Me brute forcing into the appartment (where i rent my room) modem:

*tries all most easy/logical combinations*

Nope.

*tries more difficult ones*

Nope.

*hmm.... no please not both just blank....... 😷*

Admin access granted.

😩

It finally hit me the other day.
I'm working on an IoT project for a late-stage ALS patient. The setup is that he has a tablet he controls with his eye movements, and he wants to be able to control furnishings in his room without relying on anyone else.
I set up a socket connection between his tablet and the Raspberry Pi. From there it was a simple matter of using GPIO to turn a lamp or fan on or off. I did the whole thing in C, even the socket programming on the Pi.
As I was finishing up the main control of the program on the Pi I realized that I need to be more certain of this than anything I've ever done before.
If something breaks, the client may be forced to go days without being able to turn his room light on, or his fan off.
Understand he is totally trapped in his own body so it's not like he can simply turn the fan off. The nursing staff are not particularly helpful and his wife is tied up a lot with work and their two small children so she can't spend all day every day doting on him.
Think of how annoying it is when you're trying to sleep and someone turns the light on in your room; now imagine you can't turn it off yourself, and it would take you about twenty minutes to tell someone to turn it off -- that is once you get their attention, again without being able to move any part of your body except your eyes.
As programmers and devs, it's a skill to do thorough testing and iron-out all the bugs. It is an entirely different experience when your client will be depending on what you're doing to drastically improve his quality of life, by being able to control his comfort level directly without relying on others -- that is, to do the simplest of tasks that we all take for granted.
Giving this man some independence back to his life is a huge honor; however, it carries the burden of knowing that I need to be damned confident in what I am doing, and that I have designed the system to recover from any catastrophe as quickly as possible.

In case you were wondering how I did it all: The Pi launches a wrapper for the socket connection on boot.
The wrapper launches the actual socket connection in a child process, then waits for it to exit. When the socket connection exits, the wrapper analyzes the cause for the exit.
If the socket connection exited safely -- by passing a special command from the tablet to the Pi -- then the wrapper exits the main function, which allows updating the Pi. If the socket connection exited unexpectedly, then the Pi reboots automatically -- which is the fastest way to return functionality and to safeguard against any resource leaks.
The socket program itself launches its own child process, which is an executable on the Pi. The data sent by the tablet is the name of the executable on the Pi. This allows a dynamic number of programs that can be controlled from the tablet, without having to reprogram the Pi, except for loding the executable onto it. If this child of the socket program fails, it will not disrupt its parent process, which is the socket program itself.

Client: I want you to reverse engineer this piece of software!!
*posts some link to an exe on altervista along with some unrelated crap*
Oh and "I PAY"! (Because you can't even take that for granted anymore these days.)

Me: Alright, I'll look into it but I'm not a reverse engineering expert so don't expect too much.
*Closes Facebook*

Client, day after: Hey have you looked into it already? Have you finished it already?! HEY, RESPOND ALREADY!!!

Me (thinking): YEAH AFTER 1 DAY AND NO PAYMENT DETAILS WHATSOEVER, I INSTANTLY DROPPED EVERYTHING JUST TO PLEASE YOU, FILTHY RAT SACK!! You fucking wish, motherfucker. Down to lowest priority you go! And if I don't feel like doing it, how about I just drop your request and tell you to suck my fleshy snek, HOW ABOUT THAT HUH? Fucking piece of shit 😤

!rant

Programming is a huge blessing i believe we all should be thankful to. For me, it literally turned my life around.

11 months ago i was fighting a losing battle with depression, and contemplated suicide constantly. I would use a self remedy of smoking weed and sleeping all day long. I was depressed because i felt my life had no real value. I was doing nothing, and its kind of an infinite loop.

You don't do anything, so you feel bad, so you don't do anything, and so on.

That was until i finally took the step that changed my life. I searched and wanted to learn something. I always liked web pages so i thought id get into web development.

Did some research, found out that the fastest way to go was to learn ruby on rails. I followed a tutorial i found online, and literally pushed myself through it. There were times when there where things i didnt understand, and when it was really bad, but i pushed myself through it and i finished the tutorial.

Just finishing the tutorial and learning something new helped me alot. I had already quit smoking and was feeling way better, but after a while i started feeling bad again since i wasnt doing anything after i had finished learning, so i started working on a personal project, creating it from scratch, and just working on it day and night. I worked 14 hours a day, never really leaving my room ( this was during summer vacation ) for a month.

There were many things i didnt understand, but i never gave up and always searched for the solution and read about it until i understood it better. Looking back, there were things i knew could have been done in a better way, but as a first project, im proud of myself, not because it rocks, but because i did not give up.

In the process of starting a new life, i was really lonely. I cut all ties with everyone i knew, since they were all toxic, all i had in my life was ruby on rails and my web application. I wanted to launch it but couldn't due to personal reasons.

Not being able to launch and see something live, something that you worked so hard on, that you put so much effort into, that was devastating to me. I felt as if all my efforts had gone to waste.

And here is what i love most about programming, NOTHING EVER GOES TO WASTE. All that effort you spent on something ? All these all nighters you pulled ? All that frustration from that bug ? It will pay off later. It always does somehow. You get more knowledge and become a better programmer, and sometimes it even gives way to new opportunities and chances you never even expected.

I included my web application in my resume and it helped land me a job as a junior developer in a really nice company. A job that i wouldn't even have dreamed of several months earlier.

Programming and creating something new and learning something new everyday, creating something that people use, that someone else will benefit from and be grateful for, i think we should never take that for granted !

Tl;dr : learning how to code and web development saved my life

Languages without a fully implemented type system.

Granted, it has been a fad for a quarter century, but everything points at one simple fact: Types matter in programming.

In dynamic languages, you tend to see that testing suites explode into thousands of tests, many of which wouldn't even be necessary if you had some type safety.

You see that languages like JS are forked into more typesafe dialects, like Typescript. Python got typehints since 3.6, and PHP added typehints for methods, then typehints for properties, and will soon even have compound types.

Maybe most languages will never reach the level of Haskell or Scala, and that's totally fine, but I think the direction languages are moving in is pretty much set in stone: No ambiguity, more safety. Code should fail before deploying, not after.

You know side projects? Well I took on one. An old customer asked to come and take over his latest startups companys tech. Why not, I tought. Idea is sound. Customer base is ripe and ready to pay.

I start digging and the Hardware part is awesome. The guys doing the soldering and imbedded are geniuses. I was impressed AF.

I commit and meet up with CEO. A guy with a vision and sales orientation/contacts. Nice! This shit is gonna sell. Production lines are also set.

Website? WTF is this shit. Owner made it. Gotta give him the credit. Dude doesn't do computers and still managed to online something. He is still better at sales so we agree that he's gonna stick with those and I'll handle the tech.

I bootstrap a new one in my own simplistic style and online it. I like it. The owner likes it. He made me to stick to a tacky logo. I love CSS and bootstrap. You can make shit look good quick.

But I still don't have access to the soul of the product. DBs millions rows of data and source for the app I still behind the guy that has been doing this for over a year.

He has been working on a new version for quite some time. He granted access to the new versions source, but back end and DB is still out of reach. Now for over month has passed and it's still no new version or access to data.

Source has no documentation and made in a flavor of JS frame I'm not familiar with. Weekend later of crazy cramming I get up to speed and it's clear I can't get further without the friggin data.

The V2 is a scramble of bleeding edge of Alpha tech that isn't ready for production and is clearly just a paid training period for the dev. And clearly it isn't going so well because release is a month late. I try to contact, but no reaction. The owner is clueless.

Disheartening. A good idea is going to waste because of some "dev" dropping a ball and stonewalling the backup.

I fucking give him till the end of the next week until I make the hardware team a new api to push the data and refactor the whole thing in proper technologies and cut him off.

Please. If you are a dev and don't have the time to concentrate on the solution don't take it on and kill off the idea. You guys are the key to making things happening and working. Demand your cut but also deserve it by delivering or at least have the balls to tell you are not up for it.

Access granted. 😂

Just saw Time magazine's cover
Person of the year 2019: Greta Thunberg

What the fuck did she do to deserve that????

It's time someone acknowledge a developer/techie as a person of the year.

There was automation, spaceX and many more advancement in the field of technology. Why does it feel like technology is always taken for granted.

Not to sound to sexist with that comment. But, living in Sweden (one of the most developed country) and telling the world leaders go fuck themselves is not an achievement.

Had an interesting time these past few days. Had a customer who, when I left for vacay, was complaining that he couldn't get access to our private package registry. Get back, this issue is still active.

We'd granted access to his github enterprise, and for some reason he wasn't getting the activation email. We spent about 22 hours of customer support time on his failing to help himself before he finally escalated to the standard 40 person IT enterprise tantrum/come to jesus meeting.

Long story short, he had somehow ignored repeated attempts (35 email replies to the ticket chain, 4 phone calls) to get him to check his spam folder. In which, as it was revealed to all the hollywood squares in attendance, there were no less than 35 activation emails from github granting him access. Of course, none of this was his fault. And while screensharing his big brain to god and everyone he decides the problem is now actually Microsoft because their office 365 spam email filtered his emails incorrectly. We of course agreed with his big brain, smoothed over his bruised ego and went about our day.

I mean, fair enough, it's kind of dumb that Microsoft ever spam lists github, but still. I was just a fly on the wall, and he burned all his paid support tickets on the issue, so hopefully we won't be dealing with him again this year.

Also, this is an edge case with our new product line, most of our customers are painless.

Ten hours of making a fully responsive website for a gf's university class in only pure HTML and CSS made me realize how much I take frameworks for granted.

I played a lot of Command & Conquer when I was younger, and I remember going through the files for C&C: Red Alert. I found one that had all the units names and properties, and wondered what happened if I changed a value. So I changed grenadiers attack speed to something ridiculously fast, and found that it actually changed it in the game!

The light bulb went off in my head, and I then created new units:
- Albert Einstein that shot electricity
- Attack dogs that launched missiles

Granted the animations didn't exist for these so it defaulted to playing their death animations when attacking, which was amusing.

That was the ah-ha moment for me that lead me to pursue programming. It was just so much fun!

A room full of mostly old male stressed out engineers sat in chairs, and the presenter said:

"So who watched Judging Amy last night?"

The presenter went on to express her surprise that nobody in the room had seen last night's episode of Judging Amy.... and wasn't going to drop the topic.

The meeting, if it ever had any, now had no chance of going anywhere good.

By the end of the meeting someone would walk out and "retire" shortly there after, and it certainly wasn't going to be the presenter....

Backstory:

The company built on the IBM model of sell pricey custom hardware (granted it worked really well) and sell expensive support contracts wasn't doing as well as it had hoped. Granted it was still doing better than most of its neighboring companies, but it was clear that with the .com bust the days of catered lunches every day were over.

The company had grown fat and everyone knew that while the company had a good enough product(s) to survive, there weren't enough lifeboats for everyone to survive.

In the midst of this an HR department that took up nearly 20% of the office space at HQ felt it needed to justify its existence / expenses.

They decided to do this in the same way they always had, by taking funding from other departments, this time not by simply demanding more direct budgets for themselves.... they decided to impose mandatory 'training' on other departments ... that they would then bill for this training.

When HR got wind that there were some stressed out engineers the solution was, as it always is for HR.... to do more HR stuff:

They decided to take these time starved engineers away from their jobs, and put them in a room with HR for 4 days. Meanwhile the engineer's tasks, deadlines and etc remained the same.

Support got roped into it too, and that's how I ended up there.

It would be difficult to describe the chasm between HR and everyone else at that company. This was an HR department that when they didn't have enough cubes (because of constant remodeling in the HR area under the guise of privacy) sat their extra HR employees next to engineering and were 'upset' that the engineers 'weren't very friendly and all they did was work'.

At one point a meeting to discuss this point of contention was called off for some made up reason or another by someone with a clue.

So there we all sat, our deadlines kept ticking away and this HR team (3 people) stood at the front of the room and were perplexed that none of these mostly older males in this room had seen last night's episode of Judging Amy.

From there the presentation was chaos, because almost the entire thing was based on your knowledge of what happened to poor stressed out Amy ... or something like that.

We were peppered with HR tales of being stressed out and taking a long lunch and feeling better, and this magical thing where the poor HR person went and had a good cry with her boss and her boss magically took more off her plate (a brutal story where the poor HR person was almost moved to tears again).

The lack of apparent sympathy (really nobody said much at all) and lack of seeming understanding from the crowd of engineers that all they should do is take a long lunch, or tell their boss to solve their problems ... seemed to bother the HR folks. They were on edge.

So then they finally asked "What are your stressers?" And they picked the worst possible person they could to ask, Ted.

Ted was old, he prickly, he was the only one who understood the worst ass hell of assembly that had been left behind.

Ted made a mistake, he was honest with folks who couldn't possibly understand what he was saying. "This mandatory class is stressing me out. I have work to do and less time because of this class."

The exchange that followed was kinda horrible and I recall sitting behind Ted trying to be as small as possible as to not be called on. Exactly what everyone said almost doesn't matter.

A pedantic debate between Ted and the HR staff about "mandatory" and "required" followed. I will just sum it up that they were both in the wrong for how they behaved for a good 20 minutes...

Ted walked out, and would later 'retire' that week.

Ted had a history and was no saint. I suspect an email campaign by various folks who recounted the events that day spared ted the 'fired' status and he walked with what eventually would become the severance package status quo.

HR never again held another 'training', most of them would all finally face the axe a few months later after the CEO finally decided that 'customer facing, and product producing' headcount had been reduced enough ... and it was other internal staff's time for that.

The result of the meeting was one less engineer, and everyone else had 4 days less of work done...

Never did I realize how much I take it for granted.. Until it suddenly stopped working.

R.I.P space bar.

"I need these permissions that J has"

J has those permissions because he worked on a different team that was granted those, you do not.

"I need it"

No

"I need it"

Its not within my power to allow you access, you have to talk with R and M.

"Okay well guess what I'm gonna escalate this up thr chain and its gonna come down on you"

*sigh* what do i do when i literally have no authority to give someone something and am clearly doing my jobb right, but someone thinks they can get me... idk... in trouble? Threaten me??? Logic, meet the window

"Thank you for choosing Microsoft!"

No Microsoft, I really didn't choose you. This crappy hardware made you the inevitable, not a choice.

And like hell do I want to run your crappy shit OS. I tried to reset my PC, got all my programs removed (because that's obviously where the errors are, not the OS, right? Certified motherfuckers). Yet the shit still didn't get resolved even after a reset. Installing Windows freshly again, because "I chose this".

Give me a break, Microshaft. If it wasn't for your crappy OS, I would've gone to sleep hours ago. Yet me disabling your shitty telemetry brought this shit upon me, by disabling me to get Insider updates just because I added a registry key and disabled a service. Just how much are you going to force data collection out of your "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" users, Microsoft?

