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Search - "i'm still not wrong"
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Oh my god... Storytime.
A customer comes in with I assume is his father or grandfather.
Customer: I need a computer, but without all the internals
Me: So a case?
Customer: Yes, I need a Dell computer outsides, but without the internal components.
Me: Well, we don't have Dell cases, but we sell custom build cases and they come with a power supply.
Customer: *says nothing, but looks interested*
Me: *walks over to the cases to show him* So this is what the cases look like and we have two types, one for a ATX and one for a micro-ATX.
Customer: *still says nothing, but looks at them*
Me: What motherboard do you have at the moment?
Customer: Well, I don't have anything right now, but I'm replacing another computer that didn't work very well. I'm going to be getting some Dell parts to put in here.
Me: O-okay. So this other computer, I'd like to see it in shop to see what's going on with it.
Customer: Oh, you do NOT want to do that. I hooked it up to another computer and it blew it up.
Me: Huh, that's weird. I'd still like to look at it if possible.
Customer: Oh no, it's all wired wrong and... *some bullshit, but stay with me*
Customer: I am the best at technology. My hand has computer parts in it--government funded. *some more bullshit*
Me: Okay... *I try to bring it back around* Well, I'd still like to see the other computer for myself. So you don't have parts for this new build yet, right? You don't know what type of motherboard you have?
Customer: No.
Me: Well, I would get the internals first, so you know what size of case to get, and then get the case.
Customer: Okay. Thank you for your time.
He shook my hand with his "cyborg" hand and I was tempted to say something about "try not to crush my hand," but elected not to. Also during this entire exchange, the old man continuously farted in the background.22 -
I'm a self-taught 19-year-old programmer. Coding since 10, dropped out of high-school and got fist job at 15.
In the the early days I was extremely passionate, learning SICP, Algorithms, doing Haskell, C/C++, Rust, Assembly, writing toy compilers/interpreters, tweaking Gentoo/Arch. Even got a lambda tattoo on my arm after learning lambda-calculus and church numerals.
My first job - a company which raised $100,000 on kickstarter. The CEO was a dumb millionaire hippie, who was bored with his money, so he wanted to run a company even though he had no idea what he was doing. He used to talk about how he build our product, even tho he had 0 technical knowledge whatsoever. He was on news a few times which was pretty cringeworthy. The company had only 1 programmer (other than me) who was pretty decent.
We shipped the project, but soon we burned through kickstart money and the sales dried off. Instead of trying to aquire customers (or abandoning the project), boss kept looking for investors, which kept us afloat for an extra year.
Eventually the money dried up, and instead of closing gates, boss decreased our paychecks without our knowledge. He also converted us from full-time employees to "contractors" (also without our knowledge) so he wouldn't have to pay taxes for us. My paycheck decreased by 40% by I still stayed.
One day, I was trying to burn a USB drive, and I did "dd of=/dev/sda" instead of sdb, therefore wiping out our development server. They asked me to stay at company, but I turned in my resignation letter the next day (my highest ever post on reddit was in /r/TIFU).
Next, I found a job at a "finance" company. $50k/year as a 18-year-old. CEO was a good-looking smooth-talker who made few million bucks talking old people into giving him their retirement money.
He claimed he changed his ways, and was now trying to help average folks save money. So far I've been here 8 month and I do not see that happening. He forces me to do sketchy shit, that clearly doesn't have clients best interests in mind.
I am the only developer, and I quickly became a back-end and front-end ninja.
I switched the company infrastructure from shitty drag+drop website builder, WordPress and shitty Excel macros into a beautiful custom-written python back-end.
Little did I know, this company doesn't need a real programmer. I don't have clear requirements, I get unrealistic deadlines, and boss is too busy to even communicate what he wants from me.
Eventually I sold my soul. I switched parts of it to WordPress, because I was not given enough time to write custom code properly.
For latest project, I switched from using custom React/Material/Sass to using drag+drop TypeForms for surveys.
I used to be an extremist FLOSS Richard Stallman fanboy, but eventually I traded my morals, dreams and ideals for a paycheck. Hey, $50k is not bad, so maybe I shouldn't be complaining? :(
I got addicted to pot for 2 years. Recently I've gotten arrested, and it is honestly one of the best things that ever happened to me. Before I got arrested, I did some freelancing for a mugshot website. In un-related news, my mugshot dissapeared.
I have been sober for 2 month now, and my brain is finally coming back.
I know average developer hits a wall at around $80k, and then you have to either move into management or have your own business.
After getting sober, I realized that money isn't going to make me happy, and I don't want to manage people. I'm an old-school neck-beard hacker. My true passion is mathematics and physics. I don't want to glue bullshit libraries together.
I want to write real code, trace kernel bugs, optimize compilers. Albeit, I was boring in the wrong generation.
I've started studying real analysis, brushing up differential equations, and now trying to tackle machine learning and Neural Networks, and understanding the juicy math behind gradient descent.
I don't know what my plan is for the future, but I'll figure it out as long as I have my brain. Maybe I will continue making shitty forms and collect paycheck, while studying mathematics. Maybe I will figure out something else.
But I can't just let my brain rot while chasing money and impressing dumb bosses. If I wait until I get rich to do things I love, my brain will be too far gone at that point. I can't just sell myself out. I'm coming back to my roots.
I still feel like after experiencing industry and pot, I'm a shittier developer than I was at age 15. But my passion is slowly coming back.
Any suggestions from wise ol' neckbeards on how to proceed?32 -
Linux sucks.
Now now, chill. I'm using it as my main OS for a few years now. I know what I'm talking and this title is a bit click-baity, but this just has to go out there:
1. It's usable as a Windows replacement just fine - FALSE. XFCE4 is years old and buggy as hell especially on multi-monitor set-up, Gnome3 gets stuck more often than my Windows 98 machine used to, KDE is like a rich kid on meth. Plug in Bluetooth headphones? Well no, sorry, you have to research that online, since you'll probably need to install some packages for it to work. Did I say "work"? Well no, because after more research you realize that Debian on Gnome3 on gdm3 launches pulseaudio on its own, so you have 2 instances of pulseaudio, and one of them is stealing your headphones sometimes and you either have no sound or shitty sound. How do I know that you ask? The same way I know everything else - every time you try to do something new on any Linux, it involves a ton of research. Exciting research, don't get me wrong, but at this point it looks more like a toy than a reliable desktop computer operating system.
2. And why am I using pulseaudio? Why not alsa? years ago people were discussing on forums that pulseaudio is old and dead, yet here we are with new LTS release of Ubuntu still shining with Pulseaudio. How about several different service management systems being deprecated by new ones, each having different configurations and calling methods? Apparently systemd is old and lame now. It's a mix of 10 year old software that works badly, with a 5 year old replacement that works worse, somehow trying to live under the same roof. Does it work? Ask my headphones who sound like a fucking dial-up modem.
3. Let's talk about displays, shall we? xorg is old and deprecated, right? We got Wayland that's mostly stable. Don't know what that is? That's just basic knowledge for Linux. And when you try to install network-manager, it also tries to install Mir toolkits. Because why the fuck not install 3 display managers when you want a network manager, of which one is old and dying, one is young and stupid, and another is an infant that died of cancer?
4. Want to integrate with Google Drive? Yeah, there's a tool that mounts the drive as a local directory. Yeah only for Ubuntu. Want it on Debian? You need to compile it. Oh wait, it's on Ocaml, because fuck mainstream languages, we're hipsters. How do you compile Ocaml? Well you need to have Ocaml on your system, dummy. How do you do that? Well you need to compile Ocaml. Ok, how do I do that? Well, git clone, download and install some dependencies, configure, make... oh sorry, you're using libssl1.0.2g when you need libssl1.0.1f, nope, sorry, won't work. Want to install libssl1.0.1f? Why? You already have the "g", stupid! Want to remove libssl1.0.2g? Bye-bye literally everything that you have on your PC. But at least you got the "f". Does it work now? Well no, because you need libssl1.0.2g for another dependency to work.
And all I ever wanted was to get a fucking document from google drive (not nudes, I promise).
5. Want to watch a movie? Let me tear that screen in half and make the bottom half late by a couple of frames, because who needs vertical sync, right? Oh you do? Well install the native drivers maybe. Oh you have? Welcome to eternal Boot to Recovery mode, motherfucka!
---------------------------------
Yeah, most of the times things work just fine. But the reason I know what those things are and how they work is not curiosity. The reason that I know the inner workings of Linux much better than the inner workings of Windows, is because in those few years that I've been using it full time, it has caused me 10 times more headache than I have ever experienced with other systems. And it's not the usual annoyances like "OMG it rebooted when I didn't ask it to", but more like "Oh, it won't work and I need 2 days to find out why" kind of stuff, because even if you experience the same thing again, it's always caused by some new shit and the old solution won't work any more.
I still love it, and will continue to use it. I don't know why really. Maybe because I'm not afraid of fucking it up any more? Maybe because I can do what I want in it and recovering will be easier than on Windows?
It's a toy for me, after all these years. And I also use it for professional reasons.
But whenever someone presents it as a better alternative to Windows, I just want to puke.51 -
1. Have some issue with my code which spits out cryptic compiler error.
2. Ask on stack overflow, Reddit, etc for a solution.
3. Get scolded at for "not reading the documentation" and "asking questions which could be answered by just Googling". Still no clue what I'm doing wrong, or what the solution would be.
4. Find someone else's vaguely related problem.
5. Post my problematic code as the answer, with arrogant comment about OP being a retard for not figuring that out for themselves.
6. A dozen angry toxic nerds flock in to tell me how retarded and wrong I am, correcting me... solving my original problem.
7. Evil plan succeeded, my code compiles, and as a bonus I made the internet a worse place in the process.
I think if you tell a bunch of autistic neckbeards that "all coronaviruses are fundamentally incurable", you'd have a vaccine within a week.15 -
LONG RANT AHEAD!
In my workplace (dev company) I am the only dev using Linux on my workstation. I joined project XX, a senior dev onboarded me. Downloaded the code, built the source, launched the app,.. BAM - an exception in catalina.out. ORM framework failed to map something.
mvn clean && mvn install
same thing happens again. I address this incident to sr dev and response is "well.... it works on my machine and has worked for all other devs. It must be your environment issue. Prolly linux is to blame?" So I spend another hour trying to dig up the bug. Narrowed it down to a single datamodel with ORM mapping annotation looking somewhat off. Fixed it.
mvn clean && mvn install
the app now works perfectly. Apparently this bug has been in the codebase for years and Windows used to mask it somehow w/o throwing an exception. God knows what undefined behaviour was happening in the background...
Months fly by and I'm invited to join another project. Sounds really cool! I get accesses, checkout the code, build it (after crossing the hell of VPNs on Linux). Run component 1/4 -- all goocy. run component 2,3/4 -- looks perfect. Run component 4/4 -- BAM: LinkageError. Turns out there is something wrong with OSGi dependencies as ClassLoader attempts to load the same class twice, from 2 different sources. Coworkers with Windows and MACs have never seen this kind of exception and lead dev replies with "I think you should use a normal environment for work rather than playing with your Linux". Wtf... It's java. Every env is "normal env" for JVM! I do some digging. One day passes by.. second one.. third.. the weekend.. The next Friday comes and I still haven't succeeded to launch component #4. Eventually I give up (since I cannot charge a client for a week I spent trying to set up my env) and walk away from that project. Ever since this LinkageError was always in my mind, for some reason I could not let it go. It was driving me CRAZY! So half a year passes by and one of the project devs gets a new MB pro. 2 days later I get a PM: "umm.. were you the one who used to get LinkageError while starting component #4 up?". You guys have NO IDEA how happy his message made me. I mean... I was frickin HIGH: all smiling, singing, even dancing behind my desk!! Apparently the guy had the same problem I did. Except he was familiar with the project quite well. It took 3 more days for him to figure out what was wrong and fix it. And it indeed was an error in the project -- not my "abnormal Linux env"! And again for some hell knows what reason Windows was masking a mistake in the codebase and not popping an error where it must have popped. Linux on the other hand found the error and crashed the app immediatelly so the product would not be shipped with God knows what bugs...
I do not mean to bring up a flame war or smth, but It's obvious I've kind of saved 2 projects from "undefined magical behaviour" by just using Linux. I guess what I really wanted to say is that no matter how good dev you are, whether you are a sr, lead or chief dev, if your coworker (let it be another sr or a jr dev) says he gets an error and YOU cannot figure out what the heck is wrong, you should not blame the dev or an environment w/o knowing it for a fact. If something is not working - figure out the WHATs and WHYs first. Analyze, compare data to other envs,... Not only you will help a new guy to join your team but also you'll learn something new. And in some cases something crucial, e.g. a serious messup in the codebase.11 -
Summary of the summary: Boss is an asshole. Root gets angry; boss leaves instead of picking a fight for once. This makes Root sad (and really angry).
Summary: Root has another interaction with her boss. The boss is an asshole. Root is a bitch. Root would have been so so so much more of a bitch if the boss actually fucking responded. Root is sad this didn't happen. Root might have gotten fired. That would have made Root happy. :<
-------------
Le wild blackout appears!
-- Conference call (the short-short version) --
Boss: *freaks out* Fix it! Why aren't you fixing it? You have to fix it.
Me: I'm already fixing it. 😕
Boss: You have to fix it! This is important!
Me: Then let's get off this call so I can focus on fixing it!
Boss: Okay but fix it! *begrudgingly hangs up*
-- Slack --
Me: (posting a running log of what I'm doing) This is what i discovered. this is the cause. these are the possible fixes. I picked this one because it's quick and has few consequences, though it may break ____ so it'll need followup fixes. I'll do those tomorrow. Blackout resolved!
Boss: (apparently doesn't even noticed I fixed his shitty service)
-- Next day --
Boss: I want you to work on [stupid shit] instead.
Me: But what about the followup fixes?
Boss: Top priority! because customer service!
Me: ... fine.
-- Next week (verbatim because wtf) --
Boss: Did we test that [resolution] on ______? No one thought to test this. It didnt cross anyones mind at all? Either you guys can make good decisions and document concerns or I have to be part of every decision [...]. But this is basic. SHould have been a team heads up and said if we are switching this what can it break and can we test it. [sic]
Me: Did you want me to resolve the blackout quickly and allow people to actually use our service, or spend two days checking everything that might possibly have gone wrong? I weighed the possibilities and picked the solution with the quickest implementation with the fewest consequences. You're welcome.
Me: (Quotes boss's "SHould have been a team heads up" and links my "this is what could go wrong" heads-up in Slack)
Boss: (pretends not to even notice)
Boss: (talks about customer service related crap)
What a fucking loser.
I'm so angry he didn't respond and start in on me over it. I wanted to tear him to shreds in front of everyone.
Related:
He tried adding another huge project to my plate earlier today, and I started flipping out on him for all these shitty sales features he keeps dumping on me in place of real work that i still get blamed for not finishing. The contractor stepped in before it got too heated, though, which is probably best because my reaction was pretty unprovoked. The above rant, though? Asshole doesn't read, just blames and yells when he's angry.
I really hate him.20 -
Last day on the contract from hell. I'd written a project with one other person in our spare time that performed a critical business function. The following conversation was had between myself, the job thief who was handed my job and their manager, with the 10 other IBM GS "dev domain experts" assigned to that team sitting silently on zoom:
Moi: hey all, what seems to be the problem?
JT: how to update the java for requirement?
Moi: I would assume a text editor, have you tried intellij
JTM: she's talking about ticket BS-101, the data is wrong
Moi: ah, well, you might want to fix that
JT: how to fix?
Moi: update the database and update the logic that depends on it
JTM: what changes are those?
Moi: the ones described in the ticket, I would assume, I'm no longer on that project
JTM: didn't you write this application?
Moi: yes.
JTM: ok, so do you know how to fix the issue?
Moi: definitely
JTM: ok... ... Can you tell us how to fix it?
Moi: yes.
*The sound of silence*
JTM: *will* you tell us?
Moi: I would, but I'm already off the clock, and as of an hour ago I no longer have a contract. And even if I did, I don't have a contract or authorization to work on that system. I'm not actually being paid for this call.
JTM: ... What are we going to do about this?
Moi: I have no idea
JTM: ok, so we can look at getting a 1 month contract to support this
Moi: I'm sure our firm has someone who can definitely help you out
JTM: *heavy raging* ... Can you do the work?
Moi: Unfortunatley, I'm already committed to a new contract at another customer. I also don't do one month contracts. I'm an engineer, not a car wash employee
JTM: well, I don't understand how you can just leave us in the lurch like this?!
Moi: well, respectfully, it was your decision to cut me from the budget because you thought you were close enough to end of the project to get it across the line with junior resources.
Interjecting-JT: I am senior!
Moi: Right. So, basically, you took ownership of the product before go live. We advised against it, in writing, numerous times. We also notified you that we would not carry a bench, so the project resources are now working on other things. We can provide you with new resources for a minimum 6 month duration who can help you out. Also, since we've cycled out, our rate has increased per the terms of our MSA.
JTM: we don't have budget for that! How are we supposed to do this?!
Moi: *zoom glare at JT* that question is more appropriate for your finance officer and the IT director. I can send a few emails and schedule a call with your account representative and the aforementioned individuals so you can hash this out.
-_---------------
I'm free! 🥳 That said, still plenty of residual fodder I need to get out of my system on these guys. Might need to start my own Dilbert.12 -
This rant is a confession I had to make, for all of you out there having a bad time (or year), this story is for you.
Last year, I joined devRant and after a month, I was hired at a local company as an IT god (just joking but not far from what they expected from me), developer, web admin, printer configurator (of course) and all that in my country it's just called "the tech guy", as some of you may know.
I wasn't in immediate need for a full-time job, I had already started to work as a freelancer then and I was doing pretty good. But, you know how it goes, you can always aim for more and that's what I did.
The workspace was the usual, two rooms, one for us employees and one for the bosses (there were two bosses).
Let me tell you right now. I don't hate people, even if I get mad or irritated, I never feel hatred inside me or the need to think bad of someone. But, one of the two bosses made me discover that feeling of hate.
He had a snake-shaped face (I don't think that was random), and he always laughed at his jokes. He was always shouting at me because he was a nervous person, more than normal. He had a tone in his voice like he knew everything. Early on, after being yelled for no reason a dozen of times, I decided that this was not a place for me.
After just two months of doing everything, from tech support to Photoshop and to building websites with WordPress, I gave my one month's notice, or so I thought. I was confronted by the bosses, one of which was a cousin of mine and he was really ok with me leaving and said that I just had to find a person to replace me which was an easy task. Now, the other boss, the evil one, looked me on the eye and said "you're not going anywhere".
I was frozen like, "I can't stay here". He smiled like a snake he was and said "come on, you got this we are counting on you and we are really satisfied with how you are performing till now". I couldn't shake him, I was already sweating. He was rolling his eyes constantly like saying "ok, you are wasting my time now" and left to go to some basketball practice or something.
So, I was stuck there, I could have caused a scene but as I told you, one of the bosses was a cousin of mine, I couldn't do anything crazy. So, I went along with it. Until the next downfall.
I decided to focus on the job and not mind for the bad boss situation but things went really wrong. After a month, I realised that the previous "tech guy" had left me with around 20 ancient Joomla - version 1.0 websites, bursting with security holes and infested with malware like a swamp. I had never seen anything like it. Everyday the websites would become defaced or the server (VPN) would start sending tons of spam cause of the malware, and going offline at the end. I was feeling hopeless.
And then the personal destruction began. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat. I was having panick attacks at the office's bathroom. My girlfriend almost broke up with me because I was acting like an asshole due to my anxiety issues (but in the end she was the one to "bring me back"(man, she is a keeper)) and I hadn't put a smile on my face for months. I was on the brink of depression, if not already there. Everyday I would anxiously check if the server is running because I would be the one to blame, even though I was trying to talk to the boss (the bad one was in charge of the IT department) and tell him about the problem.
And then I snapped. I finally realised that I had hit rock bottom. I said "I can't let this happen to me" and I took a deep breath. I still remember that morning, it was a life-changing moment for me. I decided to bite the bullet and stay for one more month, dealing with the stupid old server and the low intelligence business environment. So, I woke up, kissed my girlfriend (now wife), took the bus and went straight to work, and I went into the boss's office. I lied that I had found another job on another city and I had one month in order to be there on time. He was like, "so you are leaving? Is it that good a job the one you found? And when are you going? And are you sure?", and with no hesitation I just said "yup". He didn't expect it and just said "ok then", just find your replacement and you're good to go. I found the guy that would replace me, informing him of every little detail of what's going on (and I recently found out, that he is currently working for some big company nowadays, I'm really glad for him!).
I was surprised that it went so smoothly, one month later I felt the taste of freedom again, away from all the bullshit. Totally one of the best feelings out there.
I don't want to be cliche, but do believe in yourself people! Things are not what the seem.
With all that said, I want to give my special thanks to devRant for making this platform. I was inactive for some time but I was reading rants and jokes. It helped me to get through all that. I'm back now! Bless you devRant!
I'm glad that I shared this story with all of you, have an awesome day!15 -
API Guy.
He has a serious regex problem.
Regexes are never easy to read, but the ones he uses just take the cake. They're either blatantly wrong, or totally over-engineered garbage that somehow still lacks basic functionality. I think "garbage" here is a little too nice, since you can tell what garbage actually is/was without studying it for five minutes.
In lieu of an actual rant (mostly because I'm overworked), I'll just leave a few samples here. I recommend readying some bleach before you continue reading.
Not a valid url name regex:
VALID_URL_NAME_REGEX = /\A[\w\-]+\Z/
Semi-decent email regex: (by far the best of the four)
VALID_EMAIL_REGEX = /\A[\w+\-.]+@[a-z\d\-.]+\.[a-z]+\z/i
Over-engineered mess that only works for (most) US numbers:
VALID_PHONE_REGEX = /1?\s*\W?\s*([2-9][0-8][0-9])\s*\W?\s*([2-9][0-9]{2})\s*\W?\s*([0-9]{4})(\se?x?t?(\d*))?/
and for the grand finale:
ZIP_CODE_REGEX = /(^\d{5}(-\d{4})?$)|(^[ABCEGHJKLMNPRSTVXY]{1}\d{1}[A-Z]{1} *\d{1}[A-Z]{1}\d{1}$)|GIR[ ]?0AA|((AB|AL|B|BA|BB|BD|BH|BL|BN|BR|BS|BT|CA|CB|CF|CH|CM|CO|CR|CT|CV|CW|DA|DD|DE|DG|DH|DL|DN|DT|DY|E|EC|EH|EN|EX|FK|FY|G|GL|GY|GU|HA|HD|HG|HP|HR|HS|HU|HX|IG|IM|IP|IV|JE|KA|KT|KW|KY|L|LA|LD|LE|LL|LN|LS|LU|M|ME|MK|ML|N|NE|NG|NN|NP|NR|NW|OL|OX|PA|PE|PH|PL|PO|PR|RG|RH|RM|S|SA|SE|SG|SK|SL|SM|SN|SO|SP|SR|SS|ST|SW|SY|TA|TD|TF|TN|TQ|TR|TS|TW|UB|W|WA|WC|WD|WF|WN|WR|WS|WV|YO|ZE)(\d[\dA-Z]?[ ]?\d[ABD-HJLN-UW-Z]{2}))|BFPO[ ]?\d{1,4}/
^ which, by the way, doesn't match e.g. Australian zip codes. That cost us quite a few sales. And yes, that is 512 characters long.47 -
So Last year December my cousin see's me making a basic 3D game in Unity and says he wants to do programming.
Me: No, you don't want that. Become a doctor like your parents want you two.
Him: I'll do it.
Me: Ok. If you want to suffer, i'll teach you some basic C#
Me: *Shows him basic C# code in visual studio*
Him: *Not paying attention* Cool. When can i make games?
Me: That's not how this works. Where do you intend to study?
Him: M.I.T!
Me: You better get your ass infront of that fucken computer, google and youtube the shit out of you, matter of fact i'll get you a shit bucket so you don't have to get up.
Him: I don't have to go so hard now, i'm only 16.
Me: *Facepalm* That's why you have to do this now.
...7 months later...
(Yesterday)
Me: Show me how you make a basic calculator application.
Him: I don't know how to do that, you didn't show me.
Me: *laughing*
Him: Whats so funny?
Me: You're screwed *still laughing*
Don't get me wrong. He's a smart kid. Just needs to fucken do something if he wants his goal.13 -
How do I un-idiot my users when it comes to clicking on dodgy email-links??
Got a forwarded email just there from a user who said;
Good afternoon,
Is the below ok to open?
I just tried but got a popup saying I've been blocked from opening it.
I'm not sure who it is coming from and I am not waiting on anything but as it says its from dropbox and is important, i know it's okay.
Can you unblock the link ASAP please?
This is really impeding my work-day as I need to know what it is and act accordingly.
Regards... user.
The Original email came from a random jumble of letters with a subject line of 'important dropbox program' - not only does it look dodgy but its english is horrible! It said;
"Hi tu my freind,
You tu still read a pending verrry important document sent by one of your own contact to be vieweddd.
Install "Highly Confidential english.pdf" by clickinggg here
*insert link leading to something called 'viral-update-trojan.exe'*"
I mean, seriously... help!!! 😢
We have sent emails explaining how to hover over links and to not to click them if it looks wrong.
No one does it.
We hired a company to send fake phishing emails to train users in what to do.
It made no difference!
We now make people 'verify' their email addresses when opening any sort of link to try get them to actually look at what they're opening.
We also strip emails of original attachments and create 'safe' html copies as we can't trust them to look at what they're opening.
Everyone complains about it but Jesus Christ, this is why!!!
Its so exhausting!! What is wrong with people!!! Argh!!! 😤16 -
So I own a webshop together with a guy I met at one of my previous contract jobs. He said he had a great idea to sell product X because he can get them very cheap from another European country. Actually it is a great idea so we decided to work together on this: I do everything tech related, he does the non tech stuff.
Now we are more than 1 year in business. I setup a VPS, completely configured it, installed and setup the complete webshop, built 2 custom PrestaShop modules, built many customizations, built a completely new order proces (both front and back end), advertised quite some products, did some link building, ensured everything is in place to do proper SEO, wrote some content pages, did administration and tax declarations, rewrote a part of a PrestaShop component because it was so damn inefficient and horribly slow, and then some more. Much more.
He did customer relation management, supplier management and some ad words campaigns. Promised me many times to write the content for our product pages. This guy has an education in marketing but literally said: I'm not gonna invest in creating some marketing plan. I have no ambition in online marketing.
What?! You have the marketing knowledge and skills but refuse to use it to market our webshop and business? What the fuck is wrong with you?!
Today he says to me: 'Hey man, this is becoming an expensive hobby as we don't sell much and have lots of costs. I don't understand why I should be the one to write these content pages. Everything you did in the past 8 months can be done in less than 20 hours! You are a joke and just made it a big deal by spreading your work over so many months. I know for sure because I currently work at a company where I'm surrounded by front end devs! Are you fucking crazy?! You're a liar.'
He talks like this to me every 2 months or so while he can't even deliver the content for 1 single product in 6 fuckin' months! We even had to refund a few of our customers because Mr. client relations manager didn't respond to their e-mails within 1 fucking week!! So I asked him how could that have happened as you do the client relations and support. Well, he replied to me: 'Why didn't YOU respond to our clients? You don't log on in our back office at least once a day?!'.
Of course I do asshole. But YOU don't. He replied that I was lying just like I was lying about what I did for our business.
So, asshole, let's have a look at PrestaShops logs to see who's logging in daily. Well, you can probably guess who's IP was there in most of the entries. It wasn't his.
So, what the fuck have you been doing then?! You can't even manage to respond quickly to a client?!! We have maybe 50 clients and if we get 1 question a month by email it is already a lot. But you keep bitching, complaining and insulting me instead?!!!
Last time he literally admitted on a WhatsApp conversation that he had and still has the hope that he could just sit back and relax and watch me do ALL the work.
Well, guess what you fucking moron. That's not what we agreed upon. You fuckin' retard think you're so smart but you say EVERYTHING on WhatsApp! Including your promises to me. Thank you you fuckin' piece of dog shit because now I have hard evidence and will hand it over to my lawyer to make you pay every god damn cent for all the hours I've spent working on our business. Oh, and I'll take over the webshop and make it a success on my own because I know damn well how to get relevant traffic and thus customers.
You just go get yourself fucked in the ass without lubricant you fuckin' asshole. I have told you you shouldn't fuck with me because I take business very seriously. I even warned you when you were crossing a line again. Well, if you don't listen... You will pay for the consequences. I will be so damn happy to tell you 'I told you so' with a very very big smile on my face. That momemt WILL come, 'partner'.
Fuck you. You will be fucked. Count on that. Fucking asshole.8 -
I work at a small retail store and we have quite a few regular customers who know I'm studying computer science because I'm always coding at work on my laptop.
One lady who comes in quite often and is very sweet asked me if I would take a look at her phone. She said she bought it and paid the owner of a phone repair store to set it up for her, but was felt like he did something weird to it. I told her I wasn't an expert but would look at it.
Oh my god. This guy set up her phone connected to his own personal icloud account. All of his music was on there. All of his contacts were on there. All of his pictures were on there. Even nude pictures of multiple people that this lady said she definitely does not know. I tell her this is very very wrong and no one in their right mind should've set her phone up this way.
I automatically think to factory reset. I'm unfamiliar with iPhone, as the last time I used one was an iPhone4 many years ago. I was unaware that apple applies an authentication lock when the phone is reset.
The authentication is set up underneath yet ANOTHER email address that belongs to this guy, as this lady promised me she has no knowledge of any email address similar to the one listed, nor does she have access to it.
I tell her to call the guy and ask for her money back and to unlock her phone so that she can reset it herself.
He claims that he cannot accept refunds if a factory reset has been performed.
Uhm, I am calling SOOOOO much bullshit. There should be absolutely no reason why the owner of the phone cannot factory reset it. The owner should be able to do ANYTHING she wants with it, without being locked out of it because some creep at a repair store did NOT DO HIS JOB CORRECTLY AND HE KNOWS IT. Why else would he claim he can't refund if it's been reset, because he KNOWS she got locked out.
So long story short I talked on the phone with him and cussed him out telling him he was wrong for taking advantage of someone who doesn't know much about technology and that he was invading privacy and violating her security and that i would report him if he didn't fully refund her and unlock her phone.
He gave her all of her money back, unlocked the phone (which she is deciding to sell because she got so scared by this), and I'm still filing a complaint against this man and his store. Who knows how many more clueless people he did this too. Fucking scumbag.10 -
Welcome back to practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.
Episode 2: Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand
This is a particularly special episode for me, as these problems are taking up so much of my time with non-sensical bullshit, that i'm delayed with everything else. Some badly require tooling or new products. Some are just unnecessary processes or annoyances that should not need to be handled by another human. So lets jump right in, in no particular order:
- Jira ... nuff said? not quite because somehow some blue moon, planets aligning, act of god style set of circumstances lined up to allow this team to somehow make Jira worse. On one hand we have a gigantic Jira project containing 7 separate sub teams, a million different labels / epics and 4.2 million possible assignees, all making sure the loading page takes as long as possible to open. But the new country we've added support for in the app gets a separate project. So we have product, backend, mobile, design, management etc on one, and mobile-country2 on another. This delightfully means a lot of duplication and copy pasting from one to the other, for literally no reason what so ever.
- Everything on Jira is found through a label. Every time something happens, a new one is created. So I need to check for "iOS", "Android", "iOS-country2", "Android-country2", "mobile-<feature>", "mobile-<feature>-issues", "mobile-<feature>-prod-issues", "mobile-<feature>-existing-issues" and "<project>-July31" ... why July31? Because some fucking moron decided to do a round of testing, and tag all the issues with the current date (despite the fact Jira does that anyway), which somehow still gets used from time to time because nobody pays attention to what they are doing. This means creating and modifying filters on a daily basis ... after spending time trying to figure out what its not in the first one.
- One of my favourite morning rituals I like to call "Jira dumpster diving". This involves me removing all the filters and reading all the tickets. Why would I do such a thing? oh remember the 9000 labels I mentioned earlier? right well its very likely that they actually won't use any of them ... or the wrong ones ... or assign to the wrong person, so I have to go find them and fix them. If I don't, i'll get yelled at, because clearly it's my fault.
- Moving on from Jira. As some of you might have seen in your companies, if you use things like TestFlight, HockeyApp, AppCenter, BuddyBuild etc. that when you release a new app version for testing, each version comes with an automated change-log, listing ticket numbers addressed ...... yeah we don't do that. No we use this shitty service, which is effectively an FTP server and a webpage, that only allows you to host the new versions. Sending out those emails is all manual ... distribution groups?? ... whats that?
- Moving back to Jira. Can't even automate the changelog with a script, because I can't even make sense of the tickets, in order to translate that to a script.
- Moving on from Jira. Me and one of the remote testers play this great game I like to call "tag team ticketing". It's so much fun. Right heres how to play, you'll need a QA and a PM.
*QA creates a ticket, and puts nothing of any use inside it, and assigns to the PM.
*PM fires it back asking for clarification.
*QA adds in what he feels is clarification (hes wrong) and assigns it back to the PM.
*PM sends detailed instructions, with examples as to what is needed and assigns it back.
*QA adds 1 of the 3 things required and assigns it back.
*PM assigns it back saying the one thing added is from the wrong day, and reminds him about the other 2 items.
*QA adds some random piece of unrelated info to the ticket instead, forgetting about the 3 things and assigns it back.
and you just continue doing this for the whole dev / release cycle hahaha. Oh you guys have no idea how much fun it is, seriously give it a go, you'll thank me later ... or kill yourselves, each to their own.
- Moving back to Jira. I decided to take an action of creating a new project for my team (the mobile team) and set it up the way we want and just ignore everything going on around us. Use proper automation, and a kanban board. Maybe only give product a slack bot interface that won't allow them to create a ticket without what we need etc. Spent 25 minutes looking for the "create new project" button before finding the link which says I need to open a ticket with support and wait ... 5 ... fucking ... long ... painful ... unnecessary ... business days.
... Heres hoping my head continues to not have a bullet hole in it by then.
Id love to talk more, but those filters ain't gonna fix themselves. So we'll have to leave it here for today. Tune in again for another episode soon.
And remember to always practiseSafeHex13 -
Perhaps not "best", but certainly most amusing, so what the heck!
Years ago as an intern, I applied to a large pharmaceutical company. On part of the application form, you had to enter the code of the department you were applying to.
What I *should have* put down was "IT", which is the department that houses all their devs. However, I didn't actually read any of what the codes meant, assumed that was the department for helping people with how to mail merge, and put down "COMPSCI" instead. This was computational sciences - loosely summarised as computational data analysis on various druggable molecules.
I do *not* have any sort of biology or chemistry background, so the interview was rather... interesting, and I muddled through on the basis of getting some more interview practice assuming it was a no go.
To my amazement, got a phone call saying that they'd been thinking they wanted someone more technical on the team, and despite my lack of scientific experience they thought I'd be a good fit. I was unsure as to whether I should accept for a while, but then decided to just go for it - and had a fantastic internship there, working on a great variety of stuff, and learning tons all under a supervisor who I'm still in touch with to this day.
tl;dr - Applied for the wrong job. Coincidentally got it anyway, and miraculously had a fantastic year working there.8 -
Currently on an internship, PHP mostly, little bit of Python and the usual web stuff, and I just had the BEST FUCKING DAY EVER.
Wake up and find out I'm out of coffee, oh boy here we go.
Bus leaves 10 minutes late, great gonna miss my train.
Trains just don't wanna ride today, back in a bus I go, what's normally a 10 minute train travel is now a 90 minute bus ride.
Arrive at internship, coffee machine is broke, non problem, I'll just lose it slowly.
NOW HERE COMES THE FUCKING GOOD PART!!
Alright, so I'm working on a CMS that can be used just about on any device you want, mobile or desktop, it's huge, billion's of rows of scientific data. Very specific requirements and low error margins. Now, yesterday I was really enjoying myself here until today, Project manager walks in, comes to my desk and hands me a Samsung Gear S3, an Apple watch and some cheap knockoff. He tells me that before the Friday deploy, THE ENTIRE CMS SHOULD WORK ON THOSE WATCHES!
I mean, don't get me wrong, I like a challenge but it's just not right, I mean, I'm still not sure what the right way to handle tables on phones is, but smart watches, just no. Besides that, I've never worked with any Apple devices, let alone WatchOs, nor have I worked with Android Wear.
Also, Project Manager is a total dickhead, he's the kinda guy that prefers a light theme, doesn't clean up his code, writes 0 documentation for an API, 1 space = tab, pure horror.
So after almost flipping my desk, I just called my school coach to announce I'm leaving this internship. After a brief explanation he decides to come over, and guess what, according to the Project Manager I wasn't supposed to do that, I was supposed to test if it would be possible.
FUCKING ASSFUCKFACE9 -
Dev : Every user in your organisation requires their own username and password...
User: Why?
Dev: Because if everyone uses one account, every note, product, message etc made by all the user's will be saved to that one account and confuse the he'll out of everyone using it when they can't find their 'own' information they made/captured/downloaded.
We just need the user emails.
User:We can't give you all the user emails just use one account ....
(The reason for not providing us the emails is purely cause it would require user to do work and that's out of the question)
Dev: Uhm ok, but this is not what you want, and *interrupts*
User: It is what we want, do it like that everyone will understand and it will make the system easier.
*Two weeks later*
User: Why is there only one account? Why doesn't everybody have their own account? This is not what we wanted.
... The shit you have to deal with when you are on holiday ...undefined where to hide bodies you still thing it's our fault working even when i'm not working i was right and you were wrong stil my fucking problem6 -
So, basically i am getting desperate, and i'm also angry... and want to cry, and i feel a failure.
My biggest error in this story is "believing"
First of all, I'm a starting entrepreneur as freelancer, started of 6 months ago, back then it all seemed bright, i had my first customer, they believed me, got a second assignment for that same customer, fulfilled the task in brilliance, and was ready to move on to a bigger customer base. Here's where shit goes wrong.
Working with another office that outsources people to various (goverment) contractors, Had a meeting with them, we would cooperate very soon. This was january.
PM: "We've got a gov Dept as a customer that wants to do project XYZ and starting in february, requirements are yadiyadiyadi, you up for it?
Me:"Sure, send me the specs, and timeframe and i'll apply with my offer)"
Project is about a bit backup system migration, lots of fancy shmancy tech used, 2 datacenters setup... a big project that can take up several months...
- sends offer- received an acceptance on the offer
PM " Great, we'll start end of february"
Me: "Ok, end of february is a go then, looking forward to cooperate"
FF to near end of february, receive msg from PM: "Project XYZ delayed until half if march"
Me: "Okay... what is the delay?"
PM:"Govt bureaucracy"
Me " Ok, let's keep in touch"
Near Half of March
PM " Project delayed again".
Me: " Okay... what's the reason?"
PM: "they have decided to take a different approach, and want 3 datacenters now"
Me: "That will change the offer i made for you, can you send me the specs?"
PM: "No, because they havent decided on the techs used, expect end of march"
Me: "Okay...but once you got the specs,s end them to me"
End of March
Pm: " Hy NeatNerdPrime, we still havent got any specs yet... they still forgot to make the shopping list"
Me: "(-_-) ... I thought they already had that covered"
PM:" No, new Govt budget cuts and lots of changes, basically, they still don't know what they really want. But we're just -delayed- , not -cancelled-"
Me: "Okay... i hope we get started soon"
PM: "expect launch beginning of april"
I was not really satisfied with this explanation.... but ok
Beginning of april, at april's folls day
PM "Project delayed again"
Me: " This is a joke right?"
PM: "Sadly, no, they delayed the project since they don't really know what they actually want, we are trying to give them the proposed solution... but they still need approval, and still need to set up shopping list"
Me:"when do we start then?"
PM: " I was told 17th of april'
Me:" I really hope it gets through, i had to decline some proposals for work for months due to this, this ain't funny"
PM: "I know, i'll make up for it"
15th of april...
PM " Project delayed again"
Me right now almost losing my shit
"why this time??? I thought you said 17th of april real launch!"
PM: "they fired their PM, need to hire a new one, delayed until May/June"
Me: "I've set aside some other assignments just because you said you were going to launch at those dates... This is really pushing my limits, can you give me SOME assurances?"
PM: "5th of june would be official go" Me: " Okay, i'm noting 5th of june in my agenda, let's get this through!"
And now i get a message...stating that the date of 5th of june , is for another project, at the same goct dept, but totally different project
WHAT THE FUCKING SHIT I'VE SPENT MONTHS WAITING FOR A PROJECT THAT WAS PRACTICALLY ALL SET AND GO AND EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TIME IT GETS DELAYED, EVERY FUCKING TIME I THINK "you know, i cannot accept these offers since that Govt project will start soon, i cannot do 2 assignments at once especially when they require me to work at govt office at the capital..." AND EVERY FUCKING TIME IT GETS DELAYED!!!
I feel at a loss now..... i've done i think the most horrible thing you can do as a independent and that's not accepting another assignment just because there was a concrete promise for a govt contract...
Almost dried up, nothing much left, had to do some spending because of a move to another apartment... I'm feeling really down, and angry...and down, but mostly angry, for not accepting those offers in the meantime...undefined govt contracts why i'm so gullible promise promises written in butter wtf start dates fucking delays never refuse another assignment again13 -
Finally decided to quit from my current job. Fuck it. They still don't understand that an estimate is an approximation. They still don't understand that I have to fix all the shit made by all the contractors they hire and pay much more than me to implement solutions that work only until they leave the building, something that many barely understand but pretend to be experts in. I quit because of the managers that have no clue about what's happening although I stress them to make changes.
Should I care less about the product an just ship shit? Should I just do my tasks first and stop really helping others but pretend to do so?
Fuck it. I've tried to get it right they want it wrong but in a nice box. I'm an engineer not a fucking magician.12 -
I'm 20, and I consider myself to be as junior as they come. I only started programming seriously in June 2016,and since then, I've been doing mainly Android Work, and making my own servers and backends(using AWS/Firebase nd stuff).
For the first time in life, I was approached by a recruiter for a company on linkedIn. They "stumbled upon" my Github profile and wanted to see if I was interested in an internship opportunity. This company is an early stage start up, by that I mean a dude with an idea calling himself the CEO and a guy who "runs a tech blog" and only knows college level C programming (explaination follows).
So they want me to make the app for their startup. and for that, I ws first asked to solve a couple problems to prove my competence and a "technical interview" followed.
They gave me 3 questions, all textbook, GCD of 2 numbers, binary search and Adding an element to the linked List, code to be written on a piece of paper. As the position was that of an Android Developer, I assumed that Java should be the language of choice. Assumed because when I asked, the 'tech blogger' said, yeah whatever.
But wait, that ain't all, as soon as I was done, Mr. Blogger threw a fit, saying I shouldn't assume and that I must write it in C. I kept my cool (I'm not the most patient person), and wrote the whole thing in C.
He read it, and asked me what I've written and then told me how wrong I was to write 2 extra lines instead of recursion for GCD. I explained that with numbers large enough, we run the risk of getting a stackoverflow and it's best to apply non recursive solution if possible. He just heard stackoverflow and accused me of cheating. I should have left right then, but I don't know why, I apologized and again, in detail explained what was happening to this fucktard. Once this was done, He asked me how, if I had to, I'd use this exact code in my Android App. I told him that Id rather write this in Java/Kotlin since those are the languages native to Android apps. I also said that I'd export these as a Library and use JNI for the task. (I don't actually know how, I figured I can study if I have to).
Here's his reply, "WTF! We don't want to make the app in Java, we will use C (Yeh, not C++, C). and Don't use these fancy TOOLS like JNI or Kotlin in front of me, make a proper application."
By this I was clear that this guy is not fit to be technical lead and that I should leave. I said, "Sir, I don't know how, if even possible, can we make an Android App purely in C. I am sorry, but this job is not for me".
I got up and was about to leave the room, when we said, "Yeah okay, I was just testing you".
Yeah right, the guy's face looked like a howling monkey when I said Library for C, and It has been easier for me to explain code to my 10 year old cousin that this dumbfuck.
He then proceeded to ask me about my availability, and I said that I can at max to 15-20 hours a week since my college schedule is pretty tight. I asked me to get him a prototype in 2 months and also offered me a full time job after I graduate. (That'd be 2 years from now). I said thank you for the offer, but I am still not sure of I am the right person for this job.
He then said, "Oh you will be when I tell you your monthly stipend."
I stopped for a second, because, money.
And then he proceeded to say 2 words which made me walk out without saying a single word.
"One Thousand".
