This story is 100% true.

I got hired onto a team of construction workers to build a house. We set up a meeting with Management to find out what kind of house they wanted us to build, where’s the floor plan, what it’s going to be used for, who it’s for, etc. Management said that they didn’t know all that, we should just get started. They told us that we were going to use “Agile” which means that we just work on small deliverables and build the thing incrementally.

The developer team lead argued that we at least need to know how big the thing is going to be so that we can get started pouring the foundation, but Management told him they just don’t know. “What we do know,” Management said, “is that the house is going to have a bathroom. Just start there, and we’ll know more when it’s done. You have two weeks.”

So we just bought a port-a-potty, and screwed around on the internet for two weeks. Management was outraged. “You call this a house? This is the worst house ever! It doesn’t even have a tv!”

So we bought a tv and put it in the port-a-potty, attached to an outdoor generator. We were going to buy a a dvd player and get it hooked up to cable, but Management rejected the expense request, saying that they didn’t know if we needed it, and we’d come back to that later.

Management decided that we definitely need storage space, so we bought a boxcar and duct-taped the port-a-potty to it. Then to our horror they set up some desks and put a few miserable business interns in there. It went on like this…

After a few years the boxcar grew into a huge, ramshackle complex. It floods, leaks, it’s frozen in the winter and an oven in the summer. You have to get around in a strange maze of cardboard tubes, ladders and slides. There are two equally horrible separate buildings. We’re still using just the one outdoor generator for all power, so electricity is tightly rationed.

Communication between the buildings was a problem. For one of them, we use a complex series of flag signals. For the other we write notes on paper, crumple the paper up, and toss it over. Both of these methods were suggested as jokes, but Management really liked them for some reason. The buildings mostly talk to each other but they have to talk through us, so most of what we do is pass messages on.

It was suggested that we use paper airplanes instead of crumpled up balls, but the fat, awkward fingers of the Business Majors who inevitably take those jobs couldn’t be trained to make them. I built an awesome automatic paper airplane folder, but once again they couldn’t be trained to use it, so they just went back to crumpling the notes up in balls.

The worst part of all this is that it’s working. Everyone is miserable, but the business is making money. The bright side is that this nightmare complex is done so now we know what kind of building they actually needed in the first place, so we can start work on it. Obviously we can’t tell Management anything about what we’re doing until it’s finished. They noticed the gigantic hole in the ground where the foundation is coming in, but we told them that it’s a cache reset, and they mostly ignore it except when the occasional customer falls in.

I’ll probably be out of here before the new building gets finished. I could get a 50% raise by switching jobs, but Management still doesn’t think I should get a raise because I missed a couple sprints.

My mom died when I was 7, after which my dad bought me a Commodore 64 so I had something to lose myself in during the mourning process.

I learned everything about that system, from my first GOTO statement to sprite buffers, to soldering my own EPROM cartridges. My dad didn't deal with the loss so well, and became a missing person 5 years later when I was 12.

I got into foster care with a bunch of strict religious cultists who wouldn't allow electronics in the house.

So I ran away at 14, sub-rented a closet in a student apartment using my orphan benefits and bought a secondhand IBM computer. I spent about 16 hours a day learning about BSD and Linux, C, C++, Fortran, ADA, Haskell, Livescript and even more awful things like Visual Basic, ASP, Windows NT, and Active Directory.

I faked my ID (back then it was just a laminated sheet of paper), and got a job at 15-pretending-to-be-17 at one of the first ISPs in my country. I wrote the firmware and admin panel for their router, full of shitty CGI-bin ASP code and vulnerabilities.

That somehow got me into a job at Microsoft, building the MS Office language pack for my country, and as an official "conflict resolver" for their shitty version control system. Yes, they had fulltime people employed just to resolve VCS conflicts.

After that I worked at Arianespace (X-ray NDT, visualizing/tagging dicom scans, image recognition of faulty propellant tank welds), and after that I switched to biotech, first phytogenetics, then immunology, then pharmacokynetics.

In between I have grown & synthesized and sold large quantities of recreational drugs, taken care of some big felines, got a pilot license, taught IT at an elementary school, renovated a house, and procreated.

A lot of it was to prove myself to the world -- prove that a nearly-broke-orphan-high-school-dropout could succeed at life.

But hey, now I work for a "startup", so I guess I failed after all.

7 am. Dog wants out. I roll out of bed after trying to pretend I am dead.

Walk down the stairs to the side door. Half asleep and notice that the door has daylight shining through on the lock side. Didn't shut it all the way the night before. Walk outside. Dog does his thing. Turn around. Doors locked.

Fuck.

Go for my phone. In the house. Go for my keys. In the house. Fuck. Fuck a duck.

Start checking my windows. One opens a fraction of an inch. Doesn't do me any good. Dog is outside with me. Freezing his ass off. It's like 5 degrees here.

Both of my neighbors don't answer their door. Life flashes before my eyes. Put my dog in my jacket to warm him up. Little 15lb rat terrier. Not made for snow.

He's fine for now. I grab a piece of rebar from my backyard and lever my window a bit more open, busting one of the locks.

And then I yell "ALEXA. OPEN THE FRONT DOOR." The voice of an angel responds. "OK." Whirrr. Click. Door opens. Sweet warmth.

I need a fake rock with a key under it.

Great Sunday.

Story time!

This is “Güero” (Blondie), the only cat I know who can use a computer.

I was at university. I couldn’t take my laptop to class because it was too huge, so I had to use remote connection.

One day, I connected to my laptop from the library, and everything was ok except that I couldn’t move the mouse! 😱 It was like somebody on the other side was using the mousepad. There was nobody in my house, just Blondie.

My solution? I called to my house. The cat heard the ring and left my laptop. It sounds stupid but, believe it or not, it worked! 😂

Blondie, the informatic cat.

When I left the house to work abroad my mom called me.

Mom: “every time you touch the computer things change!”

Me: “I haven’t touched it in months, what’s the problem?”

Mom: “my google has changed, please put it like before!”

The same phone call, day after day, I couldn’t figure what she meant and she was getting pissed off.

Then I realized, it was just the google doodle...

Four months ago changed a laptop failing hdd and give it back to customer. Today I got a 30 minutes call because the computer "is not like before the repair, it doesn't work well".

*Thinks* Well, s#*@, before the repair the hdd had more than 2000 damaged clusters, which prevented even the os to start

*Says* "Could you describe me the issue?"
....
...
[ basically he was saying that since he started using IE as a browser, he didn't have Google.com set as the first page and that he had to bing it]
...
"When did the 'issue' start, If I may ask?"

>"Two weeks ago. "

Two weeks ago.
Two f*""#ng weeks ago.
Set aside for the nature of the issue, you blame my four months ago repair for a two weeks ago issue?
"The computer was better before"?
THAT F###ING MACHINE WAS LIKE A BURNING HOUSE - I RESCUED DATA FOR 2 DAYS JUST BEFORE THE HDD STARTED TO CRANK AT EVERY SPIN - I REBUILT IT TO GIVE IT YOU BACK FULLY WORKING AFTER YOU USED AS A FOOTBALL, AND NOW YOU BLAME ME BECAUSE THE
BROWSER ISN'T SETTED AS YOU LIKE

No,seriously, is like I rebuilt a burned house from scrap and now the owner blames me because in the kitchen sink the hot water tap is on the right side instead of the left side.
Seriusly, wtf.

So my actual job is being a nurse at the local hospital, with coding being just a hobby. However, the way some IT–Related things are treated here are just mind-blowing. Here are some examples:

Issue: Printer is not recognized by network anymore due to not being properly plugged in

Solution: Someone has to tell the house technician, if the house technician is currently not available, ask his assistant who only works part time and like twice a week. House technician took the printer (God knows why), came back 2 days later and plugged it back in.

Issue: Printer 1 of 2 on ICU has run out of ink and since all computers default to printer 1, nobody can print.

Solution: Call the house technician, blah blah, house technician comes, takes ink cartridge of printer 2 and puts it into printer 1.

Issue: Public WiFi is broken, can be connected to but internet access is missing. Probably config issue as a result of a recent blackout.

Solution: Buy a new router, spend 5 days configuring it and complain about how hard networking is.

Issue: Computer is broken, needs to be exchanged with a new one, but how do we transfer the data?

Solution: Instead of just keeping the old hard drive, make a 182GB backup, upload it to the main file server and then download it again on the new computer.

Issue: Nurse returns from vacation, forgot the password to her network account.

Solution: Call the technician who then proceeds to open a new account, copies all the files from the old one and tells her to pick an easier password this time. She chooses "121213".

I have this old lady that I help from time to time with her computer issues.

She is nice, so I feel compelled to help her.

Get a call one day.

Lady : "hello, my internet and email isn't working, I've tried everything, could you maybe help me?"

Me : "Sure, ill come over after work and check it out"

*arrive at her house*

Lady : "you see, none of the web pages load, and my email refuses to sync. Should I call (insert isp name), or can you fix it?"

Me : I'm sure I can get it, gimme a sec.

*find the issue in a sec or two, dunno how to tell her about it, she isn't totally stupid*

Me : "Uhh, I don't know if you checked, but the ether.. internet cable isn't plugged in"

Lady : *realizes the wtf moment I'm having, obviously feeling very stupid*

Me : "Don't worry, happens to the best of us"

Obviously I lied a little, most of us would probably check the damn cable. Sometimes is just better to make people not feel like its their fault. People learn better when they don't feel like something is making a fool of them.

I have helped this lady with so many things that are just straight out of this world.

The one time she tried emailing 37mb tiff files over her 315kbps network.

Another time she said her email was not syncing, so I went to her house and clicked the "sync" button.

She even once phoned me to get their wifi password.

I just like helping her, somehow it makes me feel as if we all have something to learn.

Before iPads took over the general population of home computing, I used to do house calls to help people with their computers for some extra folding money. One day I get a call from a regular saying that ever since I last worked on his computer it won't stay on.

He says it comes on for a few seconds, then just shuts down. It never did that before I upgraded the RAM.

So I drive over to his house and turn on the computer. He says, "See, it starts fine, but in a few seconds it'll just shut off. Just watch"

The computer boots up without any issues.

He says, "Well, of course it doesn't do it now that you're here!"

I reboot it a few times, boots fine every time. Suddenly I realize what's going on. I say to him, "Hey, why don't you try turning it on for me?"

He says, "What difference will that make?"

I say, "Just trust me, turn it on."

He bends down, presses the power button, looks up at the monitor and watches it boot. But he doesn't release the button! He just keeps holding it down until it shuts off.

"See!" he says, "why does it only do that when I turn it on!"

I then have to explain to him how holding down the power button forces a shutdown.

But, it never did that before I worked on it!

Today.

Last night someone detonated an improvised nail bomb at a concert venue in downtown Manchester. 22 dead and 59 injured (many life threatening).

I'm working from home as my home is listed as a safe haven.

I'm not sure how much, if any, work I'll get done.

If you're in Manchester and need anything let me know.

It's all very much process:

Check everyone I know is ok
List house as safe space
Buy food
Keep passing information around to those who need it

No real time to think about it, just stay in the "response" mode.

Some do it with coffee, some with tea, some in their house, some in a cafe, but I do it in a shawarma restaurant while eating a shawarma!

A few years back, there was a super repetitive task I needed to do to create a bunch of new screens for a new feature.

The task was so repetitive that I just couldn't bring myself to do it, and was avoiding it as long as possible.

Finally the day came where I needed to get it done. I sat at the computer readying myself to finally start/finish the task.

As I was going through the files, I could see all the work had already been done..? Confused, I opened up git history, and saw that I had checked the files in a few nights back.

Best I could do was trace it back to a house party where I was the last to go to sleep.

That was the day that I realised the power of auto-pilot :)

I'll get to my four words in a sec, but let me set the background first.

This morning, at breakfast, I fired up my trusty laptop only to get a fan failure warning.

Finally, after the three year old is asleep tonight, I'm able to start dismantling the case to get to the fan. I'm hoping it just needs cleaned out.

Hard drive, memory, and keyboard spread out over the kitchen table. I'm not even halfway done.

