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So, basically i am getting desperate, and i'm also angry... and want to cry, and i feel a failure.
My biggest error in this story is "believing"
First of all, I'm a starting entrepreneur as freelancer, started of 6 months ago, back then it all seemed bright, i had my first customer, they believed me, got a second assignment for that same customer, fulfilled the task in brilliance, and was ready to move on to a bigger customer base. Here's where shit goes wrong.
Working with another office that outsources people to various (goverment) contractors, Had a meeting with them, we would cooperate very soon. This was january.
PM: "We've got a gov Dept as a customer that wants to do project XYZ and starting in february, requirements are yadiyadiyadi, you up for it?
Me:"Sure, send me the specs, and timeframe and i'll apply with my offer)"
Project is about a bit backup system migration, lots of fancy shmancy tech used, 2 datacenters setup... a big project that can take up several months...
- sends offer- received an acceptance on the offer
PM " Great, we'll start end of february"
Me: "Ok, end of february is a go then, looking forward to cooperate"
FF to near end of february, receive msg from PM: "Project XYZ delayed until half if march"
Me: "Okay... what is the delay?"
PM:"Govt bureaucracy"
Me " Ok, let's keep in touch"
Near Half of March
PM " Project delayed again".
Me: " Okay... what's the reason?"
PM: "they have decided to take a different approach, and want 3 datacenters now"
Me: "That will change the offer i made for you, can you send me the specs?"
PM: "No, because they havent decided on the techs used, expect end of march"
Me: "Okay...but once you got the specs,s end them to me"
End of March
Pm: " Hy NeatNerdPrime, we still havent got any specs yet... they still forgot to make the shopping list"
Me: "(-_-) ... I thought they already had that covered"
PM:" No, new Govt budget cuts and lots of changes, basically, they still don't know what they really want. But we're just -delayed- , not -cancelled-"
Me: "Okay... i hope we get started soon"
PM: "expect launch beginning of april"
I was not really satisfied with this explanation.... but ok
Beginning of april, at april's folls day
PM "Project delayed again"
Me: " This is a joke right?"
PM: "Sadly, no, they delayed the project since they don't really know what they actually want, we are trying to give them the proposed solution... but they still need approval, and still need to set up shopping list"
Me:"when do we start then?"
PM: " I was told 17th of april'
Me:" I really hope it gets through, i had to decline some proposals for work for months due to this, this ain't funny"
PM: "I know, i'll make up for it"
15th of april...
PM " Project delayed again"
Me right now almost losing my shit
"why this time??? I thought you said 17th of april real launch!"
PM: "they fired their PM, need to hire a new one, delayed until May/June"
Me: "I've set aside some other assignments just because you said you were going to launch at those dates... This is really pushing my limits, can you give me SOME assurances?"
PM: "5th of june would be official go" Me: " Okay, i'm noting 5th of june in my agenda, let's get this through!"
And now i get a message...stating that the date of 5th of june , is for another project, at the same goct dept, but totally different project
WHAT THE FUCKING SHIT I'VE SPENT MONTHS WAITING FOR A PROJECT THAT WAS PRACTICALLY ALL SET AND GO AND EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TIME IT GETS DELAYED, EVERY FUCKING TIME I THINK "you know, i cannot accept these offers since that Govt project will start soon, i cannot do 2 assignments at once especially when they require me to work at govt office at the capital..." AND EVERY FUCKING TIME IT GETS DELAYED!!!
I feel at a loss now..... i've done i think the most horrible thing you can do as a independent and that's not accepting another assignment just because there was a concrete promise for a govt contract...
Almost dried up, nothing much left, had to do some spending because of a move to another apartment... I'm feeling really down, and angry...and down, but mostly angry, for not accepting those offers in the meantime...13 -
Wow, what a fucking mess this sunday was.
My boss wrote me an email that one route of a RESTful API we wrote for a customer was not working anymore and puking back a status 500 with some error mentioning invalid UTF-8 characters.
Not one single person has had touched nor changed the code on production in some 6 months, so what the fuck could it be?
Phpunit did not give any errors (running only locally), the code had no syntax errors and the DB dump did not contain any invalid bytes (tested with a hex editor).
WHAT THE FUCK?!
OK so I started to comment out lines (all tested directly on production of course) until the error vanished.
Guess what was the culprit?
.
.
.
.
.
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In the code (PHP) we used strftime(...) to get nice time strings. Of course we set the correct locale on the server, thus having months and days formatted in German.
So, in Geman there is this one mysterious month called "März" which contains an umlaut character.
Calling strftime generated the date with März in it, but the server locale was de_CH.iso-8859-1 and not fucking de_CH.utf8, so the "ä" was returned as 0xE4 instead of 0xC3A4 (valid UTF-8), which json_encode(...) did not want to swallow but instead threw an exception.8 -
Yesterday, after six months of work, a small side project ran to completion, a search engine written in django.
It's a thing of beauty, which took many trials, including discovering utf8 in mysql isn't the full utf8 spec, dealing with files that have wrong date metadata, or even none at all, a new it backup policy that stores backups along side real data.
Nevertheless, it is a pretty complete product. Beaming with pride I began to get myself a drink, and collapsed onto the floor, this caused me to accidentally hibernate my computer, which interrupted the network connection, which in turn caused an OSError exception in one of my threads, which caused a critical part of code not to run, which left a thread suspended, doing nothing.
From the floor I looked at my error and realised my hubris and meditated on my assumptions that in theory nothing should interrupt a specific block of code, but in reality something might, like someone falling over...7 -
Developer came to our area to rant a bit about a problem he was having with Xamarin. A particular android device was receiving a java runtime error trying to de-serialize data from a WCF contract. What he found was not to use WCF and use WebAPI (or a simple REST service that sent back/forth JSON).
When he proposed changing the service (since the data transport didn’t really matter, he could plug the assembly into a WebAPI project in less than an hour), the dev manager shot down the idea pointing him to our service standard that explicitly stated no WebAPI (it’s in bold letters).
I showed him the date on the “standard”, which was 5 years ago. We have versioning on our sharepoint server, so I also him my proposal notes on the change request document (almost two years before that) stating we should stop using WCF in favor of REST based web standards. Dev manager at the time had wrote in his comment “Will never use REST. Enterprise developers prefer RPC.”
He just about fell over laughing when I showed him this gif.
2 -
"I decided to write the core software for my Time Machine in Java. It's Date API is so error free and easy to use."
As the legend goes, the scientist is trapped in another dimension between Timezones.
#thanksjava4 -
So I'm back from vacation! It's my first day back, and I'm feeling refreshed and chipper, and motivated to get a bunch of things done quickly so I can slack off a bit later. It's a great plan.
First up: I need to finish up tiny thing from my previous ticket -- I had overlooked it in the description before. (I couldn't test this feature [push notifications] locally so I left it to QA to test while I was gone.)
It amounted to changing how we pull a due date out of the DB; some merchants use X, a couple use Y. Instead of hardcoding them, it would use a setting that admins can update on the fly.
Several methods deep, the current due date gets pulled indirectly from another class, so it's non-trivial to update; I start working through it.
But wait, if we're displaying a due date that differs from the date we're actually using internally, that's legit bad. So I investigate if I need to update the internals, too.
After awhile, I start to make lunch. I ask my boss if it's display-only (best case) and... no response. More investigating.
I start to make a late lunch. A wild sickness appears! Rush to bathroom; lose two turns.
