I absolutely HATE "web developers" who call you in to fix their FooBar'd mess, yet can't stop themselves from dictating what you should and shouldn't do, especially when they have no idea what they're doing.

So I get called in to a job improving the performance of a Magento site (and let's just say I have no love for Magento for a number of reasons) because this "developer" enabled Redis and expected everything to be lightning fast. Maybe he thought "Redis" was the name of a magical sorcerer living in the server. A master conjurer capable of weaving mystical time-altering spells to inexplicably improve the performance. Who knows?

This guy claims he spent "months" trying to figure out why the website couldn't load faster than 7 seconds at best, and his employer is demanding a resolution so he stops losing conversions. I usually try to avoid Magento because of all the headaches that come with it, but I figured "sure, why not?" I mean, he built the website less than a year ago, so how bad can it really be? Well...let's see how fast you all can facepalm:

1.) The website was built brand new on Magento 1.9.2.4...what? I mean, if this were built a few years back, that would be a different story, but building a fresh Magento website in 2017 in 1.x? I asked him why he did that...his answer absolutely floored me: "because PHP 5.5 was the best choice at the time for speed and performance..." What?!

2.) The ONLY optimization done on the website was Redis cache being enabled. No merged CSS/JS, no use of a CDN, no image optimization, no gzip, no expires rules. Just Redis...

3.) Now to say the website was poorly coded was an understatement. This wasn't the worst coding I've seen, but it was far from acceptable. There was no organization whatsoever. Templates and skin assets are being called from across 12 different locations on the server, making tracking down and finding a snippet to fix downright annoying.

But not only that, the home page itself had 83 custom database queries to load the products on the page. He said this was so he could load products from several different categories and custom tables to show on the page. I asked him why he didn't just call a few join queries, and he had no idea what I was talking about.

4.) Almost every image on the website was a .PNG file, 2000x2000 px and lossless. The home page alone was 22MB just from images.

There were several other issues, but those 4 should be enough to paint a good picture. The client wanted this all done in a week for less than $500. We laughed. But we agreed on the price only because of a long relationship and because they have some referrals they got us in the door with. But we told them it would get done on our time, not theirs. So I copied the website to our server as a test bed and got to work.

After numerous hours of bug fixes, recoding queries, disabling Redis and opting for higher innodb cache (more on that later), image optimization, js/css/html combining, render-unblocking and minification, lazyloading images tweaking Magento to work with PHP7, installing OpCache and setting up basic htaccess optimizations, we smash the loading time down to 1.2 seconds total, and most of that time was for external JavaScript plugins deemed "necessary". Time to First Byte went from a staggering 2.2 seconds to about 45ms. Needless to say, we kicked its ass.

So I show their developer the changes and he's stunned. He says he'll tell the hosting provider create a new server set up to migrate the optimized site over and cut over to, because taking the live website down for maintenance for even an hour or two in the middle of the night is "unacceptable".

So trying to be cool about it, I tell him I'd be happy to configure the server to the exact specifications needed. He says "we can't do that". I look at him confused. "What do you mean we 'can't'?" He tells me that even though this is a dedicated server, the provider doesn't allow any access other than a jailed shell account and cPanel access. What?! This is a company averaging 3 million+ per year in revenue. Why don't they have an IT manager overseeing everything? Apparently for them, they're too cheap for that, so they went with a "managed dedicated server", "managed" apparently meaning "you only get to use it like a shared host".

So after countless phone calls arguing with the hosting provider, they agree to make our changes. Then the client's developer starts getting nasty out of nowhere. He says my optimizations are not acceptable because I'm not using Redis cache, and now the client is threatening to walk away without paying us.

So I guess the overall message from this rant is not so much about the situation, but the developer and countless others like him that are clueless, but try to speak from a position of authority.

If we as developers don't stop challenging each other in a measuring contest and learn to let go when we need help, we can get a lot more done and prevent losing clients. </rant>

QA: Why have you sent this for testing? it's not working!

Me: Have you cleared your cache?

QA: Oh

-> "cs" friend wants to install "linux" on his laptop
->won't do it himself cuz cuckhole is afraid of ruining his original windows installation
->shitfuck bugging me for months and I always deny saying he needs to learn this shit too
->finally decide to help him, get a "linux" and go to the craphole he dwells in
->laptop looks high end, bezel less and what not. Also has a 120gigs ssd.
-> decide to partition it. Shit.
->ssd has less dan 40gigs left. Check and see there's ntn but a few store apps and visual studio installed+some personal data. Hmm where the fuck is the missing space.
->few mins of fkin shit around, decide to see size of windows installation
->nope
->nope
->nopenopenope
->windows+fuckYouUpdates takes > 50gigs of Precious and COSTLY ssd space
->tell my friend to reset windows, he denies and i nope the fuck outta there.(ik uninstalling updates and clearing cache and stuff might release space but not spending my whole fkin eve doing that thanks)

I don't hate windows, i love pc gaming but THIS is some shady shit microsoft fuck u and your worthless imbecile space sucking updates

I hate setting up case statements cause it's hard to cover every case. What if a virus puts a gun to my programs head? What if my program is at a cache party and chrome offers it weed? What if my program isn't gay, but $20 is $20?

