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Search - "is-there-nothing-else?"
-
What it's like to be a network engineer...translated into normal people speak
User: I think we are having a major road issue.
Me: What? No, I just checked, the roads are fine. I was actually just on the roads.
User: No, I’m pretty sure the roads are down because I’m not getting pizzas.
Me: Everything else on the roads is fine. What do you mean you aren’t getting pizzas?
User: I used to get pizzas when I ordered them, now I’m not getting them. It has to be a road issue.
Me: As I said, the roads are fine. Where are you getting pizzas from?
User: I’m not really sure. Can you check all places that deliver pizzas?
Me: No I don’t even know all the places that deliver pizza. You need to narrow it down.
User: I think it is Subway.
Me: Okay, I’ll check…No, I just looked and Subway doesn't deliver pizzas.
User: I’m pretty sure it is Subway. Can you just allow all food from Subway and we can see if pizza shows up?
Me: Sigh, fine I’ve allowed all food from Subway, but I don’t think that is the issue.
User: Yeah I’m still not getting pizza. Can you check the roads?
Me: It’s not the roads, the roads are fine. I’m pretty sure Subway isn’t the place.
User: Okay, I found it. It’s Papa Johns.
Me: Okay, I looked and Papa Johns does deliver pizza. Is it the local Papa Johns or one in a different town?
User: I don’t know. Can you allow pizza from all Papa Johns to me?
Me: No I can’t do that. Can you get me an address for Papa Johns?
User: No, I only know it as Papa Johns. Can you get me all the addresses of all Papa Johns and I’ll tell you if one of them is correct?
Me: No, I don’t have time for that. Okay, I looked at the local one and it looks like they have sent you pizza in the past and they are currently allowed to send you pizzas. Try ordering a pizza while I watch.
User: Yeah still no pizza. I’m guessing they are getting blocked at the freeway. Can you check the freeway to make sure they can get through?
Me: No, this is a local delivery. They aren't even using the freeway.
User: Okay, well then it has to be a road issue.
Me: No, the roads are fine. Okay, I just drove from the Papa Johns to the address they have on file for you and there is nothing there.
User: Hmm, wait we did move recently.
Me: Did you give your new address to Papa Johns?
User: No, I just thought they would be able to look me up by name.
Me: No they need your new address. What’s your new address?
User: I’m not really sure. Can you look it up?
Me: Sigh, give me a second…Okay, I found your address and gave it to Papa Johns. Try ordering a pizza now.
User: HEY! PIZZA JUST SHOWED UP!
Me: Okay, good.
User: (To everyone else they know) I apologize for the delay in the pizza but there was a major road issue that was preventing the pizza from getting to me. The network engineer has fixed the roads and we are able to get pizza again.
Me: But it wasn’t the roads…whatever.
User: Oh, can you also check on an issue where Chinese food isn’t getting to me? I think it may be a road issue47 -
Its Friday, you all know what that means! ... Its results day for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!
*audience: wwwwwwooooooooo!!!!*
We've had a bewildering array of candidates, lets remind ourselves:
- a psychopath that genuinely scared me a little
- a CEO I would take pleasure seeing in pain
- a pothead who mistook me for his drug dealer
- an unbelievable idiot
- an arrogant idiot obsessed with strings
Tough competition, but there can be only one ... *drum roll* ... the winner is ... none of them!
*audience: GASP!*
*audience member: what?*
*audience member: no way!*
*audience member: your fucking kidding me!*
Sir calm down! this is a day time show, no need for that ... let me explain, there is a winner ... but we've kept him till last and for a good reason
*audience: ooooohhhhh*
You see our final contestant and ultimate winner of this series is our good old friend "C", taking the letters of each of our previous contestants, that spells TRAGIC which is the only word to explain C.
*audience: laughs*
Oh I assure you its no laughing matter. C was with us for 6 whole months ... 6 excruciatingly painful months.
Backstory:
We needed someone with frontend, backend and experience with IoT devices, or raspberry PI's. We didn't think we'd get it all, but in walked an interviewee with web development experience, a tiny bit of Angular and his masters project was building a robot device that would change LED's depending on your facial expressions. PERFECT!!!
... oh to have a time machine
Working with C:
- He never actually did the tutorials I first set him on for Node.js and Angular 2+ because they were "too boring". I didn't find this out until some time later.
- The first project I had him work on was a small dashboard and backend, but he decided to use Angular 1 and a different database than what we were using because "for me, these are easier".
- He called that project done without testing / deploying it in the cloud, despite that being part of the ticket, because he didn't know how. Rather than tell or ask anyone ... he just didn't do it and moved on.
- As part of his first tech review I had to explain to him why he should be using if / else, rather than just if's.
- Despite his past experience building server applications and dashboards (4 years!), he never heard of a websocket, and it took a considerable amount of time to explain.
- When he used a node module to open a server socket, he sat staring at me like a deer caught in headlights completely unaware of how to use / test it was working. I again had to explain it and ultimately test it for him with a command line client.
- He didn't understand the need to leave logging inside an application to report errors. Because he used to ... I shit you not ... drive to his customers, plug into their server and debug their application using a debugger.
... props for using a debugger, but fuck me.
- Once, after an entire 2 days of tapping me on the shoulder every 15 mins for questions / issues, I had to stop and ask:
Me: "Have you googled it?"
C: "... eh, no"
Me: "can I ask why?"
C: "well, for me, I only google for something I don't know"
Me: "... well do you know what this error message means?"
C: "ah good point, i'll try this time"
... maybe he was A's stoner buddy?
- He burned through our free cloud usage allowance for a month, after 1 day, meaning he couldn't test anything else under his account. He left an application running, broadcasting a lot of data. Turns out the on / off button on the dashboard only worked for "on". He had been killing his terminal locally and didn't know how to "ctrl + c a cloud app" ... so left it running. His intention was to restart the app every time you are done using it ... but forgot.
- His issue with the previous one ... not any of his countless mistakes, not the lack of even trying to make the button work, no, no, not for C. C's issue is the cloud is "shit" for giving us such little allowances. (for the record in a month I had never used more than 5%).
- I had to explain environment variables and why they are necessary for passwords and tokens etc. He didn't know it wasn't ok to commit these into GitHub.
- At his project meetups with partners I had to repeatedly ask him to stop googling gifs and pay attention to the talks.
- He complained that we don't have 3 hour lunch breaks like his last place.
- He once copied and pasted the same function 450 times into a file as a load test ... are loops too mainstream nowadays?
You see C is our winner, because after 6 painful months (companies internal process / requirements) he actually achieved nothing. I really mean that, nothing. Every thing was so broken, so insecure / wide open, built without any kind of common sense or standards I had to delete it all and start again ... it took me 2 weeks.
I hope you've all enjoyed this series and will join me in praying for the return of my sanity ... I do miss it a lot.
Yours truly,
practiseSafeHex20 -
Le monday morning after a commit on sunday evening...
PM: BLAAAH!!!! Your commit broke the site, nothing is working!!!!!!
Me: What? All of tests passed (coverage 95%), no issues were found.
PM: NOO!!!! Site is broken, we can't use it no more!!!
Me: Ok, what's the problem?
PM: I've tried to enter -10021 into this field on that page and it gived me an error.
Me: Ok? So, that single page is broken?
PM: No, whole site!!!! This is important
Me: Sure... Let me take a look
* PM tried to enter a negative value into an unsigned field that I've mutated yesterday after checking LIVE database if there was no records with negative value. Reason: we've hit an int limit and there was no chance that the value would be negative. Validation? Well, yes.... Except that page was added by him this morning without even checking everything else *
Me: Here, this is the issue, *gives explanation*
PM: Well.... You shouldn't do this. This is unacceptable. You must never leave int fields without negative values. Didn't they teach you in school that integers can be negative?!
Me: What? *consufed as hell*
PM: *More morale... blah blah blah....* Revert it back!
Me: Ok but if anything else breaks, copy of this slack conversation will be kept.
PM: Don't care! Fix it!
Me: * Reverts the fix, saves chat copy * - Done.
PM: Great.
* 5 wild minutes later *
PM: BLAAAH!!!! Site is down, service is not working, what have you done?
Me: Reverted the change needed for it to work. Todays schedule is full with other important tasks. * pastes a screenshot as a proof that he asked me to do this *
PM: FIX IT NOW! Apply your fix.
Me: You're the PM. - Done.
PM: Great, now I'll fix my code. You should be more careful next time.
Me: * YOU DENSE MATHA...KER * Sure.
How's your morning going? :)9 -
Roughly 180 days, 5 months and 29 days, 4,320 hours, 259,200 minutes, I devoted myself to a client project. I missed family outings with my daughter and my wife. People started asking my wife if we had broken up. My daughter became accustomed to daddy not being around and playing with her. Sometimes only sleeping 4 hours, I would figure out solutions to problems in my sleep and force myself to wake and put them into action. My relationship with my wife became very fragile and unstable. I knew I had to change but I just needed a little bit more time to complete this client project.
Finally, the project was ending there was light at the end of the tunnel. I “git add –-all && git status” everything looked good. I then “git commit -m “v1.0 release candidate && git push beanstalk master”
I deployed the app to the staging server where I performed my deployment steps. Everything was good. I signed-up as a new user, I upload a bunch different files types with different sizes, completed my profile and logged out. I emailed the client to arrange a time to speak remotely.
“Hello” says the client “How are you” I replied. “Great, lets begin” urged the client. I recited the apps url out to the client. The client creates a new account and tries to upload a file. The app spews a bunch of error messages on the screen.
The client says
“Merlin – I do not think you really applied yourself to this project. The first test we do and it fails. If you do not have the time to do my project properly please just say so now, so I can find somebody else who can”
I FREAKED THE FUCKOUT on the client!!!!!!! and nearly hung up. My wife was right next to and she was absolutely gobsmacked. I sat back and thought to myself “These fuckers don’t get it”. All that suffering for nothing!
Thanks for reading my rant….
BTW: I did finish the project, the client was amazed on how the app worked and it is has become an indispensable tool for their employees.19 -
I’m a senior dev at a small company that does some consulting. This past October, some really heavy personal situation came up and my job suffered for it. I raised the flag and was very open with my boss about it and both him and my team of 3 understood and were pretty cool with me taking on a smaller load of work while I moved on with some stuff in my life. For a week.
Right after that, I got sent to a client. “One month only, we just want some presence there since it’s such a big client” alright, I guess I can do that. “You’ll be in charge of a team of a few people and help them technically.” Sounds good, I like leading!
So I get here. Let’s talk technical first: from being in a small but interesting project using Xamarin, I’m now looking at Visual Basic code, using Visual Studio 2010. Windows fucking Forms.
The project was made by a single dev for this huge company. She did what she could but as the requirements grew this thing became a behemoth of spaghetti code and User Controls. The other two guys working on the project have been here for a few months and they have very basic experience at the job anyways. The woman that worked on the project for 5 years is now leaving because she can’t take it anymore.
And that’s not the worse of it. It took from October to December for me to get a machine. I literally spent two months reading on my cellphone and just going over my shitty personal situation for 8 hours a day. I complained to everyone I could and nothing really worked.
Then I got a PC! But wait… no domain user. Queue an extra month in which I could see the Windows 7 (yep) log in screen and nothing else. Then, finally! A domain user! I can log in! Just wait 2 extra weeks for us to give your user access to the subversion rep and you’re good to go!
While all of this went on, I didn’t get an access card until a week ago. Every day I had to walk to the reception desk, show my ID and request they call my boss so he could grant me access. 5 months of this, both at the start of the day and after lunch. There was one day in particular, between two holidays, in which no one that could grant me access was at the office. I literally stood there until 11am in which I called my company and told them I was going home.
Now I’ve been actually working for a while, mostly fixing stuff that works like crap and trying to implement functions that should have been finished but aren’t even started. Did I mention this App is in production and being used by the people here? Because it is. Imagine if you will the amount of problems that an application that’s connecting to the production DB can create when it doesn’t even validate if the field should receive numeric values only. Did I mention the DB itself is also a complete mess? Because it is. There’s an “INDEXES” tables in which, I shit you not, the IDs of every other table is stored. There are no Identity fields anywhere, and instead every insert has to go to this INDEXES table, check the last ID of the table we’re working on, then create a new registry in order to give you your new ID. It’s insane.
And, to boot, the new order from above is: We want to split this app in two. You guys will stick with the maintenance of half of it, some other dudes with the other. Still both targeting the same DB and using the same starting point, but each only working on the module that we want them to work in. PostmodernJerk, it’s your job now to prepare the app so that this can work. How? We dunno. Why? Fuck if we care. Kill you? You don’t deserve the swift release of death.
Also I’m starting to get a bit tired of comments that go ‘THIS DOESN’T WORK and ‘I DON’T KNOW WHY WE DO THIS BUT IT HELPS and my personal favorite ‘??????????????????????14 -
This is kind of a horror story, with a happing ending. It contains a lot of gore images, and some porn. Very long story.
TL;DR Network upgrade
Once upon a time, there were two companies HA and HP, both owned by HC. Many years went by and the two companies worked along side each one another, but sometimes there were trouble, because they weren't sure who was supposed to bill the client for projects HA and HP had worked on together.
At HA there was an IT guy, an imbecile of such. He's very slow at doing his job, doesn't exactly understand what he's doing, nor security principles.
The IT guy at HA also did some IT work for HP from time to time when needed. But he was not in charge of the infrastructure for HP, that was the jobb for one developer who didn't really know what he was doing either.
Whenever a new server was set up at HP, the developer tried many solutions, until he landed on one, but he never removed the other tested solutions, and the config is scattered all around. And no documentation!!
Same goes with network, when something new was added, the old was never removed or reconfigured to something else.
One dark winter, a knight arrived at HP. He had many skills. Networking, server management, development, design and generally a fucking awesome viking.
This genius would often try to cleanse the network and servers, and begged his boss to let him buy new equipment to replace the old, to no prevail.
Whenever he would look in the server room, he would get shivers down his back.
(Image: https://i.bratteng.xyz/Ie9x3YC33C.j...)
One and a half year later, the powerful owners in HA, HP and HC decided it was finally time to merge HA and HP together to HS. The knight thought this was his moment, he should ask CEO if he could be in charge of migrating the network, and do a complete overhault so they could get 1Gb interwebz speeds.
The knight had to come up with a plan and some price estimates, as the IT guy also would do this.
The IT guy proposed his solution, a Sonicwall gateway to 22 000 NOK, and using a 3rd party company to manage it for 3000 NOK/month.
"This is absurd", said the knight to the CEO and CXO, "I can come up with a better solution that is a complete upgrade. And it will be super easy to manage."
The CEO and CXO gave the knight a thumbs up. The race was on. We're moving in 2 months, I got to have the equipment by then, so I need a plan by the end of the week.
He roamed the wide internet, looked at many solutions, and ended up with going for Ubiquiti's Unifi series. Cheap, reliable and pretty nice to look at.
The CXO had mentioned the WiFi at HA was pretty bad, as there was WLAN for each meeting room, and one for the desks, so the phone would constantly jump between networks.
So the knight ended up with this solution:
2x Unifi Securtiy Gateway Pro 4
2x Unifi 48port
1x Unifi 10G 16port
5x Unifi AP-AC-Lite
12x pairs of 10G unifi fibre modules
All with a price tag around the one Sonicwall for 22 000 NOK, not including patch cables, POE injectors and fibre cables.
The knight presented this to the CXO, whom is not very fond of the IT guy, and the CXO thought this was a great solution.
But the IT guy had to have a say at this too, so he was sent the solution and had 2 weeks to dispute the soltion.
Time went by, CXO started to get tired of the waiting, so he called in a meeting with the knight and the IT guy, this was the IT guys chance to dispute the solution.
All he had to say was he was familiar with the Sonicwall solution, and having a 3rd party company managing it is great.
He was given another 2 weeks to dispute the solution, yet nothing happened.
The CXO gave the thumbs up, and the knight orders the equipment.
At this time, the knight asks the IT guy for access to the server room at HA, and a key (which would take 2 months to get sorted, because IT guys is a slow imbecile)
The horrors, Oh the horrors, the knight had never seen anything like this before.
(Image: https://i.bratteng.xyz/HfptwEh9qT.j...)
(Image: https://i.bratteng.xyz/HfptwEh9qT.j...)
(Image: https://i.bratteng.xyz/hmOE2ZuQuE.j...)
(Image: https://i.bratteng.xyz/4Flmkx6slQ.j...)
What are all these for, why is there a fan ductaped to on of the servers.
WHAT IS THIS!
Why are there cables tied in a knot.
WHY!
These are questions we never will know the answers too.
The knight needs access to the servers, and sonicwall to see how this is configured.
After 1.5 month he gains access to the sonicwall and one of the xserve.
What the knight discovers baffles him.
All ports are open, sonicwall is basically in bridge mode and handing out public IPs to every device connected to it.
No VLANs, everything, just open...10 -
Her diary:
Tonight I thought my husband was acting weird. We had made plans to meet at a nice restaurant for dinner. I was shopping with my friends all day long, so I thought he was upset at a fact that I was a bit late, but he made no comment on it. Conversation wasn’t flowing, so I suggested that we go somewhere quiet so we could talk. He agreed, but he didn’t say much. I asked him what was wrong. He said, "Nothing". I asked him if it was my fault that he was upset. He said he wasn’t upset, that it had nothing to do with me, and not to worry about it. On the way home, I told him that i loved him. He smiled slightly, and kept driving. I can’t explain his behavior, I can’t explain why he didn’t say, "I love you too". When we got home, I felt as if I had lost him completely, as if he wanted nothing to do with me anymore. He just sat there quietly, and watched TV. He continued to seem distant and absent. Finally, with silence around us, I decided to go to bed. About 15 minutes later, he came to bed. But I still felt that he was distracted, and his thoughts were somewhere else. He fell asleep - I cried. I don’t know what to do. I’m almost sure that his thoughts are with someone else. My life is a disaster :(
His diary:
My code is broken, can’t figure out why.3 -
One week, and it turned out to be worse than that.
I was put on a project for a COVID-19 program in America (The CARES Act). The financial team came to us on Monday morning and said they need to give away a couple thousand dollars.
No big deal. All they wanted was a single form that people could submit with some critical info. Didn't need a login/ registration flow or anything. You could have basically used Google Forms for this project.
The project landed in my lap just before lunch on Monday morning. I was a junior in a team with a senior and another junior on standby. It was going to go live the next Monday.
The scope of the project made it seem like the one week deadline wasn't too awful. We just had to send some high priority emails to get some prod servers and app keys and we were fine.
Now is the time where I pause the rant to express to you just how fine we were decidedly **not**: we were not fine.
Tuesday rolls around and what a bad Tuesday it was. It was the first of many requirement changes. There was going to need to be a review process. Instead of the team just reading submissions from the site, they needed accept and reject buttons. They needed a way to deny people for specific reasons. Meaning the employee dashboard just got a little more complicated.
Wednesday came around and yeah, we need a registration and login flow. Yikes.
Thursday came and the couple-thousand dollars turned into a tens of millions. The amount of users we expected just blew up.
Friday, and they needed a way for users to edit their submissions and re-submit if they were rejected. And we needed to send out emails for the status of their applications.
Every day, a new meeting. Every meeting, new requirements that were devastating given our timeframe.
We put in overtime. Came in on the weekend. And by Monday, we had a form that users could submit and a registration/ login flow. No reviewer dashboard. We figured we could take in user input on time and then finish the dashboard later.
Well, financial team has some qualms. They wanted a more complicated review process. They wanted roles; managers assign to assistants. Assistants review assigned items.
The deadline that we worked so hard on whizzed by without so much as a thought, much less the funeral it deserved.
Then, they wanted multiple people to review an application before it was final. Then, they needed different landing pages for a few more departments to be able to review different steps of the applications.
Ended up going live on Friday, close to a month after that faithful Monday which disrupted everything else I was working on, effective immediately.
I don't know why, but we always go live on a Friday for some reason. It must be some sort of conspiracy to force overtime out of our managers. I'm baffled.
But I worked support after the launch.
And there's a funny story about support too: we were asked to create a "submit an issue" form. Me and the other junior worked on it on a wednesday three weeks into the project. Finished it. And the next day it was scrapped and moved to another service we already had running. Poor management like that plagued the project and worked in tandem with the dynamic and ridiculous requirements to make this project hell.
Back to support.
Phone calls give me bad anxiety. But Friday, just before lunch, I was put on the support team. Sure, we have a department that makes calls and deal with users. But they can't be trained on this program: it didn't exist just a month ago, and three days ago it worked differently (the slippery requirements never stopped).
So all of Friday and then all of Saturday and all of Monday (...) I had extended panic attacks calling hundreds of people. And the team that was calling people was only two people. We had over 400 tickets in the first two days.
And fuck me, stupid me, for doing a good job. Because I was put on the call team for **another** COVID project afterwards. I knew nothing about this project. I have hated my job recently. But I'm a junior. What am I gonna say, no?7 -
!rant
Programming is a huge blessing i believe we all should be thankful to. For me, it literally turned my life around.
11 months ago i was fighting a losing battle with depression, and contemplated suicide constantly. I would use a self remedy of smoking weed and sleeping all day long. I was depressed because i felt my life had no real value. I was doing nothing, and its kind of an infinite loop.
You don't do anything, so you feel bad, so you don't do anything, and so on.
That was until i finally took the step that changed my life. I searched and wanted to learn something. I always liked web pages so i thought id get into web development.
Did some research, found out that the fastest way to go was to learn ruby on rails. I followed a tutorial i found online, and literally pushed myself through it. There were times when there where things i didnt understand, and when it was really bad, but i pushed myself through it and i finished the tutorial.
Just finishing the tutorial and learning something new helped me alot. I had already quit smoking and was feeling way better, but after a while i started feeling bad again since i wasnt doing anything after i had finished learning, so i started working on a personal project, creating it from scratch, and just working on it day and night. I worked 14 hours a day, never really leaving my room ( this was during summer vacation ) for a month.
There were many things i didnt understand, but i never gave up and always searched for the solution and read about it until i understood it better. Looking back, there were things i knew could have been done in a better way, but as a first project, im proud of myself, not because it rocks, but because i did not give up.
In the process of starting a new life, i was really lonely. I cut all ties with everyone i knew, since they were all toxic, all i had in my life was ruby on rails and my web application. I wanted to launch it but couldn't due to personal reasons.
Not being able to launch and see something live, something that you worked so hard on, that you put so much effort into, that was devastating to me. I felt as if all my efforts had gone to waste.
And here is what i love most about programming, NOTHING EVER GOES TO WASTE. All that effort you spent on something ? All these all nighters you pulled ? All that frustration from that bug ? It will pay off later. It always does somehow. You get more knowledge and become a better programmer, and sometimes it even gives way to new opportunities and chances you never even expected.
I included my web application in my resume and it helped land me a job as a junior developer in a really nice company. A job that i wouldn't even have dreamed of several months earlier.
Programming and creating something new and learning something new everyday, creating something that people use, that someone else will benefit from and be grateful for, i think we should never take that for granted !
Tl;dr : learning how to code and web development saved my life9 -
Please stop recommending arch. For real. Stop!
Let's back up. I'm an arch user. Have been for years. I love arch! Like hardcore! But for real, cut it out.
Either they didn't ask and you're being obnoxious or they probably asked "what's a good distro to learn?" Or "Ubuntu holds my hand too much, I want something more consoley" either way, arch is not the answer. Arch is a distro for us stuck up types who like spending all day fixing dependency errors, changing our WM every other week, debating the merits of X vs wayland, and acting better than everyone else.
But here's the thing: I found arch because I wanted something that I could compulsively configure and get really in the weeds. I think most arch users feel that way to some degree. You kinda have to if you want to not be miserable. But many Linux users aren't like that. And that's fine! Let them use mint, or Debian. So they never change their DE. Cinnamon is a great interface! Gnome 2 is totally fine! There's literally nothing wrong with being content with sane defaults and not manually installing every package, and having scheduled releases from a stable source.
Do you tell 7th graders "if you really want to get better at algebra, you should try calculus. You really gain a deep knowledge of math!" No! They will get there when they are good and ready! Or not. It's not a beginner distro. In fact (controversial opinion ahead) it's pretty shitty at being a distro. I have used arch for years! But I don't recommend it to anyone. Because if you want to configure a box for literally 100s of hours (it's never really over is it?), Then you aren't asking anyone about distro recommendations. You've tried them all. You've heard of arch. You been to /r/unixporn.
Stop acting better than everyone else and stop telling people it's better than <other distro here>. It's not. It's different. Very different. And it's not for everyone.26 -
I'm drunk and I'll probably regret this, but here's a drunken rank of things I've learned as an engineer for the past 10 years.
The best way I've advanced my career is by changing companies.
Technology stacks don't really matter because there are like 15 basic patterns of software engineering in my field that apply. I work in data so it's not going to be the same as webdev or embedded. But all fields have about 10-20 core principles and the tech stack is just trying to make those things easier, so don't fret overit.
There's a reason why people recommend job hunting. If I'm unsatisfied at a job, it's probably time to move on.
I've made some good, lifelong friends at companies I've worked with. I don't need to make that a requirement of every place I work. I've been perfectly happy working at places where I didn't form friendships with my coworkers and I've been unhappy at places where I made some great friends.
I've learned to be honest with my manager. Not too honest, but honest enough where I can be authentic at work. What's the worse that can happen? He fire me? I'll just pick up a new job in 2 weeks.
If I'm awaken at 2am from being on-call for more than once per quarter, then something is seriously wrong and I will either fix it or quit.
pour another glass
Qualities of a good manager share a lot of qualities of a good engineer.
When I first started, I was enamored with technology and programming and computer science. I'm over it.
Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all.
The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.)
Related to above, writing good proposals for changes is a great skill.
Almost every holy war out there (vim vs emacs, mac vs linux, whatever) doesn't matter... except one. See below.
The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me.
If I ever find myself thinking I'm the smartest person in the room, it's time to leave.
I don't know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly. No really, they should be paid like half a mil a year just base salary. Fuck they have to understand both front end AND back end AND how different browsers work AND networking AND databases AND caching AND differences between web and mobile AND omg what the fuck there's another framework out there that companies want to use? Seriously, why are webdevs paid so little.
We should hire more interns, they're awesome. Those energetic little fucks with their ideas. Even better when they can question or criticize something. I love interns.
sip
Don't meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He's a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he's making it up as he goes along like the rest of us.
Tech stack matters. OK I just said tech stack doesn't matter, but hear me out. If you hear Python dev vs C++ dev, you think very different things, right? That's because certain tools are really good at certain jobs. If you're not sure what you want to do, just do Java. It's a shitty programming language that's good at almost everything.
The greatest programming language ever is lisp. I should learn lisp.
For beginners, the most lucrative programming language to learn is SQL. Fuck all other languages. If you know SQL and nothing else, you can make bank. Payroll specialtist? Maybe 50k. Payroll specialist who knows SQL? 90k. Average joe with organizational skills at big corp? $40k. Average joe with organization skills AND sql? Call yourself a PM and earn $150k.
Tests are important but TDD is a damn cult.
Cushy government jobs are not what they are cracked up to be, at least for early to mid-career engineers. Sure, $120k + bennies + pension sound great, but you'll be selling your soul to work on esoteric proprietary technology. Much respect to government workers but seriously there's a reason why the median age for engineers at those places is 50+. Advice does not apply to government contractors.
Third party recruiters are leeches. However, if you find a good one, seriously develop a good relationship with them. They can help bootstrap your career. How do you know if you have a good one? If they've been a third party recruiter for more than 3 years, they're probably bad. The good ones typically become recruiters are large companies.
Options are worthless or can make you a millionaire. They're probably worthless unless the headcount of engineering is more than 100. Then maybe they are worth something within this decade.
Work from home is the tits. But lack of whiteboarding sucks.39 -
I am bloody sick of being on my own.
I was the sole dev at the last few jobs I've held, with the exception of API Guy -- who didn't really help much, and who got fired / quit six months after I started. Every other job I've either been the only dev, or the only web dev. (Exception:My boss at my previous job was a Rails dev, but he has zero time to code, and was significantly less experiened so he could only rarely help anyway.)
But now I'm in a company with a bunch of other devs, and they're all ostensibly senior devs, so you'd think I should be able to ask questions, right? And get answers? that actually help? like "Hey, you built this; how does it work?" No bloody way.
So far every time I've asked someone for help, they've been incompetent. I asked about what a few flags did, and got an answer that basically said "you just gotta know. oh, and the labels aren't up to date, so don't trust what they say." I asked the head of the "product team" about a ticket that he wrote, and he changed what it meant four times within two days. I asked about another, and he said "oh, that isn't reproduceable." Thanks. I asked about mailers, and got two very different, very incompete walkthroughs from the more senior devs (9+ years on this codebase) that didn't help. I asked two people about how users and roles work, and still have no idea what kind of user (there are like twelve?) is what, what roles even exist, or how to check for permissions. `@current_user` is a thing, but idfk what it holds since that can change considerably, and there's an impersonation feature that changes how it works, too. I ask the product guy again about where to link something, and he has no idea. I ask said product guy about what this feature needs to do, and he doesn't know. I ask what the legal team needs, and i get nothing. I ask the designer where the goddamn CSS lives, and he doesn't know; he apparently just puts it wherever he feels like, even if it's a completely unrelated stylesheet. As long as it works, right?
I ask very simple and straighforward questions, and it takes them forever to get back to me saying what amounts to "idk, ask someone else."
This feels like the same crap all over again, except now there are a bunch of devs I can ask that give me basically the same answers as the sales people always did. Always "idk" or a confusing mess of an 'answer' that skips most/all of the important bits. At least these people don't [usually] contradict themselves.
So, @Root is all alone, again.
And currounded by incompetence.
Again.
For fuck's sake.
Can't I catch a break?19 -
Navy story continued.
And continuing from the arp poisoning and boredom, I started scanning the network...
So I found plenty of WinXP computers, even some Win2k servers (I shit you not, the year was 201X) I decided to play around with merasploit a bit. I mean, this had to be a secure net, right?
Like hell it was.
Among the select douchebags I arp poisoned was a senior officer that had a VERY high idea for himself, and also believed he was tech-savvy. Now that, is a combination that is the red cloth for assholes like me. But I had to be more careful, as news of the network outage leaked, and rumours of "that guy" went amok, but because the whole sysadmin thing was on the shoulders of one guy, none could track it to me in explicit way. Not that i cared, actually, when I am pissed I act with all the subtleness of an atom bomb on steroids.
So, after some scanning and arp poisoning (changing the source MAC address this time) I said...
"Let's try this common exploit, it supposedly shouldn't work, there have been notifications about it, I've read them." Oh boy, was I in for a treat. 12 meterpreter sessions. FUCKING 12. The academy's online printer had no authentication, so I took the liberty of printing a few pages of ASCII jolly rogers (cute stuff, I know, but I was still in ITSec puberty) and decided to fuck around with the other PCs. One thing I found out is that some professors' PCs had the extreme password of 1234. Serious security, that was. Had I known earlier, I could have skipped a TON of pointless memorising...
Anyway, I was running amok the entire network, the sysad never had a chance on that, and he seemed preoccupied with EVERYTHING ELSE besides monitoring the net, like fixing (replacing) the keyboard for the commander's secretary, so...
BTW, most PCs had antivirus, but SO out of date that I didn't even need to encode the payload or do any other trick. An LDAP server was open, and the hashed admin password was the name of his wife. Go figure.
I looked at a WinXP laptop with a weird name, and fired my trusty ms08_067 on it. Passowrd: "aaw". I seriously thought that Ophcrack was broken, but I confirmed it. WTF? I started looking into the files... nothing too suspicious... wait a min, this guy is supposed to work, why his browser is showing porn?
Looking at the ""Deleted"" files (hah!) I fount a TON of documents with "SECRET" in them. Curious...
Decided to download everything, like the asshole I am, and restart his PC, AND to leave him with another desktop wallpaper and a text message. Thinking that he took the hint, I told the sysadmin about the vulnerable PCs and went to class...
In the middle of the class (I think it was anti-air warfare or anti-submarine warfare) the sysad burst through the door shouting "Stop it, that's the second-in-command's PC!".
Stunned silence. Even the professor (who was an officer). God, that was awkward. So, to make things MORE awkward (like the asshole I am) I burned every document to a DVD and the next day I took the sysad and went to the second-in-command of the academy.
Surprisingly he took the whole thing in quite the easygoing fashion. I half-expected court martial or at least a good yelling, but no. Anyway, after our conversation I cornered the sysad and barraged him with some tons of security holes, needed upgrades and settings etc. I still don't know if he managed to patch everything (I left him a detailed report) because, as I've written before, budget constraints in the military are the stuff of nightmares. Still, after that, oddly, most people wouldn't even talk to me.
God, that was a nice period of my life, not having to pretend to be interested about sports and TV shows. It would be almost like a story from highschool (if our highschool had such things as a network back then - yes, I am old).
Your stories?8 -
#3 Worst thing I've seen a co-worker do?
A 20-something dev, 'A', back in the early days of twitter+facebook would post all his extracurricular activities (drinking, partying, normal young-buck stuff). The dev mgr, 'J', at the time took offense because he felt 'A' was making the company look bad, so 'A' had a target on his back. Nothing 'A' did was good enough and, for example, 'J' had the source control czars review 'A's code to 'review' (aka = find anything wrong). Not sorting the 'using' statements, and extra line after the closing }, petty things like that. For those curious, orders followed+carried out by+led by 'T' in my previous rant.
As time went on and 'T' finding more and more 'wrong' with A's code, 'J' put A on disciplinary probation. 'A' had 90 days to turn himself around, or else.
A bright spot was 'A' was working on a Delphi -> C# conversion, so a lot of the code would be green-field development and by simply following the "standards", 'A' would be fine...so he thought.
About 2 weeks into the probation, 'A' was called into the J's office and berated because the conversion project was behind schedule, and if he didn't get the project back on track, 'A' wouldn't make it 30 days. I sat behind 'A' and he unloaded on me.
<'A' slams his phone on his desk>
Me: "Whoa...whats up?"
A: "Dude, I fucking hate this place, did you hear what they did?"
<I said no, then I think we spent an hour talking about it>
Me: "That all sucks. Don't worry about the code. Nobody cares what T thinks. Its not even your fault the project is behind, the DBAs are tasked with upgrades and it's not like anyone is waiting on you. It'll get done when it's done. Sounds like a witch hunt, what did you do? Be honest."
A: "Well, um...I kinda called out J, T, and those other assholes on facebook. I was drunk, pissed, and ...well...here we are."
Me: "Geez, what a bunch of whiney snowflakes. Keep your head down and you'll get thru it, or don't. Its not like you couldn't find another job tomorrow."
A: "This is my first job out of college and I don't want to disappoint my dad by quitting. I don't even know what I'm supposed to be doing. All J told me was to get better. What the fuk does that even mean?"
Me: "He didn't give you any goals? Crap, for someone who is a stickler for the rules, that's low, even for J."
Fast forward 2 weeks, I was attending MS TechEd and I was with another dev mgr, R.
R: "Did you hear? We had to let 'A' go today."
Me: "What the hell? Why?"
R: "He couldn't cut it, so we had to let him go."
Me: "Cut what? What did he do, specifically?"
R: "I don't know, 'A' was on probation, I guess he didn't meet the goals."
Me: "You guess? We fire a developer working on a major upgrade and you guess? What were these so-called goals?"
R: "Whoa...you're getting a little fire up. I don't know, maybe not adhering to coding standards, not meeting deadlines?"
Me: "OMG...we fire people for not forming code? Are you serious!?"
R: "Oh...yea...that does sound odd when you put it that way. I wish I'd talk to you before we left on this trip"
Me: "What?! You knew they were firing him *before* we left? How long did you know this was happening?"
R: "Honestly, for a while. 'A' really wasn't a team player."
Me: "That's dirty, the whole thing is dirty. We've done some shitty things to people, but this is low, even for J. The probation process is meant to improve, not be used as a witch hunt. I don't like that you stood around and let it happen. You know better."
R: "Yea, you're right, but doesn't change anything. J wanted to do it while most of us were at the conference in case 'A' caused a scene."
Me: "THAT MAKES IT WORSE! 'A' was blindsided and you knew it. He had no one there that could defend him or anything."
R: "Crap, crap, crap...oh crap...jeez...J had this planned all along...crap....there is nothing I can do no...its too late."
Me: "Yes there is. If 'A' comes to you for a letter of recommendation, you write one. If someone calls for reference, you give him a good one."
R: "Yea..yea...crap...I feel like shit...I need to go back to the room and lie down."
As the sun sets, it rises again. Within a couple of weeks, 'A' had another job at a local university. Within a year, he was the department manager, and now he is a vice president (last time I checked) of a college in Kansas City, MO.10 -
I’m surrounded by idiots.
I’m continually reminded of that fact, but today I found something that really drives that point home.
Gather ‘round, everybody, it’s story time!
While working on a slow query ticket, I perused the code, finding several causes, and decided to run git blame on the files to see what dummy authored the mental diarrhea currently befouling my screen. As it turns out, the entire feature was written by mister legendary Apple golden boy “Finder’s Keeper” dev himself.
To give you the full scope of this mess, let me start at the frontend and work my way backward.
He wrote a javascript method that tracks whatever row was/is under the mouse in a table and dynamically removes/adds a “.row_selected” class on it. At least the js uses events (jQuery…) instead of a `setTimeout()` so it could be worse. But still, has he never heard of :hover? The function literally does nothing else, and the `selectedRow` var he stores the element reference in isn’t used elsewhere.
This function allows the user to better see the rows in the API Calls table, for which there is a also search feature — the very thing I’m tasked with fixing.
It’s worth noting that above the search feature are two inputs for a date range, with some helpful links like “last week” and “last month” … and “All”. It’s also worth noting that this table is for displaying search results of all the API requests and their responses for a given merchant… this table is enormous.
This search field for this table queries the backend on every character the user types. There’s no debouncing, no submit event, etc., so it triggers on every keystroke. The actual request runs through a layer of abstraction to parse out and log the user-entered date range, figure out where the request came from, and to map out some column names or add additional ones. It also does some hard to follow (and amazingly not injectable) orm condition building. It’s a mess of functional ugly.
The important columns in the table this query ultimately searches are not indexed, despite it only looking for “create_order” records — the largest of twenty-some types in the table. It also uses partial text matching (again: on. every. single. keystroke.) across two varchar(255)s that only ever hold <16 chars — and of which users only ever care about one at a time. After all of this, it filters the results based on some uncommented regexes, and worst of all: instead of fetching only one page’s worth of results like you’d expect, it fetches all of them at once and then discards what isn’t included by the paginator. So not only is this a guaranteed full table scan with partial text matching for every query (over millions to hundreds of millions of records), it’s that same full table scan for every single keystroke while the user types, and all but 25 records (user-selectable) get discarded — and then requeried when the user looks at the next page of results.
What the bloody fucking hell? I’d swear this idiot is an intern, but his code does (amazingly) actually work.
No wonder this search field nearly crashed one of the servers when someone actually tried using it.
Asdfajsdfk.rant fucking moron even when taking down the server hey bob pass me all the paperclips mysql murder terrible code slow query idiot can do no wrong but he’s the golden boy idiots repeatedly murdered mysql in the face21 -
The following meeting occurred at a client between a recently added client PM and our team, we'll call her Shrilldesi, previously from one of the main consulting vendors.
*Meeting begins after 15 minutes of bullshitting, waiting for people to file in*
Shrilldesi: "Ok everyone, let's get started
TeamMember: "We're still waiting for Z and W, not sure why they're late."
SD: "We can start there. It was decided had to lay off Z and W, because we didn't have enough work."
Moi: "Wait, what. Who made that decision? Why weren't we consulted on this? We have another project starting next week that they were needed for. They just delivered the entire public facing rewrite, why would we let them go?!"
SD: "It was decided by myself, pajeet, and venkata looking at the backlog. Not enough work, week gap."
Moi: "This is going to hurt our ability to deliver the next phase. When are we going to start interviewing new people, the project begins next week?"
SD: "We will interview new resources as needed."
Moi: "Who is we? And 'as needed' is yesterday, or realistically several weeks ago as the. project. starts. next. week. Also, we're obligated by federal law to bring back anyone we lay off before we hire anyone else for the same position."
SD: "Interviews will be done by myself, Mohd, and Pajeet."
Moi: "...can I point out that there's only one modestly technical person in that group, they're an admin, and none of them are from this team? How do you conduct an engineering interview without any engineers?"
SD: "That does not matter, I have watched enough to be able to ask your questions."
Moi: *anger intensifies* "I have to respectfully disagree. I don't feel it's appropriate to cut us out of the process of interviewing our own team members."
SD: "It is decided, we will take care of it, let us move on. Next, we need to find work for the Manasa, she doesn't have anything to do."
Moi: *sharpens baseball bat* "...shouldn't we just fire her then?"
SD: "Oh that is so mean, why would we fire her? We were thinking she might be able to do some of my project management work."
Moi: *sharpening intensifies* "You do realize it's a violation of H1-B statutes for someone to be employed in work other than what is stated on their contract, and Project Managers are specifically listed as not specialized skillsets per federal law."
SD: *ignores question* "We also need to find work for the offshore team, they don't have enough to do. Please find them work for the next period."
Moi: *checks how long the wait period is for ar-15s*
SD: "We also have a new person rolling onto our team, he comes from the xyz team, Dikshit *gestures to person we all figured was lost*. He will be handling our front end development."
Moi: *seething hatred* "WE JUST LET TWO EXCELLENT FRONT END DEVELOPERS GO. WE DO NOT NEED DIKSHIT."
SD: "Please calm down. We will be replacing the other two shortly, there is no problem."
Moi: "Have you heard nothing I've said? Did you even run this by legal and HR? Why did we let them go in the first place? Why do we even need Dikshit?!"
SD: "I said it before, please listen. There is not enough work for them. Dikshit will do front end. What is unclear?"
Note: There's not really any dramatization here. It's almost verbatim what happened. Eventually, the next project was cancelled, they incrementally rolled the rest of the local team off. They then had the cojones to express aghast anger when I notified them I would not be renewing my contract, and open hatred when I explained to them I was not a slave, and I refused to be a bag holder for the inevitable failure of a project without any chance of success. I don't really care what happened after that, they can all burn in their own little nepotistic shitshow of perpetual failure.4 -
I have never been fucked more in my life. A month ago I finished a 3 month internship for my last year of my education. And next to the internship I only have my thesis to defend and voila, I got my diploma! The internship itself went awesome, met some very interesting people, had a ton of fun working there and they were really happy about me.
But then it started, about 2 weeks after my internship started I got an email that my mentor (from school itself) had changed. It changed to a guy who's known for his insane way of teaching and being very unprofessional. Sometimes when I had a class on another level a bit further in the hall, we could hear him screaming while he was "teaching". He's really insane and should in no way be teaching to students. On top of that he has very little knowledge about CS, since he "teaches" maths.
So after I got the news I knew I was fucked. This guy is really hard to communicate with. And I'd never be able to have a decent, professional conversation with him.
So after I did everything I knew I was supposed to do, I tried to contact him on what else he'd need from me. His emails were crazy, unprofessional, and in no condition of being able to read and understand. So I started to get really annoyed but I didn't make this clear towards him. I even complained to another person of my school in a very polite way by saying that our communication wasn't going so well, I got no answer from that person and she even forwarded my complaint to him without asking for my permission and answering me.
So I kept doing what he kinda asked for, but had no idea if I was doing it wrong or right since I almost never got an answer from him, or the answer was not even an answer to my questions in the first place.
Today I had my presentation of the internship in front of him. It's the first time I see him since this school year. I give my presentation being quite happy of what I did at the company. When I was finished he starts bashing me into oblivion with ignorant questions, comments and very deconstructive negative feedback. Me not knowing what the fuck is happening and getting really angry inside standing there with nothing to say. I answered all of his questions as good as I could. But he was tearing me down so fucking hard. Because I only had half an hour I sticked with the most important stuff about my internship, didn't go to deep into all of it because he's not a fucking it'er anyway, and he asked for it specifically not to go deep into the project. But now he's saying I'm not giving enough information?! (He wanted to know what IDE I used?!?! What the fuck has that to do with anything)
So although I had a wonderful internship and I completed my project far better than the company had expected, my presentation went awful. I'm thinking that the guy was predetermined in failing me. How can I do a good job if he himself is not give a fuck about me. So now he's probably failing me for something he has no clue of what I did, and it's not even my fault.
