As a developer, sometimes you hammer away on some useless solo side project for a few weeks. Maybe a small game, a web interface for your home-built storage server, or an app to turn your living room lights on an off.

I often see these posts and graphs here about motivation, about a desire to conceive perfection. You want to create a self-hosted Spotify clone "but better", or you set out to make the best todo app for iOS ever written.

These rants and memes often highlight how you start with this incredible drive, how your code is perfectly clean when you begin. Then it all oscillates between states of panic and surprise, sweat, tears and euphoria, an end in a disillusioned stare at the tangled mess you created, to gather dust forever in some private repository.

Writing a physics engine from scratch was harder than you expected. You needed a lot of ugly code to get your admin panel working in Safari. Some other shiny idea came along, and you decided to bite, even though you feel a burning guilt about the ever growing pile of unfinished failures.

All I want to say is:

No time was lost.

This is how senior developers are born. You strengthen your brain, the calluses on your mind provide you with perseverance to solve problems. Even if (no, *especially* if) you gave up on your project.

Eventually, giving up is good, it's a sign of wisdom an flexibility to focus on the broader domain again.

One of the things I love about failures is how varied they tend to be, how they force you to start seeing overarching patterns.

You don't notice the things you take back from your failures, they slip back sticking to you, undetected.

You get intuitions for strengths and weaknesses in patterns. Whenever you're matching two sparse ordered indexed lists, there's this corner of your brain lighting up on how to do it efficiently. You realize it's not the ORMs which suck, it's the fundamental object-relational impedance mismatch existing in all languages which causes problems, and you feel your fingers tingling whenever you encounter its effects in the future, ready to dive in ever so slightly deeper.

You notice you can suddenly solve completely abstract data problems using the pathfinding logic from your failed game. You realize you can use vector calculations from your physics engine to compare similarities in psychological behavior. You never understood trigonometry in high school, but while building a a deficient robotic Arduino abomination it suddenly started making sense.

You're building intuitions, continuously. These intuitions are grooves which become deeper each time you encounter fundamental patterns. The more variation in environments and topics you expose yourself to, the more permanent these associations become.

Failure is inconsequential, failure even deserves respect, failure builds intuition about patterns. Every single epiphany about similarity in patterns is an incredible victory.

Please, for the love of code...

Start and fail as many projects as you can.

A story about how a busy programmer became responsible for training interns.

So I was put in charge of a team of interns and had to teach them to work with Linux, coding (Bash, Python and JS) and networking overall.
None of the interns had any technical experience, skills, knowledge or talent.
Furthermore the task came to me as a surprise and I didn't have any training plan nor the time.

Case 0:
Intern is asked to connect to a VM, see which interfaces there are and bring up the one that's down (eth1). He shuts eth0 down and is immediately disconnected from the machine, being unable to connect remotely.

Case 1:
Intern researches Bash scripting via a weird android app and after a hour or so creates and runs this function: test(){test|test&}
He fork-bombed the VM all other interns used.

Case 2:
All interns used the same VM despite the fact that I created one for each.
They saved the same ssh address in Putty while giving it different names.

Case 3:
After explicitly explaining and demonstrating to the interns how to connect to their own VMs they all connect to the same machine and attempt to create file systems, map them and etc. One intern keeps running "shutdown -r" in order to test the delay flag, which he never even included.

Case 4:
All of the interns still somehow connect to the same VM despite me manually configuring their Putty "favorites". Apparently they copy-paste a dns that one of them sent to the entire team via mail. He also learned about the wall command and keeps scaring his team members with fake warnings. A female intern actually asked me "how does the screen knows what I look like?!". This after she got a wall message telling her to eat less because she gained weight.

Case 5:
The most motivated intern ran "rm -rf" from his /etc directory.
P.S. All other interns got disconnected because they still keep using his VM.

Case 6:
While giving them a presentation about cryptography and explaining how SSH (that they've been using for the past two weeks) works an intern asked "So is this like Gmail?".
I gave him the benefit of the doubt and asked if he meant the authorization process. He replied with a stupid smile "No! I mean that it can send things!".

FML. I have a huge project to finish and have to babysit these art majors who decided to earn "ezy cash many" in hightech.

Adventures will be continued.

A devRant Update!

Hey everyone,

We thought now would be a great time for a devRant summer update on what we've added recently and what we've been working on.

Highlights since our last update:

- We launched devRant++, a supporter program for people who want to help us cover our costs while getting some cool extra features (a supporter badge on rants/comments/profile, reserved spot on our in-app supporter list, ability to edit rants/comments for up to 30 minutes instead of 5, and thanks to immediate user feedback, we also added the ability to post a rant every 1 hour instead of 2, and post comments that are up to 2,000 characters instead of 1,000!) We are extremely happy and thankful for the great response the program has gotten and we plan to continue to improve it using your feedback.

- We added the ability to subscribe to a user's rants. This makes it so you get a notification whenever that user posts a new rant!

- We added an "active discussions" feature (available in the "more" tab on the right). If you're looking to join a conversation happening in the moment, then this feature will help you discover those rants. It shows rants that have recently been commented on so if it's a topic that interests you, you can easily get in on the discussion!

Some stuff we have in the pipeline:

- More fun avatar stuff, including fun new OS/language-themed pets
- More perks for the devRant++ subscriber program - if you have anything you'd like to see, please let us know and we will try to make it happen!
- We will be testing some stuff to help classify rant types (rants, jokes, questions, etc.) in order to create a more personalized experience
- On that note, we're also going to take some more time to do some work on the algo as we haven't done much in terms of improvement since the initial smart algo launched
- Community projects page update - we've been slacking on updating the page and apologize for that. If you have created a devRant-related project and it's not on the community page, please resend it to david@hexicallabs.com (even if you sent it already) so we can make sure it gets added. Sorry about that!

A note on community etiquite regarding voting on content:

We've always believed that one of the most important and awesome experiences on devRant is getting your content noticed and appreciated by others. If you enjoy a piece of content, you should upvote it. If you enjoy 500 pieces of content, you should upvote them all. People really appreciate others enjoying their rants and comments so let them know if you do! If you don't like content, you can downvote it with the relevant reason. What we don't encourage is voting on content that you haven't actually looked at or spamming upvotes in mass for content you're not even actually reading/viewing. While we don't encourage that, it's not explicitly disallowed so we won't impose any penalty for it.

What is strictly prohibited and enforced is using scripts or automated procedures for voting on content. Anyone who is caught doing that will have their account deleted without warning. While very rare, we caught a couple of people doing that this week and both accounts in question were immediately deleted once discovered. To be clear, this is the practice of explicitly using a script or automation to mass vote on content. You will NEVER be banned/deleted for voting on a lot of content manually, even if you vote quickly and on lots of stuff. We just want to make that clear becuase this is not meant to discourage people from voting, it is only regarding votes not placed by humans. So if you're a human voting on content, you have nothing to worry about, we promise!

Please feel free to let us know if you have any questions or feedback on any of this. We love constructive feedback and in the past it has gone a very long way to improving and advancing the devRant community. And as always, thank you to everyone who contributed to the community in any way, we really appreciate it and want to keep making your experienfce better.

Happy ranting,
~David and Tim (Team devRant)
@dfox @trogus

WHY THE FUCKIDY FUCK DO PEOPLE THINK THAT JUST BECAUSE YOU ARE A DEVELOPER THEN YOU CAN DO EVERY FUCKING THING IN A SNAP?!

THIS ENTIRE SUMMER I WORKED FOR THIS MIDGET OF A FUCK AND THE IDEA WAS TO MAINLY DEVELOP AN IOS APP FOR THEIR PRODUCT. THAT ONE APP TRANSLATED TO THREE SEPARATE APPS AND KEEP IN MIND THAT I AM THE ONLY DEVELOPER THEY HAVE SO I HAVE TO DEVELOP IT, TEST IT AND DOCUMENT IT!! AND WHAT'S EVEN WORSE IS HE KEEPS GIVING ME DESIGNS AT THE LAST MINUTE SO I ALWAYS END UP HAVING TO CREATE NEW PROJECTS ALL THE TIME. WHEN A WEEK PASSES BY WITHOUT ANY UPDATE HE AND HIS FUCKED UP BRAIN CELLS GATHER A MEETING WITH HIS 'DONALD TRUMP HANDS-SIZED' BALLS TO ASK ME, 'WHY ARE YOU TAKING SO LONG? THESE ARE JUST THREE BUTTONS ON THIS VIEW?' MOTHERFUCKING COCKSUCKER!! GO GET YOUR MOM TO DO THIS WORK THEN IF IT'S JUST THREE BUTTONS. TO HIM EVERYTHING IN IOS WHICH INCORPORATES A TAP IS A FUCKING BUTTON! BUTTON THIS! BUTTON THAT! AND IT'S NOT LIKE HE HAS SIMPLE DESIGNS..NO.NO.NO.NO. THIS ASSHOLE-SHAPED-HEAD MUGGET DESIGNS SHIT WHICH REQUIRES ME TO HAVE TO DRAW A UIVIEW AS THE SHAPE OF A HUMAN BODY AND HEART. THEN ASIDE FROM THAT, JUST BECAUSE MY RESUME SAYS I MINORED IN MATH AND APPLIED MATH, HE SENDS ME A PAPER THAT EXPLAINS MATHEMATICAL CONCEPTS OF DATA ANALYSIS THEN WANTS TO MEET WITH ME TO DISCUSS THE SUGGESTED METHODS THEN IMPLEMENT THEM. AT THIS POINT I HAD ALREADY IMPLEMENTED AN ALGO FOR COUNTING THE NUMBER OF STEPS THAT WAS WAY WAY WAY MORE ACCURATE THAN THE SHIT THEY HAD IN THEIR CONTROLLER..

SO AS I AM ABOUT TO FINISH IMPLEMENTING JUST THE INITIAL 5 VIEWS OF THIS 'FINAL' APP, HE SERIOUSLY WALKS IN AND TELLS ME, SO I'M STARTING TO WORRY THAT WE'LL NOT MEET THE AUGUST DEADLINE SO I'M THINKING MAYBE YOU SHOULD START SWITCHING BETWEEN DEVELOPMENT. WORK ON IOS FOR 4 HOURS THEN SWITCH TO ANDROID FOR THE REMAINDER OF THE TIME. OH AND UHH IF YOU FEEL LIKE TAKING THE IMAC WITH YOU TO WORK FROM HOME, THAT'S FINE AS WELL AND I'LL BE AVAILABLE IN THE WEEKENDS AS WELL. IT WAS AT THIS MOMENT THAT I REALLY REALLY HOPED I WERE GAY! LIKE 'NO LUBE' STYLE KINDA GAY!! OH BTW AT SOME POINT HE HAD ME PROGRAM ONE OF THEIR CONTROLLERS, AND WAS ASKING IF I COULD START RESEARCHING MEANS OF WRITING AN SDK FOR THEM.

KEEP IN MIND THAT I'M AN INTERN WITH ONE YEAR IOS DEV EXPERIENCE.. THEN HE WANTS ME TO ENTIRELY START LEARNING ANDROID AND GIVE HIM TWO VERSIONS OF THIS THIRD APP IN TWO WEEKS.

HE CAN GO SUCK HIS OWN DICK WHILE GETTING FINGER FUCKED BY A FORK WITH A BLUE WHALE'S 6FT LONG DICK UP HIS MOUTH.

*** that felt good ****

Whenever i see "Create an app without coding" advertisement on facebook, first thing that come in mind is "Fuck a girl without a dick"

Rant
Why do shithead clients think they can walk away without paying us once we deliver the project !!!

So, here goes nothing..
Got an online gig to create a dashboard.
Since i had to deal with a lot of shitheads in the past, I told them my rules were simple, 20% advance, 40% on 50% completion and 40% after i complete and send them proof of completion. Once i receive the payment in full, only then i will hand over the code.
They said it was fine and paid 20%.
I got the next 40% also without any effort but they said they also needed me to deploy the code on their AWS account, and they were ready to pay extra for it, so i agreed.
I complete the whole project and sent them the screenshots, asking for the remaining 40% payment. They rejected the request saying my work was not complete as i had not deployed on AWS yet. After a couple of more such exchanges, i agreed to setup their account before the payment. But i could sense something fishy, so i did everything on their AWS account, except registered the domain from my account and set up everything. Once i inform them that its done and ask for the remaining payment.
The reply i got was LOL.
I tried to login to the AWS account, only to find password had been changed.
Database access revoked.
Even my admin account on the app had been removed. Thinking that they have been successful, they even published ads about thier NEW dashboard to their customers.
I sent them a final mail with warning ending with a middle finger emoji. 24 hours later,
I created a github page with the text " This website has been siezed by the government as the owner is found accused in fraud" and redirected the domain to it. Got an apology mail from them 2 hours later begging me to restore the website. i asked for an extra 10% penalty apart from the remaining payment. After i got paid, set an auto-reply of LOL to thier emails and chilled for a week before restoring the domain back to normal.
Dev : 1
Shithead Client: 0

So, you start with a PHP website.

Nah, no hating on PHP here, this is not about language design or performance or strict type systems...

This is about architecture.

No backend web framework, just "plain PHP".

Well, I can deal with that. As long as there is some consistency, I wouldn't even mind maintaining a PHP4 site with Y2K-era HTML4 and zero Javascript.

That sounds like fucking paradise to me right now. 😍

But no, of course it was updated to PHP7, using Laravel, and a main.js file was created. GREAT.... right? Yes. Sure. Totally cool. Gotta stay with the times. But there's still remnants of that ancient framework-less website underneath. So we enter an era of Laravel + Blade templates, with a little sprinkle of raw imported PHP files here and there.

Fine. Ancient PHP + Laravel + Blade + main.js + bootstrap.css. Whatever. I can still handle this. 🤨

But then the Frontend hipsters swoosh back their shawls, sip from their caramel lattes, and start whining: "We want React! We want SPA! No more BootstrapCSS, we're going to launch our own suite of SASS styles! IT'S BETTER".

OK, so we create REST endpoints, and the little monkeys who spend their time animating spinners to cover up all the XHR fuckups are satisfied. But they only care about the top most visited pages, so we ALSO need to keep our Blade templated HTML. We now have about 200 SPA/REST routes, and about 350 classic PHP/Blade pages.

So we enter the Era of Ancient PHP + Laravel + Blade + main.js + bootstrap.css + hipster.sass + REST + React + SPA 😑

Now the Backend grizzlies wake from their hibernation, growling: We have nearly 25 million lines of PHP! Monoliths are evil! Did you know Netflix uses microservices? If we break everything into tiny chunks of code, all our problems will be solved! Let's use DDD! Let's use messaging pipelines! Let's use caching! Let's use big data! Let's use search indexes!... Good right? Sure. Whatever.

OK, so we enter the Era of Ancient PHP + Laravel + Blade + main.js + bootstrap.css + hipster.sass + REST + React + SPA + Redis + RabbitMQ + Cassandra + Elastic 😫

Our monolith starts pooping out little microservices. Some polished pieces turn into pretty little gems... but the obese monolith keeps swelling as well, while simultaneously pooping out more and more little ugly turds at an ever faster rate.

Management rushes in: "Forget about frontend and microservices! We need a desktop app! We need mobile apps! I read in a magazine that the era of the web is over!"

OK, so we enter the Era of Ancient PHP + Laravel + Blade + main.js + bootstrap.css + hipster.sass + REST + GraphQL + React + SPA + Redis + RabbitMQ + Google pub/sub + Neo4J + Cassandra + Elastic + UWP + Android + iOS 😠

"Do you have a monolith or microservices" -- "Yes"

"Which database do you use" -- "Yes"

"Which API standard do you follow" -- "Yes"

"Do you use a CI/building service?" -- "Yes, 3"

"Which Laravel version do you use?" -- "Nine" -- "What, Laravel 9, that isn't even out yet?" -- "No, nine different versions, depends on the services"

"Besides PHP, do you use any Python, Ruby, NodeJS, C#, Golang, or Java?" -- "Not OR, AND. So that's a yes. And bash. Oh and Perl. Oh... and a bit of LUA I think?"

2% of pages are still served by raw, framework-less PHP.

The way 90% of the population wears their face masks really explains a lot about their approach to using software, apps & websites as well.

I feel like giving up.

I am not a developer for the salary, or just to solve analytical puzzles. Those are motivators, but my main drive is to make the world more comfortable and enjoyable, better optimized, build ethical services which bring happiness into people's lives. I want to improve society, even if it's just a tiny bit.

But if users invest absolutely zero percent of their limited brain capacity into understanding a product that already has a super-clean design and responds with helpful validation messages...

...why the fuck bother.

I used to think of the gap between technology and tech-incompetent people as an optimization problem.

As something which could be fixed by spending a fortune on UX research. Write tests, hire QA employees, decrease tech debt, create a bold but unified & simple design.

But the technologically incompetent just get more entitled with every small thing you simplify.

It's never fucking fool-proof enough.

Why can't I upload a 220MB PDF as profile picture? Why doesn't the app install on my 9 year old Android Froyo phone? Why can't I sign up if my phone number contains a  U+FFFC? Why does this page load so slowly from my rural concrete bunker in East Ukraine? WHY DO I HAVE PNEUMONIA, HOW DID I GET INFECTED EVEN THOUGH I WAS WEARING A MOUTH MASK ON MY FOREHEAD?

This is why I ran away from Frontend, to Backend, to DBA.

If I could remove myself further from the end user, I would.

At least I still have a full glass of tawny port and a huge database which needs to be normalized & migrated.

