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As a long-time iPhone user, I am really sorry to say it but I think Apple has completed their transition to being a company that is incompetent when it comes to software development and software development processes.
I’ve grown tired of hearing some developers tell me about Apple’s scale and how software development is hard and how bugs should be expected. All of those are true, but like most rules of law, incompetence and gross negligence trumps all of that.
I’m writing this because of the telugu “bug”/massive, massive security issue in iOS 11.2.5. I personally think it’s one of the worst security issues in the history of modern devices/software in terms of its ease of exploitation, vast reach, and devastating impact if used strategically. But, as a software developer, I would have been able to see past all of that, but Apple has shown their true incompetence on this issue and this isn’t about a bug.
It’s about a company that has a catastrophic bug in their desktop and mobile platforms and haven’t been able to, or cared to, patch it in the 3 or so days it’s been known about. It’s about a company, who as of a view days ago, hasn’t followed the basic software development process of removing an update (11.2.5) that was found to be flawed and broken. Bugs happen, but that kind of incompetence is cultural and isn’t a mistake and it certainly isn’t something that people should try to justify.
This has also shown Apple’s gross incompetence in terms of software QA. This isn’t the first time a non-standard character has crashed iOS. Why would a competent software company implement a step in their QA, after the previous incident(s), to specifically test for issues like this? While Android has its issues too and I know some here don’t like Google, no one can deny that Google at least has a solid and far superior QA process compared to Apple.
Why am I writing this? Because I’m fed up. Apple has completely lost its way. devRant was inaccessible to iOS users a couple of times because of this bug and I know many, many other apps and websites that feature user-generated content experienced the same thing. It’s catastrophic. Many times we get sidetracked and really into security issues, like meltdown/spectre that are exponentially harder to take advantage of than this one. This issue can be exploited by a 3 year old. I bet no one can produce a case where a security issue was this exploitable yet this ignored on a whole.
Alas, here we are, days later, and the incompetent leadership at Apple has still not patched one of the worst security bugs the world has ever seen.
81 -
Hi, I am a Javascript apprentice. Can you help me with my project?
- Sure! What do you need?
Oh, it’s very simple, I just want to make a static webpage that shows a clock with the real time.
- Wait, why static? Why not dynamic?
I don’t know, I guess it’ll be easier.
- Well, maybe, but that’s boring, and if that’s boring you are not going to put in time, and if you’re not going to put in time, it’s going to be harder; so it’s better to start with something harder in order to make it easier.
You know that doesn’t make sense right?
- When you learn Javascript you’ll get it.
Okay, so I want to parse this date first to make the clock be universal for all the regions.
- You’re not going to do that by yourself right? You know what they say, don’t repeat yourself!
But it’s just two lines.
- Don’t reinvent the wheel!
Literally, Javascript has a built in library for t...
- One component per file!
I’m lost.
- It happens, and you’ll get lost managing your files as well. You should use Webpack or Browserify for managing your modules.
Doesn’t Javascript include that already?
- Yes, but some people still have previous versions of ECMAScript, so it wouldn’t be compatible.
What’s ECMAScript?
- Javascript
Why is it called ECMAScript then?
- It’s called both ways. Anyways, after you install Webpack to manage your modules, you still need a module and dependency manager, such as bower, or node package manager or yarn.
What does that have to do with my page?
- So you can install AngularJS.
What’s AngularJS?
- A Javascript framework that allows you to do complex stuff easily, such as two way data binding!
Oh, that’s great, so if I modify one sentence on a part of the page, it will automatically refresh the other part of the page which is related to the first one and viceversa?
- Exactly! Except two way data binding is not recommended, since you don’t want child components to edit the parent components of your app.
Then why make two way data binding in the first place?
- It’s backed up by Google. You just don’t get it do you?
I have installed AngularJS now, but it seems I have to redefine something called a... directive?
- AngularJS is old now, you should start using Angular, aka Angular 2.
But it’s the same name... wtf! Only 3 minutes have passed since we started talking, how are they in Angular 2 already?
- You mean 3.
2.
- 3.
4?
- 5.
6?
- Exactly.
Okay, I now know Angular 6.0, and use a component based architecture using only a one way data binding, I have read and started using the Design Patterns already described to solve my problem without reinventing the wheel using libraries such as lodash and D3 for a world map visualization of my clock as well as moment to parse the dates correctly. I also used ECMAScript 6 with Babel to secure backwards compatibility.
- That’s good.
Really?
- Yes, except you didn’t concatenate your html into templates that can be under a super Javascript file which can, then, be concatenated along all your Javascript files and finally be minimized in order to reduce latency. And automate all that process using Gulp while testing every single unit of your code using Jasmine or protractor or just the Angular built in unit tester.
I did.
- But did you use TypeScript?37 -
One of our web developers reported a bug with my image api that shrunk large images to a thumbnail size. Basically looked like this img = ResizeImage(largeImage, 50); // shrink the image by 50%
The 'bug' was when he was passed in the thumbnail image and requesting a 300% increase, and the image was too pixelated.
I tried to explain that if you need the larger image, use the image from disk (since the images were already sized optimally for display) and the api was just for resizing downward.
Thinking I was done, the next day I was called into a large conference room with the company vice-president, two of the web-dev managers, and several of the web developers.
VP: "I received an alarming email saying you refused to fix that bug in your code. Is that correct?"
Me: "Bug? No, there is no bug. The image api is executing just as it is supposed to."
MGR1: "Uh...no it isn't. Images using *your* code is pixelated and unfit for our site and our customers."
MGR2: "Yes, I looked at your code and don't understand what the big deal is. Looks like a simple fix."
<web developers nodding their heads>
Me: "OK, I'll bite. What is the simple fix?"
<MGR2 looks over at one of the devs>
Dev1: "Well, for example, if we request an image resize of 300, and the image is only 50x50, only increase the size by 10. Maybe 15."
Me: "Wow..OK. So what if the image is, for example, 640x480?"
MGR1: "75. Maybe 80 if it's a picture of boots."
VP: "Oh yes, boots. We need good pictures of boots."
Me: "I'm not exactly sure how to break this to you, but my code doesn't do 'maybe'. I mean, you have the image from disk.
You obviously used the api to create the thumbnail, but are trying to use the thumbnail to go back to the regular size. Why not use the original image?"
<Web-Dev managers look awkwardly towards the web devs>
Dev3: "Yea, well uh...um...that would require us to create a variable or something to store the original image. The place in the code where we need the regular image, it's easier to call your method."
Me: "Um, not really. You still have to resolve the product name from the URL path. Deriving the original file name is what you are doing already. Just do the same thing in your part of the code."
Dev2: "But we'd have to change our code"
Mgr2: "I know..I know. How about if we, for example, send you 12345.jpg and request a resize greater than 100, you go to disk and look for that image?"
<VP, mgrs, and devs nod happily>
Me: "Um, no that won't work. All I see is the image stream. I have no idea what file is and the api shouldn't be guessing, going to disk or anything like that."
Dev1: "What if we pass you the file name?"
<VP, mgrs, and devs nod happily again>
Me: "No, that would break the API contract and ...uh..wait...I'm familiar with your code. How about I make the change? I'm pretty sure I'll only have to change one method"
VP: "What! No...it’s gotta be more than that. Our site is huge."
<Mgrs and devs grumble and shift around in their chairs>
Me: "I'm done talking about this. I can change your code for you or you can do it. There is no bug and I'm not changing the api because you can't use it correctly."
Later I discovered they stopped using the resize api and wrote dynamic html to 'resize' the images on the client (download the 5+ meg images, and use the length and width properties)22 -
If Doctors Were Like Coders
(cross-posted from https://medium.com/@c09b6133a238/...)
Problem: The patient has a broken leg.
Solution:
1. Ask the patient to reproduce the exact scenario that resulted in the broken leg. Watch closely to see if the leg breaks again. Check for consistency by repeating the scenario a few more times.
2. Explain that this isn’t an intended use case for the leg, and besides, it only affects one person. Ask the patient if, all things considered, he really wants to prioritize his broken leg over your other work.
3. Point out that the patient’s other leg performs just fine under the same circumstances. Ask if he can use his other leg instead, at least as a workaround.
4. Attach several accelerometers to the broken leg and break it again. Stare at the data received from the accelerometers, then shrug and declare it useless.
5. Decide that the patient’s problem must be in his spleen. After all, that’s the only part of his body you don’t really understand.
6. Track down the people who created the patient. Ask them if he’s ever had spleen problems before. When they seem confused, explain that he has a broken leg. Ignore them when they tell you that the spleen they created could not possibly cause a broken leg.
7. Ask Google where a person’s spleen is. Spend half an hour reading the Wikipedia article on Splenomegaly.
8. Open the patient and grumble about how tightly-coupled his spleen and circulatory system are. Examine the spleen’s outer surface to see if there are any obvious problems. Inform him that several of his organs are very old and he should consider replacing them with something more modern.
9. Compare the spleen to some pictures of spleens online. If anything looks different, try to make it look the same.
10. Remove the spleen completely. See if the patient’s leg is still broken. If so, put the spleen back in.
11. Tell the patient that you’ve noticed his body is made almost entirely out of cellular tissue, whereas most bodies these days are made out of cardboard. Explain that cardboard is a lot easier for beginners to understand, it’s more forgiving of newbie mistakes, and it’s the tissue franca of the Internet. Ask if he’d like you to rebuild his body with cardboard. It will take you longer, but then his body would be future-proof and dead simple. He could probably even fix it himself the next time it breaks.
12. Spend some time exploring the lymph nodes in the patient’s abdominal cavity. Accidentally discover that if the patient’s leg is held immobile for six weeks, it gets better.
13. Charge the patient for six weeks of work.14 -
Frack he did it again.
In a meeting with the department mgr and going over a request feature *we already discussed ad nauseam* that wasn’t technically feasible (do-able, just not worth the effort)
DeptMgr: “I want to see the contents of web site A embedded in web site B”
Me: “I researched that and it’s not possible. I added links to the target APM dashboard instead.”
Dev: “Yes, it’s possible. Just use an IFrame.”
DeptMgr: “I thought so. Next sprint item …what’s wrong?…you look frustrated”
Me: “Um..no…well, I said it’s not possible. I tried it and it doesn’t work”
Dev: “It’s just an IFrame. They are made to display content from another site.”
Me: “Well, yes, from a standard HTML tag, but what you are seeing is rendered HTML from the content manager’s XML. It implemented its own IFrame under the hood. We already talked about it, remember?”
Dev: “Oh, that’s right.”
DeptMgr: “So it’s possible?”
Dev: “Yea, we’ll figure it out.”
Me: “No…wait…figure what out? It doesn’t work.”
Dev: “We can use a powershell script to extract the data from A and port it to B.”
DeptMgr: “Powershell, good…Next sprint item…”
Me: “Powershell what? We discussed not using powershell, remember?”
Dev: “It’s just a script. Not a big deal.”
DeptMgr: “Powershell sounds like a right solution. Can we move on? Next sprint item….are you OK? You look upset”
Me: “No, I don’t particularly care, we already discussed executing a powershell script that would have to cross two network DMZs. Bill from networking already raised his concern about opening another port and didn’t understand why we couldn’t click a link. Then Mike from infrastructure griped about another random powershell script running on his servers just for reporting. He too raised his concern about all this work to save one person one click. Am I the only one who remembers this meeting? I mean, I don’t care, I’ll do whatever you want, but we’ll have to open up the same conversations with Networking again.”
Dev: “That meeting was a long time ago, they might be OK with running powershell scripts”
Me: “A long time ago? It was only two weeks.”
Dev: “Oh yea. Anyway, lets update the board. You’ll implement the powershell script and I’ll …”
Me: “Whoa..no…I’m not implementing anything. We haven’t discussed what this mysterious powershell script is supposed to do and we have to get Mike and Bill involved. Their whole team is involved in the migration project right now, so we won’t see them come out into the daylight until next week.”
DevMgr: “What if you talk to Eric? He knows powershell. OK…next sprint item..”
Me: “Eric is the one who organized the meeting two weeks ago, remember? He didn’t want powershell scripts hitting his APM servers. Am I the only one who remembers any of this?”
Dev: “I’m pretty good with powershell, I’ll figure it out.”
DevMgr: “Good…now can we move on?”
GAAAHH! I WANT A FLAMETHROWER!!!
Ok…feel better, thanks DevRant.11 -
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 -
Anyone know this bitch hacker 127.0.0.1 story?
WORST HACKERS OF ALL TIME
CONTINUED IN THE COMMENTS BECUASE IT IS SO LONG...
TLdr bitch hacker hacks himself by localhost
bitchchecker (~java@euirc-a97f9137.dip.t-dialin.net) Quit (Ping timeout#)
bitchchecker (~java@euirc-61a2169c.dip.t-dialin.net) has joined #stopHipHop
<bitchchecker> why do you kick me
<bitchchecker> can’t you discus normally
<bitchchecker> answer!
<Elch> we didn’t kick you
<Elch> you had a ping timeout: * bitchchecker (~java@euirc-a97f9137.dip.t-dialin.net) Quit (Ping timeout#)
<bitchchecker> what ping man
<bitchchecker> the timing of my pc is right
<bitchchecker> i even have dst
<bitchchecker> you banned me
<bitchchecker> amit it you son of a bitch
<HopperHunter|afk> LOL
<HopperHunter|afk> shit you’re stupid, DST^^
<bitchchecker> shut your mouth WE HAVE DST!
<bitchchecker> for two weaks already
<bitchchecker> when you start your pc there is a message from windows that DST is applied.
<Elch> You’re a real computer expert
<bitchchecker> shut up i hack you
<Elch> ok, i’m quiet, hope you don’t show us how good a hacker you are
<bitchchecker> tell me your network number man then you’re dead
<Elch> Eh, it’s 129.0.0.1
<Elch> or maybe 127.0.0.1
<Elch> yes exactly that’s it: 127.0.0.1 I’m waiting for you great attack
<bitchchecker> in five minutes your hard drive is deleted
<Elch> Now I’m frightened
<bitchchecker> shut up you’ll be gone
<bitchchecker> i have a program where i enter your ip and you’re dead
<bitchchecker> say goodbye
<Elch> to whom?
<bitchchecker> to you man
<bitchchecker> buy buy
<Elch> I’m shivering thinking about such great Hack0rs like you
bitchchecker (~java@euirc-61a2169c.dip.t-dialin.net) Quit (Ping timeout#)
bitchchecker (~java@euirc-b5cd558e.dip.t-dialin.net) has joined #stopHipHop
<bitchchecker> dude be happy my pc crashed otherwise you’d be gone
<Metanot> lol
<Elch> bitchchecker: Then try hacking me again… I still have the same IP: 127.0.0.1
<bitchchecker> you’re so stupid man
<bitchchecker> say buy buy
<Metanot> ah, [Please control your cussing] off
<bitchchecker> buy buy elch
bitchchecker (~java@euirc-b5cd558e.dip.t-dialin.net) Quit (Ping timeout#)
bitchchecker (~java@euirc-9ff3c180.dip.t-dialin.net) has joined #stopHipHop
<bitchchecker> elch you son of a bitch
<Metanot> bitchchecker how old are you?
<Elch> What’s up bitchchecker?
<bitchchecker> you have a frie wal
<bitchchecker> fire wall
<Elch> maybe, i don’t know
<bitchchecker> i’m 26
<Metanot> such behaviour with 26?
<Elch> how did you find out that I have a firewall?
<Metanot> tststs this is not very nice missy
<bitchchecker> because your gay fire wall directed my turn off signal back to me
<bitchchecker> be a man turn that shit off
<Elch> cool, didn’t know this was possible.
<bitchchecker> thn my virus destroys your pc man
<Metanot> are you hacking yourselves?
<Elch> yes bitchchecker is trying to hack me
<Metanot> he bitchchecker if you’re a hacker you have to get around a firewall even i can do that
<bitchchecker> yes man i hack the elch but the sucker has a fire wall the
<Metanot> what firewall do you have?
<bitchchecker> like a girl
<Metanot> firewall is normal a normal hacker has to be able to get past it…you girl
<He> Bitch give yourself a jackson and chill you’re letting them provoce you and give those little girls new material all the time
<bitchchecker> turn the firewall off then i send you a virus [Please control your cussing]er
<Elch> Noo
<Metanot> he bitchchecker why turn it off, you should turn it off
<bitchchecker> you’re afraid
<bitchchecker> i don’t wanna hack like this if he hides like a girl behind a fire wall
<bitchchecker> elch turn off your shit wall!
<Metanot> i wanted to say something about this, do you know the definition of hacking??? if he turns of the firewall that’s an invitation and that has nothing to do with hacking
<bitchchecker> shut up
<Metanot> lol
<bitchchecker> my grandma surfs with fire wall
<bitchchecker> and you suckers think you’re cool and don’t dare going into the internet without a fire wall
<Elch> bitchchecker, a collegue showed me how to turn the firewall off. Now you can try again
<Metanot> bitchhacker can’t hack
<Black<TdV>> nice play on words
<bitchchecker> wort man
<Elch> bitchchecker: I’m still waiting for your attack!
<Metanot> how many times again he is no hacker
<bitchchecker> man do you want a virus
<bitchchecker> tell me your ip and it deletes your hard drive
<Metanot> lol ne give it up i’m a hacker myself and i know how hackers behave and i can tell you 100.00% you’re no hacker..30 -
Testivus On Test Coverage
Early one morning, a programmer asked the great master:
“I am ready to write some unit tests. What code coverage should I aim for?”
The great master replied:
“Don’t worry about coverage, just write some good tests.”
The programmer smiled, bowed, and left.
...
Later that day, a second programmer asked the same question.
The great master pointed at a pot of boiling water and said:
“How many grains of rice should I put in that pot?”
The programmer, looking puzzled, replied:
“How can I possibly tell you? It depends on how many people you need to feed, how hungry they are, what other food you are serving, how much rice you have available, and so on.”
“Exactly,” said the great master.
The second programmer smiled, bowed, and left.
...
Toward the end of the day, a third programmer came and asked the same question about code coverage.
“Eighty percent and no less!” Replied the master in a stern voice, pounding his fist on the table.
The third programmer smiled, bowed, and left.
...
After this last reply, a young apprentice approached the great master:
“Great master, today I overheard you answer the same question about code coverage with three different answers. Why?”
The great master stood up from his chair:
“Come get some fresh tea with me and let’s talk about it.”
After they filled their cups with smoking hot green tea, the great master began to answer:
“The first programmer is new and just getting started with testing. Right now he has a lot of code and no tests. He has a long way to go; focusing on code coverage at this time would be depressing and quite useless. He’s better off just getting used to writing and running some tests. He can worry about coverage later.”
“The second programmer, on the other hand, is quite experience both at programming and testing. When I replied by asking her how many grains of rice I should put in a pot, I helped her realize that the amount of testing necessary depends on a number of factors, and she knows those factors better than I do – it’s her code after all. There is no single, simple, answer, and she’s smart enough to handle the truth and work with that.”
“I see,” said the young apprentice, “but if there is no single simple answer, then why did you answer the third programmer ‘Eighty percent and no less’?”
The great master laughed so hard and loud that his belly, evidence that he drank more than just green tea, flopped up and down.
