Boss: I need to demo our product but it looks smaller on my laptop.
Me: That is because you have a 1920x1080 monitor and your laptop is 1280x800
Boss: Is that something you can fix?
Me: No you will need a new laptop, but the company has a sales laptop with that resolution.
Boss: No just get the company credit card and buy me one today!
*Bosses son hears*
Bosses Son: Here take the sales laptop
Boss: Will that be quick enough
Bosses Son: It has a 8 core i7 Processor, 16GB ram and a dedicated GPU
Boss: *looks at me confused*
Me: Your demoing a web browser, that will be more then ok. But were using chrome so 16GB of ram will be pushing it.
*me and bosses son laughs*
Boss: Can we upgrade it?

I had just started my new job and deleted 3 years of data that the client had spent over £450,000 collecting 😱

another developer used my PC to quickly access the clients database while I was out the room as I had sql management studio open. I went back to my PC thinking I was connected to my local database, did a few truncate tables to test my software and :0 minutes later I get a call asking why there was no data on the server!

Thank god for backups 😓

lol #fakenumber

At middle school they kept on banning the flash game sites so I made one my self but it was called something like mathhomework.somefreehost.com, the landing page looked like a homework site and all the flash games were called something like problem_1.swf. I use to sell logins to class mates at like £2.50.

<br />
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<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
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....

Lock computer when AFK!!!

Stack overflow

F***ing windows, spent ages repairing a database table only for windows to bloody BSOD at 97% complete 😡

Gets email from work

"New password policy introduced from next month

Passwords will have to include:
- a capital
- a lower case
- a number
- a symbol
- be at least 8 characters

Passwords will be be changed every 60 days with a new password not previously used"

Everyone starts moaning, there I am laughing as I'm in Linux and off their domain controller, and my windows laptop is a BYOD laptop and they don't want it on the domain :D

How would you get your "Cash prize" if you reported anonymously ...

"So we have 20GB of data, we need to show ALL of it on the graph ... oh yea it needs to work on mobile"

After 5 years of neglect I have finaly found some time to work on an old project of mine.

Not a bad view to work from either

LOL good marketing

God virgin media are useless:

Me: “hello how long is left in my contract”
VM: “you have three months left, may I ask why”
Me: “this is now the 3rd day in two weeks I have had no broadband I’m looking to swap to someone more reliable”
VM: “ I’m sorry to hear that I’ll check our system to see what I can do for you”
2 mins on hold
VM: “hello mr day we can offer you a special offer of doubling your internet speed for only £5 a month”
Me: “how does that help with the fact I have no internet”
VM: “well it won’t but we have an engineer looking at the problem and we estimate it will be fixed by 17:05”
Me: “thanks but no thanks, what’s the early exit fee”

😡🤬😡

So 10 months ago i moved from Cambridge (UK) to Guildford (UK), due to moving this distance i started working from home and going into the office once a week.

Now after 10 months i have finally got my home office how i first imagined it. Everything runs from my laptop which is located on the shelving unit away from my desk. Everything plugs into it via 1 USB lead.

Setup:
27" 2560 x 1440 monitor flanked by two 1280 x 1024 monitors.
Asus Laptop (i5-6300HQ, 12GB ram, 512GB SSD + 1TB HDD)
Home PC (i5-7600, 8GB ram, GTX 770)

Accessories:
StarTech USB hub - This allows me to plug my three monitors, keyboards, mouse and everything else into my laptop.
KVM switch - Allows me to swap between my Work PC and Home PC with a click of a button

Just got the first pull request to my open source project :D

Finally got myself setup in my new office today, before there was three of us cramped into a tiny 3mx4m office, now only two of us in a much larger office.

It was about 10 at night I thought I was the only one at work. I had my favourite music playlist on, there I was singing and dancing to the music with my headphones on.

With me sitting in a position not seeing the door, my boss and a client walked in and was in hysterics laughing at me 😂

A mate couldn't remember a IP address so asked me to make him a domain to make it easier for him. His new domain is xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx.somewebsite.com (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is the IP)

So after being in this role for 4 years we have finally got to the point where there are 0 outstanding bugs/issues with our software.