I come back and get distracted by more investigating. I start to make an early dinner... and end up making dinner for my monster instead.
Boss responds, tells me it's just for display (yay!) and that we should use <macro resource feature> instead.
I talk to Mr. Product about which macros I should add; he doesn't respond.
I go back to making lunch-turn-dinner for myself; monster comes back and he's still hungry (as he never asks for more), so I make him dinner.
I check Slack again; Mr. Product still hasn't responded. I go back to making dinner.
Most of the way through cooking, I get a notification! Product says he's talking it through with my boss, who will update me on it. Okay fine. I finish making dinner and go eat.
No response from boss; I start looking through my next ticket.
No response from boss. I ping him and ask for an update, and he says "What are you talking about?" Apparently product never talked to bossmang =/ I ask him about the resources, and he says there's no need to create any more as the one I need already exists! Yay!
So my feature went from a large, complex refactor all the way down to a -1+2 diff. That's freaking amazing, and it only took the entire day!
I run the related specs, which take forever, then commit and push.
Push rejected; pull first! Fair, I have been gone for two weeks. I pull, and git complains about my .gitignore and some local changes. fine, whatever. Except I forgot I had my .gitignore ignored (skipped worktree). Finally figure that out, clean up my tree, and merge.
Time to run the specs again! Gems are out of date. Okay, I go run `bundle install` and ... Ruby is no longer installed? Turns out one of the changes was an upgrade to Ruby 2.5.8.
Alright, I run `rvm use ruby-2.5.8` and.... rvm: command not found. What. I inspect the errors from before and... ah! Someone's brain fell out and they installed rbenv instead of the expected rvm on my mac. Fine, time to figure it out. `rbenv which ruby`; error. `rbenv install --list`; skyscraper-long list that contains bloody everything EXCEPT 2.5.8! Literally 2.5 through 2.5.7 and then 2.6.0-dev. asjdfklasdjf
Then I remember before I left people on Slack made a big deal about upgrading Ruby, so I go looking. Dummy me forgot about the search feature for a painful ten minutes. :( Search found the upgrade instructions right away, ofc. I follow them, and... each step takes freaking forever. Meanwhile my children are having a yelling duet in the immediate background, punctuated with screams and banging toys on furniture.
Eventually (seriously like twenty-five minutes later) I make it through the list. I cd into my project directory and... I get an error message and I'm not in the project directory? what. Oh, it's a zsh thing. k, I work around that, and try to run my specs. Fail.
I need to update my gems; k. `bundle install` and... twenty minutes later... all done.
I go to run my specs and... RubyMine reports I'm using 2.5.4 instead of 2.5.8? That can't be right. `ruby --version` reports 2.5.8; `rbenv version` reports 2.5.8? Fuck it, I've fought with this long enough. Restarting fixes everything, right? So I restart. when my mac comes back to life, I try again; same issue. After fighting for another ten minutes, I find a version toggle in RubyMine's settings, and update it to 2.5.8. It indexes for five minutes. ugh.
Also! After the restart, this company-installed surveillance "security" runs and lags my computer to hell. Highest spec MacBook Pro and it takes 2-5 seconds just to switch between desktops!
I run specs again. Hey look! Missing dependency: no execjs. I can't run the specs.
Fuck. This. I'll just push and let the CI run specs for me.
I just don't care anymore. It's now 8pm and I've spent the past 11 hours on a -1+2 diff!
What a great first day back! Everything is just the way I left it.6 -
[long]
When searching for internship via school I found this small startup with this cute project of building a teaching tool for programming. There were back then 2 programmers: the founder and the co-founder.
Then like 1 week before the internship started, the co-founder had a burnout and had to get off the project, while the company was so low on budget the founder, aka my new b0ss, had to work separate jobs to keep the company alive. (quite metal tbh)
It's funny because I'm a junior developer, 100%. I've been coding as a hobby for around 8 years now but I've never worked in a big company before. (No exception to this workplace either)
First project I get: rewrite the compiler. The Python compiler.
"But wait, why not just embed a real compiler from the first case?"
-nanananana it's never simple, as you probably know from your own projects.
The new compiler, as compared to existing embedded compiler solutions out there, needed these prime features:
- Walk through the code (debugger style), but programmatically.
- Show custom exceptions (ex: "A colon is needed at the end of an if-statement" instead of "Syntax error line 3")
- Have a "Did-you-mean this variable?" error for usage of unassigned variables.
- Be able to be embedded in Unity's WebGL build target
All for the use case of being a friendly compiler.
The last dash in the list is actually the biggest bottleneck which excluded all existing open-source projects (i could find). Compliant with WebAssembly I can't use threads among other things, IL2CPP has lots of restrictions, Unity has some as well...
Oh and it should of course be built using test-driven development.
"Good luck!" - said the founder, first day of work as she then traveled to USA for **3 weeks**, leaving me solo with the to-be-made codebase and humongous list of requirements.
---
I just finished the 6th week of internship, boss has been at "HQ" for 3 weeks now, and I just hit the biggest milestone yet for this project.
Yes I've been succeeding! This project has gone so well, and I'm surprising myself how much code I've been pumping out during these weeks.
I'm up now at almost 40'000 lines of source and 30'000 lines of code. ‼
( Biggest project I've ever worked on previously was at 8'000 lines of code )
The milestone (that I finished today) was for loops! As been trying to showcase in the GIF.
---
It's such a giant project and I can honestly say I've done some good work here. Self-five. Over-performing is a thing.
The things that makes me shiver though is that most that use this application will never know the intricates of it's insides, and the brain work put into it.
The project is probably over-engineered. A lot. Having a home-made compiler gives us a lot of flexibility for our product as we're trying to make more of a "pedagogic IDE". But no matter that I reinvented the wheel for the 105Gth time, it's still the most fun I've had with a project to date.
---
Also btw if anyone wants to see source code, please give me good reasons as I'm actively trying to convince my boss to make the compiler open-source.
Cheers!
4 -
Recently wrote a script that would check 2 years worth of images, crop them, and resize to different sizes as changes to front end required those.
Eventually the script went into an infinite loop and crashed the whole CMS.
The worst part was that my manager was on a date and I had to call him back into office, since his laptop was still at the office.
The actual problem wasn't the loop.. I forgot to check if file actually exists before cropping... Error log size was 10gb!1 -
About browsers and whole SSL CERT thing...
Most likely everyone here noticed, that https site with broken certificate will throw these big red warnings, in your face and there is so much wording like "ITS NOT SECUREEEE" or "ITS HACKEDDD" almost like it was written by passionate fanatic.
But when you are on plaintext http browsers reaction is like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Even if you have plaintext with password, it will for example in chromium put small little red thingy that almost no one notices.
I believe that broken cert with some error like invalid date is MORE secure than plaintext password, yet still there is this hypocracy with browsers...
I dont say that broken SSL cert is good, or something, Im just pointing out contrast of "broken" https vs plain http.... One looks for casual Joe like end of the world is coming and second is bearly noticable. Da fuck?
I disagree with this approach18 -
My work is LITERALLY cock blocking me.
My wife and I scheduled a lunch 'date' at 12:30. At 12:10, I foolishly thought "Eh I'll check in my changes, I'm 95% sure everything will be fine". Wouldn't you know it, after compiling for 7 minutes, the build server throws an error complaining about package compatibility, which locally is just a warning. Now I have to babysit the good damn build.
I seriously thought about bolting and just dealing with it after lunch, but I'm a good little developer.3 -
At my previous job I used to deal directly with a client. This client wasn't particularly tech savvy although he was the head of IT department.