I live in India, 1000 INR translates to roughly $15. I made 25 times that by doing nothing more than add a web view to an activity and render a company's responsive website in it so it looks like an app.
If this wasn't enough, the recruiter later had the audacity to blame me for it and tell me how lucky I am to even get an offer "so good".
Fuck inexperienced assholes trying shit they don't understand and thinking that the other guy is shitsworth.10 -
QA: Please Look at this Defect.
Me: Okay not a problem!
QA: Thanks
Me: <Starts to look at Defect>
QA: 2 mins later. Do you have an ETA on when it will be fixed?
Me: Not yet, I'm still looking at it.
QA: Do you know what time it can be fixed? I have a deadline.
Me: I don't know what's wrong yet, I can't tell you when it will be fixed if I don't know what's wrong.
QA: Okay. Update Me.
Me: Opens Dev Rant.5 -
Root encounters HR at her new job.
So, I left my job a few weeks ago. I was pretty sad about it, so I didn't want to write anything about it. It was a great place to work, with great managers, decent coworkers, and interesting work. I also had free reign over how I built things, what to improve, etc. Within about four months, I authored over half of the total commits on their backend repo, added a testing suite with 90% coverage, significantly improved the security (more accurately: added security), etc. but I got a job offer that allowed me to work remotely, and make well over six figures (usd). I couldn't turn it down, even though I wanted to. So, I left. I'm still genuinely sad about that. I had emotions and everything. 🙁 I stayed on long enough to finish the last of the features for their new product launch, and make sure everything was stable. I'm welcome back whenever, though they don't want to have remote employees, and I want to move, so. that's probably not going to happen. sigh.
Anyway, I started my new job this week. Rented an office (read: professional closet) and everything! It's been veritable mountains of HR paperwork so far. That's all I've done besides some accounts setup. I've seriously only worked on and completed one ticket so far in two and a half days, and I still have six documents/contracts to sign! (and benefits; that'll probably take my weekend.)
But getting an I9 thing notarized? Apparently I only have three days before I'm legally unemployable by them or something, idk. HR made it sound ridiculously dire and important, and reminded me like five or more times. I figured it was just some notary service; that takes like 10 minutes, right? So I put it off until my second day so I didn't have to disappear in the middle of my first day. Anyway, I called a bunch of notary services on day 2, and apparently only like 5% of them both do notary services this time of year and aren't booked full. And of those, probably another 5% will notarize I9 documents.. No idea why it's rare, but whatever, I'm not a notary.
The HR lady assured me that I didn't need any special documents; I should just go there, present my IDs, and the notary will provide or draft documents for everything else. Totally doesn't sound right, but fine; I'm not a notary nor will I ever work in HR, so I'm not very knowledgeable about this. So, against my better judgement I decided to just go anyway. I called around and finally found a place that wasn't closed, busy, or refusing, and drove over there. Waited. Waited. Waited. Notary lady was super slow in every single action. (I should mention that it's now 10am, and I have a meeting with the Senior VP of Engineering [a stern, stubborn old goat who enjoys making people feel inadequate] at 12:30pm.) The notary lady looks like she's an npc updating in slow motion (maybe at 0.25x speed?) and can't seem to understand what I need. Eventually, she tells me exactly what I had assumed: if there's no document, she can't notarize said document, and she doesn't have an I9 for the company I'm trying to work for. (like, duh.) So I thank her for proving the flow of time is variable, which she ignores in slow motion, and drive back home. It's now about 11.
I message the same HR lady, and the useless wench gawks in surprise and says she's never heard of that ridiculous request before. It took prodding to get her to respond every time, but after some (very slow) back and forth, she says she wants to call the notary personally and ask what they need. I waited around for another response that never came, and eventually just drove to the notary place again to have them notarize the required ID documents. That plus my chat history with HR should be enough to show that I bloody well tried, and HR just shit the bed instead. I finally got them notarized at like 12:10, and totally broke the speed limit the entire way to the office, found the last remaining parking spot, and made it to my office just in time for the meeting. seriously, less than two minutes to spare. Meeting was interesting (mostly about security), but totally made me facepalm, shout "Seriously!? What the hell are you thinking!?" and make slapping motions at some of the people talking. I will probably rant about that next.
But anyway, I'm willing to bet that the useless wench won't get back to me before the notary closes, if at all, and will somehow try to blame it completely on me if I bring it up again. Passive aggressive bitch. She's probably thinking: "If I don't help her with these mandatory legal processes, it'll be her fault she didn't get them done in time. I mean, they're so easy! She's just doing it wrong." I fucking hate HR.13 -
So, some time ago, I was working for a complete puckered anus of a cosmetics company on their ecommerce product. Won't name names, but they're shitty and known for MLM. If you're clever, go you ;)
Anyways, over the course of years they brought in a competent firm to implement their service layer. I'd even worked with them in the past and it was designed to handle a frankly ridiculous-scale load. After they got the 1.0 released, the manager was replaced with some absolutely talentless, chauvinist cuntrag from a phone company that is well known for having 99% indian devs and not being able to heard now. He of course brought in his number two, worked on making life miserable and running everyone on the team off; inside of a year the entire team was ex-said-phone-company.
Watching the decay of this product was a sheer joy. They cratered the database numerous times during peak-load periods, caused $20M in redis-cluster cost overrun, ended up submitting hundreds of erroneous and duplicate orders, and mailed almost $40K worth of product to a random guy in outer mongolia who is , we can only hope, now enjoying his new life as an instagram influencer. They even terminally broke the automatic metadata, and hired THIRTY PEOPLE to sit there and do nothing but edit swagger. And it was still both wrong and unusable.
Over the course of two years, I ended up rewriting large portions of their infra surrounding the centralized service cancer to do things like, "implement security," as well as cut memory usage and runtimes down by quite literally 100x in the worst cases.
It was during this time I discovered a rather critical flaw. This is the story of what, how and how can you fucking even be that stupid. The issue relates to users and their reports and their ability to order.
I first found this issue looking at some erroneous data for a low value order and went, "There's no fucking way, they're fucking stupid, but this is borderline criminal." It was easy to miss, but someone in a top down reporting chain had submitted an order for someone else in a different org. Shouldn't be possible, but here was that order staring me in the face.
So I set to work seeing if we'd pwned ourselves as an org. I spend a few hours poring over logs from the log service and dynatrace trying to recreate what happened. I first tested to see if I could get a user, not something that was usually done because auth identity was pervasive. I discover the users are INCREMENTAL int values they used for ids in the database when requesting from the API, so naturally I have a full list of users and their title and relative position, as well as reports and descendants in about 10 minutes.
I try the happy path of setting values for random, known payment methods and org structures similar to the impossible order, and submitting as a normal user, no dice. Several more tries and I'm confident this isn't the vector.
Exhausting that option, I look at the protocol for a type of order in the system that allowed higher level people to impersonate people below them and use their own payment info for descendant report orders. I see that all of the data for this transaction is stored in a cookie. Few tests later, I discover the UI has no forgery checks, hashing, etc, and just fucking trusts whatever is present in that cookie.
An hour of tweaking later, I'm impersonating a director as a bottom rung employee. Score. So I fill a cart with a bunch of test items and proceed to checkout. There, in all its glory are the director's payment options. I select one and am presented with:
"please reenter card number to validate."
Bupkiss. Dead end.
OR SO YOU WOULD THINK.
One unimportant detail I noticed during my log investigations that the shit slinging GUI monkeys who butchered the system didn't was, on a failed attempt to submit payment in the DB, the logs were filled with messages like:
"Failed to submit order for [userid] with credit card id [id], number [FULL CREDIT CARD NUMBER]"
One submit click later and the user's credit card number drops into lnav like a gatcha prize. I dutifully rerun the checkout and got an email send notification in the logs for successful transfer to fulfillment. Order placed. Some continued experimentation later and the truth is evident:
With an authenticated user or any privilege, you could place any order, as anyone, using anyon's payment methods and have it sent anywhere.
So naturally, I pack the crucifixion-worthy body of evidence up and walk it into the IT director's office. I show him the defect, and he turns sheet fucking white. He knows there's no recovering from it, and there's no way his shitstick service team can handle fixing it. Somewhere in his tiny little grinchly manager's heart he knew they'd caused it, and he was to blame for being a shit captain to the SS Failboat. He replies quietly, "You will never speak of this to anyone, fix this discretely." Straight up hitler's bunker meme rage.13 -
A fanfic based on devRant-chan. The character was created by @caramelCase and a drawing by @ichijou.
This is freestyle. I'll think of an image of a scene and go with the flow. I won't remove my fingers from the keyboard and I won't edit or change anything. That's how I come up with my best ideas.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Notes:
B/N = Boss' name (I was too lazy to think of one.)
Anything in between astericks is in italics.
Ex.) *this is in italics.*
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It was an early January morning when devRant-chan was situated in her desk, typing away on her laptop. She was working on a Python script for her barbaric client when she could've been out with friends. Oddly enough, her Sunday was surged with tranquility.
Normally, Sunday is when her irksome boss barks orders at her on the phone.
"This is wrong!"
"What is this?"
"Change it!"
devRant-chan resented her boss but loved her job. After all, "you can't force yourself to like everyone," was something her elder brother would tell her.
She released a slight chuckle, the one she would only display at the thought of her brother.
Her musings were interrupted when a concerning thought crawled into her mind like an undesirable intruder.
Why hasn't her boss called to complain yet? It's not that she enjoyed his complaining, which she didn't. She simply found it odd, since he's done this every Sunday morning, since she was a junior developer.
Unless he found someone else to complain to? In that case, good riddance!
But still, it wasn't a euphoric feeling to be replaced. She was already accustomed to his Sunday morning calls that it feels almost lonely not to receive them.
She should call him... Just in case some situation—or—problem—has emerged.
She dialed his number, waiting patiently for a reply.
"Hello," said her boss.
"Ah, hello," said devRant-chan. "I called, wondering—"
"You've reached the voicemail of B/N, please leave a message after the beep."
"Damn..." mumbled devRant-chan with a sharp exhale. "I always fall for that."
Why didn't her boss answer the phone? It was odd of him, considering he's always answered her calls.
She was about to dial her coworker when she received an email, which stimulated her attention. The subject of the email read:
*Important. Please read.*
She opened the email. It was her boss. The email read:
*Hello.*
*In case you aren't aware, I had quit my job, due to the stress. I've left the manager in charge. Starting tomorrow, he will be your new boss.*
*-B/N*
Before she could rejoice in excitement, she detected a strange change of voice, emitting from the email. Did her boss really write this?
That's when she spotted something. The word "tomorrow."
Her boss didn't write this.
He would never use words such as "tomorrow," or "today." He would use time instead. If this was her boss, he would say "in 24 hours."
She checked the IP of the email. Oddly enough, it was her boss' IP.
Still, the pieces didn't fit the puzzle. Her boss didn't complain, answer her call, or use his style of speaking in the email.
Something happened to him and she knows it. Whatever it is, has something to do with the manager, and she was determined to figure it out.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This was just a quick random fanfic, and I'm not sure if I'll continue it. As I said, I didn't plan anything, since it's freestyle. I might or might not continue it, so I'll think it over.8 -
To those that think they can't make it.
To those that are put down by those that don't understand you.
And to those that have never had a dream come true.
Not a rant, but the story of how I got into programming
I've always been into tech/electronics. I remember being told once that when I was 3, I used to take plug sockets to pieces. When I was 7, I built a computer with my dad.
There isn't a thing in my room that hasn't been dismantled and put back together again. Except for the things that weren't put back together again ;)
When I was 15, I got a phone for Christmas. It was a pretty crappy phone, the LG P350 (optimus ME). But I loved it all the same.
However I knew it could do a lot more. It ran a bloated, slow version of Android 2.2.
So I went searching, how can I make it faster, how to make it do more. And I found a huge community around Android ROMs. Obviously the first thing I did was flashed this ROM. Sure, there were bugs, but I was instantly in love with it. My phone was freed.
From there I went on to exploring what else can be done.
I wanted to learn how to script, so over the weekend I wrote a 1000 line batch (Windows cmd) script that would root the phone and flash a recovery environment onto it. Pretty basic. Lots of switch statements, but I was proud of it. I'd achieved something. It wasn't new to the world, but it was my first experience at programming.
But it wasn't enough, I needed more.
So I set out to actually building the roms. I installed Linux. I wanted to learn how to utilise Linux better, so I rewrote my script in bash.
By this time, I'd joined a team for developing on similar spec'd phones. Without the funds to by new devices, we began working on more radical projects.
Between us, we ported newer kernels to our devices. We rebased much of the chipset drivers onto newer equivalents to add new features.
And then..
Well, it was exam season. I was suffering from personal issues (which I will not detail), and that, with the work on Android, I ended up failing the exams.
I still passed, but not to the level I expected.
So I gave up on school, and went head first into a new kind of development. "continue doing what you love. You'll make it" is what I told myself.
I found python by contributing to an IRC bot. I learnt it by reading the codebase. Anything I didn't understand, I researched. Anything I wanted to do, google was there to help me through it.
Then it was exam season again. Even though I'd given up on school, I was still going. It was easier to stay in than do anything about it.
A few weeks before the exams, I had a panic attack. I was behind on coursework, and I knew I would do poorly on exams.
So I dropped out.
I was disappointed, my family was disappointed.
So I did the only thing I felt I could do. I set out to get a job as a developer.
At this stage, I'd not done anything special. So I started aiming bigger. Contributing to projects maintained by Sony and Google, learning from them. Building my own projects to assist with my old Android friends.
I managed to land a contract, however due to the stresses at home, I had to drop it after a month.
Everything was going well, I felt ready to get a full time job as a developer, after 2 years of experience in the community.
Then I had to wake up.
Unfortunately, my advisors (I was a job seeker at the time) didn't understand the potential of learning to be a developer. With them, it's "university for a skilled job".
They see the word "computer" on a CV, they instantly say "tech support".
I played ball, I did what I could for them. But they'd always put me down, saying I wasn't good enough, that I'd never get a job.
I hated them. I'd row with them every other day.
By God, I would prove them wrong.
And then I found them. Or, to be more precise, they found me. A startup in London got in contact with me. They seemed like decent people. I spoke with their developers, and they knew their stuff, these were people that I can learn from.
I travelled 4 hours to go for an interview, then 4 hours back.
When I got the email saying they'd move me to London, I was over the moon.
I did exactly what everyone was telling me I couldn't do.
1.5 years later, I'm still working with them. We all respect each other, and we all learn from each other.
I'm ever grateful to them for taking a shot with me. I had no professional experience, and I was by no means the most skilled individual they interviewed.
Many people have a dream. I won't lie, I once dreamed of working at Google. But after the journey I've been through, I wouldn't have where I am now any other way. Though, in time, I wish to share this dream with another.
I hope that all of you reach your dreams too.
Sorry for the long post. The details are brief, but there are only 5k characters ;)23 -
This codebase reminds me of a large, rotting, barely-alive dromedary. Parts of it function quite well, but large swaths of it are necrotic, foul-smelling, and even rotted away. Were it healthy, it would still exude a terrible stench, and its temperament would easily match: If you managed to get near enough, it would spit and try to bite you.
Swaths of code are commented out -- entire classes simply don't exist anymore, and the ghosts of several-year-old methods still linger. Despite this, large and deprecated (yet uncommented) sections of the application depend on those undefined classes/methods. Navigating the codebase is akin to walking through a minefield: if you reference the wrong method on the wrong object... fatal exception. And being very new to this project, I have no idea what's live and what isn't.
The naming scheme doesn't help, either: it's impossible to know what's still functional without asking because nothing's marked. Instead, I've been working backwards from multiple points to try to find code paths between objects/events. I'm rarely successful.
Not only can I not tell what's live code and what's interactive death, the code itself is messy and awful. Don't get me wrong: it's solid. There's virtually no way to break it. But trying to understand it ... I feel like I'm looking at a huge, sprawling MC Escher landscape through a microscope. (No exaggeration: a magnifying glass would show a larger view that included paradoxes / dubious structures, and these are not readily apparent to me.)
It's also rife with bad practices. Terrible naming choices consisting of arbitrarily-placed acronyms, bad word choices, and simply inconsistent naming (hash vs hsh vs hs vs h). The indentation is a mix of spaces and tabs. There's magic numbers galore, and variable re-use -- not just local scope, but public methods on objects as well. I've also seen countless assignments within conditionals, and these are apparently intentional! The reasoning: to ensure the code only runs with non-falsey values. While that would indeed work, an early return/next is much clearer, and reduces indentation. It's just. reading through this makes me cringe or literally throw my hands up in frustration and exasperation.
Honestly though, I know why the code is so terrible, and I understand:
The architect/sole dev was new to coding -- I have 5-7 times his current experience -- and the project scope expanded significantly and extremely quickly, and also broke all of its foundation rules. Non-developers also dictated architecture, creating further mess. It's the stuff of nightmares. Looking at what he was able to accomplish, though, I'm impressed. Horrified at the details, but impressed with the whole.
This project is the epitome of "I wrote it quickly and just made it work."
Fortunately, he and I both agree that a rewrite is in order. but at 76k lines (without styling or configuration), it's quite the undertaking.
------
Amusing: after running the codebase through `wc`, it apparently sums to half the word count of "War and Peace"15 -
My friend loves Dreamweaver... And continuously says that he doesn't understand what people see in it that is so wrong... It does the job right?...... Fucking blind...
Uses a bootstrap plugin which generates HTML code for bootstrap.
I did not know this at the time.
Comes to me the night before submission.
He: Dude i need help quick! I've got the presentation tomorrow morning and bootstrap fucked up the links to my style sheets or something, my page is broken and won't work. I should have done what you did and gone for Foundation...
Me: Yeah, because the bootstrap framework definitely affects the style links...
He: help me out man, please! I can't do this anymore!
I had my submission the day after him to prepare still...
Me: Teamviewer. Now.
Log on to Teamviewer.
See what he's using to code...
Dreamweaver..... Niiiiice....
I go through the code. There are empty divs with &nbsc; in them everywhere.. some HTML elements haven't been closed, no comments, indentation seems to be completely random. All the usual shit storm of a novice web designer.
The only thing is, this guy I know knows how to indent, I've seen his previous work. Why is this so horrible then???
I ask what the hell happened, it looked like a nuclear explosion happened!
He: Yeah I'm using this great plugin for Dreamweaver which lets me click and it puts in Bootstrap elements! It's great!
........ You're blaming the bootstrap framework for affecting your links to your stylesheets, you're using an elements generator, you're not checking what the FUCK it puts into your code, not fixing the indenting, not checking the standard HTML rules are followed AND YOU WONDER WHY IT'S BROKEN???
Kill me now.4 -
I can't help but be disappointed in the direction that technology has directed us into, especially social media.
While I love my girlfriend, she more often than not spends her time scrolling away at the dumbest shit on Instagram, Facebook, .. reels. Reels everywhere. And she's not dumb, mind you. She's an engineer just as much as you (presumably) and I are. Just in a different field.
When looking into it online and stumbling upon more than one study, I learned about the term it had been coined.. technoference. That's the constant interruption of social media into our day-to-day lives, and the dopamine kick it gives -- more so than IRL peers do. Why that is, being the digital equivalent to McDonald's, that's beyond me. But somehow it seems to be better, all while the content isn't even useful. It doesn't allow you to learn anything, to gain insights, or to explore things that could serve you in the real world. Cat videos and random shit that's somehow.. funny? Having pretty much completely disconnected from social media years ago, I seriously fail to see how.
Maybe us nerds in the 90's and early 2000's telling everyone else how we'd change the world and prove everyone who called us freaks wrong, disenchanted as we were (and probably still are), were the catalyst for this social disaster. We had the cognitive skills to do it, but not the social equivalent. I feel guilty... Even though I've always been part of a big tech resistance in some capacity, I still feel guilty. Because I'm one of those people with the skills of those who created this trash fire of a societal status quo. Everyone glued to their screens, 95% of the time not for work. Not even to aid one's ability to function in the real world. Just to combat boredom. All day, for many hours on end.
Where is it going to end? When will people realize the dystopia we got ourselves into? Will anyone but a few fight it? Would those who don't fight it even care?11 -
Wtf, really??? Are they trying to liyerally KILL ME????
Got home from hospital today wth my family. Baby got sick. Wife also caught cold... Bad news. It was just me still healthy like a raddish [we have such saying].
So I got home. Started feeling somewhat funny. Sore thighs, feeling nauseaus, chilly, a bit dizzy.
10 minutes later I'm fucking trembling! It felt as of I was kicked put bare ass to -20C outside! I'm not exaggerating [probably made some typos.. Pls correct me] - i live where winters get like -35C. Everything around got like twice darker. And my lower teeth got itchy af [NOT the best feeling, trust me].
I must have caught cold too - I thought to myself, cuz I know what these sympthoms mean. I always have 'em all when I have fever. Since shivers are caused by rising fever I got my Microlife remote thermometer out of my drawer. Click, blue light, wait, beeep. 36.5C. Allright.. Maybe I got it wrong... Try again -- same result. Wife also gave a couple tries - nada. Nil. Nullpointerexception. Healthy like a pickle!
10 minutes later I couldn't stand the cold. Got under my blankets wife made some soup, tea,... I still have this analog thermometer, the one with quicksilver. Pop it into my armpit - jusyt in case. 10minutes later I take it out. It says 39,5 and rising. Try the microlife again. 36,5. WHAT THE FUCK?????????
If I weren't so fond of old-school stuff I'd be in a fucking ER now!!
Fuck you medical digital equipment made to be used at home! FUCK YOU!!
I'm pissed.
Do you folks kbow where could I get those q-silver thermometers? Just in case. They're already out of matket in my area for quite some time... For being dangerous [i give 'em that, okay?] and.... Lisen to this.... "unreliable"!
FUCK IT!15 -
So yesterday was a regular old day where I came into the office and began my work. My office mate that sits next to me happens to be having an issue with her batch script. It wasn't running correctly so she had decided to call in IT and have them take a look at it. What she was trying to do was process some images through a dedicated super-computer located on site.
So as you can imagine with both of them standing right next to me it was hard not to listen in on their conversation. The IT guy decided to go through a barrage of different troubleshooting methods to figure out what was happening with her script. And soon enough they discovered what was wrong. It happened to be an issue with how Windows decides to deal with new line characters. FYI it looks like this shit "\n \r"
The fucking \r looked like a directory to Linux. So it would squeal to a halt every single time she tried to run.
How this happened was due to her using notepad to edit her batch file.
At this point, I made a comment about her use of Notepad.
"Oh, you're using notepad? I've had similar issues like this in the past when I've used notepad. I really hate notepad." I said with a slight chuckle.
And that was pretty much the end of our encounters. However, at the end of the day, she decided to speak up about this.
"I don't appreciate you making comments about my use of Notepad. That was a form of microaggression towards me, and I don't want you to do it again."
Completely taken aback I replied.
"I'm sorry you took it that way, it was a joke and wasn't meant to be taken personally."
"Well, your intent does not change impact. And by the way, I take pride in my code and scripting. I don't need your commentary about my code nor your micro-aggressions." She said in a huff.
"Well again, I'm sorry you feel that way," I replied back
*I'd like to say that this situation is loosely paraphrased, but the essence of what happened is still there.
At this point, this is what I have to say about this situation. Why the FUCKING FUCK are you using notepad to program anything. There ARE A SHIT TON of differing programs that are available for your use and you decide to use fucking notepad?!?! $%&*@#$^
You could use notepad++, you could use Sublime, you could use every-fucking-thing except Notepad!!! If anything I think I had every right to make a comment about your stupid use of notepad. And darling, your script not working was well deserved, I hope you run into more errors like this because you deserve nothing less for your arrogance. So you can take your opinions and shove them up your fat-ass because at the end of the day I don't give a FUCK about your opinions on my micro-aggressions that you're spouting off about.
I suggest the next time you feel attacked about your code perhaps you should take a cold hard look at yourself before thinking that I'm the one that is the FUCKING problem.17 -
Hey. This code look broken. What should I do?
It isn't broken. It's doing what it's supposed to.
Well, it's hard to follow, but it certainly doesn't look right. And it isn't doing what I expect. Also, why is it calling method(a_class1_or_class2) with a class3?
It isn't hard to follow, and it works just fine. Let me show you. ... huh. looks like it isn't right. and there's a comment here saying the calls aren't clear. but it works just fine. Just copy it over and do it the same way.
I already did that. and it isn't working.
What are you talking about? Of course it works fine. Did you check your code?
------
Really, dude? It doesn't work fine. but, guess what? It works fine* when I change it to call that method with a class2 like it asks for. (Surprise!) But I can't tell him that. Nope. Bossmang get offended. Still won't admit I was right about anything, either.
Ahh... the continual joy of working with (and for) trash.
* well, more fine; the rest of the feature is still wrong. but nope, i'm not allowed to fix it. because why would they want anything to work properly? Already-accepted wrong behavior is good enough. Can't clean up the code, either, because that "muddies the waters." Bitch, I couldn't see the bottom of this sewer if it was half an inch deep! Which is more important: the last contributor entry beside the code, or that code being readable and maintainable? or it, you know, working?
doot doot.
need to scoot.8 -
Forgive me father, for I have sinned. Alot actually, but I'm here for technical sins. Okay, a particular series of technical sins. Sit your ass back down padre, you signed up for this shit. Where was I? Right, it has been 11429 days since my last confession. May this serve as equal parts rant, confession, and record for the poor SOB who comes after me.
Ended up in a job where everything was done manually or controlled by rickety Access "apps". Many manhours were wasted on sitting and waiting for the main system to spit out a query download so it could be parsed by hand or loaded into one of the aforementioned apps that had a nasty habit of locking up the aged hardware that we were allowed. Updates to the system were done through and awful utility that tended to cut out silently, fail loudly and randomly, or post data horrifically wrong.
Fuck that noise. Floated the idea of automating downloads and uploads to bossman. This is where I learned that the main system had no SQL socket by default, but the vendor managing the system could provide one for an obscene amount of money. There was no buy in from above, not worth the price.
Automated it anyway. Main system had a free form entry field, ostensibly for handwriting SELECT queries. Using Python, AutoHotkey, and glorified copy-pasting, it worked after a fashion. Showed the time saved by not having to do downloads manually. Got us the buy in we needed, bigwigs get negotiating with the vendor, told to start developing something based on some docs from the vendor. Keep the hacky solution running as team loves not having to waste time on downloads.
Found SQLi vulnerability in the above free form query system, brought it up to bossman to bring up the chain. Vulnerability still there months later. Test using it for automated updates. Works and is magnitudes more stable than update utility. Bring it up again and show the time we can save exploiting it. Decision made to use it while it exists, saves more time. Team happier, able to actual develop solutions uninterrupted now. Using Python, AutoHotkey, glorified copy-pasting, and SQLi in the course of day to day business critical work. Ugliest hacky thing I've ever caused to exist.
Flash forward 6 years. Automation system now in heavy use acrossed two companies. Handles all automatic downloads for several departments, 1 million+ discrete updates daily with alot of room for expansion, stuff runs 24/7 on schedule, most former Access apps now gone and written sanely and managed by the automation system. Its on real hardware with real databases and security behind it.
It is still using AutoHotkey, copy-paste, and SQLi to interface with the main system. There never was and never will be a SQL socket. Keep this hellbeast I've spawned chugging along.
I've pointed out how many ways this can all go pearshaped. I've pointed out that one day the vendor will get their shit together they'll come in post system update and nothing will work anymore. I've pointed out the danger in continuing to use the system with such a glaring SQLi vulnerability.
Noone cares. Won't be my problem soon enough.
In no particular order:
Fuck management for not fighting for a good system interface
Fuck the vendor for A) not having a SQL socket and B) leaving the SQLi vulnerability there this long
Fuck me for bringing this thing into existence5 -
I'm editing the sidebar on one of our websites, and shuffling some entries. It involves moving some entries in/out of a dropdown and contextual sidebars, in/out of submenus, etc. It sounds a little tedious but overall pretty trivial, right?
This is day three.
I learned React+Redux from scratch (and rebuilt the latter for fun) in twice that long.
In my defense, I've been working on other tasks (see: Alerts), but mostly because I'd rather gouge my freaking eyes out than continue on this one.
Everything that could be wrong about this is. Everything that could be over-engineered is. Everything that could be written worse... can't, actually; it's awful.
Major grievances:
1) The sidebars (yes, there are several) are spread across a ridiculous number of folders. I stopped counting at 20.
2) Instead of icon fonts, this uses multiple images for entry states.
3) The image filenames don't match the menu entry names. at all. ("sb_gifts.png" -> orders); active filenames are e.g. "sb_giftsactive.png"
4) The actions don't match the menu entry names.
5) Menu state is handled within the root application controller, and doesn't use bools, but strings. (and these state flags never seem to get reset anywhere...)
6) These strings are used to construct the image filenames within the sidebar views/partials.
7) Sometimes access restrictions (employee, manager, etc.) are around the individual menu entries, sometimes they're around a partial include, meaning it's extremely difficult to determine which menu entries/sections/subsections are permission-locked without digging through everything.
8) Within different conditionals there are duplicate blocks markup, with duplicate includes, that end up render different partials/markup due to different state.
9) There are parent tags outside of includes, such as `<ul>#{render 'horrific-eye-stabbing'}</ul>`
10) The markup differs per location: sometimes it's a huge blob of non-semantic filthiness, sometimes it's a simple div+span. Example filth: section->p->a->(img,span) ... per menu entry.
11) In some places, the markup is broken, e.g. `<li><u>...</li></u>`
12) In other places, markup is used for layout adjustments, such as an single nested within several divs adorned with lots of styles/classes.
13) Per-device layouts are handled, not within separate views, but by conditionally enabling/disabling swaths of markup, e.g. (if is_cordova_session?).
14) `is_cordova_session` in particular is stored within a cookie that does not expire, and within your user session. disabling it is annoying and very non-obvious. It can get set whether or not you're using cordova.
15) There are virtually no stylesheets; almost everything is inline (but of course not actually everything), which makes for fun layout debugging.
16) Some of the markup (with inline styling, no less) is generated within a goddamn controller.
17) The markup does use css classes, but it's predominately not for actual styling: they're used to pick out elements within unit tests. An example class name: "hide-for-medium-down"; and no, I can't figure out what it means, even when looking at the tests that use it. There are no styles attached to that particular class.
18) The tests have not been updated for three years, and that last update was an rspec version bump.
19) Mixed tabs and spaces, with mixed indentation level (given spaces, it's sometimes 2, 4, 4, 5, or 6, and sometimes one of those levels consistently, plus an extra space thereafter.)
20) Intentional assignment within conditionals (`if var=possibly_nil_return_value()`)
21) hardcoded (and occasionally incorrect) values/urls.
... and last but not least:
22) Adding a new "menu sections unit" (I still haven't determined what the crap that means) requires changing two constants and writing a goddamn database migration.
I'm not even including minor annoyances like non-enclosed ternaries, poor naming conventions, commented out code, highly inefficient code, a 512-character regex (at least it's even, right?), etc.
just.
what the _fuck_
Who knew a sidebar could be so utterly convoluted?6 -
POSTMORTEM
"4096 bit ~ 96 hours is what he said.
IDK why, but when he took the challenge, he posted that it'd take 36 hours"
As @cbsa wrote, and nitwhiz wrote "but the statement was that op's i3 did it in 11 hours. So there must be a result already, which can be verified?"
I added time because I was in the middle of a port involving ArbFloat so I could get arbitrary precision. I had a crude desmos graph doing projections on what I'd already factored in order to get an idea of how long it'd take to do larger
bit lengths
@p100sch speculated on the walked back time, and overstating the rig capabilities. Instead I spent a lot of time trying to get it 'just-so'.
Worse, because I had to resort to "Decimal" in python (and am currently experimenting with the same in Julia), both of which are immutable types, the GC was taking > 25% of the cpu time.
Performancewise, the numbers I cited in the actual thread, as of this time:
largest product factored was 32bit, 1855526741 * 2163967087, took 1116.111s in python.
Julia build used a slightly different method, & managed to factor a 27 bit number, 103147223 * 88789957 in 20.9s,
but this wasn't typical.
What surprised me was the variability. One bit length could take 100s or a couple thousand seconds even, and a product that was 1-2 bits longer could return a result in under a minute, sometimes in seconds.
This started cropping up, ironically, right after I posted the thread, whats a man to do?
So I started trying a bunch of things, some of which worked. Shameless as I am, I accepted the challenge. Things weren't perfect but it was going well enough. At that point I hadn't slept in 30~ hours so when I thought I had it I let it run and went to bed. 5 AM comes, I check the program. Still calculating, and way overshot. Fuuuuuuccc...
So here we are now and it's say to safe the worlds not gonna burn if I explain it seeing as it doesn't work, or at least only some of the time.
Others people, much smarter than me, mentioned it may be a means of finding more secure pairs, and maybe so, I'm not familiar enough to know.
For everyone that followed, commented, those who contributed, even the doubters who kept a sanity check on this without whom this would have been an even bigger embarassement, and the people with their pins and tactical dots, thanks.
So here it is.
A few assumptions first.
Assuming p = the product,
a = some prime,
b = another prime,
and r = a/b (where a is smaller than b)
w = 1/sqrt(p)
(also experimented with w = 1/sqrt(p)*2 but I kept overshooting my a very small margin)
x = a/p
y = b/p
1. for every two numbers, there is a ratio (r) that you can search for among the decimals, starting at 1.0, counting down. You can use this to find the original factors e.x. p*r=n, p/n=m (assuming the product has only two factors), instead of having to do a sieve.
2. You don't need the first number you find to be the precise value of a factor (we're doing floating point math), a large subset of decimal values for the value of a or b will naturally 'fall' into the value of a (or b) + some fractional number, which is lost. Some of you will object, "But if thats wrong, your result will be wrong!" but hear me out.
3. You round for the first factor 'found', and from there, you take the result and do p/a to get b. If 'a' is actually a factor of p, then mod(b, 1) == 0, and then naturally, a*b SHOULD equal p.
If not, you throw out both numbers, rinse and repeat.
Now I knew this this could be faster. Realized the finer the representation, the less important the fractional digits further right in the number were, it was just a matter of how much precision I could AFFORD to lose and still get an accurate result for r*p=a.
Fast forward, lot of experimentation, was hitting a lot of worst case time complexities, where the most significant digits had a bunch of zeroes in front of them so starting at 1.0 was a no go in many situations. Started looking and realized
I didn't NEED the ratio of a/b, I just needed the ratio of a to p.
Intuitively it made sense, but starting at 1.0 was blowing up the calculation time, and this made it so much worse.
I realized if I could start at r=1/sqrt(p) instead, and that because of certain properties, the fractional result of this, r, would ALWAYS be 1. close to one of the factors fractional value of n/p, and 2. it looked like it was guaranteed that r=1/sqrt(p) would ALWAYS be less than at least one of the primes, putting a bound on worst case.
The final result in executable pseudo code (python lol) looks something like the above variables plus
while w >= 0.0:
if (p / round(w*p)) % 1 == 0:
x = round(w*p)
y = p / round(w*p)
if x*y == p:
print("factors found!")
print(x)
print(y)
break
w = w + i
Still working but if anyone sees obvious problems I'd LOVE to hear about it.38 -
(Written March 13th at 2am.)
This morning (yesterday), my computer decided not to boot again: it halts on "cannot find firmware rtl-whatever" every time. (it has booted just fine several times since removing the firmware.) I've had quite the ordeal today trying to fix it, and every freaking step along the way has thrown errors and/or required workarounds and a lot of research.
Let's make a list of everything that went wrong!
1) Live CD: 2yo had been playing with it, and lost it. Not easy to find, and super smudgy.
2) Unencrypt volume: Dolphin reports errors when decrypting the volume. Research reveals the Live CD doesn't incude the cryptsetup packages. First attempts at installing them mysteriously fail.
3) Break for Lunch: automatic powersaving features turned off the displays, and also killed my session.
4) Live CD redux: 25min phonecall from work! yay, more things added to my six-month backlog.
5) Mount encrypted volume: Dolphin doesn't know how, and neither do I. Research ensues. Missing LVM2 package; lvmetad connection failure ad nauseam; had to look up commands to unlock, clone, open, and mount encrypted Luks volume, and how to perform these actions on Debian instead of Ubuntu/Kali. This group of steps took four hours.
6) Chroot into mounted volume group: No DNS! Research reveals how to share the host's resolv with the chroot.
7) `# apt install firmware-realtek`: /boot/initrd.img does not exist. Cannot update.
8) Find and mount /boot, then reinstall firmware: Apt cannot write to its log (minor), listed three install warnings, and initially refused to write to /boot/initrd.img-[...]
9) Reboot!: Volume group not found. Cannot process volume group. Dropping to a shell! oh no..
(Not listed: much research, many repeated attempts with various changes.)
At this point it's been 9 hours. I'm exhausted and frustrated and running out of ideas, so I ask @perfectasshole for help.
He walks me through some debugging steps (most of which i've already done), and we both get frustrated because everything looks correct but isn't working.
10) Thirteenth coming of the Live CD: `update-initramfs -u` within chroot throws warnings about /etc/crypttab and fsck, but everything looks fine with both. Still won't boot. Editing grub config manually to use the new volume group name likewise produces no boots. Nothing is making sense.
11) Rename volume group: doubles -'s for whatever reason; Rebooting gives the same dreaded "dropping to a shell" result.
A huge thank-you to @perfectasshole for spending three hours fighting with this issue with me! I finally fixed it about half an hour after he went to bed.
After renaming the volume group to what it was originally, one of the three recovery modes managed to actually boot and load the volume. From there I was able to run `update-initramfs -u` from the system proper (which completed without issue) and was able to boot normally thereafter.
I've run updates and rebooted twice now.
After twelve+ hours... yay, I have my Debian back!
oof.rant nightmare luks i'm friends with grub and chroot now realtek realshit at least my computer works again :< initrd boot failure8 -
Story Time. Inspired by another rant.
Context: I'm In a coding camp years ago, it's the first day.
We're doing introductions (name, why you're here, etc). Always fun to do that....
The folks running the camp are excited to introduce a student who also at one point was a teacher for some sort of girl power coding organization. So this raises questions, why would someone who teaches be a student in this camp?? And even a bigger question is raised when this person introduces themselves for a long time, and as an aside puts down the girls she taught in this program they taught ... like who does that?
horribleLady does that ...
A few hours later horribleLady asks her 12th question of the day (we haven't even started talking about code). Before she asks her question actually says:
“I know, I’m going to be a problem.” -laugh-
🚨🚨🚨 ヽ ( ꒪д꒪ )ノ 🚨🚨🚨
Fast forward to group projects and she's this sort of emotional storm, tears, and a sort of angry shouting that isn't angry enough for some folks to say she's yelling at people ... but she is. Fortunately I'm not in the first group project with her, but because we're all working in the same room we all get to see the train-wreck unfold.
The moment she doesn't get something (all the time) everyone in her group has to STOP and figure out what they're going to do about it, then again STOP because she thinks someone is doing something different than what was planned. STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP.
In a way, everything had to go through her, she didn’t declare it that way, she didn't present herself as any sort of authority, she would just stop everyone the moment she thought anything was wrong, or she didn't understand it (all the time), and either inject herself or demand help from her team. Everyone around her had to be drawn into whatever problem she had. It was horrific to watch.
Private slack channels would light up like crazy with "OMG", "WTF", "I DON'T UNDERSTAND HER", "FUCK" and "SHE"S HOW OLD!?!?"
So finally it happens to me and guyWhoDoesPotConstantly (capable guy, nice dude, pretty sure he was high all the time).... we're teamed up to work with horribleLady. Thankfully for just one day. I accept this because I figure one day with her is enough penance to try to avoid any further contact later on.
My approach is straight stone face. I refuse to respond to her sulking, or sighing, or general emotional bait she throws out constantly. I saw other students unwittingly take her bait (they were trying to be helpful) only to have her crap all over them with her frustrations or whatever it is is going on.
Still we're teamed up with her her for the day so I'm going to be a good team member and I explain what guyWhoDoesPotConstantly and I are doing / trying.... and so forth. But she's just too upset that she's even assigned to work with us, and tells me I'm just not doing it right, and her explanations about how we're not doing it right makes less than 0 sense. I ask her to show me what she means but she won't type anything on her keyboard, she'd just talk about how she’s thinking conceptually in circles and sulk about it rather than listen. I don't respond to any of her shit and say "I'm going to try this." and guyWhoDoesPotConstantly and I just keep working.
She would later call the instructor over and complain to him for a while and say: "These guys just get it, they're not helping me, I want to be assigned to another group." She doesn't get her way so she just moves to another table in front of us.
After that day I figured it was a great time to ask .... to NEVER be assigned to anything with her because "If I told her what I thought it would just get a lot worse." I got my way ;)
Other students weren't so lucky. Tears, sulking, her special way of yelling at people that somehow never got her in trouble (she should have been kicked out of the program) just kept going on. She refused to even present one group project she deemed not good enough despite the fact that she contributed nothing functional to the project that the TA's didn't write for her...
Amidst the stories she would tell to students was one of how she sued her totally sexist/racist/evil former employer. She never said what came of it, but that combined with her inability to do things reminded me of a rant I read on here.
I sometimes fear being hired someplace and walking in my first day to find I'm assigned to work with .... horribleLady. In this scenario she managed to get hired and they're too afraid to fire her so they assign the new guy to work with horribleLady...
I've no idea what happened to her after the camp.
(I rewrote this rant a few times because it kept circling back to a larger story about the coding camp I wrote about a few years ago, so if this seemed sort of broken up and wonky, yeah it was / is / yeah)4 -
Ticket: Add <feature> to <thing>. It works in <other things> so just copy it over. Easy.
Thing: tangled, over-complicated mess.
Feature: tangled and broken, and winds much too deep to refactor. Gets an almost-right answer by doing lots of things that shouldn't work but somehow manage to.
I write a quick patch that avoids the decent into madness and duplicates the broken behavior in a simple way for consistency and ease of fixing later. I inform my boss of my findings and push the code.
He gets angry and mildly chews me out for it. During the code review, he calls my patch naive, and says the original feature is obviously not broken or convoluted. During the course of proving me wrong, he has trouble following it, and eventually finds out that it really is broken -- and refuses to admit i was right about any of it. I'm still in trouble for taking too long, doing it naively, and not doing it correctly.
He schedules a meeting with product to see if we should do it correctly. He tells product to say no. Product says no. He then tells me to duplicate the broken behavior. ... which I already did.
At this point I'm in trouble for:
1) Taking too long copying a simple feature over.
2) Showing said feature is not simple, but convoluted and broken.
3) Reimplementing the broken feature in a simpler way.
4) Not making my new implementation correct despite it not working anywhere else, and despite how that would be inconsistent.
Did everything right, still in the wrong.
Also, they decided I'm not allowed to fix the original, that it should stay broken, and that I should make sure it's broken here, too.
You just have to admire the sound reasoning and mutual respect on display. Best in class.19 -
!drunk (yet)
It's whiskey and code tonight!
(Whiskey because I couldn't get to my rum. annoyed face.)
Why? Because rum is so much better. duh.
More seriously: My boss has thrown me every single one his current tasks and is refusing to answer simple questions about them, such as "oh, so you already know about this bug; what's the cause?" or "how do i test this once i've fixed it?" or "where the fuck are you?"
and I'm also getting lots of bugs from other people. They're all basically categorized "urgent, please fix immediately" but should instead be categorized "super-boring and not-at-all-important, and should get fixed on the off chance you happen to remember it next year". That's the best category of bug.
I just gave up on fixing a Rails pluralize bug which fits into the aforementioned category quite nicely. It's returning "2x round of golves" -- which is hilarious and I might leave it in just for the amusement. But now it's back to fighting with ActionCable! Everything has been getting in the way of me finishing that. I'm about to start biting.
Speaking of ActionCable, it turns out my code wasn't wrong after all (have I said that yet?). Since the official documentation and examples suck, I've been digging through the (generated) javascript source and working my way backwards to learn how to use it. I cleaned up my code a little, but it was still correct. The reason nothing is working correctly is that API Guy gave me broken code. ...Again! Go figure. So I'll be rewriting that today. or tomorrow. (Whiskey, remember?)
I also have some lovely netcode to debug and fix. So totally not looking forward to that. The responses are less bloody reliable than my boss's code ffs. *grumble grumble*6 -
When I'm tired, I can't do a damned thing. If it takes effort or concentration, I'm useless. Games are just frustrating. If it's something enjoyable, I simply can't care enough to enjoy it. If I read a book, I can't focus on the words, and won't remember anything I read. If its mindless like watching Netflix, I won't remember the next day, or rather I'll remember just enough to ruin it for myself.
So why not sleep?