Guess what? Now I'm one of the lucky 3500 people to have a power outage at 9 pm. Estimated restore time: 2 am.

Sigh.

"All those tiny screws"

And a three year old in the house...

The craziest shit in my life just happened.

I left my laptop(basically my whole life) and my handbag at my dinner table and went to the the toilet for 4 minutes. I live in a ground-house in a rural area, and the front door wasn't locked.

After I exited the bathroom I noticed eevrything was gone. My laptop, my bags, my wallet. Everything. I panicked.

I quickly informed the local security authority while canceling my credit card and resetting all of my credentials, they with the help of the police they tracked the theives in 10 minutes in a neighboring town, with what it seems all of my stuff intact, which I am supposed to get tommorow.

This is both insane and a miracle. I am speechless and thankful to G-d. This is divine providence. I can't explain it in any other explanation

Watch over your stuff like your life depends on them. Don't ever leave your laptop even for a few minutes.

A real interaction I just had...

Team Member: "Can you handle this ticket for a bug fix?"

Me: "Whats the problem?"

TM: "We aren't exactly sure..."

Me: "Ok, so can you show it to me?"

TM: "We can't get it to happen again, and when it does the machine freezes and we can't debug it..."

Me: "So, if I find a fix then how do we test to make sure it worked?"

TM: "I'm not sure..."

Then today,

Product Manager: "How's that bug fix going?"

Me: "Well, let's see. The problem still hasn't been defined. I have never been able to recreate the issue. I have a hacky fix in a PR..."

PM: "Great, so we can deploy today?!?"

Me: "No, because we have no way to reproduce or test this issue at all..."

PM: "Do you think your fix will work?"

Me: "Honestly, no. If you're asking for my opinion then you can have it. IMO this is NOT a bug fix but a change to how the system operates altogether. This system was built by someone who didn't know what they are doing. We have done our best with it but it is a house of cards. And now the solution is to replace a card at the bottom layer. It is likely that no matter what fix we do (even when we can fucking test it) that it will topple the house of cards..."

PM: ~Looking at me in disbelief~

Me: "If you ask me for my honest professional opinion then you will get it. Keep that in the future if that honest response was outside what you expected."

PM: "I will do that, thanks for your assessment"

Where do we go from here? God only knows.

Praise Joe Pesci

Life with Windows 10:

An absolute nightmare. My oven doesn't work, Washing machine started rattling, toaster toasted more than it was supposed to toast. Every time windows updates it restarts my TV in my living room.

Then I met my neighbour. He lives a very happy life. I always wanted to know his secret ingredients.

One day I invited him to my house and he saw my Windows machine. He immediately insisted that I install Linux so that I can be happy and cool like him.

And that's the day my life changed. My oven started to bake beautifully, my washing machine was spinning at full speed.

Linux changed my life. I'm now part of the cool kids. Everyone loves me, embraces me.

Is your life hard? Are you not being noticed by other cool boys/girls? Are you having pain in your back? Remember:

Whatever bad happens, it's Windows 10's fault.

Couldn't sleep last night. Spent about 5 hours laying down reading devRant.

Mom calls taxi to go shopping. I'm starving so I go with her. The only reason I went was to get food.

Half way there, so tired I could fall asleep while standing.

I order my food. Walk to bus stop. An hour until next bus. Fuck it, I'll get a taxi.

Phone slips out of pocket while in taxi. Goes under seat. Can't grab a hold of it.

Driver says you can just get it from the back before you leave. It will be easier. I put my food down infront of me. And try one last time.

He then spends the entire trip telling me how all these customers keep leaving shit in his car, etc. Meanwhile we almost got into 2 accidents. Anyway...

So we get to my house, I pay. I get out and get my phone. I walk inside the house. Open devRant.

Wait, where's my food?

CIO: what kind of web server do you want for your dev environment? WordPress?
Me: Uhm, Linux centos running apa-
CIO: whoa that's dangerous you need to think of the people who are going to support this.
Me: right...
CIO: we're going to pick something and stick with it.

FML company is just starting to do in house dev. CIO is heavily involved and knows more than I do... My life is a Dilbert comic strip

one day my dad brings home an old blade server from work and a centos distro. we set it up in the garage of our hot Florida house and he gave me his old perl programming books and showed me a few things. I was 12 or 13. that summer I moved my bed to the garage and barely slept as I learned everything I could. I've never looked back.

Wife has literally the best IT job in the city. First wall of miners up and running. From my previous post of the 8 card boxes to this -- stacks of them and more stacks of bitmains. Fuck I wish these were ours. I know one IT honey that's getting chased around the house tonight cause she's sending me pics like this:

!rant
The change log from notepad++ update. The last paragraph is the cream!

" The issue of a hijacked DLL concerns scilexer.dll (needed by Notepad++) on a compromised PC, which is replaced by a modified scilexer.dll built by the CIA. When Notepad++ is launched, the modified scilexer.dll is loaded instead of the original one.
It doesn't mean that CIA is interested in your coding skill or in your sex message content typed in Notepad++, but rather it prevents raising any red flags while the DLL does data collection in the background.

It's not a vulnerability/security issue in Notepad++, but for remedying this issue, from this release (v7.3.3) forward, notepad++.exe checks the certificate validation in scilexer.dll before loading it. If the certificate is missing or invalid, then it just won't be loaded, and Notepad++ will fail to launch.

Checking the certificate of DLL makes it harder to hack. Note that once users’ PCs are compromised, the hackers can do anything on the PCs. This solution only prevents from Notepad++ loading a CIA homemade DLL. It doesn't prevent your original notepad++.exe from being replaced by modified notepad++.exe while the CIA is controlling your PC.

Just like knowing the lock is useless for people who are willing to go into my house, I still shut the door and lock it every morning when I leave home. We are in a f**king corrupted world, unfortunately. "

Email. Fuck everything about it.

It's an obnoxious queue of messages I somehow must handle. And everyone in society expects you to have email. You can cancel your phone number, maybe even live without a house... but every hobo still must check their email.

It is an endless shitstream of things I don't want. Like a garden with some nice tomato plants, but then a really smelly weed starts invading and no matter what you do it keeps coming back.

I don't want to login to unsubscribe. I don't care about your "notifications center", or "managing the offers you receive from us".

And then your boss asks you to design an email campaign... I don't want to receive that shit, why would our customers? And even if I agreed with using email as a communication channel... YOU THOUGHT CSS IN INTERNET EXPLORER WAS A BITCH?

No really. Fuck email. Fuck everything about it.

God dammit, my ISP fucked up.

I have a 400 Mbit/s Internet connection, which I pay a lot for it. I live in the central of a average city and we got 18 Appartements here with a banque and a wellness shop underneath.

There is a new shop under our block and 1 month ago a tecnician was here and made some recabling, so the shop would get enough performace.

Now since 1 week ago I have a bad output, laggs in games and just get about 250 Mbit/s, when not on high traffic times.

That fucking multipler in our house is over 10 years old and around 18 households are connected to it.

WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU NOT CHANGING IT, WHEN YOU SEE IT'S NOT ENOUGH?

We all here in this building are paying a lot for it, and now that fucking thing is overused and broken and you're just grabbing our money you shitbags!!!

YOU HAD ONE JOB! ONE FUCKING JOB!!!

A guy breaks into your house and start slapping your face with a huge C programming book for 5 minutes until you bleed top quality code from your nose.

Well this is what I was going to comment to the "learn C in 5 minutes app" rant, but can't find it anymore.

Holy shit, I never thought I would see the day that Microsoft makes me even more disappointed, but this is a NEW low.

The windows 11 email client is being deprecated, and they automatically "upgrade" you to the new outlook.

THERE'S ADS. THERE'S ADVERTISEMENTS IN OUTLOOK. WHAT THE FUCK. IF YOU CLICK THIS, IT JUST OPENS THE AD IN A BROWSER. IT'S IN MY EMAIL LIST, THEY ARE ACTIVELY TRYING TO TRICK YOU INTO CLICKING IT.

This is crappy free Chinese mobile game ad level of scummy. I never fucking thought they would honestly stoop so low as to make misleading ads a default part of their operating system. But here it is, in an app installed by default, developed in-house by Microsoft. Actually astounding and appalling.

I THOUGHT I JUST DAMAGED MY PHONE SCREEN LIKE AN IDIOT.

I haven't slept for 3 days, so I'm kind of out of it.

I was using my phone for a few hours non-stop, because if my mom sees me on my laptop she might take it away lol.

I had to edit my manuscript, so I didn't put my phome down, and it's really hot in my house for some reason even though it's cold outside (63°f).

So my phone overheated, and being the sleep deprived idiot I was, I realized how squishy it felt when I kept pressing my screen down. For some reason it felt good to push on it.

I know, I'm stupid. I kept pressing down until I snapped out of the trance, and realized what I was doing, so I stopped. Then I saw these distinct patches on my screen. Like when there's water in your phone, and you see these roundish splotches. Also, I couldn't move the screen.

I panicked because I thought I ruined the screen, so I turned it off. I kept it face down on my table, and read a book for an hour.

When I turned it back on, the patches were gone. I guess they were present because my phone overheated or something.

Still, that was kind of scary. I thought I ruined it.

Moved in to new house, finally have myself a room for an office. Started to deck it out and the wife asks if we can find matching chairs, one for her, one for me...

It's more than an office, its supposed to be my man/dev cave!

Just scored my personal red flag bingo in new project:
- engineers who work there for 20+ years
- their own in house build tool
- "we have Jira so it means we are agile"
- "we have Jenkins so it means we do Ci/cd"
- git adoption is "in progress"

Manager: Hi, here is component X with 200k lines of code. Can you go through the code and see if you can implement component Y using component X?

Me: What does component X do?

Manager: I don't know.

Me: Is there a design docs for it?

Manager: I don't know. Can you check? Let me know when it is done.

*Wondering if I should joke and say "Oh management, hard job huh?"*

*Remembering how life is fucked up unfair and I need food to survive and house to live in and follow the society's rules and work hard to make the rich richer and shove money into their fat belly of greed...*

Me: OK.

Christmas lights were blinking randomly IN SECTIONS without any sort of "control brick", just with a plain wall plug and TWO wires coming out of it.

In this house we obey the laws of physics, I immediately called magic on this and started digging. I found out that was like five chains of lights wired in parallel, and every chain contained one special lamp that had a thin plate of some thermal-sensitive material inside. It heats up which makes it go straight, thus breaking its chain until it cools down enough to curl again and make the contacts touch.

Brilliant and really cheap way of making randomly blinking Christmas lights without any kind of controller, with just two wires and some physics. That's what I call "nocode".

Found this in my dad's house.

Looks as if he didn't used it.

Any one know how to install this somehow? (Even though it is impossible, probably)

Not to say anyone here is right or wrong about this, but I just do t get the whole privacy paranoia. Yes, I get that our rights are being violated. Yes I know I need to be aware and concerned.

People use specials rims, VPN software, etc... The bottom line is every keystroke, SMS, voice call, search text, historical reference... every piece of digital communication is recorded (At least in the US).

The sad reality is I can be as angry as I want, but unless I forego using tech or leaving the house, there is nothing I can do about it.

I await your comments, both positive and negative.

>Have 64gb memeory stick with software and precious memories (back ups of childhood pictures and stuff)
>Go to girlfriend's house
>Let her borrow it because she needed it for photography (pictures in the TrueCrypt file take only about a quarter of the drive)
>Get dumped by girlfriend after a while
>Shrug and be a little sad
>Find out that i dont have a local copy of what was there
>Don't have courage to ask for it back or even speak to her
>Cry because of now gone data
>Cry because no back ups.

Moral of the story is dont fuck with your back up and also, don't give people precious data, even the ones you trust at the time.

1 "Even though we divide our developers in cells (actual word used), our company's hierarchy is very horizontal."

2 "Sometimes we have to stay until later to get the job done"

3 "Covid has taught us that we shouldn't think of life and work as two separate things. They're one and the same"

4 "You can rack up points in the company to cash in for things like headphones!"

