WINDOWS USER VS LINUX USER

A Windows User's view on computing

I have the blue screen of death again
You'll never hear me say
I'm happy with my computer
At the end of the day
my operating system
dictates
my choice
in programs i use and the features I've
i have complete control
over nothing
i lose sleep
worrying about getting viruses
and
microsoft patching vulnerabilities in time
i don't have time to think about
some thing better.
i've learned
to live with old software issues
There's no way i'm planning
to change, and
its worth it to me

A Linux User's view on computing
(read this bottom to top)

I stayed at a hotel called "Crowne Royal Plaza" for a work event in Denver. The TV in the room was a nice new '50 Samsung. Much to my dismay I discovered they had disabled the ability to change the input to HDMI. I called the front desk to compain and the pesent who answered the phone had the nerve to tell me that feature had been disabled because it was "illegal". I laughed histarically and explained the reason was actually to try and force customers to buy shitty pay-per-view content, to which he replied, "Probably".

We must put an end to such blantant disregard for hardware and software freedom. This is beyond uneccaptable. I am completely and utterly disgusted by such slimy business practices.

To the management of the Crowne Royal Plaza, from the bottom of my heart, fuck you and burn in the deapest, darkest part of hell, you scum sucking dick fucks!

Best part about the covid19 manufactured crisis?
Liquor stores deliver. Worst part about liquor stores delivering? Needing to use their shoddy websites.

I've been using a particular store (Total Wines) since they're cheaper than the rest and have better selection; it's quite literally a large warehouse made to look like a store.

Their website tries really hard to look professional, too, but it's just not. It took me two days to order, and not just from lack of time -- though from working 14 hour days, that's a factor.

Signing up was difficult. Your username is an email address, but you can't use comments because the server 500s, making the ajax call produce a wonderfully ambiguous error message. It also fades the page out like it's waiting on something, but that fade is on top of the error modal too. Similar error with the password field, though I don't remember how I triggered it.

Signing up also requires agreeing to subscribe to their newsletter. it's technically an opt-in, but not opting-in doesn't allow you to proceed. Same with opting-in to receiving a text notification when your order is ready for pickup -- you also opt-in to reciving SMS spam.

Another issue: After signing up, you start to navigate through the paginated product list. Every page change scrolls you to the exact middle of the next page. Not deliberatly; the UI loads first, and the browser gets as close as it can to your previous position -- which was below that as the pagination is at the bottom -- and then the products populate after. But regardless of why, there is no worse place to start because now you must scroll in both directions to view the products. If it stayed at the very bottom, it would at least mean you only need to scroll upwards to look at everything on the page. Minor, but increasingly irritating.

Also, they have like 198 pages of spirits alone because each size is unique entry. A 50ml, 350ml, 500ml, 750ml, 1000ml, and 1750ml bottle of e.g. Tito's vodka isn't one product, it's six. and they're sorted seemingly randomly. I think it's by available stock, looking back.

If you fancy a product, you can click on it for a detail page. Said detail page lists the various sizes in a dropdown, but they're not sorted correctly either, and changing sizes triggers a page reload, which leads to another problem:

if you navigate to more than a few pages within a 10 or so second window, the site accuses you of using browser automation. No captcha here, just a "click me for five seconds" button. However, it (usually) also triggers the check on every other tab you have open after its next nagivation.

That product page also randomly doesn't work. I haven't narrowed it down, but it will randomly decide to start failing, and won't stop failing for hours. It renders the page just fine, then immediately replaces it with a blank page. When it's failing, the only way to interact with the page is a perfectly-timed [esc], which can (and usually does) break all other page functionality, too. Absolutely great when you need to re-add everything from a stale copy of your signed-out cart living in another tab. More on that later. And don't forget to slow down to bypass the "browser automation" check, too!

Oh, and if you're using container tabs, make sure to open new tabs in the SAME container, as any request from the same IP without the login cookie will usually trigger that "browser automation" response, too.

The site also randomly signs you out, but allows you to continue amassing your cart. You'd think this is a good thing until you choose to sign in again... which empties your cart. It's like they don't want to make a sale at all.

The site also randomly forgets your name, replacing it with "null." My screen currently says "Hello, null". Hello, cruft!

It took me two days to order.
Mostly from lack of time, as i've been pulling 14 hour shifts lately trying to get everything done. but the sheer number of bugs certainly wasted most of what little time i had left. Now I definitely need a drink.

But maybe putting up with all of this is worthwhile because of their loyalty program? Apparently if you spend $500, you can take $5 off your next purchase! Yay! 1%! And your points expire! There are three levels; maybe it gets better. Level zero is for everyone; $0 requirement. There are also levels at $500 and $2500. That last one is seriously 5x more than the first paid level. and what does it earn you? A 'free' magazine subscription, 'free' classes (they're usually like $20-$50 iirc), and a 'free' grab bag (a $2.99 value!) twice per month. All for spending $2500. What a steal. It reminds me of Candy Crush's 3-star system where the first two stars are trivial, and the third is usually a difficult stretch goal. But here it's just thinly-veiled manipulation with no benefit.

I can tell they're employing some "smarketing" people with big ideas (read: stolen mistakes), but it's just such a fail.

The whole thing is a fail.

Holy fuck the Instagram Android app has the WORST UX I've ever encountered!

I'm a professional Android developer and my girlfriend had to explain how to see a specific "story" more than once; IE; tap on it until it rotates round to the first! But tapping on a video post turns on the sound! What kind of dog shit for brains moron designed those interactions to be the same?

I can navigate around the app until all but one of the tabs displays a profile page when I navigate back to it. Lost much?

The center tab breaks that but only because it opens up a whole new screen out of nowhere, (bye bye bottom bar!) which repeats the "photo capture" that you can also get by swiping left on the left most tab!

Don't even get me started on the swiping! None of the tabs swipe between each other, like the convention, oh no. But some of them can swipe, yes!

The first tab swipes left and right, where the hell do they go you ask? Look for the obscure icons at the top (oh and bye bye bottom bar again!). The forth tab swipes but only to the left, they have text tabs like standard. That screen that comes up out of nowhere I mentioned? That can swipe too, but now the text tabs are at the bottom for god knows what reason as the top is empty!

On the profile tab we have more tabs. These are icon tabs inside the content now. The first two change the post content from a feed style to a grid, okay, so far so good. The other two? You'd imagine they also change how you view content right? Nope, one shows your favorites, and the other replaces the whole screen with a "photos of you" screen! With not only the bottom bar still showing, but an up button! Where the fuck do we go "up" to on the home screen??

Then we have the bookmark icon on the toolbar, which opens up a new screen "Saved", guess where that tabs are this time? They're back at the top! You know why? Because the navigation bottom bar is still there!! And there's an up button!!

At this point I'm just about ready to kill myself using this fucked up, backwards facing, ass for a face app that is somehow one of the most popular platforms on the earth, yet seems to have been made by five different designers on opposite ends of the planet!

FUCK ME!!

I'll use this topic to segue into a related (lonely) story befitting my mood these past weeks.

This is entire story going to sound egotistical, especially this next part, but it's really not. (At least I don't think so?)

As I'm almost entirely self-taught, having another dev giving me good advice would have been nice. I've only known / worked with a few people who were better devs than I, and rarely ever received good advice from them.

One of those better devs was my first computer science teacher. Looking back, he was pretty average, but he held us to high standards and gave good advice. The two that really stuck with me were: 1) "save every time you've done something you don't want to redo," and 2) "printf is your best debugging friend; add it everywhere there's something you want to watch." Probably the best and most helpful advice I've ever received 😊

I've seen other people here posting advice like "never hardcode" or "modularity keeps your code clean" -- I had to discover these pretty simple concepts entirely on my own. School (and later college) were filled with terrible teachers and worse students, and so were almost entirely useless for learning anything new.

The only decent dev I knew had brilliant ideas (genetic algorithms, sandboxing, ...) before they were widely used, but could rarely implement them well because he was generally an idiot. (Idiot sevant, I think? Definitely the idiot part.) I couldn't stand him. Completely bypassing a ridiculously long story, I helped him on a project to build his own OS from scratch; we made very impressive progress, even to this day. Custom bootloader, hardware interfacing, memory management, (semi) sandboxed processes, gui, example programs ...; we were in highschool. I'm still surprised and impressed with what we accomplished.

But besides him, almost every other dev I met was mediocre. Even outside of school, I went so many years without having another competent dev to work with. I went through various jobs helping other dev(s) on their projects (or rewriting them), learning new languages/frameworks almost every time: php, pascal, perl, zend, js, vb, rails, node, .... I learned new concepts occasionally (which was wonderful) but overall it was just tedious and never paid well because I was too young to be taken seriously (and female, further exacerbating it). On the bright side, it didn't dwindle my love for coding, and I usually spent my evenings playing with projects of my own.