Fuck humans, I'm going to hug a server.

WHATTT?!! I need 10 WHOLE POINTS JUST TO BUILD AN AVATAR!!! What kind of person would set such a high amount of points just to CREATE AN AVATAR! Do you know how hard that is for an introvert... ugg What kind of post should I rant about? I could rant about that one problem with HTML <divs>.. but then everyone would laugh at how simple that was... I could rant about how long I have had to live without this app. No no that would be way to big of a rant... hmmm. OH I KNOW!

I’m a senior dev at a small company that does some consulting. This past October, some really heavy personal situation came up and my job suffered for it. I raised the flag and was very open with my boss about it and both him and my team of 3 understood and were pretty cool with me taking on a smaller load of work while I moved on with some stuff in my life. For a week.

    Right after that, I got sent to a client. “One month only, we just want some presence there since it’s such a big client” alright, I guess I can do that. “You’ll be in charge of a team of a few people and help them technically.” Sounds good, I like leading!

    So I get here. Let’s talk technical first: from being in a small but interesting project using Xamarin, I’m now looking at Visual Basic code, using Visual Studio 2010. Windows fucking Forms.

    The project was made by a single dev for this huge company. She did what she could but as the requirements grew this thing became a behemoth of spaghetti code and User Controls. The other two guys working on the project have been here for a few months and they have very basic experience at the job anyways. The woman that worked on the project for 5 years is now leaving because she can’t take it anymore.

    And that’s not the worse of it. It took from October to December for me to get a machine. I literally spent two months reading on my cellphone and just going over my shitty personal situation for 8 hours a day. I complained to everyone I could and nothing really worked.

    Then I got a PC! But wait… no domain user. Queue an extra month in which I could see the Windows 7 (yep) log in screen and nothing else. Then, finally! A domain user! I can log in! Just wait 2 extra weeks for us to give your user access to the subversion rep and you’re good to go!

    While all of this went on, I didn’t get an access card until a week ago. Every day I had to walk to the reception desk, show my ID and request they call my boss so he could grant me access. 5 months of this, both at the start of the day and after lunch. There was one day in particular, between two holidays, in which no one that could grant me access was at the office. I literally stood there until 11am in which I called my company and told them I was going home.

    Now I’ve been actually working for a while, mostly fixing stuff that works like crap and trying to implement functions that should have been finished but aren’t even started. Did I mention this App is in production and being used by the people here? Because it is. Imagine if you will the amount of problems that an application that’s connecting to the production DB can create when it doesn’t even validate if the field should receive numeric values only. Did I mention the DB itself is also a complete mess? Because it is. There’s an “INDEXES” tables in which, I shit you not, the IDs of every other table is stored. There are no Identity fields anywhere, and instead every insert has to go to this INDEXES table, check the last ID of the table we’re working on, then create a new registry in order to give you your new ID. It’s insane.

   

    And, to boot, the new order from above is: We want to split this app in two. You guys will stick with the maintenance of half of it, some other dudes with the other. Still both targeting the same DB and using the same starting point, but each only working on the module that we want them to work in. PostmodernJerk, it’s your job now to prepare the app so that this can work. How? We dunno. Why? Fuck if we care. Kill you? You don’t deserve the swift release of death.

    Also I’m starting to get a bit tired of comments that go  ‘THIS DOESN’T WORK and ‘I DON’T KNOW WHY WE DO THIS BUT IT HELPS and my personal favorite  ‘??????????????????????

User: We have been dealing with this bug for a month now! How come nobody has fixed it?

Dev: Who did notify about this issue?

User: You’re not listening we have been dealing with this for a MONTH!

Dev: When this issue first occurred did you tell anyone?

User: Yes!

Dev: Who?

User: …. Ok I don’t remember but I know I said something to someone. Anyway it doesn’t matter, your job is IT so how come this isn’t fixed?

Dev: Did you have an email? Ticket number? Teams message? Any record of where this was dropped?

User: I think you’re missing the point. We haven’t been able to do out jobs for A MONTH. We’ve just been sitting around completely helpless. We’ve been trying to figure a system using paper and pencil to replace the electronic one but it’s too complicated. How come this wasn’t fixed the second it happened?

Dev: It’s hard to respond to an issue if it’s not brought to out attention.

User: Ok but we are too busy to create a ticket! We have a million things to do and we can’t do any of them because your app doesn’t work! We’ve been sitting here telling each other how terrible this system is AND IT HAS BEEN A MONTH.

Dev: …. Yeah I got that

User: *Clicks on staging environment*

Giant Warning Dialog: YOU ARE CURRENTLY ENTERING THE STAGING ENVIRONMENT

Users: Ok

App: *Completely different colour, I’m talking bright unsightly yellow*

User: Ok

Giant Yellow and Red Flashing Banner at the Top of the Screen: WARNING YOU ARE CURRENTLY USING STAGING, THIS AREA IS FOR TESTING ONLY

User: The production environment sure is acting strange today. It’s a weird colour and I don’t recognize any of the data, it’s all just dummy filler data. I better create a ticket for the dev team to check o—….. no wait I’ll send an email CC everyone including the CEO and sound the alarm production is currently down and filled with giant warning messages.

Manager: OH MY GOD PRODUCTION IS DOWN DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THIS??? WHAT THE FUCK COULD THESE WARNING MESSAGES BE THAT’S ONLY SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN ON STAGING! THE CEO IS BREATHING DOWN MY NECK YOU NEED TO GET THIS FIXED IMMEDIATELY!!!!!!!

Dev: …

One week, and it turned out to be worse than that.

I was put on a project for a COVID-19 program in America (The CARES Act). The financial team came to us on Monday morning and said they need to give away a couple thousand dollars.

No big deal. All they wanted was a single form that people could submit with some critical info. Didn't need a login/ registration flow or anything. You could have basically used Google Forms for this project.

The project landed in my lap just before lunch on Monday morning. I was a junior in a team with a senior and another junior on standby. It was going to go live the next Monday.

The scope of the project made it seem like the one week deadline wasn't too awful. We just had to send some high priority emails to get some prod servers and app keys and we were fine.

Now is the time where I pause the rant to express to you just how fine we were decidedly **not**: we were not fine.

Tuesday rolls around and what a bad Tuesday it was. It was the first of many requirement changes. There was going to need to be a review process. Instead of the team just reading submissions from the site, they needed accept and reject buttons. They needed a way to deny people for specific reasons. Meaning the employee dashboard just got a little more complicated.

Wednesday came around and yeah, we need a registration and login flow. Yikes.

Thursday came and the couple-thousand dollars turned into a tens of millions. The amount of users we expected just blew up.

Friday, and they needed a way for users to edit their submissions and re-submit if they were rejected. And we needed to send out emails for the status of their applications.

Every day, a new meeting. Every meeting, new requirements that were devastating given our timeframe.

We put in overtime. Came in on the weekend. And by Monday, we had a form that users could submit and a registration/ login flow. No reviewer dashboard. We figured we could take in user input on time and then finish the dashboard later.

Well, financial team has some qualms. They wanted a more complicated review process. They wanted roles; managers assign to assistants. Assistants review assigned items.

The deadline that we worked so hard on whizzed by without so much as a thought, much less the funeral it deserved.

Then, they wanted multiple people to review an application before it was final. Then, they needed different landing pages for a few more departments to be able to review different steps of the applications.

Ended up going live on Friday, close to a month after that faithful Monday which disrupted everything else I was working on, effective immediately.

I don't know why, but we always go live on a Friday for some reason. It must be some sort of conspiracy to force overtime out of our managers. I'm baffled.

But I worked support after the launch.

And there's a funny story about support too: we were asked to create a "submit an issue" form. Me and the other junior worked on it on a wednesday three weeks into the project. Finished it. And the next day it was scrapped and moved to another service we already had running. Poor management like that plagued the project and worked in tandem with the dynamic and ridiculous requirements to make this project hell.

Back to support.

Phone calls give me bad anxiety. But Friday, just before lunch, I was put on the support team. Sure, we have a department that makes calls and deal with users. But they can't be trained on this program: it didn't exist just a month ago, and three days ago it worked differently (the slippery requirements never stopped).

So all of Friday and then all of Saturday and all of Monday (...) I had extended panic attacks calling hundreds of people. And the team that was calling people was only two people. We had over 400 tickets in the first two days.

And fuck me, stupid me, for doing a good job. Because I was put on the call team for **another** COVID project afterwards. I knew nothing about this project. I have hated my job recently. But I'm a junior. What am I gonna say, no?

Well... There is an App called 'Tinker' where you can create games and stuff with a Scratch-like programming language.
One day I made a really simple 3D Rendering Engine and as a demo a rotating cube.
Then I published it.

The Tinker-Community consists of mostly little children and therefore they were really impressed :D

The project is now in the top 10 of the most viewed projects!
(There are thousands of other projects on Tinker.)

Yeah... I felt like an badass...

I never wanted to be any sort of developer. I was studying graphic design. I partnered with a friend to create an app. He would code and I'd make things pretty. He flaked, and I picked up programming. That's my story.

Welcome back to practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 2: Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand

This is a particularly special episode for me, as these problems are taking up so much of my time with non-sensical bullshit, that i'm delayed with everything else. Some badly require tooling or new products. Some are just unnecessary processes or annoyances that should not need to be handled by another human. So lets jump right in, in no particular order:

- Jira ... nuff said? not quite because somehow some blue moon, planets aligning, act of god style set of circumstances lined up to allow this team to somehow make Jira worse. On one hand we have a gigantic Jira project containing 7 separate sub teams, a million different labels / epics and 4.2 million possible assignees, all making sure the loading page takes as long as possible to open. But the new country we've added support for in the app gets a separate project. So we have product, backend, mobile, design, management etc on one, and mobile-country2 on another. This delightfully means a lot of duplication and copy pasting from one to the other, for literally no reason what so ever.

- Everything on Jira is found through a label. Every time something happens, a new one is created. So I need to check for "iOS", "Android", "iOS-country2", "Android-country2", "mobile-<feature>", "mobile-<feature>-issues", "mobile-<feature>-prod-issues", "mobile-<feature>-existing-issues" and "<project>-July31" ... why July31? Because some fucking moron decided to do a round of testing, and tag all the issues with the current date (despite the fact Jira does that anyway), which somehow still gets used from time to time because nobody pays attention to what they are doing. This means creating and modifying filters on a daily basis ... after spending time trying to figure out what its not in the first one.

- One of my favourite morning rituals I like to call "Jira dumpster diving". This involves me removing all the filters and reading all the tickets. Why would I do such a thing? oh remember the 9000 labels I mentioned earlier? right well its very likely that they actually won't use any of them ... or the wrong ones ... or assign to the wrong person, so I have to go find them and fix them. If I don't, i'll get yelled at, because clearly it's my fault.

- Moving on from Jira. As some of you might have seen in your companies, if you use things like TestFlight, HockeyApp, AppCenter, BuddyBuild etc. that when you release a new app version for testing, each version comes with an automated change-log, listing ticket numbers addressed ...... yeah we don't do that. No we use this shitty service, which is effectively an FTP server and a webpage, that only allows you to host the new versions. Sending out those emails is all manual ... distribution groups?? ... whats that?

- Moving back to Jira. Can't even automate the changelog with a script, because I can't even make sense of the tickets, in order to translate that to a script.

- Moving on from Jira. Me and one of the remote testers play this great game I like to call "tag team ticketing". It's so much fun. Right heres how to play, you'll need a QA and a PM.

*QA creates a ticket, and puts nothing of any use inside it, and assigns to the PM.
*PM fires it back asking for clarification.
*QA adds in what he feels is clarification (hes wrong) and assigns it back to the PM.
*PM sends detailed instructions, with examples as to what is needed and assigns it back.
*QA adds 1 of the 3 things required and assigns it back.
*PM assigns it back saying the one thing added is from the wrong day, and reminds him about the other 2 items.
*QA adds some random piece of unrelated info to the ticket instead, forgetting about the 3 things and assigns it back.

and you just continue doing this for the whole dev / release cycle hahaha. Oh you guys have no idea how much fun it is, seriously give it a go, you'll thank me later ... or kill yourselves, each to their own.

- Moving back to Jira. I decided to take an action of creating a new project for my team (the mobile team) and set it up the way we want and just ignore everything going on around us. Use proper automation, and a kanban board. Maybe only give product a slack bot interface that won't allow them to create a ticket without what we need etc. Spent 25 minutes looking for the "create new project" button before finding the link which says I need to open a ticket with support and wait ... 5 ... fucking ... long ... painful ... unnecessary ... business days.

... Heres hoping my head continues to not have a bullet hole in it by then.

Id love to talk more, but those filters ain't gonna fix themselves. So we'll have to leave it here for today. Tune in again for another episode soon.

And remember to always practiseSafeHex

Give a man an Android app and he will thank you for a day. Teach a man how to create Android app and he will curse you for a lifetime.

So devRant is an app I found while coming up with an idea to create a platform for developers to rant.....DAMN IT!!!

Designer: Need to file a bug, I'm not getting an option to login with FaceID

Me: Oh weird bug. Is it setup on the phone you are testing with?

Designer: yes, use it in all other apps

Me: Did you get an error during onboarding on the FaceID screen?

Designer: nope no error

Me: ..... hhhmm, can you show me your settings?

Me: ... eh, says you have FaceID disabled for this app ... did you click "No" to FaceID during onboarding?

Designer: Yes, to test edge cases

Me: ................ ok ........ if you setup the app and told it to not allow FaceID to login ......... you won't get the ability to use FaceID to login .......... like .... by design .... on purpose ...... cause .... you told it to do that

Designer: No no, it needs to have a setting on the login screen to allow me to turn that back on incase I forget my passcode

Me: the fuck it does. Yeah we can't have anything on the login page that says, without authorization, change my settings

*Deep breath*

Me: Remember we had this conversation previously, where you didn't want the user to create a passcode during onboarding as it was too much friction, and wanted to do FaceID only. With your backup plan being to allow the user to create a NEW passcode on the login screen if FaceID failed .... remember that discussion we had about security? ... and how its important? ... and that we like having any? Ok so its the same reason as that, just with a different setting this time

Designer: ... hhmm i'm not sure I like this

Me: ... tough luck then, not happening

Me: oh and btw, remember we had that other talk about reproduction steps for bugs? Like when the app crashed and you told me it was because its in light mode, and nothing else at all? So disabling FaceID, is very relevant info to the problem of "I can't login with FaceID", please tell me these things first

I want to create an android app, but I also don't want to re-download android studio...

Choices... Choices...

My morning (RO = remote office):

Me: Your xxx implementation is very strange.
RO: Yes we are following a new example from experts in this field. See this link.

Me: Paragraph 1, use xxx class in these situations. Were not doing that.
RO: Yes we had problems with that, we decided to skip that.

Me: Paragraph 2, always use xxx when accessing data. Were not doing that.
RO: Yes that create many bugs, we skipped that.

Me: This section on debugging says to enable this flag while in development to allow the IDE to alert you to issues.
RO: Yes this causes the app to crash constantly. So we took it out.
Me: ... because its finding issues ... and telling you where the problem is, with an error message.

... your not following the experts at all.

RO: We are!, please read the link we provided.

... this will be discussed on my exit interview

I wish one day I had the skills to create an app like that, too 🍺😂

Sometime in mid 2013 or 2014 as a junior dev I woke up to a call from my company's CEO. He informed me that the legacy system they use for order processing is down nationwide that nobody can add new orders until it's fixed and that I needed to fix it. I had been working there 6 months and was hired along with a senior dev to begin developing a web app to replace this legacy system. The senior dev had left the company two weeks earlier for a better offer so it was put on me to figure it out. I was very frank with the CEO and told him I didn't know if I could fix it and suggested he try to call the company they hired to create it. I didn't even know where the source code was let alone what the design paradigm was or whether or not there was any documentation. He said he would try figuring out who created it and give them a call and asked "As a developer you shouldn't you be able to fix this?" I just told him it wasn't that simple and left it at that.

I get to work and the CEO has discovered that the company who created the software no longer exists and I tell him he may need to find a company to consult on this if I can find the source code and if I can't find the code he might be screwed.
I found the source code in a random IT shared folder there is no source control, no documentation, no unit tests, no test environment, and it looks like nobody had touched it since 2005 or about 8 years.

Despite being completely unfamiliar with the code and the design paradigm I was able to figure out that they were validating customer addresses against an old Google geocoding API that was shutdown the day before and the lack of response was killing the application. I fixed the issue and warned the CEO before deployment that I wasn't able to test but he said to go ahead and thankfully all went well.

I was offered to work for a startup in August last year. It required building an online platform with video calling capabilities.
I told them it would be on learn and implement basis as I didn't know a lot of the web tech. Learnt all of it and kept implementing side by side.
I was promised a share in the company at formation, but wasn't given the same at the time of formation because of some issues in documents.
Yes, I did delay at times on the delivery date of features on the product. It was my first web app, with no prior experience. I did the entire stack myself from handling servers, domains to the entire front end. All of it was done alone by me.
Later, I also did install a proxy server to expand the platform to a forum on a new server.
And yesterday after a month of no communication from their side, I was told they are scraping the old site for a new one. As I had all the credentials of the servers except the domain registration control, they transferred the domain to a new registrar and pointed it to a new server. I have a last meeting with them. I have decided to never work with them and I know they aren't going to provide me my share as promised.
I'm still in the 3rd year of my college here in India. I flunked two subjects last semester, for the first time in my life. And for 8 months of work, this is the end result of it by being scammed. I love fitness, but my love for this is more and so I did leave all fitness activities for the time. All that work day and night got me nothing of what I expected.
Though, they don't have any of my code or credentials to the server or their user base, they got the new website up very fast.
I had no contract with them. Just did work on the basis of trust. A lesson learnt for sure.
Although, I did learn to create websites completely all alone and I can do that for anyone. I'm happy that I have those skills now.
Since, they are still in the start up phase and they don't have a lot of clients, I'm planning to partner with a trusted person and release my code with a different design and branding. The same idea basically. How does that sound to you guys?