5 "We use this house as an office for our meetings. It's a big house."
----
1. That tells me you have no structure
2. Probably because you have no structure and you can't plan things out right.
3. you havin' a laugh? I'm all for not being a dick and socializing with colleagues every now and then but my free time is my own.
4. I'd rather you gave me more money.
5. Offices are a bit of a scam, but if you actually use a house as an office for a company that is supposed to have a presence in 3 different countries it makes me question how good you're doing at the moment.

---
I think I'm gonna pass if they don't ghost me.

*family dictionary*
Software developer (noun) : IT guy.

Individual who will know every issue you have with any electronic device in your house. He'll fix it.

My daughter made me two things:
1) She found a rock in the shape of an “alien” head. Knowing I love to research UFOs, she used nail polish to decorate the rock like an alien. And I just love it!

2) I have a reputation for being just like Charlie Brown with my luck in life. I also suck at math. Like, really, really bad. I was diagnosed with dyscalculia 22 years ago. It’s a running joke at our house such that I even have the t-shirt she depicts me wearing in this painting of “me” she did for my birthday.

My older brother just moved out today. For 18 years I've shared a room with him, and now he's gone. I have a ~30x10 foot room all to myself (it's the entire second floor of my house).

I do love that now I'm able to play music anytime, and with his stuff gone, it'll be less space taken up in general, that type of thing.

I've been in this room with him for over 8 years now, after my oldest brother moved out, and I've always had this feeling that one portion of the room was mine and the other portion was his. Now it's just...weird. I have both portions now. I have this whole big room to maintain myself. I don't have to worry about my stuff conflicting with his for whatever reason.

The past few weeks, when he's talked about moving out, I've always told him that I was looking forward to it, to having the whole room to myself. Now that he's gone, I just...can't. I can't bring myself to move his stuff that he hasn't taken over to the new house yet, or clean his part of the room.

When we were kids we didn't really get along, and I HATED sharing a room with him. But over time, as we grew up, we started to get along better, and for the past couple years, we've always just talked in the middle of the night when we were both awake. And now he's gone (the new house is maybe a 10 minute drive away), and I know he's not coming back. I know that this whole space is mine now.

I'm gonna miss the talks in the middle of the night, and us keeping each other in check (whenever one of us isn't home in the middle of the night we tend to text each other like "bruh where the fuck you at"), and waking up in the middle of the night (when I'm able to actually fall asleep kinda early) to see him playing Skyrim or Fallout. Hell, even coming home from work or wherever to see him passed the fuck out.

I know that I'm gonna have to clean the whole room soon, and that I'll just have to get over it. I've always been the one in my family that doesn't really show emotion very often, unless I get angry, so when people were crying earlier, I just sat there with an emotionless look on my face. But that's also because I wasn't really feeling much at the time, it didn't really hit until I got home and came upstairs to my room. Hell, right now I'm sitting here just expecting to hear his car alarm as he locks his car like I normally hear every night.

So I have been working at the same company for five years, doing pretty much all the IT stuff. Sys admin, help desk, you name it. I've also developed a fair amount of in-house software for the company.

Today, I learned from a trusted source that they are actively interviewing people to replace me. I probably have a week, maybe two until I'm fired. To my knowledge I've done nothing to warrant this.

I've been looking around lately for a new job anyway, but without any sense of urgency. I have put in several applications with very few responses though.

I have 5 years experience doing this professionally and 15 total years of dev experience, but only a GED.

I'm not sure why I'm not getting any responses from my applications, but I'm pretty scared right now. I have a 5 month old baby, a wife and a teenager that all depend on me.

I don't know what to do...

We got an HTC Vive from my girlfriend’s brother two weeks ago. We’ve been enjoying it, playing games, looking at places to move, using it as a virtual vacation (since we haven’t left the house in months thanks to covid and sweltering heat), etc. It’s been amazing.

Today, my 1yo decided it would be great fun to wrap its cord in the exercise bike and spin the pedals (and therefore flywheel) as fast as he could. It ripped the headset band off, broke the plastic attachment, and tore the cables out. He also broke the pedal somehow.

So no more Vive.

We can probably get it fixed, but.
My heart hurts.

Well, fuck. The CTO of our startup decided to migrate data of our hundred thousand customers from a stable functioning platform to an in-house unstable platform with severe performance issues, to "save" costs, despite our repeated requests. He made us not have any contingency plans because he wanted to "motivate" us to complete the migration.

Result- we have a thousand customers reporting major issues daily, which is causing loss of revenue to both us and them. The company ran out of funding. Most of the team members were fired. And he's expecting the rest of us to magically fix everything. Dunno what kind of office politics is this, in which you're sabotaging Your Own company.

Looking for a new job now to get out of this hellhole. I really used to love this company. Feels sad to see it ruined like this.

!dev

So the ceiling in our (upstairs) laundry room started leaking. After some troubleshooting, we determined it was the A/C, and not the water pipes. (The house is cheap as hell and fucking stupid.) We did some troubleshooting and research, and tried fixing it ourselves; no luck. Cleaning the pipes from outside: no joy. Cleaning the pipes from inside: no access. The attic is ... small. Maybe half a small closet? and doesn’t give access to fucking anything. The builders must have installed everything before putting up the walls and ceilings, sealing everything off, because there is no access. It’s fucking stupid. Also, the usual maintenance openings aren’t even there either because why the fuck would they be?

But fucking whatever.

We called an a/c repair guy, who never showed. We assumed he was busy (it’s fucking hot), so we called him again the next day; two days later he showed.

Busy. Whatever.

Guy didn’t bring a ladder. Whatever, we have one right there in the hallway because we’ve been trying in vain to fix it.

Guy didn’t bring a wrench of any kind. Guy didn’t bring a screwdriver. Guy didn’t bring a bucket. Guy didn’t bring any pipe. Or any pipe sealant. Or fucking anything but his sagging fucking pants, fat belly, and fat stench. We had to supply everything, which fortunately we had on hand as we were already trying to fix it. Hoorah for being proactive.

Guy said he drained both primary and secondary pans. Somehow. Without access. I’m not even convinced it HAS a secondary pan. Guy said he cleaned out the pipes, too. From inside the house. Without access. Somehow. Maybe he did that from outside, without tools, while I was chasing the brats and someone else was watching the fat bastard. Who knows; I wasn’t with him most of the time.

When he was done, the guy said “pay whatever you think it’s worth” (or whatever). Fine, if he actually cleaned the pipes out and it isn’t leaking anymore, that’s great.

Guy leaves.

We go up to check. AND THE FUCKING A/C IS STILL LEAKING. BUT NOW IT’S FROM BEFORE THE PIPES, TOO. AND HALF AN HOUR LATER, THE LAUDRY ROOM CEILING IS ALSO LEAKING, WHICH MEANS THE PIPES ARE STILL LEAKING.

It turns out the asshole broke the pan.

We call him back, he goes blah blah blah, we send him a video. Drip, drip, drip.

His response?
“The pan must be rusted.” IT’S FUCKING PLASTIC.

“Oh, in that case, it’s probably a rusted coil that’s leaking.”

a) HOW DID YOU NOT KNOW IT WAS FUCKING PLASTIC IF YOU DRAINED IT?

b) THE COILS CARRY FREON, NOT WATER, AND THE A/C IS STILL WORKING. IF THERE WAS A LEAK, SHIT WOULD BE HOT. AND RANK. FREON SMELLS NASTY AND DOESN’T CAUSE IT TO RAIN IN THE FUCKING HOUSE.

REPLACING A COIL IS ALSO A $2000 FUCKING REPAIR.

THE FAT BASTARD PROBABLY BROKE THE PAN INTENTIONALLY JUST TO UPSELL. I WANT TO FUCKING MURDER HIS LYING FUCKING FACE OFF.

It’s possible he didn’t break the pan intentionally, so I’ll tentatively remove that from his charges. BUT TO FUCKING LIE?

LIE AND DIE, FUCKER.

Me at midnight: let's release a demo build

Me at 1 am: why are there so many bugs? Why won't it compile.

Me at 2 am: omg finally compiled. Runs it, buttons don't work. Closes it, reopens it. Buttons work.

Me at 3 am: let's write apologetic posts for the bugs, but post the version anyway

Me at 4 am: why do I advertise in so many places

Me at 5 am: let's update the patreon reward tiers

Me at 5:30 am: nah fuck this, going to bed.

Mom at 9 am: wake the hell up we need you to dig out a hill and build a stone wall around one side of the house.

Me: omg wtf why.

Me at 2:30 pm: why the hell are we doing this, I have so many bugs to patch and everyone knows they are there because I told them all!

Got invited to a friend's house for supper.he asks me ,why don't I see you online on Facebook these days
And do you have an Instagram account
Me:yeah but have never used it actively
Friend: Twitter
Me:yeah but also don't use it actively ,in fact haven't logged on for months or even years
Friend:wow.u live under a rock.what social networks do u use actively
Me:devrant,quora
Friend:wat da hell are those.
Me: social networks which u would most probably get roasted on

Warning: American perspective of some shit that happens in America that I do not know if it is the same in other places of the world.

I got a notification from my child's school saying that she has been selected for doing <bs activity> between the hours of 1-3 and that parent cooperation is expected. I called the institution and told them that she would not be participating. They asked me WHY, to which I answered that said schedule does not align with my daily schedule. They continue to press as to WHY she would not make it to which I added in a very harsh tone: "because I am fucking working and my wife is fucking working, what age do you think it is? the 1950s in which I can have some meaningless desk job and pay for a house that would be worth half a mil now a days when my wife stays at home all day and just goes with whatever whim y'all have?"

Needless to say, she is no longer in said activity group, but this seems to be very frequent inside of school systems in the U.S, they really ain't evolved much.

No, wait, they have, we have active shooter trainings now, that shit is semi-new.

This guest at our house was checking out the whiteboard in my room. It had some JavaScript code i wanted to keep in mind and some ReactJs stuff

Him: you know, I can recommend you a book, if you're into reading?
Me: well, I don't have that much time to read, I prefer online tutorials

(We're interrupted at that point)
(Later at dinner)

Me: which book were you gonna recommend me btw
Him: there's this psychology book I'm reading...
Me: oh.

Woke up this morning to the message below:

"I have [ insert name ]'s old laptop. Can you please have a look at it , i mean to see if it can be fixed.It seems fine."

Long story short.. Windows 10 out, Elementary OS in! While I enjoy this pizza at the same time. Funny thing is, the time taken to install Elementary OS was shorter than the time Windows was taking to update this laptop..oh well, another old PC joins the Linux laptops in the house.

At a previous job, we had a CTO and in a meeting of all the department heads, we all realized we have a CTO that knows about as much about tech as the pigeons do.

I’d always seen the confused emoji, I however never knew an actual human being could look like it, I’ve seen confused people, but on this day I saw a living 🤔…

How did I manage to achieve this result, I told him you can’t copy AngularJS code into a Flutter project, I then proceeded to tell him you also cannot copy it into a react project. I think I broke his brain.

Oh and yes, I worked at a development house, all the department heads were developers except for the QA head.

It was not me doing the screaming but one of my colleagues. He is a super programmer and joined our team early this year as my partner on frontend development.

We're a React/React Native dev house and he has always been uncomfortable with how loose it goes here because of dynamic typing. He has been advocating typescript and Angular since he started and I even allowed him to use typescript on one of the projects.

A month back I started to make jokes about how dead angular was (trigger alert) and he almost lost it. We are good friends so he as been taking it in good spirits.

Last week our boss allowed him a chance to propose a Tech stack for a new project. Naturally he started comparing Angular vs React. I chime in to trigger him again with "why would we work with a bloated zombie framework", he picked up his chair and almost threw it at me while screaming " React is just hacky ". I was laughing so hard and in the end we both did some research. We are proposing Jquery to our boss... (Evil laugh)

!dev

So, the house next door to me is being renovated into half a dozen apartments. This process has been ongoing for like 4 years of here-and-there houseflipper failboating, and if I had to guess, 3 owners worth of this fuckery.