The second dev (and one one of the best I've ever met) went by Novo. His approach to a game engine reminded me of General Relativity: Everything was modular, had a rich inheritance tree, and could receive user input at any point along said tree. A user could attach their view/control to any object. (Computer control methods could be attached in this way as well.) UI would obviously change depending on how the user could interact and the number of objects; admins could view/monitor any of these. Almost every object / class of object could talk to almost everything else. It was beautiful. I learned so much from his designs. (Honestly, I don't remember the code at all, and that saddens me.) There were other things, too, but that one amazed me the most.

I havent met anyone like him ever again.

Anyway, I don't know if I can really answer this week's question. I definitely received some good advice while initially learning, but past that it's all been through discovering things on my own.

It's been lonely. ☹

CR: "Add x here (to y) so it fits our code standards"
> No other Y has an X. None.

CR: "Don't ever use .html_safe"
> ... Can't render html without it. Also, it's already been sanitized, literally by sanitize(), written by the security team.

CR: "Haven't seen the code yet; does X change when resetting the password?"
> The feature doesn't have or reference passwords. It doesn't touch anything even tangentially related to passwords.
> Also: GO READ THE CODE! THAT'S YOUR BLOODY JOB!

CR: "Add an 'expired?' method that returns '!active'?"
> Inactive doesn't mean expired. Yellow doesn't mean sour. There's already an 'is_expired?' method.

CR: "For logging, always use json so we can parse it. Doesn't matter if we can't read it; tools can."
CR: "For logging, never link log entries to user-readable code references; it's a security concern."
CR: "Make sure logging is human-readable and text-searchable and points back to the code."
> Confused asian guy, his hands raised.

CR: "Move this data formatting from the view into the model."
> No. Views are for formatting.

CR: "Use .html() here since you're working with html"
> .html() does not support html. It converts arrays into html.

NONE OF THIS IS USEFUL! WHY ARE YOU WASTING MY TIME IF YOU HAVEN'T EVEN READ MY CODE!?

dfjasklfagjklewrjakfljasdf

Pale night themes
>= blackest of black themes
>= no screen at all
>= satan's glowing asshole
>= light themes

CMV

Tl;Dr - It started as an escape, carried on as fun, then as a way to be lazy, and finally as a way of life. Coding has defined and shaped my entire life from the age of nine.

When I was nine I was playing a game on my ZX spectrum and accidentally knocked the keyboard as I reached over to adjust my TV. Incredibly parts of it actually made a little sense to me and got my curiosity. I spent hours reading through that code, afraid to turn the Spectrum off in case I couldn't get back to it. Weeks later I got hold of a book of example code to copy out to do various things like making patterns on the screen. I was amazed by it. You told it what to do, and it did it! (don't you miss the days when coding worked like that?) I was bitten by the coding bug (excuse the pun) and I'd got it bad! I spent many late nights on that thing, escaping from a difficult home life. People (especially adults) were confusing, and in my experience unpredictable. When you did things wrong they shouted at you and threatened to take you away, or ignored you completely. Code never did that. If you did something wrong, it quietly let you know and often told you exactly what was wrong. It wasn't because of shifting expectations or a change of mood or anything like that. It was just clean logic, simple cause and effect.

I get my first computer a year later: an IBM XT that had been discarded by a company and was fitted with a key on the side to turn it on. With the impressive noise it made it really was like starting an engine. Whole most kids would have played with the games, I spent my time playing with batch scripts and writing very simple text adventures. And discovering what "format c:" does. With some abuse and threatened violence I managed to get windows running on it. Windows 2.1 I think it was.

At 12 I got a Gateway 75 running Windows 95. Over the next few years I do covered many amazing games: ROTT, Doom, Hexen, and so on. Aside from the games themselves, I was fascinated by the way computers could be linked together to play together (this was still early days for the Web and computers networked in a home was very unusual). I also got into making levels for Doom, Heretic, and years later Duke Nukem 3D (pretty sure it was heretic; all I remember is the nightmare of trying to write levels entirely by code!). I enjoyed re-scripting some of the weapons and monsters to behave differently. About this time I also got into HTML (I still call this coding, but not programming), C, and java. I had trouble with C as none of the examples and tutorial code seemed to run properly under a Windows environment. Similar for my very short stint with assembly. At some point I got a TI-83 programmable calculator and started rewriting my old batch script games on it, including one "Gangster Lord" game that had the same mechanics as a lot of the Facebook games that appeared later (do things, earn money, spend money to buy stuff to do more things). Worried about upcoming exams, I also made a number of maths helper apps, including a quadratic equation solver that gave the steps, and a fake calculator reset to smuggle them into my exams. When the day came I panicked and did a proper reset for fear of being caught.

At 18 I was convinced I was going to be a professional coder as I started a degree in Computer Science. Three months later I dropped out after a bunch of lectures teaching what input and output devices were and realising we were only going to be taught Java and no C++. I started a job on the call centre of a big company, but was frustrated with many of the boring and repetitive tasks we had to do. So I put my previous knowledge to use, and quickly learned VBA to automate tasks. It wasn't long before I ended up promoted to Business Analyst where I worked on a great team building small systems in Office, SAS, and a few other tools.

I decided to retrain in psychology, so left the job I was in and started another degree. During my work and placements my skills came in use a number of times to simplify and automate tasks. I finished my degree, then took a job as a teaching assistant while I worked out what I wanted to do next and how to pay for it. Three years later I've ended up IT technican at the school, responsible for the website, teaching a number of Computing lessons each week, and unofficial co-coordinator for Computing as a subject. I also run a team of ten year old Digital Leaders who I am training in online safety and as technical experts; I am hoping to inspire them to a future in coding. In September I'll be starting teacher training with a view to becoming a Computing specialist teacher. Oh, and I'm currently doing a course in Android Development in my free time.

And this all started with an accidental knock on the keyboard of a ZX Spectrum.

Highlights from my week:

Prod access: Needed it for my last four tickets; just got it approved this week. No longer need it (urgently, anyway). During setup, sysops didn’t sync accounts, and didn’t know how. Left me to figure out the urls on my own. MFA not working.

Work phone: Discovered its MFA is tied to another coworker’s prod credentials. Security just made it work for both instead of fixing it.

My merchant communication ticket: I discovered sysops typo’d my cronjob so my feature hasn’t run since its release, and therefore never alerted merchants. They didn’t want to fix it outside of a standard release. Some yelling convinced them to do it anyway.

AWS ticket: wow I seriously don’t give a crap. Most boring ticket I have ever worked on. Also, the AWS guy said the project might not even be possible, so. Weee, great use of my time.

“Tiny, easy-peasy ticket”: Sounds easy (change a link based on record type). Impossible to test locally, or even view; requires environments I can’t access or deploy to. Specs don’t cover the record type, nor support creating them. Found and patched it anyway.

Completed work: Four of my tickets (two high-priority) have been sitting in code review for over a month now.

Prod release: Release team #2 didn’t release and didn’t bother telling anyone; Release team #1 tried releasing tickets that relied upon it. Good times were had.

QA: Begs for service status page; VP of engineering scoffs at it and says its practically impossible to build. I volunteered. QA cheered; VP ignored me.

Retro: Oops! Scrum master didn’t show up.

Coworker demo: dogshit code that works 1 out of 15 times; didn’t consider UX or user preferences. Today is code-freeze too, so it’s getting released like this. (Feature is using an AI service to rearrange menu options by usage and time of day…)

Micromanager response: “The UX doesn’t matter; our consumers want AI-driven models, and we can say we have delivered on that. It works, and that’s what matters. Good job on delivering!”

Yep.
So, how’s your week going?

Did some updates to an older Web Forms website built by a previous SENIOR developer who is a notoriously horrible developer.

Now before I start, you have to understand this guy studied at a University and had been working for at least two years before I even started working. He is supposed to know the basic shit mentioned below.

This also happened a couple of days ago, so I have calmed down since then so I apologise for the relaxed tone. My next rant will contain a lot more swearing.

This fucking guy did the stupidest shit imaginable.

On the details view of a post|page|article|product|anything that would require a details view this jackass would load the data from the DB.

Using an OleDbConnection, OleDbDataAdapter, DataTable and the poorest writter fucking sql statements you have ever seen. All of these declared in the Page_Load method.

There was literally no reason for him to use OleDb instead of Sql, but he simply did not know any better.

He especially liked: "select * from tbl where id = " & Request("T") & ""

ZERO fucking checks to see if the value is even passed or valid, nothing. He did not even check whether the DataTable had any rows.

