data we are required to keep for government compliance.

Luckily I had exported that table earlier today and was able to recover it all. I'm in need of a very strong drink right about now.

Someone registered a company in the UK to reap havoc on government and directory sites.

(And some people say registering a company in the UK is too easy!)

If I was a super hero I would want to be called "ThreadPool"

What name would you pick?

Senior leadership: "We've had great feedback that these short, quick meetings are highly valuable, so we are going to make them longer."

Several months back when I started this job, one of the HR guys I met was super energetic and outgoing (I'm a quite introvert).

HR Guy: Hey it's so great to meet you! Everyone here is super excited to have you starting in this role!!!

Me: .......uh "everyone"? There's like 500 people here and only about 3 even know I exist.

HR Guy: *thinks for a second* Haha yeah I guess you are right!!!

The corporate cunts have no clue how manufacturing facilities work. They decided to roll out major changes to their financial systems that control how workers report their hours.

They decide that Dec 29th is a good idea. We are a 24/7 operation and the last 3 days of the year are the busiest time of the year by far trying to meet quotas.

Even today they are trying to finish functionality and are unsure how certain parts will work. This will be a disaster.

For the love of God use descriptive variable names. I dont care if it is 15 characters long instead of 5. Besides any halfway modern IDE does auto completion.

"tTime" is not helpful. Target time? Test time? Total time? Tea time? Turtle Timmy? No clue...

User: Bobby, please update this quality controlled document because I screwed it up.

Me: No there is a process for a reason, multiple people need to sign off on this. Also, we talked about this exact issue a year ago that you did not fix.

User: But its a minor change, several hyperlinks in the Word document need adjusted.

Me: Ok, you do it and submit it through the process again.

User: Can you make the changes to the document? It will take me forever and I'm very busy. I know you can do it much quicker than I can.

Me: I really don't want to edit this document myself. It doesn't apply to my job at all and I cannot verify any of the changes would be correct.

User: Oh it's fine. Make the changes and I'll look over it.

...

I hate my job sometimes.

99% of our server-side code is Python and PHP (legacy applications).

Asked a junior dev to make a small update to a PHP site so we could have it run some cleanup server side. Plenty of existing PHP code to look at and piece something together. Should be 50 lines max.

Did he use the existing PHP code to do this task? Nope. Did he at least use Python? Nope.

Node.js

His response?

"I couldn't figure it out and Node.js seemed to have good support for mongo so I used that instead."

We have 0 lines of server side javascript. Never had node installed. Literally none of the devs use node here. Not only is this completely outside of our tech stack, but he had to take the time to learn Node and JS just because he thought it was easier.

Much would of rather he put in twice as much time to learn the tools of our stack.

So like, are you implying the chef will come to my house?

Oh little Bobby tables..

I wish you needed at least 500++ to post images or in the joke section.

What's with all these new people just reposting memes?!

Riverbed...the software cost USD $120,000+ and their support was horrible.

Tickets would go unanswered.

Their documentation was pretty good but there were parts that were wrong and they would not fix it.

They would usually close an issue because it was opened by someone else 5 years prior and hadn't been fixed.

The several years I used it their releases consisted of no tangible code enhancements.

Several times we provided very simple reproducable issues and there response was basicly "just don't do that".

Management: Feature X is your top priority. Dont work on anything else because this needs to be ready for next Monday.

Me: *works furiously*

Management: *monday* Oh yeah we dont need that now. Why are you behind on your other work?

I had 19 views on my GitHub repo yesterday. Today...wtf!?!

And almost tripled my star count.

I just realized our business runs on a WIMP stack :(

Windows, IIS, MySQL, PHP

self.spawnChild()

RFC 6068: The 'mailto' URI is suppose to use commas to separate email addresses.

Outlook: Fuck you and your specification I want semicolons unless the user's regional settings has a comma specified as a list seperator.

Google: "How do we have millions of people identify images for us so we can reinforce our image recognition software?"

Answer: reCAPTCHA

Experimental networking protocols that ran on the International Space Station to test deep space communications.

User: "I emailed my spreadsheet to a colleague. Why can't I see their updates in mine?"

Please just kill me now.

Notepad Next - A cross-platform, reimplementation of Notepad++

Python 3.8 now has "the walrus operator"

:=

Previous dev created a switch statement on a boolean flag. WTF

Hiring Manager: Thanks for interviewing for the position. But the things we listed as "nice to haves" are actually required for the job so we aren't going to hire you.