“The third programmer wants only simple answers – even when there are no simple answers … and then does not follow them anyway.”
The young apprentice and the grizzled great master finished drinking their tea in contemplative silence.
Found on stack overflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions...8 -
I’m kind of pissy, so let’s get into this.
My apologies though: it’s kind of scattered.
Family support?
For @Root? Fucking never.
Maybe if I wanted to be a business major my mother might have cared. Maybe the other one (whom I call Dick because fuck him, and because it’s accurate) would have cared if I suddenly wanted to become a mechanic. But in both cases, I really doubt it. I’d probably just have been berated for not being perfect, or better at their respective fields than they were at 3x my age.
Anyway.
Support being a dev?
Not even a little.
I had hand-me-down computers that were outmoded when they originally bought them: cutting-edge discount resale tech like Win95, 33/66mhz, 404mb hd. It wouldn’t even play an MP3 without stuttering.
(The only time I had a decent one is when I built one for myself while in high school. They couldn’t believe I spent so much money on what they saw as a silly toy.)
Using a computer for anything other than email or “real world” work was bad in their eyes. Whenever I was on the computer, they accused me of playing games, and constantly yelled at me for wasting my time, for rotting in my room, etc. We moved so often I never had any friends, and they were simply awful to be around, so what was my alternative? I also got into trouble for reading too much (seriously), and with computers I could at least make things.
If they got mad at me for any (real or imagined) reason (which happened almost every other day) they would steal my things, throw them out, or get mad and destroy them. Desk, books, decorations, posters, jewelry, perfume, containers, my chair, etc. Sometimes they would just steal my power cables or network cables. If they left the house, they would sometimes unplug the internet altogether, and claim they didn’t know why it was down. (Stealing/unplugging cables continued until I was 16.) If they found my game CDs, those would disappear, too. They would go through my room, my backpack and its notes/binders/folders/assignments, my closet, my drawers, my journals (of course my journals), and my computer, too. And if they found anything at all they didn’t like, they would confront me about it, and often would bring it up for months telling me how wrong/bad I was. Related: I got all A’s and a B one year in high school, and didn’t hear the end of it for the entire summer vacation.
It got to the point that I invented my own language with its own vocabulary, grammar, and alphabet just so I could have just a little bit of privacy. (I’m still fluent in it.) I would only store everything important from my computer on my only Zip disk so that I could take it to school with me every day and keep it out of their hands. I was terrified of losing all of my work, and carrying a Zip disk around in my backpack (with no backups) was safer than leaving it at home.
I continued to experiment and learn whatever I could about computers and programming, and also started taking CS classes when I reached high school. Amusingly, I didn’t even like computers despite all of this — they were simply an escape.
Around the same time (freshman in high school) I was a decent enough dev to actually write useful software, and made a little bit of money doing that. I also made some for my parents, both for personal use and for their businesses. They never trusted it, and continually trashtalked it. They would only begrudgingly use the business software because the alternatives were many thousands of dollars. And, despite never ever having a problem with any of it, they insisted I accompany them every time, and these were often at 3am. Instead of being thankful, they would be sarcastically amazed when nothing went wrong for the nth time. Two of the larger projects I made for them were: an inventory management system that interfaced with hand scanners (VB), and another inventory management system for government facility audits (Access). Several websites, too. I actually got paid for the Access application thanks to a contract!
To put this into perspective, I was selected to work on a government software project about a year later, while still in high school. That didn’t impress them, either.
They continued to see computers as a useless waste of time, and kept telling me that I would be unemployable, and end up alone.
When they learned I was dating someone long-distance, and that it was a she, they simply took my computer and didn’t let me use it again for six months. Really freaking hard to do senior projects without a computer. They begrudgingly allowed me to use theirs for schoolwork, but it had a fraction of the specs — and some projects required Flash, which the computer could barely run.
Between the constant insults, yelling, abuse (not mentioned here), total lack of privacy, and the theft, destruction, etc. I still managed to teach myself about computers and programming.
In short, I am a dev despite my parents’ best efforts to the contrary.30 -
26 years ago Linus Torvalds sent out this message to the comp.os.minx newsgroup.
Hello everybody out there using minix -
I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and
professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing
since april, and is starting to get ready. I’d like any feedback on
things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat
(same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons)
among other things).
I’ve currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work.
This implies that I’ll get something practical within a few months, and
I’d like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions
are welcome, but I won’t promise I’ll implement them :-)
- Linus
PS. Yes — it’s free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs.
It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never
will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-(.
Fast forward to today and Linux has more than 12 000 contributors from over 1300 companies that contribute to the Linux kernel.
The Linux Foundation released a fairly detailed progress report, including an infographic which I was tempted to include here but you can view it in it’s original context here.
While you’re over there, remember you can be a sponsor of the Linux Foundation too.
Happy Birthday Linux and a giant thanks to not only Linus but every single one of the contributors that have taken part of it over the years.5 -
Manager: Hurry up and login, I don’t have all day
Dev: One sec I have to lookup my password for the system
Manager: How can you not remember your password? Everything requires it these days
Dev: I use a different password for each service.
Manager: Wow you really like to overcomplicate things. Just use the same one for everything like I do, it’s way more efficient!
Dev: …19 -
Not a rant, but I found this funny enough to share.
About two weeks ago, I’m contacted by a third party development firm that is responsible for building the next iteration of a control board were are developing. Alongside build of the PCB they were scoped to flash the firmware and verify all connected components.
During the call, they tell me they don’t have the resources to build our testing environment with the Ansible script I provided, and they don’t know if the updates they have made will work with our control system. Ugh...really...
I attempt to walk them through the 3 pretty simple commands to launch the playbook. Instead of listening, their project manager insists that I need to load up the environment and send them a ready to go system.
I quickly load up a RaspberryPi and prepare it for shipping. I hand the box to our shipping clerk and fill out the shipping request documentation. Then about a week goes by and this is where the story really begins.
I get an email from the same rep asking where the environment is, and I head down to the warehouse to inquire where the RaspberryPi might be. After speaking with the head clerk, we can’t seem to track down the package. I’m assured that they will find the Pi and send me the shipment update.
I pass the information along and after about a day and a half I still didn’t receive word back from the warehouse team. I load up another Pi and head back down to the warehouse. I follow up with the warehouse staff. They inform me that they have not been able to locate my package and another warehouse worker is called over. He says he hasn’t seen it, but they they were having a food day that day and he thinks more than likely someone ate it.
Like it didn’t even click at first but after a few seconds I realize that these guys have literally been looking for a pie for the past two days...and I JUST DIE.
After the 5 or so minutes of laughing I show them the newly flashed RaspberryPi, and of course they know exactly where the original one was.
It’s shipped out now, but wow. Also, it turns out the PCB manufacturing company didn’t even really need this and it was all a guise to hide that they are behind schedule and that they will not be able to finish the work scoped. FML!6 -
*deep breath*
Remain calm, don’t freak out, remain calm, don’t freak out.
*deep breath*
Ok, so my sort of new manager (had a slightly different manger-ish role on the team), has for the third time in as many months, just sent an email criticizing the dev team for our working from home-ness (which for the record has not been that bad, 2/3 or 3/3 have been in everyday for the past month)
In this same period, there has been late nights, weekends, successful releases, I’ve been invited to talk at a conference about my work (not a particularly big one, but still). Point is, everything is going well, very well in fact.
There has been no emails discussing our great work, thanking us for extra work, thanking us for picking up slack from other teams who are down a few people etc. no our major concern it seems is the “optics” of our team not being present in the open space.
Our contracts list flexible working hours, and his boss has frequently told us WFH is fine when things are too busy. But no he is complaining for us to get our hours in the office in line and make sure we are in the office more.
It’s been a particularly long and frustrating week, and I’m very tempted to inform him that if he is concerned about my chair and desk looking empty, that I can put them somewhere for him where they will always be occupied until a surgeon can remove them.
However, thanks to the deep breaths, I’ve managed to restrain myself long enough to run this past you all first and ask advice.
Please help,
Sincerely,
My sanity15 -
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail!
This was something which my tech lead used to tell me when I was so obsessed with nosql databases a few years back. I would try to find problems to solve that has a use case for nosql databases or even try to convince me(I didn’t realise it back then) that I need to use nosql db for this new idea that I have, without really thinking deep enough whether the data in question is better represented using an sql schema or not.
Now, leading a team of young developers, I come across similar suggestions from few of my team members who just discovered this new and shiny tech and want to use it in production projects.
While I am not against new and shiny, it’s not a good practice to jump right in to it without exploring it deep enough or considering all the shortcomings. The most important question to ask is, whether some of the problems you are trying to solve can be solved with the current stack.
Modifying your stack requires more than just a week’s experience of playing around with the getting started guide and stack overflow replies. This is something which need to be carefully considered after taking inputs from the people who would be supporting it, that include operations, sysadmins and teams that are gonna interface with your stack indirectly.
I am not talking about delaying adoption by waiting for long list of approvals to get some thing that would bring immediate value, but a carefully orchestrated plan for why and how to migrate to a new stack.
Just because one of the tech giants made a move to a new stack and wrote about it in their engineering blog doesn’t mean that you need to make a switch in the same direction. Take a moment to analyse the possible reasons that motivated them to do it, ask yourself if your organisation is struggling with the exact same problems, observe how others facing the same issue are addressing it, and then make an informed decision.
Collect enough data to support your proposal.
Ask yourself again if you are the one holding the hammer.
If the answer is no, forge ahead!
9 -
Assembly: He’s the nerd. He speaks very quickly and uses short sentences. Very few people talk to him. He’s considered to be an autist asperger by a majority of the class because he finishes the exams so quickly it’s insane and he faces a lot of difficulties in speaking with others. He’s at school but already dressed like an engineer.
Ada: She’s a foureyes nerd. When she gets the answer she’s doesn’t make any mistake. Ada often corrects the teacher when she writes a line a little ambiguous. She’s building a rocketship in her backyard and she’s always speaking about this weird hobby.
Python: He’s Mr Popular. He likes skate, brags about all the parties he’s invited to. He’s good in all the subjects taught in class but he’ll do them a bit slower than the others. Everyone loves him because he explainsthings so well, sometimes the teacher herself asks Python to explain some part of the course. He’s dressed with a hoodie, a baggy and glasses on the top of the head ;)
Java: She is one of the toppers of the class and very popular. She’s very good in all the topics. The teacher loves her but she’s a very talkative person.
Scala/Kotlin: They are twin sisters and the best friends of Java. Unfortunately, they are not as popular and it’s often Java who takes the lead in the group. It’s very difficult to distinguish one from another. Both are far less talkative than Java but Scala speaks a bit differently than Kotlin and Java.
C: He’s the topper of the class. He’s so fast in completing the exams that the teacher really thinks he’s copying Assembly’s work. He has a little brother C++ and they share a lot in common together. He’s the chess major and often plays chess with Assembly and his big brother.
Go: He’s the new kid on the bloc. He doesn’t like C++ and his friends and he wants to prove he can do better than them. Of course, he prefers playing Go over Chess.
APL: He’s a lonely guy. No one understands him when he speaks. Even the teacher is surprised when APL shows a correct answer after several lines of incomprehensible pictograms. People think that he was born in a foreign country… or a foreign planet ?
HTML/CSS: These twin brothers are very different. One is dressed in black and white and the other is dressed with everything except black and white. HTML is very talkative and annoying and the CSS is very artistic. CSS is the best student in Art lessons and HTML performs well in written expression.
LaTeX: She’s friend of HTML. The teacher likes her because she has a gift of writing. LaTeX likes the mathematical courses because she can draw fancy greek letters. The teacher knows this well and she is often asked to write a formula on the black board.
VBA: He’s in the back, looking through the windows. Not really interested in the courses taught in class. In the exams, he answers always with a table.
C#: He’s in the back playing yet another game on his smartphone. He likes being next to the windows also.
JavaScript: People often mix up Java and JavaScript because they have a similar name. But they are definitly not the same. Javascript spends a lot of time with HTMLand CSS. He’s as artistic as CSS but he prefers things that move. He likes actions and movies. CSS dreams to be a painter wheras JavaScript wants to be a film-maker.
Haskell: He’s a goth. Dressed up in dark. Doesn’t talk to anyone. He doesn’t understand why others write pages when he can write a couple of lines to answer the same question.
Julia: She’s the newest student here. She doesn’t have any friends yet but her secret aim is to be as popular as Python and as fast as C.
Credit: Thomas jalabert4 -
PEOPLE. DO NOT LIE ON YOUR RESUME. IT. IS. NOT. WORTH. IT. Ok, backstory.
We had a guy apply for this position at work. It really needed to be filled but also required someone with just the right certifications, so hiring the first schmuck to come along Was not an option.
We search high and low and as time passes without an acceptable applicant we become more desperate and open to negotiation. Basically, you name your price, we’ll agree to it at this point.
So finally a guy comes in, got everything we need but one minor certification. No problem. He can get that on the job, he doesn’t need it to start. He’s hired.
So he quotes us a salary 10% above our top range of what we’d usually pay a guy for this position, we don’t care. He gets it. Plus a housing allowance.
So we’re getting him registered with a place to handle his certification process and they call his four year institution to verify his transcript. We work with hazardous materials and a four year degree in a relevant field is required. It’s standard for the certification training institution to check. Especially when it’s a prestigious big name place like this guy had. And here I used to think that was paranoid of them.
They call and tell us the school says they have no record of him. We do some digging. He was never registered there. I’m like “that’s not possible, his professor is a listed reference. We call that reference.
He worked on a project with this man, he never taught him. Is very fascinated to learn this man has been presenting himself as though he attended the university. Asks to be delisted as a reference.
So long story short it comes out this guy did have a degree in this field, just from a less prestigious university.
The insane thing is, he would’ve still gotten the same job and salary package if he’d been honest about his university!
It is a loss for all involved. He doesn’t have a job. We don’t have anyone working in this position. It’s really unfortunate. Don’t lie on your resume people. Your employer will find out and the risks are not worth the benefits.12 -
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.21 -
Manager: What’s taking so long on that PR?? It’s just some small styling adjustments
Dev: No it’s not you added an entire new calendar module that doesn’t work
Manager: Ok but besides that it’s just a small couple of css edits
Dev: You made styling changes in 50 files, half of which break our mobile responsiveness
Manager: Well then STOP talking to me and FIX IT if you’re so smart.
Dev: You also added a series of filters on a table in this same PR that cause th—
Manager: OK SO I GOT A BIT DISTRACTED THE FACT IS IT ALL NEEDS TO GET DONE SO IT DOESN’T MATTER IF IT’S ALL ON ONE PR SPLITTING THINGS UP INTO SMALL UPDATES IS JUST UNNECESSARY BUREAUCRACY AND IF YOU LIKE THAT THEN GO. WORK. FOR. THE GOVERNMENT!!!
Dev: …10 -
!!politics
My employer held a company wide zoom meeting today. It was officially optional, but like 90% of the company attended.
It started out interesting as they had invited a speaker, but it quickly degraded into a gigantic political circlejerk. It was an hour and a half of bashing everyone who doesn’t hold exactly their views, calling them evil, calling them nazis, radicals, militants, racists, etc. — and I don’t share their views, like, at all, so. That really lets me know how they feel!
As far as I can tell, everyone else at the company has the same ideology. Not only does this make me incredibly uncomfortable and require me to act and pretend at all times, it’s honestly kind of infuriating, too. The amount of insults they throw around and blatant lack of tolerance displayed by these “tolerant” people is just incredible.
To them, anyone that doesn’t hold exactly their beliefs is evil, and often a slew of other things, too. And it doesn’t seem to matter how far removed those views are; apparently libertarians are evil as well? Apparently “leave everyone alone” is evil and gets you branded as a militant far-righty? Like, how does that even work? They ascribe to “everyone who doesn’t agree with me is literally Hitler,” I guess.
Fucking hell I can’t stand these people and their politics. And when they all get going on it together? Just. Fucking toxic.
I’ve been so disgusted today after sitting in on that meeting I’ve gotten practically nothing done. And I was so hoping to finally finish this stupid ticket.
Oh, and Mr. PM wants that screwdriver to do even more things now — by next week, of course. Fucking hell.
Why did I switch jobs, again?
Right, to get away from the politics.
Fucking hell.66 -
So this chick has been super nice to me for the past few months, and has been trying to push me towards a role in security. She said nothing but wonderful things about it. It’s easy, it’s not much work, it’s relaxing, etc.
I eventually decided I’m burned out enough that something, anything different would be good, and went for it. I’m now officially doing both dev and security. The day I started, she announced that she was leaving the security team and wouldn’t join any other calls. Just flat-out left.
She trained me on doing a security review of this release, which basically amounted to a zoom call where I did all of the work and she directed me on what to do next, ignored everything I said, and treated me like an idiot. It’s apparently an easy release. The work itself? Not difficult, but it’s very involved, very time consuming, and requires a lot of paper trail — copying the same crap to three different places, tagging lots of people, copying their responses and pasting them elsewhere, filing tickets, linking tickets, copying info back and forth to slack, signing off on things, tagging tickets in a specific way, writing up security notes in a very specific format etc. etc. etc. It’s apparently usually very hectic with lots of last-minute changes, devs who simply ignore security requests, etc.
I asked her at the end for a quick writeup because I’m not going to remember everything and we didn’t cover everything that might happen.
Her response: Just remember what you did here, and do it again!
I asked again for her to write up some notes. She said “I would recommend.. you watch the new release’s channel starting Thursday, and then review what we did here, and just do all that again. Oh, and if you have any questions, talk to <security boss> so you get in the habit of asking him instead of me. Okay, bye!”
Fucking what.
No handoff doc?
Not willing to answer questions after a day and a half of training?
A recap
• She was friendly.
• She pushed me towards security.
• She said the security role was easy and laid-back.
• I eventually accepted.
• She quit the same day.
• The “easy release” took a day and a half of work with her watching, and it has a two-day deadline.
• She treated (and still treats) me like a burden and ignores everything I said or asked.
• The work is anything but laid-back.
• She refuses to spend any extra time on this or write up any notes.
• She refuses to answer any further questions because (quote) “I should get in the habit of asking <security boss> instead of her”
So she smiled, lied, and stabbed me in the back. Now she’s treating me like an annoyance she just wants to go away.
I get that she’s burned out from this, but still, what a fucking bitch. I almost can’t believe she’s acting this way, but I’ve grown to expect it from everyone.
But hey, at least I’m doing something different now, which is what I wanted. The speed at which she showed her true colors, though, holy shit.
“I’m more of a personal motivator than anything,” she says, “and I’m first and foremost a supporter of women developers!” Exactly wrong, every single word of it.
God I hate people like this.20 -
Wow... this is the perfect week for this topic.
Thursday, is the most fucked off I’ve ever been at work.
I’ll preface this story by saying that I won’t name names in the public domain to avoid anyone having something to use against me in court. But, I’m all for the freedom of information so please DM if you want to know who I’m talking about.
Yesterday I handed in my resignation, to the company that looked after me for my first 5 years out of university.
Thursday was my breaking point but to understand why I resigned you need a little back story.
I’m a developer for a corporate in a team of 10 or so.