The latest shitheel trying to polish this turd into something saleable has had it sit partially covered with plastic for months, mostly getting rained on. One crew came by last week and put half the thermal shielding up before something happened and they left. Then half of it fell off the house, into my yard. Nice person that I am I gathered it all up and left it in the various excavated pools of water on their property in which I can only imagine they are busily raising farm to table mosquitoes for the local market.

FF to today and I see a crew pull up to the house and start nailing plywood to the side of the house with no thermal pad underneath it. Which is a legit code violation and a mold hazard, but yolo amirite? I chat up some of the guys and find out that they were scheduled to install the plywood today (apparently he'd run out of money for the nice modular siding they used on the back half) and the owner didn't give a shit if the rest of the work was done. Meanwhile shit is still falling off the house onto my house, but also wgaf. 🚬

Tl;Dr the people trying to flip the house next to mine were obviously IT managers in a previous life.

Note that the example tags for rants includes Xcode... There is a reason.

In 1984 Apple introduced Macintosh and we got a computer that could barely handle multiple windows on the screen. But by 1986 multiple windows all over the place.

In 1985 Microsoft introduced Window 1.0 Yes boys and girls, no "s" because it hand only one Window. 7 years later in 1992 Microsoft got their head out of their ass and produced "MDI" or Multiple Document Interface and woohoo, had multiple windows on the screen... big boy pants 8 years after Mac.

Today we have Xcode from Apple. The old Window 1.0 engineers are apparently alive and well as Xcode is a One Window Trick Pony and if you fight with it, it starts randomly jamming your separate Windows into tabs into one window, completely fucking up your spatial organization of your working source code.

It is like the bastards going into a blind man's house and re-arranging his furniture for fun.

Xcode - it's only free if your time is worth absolutely nothing.

My life could get worse, but it's really shitty now.

Suffering from a serious back injury since last year, my health has been not so positieve lately.
It put a toll on my mood, which in turn asked it's price regarding my relationship. Needless to say that did not go well. Already a fe months single but we kept in touch.

Three days ago my back injury returned, and was unable to lead a normal life. Constant pain, coyld not even move in the house. Even going to the toilet was a terrible experience because when you move, you're in a world of pain.

I asked my ex girlfriend to help me, since she was the only one having a key to my house.

When she arrived i hoped to have some moral support and to help me mive around, ensuring i would not injure myself any more.

Instead i received the cold shoulder. When she wanted to help pe up she did it a bit too hard and the pain sheered thrpughout my body. Screaming in pain.

She promptly left, leaving keys behind.

The hardest part is that she just left without me being able to explain clearly why i screamed. She thought i was yelling at her while in reality i was yelling due to the immense pain.

After that i had to cut ties forever. Tabula rasa. So i removed everything that is related to that time and locked it in my vault.

Since then i can hardly focus, my mibd is numb and i cannot think straight. The alcohol and other sedatives are probably also involved, but still i feel my life is a mountain of depressing shit.

Needed to vent. And yes i post this because i have a need for some understanding, yes for now i crave for some attention and some encouraging, supportive words. I'm left With no other options since the person i wanted it from the most has simply left... And the fact i am unable to actually be social outside...

Fuck friends and relationships, right?

Literally anything but work with computers, I think. They ask my brother to fix anything technical in the house and ignore it when he fails. They haven't been able to watch TV in six months. When I suggest that my (well-intentioned but mostly nonverbal) sibling probably shouldn't go into development, they tell me I don't know my own job. I suspect they're convinced I do graphic design.

I write C++ applications that run physical simulations and sometimes train AI models for pattern recognition and highlighting unusual incoming files.

They suggested I go to an undergrad program for data science. I already *do* data science for money and I already have an undergrad degree. 🙄

I've accomplished something I thought I'd never do.
I convinced my boss to switch from SVN to Git. (before SVN we've even been using CVS if someone remembers)
Only requirement: it needs to stay in house and I'm the one setting up the server, writing documentation and teach everyone how to use it.

What? Why should I setup the server? Don't we have someone whose job it is to... OK ok... I'll do it.

So after some painstaking arguments with the guy whose job it should have been to do that, I've managed to install a virtual machine running Gitlab.

Long story short: I've just found out about the joys of mail configuration to send E-Mails to established mail providers. Every... single... one of them has a different problem with the way the mails are sent.
Fml

I think I'm going to ask that guy again to use our mail servers SMTP. There should be a possibility to use my gitlabs domain for that somehow.
Really looking forward to Monday. Ugh...

!dev

I gave this damn fly three chances. Once, when it came into my room to leave on its own. Once when I captured it and let it go outside of my window. And once when I found it on one window, opened the other and shooed it with a shoe to leave.

And it came back.

And that was it. My mercy was over.

So I'm sorry it's dead now. It fought bravely. But nobody gets to live in my house without paying me rent or hugs.

RIP fly.

Also, fucks sake, it is the fly season again? Urghhhhh!

A certain, reasonably sized company had a large in house payment system to handle all their client purchases that was developed many, many years ago. All the devs that developed it had left, and as it "just worked" they hadn't seen fit to get anyone to update or maintain it since.

That was all fine until it suddenly (and completely) stopped working one sunny afternoon.

After paying a small fortune for one of the original devs to come back and look at it, turns out the payment API it was based on had been retired. Warnings of deprecation had been sent out 18 months prior, but they had just been ignored, as the secretary receiving them after the devs left had no idea what it meant.

Freelance project I was working on was deployed. Without my knowledge. At 11pm. Their in-house "tech guy" thought that the preview build i gave them was good enough for deployment. Massive bug, broke their api endpoints.
Got a call at 2 in the morning,asking for a fix. I told them how it was their fault and the App they deployed had TESTING written right on the main screen.
They promised additional payment to get me to fix it asap.
Went through the commit history (thank goodness their tech guy knew git, fuck him for committing on production though) and the crash reports.
Removed three lines. All became right with the world again. 😎

Since I already posted images of my desktop setups at work(Mac) and home(Linux), I didn't want to repost this week. So, to keep it at least mildly interesting, here's a shot of my garage networking setup.

Pictured:
Ubiquiti Edgerouter-L
Ubiquiti UAP-AC Lite
Drobo 5N
TP-Link cable modem
A big UPS, so we'll still have wifi during a power outage, since that's apparently important
A couple of older machines I'm working on when I have time
A Philips Hue Bridge
An unremarkable 7-port switch
An Ooma phone device
A shitload of my wife's stuff that she's left there on her way in and out of the house.

Some years ago our company site was hosted by a prick who knew nothing and started to pretend the server got a virus or whatever.

I tested their server and figured out they did not have any firewall policies going on like mitigation of ssh brute force.

It was at this time I learned about SYN flood, and boy I flooded that port 80 of them.

The company site went down for as long as I wanted.

It was great because now we manage it in house and never had a problem anymore.

I've never been a fan of "wireless" technologies.

Whether it's a keyboard, mouse, gamepad. Nope none of it. The latency, need to change batteries (if any), chances of putting the accessories in places other than your gaming desk thus creating clutter around your house.

And earphones, HOLY CRAP. You cannot convince me that any sort of Bluetooth earphones have better sound quality than my wired 3.5mm Sennheiser earphones.

I'd rather take wires and get quality content consumption over Bluetooth/Wireless for a little "convenience".

Few months back, one of my good but non-dev friend came to visit me.

He: I've done a website in HTML. Can you help me make it responsive.

Without a second thought, I agreed.

*Opened the file in editor*

<tables> <tables> <tables> <tables>

I kicked him out of my house without a second thought.

Unsurpisingly, an in-house client reported a visual bug in IE. So I candidly asked him which version of browser he was running. He told me with confidence: 11. As I couldn't reproduce the bug I asked him where he found the version number. He answered: "below the laptop on a sticker".
Well, it happened to be the year of construction of the computer.

!dev && rant
Temperature causing temper!!!

Summer 2009...
Me: Dad, can me and sis go swim in the pool?
Dad: No son, you can only swim if it's 25°C or higher.
Which in practice meant that we could only swim a few days each summer. Average in Belgium used to be about 21°C.

Spring 2019, my younger siblings...
Little sis: Mom, can we go swim in the pool?
Mom: Lol sure, it's only April but it's already way hot enough.. and during summer it'll be too hot to do the work on setting up the pool anyway.

Winter 2029, in Antarctica...
Me, to my children: During my old days my children, we had this thing called snow!! And we lived in the wasteland that used to be the glorious Europe, back when it was still habitable.. you should've seen it, now it's a desert, but back then it was awesome!
My children: Mum!! He's acting senile again, and talking about things that don't exist!!!

Coming to the crux of the problem right now, fuck me.. I'm tired as fuck but can't sleep because already in the fucking spring, my house is too fucking hot to be able to sleep without sweating like a pig!!!
AaaaaAAAAA 😣

We had given my mom a phone recently, I found out that she never used it for the reason we gave it to her, and that is to be accessible whenever she leaves the house, Instead she kept the phone at our house and when in the house be always connected to the WiFi and watch WhatsApp videos and stuff that her old college/School friends sent. I had to give her a lecture for half an hour as to why she wasn't using the phone for what it is intended to do and threatened her to disconnect from the WiFi if she did this again. Damn! This teenage stuff again.

!rant

TL;DR: "Gather all resources before working on any project and committing to the client... & over smartness can be deadly"

Couldn't stop my laughter after reading this one.

A new vacuum salesman knocked at the door….

A lady opened it. Before she could speak... The salesman rushed into the living room and emptied a bag of cow dung on the carpet.

Salesman: - Madam, if I couldn't clean this up in the next 3 mins with my new powerful vacuum cleaner, I will EAT all this!!

Lady: Do you need Chili Sauce with that?

Salesman: - Why Madam?

Lady: - Because there's no electricity in the house...!!!

😂😂😂

First story (not rant) :3

So I was asked to set problems for an online programming contest for my college (I'm a sophomore)

The participants were students from my college.

Teacher told me "make as hard as you can"

I gave it my all.

:|

1 person solved the first question. Nobody solved the other four. :|

Not sure if I should be proud or sad.

And if you're wondering - here was my first question -

Sam wants to invest in real estate. He's got X dollars to spend. He knows the expected value per square meter of a given property. He knows the coordinates of the vertices of the polygon shaped properties he's interested in.

(both the values and coordinates for each property are given in input)

Find the maximum return on investment he can get.

(answer is, basically you calculate the area of each polygonal house using half the vector cross product, multiply it with their expected value per square meter, and then apply a dynamic programming - knapsack approach)

;-; I really thought it was a nice question man. ;-; I put so much thought into others too. ;-;

Got ignored. ;-;

You know you’ve been putting in too many extra hours when you try to use your house key on the office lock and it takes you 30 seconds to realize what’s wrong...

Dear client:
You have to think this is like building a house, so you have to spend time doing some serious thinking, so you come up with a (somewhat) good vision of what you want and what could possible change in the future... let me give you an example: let's say we were building a house and we are very close to finishing it, so you come up with the great idea of putting the kitchen where the living room is, and the bathroom in the second floor where the TV room was... if that happens, then I would tell you to go fuck yourself.
See dear client... there are pipes, wiring, and all sorts of stuff you don't see, that makes a house be a house... apply the same logic to building software and we'll be on the same page more often.
PS: I appreciate your business

New job surprise: I will inherit a 900k lines of php code from a contractor dev shop. It is the company erp web app.
It has no version control, tests, architecture or configuration management of any kind.
There are just 1800 bug ridden files with almost no comments in a directory with lots of code duplication.
Also just learned that the contractor was paid a lot monthly for over 2 years for this monster.

I will need a raise quickly. At least management understands that I will need a couple of months to get a semblance of order in this madness.

And to you contractor I have your address and i'll try to restraint myself from vandalizing your house but I can't make any promises.

And fellow developers send help or beers or come and join me to teach this bastard a lesson.

if there's one thing I love more than coding, it's using metaphors to explain to other people why they're not "getting it". like the all famous contractor:

"yeah I know you need 5 months to build my house, but can you do it in 2. Also, I'm going to pay half. Oh, and when the house is done, could you also add a cellar?"

any more good metaphors out there?