Honestly, at this point I think that Microsoft under Ballmer might've been better. Because while Linux was apparently cancer back then, at least this shitty data collection for "a free OS" wasn't yet a thing back then.

My mother still runs Vista, an OS that has since a few months ago reached EOL. Last time she visited me I recommended her to switch to Windows 7, because it looks the same but is better in terms of performance and is still supported. She refused, because it might damage her configurations. Granted, that's probably full of malware but at this point I'm glad she did.

Even Windows 7 has telemetry forcibly enabled at this point. Vista may be unsupported, but at least it didn't fall victim to the current status quo - data mining on every Microshaft OS that's still supported.

Microsoft may have been shady ever since they pursued manufacturers into defaulting to their OS, and GPU manufacturers will probably also have been lobbied into supporting Windows exclusively. But this data mining shit? Not even the Ballmer era was as horrible as this. My mother may not realize it, but she unknowingly avoided it.

My parents are real sticklers for who is allowed to be on Netflix. They only let people on when they are present, and they never click 'save password'.

Me being a poor college student and desperate for the Netflix password, created a fake website for one of my parents to sign into.

How did I do this? I created my own localhost server with a backend database for the password to go to. I then copied the Netflix home screen and log in and asked them to log me into their account.

They said I can be on for one hour, and then they were signing me out.

I agreed to these terms.

As a small twist, I had also copied the no internet tab from Chrome for the page to redirect to. Knowing that once they logged in they would be expecting the main UI.

They logged in and then waited for the page to load. I, of course, put in a delay for the page to load and then displayed the no internet tab. They were confused and asked me to refresh, still nothing. I asked them if the router was out, and they went to check.

While they were away I quickly switched back to the real Netflix website and yelled back saying I got it working again. They came back over and saw that it was asking for a password again. They signed in and saw the main homepage and none were the wiser that day.

Once they left I checked inside the DB and found the plaintext password they typed in... The damn password was so simple, I cursed myself for not having figured it out sooner. No matter, I had my parents Netflix password.

So you're probably wondering how they didn't see the URL above and think something was off?

I pressed F11 and fullscreened my entire browser. They did ask, and I simply replied with, I don't like seeing all the crap up above when I'm streaming. No further questions, perhaps I was lucky.

Me: Wish I got one guilty free murder pass..

God: GRANTED! Which software tester would you like to kill?

if people are curious of the PTSD baggage i'm carrying and why i rage so much at everything, see attached picture

granted, this was partly my fault, as i said, i was far too nice, and stayed for far too long

also note this job was AFTER a 2+ previous e-commerce job with ultimately failed project and little pay

UG i mean LOOK at this... i could go on and on for hours "push notifications must run" - yeah a casual bullet point that needs to be finished by end of day? hahahaha

Why do people hate windows 10? Granted I'm not super picky about my OS but windows 10 works just fine for me, and looks better than win7 imho.

Give everyone a chance

If someone in your company/workgroup doesn't know something basic that you might take for granted, don't undermine them and mock them.

Everyone has to learn and it just breaks morale and motivation.

Be humble and think that you're not any kind of God and think that you wouldn't like the same thing happening to you.

People who mock others for not knowing stuff just piss the shit out of me.

Be humble guys

It's long, but trust me you won't get bored. So today, I went to work, even on a Sunday. My supervisor had given the task to finish off my custom module by this week.
There were only the 2 of us in the office. Everyone else enjoyed the holiday.
I got stuck somewhere in the code and approached his desk. We could never see what he was doing on his computer.
Suddenly, I could find him uneasy as I approached and he started jolting St those "ctrl+w" and "alt+f4s" and clutched his mouse to minimize. I said, "Uh sorry, sir but this taxonomy doesn't work in this code, help me out?"
He said, "Oh sure, sit. And he opened chrome trying to act cool. Guess what? Chrome played it like a boss, "Google Chrome didn't shut down correctly. Restore the following pages.
[] Shocking! 99 year old couple have s3x
[] xxx tiny teen shows her.... (i don't remember exactly.)"
The quickest possible glance I ever had. And the most sweaty face I ever saw of his.
He granted me a leave today and extended my deadline for the next week as well. I thought I was screwed :P

Today I volunteered for an iOS event to help people get started with Xcode and swift. Granted, I only volunteered because my gf is part of this startup and the pay was 50 bucks ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The fucking stupid organizer (has no idea what programming is) thought it would be a good idea to have a gaming section where people can play video games. Well stupid fucking fortnite had everyone's attention, and only a little group of people was interested in participating in the workshop (build an iOS game from scratch) that my gf worked her ass off to create.

Also, fuck trying to teach programming to kids.

Son of a... insurance tracker
You hit delete and I’m stuck with this reply!?!

Stuff it, I’ll rant about it instead of commenting.

How’s an insurance e company any different to google tracking your every move, except now it’s for “insurance policy premiums” and setting pricing models on when, how, and potentially why you drive.

Granted no company should have enough gps data to be able to create a behaviour driven ai that can predict your where and when’s with great accuracy.

The fight to remove this kind of tech from our lives is long over, now we have to deal with the consequences of giving companies way to much information.

- good lord, I sound like a privacy activists here, I think I’ve been around @linuxxx to long.

Success to me is silence. No phone calls, no emails, no "why doesn't this work?"

It's when you made something that works in the background, almost invisibly, that others could take for granted but that they also don't bother you with because it is still working as designed.

Just now, I managed to compile my first linux kernel for my laptop on the first try :D
Granted, it was just a single line to get my touchpad to work, still a great feeling.
Also, Nvidia is still going strong on my laptop, no problems whatsoever :)

First, they came for those who Open Source'd code.
And I did not speak out, because my code could never be used by anyone out of the company, anyway.

Then, they came for the Trade Unionists.
And I did not speak out, because I was not in a union.

Then, they came for those who worked from home.
And I did not speak out, because I was granted an exception.

Then, they came for Scrum Masters and other Agile practitioners.
And I did not speak out, because fuck those spreadsheet jockeys productivity thespians.

Then, they came for in-house Data Analysts and Data Engineers.
And there was no one left to speak out for us.

Yeah, folks. The day finally came. I'm officially updating my LinkedIn and putting a ridiculous sash under my picture, "open to work". The Layoffs came for me, too.

I don't understand why so many devs complain about not having money or complain about the company that they work for. We literally have the skills to do whatever the fuck we want in today's world. Literally everything is structured around what we do. If you hate your life so much, do something about it. Granted, I understand if you live somewhere that doesn't allow you to control your own destiny but I'm pretty sure that the majority of the people on this app has the ability to do so. The rewards are endless if you decide to think outside the box just a little bit. Sorry, this has just been on my mind for a while and decided to rant about it here since that's what this app is for.

Just read an article that really grinds my gears. Its about coding in other languages. Not programming languages, but literally other languages.

Btw I learned to code in Spanish and I'm not against coding in programming languages using variable names in other languages.

That's fine.

What pissed me off was that the author claimed that we should be able to code Fucking JavaScript in SWAHILI or other languages available. What kind of PC bullshit is that!

Coding is barely fucking readable and now we have to make standards for Multilanguage support. Just learn the less than 60 reserved words you lazy fuck and code with them! I leaned to code with shitty tutorials in Spanish and theres no 1000x resources out there and this author claims you can't code unless you know english.

Granted. It's easier but wtf not just learn it. When I coded in Java in Spanish, I didn't know wtf a Class was or ags meant. So what. I memorized that shit. How? By coding!

Why bring this PC shit to programming? The author thinks there are few programmers bc we don't support fucking SWAHILI in JavaScript. Fuck no!

Now if you want to support this initiative. Think of this,

...legacy code

...in 32+ languages.

Have fun debugging this thing.

I was never really fond of 2FA, mostly due to the pain in the ass it creates if you lose or can’t access the 2nd device or jumping between GAuth to access Password Manager to access a password to use a login 😱.

But when your phone prompts up with a “allow some Asian, access to you’re iCloud account” you feel a world of relief that you have:

1) a notification you’re account is no longer secure,

And,

2) an immediate ability to change passwords before any access is granted.

Now it’s 1 more password I no longer know due to it being a scrambled mess of characters.

PS: Fuck you, you low life shithead!

Complete and total rant:

You know what fucking confuses the holy fucking shit out of me? DESIGN

I have MAD respect for motherfuckers that spend their days tailoring shit away in CSS, writing custom animations and toggles in JS and ensuring that their HTML is pristine as fuck. I really do and in my opinion they should b getting mad props from everyone, because if they so decide to learn GOOD server side scripting then they are most definitely on their way to create some awesome functional and beautiful shit.

But...

I am not a designer by any means of it. And I know that shit is supposed to look good and work across a multitude of devices. Doing something like that takes me a couple of lines of code (granted, after hours of work that is) that may take a designer way less.

But why oh why do I see THOUSANDS of lines of CSS code for shit that does not take me half the amount of work that it takes other people?
Like seriously. I am trying to emulate the menu that university of Chicago uses(as an example for a lil design practice cuz i suck at it) and looking into their CSS I see thooooousands of lines of code to do something that I did in about two hundred.

So wtf man, do I suck so hard that I am missing some serious shit? wtf is happening? This confuses me, because in my mind it should take me just about as much work as it takes them right?

AGAIN MAD RESPECT FOR DESIGNERS -- If you are a designer reading this please tell me wtf is happening

I'm a junior programmer at a small company with mostly web dev. I had a C# project and before the deadline I granted access to the project repository one of my boss/senior coder. Several hours later I got an email with the whole project zipped and a note: I made some modifications, check it out.

Why someone doesn't want to use some kind of version control system?

Come on guys ... Everyone was young once we all thought java and JavaScript were basically the same thing! ...

Granted I was 7... when I learnt the truth....

Sometimes, being the only fullstack dev with access to a lot of systems gives you the ability to introduce functionality that:

A) prevents future errors

B) introduces new validations to users to make sure A) is prevented.

C) apply these changes to different projects

But most importantly...

D) without a single person in management getting involved or having to sign it off.

It's like running a company you own, but without owning it.

Granted with such power, comes the trust and responsibility of deploying changes with the adequate testing being done prior and handling change management, but fuck, sometimes I wonder if "god mode" for lack of a better term, is too much, or just enough to get the job done without the politics.

There's just way too many choices when it comes to buying a new pc. And then there is Intel. Granted they produce great chips. But the whole cpu market is under their control. They are releasing new chipsets and sockets for breakfast.

We need stronger competitors

So I'm in the market for a laptop and my friends don't understand why I'm being so picky. They don't understand why a laptop that weighs more than 2.0kg is heavy or why a 1366 x 768 isn't good if they have one with the same resolution and it's perfect. This mind might sound really "deep" but I feel like our laptop ends being the same as a canvas is for a painter. We spend 8 hours a day looking and working in these machines trying to create solutions for stuff that the "other people" - non-techies - take for granted. If they can be bloody picky about the pen the use to take notes in their classes and it's just a pen, why can't I be with the tool that's responsible for what I do on a daily basis and love doing?

"What would your perfect job look like?"

I remember when I got my first 'good' job. There were all these offices that were occupied and I wondered what everyone did in them. Some ... nobody even knew. Like I couldn't find one person in the office who knew what a given person occupying an office even DID...

I thought then (and I kinda think now) it would be fun to have one of those jobs that seems accountable to nobody and everyone at the office wonders:

"What does that guy even do here!?!?!"

Granted I'd probably just come in every day and work on a lot of personal projects (dare to dream) ... with the door closed... in peace...

I just gave robocopy another try, in order to get my WanBLowS D: drive and my file server synchronized again, in preparation to move that file server VM to a LXC container instead.. bad choice. I should've used rsync in WSL.

Hey you Not so Robust File Copier for WanBLowS, how many attempts of you fucking up my file server's dotfiles does it take before I configure you right with every fucking option you have specified? How about you actually behave somewhat decently like rsync where -avz works 99% of the time, in local, remote, any scenarios that you can think of that aren't super obscure?! HOW DIFFICULT CAN IT BE, REDMOND CERTIFIED ENGANEERS?!!

Drown in a pond of bleach, Microshit certified MOTHERFUCKERS!!!!

Well, at least this time it didn't fuck up my .ssh directory so I can still authenticate to the VM.. so I guess that at least that's a win. Even that you can't take for granted anymore with this piece of garbage!!!

Working in security for many years only granted me world-class paranoia about taking pictures of myself and my family. It even made it hard to keep in touch with my friends as we don’t live in the same country anymore.

The good side is that it pays well enough to grant me a platinum foil hat.

I know you folks in Europe and elsewhere in the world probably take this sort of thing for granted, but it is really unusual here in the US. When our daughter is born next month, I will be entitled to 12 weeks of paid leave, which my boss (great guy, btw) has encouraged me to take fully.

My concern is that I have projects, and twelve weeks is enough time that they would probably die on the vine, even if/when I hand them off to someone else.

It's stressful, and I need a way to deal with it.

The things we take for granted... I was laughing my tits off at my mate taking a screenshot this is how it transcribed :)

My mate:
morning!

Me:
morning mate 🙂

My mate:
how are you getting on?

Me:
not bad thanks, bit knackered but good 🙂

My mate:
the band was good then lol. how do i take a screen shot buddy?

Me:
there's print screen button on the top right of the keyboard
My mate:
what will it be under?

Me:
it's a button
on the keyboard
print screen
prt scr or something

My mate:
no when i want to use it

Me:
??

My mate:
what file/folder

Me:
you have to open something like paint
paste it in
save it 🙂

My mate:
urghh
fuck doing all that
you do it

Me:
hahaha
My mate:
haha

Me:
I'm all good 😀
just open paint
ctrl+v
save
that's it

My mate:
i just got a killer score on wows lol i want to post it to the group
so i go to the game screen take a shot by pressing that button then go to paint and do what?
i dont even have paint lol

Me:
don't know what it's called in Windows 10

My mate:
ahh fuck it

Me:
burger nipples

My mate:
why doesnt it just pop up on your downloads or pictures ffs

Me:
it might do in Windows 10 I don't know 😀
doubtful though

My mate:
it has done for other ones
for other games it has

Me:
sometimes the game has it built in
depends on so many things haha

My mate:
nailed it!!
i just hit the right click then hit paste and it came on to the post haha
no fucking about

Me:
Congrats ;)

I got a kindle paper as a hand me down gift. And I feel I'm reading so much more than before, now!

I'm starting a new small novel
A Wrinkle in Time, I'll be reading alongside my girlfriend.

I'm 52% done with a book called
Python Tricks: The Book
Literally coolest book I've touched. Contains a bunch of different tidbits about the language, granted most of them confirmed my understanding, but it's still neat to read and learn about them in a more rigorous setting.

I'm 13% done with another book called
How to Day Trade for a Living
I'm heading for the crypto currency exchange, but with a catch,
I'm reading another book called
Genetic Algorithms with Python
You can probably already guess where I'm heading.