The company that I work for is systemically incompetent and have shown me this without fail over the last 6 months.
For the last year we’ve had a brilliant contracted, AWS Certified developer who writes clean as hell hybrid mobile apps in Ion3, node, couch and a tonne of other up to the minute technologies. Shout out to Morpheus you legend, I know you’re here.
At its core my job as a developer is to develop and get a product into the end users hands.
Morpheus was taking some shit, and coming back to his desk angry as fuck over the last few months... as one of the more experienced devs and someone who gives a fuck I asked him what was up.
He told me, company want their mobile app that he’s developed on internal infrastructure... and that that wasn’t going to work.
Que a week of me validating his opinion, looking through his work and bringing myself up to speed.
I came to the conclusion that he’d done exactly what he was asked to, brilliant Work, clean code, great consideration to performance and UX in his design. He did really well. Crucially, the infrastructure proposed was self-contradicting, it wouldn’t work and if they tried to fudge it in it would barely fucking run.
So I told everyone I had the same opinion as him.
4 months of fucking arguing with internal PMs, managers and the project team go by... me and morpheus are told we’re not on the project.
The breaking point for me came last Wednesday, given no knowledge of the tech, some project fannies said Morpheus should be removed and his contract terminated.
I was up in fucking arms. He’d done everything really well, to see a fellow developer take shit for doing his job better than anyone else in [company] could was soul destroying.
That was the straw on the camels back. We don’t come to work to take shit for doing a good job. We don’t allow our superiors to give people shit in our team when they’re doing nothing but a good job. And you know what: the opinion of the person that knows what they’re talking about is worth 10 times that of the fools who don’t.
My manager told me to hold off, the person supposed to be supporting us told me to stand down. I told him I was going to get the app to the business lead because he fucking loves it and can tell us if there’s anything to change whilst architecture sorts out their outdated fucking ideas.
Stand down James. Do nothing. Don’t do your job. Don’t back Morpheus with his skills and abilities well beyond any of ours. Do nothing.
That was the deciding point for me, I said if Morpheus goes... I go... but then they continued their nonsense, so I’m going anyway.
I made the decision Thursday, and Friday had recruiters chomping at the bit to put the proper “senior” back in my title, and pay me what I’m worth.
The other issues that caused me to see this company in it’s true form:
- I raised a key security issue, documented it, and passed it over to the security team.
- they understood, and told the business users “we cannot use ArcGIS’ mobile apps, they don’t even pretend to be secure”
- the business users are still using the apps going into the GDPR because they don’t understand the ramifications of the decisions they’re making.
I noticed recently that [company] is completely unable to finish a project to time or budget... and that it’s always the developers put to blame.
I also noticed that middle management is in a constant state of flux with reorganisations because in truth the upper managers know they need to sack them.
For me though, it was that developers in [company], the people that know what they’re talking about; are never listened to.
Fuck being resigned to doing a shit job.
Fuck this company. On to one that can do it right.
Morpheus you beautiful bastard I know you’ll be off soon too but I also feel I’ve made a friend for life. “Private cloud” my arse.
Since making the decision Thursday I feel a lot more free, I have open job offers at places that do this well. I have a position of power in the company to demand what I need and get it. And I have the CEO and CTO’s ears perking up because their department is absolutely shocking.
Freedom is a wonderful feeling.13 -
Stupid bloody PM.
I asked him for two images a long time ago: a 1x and a 2x ‘0’ monogram for Apple wallets, since we currently have monograms for glyphs 1-9 and a-z. And this is in production, so any merchant whose name starts with a ‘0’ will cause a crash. We’ve been fortunate thus far.
But this PM. He lied about who needed to make the images for three weeks, saying it’s up to the designer, when he actually made them himself. He also said he was going to take care of handing the task off, and never did, and then said designer when on FTO. When I asked the designer about it after he came back, he had no clue what graphics (and even the feature) I was talking about, or even what the requirements for the graphics might be. I had to confront the PM before he admitted he made the originals, and (begrudgingly) said he would make the new ones.
When said PM did finally make the images, the colors were all wrong. They’re not the light teal from our branding, they’re dark blue and the font is different, making them pretty ugly.
Also, after assuring me that the naming convention for the new images is the same, I discover that they’re neither organized into folders nor even named properly. (And yes, he is aware of how it should be.) I can rename and move them around easily enough, but come on, don’t say you did the work and then give me a mess to clean up!
And to top it all off, he completely spaced making the ‘u’ monograms, so I’m still short a fucking glyph!
Asdfjskldf.
How do you do every single thing wrong? Like, how!?1 -
Week 278: Most rage-inducing work experience — I’ve got a list saved! At least from the current circle of hell. I might post a few more under this tag later…
TicketA: Do this in locations a-e.
TicketB: Do this in locations e-h.
TicketC: Do this in locations i-k.
Root: There’s actually a-x, but okay. They’re all done.
Product: You didn’t address location e in ticket B! We can’t trust you to do your tickets right. Did you even test this?
Root: Did you check TicketA? It’s in TicketA.
Product guy: It was called out in TicketB! How did you miss it?!
Product guy: (Refuses to respond or speak to me, quite literally ever again.)
Product guy to everyone in private: Don’t trust Root. Don’t give her any tickets.
Product manager to boss: Root doesn’t complete her tickets! We can’t trust her. Don’t give her our tickets.
Product manager to TC: We can’t trust Root. Don’t give her our tickets.
TC: Nobody can trust you! Not even the execs! You need to rebuild your reputation.
Root: Asks coworker a simple question.
Root: Asks again.
Root: nudges them.
Root: Asks again.
Coworker: I’ll respond before tomorrow. (And doesn’t.)
Root: Asks again.
Root: Fine. I’ll figure it out in my own.
TC: Stop making it sound like you don’t have any support from the team!
Root: Asks four people about <feature> they all built.
Everyone: idk
Root: Okay, I’ll figure it out on my own.
TC: Stop making it sound like you don’t have any support from the team!
Root: Mentions multiple meetings to discuss ticket with <Person>.
TC: You called <Person> stupid and useless in front of the whole team! Go apologize!
Root: Tells TC something. Asks a simple question.
Root: Tells TC the same thing. Asks again.
TC: (No response for days.)
TC: Tells me the exact same thing publicly like it’s a revelation and I’m stupid for not knowing.
TC: You don’t communicate well!
Root: Asks who the end user of my ticket is.
Root: Asks Boss.
Root: Asks TC.
Root: Fine, I’ll build it for both.
Root: Asks again in PR.
TC: Derides; doesn’t answer.
Root: Asks again, clearly, with explanation.
TC: Copypastes the derision, still doesn’t answer.
Root: Asks boss.
Boss: Doesn’t answer.
Boss: You need to work on your communication skills.
Root: Mentions asking question about blocker to <Person> and not hearing back. Mentions following up later.
<Person>: Gets offended. Refuses to respond for weeks thereafter.
Root: Hey boss, there’s a ticket for a minor prod issue. Is that higher priority than my current ticket?
Root: Hey, should I switch tickets?
Root: Hey?
Root: … Okay, I’ll just keep on my current one.
Boss: You need to work on your priorities.
Everyone: (Endless circlejerking and drama and tattling)6 -
expect([
row[‘blah’][0][1],
row[‘blah’][1][1],
row[’blah’][2][1],
row[‘blah’][3][1],
row[‘blah’][4][1],
]).to contain_exactly(
a.name(user), # “John doe”
c.name(user), # “John doe”
e.name(user), # “John doe”
b.name(user), # “John doe”
d.name(user), # “John doe”
)
(Note: The comments are mine.)
See the problem? No, not the ugly code (which is actually worse than what i posted here).
It’s using the same ridiculous getter (if you can call it that) that pulls a name out of the passed user object, and then expecting each row to have that name, in order. Not that order matters when they’re all the same.
Upon inspection, all objects created by the spec have the exact same name, so the above test passes (as long as there are 5 rows). It passes, but totally not because it should: those aren’t the objects that are actually in the table. All of the specs — all 22 of them — only check for that shared name on various rows, and no other data. And it’s not like this is the only issue, either.
Fuck me these are bad.
And this guy is a senior dev earning significantly more than me. Jesus what the fuck Christ.18 -
The tech stack at my current gig is the worst shit I’ve ever dealt with...
I can’t fucking stand programs, especially browser based programs, to open new windows. New tab, okay sure, ideally I just want the current tab I’m on to update when I click on a link.
Ticketing system: Autotask
Fucking opens up with a crappy piss poor sorting method and no proper filtering for ticket views. Nope you have to go create a fucking dashboard to parse/filter the shit you want to see. So I either have to go create a metric-arse tonne of custom ticket views and switch between them or just use the default turdburger view. Add to that that when I click on a ticket, it opens another fucking window with the ticket information. If I want to do time entry, it just feels some primal need to open another fucking window!!! Then even if I mark the ticket complete it just minimizes the goddamn second ticket window. So my jankbox-supreme PC that my company provided gets to strugglepuff along trying to keep 10 million chrome windows open. Yeah, sure 6GB of ram is great for IT work, especially when using hot steaming piles of trashjuice software!
I have to manually close these windows regularly throughout the day or the system just shits the bed and halts.
RMM tool: Continuum
This fucker takes the goddamn soggy waffle award for being utterly fucking useless. Same problem with the windows as autotask except this special snowflake likes to open a login prompt as a full-fuck-mothering-new window when we need to open a LMI rescue session!!! I need to enter a username and a password. That’s it! I don’t need a full screen window to enter credentials! FUCK!!! Btw the LMI tools only work like 70% of the time and drag ass compared to literally every other remote support tool I’ve ever used. I’ve found that it’s sometimes just faster to walk someone through enabling RDP on their system then remoting in from another system where LMI didn’t decide to be fully suicidal and just kill itself.
Our fucking chief asshat and sergeant fucknuts mcdoogal can’t fucking setup anything so the antivirus software is pushed to all client systems but everything is just set to the default site settings. Absolutely zero care or thought or effort was put forth and these gorilla spunk drinking, rimjob jockey motherfuckers sell this as a managed AntiVirus.
We use a shitty password manager than no one besides I use because there is a fully unencrypted oneNote notebook that everyone uses because fuck security right? “Sometimes it’s just faster to have the passwords at the ready without having to log into the password manager.” Chief Asshat in my first week on the job.
Not to mention that windows server is unlicensed in almost every client environment, the domain admin password is same across multiple client sites, is the same password to log into firewalls, and office 365 environments!!!
I’ve brought up tons of ways to fix these problems, but they have their heads so far up their own asses getting high on undeserved smugness since “they have been in business for almost ten years”. Like, Whoop Dee MotherFucking Doo! You have only been lucky to skate by with this dumpster fire you call a software stack, you could probably fill 10 olympic sized swimming pools to the brim with the logarrhea that flows from your gullets not only to us but also to your customers, and you won’t implement anything that is good for you, your company, or your poor clients because you take ten minutes to try and understand something new.
I’m fucking livid because I’m stuck in a position where I can’t just quit and work on my business full time. I’m married and have a 6m old baby. Between both my wife and I working we barely make ends meet and there’s absolutely zero reason that I couldn’t be providing better service to customers without having to lie through my teeth to them and I could easily support my family and be about 264826290461% happier!
But because we make so little, I can’t scrap together enough money to get Terranimbus (my startup) bootstrapped. We have zero expendable/savable income each month and it’s killing my soul. It’s so fucking frustrating knowing that a little time and some capital is all that stands between a better life for my family and I and being able to provide a better overall service out there over these kinds of shady as fuck knob gobblers.5 -
Our web department was deploying a fairly large sales campaign (equivalent to a ‘Black Friday’ for us), and the day before, at 4:00PM, one of the devs emails us and asks “Hey, just a heads up, the main sales page takes almost 30 seconds to load. Any chance you could find out why? Thanks!”
We click the URL they sent, and sure enough, 30 seconds on the dot.
Our department manager almost fell out of his chair (a few ‘F’ bombs were thrown).
DBAs sit next door, so he shouts…
Mgr: ”Hey, did you know the new sales page is taking 30 seconds to open!?”
DBA: “Yea, but it’s not the database. Are you just now hearing about this? They have had performance problems for over week now. Our traces show it’s something on their end.”
Mgr: “-bleep- no!”
Mgr tries to get a hold of anyone …no one is answering the phone..so he leaves to find someone…anyone with authority.
4:15 he comes back..
Mgr: “-beep- All the web managers were in a meeting. I had to interrupt and ask if they knew about the performance problem.”
Me: “Oh crap. I assume they didn’t know or they wouldn’t be in a meeting.”
Mgr: “-bleep- no! No one knew. Apparently the only ones who knew were the 3 developers and the DBA!”
Me: “Uh…what exactly do they want us to do?”
Mgr: “The –bleep- if I know!”
Me: “Are there any load tests we could use for the staging servers? Maybe it’s only the developer servers.”
DBA: “No, just those 3 developers testing. They could reproduce the slowness on staging, so no need for the load tests.”
Mgr: “Oh my –bleep-ing God!”
4:30 ..one of the vice presidents comes into our area…
VP: “So, do we know what the problem is? John tells me you guys are fixing the problem.”
Mgr: “No, we just heard about the problem half hour ago. DBAs said the database side is fine and the traces look like the bottleneck is on web side of things.”
VP: “Hmm, no, John said the problem is the caching. Aren’t you responsible for that?”
Mgr: “Uh…um…yea, but I don’t think anyone knows what the problem is yet.”
VP: “Well, get the caching problem fixed as soon as possible. Our sales numbers this year hinge on the deployment tomorrow.”
- VP leaves -
Me: “I looked at the cache, it’s fine. Their traffic is barely a blip. How much do you want to bet they have a bug or a mistyped url in their javascript? A consistent 30 second load time is suspiciously indicative of a timeout somewhere.”
Mgr: “I was thinking the same thing. I’ll have networking run a trace.”
4:45 Networking run their trace, and sure enough, there was some relative path of ‘something’ pointing to a local resource not on development, it was waiting/timing out after 30 seconds. Fixed the path and page loaded instantaneously. Network admin walks over..
NetworkAdmin: “We had no idea they were having problems. If they told us last week, we could have identified the issue. Did anyone else think 30 second load time was a bit suspicious?”
4:50 VP walks in (“John” is the web team manager)..
VP: “John said the caching issue is fixed. Great job everyone.”
Mgr: “It wasn’t the caching, it was a mistyped resource or something in a javascript file.”
VP: “But the caching is fixed? Right? John said it was caching. Anyway, great job everyone. We’re going to have a great day tomorrow!”
VP leaves
NetworkAdmin: “Ouch…you feel that?”
Me: “Feel what?”
NetworkAdmin: “That bus John just threw us under.”
Mgr: “Yea, but I think John just saved 3 jobs. Remember that.”4 -
The nightmare continues.
Currently dealing with a code review from a “principal” dev (one step above senior), who is unironically called a “legendary dev” by some coworkers. It’s painfully obvious he didn’t read the code, and just started complaining and nitpicking.
It’s full of requests to do things that make absolutely no sense, and would make the code an unmaintainable mess.
• Ex: moving the logic and data collection from the module’s many callers into the module instead of just passing in the data.
• Ex: hiding api endpoint declarations by placing them in the module itself, and using magic instance variables to pass data to it. Basically: using global functions and variables instead of explicit declarations and calls.
• Ex: moving the logic to determine which api endpoint to use, for all callers, into the view.
More comments about methods being “too complex” (barely holds water) right next to comments saying “why are these separate? merge them together!”
Incredulously asking how many times I’m checking permissions and how ridiculous it all is. (The answer? Twice.)
Conflating my “permissions” param and method names with a supposedly forthcoming permissions system overhaul, and saying I shouldn’t use permissions because my code will all have to get rewritten. Even if that were true, and it’s likely not, the ticket still needs to use the current permissions. I can’t just ignore them because they might be rewritten someday.
Requests to revert some code cleanup because the reviewer thought the previous heavily-nested and uncommented versions (with code duplication) were easier to read. Unsurprisingly, he wrote them.
On the same ticket, my boss wants me to remove all styling and clientside validation, debouncing, and error messages from a form. Says “success” and “connection failed” messages are good enough. The form in question sends SMS and email using arbitrary user input for addresses. He also says it shouldn’t be denounced on the server, and doesn’t want me to bother checking permissions. Hello, spam!
Related: the legendary dev reviewer says he can’t think of a reason why we would want to disable the feature for consumers, so I should remove the consumer feature flag.
You can’t make this stuff up.7 -
Been reviewing ALOT of client code and supplier’s lately. I just want to sit in the corner and cry.
Somewhere along the line the education system has failed a generation of software engineers.
I am an embedded c programmer, so I’m pretty low level but I have worked up and down and across the abstractions in the industry. The high level guys I think don’t make these same mistakes due to the stuff they learn in CS courses regarding OOD.. in reference how to properly architect software in a modular way.
I think it may be that too often the embedded software is written by EEs and not CEs, and due to their curriculum they lack good software architecture design.
Too often I will see huge functions with large blocks of copy pasted code with only difference being a variable name. All stuff that can be turned into tables and iterated thru so the function can be less than 20 lines long in the end which is like a 200% improvement when the function started out as 2000 lines because they decided to hard code everything and not let the code and processor do what it’s good at.
Arguments of performance are moot at this point, I’m well aware of constraints and this is not one of them that is affected.
The problem I have is the trying to take their code in and understand what’s its trying todo, and todo that you must scan up and down HUGE sections of the code, even 10k+ of line in one file because their design was not to even use multiple files!
Does their code function yes .. does it work? Yes.. the problem is readability, maintainability. Completely non existent.
I see it soo often I almost begin to second guess my self and think .. am I the crazy one here? No. And it’s not their fault, it’s the education system. They weren’t taught it so they think this is just what programmers do.. hugely mundane copy paste of words and change a little things here and there and done. NO actual software engineers architecture systems and write code in a way so they do it in the most laziest, way possible. Not how these folks do it.. it’s like all they know are if statements and switch statements and everything else is unneeded.. fuck structures and shit just hard code it all... explicitly write everything let’s not be smart about anything.
I know I’ve said it before but with covid and winning so much more buisness did to competition going under I never got around to doing my YouTube channel and web series of how I believe software should be taught across the board.. it’s more than just syntax it’s a way of thinking.. a specific way of architecting any software embedded or high level.
Anyway rant off had to get that off my chest, literally want to sit in the corner and cry this weekend at the horrible code I’m reviewing and it just constantly keeps happening. Over and over and over. The more people I bring on or acquire projects it’s like fuck me wtf is this shit!!! Take some pride in the code you write!16 -
First I wanna say how grateful I am that devRant exists, because my friends either don’t understand this vocab or don’t care lol.
Last week I worked on a pretty large ticket, opened a PR with 54 file changes. Just to follow standards I set the PR milestone to a future release version, but the truth is I didn’t care which version this work ended up in— I just needed it to go into the develop branch asap.
Since it was a large PR there was some expected discussion that prolonged its merging, but in the meantime I started a second branch that depended on some of the work from this branch. I set the new branch’s upstream to develop, fully expecting my PR to merge into develop, since that’s what I set the PR base to.