I have no idea what I should be doing now. I start working in the second week of February but I probably won't get my bachelors degree until September now because of this fucker. I'm even thinking on taking legal actions. This guy just fucked my self confidence so hard. I'm fucking depressed right now15 -
( rant || !rant ) && idiots
console.info( this.isLongRant );
console.warn( "contains strong language and wordpress" );
A friend of mine sent two of his "friends" to me because they wanted me to build a website for their new business (~idea).
So I had a meeting with them.
First of all they wanted me to have a look on the current (work in progress) site.
First impression of the frontend:
OH BOY!?
Well, imagine this:
- a 90s/2k background (dotted/pixelated cloud in baby-blueish as backgroud with repeat)
- the logo was made by the sister of one of the guys, it wasn't too bad, but badly aligned, asymmetrical
- some obvious $offTheShelfShopPlugin with $randomStockContent
- the fucking slider had a small loading bar to indicate changes, it appears like an hyperanxious child on ADHS
- below the logo TWO FUCKING GIF SPINNERS to indicate nothing else but how fucking brain amputated these two dudes are, including the dev who is responsible for adding this. (to this point, they only told me, that a webagency did the setup and some basic work on the site, more on that later)
- no styling concept at all, random fonts and stuff everywhere including default styles of the shop plugin.
- FUUUUUCK WTF wil come furtherin this meeting?
After seeing a pile of binary puke fisted out of a 60yo nonstop-intern who changed his jobtitle from dildo-traveling-salesman to fullstack-frontend-dev by wrinting it on a post-it-note, I imagined, there has to be something wrong with the backend as well.
Boy was I right!
Yes, you guessed it! A random Wordpress adminpanel login appeared! OH NO....
I really wanted to levae this meeting immediately.
I was not able to hold my disgust back and I told them right in their face, what a shit pile of nutty squirrel turds this current page is. And that Wordpress is not the right choice at all for a shop.
Then came the best part: They basically told me, that they terminated the previous contract with the webagency because they were too expensive (they are cheap, compared to others, I know people who know their prices) and that they wanted to create A BIG MARKETPKACE with multiple ressellers who can have their shop in their website. Something similar to FUCKING AMAZON. ON FUCKING WORDPRESS!?!?!?
They even asked me if I wanted to be their partner & developer and that they can't pay much at the moment until the marketplace starts to grow.
I more or less told them to go fuck themselves with a rusty pitchfork.2 -
Every single one of them, and every one that will come after them.
Google, it started out as 2 people in their garage, wanting to make a search engine that was better than the others. Nothing else, nothing evil. Just make the world a little bit better. And look what it's become now. A megacorporation with little to no regards for their user base. Because who cares about users anyway?
Microsoft, it started out with Bill Gates - young high school computer nerd - who wanted to make an operating system for the world to use. Something that's better than the competition. And boy did he do so. Well "better than the competition" aside, he did make it for the world to use. And the world adopted it. And look what it's become now. A megacorporation with little to no regards for their user base. Because who cares about users anyway?
See where I'm going here?
Apple, it started out with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in their garage, just like Google did, wanting to make hardware that was better than the others. Nothing else, nothing evil. Just to make the world a little bit better. And look what it's become now. Planned obsolescence has been baked into it, just like it is in every other piece of technology. Quality control and thinking through the design has become a thing of the past. User choice, yeah who cares about that.
Samsung, it started out centuries ago actually, and I don't really remember the details of it.. ColdFusion has a video on it if memory serves me right. Do watch it if you're interested. Anyway, just like all the others they started out as a company which wanted to make the world a little bit better. And damn right did they do so.. initially. Look what they've become now. Forcing their stupid TouchWiz UI upon their customers (or products?), a Bixby button that can't even be reprogrammed.. and the latest thing.. Knox, advertised as a security feature, but as everyone who likes rooting their devices and mucking with it knows, it is an anti-feature that only serves for lockdown. Why shouldn't you be able to turn in a phone for RMA when a hardware error occurs, when all you've personally modified is the software? Why should changing the software blow that eFuse, so that you can be sure that you can't replace it without specialized equipment and a very steady hand?
I could go on and on forever about more of the tech giants out there, but I feel like this suffices for now. Otherwise I won't have anything else left for future rants! But one thing I know for sure. Every tech company started, starts, and will start out with a desire to make the world a better place, and once they gain a significant customer base, they will without exception turn into the same kind of Evil Megacorp., just like the ones before them. Some may say that capitalism itself is to blame for this, the greed for more when you already have a lot. Who knows? I'd rather say that the very human nature itself is to blame for it. We're by design greedy beings, and I hate it. I hate being human for that. I don't want humans to be evil towards one another, and be greedy for ever more. But I guess that that's just the way it is, and some things do actually never change...17 -
It wasn't my curiosity that introduced me to programming. Actually, it was my mother.
It was about six years ago, when I'd told her I'd like to make video-games, like all kids do. She didn't just nod and go about her way. She found a free course that taught programming to kids my age and immediately enrolled me. Looking back, it was surely the best thing she'd done for me, because it gave me a purpose and a future to look forward to.
The course was interesting. We learned the basics of C++, then moved on to harder topics like algorithms and data types. But more and more, I was beginning to feel left behind. Like I didn't belong there. It didn't help that I only programmed on the course, with no practice back home.
I felt scared of the future. Thought I didn't have what it takes to become a programmer. I might have broken the last straw when I started playing truant and went to McDonald's to pass the time. Because every time I did go to the course, I felt stupid and anxious. So I simply skipped.
Time passed. I got more depressed, became more antisocial, my self-esteem took a nosedive. And when it comes to depression, people always seek an escape path.
I got my escape in fiction. Started reading books, tried writing stories, and it got to the point where I asked my mother if I could become a writer and not a programmer.
And guess what? She said, "Do what brings you happiness. This is your life."
It's funny, that such a silly line stopped and got me to think. Turned out, I didn't program for fun, for myself or for my career. I'd done it for my parents, for their expectations and I was scared that in failing, I'd become a loser in their eyes.
I dropped out of the programming course. Not because it sucked, but because I wasn't going there for myself, but for my parents. But I didn't quit programming. No, I watched countless tutorials, youtube videos, browsed StackOverflow, read some books, coded every day, and now I can say without hesitation, that I love programming. I'm hooked. And I don't want to stop.
If you've read this so far, I'm sorry for my rambling. I will now leave you with only one tip: If you decided to do something, do it for yourself. Forget about parents, expectations, career, future, time or money and do it only because you want to. Because nothing else matters. Only your happiness.7 -
This is my first post on devRant!
Story time:
It was on my first job as a developer, learning a lot but getting paid less than 50% of the minimum monthly wage of my country.
It was settled in the interview that as I gained more experience, I could handle more projects and earn more money.
At the time, I was living with my parents and didn't have to pay rent and some stuff, so I was like "Well, I'm gonna learn a lot and, if I put a lot of effort into it, soon I'll be making more money".
We agreed that I'll only develop, but 4 months into the job, I was already going to clients
and started coding there (having the client on my back every minute, not being able to work properly) and fixing some computer/network issues they had,
because my boss said I should do it.
Things at home started to go south, and suddenly I needed more money, so I kept doing the work and getting paid a little bit more
A year goes by, devs came and go beacuse of the work/payment situation, and I was still there.
From my first "paycheck" to the last day I never got paid on time, and that was the same for everybody else
The last month I was there, I had a job offer with a better salary and weekends free, so I wanted to take it (I worked saturdays there).
We were working at our biggest clients place at the time (a hospital, working in the server room, desk and chair were a total crap),
so I wanted to have a good conversation with my boss and tell him whats up, after all, I was really grateful for the job despite all things.
We headed outside and started talking. He basically begged me to stay, said that he will pay me on time and offered me more money (less than the other company was offering me),
and that he needed me to finish the implementation and "minor issues" with the app.
I thought about it for a couple of days, and decided to stay. I politely rejected the job offer, and even recommended someone else.
As the days passed, regret was building fast inside of me, until the day that I was supposed to get paid.
He never showed up to the client, told me in a call that he will be there sometime in the morning, that he had the money for me.
So I stayed until my day ended, and still no sign of him. I had no money on me, needed some for gas so I could go, and I called him 5 times.
He picked up the last time, talks to me like nothing is happening and I started to shout at him like I never shouted to anybody before,
got all the things of my chest, and when I was done, he said that he will send the money to my account right away.
This happened on a Saturday, so I quit the following Monday, and lost the other job offer.7 -
So, some time ago, I was working for a complete puckered anus of a cosmetics company on their ecommerce product. Won't name names, but they're shitty and known for MLM. If you're clever, go you ;)
Anyways, over the course of years they brought in a competent firm to implement their service layer. I'd even worked with them in the past and it was designed to handle a frankly ridiculous-scale load. After they got the 1.0 released, the manager was replaced with some absolutely talentless, chauvinist cuntrag from a phone company that is well known for having 99% indian devs and not being able to heard now. He of course brought in his number two, worked on making life miserable and running everyone on the team off; inside of a year the entire team was ex-said-phone-company.
Watching the decay of this product was a sheer joy. They cratered the database numerous times during peak-load periods, caused $20M in redis-cluster cost overrun, ended up submitting hundreds of erroneous and duplicate orders, and mailed almost $40K worth of product to a random guy in outer mongolia who is , we can only hope, now enjoying his new life as an instagram influencer. They even terminally broke the automatic metadata, and hired THIRTY PEOPLE to sit there and do nothing but edit swagger. And it was still both wrong and unusable.
Over the course of two years, I ended up rewriting large portions of their infra surrounding the centralized service cancer to do things like, "implement security," as well as cut memory usage and runtimes down by quite literally 100x in the worst cases.
It was during this time I discovered a rather critical flaw. This is the story of what, how and how can you fucking even be that stupid. The issue relates to users and their reports and their ability to order.
I first found this issue looking at some erroneous data for a low value order and went, "There's no fucking way, they're fucking stupid, but this is borderline criminal." It was easy to miss, but someone in a top down reporting chain had submitted an order for someone else in a different org. Shouldn't be possible, but here was that order staring me in the face.
So I set to work seeing if we'd pwned ourselves as an org. I spend a few hours poring over logs from the log service and dynatrace trying to recreate what happened. I first tested to see if I could get a user, not something that was usually done because auth identity was pervasive. I discover the users are INCREMENTAL int values they used for ids in the database when requesting from the API, so naturally I have a full list of users and their title and relative position, as well as reports and descendants in about 10 minutes.
I try the happy path of setting values for random, known payment methods and org structures similar to the impossible order, and submitting as a normal user, no dice. Several more tries and I'm confident this isn't the vector.
Exhausting that option, I look at the protocol for a type of order in the system that allowed higher level people to impersonate people below them and use their own payment info for descendant report orders. I see that all of the data for this transaction is stored in a cookie. Few tests later, I discover the UI has no forgery checks, hashing, etc, and just fucking trusts whatever is present in that cookie.
An hour of tweaking later, I'm impersonating a director as a bottom rung employee. Score. So I fill a cart with a bunch of test items and proceed to checkout. There, in all its glory are the director's payment options. I select one and am presented with:
"please reenter card number to validate."
Bupkiss. Dead end.
OR SO YOU WOULD THINK.
One unimportant detail I noticed during my log investigations that the shit slinging GUI monkeys who butchered the system didn't was, on a failed attempt to submit payment in the DB, the logs were filled with messages like:
"Failed to submit order for [userid] with credit card id [id], number [FULL CREDIT CARD NUMBER]"
One submit click later and the user's credit card number drops into lnav like a gatcha prize. I dutifully rerun the checkout and got an email send notification in the logs for successful transfer to fulfillment. Order placed. Some continued experimentation later and the truth is evident:
With an authenticated user or any privilege, you could place any order, as anyone, using anyon's payment methods and have it sent anywhere.
So naturally, I pack the crucifixion-worthy body of evidence up and walk it into the IT director's office. I show him the defect, and he turns sheet fucking white. He knows there's no recovering from it, and there's no way his shitstick service team can handle fixing it. Somewhere in his tiny little grinchly manager's heart he knew they'd caused it, and he was to blame for being a shit captain to the SS Failboat. He replies quietly, "You will never speak of this to anyone, fix this discretely." Straight up hitler's bunker meme rage.13 -
Woohoo! 32k achieved!!! Finally I can post some new rant without risking some sudden overshoot 😁
So putting celebrations aside for a minute, a while ago I've noticed a tingle when I stroke my finger across metal areas of my tablet, or the sides of my phone (which probably has metal near it too) while it's charging. And it's been bugging me ever since.
Now, some things to note are that it only happens when my feet are touching the ground though slippers, and that the frequency is so low that I can actually feel the tingle when I slide my finger across the material. This to me at least seems like electricity flows through me into ground, and touching the ground directly provides a path so easy for the electrons to run away that I don't feel it at all. But if I lift my feet off the ground entirely, I just get charged up and after that, nothing else happens.
So those are my ideas. The answers on the subject on the other hand.. absolute cancer. Unsurprisingly, most of them came from Apple users. Here's some of them.
https://discussions.apple.com/threa...
- I've not noticed it, but if you're concerned bring the phone to Apple for evaluation.
- Me too facing same problem.. did u visit apple care?
And one good answer at least...
- google emf sensitivity, its real. You are right, there is a small current flowing through your body, try to limit your usage. The problem with this issue is those who aren't affected (lucky ones for now) will tell you these products are 100% safe. To a degree they are, i used my ipod touch for about 2 years straight vwith virtually no symptoms. then the tingling started and it gets worse.You will get more sensitive to progressively less powerful things. I dont want to scare you but just limit your usage like i didnt do 🙂
Overall that discussion was pretty good actually, aside from "bring it to the Genius Bar, they'll know for sure and not just sell you another unit". But then there's Reddit.
https://reddit.com/r/iphone/...
- Ok, real reason is probably that the extension cord and/or outlet is probably not grounded correctly. Either that or you are using a cheap knockoff charger.
Either use a surge protector and/or use the authentic Apple Charger.
- It's not the volts that hurt you, it's the amps
- I think you are in deep love with your phone. That tingling sensation is usually referred to as "love" in human language.
- Do less acid, I would advise.
Okay, so that's the real cancer. Grounding issue sounds reasonable despite it being wrong. Grounding is actually not needed when your charging appliance doesn't have any exposed metal parts. And isolation from high voltage to low voltage side actually happens through things like routering holes into the PCB, creating spark gaps, and using galvanic isolation through things like optocouplers. As for a surge protector? I'm using them to protect my PC and my servers, but the only purpose they serve is to protect from.. you guessed it.. voltage surges, like lightning bolts hitting the grid. They don't do shit for grounding or reducing this tingle! What a fucking tool.
It's not the volts that kill, it's the amps.. yeah I'm sure that the debunking of that is easy to find. Not gonna explain that here. And the rest of it.. yeah it's just fucking cancer.
Now what's the real issue with this tingle? It's actually a Class-Y rated (i.e. kV rated) capacitor that's on the transformer of any switch-mode power supply, including phone chargers. If memory serves me right, it helps with decoupling the switching noise and so on. But as it's connected to the primary side of the transformer, if the cap is sufficiently large and you are sufficiently sensitive, it can actually cause that tingle by passing a fraction of the mains electricity into your body. It's totally safe though, as the power that these caps pass is very small. But to some, it's noticeable.
Hope you found this interesting! And thanks a lot for bringing me to 2^15. I really appreciate it ♥️15 -
I don't want to write clean code anymore :(
I read Clean Code, Clean Coder, and watched many uncle bob's videos, and I was able to apply best practices and design patterns
I created many systems that really stood the test of time...
Management was kind enough to introduce me to uncle bob clean code in the first place, letting us watch it during work hours. after like one year, my code improved 400% minimum because I am new and I needed guidance from veterans...
That said, to management I am very slow, compared to this other guy, they ask me for a feature and my answer would be like "sure, we need to update the system because it just doesn't support that right now, it is easy though it would take 2 days tops"
they ask the same thing for the other guy : "ok let me see what I can do", 1 hour later, on slack, he writes : done. he slaps bunch of if-statement and make special case that will serve the thing they asked for.
oh 'cool' they say -> but it doesn't do this -> it needs to do that -> ok there is a new bug,-> it doesn't work in build mode-> it doesn't work if you are logged in as a guest, now its perfect ! -> it doesn't work on Android -> ok it works on android but now its not perfect anymore.
and they feel like he is fast (and to be fair he is), this feature? done. ok new bugs? solved. Android compatibility ? just one day ... it looks like he is doing doing doing.
it ends up taking double the time I asked for, and that is not to mention the other system affected during this entire process, extra clean up that I have to do, even my systems that stood the test of time are now ruined and cannot be extracted to other projects. because he just slaps whatever bools and if statements he needs inside any system, uses nothing but Singleton pattern on everything. our app will never be ready-for-business, this I can swear. its very buggy. and to fix it, it needs a change in mentality, not in code.
---------------
uncle bob said : write your code the right way, and the management will see that your code generates less errors, with time, you will earn respect even though they will feel you are slow at first.
well sorry uncle, I've been doing it for a year, my image got bad, you are absolutely right, only when there is no one else allowed to drop a giant shit inside your clean code.
note: we don't really have a technical lead.
-------------------
its been only two days since my new "hack n' slash" meta, the management is already kind of "impressed" ... so I'll keep hacking and slashing until I find a better job.9 -
So before today, I'd never used GoDaddy before. Not even once. My supervisor walks in and happily informs me that I'm going to be adding photos to a website that she does editing for. Okay, fine, that's stupidly easy. What I did not realize, however, is that this entire website had been built using GoDaddy's site builder, and if you're not familiar with it, thank whatever gods you worship that you've dodged that bullet. I hardly want to go wandering around somebody else's web hosting, so I search about for a bit praying that there's SOME semblance of a normal text editor someplace, because text editors make me happy and all, and find very little on the regular site. Already not thrilled. So I figure, how bad is this site editor? Really, how bad can it possibly be?
Oh, you poor misguided son of a -
Anyway, I go in and look at the site. Slideshows everywhere, nothing is aligned correctly, it's a web designer's nightmare. Thankfully, I'm not a web designer, so I press on and reorganize a little bit. I try slapping a new slideshow on their, and discover that unlike the way it SHOULD work, elements do not move to allow for other elements, they just sit there and let you throw things on top of them. I stare at my neatly-stacked slideshows for a second in utter disbelief, knowing but not really accepting that I'm going to need to take every last one of those slideshow elements and slide those little so-and-so's down by hand. ....why? Who designed this? Who decided that was a good idea? I do some Googling to see if there's anything out there to make this less horrid, and lo and behold I find a GoDaddy page about their FTP file manager! It's under web/classic hosting, which apparently means it's deprecated because I spent the next ten minutes hunting around for the "web hosting" link those chicken-lickers were so proud of and it's nowhere to be found.
Alright, so they want to do this the hard way.
At this point I'm screaming internally and PRAYING that I'm just being stupid and not seeing anything to make it easi-
No, not even easier. Just less stupid. This website builder makes no sense. It's like hiring a contractor to build a bridge and handing him a box of Legos and a banana.
So I do more googling and find instructions on getting to the file manager. FINALLY. The first step is find "Hosting" under "My Products." I rush over to My Products joyfully, hoping I can get this stupid website up and running reasonably quickly, and...!
There's no hosting tab.
No button.
Not even a little hard-to-see link. At this point my brain is screaming. WHY would you give me a website builder but absolutely no way to actually write the website? Do people actually use this thing? I mean, I get it if they want to make it nice and accessible for people to make websites without overwhelming them with HTML but if they know how to edit the website and they don't want your help, why would you force me in to this? Why? Then it occurred to me that maybe the organization just hasn't ever had a web developer in it, ever, or at least not one who was willing to help out with the website, so they purposefully signed up for hosting that deprived them of any kind of HTML editor. Then on top of all of that, I noticed that on the home page, which had been edited by someone else long before I ever looked at it, ALSO had one of these stupid slideshows that I had to reorganize by hand, and some sad, angry little man had put in one of the photos sideways. It was SIDEWAYS. Just sitting there on its side, the photo's occupants staring at me with sad eyes begging me to turn them facing up again. I sat there and stared at a badly-designed website in a questionably-designed editor. And I wondered. I wondered who put this all together, and I wondered why *I* was the one doing it, when I work for a university and the website was for some beach homeowner's association. And I wondered if this job was a task that my supervisor had agreed to do and just passed off onto an office monkey. And I wept bitter tears at the realization that I am that office monkey.7 -
Hello there, just couple of words about PHP. I've been develop on PHP more than 10 years, I've seen it all 3,4,5,{6},7. Yes PHP was not good in terms of engineering and patterns, but it was simple, it was the most simple language for web to start those days. It was simple as you put code into file, upload it via FTP and it works. No java servlets, no unix consoles, no nothing, just shared hosting account was enough to host site, or even application with database. As database everybody used to have mysql, again because its simple to start and easy to maintain. So PHP+MySQL became industry standard on Web during 00-2012, and continues in some way.
You can write HTML and logic inside single file, within php code, even more single file may content few pages, or even kind of framework. That simplicity and agility sticks everybody who wants to develop sites with PHP.
This is pretty much about why it is so popular.
Each good or wannabe PHP developer in an early days write its own framework or library (like in javascript this days because of nodejs)
Imagine that PHP has hadn't have package manager, developers used to have host packages on their own sites, then various packages catalog sites created, and then finally composer. A gazillions of php code had spread over internet, without any kind of dependency control. To include libraries to your projects you have to just write include, or require. Some developers do it better than others.
So what we have ? A lots of code, no repositories, zip archives with libraries, no dependency control.
Project that uses that kind of code are still alive even today, they are solid hose of cards, and unmaintainable of course.
And main question that I'm trying to answer is Why PHP is not good ?
- First is amount of legacy code which people copy and pasted into their project, spread it even more like a virus.
- Lack of industry standards at the beginning lead to a lots of bad practices among developers. PHP code usually smells.
open source php projects in early days was developed in same conditions so even in phpbb, phpnuke, wordpress, drupal used to have a lot of bad practices in their codebase. So php developers usually not study by another library, instead they write their own frameworks/libraries.
- "It works", - there are no strong business demands, on web development, again because lack of standards, and concerns.
This three things are basically same, they linked to each other and summarize of answer of why PHP have strong smells and everybody yelling against it.
Whats is with PHP nowadays ? Of course PHP today is more influenced by good practice of webdev. Composer, Zend, Laravel, Yii, Symphony and language it self became more adult so to say, but developers...
People who never tried anything except PHP are usually weaker in programming and ecosystem knowledge than people who tried something else, python, perl, ruby, c for instance.
Summary
PHP as any other programming language is a tool. Each tool has its own task. Consider this and your task requirements and PHP can be just good enough solution.
"PHP is shit" - usually you heard that from people who never write strong applications on PHP and haven't used any good tools like Symphony or Laravel.
Cheap developers, - the bigger community, the more chance to hire cheap developers, and more chance to get bad code. That can be applied on any other language.
PHP has professionals developers, usually they have not only php on scope.
That's all folks, this is very brief, I am not covering php usage early days in details, but this is good enough to understand the point.
Enjoy.8 -
So... my girlfriend has a very random work schedule. Sometimes she works 4 days a week sometimes only 1, sometimes only at the weekend sometimes not at all. If only there would be an app to track that... 🤔
She tried quite a few apps on the app store but they were shit/ugly/too complex..etc
Wait.. i’m a developer, i can do that.
So i made a dead simple calendar-like app in javascript+fuseopen.
She selected the colors, background, layout etc..
If she taps on a date it turns red indicating that is a workday, if a workday is tapped it turns back to normal color.
The main logic is:
Main:
If(AppHasSavedWorkdays){
//check if save is current month
LoadCalendarWithWorkdays();
}else{
CreateEmptyCalendarAndSave();
}
She likes it.
Cool, so let’s build this! She has an iphone and my mac is still in the service center so i can’t build🙁
But its okay, i have a mac at my office, we can build there, the only downside is that is 40min of travel.
We take the subway, go to the office, build the app, make a certificate, install to her phone, everything goes as planned.
Coming back we were lucky enough to catch the bus that goes in 30 min intervals, we only had to wait like a minute so life is good 😃
I enter the house, chill down on the bed, pull out my laptop to close the project when a FUCK ME!!!!
I completely forgot to implement a whole else branch on start!!!
Soo the app does nothing when is opened on january 1😂😂
I guess that’s why we have testers and qa.. 😃8 -
*opens DevRant*
*sees Meme about how bad language xy is*
*closes DevRant*
Is there nothing else one can laugh about? Does it always have to be hate? Well... it's about rants, but at least hate your own language. Not others for theirs. That's their job. Amen.31 -
Series of events between me (Mi) and dude in office (DIO).
Instance 1
DIO: There is not psql installed on staging.
Mi: Install it.
DIO: YUM is not working.
Mi: *tries yum it works* It is
DIO: Oh. Didn't work earlier.
Mi: *blank* Make sure you install 9.6
DIO: Cannot find psql
Mi: *types psql, it is already installed*
DIO: Oh, didn't work earlier.
Instance 2
DIO: Made this change to the API, the endpoint is not returning the right value
Mi: *restarts server, shit starts working*
DIO: I am pretty sure I did that, don't know what happened.
Instance 3
DIO: Cannot alter role to give login to this db user.
MI: *runs alter role db_user with login* works
DIO: Don't know why it wasn't working before.
Instance 4
DIO: I have been stuck on this test for the past 1 day, cannot get the API to return the right data while the Rest Endpoint works fine.
Mi: You are hitting the wrong endpoint in the test.
DIO: Oh, I put an extra 's'
Mi: BTW you are testing Spring-Boot with that test and nothing else.
DIO: Yes but what if Spring Boot has a bug?
Mi: ok.7 -
I'm the only windows user in my office(my only other choice was Mac). One of the salesmen walks in my office with his macbook.
salesman: what do you know about macs?
me: nothing, why?
salesman: well I just got a new MacBook and I can't right-click, is there like a setting or something I gotta click?
me: well there's no "right-click" by default on Macs, but I think there's a way so you can click with the right side of the touchpad and get the "command-click" you're looking for. stand over there quietly while I finish this function then I'll look into it.
*i proceed to fiddle with some code for 5 or so minutes while he stands in the corner*
me: ok so let's look at your MacBook... ok *at this point I jump on my computer* let's see what Google has to say.
search: enable right-click on mac
me: huh! look at that! Google gives you the answer right there, poof! like magic. now we just follow directions, system settings>keyboard and touchpad>enable click with bottom right corner. bam! anything else?
salesman: yeah, I want the little bar thing to go away *talking about the dock auto-hide
me: ok well that's called the dock, let's ask Google again...look, Google gives the answer again, without even needing to click any links, I could probably click these links and get more in-depth instructions, but right here at the top is the answer
salesman: wow man, thanks! I've got a meeting in 10 minutes and I never would have figured this out.
*before he leaves
me: here take this...4 -
As devs we like to complain about our jobs. But I just want to take a moment and acknowledge how truly amazing writing software is. Nothing else has given me so much joy and happiness. The endless stream of new things to learn, the elusive art of clean code, and deep understanding of systems required for architecture. There is so much depth to this career we have all chosen and I hope you guys love it just as much as I do.5
-
I absolutely love the email protocols.
IMAP:
x1 LOGIN user@domain password
x2 LIST "" "*"
x3 SELECT Inbox
x4 LOGOUT
Because a state machine is clearly too hard to implement in server software, clients must instead do the state machine thing and therefore it must be in the IMAP protocol.
SMTP:
I should be careful with this one since there's already more than enough spam on the interwebs, and it's a good thing that the "developers" of these email bombers don't know jack shit about the protocol. But suffice it to say that much like on a real letter, you have an envelope and a letter inside. You know these envelopes with a transparent window so you can print the address information on the letter? Or the "regular" envelopes where you write it on the envelope itself?
Yeah not with SMTP. Both your envelope and your letter have them, and they can be different. That's why you can have an email in your inbox that seemingly came from yourself. The mail server only checks for the envelope headers, and as long as everything checks out domain-wise and such, it will be accepted. Then the mail client checks the headers in the letter itself, the data field as far as the mail server is concerned (and it doesn't look at it). Can be something else, can be nothing at all. Emails can even be sent in the future or the past.
Postfix' main.cf:
You have this property "mynetworks" in /etc/postfix/main.cf where you'd imagine you put your own networks in, right? I dunno, to let Postfix discover what your networks are.. like it says on the tin? Haha, nope. This is a property that defines which networks are allowed no authentication at all to the mail server, and that is exactly what makes an open relay an open relay. If any one of the addresses in your networks (such as a gateway, every network has one) is also where your SMTP traffic flows into the mail server from, congrats the whole internet can now send through your mail server without authentication. And all because it was part of "your networks".
Yeah when it comes to naming things, the protocol designers sure have room for improvement... And fuck email.
Oh, bonus one - STARTTLS:
So SMTP has this thing called STARTTLS where you can.. unlike mynetworks, actually starts a TLS connection like it says on the tin. The problem is that almost every mail server uses self-signed certificates so they're basically meaningless. You don't have a chain of trust. Also not everyone supports it *cough* government *cough*, so if you want to send email to those servers, your TLS policy must be opportunistic, not enforced. And as an icing on the cake, if anything is wrong with the TLS connection (such as an MITM attack), the protocol will actively downgrade to plain. I dunno.. isn't that exactly what the MITM attacker wants? Yeah, great design right there. Are the designers of the email protocols fucking retarded?9 -
What's the difference between a wasp and single loose hair?
Apparently none till the wasp stings :/
Yesterday I thought I had a loose hair on my neck.. ok, I shrug it off.. later again the creepy feeling.. shrugs off..
I continue to work, sumberged in code, wanting to find the fucker (bug, not the wasp/hair).. lean in to the monitor... 10 cents away from the screen... Ok, maybe that's it! Feels the hair on my back, near shoulderblades again... shrugging again more violently to get it further down to fall out.. nothing.. ok, got the bug, threw myslef back in the chair with substential force & BAAAAM!!! Motherfucking hair bit me!! O.o
I scream in horror & on top of the lungs (it was late, after work hours so I didn't expect anyone else still at the office) PROKLETA PRASICA (roughly translated to goddamn female swine).. I previously saw some green bug flying around the office and I thought that nasty thing bit me (didn't know they bite soo, much more horror for me).. O.o
Anyhow, I jump up from the computer and see my coworker looking at me all baffled.. I proceed to franticly take of my headphones and hoodie..thinking about wtf should I do now, I cannot get undressed in front of him (not for my sake, bra is the same as top of the bathing suit for me, but still..I don't want anyone suing me for impropper behaviour of undreasing in front of coworkers..), how the fuck should I get to the toilet?! O.o
C: Are you ok?!
M: Um.. sth bit me..wtf?!
C: There was a wasp flying around somewhere some time ago.. are you alergic?!
M: um..not sure, I don't think so..we'll see soon..
I proceed to the WC, to take off tshirt & check/kill off the fucker.. on my way there (walking funny to not press the hair to my body again) I got another surprise, another coworker was working late..
C2: Are you ok?! O.o
M: yeah, sth bit me, probably a wasp..
Ok, finally on the loo..ok, do not lock self in in case it escapes and you need help.. don't even shut the door. Check.. standing between the doors I contemplate on how the fuck should I take my tshirt off without angering the fucker even more and getting bitten again.. O.O
I lifted the tshirt up my back to let it out.. nope, not there..the creepy felling of buzzing around between my shoulder blades continues.. crap.. what to do?!
I stood there & contemplated the task.. ok, roll up the tshirt to the shoulder blades, not against the body (duh) to prevent further stings..tighten the fabric, so it cannot escape, quickly remove the band from the body.. done..reversed the tshirt and straightened it.. bzzz... Fucker fell somewhere.. Dafaq?! Was it really just a wasp?! If yes, no problem...but what if coworker was wrong and I got bitten by that nasty green whateveritsname bug?! Eeeeewwww! Is it poisonous? Gotta find it & kill it for good.. waited a bit, than saw a goddamn wasp crawl from under the toilet.. wasp!! Yess!! Stopm stomp fucker!!
I get dressed & go back to my desk..
C: Did you terminate it?!
M: Yup, fucker went on a toilet paper trip down the drain!!
I sit down, starting to get my headphones back on and proceed to work.., but before I could, one last gem:
C: CTO would say, thank god it didn't sting you in your finger cuz you wouldn't be able to type anymore..
M: O.O so true hahhahahaaa
Disclaimer - I like animals, but I freakking hate wasps..especially if they get under my tshirt to sting.. :/7 -
6 months ago:
Boss: We have this idea to improve our onboarding to avoid drop off in the new app. See this section here? Were going to take that out of the onboarding and just let them pass straight through to the app. Then when they get into the app, there will be a banner telling them they should go to settings and set this up. That way they can ignore it for a while and get into the app sooner
Me: Get into the app sooner to do what?
Boss: Explore it
Me: Explore an empty app with no content, as they are a brand new user with nothing setup? While theres a big banner on the screen saying "You have insecure settings" ... basically forcing them to do it straight away anyway?
Boss: Yeah, we can give them some recommendations or something while they click around. It will be good. This is months away anyway, we'll talk again
Yesterday:
Boss: So this weird unexpected thing happened. We showed some beta users our plans to remove this section from onboarding and they felt weird about it. They said they didn't like the idea of the banner telling them they haven't set it up correctly
Me: Thats not weird, I said the same thing 6 months ago
Boss: ......... oh, really?
Me: Yep. Its not an improvement to get them through onboarding quicker, just to tell them they have to now go do it somewhere else
Boss: ... right. Ok maybe we'll build it anyway and see how they feel with it in there hands?
Me: nope
Boss: ... what do you mean?
Me: We are behind, you've asked me 3 times in the last week if we are going to be able to get everything in on time ... and now you want me to build something that everyone, apart from you, says they don't like. So realistically, i'm going to build it, and then remove it next week ... and we'll have a discussion about what has to be dropped because of this
Boss: ........ right .... ok .... hhhmmm
Me: *sits with resting bitch face*
Boss: ... maybe we can hide the banner until later. Not show it to them until they've done something in the app?
Me: ... maybe we can not do any of this?
Boss: right but then the onboarding will ...
Me: *talks louder* ... yes will be the way our users want it to be
Boss: ... hhmm i'm not sure
Me: Ok heres what we'll do, so long as it doesn't delay me getting the designs I need, feel free to have the designer mock up what it would look like using that figma on device preview thing. If users say they like it, i'll build it
Boss: ... right but it won't be real on device app so ...
Me: Its that or we cut feature X
Boss: ... well we need that
Me: ok glad we agree, let me know what feedback the designer gets
Boss: ... ok10 -
Working on a database priorly designed and maintained by some private agency.
The fuck I'm dealing with!
Boolean values stored as 'TRUE'/'FALSE'. It's varchar, my dudes.
There are no FK relations. Just the values of IDs in a column.
There are no indexes, all on just the PKs, nothing else. Nothing.
Null, what's that? I'm dealing with 'N/A', my dudes.
Unique key, what's that? The table which stores users has all the fields nullable. Email is not unique ( even though that's the required behaviour).
ALL the numeric values are stored as varchar. Varchar, my dudes. Varchar. '1', '1.1'
And finally, the good ole, 1 table to rule them all. Normalisation, fuck that.
And what's the root cause of all this? My PM used to hand them Excel sheets she maintains on her local system. FTW. I don't have a enough explanations.7 -
!(short rant) && (long story)
So these last 2 months of my life have been quite topsy turvy. Everything was pretty much unexpected and now I am on my way to Banglore, which is referred to as the Silicon Valley of India.
All this started in mid Feb when one day my ceo dropped a mail to all of us saying he wants to covey something important. A little background story about my company before I go on. We were a bunch of 6-7 tech guys working on a location based analytics product and had a decent client base. I had joined them in November 2017 and I was very hopeful that I would get to learn a lot owing to the good seniors from reputed universities and their experience. Coming back to the day, the ceo called us and dropped a bomb on us that the funding is depleted and we only have enough money to pay you salaries for this month. "We didn't anticipate that this day will come but currently we are in talks with some companies that are looking to acquire us. I am very much hopeful that we will figure something out by the end of this month(Feb). Until then, I can't stop you from applying to other companies but don't reveal that we are in this situation." So, keeping my fingers crossed I was waiting for the acquisition and wasn't looking for any other opportunities.
The company work was under hold and during this time one of my friends approached me with his idea. Since I had nothing else to do, I agreed to work with him. I was living in Mumbai, the city with one of the highest living standards in India, and I was paying exorbitant rent without any income. There was no news until mid March when the ceo called and dropped bomb#2 that an Indonesian company is looking to acquire us and he had scheduled an interview for the entire team. This isn't what I had signed up for. Indonesia wasn't a country I had even considered, let alone leave the country. Still I appeared for the interview and it went very well.
No news from the company or the ceo after that. One of my friends advised me to start applying to other companies and not rely on this acquisition. Now the problem was I couldn't reveal about the acquisition in my interview, so I used to give some bullshit about me not liking the work here. The company didn't buy it because how can someone judge a company in just 4 months. So obviously I didn't clear the interviews, also partially because I didn't meet their technical requirements.
March end, I moved to my hometown in Gujarat because obviously I had started to get broke in this expensive-ass city. The friend with whom I was working with also didn't have any issue since it was just tech and coding and I could do it remotely. Comes mid-April when the ceo called and said the acquisition is done and gave me some details about it. For confidentiality sake I can't reveal the details but I figured enough red flags for me to go with it.
*Eye of the tiger playing in the background*
Now started my quest of finding a decent job. The edge I had now was that I could reveal about the acquisition to the other company. I started applying left right and center to any company I could find. Amazon, saavn and some good-ass Indian companies. The thing that now came in my way was my experience. I am 23 year old(soon to be 24) with around 20 months of experience. Everyone wanted a 3-5 year experience guy/girl. Soon, my entire optimism was draining and I even considered going back to my first company.
During this time, I got a call from this company in Banglore who were looking for a candidate which best suited my profile. I went all guns blazing and appeared for the interview. I had 6 rounds of technical interview plus 1 logical reasoning. And since I was giving the interview remotely, I had one round on each alternate working day. Everyday was a challenge and I spent the nights in anxiousness and anticipation. Meanwhile I was appearing for other interviews too, since I wasn't too hopeful about my chances in this one.
Cut to April 27, I got an offer from this company and without negotiating they offered me the package I was hoping for.
After this entire ordeal, I realised one thing. Whatever happens, happens for good. Looking forward to this new city, new company, new people and new environment.11 -
A colleague of mine from the administration department suddenly enters my room where my team and me are all busy and, without considering I'm talking with someone else, interrupts us.
he: "I needed to call you but your phone is in do-not-disturb mode"
me: "that's because I'm busy working on something urgent and I don't want to be disturbed"
he: "but I need your help!"
me: "we're working on a urgent thing, but, anyway, what's the problem"
he: "I need help with digital invoicing"
me: "I deal with programming, I don't think I can help..."
he (interrupting): "I created a digital invoice but I need to send a printable version to a customer"
me: "digital invoices should be XML files so you can't simply take the file's content and paste into Word and print..."
he: "in fact that's what I did and the result was horrible"
me: "I was saying just that. I'm sure, anyway, there should be some online tool for producing a well-formatted PDF from a digital invoice"
he doesn't say anything
me: "you can try with a search on Google..."
he: "but I'm not an IT guy, that's not my business"
me: "this has nothing to do with programming, you simply need to find a tool online for doing this"
he (disappointed): "ok, but this is computer stuff, I'll try..."2 -
Here's a genuine rant for you. Probably the only one I've ever made and ever will..
It's a bit depressing and covers a few topics so just read it, it's important.
*deep inhale*
So, with the help of my friend and my Nana, I was getting VR set up. (Oh, what joy.)
Now, I love everything about VR. But the thing is, I've had this damned headset since may (Dell MMR) and I haven't been able to use it. The reason for that is, something always came up that I needed to buy and this became a huge deal.
But let's start from the beginning.. I'm curentally fighting depression. I have been for months. My only income is what my Nana gives me ($150/mo) and what my friend ocasinally gives me.
Anyways, the first issue was that I couldn't afford the headset. This was find, as my friend would get it for me, and I would pay them back the following month. But, then, once I got the headset that's when the real problems started. First it was that I needed bluetooth, so I bought an adapter. Then I realized my entire CPU was incompatable, so I had to get a new tower and I went ahead and got a new GPU as well. I also got a charging kit for my headset (This ended up making me owe my Nana money). Then after all of that was settled, I learned that the evauation software lied, and my computer doesn't have USB 3, so I need that too but low and behold; both of my graphics cards cover my second pcie slot. So my options are to either try and rig up something, or to buy a cpu and psu for my third AMD PC which I had forgotten about during this whole ordeal..
This was soposed to help me with my depression and stress. Now I don't even want to get out of bed.
With all that said, I might be getting on SSI soon (I'm sure some of you are familar with that, and no I don't want to talk about it) and when that happens I might just leave behind tech (well, my PC and games) and all the stress and pain it's caused me over my life so this was all for nothing.
Honestly.. I'm just done with everything. To all the new faces around here; Hello! How are ya? To everyone else; You know me. I've been around for a while, though I'm not popular because I lurked and commented with Alice. You all probably noticed that I left a while back, and it was because I was trying to get out of tech. My reason for tech was that I was searching for something. I was always looking for the next game to sate me, or fill this gap in my life. I became a programmer because it gave me control were I lacked it otherwise. I made friends online because my anxiety prevented me from doing so in the real world.
But to what end? What have I acomplished? My twenty second birthday is next month. I've no job, I move from family member to famly member because I'm so fixated on becoming someone else to make something of myself.
I have my own ideals, but it seems that I push them aside to try (and fail to) impress others.
It's time for change. Of course, I can't do anything without money, so I'll have to wait for my SSI which I will get news on in August.
I hope this message came through how I meant it to. There is so much I want to say, but I've no words to say them. And btw, the VR thing is just one of manny issue that i've delt with (but certanly the most expensive)
Alice, Zennoe (Alexis, whom is not on devrant); I'm not giving up tech entirely. don't expect to suddenly not hear from me. I'm mostly just giving up my computer and games. More casually so for now, and them more seriously once I get on SSI. I'll still message you every/other day like I have been. <326 -
My laptop started making faint high-pitched noises - I hope I misheard and it's actually just some coil singing inside the power-supply and not one of the disks/something else - also, I seem to have dropped 4GB of RAM suddenly where there should be 8GB.
(Also, I should really wipe the messed up dual-boot still residing on disk from last semester and replace it by a fresh arch-only install. (No time and joy in debugging that right now.) Probably something for tomorrow evening.)
The device is ~8 years old by now and starting to fall apart - nothing duct tape can't fix - but I'm somewhat worried about the rest right now. D:
Meh, I really need that laptop during the next two weeks, I just hope the hardware doesn't die on me in the meantime because I can't wait for an order to arrive, let alone afford some cheap replacement.11 -
Okay so here are a few lessons that I have learned from being an intern to a junior developer (who’s just 2 years out of college).
- every ninja engineer starts off as a noob. There’s nothing to be ashamed of if you don’t know “everything” about coding
- Respect everyone’s opinion (including the one that shouts your design is crap in a meeting). Don’t process them too much.
- leave things that happen at work, in the workplace
- Keep yourself up to date even after you’ve bagged the 100,000$ offer. Never.stop.learning.
- Be polite to your interns (been there). They look up to you and treat their juniors the way you treat them.
- Be honest. Including your tiny scrum updates. If you need more time, tell it. If you’ve screwed up something , own it up.
- Never blame or point fingers.
- Nothing is irreversible.(except things like sudo rm -rf/)
- There’s always a way out(of any mess).
- Respect what came before.
- Respect what comes after (before you push badly written code)
- It’s ok to point out mistakes but Be kind. (Else you’ll end up in someone else’s rant ;-) )3 -
Hey guys,
this rant will be long again. I'm sorry for any grammar errors or something like that, english isn't my native language. Furthermore I'm actually very sad and not in a good mood.
Why? What happened? Some of you may already know - I'm doing my apprenticeship / education in a smal company.
There I'm learning a lot, I'm developing awesome features directly for the clients, experience of which other in my age (I'm only 19 years old) can only dream.
Working in such a small company is very exhausting, but I love my job, I love programming. I turned my hobby into a profession and I'm very proud of it.
But then there are moments like the last time, when I had to present something for a client - the first presentation was good, the last was a disaster, nothing worked - but I learned from it.
But this time everything is worse than bad - I mean really, really worse than bad.