Because I've been feeling like this every day, all day long for months. No, that vile liquid called coffee doesn't help. If I rest my eyes and stop thinking for a few minutes, I wake up a little and can function normally for a minute or two before passing out again. I'm not depressed, or at least I don't think I am. I feel like my brain died or got replaced with a lizard's.
And this sucks because I'm still during the probation period at work, and learning the sprawling and intricate codebase is actually challenging. And they're giving me large tickets because I was a dummy and impressed them too much.
Idk what's wrong with me, but I hope it stops soon.
I miss being able to think and plan and do anything besides just struggle to stay awake. 😞16 -
Part 1: https://devrant.com/rants/4210605
So let's talk about these tasks we were assigned. Ms Reliable and Mr DDTW's friend who I just realized I haven't named yet were in charge of programming communications. Ms Enabler and Mr DDTW were in charge of creating the vehicle subclasses for the new variants we were instructed to build. Each one had to handle one variant, and we estimated that both of these would be about the same difficulty (Ms Enabler's one turned out to be a little harder).
I like Ms Enabler, and she's a good friend, although she isn't the best at problem solving and her strengths as a dev lie in her work ethic and the sheer amount of theory she knows and can apply. These just so happened to be the exact opposites of my strengths and weaknesses. Within a few days of having assigned the tasks, she came up to me asking for help, and I agreed. Over the following couple of weeks I'd put in quite a lot of hours reviewing the design with her, and we'd often end up pair programming. It was more work for me, but it was enjoyable and overall we were very efficient.
The other two girls in the group were also absolutely fine this sprint. They simply did the work they had to and let us know on time. Outside of some feedback, requests, bugfixes, and mediating disagreements, I didn't have to do anything with their tasks.
A week and half into the sprint and everybody else has their part almost in an MVP state. As Mr DDTW hadn't said or shown anything yet, I asked if he could push his stuff to the repo (he got stuck with this and needed help btw), and what does he have?
A piece of shit "go to this location" algorithm that did not work and was, once again, 150 lines of if statements. This would not have been such a massive deal if THE ENTIRE PREVIOUS SPRINT HAD BEEN DEDICATED TO MAKING THE CODE DO THIS IN A SENSIBLE WAY. Every single thing that this guy had written was already done. EVERY SINGLE THING. A single function call with the coordinates would let the vehicle do what he wrote but in a way THAT ACTUALLY WORKED AND MADE THE TINIEST BIT OF FUCKING SENSE. He had literally given so few shits about this entire goddamn project that he had absolutely zero clue about what we'd even done last sprint.
After letting this man civilly know through our group chat about his failures, giving him pointers on what's wrong and what he can use and telling him that he should fix it by the end of the week, his response?
"I'll try"
That was it. Fuckass was starting to block us now, and this was the first sign of activity he's given since the sprint started. Ms Enabler had finished her work a fucking week ago, and she actually ASKED when she ran into trouble or thought that something could be improved. Mr DDTW? He never asked for shit, any clarification, any help, and I had let everybody know that I'm open. At least the other two who didn't ask for shit ACTUALLY DID SOMETHING. He'd been an useless sack of shit for half a semester in three separate projects and the one time he's been assigned something half important that would impact our grades he does this. I would not stand for it.
I let him know all this, still civil (so no insults) but much less kind, capped with "Stop fooling around. Finish this by the of the week." which probably came off as a threat but his shithead kinda had it coming.
He was actually mad. Dropped a huge faux-apologetic spiel in the chat. Why couldn't I just trust him (his code was garbage and he was constantly late without explanation), his work was almost done (it wasn't and if he'd started he'd understand the scope of what he was assigned), that the problem was that I'm a condescending piece of shit (bruh), and was suddenly very interested in doing work. Literally everybody ignored him. What was funny was seeing the first questions and requests for help after that spiel. I obliged and actually answered what he asked.
The end of the week came and went he'd just uploaded more garbage that didn't work. I had foreseen this and, on top of everything else, had been preparing his section of the work done by myself and properly. Thus came a single commit from me with a working version of the entire module, unblocking the entire team. I cannot imagine the sheer hatred for this man at that moment for the commit message to simply be:
"judgement"
And with that, all I got was a threat to report me to the professor for sabotaging his work. The following day our group got an email from the professor, with no explanation, asking for an almost-immediate video conference. Group chat was a shitshow of panic, as nobody knew what was going on. Least of all Mr DDTW.
Once again, I'm approaching the word limit so to be continued in part 3 (hopefully of 3)7 -
I took a civil service exam October last year, the list of passers where posted in the government website last December. My name wasn't on the list. I was heart broken. :'(
I wasn't able to apply for the job I wanted. I thought that I'm so stupid I can't even pass an exam.
I was depressed for almost a month.
Then yesterday, a friend of mine was searching google since I refuse to tell her my middle name.
Suddenly she exclaimed, wow! you're a civil service exam passer!
I was shocked beyond belief!
I checked the website, my name is still not there. HAHA. (deep inside it hurts)
I cursed my friend for trolling me but she swear that it's true. She sent me the link and BOOM! my name is on the list of APRIL passers!
WHAT THE HECK???
i just verified through phone that I actually passed and that it was an error on their website that included me on the wrong list. I don't know whether to be angry or pleased. lol XDundefined error404 name not found oops it's there...wrong error. i passed oh my gosh after 6 months good news8 -
HR, why so stupid?
I'm currently living in Sweden, want to move to Austria (significant other is studying there, I'm finishing my studies over here)
Me: *Applies for a Junior Java Dev job via company's online platform*
HR1: We like your CV, be here for an interview in person in 5 days.
Me: That's expensive, can we do it via Skype? I'm still in Sweden.
HR1: How are you planning on working in Austria while living in Sweden?
Me: I'm not. I'll move to Austria in 2 months. That's when I'd like to start working with you.
Me: *wonders why they skipped that part in my CV/cover letter as it's clearly stated there*
HR1: ....
Me: Hello?
Me: Helloooo?
HR2: We're sorry to tell you that the position of Senior Database Engineer has been filled. May we use your CV for other potential openings at our company?
Me: No worries, I applied for Junior Java Dev anyways. You may use my CV for other openings.
HR2: Oh, sorry for the confusion. I just mistyped the job title.
Me: *WTF? That was a machine-generated answer. Your system filed my application in the wrong place. You didn't mistype shit.*
HR1: Oh good for you. We've suddenly found out we need a Junior Java Dev as well as a Senior Database Engineer. Do you have time for a Skype interview this afternoon?
Me: ....
HR1: Hello?
Me: ....
HR1: Tomorrow then?4 -
I'm really close to just quitting coding all together. This job is sucking the life out of me. I've lost my interest in code and the idea that there are better jobs out there.
My "boss" who's not even really my boss but behaves like he is, is micromanaging my every tag, and is an information hog. He doesn't document, he doesn't tell me anything, I've been here six months and still don't know half of what I need to know to do my job properly!
I'm expected to implement a new responsive design, but we don't have design specifications.
Cool, you'd think, new ideas, complete overhaul! Let's get a good foundation in bootstrap going!
WRONG! It needs to fit in with the old, fuck- ugly pre 2000 design.
Not because of any design constraints in particular, but because HE wants it that way. You know what was fucking trendy in 2000? Tables. Tables fucking everywhere. YOU KNOW WHAT TABLES ARE NOT? RESPONSIVE YOU FUCKING ICE LOLLY CHEWER!
We have no development timeline, no process management, no fucking project management. THE FUCKING PASSWORDS WERE STILL STORED IN PLAIN TEXT UNTIL LAST MONTH YOU IRRESPONSIBLE BANANA DEEPTHROATER! 😤😤😤😤😤😤
I'm doing my best here to get something resembling the old page, but there needs to be some fucking compromise! We are in fucking 2017, let's work with Bootstrap instead of against it, how about that you fucking bald cactus!
I know enough about UI to know that the way we're going, this is just going to be another unusable fucking clusterfuck.
YOU KNOW THE BEST FUCKING PART? I'M A FUCKING BACKEND DEV AND I WAS HIRED AS SUCH! GIVE ME A DESIGN TEMPLATE AND I'LL DO MY BEST TO IMPLEMENT IT, BUT FUCK YOU FOR EXPECTING FRONT END LEVEL DESIGN KNOWLEDGE YOU DUMB FUCKING SPAGHETTI!14 -
So today was the worst day of my whole (just started) career.
We have a huge client like 700k users. Two weeks ago we migrated all their services to our aws infrastructure. I basically did most of the work because I'm the most skilled in it (not sure anymore).
Today I discovered:
- Mail cron was configured the wrong way so 3000 emails where waiting to be sent.
- The elastic search service wasn't yet whitelisted so didn't work for two weeks.
- The cron which syncs data between production db en testing db only partly worked.
Just fucking end me. Makes me wonder what other things are broken. I still have a lot to learn... And I might have fucked their trust in me for a bit.13 -
College can be one of the worst investments for an IT career ever.
I've been in university for the past 3 years and my views on higher education have radically changed from positive to mostly cynical.
This is an extremely polarizing topic, some say "your college is shite", "#notall", "you complain too much", and to all of you I am glad you are happy with your expensive toilet paper and feel like your dick just grew an inch longer, what I'll be talking about is my personal experience and you may make of it what you wish. I'm not addressing the best ivy-league Unis those are a whole other topic, I'll talk about average Unis for average Joes like me.
Higher education has been the golden ticket for countless generations, you know it, your parents believe in it and your grandparents lived it. But things are not like they used to be, higher education is a failing business model that will soon burst, it used to be simple, good grades + good college + nice title = happy life.
Sounds good? Well fuck you because the career paths that still work like that are limited, like less than 4.
The above is specially true in IT where shit moves so fast and furious if you get distracted for just a second you get Paul Walkered out of the Valley; companies don't want you to serve your best anymore, they want grunt work for the most part and grunts with inferiority complex to manage those grunts and ship the rest to India (or Mexico) at best startups hire the best problem solvers they can get because they need quality rather than quantity.
Does Uni prepare you for that? Well...no, the industry changes so much they can't even follow up on what it requires and ends up creating lousy study programs then tells you to invest $200k+ in "your future" for you to sweat your ass off on unproductive tasks to then get out and be struck by jobs that ask for knowledge you hadn't even heard off.
Remember those nights you wasted drawing ER diagrams while that other shmuck followed tutorials on react? Well he's your boss now, but don't worry you will wear your tired eyes, caffeine saturated breath and overweight with pride while holding your empty title, don't get me wrong I've indulged in some rough play too but I have noticed that 3 months giving a project my heart and soul teaches me more than 6 months of painstakingly pleasing professors with big egos.
And the soon to be graduates, my God...you have the ones that are there for the lulz, the nerds that beat their ass off to sustain a scholarship they'll have to pay back with interests and the ones that just hope for the best. The last two of the list are the ones I really feel bad for, the nerds will beat themselves over and over to comply with teacher demands not noticing they are about to graduate still versioning on .zip and drive, the latter feel something's wrong but they have no chances if there isn't a teacher to mentor them.
And what pisses me off even more is the typical answers to these issues "you NEED the title" and "you need to be self taught". First of all bitch how many times have we heard, seen and experienced the rejection for being overqualified? The market is saturated with titles, so much so they have become meaningless, IT companies now hire on an experience, economical and likeability basis. Worse, you tell me I need to be self taught, fucker I've been self taught for years why would I travel 10km a day for you to give me 0 new insights, slacking in my face or do what my dog does when I program (stare at me) and that's just on the days you decide to attend!
But not everything is bad, college does give you three things: networking, some good teachers and expensive dead tree remnants, is it worth the price tag, not really, not if you don't need it.
My broken family is not one of resources and even tho I had an 80% scholarship at the second best uni of my country I decided I didn't need the 10+ year debt for not sleeping 4 years, I decided to go to the 3rd in the list which is state funded; as for that decision it worked out as I'm paying most of everything now and through my BS I've noticed all of the above, I've visited 4 universities in my country and 4 abroad and even tho they have better everything abroad it still doesn't justify some of the prices.
If you don't feel like I do and you are happy, I'm happy for you. My rant is about my personal experience which is kind of in the context of IT higher education in the last ~8 years.
Just letting some steam off and not regretting most of my decisions.15 -
TL;DR :
"when i die i want my group project members to lower me into my grave so they can let me down one last time"
STORY TIME
Last year in College, I had two simultaneous projects. Both were semester long projects. One was for a database class an another was for a software engineering class.
As you can guess, the focus of the projects was very different. Databases we made some desktop networked chat application with a user login system and what not in Java. SE we made an app store with an approval system and admin panels and ratings and reviews and all that jazz in Meteor.js.
The DB project we had 4 total people and one of them was someone we'll call Frank. Frank was also in my SE project group. Frank disappeared for several weeks. Not in class, didn't contact us, and at one point the professors didn't know much either. As soon as we noticed it would be an issue, we talked to the professors. Just keeping them in the loop will save you a lot of trouble down the road. I'm assuming there was some medical or family emergency because the professors were very understanding with him once he started coming back to class and they had a chance to talk.
Lesson 1: If you have that guy that doesn't show up or communicate, don't be a jerk to them and communicate with your professor. Also, don't stop trying to contact the rogue partner. Maybe they'll come around sometime.
It sucked to lose 25% of our team for a project, but Frank appreciated that we didn't totally ignore him and throw him under the bus to the point that the last day of class he came up to me and said, "hey, open your book bag and bring it next to mine." He then threw a LARGE bottle of booze in there as a thank you.
Lesson 2: Treat humans as humans. Things go wrong and understanding that will get you a lot farther with people than trying to make them feel terrible about something that may have been out of their control.
Our DB project went really well. We got an A, we demoed, it worked, it was cool. The biggest problem is I was the only person that had taken a networking class so I ended up doing a large portion of the work. I wish I had taken other people's skills into account when we were deciding on a project. Especially because the only requirement was that it needed to have a minimum of 5 tables and we had to use some SQL language (aka, we couldn't use no-SQL).
The SE project had Frank and a music major who wanted to minor in CS (and then 3 other regular CS students aside from me). This assignment was make an app store using any technology you want. But, you had to use agile sprints. So we had weekly meetings with the "customer" (the TA), who would change requirements on us to keep us on our toes and tell us what they wanted done as a priority for the next meeting. Seriously, just like real life. It was so much fun trying to stay ahead of that.
So we met up and tried to decided what to use. One kid said Java because we all had it for school. The big issue is trying to make a Java web app is a pain in the ass. Seriously, there are so many better things to use. Other teams decided to use Django because they all wanted to learn Python. I suggested why not use something with a nice package system to minimize duplicating work that had already been done and tested by someone. Kid 1 didn't like that because he said in the real world you have to make your own software and not use packages. Little did he know that I had worked in SE for a few years already and knew damn well that every good project has code from somewhere else that has already solved a problem you're facing. We went with Java the first week. It failed miserably. Nobody could get the server set up on their computers. Using VCS with it required you to keep the repo outside of the where you wrote code and copy and paste changes in there. It was just a huge flop so everyone else voted to change.
Lesson 3: Be flexible. Be open to learning new things. Don't be afraid to try something new. It'll make you a better developer in the long run.
So we ended up using Meteor. Why? We all figured we could pick up javascript super easy.Two of us already knew it. And the real time thing would make for some cool effects when an app got a approved or a comment was made. We got to work and the one kid was still pissed. I just checked the repo and the only thing he committed was fixing the spelling of on word in the readme.
We sat down one day and worked for 4 straight hours. We finished the whole project in that time. While other teams were figuring out how to layout their homepage, we had a working user system and admin page and everything. Our TA was trying to throw us for loops by asking for crazy things and we still came through. We had tests that ran along side the application as you used it. It was friggin cool.
Lesson 4: If possible, pick the right tool for the job. Not the tool you know. Everything in CS has a purpose. If you use it for its purpose, you will save days off of a project.1 -
What an absolute fucking disaster of a day. Strap in, folks; it's time for a bumpy ride!
I got a whole hour of work done today. The first hour of my morning because I went to work a bit early. Then people started complaining about Jenkins jobs failing on that one Jenkins server our team has been wanting to decom for two years but management won't let us force people to move to new servers. It's a single server with over four thousand projects, some of which run massive data processing jobs that last DAYS. The server was originally set up by people who have since quit, of course, and left it behind for my team to adopt with zero documentation.
Anyway, the 500GB disk is 100% full. The memory (all 64GB of it) is fully consumed by stuck jobs. We can't track down large old files to delete because du chokes on the workspace folder with thousands of subfolders with no Ram to spare. We decide to basically take a hacksaw to it, deleting the workspace for every job not currently in progress. This of course fucked up some really poorly-designed pipelines that relied on workspaces persisting between jobs, so we had to deal with complaints about that as well.
So we get the Jenkins server up and running again just in time for AWS to have a major incident affecting EC2 instance provisioning in our primary region. People keep bugging me to fix it, I keep telling them that it's Amazon's problem to solve, they wait a few minutes and ask me to fix it again. Emails flying back and forth until that was done.
Lunch time already. But the fun isn't over yet!
I get back to my desk to find out that new hires or people who got new Mac laptops recently can't even install our toolchain, because management has started handing out M1 Macs without telling us and all our tools are compiled solely for x86_64. That took some troubleshooting to even figure out what the problem was because the only error people got from homebrew was that the formula was empty when it clearly wasn't.
After figuring out that problem (but not fully solving it yet), one team starts complaining to us about a Github problem because we manage the github org. Except it's not a github problem and I already knew this because they are a Problem Team that uses some technical authoring software with Git integration but they only have even the barest understanding of what Git actually does. Turns out it's a Git problem. An update for Git was pushed out recently that patches a big bad vulnerability and the way it was patched causes problems because they're using Git wrong (multiple users accessing the same local repo on a samba share). It's a huge vulnerability so my entire conversation with them went sort of like:
"Please don't."
"We have to."
"Fine, here's a workaround, this will allow arbitrary code execution by anyone with physical or virtual access to this computer that you have sitting in an unlocked office somewhere."
"How do I run a Git command I don't use Git."
So that dealt with, I start taking a look at our toolchain, trying to figure out if I can easily just cross-compile it to arm64 for the M1 macbooks or if it will be a more involved fix. And I find all kinds of horrendous shit left behind by the people who wrote the tools that, naturally, they left for us to adopt when they quit over a year ago. I'm talking entire functions in a tool used by hundreds of people that were put in as a joke, poorly documented functions I am still trying to puzzle out, and exactly zero comments in the code and abbreviated function names like "gars", "snh", and "jgajawwawstai".
While I'm looking into that, the person from our team who is responsible for incident communication finally gets the AWS EC2 provisioning issue reported to IT Operations, who sent out an alert to affected users that should have gone out hours earlier.
Meanwhile, according to the health dashboard in AWS, the issue had already been resolved three hours before the communication went out and the ticket remains open at this moment, as far as I know.5 -
I'm disappointed with my boss.
I've always felt that the company I work for was different, I'm a web dev in a foreign country, finding a job as a fresh graduate wasn't easy at all.
before joining this company, all the employers I've met expected so many skills from foreigners like me, while they sat the bar so low for local fresh grad candidates.
Except my current boss, after the second interview he said that he believes in my potential and he wants to take this risk, the risk of hiring a foreign fresh graduate.
After I joined I worked my ass off and after 9 months I became a team lead.
And my boss said to me that the risk he took was completely worth it and I exceeded expectations.
Now I'm involved in assessing candidates applying for web development role at this company, we have 3 candidates 2 local and 1 foreigner.
Ironically the foreigner proved great potential and understanding of web technologies that exceeds a fresh entry role.
The other 2 local were alright, need training but they pass the criteria for an entry level role.
I reviewed this objectively and urged the same man that hired me to consider hiring the foriegner.
He said no, because of Visa costs and because of the lengthy legal process employers need to go through to hire a foreigner, and asked me to move forward with the 2 locals and not lose them to another company.
I felt that, if i were in the foriegner candidate's shoes I would've felt that there's something wrong with me for that no one wants to hire me for my skills and what I've worked hard to achieve was all not enough, it would make me feel like an outcast.
I know that I should do what I'm told, after all he's the employer, but still.. this feeling is bothering me, in a way I feel like I've cheated or I was just lucky and I didn't really earn this job.4 -
[Little perspective: For the last 7 months I'm working in a certain project.]
[The project is full of unimaginative, non-creative devs with 0 initiative and poor technical background.]
[And they're almost all from one country which you all can figure out.]
[But I'm not going to mention it here because I don't want to come up as a racist]
[So there's US (Europeans) and THEM. 3 of US and about 10 of THEM. And we're doing 90% of all the heavy lifting]
---
Yesterday
---
D (Dev from THEM): Hi S, I have a problem with my task
Me: (sighing) Ok let's have a call
* on the call with D we were checking some stuff loosely related to task *
* code wouldn't get invoked at all for some reason *
* suddenly I realize that even if the code would invoke, D's probably doing everything wrong in it anyway *
Me (thinking): I need to double check something.
Me: I can't help you now, I'll get back to you later.
* call ended *
---
Me: Hey J, I need your help, I need to clarify the work package in my mind, because I am no longer sure.
J (my European TL): Ok, fire away.
* call started *
Me: Is it true that [blahblahblah] and so D's task depends on me completing first my task, or am I losing my mind?
J: That is correct.
Me: Well she's trying to do this in [that] way, which is completely wrong.
J: You see, that's how it is in this project, you do refinements with them, split these work packages to tasks, mention specifically what depends on what and what order should things be taken in, and in some cases all tasks from given user stories should be done by one person entirely... But they do it their way anyway, assign different people to different interdependent tasks, and these people don't even understand the big picture and they try to do the things the way they think they understand them.
Me: It's a fire in a brothel.
J: Yup.
Me: I fucking love this project.
J: (smiling silently)
* call ended *
---
Me: Ok D, you can't do your task because it's dependant on my task.
D: Oh... so what do I do?
Me: I don't know, do something else until I do my task.
---
A (THEIR TL) (Oh, did I forget to mention that there are 2 TLs in this project? THEY have their own. And there are 2 PMs as well.)
A: Hey S, I need to talk
Me: (sighing, getting distracted from work again) Ok let's have a call
* call started *
A: S, we need this entire work package done by Friday EOD.
Me: I can't promise, especially since there are several people working on its several tasks.
A: D's working on hers for 3 days already, and she's stuck. We want you to take over.
Me: (sighing, thinking "great"): Ok.
* call ended *
---
Me: Hey D, A instructed me to take over your task. This is actually going to be easier since you'd have to wait for mine after all.
D: Oh, ok.
---
* I switched the Assigned Person on D's task to myself on Azure *
---
This morning, email from D.
"Hey, I completed my task and it's on [this] branch, what do I do now?"
........................................
Me, hesitating between 2 ways to reply:
(and take note there are people in CC: A, J, P - the last one is THEIR PM)
1) "Hi, Unfortunately you'd still have to wait for my changes because your task is dependent on my task - the column to be changed is in the table that I am introducing and it's not merged to develop branch yet. By the way I already did your task locally, as I was instructed to do it, I'm wrapping things up now."
(y'know: the response which is kind, professional, understanding; without a slight bit of impatience)
2) WHAT FUCKING PART OF "DON'T DO THIS I WILL FUCKING DO IT MYSELF GO HOME JUST GO HOME" YOU DON'T FUCKING UNDERSTAND4 -
Crappy day, entirely related to cars and trucks and other wheeled implements of doom and annoyance.
My car died this morning.
It has been slowly dying for weeks in a very unusual way (something electrical; we're not sure what), but today it finally gave up and just wouldn't start anymore.
We replaced the crap battery (it had been a crap freebie from my parents), which fixed the not-starting issue for now, but it still has lots of other problems. Fluid leaks, disintegrating paint, some lights suddenly or randomly not working, super long clutch distance, sporadic grinding sounds, shifter randomly not engaging, pieces literally falling off, bits of the interior breaking (like the driver's side door handle), the wiper sprayers bloody missing the windshield, etc., etc., etc. My poor, poor car. It was super cheap, and I've had it for a long time, so I'm not surprised, but. I love my car, so it makes me really sad. ☹
Anyway, we finally got the car starting again, and I drove to work about four hours late. I had worked super late the previous night (11:45pm), and had let my boss know already, so whatever.
As for the trip, I work ~40 minutes away, and with the poor quality of drivers here there's usually something dumb happening. Today... well. Today was one of the bad days.
Someone was in the fast lane doing 50mph. The usual speed of traffic is 80mph. They got annoyed whenever someone passed them. Minor, but worth including.
Later on, people slowed way down and gawked at... a port-a-potty. Seriously, a port-a-potty. It was on the shoulder where there had been some construction, so it's not surprising or anything. People seriously dropped from 80mph down to 20mph just to stare at this thing, and it wasn't even occupied or anything. It was just a port-a-potty! There was nothing else around! What could possibly be so interesting?!
There was also a random Penske (moving) truck doing 35mph on the freeway holding up traffic like 10 minutes later; no idea why. Traffic usually does ~70mph there. No blinkers or anything, it was just being slow and causing everyone to go around in a pretty traffic-heavy area.
The truck in front of me for ~40% of the trip kept waiting way too long to stop, and would then slam on the breaks. I almost hit him twice because of this, and I couldn't see around him, either. It was some giant pickup staying just in the wrong spot. I ended up driving partially in the shoulder so I could gauge when to stop by the car in front of him. He slammed on the breaks like twelve more times before he finally left. Jerk.
The same thing happened again like 85% of the way to work, but this time it was a different pickup, and there was a semi was behind me, which obviously couldn't stop very quickly. Fortunately for both of us, there was a gap in traffic to my right, so I slipped out of the way before getting squished. ><
Bloody hell.
Today has not been fun.
Nobody flipping me off or was doing their damnedest to prevent me from changing lanes today, though, so I suppose it could have been worse. Also I didn't die, so there's that.2 -
I fucking hate holidays. Every goddamn time when it's a holiday, that's when I need to go to the store and get something, only to find out that they're closed. And what for.. holidays are - to me at least - no more than an excuse for people to not go to work for the day.
So, now I ran out of booze, and can't continue developing and testing my breathalyzer until Monday.
Then it hit me.. what if I take all my Arduino equipment (laptop, jumper wires, ...) to the café and deploy my build environment on a table there?
Eh, no no no. I don't want some idiot to come up to me saying "YOU EVIL HEKORMAN!!!" and have to explain that just like when you call a banker who's working with the money vaults a thief, it's wrong to call someone that's developing shit an evil hacker.. one should strive to not throw mindless accusations out of unknowingness. Not that I'm a good example of that though. But still.
It's probably that or some stupid bitch coming up to me asking to hack her boyfriend's Phasebuk.. that said, that could probably be an opportunity to get in her pants. But then, I don't wanna insert my meat in an idiot like that... ._.
So, no booze it is then? Thanks national holidays!
"Ok Google, remind me every day before a holiday because I really couldn't care less about them!!"16 -
I've been lurking for a while but I had it up to here with these goddamned "js sucks" posts.
I'm not gonna deny js has severe design problems,
or that chromium is a motherfucking vampire
or that it's a goddamn pain in the ass to understand how to babel webpack + plugins correctly
that is all true.
the problem is that it's just a lazy damn circlejerk at this point where no learning is gained, with no outlook on any possible solution of these problems, let alone ANY type of actual collaboration to help the situation.
sometimes people don't even care to specify what is specifically wrong with js. It's just "js sucks" and that's it, farm ++.
slack is a ram hog, yes, yes, we know... WE KNOW.
every 5 days someone has to remind that!
is there any solution? why is it a ram hog? is electron the problem, or is the slack source code doing weird shit?
are there any lightweight alternatives to electron?
That's actual good conversation, but no, apparently it's impossible to drop the snarky tone for 2 seconds.
I think it's fine to point out defficiencies in applications, but it's not ok to shitpost on and on.
I would very ok with someone shitcomplaining about js is if they were doing something about it.
I'm still ok with people letting of some steam, I'm fine with people expressing frustration from direct work experience with js. I'm not ok with people and their ignorance and snarky comments and non helpfulness while comfortably laughing from their own camp of totally unrelated technologies.
Hearing sysadmins or people that code exclusively in c shit on js makes me feel my insides twirl.
Imagine I didn't do shit for linux, but I went around forums pointing out the defficiencies, like the lack of standards, and saying that mac is way better.
Or I if yapped on and on about openvpn and having an obscure as fuck api, meanwhile not doing a single fucking thing about it, or not even using it in a day to day basis.
do you hate slack's ram usage? me too and js isn't going anywhere in the next 5 years, so either do something or provide smart conversation, diagnosis of the problem or possible alternstives/solutions, otherwise stfu12 -
It works.
How I hate that sentence.
Whenever that sentence pops up, I wanna take a frying pan, make some bacon, eat the bacon and slam the still hot pan with grease through someone's face till the skull breaks.
Why has he so many anger issues, one might ask.
Usually the sentence "It works" means that after looking at "working thing" it works wrong in 95 % of all cases, but hey - for 5 % it at least does *something* right. Not everything, don't get ya hope up.
We had this fun topic happening again today and I'm still too angry to sleep.
Lucene analysis of texts in Elasticsearch.
Stopword list? Multiple word n-grams per line, duplicates, not lower cased, not properly encoded.
Tokenizers? Duh. Why should one put them in proper order.... Or more realistic: There is an order in tokenizers necessary *devs with shocked faces*.
Language specific details... UHM. Wait. Languages are different? There are edge cases in languages? *more shocked faces*.
Even more shocking that if an text processing pipeline is implemented horribly wrong, it delivers wrong results. *mind blown*.
But our unit tests (this goes out to @kiki) were working.
Yeah. You dumb nuggets who even an amoeba would be ashamed of, when you only do positive tests in unit tests with the most obvious working examples, then your unit tests are just useless waste of nibbles.
Some of the devs are really a fucking waste of genetic information, should have probably ended better in a sock.
If this sounds too harsh, they had 2 weeks.
In just 3 hours I found out that they can redo that with supervision.
-.-
I'm getting too old for that shit. Seriously.4 -
Biggest challenge I overcame as dev? One of many.
Avoiding a life sentence when the 'powers that be' targeted one of my libraries for the root cause of system performance issues and I didn't correct that accusation with a flame thrower.
What the accusation? What I named the library. Yep. The *name* was causing every single problem in the system.
Panorama (very, very expensive APM system at the time) identified my library in it's analysis, the calls to/from SQLServer was the bottleneck
We had one of Panorama's engineers on-site and he asked what (not the actual name) MyLibrary was and (I'll preface I did not know or involved in any of the so-called 'research') a crack team of developers+managers researched the system thoroughly and found MyLibrary was used in just about every project. I wrote the .Net 1.1 MyLibrary as a mini-ORM to simplify the execution of database code (stored procs, etc) and gracefully handle+log database exceptions (auto-logged details such as the target db, stored procedure name, parameter values, etc, everything you'd need to troubleshoot database errors). This was before Dapper and the other fancy tools used by kids these days.
By the time the news got to me, there was a team cobbled together who's only focus was to remove any/every trace of MyLibrary from the code base. Using Waterfall, they calculated it would take at least a year to remove+replace MyLibrary with the equivalent ADO.Net plumbing.
In a department wide meeting:
DeptMgr: "This day forward, no one is to use MyLibrary to access the database! It's slow, unprofessionally named, and the root cause of all the database issues."
Me: "What about MyLibrary is slow? It's excecuting standard the ADO.Net code. Only extra bit of code is the exception handling to capture the details when the exception is logged."
DeptMgr: "We've spent the last 6 weeks with the Panorama engineer and he's identified MyLibrary as the cause. Company has spent over $100,000 on this software and we have to make fact based decisions. Look at this slide ... "
<DeptMgr shows a histogram of the stacktrace, showing MyLibrary as the slowest>
Me: "You do realize that the execution time is the database call itself, not the code. In that example, the invoice call, it's the stored procedure that taking 5 seconds, not MyLibrary."
<at this point, DeptMgr is getting red-face mad>
AreaMgr: "Yes...yes...but if we stopped using MyLibrary, removing the unnecessary layers, will make the code run faster."
<typical headknodd-ers knod their heads in agreement>
Dev01: "The loading of MyLibrary takes CPU cycles away from code that supports our customers. Every CPU cycle counts."
<headknod-ding continues>
Me: "I'm really confused. Maybe I'm looking at the data wrong. On the slide where you highlighted all the bottlenecks, the histogram shows the latency is the database, I mean...it's right there, in red. Am I looking at it wrong?"
<this was meeting with 20+ other devs, mgrs, a VP, the Panorama engineer>
DeptMgr: "Yes you are! I know MyLibrary is your baby. You need to check your ego at the door and face the facts. Your MyLibrary is a failed experiment and needs to be exterminated from this system!"
Fast forward 9 months, maybe 50% of the projects updated, come across the documentation left from the Panorama. Even after the removal of MyLibrary, there was zero increases in performance. The engineer recommended DBAs start optimizing their indexes and other N+1 problems discovered. I decide to ask the developer who lead the re-write.
Me: "I see that removing MyLibrary did nothing to improve performance."
Dev: "Yes, DeptMgr was pissed. He was ready to throw the Panorama engineer out a window when he said the problems were in the database all along. Didn't you say that?"
Me: "Um, so is this re-write project dead?"
Dev: "No. Removing MyLibrary introduced all kinds of bugs. All the boilerplate ADO.Net code caused a lot of unhandled exceptions, then we had to go back and write exception handling code."
Me: "What a failure. What dipshit would think writing more code leads to less bugs?"
Dev: "I know, I know. We're so far behind schedule. We had to come up with something. I ended up writing a library to make replacing MyLibrary easier. I called it KnightRider. Like the TV show. Everyone is excited to speed up their code with KnightRider. Same method names, same exception handling. All we have to do is replace MyLibrary with KnightRider and we're done."
Me: "Won't the bottlenecks then point to KnightRider?"
Dev: "Meh, not my problem. Panorama meets primarily with the DBAs and the networking team now. I doubt we ever use Panorama to look at our C# code."
Needless to say, I was (still) pissed that they had used MyLibrary as dirty word and a scapegoat for months when they *knew* where the problems were. Pissed enough for a flamethrower? Maybe.6 -
Tl;Dr - It started as an escape, carried on as fun, then as a way to be lazy, and finally as a way of life. Coding has defined and shaped my entire life from the age of nine.
When I was nine I was playing a game on my ZX spectrum and accidentally knocked the keyboard as I reached over to adjust my TV. Incredibly parts of it actually made a little sense to me and got my curiosity. I spent hours reading through that code, afraid to turn the Spectrum off in case I couldn't get back to it. Weeks later I got hold of a book of example code to copy out to do various things like making patterns on the screen. I was amazed by it. You told it what to do, and it did it! (don't you miss the days when coding worked like that?) I was bitten by the coding bug (excuse the pun) and I'd got it bad! I spent many late nights on that thing, escaping from a difficult home life. People (especially adults) were confusing, and in my experience unpredictable. When you did things wrong they shouted at you and threatened to take you away, or ignored you completely. Code never did that. If you did something wrong, it quietly let you know and often told you exactly what was wrong. It wasn't because of shifting expectations or a change of mood or anything like that. It was just clean logic, simple cause and effect.
I get my first computer a year later: an IBM XT that had been discarded by a company and was fitted with a key on the side to turn it on. With the impressive noise it made it really was like starting an engine. Whole most kids would have played with the games, I spent my time playing with batch scripts and writing very simple text adventures. And discovering what "format c:" does. With some abuse and threatened violence I managed to get windows running on it. Windows 2.1 I think it was.
At 12 I got a Gateway 75 running Windows 95. Over the next few years I do covered many amazing games: ROTT, Doom, Hexen, and so on. Aside from the games themselves, I was fascinated by the way computers could be linked together to play together (this was still early days for the Web and computers networked in a home was very unusual). I also got into making levels for Doom, Heretic, and years later Duke Nukem 3D (pretty sure it was heretic; all I remember is the nightmare of trying to write levels entirely by code!). I enjoyed re-scripting some of the weapons and monsters to behave differently. About this time I also got into HTML (I still call this coding, but not programming), C, and java. I had trouble with C as none of the examples and tutorial code seemed to run properly under a Windows environment. Similar for my very short stint with assembly. At some point I got a TI-83 programmable calculator and started rewriting my old batch script games on it, including one "Gangster Lord" game that had the same mechanics as a lot of the Facebook games that appeared later (do things, earn money, spend money to buy stuff to do more things). Worried about upcoming exams, I also made a number of maths helper apps, including a quadratic equation solver that gave the steps, and a fake calculator reset to smuggle them into my exams. When the day came I panicked and did a proper reset for fear of being caught.
At 18 I was convinced I was going to be a professional coder as I started a degree in Computer Science. Three months later I dropped out after a bunch of lectures teaching what input and output devices were and realising we were only going to be taught Java and no C++. I started a job on the call centre of a big company, but was frustrated with many of the boring and repetitive tasks we had to do. So I put my previous knowledge to use, and quickly learned VBA to automate tasks. It wasn't long before I ended up promoted to Business Analyst where I worked on a great team building small systems in Office, SAS, and a few other tools.
I decided to retrain in psychology, so left the job I was in and started another degree. During my work and placements my skills came in use a number of times to simplify and automate tasks. I finished my degree, then took a job as a teaching assistant while I worked out what I wanted to do next and how to pay for it. Three years later I've ended up IT technican at the school, responsible for the website, teaching a number of Computing lessons each week, and unofficial co-coordinator for Computing as a subject. I also run a team of ten year old Digital Leaders who I am training in online safety and as technical experts; I am hoping to inspire them to a future in coding. In September I'll be starting teacher training with a view to becoming a Computing specialist teacher. Oh, and I'm currently doing a course in Android Development in my free time.
And this all started with an accidental knock on the keyboard of a ZX Spectrum.6 -
Controversial tech rant begins here:
You know, I'm sure a lot of you guys know that it is pretty uncommon to encounter a woman who is who is into tech (and ranting about said tech). This has always made people question why. I personally feel like that is the case because those that do like tech, and those that don't just find a different interest. I thought that would suffice, but now Google and Microsoft are advertising their diversity programs. I was fine with all that until I was personally affected by it. I intended to apply for scholarships from Microsoft. They turned me away because according to them, they began giving them only to people who were "marginalized". That and their commercials trying to pressure young girls to join the STEM field. Again nothing wrong with women in the tech field, but now that this is turning into favoritism I have to fight harder battles to compete in the tech industry. Not only that, but now I read a study about their employment. Despite the number of people they turned away and the money they spent on these programs, thr companies STILL haven't become any more diverse, and from what it seems, their reaction lately has been to double-down and try harder. I just want an open, honest, and fair tech community. Has anyone else felt the affects of this situation?10 -
I've been lurking on devrant a while now, I figure it's time to add my first rant.
Little background and setting a frame of reference for the rant: I'm currently a software engineer in the bioinformatics field. I have a computer science background whereas a vast majority of those around me, especially other devs, are people with little to no formal computer background - mostly biology in some form or another. Now, this said, a lot of the other devs are excellent developers, but some are as bad as you could imagine.
I started at a new company in April. About a month after joining a dev who worked there left, and I inherited the pipeline he maintained. Primarily 3 perl scripts (yes, perl, welcome to bioinformatics, especially when it comes to legacy code like is seen in this pipeline) that mostly copied and generated some files and reports in different places. No biggie, until I really dove in.
This dev, which I barely feel he deserves to be called, is a biology major turned computer developer. He was hired at this company and learned to program on the job. That being said, I give him a bit of a pass as I'm sure he did not have had an adequate support structure to teach him any better, but still, some of this is BS.
One final note: not all of the code, especially a lot of the stupid logic, in this pipeline was developed by this other dev. A lot of it he adopted himself. However, he did nothing about it either, so I put fault on him.
Now, let's start.
1. perl - yay bioinformatics
2. Redundant code. Like, you literally copied 200+ lines of code into a function to change 3 lines in that code for a different condition, and added if(condition) {function();} else {existing code;}?? Seriously??
3. Whitesmiths indentation style.. why? Just, why? Fuck off with that. Where did you learn that and why do you insist on using it??
4. Mixing of whitesmiths and more common K&R indentation.
5. Fucked indentation. Code either not indented and even some code indented THE WRONG WAY
6. 10+ indentation levels. This, not "terrible" normally, but imagine this with the last 3 points. Cannot follow the code at freaking all.
7. Stupid logic. Like, for example, check if a string has a comma in it. If it does, split the string on the comma and push everything to an array. If not, just push the string to the array.... You, you know you can just split the string on the comma and push it, right?? If there is no comma it will be an array containing the original string.. Why the fuck did you think you needed to add a condition for that??
8. Functions that are called to set values in global variables, arrays, and hashes.. function has like 5 lines in it and is called in 2 locations. Just keep that code in place!
9. 50+ global variables/hashes/arrays in one of the scripts with no clear way to tell how/when values are set nor what they are used for.
10. Non-descriptive names for everything
11. Next to no comments in the code. What comments there are are barely useful.
12. No documentation
There's more, but this is all I can think to identify right now. All together these issues have made this pipeline the pinnacle of all the garbage that I've had to work on.
Attaching some screenshots of just a tiny fraction of the code to show some of the crap I'm talking about.6 -
rant.GetType() == typeof(long)
I have voiced my unhappiness to the powers that be regarding having to sit in traffic for over an hour to get to work and an hour to get back home, in the hopes that some sort of resolution and compromise can be reached.
The response basically was, "We've never had anyone work from home before and this is very new to us, so we wouldn't know where to start and how to manage this."
Firstly, from what I've heard along the grapevine, someone has worked from home before. In fact, it was a developer... wouldn't you fucking know!
Secondly, you're the manager... FUCKING MANAGE! Yes this is perhaps "new" territory for the company, but it's certainly nothing new to the world. Or maybe I'm wrong?
How's about, rather than fucking "ummm-ing" and "ahhh-ing" about the working from home being a good idea or not, perhaps try saying, "You know what, let's try something for the next 3 months and see how it goes. We sit down and hash out when and how we are going to communicate regarding the work that needs to be done, and when you will need to come in for meetings and the like." If it doesn't work after 2 weeks, oh well... we tried. And if we're still going strong after month 4, I think we have a winner!
Perhaps it's a generational thing, seeing as management are Baby Boomers and I'm a Millennial? Then again, I could be wrong.
The point is that I see a potential solution to my problem that may actually work and benefit both parties, but they're either to fucking set in their old ass ways and stubborn to allow this. Or perhaps it's a thing of "if we do this for you, we have to do it for everyone", which they don't want to do.
But more importantly, they don't seem to get the whole notion of "a happy employee is a productive employee".6 -
Here's to clients who wish to pay "per project" instead of "per month". Man, fuck that.
Back when I was still a novice, I took on a couple of small time projects from clients who contacted me after looking at my GitHub, and they all wanted to pay me a lump-sum for the project. Because I'm an idiot, I thought sure, what difference would that make. Boy was I wrong.
What followed was me finishing the projects well before time but because of the clients' constant reiterations and changes in design and nitpicking every decision I made while creating the websites for them, the projects dragged on for weeks longer than they were originally intended. And I fucking got paid that one-time amount in the beginning. All this maintenance, for free. Even though I had not explicitly agreed to the maintenance part, since they never finalized the specifications of the project, it just never got "done" officially, and all the maintenance part just came under development.
How many different kinds of disgusting does someone have to be to do this? I should've fucking said NO to those terms, but I had to have experience. Well, nice experience that was. Never again. :(1 -
Woo, rant time.
I've recently changed jobs to a new company due to a number of factors at my old job. I didn't tell my old boss (let's call him X) my expected salary, nor did I tell him which company I was going to.
However, I've been informed by someone that still works there that X has been discussing my new wage in front of everyone; he was telling everyone that I'm going to lose money by moving job and that I made a stupid decision.
I didn't leave due to money, it was due to X's inability to take constructive criticism, the constant subtle sexism of the office and just a generally bad overall feeling about the job/office going forward. Yes, I will admit that money did have a minor part in my decision to leave but I didn't verbalise that to anyone in the office, and I made X aware that my departure wasn't to do with money. I left on good terms.
I feel as though it was wrong of X to talk about his opinions on my new job in front of my ex-colleagues and friends. I don't know, maybe this is the norm and I've just been living in a cave before this, or maybe my last boss was just a bit of a douchenugget. Has anyone else had this experience?
I've got to meet up with everyone from my last place tomorrow to properly say goodbye and things.. but I'm not sure how to approach my old boss when leaving drinks are held now. Should I say anything? Should I just act as though I know nothing about it?
What would you guys do in this situation???19 -
Two years ago, I developed an security app for Android as a school project. I didn't like teamwork at school (you know, you do all the work and everyone else is getting the same grade you receive, specially if you are the nerd of the class), actually I hated it, so I made it alone.