I completed all the work I could in the new branch, and got two colleagues to approve the initial PR so it would be merged into develop, I could add the finishing touch and get this work done seamlessly before the week was over. They approved, it got merged, I pulled develop, and… my work wasn’t there. I went to look at my PR and someone had changed the base branch to a release branch. It was my boss, who thought he was helping. (Our bosses don’t actually work on the same team as us, so he didn’t know. it’s weird. We have leads that keep track of our work instead.)
I messaged him and told him I really needed this in develop, knowing our release branch won’t be in develop for probably another week. I was very annoyed but didn’t wanna make him feel too bad so I said I’d just merge the release branch into my new branch. So many conflicts I couldn’t see straight. His response was “yeah and you’ll probably have a bunch of package manager conflicts too because that’s in that release.” He was right— I have so many package manager conflicts that I can’t even see how many compiler conflicts there are. I considered cherry picking my changes, but the whole reason I set develop as my upstream was to avoid having any conflicts since I’m working in the same functions, and this would create more.
So I could spend the next (?) days making educated guesses on possibly a thousand conflict resolutions, or I can revert my release branch merge and quietly step back and wait for the release branch to be merged into develop.
I’m sure cherry picking is the best option here but I’m genuinely too annoyed lol, and fortunately my team does not care to notice if I step back and work on something else to kill time until it’s fixed automatically. But I’m still in dire need of a rant because my entire plan was ruined by a well-meaning person who messed with my PR without asking, so here is that rant and I thank you for your time.8 -
The website for our biggest client went down and the server went haywire. Though for this client we don’t provide any infrastructure, so we called their it partner to start figuring this out.
They started blaming us, asking is if we had upgraded the website or changed any PHP settings, which all were a firm no from us. So they told us they had competent people working on the matter.
TL;DR their people isn’t competent and I ended up fixing the issue.
Hours go by, nothing happens, client calls us and we call the it partner, nothing, they don’t understand anything. Told us they can’t find any logs etc.
So we setup a conference call with our CXO, me, another dev and a few people from the it partner.
At this point I’m just asking them if they’ve looked at this and this, no good answer, I fetch a long ethernet cable from my desk, pull it to the CXO’s office and hook up my laptop to start looking into things myself.
IT partner still can’t find anything wrong. I tail the httpd error log and see thousands upon thousands of warning messages about mysql being loaded twice, but that’s not the issue here.
Check top and see there’s 257 instances of httpd, whereas 256 is spawned by httpd, mysql is using 600% cpu and whenever I try to connect to mysql through cli it throws me a too many connections error.
I heard the IT partner talking about a ddos attack, so I asked them to pull it off the public network and only give us access through our vpn. They do that, reboot server, same problems.
Finally we get the it partner to rollback the vm to earlier last night. Everything works great, 30 min later, it crashes again. At this point I’m getting tired and frustrated, this isn’t my job, I thought they had competent people working on this.
I noticed that the db had a few corrupted tables, and ask the it partner to get a dba to look at it. No prevail.
5’o’clock is here, we decide to give the vm rollback another try, but first we go home, get some dinner and resume at 6pm. I had told them I wanted to be in on this call, and said let me try this time.
They spend ages doing the rollback, and then for some reason they have to reconfigure the network and shit. Once it booted, I told their tech to stop mysqld and httpd immediately and prevent it from start at boot.
I can now look at the logs that is leading to this issue. I noticed our debug flag was on and had generated a 30gb log file. Tail it and see it’s what I’d expect, warmings and warnings, And all other logs for mysql and apache is huge, so the drive is full. Just gotta delete it.
I quietly start apache and mysql, see the website is working fine, shut it down and just take a copy of the var/lib/mysql directory and etc directory just go have backups.
Starting to connect a few dots, but I wasn’t exactly sure if it was right. Had the full drive caused mysql to corrupt itself? Only one way to find out. Start apache and mysql back up, and just wait and see. Meanwhile I fixed that mysql being loaded twice. Some genius had put load mysql.so at the top and bottom of php ini.
While waiting on the server to crash again, I’m talking to the it support guy, who told me they haven’t updated anything on the server except security patches now and then, and they didn’t have anyone familiar with this setup. No shit, it’s running php 5.3 -.-
Website up and running 1.5 later, mission accomplished.6 -
“Don’t learn multiple languages at the same time”
Ignored that. Suddently I understood why he said that. Mixed both languages. In holiday rechecked it and it was ok.
Sometimes mistakes can lead to good things. After relearning I understood it much better.
“Don’t learn things by head” was another one. Because that’s useless. If you want to learn a language, try to understand it.
I fully agree with that. I started that way too learning what x did what y did, ... But after a few I found out this was inutile. Since then, I only have problems with Git
Another one. At release of Swift, my code was written in Obj-C. But I would like to adopt Swift. This was in my first year of iOS development, if I can even call it development. I used these things called “Converters”. But 3/4 was wrong and caused bugs. But the Issues in swift could handle that for me. After some time one told me “Stop doing that. Try to write it yourself.”
One of the last ones: “Try to contribute to open source software, instead of creating your own version of it. You won’t reinvent the wheel right? This could also be usefull for other users.”
Next: “If something doesn’t work the first time, don’t give up. Create Backups” As I did that multiple times and simply deleted the source files. By once I had a problem no iOS project worked. Didn’t found why. I was about to delete my Mac. Because of Apple’s WWDR certificate. Since then I started Git. Git is a new way of living.
Reaching the end: “We are developers. Not designers. We can’t do both. If a client asks for another design because they don’t like the current one tell them to hire one” - Remebers me one of my previous rants about the PDF “design”
Last one: “Clients suck. They will always complain. They need a new function. They don’t need that... And after that they wont bill ya for that. Because they think it’s no work.”
Sorry, forgot this one: “Always add backdoors. Many times clients wont pay and resell it or reuse it. With backdoors you can prohibit that.”
I think these are all things I loved they said to me. Probably forgot some. -
If programming languages had honest slogans, what would they be?
C: If you want a horse, make sure you feed it, clean it and secure it yourself. No warranties.
C++: If you want a horse, you need to buy a circus along with it.
Java: Before you buy a horse - buy a piece of land, build a house in that land, build a barn beside the house & if you are not bankrupt yet, buy the horse and then put the horse in the barn.
C#: You don’t want a horse, but Microsoft wants you to have a horse. Now it’s up to you if you want Microsoft or not.
Swift: Don’t buy an overpriced Unicorn if all you wanted was a horse.
JavaScript: If you want to buy a horse & confidently ride it, make sure you read a book named "You don't know horse".
PHP: After enough optimization, your horse can compete the top most horses in the world; but deep down, you'll always know it's an ass.
Hack: Let's face it, even if you take the ass from the ass lovers and give them back a horse in exchange, not many will ride it.
Ruby: If you want a horse, make sure you ride it on top of rail roads, even if the horse can't run fast on rails.
Python: Don't ride your horse and eat your sandwich on the same line, until you indent it on the next line.
Bash: Your horse may shit everywhere, but at least it gets the job done.
R: You are the horse. R will ride you.
Got this from Quora.
https://quora.com/If-programming-la...7 -
I had a huge epiphany on Friday... not all developers enjoy coding.
Discovered when they brought down 2 of our environments, well told them what was wrong with the changes in their code that caused the environments to break, gave them links directly to the file in the gitlab repo that needed to be updated, and...
They fucking went home. The change would’ve taken all of about 30-45 seconds to update and they fucking left.
This person’s team lead come storming in pissed off because her manager is furious about 2 environments going down and preventing everyone else from being able to deploy their changes.
We provide the exact same details to the team lead about what needs to be changed, and advise that her team member took off....
30 mins later, her manager is storming up to us (devops/sre) livid as hell.
Explain the situation for a third time... manager is like, why can’t you guys fix it?
Look here you dense motherfuckers, we can fix the code. We can be the plumbers that clean up your shit. But what value do you gain as a developer if you don’t understand how the systems work and you keep pushing shit in?
Made the changes, fixed the environments, done right? Wrong.
The original developer made more changes not knowing what would happen and thoroughly fucked the environments again.
This dumb-fucking dumpster fire of a dude then sends us a slack message. “It’s down again, can you fix it?”
Our manager steps in and tells us to send him a link to the logs and have him fix it himself!
Thank goodness we have a badass manager.
Send logs, send repo file links (again), and send line numbers in the logs to try and help just a bit more. Dude goes almost the whole day without fixing it, environments are down, other devs are pissed, we throw this dude to the wolves. His manager starts to head over and was about to talk with my team lead when our manager steps out of his office and tells him the in’s and out’s of the situation and that our job isn’t to play log parser/error fixer for the developers. This dude that’s breaking the environments needs to be the one to fix the issue and his team lead should be aware of the problems and should have been able to correct his errors before it ever came to us.
The amount of hand-holding we do is ridiculous.
(Disclaimer, this one guy making some mistakes doesn’t sound too bad, but this is actually a common occurrence for like 40% of all of our developers)
We literally have interns still in college running circles around some of our full time devs. I know I’m not a developer, but for anyone that’s new-ish to developing, when you see shit like that please don’t lose hope. Those ass-hats got into programming purely for a paycheck, not because of passion.
Stick with it and your greatness will know no bounds 👍
As for you craptastic dipstick lickers, FUCK YOU!!! Go back to school and learn how to give a damn.4 -
“There’s too many Firefox quantum rants...”
Lemme let you in on a little secret:
It’s nothing new, get over it.
Apple released a new phone.
Windows updated.
Samsung or Google releases a phone.
Exam time.
Do any of you see a common theme? It’s the same people posting three metric fuck tons of posts about recent news. Wow, a tech person sharing tech news, imagine that. It’s just a phase, we all notice it. It’ll go away. Thanks. Have a nice day.13 -
I’m adding some fucking commas.
It should be trivial, right?
They’re fucking commas. Displayed on a fucking webpage. So fucking hard.
What the fuck is this even? Specifically, what fucking looney morons can write something so fucking complicated it requires following the code path through ten fucking files to see where something gets fucking defined!?
There are seriously so fucking many layers of abstraction that I can’t even tell where the bloody fucking amount transforms from a currency into a string. I’m digging so deep in the codebase now that any change here will break countless other areas. There’s no excuse for this shit.
I have two options:
A) I convert the resulting magically conjured string into a currency again (and of course lose the actual currency, e.g. usd, peso, etc.), or
B) Refactor the code to actually pass around the currency like it’s fucking intended to be, and convert to a string only when displaying. Like it’s fucking intended to be.
Impossible decision here.
If I pick (A) I get yelled at because it’s bloody wrong. “it’s already for display” they’ll say. Except it isn’t. And on top of that, the “legendary” devs who wrote this monstrosity just assumed the currency will always be in USD. If I’m the last person to touch this, I take the blame. Doesn’t matter that “legendary Mr. Apple dev” wrote it this way. (How do I know? It’s not the first time this shit has happened.) So invariably it’ll be up to me to fix anyway.
But if I pick (B) and fix it now, I’ll get yelled at for refactoring their wonderful code, for making this into too big of a problem (again), and for taking on something that’s “just too much for me.” Assholes. My après Taco Bell bathroom experiences look and smell better than this codebase. But seriously, only those two “legendary” devs get to do any real refactoring or make any architecture decisions — despite many of them being horribly flawed. No one else is even close to qualified… and “qualified” apparently means circle jerking it in Silicon Valley with the other better-than-everyone snobs, bragging about themselves and about one another. MojoJojo. “It was terrible, but it fucking worked! It fucking worked!” And “I can’t believe <blah> wanted to fix that thing. No way, this is a piece of history!” Go fuck yourselves.
So sorry I don’t fit in your stupid club.
Oh, and as an pointed, close-at-hand example of their wonderful code? This API call I’m adding commas to (it’s only used by the frontend) uses a json instance variable to store the total, errors, displayed versions of fees/charges (yes they differ because of course they do), etc. … except that variable isn’t even defined anywhere in the class. It’s defined three. fucking. abstraction. layers. in. THREE! AND. That wonderful piece of smelly garbage they’re so proud of can situationally modify all of the other related instance variables like the various charges and fees, so I can’t just keep the original currency around, or even expect the types to remain the same. It’s global variable hell all over again.
Such fucking wonderful code.
I fucking hate this codebase and I hate this fucking company. And I fucking. hate. them.7 -
!dev
!!politics (kinda)
Here’s a gem from our recent harassment and diversity training at work:
Speaker: “All of these things are protected from discrimination in California! Wow! It’s a huge list, isn’t it? Now let me ask you a question: is a single white male under 40 protected?”
Everyone: *crickets*
Fucking really?
After immediately jumping on all of the other speaker’s questions, you can’t answer this one?
And later, here’s another gem:
Speaker: “If you witness an employee harassing another employee outside of work and work hours, completely unrelated to work, should you report it? What if you ask the person being harassed and she says no?”
Speaker: “Always report it! While it’s not *technically* required by law, you must report it! Why? Because you have the same protections she would! And maybe it’s easier for you to say something than for her.” (Surprise gendering was her own addition)
Fair on that last point, but against the person’s wishes? Totally not cool. Maybe it wasn’t harassment, or you don’t know the situation. Heads up: you probably don’t. Or maybe it wasn’t a big deal at all, but you think it’s earth-shattering. But all that reporting it against someone’s wishes does is create drama and possibly legal trouble. And if it wasn’t harassment or the case goes poorly, you just created enemies for yourself, or for one or both of them if you’re reporting it anonymously, and possibly even ruined one or both of their jobs/careers by doing so. Good fucking job, asshole.
Snitches get stitches.16 -
This has been said countless times before me, and way better than me that’s supper tired, but I need to rant out
And what I’m ranting out today, is Apple. Its essence, its core, the reason it still exists: the ECOSYSTEM!
The problem with Apple ecosystem is that it’s the ecosystem of a fucking PRISON!
People like it because it works well together , but it’s sure that in a prison, the path from your cell to the cantine is pretty optimized; you get forced there! And you might try to get your food elsewhere, but the walls of the prison are made to be difficult to cross. Especially on mobile, where they’re making it harder and harder to escape, to make a jailbreak (pun-intended). Keeping you the loyal little sheep, or the forcing you to it.
That prison is also made private, a little club, to attract people to it. They even got their own little system to talk to each other, but oh god protect them from their little messages to pass the walls of the prison.
And all that prison is guarded by the warden, watching from high in the cloud. Forcing you to report yourself to him to be part of that prison.
That prison, also, can only be entered with specific vehicles, provided by the prison, to ensure maximum compatibility and efficiency. Good luck entering with a disguised vehicle if you find the official ones too pricey for their parts.
They also provided pressure tubes to send things from one cell to another. While being only simple pressure tubes like any other, they’re acclaimed because they’re apparently easier to use than the other 3rd party pressure tubes that can send things to the outside. Why? Because, oh yes it’s already in everybody’s cells (of that prison, outside is dangerous) and the other tubes have been conveniently being placed somewhere harder to reach.
Another thing they have are those windows that can view the outside. While being maybe less clear than some other windows, they are ok. But if you ever consider going mobile to enjoy that safari with lions, then man do they love bringing you back to that window.
Ok so I’m done with the prison metaphor, or I won’t sleep.
The ecosystem is probably the major reason Apple is still there. You buy from there because you’re a prisoner (I guess I’m not finished with the metaphor after all).
This is a prime example of RMS’s quote “If the user doesn’t control the software, the software controls the user”
AirDrop isn’t some sort of revolutionary tech, it uses a well established protocol that other implementations use to do the same thing. They could really easily open source the protocol and allow everyone to profit, but they won’t, because that would mean you don’t have to buy Apple.
That’s why I militate for open source, decentralized and standardized protocols. Because that way, we control the software, and it doesn’t control us.
All the things I said aren’t so bad because when you buy Apple, you make a choice. But I don’t have a choice, I am typing this on an Apple device, because I need to (I won’t elaborate on that) because of that fucking *ecosystem*
I am really tired, so half the sentences probably don’t make sense, but thanks for coming to my stupid TED talk.12 -
“I Pay $900 A Month for student loans.”
Not sure why there’s a video about this but let’s watch it...
*Sad music is playing*
“My name is _____ and I pay $900 a month for student loans..”
Yeah so what?
*Sad music continues*
??
*Woman makes a call and asks about when they’re going to make a student loan reform aggressively*
????
Then I realized my family was eligible for low income and I received Cal and Pell grants to pay for my tuition and living.
Then I realized that the salary for my computer science degree has numbed me to a point where $900 a month doesn’t seem too bad. Or awful. I mean I just leased a new car for my mom! And didn’t hesitate (only when having fun negotiating though).
Back then, I would be shocked. But it’s a surreal feeling to see now that I don’t. I was literally confused at the basis of this video. And now I’m surprised at my disconnect from it.
I also realized that they make videos based on how society should react to it. Am I an outcast to society because of this? Why am I not reacting the same way?
Maybe society (nowadays) would disdain me because I’ve come into high income like we all will because of our passion (and the demand for it).
But fuck society. It’s full of the very same people who use technology each and every day. Protesting for things they found trending on Twitter. The ones who refused to learn even though it’s a huge part of their lives. They’re the ones holding us back for an Engel’s Technological Utopia (idk if I’m even correct about the philosopher but anyways..)
We’re above them. We make things they’ll use and in massive numbers.
Don’t let them dictate what you should like. How you should act. Whether or not you should feel lonely while they’re posting pictures of fun times on Facebook.
We should be the ones doing that. Because we are the ones doing that.
That’s why we’re given the best to perform what we love most.
So devs, continue what you’re doing. Small or big, you’re still driving the world forward. Opening pull requests and contributing to open source projects. Answering questions on Stack Overflow not only for the person intended but for the beginner or even experienced professional who may stumble upon it later in a Google search.
And be highly rewarded for it. How society feels doesn’t matter any more when it comes to your passion. You’re important. Your work helps others in ways you can’t even imagine. We’re like one big fucking hivemind of engineers with the accessibility of the internet.
I love drinking on a Sunday!12 -
Long rant, sorry.
I’m pretty upset, or let’s say: I want to kick asses and chew gum but I’m all out of gum(The duke TM).
Yesterday we had a discussion in the office about salary basically.
Context: The company has about 150 employees and earns a lot of money. I’m the lead dev for about 1.5 years since I joined.
So I talked to our CEO/HR about a raise since I was hired as a normal fullstack dev(title is lead dev now) but have to:
train my junior(PHP), frontend guy(react), our QA(Automation with cypress atm), our junior devop(gitlab, jenkins, docker) and even assist marketing with GTM and adword campaigns.
I’m a jack of all trades basically since I was a freelancer for big brands for a long time.
I’m fine with helping/training, I like it a lot but I still have to watch everything and be fast with my own stuff. If anything goes wrong, people call me.
That will change since I train them all(They will all be independent soon) but still, doing everything for the same pay feels wrong.
Bottom line: CEO told me it’s cool that they can use all my skills but I won’t get a raise.
The worst/strangest was: My coworkers heard about that(as always in an office) and were like: Everybody should get paid equally because we’re all a team. Uhm, ok?
I just contacted the head hunter which got me that job. I guess I’ll just see what the market has to offer.
It should never be about money but this was confusing. People telling me we should all be equal who are on their mobiles 3h a day and feel underpaid. Check yourself, really.