I've worked the whole week on a cool new feature - I've done everything that it works yesterday, that everything gets done before the deadline of yesterday.
To achieve this I've coded thursday till 10pm ! At home! Friday I tested the whole day everything to ensure that everything is working properly. I fixed several bugs and then at the end of the day everything seems to be working. Even my boss said that it looks good and he thinks that the rollout to all clients will become good and without any issues.
But unfortunately deceived.
Yesterday evening I wrote a long mail to my boss - with a "manual". He was very proud and said that he is confident that everything will work fine. He trusts me completly.
Then, this morning I received a mail from him - nothing works anymore - all clients have issues, everything stays blank - because I've forgotten to ensure that the new feature (a plugin) and its functionality is supported by the device (needs a installation).
First - I was very shoked - but in the same moment I thought - one moment - you've written an if statement, if the plugin is installed - so why the fuck should it broken everything?!
I looked instant to the code via git. This has to be a very bad joke from my boss I thought. But then I saw the fucking bug - I've written:
if(plugin) { // do shit }
but it has to be if(typeof plugin !== 'undefined')
I fucked up everything - due to this fucking mistake. This little piece of shit I've forgotten on one single line fucked up everything. I'm sorry for this mode of expression but I thought - no this can not be true - it must be a bad bad nightmare.
I've tested this so long, every scenario, everything. Worked till the night so it gets finished. No one, no one from my classmates would ever think of working so long. But I did it, because I love my job. I've implemented a check to ensure that the plugin is installed - but implemented it wrong - exactly this line which caused all the errors should prevent exactly this - what an irony of fate.
I've instantly called my boss and apologized for this mistake. The mistake can't be undone. My boss now has to go to all clients to fix it. This will be very expensive...
Oh my goodnes, I just cried.
I'm only working about half a year in this company - they trust me so much - but I'm not perfect - I make mistakes - like everyone else. This time my boss didn't looked over my code, didn't review it, because he trusted me completly - now this happens. I think this destroyed the trust :( I'm so sad.
He only said that we will talk on monday, how we can prevent such things in the feature..
Oh guys, I don't know - I've fucked up everything, we were so overhelmed that everything would work :(
Now I'm the looser who fucked up - because not testing enough - even when I tested it for days, even at home - worked at home - till the night - for free, for nothing - voluntary.
This is the thanks for that.
Thousand good things - but one mistake and you're the little asshole. You - a 19 year old guy, which works since 6 months in a company. A boss which trusts you and don't look over your code. One line which should prevent crashing, crashed everything.
I'm sorry that this rant is so long, I just need to talk to you guys because I'm so sad. Again. This has happend to frequently lately.16 -
Crappy day, entirely related to cars and trucks and other wheeled implements of doom and annoyance.
My car died this morning.
It has been slowly dying for weeks in a very unusual way (something electrical; we're not sure what), but today it finally gave up and just wouldn't start anymore.
We replaced the crap battery (it had been a crap freebie from my parents), which fixed the not-starting issue for now, but it still has lots of other problems. Fluid leaks, disintegrating paint, some lights suddenly or randomly not working, super long clutch distance, sporadic grinding sounds, shifter randomly not engaging, pieces literally falling off, bits of the interior breaking (like the driver's side door handle), the wiper sprayers bloody missing the windshield, etc., etc., etc. My poor, poor car. It was super cheap, and I've had it for a long time, so I'm not surprised, but. I love my car, so it makes me really sad. ☹
Anyway, we finally got the car starting again, and I drove to work about four hours late. I had worked super late the previous night (11:45pm), and had let my boss know already, so whatever.
As for the trip, I work ~40 minutes away, and with the poor quality of drivers here there's usually something dumb happening. Today... well. Today was one of the bad days.
Someone was in the fast lane doing 50mph. The usual speed of traffic is 80mph. They got annoyed whenever someone passed them. Minor, but worth including.
Later on, people slowed way down and gawked at... a port-a-potty. Seriously, a port-a-potty. It was on the shoulder where there had been some construction, so it's not surprising or anything. People seriously dropped from 80mph down to 20mph just to stare at this thing, and it wasn't even occupied or anything. It was just a port-a-potty! There was nothing else around! What could possibly be so interesting?!
There was also a random Penske (moving) truck doing 35mph on the freeway holding up traffic like 10 minutes later; no idea why. Traffic usually does ~70mph there. No blinkers or anything, it was just being slow and causing everyone to go around in a pretty traffic-heavy area.
The truck in front of me for ~40% of the trip kept waiting way too long to stop, and would then slam on the breaks. I almost hit him twice because of this, and I couldn't see around him, either. It was some giant pickup staying just in the wrong spot. I ended up driving partially in the shoulder so I could gauge when to stop by the car in front of him. He slammed on the breaks like twelve more times before he finally left. Jerk.
The same thing happened again like 85% of the way to work, but this time it was a different pickup, and there was a semi was behind me, which obviously couldn't stop very quickly. Fortunately for both of us, there was a gap in traffic to my right, so I slipped out of the way before getting squished. ><
Bloody hell.
Today has not been fun.
Nobody flipping me off or was doing their damnedest to prevent me from changing lanes today, though, so I suppose it could have been worse. Also I didn't die, so there's that.2 -
Soooo I think I have finally come to the point that I may have to create a YouTube channel, to teach software engineering from the ground up... and teach it the way the universities and everyone else should be teaching it, so that they have a solid foundation.... throwing hello world, and loops and variables at folks out of the box without any of the environment context or low level embedded register, even logic gate understanding
That lack of understanding is why, soooo many college students and younger folks, are actually pretty shitty engineers. Everything is high level languages and theoretical concepts to them. Nothing practical, that’s why there’s sooo many python and java developers that can’t for the life of them understand memory management, low level hardware interfacing etc, because the colleges don’t teach it the way it use to be taught.
I seriously fear 30 years from now or sooner when there are few embedded engineers only left till retirement, as without those folks the whole pyramid of electronics falls to pieces.
Java, C#, python, all that shit don’t run on the bare metal... there’s this magical layer of C, and assembler that does all the work just so folks can abstract their thoughts.
Either 1 of two situations will happen.. price of electronics will rise because the embedded guys are few and far between therefore salaries skyrocket... OR everything starts running shit like java on the metal, where there are a over abundance of developers, their salaries will be low because there are soo many but the processing power, space, and energy needed to run java natively causes electronics cost to increase
but regardless 30 years from now if those script kiddies are building everything I fear it cuz there’s gonna be memory leaks, and overflow issues everywhere.. shit be blowing up more than 4th of July.. lol
Soooo in effort to prevent that and keep the embedded engineers up, or atleast properly educate the script kiddies, I’m gonna make that YouTube channel.. 1 maybe 2 videos a week, 1-2 hours sessions each.. starting at the fucken ground and building up.39 -
LONELINESS IS REAL
I am a freshman in a university ( about to complete my first year ) with a girl to boy ratio of around 1:10. During my first semester I was spending a lot of time with friends, chatting up with people and making connections. Due to this my productivity as a dev, if I am even capable of being called that decreased ( I was not a developer before joining , but I had an aim of being one , esp at least the best in my batch ) after 1st year. In retrospect I did nothing productive till 3 months out of 4 in my first sem and the guilt hit me hard . During the last month I had to catch up with my much neglected studies and all I had done was a little bit of html and css, and barely scratched the surface of js( please don't judge me for this :) , I had to start somewhere < although I learned a little bit of C++ > ). BUT I WAS A HAPPY CUNT, and had no sign of lonelines. Now during this sem , I had made progress ( learn js with es6 syntax and still learning, did c++ and extended my knowledge ) . Currently I am working on my Vue full stack app ( along with express and some websocket library , TBD ) < yeh I learnt some backend too > , and increasing my knowledge of dsa using clrs. Although my productivity has increased manifolds but I know feel the need of closure. I am kinda happy with the fact that I know a lot of people around here ( thanks to my extroverted 1st semester ) but sometimes it hits me hard at night when I don't have a monitor to drown my eyes and thoughts in. I have increased my academic performance too but I need someone to share and express my feelings with. I could have made a girlfriend earlier but now most of them are taken and I have lost touch. But believe me, all I want is a companion to spend these lonely days and night ( not talking about as a friend ). Staying away from home isnt easy you know...m :(
KUDOS TO DEVRANT FOR DEVELOPING A COMMUNITY WHERE PEOPLE LIKE ME CAN FEEL SAFE IN OUR NATURAL HABITAT. I COULDN'T HAVE EXPRESSED MY FEELINGS ANYWHERE ELSE EXCEPT IN A PERSONAL BLOG ( where no one would have read it )
PS1: I apologise if I sounded arrogant about any of my skill, I didn't mean that way. I ain't even that good, just kinda proud of myself a little for achieving something I couldn't have thought.
PS2: Any type of suggestions and help is much appreciated ( considering I am a college student who went into some serious development 4 months ago , I am pretty impressionable ;) )
PS3: Please don't confuse this with depression. I am HAPPY BUT LONELY
PS4: Is there a way so that I can change my username?16 -
Tl;dr younger people on here, especially passionate ones, don't worry about comparing yourself to people who appear to have tremendous laurels, those people are probably completely full of shit.
I say kids because you may be like me and more likely to underestimate your ability or more likely to be modest about your accomplishments, and you're too young to know you're doing that.
Either way. I've been doing a web development boot camp the last six months. It's been quite good with the teachers, and some of the classmates. Hell career services is now run by this woman who really actually seems like she knows what she's doing. It's pretty awesome.
That said, my teammates on the group projects have been a different story. I've primarily stuck with some of them out of loyalty and friendship. But one guy in particular has pissed me off to no end. He said he was a computer scientist going for masters. I thought I could learn from this guy. Now I wonder if he's a pathological liar.
Our first project he made one commit. Ripped straight from the homework. It was a simple api mash-up so alright. Fair enough. Next project was when he really started to piss me off.
He didn't do shit the first week and a half. No PM, no design, no programming. Nothing. Comes in two days before project is due, and me one other guy are fucking scrambling. Because of course no one else is there.
I live significantly further than my teammates mind you. We're busting ass. This fucking guy, this dumbass pick who is convinced he's a genius that will work in higher academia clobbers our whole fucking repo.
Why you ask? To put in an unrelated commit that replicated homework from the week before. Why you ask, again? Because this person is a borderline sociopath trying to appear busy in the commit logs.
We're onto the third project now. I spend days designing something original. Side note: I fucking hate design.
So I design my heart out come up with something awesome. This fuck ass, disappears. And another group member. This was the end of November, I hear from this prick last week about refactoring to ES6. But here's the kicker-fucker, our shit ALREADY WAS IN ES6!
I go in Saturday, slack a message I'll be late. I see this fucking "genius dedicated computer scientist" leaving the fucking university shadily checking to see who was watching. He saw me see him. Coward tried to shrug it off.
Here we are, end of semester. He gets the same certification as I do. The difference? I actually know what I'm taking about, I haven't paid in full to fail.
So never, ever fucking ever take what someone says on their resume or LinkedIn as truth. The better it sounds, the more full of shit they may very well be.
And as for our presentation on Saturday? I plan on handling that but letting him do all of the talking. Let's even see if he knows what the project is about :).6 -
New position at work. Lots of power in regards to tech stacks of my choice.
I feel like Neo.
First project was finished in a week using Clojure. A basic application that would automate the process of adding our students into a particular active directory system in which many other things happen at the same time including updates to pins and other shit as well as networking and wifi permissions. Works fast as fuuuuuuuuuck, the alternative existed(somewhat) in php and while there was nothing wrong other than speed I wanted to show the head of my department what i could do.
It was anticlimactic as fuck. I thought it was gonna take me longer. It fucking didn't and i am glad as shit. It is now working like an absolute powerhouse in its own environment and being monitored by the sys admins, they loved how easy it was to deploy and how well behaved it is.
The head of the department is impressed as fuck and the board of directors got a hold of it. Reason being that I am being displayed as some sort of wizard that used ancient alien tech in the 21st century.
Fuck yes, major win.
I also get to add Clojure to my resumee. Hod even said that if needed be they will rethink my salary to add the fact that i get to use this tech where no one else can.11 -
@netikras since when does proprietary mean bad?
Lemme tell you 3 stories.
CISCO AnyConnect:
- come in to the office
- use internal resources (company newsletter, jira, etc.)
- connect to client's VPN using Cisco AnyConnect
- lose access to my company resources, because AnyConnect overwrites routing table (rather normal for VPN clients)
- issue a route command updating routing table so you could reach confluence page in the intranet
- route command executes successfully, `route -n` shows nothing has changed
- google this whole WTF case
- Cisco AnyConnect constantly overwrites OS routing table to ENFORCE you to use VPN settings and nothing else.
Sooo basically if you want to check your company's email, you have to disconnect from client's VPN, check email and reconnect again. Neat!
Can be easily resolved by using opensource VPN client -- openconnect
CISCO AnyConnect:
- get a server in your company
- connect it to client's VPN and keep the VPN running for data sync. VPN has to be UP at all times
- network glitch [uh-oh]
- VPN is no longer working, AnyConnect still believes everything is peachy. No reconnect attempts.
- service is unable to sync data w/ client's systems. Data gets outdated and eventually corrupted
OpenConnect (OSS alternative to AnyConnect) detects all network glitches, reports them to the log and attempts reconnect immediatelly. Subsequent reconnect attempts getting triggered with longer delays to not to spam network.
SYMANTEC VIP (alleged 2FA?):
- client's portal requires Sym VIP otp code to log in
- open up a browser in your laptop
- navigate to the portal
- enter your credentials
- click on a Sym VIP icon in the systray
- write down the shown otp number
- log in
umm... in what fucking way is that a secure 2FA? Everything is IN the same fucking device, a single click away.
Can be easily solved by opensource alternatives to Sym VIP app: they make HTTP calls to Symantec to register a new token and return you the whole totp url. You can convert that url to a qr code and scan it w/ your phone (e.g. Google's Authenticator). Now you have a true 2FA.
Proprietary is not always bad. There are good propr sw too. But the ones that are core to your BAU and are doing shit -- well these ARE bad. and w/o an oppurtunity to workaround/fix it yourself.13 -
I've been lurking on devrant a while now, I figure it's time to add my first rant.
Little background and setting a frame of reference for the rant: I'm currently a software engineer in the bioinformatics field. I have a computer science background whereas a vast majority of those around me, especially other devs, are people with little to no formal computer background - mostly biology in some form or another. Now, this said, a lot of the other devs are excellent developers, but some are as bad as you could imagine.
I started at a new company in April. About a month after joining a dev who worked there left, and I inherited the pipeline he maintained. Primarily 3 perl scripts (yes, perl, welcome to bioinformatics, especially when it comes to legacy code like is seen in this pipeline) that mostly copied and generated some files and reports in different places. No biggie, until I really dove in.
This dev, which I barely feel he deserves to be called, is a biology major turned computer developer. He was hired at this company and learned to program on the job. That being said, I give him a bit of a pass as I'm sure he did not have had an adequate support structure to teach him any better, but still, some of this is BS.
One final note: not all of the code, especially a lot of the stupid logic, in this pipeline was developed by this other dev. A lot of it he adopted himself. However, he did nothing about it either, so I put fault on him.
Now, let's start.
1. perl - yay bioinformatics
2. Redundant code. Like, you literally copied 200+ lines of code into a function to change 3 lines in that code for a different condition, and added if(condition) {function();} else {existing code;}?? Seriously??
3. Whitesmiths indentation style.. why? Just, why? Fuck off with that. Where did you learn that and why do you insist on using it??
4. Mixing of whitesmiths and more common K&R indentation.
5. Fucked indentation. Code either not indented and even some code indented THE WRONG WAY
6. 10+ indentation levels. This, not "terrible" normally, but imagine this with the last 3 points. Cannot follow the code at freaking all.
7. Stupid logic. Like, for example, check if a string has a comma in it. If it does, split the string on the comma and push everything to an array. If not, just push the string to the array.... You, you know you can just split the string on the comma and push it, right?? If there is no comma it will be an array containing the original string.. Why the fuck did you think you needed to add a condition for that??
8. Functions that are called to set values in global variables, arrays, and hashes.. function has like 5 lines in it and is called in 2 locations. Just keep that code in place!
9. 50+ global variables/hashes/arrays in one of the scripts with no clear way to tell how/when values are set nor what they are used for.
10. Non-descriptive names for everything
11. Next to no comments in the code. What comments there are are barely useful.
12. No documentation
There's more, but this is all I can think to identify right now. All together these issues have made this pipeline the pinnacle of all the garbage that I've had to work on.
Attaching some screenshots of just a tiny fraction of the code to show some of the crap I'm talking about.6 -
OK, so we had a session in which a so called Company (Some ecorise.in ) came to give Internship-Training-Program. Ok, he said it'll take 5-8 minutes, and then it took fucking 75 minutes for the session to end. Horrible blunders he made.
1) Did not tell about the company and important stuff for the first 50-60 minutes. Instead, was just focusing on why you should do an Internship, what is it's benefit, what does a company want from you. And why this Internship-Training Program is important... I mean seriously? - A training for Internship. 🤦🏻♂️
2) Said all the Web Developers can be Mobile App Developers with the help of just HTML and CSS.... Wow, so XAML/XML is shit now, and we will call APIs with the help of CSS rules. 🤦🏻♂️
OK, still I tolerated all that, then was the part when he said how much will be the stipend. It was fucking nothing, they said. That for first three months they will not give a single penny as it is training, and then IF the performance is good, then they will give stipend, and then Placement assurance. OK, that's good that they are assuring placement, but wait. Package of 2LPA INR... WTF Man, it's like $3107.28 for a whole Year.
OK, that too tolerated, then was the part when they said that they'll take the written test, I was like OK, let's see. We moved to a classroom, it went over-the-full capacity, so we moved back to the seminar hall. (Arrrrgggghhhhhhhhh), still tolerable. But then that guy realised that there were no question papers to take the test, then sent someone to get the print outs. Wasted 15+ minutes, I was burning inside.
In the whole seminar hall, I stood up and said, that when you knew there will be a test, why didn't you pre-prepared the sheets beforehand, he was like, that we didn't knew the count. But his tone was. like he got offended and Get-Lost-ed me out of the seminar.
Then even I said:
🙏🏻 - Nahi chaahiye aapki Company
(🙏🏻 - I don't want your Company).
And moved out.
But my point, I am a third Year College Student, and this Company came for our benefit, but I did so (and I am not sorry), so that's pretty obvious that the Company guy will talk (bitch) to the teachers about me, and tomorrow will be a bad day for me... But isn't it wrong on the side of the company also?
I mean, there was an attendance sheet passed in the beginning of the session, had he taken count from that and got the sheets printed, (He had almost an hour for that).
Secondly, when they knew that the count of students is more than expected, then why didn't they check for the classroom that whether the class can accommodate so many students or not. If not then something would have been planned accordingly... But no, the Guy (I guess, that small Company's Owner) got offended that a Student back-chat-ted a CEO of a so-called company, and so he just had to "Get-Lost" me. Checked the website of his Company, they have hardly done 3 Static Websites... I mean, WoW, I have done at-least 10X the work of the Company, alone!
I don't know, I feel happy that I kept my point, but I feel sad because I generally don't do this kind of thing (may be my tone was also wrong, I had other issues also, may be because of them and they all combined and this happened). I feel scared too, that I don't know what the Company guy will say to my teachers and what action will they take against me...
Because I know, none of my friends will stand with me when I go down, it's all fake here, everyone can just give sympathy, but nothing else.
I don't know why I am posting this here, and if you have read this till here, thank you. I just wanted to share my heart out... :-)9 -
Had a configure issue on a site running through CloudFlare hosted at WPEngine. Support on chat guy says "can I take a look at your setup" so I screenshot him! He says they're are new ways to point to WPEngine whilst using SSL so I say OK and he points me to a support article which seems accurate. He then says now I want you to change two records so I say ok (not thinking) which I do (stupidly)
Result site no longer reachable.
What do I do now? He says very seriously "you need to wait 24-48 hours for the DNS to propogate"
"Your joking it's a huge site with 20k visitors per day with advertisers on it"
"I'm sorry there is nothing I can do until the DNS YOU changed has propagated"
"I changed?" "Yes you changed the CloudFlare settings"
"You told me to!"
"Is there anything else I can help you with?"7 -
Recently started at a new job. Things were going fine, getting along with everyone, everything seems good and running smoothly, a few odd things here and there but for the most part fine.
Then I decided to take a look at our (public facing) website... What's this? Outdated plugins from 2013? Okay, that's an easy fix I guess? All of these are free and the way we're using them wouldn't require a lot of refactoring...
Apparently not. Apparently, we can't even update them ourselves, we have to request that an external company does it (which we pay, by the way, SHITELOADS of money to). A week goes past, and we finally get a response.
No, we won't update it, you'll have to pay for it. Doesn't matter that there's a CVE list a bloody mile long and straight up no input validation in several areas, doesn't matter that tens of thousands of users are at risk, pay us or it stays broken. Boggles the fuckin' mind.
I dug into it a bit more than I probably should have (didn't break no laws though I'm not a complete dumbass, I just work for em) and it turns out it's not just us getting fucked over, it's literally EVERYONE using their service which is the vast majority of people within the industry in my country. It also turns out that the entirety of our region is running off a single bloody IP which if you do a quick search on shodan for, you guessed it, also has a CVE list pop up a fuckin' mile long. Don't get me started on password security (there is none). I hate this, there's fucking nothing I can do and everyone else is just fine sitting on their hands because "nobody would target us because we're not a bank!!", as if it bloody matters and as if peoples names, addresses, phone numbers and assuming someone got into our actual database, which wouldn't be a fuckin' stretch of the imagination let me tell you, far more personal details, that these aren't enticing to anyone.
What would you do in my situation?
What can I even do?
I don't want to piss anyone senior off but honestly, I'm thinkin' they might deserve it. I mean yeah there's nothing we can do but at least make a fuss 'cause they ain't gunna listen to my green ass.10 -
In the Ruhr area (Germany) we have some very old, very strange words with strange meanings. One of those words is ‚Prutscher‘.
A Prutscher refers to a person who does things but never gets a good result, due to lack of knowledge or simple carelessness. Most of the time, Prutschers are people who are interested in certain subjects and often work in the related jobs, but who lack the motivation to properly train themselves, learn what there is to learn and to always keep up with their technologies .
Here are a few examples I've stumbled upon so far in my career:
- Developers in their 60's who read a book about PHP 25 years ago and decided to become a software developer. Since then haven't read anything about it. Who then now build huge spaghetti monoliths for large companies, in which they prefix every function, every variable and constant with their initials and, of course, use Hungarian notation.
- People who read half a fucking tutorial about <insert any fancy js framework here> and start blogging/tweeting about it
- Senior web developers who need to be told what the fuck CORS is and who can't even recognize CORS related errors in their browser console.
- People who have done nothing else for 18 years than building websites for companies on Wordpress 1.x and writing few lines of PHP and Javascript from time to time. Those who are now applying as a frontend dev due to the difficult economic situation and are surprised that they are not accepted due to a lack of experience.
- Developers who are the only ones working on Windows in the team and ask their Linux colleagues for help when Windows starts bitchin.
- People who have been coding for 30 years, have worked with ~42 languages and don't know the difference between compiled and interpreted languages in the job interview.
- Chief developers at a large newsletter-publisher who think it's a good idea to build your own CMS (due to a lack of good existing ones, of course).
- Developers who have been writing PHP applications for multinational corporations for 25 years and cannot explain how PHP is executed. They don't even know what the fucking OPcache is, let alone fpm. FML
- People who call themselves professional developers but never ever heard of DRY, KISS, boy-scout rule, 12-Factor App, SOLID, Clean Code, Design Patterns, ...
- Senior developers wondering why the bash script won't run on their fucking Windows machine.
- Developers who consider Typescript to be a hindrance and see no value in it.
- Developers using ftp for deployments in 2022
- Senior Javascript Developer applying for a job and for whom Integer is a primitive data type in JS.
- Developers who prefer to code without frameworks and libraries because they are only an unnecessary burden/overhead and you can quickly code everything up yourself.
- Developers who think configuring their server(s) manually is a good idea.
You fucking Prutscher. What you have already cost me in terms of work and nerves. I can't even put it into words how deeply I despise you. I have more respect for the chewing gum that has been stuck in my damn trash can for the past 3 years than I do for you guys. You are the disgrace of our profession. I will haunt you in your dreams and prefix every fucking synapse of your brain with MY initials.
As a well-known german band once sang in a very fitting song: I wouldn't even piss on you if you were on fire.
If you recognized yourself in one of the examples here: FUCK YOU!29 -
Woo, rant time.
I've recently changed jobs to a new company due to a number of factors at my old job. I didn't tell my old boss (let's call him X) my expected salary, nor did I tell him which company I was going to.
However, I've been informed by someone that still works there that X has been discussing my new wage in front of everyone; he was telling everyone that I'm going to lose money by moving job and that I made a stupid decision.
I didn't leave due to money, it was due to X's inability to take constructive criticism, the constant subtle sexism of the office and just a generally bad overall feeling about the job/office going forward. Yes, I will admit that money did have a minor part in my decision to leave but I didn't verbalise that to anyone in the office, and I made X aware that my departure wasn't to do with money. I left on good terms.
I feel as though it was wrong of X to talk about his opinions on my new job in front of my ex-colleagues and friends. I don't know, maybe this is the norm and I've just been living in a cave before this, or maybe my last boss was just a bit of a douchenugget. Has anyone else had this experience?
I've got to meet up with everyone from my last place tomorrow to properly say goodbye and things.. but I'm not sure how to approach my old boss when leaving drinks are held now. Should I say anything? Should I just act as though I know nothing about it?
What would you guys do in this situation???19 -
1. There is nothing in this field that is impossible or out of reach for someone with the correct dedication and perseverance. Even if you suck at a particular topic, I highly believe that you can make sense of it through computer science, be it math, biology physics, finances etc. The field opens the doors to other subjects. This is true for everything else, but I seriously believe that Comp Sci makes it more reachable.
2. You cannot make development a quirky personality trait. There is more to life than just sitting around all day fucking with a computer, but at the same time that is how you hone your skills, find balance!
3. Being attractive and or charismatic in this field pays a lot, but also makes you a target.
4. I have never met more people in my life I wanted to punch to a pulp, and I worked in retail and was in the military....that says a lot.
5. Penises, there are way too many penises in this field. I hate being surrounded by dudes and since I grew up in a nail/hair salon I am more used/enjoy female company more.
6. Stuxnet se la come.10 -
Ok, so teacher (which should be something like a professional dev or whatever) assigned us a homework for a Christmas (I dont care, I can complete his assignments in like 10 minutes max). We have to do some simple shit in C++, just some loops and input + output. Nothing hard. He challenged me to write it as short as possible, so I did. My classmates have codes around 60 to 70 lines long (after propper formating). I made it 20 lines long using some pointer magic and stuff like that. I tried my code, it ran fucking perfectly, so I sent that to him. He replied that the code does not work. I tried to recompile it and it ran perfectly. Again, it does not work. Afeter 13 fucking emails he fucking finally sent me the error message. Some fucntion was not found (missing some library but literally everywhere else it works without it...). Thats strange, because it run perfectly on my Fedora with CLion, so I switch to Windows and try to run same code in Visual Studio (which we are using in school btw). Works perfectly. So I start arguing with the teacher more and more. I tried around 10 online compilers. Works fuckng everywhere. Teacher is pissed, me too. So I rewrote my whole code, added comments and shit, reinvented wheel literally everywhere. Now I have C99 standardised code over 370 lines long that run even on a fucking arduino after changing input output methods so it can work with it. It (suprisingly runs) on his PC too.
After a bit more arguing, he said that he is using CodeBlocks from fucking 2015. Wow. Just fucking wow. Even our school has some old Visual Studio (2007 I guess) and it worked there.6 -
Haha kids, you're all dead wrong. Here's my story.
There is a thing called “emergence”. This is a fundamental property of our universe. It works 100% of the time. It can't be stopped, it can't be mitigated. Everything you see around you is an emergent phenomenon.
Emergence is triggered when a lot of similar things come together and interact. One water molecule cannot be dry or wet, but if you have many, after a certain number the new property emerges — wetness. The system becomes _wet_.
Professionalism is an emergent phenomenon too, and its water molecules are abstract knowledge. Learn tech things you're interested in, complete random tutorials, code, and after a certain amount of knowledge molecules is gained, something clicks inside your head, and you become a professional.
Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts here. Uni education can make you a professional seemingly quicker, but it's not because uni knowledge is special, it's because uni is a perfect environment to absorb a lot of knowledge in a short period of time.
It happened to me too. I started coding in Pascal in fifth grade of high school, and I did it till sixth. Then, seventh to ninth were spent on my uni's after-school program. After ninth grade, I drop out of high school to get to this uni's experimental program. First grade of uni, and we're making a CPU. Second grade, and we're doing hard math, C and assembly.
And finally, in the third grade, it happens. I was sitting there in the classroom, it was late, and I was writing a recursive sudoku solver in Python. And I _felt_ the click. You cannot mistake it for anything else. It clicks, and you're a changed person. Immediately, I realized I can write everything. Needless to say, I was passing everything related to code afterwards with flying colours.
From that point, everything I did was just gaining more and more experience. Nothing changed fundamentally.
Emergence is forever. If you learn constantly, even without a concrete defined path, I can guarantee you that you _will_ become a professional. This is backed by the universe itself. You cannot avoid becoming one if you're actively accumulating emergence points.
Here's the list of projects I made in the past 11 years: https://notion.so/uyouthe/...
I'm 24.7 -
I’m trying to add digit separators to a few amount fields. There’s actually three tickets to do this in various places, and I’m working on the last of them.
I had a nightmare debugging session earlier where literally everything would 404 unless I navigated through the site in a very roundabout way. I never did figure out the cause, but I found a viable workaround. Basically: the house doesn’t exist if you use the front door, but it’s fine if you go through the garden gate, around the back, and crawl in through the side window. After hours of debugging I eventually discovered that if I unlocked the front door with a different key, everything was fine… but nobody else has this problem?
Whatever.
Onto the problem at hand!
I’m trying to add digit separators to some values. I found a way to navigate to the page in question (more difficult than it sounds), and … I don’t know what view is rendering the page. Or what controller. Or how it generates its text.
The URL is encrypted, so I get no clues there. (Which was lead dev’s solution to having scrapeable IDs instead of just, you know, fixing them). The encryption also happens in middleware, so it’s a nightmare to work through. And it’s by the lead dev, so the code is fucking atrocious.
The view… could be one of many, and I don’t even know where they are. Or what layout. Or what partials go into building it.
All of the text on the page are “resources” — think named translations that support plus nested macros. I don’t know their names, and the bits of text I can search for are used fucking everywhere. “Confirmation number” (the most unique of them) turns up 79 matches. “Fee” showed up in 8310 places before my editor gave up looking. Really.
The table displaying the data, which is what I actually care about, isn’t built in JS or markup, but is likely a resource that goes through heavy processing. It gets generated in a controller somewhere (I don’t know the resource name so I can’t find it), and passed through several layers of “dynamic form” abstraction, eventually turned into markup, and rendered as a partial template. At least, that’s how it worked in the previous ticket. I found a resource that looks right, and there’s only the one. I found the nested macros it uses for the amount and total, and added the separators there… only to find that it doesn’t work.
Fucking dead end.
And i have absolutely nothing else to go on.
Page title? “Show”
URL? /~LiolV8N8KrIgaozEgLv93s…
Text? All from macros with unknown names. Can’t really search for it without considerable effort.
Table? Doesn’t work.
Text in the table? doesn’t turn up anything new.
Legal agreement? There are multiple, used in many places, generates them dynamically via (of course) resources, and even looking through the method usages, doesn’t narrow it down very much.
Just.
What the fuck?
Why does this need to be so fucking complicated?
And what genius decided “$100000.00” doesn’t need separators? Right, the lot of them because separators aren’t used ANYWHERE but in code I authored. Like, really? This is fintech. You’d think they would be ubiquitous.
And the sheer amount of abstraction?
Stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid.11 -
!dev (when do I ever post a dev related story? I only post about my personal life really)
For about 2 years I had a very good friend, and I had a huge crush on her for most of those 2 years. All of my junior year of high school, she dated my best friend, then they broke up the summer after because he'd cheated on her around the time they got together and she had found out. I was there for both of them during the breakup (it was fucking exhausting). The thing is, I was there for the girl more because I had a crush on her, and I started to consider her my best friend rather than her ex.
She knew I had a crush on her for a long time. But she still spent about a year going to parties every weekend, getting fucking hammered, and hooking up with random guys, then proceeded to tell me about it after. I can't count how many times she had to cancel plans because she got hammered the night before.
But I had a huge crush on her, so I essentially put her up on a pedestal, thinking she could do no wrong. Then we hit a point where we didn't talk for a couple months because I hit a low point and she was uncomfortable with me because of it. Around April we started talking again, immediately back to being best friends but my feelings for her came and went for a while. She had a huge crush on our other friend that had a girlfriend at the time. Life went on, she actually ended up being my first kiss while she was drunk one night (I was sober cause I was driving), but I started talking to a different girl a few days before then, so I was very conflicted about everything there.
Then a few weeks ago came. A different friend got a Radeon 5700 XT and I went over to his house to check it out and everything. We ended up talking for a while, and the conversation turned to my whole friend group that I hung out with all the time (the girl being the center of the group). That friend was never very fond of her, and he always made that very clear. Basically he made me realize that she's not perfect, and that I'd been seeing her through rose-colored glasses.
I spent a week or so rethinking our whole friendship, and I realized that she is nowhere near fucking perfect. For example, she ALWAYS has to be the center of attention. If our friend group is focusing on someone else for whatever reason, she essentially throws a fit then gets really quiet to get attention. Also she can't take criticism at all, she always acts like a victim if you try to criticize her in any way. I also feel like every time I tried to better myself in some way, she ended up bringing me down and making me feel like my problems aren't important. She uses her kindness as a weapon, such as "How could you say that about me? I've been nothing but kind to you!" And the list just goes on.
So, about a week ago, I told her that I feel like she's a toxic person, and she does nothing but bring people down over time, because that's truly how I feel. And of course, she couldn't take the criticism, and said "I don't even know why you feel that, I've been nothing but nice to you".
I haven't talked to anyone in that friend group in one week now. And I feel a lot better mentally. Being friends with her felt like a chore. Only one person in that friend group has tried to talk to me, and that was today. Nobody else has texted me or anything since last Monday. And I honestly couldn't care less. I feel like a huge chapter of my life is over, like the depressing chapter in a book.
I don't know how to end this. I'm doing fairly well now, been hanging out with coworkers a bunch lately. Life's actually kinda good for once.9 -
DO !!!NOT!!!!! USE 'X' AND 'P' TO 'CUT AND PASTE' A LOT OF LINES ACROSS FILES IN VIM!!! HOLY SHIT I JUST PWNED MYSELF SO HARD I LOST SO MUCH CODE HOLY FUCK IT'S NOT EVEN FUNNY! WHERE DID AT ALL GO YOU ASK, WHY THE FUCKING REGISTER, OK LET'S CHECK THE REGISTER, COOL THERE IT IS, BUT WAIT, THERE'S ONLY LIKE 20% OF IT BECAUSE WE CUT A SHIT LOAD OF LINES AT ONCE, AND THE REGISTER OVERFILLED.... Ok let's calm down, doesn't Vim have a recovery option? Yes it does, but WAIT A FUCKING MINUTE, MY CHANGES ARE NOT IN THE SWAP FILE BECAUSE IT'S NOT LIKE VIM CRASHED OR ANYTHING, MY DUMB-FUCK-ASS WILLFULLY WROTE THE CHANGES WHEN I SWITCHED OVER TO THE NEW FILE, AND NOW, WELL THAT'S IT, YOU'RE DEAD KIDDO, YOU WROTE THE CHANGES TO DISK, NOTHING YOU CAN DO, AND I AM SO SCREWED I SPECIFICALLY MADE A DEVRANT ACCOUNT TO MAKE SURE NO ONE ELSE PWNS HIMSELF AS HARD AS I JUST DID HOLY FUCK17
-
Our project schedule is quite full at the moment, we are basically at the limit for the next three months.
In comes one of our sales people: "Hey, can we squeeze in a little project, nothing fancy just a very basic static web page." (No question mark there, it was not a question...)
I say no, we are full, the deadline is to tight (3 weeks), can't do it.
In comes boss: "Sure you can, just push everything else back." (We won't change deadlines, what he actually means is for us to do unpaid overtime for two months so he can barocke make a few thousand extra bucks...)
So I cave and allow it. It were just 4 hours of work, we can squeeze it in, maybe do a little less R&D this month.
Next day, the project scope changed, suddenly we are not taking about 4 hours but 80. Sure, we can squeeze two extra weeks into the month.
That is when I realized, I don't hate my work, just my work environment.4 -
> Worst work culture you've experienced?
It's a tie between my first to employers.
First: A career's dead end.
Bosses hardly ever said the truth, suger-coated everything and told you just about anything to get what they wanted. E.g. a coworker of mine was sent on a business trip to another company. They had told him this is his big chance! He'd attend a project kick-off meeting, maybe become its lead permanently. When he got there, the other company was like "So you're the temporary first-level supporter? Great! Here's your headset".
And well, devs were worth nothing anyway. For every dev there were 2-3 "consultants" that wrote detailed specifications, including SQL statements and pseudocode. The dev's job was just to translate that to working code. Except for the two highest senior devs, who had perfect job security. They had cooked up a custom Ant-based build system, had forked several high-profile Java projects (e.g. Hibernate) and their code was purposely cryptic and convoluted.
You had no chance to make changes to their projects without involuntarily breaking half of it. And then you'd have to beg for a bit of their time. And doing something they didn't like? Forget it. After I suggested to introduce automated testing I was treated like a heretic. Well of course, that would have threatened their job security. Even managers had no power against them. If these two would quit half a dozen projects would simply be dead.
And finally, the pecking order. Juniors, like me back then, didn't get taught shit. We were just there for the work the seniors didn't want to do. When one of the senior devs had implemented a patch on the master branch, it was the junior's job to apply it to the other branches.
Second: A massive sweatshop, almost like a real-life caricature.
It was a big corporation. Managers acted like kings, always taking the best for themselves while leaving crumbs for the plebs (=devs, operators, etc). They had the spacious single offices, we had the open plan (so awesome for communication and teamwork! synergy effects!). When they got bored, they left meetings just like that. We... well don't even think about being late.
And of course most managers followed the "kiss up, kick down" principle. Boy, was I getting kicked because I dared to question a decision of my boss. He made my life so hard I got sick for a month, being close to burnout. The best part? I gave notice a month later, and _he_still_was_surprised_!
Plebs weren't allowed anything below perfection, bosses on the other hand... so, I got yelled at by some manager. Twice. For essentially nothing, things just bruised his fragile ego. My bosses response? "Oh he's just human". No, the plebs was expected to obey the powers that be. Something you didn't like? That just means your attitude needs adjustment. Like with the open plan offices: I criticized the noise and distraction. Well that's just my _opinion_, right? Anyone else is happily enjoying it! Why can't I just be like the others? And most people really had given up, working like on a production line.
The company itself, while big, was a big ball of small, isolated groups, sticking together by office politics. In your software you'd need to call a service made by a different team, sooner or later. Not documented, noone was ever willing to help. To actually get help, you needed to get your boss to talk to their boss. Then you'd have a chance at all.
Oh, and the red tape. Say you needed a simple cable. You know, like those for $2 on Amazon. You'd open a support ticket and a week later everyone involved had signed it off. Probably. Like your boss, the support's boss, the internal IT services' boss, and maybe some other poor sap who felt important. Or maybe not, because the justification for needing that cable wasn't specific enough. I mean, just imagine the potential damage if our employees owned a cable they shouldn't!
You know, after these two employers I actually needed therapy. Looking back now, hooooly shit... that's why I can't repeat often enough that we devs put up with way too much bullshit.3 -
Tell me the classics you never get tired of. I'll start.
User message / report: "there is an error". With absolutely nothing else written or attached.17 -
"four million dollars"
TL;DR. Seriously, It's way too long.
That's all the management really cares about, apparently.
It all started when there were heated, war faced discussions with a major client this weekend (coonts, I tell ye) and it was decided that a stupid, out of context customisation POC had that was hacked together by the "customisation and delivery " (they know to do neither) team needed to be merged with the product (a hot, lumpy cluster fuck, made in a technology so old that even the great creators (namely Goo-fucking-gle) decided that it was their worst mistake ever and stopped supporting it (or even considering its existence at this point)).
Today morning, I my manager calls me and announces that I'm the lucky fuck who gets to do this shit.
Now being the defacto got admin to our team (after the last lead left, I was the only one with adequate experience), I suggested to my manager "boss, here's a light bulb. Why don't we just create a new branch for the fuckers and ask them to merge their shite with our shite and then all we'll have to do it build the mixed up shite to create an even smellier pile of shite and feed it to the customer".
"I agree with you mahaDev (when haven't you said that, coont), but the thing is <insert random manger talk here> so we're the ones who'll have to do it (again, when haven't you said that, coont)"
I said fine. Send me the details. He forwarded me a mail, which contained context not amounting to half a syllable of the word "context". I pinged the guy who developed the hack. He gave me nothing but a link to his code repo. I said give me details. He simply said "I've sent the repo details, what else do you require?"
1st motherfucker.
Dafuq? Dude, gimme some spice. Dafuq you done? Dafuq libraries you used? Dafuq APIs you used? Where Dafuq did you get this old ass checkout on which you've made these changes? AND DAFUQ IS THIS TOOL SUPPOSED TO DO AND HOW DOES IT AFFECT MY PRODUCT?
Anyway, since I didn't get a lot of info, I set about trying to just merge the code blindly and fix all conflicts, assuming that no new libraries/APIs have been used and the code is compatible with our master code base.
Enter delivery head. 2nd motherfucker.
This coont neither has technical knowledge nor the common sense to ask someone who knows his shit to help out with the technical stuff.
I find out that this was the half assed moron who agreed to a 3 day timeline (and our build takes around 13 hours to complete, end to end). Because fuck testing. They validated the their tool, we've tested our product. There's no way it can fail when we make a hybrid cocktail that will make the elephants foot look like a frikkin mojito!
Anywho, he comes by every half-mother fucking-hour and asks whether the build has been triggered.
Bitch. I have no clue what is going on and your people apparently don't have the time to give a fuck. How in the world do you expect me to finish this in 5 minutes?
Anyway, after I compile for the first time after merging, I see enough compilations to last a frikkin life time. I kid you not, I scrolled for a complete minute before reaching the last one.
Again, my assumption was that there are no library or dependency changes, neither did I know the fact that the dude implemented using completely different libraries altogether in some places.
Now I know it's my fault for not checking myself, but I was already having a bad day.
I then proceeded to have a little tantrum. In the middle of the floor, because I DIDN'T HAVE A CLUE WHAT CHANGES WERE MADE AND NOBODY CARED ENOUGH TO GIVE A FUCKING FUCK ABOUT THE DAMN FUCK.
Lo and behold, everyone's at my service now. I get all things clarified, takes around an hour and a half of my time (could have been done in 20 minutes had someone given me the complete info) to find out all I need to know and proceed to remove all compilation problems.
Hurrah. In my frustration, I forgot to push some changes, and because of some weird shit in our build framework, the build failed in Jenkins. Multiple times. Even though the exact same code was working on my local setup (cliche, I know).
In any case, it was sometime during sorting out this mess did I come to know that the reason why the 2nd motherfucker accepted the 3 day deadline was because the total bill being slapped to the customer is four fucking million USD.
Greed. Wow. The fucker just sacrificed everyone's day and night (his team and the next) for 4mil. And my manager and director agreed. Four fucking million dollars. I don't get to see a penny of it, I work for peanut shells, for 15 hours, you'll get bonuses and commissions, the fucking junior Dev earns more than me, but my manager says I'm the MVP of the team, all I get is a thanks and a bad rating for this hike cycle.
4mil usd, I learnt today, is enough to make you lick the smelly, hairy balls of a Neanderthal even though the money isn't truly yours.4 -
! exactly dev
I'd ditched Windows and spent a while exploring the Linux ecosystem for content creation. And I have to say, it was not a nice experience.
As much as I respect the Linux mantra of "free as in freedom" and "you need to roll up your sleeves and figure out stuff on your own", it just isn't good enough for non-dev work. Sorry guys, but I need software that gets out of my way and at least does what it's supposed to do. I can't stand a horrible UI or delays and random crashes, which is exactly what happens with most things under Linux.
