Do any of you guys or gals sit outside and code?

Since 2009 this has been my primary work place (even in the cold and rain), I go to the office for mostly non-coding work and have a pc inside for serious sessions but I'd say 80% of my heads down dev time is spent sitting here. A little quirk is when people call or Skype me they'll immediately say "I can hear birds in the background, where are you??".

Anyway, I'm moving soon and thought I should share while I still can ☺️

So.... My mouse just froze

The Orange Juice Saga ....

I've just come off one of the stupidest calls ever.

Firstly, I am not in tech support, I'm a software developer - read the below with this in mind.

My client called up to say the system I created as been compromised. When he attempts to login, he is logged off his Windows machine.

He'd also apparently taken his PC to ***insert large UK computer superstore here***, who took £100 plus to look at the machine and conclude his needs to buy a new PC.

I remoted into his computer to see WTF was going on.

As he described, visiting my login form did log you out. In fact, whenever you pressed the "L" key you were logged out. Press the "M" key, all windows were minimized. Basically, all Windows hotkeys appeared to be active, without the need to press the Windows key.

Whilst connected to his PC I spent a good 30 minutes checking keyboard settings and came up short.

After asking all the normal questions (has anything changed on your PC, have you installed stuff lately etc.) without any useful answers I got nothing.

I then came across an article stating several presses of the Windows in quick succession will solve the issue.

I got the client to try this, pressed the "L" key (which would have logged me off previously) and the issue was resolved.

Basically, the Windows key was "stuck", which oddly makes your PC kind of useless.

I asked the client if they'd split anything on the keyword whilst working. His exact word were simply lol:

"Oh yer, yesterday, I was trying to drink a glass of orange quickly and split some in the corner of keyboard. I did clean it up quickly though".

Yep, the issue was due to the client spilling orange juice on their keyboard , which in turn made the Windows key stick.

Disaster averted.

A call that started with the client stating I made a system that was easily compromised (i.e. my fault), morphed into a sorry saga of cold drinks.

The client did ask why the ***superstore name*** charged him money for that and recommended a new machine. That is a good question and demonstrated some the questionable tech support practices we see nowadays, even at very large stores.

To be fair to the client, he told me to bill him for half a days work as it was his own fault.

When I'm able to stop myself involuntarily face palming, I'm off for a swim to unwind :)

Reading some of the wk50 rants makes my blood run cold. brrrrr. They're terrifying.

While my story goes just like this.
Didn't know our manager(let's call him R) messaged us in our group chat that he won't make it to office for that day.
My account replied "Let's have moment of silence for those who left us. R, you will be missed. :'( Thank you for everything.".

I didn't notice the message until lunch time and my co-devs (with much back-slapping and laughing) told me I'm a gem. -_-
I just went to get some coffee, forgot to lock my unit and came back a murderer.
AND It was only my 2nd month on the job.

My day.

6 am: 2yo woke up
8:30 am: start work (from home)
11 am: go get breakfast/lunch
11:30 am: work call. while driving. Learn nothing new.
12:00 noon: infuriatingly slow errand
12:30 pm: work call. Learn nothing new.
1 pm: finally get to eat. It's cold. And terrible.
6 pm: 2yo finally goes to sleep (missed nap)
9:20 pm: 2yo wakes up screaming.
9:30 pm: find 3 or 4 tablespoons of leftover tuna in the fridge. No bread.
10:45 pm: I finally finish my work (super-urgent friday-morning release of a next-Wednesday-morning deadline... Yeah idfk.)
11:29 pm: 2yo stops yelling and screaming and goes back to sleep
11:39 pm: finish writing this while in bed.
11:40 pm: Sleep?

Slept terrible the entire week due to a fucking annoying cold.

My turn of being the on call server engineer for a week starts tomorrow.

😭

So yesterday was a regular old day where I came into the office and began my work. My office mate that sits next to me happens to be having an issue with her batch script. It wasn't running correctly so she had decided to call in IT and have them take a look at it. What she was trying to do was process some images through a dedicated super-computer located on site.