People who think their pure presence is enough.. Germany -.-25 -
People/companies talking about ooh we want gender diversity we want more female software developers, IT professionals etc
You talk the talk, do you know how to walk the walk?? Do you know how to deal with female engineers?
I am a hardcore engineer worked and studied majorly with men for years. I lead, managed teams had my own company worked as a consultant for years.
Then I got into the IT industry as developer later. I was completely against the idea of being female would make any difference or you would be treated differently.
Finally I had my own enlightenment and stopped resisting that idea.
Some treatments made me think what are these guys doing? Don’t treat me like your sister. I am not your sister. Don’t see the femininity or looks. I am not a Merrilyn Monroe to say oooh you are great you know soo much. I am not paid for that act, I do my job! It’s same as yours mate.
Don’t underestimate me or try to preach me as if I am a cute little girl. Don’t show off and boost your ego next to other guys.
Now I regretfully I agree the ladies ranting about male dominance and getting different treatment in IT.
I am literally trying to avoid red nail polishes or red lipstick god forbid. Maybe I should put some fake beard and a belly, loose jeans with an energy drink in hand. Here comes the expert IT professional, already ticking a box.
Honestly you are not taken seriously most of the time. If you are a guy then they are all ears..And those guys talk about they want gender diversity blah blah
You feel like a ghost when you express your opinion. You are not taken into account even when you have a comment or suggestion.
Even humiliated by a guy giving me a speech about how to be a good developer next to a manager. Look buddy I am not a yesterday’s child. I am at your age. I haven’t come to this position by jumping around picking flowers in a field. If I was a man, would you dare saying those to me? There could be a street fight coming.
LinkedIn selfie takers with body show offs putting ooh I am an IT recruiter as a female I got into IT. You can do it too. (don’t get me wrong I respect that achievement that’s good) but those girls get thousands of likes and applauses, you are working in IT for years people say they are seeking for. Your technical post doesn’t even get 20 likes. Your encouraging comment on a guy’s post isn’t even acknowledged. You are not even taken into account. Am I a ghost or something?
Honestly I don’t understand.
What do you mean by gender diversity? What do you want here?
Leave this gender bullshit. Look at the knowledge you don’t even know what equality means. It’s not having even numbers of genders. It is respecting knowledge and hard work regardless. Listening and acknowledging without judgement. Looking beyond male, female or others
Companies that say we want to have more females, you don’t come and knock on my door either. You are already stating a difference there. Attract with indifference don’t come and tell me you are a female we want more females here.
I’m telling you this sector is not getting proper gender equality for 25 years. Talk is there but mentality is not yet there.
I am super pissed off and discouraged today. I don’t even get discouraged that easily. Now I understand some women in IT talking about insecurities. I am on the edge of having one, such a shame.
Don’t come at me now I would bite!
This is my generalisation yes. Exceptions apply and how good it would have been if those exceptions were dominant.33 -
Ticket: This API param doesn’t work.
Ticket Size: 1 story point / extra small baby fries
Found the issue almost immediately: some fucked up date math. Or at least backwards as hell. I don’t know. I don’t care.
There’s no spec for it, and writing it is a bitch. None of the API test helpers are designed for end-to-end tests. Why? I don’t care. They’re stupid. They all just break. And the API does weird shit like fucking redirects to an HTML page. Which is… i don’t know. They mix up API and embedded sessions a bunch, so who knows if this is right or broken as fuck.
I can’t deal with this shit anymore.
It’s just mountains of fucking garbage. Every time I dig into anything, anywhere in this codebase, or, let’s be honest: the entire goddamn company, it’s just more fucking garbage. The code is garbage. The specs are garbage. The people are garbage. The woke crap they love so much is garbage. The industry is garbage. The macs we’re required to use are garbage. The strongly-encouraged editor is garbage. The new hires are garbage. The legendary devs are garbage. The VPN is garbage — still haven’t gotten it to fucking work outside of fucking Safari, which is also garbage. The meetings are garbage. The “culture” is garbage. The “raises” are garbage. The thirty-step dance ceremony for each ticket is garbage. The literal fucking garbage at the office is the best part of the entire goddamn landfill.
And yeah, over half of the code that’s been giving me problems on this ticket was written by the same dev: The legendary golden garbage boy himself.
Just.
Fucking hell.
I’m going back to looking for work again. I can’t do this anymore.10 -
Seriously does this master/slave bullshit actually affect everyone here?
From what I’ve seen it’s just a fucking idea / suggestion not a full blown change set being implemented.
Stop fucking over reacting to bubble wrap nonsense, if you want to call it a master/slave relationship then call it a fucking master/slave relationship and be done with it, if this really offends you or you believe political correctness is needed here, go call it something else, at the end of the day it’s still going to be the same thing, just called something else.9 -
The more I use Go, the more i start to like it. I didn’t realize how nice being able to generate binaries for every OS that matters was, until I had that power. It beats the hell out of trying to distribute a Python app for sure.
Sure, it has its warts.
It’s overly bureaucratic in the same way Java is.
I hate that you can’t import something without using it (most people I’d wager preemptively import libraries they know they’re gonna need even if the code isn’t written yet)
I really wish there was a way to just say “See this JSON blob? All those keys and values are strings, trust me, you don’t need me to tell you the type of each one individually.”
Generics would be nice.
I’d kill for exceptions - any decently sized go program is going to have very many if err checks where most could be condensed down to a single try/catch in most other langs.
I wish the tooling was better. Dependency management was a solved problem when Go was released and yet they chose to ship without it. There’s still no standard. Many hours of time have been wasted dinking with this.
But ya know what? Even with those warts, it’s still easier to write than Java. It’s still write once run anywhere, it’s blazing fast, and doesn’t require your end user to install an entire freakin runtime.
<3 Go2 -
I’ve been programming for 20 years now. My friends and family never really understood what I did back in the days. And they still don’t.
All they saw was a kid who was good with computers. Your friendly neighborhood tech guy who would take a look at your computer for free.
I’m sure most of you have been in the same situation.
When people ask me what I do for a living. I’d just say “something with computers”. Because most of the time they will ask me to look at their computers and I’d reply with “oh that’s not what I do”.
When I was younger, I’d try to explain what I actually do for a living. To really tell people the problems we as a programmer solves on a daily basis or the things we create. That’s really hard to explain to “common” people.
So whenever someone asks me what I do for a living? It’s always something with computers ;)12 -
I am being mentored all of my life.
Parents mentored me that I won’t get to that school and I should pick other one ( I got there where I wanted ).
Politicians mentor me to make me happier by taking more and more of money I earned ( I am not ).
Advertisers mentor me to buy their products cause those are best products in the world ( I buy cheaper versions produced in same factories by same people ).
My boss ( when I got one ) mentored me that everything is simple and could be done in 5 minutes. ( after reading some dummy article )
Coworkers are mentoring me everyday that it’s not their fault ( It definitely is ).
Telemarketers, emails, sms messages are mentoring me about my future, don’t miss that occasion, it’s best for your life ( No it’s not )
Celebrities are mentoring me how to live my life to become a successful person ( Yeah right, cause they known how to become one right after they were born ).
Now I see I am starting living in times where computer will start mentoring me how to live my life. ( Sometimes it already is )
What’s left is doctors start mentoring me about my illnesses and children ( if I ever have one ) mentoring me about how dumb I am.
Then I can finally peacefully die and don’t come back to this mentoring hell.7 -
Dealing with other technical professionals who cannot think outside their respective boxes.
Here is an example.
A QA (who is very good at her job) said this...
Her:
“We need to get one customer who is willing to pay us a lot of money to make the features they want!”
Me:
“But you realize we are a SaaS company and that means we need lots of customers and constant growth”
Her:
“No, we need to find a customer who is willing to pay us, like a million, to make the features they want. Then we make them for that customer. Then we do that again.”
Me:
“We sell software to small businesses, none of them have a million dollars to pay us, and even if they did then why wouldn’t they build it themselves?
Her:
“Well, when I worked for my last company this is what we did...”
Me:
“So you worked for a contracting company who built software for individual companies. We are not that type of company. We are a SaaS company.”
Her:
“It’s the same thing”
Me:
~Facepalm~
As a software developer and entrepreneur it frustrates me when everyone think everything is the same.
You’ll here things like...
“All we need is to get lucky with one big hit and then we will ride that wave to success, just like Facebook or Amazon!”
Holy fucking shit balls, how stupid can you be!
FB and AZ run thousands of tests a day to see what works. They do not get “lucky”. They dark launched FB messenger with thousands of messages and then rolled it out to their internal team first, they did not get lucky!
Honestly though, I can’t blame them. Most people just want a good job that pays. They aren’t looking to challenge their assumptions.
Personally I know I will be in situations again where my pride, my assumption, my fears are realized and crushed by the market place and I do not want to live in a world of willful ignorance.
I’d rather get it right than feel good.1 -
Electric cars are not better for the environment. All petrol cars combined are only responsible for 7.9% of CO2 emissions. If your electric car is charged from a grid that is powered by a coal-burning power station, it contributes nothing to dealing with climate change. It only provides you with the false sense of security, and you can look cool telling your friends that “you know, I drive a Tesla, I’m environmentally conscious, your gas car is bad”.
Electric cars are lame. When I’m out of fuel, I can refuel fully in minutes. With electric car, I’ll have to wait at least five hours. Let’s be realistic, superchargers aren’t common, and will never be.
Gasoline is 46.4 MJ/kg, or 34.2 MJ/l. Li-Ion is 0.36–0.875. Let’s be generous and say it’s 0.9. To match 1 kg of petrol, I would need 51 kilos of batteries.
Average gas tank is 18 gallons, or 68 litres. To match that, my battery must have a weight of 2.5 metric tonnes. Bear in mind, empty battery and full battery has the same weight. Also, bear in mind, batteries perform worse in the winter.
As per energy density and practicality, things don’t get much better than petrol. Liquid hydrogen has higher energy density, but to store it, gas tank has to have very, very thick walls, to withstand the pressure. And, hydrogen is a bitch. It’s extremely dangerous. You can’t smell it until it’s too late. Hydrogen-air mixture will explode if you look at it the wrong way.
All that “electric cars good for climate” hype is merely Elon maintaining his stock bubble.23 -
This isn’t gonna be a random because I do eventually get to a Tech and YouTube related topic.
YouTube is actually killing itself with all of the dumbass rules they’re implementing. Trying to child proof or limit educational content is genuinely a shit policy. The reason so many gaming channels are switching to twitch because it doesn’t try to censor you.
But now I don’t know if you’ve heard but YouTube updated their guidelines and they’re no longer allowing content that teaches people about Hacking essentially (and I hate putting it like that but I can’t remember the exact words they used Hacking just summarizes it) which is fucking ridiculous like what the fuck else, are they gonna stop allowing lock picking videos?
YouTube has always been an amazing FREE resource for people learning Programming, Cyber Security, IT related fields, and even shit like lock picking, cooking, car stuff, and all that stuff. Even sometimes when the tutorials aren’t as detailed or helpful to me they might be exactly what someone else needed. And Cyber Security can be a difficult topic to learn for free. It’s not impossible far from it, but YouTube being there was always great. And to think that a lot of those could be taken down and all of the Security based channels could either lose all revenue or just be terminated is terrifying for everyone but more so them.
A lot of people and schools rely on YouTube for education and to learn from. It’s not like YouTube is the only resource and I understand they don’t want to be liable for teaching people that use these skills for malicious purposes but script kiddies and malicious people can easily get the same knowledge. Or pay someone to give them what they want. But that’s unfair to the people that don’t use the information maliciously.
It’s the same for the channels of different topics can’t even swear and it’s ridiculous there’s so many better options than just banning it. Like FUCK kids nowadays hear swearing from their older siblings, parents, friends, and TV it’s inevitable whether someone swears or not and YouTube is not our parents, they aren’t CBS, so stop child proofing the fucking site and let us learn. Fuck.
TLDR YouTube is banning educational hacking videos and are being retarded with rules in general16 -
Finally finished the screwdriver followup ticket. I think.
I spent almost two full days (14 hours) on a seemingly simple bug on Friday, and then another four hours yesterday. Worse yet: I can’t test this locally due to how Apple notifications work, so I can only debug this on one particular server that lives outside of our VPN — which is ofc in high demand. And the servers are unreliable, often have incorrect configuration, missing data, random 504s, and ssh likes to disconnect. Especially while running setup scripts, hence the above. So it’s difficult to know if things are failing because there’s a bug or the server is just a piece of shit, or just doesn’t like you that day.
But the worst fucking part of all? The bug appeared different on Monday than it did on Friday. Like, significantly different.
On Friday, a particular event killed all notifications for all subsequent events thereafter, even unrelated ones, and nothing would cause them to work again. This had me diving through the bowels of several systems, scouring the application logs, replicating the issue across multiple devices, etc. I verified the exact same behavior several times over, and it made absolutely no sense. I wrote specs to verify the screwdriver code worked as expected, and it always did. But an integration test that used consumer-facing controller actions exhibited the behavior, so it wasn’t in my code.
On Monday while someone else was watching: That particular event killed all notifications but ONLY FOR RELATED EVENTS, AND THEY RESUMED AFTER ANOTHER EVENT. All other events and their notifications worked perfectly.
AKL;SJF;LSF
I think I fixed it — waiting on verification — and if it is indeed fixed, it was because two fucking push event records were treated as unique and silently failing to save, run callbacks, etc.
BUT THIS DOESN’T MATCH WHAT I VERIFIED MULTIPLE TIMES! ASDFJ;AKLSDF
I’m so fucking done with this bs.8 -
I fucking hate my boss so much
He looks down on me like I’m some idiot who doesn’t know his shit.
The other day he was trying to explain OAuth2.0 to me in the most dumbed down way ever, even after telling him I do already know how OAuth 2.0 works. He just said “oh well just making sure” and continued explaining it to me the exact same way. Felt shitty having something explained to you which you already know in such a way in front of all of your coworkers
Whenever I give my thoughts on something he answers with an argument that’s essentially true but pretty stupid:
B: “We don’t need to bundle our JS files” (see my other rant)
M: “Our load time is around 15 seconds though and it takes forever to update our script tags”
B: “Yes but it’s only 15 seconds once and the tags are already there so it’s fine”
How do you reply to something like that??
On top of that, his code is absolutely awful, always looks hacked together, lacks documentation and i don’t think he has written a unit test in his life
I don’t even like frontend, was told I would mostly do backend and it seems like all I’m doing recently is write fucking javascript because even if I wanted to write backend code, it’s nearly impossible to write clean code in this pile of horseshit codebase7 -
I was called back into work last night at 4 a.m.
(L)user - *anony* I’m sorry to wake you but I’m needing on the internet and I can’t get out.
**Just installed a new firewall and I haven’t had time to get a trusted cert pushed through**
Me - alright I’ll be there in a second.
After rolling my sweet ass out of bed and getting here, I get her through and leave. When I get back to my house I realize I’d forgot my fucking keys... I come back and the bitch has her computer shut down reading a book and isn’t even using the internet...
Me - I thought you needed on the internet, whys your computer shut down...?
Her - Oh, I don’t need it right now, I was just having trouble getting on is all.
FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKING FUCK! This is the SAME fucking (l)user that somehow managed to get the fucking toner stuck backwards in a printer. It’s the same girl that has called me in the past at late hours and requested that I move a chair from one patient room to the other. A fucking chair. I’m not in the maintenance department... so first, you’re calling the wrong department and second; the time it took you to call me you yourself could have fucking done it. She didn’t like the way that call ended.
Although partially my fault, if I would have finished everything I wouldn’t have had to get up but shit... this fuck still deserves a chair to the fucking face.3 -
Ever want to smack someone in the face with a sea bass? Like left out of the water for 3 days with all kinds of juicy and smelly goodness?
When we get an X number system errors, an email is sent to our team. Couple of hours ago I had to move the alerts from one system to another, re-naming some because I suck at naming things. I guess when I copied, I duplicated one. About an hour ago we get a system alert (as it should, there was a server hiccup) and there were two emails with the same data (just named differently)
DevA: “Why are there two emails?”
Me: “Oh, that’s me. I think I copied the alert instead of move. I’ll fix it tomorrow.”
DevA: “Hmm, but the data is the same. It’s a duplicate.”
Me: “Yea, I know. Networking responded and said it’s fixed. We won’t get another email.”
- 15 minutes later
DevA leans over and says to the boss (who was in a meeting and just sat down)…
DevA: “I looked at the alert, it’s duplicated, but the name is different. I don’t understand why.”
Me: “Like I said, the alert is duplicated. When I migrated, I copied instead of moved. No big deal.”
DevA: “Oh …oh ..yea.…OK.”
- 5 minutes later
DevA: “I looked at the query, we might have to add a filter to prevent duplicate emails. Probably some logic problems in the search.”
Me: “I just deleted the duplicate alert.”
DevA: “Oh…OK…that fixes it too.”
Good lord…as I was typing this, he just told another dev the ‘duplicate’ emails were because of a logic bug in the search. I’m getting my fishing pole. -
Fml... you keep getting the weekly discussions right on point.
I started with the last guys right out of university... just out of Hospital.
With a brand new degree and a Crohn’s diagnosis I stepped into the first place I found hiring. They were good guys, after a junior dev... to get stuck in their muck.
I did! I nailed project after project, tricky development after tricky development. I spent 5 years with them and over those years things changed.
They had a mass cull... the original idea was to get rid of the useless middle managers, the ones managing other managers being managed by another manager for no real reason.... the ones that do fuck all with their day.
But the fucking idiots upstairs put the job of working out the cull in the shitty middle managers hands.
So, instead, they cut the titles senior, junior and everything in between. Everyone was just a thing, no senior things, no junior things. Just things.
Once they’d done that they said “we’ll we have this many things, they’re all the same, let’s get rid of the things with the highest pay checks because the other things can do it just as well for less money”...
And that’s how they cut 50% of their senior techs.
I was one of the ones left behind but the damage became obvious quick. The middle managers barked out orders at people who couldn’t complete them, and everything went to shit.
My team was rebranded twice in as many years... an obvious ploy for funding, but the cost of the team fluctuated like hell because contractors had to fill the senior positions at 3 times the cost.
Then the managers started barking out Self contradictory orders. Do this, but this way...
This would work, but not that way... try explaining that to a group of non-technical, useless as fuck middle managers. It took months, and shit flows downstream so we got the bulk of the hassle for it.
Then my boy Morpheus, got a warning... they threatened his contract for saying “this will work, but not that way”.
He kept the contract, and the manager giving him the warning said he didn’t think he should... but he, and all the middle fuckwits don’t have the balls to stand up against nonsense.
That was the breaking point for me, I handed in my notice and told them a month was what they could have.
I didn’t have a position or an idea of where to go, a few long-standing offers as back up in a pinch but not the perfect job.
On the Thursday I decided I was done, I let my manager know. Then I boshed the fuck out of my CV and updated my profiles.
My phone started ringing off the hook, a senior NG2/MEAN/Ionic dev on the market is like candy to recruiters. They’re lovely too.
I went to a few interviews that were okay but not great. Then a company got in touch... one that I immediately recognised as an IT book publisher. They said they were looking for NG/NG2 devs, senior. winner! Set up the interview.