I feel armed with more knowledge and I feel like this is a really great way to start the New Year off.

So I left this company I was working for for about 6 years and then eventually came back earlier this year. It was basically 2 backend devs, 2 frontend, and a designer, with me being one of the frontend devs, and the other operating as the owner/alpha of the group. And our coding styles couldn’t have been more different. I wrote code with purpose that could scale, while he wrote garbage that I affectionally labelled "brute force code"; meaning it eventually got the job done, but was always a complete nightmare to work with. Think the windiest piece of shit you’ve ever seen and then times it by 10. Edit the simplest thing at your peril. And if you think you fixed something, all you’ve ever really done is create another 10 problems. And because the code was such shit, it relied on certain things to be broken in order for other things to work. Anyway, you get the drift.

In the beginning we used jQuery and so we just continued to use it throughout the years. But then when I finally left I realized we were operating in a bit of a bubble, where we didn’t really care much to ever try anything else, and mostly because we were arrogant. But eventually my boss started to notice the trend of moving away from jQuery, so he converted everything to vanilla JavaScript. Thing is, he hadn’t learned ES6 yet or any of the other tools that came along with it. And so it was a mess, and I was quite shocked at how many lengths he’d gone to create the full conversion. Granted, it was faster. But overall, still a nightmare to work with, as the files were still thousands of lines long. And when I dug deeper, I realized that he’d started to pluck things out of the DOM manually on-demand. And so it dawned on me: he’d been looking at sites built with React and other dif-engines, and then instead of just using one, he decided to reinvent the wheel. And the funny thing is, he thought it was just a matter of always replacing the entire HTML for whatever was needed. And so he thought what he was doing was somehow clever. And why not? He’s a badass mathematician who created an empire with jQuery. And so he obviously didn’t need input from anyone, and especially not from the shitty devs over there at Facebook. Anyway, while I was gone I learned quite a bit of React, and so it was just comical to me when I came back and saw this. Because it would have been a million times more efficient had he just used the proper tool. In short, he’d re-written the entire codebase for two full years and then ended up with another round of brute-force garbage.

So that’s my story. The lesson is, when you work for someone who’s a dumbass piece of shit, sometimes he’ll be so stupid the only recourse is uncontrollable laughter. I became a digital nomad somewhere in between and fucked off to Asia where I barely worked for 2 years. And I’d definitely recommend the same for anyone else with an asshole boss where the work is unfulfilling. Because it doesn’t matter what your job is when you’re living like a millionaire in Asia working 15 hours a week.

Not at the hate point yet, but Apple's hardware division has been missing the mark for about 5-6 years now.

The phones have been too big for my hands since the 5 came out, and the latest lineup doesn't even have a compromise in that size.

The keyboards that replaced the chiclet keyboards suck because they provide almost no tactile feedback whatsoever.

Ditching the magsafe adaptors to force you to dedicate one of your USB ports to powering your machine is stupid.

Still doing fine on the software front overall, however. Granted, they've been dismantling everything I ever liked about iTunes since version 8 came out, but I've given up on that at this point.

I'm working on a project that integrates your Android phone with your PC. Stuff like file transfer, sending SMS and notification sync. I just had an idea for an awesome feature. Started researching and found that the Android API exposes exactly what I need. Full of motivation I started coding until I realized that the permission I need cannot be granted to third-party apps. Happened the second time. Fml

Sometime this year(what is left of it) or the next I will be promoted to the senior developer in charge of two schools.....

I already thought that the level of work that me and the current senior do is way too fucking much for two people. Can't really fathom all of it just being me without seeing a substantial increase in salary(there is one in place for it...but shit man I know myself and even then I am going to bitch about it repeatedly)

What sucks the most is that I can't wing it or just not give a fuck(my preferred technique) since I really like my department, my coworkers and specially my manager.

Its her fault. It really is. She is just so likeable and I really can't imagine not giving her anything other than my 100 .

And before everyone states that it should be 100 from the get go. I am not particularly fond of giving my all for a company/institution. Never.

The reason is that I have been fucked with way more times than I can count and normally feel that regardless of how much of a total badass I can be I will never see the full compensation of it. It has happened on every other job. So instead of working for the company I work for my team. If I don't like my team I don't give a fuck.

I am a good worker, was an excellent soldier and I am an even better engineer. But there is always this feeling that I am being taken advantage of that I just can't shake off everywhere that I am working at.

Even now, the reason why the lead is leaving is because of how he was fucked over during the reclassification process. It was a slap to him in the face. Now this glorious institution will lose someone that is really amazing all because they take shit for granted.

Everyone is a number, an id. As irreplaceable as we are they treated him as someone that would just take shit and be fine with it.

And trust me, where I am at, we ARE irreplaceable, this ain't cali where you flip a stone and you get 100 node/php devs. This is 0 man ground where devs are fucking wizards that no one knows exist.

Oh well.

PHB wanted access to our team chat room where we do standup, among other things. Access granted. Immediately a new chat room was created.

Today in development: discovered that it's possible via combination of keys to rename a database in SQL Server Management Studio without as much as a dialog box to confirm.

Shout out to the 2000ish users in production that discovered this delightful nugget of info with me.

Lessons learned:

A) Don't trust Microsoft to create software that makes you confirm potentially catastrophic actions

B) Make sure your user hasn't been granted ALTER DATABASE permissions without your knowledge before you start using it.

When I started off working on this particular project under a new technical manager, I used to love working overtime because the work and the problem we were trying to solve was really interesting. My technical lead was also a really awesome dude and I was able to learn a lot of things under his guidance. A couple of times, I didn't even mind working on the weekends too in case we wanted to meet some strict deadlines. I wanted to make sure that my team's brand name does not get spoiled and we deliver on what we promise.

It was all good until all the management started taking our overtime and weekend work for granted. It took me some time to realize this. Now it almost became a part of standard expectations. It was getting irritating. Managers could see this uneasiness but chose to do nothing.

The work increased, so did the team and the communication channels. The newbies in the team now worked overtime and on weekends. And everybody started acting as if it was normal. That's when it stuck me that I am responsible for inculcating this unsustainable and life sucking culture in the team. I stopped working overtime and started questioning the set deadlines, often asking them to postpone things. Management got furious and changed their focus on the newbies who'd work overtime, often rewarding them to reinforce the behavior.

I tried undoing it, asking managers that the team will not work on weekends. There was friction and managers would agree but the old bad habited cultural spore would pop up tume and again and the team would go back to the regular overtime and working weekends thing. As more time passed, the managers would circumvent me and start talking to others in the team, giving them work and deadlines directly because I started to say 'No' when I felt the need to do so. I tried to protect some folks in the team who would not be able to speak up but were frustrated. I started caring less about the team's brand and more about colleagues who were suffering due to such unethical (and illegal?) practices being normalised in the team.

Trying again and again to get back to 'normal', I failed everytime. Unsure of how far I'll be able to go on with this without getting severly burnt in the process and seeing no respite, I decided to move on. I put in my resignation two weeks back and want to start a fresh in another company.

I feel I am responsible for bringing this into the team without realizing the repurcussions of my working overtime. Staying in the team for more than 3.5 years, I could actually feel how managers have no fucks about your personal life and work life balance (despite showing oh so much concern about the well being of my family) and would reward anyone who works as per their whims and fancies. I wish I never get to work for a management such as this.

OsCommerce is literally the most awful piece of software ever. Granted, I'm migrating a version from 2007, but even still.

The admin area has a screen to set related products to a target product.

The page takes an age to load, even longer to save and is god awful to use from a UI POV.

Why may you ask?

The OsCommerce devs decided to display a flat list, which check boxes of ALL products in the database.

So for the site in question, that's a single list of 167,000 products, without pagination. Some of the worst development/design on a single page I've seen since last week when I inherited a god awful butchered Wordpress site :|

Any idea how to make a fan in an HP laptop spin at lower temperatures? The fan in my Pavilion dm-1 only starts spinning when CPU reaches 75°C and enters full speed when the GPU also becomes 75°C. Which is strange because this CPU and GPU are one and the same thing.. an APU. And overheating freezes often happen at around 75-80°C.. which isn't too much of a headroom really. I'd rather have it kick in at 50-60°C already, but would like to avoid using the power of the soldering iron for it.. I've already lost a fan to that previously (current one is a spare part from AliExpress). Granted, my soldering experience was much less back then.. nowadays I can probably even solder 1206 SMD packages comfortably. But I don't want to risk it, and I've got experience with custom kernels anyway.. are there any fan speed governors in the kernel that you know of?

FWIW, fancontrol doesn't seem to be supported on this laptop, and neither is pwmconfig. Perhaps I'll have to stick to the electronics method after all? Given that it's just a 5V fan, I guess that I could feed it power by tapping some power from a USB rail and controlling its speed from an ATtiny85.. but inside the laptop there isn't enough space for that and I don't feel like freeing this hardware out of its laptop chassis yet (though that is on the list). Either way running at 60°C under no load is terrible.. some HP certified enganeering "feature" I guess...

So my car has a problem with a steering column lock. Sometimes the actuator pops an error and it does not unlock until I clear that buggar. Carrying a lappy with vag-com seems somewhat annoying so I got a obdeleven bluetooth dongle with am app.

Once you get it to work it works perfectly. Have been using it for a few years now. It's like a half a year or so since it got a last update and it's been stable as a rock since.

Today me and my fam took a night out with a car. Drove here, drove there, had fun. Time to go home, as the little one is getting sleepy. Got in a car, insert a key, turn it -- no ignition. Damn that steering lock!

So I pop in a dongle, open the app, hit connect,... Wait, what is that? A toast with "a new update is available. [[update now]] [[cancel]]".

Cancel ofc, I need to go home asap! Will gladly get the update when the kiddo is in his bed!

[[cancel]]. The toast disappears. Okay, now [[connect]]

"a new update is available. [[update now]] [[cancel]]"

mother f#$@%!!! Allright already, [[update]] it ffs.

Updated the app. Now [[connect]].

Loading.. Loading... "could not connect to device"

tfq?!?

Reinsert the dongle, connect
restart the app, connect
restart the phone, connect
clear all bt devices, connect
do the rain dance, connect.

Permission to panic: GRANTED.

Dear devs. If you are rolling out an update -- never ever EVER make it non-postponable, non-cancelable. No matter how critical, your updates must NEVER be mandatory.

2017 has ended and I want to throw this fucking rock of anger with it out of the Window.

I will tell you how my last 3 to 4 years as private IT Guy (IT Dumpster) for everything was.

My Gaming Community:
It was so fucking retarded that I would like to punch everyone there in the face over a thousand times.

Seriously there are over 60 People in that Community and they take every shit for granted and only cry about everything.

I'm Paying since 4 Years over 60 € for our Server every month. Some people donated some small bucks over the time and in the end it was around 150 € Donations over 4 years.

Im thankful for the Donations, but these people really think that they can demand for this Donations private Gameservers for over years for free or think that they now own the Servers. WTF?? FUCK YOU!!

Im managing 2 Linux Server with Web, MySQL, Voice and Gameserver. What did 1 guy donate? 10 € for 4 years, thats around 15% for just a month. You would get our Teamspeak for 7 Days for that price idiots!!

I did all the damn Webdev and am now writing a App in Kotlin for Android man!!

Since last everybody in the Community gets on my nerves, because they are so ignorant and dont appreciate the work of others 😡.

My Association where I support the hole IT with a friend:

We decided in the commitee that we would take on major changes in our infrastructure.

We need to finish the barebone concept in the end of January 18.
Early December 17 I wrote my friend, that we need to have a meeting and plan everything.

Well, now I mostly designed the roadmap by myself and didnt receive any reply from my friend 💀.

I really dont understand why the shit always sticks at me and I need to finish it.

I really love to code something, install or repair PC's with joy or manage Server but the people around me are in my free time like poison and they take out my fun for it.

The only fun and enjoyable IT Part for me is at my fulltime job. Thats the only good place left for me as Safe Heaven and the people there really appreciate my knowledge and work I do.

Anti malware Service Executable

Can the cunt who programmed this please witness the random carnage their piece of shit causes on my work desktop ?

Granted it’s windows but seriously…

I wish my boss would stop revoking my permissions. He's always saying how these slew of things need to be accomplished, yet, everytime I go to do them I'm at a wall because, despite having permissions for a very long time he decided to revoke them entirely.

It's not like I can't be trusted with them, it's been over 2 years with them, so why the sudden revoke?

I finally sent some snot mail to him informing him I'm unable to complete my tasks without the permissions granted to me (I'm a sysadmin, sec guy, boss is vp of tech), and instead of him granting them yet again he's going to run around and try to hack around the permission requirement so he can avoid giving me them.

Seriously? This is stupid. I was the one who wrote the security design and implementation document, and put all that work in. Now I'm being locked out of the system I designed, built and implemented?

Well, time to look for a new job. If you're a manager, please don't revoke your employees permissions without notice, at random, and try to hack around well-documented security policies. It won't end well!

All my life I've used windows, and my new company gave me a MacBook. Having used it for few days, I am missing some basic windows functionalities that I took for granted.

There are very little option of customisation.
Most of my daily used softwares are unavailable.
Maximise is painful. No multi-window explorer.
Shortcuts are messed up.

I know many people love mac, but I really wish to revert back to windows. (-__-)

So, for the past...what, week or so? I've been working on a side project with @gianlu. It's the PretendYoureXyzzy fork - our attempt to rejuvenate an old shitty piece of software.

I had started working on a fork alone, and then he asked to team up so I was like "Sure, I got nothing better to do." So, he's working on the backend (and hooking JS up to the backend) and I'm developing the frontend.

I don't know why I thought tech would stand still. Google says they're putting MDL on life support and replacing it with a much more complex successor, MDC. It's not hard to use, but what really bugs me is the lack of notice on getmdl.io. If you are switching to another project as your main focus, why the fuck wouldn't you advertise in the most places possible?

Granted, I don't do web design and/or development on the daily. Yes, I can do it, but I'm not always as up-to-date with web technologies as I'd like to be.

However, the screencap captured is the third time I've taken the knife to the UI. MDC is great tooling, at least to me. That dialog? Not something MDL would've had out the box on the first day. You'd have to work for that.

I don't have an issue with MDC, I have an issue with the lack of PR around it.

Now, I started in a new position as a dev back in September 2020 - after some starting pleasantries like "how are you", "whats up", "how is your weekend" the working relationship with my office partner soured.

It started with asking me TOTALLY random questions while my headset was on and i was "in the zone". These were questions like: "where should I buy a car", "Why is the virus spreading so fast". I tried to answer politely but made it very clear that when the headset is on my brain and every fibre in my body is inside the code and f---ing it.

Then it escalated, she called me 9.30PM on xmas day and wondered if i needed the API we are using........ Which i most certainly did not.