I learned that:
. No matter what happens, never ignore your health for anybody or any reason.
. Never trust in business without a solid security.
. Web is fun.
. Self-learning is the best form of learning.
. Take business as business, don't let anyone cheat you.

Dev related: To actually finish my projects instead of working on different ones, and end up finishing nothing.

I said I was going to create my own operating system. I started it, but barely. I haven't touched the compiler I was working on for months. Oh, and I'm working on an android app related to writing. I started it a while back, and never got to finish it.

My need to stop starting new projects, because if I keep doing this, I'll never finish anything.

Non dev related: To get my manuscript out of the slush pile, and finally published. It's currently in the dreadful querying process.

Oh damn....I just realized that I am working with a scammers' company. They wanted us (new employee) to create an app behave like keylogger for Android(not in Google play , because Google with ban this one).

Today I asked the manager about our salary. He said that our salary are based on commission. So look what happened, one of my colleague disappeared since yesterday (as in not coming to work without warning)

Once a recruiter called me

Recruiter: Hi, We are looking for an Android developer with n+ years of experience

Me: Umm ok. Actually I am not a full fledged native Android developer, but I can work on hybrid platform where we can create an App for Android using Web Technologies like html and javascript

Recruiter : ohh I will talk to our tech team and get back to you

Me: Sure. Thank you

-Next day-

Recruiter : so you can create an Android application right

Me: yes but using web technologies not JAVA

Recruiter : ok your interview is scheduled on x date and you will get an email

Me: ok cool. Thanks

-Interview day-

Interviewer : so lets start with the technical round, tell me what are Fragments

Me: :| i know what is a Fragment but I am not a native developer but Hybrid application developer like in phonegap - cordova using javascript

Interviewer: ohh but our App is in native Android and native IOS

Me: da faq :| (why the fuck did you call me then)

Interviewer : nice meeting you man

Me: :|||

- Next day same Recruiter again called me-

Recruiter : So how was your Interview?

Me: Actually they are looking for native developer, i told you i dont work on native

Recruiter : So your interview WENT BAD!

ME: What da FUCK :||||||

-Again same day after sometime-

Recruiter : So can you make Apps for IOS?

Me: What the fuckin fuck... :|||||||¦

The client requested an ability to create reports in the app I had been working on. It was completed to their specification and they were happy with it for about a week.

Then, they asked me to redo the report, changing various components around so I told them it can be done, but is time consuming because they're essentially asking for a completely different report.

Now, they never even looked at the code before and the extent of their coding knowledge is excel formulas. Their repond to me was "it's easy, just reverse the loop."

I simply did not know how to respond. "Just reverse the loop." ...I mean it's so simple, just reverse the loop... It doesn't matter that I've spent a good amount of time on this already, or that the client have never seen the code, doesn't understand coding, doesn't care about programming, none of that matter. ...just...reverse...the...loop...

Laziest dev thing I've ever done.

An annoying "I-do-nothing-but-delegate-and-make-fuzz" manager proposed to create a new application with redundant functionalities, that would take me at least half a year to build.
Practically, the app would never be used and I didn't want to put effort in that monstrosity.

So, naturally I...

Pressure the right people, schedule numerous meetings, become the project manager for all internal applications and... I cancel the project.

The education system is a fucking joke. How do you get through all the required courses and get to the capstone course where your one goal is to build a simple prototype of a project(like a simple website) for a real world client and not know HTML or CSS when you spent a whole fuckboy semester on a class dedicated to HTML, css, JavaScript and the teacher gave you the PHP. Not only that but you can't even figure out how to use a simple google search to look up the documentation on any of these topics or even the easy to follow tutorials littering the internet on how to use Bootstrap which is what we're fucking using to make it faster to develop the core logic of our app but all you fucking want to do is take shortcuts and create a PowerPoint presentation in google slides and make an easy project look like shit and make me and yourselves look like shit. But don't fucking worry, I'll code the whole thing in a fucking night because you didn't do your part of taking care of just the front end and planned for your incompetence and lack of questions or help. I know you're busy looking for a job for after you graduate but you can't even answer a simple programming question. Let me give you the solution on how to reverse a string, cuz you don't remember c# but it literally takes 30 seconds to google the solution that is everywhere. My project team is why no one takes a degree from this university seriously.

I took a course in app programming and one of the assignments was to create an "instagram-like" photo app with some simple filters. One of them was pixelate.
Instead of changing the RGB value of each individual pixel, i just saved the image in a lower resolution.
The result wasnt perfect, but good enough to pass.
And the teacher never even looked at the code..

My 14 year old self stared at Chrome and decided to consult Google on a random fleeting thought...

"How is software made?"

The search resulted in my downloading Visual Studio. Without any understanding of what it was or how it worked I somehow managed to create a new Winforms project.

I started to drag controls from the ToolBox onto the form, and I specifically recall thinking "Wow! This is easy.". Little did I know...

I then inadvertently double clicked either a control or the form which as most will know switches from the designer view to the code editor taking you to the code that drives the form.

"What the hell is this?"

I had absolutely no idea what I was looking at, but decided I was determined to understand what all of that random text did.

So, yeah, my first dev project was a Winforms App consisting of a single button that did absolutely nothing, but yet happens to be the most important app I have ever created.

To think I'd be working in an entirely different sector if it wasn't for that one Google search.

Create an ai powered music app which understands my taste in music, such that i never have to skip songs while playing in shuffle mode.

This morning:
SLACK HAS A DARK THEME! ALL GLORY TO THE AMAZING SLACK TEAM! SLACK FOR PRESIDENT!

This afternoon:
OH GOD THIS THEME MAKES ME WANT TO SCOOP THE EYES OUT OF MY SOCKETS THE FONT LOOKS UGLIER THAN THE PILE OF SKINFAT I SCRAPED OFF MY MOUSE ITS AWFUL I NEED HUGS SEND HELP

Thanks, companies, for trying, I guess.

I love dark themes, but the ones provided are often even worse than the light themes.

They go overboard with extreme black/white contrasts, pick a super weird hue of puke-gray, or certain elements are unreadable.

So, please, instead of wasting the time of your designers on something that's clearly too difficult for them.... how about just making it easy to create community themes for your app?

Especially if it's an electron app, how hard is it to add a config option to import a CSS file, and provide one template as an example?

So this customer wanted me to create an app using Flutter (user and admin), PHP for the backend, so I made one for him . He seems to complain he can't login to the admin account which he called me to registered for him right after the payment and weeks later.

With deeper investigation , I checked the log he drop the table where users authentication is stored and blame me about that. Which I fixed it lately by creating a table back.

Later I visit my account Shopee , he reviewed me as "THE WORST PROGRAMMER "

So I was like WHAT THE FUCK? YOU DROP THE TABLE WHICH LEAD YOU CANT LOGIN AS AN ADMIN AND BLAME FOR THAT?

Hi,
I'm not a ranty person so I never actually thought I'd post anything here but here it goes.

From the beginning.
We use ancient technologies. PHP 5.2, Symfony 1.2 and a non RFC complient SOAP with NO documentation.
A year ago We've been thrown a new temporary project. An VOIP app for every OS.
That being iOS, Android, MAC, PC, Linux, Windows mobile. With a 3 month deadline. All that thrown at 4 PHP developers. The idea being that They'll take it, sign the delivery protocol, everyone happy. No more updates for the app needed. They get their funds they needed the app for and we get paid.

Fast forward to today...

Our dev team started the year with great news that We'll most likely have to create a new project. Since the amount of new features would be far greater than current feature set, we managed to finally force our boss to use newer technologies (ie. seperate backend symfony4 PHP7+/frontend react, rest api and so on). So we were ecstatic to say the least. With preestimates aimed at a minimum 3 month development period. Since we're comfortable with everything that needs to be done.
Two days later our boss came to me that one of our most annoying clients needs a new feature. Said client uses ancient version written on a napkin because They changed half of the specification 2 weaks before deadline in a software made not by a developer but some sysadmin who didn't know anything. His MVC model was practically VVV model since he even had sql queries in some views. Feature will take 3 days - fixing everything that will break in the meantime - 1-2 months.
F*** it, fine. A little overtime won't kill me.
Yesterday boss comes again... Apparently someone lost a delivery protocol for a project we ended that half a year ago. Whats even better at the time when we asked for hardware to test we never got any. When we asked about any testing enviornment - nothing. The app being SEMI-stable on everything is an overstatement but it was working on the os'es available at the time. Since the client started testing now again, it turns out that both Android app does not work on 8.1/9 and the iOS app does not work on ios12. The client obviously does not want to pay and we can do little with it without the protocol, other than rewriting the apps.
It will take months at least since all of those apps were written by people that didn't know neither the OS'es nor the languages. For example I started writing the iOS one in swift. Only to learn after half of the development time, that swift doesn't like working by C Library rules and I had to use ObjC also. With some C thrown in due to the library. 3 unknown languages, on an unknown platform in 3 months. I never had any apple device in my hand at that time nor do I intend to now. I'm astonished it worked out then. It was a clusterf**k of bad design and sticking everything together with deprecated apis and a gum. So I'll have to basically fully rewrite it.

If boss decides we'll take all those at the same time I'll f***ing jump of a bridge.

The company I work for wants me to create an app to compress "foxit phantompdf" files, so that they are still readable after compression.

(referencing my last rant)

Client:
"Ok,. so your saying that its gonna take you 63 hrs to create a simplified CRM with basic functionality and auto fill docs or automated work flow docs as an added feature?"

My response (after already under-quoting and planning on cutting some corners because he has a smaller budget than normally necessary):
"It sounds simpler than it is. There are a lot of things I need to take into account that you wouldn't even think about.

For instance:

Making sure your emails don't go to the client's spam folder. This requires the sending domain to be verified via DNS settings. I have to ensure your email content passes a spam test (link to text ratio needs to be good). I assumed you'd want an email that has your logo and looks good. This means testing the design in Outlook to make sure it's not broken.

What if the email doesn't send due to an invalid email address, or bounces back? You'll need to be notified.

What if the client list for the week contains duplicates? You need them merged or ignored.

Generating a PDF from HTML can be tricky because the conversion isn't apples to apples so there are things I need to adjust to make them as close as possible.

Making a site completely mobile friendly (the tier 3 option) can be very time consuming as well. It's not about whether or not it fits on a mobile phone, it's about whether or not it's intuitive and useful. You're essentially getting a mobile app without paying for separate development of an app.

If I took everything into consideration and built this to be 100% bullet proof, it would cost tens of thousands.

I'm doing my best to leverage your needs with the probability of running into an issue. I'm not going waste my time/your money on something that will likely never happen."

1. have an exciting app idea
2. create project folder
3. include WebPack

…

47. lose all passion for project and give up

GOTO 1

So I am at the client's location for onsite consultation of their projects.
The HoD asked me to create an application to accept feedbacks from multiple points urgently. Although I was there just for consulting, I thought why not, I am anyway getting bored here.
So after explaining the functionality, she asked me, when can she accept a working app. I told her that it would depend upon a lot of factors, so give me till evening to figure it out.
When she insisted I told her, that it can take at least a month with all the APIs, logins, UI, QA etc. She was surprised and told me that she expected it in 4 days since the requirements can be fit into a single page of her notebook. (That's how she measures project duration).

I told her it's impossible, given that I am the only one working on it. So she told me that her team can do it in two days. I probably have more experience than her entire team combined, but still I thought they might know some simple magic or faster way, that I might not, so I asked her to discuss with the team and then decide.

After explaining the requirements, when she mentioned that it should be done in 2 days, everyone was kinda frozen. One of them said that it's going to take at least 4 months.

I couldn't hide my smirk 😉

Building a business can hamper one's development urges!

I have been building stuff since 2008. Took my first job in 2012, won a hackathon at Yahoo right after that. Got an amazing team to work with! Our team converted the hacked product into a proper product using Django and AngularJS. Those were the fun days. At that time AngularJS had just come out and I was under the dilemma to use Angular, Ember or backbone. But with all this came the responsibility to build a business out of our product. It didn't happen eventually though.

So I moved on to cure my entrepreneural itch and went on to start up an e-commerce startup along with my day job. It started getting good traction and I finally left my day job to focus completely on it. It's a sticker marketplace and I had to focus a lot on the actual physical product, improve the quality, tackle business development and stuff etc. In all this, my habit of creating stuff with code kind of got the back seat. Everyday, I see such exciting technologies come up and I want to try them out. I have been itching to create a native app using react native. Try to build a skill for Amazon Alexa.

On one side I am happy that I have been able to build a brand and become the largest sticker marketplace in India providing super awesome reusable stickers, but on the other hand, managing the business on a daily basis is killing the developer in me :(

Does anyone else building a business which involves a physical product also face a similar problem? I think I should just take up weekend hackathon type problems and try to solve them using the technologies I want to learn. Example, I have been meaning to build an app for our company. I think I will start with that!

I have been following devRant for quite sometime now and it has been awesome. Finally, signed up and ranted today! 😊😊

First rant: but I'm so triggered and everyone needs a break from all the EU and PC rants.

It's time to defend JavaScript. That's right, the best frikin language in the universe.

Features:
incredible async code (await/async)
universal support on almost everything connected to the internet
runs on almost all platforms including natively
dynamically interpreted but also internally compiled (like Perl)
gave birth to JSON (you're welcome ppl who remember that the X in AJAX stood for XML)

All these people ranting about JS don't understand that JS isn't frikin magic. It does what it needs to do well.

If you're using it for compute-heavy machine learning, or to maintain a 100k LOC project without Typescript, then why'd you shoot yourself in the foot?

As a proud JS developer I gotta scroll through all these posts gushing over the other languages. Why does nobody rant about using Python for bitcoin mining or Erlang to create a media player?

Cuz if you use the wrong tool for the right job, it's of course gonna blow up in your face.

For example, there was a post claiming JS developers were "scared" of multithreading and only stick in their comfort zone. Like WTF when NodeJS came out everything was multithreaded. It took some brave developers to step out of the comfort zone to embrace the event loop.

For a web app, things like PHP and Node should only be doing light transforms between the database information and HTML anyways. You get one thread to handle the server because you're keeping other threads open to interface with databases and the filesystem. The Nexus.js dev ranting on all us JS devs and doesn't realize that nobody's actual web server is CPU bound because of writing HTML bodies, thats why we only use 1 thread. We use other worker threads to do the heavy lifting (yes there is a C++ bridge look it up)

Anyways TL;DR plz respect JS developers we're people too. ES7 is magic and please don't shit on ES3 or we'll start shitting on the Python 2-3 conversion (need to maintain an outdated binary just cuz people leave out ()'s in their print statements)

Or at least agree that VB.NET is an abomination and insult to the beauty that is TI-84 BASIC

Devs: Hey, what should we do?

A:
provide our SDKs for download as easily as possible so that any potential customer can try it out and see how much better we are compared to our competitors?

Or…
B:
Should we lock our SDKs behind a login where the customer needs to create an account and enter the most amount of private information possible, just in case, then also require to create some security access tokens that he needs to configure in his app to have access to our service via the sdk and also hide all of the documentation behind a login which requires some permission based roles to access and also make the sdks closed source so that it’s a pain in the ass to debug and understand?

Marketing people:
B! Definitely B! Make sure to piss off and annoy our customers as much as humanly possible!

So far all designers I worked with do the following:
1. Use "creativity" to come up with stuff that the system does not allow implementing, for example: Changing clock color in mobile statusbar to Blue!
2. Use "creativity" to come up with a heavily customized calendar for a windows software which requires building the control from scratch, but they explain their creativity by saying: Can't you use CSS?
3. Provide iOS only design which follows android guidelines and refuse to provide android styles for at least pages that to be handled differently on each platform, for example, we had a checkout page in an app, and they wanted the same style for both WITHOUT building custom control for it, they said: Can't you use the android custom control inside iOS
4. They design for a website and send same mockups for me to implement on mobile apps, the problem is a web page runs on a big screen when the mobile app doesn't have room for half the stuff they designed but they must look exactly the same as website !!
5. They send entire PSD with no color codes and say: You can extract icons, and colors from psd ... When they should provide them as per our request which is: SVG for Android and PDF for iOS with the color codes, but no, they are lazy!
6. They ask the team to create a page in the app which is almost production ready just so that they test different font sizes and see how it will look on the phone
7. Same as #6 for images that contain text

The list goes on, but those are by the far the ones that made me one step away from resigning, some of them made me resign...

@dfox sorry to ask but, what happened to you that made you so pissed off, you had to create an app just to rant? 😁

I finaly managed to make a dark mode on slack desktop app! Still has some bugs (like scrollbar being white) but works well enough for me. If anyone is interested tell me in the comments 🙂

How i did it (Linux paths but should be the same process for Windows):

You can execute scripts in /usr/lib/slack/resources/app.asar.unpacked/src/static/index.js

Using that i figgured out that slack desktop is basically an actual webview to their website and some os hooks.