So I’d spent the weekend with the missus, about an hour away from mine and 2 from the interview. I hadn’t planned on staying there but at 6ish she looked over at me and said “do you have to go” <- imagine that with puppy dog eyes from a gorgeous Slovenian lass.
I folded quicker than a shitty pancake toss.
We spent the night together but that meant I had to be up at 6, to go back to mine, iron my interview clothes and make it to the train to manage the interview. Fuck. I did it, but I was at the interview wired on caffeine and struggling to be awake and coherent. I still managed, that’s what I do, I make do and try to do well regardless of the situation.
That comes from being ill btw, when you’re dealt a shitty hand you learn to play it well.
They were good guys, the heads all knew what they were on about, not the middle management bs I was used to.
They demoed me live with an ng1 test, which was awesome as hell to play with.
We chatted, friendly and cool guys! I loved the place.
The end of the week they got me in for second round. Ng2 and competence test, again I went for it!
Positive feedback and a “we’ll get back to you ASAP, should be by Tuesday”...
Tuesday was the Tuesday before the Friday I was due to leave the old company... I was cutting it close.
On the Monday the offers started rolling in, a few C# ASP MVC positions, cool but I was holding out for the guys I’d interviewed with.
Then Tuesday comes around, I’m nervous as fuck but it’s okay because I knew regardless I can pay the rent in December with one of the offers.
Then said yes!
The thing that seemed most important in the process was my ability to talk to any fucker. If you’re coming up to interview, talk to everyone, the grocer, your barista, the binmen, anyone. Practice that skill above all others.
I start tomorrow morning! I can’t wait.
Final thought: middle managers are taints.7 -
Every time I tell a more senior dev I need help, they tell me to try the obvious things, I tell them I tried those things already, and they think I must have just done it wrong. So they spend an hour explaining to me how to do something I literally just did, and then more time trying the exact same things I just tried. Nobody wins.
Except for me when I find the correct solution while they’re re-implementing the failed solutions because nobody trusted me.
Sadly, this happens all the time. “Did you try a and b?” “Yeah, no luck.” “Okay, so when you try a, you have to remember to call c and d. Let me explain...”
So much wasted time. But the silver lining is in getting to be the one who found the solution (until they wonder ‘why’d she even come to me anyway if she knew the answer?’ ... 🙄) Because I trusted you to know what “team” means, and it’s not too late to learn ¯\_(ツ)_/¯5 -
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.24 -
A dollar or a peso is a certain amount of work stored in a piece of paper. You need to work to get them or have other people work for you. When governments print new money and push it into circulation they reduce what you were compensated with for the work you did. Essentially they are taking your wealth (spending power) away without you even realizing. It is a modestly sophisticated form of theft. When public companies issue new shares onto the market they are doing same thing by reducing the percentage of the company you own. This is why you will see non-inflationary assets such as Bitcoin, land, gold bars and gold ETFs, etc. continue to rise in value and certainly outpace inflation. It’s because people who are smart with money are fearful of holding cash and they are looking for a safe place to store it. If you are not afraid of holding substantial amounts of cash, then I suppose you don’t really understand what it is. There is a reason why they don’t teach teenagers about inflation in any country of the world. As long as the masses are focused on earning and saving fiat, governments have so much more power and control. If you remove all of the fiat from circulation, then we will revert to a barter/trading system which would substantially reduce government power, at that point they would only maintain control using physical force, which is a lot more challenging to carry out. #btc #gold #rant #av41
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!rant I’ve been with the same company for 6 years, but the past few years things have been continually declining. Nothing has been awful, I just feel like there is very little room for promotion, or even worse, knowledge gains (we do a lot of win forms, c# mvc, vb6, sql stored procs). I’ve been so desperate to learn “new stuff” that I’ve been picking up contract work where I can find it (for nights and weekend projects). I’m excited to say that the company I’ve been doing most of my contract work with has offered me a full time remote position! It’s a 30% increase in pay, all new tech (mostly React Native, ReactJS, GraphQL, Nodejs, python, and integration with existing .Net applications)!
Feel honored DevRant, I’m telling all of you before I even share the news with my family (with the exception of my wife)!1 -
ALWAYS read warnings guys.
Story time !
A client of ours has a synchronization app (we wrote it) between his inhouse DB and our app. (No, no APIs on their end. It’s a schelduled task).
Because we didn’t want to ask them for logs every single time, the app writes logs to disk (normal) and in Applications Insights in Azure.
When needed, I can go in portal, get all logs for last execution in a nice CSV file.
Well, recently we added more logs (Some problems were impossible to track).
So client calls us : “problem with XXX”
Me : Goes to Azure, does the same manipulation as always. Dismiss a smaaaaaalish warning without reading. Study logs. Conclusion: “The XXX is not even in the logs, check your DB”.
Little I knew, the warning was telling me “Results are truncated at 10.000 lines”.
So client was right, I was wrong and I needed to develop a small app to get logs with more than 10.000 lines. (It’s per execution. Every 3 hours) -
Dad: “Cool! Now you can sit around like you always do!” 😑
Mom: “So you are programming the computer? Can you show me how to do x on my computer/iPhone?” Except it’s the same questions every single time... She never learns...
Brother: Talks to me about jailbreak stuff
And of course, they all ask me how to fix things on different electronics.3 -
Why you should always backup.
Nearly a year ago I developed a whole project (iOS, tvOS, watchOS), but I never backed it up because I had a recent machine and thought the chance that something happens to the disk is so small I didn’t backup. But then my mac didn’t start correctly. So I needed to reset it. Lose the project, some other files but not much else. Then I recoded the project and backed it up on multiple places. But a little later, I was writing another app, again didn’t copy again... This time I deleted the wrong folder and deleted the trash, was gone too. So from then I learned to copy everything I coded. All projects I work on, I keep a copy of on an external disk, GitHub and Bitbucket. Assuming they wont crash all at the same time 😉.
So I recommend everyone to backup all your code. Even if it’s only 500 lines. Losing it is hard...3 -
Shit Developers say:
Fuck you Jasmine and your camelCase
I’ve been wrestling cucumbers all day
Oh no all the cucumbers are broken
In a fit of refactoring madness I have gone and changed a lot
Did you seriously just give ME nil?... No!
If the shit sticks, then we put nice paint on it
Fucking red dot motherfucker (Ben and his failing specs)
You know what we don’t do often..kill each others builds. Kill them and reschedule for later. Mwahaha ha ha.
This build is going to be so rad...(5mins later)...Ok this is not going to pass..I can feel it in my waters!
Can i do that in a digital way or do i have to move my meaty body downstairs to find him?
All the donkeys have be out the gate by sundown
God, imagine if you could patent mathematical solutions
actually, I wouldn't be surprised if you can in the states "no, you can't use a laplace transform, you haven't got the rights, you have to use a less accurate transform on your matrices"
ooooo a boolean that's phrased in the negative, my favourite for code review destruction!
Fuck the police i'll call the object here
Web RTC - its super easy, all you have to do is..probably some hard stuff
I want to go to that conference so I can start arguments with dickheads about semicolons. Just for fun.
This this is not the same as that this.
Can’t come to work I can’t find any clothes. It’s best for everyone if I just don’t come in. ...2 hours later... Yeah my clothes were just in the other room and i couldn’t be fucked moving
(OH about bad bug reports) - you know when they are all like oh joogly joogly doesn’t doodle doodle and it should wobbly doodle you know? and im all like fuck i don’t know any of that shit you are talking about.
Him: "I don’t like it, it’s against REST convention its so 2006 that my eyes are bleeding. As a privileged white male i feel entitled to complain about this." Me: "you. were. eleven in 2006
Source: Kellective Github2 -
Ok, im officially at the point where I can say this and I don’t say it lightly.. I’m really unhappy..
It’s hard for me to be happy anyway but being unhappy is not the same as not being happy IMO..
I’m so angry, especially at the western governments but also at the western society for making everything down that we’ve built over hundreds of years..
I’m socially pretty conservative I’d say. I have my values and manners which are very important to me. I try to be kind, diplomatically correct, hard working and honest but people sh!t all over that. Almost on a daily basis people tell me to “just lie”, it’ll solve the problem or to blame someone else.
What happened to work for what you want? And to “Be honest and loyal and it will pay off”? It’s more like the opposite nowadays..
Lie to everyone you can, cheat your way through every conflict and try as hard as you can to be a victim and all will work out…?
My boss had an interview ihr a grad student and she caught him googling stuff, trying to hide it. I told her to not even consider him but she thought he “deserves” another chance..
someone who applies and lies “deserves”??? You don’t DESERVE anything, you EARN it.. if you can’t earn it then sorry but this job is probably not for you.. not to mention that this guys CV was full of crap..
I just wanna find a woman, buy a farm an go off grid for a couple of years 😅 oh wait.. that’s legally not possible in pretty much any European country.11 -
A little over a year into my job at my current company back in January, I have a yearly meeting with my manager to discuss the progress I’ve made and to talk about what’s next. This is the meeting where we are supposed to discuss a potential pay raise but it’s the last topic of a predefined agenda.
So we spend a couple hours talking about how work has been for me. I started there as a junior developer with very little experience in the field but was quickly able to jump into a project with a fairly large codebase to help out the only other developer working on the project. Before long they’re so happy with me that they actually put me in charge of the application, which means my responsibilities evolve toward a whole lot more communication with the client and everything else that comes along with being in charge, including a lot of stress. I also salvaged another application initially developed by another company but that was so bugged it should’ve just been sent to the pits and rewritten from scratch. I was also asked to develop a couple POCs that were satisfactorily delivered.
Anyway, after almost two hours of going over my accomplishments and getting praises from my manager, we finally get to the part where we’re supposed to discuss a pay raise. He immediately cuts me off by saying the subject is not on the table due to the current crisis and our company struggling to make ends meet. I tell him I understand how hard it must be for them but also explain that I know for a fact other companies in the field are still making financial efforts to reward employees they’re happy with. He responds by saying that he’s aware of that, but he also “knows” that those same companies are laying off people that don’t deserve to be laid off despite the fact that they’re receiving government aid to stay afloat.
In the weeks following that meeting, I find out our company is doing the exact same thing my manager was condemning (laying off good people, taking massive advantage of government aid) and all the while not giving anybody a raise.
In any case, I really felt like that meeting was huge waste of time. What’s the point of going over everything I’ve done, congratulating me for my great work and even promising to give me even more responsibility if you don’t want to reward me for any of it? Do you honestly think I’m working hard so I can get a pat on the back or brownie points from you? I’ve got a family to take care of and I am trying to make their lives a little better each day by putting in hard work. But if hard work and climbing the latter of responsibility does not help me achieve that, what’s the point??1 -
Social Media. I have had the same message for 16 years from Linkedin ‘4 people visited your profile’. I still don’t give a fuck. Got a twitter account shortly after it launched, I still think it’s totally pointless. Recently looked at Instagram as everyone keeps asking me for it. There is no point to that either. It’s all fucking pointless and just a way to pretend you have a superior life to other sad mother fuckers. God I hate social fucking media!7
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This is just a bunch of things I needed to get out that I’ve been holding in for a while now.
Recently I’ve found myself In this state where I feel so depressed, lazy, and just pressured to program in general. I feel like it comes from me dismissing my abilities a lot of the time and I get demotivated to do stuff but at the same time when I do sit down and code I get distracted so easily, I can get work done but I just feel like I’m everywhere.
I want to apply for positions but I’m in this duality where I both feel like I can or can’t do it, I feel like wherever I apply to will not be accepting to people that don’t have a big degree or a ton of work experience and that I’ll get fucked on it. I’m fucking anxious that if I do get a job they will be like “hey fucking do X” and I will have no fucking clue how to even do X, and I’ve had people tell me that they know for a fact I can do it but I still fucking can’t believe it because I just completely doubt myself because I have failed at things like learning certain frameworks or failing to make the things I want and having to turn to simpler projects first because I’m too overwhelmed by the scale and I didn’t do any thinking about it before hand.
I don’t know if I’m making sense at all, I always write out rants like this and I always just erase them because I fucking hate whining like this but I need to let it out before I go more crazy I’ve been holding so much in for a long time now and it’s not been good.
I just over all feel terrible, anxious, and unproductive and I want it to stop.5 -
I heard good things about Edge recently and thought that I should give it a try for a few days.
I’ve opened the same pdf file in multiple Edge windows and and tabs, each scrolled to a different page.
#1
The middle-mouse button scrolling is broken on half of the windows and tabs. You press the button, you see the scroll mouse curser. But it doesn’t scroll.
#2
Scrolling horizontally to an area which wasn’t visible before, the content there is extremely blurry. Scrolling vertically to different pages doesn’t fix it. Is it the pdf? No. It’s just Edge. Zoom in and out again and the blurriness is fixed for now. Until it comes back later on a random page.
#3
Duplicate another tab and suddenly it crashes all of the tabs and windows of Edge. Now I need to open them all again and scroll to the positions that they were before…
If you think that it was just a one time issue, you are wrong. All of them happened multiple times and after Windows reboots.
I’m back to Firefox again.4 -
I like what I do for a living.
I build software, mostly from scratch or early stage products. Those are different industries, different companies, different technologies, frameworks and languages. Systems that impact economy in a different way.
When I develop software I am picking different parts of same project and try to understand how companies earn money and what are advantages of their software. What are required regulations and requirements to sell the stuff.
How the money flows from client and what they’re changing for. I especially try to understand stuff from business perspective.
When I pay my debts and luckily be still alive but unemployed and with minimum income from stocks / properties rental I will have plenty of time to duplicate many of those businesses.
I picked programming cause it’s touching all parts of economy basically without any skill requirements and certifications. It’s young impactful industry that is luckily not yet regulated. You just need laptop, like to solve puzzles and have plenty of free time and you can create everything. Never forget about it.
Cloud corporations try to make people think differently but it’s just that simple.7 -
I’m developing a fairly sophisticated desktop app in Python with PyQt5 as the widget set. Because my partner insists that all the kids these days love Python.
Piss on Python. And that goes double for PyQt5.
I’m on the absolute hardest section of the app. It’s a fairly complex import of data from PDF reports. There are so many different parts that I decided to go with a wizard.
So, I built a QWizard in Qt Designer. It generates a C++ .ui file, but you just truck it over to the command line and run this pyuic5 command, and it converts to a handy dandy Python class. Woo. You can subclass it and consume it from your Python script.
Sounded SO MUCH EASIER than writing the wizard from scratch. But OH NO. I need to do custom validation on my custom text control at every stage to control when the Next and Finish buttons are enabled, which means I gotta overwrite some damn event.
But I can’t. Because I can’t subclass the individual pages. Because they’re part of the same damn file and the wizard offers no access to them.
I’m almost certain that I’m going to have to completely redesign the wizard so that it’s pages are in separate files, which means I have to recode the bitch as well.
The cherry on top is that there’s zero documentation for this specific thing. None. No QWizard documentation exists for PyQt5 (if there is, they’re doing a damn good job of hiding it), so I have to read the documentation for PyQt4. Not the same animal. Close, but different. Even with the differences aside, this documentation is minimal and useless. “We’re going to tell you in very general terms what you should do, but we’ll give you zero idea how to do it. And we know the very common code method you’ll want to try first won’t work.”
And getting at this stuff when you do it in Qt Designer is WAY different. And all that documentation is in C++. Because apparently you HAVE to speak C++ if you want any real info about PyQt. Because that’s perfectly reasonable, right?
So, now I’ve lowered myself and posted a question on Stack. Because, hey, once you get past the power-tripping, mouth-breathing, basement-dwelling, neck-bearded high school punching bags picking apart your question rather than, I dunno..., BEING HELPFUL, sometimes you can get good info there. Sometimes. They seriously saved my ass at least one time.
But yeah. Fuck Python. Fuck everything Qt.17 -
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 -
I got job offer from company that makes AI product that works like electric fence for people, tracks their work and report to managers so they know when to meet and talk with this person.
Some Fucking Behavioral Shit. Well I’m tracking this company to see who they got acquired by and at the same time get the fuck out from this smart phone operating system.
Mother fuckers want to know all about everything and everyone.
At this point I saw my face in front of robot being my boss and started to questioning my life. Maybe that’s it.
Maybe it’s just last days, last year, last hour, last minute, last second…5 -
My first project it’s an emotional roller coaster. I was a little trainee/ junior dev at my job with a little more than a month learning RoR and one day my tech lead receives an email from the big boss saying: “We got a big client who wants a total redesign of his web and we said yes we can do it in a month, so please check if anything it’s reusable”, after reading my tech lead said to me “Do you want to help me with this ?” And well, we spend like 2-3 hours checking all the controllers, views, assets, etc. We conclude that the project was mostly front end changes and the back end will stay the same, so yeah it can be done in a month. The next day in a meeting with all the team I was nominee to be the person in charge of that project, because it was an easy project and all my teammates hate to do front end stuff, so I take the challenge. After that I met the Project Manager, another guy who recently start as PM about a month, so yeah we were two new guys who need to handle the project of a big client, nothing can go wrong. We did the planing, I give an estimation ( first one in my life ) for the tasks and added like 4 hours in case anything goes wrong. Then the first sprint came by, and I couldn’t finish it because the time given to some features was to low and the “design” was a mockup made by the PM, ok, no problems, we add more time to the tasks and we ask for a real design. At the half of the sprint the client start adding more and more stuff, the PM doesn’t talk back, just say yes yes yes. Then in a blink of an eye the easy project became a three months projects with no design at all, two devs ( a new guy who recently begin as dev enter the project ), just mockups and good hopes. But somehow we did it, we finish it! Nope. The early Monday of the next week I received an email of the PM saying we would have a second version and the estimation of the tech lead was a minimum of six months ( that became 8 months). This time was hell, because the client doesn’t decide what the hell he wants so a task would take a couple of days more or so, the PM became the personal bitch of the client, but it wasn’t his fault, because we later knew that the company became partner with this client and because of that the PM didn’t have too much choice :/, the designs were cool, but they weren’t on time ever, our only design guy had to do designs to our project and another 5 projects of the company, so yeah, we weren’t the only ones suffering. At the end we survive, the project was done and the client somehow was happy. Of course the project didn’t end and it was terminated half a year later, but I’ll always remember it because thanks to this project I was given the opportunity to work as a Front end dev and I’m happy still working as one.
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It’s really painful how non technical people think all technical stuff is the same.
The amount of times I’ve been brought in to help someone with a printer or WiFi network.
I didn’t do a computer science degree for this.
I’m also pretty sure my last two bosses think fixing the printer is the same as creating large scale systems.
My last boss wanted me to build a Vr chatbot despite spending the last few years building web servers and react/redux apps. I mean I can probably figure it out and it’ll be fun, but don’t think I’m gonna get this done in a week with all my other responsibilities too.
My new boss wants me to singlehandedly build a massive marketplace system that would probably take a team of ten, several years.
Fed up of being around non technical managers who don’t listen to me with my feedback.
Time for a new chapter in the new year.2 -
Not Speaking The Same Programming Language
(It is the mid 80s, and I have a coworker come to me with two full pages of computer programming source code.)