CEO: What are your plans for these hollidays?

Me: Clean up the house. I haven't had much time because we've had some busy last few months.

CEO: Seriously? Are you joking? (I could see in his eyes, "why would a talented programmer ever waste their time doing menial housework...") I mean, you could be working instead and earning a couple more bucks...

(Fuck him, none of his business...)
Me: I can't delay it this time. My wife has dust allergies.

CEO: Oh. Ok. I get it. When I was a kid, my father and I had some serious dust allergies. The house maid had to clean everything thoroughly at least once a week.

Not surprised...

I love it when people make a mistake and break something on their website then act as tho the are losing millions of pounds every second like they are going to have to remortgage their house "life is over", if it's not fixed in 30 seconds the world will end!

Then you look at their website and you think they probably have about two users every week, and the website looks like it has been built by a one armed monkey. Delusional

I just realized with this pandemic it's better to live in a dirt-cheap country, in a house you own, have a second hand car, work as a dev from home, become good with tools in your spare time, grow your own food in the garden.
Fuck this impossible system with it's promises of finding a cure and it's high pay but high taxes and expensive rent for living in a shitty rented apartment with no friends around, nothing to do than watch YouTube and play video games and be depressed half the time, then die because of lack of phisical activity.
I used to think countries that had good infrastructure were the best. Now public transportation is the worst idea around here, since no one wears masks and pretends all is well.
This is actually a decision I need to take next week. If you believe things will "get back to normal" please give me your input as it is valuable to me.

Woo-hoo!!! Yoda is in da house! Or to say it in his own words: "Truly wonderful, the mind of a child is."

So, we’ve a small UK based dev team, we follow good practices and get good results. But ‘they’ want to deploy quicker (it was suggested we skip the test phases...) but don’t want to invest in more staff.
So their suggestion is to outsource development to Bangladesh and have us in-house devs work on discovery and innovation.
I’m uncomfortable with this as it feels they are thinking they can get quicker and cheaper dev done abroad (which I hate as it feels disrespectful to my fellow dev brothers n’ sisters).
Also disjointed as in my experience planning and dev’ing work best when you can talk face-to-face.
Thoughts?

The only thing more dangerous than an alcoholic short-term-memory-challenged non-technical throw-you-under-the-bus IT director with self-esteem issues that are sporadically punctuated by delusions of superiority is one who fears for his job. Submitted for your inspection: a besotted mass of near-human brain function who not only has a 50 person IT department to run, but has also been questioned by the business owners as to what he actually does. So he has decided to show them. He has purchased a vendor product to replace a core in-house developed application used to facilitate creating the product the business sells. The purchased software only covers about 40 percent of the in-house application's functionality, so he is contracting with the vendor to perform custom development on the purchased product (at a cost likely to be just shy of six-figures) so that about 90 percent of existing functionality will be covered. He has asked one of his developers (me) to scale down the existing software to cover the functionality gaps the purchased software creates. There is no deployment plan that will allow the business to transition from the current software to the new vendor​-supplied one without significantly hurting the ability of the business to function. When anyone raises this issue he dismisses it with sage musings such as, "I know it will be painful, but we'll just have to give the users really good support." Because he has no idea what any of his staff actually does, he is expecting one of his developers (again, unfortunately, me) to work with the vendor so that the Frankensoftware will perform as effectively as the current software (essentially as a project manager since there will be no in-house coding involved). Lastly, he refuses to assign someone to be responsible for the software: taking care of maintenance, configuration, and issue resolutions after it has been rolled out. When I pointedly tell him I will not be doing that (because this is purchased software and I am not a system admin or desktop engineer) he tells me, "Let me think about this." The worst part is that this is only one of four software replacement initiatives he is injecting himself into so he can prove his worth to the business owners. And by doing so he is systematically making every software development initiative akin to living in Dante's Eighth Circle. I am at the point where I want to burn my eye out with a hot poker, pour salt into the wound, and howl to the heavens in unbearable agony for a month, so when these projects come to fruition, and I am suffering the wrath of the business owners, I can look back on that moment I lost my eye and think "good times."

Crazy weather in here. There is a little sandstorm. It's pretty windy, even the outdoor advertisement letters are moving and the sky is brown :v

The thing is that, in order to go back home, I must walk 4 or 5 blocks (from the place one of my co-workers can leave me), but with this wind I'm afraid of getting sand in my eyes (I don't have glasses). Another option is to take an Uber to my house, but it takes too long to arrive to the office.

What can I do? Do I take the Uber or do I run to my house?

Ever lose a laptop? I did. 13 days ago. at the airport in security. left it behind because I had two with me, which I don’t usually do. i just realized YESTERDAY that it was missing. someone come to my house and shoot me. because i’m too stoopid to live.

Shootout to my 2.5GB Maxtor hard drive, that I heavily used between 1997 and 2001. There were no USB drives, and CD burners were too expensive for consumers. So I used to open my PC case, remove the drive (along with Windows and my software), bring it around at my friend's house and have fun while copying hundreds of mp3s, patiently downloaded from filesharing and 56k modems or ripped from CD audio, in and out.

One time it fell out from my desk, hitting hard floor big time. I thought I lost it forever, and basically my whole PC in it. Then I tried plugging again its IDE and power connectors, and it was still working! ... well, half of it. That badass still continued to work with one of its two platters crashed, and got some more mp3s with it.
Maybe I still have it...

Was busy today doing some house work. Everything was normal till afternoon.

Me thinking of using laptop noticed that there was no laptop

My office laptop and another bag was stolen from my home .

It had most of the production details and source code. Running behind police for help now.

Informed my boss too about this incident.

Will update on what happens tomorrow in office.

Fuck that person who stole my office laptop and destroyed my Peace.

So today I found a way to break into any Apple Mac (provided the exploit hasn't been fixed by the owner) and access all private files, as long as I have physical access to it, in less than 5 minutes.

After finding this, a quick Google on the method reveals this has been a workaround for years.

And to think I once praised Apple for their security standards.

Edit: this was done to an in-house Mac that my company own, and had been password locked by a member of staff who had been fired, but held important company documents on the computer. It was in no way a breach of privacy.

our tester arguing with software house about blocker severity bug

SH: "No, this bug is not possible. It's possible only when you are logged as admin in other tab"

T: "I managed to replicate it in another browser in private mode"

SH: "But you can't replicate the bug now"

T: "True that I don't know steps to replicate it and it occurs just sometimes... Let me check right now"

...

T: "Okay, I managed to replicate it right now in private mode in other browser on normal user account"

SH: "Because you are admin"

They are pretending to be idiots or just are?

Oh sweet mother of god.
What is the NBN Connection i have attached to my router?

It goes "give me all your data... NOW"
I'm not used to such speed in my house, excuse me while I watch my porn collection in 4K!

Continued from previous post.

The man with hoodie walked down a dark alley. At distance, a house which looked haunted stood. As he entered the house he sighed a relief. Once inside, he descends to the basement where an old computer sat. He turned on the computer and smiled. The screen showed a prompt. With fews keystrokes, a series of scripts begin to execute. Finally at the bottom, a text blinked.
"Awaiting Connection........"

The CPU was recovered from rubble and brought to General's office as per his order. It was connected to a power source and it started to boot. A prompt showed up. A man in suit, suggested perhaps it expected a login. The General sat on his chair smoking a cigar thinking on what action must be taken next.

While men in suit discussed about the CPU, someone plugged in a LAN cable. The General who was lost in thought, saw this from corner of his. A moment passed. General sprang from his chair, hurling his cigar to the floor. As men in suits, looked at the General's display of athletic behavior they sensed the tension. Everyone turned to the CPU now connected to LAN now.

Far way, the screen on hooded man computer showed. "Connected".
A series of scripts started to execute.
Cold wind was all that could be heard out side the General's office building and the house, where hooded man sat in the dark.

Little anecdote from my in-house it:

"Our passwords are safe because we change them every 3 months and they have to contain uppercases, lowercases, numbers and special characters. 6 digit length is enough and can't be hacked."

how many docker lovers in the house?? Why do you love it?

I'm starting my new job in 10 days, but I don't have the proper internet access to feel really confident about it. My parents want me to move out of the house so they don't have to accommodate for my new job. I'm getting chemo in a few weeks. I'm really sick of fighting shit. Trusting in the plan though.

my family is fucking weird. and by weird I mean we have nothing in common, like people make make milk baby jokes and I am like "that totally makes sense!".

anyway my self proclaimed luddite sister and her annoyingly hipster husband recently purchased 300 acres of land in the middle of fucking nowhere with an old farm house on it. my family is always bugging my wife and I to come out and visit on the weekends. so last weekend I relented and we went out. apparently their idea of a good time is wandering through the woods ( I guess a trip to microcenter was to much to ask?). fast forward and I am now covered. COVERED in chigger bites. it is so bad that I have had to shave my legs then cover them in allow & lidocaine and wrap them up in gauze. FUCK THIS SHIT🤕😤🤕

Inspiration to code kicks in!

Kids asleep, everybody’s asleep, house is quiet. The kind of peace ive always wanted and wished! (Parents here will understand.)

Get to my laptop, opened up code editor, start fresh and clean! Created new file, about to type my first code and.........blood dripping from my nose. It doesn’t stop there, its like flowing for a while!

I noticed it keeps flowing while im projecting the inner excitement to code. When my mind drifted a bit, the nose bleeding stops. Wth? Its like my body is ejaculating when im excited to code, yeah.. it ls blood shot out of my nose, wtf!

...and i have to stop what im doing. Then the ideas just spoofly gone. Suddenly i dont know why im staring at an empty code editor.. (what was im about to code again?) i totally cant recall, it simply gone. Damn it. That could be a million dollar apps! Wish i can go back to an hour ago and record myself when i received that historic inspirational moment. 😔

So a non programmer friend of mine needed an in house time tracking tool and found one on codecanyon. He bought it for 40$ and asked me if I could provide him some Webspace to host it until they deploy it in house. I said yes and took a look at the code as some stuff wasn't really working. All I can say is "wtf is that pile of crap". Nothing works, it looks like it's written by a first grader and it's UI looks like it was assembled by a chimp (well actually I think chimpanzees could make a better UI). Now I am interested the progress of rewriting that tool for him and I am almost done with all functions that thing should have and even more after 6 hours. I wonder if all stuff on codecanyon has the same quality and if, I am considering this as bonus income...

Well my home office is a proper mess currently. It isn't so much an office as a corner desk in the child's nursery, but house hunting went on hold.

It features the likes of my devrant ducky, crazy aarons thinking putty, a stuffed gnu, and a galileo thermometer among other paraphernalia; also a plastic goat that screams when I push down on it. That last one is a huge help to me these last few weeks.

Not dev related.

I am fucking tired of the house buying process in the England. Honestly it is such shambles that I don't think I have ever encountered anything like this. Nothing is ever predictable, everything and everone works at random timescale and nobody gives a fuck of you as a buyer even if you are paying crazy money. Apparently we are meant to be moving next Monday but contracts haven't been exchanged, my mortgage broker gave incorrect solicitors details to the bank so they are having to redo some paperwork, the buyer of our current place has not responded for last week to confirm the date, the seller we are buying from has been jumping up and down to exchange and here I am with no certainty.

My anxiety and frustration levels are through the roof for last 10 days. I can't wait for it all to be over. I don't think I am ever buying another house unless the process changes. Just needed to vent my frustration somewhere

Levels of tech awareness:

0: Doesnt use tech at all
1: Uses tech only for work
2: Uses it for films/gaming
3: Has alexa/google home
4: Uses smart home system
5: Has a loaded shotgun under the pillow, which is used to shoot the only piece of tech in the house (a printer from 2004) when it makes an unexpected noise!

Oh my God I fucking hate humidity

I've been without power for over 40 hours now. It's no big deal, but the fucking humidity makes it so fucking hot on my house and every fucking building.

It's about a nice and cool 70° f outside, but I'm still drenched in fucking sweat. Hopefully the power will be on soon.