He then proceeded to use only the Heading column of the returned row to change the page's title.

Stupidly I assumed the aspx page will be in a better state. Fuck NO!

This fucktard went, added server tags to the opening of the asp:Content tag, copied that shit he used to fetch the data and pasted it between the server tags.

He did not know how to access the DataTable mentioned above from the aspx page!

He did this on every fucking project he worked on. Any place that required <%= %> to display data instead of using asp server controls, this cunt copied whatever was written in the code behind and pasted everything between server tags.

Fuck I could go on forever, but I think this is enough for my first rant.

I wanna make you feel what you have brought into my house!!

I was working with security cameras once in a home automation project. One of those camera particularly stand out by offering a cgi without password request to view and change the current passwort and username.

Seriously wtf is wrong with you? I mean this thing automatically connects to an internet service offering everyone to connect to it with that passwort and username. And I know some of you might say "hey chill the cgi is only available on the wifi" - dammit no. Security is a lifestyle do it complete or get the fuck out. God knows what other mistakes there might be hidden in that thing screaming out to everyone to watch me taking a shit.

But that's not the end of it. My company arranged a call to the technical support of that camera so that I can explain the problem and a patch gets released. Those guys didn't give a shit about it and were even laughing at me. Fuck you!

So whoever is responsible - I will find you - and you will never see me coming.

I think I might change my middle name to "I told you so"

Couple of weeks ago I proposed integrating a daily process job into an existing WPF application (details of what+why would be too long to explain) and the manager suggested I make the changes

Me: "I can do it, but Jay has the most experience with that application. I don't have his WPF skills"
Mgr: "How hard can WPF be? If it uses the MVVM pattern, it should be a snap."
Me: "Its nearly an 8 year old WPF project with several chefs in that kitchen. I pretty sure I could figure it out, but that is a difference between 2 weeks and 2 days. Integration is pretty straight forward, Jay could probably do it in a day."
DevA: "WPF is easy. MVVM makes it even easier. I worked on the shipping app."
Me: "That's was a brand new, single page app, but yea, it should be easy."
DevB: "WPF has been around a long time and the tools have really matured. I don't understand what is so difficult."
Me: "I didn't say anything would be difficult, I know with that application, there is going to be complexity we need to figure out."
DevB: "It uses the MVVM, so all we need is the user control, a view model, controller, and its done."
DevA: "Sounds easy to me."
Mgr: "If you need more time to work on the vendor project, I'll have DevB work on the integration."

<yesterday>
Me: "How is the integration going?"
DevB: "This app is a mess. I have no idea how they got the control collections to work. If I hard-code everything, I can get it to work. This dynamic stuff is so confusing. Then there is the styling. Its uses dark mode, but no matter what I do, my controls show up in light mode."
Me: "The app uses Prism, so the control configuration is in, or around, the startup code."
DevB: "That makes sense. Will it fix the styling too?"
Me: "I have no idea. When I looked at it, some controls loaded the styles from the main resource, other's have it hard-coded. Different chefs in the kitchen, I guess. How far have you got?"
DevB: "I've created invoice button. That is as far as I got"
Me: "I'm finished with the vendor project and I'll be wrapping up the documentation today. I can try to help next week."
DevB: "Thanks. I think we might have to get Jay to help if we can't figure this out."
Me: "Good idea"

Two weeks and only a button. A button? I miss Delphi.

So lets start here, as i have been preparing myself for a while for that rant. I have been putting it off for a while, but today I had enough.
Fuck react-native and fuck facebook react-native team. Bunch of lazy incompetent twats.
The all amazing framework that suppose to be speed up your development process, since you don't have to compile your code after each change. SO FUCKING WHAT if the god damned framework is so fucking buggy and so fucking shit that you constantly have to fix build, dependancies etc issues. Every day since I work on this project that is using react-native I have to deal with some of the react fucked up behaviour. You got an issue ? don't worry google it just to find out that 100 other people had the same issue. Scroll through down the bottom of the page just to find out that facebook devs have closed the issue as resolved (without fucking fixing it) because there wasnt recent replies to the post. Are you fucking kidding me? It's ok thou, create a new issue just to get an automatic reply from the bot that locks the thread and keeps it locked till you update your React-native version to the newest one. You do that and guess fucking what? Their newest version fucks up remote debugging on iOS(fucking android been broke for over a year) so say good bye to debugging your js code. Documentation is fucking trash. You found a nice function like autoCaptialise on your text input? Great! Ah wait, its not fucking working, what is wrong? You google this just to fucking found out it, function never worked on android, so why the fuck you still have it exposed and still have it in your docs? You want to add package? So fucking ez, just type npm install <name of the package>. Ha! fuck you, you still have to go and add them fucking manually in gradle in android and in pod in xcode, because obviously react-native is a one big fucking bullshit. Oh and a scroll view is a fucking glorious highlight of that framework, try add some styling to it, you gonna have loads of fun. Fuck react-native. And fuck the fucking idiot who convinced my boss that framework is so fucking great and now I have to work on this shit. Sincerely Xamarin Developer.

!rant

Need some opinions. Joined a new company recently (yippee!!!). Just getting to grips with everything at the minute. I'm working on mobile and I will be setting up a new team to take over a project from a remote team. Looking at their iOS and Android code and they are using RxSwift and RxJava in them.

Don't know a whole lot about the Android space yet, but on iOS I did look into Reactive Cocoa at one point, and really didn't like it. Does anyone here use Rx, or have an opinion about them, good or bad? I can learn them myself, i'm not looking for help with that, i'm more interested in opinions on the tools themselves.

My initial view (with a lack of experience in the area):

- I'm not a huge fan of frameworks like this that attempt to change the entire flow or structure of a language / platform. I like using third party libraries, but to me, its excessive to include something like this rather than just learning the in's / out's of the platform. I think the reactive approach has its use cases and i'm not knocking the it all together. I just feel like this is a little bit of forcing a square peg into a round hole. Swift wasn't designed to work like that and a big layer will need to be added in, in order to change it. I would want to see tremendous gains in order to justify it, and frankly I don't see it compared to other approaches.

- I do like the MVVM approach included with it, but i've easily managed to do similar with a handful of protocols that didn't require a new architecture and approach.

- Not sure if this is an RxSwift thing, or just how its implemented here. But all ViewControllers need to be created by using a coordinator first. This really bugs me because it means changing everything again. When I first opened this app, login was being skipped, trying to add it back in by selecting the default storyboard gave me "unwrapping a nil optional" errors, which took a little while to figure out what was going on. This, to me, again is changing too much in the platform that even the basic launching of a screen now needs to be changed. It will be confusing while trying to build a new team who may or may not know the tech.

- I'm concerned about hiring new staff and having to make sure that they know this, can learn it or are even happy to do so.

- I'm concerned about having a decrease in the community size to debug issues. Had horrible experiences with this in the past with hybrid tech.

- I'm concerned with bugs being introduced or patterns being changed in the tool itself. Because it changes and touches everything, it will be a nightmare to rip it out or use something else and we'll be stuck with the issue. This seems to have happened with ReactiveCocoa where they made a change to their approach that seems to have caused a divide in the community, with people splitting off into other tech.

- In this app we have base Swift, with RxSwift and RxCocoa on top, with AlamoFire on top of that, with Moya on that and RxMoya on top again. This to me is too much when only looking at basic screens and networking. I would be concerned that moving to something more complex that we might end up with a tonne of dependencies.

- There seems to be issues with the server (nothing to do with RxSwift) but the errors seem to be getting caught by RxSwift and turned into very vague and difficult to debug console logs. "RxSwift.RxError error 4" is not great. Now again this could be a "way its being used" issue as oppose to an issue with RxSwift itself. But again were back to a big middle layer sitting between me and what I want to access. I've already had issues with login seeming to have 2 states, success or wrong password, meaning its not telling the user whats actually wrong. Now i'm not sure if this is bad dev or bad tools, but I get a sense RxSwift is contributing to it in some fashion, at least in this specific use of it.

I'll leave it there for now, any opinions or advice would be appreciated.

I just have to rant...

7 months ago, I was still a pretty new iOS developer, but finally coming into my own. My boss gave me my first feature ever... a fully custom backend tweaker for our development builds, complete with text fields that devs and testers alike could fill in themselves for whatever they needed to test. I worked harder on that than I’ve ever worked on anything... and I got to make all the decisions on how it looked, behaved, what exactly the user saw/read... everything.

A month ago the most senior dev on my team was asked to update the tool to prepare for a backend migration to a new server. He was then hired to work for Apple, hurried to finish this task, and left forever. (He deserves it, we probably were slowing him down realistically. But that doesn’t forgive the following...)

