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Anyone else used Stack Overflow for many years without ever asking or answering a single question?21
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Just for fun I am making an RPG Maker game called "IT Quest" where you go on a 40 hour long quest just to get the security team to modify a user. The game will feature tons of mandatory side quests and a convoluted plot that requires descending into the depths of the server room to find a virgin followed by a sacrificial ritual over the broken fax machine. And ultimately the security team just closes your request without telling you why and you have to fight the final boss of the game, Zeromus who runs security. When you defeat him you get the golden CAT5 cable of time which you beat the person who closed your request with until he reopens it and does his damned job.12
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My sister in law got me this guy for Christmas after I told her about devrant!
She found it in a rubber duck shop in Amsterdam.
Best sister in law!
11 -
How most recruiter emails go these days:
- Hiring multiple senior lead engineers <— That’s me
- 180k+ <— I like it.
- Must have experience with AWS, GCE, AND Azure <— Okay, you’re looking for a unicorn
- Kubernetes expert
- Experience with Rust, Node, and .NET <— What type of fucking company are you?
- Must be on call and 25% travel <— Why?
- Preferred: experience with printer repair, Raid Arrays, CAT5, and Microsoft Access <— Y’all fucked up somewhere a long time ago. I’m out.16 -
A common scenario strikes again today:
- Blocked on a problem at the end of the day
- Tell my wife I'm headed home
- Inspiration strikes
- time flies by coding in the zone
- realize I'm super late
- run out the door like a crazy person1 -
The riskiest dev choice...
How about "The riskiest thing you've done as a dev"? I have a great entry for that. and I suppose it was my choice to build the feature afterall.
I was working on an instance of a small MMO at a game company I worked for. The MMO boasted multiple servers, each of them a vastly different take on the base game. We could use, extend, or outright replace anything we wanted to, leading to everything from Zelda to pokemon to an RP haven to a top-down futuristic counterstrike. The server in this particular instance was a fantasy RPG, and I was building it a new leveling and experience system with most of the trimmings. (Talents, feats/perks, etc. were in a future update.)
A bit of background, first: the game's dev setup did not have the now-standard dev/staging/prod servers; everything ran on prod, devs worked on prod, players connected and played on prod, etc. Worse yet, there was no backup system implemented -- or not really. The CTO was really the only person with sufficient access. The techy CEO did as well, but he rarely dealt with anything technical except server hardware, occasionally. And usually just to troll/punish us devs (as in "Oops ! I pulled the cat5 ! ;)"). Neither of them were the most reliable of people, either. The CTO would occasionally remote in and make backups of each server -- we assumed whenever he happened to think of it -- and would also occasionally do it when asked, but it could take him a week, sometimes even up to a month to get around to it. So the backups were only really useful for retreiving lost code and assets, not so much for player data.
The lack of reliable backups and the lack of proper testing grounds (among the plethora of other issues at the company) made for an absolutely terrible dev setup, but that's just how it was, and that's what we dealt with. We were game devs, afterall. Terrible or not, we got to make games! What more could you ask for!? It was amazing and terrible and wonderful and the worst thing ever, all at the same time. (and no, I'm not sharing the company name, but it isn't EA or Nexon, surprisingly 😅)
Anyway, back to the story! My new leveling system also needed to migrate players' existing data, so... you can see where this is going.
I did as much testing and inspection of my code as I could, copied it from a personal dev script to the server's xp system, ... and debated if I really wanted to click [Apply]. Every time I considered it, I went back to check another part or do yet more testing. I ended up taking like 40 minutes to finally click it.
And when I did... that was the scariest button press of my life. And the scariest three seconds' wait afterwards. That one click could have ruined every single player's account, permanently lost us players ...
After applying it, I immediately checked my character to see if she was broken, checked the account data for corruption or botched flags, checked for broken interactions with the other systems....
Everything ended up working out perfectly, and the players loved all of the new features. They had no idea what went into building them, and certainly had no idea of what went into applying them, or what could have gone wrong -- which is probably a good thing.