How my year has gone so far...

Management: Bobby, we are replacing your old hammer.
Me: Ok cool.
Management: Well actually there's so much going on...here is a wrench instead.
Me: But, this isn't a hammer.
Management: Yes we are aware but we are busy and cannot buy a hammer for a several more months.
Me: How the fuck am I suppose to hammer nails with this?
Management: Oh gosh you are right. That sounds difficult. We will grind down one side of it so you have a flat surface to hammer in those nails.

Management: Oh and by the way, those nails are super important so don't screw anything up.

User: Your web app hasn't been working all day.

Me: Uh ok...this is the first I heard of it. Whats the problem? Are you getting an error message with any details? Can you send a screenshot so I can look into it?

User: Yeah it was an error message.

...

🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃

Previous front end dev apparently was not aware of padding and margin.

The html is riddled with &nbsp; and <br>

Shoot me now

Found that out that one of our company's internal API (I hope it's only internal) is exposing some personal data. After finally getting the right people involved they said they'd fix it 'immediately'.

5 days later I check and now there is more personal data exposed...which includes personal security questions and the hashed answers to said questions.

And of course they are using a secure hashing mechanism...right? Wrong. md5, no salt

Sigh...

Me doing front-end work and get a stupid feature request from a customer...."I'll have to talk to our back-end developer and DBA to see if those changes are possible".

Guess what...Im the back-end developer and DBA and the answer is "hell no".

IT != Help Desk

Yes I'm in IT (I'm a software developer). No I cannot fix Outlook not opening for you.

Guy: "We need you to update a few applications so we can get some new data. We have very important reports we need out of it!"

Me: "OK how soon do you need it?"

Guy: "Two days!! So we can start putting in the data then will have you create the reports."

...two days later...(in the spongebob narrator voice)

Me: " OK its done. Go in add the data you need then let me know so I can generate the reports."

....4 weeks later...still haven't heard from them and they haven't put in the data. Glad it was soooo important that I had to drop everything else to put in the updates that haven't been used.

Just heard a site IT leader say her laptop was "fixed with a BIOS update" followed by "I have no idea what that means"

How do these people get into these kinds of roles?

Clients don't know what they want!

Was handed a detailed report and asked if I could create a webpage to dynamically generate the same thing from our database. Sure its ez ps lemon squeezy.

Simple page and database query. Boom, done. Exactly matched what they gave me.

They ask why some of the data isn't there. Uh well you cunts it wasn't on the original report...so it's not there obviously.

As IT, I hate being too accessible to users (I'm a software dev, not help desk support). One particular user...let's call him Fred (even though his real name is Joe)...sits close to me.

---

Fred: Bobby, fix my Outlook (he says it jokingly but serious). It keeps saying it needs to be repaired.

Me: Yeah had the same issue last week. I just reinstalled it.

Fred: So...you can't fix it?

---

Fred: Bobby, I need access to X.

Me: Ok go to this link to request access and a manager will approve it.

Fred: Whaaat? That's too much work. You are IT and should just give me access.

---

Fred: Youtube isn't working.

Me: Ok...and?

Fred: It means my internet isn't working!

Me: *sigh*

I'm starting on a new project and the person that is wanting this done recommended we have a "living document of requirements"

Fuck no!

Sometimes I get so caught up questioning myself how to *architect* the code, that it takes me forever to do the actual coding.

Anyone else ever do this?

Was on a call today...nobody knew who owned or was responsible for one of the servers. My manager has a great way of finding out...he says "If I take my hammer and smash the server to pieces...who gets pissed." A moment of silence then someone speaks up..."Oh well then that would be Joe down the hall."

That my friends is how to get answers. Threaten to break things.

Years ago I co-authored a technical paper. I now see you can buy a paper copy of it on Amazon for nearly $900.00

Its freely available anyways so I sure hope nobody has actually bought it haha.

User: "Why isn't this process updated? There's something wrong with your system."

Me: "Did you submit the request?"

User: "Uh yeah I'm sure I did..."

Me: "Go submit the request again." (they never did the first time)

User: "I don't know how. Will you show me?" *shows user how to do it* "Ok I did it now."

Me: "You did it wrong, you need to resubmit it."

User: "Ok I resubmitted it."

* a week later *

User: "The process still hasn't shown any progress."

