Mac: Suddenly turns off
Me: Fuck my code..F***
Mac: No response at all
Me: reset SMC etc etc
Mac: I am dead (no battery detection, dies after 10 min on power adaptor)
Me: Skips a heart beat..(Git, oh yea git)

**Takes Mac to store, After diagnosis**

Apple Freaking Genius (AG): Your Mac has a mother board problem it needs to be replaced.
Me: Hmm what is the problem exactly??
AG: Issues in logic board and some other components.
Me: How much?
AG: Out of warranty so $$$ (60% of original amount)
Me: (wtf?) Really
AG: It's entire motherboard replacement .. bla bla

**Bring it home > open > everything seems ok on multimeter as per circuit diagram > finally finds a voltage drop that is not consistent > minute short circuit > remove > check further > nothing else > reassemble > hit power button > starts fine > freaking battery detected > works fine**

0 $ repair

Fixes two more devices @ 0 $ in friend circle

Builds a raspberry pi backup laptop with 3d printed body..Ubuntu.. you know can't live without a computer

#ThugLife #Engineer

So apparently my boss knows the "new senior dev", which I will call 'B'.

Backstory:
Program which I worked on for a year, my baby, is doing fine. Suddenly B decides to update it to "standardize it", against my suggestions/protests. Fastfoward to the following morning, I get to work and there's a bunch of emails from B waiting for me. I'm like "Well there's a meeting in an hour, so no point in answering all of these". 30 minutes go by and then boss shows up in my team's area. Asking for me.

(I didn't know this at the time, but apparently boss knows B. And thinks that B is this amazing programmer and super nice.)

According to boss, B has been trying to contact me all morning about my program failing.

It is at this moment that my mentor stands up to defend me. She basically tells our boss that B is a piece of shit. And I'm just loving it, ++ to mentor for bring awesome.

How you can make the perfect clickbait that will even bring highly intellectual software engineers to click on your things?
It is very easy you only have t... [read more]

We used to do this more often - but to kind of bring it back - what is everyone working on this weekend?

I’m working on some new API endpoints for the awesome new devRant web version that @trogus made that we’re releasing soon.

Share your weekend project!

Free advice take it or leave it
A few days ago I completed my one year work anniversary(is that how it's said) at my first job. And this rant is basically stuff I learnt and stuff I wish someone had told me when I was starting out. Here goes:-

When you are starting out your first job you would be a fresh out of college and people around you in college are your friends where as people around you at work are colleagues. Your friends can like you, but you have to earn the respect of colleagues.

If you sit yo ass too long u will become fat(started going to the gym again).

Don't bother your seniors too much. they have their own shit to deal with.

Don't bring your personal shit to office I don't want to hear how cute your dog looked while it took a dump on your carpet.

Avoid the person who gossips.
It's a two way street.

Whatever you find amazing your boss may not you know coz you are a geek and your boss isn't.

Don't talk to people when they are coding.Yeah just don't.

Avoid "below the belt" humor you may look funny but you loose respect in the long run.

Keep upgrading yourself don't stop learning.

Admit stuff you don't know don't Bullshit.

To sum it up it's a game of respect, respect of knowledge,respect of skill and most of all respect of attitude.

People in my office sing me praises for what I can do with Linux even though I joke with them that “I have no idea how to do that - but give me half an hour and an internet connection and I’ll figure something out for you.” I even once specifically said in response to my boss commenting on my skills, “You do realize that I just like…google stuff when you ask me to do something with Linux that I don’t know how to do, right?”

But his praise didn’t change at all. There was no “Wait, that’s all it is?”

Instead, he said “Yes, but the fact that you think to do that - and that you know exactly how to phrase your searches and how to sift through the results to get the right answer, and you then integrate what you’ve learned and use it going forward - is still so much more than any of the rest of us can do. To you, it’s “just googling stuff,” but it’s still a unique and valuable skill you bring, so don’t shrug off the compliments so cavalierly, okay?“

And this was coming from an executive with an MBA. Don’t undervalue your googling skills, kids. It’s not lying if you know you can figure it out.

Started talking with someone about general IT stuff. At some point we came to the subject of SSL certificates and he mentioned that 'that stuff is expensive' and so on.

Kindly told him about Let's Encrypt and also that it's free and he reacted: "Then I'd rather have no SSL, free certificates make you look like you're a cheap ass".

So I told him the principle of login/registration thingies and said that they really need SSL, whether it's free or not.

"Nahhh, then I'd still rather don't use SSL, it just looks so cheap when you're using a free certificate".

Hey you know what, what about you write that sentence on a whole fucking pack of paper, dip it into some sambal, maybe add some firecrackers and shove it up your ass? Hopefully that will bring some sense into your very empty head.

Not putting a secure connection on a website, (at all) especially when it has a FUCKING LOGIN/REGISTRATION FUNCTION (!?!?!?!!?!) is simply not fucking done in the year of TWO THOUSAND FUCKING SEVENTEEN.

'Ohh but the NSA etc won't do anything with that data'.

Has it, for one tiny motherfucking second, come to mind that there's also a thing called hackers? Malicious hackers? If your users are on hacked networks, it's easy as fuck to steal their credentials, inject shit and even deliver fucking EXPLOIT KITS.
Oh and you bet your ass the NSA will save that data, they have a whole motherfucking database of passwords they can search through with XKeyScore (snowden leaks).

Motherfucker.

Today was different at work. It felt as if something was missing. The circle of fun at work that was developed over last two months among few of us was gone overnight..

Two months ago, we ( 7, including our PM ) were shifted from our cabin space to this special room by boss in hopes to keep our ass under fire and increase our productivity. Everyone in the office saw this room like a concentration camp as it was next to boss 's office. Nobody liked the idea of working in that room. We were seen as prisoners as we walked into our work cage.

In the cage, there is a fixed table. We had to adjust our workspace around that table. Everyone was just an arm length away from each other. It didn't take that long to form a bond among us. Some of us would bring snacks and we all shared it and ate it there. We had fights and discussions. The girl in my team and other team would have silly fights about their legspace boundary. The guy who is on a quest to find his life partner would seek for our opinions about his matrimony findings. That time the girls roasted guy about his patriarchal attitude. Instant discussions on current events. Movie reviews and sharing about various life experiences. Lots of such memories were formed and shared over last two months while we worked in there.

For me, it felt like living "The Office" in real life. It was amazing. I was starting to forget my dreams of self employment and plans to resign career because this human connection was addictive. We all learned a little more about each other which otherwise would not have been happened outside the cage.

We didn't realize the bubble and dynamics we had formed in that room until it was gone today when we were shifted back to our cabin space.

It was obvious we were little sad inside having to say bye to our bubble.

😅

A while ago (few months) I was on the train back home when I ran into an old classmate. I know that he's a designer/frontend/wordpress guy and I know that he'll bring anyone down in order to feel good. I also know that he knows jack shit about security/backend.
The convo went like this:

Me: gotta say though, wordpress and its security...
Him: yeah ikr it's bad. (me thinking 'dude you hardly know what the word cyber security means)
Me: yeah, I work at a hosting company now, most sites that get hacked are the wordpress ones.
Him: yeah man, same at my company. I made a security thing for wordpress though so we can't get hacked anymore.
Me; *he doesn't know any backend NOR security..... Let's ask him difficult stuff*
Oh! What language did you use?
Him: yeah it works great, we don't get hacked sites anymore now!
Me: ah yeah but what language did you use?
Him: oh it's not about what language you use, it's about whether it works or not! My system works great!
Me: *yeah.....right.* oh yeah but I'd like to know so I can learn something. What techniques did you use?
Him: well obviously firewalls and shit. It's not about what techniques/technology you use, it's about whether it works or not!

That's the moment I was done with it and steered the convo another way.

You don't know shit about backend or security, cocksucker.

FOR FUCKS SAKE PEOPLE ! JS AND PYTHON ARE NOT THE BEST LANGUAGES NOR THE ONLY THING YOU SHOULD LEARN. THERE'S NO TOOL OUT THERE THAN CAN FIX EVERYTHING.

WTF HAPPENED TO THIS INDUSTRY IT'S AS IF JS AND PYTHON ARE ALL THEY TEACH THESE DAYS ...

ENOUGH ! BE A POLYGLOT OR GTFO (OR YOU CAN SPEAK ONLY 1 LANGUAGE AND STOP FORCING IT WHERE IT DOESN'T BELONG)

now that that's out of my system. bring it on

A girl that I like once ask me to download movies for her because her internet at home is slow. A day after that I told her that the first 3 on the list she gave me is done. She then told me that she forgot to bring her thumb drive and ask me if it is possible that I email the movies to her instead.

Looks like I'm getting fired on Wednesday :)

Long story:

*I add first unit tests to project.

*Boss adds new functionality and breaks all the tests so I can't compile and write more for what I'm working on.

*Boss is very fragile and cannot handle any comment that can possibly be taken as a slight against him.

Me: "I wanted to ask what our policy on unit tests is please? Because we haven't really said how we are treating unit tests, and everyone myself included is not thinking about them. I also haven't added tests when I fixed bugs and this time your changes broke the tests"

Boss 10 minutes later: "I want to speak to you in private".