Looking back, that entire environment was so fragile, it's a wonder things didn't go horribly wrong all the time. Really, they almost never did. Apocalypses did happen, but were exceedingly rare, and were ususally fixed quickly. I guess we were all super careful simply because everything was so fragile? or the decent devs were, at least. We never trusted the lessers with access 😅 at least on the main servers where it mattered. Some of the smaller servers... well, we never really cared about those.
But I'm honestly more surprised to realize I've never had nightmares of that button click. It was certainly terrifying enough.
But yay! Complete system overhaul and migration of stored and realtime player data! on prod! With no issues! And lots of happy players! Woooooo!
Thinking back on it makes me happy 😊1 -
Night before flying internationally includes the following checklist:
- check VPN works, can access frontend sites and hit the backend
- git push4 -
This morning I kept falling back asleep after the alarm went off, drifting in and out of a dream about programming.
My wife finally said "no more sleeping".
Still mostly sleep, I replied very confidently "you can't sleep in a sandbox!".
I was dreaming I was in a code sandbox. Obviously sleeping is not allowed.
Jeez, my head has been really full of programming since this conference. (One of the talks was on codesandbox). -
Let me tell you a story.
Our company has a homegrown monitoring solution. Keeps track of our deployments and alerts us when something is broken. Really nice for the most part, except a little issue where we get up to 25 alerts PER DAY that our PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT IS DOWN. Including weekends.
With this many false positives, we quickly learn to ignore the alerts and miss real incidents.
So we approached this team, remember its our own tool, and told them about the problem. Turns out it is a known issue. And here's the kicker: they aren't planning on fixing it!
It gets better. Rather than fix this glaring issue, their solution is to make ANOTHER ALERT that lets us know the monitoring is misbehaving.
To recap, we can now expect to get up to 25 false positive alerts per day that our production is down, followed immediately by more alerts that the monitor is broken, which means we can ignore the previous alert.
As our PM said when he heard this: fuck that noise. We are escalating the shit out of this!7 -
I'm such an idiot.
Spilled water on my MacBook today. Not that much water, but the cup landed right in the middle of my keyboard.
Worst part is I was gaming with my sister and didn't want to stop. So I wiped it off and shook it out a bit and kept playing. A bit later the screen started flickering and eventually went black.
Finally my brain turned on and I switched it off, shook out some more water, and set it up to dry. Just hoping it's not too late.
At least the drying setup recommended by the internet is pretty hilarious looking.
Now we play the waiting game. They say 72 hours before turning it on again. Seems a bit extreme. Will there still be moisture evaporating 3 days later? Not sure I can wait that long to see if it's toast.
Such an idiot.
14 -
*spends a long time crafting a huge eBay post (we're moving)
* tries to drag and drop first picture
* page navigates to the picture without warning
* loses everything
WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY
WHEN DRAGGING A PICTURE INTO A WEB PAGE I NEVER WANT TO NAVIGATE TO A PAGE WITH JUST THAT IMAGE. WHY NO WARNING BEFORE LEAVING THE PAGE. WHY DON'T YOU SAVE TEXT LOCALLY. WHY DOES THE WEB SUCK SO HARD. AAAGGGHHHH.
* feels better
* starts over7 -
Netflix, why is your loading spinner so horrible!
Do you know what a percentage is??? 99% means you are ALMOST done. Just a tiny fraction to go. I should not see 99% for seconds or even minutes on end. Much less after the first 98% took only a couple seconds!!
Stop the lies!!!5 -
My new fitbit reminds me take 250 steps each hour. When I do stop and take a walk, I find it helps my productivity, and I feel better. However, I'm not good at keeping to it.
It's always the same story.
"Quiet you, I'll get up and walk once I finish this one thing".
...
Another hour goes by.
If only I could keep to my own convictions.4 -
I spent more than an hour trying trying to debug why two functions were always returning undefined. I even put in conditional breakpoints and executed the statements to confirm the logic was correct.
I forgot return.4 -
I think my productivity at work seriously went up when I discovered this site with custom noise generators. Blocks out my coworkers, and I can pretend it's raining all the time. Perfect for coding!
http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/...2 -
Coding has given me the ability to turn my favorite hobby into a career. This in turn gave me the chance to take jobs in three countries so far (US, Germany, UK). So, I can explore the world with lovely wife while doing something I'm really passionate about and constantly learning. It also allows me to relate more to my dad, a software engineer of about 30 years who got me started when I was a kid.