Its name was "Alex" and was a simple "panic button". You can configure two emergency emails and phone numbers (contacts only, not police) and, if you're in danger, you just have to press the button and the app is gonna send two messages/emails to your contacts: the first one, to tell where are you (GPS, only the name of the place) and that you're in problems. The second one with an audio/photo file of the situation.
Sounds like a great app, and I tested it few times. The reason I didn't continue with this is that I got my first job and I had not time, and that, tree or four months later, the government (of the city) launched a similar app. Less sophisticated, but I think it's still useful: "No estoy sola"(I'm not alone). I haven't tested it cause I don't trust on the authorities, I'd preffer to send my location to a friend through messenger app instead.
I don't know if I should re-work this app (I didn't released it, I just have the beta) or work on something else. I'm afraid that, if I release it, someone could die or get kidnapped because of a bug or something going wrong with the app :c What do you think?5 -
I fucking hate chained methods. Ok, not all of them. Query things like array.where.first... that stuff is ok.
Specially if it's part of the std lib of a lang, which would be probably written by a very competent coder and under scrutiny.
But if you're not that person, chances are you'll produce VASTLY inferior code.
I'm talking about things like:
expect(n).to.be(x).and.not(y)
And the reason I don't like it is because it's all fine and dandy at first.
But once you get to the corner cases, jesus christ, prepare to read some docpages.
You end up reading their entire fucking docs (which are suboptimal sometimes) trying to figure if this fucking dsl can do what you need.
Then you give up and ask in a github issue. And the dev first condescends you and then tells you that the beautiful eden of code he created doesn't let you do what you want.
The corner cases usually involve nesting or some very specific condition, albeit reasonable.
This kind of design is usually present in testing or validation js libraries. And I hate all of those for it.
If you want a modern js testing lib that doesn't suck ass, check avajs. It's as simple as testing should be.
No magic globals, no chaining, zero config. Fuck globals forced by libs.
But my favorite thing about it that is I can put a breakpoint wherever the fuck I want and the debugger stops right fucking there.
Code is basically lines of statements, that's it, and by overusing chaining, by encouraging the grouping of dozens of statements into one, you are preventing me from controlling these statements on MY code.
As an end dev, I only expect complexity increases to come from the problems themselves rather than from needlessly "beautified" apis.
When people create their own shitty dsl, an image comes to my mind of an incoherent rambling man that likes poetry a lot and creates his own martial art, which looks pretty but will get your ass kicked against the most basic styles of fighting.
I fucking hate esoteric code.
Even if I had to execute a list of functions, I'd rather send them in an array instead of being able to chain them because:
a) tree shaking would spare from all the functions i didn't import
b) that's what fucking arrays are for, to contain several things.
This bad style of coding is a result of how low the barrier to code in higher level langs are.
As a language or library gets easier to use you might think that's a positive thing. But at the same time it breeds laziness.
Js has such a low learning curve that it attacts the wrong kind of devs, the lazy, the uninspired, the medium.com reader, the "i just care about my paycheck" ones.
Someone might think that by bashing bad js devs I'm trying to elevate myself.
That'd be extremely stupid. That's like beating a retarded blind man in a game and then saying "look, I'm way better than this retarded blind man".
I'm not on a risky point of view, just take a stroll down npmjs.com. That place is a landfill. Not really npm's fault, in fact their search algorithm is good.
It's just the community.
Every lang has a ratio of competence. Of competent to incompetent devs.
You have the lang devs and most intelligent lib devs at the top. At the bottom you have the bottom.
Well js has a horrible ratio. I wouldn't be shocked to find out that most js devs still consider using import or await the future.
You could say that js improved a lot, that it was way worse beforr. But I hate chaining now, and i hated back then!
On top of this, you have these blog web companies, sucking the "js tutorial" business tit dry, pumping out the most obscenely unprofessional and bar lowering tutorials you can imagine, further capping the average intelligence of most js devs.
And abusing SEO while they're at it, littering the entire web with copy paste content.2 -
!dev (when do I ever post a dev related story? I only post about my personal life really)
For about 2 years I had a very good friend, and I had a huge crush on her for most of those 2 years. All of my junior year of high school, she dated my best friend, then they broke up the summer after because he'd cheated on her around the time they got together and she had found out. I was there for both of them during the breakup (it was fucking exhausting). The thing is, I was there for the girl more because I had a crush on her, and I started to consider her my best friend rather than her ex.
She knew I had a crush on her for a long time. But she still spent about a year going to parties every weekend, getting fucking hammered, and hooking up with random guys, then proceeded to tell me about it after. I can't count how many times she had to cancel plans because she got hammered the night before.
But I had a huge crush on her, so I essentially put her up on a pedestal, thinking she could do no wrong. Then we hit a point where we didn't talk for a couple months because I hit a low point and she was uncomfortable with me because of it. Around April we started talking again, immediately back to being best friends but my feelings for her came and went for a while. She had a huge crush on our other friend that had a girlfriend at the time. Life went on, she actually ended up being my first kiss while she was drunk one night (I was sober cause I was driving), but I started talking to a different girl a few days before then, so I was very conflicted about everything there.
Then a few weeks ago came. A different friend got a Radeon 5700 XT and I went over to his house to check it out and everything. We ended up talking for a while, and the conversation turned to my whole friend group that I hung out with all the time (the girl being the center of the group). That friend was never very fond of her, and he always made that very clear. Basically he made me realize that she's not perfect, and that I'd been seeing her through rose-colored glasses.
I spent a week or so rethinking our whole friendship, and I realized that she is nowhere near fucking perfect. For example, she ALWAYS has to be the center of attention. If our friend group is focusing on someone else for whatever reason, she essentially throws a fit then gets really quiet to get attention. Also she can't take criticism at all, she always acts like a victim if you try to criticize her in any way. I also feel like every time I tried to better myself in some way, she ended up bringing me down and making me feel like my problems aren't important. She uses her kindness as a weapon, such as "How could you say that about me? I've been nothing but kind to you!" And the list just goes on.
So, about a week ago, I told her that I feel like she's a toxic person, and she does nothing but bring people down over time, because that's truly how I feel. And of course, she couldn't take the criticism, and said "I don't even know why you feel that, I've been nothing but nice to you".
I haven't talked to anyone in that friend group in one week now. And I feel a lot better mentally. Being friends with her felt like a chore. Only one person in that friend group has tried to talk to me, and that was today. Nobody else has texted me or anything since last Monday. And I honestly couldn't care less. I feel like a huge chapter of my life is over, like the depressing chapter in a book.
I don't know how to end this. I'm doing fairly well now, been hanging out with coworkers a bunch lately. Life's actually kinda good for once.9 -
Been a while but I'm back with fresh rants.
If you look in my history you will see support wanted us devs to start paying for writing bugs. Now the release presentation has passed but we're still in crunch time because we can't put clients onto the new version yet. And in the meantime our coffee machine broke. So support has started to manually pour coffee, which was actual real nice of them.
Now yesterday I'm in a hurry and the coffee is out so I decide to pour a quick cup for myself with the leftover grounds. When I'm back at my desk I get a call asking if I just made coffee. I'm like yeah something wrong? Proceed to get chewed out for being selfish and that they see how it is with me, then get hung up on before I can even explain.
So yeah not only is my company too cheap to get a new machine, the lack of one causes drama.
Today however our network guy, who was present when my colleagues asked what was with the weird phone call, brought in his own machine and let me have coffee from it. Meanwhile suport can keep their crappy manual pouring. And I don't need to go into their office anymore.3 -
Why is it that an issue is only critical-priority until the person who's raising the biggest fuss has to do something about it?
I was notified that a website hosted in AWS went down overnight and never came back up. I was then bombarded with email after email after email while I logged into our AWS account and poked around. I'm responsible for cloud infrastructure stuff, like VMs or virtual networking or security or whatever, not the actual applications running on said infrastructure. Once I confirmed their EC2 instance was reachable and I could login with SSH, I told them they'd have to fix their application.
They told me that they had no backend developer on their development team. I'm still getting a deluge of emails from multiple people on this team and their managers and managers' managers and so on.
"Perfectly understandable," I told them, though it was anything but. "You should probably look into obtaining one."
The emails stopped immediately. I assumed they were handling it and closed my ticket and moved on. But apparently I was wrong.
Six weeks later, the site is still down, they still have no backend dev, and I'm convinced that they were lying to me when they stressed the importance of this web app because now that it's no longer my problem, not a single person seems to care that it's still broken.3 -
Why is it that pretty much zero package & framework maintainers understand semantic versioning?
1. If you do a complete rewrite of your package, but the resulting API is identical, you don't need to bump to the next major version. As a user, I'm thankful for your increased performance or cleaner internal code, but it doesn't really affect my update process.
2. If your package required some-framework 6.0.0, and now ALSO supports some-framework 7.0.0 but is still compatible with 6.0.0, you don't need to bump to the next major version. As a user, I can now upgrade the framework, and know that the package will keep working, but otherwise it doesn't really affect me.
3. Following your versioning along with the framework/language version is super annoying, especially if your library really doesn't need to differentiate between framework versions because it's not actually utilizing new framework functionality.
4. On the other hand, if you stop supporting a certain language, framework or shared library version, or change the public methods, exceptions, fields, etc, you MUST bump to a new major version.
Yet everyone gets this wrong.
For example, many of Laravel's underlying subpackages (for collections, filesystem, database, config, http, mail, etc) do not change their code in a breaking way, or do not even change at all between major framework versions.
Yet they follow along with the major framework version.
Now if someone makes a library "laravel-elasticsearch" which uses the support libraries and collections from laravel, they need to update their package to move along with the versions as well, and often they choose to number their library along with the framework in turn.
This means that to update the framework, you also need to update over 9000 dependencies.
FOR NO FUCKING REASON. THE ONLY CHANGE IN THOSE FUCKING DEPENDENCIES IS TO UPDATE COMPOSER.JSON TO BE COMPATIBLE WITH THE FUCKING FRAMEWORK.
Meanwhile, Laravel itself breaks repeatedly on minor/patch version updates, because breaking changes slip through their review process.
Ugh.3 -
I was just waiting for it to happen. The gaslighting charade finally crumbles.
Tldr: was strongly asked to work overtime again for no reason, refused it (weakly, but it is a start).
(Boss isn't actually my boss, just my unofficial lead at the moment.)
1.4 hours after regular work hours:
Me: boss, this issue is still not resolved but I am out of ideas for it. Already shared my last resort idea twice with you but you don't agree to it. If you are available I can meet you for a short call before logging off for the weekend.
.
10 minutes later, just as I am about to log off.
.
Boss: let's meet. The problem implies something wrong with your code. Let's check.
Me: [ugh] okay
.
Boss then rambles on about a juvenile nsfw joke to describe the situation and I force a laugh, we get to the topic. I manage to explain the situation despite the interruptions from him. Then he shares his genius idea. We agree it might work but the implementation will be slightly tricky. It is now 2 hours outside of work hours.
.
Boss: can you try it out and let me know if it works?
Me: sure, I'll try it out on Monday and keep you posted.
Boss: Monday?!! Look, it is getting on my nerves now, this has been going on for too long (false, since the issue is from a day before not a week before and I had asked for help multiple times before today).
I don't even know what big boss is going to be like. This needs to be done.
Me:. ...
[ You manipulative asshole, I'm not doing overtime for you, I owe you nothing and don't give a shit about your senile nerves. Fuck you and your shit codebase and clusterfuck development environment which makes the hairballs in a public toilet look well engineered.]
Look, it is difficult for me too...
Boss: If not now, I can accept weekend. Because I don't know how big boss will take it. You understand right what I'm saying. This needs to be done.
Me: [Fuck off scum chod! Take your acceptance, fuck it hard, and take it away with you! ]
Hmm. Let's see what can be done.
Thanks for your help.
Logged off.
I can't express the tone of his righteous rage in words.
I have never had to face such revolting attitude before from people at work. I just don't get how people can be so ridiculous. The whole team is filled with chodebags of different sizes.rant fucking chodebag little wins how do these people get chosen to lead? perhaps more to come later35 -
there's this club at my school, called STEM, and another called "science olympiad." both are pretty cringey, bad, or boring. science olympiad was just for the college credit. during the intro to the club, they said there was a coding section. "game on!" is what they dubbed it as, where basically you're timed to make a game in scratch. i'm fucking tired of it. why is scratch considered programming? don't get me wrong, i'll write an OS in PHP before i say code.org is better than scratch, but fuck it. its a fucking interpreted language that's interpreted by another interpreted language. i don't understand why this shit is still used. scratch isn't good. please codecademy or w3schools or just write in binary directly, but not scratch. my hand hurts from dragging and dropping, my eyes hurt from the light theme, my imaginary cat committed suicide after learning about scratch's mascot. fuck it. now onto stem club, fuck it too. not for being bad (well, kinda), but for not being more recognized. it should be above science olympiad, and other clubs because you actually have to think instead of just memorize. but alas, we still were offered the choice of scratch to program the robot. sigh. arduino much? i guess not. challenging much? nope. was i elected "leader"? with three of my friends out of the eight there, i could have been, but no. effort in this would be depressing.rant fuck off fucking clubs fuck you fucking fuck fuck code.org just fuck fuck clubs fuck scratch fucking ducks fucking hell fuck this shit
-
26 or so hours up now. And I've got a few stories to tell :) feel free to refresh your cup of coffee and take a seat.
Last few days I've been going into this odd place called intown.irl to get in touch with its inhabitants. An odd place I have to say. But in some cases quite rewarding, even got a MILF home with me and into bed at some point. Anyway...
3 days ago I think it is now? Thursday evening I took my laptop to this local bar where I had this issue about dihydrogen monoxide with one of the bartenders earlier (you'll find that rant on those keywords). Still wanted to visit it regardless though, as I met that first woman there earlier that approached me. Unfortunately I didn't see her there that day.
Some bald guy who was clearly drunk approached me. Many people were already giving curious looks at this laptop I brought to the bar. I finally tuned it up with the stickers from FOSDEM.. I'll put a picture of it in the comments. My theme was one of privacy (central), distributions and Google's open source initiative (which aligns with the keychain token I got from them as well). But of course.. that guy.. he thought that a pimped/riced laptop obviously meant that I was a hacker.
Guy went to the toilet.. went back.. and suddenly grabbed my laptop and turned it towards him. Boy was I never more smugly satisfied that those rubber pads on the bottom are quite resilient. Could've almost damaged my screen by trying to grab it like that. But it's a CCFL display.. so high voltage. If it were to become broken.. worth it. 😈
On it at the time was a terminal, pinging Google (had network issues at that bar, to the point where one of the - I think - staff members got up to me and offered the WiFi password and got to talk with me.. more on that later), and my usual Linux desktop along with the Arch anime wallpaper with the quote of Da Vinci.. simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Of course the guy saw the terminal.. and probably reaffirmed.. yep, that's a hacker. At least he wasn't too wrong about the general term.. but the hat.. most likely he was wrong on that one.
Guy left with this question.. "you are a hacker, aren't you."
I replied to him: "No sir. I'm not a hacker. I've got no idea what you're talking about."
Guy kept looking at me weirdly for the whole night to come.
Back to that companion guy though. Mac user, yada yada.. but he told me about his backup solution. Apparently - I shit you not - he has not only the photos on his local device, he's also frequently backing them up in Time Machine (which I was really curious about whether it uses mirroring or snapshots.. he couldn't tell, lmk if you do) but not only that.. he was storing another offsite backup in that very bar, in case his house went on fire.
Now that is a proper backup scheme!!! If only more people were like that.
Seriously though.. that bald guy who took my laptop just like that... I just let it slide for that one time, but I tend to treat my machines as an extension of my very self. I think that was a very uncalled for move. Asshole...
How would you have reacted to such a thing? And.. maybe that's why we technologists don't get outside too often? Fucking everything is hacking these days if it's not Knopkes and Blinkenlights… Not every shell is a h4xx0ring console for h3kk1ng de fasbuk…9 -
Not exactly wrong there. I got started at 10 with odds and ends for fun.
Took a semester of it in college before switching because the compiler and I didn't get along.
Only to pick it back up via self-study 10 years later because the programmer who came on board for a side project never showed up and I wanted to keep things moving.
10 years later still, I'm now running a web design shop full time. -
Hey, it's 2023.
If your component isn't written in TypeScript, I'm not using it :)
"TypeScript is overly complicated!!!" why, because it pointed out everything wrong in your JS code?
"TypeScript is not flexible!!!" why, because it makes you not rely on fragile "only possible in javascript" patterns?
"TypeScript isn't needed!!!" why, because you've never worked on a project with more than 100 lines of code where dependency management and clean code policies were implemented?
god just stop with the JavaScript purist BS, you aren't going to win this battle, and it's even worse because not only are you injuring everyone in the software community, you're injuring your own productivity and skillset
actually, you know what, fine. just use pure JS and HTML implementations. see you in 10 years when i'm retired and you are still running around in circles wondering why the world has left you behind25 -
I work for a web agency.
Over the last 18 months a company asked us about 5 different quotes for rather minimal changes to their website.
While being minimal changes, estimating costs for them still requires several hours of work for research, meetings, correspondance and writing the damn things. They never even gave us a response (neither positive nor negative), except once where they told us that they wouldn't pay for project management because their instructions are so clear that PM isn't necessary.
As a response to the last one, after several months, they send us a 10 pages long pdf with requirements for a new website (or a "restyle" like they call it, even if it has absolutely nothing in common with the current one).
We inform them that we can't permit ourselves to continue studying new solutions for free and therefore tell them that a detailed offer would cost them something like 300$, and that amount would then be discounted from the eventually accepted job. We also roughly estimate a price range of about 15k - 20k for the new website.
We get an email back, from the CEO (until now it was a secretary), with essentially 3 arguments written in condescending form:
1. he brags about his revenue being over 9 billion $$$ a year, and that being a part of a global holding for which "communication is essential" (sic.) means that they need to coordinate and "can't simply accept an offer" [even if it's 400$, for specific change exactly requested by them, I guess...]
2. 15k is too much [... for the website representing this 9 billion dollar holding on the internet, for which the requirements are written in the 10 pages long pdf]
3. He asks for a meeting
We accept the meeting, we go to their office.
When we arrive there, the secretary informs us that the CEO will not participate. So we talk the her and the head of the "Communication Dept" in videoconference.
I explain them that if the sum, which we thought would be appropriate (~15 - 20k), is too high, the Pareto principle would allow us to, theoretically, achieve about 80% of the features and quality for about 20% of the cost. Their genuine response is:
"So your estimate was wrong! You can do it for much less!".
I try to explain them that the most money in a project goes into "attention to detail".
The "Communication Dept." person, who is "doing this job since too much time" (sic.), refuses to believe and insists that "details" don't exist on the web.
I tell her: "In any kind of work, the more effort you put into something, the better it tends to get, with diminishing returns".
She insists: "I don't understand this".
So now I'm here, doing the 6th offer, free of charge, for a 5k website, for a company that generates 9kkk revenue each year, trying to define a "Definition of Done" that works out.
FML I guess.
Sorry for the long post.7 -
Was forced to do some work on Windows this week (CAD tools that runs only on Windows). I spent a few days just setting up the tools. There were quite a few things I realized I forgot about Windows (as compared to Linux).
1) Installation times are down right horrific. What exactly are the installer doing for 10 minutes?
2) .NET is a cluster fuck. Not even Microsofts repair tool can fix it, but rather just hangs. I ended up using another tool to nuke it and reinstall.
3) Windows binary installs are insanely huge, thus, takes forever to download.
4) The registry is a pointless database that must have been written in hell with the single intent of destroying users will to live. The sole existence of the registry is another proof that completely incompetent engineers designed Windows.
5) Rebooting is the only way to solve many problems. This is another sure sign of a fundamentally fucked up OS design.
6) What the heck is wrong with the GUIs designers? The control panel must be the worst design ever. There are so many levels to get to a particular setting I'm getting dizzy. Nothing gets better by the illogical organisation.
7) Windows networking. A perversion of the tcp/ip stack that makes it virtually impossible to understand a damn thing about the current network configuration. There are at least 3 different places that effects the settings.
8) Windows command prompt. Why did they even bother to leave it in? The interpreter is as intelligent as retarded donut. You can't do anything with it, except typing "exit" and Google for another solution.
8) Updates. Why does it takes hundreds of updates per month to keep that thing safe?
9) Despite all updates that is flying out of Redmond like confetti, it is still necessary to install antivirus to keep the damn thing safe. That cost extra money, and further cost you by degrading performance of your hardware.
10) Window performance. Software runs like it was swimming in molasses. The final stab in the back on your hardware investment, and pretty much sends performance on your hardware back a few hundred bucks more.
11) Closed source is evil. If something crash consistently, you might find a forum that address the issues you have. Otherwise you're out of luck. On the other hand, it might be for the better. I imagine reading the code for Windows can lead to severe depression.
I'm lucky to be a Linux dev, and should probably not complain too much... But really, Windows, go get yourself hit by a truck and die. I won't miss you.14 -
Consumers ruined software development and we the developers have little to no chance of changing it.
Recently I read a great blog post by someone called Nikita, the blog post talks mostly about the lack of efficiency and waste of resources modern software has and even tho I agree with the sentiment I don't agree with some things.
First of all the way the author compares software engineering to mechanical, civil and aeroespacial engineering is flawed, why? Because they all directly impact the average consumer more than laggy chrome.
Do you know why car engines have reached such high efficiency numbers? Gas prices keep increasing, why is building a skyscraper better, cheaper and safer than before? Consumers want cheaper and safer buildings, why are airplanes so carefully engineered? Consumers want safer and cheaper flights.
Wanna know what the average software consumer wants? Shiny "beautiful" software that is either dirt ship or free and does what it needs to. The difference between our end product is that average consumers DON'T see the end product, they just experience the light, intuitive experience we are demanded to provide! It's not for nothing that the stereotype of "wizard" still exists, for the average folk magic and electricity makes their devices function and we are to blame, we did our jobs TOO well!
Don't get me wrong, I am about to become a software engineer and efficient, elegant, quality code is the second best eye candy next to a 21yo LA model. BUT dirt cheap software doesn't mean quality software, software developed in a hurry is not quality software and that's what douchebag bosses and consumers demand! They want it cheap, they want it shiny and they wanted it yesterday!
Just look at where the actual effort is going, devs focus on delivering half baked solutions on time just to "harden" the software later and I don't blame them, complete, quality, efficient solutions take time and effort and that costs money, money companies and users don't want to invest most of the time. Who gets to worry about efficiency and ms speed gains? Big ass companies where every second counts because it directly affects their bottom line.
People don't give a shit and it sucks but they forfeit the right to complain the moment they start screaming about the buttons not glaring when hovered upon rather than the 60sec bootup, actual efforts to make quality software are made on people's own time or time critical projects.
You put up a nice example with the python tweet snippet, you have a python script that runs everyday and takes 1.6 seconds, what if I told you I'll pay you 50 cents for you to translate it to Rust and it takes you 6 hours or better what if you do it for free?
The answer to that sort of questions is given every day when "enganeers" across the lake claim to make you an Uber app for 100 bucks in 5 days, people just don't care, we do and that's why developers often end up with the fancy stuff and creating startups from the ground up, they put in the effort and they are compensated for it.
I agree things will get better, things are getting better and we are working to make programs and systems more efficient (specially in the Open Source community or high end Tech companies) but unless consumers and university teachers change their mindset not much can be done about the regular folk.
For now my mother doesn't care if her Android phone takes too much time to turn on as long as it runs Candy Crush just fine. On my part I'll keep programming the best I can, optimizing the best I can for my own projects and others because that's just how I roll, but if I'm hungry I won't hesitate to give you the performance you pay for.
Source:
http://tonsky.me/blog/...13 -
"It works on our end", the sentence that made me lose my shit.
I've been working on a project were we're supposed to integrate an API into our system.
When trying to get some user id's (UUID) from said API, we got a type-error in the response (???), so I called their integration support and asked what the fuck they were doing (not really, i was kinda calm at this point).
The answer I got was following:
Integration guy: "Uh, bro, like, I don't even know, it's probably on your end"
Me: "We literally used this endpoint with the same parameters yesterday, and got a result we expected. I noticed you updated your API this morning, did you make any major changes?"
Integration guy: "Yeah we changed the type of user id from string to number"
Me: "So, you changed the type of a UUID (uuid4) from string to number? How did you not think that would be an issue? I can see in your forums that everyone else is having the same issue."
Integration guy: "Nah, it's probably a bug in your code, it works on our end"
Me in my mind: *IT WORKS ON YOUR END?!? IT DOESN'T FUCKING MATTER IF IT WORKS ON YOUR END, FUCKTARD.*
What I actually said: "Uhm, I'm not sure if works on your end either, I'm not even sure how this change made it to production. But hey, thanks I guess, bye."
WHY AM I NOT ABLE TO YELL AT PEOPLE WHEN THEY ARE BEING RETARDED???
But really though, when you're maintaining an API, you shouldn't fucking care if things work on your end in your dev environment. What matters is how it works in production, for the end user/users.
And I know that 99% of cases it's the users fault by entering the wrong parameters or trying to request with wrongly setup auth and what not, but still.
Don't ASSUME nothing's wrong on your end. It's your fucking job to fix the issues.
And guess what? The problem was on their side.
I'm going fucking bald.2 -
So... I've got a confession to make.
I'm no longer a Dev. After the disaster that was my last commercial gig, I went and got a sec Ops role... And I love it. It's just technical problem solving and explaining all the way.
Don't get me wrong, I still love to code. But that's exactly the thing. As a commercial developer employed by corporations, I spent close to 80 % of my time not coding, but in useless meetings, or trying to figure out just what my colleagues thought was "common sense", reverse engineering their work and documenting how to get it running, etc. Basically, fixing shit for braindead academics with next to no real world experience.
Now, when I code, I get to do it on my own terms, with my own stack and as much comments and docs as I want to have. I own my time, and the only ones that are allowed to interrupt me is the local fire department.
I can do what I'm fucking passionate about and leave the rest for the useless people.4 -
I lurk here on occasion. Quite frequently in fact. It's honesty been years and I've grown up with the community. I'm glad to still see old faces here but many of the ones that I used to see are long gone. Man - it's so different.
It's not the same anymore. There's no longer any gangs or clans or anything. It was really fun.
Another thing I specifically miss when @dfox was actually around. Actually replying to people most of the time. Lately, there just hasn't been any trace of him that I've seen. He comments on averages 2-3 times a month lately, and he used to comment a lot more on average years ago. But I don't blame him. I'm the same.
Everything about this feels wrong and off. I used to love this but now i just don't.
I'm going to formally say goodbye to everyone here. And to the OG peeps, I love ya all, you know who you are.
Byes.13 -
I don't know if I'm being pranked or not, but I work with my boss and he has the strangest way of doing things.
- Only use PHP
- Keep error_reporting off (for development), Site cannot function if they are on.
- 20,000 lines of functions in a single file, 50% of which was unused, mostly repeated code that could have been reduced massively.
- Zero Code Comments
- Inconsistent variable names, function names, file names -- I was literally project searching for months to find things.
- There is nothing close to a normalized SQL Database, column ID names can't even stay consistent.
- Every query is done with a mysqli wrapper to use legacy mysql functions.
- Most used function is to escape stirngs
- Type-hinting is too strict for the code.
- Most files packed with Inline CSS, JavaScript and PHP - we don't want to use an external file otherwise we'd have to open two of them.
- Do not use a package manger composer because he doesn't have it installed.. Though I told him it's easy on any platform and I'll explain it.
- He downloads a few composer packages he likes and drag/drop them into random folder.
- Uses $_GET to set values and pass them around like a message contianer.
- One file is 6000 lines which is a giant if statement with somewhere close to 7 levels deep of recursion.
- Never removes his old code that bloats things.
- Has functions from a decade ago he would like to save to use some day. Just regular, plain old, PHP functions.
- Always wants to build things from scratch, and re-using a lot of his code that is honestly a weird way of doing almost everything.
- Using CodeIntel, Mess Detectors, Error Detectors is not good or useful.
- Would not deploy to production through any tool I setup, though I was told to. Instead he wrote bash scripts that still make me nervous.
- Often tells me to make something modern/great (reinventing a wheel) and then ends up saying, "I think I'd do it this way... Referes to his code 5 years ago".
- Using isset() breaks things.
- Tens of thousands of undefined variables exist because arrays are creates like $this[][][] = 5;
- Understanding the naming of functions required me to write several documents.
- I had to use #region tags to find places in the code quicker since a router was about 2000 lines of if else statements.
- I used Todo Bookmark extensions in VSCode to mark and flag everything that's a bug.
- Gets upset if I add anything to .gitignore; I tried to tell him it ignores files we don't want, he is though it deleted them for a while.
- He would rather explain every line of code in a mammoth project that follows no human known patterns, includes files that overwrite global scope variables and wants has me do the documentation.
- Open to ideas but when I bring them up such as - This is what most standards suggest, here's a literal example of exactly what you want but easier - He will passively decide against it and end up working on tedious things not very necessary for project release dates.
- On another project I try to write code but he wants to go over every single nook and cranny and stay on the phone the entire day as I watch his screen and Im trying to code.
I would like us all to do well but I do not consider him a programmer but a script-whippersnapper. I find myself trying to to debate the most basic of things (you shouldnt 777 every file), and I need all kinds of evidence before he will do something about it. We need "security" and all kinds of buzz words but I'm scared to death of this code. After several months its a nice place to work but I am convinced I'm being pranked or my boss has very little idea what he's doing. I've worked in a lot of disasters but nothing like this.
We are building an API, I could use something open source to help with anything from validations, routing, ACL but he ends up reinventing the wheel. I have never worked so slow, hindered and baffled at how I am supposed to build anything - nothing is stable, tested, and rarely logical. I suggested many things but he would rather have small talk and reason his way into using things he made.
I could fhave this project 50% done i a Node API i two weeks, pretty fast in a PHP or Python one, but we for reasons I have no idea would rather go slow and literally "build a framework". Two knuckleheads are going to build a PHP REST framework and compete with tested, tried and true open source tools by tens of millions?
I just wanted to rant because this drives me crazy. I have so much stress my neck and shoulder seems like a nerve is pinched. I don't understand what any of this means. I've never met someone who was wrong about so many things but believed they were right. I just don't know what to say so often on call I just say, 'uhh..'. It's like nothing anyone or any authority says matters, I don't know why he asks anything he's going to do things one way, a hard way, only that he can decipher. He's an owner, he's not worried about job security.13 -
After a few weeks of being insanely busy, I decided to log onto Steam and maybe relax with a few people and play some games. I enjoy playing a few sandbox games and do freelance development for those games (Anywhere from a simple script to a full on server setup) on the side. It just so happened that I had an 'urgent' request from one of my old staff member from an old community I use to own. This staff member decided to run his own community after I sold mine off since I didn't have the passion anymore to deal with the community on a daily basis.
O: Owner (Former staff member/friend)
D: Other Dev
O: Hey, I need urgent help man! Got a few things developed for my server, and now the server won't stay stable and crashes randomly. I really need help, my developer can't figure it out.
Me: Uhm, sure. Just remember, if it's small I'll do it for free since you're an old friend, but if it's a bigger issue or needs a full recode or whatever, you're gonna have to pay. Another option is, I tell you what's wrong and you can have your developer fix it.
O: Sounds good, I'll give you owner access to everything so you can check it out.
Me: Sounds good
*An hour passes by*
O: Sorry it took so long, had to deal with some crap. *Insert credentials, etc*
Me: Ok, give me a few minutes to do some basic tests. What was that new feature or whatever you added?
O: *Explains long feature, and where it's located*
Me: *Begins to review the files* *Internal rage wondering what fucking developer could code such trash* *Tests a few methods, and watches CPU/RAM and an internal graph for usage*
Me: Who coded this module?
O: My developer.
Me: *Calm tone, with a mix of some anger* So, you know what, I'm just gonna do some simple math for ya. You're running 33 ticks a second for the server, with an average of about 40ish players. 33x60 = 1980 cycles a minute, now lets times that by the 40 players on average, you have 79,200 cycles per minute or nearly 4.8 fucking cycles an hour (If you maxed the server at 64 players, it's going to run an amazing fucking 7.6 million cycles an hour, like holy fuck). You're also running a MySQLite query every cycle while transferring useless data to the server, you're clusterfucking the server and overloading it for no fucking reason and that's why you're crashing it. Another question, who the fuck wrote the security of this? I can literally send commands to the server with this insecure method and delete all of your files... If you actually want your fucking server stable and secure, I'm gonna have to recode this entire module to reduce your developer's clusterfuck of 4.8 million cycles to about 400 every hour... it's gonna be $50.
D: *Angered* You're wrong, this is the best way to do it, I did stress testing! *Insert other defensive comments* You're just a shitty developer (This one got me)
Me: *Calm* You're calling me a shitty developer? You're the person that doesn't understand a timer, I get that you're new to this world, but reading the wiki or even using the game's forums would've ripped this code to shreds and you to shreds. You're not even a developer, cause most of this is so disorganized it looks like you copy and pasted it. *Get's angered here and starts some light screaming* You're wasting CPU usage, the game can't use more than 1 physical core, and after a quick test, you're stupid 'amazing' module is using about 40% of the CPU. You need to fucking realize the 40ish average players, use less than this... THEY SHOULD BE MORE INTENSIVE THAN YOUR CODE, NOT THE OPPOSITE.
O: Hey don't be rude to Venom, he's an amazing coder. You're still new, you don't know as much as him. Ok, I'll pay you the money to get it recoded.
Me: Sounds good. *Angered tone* Also you developer boy, learn to listen to feedback and maybe learn to improve your shitty code. Cause you'll never go anywhere if you don't even understand who bad this garbage is, and that you can't even use the fucking wiki for this game. The only fucking way you're gonna improve is to use some of my suggestions.
D: *Leaves call without saying anything*
TL;DR: Shitty developer ran some shitty XP system code for a game nearly 4.8 million times an hour (average) or just above 7.6 million times an hour (if maxed), plus running MySQLite when it could've been done within about like 400 an hour at max. Tried calling me a shitty developer, and got sorta yelled at while I was trying to keep calm.
Still pissed he tried calling me a shitty developer... -
This was some time ago. A Legendary bug appeared. It worked in the dev environment, but not in the test and production environment.
It had been a week since I was working on the issue. I couldn't pinpoint the problem. We CANNOT change the code that was already there, so we needed to override the code that was written. As I was going at it, something happened.
---
Manager: "Hey, it's working now. What did you do?"
Me: *Very confused because I know I was nowhere close to finding the real source of the problem* Oh, it is? Let me check.
Also me: *Goes and check on the test and prod environment and indeed, it's already working*
Also me to the power of three: *Contemplates on life, the meaning of it, of why I am here, who's going to throw out the trash later, asking myself whether my buddies and I will be drinking tonight, only to realize that I am still on the phone with my manager*
Me again: "Oh wow, it's working."
Manager: "Great job. What were the changes in the code?"
Me: "All I did was put console logs and pushed the changes to test and prod if they were producing the same log results."
Manager: "So there were no changes whatsoever, is that what you mean?"
Me: "Yep. I've no idea why it just suddenly worked."
Manager: "Well, as long as it's working! Just remove those logs and deploy them again to the test and prod environment and add 'Test and prod fix' to the commit comment."
Me: "But what if the problem comes up again? I mean technically we haven't resolved the issue. The only change I made were like 20 lines of console logs! "
Manager: "It's working, isn't it? If it becomes a problem, we'll work it out later."
---
I did as I was told, and Lo and Behold, the problem never occurred again.
Was the system playing a joke on me? The system probably felt sorry for me and thought, "Look at this poor fucker, having such a hard time on a problem he can't even comprehend. That idiotic programmer had so many sleepless nights and yet still couldn't find the solution. Guess I gotta do my job and fix it for him. I'm the only one doing the work around here. Pathetic Homo sapiens!"
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that it's over but..
What the fuck happened?5 -
Swear to god, I'm worse than a cat.. my fascination & curiosity will get me killed someday.. o.O
12:19 - Magnitude 6,4 earthquake 3 km from Petrinja, Croatia..
Felt it in Ljubljana..and my stupid ass was fascinated.. :/
Yup, you read it right, not scared or whatever the hell should people feel when earthquake happens..just fascinated..and curios...and in full analysis mode..
Oh tremors?! Yup, something's definitely shaking.. Eartquake? Yup, earthquake! Woow, huge earthquake.. Where is epicenter?! Also long one.. nice, never felt it like this before.. hm.. x, should we go out? How?! I know an elevator is a no go, stairs also do not look promising..better stay in I guess.. hm..still going...feels weird.. Ok, look for shelter I guess.. wow..that's a long one.. ok, doorways should be safe-ish?! Where's x? He went silent..go check up on x.. x is fine, he's not stupid like me, and unlike me also has preservation instinct to not stand under the doorway that has glass components in it.. DumbAss.. Shaking stops... Well that was weird..also I didn't have time to analyze everything..or record it! Stoopid! How did I not think of this before?! Recording would be awesome!! shame..
I know panic doesn't help anyone, but FFS, sometimes I do wish my head would panic at least for a second instead of trying to analyze everything..
I mean, WTF is wrong with me?! Most people would be scared, I just estimated that it's not that dangerous for us and no use/not smart to try to go out of the building so I just took shelter (not a good one, I know now for next time?! o.O what next time?!idiot!!) and started observing.. DumbAss.. :/10 -
You motherfucking incompetent useless collection of hairy ballsacks even a trained monkey could do a better job than you do. And I swear once we literally cross the 99% availability rate I will find your headquarters and smash everyone's face into each of your fucking servers then set that whole place on fire.
You forget to flush the DNS cache after moving my server (of course on Friday when else), here is 2 days of error page for my site, whoose instructions a normal user simply couldn't follow. Not to mention it pointed to the wrong article.
Random 503 error, and you aren't answering my phone calls, though usually I am the first one who informs you of a fucking problem with your fucking server and I have to wait 5-10 minutes in line while you are figuring out the problem.
And now random forbidden error for my whole page. Out of nothing. I've changed nothing. You said one hour earlier that it's your mistake and it will took around 30 min. Still nothing.
I'm fed up with all your bullshit. Go fuck yourselves.
I'm out...5 -
I had spent the last year working on a online store power by woocommerce with over 100k products from various suppliers. This online store utilized a custom API that would take the various formats that suppliers offer their inventory in and made them consistent. Now everything was going swimmingly initially, but then I began adding more and more products using a plug-in called WP all import. I reached around 100k products and the site would take up to an entire minute to load sometimes timing out. I got desperate so I installed several caching plugins, but to no avail this did not help me. The site was originally only supposed to take three to four months but ended up taking an entire year. Then, just yesterday I found out what went wrong and why this woocommerce website with all of these optimizations was still taking anywhere from 60 to 90 seconds to load, or just timing out entirely. I had initially thought that I needed a beefier server so I moved it to a high CPU digitalocean VM. While this did help a little bit, the site was still very slow and now I had very high CPU usage RAM usage and high disk IO. I was seriously stumped the Apache process was using a high amount of CPU and IO along with MYSQL as well. It wasn't until I started digging deeper into the database that I actually found out what the issue was. As I was loading the site I would run 'show process list' in the SQL terminal, I began to notice a very significant load time for one of the tables, so I went to go and check it out. What I did was I ran a select all query on that particular table just to see how full it was and SQL returned a error saying that I had exceeded the maximum packet size. So I was like okay what the fuck...
So I exited my SQL and re-entered it this time with a higher packet size. I ran a query that would count how many rows were in this particular table and the number came out to being in the millions. I was surprised, and what's worse is that this table belong to a plugin that I had attempted to use early in the development process to cache the site. The plugin was deactivated but apparently it had left PHP files within the wp content directory outside of the actual plugin directory, so it's still executing scripts even though the plugin itself was disabled. Basically every time I would change anything on the site, it would recache the whole thing, and it didn't delete any old records. So 100k+ products caching on saves with no garbage collection... You do the math, it's gonna be a heavy ass database. Not only that but it was serialized data, so when it did pull this metric shit ton of spaghetti from the database, PHP then had to deserialize it. Hence the high ass CPU load. I had caching enabled on the MySQL end of things so that ate the ram. I was really desperate to get this thing running.
Honest to God the main reason why this website took so long was because the load times made it miserable to work on. I just thought that the hardware that I had the site on was inadequate. I had initially started the development on a small Linux VM which apparently wasn't enough, which is why I moved it to digitalocean which also seemed to not be enough, so from there I moved to a dedicated server which still didn't seem to be enough. I was probably a few more 60-second wait times or timeouts from recommending a server cluster to my client who I know would not be willing to purchase it. The client who I promised this site to have completed in 3 months and has waited a year. Seriously, I would tell people the struggles that I would go through with this particular site and they would just tell me to just drop the site; just take the money, just take the loss. I refused to, this was really the only thing that was kicking my ass. I present myself as this high-and-mighty developer like I'm just really good at what I do but then I have this WordPress site that's just beating the shit out of me for a year. It was a very big learning experience and it was also very humbling as well, it made me realize that I really don't know as much as I think I might. It was evidence that there is still so much more to learn out there, I did learn a lot from that experience especially about optimizing websites the different types of methods to do that particular lonely on the server side and I'll be able to utilize this knowledge in the future.
I guess the moral of the story is, never really give up. Ultimately things might get so bad that you're running on hopes and dreams. Those experiences are generally the most humbling. Now I can finally present the site that I am basically a year late on to the client who will be so happy that I did not give up on the project entirely. I'll have experienced this feeling of pure euphoria, and help the small business significantly grow their revenue. Helping others is very fulfilling for me, even at my own expense.
Anyways, gonna stop ranting. Running out of characters. If you're still here... Ty for reading :')7 -
I've got a rant-type question:
Why would you EVER use Google Chrome?
There are a million browsers in the world, you could've used Firefox, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, Bad Wolf, Qute, st, Epiphany etc, but you chose to uss Google Chrome.
What would be the reason you would ever choose Google Chrome over any of the million browsers, out of which many of them get the job done much better than Chrome? Okay, I get it why you might use IE or Edge, cause you might be too lazy to install any other browser or you just want the performance benefits you get with Edge which totally, most definatelly, a very big plus point for Edge.
*"Chrome has a balanced-bloat out of all browsers"*
But how tf does that matter? That doesn't even help performance wise anyways.
I can't get over the fact that I have to see/hear about 'Chrome hogging RAM' EVERYWHERE. Like, why do you even care about the god damn browser? Why is it a standard over the million other browsers that exist? Why can't the general public be educated that browsers have choices (just like phones) and you don't have to spit crap over people who don't use Chrome.
It just drives me crazy of how many people hate Chrome, and still it's a 'default' browser.
I would quote Vivaldi (the company/browser):
'A browser should adapt to you, not the other way around.'
(Disclaimer: Rant of a former Firefox, qute, st, Opera, OperaGX, Edge, and ofcourse, Chrome user. Currently in deep love with Vivaldi.)
I'm done ranting. Have a nice day!
(My first post here, if I did something wrong, let me know! I'll make sure I don't do it again!)55 -
Static HTML pages are better than "web apps".
Static HTML pages are more lightweight and destroy "web apps" in performance, and also have superior compatibility. I see pretty much no benefit in a "web app" over a static HTML page. "Web apps" appear like an overhyped trend that is empty inside.
During my web browsing experience, static HTML pages have consistently loaded faster and more reliably, since the browser is immediately served with content useful for consumption, whereas on JavaScript-based web "apps", the useful content comes in **last**, after the browser has worked its way through a pile of script.
For example, an average-sized Wikipedia article (30 KB wikitext) appears on screen in roughly two seconds, since MediaWiki uses static HTML. Everipedia, in comparison, is a ReactJS app. Guess how long that one needs. Upwards of three times as long!
Making a page JavaScript-based also makes it fragile. If an exception occurs in the JavaScript, the user might end up with a blank page or an endless splash screen, whereas static HTML-based pages still show useful content.
The legacy (2014-2020) HTML-based Twitter.com loaded a user profile in under four seconds. The new react-based web app not only takes twice as long, but sometimes fails to load at all, showing the error "Oops something went wrong! But don't fret – it's not your fault." to be displayed. This could not happen on a static HTML page.
The new JavaScript-based "polymer" YouTube front end that is default since August 2017 also loads slower. While the earlier HTML-based one was already playing the video, the new one has just reached its oh-so-fancy skeleton screen.
It would once have been unthinkable to have a website that does not work at all without JavaScript, but now, pretty much all popular social media sites are JavaScript-dependent. The last time one could view Twitter without JavaScript and tweet from devices with non-sophisticated browsers like Nintendo 3DS was December 2020, when they got rid of the lightweight "M2" mobile website.