Boss: "you are too forceful and direct. You said I should have added tests."

Me: "yeah but I didn't mean in a nasty way"

Boss getting louder and more aggressive: "You are too forceful"

Me: "I didn't mean it in a bad way"

Boss: "I didn't want to add tests for that!"

Me: "then why add any tests?"

Boss: "Fine we are not having this conversation now!"

*Boss storms out

I decided I can't speak to the guy about anything without upsetting him spoke to the manager before I quit because I can't work like this.

That resulted in a meeting with my boss, his boss and the head of HR where I ended up savaging him and told them I can't bring up anything as I can never tell if it will offend him and that I spend ages writing emails and trying to document communications because I just can never tell if I will upset him. Also that I cannot bring up any ideas because I can't tell if he will somehow get offended and that I can't even write code because if I change something he wrote at some point he will get angry.

My boss claims that I am extremely forceful and disrespectful and that I am constantly insulting him and his decisions.

We go back over a ton of shit and I refute everything he says. In the end I have to have a meeting with him on Wednesday where we either get things straight, he fires me or I quit.

I think at this point that our relationship is too fucked for him to be my team lead on a 6 man team.

Side note I keep bringing forth ideas because we have one database shared between 6 Devs, no pull requests (apart from mine and another new guy), no test driven development, no backlog, no team driven story pointing, no running tests before merging, no continuous integration setup, no integration tests, no build step on merge, no idea of if we are on track to our deadline other than his gut feeling, no actual unit tests backend - just integration with a test db, no enthusiasm to learn in the team and no hope.

Planning a camping trip with my friends.

Friend1: I’ll bring the snacks.

Friend2: I’ll bring the equipment to build the tents.

Friend3: I’ll bring the first aid kit.

Everybody: who’s bringing the equipment to make the fire?

Me: I’ll do that. I’ll just run Android Studio on my laptop.

Everybody: woah woah man! Take it easy! We just want a simple fire, not burn the whole forest down!

Tester: I'm going to start testing your Android code. How do I set up it?

Me: just bring me an Android test device and I'll show you

Tester: *comes back holding a big golden phone*

Me: *huh? Haven't seen that Android device before... I wonder which manufacturer made it*

Tester: *puts down golden phone on my desk* here you go!

Me: 😱😱😱😱
...
HUH? This is an iPhone!!!!
😩😱😧😖😰😫😵😱😱

I wish my dad wouldn't bring up the cost of college to me.

Yes it costs me $12,000 to attend full time semester. Yes I'll be on $75,000 of debt by the time I graduate next year.

Why the fuck do you think older millennials aren't planning on buying homes, putting off marriage into their 30's let alone thinking about fucking kids.

It's not his fault, I love my parents. I just feel like they want me to pull a rabbit out of a hat when I'm already pushing full time work and soon full time classes.

I'm tired. 😔

My boss is technically my coworker.
I screamed my lungs out after it became clear that he didn't give a shit about employees that bring him money. After snatching all funds from a finished project on time, failing to deliver on the promise about bonuses (it's what I used to motivate employees to deliver the project on time), refusing to buy a new chair to replace the one held together by scotch tape and careful balancing, I decided to quit with maximum damage.

I screamed so that everybody would hear it. That encouraged another guy to get in with quitting, and within 1 month most of the team had quit, leaving the boss with a risk of lawsuits for prepaid contacts not delivered.

Knowing that piece of shit, he probably recovered and is treating other people badly, but at least every single person from the team experienced the biggest jump in careers straight after that.

Being one of the top devs (and a good student admired by most lecturers) at college, my most humbling experience was when I joined my first job. I thought I knew SQL, I thought I knew C#. I realized in the first week, the thing I didn't know was "I don't know jack".
Thanks to a couple of great mentors (it took a few of them to bring me up to speed :P), I learned that the more I learn something, the more I will realize how much more there is to learn. I used tools to create storyboard animations in WPF, and my mentor would write it all in XAML! I'd write messy SQL and the other mentor just reduces it to a couple of elegant lines. They were like tech gods to my college self, all while being humble and friendly.
They also imbibed in me a sense of responsibility to carry on the culture of mentoring my juniors, which taught me much more than just the technical side of our profession.

"Hey, about that matter from yesterday..."
"Yes, what about that?"
"We need to talk about that again! How often do you trigger that system?"
"Once."
"You sure?"
"Yes, but i can check it, if you like."
*find references*
"See, only once."
"Can it happen at a random point later one?"
"No."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes"
"Can you check it?"
"Okay."
*shows code"
"Look here, as you can see, it will not happen at other times."
"Do you have an idea why it could happen anyway?"
"Maybe that system does the action without my software telling it to do so, wasn't that specified that way?"
"Yes, but it normally does that roughly 10 seconds after you give the command the first time, so we thought maybe you could say what makes it do the action at other points maybe."
"Did you check that systems sourcecode?"
"No not yet. But did that happen with the older version?"
"No. But we didn't try."
"Did you change something between the versions?"
"Yes, the new feature."
"Could that make a change in behaviour?"
"I don't see how."
"Can you remove that feature for test?"
"We can take the old version."
"No, we need the new version, but without the feature you added."
"That IS the old version, there is no other difference!"
"Are you sure?"
"Would you like to see it in source control?"
"No, ~ okay. What do you think causes the problem?"
"I haven't had any new ideas since we talked yesterday."
"Okay. Mhhh,...okay. Lets talk again later."

YES SURE! BRING IT ON! I'M LOOKING FORWARD TO THAT! PLEASE COME BY OR CALL ME AGAIN! AND BRING THE BOSS WITH YOU, TO SHOW HOW SERIOUS THE MATTER IS! LET ME TELL HIM THE STUFF I TOLD SEVEN TIMES LAST WEEK!

So today I decided to switch to angular 4(material) on a project I had done. I have to say I am shocked by the sheer size of the node modules dependencies I have to install. Why wouldn't they just ship it all in one package. 😤 I had to install the client, material SDK, animations etc and all this is happening over shit sub-saharan Africa internet speed. I have been setting up for the past 5 hours and I'm only halfway through. If anyone reading this rant has a company that works to bring internet to Africa please hurry. We need you.

Today was hell on earth as for user support. Phone going non stop, tickets coming in faster than we were able to process.

At the end of the day I had to make a symlink for a customer which is fine. But, the day was so busy that I just couldn't focus anymore.
I've made 1K+ symlinks in my life probably but I couldn't remember if the source or destination comes first with a symlink.... The day has been hell and I just couldn't bring up a single second of focus anymore..

Fuck it, I'll do it tomorrow. I know I can do this but I don't trust myself with this right now in case of a huge webshop (swap the source/destination: webshop gone).

I think I'll thank myself for this tomorrow.

Colleagues sharing passwords.That was a big fat NO when I was a sysadmin - and for a good reason. But now, since I'm closer to development, it feels like no one really cares about the passwords. If I tell my colleague I'll take 10 minutes more because I can't log in, he OFFERS me his credentials. And sends them over saying "in case you need it". [the next day the same colleague was complaining his account is locked out. Oh, wonders! How on Earth...!]

But seriously, password sharing is a serious problem. I would fire the person on spot if I caught him sharing his credentials! This is the 8th deadly sin! IDC if they are for non-prod. Most people reuse their passwords in multiple systems, and even non-prod envs can bring the prod down! Or worse - install a trojan.

My old employer used to used a highly complex people management system, made up of around fifteen or so different tools and packages. Apparently this had been the case for decades, so in my spare time, I wrote an entirely bespoke, extensible HR web application that could be easily modified without changing the code. It even supported the weird spider web management structure.

I took it to my area manager, who pushed it up the chain. Apparently the country representative liked it a lot, so decided to bring me on board for an implementation and test case. Fast forward a few months, and people are singing praises. I get a huge promotion, with a sizeable pay bump to match.

Sadly, most of my country was sold out to another org, who decided pretty much straight off to make 90% of us redundant. Last I heard, though, my app is now in use in almost every operating country around the world. Not bad for something I wrote in my spare time.

I'm waiting for them to need modifications, because I never had time to complete the documentation...

So I'm a entry level female Developer and I started a contract to hire position in July. Its my first job as a developer and I love almost everything about it. Except this..., there is a Senior Female Developer on my team who hates me and isn't shy about it. She goes for the throat man! She magnifies any mistake I make, hell she calls me out on things that people would consider positive. In sprint planning this week she got mad at me for pulling tasks from the backlog after finishing mine early. I've tried to do everything I could to make her like me. I patiently listen when she goes on and on about her damn cats, kids, sports, ah everything, and she is a non stop talker.

Her main problem with me, so she tells the head of engineering, is that I bug her too much. I almost laughed when I heard this was her main issue with me! Sure, I asked her the normal amount of newbie questions but it's not like I don't know how to read code or google! In fact I started avoiding talking to her about a month ago because she was so rude to me. Now getting hired on full time comes down to whether or not she can stand me still if I am working on another team. I'm so frustrated because it's impossible to prove my worth to this company with this crazy lady making me look bad. I have no problems with anyone else at work. In fact a lot of us have become good friends. No one understands why she hates me so much. It feels like middle school all over again.