Upgrade on Friday 😬

For about 6 months when I started coding php I didn't think indentation was worth it so all of my files were like
}
}
}
}
}

Windows: You have low power (5% = like 5 mins)
Me: Goes to shit down
Windows: You can only shut down if you update
Me: I'm not risking that *holds power button down and smothers it to death*

I had a 6 hour flight home so thought I would do some coding. We take off, get to cruising altitude, I get my laptop out and boom windows update. It's like they know the most inconvenient time possible FML

Me fixing bugs on our legacy system

Love reading through old code and seeing things like this

var hasFailed = (errors.length > 0)?true:false;

Makes you wonder what their thought process was when writing it :D

Our IT department is almost as bad as apple

Sales: We NEED to view the minutely data but showing 10 years of data at a time
Me: you do realise that would be like 2 days of data per pixel even on one of largest monitor resolutions
Sales: your a clever guy I'm sure you can work something out
Me: well I can consolidate the data so you ...
Sales: No we need to see the temperature for every minute

Work: there is little work for our freelancer we're getting rid of him at the end of the year
Me: are you sure, that will put a lot of work on my schedule.
Work: I'm sure you can handle it
*two weeks later*
Work: have you finished feature xyz yet
Me: nope had a server crash today so pushed it back
Work: why didn't you get "free lancers name here" to do it for you
Me: I could of if you didn't fire him, he could of also done the other features you want too
Work: ah ok

I just found this in some code I'm now supporting

for (var i = 0; i<1; i++) {
...
}

Was asked to pop down to my bosses office for 5 minutes, turns out I was interviewing someone. Not one word of warning was given to me prior the phone call asking me to come down.

Reviewing bosses code and had these two if statements with no logic between
if (someVar) {
if (someVar) { // double check someVar is true just in case
}
}

I just found this bit of code in our product :P

setInterval(function () {
$("body").find("div, td").replaceText("oldProductName", "newProductName" );
}, 50);

I just installed some anti-virus, little did i know it was also going to install their 'System "Speed up" software'

Was using 50% of my Disk Usage 40% of my ram and 100% of one of my CPUs ... great job at speeding up my system

Who else finds themselves typing esc + :wq in there IDE after using vim for a while.

So the CEO called me down about a super urgent bug that needs to be fixed or we will loose several hundred thousand pounds of business.

I rush down to his office and there he has a graph "look the values are barely moving i would expect the values to be more erratic this time of day"

*i look at the graph*

"Errrr your looking at 02:00 in the morning, it's 14:00"

Boss: ahh good spot *looks at 14:00* yea that looks good, great job.

I leave my laptop for 30 minutes and it decides to update 😤

Checking database table with 100m+ transactions ... no indexes or primary key :/

Started work on redeveloping a module for our system, I look at the database document and see two fields, one for date and one for time. Both are full date time and the data is stored like so:
Date I want to store: 2016-04-09 05:54:00
Date: 2016-04-09 00:00:00
Time: 1899-01-01 05:54:00

Got my stress-ball + stickers today :D

Now where to put the stickers 🤔

var date = new Date();
var month = date.getMonth();
console.log(month); // 2

who thought it would be a good idea to start the months of at 0 rather then 1

3 BSOD in a hour at a customer site ... Linux will be installed tomorrow

So someone wants me to sign a NDA so they can use my open source software (MIT licence) in there software.

They also NEED to minify there php to save on storage and to boost performance. 😂

Really not sure if showing devRant to my colleague was a good idea or not :|

Spec'ing out a data analysis tool for several billion transactions and I got this when sending the final spec to the client.

Client: "I don't see why it takes so long, I downloaded this template from theme forest and edited it in dreamweaver, it only took 3 hours"

When you look at some production code that has been released for 4 years and find a HUGE security, like catastrophic here is my server hack me flaw 😁

So we decided to use Monday evenings as a development night for our game, we are currently down the pub enjoying the sun. Maybe next Monday

Tesco’s scan as you shop runs using Windows apparently

Want to annoy a co-worker, replace a semi colon with a Greek question mark (U+037E) 😈

So last week I ranted about the hours I was working, great start this week I'm up at 03:00 to go up north, not going to get back till 20:00 ish. Tomorrow I have to be in Wales for 09:00 so going to have to be up at 04:00 for a 5 hour travel time. Check my emails and my boss says after I get back from Wales tomorrow can we have a design and specification meeting about a "super urgent" product that we have to develop. Oh and Thursday I have to prep everything for going live with a new product Friday.