So as you can imagine with both of them standing right next to me it was hard not to listen in on their conversation. The IT guy decided to go through a barrage of different troubleshooting methods to figure out what was happening with her script. And soon enough they discovered what was wrong. It happened to be an issue with how Windows decides to deal with new line characters. FYI it looks like this shit "\n \r"

The fucking \r looked like a directory to Linux. So it would squeal to a halt every single time she tried to run.

How this happened was due to her using notepad to edit her batch file.

At this point, I made a comment about her use of Notepad.
"Oh, you're using notepad? I've had similar issues like this in the past when I've used notepad. I really hate notepad." I said with a slight chuckle.

And that was pretty much the end of our encounters. However, at the end of the day, she decided to speak up about this.

"I don't appreciate you making comments about my use of Notepad. That was a form of microaggression towards me, and I don't want you to do it again."

Completely taken aback I replied.
"I'm sorry you took it that way, it was a joke and wasn't meant to be taken personally."

"Well, your intent does not change impact. And by the way, I take pride in my code and scripting. I don't need your commentary about my code nor your micro-aggressions." She said in a huff.

"Well again, I'm sorry you feel that way," I replied back

*I'd like to say that this situation is loosely paraphrased, but the essence of what happened is still there.

At this point, this is what I have to say about this situation. Why the FUCKING FUCK are you using notepad to program anything. There ARE A SHIT TON of differing programs that are available for your use and you decide to use fucking notepad?!?! $%&*@#$^

You could use notepad++, you could use Sublime, you could use every-fucking-thing except Notepad!!! If anything I think I had every right to make a comment about your stupid use of notepad. And darling, your script not working was well deserved, I hope you run into more errors like this because you deserve nothing less for your arrogance. So you can take your opinions and shove them up your fat-ass because at the end of the day I don't give a FUCK about your opinions on my micro-aggressions that you're spouting off about.
I suggest the next time you feel attacked about your code perhaps you should take a cold hard look at yourself before thinking that I'm the one that is the FUCKING problem.

The solution for this one isn't nearly as amusing as the journey.

I was working for one of the largest retailers in NA as an architect. Said retailer had over a thousand big box stores, IT maintenance budget of $200M/year. The kind of place that just reeks of waste and mismanagement at every level.

They had installed a system to distribute training and instructional videos to every store, as well as recorded daily broadcasts to all store employees as a way of reducing management time spend with employees in the morning. This system had cost a cool 400M USD, not including labor and upgrades for round 1. Round 2 was another 100M to add a storage buffer to each store because they'd failed to account for the fact that their internet connections at the store and the outbound pipe from the DC wasn't capable of running the public facing e-commerce and streaming all the video data to every store in realtime. Typical massive enterprise clusterfuck.

Then security gets involved. Each device at stores had a different address on a private megawan. The stores didn't generally phone home, home phoned them as an access control measure; stores calling the DC was verboten. This presented an obvious problem for the video system because it needed to pull updates.

The brilliant Infosys resources had a bright idea to solve this problem:

- Treat each device IP as an access key for that device (avg 15 per store per store).
- Verify the request ip, then issue a redirect with ANOTHER ip unique to that device that the firewall would ingress only to the video subnet
- Do it all with the F5

A few months later, the networking team comes back and announces that after months of work and 10s of people years they can't implement the solution because iRules have a size limit and they would need more than 60,000 lines or 15,000 rules to implement it. Sad trombones all around.

Then, a wild DBA appears, steps up to the plate and says he can solve the problem with the power of ORACLE! Few months later he comes back with some absolutely batshit solution that stored the individual octets of an IPV4, multiple nested queries to the same table to emulate subnet masking through some temp table spanning voodoo. Time to complete: 2-4 minutes per request. He too eventually gives up the fight, sort of, in that backhanded way DBAs tend to do everything. I wish I would have paid more attention to that abortion because the rationale and its mechanics were just staggeringly rube goldberg and should have been documented for posterity.