On top of that there is an even newer hire who she is supposed to help bring on to the team, but because of her horrible management skills, I have become his defecto mentor for learning the project, as well as the technologies we use. The stress of being in an uncertain contract to hire position + tyrant coworker + helping the new guy + still learning and having my own work to do has been overwhelming! I don't know what to do other than hope that she doesn't try to sabotage me moving to a new team.

Dear "managers,"

Stealing credit for something you have not done is real theft.

When I come up with an idea and a detailed outline of how to build and deliver it, you do not get to say "oh I also had this idea." You did not. How could you? It uses tech you don't even know exists.

When I then proceed to build the whole thing on my own without any of your inputs (then again, you have no idea of how it works, what would you bring to the table), you don't get to parade my project in front of the board not even mentioning my name.

You see, it's not the first time you pull that off, you have taken full credit for every thing.

it's not just my wee feelings getting hurt for lack of recognition: it has real world consequences.

You get the promotion, you get the salary raise and you now live in a flat with a balcony and a view, while my wife and I share a studio as my salary has not budged.

You're a cunting thief, I hope your mom dies.

Best,

X

micromanager: "Quick and easy win! Please have this done in 2-3 days to start repairing your reputation"

ticket: "Scrap this gem, and implement your own external service wrapper using the new and vastly different Slack API!"

slack: "New API? Give me bearer tokens! Don't use that legacy url crap, wth"

prev dev: "Yeah idk what a bearer token is. Have the same url instead, and try writing it down so you don't forget it?"

Slack admin: "I can't give you access to the slack integration test app, even though it's for exactly this and three others have access already, including your (micro)manager."

Slack: "You can also <a>create a new slack app</a>!" -- link logs me into slack chat instead. After searching and finding a link elsewhere: doesn't let me.

Slack admin: "You want a new test slack app instead? Sure, build it the same as before so it isn't abuseable. No? Okay, plan a presentation for it and bring security along for a meeting on Friday and I'll think about it. I'm in some planning meetings until then."

asdfjkagel.

This job is endless delays, plus getting yelled at over the endless delays.

At least I can start on the code while I wait. Can't test anything for at least a week, though. =/

!dev
> Get on Deutsche Bahn train
> Train delayed
> Miss Eurostar connection (not just me, many people did too), get the next one
> Building works in Brussels Station
> Maps inaccurate
> Get lost
> Find Eurostar terminal
> Electricity failure
> Check-in suspended
> After 40min, announcement
> This train cancelled, get the next one
> Electricity fixed
> Check in, finally
> Now 2½ trains worth of people need to get on this one
> Somehow fit on train
> Lose table because family needs it (fair, but annoying)
> Train departs
> More delays due to scheduling conflict
> Arrive in Lille Europe
> Stop for 10 minutes for no reason
> Announcement: "there is an illegal passenger on board, everyone and their luggage needs to get off"
> Get off train, stand on platform for a decade
> "Who has left an orange bag on coach 18?"
> Nobody
> They bring the bag out
> It's red, not orange
> "Oh it's mine, sorry" - some woman
> Wait around for ages
> "Everybody go downstairs and go through security again"
> Go through security and passport control
> Get back on train
> Arrive at St. Pancreas
> Last train to where I live has gone
> Woohoo, I get to pay for an expensive hotel in London
> Get rail replacement bus service home
> Home 😒

When pandemic hit in 2020 I found myself out of work. Until then I used to have a java based pirate gameserver of a MMORPG as a hobby.

When pandemic hit I noticed that online players count increased from like 70 to 200 without much advertising because purely of people being stuck in home. So i decided to scale and spent 2 years with that. What a wild ride it was.

So i invested a bit in ads, managed to reach around 500 online players, opened my own company and launched a couple other successful spinoffs of that gameserver.

First year it was a goldmine but I was doing 10-14 hour days because I had to take care of everything (web, advertising, payment integrations, player support and also developing the server itself, ddos protections and etc.). I made quite a bit of money, saved for a downpayment for mortgage and got an apartment.

Second year I noticed that there was a lot of competition and online players count dropped, but I double downed on this and invested a lot into the product itself and spent most of the time developing a perfect gameserver that would be the big bang while also maintaining existing ones. Clasic overengineering mistake. As you can guess, I crashed and burned on all levels, never even managed to launch my final project because simply the scope was too big and I had trouble finding decent devs to outsource it to, since it was a very niche gameserver.

In the end I learned a lot especially about my own limits and ownership, now Im back to being a dev but working as a contractor.

I believe having actual business owner experience allows me to have different perspective and I can bring more to the table rather than focusing on crunching tasks.

Keep this between us, but I got sexually assaulted in a work party by a very old guy who worked at the venue.

I didn't bring it up because a) I had already resigned from that company and was on my notice period, and b) I was going to leave the country in a few weeks and couldn't be arsed having to think about it on my vacation or even after.

Still pretty awkward with myself because after that, the very drunk me got emotionally unhinged, went outside and cried my eyes out for no reason. 😐
Like, it wasn't even the worst assault that has ever happened to me so what was the hysterical crying and panic about ffs?

Asked a coworker for their opinion on mechanical keyboards, they suggested I get a quiet one if I was going to bring it to work.

Forgive me father, for I have sinned.  Alot actually, but I'm here for technical sins.  Okay, a particular series of technical sins.  Sit your ass back down padre, you signed up for this shit.  Where was I?  Right, it has been 11429 days since my last confession.  May this serve as equal parts rant, confession, and record for the poor SOB who comes after me.

Ended up in a job where everything was done manually or controlled by rickety Access "apps".  Many manhours were wasted on sitting and waiting for the main system to spit out a query download so it could be parsed by hand or loaded into one of the aforementioned apps that had a nasty habit of locking up the aged hardware that we were allowed.  Updates to the system were done through and awful utility that tended to cut out silently, fail loudly and randomly, or post data horrifically wrong.

Fuck that noise.  Floated the idea of automating downloads and uploads to bossman.  This is where I learned that the main system had no SQL socket by default, but the vendor managing the system could provide one for an obscene amount of money.  There was no buy in from above, not worth the price.

Automated it anyway.  Main system had a free form entry field, ostensibly for handwriting SELECT queries.  Using Python, AutoHotkey, and glorified copy-pasting, it worked after a fashion.  Showed the time saved by not having to do downloads manually.  Got us the buy in we needed, bigwigs get negotiating with the vendor, told to start developing something based on some docs from the vendor.  Keep the hacky solution running as team loves not having to waste time on downloads.

Found SQLi vulnerability in the above free form query system, brought it up to bossman to bring up the chain.  Vulnerability still there months later.  Test using it for automated updates.  Works and is magnitudes more stable than update utility.  Bring it up again and show the time we can save exploiting it.  Decision made to use it while it exists, saves more time.  Team happier, able to actual develop solutions uninterrupted now.  Using Python, AutoHotkey, glorified copy-pasting, and SQLi in the course of day to day business critical work.  Ugliest hacky thing I've ever caused to exist.

Flash forward 6 years.  Automation system now in heavy use acrossed two companies.  Handles all automatic downloads for several departments, 1 million+ discrete updates daily with alot of room for expansion, stuff runs 24/7 on schedule, most former Access apps now gone and written sanely and managed by the automation system.  Its on real hardware with real databases and security behind it.

It is still using AutoHotkey, copy-paste, and SQLi to interface with the main system.  There never was and never will be a SQL socket.  Keep this hellbeast I've spawned chugging along.

I've pointed out how many ways this can all go pearshaped.  I've pointed out that one day the vendor will get their shit together they'll come in post system update and nothing will work anymore.  I've pointed out the danger in continuing to use the system with such a glaring SQLi vulnerability.

Noone cares.  Won't be my problem soon enough.

In no particular order:
Fuck management for not fighting for a good system interface
Fuck the vendor for A) not having a SQL socket and B) leaving the SQLi vulnerability there this long
Fuck me for bringing this thing into existence

A few interview tips from the other side of the table:

1. Bring a laptop

I mean come up man! Bring a laptop. Especially if there was some kind of project or challenge to present. I have seen so many people do a big UI design presentation and then come in like “can I use your laptop???”. Of course you can, but your looking very unprepared.

2. Ask for clarification

Communication problems happen in business every day. Different cultures and accents can cause issues. The important part isn’t wether you understand everything said but that you ask enough questions to make sure you eventually understand. Most people just wrongly assume things and start rambling.

3. Know what kind of company you and talking to

In my case, this is a startup. We aren’t IBM or Amazon or Google. We work hard and we play hard. Work life balance is important in life but if your very first question is “work/life balance???” then you played yourself. Wait a bit, pepper it in on the sly. Just don’t ask it right away, it shows us that you aren’t ready to work harder than usual if needed. Maybe try “so how do you like working here? How are the people, hours etc?” Or something besides the first question being a bad signal.

Just some random tips for an interviewer.

From me to you, don’t make me have to tell you like DJ Khalid would ...

Congratulations, you played yourself.

I give up. It‘s impossible to argue with Apple.

I tried to bring my unofficial iOS devRant app "JoyRant" into the AppStore. It was available via TestFlight for years and it wasn‘t a problem there, apparently. Now for the AppStore, it is a problem.