During the beta testing phase of the project. The client would regularly send me emails with snapshots of his laptop with application open accompanied by some amount of text to explain what the error/problem he was facing.
One fine day I got an email with a very wierd error. It was a module for attendance of employees based on which salaries were calculated. The mail had a snapshot and some text saying that he was unable to see the attendance for the dates 22, 23, 24 and so on...
I immediately replied with a snapshot of the calendar highlighting the date, which was the 21st of the month. Those attendance are empty because they haven't been marked yet.
No reply untill the next day with more "errors" 😂2 -
So ok here it is, as asked in the comments.
Setting: customer (huge electronics chain) wants a huge migration from custom software to SAP erp, hybris commere for b2b and ... azure cloud
Timeframe: ~10 months….
My colleague and me had the glorious task to make the evaluation result of the B2B approval process (like you can only buy up till € 1000, then someone has to approve) available in the cart view, not just the end of the checkout. Well I though, easy, we have the results, just put them in the cart … hmm :-\
The whole thing is that the the storefront - called accelerator (although it should rather be called decelerator) is a 10-year old (looking) buggy interface, that promises to the customers, that it solves all their problems and just needs some minor customization. Fact is, it’s an abomination, which makes us spend 2 months in every project to „ripp it apart“ and fix/repair/rebuild major functionality (which changes every 6 months because of „updates“.
After a week of reading the scarce (aka non-existing) docs and decompiling and debugging hybris code, we found out (besides dozends of bugs) that this is not going to be easy. The domain model is fucked up - both CartModel and OrderModel extend AbstractOrderModel. Though we only need functionality that is in the AbstractOrderModel, the hybris guys decided (for an unknown reason) to use OrderModel in every single fucking method (about 30 nested calls ….). So what shall we do, we don’t have an order yet, only a cart. Fuck lets fake an order, push it through use the results and dismiss the order … good idea!? BAD IDEA (don’t ask …). So after a week or two we changed our strategy: create duplicate interface for nearly all (spring) services with changed method signatures that override the hybris beans and allow to use CartModels (which is possible, because within the super methods, they actually „cast" it to AbstractOrderModel *facepalm*).
After about 2 months (2 people full time) we have a working „prototype“. It works with the default-sample-accelerator data. Unfortunately the customer wanted to have it’s own dateset in the system (what a shock). Well you guess it … everything collapsed. The way the customer wanted to "have it working“ was just incompatible with the way hybris wants it (yeah yeah SAP, hybris is sooo customizable …). Well we basically had to rewrite everything again.
Just in case your wondering … the requirements were clear in the beginning (stick to the standard! [configuration/functinonality]). Well, then the customer found out that this is shit … and well …
So some months later, next big thing. I was appointed technical sublead (is that a word)/sub pm for the topics‚delivery service‘ (cart, delivery time calculation, u name it) and customerregistration - a reward for my great work with the b2b approval process???
Customer's office: 20+ people, mostly SAP related, a few c# guys, and drumrole .... the main (external) overall superhero ‚im the greates and ur shit‘ architect.
Aberage age 45+, me - the ‚hybris guy’ (he really just called me that all the time), age 32.
He powerpoints his „ tables" and other weird out of this world stuff on the wall, talks and talks. Everyone is in awe (or fear?). Everything he says is just bullshit and I see it in the eyes of the others. Finally the hybris guy interrups him, as he explains the overall architecture (which is just wrong) and points out how it should be (according to my docs which very more up to date. From now on he didn't just "not like" me anymore. (good first day)
I remember the looks of the other guys - they were releaved that someone pointed that out - saved the weeks of useless work ...
Instead of talking the customer's tongue he just spoke gibberish SAP … arg (common in SAP land as I had to learn the hard way).
Outcome of about (useless) 5 meetings later: we are going to blow out data from informatica to sap to azure to datahub to hybris ... hmpf needless to say its fucking super slow.
But who cares, I‘ll get my own rest endpoint that‘ll do all I need.
First try: error 500, 2. try: 20 seconds later, error message in html, content type json, a few days later the c# guy manages to deliver a kinda working still slow service, only the results are wrong, customer blames the hybris team, hmm we r just using their fucking results ...
The sap guys (customer service) just don't seem to be able to activate/configure the OOTB odata service, so I was told)
Several email rounds, meetings later, about 2 months, still no working hybris integration (all my emails with detailed checklists for every participent and deadlines were unanswered/ignored or answered with unrelated stuff). Customer pissed at us (god knows why, I tried, I really did!). So I decide to fly up there to handle it all by myself16 -
It began when I was tasked with creating a better and more engaging experience for our new Facebook page. This was in Facebook's early days, so there were not really any "best practices". We were making it up as we went along. I decided one way would be to game-ify things, since gaming, at the time, was a Big Deal on Facebook and people were starting to use it to build customer funnels.
Grasping for low-hanging fruit, I decided a Tetris variant around our topic would be fun. I had to hire a dev because at the time I was a static HTML web developer just getting into social media management. I knew nothing about game development or how to use Facebook's API for such things.
Long story short, we got about $10,000 (FB app devs came at a premium then) into the project when I came across a very recent article about the history of Tetris games. It said that even though Tetris had once been considered for all intents to be public domain due to it being created by a Russian coder during the Cold War, it had just been acquired by an IP protection entity that was charging royalties for any variant of Tetris created from a specific date onward and paying the original developer. So, even though I thought I had been thorough in my initial permissions checking, it turned out we were gonna be in deep doo-doo with licensing fees and restrictions if we released this game to the public.
I had to call my boss and admit my error. She was FURIOUS and really gave me an ass-chewing over it. I then had to call the marketing person whose budget I'd been slaving away at wasting. She was a bit more forgiving (her budget was in the millions). Then I had to call the corporate legal department and explain what was going on. They told me to immediately pay any outstanding hours, then fire the dev but not before getting him to send me all code and assets, deleting his copy, and then, upon my receipt of those assets, deleting MY copy so that nothing of it ever existed. And I was supposed to say _nothing_ to the dev about why he was being let go, so that there would be no "trail" leading back to this fiasco. (The dev hounded me for weeks asking what he'd done wrong. It killed me that I was bound and gagged by corporate legal and couldn't tell him.)
I was in so much trouble. I was literally in tears over it. I'd never wasted that much money in my life. That incident pretty much sealed my fate as far as any trust my bosses ever put in me again (not much at all). I was a bit of a pariah in a lot of ways for the next 5 years whereas I had come onto the team as a young social media rockstar at first.
After that, and a couple of other bad scenarios that were less my fault and more due to a completely dysfunctional management and reporting structure, they eventually "transferred" me to another team. Which was really just a way of getting rid of me by sending me to a department that was already starting to outsource overseas and lay people off. It was less messy that way. I was in the first set of layoffs.
Since then, I've had a BIG fear of EVER joining a large corporation EVER again. I prefer to work for small businesses now, even if I get paid less. Much less stressful from an office politics and impact of mistakes standpoint.3 -
me vs marketing guy, again
me: yeah, the database server is not responding, so you cannot log in to post your blog, wait for it to get online.
MG: But, the website is online.
me: web host and database server are two distinct things, they are not the same, *share a screenshot of the error*
MG: Oh okay.
Literally 3 hours later this fucking idiot sends an email and I quote.
"Hi Dev,
@CTO FYI, Someone has removed this code So there is some tracking issue on it.