Sometimes, web developers break a site in older browser versions by using a JavaScript feature that they do not support, or using a dependency (like Plyr.js) that breaks the site. Static HTML is immune against this failure.
Static HTML pages also let users maximize speed and battery life by deactivating JavaScript. This obviously will disable more sophisticated site features, but the core part, the text, is ready for consumption.
Not to mention, single-page sites and fancy animations can be implemented with JavaScript on top of static HTML, as GitHub.com and the 2018 Reddit redesign do, and Twitter's 2014-2020 desktop front end did.
From the beginning, JavaScript was intended as a tool to complement, not to replace HTML and CSS. It appears to me that the sole "benefit" of having a "web app" is that it appears slightly more "modern" and distinguished from classic web sites due to use of splash screens and lack of the browser's loading animation when navigating, while having oh-so-fancy loading animations and skeleton screens inside the website. Sorry, I prefer seeing content quickly over the app-like appearance of fancy loading screens.
Arguably, another supposed benefit of "web apps" is that there is no blank page when navigating between pages, but in pretty much all major browsers of the last five years, the last page observably remains on screen until the next navigated page is rendered sufficiently for viewing. This is also known as "paint holding".
On any site, whenever I am greeted with content, I feel pleased. Whenever I am greeted with a loading animation, splash screen, or skeleton screen, be it ever so fancy (e.g. fading in an out, moving gradient waves), I think "do they really believe they make me like their site more due to their fancy loading screens?! I am not here for the loading screens!".
To make a page dependent on JavaScript and sacrifice lots of performance for a slight visual benefit does not seem worthed it.
Quote:
> "Yeah, but I'm building a webapp, not a website" - I hear this a lot and it isn't an excuse. I challenge you to define the difference between a webapp and a website that isn't just a vague list of best practices that "apps" are for some reason allowed to disregard. Jeremy Keith makes this point brilliantly.
>
> For example, is Wikipedia an app? What about when I edit an article? What about when I search for an article?
>
> Whether you label your web page as a "site", "app", "microsite", whatever, it doesn't make it exempt from accessibility, performance, browser support and so on.
>
> If you need to excuse yourself from progressive enhancement, you need a better excuse.
– Jake Archibald, 20139 -
Sometimes I see advice given to others that is either clearly wrong or even dangerous, but it's not socially acceptable to call them out on it because 'everyone is entitled to their opinion'.
Yes, you're right. I'm entitled to my opinion based on doing this for 20 years and facing your exact, usually "junior" situation a hundred times. You did a code camp earlier this year and still think JSX is part of the Ecmascript standard.
There is a difference, and not being able to point it out without being scolded for being "entitled" (ironically) is slowly draining me of any interest in helping others.
How the fuck do you cope with this?18 -
Project manager, who i've complained in the past is neglecting critical things that he doesn't want to do, decided today to cancel our weekly planning meeting, to have the below conversation with me 1:1. Its very long, but anyone who has the will to get through it ... please tell me it's not just me. I'm so bewildered and angry.
Side note: His solution to the planning meeting not taking place ... to just not have one and asked everyone to figure it out themselves offline, with no guidance on priorities.
Conversation:
PM: I need to talk to you about some of phrasing you use during collaboration. It's coming across slightly offensive, or angry or something like that.
Me: ok, can you give me an example?
PM: The ticket I opened yesterday, where you closed it with a comment something along the lines of "as discussed several times before, this is an issue with library X, can't be fixed until Y ...".
"As discussed several times" comes across aggressive.
Me: Ok, fair enough, I get quite frustrated when we are under a crunch, working long hours, and I have to keep debugging or responding to the same tickets over and over. I mean, like we do need to solve this problem, I don't think its fair that we just keep ignoring this.
PM: See this is the problem, you never told me.
Me: ... told you what?
PM: That this is a known issue and not to test it.
Me: ..... i'm sorry ..... I did, that was the comment, this is the 4th ticket i've closed about it.
PM: Right but when you sent me this app, you never said "don't test this".
Me: But I told you that, the last 3 times that it won't be in until feature X, which you know is next month.
PM: No, you need to tell me on each internal release what not to test.
Me: But we release multiple times per week internally. Do you really need me to write a big list of "still broken, still broken, still broken, still broken"?
PM: Yes, how else will I know?
Me: This is documented, the last QA contractor we had work for us, wrote a lot of this down. Its in other tickets that are still open, or notes on test cases etc. You were tagged in all of these too. Can you not read those? and not test them unless I say I've fixed them?
PM: No, i'm only filling for QA until we hire a full time. Thats QA's job to read those and maintain those documents.
Me: So you want me to document for you every single release, whats already documented in a different place?
PM: ok we'll come back to this. Speaking of hiring QA. You left a comment on the excel spreadsheet questioning my decision, publicly, thats not ok.
Me: When I asked why my top pick was rejected?
PM: Yes. Its great that you are involved in this, but I have to work closely with this person and I said no, is that not enough?
Me: Well you asked me to participate, reviewing resumes's and interviewing people. And I also have to work extremely close with this person.
PM: Are you doubting my ability to interview or filter people?
Me: ..... well a little bit yeah. You asked me to interview your top pick after you interviewed her and thought she was great. She was very under qualified. And the second resume you picked was missing 50% of the requirements we asked for ... given those two didn't go well, I do think its fair to ask why my top pick was rejected? ... even just to know the reason?
PM: Could you not have asked publicly? face to face?
Me: you tagged me on a google sheet, asking me to review a resume, and rather than tag you back on 2 rows below ... you want me to wait 4 days to ask you at our next face to face? (which you just cancelled for this meeting)
PM: That would have been more appropriate
Me: ..... i'm sorry, i don't want to be rude but thats ridiculous and very nit pick-y. You asked my opinion on one row, I asked yours on another. To say theres anything wrong with that is ridiculous
PM: Well we are going to call another team meeting and discuss all this face to face then, because this isn't working. We need to jump to this other call now, lets leave it here.5 -
Built a C#/.NET application with support for a serial device. Tested it on systems A, B, C initially, all Windows system, same .NET version, same targeting, same build tool version, same initial connection configuration etc, etc.
Testing - works on A and C, B nopes.
...
OK, let's check the source, is there something about B that makes it impossible to execute that bit? - No, there is not, you checked that already, stop poking around, it definitively should work on B.
...
OK, maybe admin privileges, there is I/O involved, didn't need that on A and C, but who knows - nope, doesn't work on B.
...
OK, maybe something wrong with the connection settings? First try at reinstalling driver - but no, it doesn't work on B.
...
OK let's try with another device - more/less devices on B. Other USB ports. No. Still does not work on B.
...
OK, this is stupid, but, is the cabling alright? It is, of course it is, stupid - but it still does not work on B.
...
OK, at that point I'm just gonna ask a colleague, GrumpySoftwareDev whether he has any clue why it doesn't work on B. GrumpySoftwareDev knows nothing, but discovers that one of his applications doesn't work on Windows 10. You know nothing, Jon Snow, but it doesn't work on B.
...
OK, now I'm just going to ask another colleague TheLastOfHisKind who handed B down to me somewhat bluntly if he ever experienced problems when working with B and its serial configuration. TheLastOfHisKind tells me he does not and kindly offers me some input on the situation. Still no progress to get it working on B but he hinted he might have fucked up B's driver. I already reinstalled the driver but didn't reboot, which comes after reinstall.
...
OK, I'm just gonna remove and re-install the driver, then restart. Hu! Now the UI is gone but another serial device reacted on a general call. Not fully working on B but we're getting there.
...
OK, I don't know, I'm getting frustrated, let's borrow another system D - which has roughly the same configuration as B - from my colleague StrongCurrentGuy. StrongCurrentGuy borrows me his system and cautions me not to break it. I install the driver, plug the device and copy the application from B. It just works on D. Not on B though.
...
OK, you know what. I'm done. For shits and giggles I'm gonna remove that driver again, reinstall it and restart, maybe it'll magically work afterwar- WHAT THE HELL, I JUST OPENED IT AFTER RESTARTING, IT JUST WORKS - ON B!
... seriously, what the fuck. But yeah, at least it works now.4 -
Managed to land 2 interviews:
The first one was for a startup that was looking for a react programmer (I've never used react before).
The later was a php job at a big company. They told me they used cakephp which is a framework I had not used before either.
Still, I'm more familiar with php than react so I felt more confident with the second interview. However, I felt there was a lot of good chemistry going on in the first interview.
The interviewer was incredibly nice (he was the lead dev, not an HR person as opposed to the second interviewer)
He gave me a small react test to be completed within a week. I barely managed to do it in time but I felt good about the solution.
Just as I was sending it, I get a call from the second interviewer saying I landed the php job.
I wasn't sure if my novice react skills would be impressive enough to secure me the react job (and I really needed a job) so I accepted.
After explaining everything to the guy who was interviewing me for the react job, he understood and was kind enough to schedule a code review where he walked through my novice code explaining what could be improved, helping me learn more in the process.
I regret not accepting the react position. The PHP they got me working with is fucking PHP5 with Cake2 :/
Don't get me wrong, I like the salary and the people are nice but the tech stack they're using (lacking source control by the way!), as well as all the lengthy meetings are soul-draining.6 -
*flashback to days of windows xp*
Just finished formatting and installing xp on friend's trash pc cuz the os was compromised due to a shitload of viruses. Notice that other partitions might still be infected and i don't have an antivirus on me.
"Big boi Ill be back in an hour, just whatever you do, don't open ANY drives no matter how urgent it is. Just Don't do it or i won't be able to help you"
Come back and VIOLA this worthless trash avocado opened a drive to play a game and d pc was infected. Again. Back to square one. It almost broke my heart. Almost.
I remember that day well. I was 15yo and hopeful. That day marks d start of my hatred toward tech incompetent people.
SO FKIN
A N G E R Y
So today
College
My classmates stink of incompetence. I'm not that smart in fact i consider myself to be a noob among devs but seeing ppl that are several order of magnitudes trashier than me breaks my heart and makes me soo Fkin
A N G E R Y
Hey you cunt of a skunk, WHY can't you even compile a fkin cpp file without an IDE what the fuck is wrong with you? What do u mean ur program isn't compiling? Well it literally says there syntax error on line 15 congrats u moron u fkin spelled else as esle. Why shud I waste my time on stupid Shitty ppl like u huh?
And waddup mr shithead.No. Not gonna help you partition ur drives and install a fkin linux just cuz ur too lazy to google it urself.
And if i refuse to help cuz im working on my shit then I AM D BAD GUY? Stop bitching about me u lazy bastards get ur lazy arse off and read the fkin book. Watch a tutorial or sm shit why the fuck can't u understand YOU LITERALLY PAY TO COME HERE AND YOU AREN'T EVEN TRYING TO LEARN THE BASICS GOOD LUCK GETTING A JOB YOU WORTHLESS CUNTS.
Now now all the poison is out i can finally focus on improving myself and stop giving a fuck about them. Its hard to be calm and cool when ur surrounded by ppl like this all day. Even harder when there is almost noone that you can look upto. All this time, there's only one thing I've learnt- in a place like dis, being an asshole is better dan being polite.3 -
A story about burnout you say? Well, here it goes.
In 2019, I worked in a now-defunct startup. Back then, I was deep in "treatment" with wrong medications that almost ended up turning me into a vegetable. When I was hired, my mind was already deteriorating quickly, and I was caught in a downward spiral of losing intelligence.
Prior to working there, there was never ever ever a situation in my career when I was given a problem to solve and failed to do it.
But right then, with already double-digit IQ and constant, pumping anxiety, I was seeing task descriptions that looked familiar and doable, yet I absolutely could not do them. I couldn't comprehend. It was an absolutely screeching, crippling panic about me losing my intelligence forever, being fired and ending up unhireable, dying alone on the streets.
Apart from my depression I recovered from, this very experience was a trauma that haunts me to this day, every day. You know, my experience being raped as an adolescent doesn't, but this, it's something else. Now, my intelligence is back, I design architecture, I'm a CTO, and my solutions are objectively cleaner and better in every way than what I did pre-depression. Yet, I still feel a sharp, sudden rush of anxiety, and my heart skips a beat, when I think about writing code or even opening the IDE.
I don't know how does one recover from this. I'm now slowly transitioning into "architecting CTO" role that is just being a devrel, assessing ethics, working with business to realize their need, designing solutions and leaving the implementation for the team to do. You know, the stuff I was taught in the uni.
Maybe doing open source and launching small pet projects will help. But at this stage of my life I have no emotional resource to care.11 -
This was not exactly the worst work culture because the employees, it was because the upper level of the organization chart on the IT department.
I'm not quite sure how to translate the exact positions of that chart, but lets say that there is a General Manager, a couple of Area Managers (Infrastructure, Development), some Area Supervisors (2 or 3, by each area), and the grunts (that were us). Anyway, anything on the "Manager" was the source of all the toxicity on the department.
First and foremost, there was a lack of training for almost any employee. We were expected to know everything since day-1. Yes, the new employees had a (very) brief explanation about the technologies/languages were used, but they were expected to perform as a senior employee almost since the moment they cross the door. And forget about having some KT (Knowledge Transfer) sessions, they were none existent and if they existed, were only to solve a very immediate issue (now imagine what happened when someone quit*).
The general culture that they have to always say "yes" to the client/customer to almost anything without consulting to the development teams if that what was being asked to do was doable, or even feasible. And forget about doing a proper documentation about that change/development, as "that was needed yesterday and it needs to be done to be implemented tomorrow" (you know what I mean). This contributes to the previous point, as we didn't have enough time to train someone new because we had this absurd deadlines.
And because they cannot/wanted to say "NO", there were days when they came with an amount of new requirements that needed to be done and it didn't matter that we had other things to do. And the worst was that, until a couple of years (more or less), there was almost impossible to gather the correct requirements from the client/user, as they (managers) "had already" that requirement, and as they "know better" what the user wants, it was their vision what was being described on the requirements, not the users'...
And all that caused that, in a common basis, didn't have enough time to do all this stuff (mainly because the User Support) causing that we needed to do overtime, which almost always went unpaid (because a very ambiguous clause of the contract, and that we were "non-union workers"**). And this is my favorite point of this list, because, almost any overtime went unpaid, so basically we were expected to be working for free after the end of the work day (lets say, after the 17:00). Leaving "early" was almost a sin for the managers, as they always expected that we give more time to work that the indicated on the contract, and if not, they could raise a report to HR because the ambiguous clause allowed them to do it (among other childish things that they do).
Finally, the jewel of the crown, is that they never, but never acknowledge that they made a mistake. Never. That was impossible! If something failed on the things/systems/applications that they had assigned*** it was always our fault.
- "A report for the Finance Department is giving wrong information? It's the DBA's fault**** because although he manages that report, he couldn't imagine that I have an undocumented service (that runs before the creation the report) crashed because I modified a hidden and undocumented temporal table and forgot to update that service."
But, well, at least that's on the past. And although those aren't all the things that made that workplace so toxic, for me those were the most prominent ones.
-
* Well, here we I live it's very common to don't say anything about leaving the company until the very last day. Yes, I know that there are people that leave their "2-days notice", but it's not common (IMHO, of course). And yes, there are some of us that give a 1 or 2-weeks notice, but still it's not a common practice.
** I don't know how to translate this... We have a concept called "trusted employee", which is mainly used to describe any administrative employee, and that commonly is expected to give the 110% of what the contract says (unpaid overtimes, extra stuff to do, etc) and sadly it's an accepted condition (for whatever reasons). I chose "non-union workers" because in comparison with an union worker, we have less protections (besides the legal ways) regarding what I've described before. Curiously, there are also "operative workers", that doesn't belong to an union, but they have (sometimes) better protections that the administrative ones.
*** Yes, they were in charge of several systems, because they didn't trust us to handle/maintain them. And I'm sure that they still don't trust in their developers.
**** One of the managers, and the DBA are the only ones that handle some stuff (specially the one that involves "money"). The thing that allows to use the DBA as scapegoat is that such manager have more privileges and permissions than the DBA, as he was the previous DBA2 -
So here's my problem. I've been employed at my current company for the last 12 months (next week is my 1 year anniversary) and I've never been as miserable in a development job as this.
I feel so upset and depressed about working in this company that getting out of bed and into the car to come here is soul draining. I used to spend hours in the evenings studying ways to improve my code, and was insanely passionate about the product, but all of this has been exterminated due to the following reasons.
Here's my problems with this place:
1 - Come May 2019 I'm relocating to Edinburgh, Scotland and my current workplace would not allow remote working despite working here for the past year in an office on my own with little interaction with anyone else in the company.
2 - There is zero professionalism in terms of work here, with there being no testing, no planning, no market research of ideas for revenue generation – nothing. This makes life incredibly stressful. This has led to countless situations where product A was expected, but product B was delivered (which then failed to generate revenue) as well as a huge amount of development time being wasted.
3 - I can’t work in a business that lives paycheck to paycheck. I’ve never been somewhere where the salary payment had to be delayed due to someone not paying us on time. My last paycheck was 4 days late.
4 - The management style is far too aggressive and emotion driven for me to be able to express my opinions without some sort of backlash.
5 - My opinions are usually completely smashed down and ignored, and no apology is offered when it turns out that they’re 100% correct in the coming months.
6 - I am due a substantial pay rise due to the increase of my skills, increase of experience, and the time of being in the company, and I think if the business cannot afford to pay £8 per month for email signatures, then I know it cannot afford to give me a pay rise.
7 - Despite having continuously delivered successful web development projects/tasks which have increased revenue, I never receive any form of thanks or recognition. It makes me feel like I am not cared about in this business in the slightest.
8 - The business fails to see potential and growth of its employees, and instead criticises based on past behaviour. 'Josh' (fake name) is a fine example of this. He was always slated by 'Tom' and 'Jerry' as being worthless, and lazy. I trained him in 2 weeks to perform some basic web development tasks using HTML, CSS, Git and SCSS, and he immediately saw his value outside of this company and left achieving a 5k pay rise during. He now works in an environment where he is constantly challenged and has reviews with his line manager monthly to praise him on his excellent work and diverse set of skills. This is not rocket science. This is how you keep employees motivated and happy.
9 - People in the business with the least or zero technical understanding or experience seem to be endlessly defining technical deadlines. This will always result in things going wrong. Before our mobile app development agency agreed on the user stories, they spent DAYS going through the specification with their developers to ensure they’re not going to over promise and under deliver.
10 - The fact that the concept of ‘stealing data’ from someone else’s website by scraping it daily for the information is not something this company is afraid to do, only further bolsters the fact that I do not want to work in such an unethical, pathetic organisation.
11 - I've been told that the MD of the company heard me on the phone to an agency (as a developer, I get calls almost every week), and that if I do it again, that the MD apparently said he would dock my pay for the time that I’m on the phone. Are you serious?! In what world is it okay for the MD of a company to threaten to punish their employees for thinking about leaving?! Why not make an attempt at nurturing them and trying to find out why they’re upset, and try to retain the talent.
Now... I REALLY want to leave immediately. Hand my notice in and fly off. I'll have 4 weeks notice to find a new role, and I'll be on garden leave effective immediately, but it's scary knowing that I may not find a role.
My situation is difficult as I can't start a new role unless it's remote or a local short term contract because my moving situation in May, and as a Junior to Mid Level developer, this isn't the easiest thing to do on the planet.
I've got a few interviews lined up (one of which was a final interview which I completed on Friday) but its still scary knowing that I may not find a new role within 4 weeks.
Advice? Thoughts? Criticisms?
Love you DevRant <33 -
I am thinking about leaving this platform. To be honest I don't get anything out of it anymore and the only thing keeping me here is the less-rant'ish content like @devNews or the stories.
I am actually a bit disappointed, the quality of devrant really did degrade alot in the last few months. Don't get me wrong but I feel like people have become "normies" over here. I don't mean that in an edgy or degrading way but let me explain. When I started here I had a very high opinion of the people here. Everyone seemed like a passionate / knowledgeable individual from whom you could hear interesting stories or learn. Maybe I just saw it like that because I was still a very inexperienced dev and was looking for a dev community. But nonetheless I think devRant transformed into a place of mediocrity.
Dont get me wrong I wouldn't think of myself as aspiring or generally "better" than anyone else on here, but the content over here got a little stale.
I am not the kind of person who would "rant", in the first place, so I may have a different mindset and to be honest "ranting" has always been a thing I looked down upon. It just does not support my style of thinking. I totally get that people sometimes need to "vent" their feelings but there is nothing productive to gain from ranting, like you ain't not improving your situation by doing it. The more passionate raters over here call people things, I would never even dream about saying to people. Don't worry I'm no sjw or something like it, I don't care if you do it. If it helps you sure, why not. But there is a point where you corner yourself so much that you stop respecting your colleagues because they wrote that shitty code, instead of helping.
Some tech sure is bad, but it is not getting any better by insulting it.
Another thing I use to notice are people, thinking so highly of them selfes / being so close-minded - that they only accept their own views as true. These are the people that I always try to avoid, but that is getting harder and harder as time goes on.
Collectivism and group thinking are very strong on devRant making it really hard to defend a unpopular opinion - I get that devRant is not the kind of platform that would support actual proper arguments/discussions - but I still feels like some people shove opinions down another people's throat with no reasoning behind it.
Arguments on devRant are always won by the person coming up with the most witty response. Having another opinion is always seen as offensive. That's not exactly the definiton of open-mindedness.
Another rather annoying thing are what I call the "non dev, dev's". See: As a developer you should aspire to understand what your doing - I won't get into this too much but one sentencd: How are things like serious "Semicolon memes" a thing? I am as much into memes as the next guy, but debugging 3 hours, just to find out its a typo. I mean come on...
I sure get that devRant is not the kind of place where you would find the people I am looking for, and that's why I am leaving.
My whole post may seem super negative of the platform - and it is to an extend - but I sure also had a good time back in the day - devRant as in "the platform" surely is not at fault, but a forum is only as good as the people on it. Maybe I changed, maybe devRant did. All I know is that it is not for me anymore.
I won't delete my account and I probably will not leave completely, but all I will do is the "once a week" checkout.6 -
Making an ssh connection:
No....
No this one.
Not that one.
Not that one, either.
*starts typing*
*Typo 1*
*Typo 2*
Yay. Connected to server.
... Okay. Wrong environment.
*Exiting*
*trying again*
*Typo 1*
*Typo 2*
*finally connected*
Okay. I'm here...
Why did I connect to this machine again?!
------
Migrations are fun. Your bash history is an obsessive lier, your brain completely fried and when you finally managed to achieve something... You either forget what it was - or even worse - you get reminded of all the stuff you still have to do.
I'm literally amazed that I currently manage to go to the toilet, don't forget to make coffee and eat stuff at least once a day.
Before anyone thinks... Haha joke.
Nope I'm dead serious.
I am amazed that I didn't forget to go to the toilet, aka sitting in my own piss and wonder why it's so warm and wet down there.
I'm glad that the migration is going to end soon, otherwise I might opt in out of paranoia for adult diapers.
*My brain is really fried*4 -
-Writes a function that I'm going to schedule for django.
-works in development.
-adds it to production cron using django-crontab
-not working.
-spends 3 hours editing code, searching for similar problems and reading documentations but find nothing wrong and it's still not working.
-maybe it's django-crontab so I decide to just write a custom management command and call it through cron.
-still not working.
-calls function using what I'm telling cron to do.
-everything works.
-?????????
-adds logs to cron command (sorry for not making it earlier)
-mfw the code is not working because I imported 'patterns' in urls.py which has been deprecated since django 1.8 -
When I was in college OOP was emerging. A lot of the professors were against teaching it as the core. Some younger professors were adamant about it, and also Java fanatics. So after the bell rang, they'd sometimes teach people that wanted to learn it. I stayed after and the professor said that object oriented programming treated things like reality.
My first thought to this was hold up, modeling reality is hard and complicated, why would you want to add that to your programming that's utter madness.
Then he started with a ball example and how some balls in reality are blue, and they can have a bounce action we can express with a method.
My first thought was that this seems a very niche example. It has very little to do with any problems I have yet solved and I felt thinking about it this way would complicate my programs rather than make them simpler.
I looked around the at remnants of my classmates and saw several sitting forward, their eyes lit up and I felt like I was in a cult meeting where the head is trying to make everyone enamored of their personality. Except he wasn't selling himself, he was selling an idea.
I patiently waited it out, wanting there to be something of value in the after the bell lesson. Something I could use to better my own programming ability. It never came.
This same professor would tell us all to read and buy gang of four it would change our lives. It was an expensive hard cover book with a ribbon attached for a bookmark. It was made to look important. I didn't have much money in college but I gave it a shot I bought the book. I remember wrinkling my nose often, reading at it. Feeling like I was still being sold something. But where was the proof. It was all an argument from authority and I didn't think the argument was very good.
I left college thinking the whole thing was silly and would surely go away with time. And then it grew, and grew. It started to be impossible to avoid it. So I'd just use it when I had to and that became more and more often.
I began to doubt myself. Perhaps I was wrong, surely all these people using and loving this paradigm could not be wrong. I took on a 3 year project to dive deep into OOP later in my career. I was already intimately aware of OOP having to have done so much of it. But I caught up on all the latest ideas and practiced them for a the first year. I thought if OOP is so good I should be able to be more productive in years 2 and 3.
It was the most miserable I had ever been as a programmer. Everything took forever to do. There was boilerplate code everywhere. You didn't so much solve problems as stuff abstract ideas that had nothing to do with the problem everywhere and THEN code the actual part of the code that does a task. Even though I was working with an interpreted language they had added a need to compile, for dependency injection. What's next taking the benefit of dynamic typing and forcing typing into it? Oh I see they managed to do that too. At this point why not just use C or C++. It's going to do everything you wanted if you add compiling and typing and do it way faster at run time.
I talked to the client extensively about everything. We both agreed the project was untenable. We moved everything over another 3 years. His business is doing better than ever before now by several metrics. And I can be productive again. My self doubt was over. OOP is a complicated mess that drags down the software industry, little better than snake oil and full of empty promises. Unfortunately it is all some people know.
Now there is a functional movement, a data oriented movement, and things are looking a little brighter. However, no one seems to care for procedural. Functional and procedural are not that different. Functional just tries to put more constraints on the developer. Data oriented is also a lot more sensible, and again pretty close to procedural a lot of the time. It's just odd to me this need to separate from procedural at all. Procedural was very honest. If you're a bad programmer you make bad code. If you're a good programmer you make good code. It seems a lot of this was meant to enforce bad programmers to make good code. I'll tell you what I think though. I think that has never worked. It's just hidden it away in some abstraction and made identifying it harder. Much like the code methodologies themselves do to the code.
Now I'm left with a choice, keep my own business going to work on what I love, shift gears and do what I hate for more money, or pivot careers entirely. I decided after all this to go into data science because what you all are doing to the software industry sickens me. And that's my story. It's one that makes a lot of people defensive or even passive aggressive, to those people I say, try more things. At least then you can be less defensive about your opinion.53 -
This is the story connected to this rant:
https://devrant.com/rants/1533475/...
Thanks everybody for the concern! I want to inform you that I'm doing alright again. I went to a not too big event not far from home.
After a few beers and one stronger drink me and my friend had a good time. Everything that happened after, I can't remember it.
My friend told me we were walking to our bikes (he wouldn't let me go home, he noticed something was wrong) and right before we arrived I fell to the ground. After a while my friend helped me up but as I stood again I fell immediately, my head hit the ground hard.
I puked a lot and after almost an hour the police was there, who called an ambulance (last night I got a flashback in my dreams and vaguely saw one of the two ambulance drivers.
They inspected me but surprisingly they didn't take me to the hospital. My friends' mom also arrived and together they pulled me in to her car.
After that they brought me home and of course my parents were shocked as hell. They pulled me out of the car and put me down on the couch. It was about 4 am at this moment.
I first woke up at 7 am but immediately fell asleep again (I can't remember me doing this but my father said I did this, he stayed awake the rest of the night). An hour later, 8 am, I finally woke up. A lot went through my head because I could't remember how I came home.
Without many words I went to bed and later we talked about everything that happened.8 -
I once interviewed for a role at Bank of America. The interview process started off well enough, the main guy asked some general questions about career history and future goals. Then it was off to the technical interviewers. The first guy was fine. Asked appropriate questions which he clearly understood the answers to.
The next guy up, however, was what I like to call an aggressive moron. After looking at my resume, he said I see you listed C++. To which I said, yes I have about 7 years of experience in it but I've mostly been using python for the past few years so I might be a bit rusty. Great he said, can you write me a function that returns an array?
After I finished he looked at my code, grinned and said that won't work. Your variable is out of scope.
(For non C programmers, returning a local variable that's not passable by value doesn't work because the local var is destroyed once the function exits. Thus I did what you're supposed to do, allocate the memory manually and then returned a pointer to it)
After a quick double take and verifying that my code did work, I asked, um can you explain why that doesn't work as I'm pretty sure it does.
The guy then attempted to explain the concept of variable scope to me. After he finished I said, yes which is why I allocated the memory manually using the new operator, which persists after the function exits.
Einstein then stared really hard at my code for maybe 10 to 15 seconds. Then finally looked up said ok fine, but now you have a memory leak so your code is still wrong.
Considering a memory leak is by definition an application level bug, I just said fine, any more questions?4 -
Not work, but was very pissed off anyways.
So, today my C# lecturer was teaching about escape sequences in strings. Specifically, he's showing how to escape the single quotes character ( ' ) since we're learning about how to send SQL queries as well.
He started writing on the whiteboard the following and said that this was how to escape the single quotes character in a string:
\' "abc123" \'
Me and one of my classmates looked at this and started to ask questions, since this is definitely not how you do it. Somehow, the lecturer could not understand us. We tried to explain it the best we could, starting from verbally, then writing on the whiteboard, then even showing code on a laptop. For some unknown reason the lecturer still couldn't understand where he was wrong and both of us just gave up after 15 minutes of trying to explain it.
Mind you, most of the class had little to none prior programming experience, me and said classmate are one of the few that actually programmed before, so all my other classmates were just very confused as to what is right and what is wrong.
Now I'm really questioning my lecturer's abilities....5 -
I fucking hate morning people like the one in the story below!
Before we begin story time I want to acknowledge some things.
This is largely a case of a person having a lack of awareness and giving in to their base instincts (which are wrong).
People all tend to think that everyone else is like them (most children below a certain age cannot make this distinction and many adults never learn it either).
To take it a step further, anyone who isn't just like them is Lazy/Bad/An Asshole/etc.
FUCK THOSE PEOPLE
Now it's story time...
---------
I worked for a startup. We used a modified SCRUM, and we had standups every day @ 10 AM, the other team had then at 11:30 AM.
We get a new product owner. He is a morning person. But basically, he is a day-trader so he wakes up at 5 AM to trade and is in the office by 8 AM every day.
The problem is, he uses this as a reason to leave every day at 3 PM when EVERY other member of the team is there until at least 5 PM.
So he says one day (when I am not there) that we are moving our standups to 8:30 AM...
"Because he wants to make more use of the time and wants to get more done!"
So the next day a bunch of us miss this standup, the second day I was there in time but instead of going to the standup I sent them a picture of myself sitting in a coffee shop across the street with a message saying...
"I will be holding a meeting today at 10 AM, I expect EVERYONE to be there. If anyone on our team is absent then we will sit there and that absent person will be responsible for the time we waste waiting for them."
10 AM rolls around and the Product Owner is nowhere to be seen. The team starts complaining about the early standup and I tell them that this meeting is for me to take care of it. I tell them to sit silently and let me handle it.
We all message the PO saying the same thing...
"Come to the meeting, You are wasting our time!!!"
So he shows up at 10:20 AM and it begins.
(Now I'm going to do this as a conversation)
PO: "So I assume this is about the standup?..."
ME: "Feel free to ramble on as long as you want, you have already wasted 20 minutes of our time so we will sit here quietly and wait for you to decide you are ready to stop wasting our time with your ramblings. That's fine."
<PO then shuts up in disbelief>
ME: "So are you finished?"
PO: ...
ME: "I'm expecting an answer PO!"
PO: Yes, for now.
ME: I am moving our standups to 5 PM, end of discussion.
PO: Becuase your too lazy to be here by 8 AM?
<I expected this>
ME: No because I'm an asshole who expect everyone to conform to my schedule.
PO: ..., Well, I am not here at 5 PM.
ME: Sounds like your too "lazy" be here at 5 PM, eh?
PO: I have other things I do then.
ME: Ah, now the truth comes out. You care more about your life than our business. That's unacceptable! I personally don't care what you want to do. The fact is that we are working here and every day we end up having PO questions that need to and can't be answered because you are not here.
PO: <To the team> The standup is still at 8:30 AM.
ME: <To the team> The standup is at 5 PM. End of story. And from now on whenever we have questions before 5 for PO and he is not here we will be recording it and putting it in his report.
Then I walk away.
That day we held a standup at 5 PM. He wasn't there. He held a standup at 8:30 AM and he didn't even show up. He stayed home a video in. He then arrived in the office and said...
PO: Since no one was in the standup today we will be moving it back to 10 AM.
ME: Since PO has seen the selfishness of his ways, We will be moving the standup from 5 PM back to 10 AM.
FUCK THOSE PEOPLE6 -
Does most memorable in a bad way count? 🤔
He left almost 2 years ago..or even more.. left a bunch of bugs and logical fuckups for me to fix.. some already fixed, some still lingering there..
I want to not blame him for everything, since we lack proper code review protocols and all.. but I've asked on several occasions if he understands the problem and what must be done..and the answer was always yes..results, after I got time to check up on him, the code he wrote was most probably copy pasted from stack overflow or somewhere else.. butchered in any and every way possible..
And of course already checked in to TFS.. along with bunch of files that were not even changed (he didn't bother to check that and exclude them) + a bunch of files from other projects... Told him to not do that on several occasions too, but he still managed to fuck things up this way.. leaving all the uncommented debugger; crap and alerts in the js files..
On one occasion I was working on new GUI..api part I already finished..got the order from above to delegate this to him as it is not much he can fuck up so I could focus on more important & complex stuff..
Maybe additional 4h of work + testing for everything..
I show him the prepared files, one controller, one view..explained what parts of code goes where etc.. a little short of writing everything myself.. Ask if he understands what needs to be done & how and told him if he has any problems/questions to ask me asap..
Said he understood what needs to be done.. after a day or two he asks me why something is not workig as expected.. I check the files, correct initialization was commented out and all the code was stuffed in the view file.. Took him another day to move the code to proper files.. Not sure about the possible bugs left there as the client later decided that they will not be using this..
I later found out that years of C# experience on his CV was actually a school course.. he didn't even know why the changes on api are not showing up..because he didn't know that he has to build the code..
I mean, if he was honest when asked about experience with .net, we would've taken a month or two to just explain everything from the start..
But as he didn't and based on his CV (much more experience with .net than me) and 'I understand everything' attitude from the start I assumed he knows WTF was he doing..
Boy was I wrong..
He was also more interested in how much I get payed and if I have a company phone etc..than actually doing his job.. I fucking hate chit chat, and this..well.. he didn't get the hints that this is in no way appropriate to ask.. I've told him that if he has problems with his pay and bonuses that he should talk to the management and not me about this..and that I'm only interested in his actual work and progress..
So yeah, I'll definitely be remembering this guy till the day I die..3 -
To everyone involved in my last rant, I deleted it because it was just going in the direction of "this guy thinks he's better than everyone, boohoo you have to revert to a perfectly acceptable laptop" and so on.
My intent was to compare my two laptops as a follow-up related to my HDD doing shit, but everyone took it the wrong way. So please, don't continue this discussion over this rant because you think I am spoiled or anything, I get your opinion, I disagree with it, you disagree with my opinion whether you get it or not...
That being said, I still think everyone can rant about what they have (assuming it was bought with their own money) without being called "spoiled". If you own a sports car or a great computer, you can hate the fact that you have to go back to an ordinary one. If you have a great house and it's destroyed in a fire, you can hate having to go back to a normal apartment. If you're a CEO, you can rant about going down to normal employee.
To everyone who has a crappy laptop or whatever that converts to in any other field, I can only wish that you'll upgrade it to a better one. To everyone that has a great laptop that's breaking down, I can only wish that you'll get it fixed and will be able to get off your older laptop you have to use meanwhile. Use your money the way you want, decide for yourself what parts of your life you want " more than average" and which ones you want just average, and live with what you want.
I don't really know what the whole point of this rant is... I wrote it without re-reading it, so feel free to ignore it, but I just wanted to address this. I'll still give updates about me fixing my better laptop, so to everyone wanting to comment on it, do as you wish. I just don't want another "Quality of life" war to happen, that wouldn't lead anywhere.
Sorry for this rant if its stupid, but I'm feeling a bit better now :)7 -
! rant
Sorry but I'm really, really angry about this.
I'm an undergrad student in the United States at a small state college. My CS department is kinda small but most of the professors are very passionate about not only CS but education and being caring mentors. All except for one.
Dr. John (fake name, of course) did not study in the US. Most professors in my department didn't. But this man is a complete and utter a****le. His first semester teaching was my first semester at the school. I knew more about basic programming than he did. There were more than one occasion where I went "prof, I was taught that x was actually x because x. Is that wrong?" knowing that what I was posing was actually the right answer. Googled to verify first. He said that my old teachings were all wrong and that everything he said was the correct information. I called BS on that, waited until after class to be polite, and showed him that I was actually correct. Denied it.
His accent was also really problematic. I'm not one of those people who feel that a good teacher needs a native accent by any standard (literally only 1 prof in the whole department doesn't), but his English was *awful*. He couldn't lecture for his life and me, a straight A student in high school, was almost bored to sleep on more than one occasion. Several others actually did fall asleep. This... wasn't a good first impression.
It got worse. Much, much worse.
I got away with not having John for another semester before the bees were buzzing again. Operating systems was the second most poorly taught class I've ever been in. Dr John hadn't gotten any better. He'd gotten worse. In my first semester he was still receptive when you asked for help, was polite about explaining things, and was generally a decent guy. This didn't last. In operating systems, his replies to people asking for help became slightly more hostile. He wouldn't answer questions with much useful information and started saying "it's in chapter x of the textbook, go take a look". I mean, sure, I can read the textbook again and many of us did, but the textbook became a default answer to everything. Sometimes it wasn't worth asking. His homework assignments because more and more confusing, irrelavent to the course material, or just downright strange. We weren't allowed to use muxes. Only semaphores? It just didn't make much sense since we didn't need multiple threads in a critical zone at any time. Lastly for that class, the lectures were absolutely useless. I understood the material more if I didn't pay attention at all and taught myself what I needed to know. Usually the class was nothing more than doing other coursework, and I wasn't alone on this. It was the general consensus. I was so happy to be done with prof John.
Until AI was listed as taught by "staff", I rolled the dice, and it came up snake eyes.
AI was the worst course I've ever been in. Our first project was converting old python 2 code to 3 and replicating the solution the professor wanted. I, no matter how much debugging I did, could never get his answer. Thankfully, he had been lazy and just grabbed some code off stack overflow from an old commit, the output and test data from the repo, and said it was an assignment. Me, being the sneaky piece of garbage I am, knew that py2to3 was a thing, and used that for most of the conversion. Then the edits we needed to make came into play for the assignment, but it wasn't all that bad. Just some CSP and backtracking. Until I couldn't replicate the answer at all. I tried over and over and *over*, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong and could find Nothing. Eventually I smartened up, found the source on github, and copy pasted the solution. And... it matched mine? Now I was seriously confused, so I ran the test data on the official solution code from github. Well what do you know? My solution is right.
So now what? Well I went on a scavenger hunt to determine why. Turns out it was a shift in the way streaming happens for some data structures in py2 vs py3, and he never tested the code. He refused to accept my answer, so I made a lovely document proving I was right using the repo. Got a 100. lol.
Lectures were just plain useless. He asked us to solve multivar calculus problems that no one had seen and of course no one did it. He wasted 2 months on MDP. I'd continue but I'm running out of characters.
And now for the kicker. He becomes an a**hole, telling my friends doing research that they are terrible programmers, will never get anywhere doing this, etc. People were *crying* and the guy kept hammering the nail deeper for code that was honestly very good because "his was better". He treats women like delicate objects and its disgusting. YOU MADE MY FRIEND CRY, GAVE HER A BOX OF TISSUES, AND THEN JUST CONTINUED.
Want to know why we have issues with women in CS? People like this a****le. Don't be prof John. Encourage, inspire, and don't suck. I hope he's fired for discrimination.11 -
Ever had a day that felt like you're shoveling snow from the driveway? In a blizzard? With thunderstorms & falling unicorns? Like you shovel away one m² & turn around and no footprints visible anymore? And snow built up to your neck?
Today my work day was like that.. xcept shit..shit instead of pretty & puffy snow!!
Working on things a & b, trying to not mess either one up, then comes shit x, coworker was updating production.. ofc something went wrong.. again not testing after the update..then me 'to da rescue'.. :/ hardly patch things up, so it works..in a way.. feature c still missing due to needed workarounds.. going back to a and b.. got disrupted by the same coworker who is nver listening, but always asking too much..
And when I think I finally have the b thing figured out a f-ing blocker from one of our biggest clients.. The whole system is unresponsive.. Needles to say, same guy in support for two companies (their end), so they filed the jira blocker with the wrong customer that doesn't have a SLA so no urgent emails..and then the phone calls.. and then the hell broke loose.. checking what is happening.. After frantic calls from our dba to anyone who even knows that our customer exists if they were doing sth on the db.. noup, not a single one was fucking with the prod db.. The hell! Materialised view created 10 mins ago that blocked everything..set to recreate every 10 minutes..with a query that I am guessing couldn't even select all that data in under 15.. dafaaaq?! Then we kill it..and again it is there.. We found out that customers dbas were testing something on live environment, oblivious that they mamaged to block the entire db..
FML, I'm going pokemon hunting.. :/ codename for ingress n beer..3 -
Probably had my worst half-week ever this week.
Customer's CRM system, the read and edit masks just...stopped existing on last week friday. CRM fell back on some default masks for the dataset. No way to create new masks directly without putting the whole system upside down.
We couldn't do anything anyway because they reported the issue literally as we all were about to leave for weekend and our boss was like "Ah nah, well do it next week."
Our brains were already fried anyway...
I mail the reporter that we've registered their issue, will investigate and report back ASAP once we've got news.
Monday rolls around, I'm whacking my head against their system trying to figure the fuck out, what went wrong and how to solve it, I come up empty; Not that terrible since the masks only stopped existing in the webclient version of the system and they can still use the windows client, so they can still work.
Tuesday rolls around, I'm at an on site training for an ERP system with my boss at a remote company. Get an email in midst of the training, I was doing protocol.
Guy from the afflicted company goes and tells me that the issue has somehow spread to his colleague and him...IN THE WINDOWS CLIENT.
I'm fucking flabbergasted, so to speak, since the masks for the windows client and the web client are totally isolated from one another.
After we're back at our company, I investigate, less efficiently this time because my brain got fried at the training. I come up empty again.
NOW TODAY: Discuss further proceedings with my boss, he's not pissed at me or anything, just to say, but we're both worried, obviously.
Then at 10:20, a guy from the afflicted company mails me in an annoyed tone that the masks are still broken.
11:00, we figure out a workaround so the windows client users can at least work again, albeit limited.
11:10, I mail the guy, telling him that although we're still not able to fully work everything out and are still investigating, we've made a workaround so they can at least work again.
11:20, the guy mails me in a pissed tone around the lines of "This is very very important and must be fixed ASAP or else we'll not be able to work at all [...]"
And I think like "Dude I literally just told you like 8 minutes ago that there's are workaround so you'll be able to at least work again..."
Forward the mail to boss, we meet up quickly to discuss how in God's name we can deescalate this mfer.
11:31, the guy mails me again, all apologetically this time "Stop! All is good, I just now fully read you mail, thanks for implementing the workaround, nothing will come to a standstill [...]"
BRUH CAN YOU NOT FUCKING READ BEFORE ESCALATING SHIT
Fuck customers. Dumb fucking cretins unable to fucking read.
The issue is still unresolved. Support of the CRM software lets us sit on our collective asses and wait.
There is no such thing as stable software, it's a myth.
Every corporate software is like an ever-decaying semi-corpse of a brain dead patient slowly getting worse and worse but not fucking dying.
Rant over. -
When will X be finished?!
Um..I don't know cuz thing Y is blocking me from doing X implementation and it makes no sense.. I have no idea what is wrong with it and can't tell how long it'll take me to fix, hopefully by the end of today I'll have thing Y fixed enough so I can finish thing X..