To edit the contents of the webview you can call `document.getElementsByClassName('WebViewContext')[0].executeJavaScript("alert(1)")`

Then i just simply packaged up some custom css to be loaded with JS.

Quite simple actually.

Using this method you can create all kinds of plugins for slack, so go wild!

Frustrated, tired and a bit lost.

I'm a "Senior PHP Backend Dev", which includes not the greatest tech stack nor the best job title, but it pays fine, and the company is awesome to work for.

I suck at writing features, but I'm great at bitching, and I easily put complex abstract concepts into usable models. So I'm also QA, tester, tech lead, database architect, whatever.

That makes writing PHP less annoying, because I create the rules, and whip devs around when they forget a return type definition or forget to handle an edge case. But I don't write a lot of code anymore, I mostly read (bad) code.

Lately I REALLY feel like doing something else... problem is that I know JS/ES6, but really dislike React/Vue and the whole crappy modern frontend toolchainchootrain of babelifyingwebpackingyarnballs. I know Python/Tensorflow/etc, but don't feel like I want to go into data science or AI. And then I'm awesome at the shit no one uses, like Haskell, Go and Rust (and worse).

I got a job offer which combines a very interesting PHP codebase with a Java infrastructure, where I could learn a lot... and I'm kind of tempted.

Problem is, everyone always shits on Java. I always made a bit of fun of Java myself. Don't even know exactly why, probably some really cruel instinct which causes kids to bully the least popular kid.

I know the basics, I've written the hello world, and a small backend app for a personal project. I know how strict and verbose it can be. I love the strictness in Haskell and Rust.... but those are both also quite terse.

Should I become a Java dev? I'm not talking about Android SDK, but an insane enterprise codebase at a life sciences corporation.

To the pro Java devs: What are the best and worst things about your job, about the weekly processes, about the toolchains? Have you ever considered other languages? Do you unconditionally love and believe in Java, or do you believe Swift, Kotlin, Scala or whatever will eventually make it completely obsolete?

Will Java hasten my decline into the cynical neckbeard I was always destined to be?

There are a lot more fun langauges, but looking at realistic demand and career value...

1. attach a debugger
2. create a set of breakpoints
3. perform an action in the UI
4. breakpoint is hit. F9 to jump to another breakpoint
5.
...
.......
...........
................
....................
nothing............
even more of nothing.....
......................................................
6. Kill the app. Restart. Repeat. Nothing again. Repeat it all ~5 times. Give up.
7. Go get some tea.
8. Come back with a cup of hot tea
9. the _next_ breakpoint is now hit (º . º)
10. F9 - yet another breakpoint is hit.

11. contemplate your own mental state, considering the #6

Adventures​ Of The New COO

So when that new COO joined our company ( read my previous rant to know that story ) he brought a graphic designer with him

as a designer he's ok, more of a old school package designer type, but as a person one of the most annoying one I've ever met, always want to be included with our conversations, talk about rain and stuff

so few days ago, i was working on a website, headphones plugged in, music playing, he comes near my seat

Designer​: Are you busy ?
Me: yeah, I've this website to finish
Designer: So i have this idea for an app
Me: *taking off headphones while thinking doesn't this dumbass know the meaning of busy*
Designer: what if we create an app for super markets, like this isle has this stuff, that isle has soap or something and how it'll be easy to find what you want to buy and keeps going on and on for about 5 minutes
Me: *making my voice as polite and sarcastic as possible*
It wouldn't work, every market has a different layout even among same market chain it's different
Me: have you ever been to a super market, they have a board saying what the isle is above the isle, all you have to do is just look up
Designer​: hmm yeah i guess
*walks away*

everyone​ wants to make apps and make money, but doesn't have the fucking brain capacity to think about the idea for a bit and do some research, instead they come and waste our time

Hi every developer! My name is Allen. English is not my native language so forgive me if I say something that does not make any sense. Let me tell you my story how I become a programmer. (I am still learning) My first computer was a DELL OptiPlex GX 720 desktop. My father bought it for our self-employee job. Before he allow me to use the computer, I used to sit next to him and watching what he do, what he click and what he gets. When he allow me to use the computer, I was slow at typing. One or 2 WPM (word per minute) my father taught me how to use the computer. Very slowly, my typing speed improves. I understand how to use the computer. but one day, I do what make me regret. I was playing with some executables, when I double clicking it, it does not work I used to associate files with apps. I associate music files with every player I want. So, I did what I used to, I associate exe files with windows media center! The computer started to open hundreds of windows media center (WMC for short) whenever an app is clicked, it opens windows media center. Today, I realized that windows were trying to open every app and every process that regularly run. However, since I associate it with WMC, instead of the app itself, it opens WMC some days after the mistake, I wonder how apps work and how I can create my own. My father  told me before that a program is simply a binary file that the computer can read. However, it was too advanced to me at the time.I begin my search with google. Everytime I search, it says "learn to code" or something like that. I see some C++ code but, it was disgusting. when I read just a few lines of a hello world code in java. it was too complex

What I seen

#$$#% $%&$%&*#!@

~

(&*%&$ (_(*^% #&&* (^^$(&^$%^( %^*$())

~

^$70^(`*#%`*#&%^)*!"   Hello world   "#@

~

~

The actual code:

class helloworld

{

    public static void main(String args[])

    {

         System.out.println("Hello World!");

     }

}

I look for an easy way but my attempts fail. then. I push

I to learn how to code.I try learning java. but it still

Very complex. i tried LibertyBASIC. from LibertyBASIC to

Java. after learning LibertyBASIC, it was easy!

LibertyBASIC -> Java -> Ruby -> NOW, C# and XAML

Today, I am learning C# and XAML.

My first OS                         :  Windows 7

My first Computer             :  DELL OptiPlex GX 720

My first successful click  :  The Start menu

My first used App              : Microsoft Encarta 2009

My first created App         : Hi-Lo(number-guessing game. written in LibertyBASIC)

Thankyou for reading this Long story.

 

our neighbor has very fast Wi-Fi (~200 MBPS) . but, he didn't tell us the password and we don't know where to ask

sis : You said that you are a programmer right?
me : Of course!
sis : So why don't you do your job?
me : Create an app?
sis : No! hack his Wi-Fi
me : *Hacked the Wi-Fi and give her the password*

another day, mom's phone got crazy,

mom: Allen! Come and fix this phone
me : *After looking at the phone*
me : It is the screen saver I installed earlier

but why people think that programmers are "Computer gods" ?

Dear developers who create an electron based app... Yes it's easy to make custom titlebars but please... Please please please give us the option to use the system default title bars... Looking at you itch!

(Also stop assuming everyone uses windows and use the minimise > maximise > close to the right of the window, not everyone does)

Fuck me in the ass, but do it harder then this api just so I can feel some love 😖

it's one of those days where you have to migrate from soap to rest, only the rest api doesn't have the same structure or search parameters as the soap api, so there's this entire fucking application sending requests at a brick wall, and expecting a purple throbbing 12 inch cock of xml to be pushed into an multi dimensional array and pushed through to the views to derange the mess, only you have to create that fucking 12 inch cock from several 2 inch dipsticks that have a different hierarchy, different field names, and merge the shit together with a glue gun...

good thing it's only an unexpected prod problem... right? 🤷‍♂️

Ah, the woes of a Monday on the legacy app adventures.

Create an web application(a product of our company). Manager insisted on using X third party API instead of Y third party API.

Now the app is complete.
*Very slow, Shitty User Experience *

I feel shameful for creating such a disaster and also wasted 3 sprints on it. But couldn't do anything because I don't have an authority to take decision which API or technology stack I should use.

Business head and manager had a meeting. Now they want to use Y third party API.

So they called me for discussion, lets me know we will now use Y third party API and it should be completed within a week because we just need to change the API calls in code that's all, despite of knowing all the core logic is built around those API.

Don't know how to react to this :( Want to hit my head on a wall

Tried a mobile app club this semester and the second meeting they brought in these two business majors who said they had an idea for an app that would share videos of college parties and the videos would disappear after 24 hours. You could also invite people to the parties as well.

I was like so you basically want snapchat... what happens when cops create accounts and fine people for under age drinking? How will you get market share over snapchat or vine? How much money are you offering?

They were not pleased...

Just found there is an alternative to create-react-app with parcel. It's called create-react-app-parcel or in short CRAP.

To initialise a new project you even do

crap sample-project

Nice!

Diary of an insane lead dev: day 447

pdf thumbnails that the app generates are now in S3 instead of saved on disk.

when they were on disk, we would read them from disk into a stream and then create a stream response to the client that would then render the stream in the UI (hey, I didn't write it, I just had to support it)

one of my lazy ass junior devs jumps on modifying it before I can; his solution is to retrieve the file from the cloud now, convert the stream into a base64 encoded string, and then shove that string into an already bloated viewmodel coming from the server to be rendered in the UI.

i'm like "why on earth are you doing that? did you even test the result of this and notice that rendering those thumbnails now takes 3 times as long???"

jr: "I mean, it works doesn't it?"

seriously, if the image file is already hosted on the cloud, and you can programmatically determine its URL, why wouldn't you just throw that in the src attribute in your html tag and call it a day? why would you possibly think that the extra overhead of retrieving and converting the file before passing it off to the UI in an even larger payload than before would result in a good user experience for the client???

it took me all of 30 seconds to google and find out that AWS SDK has a method to GetPreSignedURL on a private file uploaded to s3 and you can set when it expires, and the application is dead at the end of the year.

JFC. I hate trying to reason with these fuckheads by saying "you are paid for you brain, fucking USE IT" because, clearly these code monkeys do not have brains.

When your team's hard work receive such a mail from the client and still your Project Manager treats you like shit :|

A little back story

Me (hybrid app guy), backend (php api) guy and ui guy (html-css) worked fuckin day and night, to chase the fuckin less than 10 days deadline for this App

We hard to create the App for all 4 platforms including win mobile and blackberry (god bless UI guy and me :|) ~ 2013

Those were the coolest days of our lives , we had a super blast - working (slogging) + drinking + just having fun cursing + not giving fuck to anything and anyone + more drinking..

Cool thing is, our client was in an impression that full backend and front end TEAM is working on this App 😀

This mail still makes us laugh
"professional team" 😁😂

Unfortunately I got paid only half of the salary for next month and left the company shortly
(because official company timing was from 10:00 AM or else half day paycut and I am a night guy, I used to come at around 12:00 noon)

!rant #meta: I registered just yesterday and woke up this morning with 44 notifications, which is great because this community is obviously refreshingly active, plus I really love getting notifications. Nevertheless, is it really necessary to create an individual notification for EVERY SINGLE +1?! Dear devRant devs, I love what you're doing. But please, PLEASE, merge/group these notifications into just a few. I don't want to go through every single one of these, it's just cluttering my notification list. I always just clear the list and then use the in-app bell symbol to navigate to whatever item I'm interested in. I can't be the only one.

The Cloud Of Bullshit

Every day I wake, and I think of my one true mission in life. To mock and ridicule paint huffing idiots. Something recently that drew my ire, like the hemorrhoids on my ass is this idea of 'the cloud', THE CLOUD and the buzzword lingo-bingo bullshit that providers use to hype and sell it.

For example, airtable is an amazing service. I love that I can insert just about anything into a row, create any of my own row datatypes, that it's flexible as all hell.

I love it.

And I hate that I'm essentially locked in to the cloud.
I fucking hate how if my internet goes down (thanks you pie eating inbred dipshits at comcast) I have no access.
If the company is bought, they'll shut down like all the rest , to be "relaunched at a later time" (or never).
I hate that if the company doesn't make enough money, or it's investors change their mind, woopsie, service is shut down.
I hate that the cloud is synonymous with massive data leaks and IOT-levels of stupidity in security practices.

Every time someone says "but its in the cloud! Isn't it amazing!"

I always think 1. YEAH IF IM AN INVESTOR I GET TO MILK LOW BROW FINGER PAINTING FUCKWITS EVERY MONTH like Adobe sucking the blood from infants who are still in college.

2. Why? So I can get locked into their platform, have them segment off previously free features (fucking youtube and the 'subscribe so you can continue playing audio with your screen off' bullshit), and then have fees increase month over month?

3. Why, so every four years during the presidential selection, if I piss off some fuckstick braindead lemming literally sucking his girlfriends BFs cock, they can potentially shut me out from my own data completely?

The Cloud is built on shit-colored hype sold to knob gobbling idiots, controlling idiots, profiting at the expense of idiots, and later fucking them for buyout payola. The Cloud is a Cloud of Bullshit shat out by huckster messiahs straight into the lapping mouths of fanatics worshiping slavishly like toilet drinking scum at the porcelain alter of a neon god, invisible, untouchable, and like a spigot, easily shut off without anyone noticing. And when it happens, I'll be there, shouting "WHERE IS YOUR CLOUD NOW?"

Native any day. 100% native or I don't fucking want it
None of this node.js-gone-native bullshit either with notetaking apps taking up hundreds of megabytes of ram, where everything is bootstrap or react, in a browser, in a window container, because people are so fucking incompetent we have to hold their hand WHILE they give themselves a reach around.

Native or nothing.

For my favorite notetaking app, I use Microsoft OneNote. "OH god, a heathen, quick, stick his body up on a stake!"

But hear me out. I'll be the first one in a crowd to kick bill gates in the nuts (not because I particularly hate microsoft, just because I think hes kind of a cunt).

So when I say onenote is good, I really fucking mean it. Sure they did some cunty things like 'dumbed down' the interface, and cut out some options. But you know what they can't do?
Shut down the damn service (short of a system update completely removing the whole app, which, frankly, wouldn't surprise me).

It's so god damn good it waxed my balls, cured my cancer, fixed my relationship with my father, found my long lost brother, and replaced ALL my irl notebooks.

It's so good that if it was cocaine I'd be hospitalized for overusing it.

So god damn good it didn't just replace all my notebooks, it even replaced and sped up my mockup process three to five times. Want layers?

Built in. Just drag an image on to the notebook to import instantly.

Want to rearrange layers? Right click select "send forward/back/bring to front/send to back".

Everything snaps to grid by default and is easily resizeable.

I had all the elements for a UI sliced and diced. Wanted to try a bunch of layouts. Was gonna take me two damn days.

Did it in three hours with the notebook features of onenote.

After I started using onenote, me and my bodypillow finally conceived even.

Sweet marries mammaries I just fucking jizzed. Thank you onenote.

P.s. It really did speed up my UI design, allows annotated images, highlighted text. Shit, it can even do kanban.

And all I can think is "good job microsoft making an awesome product for free, being dumb as fuck for not charging for it, and then not marketing it at ALL."

It was sheer fucking luck that I discovered it while was I was looking for vendor STD bloatware to blast off my new install.

OneNote: Worth a try even for the kick-gates-in-the-nuts fan club.

The cloud can suck my balls.

So My Employer want me to create an app like spotify+Baidu+Alipay for IOS and Android, and he want the app in the production in two days.

ouch! my health :(

Do you know whats worse than someone reach you for an idea " Lets create X existing app, but..." ?
Its "Lets clone that app, we will sell the service cheaper than the cloned app, you do all the job, se urity, hosting, administrating, and we will split the revenue 50/50."
Just happened.

I used to work for a company that had a main website and a lightweight app. LW app was distributed to partners and added to other sites using an iframe.

Someone decided a requirement was to retain the shopping cart for anonymous users. Some dev thought the best way to do that was to issue auth cookies to anonymous users.

The auth cookie issued by the LW app was actually for the main site. A few users for LW app decided to just come to main site to make a purchase. Since they already had an auth cookie (issued from LW app), they were never prompted to log in, create an account, or use guest checkout on the main site. They were still able to complete their order and we had their shipping address, but we didn’t have their email address so we couldn’t contact them about their order.

Customer service had no way to email customers if something went out of stock or if there was a product recall. CS would have to call these customers and ask for email addresses. Good luck getting anyone to answer or return a call nowadays. Customers were asking where their confirmation email was. The admin website was polluted with “users” that had the placeholder email for non-logged in users.

This happened because of a combination of an understaffed and overextended engineering department. Of course when something goes bad it’s going to be bad.

The MS Teams SDK is bullshit. It's so half baked and comes with instructions like "you'll probably want a better implementation for production, good luck cause you'll have to write it yourself."

Oh and don't forget to cache your installations in a file called "notifications.json"

Deploying will create 2 app registrations (OIDC) and about 6 resources in Azure... But "you'll probably want to log to app insights in production"... So I hope you're very familiar with Bicep cause you'll have to figure out how to add that to your template properly and there are about 7 Bicep files to decipher and it doesn't create an app insights out of the box.

Probably written by an intern.

Programming back in the days you would spend hours, days, week, even month to create an app.. nowadays you can just download an app to create an app..

TL;DR: Stop using React for EVERYTHING. It's not the end-all solution to every application need.