When your wife doesn't understand the concept of working remotely and keeps asking you to put up flat pack that has been in the corner for a few days because you really don't want to put it up. Just because I am sat on the sofa with my laptop on my lap watch the whole series of west world does not mean I am not working. Working from your own house makes you lose your alpha male role pretty quickly when they realise what you really do. Perhaps I should put up the flat pack knock down a wall or something have a break from socket.io!

When the house is one fire, and all the devs are running in circles, trying to fix it, and you overhear the PM (while prepearing your 8th cup of coffee) complaining on their phone, about how hard he/she has to work, because the devs fucked up... priceless.

Ok, time to eat some humble pie. I seem to remember ranting about the fact we were going to use an offshore dev house a while back, and I'd convinced myself they were going to be absolutely useless.

Far from it. It's certainly meant I've had something else to do in managing them, and I can't say everything has been completely rosy - but overall, they're a bunch of hard working, decent devs who write good, well-tested code, are receptive to feedback in code reviews and take the initiative and ask questions when they need to. Shame on me for initially thinking otherwise - I'll miss working with them when I leave this place.

Yesterday my cousin called me to fix his scanner, he said that it didn't work anymore. When i went to his house to check it out, the scanner worked properly! In the 99% of cases, the problem is between the device and the chair

We developed this website plus custom CMS for an university. I told them that we could host the entire system and take care of it for an annual fee but they decided to host it in house because security. The IT guy didn't ask for my public key, he sent me a password. By email. Less than 8 characters long. Only recognizable abbreviated words. And a dot.

Fuck me sideways. I work for a small business doing most of their IT work, a lot of which is in-house software development. Today I was working on a feature of our employee schedule system that I wrote and for the last couple of hours, my laptop (which is my dev machine) kept freezing up on me every ten minutes or so... 😬

Well, I finally found the cause, but only after running apt-get update/upgrade to see if updating fixed the issue. I haven't updated in a LONG time... Productivity is not on the agenda for today I suppose.

My mom (a single mother who had to feed 4 kids) feed me, let me stay in her house (at least until I was 21) and let me use the motorcycle.
Instead of running away and giving up her children to child institution (because that's probably what I will do being a selfish person that I am)
If that's not support, I don't know what that is anymore.
It might not be much but at least it gave me the time to grew up and be independent to pursue my dream of working in IT.

Her strength and toughness facing the hard life is also the main inspiration for me to keep going, to prove that I can do whatever I want if I put enough effort on it.

My First !Experience : Disappointment with a computer

My mum kept tons of floppies but we didnt have a computer at home. Went to my friends house, who had one, and had Encarta 95 (its like a fun wikipedia for kids). When I mentioned I had floppies, he asked for one, since he didnt have one. We copied Encarta to that floppy hoping we would cheat in the next computer science test. We even tested it.

After we were certain that all works (you should know we were surprised that it could fit in one floppy), we got to school, put the disk in and voila

we had copied a shortcut :)

## Building my own router

IT HAS ALREADY PAID OFF!!!!!

So I (with my fam) have evacuated from the capital of Lithuania into a distant place - much smaller, where average age is prolly >30 or even >40 years. I live in a village now. In a house with very good neighbours. In fact these neighbours own that house :D

Back to the point.

So these neighbours used to share their wifi (w/ internet) between the two houses. They have the line, the mian router has quite a strong antenna and that other house has 2 repeaters: 1 on the outside wall and another one -- indoors. Sepeaters are connected sequentially, i.e. the indoors one is repeating the outdoors one. ikr....?

The first day was alright. We settled in, got everything set up wifi-wise. Peachy.

The second day repeaters refused to issue a DHCP IP. That's something, right? Alright, nvm - I don't mind setting up static IPs. In fact I prefer them over the DHCP magic!

And by the noon both repeaters were connectable but neither of them could provide internet connection... We that sucks! I restarted both of them a few times, neighbours restarted their main router -- still no luck.

Here comes my router [God am I happy with this purchase and the whole idea of a customized router!!! Thanks @hakx20!].

I brought it outside, plugged it in. Connected to it through it's hotspot, used nmcli to connect to neighbours' main router with an internal wifi card (that shitty mPCIe operating in USB mode. yes, the same one, manufactured in 2003. Yes, in g mode.). A couple of iptables rules for traffic forwarding et voila! I have built my own repeater! And tomorrow I can WFH w/o any issues.

Yes, hardware routers are faster and easier to maintain. Yes, hardware routers are cheaper and usually have nicer bells and whistles. But when hardware fails you and the last thing you want is going to the public (shop), soldering rod won't help you. A software solution becomes the easiest to set up, considering you know how to.

Boi am I so happy about my purchase! CentOS router FTW!

P.S. even though we've fled the city we are responsible citizens and we've self-quarantined ourselves for the 14 days period. No local person any closer than 10 meters for the whole period until we're cleared. Being away from the city gives us sooo much freedom! Especialy now, when cities are shitting bricks in fear.

When I was in college I was working on a game in Java using Slick2D. My folks were away on holiday so I had the ability to drink in the house (I was over 18). I worked on this coursework piece whilst drinking.

The next morning I went into college with my work and found that it had a massive memory leak that was included by the work that I’d done whilst under the influence.

The issue was fixed (quite easily tbh) but everyone in my class reminded me for the rest of the year...

Not particularly dev related but I do need to rant.

Parents are here to visit, it's lovely to see them. Unfortunately I have a small ass 1 bed flat because rent and house prices are stupid high where I work. I'm sleeping in the living room on an air bed, the fridge/freezer is noisy and about 3 foot from my head so I've been turning it off over night. It didn't get plugged in this morning so shit's getting thrown out. I sleep maybe 5 hours, wake up at 1 too hot, 4 too cold then mother comes in at 6 with the dogs. 3rd night of this. I've taken holiday even though I don't have much to spare because there's no way in fuck I can work feeling like this, I'm a dev and need to be able to think and do intelligent things ffs.

It's nice to see family but it's nice to have my own space too.

It was sometime in 2009. I kept seeing these ads for something called Bitcoin. I had some extra cash, so I decided to buy $100 worth. I had my debit card out, and was trying to figure out how it worked. Got distracted with a work email, and decided to put it off until later. I forgot all about it until around 2013 when I read about some guy that bought a house using $70 worth of Bitcoin he bought in 2009.

I know I’m not the only Numpy lover in the house. It deserves its own song…I’m pretending I haven’t already written one…

I got a last minute request to do an app a day before going to my hometown which is basically a village. Thought I would complete it there using Internet from my mobile Hotspot. Turns out I was not even getting 2g network.

Then I discovered that if I sat at one particular corner of my house I would get 1 bar of some unprotected WiFi of some neighbouring home. Ended up uploading and downloading all changes sitting in an awkward position in some corner for all changes for almost a whole day.

Today was a good day.

I was told to use in-house BitBucket runners for the pipelines. Turns out, they are LinuxShellRunners and do not support docker/containers.

I found a way to set up contained, set up all the dependencies and successfully run my CI tasks using dagger.io (w/o direct access to the runner -- only through CI definition yaml and Job logs in the BitBucket console).

Turns out, my endeavour triggered some alerts for the Infra folks.

I don't care. I'm OOO today. And I hacked their runners to do what I wanted them to do (but they weren't supposed to do any of it). All that w/o access to the runners themselves.

It was a good day :)))))
Now I'll pat myself on my back and go get a nice cup of tea for my EOD :)

"Did you manage to reproduce this issue in-house?"

Yes, off course we managed to reproduce your fucking random reboot issue that happen to two in thousand customers and might happend just after boot of after several hours or days or not at all when you, as you said yourself, were doing nothing. While at it we also turned lead to gold, water to wine and resurected Elvis (although he is a little bit grumpy and mumbles something about brains).

Based on @darksideofyay "poll feature" request I made a simple bot to make them.

Just post this as a comment:
@PollBot Q: <Your question>?
A:
- <Answer 1>
- <Answer 2>

// Up to 10 answers
It will post a comment for each answer, just upvote the one you like (look at the upvotes to see the result of the poll).

P.S. It's not ideal and it's running on a mini PC in my house, so it could fail sometimes. :P

I was giving a demo for a university project. It was a simulation of a bunch of healthcare robots in a 3D world.

When the demo started, two of the robots attempted to path through the front door at the same time and promptly got stuck on each other. We were allowed to manually unstick them, so we did so.

Once they were going again, they decided to not to turn down the hallway like they were supposed to. Instead, they drove through one of the walls of the house and continued until they disappeared of the screen.

We never saw them again.

I have a dream that I will find a group of programmers that enjoy their craft and we are able to bond together and create the coolest shit we want and monetize it. We will inspire programmers to overthrow corporate America. We will all live in a big house and everyone will have their different hobbies and we can learn from each other and work on whatever we want to do each day. We will have unlimited dried mangoes, chocolate chips, and chips n salsa. We will create a kingdom.

So ever since I was a kid I've been terrified of being submerged in water. A couple times I've gone up to my friend's dad's lake house, and the most I've done there is like put my foot in the water before I got scared.

But today I was at a coworker's grad party, and they had a pool in the yard, and he convinced me to get in. His words were "get in or I'll throw you in", and that got me right in there. It scared the FUCK out of me, but I did it. After that everyone was splashing water all over me, trying to get my hair wet.

Overall, great time, but I'm still scared of being like fully submerged.

At a previous job I bumped heads with the IT person a lot because he would spread misinformation about technology so the owners would never replace him. This was conversation with the VP:

VP: Hey I just got a new security setup at my house and I can monitor everything with my phone.
Me: That's cool.
VP: I'm rethinking it because [IT guy] said it was very dangerous to have, what do you think?
Me: ....? What did he say was dangerous about it?
VP: He said hackers could then gain access to cameras and plan the perfect time to rob me since it's in the cloud.
Me: I seriously doubt anyone is planning an Ocean's 11 heist to steal your TV.
VP: Yea I thought it sounded weird when he told me.

Well I'm officially terrified. My biz/coding partner in a project had to move back to China about a year ago. We have been working on a project for about 2 years. About two weeks we had to use different VPNs about every 30 minutes so we could communicate because Chinese government keeps cutting it off. He said the virus is much worse than reported and he was to be imprisonment in his house. I have not heard back from him in over a week. ☹️

More of a rave than a rant.

My Dad was having some trouble with a game disconnecting on the PS4 and he read somewhere that it might be a problem with our home router. I didn't think it would be, as every other game works fine. But there was no talking him out of it. And to be fair the current router WAS kind of old.

So I have a look at the one he's decided to buy and it's some massive triple-antenna beast for well over a hundred pounds. I felt like such a weapon might be overkill for 2 people in a house, but did say that it would definitely help with connection issues in some rooms and I kind of wanted to play with it.

So he got it and oh am I glad he did. It has so many fun toys, including a built in VPN. Right now I live abroad so there's a few services I used at home that I can't access, I was literally just considering buying a vpn the other day. I found this while setting up port-fortwarding for my Raspberry Pi to run a discord bot I'm building. I had condisered putting a VPN server on the Pi but this works too!

It also has built in DDNS from ASUS, which IS cool, but our IP hasn't changed in years so I'm not sure we'll need it. I set it up anyway just in case though!

Story time:

I worked at a firm that had an infernal off the shelf CRM system that they collaborated with the dev company to customise.

They were seriously behind the competition, and didn’t have any app or web presence for interacting with their system, instead relying on people calling (fine for the nature of the business, but competition was leaving them in the dust).

They decided that they needed to redevelop it in-house, with a focus on supporting the web and apps.

I was hired for this purpose.

It was me and one other dev, who was also the head of IT.

He’d built a small prototype, and was new to the whole WPF / MVVM thing for the in-house app, so with my previous experience it was clear it needed to serve as an example only, and that it would need redeveloping.

I was only there three months.

In that time I singularly (he was pulled away to troubleshoot their VOIP installation - yes, for three months as other companies kept dropping the ball) built:

- A WebAPI with JWT auth
- An MVC skeleton frontend
- A WPF desktop app

It had all sorts of cool shit in it, 2FA, Reactive UI, Reactive extensions, server push to desktop, a custom workflow and permissions system.