Now she hates me because I asked to move to another office and was granted that request 15 minutes after asking....

No need to think small when you have eternity to work with. Right now I am building a network operating system, something I've started around 2 years ago. I expect to have an installable and more or less usable system in maybe a few more years.

When I would have an eternity to work with, I'd first look to make our planet redundant. It's insane to imagine that we only have this blue marble to work with, while we have a fireball of hell as a neighbor in our cosmic neighborhood. What even happened there? I'd like to find out. Granted Musk is already figuring out Mars, and he has the money for it while I don't. I don't like the man all that much (too much marketing wank) but hey, at least he's got us covered there.

Maybe one day we could live forever. Maybe we could map and upload our minds. Maybe we could replace our entire body with synthetic components when the frail meat-based components inevitably fail. Perhaps it could even happen in our lifetime, at the pace technology is progressing at. If and when that happens, sign me up!

I usually work in a two person team on a hybrid application we are developing, using AngularJS and node.

This normally works okay, because he handles the back end (he's been on the project since January last year, I joined in August as a placement student), and I handle the front end.

However, due to Christmas holidays and such, he's ended up taking an entire month off, and won't be back until the end of January.

I've dabbled in back end before, some routes and that for SQL queries, but nothing serious.

Last Tuesday our core service for the application that needs to be updated in real time broke and pissed off the API provider because we were hammering them with requests.

My first day on back end and this happened. I didn't really know what to do, and had to call my teammate to ask what to do. I essentially just restarted things, and left them as is, until I could find a solution.

From there, I had to mock the operation of the service (which is a complex enough beast) to figure out the problem, and find a fix. Our app more or less hinges on this service, so if it messes up, it's the end times.
All of this while flying on what I've interpreted because the guy that's on holidays was the only guy that knows more about this project than I do.

To make things worse, the clients are being very particular because they're waiting on investments and don't have money to pay our company. So, if they're paying for 5 days work, they're going to put in 5 days of project development. The problem is that their interpretation of 5 days of project development has not changed from when there were two people on this project.

There are 40 tickets in this sprint (ends Friday) and 35 of them are assigned to me. Granted, not all of those take a day to do, but estimates don't mean anything, I guess.

Ganbarimasu.

I feel really bad for the guy I'm currently working with. I have until roughly the end of August to upskill him in every aspect of 3 different iOS apps because once I move to a new project he will be the entire maintenance team for those apps. Feel like he is getting shafted so badly. The whole process has been poorly managed. The managers don't care how well I train him as long as it doesn't take too many man-days. And they are expecting that they can still pull me back in to help if he gets stuck even after I've moved. Starting to feel like I'm being taken for granted. Can't wait to get off this horrible project.

Writing clean code.
Writing useful comments.
Commit before experimenting.

Just anything to prevent Technical Debt. Just because it works doesn't mean it should be kept as is. Later down the line you'll need to add a new feature and you'll spend 2x more time fixing the things you took for granted.

Trigger warning:
Emotional !dev love life rant

I think this is not the right place to pour my heart out, but despite its more recent infights I still consider devRant to be a special community to me. And I guess if devRant is my goto place for support that's an issue. But maybe I just need to shout into a void because this is not about you solving this for me.

I have been in this relationship for ~6 years. My first great love. In the beginning, everything was perfect - a love story like from a cheesy movie. We've been through a lot to be together: Long distance, moving countries, a ton of bureaucracy (as she's from another country). So many memories.

It came as a surprise to me when she ended things. It really shouldn't have been. We've talked a lot about the reasons and I now see how much I've taken her for granted and neglected our relationship. I see now how I've been avoiding my problems and how I didn't work on my (mental and physical) health issues as good as I need to - not just for any relationship, but for myself. The regret/shame/guilt of not giving it 100% and of neglecting her weights heavily on me (besides the loss) and I am not sure what is worse.

Besides our relationship withering because of neglecting emotional needs, she also questioned our compability. We certainly have differences and different interests and we're both somewhat uncertain whether we really fit, if we ignore our history/emotions. It is actually a question that popped up in my head before sometimes, but I was too afraid to look into it for fear the answer is no. But here we are and ignoring that didn't help.

For now, we both need time to think about what we really want and whether this includes the other. We agreed that we need some distance to process the feelings. We still live in the same flat but for now she's staying with a friend most of the time and I'll also have a friend's place available soon. If in some time we both feel like we want to be together, we can date again - however she was also clear that she doesn't want to give any false hope and her current vision doesn't include me. If not, well have to hire a divorce lawyer. (Why you need a lawyer for that if both agree is beyond me.)

I am shattered. When it became clear to me that the relationship is over (and I ruined it), I got nauseous to the point that I threw up constantly for 6 hours. For the following 2 days I only cried and haven't eaten. Third day I started cleaning up the flat (long overdue!) - mostly for her tbh but I know it's good for myself, so better do the right thing with wrong motivation than sob all day -
talked to my psychiatrist and she brought some lunch which I could eat. Today (fourth day) she came over and we cooked lunch. I am still feeling terrible but the first days have been the worst I've ever felt and I've been trough quite a bit of (physical & chronic) pain - emotional pain hits different.

Let's see how this works out. In any case I now know very clear that I can't continue like before and need to work on my issues (for my own sake). I want be my best self, even if right now I don't have a lot of energy and am very depressed. I got an appointment with a therapist tomorrow - something I should have done years ago but I was overwhelmed with anxiety and analysis paralysis. I hope the future will be brighter and while I still wish to wake up from this nightmare and realize my faults without this breakup, I also know that I have to face reality.

PS: I do feel better now after writing this out. Thanks for listening, I guess.

Me: we should take this project a little more serious, follow the coding standards and please let us use git!

Pal: Oh sure.

//made a new repo and the first commit, sent the link and prepared everything (Granted access etc.)
//2 weeks later

Me: What's up, I already got quite some commits and you haven't pushed anything so far.

Pal: Pushed? what do you mean?

Me: I'm the talking about the git repo, I'm the only one contributing.

Pal: Oh yeah git, I installed it but I have no idea how that stuff works. I opened Git gui but i don't know what I'm supposed to do. I got everything in the Dropbox tho.

Me: ... ... ... FUUUUUUUUU WHAT THE FUCK MATE ARE YOU SHITTING ME, THE HELL DO WE HAVE GOOGLE FOR AND WHY DIDNT YOU ASK, LIKE WTF SERIOUSLY I EXPLICITLY TOLD YOU TO USE GIT.

😣

I'm quite a vengeful person, I'm sure I get the wrong end of the stick sometimes to.

In the last few years of my life I've been trying to not act and "be mature" about the situation.

There's still times I fall of the wagon but generally I have shrugged it off...

But do you know how I feel like now!? That I've been walked all over people are taking me for granted. People think they can get away with lying and messing me about.

Quite honestly I don't know how to act your always meant to rise above the situation. When all I can think of is how I could fuck up the thing they did.

And people go well just protect yourself but that means I'm not open and honest myself and that's what I fucking hate to begin with!

Today I'm feeling vengeful because a client didn't pay until the last second. They wanted the website for next to nothing. And took a year to pay. Now they have gone and paid a tonne on a new site ! Because they went well what you did was shit "effectively"

Granted it was but you don't spend a few hundred quid and expect to get everything. I gave them what they paid for.

Everyone is expecting something for nothing 🙄 I get that's just the life of companies directors

But it pisses me off I try to do everything truthfully on the up an up and they would prefer a group of liars

Oh front page of Google yes we can do that for free

Oh yes the greatest animation look!

😤 And I'm meant to sit here and be like yeah that's cool. I mean at this point what reason do I have to be open and honest if shit stains like that exist!

What pisses me off more is that I'm trying to rise above. I don't think I should I think I should ruin their fucking day and be done with it. I have the capabilities.... But I know "it ain't legal"

Then people go on about well if you don't like the rules help them get changed ...

I've tried the political route they are all far worse 😐 they are ignorant cunts. That's the truth! I can't stand to be around half of them 🙄

So here I am ranting to not fuck up someone's day , trying to rise above 😔

When you hack up some spaghetti code which works right off the bat and you don't even know why but you take it for granted anyways. Week later someone tells you that it's not working anymore and you have to find out why.

Android flow I’ve found(fixed in android 8, working on 7.1.1):
To make app uninstallable by the normal user make the app device administrator, add “android.permission.SYSTEM_ALERT_WINDOW” to the manifest and make sure it’s not granted by the user.
Now when you try to uninstall the app, it tells you to disable it from device administrators but the device administrator disable dialog is System Window handled by the app itself and if the app has this permission but not granted, settings will crash with SecurityException leaving the app untouched.

Never been promoted.

I was at my last job for 3 years 6 months (first out of uni), my last mid year review I was discussing my performance with my manager, he said I was doing everything I needed to be promoted, just needed to wait a bit longer. I had been performing at that level, with that extra responsibility, for 18 months.

I've since left for a job at Amazon, start in a week, and will literally double my salary. The thing that annoys me is I was one of the most junior engineers in the building, but giving support and teaching almost every engineer in the office. Granted, the company was only 30 people (mostly engineers), but still felt undervalued...

We really take for granted just how much ergonomics goes into the average user interface that has matured.

Like knowing that when I doubleclick a keyword, I don't want the comma as well to be selected.

Or that when I use a command in the terminal and I press tab I want a list of a specific element type.

Everything has gotten so much better since the 90s !

When depression set in, I thought pain relief lied in getting duller. People I called “stupid” — who lived simple lives filled with alcohol and lack of any talent or purpose — weren't suffering. Better even, they denied the existence of depression.

My “wish” was granted when they prescribed cariprazine. In two months, I lost my ability to read, let alone code.

Before that, even depressed, writing a simple email/password auth was a matter of ten minutes in any of the languages I knew how to do web in (JS, Python, Clojure, PHP). But on cariprazine, I remember myself not quite getting what an HTML form was.

Tell you what… you should never wish to become dumber. When I was smart and depressed, the pain was real, but it felt like… let's say a breakup. When I was dumb and depressed, it felt like being raped with a red-hot soldering iron. Or like being skinned alive. Or like when 100% of your skin is a third-degree burn. The pain weren't listening to me, as my mouth was glued shut as if I was Keanu in the first Matrix movie. You can't say, do or think anything, at all, to ease your pain somehow. You can't even realize that just DMing or calling someone is probably a good idea.

Instead of you vs. despair situation from when you were smart, now it's just despair that is actively melting you, so you two become one. Even time loses its meaning. There is nothing out there but suffering.

If you're smart(er than I was at my lowest), DO cherish it. Losing that will spell disaster. So stay away from substances that can facilitate that loss.

Wooo hoo! I got suspended from reddit!

Never happened before to me (not site wide at least). Apparently for 'report abuse' from some report I must have made like a month ago?

Some user posting in a sub apparently had a theory that a bunch of other subs and other users were in on some conspiracy against them, supposedly sending death threats and 'spreading lies'.... kinda hard to imagine that some subs with thousands (some with millions) of users are all in on this wonky conspiracy against them....

So anyway I report his nasty little post to the local moderators of that sub because it usually is a chill sub and his post is full of insults and so on.

Turns out... that guy is also a mod of the sub I reported him to.

A month later I get suspended from reddit for 'report abuse'... of course I can't see the 'report abuse' (can't see reports...) so how do you even speak intelligently / appeal?

Moderation at scale is hard, but kinda crazy to think someone employed at reddit decided "yeah this crazy guy is right" and does their bidding ...

I used to moderate a busy gaming forum, and sniffing out the crazy folks was part of the job when accepting new moderators. Wasn't that hard...

Granted no big loss here, just a few days.

There is a mAtHeMaTicAl pRoOf 🤡 that a comparison-based sorting algorithm cannot get more efficient than O(n*log n). That's bullshit. Radix sort et al. — granted, they're not comparison-based.

But there is one comparison-based algorithm that can sort an array in O(n). It's called Stalin sort.

It traverses the array and deletes every item that doesn't appear in order. Boom, problem solved — the array is sorted in O(n), at the expense of losing (most of the) elements.

This is the perfect metaphor of Stalin's politics.

I saw a genie once.

So it was like 1 am, me and my girlfriend back then was wandering around the street. We haven’t slept for like two days. It was also a time when she started showing signs of being bipolar and my manic episodes started. So we wasn’t exactly in a good shape, everything felt surreal.

To add absurdity I was holding a pair of scissors (I don’t remember how I got them in the middle of the street) ready to fight back night gopniks.

We went underground and we saw this: there was a hobo standing on a chair and singing. He was really good at it, all opera level stuff with tremolo and everything. The other hobos was standing around him looking and listening. They all completely ignored our presence.

Between two pillars lied the other hobo. He was covered in some dark-looking liquid. Around him was a really huge bottle, so huge in fact that he could probably fit in. I guess they use those kind of bottles in bars or something.

I have no other explanation that he was a genie that was living in that bottle before and granted that singing hobo three wishes: brilliant singing voice (he could probably be a guy who always wanted to sing but had no talent and so he started drinking and became a hobo eventually), an audience that understands and appreciates (the other hobos) and a final wish, just to drink together and have a great conversation.

Today my boss granted the intellij Ultimate license. It's a good day.
(even though eclipse isn't that bad I like intellij more)

tfw your nose blocks up and you realise how you just took breathing for granted this whole time

You know what feels good?

When you take a peek inside a class that you wrote 6 months ago that performs a vital, but complex function, that you've been using (and taking for granted) on a daily basis, and it's the first time you ever have to debug in there, and when you do, there was actually nothing you had to change and it was clear as fuck what it was doing.

That's a good feeling.

!dev (maybe slightly)

I went to a CV Workshop organized by my first school. The presenter was the slightly-arrogant/know-it-all/cool type of guy who's a recruiter and also has his own company he runs. The presentation was OK, even though it took longer than announced. However, there were some things that bugged me. He expects everyone somehow to be extraordinary. Granted he works as a recruiter and his clients would like only the cream of the top, but some of the examples he gave from his personal experience, he seemed to give more gravity on other traits of the candidates than their achievements and qualifications (e.g. rejecting a candidate because she had posted a photo of her clubbing on Facebook). Also, somehow he judges candidates based on their parents profession. Lucky me that I fall into the category he dislikes. Now the fun part (sorry for the long post):

Next week there's a career day. I sent my CV as soon as I got the mail and then I also phoned the person in charge (as per the instructions). Yesterday on the workshop it was said we should resend our CVs by tomorrow on another mail? No problem you may think, but that said recruiter will take a look on them and that means I will have to rework mine just to make sure it is to his liking. I'm no fan of writing mission statements, nor trying to guess what my qualities (aka soft skills) are because what I think I am doesn't mean I actually am.

So now, I'm in a dilemma. Just send the CV as is or get a mental breakdown just so to please that person?
Thanks everyone for your patience and time, I just wanted to pump some steam out me...