My team is staffed about 50/50 with tenured devs, and junior devs who have never written a full application and don't understand the specific benefits of different libraries/framworks. As a result, most of these junior devs have jumped on the React train, and they're under the impression that React is the end-all answer to any possible application need. Doesn't matter what type of app is, what kind of data is going to be flowing through the app, data scale, etc. In their eyes, React is always the answer. Now, while I'm not a big fan of React myself, I will say that it does its job when its tasked with a data-heavy application that needs to be refreshed/re-rendered dynamically and frequently (like Facebook.) However, my main gripe is that some people insist on using it for EVERYTHING. They refuse to acknowledge that there can be better library/framework choices (Angular, Vue, or even straight jQuery,) and they refuse to learn any other frameworks. You can hit them with countless technical reasons as to why React isn't a good choice for a particular application, and they'll just spout off the same tidbits from the "ReactJS Makes My Nips Hard 101" handbook: "React is the future," "Component-based web architecture is the future," (I'm not arguing with that last one) "But...JSX bro.," "Facebook and Netflix use it, so that's how you know it's amazing." They'll use React for a simple app, and make it overly-complex, and take months to write something that should have taken them a week. For example, we have one dev who has never used any other frameworks/libraries apart from React, and he used React (via create-react-app) to write what is effectively a single form and a content widget inside of a bootstrap template. It took him 4 MONTHS to write this, and it still isn't fully functioning. The search functionality doesn't really work (in fact, it's just array filtering,) and wont return any results if you search for the first word in an entry. His repo is a mess, filled with a bunch of useless files that were bootstrap'd in via create-react-app. We've built apps like this in a week in the past using different libraries/frameworks, and he could have done the same if he didn't overly-complicate the project by insisting on using React. If your app is essentially a dynamic form, you don’t need a freaking virtual DOM.

This happens every time a big new framework hits the scene. New young developers get sucked into it, because it's the cool hip new framework (or in React's case, library.) and they use it for everything, even when it's not the best choice. It happened with Angular, Rails, and now it's happening with React.

React has its benefits, but please please please consider which library/framework is the best choice from a technical standpoint before immediately jumping on the React train because "Facebook uses it bro."

I fucking hate MS Teams!

I do not use it at all, but there is another company of our group that has it. At the beginning, I could just access the website and talk to them over there. Ok, the page was not good, but that used to work for me.

The last meeting I had with them, the web version did not exist anymore, they just made me install the app. Luckily there is an official Linux version, so I could install it. I got late to the meeting, but could make it.

Today I had a meeting with a client. Important stuff and Teams did not let me use it because I had no business account with Teams enabled on it.

I've tried to use one of my personal accounts, to create a new one, to enable Teams, I've clicked, enabled, allowed every single thing they asked, but I ended up on the Teams home page again or with Teams asking me to call people on Skype instead of using Teams.

I've managed to create a company on Microsoft account on which I had to be responsible to my workers (!?!?!?) and it finally opened the Teams app, but when I try to enter the client meeting link, it just opens the app with no error message at all.

Fuck Teams and fuck Microsoft!

So... Heard back from a recruiter today. Lovely lass.

I’d passed over a submission for her tech demo.

The brief was basically just to create a small simple module that calculates shit, nae effort.

But, when the recruiter had me on the phone she said “I know it’s a silly small module but try and run it up like you would a production ready app”.

The job spec and recruiter were keen on me demonstrating TDD, not specific on js version, final runtime, etc. The job was a senior spec at a higher salary range. So it warranted some effort, and demonstrating more than a simple module.

“Okay, cool, nae bother, let’s crack on.”

The feedback in the response from the dev today:
“He’s over-engineered tests, build...”

SUCK MY LEFT TESTICLE YOU FUCKWIT.

Talk to your recruiters, not me.

The feedback included a phrase I never hope to hear from a developer I work with:
“Tests are good but...” 😞

It was a standard 98% test suite from an RGR cycle, no more or less than I’d expect in prod.

The rest of the feedback was misguided or plain wrong. It was useful to see because I know now when they say they have “high standards” they mean: we listen to the dude who put the factory pattern in a JS brief.

Oh shit also: “someone’s done chmod 777” was in there as a sarcastic comment in the feedback. It was his fucking unarchive tool 😞

My response was brief and polite: “cheers for the consideration, all the best, James”

It’s honestly not worth warning them. Or, asking why they’d criticise something they’d asked me to do.

If you want a shitty js module, ask for a shitty js module and no more.

I once agreed to maintain and develop an application used in a different section of the school to keep inventory and make sure everything is where it is supposed to be.

At first there was enthusiasm, together with 2 of my classmates we agreed and git clone-d the .NET application that now graduated students built and maintained for the past few years. What could go wrong right?!

It became clear that the original students that worked on it followed an older curriculum, meaning they still got taught .NET instead of the core variant that we get now, not only that but it also seemed that they either did not fully grasp the Clean/Onion architecture or didn't get it in class since there were infrastructure components in the 'Domain' project of the solution. Think of 2 DBContexts in the domain model, yep.

One of us bailed in the first week, the other one and I felt bad for the people using the app so we went on and tried to work on the first bugs that were described in a document. One of these bugs was 'whenever I filter on something in the list, everybody gets to see that filter on their screen instead of only me'. Woah that's weird! Let's see how they put that together!

Oh god, they are using a _static_ variable to store filters, no wonder that it doesn't work properly. Ever heard of sessions?!

Second bug: Sometimes people can't create an account when we sign them up from the admin panel. Alright that is weird, let's figure that one out! Wait a second it seems to work in development? What's this about.

Oh wait I can't create an account on production either? Oh that's weird, wait a second... Why do I have to put my e-mail in a form that was sent to me through e-mail? Why is my address not filled in already? OOH, if someone types in the wrong e-mail address (which is easy since our school has 4 variants of the same f*cking e-mail address) it won't work since it can't recognize the user! Brilliant! Remove e-mail input box and make a token/queryparam determine the user account.

Ah that seems good, it's a mess but it seems a tiny bit better now, great! We're making progress and some sweet buck.

Next bug, trillions of 50x errors on random pages, that's a weird one.

Hm everything works in development, that's odd. Is the production data corrupted?

DID I MENTION that in order to get into the system in development we have to load in a f*cking production database backup ON OUR DEVELOPMENT MACHINE and then ask one of the users' password to login to it and create an account for ourselves? Seeding? What's that, right?!

Anyway, back to bug fixing. I e-mail the the people responsible for the app and get a production admin account, oh I also can't ssh into it because of policies so I have to do everything over e-mail and figure out what's causing the errors. I somehow also wonder if they have any kind of virtualization in place, giving students a VM to do that stuff in doesn't seem so weird does it ? Even with school policies?

Oh btw, 'deploying' means sending a .zip file to a guy in another building and telling him how to configure it, apparently this resulted in a missing folder that the application needed to work and couldn't make on its own. This after 2 weeks of e-mailing back and forth.

After 3 months i quit out of despair and sadness, and due to the fact that I just couldn't do it anymore. I separated everything into logical subprojects and let the last guy handle it, he was OK with that and understood why I left.

Luckily, around that time I already had an actual job at a software development company :)

Had a guy test an iOS app for me several months ago. Couple of days ago he messages me asking me if I can give him my code because and I quote...
"I'd like to create the same app"

I (as politely as possible) told him no & why.

Made an Android app a while ago. I needed some pet project so I decided to go with Java for Android. First time, no experience at all.

So everything went ok, I had a little help from a colleague, structuring code, and pushing to the store. Work done app was doing ok.

A year later I came back to this project. I needed to fix a bug - date time and daylight savings crap. 😥

Spent a week on it. Ready to push a new version to the store, with some extra features! Build apk. All good.

Wait. I need to sign the APK? Wtf. I had to format my hard drive. How do I recover my fucking certificate?

*Google's for a while*

No fucking way. I can't restore the certificate. Or get the keystore back. The solution is to create a new app with a brand new package name?

Thanks for nothing, I'm done with Android development.

I genuinely regret and believed that I just got scammed by recruiter. There's a company wanted me to create a prototype of Social Media App in order to be qualified for the interview , which I completed in weeks, as soon as they got my source code, they went ghosting me.

I woke up in the early morning today, in my WeChat Moment appears to be an advertisement of a "Social Media App" , which the design and the concepts are very familiar.

So technically I just build the an app for their money making scheme, and I am unemployed.

I hate myself for making this decision, I thought the app is for testing my capabilities, but unfortunately that's not it...

我只是棋盤上的棋子...........

Ad an Android dev, I hate that hybrid solution like cordova, react native or similar frameworks. Companies sell their apps for ridicolous prices, so every native Android/ios dev need to get it's work faster and for a lower price.
Customers can't understand that hybrid app are faster to create but works worse. I'm hating you, hybrid-guys

So....
I was asked to transfer a spaghetti Android/iOS project to xamarin for a bank client yesterday because "that's what they use".

This is a crm/loyalty app that has been around for 2+ years now (you can imagine the mess). On top of that I have no knowledge of c#, .net or xamarin.

So I ask: "When is this supposed to be delivered?"

Boss: "It was scheduled for 2 weeks ago but let's say 2 weeks from now"

Me: "..... This is a huge remake it won't be even close to ready in 2 weeks"

Boss: "Let's check on the progress in 2 weeks and see how it goes"

Why is it hard for bosses to provide an actual timeframe???

He's been pulling the same crap with junior devs for years and of course they get nervous and create more spaghetti code...

Anyway long story short (not) I have an interview Monday!

Let's hope it's not more of the same!

P.S.: to junior devs: When you are given a deadline... IGNORE IT.

On iOS 11, Apple is no longer allowing you to open apps that are 32 bit. Apple should have given all the developers with 32-bit apps free access to the developer program rather than forcing them to pay a $99 fee to publish a 64-bit version of their app.

This would’ve made better business sense for them as publishers would have had an opportunity to create new apps and see more revenue coming in from upgraded apps. Ultimately more money for Apple. Not sure what dumb fool at Apple HQ thought this was a good idea.

I started programming when I was 14, because I was deeply enrooted in MMORPG hacking communities. It gave me an escape from real life, and I felt empowered by the skill to create something from nothing. My first language was Lazarus FPC, followed by VB.NET, C#, C++ ( managed and unmanaged non CLR ). As time went on, I found more ways to turn my "hacks" into software, and finally I began selling subscriptions which required me writing an authentication system.

After weeks of research, I began writing my own REST API in PHP using MySQL as my database. At this point I had an IPB forum up and running for a year, but with my newly acquired knowledge I was able to couple my API with my forum software. To properly distribute my API i had to learn NGINX to route my API to a subdomain.

Soon after I began writing my own portal for my authentication system, at which point I had become entirely enveloped in Web Development. I was 17 when I dropped my forum, I'm now 21 and freelancing web app consulting, day job as a QA automation developer.

when you divide the products you sell into different categories, i dont think "human hair" is a good category.

this actually gives me an idea. i kinda wanna create a redesign plan for aliexpress app tbh cause i dont like its UI/UX.

Create an app with a group of friends who are non-developers. My god.

Saw this sent into a Discord chat today:

"Warning, look out for a Discord user by the name of "shaian" with the tag #2974. He is going around sending friend requests to random Discord users, and those who accept his friend requests will have their accounts DDoSed and their groups exposed with the members inside it becoming a victim as well. Spread the word and send this to as many discord servers as you can. If you see this user, DO NOT accept his friend request and immediately block him. Discord is currently working on it. SEND THIS TO ALL THE SERVERS YOU ARE IN. This is IMPORTANT: Do not accept a friend request from shaian#2974. He is a hacker.

Tell everyone on your friends list because if somebody on your list adds one of them, they'll be on your list too. They will figure out your personal computer's IP and address, so copy & paste this message where ever you can. He is going around sending friend requests to random discord users, and those who accept his requests will have their accounts and their IP Addresses revealed to him. Spread the word and send this to as many discord servers as you can. If you see this user, DO NOT accept his friend request and immediately block him. Saw this somewhere"

I was so angry I typed up an entire feature-length rant about it (just wanted to share my anger):

"1. Unless they have access to Discord data centres or third-party data centres storing Discord user information I doubt they can obtain the IP just by sending friend requests.

2. Judging by the wording, for example, 'copy & paste this message where ever you can' and 'Spread the word and send this to as many discord servers as you can. If you see this user, DO NOT accept his friend request and immediately block him.' this is most likely BS, prob just someone pissed off at that user and is trying to ruin their reputation etc.. Sentences equivalent to 'spread the word' are literally everywhere in this wall of text.

3. So what if you block the user? You don't even have their user ID, they can change their username and discrim if they want. Also, are you assuming they won't create any alts?

4. Accounts DDoSed? Does the creator of this wall of text even understand what that means? Wouldn't it be more likely that 'shaian' will be DDoSing your computer rather than your Discord account? How would the account even be DDoSed? Does that mean DDoSing Discord's servers themselves?

5. If 'shaian' really had access to Discord's information, they wouldn't need to send friend requests in order to 'DDoS accounts'. Why whould they need to friend you? It doesn't make sense. If they already had access to Discord user IP addresses, they won't even have to interact with the users themselves. Although you could argue that they are trolling and want to get to know the victim first or smth, that would just be inefficient and pointless. If they were DDoSing lots of users it would be a waste of time and resources.

6. The phrase 'Saw this somewhere' at the end just makes it worse. There is absolutely no proof/evidence of any kind provided, let along witnesses.

How do you expect me to believe this copypasta BS scam? This is like that 'Discord will be shutting down' scam a while back.

Why do people even believe this? Do you just blindly follow what others are doing and without thinking, copy and paste random walls of text?

Spreading this false information is pointless and harmful. It only provides benefits to whoever started this whole thing, trying to bring down whoever 'shaian' is.

I don't think people who copy & paste this sort of stuff are ready to use the internet yet.

Would you really believe everything people on the internet tell you?

You would probably say 'no'.

Then why copy & paste this? Do you have a reason?

Or is it 'just because of 'spread the word''?

I'm just sick of seeing people reposting this sort of stuff

People who send this are probably like the people who click 'Yes' to allow an app to make changes in the User Account Control window without reading the information about the publisher's certificate, or the people who click 'Agree' without actually reading the terms and conditions."

Ugh I was so bored creating icons that I decided to create an app icon generator with Webpack-style config and icon generation for multiple platform + custom shape for desktop

Story about my old boss:

I was doing a lot of work in an area that had a data property and a method to build an object. I noticed a reset method that iterated all that objects properties, found the matching data from the data object, passed that data through some logic to format it and then assigned that value to the object property.

As part of my PR I removed that method, since data wasn't changing, and simply called the create method again with data.

The result of tidying the code base and putting it up for review before a merge? I get told I have no respect for my boss's code, that I am undermining him, that I need to be more considerate and respectful of other people's work and that I am no longer allowed to change any code he has written in the code base (half the code base) without talking to him about it first, before it goes up for review. Also if he is working on an area I cannot change anything - not even 1 character (he is working on the core of the app).

Every day there I was so confused :D

Me: Oh, man, there are hooks for react-redux now? I don’t have to wrap components in a higher order component to get information from the redux store and dispatch actions? Could this solve the problem I’m having with data fetching and consistency in the app I’m working on?!

Spends entire Saturday writing a basic server, connecting to an mLab instance, filling said instance with dummy data, starting a create-react-app, writing a reducer, action creators, components, etc. just to test how useSelector(), useEffect(), and useDispatch() would work in an application that isn’t just a simple counter (why is it that like every example is always the counter example?!). Bonus, react-router now ALSO has hooks, so got to play with useHistory() and useParams()

Conclusion: Maybe. It does appeal to me to not have the cascade of virtual DOM that you always get nesting HOCs, but I’m also wary of appearing too willing to jump on it just because it’s the new thing.

Has anybody else played around with react-redux hooks? Your thoughts?

Also, yes, I know, not every app needs redux. It had it when I was brought on and I don’t really have the ability to change that implementation detail now.

Fucking fuck fuck fuck outdated superiors that know jack shit about how software development works. Dnt even know about git, docker, cloud services. Everything is done on premise with network that is fucking crap and when an app is down "hey why is it down?" ask the fucking server and network admin how the fuck am i supossed to know? i have to create workaround codes when other devs just need to deploy their app and its fucking running as it should be. why the fuck do i need to spend my time debugging Ping timeouts? im a fucking dev. I have done designs, analyze requirements, build frontend, backend, optimize codes, paying attention to security and now i have to fix network problems as well? fuck off

Create Innovation my fucking arse. you just Keep saying that but then wondering "what is this new thing youre trying? its new and different why do that?" because you asked for innovation you fuck. If i copied some other concept its not innovation is it pricks.

Fuck them and all the brown nosers as well.

Dev sent out a code review request.
I take about an hour, ask questions, make suggestions, general feedback, etc.

Today I noticed none of my questions were answered, developer closed the review, and the code merged into the production branch.

So I email him, asking him why the review was closed and why none of my concerns were addressed before merging to production.

Dev: "No one responded or left feedback, so I thought it was OK to merge up."
Me: "I reviewed and left feedback within the hour you sent the request."
Dev: "Oh yea...you did. Sorry. The code is already in production, but if you still want to leave feedback, create a work item, and I'll take a look."

No you won't.

An example of the code...The dev added an async method to a test harness *console app*. Why? .. check in comment was "Improves performance and enhances the developer experience.."
NO IT DOESN'T!

OK..that's off my chest. No one is getting punched in the face today.

Fiddling with the UiPath RPA tool. What the fuck is this monster?

So, you create apps by drawing a flowchart, like some kid using Scratch. Then, suddenly, you have to create a .NET object just to get a random number!

Who the fuck is the target audience that can create objects, call a directory read function, etc, but can't write a loop?! Show me that fucking person.

Then I have to debug the fucking selectors when they don't work correct. All this requires is understanding how UIs are structured under the hood. So, you know that a menu bar is a window, but you need to draw a fucking if statement?!

And how would you debug and manage this monstrosity?

It like we learned nothing from all the Excel apps we build for decades.

I mean, it's an impressive app. But, why does it exist?

Someone needs to stop this before it gets out into the wild or we'll all be debugging flowchart a created by business analysts.

You have been warned. Join the fight or accept the consequences.