To replace my Windows workflow I used the following:
1. Windows -> elementaryOS (because Debian/Ubuntu repositories seem to have the best software support, and elementaryOS is the least horrible looking thing that supports that) and then Arch, because, well, Arch.
2. Blender + Maya -> Blender + Maya on Linux.
3. Reaper + FL Studio -> Ardour + LMMS.
4. Photoshop -> GIMP + Krita + Inkscape.
5. ZBrush -> nothing :(
As you can see, my use cases are pretty much all over the spectrum.
Firstly, installing and configuring stuff. A pleasure on Windows, an absolute pain on Linux. Everything just worked on Windows, I had to wrestle with library versions and patches and unstable audio layers (Linux audio just sucks, except for JACK) on Linux.
Out of these, Blender and Maya were the best experience. But even then, both would suffer from random crashes that just didn't happen on Windows.
Ardour is actually really nice when it works. Its use of JACK for routing makes it really really flexible, but it just isn't stable enough to depend on. LMMS is utter crap. I'm sorry, but I just hate the UI. Can't stand it.
GIMP, Krita, and Inkscape can't beat Photoshop, even when you consider them together. Adobe software workflow is just so much better and more intuitive.
Blender 3D sculpting is not bad, but it's nowhere as good as ZBrush.
Also, if you're a C++ dev like me, nothing beats Visual Studio 2017. Nothing. That IDE just blows everything else out of the water. Even VSCode. And it's not slow at all, it handled a fairly large project (PBRTv3) just fine on my Windows development VM. Yes, a VM.
So...I ditched Linux and went back to Windows, but I keep Linux as a VM for when I actually want to mess with Blender or Ardour. Or some dev stuff which Windows sucks at (which is becoming less frequent because of WSL).
Out of all the above, the only one I'd consider ready for production use would be Blender. Developers of open source software, please learn from Blender. Kickass UI and user friendly operation is extremely important, you can't make a random window with GTK buttons and text boxes and arcane config files and expect people to use it for serious work.
Also, Windows beats Linux hands down as an everyday OS. It's always been rock solid, if you take care of it properly (and that goes for any OS). Updates hardly take any time because I run it on a SSD. As for all the advertising and marketing bullshit, you can block a large amount of stuff. And for what can't be blocked, well, I just have to live with it, because the alternative is compromising on my creative output, which is too much for me.
I still run Linux on my server, though. And on my embedded devices (Pi, BeagleBone, etc.). It absolutely rocks there.
I realize that Linux software is not going to improve unless we do something about it, so I'll be contributing fixes and code (the joys of being a C++ dev, yay). Still, I feel that the platform and software as a whole is just not mature enough.18 -
I’m tired of all these profane “frontend developers” who do nothing but get cheap internet points by shitting on web technologies.
Bitch, NPM is just a package manager. That’s what it is. Anyone who ever used a package manager already knows how to use NPM.
Here on devrant, there at your workplace, people hear nothing but bitching when you open your mouth. You always need a “solid task description” and “best practices”. You always need somebody else to do your job for you. Frontend is the area where you have to constantly switch between heavy, performance-oriented coding, UX and graphic design while remaining in a dynamic environment that is called “web”, no wonder why you can’t do that. Instead of bitching, you could just present your own solution you designed with just a little bit of product-oriented thinking. But noooo, you fucking bother designers whenever you’re not sure about “how many pixels is that padding”.
You can only be barely productive (and only with a frozen spec) but can never take the lead just once.
In the 80s your kind of approaches were doubted, by the 90s they were dead. In 2020s they’re straight up laughable.
And don’t get me started on CSS. You have to be an absolute buffoon of a developer to not know how to use a DECLARATIVE tool that don’t even require real structural thinking.
No wonder why you praise php. You throw shit all over the place and tell everybody that you’re a “sociopath” and you don’t need that “stupid frontend” and “stupid users”. But you know what? Any real backend or embedded dev would’ve laughed at your face.
Because backend developers are respected.
You’re not.10 -
Me and my manager throughout 2020
January:
Me: So umm, we can release the new app version
Manager: No we promised client X app first go build that
Me: umm, ok.
February:
Me: so the app is done, but client hasn't setup area L so there is no data there
Manager: ok, I'll have them setup area L soon ™️
March:
Manager: area L is too much work to setup, use workaround L thats way better
Me: ok ...
April:
Manager: client is nitpicking on design and layout please make this mess even greater
Me: ok, anything else?
Manager: yeah also start on app for client Z!
Me: and our app update?
Manager: later son! Risk tooo muchos!
May:
Me: the mess for client X is done, and first version for client Z is also ready for test
Manager: ok good work, here is a new set of things to mess up
Me: but... Seriously, wtf?!
Manager: clients want quality
Me: ah ok, not nitpicking, cool
June:
Manager: client X went MIA, but client Z will send you a weekly list of things they don't understand and want to change
Me: ah great, truly worth postponing my February holiday to release nothing
July:
Manager: so, how we doing on all them changes
Me: well, I am a loyal custodian with alot of pleasure in my work!
Manager: ah ok good!
Me: any news from client X??
Manager: who
Me: mkay ... n.v.m
August:
Me: can we release yet?
Manager: change, we can!!!
Me: are you Obama?
Manager: ambitions
Me: fuck you pay me
September:
Me: I am confident we can now release all 3 apps as promised mid september
Manager: great!! Good work
Also manager: you know that immensely complex area within the app? That needs a complete rewrite because we have bad ux there!!!
Me: ok... To which requirements?
Manager: good ux, we must have standards
Me: but the layout of page R id generic as page F so then we need to align there as well
Manager: go! Do!
Me: ok I'll come up with my own requirements then
Manager: we also need documentation
Me: really!!!! How clever of you to fire colleagues T & P and we now have zero workforce for that
Manager: things will get better someday
Me: ah, great! Put it on my calendar
October:
Me: I need a sabbatical biatch
Manager: a what?4 -
This rant has been one that I've been wanting to rant about for a while now. Me being drunk as fuck right now (mind, stay awake!) doesn't really help, but meh.
At least Wanblows was able to install its "features" properly... Except it wasn't, being the featureful ShitOS it is.
I want to rant about privacy. Not about "nothing to hide, nothing to fear". That's been ranted about plenty by the MIcroshaft-loving folks as well as the privacy-aware opposition. Rather, I'd like to rant about the privacy-concious.
I am a privacy-concious-person, with his current status quo being that he doesn't yet know a privacy-concious solution to every data-intrusive "common solution" out there. So I tend to value privacy next to De Lijn while sharing location data to Google with Google Maps. Point is, I do not know privacy-concious solutions to everything out there yet. So I use the convenient over the privacy-aware.
(after review while drunk I was unable to make sense of this)
In the privacy-aware circles I tend to see that it seems to be black and white. You share your data with Google, yet you oppose data collection by local institutes? WRONG!!! YOU MUST BE A TINFOIL HAT!!!
No, seriously I don't want to share my data with Google. Just that they're the only realtime navigation platform with decent UI out there that I know of right now.
Privacy isn't all black and white here. I block any intrusion that I'm able to, anything else I abide to, while awaiting a good alternative that does respect my privacy which I would gladly use instead. That does not imply that "I have nothing to hide". I do, and I have a lot to hide.
So that makes up the black and white nature of privacy, which is a fallacy. Another one is the whole idea of "I have nothing to hide" to begin with.
If you have nothing to hide, would you be comfortable with sharing your location data (IP address, habits, common trends, etc) with me? To share your information with me, to have your contacts share your info with me, without your consent? Of course you wouldn't. But that's what's happening right now.2 -
FFUUUuucccckkk me sideways. So I decided to look into USB type-c's power delivery and alt modes. Cause I kinda want to make an adapter card to run my displays over a single cable. TLDR of the rest: USB-C has some huge capabilities which noone is interested in using since its way to complex to handle for what its worth in the end.
Now PD alone is kinda ok to deal with since a lot of powerbanks use it and some hobby guys documented how to work with it. I find it really odd thou that you NEED to use a dedicated IC for using the configuration chanel to negotiate how much power you can draw. Why the USB standard didnt use some simple 5V low speed signalling? Also the standard says that you only have to implement 5v 0.6A with every other power level being optional. (This is also true for cables. Most manufacturers use only the USB 2.0 standard for them and brag about how fast type-C is. ლ(ಠ益ಠლ) )
Now to the alt modes. These motherfuckers are a real shitshow to deal with. First you need a Mux to deal with USB-C's two way insertion, so your signals wont get flipped. Next thing is that you have four lanes at your disposal in alt mode. Which you can either use for four Display Port Lanes or two DP lanes and two USB 3.0 lanes. (You always get USB 2.0) Now you may think that there would be one simple chip to do it all? Nope you need atleast two at the price of 6$ each. One for PD and one for Alt modes. Both are very hard to solder (QFN, 0.5 mm pitch 40+ pins) TI ended up being the only one with a decent offering of IC's that do what I need. As for working with them, you would think that you just slap a simple MCU on there that communicates over I2C or SPI to configure the chips? Nope! You program the chips memory from which it configures itsself. And the programming is done with some TI tool which gives me no idea as to how you can handle everything whith no control logic behind it.
Looking into alternative IC's leaves me with cypress semi. And their documentation is basically a total mess. I wanna know what that chip is good for and what I need to do to make it work. I dont care about technical details mixed with marketing jargon nobody understands. And I really despise that I have to register just to download a datasheet. Especially since there is no info about it on the main page.
And this whole rant hasnt even touched the topic that USB-C only uses DP and nothing else. So you better hope that you have DP++ so you can use a passive conversion.
This was my Ted Talk about USB-C. Some info in it may be subject to my stupidity and errors as it currently is 02:15 in the morning and I need some sleep.14 -
For the first time I am feeling like.... I hate my job.
Agile and Scrum can be fucked, but at least there is a work methodology. I was hired by a company being run the old school way.
These guys never heard of git??
- Fuck you. We never used git and neither should you.
Client company does not want to give me push/pull access to their gitlab instance??
- Fuck you, you can use our RDP server for that.
Project planning features be damned, they've got email, Teams and videocalls!
Can I develop in peace? Fuck no, I have to give IT support to the guy who hired me.
Our timeline is defined IN A FUCKING WORD DOCUMENT FOR FUCKS SAKE. I can't connect Issues to milestones in a Word doc
Oh, and the customer is running everything on prem. If there is a need to scale up, FUCK ME. I should have specified 20 machines from the get go or gtfo. We're using 2 machines to run 8 different services that are going to be ingesting and computing data.
They want state of the art on a cheapskate.
And I have nothing else lined up at the moment. Although I am soon to renew the contract... This contract binds me with professional responsibility for a project being ran by people who do not give a single fuck about optimizing the work process.3 -
TLDR: Read the post.
Bare with me here, I am new to all of this jazz. But I wanted to tell a story.
I have been a programmer for a while now, working on various projects with various companies, doing various things. I know that sounds vague, but it's the truth.
I never work on the same thing, ever, I never work with any fancy IDE, because I don't need one. I personally believe no developer works with the massive huge code base all at once, but instead works on it in pieces. That's a story for another day.
I have seen the shittiest of the shittiest and some how survived, I have been beaten down by code bases that were out sourced yet some how managed to stand up and gain my baring and fight back. I have dealt with clients, bosses and idiots from A-Z. Watching them all scramble around for their pennies like greedy rich white men seeking more pennies to swim in.
Some how I survived all this. I started working from home almost 3 years ago, the freedom is exhilarating. The ability to fuck off for most of the day and work at night, or work all morning and fuck off. There's nothing better.
As you work from home you think, this will be amazing. Until the crippling loneliness takes over and even the 6th bottle of beer doesn't quench the thirst of human contact. The pain of being trapped in the four white walls of your office makes that bottle of tequila, to numb out the emptiness inside look more satisfying.
At some point, you crawl out of your space to find people to interact with, refusing to be beaten down by both shit code and loneliness only to find all your friends, family and significant others are working, in offices, where they cant just fuck off for a day with you. The silence of the house, the office, the what ever becomes deafening.
its crawling all over you like bugs that pick away at your mind, breaking you, hating you. So you decide that a coffee shop is the best place, only to sit there and people watch or check Facebook or what ever else people do at coffee shops that isn't actually work.
The point in all of this, is that working from home is both a positive and a negative. It has destroyed me, created a workaholic and, probably, an alcoholic. There isnt a day I dont wish that I could sleep away the deafening silence of the world around me as every one busies off to the office.
One might think: get an office job, but I have become accustomed to my misery, pain and suffering of working from home, isolated and medicated by vaping and alcohol. the freedom, from what I have found, is worth more then the sacrifice of it - to work around people I slowly begin to hate, people that make me want to overdose on anything rather then see their smug faces and be beaten down by their idiotic words, code bases and money grubbing hands...
I guess I'll get back to work now, in my house, with my cats, my vape and my beer. Here's to freedom and the sacrifices that go along with it.5 -
I am the manager of a customer service team of about 10-12 members. Most of the team members are right out of school and this is their first professional job and their ages range from 22-24. I am about 10 years older than all of my employees. We have a great team and great working relationships. They all do great work and we have established a great team culture.
Well, a couple of months ago, I noticed something odd that my team (and other employees in the building) started doing. They would see each other in the hallways or break room and say “quack quack” like a duck. I assumed this was an inside joke and thought nothing of it and wrote it off as playful silliness or thought I perhaps missed a moment in a recent movie or TV show to which the quacks were referring.
Fast forward a few months. I needed to do some printing and our printer is in a room that can be locked by anyone when it is in use (our team often has large volumes of printing they need to do and it helps to be able to sort things in there by yourself, as multiple people can get their pages mixed up and it turns into a mess). The door had been locked the entire day and this was around noon, and the manager I have the key to the door in case someone forgot to unlock it when they left. I walked in, and there were two of my employees on the couch in the copier room having sex. I immediately closed the door and left.
This was last week and as you can imagine things are very awkward between the three of us. I haven’t addressed the situation yet because of a few factors: This was during both of their lunch hours. They were not doing this on the clock (they had both clocked out, I immediately checked). We have an understanding that you can go or do anything on your lunch that you want, as long as you’re back after an hour. Also, as you mentioned in your answer last week to the person who overheard their coworker involved in “adult activities,” these people are adults and old enough to make their own choices.
But that’s not the end of the story. That same day, after my team had left, I was wrapping up and putting a meeting agenda on each of their desks for our meeting the next day. Out in broad daylight on the guys desk (one of the employees I had caught in the printing room) was a piece of paper at the top that said “Duck Club.” Underneath it, it had a list of locations of places in and around the office followed by “points.” 25 points – president’s desk, 10 points – car in the parking lot, 20 points – copier room, etc.
So here is my theory about what is going on (and I think I am right). This “Duck Club” is a club people at work where people get “points” for having sex in these locations around the office. I think that is also where the quacking comes into play. Perhaps this is some weird mating call between members to let them know they want to get some “points” with the other person, and if they quack back, they meet up somewhere to “score.” The two I caught in the copier room I have heard “quacking” before.
I know this is all extremely weird. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to write you because of how weird this seems (plus I was a little embarrassed). I have no idea what to do. As I mentioned above, they weren’t on the clock when this happened, they’re all adults, and technically I broke a rule by entering the copier room when it was locked, and would have never caught them if I had obeyed that rule. The only company rule I can think of that these two broke is using the copier room for other purposes, preventing someone else from using it.
I would love to know your opinion on this. I tend to want to sweep it under the rug because I’m kind of a shy person and would be extremely embarrassed to bring it up.21 -
You stupid lousy price of potato shit windows, yes that’s right - this pissed of windows user is pissed the fuck right off.
Here I am letting you sit there idling along and then I press the start button, you know that fucking button I press regularly for fucking years, only for you to go “fuck you, I’m going to blue screen instead” like what the flying fuck? There hasn’t been any updates in a while that I’ve noticed but this shit is just a shit.
So what ever, let’s reboot this mother fucker, oh wait now you can’t fucking boot, I can hear the hdd spinning a million miles an hour (coz non ssd) but noooo your just going to sit there like a dumb ass prick who doesn’t know what the fuck your doing.
So fine, let’s pull out that old USB with w10 on it and do a MBR repair... (coz nothing else will fucking work in your shit list of options) ok so apparently an MBR repair gets you booting.. but wait there’s more, now you useless piece of shit are going to run a scan disk which has sat at 0% for the past 20 minutes and I don’t think I’m ever going to see that fucker move, I get it you want to do something useful, but Fucking Do it already!
Like wtf, how does a stable system just decide to shit itself.
Oh and before you say it.. no I can’t install Linux on this piece of shit, see my previous rants for that problem.rant i’m done that’s not how it works w10 os as a service i need a new laptop hunk of shit go fuck your self6 -
Internships are fucking bullshit and if more senior developers were to take the role of an actual mentor to coach juniors properly then the state of software engineering would be better.
Some people can be let down easy in terms of "this is not for you bruh", others can be built. I know that social interactions are not common for a lot of the morons in here, but being polite and kind is relatively simple if you know what you are doing. Being a dickhead != "royal levels of expertise" and if we were to coach more people into proper development practices then software would not be in such a shitty state.
For an environment that thrives in cooperation I find it hard to believe that we are still subjecting new people to the field to what can be considered slavery with little to actual no monetary compensation.
I removed many of the requirements for the application to a software developer job where I am at (I am the boss, I get to do shit like that) and my fight with HR was "I would rather someone fresh from college that I can coach properly than some dickhead with years on the field that won't listen to anything else than their own words"
Sure it would be slow, sure it would be hard, nothing ever is that simple, but my idea is "train this mkfer, level the fuck out of him, let him be off to great shit rather than giving him to some dickhead that will treat him like shit on account of being a newbie"
And yes, I do know how and what can go bad, I am going to have someone desinging shit in basic html/js/css with some php here and there not giving them the keys to every server I control. Thank you for your fucking concerns, I know what I am doing.
the experiment fails? GOOD more data for me.
Plus, you learn more when you teach others.16 -
Today was a manic-depressive kind of day. Spent the morning helping some developers with getting their code to run a stored procedure to drop old partitions, but it wasn't working on their end. It was a fairly simple proc. But working with partitions is a little like working with an array. I figured out that they were passing the wrong timestamp, and needed to add +1 to delete the right partition. Got that sorted out, and things were good. Lunch time.
After lunch I did some busy work, and then the PO comes up at about 2PM and says he's assigned some requests to me. The first was just attaching some scripts. Easy. The second, the user wants a couple of schemas exported ... at 6PM. I've been in the office since 6:45AM.
While I'm setting up some commands to run for the data export, a BA walks up and asks if I'm filling in for another DBA who is out for a few weeks. Yep. There's a change request that hasn't been assigned, and he normally does the work. I ask when it's due. Well, the pre-implementation was supposed to be done in the morning, but it wasn't, and we're in the implementation window ... half way through. I bring up the change task, and look at. Create new schema and users. That's all it says. The BA laughs. I tell I need more to go on. 10 minutes later he sends an email with the information. There's only two hours left in the window, and I can only use half of it, because the production guys have to their stuff, and we're in their window. Now I'm irritated, because I'm new to Oracle, and it's an unforgiving mistress. Fortunately, another DBA says he'll do it, so that we can get it done in time. But can't work it either, because Dev DBAs don't have access to QA, and the process required access for this task. Gets shelved until the access issue is resolved. It's now after 4:15PM. I'm going to in traffic with that 6PM deadline.
I manage to get home and to the computer by 5:45PM. Log in. Start VPN. Box pops on screen. Java needs to update. I chose skip update. Box pops up again. It won't let me log in until Java is current. Passed.
I finally get logged in, and it's 6:10PM. I'm late getting the job started. I pull up Putty and log into the first box, and paste my pre-prepared command in the command line and hit error. Command not found. I'm tired, so it's a moment to sink in. I don't have time for this.
I log into DBArtisan and pull up the first data base, use the wizard to set the job, and off it goes. Yay. Bring up the second database, and have enter the connect info. Host not found. Wut? Examine host name. Yep, it's correct. Try a different method. Host not found. Go back to Putty. Log in. Past string. Launch. Command not found. Now my brain is quitting on me. Why now? It's after 6:30PM. Fiddle with some settings, reset $Oracle home. Try again. Yay. It works. I'm done. It's after 7PM.
There is nothing like technology to snatch the euphoria of a success away from you. It's a love-hate thing, but I wouldn't trade it for anything else. I'm done. Good night.3 -
At work, my closest relation is with the DBA. Dude is a genius when it comes to proper database management as well as having a very high level of understanding concerning server administration, how he got that good at that I have no clue, he just says that he likes to fuck around with servers, Linux in particular although he also knows a lot about Windows servers.
Thing is, the dude used to work as a dev way back when VB pre VB.NET was all the rage and has been generating different small tools for his team of analysts(I used to be a part of his team) to use with only him maintaining them. He mentioned how he did not like how Microsoft just said fk u to VB6 developers, but that he was happy as long as he could use VB. He relearned how to do most of the GUI stuff he was used to do with VB6 into VB.NEt and all was good with the world. I have seen his code, proper OOP practices and architectural decisions, etc etc. Nothing to complain about his code, seems easy enough to extend, properly documented as well.
Then he got with me in order to figure out how to breach the gap between building GUI applications into web form, so that we could just host those apps in one of our servers and his users go from there, boy was he not prepared to see the amount of fuckery that we do in the web development world. Last time my dude touched web development there was still Classic ASP with JScript and VBScript(we actually had the same employer at one point in the past in which I had to deal with said technology, not bad, but definitely not something I recommend for the current state of web development) and decided that the closest thing to what he was used was either PHP(which he did not enjoy, no problem with that really, he just didn't click with the language) and WebForms using VB.NET, which he also did not like on account of them basically being on support mode since Microsoft is really pushing for people to adopt dotnet core.
After came ASP.NET with MVC, now, he did like it, but still had that lil bug in his head that told him that sticking to core was probably a better idea since he was just starting, why not start with the newest and greatest? Then in hit(both of us actually) that to this day Microsoft still not has command line templates for building web applications in .net core using VB.NET. I thought it was weird, so I decided to look into. Turns out, that without using Razor, you can actually build Web APIs with VB.NET just fine if you just convert a C# template into VB.NET, the process was...err....tricky, and not something we would want to do for other projects, with that in we decided to look into Microsoft's reasons to not have VB.NET. We discovered how Microsoft is not keeping the same language features between both languages, having crown C# as the language of choice for everything Microsoft, to this point, it seems that Microsoft was much more focused in developing features for the excellent F# way more than it ever had for VB.NET at this point and that it was not a major strategy for them to adapt most of the .net core functionality inside of VB, we found articles when the very same Microsoft team stated of how they will be slowly adding the required support for VB and that on version 5 we would definitely have proper support for VB.NET ALTHOUGH they will not be adding any new development into the language.
Past experience with Microsoft seems to point at them getting more and more ready to completely drop the language, it does not matter how many people use it, they would still kill it :P I personally would rather keep it, or open source the language's features so that people can keep adding support to it(if they can of course) because of its historical significance rather than them just completely dropping the language. I prefer using C#, and most of my .net core applications use C#, its very similar to Java on a lot of things(although very much different in others) and I am fine with it being the main language. I just think that it sucks to leave such a large developer pool in the shadows with their preferred tool of choice and force them to use something else just like that.
My boy is currently looking at how I developed a sample api with validation, user management, mediatR and a custom project structure as well as a client side application using React and typescript swappable with another one built using Angular(i wanted to test the differences to see which one I prefer, React with Typescript is beautiful, would not want to use it without it) and he is hating every minute of it on account of how complex frontend development has become :V
Just wanted to vent a little about a non bothersome situation.8 -
I don't know if I'm being pranked or not, but I work with my boss and he has the strangest way of doing things.
- Only use PHP
- Keep error_reporting off (for development), Site cannot function if they are on.
- 20,000 lines of functions in a single file, 50% of which was unused, mostly repeated code that could have been reduced massively.
- Zero Code Comments
- Inconsistent variable names, function names, file names -- I was literally project searching for months to find things.
- There is nothing close to a normalized SQL Database, column ID names can't even stay consistent.
- Every query is done with a mysqli wrapper to use legacy mysql functions.
- Most used function is to escape stirngs
- Type-hinting is too strict for the code.
- Most files packed with Inline CSS, JavaScript and PHP - we don't want to use an external file otherwise we'd have to open two of them.
- Do not use a package manger composer because he doesn't have it installed.. Though I told him it's easy on any platform and I'll explain it.
- He downloads a few composer packages he likes and drag/drop them into random folder.
- Uses $_GET to set values and pass them around like a message contianer.
- One file is 6000 lines which is a giant if statement with somewhere close to 7 levels deep of recursion.
- Never removes his old code that bloats things.
- Has functions from a decade ago he would like to save to use some day. Just regular, plain old, PHP functions.
- Always wants to build things from scratch, and re-using a lot of his code that is honestly a weird way of doing almost everything.
- Using CodeIntel, Mess Detectors, Error Detectors is not good or useful.
- Would not deploy to production through any tool I setup, though I was told to. Instead he wrote bash scripts that still make me nervous.
- Often tells me to make something modern/great (reinventing a wheel) and then ends up saying, "I think I'd do it this way... Referes to his code 5 years ago".
- Using isset() breaks things.
- Tens of thousands of undefined variables exist because arrays are creates like $this[][][] = 5;
- Understanding the naming of functions required me to write several documents.
- I had to use #region tags to find places in the code quicker since a router was about 2000 lines of if else statements.
- I used Todo Bookmark extensions in VSCode to mark and flag everything that's a bug.
- Gets upset if I add anything to .gitignore; I tried to tell him it ignores files we don't want, he is though it deleted them for a while.
- He would rather explain every line of code in a mammoth project that follows no human known patterns, includes files that overwrite global scope variables and wants has me do the documentation.
- Open to ideas but when I bring them up such as - This is what most standards suggest, here's a literal example of exactly what you want but easier - He will passively decide against it and end up working on tedious things not very necessary for project release dates.
- On another project I try to write code but he wants to go over every single nook and cranny and stay on the phone the entire day as I watch his screen and Im trying to code.
I would like us all to do well but I do not consider him a programmer but a script-whippersnapper. I find myself trying to to debate the most basic of things (you shouldnt 777 every file), and I need all kinds of evidence before he will do something about it. We need "security" and all kinds of buzz words but I'm scared to death of this code. After several months its a nice place to work but I am convinced I'm being pranked or my boss has very little idea what he's doing. I've worked in a lot of disasters but nothing like this.
We are building an API, I could use something open source to help with anything from validations, routing, ACL but he ends up reinventing the wheel. I have never worked so slow, hindered and baffled at how I am supposed to build anything - nothing is stable, tested, and rarely logical. I suggested many things but he would rather have small talk and reason his way into using things he made.
I could fhave this project 50% done i a Node API i two weeks, pretty fast in a PHP or Python one, but we for reasons I have no idea would rather go slow and literally "build a framework". Two knuckleheads are going to build a PHP REST framework and compete with tested, tried and true open source tools by tens of millions?
I just wanted to rant because this drives me crazy. I have so much stress my neck and shoulder seems like a nerve is pinched. I don't understand what any of this means. I've never met someone who was wrong about so many things but believed they were right. I just don't know what to say so often on call I just say, 'uhh..'. It's like nothing anyone or any authority says matters, I don't know why he asks anything he's going to do things one way, a hard way, only that he can decipher. He's an owner, he's not worried about job security.13 -
Anyone else here working as a developer in a digital advertising agency? You end up working on lots of shitty projects and there is nothing harder than working on something you don't believe in :/5
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To long to read. So don’t do it.
I feel disappointed. It’s not about job or stuff. I’m disappointed about world in general. I don’t see my future on this planet anymore.
The world more or less looks like that :
Politics are trying to help you by stealing more money from you. The more you’re lucky the more money you will pay for it.
Media punch you with some family stuff from everywhere, give you young rich and far away, beautiful picture photos of places, people and food that you at most could visit once or twice per year during holidays that are break from work concentration camps.
If you’re lucky you’re rich or got rich or wealthy and infamous so you can walk wherever you want and don’t give a fuck what you wear but again your old friends are not so lucky bastards so you need to find new friends that are probably assholes. At the end most of the days you you’re doing nothing except killing time to meet with people you like during weekends or evenings.
Then there are families and everyone want to tell you that’s important. Family is like herd of assholes, if you’re weak they will sacrifice you and tell that you’re looser behind your back but when you get wealthy they will come back to tell you that when you were young and stupid they played with you so now you have to buy them some stuff or get them a job.
At the end there are people with “I wrote that book” certificate of excellence try to sell you opinions on everything starting from sexual positions ending on how to take a good dump. The problem is that the moment they wrote that book it becomes obsolete. Teachers of useless knowledge from last century that forgot about google or wikipedia.
All of them are playing your emotions, cause impulses and hormones are what makes you weak and people are looking for your weaknesses to take advantage of you. Get your money or get your attention and maybe even both at the same time. Cause views matter you know it. So like and subscribe dumb fucks.
If you’re lucky you find couple of them who aren’t doing that. Who the fuck knows why but this shit happens. It doesn’t matter if they’re family or you met them month ago. Those are only to keep and hardest to find. Unluckily those also can change by other people they meet or when they’re young.
If you can’t find a friend get a dog or cat or whatever animal you like. Their love is unconditional and obvious to read.
Well that’s most of the “I want to be spotted” culture that is all boring as fuck. Personalized ass and glamorous pictures and short movies of everything you don’t need but looks awesome. And as you see it’s still growing with more specialized portals like onlyfans, twitch and tiktok. We all need to look at what everyone else have or want to have cause 99% of time 99% of us are boring and is bored as fuck. Most of us can repeat same small amount set of stories all their life cause we’re not created to entertain.
I don’t feel joy looking at this shit fucked full of shit people arguing who’s dick is bigger. Who can post most dumb thing. I think I need a break but how to break from everything ? How to break from culture of money where to live on your country land you need to pay property tax ?
That’s all fucked up. Life’s fucked up.27 -
A few days ago Aruba Cloud terminated my VPS's without notice (shortly after my previous rant about email spam). The reason behind it is rather mundane - while slightly tipsy I wanted to send some traffic back to those Chinese smtp-shop assholes.
Around half an hour later I found that e1.nixmagic.com had lost its network link. I logged into the admin panel at Aruba and connected to the recovery console. In the kernel log there was a mention of the main network link being unresponsive. Apparently Aruba Cloud's automated systems had cut it off.
Shortly afterwards I got an email about the suspension, requested that I get back to them within 72 hours.. despite the email being from a noreply address. Big brain right there.
Now one server wasn't yet a reason to consider this a major outage. I did have 3 edge nodes, all of which had equal duties and importance in the network. However an hour later I found that Aruba had also shut down the other 2 instances, despite those doing nothing wrong. Another hour later I found my account limited, unable to login to the admin panel. Oh and did I mention that for anything in that admin panel, you have to login to the customer area first? And that the account ID used to login there is more secure than the password? Yeah their password security is that good. Normally my passwords would be 64 random characters.. not there.
So with all my servers now gone, I immediately considered it an emergency. Aruba's employees had already left the office, and wouldn't get back to me until the next day (on-call be damned I guess?). So I had to immediately pull an all-nighter and deploy new servers elsewhere and move my DNS records to those ASAP. For that I chose Hetzner.
Now at Hetzner I was actually very pleasantly surprised at just how clean the interface was, how it puts the project front and center in everything, and just tells you "this is what this is and what it does", nothing else. Despite being a sysadmin myself, I find the hosting part of it insignificant. The project - the application that is to be hosted - that's what's important. Administration of a datacenter on the other hand is background stuff. Aruba's interface is very cluttered, on Hetzner it's super clean. Night and day difference.
Oh and the specs are better for the same price, the password security is actually decent, and the servers are already up despite me not having paid for anything yet. That's incredible if you ask me.. they actually trust a new customer to pay the bills afterwards. How about you Aruba Cloud? Oh yeah.. too much to ask for right. Even the network isn't something you can trust a long-time customer of yours with.
So everything has been set up again now, and there are some things I would like to stress about hosting providers.
You don't own the hardware. While you do have root access, you don't have hardware access at all. Remember that therefore you can't store anything on it that you can't afford to lose, have stolen, or otherwise compromised. This is something I kept in mind when I made my servers. The edge nodes do nothing but reverse proxying the services from my LXC containers at home. Therefore the edge nodes could go down, while the worker nodes still kept running. All that was necessary was a new set of reverse proxies. On the other hand, if e.g. my Gitea server were to be hosted directly on those VPS's, losing that would've been devastating. All my configs, projects, mirrors and shit are hosted there.
Also remember that your hosting provider can terminate you at any time, for any reason. Server redundancy is not enough. If you can afford multiple redundant servers, get them at different hosting providers. I've looked at Aruba Cloud's Terms of Use and this is indeed something they were legally allowed to do. Any reason, any time, no notice. They covered all their bases. Make sure you do too, and hope that you'll never need it.
Oh, right - this is a rant - Aruba Cloud you are a bunch of assholes. Kindly take a 1Gbps DDoS attack up your ass in exchange for that termination without notice, will you?6 -
I get angry every fucking time when I see such method signature:
method(int, int, int, string, string, string, string)
Sounds scary, doesn't it?
Nah. That's the reason our IDEs are so complex. So, I change this and put proper data value/struct class instead, just to make this much readable and understandable for everyone.
And, every time there is a fella that asks this utterly stupid question:
What about performance impact?
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaa fuckyutitititiigig
And. I. Have. To. Run. Performance. Tests.
Because noone understands performance and computers so I have to prove there is nothing to worry about.
I know when I will go somewhere else I will have to again prove some fuckwit that web applications are so complex already, so adding a new data structure doesn't impact its performance.12 -
I feel so empty.
I can't keep up with what is being teached to us in the mathematical courses. Everything else is fine. "Algorithm and data structures" aka Info A (Programming in C++) and "Computer engineering" aka Info C (details of how a CPU, RAM etc. works) is understandable, but when it comes to math I, completely, am lost.
2-4 hours drive to university and 2-4 hours drive back to my home each day. Two oral examinations each week in Info A and Info C. Three assignments in Info A, Info C and math.
I was so naive to believe that I would be more free and have more free time as a student haha.
Maybe I should switch to a university of applied sciences. The classical university is too theoretical for me, but in the same time I know that I can't keep up with the time when I have to build a circuit in the university of applied sciences.
I am able to design and build a circuit, but I am slow. Probably because I am checking many times if I did it properly before testing it.
To my fellow German devRanters who have studied or tried to study: You all just read my situation and my thoughts. Am I wrong about what I am thinking about a university of applied sciences? How are the mathematical courses there in terms of difficulty?
If mathematics is at the same difficulty, I will try to do something else that has nothing to do with college. It just won't get into my brain.32 -
Lessons I've learnt so far on programming
-- Your best written code today can be your worst tomorrow (Focus more on optimisation than style).
-- Having zero knowledge of a language then watching video tutorials is like purchasing an arsenal before knowing what a gun is (Read the docs instead).
-- It's works on my machine! Yes, because you built on Lenovo G-force but never considered the testers running on Intel Pentium 0.001 (Always consider low end devices).
-- "Programming" is you telling a story and without adding "comments" you just wrote a whole novel having no punctuation marks (Always add comments, you will thank yourself later for it I promise).
-- In programming there is nothing like "done"! You only have "in progress" or "abandoned" (Deploy progressively).
-- If at this point you still don't know how to make an asynchronous call in your favourite language, then you are still a rookie! take that from me. (Asynchronous operation is a key feature in programming that every coder should know).
-- If it's more than two conditions use "Switch... case" else stick with "If... else" (Readability should never be under-rated).
-- Code editors can MAKE YOU and BREAK YOU. They have great impact on your coding style and delivery time (Choose editors wisely).
-- Always resist the temptation of writing the whole project from scratch unless needs be (Favor patching to re-creation).
-- Helper methods reduces code redundancy by a large chunk (Always have a class in your project with helper methods).
-- There is something called git (Always make backups).
-- If you don't feel the soothing joy that comes in fixing a bug then "programming" is a no-no (Coding is fun only when it works).
-- Get angry with the bugs not the testers they're only noble messengers (Bugs are your true enemy).
-- You would learn more than a lot reading the codes of others and I mean a lot! (Code review promotes optimisation and let's you know when you are writing macaroni).
-- If you can do it without a framework you have yourself a big fat plus (Frameworks make you entirely dependent).
-- Treat your code like your pet, stop taking care of it and it dies! (Codes are fragile and needs regular updates to stay relevant).
Programming is nothing but fun and I've learnt that a long time ago.6 -
probably the one who sent me 3 mails within 10 minutes regarding 3 different positions, and all were addressed to someone else (Hello, Mr. Completely Different Name), so i replied telling him that's not me, and gave him the info to fix it in their db. he apologized profusely and said he fixed the error.
Next day I got two mails for another two positions, with the same incorrect name.
Or the one with whom I had half an hour phone "interview" for a specific position, they couldn't answer even the most basic technical question about the project, but invited me to an in-person interview and said my questions will be answered there, the phone interview was just to make sure they don't send completely offtopic people to the interview with the client (so far acceptable).
On the in-person interview, it was partially a repetition of the phone one, but okay, lady from the company is talking to me first time in her life. We get to the part where I can ask my questions, so I ask those basics about the project again, and her answer is:
"Oh, i don't know, i'm not a technical person, you'd have to ask that to the technical person from the company, I'm an hr person from the recruiting company."
"Wait... so... not only was this whole meeting a waste of my time, but you also lied about what it is, when you scheduled it with me on the end of the phone interview?"
"Well... it wasn't a waste of time, we like to meet the candidates in person before we forward them to actual interviews in the company, to make sure that they're not completely offtopic."
"... and how exactly do you think you'd be able to evaluate that, since you're not at all a technical person and know nothing about the project??"
" Well, i talk to programmers a lot, so i've picked up quite a bit of the terms."
...7 -
Most painful code error you've made?
More than I probably care to count.
One in particular where I was asked to integrate our code and converted the wrong value..ex
The correct code was supposed to be ...
var serviceBusMessage = new Message() {ID = dto.InvoiceId ...}
but I wrote ..
var serviceBusMessage = new Message() {ID = dto.OrderId ...}
At the time of the message bus event, the dto.OrderId is zero (it's set after a successful credit card transaction in another process)
Because of a 'true up' job that occurs at EOD, the issue went unnoticed for weeks. One day the credit card system went down and thousands of invoices needed to be re-processed, but seemed to be 'stuck', and 'John' was tasked to investigate, found the issue, and traced back to the code changes.
John: "There is a bug in the event bus, looks like you used the wrong key and all the keys are zero."
Me: "Oh crap, I made that change weeks ago. No one noticed?"
John: "Nah, its not a big deal. The true-up job cleans up anything we missed and in the rare event the credit card system goes down, like now. No worries, I can fix the data and the code."
<about an hour later I'm called into a meeting>
Mgr1: "We're following up on the credit card outage earlier. You made the code changes that prevented the cards from reprocessing?"
Me: "Yes, it was my screw up."
Mgr1: "Why wasn't there a code review? It should have caught this mistake."
Mgr2: "All code that is deployed is reviewed. 'Tom' performed the review."
Mgr1: "Tom, why didn't you catch that mistake."
Tom: "I don't know, that code is over 5 years old written by someone else. I assumed it was correct."
Mgr1: "Aren't there unit tests? Integration tests?"
Tom: "Oh yea, and passed them all. In the scenario, the original developers probably never thought the wrong ID would be passed."
Mgr1: "What are you going to do so this never happens again?"
Tom: "Its an easy addition to the tests. Should only take 5 minutes."
Mgr1: "No, what are *you* going to do so this never happens again?"
Me: "It was my mistake, I need to do a better job in paying attention. I knew what value was supposed to passed, but I screwed up."
Mgr2: "No harm no foul. We didn't lose any money and no customer was negativity affected. Credit card system may go down once, or twice a year? Nothing to lose sleep over. Thanks guys."
A week later Mgr1 fires Tom.
I feel/felt like a total d-bag.
Talking to 'John' later about it, turns out Tom's attention to detail and 'passion' was lacking in other areas. Understandable since he has 2 kids + one with special-needs, and in the middle of a divorce, taking most/all of his vacation+sick time (which 'Mgr1' dislikes people taking more than a few days off, that's another story) and 'Mgr1' didn't like Tom's lack of work ethic (felt he needed to leave his problems at home). The outage and the 'lack of due diligence' was the last straw.1 -
I rarely tell this story because it's hard to believe and would show me in a bad light if people don't believe its details. I know there have been foolish moves from my part, and more stuff should have been agreed to in writing, and I did step into a legal grey area. However I am pleased with what I did and how it all turned out, and this is as close to the truth as possible without needing to explain too many details.
I was once a team lead in an outsourcing company. We had a flexible payment plan depending on results. That helped me motivate myself and my team. Things worked great.
But then the boss started acting like shit:
1. Flexible payment means minimum, right?
2. Promises are made to be broken, as long as your employees have hope and work overtime for a whole month just to finish an important project before schedule, right?
3. Who needs a good, comfortable, SAFE work environment when you can save 30$ on not buying a new crappy chair in place of the old broken crappy chair, if it can be maintained standing by just a bit of duct tape and careful balancing on it? It's not like that developer who earns 30$ per hour has anything else to think about than balancing on a broken chair, right?
I'm a very calm person at work. I never ever raised my voice at anyone for 10 years of my career. Except this situation. I pulled the boss out of the office so his secretary wouldn't hear what I had to say. I threw this everything into his face.
A guy from sales got out of the office to go to the bathroom, and when he heard me, he carefully snuck back into the office (I didn't see him. He told me this over a beer after he left).
Of course I quit on the spot, convinced most of my team members to leave (wasn't hard, I just had to offer a secure plan, which I did), and helped my team members to get good positions elsewhere, and assisted others in starting their own business, by stealing customers from this company (the asshole did not foresee this when he prepared the labour contracts), after he accused me of plagiarism (that I stole code from somewhere else) and used that excuse to not pay me what we agreed upon.
I didn't want litigation. I just used karma, while remaining in the legal realm.
Within a month after this, more than half of his company was gone, and he was left with only a fraction of the revenue he was making before, since the only ones left were people that did not produce value (sales that had nothing to sell, accounting that had nothing to account, etc.), and just one person maintaining one remaining contract that was bringing barely enough money to sustain half of these people.
Now I want to congratulate you for actually finishing reading this :)1 -
So here's my problem. I've been employed at my current company for the last 12 months (next week is my 1 year anniversary) and I've never been as miserable in a development job as this.
I feel so upset and depressed about working in this company that getting out of bed and into the car to come here is soul draining. I used to spend hours in the evenings studying ways to improve my code, and was insanely passionate about the product, but all of this has been exterminated due to the following reasons.
Here's my problems with this place:
1 - Come May 2019 I'm relocating to Edinburgh, Scotland and my current workplace would not allow remote working despite working here for the past year in an office on my own with little interaction with anyone else in the company.
2 - There is zero professionalism in terms of work here, with there being no testing, no planning, no market research of ideas for revenue generation – nothing. This makes life incredibly stressful. This has led to countless situations where product A was expected, but product B was delivered (which then failed to generate revenue) as well as a huge amount of development time being wasted.
3 - I can’t work in a business that lives paycheck to paycheck. I’ve never been somewhere where the salary payment had to be delayed due to someone not paying us on time. My last paycheck was 4 days late.
4 - The management style is far too aggressive and emotion driven for me to be able to express my opinions without some sort of backlash.
5 - My opinions are usually completely smashed down and ignored, and no apology is offered when it turns out that they’re 100% correct in the coming months.
6 - I am due a substantial pay rise due to the increase of my skills, increase of experience, and the time of being in the company, and I think if the business cannot afford to pay £8 per month for email signatures, then I know it cannot afford to give me a pay rise.
7 - Despite having continuously delivered successful web development projects/tasks which have increased revenue, I never receive any form of thanks or recognition. It makes me feel like I am not cared about in this business in the slightest.
8 - The business fails to see potential and growth of its employees, and instead criticises based on past behaviour. 'Josh' (fake name) is a fine example of this. He was always slated by 'Tom' and 'Jerry' as being worthless, and lazy. I trained him in 2 weeks to perform some basic web development tasks using HTML, CSS, Git and SCSS, and he immediately saw his value outside of this company and left achieving a 5k pay rise during. He now works in an environment where he is constantly challenged and has reviews with his line manager monthly to praise him on his excellent work and diverse set of skills. This is not rocket science. This is how you keep employees motivated and happy.