"In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted." - Bertrand Russell

I worked a whole year in a company for which I produced 30 software and none of them saw the publication even though they were completed. I was the most productive employee and had a productivity of 428% compared with the other employees. 
All because of the constant changes in business strategies. 
For a moment I believed to be a pirate ship during a storm. When I was tired of the way they were treating employees, months of backlog payments, unpaid leave or not granted, I quit and I was told to me that I was a bad employee and I was unproductive. 
In a month he is left only the designer working. At the moment the company in question is still looking for employees, after more than a year no one wanted to work again. Stupid me.
While I ras looking for another job I did freelance for a month, gaining about five times my earlier pay.

I really loving coding but i cant stand people that take coding for granted, theres no single way to code there are a lot of ways to make a single function work and you can code it in different ways, i hate it when people dont use their imagination, in coding you dictate what you want to do, thats the power of coding

Did my first meaningful work in angular in many moons at work today - also apparently the first time I've touched it in 4 major version releases lol.

I typically find myself specializing in API and service architecture lately, so I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly I got back into the swing of things with the front end in general. Granted the app itself has been very neatly organised and written which goes a very long way to helping one find their way quickly.

That said, I really can't admit to having any desire to stay working in angular for very long. Yes, I think it speaks well to the framework itself that I can pick up immediately going from version 8 to 12 without any issue, but also, I think angular kinda sucks ass*.

* Opinion should be taken with a grain of salt coming from a .NET dev. This does not reflect the views of .NET or other devs in general. User results may vary.

I hate the Android update policy as hell. Why do they have to publish a new version each year? Why not a LTS version which is supported for 5 years? Barely no manufacturer is able to change their own interface aiming to adept it to the new Android version. Windows isn't publishing a new os every year. They just update it regularly to implement new functions. Ubuntu is doing the same.
WHY THE FUCK NOT ANDROID?
My HTC A9 was the first with Android 6. I didn't get Android 7 until now?! I paid a lot of money for this peace of shit! And I was granted an update for Android 7. So where is it HTC? Where?!?!?!?!?!?!

I'm not going to lie, the surge of bootcamps really irks me. Not because I'm afraid of competition, or that I'm an elitest. Mainly because a lot of people who attend these bootcamps have no real interest in software engineering. I sometimes attend a meetup, and it's a beginner meetup. I try to help out. And a lot of people clearly have no patience for learning software engineering. I try to be encouraging, but sometimes I just want to be dick and tell them "Why the hell do you want to be a dev, if you're not interested in how computers work".

I'm an 100% myself taught developer. Granted I'm 38 and taught myself programming at 14. But it came out of an earnest desire and love for technology in general. So I never shyed away from learning? C and assembler? Bring it on. Theoretical computer science? I can get with that. For me I loved computer so much, that I was willing to learn about anything in the realm of computing.

This is what annoys me with the adult bootcamp crowd. I feel they're only willing to learn as long as it's easy. If something gets complicated or complex, then they check out. And I a lot of their questions is "tell me how to do this/that". But they don't know why they would do it.

To me it feels like they're trying to fast track themselves to a dev job. Yet you would think if they're trying to do this all professionally, they would be open to learning as much as possible, and not closing themselves off.

My semi-friend who runs the meetup is trying to start a bootcamp himself. So I try I severely hold my tongue when I attend those meetups. And I want to be supportive. I certainly don't want to be the reason why people are turned off by programming. But at the same time, I hate how people are abusing this profession because they think it's fast money and an easy way to earn 6 figure salaries.

After meddling around with all kinds of goopy front end frameworks I decided to take a look at TypeScript (in Angular 2).

I must say, as a Java developer: Why have I only found this now??

Granted, I have only played around with it for one day.

First time programming for work... Man in the middle student password changes. Yep that's right I'm being asked to write a program that will change students passwords on their Google accounts and local domain while also keeping a decryptable format password in a database. Granted it's much better than not letting students change their passwords at all. Plus were doing it because it will let us fix their issues while their out of school so...

missing rust's infinite loops in other languages now

also now I don't like variable++ and it throws me off

also missing iterators. because you can consume part of them and don't have to keep track that some of a list has already been "used up" so to speak. now I have index counters and laaame (granted not having to wrestle with borrowing rules... actually just strangely feels weird)

also why must languages have different naming conventions. this is a disaster now because my reflexes for what I name variables is all over the place. now I find snake_case more readable than camelCase because the letters are the same height so you can skim for names easier, and by how many words which correlates to how specific a variable is to the logical loops at hand

I guess end of the day we just develop a handwriting style in code our brains like and the idea of having to change your accent every time you switch a locale sounds annoying

That automation thing with NASA I was ranting about yesterday finally worked. Granted, they posted a pic today instead of a video.

So, assuming it's a true Pic of the Day, my wallpaper gets updated at 4 AM. Maybe they saw my rant? haha

My new favourite license

# The "You Can't Have It" License (YCHI)

**Version 1.0, October 2024**

**Copyright Me. All rights reserved.**

## 1. Definitions

**1.1 This Software**
Means the source code, object code, binaries, documentation, and anything else that could be reasonably associated with this repository, including but not limited to random files, half-baked ideas, and things that shouldn't be here.

**1.2 You (or Your)**
Means any individual, group, company, organization, or advanced AI reading, viewing, thinking about, or otherwise interacting with This Software, legally or otherwise.

**1.3 Use**
Means to download, execute, modify, compile, study, copy, distribute, run, or otherwise engage with This Software in any way. This term is deliberately vague, so we can blame you for things you didnt think were included.

**1.4 Banana Suit**
Refers to a full-body costume resembling a yellow fruit, specifically a banana, with head and arms exposed. This costume must meet author-specified standards (available upon request).

**1.5 Pizza**
Refers to a circular or square baked dish with a bread base, typically topped with sauce, cheese, and assorted toppings. **Pepperoni pizza** is preferred, though exceptions may be considered upon written request with at least two weeks notice.

**1.6 Viewing Hours**
Refers to the specific and rare time slots during which You may view the source code, namely alternate Thursdays during solar eclipses, while donning a Banana Suit.

---

## 2. Terms and Conditions for Use, Distribution, and Modification

**2.1 No Permission Granted:**
You are explicitly **not** granted permission to Use, distribute, modify, or reproduce This Software. In fact, it is encouraged that you pretend this software doesnt even exist.

**2.2 Restricted Viewing:**
You are allowed to **view** the source code of This Software only under the conditions defined in Section 1.6 ("Viewing Hours"). Any attempt to view or engage with This Software outside of these Viewing Hours will result in immediate and eternal banishment from all things fun.

**2.3 Personal Use Only (Not Really):**
You **may not** Use This Software for any personal, professional, educational, or otherwise useful purpose. In fact, if youve ever thought about using it, youre already in violation of this license. Apologize immediately.

**2.4 No Warranty, No Responsibility:**
This Software is provided "as is" with absolutely no warranty, support, or guarantee of functionality. If it breaks, you get to keep both pieces. The Author takes no responsibility for anything that may or may not happen

I asked Santa to carpet fire every HR from my company, now it's time to log in and see if I've been good enough to have my wish granted.

FIRE DRILL!!!!!

Customer who decided to deploy our system in the middle of their busiest time ... and kinda ad hoc-ed their ... human processes (not sure what to call it). Just to get by, and then sort of let things rot.

So last week they contact us and say "OMG some poor soul at this company was spending hours making spreadsheets to track what they were doing... and they keep fucking it up because it's nigh impossible to get right".

Real story, big shake up at the company, and someone said "lets look at our process" and they discovered "holy fuck we have this software but we're doing shit like it's the damned civil war".

This naturally raised questions about the competence of the folks we work with ... who chose our software, and thus our software.

So now we're flushing out all the stuff we asked the customer to figure out months ago that is usually done via a months long implementation / integration ... in a few days. Also ... I'm making some new things for them.

WEEEEEEEE

Granted, we're billing them like mad for this so no big deal really.

To be honest I forgot completely about the ducks and was kind of disappointed to see them, don't understand me wrong, its a great addition to the shop (especially to support devrant more when buying them and I will probably do too) and trogus (wow it's pronounced t-rogus) deserves a lot of respect for going through the very hard process of developing it, getting somebody to do a decent quality result etc. but I was hoping for the new site that got hyped up some time ago or some update to the app that fixes design issues on phones that have 2k resolution and no statusbar and more. ("just open a github issue" - I don't have one right now and it didn't get much attention anyway, since I am in the niche of people with those kind of setups, most people it seems have phones that can even barely run the app lol). The login still pops up each time you visit the site (basically just click it away, but it's rather annoying to have it pop up), it's nowhere near to the original app (although the native app is written in some sort of wrapper anyway?) - especially what comes to options, customizing, deactivating things, posting into categories (newest feature), getting notifications etc

There is some community builds that try to recreate a better desktop experience, but sadly fail to do so (sorry to devrantron and others, but what the fuck were you thinking when you rounded only the top right and left corner?) - since they always have something that is just thrown out to "be there" or design fails (which devrant just lacks and looks good across the board), that makes me rather cautious if that program doesn't send my credentials to some african prince. ("just look at the sourcecode", yes I have better things to do, thanks)

I could just create my own build, having to reverse engineer the whole website and app (granted, most of it are just api calls), but I simply lack the time (so I understand why my mentioned problems aren't getting really any attention or can't be implemented that fast, yet still its somewhat bugging)

I have listened to the Q&A and I know you guys are working full time at for example adobe (amazing that you both have time to be putting it towards devrant), so its not as much of a rant, just wanted to get out my disappointment about the event I felt personally. Still nice to have seen you and talk with the community a bit (although the time I feel was picked more towards your US audience rather than EU?).

My thesis supervisors gave me a set of templates and guidelines for the whole thing and argh.

they constantly assume that I've no fucking idea about academic writing despite the very good graded talks and texts I handed in in the past - granted, they probably often deal with inexperienced students.

but what they've given me.. a) the thesis template does not work, they fucked up some latex packages and b) there's a almost passive aggressive 3 page explanation on academic writing and how wo work with sources and references and they forgot the fucking references lol. There are none included and the references all go like [?].

!rant

The amount of effort being made to make php a saner development platform is outstanding really, specially with the release of php8, really good features in there. As someone that started with version 4(*shivers*), and stuck with it all the way to the glory of 7, 8 is a welcomed addition.

One in particular that I really like is the fact that we now (fucking finally) have union types as well as fucking match expressions! Which granted, these are single lines, but in place of it one could argue for a function.

I am pretty excited for some of the other items, but have not had the time to play with anything yet really. Wonder how much more is in store.

Why is so hard to find engineers that actually care? It feels like the majority of people always want to do the bear minimum, no one wants to fix their shitty code even when it clearly violates the project or company standards. Everyone constantly comes up with shit about why they can't do things properly or how they'll fix it later and then get their mates to push their shit through review. The majority of lower management usually care equally as little so there's no point explaining the situation to them and the lack of care probably goes much higher. It seems like so many people go from job to job getting bump after bump in salary, which granted is absolutely fine and probably advised, but have nothing to show for it. Usually very little skills but alleged mountains of experience and a lazy piece of shit attitude. I hear all the time people saying you'll never change anything so why try and it feels like that most of the time but more because everyone keeps saying it. If everyone pulled their fingers out their arse, maybe we would stand a chance. I'm sure a lot of people on here have a real passion for computer science, whichever division you're in and love to learn and improve and reflect. What I really want to know is how you deal with people who are just taking their paycheck and enjoying the ride but don't actually care and how you discover these people as early on as possible to get shot of them.

There needs to be some sort of enforcement about who can write code. JK,
but seriously, the current dev wannabes and influencers on sh-t-witter and linkedin are literal cancer.
A dude will make a post about how to "scale" a system, yet they have no grasp of the most basic fundamentals. They have no idea what a CDN is, they think you can just store blobs and be done with it. Like, bro, are you going to be serving a 10MB image from the DB every single time it's requested? How WILL that scale? How will low bandwith users be served? Oh, yeah right, I forgot that everyone in the world has 1Gbps internet from NASA.
They think serverless will take care of it.
BUT HOW? No wonder "serverless" companies like Vercel are making bank out of idiots who can't manage to spin up a decent VPS that would take care of 99% of usecases.
Granted, most copy paste regurgitated AI slop from chatgpt but still.
It's so infuriating. There used to be a decent Twitter dev community, but not it's just AI shills, crypto bros and script kiddies all pretending to write code.
It's time I stopped using that site.
Also probably a sign I should quit this industry. Getting tired of it to be honest.
Don't see myself still writing code in 3 years.

Finished writing code for a feature. Begins code analysis. "Analysing code" moments later "Build Failed". Really?! fucking really?! you tell me that now?

Ok granted it is nearly 1AM here I should go to bed. Good night guys!

Spent two hours trying to figure out why I couldn't get SSH agent forwarding working in Docker. Turns out I was never granted access to that other obscure GitHub organization we use. 🤦‍♂️

Install linux they said.
Ok, granted. I still want to dual boot with my win10. So ok, mint live usb, boot, begin install, freezes mid way.

Ok, try++

The few times i have pushed code to the repo when it's not ready.

Granted it was so i can carry on working on it elsewhere but it wasn't my proudest moment.

So I'm on orders for the Marine Corps, and this one guy thinks he's a programmer because he made a "program" in excel for dispatching our equipment. He's complaining that he's just fixing bugs. I take a look at his VBA code and see literally 1000 lines of if statements bundled into one function. (Or I think they're referred to as sub routines in VBA - it's been a while since I worked with it).

I try to give him some tips and pointers since he's literally just manually checking. Each. F'ing. Cell and a million nested if statements. Tried giving tips on making reusable code, and he has the cojones to tell me he knows what he's doing and doesn't need my "help". Granted I'm higher ranking than him and he also answers in a disrespectful manner.

End rant.

Guys at work just found out that they can see all the commits in a repo that they have to change stuff in on a daily basis..
Granted they aren't really the most tech savvy sometimes but they have both been there for like a year...

Made me laugh a bit when one went
"Dude did you know we can search our git for commits? So we can look for who fucked up!?"

This started as an update to my cover story for my Linked In profile, but as I got into a groove writing it, it turned into something more, but I’m not really sure what exactly. It maybe gets a little preachy towards the end so I’m not sure if I want to use it on LI but I figure it might be appreciated here:

In my IT career of nearly 20 years, I have worked on a very wide range of projects. I have worked on everything from mobile apps (both Adroid and iOS) to eCommerce to document management to CMS. I have such a broad technical background that if I am unfamiliar with any technology, there is a very good chance I can pick it up and run with it in a very short timespan.

If you think of the value that team members add to the team as a whole in mathematical terms, you have adders and you have subtractors. I am neither. I am a multiplier. I enjoy coaching, leading and architecture, but I don’t ever want to get out of the code entirely.