Me: "You didn't resubmit it like you said you did."

User: "Will you show me how to do it again?"

* fuck me *

Me: "Sure..."

Process works as expected and everyone lives happily ever after, except the developer that knows it is just a matter of time till the next user blatantly lies, has no respect for anyone's time, and demonstrates a complete lack of desire to care about their job at all and just wants to bitch and complain like a typical lazy ass-hat.

!dev

Had a shitty birthday. Don't ask details. Hopefully next year is better.

Management wants weekly update meetings on some "super important" work. Fine.

But for the past 8 weeks they've been late to the meeting or moved it or cancelled it completely. They keep telling me if I need help, let them know and they will get me the help I need no questions asked.

The one time I ask for help they have done literally nothing.

Glad it is so important to them.

If it is lunch time and I have a sandwich stuffed halfway in my face, do not walk up to me with your computer asking for help. It doesn't take me long to eat so give me 3 fucking minutes to finish.

I will help you...I will touch your keyboard with my greasy fingers...I will touch your screen...multiple times.

You're welcome.

Why is my CSS not working?

*adds !important*

Ah much better.

At work the other day...

Guy: "Oh hey I was thinking if you could help me with an application to visualize some data."

Me: "Ooookay...what did you have in mind?"

Guy: "I think we have XML files that could be turned into graphs...oh and we could add some trend lines. (Getting more excited) And maybe we could supplement it with live data...oh hey and maybe we could add real time alerts via email..."

Me: *thinks to self...there is no way in hell I am starting to work on something that he is literally coming up with requirements as he's talking* "I need specifics...so go take some time, think it through and get back to me with concrete details and examples."

Guy: "Ok. That should be enough to get you started for now at least."

That would be a big fuck no, good sir. Haven't started and won't start it. He has never mentioned it to me again since then.

Wasted a total of 4 plus hours. Realized one of the windows registry keys I created wasn't working due to a typo. "comand" instead of "command". FML

My Manager: Could you help "other manager" (OM) they need some very simple code changes.

Me: sure that will only take a few minutes *adds 15 lines of code tells OM one single line they have to modify*

Some other manager (SOM): Hey how does this work, I'm confused, do I need to do anything?

Me: Yes see the email chain you were copied on.

SOM: Actually let's have a meeting instead and all discuss this.

Goddammit this was a simple change to make your life easier now you are wasting everyones time by not reading the email

The developer's conundrum:

Do I fix the issue before a user encounters it...

Or do I wait for a user to contact me and then quickly fix it so they think I am super helpful.

Hosting a PHP/MySQL application for a really wealthy NGO that must have paid thousands of dollars for the app, and everything works fine but no sanitised inputs and direct SQL statement execution. Just waiting for little Bobby Tables so I can charge them a fortune for recovery 😊

Confession: In my almost 10 years of professional dev experience, I have never written any kind of units tests for my code. Ever.

I think I'm not as socially awkward as I once believed. I realize I just have nothing in common with the majority of people.

I don't watch sports, I don't care about cars, or fantasy football, or have any hobbies non-developers would find interesting.

If you want to talk about software patterns, finite automaton, Lua/C APIs, etc, then fuck yeah I'll talk to you all day long.

Some non-IT people wrote a crappy software tool. Others have started using it for business critical processes.

Asshats: "People are starting to use our tool and that means it's production ready!"

Me: "If and when this breaks are they going to call you to fix it?"

Asshats: "Well it's really just a proof of concept."

They want the glory but not the work that goes with it. And they dont want anyone else to develop it. They have been a huge pain for me lately.

Just because I manually updated a database record, does not mean I can fix your bluetooth headset. Now fuck off.

!rant

Monday morning panic...the dreaded question.

Random office colleague: "Do anything fun over the weekend?"

Me internally: Fuck...what did I do? Did I do anything at all? I mowed the yard...played video games...spent 3 hours looking at some random open source package I gave up trying to compile. All that is boring though. Was there nothing exciting I can brag about? Fuck...oh wait. I went to a huge theme park Saturday. Yeah that's cool enough to mention!

Me: "No not really"

Looking at the version history of Git (which is obviously tracked by Git), it goes all the way back to the initial commit...for some reason this blows my mind.

Today I had my first dealings with SOAP + .NET

I want to kill myself.

I hate updating my resume.

The lower the level language, the more concerned I am with performance for some reason...irrational I know.