I talked with the Apple review team for 3 weeks and the discussion went in circles.
They said that my app tries to disguise as or to misrepresent another app on the store (the official devRant app, even though it‘s not available anymore, apparently).

I was asked to remove all of the mentions of devRant from any description or any place in the app. I did. Even though it was stupid because how are people supposed to know that they need a devRant account to use my app? I‘m not allowed to mention devRant.

After that, they said that it can not have the name JoyRant because it sounds too similar to devRant.
I changed it to devJoy everywhere, the app, the meta data for the app store, the github page where the required legal crap is hosted, and in the legal documents themselves.
Did it help? No, it didn‘t.

Apple then proceeded to claim that my app is trying to deceive the users into thinking that this is the official devRant app. Even though I have explicitly stated in the description that it is just an unofficial devRant client.

Now apple says that I should "revise the app content".
Which I assume means that I need to make it something different. Yeah. Great suggestion!

So, I will rename the app back to JoyRant and provide it via TestFlight, as it was before.

Thanks for reading. I needed to vent.

Most common UX blunder: Icons

FUCK icons. The big problem with them is they assume a level of familiarity with the product. Someone who has never seen a folder before won't know what a button with a folder icon on it does!

This can be remedied with text NEXT to the icon, giving the button a readable purpose. But guess what? THAT SHIT AIN'T COMMON ENOUGH.

Here's a good example for you; cars. I am familiar with cars, but there's some fucking icons that I can't even figure out. And imagine if you aren't familiar with cars? That's what happens all the time; there's a hundred unused buttons on a car's interior these days because painted upon them is an icon, and only an icon! And who the hell cares enough to take out the manual and finger through it until you find that specific icon. In my experience, almost nobody.

Let's bring it back to software. It's the most overlooked UX sin to have icons without labels or some sort of describing text. As programmers, you and me have seen and can instantly recognize thousands of icons. But to get the typical user's experience, load up a complex program like Blender (assuming you aren't familiar with it yet) and see if you can tell me what all of the icons mean. Or don't, here's a screenshot from Blender 2.8 Beta. None of these icons have any labels.

Fucking frustrating, isn't it?

Don't rely on tooltips! Nobody wants to hover over every fucking icon and wait for it to pop up just to find what they're fucking looking for! Don't forget that a lot of users DON'T EVEN KNOW THEY EXIST! (This number isn't shrinking as fast as you'd expect with the newer generations, because many of the newer generations use touch devices where tooltips don't exist at all)

There's my UX rant. Remember that users are afraid to click things which they don't know what they do. For the most positive user experience, give users something to read; a way to understand what the fuck is going on without experimenting, and without waiting for the tooltip to appear.

Be me, new dev on a team. Taking a look through source code to get up to speed.

Dev: **thinking to self** why is there no package lock.. let me bring this up to boss man

Dev: hey boss man, you’ve got no package lock, did we forget to commit it?

Manager: no I don’t like package locks.

Dev: ...why?

Manager: they fuck up computer. The project never ran with a package lock.

Dev: ..how will you make sure that every dev has the same packages while developing?

Manager: don’t worry, I’ve done this before, we haven’t had any issues.

**couple weeks goes by**

Dev: pushes code

Manager: hey your feature is not working on my machine

Dev: it’s working on mine, and the dev servers. Let’s take a look and see

**finds out he deletes his package lock every time he does npm install, so therefore he literally has the latest of like a 50 packages with no testing**

Dev: well you see you have some packages here that updates, and have broken some of the features.

Manager: >=|, fix it.

Dev: commit a working package lock so we’re all on the same.

Manager: just set the package version to whatever works.

Dev: okay

**more weeks go by**

Manager: why are we having so many issues between devs, why are things working on some computers and not others??? We can’t be having this it’s wasting time.

Dev: **takes a look at everyone’s packages** we all have different packages.

Manager: that’s it, no one can use Mac computers. You must use these windows computers, and you must install npm v6.0 and node v15.11. Everyone must have the same system and software install to guarantee we’re all on the same page

Dev: so can we also commit package lock so we’re all having the same packages as well?

Manager: No, package locks don’t work.

**few days go by**

Manager: GUYS WHY IS THE CODE DEPLOYING TO PRODUCTION NOT WORKING. IT WAS WORKING IN DEV

DEV: **looks at packages**, when the project was built on dev on 9/1 package x was on version 1.1, when it was approved and moved to prod on 9/3 package x was now on version 1.2 which was a change that broke our code.

Manager: CHANGE THE DEPLOYMENT SCRIPTS THEN. MAKE PROD RSYNC NODE_MODULES WITH DEV

Dev: okay

Manager: just trust me, I’ve been doing this for years

Who the fuck put this man in charge.

Once upon a time, there were a restaurant called "iEat.tech.com".
It was a small single-location place, where the sufficient number of patrons could be served by the cozy number of employees.
In fact, headcount was so lean that the cook was also the one who washed all the dishes.

But then came the suits and their "VC"(daddy) money and scaled shit up.
Soon, there were so many patrons that the dishes started to pile up the sink, never washed.
"We need someone to wash the dishes!" said the cook
"Fuck you, you wash the dishes!" said the s*its
Naturally, the cook left soon after.

The s*its had a problem now. They could not replace the cook fast enough - all other cooks were either young, inexperienced and mediocre (but did clean the dishes), or refused to waste their time on the sink.
So the suits did what $*its always do - they got a fucking consultant. Who told them to get a fucking dishwashing machine and billed them the GDP of Ireland.

The s*is, of course, did not want to buy a dishwashing machine. "Our fucking process is too fucking disruptive for us to use a fucking store-bought mass-produced metal servant!" (s*its don't know what "machines" are. For them, it's all in terms of "servants", employees and machines alike).

So the s*its hired an engineer to "solve the fucking dish problem, once and for all".
The engineer quickly started measuring and drawing and calculating. The engineer was about to prepare a budget when the s*its came screaming "What the fuck are you doing? There is a fucking pile of dishes in the sink!"
The engineer replied that "I'm designing the machine!", to what the s*its responded "don't bring me fucking problems, bring me solutions!" (or some other s*it blabber)

So the engineer quickly designed an efficient dishwashing assembly line to be done in half the time most people would. And then went back to designing the machine.
But the s*its were having none of it. They kept expanding and expanding and doing what they could so that the engineer never had a moment to work on the machine. They dit it so surreptitiously that no one barely even noticed, but one day they were paying a team of engineers to be fucking human dishwashers.

Now replace "dishes" with "Jira tickets" or "quick fixes" or "tiny changes" and fix other terms accordingly.
Fucking s*its.

I don't understand people who watch football at all... Yesterday at around 4pm France time, France was playing against Denmark I think, so my boss had the brilliant idea of making some kind of party so everyone in the company would watch that. He brought beer, make up, food and so on.

Guess what, pretty much all my coworkers stopped working on their programming projects and went to watch it, I was the only one who stayed in my office and worked on my project, yeah, i'd rather finish my PHP project than watch a bunch of brainlets running after a ball.

Boss was nice enough to bring me a drink though lol

The brief history of Facebook open source:
- FB releases React under an oppressive licence that tells "woopsie, can't sue FB if you use React"
- a lot of money goes into making React popular to gain leverage from mass adoption
- VMware bans React in their company
- FB releases Flux to bring state management. It flops. Replaced by what some Russian student wrote in several evenings (Redux)
- Preact is released. It's faster than React, and it has MIT licence. Vue beats React in GitHub stars.
- Under mass pressure, FB changes React's licence to MIT. Initial plan to gain leverage fails spectacularly.
- FB releases Flow Types. It flops. Replaced by TypeScript.
- FB releases their own app market for React Native. It flops.
- FB releases Relay. It flops. Replaced by Apollo.
- FB tries to push React.Suspense for the whole JS landscape to obey and comply to how it works. Community says "Fuck You".
- FB releases react-native-web. It flops.
- Web Components are out in all browsers, adopted as a standard. React doesn't support them.
- Google releases Lit, a virtual DOM framework on top of Web Components to fuck with React. It's a massive success.
- React 18 is out. Still no Web Components support.
- (you are here)

At my previous job I was told by "senior" devs that my interest in learning new things and knowing more is not a good thing. And that I should learn to increase my depth in the programming of the product that was being used.
As part of my job I was asked to analyze the product's architecture. I found out that it was needlessly complicated and performed horribly. The senior devs that were on that product for a while had been hiding their mess from the rest of the teams. Needless to say, my report didn't make me very popular with them.
I was asked to help come up with a strategy for testing.
A guy who had just joined our company out of college and me worked really hard for a few weeks and managed to bring testing down from 3 months to around 3weeks. Our reward: he was fired(albeit for different reasons. The company was trying to restructure)
My yearly review was terrible and I was put on 2 months probation. So I quit.
It sucked. And made me question my ability as a programmer for a while. I've floated my own firm and though money is hard sometimes, it so much more rewarding.