Spent 4 hours debugging a “button” styling, worked fine locally but not on production.!

After striking out “cache” issues, “browser” versions, “fonts”, “sass errors” the error was with a stupid chrome extension that appended a css class attribute to the “HTML” tag 😡

And the other developer thought that was a part of what was written in the code !!

Hate these kinda plugins that manipulate the DOM 😪

P S the plugin is "Grammarly".

I hate time.

Yes, that dimension which unidirectionally rushes by and makes us miss deadlines.

Also yes, that object in most programming languages which chokes to death on formatting conversions, timezones, DST transitions and leap seconds.

But above all, I hate doing chronological things from the point of view of code, because it always involves scheduling and polling of some kind, through cron jobs and queues with workers.

When the web of actions dependent on predicted future and passed past events becomes complicated, the queries become heavy... and with slow queries, queues might lock or get delayed just a little bit...

So you start caching things in faster places, figure out ways to predict worker/thread priorities and improve scheduling algorithms.

But then you start worrying about cache warming and cascading, about hashing results and flushing data, about keeping all those truths in sync...

I had a nightmare last night.

I was a watchmaker, and I had to fix a giant ticking watch, forced to run like a mouse while poking at gears.

I fucking need a break. But time ticks on...

I've started to do some time tracking and just after one day of doing it I noticed that I can't get more that 10 mins working without someone interrupting me.

I love to help and hate to say no, but this is killing my productivity and delaying my work.

Most of the time my help isn't really needed too. "Did you clear the cache?" "Did you run yarn install after pulling?" "Let me look at the stack trace/error message." Sentences like these are all I need to say most of the time.

Did my coworkers get lazy because I'm there to help? Should I start say "not now" more often? Or should I just look for a better team somewhere else?

I think I made someone angry, then sad, then depressed.

I usually shrink a VM before archiving them, to have a backup snapshot as a template. So Workflow: prepare, test, shrink, backup -> template, document.

Shrinking means... Resetting root user to /etc/skel, deleting history, deleting caches, deleting logs, zeroing out free HD space, shutdown.

Coworker wanted to do prep a VM for docker (stuff he's experienced with, not me) so we can mass rollout the template for migration after I converted his steps into ansible or the template.

I gave him SSH access, explained the usual stuff and explained in detail the shrinking part (which is a script that must be explicitly called and has a confirmation dialog).

Weeeeellll. Then I had a lil meeting, then the postman came, then someone called.

I had... Around 30 private messages afterwards...

- it took him ~ 15 minutes to figure out that the APT cache was removed, so searching won't work
- setting up APT lists by copy pasta is hard as root when sudo is missing....
- seems like he only uses aliases, as root is a default skel, there were no aliases he has in his "private home"
- Well... VIM was missing, as I hate VIM (personal preferences xD)... Which made him cry.
- He somehow achieved to get docker working as "it should" (read: working like he expects it, but that's not my beer).

While reading all this -sometimes very whiney- crap, I went to the fridge and got a beer.

The last part was golden.

He explicitly called the shrink script.
And guess what, after a reboot... History was gone.

And the last message said:

Why did the script delete the history? How should I write the documentation? I dunno what I did!

*sigh* I expected the worse, got the worse and a good laugh in the end.

Guess I'll be babysitting tomorrow someone who's clearly unable to think for himself and / or listen....

Yay... 4h plus phone calls. *cries internally*

Today I spent several hours arguing with a client. Why? Because she's seeing an error on her website, and no matter how many times I explain to her that she's the only one seeing a css misalignment that was fixed this morning, and that she should clear the browser's cache or just use a different one, she refuses to understand that it's not my fault and that the website that's in production is working just fine for her users.

FFS I tested the same thing on Firefox Chrome, chromium, edge and even fucking IE8 on as many OSs as I can, namely Windows 7, Windows 10, Debian, Ubuntu, Android and OSX.

WHY DO YOU KEEP BLAMING ME FOR YOUR BROWSERS CACHE. SHUT THE FUCK UP AND ACCEPT YOU WERE WRONG FOR THE FIRST TIME IN YOUR LIFE.

Uffff, that feels better.

God I hate Liferay.... now I had to make bkend to make ws calls to frontend just to keep LR cache happy. Is there at least one sane soul who likes that thing?