For the last 9 years, I have functioned as a technical team lead on a variety of highly successful and highly productive teams. As far as team leads go, I tend to be a bit more hands on. Generally, I manage to actively develop code about 25% of the time to keep my skills sharp and have a clear understanding of my team’s codebase.

Beyond that I also like to review as much of the code coming into the codebase as practical. I do this for 3 reasons. I do this because as a team lead, I am ultimately the one responsible for the quality and stability of the codebase. This also allows me to keep a finger on the pulse of the team, so that I have a better idea of who is struggling and who is outperforming. Finally, I recognize that my way may not necessarily be the best way to do something and I am perfectly willing to admit the same. I have learned just as much if not more by reviewing the work of others than having someone else review my own.

It has been said that if you find a job you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. This describes my relationship with software development perfectly. I have known that I would be writing software in some capacity for a living since I wrote my first “hello world” program in BASIC in the third grade.

I don’t like the term programmer because it has a sense of impersonality to it. I tolerate the title Software Developer, because it’s the industry standard. Personally, I prefer Software Craftsman to any other current vernacular for those that sling code for a living.

All too often is our work compiled into binary form, both literally and figuratively. Our users take for granted the fact that an app “just works”, without thinking about the proper use of layers of abstraction and separation of concerns, Gang of Four design patterns or why an abstract class was used instead of an interface. Take a look at any mediocre app’s review distribution in the App Store. You will inevitably see an inverse bell curve. Lot’s of 4’s and 5’s and lots of (but hopefully not as many) 1’s and not much in the middle. This leads one to believe that even given the subjective nature of a 5 star scale, users still look at things in terms of either “this app works for me” or “this one doesn’t”. It’s all still 1’s and 0’s.

Even as a contributor to many open source projects myself, I’ll be the first to admit that have never sat down and cracked open the Spring Framework to truly appreciate the work that has been poured into it. Yet, when I’m in backend mode, I’m working with Spring nearly every single day.

The moniker Software Craftsman helps to convey the fact that I put my heart and soul into every line of code that I or a member of my team write. An API contract isn’t just well designed or not. Some are better designed than others. Some are better documented than others. Despite the fact that the end result of our work is literally just a bunch of 1’s and 0’s, computer science is not an exact science at all. Anyone who has ever taken 200 lines of Java code and reduced it to less than 50 lines of reactive Kotlin, anyone who has ever hit that Utopia of 100% unit test coverage in a class, or anyone who can actually read that 2-line Perl implementation of the RSA algorithm understands this simple truth. Software development is an art form. I am a Software Craftsman.

#wk171

Yet three other flaws...
Now it's pretty clear that Intel, either kept their backdoors pretty much knowingly and patch them when they find a better way to access data(yes I see you the functioning of ME) or it's like in the race of faster clock, took the safety of the data for granted.

Anyways, one word, Assholes. The management of Intel

It took me literally 2 months or less to surpass any and all my teachers on the subject of Unity3D.

Granted they didn't know shit about it, but that also ment that i had roughly 10 more months of them not being able to teach me jack shit.

I have self learned a lot in that time, but imagine what a decently knowledgeable teacher could have made of that process. I would have known so much more by now!

I think I joined the wrong crowd. After the recent Hackathon, I proposed that the team that I was working with, form a company in which we continue building apps, launch and try to profit. Y'know, the whole build fast and die slow kind of thing. Granted, I proposed it late November and we're all gearing up for the holidays. Now its January and everyone has this mindset of "if we don't meet, we don't get anything done" or "discuss face to face only". Guess they don't like the idea of working remotely.

I think I might just quit this venture after a couple of meetings with them before I lose my mind.

Part of a little lecture I gave my boss this week: "... you really should stop taking things so casually and so for granted. ALL of this stuff is not just something you can summarize in a single vague word or phrase like "stuck" or "kick the tires" or whatnot. there's no "magic" to any of this. there's no buttons or knobs you just touch with one finger and stuff magically works. it's all way more complicated than you probably think, ALL the time. And making assumptions will always get us in trouble." (To a tech-illiterate boss who always uses vague verbage like "stick this on the server" and has no idea how anything works.)

I love the whole NodeSchool thing, so not really a dis to them - but this is a good example of some of the problems I have with web tutorials. I think things like npm should be explained before you have someone use them. Just like jQuery, you can end up with a majority of people taking parts of their stack for granted.

After years of back-end development there's a thing which keeps bugging me: how little "interactive" the development process can be.
When I did front-end I took for granted that the application I was developing was easy to run so I could immediately test any little change I do on code but on back-end this is rare to see: you develop with tons of external dependencies (authentications, VPNs, databases...) so getting your application up and running can be an huge hassle and testing API controllers can be slow and frustrating since I have to continuously juggle multiple development environments, manually regenerate tokens, do guesswork to find which parameters you have to use for your API request, maintain my Postman/Insomnia HTTP calls collection to prevent it from turning into an unusable spaghetti mess... lots of repetitive tasks which kills my focus and makes me struggle in getting into a decent flow.

Automated testing has lot of potential in helping with that but its hard to introduce when you're rewriting a legacy sistem and you're already exceeded your budget.

I wonder if I'll keep doing back-end once I'm done with this project.

To all self made seniors (and those who got granted this title because it was a morale boost): is it really so difficult to grasp ideas like: Single responsibility? Don't repeat yourself? Encapsulation?

Seriously? Is it difficulty level of some quantum physics or what?

I'm not a fucking genius myself either, but when I see 300-500 LoCs function, accepting 10 parameters, having half of code duplicated in different parts of solution - I really wanna start firing people ON THE SPOT.

P.s.
To all shitty developers advocates - I know that everyone makes mistakes sometimes - I'm talking here about consistent "don't give a shit about code" behaviour.

This is odd for me to say this.. but Microsoft is kind of impressing me right now. I haven’t had many issues, and kind of testing out visual studio team services and liking what I’m seeing. Started out with VS code at work and here I am using it on small projects at home and seeing what else MS has to offer. Granted I’m still using my linux boot more but it’s been 8 days since my Win10 partition hasn’t crashed and that’s 8 days longer than when I first got this computer a few months ago when it was crashing hourly even after a fresh install and updates.

upside I guess, if your website's content is generated by JavaScript I'm too lazy to find an emulator to scrape it off you

granted I'm sure this website's business would've been much better had they made it scrapable since I'm quite literally trying to retrieve their capabilities listed in one of their help pages and give myself alerts when they gain new features

but no, I guess

I'm writing all the dev things I know in a docs site as a means to be hireable should I need to switch jobs.

I'm not gonna go too deep on how I'm doing it. One style I'm enjoying is making every article take only one page long, and if they take longer, maybe consider breaking it into another article.
Fuck long articles. Yes, that's a bit autistic.

But I will describe the challenges I'm finding (which are quite many) in further detail.

One of them is that words can be ambiguous. Production can mean the production environment but it can also mean production in plain english.
And there are tons of cases like this.

Because of this, I felt a lot of confusion in my beginner days. So it my objective to write this as to prevent as much confusion as possible.

Granted, I don't want to write "development for dummies". Software is complex. But because it's complex on its own, I don't want to add complexity to the learning process through obscure language usage.

"Fine", I say, "I'll disambiguate". But this means I find myself branching out very often into fundamental or commonly used software terms like "framework", "model", "scaffold", "algorithm", "viewport", "breakpoint", etc.

Another challenge is reaching good levels of completitude.
This means I have to explain that obscure CLI flag I never used in my life.

If I don't do this, then what makes my docs different than these superficial dev.to or medium posts? Nothing.
But trying to explain EVERYTHING about a software can generate a lot of frustration: I never finish.

It also makes me wonder "do I even know shit?". I think some amount of insecurity is healthy and pushes myself forward.
But at some point it's kind of making me feel like shit. Maybe I just need to keep learning.

Client be like:
Pls, could you give the new Postgres user the same perms as this one other user?

Me:
Uh... Sure.

Then I find out that, for whatever reason, all of their user accounts have disabled inheritance... So, wtf.

Postgres doesn't really allow you to *copy* perms of a role A to role B. You can only grant role A to role B, but for the perms of A to carry over, B has to have inheritance allowed... Which... It doesn't.

So... After a bit of manual GRANT bla ON DATABASE foo TO user, I ping back that it is done and breath a sigh of relief.

Oooooonly... They ping back like -- Could you also copy the perms of A on all the existing objects in the schema to B???

Ugh. More work. Lets see... List all permissions in a schema and... Holy shit! That's thousands of tables and sequences, how tf am I ever gonna copy over all that???

Maybe I could... Disable the pager of psql, and pipe the list into a file, parse it by the magic of regex... And somehow generate a fuckload of GRANT statements? Uuuugh, but that'd kill so much time. Not to mention I'd need to find out what the individual permission letters in the output mean... And... Ugh, ye, no, too much work. Lets see if SO knows a solution!

And, surprise surprise, it did! The easiest, simplest to understand way, was to make a schema-only dump of the database, grep it for user A, substitute their name with B, and then input it back.

What I didn't expect is for the resulting filtered and altered grant list to be over 6800 LINES LONG. WHAT THE FUCK.

...And, shortly after I apply the insane number of grants... I get another ping. Turns out the customer's already figured out a way to grant all the necessary perms themselves, and I... No longer have to do anything :|

Joy. Utter, indescribable joy.

Is there any actual security reason for disabling inheritance in Postgres? (14.x) I'd think that if an account got compromised, it doesn't matter if it has the perms inherited or not, cuz you can just SET ROLE yourself to the granted role with the actual perms and go ham...

Node.js, why!? I understand that websites are built on JavaScript so we've been fucked into having to use it without a choice. But why the hell would anyone choose to use JavaScript for backend development? I just finished an interview assessment that required me to use Node.js and it sucked. Granted, I'm not a JavaScript developer, but there was nothing that made me want to go back for more.

Working with a SOAP endpoint. I know it is some .NET server due to the style of stacktrace on exceptions. Nice, a framework where I can expect some type safety granted by static types. I build some xsl to transform the SOAP wsdl files into classes and structs to interact with the endpoint. Works out perfectly.

Plottwist!

Elements which are defined in the xsd/wsdl with maxOccur=unbounded and minOccur=0 should represent a simple collection of this type. Therefore does my implementation expect a collection of this type. But no. The shipped SOAP client in my stack ignores the definition and simply deserializes the SOAP response into T and not a collection of T.

Where the duck are the types when they are defined all over the place?

This is just funny more then anything 😂

This guy has been fucking up non stop!

He did something incredible, we gave him precise EXACT instructions you couldn’t mistake them

What does he do? Everything wrong.

Granted what he does, works, but... it will take me hours to do what I want to do with the data, if he did it the right way, minutes!

All I wanted was all the active products for this company and their links on the site. He creates an export I can convert to google xml shopping.

What does he do? create over a 100 export buttons one for each supplier so it’s right but it’s all products for that supplier in one file.

So I can do my bit if I just combine 100 files together 😂

It’s funny because there’s already an export that does the exact thing we want just without all the right fields. This is what we asked.

He just needed to duplicate that and add more fields 😂 we think he’s doing it on purpose to be a dick 😂 no one can be that dumb.

I’m laughing cause it’s fucking ridiculous. He’s gonna get fired soon, and he knows it.

So I figure since I straight up don't care about the Ada community anymore, and my programming focus is languages and language tooling, I'd rant a bit about some stupid things the language did. Necessary disclaimer though, I still really like the language, I just take issue with defense of things that are straight up bad. Just admit at the time it was good, but in hindsight it wasn't. That's okay.

For the many of you unfamiliar, Ada is a high security / mission critical focused language designed in the 80's. So you'd expect it to be pretty damn resilient.

Inheritance is implemented through "tagged records" rather than contained in classes, but dispatching basically works as you'd expect. Only problem is, there's no sealing of these types. So you, always, have to design everything with the assumption that someone can inherit from your type and manipulate it. There's also limited accessibility modifiers and it's not granular, so if you inherit from the type you have access to _everything_ as if they were all protected/friend.

Switch/case statements are only checked that all valid values are handled. Read that carefully. All _valid_ values are handled. You don't need a "default" (what Ada calls "when others" ). Unchecked conversions, view overlays, deserialization, and more can introduce invalid values. The default case is meant to handle this, but Ada just goes "nah you're good bro, you handled everything you said would be passed to me".

Like I alluded to earlier, there's limited accessibility modifiers. It uses sections, which is fine, but not my preference. But it also only has three options and it's bizarre. One is publicly in the specification, just like "public" normally. One is in the "private" part of the specification, but this is actually just "protected/friend". And one is in the implementation, which is the actual" private". Now Ada doesn't use classes, so the accessibility blocks are in the package (namespace). So guess what? Everything in your type has exactly the same visibility! Better hope people don't modify things you wanted to keep hidden.

That brings me to another bad decision. There is no "read-only" protection. Granted this is only a compiler check and can be bypassed, but it still helps prevent a lot of errors. There is const and it works well, better than in most languages I feel. But if you want a field within a record to not be changeable? Yeah too bad.

And if you think properties could fix this? Yeah no. Transparent functions that do validation on superficial fields? Nah.

The community loves to praise the language for being highly resilient and "for serious engineers", but oh my god. These are awful decisions.

Now again there's a lot of reasons why I still like the language, but holy shit does it scare me when I see things like an auto maker switching over to it.

The leading Ada compiler is literally the buggiest compiler I've ever used in my life. The leading Ada IDE is literally the buggiest IDE I've ever used in my life. And they are written in Ada.

Side note: good resilient systems are a byproduct of knowledge, diligence, and discipline, not the tool you used.

I'm wondering if the computer let me win...

Up to now it was ahead and got me on the ropes... Granted I haven't played an actual Go game in years...

But then somehow it made a mistake? here... A 100 point game turning mistake... which I don't notice until 30+ moves later

Maybe I should just goto sleep.... It's actually 2:30am here...

How do you cope with stress and maintaining structure to your day as you work from home? Since I started working from home, I'm struggling with vaping more than normal, exercising less. When I was still in an office, I had an unconscious rhythm to the day that I took for granted.

Command Prompt is archaic and useless. The most I can do with it (without using other programs) is copy files and overwrite user passwords. Both useful, granted, but nothing compared to the Windows GUI - or, like, any other command line? Heck, I'd rather just have a python shell and nothing else.

Praying to every deity, I begged to spare me, to never kill my inner child. To never make me grow up into materialistic mindset that punishes curiosity and denies miracles.
It seems like my wish was granted. Am I naive? Sure. Do I have kid ego? Sometimes.
But I never wanted to be someone else.

OK, I'm spoiled Linux bra^H^H^Huser, so MD5, SHA1,... checksums for distributions' ISO files are something I take for granted but is really that hard for Microsoft to provide same for Windows 10 ISOs (plain and simple info, not something that require equilibristics and deep diving into MSDN site) ?!