I used to work in a tech shop. Old lady brings her laptop in claiming viruses broke her Gmail. I do the diagnostic, it's relatively clean with a bit of browser adware and tracking cookies. I call her and let her know there was nothing wrong with her Gmail and that it's good to go (she approved a tune up). She comes in and gets it. She calls later saying Gmail is still broken. I invite her to bring it in so we can have a look together (knowing for sure she was the problem). So we open up Gmail together and she shows me what she's doing. She's clicking on the sender and getting the contact card instead of the email opening. I show her how to actually open the email. She doesn't understand. I spend twenty more minutes explaining how to open an email. And this is the wk13 kicker, she waits until after twenty minutes to ask what "click" means. I was so done. That lady was too old to be using a computer.

Beware, this is gonna be a long one.

Today, in university, our professor wanted us to do an algorithm where a number was given in input, and we had to see if that number was, as she put it, "triangular".
For example:
3 is triangular because it's 1+2.
6 is triangular because it's 1+2+3.
10 is triangular because it's 1+2+3+4.
And so on.

While she was explaining this, I was programming it on my phone (because I didn't bring a PC there).
In about 10 minutes I completed it.

This student who was beside me, which I didn't know until today (I'm still in my first year here), saw me programming it, and when I finished it, he looked at it and said: "It takes too much time, like this."
So he spent another like 5-10 minutes """fixing""" it, and then showed it to me: "Here, now it's better."
Do you want to know what he did?
The only thing he did was putting a for cycle instead of my while cycle.
And he didn't even do it properly!
He put an else statement inside the brackets of an if, and some variables weren't correct.
You call that making a program more efficient? Deficient is more like it.

Also, like 5-10 minutes after I did it on my phone, on my own, I looked at the prof's desk: a guy (who apparently is "the best") wrote his algorithm on the blackboard, and the whole fucking class applauded.

Later, I saw on our Whatsapp group that someone sent a photo of him writing on the blackboard, with the caption "The student surpasses the teacher." Others agreed.
I replied with: "For the record, I did this algorithm in 10 minutes."
An asshole replied: "You'll never be superior to the master"

Fuck off. -.-"
...I'll show them.

We can compile, transpile, and do all sorts of fucky internet things through an entire development pipeline and then troubleshoot through all sorts of hackery and dev sorcery to output html.

Or I can just index.php and be done with it.

I dunno man, I dig frontend and using the popular js libs to put shit online and be done without having to deal with the fuckery that is wasm or use something similar to Rust to bring shit to my clients.

9 times out of 10, these dudes have been well served with the php or node or even golang that i give them.

Seems that a lot of tools coming up just make shit harder.

Even VBScript seems simpler compared to the amount of web fuckery going on right now.

Yeah I keep current, but fuck, every day it seems as if shit was just getting more and more complex

This fucking idiot at work needs to use the pre release version of the iOS app for a training programme, and I swear I have tried my best to best to help him get the app on his phone.

I use Fabric and I chose because of how easy it is to install on a persons phone, but this is the situation so far. Also he lives a couple cities away so I can't do it myself.

I had to waste time waiting for him to call me, beforehand I sent the email, maybe 5 minutes before his call and told him that he needs to find the email, he says oh okay alright well I'll contact you if I have any problems.

I waited a day and sent a follow-up email on what the subject, from email, and even what the email looks like with screenshots.

No response for 3 weeks, and I bring it up in a meeting that I need to help him again.

So it's a literal fucking repeat of the first step, wait for his call, this time close to the end of my work day and he's 30 minutes late for his own fucking schedule, I thought whatever so I say the exact same thing BUT expecting him to get it out of the way while I'm on the phone...

Waited two days and sent him an email today and since I forgot to mention it, I've told him that this is to REGISTER to get the app. Guess what his reply was.

Sorry I can't get it on my phone!

He can't get what a fucking email to open on his phone and follow instructions a small bipedal animal could figure out?

It's literally follow the fucking icon moving they have gifs showing exactly what to click...

So tomorrow I have to somehow not blow up and get this app on his phone, honestly I understand some people can have issues with technical things but I got a guy at work that has trouble with his computer all the time to follow my same instructions without me needing to say more than I'll send an email all you need to do is follow the instructions, he actually enjoyed going through it.

...I swear this guy is just not even bothering, and I made sure I sent it to the right email, also second call he told me he found the email..

Do you believe that anyone can do anything? (See: 13th Doctor)

Can anyone become a programmer? Or is it not for everybody?

My cousin has started "learning" C programming at college. I was actually surprised when he first told me that he wanted to study programming and get an IT degree. He would give an impression of a spoiled non-tech son of a non-tech manager to you. (He plays games on his Xbox One and Nintendo Switch and uses his MacBook Air to watch anime).He was never good at studying or learning. I immediately thought that it was totally not for him and he should give it a second thought, but he said that he was absolutely sure about it. It's been a few weeks now and he's finding it all really difficult.

I think one should like learning constantly and should like solving problems to make it all an enjoyable learning experience.

Self-study is also really important, especially if you have garbage professors (like he says he has).

I always try to help him. I told him to focus on self-study, recommended good books (he even bought one for C), recommended good online resources. But he's a procrastinator leveled over 9000. So, you'd understand, he's not doing any of that right now. I even told him that if he didn't self-study, he might regret it one day, but he just can't bring himself to self-study, he says. I'm gonna continue helping him in any way I can, but I guess you can't really help someone who doesn't want to help themselves.

Thanks for reading. :)

!dev

So the ceiling in our (upstairs) laundry room started leaking. After some troubleshooting, we determined it was the A/C, and not the water pipes. (The house is cheap as hell and fucking stupid.) We did some troubleshooting and research, and tried fixing it ourselves; no luck. Cleaning the pipes from outside: no joy. Cleaning the pipes from inside: no access. The attic is ... small. Maybe half a small closet? and doesn’t give access to fucking anything. The builders must have installed everything before putting up the walls and ceilings, sealing everything off, because there is no access. It’s fucking stupid. Also, the usual maintenance openings aren’t even there either because why the fuck would they be?

But fucking whatever.

We called an a/c repair guy, who never showed. We assumed he was busy (it’s fucking hot), so we called him again the next day; two days later he showed.

Busy. Whatever.

Guy didn’t bring a ladder. Whatever, we have one right there in the hallway because we’ve been trying in vain to fix it.

Guy didn’t bring a wrench of any kind. Guy didn’t bring a screwdriver. Guy didn’t bring a bucket. Guy didn’t bring any pipe. Or any pipe sealant. Or fucking anything but his sagging fucking pants, fat belly, and fat stench. We had to supply everything, which fortunately we had on hand as we were already trying to fix it. Hoorah for being proactive.

Guy said he drained both primary and secondary pans. Somehow. Without access. I’m not even convinced it HAS a secondary pan. Guy said he cleaned out the pipes, too. From inside the house. Without access. Somehow. Maybe he did that from outside, without tools, while I was chasing the brats and someone else was watching the fat bastard. Who knows; I wasn’t with him most of the time.

When he was done, the guy said “pay whatever you think it’s worth” (or whatever). Fine, if he actually cleaned the pipes out and it isn’t leaking anymore, that’s great.

Guy leaves.

We go up to check. AND THE FUCKING A/C IS STILL LEAKING. BUT NOW IT’S FROM BEFORE THE PIPES, TOO. AND HALF AN HOUR LATER, THE LAUDRY ROOM CEILING IS ALSO LEAKING, WHICH MEANS THE PIPES ARE STILL LEAKING.

It turns out the asshole broke the pan.

We call him back, he goes blah blah blah, we send him a video. Drip, drip, drip.

His response?
“The pan must be rusted.” IT’S FUCKING PLASTIC.

“Oh, in that case, it’s probably a rusted coil that’s leaking.”

a) HOW DID YOU NOT KNOW IT WAS FUCKING PLASTIC IF YOU DRAINED IT?

b) THE COILS CARRY FREON, NOT WATER, AND THE A/C IS STILL WORKING. IF THERE WAS A LEAK, SHIT WOULD BE HOT. AND RANK. FREON SMELLS NASTY AND DOESN’T CAUSE IT TO RAIN IN THE FUCKING HOUSE.

REPLACING A COIL IS ALSO A $2000 FUCKING REPAIR.

THE FAT BASTARD PROBABLY BROKE THE PAN INTENTIONALLY JUST TO UPSELL. I WANT TO FUCKING MURDER HIS LYING FUCKING FACE OFF.

It’s possible he didn’t break the pan intentionally, so I’ll tentatively remove that from his charges. BUT TO FUCKING LIE?

LIE AND DIE, FUCKER.

Technology never stops to amaze me.

I bought hdmi stick with nes emulator, connected it to power using usb on my tv directly no power adapter needed - only cable, it has 2 remote pads powered by batteries, all fits into my pocket and it has removable sdcard that I can connect to my computer and upload games.
I can go to someone’s house, bring up this little fella and we can play games together. It only took 40 years to do it.

Damn I remember playing, mario, contra or micro machines as a kid.

Spent 8+ hours playing great old games already lol.

I just need portable 60 inch tv screen or projection screen and battery that would power it for at least 8 hours and fit to my pocket and my life is complete.

Imagine you go to the bar, sit, grab a beer and play mario with random people all night.