There are always days when everything related to school projects seems to hate me. In example we have to create a tunnel from our own computers to access uni's private server and suddenly mine stopped working. Me and my classmate were trying to figure it out for 1,5 hour and even our teacher didnt understand the hell was happening and in the end we found out that even tho we deleted the faulty line from host file the firefox still had it in its cache

!rant
I fucking hate maven and its shitty principles and the pain in the ass it fucking is to fucking use a dependency from another fucking repo that isn't in your fucking artifactory yet and how it can't fucking resolve it even when you downloaded it manually to your fucking m2 cache

Most hate/love thing. Cache.

I hate group project so much.

I yet again successfully stirred up a big drama in my project group. For project, I proposed a CDN cache system for a post only database server. Super simple. I wanted to see what ideas other people come up with. So I said I am not good at the content and the idea is dumb. Oh man, what a horrible mistake. One group member wants to build a chat app with distributed storage. We implemented get/put for a terribly designed key value store and now they want to build a freaking chat app on top of a more stupid kV store using golang standard lib. I don't think any of those fools understand the challenges that comes with the distributed storage.

I sent a video explaining part of crdt. "That's way too complicated. Why are you making everything complicated."

Those fools leave too much details for course stuff's interpretation and says

"course stuff will only grade the project according to the proposal. It's in the project description".

I asked why don't they just take baby steps and just go with their underlying terribly designed kV store.

"Messaging app is more interesting and designing kV store with generic API is just as difficult"

😂 Fucking egos

Then I successfully pissed off all group members with relatively respectful words then pissed off myself and joined another group.

#Suphle Rant 3: Road to PHP8, Flow travails

Some primer: Flows is a feature that causes the framework to bypass handling the request now but read it from cache. This cache entry is meant to be populated without warming, based on the preceding request. It's sort of like prefetching but done on the back end

While building Suphle, I made some notes on some chapters about caveats and gotchas I may forget while documenting. One such note was that when users make the Flow request, the framework will attempt to determine who user is, using authentication mechanism defined on the first module (of the modular monolith)

Now, I got to this point during documentation and started wondering whether it's impossible for the originating request to have used a different authentication mechanism, which would result in an empty entry for returning user. I *think* it's possible cuz I've got something else called "route mirroring", where web based routes can be converted to API routes. They'll then return JSON, get served under defined API path, use JWT, all automatically. But I just couldn't connect the dots for the life of me, regarding how any of this could impact authentication on the Flow request

While trying to figure out how to write the test for this or whether it was even necessary (since I had no use case), it struck me that since Flow requests are not triggered by an actual user, any code attempting to read authenticated user will see nothing!

I HATE it when I realize there's ambiguity or an oversight, after the amount of attention and suffering devoted. This, along with a chain of personal troubles set off despondency for a couple of days. No appetite for food or talk. Grudgingly refactored in this update over some days. Wrote some tests, not all passed. More pain. May have to convert them to unit tests

For clarity, my expectation is, I built this. Nothing should be impossible for me

Surprisingly, I caught a somewhat lucky break –an ex colleague referred me to the 1st gig I'm getting in 1+ year. It's about writing a plugin for some obscure forum software. I'm not too excited cuz it's poorly documented and I'll have to do a lot of groping, they use arrays instead of objects etc. There's no guarantee I'll find how to implement all client's requirements

While brooding last night, surfing the PHP subreddit, stumbled on a post about using Rector to downgrade a codebase. I've always been interested in the reverse but didn't have any incentive to fret over it. Randomly googled and saw a post promising a codebase can be upgraded with 3 commands in 5 minutes to PHP 8. Piqued my interest around 12:something AM. Stayed up all night upgrading it, replacing PHPSTAN with Psalm, initializing the guy's project, merging Flow auth with master etc. I think it may have taken 5 minutes without the challenge of getting local dev environment to PHP 8

My mood is much lighter than it was, although the battle is not won yet –image tests are failing. For some weird reason, PHP8 can't read generated test images. Hope I can ride on that newfound lease on life to study the forum and get the features working

I have some other rant but this is already a lot to digest in one sitting. See you in rant #4

Is there an Android media player that doesn't take over headset buttons, doesn't store a history, doesn't search for media to play, and doesn't do shit when off when you accidentally hit your headset button?

Is the headset button thing just an Android 11 problem?

I use vlc for the desktop and it does exactly what I want. On Android it takes over headset buttons and plays last file even after being completely shutdown and history is disabled. I HATE apps that do shit without you telling them to. The only way to fix this in vlc is to clear its cache and history manually in its settings and then forcing it to restart the app. Another thing vlc did was have full screen controls when I swiped right when the phone was fucking locked! I cannot remember what I did to disable that, but that was not cool at all. I think that was some fucked up android 11 feature.

I tried MX Player and it has zero options for disabling history.

So I figured I would ask here. Are there any non-shitty media players for Android?

I am so close to saying fuck you android 11 and sending the damn phone back. I hate the automatic shit I have to figure out how to turn off every time I do something. Leave me the fuck alone until I tell you to do something you pos phone.