I have been working as a freelancer for a little while now. I recently started using upwork. The first job that I got on upwork was titled: “help me”, the bio explained that it was with node.js. Later, during the interview, the client mentioned that it was 30+ hours a week. I was kind of confused. I had no idea what I was getting into. A little bit down the road, he provided me with the project. This is when I almost wanted to jump off a cliff. The code was organised as if it was a c or c++ app and I couldn’t follow anything. The guy thought that “pass by reference” was a thing in JS. I cried. Granted, with objects, there are some reference exceptions, but generally passed by value. The code is like spaghetti... I still have 2 months left on the contract. It’s awful.

I just came home from opening of the fiscal year of a small drivers' club and it was quite an amazing life experience.

I got about a 5-times "rise" for a first, small, post-due-time project.

All of the members were so relaxed in one of the most serious moments of an association. We ate, drank beer and had as much fun as possible without break the law and other rules.

The story goes like this:

I was an intern in a website development company as students tend to do. In middle of the internship my teacher asked me if I'd be willing to develop a website to the before mentioned organization.
School will help with the money by being as a middle-man. It wasn't going to pay much, about 120€ or so, it's nothing really for the job, but I said yes for the experience. We organized a meeting, school provided the space, and went straight to the business.

The development went quite well: I got the final design requirements late (there weren't too much), research a lot about CMS:s, ended up with a beta version CMS (a risk), learned it, developed some plugins (not published yet), kept copyrights for most of the work and so on.

I was done _relatively_ quickly with the project and was quite happy with it. Only things still pressing my mind was bugs of the beta CMS, support for the plugins and my somewhat inexperienced graphical design.

Then it hit me, the world. Hosting, domain transfer, certificates, registry agreements. Arrgh. Most of things were fine, I know them. I had luck that I had a technical contact for the club. It would have been a nightmare of it's own otherwise.

We had problems transferring the domain, again, as you do. The other hosting company was to blame. They were the n00bs here. I went trough the law, technical guidance, etc. I was having heavy messaging with my technical contact about it, who was a middle-man for me and the hosting firms.
After a long while loop of waiting, reconfiguring, researching and messaging, until he transfer was finally over.

We had a long while of radio silence after some bug fixes. Until the Christmas came and I was invited to a Christmas party in a cottage, third Christmas party that year. It was great fun. We ate, drank, talked, went to sauna and had a playful adult stiga or sledging competition, etc.
I updated the site yet again, a stable version of the CMS were published. Yess!

Another radio silence came and year changed. It was broken off by a call to the opening of the fiscal year, the same day. This is today, or yesterday by now. This was just after my current company's board game night. I was really busy that day. A whole afternoon of second-hand shopping around the city with a bike. I counted 35 kilometers. Yes I go by bike, don't own a car or have an driving license... Yet.

I wasn't horribly late, around 30 minutes. I started eating and drinking. Free food and beer! They was also late, they should've got trough the business before I got there, before eating. So I ate and listened. Learned more about having business or an association in general. Until my matter came to be heard. They thanked me of the co-operation and made public the change of my reward sum, I WAS GRANTED 500€ REWARD for the work. It's still not an amazing sum in a larger point of view, but I can imagine that it's big deal for a small non-profit organization, which was loosing money. Everybody applauded, every 25 members of the club. I was greatly pleased. I will have to update their site a bit still, but they are going to pay the reward ASAP.

Did I mention that the school works around the taxes, legally. Taxes for the reward, if it were assumed as a wage would be 15%, for me, at the worst case scenario, only for getting the money to my hands.

I was offered another gig at the event, but didn't promise anything yet. I left before sauna, so we didn't get to change contact details. He will find a way to reach me if he really wants so. I'm a busy free man.

Initially I wanted to be a sysadmin 6 years ago actually. And to this day I still am, to some extent. But since a while ago - I believe last year - that idea started to shift. I always got so enraged at software going tits up, further fueled by the fact that without programming skills I couldn't do anything about it but weep.

Last year in February I did my first part of the LPIC-1 exam, and this year also in February I did the second part. Failed the second part though so I'll have to go back for that. But in the exam results I found that my shell scripting skills are pretty much perfect. I got a big fat 100% on that part.

So that got me thinking. Is the shell a proper programming language, and could I use this to write my own software? And the answer turned out to be yes. Granted like every programming language "'it's\ definitely\ not\ perfect.'" But hey it does most of what I need and for automation it's absolutely great.

So that's what I do nowadays. Still a sysadmin, but I picked up a habit of writing out everything I would otherwise do manually into code. I love it!

Oddly enough, i have simultaneously been less busy and more productive since working 66% remotely.

I find myself with more time that feels "wasted" or not busy, but my metrics show that I have more production, better results, and far nicer documentation. A bunch of us also sat down and did a bunch of coursework on really putting together a domain script library for one click onboarding of new servers or new client setups. We spun up a bunch of new virtual environments that literally solved headaches that had existed for years that never got dealt with because of too many other tickets.

Some of our web clients freaked out at us because the business is moving away from doing maintenance of legacy web work (small to midsize businesses). But it didn't matter. Rather than respond with a "make them happy," the response was "well, we will get rid of them as clients. We need to focus our energy on the essential service sectors we support."

Hell, we even got an automated test that has been broken apparently since 2018 to work again.

Granted, the incoming workload has slowed down. But it's still interesting to me to see that despite the slowdown, there isn't any concern; its still paying the bills and we are getting rid of technical debt everywhere. Tbh, this has really been a good reality check.

Client used IR35 as an excuse to not say thanks for helping them win an award. Been working on a contract for a firm for 3.5 years. I single handedly architected lead, recruited a front end dev and built the site (along with that other contractor).

The other day they won an award for the site. I didn't expect to be on the official thank you list (they named and thanked everyone involved) but they even excluded me and the other contractor (who granted was short term) from the internal email. Their reasons? IR35 and they're protecting me.... My rates are now being adjusted for the work I actually do!

Asking for a friend: Well actually a friend asked me (since "I'm good with computers", you know it ;)) and no real solution came to my mind, so I thought, why not ask the internet

Anyways. She's an artist and does a project (kind of a documentation) about the Egyptian revolution. She currently lives in Europe but still has her Egypian passport. As an Egyptian national, she fears, that she could be holden back for a while and have her laptop/external HD with all the photos/videos/interviews confiscated and/or searched. She asked me for help to have a "backup solution".

The requirements: a way to backup work (from a mac) to a secure location (I would offer my server running linux for it).
The upload would have to be encrypted (if possible, I suggested to use a VPN, is this enough?)
Access to the files should only be granted if you have the propper password (in my opinion the VPN tunnel should work here too, as when it's down, you can't just reopen it without a password.

What are your thoughts on this?

!rant

Ever find something that's just faster than something else, but when you try to break it down and analyze it, you can't find out why?

PyPy.
I decided I'd test it with a typical discord bot-style workload (decoding a JSON theoretically from an API, checking if it contains stuff, format and then returning it). It was... 1.73x the speed of python.

(Though, granted, this code is more network dependent than anything else.)

Mean +- std dev: [kitsu-python] 62.4 us +- 2.7 us -> [kitsu-pypy] 36.1 us +- 9.2 us: 1.73x faster (-42%)

Me: Whoa, how?!
So, I proceed to write microbenches for every step. Except the JSON decoding, (1.7x faster was at least twice as slow (in one case, one hundred times slower) when tested individually.
The combination of them was faster. Huh.

By this point, I was all "sign me up!", but... asyncpg (the only sane PostgreSQL driver for python IMO, using prepared statements by default and such) has some of it's functionality written in C, for performance reasons. Not Cython, actual C that links to CPython. That means no PyPy support.

Okay then.

I haven't tried developing any Android project in a while but once I did, holy effff Android Studio is soooooo frustrating! Even on a 7th gen i7 (granted U version) 16 GB of RAM laptop it's slow AF. But I heard a lot of people saying that it's not bad and works well even on 6 GB of RAM. What's your setup for a good experience developing with Android Studio?

So this past few days of a mix bag of emotions. Friday's weekly deliverables on our first dry run at launch, I squeeze across the line in an embarrassing finish. Decision to proceed with the live run to be delayed, not going to happen if I've got something to say about it.

Next day, vendor on the house my wife has purchased (our first!!) and says we can move the settlement date ahead 4 weeks! Winning!

Monday, meeting with all stakeholders on the fuck up that was my deliverables I'm responsible for, granted a conditional pass. "Don't worry, I got this."

Tuesday, received the results of a technical challenge I've given one of the developer candidates - he smashed it. Keen to give him the job!

The taboo of not finishing.

(As I prefaced to many posts I made, don't take this too seriously)

It is very normal in the programming world to get recommended to finish projects.

But I was wondering "what if you don't?".
Of course, we can agree that having little patience or persistence is not good for any endeavor.

But what if this recurrent focus on finishing is also bad?

Granted, I have started dozens of things and only finished one or two of them and none have become popular.
So there's not a lot of support to back my take.

But I definitely learned a lot from these projects. And I definitely had a lot of fun at some points.

In fact, I think if I had switched more often early on I would have been less miserable, and maybe I would have learned more by the virtue of not getting stuck with some project.

Of course this applies as long as you stay within the same field; it doesn't help learning gardening one day but karate the following.

But even then, there are so many hobbies in life that the chance of finding the one that you love and are the best at are very slim. So switching out of the least pleasant ones might bring you to a favorite one.

But, let's go back to programming.

Here, people recommend finishing things as means to become profitable. If you want to live as a gamedev, then you need to sell games, and to do that, you need to finish games.

That is understandable.

But if gamedev isn't your main profit, why is finishing games a requirement?

What's the point of publishing a game that you know looks like shit?

Why? Why should you put time and energy, pain and stress, all the way through the end only to finish or even publish a game that you can feel ashamed of how awful it looks? (because most 1st games look awful).

Why would you ever want to finish something that looks horrible?

First tries are always terrible, and that's fine, nothing wrong with that.

What's wrong is this sheepthought that you should publish to the public every turd that you can produce in your early learning stages.

I've been a programmer for almost 8 years now. I'm not the best out there, but I consider myself ok.

And considering I had some pretty deep depression pits thanks to this mentality, here's my advice to folk having stress with unfinished projects: don't give a single fuck.

If a side project has become stressful, shelf that shit, maybe tell someone about your issues with it. But don't care much about it.

In fact, if you manage to finish a project but it has costed you a great deal of stress, maybe that should be the shameful thing.

Life is too short to waste it considering suicide because you're not a prolific programmer.

And i would argue that iterating 100 times on different things is far more productive (and fun) than fetting stuck or spending shitloads of time on the first one, even if you don't finish any of them.

120fps and 240fps filming isn't just for slow motion playback, but recent smartphones have 120 Hz screens so those videos can finally be watched as ultra-smooth motion with audio.

If only all smartphones encoded high-framerate videos in real-time with the same framerate recorded from the image sensor instead of stupidly slowing down when encoding.

Granted, this is a thing Apple has always done right: they encoded their "slow motion" videos in real-time and let the user select the slowed-down portions during playback!

Let the user set their preferred playback speed in the video editor, don't dictate that 1× playback speed is 1/4 of real-life speed. 1× playback speed must be 1× real-life speed to clear up all confusion.

Besides, laptops with 120 Hz screens existed as early as 2011 (Samsung 700G7A)!.

Its taken for granted in most projects but for me its definitely git, I especially like Gitlab's approach.

Also a rubber duck.

When I first started down the path to becoming a developer, I was a "business analyst" where I managed our departments reports and ended up migrating all the reports from daily query run in MS Access with Task manager and emailed out to all the managers including the VP of the entire business unit, I created
Views in the database and sent out the same spreadsheet with the view in excel daily since management didn't want "change". Granted this was at a large health care company in the US and didn't want to invest in a real dashboard for their reports. The only thing that was changed in the email and file was the file name with the current date. I left the company a while ago and recently applied for a similar position for the shits and gigs. Interviewed with the It manager and they're still using the same excel macro I wrote 3 years later.

Made a root only app: enable/disable GPS, mobile data, airplane mode and etc. work on not rooted device(yes all these functions work too).

How: Desktop app which downloads cross-platform ADB drivers, unzips them, executes a few commands, deletes the drivers and voala.
P.S: I use local ADB TCP connection(yeah I ported a part of the drivers for java android) and write_secure_settings granted with 'pm grant'.
And everything is user-friendly with screenshots explaining how to enable ADB and how to click a 2 buttons.

Control your searches like an ADULT damn it!!!

So we have records that can have any of a bazillion different reference numbers associated with them. No big deal. Everyone does right?

Our customer's love to run reports and so we have this one option for "just look at a hell of a lot of reference numbers". I call it the 'fuck all' search.

Really it is just there to find something that you don't know where a rando string or number might be in the record and just want to do a "fuck all" search across a number of likely fields to find it... and then presumably you'd be an adult and refine your search from there. LOL yeah right...

Customers get lazy and include that stupid option in their reports and we get a lot of.

Customer: "I always run this report (that includes the fuck all search) and now it isn't working. I want records that have ID 2222."

Me: "Yeah well that was only working because you were rando typing '2222' in like several fields and it would find those .... but now you quit doing that so it won't find them. If you want ID 2222, click the drop down and search by 'ID'. That will find it right away."

Customer: "But I want to just search by 'fuck all search' to find it..."

Me: "But then you get all these other records too right?"

Customer: "Yeah but I just delete them out of the spreadsheet ... "

Me: "Look watch this <screen share> there, look all records with an ID of 2222 and no more extra records you need to delete!!! How great is that?"

Customer: "But why do I have to do it this way now, I want to do it the old way..."

ಠ_ಠ

(granted I could add their ID to the fuck all search but we try to avoid adding too much because it gets out of hand / stops being useful the more fuck all it gets)

Tying to make something of myself without working for anyone else.

It used to be easy for me, but fear kept me from perusing things all the way thru when I was younger. I never wanted to leave what were decent jobs at the time.

I finally did it. Threw away a very good job to bet on myself.

But the difference is, now I have a family and finding free time in itself isn’t that hard, but finding free time to code uninterrupted for hours... the way one needs to in order to hold a program in ones mind... yeah, near impossible these days, haha.

I have great ideas but I need help to get things to that ‘next level’ where an idea could take off and get real investments. And I need money to pay the help... Just getting the ball rolling would be nice. I used to take it for granted how easily I could get side jobs and be literally the best in town. But now it’s insanely competitive. I don’t even consider Webdesign an option for side work anymore, with sites like Wix and customers that don’t appreciate what I do vs a kid that gives them a Wordpress theme for just the cost of dirt cheap hosting... traditional Webdesign is dead.

But that’s all well and good, i saw that coming over a decade ago and focused more on coding application. I do think there’s a niche for my programming skills, so my current goal is trying to exploit that, or at least see if it’s viable. I just need something to get money to invest in my real projects.