9 - People in the business with the least or zero technical understanding or experience seem to be endlessly defining technical deadlines. This will always result in things going wrong. Before our mobile app development agency agreed on the user stories, they spent DAYS going through the specification with their developers to ensure they’re not going to over promise and under deliver.
10 - The fact that the concept of ‘stealing data’ from someone else’s website by scraping it daily for the information is not something this company is afraid to do, only further bolsters the fact that I do not want to work in such an unethical, pathetic organisation.
11 - I've been told that the MD of the company heard me on the phone to an agency (as a developer, I get calls almost every week), and that if I do it again, that the MD apparently said he would dock my pay for the time that I’m on the phone. Are you serious?! In what world is it okay for the MD of a company to threaten to punish their employees for thinking about leaving?! Why not make an attempt at nurturing them and trying to find out why they’re upset, and try to retain the talent.
Now... I REALLY want to leave immediately. Hand my notice in and fly off. I'll have 4 weeks notice to find a new role, and I'll be on garden leave effective immediately, but it's scary knowing that I may not find a role.
My situation is difficult as I can't start a new role unless it's remote or a local short term contract because my moving situation in May, and as a Junior to Mid Level developer, this isn't the easiest thing to do on the planet.
I've got a few interviews lined up (one of which was a final interview which I completed on Friday) but its still scary knowing that I may not find a new role within 4 weeks.
Advice? Thoughts? Criticisms?
Love you DevRant <33 -
First company:
- being sat at an office that didn't have chairs with proper back support. It would kill my back every day. Like sitting on a bar stool coding.
- not having access to basic resources (cafeteria, salary bonuses)
- being seriously underpaid ($200 under)
- not having an IT process pipeline (yeah, this is a huge one): no JIRA, no git, no VCS, no continuous integration, etc. I fucking spend 45% of the time fixing coding-unrelated shit.
Second company (very aggravating):
- dumb frontend bitch and privileged colleague who both kept telling me months on end to shut up and who wouldn't listen to my advice on anything, while my advice would actually help the company advance in productive ways. The key here is being told to shut up while stagnating. i.e. dead end job.
- people advancing in the company based on nepotism and favoritism, based on having tits and ass, rather than skills and independence.
- pointlessssssssss meetings where decisions are made solely based on the opinion of Mr. favorite senior dev. The rest just sits there like a bunch of sad saps and yay-nodders. Incompetent PO's who "would like to hear your input" but then when you give it, they completely dismiss you.
- pointlessssssssss monthly meetings with stakeholders, where the dev teams do nothing but clash and act like pussies in front of the PM just to get in his favor, but behind scenes continue to make the same mistakes and telling the CEO everything is fine. Goodness, how can it get more unproductive.
- completely antisocial and nepotistic 'colleagues' who won't even talk to you, let alone smile at you or be friendly. You saying good morning and them pretending you're vapor that doesn't exist. Go go company atmosphere! Especially during lunch, those are the worst times. Imagine sitting at lunch where everyone looks like you killed their dog and the rest is huddled up in little high school groups.
What else? The incessant and pointless smalltalk that makes me want to bang my head against the wall. Talking about dogs, kids, what show was on tv last night. The fuck man, do you have a brain?!
Third company:
- HR bitches who think they are the shit and developers are antisocial, helpless misfits, but they work with computers and they don't even fucking know what a status bar is! The irony!
- forced socializing and stigmatization for the opposite. Imagine coming into a company and you don't say good morning. Should that be a problem? No. Instead, everyone starts dogging on you and hating you just because you didn't smile in their faces and said: hiiiiiiiiiiii how did you sleep? Did you feed your dog? Fuck you.
Elliot (Mr. Robot): "Wouldn't it be awesome if there was a mute button for life?" -boop, boop, boop, boop...- Ahh.. there.. that's much better."
- CEO's sucking up to you but when it comes to salary increase, they say shit like: "Ahhh ya know, it's kinda difficult." Yet another dead end job.2 -
You know that you made it as dev when you realize that your creation has ability to effect your life also the life of others
It came to me much earlier in life ( college final semester)
F: Hey there is this girl that i am trying to talk but she never replies me on Facebook i waste to much time looking for her online status , i wish if i can say hi as soon as she comes online
HF: (first reaction) leave her alone man , ( dev reaction) hmm fb probably be using jabber protocol like xmpp I could make xmpp client and sync online status. If status changes drop a notification also the asmack lib provides a way to send msg to user in your chat room sooo we good !!
At the time i was handling 3 android app , implemented this and called it FacebookStalker , you can select who you wanna stalk and what msg you wanna send them as soon as they come online
Google obviously didn’t liked it
for a long time i judged myself that How can i can make this creepy app
Later I realized that it was not the app i was suspended because i used a DRM marked image as icon
Google never tells you the actual reason why your app is suspended so you cannot fix it.
I learned to be mindfull of what i code cause it started having real impact. Loosing dev account was like loosing everything at that point. i had nothing else25 -
Project in college, many moons ago.
Team is building a robot for a project. Nothing too crazy, it does some simple tasks like walk along a path and shit.
3 weeks for the project. 3 team members.
The largest graded part of the project is the ability to follow a path based on vision.
The 3rd member INSISTS on doing that part, he says “I want to prove to the professor that I am the smartest in the class so he helps me get a work term.”
Of course, my other partner and I see this as the complete selfishness of a child who will never be employed anywhere worth talking about anyways. He is a big asshole about it and we end up giving in.
## Week 1
We get our parts done (working together the way a team would) without his help.
He struggles, hits walls, complains. You know, dumbass grown child stuff...
## Week 2
We offer to help since we are done. He refuses. The teacher sees all of this and doesn’t like it at all.
After class the 2 of us go to the teacher and let him in on the details. The guy insisted, he is struggling and will not take help etc.
Teacher goes and talks to him and tells him it is a team project for a reason and that we should be helping. He says yes.
Then he misses the rest of the classes that week and send an email saying...
“Since everyone decided to keep interrupting me and breaking my train of thought, I could not get anything done in class. Therefore I will be staying home to finish the project from there.”
And to top it off, he didn’t even take home the robot’s connectors he needed to do the damn thing. Haha.
## Week 3
We know he wasn’t going to get it done, so we approached the teacher. We make it clear that we have done all we can and that we are not ok with losing marks because of this.
Since we are both good students that he likes, he decides to give us an option.
You can take a 50% on his part even if he doesn’t get it done (for trying to help) or we can do it ourselves and he won’t get the marks if he doesn’t finish.
## Night before
We say fuck it and do the thing.
In fact, since we were learning Java at the time we decided to do it in Java. Our other prof sees us playing with robots and gets excited, he stays with us and suggest improvements.
In the end we rewrite all 3 robot functionalities in Java and hand in the project the next day.
## The day of
Partner 3 comes into class and says this...
“That walking path part is impossible, I didn’t get it done, but I bet nobody else did either. So at least we will get a 60% on the other 2 parts!” (With a big shit eating grin)
Prof calls our group up. We walk up and the prof looks at the 3rd guy and says.
“Since you have decided to do your part alone, we will have you present your part alone at the end of the groups”
He tries to say something but the prof cuts him off and tells him to sit down.
We show all of our code and the robot does everything perfectly.
Groups go by, now it’s that guys turn.
He says that the walking part was impossible but seems to realize right away that he just saw EVERY other group get it working.
The teacher ask him to stay after class.
## Result
We got a 98 (prof said he was hoping we would have done in VB like asked but he liked the result a lot).
Other guy gets a 5% for his non-working spaghetti code on 0s on the other 2 sections. He blames us, of course.
Bonus Content:
That same asshat above once said this to me...
“I don’t indent my code so that if I work for a company and no one else can understand the code then I am unfireable!”
Yes, he wrote all code like this...
const Example = () => {
Stuff
More stuff
For() {
Stuff
If() {
Stuff
}
}
}
Fuck that guy🖕🏽3 -
Long time no rant from me. Sorry guys, has been a tough time for me.
Little background: I'm an apprentice and as such definitely not a fully trained professional. I'm working in a big company with people who have very let's say interesting ideas what I should be able to do.
This whole disaster begins shortly after I started my apprenticeship. I was offered to choose my first little project. "Something from the backlog, not very challenging and a nice beginner one. It's just about a PoC" ok, le me thinks. I choose to make a weather display.
Basic functionality was provided within the next 3 weeks. My direct boss (let's call him Jo) liked it and talked to his boss (Hugo) about it. Hugo was so excited he called our product manager to get my plugin into our software asap and began to think about where else we could use this.
This is where shit went downhill. Hugo told me it was my task to implement it on a totally different platform and to "host it in azure". I don't know much about azure and I never used it. I told him that I'd need time and some kind of sandbox to try and learn how things work. He promised but nothing ever came through. Not even Jo could do something about this.
They told me I should write this asap because "every customer would LOOOOVE this" and I honestly can't think of a way to meet all their requirements without access to our azure system/ sandbox. (There are a lot of requirements)
Am I wrong? Should I be able to do this? I'm a fucking trainee. I don't know everything.7 -
I am currently looking for a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), because my music projects are starting to get a little too complex for Audacity.
So I started looking for a good, easy-to-learn, ideally free program, and quickly learned that Avid now has a free version of Pro Tools called First.
So I go to their site and fill out the registration form to get the download. In addition to creating an account with Avid, you also need to create one with iLok, which apparently has something to do with how they manage their licenses. Kinda overkill for a free program, but okay...
I download the program (about 3gigs...), install it and try to start it. It gives me an error message about missing some service. Okay? I'm confused because I notice that an 'Application Manager' service has appeared in my tray, and when I open that I can log into my new account just fine. But it still doesn't work.
There's a link in the error message to the iLok website, and it looks like ai need to dowload and install another component. Why didn't that get installed with the program if it's required?
Hmm...
So I go to the iLok site, download it and install it. Pro Tools First still won't start. I realize that the PTF installer asked me to reboot, which I didn't do because: a) I always have a lot of windows open, and b) How often is a reboot ACTUALLY required? Why would you need to reboot?
So I (begrudgingly) reboot, and now the program seems to start initializing... but then it throws an error message about some plugin that it can't load because it doesn't work for the 64 bit version. Then... why are you even looking for it?
And then it says something like: 'I can't handle that, I'm just gonna shut down'.
What?
I try starting it again. Same error appears, but then it gets past it this time... Only to throw another error message about something else it can't load, and therefore it must shut down.
Deep breath.
Third time is the charm, the program actually made it to the project create/load screen! Huzzah!
So I look around a bit, but don't do much. It doesn't seem too intuitive to me, so I start watching some tutorials on YouTube from Avid themselves. It's a little late by now, so I don't get my hands dirty that day.
Next time I want to try out the program I start it up, still get error messages, but it does seem to initialize okay. But then the 'Create project' button doesn't react when I press it.
It turns out that the program takes a looong time to log in to the avid account, even though the manager service is running and logged in...
When it finally logs on I create a new blank project, but it doesn't ask me where to save it to. I see there is a counter saying 1/3 and looking around I find some info about 'cloud based projects'.
It would seem that this program only supports saving projects to the cloud, and you get only 3 projects total. Three. THREE?
Ahem...
I add an instrument track to my new project and select the one and only plugin, which is a synth. I don't see the plugin window, like in the tutorials I watched. I fiddle around with the windows, but I only manage to get the layout fucked up. There's a handy 'Window' menu, but none of the options resets the view. The main window is now sporting a WINDOWS FUCKING 7 BORDER! And partially blocking the view of the top menu.
Blaaargh!
Frustrated, I shut the program down and restart it. I now select one of the project templates (after waiting for it to LOG IN AGAIN!) in the hope that I might have a bit more luck with that starting point.
But when the template has loaded, out of nowhere, the program goes from maximized to windowed mode! And the fucking Win7 border is back again, still messing with the main menu!
FFS!
I get the sucker maximized again and select one of the synth tracks, and Lo and Behold! The synth plugin window actually shows up! But of course there is no sound produced when I play, neither with the keyboard or my midi keyboard.
Oh no, that would have been too easy.
I see some the meters moving when I play, but no sound is produced. I check the options menu, but find out nothing useful except for the fact that the program only support 48kHz sample rate. That's pretty disappointing when you have a 192kHz/24bit soundcard.
I'm done. This piece of shit software is NOT for me. It's bloated, complicated to sign up for and install, extremely limited and buggy as hell!
The final insult is that it takes 5 minutes to uninstall because there is no uninstall option in the so-called 'Application Manager' (of course fucking not!), and doing it through Programs & Features there are 5 (FIVE!!) different apps and services to uninstall, one by one.
0/10, would not recommend.11 -
Yesterday evening my family were watching his favourite tv show. Have nothing to do i too sat there with them.
The scenes on television were going like : The leading lady of the show were trying to convince her family that her husband is not involved in the molestations which police has charged on him. Person can be look alike of her husband. In fact my husband was some where else when the molestation was happening. She also had a proof and that was CCTV camera footage in a Compact Disk. So she started playing it in the TV presented in room with CD player. But it turns out that CD can't be played because villain hired a hacker to corrupt video quality playing in TV.
I laughed because in my knowledge that was not even possible in real life. Every family memeber started staring at me.
My mother : That's what you do? No? That's what you do whole day in your office?
Me: No, no. I....
My mother: See her face. Poor lady.
Me: But mom, that's impossible. It is just fiction. In real life it is not possible.
My mother : Get out of my sight.
My mom did not dine yesterday. These fucking serial maker. These women's. -
TL;DR:
JuniorDev ignores every advice, writes bad code and complains about other people not working because he does not see their result because he looks at the wrong places.
Okay, so I am really fed up right now.
We have this Junior Dev, who is now with us for circa 8 months, so ca. a year less than me. Our first job for both of us.
He is mostly doing stuff nobody in the team cares about because he is doing his own projects.
But now there's a project where we need to work with him. He got a small part and did implement that. Then parts of the main project got changed and he included stuff which was not there anymore. It was like this for weeks until someone needed to tell him to fix it.
His code is a huge mess (confirmed by senior dev and all the other people working at the project).
Another colleague and me mostly did (mostly) pair programming the past 1-2 weeks because we were fixing and improving (adding functionality) libraries which we are going to use in the project. Furthermore we discussed the overall structure and each of us built some proof-of-concept applications to check if some techniques would work like we planned it.
So in short: We did a lot of preparation to have the project cleaner and faster done in the next few weeks/months and to have our code base updated for the future. Plus there were a few things about technical problems which we need to solve which was already done in that time.
Side note: All of this was done not in the repository of the main project but of side projects, test projects and libraries.
Now it seems that this idiot complained at another coworker (in our team but another project) that we were sitting there for 2 weeks, just talking and that we made no progress in the project as we did not really commit much to the repository.
Side note: My colleague and me are talking in another language when working together and nobody else joins, as we have the same mother tongue, but we switch to the team language as soon as somebody joins, so that other colleague did not even know what we were talking about the whole day.
So, we are nearly the same level experience wise (the other colleague I work with has just one year more professional experience than me) and his work is confirmed to be a mess, ugly and totally bad structured, also not documented. Whereas our code is, at least most of it, there is always space for improvement, clean, readable and re-useable (confirmed by senior and other team members as well).
And this idiot who could implement his (far smaller part) so fast because he does not care about structure or any style convention, pattern or anything complains about us not doing our work.
I just hope, that after this project, I don't have to work with him again soon.
He is also one of those people who think that they know everything because he studied computer science (as everybody in the team, by the way). So he listens to nothing anybody explains to him, not even the senior. You have to explain everything multiple times (which is fine in general) and at some points he just says that he understood, although you can clearly see that he didn't really understand but just wants to go on coding his stuff.
So you explain him stuff and also explain why something does not work or is not a good thing, he just says "yes, okay", changes something completely different and moves on like he used to.
How do you cope with something like this?6 -
Hey there 👋
I am more or less throwing any burden (WhatsApp, Facebook, Google etc.) out of my life. Of course I will continue using the Google account for YouTube and some games that need it.
That's what it looks like right now:
Raspberry Pi 3B+
✅ webserver
- forum - complete (atm just for me)
- blog - no ideas and just installed october cms and nothing done yet
- nextcloud - complete and filled with my porn... eeh... data
✅ mailserver
(missing spamassassin, clam or sth. like this but it's working 😂)
✅ matrix-synapse
(as an additional alternative to messengers)
______________
Raspberry Pi 2
✅ catches dust
(any ideas?)
Of course, many more configurations and the like are necessary before everything is ready... but what then or what else is there?
At the moment I still use WhatsApp. Just wanna take time before sending everyone a message about changing the messenger and that it should be important for thinking about the own privacy, which alternatives there are bla...
Edit: For passwords I'm using Myki - didn't hear anything bad about it yet and it's very easy to use (Firefox add-on, Android app).
I love my passwords with 200 characters 😂
Maybe someone's knowing more about them?
Hope I didn't forget a thing... thanks in advance aaaaaaand... I'm gone. ☺23 -
I am thinking about leaving this platform. To be honest I don't get anything out of it anymore and the only thing keeping me here is the less-rant'ish content like @devNews or the stories.
I am actually a bit disappointed, the quality of devrant really did degrade alot in the last few months. Don't get me wrong but I feel like people have become "normies" over here. I don't mean that in an edgy or degrading way but let me explain. When I started here I had a very high opinion of the people here. Everyone seemed like a passionate / knowledgeable individual from whom you could hear interesting stories or learn. Maybe I just saw it like that because I was still a very inexperienced dev and was looking for a dev community. But nonetheless I think devRant transformed into a place of mediocrity.
Dont get me wrong I wouldn't think of myself as aspiring or generally "better" than anyone else on here, but the content over here got a little stale.
I am not the kind of person who would "rant", in the first place, so I may have a different mindset and to be honest "ranting" has always been a thing I looked down upon. It just does not support my style of thinking. I totally get that people sometimes need to "vent" their feelings but there is nothing productive to gain from ranting, like you ain't not improving your situation by doing it. The more passionate raters over here call people things, I would never even dream about saying to people. Don't worry I'm no sjw or something like it, I don't care if you do it. If it helps you sure, why not. But there is a point where you corner yourself so much that you stop respecting your colleagues because they wrote that shitty code, instead of helping.
Some tech sure is bad, but it is not getting any better by insulting it.
Another thing I use to notice are people, thinking so highly of them selfes / being so close-minded - that they only accept their own views as true. These are the people that I always try to avoid, but that is getting harder and harder as time goes on.
Collectivism and group thinking are very strong on devRant making it really hard to defend a unpopular opinion - I get that devRant is not the kind of platform that would support actual proper arguments/discussions - but I still feels like some people shove opinions down another people's throat with no reasoning behind it.
Arguments on devRant are always won by the person coming up with the most witty response. Having another opinion is always seen as offensive. That's not exactly the definiton of open-mindedness.
Another rather annoying thing are what I call the "non dev, dev's". See: As a developer you should aspire to understand what your doing - I won't get into this too much but one sentencd: How are things like serious "Semicolon memes" a thing? I am as much into memes as the next guy, but debugging 3 hours, just to find out its a typo. I mean come on...
I sure get that devRant is not the kind of place where you would find the people I am looking for, and that's why I am leaving.
My whole post may seem super negative of the platform - and it is to an extend - but I sure also had a good time back in the day - devRant as in "the platform" surely is not at fault, but a forum is only as good as the people on it. Maybe I changed, maybe devRant did. All I know is that it is not for me anymore.
I won't delete my account and I probably will not leave completely, but all I will do is the "once a week" checkout.6 -
PhD saga:
The applications have closed and yours truly shall await the results, which could come anytime in January or February.
And so I wait. I hate this limbo since there is nothing for me to do to impact the outcome. What's worse is that I am absolutely unmotivated to do anything else. Since this project is literally my dream, and despite how I'm trying to mentally prepare myself in case I don't get in, there's just something in my brain that goes like "nah. I just want this shiney thing. Just this and nothing else". So I don't even know what to do with myself.
*Sigh*5 -
Automation always fascinated me. Not only it looks and behaves like a life form, it also can perform billions of calculations without making a single mistake while I can’t even multiply double-digit numbers with my double-digit IQ.
If you pick the right components, you can make an immortal, perfect machine that can do its job for centuries, even millennia without a single mistake. There is nothing else on earth that can do this.
There is a robot surgeon and its hands never shake. It’s just flawless. If it fucks up, there is only you to blame, the flawed, pathetic operator.
And now it’s time to remember that it was just a 40s technology all along. And now it’s time to remember that now there is machine learning. A whole new perspective isn’t it. All the mistakes that machines make are sitting in front of the monitors.
No wonder I decided to be an engineer.17 -
Probably had my worst half-week ever this week.
Customer's CRM system, the read and edit masks just...stopped existing on last week friday. CRM fell back on some default masks for the dataset. No way to create new masks directly without putting the whole system upside down.
We couldn't do anything anyway because they reported the issue literally as we all were about to leave for weekend and our boss was like "Ah nah, well do it next week."
Our brains were already fried anyway...
I mail the reporter that we've registered their issue, will investigate and report back ASAP once we've got news.
Monday rolls around, I'm whacking my head against their system trying to figure the fuck out, what went wrong and how to solve it, I come up empty; Not that terrible since the masks only stopped existing in the webclient version of the system and they can still use the windows client, so they can still work.
Tuesday rolls around, I'm at an on site training for an ERP system with my boss at a remote company. Get an email in midst of the training, I was doing protocol.
Guy from the afflicted company goes and tells me that the issue has somehow spread to his colleague and him...IN THE WINDOWS CLIENT.
I'm fucking flabbergasted, so to speak, since the masks for the windows client and the web client are totally isolated from one another.
After we're back at our company, I investigate, less efficiently this time because my brain got fried at the training. I come up empty again.
NOW TODAY: Discuss further proceedings with my boss, he's not pissed at me or anything, just to say, but we're both worried, obviously.
Then at 10:20, a guy from the afflicted company mails me in an annoyed tone that the masks are still broken.
11:00, we figure out a workaround so the windows client users can at least work again, albeit limited.
11:10, I mail the guy, telling him that although we're still not able to fully work everything out and are still investigating, we've made a workaround so they can at least work again.
11:20, the guy mails me in a pissed tone around the lines of "This is very very important and must be fixed ASAP or else we'll not be able to work at all [...]"
And I think like "Dude I literally just told you like 8 minutes ago that there's are workaround so you'll be able to at least work again..."
Forward the mail to boss, we meet up quickly to discuss how in God's name we can deescalate this mfer.
11:31, the guy mails me again, all apologetically this time "Stop! All is good, I just now fully read you mail, thanks for implementing the workaround, nothing will come to a standstill [...]"
BRUH CAN YOU NOT FUCKING READ BEFORE ESCALATING SHIT
Fuck customers. Dumb fucking cretins unable to fucking read.
The issue is still unresolved. Support of the CRM software lets us sit on our collective asses and wait.
There is no such thing as stable software, it's a myth.
Every corporate software is like an ever-decaying semi-corpse of a brain dead patient slowly getting worse and worse but not fucking dying.
Rant over. -
!rant
Need some opinions. Joined a new company recently (yippee!!!). Just getting to grips with everything at the minute. I'm working on mobile and I will be setting up a new team to take over a project from a remote team. Looking at their iOS and Android code and they are using RxSwift and RxJava in them.
Don't know a whole lot about the Android space yet, but on iOS I did look into Reactive Cocoa at one point, and really didn't like it. Does anyone here use Rx, or have an opinion about them, good or bad? I can learn them myself, i'm not looking for help with that, i'm more interested in opinions on the tools themselves.
My initial view (with a lack of experience in the area):
- I'm not a huge fan of frameworks like this that attempt to change the entire flow or structure of a language / platform. I like using third party libraries, but to me, its excessive to include something like this rather than just learning the in's / out's of the platform. I think the reactive approach has its use cases and i'm not knocking the it all together. I just feel like this is a little bit of forcing a square peg into a round hole. Swift wasn't designed to work like that and a big layer will need to be added in, in order to change it. I would want to see tremendous gains in order to justify it, and frankly I don't see it compared to other approaches.
- I do like the MVVM approach included with it, but i've easily managed to do similar with a handful of protocols that didn't require a new architecture and approach.
- Not sure if this is an RxSwift thing, or just how its implemented here. But all ViewControllers need to be created by using a coordinator first. This really bugs me because it means changing everything again. When I first opened this app, login was being skipped, trying to add it back in by selecting the default storyboard gave me "unwrapping a nil optional" errors, which took a little while to figure out what was going on. This, to me, again is changing too much in the platform that even the basic launching of a screen now needs to be changed. It will be confusing while trying to build a new team who may or may not know the tech.
- I'm concerned about hiring new staff and having to make sure that they know this, can learn it or are even happy to do so.
- I'm concerned about having a decrease in the community size to debug issues. Had horrible experiences with this in the past with hybrid tech.
- I'm concerned with bugs being introduced or patterns being changed in the tool itself. Because it changes and touches everything, it will be a nightmare to rip it out or use something else and we'll be stuck with the issue. This seems to have happened with ReactiveCocoa where they made a change to their approach that seems to have caused a divide in the community, with people splitting off into other tech.
- In this app we have base Swift, with RxSwift and RxCocoa on top, with AlamoFire on top of that, with Moya on that and RxMoya on top again. This to me is too much when only looking at basic screens and networking. I would be concerned that moving to something more complex that we might end up with a tonne of dependencies.
- There seems to be issues with the server (nothing to do with RxSwift) but the errors seem to be getting caught by RxSwift and turned into very vague and difficult to debug console logs. "RxSwift.RxError error 4" is not great. Now again this could be a "way its being used" issue as oppose to an issue with RxSwift itself. But again were back to a big middle layer sitting between me and what I want to access. I've already had issues with login seeming to have 2 states, success or wrong password, meaning its not telling the user whats actually wrong. Now i'm not sure if this is bad dev or bad tools, but I get a sense RxSwift is contributing to it in some fashion, at least in this specific use of it.
I'll leave it there for now, any opinions or advice would be appreciated.question functional programming reactivex java library reactive ios functional swift android rxswift rxjava16 -
My internship is about to end in two months. I was under the impression that I'll start looking for a job towards mid August and then decide what to do. I didn't expect my company to offer me a position so early before my internship ended.
Initially I had liked the place. The work was pretty relaxed and I had quite a bit of freedom. Soon enough, I proved my worth and my team started respecting my opinions and suggestions. They even consulted me on multiple occasions.
The first thing I noticed on the downside was the company, despite being resourceful enough and having a decent turnover and important clients, was quite stingy in terms of employee welfare. There was no coffee. There was machine but you had to buy the capsule for yourself. And that sucks. I know I don't need to say more but the other problems were there was no enterprise subscription (or any subscription) to PhpStorm even though our team handled so many PHP projects. I know IDEs are personal preferences but not having any professional IDEs is not something to let slide. The lead dev uses NetBeans (and not because he loved it or anything). Even though I worked on WebDev and front end, I had no option to ask for a second screen. I had one display apart from my laptop. Usually most companies in Paris provides food tickets for internships and this company did not even give me that. And worst of all, there wasn't really anyone I looked up to. As much as I enjoy responsibilities and all, I don't think I should be in an environment where I have nothing much to learn from my seniors. For some fucked sense of security and certainty, I was willing to overlook all this when they offered me a position. But I recently had my interview and the regional manager, a fuck face who still makes me wonder how he reached his position, made a proposal for some quite a small amount of salary. What infuriated more than his justifications was his attitude itself. There was absolutely no respect whatsoever. It was more like "We'll give you this, I think this is more than enough for you. Take it or do whatever you want". I asked for more and he didn't even bother negotiating. I declined the offer.
Now this would have solved all the issues. But my manager and my lead dev like me a lot. Both of them are pretty nice people. They both were bothered with the fact that I had turned down the offer. My manager even agreed that the offer was too low and had already given me tips to help me negotiate. But after I turned down the offer, she went and discussed the issue with the regional manager and he offered me a new proposal. This time it was decent but still under my expectations. I'm pretty sure I can do better elsewhere. I said I need time to think about it. I get multiple advises from people to take it atleast so that I get my visa converted to a work permit. For some reason, I want to take the risk and say no. And find something else. But today my lead dev called me aside and asked me if was going to say no. He really tried to influence me by telling me a lot of good things about me and telling me about the number of different projects we're going to start next month and all that. Even though I'm fully convinced that I don't want to work here, just the sheer act of saying no to these two people I respect is sooo fucking difficult for me that I can already imagine me working here for the next one year. The worst part is I can clearly classify their words and sentences into stuff they say to canvass me, stuff they're bullshitting about and flattery just to make me stay. Despite knowing I'm being taken advantage of, some fucked up module in my head wouldn't stop guilt tripping me. I don't know what to do. If I only I could find a really better job.
Pardon the grammatical errors if any. I'm just venting out and my thoughts branch in 500 different ways simultaneously.5 -
Week 1 of the new job, and it seems I have some pretty low expectations to meet.
Seriously, I just did the math. Let's say one works an average of 48 hours per week, 50 weeks per year. Just as an average. That's 2400 hours in a year.
In the Micro-scale, a manager would mess up their team once every 2.4 hours (2h24m) or about 4 times per day (assuming 5 working days per week).
That is a pretty low bar to clear. It easy not to be an antsy brat that are-we-there-yet's a professional dev four fucking times a day.
And yet... that is what the complete moron who previously sat on my chair used to do.
Seriously, apparently he used to remote access the team's dev envs *while they were working* and even mess up some of their code. Just as a "monitoring measure". He logged their "keystroke time" in a day (using a primitive windowing method, I must add).
At least 7 requests for updates per person per day. I have his slack history, I checked. Dude literally did nothing else but be an annoying anxiety death pit.
And then there is his bulshit planning...
He created tasks out of his stupid whims, no team review or brainstorming, not even a fucking requisites tallying interview.
He prioritized those out-of-nowhere tasks using panic-driven-development practices and assigned them by availability heuristics.
No sizing method, just arbitrary deadlines for tasks.
I think I will need to have daily standup meetings and an open door policy (that is to say, do no actual work) for a couple months until I can instill some sense of autonomy on my new team. Shit.
Someone has another idea? How do I bring some confidence&autonomy back to devs that are used to be treated like dogs?!?9 -
...sincerely?
FUCK YOUR PASSWORDS
FUCK YOUR PASSWORD REQUIREMENTS.
FUCK YOU thinking you are the most important site in the universe so of course everyone will remember their password mangled beyond the original intention/recognition by your idiotic requirements!
I want to have an insecure password? MY PROBLEM.
I want to have the same password everywhere so I don't have to go through the idiotic "forgot my password" dance each time I try to login into your page? MY PROBLEM!
You're not the most important site in the universe.
I'm getting seriously fed up with this idea in general.
WHAT THE FUCK. Why did nobody come up with nothing better yet?
And the password storages and autocompletions don't count, that's a plaster on top of idiotic paradigm, nothing else.
...how is there nothing more sensible, still, after 18+ years?5 -
I just can't stress enough how fascinated I am by biology and biochemistry.
I mean, we, who call ourselves engineers, are no more but a gang of toddlers having a blast with jumbo legos on Aunt Lucy's dining room carpet on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Our solutions using "modern tools" and "modern engineering" are mere attempts to *very* remotely mimic what beautiful and elegant solutions are around us and inside of each of us.
IC/EC engines, solar batteries, computers and quantum computers, spaceships and ISSes, AI/ML, ... What are they? just the means to leverage what's been created all around us to create something that either entertains us, encourages our laziness or helps us to look at the other absolutely fascinating engineering solutions surrounding us so we could try and "replicate" their working principles to further embrace our laziness and entertain us.
Just look at the humble muscle - a myofibril made out of actin and myosin. The design is soooo simple and spot on, so elegant and efficient, the "battery" and signalling system are so universal and efficient.
Look at all those engineering miracles, small and big. Look how they work, how they leverage both big and small to create holistic, simplistic and absolutely efficient mechanisms. And then come back to me, and tell me again that all these brilliant solutions came out of nothing just by an accident we call "evolution".
How blinded by our narcissism are we to claim that there can't be a grand designer of any kind, that there's nothing smarter than us and that the next best thing than us is an incomprehensible series of accidental mutations over an unimaginable amount of time?
I mean.. could it be that someone/something greater than us created us and everything around us? naaaah.. we are the crown jewel of this universe. Everything else must be either magic or an accident. /s
Don't read this as yet another crazy-about-God person's ramblings. I'm not into religion fwiw. But science has taught me enough critical thinking to question its merit. Look at it all as engineers. Which is more probable: that everything around us happened by an accident or that someone/something preceding us had a say in the design?random biology humanity think about it biochemistry creation big and small shower thoughts narcissism had to be said naive evolution20 -
I would like to rant one more time about my internship.
I began in July, the first. That's my sister who helped me to find this internship and I was a little scared about how bad it could be.
I came at the office, my boss told me that I would work in an "Innovation lab", an apartment where people works on projects that are less corporate than the enterprise's ones.
To me, it was amazing. So I came in this apartment, it was like a dream. I didn't know that I would have such luck to be in this environment : kitchen, sofas, beds, many decorations for all political ideologies, ideas. There was some decorations that were about weed and many cool things for the young guy I am.
The lab's leader told me that it was a very free environment and all the awesome stuff I could use.
Then they showed me where I would work.
We were two interns employed as web developers. We had a complete room for us.
Then we began to work there, and I was presented to my internship tutor.
He gave me some instructions but told me that I had a week before the project begin.
Here began the troubles.
We waited a complete week without having any instructions. Then we began to build something in PHP with our knowledge and the informations someone from the lab gave us.
When finally we had news from the project, two weeks later, we learned that the project would be built with ASP. NET.
Here we go, I learn ASP. NET alone. I have many problems and nobody helps (even if the problem comes from enterprise's API/Framework). I finally make something usable with no help, after I discovered that my mate wasn't developer at all and just took an option for her classes which forced her to get an internship.
She had 3 month left, I had 6.
Then when the project really began, nobody came to verify what I was doing and on a meeting, they said that I was doing nothing.
The boss even became mad on us because he couldn't see what we were doing (we're back end developers).
I asked for help to the developers of the enterprise and someone came, sad to have to help an internship, and learned some tricks but nothing else.
To have a concrete explanation of what DDD was, I had to ask 4 times for help.
Finally I had something that could receive data from the connected hives we are working on and store them into a database in the architecture of the enterprise.
Then, they wanted me to try an API for them. I tried, and it wasn't working at all. So they make me still wait to change my whole architecture when the API will be released.
Recently, I was told that I would never do the front-end of the project (which was an horror because of the fantasm of the lab leader). Then they realized that my late wasn't a programmer. So they asked me to make a prototype for the front-end. I did for a presentation.
Then they didn't tell me the device they would use for the presentation and it was an iPhone 7. Idk why, safari couldn't display what IE can.
They blamed me for having done a bad work. It wasn't my job. I did it to help because they can't find a fucking front-end developer with a little more experience than me.
Actually, I am an alone developer since my mate is gone and the lab leader don't want me to show up because she considers me as a shame.
I asked to be moved back in the office of the enterprise, they agreed and said it was a 2-weeks delay. It's the Thursday of the second week and I have no news. I send mails to my tutor, even SMS, he doesn't answer me. They didn't call me to give me my pay with a week late. And the person who is responsible doesn't answer me neither. I came to see her, but she wasn't available. I'm now alone in a desk, waiting the time to pass.
Fucking this shit.
I'm in France.
EDIT : I forgot to say that I can't use the sofas or bed because I'm allergic to cats and there were 3 cats. Now there is still one and this beast vomits and poos everywhere in the house...7 -
In today's episode of kidding on SystemD, we have a surprise guest star appearance - Apache Foundation HTTPD server, or as we in the Debian ecosystem call it, the Apache webserver!
So, imagine a situation like this - Its friday afternoon, you have just migrated a bunch of web domains under a new, up to date, system. Everything works just fine, until... You try to generate SSL certificates from Lets Encrypt.
Such a mundane task, done more than a thousand times already... Yet... No matter what you do, nothing works. Apache just returns a HTTP status code 403 - Forbidden.
Of course, what many folk would think of first when it came to a 403 error is - Ooooh, a permission issue somewhere in the directory structure!
So you check it... And re-check it to make sure... And even switch over to the user the webserver runs under, yet... You can access the challenge just fine, what the hell!
So you go deeper... And enable the most verbose level of logging apache is capable of - Trace8. That tells you... Not a whole lot more... Apparently, the webserver was unable to find file specified? But... Its right there, you can see it!
So you go another step deeper and start tracing the process' system calls to see exactly where it calls stat/lstat on the file, and you see that it... Calls lstat and... It... Returns -1? What the hell#2!
So, you compile a custom binary that calls lstat on the first argument given and prints out everything it returns... And... It works fine!
Until now, I chose to omit one important detail that might have given away the issue to the more knowledgeable right away. Our webservers have the URL /.well-known/acme-challenge/, used for ACME challenges, aliased somewhere else on the filesystem - To /tmp/challenges.
See the issue already?
Some *bleep* over at the Debian Package Maintainer group decided that Apache could save very sensitive data into /tmp, so, it would be for the best if they changed something that worked for decades, and enabled a SystemD service unit option "PrivateTmp" for the webserver, by default.
What it does is that, anytime a process started with this option enabled writes to /tmp/*, the call gets hijacked or something, and actually makes the write to a private /tmp/something/tmp/ directory, where something... Appeared as a completely random name, with the "apache2.service" glued at the end.
That was also the only reason why I managed fix this issue - On the umpteenth time of checking the directory structure, I noticed a "systemd-private-foobarbas-apache2.service-cookie42" directory there... That contained nothing but a "tmp" directory with 777 as its permission, owned by the process' user and group.
Overriding that unit file option finally fixed the issue completely.
I have just one question - Why? Why change something that worked for decades? I understand that, in case you save something into /tmp, it may be read by 3rd parties or programs, but I am of the opinion that, if you did that, its only and only your fault if you wrote sensitive data into the temporary directory.
And as far as I am aware, by default, Apache does not actually write anything even remotely sensitive into /tmp, so...
Why. WHY!
I wasted 4 hours of my life debugging this! Only to find out its just another SystemD-enabled "feature" now!
And as much as I love kidding on SystemD, this time, I see it more as a fault of the package maintainers, because... I found no default apache2/httpd service file in the apache repo mirror... So...8 -
PM: OK team. There seems to have been some confusion over card AAA-111. So from now on we need to be specific in the cards and make sure we have AC and a description of the issue
Devs: Thanks, we appreciate that
PM: makes card
Card: Why is it slow (yes, that's the actual card title)
Card: ... nothing else, completely blank
Devs: Wtf?
PM: these are supposed to be conversation starters guys!
Devs: JUST TELL US THE PROBLEM! WE'LL ASK WHEN WE NEED TO8 -
Check in, check out, punch in punch, out, wax on (my balls), wax off. Do your duty. Be a good citizen. Work overtime. Conserve the environment: buy a tesla that runs on afghan lithium conflict minerals. Post your life to facebook. Get married. Have exactly 2.5 kids.
Use jquery. Use knockout. Use react. Use vue. Use svlete. Use heroin. Used needles. Used people. Used toilet paper. Toilet paper apocalypse. Social trends. Be a good citizen.
Watch tv. Watch nightly news. CNN says. Fox news says. Hey, did you read this article by important funny guy on tv? American taliban. Scary. Be afraid. Hey did you read this article on cute puppies? Funny! Did you see this meme? What a funny meme! HAHAHA. Do we need prisons for dissidents? Do we need to release all the prisoners in federal prison? Should we round up people who dont follow health authorities? Science says. Science is wrong. Science is right. Man in robe agrees with me. Man in robe disagrees with me. You're evil. These people are bad. Is doing bad always wrong? Should we tolerate intolerance? Its time to stop tolerating intolerance. Be an individual, like everyone else. Be you. Be the best you that you can be. Individualism. But we're all in this together. We're all different and unique. But we're all the same. Love each other. Love humanity. But not these guys over here. Punch a nazi. Punch a commie. Isn't it time we punched a nazi? Isn't it time we had socialism? Isn't it time the old get out of the way for the young? Why are the old hateful? Why do they horde all the money? Do we need rent controls? We need rent controls. Its time for rent controls. I think I believe what others believe. Believe different. Think different. Apple. An apple a day keeps the windows away. Open windows, a breathe of fresh air. Is climate change real? We need to have a national conversation about climate change! The world is freezing. The world is flooding. We're all gonna drown. The world is overpopulated. We need to talk about overpopulation. People who have too many kids are polluting the world. America doesnt have enough kids! Is it time to bring in more immigrants to have more kids? Who will work the fields? Thats racist. Is racism an epidemic? Is white flight an epidemic? Lets talk about epidemics. Lets have a conversation about mandatory vaccination. Lets have a national conversation about mandatory pandemics. I mean, vaccinations. Lets change the world. Trust the science. Don't trust the science. Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu I'm loving it. Love who you are. Live love laugh. If you don't love me at my best, then you can't handle me at my worst. People who disagree with [current year] are the worst. Is it time to regulate speech? Its time to regulate speech. Should there be laws against hatespeech. I think there should be laws against hatespeech. People who upset me should go to jail. Its current year. Think big. Think outside the bun. Have it your way. All the time, always. All for freedom, freedom for all. Because this is america, and current year. I like to work hard. But you have to remember to play hard too. Work hard. Play hard. With a childlike sense of wonder. Be you. Belong anywhere. Just do it. Challenge Everything. Because you're worth it. Save money...live better...have an abortion. You're in good hands. Democracy dies in darkness. Is it time to regulate hatespeech. Politician in current year is hurting our democracy. War is a racket. We need to liberate afghanistan. Why are we bombing afghanistan? Its there culture. They're oppressing people! Don't criticize anyones culture. Be kind. Rewind. Go further. Lets go places. Because Impossible is Nothing.
Lets change the world. I'm a smart passionate funny guy with a childlike sense of wonder and play. You ever want to travel? I want to travel. See the world. Eat new food. Eat. Love. Pray. Eat love. kill. Is meat murder? I think meat is murder. Go vegan. Go home. Order out. Support your local economy. Think global, act local. I'm a good corporate citizen. Be the change you want to see. Did you hear about this local brewery? Do you like craft beer? Hey try this new IPA. I shared it on twitter. Twitter is a very important part of my life. I think what other people say matters, and them reading what I think matters. What I ate for lunch matters. Hey what did you eat for lunch? I LOVE FOOD. You want to order door dash. There new commercial is amazing. Commercials are SO FUNNY. Hey did you see this meme of this commercial? I shared it on tiktok. Heres a funny dance. Watch these nurses dance. I wish I could dance like that. They're so overworked. So brave. Our hospitals are overflowing. People are dying. Hey did you see this new dance trend on tiktok? I like tiktok. I think its a very important part of life to share your life with others. Nurses are dying. Look at this image of hospitals. Scared. Very scary. Very bad. Bad and scary. Big thoughts! Thoughts and prayers!
Because Yes we can!
Beep boop.7 -
5 years ago in Texas. There is shit code and then there's SHIT code. I know I can produce bad code and often do, but that codebase was an eldritch abomination.
Just to give you a tiny taste, variables in JS would usually be called "that" because "when calling them, I send the 'this' value right? So in the other function it is 'that'". I wish I was making this up. And this is nothing compared to everything else.12 -
sales-managers: How long do you need to implement feature X ?
software-dev: Hmmm, that's nothing we have in our default-packages ... could be nasty, because it won't work without feature Y, which also does not exist in the current version 3 of our system.
I need to investigate this issue.
... 2 days later:
software-dev: This is really a nasty problem - to make X work, we've to reimplement Y for our system version 3, but this won't work with feature Z.
If we do this, it may take several weeks.
sales-manager: we need to go live in 2 months.
software-dev: might work.
------
1 week before go-live:
sales-manager: The customer saw us testing feature X. He does not like it. Could we just do it in ... blabla ... this way?
software-dev: This would work out of the box with feature Z, yes - we've to remove feature Y and X for that. But be warned - this might work next week without testing only.
sales-mamanger: do it now!
day of go live:
The customer tried the new feature X - it won't work.
software-dev: But it's not there, was removed, instead he has to use feature Z.
...
sales-guy comes back: He does not like it.
software-dev: why not? its working!
sales-guy: Yes, but he still wants it to work like feature X as he ordered.
software-dev: according to the specs, its exactly what he ordered. look at that: (showing the general specifications of project, showing feature Z).