Unfortunately, he thought it’d be a good idea to remove my entire custom backend tool in the process. Not sure why— maybe he thought it was legacy code or something. He must not have tested either, because the entire backend selector stopped working after that. But that was no problem— I could fix the pre-filled environment buttons just by updating a few values.

It’s the fact that he removed 100+ lines of my custom code from 3 separate classes (including entirely removing one of those classes), for no known reason, and now I have to completely rebuild the feature. Since it was entirely custom, it required no change for our migration in the first place. But he rewrote how the entire view works by writing an entirely new VC, so there is no chance I can just restore my work as it was written.

And in the shared class, he erased every line with the word “custom.” So, so many lines of hard work, now irrelevant and only visible in old defunct versions. And my boss has asked me to “just make it look how it did before the migration.”

I know it’s useless to be angry at a guy who’s long gone, but damn. I am having a real hard time convincing myself to redo all this work. He removed every trace, and all I can think is WHY DID YOU DO THAT YOU FUCKING MONSTER? IT WAS MY GREATEST WORK, AND NOBODY ASKED YOU TO DESTROY IT. THIS WAS NOT EVEN RELATED TO THE TASK YOU WERE GIVEN, AND NOW A SIMPLE TICKET TO RESTRUCTURE A TOOL HAS BECOME A MANDATE TO REBUILD IT FROM SCRATCH.

Thank you for being here, devRant. I would’ve gotten myself into deep trouble long ago if I didn’t have this safe place to blow off steam 🙏

Let's talk about the cargo cult of N-factor authentication. It's not some magic security dust you can just sprinkle onto your app "for security purposes".

I once had a client who had a client who I did server maintenance for. Every month I was scheduled to go to the site, stick my fingerprint in their scanner, which would then display my recorded face prominently on their screens, have my name and purpose verified by the contact person, and only then would the guards let me in.

HAHA no of course not. On top of all of that, they ask for a company ID and will not let me in without one.

Because after all, I can easily forge my face, fingerprints, on-site client contact, appointment, and approval. But printing out and laminating a company ID is impossible.

---

With apologies to my "first best friend" in High School, I've forgotten which of the dozens of canonicalisations of which of your nicknames I've put in as my answer to your security question. I've also forgotten if I actually listed you as my first best friend, or my dog - which would actually be more accurate - and actually which dog, as there are times in my High School life that there were more tails than humans in the house.

I have not forgotten these out of spite, but simply because I have also forgotten which of the dozen services of this prominent bullshit computer company I actually signed up for way back in college, which itself has been more than a decade ago. That I actually apparently already signed up for the service before actually eludes me, because in fact, I have no love for their myriad products.

What I have NOT forgotten is my "end of the universe"-grade password, or email, or full legal name and the ability to demonstrate a clear line of continuity of my identity from wherever that was to now.

Because of previous security screwups in the past, this prominent bullshit company has forced its users to activate its second, third, and Nth factors. A possibly decade-old security question; a phone number long lost; whatever - before you can use your account.

Note: not "view sensitive data" about the account, like full name, billing address, and contact info. Not "change settings" of the account, such as changing account info, email, etc. Apparently all those are the lowest tier of security meant to be protected by mere "end of the universe"-grade passwords and a second factor such as email, which itself is likely to be sold by a company that also cargo cults N-factor auth. For REAL hard info, let's ask the guy who we just showed the address to "What street he lived in" and a couple others.

Explaining this to the company's support hotline is an exercise in...

"It's for your security."

"It's not. You're just locking me out of my account. I can show you a government ID corroborating all the other account info."

"But we can't, for security."

"It's not security. Get me your boss."

...

"It's for security."

Colleagues cannot seem to grasp that allowing a user to manually update a field via an Api, that only business process should update is a bad idea.

The entire team of around 10 'software developers' cannot grasp that just because the frontend website won't set it doesn't mean its secure. I have tried many times now...

Just an example honestly... Our project follows a concrete repository pattern using no interfaces or inheritance, returning anaemic domain models (they are just poco) that then get mapped into 'view models' (its an api). The domain models exist to map to 'view models' and have no methods on them. This is in response to my comments over the last 2 years about returning database models as domain transfer objects and blindly trusting all Posts of those models being a bad idea due to virtual fields in Ef.

Every comment on a pull request triggers hours of conversation about why we should make a change vs its already done so just leave it. Even if its a 5 minute change.

After 2 years the entire team still can't grasp restful design, or what the point is.

Just a tiny selection of constant incompetence that over the years has slowly warn me down to not really caring.

I can't really understand anymore if this is normal.

I take a moment for myself and assess the situation from a bird's view.

Then, I objectively look at the current situation and my response/reaction to this and try to change my thinking process/acting to a more rational one.

But, also, my general way of thinking in the cyber security world plus how I'm hardwired to think in a 'paranoid' kind of way makes my current job so fucking perfect for me that i often think about that and the fact that there aren't many people around who have this.

Below is a transcript from work Slack today. Only the names and some code are changed. It ended up causing a bit of drama. DevRanters, what do you take from this?

---

Delivery Lead:
Hey Gang. What's the blocker for FEATURE-123?

Dev1:
FEATURE-122 crashed on iOS app when viewing Feature Introduction page.

Teach Lead:
I've talked about this with Dev1 on a side channel.
And diagnosed the stack trace.
It looks like there is/was some bad handling of a List in the Feature Introduction view logic.
But this is confined to changes that Dev2 is still working on.
(It's not present in master)
Dev2, what's your current position on this?

Dev2:
I have tested at my end with Dev1 but it seems to be working fine

Tech Lead:
There is a race condition related to the use of someList.first()
My guess is that theres a Flow of those lists defined, with an initial value of emptyList
And that on your machine, that Flow is updating with a new value quickly enough that it doesn't matter.
But on Dev1's, for whatever reason, it doesn't get there in time, hits the empty list and falls over.
The logic that's performing the first() needs to gracefully handle empty lists as well.

Dev2:
Where is that logic called?

Tech Lead:
Here's the stack trace Dev1 provided in our conversation earlier:
Caused by: kotlin.NoSuchElementException: List is empty.
...
at 3 iosApp 0x00000000 kfun:kotlin.NoSuchElementException#<init>(kotlin.String?){} + 00
at 4 iosApp 0x0000000 kfun:kotlin.collections#first@kotlin.collections.List<0:0>(){0§<kotlin.Any?>}0:0 + 000
...
at 9 iosApp 0x0000000 kfun:kotlin.coroutines.native.internal.BaseContinuationImpl#resumeWith(kotlin.Result<kotlin.Any?>){} + 0000

This line:
kfun:kotlin.collections#first@kotlin.collections.List<0:0>()
...says that it's first() being called on an empty list.

Dev1:
FYI: Dev3/Dev4/myself are seeing the same issue with the same stack-trace above.

Tech Lead:
So Dev2, have you introduced such a call?
Because I checked master branch and there isn't one, in that version of the file.
Ok, I'll check your working branch Dev2
...
Yes you have here:
var processed1 = someList.first()
var processed2 = someList.first()
...
Lines 123, 124.
Solution looks really straightforward guys.

Dev2:
Okay, I will fix that and push the change

Tech Lead:
Check if someList is empty and allow for generating / handling null processedValues in the view.

Now; I'm going to be straight with you here.
This issue has been discussed over several hours today.
I expect that either one of you could have gone through the process I did in the last 10 minutes above, and resolved it in the same way :point_up:

Dev2:
I went on a break and it's not reproducible on my machine

Tech Lead:
I didn't reproduce it on mine either.

Dev1:
Dev2 and myself are now on sharing screen to sort this issue out. Hope to update back later.

Tech Lead:
<Screen shot of diff with changed code>
:point_up: That change should do it.

Dev2:
Already have pushed the change.

Tech Lead:
...just seen it, is good - same approach :ok_hand:
Dev1 please let us know when tested on your machine.

Dev1:
That does it. It fixes the issues. Thank you, Dev2. I will pick it off from here.

Tech Lead:
Glad to hear it guys.

Dev1:
I have to say this that it is not because we are not working on the issue - Dev2 and myself (together with Dev3/Dev4) have been on this issue all this morning. It just difficult to connect the dot when it wasn't reproducable on Dev2's machine. I brought the issue up because I wanted to switch to working on other tickets while waiting for this to resolve. Still thank you largely for Dev2's work and your keen eyes that spot and resolve the issue quickly.