So we're looking for a new developer, my boss sends me an email with a subject "Intresting CV". It was for a office clerk who altered a Wordpress website for the company they use to work for

@ cineworld tonight and I see this, what if your between 15 and 17?

Errr, i was not expecting this when i went on SO

My boss had a 50 page word document where he add any bugs he has found (he likes to test before it goes to QA) we then have to read that document for any changes (hi-lighted in blue) then add them to our bug tracking system. Any updates that are made on the ticket we have to add to the word document.

We tried letting him use our bug tracking tool but he hated using it as the padding on the navigation links was too big. We would have to redesign the 3rd party tool just for him

Work want me to use wordpress :(

Went to buy a CPU from CeX ... maybe not!

Bargain!

@dfox i have a devRant Idea.
Achievements - Kind of like Xbox achievements etc ...
For example: (Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum)

Total Likes: 2k, 5k, 10k, 25k
Likes On a post: 100, 250, 500, 1000
Likes on a comment: 10, 25, 50, 100
Total Rants: 15, 50, 100, 500
Total Comments: 50, 150, 400, 1000
Weekly Rant: Top 10, Top 5, Top 3, Number 1
Monthly Rant (most popular rants that month): Top 10, Top 5, Top 3, Number 1

Having to pay a "Setup fee" for your hosting that you have had for the last 3 years ... what do they need to setup 🙄

Need to look at socket.io documentation and their site is down :(

*sigh* woke up did a data export for the customer, send it to them then they reply "thanks but it's next weekend we wanted the data export not this one" checked the email and they were correct.

When a password hint tool throws an error saying your password is too weak, you then remove a symbol and it now works 👌

So I'm called down to the office the other day for a meeting, I get there and my boss says "hi this is John Doe he has applied for the developer role, can you give him the technical interview" had no time to prep, my boss didn't even give me a copy of his CV

Went for a job interview and they used spaces rather then tabs!!! Walked straight out of there!

(^ Sarcasm it really doesn't bother me as it's just a setting on my ide)

Ran out of mobile data, go to top it up and it's £3.00 for 100MB or £9 for 1GB ... I'll just wait 3 days with no internet

We make a small server product with a web based admin system, as we were going to have limited customers who will use this (usually just the engineers) and this was not on the www. We dropped all support for all browsers other then chrome/firefox. No more IE/safari bugs for us XD

Just found this great JQuery selector in a bit of code a freelancer wrote:

var showErrorFor = $('[name="newPass"]').attr('name')

me right now:

while (me.onHoliday) {
wisdomTooth.x--;
wisdomTooth.y++;
me.ingest(new Painkillers());
}

My first proper holiday in several years, swear my body won't let itself rest!

So Friday evening decided to "Update and Shut Down" my window 10 laptop.

I come in Monday morning and turn it on ... "Working on updates" So far its been 15 mins and its 27%.

Oh and my other laptop at home decided to restart itself and apply updates and stayed at "Applying Update 100%" for 35 minutes, luckily i was able to watch Glastonbury via my Xbox as my GF would not of been happy missing Ed Shearan :P

How hard would it be for MS to say "Look this update is going to take 45 minutes, do you want to wait"

My boss develops with access 2000 and uses variable width arial font. 🤢

So I can't get 2G where I live, like 1 mile away from a telephone mast yet I'm in the middle of the Wales country side and I have 4G

I was at a car boot sale (mix between a flea market and yard sale for the Americans out there) the stall next to me was selling a PC tower, monitor, keyboard and mouse for £10. So all day I was trying to sell my old toys (I was 9 at the time) but only made £5.

At the end of the day I went to the stall and asked if he would take £5 for it, he then game me it for free as he saw me trying to sell my toys all day.

A programme I have to maintain (and not allowed to optimise or change):

1) read input from serial connection
2) store data in MySQL database
3) every day convert to CSV
4) store on Windows file share
5) process CSV in access 2000
6) store in MsSQL database

When it was first developed, I said to te developer to store it straight from serial to MsSQL but out boss wanted it to follow the above spec.

