Anyone else used Stack Overflow for many years without ever asking or answering a single question?

I found it!

Seen in Amsterdam, getting on a ferry.

My sister in law got me this guy for Christmas after I told her about devrant!

She found it in a rubber duck shop in Amsterdam.

Best sister in law!

A common scenario strikes again today:

- Blocked on a problem at the end of the day
- Tell my wife I'm headed home
- Inspiration strikes
- time flies by coding in the zone
- realize I'm super late
- run out the door like a crazy person

This morning I kept falling back asleep after the alarm went off, drifting in and out of a dream about programming.

My wife finally said "no more sleeping".

Still mostly sleep, I replied very confidently "you can't sleep in a sandbox!".

I was dreaming I was in a code sandbox. Obviously sleeping is not allowed.

Jeez, my head has been really full of programming since this conference. (One of the talks was on codesandbox).

Night before flying internationally includes the following checklist:

- check VPN works, can access frontend sites and hit the backend
- git push

Our "monitoring" today.

Let me tell you a story.

Our company has a homegrown monitoring solution. Keeps track of our deployments and alerts us when something is broken. Really nice for the most part, except a little issue where we get up to 25 alerts PER DAY that our PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT IS DOWN. Including weekends.

With this many false positives, we quickly learn to ignore the alerts and miss real incidents.

So we approached this team, remember its our own tool, and told them about the problem. Turns out it is a known issue. And here's the kicker: they aren't planning on fixing it!

It gets better. Rather than fix this glaring issue, their solution is to make ANOTHER ALERT that lets us know the monitoring is misbehaving.

To recap, we can now expect to get up to 25 false positive alerts per day that our production is down, followed immediately by more alerts that the monitor is broken, which means we can ignore the previous alert.

As our PM said when he heard this: fuck that noise. We are escalating the shit out of this!

I'm such an idiot.

Spilled water on my MacBook today. Not that much water, but the cup landed right in the middle of my keyboard.

Worst part is I was gaming with my sister and didn't want to stop. So I wiped it off and shook it out a bit and kept playing. A bit later the screen started flickering and eventually went black.

Finally my brain turned on and I switched it off, shook out some more water, and set it up to dry. Just hoping it's not too late.

At least the drying setup recommended by the internet is pretty hilarious looking.

Now we play the waiting game. They say 72 hours before turning it on again. Seems a bit extreme. Will there still be moisture evaporating 3 days later? Not sure I can wait that long to see if it's toast.

Such an idiot.

*spends a long time crafting a huge eBay post (we're moving)
* tries to drag and drop first picture
* page navigates to the picture without warning
* loses everything

WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

WHEN DRAGGING A PICTURE INTO A WEB PAGE I NEVER WANT TO NAVIGATE TO A PAGE WITH JUST THAT IMAGE. WHY NO WARNING BEFORE LEAVING THE PAGE. WHY DON'T YOU SAVE TEXT LOCALLY. WHY DOES THE WEB SUCK SO HARD. AAAGGGHHHH.

* feels better
* starts over

Netflix, why is your loading spinner so horrible!

Do you know what a percentage is??? 99% means you are ALMOST done. Just a tiny fraction to go. I should not see 99% for seconds or even minutes on end. Much less after the first 98% took only a couple seconds!!

Stop the lies!!!

2 days into a new java project and I already miss scala so much.

My new fitbit reminds me take 250 steps each hour. When I do stop and take a walk, I find it helps my productivity, and I feel better. However, I'm not good at keeping to it.

It's always the same story.

"Quiet you, I'll get up and walk once I finish this one thing".

...

Another hour goes by.

If only I could keep to my own convictions.

I spent more than an hour trying trying to debug why two functions were always returning undefined. I even put in conditional breakpoints and executed the statements to confirm the logic was correct.

I forgot return.

A2035/17 NOTAMN

Q) RKRR/QRPCA/IV/NBO/W/000/100/3535N12700E999

A) RKRR B) 1711160405 C) 1711160440

E) TEMPO PROHIBITED AREA ACT DUE TO NOISE ABATEMENT FOR COLLEGE

SCHOLASTIC ABILITY TEST(CSAT)

-----------------------------------

Anyone arriving to South Korea by aircraft between 13:10 and 13:40, all departures and arrivals will be delayed 30~60 mins.