Please add below google analytics code on the website.
Note: Copy and paste this code as the first item into the <HEAD> of every web page that you want to track. If you already have a Global Site Tag on your page, simply add the config line from the snippet below to your existing Global Site Tag.
<!-- Global site tag (gtag.js) - Google Analytics -->
<script async src="https://googletagmanager.com/gtag/..."></script>
<script>
window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
gtag('js', new Date());
gtag('config', 'UA-xxxxxxxx-1');
</script>
"
The fucking issue was of him not being able to post his shitty blog, and he shares an email like this, FOR FUCK'S SAKE!2 -
Longest I've worked without rest + why?
Over 24 hours. Why?
In our old system, the database had fields, for example, a customer like Total97, Total98, etc. to store values by year (or some date-specific value).
Every January 1, we had to add fields to accommodate the upcoming year and make the appropriate code changes to handle the new fields.
One year the UPS shipping rates changed and users didn't want to 'lose' the old rates, so they wanted new fields added (Rate98, Rate99, etc) so they could compare old vs. new. That required a complete re-write of most of the underlying applications because users wanted to see the difference on any/all applications that displayed a shipping rate. I'll throw in asking 'why?' was often answered with "because we pay you to do what we say". Luckily, we had already gotten to work on a lot of this before January 1st, so we were, for the most part, ready.
January 1st rolls around (we had to be in the office at 3:00AM), work thru changes, spend some time testing, and be done before noon. That didn't happen. The accounting system was a system that wasn't in (and had never been) in scope, and when we flipped the switch, one of the accountants comes into the office:
E: "Guys? None of our Excel spreadsheets are working. They are critical to integration with the accounting software"
Us: "What? Why would you be using Excel to integrate with the software instead of their portal?"
E: "We could never figure it out, so we had a consultant write VBA scripts to do the work."
Us: "OK, a lot of fields changed, but shouldn't be a big deal. How many spreadsheets are we talking about?"
E: "Hundreds. We have a separate spreadsheet for every integration point. The consulting company said it scalable, whatever that means."
Us: "What?! Why we just know hearing about this!?"
E: "Don't worry, the consultant said making changes would be easy, let me show you, just open the spreadsheet..click here..<click><click><click>...ignore that error, it always happens...click that <click><click><click>.."
Us: "Oh good lord, this is going to take hours"
E: "Ha! Probably. All this computer stuff is your job and I've got a family to get to. Later"
Us: "Hey 'VP of IS', can we go home and fix these spreadsheets as-needed this week?"
VP-IS: "Let me check with 'VP-FS'"
<few minutes later>
VP-IS: "No, he said Excel is critical to running their department. We stay until Excel is fixed."
Us: "No, no...its these spreadsheets. I doubt FS needs all of them tomorrow morning."
VP-IS: "That's what I said. Spreadsheets, Excel, same thing. I'll order the pizza. Who likes pepperoni!?"
At least he didn't cheap out on the pizza (only 4 of us and he ordered 6 large, extra pepperoni from one of the best pizza places in town)
One problem after another and we didn't get done until almost 6:00AM. Then...
VP-IS: "Great job guys. I've scheduled a meeting at 8:00AM to review what we did so we can document the process for next year. You've got a couple of hours. Feel free to get some breakfast and come back, or eat the left over pizza in the breakroom fridge. There is a lot left"
Us: "Um...sorry...we're going home."
VP-IS: "WHAT!!...OK...fine. I'll schedule the meeting for 12"
Us: "No...we're going home. We'll see you tomorrow." -
Living on the edge!
One or two years ago I managed to deploy a DDL change directly on the production server. As I knew there was a backup job which will run every day at noon and at midnight. So I run my script some minutes after noon. So far so good. But somehow I tested it badly in my test environment and the UI of the application throws error after error now in production.
Well, just revert the db to the latest recovery point with the backup, I thought.
It became clear then after a couple of minutes of searching the backup folder for the db backup that there was no such file. The youngest backup file was 3 years old.
Now what happened: The backup script had a switch "simulate=true" and then simulated a successful backup on each run. Therefore the monitoring system got no alerts for not correctly executing those jobs correctly. Then the monitoring job which should do the backupfolder surveillance stuck with green, because there was a valid backup file inside. But it did not check for a specific creation date.
Now this database is the one we need for doing our daily business and is really crucial. Therefore It was easier to emergencyfix the application than doing a rollback of the db 🙄
Well, not really a data loss story, but close to one. -
In today's episode of kidding on SystemD, we have a surprise guest star appearance - Apache Foundation HTTPD server, or as we in the Debian ecosystem call it, the Apache webserver!
So, imagine a situation like this - Its friday afternoon, you have just migrated a bunch of web domains under a new, up to date, system. Everything works just fine, until... You try to generate SSL certificates from Lets Encrypt.
Such a mundane task, done more than a thousand times already... Yet... No matter what you do, nothing works. Apache just returns a HTTP status code 403 - Forbidden.
Of course, what many folk would think of first when it came to a 403 error is - Ooooh, a permission issue somewhere in the directory structure!
So you check it... And re-check it to make sure... And even switch over to the user the webserver runs under, yet... You can access the challenge just fine, what the hell!
So you go deeper... And enable the most verbose level of logging apache is capable of - Trace8. That tells you... Not a whole lot more... Apparently, the webserver was unable to find file specified? But... Its right there, you can see it!
So you go another step deeper and start tracing the process' system calls to see exactly where it calls stat/lstat on the file, and you see that it... Calls lstat and... It... Returns -1? What the hell#2!
So, you compile a custom binary that calls lstat on the first argument given and prints out everything it returns... And... It works fine!
Until now, I chose to omit one important detail that might have given away the issue to the more knowledgeable right away. Our webservers have the URL /.well-known/acme-challenge/, used for ACME challenges, aliased somewhere else on the filesystem - To /tmp/challenges.
See the issue already?
Some *bleep* over at the Debian Package Maintainer group decided that Apache could save very sensitive data into /tmp, so, it would be for the best if they changed something that worked for decades, and enabled a SystemD service unit option "PrivateTmp" for the webserver, by default.
What it does is that, anytime a process started with this option enabled writes to /tmp/*, the call gets hijacked or something, and actually makes the write to a private /tmp/something/tmp/ directory, where something... Appeared as a completely random name, with the "apache2.service" glued at the end.
That was also the only reason why I managed fix this issue - On the umpteenth time of checking the directory structure, I noticed a "systemd-private-foobarbas-apache2.service-cookie42" directory there... That contained nothing but a "tmp" directory with 777 as its permission, owned by the process' user and group.
Overriding that unit file option finally fixed the issue completely.
I have just one question - Why? Why change something that worked for decades? I understand that, in case you save something into /tmp, it may be read by 3rd parties or programs, but I am of the opinion that, if you did that, its only and only your fault if you wrote sensitive data into the temporary directory.
And as far as I am aware, by default, Apache does not actually write anything even remotely sensitive into /tmp, so...
Why. WHY!
I wasted 4 hours of my life debugging this! Only to find out its just another SystemD-enabled "feature" now!
And as much as I love kidding on SystemD, this time, I see it more as a fault of the package maintainers, because... I found no default apache2/httpd service file in the apache repo mirror... So...8 -
Everyone argues about the perfect date, so I searched and found it using complex machine learning, a lot of trial and error, and too much alcohol:
'#76ab%Y%Y@98:%M%D%h@()%m&%m%Y%D%Y€¥$¢%M%h+%s-%s%%'
Where:
- %Y stands for one number of the last year
- %M stands for one number of the following month
- %D stands for one number (09 are two numbers for example) of SQRT((CURRENT_DAY^7)/3)
- %h stands for one number of the hour next evening(12h system)
- %% stands for either 7 or 3, 7 means that the hour(%h) is a.m., 3 means that the hour is p.m.