I’d love to hear from people with similar situations! Not sure if I’ll pull it off before I have to go back to work. Although, I viewed never returning to the workforce haha. We’ll see...

I am really frustrated and angry when my friends only think that web development is easy you just do everything in bootstrap thats it, but really not all web apps are made in bootstrap, i make mine using css media query and thats hard to set everything manually, im so pissed that they take my job for granted and they cant even right a single decent php function , ignorant retards

i am taking some pills for hemorrhoids and yesterday i was combined them with my third coffee. Somehow i was full of energy and i started coding like f crazy. I was literally writing code withe the speed and tension you see in movies, or if you like it, like our non tech bosses are thinking we work 8 hours a day for granted. I did not know what was happening, i was typing correctly, fast, and i want to live it again. Dope, adrenaline, aggression!
The code must fear us, not we the code!

Last week I hired a friend of friend to work on my projects. Hes a young and friendly guy. However he never worked in actual office and it shows. During the meeting he brings his phone and in the middle of explaining he pulls out his phone to respond someone back. Basically lacks professionalism and has this young person cockiness where he thinks he is competent to handle everything while in reality last week he did 2-3 hours worth of work. I want to set up some boundaries but I dont want to seen as a harsh dictator. On the other hand Im paying him over the top even though he doesnt have skills, but the least I want to is a decent attitude and effort. How u would advice me to approach this and teach him to get his shit together? Im already becoming resentful and next week if he keeps treating his work like a school project I will let him go.

Im really trying to setup a nice environment for him to work at, I rented a nice office in a hub space and also bought entirely new laptop plus monitor setup for him to work. I even took him for drinks and lunches but for some reason I start to feel that hes taking that shit for granted and Im being too good.

Hes not proactive, it seems that he will do bare minimum that I give him.

NGL on the weekend I love eating, drinking beer, and not coding. Granted if I want to code, I will, but I like that i can do it as a hobby and turn my coding brain off if I want to.

First and foremost, students should be carefully taught the logic and mentality behind programming. Most of the time I see that the introductory programming courses waste so much energy in teaching the language itself. So students kinda just get fucked cause many people end up ending the course without having actually gained the "programming perspective".
Stop teaching pointers and lambdas and even leave the object oriented stiff till later. If a student doesn't know why we use a For loop then how can they learn anything else.
I believe once that thing in your brain clicks about programming, everything goes smooth from there... kinda :P

Second of all, and this pertains mainly to the engineering and science disciplines.
We need a fundamental and strong mathematical foundation. And no I don't mean taking fucking double integrals. Teach us Linear Algebra, Graph theory, the properties of matrices, and Probability theory.
One of the things I suffered from most and regret in university is having a weak foundation in math and having to spend more time catching myself up to speed.
It's so annoying reading a paper on a new algorithm or method and feeling like an idiot because I can't understand what magic these people did.

Numerical Methods...
Ok this is more deeper, maybe a 2nd year course.
But this is something we take for granted.
Computers don't magically add and subtract and multiply.
They fuck up.
And it'll bite you in the ass if you're not even aware that the computer we all love so much isn't as perfect as we think

Some hardware knowledge.
Probably a basic embedded systems course with arduinos
just so you can get a feel for how our beautiful software actually makes those electrons go weeeeeeeee

And finally
Practice practice
Projects projects
like honestly
just give me the internet and some projects
Ill learn everything else
Projects are the best motivation
I hate this purely theoretical approach
where we memorize or read code and write these stupid exams
Test what we are capable off
make us do projects that take sleepless nights and litres of coffee
And judge our methods, documentation, team work, and output

Team work skills and tools (VCS, communicating, project management, etc.)

Documentation and Reporting
Properly
:)
maybe even with LaTeX :D

Yeah that's the gist of whats on my mind at the moment regarding an ideal computer science education
At least the foundations
The rest I leave it to the next dude.

I'm very sad.

I don't pretend to work on the next Facebook, Google search engine or something else.

I would to be part of something useful.

But i work in a shitty company where quality, architecture planning and TDD are underrated.

Only to build very simple webapplications, where things you take for granted like server side input or a simple error page without java stacktrace are missing or not planned properly.

We have functional analysts, but worst specs ever.

I hate all of this...

More and more declining respect for programmers, unrealistic expectations from managers, and worse and worse code as everyone becomes dependent on taking modern hardware for granted.

!rant
TL;DR - not sure if I should take a full-time gig at my current pretty good job, or go do an internship with AWS for the summer.

Needing some wizened development career advice, guys. I am coming to a small crossroads at the moment.

I am in my last year of school getting a BS in Computer Science. I love it. I had a pretty sweet job at a cool startup, until recently, when they were bought by a bigger company. This turned out to still be alright though, since they hired everyone on to the new company to keep our codebase alive and well (it's a pretty good product that they don't want to get rid of). Except they hired me as an Intern instead, which I thought was weird, but they said that's normally what they do with peeps that are still in school. Whatevs. But then I got offered an internship at some company called Amazon Web Services to be a Systems Analyst Intern (basically cloud support engineering from the sounds of it). And then I told the cats at the new company that I was considering this internship and they started saying they'd consider giving me full-time. And they didn't want to lose me.

Well... my thing is that both are tempting. Like the company that'd offer me a full-time gig would be cool because I'd get to keep working on the projects I'm currently on and I'd be immersed in a good development cycle and whatnot. Probably more full-stack programming, which I like a good bit and want to master more of. The Amazon thing seems cool, but I worry that it'd be more of a support gig. And as well as they pay, I may not get as good of development experience. Granted I was told I could definitely get into scripting to automate various things. But I just don't know how much would actually be that. Except having Amazon on my resume would likely be pretty great to have also coming out of graduation.

Down yet another avenue of thought, the AWS internship would only be for a few months in the Summer. So there's a chance I could come back and I could get my old job back. But maybe they would see me as disloyal or something and not want me to come back. I would also likely forfeit my retention bonus (which is an ok amount, but not a deal-breaker and it's spread out over 3 years) for staying on with the company after the acquisition.

I just don't know. Would it be better to stay where I'm at or go on a wild adventure over the summer? Help me, DevRant Kenobi you're my only hope...

Sadly took me a little longer than I’d like to admit to go from well placed print statements to using a debugger. Granted there are times when print statements are needed, but for all the devs out there who are using an IDE with a perfectly good debugger and yet doesn’t use it... please use it. It literally gives you a mapping of all objects and data types around a break point that you can easily glance at to speed up debugging. Go figure!

We have a somewhat experience developer for whom we have to CONSTANTLY fix his type errors. He just doesn't seem to grasp the idea that there is a difference between integers, strings, floats, etc. and that when you don't bother with them, things get a little screwed up.

Granted, Javascript's typing leaves... well, everything.. to be desired, but STILL dude, this is basic shit. Come on.

For some reason my Ubuntu stopped viewing the open windows when pressing 'super+tab' and it felt as if I couldn't navigate the os anymore,like I was just sitting there feeling....stuck. Holy shit we've taken these features for granted.

Today I removed all the stickers I had on my laptop, and it looks pretty clean and better now.
I still remember the day when I would do anything to collect schwag and free stickers. In fact - I joined devRant just to get those free stickers XD.
but yesterday I had to do a presentation in my college and during the presentation, I realized how stupid it is to have a laptop filled with laptop stickers.
What I used to chase in the past, is what I am getting rid of in present. And it is true with many other things as well. We crave things and once we get them it hardly matters to us.
I sometimes wonder what life is really about, and is there anything that we can cherish forever and not take for granted?

A customer has this project that smells ... like it could be not fun.

They're doing business with walmart (actually a walmart satellite company, even worse).... I've seen this story before. They're super excited, they're seeing $$$... seen it not work out so many times.

Anyway they're having us rush out these forms and documents and so on and I can see there's a lot of data that is going to be required missing.

My contact is super peppy and happy and so sunshiny that my concerns are going over her head... she just sends emails to people, like FW, RE RE ... this is gonna be a mess of last minute / 'where is this?!?!?!' kinda work...

Granted I work at a good place, this won't have any blowback on me... but god damn guies listen to coder guy that the data that will be needed isn't there and there is a SHIT ton that I'm pretty sure isn't ... anywhere.

Started a new job recently. Super cool place, awesome people and I get to do something that actually matters.

But I did get caught up in some organizational changes and have been in a bit of a weird situation. I'm employed in one department, but hired to participate in a project owned by another department. The project is sort of ongoing, but currently in a bit of a twilight zone because a new project team is being put together, and it'll be a few weeks before we're all ready.

Until that time, I am learning tons of new stuff. About the project, the technologies currently used and also exploring new tech and other ways we could go with it.

There's a lot of freedom granted to me, and I've had some good experiences and successes. But it's also a LOT to take in; starting a new job, learning multiple new technology stacks, and waiting for everything to really kick off for good. At which point things might get really hectic.

Drag-to-select in Samsung's "My Files" app is a disaster.

If you don't move your finger and stop dragging towards the top or bottom, it goes into "drag-and-drop" after one second. When you release your finger, it unselects everything, so you have to start over.

This is why every mobile file manager needs range selection. This means tapping two files, tapping a button, and everything inbetween is immediately selected.

This is similar to shift+click selection on desktop. We take this for granted since it has been a standard feature for three decades. But mobile apps still can't do this simple thing as of 2024.

"Drag-to-select" is better than individual selection, but comes nowhere close to real range selection. "Drag to select" is at best an ugly twin of full desktop-like range selection, but file manager developers can still get away with giving it the label of "mass selection".

ES File Explorer had this since at least 2012, yet billion-dollar Samsung and Google fail to implement this in their file managers.

We here in India are going through a nightmare. We have our CS syllabus from 1990s, we still write lab records, and solve 10 pineapples problem for placement training. Nobody really bothers about actual skill or knowledge, are like sheep behind feed. Passion is taken for granted and overruled by the “experts”.

A good education in CS starts from the hunger to solve problems that would matter to people. Future of CS education is in online courses that give out ideas to generate more ideas and inspire programming not as a subject but as a basic need of the hour. People should love the fact that CS is queer in many ways but is very powerful. Basics are important but the education must hold on to what is currently happening in the world.

World will be doomed when we start making students study the same thing what we did, except it is called Math. A subject has to be dynamic. If anybody agrees what I say, spread it so that world will understand what learning means...

Just office things.

"Yes Dr, we do cover the corpse as part of our policy if such a case occurs."

Something about the corpse falling off a gurney and breaking something from what I could tell. Granted, it's dead already. People love to sue.

Long time no rant...
Just fuck apple.
I’m working in partnership with an startup as iOS dev.
We have payments in our app since it was released couple years ago. And everything was ok. Two months ago we implemented a subscription based program that granted our user access to a few things that we need to process manually. I specified that because in apple’s guidelines states that services consumed outside app are not allowed to be sold using inapp purchase and you have to implement your own payment method.
All nice and good we used what we had already in place and the updated was approved. Same for the next 6 versions. Now we discovered a quite critical bug and fixed and submitted a new update just so apple would reject it because we are using subscription that is not implemented using their fucking store kit. So they can’t get those 30% share cut.
Fuck them fuck their echo system fuck their overpriced product. I’v just abandoned my 15” mbp mid2015 in favor of a hackintosh just because my mbp was dying from high temps. Fuck it i’m almost done with mobile development after 6 years

ok I'll give it this,
because everything is so slow to write in rust and you have to be so methodical and specific,
I think it's giving me discipline

so it's training me to be less lazy over time,
which is actually something I genuinely wanted,
so it's kind of exciting

granted it still sucks that I have to wait on myself to gain the fortitude to be able to write the old stuff I used to, but if I build discipline / fortitude then it wouldn't matter how big a project was, I could maintain making it indefinitely because I'm not sputtering on effectively "junk food fuel" to power myself but managed to refine fuel that can stick for the long haul
my stupid refinery just has to get its shit together first, which is what all the rust training is slowly doing

Entering 2021 strong with more knowledge and more experience 💙💪
2020 was a year of learning.
It taught us the value of time, to believe in ourselves, to make the best use of what we have, not take anything for granted and always keep learning.
Only then we can overcome our biggest fears
Wishing you all a very Happy New Year 2021

Literally every single professional breakthrough I've had is because of being better at coding than my peers. Internship, and potentially even my PhD. Granted, scientists have low standards for code...

I kinda wish that Ubuntu Satanic Edition had been more of a thing, and not just like a novelty metal-themed wrapper on Ubuntu with a bunch of metal tracks that fell by the wayside.

Aside from the hellish theming, it should have like all the best open source software to enable all the most perverse and questionable indulgences that any tech person would fantasize about. Obviously with a high priority on anonymity. Would be perfect for this time of year when one might, i dunno, research all sorts of perverse things for cheap thrills, without having to worry about the search history; among other things perhaps. Maybe a dual-boot scenario, where you can boot into it to host your zoom sex orgies?

Yes, I'm aware that any user can completely customize their desktop to their liking with existing theming and software/packages even to create something such as this, but to be complete, it *really* needs that cult following to go with the flavor. Granted, a large community generally goes against the tenants of Laveyan Satanism, but then again, fantasy in a forum shrouded in obscurity seems right in line with it.

I love this weekly group rant, it made me think back when my mom started to work in a kindergarten and she used to take me to work when i was 4-7 years old ('94 - '97).

There was this "TV" and all the kids used to smash the buttons on it. It also played sound, but there was always a lot of kids there so I was shy to ask them if I push the buttons too. But I was the teachers son, so I didn't had to sleep in the afternoon, and then I discovered this computer thing I was amazed, it was like nothing I saw before, you push it and it does what you pushed and, *_* this smiley is exactly me back then. It was probably an old commodore with green text on the black screen. It was the moment when I decided to get more information about this wonder.

In elementary school (around '98) we had this computer room and as I was one of the best students back then I was granted access to it. It was a huge success in a post communist country to get money for new computers to teach us kids to use them back then, so only the chosen ones could use them, and I was one of them, one of the best time time of my life, honestly. At this moment I knew for sure, I want one and when I grow up I gonna work with them. I had no idea what you can do with it but every adult is talking about how well paid are the people who use them at work. :D it sounds funny now

In '89 or '99 we visited our family in a town far away. My grandfathers sisters boyfriend had a computer and he said, look I also have internet. This face again *_* what the hell is internet. So he explained me this internet thing which "makes all computers connected, but you have to pay for it and it kinda works like wired phones you know. Here you put the address and you can open the website"
me: website, whoooa *_*
8-9 year old clever me: "but how do you know what are the addresses, do you have a phonebook for these addresses?"
he showed me google, and a slovak and czech search engine, I remember searching for "funny pictures" on the slovak search engine, because I was thinking If I search google, its english so he would pay too much :D

I didn't had a computer until I was 13 years old, but then I started to messing with Microsoft Front Page 2003, was amazed with the html and css generated by it and started to editing it.

Now Im a front end web dev