Fuck you Apple. I forgot the headphone dongle for my iPhone at home, so now I can't (1) plug my apple headphones into anything (i.e. my laptop, which is made by the same fucking company) and (2) use any other headphones with my phone. Buying an iPhone was a mistake. Apple has been implementing the shittiest UX recently. Don't even bring up the fucking bezel on the iPhone X or the marketing bullshit that is "retina display". The worst part is the Apple fanboys that act like everything Apple pumps out has been touched by the hand of God—Tim Cook could show up at their house and kill their fucking dog right in front of their eyes and they'd worship Apple for doing it.

I'm so over the politics....

System team: So, we've rewritten the entire site and the stats are looking pretty great. We're more than a year into the two-month transition period, and hey, that's cool, no judgement. But now we're gonna hit a license expiration on the old site, so we need to shut it down, or otherwise pay a ridiculously big amount to renew the license.

Business: nooooooooo you can't shut down the old site!

Systems: but nobody is using it

Business: yes, they are

Systems: no, they're really not, we checked and everything

Business: ...........

Systems: ok, well are you gonna pay for the license renewal?

Business: oh hell no

Systems: ok then we're shutting it down

Business: ..............

Systems: ok, it's down

Business: how dare you! We didn't sign off on that! Bring it back immediately!

Systems: are you gonna pay the license?

Business: no! now bring it back!

FML.

Pseudo-rant:

I'm worn out from working a full-time job, working on my app, and having a family.

My app has potential, I launched it in July (iOS only so far) and am already well over 1000 active users. It's first week in the app store, it was in the top 100 for it's category.

It has some bugs that I'm working out, and some features that are in high demand.

I'm currently completely refactoring the API because I let it become spaghetti as I went from concept to v1.

That refactor means a rewrite of the website, and a major refactor of the iOS app, which is all fine and dandy.

On to the question: I am an engineer/architect, not a business major. I know I could really use help, and I know the perfect people to try to bring on, but also know I have nothing real to offer them other than a stake in the company.

As a developer, does a stake in a promising, but unproven company have enough prospect to sacrifice your time for?

Am I just being impatient, and should I continue nibbling at it myself until I get there, even if it takes a long time?

How do you determine the stake to give up, when you know that you COULD do it all yourself and keep all the monies?

I should have taken some business classes.

Thanks to Devrant I've learned about rubber duck debugging. Never heard of it before! It reminds me of a story many moons ago when I worked for a certain multinational company as a business analyst. The company brought in some consultants who basically stole the work my team was already doing on a big project (a horrendous series of spreadsheets linked to data coming from the core systems) and sold it back to the company for an insane amount of money as their idea.

When they launched the new product, the team I was in was asked to test and review it. It took my colleague ten seconds to bring the whole thing to its knees and trigger a corrupt data export back into the core systems. Bearing in mind this external company somehow managed to charge tens of thousands of pounds. So what did my colleague do? Hack the system? Some kind of complicated sabotage? Nope. He typed "FISH" into one of the spreadsheet cells! Thus the FISH test was born.

That day I learned several things: it's easy to break things with a fish; the importance of validating your input; and the satisfaction of showing up the smug bastards who stole your ideas and work.

What you see in that screenshot, that was earned.

I'm on the plane and I want an hour of free Gogo (read: crappy) WiFi on my laptop (so I can push the code I'm probably the most proud of, more on that another time). The problem is that the free T-Mobile WiFi is apparently only available on mobile.

So after trying to just use responsive mode, and that still (almost obviously) not working. I realize it's time to bring in the big guns: A User Agent switcher. Small catch: I don't have an add-on for FF that can do that.

So on my phone I find an add-on that can and download the file. To send it to my computer, I initially thought to go through KDEConnect, but Gogo's network also isolates each system, so that doesn't work. So I try to send it over Bluetooth, except I can't. Why? Because Android's Bluetooth share "doesn't support" the .xpi extension, so I dump it in a zip (in retrospect, I should have just renamed it), and now I can share.

After a few tries, I successfully get the file over, extract the zip, and install the extension. Whew! Now I open up Gogo's page and proceed to try again, but this time I change the user-agent. Doesn't work... Ah! Cookies! I delete the cookies for Gogo (I had a cookie editor add-on already), but I had to try a few times because Gogo's scripts keep trying to, but I got it in the end.

Finally that stupid error saying it's for phones only went away, and I could write this rant for you.

Hardware of laptops today.
Displays: Glossy screens everywhere. "Hurr durr it has better colors". Idgaf what colors it has, when the only thing I can see is the wall behind me and my own reflection. Make it matte or get it out.
Touchpads: Bring back mechanical buttons. Haptic feedback dying with touchscreens/surfaces is a tragedy. "But we can have bigger touchpad area without buttons" ...why? the goal shouldn't be 1:1 touchpad vs. display ratio. It ain't a bloody tablet.
Docking stations: Some bright fucker figured out that they can utilize USB C. That thing keeps falling out with slightest laptop movement disconnecting all peripherals (guess why microUSB had those small hooks?). Also it doesn't have sufficient throughput, so the 5 years old dock can feed 3 full HD monitors just fine and the new one can't.
Keyboards: Personally I hate chiclet. And it's everywhere, because "apple has it so we must too". But the thing I hate even more is retardation of the arrow keys (up and down merged into size of one key), missing dedicated Home/End/PgDwn/PgUp buttons and somebody deciding the F keys are not needed and started replacing them with some multimedia bullshit.

My overall feeling is that this happens when you give the market to designers and customer demand. You end up with eye candy and useless fancy gadgets, with lowered ergonomy and worse features than previous generations of the same hardware. My laptop dying is my daily nightmare as I have no idea with what on the current market I would replace it.

Can't tell what my most successful project is...
But according to GitHub Stars, my
most successful project is my RandomQuote Bot (@RandomQuote).
The story behind it is pretty boring:

One day little Skayo thought: "Hey there is no bot on DevRant yet, let's make one!".
Then he began to think: "But what should it do? What would be easy to do for an inexperienced programmer like me?".
Suddenly he got an idea: A Bot that posts a random quote everyday!
Yay!
He instantly started making it.
About a day later, it was finished.
"Let's bring this thing to live", he thought.
And there he was, quickly getting a lot of fucking ++'s...
This bot is like my first born child! I am so proud of him!

And that's the story behind the bot.
Very spectacular, isn't it?

So my HP laptop got a weird problem lately.

It doesn't charge when I plug in the charger(yes, i turned on the switch). So I began searching forums for a solution and then found out that there are so many people like me out there.
Then I was like ok, chill. There are many people like me, there must be a solution somewhere.

And after doing lots of research and trying all the solutions in the internet, the only thing that worked out is this ....

Step1 : turn on and the laptop and plug in the charger.
Step 2: Turn off the laptop.
Step 3: Now turn it back on and poof there you go, the laptop's charging.

And then I improvised the solution myself, which is u can replace the switch off part with Sleep which saved me some time.

And then whenever I try to show something my friends somethjng on my lap and the battery gets low, I do the ritual. For a brief moment their face becomes like dude I'm gonna kill you off, why the hell did u bring me here and now u r turning that off. And then I explain the history of my laptop.

Why HP whyyy ?

Okay so this happened ages ago (nearly five years) but this suddenly came to my mind again.

It was in the first year of my study (currently in my 5th and last year).

I was experimenting around with php and mysql during some free hours. All the insert,delete and so on statements worked perfectly find except for one update statement. Started to debug of course and after a little while of no results I was like "oh yeah right, something like logs exists of course". Looked in the logs but nothing. No matter how I altered my code (rewrote it numerous times for some 'clean starts') it just would not run the update statement.

Alright, time for some class mate help. After multiple hours of debugging with a few classmates, there was still no result at all.

Time to bring in one or more teachers. After hours of debugging, still no result even with the help of a few good teachers.

Decided to give it a rest for that day.

Two weeks later it still was not updating anything/working and I finally gave up.

Till today, I still have no clue what went wrong and it still bugs me from time to time :/

A new guy was brought on to help with a particular part of my program.

He worked on it for a little while and got something working. But honestly the code hurts me. And not because I'm some arrogant prick, but because there's something about the way it's written that's really bothering me.

I was saying to my girlfriend that I don't mind people helping me out and adding new features. Usually they bring something to my attention that I otherwise would have never thought of.

However, in this case I was told to back off completely. This of course, makes sense, we don't want to be stepping on each other's toes. But now that he's sort of done, I've taken a look around at it is really getting to me.

They've placed redundant pieces of code in places that I would have never done. And objects have been made that seem to only match precisely one particular use case.

I had overhauled this program with flexibility in mind a while back, and now I feel like it's doing a 180 again simply because the client is getting impatient.

Epic newb here. Like, can-barely-read-HTML new. But I'm curious and interested. I work in an office filled with very skilled developers, and I bring the human component to the operations. Not a day goes by when I don't learn something, or teach something. Sadly, that enriching experience accounts for maybe half an hour of my day. I wish it was more. Anyhoo, rant on, Wayne!

Me: Can you do the javadocs comments
Coworker: I've never done that, *looks for it on google*, I can't do it, I don't know how.
Me: Did no one asked you to comment you code at school?
Coworker: Yeah, but only the ones with '//'
Me: Ok, bring me coffee

my co-worker raged-flipped her keyboard cause she accidentally deleted the file she has been working on for 2 hours. when we looked in the recycle bin and tried to restore it, it shows an error saying "unknown file extension". she had to start all over because for some reason, we couldnt bring the file back.