> Mister IHateForALiving, we need a new table on the website do to thing

No biggie, we know there's a datatable plugin somewhere.

> No, you can't use that, it doesn't have pagination

Oh, right. I also see here it was last updated 4 years ago, it's kinda shit too, it's like the inbred cousin of a real datatable. Ok, how did you tackle the thing until now?

> There's a script template somewhere in the page, we iterate over that to create our tables

Ok, but I'll have to write some logic for that, how much time do I have?

> I want this to be online by this evening

Can't be done, what if we used a normal datatable like normal people?

> No, it looks too different from the real site

How am I supposed to manage the thing then?

> IDK, just reload the page every time

_____________
And here we are, triggering a full page reload on an already bloated Laravel app (something like 600-800ms) for 20 lines of json. Great idea mister team leader, but consider the following: fuck you and your bastard lineage.

So the story is true and this is what we have to deal with now..

My friend and I started to build a Web Application for a Roleplay Community. The project was for a client mainly and they don't mind if we try to sell this project to the public. All goes well except the shitty design, which is the one our client asked for. So after 6 months of work we planned to switch our backend to Nodejs, the switch look quite easy in our brains [PHP => NODEJS] because we already use Nodejs for instant functions without reloading the page.

So during the planning we earn a client which is one of the member of the clan, but he pay for another clan which is 6x bigger then the one we're in. So we continue to develop and think about the switch. We learn a news about a new competitor, this one sucks, we tried their App and it's not worth the money they ask. A few days after another competitor enter the market, this one is a big challenge for us. "Sit down tight, yea you reading this"..

The competitor use BUBBLE to create their shit, they earned 10 clients in one week and just punch us with "THE ROCK" hand, they release a lot of feature each week, they're 6 devs on that (if we can call them devs), we're 2 programmers (True Programmers). What we do in 1 week they do it in 5 hours with Bubble, the switching to Nodejs was a badluck, you couldn't add feature because of this switch during 2 weeks, this made us later and second in the race. My friend (at the same time my employee and back-end programmer) move into another appartment which obligate him to work full-time. At this time I'm f****, I'm only a Front-End Programmer vs 6 Wannabe Devs with a mother**** tool of *** (#Bubble).

This is where I am, in this beautiful opportunity to win this market but with this bad luck occuring = the opportunity is low, but our advantage is we don't have made our project public yet so they're the only good option for the communities to get that kind of web app, the others are not included and only a copy of this (Their Product) or just a big junk made with Wix.

At this time I'm working hard to make this opportunity happen, I have my math which I have to finish to have my High School diploma to do, a part-time job to get if I want to stay with an internet connection and finally I have to find a way to still be able to make my dream come true (Working on my Business at full time & Make money from it) and continue to be a Front-End Programmer/CEO of an enterprise.

Curious interview process for a job I was denied for. I was told to create an app for a "case study" I was given a week it was supposed to be a single activity sports app written in MVVM with a specific API. I turned in a single activity, 3 fragment application, that made queries and displayed results from that specific API as well as told the weather and in quirky quotes told you whether or not it was a good idea to go tailgating. When I got to the interview after turning it in a day early they said they loved the application, hounded me on code (all questions in which I answered) and they told me that I would get word on next steps within the next few days. Obviously I didn't get that job as earlier stated however, does this not seem weird?

I have a 24 hours hackathon tomorrow (25 hours actually because of the time change).
I want to learn and create an app and I opted for xamarin as a development platform. Problem was: I didn't have enough space in my windows partition (it's a ~40Gb partition in a 128Gb ssd) so, as I am not using Ubuntu that much I simply deleted its partitions from Windows and installed visual studio with xamarin. I played a bit with it, everything was working fine, I switched it off and I was feeling great for my wonderful problem solving abilities and I was ready to go to bed to have a nice 10 hours sleep before the big event. I was about to sleep when I realised it was my cousin's birthday and I hadn't said "happy birthday" so I switch my computer back on and there I realised how much I had fucked up.
The grub wasn't working anymore and I couldn't boot.
I've just spent the last 3 or 4 hours trying to figure out how to make my computer boot normally using my housemates' laptops to create bootable USBs for Windows and Ubuntu
Thanks to some random commands in the trial version of Ubuntu I managed to disinstall the grub and make windows start but thanks to my experimentations while trying to fix the problem I am now waiting for visual studio + xamarin (~35Gb) to download and install again.
Tomorrow's gonna be great

I'm currently between jobs and have a few rants about my previous job (naturally). In retrospect, it's somewhat therapeutic to range about the sheer brainfuckery that has taken place. Enjoy!

First, let me set the scene: legacy B2B web app made with LEMP stack and sencha ext.js 3 + 4 (don't ask) and a lot of madness. Let's call that app "Alpha".

Alpha is a self made CMS build for typical ERP stuff. Yes, a self made CMS: entities are containers, containers have types and fields and values. Like so many legacy PHP apps, it does not have a dedicated FE: the HTML is rendered on the server and then spewed out to the browser.

Easy right? Coding like it's 1999! But there was a twist: Because everything is basically a container, the HTML-templates are saved in the DB. Along with the nessary JS and the CSS. And the translation variables. Why? Because fuck you! That's why. Who needs a git history anyways.

For some reason, Alpha was kinda slow.

There was also an editor, that allowed you to modify templates (web, mail, pdf) on the fly in prod. Because templates contain repeating data (header/footer), one template could contain additional templates. Much confusion. You could change templates via migration (slow, boring) or just ctrl-c/ctrl-v that sucker (fast, much excitement).

Did I mention Alpha was slow?

On with the rant: e-mails! How do they work? Noone knows. How to send mails asynchronous in PHP? Witchcraft is the only possible answer to that riddle. Here is your enterprise™ solution:
1. create mail
2. insert mail into DB
3. WAIT UP TO 59 SECONDS FOR A FUCKING CRON TO SEND MAIL

Why? "Because that way, we can resend mails in case the network is down :)"

Same procedure for the SOAP-API (db-queue + cron). You read that right: all requests to various other systems are processed once a minute.

Alpha slow.

Alpha was only one of several systems. Imagine a bunch of monolithic php apps, interconnected via SOAP, REST and GraphQL like a godamn intergalactic orgy. Image having to debug that cluster fuck.

Let's say there is a bad request. These things happen. No biggie. Remember the db-queue? Let's try to send the bad request a second time! And a third time! Still no luck? How odd. Let's create a specific file in a specific directory: a LOCK-file. Now, "the db-queue is on hold and no request gets processed :)"

Golly gee thanks Alpha.

Anyhow, did you know that MySQL has a join limit of 61 tables?

At work, how often do you create your own apps? As opposed to adding a new feature to an existing one?

I am thinking maybe the biggest difference between me and everyone else on my team is because I have a lot more experience creating my own apps.

So when I get a problem I tend to start by thinking how to create a new app for it, what would be the ideal way to solve the problem. And then if needed, figure out how to integrate it into an existing project.

Whereas everyone else thinks about how to solve a problem within the context (and constraints) of an existing app.

How come something works absolutely perfectly in dev but not in prod?
I was making a desktop app in election js and everything is working perfectly. No problem at all. But then I create the installer/distributable and nothing shows on the screen. And out of curiosity, I wanted to see the error log and it shows an unknown error, I didn't even know from what thing the error is being generated. And after I fixed that, another problem came with Asana Api. I mean, if it's a public API, why do you have to block it with cors? I hate cors!
And after all of it, there's more to it. I mean, why can't you just show the errors in dev?

TL;DR: A new "process" for collaboration between teams was created in order to stonewall requests from my team.

A couple months ago, we created a new Dev team that specializes in writing internal tools. This team was staffed with internal developers, and got a separate manager. The whole point of this team was to collaborate with my dev team so we can both help each other develop tools that the company needs.

One of the developers that was on my team went over to this team while he and I were still working on a big application. For a few weeks, he still worked on this application as he normally would, and we'd sit with each other and work through features together whenever we needed a fresh set of eyes.

Well, eventually his new team got protective of him and created a new "process" for our teams to request assistance from one another. So now instead of just popping over to someone's desk to ask a quick question, you have to send an email to the team and request that you can borrow that particular developer for a question, and then the entire team sits down and discusses whether or not they're going to allow that person to answer your question. Then after a week of discussion, if they decide to allow it, they schedule a meeting for a week later, in which you will get the question answered.

So instead of just spending 2 minutes to ask and answer the question, you have to spend weeks in order to request assistance, and then schedule a meeting.

It's ridiculous, and it's all because his team got protective that he was working with another Dev team. Dev teams collaborate all the time, and work together. My team is constantly helping other teams, and we don't have this ridiculous process. We get asked a question, and we answer it. Simple as that.

Last week, I sent an email for assistance in completing a feature, and didn't hear back. I talked to the Product Owner for the team, and he said "Just send an email," to which I responded that I did and hadn't got a response. He said "Oh....." I then told my boss that this is an enormous bottleneck, and he seemed surprised hearing that this is a bottleneck.

A week passed and today I still hadn't got a response, so my boss reached out to the Product Owner to push him. Finally, I got a response and they scheduled a meeting to answer my question 3 days down the road. So it's going on 2 weeks to get this simple question answered.

Normally I'd just have the other developer come over and help, but apparently they yelled at him the last time he did that.

The issue is that the process was created with the assistance of our "senior" developers, who never work with this other team in this capacity, so they just nodded and smiled and let them put this ridiculous process in place.

Like, get off your high horses. You don't "own" him, he's allowed to collaborate with other teams. This question would've taken literally 10 minutes, but because of your new "process" you've turned it into a 2 week debacle and you've effectively delayed the app launch with your pettiness.

They say that this process isn't intended to prevent us from getting assistance, and that might not have been the original intention of the Product Owner/manager, but it's very clear that the developers on the other team are taking advantage of it and using it as a big stonewall so they can beat around the bush and avoid providing assistance when it's needed.

If this becomes a trend, I'm going to schedule a meeting (which apparently they love to do,) and we're going re-work this entire process, because it's extremely counterproductive and seems to only exist in order to create red tape.

Got one right now, no idea if it’s the “most” unrealistic, because I’ve been doing this for a while now.

Until recently, I was rewriting a very old, very brittle legacy codebase - we’re talking garbage code from two generations of complete dumbfucks, and hands down the most awful codebase I’ve ever seen. The code itself is quite difficult to describe without seeing it for yourself, but it was written over a period of about a decade by a certifiably insane person, and then maintained and arguably made much worse by a try-hard moron whose only success was making things exponentially harder for his successor to comprehend and maintain. No documentation whatsoever either. One small example of just how fucking stupid these guys were - every function is wrapped in a try catch with an empty catch, variables are declared and redeclared ten times, but never used. Hard coded credentials, hard coded widths and sizes, weird shit like the entire application 500ing if you move a button to another part of the page, or change its width by a pixel, unsanitized inputs, you name it, if it’s a textbook fuck up, it’s in there, and then some.

Because the code is so damn old as well (MySQL 8.0, C#4, and ASP.NET 3), and utterly eschews the vaguest tenets of structured, organized programming - I decided after a month of a disproportionate effort:success ratio, to just extract the SQL queries, sanitize them, and create a new back end and front end that would jointly get things where they need to be, and most importantly, make the application secure, stable, and maintainable. I’m the only developer, but one of the senior employees wrote most of the SQL queries, so I asked for his help in extracting them, to save time. He basically refused, and then told me to make my peace with God if I missed that deadline. Very helpful.

I was making really good time on it too, nearly complete after 60 days of working on it, along with supporting and maintaining the dumpster fire that is the legacy application. Suddenly my phone rings, and I’m told that management wants me to implement a payment processing feature on the site, and because I’ve been so effective at fixing problems thus far, they want to see it inside of a week. I am surprised, because I’ve been regularly communicating my progress and immediate focus to management, so I explain that I might be able to ship the feature by end of Q1, because rather than shoehorn the processor onto the decrepit piece of shit legacy app, it would be far better to just include it in the replacement. I add that PCI compliance is another matter that we must account for, and so there’s not a great chance of shipping this in a week. They tell me that I have a month to do it…and then the Marketing person asks to see my progress and ends up bitching about everything, despite the front end being a pixel perfect reproduction. Despite my making everything mobile responsive, iframe free, secure and encrypted, fast, and void of unpredictable behaviors. I tell her that this is what I was asked to do, and that there should have been no surprises at all, especially since I’ve been sending out weekly updates via email. I guess it needed more suck? But either way, fuck me and my two months of hard work. I mean really, no ego, I made a true enterprise grade app for them.

Short version, I stopped working on the rebuild, and I’m nearly done writing the payment processor as a microservice that I’ll just embed as an iframe, since the legacy build is full of those anyway, and I’m being asked to make bricks without straw. I’m probably glossing over a lot of finer points here too, just because it’s been such an epic of disappointment. The deadline is coming up, and I’m definitely going to make it, now that I have accordingly reduced the scope of work, but this whole thing has just totally pissed me off, and left a bad taste about the organization.

The global joke of Information Security

So I broke my iPhone because the nuclear adhesive turned my display into a shopping bag.

This started the ride for my character arc in this boring dystopia novel:

Amazon is preventing me from accessing my account because they want my password, email AND mobile phone number in their TWO.STEP Verifivation.
Just because one too many scammers managed to woo one too many 90+y/o's into bailing their long lost WW2 comrades from a nigerian jail with Amazon gift cards and Amazon doesn't know what to do about anymore,

DHL is keeping my new phone in a "highly secure" vault 200m away from my place, waiting for a letter to register some device with a camera because you need to verify your identity with an app,

all the while my former car insurance is making regress claims of about 7k€ against me for a minor car accident (no-one hurt fortunately, but was my fault).

Every rep from each of the above had the same stupid bitchass scapegoat to create high-tech supra chargers to the account deletion request:

- Amazon: We need to verify your password, whether the email was yours and whether the phone number is yours.

They call it 2-step-verification.

Guess what Amazon requests to verify you before contacting customer support since you dont have access to your number? Your passwoooooord. While youre at it, click on that button we sent you will ya? ...

I call this design pattern the "dement Tupi-Guarani"

- DHL: We need an ID to verify your identity for the request for changing the delivery address you just made. Oh you wanted to give us ANOTHER address than the one written on your ID? Too bad bro, we can't help, GDPR

- Car Insurance: We are making regress claims against you, which might throw you back to mom's basement, oh and also we compensated the injured party for something else, it doesn't matter what it is but it's definitely something, so our claims against you just raised by 1.2k. Wait you want proof we compensated something to the injured at all? Nah mate we cant do that , GDPR. But trust me, those numbers are legit, my quant forecasted the cost of childrens' christmas wishes. You have 14 days or we'll see you in court haha

I am also their customer in a pension scheme. Something special to Germany, where you save some taxes but have to pay them back once you get the fund paid out. I have sent them a letter to terminate the contract.

Funniest thing is, the whole rant is my second take. Because when I hit the post button, devrant made me verify my e-mail. The text was gone afterwards. If someone from devRant reads this, you are free to quote this in the ticket description.

Fuck losing your virginity, or filing your first tax return, or by God get your first car, living through this sad Truman dystopia without going batshit insane is what becoming a true adult is.

I am grateful for all this though:

Amazon's safety measures prevented me from spending the money I can use to conclude the insurance odyssey, and DHLs "giving a fuck about customers" prevention policies made me support local businesses. And having ranted all this here does feel healthy too. So there's that.

Oh, cherry on top. I cant check my balance, because I can only verify my login requests to my banking account wiiiiiiith...?

Why is Google so annoying? Download the latest version of Android Studio,, create an empty application from their template, build the empty APK and try to upload it to Google Play. Turns out the template for new app in Android Studio is set to use Experimental SDK, not accepted by Play Console.

Am I the only one who thinks this is dumb and left hand needs to talk to right hand?

With a recent HAProxy update on our reverse proxy VM I decided to enable http/2, disable TLS 1.0 and drop support for non forward-secrecy ciphers.

Tested our sites in Chrome and Firefox, all was well, went to bed.

Next morning a medium-critical havock went loose. Our ERP system couldn't create tickets in our ticket system anymore, the ticket systems Outlook AddIn refused to connect, the mobile app we use to access our anti-spam appliance wouldn't connect although our internal blackboard app still connected over the same load balancer without any issues.

So i declared a 10min maintenance window and disabled HTTP/2, thinking that this was the culprit.

Nope. No dice.
Okay, i thought, enable TLS 1.0 again.

Suddenly the ticket system related stuff starts to work again.

So since both the ERP system and the AddIn run on .NET i dug through the .NET documentation and found out that for some fucking reason even in the newest .NET framework version (4.7.2) you have to explicitly enable TLS 1.1 and 1.2 or else you just get a 'socket reset' error. Why the fuck?!

Okay, now that i had the ticket system out of the way i enabled HTTP/2 and verified that everything still works.

It did, nice.

The anti-spam appliance app still did not work however, so i enabled one non-pfs cipher in the OpenSSL config and tested the app.

Behold, it worked.

I'm currently creating a ticket with them asking politely why the fuck their app has pfs-ciphers disabled.

And I thought disabling DEPRECEATED tech wouldn't be an issue... Wrong...

Coolest bug is less of a bug and more of a feature. I've been working on a medical app and I used an open source backend which had almost everything I needed. To be hipaa compliant you have to encrypt all sensitive data - full db encryption was not something this backend was capable of.

So my solution was to encrypt the data on the client side and create a secondary server - that can only be accessed on my app server - to store and retrieve the keys.