Programming in C: oh no I have this extra if statement which may have to copy the 16 byte struct.

Programming in Python: oh hey I can simplify the logic if I write a class to dynamically build this regex, compile it, and search through a 1MB text file.

During the 3 years I've been in this job I have had one pay increase.

My manager has gotten 2 raises and 2 promotions (which each come with a pay raise) during that same time.

My company really knows how to make you feel unappreciated.

User: This web page form is too hard to use and is prone to have wrong data filled out.

Me: Uh...ok. Here is a redesign. You literally fill out one text field and a date picker.

User: Oh this is great, thanks.

*checks the database and the very first entry they created had the wrong date.*

Fuck me.

How to make your employees feel like shit 101:

Continually praise a small group of people for doing something for a few days that someone else does as their full time job. Call what that team did "unlike anything else in the software development world"

I am soooo fucking pissed right now. You can guess what side of this I am on.

Customer: as soon as you get a proof of concept could you send it to me?

Me: sure *sends app to test* here is what it currently does and does not do.

Customer: thanks, here is a list of 59284 things that dont work or need changed.

No shit sherlock. It's not done, you wanted a very early version, and of the things you listed I already mentioned half of those.

How my day went.

Project Manager: We need deliverable X.

Me: That's not listed.

PM: But we need it. Other PM says what you provided isn't enough.

Me: Too bad. I was not told to deliver it.

PM2: We need deliverable X.

Me: Look at the requirements. It is not there. I'm not providing it.

PM2: We need it. Let me ask PM3.

PM3: We need deliverable X.

Me: No. It's not listed. And here's why it's not even applicable.

PM3: Oh....ok

Overheard a conversation...

Dev: We should focus on getting it working in production, then we can copy it over to dev so we have a working version.

Me: da fuq?

I downloaded the self-proclaimed "industries #1 API testing tool".

Within 2 minutes I managed to cause it to completely freeze up, and now I cant close it.

That awkward moment when you realize you misspelled your own name in an email. Fuk!

Manager: Have you ever developed anything on Mac?

Me: Nope never even used one more than 5 minutes.

Manager: Mr Important Guy has a Mac and he needs to use one of our tools (which is very Windows specific).

Me: Tell him to use Windows like everyone else. We aren't going to support a single Mac user when the other 500 machines are Windows.

Manager: But he's important. Can we get him something with limited functionality?

Me: Fine but it will be *very* limited and buggy.

On a side note I hate Macs (only because I've never used them). I have to google how to do the most trivial of tasks.

Sent an email to 4 people.

Got 5 out of office auto responses. WTF.

Good thing I don't have work to do 🙃

I just now realized I'm famous!

I'm listed in the acknowledgement section of an IETF RFC. Sweet.

New manager was hired in another department but he sits close to me.

After a couple of weeks he complimented how it always seemed like I was there at work.

I just said thanks. But what I wanted to say was...

"Yeah no kidding fucktard, you get here after 8am, leave before 3pm, and you some how are impressed that not only does my normal 8 hour shift completely overlap the time you are here, but I also regularly put in 9 hour days which is pretty normal for people around here.”

I have 69 followers on GitHub. You could say I'm kind of a big deal.

Spent a good bit of my time the past few months developing a cool web app for our company.

Was told last week the due to all the layoffs etc that we would no longer have a need for it.

Fuck!

Still proud of the work I did and how it turned out.

Get a "Covid-19" email from an online service I last used 4 years ago. The email boils down to 2 sentences of "we are working remotely as we have always done, there is no impact".

3 paragraphs of "here are the services we offer you should check out".

Fuck off

Received an email from my previous employer (I worked there two years ago)

They have positions opening up in a few months and want me back.

Here I was worried my current job is at risk and now more than likely I have a job waiting for me now.

Within our company someone put out a survey for software developers.

The one question was ”What question would you want to ask other software developers at our company?"

One of the responses was "Why am I such an embarrassment to programming?"

I feel like I need to tell this person about devrant.

If you start your email subject with [PLS READ]...

I will, for a fact, not read your email.

Why the fuck does a company put such crappy antivirus software on your PC you can't even compile code.

"Hey Bobby, can you do XYZ for me? I can do it myself but it's such a pain in the ass"

So why the fuck would I do it if you can do it yourself? Guess what it's a pain in the ass for me too! And it's not even my problem!

I'm surrounded by idiots.