Ok, will you be able to update production today?! Just put it on production when you're done with X.
Uuuumm... Yeah... // still need to know how X will behave in cases a, b, c & b+c...
I'm writing this while waiting for abc feedback.. this is going great.. :/
I know prod is not used as prod yet, but still... fuuuuu!!1 -
So first of all merry delayed Xmas and of course wishing you all a happy new year.
Now...
I always loved designing and coding, yes I actually like it, I must be absolutely mental or something.. I finally after pushing myself through hours upon hours of courses, finishing most within 15% of the allotted time, and doing more then was requested, I finally found a job, related to front-end development. You might think "Gee; good for you buddy, you filthy commoner.." Well; it didn't last all too long, I basically after nailing the interview process got my first day there within a few days, now I am absolutely stoked and my nerves are shot, plus the 4 cups of coffee aren't helping. I literally was so nervous to do well on my first day, that I slept for only one hour, literally one bloody hour.
I get into the office where I am greeted by an amazing laptop, I mean high-end gaming 360 no-scope all over the place gaming. I sit down and start on getting all my tools ready to go (they let us use whatever IDE we wanted, which I thought was amazing) after getting my IDE and the plugins and all the emails/Slack etc setup, I then get told to get a Dropbox account. I assumed the Dropbox account was just there to share things quickly with the designers, we would obviously be using Git right?! Well; no not exactly, actually not at all - we all used the Dropbox account of one of the bosses, I swear everybody pushed and pulled stuff all the time, a copy of the boss's passport was in there as well, and they had projects from and up to 3 years ago, still in there... It took my Dropbox 3 bloody hours to grab as much as it could to actually allow me to get started...
I then to my absolute dismay notice that I would be working on a prefab of a prefab, basically the only thing I would be responsible for, is to adjust the animations and aligning elements.... Aligning and animations.... Fine, I guess it could be worse right? Started going along with it, using a framework that I never heard of before, till like a good 3 days before starting there called "Greensock" which is amazing I must admit, could've helped me allot on my solo-projects. Problem was; we had designers who wanted things, that just looked plain horrible, it was never 'on-point' so to say, maybe it's just me being a perfectionist but it just looked wrong.
Finally got it done after struggling with the prefabs and what not, then the day was almost over and I finally got to go home, fortunately dodging the drinking that was occurring around 4 in the afternoon in the middle of the office, it wasn't beers or anything of the sort - but hard liquor along the lines of Wodka and straight up Gin. I fortunately had a personal issue I had to attend too, so I got out of there before things got too crazy and they went out for dinner stumbling all over the place.
Well this wen't for a few more days (minus the drinking), with 8 being the exact number of days and my grievance list only kept growing. I was for one a junior-developer and thus with them knowing was supposed to get training from our lead, however; that never occurred instead said 'lead' would leave early or be completely absent on most days, leaving me to mess around with prefabs that did my head in, with no comments nor any indication what it did or should've done, I spent hours just adjusting one line of code at a time to see what would happen.
Eventually they told us to work from home only, so I did - did a project here and there and then got told they wouldn't keep me on board any longer, stating I was too inexperienced and they didn't have enough work (which was a load of bs) and that I lacked "office experience" whatever the heck that means, I was always sociable and hell I ever cracked people up, kept a neat and orderly list of things that needed doing, I even contrary to most commented on my code, so the next poor sod wouldn't be going through 'try by error' hell that I wen't through.
Either way; I currently have been feeling absolutely wrecked in terms of motivation, that job would've solved my financial situation and allowed me to finally do what I wanted to do. Instead of doing some random dead-end job each week or month, I would've had a steady income and something I could've built on.
But to add some positivism to this endless and too long of a rant... I'm currently going through a boot-camp and doing a small Linux based course on the side, this little thing isn't going to hold me back; yeah it will be tough, but then again most things don't come easy..
Thank you for reading and I hope you have allot and I mean allot more luck on your first job.5 -
Co-worker is in his office.
Co-worker whistles continuously "The rains of Castamere" from the Game of Thrones series.
I like Game of Thrones.
I also like the series' score.
But not the way my co-worker interprets it.
Because it's wrong.
Anyway, he whistles.
Sometimes louder, sometimes less so.
It's very out of tune.
It's annoying.
I can't concentrate, let alone code.
Co-worker goes to a meeting.
Silence.
I delete the bullshit I've written earlier.
Then, I get some coding done.
Then, I'm relaxed again.
Then, Co-worker returns.
Now he hums.
It's the same song.
Over and over again.
Again.
It's not that much out of tune, but it's still annoying.
I can't think, I can't concentrate, let alone code.
My thoughts drift to a certain Red Wedding.
I imagine it in vivid detail.
Strangely, it's a happy place right now.
I imagine throwing my screen through two fucking walls.
I don't do it, because the laws of physics are against me.
But the thought is enough.
I'm at peace, again.
... also, I got to leave early today, so I got that going for me which is nice.
(I already had to tell that co-worker *not* to whistle loudly in the cafeteria - you can hear it in a big part of the building. We had some important customers over and Office Management was not amused.)6 -
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 😔 -
A few years ago I would whine, complain and rant about shitty software, which I knew could be so much better than it was. But I didn't yet write software of my own.
Now I complain about shitty libraries, API's and users. Not much has changed really. And every time I write code, I curse myself, and whoever made this trashpile I have to work with. I curse the user to the moon and beyond for using the program wrong. Funny thing is, exactly the thing I was complaining about (input validation, see earlier rant) is also exactly what no more than 5 minutes after release, a user fucked up with. The bot just does not respond at this point. But fuck these braindead retards for users.
In a few years I expect myself to be complaining about shitty compilers and buffer overflows, segmentation violations, bad coding style (don't make your program a fucking colander kthx), and so on.
Next decade I expect myself to be complaining about physics itself, and why the universe is governed by the laws it's governed by. Whoever this God is, he's a fucking retard. Funny thing is, the signs for it are already there. Electron theory! If only those electrons were positrons, then the math would check out properly. Instead of negative electrons traveling from negative to positive, we'd have positive positrons traveling from positive to negative. At least from what I understand so far, this is still a decade away after all.
The point I'm trying to make is that nothing changes, only my understanding of the world around me does, as I tumble further and further down the rabbit hole. Sometimes I wish I had taken the blue pill... Either complain about others' software or perhaps not give a shit at all. Become one of those filthy users I now despise.1 -
what kind of dumb fuck you have to be to get the react js dev job in company that has agile processes if you hate the JS all the way along with refusing to invest your time to learn about shit you are supposed to do and let's add total lack of understanding how things work, specifically giving zero fucks about agile and mocking it on every occasion and asking stupid questions that are answered in first 5 minutes of reading any blog post about intro to agile processes? Is it to annoy the shit out of others?
On top of that trying to reinvent the wheels for every friggin task with some totally unrelated tech or stack that is not used in the company you work for?
and solution is always half-assed and I always find flaw in it by just looking at it as there are tons of battle-tested solutions or patterns that are better by 100 miles regarding ease of use, security and optimization.
classic php/mysql backend issues - "ooh, the java has garbage collector" - i don't give a fuck about java at this company, give me friggin php solution - 'ooh, that issue in python/haskel/C#/LUA/basically any other prog language is resolved totally different and it looks better!' - well it seems that he knows everything besides php!
Yeah we will change all the fucking tech we use in this huge ass app because your inability to learn to focus on the friggin problem in the friggin language you got the job for.
Guy works with react, asked about thoughts on react - 'i hope it cease to exists along with whole JS ecosystem as soon as possible, because JS is weird'. Great, why did you fucking applied for the job in the first place if it pushes all of your wrong buttons!
Fucking rockstar/ninja developers! (and I don't mean on actual 'rockstar' language devs).
Also constantly talks about game development and we are developing web-related suite of apps, so why the fuck did you even applied? why?
I just hate that attitude of mocking everything and everyone along with the 'god complex' without really contributing with any constructive feedback combined with half-assed doing something that someone before him already mastered and on top of that pretending that is on the same level, but mainly acting as at least 2 levels above, alas in reality just produces bolognese that everybody has to clean up later.
When someone gives constructive feedback with lenghty argument why and how that solution is wrong on so many levels, pulls the 'well, i'm still learning that' card.
If I as code monkey can learn something in 2 friggin days including good practices and most of crazy intricacies about that new thing, you as a programmer god should be able to learn it in 2 fucking hours!
Fucking arrogant pricks!8 -
A (work-)project i spent a year on will finally be released soon. That's the perfect opportunity to vent out all the rage i built up during dealing with what is the javascript version of a zodiac letter.
Everything went wrong with the beginning. 3 people were assigned to rewrite an old flash-application. Me, A and B. B suggested a javascript framework, even though me and A never worked with more than jquery. In the end we chose react/redux with rest on the server, a classic.
After some time i got the hang of time, around that time B left and a new guy, C, was hired soon after that. He didn't know about react/redux either. The perfect start off to a burning pile of smelly code.
Today this burning pile turned into a wasteland of code quality, a house of cards with a storm approaching, a rocket with leaks ready to launch, you get the idea.
We got 2 dozen files with 200-500 loc, each in the same directory and each with the same 2 word prefix which makes finding the right one a nightmare on its on. We have an i18n-library used only for ~10 textfields, copy-pasted code you never know if it's used or not, fetch-calls with no error-handling, and many other code smells that turn this fire into a garbage fire. An eternal fire. 3 months ago i reduced the linter-warnings on this project to 1, now i can't keep count anymore.
We use the reactabular-module which gives us headaches because IT DOESN'T DO WHAT IT'S SUPPOSED TO DO AND WE CANT USE IT WELL EITHER. All because the client cant be bothered to have the table header scroll along with the body. We have methods which do two things because passing another callback somehow crashed in the browser. And the only thing about indentation is that it exists. Copy pasting from websites, other files and indentation wars give the files the unique look that make you wonder if some of the devs hides his whitespace code in the files.
All of this is the result of missing time, results over quality and the worst approach of all, used by A: if A wants an ui-component similar to an existing one, he copies the original and edits he copy until it does what he wants. A knows about classes, modules, components, etc. Still, he can't bring himself to spend his time on creating superclasses... his approach gives results much faster
Things got worse when A tried redux, luckily A prefers the components local state. WHICH IS ANOTHER PROBLEM. He doesn't understand redux and loads all of the data directly from the server and puts it into the local state. The point of redux is that you don't have to do this. But there are only 1 or 2 examples of how this practice hurt us yet, so i'm gonna have to let this slide. IF HE AT LEAST WOULD UPDATE THE DATA PROPERLY. Changes are just sent to the server and then all of the data is re-fetched. I programmed the rest-endpoints to return the updated objects for a very reason. But no, fuck me.
I've heard A decided (A is the teamleader) to use less redux on the next project and use a dedicated rest-endpoints for every little comoutation you COULD DO WITH REDUX INSTEAD. My will is broken and just don't want to work with this anymore.
There are still various subpages that cant f5 because the components cant handle an empty redux state in the beginning, but to be honest i don't care anymore. Lets hope the client will never find out, along with the "on error nothing happens"-bugs. The product should've been shipped last week, but thanks to mandatory bugfixes the release was postponed to next week. Then the next project starts...
Please give me some tips to keep up code quality over time, i cant take this once more.
I'm also aware that i could've done more, talking A and C about code style, prettifying the code, etc. Etc. But i was busy putting out my out fires, i couldn't kill much of the other fires which in the end became a burning building (a perfect metaphor for this software)4 -
Should I be excited or concerned?
Newbie dev(babydev) who just learned string vs int and the word "boolean", is SUPER into data parsing, extrapolation and recursion... without knowing what any of those terms.
2 ½ hrs later. still nothing... assuming he was confused, I set up a 'quick' call...near 3 hrs later I think he got that it was only meant so I could see if/where he didnt understand... not dive into building extensive data arch... hopefully.
So, we need some basic af PHP forms for some public-provided input into a mySQL db. I figured I'd have him look up mySQL variables/fields, teach him a bit about proper db/field setup and give him something to practice on his currently untouched linux container I just set up so he could have a static ipv4 and cli on our new block (yea... he's spoiled, but has no clue).
I asked him to list some traits of X that he thinks could be relevant. Then to essentially briefly explain the logic to deciding/returning the values/how to store in the db... essentially basic conditionals and for loops... which is also quite new to him.
I love databases; I know I'm not in the majority... I assumed he'd get a couple traits in his mind and exhaust himself breaking them down. I was wrong. He was/likely is in his sleep now, over complicating something that was just meant as a basic af.
Fyi, the company is currently weighted towards more autistics (him and myself included) than neurotypicals.
I know I was(still am) extremely abnormal, especially when it comes to things like data.
So, should I be concerned/have him focus elsewhere for a bit?... I dont want to have him burnout before he even gets to installing mySQL44 -
Client contacts our company that his site is down, we do some investigating and the only way we can access the site is on a mobile phone. From the office computers the site never loads and times out. Since we don't host the site and I've never logged into it before I don't have a lot of details so I suggest they contact whoever hosts their site. This is where things get weird.
Client tells me that the site is hosted on someone's home server. I tell him that this is quite strange in 2018 and rather unlikely and ask if he was ever given access to the site to log in or if he has access to his domain registration, GoDaddy.
He says he doesn't understand any of this and would rather I just contact his current developer and figure it out with him. We agree that he needs to get access to his site so we are going to migrate it once I get access to it.
I email his current developer letting him know the client has put me in contact with him to troubleshoot the issues with the site. I ask him some standard questions like: where is the site hosted? Can you access it from a computer? Do you have some security measures in place to block certain IP ranges? Can you give me from access to get the files? Will you send me a backup of the site for me to load up on my server?
*2days pass*
Other dev: Tell me the account number and I'll transfer the domain.
Me: I'll have to get back to you on that once I talk to the client and set up his GoDaddy account since we believe the business owner should own their domain, not their developers. In the meantime you didn't answer any of the questions I asked. Transferring the domain won't get the site on my server so I still need the files.
*3 days pass*
OD: You are trying the wrong domain. The correct domain is [redacted].com I'll have my daughter send you the files when she gets in town. We will transfer the domain to you, the client will forget to pay and the site will go down and it'll be your fault.
Me: I appreciate your advice, but the client will own their domain. I'm trying to get the site online and you have no answered any of my questions. It's been a week now and you have not transferred the domain, you have not provided a copy of the site, you have not told me where the site is hosted. The client and I are both getting impatient at this point when will we receive a backup of the site and the transfer of the domain?
OD: Go fuck yourself, tell the client they can sue me.
If the client is that terrible, wouldn't you want to hand them off to anyone willing to take them? I have never understood why developers and agencies try to hold clients hostage by keeping their domain or website and refusing access. From what I can tell this is a freelance developer without a real company so a legal battle likely isn't going to go well since the domain is worthless to him as the copyright to the name is owned by the client. This isn't the first time we've had to help clients through this sort of thing.4 -
*working at a project, currently creating commits and pushing to remote
I created an early PR with a title [UNFINISHED] and [NOT YET DONE]. I'm really not finished yet. lots of stuff still need to be committed and pushed to repo
And suddenly, I find out that my team mate - just out of the blue without any prior warning - MERGES THE PULL REQUEST
"oh hey there are conflicts in the pr you made"
YEAH WELL MAYBE TRY GETTING YOUR HEAD OUT OF YOUR ASS WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU ARE YOU EVEN SANE
So now what happened is half of my commits are merged, he didn't tell me, i pushed more commits, branch recreated, and then he reverts the merge. so now everything is really messed up :)AS)D(F)AEF)SDF)AW)sfdjsigkl;zfghlkkj ghaslkj;gabsd;lkgjabslkfgh GET YOUR HEAD OUT OF YOUR ASS I WANT A PROMOTION3 -
Context: Am Sysadmin, occasionally a programming job flies in.
I just told my superiors that i will can no longer program for a specific customer i already poured ~90hrs into due to stress and thus health issues that have been accumulating since the beginning of the year. Everything relating to this customer is giving me chills. I can't even do my other stuff without hinderance anymore.
Because this is in parrallel to an existing customer complaint that came in yesterday i just received a rather rant-y email about what the fuck would be wrong with me, which immidiately disappeared again.
It was revoked as i now know. So far they seem to be understanding, but i still don't feel good with the decision i made.
I really want to finish the project, but i just can't. It drives me insane. I never felt like this.
Sorry for the wall of text and any errors. I'm really not having a good time right now.4 -
TL;DR: I'm stressed out over choosing a side project because of the commitment and fear of failure :(
I'm a student and summer vacation starts in 3 days (and actually has already started for me, thanks to a "smartly planned" hospital stay), so I'm currently looking for a cool project to start. This will be my third summer vacation during which I want to make complete a project, and I never actually did it. The first year, I couldn't think of any reasonable, doable project which would be interesting and fitting for the time scope (I was quite new to programming back then, so I probably couldn't have done things that would be interesting to me, an any project that I could've done would just take 20 minutes, cause I wouldn't understand anything more complex). The second time, I chose a project too big with too much new things I had to learn on the go. I actually pushed through for nearly a week, but then I realized that I only completed like 25% in that time, so I lost my motivation, thinking I could never finish it, while not wanting to start a complete new project, because that would've felt like wasting the time I put into my first project. It was still a valuable project and I learned a lot by doing it, but this year I want to actually finish a project; so I'm really stressed out right now trying to come up with a good project.
Usually I have millions of vague ideas in my head, but as soon as it comes to choosing, every single one seems to be the wrong one, or I forget about all of them. Everything that kinda interests me seems way to big and complicated to me, but I sometimes feel like I'm just underestimating my abilities, but on the other hand I have ~25 projects on my hard drive, of which 4 or 5 are finished and most will never be finished. :/
And it's just so overwhelming to choose something like that, because on one hand I really want to do a bigger project that I actually finish, and summer vacation is the only time I have so much time to code, and I love coding, but on the other hand choosing such a project that I will work 2-3 weeks on is too much commitment and also I'm anxious about failing it and never finish it, just abandon a buggy mess. Am I the only one to feel that way, or are you too having problems choosing side problems?
And, I guess if you have any ideas for a suitable project (literally anything, so that I might be exposed to some new ideas), just comment it.14 -
My first project, ever, was a very unproud thing that was developed...
A little detail - I was 12 back then.
So, a distant family member had a business of selling things that they brought to the country. They, of course, needed a website and my parents knew that I had some skills in development so suggested them my services.
Discussion started and well, what came out was this:
1. They need a site with items list.
2. It had no actual design plans, no actual requirements, just a list.
3. Oh. It had to work perfectly on IE4 or IE5 (can't remember).
So what was actually done, was a site full of divs, clearfixes and so buggy that opening in any other browser than IE - resulted in a total failure.
We have sat down and I, with all the respect told them that my skills are not sufficient to make all of the browsers work equally (I've been on HTML/CSS for more than 6 months back then. And all of it was after school). They calmed me down and said that it's ok, they can give me as much time as I need to figure things out. Yet, my English wasn't good back then so I couldn't... (I was 12, with 3 years of basic English as a non-native speaker).
We sat around the table, discussed what could be done and if I could investigate that and re-do when I'm fully ready. I agreed. The site was launched for IE only as it worked fine and others were just throwing an error to visit it with IE.
They were happy, people were using it and they didn't say that anything was bad. Of course, management was thru FTP and editing LIVE files because, well, no php, no control panels, nothing... I felt ashamed that the site wasn't what they wanted but they were ultra happy with it - first customers rolled in from there. They paid me around 60EUR at that time (it was ~12 years ago) and I've spent a month there. (minimum monthly wage here was around 90-120EUR at that time...
So, all in all, this project that I still think I failed - pushed me to the world of devs and... I've never regretted it. Of course, when I actually met with them after years - they have dropped the site as it was not needed anymore but they said that it was exactly what they needed and there was nothing wrong, even if it didn't work perfectly.2 -
How surprising is it when a person designs code in a very clear and impressive structure and just when you think about asking them for guidance, they reveal themselves to be complete turds?
I've been working with this person's "infra" code, at work. I've rewritten some classes to use their infra. I had a vague idea of how the classes work. I had no idea of how their code works. Expectedly, there were some issues but now only minor ones remain.
I asked them for a description of what I'm supposed to do for the few bugs I'm facing. They replied in such a condescending tone, it made me want to punch them through the screen.
Almost a month later, we're still going back and forth with emails. I've been swallowing it and responding calmly. I never got direct answers. Always deflections to irrelevant things or veiled insults. I took it because they did correct one silly error of mine that actually my code reviewer should've caught. (What's worse is that it got introduced by me just before my review and commit.)
But does that give them the right to insult me in front of the whole team including my project manager? I got a reply today from them with everyone of note in cc implying very clearly that I have not done any work. They highlighted a line from my code with some todo tag (that was not meant for them) to make their invalid point. A line that's unrelated to the bug I asked them about. This is after I proved them wrong when they insisted that I had done something wrong about a feature related to the bug.
If you don't understand what I asked for fucking ask me to ask again. But do not fucking try establish yourself on higher ground by pointing out irrelevant things in my code.
I was shocked and enraged that they'd do such a thing. I double checked everything like a mad man. Despite knowing that the fix has to come from them, I was instantly transported to the noob stage, grasping at straws. I wanted to send a really scathing reply right away but my manager asked me to wait.
My mind is now a see saw shifting between a panicked noob questioning every fucking thing I ever did in my nada life and a hungry enraged monster looking to maul that fucking shithead for burning me like that.1 -
Stupid stupid stupid API that returns a 204 on failed validations.
Informative docs? Hell no! Here's a few hundred long-ass field names that you need to pass as a JSON.
Doesn't work huh? Yeah, you're structure's all wrong. Some of these are grouped in vaguely named keys like "Wholesale".
Oh you need those as well? Yeah, you can see the whole structure if you try to GET an object.
Oh you need an ID to GET an object? Yeah you can just go ahead and create as many as you want. This is just a sandbox API, it's cool.
Oh that's not the point? Ahh you need the structure to be able to create one! *haha* Right, I'll get back to you on that.
* Email correspondence over 2 weeks time. I have still yet to be able to make a an actual successful request. The fucking 204 doesn't count if it doesn't actually create the resource.
Fucking fucky fuckity fuck fuck fuck.
I swear to god if I ever meet this guy in person, I will probably buy him coffee or beer and have a long talk about how to build proper REST APIs.
Because I'm nice like that.8 -
Stories like the one I'm about to tell you are just another reason why people hate Windows. I know I usually preach 'Don't hate everything' and shit, but this is a real big fucking deal when it hits your desktop for no reason.
Now, onto the actual story...
Background: Playing with my Oculus, fixing issues like forgetting to use USB3 and stuff. I learned about an issue with Nvidia GPUs, where in Windows, they can only support 4 simultaneous displays per GPU. I only have the one GPU in my system, Nova, so I have to unplug a monitor to get Oculus and its virtual window thingy working. Alright, friend gave me idea of using my old GPU to drive one of my lesser used monitors, my right one. Great idea I thought, I'll install it a bit later.
A bit later...
I plug the GPU in (after 3 tries of missing the PCI-E slot, fuckers) and for some reason I'm getting boot issues. It's booting to the wrong drive, sometimes it'll not even bother TRYING to boot, suddenly one of my hard drives isn't even being recognized in BIOS, fuck. Alright, is the GPU at least being recognized? Shit, it isn't. FUCKFUCKFUCK.
Oh wait. I just forgot the power cable Duh. Plug that in, same issues. Alright, now I have no idea. Try desperately to boot, but it just won't I start getting boot error 0xc000000f. Critical device not found. Alrighty then. Fuck my life, eh?
Remove the GPU, look around a bit while frantically trying to boot the system, and I notice an oddly bent SATA cable. I look at it and the bastard is FRAYED AT THE END! Fuck, that's my main SSD! I finally replace the SATA cable and boot, still the same error... Boot into a recovery environment, and guess what?
Windows has decided to change my boot partition, ya know, the FUCKING C: DRIVE, from NTFS to RAW format, stripping it of formatting! What the actual fuck Microsoft? You just took a shit on yourself while having a seizure on the fucking MOON! Fine, fuck you, I have recovery USB! Oh, shit, that won't boot... I have an old installation! Boot ITS recovery, try desperately to find a fix online... CHKDSK C: /F... alright, repairing, awesome! Repaired, I can see data, but not boot. So now I'm at the point where I'm waiting for a USB installer to be created over USB 2.0. Wheeeeeeeeee. FML.
THESE are the times I usually hate Windows a lot. And I do. But it gets MOST of my work done. Except when it does this.
I'm already pissed, so don't go into the comments and just hate on Windows completely. Just a little. The main post is for the main hate. Deal with it. And I know that someone is going to come at me "Ohhhhh, you need FUCKIN LIIIIIIINUUUUUUUXXXXXXXX!' Want to know my response to that?
No.3 -
It all started with an undelivereable e-mail.
New manager (soon-to-be boss) walks into admin guy's office and complains about an e-mail he sent to a customer being rejected by the recipient's mail server. I can hear parts of the conversation from my office across the floor.
Recipient uses the spamcop.net blacklist and our mail was rejected since it came from an IP address known to be sending mails to their spamtrap.
Admin guy wants to verify the claim by trying to find out our static public IPv4 address, to compare it to the blacklisted one from the notification.
For half an hour boss and him are trying to find the correct login credentials for the telco's customer-self-care web interface.
Eventually they call telco's support to get new credentials, it turned out during the VoIP migration about six months ago we got new credentials that were apparently not noted anywhere.
Eventually admin guy can log in, and wonders why he can't see any static IP address listed there, calls support again. Turns out we were not even using a static IP address anymore since the VoIP change. Now it's not like we would be hosting any services that need to be publicly accessible, nor would all users send their e-mail via a local server (at least my machine is already configured to talk directly to the telco's smtp, but this was supposedly different in the good ol' days, so I'm not sure whether it still applies to some users).
In any case, the e-mail issue seems completely forgotten by now: Admin guy wants his static ip address back, negotiates with telco support.
The change will require new PPPoE credentials for the VDSL line, he apparently received them over the phone(?) and should update them in the CPE after they had disabled the login for the dynamic address. Obviously something went wrong, admin guy meanwhile having to use his private phone to call support, claims the credentials would be reverted immediately when he changed them in the CPE Web UI.
Now I'm not exactly sure why, there's two scenarios I could imagine:
- Maybe telco would use TR-069/CWMP to remotely provision the credentials which are not updated in their system, thus overwriting CPE to the old ones and don't allow for manual changes, or
- Maybe just a browser issue. The CPE's login page is not even rendered correctly in my browser, but then again I'm the only one at the company using Firefox Private Mode with Ghostery, so it can't be reproduced on another machine. At least viewing the login/status page works with IE11 though, no idea how badly-written the config stuff itself might be.
Many hours pass, I enjoy not being annoyed by incoming phone calls for the rest of the day. Boss is slightly less happy, no internet and no incoming calls.
Next morning, windows would ask me to classify this new network as public/work/private - apparently someone tried factory-resetting the CPE. Or did they even get a replacement!? Still no internet though.
Hours later, everything finally back to normal, no idea what exactly happened - but we have our old static IPv4 address back, still wondering what we need it for.
Oh, and the blacklisted IP address was just the telco's mail server, of course. They end up on the spamcop list every once in a while.
tl;dr: if you're running a business in Germany that needs e-mail, just don't send it via the big magenta monopoly - you would end up sharing the same mail servers with tons of small businesses that might not employ the most qualified people for securing their stuff, so they will naturally be pwned and abused for spam every once in a while, having your mailservers blacklisted.
I'm waiting for the day when the next e-mail will be blocked and manager / boss eventually wonder how the 24-hours-outage did not even fix aynything in the end... -
Bittrex is "amazing"...
I had lost my 2FA a long time ago (as my phone fried) and missed the account ferification deadline which caused my account to get disabled. Off we go to support!
0. Nothing to rant about at this point. I just created an account in their zendesk, logged in and logged a ticket to reset my 2FA and reactivate my account. They asked me for info, I provided it to them and got my 2FA disabled. Hooray!
1. I then asked to reenable my account. They sent me a link to restart the verification process. I open up that link and log in. I'm asked to upload some photos. I select requested photos from my galery and hit [UPLOAD]. An error pops up saying that smth wrong happened and I need to reload that site and reupload my photos. After page refresh they are telling me they are validating my uploaded info (w/o any way to resubmit my info, which, according to the error seen below, was not successfully submitted in the first place)...
2. So I reach out to the support guy again. Guess what he replies! He says he's sorry but he cannot help me any more and I need to create a NEW ACCOUNT in their support site with the same email <???!!!???>
3. I try to log in to the support portal and my access no longer works. MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN DELETED! WTF!!!
4. I do as I'm told and create a new acc with the same email. Now I can log back in. So I'm raising a new ticket saying I still cannot finish my verification process due to the same error. It looks like it's going to be a fun ride with them so I can't wait to see what they'll reply.2 -
I hoped I would write about other things than EU internet regulation... But I hoped wrong.
The new online antiterror regulation is flawed, too.
What will the new regulation change?
The EU plans stricter anti terror laws for online platforms. In a nutshell, reported terroristic content has to be removed in <1 hour> after reporting. While automated filters are not required (the EVP party and the EU commission wanted those, but couldn't get a majority in the perliament), but it is unclear how to fulfill the regulation without.
What is the current progress of the regulation?
The EU parliament approved the draft, the trialogue will begin after election. The parliament has to approve the final trialogue result again and might reject it then. The characteristics of the regulation might change, too.
Who (platforms) will be affected?
All platforms, "offering servicd in the EU, independent of their business address" (free translation from German).
Will there be exceptions (e.g. for smaller or non commercial platforms)?
No.
At the very first report, the platform will have 12h time.
What are the consequences of not following?
Regularly breaking the law _constantly_, up to 4%/of the total yearly revenue.
Sources?
- The "fact sheet" of last year (upload filters were still a requirement): https://ec.europa.eu/commission/...
- The law proposal itself (also outdated): https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-con...
- Proposed changes by the EU parliament (I'm not sure which ones were approved): http://europarl.europa.eu/doceo/...
- German news article: https://golem.de/news/...2 -
I recently have been delegated the responsibility of managing a 4 people team by planning the sprints, scheduling tasks, and in general "take charge" (as said by the boss).
What bothers me is there is this "developer" with a heavily toxic attitude, who feels he is above all laws and knows everything just because he joined some months ago all of us.
He is basically a human linter. When he code reviews, you can get away with any major mistake if your linting and indentation (and all that shit) is according to "his standards".
A new guy recently joined the team and was given an overwhelming task by the boss just to test whether he belongs here. (Again, wrong, in my opinion). He didn't know any of the technologies he needs to work on to complete that task but he still learnt them and got a working product. Albeit not according to our God's "standards".
Cut to the chase, the asshole dev is now mocking him in PR comments and demeaning him in every discussion. As a "team lead", what should I do? If I let it go, it'll make the environment toxic and I don't want him to get away with it. If I do take any action, I don't want to be seen as as pussy who can't take such minor insults. Please advise.
PS. The asshole developer once wrote a "friend request accept" API endpoint in such a way that when any single person accepts a request, that'll cause all pending requests (from any person to any person) get accepted. Fucked up the DB queries basically. This is just to give a perspective on what I'm dealing with here.4 -
I am starting to get really annoyed by shitty devs and tech leads from other teams that ask me to fix urgently a "problem" with my project they rely on, but turns out they did not even debug the fucking thing in the first place to understand where the problem comes from.
Turns out someone used the wrong parameters on his duct taped jenkins CI and instead of finding the reason for the failure, he just assumed my code did not work.
This is the last time I'm helping you fucks before a release while I am on holidays in my country. Worst thing is you guys are paid twice my salary in US dollars but you still can't code and debug for shit.
How about telling me truth when I asked you guys if everything was working fine before I took my vacations? Do you fucking test your shit for fuck's sake? Nah you guys just suck ass.
I will turn off my computer when off work from now on and uninstall slack and emails from my cell phone. These guys are not competent enough to use those tools properly.3 -
Over the summer I was recruited to be a supplement instructor for a data structures course. As a result of that I was asked (separately by the professor) to be a grader for the course. Because of pay limitations I've mostly been grading homework project assignments. In any case, it's a great job to get my foot into the department and get recognized.
Over the course of the semester I've had this one person, OSX, named after their operating system of choice, who has been giving me awkward submissions. On the first assignment they asked the professor for extra time for some reason or the other, and that's perfectly fine.
So I finally receive OSX's submission, and it's a .py file as per course of the course. So I pop up a terminal in the working directory and type "python OSX_hw1.py". Get some error spit out about the file not being the right encoding. I know that I can tell python to read it in a different encoding, so I open it up in a text editor. To my surprise it's totally not a text file, but rather a .zip file!
I've seen weirder things done before, so no big deal. I rename the file extension, and open it up to extract the files when I see that there's no python files. "Okay, what's goin on here OSX..." I think to myself.
Poking around in the files it appears to be some sort of meta-data. To what, I had no clue, but what I did find was picture files containing what appeared to be some auto-generated screenshots of incomplete code. Since I'm one to give people the benefit of doubt even when they've long exhausted other peoples', I thought that it must be some fluke, and emailed OSX along with the professor detailing my issue.
I got back a rather standard reply, one of which was so un-notable I could not remember it if my life depended on it. However, that also meant I didn't have to worry about that anymore. Which when you're juggling 50 bazillion things is quite a relief. Tragically, this relief was short lived with the introduction of assignment 2.
Assignment 2 comes around, and I get the same type of submission from OSX. At this time I also notice that all their submissions are *very* close to the due time of 11:59pm (which I don't care about as long as it's in before people start waking up the next morning). I email OSX and the professor again, and receive a similar response. I also get an email from OSX worried about points being deducted. I reply, "No issue. You know what's wrong. Go and submit the right file on $CentralGradingCenter. Just submit over your old assignment".
To my frustration OSX claimed to not know how to do this. I write up a quick response explaining the process, and email it. In response OSX then asks if I can show them if they comes to my supplemental lesson. I tell OSX that if they are the only person, sure, otherwise no because it would not be a fair use of time to the other students.
OSX ends up showing up before anyone else, so I guide them through the process. It's pretty easy, so I'm surprised that they were having issues. Another person then shows up, so I go through relevant material and ask them if they have any questions about recent material in class. That said, afterwards OSX was being somewhat awkward and pushy trying to shake my hand a lot to the point of making me uncomfortable and telling them that there's no reason to be so formal.
Despite that chat, I still did not see a resubmission of either of those two assignments, and assignment 3 began to show it's head. Obviously, this time, as one might expect after all those conversations, I get another broken submission in the same format. Finally pissed off, I document exactly how everything looks on my end, how the file fails to run, how it's actually a zip file, etc, all with screenshots. That then gets emailed to the professor and OSX.
In response, I get an email from OSX panicking asking me how to submit it right, etc, etc. However, they also removed the professor from the CC field. In response I state that I do not know how to use whatever editor they are using, and that they should refer to the documentation in order to get a proper runnable file. I also re-CC the professor, making sure OSX's email to me is included in my reply.
OSX then shows up for one of my lessons, and since no one had shown up yet, I reiterate through what I had sent in the email. OSX's response was astonished that they could ever screw up that bad, but also admits that they had yet to install python(!!!). Obviously, the next thing that comes from my mouth is asking OSX how they write their code. Their response was that they use a website that lets them run python code.
At this point I'm honestly baffled and explain that a lot of websites like those can have limitations which might make code run differently then it should (maybe it's a simple interpreter written on JavaScript, or maybe it is real python, but how are you supposed to do file I/O?) .
After that I finally get a submission for assignment 1! -
FML I am an idiot.. might end up in a rant here (well deserved!!) //if you are here reading this I'm so sorry again!!
I wrote to our support I need DP/HDMI cable.. they asked me to take a pic of the cable I'm currently using.. WTF?! Don't you know how connectors look?! Just get me the damn cable.. :/
Ok.. Took a picture.. sent it back.. At that time I still didn't see the problem with what I wrote/demanded..
Got back reply this is not HDMI connector... FML, I was so convinced computer had HDMI ports so even when I took the pic I wasn't paying attention.. Fuck.
And before when I was switching cables behind the computer below desk I was just blindly feeling around, it didn't even occurr to me to actually check what connectors are used..just knew both monitors had the same connector (and not aure why I thought HDMI :/)...so yeah, I'm the idiot who is not paying attention to stuff.. Fuck.. Was on a scavanger hunt for a wrong type of cable the whole time.. Sorry again!! And please don't kill me next time you see me.. o.O1 -
I've been doing it wrong for 6 months! I've been building -> uploading my work manually to server using ssh.
Now I decided I write a script for that shit .-.
Though I'm still not able to make output take a different color in Ubuntu default terminal, tried many solutions but I still fail :\
Any suggestions?14 -
I applied for a position as an engineer for a nonprofit organization that helped kids across the country (and the world) and got the position. The people across the organization were wonderful and, without a doubt, mission driven to help kids and it felt good to do the work. The agile teams worked well together, every team had their roadmaps, and management always emphasized family first. The organization was making crazy money so we were given all the tools we needed to succeed.
Then, within a few months of my hiring, it was announced that the non-profit organization was being bought by a large, fairly well known for-profit company which had also been recently acquired by a venture capital firm.
The next thing we knew, everything changed all at once. We went from building applications for kids to helping this company either make money or build value for their owners. Honestly, I did not know what my day-to-day work was doing for this company. The executives would tell us repeatedly that we were expensive and not a good value compared to their other teams. It felt like we were only being kept until the systems were integrated and their had access to our decades of data.
You might think I'm being paranoid but a year after the acquisition, we still did not have any access to any of their systems. We operated on a separate source code solution and were not given access to theirs. When requests came from them that would facilitate them connecting applications to the data, it was to be considered highest priority.
The final straw for me was when I was told my compensation would be cut for the next year. We were strung along for the whole year leading up to it saying that the company was evaluating our salaries compared to others in the industry. Some of us figured that we would probably even go up knowing that we were underpaid for a for-profit tech company because we chose to work in a non-profit for a lower rate to be able to do worthwhile work. Nope! We were told that we were overpaid and they talked about how they had the data to prove it. One quick look at LinkedIn would tell you they must be smoking something that had gotten stale in a shoebox. Or they were lying.
So that was my rant. If you think you are protected from the craziness in tech right now just because you are writing code at a nonprofit, you might be wrong. Dishonest executives can exist anywhere.3 -
I've been working on the ecommerce website from hell for over a year now. I should have heard the alarm bells when the studio who were running the project took a month to pay my deposit but still expected me to start working, but I explained that I wouldn't start without some form of security and they were cool with it, so I carried on.
It started off as a simple build with simple products, no product variations etc and a few links on the designs which appeared to lead to external links, and checkout and cart pages were nowhere to be seen. It wasn't a big money job so I just build them in as plain and straightforward as I could, in line with how the rest of the site looked. They then changed their mind about how they wanted these to look, and added loads of functionality to the site throughout the build, so by the end of the line, the scope of work had completely changed. I also had loads of disagreements in terms of design and useability, as their designs straight-up weren't going to function otherwise, plus every round of changes meant that I had to prolong the job further and fit it around work for other clients.
Fastforward a few more months and I get sent a really angry email with some of the client's complaints, including one that raised an issue with the user journey, and the finger of blame was pointed at me. The user journey had been a part of the designs from the start, and this was never raised as an issue for A WHOLE YEAR. They then said that it had to go live on Monday (three days after they sent email with these huge new structural changes). I told them I could no longer work on the project but was happy to waive the rest of my fee (3/4 of the total fee, when I had essentially completed the site, minus 2 minor bugs), so they could find another developer in the limited time they had. At first they refused to hire another developer, claiming that it would be too expensive, which made no sense, as for a few minor fixes and out of scope additions he could get paid a wage that would have otherwise paid for the majority of the work I had done on the site. I stood my ground and finally they found someone, so I sent over all of the files and database to their new developer and asked him to give me a heads up when I could remove the staging site from my server. The next day, I received an email from the studio asking me to fix some bugs the developer was requesting I fix so he could carry on with the site. They were basically asking me to work more, for free, to enable him to walk off with the majority of the money and do less work. They also forwarded a suuuuuper shitty, condescending email from him, listing all the things he thought was wrong with the site (he even listed 'no favicon' although they'd never supplied a graphic for this). He also wrote a paragraph at the bottom EXPLAINING MY JOB TO ME and telling me:
I get the feeling you like to write Javascript, while being one of the easiest languages to learn, it can also be one of the hardest to master. While I applaud you for writing Vanilla JS, it looks like you have a general problem with structuring your application.
Not sure if I'm being oversensitive here but it felt so patronising, and i couldn't even go for an angry walk to get it out my system because of social distancing lol.
Let a girl quarantine in peace!!!!!!2 -
Okay, so yesterday was crazy. So crazy, in fact, that I'm not even typing this on my phone. I'm typing it on an LG G4.
So, I took an Uber out to a Sprint store I'd been told did repairs. My phone's vibrator was broken. So, basically I thought just like that R&M episode "20 minutes adventure in and out" - only to find out they'd need to wipe my goddamn phone, and then send it to Texas. I now have to wait 6 days for my phone lmfao.
So, in the meantime, they took an hour to get me this G4 which makes me miss all the finer things in life - I miss my USB-C and not having to give a damn about how I plug it in and I miss my fingerprint reader (I know, I'm a lazy fuck with first-world problems. I don't care to hear about how fucking stupid I am for either of those thoughts, STFU). Also the G4 is prone to hardware failures, so they said they weren't too happy about giving me this, but it's the only one with NFC.
So in the middle of setup, the Sprint store's power went out. FUUUUUUCK. The phone was pretty much at 5% battery and was being slow as hell, so you can just about imagine the irritation me and this guy had when the phone died in the middle of setup.
The next thing is an unrelated story, but I'm sure some of you older guys here will love this. I was at a place called Triangle Park last night. I go there for burgers, but they also have a bar. Sometimes I get sent to the bar and the bartender gets me my food. So last night I went to pick the food up from the bar for takeout.
The bartender must've had an accident and messed something up, so she told me to sit at the bar. I thought it was obvious I was only 19, so I barely sat. I'm literally not old enough to sit at the bar, even though when I was younger my dad and his friends used to let me sit with them because I had a history of saying stupid shit that made his friends laugh. Nonetheless, I sat with my ass hanging off the edge because I knew it was wrong :/
She comes back and asks what type of drink I want. I had to tell her that I was 19. I wasn't gonna sit here and lie because I'm pretty sure she could've lost her job for serving a minor. I exited and waited in the lobby.
But are we at the point where 19-year-olds look like 25-year-olds? I don't want to think about this because it means I'm getting older. That's a lot to take in. Later in the night it was still gnawing at my gut.
Yesterday was one hella day man.5 -
Of course, I just swiped the wrong way on my fucking laptop trackpad and list everything I just typed. FUCKING MARVELOUS.
TL;DR: Teacher stopped me from being productive. Principal almost called cops on me. Nearly threw chair at librarian.
So I'm at school yesterday, and we have a presenter in 2nd hour, so naturally, I'm gonna be on my computer doing things for other classes at the same time. Efficiency. Teacher doesn't like it, I refuse to put the computer away telling her that I'll be more productive and still pay attention, which HAS BEEN PROVEN MIND YOU, but she ends up calling security on me and I get sent down to the principal's office.
I talk to him, and he says 'Yeah, I know it's in the way, but you have to follow the directive given by the teachers.' Fine, fuck it. Won't go to her class for third hour. (I have her twice in a row for two different classes.) Next day.
I walk in, asking her if she's gonna do the same thing she did yesterday, hoping that she realized her error and will fix it, but no. She says I STILL can't have the computer out. I'm sorry, do you not realize I have 6 other fucking classes, most of which are required to graduate, unlike YOURS, as well as a FUCKING COLLEGE CLASS TONIGHT?! She gives the ultimatum. 'Obey or leave.' Fine, I'll leave. I go to the principal's office again, he must have a stick up his ass or something today because he's not budging. We argue for a while and he gives a WORSE ultimatum: 'Obey, Go to the Library, In House Suspension, or I'll call the police.' What the actual FUCK MAN?! You're gonna call the POLICE on a NONVIOLENT STUDENT?! Are you fucking MAD? I keep trying to tell him that there's an easy solution to this, but as he's getting up to call the cops, I say 'Fine! I'll go to the library!' He follows me over to make sure I don't kill anyone on the way.