In short, coding changed everything for me.
PS: I met my wife in intro to CS, though she's not a developer. -
When your company buys a third party solution and you spend all your time emailing them about bugs in their system.
Seriously, I even sent you the exact line of the bug in your JavaScript with a suggested solution, and deployed a new stack with your latest (broken) fix so you can test out that solution. Then you email back saying it is fixed but it is clearly still broken. If I email you a fixed version of your file will you deploy it? OMG!1 -
After being live multiple years supporting only Safari, Firefox, and Chrome, one customer wanted IE support. After taking a close look at the usage numbers, and discussing with us front-end devs, our product guy shot it down. Pop the champagne!2
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When you make a mistake and try to fix it, but you can't remember how to spell amend...
git commit --ammend
error: unknown command `amend'
git commit -ammend
[branch-name] mend
Huh?
git log
commit #
mend
Created a new commit with message 'mend'. Now to clean this all up and go get some sleep!2 -
Years ago, one of my friends in college was taking an intro to CS class. He asked me for help on one of his assignments. It was a simple Python program, but it wasn't running as expected. I go in figuring it will be easy to fix. But everything looks exactly right. An hour later I'm tearing my hair out! It isn't even entering the function although it's clearly called. I'm beginning to feel very self conscious, as a CS major who can't even debug a 15 line program for a friend.
Then it hit me. This is Python. I used an editor macro to convert all indentation to tabs, lined them up, and it ran on the first try. Turns out, he had somehow ended up with a mixture of tabs and spaces.
I'm not sure what the takeaway is, but I think he got a surprisingly honest introduction to the life of a developer...2 -
!rant
Super awesome day today.
1. Got up early to do a risky production deploy and it worked!
2. Three PRs approved before lunch.
3. Got some time to continue learning scala.
4. Coffee and cupcakes with some refugees and discussed work as a software engineer.
5. Tried virtual reality for the first time. Really fun.
6. Helped prepare our goals for this quarter and present them to the department.
7. Department meeting had free local craft beer and pretzels.
8. Went bouldering after work and flashed a 6c.
9. Curled up with my wife watching Netflix.
I really love my life sometimes.5 -
Me: *adds a shiny new graph to our foos web app showing player ratings*
Fred: Can I please have a button to see just my scores?
Me: *adds "JUST FRED" button*
Fred: perfect, thanks4 -
PSA: negate your tests and make sure they fail!
I have what I thought was a weird and slightly paranoid habit. When I write tests sometimes just as a sanity check negate the assertion to make sure the test fails and isn't a false positive. Almost always fails as expected.
But not today! Turns out I had forgotten to wrap my equality check in an assertion so it would always pass. It freaks me out to imagine pushing a test that always passes not just because it doesn't do its job, but could also obscure a bug and trick me into thinking it works differently than it does. Broken tests are the worst!
But it pays to be paranoid. -
I get home today and my wife says:
"Just finished some chores and really want to play stardew valley, but the computer has been updating for an hour!"
Windows 10 anniversary update strikes again.3 -
When you offer to help out a fellow coworker on the top priority feature he is developing and he just sends you the branch and stops working on it.2
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We've been using private GitHub repos as a distribution method for our personal npm packages at work for years.
I finally got sick of it and did the work to publish them to artifactory yesterday. Today, I worked out the remaining kinks, fixed the CI builds, and wrote a wiki page explaining the change with step by step migration instructions and sent it around to the rest of the devs. And it's working great!
I feel simultaneously like a hero for finally getting this fixed and an idiot for putting up with it for so long.
Also thankful for my devops friend who helped a bunch.1 -
I want to buy a beer for everyone who developed the mobile pass app. Just breezed through immigration and customs without waiting in the 1 hour+ line. Technology wins. Cheers!1
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Things you should not say on your last day of work:
If I broke it, I think it would be pretty obvious. -
Seeing CAT5 Cables sold as CAT8 cables makes me think how many non techies have been scammed and don't even know it.
Like when apple marketed the 3rd gen PoS iPad as the new iPad and people starting for years after selling new ipads that were anything but.