- %m stands for the minute the next solar eclipse will happen
- %s stands for one number of the second you will hate yourself to have this system implemented.
How to use it im 3 simple steps:
1. Implement it using ???
2. ?????
3. Profit? -
Recently I have updated my lubuntu to 18.04.
I don't use it regularly but I like to have it on the side of my window 10.
Anyway today I boot and decide to use it and get this error.
[0.000000] [Firmware Bug]: TSC_DEADLINE disabled du to errata; please update microcode to version 0x22 (or later)
and two MMIO read fault.
At first it sounds really dramatic and I was thinking, "Nice ... I never get a problem with Windows Update and when its Linux it doesn't work ..."
But lubuntu boots normally after so it's not a blocking problem.
So I do what most of us do in case like this, go to Google and search to know what the hell is going on.
And the answer is simple, my CPU microcode isn't up to date to prevent Spectre, one apt get install and a reboot later my 4700HQ is patched in 0x24 version and protected for Spectre where my windows didn't patch anything and worst disable the KB that I have installed manually before the last big update.
So thanks Linux, you scared me with your error but it was a good job to throw it :)1 -
Well... I can think of several bugs that I found on a previous project, but one of the worst (if not the worst, because the damage scope) it's one bug that only appears for a couple of days at the end of every month.
What happens is the following: this bug occurs in a submodule designed (heh) to control the monthly production according the client requirements (client says "I want 1000 thoot picks", that submodule calculates the daily production requirements in order to full fill the order).
Ideally, that programming need to be done once a week (for the current month), because the quantities are updated by client on the same schedule, and one of the edge cases is that when the current date is >= 16th of the month, the user can start programming the production of the following month.
So, according to this specific case, there's an unidentified, elusive, and nasty bug that only shows up on the two last days of every month, when it doesn't allow to modify/create anything for the following month. I mean, normally, whenever you try to edit/create new data, the application shows either an estimated of the quantities to produce, or the previous saved data. But on those specific days it doesn't show any information at all, disregarding of there's something saved or not.
The worst thing is that such process involves both a very overcomplicated stored procedure, and an overcomplicated functionality on the client side (did I mentioned that it dynamically generates a pseudo-spreadsheet with the procedure dataset? Cell by cell), that absolutely no one really fully understands, and the dude that made those artifacts is no longer available (and by now, I'm not so sure that he even remember what he done there).
One of the worst thing is that at this point, it's easier to handle with that error rather to redesign all of that (not because technical limitations, but for bureaucratic and management issues).
The another worst thing (the most important none) is that this specific bug can create a HUGE mess as it prevents the programming of the production to be done the next day (you know, people tends to procrastinate and start doing things at the very end of the day/week/month)... And considering that the company could lose a huge amount of money by every minute without production, you can guess the damage scope of this single bug.
Anyway, this bug has existed since, I don't know, 2015 (Q4?) and we have tried so many things trying to solve it, but that spaghettis refuse to be understood (specially the stored procedure, as it has dynamically generated queries). During my tenure (that ended last year) I spent a good amount of time (considering what I mentioned on the last rant, about the toxic environment) trying to solve that, just giving up after the first couple of weeks.
Anyway... I'm guessing that this particular bug will survive another 4-ish years, or even outlive the current full development team... But, who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ? -
A loooong time ago...
I've started my first serious job as a developer. I was young yet enthusiastic as well as a kind of a greenhorn. First time working in a business, working with a team full of experienced full-lowered ultra-seniors which were waiting to teach me the everything about software engineering.
Kind of.
Beside one senior which was the team lead as well there were two other devs. One of them was very experienced and a pretty nice guy, I could ask him anytime and he would sit down with me a give me advice. I've learned a lot of him.
Fast forward three months (yes, three months).
I was not that full kind of greenhorn anymore and people started to give me serious tasks. I had some experience in doing deployments and stuff from my other job as a sysadmin before so I was soon known as the "deployment guy", setting up deployments for our projects the right way and monitoring as well as executing them. But as it should be in every good team we had to share our knowledge so one can be on vacation or something and another colleague was able to do the task as well.
So now we come to the other teammate. The one I was not talking about till now. And that for a reason.
He was very nice too and had a couple of years as a dev on his CV, but...yeah...like...
When I switched some production systems to Linux he had to learn something about Linux. Everytime he encountered an error message he turned around and asked me how to fix it. Even. For. The. Simplest. Error. He. Could. Google. Up.
I mean okay, when one's new to a system it's not that easy, but when you have an error message which prints out THE SOLUTION FOR THE ERROR and he asks me how to fix it...excuse me?
This happened over 30 times.
A. Week.
Later on I had to introduce him to the deployment workflow for a project, so he could eventually deploy the staging environment and the production environment by hisself.
I introduced him. Not for 10 minutes. I explained him the whole workflow and the very main techniques and tools used for like two hours. Every then and when I stopped and asked him if he had any questions. He had'nt! Wonderful!
Haha. Oh no.
So he had to do his first production deployment. I sat by his side to monitor everything. He did well. One or two questions but he did well.
The same when he did his second prod deploy. Everythings fine.
And then. It. Frikkin. Begins.
I was working on the project, did some changes to the code. Okay, deploy it to dev, time for testing.
Hm.
Error checking out git. Okay, awkward. Got to investigate...
On the dev server were some files changed. Strange. The repo was all up to date. But these changes seemed newer because they were fixing at least one bug I was working on.
This doubles the strangeness.
I want over to my colleague's desk.
I asked him about any recent changes to the codebase.
"Yeah, there was a bug you were working on right? But the ticket was open like two days so I thought I'll fix it"
What the Heck dude, this bug was not critical at all and I had other tasks which were more important. Okay, but what about the changed files?
"Oh yeah, I could not remember the exact deployment steps (hint from the author: I wrote them down into our internal Wiki, he wrote them done by hisself when introducing him and after all it's two frikkin commands), so I uploaded them via FTP"
"Uhm... that's not how we do it buddy. We have to follow the procedure to avoid..."
"The boss said it was fine so I uploaded the changes directly to the production servers. It's so much easier via FTP and not this deployment crap, sorry to say that"
You. Did. What?
I could not resist and asked the boss about this. But this had not Effect at all, was the long-time best-buddy-schmuddy-friend of the boss colleague's father.
So in the end I sat there reverting, committing and deploying.
Yep
It's soooo much harder this deployment crap.
Years later, a long time after I quit the job and moved to another company, I get to know that the colleague now is responsible for technical project management.
Hm.
Project Management.
Karma's a bitch, right? -
Day 2 of trying to get into android development with flutter.
- Downloads Android Studio
- Tries to download Android-SDK from Android Studio's SDK Manager: "Error: Android SDK is missing or out of date".
YEAH NO FUCKING WAY, THAT'S WHY I'M TRYING TO DOWNLOAD IT.