Yet they keep getting promoted.

It seems being competent and skilled at your current role means absolute dog shit.

One thing I learned early on was...

"If the bug is not where you are looking...look somewhere else."

I just spent 2 hours looking at 50 lines of code pulling my hair out why it wasn't working. Guess what...those lines were correct. The bug was somewhere else.

Zup - A lossy compression algorithm for text files.

86 lines of code...duplicated 3 times in the same file...and only a single integer constant is different. This is the shit that makes my day to day work tedious.

Im glad I dont personally know the previous dev, he would get his throat punched...though calling him a dev is more of a compliment than he deserves.

One of the most rude things you can do to an open source project is immediately question why they use a specific (language, toolkit, gui, build system, etc) and suggest they use something entirely different simply because it is "better".

Like I can't even compare it to something a normal non-technical person would understand.

It's not even a preference thing like what car you drive or iPhone vs Android.

I've literally donated hundreds and hundreds of hours of my time and you get the benefit of using the software free of charge and then you have the balls to question what I've given you.

Amazing feature. Much wow.

I need a vacation. More importantly, I need money to take said vacation.

Side note, how the fuck do Europeans afford to take super long vacations.

I'm tempted at some point to get a non-dev job. After about 2 weeks I could automate everything then just slack off.

<insert obligatory "long time lurker" statement here>

Started a role about 6 months ago. I'm the sole IT programmer. A bit of the mess I inherited...

- 100+ stand-alone applications/tools (luckily most of them aren't too big).
- No documentation.
- Some applications' only copy of the code exists in production.
- We only have production.
- A single file consisting of 30K+ lines of VB. Little to no comments. The one comment at the top says to keep old code by commenting it out and state what you changed.
- Previous devs didn't like foreign keys.
- No. Fucking. Version. Control. At. All.
- And so much more...

Luckily I was hired due to my experience so I could fix all these problems. Its actually a really great job.

I've hit my quota for this month for social interaction. Unfortunately I have a very busy weekend coming up and already super anxious and stressed. I hate being an adult sometimes.

TIL: Don't screw up your fstab on a VM you don't have console access to manage.

I fucked up...

I inadvertently fixed a bug which changed the behavior in another application. Weeks later had a seemingly unrelated issue which my initial assumption was to blame a 3rd part tool (which was wrong). I gave said assumption to my manager not thinking anything of it and putting a simple change in place.

Higher ups start asking my manager about it, he provides details...the more I thought about it the more I realized the changes I made did not make sense.

I dug deeper into it and found it was due to the change I made weeks ago. So my manager offers to cover for me but i told him I'd take full responsibility.

I'm not getting fired or any type of reprimand at all...I just hate fucking up and then it looks like we are trying to lie about it being our fault.

As dumb and childish as it is...

I really fucking love seeing those cheesy achievement badges on my GitHub profile.

I slightly changed the color of a label on a WinForms app...and broke everything.

Why the fuck would anyone code logic that is dependent on the exact color of a control.

This code is a train wreck.

How did I not know there was a devrant website. Literally thought it was only an Android/iPhone app.

self.title = f"Senior {self.title}"

In an average day, how many different languages do you use?

For example my previous job was strictly C and Python.

My current job involves Python, C#, VB, PHP, SQL, HTML/CSS, JS. It's rare but quite possibly I could touch all these on a single day.

I've been developing an application off and on over the past year and a half for fun. Was a good excuse to learn something new.

It is to the point now that it has potential (still needs tons of work) to be much better than several existing applications out there doing the same thing.

I am feeling overwhelmed because I either need to a) seriously invest time into it to make it a fully fledged tool and try to sell it b) open source it and see if other people find it worth working on or c) just abandon it and move on.

Has anyone else been in this type of situation knowing there is potential but honestly may be more than you can do as a single person?

When I was learning to program nearly 15 my years ago I was incorrectly lead to believe that dividing by zero would be a much more common problem.

Was late the first day (nobody told me when to be there). Was sick as a dog. Had to pull my car over on the way there to puke. Sat through a few hours of orientation hoping I could just go the next 5 minutes without puking. Puked between orientation and actually getting to my office location. Not a fun day.

Never told anyone I was sick.

Quote of the day: "This is essentially a layer 8 problem of users feelings."

😂

Email this morning: "Program X is not working".

Wow thanks. That's not fucking helpful at all. We have like 100 different applications and I've only ever seen about half of them so far and have no clue how to even use it or what is supposed to do.