Coding has given me the ability to turn my favorite hobby into a career. This in turn gave me the chance to take jobs in three countries so far (US, Germany, UK). So, I can explore the world with lovely wife while doing something I'm really passionate about and constantly learning. It also allows me to relate more to my dad, a software engineer of about 30 years who got me started when I was a kid.

In short, coding changed everything for me.

PS: I met my wife in intro to CS, though she's not a developer.

When your company buys a third party solution and you spend all your time emailing them about bugs in their system.

Seriously, I even sent you the exact line of the bug in your JavaScript with a suggested solution, and deployed a new stack with your latest (broken) fix so you can test out that solution. Then you email back saying it is fixed but it is clearly still broken. If I email you a fixed version of your file will you deploy it? OMG!

After being live multiple years supporting only Safari, Firefox, and Chrome, one customer wanted IE support. After taking a close look at the usage numbers, and discussing with us front-end devs, our product guy shot it down. Pop the champagne!

If an orange costs $6 and a grape costs $4, how much does a pineapple cost?

Slow time so I can code more AND sleep more!

When you try to clap in a presentation while holding coffee and spill it all over yourself.

When you make a mistake and try to fix it, but you can't remember how to spell amend...

git commit --ammend
error: unknown command `amend'

git commit -ammend
[branch-name] mend

Huh?

git log
commit #
mend

Created a new commit with message 'mend'. Now to clean this all up and go get some sleep!

"Can you check what my password is?"

Years ago, one of my friends in college was taking an intro to CS class. He asked me for help on one of his assignments. It was a simple Python program, but it wasn't running as expected. I go in figuring it will be easy to fix. But everything looks exactly right. An hour later I'm tearing my hair out! It isn't even entering the function although it's clearly called. I'm beginning to feel very self conscious, as a CS major who can't even debug a 15 line program for a friend.

Then it hit me. This is Python. I used an editor macro to convert all indentation to tabs, lined them up, and it ran on the first try. Turns out, he had somehow ended up with a mixture of tabs and spaces.

I'm not sure what the takeaway is, but I think he got a surprisingly honest introduction to the life of a developer...

!rant

Super awesome day today.

1. Got up early to do a risky production deploy and it worked!
2. Three PRs approved before lunch.
3. Got some time to continue learning scala.
4. Coffee and cupcakes with some refugees and discussed work as a software engineer.
5. Tried virtual reality for the first time. Really fun.
6. Helped prepare our goals for this quarter and present them to the department.
7. Department meeting had free local craft beer and pretzels.
8. Went bouldering after work and flashed a 6c.
9. Curled up with my wife watching Netflix.

I really love my life sometimes.

Me: *adds a shiny new graph to our foos web app showing player ratings*

Fred: Can I please have a button to see just my scores?

Me: *adds "JUST FRED" button*

Fred: perfect, thanks

Heathrow express having some trouble this morning.

PSA: negate your tests and make sure they fail!

I have what I thought was a weird and slightly paranoid habit. When I write tests sometimes just as a sanity check negate the assertion to make sure the test fails and isn't a false positive. Almost always fails as expected.

But not today! Turns out I had forgotten to wrap my equality check in an assertion so it would always pass. It freaks me out to imagine pushing a test that always passes not just because it doesn't do its job, but could also obscure a bug and trick me into thinking it works differently than it does. Broken tests are the worst!

But it pays to be paranoid.

I get home today and my wife says:

"Just finished some chores and really want to play stardew valley, but the computer has been updating for an hour!"

Windows 10 anniversary update strikes again.

When you offer to help out a fellow coworker on the top priority feature he is developing and he just sends you the branch and stops working on it.

When you immediately regret your career decisions.

We've been using private GitHub repos as a distribution method for our personal npm packages at work for years.

I finally got sick of it and did the work to publish them to artifactory yesterday. Today, I worked out the remaining kinks, fixed the CI builds, and wrote a wiki page explaining the change with step by step migration instructions and sent it around to the rest of the devs. And it's working great!

I feel simultaneously like a hero for finally getting this fixed and an idiot for putting up with it for so long.

Also thankful for my devops friend who helped a bunch.