Coworker: “Hey, can you help me with this? This function is not working right.”
Me: “Sure. What’s it do?”
Coworker: “Well, on the first line I copy…” *drones on for a few seconds about stuff I can clearly read*
Me: “Wait! Let me interrupt for a moment. I can read the code. In 20 words or less, what does this do?“
Coworker: *long pause that tells me he’s having trouble seeing the forest for the trees* “It, um, converts a date that’s a string to three integers: month, day, and year.”
Me: “Ah! Excellent. And by the time you get the string, has it been sanitized? You know, guaranteed to be pairs of digits with a slash in-between, not blanks or words or other garbage?”
Coworker: “Oh, yeah, all the user input is cleaned up.”
Me: “Okay, good.”
(I scribble “sscanf(text, “%02d/%02d/%02d”, &month, &day, &year);” in a blank spot on the page.)
Me: “Throw out everything and replace it with that.”
Coworker: “You’re kidding.”
Me: “Not at all. Use that. It’ll work. Trust me.”
Coworker: *not sure* “Well, okay.”
(Half an hour later he’s back and looking a bit sheepish.)
Coworker: “That worked. Thanks.”
Me: “No problem.”
(It’s been 30 years. Unfortunately, the new generation of programmers is in the same spot.)
https://notalwaysright.com/not-spea...2 -
Inspired by @NoMad. My philosophy is that technology is a means to and ends. We’re a tool oriented species. As it relates to software and hardware, they should be your means to achieve your ends without you needing to think. Think of riding a bicycle or driving a car. You aren’t particularly conscious of them - you just adjust input based on heuristics and reflex - while your doing the activity.
For a long time Software has been horrendously bad at this. There is almost always some setup involved; you need to front-load a plan to get to your ends. Funny enough we’re in the good days now. In the early days of GUI you did have to switch modes to achieve different things until input peripherals got better.
I’ve been using windows from 95 and to this day, though it’s gotten better it’s not trivial to setup an all in one printer and scan a document - just yesterday I had to walk my mother through it and she’s somewhat proficient. Also when things break it’s usually nightmare to fix, which is why fresh installing it periodically is s meme to this day. MS still goes to great lengths with their UI so that most people can still get most of their daily stuff done without a manual.
I started Linux in University when I was offered an intro course on the shell. I’ve been using it professionally ever since. While it’s good at making you feel powerful, it requires intricate knowledge to achieve most things. Things almost never go smoothly no matter how much practice you have, especially if you need to compile tools from source. It also has very little in the ways of safe guards to prevent you from hurting yourself. Sure you might be able to fix it if you press harder but it’s less stress to just fresh install. There is also nothing, NOTHING more frustrating than following documentation to the T and it just doesn’t work! It is my day job to help companies with exactly this. Can’t really give an honest impression of the GUI ux as the distros have varying schools of thoughts with their desktop environments. Even The popular one Ubuntu did weird things for a while. In my humble opinion, *nix is better at powering the internet than being a home computer your grandma can use.
Now after being in the thick of things, priorities change and you really just want to get things done. In 2015 I made the choice to go Mac. It has been one of my more interesting experiences. Honestly, I wish more distros would adopt its philosophy. Elementary only adopted the dock. It’s just so intuitive. How do you install an application? You tap the installer, a box will pop up then you drag the icon to the application folder (in the same box) boom you are done. No setup wizards. How to uninstall? Drag icon from app folder to trash can. Boom done. How to open your app? Tap launch pad and you see all your apps alphabetically just click the one you want. You can keep your frequent ones on the dock. Settings is just another app in launchpad and everything is well labeled. You can even use your printers scanner without digging through menus. You might have issues with finder if your used to windows though and the approach to maximizing and minimizing windows will also get you for a while.
When my Galaxy 4 died I gave iPhone a chance with the SE. I can tell you that for most use cases, there is no discernible difference between iOS and modern android outside of a few fringe features. What struck me though was the power of an ecosystem. My Mac and iPhone just work well together. If they are on the same network they just sync in the background - you need to opt in. My internet went down, my iMac saw that my iPhone had 4g and gave me the option to connect. One click your up. Similar process with s droid would be multi step. You have airdrop which just allows you to send files to another Apple device near you with a tap without you even caring what mechanism it’s using. After google bricked my onHub router I opted to get Apples airport series. They are mostly interchangeable and your Mac and iOS device have a native way to configure it without you needing to mess with connecting to it yourself and blah. Setup WiFi on one device, all your other Apple devices have it. Lots of other cool stuff happen as you add more Apple devices. My wife now as a MacBook, an IPad s d the IPhone 8. She’s been windows android her life but the transition has been sublime. With family sharing any software purchase works for all of us, and not just apples stuff like iCloud and music, everything.
Hate Apple all you want but they get the core tenet that technology should just work without you thinking. That’s why they are the most valued company in the world14 -
I decided I should finally relocate from Russia. As one of the people I value much once said, it’s not about grass being greener, it’s about grass being alive.
I’m not going to buy a property here. Instead, I do this all at the same time:
- fixing my health (eye surgery done, quit smoking half a year ago, quit sugar several months ago, now through dental care and an obesity treatment with newest novo-nordisk stuff and sports, so far so good)
- gaining some momentum (newsletter launched, articles and open source stuff are published on a regular basis, it all gonna assembly to make my new website and a v2.0 media presence)
- learning (hands-on management and a11y experience on my current job as a tech evangelist, also a11y courses, bleeding edge JavaScript and css)
- saving money. Fuck rouble, just converting everything into usd covers up all commissions and taxes and basically makes me money
I’m going to accomplish all this and finally relocate.
Being attached to my city is a bias and a mind game. I just need to leave.
18 -
VIM! ViM! vim! Vi Improved! Emacs (Wait ignore that one). What’s this mysterious VIM? Some believe mastering this beast will provide them with untold mastery over the forces of command line editing. Others would just like to know, how you exit the bloody thing. But in essence VIM is essentially a command line text editor at heart and it’s learning curve is so high it’s a circle.
There’s a lot of posts on the inter-webs detailing how to use that cruel mistress that is VIM. But rather then focus on how to be super productive in VIM (because honestly I’ve still not got a clue). This focus on my personal journey, my numerous attempts to use VIM in my day to day work. To eventually being able to call myself a novice.
My VIM journey started in 2010 around the same time I was transiting some of my hobby projects from SVN to GIT. It was around that time, that I attempted to run “git commit” in order to commit some files into one of my repositories.
Notice I didn’t specify the “-m” flag to provide a message. So what happened next. A wild command line editor opened in order for me to specify my message, foolish me assumed this command editor was just like similar editors such as Nano. So much CTRL + C’ing CTRL + Z’ing, CTRL + X’ing and a good measure of Google, I was finally able to exit the thing. Yeah…exit it. At this moment the measure of the complexity of this thing should be kicking in already, but it’s unfair to judge it based on today’s standards of user friendly-ness. It was born in a much simpler time. Before even the mouse graced the realms of the personal computing world.
But anyhow I’ll cut to the chase, for all of you who skipped most of the post to get to this point, it’s “:q!”. That’s the keyboard command to quit…well kinda this will quit the program. But…You know what just go here: The Manual. In-fact that’s probably not going to help either, I recommend reading on :p
My curiosity was peaked. So I went off in search of a way to understand this: VIM thing. It seemed to be pretty awesome, looking at some video’s on YouTube, I could do pretty much what Sublime text could but from the terminal. Imagine ssh’ing into a server and being able to make code edits, with full autocomplete et al. That was the dream, the practice…was something different. So I decided to make the commitment and use VIM for editing one of my existing projects.
So fired the program up and watched the world burn behind me. Ahhh…why can’t I type anything, no matter what I typed nothing seemed to appear on screen. Surely I must be missing something right? Right! After firing up the old Google machine, again it would appear there is this concept known as modes. When VIm starts up it defaults to a mode called “Normal” mode, hitting keys in this mode executes commands. But “Insert” entered by hitting the “i” key allows one to insert text.
Finally I thought I think I understand how this VIM thing works, I can just use “insert” mode to insert text and the arrow keys to move around. Then when I want to execute a command, I just press “Esc” and the command such as the one for saving the file. So there I was happily editing my code using “Insert” mode and the arrow keys, but little did I know that my happiness would be short lived, the arrow keys were soon to be a thorn in my VIM journey.
Join me for part two of this rant in which we learn the untold truth about arrow keys, touch typing and vimrc created from scratch. Until next time..
:q!4 -
It’s really painful how non technical people think all technical stuff is the same.
The amount of times I’ve been brought in to help someone with a printer or WiFi network.
I didn’t do a computer science degree for this.
I’m also pretty sure my last two bosses think fixing the printer is the same as creating large scale systems.
My last boss wanted me to build a Vr chatbot despite spending the last few years building web servers and react/redux apps. I mean I can probably figure it out and it’ll be fun, but don’t think I’m gonna get this done in a week with all my other responsibilities too.
My new boss wants me to singlehandedly build a massive marketplace system that would probably take a team of ten, several years.
Fed up of being around non technical managers who don’t listen to me with my feedback.
Time for a new chapter in the new year.
#whosHiring?1 -
!dev !rant
Personal life update:
Like I said a few rants ago, I got a job in a call center for a national Japanese food chain. I am getting a pretty good salary for a teenager, and I am being paid the same amount as the other call center agents.
What I didn’t tell you is that I am doing a pre-university SAT, and it’s pretty much destroying me. I regret choosing to do it.
About AltRant: currently on short hiatus, though I swear to god that I will DEFINITELY upload it to TestFlight so you can get a taste of the app. All I ask is patience. I think I will wait until iOS 15 is out because the latest betas created a massive issue in a few parts of the app. All of them are aesthetic but damn it, I want to fix them only when they are officially there to stay because right now iOS 15 is still in beta.9 -
Here’s the second book for today.
Another small 100 page or so book.
It’s called advanced programming techniques, personally I don’t like the title, I don’t consider most of the items in here advanced, I would consider them more “better ways of solving a problem”, they do talk about recursion and linked lists, so I guess that could be a little advanced.
But like table based solutions is not advanced it’s just a technique that allows for simpler, scale able and main table code.. I been doing it for a long time, most easiest way to determine if something can turn into a table solution is look for a function that has a bunch of calls to the same function or something of that nature lots of repeated code with slight changes in a function or range of functions .. those of simplist way of “tablefiying”a solution I will picture the example from the book below.
The book, is all in java except for linked lists Thats in C..
But anyway this book is a great quick reference book, into the pile with programming pearls book, and those like that.
14 -
I was flash developer once, it was great when macromedia was around, then adobe acquired them, now flash is gone.
Years are passing and most of industry is the same as always. Trying to drag you into this rat race of learning new amazing technologies, amazing projects that are actually doing same job as 50 years ago but using more memory and cpu cycles. Because all has it’s roots in algorithms from previous centuries.
So youngsters loose your best life time, be innovative by doing nothing more then copy paste from stackoverflow and duck typing shitty code.
Be a slave and sit in the amazing office, that has everything but not your real life that meanwhile is sucked by corporate squeezer till your last breath.
Be piece of shit that can be kicked around.
Watch youtube, facebook, instagram or whatever social network that shows you pictures that are fooling your mind that you’re someone special and you need this stuff.
Then be ready to suck some dicks to earn money and buy stuff you don’t need, live where you don’t want and do what you don’t like. You piece of shit.
Well that’s what disappoints me from my tech stack.
Now chill out, turn off your electronic gadgets, go out and enjoy real world.1 -
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 -
Just want to put it out here... reading this will waste ur time. :(
Having a serious crush on co-worker. I tried not to have a crush on him initially because he’s a colleague and he seems to be much older(max 10 yrs I guess). Age isn’t an issue but ppl say it’s not good to like someone from work.
But then he kept on glancing at me and caught him turning back to look into my cubicle at several occasions. Saw him looking at my direction across the room, hall, turning back to look when he was waiting at lobby, and all the way from smoking corner as well. Could be possible that he just happened to be looking in my direction several times.
Now, haven’t seen him since early feb because of the quarantine. Luckily, I chanced upon his number when everyone in the dept was put into the same chat channel for the Covid19 news. I had this urge to ask what was it all about because we’ve been told to wfh till further notice. Who knows what could happen to us during these period.
So tried to be brave and asked abt why he was looking into my cubicles several times, without coming out weird (I hope). His reply was “dont know”. I don’t know what to make of it. Could have been anything else but how could someone just reply don’t know.
Then came yesterday, my friend was telling me about her experience on tinder. Apparently she’s been using it for fun and she got funny texts from the guys there. So I decided to give it a try. Man, it was so fun swiping left all the way (cuz they couldnt be compared with work crush) till I swiped right for this older guy. We matched!
He was the first one to match, probably abt 5-10mins after I’ve finished setting up profile and all that. It was totally a new experience for me. I forgot abt my work crush in that moment. He had this minimalistic vibe. Didn’t smile much in his photos, gave me calm feeling and looked so cool. He put “Everything is good in moderation” in the bio. He’s the only one comparable for that work crush. Not sure who’s supposed to start saying hi. My friends said wait for the guy, so I waited.
Got a few other matches after him but didn’t like them as much as him. I finally decided to say hi. No respond till today. Given that he put Doctor for his occupation, I assumed he’d be busy. So I waited. Then sent another in late afternoon asking if he plays LoL often (he’s wearing LoL land yard in one of the photos). No reply.
I started to feel weird because this is supposed to be light and fun because who takes things seriously on tinder, right. They’re there to flirt and kill the boredom especially because of the lockdown. And I started to have serious feelings for this one guy whom didn’t even bother to reply. So decided to delete tinder for good. Sent him one final msg that I really wanted to get to know him and I thought he’s a really cool handsome dude. But now that I’ve deleted my acc, he wouldn’t even see my msg anymore.
His profile name is Randolf. I want to get to know him in real life. But is it illegal? :(
Thank u for read this far. I just didn’t know where to put all those feelings. And sorry for wasting your time with nonsense.17 -
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 -
So about two months ago in my consulting firm I was asked to replace a colleague on a project (node and Angular). The project is only a few months old but it’s already a total clusterfuck. DB is very poorly designed. It’s supposed to be a relational database but there’s not a trace of a foreign key or any key for that matter and I’ve seen joins like tableA.name = tableB.description (seriously, that’s your relation??). The code is a mess with entire blocks of code copied from another project and many parts of the code aren’t even used. He didn’t even bother renaming variables so they would make sense in the context they were shamelessly thrown into. The code is at best poorly typed if not typed at all.
During our dailies I sometimes express my frustration with my other colleagues as I very politely allude to my predecessor’s code as being hard to work with. (They are all “good friends" with him). I always get the same response from my colleagues: "yeah but you’ve gotta understand Billybob was under a lot of pressure. The user stories were not well defined. He didn’t have time to do a proper job". That type of response just makes me boil inside.
Because you think I have time to deal with this shit? You don’t think I’m working with the same client and his user stories that are barely intelligible? How long does it take to write type definitions for parameters going into a function? That’s right, 30 seconds at most? Maybe a minute if it’s a more elaborate object? How much time do you think you’ll save yourself with a properly typed function or better yet an interface? Hard to tell but certainly A LOT MORE than those 30 seconds you lost (no, the 30 seconds you INVESTED) in writing that interface!!!
FUCK people with their excuses! Never tell me you don’t have time to do a proper job! You’ve wasted HOURS of my time just because you were too fucking lazy to type your functions, too lazy to put just a little more thought into designing your tables, too lazy to rename a variable so that it’s name actually makes sense where it’s being used. It’s not because you were short on time. You’re just lazy!
FUCK!!!!!!3 -
I’m becoming really frustrated working with my current project. It’s like someone’s dog ate the requirements and all stakeholders are on a different page on what’s needed/wanted. I’m fishing for the info I need and try to decipher the vagueness I get. I know I could just call a meeting and try to get us all on the same page there - but I’ve been in a few meetings with this specific lot of people, and I know it’s just going to end up in much more confusion...3
-
How are Coding Bootcamps and what are they like?
A little background:
I’ve been going to a University (have a year left for a CS degree) and I am so EXTREMELY frustrated. I thought I would get an education but it’s so underwhelming. 95% of it doesn’t involve programming and the classes that do are so elementary that I know more than the professors. By the end of my web design course we had been taught to center text, insert images, insert links, and how to use tables with a single day on CSS using colors.
The OOP courses are all the same, learn variables, types, conditionals, loops, classes, functions, and so forth. Python, C++, and Java. I taught all this to myself when I was 15, I’m 29 now.
I’ve recently gotten extremely interested into full stack web development. .NET Core, React, Typescript. I’m also working with Electron. I’m basically 100% self taught and spend almost every waking moment trying to learn more and apply it.
There’s only one person at my school who has the same passion as me and he’s the president at the coding club but is going into machine learning and big data (I’m the Secretary) and I just wish I could interact with more people who have the same passion. I would love to be challenged. I feel as if I spend more time trying to learn and diagnose problems then applying my knowledge because web development is so complicated when it comes to connecting everything together and I’m still relatively new to it (started like 4 months ago). I’m an extremely fast learner and extremely dedicated so I’m not worried about that being an issue.
I just really want to be a part of a community where I have people who can answer my questions and I don’t have to spend hours or days on google finding a solution to integrating Webpack or using typescript with react, and more. I want to feel challenged.
Can I get this from a boot camp? I recently listened to a podcast from Syntax and it really excited me but I don’t want to be let down again. Either way I’m finishing my degree to get that bullshit $60000 piece of paper but I wouldn’t mind taking a couple months off for something like this if it’s worth it.
I live in CO so if you have any Bootcamps in CO that you recommend, I’d love to hear it and take a trip to check it out in person.
Thanks a bunch!10 -
So happy about being about to convince management that we needed a large refactor, due to requirements change, and since the code architecture from the beginning had boundaries built before knowing all the requirements...
pulled the shame on us, this is a learning lesson card.. blah blah blah
Also explained we need to implement an RTOS, and make the system event driven... which then a stupid programmer said you mean interrupt driven ... and management lost their minds... ( bad memories of poorly executed interrupts in the past).... had to bring everyone back down to earth.. explained yes it’s interrupt driven, but interrupt driven properly unlike in the past (prior to me)... the fuck didn’t properly prioritize the interrupts and did WAYYY too much in the interrupts.
Explained we will be implementing interrupts along side DMA, and literally no message could be lost in normal execution.. and explained polling the old way along side no RTOS, Wastes power, CPU resources and throws timing off.
Same fucker spoke up and said how the fuck You supposed to do timing, all the timing will be further off... I said wrong, in this system .. unlike yours, this is discreet timing potential and accurate as fuck... unlike your round robin while loop of death.
Anyway they gave me 3 weeks.. and the system out performs, and is more power efficient than the older model.
The interrupting developer, now gives me way more respect...4 -
!dev
I just had one guy coming back to the house at 4am, again, and he made his usual grand entrance, slamming the doors, stomping on the wooden floor making all the creaking sound as he walk all the way to his room, which is right beside mine. And when he went into the bathroom, which is on the other side of my room, he slammed he motherfucking lid on the toilet bowl which was so fucking loud I literally jumped out of bed. I ended up not being able to sleep (I have a lot of trouble falling asleep), and when I tried to sleep in the afternoon to catch up on the missed winks, another motherfucking bastard started blasting fucking hardcore electronics in the living room which is right below my room. The same bastard also plays loud movies or music at 2-3am. I’ve told that bastard that comes home late to watch his noise but man he only minds the noises I told him and nothing else. As for the other fucker, he’ll say he’d keep it down but continues doing what he’s doing anyway.