Anyone else experience "coder's block"?

No, this is not burn out. I've been learning alot of cool new stuff lately...but no clue what to start doing with it.

Any good recommendations for creating PDFs with Python? ReportLab seems powerful, but a steep learning curve. Looked at a couple other options quickly.

Side note...for as popular as PDFs are...it is surprisingly difficult to create them.

DB team: We will have someone reach out to you and set up a call for your database support request.

Me: *this will suck...some dude with a super strong accent, audio that sounds like crap on a 56k modem, and horns beeping in the background*

DB team: The support engineer is actually from your same area.

Me: Nice! *maybe an American*

DB engineer: "uh yes ello dish is ramajadeshava and I will be supporting each and every request"

Me: *fuck...but at least there's no horns in the background*

I wrote a RESTful(ish) API today and it was beautiful. The API looks exactly how I wanted it, the logic is clean and readable, it has some extensibility built-in without cluttering the code.

There are parts I'm not thrilled about but that's mostly due to having to interact with legacy systems. Super proud of myself!

Why is saving this form so slow? It should be doing a single SQL update...

Oh it is doing 6500 individual updates to every possible field...fuck my life...and also the previous devs.

More than 50% of my work is due to the fact people don't do what they are suppose to do.

"Joe is suppose to submit report X every week. He hasnt been keeping up so make a script that reminds him if he's late. Better yet make a tool so Joe doesn't waste those 3 minutes every week."

Me: Tell him to do his job.

"But we need you to do it"

Me: Fine

"Suzie is complaining she does this menial task"

Me: She was hired to do that.

"Can we automate it?"

Me: No

"X is broken"

Me: I know. Group Y isn't doing what they are suppose to.

"Go talk to them so you can see why they aren't doing it. Then bend over backwards so you can handle these kinds of issues due to their laziness in the future."

Me: Fine...

I did some number crunching for a report...had someone ask me to "peanut butter spread" the numbers out. What the actual fuck...

We should rename our "users" table to "losers".

It would be more accurate, plus the added benefit of security through obscurity - we'd be immune to little Bobby Tables.

Fuck IIS

The documentation is crap. Most useful information is from forum posts from 2009. I just want a bit of customizable logging for fuck sake.

Within the past year, I've been on both sides of the table...the interviewee and the interviewer. No two interviews end up turning out the same way.

I tend to try to give people the benefit of just being stressed. But others can hear a word or two and assume they know key character flaws and all these reasons not to hire some one.

I had to log into sourceforge.

I feel dirty now. I wish it would die already

Spent over 25 hours in 2 days fighting with character sets and compatibility issues to get 20 year old software working with MySQL 8.

Fuck that shit...

Does this mean I win?

"Let's join two views and create a custom column that acts as a primary key so that other tables can treat it like a foreign key" said no dev ever.

Or at least I had thought that until today when I started figuring out why our queries are so goddamn slow. I hate the previous devs so much.

I. Fucking. Hate. Tests.

I am writing a module according to a standard and this standard has a test suite. Awesome...this should make development go pretty smoothly especially since their human-readable "specification" is severely lacking.

I get the module passing most of the tests...however there are few I just can't get my module to pass, no matter what...well fuck.

I go digging deeper into the test cases, compare it to source code. What's this? The tests are fucking wrong. There are several other implementations that use this test suite, how the fuck have they not caught this?

Also come to find out, it is not possible to pass *all* the tests in the suite because some are for older versions that have different functionality.

Got to love a test suite that is incorrect and can't be passed 100%

Maybe they need tests to make sure the tests are working correctly.

Anyone else live/work in a fairly rural area?

Out here (this is the US btw) anything other than 5Mbps DSL is a luxury, Uber doesn't exist, Chinese restaurant is 45 minutes away, oh and lots of druggies. But hey at least theres no traffic and cost of living is reasonable

Management: Please spend 2 full days automating this so you save these 3 people 30 seconds a week. Also this is important, so if it breaks we are fully blaming you.

This code is so horrible I'm too scared to even fix bugs.

No I did not write this code originally.

Just sat through a demo of some clicky-draggy data visualisation stuff.

The guy showed us how you can write a custom script that takes a user input and pokes it into a sql command using string concatenation, so a very obvious injection vulnerability.