He has now left and I have to maintain it

Re-Factoring old code and i find this beauty

$('.modal [name="port"]').attr('name')

exec("mysqldump -u root -pxxxx ".$_GET["table"]);

Made a node program that connects to a development board (like a raspberry pi) via rs232 and installs an image automatically.

I'm trying to investigate why chrome keeps crashing after i implemented web sockets to a web app.

I used windows perfmon to see the memory usage over night.

The usage between 17:30 and 01:50 is expected behaviour as this part of the app is a live data graph of the last 48 hours.

Now i have to find out why the app doubles in memory twice in a hour.

Working on a very large project that has been going on for 6 months and will run for 18 more.

The day before our bimonthly meeting with the client the PM decides to walk out and quit without telling anyone. Now we're left to try and figure out what he was doing, as most of it was poorly documented it's gona be a pain.

<?php
define("NOW", date("Y-m-d H:i:s", time());
/* ..... more code ..... */
$nowUnix = strtotime(NOW);

Started work at 05:00 to catch a flight, just finished work now (20:00)

Tomorrow morning i have to be up at 03:30 to catch a flight back, my boss has also booked me in with a all day meeting with our largest client tomorrow so won't be leaving the office until 18:00.

Atleast im going to the midnight viewing of Capt. America tomorrow (if I'm awake)

Just sitting around waiting for a 220GB Database to import, if I had a spare PCI-E port I could have used a 240GB NVMe PCIe SSD but now I have to use an old Seagate 500gb HHD. Gonna be a while.

So I'm a "Web Application Developer" but I have to go out on site whilst a trained engineer sits in the office doing nothing. Everything I can do on site I can do from my office with teamviewer. Hit the M25 at 09:00 and will hit it again at 17:00 ... not a fun day

When your forced to change your "Development Process" on a weekly basis because everyone has a better idea

On holiday skiing in France and all I can hear as I come down the mountain is the ring tone I assign all work related contacts.

Get to lunch and see 10 missed calls ... I will be saying "I had no signal on the mountain" a lot when I get back

PROBLEM:
We need to log out phone calls in and outlet of the company

How we wanted to do it:
Use node.js to read the serial port from the phone system then store the data into the MsSQL database

Eventual solution:
1) Read serial port
2) store in local MySQL database
3) every 3 minutes create a CSV file containing the last 3 minutes of calls and store on a Windows shared directory
4) have a access 2000 programme collect these files every 30 minutes
5) insert into MsSQL database

Latest bug from our testing Department.

They think it may be a database issue why they can't save 0.00 degrees

So glad i moved from a desktop PC to a laptop for development. I still have 2 workstations (one at home and one at work) with 3 screens, mechanical keyboard + mouse. But if i ever have to demo to a client/PM i just un-dock and take my laptop to them. Plus if the office is loud i just go to another room.

a few ideas for the future:

1) When you have just unlocked the ability to use a new item for your avatar send a notification i.e.
"XXXXXX just +1 Your comment, you can now get a pet tiger!"
or
"XXXXXX just +1 Your comment, you can now choose a new t-shirt"

2) Rant categories, i.e. Clients, colleagues, OS, jokes, !rant etc...

3) the ability to view more then the last 30 rants of a users profile

As a web developer i've never been able to use this as an excuse but now i can use the fact im compiling code as a reason for doing nothing. :P

Has to fix a bug in our old products web interface, how did I ever put up with it. In some places it has 7 nested iframes. It is also some of the worst code I have ever seen, no user input is sanitised plus there is no structure to the code, try looking for a CDs element without going into chrome dev tools is impossible as there are 52 separate CSS files

Anyone else getting a load of crappy/cringy hostgator adds on youtube

Day 2 was fun to implement but…

I find that elf very suspicious. How does he know what another elf will play? Is he a demon that can see into the future?
And why would that elf help me? He could keep this knowledge for himself and secure a place near the snacks tent.
🤔

They are trying really, really hard to get you to use IE

Thanks for the distraction :P

"Are you sure this is not a scam" mum when I wanted to but my first lot of web hosting from one.com

FML spent ages debugging why a function wasn't working, looks like I must of duplicated the function by mistake. Then after that I was trying to change the functionality slightly but wasn't working. Only spent half of Friday trying to debug it, luckily I fixed it in like 30 seconds today :P

Scenario 1) Server -> proxy -> client
Scenario 2) Server -> proxy -> 2nd proxy -> client

Scenario 1 works on some web browsers
Scenario 2 always works

foreach ($legacyCode as $codeToSupport) {
$bugsFound++;
$sanity--;
}

Ordered myself a new laptop, paid extra for next day delivery before 10:30 (not cheap)

Get the tracking number and it looks like they have used my delivery address and billing postcode :/

So my room mate threw out €700 of spending money for our holiday later this month. Luckily I thought about it today and started looking for them. Was the last palace I could think of.