Today I started work on a new project that contains a lot of legacy. I asked the developers about unit testing javascript and was told that not only is there none in place, but it's not worth adding any in.

At first, I grimaced and thought fair enough. This is their codebase, it's their choice. I've now been thinking about this for a few hours and have instead decided that screw those guys, I'm adding in a testing framework, a module pattern that's compatible with the existing code, and unit testing the crap out of it. If they don't want it they can refactoring it out, but I can't bring myself to intentionally deliver code I know is crap.

I WILL FORCE CODE QUALITY ON THEM.

3 weeks off work - complete.
1st day back - in progress
Shit storm flurry awaiting my arrival - bring it on!

Once you go black... ;D

Today was not a good day for me at all ,being considered a junior developer is not a good thing.
Yes I know due to my lack of the understanding of your 3 years old code base I could not meet up with the deadlines.
So as a punishment one of our senior devs asked me to bring my chair to his desk and told me to commit and push my progress every ten minutes .
He'll then review reading each code line by line ., Reverting too.
The worst part was that for the ten minutes I'll need to wait another 5 , because he was watching some Fifa19 gameplays on YouTube.
This went on for 3 hours .

It worked because I feel like a title noob today .

My ISP can suck the biggest, sweatiest pile of dicks.
First of all, our normal service is garbage (1mb down, 0.1 up).
On top of that, for some reason, the Internet access goes down for a few minutes every time the public IP changes (2-3 times a day) which is fucking annoying.
And THEY FUCKING BROUGHT FIBRE TO MY NEIGHBOUR (20 METRES DOWN THE STREET) WHO IS AN OLD COUPLE WHO HAVE 0 INTEREST IN THE INTERNET, BUT THEY REFUSE TO BRING IT TO ME.
Fucking Vodafone, get your shit together.

Bring it on 😂🤣

Ok going to rant about other developers this time.

Can you please stop doing just the minimal amount of work on your games/apps?!

I understand you may not have the time to go through with a fine tooth comb but just delay it, delay it and finish the product to a state that doesn't feel half assed and broken right at the get go.

A small note that the thing that triggered me with this is Android Devs at the moment, with Google requiring you support the adaptive icons and a newer SDK, so many Devs are just scraping by and putting in no effort to bring things up to date (also put more effort into adaptive icons rather than just putting your old square Icon on a white background)

This shit is just leading to everything being 'early access' or in a constant 'beta' stage with the promise of polish later.

Don't be that guy, put the extra few days of polish in... Just please...

So I'm flabbergasted at the current trend of non-native Linux gaming becoming so stable and performant. In these past few months, I've witnessed stability akin to native support on games I had never expected to run well on Linux before.

DXVK had its initial release in January 2018, and so far every single game I've thrown it at has run so well that I forget it's non-native.

With front-ends like Lutris, it's easier than ever to get these non-native titles configured perfectly - to say nothing about what Proton offers for UX.

What will the 2nd year of DXVK bring? Extended Support for Windows 7 ends in one year - and I've never seen such stability and capability from Linux gaming parity.

We work in an office where we must lock our computer screens because our screens may have confidential information on them, plus you could do things as the person without taking any blame (ie sending an email).
Anyways anytime someone forgets to lock their screen we always prank them pretty hard. The greatest thing we ever did was in our latest release we had our managers buy us drinks at the pub. Well our managers left to go to the pub and one of them forgot to lock their computers. So we downloaded an image of the blue screen of death and made it full screen, unplugged his mouse and keyboard for added effect, and locked his computer. He came in the next Monday and couldn't log in because his keyboard wouldn't work. He actually called IT to bring him a new keyboard and mouse... then he unlocked his computer and freaked out with the IT guy because there was the blue screen of death. Needless to say he got a brand new computer as well as a new mouse and keyboard.

I'd call it a win win?

Read the following in Morgan Freeman’s voice.

Okay everyone sit on down and get ready for story time. There once was a workspace that was a pain in the ass to setup. It often would take an entire day even for the most experienced devs on the team...for it was a workspace perched atop a swamp of shit that would require a whole year to refactor into something that isn’t shit.

It was inherited, passed down, stepped in and scrapped from the boot soles of every programmer that ever touched it. It was an amalgam of old, new, and third party components with a class path a mile long and no package management because the company although physically in the present, somehow maintained a temporal presence in the past. And there was nothing that the team hated more than setting that workspace. In short it was an unholy mess that made Satan cry and Dennis Ritchie spin in his grave so much that the state of California attached magnets and a coil to his body and casket to generate electricity.

Then one day the untalented clowns known as App Group decided that our IDE should be owned and configured strictly through them. They took poor Eclipse and mounted so much silly shit to it that it resembled a riding lawn mower with a fax machine and a blender duct taped to it. Eventually as everything the company touched did, it simply turned into a broken, shitty mess that not even Jesus Titty Fucking Christ could bring back the dead.

And then, every month or so the IDE would break in such a grand way that every developer had to rebuild their workspace...the very same Lovecraftian monster disguised as a code base. It was just too much to bear for old Deus. He was all out of fucks and there wasn’t enough alcohol in the world to quiet his injured soul. So he stood on a chair, carved his name in a rafter and tied a noose to it, put it around his neck and finally kicked the chair out from under himself. I am told he even pooped his pants and the post mortem shit in the seat of his pants was still better than the codebase at work. I’m Morgan Freeman.

My company’s upper leadership is sooo focused on the NUMBER of defects that are open on our project and only the number. We give each defect a priority of P0, P1, or P2. You would think this would help prioritize and strategize our plan to fix them. But nope. Every week we have some arbitrary “goal” to hit. A number purely made up by clueless leadership as to what makes a “quality” product.

On Friday’s, managers start harassing devs to merge their fixes and for QA to close out defects. So effectively rushing to hit that arbitrary number or else we’ll have to work Saturday.

Meanwhile they want more test automation coverage to reduce the incoming defect rate. But when the fuck do we have time to develop said tests when all you want is the defect closed to bring down your precious little number?!

They’d rather us close 25 P2 defects to bring the number down rather than 10 P0 or P1 defects. These leaders are so incompetent it kills me! Without any back story, they’re ultimately the reason we’re in this position in the first place! Argghhh!

Got my first laptop while I was overseas.

It was a windows hp laptop with Vista.

It was an absolute piece of shit.

Decided to find the people responsible of it.

Got to what a software engineer was.

Boss told me to look in the library to see if i find some books on the subject. Got a Java and C++ book.

Shit was hard af cuz I had no clue what I was doing, but I liked it. Decided to look more into an application wise platform of study rather than doing basic CLI shit. Got into web development with Java. Got a hold of more JS. Liked JS more cuz shit was easy, found about server side JS with classic ASP, did VBScript as well.

Eventually found Python, fell in love but hated the whitespace ussage for block level code etc. Found Ruby, to this day the most beautiful language according to me. Read about why's poignant intro to Ruby.

Dug it, but wanted some other things. Found out about the study of data structures ans algorithms, then harvard's free cs50 course, then mit courseware, rice's python class. Took all of them. CS50 introduced php, liked it, sounded like a drug, was easy to use, for whatever fucking reaskn my ass decided to use version 4 even though 5 was already out. Learned to appreciate advancements in programming language even more

Hipster phase, while studying php got more into JS and web design with more css concepts, wanted my shit to be pretty. Somehow landed with Common Lisp. Mind fucking blown.

Continued with php. Got into uni, math made sense through programming, ok so I am stupid, but not that stupid, python is the best calculator ever.

bring it bitches.

Graduated.

Still don't know what I am doing.

So my wife bought a really old android tablet (it's on gingerbread lol) so I've decided to bring it up to android pie, yes that means building a custom ROM, from scratch, for a 7 year old device. I will be documenting my progress and if I fail then at least it will be published research as the memory optimization in android pie is so much smoother now it should be good. If it fails I shall try to build android go to the device.

It's still got a 1.5ghz processor and 1gb of ram which should be fine so here's hoping.

How often do women bring up their own gender in tech interviews? I've never done it, and I've never interviewed anyone, but I'm curious about whether it's ever explicitly mentioned (beyond a, "I'm in a women in tech group" or "I mentor young girls in my free time").

I don't want to start any debates. Just curious about what people on the Other Side of the Table see.

"I don't want to offend you but well clearly you're not an artist. "

From the client i tell repeatedly "Web design is not my strong point so if there is a design you want we should bring on a designer"

And actually i was an artist. But i didn't like all the subjective criticism. Criticise my code when it doesn't work. I didn't ever sell you Web design

During my first internship, my boss had me build a social network type of platform for doctors, all by myself, using Drupal 7. I was like 'aw yeah sure!'...*sigh* younger me...

While I was working there, he didn't have any particular input on the project other that the occasional brainstorming session, where he would tell me things that big firms do (Facebook, Twitter etc.) that should be implemented. It was 2012 so you can imagine that many standard concepts of today, were making their first appearance back then.

I remember that he was sitting on his desk, a little further next to mine, watching a video about how to treat your employees like mine-digging goblins, in a way that would bring profit to the company. He didn't notice that the volume was loud enough and that I could hear what the video said. Still to this day, that moment was one of the most awkward experiences I had in any workspace.