It was pretty dang cool.

End of the three months rolled around, and the non-technical managers were concerned about time to market, so they decided to drop me as I’d “not made enough progress”.

I’d also had a bit of absence which they were aware of and were supposedly supporting me through.

But MFW three months is assumed to be enough time to build such a system with one dev.

I got a degree in music performance. But at the end of it, I decided that I enjoyed the finer things in life, like having a house and, you know, food.

So I struggled through some entry level jobs until folks noticed I had potential, and a kindly manager paired me with our database developer. The rest is history!

So, i've noticed something:

- My grandfather drinks nothing but the water.
- My grandmother recently increased her water intake due to meds making her retain water way less
- My dad has been drinking more water in an attempt to be healthier.
- I don't drink the house water without boiling it first, as i'm the only one that thinks it smells and tastes like wet dog smells, aside from with like kool-aid or similar where the taste is masked enough to not be detectable.

Well, what does this matter? I'll tell you:
- My grandfather went from fine aside from minor balance issues to totally mentally fried in 24 hours.
- My grandmother is spacing out while driving and falling more and more.
- My dad went from fine to overwhelmed by basic decisions in a couple months of moving here.
- I've noticed a slight decline in my mental health, but this is probably from issues i've had with my college and general stress.

Correlation ≠ causation, but... it's usually-unfiltered water from a well placed uncomfortably close to a lagoon, and it was never tested for safety before use (despite my protests.)

To leave 9/5 behind and successfully launch my own thing. By design it should require minimal maintenance so I should be good to spend my time however I feel fit. Get my fam and close relatives involved as well.

Move out of that tiny apartment into a large house outside the city where my kids could grow their imagination, have nearly unlimited space to plat at safely, where I would no longer feel squeezed in tightly.

I'm the donkey and that's my carrot hanging in front of me

!dev

It’s midnight, I’m alone in the big house, it’s pitch black outside, I had a few beers already and I thought it would be a good idea to watch some horror stuff..

I want to go out to have a smoke but I’m scared as fuck now.
There are cats running around in the dark and there are so many great opportunities for some alien zombie monsters to hide and sneak up to me..

Think I became too old for this shit.

HELP!!!

Adventures with house IT

I'm currently experimenting with PowerShell but my scripts won't run even though I've got every local permission. The error message indicates it's a GPO problem.
"No problem" le me thinks and calls IT hotline.
After 2 incompetent and unprofessional technicians i've still got no solution. I'm waiting for the second tech to call back because he "needed some time to get to know PowerShell" (he is a trained and certified SysAdmin).
During my call he couldn't decide if it was a GPO problem or not.
And this is just one story of their incompetence...

Decided to swap ISP.
Arranged that my new ISP started today and my old one would end next week so I had some wiggle room for issues.

Today my old ISP just disconnected my house in the middle of the day.

Then my new ISP failed to connect me and _might_ have it fixed tomorrow.

Looking forward to working remotely over 5G...

So I recently moved into an student house. Its really awesome but the only thing thats frustrating as fuck is the internet. Its like 50 - 200 kbs. I litterally type in slow motion over ssh. It stops working every few days and the dhcp range is to small :(. Not like my landlord can't afford better internet. There are like 50 people in this building and I think we have the basic abbonement.

Luckily I get my own internet next thuesday. I can't wait.

I gotta say I never understood owning a Roomba until my wife got me an off-brand Deebot one for my birthday. I named it “The Kraken”, as in “release the...” because it sees nothing and devours all. My kids can now rest easy because they won’t hear me complain about how the floor is always dirty and how nobody wants to vacuum but me. Now I just fire up the app, hit “Auto”, and The Kraken cleans my house. It even mops! I feel bad for the doggo, though.

Remote work (for the software industry, at least) is PERFECT and I still haven't heard a single argument against it that could not be derived into one of the following explanations:
- the complainer is/has a terrible manager
- the complainer has a shitty house
- the complainer has a shitty family
- the complainer is a shitty person
Naturally I mean only real-adult healthy people who work in the software industry.

I will now list the complaints I have heard more often. All fit neatly in the categories above:
- "my family interrupts me a lot, require lots of attention and/or creates an environment I cannot work in" - in this case it is very irresponsible of the complainer to try and escape to an office. If the adults you live with cannot get by without you, how going to an office will help them? If you can't teach your children to behave, who will?

- "my house is noisy and/or uncomfortable" - move out! if you can go to the office, you can look for another place to live.

- "I need in person conversations to understand people / zoom meetings are a waste of time" - why? do you need the smell of other people to properly organize your thoughts? Yes, meetings are extra-shitty during the pandemic. But pandemics come and go and your terrible time management skills won't simply improve themselves. Learn to lead better meetings instead of blaming the medium.

- "I miss face-to-face interactions at work" - Those do not miss you. If you want to have personal conversations, do it *out of working hours* with consenting adults. If you want to have personal touch in work contexts, it is called "sexual harassment" and is a crime.

- "my employees / colleagues are not as effective without me breathing at their necks" - you are a terrible manager and leader if you can't inspire people in words only. Maybe even video.

My main point is, there is no argument against WFH. When people try to argue against it, they often actually mean "I don't like the pandemic". No shit. Life will be better after people stop dieing for breathing close to their friends and family. In the mean time, learn to organize your life instead of running away from it every day.

Have you ever been to love theatre? How many times? Have you ever seen a movie? How many?
Why so many more movies than live theatre? You think you would have liked the movies, and their price, more if it was live theatre? Would you have seen as many?
WFH is not perfect for everybody in the planet. But it sure is for the software industry.

*tentatively watching movie*
Some family standing in front of a house.
Kid asks: dad, what is this?
Dad: homepage
Me: ??

It took me way to long to realize that the kids name is Paige and the place is their new house. I hate it when that happens.

The overuse of something is designed to demoralize and discourage the very thing.

Vapid christmas jingles, meaningless consumerism, blackfriday shopping, keeping up with the joneses, decorations and tinsel bullshit so overloaded on homes and trees that it looks like a gaudy airstrip display, holiday-town-esque themes and festivals so frequent, overcooked and overcommercialized that its like you've stepped into a 40-year-old sterile suburban house-wives braindrain internal fantasy reruns of regurgitated hallmark christmas romance movies.

Alls fair love and christmas.

In other news, some strapping young and intrepid adventurer *lit a public christmas tree on fire*.

Its a shame really, when we can't just enjoy the simple things without some dickhead going and spoiling it. But also I can't help but ask

"ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?!"

This is why you should NEVER do tech favours for friends...

As a Christmas present I setup a WiFi router for a friend (Natted to the ip it acquires through DHCP). Since then I have had numerous messages from her because her brothers are blaming the WiFi for any internet issue they have.

I told her they need to check their cables since they looked quite dodgy when I installed the router.

Today they discovered they have a termite infestation. Her father is losing his shit with her and wants her to remove the router because he is adamant that the WiFi attracted the termites and they would not have an infestation without it.

FML... I just can't.... any fucking issue in that house is going to be blamed on the WiFi router as long as it exists.

I started a new job about a week ago in an R&D software house which is a completely different world from what I am used to.

I worked as a coder in small teams, sometimes with Agile but always sunk in multiple projects at once - requiring constant switching of sprint goals week to week.

Now, I am alone (first person in a "maybe-in-the-future" team), doing research and preparing a demo for the client. It's hella lot of responsibility yet I found it weirdly liberating - being on my own, in control of what I do.

It may change in the future when project will inevitebly grow, but for right now, a week in, I started smiling while coding and learning, which I apparently haven't done in years.

So I was playing with deauthing because I was curious about to and I got this little deauthing tool and I no joke fucked up my whole network for hours.

In my house we recently had tplink smart light switches installed and that created 40 more iot devices on the network. Soooo I disconnected them all at once and also cloned my AP so they went into this limbo state where they could not connect to anything and also for some reason Ethernet stopped working I think my isp thought I was getting a DOS attack or something idk but no joke took me hours to fix it.

There is an nerdy socially retarded IT head. He asked me to look into a project after the programmers left the company. Basically he gave me a list of modification with one particular screenshot of Calendar( seems like a JQuery plugin) and asked me to develop it.. I asked him to give me the link from where he got the Calendar... No fucking response in Skype.
So after a month he asked me to show the project, I showed him with the Calendar similar to picture and no functionality. He said it was CRAP. I asked him to give me proper documentation as what he expects and what he wants.
BUT FUCK NO. HE SAYS, "ARE YOU A JUNIOR CODER? DO IT WITHIN A WEEK OR WE ARE DONE. "
And I am here keeping myself in control not to punch him. he lives nearby my house wondering if he lives alone 😂

Rant.TYPE_REAL_LIFE

So I go for a run for the first time, well, ever. I put my keychain in my pocket and I'm off with my headphones on. Come back home I FUCKING LOST MY WHOLE KEYCHAIN. Key to my house, my apartment, the garage remote, .. fucking dogshit man. Tried to track it down by going down the same path twice but no luck so now my only hope is the police but what are the odds :/

Rails. Fucking rails...

God damn monoliths, built by a cowboy coder.

Every one I have ever worked with becomes (or already is) a house of fucking cards that will blow over at the slightest gust of wind.

The worst part is that you always hear the same justifications from rails developers, then after they convince the higher-ups that “we will build it right, not like those other monoliths” we find ourselves F’ed right in the A a few months later.

It’s this frustration that lead me to MUCH better paradigms like Microservices, Event-Sourcing, CQRS, Domain Driven Design and the like.

When someone says “our backend is in rails” my first response is “so when are you replacing it?”

I didn't WANT to do it, but he left me no choice. He was about to tell everyone the secret that I'd kept for such a long time. I couldn't allow him to do that.

I'm still debating whether it was me who pulled the trigger, I never wanted to, but I did, it changed me.

Now I've been living with his wife, his children, in his house, with his parents and family. I've been to countless reunions and everybody seems to enjoy having me around, claiming that I've 'changed' and become a better person.

My old self seems to have faded away into nothingness, I don't know if I should be happy with that. But I do know one thing,

If such a situation were to come up one more, I'd do it again.

How to clear the lunch of developers: Shout as loud as you can from the office that ZEPTO is loose on the network drives and watch everyone scramble to their computer.

Actually happened at work today, somehow the boss let it in. To top it off, we had customers in the house that watched the whole thing happen.

It wasn't pretty.

That feeling when you walk in a room, make a few steps on the floor and hear how all the walls are making cracking noises...

And some people choose to live in apartments/houses like that one.. Where walls can be punctured with a finger

what happened to firm, sturdy constructions...? What happened to strong walls and steady floors?

No way.. My house is gonna be built with rocks. Or at least a better part of it

Sometime in the near future…

"Hey Joe, how's the new robot working out?"

"Oh it's great, except that we have no more shampoo in the house."

"…"

"Yeah, apparently it got its hands on a bottle and infinite-looped on Lather, Rinse, Repeat."

Been waiting for my new computer to come in the mail for a week only to find out that Amazon sent it to my old house all the way in utah (i live in georgia now). My life is over goodbye🙂

Job frustrated me again today.

The shit just keeps on commiting suicide...

Cannot talk much about it, but essentially it's faulty software killing randomly one or one up to N servers running elasticsearch...

Conversation between me and a good friend:

Me: No gaming today, work todo.
Him: noooo...
Me: Yes...... Could u go buy some groceries? Household help is sick.
Him: maybe...what u need?
Me: coffee. I need frigging fucking coffee.
Him: ok. How bad is it.......
Me: empty today.
Him: will be at your house in hour. DON'T DO ANYTHING STUPID.

...

It's funny how good friends immediately sense danger and become very attentive when the lack of coffee and myself is mentioned in one sentence.

I just found out my parents have less than $30 in the bank by the end of each month after all expenses...

We are not living. We are barely surviving....

Every day in my house it is dark and the lights are off. They turn all lights off in order to avoid getting a high electricity bill. I have to use my phone's flashlight as the main source of light in my own house, as if i live in abandoned cottage in the middle of a forest.....