- Uninstalls flutter and android studio
Lost all motivation to get into mobile development again.7 -
Way too much stuff is having a Y2K type date error in 2020! So frustrating that people did not even think 10 years ahead. All this stuff is solved already and not implementing it well is just lazy.6
-
This is going to be fun. We are switching our phone system to use Zoom and the turn on date is sometime in October (couple of weeks away). I have a feature I'm working on (automated phone calls) that the salesman said was fully functional (jump through a hoop, stand on your head, turn around three times, type of functional). Tried the steps they gave me, got to #3 and there is no virtual agent API call I can find to hand off/transfer the call. Send our contact at Zoom some questions, responds "That is a feature we might put in a future product. Can't do that right now." WTF?!
Other developers are running into similar "How do we get there from here?" issues that features promised, either don't exist or don't work.
One feature in particular I'm receiving a 403 permission denied error.
K: "Feature X needs to be enabled."
Me: "It is."
<send a screenshot showing the feature enabled>
K: "Your account doesn't have permissions. Have the sysadmin elevate you authentication level."
Me: "I'm an admin"
<send a screenshot showing my admin status>
K: "I'll have to get back with you."
Its been 3 days and no update on my ticket. *sigh*3 -
Wow, I thought Australia's subjects were up-to date with modern technology, but as my year 11 IPT course has proven... No.
Genuine Questions from it:
• Where are Web pages stored?
Most web pages are dynamically generated, so... RAM?
•Locate one webpage that uses ASP. Save a copy of this webpage (file name must = asp.mht)
Chrome Doesn't Even Support that as a save able file format any more!!!!
•Visit the webpage [error 404 anyway why write it]
Wow I can click hyperlinks I thought it was just a fancy color added to the text :|
•Add this webpage to your favorites. Supply one (1) screenshot showing this webpage as one of your favorites.
I ask; Who hasn't bookmarked a webpage in their life at the age of 17, and who actually calls them favorites.
•Press the "Back" Button to view the page you were previously on, take a screen shot to prove you doing so.
I am a rebel, I used my magic fingers to press the button without a mouse (keyboard shortcut)
•Press the "Forward" Button to view the page you were on before you went backwards, take a screen shot to prove you doing so.
I never would of guessed :|
•Take a screen shot after opening multiple tabs in Internet Explorer
...
•View the HTML source of the webpage www.google.com, and save a screen shot
Why not the actual file, really? bloat much?
•Take one screen shot of your Internet Explorer Search History
Stalky much?
•What is a Web browser and what tasks does it perform?
Well.... Do you have a page for indepth analyse? Or do you literally what me to say "It let's you load stuff from dat interwebz, via requesting content from a server"
•Define what JavaScript is in relation to web pages
Are we talking server side? or client?
•Define what CSS is in relation to web pages
Do I even need to say fellow ranters ;) -
I'm developing a new (just for fun) programming language and I'm wondering what features I should add next? These features are already implemented:
- Printing text
- Variables
- user-input
- Datatype conversion (String, Int, Float, Bool, List, Dictionary)
- lists/arrays
- dictionaries
- Sorting
- Shuffling
- random numbers & choices
- Math stuff like: log, abs, floor, ceiling, sin, etc...
- Time & Date
- Working with files
- If-else statements
- Ternary operators
- Loops (for & while)
- Functions
- Classes
- Error handling
- Importing libraries & other scripts
- Arrow/callback functions
- Escaping (\)
is there anything you often use missing?11 -
I feel like writing or telling people about the time I jumped from Windows 7 Ultimate and jumping to Windows 10. (I'm not against 10, but I'm never updating after what had happened to me)
It all starts when none of my games will play due to a possible issue with my graphics card. I look up "3D source game bug" and not many results pop up. I go on Microsoft's Qna areas and ask this question but to my surprise nothing they say would make sense. "Clean the pins of your graphics card, make sure you verify the games on Steam". I verified the games and they checked out as perfectly fine. I don't have access to my graphics card because this is a laptop, sadly not a tower.
Two months pass and my computer is already showing signs of stress, like it didn't want to live in a sense. It was three times slower than when I was on Windows 7 and it was unallocating areas of my main hard drive where I could make virtual hard drives.
Instantly I start looking up Linux distros and find Linux Mint. 17.3 was the current version at the time. I downloaded it and burned it onto a DVD-rom and rebooted my computer. I loaded into the disc and to my surprise it seemed almost like Windows 7 apart from the Linux part. I grab my external hard drive and partition it to hold the Linux distro and leave it plugged in incase Windows 10 does actually fail.
On December 19, a few months after Windows 10 had released. I start my laptop to try and continue my studies in video game development. But to my surprise, Windows 10 had finally crashed permanently. The screen flickered blue and black, and an error box saying Loginui.exe failed to start. I look at it for a solid minute as my computer had just committed suicide in a sense.
I reboot thinking it would fix the error but it didn't. I couldn't log in anymore.
I force shutdown the laptop and turn it back on putting it into safe mode.
To my surprise loginui.exe works and I sign in. I look at my desktop, the space wallpaper I always admired, the sound files, screen shots I had saved.
I go into file explorer and grab everything out of my default hard drive Windows was installed on. Nothing but 400gb got left behind and that was mainly garbage prototypes I had made and Windows itself. I formatted my external hard drive and placed everything on it. Escaping Windows 10 with around 100GB of useful data I looked at the final shutdown button I would look at.
I click it and try to boot into normal Windows 10. But it doesn't work. It flickers and the error pops up once more.
I force it to shutdown and insert the previous Linux Mint disc I made and format the default hard drive through Linux. I was done. 10 gave me a lot of shit. Java wouldn't work, my games has a functional UI but no screen popped up except a black abyss and it wouldn't even let me try to update my graphics card, apparently my AMD Radeon 5450 was up to date at the AMD Radeon 5000's.
I installed Linux Mint and thinking the games would actually play I open steam and Launch Half-Life 2 to check if Linux would be nicer to me than Windows 10 had been.
To my surprise the game ran. The scene from Highway 17 popped on screen and the UI was fully functional. But it was playing at 10-15fps rather than the usual 60-70fps. Keep look at my drivers and see my graphics card isn't in use. I do some research and it turns out I have a Hybrid Laptop.
Intel HD Graphics and an AMD Radeon 5450 and it was using the Intel and not the AMD. Months of testing and attempts of getting the games to work at high frame rates pass and the Damn thing still functions at a low terrible fps. Finally I give up. I ask my mom for a Windows 7 disc and she says we can't afford it. A few months pass and I finally get a Windows 7 installation disc through money I've saved up. Proudly I put it into my optical disc drive and install it to my main hard drive deleting Linux completely. I announced to all my friends my computer was back in working order and I install everything I needed, Steam, Skype, Blender, and Unity as well as all my games. I test Half-Life 2 and it's running exceptionally smoothly, I test Minecraft at max settings and it's working beautifully. The computer was functioning properly once again and my life as a developer started as I modeled things and blender, learned beginners C# and learned a lot of Batch. Today the computer still runs at a great speed and I warn others of what happened to me after I installed Windows 10 to my machine if they are thinking of switching from 7 or 8 on an older machine.
Truly the damage to my data cannot be undone. But the memory of the maintenance, work, tests, all are a memory of how Windows 10 ruined me and every night before the one year anniversary of Windows 10's release, I took out the battery of my laptop and unplugged it from the a.c. power, just so Windows 10 doesn't show it's DLLs, batch scripts, vbs scripts, anything on my computer. But now, after this has happened and I have recovered, I now only have a story to tell5 -
I had to build a few packages today from a git source.
Everything just plain text or shell scripts - so no fancy shit, no buildsystem... Nothing.