When your work finally realises you haven't done time sheets for the last 4 years :/

Arghhhhh working with regular expressions (already a bad start) got it working on my dev PC but it won't work on the server.

The only difference is my pc is running PCRE v8.41 and my server is running v8.42. Can't find anyone else having the same issue on SO/Google

Completely fed up today, trying to investigate a memory leak using google chromes profiling tools, first of all all the "documentation" is well out of date so you have to pretty much guess your way through it.

Anyway i start to investigate and it looks like the JS Heap increases in size only after a garbage collection, surely this is the wrong way round or am i just being stupid

Me doing ops analysis...

Day1: No way! How the fu
Day2: Nah, someone else will do this...
Day3: Fuck! Why dont we have a Legal Dept
Day4: Okay Im just gonna run an ml to find irregularities
Day5: These scans cannot be ocr-ed...
Day6: br-brute force
2 months later: so there's a problem regarding the Express Contractual Remedies of Contract A and Amendment C...

!rant

Does anyone know of any software I can use to monitor a RAID 1 array health. Ideally ild like an email if one of the drives has failed/removed.

On a side note thank god for RAID 😅

Found out that i have amazon prime music with my account for free (i always thought it was £7.99 extra) So mow im going through down loading a load of music and remaking my playlists, in the end it will make me more productive so that's how im justifying it to myself :P

When you start a data import to a test database on Friday as it will take a few days only to forget later and turn off your PC. Just finished after restarting it Monday.

This button layout bugs me more then it should :/

@dfox

Think I’ve finally finished setting up my shared hosting server for my clients websites 😁

I found Webmin a few days ago and spent a few evenings sorting it out, so far so good. Should save a lot of time ☺️

When you get a call at 7 am on a bank holiday from a client ... not paid enough for this

When I saw they remastered Call of Duty 4 I was very happy, spent alot of my childhood on that game and would easily pay £40-50 for it. But they are only selling it as an add on to the new COD game for £90-110 😔

Skip half of my 6th form lessons to sit in the library and make a web based game :P

We create home automation S/W and have it installed in the workplace.

For some reason the lights in the Help Desk/Testing department didn't turn on this morning. At the time our lead engineer was there too.

Rather then try sort it out themselves, they called R&D and got us to check the issue out. Turns out the lighting had been tripped over the weekend when the maintenance department was doing some work.

As we were investigating the issue they were just talking about their weekend so could of easily investigated it themselves!

Actually looking forward to work tomorrow, a colleague spent last week implementing web sockets to our communications server, this week I now start to strip out all of our Ajax polling (in some cases it is polling every 150ms) and replace with web sockets!

After three years of asking and waiting I can finally remove the last annoying bit of code from our software 😄

With all this uproar about MS taking over github I’m so glad I decided to go self hosted. I’m currently using gogs.io and have been for the past year or so. Granted it doesn’t have all the features that github/bitbucket does, but it’s also free for an infinite amount of users/private repos.

So today I started in Cambridge, went to Birmingham then Manchester now I'm in Sunderland and back to Cambridge tomorrow. I don't mind driving but almost every motorway I went on had like 20 miles of average speed checks at 50 due to "road works"

Working day 2 of 2023… (yes, I got the year right this time)

Another day of CDK, and cursing how far it can at points lack behind in features. It’s only annoying when you’d actually want to use one of those new features. 4 issues resolved today, only 3 (known issues) on my backlog before this one’s done.

Oh, and TIL that one of my first tasks in my new role (that I can transfer to once I’m done with this project) is to write some IaC. Happy days. It’s pretty much all I’ve done for gawd knows how long. So good nothing ever changes.