Ok, so it's only a demo. But you wouldn't do a demo with an example user called Captain Cock, so why do a demo with a screamingly obvious security hole?

Whole thing was basically pivot tables in a short skirt anyway.

Every time I read a job description and they are looking for a "super star" or "rock star" etc I feel they are specifically trying to target the people that were the nerds and geeks in school that just wanted to be popular.

Why did I just now find out about <colgroup>?

If you create alot of html table data I recommend looking into it.

This is super useful!

Fuck

Threw together a quick Python/Qt app that would have been exactly what we were looking for...but no...the one class method I absolutely *need* isn't available in pyside2 yet.

Stupid asshats can suck my bologna pony.

Looking at code from previous devs...which I now support...

Oh hey there is a function to retry connecting to the database if it fails to open...ok...

It doesn't return anything e.g. a boolean. Not a big deal I'll catch the exception...

It catches the exception and silently ignores it? WTF how do I know if it fails??

It keeps trying for 20 seconds...sounds reasonable...wonder how long it waits between failed attempts...0. No sleep, no back off, literally spams the open call as quick as it can throw the exception...

I'm glad I personally dont know them. They are fucking idiots.

People thinking their computer problem justifies them being rude.

I've literally been in the middle of a conversation and someone walks up and hands me their computer and says "can you fix this?". Just because you work 20 feet away from me does not mean I'm your personal IT help.

I'm so sorry Jeb.

How do you train someone to be a programmer fast? (No not like a 'learn to code in a weekend' thing.) Books? Throw them in the deep end? Work with them side by side for a while?

We will be hiring a guy as a programmer. He is very tech/computer savvy, but literally 0 school or work experience programming. I've known him for a little while and honestly trust he'll try to learn but I feel with as little as he knows he is going to get overwhelmed fast. He is not technically under me but it's going to be my responsibility to train him.

I'm worried he's going to get completely overwhelmed and burn out quickly.

The layout system for WPF fucking sucks.

How do you get word out on an open source project? The several of mine I've done over the years slowly get usage/attention. Plus they have been small enough for me to completely manage.

I've got an open source project that is becoming quite large and needs smarter people than me to be interested in it. It is far from complete but useable and has a ton of potential. And I'm really not one to brag or try to draw attention to anything.

Before you ask...no I dont want to link to the github...I'd rather keep this account completely separate from the rest of my online persona.

I have to design a small web-based application (flask, MySQL) and it will also need an API (e.g. JSON).

Is it good/recommended practice to have the web browser directly use the JSON API? Or should I just let it post form data and reuse the underlying business logic?

I hate git submodules.

Upgrading our DB software.Been fighting with table and view character sets for hours. This is going to be the death of me.

I have to rewrite a good chunk of logic because it is too hard for any one of 4 people to complete a 5 minute job within 7 days.

I hate users.

I scrolled through the D3.js examples and I feel completely inadequate now as a developer. Some of that stuff is incredible and here I am just hoping to make a couple rotated boxes change color.

Is is possible to still update Win7 to Win10 for free? I know they dont offer the upgrade option free like they did a couple years ago.

I've read several articles stating a Win7 key will work for Win10. Can anyone verify this still works as of recently? I want to update my main dev machine but want to make sure I dont massively screw it up.

kthx

So I have negligible experience doing mobile app development (simplish hello world Java app few years ago).

What's your advice to start getting into it? Flutter? Kotlin? I honestly dont have a clue. I want to target Android at first but very like this needs to support iOS as well.

I'm quite the experienced dev so I dont need some something to hold my hand, yet I dont have the time currently to fight a steep learning curve.

Every time I have a large code base...

When you manage updating numerous 3rd party libraries by hand, git submodules sound like the greatest thing ever.

Replace all 3rd party sources with git submodules.

Realize how much of a pain in the ass they are and managing them yourself seems totally worth it again.

Replace submodules with folders of the 3rd party libraries.

Repeat...

I'm getting laid off for a month.

Any tech related suggestions of what I should do in my excess free time? Got a book (Clean Code) I want to read. Some side projects I might tinker around with. But other than that no concrete ideas.

Been trying to use the Qt Installer Framework to build an installer. Seemed very appealing, cross-platform support, etc.

It is very easy to do the standard setup...anything beyond that you better be prepared to waist alot of time and get get half working implementations.

Want install over a previous version? Nope!

Want good documentation? Sorry.

User supported community to at least offer some help? Non existent.