I was painfully reminded why I had forgotten a lot about dpkg package builds.
Fun facts:
- seems like impossibro to define an output directory for debuild (../ from source which must be pwd/cwd)
- i used /opt/<vendor_name>... Purging the deb from system deletes opt too, as it is empty
- reprepro (or whateva it is called) fails with an "uncommon GPG error" instead of saying "I don't know which key to use"
- creating rolling release numbers (as the packages won't have a real versioning system...) is fun - when you remember that date isn't sufficient, as the time part is necessary to build multiple packages (versions) per day
Compared to an Gentoo ebuild, this was really rocket science....
Guess as soon as someone does not follow the debian way, he must be shunned and exiled. At least it felt like this ....
But it works now. Woohoo. *cries internally* -
I just fucked up real bad:
My phone was giving some error about not being able to install an update. Fair enough, i think to myself, so i try rebooting. Still nothing...
I then remember that i at some point OEM unlocked it for some testing, so i start up adb and see if i can connect during the update process. I can't. This is bad: I can't get into my home environment, nor can i connect with adb
Then i try booting into recovery, but instead of booting to ACTUAL recovery, it boots to some custom made "E-Recovery" made by huawei (my phone is a huawei p9 lite), which only gives me the option to download the update, which crashes, and no way of resetting. However, from here, i am finally able to connect to my internal storage via hisuite to make a backup
Next up: Bootloader
So i next load up the unlocked bootloader to try and manually flash the update. That works great, but it still wont boot normally. So i figure: it must think my device is in fact a different device. At this point i'm pretty fucked: Even though i have my data backed up, i can't manually download the update from huawei's site because i don't have the right keys, and i can't download an OTA because their site sucks and half of the downloads don't work, including the one i need. So now i'm stuck here with a bricked phone because EMUI doesn't know how to install an update.
I then did the stupidest thing i have done to date: i wanted to flash a custom recovery image over the "E-Recovery" in order to do some troubleshooting, but instead of writing
"fastboot (mydeviceid) flash recovery recovery.img"
I wrote
"fastboot (mydeviceid) flash boot recovery.img"
Meaning i flashed my BOOT partition with a custom recovery image that turned out to not be able to run. Great! Now i've totally fucked my boot sequence
I can't call their support line either, because as soon as they realize i've tried to restore it myself, and therefor had my OEM unlocked, they basically just hang up.7 -
So there is this website called 100daysofrunning.in one of the worst design seen ever. They've a submit page which is another app that opens in an iframe.
If you're part of challenge, everyday you've to submit a form. Distance, time, Strava link, date and it's a pain to do so every day.
On the 50th day they restricted the date to7 days, so you cannot post data older then 7 days.
Being a programmer it would have been insult had i entered data manually.
Thanks to casperjs, meteorjs i was able to automate fetch from strava and post on this dumb page.
One day due an error, the script failed and I've missed one day of data entry. That's 2km of running gone invain and I'm out of the challenge.
Programming has mad me lazy. Screw programming. I should've been a dumb idiot to manually add data spending fkin 30 mins, atleast life would be simple. -
{
"$schema": "http://json-schema.org/draft-04/...#",
"type": "object",
"id": "https://[URL_NAME]/forms/{id}/...#",
"properties": {
"title" : { "type": "string" },
"date" : { "type": "string" },
"content" : { "type": "string" },
"date_start": { "type": "string" },
"date_end" : { "type": "string" },
"status" : {
"type" : "string",
"enum" : ["1", "2", "3", "4", "5"]
}
},
required [
"title",
"date",
"content",
"date_start",
"date_end",
"status"
]
}
See if you can notice the error is this schema. Don't copy and paste it. I change some format to obsfucate the real data naming, but this schema error is still up there
Just wasted my 30 minutes staring at this10 -
Ah, yes, the ages old dilemma of a piece of shit function written in-between taking long drags out of a fucking crackpipe being more reliable than the refactored version; how delightful.
Now, they say broken code from cleanup of sketchy bits is better than any working snippet whose reading feels as pleasant as being repeatedly slapped with a decaying rhinoceros testicle sack, but I'll be fucked if I don't __sometimes__ feel like I just *might* prefer eating the maggot soup out of the rotting fucking gonads of deceased male pachydermata than deal with this kind of shit: feet facing backwards and all that.
Ugh. If only I could live my life without everyday feeling like I'm on a pointless quest to slay a mother fucking dragon, where everytime I get to the castle I'm suddenly a mustachioed italian plumber stepping on turtles and my bitch is in another sicillian ghetto. You know, basic shit.
The good thing in seeing these old errors pop up again after my shoddy bandaid of a patch is taken off is that I'm finally experienced enough to realize that my ~ A P P R O A C H ~ was wrong to beg with. And this is VERY nice, because I came in to do some trivial maintenance of forgotten code, and now I have a plan for correcting a very small and silly but definitively annoying as fuck design error.
Why am I so annoyed then? Because it's more and more work, it never fucking ends, and I can't EVER take a break: with apocalypsis incoming, as we have clearly seen in the stars, tea cups, palm readings, crytal balls, ouija boards, and also in the cover of old-school pornographic magazines nailed to the wall of a defunct newspaper kiosk, the fear of economic collapse is somewhat too real to even THINK about any kind of necessary vacation.
And so: fucking shit, here we go again... TIME FOR MORE COFFEE.
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Microsoft, please stop the incomprehensible work vs. school account stuff and if you want to mail me a login code, then please actually do send an email. What's wrong with Microsoft Teams and office always giving its users headaches already when trying to log in?
A customer sent me a "FindTime" link, something like Calendso / Calendly, but "powered" by Microsoft Office. Seems that their power is off again, like ever so often. Microsoft: "can't access your account: You can't sign in here with a personal account. Use your work or school account instead."
Okay, go to bing, and search your error message. Try to use bing page to log in to my account: Microsoft: "We emailed a code." (No you didn't. At least I never received anything. And, yes, I did check my spam folder!) Microsoft: "Other ways to sign in: use Microsoft Authenticator".
me: "dear customer, please feel free to pick any time and date that matches your preference, as the FindTime link has been impossible to use".
How can Microsoft make me feel so dumb again, after more than 20 years as a developer? Have they ever heard about usability?10 -
Form plugin for WordPress on a seriously out of date install won't update until I update WordPress core. Fine, I update core and update the plugin and test the forms again. Form still isn't sending emails on submission. Look into forms settings. Oh look error messages, awesome!
Message: "There are 2 configuration errors"
OK, what are the errors where are the errors?
"There are two configuration errors."
Gee that's really fucking helpful, why even tell me you can see the errors if you aren't going to fucking tell me where the blasted things are. Spend 4 fucking hours trying to figure this out, checking "docs" wiki, support forums, nothing.
Finally decided to just trash the client's form plugin they were using and installed my reliable Gravity Forms.
P.S. if you are going to write code to find errors, and tell me about them, then you had better fucking tell me what the goddamned error is. There is no need to waste a developer's time trying to debug your shitty plugin because you couldn't be bothered to write a useful error handler. -
Dealing with government bureaucracy today. Prepare for pure anger.
First of all, what fucking dipshit site does testing and maintenance in production without letting users know? Bitch I'm getting an invalid date error when I use your own stupid date selector and I had to waste the office lady's time asking about it because you couldn't be arsed to either test your shit properly or actually take it down if it's broken. Who made that stupid ass decision and why the fuck did nobody question it. Fuck you.3 -
So, do any of your poor fuckers have the opportunity - nay, PRIVILEGE of using the absolute clusterfuck piece of shit known as SQL Server Integration Services?