Tech Lead:
Noted Dev1.
I think the take-away has to be to read the stack-trace carefully... don't worry - we've all been guilty of not reading the error in full, at some point.
The stack trace said that the 'first' element is being referenced from an empty list - that's just logically impossible, right?
Looking for that call to first, we saw it wasn't in the code before, and is after (two of them, in fact).
So then we ask ourselves, how can we deal with an empty list - and then solution almost presents itself.
It didn't really take reproduction of the error to resolve.
Maybe working with a new tech stack creates an anxiety that every issue faced will have a complex solution related to that stack; but I think you'll agree, this particular issue really just required a deep breath and your trusty 'debugging skills 101'... don't lose them! :smiling_face:

every day I see full stack here and there...
full stack is not only db and code, but also "every step the bit goes through " from end user's screen/input to server and back to him
whether is an app or service, end user is only an example.

it's about knowing how the language behaves, how the server interprets and replies to requests, protocols, even how to do every single configuration on the systems you are using, and in my point of view that includes hardware.

pretty much that...

I get sic when I see on a resume claiming "I'm a full stack dev" and there's nothing on it saying that the guy knows at least to change a light bulb... lol
Even worse, when I see job offers asking for "Full stack Dev, with no experience" ...

that's not possible without experience ! sorry

So I've been working a project while now. last week we got a lot of changes from the client and the boss suggest we pull one of the senior devs from another project to help out. All good...until I checked the code...WTF!
For ex we have a method that checks and update weather info, if required, and returns a view(100 lines of code). so the client wants the weather to display differently in certain areas. exactly same data and everything just the view to look different. easy right..? Mr "senior" dev duplicates the method each time and just change the return statement to a different view...Fuck me right? Oh and 90% of CSS statements ends with !important. senior my fucking ass!

So there seems to be a lot of discussion lately about the closing of background apps on Android. Now, I expect a decent amount of disapproval from this, but I happen to be one of those people BECAUSE I've experienced that it drains my battery more to have them running.

Since I genuinely trust y'all quite a lot compared to how much one should trust the internet in general, I'd like some more proper and reliable info (or as reliable as it can get) on this. If I'm indeed wrong I want you to convince me.

I just came home from opening of the fiscal year of a small drivers' club and it was quite an amazing life experience.

I got about a 5-times "rise" for a first, small, post-due-time project.

All of the members were so relaxed in one of the most serious moments of an association. We ate, drank beer and had as much fun as possible without break the law and other rules.

The story goes like this:

I was an intern in a website development company as students tend to do. In middle of the internship my teacher asked me if I'd be willing to develop a website to the before mentioned organization.
School will help with the money by being as a middle-man. It wasn't going to pay much, about 120€ or so, it's nothing really for the job, but I said yes for the experience. We organized a meeting, school provided the space, and went straight to the business.

The development went quite well: I got the final design requirements late (there weren't too much), research a lot about CMS:s, ended up with a beta version CMS (a risk), learned it, developed some plugins (not published yet), kept copyrights for most of the work and so on.

I was done _relatively_ quickly with the project and was quite happy with it. Only things still pressing my mind was bugs of the beta CMS, support for the plugins and my somewhat inexperienced graphical design.

Then it hit me, the world. Hosting, domain transfer, certificates, registry agreements. Arrgh. Most of things were fine, I know them. I had luck that I had a technical contact for the club. It would have been a nightmare of it's own otherwise.

We had problems transferring the domain, again, as you do. The other hosting company was to blame. They were the n00bs here. I went trough the law, technical guidance, etc. I was having heavy messaging with my technical contact about it, who was a middle-man for me and the hosting firms.
After a long while loop of waiting, reconfiguring, researching and messaging, until he transfer was finally over.

We had a long while of radio silence after some bug fixes. Until the Christmas came and I was invited to a Christmas party in a cottage, third Christmas party that year. It was great fun. We ate, drank, talked, went to sauna and had a playful adult stiga or sledging competition, etc.
I updated the site yet again, a stable version of the CMS were published. Yess!

Another radio silence came and year changed. It was broken off by a call to the opening of the fiscal year, the same day. This is today, or yesterday by now. This was just after my current company's board game night. I was really busy that day. A whole afternoon of second-hand shopping around the city with a bike. I counted 35 kilometers. Yes I go by bike, don't own a car or have an driving license... Yet.

I wasn't horribly late, around 30 minutes. I started eating and drinking. Free food and beer! They was also late, they should've got trough the business before I got there, before eating. So I ate and listened. Learned more about having business or an association in general. Until my matter came to be heard. They thanked me of the co-operation and made public the change of my reward sum, I WAS GRANTED 500€ REWARD for the work. It's still not an amazing sum in a larger point of view, but I can imagine that it's big deal for a small non-profit organization, which was loosing money. Everybody applauded, every 25 members of the club. I was greatly pleased. I will have to update their site a bit still, but they are going to pay the reward ASAP.

Did I mention that the school works around the taxes, legally. Taxes for the reward, if it were assumed as a wage would be 15%, for me, at the worst case scenario, only for getting the money to my hands.

I was offered another gig at the event, but didn't promise anything yet. I left before sauna, so we didn't get to change contact details. He will find a way to reach me if he really wants so. I'm a busy free man.

So I have a friend. One of few who I can freely speak with using my natural language (so that means, narrow down topics to IT, mix some of my native language, mix in lot of english and mixture of our favourite languages terms (don't ask me how it works, but it works brilantly and its actually easier to communicate)). And its true friend, seriously.

But when we meet, 80% of time we spent together, every, single, fucking time we argue (in cultural maner, its more of discussion) about what enviroment and what languages have advantages against others. And it pisses the fucking hell out of me, when he takes his enviroment, takes his problems with exac his enviroment, and applies his favourite solutions to it, and goes on how they are fucking awesome and brilliant, and than I reply, sure in my enviroment if I ever had XYZ problem, I wouldn't say use mongo DB becouse I can do it my way, and it would work well too, but it's not really the way I really should solve XYZ problem, becouse in my enviroment you dont have it in the first place. And he will fucking go on, but at least he understands my solutions and finds various details where HIS solution works better. His solution to his problem vs my solution to non-existant problem.

But that's actually an example of much grander thing that I want to rant about. You see, that's not all that bad, we keep it civil and we somewhat enjoy these discussions even if often times, they are pointless. It's like playing games and shit like that, so it's not the point, I just used the example to make it clear what I mean later down the line.

So, to the actual point. What the living fucking fuck is wrong with people, for living fucks sake they cannot physically, mentaly, virtually or otherwise change mindset and point of view if they are telling YOU what to fucking do, what's better to do, etc.
What the fuck! You have around 0.1% of context that is in my head, and my solution works with most of it and your bearly manages to deal with your given 0.1%, so kindly please for living hell, fuck off telling me what to do, what is better in my fucking situation etc. You don't know most of shit I know about my own situation (dosent apply to people with coma and heavy mental issues, sorry its not 100% universal) that I know, yet you have something in your brain that fucking allows you (dosent tell you "its no-go lol") to try push thru your shit to me like it was your fucking life. It's not.

And to be clear, before someone gets sad becouse I was to broad and generic. If you giving advice you can do it properly. And there are people who legit have mindset "well, if I was you and known what you told me, I would do XYZ", but for what the living fuck reason most of people I know have more mindset of "Do XYZ coz fuck you if you dont, coz dat is my opinion and shit and I dont give a living fuck if it does what you want"

In these days I was a bit sad. I wasn't satisfied of my works, by my website, by everything that i did. 3 days ago I started a little project for the hosting where I work and... wow I didn't believe that i could create something like that... I just love it, I redone my website(I have to finish the responsive 😂) and I learned a lot of things about flask.

I want to say that a little things can change your point of view. It can make you feel better. I'm happy now.

"Tips" are fucking stupid. Any waiter or anyone who expects me to "tip" them is a fucking clown hobo. Full disrespect

You're telling me i should pay you extra money or else you're not gonna do YOUR job right? A job where you already receive stable monthly salary?

Whoever standardized "tipping" is a fucking CLOWN. Must have been a restaurant business paying billions for this marketing scam to normalize as if tipping 2$ is normal

Who the fuck are you? Are you my fucking friend? A relative? A family member? Why the fuck should i pay you extra money just because you want some extra money?

Guess what fucktard. I want some extra money too. Has anyone ever tipped me in my job? No. Has a client or will a client who paid for a software i develop ever tell me "hey youve done such a great job heres some extra $$$"? No. Will a client ever tell me "hey your software earned me 100k$ heres a $100 tip or a $1000 tip"? NO

If i dont get tips Fuck you. Rough world and live with it.

Anyone who wants or expects tips I immediately view him as:
- beggar
- gypsy
- homeless

What the fuck are you gonna do with 2$ 5$ 10$ tip bro? You're broke and your job sucks go and learn some skill and you might earn more if you're so stubborn about a tip

Today i paid for coffee $7 but the price was 6.25$. Expecting a change, the waiter just went off. I told him give me my fucking 0.75$ back you fuck. And so he did. But he gave me back 0.7$. Where the fuck is my 0.05$????? Fucking retard. You want to take extra money from me just for a COFFEE. YOURE HOMELESS BRO TF U GONNA DO WITH 5 CENTs???