If anyone's thinking of working on a HIPAA project - you're welcome

This project is frontend hell.

We have a dark theme and a light theme. Light is the default but not for mobile. For mobile the dark theme is the default. And if we dont like something we just create a overwrite css. And if that one isnt working we just create yet another overwrite file. And !importants. They are important to make sure things are working.

The we use this framework, but not for mobile. No mobile is just custom jQuery.

Ow and of course separately from the mobile version we need a iOS app. An app which totally differs from the mobile version because we want users to use this now.

Data representation is one of the most important things in any kind of app you develop. The most common, classic way to do it is to create a class with all the fields you want to transport, for example User(name, lastName). It's simple and explicit, but hell no, in my current company we don't play that kindergarten bullshit, the only way we know how to do things here is full hardcore. Why would anyone write a class to represent a Song, a Playlist or an Album when you can just use a key-> value map for pretty much everything? Need a list of songs? No problem, use a List<Map<String, String>>, OBVIOUSLY each map is a song. Need a list of playlists? Use a List<List<Map<String, String>>>... Oh wait, need to treat a value as a number and all you have are strings? That's what casting is for, dumbass.

No, seriously, this company is great. I'm staying here forever!

There's very little good use cases for mongo, change my mind.

Prototyping maybe? Rails can prototype, create/update/destroy db schemas really quickly anyways.

If you're doing a web app, there's tons of libs that let you have a store in your app, even a fake mongo on the browser.

Are the reads fast? When I need that, use with redis.

Can it be an actual replacement for an app's db? No. Safety mechanisms that relational dbs have are pretty much must haves for a production level app.
Data type checks, null checks, foreign key checks, query checks.
All this robustness, this safety is something critical to maintain the data of an app sane.

Screw ups in the app layer affecting the data are a lot less visible and don't get noticed immediately (things like this can happen with relational dbs but are a lot less likely)

Let's not even get into mutating structures. Once you pick a structure with mongo, you're pretty much set.
Redoing a structure is manual, and you better have checks afterwards.

But at the same time, this is kind of a pro for mongo, since if there's variable data, as in some fields that are not always present, you don't need to create column for them, they just go into the data.

But you can have json columns in postgres too!

Is it easier to migrate than relational dbs? yes, but docker makes everything easy also.

God I fucking hate macs.
I got a mac at work. I tried to install ubuntu, with rather questionable results (unfortunately, I expected that) - so I tried to get mac work for me the way I like a system to work. I needed to download slack, simple enough, right? Ha, you wish. It's gotta be done through Apple store, so I went to create an Apple ID inside the Apple Store form. And, well, it just errored out on the submission. Great start. I went then to the settings and created an account there, great success, went back to Apple Store. Unfortunately being logged in at the system level doesn't mean you are logged in to the store. So, I went to log in to the store, simple enough, right? No, nothing's simple with Apple. After logging in I got a message that the Apple ID has not yet been used with Apple Store and that I need to review the account's setting. So, I click the "review" button and... I'm presented with a log in form. Yep, a perfect log in loop. I can't log in because I can't review the account but I can't review the account because I can't log in. Fun :)

You can't just go to the web admin panel for your account to review it for Apple Store, that would too be too easy. After a bit of searching I've found an answer on StackOverflow. You need to log in to iTunes. Through a fucking MUSIC APP. To install a free application from the store you need to log in to a music app. Yes, we're all mad here.

Then, after finding out that to be able to use side buttons on my mouse I need an app that I need to manually restart every time I restart the machine and that I need to have an app to fucking transfer files from an android I need another fucking app, because reading a storage of a linux-based system would be too standards compliant - something in me broke. I found out that installing windows on a mac is officially supported.

Supported doesn't mean that it's easy. I tried to install it trying different solutions from SO, but each time I would get an error that Windows couldn't modify the boot partition. Turns out that even wiping the drive and reinstalling OSX doesn't remove residual files on a boot partition and Windows installer is not allowed to modify them. It took me hunting into some shady looking site to actually find this answer. I have no fucking idea how long it all took me, but, finally, great success, Windows, WSL, side buttons working, I can even install slack from an installer. I just wish I could have those hours of my life back.

There's no provisioning script. Code repo's there, but no configuration files. Missing folders that break the app. No documentation on what to install, what directories to create, NO instructions. Nothing. Just an empty Ubuntu vagrantbox and a git repo. Took the entire morning and then some, just to replicate the dev environment. Fuck

I hate this joke. It makes zero sense; not something I'd expect to see all over an app for devs!

A factory creates something, if I already have a problem, why would I need a factory to create more?

For what fucking reason the ability to set the date and time programatically has been blocked on Android?!
Why you can create fucking invisible apps that work in the background, mine cryptos, steal your data but they decided that something like that is considered dangerous?

Can anyone give me a logical explanation?

P.S.
There are cases (big pharma companies) where the users don't have access to internet nor a ntp server is available on the local network, so the ability for an app to get the time of a sql server and set it in runtime is crucial, expecially when the user, for security reasons, can't have access to the device settings and change it by himself.
"System apps" can do it, but you would have to change the firmware of a device to sideload an external "System app" and in that case it would lose the warranty.

So, yeah, fucking Google assholes, there are cases where your dumb decisions make the others struggle every other day.
Give more power to third party developers, dumb motherfuckers.
It's not that difficult to ask the user, once, to give the SET_TIME permission.
It was possible in the past...

P.S.2
Windows Mobile 6.5 was a masterpiece for business.
It still could be, just mount better CPUs on PDAs and extend the support. But no, "Android is the future". What a fucking bad future.

I’m new to coding. I decided to pick JavaScript to learn how to code. For a while I was confused as I couldn’t grasp the fact that jQuery wasn’t a language of its own even though multiple people on devRant told me it wasn’t (or was?)
Anyway thanks for baring with me. I’ve decided to drop jQuery. It seems kind of outdated even though a new version of the library was added quite recently.
I’m now delving into ReactJs. Some people say it’s a framework, others say it isn’t. Again one of those confusing debates which is beyond me. Anyways I’m amazed at how easily I can get a basic web page up and running with React. So far I’ve only managed to launch an application using the create-react-app command in the command box. Oh and I’ve also been able to add a button to the html with a counter increment.
Fun times ahead!

Allright, so now I have to extend a brand new application, released to LIVE just weeks ago by devs at out client's company. This application is advertised as very well structured, easy to work on, µservices-based masterpiece.

Well either I lack a loooot of xp to understand the "µservices", "easy to work on" and "well structured" parts in this app or I'm really underpaid to deal with all of this...

- part of business logic is implemented in controllers. Good luck reusing it w/o bringing up all the mappings...
- magic numbers every-fucking-where... I tried adding some constants to make it at least a tiny bit more configurable... I was yelled at by the lead dev of the app for this later.
- crud-only subservices (wrapped by facade-like services, but still.. CRUD (sub)services? Then what's a repository for...?). As a result devs didn't have a place where they could write business logic. So business logic is now in: controllers (also responsible for mapping), helpers (also application layer; used by controllers; using services).
- no transactions wrapping several actions, like removing item from CURRENT table first and then recreating it in HISTORY table. No rollback/recovery mechanism in service layers if things go South.
- no clean-code. One can easily find lines (streams) 400+ cols long.
- no encapsulation. Object fields are accessed directly
- Controllers, once get result from Services (i.e. Facade), must have a tree of: if (result instanceof SomeService.SomeSubservice1.Item1) {...} else if (result instanceof SomeService.SomeSubservice2.Item4) {...} etc. to build a proper DTO. IMO this is not a way to make abstraction - application should NOT know services' internals.
- µservices use different tables (hats off for this one!) but their records must have the same IDs. E.g. if I order a burger and coke - there are 2 order items in my order #442. When I make a payment I create an invoice which must have an id #442. And I'm talking about data layer, not service or application (dto)! Shouldn't µservices be loosely coupled and be able to serve independently...? What happens if I reuse InvoiceµService in some other app?

What are your thoughts?

Had to create an App in unstable Phonegap (2012) for all 4 platforms,
for our biggest Dubai based client for a Tech Event, within A WEEK :/

Forget Phonegap, I didn't even know JavaScript back then :|

That was the shittiest App I have ever created, still somehow got an appreciation mail :|

Last year, 2nd year of Uni, we had to create an app that read from CSV file that contained info on the no of ppl in each class and things like grades and such and had to display graphs of all the info tht you could then export as a pdf.

This had to also be sone in a team. I, however, hate doing anything other than programming (no team leader, pm bullshit) so I tell them I want to be one of the programmers (basically split the roles, rather than each one doing a bit of everything like my professor wanted) and we did.

I program this bitch wverything works well, I am happy. Day of the presentation comes, one of the graphs is broken... FUCK. I then go past it and never discuss the error. We got a 70.

I swear to God it worked on my computer -.-

I also have to mention that our professor was the client and he had set an actual deadline until we can ask him questions. After the deadline I realized I didn't know what a variable in the csv file was for and when I went to ask him he said "You should've asked me this before. I can't tell you now". My team was not the only one that didn't know and he gave the exact answer to everybody else. Got the answer from another team. Turns out it was useless.

He was the worst client ever. Why tf would you put a deadline on when you can ask the client questions?! I should be able to fucking ask questions during production if you want the product as you want it >.<

ChatGPT, Copilot, React, how to make a link in a frontend website?
To create a link in a frontend website, create a span, a div, or a paragraph that contains the link text. In your JavaScript web app, add an event listener to that element that opens the link on click. If you want to claim you're accessible, add an aria-role to the clickable element. To make debugging harder and only possible for the real arcane experts, let your framework generate generic ids and class name hashes for styling and event handling, like "item_09fcfck" or "elementor_element_foo_bar". Avoid, at all price, to use an a href element!

My boss is being a stupid cunt. To give you a background we were facing issues with our Collections system. First week December 2019, I and a colleague of mine came up with a new efficient collections architecture. My colleague and I started to Code and create automation scripts mid December and completed it in First week of Jan 2020. This PoC version was supposed to be just between the Dev team(App Dev and Back end, also one from the Ops side to verify the data). I did not receive any feedback on the actual collections system and the data integrity but during this time all they’ve done is take meetings with no real outcome. I raised this and the only email I got is data is looking fine when I know it is not.Now in First week of Feb, he is stressing us to go ahead and deploy the architecture in Production and we have not done any Code Review, Static Code analysis, any real tests on Code and deployment scripts. Have not discussed any metrics for our dashboard and alerting. I have no idea how to handle this cunt. I have even asked for resources to atleast productionalize the code and move ahead the deployment and still no out come. I’ll go in a meeting with him in an hour, I will be very blunt and tell him that whatever he is doing is a foolish way and maybe resign in couple of weeks

So I'm not sure on how much Youtube can fuck up so much in a short time, but I'm actually suprised.
And I'm not just tslking of all the shady/bullshit bahavior and reasoning on content creators, but also on how this shitty new app is just one clusterfuck of not working shit.

One if the easiest features there is - the damn shuffle feature for a damn playlist - doesn't properly work since the first day it went live. Are you shitting me? Even after a felt decade they are still not able to fix it. Yet alone showing more than 200 in the playlist items (when a video is already playing)

But a simple feature which is useful to nearly everyone and which worked before is surely no problem when the damn service itself would work.
Aside that the app sometimes randomly crashes when leaving fullscreen mode (desktop) and making it for some magical way impossible to interact with the browser (WTF?!) until you resize it or wait for an eternity to relase you from that suffer.

On top of that pile of garbage, the videos don't load properly anymore. Whats the fucking point of showing how much of a video is supposidly loaded when you skip forward for 5sec and it has to buffer for 10 to continue?

Well, if that were to at least only happen when the video is skipped forwards/backwards. On some strange occasion (Probably when the stars arrange properly) than your connection to the servers is back in the stoneage. Because otherwise I can't explain how the fuck it has to lower the resolution down to 360p and STILL buffer. I have a fucking 10MByte/s+ DL rate, ARE YOU SHITTING ME?!

Now after over 1.5k chars I notice I maybe a bit over the top ... BUT FUCK IT. I mean, it's fucking youtube ffs. If the biggest videoplatform can't even create a properly working webapp, then what the fuck are you doing google?

Malwares are nasty applications, that can spy on you, use your computer as an attacker or encrypt your files and hold them on ransom.

The reason that malware exists, is because how the file system works. On Windows, everything can access everything. Of course, there are security measures, like needing administrator permissions to edit/delete a file, but they are exploitable.

If the malware is not using an exploit, nothing is there to stop a user from unknowingly clicking the yes button, when an application requests admin rights.

If we want to stop viruses, in the first place, we need to create a new file-sharing system.

Imagine, that every app has a partition, and only that app can access it.

Currently, when you download a Word document, you would go ahead, start up Word, go into the Downloads folder and open the file.

In the new file-sharing system, you would need to click "Send file to Word" in your browser, and the browser would create a copy of the file in a transfer-partition. Then, it would signal to Word, saying "Hey! Here's a file that I sent to you, copy it to your partition please!". After that, Word just copies the file to its own partition, signals "Ok! I'm done!", and then the browser deletes the file from the shared partition.

A little change in the interface, but a huge change in security.

The permission system would be a better UAC. The best way I can describe it is when you install an app on Android. It shows what permission the app wants, and you could choose to install it, or not to.

Replace "install" with "grant" and that's what I imagined.

Of course, there would be blacklisted permissions, that only kernel-level processes have access to, like accessing all of the partitions, modifying applications, etc.

What do you think?

Oh my dear internet,

FUCK THIS FUCKING SHIT
I AM SICK AND TIRED OF IT, WHO BUILT THIS HACKED TOGETHER ORWELLIAN SWAMP PIT?

Fuck the same fucking Envato template on every content page with 70 layers of sidebars, inline ads, popups, cookies and content shifting as if I was playing CATCH UP WITH YOUR FUCKING CONTENT.

FUCK the same fucking annual upselling 'plans' on every 7-day trial overengineered scam app that requires me to sign up for 1 fucking, falsely advertised task where my fucking password generator doesn't even recognize the input as a password field so I have to cmd+, to my FUCKING BABYLONIAN PASSWORD ARCHIVES PROMPTING ME FOR THE MASTER PASSWORD.
Thank god I can at least CREATE A BURNER CREDIT CARD THAT FREEZES ITSELF BECAUSE I CANNOT BE BOTHERED TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM YOUR FUCKING STEAMING CRAP.

FUCK every fucking step I take being recorded by our CYBERPUNK OVERLORDS REQUIRING ME to sign up for 5 different fucking privacy protection tools' annual plan or duct tape some open source shit onto my browser just for some BASIC PRIVACY WHILE TRYING TO NAVIGATE ALL THE OTHER 5000 annuals plan naval mines like A FUCKING FRENCH SUBMARINE IN 1940 GERMAN WATERS.

FUCK my walled garden scam ecosystem not being compatible with your walled garden scam ecosystem prompting me to reactivate my old SATANIC GOOGLE DON'T BE EVIL ACCOUNT from 2012 sending me on a DANTE ALIGHIERI STYLE ODYSSEY THROUGH THE 9 LAYERS OF PASSWORD RESET QUESTIONS, UNEXPECTED ERROR, 2FA MY PHONE DIED HELL to come out on the other side as a broken man.

Thank GOD I have your useless SUPPORT PAGE to aid with my signup problems that is actually just an FAQ with a hidden EASTER EGG HUNT for your support form CRISP AI BOT THAT IS ALSO 'currently experiencing high demand due to COVID' which is peculiar since that has been 3 years ago, but fortunately for you enabled you to fire ALL YOUR SUPPORT STAFF AND REPLACE IT WITH THIS BANNER.

I might as well just SCRAPE your fucking content, it'd be faster.

And although it is quite funny, FUCK THIS PAGE TOO for having me create another of 10.000 accounts to write this shit, where my browser firmly placed a newly created burner email into the PASSWORD FIELD.

I do not know how we managed to create something that is even more unwieldy than 56k DIAL-UPS, but I know that if this shit continues I'll have to train my own AGI to proudly interact with of all this STUPID SHIT on my behalf or I'll have to move into THE FUCKING MOUNTAINS AND LIVE WITH THE DEER.

so if i get this correctly :

1. mongodb( community server) is going to create some files in my system which will be called "databases/collections/document bullshit via its own special process called mongod (similar to mysql , but ok)

2. my python flask app is going to connect to it via its official driver pymongo (which could be used directly)
3. mongoengine is a library (more of a wrapper on pymongo) providing "easy ways for connecting mongodb via pymongo" (which again could be used directly)

4. flask-mongoengine is library (more of a wrapper on mongoengine providing "easy ways for connecting mongodb via mongoengine via pymongo" (which again could be used directly)

5. flask-pymongo is some another bullshit library/wrapper that took away 6hours of mine which again is "A FUCKING WRAPPER PROVIDING EASY WAYS FOR CONNECTING TO MONGODB VIA PYMONGO"

seriously, fuck web development. Why can't the original driver (i.e pymongo from mongodb devs) could have simpler wrappers? and why does my fucking tutorial instructor had to use the most fucking rarely used flask-mongoengine (which i accidently read as flask-pymongo and got f**ked) to teach newbies? fucking day wasted trying to understand this crap.

I don't like monnopolies, but its somewhat good that the mobile environment is still in the hands of nononsense players like google and oracle(java) . atleast we don't have people releasing wrapper over wrapper over wrapper and then fighting about which wrapper is better to use.
Like , even when devs started cmplaining that android dbs are too difficult to understand, google themselves created an actively supported wrapper that shutted down the fight over which wrapper to use(sqldelight, realm,sql bright etc)

So, while I was hunting for job...waiting for reply to the job I applied. (As now is CNY) , so my friends and I do a little bit of freelancing...