Why do I keep seeing articles about how "powerful" and "fast" it is? Why do people recommend it? Why do some think it's easy to use - or even useful?
It can't report an error to save its life. It's logging is fucked. It's not just that it swallows all exceptions and gives unhelpful error messages with no debugging information attached, its logging API is also fucked. For example, depending on where you want to log a message - it's a totally different API, with a billion parameters most of which you need to supply "-1" or "null" to just to get it do FUCKING DO SOMETHING. Also - you'll only see those messages if you run the job within the context of SQL FUCKING SERVER - good luck developing on your ACTUAL FUCKING MACHINE.
So apart from shitty logging, it has inherited Microsoft's insane need to make everything STATICALLY GODDAMN TYPED. For EVERY FUCKING COMPONENT you need to define the output fields, types and lengths - like this is 1994. Are you consuming a dynamic data structure, perhaps some EAV thing from a sales system? FUCK YOU. Oh - and you can't use any of the advances in .NET in the last 10 years - mainly, NuGet and modern C# language features.
Using a modern C# language feature REMOVES THE ABILITY TO FUCKING DEBUG ANYTHING. THE FUCKER WILL NOT STOP ON YOUR BREAKPOINTS. In addition - need a JSON parsing library? Want to import a SDK specific to what you're doing? Want to use a 3rd party date library? WELL FUCK YOU. YOU HAVE TO INDEPENDENTLY INSTALL THE ASSEMBLIES INTO THE GAC AND MAKE IT CONSISTENT ACROSS ALL YOUR ENVIRONMENTS.
While i'm at it - need to connect to anything? FUCK YOU, WE ONLY INCLUDE THE MOST BASIC DATABASE CONNECTORS. Need to transform anything? FUCK YOU, WRITE A SCRIPT TASK. Ok, i'd like to write a script task please. FUCK YOU IM GOING TO PAUSE FOR THE NEXT 10 MINUTES WHILE I FIRE UP A WHOLE FUCKING NEW INSTANCE OF VISUAL STUDIO JUST TO EDIT THE FUCKING SCRIPT. Heaven forbid you forget to click the "stop" button after running the package and open the script. Those changes you just made? HAHA FUCK YOU I DISCARDED THEM.
I honestly cant understand why anyone uses this shit. I guess I shouldn't really expect anything less from Microsoft - all of their products are average as fuck.
Why do I use this shit? I work for a bunch of fucks that are so far entrenched in Microsoft technologies that they literally cannot see outside of them (and indeed don't want to - because even a cursory look would force them to conclude that they fucked up, and if you're a manager thats something you can never do).
Ok, rant over. Also fuck you SSIS1 -
Worked with two different customers
(customer 1 is up to date because of active development and customer 2 got his update long ago)
Changed something for customer 1 and accidently pulled customer 2. 49 changesets (needs a db update probably). Rolledback and now keeping an eye on the error logs -
It's funny that I still somehow think that windows can do anything but crash itself at this point, so I'm playing an fps, and get an error message that complains about driver failure, so I go to device manager and try to update nvidia drivers, windows as always says that my driver is the newest available, so I check the nvidia website, newest version released literally last Tuesday so I think to check device manager again, date of nvidia newest driver: 05/03/2019, date of windows' "newest" driver's install: 13/08/2018... glad to know that windows keeps my computer up to date.
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how is it that the android emulator in android studio runs buttery smooth on my up-to-date linux ryzen setup with just few terminal commands to set up, while my up-to-date windows version has some bullshit problem with virtualization, even with SVM on, Hypervisor all good, and yet crashes with a WHPX(?) error?
i mean ok i don't have an intel at hand but still the problem should be fixed by now according to google docs. even the fixes provided by the internet didn't help. this twist between windows and linux is very weird on my machine.1 -
So the company is launching this massive new project, I'm tasked with building a dashboard to track the performances of the whole thing in near real-time.
90% if the data comes from this one somewhat rubbish API (3rd-party).
I'm given plenty of time to build this, everything runs fine prior to the launch, manager happy.
Launch day, happening exactly at midnight.
I go and check my dashboard 5 min past the hour, all excited.
Errors, errors everywhere. "What is going on?" I exclaimed. #datHeartAttack
Took me a fair amount of time to figure out the issue.
Due to the time difference I was technically requesting the 3rd party servers for "tomorrow's data," and that instead of handling that in some sensible manner, the API just threw a "wrong fucking date error."
I mean, we're paying additional money, good money, for this API. -
I had been assigned a task to create a cross-platform desktop application that keeps track of the expiry of a certain product and notify in real-time.
So, my journey to create such an application starts today and the list below describes the first few hours.
1. Google/Date and time in javascript
2. Google/Javascript date object
3. W3school/Time in javascript
4. W3school/Javascript date getTime() method
5. Google/Are electron.js applications platform independent
6. Google/Dart for desktop applications
7. Google/Is dart cross-platform
8. Google/Best desktop application framework
9. Google/Python for desktop app development
10. Freecodecamp/How to build your first desktop application in python
11. Google/Pyqt
12. Google/Which is the best technology to build cross-platform desktop application
13. Google/Cross-platform desktop app development for windows mac and linux
14. Udemy / cross platform desktop app development for windows mac and linux
15. Youtube/ electron desktop app, demo
16. Youtube/ electron.js is obsolete
17. Youtube/Neutralinojs
18. Youtube/ neutralinojs tutorial
19. Google/Neutralinojs or electronjs
20. Google/Math.js
21. Google/Math.js/JS Bin
22. Google/Cannot find package “math.js”
23. StackOverFlow/How do I resolve “cannot find module” error using Node.js
24. Google/ is it better to install npm packages locally
25. Quora/ why should you stop installing NPM packages globally
26. Google/ what is nvm
27. Google/nvm version check
28. Stackoverflow/node version management on windows
29. Github/coreybutler/nvm-windows: a nvm for windows. Ironically written in Go
30. Google/how to uninstall a npm package
31. Npm docs/uninstalling packages and dependencies
32. Google/require in javascript
33. Youtube/how to install electronjs
34. Youtube/electronjs in 100s(fireship.io)
35. Roryok.com/electronjs memory usage compared to other cross-platform frameworks
36. Google/is electronjs memory hungry
37. Youtube/sql in one hour
38. Youtube/learn sql in 60 mins
39. Geeksforgeeks/connect mysql with node app
40. Stackoverflow/How to return to previous directory using cmd
41. Stackoverflow/how to require using const
42. Geeksforgeeks/difference between require and es6 import and export
TO BE CONTINUED...1 -
Angular cli was installed globally with some "more up-to-date" version and locally for a project with a slightly older version. On a local machine. No problem.
The same thing on a VM: nope, module not found error. node trying to run a node_modules install script from within windows directory, in which nothing node-related exists ... ?? -
Trying to book a trip to the sun. Filling in personal info. -> "untranslated error message".
Trying again -> no more room for these dates.
Trying again on another computer -> the date itself does lot appear (but other dates do show up as "fully booked")
IS IT SO DIFFICULT?? WHY CAN'T YOU MAKE YOUR WEBZ WORKZ!!?!2 -
Client purchases platform from large tech company. Needs to be able to add custom CSS and JS. Spend weeks combing through sites looking for documentation. Compile my own from my own trial and error, a half ass wiki, and forums.
Client's platform is years out of date.
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