...
sales-guy: The customer did not review this new document since last week.... Its still feature X
...
dev: really? why? I sent that version to you the day, he said, he doesn't like feature X, and you said I've to change that just urgently.
sales-guy: Please switch back to the version with X of last week. - could you. please ?
me: This won't work, because the other colleagues already finished their stuff on that currently running system - we'll lose all the optimations we've done to make this and other stuff work.
----- FAIL ------- NEVER DO ANYTHING WITHOUT SIGNATURE OF THE CUSTOMER !!!
One week onsite and rescheduled go-live is just so-what expensive.
Today (some weeks later) ... I saw someone else sitting in sales-guys office.1 -
I need to rant about life decisions, and choosing a dev career probably too early. Not extremely development related, but it's the life of a developer.
TL;DR: I tried a new thing and that thing is now my thing. The new thing is way more work than my old thing but way more rewarding & exciting. Try new things.
I taught myself to program when I was a kid (11 or 12 years old), and since then I have always been absolutely sure that I wanted to be a games programmer. I took classes in high school and college with that aim, and chose a games programming degree. Everything was so simple, nail the degree, get a job programming something, and take the first games job that I could and go from there.
I have always had random side hobbies that I liked to teach myself, just like programming. And in uni I decided that I wanted to learn another language (natural, not programming) because growing up in England meant that I only learned English and was rarely exposed to anything else. The idea of knowing another fascinated me.
So I dabbled in a few different languages, tried to find a culture that seemed to fit my style and attitude to life and others, and eventually found myself learning Korean. That quickly became something I was doing every single day, and I decided I needed to go to Korea and see what life there could be like.
I found out that my university offered a free summer school program for a couple of weeks, all I had to pay for was the flights. So a few months later I was there and it was literally the best thing I'd done in my life to that point. I'd found two things that made me feel even better than the idea of becoming the games programmer I'd always wanted to be. Travelling and using my other language to communicate with people that I couldn't in English. At that point I was still just a beginner, but even the simple conversations with people who couldn't speak English felt awesome.
So when I returned home, I found that that trip had completely thrown a spanner into my life plan. All I could think about after that was improving my language skills and going back there for as long as possible. Who knows what to do.
I did exactly that. I studied harder than I'd ever studied for anything and left the next year to go and study in Korea, now with intermediate language skills, everyday conversations no longer being a problem at all.
Now I live here, I will be here for the next year and I have to return to England for one year to finish my degree. Then instead of having my simple plan of becoming a developer, I can think of nothing I want to do less than just stay in England doing the same job every day, nothing to do with language. I need to be at least travelling to Korea, and using my language skills in at least some way.
The current WIP plan is to take intensive language classes here (from next week, every single weekday), build awesome dev side projects and contribute to open source stuff. Then try to build a life of freelance translation/interpreting/language teaching and software development (maybe here, maybe Korea).
So the point of this rant is that before, I had a solid plan. Now I am sat in my bed in Korea writing this, thinking about how I have almost no idea how I'm going to build the life that I want. And yet somehow, the uncertainty makes this so much more exciting and fulfilling. There's a lot more worrying, planning and deciding to do. But I think the fact that I completely changed my life goals just through a small decision one day to satisfy a curiosity is a huge life lesson for me. And maybe reading this will help other people decide to just try doing something different for once, and see if your life plan holds up.
If it does, never stop trying new things. If it doesn't (like mine), then you now know that you've found something that you love as much as or even more that your plan before. Something that you might have lived your whole life never finding.
I don't expect many people to read this all, but writing it here has been very cathartic for me, and it's still a rant because now I have so much more work and planning to do. But it's the good kind of work.
Things aren't so simple now, but they're way more worth it.3 -
I'm fucking done.
I honestly can't see how developers like to work for years on a single project. Nothing on the side, just the one project. Fuck I'm a year in and I've already been pushing my patience.
After working on something for half a year I want some diversity, but every time I ask for it I get the "we need you doing this" card. I've asked plenty of times for my manager to find someone else to do part of my work, and every time I get the same thing. "We're looking for someone, don't worry". Yeah my ass you've been saying that for months and I still haven't seen a job opening.
Honestly, in a month or so I'm gonna tell my manager that I'm quitting soon, so he has some time to actually go look for someone. If he doesn't, not my problem.
For real though, the company is nice, people are chill, I'm just lacking challenge, and no matter how many times I bring it up, nothing's being done with it.
What will I do when I quit? I have no fucking clue, but anything's better than doing the same repetitive shit day in day out. Fuck it I'll probably go balls deep on my own projects for a few months, see if I can generate an income there.
If that doesn't work out I'll just go back to the life of sucking someone's dick for a monthly salary.4 -
Company has a severe lack of fresh blood.
"let's recruit everyone who has an IQ over room temperature and barely passes the mark".
Me protesting bloody murder cause I know that the idea is not just profoundly dumb, but frustration from high staff turnover takes a toll on *everyone*.
"nah can't be that bad".
Then the discussion started who could do monitoring and mentoring, so we can sort out the bad apples *quickly*.
Me reminding again that this is exactly what leads to a high staff turnover, as this is nothing else than "hire, hire - quickly fire".
Guess who won the award of being the mentor / monitor ....
*drum roll*
Come on, I know you would NEVER expect this.
Let me surprise you: M E.
Yeah. They chose the person that was absolutely against this idea...
Because that person is "most qualified for the task at hand and has the necessary qualifications".
Today was the first 4 h workshop with a new recruit.
The Lord has had zero mercy on me.
I started to mute myself after 30 minutes in regular intervals to just scream and curse the world.
How profound dumb a person can be amazes me.
Person has had a "very expensive 6 month boot camp course".
I was close asking if the boot camp course was in watching porn and wanking their brain cells out....
Git... Yeah he knew what he was doing...
Except that he messed up every commit by either not sticking to the companies format or - what I found funny the first 2 times, then not so much anymore - just writing a git commit message like a 15 year old teenage girl would write to their diary.
Programming. Oh yeah. He should be a programmer.
He had much Bootcamp.
Bootcamp expensive. Bootcamp good.
If someone is unable to iterate over an iterator... And instead starts creating an integer based array of a map's key name to then fetch the map value in an for loop based on the created key array.
Yeah. Bootcamp much good.
Creating DTOs...
It took an hour to write a DTO with him... Cause constructors are hard and it's even harder when you have to explain primitive datatypes in Java, null safety, constructors, NPEs, final, ...
Like really no experience at all.
The next week's will be amazing.
Either I get a valium drop or I'm gonna blow my head off, cause mentoring will drain the last bit of hope I had left in me.
Note that I do not blame the recruit (yeah he's dumb. But he has ZERO work experience, so it's not unexpected), I'm just too fed up with getting the poo crown despite being against the whole process.
I think the recruit could make it..........
But that I got the shittiest job ever is really haunting me.
I dunno how I survive the next weeks.
And this is just the first recruit... There will be more.2 -
So, a few years ago I did an internship at this company really close to my house. It was a total disaster but a few months ago I decided to give it another shot and apply for a junior position there as I needed money and they knew me there. For some reason they hired me and now I work there for about 2 months.
There's one other developer here and my problem is that he's the senior here. Guys I don't know what to do about it, this guy is so controlling. He won't allow me to decide ANYTHING.
I have a whiteboard with all my projects and he wrote deadlines there (because his boss said he needs to set deadlines since he never finishes anything on time, but he decided to put that on me) when I finished something in time (like 3 days early!) I wanted to put that under the project on the board. But he didn't want it. No reason. Just no.
He's also constantly talking, all day long. He writes 1 or 2 functions per day. Maybe fixes a small bug. And then one day per week he actually works. Constantly complaining about me, bugging me, removing electricity from my screens, setting my wallpaper to 2 dudes kissing ect. ect. its fucking annoying me. This guy even plays video games on his nintendo or call of duty.. Working for other customers that have nothing to do with this company. And the boss thinks he's great..
So 2 days ago, the whiteboard filled with his drawings was completely emptied because of me. It felt so good, he was so angry he didn't talk all day, to no one. What else can I do guys? I can't go to my boss, the other guy in this office doesn't really care and he's on his side. But when I code I need to be able to concentrate. I can't even have a serious conversation with this guy because he just doesn't take me serious. He always thinks he's right and wants control of every little thing...
What do I do?10 -
The more I use LinkedIn the more I hate it. I know I shouldn't be a nosy fuck but sometimes I've got nothing better to do for a couple of minutes on my work OS and the tab's right there. Every time I open it up it reminds me of why I'm not on Facebook. My coworkers are probably the most benign people to follow, all they do is repost company videos and blogposts. Basically advertizing, whatever.
It's the other people who get to me, the ones who are advertizing themselves. The soapboxing, the 'look at all the cool shit im doing', the reposting shit from people who I have no clue about. It's literally a window into just the good parts of peoples lives, like any other shitty social media site, but put through the filter of corporate PR bullshit. At least you can be yourself somewhat anywhere else, everything on LinkedIn needs to conform to what's acceptable to the sterile corporate environment, which amounts to showing off your certs or marketable products and the most surface-level 'progressive' social politics.
Fuck LinkedIn and fuck my curious ass for opening it like a dumbass kid who doesn't understand why you shouldn't touch a hot stove.6 -
I often read articles describing developer epiphanies, where they realized, that it was not Eclipse at fault for a bad coding experience, but rather their lack of knowledge and lack of IDE optimization.
No. Just NO.
Eclipse is just horrendous garbage, nothing else. Here are some examples, where you can optimize Eclipse and your workflow all you like and still Eclipse demonstrates how bad of an IDE it is:
- There is a compilation error in the codebase. Eclipse knows this, as it marks the error. Yet in the Problems tab there is absolutely nothing. Not even after clean. Sometimes it logs errors in the problems tab, sometimes t doesn't. Why? Only the lord knows.
- Apart from the fact that navigating multiple Eclipse windows is plain laughable - why is it that to this day eclipse cannot properly manage windows on multi-desktop setups, e.g. via workspace settings? Example: Use 3 monitors, maximize Eclipse windows of one Eclipse instance on all three. Minimize. Then maximize. The windows are no longer maximized, but spread somehow over the monitors. After reboot it is even more laughable. Windows will be just randomly scrabled and stacked on top of each other. But the fact alone that you cannot navigate individual windows of one instance.. is this 2003?
- When you use a window with e.g. class code on a second monitor and your primary Eclipse window is on the first monitor, then some shortcuts won't trigger. E.g. attempting to select, then run a specific configuration via ALT+R, N, select via arrows, ALT+R won't work. Eclipse cannot deal with ALT+R, as it won't be able to focus the window, where the context menus are. One may think, this has to do with Eclipse requiring specific perspectives for specific shortcuts, as shortcuts are associated with perspectives - but no. Because the perspective for both windows is the same, namely Java. It is just that even though Shortcuts in Eclipse are perspective-bound, but they are also context-sensitive, meaning they require specific IDE inputs to work, regarldless of their perspective settings. Is that not provided, then the shortcut will do absolutely nothing and Eclipse won't tell you why.
- The fact alone that shortcut-workarounds are required to terminate launches, even though there is a button mapping this very functionality. Yes this is the only aspect in this list, where optimizing and adjusting the IDE solves the problem, because I can bind a shortcut for launch selection and then can reliably select ant trigger CTRL+F2. Despite that, how I need to first customize shortcuts and bind one that was not specified prior, just to achieve this most basic functionality - teminating a launch - is beyond me.
Eclipse is just overengineered and horrendous garbage. One could think it is being developed by people using Windows XP and a single 1024x768 desktop, as there is NO WAY these issues don't become apparent when regularily working with the IDE.9 -
I recently tried to apply the same data analytics rationale that I use at work to my personal life. This is not a rant, it is more like an data storytelling of an actual use case I would like some input on.
I set a goal - gotta thin up a bit and calm down my ticker - and got a (almost unreasonably expensive) field expert consultant to yell at me about it for a couple hours.
I unravel the metrics - there is like a million weight-related KPIs and most say nothing at all. I have never seen an non-infrastructure measurable subject that could not be resumed to 2-5 performance metrics. I got overall weight, how well my nine-years-old business suit fits me, heart rate, and day-after relative muscle pain (it will make sense soon).
Then its data-pipeline time. I bought a cheap weight scale and smartwatch, and every morning I input the data in an app. Yes, I try to put on the suit every morning. It still does not fit.
After establishing a baseline, I tried to fit different approaches. Doing equipment-free exercises, going to the gym, dieting. None was actually feasible in the long run, but trying different approaches does highlight the impacts and the handling profile of each method.
Looking at the now-gathered data, one thing was obvious - can't do dieting because it is not doable to have a shopping list and meals for me and another for the family.
Gym is also off the table - too much overhead. I spend more time on the trip there and back than actually there.
And home exercise equipment is either super crappy or very expensive. But it is also the most reasonable approach.
So it is solutions time. I got a nice exercise bycicle (not a peloton), an yoga mat (the wife already had that one) and an exercise program that uses only those two resources. Not as efficient without dieting, not as measurable and broad as the gym, but it fits my workflow. Deploy to production!
A few months pass and the dataset grows. The signal is subtle but has support - it works! The handling, however, needs improvement, since I cannot often enough get with the exercise program. Some mornings are just after some hard days.
I start thinking about what else I can improve in the program, but it is already pretty lean and full of compromises.
So I pull an engineer and start thinking about the support systems and draft profile. What else could be draining my willpower and morning time?
Chores. Getting the kids ready for school, firing up the moka pot, setting the off-brand roomba, folding the overnight-dried clothes, cooking breakfast, doing the dishes, cleaning the toilets. All part of my morning routine. It might benefit from some automation.
Last month I got that machine our elders call "wasteful" and "useless crap lazy entitled Americans invented because they feel oh-so-insulted for simply doing something by hand like everyone always did" - a "dish-washer".
Heh, I remember how hard was to convince my mother-in-law that an remote-controled electric garage door would not make she look like an spoiled brat.
Still to early to call, but I think that the dishwasher just saved me about 25 mins every morning. It might be enough to save willpower for me to do more exercise.
This is all so reflective of all data analytics cases really are out in the wild - the analytics phase seems so small compared to the gathering and practical problem-solving all around. And yet d.a. is what tells you that you are doing the wrong thing all along. Or on what you should work next.7 -
tldr: Fuck Adobe Premiere
What the flying fuck.
I have a school project together with a friend and decided to do a video. Not only do we now only have one fucking day left, because the teacher decided we dont need time or anything, but I have to learn video editing software, record clips and create the video withing one fucking day.
I've downloaded Premiere because I have a 7 day trial left and had Creative Cloud on my PC and WHAT THE FUCK kind of fucked up bullshit software is this human compiled piece of shit?! I needed to google how to add text and edit it because adding text gives you absolutely nothing, you get no possibility to edit the text in any way, except the content. After googling for 10 minutes because I have the newest version and they changed the text tool, I found out that you need to go to another tab... of which there is 7 and all have such telling names like: "Effects" and "Compose"...
I needed to go to "Effects" BECAUSE WHY THE FUCK NOT, TEXT SURE LOOKS LIKE AN EFFECT TO ME! Then I wanted to align it to the right so its on 50% of the screen. You fucking cant, I've tried and looked for an hour the only possibility you have is to align it to the center or just throw it somewhere. The snapping didn't even work correctly. So I tried to do something else because I was ready to punch a kitten.
A box. A box thats black. A box thats black and thats aligned to the... FUCK YOU, YOU CANT ALIGN THIS BOX.
I cant align a box...
They dont even give me the possibility to...
But I can align the text BOX, not even the FUCKING TEXT itself...
What
The
Fuck
This is the worst program I've EVER had to use. I'm fucking mad and this fucking project can FUCK ITSELF.19 -
During one of our 'pop-up' meetings last week.
Ralph: "The test code the developers are checking in is a mess. They don't know what they are doing."
ex.
var foo = SomeLibrary.GetFoo();
Assert.IsNotNull(foo);
Fred: "Ha ha..someone should talk to HR about our hiring practices. These people are literally driving the company backwards."
Me: "I think unit testing is complete waste of time."
- You could almost see the truck hit the wall and splatter watermelon everwhere..took Ralph and Fred a couple of seconds to respond
Fred: "Uh..unit testing is industry best practice. There is scientific evidence that prove testing reduces bugs and increases code quality"
Ralph: "Over 90% of our deployments are rolled back because of bugs. Unit testing will eliminate that."
Me: "Sorry, I disagree."
- Stepping on kittens wouldn't have gotten a worse look from Fred and Ralph
Fred: 'Pretty sure if you ask any professional developer, they'll tell you unit testing and code coverage reduces bugs.'
Me: "I'm not asking anyone else, I'm asking you. Find one failed deployment, just one, over the past 6 months that unit testing or code coverage would have prevented."
- good 3 seconds of awkward silence.
Ralph: "Well, those rollbacks are all mostly due to server mis-configurations. That's not a fair comparison."
Me: "I'm using your words. Unit tests reduces bugs and lack of good tests is the direct reason why we have so many failed deployments"
Boss: "Yea, Ralph...you and Fred kinda said that."
Fred: "No...we need to write good tests. Not this mess."
Me: "Like I said, show me one test you've written that would have prevented a rollback. Just one."
Ralph: "So, what? We do nothing?"
Me: "No, we have to stop worshiping this made up 80% code coverage idol. If not, developers are going to keep writing useless test code just to meet some percent. If we wrote device drivers or frameworks for other developers maybe, but we write CRUD apps. We execute a stored procedure or call a service. This 80% rule doesn't fit for code we write."
Fred: "If the developers took their head out of their ass.."
Me: "Hey!..uh..no, they are doing exactly what they are being told. Meet the 80% requirement, even if doesn't make sense."
Ralph: "Nobody told them to write *that* code."
Boss: "My gosh, what have you and Fred been complaining about for the past hour?"
- Ralph looks at his monitor and brilliantly changes the subject
Ralph: "Oh my f-king god...Trump said something stupid again ..."
At that point I put my headphones on went back to what I was doing. I'm pretty sure Fred and Ralph spent the rest of the day messaging back-n-forth, making fun of me or some random code I wrote 3 years ago (lots of typing and giggling). How can highly educated grown men (one has a masters in CS) get so petty and insecure?7 -
! First Apk
There is nothing else great feeling than making your first application's about us page.
Touched moon just now !
Bingo !1 -
Okay after reviewing all my options. There are fucking no resources I can use to teach myself ASP.NET (Core). The official docs don’t give information as to how or why you should do something, and everything else is either not the same version or there’s differences in the versions project files such as Startup.cs just as an example. So it’s very confusing to follow along with tutorials or whatever it is because I don’t know what the differences do because backend is still really new to me. And I want to know what all is happening and why.
It’s nothing against ASP.NET, ASP.NET Core just the tutorials and resources and documentation for it. Although I’m open to recommendations.37 -
Avoid ACPICA if at all possible. It's one garbage tier cluster fuck of bad design, horrible documentation and downright misleading and wrong code
It's meant to consist of an ASL compiler, disassembler, debugger, dumper, various user space utitilies and a kernel resident OSPM implementation *if* you can figure out what belongs to what. Even just compiling this pile of trash is a mystery in itself. Think you need the source files in source/common? EEEEH, wrong. Well, at least partially since most of them seem to be for the user space stuff..? Other ones *are* needed on the other hand. At least the disassembler and/or debugger and/or dumper components seem to reference them. Not that I could figure out how to compile those anyways. The real path to your goal seems to be to ignore a seemingly arbitrary subset of source and header files until your linker stops complaining
There's also a bunch of configuration defines, some of which *you* define, some defined *for* you, based on again others. Of course most of them do stupid shit. Enabling the debugger automatically enables debug logging. Enabling the disassembler force enables debug allocation tracking... What?
The code itself isn't of much help either. Looking in "os_specific/service_layers" you find what looks to be reference implementations of acpica functions in certain os' like windows and unix. Of course I had a look because AcpiOsReadMemory is supposed to read physical memory and I don't know how I would even implement that. But hey, osunixxf.c (xf for interface... of course) should tell me. I'll let you see for yourself in the attached image. Apparently it does fuck all and just returns AE_OK. No error, no logging, no nothing. Just ok. As you can imagine, AcpiOsWriteMemory doesn't do much more either.
...okay so maybe physical memory accesses aren't actually used and these functions are some sort of relic from past times? Nope! They are absolutely necessary for doing low level device interaction. WTF. So finally I went to the linux source and checked how *they* implemented them, and just as I thought, these functions are anything but no-ops...
...So for what fucking reason do these stupid interface implementations even exist but to purposefully mislead you?? They aren't used for fucking anything! As far as I know Windows doesn't even *use* ACPICA and Linux have their own fork with working implementations... They just sit there, just to tell you how to NOT do it
So that's some of my thoughts about ACPICA. Note that I haven't even used it as a library yet, I just got it to compile and link and it already fucked with me this much.
There's also so much more I didn't mention like that you *have* to modify the acpica source in order to get your own platform header working (else #error) eventhough the docs explicitely instruct you not too but you get the point
Don't use ACPICA if you don't have to. Save your sanity for something that's worth it -
TLDR;
When governments started printing money to cure new pandemic and crash current market with great inflation I took all my savings, got a loan and bought biggest property I could afford. Every major news station was talking about end of world, but this was not I was scared of. I was scared of the helicopter money that would wipe my 5 years old savings.
When I was about to sign loan papers to buy my first apartment I got an email that my contract will end in 3 months. I said ok, the contractor company will find me something else.
I asked and they assured me they will do it. After my contract end just before summer holidays there was silence from contracting company and then after 5 years of me earning them piles of money, after finished project and congratulations from customer they offered me most shitty job they had where people resign after a week. I said I don’t want to land in another shit hole bring it back to life for another 2-5 years and kill myself when they offer me same shit afterwards so I resigned.
It was so fucked up that even the boss from the client I was contracting asked me if I lost my job cause I finished all that they wanted. I said it’s not your fault man. I will be ok, but I wasn’t.
I had apartment I couldn’t move in cause I needed to renovate. Loan I needed to pay. Rented apartment, accountant and business that was loosing money cause I was without contract, the world was locked down and everyone was depressed.
I said ok, I still have some savings left so I I started looking for something new but market was dead. Everyone was gone for holidays after winter lockdown. I was burning money and trying to figure out what to do.
After 2 months of nothing, when I started thinking about finding some temporary job to not loose everything I worked for, things moved. I started attending hiring meetings and solving tests everyday, also from big four gang but I didn’t passed trough hr due to how they say I’m to independent and I need to look for consulting business or do something on my own.
People asked why I don’t do something on my own and I politely answered that I want to work there.
I was about to run out of money when I got a call that company is looking for me cause I was doing similar things they want to do. During interviews it was pleasant small talk about what id did over those years and what they want to do, 2 days later I joined small team. I barely managed to survive a month for a first paycheck.
Since then we created new product for a company. Now the person who hired me is leaving and I think I should also leave the ship and find other things to do.2 -
Why for fucks sake can't I motivate myself to finish my thesis?
I mean I guess it is because I already got my third raise in my current (full-time) job because of hard work, which left not much time for side projects (or thesis writing).
On top of that, there is nothing which forces me to finish. My Prof. does not really care. I would probably not earn more because of a higher degree. Only thing is I have to pay the fee for enrolment once a semester.
Also, going back to my thesis project after some time, and having to upgrade all the npm modules in there does not help.
Even though I already have a working backend and proof-of-concept app, something blocks me from finishing all this work.
It is a curse. I would do so many side projects, but I tell myself that I first have to finish my thesis before doing anything else.
It is some kind of loop and I have yet to find the return condition.3 -
No no no. That's it. Less than 2 years experience supposed to be leading a team of 12 soon to be 17 most of which have more experience than me! Been given sever admin responsibilities, training and managing 2 large frame works in addition to everything else I was doing before.
With the current set of projects we were given half the amount of time to do over twice the amount of work. Management seems to expect constant over time. And I keep being nagged by management to finish x,y,z. Every thing is high piority and I keep being asked to switch between tasks every hour or so nothing gets completed when this happens every time I make them aware this happens. The worse thing is that the CEO has a way of naming and shaming people who fall behind work infront of the entire company.
I have only been surviving thanks to a few saints in the team who just get on with the work without argument but now found out a bunch of these are moving to better companies!!!
I like helping people but with everything that is going on I can't find time to and I know at times I end up coming across inpatient with them that they don't deserve. But if you are part of a team please try and solve your issue yourself before asking others every half an hour there are too many of you and I need to get things done too.
And why is it so damn hot sitting at the desk sweating.
Ok I am prob on my meriod and being over the top grumpy. I want to find a new job but so tired in the evenings that I just want to collapse on my bed and do nothing. At end of writing this and feel a little better.2 -
I turned down another women who was absolutely, 100% flirting with me, because, from what I can gather, she was trying to get out of a relationship with her current boyfriend, a military veteran.
I outright ignored her and then when that failed, I made our work relationship 100% about that, work.
Even though I'm friendly with everyone else.
I'm an absolute shit, aren't I? I feel genuinely bad.
I'm not sure if I did it out of a misplaced sense of honor for a dude who obviously has some ptsd, or because I don't feel like I'm able to connect with anyone anymore.
I feel like I'm alone in this world. Not, like, sexually or anything, but more like I don't want to burden anyone with the shit I'm going through. Like a man on a mission on a sinking ship, and it would be wrong to let anyone else on board.
Like a one-man shit-show, all singing, all dancing, driven to one end, with one purpose. And it'd be wrong to let anyone get attached, or invite anyone else in.
Fuck I got so many irons in the fire. I have an ARG in the works, a full game, a social platform that the code and marketing plan is laid out and I'm saving money for, two more games already planned, plus spending an in-ordinate amount of time with my father and sister and mother as they deal with the loss of my sister, plus volunteering to help the homeless, plus working, plus studying.
I barely sleep.
It's just me. I'm like a cruise missile heading to one destination, to some final destination, I just don't know what. And I don't let anyone in, because then they might see how fucking crazy I am, and how crazy my life is, and how crazy my goals are. Thats not a humblebrag. Thats more of a "wholly shit, I'm so in over my head, I'm fucking drowning" type thing. But I'm not giving up, I'm just going deeper.
And it feels like drowning but somehow I'm okay with it. Like I've passed the crux of loneliness, and settled for going for it all, alone, shooting out of orbit, and saying "fuck it all' to everything and everyone. They say "if you got everything you wanted, everything you wished for, you'd wish you hadn't, which is why god isn't a genie". And lately I've been thinking god doesn't exist, or doesn't care, because he's left it all up to me, and I've fucked it up good and proper, and am on my way to either nothing, or everything I've ever wanted.
Is this what happiness feels like? Or suicide?
I don't know. I mean I really don't. I don't want to die. I think I could stop existing and be okay with it. Having achieved at least a modicum of understanding the universe, at least accomplished something small but meaningful.
Or maybe I'm delusional, driven mad with the full comprehension of human floundering against a meandering existence.
I don't fucking know.
I feel like I'm spinning my wheels, so much, that even two weeks feels like a fucking eternity. I don't sleep anymore. When I do, I escape into my dreams, where I can fly, or float, and the people in my dreams tell me I'm living in the matrix and I believe them..in my dreams. Feel it even.
And when I wake up, the feeling persists. Leaves me in wonderland, for hours after waking.
And I have visions, of going homeless, like some buddha, all the time, and then I say "wake up J, you're fucking crazy! You want to go be some couch surfing homeless bum living off other's good graces? get the fuck outa here! While others suffer, schlep it at whatever job they work, day in day out, toil. In this economy? In this inflation? What a dishonest way of thinking. What a dishonest way of dreaming."
And yet I daydream. Because its the only escape there is from all the world has become.
And I bring joy to others, earnestly, vicariously, because its the closest joy I can feel, when I've become numb.
It is this quasi-permanent sense of alienation that permeates my whole world, a sort of invisible force field that separates me from others, even as I reach out to understand them, to comfort them, to smooth the corners off their world, so that they don't become like I have, something not entirely human, but...other.
Often when we meditate, long and hard enough,
at the center that emerges, at the center of ourselves, we find an abyss, a whole universe, devoid of anything, a perfect silence, mirroring back the cosmos, and other people. Observing, silent, irreducible, implacable.
Sometimes I feel like I don't exist. Sometimes I think others don't exist.
Very often I feel like nothing is real. And that I am playing some sort of game. Not like a video game per se, but that there is a bigger pattern, a hidden pattern to it all, just out of reach, and I'm reaching for it but understanding eludes me.
Not that the universe has made me for some special purpose, but merely that the universe observes me specifically, for no special purpose, other than that it can, whatever trivialities may impede or push forward my life.
As if the universe were bored.24 -
just found out a vulnerability in the website of the 3rd best high school in my country.
TL;DR: they had burried in some folders a c99 shell.
i am a begginer html/sql/php guy and really was looking into learning a bit here and there about them because i really like problem solving and found out ctfs mainly focus on this part of programming. i am a c++ programmer which does school contest like programming problems and i really enjoy them.
now back on topic.
with this urge to learn more web programming i said to myself what other method to learn better than real life sites! so i did just that. i first checked my school site. right click. inspect element. it seemed the site was made with wordpress. after looking more into the html code for the site i concluded all the images and files i could see on the site were from a folder on the server named 'wp-content/uploads'. i checked the folder. and here it got interesting. i did a get request on the site. saw the details. then i checked the site. bingo! there are 3 folders named '2017', '2018', '2019'. i said to myself: 'i am god.'
i could literally see all the announcements they have made from 2017-2019. and they were organised by month!!! my curiosity to see everything got me to the final destination.
with this adrenaline i thought about another site. in my city i have the 3rd most acclaimed high school in the country. what about checking their security?
so i typed the web address. looked around. again, right click, inspect element and looked around the source code. this time i was more lucky. this site is handmade!!! i was soooo happy because with my school's site i was restricted with what they have made with wordpress and i don't have much experience with it.
amd so i began looking what request the site made for the logos and other links. it seemed all the other links on the site were with this format: www.site.com/index.php?home. and i was very confused and still am. is this referencing some part of the site in the index.php file? is the whole site written inside the index.php file and with the question mark you just get to a part of the site? i don't really get it.
so nothing interesting inside the networking tab, just some stylesheets for the site's design i guess. i switched to the debugger tab and holy moly!! yes, it had that tree structure. very familiar. just like a project inside codeblocks or something familiar with it. and then it clicked me. there was the index.php file! and there was another folder from which i've seen nothing from the network tab. i finally got a lead!! i returned in the network tab, did a request to see the spgm folder and boooom a site appeared and i saw some files and folders from 2016. there was a spgm.js file and a spgm.php file. there was a contrib, flavors, gal and lang folders. then it once again clicked me! the lang folder was las updated this year in february. so i checked the folder and there were some files named lang with the extension named after their language and these files were last updated in 2016 so i left them alone. but there was this little snitch, this little 650K file named after the name of the school's site with the extension '.php' aaaaand it was last modified this year!!!! i was so excited! i thought i found a secret and different design of the site or something completely else! i clicked it and at first i was scared there was this black/red theme going on my screen and something was a little odd. there were no school announcements or event, nononoooo. this was still a tree structured view. at the top of the site it's written '!c99Shell v. 1.0...'
this was a big nono. i saw i could acces all kinds of folders. then i switched to the normal school website and tried to access a folder i have seen named userfiles and got a 403 forbidden error. wopsie. i then switched to the c99 shell website and tried to access the userfiles folder and my boy showed all of its contents. it was nakeeed naked. like very naked. and in the userfiles folder there were all, but i mean ALL files and folders they have on the server. there were a file with the salary of each job available in the school. some announcements. there was a list with all the students which failed classes. there were folders for contests they held. it was an absolute mess and i couldn't believe it.
i stopped and looked at the monitor. what have i done? just to learn some web programming i just leaked the server of the 3rd most famous high school in my country. image a black hat which would have seriously caused more damage. currently i am writing an email to the school to updrage their security because it is reaaaaly bad.
and the journy didn't end here. i 'hacked' the site 2 days ago and just now i thought about writing an email to the school. after i found i could access the WHOLE server i searched for the real attacker so if you want to knkw how this one went let me know in the comments.
sorry for the long post, but couldn't held it anymore13 -
Major rant incoming. Before I start ranting I’ll say that I totally respect my professor’s past. He worked on some really impressive major developments for the military and other companies a long time ago. Was made an engineering fellow at Raytheon for some GPS software he developed (or lead a team on I should say) and ended up dropping fellowship because of his health. But I’m FUCKING sick of it. So fucking fed up with my professor. This class is “Data Structures in C++” and keep in mind that I’ve been programming in C++ for almost 10 years with it being my primary and first language in OOP.
Throughout this entire class, the teacher has been making huge mistakes by saying things that aren’t right or just simply not knowing how to teach such as telling the students that “int& varOne = varTwo” was an address getting put into a variable until I corrected him about it being a reference and he proceeded to skip all reference slides or steps through sorting algorithms that are wrong or he doesn’t remember how to do it and saying, “So then it gets to this part and....it uh....does that and gets this value and so that’s how you do it *doesnt do rest of it and skips slide*”.
First presentation I did on doubly linked lists. I decided to go above and beyond and write my own code that had a menu to add, insert at position n, delete, print, etc for a doubly linked list. When I go to pull out my code he tells me that I didn’t say anything about a doubly linked list’s tail and head nodes each have a pointer pointing to null and so I was getting docked points. I told him I did actually say it and another classmate spoke up and said “Ya” and he cuts off saying, “No you didn’t”. To which I started to say I’ll show you my slides but he cut me off mid sentence and just yelled, “Nope!”. He docked me 20% and gave me a B- because of that. I had 1 slide where I had a bullet point mentioning it and 2 slides with visual models showing that the head node’s previousNode* and the tail node’s nextNode* pointed to null.
Another classmate that’s never coded in his life had screenshots of code from online (literally all his slides were a screenshot of the next part of code until it finished implementing a binary search tree) and literally read the code line by line, “class node, node pointer node, ......for int i equals zero, i is less than tree dot length er length of tree that is, um i plus plus.....”
Professor yelled at him like 4 times about reading directly from slide and not saying what the code does and he would reply with, “Yes sir” and then continue to read again because there was nothing else he could do.
Ya, he got the same grade as me.
Today I had my second and final presentation. I did it on “Separate Chaining”, a hashing collision resolution. This time I said fuck writing my own code, he didn’t give two shits last time when everyone else just screenshot online example code but me so I decided I’d focus on the PowerPoint and amp it up with animations on models I made with the shapes in PowerPoint. Get 2 slides in and he goes,
Prof: Stop! Go back one slide.
Me: Uh alright, *click*
(Slide showing the 3 collision resolutions: Open Addressing, Separate Chaining, and Re-Hashing)
Prof: Aren’t you forgetting something?
Me: ....Not that I know of sir
Prof: I see Open addressing, also called Open Hashing, but where’s Closed Hashing?
Me: I believe that’s what Seperate Chaining is sir
Prof: No
Me: I’m pretty sure it is
*Class nods and agrees*
Prof: Oh never mind, I didn’t see it right
Get another 4 slides in before:
Prof: Stop! Go back one slide
Me: .......alright *click*
(Professor loses train of thought? Doesn’t mention anything about this slide)
Prof: I er....um, I don’t understand why you decided not to mention the other, er, other types of Chaining. I thought you were going to back on that slide with all the squares (model of hash table with animations moving things around to visualize inserting a value with a collision that I spent hours on) but you didn’t.
(I haven’t finished the second half of my presentation yet you fuck! What if I had it there?)
Me: I never saw anything on any other types of Chaining professor
Prof: I’m pretty sure there’s one that I think combines Open Addressing and Separate Chaining
Me: That doesn’t make sense sir. *explanation why* I did a lot of research and I never saw any other.
Prof: There are, you should have included them.
(I check after I finish. Google comes up with no other Chaining collision resolution)
He docks me 20% and gives me a B- AGAIN! Both presentation grades have feedback saying, “MrCush, I won’t go into the issues we discussed but overall not bad”.
Thanks for being so specific on a whole 20% deduction prick! Oh wait, is it because you don’t have specifics?
Bye 3.8 GPA
Is it me or does he have something against me?7 -
So I am driving home and stop at a light. Some dude in a truck behind me starts flipping me off at the light. The road is 45mph and 2 lanes. I am in the right lane. So when the light changes I speed up to 35mph so he can pass me. He decides to tailgate me and honk at me. So I stay steady and he eventually goes around me. I keep my distance. But it looks like he is going to the same place as me. Before I get to the road I want to park for my destination he takes the same road and parks his truck and trailer where I normally park facing the wrong direction. Okay, wtf, but okay. So I go further down the road to turn around and park somewhere else. He guns his truck to cut me off from that parking spot. I have to hit my brakes to prevent hitting him. I raise my hands in the are like "why?" I then finish turning around and head back to my parking spot and park. So this guy tried to cause a car accident. At this point I took my stuff inside and put it away. Came back out and called the police to report the incident. They said they cannot identify a crime, but I can fill out a police report. While I am on the phone with the police this guy leaves that street giving me this bizarre deranged smile. I refuse to engage. I spent the next hour filling out the police report. In the process I find out he lives on that street a few houses down. I am nowhere near his house, but he seems to not like me parking on that street. This guy must have seen my car on that street before and decides to randomly road rage. I gave his name and address to the police. My intent to build a case file if he doesn't knock this shit off.
So now I gotta buy a fucking dash cam and put it in my car because of some nutjob plumber. I have nothing against plumbers, but this guy fits the definition of knuckle dragger. His name isn't even Mario or Luigi, bummer.
Another thing that might be related is that during the winter somebody dumped a ton of snow onto my car when it was parked there. It looked like it was on purpose. If this is the same guy this guy drove his snow plow 4 houses down. Definitely has mental problems.10 -
!rant
For a bunch of application redesigns that we are doing at work I am letting the other two developers in my department help with selecting the stack. Normally, we work with Java and PHP, and while they seem to enjoy php I find them concerned at the possibility of making it more Java centric.
So I compiled a list of examples of different tech stacks that are not only more modern (cuz our Java stuff is old JSP stuff) but also simple to learn and use. Mind you, the point is to make this a gradual change, not just rewrite the entire house from scratch.
the list contained examples in:
Python: django and flask
Ruby: Ruby on Rails
Java: Spring Boot
Golang: Small self made mvc framework I built, nothing fancy on it, it uses templates and shit, didn't make it api centric
Node: Express examples in both vanilla JS and TypeScript
php with Laravel.
Since we work with php most of the time as well I imagined that they would be more inclined for Laravel, but I was wrong :P they seemed to like the Node Express route and the Golang route more than anything else with Python and Django being close.
Personally I know that there is more to selecting a stack, but initial perceptions make for a lot of things in selection of the stack.
Pretty excited, if they gauge everything considered in regards to what we have and we found Golang to be a clear winner it would give them the chance to add a nice and competitive tech to their resumes.
not a rant, or anything per se, just wanted to share some stuff with y'all2 -
Context: New to typescript. Writing a thing, doing it for work, good opportunity to stretch my dev legs. Using a propriety lib, alternatives not an option.
Rant begin:
SOOOO, who the fuck thought THIS was a good idea:
1. Lib has minified react in dev (because closed source) meaning no downstream errors AND the entire premise of the lib is that a widget is a react component, so I'm writing typescript react the entire time without downstream errors
2. SHIT docs. By that, I mean there's an API reference page that's so sparse there's literally a set of CRUCIAL interfaces that only say the word 'Interface' on them. That's it. that's what i get. It's an interface. NO FUCKING SHIT SHERLOCK, what the fuck is it though? What's its purpose? Is it an interface for a dog? A dog that has a 'shit' property? or a cat? or a cat eating dog shit? Nobody fucking knows - the docs sure as fuck don't care.
3. No syntax highlighting - editors, IDEs (i've tried a few) can't even find the lib inside this environment, so Code and everything else thinks I'm importing shit that doesn't even exist - so no error prediction, code completion based on syntax of the library, none of that.
4. There are some EXTREMELY basic samples - these samples exclusively use React classes - no function components, no hooks, nada - just classes and even perfect replicas of the sample code display erratic behavior like errors about missing props, so that's mostly FUCKING USELESS
5. And this... this is where the straw breaks the fucking camel's back... there's no... there's no hot reloading... Do you know what that (in conjunction with the previous 4 fuckups) means?
When I write anything or I fuck up (which of course I'm doing every time I write half a line because how the fuck?) I have to restart the client and server EVERY FUCKING TIME and manually test to see if the error (THAT ONLY GETS REPORTED IN THE LOCAL UI) is gone or different.
Then, once I see the error, it isn't an error: it's the minified React error-decoder link and guess what? It isn't really clickable a link OR copyable, meaning that every FUCKING time I get a new error, I have to MANUALLY TYPE A FUCKING 50 CHAR URL TO FIND OUT A GENERIC REACT ERROR MESSAGE WITHOUT A LINE NUMBER OR ANY FUCKING CONTEXT. I HAVE TO DO THIS CONSTANTLY TO SEE IF ANYTHING I'M DOING EVEN WORKS.
6. There's no github to complain to the maintainers or search for issues because it's NOT FUCKING OPEN SOURCE so there is literally nothing to be fucking done about it.
This is due in a week and a half, found out about it last Friday. How's your day going?
PS: good to be back after a long respite from dev ranting.1 -
For me side projects have been things I'll make to do something that others will use. Some people call it innovation, some call it side business. But that's how i look at side projects. So the points below are more to do with entrepreneurial experiences.
1. If there are more people involved, ensure that there is work for everybody (also level of commitment is tested by how much they put in). Also have as varied set of skills as possible. So that areas are well defined in terms of scope of work and areas of expertise.
2. Put in some money. Money is super glue. It will ensure that you're committed to the thing. Things change when decent amount of money is involved. You're invested, as may be others.
3. Learn something as an intention. This has nothing to do with the learnings you'll get on the way. This one seems obvious, but nevertheless needs to be said.
4. Set timelines and deadlines. Ask someone else to check on whether you're keeping on to your deadlines or not.
5. Don't go live without proper testing.
6. Make something you feel strongly about. The path will be exciting and clear.
7. Talk to people to get their feedback on everything. You may not like what's told to you. Listen dispassionately. Absorb everything. Feel miserable. But listen and think about it after sleeping over it.
8. Continuation of above point. Talk to varied set of people in terms of backgrounds. You would be surprised as to how differently people think.
9. Ask for help when stuck. Kill your ego and be vulnerable.
10. Check out what's already available. What value are you adding. And make it! -
Windows 10 updating, decides it would be cool to install gigabytes of sdk, edge, and other bloatware without asking first, on a metered connection i use for work.
Guys, between you there and those fanboy demons in cupertino, one wants to just shut it all off and return to monke.
Sidenote this, because all of this nonsense started on that crap called Windows 8, which was in the end caused to copy that Unholy crap (sold as gold) that is Apple's range of products. It's a company that sells designs nowadays, like Prada, to say, Jobs era is long gone. Everything related to Apple, Mac, Safari, Development, Gaming, UI/UX, productivity and whatever is a
f***ing Nightmare.
We alreay have a global plague, and Apple exists, we dont' need you too making another catastrophe.
All this said,
Use your goddamn trillions to create your own customizable environment that is stable, fast, and WITHOUT BULLSHIT.
I don't give a mindflying F**k of the blurs, i know how to place them with a shell, if i need those. I want control, the shit i decide is going to happen, to happen fast.
This is of Critical importance, because it defines my productivity. And considering we're all sealed indoors since 2019, i want to get away from my pc asap and live my life, instead of spending time(and money, in this moment of emergency) fixing your F**kfests, or else seeing my pc slowing down to death.
First: IF i want stuff on my pc, I know how to install something, thank you.
Second: You can take it, all your Useless - Bugged as Hell - Nonsensical - and of no practical use Bloatware, and shove it deep in your Backdoor.
I'll debloat my pc with batches again, and there's nothing you can do to stop me doing that at every update you force me into.
So please, stop wasting my time, and yours.4 -
It was the last year of high school.
We had to submit our final CS homework, so it gets reviewed by someone from the ministry of education and grade it. (think of it as GPA or whatever that is in your country).
Now being me, I really didn’t do much during the whole year, All I did was learning more about C#, more about SQL, and learn from the OGs like thenewboston, derek banas, and of course kudvenkat. (Plus more)
The homework was a C# webform website of whatever theme you like (mostly a web store) that uses MS Access as DB and a C# web service in SOAP. (Don’t ask.)
Part 1/2:
Months have passed, and only had 2 days left to deadline, with nothing on my hand but website sketches, sample projects for ideas, and table schematics.
I went ahead and started to work on it, for 48 hours STRAIGHT.