To people who do this kindly fuck off5 -
I had an interesting mystery the other day. I work in the UK, but I'm working remotely from the US for a while. First day, I made some changes, ran the tests and they failed. Weird part was the failing test was for a component I hadn't touched. I took a closer look, and realized it was a date off by several hours. The test was checking that a passed in date appears in the output. But it was creating the date by parsing a string. The library I was using defaults to local time, but the component uses UTC. So, I had inadvertently created a unit test that only passes when run from UTC. But I had never noticed before because my work is in that timezone. Yikes!
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Just moved countries and started a new job at an awesome company, which is so great I have nothing yet to rant about.
Oh here goes: almost three weeks with no internet at home and no end in sight.2 -
Just attended my first conference and it was awesome! So many new ideas, but also tired and overloaded. Can't decide if I should code tonight, go to bed early, or just do something mindless.1
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Why is so Fitbit so bad at multiple time zones??
Guess what, people get on planes and travel.
Every time, my Fitbit gets so screwed up, including things like changing previous step counts, or duplicating an entire day of steps.
I understand MTZ is a tough problem, but this is just unacceptable. I'm not obsessed with my steps, but when your product is all about counting something, seems like you should be more careful to avoid double counting or not counting at all. Seriously, how much R&D have they invested in their hardware and apps, but it completely fails when you travel. Get it together!1 -
Was asked to crimp a simple Cat5 LAN cable in today's networking tutorial class. Little did the lecturer know I had been doing that (usually Cat6) for almost a year. Walked into the class 30 minutes late, terminated both sides within 5 minutes and just sat there helping my friends for the rest of the 2 hour class...1
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Computer does a BSOD right at the end of a tiebreaker competitive overwatch match where the enemy is about to cap the point and win. I'm one of the tanks. Hard reboot and back in the game within 45s. Just barely hold them off in overtime and win the match. Epic!
Thank God for SSDs!4 -
Best tip for getting unstuck? If it's after your usual leaving time, GO HOME.
So many times I solved the problem right away the next morning. Only wish I followed my own advice more often... -
When everyone thinks FE is easier, quicker, and less important than BE. Just because our fantastic UX people made you a high fidelity mockup in a day does not mean we can build the whole FE in a week.
This is why I'm returning to full stack. -
It drives me crazy when there are unclosed parens or quotes anywhere.
Is it too much to ask for people to run their Facebook posts through a compiler first? -
I was always interested in computers. My dad was a big computer geek and a programmer to boot. Usually had a couple old PCs in the basement to play with.
In middle school, I took tech ed and we made simple web sites with html and css. I remember the struggle of nested tables.
In high school, I couldn't fit any CS into my schedule. But someone gave me a learning to code book in ruby. I loved it, and have been hooked ever since. -
Current Mac and Windows user here looking to get back into Linux. Any distro suggestions?
Looking for something not too high maintenance.7 -
Any recommendations for moving a blog?
My wife and I just cancelled our account with siteground hosting a WordPress blog. Looking for a cheaper alternative. Willing to get my hands dirty as a web dev, but would like a nice CMS experience for my wife. Also want to keep our existing content. If we can keep our custom domain somehow that would be a win.
Thanks!7 -
Trying to add money to a prepaid SIM card today. Their website is a mess. Plus and minus buttons were not functioning, so my only option was to add 15 euro. Checked the console, no errors. Tried triggering the buttons jQuery, no luck. Found a data value attached to the submit button set to 15. Changed to 10, clicked submit, and BOOM, it worked! You just got engineered!
After I paid, I was curious, went back and set it to -15, and tried it again. Unfortunately, they know about backend validation. -
I walk by our devops dashboard several times per day. It keeps track of key metrics for all our live services. I noticed an interesting trend the last few weeks.
3 weeks ago: all metrics green
2 weeks ago: 1 metric red
1 week ago: 1 metric still red
this week: 1 metric still red but covered with a post it note -
When you are tearing you hair out trying to figure out why the PR you're reviewing isn't working. Then you realize you forgot to pull the latest changes!
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You know it's Friday afternoon when your interface is broken because you tried to set the type to the string 'string' instead of the keyword string.
Interface IEnvironment {
name: 'string',
...
}
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