Both my parents are jobless (have been their entire lives). They just borrow money from their family members and grandparents to pay these bills every month. They depended on luck their whole lives. A luck in context of "maybe if i dont work anything at all then a huge pile of money will fall down from the sky!".

So now I, as their son, have to grow up in extreme poverty and fight my way up, because of DUMB, STUPID people. They are good people, but what does being a good person bring if you are fucking stupid and valueless?

I knew i was poor but today i found out i was THIS poor. I had no idea we were THIS much poor. Because today my 4g internet got cut off due to not paying bills. The bill is $30. My dad cant pay it cause he doesnt have $30 in the bank. I was in shock. So i had to pay it

My $8.125 usd an hour backend software engineer + DevOps engineer (2 jobs in 1), is considered as LUXURIOUS SALARY, in the most corrupted country of Europe -- SERBIA 🇷🇸

When i tell the world i make $8 an hour with a computer science degree working as a software engineer, they laugh at me. People mock me "bro even a mcdonalds worker earns $17/hour what are you doing" im doing what i was born into -- born into poverty of a third world shithole country.

With my $8 an hour salary, i am in TOP 3% of the HIGHEST earners in serbia. Can you fucking imagine how miserable lives do people live if this is not even an average salary, but among the ELITE salary? Because the average salary in Serbia, is $3.75 usd an hour, sometimes even less than that.

When people say "its not about luck its about hard work", please, GO. FUCK. YOURSELF.

Go and be born in a shithole third world country. Now on top of that be born in poverty due to poor decisions of your parents. Go ahead and try it. Lets see how hard you fucking have to work to get to the same level compared to someone who was born into for example America, where you get paid 6 figures immediately after graduating computer science. Or on top of that, you're born in a wealthy family in america. Did you work hard to be born in the 1st class freak show or were you LUCKY to be gifted such life?

My whole life i have been fighting to get money and escape this misery due to poor decisions of my parents.

Very ironically, my parents have lived extremely luxurious lives in the 90s. They had 5 cars. 1 huge house with a backyard garage private office private jacuzzi private gym. This house was worth at least 500k in the 90s. Today this house would cost at least 1.5 or 2 million. They went to luxurious travels. Hotels of $5000 per night per person. Literally wasted 45k in 3 days just for hotel. They even GAVE AWAY FOR FREE money to our relatives and cousins, taking them on luxurious vacations for free etc. None of those people appreciated them, none of them came to help them in tough times, everyone forgot about them and abandoned us.

Like i said, my parents are good people, but what does it profit being a good person if you are FUCKING STUPID.

They were extremely LUCKY but their STUPIDNESS has made them broke. I couldn't be THIS much fucking stupid even if i tried hard.

Nobody is coming to save us. No one cares. Its all up to me now. All the pressure and stress and poverty is passed and inherited onto my life now. its up to me to either get rich or end my STUPID bloodline

I am living a very difficult life and no one seems to understand this...

Debugging in real life

Our family is working on the house. We have an integrated floor heating system, which is connected individually for each room. (we have three rooms, only two are connected yet)

Today we changed the main water boiler. At first it seemed like it was working, but then we lost pressure. It dropped fairly fast so we checked every sink, every water outlet.

We just missed the unconnected floor heating pipe, that was connected to the main pipe...

Its a fucking mess down here, so dont complain about you bugs, I have experienced worse!!!

Here at the client site everyone uses Windows 7, since this is not an IT firm. They make jewellery. So I don't blame them.
The problem is their in house dev team are also forced to use Windows.

Today someone from their dev team was with me for a new project. Their senior guy sent us a mail mentioning that the project code is on AWS EC2 instance and we will have to SSH to see it.
I checked the code on my MacBook with SSH and copied it to local using SCP. The dev guy was seeing it in amazement. I asked, what's it?

He just asked, "You don't have to use PUTTY" 😮

I smirked 😏

Recently made a sub 750 euro in home server with raid 1, to back up all pc's laptops and smartphones in the house to. Never been better!

Using a simple little daily backup tool on all pc's, and another app to sync 2 way to my phone, i was able to have all my data safe on that home server.

It even allows me to edit content on my phone which will sync overnight, because of the way usb access is shit on android since.. 5.0?

I am loving it! Worth every penny and week of setup effort.

I quietly refactored an entire NodeJS express in-house framework that was written in Java style (dependency injection, inheritance, inversion of control) and split it into typed, composable, parameterized, testable middlewares in 2 weeks (including some complicated ones like a custom Openid Connect flow)

Now comes the hard part: convincing the Java-devs who wrote it that it is useful

GODDAMN I HATE WIX!

I feel angry. I feel like smashing the developer's face who programmed this piece of shit editor. Everything I touch there just breaks and moves on its own. I fix the header, save, come back the next day and everything is shifted 5 pixels. WTF!?!

Plugins that they developed in-house aren't even compatible with their own systems. Custom code disappears suddenly. Editor doesn't allow two people to edit at the same time, resulting in lost work.

Seriously FUCK WIX.

Don't ever even consider touching this nightmare of an editor.

I could literally have hard-coded the entire site in React or Vue faster than building it in this editor, but my client wants the ability to edit things on their own later.

WIX: Not even once.

Deadline in 24 work hours, for a in-house product to automate payment processing.

Why in 24 hours you say? , Me and the accounting guy is going on vacation on Friday.

Will it go into production on Friday evening while I'm going through the door?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

man, fuck php.
fuck fucking php fuckitily fucking hard.
basically every fuckin stdlib function it has is fucked in some way.
can't even remember it anymore properly, but...

for example:
explode(" ", "some string like this ");

function to "split a string into array of strings using the first param as the boundary marker.

the above one would return
["some", "string", "like", "this", ""]

BECAUSE I'M FUCKING FUCKITTY SURE THAT WHEN THE LAST CHARACTERS OF THE STRING ARE EQUAL TO THE SEPARATOR STRING, EVERYONE WANTS TO GET BACK ONE EXTRA FUCKING USELESS EMPTY ITEM IN THE ARRAY.

because beyond the last wall of my house, there's another room of my house, you stupid Lerdorf fuck.

The company I work for now has so much tech debt. When I find an issue, I can’t necessarily fix it right away because I have other priorities. If something isn’t a site-breaking issue, then I only fix it when a user or staff member reports it.

The website is a mess because it was built and maintained by an outside dev agency. It was so expensive to outsource that my employer decided to bring development in-house.

That’s where I came in. I found so many issues. Tech debt. UX weirdness. Newish features that no one seemed to use. It goes on.

So I’m balancing new feature development, fixing bugs, and trying to lessen our tech debt. I’m a team of one.

As a student, I live in a house with friends and the actual didn't have a table in my room.
So after one month waiting for a answer of the owner I decided to buy one in second hand. All I can say is that I love it.
Any suggestions to some improvements?

PS: external drive is only temporary

Postman Rant

wow just wow ! just got turned my home internet off by the cable company. And they are right to do !
I apparently didn't sent them their money. But why didn't I ?
Im the typo guy who likes a bill in any type and then pay it. Sorry for beein old fashioned there. Now this lack of human intelligence aka. my postman didn't brought me them. Instead I always receive others Bills and shit( ok sometimes he drops it right ). Does he think the people
in this house live in a fuckin hippie community or some
shit where we all are one system. WTF ????

But my revenge will come you giant shitpile, except from reporting you to your office.
You FUCKED with my internet connection. That's personal

FUCKING CHINESE SUPOSED IP CAMERAS...
First, they aren't Ip cameras, they are p2p cameras with different settings and more limited...
then took me 3 days to open 5 ports for 2 cameras, config the cameras, till they work.
YEY they finally work, can see them over the Internet (no default settings, even changed the Alias), have my Ip camera viewer on the Phone... but one doesn't activate on moviment.. in this 3 days only took 2 pictures with motion detection on and people passing in front of them... the other was working for like 5 minutes... giving black and white 7kb jpgs... after a few teeks... can't make it work again.
Now I have two cameras that I can see if my house is being robbed but no motion detection to warm me, or at least save some pictures on the server to serve as evidence (and maby finally get the team that is robbing one house a day, If they try to rob my house again...).
The cameras are very good as baby monitors or to play around, for 14$ and 20$... (love the 360º ball) , but as security cameras... Unless you have them connected to a security station and with a repeater close by... worthless...
Oh, and they may give me 1 good frame a second or lag to 10+seconds a frame...

Man I have no idea how my company is running as stable as they do. Every time I peak under the curtain of some piece of machinery I find such bad practices…

Just found out our in house database manager only supports listing all objects in a table, updating objects by first reading each row you need to update and only support “select *” queries.

This is after having to argue with some engineers that using http or grpc when interacting with the new service I’m writing in the none-jvm language is better than writing our own driver for their custom rpc and service discovery system.

But like honestly I’d be mad if these decisions had a visible performance impact on the business, but it somehow doesn’t… this is bizzaro world where all I learned from my 8 years experience as a professional goes out the window…

Software runs fine on several in-house instances. First time customers hosting it themselves. Runs fine. Users start using. Server need absurdly high processing power and fucks up. I can not access customers Server to debug. Only hope, get copy of their images to reproduce their setup. And have *** one single fucking hour *** to go into it before having to tell in emergency meeting if we can fix it or they would blew the project.

I didn't expect, but found the cause, a single very badly written query. Written by myself years ago I have to admit.
They also gave me one hour to produce a patch. I did but but lost so many hair.

So it's not just through reading your own code later that you can realize how stupid you are. All the great card house of the belief in your own superiority collapsing instantly.
Currently intense time with my son. Can be hard being around one another 24h non-stop... And then realizing that a lot of the stubbornness and quirks of his that drive me crazy: is actually me! (Be it that it's in my character as well or he was reacting to a stupidness of mine)

!rant

Last night I found two Athlon XP processors in my house. They're a 2400 and a 2700, but I don't know if they work because I don't have other parts to test them.

Nothing too interesting, I just thought it was kinda cool

ah yes, the usual family get-together: my grandma's throwing heavy shit with intent to kill, my sister is violently crying in a corner and refuses to move to safety, and my dad's shut down in a chair somewhere in the house. Just like every Christmas. And Thanksgiving. And Halloween. And every other large holiday.

Surprised I made it to 19.

Fuck mi ISP, really, fuck it.
It left the whole city without internet access for 3 days, and it's service is HORRIBLE.
Not only that, they don't expand the network they have and we are stuck with 5mbps! (3, effectively).
Imagine trying to download a file, while 2 other people are watching YouTube, and 2 other devices are PLAYING NETFLIX. OF COURSE IT WILL STOP WORKING.
I COULDN'T EVEN POST A RANT WITH AN IMAGE (it'd stuck loading for minutes).
I am trying to get a new ISP and this one will be wire to my personal PC, fuck them. However, as a house in the suburbs of a small satellite city, it's hard to get a decent new service.

What happens to a fart?

Does it disappear?

Well my science background says it cannot disappear. So what happens to the fart?

My theory is that the air cools and can no longer suspend the butt particles in the air. So all the particles fall to the ground. On the ground this forms a layer of butt dust.

So remember when you walk around the house without shoes on. There is butt dust sticking to your feet.

I just recently started working on a product that uses MaterialUI.

I’m not saying it is bad, but it is frustrating me. As a person with a very strong understanding of CSS (SASS mostly), it is frustrating to see the framework try to make things easier while making them entirely more hard.

It would take one or two classes do a thing in SASS but instead it is accessing a bunch of sub classes already built in and modifying some aspects. And then having to add custom css-in-js for other layout needs.

It feels wrong for 1 element to have 2 different methods and areas to house it’s own styles.

I’m sure I’m going to get used to it soon enough. But it is frustrating now.

So there was this rant: "I have a beard now" but by the time I wrote my comment it was gone. So why not make it a dedicated story of its own. This was partially in response to @Floydian who asked if he grew it overnight.

It's the remarkable moment:
1) It's been a while since you shaved and you will return to work/school/wherever today/tomorrow, so you pick up the razor.
2) You look at the mirror and like what you see so you just return the razor to its place.
3) ???
4) Still have beard when you leave the house.