So I catch wind of this sitting in a CAB meeting. I hear them talking about how there's "no way to solve this problem, it's too complex, we're going to need a lot more databases to handle this." I tune in and gather all it really needs to do, since the ingress firewall is handling the origin IP checks, is convert the request IP to video ingress IP, 302 and call it a day.

While they're all grandstanding and pontificating, I fire up visual studio and:

- write a method that encodes the incoming request IP into a single uint32
- write an http module that keeps an in-memory dictionary of uint32,string for the request, response, converts the request ip and 302s the call with blackhole support
- convert all the mappings in the spreadsheet attached to the meetings into a csv, dump to disk
- write a wpf application to allow for easily managing the IP database in the short term
- deploy the solution one of our stage boxes
- add a TODO to eventually move this to a database

All this took about 5 minutes. I interrupt their conversation to ask them to retarget their test to the port I exposed on the stage box. Then watch them stare in stunned silence as the crow grows cold.

According to a friend who still works there, that code is still running in production on a single node to this day. And still running on the same static file database.

#TheValueOfEngineers

I just got a call from a recruiter asking if I had any recommendations for a company in town. Eight years ago, I met the owner of this company and he seemingly went out of his way to ignore me every time we met. His attitude was cold, unwelcoming, and not a character I ever wanted to associate with.

It's a small world. Please don't burn your bridges before you ever get your company's first round of major funding. Yes, I know a lot of people that might have wanted a position like this, but not with him at the helm.

As much as I wanted to express my disdain for the owner, I hold steadfast that the only respectful answer to this recruiter is to say: "I have no recommendations for this position."

Morning Ritual

1. Start all devices 
2. Check headset status 
3. Check emails 
4. COFFEE <3 
5. First call... 
6. 20 annoying minutes of two people talk to each other without a result 
7. COFFEE <3 ... cold

I've promised to do the Mozilla rant about the whole meritocracy thing a few days ago.. well, this is that. Along with some other stuff along the way. Haven't ranted for a couple of days man, shit happened! But losing 6 days that could've been spent on finishing my power supply project.. to a stupid cold, it got a little bit on my nerves, so that's what I've been working on for the time being. Hopefully I'll be able to finish it up in a couple of days.

1. COCKtail party thingy

Turns out that there's this conference in Brussels in a couple of days about the whole Article 13 copyright stuff. I've been letting a mail to the MEP's about it mature on my systems for a while now.. well, maturing or procrastinating, you be the judge 😛
Now I'm glad that I waited with that though. It's mostly a developer-centric insight into how the directive would be a horrible idea.. think AI, issues with context recognition, Tom Scott's video on Penistone and Scunthorpe etc etc. But maybe I can include some stuff from the event afterwards.
Also, if you're coming to the conference too, do let me know! Little devRant meet while we're at it, it'd be fucking great! I'll try to remember to bring my Christmas ducks, they've got these cute little Santa hats 😋

(P.S.: about the whole COCKtail, I saw the email while drunk and during registration I had to choose an email address.. I figured, feminazis are doing such a great job at going out of their way to find offense in everything, I figured that I'd make their job a little bit easier by sending a COCK bomb in my registration mail address, in the hopes that it finds its way to one of them.. evil, I know XD)

2. The whole feminazi stuff at Mozilla

So Mozilla hates meritocracy now? I've been wanting to rant about the big bad meritocracy for a while now. Thank you Mozilla for giving me an incentive to actually do it!

Meritocracy, feminazis think it's bad because it's about power relationships and discrimination, right? But what if I told you that that is exactly what makes great software great. Good code, good merit, is what's welcomed in software development.. or at least it should be. Because it's a job of fucking knowledge, experience, and quality! Also, meritocracy is a great thing because nobody cares if you're a professional developer in a suit, getting paid to work on a piece of OSS, or a homegamer neonazi who's coding shit in their underwear while wanking to child porn.. nobody fucking cares. If your code, your merit, is good, contribute ahead! Super inclusive, yet apparently bad because bad code is excluded to ensure the health of the project.