Also the reason why i get so pissed off about this is

1) The other day i was at some other coffee shop also paying for coffee. Dont remember the price but i paid. However i miscalculated. I paid 0.10$ less than i was supposed to. She was standing there and telling me I'm missing 10 Fucking cents. Confused, i calculated again and realized i made a mistake. So i round it up to 1$ instead of 0.10$ and she kept everything instead of giving me the change of 0.90$. So its NOT ok that you're a gypsy for not accepting the payment because its missing 10 cents, but its TOTALLY fine that you take 0.90$ extra money just because you want to. GET FUCKED

2) The other day i was in a store buying food. At the cashier i paid $27. However i was missing 0.02$. The cashier told me do you have 0.05$ to coverup the missing funds. In disbelief, i was looking at her could not believe my fucking eyes what she asked. How fucking POOR can you get. I gave her more than 2 fucking cents and proceeded with my shit

Very valuable shit i learned from these stories: NO ONE will give a shit to accept a payment even if its missing 1 FUCKING CENT. But its totally fine that they dont return me however much they dont want to.

How about you sometimes fucking say "hey i know you you come to this store very often heres a discount"???

Or "its fine that you dont have 0.01 fucking dollars, you can take your food"???

Or "hey i seen you buy here often heres a fucking discount just for you today"????

Because of that i have decided to take ALL of my fucking hard earned money and ask for the exact change. I dont give a FUCK just as much as THEY dont give a FUCK.

For reference:
0.01$ = 1 in my currency
0.90$ = 90 in my currency
27$ = 2900 (4 figures) in my currency

My currency is shit. My country is shit. People in my city are shit. The whole vibe here is shit. And perhaps that is why i shit so much because i get stuffed with too much daily BULLSHIT

Holy fuck I'm tired of domain.com... I bought my domain with them about a year ago, and quickly I discovered how shit they are.

I can almost never access the console, the default view most of the time loads, although even that is incredibly slow. When the console loads, all settings regarding my domain are just loading. Every once in a blue moon I can actually access the settings and do something.

I got tired of it, and started transferring the domain to Cloudflare. That's where I messed up, and didn't know I had to verify the transfer twice, so the domain ended up expiring during the transfer process. Now domain.com has my domain completely locked down, pointing it to one of those 'expired' nameservers.

So three days ago I thought fuck it, I'll pay domain.com to renew the domain, maybe that'll get the domain transferred, or at least get my domain open again, so I can receive emails again, because in all my nerdiness I decided to set up a custom email using 'name@customdomain.com'. So I haven't been able to receive any emails for two weeks now.

Anyway, three days later the status of the domain is still 'pending renewal', and I can't for the life of me figure out how something like this isn't completely automated, and the domain isn't just working again.

So just now I decided to contact their live chat, and even they can't change the nameservers on my domain, and I have to be transferred to a specialist, who will then contact me by mail within 24-48 hours. Fuck I hate domain.com, and I'll certainly never buy from them again

Gradle,Android Studio

Boss: Great job can we change the UI by using a custom view..
Me:Hesitating a bit sure we can.Head back to my station and consult Stack overflow and start implementing.
Boss:Five minutes later you done and how is it so far.
Me:Am done am just rebuilding and cleaning my project yet in reality ain't done.Gradle built time to my rescue.
Boss:How comes it taking long yet you got a high end machine okay then let it built.
Me: Breathing a sigh of relief thanks gradle

Sometimes in our personal projects we write crazy commit messages. I'll post mine because its a weekend and I hope someone has a well deserved start. Feel free to post yours, regex out your username, time and hash and paste chronologically. ISSA THREAD MY DUDES AND DUDETTES
--
Initialization of NDM in Kotlin
Small changes, wiping drive
Small changes, wiping drive
Lottie, Backdrop contrast and logging in implementation
Added Lotties, added Link variable to Database Manifest
Fixed menu engine, added Smart adapter, indexing, Extra menus on home and Calendar
b4 work
Added branch and few changes
really before work
Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/master'
really before work 4 sho
Refined Search response
Added Swipe to menus and nested tabs
Added custom tab library
tabs and shh
MORE TIME WASTED ON just 3 files
api and rx
New models new handlers, new static leaky objects xd, a few icons
minor changes
minor changesqwqaweqweweqwe
db db dbbb
Added Reading display and delete function
tryin to add web socket...fail
tryin to add web socket...success
New robust content handler, linked to a web socket. :) happy data-ring lol
A lot of changes, no time to explain
minor fixes ehehhe
Added args and content builder to content id
Converted some fragments into NDMListFragments
dsa
MAjor BiG ChANgEs added Listable interface added refresh and online cache added many stuff
MAjor mAjOr BiG ChANgEs added multiClick block added in-fragment Menu (and handling) added in-fragment list irem click handling
Unformatted some code, added midi handler, new menus, added manifest
Update and Insert (upsert) extension to Listable ArrayList
Test for hymnbook offline changing
Changed menuId from int to key string :) added refresh ...global... :(
Added Scale Gesture Listener
Changed Font and size of titlebar, text selection arg. NEW NEW Readings layout.
minor fix on duplicate readings
added isUserDatabase attribute to hymn database file added markwon to stanza views
Home changes :)
Modular hymn Editing
Home changes :) part 2
Home changes :) part 3
Unified Stanza view
Perfected stanza sharing
Added Summernote!!
minor changes
Another change but from source tree :)))
Added Span Saving
Added Working Quick Access
Added a caption system, well text captions only
Added Stanza view modes...quite stable though
From work changes
JUST a [ush
Touch horizontal needs fix
Return api heruko
Added bible index
Added new settings file
Added settings and new icons
Minor changes to settings
Restored ping
Toggles and Pickers in settings
Added Section Title
Added Publishing Access Panel
Added Some new color changes on restart. When am I going to be tired of adding files :)
Before the confession
Theme Adaptation to views
Before Realm DB
Theme Activity :)
Changes to theme Activity
Changes to theme Activity part 2 mini
Some laptop changes, so you wont know what changed :)
Images...
Rush ourd
Added palette from images
Added lastModified filter
Problem with cache response
works work
Some Improvements, changed calendar recycle view
Tonic Sol-fa Screen Added
Merge Pull
Yes colors
Before leasing out to testers
Working but unformated table
Added Seperators but we have a glithchchchc
Tonic sol-fa nice, dots left, and some extras :)))
Just a nice commit on a good friday.
Just a quickie
I dont know what im committing...

This is the story of probably the least secure CMS ever, at least for the size of it's consumer base. I ran into this many years ago, before I knew anything about how websites work, and the CMS doesn't exist anymore, so I can't really investigate why everything behaved so strangely, but it was strange.

This CMS was a kind of blog platform, except only specially authorised users could view it. It also included hosting. I was helping my friend set it up, and it basically involved sending everybody who was authorized a email with a link to create an account.

The first thing my friend got complaints about was the strange password system. The website had two password boxes, with a limit of (I think) 5 characters each. So when creating a account we recomended people simply insert the first 5 characters in the first box, and the rest in the second. I can not really think of a good explanation for this system, except maybe a shitty way to make sure password are at least 5 characters? Anyway, since this website was insecure the password was emailed to you after the account was created. This is not yet the WTF part.

The CMS forced sidebar with navigation, it also showed the currently logged in users. Except for being unreadable due to a colorful background image, there where many strange behaviors. The sidebar would generally stay even when navigating to external websites. Some internal links would open a second identical sidebar right next to the third. Now, I think that the issue was the main content was in an iframe with the sidebar outside it, but I didn't know about iframe's back then.

So far, we had mostly tested on my friends computer, which was logged in as the blog administrator. At some point, we tried testing with a different account. However, the behavior of sidebars was even stranger now. Now internal links that had previously opened a second, identical sidebar opened a sidebar slightly different from the first: One where the administrator was logged in.

We expirimented somewhat, and found that by clicking links in the second sidebar, we could, with only the login of a random user, change and edit all the settings of the site. Further investigation revealed these urls had a ending like ?user=administrator2J8KZV98YT where administrator was the my friends username. We weren't sure of the exact meaning of the random digits at the end, maybe a hash of the password?

Despite my advice, my friend decided to keep using this CMS. There was also a proper way to do internal links instead of copying the address bar, and he put a warning up not to copy links to on the homepage. Only when the CMS shut down did he finally switch to a system where formatting a link wrong could give anybody admin access.