So this business owner wanted an Ewallet app in Kaios. It's possible but he keep complaining that why me and friends so slow and can't deliver in a day. WOW! He said he "Create" software before.

To burst my resentment, I asked him to show us what platform he use for creating application. He showed us "Wix.xom"

Long story short, we dropped the project. Find a new one.

So we develop several apps for Android.
And since the whole company is full of .Net developers we´re using Xamarin.
That piece of software alone is worth more than one rant.

But today someone called and said he updated to the latest version he got from our server.
But now one of the menu points in the settings menu is opening the wrong mask.

I´m like ... what? Who fucked that one up now. Ok...
I look at the code and, I didn´t expect it to be honest, but it looks alright.
The menu point has the correct id. The function "OnOptionsItemSelected" looks for the correct id and opens the correct activity.
Just to be sure I also check the activity.
Everything good.

So I start up an emulator. Deploy the app in debug. Works correctly.
Create a self signed apk and install it on the emulator. Works.
Repeat the same with a tablet and my personal phone. It works.

Then I install the apk from the server and would you look at that.
It opens the wrong mask.

So it seems only if the app is compiled on the release server it shows that strange behaviour.

And for the love of my 1080ti I can´t figure out what causes it...

Thank you Xamarin!

It's always fun... When it's not for work...

I guess the best one was when I figured out how to make extensions and used it to create an app that can monitor websites for updates (like new anime) so I don't have to keep refreshing 😆😚

Problably Reposting (like 10M times)

Fking Playstore
Uploading my first app
took me almost a hour to make the App
Its taking FOREVER to create everything required to post an App
Privacy Policy only to use the cam to read a qrcode...
Damn

"I want to create an app that rates other people. That way law enforcement officials know whether or not to trust them"

Could get an iPhone 6s 32GB for 50 bucks with my contract. Is it worth it to start developing iOS Apps?

Little backstory: I'm a computer science student with little to no exprience in developing mobile apps, and I recently started working on a bigger project which includes some php, javascript on a website as well as a mobile app for both platforms. As I currently do not own an iPhone, I suppose this would be rather difficult. Is it worth picking up an iPhone 6s for development? My current phone is a OnePlus Three, so I have no need for a new personal phone.

Also, how "hard" is it to create proper iOS apps?

So I'm a developer trainee. My development machine ? - was given a MacBook pro that was used by previous developer. The home screen is filled with random project files and documents.

Try to click on the pad, doesn't work, realized you have to press it real hard on side to click , wth, crappy touchpad. Back to setup.

I guess create a new account. Need to make an apple ID, heck no, create account without it, logon and just realized, shit all the tools need be installed..

Go to app store, need an apple id, heck.. , create an id, login, realize most of the tools aren't in app store...
Log back in crazy's account, power windows virtual machine..

Desktop filled with shyteload of files.. try to personalize windows, Windows isn't activated.. the heck.

Give up, just install vscode on corporation desktop machine for now, while the MacBook is a paperweight, and my shield in case of a gun situation

Better I see the crazy Dev who worked on this machine, and hit em in head with this paperweight.

They told me Xamarin Forms could create an app for many platforms
They didn't tell me that the Forms extensions for APIs would not work at all with the Android extensions, iOS extensions and I would need to reinstall them for each platform
They didn't tell me that at the end, I have to write individual code for each platform.
I was promised an all-in-one toolkit. I'm just writing code for Android and iOS apps, PLUS forms
I can't even find a reliable PDF generator for this. Documentations are outdated and don't work, either that, for it takes a million steps to generate a PDF file

" Under the hood... the program is using a mix of condition-based learning, procedural generation of sentences/questions, and relational queries based on weighted 'topic' identifiers. It can create its own original statements and questions. It is real-time, and it really does 'think' (an internal dialogue feedback loop)." = If Statement

I saw this in the description for an app aclled "Real AI"

Can I just say, fuck app wrappers.

Why? Well let me tell you the story of cordova.

My plan was to make a leaderboard kind of thing for the tablesoccer we do at the place I'm interning at.

How it would work:
app -> create game -> API -> live feed
Buttons (flic) -> API
API -> RTU -> live feed

They use Symfony internally and externally, so that was my first go to.

I couldn't find any way to do Symfony that can do RTU without running another service.

As they really want an app but it's not their core domain I looked around for options for wrappers and decided to put RTU on the backburner.

Setting up cordova was slightly annoying but was okay. I got to building the base app.

Then I thought, maybe let's get RTU working with cordova. Looked at the options that were available. Decided to check out socketio since it had an tutorial for cordova. Tried it and it didn't work. Went over the whole internet but nobody seems to have a solution that works (the most recent post being 2017)

So I thought, let's get websockets to work instead, but again. Seems like O just can't get it to work.

So, guess what I'm going to do?
AJAX ever 1 second to the API.

Why the hell does RTU have to be so hard cordova. You are the only open source wrapper that's both multiplatform and easy to set up. Why can't you just work...

I might just call it quits on the app and just make a mobile friendly website instead.. Where socketio and websockets just work. As does SSE..

I'm tired, so sorry for the rambling I hope somebody can make sense of this mess.

Needed to create an app for android for a school project so we tried xamarin because c#. After 2 weeks of crying and breaking we decided to switch java. Now we only hate programming in java but at least we it works

I just started a new job last week. Old-school sysadmin role for a pretty old-school company, but the pay is nice and the kids've gotta eat.

They gave me a windows laptop. I haven't used windows for work or as a daily driver since 2016, and now, a week into trying to make this machine work for me, I have the following observations to report.

WSL is nice. It's nice to have it installed(though actually installing it was an adventure unto itself), and to set alacritty to open my default user prompt straight into that is very nice. As terminal emulators are by far my most used piece of software, that's nice to have.

Command-line software management through powershell, winget, and chocolatey are also very nice.

I like the accessibility offered by autohotkey, though there is something of a learning curve on it. Once I get better with it, I suspect that what follows will be largely mitigated.

The Bad:
In general, Windows is janky. It feels like it's all kinda taped together without any particular cohesion in mind. As a desktop, it feels decidedly amateur, compared to the feature-mountain polish of MacOS, and especially compared to the flexibility and infinite possibilities of Linux.

Lots of screen real estate is wasted, with window decorations, and fonts that look terrible at smaller sizes, because the antialiasing of fonts is just terrible. Almost all the features I depend on in other desktops: ad-hoc searches and launches(alfred, rofi) are-- again --janky. They work, but they typically require more typing than alfred or rofi. I admit I haven't spent weeks on this problem yet, but I haven't found a workable solution yet with wox, hain, and keypirinha. Quick searches like what you get with alfred, alfred workflows, and the swiss army knife that is rofi, just aren't possible or reliable with the tools I've used so far, and most require some kind of indexing agent to fully function.

It beggars imagination that a desktop in which users are subjected to "default apps" that is purported to be acceptable for enterprise, professional use, does not have a default entry for text editor. I installed nvim-qt, and I want to use it to edit anything and everything I ever edit with text, but all too often, apps have hard-coded instructions to open text files with notepad.

I want to open certain URLs with firefox, certain ones with firefox developer edition, and others with vivaldi, and yet there is not an app available that I have seen yet in my searches that allows me to set this kind of configuration. I found one that's supposed to, but it just ignores everything I put into its config, and just opens MS Edge for everything. Jank.

Simple things take too long. Like the delay between when I laboriously hit ctrl-alt-del to bring up the login and when the actual text field appears, and the delay between that and when I want to start using the computer.

Changing some settings requires a reboot. Updating some software requires a reboot. Updating permissions on something sometimes requires a reboot. And those are all on top of the frequent requests to reboot for updates.

I would have thought Windows would have overcome most of the issues that create these problems, but it's just, as I said, amateur.

Whenever I stumble upon a tedious situation I want to start writing an app that does that. I don't start that though because I now realize I can't write an app for everything because I don't have time for that.

Whenever I see an inadequate app I want to create my own app, with blackjack. And hookers!

After seeing how OS X and various Linux dists are handling virtual desktops Microsoft is leaving a lot to ask for in Windows 10. OS X's full screen your app into a new virtual desktop is pretty neat after you learn to swipe back and forth. And CentOS for instance allows you to create a virtual desktop and associate certain apps with different desktops. Windows however, does only allow you to create extra virtual desktops. But if you'd like to swipe between them you're out of luck, unless your computer has a touch screen. And if you think that clicking on an icon in the task bar would transfer you to your opened windows of said application you are wrong. It just launches another instance of the same application. Sigh...

I'd like to create an imageboard app with React-Native and got a few questions.
Every user has to like or dislike the shown content to advance to the next image/video (tinder style). I want to use that data to feed a machine learning algorithm and generate an unique selection of displayed media for each user with that.
Even though I never used it yet before (I'm still learning to code) I want to use python and a python machine learning library for that.

Can you give me any advice for the python part? For example which library to use, where to start, etc. .

Do you think that might be an interesting idea to realize? :)

Any recommended reading material for someone deploying a go web application for the first time?

I am trying to see if I can deploy a go app into one of my institution's test linux servers. I would have one of the technicians create the server, so It doesn't really matter what it is, but lets say for argument's sake that the servers in question are either an ubuntu server or a red hat/centos server. Any recommendations before I dive in?

I really don't like this trend of building command line applications for controlling some <buzzword> cloud app or <buzzword> framework.

Why should I need or want to learn the exact wording of your gcloud command, or the path to your Ng cli, or some ass-backwards AWS search syntax when I can get the same functionality from your web app, where I can use my FUCKING EYES to work out where the "Create Instance" button is and how to click it!!!??

Stop pushing your shitty python monolith of a client where possibilities for the above task range from:
- google-cloud instances --add "subfjfechye thiq"
To
- gcloud /create /type=INSTANCE "rogdhyuffhue"

"BuT iT mAkEs iT MoRe aUtomaTaBLe"
I DON'T CARE. What is the point when I can use a proper programming language instead of bash, with actual code-completion and syntax rather than the horrendous excuse for a suggestion system that is the Tab key where it probably doesn't even work in the first place and I have to copy and paste some mysterious dbus command buried in an old documentation page on the Wayback Machine using a utility I don't have installed and a broken URL?

Go away.

Today I realized that compilers are children, and must be treated as such. Generally, you might tend to expect a language to follow the same rules consistently, but oh how wrong you are, my sweet summer child.

I have a framework that I've been reusing across several personal Unity3d projects for a while, and all was well. This week, I was tasked with creating a PoC that combines a web app with Unity WebGL for data visualization. My framework has a ton of useful stuff helped me create the PoC very quickly, and all was well.

Come 3 days ago and there's one last piece that isn't working for some reason. It almost appears that this one bit of code isn't executing at all. Today, after countless hours of swearing at the computer and banging my head against the wall, I realized that the WebGL compiler has a different implementation for the method that checks assignability of types. An implementation that has different rules than everything else. An implementation that has no documentation about this discrepancy anywhere. I have no words.

tl;dr: The language changed the rules on me. Fuck me right?

Given an opportunity to develop an application for R&D. What do we do as a team? Let build it exactly the same way our current stack is built. (This app won't actually be used for anything useful, just an exercise for a fun R&D task)

It still amazes me with the number of developers that literally have the mindset, let's just do what we know & don't want to learn anything new.

Let's showcase new technologies? No. Let's create a serverless application? No. Let's create some microservices? No. Let's wrap the application in a Docker container so we can easily spin it up? No. Let's have multiple services that sit behind an API gateway? No. Let's for fucks sake at try a different design pattern? Why would we do that? Can we do anything differently? No.

No innovation, nothing - it just blows my mind. Everyone seems to think that the way the stack is built is how every application is. Sorry but a huge monolithic application that can't scale isn't how the other half live...

I don't know why the lack of wanting to try something new bothers be so much, but it does.

Had a real opportunity to showcase some cool tech, design patterns, new services in the cloud. Show not only other devs but upper management that there are alternative ways to develop. It's not like anything that I put together was "new or shiny" - I just wanted to do anything... Anything that isn't how currently do things.

Full disclosure, I'm not a great Dev - I'm pretty dam average but I'm always willing to try new techniques or approaches.

git add --all && git commit -m "Alright, here's a story for you. I set out to create a navigation mechanism on here, so we could have back buttons and tabs. I also wanted the ability to customise the UI elements. In order to do that, I combined two dependencies. Each one of them provides us with some of the functionalities we need and there's quite a bit of overlap between them. Moreover, each dependency creates the UI elements differently. So customising the UI is becoming a nightmare already, since it's getting harder to tell which one of them is affecting a UI element's appearance. In spite of all that, we have an app that navigates and has tabs."

Exercise app got it all planned out in my head (well sort of). All day at work I'll be getting ideas on how id make it.

Day ends and I feel motivated to work on it all the way home. Get in make a cup of tea boot pc create a project do initial commit to git.

And nothing. Motivation dead ability to think gone. So I'll sit there sipping my tea trying to get motivated.

Eventually I'll close it down and get motivation to start it again at 4am which isn't an ideal time to start a project.

I wanted to show our DBA an example of a web api using .net core 3 in regards of how easy it is to create such things. The reason? he has been wanting to get back into programming after many years of just sticking to dba related stuff. The dude has talent and brains, he had worked years ago as a delphi dev and a vb6 dev and we had the same employer at one point, none of this man's apps have been faced out on account of how complete they are and easy to maintain for other devs was after he left. Regardless of the ancient tech stacl, the man shows ample promise and well.

Thing is, the apps I make on the Microsoft stack usually tend to C#, and my frontends are using TS, so I am more on the curlt bracket side of things and he said he was to convert my app(very basic crud example, but with auth, authorization and everything in between to plug into the frontend) to VB.NET. I thought it wouldn't be that much of a problem but apparently microsoft does not hold templates for webapi for vb.net

I thought it was shitty. VB gave Microsoft a lot of developer market back in the VB6 days, and even though I really love c# I see no reason why they would just say fuck you like that to vb.net. Shit still polls pretty high in terms of dev popularity and you can apply the same design ideas to VB without much effort.

I just think this is very shitty from Microsoft's part. Much like how Apple is forcing people to adapt to Swift when there is a huge amount of obj c out there.

I dislike when companies shift focus on tech stacks like that.

How do you think about unit testing/TDD when writing apps? (I'm working this at 3am so might be a bit messy... Just a thought I woke up to).

Whenever I write an app, I don't write unit tests but as I'm developing I may create test functions for specific parts that I run to validate a specific component is working before moving onto the next.

So first, when I get a problem, break it up into components based on the requirements. It's usually sort of input, processor, output sequence.

Where the processor is essentially the core app. And so I start coding it, referring to the input thru an interface, model objects, adding fields as I go along (assume no matter what the input, I will get these before the logic is called). I may add some more interfaces as well for other data I may need but I know won't be going in the first input.

So I write all the logic, functions needed to get a basic app to run that does what I am writing the app for.

Only then do I write a test functions passing in different parameters to make sure the logic and response is what I want and making fixes as necessary. At that point I basically have the simplest version of the app.
(I guess this is sort of like mocking?)

Then build outwards implementing and testing components as I go along and may do some simple refactoring/redesign. (I guess all these tests are functional then, have to start the whole app).

And finally when I have the basic requirements fully complete I will add the "nice to haves" on top via refactoring of specific logic in specific components. Again testing by running the app maybe with simple inputs.

I guess now I'm thinking how do you write unit tests/TDD if the app keeps changing (via adhoc refactorings) as you are creating it?

Homework for Informatics: Create a Powerpoint about yourself...
Me: That’s no homework, please let us create an app, site or something creative that’s something I prefer.
School life... development is so much nicer

I have an app idea, I need people here to tell me if this make sense.

In short I want to creat an app that supports forums and chat rooms but only for people close to you.

The reason being that whenever I move to a new place, I basically have no knowledge of what’s going on around me what so ever, so if there’s a forum that I ca easily navigate and see what people are talking about it will be great. There are certain buildings/managements that has their own app but doesn’t seem to be used at all, I think one reason being that it’s a new app for new neighborhood, and the range is too small, I’d rather see what people do around me but not within one single building

And the reason for chat room is because if I’m going some place for an event, first if there’s this forum it will be great because people can just post questions there, second if there’s any session then it really makes sense to have some time and location limited chat room for me to join, and I don’t have to worry about it once I’m out of that location or time has expired. Recently I was in a conference and people are straight up creating messenger groups.

I think it makes sense to combine the two, you have a forum where you post things that your neighbor may have answer to, and if you want to creat an event, you can create a chat room just for the event, which expires after certain time.

I need to know if this idea sounds plausible. Devrant do your best, thanks

Anybody playing with Laravel Nova? Just finished skimming the videos, and I mean, wow?

Am I seeing this right, or basically you can now create an entire, simple app about 10 times faster than Laravel.

That's unbelievable.
I'm working on a project using Flutter, a framework made by Google.
And of course, as every product of Google, is full of bullshit.
I was creating a theme for this app and I had to styles some texts. I whis I never tried it.
There's a plethora of attribute: headline, body, title, ecc. For each of them there are many types: headline1, headline2, headline3 and so on.
So I checked the documentation, because of course i had no clue on which one I should have used.
And again, the documentation is made by Google: full of bullshits.
They don't event tell you which one do what. So now the best thing to do is to create an entire project just to figure out what the fuck each of them does.