So what is the alternative to the big bad meritocracy? Inclusion (or as it's looked like in practice, more like exclusion) based on gender/sex, political orientation, things like that. But not actual fucking merit, the ability to write good code. How the fuck is politics and gender going to be any good at all to an inherently meritocratic craft?! Oh but yeah, it's great for inclusion. It's like females in tech. Artificial growth is just a matter of growth numbers and the only folks who like it are fucking HR and wanketeering cunts, and feminazis. Merit, that's what matters!! And have you ever considered that females are generally not interested in technology? Or for that matter, where's our inclusion movement for men in healthcare?! Gender equality my ass.

That's just my two cents on it of course. Meritocracy shouldn't be abandoned in tech. And even if it's just a matter of calling it something else. How the fuck is it a good idea to not call a pot a fucking pot just because someone might take offense at it?! It's meritocracy, call it fucking meritocracy!!! And while we're at it, call a master a fucking master and a slave a fucking slave!

Got a missed call from a recruitment company today. Called the number back and dude said he didn't know me so I told him the name of this dude that looked at my LinkedIn today. Turns out it's him, lmfao. How many people does this guy cold call on a daily basis?

Top three reasons why I love to code:

1) People will think you are a wizard and feel so afraid of you that they call you nerd and give you a office in a cold basement (especially good in summer times)

2) Your friends call you for every problem they have with their computer and will give you a few bucks or beers in exchange.

3) You can rant about technical stuff and no matter how unfounded the rant is, your non-tech friends will believe everything you say.

It began when I was tasked with creating a better and more engaging experience for our new Facebook page. This was in Facebook's early days, so there were not really any "best practices". We were making it up as we went along. I decided one way would be to game-ify things, since gaming, at the time, was a Big Deal on Facebook and people were starting to use it to build customer funnels.

Grasping for low-hanging fruit, I decided a Tetris variant around our topic would be fun. I had to hire a dev because at the time I was a static HTML web developer just getting into social media management. I knew nothing about game development or how to use Facebook's API for such things.

Long story short, we got about $10,000 (FB app devs came at a premium then) into the project when I came across a very recent article about the history of Tetris games. It said that even though Tetris had once been considered for all intents to be public domain due to it being created by a Russian coder during the Cold War, it had just been acquired by an IP protection entity that was charging royalties for any variant of Tetris created from a specific date onward and paying the original developer. So, even though I thought I had been thorough in my initial permissions checking, it turned out we were gonna be in deep doo-doo with licensing fees and restrictions if we released this game to the public.

I had to call my boss and admit my error. She was FURIOUS and really gave me an ass-chewing over it. I then had to call the marketing person whose budget I'd been slaving away at wasting. She was a bit more forgiving (her budget was in the millions). Then I had to call the corporate legal department and explain what was going on. They told me to immediately pay any outstanding hours, then fire the dev but not before getting him to send me all code and assets, deleting his copy, and then, upon my receipt of those assets, deleting MY copy so that nothing of it ever existed. And I was supposed to say _nothing_ to the dev about why he was being let go, so that there would be no "trail" leading back to this fiasco. (The dev hounded me for weeks asking what he'd done wrong. It killed me that I was bound and gagged by corporate legal and couldn't tell him.)

I was in so much trouble. I was literally in tears over it. I'd never wasted that much money in my life. That incident pretty much sealed my fate as far as any trust my bosses ever put in me again (not much at all). I was a bit of a pariah in a lot of ways for the next 5 years whereas I had come onto the team as a young social media rockstar at first.

After that, and a couple of other bad scenarios that were less my fault and more due to a completely dysfunctional management and reporting structure, they eventually "transferred" me to another team. Which was really just a way of getting rid of me by sending me to a department that was already starting to outsource overseas and lay people off. It was less messy that way. I was in the first set of layoffs.

Since then, I've had a BIG fear of EVER joining a large corporation EVER again. I prefer to work for small businesses now, even if I get paid less. Much less stressful from an office politics and impact of mistakes standpoint.

I made a friend this week through work

She's called Miriam

I know we're friends because we talk every day

5 times a day

Because she keeps calling

Every time she asks for my CEO, I tell her he won't be in until after Christmas but sure enough she calls back an hour and a half later, asking for the same person

But the weirdest part is she's calling from a legitimate, large company. It's not a cold call. So, why?