I slam the door to the library open, and when I walk in, the librarian is there at her computer, and she asks 'Where are you coming from?' 'Principal!' 'I need a pass-' 'Well, I'm sorry, I can't exactly get anything for you right now, I was just sent down here.' She says 'Either way, I need some kind of note or pas-' 'Listen, I'm not in the mood for any of this right now. Please, just leave me be.' She then tries to say something, but I cut her off quickly, 'Just back off and leave me alone right now. The more you push it, the more you're gonna make me want to throw this chair!' Imagine the volume just gradually getting louder on that last one. She quickly runs out and talks to the security desk or something, which is right outside the library door, but she's the only one who comes in, thankfully. I was expecting to be fucking dragged out for no good reason. I'm loud, not violent. I have no history of violence.
So yeah. Here I am in the school library, angrily tapping away at my keyboard, trying not to throw the entire table to the fucking moon. All because this broken-ass public school system has no idea how to deviate from the norm when it's actually productive and efficient to do so. And now, the obligatory:
FUCKING PIECES OF SHIT WHY DON'T YOU REALIZE THAT YOU ARE COMPLETELY WRONG IN EVERY SINGLE THING YOU ARE DOING YOU IDIOTIC SCUM-FILLED MEAT SACKS OF NO FORSEEABLE VALUE! FUCK!1 -
With a recent HAProxy update on our reverse proxy VM I decided to enable http/2, disable TLS 1.0 and drop support for non forward-secrecy ciphers.
Tested our sites in Chrome and Firefox, all was well, went to bed.
Next morning a medium-critical havock went loose. Our ERP system couldn't create tickets in our ticket system anymore, the ticket systems Outlook AddIn refused to connect, the mobile app we use to access our anti-spam appliance wouldn't connect although our internal blackboard app still connected over the same load balancer without any issues.
So i declared a 10min maintenance window and disabled HTTP/2, thinking that this was the culprit.
Nope. No dice.
Okay, i thought, enable TLS 1.0 again.
Suddenly the ticket system related stuff starts to work again.
So since both the ERP system and the AddIn run on .NET i dug through the .NET documentation and found out that for some fucking reason even in the newest .NET framework version (4.7.2) you have to explicitly enable TLS 1.1 and 1.2 or else you just get a 'socket reset' error. Why the fuck?!
Okay, now that i had the ticket system out of the way i enabled HTTP/2 and verified that everything still works.
It did, nice.
The anti-spam appliance app still did not work however, so i enabled one non-pfs cipher in the OpenSSL config and tested the app.
Behold, it worked.
I'm currently creating a ticket with them asking politely why the fuck their app has pfs-ciphers disabled.
And I thought disabling DEPRECEATED tech wouldn't be an issue... Wrong... -
I was not happy with the way my team lead made those technical decisions. I couldn't do much about it. Hit with frustration, I switched job.
What a coincidence, my new employer is exactly his old employer. Although I liked the company with my impression from the interview, knowing this fact made me nervous. What if this is the place that bred him into what he is today?...
Turned out the reality is not cruel. I'm joining a team that is formed way after he left. And this new team is expected to bring changes to the old-fashioned existing product (or simply a revamp/remake if you call it).
And it's interesting for me to now come to understand the poor decisions he has made. I said I "understand". This does not mean I agree with him now. His approach makes sense when I look at the old-fashion product I am working on. But it still feels wrong in many ways for the product he is now in charge of.
There, I witness that someone with experience is not necessarily smart.
This is the same guy who said "That's why I don't like to catch exception."
FYI https://devrant.com/rants/2420797/...1 -
Need to rant / maybe some advice.
Working remote is hard.
New company, remote on boarding. I feel like my coworkers are robots, and I'm being tossed into the deep end with minimal guidance.
The codebase is so unnecessarily complicated, its impossible to read. I've been trying to figure out how things work for a whole month, still not sure.
My mentor that is supposed to help onboard me is a robot, and answers questions in a somewhat acceptable manner, but it still feels like a lot of "figuring out" is still left for myself.
My other work partner that is also a newbie like myself is also a robot - doesn't talk or ask many questions whenever we have a sync up meeting.
The codebase is huge and feels quite overwhelming, I don't feel like I got a team "with my back", I don't enjoy work as much as I have before, I barely do any coding (mostly reading code and trying to understand how everything is working by setting breakpoints and debugging tests that take foreeeever to run), and some days I'm seriously considering cutting my losses and jumping ship just to save my sanity.
Am I paranoid? Am I just dumb? Should I just suck it up and be happy I have a job? Is this how Remote work is supposed to feel like? Why does it feel like my soul is dying?
Anyone in similar situations, or who can give some insight/advice/etc, I would highly appreciate it.
And this is supposed to be a good company too from the reviews. I don't know how it can be so crappy in reality. Did I make the wrong choice joining? Should I jump ship sooner rather than later? I've only been here about a month or so, and maybe its too soon? Halp!12 -
I think the one of the more common reason for imposter syndrome is that a lot of smart people constantly get told as children the "you're so smart/capable, you can do everything!" too much, and when you hear it enough times, it gets to you, so you think everything is just easy. And then when they start hitting roadblocks, instead of helping or explaining that it's normal for things to be hard and it's normal to fail, usually parents and teachers and whatnot tell them "Oh it's okay, don't worry about it, you're smart, you'll get it" and so they at first it works, maybe it just takes more time but they manage, but as things get harder and they still put little effort because "don't worry, you're so smart, you learn so fast/easy" and as they find out more and more things they don't umderstand or don't know they start to feel a dissonance, which builds anxiety.
And this is where I thinks it actually starts: at some points there comes a situation where they either share this anxiety with someone or someone notices their worry, and(at least from what I've seen from others) usually the response they get is something along the lines of: "Nah, you're just worrying too much, you're smarter than you think, don't be so down on yourself, you need to worry less", which, maybe I'm wrong, but I'm not sure telling someone that thinks he has a problem that he doesn't have a problem, helps their worrying.
And on one hand the amount if things they don't get/know/understand or fail at grows(cuz you can't just be good at EVERYTHING, so the more things you know about, the more things you don't understand) while mentally still being in that "Wait a minute, you're smarter than this, you should be getting this!" mindset that's been drilled into them, and so at some point the illusion shatters, and they start to think "Maybe I'm not so smart after all", and because they think they were wrong about their level, they feel like they have "oversold" themselves in the past and that makes any past accomplishments feel like lucky accidents instead: "If I'm not actually smart, the things I did manage to achieve must've been just accidental", which makes them feel like they've lied to themselves and everyone else when they "took credit for an accidents" and that their life is just a snowball of pretending.
Now, is that actually a cause or is it another one of my crazy 1AM ramblings? I don't know xD
I'm not an expert in any of this and I don't really know any psychology so hell if I know if that's how any of this works but that's just my theory of one of the reasons why. *shrug*. I've had this theory for years, but I don't know.
It at least makes sense to me, but not everything that makes sense is true soooo.
Anyways, wall of text is over.
Oh, and for anyone struggling with imposter syndrome: I just want you to know, it's okay to fail, and it's okay to not know shit, especially in the dev industry where every "insignificant" detail can have an entire rabbit hole of expertise behind it, nobody can expect to know every part of it. And it doesn't make you any less smart no matter how much you fail. Tnis shit is hard, so I hope you stay strong and I hope you succeed in whatever it is you're struggling with.
*Massive virtual hug* <31 -
I think I'm getting to the point to where I'm burnt out at my job. Don't get me wrong, it's a great place to work. But it is very, VERY boring. And I'm starting to struggle to even pay attention anymore. I know it's important but I'm struggling to care. How am I supposed to do good work when I can barely even focus? Good code is not magic! I can't be barely holding my eyes open and expected to be worth anything.
I'm also still technically a junior developer which I have some issues with >_>6 -
Allrighty, so we have a huge migration upcoming. The planning started early this spring. We've split the whole process into separate tasks and estimated each of them. Also marked all the tasks client should take care of itself so save funds and time. All-in-all the whole thing estimated like 4 months if we did it [single dev, tremendous amounts of communication with various parties, buy and prepare the infra, adapt app to the changes, testing, monitoring, etc.] and like a month if client did the tasks we shouldn't be doing. The funding for migration is time-bound and can only be used before December. Cool! We got notified that by the end of April we should be good to go! Plenty of time to do things right!
April comes. Silence. Mid-april we resch out to the client. Since there's plenty of time left migration is getting lower priority to other tasks. Well allright, sort of makes sense. We should migrate mid-July. Cool!
July comes. Client replies that everyone's on vacation now. Gotta wait for August - will do the quicker version of migration to make it on time. Well allright....
August comes. Everyone's vusy with whatever they've postponed during summer. Hopefully we'll start migration in September. Mhm...
September comes. We're invited to a meeting by project funders to explain tasks' breakdown, justify the time needed to make the migration. We're being blamed for surreal estimations and poor organization of tasks as nothing's happened yet... [they were the ones who always were postponing things....]. Moreover, they can only spare 20% of infra resources required for data alone anf they want us to make that enough for all environments, all components, all backups, all databases,... You get the pic.
The leader of the meeting semi silently mumbled to other participants 'Well then I'm afrsid we can't make a full migration in time.. Only partial. That's very unfortunate, very. That's why we should not have incopetent vendors [*glancing at us*]'
somehow we agreed we'll get the resources mid-November and we should be thankful for him bcz he'll have to pull some strings for... us..
I left the meeting with my fists squeezed so hard! But it's okay, we got smth useful: resources and start date. Although it leaves us with less than a month to do smth requiring a month for a sunny-day scenario. Nvm, still doable.
Last week we get an email that resources will be available at the beginning of December [after deadline] and we should start a full migration no sooner than Nov 12. Which leaves us with 50% of our estimated fucking optimistic scenario time and not enough resources to even move a single db.
Fuck I hate politics in dev... Is it wrong for me to want to tie them to a pole, set them on a veeery slow fire and take a piss on them while they're screaming their shitty lungs out? I'd enjoy the view and the scream. I know I would. And while enjoying I might be tempted to take a burning 20cm diameter wooden stick and shove it up their assholes. Repeatedly. Round-robin. Promissing them I'll take it out in 5 seconds and pulling it out after 2 minutes.
Can I?8 -
Client email: so you know that custom thing I wanted on my website that you made and I refused to pay for? Could you just send me the code, I'm gonna write my own.
*Staring at screen in disbelief and laughing*
Even if you were an awesome client, and you had paid, I still wouldn't just "give you my code" so you can write your own. You hired me to do it because you CAN'T not because you didn't want to, not because you're lazy, but because you are not mentally capable of making your own.
Me: I'm sorry, but I'm not sure you would even know where to start with this, what was wrong with the one built?
Client: I wanna put the code in my Salesforce so it can run the API request and automatically make a lead for me.
My code takes fields from a form, runs the data over to the API, gets the response, allows for user confirmation that the information is correct, and then sends all the relevant data to Salesforce as a lead.
Me: But that's exactly what mine does, just does it from your website where users will be entering the info, and once they've confirmed it you get a Salesforce lead.
Client: well some of my leads come from other places and I want to simplify everything.
Me: no, not possible, sorry.
If you didn't have 25 different websites for one company then all your leads would come from the same place and it would be simple.2 -
Boss assigned code cleanup to me. We put up eslint and fixed a couple of issues, all nice and cute. Now, he wants me to find any redundant code and remove it (redundant fields in config objects). Sounds doable right?
WRONG!
Because we're writing fucking ExtJS. This abomination that is still called a "web framework" in lieu of its former glory supports no typescript, no code intel, no JSDoc, no nothing. Absolutely heinous and deplorable. Add insult to injury, our code on it is even worse. NO single component reused except from a couple REALLY fucking badly written ones, because every component queries for shit outside its jurisdiction so it's all a dependency spaghetti. Everything else is just copy-paste. Barely anything works as intended anymore in this bloody joke of an app.
I tell him in a meeting, I can prepare an automated solution. Some script or something that runs on a file watcher. All nice and dandy. A weekend and a Monday later, I get tired and do something else to clear up my mind. Show him some progress in that other thing. He's like:
Boss: that's good and all but did you remove *insert misused config that got everywhere during copy paste* like I told you to?
Me: I'm still working on it. I switched cause I got tired a bit with the automation.
Boss: automation?
Me: We were talking about in the meeting. *Explains again*
Boss: That's not what we agreed upon
Mfw I've been rambling uselessly on the meeting about it just for you to put me down and make me remove all that copy pasted GUNK from the melting hot garbage that is our codebase BY HAND? All the 150 occurrences of it? What do you think I am, a fucking robot?2 -
I'm still a junior myself, but some fundamentals I've told my coworkers:
* Commit more, regret less
* Yes, you can remove a commit, if something goes wrong.
* No, I'll not explain again how to undo a commit you pushed typo to you feature branch. Feel the shame of pushing "Fix typo" commits
* ask, if you are stuck or unsure.
* don't do deployments at 5pm Friday. 6pm results in less crashes in production for some reason /s
* Don't be like me. Go to sleep at appropriate times2 -
I have fucking HATED Windows 10 from day one. Now I'm hearing there are new vacillations of this genius programming train wreck that I think is designed to force monetize Microsoft's business model.
After a short while I managed to get to a point where I can maintain W 7. In fact, I'm using my old computer right now. Because I could not get this rant to load onto Devrant website. If you are reading this we know that it is because 10 sucks consistently.
I save my files onto a backup hard drive so I can find 'paper file' type solution for whatever random crap might block me at the keyboard. In fact, I still use paper and file cabinets so "technology" doesn't bring me to a screeching halt every time something like "no record of that account" or "wrong password".
Why the hell does my PASSWORD work from W7 but not from W10?! And it's getting WORSE by the day! I'm about to take a fucking hammer to my new fucking computer. And to that guy who smarmy says something to the effect of 'don't be such a pussy... just fix it and you will be happy.' Well. Fuck you too!
Now. That being said. Anybody have a suggestion on what to try next? And don't say something like, 'take your computer to Micro Center or Geek Squad'. I've done those guys twice each. And for a small phenomenal fee they have each time made things slightly worse plus lost parts of my saved data each time.
Oh. And "reset to previous" doesn't work either.
Suggestions?
Probably better at this point to attempt to solve my own problems wrong for free at this point. Maybe I'll learn to program in Linux or some such thing.
Forrest
for suggestions please contact me at
res0naza@yahoo7 -
So, it's been a while since I've been working on my current project and I've never had the "luck" to touch the legacy project wrote in PHP, until this week when I got my first issue.
And damn, this goddamn issue. It was a bug, a very strange bug, that only happens in production and that nobody has any idea what was happening, so yeah, I didn't have anyone to ask and I got less time than usual ( because Thanksgiving ).
And thus, I have no starting point, no previous knowledge on PHP and less time! I expected a very fun week 😀 and it was beyond my expectations.
First I tried to understand what might be causing the issue, but there wasn't any real clue to star with, so no choice, time to read the flow on the code and see what are they're doing and using ( 1k line files, yay, legacy ). Luckily I got some clues, we're using a cookie and a php session variable for the session, ok, let's star with the session variable. Where it's that been initialize ? Well, spoiler alert, I shouldn't start with that, because my search end up in the login method of the API that set a that variable and for some reason in the front end app it was always false and that lead me to think that some of the new backend functions were failing, but after checking the logs I got no luck.
Ok, maybe the cookie it's the issue, I should try open the previous website on the brow...redirect to new project login, What? Why ? I ask around and it's a new feature push on Monday, ok I got Chrome Dev tools I can see which value of the cookie it's been set and THERE IT WAS it has a wrong domain! After 2 days ( I resume a lot of my pain ) I got what I've been looking for, so now I should be able to fix the bug. Then where is the cookie initialized ? In the first file the server hits whenever you tried to enter any page of the app, ok, I found the method, but it's using a function that process the domain and sets it correctly? wtf ? Then how in heaven do I get the incorrect domain ? Hello? Ok, relax, you still have one more day to fix this, let's take it easy.
Then, at the end of the Wednesday, nope I still have no clue how this is happening. I talked with the Devops guy and he explain me how this redirection happens and with what it depends on, I followed the PHP code through and nothing, everything should works fine, sigh. Ok I still have 2 days, because I'm not from US and I'm not in US, so I still have time, but the Sprint is messed up already, so whatever I'm gonna had done this bug anyhow.
Thursday ! I got sick, yay, what else could happen this week. Somehow I managed to work a little and star thinking in what external issue could affect the processing, maybe the redirection was bringing a wrong direction, let's talk with the Devops guy again, and he answer me that the redirection it was being made by PHP code, IN A FILE THAT DOESN'T EXIST IN THE REPOSITORY, amazing, it's just amazing. Then he explained me why this file might be missing and how it's the deployment of this app ( btw the Devops guy it's really cool and I will invite him a beer ) . After that I checked the file and I see a random session_star in the first line of the code, without any configuration, eureka ! There was the cause and I only need to ask someone If that line it's necessary anymore, but oh they're on holiday, damn, well I'll wait till Monday to ask them. But once and for all that bug was done for ! 🎉
What do I learn ? PHP and that I don't want any more tickets of PHP 😆. -
Started my summer internship at a company working on their codebase about two weeks ago. I expected a lot of differences from school, but not this much. I still have no clue what I'm doing. Don't get me wrong, I'm getting stuff done, and it's helping out, but I still have no idea what is going on.
Oh, also, we use outdated Javascript frameworks... I don't actually know Javascript yet but we're just gonna roll with it2 -
<iframe src="index5.jsp">
Hello Mr. Tester Guy, At last you finally saw this. I don't know how to say this but I'm sick and tired of your bs!
You wanna know what’s wrong with everything?
I could tell you what’s wrong with this country – or at least I could give you my opinion about it. I could tell you what’s wrong with “the church” (as though all churches are guilty of what some churches do). But I can't fucking tell what your problem is!
Let’s get pragmatic for a second.
I have worked tirelessly for over only God knows how long, trying to get this platform running on all browsers in this world even on obsolete ones (IE7,6,5,4,3... to the shithole).
You are heartless!
After all these pain you still rant about index pages not rendering equally in time across all browsers.
You are a demon from hell!
I could go on, but with your degree in Q.A. (like measuring the margin between two images using a tape-rule or looking for typos in a dummy text) you should understand my point fucking cunt.
I realize I just ranted a little, but I’d like to think that this rant is more of an attempt to end the useless practice of ranting about your moronic findings on this platform.
The devil awaits you in hell, bitch!
</iframe>5 -
When the monthly scrum retrospective reaches the 90 minute mark...
You know when people are being stress tested and they break by getting up, run around screaming and ultimately knock themselves unconscious by running into a wall?
That. I felt like doing that.
I swear someone activates some sort of gravity well when these meetings begin because time beings to stretch on and o........n....... while they meetings happen.
I began to list things I think I'd rather be doing than be in that meeting.
1) Tax returns.
2) Prostate exam (not old enough to need one yet but at least I'd be out the meeting).
3) Visiting the dentist.
4) Assembling IKEA furniture.
5) Watching soccer at least they have the decency to give you a break in the middle and I find sports as engaging as a dog turd on the sidewalk.
So bored was I that I began to notice notches and holes in the ceiling tiles and when I remarked upon them others became engrossed in them and began to speculate upon their origins.
I don't know who a speaker is, what department they are from, what product they're working on or what's so important about the algorithm they're working on. There is no context, no explanation and half way through a show and tell I had to check we were still in a show and tell.
I was bored shitless. I actually felt physical pain from boredom, I've not felt that way since I was a child.
I really, really hate that scrum is implemented in this way.
It left me with only half an hour of coding time left and really it sapped my energy and motivation to the point where I just went home early.
Excuse my language, but:
Fucking bloody cunting waste of time, I've had more productive moments in the restroom. They need to piss off or committed seppuku, ideally both. Dante got it wrong the seventh level of hell is this. I'm usually a very calm and balanced individual but yesterday, yesterday I just... Fuck! Argh! Fuck you meeting, fuck you.
If you are the type that schedules meetings like this:
May a thousand Jabberwockies plague your nightmares and be it that the next seventy seven times you lay with a human shall ye experience bitter failure! I hope Cthulhu himself visits his "enlightenment" upon you and you fear sleep henceforth.
I'm bringing a rubix cube or juggling balls into the next meeting so that I can say at least I learned something and it wasn't time wasted.3 -
I went to meet a client with our CTO. In the meeting we discuss the implementation of SAML SSO. Their SSO guys asked whether they need to build 2 trusts for our application because we have 2 modules that use SSO. Both the CTO and I were not sure because we did not have any prior experience of integrating SAML SSO. To act professional, we couldn't say we were not sure. So the CTO said we needed two trusts. I immediately added "We may only need one. Let us do a bit of investigation and confirm."
After the meeting I did the investigation and found out we really only needed one. So I sent out an email to tell the client, cc the CTO. 1 minute later I got the email from the CTO "why tell them one when I said two?". When it's an immediate response with only 1 line, I know I'm in trouble. So I called him and was ready to explain to him. I couldn't. Later I found out the time I was calling him, he was talking about this with the CEO.
I thought maybe I can explain to him when he's available. The next morning as I came to work, the CEO asked me to come to his office. He closed the door, and told me the first line the CTO told him the day before was "I want him (me) fired." I was so shocked. Having been working with the CTO for quite a while, I was surprised he said that without even communicating with me. Did I do something that wrong that you don't even bother to tell me what's wrong? I was not fired because the CEO at least asked what happened. He also understood I was actually making a better technical decision. But well, guess I shouldn't be making a decision when I had no power to. And even I believed the client heard my "let me investigate first" comment, the CTO didn't. I still got an unofficial warning. For that whole day because of the stress, I don't remember getting anything done.
Fuck that acting like profession and smart when you are not. I'd go down the path of becoming professional and smart instead. And fuck metting with clients. I'm a dev don't fucking dare to talk to me and get me fired. If you wanna talk, talk to the big guys who don't make us look bad like I did.
If you ask me today I still believe I haven't done anything wrong there. So fuck everything.2 -
Just started watching mr Robot, not liking that much to be honest, but still decided to give it a try. Then mr robot takes out the piece of paper with a wrong IP address on and I'm like =_= "is this for real or are they joking with me"?13
-
Some humans are calm and thoughtful, some annoyingly complicated, while others with behaviours too difficult to comprehend.
I got a call from the office (former from 6 months ago) and it's from the G.M herself.
** Phone rings **
Hmm see who's calling...
Me: * Picks up phone and set it on loud speaker, so my partner can also listen *
Me: Hello Ma
G.M: Hey (calls me by my full name)
Me: It's really nice to he...
G.M: Why would you move the YETI server hosted on AWS to Azure! We have been faced with lots of challenges ever since and that has cost the company a lot.
Me: Pardon me Ma, but that...
G.M: That is a very bad and unacceptable behaviour from you and I can have the company sue you for this.
Me: Excuse me Ma, but...
G.M: I have spoken with the director of C.M.D quaters (A sister company) and explained the situation on ground about what you did before leaving without having any prior permission. What nonsense!
** At this point my partner let's call her "CC"... was more confused than me**
CC : **Panicking** Who's that? What did you do? I thought you said you no longer work at that firm, what's going on?
Now I'm confused cus I don't even know who to reply.
Me: **Signals CC to calm the fuck down**
G.M: ** Still talking and spitting out millions of threats to the guy who left the company with evil deeds in mind...**
CC who literally hates suspense and also a half cool and half crackhead kind of person... Tries stealing the phone from me so she could pour out whatever is on her mind to the caller because of how disgusted she felt, mostly for reasons I quite understood but nevertheless i kept the phone far from her reach while we both enjoyed the suiting voice of *a threat giver*
Honestly at this point my closest guess was "Joe, who must have fucked up big time" because Joe is the company's SysAdmin and has a lot of fucked up records (One time Joe tried to convert all system OSes to Linux even with our hydra servers with pre-installed windows running smoothly, his action caused a noticeable server down-time all for the reason of Joe being a Linux freak). He and only he has the power to transfer/switch/off/on servers at will. I really don't know what Joe must have done but sure thing is there is a fuck up somewhere.
Talking about me, I was only a developer enthroned only within his desk and secondly I no longer worked there. Who fucking calls a retired soldier about a lost battle after six freaking months later! Just fucking sink with your ship captain!
But how can I explain all of this to G.M without implicating Joe and also not look like snitch, I thought to myself.
While I was pondering within myself and the call which has long been disconnected, CC broke the silence.
CC: Giddy, Can you honestly explain me why your old company is calling talking about lawyers and suing you? Have you been lying to me about your work?
Me: *Explained the situation to CC*
CC: But why was she that saucy and acting a bitch? You should have spare me a minute with her.
Me: She wouldn't let me speak but we good CC. We good.
The woman that just called is the G.M. of the firm I had formerly worked with and she's also the wife to the M.D of the same firm which was my former direct Boss whom I respect a lot. Having a disjunct with the wife can also affect the relationship with the husband, which I don't want to lose. So we cool!
Maybe I should text her or maybe not... But before then
** Another call comes in **
It's her again.
GM: Hello Giddy (Sounding calm)
Me: (WTF. She called me by my first name and also sounds cool... More confused than a stray dog) ...Yeah Hello
GM: I just called to let you know that my accusation was wrong because I was misinformed. Joe Nosa was in charge on Systems but why didn't you correct me on that during our last conversation?
Me: ... 😲
CC: (Drags the phone) Hello and Good morning whosoever...
G.M: Sorry who am I speaking with?
CC: (Introduced herself) I overheard your last conversation with Giddy, and I demand you appogise to him both in written and in verbal because not only did you accused him falsely, you also almost bridge the trust between us which may have cost the relationship.
Me: ...
** Long awkward silence **
G.M: Hey Giddy, I'm sorry. Just angry about what went down recently.
Me: All good ma'am
CC: ** Hangs up **1 -
I really like helping other learn how to use a programming language or solve problems on general. I often go out of my way and stop working on my hobby projects, just to help someone.
Thag being said, I'm no prgramming god. I myself am striving to become a better programmer.
I make mistakes, I can't always help you, I am still learning, but I only have good intentions. And you are by no means obligated to follow my advice. Quite the contrary, fight me, try to prove me wrong or say point out possible flaws. THINK ABOUT WHAT I TELL YOU. DON'T JUST BLINDLY FOLLOW MY ADVICE AND BITCH ON ME LATER.
This happens rather often and I can see why you want to blame me. And I can't deny that part of this is also my fault.
Situations like these don't really tilt me.
But today someone had the fucking nerve to pop a file into the chat and get mad at me for sugvesting a cleaner, shorter and more efficient solution. LIKE I DON'T FUCKING CARE THAT IT TOOK YOU A WHOLE DAY TO IMPLEMENT SOMETHING I CAN DO BETTER IN MINUTES, I JUST WANT TO HELP YOU.
But the best thing I get afterwards: "But you told me to do it like that" BITCH WHAT!?
I have chat logs telling me loud and clear that the concept we never talked about before in private nor on a public server (bless discord's search function). And I will not accept your lousy excuse of having me cobfused with someone. You disrespected me greatly, you put words in my mouth, just to justify your pity anger, when I'm trying to help you?!
Get crucified and put on a shooting range!
I offer you out of pure goodwill. Something you'd normally have to pay for. And this is the treatment I get in return?
Just rm -rf your disastrous, dd -if=/dev/urandom your harddrive and sod off!2 -
I've been working as a developer for 10 years now... I got my first software development job when I was still learning for my masters.
After all this time I have switched programming languages and product types a few times from web development to mobile apps to desktop software (C++, CEF, QT,).
And I have come to the conclusion that I want early retirement... like right now retirement... I'm done dealing with management that doesn't understand shit... dealing with people we have outsourced part of the shit to... needing to fix stuff that is broken after some other person refactored the code and didn't fully test it and it somehow got approved... dealing with people that think that "know better" and implemented things like that 5 years ago because they thought like "THAT" and will not accept my merge request because of that.
Like don't get me wrong I love to make and develop software, but since this is the 3rd job in the row with a toxic environment like this I feel like I need to move to the country side and open up a farm or something :|2 -
9000 internet cookie points to whoever figures out this shit:
I'm trying to import a secret gpg key into my keyring.
If I run "gpg2 --import secring.gpg" and manually type each possible password that I can think of, the import fails. So far, nothing unusual.
HOWEVER
If I type the same passwords into a file and run:
echo pwfile.txt | gpg2 --batch --import secring.gpg
IT ACTUALLY FUCKING WORKS
What the fuck??? How can it be that whenever I type the pw manually it fails, but when I import it from a file it works??
And no, it's not typos: I could type those passwords blindfolded from muscle memory alone, and still get them right 99% of the time. And I'm definitely not blindfolded right now.
BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!!
Suppose my pwfile.txt looks something like this:
password1
password2
password3
password4
password5
password6
Now, I'm trying to narrow it down and figure out which one is the right password, so I'm gonna split the file in two parts and see which one succeds. Easy, right?
$ cat pw1.txt
password1
password2
password3
$ cat pw2.txt
password4
password5
password6
$ echo pw1.txt | gpg2 --batch --import secring.gpg
gpg: key 149C7ED3: secret key imported
$ gpg2 --delete-secret-key "149C7ED3"
[confirm deletion]
$ echo pw2.txt | gpg2 --batch --import secring.gpg
gpg: key 149C7ED3: secret key imported
In other words, both files successfully managed to import the secret key, but there are no passwords in common between the two!!
Am I going retarded, or is there something really wrong here? WTF!4 -
So I’m in a bit of a pickle.
I’ve become involved with a pretty fast paced group project. We’ve got 9 weeks to write up a mock PDR and all of the communication is done through Discord and teleconferences. As of last week an issue came up where one of the teammates (Black) felt accused by Red of being called authoritative and feels disrespected by the following message: “I don't know if I'm picking up on it correctly, but it feels like you want to control every situation. I feel like you're trying to take on a part of everyone's role so that you also need more people a part of each sub category. I think whatever happened is done whether we did turn it in late or not, I don't think we need to pressure others to do more that is needed. Also, Project Manager's dad passed. Not to make it an excuse, but I think it should be taken into consideration. Also, we didn't even verify all the positions til the meeting we had. So even still, we would have had to turn it in late since there were so many arrangements
If you don't trust your other members to do their job without having to be supervised, it can be counterintuitive to the whole teamwork aspect.” This message was sent after we missed a deadline to submit a team organization chart and Black team member insisted on becoming a third Assistant Project manager while making it seem as the other 2 APM’s were incompetent at their job.
Although I agree that it is difficult to communicate all of your emotions through written messages, I still think that taking your tone into consideration is crucial when working remotely. Am I wrong? Is there a better way to work with this team member? It’s still very early on in the project and this is the first time I’m working on a project with others with very little face to face communication. Typically when similar issues became present in other group projects, we would all sit down and discuss it and try to reach an agreement (or at least an understanding of where everyone is come from). Any advice is seriously appreciated.13 -
Question: I completed a feature on separate branch. Since I'm not allowed to merge things on the master branch (only pm is allowed to) I open a pull request.
However, PM has decided that he will only accept PRs which can be automatically rebased & merged.
So now i opened my PR and PM says that GitHub complains that the branches cannot be automatically merged.
So I rebase the branch - push and tell him to try again. But the same issue - GitHub won't merge the PR. So I try again - rebase the feature branch onto master which runs me through the same rebase steps as on the last try. I successfully complete this one too and push. But still - GitHub won't swallow the PR.
Anybody an idea what could've went wrong here?6 -
I've seen far worse people doing what I'm doing, applying terrible practices and still being valued af.
Even if I do smth wrong after doing all the research and alternatives' analysis I know I'll do a proper post-mortem RCA, document it and learn from it, as a result I'll make a better choice to fix the problem and I'll know better next time.
I think I'm alright compared to them. So I don't wory about being an impostor.
Learning by good examples is a good approach. Learning by bad ones might be even better. The "good ones" are yet to fail and be replaced by better (or worse) ones. The "bad ones" are already failing and you can learn WHY you should not be doing it like that and HOW should you do instead to solve the problem.
Learning from good examples only works well if you know the back-story, all the WHYs and HOWs. People usually don't :) -
I'm literally in pain right now and not a thing I can do.
If I eat whatever the fuck is wrong with my jaw (cracked tooth or cavity) starts throbbing from the chewing action, in addition to coming on for no reason at all. vision-blurred-waves-of-nausea levels of pain. Enough that I'm alternating between laughter and almost tears.
I've downed four aspirin and it's still just barely enough WITH the numbing gel.
Got lock jaw something aweful.
Barely convinced a dentists office, which is supposed to be closed (and cancelled all it's appointments due to corona), to come in during quarantine. But thats monday. Dont kno how I'll make it. They do payment plans but I'm flat broke because I decided to pursue programming right when all this fucking bullshit went down.
And all I can think of while im typing this is the pain.
And fuck me I cant do weed because my backup plan if I fail at coding is the military.
And this stray dog that the neighbors 'adopted' but leave outside WONT STOP FUCKING BARKING.
Fuck me. Just kill me now. Do it.
Gonna go watch comedy because I read a research paper that says genuine laughter raises pain threshold by up to 10%.12 -
The first dev project, like real dev project, I participated in was a school one and it was double.
The class was meant to make us learn about the software's life cycle, so the teacher wanted us to develop a simple, yet complicated, thing: a Web platform to help tutors send/refer students to the university services (psychologist, nutriologist, etc) and to keep track of them visits.
We all agreed on it being easy.
Boy were we so wrong.
I was appointed as dev leader as well as some others (I was the programming leader, the other ones were the DB guy and the security guy) and as such I was in charge of the technology used (well, now we all know that the client is the one in charge of that as well as the designer) and I chose Django because we had some experience with it. We used it for the two projects the teacher asked us to do (the second one was to find a little shop and develop something for it, obviously with the permission and all that), but in the second one I decided to use React on top of Djangl, which ended being a really good combination tho.
So, in the first project, the other ones (all the classroom) started to discuss and decided to use some other stuff like unnecessary carousel for images, unnecessary functions, they created mock ups for stuff that was never there to begin with, etc. It was really awful, we had meetings with the client (the teacher) with updates on the project, and in not a single one he was satisfied with the results. But still, we continued with the path the majority chose and it was the worst: deadlines were not met, team members just vanished until the end of the semester, one guy broke his leg (and was a dev leader) and never said a word not did anything about the project. At the end, we presented literal garbage, the UI was awful, its colors were so ugly because we had to use the university official colors, the functionality was not there, there literally was a calendar to make appointments for the services (when did the client ask for that? No one knows), but hey, you could add services and their data to it, was it what the client wanted? Of course not! What do you think we are? Devs?
Suffice to say that, although we passed with good grades, the project and the team was shit (and I'm counting me in)
The good part is that the second project was finished by me and it looked really good, yet it didn't matter, the first project was supposed to be used by the university, but that thing was unusable.
Then, in the subsequent vacations I tried to make pretty and functional/usable, yet I failed because I had a deadline for another thing I had to do, but hey, the login screen looked amazing! -
Note: In this rant I will ask for advices, and confess some sins. I will tell my personal story- it will be long.
So basically it has been almost 2 years since I first entered the world of software development. It has been the biggest and most important quest of my life so far, but yet I feel like I missed a lot of my objectives, and lots of stuff did not go the way I wanted them to be, and it makes feel frustrated and it lowered my self esteem greatly. I feel confused and a bit depressed, and don't know what to do.
I'll start: I'm 23 years old. 2 years ago I was still a soldier(where I live there is a forced conscription law) in a sysadmin/security role. I grew tired of the ops world and got drawn more and more into programming. A tremendous passion became to burn in me, as I began to write small programs in Python and shell scripts. I wanted to level up more seriously so I started reading programming books and got myself into a 10 month Java course.
In the meanwhile I got released from army duty and got a job as a security sysadmin at a large local telco company. Job was boring and unchallenging but it payed well. I had worked there for 1 year and at the same time learned more and more stuff from 2 best friends who have been freelance developers for years. I have learned how to build full-stack mobile apps and some webdev, mainly Android and Node.js. However because I was very inexperienced and lacked discipline, all of my side projects failed horribly, and all attempts to work with my experienced friends have failed too- I feel they lost a lot of trust for me(they don't say it, but I feel it, maybe I'm wrong).
I began to realise I had to leave this job and seek a developer job in order to get better, and my wish came true 6 months ago when I finally got accepted into a startup as a fullstack webdev, for a bit lower wage but I felt it was worth it. I was overjoyed.
But now my old problems did not end, they just changed. My new job is a thousand times harder and more intensive than the old one. I feel like it sucks all the energy and motivation that was still left in me, and I have learned almost nothing in my free time, returning home exhausted. My bosses are not impressed from my work despite me being pretty junior level, and I feel like I'm in a vicious cycle that keeps me from advancing my abilities. My developer friends I mentioned earlier have jobs like I do and still manage to develop very impressive side projects and even make a nice sum of money from them, while I can't even concetrate on stupid toy projects and learning.
I don't know why It is like this. I feel pathetic and ashamed of my developer sins and lack of discipline. During that time I also gained some weight that I'm trying t lose now... I know not all of it is my fault but it makes me feel like crap.
Sorry for the long story. I just feel I need to spill it out and hope to get some advices from you guys who may or may not have similar experiences. Thanks in advance for reading this.2 -
Today is thursday. Oh no.
At thursdays I have a 8h30-19 schedule (I have 1h30' of free time to go home and cry after I finish a class at 15h30 though) and there's this one class I DREAD. It's a 2h class at 17h and it's an exercise class. This wouldn't be so bad it I actually understood the code behind the exercises, because they don't teach us code in the theory classes (btw it's C. I hate that language because of all this). The teacher pretty much tells us "do this exercise", waits like 10' and then starts to (try to) explain what we're supposed to do. Oh my god.
The other day he was like "write "exec ( ... "text" ... )", compile and execute". It didn't work. Of course it didn't why would it? I was switching around between terminal, manual and text editor, to no avail. In the end he explained but I don't think I got it.
Every time I think about this class I die a little inside and start to become somewhat anxious to be honest. The theory is not that that hard, the practice part is what is killing me (I have test in 2w but I'm just gonna start studying earlier so I can go watch this match LoL).
Does someone know a good book (preferably online, if possible) or a good website on C? I really need to read that, that language is killing me.
Bonus: the other day I had to do a homework that was to be delivered. We had to write a program that read the program and its arguments like this:
./program_name
numArgs
arg1
arg2
etc
I wrote the code, had some bumps in the way, asked a colleague for help because we needed to have a custom function made that was to be done in the class but that I couldn't make because of the reasons above. Then it came the time to test. My VM broke (I think I'm gonna format my PC to try to fix that. Have installed some other versions of the VM but the installations fails or the machine doesn't start) so I sent it to said colleague to test. She said it did OK and so I sent the work to this website we have to send our works to.
"2 errors".
What? What happened? She said it worked just fine.
Looked at my code, couldn't see anything wrong.
Asked the same colleague for help.
Turns out I missed a space. A SPACE. I don't think I've ever felt so frustrated in my life. A presentation error in Java is a good thing, at least we know the program works fine, it's just the output that's wrongly formatted. But C? Nope, errors all around, oh my god. I'm still mad about it.
And I owe her a chocolate.1 -
TIL indians live on the "satisfaction" plane hence saying yes to things they can't do to satisfy you, but also dissatisfy people as a form of attritional warfare, which is their specialty.
I was watching the trump v Kamala debate and was reminded of a bunch of tactics I've had used against me by an Indian lead dev, who I ignored the behaviour of and didn't think she was actually hostile to me until it was too late. but it made me feel so bad for him and I got an epiphany. it seems like the tactics are the same, so I got curious if there was an Indian art of war
Interestingly the AI said yes but directed me to the wrong book. I did find the right book eventually. it exists. the Chinese stole ideas from it to write their sun tzu art of war, but it's basically a Machiavellian manual before Machiavelli was alive. very cool
also turns out China is behind everything. I remember ages ago I got in a fight with a schizoid programmer friend of mine because he knew China was taking over everything and he wanted them to win, and I was rooting for team India because they were far less miserable than the Chinese. don't make a deal with the Chinese. guy was stupid. they treat people like irrelevant meat
China seems to be connected to everything that's going on right now.
- they're infiltrating Canadian politics, get international students to change Canadian election outcomes (200k/30m people who weren't citizens but got bussed to voting centers and just used proof of address to vote. they changed outcomes of 4 elected officials in one province, and local Chinese people are saying they get threats about their family back in China if they don't do what China tells them to -- but our elected government just keeps quiet on it and then goes to China for new orders during "climate conferences" and uselessly gives them a bunch of our fucking money)
- there was issues with the Chinese buying up real estate in Canada and just leaving them empty. it's probably still happening even though Canada eventually imposed a tax on leaving empty real estate around that you're not renting out. they're still buying up properties, and we have an increasing housing shortage as a result. one of my old apartments a white guy, who was suspicious and shifty, bought the unit and forced us to move out citing code violations (you can't kick someone out otherwise here because of very strong renter's protections). they never introduced who bought the place, but they did have 7 ALL CHINESE SPEAKING IN CHINESE people come in and measure everything at the apartment. so they're definitely still buying up real estate
- are behind the green agenda (our politicians seem to take orders from them under this guise)
- seem to strangely have had camps where they let migrants pass through the South Americas to get into united states, were very closed off and hostile to anyone snooping so it was up in the air what they were doing there. after people came to snoop the camps up and disappeared
- are who USA is competing with in the AI race, the whole AI narrative is literally a fight between the west and China
and there's a super smart systems guy who thinks they were behind the world economic forum and I'm increasingly starting to believe it
all electronics coming from China should be a concern. it isn't
there's tons of Chinese trying to enter open source software to install backdoors. they're nearly successful or successful often. same with that DDoS on DNS years ago
there's rumours they've been running Canada since the 80s, via infiltrating Canadian tech companies to steal their software and are the gatekeepers for a lot of underground stuff
I'm starting to believe even the COVID virus was on purpose. I didn't before. there was a number of labs that had that virus, a lab leak happened around Ukraine 6 months prior to the "Olympics outbreak" (seriously that was PERFECT timing for a lab leak if you wanted to do a bioweapon on purpose -- you would hit every country at once!), but there was also a lab in Canada that had it and some reporters were upset about it because the lab didn't seem to care about our national security and was letting suspicious Chinese nationals work at it, and for some reason there's been discovered a BUNCH of illegal makeshift Chinese labs in California with super vile stuff in them
and what the fuck was that Chinese spy balloon fiasco anyway. you can't shoot it down? I think that was a test to see how fast and readily the west would defend itself. or maybe they wanted to see the response procedures
and then on top of it many people think the opioid epidemic is all china. china makes the drugs. it would also fit perfectly, because in the 1800s or whatever the British empire had entirely decimated china for decades by getting them addicted to the opioid trade. eventually the British empire merged with USA and now USA is basically the head of the new British empire
I think we're at war with China and literally don't fucking know it13 -
This is more of an advice seeking rant. I've recently been promoted to Team Leader of my team but mostly because of circumstances. The previous team leader left for a start-up and I've been somehow the acting Scrum Master of the team for the past months (although our company sucks at Scrum generally speaking) and also having the most time in the company. However I'm still the youngest I'm my team so managing the actual team feels a bit weird and also I do not consider myself experienced enough to be a Technical lead but we don't have a different position for that.
Below actions happen in the course of 2-3 months.
With all the things above considered I find myself in a dire situation, a couple of months ago there were several Blocker bugs opened from the Clients side / production env related to one feature, however after spending about a month or so on trying to investigate the issues we've come to the conclusion that it needs to be refactorised as it's way too bad and it can't be solved (as a side note this issue has also been raised by a former dev who left the company). Although it was not part of the initial upcoming version release it was "forcefully" introduced in the plan and we took out of the scope other things but was still flagged as a potential risk. But wait..there's more, this feature was part of a Java microservice (the whole microservice basically) and our team is mostly made of JS, just one guy who actually works as a Java dev (I've only done one Java course during uni but never felt attracted to it). I've not been involved in the initial planning of this EPIC, my former TL was an the Java guy. Now during this the company decides that me and my TL were needed for a side project, so both of us got "pulled out" of the team and move there but we've also had to "manage" the team at the same time. In the end it's decided that since my TL will leave and I will take leadership of the team, I get "released" from the side project to manage the team. I'm left with about 3 weeks to slam dunk the feature.. but, I'm not a great leader for my team nor do I have the knowledge to help me teammate into fixing this Java MS, I do go about the normal schedule about asking him in the daily what is he working on and if he needs any help, but I don't really get into much details as I'm neither too much in sync with the feature nor with the technical part of Java. And here we are now in the last week, I've had several calls with PSO from the clients trying to push me into giving them a deadline on when will it be fixed that it's very important for the client to get this working in the next release and so on, however I do not hold an answer to that. I've been trying to explain to them that this was flagged as a risk and I can't guarantee them anything but that didn't seem to make them any happier. On the other side I feel like this team member has been slacking it a lot, his work this week would barely sum up a couple of hours from my point of view as I've asked him to push the branch he's been working on and checked his code changes. I'm a bit anxious to confront him however as I feel I haven't been on top of his situation either, not saying I was uninvolved but I definetly could have been a better manager for him and go into more details about his daily work and so on.