No breaks, barely ate, family visited and I barely noticed, I was just disconnected from reality.
48 hours passed and finished the project, I was quite satisfied with my it, I followed the right standards from encrypting passwords to verifying emails to implementing SQL queries without the risk of SQL injection, while everyone else followed foot as the teacher taught with plain text passwords and… do I need to continue? You know what I mean here.
Anyway, I went ahead and was like, Ok, lets do one last test run, And proceeded into deleting an Item from my webstore (it was something similar to shopify).
I refreshed. Nothing. Blank page. Just nothing. Nothing is working, at all.
Went ahead to debug almost everywhere, nothing, I’ve gone mad, like REALLY mad and almost lose it, then an hour later of failed debugging attempts I decided to rewrite the whole project from scratch from rebuilding the db, to rewriting the client/backend code and ui, and whatever works just go with it.
Then I noticed a loop block that was going infinite.
NEVER WAIT FOR A DATABASE TO HAVE MINIMUM NUMBER OF ROWS, ALWAYS ASSUME THAT IT HAS NO VALUES. (and if your CPU is 100%, its an infinite loop, a hard lesson learned)
The issue was that I requested 4 or more items from a table, and if it was less it would just loop.
So I went ahead, fixed that and went to sleep.
Part 2/2:
The day has come, the guy from the ministry came in and started reviewing each one of the students homeworks, and of course, some of the projects crashed last minute and straight up stopped working, it's like watching people burning alive.
My turn was up, he came and sat next to me and was like:
Him: Alright make me an account with an email of asd@123.com with a password 123456
Me: … that won't work, got a real email?
Him: What do you mean?
Me: I implemented an email verification system.
Him: … ok … just show me the website.
Me: Alright as you can see here first of all I used mailgun service on a .tk domain in order to send verification emails you know like every single website does, encrypted passwords etc… As you can see this website allows you to sign up as a customer or as a merc…
Him: Good job.
He stood up and moved on.
YOU MOTHERFUCKER.
I WENT THROUGH HELL IN THE PAST 48 HOURS.
AND YOU JUST SAT THERE FOR A MINUTE AND GAVE UP ON REVIEWING MY ENTIRE MASTERPIECE? GO SWIM IN A POOL FULL OF BURNING OIL YOU COUNTLESS PIECE OF SHIT
I got 100/100 in the end, and I kinda feel like shit for going thought all that trouble for just one minute of project review, but hey at least it helped me practice common standards.2 -
OKAY WHAT THE FUCK JAVA.
At school we were assigned the task to do Huffman's algorithm. Since I am way ahead of all the others, I made a GUI for that. (Btw, we use BlueJ for Java, it's just painful)
Now... I made a JTextField to put the output, which would be any character from 0x0 to 0xFFFF, into it.
Apparently, there is a bug in the setText method, which throws random NullPointerExceptions right into your face if you give it those Unicode characters.
So I looked it up:
It was a Bug, in JDK 1.6.something, where putting a 0xFFFF together with a 0x10000 would cause this. Now you may think, do we still have 1.6? No, we have 1.8 v171, WHY THE FUCK DOES THIS SHIT GIVE ME A NPE?! THE WORST PART IS I CAN'T DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT!
AND IT HAS THE WORST UNDEFINED BEHAVIOR:
1. NPE, nothing else happens
2. The Text box just gets invisible, but the border stays visible + NPE
3. The box completely disappears + NPE
Try-catching it doesn't do anything, everytime I fill the box with text, one of those options happens, and the box was never to be seen again! NOT EVEN CREATING A NEW TEXT BOX AND ADDING IT TO MY WINDOW WORKS.7 -
How about this..
So a few months ago there's this guy
He coughed.
He did nothing else.
He did not cover his mouth.
He did not even do it in his elbow.
He just did it.
He did it at a fish market in china..
...
And now today as the world is grinding to a hault I just hope he is satisfied.
ARE YOU HAPPY NOW??!
So anyway trapped at home. Nothing to do. Its cold today. Got to reduce the fan speeds on that rigs and bump the power a bit. There not so cold now :)
Ok on a serious note that coughing idiot is to blame for this cold.
One ICE AGE coming up. Global warming fans hold on to your chai. This one is a shocker..
So it turns out shutting down the world have caused CO2 levels to drop as cars dont drive and factories dont work and all the powerplants suddenly find people no longer want more power.
Thing is plantd are addaptive and they enlage the pores on the underside of thier leaves depending on the CO2 levels.
So the plants been running at 100% eat CO2 for a while now.
Then CO2 supply drop to lowest in 100 years.
Plants still eating CO2 at 100% so they did not get memmo yet. CO2 now getting used up faster than being made. Greenhouse no more.
Polar ice caps nows your turn.
First up south pole winter is coming your way.
It will freeze ice cap bigger than past 100 years. The ice will sit there making earth lobsided with all the ice on one end and none on the other .
Lobsided earth is a spinning ball
Lobsided balls change how they spin
The rotation of earh now affected by a cough.
In 6-8 months winter goes north.
CO2 all but eaten up by then. World still rather dead as the afternath is felt.
Northen poler cap freeze all the way to london again. First time in 5000 years.
All because of a bloody cough.
Its the end of the world as we know it and here i am waiting for unreal to complie just like usual..
So remember dont cough near others if someone cough near you then tel them to
Far cough24 -
I really miss having a team. Don't get me wrong, right now I do what I love and I got into a position where I can actually do Quality Assurance instead of just testing and I enjoy being able to actually change things instead of just repeating what problems there are and acting surprised when the same processes produce the same bugs over and over again but I really hope that we'll interview anything else than mouthbreathers soon.
I'm aware of the fact that QA isn't sexy and that few people who could become "Software ninja Rockstars" choose to go into it but can it be that hard to find at least two or three people who can write and read code at least on a junior level and understand how web protocols work? I get the feeling my entire branch is nothing but shit talkers clicking around blindly on pages.
I just want to exchange ideas again, come up with innovative tools, tweaking processes, learning from and teaching each other while we watch the entire operation get more and more efficient.1 -
I think karma is doing me a favor today 😍
So I started to work fir my current company early January 2017, on a project I'm still currently working on (well, now discussions are made around the next sprint, so I'm working on something else but you get the spirit)
We had the most PAIN-IN-THE-ASS-ish client I ever met. Dude gives schemas of what a page should look like (no real visual model but well things were pretty clear so there weren't big problems around).
The client was the kind of dude that could send these models, let us work on them then opening a fuck-ton of tickets, ranting about how the elements' display isn't good. Then we have to make remember him that he gave us nothing else, and he agreed on the functional specifications. And this for two WHOLE fucking years
Today, the project director came by our office and casually sat down next to me to tell me that the dude have been fired by his company for being a huge douchebag, blocking communication between us and simply being useless.
The sun is shining again 😍😍 -
so I did dry january...
conclusions:
- perhaps a slight amount of more energy, but then I just work way more than i would anyway, since there is nothing else to do
- anxiety / stress not really affected or reduced
- sleep not noticably improved either
so overall I don't think I really get any of the so called "benefits" that the health gurus claim 🤡
needless to say I will be enjoying some scotch tonight6 -
So, it's been a while since I've been working on my current project and I've never had the "luck" to touch the legacy project wrote in PHP, until this week when I got my first issue.
And damn, this goddamn issue. It was a bug, a very strange bug, that only happens in production and that nobody has any idea what was happening, so yeah, I didn't have anyone to ask and I got less time than usual ( because Thanksgiving ).
And thus, I have no starting point, no previous knowledge on PHP and less time! I expected a very fun week 😀 and it was beyond my expectations.
First I tried to understand what might be causing the issue, but there wasn't any real clue to star with, so no choice, time to read the flow on the code and see what are they're doing and using ( 1k line files, yay, legacy ). Luckily I got some clues, we're using a cookie and a php session variable for the session, ok, let's star with the session variable. Where it's that been initialize ? Well, spoiler alert, I shouldn't start with that, because my search end up in the login method of the API that set a that variable and for some reason in the front end app it was always false and that lead me to think that some of the new backend functions were failing, but after checking the logs I got no luck.
Ok, maybe the cookie it's the issue, I should try open the previous website on the brow...redirect to new project login, What? Why ? I ask around and it's a new feature push on Monday, ok I got Chrome Dev tools I can see which value of the cookie it's been set and THERE IT WAS it has a wrong domain! After 2 days ( I resume a lot of my pain ) I got what I've been looking for, so now I should be able to fix the bug. Then where is the cookie initialized ? In the first file the server hits whenever you tried to enter any page of the app, ok, I found the method, but it's using a function that process the domain and sets it correctly? wtf ? Then how in heaven do I get the incorrect domain ? Hello? Ok, relax, you still have one more day to fix this, let's take it easy.
Then, at the end of the Wednesday, nope I still have no clue how this is happening. I talked with the Devops guy and he explain me how this redirection happens and with what it depends on, I followed the PHP code through and nothing, everything should works fine, sigh. Ok I still have 2 days, because I'm not from US and I'm not in US, so I still have time, but the Sprint is messed up already, so whatever I'm gonna had done this bug anyhow.
Thursday ! I got sick, yay, what else could happen this week. Somehow I managed to work a little and star thinking in what external issue could affect the processing, maybe the redirection was bringing a wrong direction, let's talk with the Devops guy again, and he answer me that the redirection it was being made by PHP code, IN A FILE THAT DOESN'T EXIST IN THE REPOSITORY, amazing, it's just amazing. Then he explained me why this file might be missing and how it's the deployment of this app ( btw the Devops guy it's really cool and I will invite him a beer ) . After that I checked the file and I see a random session_star in the first line of the code, without any configuration, eureka ! There was the cause and I only need to ask someone If that line it's necessary anymore, but oh they're on holiday, damn, well I'll wait till Monday to ask them. But once and for all that bug was done for ! 🎉
What do I learn ? PHP and that I don't want any more tickets of PHP 😆. -
When the CTO/CEO of your "startup" is always AFK and it takes weeks to get anything approved by them (or even secure a meeting with them) and they have almost-exclusive access to production and the admin account for all third party services.
Want to create a new messaging channel? Too bad! What about a new repository for that cool idea you had, or that new microservice you're expected to build. Expect to be blocked for at least a week.
When they also hold themselves solely responsible for security and operations, they've built their own proprietary framework that handles all the authentication, database models and microservice communications.
Speaking of which, there's more than six microservices per developer!
Oh there's a bug or limitation in the framework? Too bad. It's a black box that nobody else in the company can touch. Good luck with the two week lead time on getting anything changed there. Oh and there's no dedicated issue tracker. Have you heard of email?
When the systems and processes in place were designed for "consistency" and "scalability" in mind you can be certain that everything is consistently broken at scale. Each microservice offers:
1. Anemic & non-idempotent CRUD APIs (Can't believe it's not a Database Table™) because the consumer should do all the work.
2. Race Conditions, because transactions are "not portable" (but not to worry, all the code is written as if it were running single threaded on a single machine).
3. Fault Intolerance, just a single failure in a chain of layered microservice calls will leave the requested operation in a partially applied and corrupted state. Ger ready for manual intervention.
4. Completely Redundant Documentation, our web documentation is automatically generated and is always of the form //[FieldName] of the [ObjectName].
5. Happy Path Support, only the intended use cases and fields work, we added a bunch of others because YouAreGoingToNeedIt™ but it won't work when you do need it. The only record of this happy path is the code itself.
Consider this, you're been building a new microservice, you've carefully followed all the unwritten highly specific technical implementation standards enforced by the CTO/CEO (that your aware of). You've decided to write some unit tests, well um.. didn't you know? There's nothing scalable and consistent about running the system locally! That's not built-in to the framework. So just use curl to test your service whilst it is deployed or connected to the development environment. Then you can open a PR and once it has been approved it will be included in the next full deployment (at least a week later).
Most new 'services' feel like the are about one to five days of writing straightforward code followed by weeks to months of integration hell, testing and blocked dependencies.
When confronted/advised about these issues the response from the CTO/CEO
varies:
(A) "yes but it's an edge case, the cloud is highly available and reliable, our software doesn't crash frequently".
(B) "yes, that's why I'm thinking about adding [idempotency] to the framework to address that when I'm not so busy" two weeks go by...
(C) "yes, but we are still doing better than all of our competitors".
(D) "oh, but you can just [highly specific sequence of undocumented steps, that probably won't work when you try it].
(E) "yes, let's setup a meeting to go through this in more detail" *doesn't show up to the meeting*.
(F) "oh, but our customers are really happy with our level of [Documentation]".
Sometimes it can feel like a bit of a cult, as all of the project managers (and some of the developers) see the CTO/CEO as a sort of 'programming god' because they are never blocked on anything they work on, they're able to bypass all the limitations and obstacles they've placed in front of the 'ordinary' developers.
There's been several instances where the CTO/CEO will suddenly make widespread changes to the codebase (to enforce some 'standard') without having to go through the same review process as everybody else, these changes will usually break something like the automatic build process or something in the dev environment and its up to the developers to pick up the pieces. I think developers find it intimidating to identify issues in the CTO/CEO's code because it's implicitly defined due to their status as the "gold standard".
It's certainly frustrating but I hope this story serves as a bit of a foil to those who wish they had a more technical CTO/CEO in their organisation. Does anybody else have a similar experience or is this situation an absolute one of a kind?2 -
Why you literally took fucking half hour to fix this shit, I’m telling you, there is only a naming problem there, nothing else!
And his title is
“SeNiOr FrOnT-eNd DeVeLoPeR”4 -
I hate this feeling.
Changing stuff with a greamripers scythe around my neck called doubt because the available data isn't too convincing.
Then having to go big or nothing as it is an ecosystem change (e.g. changing the cipher suites of TLS, changing protocol - e.g. HTTP 1.1 to 2) so it needs to be consistent as otherwise fun stuff could happen (fun as in the grim reaper cuts off my neck except a few centimeters and plays "now your head is off, now your head is on" ).
To top it off - just few seconds after the change has happened people coming up in the support channel.
My hands are - mysteriously - not sweaty then. Rather cold.
Lil prayer to the heavens and getting the whiskey bottle...
Opening an ongoing discussion in support channel....
And they're discussing whether the page needs to have an additional arrow for going back to the last page or if the default page navigation is enough.
Constantly using @all so everyone gets pissed off due to being pinged every few seconds in a channel that was meant for emergency support.
Now my hands go from a dark red to a bright red, my nostrils flare out, my adrenaline goes through the roof and I literally wanna murder people....
Those days.
I hate those days.
And I hate the timing of some people...
Like they're deliberately fucking with me without knowing it, like the universe told them explicitly to do so just to fuck with me.
*gooozfraba*
And of course, everything else is fine and running smooth like butter, except that said discussion now goes on in a total flamewar so I get even more pings.
Sucks to be in management.
You have way to many rooms where people can annoy you.
To top it off - after being grumpy and pissed and angry for people just annoying the fuck out of me, I have to mediate.
Yeah. Cause the usual person is on vacancy.
*slowly strangling the whiskey bottle like homer does with bart*
Turns out after 15 mins listening to enraged UX designer vs Frontend Team Lead that UX designer meant a completely different thing - uploaded wrong screenshot, whole discussion was unnecessary.
*Nah. Fuck it. Drinking whiskey*
Reminding everyone what the fucking frigging support channel is meant for and that penis fights aka who got the longest schlong don't belong there....
"Yeah it was a mistake, but it wasn't so bad"
...
You pinged fucking 32 people like it was the end of the world, you ignorant fucktwads.
For over 5 mins.
For fucking frigging nothing except your tiny dicks and shitty egos.
*Second round of whiskey*
Back to work after a wasted half hour.
What says monitoring?
Ah. Everything's working.
At least luck hasn't failed me.
Good server. Brave server.
Then I hear this lil voice in my head: no.
The servers know your personality.
They're afraid. Terrified.
Somehow that thought makes me giggle always...
Childish? Maybe. But it helps on those days.... Funnily enough, remaining 3 hours noone said anything in any chat channel.
"I wonder why, I wonder how...."... *hum* -
TL;DR: I have some rambly shit to say...
Update on the Uni stuff: I think I got a pass in all the subjects. Two exams left but I am holding on. It's a big deal to me since last year I could barely do a single subject per semester - a subject I had failed a few times because of lack of interest and good ol' depression. Anyways, I persisted with that subject, got my Bachelor's in Food Technology and now I'm doing that Master's of mine... It probably looks wild to people here that I did that switch but I have always had a relationship with computers as long as I remember myself. So it's not surprising that as soon as I got a choice in what I *actually* wanted to do I chose this kinda thing. But I do have to rant that it took me 10 fucking years to choose! And that I did not choose it before choosing food technology which I will probably never use anyways. I wasted so much of my energy and time on that. I did elect programming as one of the subjects while doing food tech but I really should have moved to something else. But oh well. Guess I had to find out the hard way.
For all those reading, this is what it looks like when you're 30, have very little experience in doing programming for anything else than academics and are doing a major career switch through studies after struggling for 10 years with a 4-year Bachelor's. But such is life.
Also a bit off topic but I just cannot handle people not telling what they mean because of the inability or lesser ability to tell what that is in the first place.
I can't deal with the fact of how fucked human societies are. I just can't. I am way too nice for it. So I listen to stuff like true crime to really get a feel of how evil people can be. I know it's ~problematic~ or whatever, but to me it is a way of engaging with the lesser spoken side of human beings.
And maybe, just maybe, I should get checked for ADHD again because I feel like despite my therapy for depression, nothing really has changed with the ADHD symptoms I was diagnosed with. And maybe for autism since people have labelled me that way and it might explain some stuff... All that is to say I need some good mental care. And this society is shit for it. Hell, apparently one of the psychologists I was under the care of thought depression resulted from ungratefulness. All this while I was legit being abused. But that abuse has stopped now that I found a psychologist that is actually standing up for me. I just mourn for all the time I spent being depressed and how it fucked my memory and stuff. How much it affected me and all. I have no idea why I'm being this vulnerable but it feels somewhat fitting... How do you cope with being 30 and not remembering almost all your life? What you remember being what you managed to write down or has been negative enough it stuck in the brain for forever...
Just why am I fucking supposed to be all happy and shit when I am just tired of life because it is too goddamn much? I have no real reason to look forward to things, online friends and the offline one included. Because ultimately, I have no damn motivation to look forward to anything, really. I am supposedly doing better but in reality I am just getting better at going through the motions. The therapy, while mindblowingly effective, is not actually addressing the core cause of everything and just expecting me to fake it till I make it. And this is me saying that about CBT. Why should I have to tell myself things just to feel human? I am one and as long as I'm alive, nothing will change that. So why do I have to always feel like an alien wherever I am? So out of touch with myself that I don't have a self image or an ability to even tell what the actual fuck I want from life... I am getting better with the latter, but still. It hurts. I wanna shed so many tears but I'm frustratingly unable to do so.
I am just a human trying to human in this ocean of 8 billion humans. Maybe I will find some more connections, maybe I won't.
I wanna end this rambling session by a few things:
1. I will have to go to Canada at some point this year to see my in-laws and some other family over there...
2. I will probably have to seek a job there (for financial reasons it is much better for me to have one there and to work remotely in Georgia) and I have no idea of where to start since I am not the greatest material for it.
3. Life is going alright-ish.
4. I will hear from the startup company at some point this month.
5. I have plans for my future but no idea if they will ever come true at this point.
6. My family arrangement will have to change in more ways than one.
7. I should resume my unofficial first music album and engage in creative stuff because at the core, I have a need to do so.
8. Do I really have to do Duolingo again? I really want to not forget German and Russian, but I just never have practice. And Duolingo is surprisingly easy to forget to do for me.
The end.3 -
Seriously guys, how do you deal when remotely collaborating with lets say not the most motivated and competent devs?
Our scrum team got formed about 6 months ago from leftover devs of other teams, choosing a couple competent devs at the core and other devs who were kinda gotten rid of by their old teams, and after 6 months of working together I can see why.
Situation is that we are 7 devs in our team and 4 of devs are not pulling their weight. They are seniors on paper, but in reality not really.
They rarely take something complex to work on and even if they do, they make sure they take as much time as possible. Two of them are contractors who I imagine decided to treat the job as a paycheck and nothing more. There is no initiative, no push to make things better and in general attitude is to do bare minimum: only what is being asked and then delaying the hell out of tasks.
Im not exaggareting: Im talking about every possible way of dragging out the tasks: delaying communication, sitting around for a few days while not asking for new tasks to work on if they are blocked, also avoiding standups. Working for days on very basic comments in their MR's. Getting "sick" for a couple days on deadline when things get tough, so that someone else would come in, refactor and save the day. Once or twice it could be a coincidence, but nowadays I can already guess ahead of time what kind of trick they will pull now.
Our project is an android app where we have to support few different tablets, so the most recent new trick that I witnessed is devs avoiding hardware delivers, sometimes for months. Idea seems to be if you dont ping your team that you dont have hardware, then you can avoid working on related tasks with that hardware.
Worst part is that they get away with it. Our teamlead is a senior dev who is first time teamlead, doesnt code anymore and doesnt want to rock the boat. He is the type of teamlead who sets arbitrary deadlines, makes it sound that they are urgent and takes a few days off in the middle of chaos just before deadline. Restrospectives don't help at all and if I try to bring up stuff directly to him he tells me to bring it up during retrospectives. We discuss issues, rant a bit ant then continue carying on like nothing happened and nothing changes.
So little by little in the past 6 months we came to this point where 2-3 devs are carrying the weight of the team and are in a constant crunch mode, while others are allowed to slack. Its becoming ridiculous.
Problem is that this is starting to affect our morale. Only way that is left to keep my sanity right now is to pull away sometimes and also slack. Then I come back at full capacity, give my best for a couple weeks until I have to go and fix some basic leftover task that has been purposefully dragged out for 2 months and left unfinished, then I just want to scream and I know that its time to disconnect again.7 -
Anyone else notice that there is a decent set of super dickbag senior devs that help nothing and use every meeting as a soapbox session? Dafuq? Why be so condescending and rude... For the purpose of feeling intelligent? Us lowly Dev I's don't have any say in the current processes. Fuck off douchewalls.2
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The moment I knew I wanted to be a dev was very early in life, but I didn't realize it until I had gotten out of high school. My parents gave me my first computer when I was like 8 and it was my grandfather's old Windows 95 PC. I loved to play the Army Men game with the plastic figures like from Toy Story. I also tinkered around and found out how Word and some of the other programs worked. About two years later, I got his old Windows 98 PC. I continued to play around in Windows and discover some nuances of the operating system. My parents had a Windows XP machine at the time and they called me in every time they needed help. I got on their computer from time to time to use the Internet, where I discovered so many cool things. In junior high, we were forced to take a typing course where I honed my typing skills through playing games. I soon was able to easily complete all of the challenges. To understand my persona, you must know that I was bullied throughout elementary and high school. I was "the nerd" of our class and I wore that badge even with all of the negative energy that it came with. I received constant criticism, ridiculed for being intelligent (my paycheck isn't too funny now, is it losers?). I didn't care, though, my mission has and always will be to show them their wrong doing. I actually can't wait to have a reunion just to see how UNSUCCESSFUL they are. My parents didn't like my interest in gaming and technology either, but that's a rant for another day. After junior high, I wasn't exposed to much else until I got to college four years ago, where I took Fundamentals Of Computing. My professor was a true nerd (major Zelda fanatic), and he taught us how to program in Python. I began to love being able to create something literally out of nothing. He opened my eyes to a world where there was order and I could have control in a world where I've never had any control in before. Since then, I've only began to love my profession more and more. This is truly what I was born to do.
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Need some advice here.
So hello everyone! I recently moved abroad for work, for the sake of the experience and the excitement of learning how developers in Latin America tackle specific problems. To my surprise, the dev team is actually composed solely of Europeans and Americans.
I work for a relatively new startup with an ambitious goal. I love the drive everyone has, but my major gripe is with my team lead. He's adverse to any change, and any and all proposals made to improve quality of throughput are shot down in flames. Our stack is a horrendous mess patched together with band-aids, nothing is documented, there are NO unit tests for our backend and the same goes for our frontend. The team has been working on a database/application migration for about a month now, which I find ridiculous because the entire situation could have been avoided by following very rudimentary DevOps practices (which I'm shunned for mentioning). I should also add that for whatever reason containerization and microservices are also taboo, which I find hillarious because of our currently convoluted setup with elastic beanstalk and the the constant complaints between our development environment and production environments differing too much.
I've been tasked with managing a Wordpress site for the past 3 weeks, hardly what I would consider exciting. I've written 6 pages in the past two weeks so our marketing team can move off of squarespace to save some money and allow us more control. Due to the shit show that is our "custom theme" I had to write these pages in a manner that completely disregard existing style rules by disabling them entirely on these pages. Now, ironically they would like to change the blog's base theme but this would invertedly cause other pages created before I arrived to simply not work, which means I would have to rewrite them.
Before I took the role of writing an entire theme from scratch and updating these existing pages to work adequately, I proposed moving to a headless wordpress setup. In which case we could share assets in a much more streamline manner between our application and wordpress site and unify our styles. I was shot down almost immediately. Due to a grave misunderstanding of how wordpress works, no one else on the team seems to understand just how easy it is to fetch data from wordpress's api.
In any event, I also had a tech meeting today with developers from partner companies and realized no one knew what the fuck they were talking about. The greater majority of these self proclaimed senior developers are actually considered junior developers in the United States. I actually recoiled at the thought that I may have made a great mistake leaving the United States to look a great tech gig.
I mean no disrespect to Latin America, or any European countries, I've met some really incredible developers from Russia, the Ukraine, Italy, etc. in the past and I'm certainly not trying to make any blanket statements. I just want to know what everyone thinks, if I should maybe move back to the states and header over to the bay/NY. I'm from the greater Boston area, where some really great stuff is going on but I guess I also wanted a change of scenery.2 -
Has anyone else encountered this issue with installing a distro before?
So my colleague has installed Elementary OS 5.0 and he recommended me to do the same (on my personal dual boot laptop). However after the installation it doesn't reboot after clicking the button, and when I turn my laptop off and on again I get the grub as I should, choose elementary, I get the login screen all fine. But after logging in I only get the wallpaper and my cursor. I can't even open a terminal...
I've searched my ass off and everyone is saying to wait around 5 minutes before everything shows up after which you get to install graphic drivers. I've tried that but nothing happened so I just left it for the night hoping I could at least open a terminal in the morning, but there is still only the wallpaper and cursor.
I've tried pretty much anything at this point but I just can't get it to function. Is there anyone that has had such an issue before that could share a solution?18 -
Our owner's other company sells products online (or has the ability to anyways). Their current site is 7+ years old WordPress/Woocommerce and is seriously outdated because the site breaks if you update anything so we've been told to make a new site (finally). They also said they were going to release a whole new line up of products. So the first thing I tried to do was get them to nail down their product line and how shipping was going to be configured. I was told to just use the shipping from the previous site.
Turns out those shipping rates don't use any sort of math or automation at all, there is literally a manually set shipping value for every single product for every single shipping location (30*60) and even values for different quantities. And there's no way to export these rates into a readable table because the plugins they use shove all the data into the postmeta table, I'm forced to go through and put the data into a spreadsheet so that I can attempt to organize it and hopefully find someone way to automate it. Owner claims at one point that he has a similar spreadsheet that's more up to date but for some reason refuses to send it over or put me in touch with the right people in the shipping department.
I've gone through the shipping rates with the old products and the new products and organized them as best I can and each time I've gotten done and shown them the spreadsheet with their products and shipping, they add or change something which requires me to basically wipe the slate clean and start over eating another 50 or so hours of my time, which with everything else really means another month+ to find time to work on it between other projects.
After about a year they finished their products and I finally finished the planning and got approval to build it out for the site. Small victory!!
After about 60 hours plugging these values into the database (only about 1/3 done) I get an email from their head of shipping who tells me the values in my spreadsheet are "terribly inaccurate, in some areas by $100+" and that the data should not be used anywhere.
So after something like a year and a half and 200+ hours of work, the data I've been using to plan all this isn't even accurate. I'm trying not to go crazy here but this kind of shit is unacceptable. When we're done with this I'm going to send the owner an invoice to show him how much money he wasted on this because nothing was planned and he just wanted it built. There's a fucking process for a reason, when you don't follow the process you fuck everything up. If a client had pulled this shit and turned their simple site into this much work they would have been dropped. I get constant emails asking when the new site will be done and every time my answer is "I'm still waiting for x items that I asked for last time you asked where we were." He gets a couple things on the list and sends them back and then goes unresponsive for weeks at a time.
Management has been telling me that I seem more stressed lately but only one of them understands what's going on here when I explain it. The rest say stupid shit like "why don't you automate it" or "make an intern do it." You won't let me hire an intern and even if I did, I'm not sure I could explain how the shipping works now to even trust someone else to do it. I'm hoping when the shipping guy gives me the new sheet that maybe there's some easier solution here because I'm ready to start shooting people.2 -
I like how I'm the only programmer or tech-kid in my school, since everybody else is using there phones for SnapChat and texting in the middle of class.
While I'm over here talking about the insides of software and hardware like if I were the person that made them.
Seriously, I wish I could show my classmates that spending all of their time on apps and websites that sell your personal data is less fun (and basically stupid) than actually making what you want with nothing but a text editor and computer.
But oh well, 90% of my classmates are either assholes, cringy white girls (or Mexican girls), and the only people I find tolerable or even likable, are the people that don't talk much.
(Like me)8 -
I already got tired of “AI”. The hype train has been so ridiculous. It’s been months since at least 50% of the orange website is not about AI. Every other tool/company that I use is adding new gimmicky “AI” features.
It’s probably just me but I’m exhausted of AI…1 -
This is more of an essay than a rant. TLDR at the end. I simply can't choose from all the shitty lecturers I've had, so I'm going to have to go through them one by one. But of background. I'm currently in 7th year of college, I did a multimedia degree in 2 years, a intro course to Software Dev and I'm currently in my final year of my Software Dev degree. So let's start.
Intro Software Course
- we had a database module, which was thought by, I shit you not, the head of the psychology course in the college, she attempted to teach us Databases using access. And not even using SQL, using access GUI components and it's query builder. Need I say more?
1st year software dev
- We had a networking module, the guy that taught the labs, he literally didn't say more than 12 words the entire 12 week semester, his answer to any question you asked him was a grunt and "research it"
- We had a psychology module, I have no fucking idea why, but instead of learning something useful we were told to read this and get in touch with your feelings...
- database module. Yes we actually did SQL here, 12 weeks of select statements and normal form, talked about by a guy in a monotone voice, who sounded like he was contemplating bringing in an assault riffle some day. Also instead of using MySQL he decided to use Ingres. Why I will never know.
2nd Year Software Dev
- We had a module called Algorithms and Data Structures. The lecturer gave us problems she couldn't solve. Simple problems. She was also crazy. Absolutely nuts.
- Object Orientated Programming. I had this lecturer for 3 semesters up until 3rd year. This guy did COBOLT in college, graduated in the 70s or something and went straight into teaching, he taught us Java for nearly 2 years. He literally copied and pasted texts from PDFs and read through them in class. He told myself and another guy at one stage he really didn't care, and was just counting down the days to his retirement.
- Databases again, different lecturer from 1st year, taught us for 2 semesters (24 weeks) and somehow managed to teach us nothing.
3rd Year Software Dev
- software engineering.. This is where the biggest cunt I've ever met was introduced. He arrives into class 15 minutes late every time without fail, talks shit about stuff that has no relevancy to the topic at all, tries to turn everything into a rugby metaphor and every time you ask a question he somehow dodges it and swiftly changes topic. This cunts past profession? A Project Manager. Fucking typical. This dickhead has also thought me 2 other modules.
4th yr Software Dev
- El cunto mentioned above for 2 more modules. Need I say more.
- real time systems, this module took the piss, the module was written by the lecturer which is what earns his space here. Assignments given to us, which required more time to do than we had in labs so we had to work at home, the problem we that is we were using an obscure RTOS called OS9 which would only work on the college computers. When brought to the lecturers attention he just said "figure it out"
Internet of Things - There was 2 lecturers, each lecturer seemingly working off a different plan, one week you'd have one lecturer, the next would be the other one going on about something completely different and unrelated to anything else we'd done.
Some lecturers didn't even make this list as I couldn't be bothered trying to think back about how shit other ones were. These were the ones that always stood out in my mind.
My main take away point from this is that you go to college for the paper which says you have a degree. Learning things that are going to benefit you in a career is up to yourself.
TLDR; 90% of my college lectures were shit. You need to learn useful stuff yourself.1 -
My top lesson was realizing that I am a stubborn person, and that I was wrong to keep trying to implement unimplemented features past a deadline and that I need to understand when to give up. I also learned that I can't trust others to finish their part of something I start. There is nothing like seeing the entire backend you wrote be gutted by someone else because they "needed to learn how route handlers work by creating it themselves" and then seeing them not complete said route handlers.
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Random thoughts on more out of the box tools/environments.
Subject: Pharo
Some time ago I had shown one of my coworkers about Pharo and he quickly got the main idea behind it but mentioned how he didn't like the idea of leaving behind his text editor to deal with source code.
Some time last week I showed the dude some cool 3d animations you can do with Pharo while simultaneously manipulating the code to change them in real time. Now that caught his attention particularly and he decided he wanted to know more about the language but in particular the benefits of fucking around with an image based environment rather than a file based.
Both of us reached the conclusion that image based makes file based dev enviroments seem quaint in comparison, but estimated that it was nothing more than a sentiment rather than a fact.
We then considered what could be the advantage/disadvantages of such environments but I couldn't come up with anything other than the system not having something like Vim or VS Code or whatever which people love, but that it makes up for it with some of the craziest IDE tools I had ever seen. Plugins in this case act like source code repos that you can download and activate into your workflow in what feels something similar to VS Code being extended via plugins written in JS, and since the GUI is maleable as it is(because everything is basically just subsets of morp h windows) then extending functionality becomes so intuitive that its funny
Whereas with Emacs(for example) you have to really grind your gears with Elisp or Vimscript in Vim etc etc, with Pharo your plugin system is basicall you just adding classes that will convert your OS looking IDE into something else.
Because of how light the vm machine is, portability is a non issue, and passing pharo programs arround is not like installing Java in which you need the JVM.
Source code versioning, very important, already integrated into every live environment and can be extended to do pushes through simple key bindings with no hassle.
I dunno, I just feel that the tool is too good to be true. I keep trying to push limits into it but thus far I have found: data visualization and image modeling to work fine, web development with Teapot to be a cakewalk and work fine, therr are even packages for Arduino development.
I think its biggest con would be the image based system, but would really need to look into how this is bad by any reason other than "aww man I want vim!" since apparently some psychos already made Emacs and VS code packages for interfacing with Pharo source trees.
Embedded is certainly out of the question for any real project since its garbage collected and not the most performant cookie in the jar.
For Data science I can see some future, seems just as intuitive and interesting as a Jupyter Notebook actually, but the process can't and will not be the same since I still don't know of a way to save playground snippets unless you literally create classes for it, in which case every model you build gets saved inside of an object, sounds possible but, strange since it is not a the most common workflow in jupyter.
Some of the environment is sometimes glitchy, but it does have continuos development and have not found many hassles.
There is a biased factor from my side: I seem to be wired to understand the syntax and simple object model better than in other languages. To me this feels natural as if I was just writing ideas rather than code, mostly because I feel that there really ain't much in terms of syntax, the language gets out of my way and the IDE feels like the most intuitive environment in the world to me. I can see why some people would find it REALLY weird of counterintuitive tho.
Guess I really am a simple dude. -
Maxi-Rant, rest in the first comment!
Yay, I've caught up with my "watch later" list on YouTube! Next thing: Just quickly go through my subscribed channels and add old videos that I haven't seen yet to the watch later list so that I have more stuff to watch the next months. The easiest way to do that is to go to the "all uploads" playlist of the channel (that is luckily always linked now, it used to be hidden sometimes) and use "add all to" to get them on my playlist. Then sort out the stuff that I've already seen and turn on automatic sorting by date, easy. Yeah...
Firstly, in the new design there's no "add all to", I have to go to the old design. For my own playlists, there's a handy "edit" button to do that, but on other pages I have to do it manually. Luckily I have set Ctrl+Shift+1 as a shortcut for "&disable_polymer=true" long ago.
Next surprise: On "all uploads" playlists, there is no "add all to" button. It's on every single other playlist on YouTube, including "liked", "watch later", "favourites" and so on, just not there.
Fine, I'll just abuse my subscription playlist script that I already have by making a copy of it, putting the channel IDs in it and setting the last execution date to 1.1.2001. Little problem with that: Google apps scripts can run for at most 5 minutes and the YouTube API restricts it to add one video per second. So it doesn't work for more than 300 videos. I could now try to split it up by dates, but I didn't write the script myself and I don't know how it sorts the videos to add, so I'll just google for another solution instead.
Found one: Go to the video overview of the channel in the old layout, Ctrl+Shift+I, paste this little Javascript thing and it automatically clicks all the little clocks that add the video to the watch later list. Yay, that works! Ok, i'm restricted to 5000 videos, because that's the maximum size of a YouTube playlist, so I can't immediately add all 8000+, but whatever, that's a minor problem and I'll sort out later anyway. Still another little problem: For some reason I can't automatically sort the watch later list. Because that would be too easy.
But whatever, I'll just use "add all to" from there to add it to my creatively named "WL" list. If that thing is restricted by the same rate limit of 1 video per second, it should be done in about 1½ hours. A bit long, but hey, I'm dealing with 5000 videos. Waiting 2 hours... Waiting 3 hours... Nothing happens. It would be nice if it at least added them one by one, but no, it waits an eternity and then adds all at once. At least in theory, right now it does absolutely nothing.
Shortly considered running it for more hours or even days on my Raspberry Pi, but that thing already struggles when using Chromium normally, I shouldn't bother it with anything that has to do with 5000 videos.
Ok, what else can I do then? Googling, trying out different things, mainly external services that have their own concept of "playlists" and can then add them to an arbitrary playlist later...
Even tried writing my own Java program with the YouTube API, but after about an hour not even the example program in the YouTube API tutorial worked (50 errors and even more open questions, woohoo), so I discarded that idea.
Then I discovered "DiskYT". Everything looked like it would work and I'm still convinced that I can do it with that little pile of shit. Why is it a pile of shit? Well, for example the site reloads itself after a while, so it can at most add 700 videos to a playlist. Also I can't just paste the channel link (even though it recognises those links, but just to show an error message that it can't copy from channels). I can't enter/paste URLs, I have to drag them. The site saves absolutely nothing (should in theory work, but in practise it doesn't), so I have to re-drag everything on every try. In one network, the "authorise YouTube" button (that I have to press again on every computer) does absolutely nothing ("inspect" reveals that there isn't even any action bound to the button), in another network the page mostly doesn't work at all or the button to copy from playlists is suddenly gone or other weird stuff. Luckily I have the WiFi at home, there it works in theory. But just on my desktop PC, no other device, wow. I tried to run it on my new laptop, but it's so new that it still has the preinstalled OS and there I can't deactivate going to standby when closing the laptop, so while I expected it to add 5000 videos, it instead added 4 and went to standby. But doesn't matter, because it would have failed at about 700 anyway. Every time I try to use this website, I get new problems, but it seems to still be the best option, because everything else just doesn't do anything. This page at least got to 700 before.
Continuing in first comment!4 -
!rant
Is there somewhere an overview article/guide on the most popular software associated with web development? There are just so many technologies I know nothing about - Gulp, Grunt, Docker, Webpack, Bower and who knows what else..
Everyone seems to be using something else and it's just total chaos for me.2 -
This is probably the worst place to start my Rant saga but this is recent (this is one of the last few episodes of a 3 series cluster fuck of a job so you're missing out on all the straws that go into breaking the camels back and making him unaccommodating)
TL;DR I do good work, management dont like me and go out their way to try and fuck up my days
So, lets start, I'm a contractor, got funeral Tuesday, book leave, book WFH for day after.
I leave in 3 weeks, woman who is the CIO's right hand bitch takes me into a room the next day or so in the morning to discuss my WFH day. Leave on tuesday is cool but this WFH day...there's only so long until I'm gone so they want me to stay in for more face-to-face time blah blah blah (considering this woman isn't even part of the project I'm working on anymore because she decided to deflect it onto a underqualified junior with no PM experience)
So I sit there, thinking of all the blood and sweat that I have shed, the mountains I've moved just to be told to move the mountain somewhere else and whether coming in would kill me (in other words im fucking burnt out!!! I have built their GDPR database and app backend single-handedly with no requirements, project managers who can't plan and being chastised for asking for documentation/plan/anything written down and having the CIO who is also the fucking DPO ignore any emails/slack I send him relating to the project and having to keep up with a team of devs....).
So because there was a momentary silence, she decided to fill the gap
"Oh, you've done some good work so far and I wouldn't want you to ruin it all in these last 3 weeks. So just come in on the Wednesday so that we can have you here."
Hmm....yeah...i didn't notice what she had ACTUALLY said there, still thinking about can i be fucked? So she decides to add
"...there's only 3 weeks left, wouldn't want you to burn any bridges. Remember, we still have to give you a reference"
....Okay....shots fired. So i respond
"You saying, if I take a WFH day, you'll give me a bad reference?"
"Noooo no no no, not saying that, just that you've done good work and we wouldn't want you to ruin it"
"With one wfh day?"
"We just want you to come in because the developers might be coming here that week"
"Oh... I hear that...what day?"
"I dunno, it's not been booked yet"
".............................I'll think about it"
"There's nothing to consider"
*Start leaving room* "I'll think about it...."
So cool, obviously, had a think, decide to shoot over an email (or more accurately, a collection of bullets). Which basically said, in devRant translation, "Fuck y'all, I'm WFH on that day, I wish a motherfucker would fuck up my reference, we can go that way if you want it. *snaps fingers* I. WISH. YOU. WOULD! "
Woman says "I wasn't threatening you, was just saying...dont ruin your last 3 weeks, wouldn't want you to burn any bridges and that we still have to give you a reference"
What kind of Godfather comment is that?
Come in today, the CIO, who is a prick who don't like me for whatever reason, sends me long email trying to disrespect me and in the midst says "I’m sorry that you have chosen to react like this, I’m sure that [my bitch] was conveying a position that your last three weeks of contract are crucial for a smooth handover. I have made the decision to not require you to work from home on Wednesday. I understand you are on leave on Tuesday and therefore this is now extended to include Wednesday. I look forward to seeing you back in the office on Thursday. I hope this will make the situation better for all parties."
.................................thought you lot needed me in the office to ensure a smooth handover................logic..........people.............where the fuck do you get yours from!?!?!?!? All this just so they can say "We made the decision at the end :cool:" -
What's wrong with Stack Overflow? Honestly, somebody asked how to do something that should in most practical cases be avoided. I provided an answer and here comes the downvote army for no reason. I explicitly said it should be avoided but for the sake of experiment I posted the solution because I think people should explore what they can do with the language instead of feeling constricted to a set of standard recipes.
I don't buy into claims that this irrational elitist moderation is necessary for SO to be useful.
In the end, even their search sucks and most of us find it easier to search SO using Google instead of their native search.
I remember when I was a student at a programme which admitted both people with linguistic and computational background how hard it was for the linguists to even start writing code and I would always try to help them and relieve the frustration.
For me, it took years to start writing a high quality code and more than 6 years to become productive while writing quality code.
Do we forget we all began somewhere? I honestly don't care about building an immense "objective" problem solving tool for someone else to earn money at the expense of treating people the way SO community does.
I think it would be way better if SO managed to distribute questions in a more relevant manner and stopped holding onto their "objectivism", which is in itself a questionable concept.
Even simply separating questions into how popular they are could move the useful ones forward without radically cancelling and hurting new people.
I like to see people thinking differently and see their questions reveal what they know and what they don't. There's nothing wrong with pointing people to already answered questions, correcting them etc. And I get that there are many people being annoying when asking, but I never forget there is a person on the other side and I would never want to destroy their potential just to massage my ego and "reputation". And heck who cares about their reputation? Show your Github, CV, talk smart in an interview and you'll get the job. And in the end, wouldn't you feel greater inner joy from helping a person grow instead of seeing only your reputation?4 -
Do you ever feel like now that you reached your goal of being a developer that there is nothing left to look forward to? I feel like all the best parts of my life are over. I will never have a first love again, I will never be young again, and all that’s left is working a shit job where everyone else could give two shits less about craftsmanship so I can survive and then eventually dying.