If anyone works at Proventa, tell Miriam to stop.

Please?

Nobody's fault. It's just my naiveness.

Meeting time is at 1pm.
2 guys from 2 different companies and me.
Guy A and Guy B offices are a bit closer.
Meeting venue is Guy B office.
Guy A confirmed and reminded me about the meeting around 12.
I had my lunch early and left my office at 1230.
Got a call from Guy A while I'm on route.
Guy B forgot the appointment, went out and they have rescheduled it to 530pm.
In the end I had to pay a round trip ride for a taxi.

Well at least it's cold inside the taxi while outside temperature is 38°.

Do not drink a lot of alcohol when you are severely dehydrated.

Much regret.

Must find rag to fill with cold water, wring out, and place over eyes to reacquire that sweet, sweet unconsciousness.

Unrelated, if I haven’t told y’all that you should never Chumbawamba, you should never Chumbawamba. I did it once in uni and it was a super bad time. (Chumbawamba is what I call using Tubthumping as an instruction set. Do not take a whisky drink, then a vodka drink, than a lager drink, then a cider drink, etc etc.)

once upon a time I went on vacation.

It was for 5 days and I went to Leh-Ladakh with my family. (Me, My big bro and my parents.)

It's a beautiful and cold place. Snow and High Mountain and no phone call from anyone.

It was supposed to be no call. But on the 3 days, I got a call from my junior and he said to me that server is not working and it's giving 404 error.

So I told him to go to Cpanel (It was client's server). After 1 hour I got a call back from him and he was not able to fix it.

So I had to open the Cpanel in my Galaxy Note 8, Open file manager, go through all the files and logs and fix it code in 2 or 3 files.

It took 4 hours to fix the problem. But that day I understood the value of my Note 8 and its big screen. Thank you, Samsung.

Note: The lake in the photo is Pangong Lake/

We can do what your saying in a week and spend the following two months redoing it, or, we can help you get your shit straight for a week and do it right in a week. So, 9 weeks versus a two week sprint. Your call Batman. I really don’t care anymore. It’s the holidays, it’s cold, and money is a great fire starter.

Summary of My Experience With Recruiters

1. They do everything until they get a phone talk. They also go cold turkey if they don’t have what you want, no politeness if you are not useful to them.

2. They are OK with your highball salary range at first
3. Once they got that you are hireable, they show their true nature

3a. Trying to lower my forever salary expectation to guarantee an offer and their one time bonus

3b. They scare you implying I would be fired from job anyways, if I don’t like some aspects of the current job

3c. They call you multiple times a week with no scheduling beforehand

3d. They lecture me on why salary shouldn’t be a big reason for job change(bitch don’t even…)

3e. They say shit like I want you to get this job(dude, you say that to every job seeker)

I will add more if I remember. What are your other bad experiences

Anyone ever get cold called through LinkedIn? I had a guy contact me asking could we have coffee. Did some research on him and he seems a pretty successful guy. I was curious so I responded with a time and date.

Met him and he explained his business, what he was doing and what he was looking for. It was a senior position but would involve alot of backend work and team leading. Lots of long hours.. i was very interested but due to other commitments I couldn't take it further, so I politely declined.

Fast forward to 6 months later, he comes back to see if my situation has changed. It has. He says the company is being bought out and being funded for 3 years, he is in the middle of negotiations and its almost done. we begin negotiations and I agree a nice package with benefits. He seems delighted. I am happy.

Nearly 4 weeks later, 3 unanswered messages and an unreturned missed call, I am like wtf!!!

Worst enterprise software experience... I was fresh out of college, and needed money. I was working in a call center, fielding IT helpdesk calls for a major US telecom company, who had just acquired a competitor. One day I got to work and about ten of us were given a new desk, new phone number, an an email address at the newly acquired company. My manager said to us "We have no clue how any of their proprietary systems work, what servers they run on, or how to login to them. Your phones are ringing, make sure you take good notes so the Tier-1s can help out next week. Good luck."