Well the project turned out to be a really well-built prototype and then canceled because reality hit me and I left after my internship ended, even though he told me that he wanted to hire me and have me work on the project full-time.

So happy to have been there, just to learn to avoid people and places like that in the future, it really paid off (seriously, this is the type of stuff that you have to experience in order to armor up in the future).

Fuck uninspired jr devs that are simply collecting a pay check.

I have been handed a project that a jr dev was allowed to wallow on for over two fucking years. This lazy mother fucker managed to create 5 functions, a whole fucking mess of bullshit that I now have to straighten out on top of the 8 other things that I have to deliver on in the next month.

They never followed requirements. Not-a-one. The API is fully broken. The DB schema is BEYOND fucked. There's ZERO validation/sanitation on I/O. The deployments only work half the fucking time. Their code is so spaghetti I'm getting triggered from when I worked at Olive Garden with Eminem. But hey, at least they were able to demo it to the client to say "it works".

I don't condone violence, but every time I find malformed if statements, linter exceptions, broken deploy configurations in this project -- I just want to kick them in their stupid fucking face.

Wherever you ended up you piece of shit, I hope your dreams of becoming a rich asshole only bring you unending despair. I believe you can make it though, because you're already halfway there.

Java. AGAIN. 😡

so, I am trying to get a csv opened and read, and then search through it based on values. Easy peasy lemon squeezy in python, right?

Well, damned be java. You need a buffered reader to read the file. Then you have to "while(has next)" the whole damn thing, then you have to do something with the data that you read one by one, right? Well, not to be disappointed, they do have json libraries, but you **have to install** the plugins for it. Aka you have to manually add the libraries or use some backwards manager like maven.

Gotta admit, jdbc is neat if you're anal about your sql statements, but bring the same jazz to csv, and all the hell will break loose.

Now, if you just read your json data into multiple objects and throw them in an array... Kiss shorthand search's ass goodbye, because this mofo can't search through lists without licking the arse of every object. And now, you have to find another way because this way, you can't group shit you just read from csv. (or, I haven't found a way after 5 hours of dealing with the godforsaken shitshow that java libraries are.)

Like, I'm devastated. If this rant doesn't make much sense to you, blame some java library for it.
Shouldn't be too hard.

Watched a TED Talk about this cool site that wants to bring open education to all.
Forgot about it.
Remembered i
the video a week later, checked it out.
Front page saw a course for Python for beginners.
Watched the first video.
Got hooked.
Never turned back.
Thanks Coursera :)

After that I relied more on books as the knowledge is layed out in a more concrete fashion and are probably nore revised. So better content, more accurate information, more advanced and in depth knowledge.

Bring it on

Rant

So a couple months ago, my dad called me to try and solve a problem he was having in his work.
You see, my dad owns a driving school and he was teaching 14 and 15yo kids how to ride mopeds and their theory exams are made in the school's facility, by going to this website of the entity that rules the moped teaching thing. When the time to have the exams came, they couldn't even see the exams and one of the kids had one of his attempts wasted (they had 3 attempts). We mailed and called the entity multiple times, to no avail, as they told us to "check the website, the instructions are all there". They were also trying to get it together but they couldn't. Here's the "funny" part: the software in which the exams were done ran on XP and there was no way in hell we could make it work on our W10 PCs. Not to mention this is a natiowide problem.
We reinstalled Java to v.7.9 (I think...?) as the "instructions" told us, with no results whatsoever.
So my dad decided to call me and asked me to bring a PC that didn't run W10. The closest thing to XP I could think of was my uncle's Toshiba, that had Vista, so I went to his house and grabbed it and drove to my dad's school. Even in compatibility mode, it didn't work. Everyone was in despair LoL. I was even put on the phone with the entity's technician, who didn't know how to solve it either but was trying, as well with our tech guy.
After a bit of running around and crying inside, our secretary remembered we still had a tower on site that ran XP. We went for the thing and connected it and booted it up. After reinstalling Java and setting security to "medium" (required), and meddling with zoom (the window was too small to show the whole exam and if the window showed up before we set the zoom to 75% or so we couldn't choose the answers) it was finally set to do the exams.
I've never felt so relieved for solving tech stuff LoL. It took me 3h to get it done and I feel it would have been easier if we had remembered about the tower earlier but oh well what can one do.

Today was a manic-depressive kind of day. Spent the morning helping some developers with getting their code to run a stored procedure to drop old partitions, but it wasn't working on their end. It was a fairly simple proc. But working with partitions is a little like working with an array. I figured out that they were passing the wrong timestamp, and needed to add +1 to delete the right partition. Got that sorted out, and things were good. Lunch time.

After lunch I did some busy work, and then the PO comes up at about 2PM and says he's assigned some requests to me. The first was just attaching some scripts. Easy. The second, the user wants a couple of schemas exported ... at 6PM. I've been in the office since 6:45AM.

While I'm setting up some commands to run for the data export, a BA walks up and asks if I'm filling in for another DBA who is out for a few weeks. Yep. There's a change request that hasn't been assigned, and he normally does the work. I ask when it's due. Well, the pre-implementation was supposed to be done in the morning, but it wasn't, and we're in the implementation window ... half way through. I bring up the change task, and look at. Create new schema and users. That's all it says. The BA laughs. I tell I need more to go on. 10 minutes later he sends an email with the information. There's only two hours left in the window, and I can only use half of it, because the production guys have to their stuff, and we're in their window. Now I'm irritated, because I'm new to Oracle, and it's an unforgiving mistress. Fortunately, another DBA says he'll do it, so that we can get it done in time. But can't work it either, because Dev DBAs don't have access to QA, and the process required access for this task. Gets shelved until the access issue is resolved. It's now after 4:15PM. I'm going to in traffic with that 6PM deadline.

I manage to get home and to the computer by 5:45PM. Log in. Start VPN. Box pops on screen. Java needs to update. I chose skip update. Box pops up again. It won't let me log in until Java is current. Passed.

I finally get logged in, and it's 6:10PM. I'm late getting the job started. I pull up Putty and log into the first box, and paste my pre-prepared command in the command line and hit error. Command not found. I'm tired, so it's a moment to sink in. I don't have time for this.

I log into DBArtisan and pull up the first data base, use the wizard to set the job, and off it goes. Yay. Bring up the second database, and have enter the connect info. Host not found. Wut? Examine host name. Yep, it's correct. Try a different method. Host not found. Go back to Putty. Log in. Past string. Launch. Command not found. Now my brain is quitting on me. Why now? It's after 6:30PM. Fiddle with some settings, reset $Oracle home. Try again. Yay. It works. I'm done. It's after 7PM.

There is nothing like technology to snatch the euphoria of a success away from you. It's a love-hate thing, but I wouldn't trade it for anything else. I'm done. Good night.

Background:

New guy on our team, deadline coming up. I bring him into a meeting room, explain what the project is about, quick run down of the code. Then spent a while explaining what we have to do next, gave him a piece to do, took a piece to do myself.

The fuck up:

A few days / week pass by and I ask to check on his progress. Fucktard decided an hour after the meeting that it would be easier for him to use a different database than what the project was using and decided he wanted to work on some other feature instead.

My stuff was dependent on his stuff, so not only did he not do his work but stopped me from delivering mine.

Let’s just say there was a few stern words in a meeting room shortly after that.

So, I'm trying to process the feelings from not getting accepted for the PhD project I applied for a while back. And it's just unfair. They've recruited people with no publication and less GPA than me. I also doubt any of them would be field-wise more relevant than me tbh. (Wouldn't be surprised if they hired MBA grads) I have all the relevant qualifications that even people working on that project do not have. I could easily get this project going beyond what they are doing with it rn. It's unfair. But it's life. And life goes on.

Am I angry? Yes. Am I disappointed, also yes. They didn't give me any alternative offers either. So I am going to steal the project and finish it so they have to throw all the money they've invested in the toilet.

... If only I wasn't depressed and could bring myself to apply elsewhere again. 🙄

Had to bring up some issues with my instructor to the school, and forgot to print out emails hosted on their Exchange server that show the issue in detail. When I logged in, every email had mysteriously disappeared from my account, but because I document everything about this horseshit school locally, I could still show the exported emails.

The instructor?
Head of IT.

The bastard tried to hide the evidence, but fuck him, Document Everything.

I just told my director that the solution for a particular problem that we have involves Machine Learning. For which I had already applied a VERY small app to make sense of an old database to make a NEW one since the old one broke every notion of how a db is supposed to be set (meaning that I recreated the project from scratch)

And on the same message I told him that I was not willing to do it using M.L since I was not paid enough to bring this level of heat to the institution.

Normalize telling mfkers that your skills are worth more.

I am paid well, but not enough to out of the blue tell mfkers that my ml based algo can save them./

Fuck em, fuck em hard, fuck em good, fuck em without even using spit.

I don't do this shit because I am paSSiOnate, since there lies the trap: "I mean, I love it so I guess I can do it, I do this on my free time either way" <---- no bitch, shit is expensive on the real world, don't do that wtf is the matter with you? *slaps* companies don't see it as a: "oh shit, employee