All in all there has been mistakes on all levels(maybe not on PSO as they can't really be held accountable for R&D inability to deliver stuff, but they should be a little more understandable at the very least) and it got us into a shitty situation which stresses me out and makes me feel like I've started my new position with a wrong step.
I'm just wondering if anyone has been in similar situations and has any tips or words of wisdom to share. Or how do you guys feel about the whole situation, am I just over stressing it? Did I get a good analysis, was there anything I could have done better? I'm open for any kind of feedback.2 -
So I'm on PTO for a week, and there is some feature for which I gave the estimations to the other team. That team thinks that eastimates are high and I'm getting pinged to think about it.
First of all they did the overriding of some feature which was required by our team without our knowledge and now when we got know what they did, they are asking us to do the work. I have an estimate and yes they are higher than expected because this feature is on their systems and I don't have complete understanding of it. This is ridiculous though but still I think that I'm wrong somewhere but I know this work is not easy for me, that's why estimations are high.
I'm on leave, I'm not supposed to be working anyway even if it's a small clarification.
Adding more here, that guy tagged another person from my team to do the work as I'm on leave. This guy did some work before too. But this is insane. HOW THE FUCK YOU EXPECT US TO DO IT FOR YOU!! YOU FUCKED IT UP!!!
I feel scared, what if the other guy can actually do the work, people will think I'm just stupid.:(((8 -
I can't help it sounding bitter..
If you work some amount of time in tech it's unavoidable that you automatically pick up skills that help you to deal with a lot of shit. Some stuff you pick up is useful beyond those problems that shouldn't even exist in the first place but lots of things you pick up over time are about fixing or at least somehow dealing or enduring stuff that shouldn't be like that in the first place.
Fine. Let's be honest, it's just reality that this is quite helpful.
But why are there, especially in the frontend, so many devs, that confuse this with progress or actual advancement in their craft. It's not. It's something that's probably useful but you get that for free once you manage to somehow get into the industry. Those skills accumulate over time, no matter what, as long as you manage to somehow constantly keep a job.
But improving in the craft you chose isn't about somehow being able to deal with things despite everything. That's fine but I feel like the huge costs of keeping things going despite some all the atrocities that arose form not even considering there could be anything to improve on as soon as your code runs. If you receive critic in a code review, the first thing coming back is some lame excuse or even a counter attack, when you just should say thank you and if you don't agree at all, maybe you need to invest more time to understand and if there's some critic that's actually not useful or base don wrong assumptions, still keep in mind it's coming from somebody that invested time to read your code gather some thoughts about it and write them down for you review. So be aware of the investment behind every review of your code.
Especially for the frontend getting something to run is a incredibly low bar and not at all where you can tell yourself you did code.
Some hard truth from frontend developer to frontend developer:
Everybody with two months of experience is able to build mostly anything expected on the job. No matter if junior or senior.
So why aren't you looking for ways to find where your code is isn't as good as it could be.
Whatever money you earn on top of your junior colleagues should make you feel obligated to understand that you need to invest time and the necessary humbleness and awareness of your own weaknesses or knowledge gaps.
Looking at code, that compiles, runs and even provides the complete functionality of the user story and still feeling the needs do be stuff you don't know how to do it at the moment.
I feel like we've gotten to a point, where there are so few skilled developer, that have worked at a place that told them certain things matter a lot Whatever makes a Senior a Senior is to a big part about the questions you ask yourself about the code you wrote if if's running without any problems at all.
It's quite easy to implement whatever functionality for everybody across all experience levels but one of your most important responsibilities. Wherever you are considered/payed above junior level, the work that makes you a senior is about learning where you have been wrong looking back at your code matters (like everything).
Sorry but I just didn't finde a way to write this down in a more positive and optimistic manner.
And while it might be easy to think I'm just enjoying to attack (former) colleaues thing that makes me sad the most is that this is not only about us, it's also about the countless juniors, that struggle to get a food in the door.
To me it's not about talent nor do I believe that people wouldn't be able to change.
Sometimes I'm incredibly disappointed in many frontend colleagues. It's not about your skill or anything. It's a matter of having the right attitude.
It's about Looking for things you need to work in (in your code). And investing time while always staying humble enough to learn and iterate on things. It's about looking at you
Ar code and looking for things you didn't solve properly.
Never forget, whenever there's a job listing that's fording those crazy amount of work experience in years, or somebody giving up after repeatedly getting rejected it might also be on the code you write and the attitude that 's keeping you looking for things that show how awesome you are instead of investing work into understanding where you lack certain skills, invest into getting to know about the things you currently don't know yet.
If you, like me, work in a European country and gathered some years of industry experience in your CV you will be payed a good amount of money compared to many hard working professions in other industries. And don't forget, you're also getting payed significantly more than the colleagues that just started at their first job.
No reason to feel guilty but maybe you should feel like forcing yourself to look for whatever aspect of your work is the weakest.
There's so many colleagues, especially in the frontend that just suck while they could be better just by gaining awareness that there code isn't perfect.6 -
Okay I'm guessing everyone here has experienced something like this but...
I dev for Company A and we have various other companies and clients utilize our service. Now, a client from Company B comes to us and says that they are having problems signing in. Apparently the page just tells them "Can't sign in".
"That's odd," I think to myself, "because our failed sign-in messages aren't that terse and usually tell you why."
I look on the system, client is registered under Company B and has verified their email address. All good there. My guess? Trying to sign in to the wrong site (we have a jobs site too) because that sometimes comes up first on the googs.
We get an email from client just now: "Hi, still can't sign in. Please see screenshot below."
I shit you not, she was trying to sign in to her own company's website that clearly had "Company B" written above the sign in box.1 -
So here's why I'm irritated ,
Day 1:I got a call from a company about an internship from a mutual contact they wanted to build an Zomato kind of application for retailers the person asked me to do it in react native which i didnt know and so I said i have experience with Android development i can do it in android he wanted a multi platform based development well i said i could learn but i haven't work on such a big project I'm still a student I'm a freshers so i didn't have the confidence to say yes so he gave me two day to make up my mind.
Day 2: I called him back i said I'm ready to develop the application I'll learn like crazy but i wont miss out on this opportunity so he was like we are not interested in react anymore we are thinking about going android and ios native I'm like great that i can work with but he shifts to I'm still thinking about flutter as well I'm like I know a lil flutter i had attended few conferences in it he asked can you brush up and I'll call you up tomorrow .
Day 3 : so he called me today and was ya so did you brush I'm like yes I'm ready to start working i need to work on my dart but as an expected internship I'll work on the development as I learn I'm totally in he said how long would it take I said I'm not confident 2,3 weeks but i could definitely provide you with what you want I'll work my ass off .He says fine then learn flutter first get back to me then we will think about it . I'm like ahhhhhh
So please what did i do right what did i do wrong can anyone please tell I'm a noob i need to learn a lot of things would appreciate your feedback
What should have i done here?7 -
Just started playing Rust again after like 9 years and holy shit is this game not noob friendly at all
I play(ed) on a relatively chill server where raiding is only enabled in the last week before wipe every month and it's not too many people playing
So I'm out on adventure, I come back and my entire base is raided... Uhm okay, I did sort of have an uneasy feeling that I left the door open when I left so okay, my dumb mistake. Lesson learned: Always make sure doors are definitely closed
So I farmed hours more to get all my stuff back, repaired a vehicle, built a nice little garage, upgraded all my windows to reinforced windows so that nobody can interact with the car or my horse inside the house, just in case that allows you mount and get in the house that way, no clue
This day I log back in. Base completely cleaned the fuck out again
Actually what the fuck man. I did *everything* right, made sure every door is locked and closed, replaced all accessible windows with reinforced ones, had 27 days of upkeep materials and still, my entire progress of 10 hours of playing is gone again
What did I do wrong? After talking with people in chat apparently I had wooden frames for the doors, which apparently are just always destroyable by anyone... Even on a damn server where raiding is disabled. Yea sure makes sense
I like Rust but holy shit, this core game mechanic of raiding is still one I cannot get over. It's so stupid to be cleaned out over night while you're not even online. It's just fucking frustrating to start all over AGAIN farming and farming and farming. I didn't really want to play because the game always looked like a meta gaming sweat fest and this just proves that it's exactly that. You have to know every single meta game mechanic to even have your damn base survive overnight
On a positive note I did figure out that unity's concurrent garbage collection doesn't seem to be a big problem for a proper fps game though, so that's something4 -
How do I help a software engineer student be better at developing software?
Background: I have this friend that started university with my young brother, two-or-so years ago my brother finished the career and got his degree while she is still there trying to finish the same career (!), we were looking the chance of changing careers but due to her low grades this is not possible and according to her U's counselor is better that she just finishes the career and gets her degree.
We scheduled a Zoom meeting for Sunday next week, to talk about her pain-points and see what improvement we can chase; issue is that I've never mentored anyone ever in my professional life (my brother from time to time drops a question to me or so, but that's different).
My plan is to either see if she suffers from lack of practice (meaning: she does not write software more often in order to improve her skills) or if it's hard for her to think in abstracts, either way, I believe that the latter improves if you do the former (just correct me if I'm wrong), thus the plan would be to assign her a bunch of programming exercises and have meetings at least once a week during her vacations.
My plan would be for her to actually learn game development with Godot, since the final result is always a game my hope is that having something to show encourages her to do the thing, but, who knows.
Have you ever done something like this for someone with the same issues? What was your experience and what nuggets of knowledge can you lend me?
P.S.: We don't live in the States but in Costa Rica, she does not have to deal with crippling student loans.6 -
Okay this is my first time posting on this site. I've browsed it (definitely not in class) and the community looks beautiful, so I'm going to just kind of slide in here. Anyways this is the part where I use my caps lock button and type lots of naughty words I guess...
<rant type = 'school'>
Our programming classes are fucking DISMAL uuugh... Okay so we have four technology classes: Tech Exploration, Coding 1, Coding 2, and Intro to CS (a 'high school' level class)... So this means a fuck ton of kids in programming classes, mostly because I WANNA MAKE MINCERAFT AND BE A KEWL BOI LIKE GAME DEV BUT I'M ALSO A FUCKING IDIOT AND WILL NOT LEARN ANYTHING YAAAAAAY but that's a mood and so there's a fucking tidal wave of dumb kids in these classes. So right we're dealing with like 80 kids per class period. Sorry if I'm repeating myself but there are a FUCKTON of students. Now, we have... wait for it... ONE FUCKING TEACHER. ONE. I fucking swear this district does not give a SINGLE SHIT about possibly THE SINGLE FUCKING MOST IMPORTANT SUBJECT WHYYYYYY... Okay so the teacher is kinda overworked as fuck lol. She can't really teach eighty kids at once so she mostly gives us exercises from websites but when she can she teaches us shit herself and actually knows a good bit about her field of study. She's usually pretty grumpy, understandably, but if you ask her a good question that makes her think you can see the passion there lol. So anyways that's a mood. Now at the other school it's even worse. They have this new asshole as a teacher that knows NOTHING about ANYTHING IT IS SO FUCKING REDICULOUS OH MY UUUUUGH... THEY STILL DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT A FUCKING LOOP IS LIKE OKAY YOU'VE BEEN TEACHING PROGRAMMING FOR A YEAR AND YOU'RE THE ONLY ONE TEACHING IT AT THAT DISTRICT SO MAYBE YOU SHOULD AT LEAST FUCKING TRY WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU... so he just makes them do shit from a website and obviously can't do half of the shit he assigns it's so fucking sad... I swear this district is supposed to be good but maybe not for the ONE THING I WANT IT TO BE GOOD FOR. Funny story: in elementary school once I wrote down school usernames for people I didn't really know and shared them a google doc that said "you have been hacked make a more secure password buddy" etc etc and made them the owner and these dull shits report it to the principal... So I'm in the principles office... Just a fucking dumb elementary school kid lol and the principal is like hAcKiNg Is BaD yOu ShOuLd NoT dO iT and I'm like how did you know it was me... so he goes on to say some bullshit about 'digital footprint' and 'tracing' me to it... he obviously has no clue what he's saying but anyways afterwards he points to where it says last change made by MY SCHOOL ACCOUNT... HOW DULL CAN YOU FUCKING POSSIBLY BE IT WAS FROM MY ACCOUNT THAT LITERALLY PROVED THAT I DID --NOT-- 'HACK' INTO THEIR ACCOUNT YOU DUMB FUCK. Okay so basically my school is a burning pile of garbage but it's better than most apparently but it's GARBAGE MY GOD... Please fucking tell me it gets better...
okay lol that was longer than I thought it would be guess I just needed to vent... later I guess
</rant>12 -
[semi-rant, kinda-story]
Day two: Managed to persuade IntelliJ IDEA into, uh, functioning.
Although it still does funky stuff like trying to force JDK v6 for bytecode compiled from Kotlin (the project's not even legacy spaghetti and JDK v6 isn't even installed).
Still had a few problems while setting up the rest of the local dev environment of the project I'm assigned to (which has been caused by documentation accidentally being followed in the wrong order, which I updated in turn, in order to prevent other people from doing the same mistake), but now I can finally work on tickets!
I love that not all tickets are marked as urgent or important, only a few!
Now the fun begins 😎2 -
I got an interview with the first company that has ever taken me seriously in 8 days (Oct 5). It's not the technical interview yet, but I'm still really fucking nervous. I really don't want to screw this up and i would love to finally be a professional...ish software/web developer; not to mention I kinda need a new job since being put on call at my current workplace (tourism's slow season). I got a lot of future plans hanging on the outcome of this at this point, and I can't shake the negative feeling that things aren't going to work out how I want them to, but at the same I feel confident enough to say within myself that I got this--what the hell is wrong eith me? 😥😥😥4
-
I finally got the lstm to a training and validation loss of < 0.05 for predicting the digits of a semiprime's factors.
I used selu activation with lecun normal initialization on a dense decoder, and compiled the model with Adam as the optimizer using mean squared error.
Selu is self-normalizing, meaning it tends to mean 0 and preserves a standard deviation of one, so it eliminates the exploding/vanishing gradient problem. And I can get away with this specifically because selu *only* works on dense layers.
I chose Adam, even though this isn't a spare problem, because Adam excels on noisy problems and non-stationary objectives (definitely this), and because adam typically doesn't require a lot of hyperparameter tuning its ideal here, especially considering because I don't know what the hyperparameters should be to begin with.
I did work out some general guidelines on training quantity vs validation, etc.
The initial set wasn't huge or anything, roughly 110k pairs for training.
It converged pretty quick all things considered, and to the low loss like I mentioned, but even then the system always outputs the same result, regardless of the input, so obviously I'm doing something incorrectly.
The effectiveness of this approach for training and validation makes me question if I haven't got something wildly wrong. Still exploring though and figuring out how to get my answers back out. I'm hoping I just fucked up the output, and not the input as well. -
!rant
I see a lot of people complain about uni degrees and stuff because they don't learn how to code etc. Is this really the standard?
I mean I'm only in fourth semester bachelor and had coding knowledge before starting uni. But we had basic to intermediate java in the first two semester, now learning how to write secure code and OS-Level stuff in C++, we had a module with practical Assembly coding all while still learning all the theory.
At the end of the first semester we had to write a terminal game in Java. I mean of course that's not "real experience" but if you dive in you definitely learn the basics you need to get started in real life.
Or am I wrong completely / just in a weird uni?6 -
Wats wrong with our QAs giving bugs thats not even related with my work seriously don't u have little senseee huhhhhh
+ haven't got proper sleep since last week
Best is lead saved me and I'm ok
But still tagging me again and again
Ahhhhhhhgggg
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻1 -
var longRant = true;
I am dextel2, if you know me, might as well know that I'm facing from quite issues, work issues personal issues and health issues
Recently broke up with my girlfriend, because I was or may be am too coward to carry on or maybe too scared from the future or our future. Initially, the break-up was mutual and understandable, this naturally affected my focus on work.
To overcome this and work issues it took me a week or so, meanwhile I mailed her few gifts for her birthday (2 weeks before her birthday), I didn't or nearly didn't wished and after wishing her she said something which affected me even worse, I don't know if we are even friends, this incident took place 3 days before, and its still fresh for me but somehow I'll overcome.
Maybe that's why I changed my username.
My parents, especially my mother knows there's something wrong with me and advised my to be happy (funny, right? because this was after I changed my username) .
I was not able to focus on work, the boss called in and gave me "improve yourself or if" pep talk, and while that duration (maybe before) I've been partially blind (thanks to my meds for epilepsy), I'll consult soon to my doctor when he is back from his vacation.
As of now, writing this rant I have no regrets so far, the only thing is that I want to be happy, maybe I am depressed, maybe this is due to her (can't really blame her).
Please help, how would you handle such stress and be happy?5 -
!dev
There are no right answers in parenting, but there are sure as hell wrong ones and if the fucking backfire effect is too much to keep you from realizing that half of your stupid fucking decisions are delusional at best then you should probably start rethinking some things. I fucking hate dealing with other people fucking up and being stupid and I know I'm going to have to keep dealing with it in one form or another but god why I'm so done with this I just fucking don't want to deal with anyone anymore I don't want to deal with myself anymore
I dunno I don't have anyone to rant to so I can't like be specific here because it's public af but you know typing this makes me feel a little better but I still just don't want to deal with this shit anymore I don't even know what I do want to do there's like nothing the positive feedback is going away and I don't know what to fucking do with myself and I don't know how to change anything I can't fucking fix anything I mean I can fix my shitty code but I'm never getting anywhere with that and whenever I want to fix anything that's actually important I just fuck up regardless of how hard I try I just don't want to fucking try anymore I don't know if I'll actually hit post but I have to put this somewhere so probably but ugh I don't even fucking ugh literally all of my problems are so fucking dumb and small and elementary but I CAN'T FUCKING DO ANYTHING I keep ranting about these fucked up people I have to deal with and yeah they fucking suck and sometimes I wish they didn't exist but I know I'm just as if not more of an idiot and everyone would probably be better off if I didn't exist but wait no that would have happened but you guys don't get to know about that because it's specific and putting that here would fuck shit up but someone else could so that so much better and I don't know everyone who interacts with me is just hurting themselves like fuck why do some friends like blades better than me maybe because I'm even less caring and even more damaging than a stupid fucking inanimate sharp piece of metal god fucking ugh okay I can't focus on anything why is this even okay side rant why are atheists so fucking hated like yes maybe some can't understand their motives for like doing things but nobody can really understand each other's like religious people all use god or gods in their own way why do you have to think of people who have zero gods as opposed to your nonzero as less human than you there's so much wrong with that okay that side rant is over but this whole thing is a side rant so cool fuck my life lol uuh I don't know I don't want to stop typing I don't know why though I guess I just actually I have no fucking idea I'm just here doing this I should be like fucking asleep I'm passing the fuck out after this ugh okay okay okay okay okay okay okay umm I really want to quote a certain person that I really hate right now and dissect them and prove every single fucking stupid argument they make wrong but I feel like that would not be good since this is so public but I swear I hate this and you know what if you're thinking that yes I AM A FUCKING WHINY BITCH DEAL WITH IT I'M WHINING YOU DENSE FUCKER YOU DON'T HAVE TO POINT IT OUT AND FEEL SMUG IT'S BETTER TO VENT HERE THAN A LOT OF OTHER WAYS SO JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP OKAY ACTUALLY FUCK IT CALL ME OUT ON IT I NEED SOMETHING TO TAKE THIS OUT ON GOD AAAAAAH okay uuh yeah that's fun I'm a fuck up okay okay so you ask "how can you be a fuck up you're so young her der" okay being young generally is a disadvantage because you haven't had opportunity but boy have I and I sure fucked every single one of those up so yeah fun stuff you know woo haha mmkay I wish I had friends online this late because then I could like rant to a person and shit I mean this community is people but not people I know and it's not really back and forth as much and ugh okay right uuh yeah good um ugh I used to be able to get this shit out by doing something I'm good at but now I'm shit at everything and I can't motivate myself and it's all just bottled up and there's so much shit and nothing works and fuck there's probably a simple solution to everything I'm facing but I'm such a dense piece of shit that I can't find any of those stupid fucking ugh okay now I'm looking at my stupid hands typing ugh I hate the things right back up here uuh uuh I have 500 charas left lets fucking go I don't want to stop I mean I do want to stop but like by that I mean I just want to not exist I do want to keep typing here because it's the only thing distracting me but yeah uuh right um some people were like wtf happened with your stalking thing and this isn't where I should put it but fuck it whatever some weird guy just logged on for 10 mins to take a screenshot of the time being 2:22:22 and logged off and boom the school year ended uuh yeah kay right fuck I have to end it now
Aaaah okay uuh right bye I'm really sorry if you actually read that whole thing4 -
God, these people...
Little backstory. I'm making an training application and we have a MySQL database set up where some elements of the training are configured. This is so learning experts can easily change some aspects of the training without programmer's help.
Meanwhile, I'm also in the middle of a server migration, because our current server is running a lot of deprecated software and is in dire need of replacement.
This is going pretty slowly, though, because of other, high-priority, work that keeps being shoved my way.
Now, someone accidentally deletes a bunch of data from one of the schemas. No big deal in my book, the training is still in development and we have nightly backups of the database.
So I shoot a support ticket to the hosting provider and ask them to restore a specific schema, telling them to restore the image to some other machine and dump the tables in an MySQL file so I can restore it that way.
I also told them to get the backup of the OLD server, not the NEW one we're still migrating to.
About an hour later, I get a message that they dumped the schema's files in a Temp folder on the D drive. So I RDP to the server to check and... The files aren't there. Just before writing a response asking where the file is, I remembered the server I was migrating to and checked that server, and there were the files.
I had already migrated part of our databases and was testing compatibility before I moved to something else.
The hosting provider just dumped the files of the wrong server, despite me telling them exactly which server to use.
This is not the first time this hosting provider has let me down...
I'm really considering jumping to another if they keep doing this... -
I'm still on a regular basis reminded of how I might be wrong despite the absolute certainty in how obviously wrong the other person is.
Lately I've been working on setting up this API with a fairly intricate database integration. One request can lead to multiple db calls if we're not careful, so we have been polishing up the implementation to guard against ddosing ourselves and dealing with thread-unsafe concurrency.
Someone on the team could happily report that they got rid of all async use so there should no longer be threading issues. "You mean it all runs sync now?" "I guess. It works at least".
I'm just internally pulling a surrender cobra. If this was pre-dev me I would have let him and everyone know what a stupidpants he is and that I thought he had some experience in api development. But let's not make an exception to the rule; I might be wrong. I mean I'm not, but let's pretend I could be. Let's pull down the changes and maybe set up a minimal example to demonstrate how this is a bad idea.
Funny story. He got rid of explicit calls to the database entirely. When resolving data, the query is instead constructed virtually and execution is deferred until the last step. Our functions are sync now because they don't call the database, and threading isn't an issue since there's only one call per request context.
Thank god I've learned to keep my mouth shut until I can prove with absolute conclusive certainty that they are wrong. Here's to another day of not making an ass of myself. -
Just now I was talking to this young girl on her employment in the corporates. I asked her if she learned anything that allows her to deliver value to her organization. She said 'not much'. And she was actually learning the wrong things, and didn't get exposed to the proper tools to get the job done, and the fact that she wanted to take the offer to work overseas.
I was telling her that if she has the adequate skills and the drive to deliver, she can be anywhere she want, but not now, and then I offered her a part time or full time freelance position that she can really learn up a lot under my supervision and deliver with satisfaction. She's not budging.
It also made me thought of myself on why I'm always hesitant to get out of Malaysia and just start a new career along with my peers overseas. I honestly want to get out of here. Seriously. I could have just gone out there. Do you know how much that I envied people who went out and had a good life being employed elsewhere?
But I still haven't been satisfied with myself, of not being able to deliver the best that I can, the best of my work throughout the 7 years of my career, and I intend to stay and prove that I can produce something great and potentially have really good gains before I make my ultimate move. I still have work to do. Unfinished business.
There are several more things that I need to cover such as server deployment on AWS, doing DevOps for web backend apps, and more architecting work. It takes time to learn. That's why I want to delegate some Android work to that young fella, so that I can move on to the more hardcore stuff. -
!Dev rant
So tired of meeting people in my generation who literally live to just freeload. Like some of us are actually trying to get shit done in life and yet here you are, just being a lazy fuck who for some reason thinks they're still in highschool and need to not give a god damn shit about anything else.
I've basically got to a point in my life where I have no idea why am I friends with someone thinks it's okay to punch another grown man in the balls after they changed a song, get to a yelling match with another person over a boardgame, sit in the one way that will definitely break the fucking couch.
But then!!!
When I'm at your house, and I change the music on the Spotify, you kick me out because I'm crossing the line? Also, they almost kicked my friend for wearing the wrong shirt (it had minions on it, they hated that movie)... The fuck.
Like you want respect, buddy you gotta earn it. You literally live off welfare and your parents and your girlfriend parents money. You are a fully capable non disabled straight white male, who hasn't aimed higher in their professional life whatsoever. I know people who had every sad story in the book thrown at them, and yet they have achieved twice what you did.
And after all of that, you feel like it's your right to be a shithead, and tell others how to act.
Go fuck yourself.2 -
It's been a good month where honestly I had nothing to rant about. Pretty much doing my own project setting up ELK.
But last few days I had to return to the reality called teammates....
It where it ok... I mentored one of them, then did the code review yesterday
And that's when the shit hit the fan.
I told them to do X but then they did Y instead thinking that they were smart.
In hindsight they seem to have no idea wtf they were doing, inexperienced and couldn't even use console.log and JSON.stringify to debug object states...
Which course now reminded what's wrong with this team, you got people jumping around stacks and projects so they're all mediocre on all of them. Rather than having specific people being good at one of them (aka more experienced than a noob).
And if course this morning, manager asked me to look into something on a program I haven't support in a while (there are a free people that are more experienced and know the current state better). And he said this is quick and urgent... And actually when he said that I'm like uh.... don't think so....
And last thing is we had to rerun a report in production so needed the shipper ten to do it. Asked them look yesterday, users were waiting.
Today... Still not done. And well I actually can run the report myself locally.. takes 5mins but in production they need to reload the data but that should take at most 20mins... Either way... Nothing was done.
Oh and I just remembered I raised a request to it SA group to have some not script installed... That not done either.
And this is why relying on others it at least these people is a bad idea..... Unless your are capable of firing them... -
Being pretty much the only one who has some knowledge of how to code and get my way around tech (even if minimal, I'm too lazy for my own good) in my familiar household - and by extension, my family (Family extends FamiliarHousehold - LoL I'm sorry) - (my brother is on his first grade of a programming course in high school, I'm a 2nd grade uni student aiming to become a game dev) sometimes I wish I knew nothing of it.
Don't get me wrong, I do like working on code (if in Java. C is making me wanna tear my eyes out) but sometimes ignorant family members push me through the edge.
I worked on a business thing my family started this summer and one of the "jobs" was managing everything via a website.
Fair enough, I knew nothing of it when I started but I learn fast and just like that I knew my way around it. The problem came when I had to teach the person who started the project how it worked. This doesn't sound all that bad except he is kinda in the stone age regarding informatics.
He got a computer a few years ago and he pretty much only played poker in it, and he still had one of those old nokias you could throw to a wall and get a hole into it. The computer is like 9y and runs like crap.
To make things worse he bought a new phone, a smartphone, and pestered me to teach him. I swear trying to teach him is like repeating the same thing 1000x and pray he keeps it in his head. Spoiler: he doesn't. ( sanity--; )
So to try and easy my suffering I decided to make a manual for the website (which is outdated by now because the team behind the website did a 180 and some things looks different), but it acted as if I'd done nothing. ( sanity--; )
To top this off he keeps on saying I don't wanna help him. ( sanity--; )
This kept going for the whole damn summer, and meanwhile I had to go back to uni and in the first days I still got like 4-5 calls/day, half of those might about the smallest things because he's so panicky.
Like (both examples happened while I was still there but it kinda goes along those lines sometimes):
- (During the period they changed the website the first time since we're there; they were mostly doing changes back and forth and testing because it had a new layout for a day or 2 before going back; also the site was totally functional, except for a thing or 2)
Him: "They're changing the website, why are they doing that?"
Me: "Because it's their website and they can?"
Him: "WHY DIDN'T THEY LET US KNOW"
Me: "They don't have to, they don't work for you." ( sanity--; )
Or (during the same period; the pages have a menu on the left; one of the submenus has a counter that resets every time the session ends; during that maintenance time they must've "disabled" the function because the number kept growing even after the session ended):
Him: "WHY IS THE NUMBER GROWING?"
Me: "They're working on the code, relax, it's nothing."
Him: "But why." ( sanity--; )
The only quesion he pretty much hasn't asked me yet is why "Is the website's colour this one and not that one?".2 -
This *is* a question you silly wrong tagging mother fucker, how dare you doubt me?
Alright, no more disclaimer: I like dungeons and dragons, but it's too fucking much in terms of rules and systems and shit, as in just *making* a character can take a long ass while.
And if that's the highest level of all your ANAL preferences then OK, but I'm not you and things only come OUT of my ass, not inwards, I swear.
Anyhoo, I got fed up with it and wrote my own ruleset and setting as a last fuck you to everyone. It's very simple: if you want to be some kinky magical alien hermaphrodite royal prostitute half sewer dragon princess and three quarters bearded female incest child of demons and fairies then FINE, but you get no bonuses for that shit.
Get it? No complex racial level scaling bullshit, FUCK YOU, race and background is just for vibes, end of story.
You get no attribute or skills or shit to distribute on level one. All you get is a prompt: pick three actions, that's it. You wanna be sexy? Pick "seduce". You wanna set turds on fire? Pick "ignite". Are you an edge lord? Pick "summon". Would you be my wife? Pick "heal", "buff" and "smite".
The game is turn based, and each action you can take is effectively a spell. Everyone can cast a basic spell like walk, attack, talk, crouch, etcetera -- that costs no mana. Special crap like flying and firing fucking electricity costs mana, and you can only do those if you either picked the spell on level one or learnt it later from a book/tutor/demonic bargain/whatever.
Which spells are valid for taking at level one is up to the game master; I just tell people to pick three verbs or short sentences, and if they choose something that's too broken like "split the Red Sea" I'm like nah you're not Moses, try again.
Still with me? Good. You get eight points of health, four points of mana, and one point of stamina. They're all energy, and you can use it to power your magery, but spending all your health means you fucking die.
Stamina recharges fully every turn, and is used for the aforementioned basic actions. All of these cost one point of stamina each. If you run out of stamina, you can use mana. Or your BLOOD.
Level one spells cost one mana, level two cost two and so on. You get back one point of mana each turn, and you can fire all the spells you want during it, long as you have mana. Or BLOOD.
That's good and all, but if you spend anywhere over eleven combined points of energy in one go, you spontaneously combust and die, erasing all signs of life in a twenty-meter radius. This is called incineration, and it *will* leave behind a blackened crater from which the dark servants of the Horror Immemorial may or may not crawl out of.
In case you didn't guess by now, your blood doesn't fucking come back unless you eat, sleep or see a healer.
But anyway, the more points you spend into casting a spell -- and remember, basic attack counts as a spell -- the more powerful it is, so the bigger your diceroll can get. My rule is I add one dice for every fourth point of energy spent, so (1d4), (1d4 + 1d6), (1d4 + 1d6 + 1d8), incineration.
Additionally, for every three points of energy spent, your spell can hit one more target. That's right, you like AoE? Then spend more mana, bitch. Oh, and if you're using shit like poison it lasts one more turn for every two points of energy spent.
How do we calculate damage? Diceroll over two and fuck your mother. Armor class? Resistances? Out of my face with that shit. Damage reduction is called "tyranny" and is for dungeon bosses only.
If you live long enough to get to level two, you *do* get attributes. Pick:
- Grit: +2 health, +1 to fighter shit type rolls.
- Cunning: +2 mana, +1 to rogue shit type rolls.
- Allure: +1 stamina, +2 to wizard shit type rolls.
- Spirit: +1 to elemental shit type spells.
- Faith: +1 to benefactor paragon asshole shit type spells.
- Hatred: +1 to demonic murder hobo destructive shit type spells.
On second level, you can pick one of the spells you know to get +1 to it, specifically. Eh, "+1" just means you get a bonus to some diceroll, no time to explain I'm running out of characters what the fuck.
On level three, the cycle repeats. Pick attr, pick spell. DONE.
Oh right, and weapons. Mostly just vibes, pick your fancy and fuck off. Normally, you can hit things one tile away; if you have a BIG melee weapon you can hit from *two* tiles away, and if you have a ranged weapon you can shoot anyone in sight, but you need to spend one point of energy to reload.
And there, all bases covered in less that 5000 characters with some flair to spare, now suck my fucking cock Hasbro.
What was the question? Oh yeah right, I'm gonna GPL this shit and put it in browsers. I think I'm going to write it in Kotlin but I'm open to suggestions. Would you guys like to play it/contribute to it's development for shits and giggles?8 -
Oh china, you always know how to snap me out of long stints of mundane and/or annoying, chore-esq work.
//...and letting me excuse a 10min, otherwise purely wrong procrastination down a current political rabbit hole
I gotta say, at least in china they are bold enough to put their image and identity on whatever they make... but in that 'im selling pseudo-sex, not because im sexy--just the opposite, so you know I relate' way.
Side note: i got an automated spam call survey yesterday*... it ot got to the 1st (of claimed 3) question.. which had a surprising amount of actual reiterations before looping... it was determined to get opinions(and totally incept the lemmings, soccer moms and politically ignorant into their stance, plus intense rage/disgust/dreams of standing on a soap box and fighting about this new issue they were totally unaware of.)... about this actively serving, politician's demand that china sell tiktok or totally stop allowing any operations/use on american soil... because of the heavily implied heinous nature of controlling and twisting society via media to it's explicitly declared communism... even directly called china, as a whole, communists, with impressive dramatics (and i coached public speaking hs and college kids then over a decade of business consulting, typically involving coaching vocals and implicit vocab)
I actually listened to it because it's what a typical subject, brought out of the koolaid fog, would view as ridiculously ironic(assuming they knew the actual, and therefore inherently ironic, def if irony... most dont. It's disturbing)... but it you have decent common sense, and dont emotionally view your entirety as wrong/broken/needing to be fixed in a cult-like manner, it's the oposite of irony. History of/and politics pull this crap all the time. It still works.
It reminds me of how my moniker, awesomeest, came about. In 3rd grade i realised that even adults, knowing they were chatting with an 8yr old, even if they knew/used the correct spelling of a, less common, term... if i misspelled it as if i thought it was right, theyd actually change their spelling to match (in perpetuity) albeit my vocab was easily high school level by then...likely at least in part to my flawless(aka blind/ignorant) demeanor of confidence that whatever i said/thought was totally correct, as a matter of fact. Not like the insecure ppl trying to prove something
I used to find it so comical... now it's just sad.
This bs automated political spam/manipulation is the modern version of i remember of kids farting in the late 90s... the culprit quickly accusing someone else of their offense, but even extra immature kids 25+ yrs ago figured that out... and even made the retort a catchy rhyme..."the one who smelt it, dealt it"
*i basically programmed in a counter attack/something akin to immature passive aggressive ' who"s really the one wasting the other's time and resources now?!? Ha!' ...odd numbers automatically go into a sort of echo chamber instead of ringing, with a manual escape to actually ringing/calling prompt built in.
I can listen in at any time without it having any effecf/sound too.
I'm curious if anyone participates in these minor acts of terrorism to complete an unrequested, intrusive, and human-less format of a proclaimed opinion poll? And if you do, are you honest? Why do you do it?
Annoyance at spam aside... the real victim I mentally mourn, and view it's method of demise akin to a cardinal sin (assuming religion...blah blah)... is the data! I <3 data... good, unobscured, not contrived, simple, pure, raw data... killed before its birth :'(5 -
"You don't need to put a type annotation here, the type will be inferred by the compiler"
"We don't need to mark this function as async, since we are already returning a promise but not awaiting it yet within this method"
TypeScript codebase. Am I wrong to prefer that things be explicit rather than implicit? Sounds a bit tryhard to try and make things implicit, but maybe the async really changes behavior in the second case? I don't think so, and I prefer to mark an asynchronous operation as such, but I'm still doubtful; that's why I humbly ask you all what makes more sense here.7 -
Hello, my first time here. I got to know this website/app from my PM because I need to vent it somewhere other than him according to my PM.
So, here goes my first rant. The date is today (Monday). The rant subject is our new tester. Some context on the guy. He started in our office 8 weeks ago and his title is senior tester with some years in testing. Me and my team with the exception of our PM are new hires and for me, this is my first job after graduation.
After a grueling month of pushing for new modules and bug fixes from our monthly UAT from the client (yes, this will be a future rant one day), about 2/3 of the team is on vacation paired with a long weekend. So, a very few ppl in the team including me and my PM came for today.
I usually came quite early, around 8 am as I commute with public transportation. As soon as I have my breakfast and just getting ready to open my dev laptop, he came to me with a bug. This is like under an hour I came to office. I'm ok with anything related to the project as today was deployment day to test server for our monthly UAT. So, I check the bug and it wasn't my module but the PIC is not there and I familiar with the code thus I fixing the module.
Then, not even 15 mins later, while fixing this module, he came to me with another bug. I'm still the only one who in office that can fix it thus have to do it too. Finished the both bugs, pushed and je retested it. Fortunately, my PM and another colleague came. But, for some reason, he only comes to me for the bug fixes.
The annoying thing for me is that he comes to me every time he found an obstacle, bug or glitch. At this rate, by hourly. Thus, this cycle of impromptu going around fixing-on-the-go for the project begins, for me. Then, my PM asks him abt our past issue log given by the client UAT. Another annoying part is he never checks the clients feedback to see if the result can be produced again. The time he checks it is when ppl ask abt it and test it 1 by 1. Then he came to me again with why x person marked it as done. Like hell I know why they marked it done, you the one who need to check with them. Thus, I called/messaged the PIC for x modules abt the issue and then they explain it. I have to explain it again to him abt it and then he makes the summary report for the feedback. This goes until lunch.
I thought the bug fixes is over and I can deploy it after lunch. I thought wrong and I kinda regret coming back early from lunch which I thought I can rest for a while with the debacle over morning. Nope, straight he comes to me after I sit down for 10 mins and until almost work hour is done, he came to me with small bugs and issues like previously, hourly. By then I think I crushed like ~10 bugs/issues and I'm knackered. I complained to the PM many times and the PM also said to him many times but he still does it again and again. Even the PM also ranted to me abt his behavior. The attitude of not compiling an issue log for the day and not testing the system to verify what the client feedbacks are valid or not is grinding my gears more and more. Not hating the guy even though his personality is quite unique but this is totally grinding ppl's gears atm. As of now, it's midnight and I finally deployed the system to the testing server. This totally drains my mental health and it's just Monday. May god have mercy on me.
Owh, the other colleague that come today? He was doing pretty much the same thing but he was resolving a major issue which is why the tester came to me.2 -
Time for an actual rant.
3rd year of CS.
We have Mobile Systems course - Android & iOS development.
Lectures - 1hr of interview with Steve Jobs about greatness of iOS.
Practice - So far we had to write 2 android apps.
Seems wrong? No, it's perfectly fine for "Course Leader" (idk how the guy is called properly in English)
First app - 3 screens (it was forced to do it with Activities), data passing between activities, lifecycles
Second app - 2 screens - one with ListView (well, I asked about RecyclerView, luckily I was allowed), another one adds elements to that List plus Snackbars, Notifications, list item selection and removing them (I ended up adding retrolambda and streams to write it anyhow). We were asked to do it on Activities, I thought it was an overkill, in the end did it on Fragments.
What pisses me off - we were asked to do those two apps after watching one hour of interview, the guy who leads the practical part of course has no idea how to do things in Android (said it clearly), I was, and still am, only one who knows how to do anything.
I work as Android dev, so I want to help my colleagues. Decided to make tutorial streams where I explain how to do everything.
Troll colleagues come and dislike it on youtube, post lulzy comments into chat. Not that it bothers me much, but still, people who I'm trying to help are mixing my help with shit, great :)
If Polish devranters want to check out those streams (you can write a decent app after watching those 4 hours) I can post them in comment.2 -
I'm building a script parser to make mods for a game I like. The first step is to write an importer.
The documentation is nonexistent and I'm delving into byte manipulation, which I'm not familiar with - at all. I'm porting existing code from Java to C#, and everything is similar but different enough that I can't always just to a 1:1 transfer.
I get everything working, cleaned up and split into classes so I can write the exporter.
I do an import and the file won't parse. I try all previously know working files and still no good. I clean, rebuild, clean rebuild, run, debug, restart my computer, clear my cache, clean, rebuild. No good.
IT WAS WORKING 5 MINUTES AGO
Proceed to revert to every version from the last hour. No dice.
I was in the wrong folder the whole time.
Navigate to the proper folder, open the filename I know to be good and bingo, works like a charm.
The same project caused me headaches because I had a "== -1", when it should have been "== 1". Between my inexperience with byte manipulation and my untreated astigmatism, I was nearly sent to the shadow realm fixing that.3 -
Okay..
So, what do I have here?
A cross platform mobile app with NO unit tests.
😕
I have to write a big new feature from scratch. (Things can't go wrong, right?)
Started working on it, pointed out problems with the UI/UX designs. The design changed multiple times, still I thought I could finish it by the expected date. And, so I did.
The feature went through testing, and they found bugs. (Surprise...?)
It's already kinda scary to touch someone's code that has no unit tests and no comments. And I think, it's all the more difficult to not introduce bugs.
Also, had to work on the weekend to fix the bugs.
I had some good learnings here, but I'm not sure how I can prevent bugs without unit tests and proper feedback cycle. :/4 -
Hi devRant. Wanna rant with some shit about my company. First some good parts. I work in company with 600+ employees. It's one of the best companies in my region. They provide you with any kind of sweets(cookies, coffee, tea, etc), any hardware you need for your work (additional monitor, more ram, SSDs, processor, graphics card, whatever), just about everything you need to make your work faster/comfortable. Then, we have regular reviews (every 6 months), which rise salary from $0.75 to $1.5 per hour. (I live in poor country, where $15 per hour makes your more solvent then 70% of people, so having 100-200 bucks increase every half year is quite good rise).
The resulting increase of review depends on how team leader and project manager are satisfied with my work. And here starts the interesting (e.g. the shit comes in).
1) Seniority level in our company applies depending on the salary you have. That't right. It does not depend on your skill. Except the case when you're applying to vacancy. So if you tell that you're senior dev and prove it during interview, you'll have senior's salary. This is fine if you're just want money. But not if you love programming (as me) because of reasons bellow.
2) You don't need to have lots of programming experience to be a team leader. You can even be a junior team leader (but thanks god, on research projects only). You start from leading research projects and than move to billable if the director of research department is satisfied with your leading skills.
As a consequence our seniors are dumb AF. This pieces me off the most. Not all of them. A would say half of them are real pro guys, but the rest suck at programming (as for a senior). They are around junior/middle level.
I can understand if guy has $15 rate but still remains junior dev. That's fine. But hell no, he is treated as a middle, because his rate is $10+ now! And his mind has priority over middles and juniors. Not that junior have lof of good tougths but sometimes they do.
I'm lucky to work yet on small project so I'm the only dev, and so to speak TL for myself. But my colleague has this kind of senior team leader who is dumb AF. They work on ASP.NET Core project, the senior does not even know how to properly write generic constraints in C#. Seriously.
Just look at this shit. Instead of
MyClass<T> where T: class {}
he does this:
abstract class EnsureClass {}
MyClass<T> where T: EnsureClass {}
He writes empty abstract class, forces other classes to inherit it (thus, wasting the ability to inherit some useful class) just to ensure that generic T is a class. What thA FUCK is wrong with you dude?! You're a senior dev and you don't even know the language you're codding in.
And this shit is all over the company. Every monkey that had enough skill just to not be fired and enough patience to work 4-5 years becomes a senior! No-fucking-body cares and reviews your skill increase. The whole review is about department director asking TL and PM question like "how is this guy doing? is he OK or we should fire him?" That's the whole review. If TL does not like you, he can leave bad review and the company will set you on trial. If you confront TL during this period, pack your suitcase. Two cases of such shit I know personally. A good skilled guy could not just find common language with his TL and got fired. And the cherry on top of the case is that thay don't care about the fired dev's mind. They will only listen to reviewer. This is just absurd and just boils me down.
That's all i wanted to say. Thanks for your attention.