I want to buy a beer for everyone who developed the mobile pass app. Just breezed through immigration and customs without waiting in the 1 hour+ line. Technology wins. Cheers!

git pull origin master --allow-unrelated-histories

Because I like to keep life interesting.

Just moved countries and started a new job at an awesome company, which is so great I have nothing yet to rant about.

Oh here goes: almost three weeks with no internet at home and no end in sight.

Things you should not say on your last day of work:

If I broke it, I think it would be pretty obvious.

Just attended my first conference and it was awesome! So many new ideas, but also tired and overloaded. Can't decide if I should code tonight, go to bed early, or just do something mindless.

I had an interesting mystery the other day. I work in the UK, but I'm working remotely from the US for a while. First day, I made some changes, ran the tests and they failed. Weird part was the failing test was for a component I hadn't touched. I took a closer look, and realized it was a date off by several hours. The test was checking that a passed in date appears in the output. But it was creating the date by parsing a string. The library I was using defaults to local time, but the component uses UTC. So, I had inadvertently created a unit test that only passes when run from UTC. But I had never noticed before because my work is in that timezone. Yikes!

Uh... how many?

Why is so Fitbit so bad at multiple time zones??

Guess what, people get on planes and travel.

Every time, my Fitbit gets so screwed up, including things like changing previous step counts, or duplicating an entire day of steps.

I understand MTZ is a tough problem, but this is just unacceptable. I'm not obsessed with my steps, but when your product is all about counting something, seems like you should be more careful to avoid double counting or not counting at all. Seriously, how much R&D have they invested in their hardware and apps, but it completely fails when you travel. Get it together!

When everyone thinks FE is easier, quicker, and less important than BE. Just because our fantastic UX people made you a high fidelity mockup in a day does not mean we can build the whole FE in a week.

This is why I'm returning to full stack.

Current Mac and Windows user here looking to get back into Linux. Any distro suggestions?

Looking for something not too high maintenance.

It drives me crazy when there are unclosed parens or quotes anywhere.

Is it too much to ask for people to run their Facebook posts through a compiler first?

Decides to fork an OS repo and make some modifications.

It's written in coffeescript.

Best tip for getting unstuck? If it's after your usual leaving time, GO HOME.

So many times I solved the problem right away the next morning. Only wish I followed my own advice more often...

I was always interested in computers. My dad was a big computer geek and a programmer to boot. Usually had a couple old PCs in the basement to play with.

In middle school, I took tech ed and we made simple web sites with html and css. I remember the struggle of nested tables.

In high school, I couldn't fit any CS into my schedule. But someone gave me a learning to code book in ruby. I loved it, and have been hooked ever since.

Computer does a BSOD right at the end of a tiebreaker competitive overwatch match where the enemy is about to cap the point and win. I'm one of the tanks. Hard reboot and back in the game within 45s. Just barely hold them off in overtime and win the match. Epic!

Thank God for SSDs!

Any recommendations for moving a blog?

My wife and I just cancelled our account with siteground hosting a WordPress blog. Looking for a cheaper alternative. Willing to get my hands dirty as a web dev, but would like a nice CMS experience for my wife. Also want to keep our existing content. If we can keep our custom domain somehow that would be a win.

Thanks!

Trying to add money to a prepaid SIM card today. Their website is a mess. Plus and minus buttons were not functioning, so my only option was to add 15 euro. Checked the console, no errors. Tried triggering the buttons jQuery, no luck. Found a data value attached to the submit button set to 15. Changed to 10, clicked submit, and BOOM, it worked! You just got engineered!

After I paid, I was curious, went back and set it to -15, and tried it again. Unfortunately, they know about backend validation.

I walk by our devops dashboard several times per day. It keeps track of key metrics for all our live services. I noticed an interesting trend the last few weeks.

3 weeks ago: all metrics green
2 weeks ago: 1 metric red
1 week ago: 1 metric still red
this week: 1 metric still red but covered with a post it note

Somebody screwed up...

When you are tearing you hair out trying to figure out why the PR you're reviewing isn't working. Then you realize you forgot to pull the latest changes!

You know it's Friday afternoon when your interface is broken because you tried to set the type to the string 'string' instead of the keyword string.

Interface IEnvironment {
name: 'string',
...
}

My favorite place to go...

2017: supporting IE now somewhat less painful.