A week ago I climbed on to the ledge of the parking garage and intended to jump. But I got scared and climbed back over and threw up everywhere. I feel like I am in a better place now, but I still don’t know what I am living for. It all feels so pointless. Does anyone else on devRant feel that way right now?4 -
I have a small NUC-like machine in my home with an old external hdd connected to it. I use it to run my local gitlab, nextcloud and to test a few websites I build for the lolz.
If you too have a homelab, whether it's a single raspberry or an entire room full or racks, you know damn well that everything you have running locally as a web service keeps going until it doesn't, for whatever fucking reason. This time, it was the turn of my nextcloud.
The machine has arch linux running, I chose it since I already use it on my coding laptop and being a rolling release means I don't have to manually upgrade to a newer version, risking various fuck-ups and consequent screaming of profanity.
The downside is that arch is a bleeding-edge distro, so, despite being pretty good for what concerns security, as updates are pushed out some packages may still require legacy software to work as intended, since obviously not all developers for all packages can release simultaneously.
The problem was that php reached 8.2.x but nextcloud couldn't use anything beyond 8.1, so the highlighted solution was to download php-legacy, a package with a set of utilities which the cloud could use instead of mainline php.
Pretty easy, right? fuck my life, here we go.
I edited apache-httpd's configurations to link the new libraries, updated every reference in every virtual host that could possibly screw up the web server.
Done.
Then I went on and disabled the php-fpm mainline, creating a new systemd unit that would instead run the legacy executable and afterwards I edited nextcloud's additional configs so they use that instead.
Done, getting a bit dizzy, but I reboot everything and breathe.
At this point the migration should be complete, but wait, the server returns an error saying that the application is still trying to use php 8.2+...wait, what in the sysadmin Christ?
Back to nextcloud config, everything is set, everything else in every other fucking php-legacy and web server is fine, the old fpm service is disabled, I am confused, and why in the FUCKING FUCK is the new php-fpm unit failing to start at boot with "error 78/config - directory not found"? Hello? Am I being trolled by a shitty dual-core amazon fake NUC?
Maybe yes, cause it turns out that the unit was referencing a directory in the external hdd, which gets mounted at boot time after the unit itself starts, so nothing much, just a matter of tinkering with cron jobs, a reboot and at least this one is off my balls.
But why still isn't the server responding correctly? why? WHY?
After slamming my cock on the keyboard here and there scrolling back through all the config files I think to myself, hmmm, my gitlab is working flawlessly, well yeah, I didn't need to install the whole web stack, everything was nice and easy wrapped in a docker container...so why am I even here, why the fuck am I bothering with all this layered web-app bullshit, why don't I just run the up-to-date docker image that someone else has already set up for me, back up all the data and reupload them on the application?
Oh joy, you can't imagine, after 3...almost 4 hours of pure computer-touching the relief I had from seeing the blue web page with the "welcome to nextcloud" title.
Right now it's copying back all the files, and the external hdd is now linked to include the data folder.
Like really, everything was solved in two lines of bash.
I am still fuming, but at least I learned a valuable lesson, if you want a service up for yourself, implement it and deploy it as fucking easy straight-forward as you can, giving MAXIMUM priority to already fully-working options that are out there just waiting to be downloaded and used. I swing my scrotal sack on web-apps elegance as long as it's MY homelab in MY place.
Eat a fat dick php.
sudo pacman -Rns nextcloud
sudo systemctl disable --now php-fpm-legacy
sudo pacman -Rns php-legacy
sudo pacman -Rns $(sudo pacman -Qdtq)2 -
I started the job I'm currently at some months ago, and since then I've been pretty shitty. There are some days where I feel less shitty, I feel like I accomplished something, but at the end of the day, it feels shitty.
I had been here previously, and my gut had told me since then to quit, and it did the same again since I started working here again. I'm afraid I'm losing my time here, time that could be precious doing something else that would mean more to me.
They didn't keep up with some parts of the contract, I'm receiving pretty much nothing since I'm in a non-existent "formation", it's overall a whole load of crap.
I was supposed to do some stuff with Python, but then they told me to focus on Java and do some stuff after I was trying to learn (by myself) Python for a month, then they told me to do stuff with another completely different language again. WTF? I felt like I was shit.
Even in the last time I was working here, I was feeling the same, people were asking me to do webpages and other web things and then discarded them (literally) after I worked on them for weeks or they asked me to remake them COMPLETELY.
I had also been promised money for some side-jobs like doing websites for their friends, but in total I've received like 2/6 of what I was supposed to get.
Overall, I feel like my experience here has been shit, but I'm scared I won't find another job for these next 6 months (I'm taking a year off college to get some money)
If I follow my gut, my heart, and try to "fight" for my happiness, I'm leaving
If I follow my brain, and possibly become even more sad and miserable, I'm staying.
Who's the strongest?
I know you might even say "it's just some months" but those months will make a complete difference when I look backwards at my journey. I believe we cannot waste any time in life being unhappy.
Why couldn't they keep all their promises, not take advantage of me paying me so low... I'm completely sure I would receive more money somewhere else.
Well, I guess this rant is about my employer and the conflict between my gut and my brain.
Why can't y'all be friends and be on the same page? -
Nothing like trying to understand a single 1500-line source file that implements the API usage in the frontend. Without a single comment.
No, wait. There are comments! But it's only commented-out code. Or explicit shit (like "gets the version" before a getAssetVersion function).
Functions with unused parameters? ✅
Weird var names (like "tmpX")? ✅
`console.log(var)` everywhere? ✅
Long-ass lines with 150+ chars? ✅
Duplicate code? ✅✅
Not a single interface was used so everything is var: any? ✅
Random unreadable RegEx? ✅
If-chains of 6+ more levels? ✅
Many `else if` towers instead of a switch? ✅
And did I mention it was written by a fucker who can't speak proper English so shit like visiable, cataloge and isExist is everywhere? Yeah.
Fun day at the office reading spaghetti code 🙃 -
(Note: I got a bit carried away while writing this, so the end result is a lot longer than I expected. Apologies for the long post!)
The beginning of my programming journey started with a book.
This was back in 7th grade. I had some basic exposure to BASIC (pun maybe intended?) from our school curriculum, but it was nothing too interesting as our teachers never really treated it as anything important. They would stress a lot on those Microsoft Office chapters (yes, we actually studied Microsoft Office as part of our computer science course at school) and mostly ignore the programming chapters because I dare say many of them struggled with it themselves. So although I had been exposed to *some* programming, it was mostly memorizing the syntax without actually understanding what was going on.
Then one day there was this book fair thing going on at this local Carrefour (for those of you who've no idea, it's a pretty famous hypermarket chain) in this mall, and for some reason my mother and I were in that mall on that day. Now the interesting thing is that this usually never happens -- I usually visit malls with my dad or my friends, this is the only instance I remember where I had actually visited one with just my mom. This turned out to be fortuitous. My father is the kind of person who's generally not amenable to any kind of extraneous shopping requests. My mother, on the other hand, was and remains pliable.
So I basically saw this book -- Sams' Teach Yourself JavaScript in 24 Hours -- being sold at half price. I vaguely remembered having read somewhere that JavaScript is a good introductory programming language (and it helped that this was the time when I was getting into a Google-craze -- I basically saw some photos of Google Zurich and went all HOLY SHIT THAT'S WHERE I NEED TO WORK WHEN I GROW UP (for those of you who haven't seen it, I recommend googling it. That office is the bomb) -- and I'd also read that you need programming skills to join Google). So I begged and begged my mum to buy that book, and thankfully she did.
Back home I returned with my new prize under my arm. Dad took one look at it and scoffed that I'll never actually use it. Pretty much entirely out of spite (to prove him wrong), I attacked the book with a zeal. I still remember how I felt when I wrote my very first JavaScript program (printing the current system date in an h1 tag) and marveling at the output. I guess that was when something struck -- the realization that this was probably what I wanted to do in life.
Fast forward to today, and I've never looked back and wondered what it would be like to have done something else.
PS: for all you beginners out there, JavaScript is a horrible language. Please start with something like Python. Also there are better resources than Sams' Teach Yourself JavaScript in 24 Hours available, that I just didn't know of back then. I'd recommend Eloquent JavaScript any day. -
Was talking with a coworker about a fictional scenario. I described walking up to the secretary receiving desk and standing there eating donut holes. There is currently a box of donut holes sitting there. I talked about standing there eating the donut holes and just starting blankly at the secretary. If the secretary tries to engage in conversation I would just act as if nothing has been said. Just keep eating donut holes. I described this as being Aggressively Anti-Social (AAS).
I will need to add this to my ideas for a tech movie. Does anyone else think up alternate universe scenarios? These crack me up.7 -
!dev
There are no right answers in parenting, but there are sure as hell wrong ones and if the fucking backfire effect is too much to keep you from realizing that half of your stupid fucking decisions are delusional at best then you should probably start rethinking some things. I fucking hate dealing with other people fucking up and being stupid and I know I'm going to have to keep dealing with it in one form or another but god why I'm so done with this I just fucking don't want to deal with anyone anymore I don't want to deal with myself anymore
I dunno I don't have anyone to rant to so I can't like be specific here because it's public af but you know typing this makes me feel a little better but I still just don't want to deal with this shit anymore I don't even know what I do want to do there's like nothing the positive feedback is going away and I don't know what to fucking do with myself and I don't know how to change anything I can't fucking fix anything I mean I can fix my shitty code but I'm never getting anywhere with that and whenever I want to fix anything that's actually important I just fuck up regardless of how hard I try I just don't want to fucking try anymore I don't know if I'll actually hit post but I have to put this somewhere so probably but ugh I don't even fucking ugh literally all of my problems are so fucking dumb and small and elementary but I CAN'T FUCKING DO ANYTHING I keep ranting about these fucked up people I have to deal with and yeah they fucking suck and sometimes I wish they didn't exist but I know I'm just as if not more of an idiot and everyone would probably be better off if I didn't exist but wait no that would have happened but you guys don't get to know about that because it's specific and putting that here would fuck shit up but someone else could so that so much better and I don't know everyone who interacts with me is just hurting themselves like fuck why do some friends like blades better than me maybe because I'm even less caring and even more damaging than a stupid fucking inanimate sharp piece of metal god fucking ugh okay I can't focus on anything why is this even okay side rant why are atheists so fucking hated like yes maybe some can't understand their motives for like doing things but nobody can really understand each other's like religious people all use god or gods in their own way why do you have to think of people who have zero gods as opposed to your nonzero as less human than you there's so much wrong with that okay that side rant is over but this whole thing is a side rant so cool fuck my life lol uuh I don't know I don't want to stop typing I don't know why though I guess I just actually I have no fucking idea I'm just here doing this I should be like fucking asleep I'm passing the fuck out after this ugh okay okay okay okay okay okay okay umm I really want to quote a certain person that I really hate right now and dissect them and prove every single fucking stupid argument they make wrong but I feel like that would not be good since this is so public but I swear I hate this and you know what if you're thinking that yes I AM A FUCKING WHINY BITCH DEAL WITH IT I'M WHINING YOU DENSE FUCKER YOU DON'T HAVE TO POINT IT OUT AND FEEL SMUG IT'S BETTER TO VENT HERE THAN A LOT OF OTHER WAYS SO JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP OKAY ACTUALLY FUCK IT CALL ME OUT ON IT I NEED SOMETHING TO TAKE THIS OUT ON GOD AAAAAAH okay uuh yeah that's fun I'm a fuck up okay okay so you ask "how can you be a fuck up you're so young her der" okay being young generally is a disadvantage because you haven't had opportunity but boy have I and I sure fucked every single one of those up so yeah fun stuff you know woo haha mmkay I wish I had friends online this late because then I could like rant to a person and shit I mean this community is people but not people I know and it's not really back and forth as much and ugh okay right uuh yeah good um ugh I used to be able to get this shit out by doing something I'm good at but now I'm shit at everything and I can't motivate myself and it's all just bottled up and there's so much shit and nothing works and fuck there's probably a simple solution to everything I'm facing but I'm such a dense piece of shit that I can't find any of those stupid fucking ugh okay now I'm looking at my stupid hands typing ugh I hate the things right back up here uuh uuh I have 500 charas left lets fucking go I don't want to stop I mean I do want to stop but like by that I mean I just want to not exist I do want to keep typing here because it's the only thing distracting me but yeah uuh right um some people were like wtf happened with your stalking thing and this isn't where I should put it but fuck it whatever some weird guy just logged on for 10 mins to take a screenshot of the time being 2:22:22 and logged off and boom the school year ended uuh yeah kay right fuck I have to end it now
Aaaah okay uuh right bye I'm really sorry if you actually read that whole thing4 -
So I have this habit of googling weird things, obvious things and random things. Over time, I've stuck to using incognito all the time because Google suggestions and targetted ads annoy me (almost) like nothing else. It's a really nice thing to know that some algorithm out there is not judging you.
On the downside, you'll have to constantly explain to people around you that you're not a porn addict. :/3 -
So, the past 2 months I get random freezes on my OS(Ubuntu 18.04). ONLY the mouse is working, nothing else but REISUB.
This happens sporadically, but seemingly ONLY WHEN I'M 30-80% DONE AND MY "ADD" HAS ME WORKING ON 4 DIFFERENT THINGS AT ONCE.
Disabling docker hasn't helped.. Ensuring using less than 50% RAM doesn't help. Changing browsers, cleaning my VSCode extensions, shifting to XMonad(lightweight DE) from gnome(which almost worked for almost a couple of days), changing graphics drivers, downgrading kernel AND JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING ELSE.. DOES. NOT. WORK.
AAARGH MY MOTHERFUCKING 7 YEAR OLD LAPTOP WITH SSD IS PROBABLY SINGING ITS LAST TUNES. TODAY IS THE LAST TIME I'LL LET FREEZES HAPPEN.. I'M RUNNING MEMTEST86 AND WILL COPY ALL MY LATEST LOGS AND LEARN A BUNCH OF STUFF I'LL NEVER WANT TO TOUCH AGAIN. I HAVE TO SPEND SUPER VALUABLE TIME TO MAKE SURGERY ON THE MIRACLE THAT IS MY ANCIENT LAPTOP. I'M SO AFRAID THAT IT FALLS APART WHEN OPENING IT.. THE PLSTIC FOR THE COOLER IS BROKEN AND THE SHIT HASENT HAD THE BEST LIVING CONDITIONS (SOME TIMES -5c OTHER 40+)
I'm aware that I should go to the forums, which is my next move. But reading on there, it could be a graphics drive or, kernel problem, a faulty harddisk or RAM problems. It also goes without saying that I'm backing up for the 14th time the past month.
My thing is, that I have dual boot and running Windows for 14 hours straight with loads of loads, while really getting punished, renders a completely functional computer...4 -
grrrr
last week my laptop died out of nowhere. it stopped recognizing the one drive in it. I lost a bunch of files, code. evidently ssds fail out of nowhere unlike hdds which slow down and error all the time before ultimate failure
my warranty for this 4k$ laptop expires in 12 months and this was month 13. nice. I don't like warranties anyway, and the site said they would replace things with "comparable hardware, sometimes refurbished" wtf no thanks
so I found some guides of people upgrading the drive in this laptop. seemed easy enough, unlike older laptops from back when I was in school where you had to take out 12 things first to get to anything
unfortunately I needed a specific screwdriver. I walked several miles to the nearby hardware store thinking they would have said screwdriver. the old guy in the basement said there was a kit where it started from t4 (I needed t5), but he had just sold out his last one. I checked their online store with a friend for a while on my way back home and we kept finding torx screws but the wrong sizes. fuck.
he said screwdrivers this small are only used for electronics, asked if there's any other hardware stores and there aren't near me
however it occurred to me this strip mall has a lot of suspicious computer stores on it. so I walked back up the street looking for one.
found one with a suspicious poster, saying it was an internet cafe but the last point on their poster said they do repairs. walked in. nobody is in there, suspiciously 2 desks with old computers all empty, then you go forward in this dark cave, with plastic wrapped implements on the walls, you finally find a glass shield and behind it was a meek Asian man that took me a moment to notice
I asked him if he had t5
he handed me a plastic baggy full of tiny screwdrivers, for me to take one
I asked if they're t5
the shape looked right, but I can't tell the size
I took one out and tried to find size marking, but nothing
he didn't seem to know what I was asking when I asked about its size
he said if it's wrong I can come back and trade what I took for another. lol
I asked him if I can buy it, since that wasn't evident to me due to how sus this random bag of screws is being thwarted on me lmao
he said 5$ cash
I gave him a fiver
this sus shop literally avoiding taxes lmao
walked back home, ate food cuz starving, tried the screw and FUCK, it's too big. put laptop in a bag and hauled ass fast, checked on maps the store I got this from closes in a few minutes so I really wanted to make it there because what if the receptionist changes and they don't know I took this screw. I got no receipt
got there right before closing, put my laptop down, said it was too big. he used a few screws until he found one that fit, said I could try it and I did (so scam aware!). bingo bango. now I got a screwdriver that fits the laptop.
walked home, sat down and took apart the laptop. been a few years since I did so. the hardware inside looks entirely unrecognizable to me. started cycling through YouTube videos of laptops of the same name as mine, but their insides don't look like mine. is this ram? is this the NVMe? what the fuck is anything?
finally found a video guide where the guy was quite informative. not the same laptop but he's informative enough I figure it out. ram and drives are so different and weird now. took parts out, put them back in, rebuilt laptop, tried to boot, same problem. jiggling parts like this works with desktops often, guess not with a failed NVMe
so I'm screwed. get on Newegg and bought a new NVMe. should arrive in 3 days via Purolator
yesterday was day 3. it was at a sort facility near me, then out on delivery, but nobody ever came. then it went back to sorting. now it's out on delivery again. I'm sitting here thinking that's a little weird, wasn't Purolator the delivery company that had me go 2 hours outside of town to pick up a 15lb desktop case once?
... and then I looked up Reddit comments... then reviews on the purolator facility it's at... I am screwed. last time iirc they were out for delivery for 3 days, never tried delivery, then on the last day at the end of day they stated they attempted delivery but no go. that was bullshit. then it ended up at that facility. which takes 2 hours to fucking reach.
the reviews are so bad... the facility has 1.2 star reviews with thousands of them. they won't leave even a stub, then seem to not know where your package is at the facility, or they deny you have the right to pick it up despite ample IDs, or someone ELSE picks it up and it's not there. they also ship your package back after 5 days, so if they don't leave a note and you miss it tough luck...
fucking hell
also rumours that they just hire "contractors" in normal cars to drop off packages? wat? lol
AND EVERY REVIEW HAS A BOT COMMENT. THEIR SUPPORT IS JUST A CHATBOT
I thought this was just a small hiccup
I think I might not have a drive for weeks now
fucking hell
now I'm sitting on my porch4 -
What it's like to be a network
engineer...translated into normal people speak
User: I think we are having a major road issue,
Me: What? No, I just checked, the roads are
fine. I was actually just on the roads.
User: No, I'm pretty sure the roads are down
because I'm not getting pizzas.
Me: Everything else on the roads is fine. What
do you mean you aren't getting pizzas?
User: I used to get pizzas when I ordered
them, now I'm not getting them. It has to be a
road issue.
Me: As I said, the roads are fine. Where are
you getting pizzas from?
User: I'm not really sure. Can you check all
places that deliver pizzas?
Me: No I don't even know all the places that
deliver pizza. You need to narrow it down.
User: I think it is Subway.
Me: Okay, I'll check...No, I just looked and
Subway doesn't deliver pizzas.
User: I'm pretty sure it is Subway. Can you just
allow all food from Subway and we can see if
pizza shows up?
Me: Sigh, fine I've allowed all food from
Subway, but I don't think that is the issue.
Usher: Yeah I'm still not getting pizza. Can you
check the roads?
Me: It's not the roads, the roads are fine. I'm
pretty sure Subway isn't the place.
User: Okay, I found it. It's Papa Johns.
Me: Okay, I looked and Papa Johns does
deliver pizza. Is it the local Papa Johns or one
in a different town?
User: I don't know. Can you allow pizza from
all Papa Johns to me?
Me: No I can't do that. Can you get me an
address for Papa Johns?
User: No, I only know it as Papa Johns. Can
you get me all the addresses of all Papa Johns
and I'll tell you if one of them is correct?
Me: No, I don't have time for that. Okay, I
looked at the local one and it looks like they
have sent you pizza in the past and they are
currently allowed to send you pizzas. Try
ordering a pizza while I watch.
Usher: Yeah still no pizza. I'm guessing they
are getting blocked at the freeway. Can you
check the freeway to make sure they can get
through?
Me: No, this is a local delivery. They aren't
even using the freeway.
User: Okay, well then it has to be a road issue,
Me: No, the roads are fine. Okay, I just drove
from the Papa Johns to the address they have
on file for you and there is nothing there.
User: Hmm, wait we did move recently.
Me: Did you give your new address to Papa,
Johns?
User: No, I just thought they would be able to
look me up by name.
Me: No they need your new address. What's
your new address?
User: I'm not really sure. Can you look it up?
Me: Sigh, give me a second...Okay, I found
your address and gave it to Papa Johns. Try
ordering a pizza now.
User: HEY! PIZZA JUST SHOWED UP!
Me: Okay, good.
User: (To everyone else they know) I apologize
for the delay in the pizza but there was a major
road issue that was preventing the pizza from
getting to me. The network engineer has fixed
the roads and we are able to get pizza again.
Me: But it wasn't the roads...whatever.
User: Oh, can you also check on an issue
where Chinese food isn't getting to me? think
it may be a road issue5 -
Today, Someone I am working for asked me to port a REST API to GraphQL.
The REST API response is a JSON containing only 3 fields.
Does it makes sense to even consider porting this to GraphQL?
To be clear, The scope of the project was finished as in, All the features and whatever were already written and there was nothing else to be added to the API.4 -
Hello all (App devs) I have finalized all APIs and here is the postman collection for you. I have been working on the chat page so excuse me for my delay but I finished all the system all that is remaining is the chat. I will be working on it tonight.
Please let me know if there is anything wrong.
Dev 1: thank you will see then asap.
Dev 2: why do u want to make me lost we said u deliver the chat first and then we move forward with the app.
Me: well I had some difficulties with the chat so I finalized all else and u can fix those while I fix the chat
Dev 2: no this is not what we agreed on. This is propostrous. I will not do anything anymore. I need the chat to finale x y and z.
Me: dude the chat has nothing to do with x y and z u can finalize those and then fix the chat!
Dev 2: no I don't understand this is not right.
Me: dude I built the backend I know what u need for x y z. Anyway why all the blame and the destructive approach?
Dev 2 don't think we r kids we r not kids .. (bullshit talk)...
This is the scenario that happens Everytime a pussy of a Dev is late and is ignorant of their job and all about blame it on the weakest point.
Therefore guess what's drafted ?!
MY RESIGNATION PAPER!1 -
Death is when you cannot tell yourself apart from everything else. Thus, the concept of “you” is cut away by Occam's razor.
That's it, there is nothing more to it. The biological aspect doesn't matter, as it's fundamentally unknowable according to Heidegger.
That said, DMT is probably a good way to experience death. After all, it is linked directly to production of a specific chemical inside your brain that is only present during birth and death. I never tried any drug whatsoever, and I think DMT is a very good first thing to try.
If you want to know more, google “ego death”. I'm not the first to think of what I say.11 -
Browser automation is a PITA. I’m going on my fourth side mission with this crap and I honestly still look like a newbie. I’ve tried Java Selenium with Chrome, Excel VBA with IE9, Vanilla JS in the browser console, and tonight I’m thinking to concoct some kind of hybrid CDP & Selenium approach in Chrome. Never used CDP before, not even sure where to start but I heard it sucks like anything else unless you get some extra libraries and plugins and stuff.
It doesn’t help that I can’t get just anything I want from our IT Department. It would be another PITA to ask for puppeteer. If puppeteer is totally legit please let me know.
Selenium sucks. The buttons don’t click, the waits don’t wait. Its unusable. Iframes are annoying as all hell but I can deal with that. HTML Tables suck too. It doesn’t help I have to restart my whole java program and whole Chrome every time an element doesn’t get picked correctly. Scripting one single element can take all fucking night.
Chrome dev tools what the fuck. Why the fuck is the DOM explorer in the same window as the web page I’m working on?? I can’t undock it. Am I supposed to use a fucking TV screen to work with this bastard?? If I use the remote chrome tools on port 9225 or whatever - It Still Renders The Whole Fucking Page Alongside The Console. Get Out Of My Way!!! The nested HTML CODE IS ONE CHARACTER WIDE ALL THE TIME. I can’t for the life of me figure out what the fuck I’m looking at. Haven’t you people ever heard of A HORIZONTAL SCROLL BAR at least.
Fuck I tried using getElementById, and the Xpath thing and its not all that great seeing I have seemingly 1000s of nested Divs all over the god damned place oftentimes containing a single element. I’m finally on chrome now should I learn Jquery now? I mean seriously wtf.
I use this one no code tool for dev it has web automation built in. As you can imagine its just as broken as anything else!! I have 10 screens to navigate it gets stuck on the second screen all the damn time. Fuck I love clicking the buttons when my script misses and playing catch up with it.
So as a work around to Selenium not waiting even 1 millisecond when I use explicit wait or implicit wait or fluent wait, I’m guessing maybe I can attach both Chrome Dev Tools Protocol (CDP as ive called it earlier) and selenium to the same browser and maybe I can use CDP to perform a Wait with any degree of success. Selenium will do nothing more than execute vanilla javascript Element.click(); This is the only way I know to even ACTUALLY use selenium beyond the simplest html documents possible. Hell I guess CDP can execute js idk.
I can’t get the new selenium that has CDP but I do have some buggy ass selenium from a few years back. Yeah, I remember reading there was a pretty impactful regression defect in the version I have. Maybe I’m being gaslighted by some shit copy of selenium?
The worst part is that I do seem to be having issues that the rest of the internet’s devs do not seem to be having. People act like browser automation is totally viable and pretty OK. How in the fuck hell is my Selenium Test Suite going to be more reliable my application under test?!!?? I’ll have more fucking bugs in my test suite than in my application. Today, I have less than half a test script and, I. already. fucking. do.
I am still SUPER PISSED at the months of 12 hour days (always 8 hours spent on normal sprint work btw only 4 to automation) I spent trying to automate our regression tests. I got NOWHERE.
I did learn a lot about HTML and JS though like I’m not that mad…but I’m just trying to emphasize my achievement on my task was zero.
The buttons don’t click. There are so many divs and I swear you sometimes need to select a div somewhere in the middle sometimes to get it working. The waits don’t wait. XHR requests are invisible. Java crashes 100 times before I find an xpath and thread.sleep() combo that works. I have no failure modes to use — Sometimes I click the same element 20x in a script because I have no way to know if it clicked the first time! Sometimes you gotta scroll the page to make the click work. So many click methods all broken. So many wait methods all broken. Its not just the elements don’t click! There are so many ways to click that almost work but surely they all fail the same in the end. ok at this point I’m just repeating myself…
there yet even more issues that I can’t remember…and will soon remember as I journey into this project yet again…
thanks for reading I hope I entertained and would love to hear your experience!6 -
Who else is frustrated/burnout at building products that never gets into production?
When I work for a company I always tend to do everything with good practices, spend a lot of time thinking on the best ways to build x feature, and then the company falls into the infinite loop of adding stupid features, and then I've been working for 2 years and 0 paid customers. Funny that we've Sentry, GA, Hotjar sitting there doing nothing.
I'm honestly hating the startup environment rn. Good thing is that I've learnt a lot and salary is good. But also I lost all motivation.
Any recommendations for a tired dev?7 -
I've adopted this per task desktop management think. Anyone else do this?
I make a new desktop, for a given task, support ticket, or whatever. And when I'm 'done'. I keep everything (ticket, whatever I was working on in vs code, related emails) open but minimize it all except the pull request waiting to happen.
If I get some feedback on the PR / changes I just fly through my virtual desktops and there it is and I'm ready to work.
Then after the PR goes through ... I keep it open for a bit anyway to be sure nothing bad happens.
Then after a while I shut it all down assuming that it is working well.
All this so I don't have to fire everything up again for a rando request or dork up or whatever.2 -
This is the first project that I remember. There were probably others before it, but nothing really stands out before this.
My buddy and I got an Independent Study together in high school. Our goal was to write a video game. We harbored no illusions that it was going to be the best game ever or anything, it was supposed to be a project that taught us enough to move on to something else later.
Our chosen tool for this endeavor was Flash 4.0, back before Adobe bought Flash. I don't know why we thought it would be a good idea to do this. I think it was because we could let Flash handle all the graphical stuff and we could focus on the behavioral side.
I don't really remember much about how the project turned out other than we both learned a lot about what not to do.
Luckily, the teacher overseeing our Independent Study felt that the lessons learned were more important than the product, so we got high marks. -
Let's start by saying that I fucken know nothing.
Not even how to fucken start this rant.
I have to build a simple game for a university project.
In Java.
Since everyone in my team chose plain swing/awt, and for many other reasons, I jumped on that band wagon.
Knowing myself and that I quit the project last year, I chose an extremely simple type of game with very simple goals and Use-cases.
So far so good.
Logic, layer, and nearly everything else is nearly finished.
Since about 3 month.
Friends helped me restructure my game for better layer separation and I couldn't be happier with how that turned out.
But all those 3 month, my main problem has persisted.
I can't get it to draw a thing on the jframe.
For 3 month.
3 fucken month.
And now I don't even get a jFrame anymore.
WHAT THE FUCK
Git, tell me, what have I changed?
...
Nothing related to construction of the frame?
Ok, I removed a call to repaint there.
Let's putt it back.
NOPE, no JFrame.
What the actual fucken hell?
This is where you can stop reading, after this there will only be me crying about everything.
Sweet tears. 😭
In-between I got a frame, and something was drawn onto it.
But only on construction.
I couldn't get the paint chain to run a single time after that.
I have a nice thread with some loops that is supposed to update the logic and make a call to repaint/ update/ refresh the frame so that the game runs nicely with 60fps.
Logic works fine, but no call to what ever does anything related to painting.
This morning I had the idea that it might be because of the thread.
Refactored that the game loop runs in the main thread and here I now am without a jFrame.
And still 3255 letters to go.
I don't even even even even even..,...rant wtf fuck fucking fuck fuck! java nojframe jframe wth what the fuck pls kill me java swing java awt5 -
In reply to this:
https://devrant.com/rants/260590/...
As a senior dev for over 13 years, I will break you point by point in the most realistic way, so you don't get in troubles for following internet boring paternal advices.
1) False. Being go-ahead, pro active and prone to learn is a good thing in most places.
This doesn't mean being an entitled asshole, but standing for yourself (don't get put down and used to do shit for others, or it will become the routine) and show good learning and exploration skills will definitely put you under a good light.
2)False. 2 things to check:
a) if the guy over you is an entitled asshole who thinkg you're going to steal his job and will try to sabotage you or not answer acting annoyed, or if it's a cool guy.
Choose wisely your questions and put them all togheter. Don't be that guy that fires questions in crumbles, one every 2 minutes.
Put them togheter and try to work out the obvious and what can be done through google or chatgpt by yourself. Then collect the hard ones for the experienced guy and ask them all at once. He's been put over you to help you.
3) Idiotic. NO.
Working code = good code. It's always been like this.
If you follow this idiotic advice you will annoy everyone.
The thing about renaming variables and crap it's called a standard. Most company will have a document with one if there is a need to follow it.
What remains are common programming conventions that everyone mostly follows.
Else you'll end up getting crazy at all the rules and small conventions and will start to do messy hot spaghetti code filled with syntactic sugar that no one likes, included yourself.
4)LMAO.
This mostly never happens (seniors send to juniors) in real life.
But it happens on the other side (junior code gets reviewed).
He must either be a crap programmer or stopped learning years ago(?)
5) This is absolutely true.
Programming is not a forgiving job if you're not honest.
Covering up mess in programming is mostly impossible, expecially when git and all that stuff with your name on it came out.
Be honest, admit your faults, ask if not sure.
Code is code, if it's wrong it won't work magically and sooner or later it will fire back.
6)Somewhat true, but it all depends on the deadline you're given and the complexity of the logic to be implemented.
If very complex you have to divide an conquer (usually)
7)LMAO, this one might be true for multi billionaire companies with thousand of employees.
Normal companies rarely do that because it's a waste of time. They pass knowledge by word or with concise documentation that later gets explained by seniors or TL's to the devs.
Try following this and as a junior:
1) you will have written shit docs and wasted time
2) you will come up to the devs at the deadline with half of the code done and them saying wtf who told you to do that
8) See? What an oxymoron ahahah
Look at point 3 of this guy than re-read this.
This alone should prove you that I'm right for everything else.
9) Half true.
Watch your ass. You need to understand what you're going to put yourself into.
If it's some unknown deep sea shit, with no documentations whatsoever you will end up with a sore ass and pulling your hair finding crumbles of code that make that unknown thing work.
Believe me and not him.
I have been there. To say one, I've been doing some high level project for using powerful RFID reading antennas for doing large warehouse inventory with high speed (instead of counting manually or scanning pieces, the put rfid tags inside the boxes and pass a scanner between shelves, reading all the inventory).
I had to deal with all the RFID protocol, the math behind radio waves (yes, knowing it will let you configure them more efficently and avoid conflicts), know a whole new SDK from them I've never used again (useless knowledge = time wasted and no resume worthy material for your next job) and so on.
It was a grueling, hair pulling, horrible experience that brought me nothing in return execpt the skill of accepting and embracing the pain of such experiences.
And I can go on with other stories. Horror Stories.
If it's something that is doable but it's complex, hard or just interesting, go for it. Expecially if the tech involved is something marketable.
10) Yes, and you can't stop learning, expecially now that AI will start to cover more and more of our work.4 -
Diesel is an incredibly beautiful ORM, but the size of the DSL means that despite Rust's state-of-the-art IDE integration I'm back to editing code, waiting for it to compile (as soon as I stop typing) and changing random shit if there are red squiggles.
The error messages are totally unreadable, all in-code references point me to meaninglessly generic abstractions, and a good portion of the impls are generated by macros so I can't even look at an actual final definition.
The confidence that if it compiles it'll run is stil there, but nothing else.11 -
At home. Phone and backup drives connected to the computer, nothing else (no external monitors, no mouse, no extra keyboard). I like it zen. One of the drives makes this turbine-like sound when on, which gives me the "ALL SYSTEMS GO" alert I need. Couple of albums lined up on [insert music streaming service here], boosting on the Bluetooth speakers.
I can work for 12 hours straight like that. (Twelve hours later, takes eyes off the screen, *blink blink blink*, is there any food in the house, oh, wow, my kidneys are killing me, when was the last time I took a piss?, also I should definitely take a shower, but while I'm doing that I can think about that class interfacing with that other one and making them... wait, I should write this down... sits down again)2 -
Liferant. I feel annoyed If I compare my efforts to efforts of my "friends". I put 500% more in my self education, my career and professional life and I earn just a tiny bit more. I don't even know if I have friends anymore. We do not have a single thing common. While I want to develop, learn something, build something useful for people, they only want to drink, going out etc. Before we had some lan parties some game night but it was long ago. I lost any interest in travel and parties. I don't enjoy alcohol, I still consume it when I'm with them because there nothing else to do. I also become vegan about 2.5 years ago and those bbq`s are just pain in the ass. Plus I heard the sentence "show me your friends and I tell you your life" - uff.. I had never a single person who I knew personally and who has similar mindset like I do. Shall I start to look for friends? Even the thought feels kind of pathetic to me. I'm a freaking island in middle of the society who is trying to make it better but it's fighting against it with full force. I'm tired. I'm not suicidal and I still enjoy the life, but I'm crazy alone in what I like to do.3
-
Well I will Program ai to do another job as long as possible.
When nothing else there is to do I will either find something to do or enjoy as our goal (automate things that far that we are not needed) is fulfilled.
Don't think it will ever happen but would be quite nice. -
Looking at @striker28 's rant made me think of my time I did my MSc and I think it needs it's own separate rant so here it goes:
So I did an MSc at one of the big league unis in London. First clue was during week 1 where in one of the class a mature student asked whether there would be actual coding during the course. There was an audible gasp from everyone else! Once the lecturer said the unfortunatly they wouldn't be you could hear the sigh of relief from the students...
Next up was all the lectures being placed in the freakin' basement of the university in crap, smelly rooms with annoying ticking A/Cs whereas all the social siences, business and other subjects had lecture halls and classrooms above ground. The contempt for CS from the university's direction was palpable.
Then there was the relegation to the theory-only (i.e. abstract with pen/paper) "tutorial" to the hand of T/As with bugger-all teaching experience. In short most were terrible and should've found a way to abscond themselved from this obligation which was part of the terms of their phd grants unfortunatly.
Further into the course there was the "group project". Oh boy! Out of the 5 in the group my now mature student friend and I were the only one commiting to the repo. There was either no code and a lot of bullshit from the others or crap code that didn't even compile despite their assurances it was all good.. Someone clearly never actually coded and pressed "run" in their lives which is fucking surprising since they've managed to graduate with a BSc and get into a MSc somehow. None of the code "made" by the other 3 persons made it into the master branch for release.
The attitude was that of "We (hahahah) wrote loads of code. We'll get a great mark!". At that stage the core wasn't even complete and the software didn't work yet.
Some of the courses where teaching things already 10 years out of date and when lecturer where pressed on that the few mature students that happen to be there the answer was always "yes, we are planning to update it for next year". Complete bullshit. Didn't help that some of the code on the lecture slides was not even correct! I mean these guy are touted as "experts" in their field...
None of the teory during the entire year was linked to any coding. Everything was abstract with no ties to applied software engineering. I.e. nothing like the real world.
The worst is that none of the youger students realised they were being screwed over and getting very little value for their money. Perhaps one reason why these evaluation forms have such high scores given on them. If you haven't had a job and haven't lived outside academia yet there is nothing to compare it to. It tends to also fall into confirmation bias (hey it's a top UK university, it must be worth it afterall! Look how much they ask for).
By the end of the year I couldn't wait to get the hell out. One of the other mature student sumed it quite well: "I will never send my children here."
Keep in mind that the guy had just over a decade of software engineering experience in the industry and was doing this for fun.
In the end universities are not teaching institutions. The lecturers's primary job is research and their priorities match that. Lectures tend to be the most time efficient teaching format for the ones giving them but, on their own, are not for the consumer.
To those contemplating university for CS: Do the BSc. Get your algo/datastructure chops and learn the basic theory. It is interesting. Don't get discouraged by the subject just because it is taught badly.
Avoid the MSc unless you want to do a phd and go for an academic carrer. You are better off using that year and the money to learn more on your own and get into colaborative projects (open source) on top of some personal ones. Build up your portfolio. It will be cheaper and more interesting!2 -
When you dont want to code a 100+ field form but still doing bcz you made it to office and there is nothing else to do
-
I recently joined a project team in my company whose client is a BIG (and I mean BIG) tech company.
We offer marketing solutions to the client. This means we create websites that showcase the company and all the good stuff that they do.
When I was going through my ramp-up meetings, my lead gave me some dummy projects to build just to get an idea of where I stood as a web developer.
So, it was one of those Photoshop mockups that were to be made entirely using vanilla JS, CSS3, HTML5 and nothing else.
There came many points where I had to align items either horizontally or vertically. So, I used flexbox to do it.
I submitted my code to the lead and while going through it, he commented, "Why do you use flexbox? It is no good. Use float instead." And I looked at him in utter confusion.
Tell me, is it wrong to use flexbox? Should I have used float instead? -
I recently joined a good MNC as a .net fullstack dev and right now contributing mostly to the frontend part to one of our projects. I have another team member writing the APIs and when i look at how the middletier is written and how APIs are structured, its just plain shit nothing else. It hardly follows any restful principles, returns weird response code, no design patterns at all, in short its a 10 year experienced dev writing code like a fresher.
I tried to communicate my concerns in a nice way but they were not taken very well. And when later I am asked to work on that codebase it will be like jumping in a pile of shit.
Now my question to you wonderfull people out there is, how do you handle situations like this? Do you have any suggestions for me please?5 -
Before he began dropping the 20K proposed to remodel my flat, I told my father I much preferred a contractor who was recommended by someone I knew, as opposed to using a big corporation like Home Depot. FAMOUS LAST... a neighbour in my building highly recommended the contractor we chose. And, week 7 [or is it 8?] of what was proposed to take no longer than two weeks has begun afresh!
On Friday the fellow who is the owner of the contract remodeling company was here touching the paint. He was here because I forbade the two painters he sent to do the initial painting job.
My internet cut out suddenly around 1300 Friday. He set to leave for the weekend shortly after that. I mentioned the outage to him. The essence of his reply was that there was no way it could have had anything to do with him. The following day, my internet provider sent a tech out to diagnose the problem. What was the problem? The head of the remodeling firm removed a face plate from the wall where there were telephone wires and disconnect them when he tore the wires as he replaced the face plate.
Although the tech told me he wasn't going to charge my account the $85.00 fee for his services because the outage was caused within my flat, I wish to be sure of this. Which brings us to the punchline.
My internet provider is a lame ass business model, dreamed up by a squint-eyed ex-circus monkey, never well endowed in the top story, and now just plain sad.
There were some 911 outages in Washington State last Thursday night. All during the day Friday when you dialled their freephone #. the recorded announcement, before saying anything else, told you they were experiencing heavier than usual call volumes, and my wait would be greater than `10 minutes. Fine. What fried my La Croix silk was that after their customer service dept closed for the weekend, that outgoing message remained.
Today, I wanted to contact my provider to see if they would know if the $ was going to be charged to my account. After pressing the 'send' key, my computer came back with an error message, saying they were having technical difficulties. So, I went on over to the 'chat' page. There's nothing to click on to take me to this enfabled location. So, can't reach them by phone unless I want to hear, every 30 seconds whether or not I wish to, how sorry they are for my delay.
A few years ago I would've used this as an excuse to have a technicolour meltdown. The reason I'm posting this is that I am now able to see beforehand what I'll be doing to myself getting upset over the circumstances. When I do reach somebody, I'm going to tell them as lightly as possible, that if they were an airline, I wouldn't board any of their aircraft. Ever. -
#Suphle Rant 7: transphporm failure
In this issue, I'll be sharing observations about 3 topics.
First and most significant is that the brilliant SSR templating library I've eyed for so many years, even integrated as Suphle's presentation layer adapter, is virtually not functional. It only works for the trivial use case of outputting the value of a property in the dataset. For instance, when validation fails, preventing execution from reaching the controller, parsing fails without signifying what ordinance was being violated. I trim the stylesheet and it only works when outputting one of the values added by the validation handler. Meaning the missing keys it can't find from controller result is the culprit.
Even when I trimmed everything else for it to pass, the closing `</li>` tag seems to have been abducted.
I mail project owner explaining what I need his library for, no response. Chat one of the maintainers on Twitter, nothing. Since they have no forum, I find their Gitter chatroom, tag them and post my questions. Nothing. The only semblance of a documentation they have is the Github wiki. So, support is practically dead. Project last commit: 2020. It's disappointing that this is how my journey with them ends. There isn't even an alternative that shares the same philosophy. It's so sad to see how everybody is comfortable with PHP templating syntax and back end logic entagled within their markup.
Among all other templating libraries, Blade (which influenced my strong distaste for interspersing markup and PHP), seems to be the most popular. First admission: We're headed back to the Blade trenches, sadly.
2nd Topic: While writing tests yesterday, I had this weird feeling about something being off. I guess that's what code smell is. I was uncomfortable with the excessive amount of mocking wrappers I had to layer upon SUT before I can observe whether the HTML adapter receives expected markup file, when I can simply put a `var_dump` there. There's a black-box test for verifying the output but since the Transphporm headaches were causing it to fail, I tried going white-box. The mocking fixture was such a monstrosity, I imagined Sebastian Bergmann's ghost looking down in abhorrence over how much this Degenerate is perverting and butchering his creation.
I ultimately deleted the test travesty but it gave rise to the question of how properly designed system really is. Or, are certain things beyond testing white box? Are there still gaps in the testing knowledge of a supposed testing connoisseur? 2nd admission.
Lastly, randomly wanted to tweet an idea at Tomas Votruba. Visited his profile, only to see this https://twitter.com/PovilasKorop/.... Apparently, Laravel have implemented yet another feature previously only existing in Suphle (or at the libraries Arkitekt and Deptrac). I laughed mirthlessly as I watch them gain feature-parity under my nose, when Suphle is yet to be launched. I refuse to believe they're actually stalking Suphle3