I wasn't happy with one of our UI views for editing a database query that consisted of about 50 fields ("editing" being the operative term here, not just viewing. It had to be two-way). Everything was hardcoded and defined manually, with each block of ~10 lines being repeated and mostly identical apart from the occasional double inline field and name of the variable. It had "just ended up that way" over time due to the variable names in the UI being different than the names of the variables that came from the API.

I decided to overhaul it all where I defined the different input components and which fields should be included, then made a function which would generate the page based on these definitions. It was about 500 lines of modularized functions and classes where the class for the actual view was about 50 lines- compared to the 1400+ lines of the previous version.

But, it didn't work. It should, but it "just didn't". There was no error. All I got was a blank, solid white page. I could make a drastic change or try something completely different and I would get the same error, same blank page. API fetch succeeded, value assignments succeeded, the object exists, but if you iterated it it was... empty.

I started getting really discouraged that I had made it too abstract. Maybe I actually made it more complex and unreadable than before. Maybe just hardcoding it all was the better solution after all. Maybe I had gone against KISS and overdesigned it.

I was up pretty late and everyone had gone home. When the last guy left there was that mood where "yeah if I can't make this work we'll just use the current version...".

Turns out I had tried iterating over a property of the set of fields to render, rather than the entire collection. In the old method the variables were a member of an object, but now they were its own object, a change I had made to isolate the set of values which were to be viewed/edited and make them easier to pass back and forth. This member existed since I hadn't cleaned it out yet, but it was empty.

I had been banging my head against this for a whole day and I was ready to admit I had made a mistake and wasted my time before discarding it all, but then I backspaced this one property and the interface went from empty to rendering perfectly and with all functionality intact. I swear god rays were coming out of my screen.

I'm currently having a problems sleeping my inner philosopher just keeps thinking about various things. I wanna try to write some of them down as an simply to see what will happen.

I'll write my opinion down as honest as possible so feel free to disagree, but point out what I should rethink, if you want me to consider it.

To me respect has to be earned. I think especially on the internet many people try to skip this crucial step when they try to get respect. Most often when they want an opinion or their ideals to be respected. Most of the time it doesn't even feel like they want to be respected, but rather accepted.

There's nothing wrong with accepted in my opinion, but there are several approaches to get to this point and I despise some of them.

Earning acceptance by earning respect is one of the right ways to do it. Working hard towards your goals, showing your individual strength, standing behind your ideals. These are things I can respect.

I should also mention that these Ideals should be concrete, based on rational thought and a general good will or you will just twist my words to say that I support e.g. IS, Stalin's politics ect.

On a side node, I think it'd be wrong to disrespect everything Stalin did, since, from an economical point of view, he pushed Russia forward by quite a bit.

Then on the other side I see crybabies. People who want to be accepted, without putting effort in their ideals. Most of the time not even aiming for acceptance through respect, but through pity. Honestly, that's all they're going to get from me.

Pity, for their petty ideals.

Basically all I ever see these people doing is attention whoring and practicing multiple deadly sins at once.

Wrath, jealousy, sloth, pride, greed and optionally also gluttony.

Lust is rather a separate package. When I think about it, I link it mostly to horny teens and "send bob and vegane" type of stuff.
Gluttony being powered by sloth or vice versa, enhancing it.

The clear image I have in mind, while I write about this packages of deadly sins however, is that of a jealous person, complaining / getting angry about something they could change change themselves, but want them to be changed for them. Mostly through social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and whatever the fuck Tumblr is supposed to be.

"I wanna be rich, why is <person> richt but I'm not? This world is so unfair 😡". Have you tried working towards becoming rich?

"I don't don't feel pretty. Accept me". Accept yourself. Done.

"I don't like <person or organization>'s doing". If that's the whole message, all you probably did so far is complaining or crying. Sweet tears.

Stuff like that can happen to any person, just like any person makes mistakes.
Mistakes are made to learn from them. If you realize realize and accept your mistakes others may do so as well and forgive you.

But we are he towards this idiotic trend where people just can swallow their pride even for microscopic things. They instead push their pride to higher levels of ignorance, blaming other people, l(ying)mfao, creating black holes of density in the process. Makes me wonder whether their real motive is an inside bet on who can get the most people to kill them selves by face palming.

Most of my life I have been fairly protected against these people, besides some spikes of incompetence, but recently the have invaded 2 areas in my world that make the world somewhat less of a pain. Programming and the internet culture.

Yes, I'm talking about that master / slave BS renaming and article 11 and 13.

The remaking itself isn't really the problem, but rather the context. This was basically a show of power for the self proclaimed "social justice warriors" or SJW for short.

The fact that this madness has spread. That's what worries me. To me it feels like the first zombie has spawned.

Then we have this corrupted piece of incompetent shit, called Axel Voss, and other old farts.

They live in a galaxy far away from reality, somewhere in the European Parlament, making laws they don't know shit about, regulating things they know shit about.

All in the name of the people of the EU of course. And by people we obviously talk about the money.

I can honestly not think of another reason, after reading the replies Voss and his party gave on Twitter regarding the shit they pulled off.
Well, at least none that doesn't involve some firm of brain death.

For now I'll show them as much as possible how much I despise / reject them. Currently playing with the thought of some kind (social media?) website were posts from other sites or actions in general can be rated only with "Fuck you"s.
Given these articles, I should not have them hosted in an European country though 😅.

Almost hitting that 5k character limit 😰

"Averice - a serial novel"

2021 - found on the remnents of an old 'youtube' server rack.

A gaunt but handsome man walks into the view finder. Adjusts the camera. "Hi guys and girls." he smiles weakly. rubs his blonde unshaved stubble, running his hand over his mouth, inhaling as if trying to find the right words.

"How can I say this. god. ...americas fucked and rapidly going down the shitter,
college is a fucking scam,
all success in the modern day is based on fraud, bullshit, mythmaking, and "who you know."

we're on the verge of a new cold war, the merger of the fed and the treasury combine with negative oil is the legit death signal of the petrodollar, we're gonna go through a *50% haircut* in living standards and a doubling of taxes on *everything* in the next six months, the tech bubble is gonna burst taking with it half the industry jobs overnight, the credit bubble will burst even as the fucking stock market climbs higher, a quarter or more of all retail will shut down leaving empty assets turning every state property market into the equivalent of fucking detroit. MAD as a protective doctrine is dead with the spread of hypersonic weapons so enjoy living with the constant threat of being obliterated without warning, my entire generation basically has no meaningful or stable future to look forward to, and none of us have really had an actual, genuine say in anything involving society for decades."

He exhalled visibly on camera, as if exhausted by the demons of anxiety he'd poured forth, a torrent of fears, uncertainties, and revelations like the tormented ghost of christmas past

A long pull from a bottle of southern comfort.

"look. we have an out of control intelligence apparatus that are in their operation more orwellian than the real life stasi ever were, a government at both the federal and state level thats made of millionaires and billionaires who give no fucks at all except for their own power, out of control and absolutely dogshit-corrupt *local* leaders, nothing is audited, nothing is meaningfully transparented, rampant fraud, destruction of evidence, witness tampering, railroading, intimidation, violence, threats of violence, skyrocketing cost of living, skyrocketing spending, skyrocketing taxes, skyrocketing policies of total control by police, skyrocketing homelessness, fatherlessness, poverty, political corruption, drug abuse, massive politically funded thinly veiled state propaganda, collapsing and decaying infrastructure, the loss of all tradition, culture, community cohesion we might have had, and on and on and on and on.

and all I want right now is to get my dick sucked. drink a beer and blow my motherfucking brains out.

and when people start fighting in the streets over some bullshit and it turns into race riots, because the motherfuckers in the media serving wallstreet always make it about race or some stupid shit like that, I wont be in america to put up with it.

do us all a favor. when you're hanging bankers, hang some fucking journalists too. they never tell the truth. doesnt matter which side they are on
they only divide people and advocate for more of the same bullshit, expanded state powers, more federal dollars, more workers for their campaign, more privileges. they're fucking cancer. yes even your favorite journalist. they're a tumor on society.

our government has become hostile to us even being *alive* anymore. it has for me become intolerable, and in time I have grown to hate it.

there is no way to change it. no way to salvage it. I cannot see any hope for the future anymore. And if you search yourself I know many of you feel the same."

He took another long pull from the bottle.