Trial by shit-storm fire, all while trying to convince the caller that yes, I did know what I was talking about. It was a lot of cold calling random employees whose job title in the corporate directory looked even remotely close to somebody I could escalate a ticket to. They didn't use the same ticketing system we used, so it was a lot of copy/pasting between two ticketing systems. To this day, I still have no clue what happened to their original call center staff. I'm sure they must have had one, but it seemingly just dissolved overnight.

That job was the springboard to my development career. I left for a gig in software helpdesk, then to quality assurance, automated testing, and now I'm a senior DevOps engineer. It was worth it.

I just had an Indian guy cold call me. He said his name was "Steve Jones." I mean, I suppose he could be a reverse Aziz Ansari, but somehow I doubt it.

It really annoys me that many tech recruiters do not have a basic knowledge of the roles they are trying to recruit for and what skill set to look for when they cold message/call potential candidates on LinkedIn.

I make it very clear on my profile that I am a Full Stack Engineer. Still, every other day I get messages about Data Engineering, Frontend Dev or SRE roles. Sometimes a recruiter would insist that I schedule a call with them before they tell me the details, and then I would realize after the call what an absolute waste of time it was.

I have a lot of respect for recruiters. It's not an easy job. But I'm starting to strongly believe that tech recruiters should be made to go through a specialized training to make life easy for themselves and to stop wasting time of people who are not even remotely suitable for their requirements.

!dev

I'm on vacation this week but spent yesterday going to the post office for the Nth to follow up on undelivered mail. When got a diff package that said was delivered... But wasn't.

This morning wake up feel sorta sick but was OK, called USPS mail number and waited 1hr to get a person. And they said the post office closed all the cases I raised regarding the missing mail.

They said they will escalate these.. Which and to be just we'll do something, eventually maybe.

After the call I felt tired so went back to bed... Woke up 3hrs later (1pm) and sorta sweaty. Maybe a cold/fever.

I have an hard to schedule appointment with doctor tmr.

So took some meds and now hoping I feel better tmr and don't have COVID..... Just so I don't need to cancel...

And if I do go there only news I expect to hear is they discover some new health problem.

Some vacation this is.... Still gotta deal with the unending onslaught of problems in life....

Incoming phone call from an unknown number. I am busy coding, the number is not in my contacts, and there is no caller ID. Callers could leave a message on my voice box, but most don't. Callers could send me an email or a short message, but most don't. When I google their number, there is either no entry at all, or one of those generic reverse phone book sites called something like "look who's calling" telling me that it's a German number of an unknown ower. I don't get it.
If making outbound cold calls is your profession, why won't you use any of those free trust-building options? Are those people getting paid just for typing numbers into their keyboard and listening to the ring tone?

fuck this shit.
fuck the pile of arcane shit that is ARCore.
fuck the fucking pile of overcomplicated shit that is mapbox.
fuck the idiotic frankensteiny steaming pile of shit that is "arcore+mapbox lifesized maps unity project" or how is it called.

fuck this retarded scammy culture when a company is doing meetups with investors before even having a working prototype.

fuck this stupid fucking culture where there's no time for some actual, sensible, creative work, just grab these two repos from github and ducktape them together and we'll call that our demo which we will present to inverstors.

fuck every fucking molecule of this fucking world.

i just wanted to be creative. to CREATE stuff. CREATE, not pile up dumb half-baked nonprojects made by someone else on top of each other until the smell is too strong for anyone to see if it's actually reasonable or not.

i wanted to create stuff. make games. design and make them. actual interesting ones which have actual value (because fuck the retarded gaming industry who's imagination doesn't go beyond "u a dude who does pew pew to other dudes", but that's a different rant).

fuck this disgusting, retarded, idiotic, boring, lonely, cold, lobotomizedly stupid world where the only way to succeed is a shitty pile of shit scammy scum.

fuck me for not being able to learn how to be scammy scum, so I could be successful too.

I shake my head at companies who think sending me unsolicited emails/texts is going to encourage me to do business with them. :P