"we no longer have a voice in america and no means to air our grievances peacefully.

theres nothing in it left worth saving when it all can be taken away at a moments notice by a deaf and hostile bureucratic government. I should have voted for bernie last year. At least he would have destroyed it.

many of you will disagree with this sentiment, thinking things can still work out. because you still have your creature comforts. your apartment which you cant afford. your car with its maintenace bills and monthly payments you've fallen behind on same as half the country now out of work, but in a short few months, a year at most, you will learn what I have learned, and the reason I drink, what I knew about as early as june of 2019, that this is it. this was as good as it was ever going to get. and that the good days, the best days are behind us. that all that you hold dear could be taken. all that you worked for, was already gone, and you just havent realized it yet. I've set this to autoupload once it's done recording. I built a company just to watch the people who dont want any of us to succeed burn america down around it. Im done. Goodbye america."

The man got up from his chair, camera still recording, and left. Only the red flashing dot remained, the only witness to the silence.

Oh china, you always know how to snap me out of long stints of mundane and/or annoying, chore-esq work.
//...and letting me excuse a 10min, otherwise purely wrong procrastination down a current political rabbit hole

I gotta say, at least in china they are bold enough to put their image and identity on whatever they make... but in that 'im selling pseudo-sex, not because im sexy--just the opposite, so you know I relate' way.

Side note: i got an automated spam call survey yesterday*... it ot got to the 1st (of claimed 3) question.. which had a surprising amount of actual reiterations before looping... it was determined to get opinions(and totally incept the lemmings, soccer moms and politically ignorant into their stance, plus intense rage/disgust/dreams of standing on a soap box and fighting about this new issue they were totally unaware of.)... about this actively serving, politician's demand that china sell tiktok or totally stop allowing any operations/use on american soil... because of the heavily implied heinous nature of controlling and twisting society via media to it's explicitly declared communism... even directly called china, as a whole, communists, with impressive dramatics (and i coached public speaking hs and college kids then over a decade of business consulting, typically involving coaching vocals and implicit vocab)

I actually listened to it because it's what a typical subject, brought out of the koolaid fog, would view as ridiculously ironic(assuming they knew the actual, and therefore inherently ironic, def if irony... most dont. It's disturbing)... but it you have decent common sense, and dont emotionally view your entirety as wrong/broken/needing to be fixed in a cult-like manner, it's the oposite of irony. History of/and politics pull this crap all the time. It still works.

It reminds me of how my moniker, awesomeest, came about. In 3rd grade i realised that even adults, knowing they were chatting with an 8yr old, even if they knew/used the correct spelling of a, less common, term... if i misspelled it as if i thought it was right, theyd actually change their spelling to match (in perpetuity) albeit my vocab was easily high school level by then...likely at least in part to my flawless(aka blind/ignorant) demeanor of confidence that whatever i said/thought was totally correct, as a matter of fact. Not like the insecure ppl trying to prove something

I used to find it so comical... now it's just sad.

This bs automated political spam/manipulation is the modern version of i remember of kids farting in the late 90s... the culprit quickly accusing someone else of their offense, but even extra immature kids 25+ yrs ago figured that out... and even made the retort a catchy rhyme..."the one who smelt it, dealt it"

*i basically programmed in a counter attack/something akin to immature passive aggressive ' who"s really the one wasting the other's time and resources now?!? Ha!' ...odd numbers automatically go into a sort of echo chamber instead of ringing, with a manual escape to actually ringing/calling prompt built in.

I can listen in at any time without it having any effecf/sound too.

I'm curious if anyone participates in these minor acts of terrorism to complete an unrequested, intrusive, and human-less format of a proclaimed opinion poll? And if you do, are you honest? Why do you do it?

Annoyance at spam aside... the real victim I mentally mourn, and view it's method of demise akin to a cardinal sin (assuming religion...blah blah)... is the data! I <3 data... good, unobscured, not contrived, simple, pure, raw data... killed before its birth :'(

The monthly subscriptions plans are an open theft of customers money because of variable number of days in a month.

It's basically free money for companies with monthly pricing strategy.

kids posting pics of the school's site after using inspect element to change the HTML code to "suck my dictator" claiming they hacked the website. *thinks of walking up two flights of stairs to the terrace but nahh..*
*finds same pics forwarded to me by my ex classmates saying that my ex schools website was hacked*
well the night's sky is beautiful, at least its a good view from the roof of the building I jump off.
+1's are obsolete now haha I'm invincible I don't need to bow down to this madness

I tend to overengineer. Why? Because I had a view in JavaFX with its controller that had a bunch of key listeners which changed the UI. I wanted to change the view based on wifi connection/no connection with a server, which was managed in a Client class. The controller took the client to give it a message that client then had to send. For "separation of concerns" I created a separate view + controller for the "not connected" state.
Now the Client knew all about the connection, so I put up the Observer pattern and wanted the Main (Application) class to swap the layouts as an Observer of the Client. After an Exception on FX thread and Platform.runLater(), to solve the issue, I faced a new problem: the key presses weren't executed anymore. I still don't know why this happens. Maybe I'm missing something.🤷
Then met with one of my group partners (it's a uni project):
Let's attach the Observer to the original controller. Have only the original view that changes due to the controller updates as Observer. Let's see if that might even remotely work...🤔
It worked🤦😂

(Note for dfox: I love this place and i would really like to have all my posts/ ++s/comment data available to me . Current system does not allow me to see posts more than some months old. is it possible? I hope devrant is not deleting old posts)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Stream of thoughts coming through

#justAthought 1
If you feel you are mentally unique (Not in retarded or disable kind of way, but having a different view of thinking, a different perspective, not-a-sheep-in-a-herd kind of mentality) , then you PROBABLY ARE, its just those who are not that mentally unique will find your thoughts absurd until you are proving yourself to be a successful person.
Even though you feel something is wrong in a current situation, and you can put some valid points in your argument, there would always come a point where your personal failures or average-ness would overshadow your valid points (kind of personal experience than a thought :/ )

#justAThought2 (Disclaimer: i am no fraud guru or priest, just a 9-5 curious , sleepless student-cum-professional)
I sometimes feel that the only good, meaningful goal that i could think for my life would be : to earn enough money to set up a small experiment environment , where I would initially take, around 25-30 people for 1-2 years. It would be an environment with totally $0 value for materialistic things like money, jewels, property,etc . Everyone is living free of tensions of basic services like food, clothes, house, taxes, work to live etc. Together we all will be collectively doing just these things: Making ourselves healthy , and more kind, spiritual towards other humans, animals, plants and environment, and thinking of ways to eradicate the value of "value".
We have already reached a point where we are generating even more harmful Technology than useful tech, how about changing the way of thinking and taking a small pause? I know a lot of people would be reluctant to do any work in such environment, but i believe one day or another, every one of these people has to come back to their usual jobs , but this time, not for money but for humanity.
Do you think this kind of environment is possible for the whole world? Because today most, if not all thinks that money is the ultimate goal. can we change that, and would that change be good?

#justAthought 3 (Disclaimer : 1. Its my mom's thought/whatsapp status , i kind off liked it. she is super religious by the way ^_^! | 2. more relevant for india/multi religious countries 3. for Indians: kind of thought from movie "oh my god")

There should be a regional law during so called "acts of god"(floods, earthquakes, other natural disasters) under which the donations given to religious places(temples, churches, mosques,etc) would be used to provide relief to affected areas.

My side project has been a SPA. One part was to make it "serverless" (folder of markdown and html files for content,config.json, no database). Another part was I wanted anybody to be able to choose whatever theme/framework they wanted and easily be able to change the config file, so I looked for a templating framework... and found PugJs. I choose it solely because I liked the logo :^).

3 days later, after successfully figuring out how to use pugjs on the client side, implementing different templates, and making sure everything loaded in the right order. I tested how big the website was without any content.

Woof.

So I'm just going to use a feature that was already in Bone.io to begin with :^). (Bone.io has a router and a "view mount" feature)

Achieved a 2:2 in computer science and graduating (got interviews with for some jobs). I have some sits in some modules, which could change my grade to a 2:1.

From a company point of view, is it worth going for the 2:1? Will it open more jobs / better salary straight away? Or shall I go for the first job offered with the 2:2 I got.

Everyone here rants about clients, and as far as I understand frustration, I understand client's side too.

For 2 years I have developed a tool for our company, my manager was responsible for outcome and was directly accountable to company's management, which made him a client for our product. Of course requirements changed many times, he pressured us much, but he is nice guy and gave us knowledge why we had to change things again. We had meetings with him, HRs, PMs and others to gain requirements for features to implement and that made me better understand client's point of view.

My point is that when you work for external companies, you only see changing requirements, pressure, deadlines, etc, but don't think that your work is just a part of process - your client is responsible for your delivery, wants to make good impression on superiors or company needs some feature ASAP. He does not have to know tech stuff, he wants outcome to be good and to be fast and cheap - that is business.

And yes - we had to tell people that X is impossible many times, had to tell Y people how things work over and over. It may seem easier when it is your own company, but note that every single employee knew that you developed that tool and you have answers for his questions.