I moved here cause I know that it’s usually a quiet place and away from the party kids, but I somehow ended up with a party kid and an insensitive fucker (This motherfucker had the loudest sigh of frustration when I knocked politely on his door last night. Yes I calmed down before I talked to him, but ended up deciding to not utter a word at all when I hear that sigh).
I should move out, but I can’t find a place before next term cause it’s way too late at this point. I am on a lease, but my landlord understands my situation, and he seems okay with breaking the contract.
Having been here as an international student for almost 2 years now, and having moved 5 times, this has been the worst nightmare of a bunch of people to stay with.
For those that has read of me ranting about this elsewhere, yes it’s that same fucking bunch that doesn’t clean the house.9 -
Generally devs who are too arrogant to accept help or constructive criticism. There’s this data visualisation library that missed a specific feature that psychologists use quite frequently, so I added it myself and opened a PR. The maintainer closed it because people should use whatever he’d already implemented. It’s like not giving someone the option to listen to disco because rock music is better. Yeah, cool story bro. Now all my visualisation projects depend on my fork instead. Same with the now abandoned Material Design Library devs. They didn’t have a drop down with free input, so I opened a PR with my solution. Closed as it was out of scope, simply because Google didn’t specifically include that in the Material specs, only an input and a drop down separately which my solution matched. I also opened a PR for an obviously missing feature (being able to validate forms via JS), closed as this behaviour wasn’t in the Material specs either. No wonder MDL died before it was ever finished.4
-
About 4-5 hours ago I wanted to make simple websocket to get input from textarea and parse it on server and somehow got myself into developing in asyncio -> aiohttp -> graphql-core -> graphql-ws -> aioredis
and svelte-> typescript
I still didn’t make the stuff I wanted but I’m very close on backend at least.
I have some frontend part somewhere in my old prototypes so it will be faster if I figure out svelte.
Still don’t understand what the fuck just happened.
Maybe it’s because I wanted try those frameworks for a long time.
All ‘simple’ examples I found have around 20-30 files for backend and same amount for frontend so more then 50 files to get this shit working.
They’re called oh irony “simple chat”.
Now I see why no one fucking understands this shit.
I’m trying to cut mine to 5 files.
I thought developers are lazy bastards who don’t like write code.
But now after this they’re all looking like adhd coders.
Looks like Monday won’t be my best day.9 -
Since my contract is going to be terminated on 1st July and brilliant devrant community injected me idea to make same project and start selling it as incorporated I made some steps.
I made simple POC that is command line application in different language and unrelated to what I’m doing and showed to my friend and ask if he want to buy it for his company and he was like wtf this shit even exist on the market or it’s new thing ?
I admit company I work for is not present in my country and this product is like not existing on the market. ( at least I can’t find it )
From this point I have a feeling I need to do it. I have life savings that will provide me to at least 2021 or even for a whole year if I’ll be smart and I think it’s going to be good thing to take a summer brake and make own project based on professional experience I have.
Despite the situation around I will be mostly coding 24/7, drinking and playing playstation.
I probably will convince my friend to work on it and my other friend to sell it once it’s done. He already wanted to sell my command line tool but I told him to keep his mouth shut cause they might steal the idea.
I already decided to use different tech stack and api so all software will be different, some business parts are unavoidable but I have many fresh ideas. At the end I will just connect some online payment, make youtube commercial and start selling it by integrating with some api and buying internet ads, also I will start looking for a new job from October if nothing will work out and just keep investing less time in it.
What you think ?
Should I take the risk or not finding job and do something that my heart is telling me to do( I write software for 12 years for money so I don’t think it’s even possible ) or should I live safe boring life and just go to another job ?
Thanks
Have a nice day.9 -
Just a quick rant on JavaScript,
So there’s a lot of people hating javascript, and while not a long time ago i was part of them, but I changed my opinion a little.
I think JavaScript is a great way to deal with website programming as it is quick and efficient, but I would not say to program directly on it, use a js-compilable language (CoffeScript, TypeScript, Kotlin(I think), etc.), but then you might say: “Well, no need for js then, compile it in byte code”. That would break the point of how I see web design/dev. The main intent behind webpages is to have an easy and fast way to send code to other computers to render them, that’s why it is interpreted: “Easy to send” and “*All* computers can handle it” with the proper browser. You need to be able to change the way the website is rendered and/or works sometimes, for diverse reasons like copy/pasting data, make it render properly or use plugins/add-ons to change that code to suit your needs.
I think js should be kept as a “readable byte-code”, so that means: {
Keep comments when compiling the js-compilable code,
Add standardized machine-readable comments that will indicate to smart code viewers how to show a particular thing (Like have a higher-end function compiled in js shown as a minimized code with explanations of the function)
Keep it nicely formated and don’t obfuscate (coz that’s annoying)
Etc.
}
So you bypass the quirks and all that pesky js stuff, while keeping it’s good sides.
-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-
Part 2:
Web design for non-web:
Ok so things like node.js, electron, react-native and all that stuff; I won’t say they’re bad but...
Why we have this is because web designers wanted to make desktop apps and were like “Hey! Making web pages is easy! Let’s port it to desktop”, the problem is: Web technologies were made to work on a restricted canvas, aka a browser. It’s good on web for reasons mention earlier and more. But it’s not on desktop! You’re trying to push it outside of those boundaries. It’s difficult to make it break that canvas and go outside, make something that really works! For social media clients and that kind of stuff that you want to make a little more inclusive, yes! it’s a great idea (hello devrantron ;), but not if it’s an exact same copy of the website, just use the website. But for things that are supposed to really make use of YOUR computer; no!
I see those PWA (progressive webapps aka mobile app, but it’s an offline website”), I stand for the same positions, social media and those sort of things: yes, great idea! Games? 🤢.
I have way more to say but I have difficulties to remember them while reading, so feel free to comment your thoughts
Lol, “just a quick rant”1 -
I decided to upgrade my intellij ultimate from 2019.3 to 2020.2 and I saw there is update button.
I clicked on it.
As I expected it didn’t work and it was 30 minutes waiting looking at progress bar going back and forth couple of times before I decided just to download latest version and drag and drop it to applications folder ( took me 5 minutes) - I use mac so it replaces all crap ( I think ).
I cleared the old cache that growed to 2 gigabytes leaving some configuration files.
Next as always crash on startup cause of incompatible plugins with long java stacktrace - at least I could click the close button or popup closed itself I can’t remember ( one version I remember this button couldn’t be clicked cause it was off the screen and you need to do some cheating to launch ide )
The font has changed and I see that it at least work a little faster - that is nice. Indexing is finally fixed after all those years - probably thanks to visual studio code intellisense pushing those lazy bastards to deal with this.
But the preloader on first logo disappears so I think they decided to remove it cause it’s so fast - no it loads the same time or maybe little longer when I launch it on my old macbook.
After that as always I looked at plugins to see if there’s something interesting, so to find ability to scroll over whole plugins I needed to click couple of times. I think they assume I remember all the nice plugins in their marketplace and I only type search.
Maybe I should be type of user who reads best 2020 plugins for your best ide crap articles filled with advertising or even waste more time to watch all of this great videos about ide ( are there any kind of this stuff ? )
After a few operations I unfortunately clicked apply instead of restart ide and it hanged up on uninstalling some plugin I’m no longer interested in for 5 minutes so I decided to use always working ‘kill -9’ from command line.
Launched again and this time success.
Fortunately indexing finished for this workspace and I can work.
I’m intellij ultimate subscriber for 7+ years and I see those craps are not changing from like forever.
What’s the point of automate something that you can’t regression test ?
I started thinking that now when most people are facebook wall scrolling zombies companies assume that when new software comes out everyone is installing it right away and if not they’re probably not our customers cause they’re dead.
What a surprise they have when I pay for another year I can only imagine ( to be fair probably they even don’t know who I am ).
Yeah for sure I am subscribed to newsletters and I have jetbrains as a start page cause I shit myself with money and have nothing better to do then be grupie ( is there corporate grupies already a big community? )
Well I am a guy who likes to spend some time when installing anything and especially software that is responsible for my main source of income and productivity speed up.
Anyway I decided to upgrade cause editing es7 and typescript got to be pain in the ass and I see it’s working fine now. I don’t know if I like the font but at least the editor it’s working the same or maybe faster then the original that is huge improvement as developers lose most of their time between keyboard and screen communication protocol.
I don’t write it to discourage intellij as it’s great independent ide that I love and support for such a long time but they should focus on code editor and developers efficiency not on things that doesn’t make sense.
Congratulations if you reached this point of this meaningless post.
Now I started thinking that maybe it’s working faster cause I removed 2 gigs of crap from it.
Well we’ll see.1 -
Month passed so I looked at job offers and I am tired again.
All of them look the same and all of them look like crap. Some require stupid online tests preparation ( cause everyone likes to traverse tree 10000 times a day ).
Seriously I think I will go to supermarket and work there.
It’s more pleasant then getting input and pushing it in some stupid places all over again.
Finding some shit in shit pile, then moving this shit pile back and forth between different shit holes.
AI should start writing this stupid code, robots should provide food and build shelter.
The sooner the better for all of us.1 -
I can’t control my thoughts.
When someone says “wrap your head around” something, I imagine it. It happens every time.
It’s always 50/50. The one times the head of the person inside my head turns into a play-doh kind of sausage that wraps around a random object, usually a cube, and his face looks confused. It’s hard to separate his head from his neck and it terrifies me.
The other times the head appears extremely solid and has an overall round shape, then I subconsciously try to forcefully wrap it around that object but it doesn’t work and that person screams. It terrifies me even more.
Thoughts like this haunt me through my life. I hate it but I also somehow feel like I’ll miss it if they’re gone and at the same time I can’t decide whether it’s like a Stockholm syndrome towards that terrifying thoughts that are somehow both so personal yet so alien, or just my intuition lies to me again. Both of those possible reasons scare me even more.
My intuition is very valuable to me, I value it the same as I value the freedom of thought – above everything else. Those situations compromise both. Intuition is a major decision-making instrument to me, so terrible things will happen if I couldn’t trust it.
I don’t know what exactly I did wrong to become like this and I can’t remember when it all started7 -
This started as an update to my cover story for my Linked In profile, but as I got into a groove writing it, it turned into something more, but I’m not really sure what exactly. It maybe gets a little preachy towards the end so I’m not sure if I want to use it on LI but I figure it might be appreciated here:
In my IT career of nearly 20 years, I have worked on a very wide range of projects. I have worked on everything from mobile apps (both Adroid and iOS) to eCommerce to document management to CMS. I have such a broad technical background that if I am unfamiliar with any technology, there is a very good chance I can pick it up and run with it in a very short timespan.
If you think of the value that team members add to the team as a whole in mathematical terms, you have adders and you have subtractors. I am neither. I am a multiplier. I enjoy coaching, leading and architecture, but I don’t ever want to get out of the code entirely.
For the last 9 years, I have functioned as a technical team lead on a variety of highly successful and highly productive teams. As far as team leads go, I tend to be a bit more hands on. Generally, I manage to actively develop code about 25% of the time to keep my skills sharp and have a clear understanding of my team’s codebase.
Beyond that I also like to review as much of the code coming into the codebase as practical. I do this for 3 reasons. I do this because as a team lead, I am ultimately the one responsible for the quality and stability of the codebase. This also allows me to keep a finger on the pulse of the team, so that I have a better idea of who is struggling and who is outperforming. Finally, I recognize that my way may not necessarily be the best way to do something and I am perfectly willing to admit the same. I have learned just as much if not more by reviewing the work of others than having someone else review my own.
It has been said that if you find a job you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. This describes my relationship with software development perfectly. I have known that I would be writing software in some capacity for a living since I wrote my first “hello world” program in BASIC in the third grade.
I don’t like the term programmer because it has a sense of impersonality to it. I tolerate the title Software Developer, because it’s the industry standard. Personally, I prefer Software Craftsman to any other current vernacular for those that sling code for a living.
All too often is our work compiled into binary form, both literally and figuratively. Our users take for granted the fact that an app “just works”, without thinking about the proper use of layers of abstraction and separation of concerns, Gang of Four design patterns or why an abstract class was used instead of an interface. Take a look at any mediocre app’s review distribution in the App Store. You will inevitably see an inverse bell curve. Lot’s of 4’s and 5’s and lots of (but hopefully not as many) 1’s and not much in the middle. This leads one to believe that even given the subjective nature of a 5 star scale, users still look at things in terms of either “this app works for me” or “this one doesn’t”. It’s all still 1’s and 0’s.
Even as a contributor to many open source projects myself, I’ll be the first to admit that have never sat down and cracked open the Spring Framework to truly appreciate the work that has been poured into it. Yet, when I’m in backend mode, I’m working with Spring nearly every single day.
The moniker Software Craftsman helps to convey the fact that I put my heart and soul into every line of code that I or a member of my team write. An API contract isn’t just well designed or not. Some are better designed than others. Some are better documented than others. Despite the fact that the end result of our work is literally just a bunch of 1’s and 0’s, computer science is not an exact science at all. Anyone who has ever taken 200 lines of Java code and reduced it to less than 50 lines of reactive Kotlin, anyone who has ever hit that Utopia of 100% unit test coverage in a class, or anyone who can actually read that 2-line Perl implementation of the RSA algorithm understands this simple truth. Software development is an art form. I am a Software Craftsman.
#wk171 -
Former android fan, I’ve been using iPhone SE for a while, and now I’m ready to give feedback. We are talking about brand new, iOS 11.2.2 device, never jailbraked (jailbroken?) or made anything fucked up to.
The main problem is battery life. It’s poor. I mean, my cheap ass Meizu m3s stands for about three times longer. Now I always need to carry power bank or charger around, keeping it up from one outlet to another.
iOS 11 is unstable and flawed. Music widget on lock screen freezes randomly, ui falls apart sometimes, apps sometimes start in landscape mode. I never found android ui falling apart, just like webpage marked up by interns.
Transferring files to Linux PC is huge pain in the ass. Nuff said.
Aaaand... that’s all. There is literally only three problems present.
On the other hand, there is huge advantages over android:
Speed. It’s unbeatable. It’s absolutely stunning. Need camera? Here it is, quarter second away. Android camera needed straight 15 seconds to start up. Taking picture? Here it is, flawless as always. Zero motion blur, gamma is ideal, focus is so sharp so you may hurt your eyes. Need 100 pictures? Here you go, just press the button and hold it. Maybe s9 or another shiny ass android takes pictures as fast as iPhone, but I bet my iPhone will be taking pictures same flawlessly after 5 years, while your android will probably become sluggish ass piece of crap.
Not. A. Single. Fucking. Lag.
Asphalt 8? 60 FPS all the way down. 2GIS? Fraction of a second away. That’s it, that’s how it have to be.
Sound quality. Just as neat as my Sansa Clip. EarPods are crap, so I’m using my SE215. Not going to ever come back to Sansa. Xperia TX had much less quality audio btw.
Apps. As long as the whole enterprise world sucking Apple’s dick, apps are running silky smooth and the things are not going to change. Come on. Apple is the king nowadays, admit it or not.
Keyboard is amazing. Screen is amazing. It’s just that pleasing. The sounds iPhone makes are great, while android sounds piss me off and making me hold myself from throwing the phone straight to the wall.
iPhone makes me feel cared about. Everything is on it’s place, everything fits perfectly. You are watching YouTube, you need to adjust volume and volume bar appears as tiny strip on the very top, just to not distract you. Make screenshot, draw something on it, share and hit delete. Every action you need is one tap away. Look up word? One tap away. Position the cursor between words? Polished as fuck, here you go, have your handy magnifying glass. Adblock in safari? Install it from the App Store and it will be literally two taps away, right at the settings. No VPN needed. Safari doesn’t become slow with Adblock, it’s just the same amazingly fast browser, but without ads. And Apple Music is just one dollar a month for students, filled with high quality songs.
Even google apps working better on iOS.
The advantages are clear for me, while downsides aren’t significant. @irene, you wanted to know what I’ll tell after a while, so I’m saying it proudly:
I’m never ever coming back to android.12 -
Quick question, is it bad to quit from a job when the project is not finished yet, especially in a startup company?
My reasoning for quitting, boss doesn’t really understand how game development usually works and mostly assuming every project will be same.
Following is my rant of background story for my question.
The incident triggered me wanting to leave is as below.
G = another guy from incubating center
B = boss
G: hey B, do u know this game studio is releasing this title soon. It’s a local company. Sounds cool.
Then they went to check the company profile. Found that the company has abt 40 staffs in total.
B: hey lunadev, do u know them? They have 40 people to make 2 titles. I think we’re the smallest company in the world that developing mobile games. Ha ha ha.
Me: oh, may be their project scope is complex. But I don’t think ours is the smallest company in the world making game. (We have 5 in total including him) there are others with only 2 ppl making games. (My sarcastic side took over me and said) I think we’re the only company in the world that has such small manpower with shortest deadline.
B: then how long do u think our timeline should be?
Me: abt 2 yrs? (Me considering all the artworks, features, testing time that we have to do)
B: urmmm I don’t think it’s that long. May be abt 6 months or a year at most?
G: ya, abt 6 months. Mobile games are not like desktop games or others so should be abt 6 months. Shouldn’t take that long.
Me: ... :)
Then I packed up my stuffs and left for the day. As for side note, boss designed the game himself and it took him 5 years to add complex features. And sometimes he will still come up to us and ask us to add that feature just cuz he was just inspired by another game he just played. Now can they tell us, this game can finish in 6 months? On what ground?
And another thing that he does gets on my nerve is that he plays game during office hours while the rest of us rushing for his project and campaign.
So, if I quit now, they’d still be in the middle of development. Oh and I’m the main programmer developing the game. So, erm.. Is it wrong?7 -
Honestly I don’t remember any particular one cause every interview is such a traumatic experience.
People on interviews are almost all the same, they just try to prove their superiority over you and break you.
I totally understand why, it’s because they think they understand what IT is about and in fact they understand shit, that’s why also most of computer systems are shit, cause of shitty people doing it who don’t understand how computer work, they can just copy paste stuff and do beautiful talks about how cool they are and how awesome their company is.
At the end ( at the edge ) it doesn’t matter if you know tech stack or not, if you have gazillion years of experience or you just started. It only matters if you can solve problems and how good and fast you can do it.
But well do your reverse tree in 15 minutes. I’d rather be talking about philosophy during the interview. -
I got assigned to work on a new project a couple of weeks ago. We got the POC code handed off from senior management, since he came up with the idea over the weekend. The project concept is hella exciting, but the dev manager and PO I have to deal with make life unbearable to say the least.
We have only 2 devs (including me) and 1 QA on this supposedly very important project. Of course, management announced the project to the clients already, so now we have to deliver ASAP cause it adds “sizzle”.
The MVP deadline is... no one knows when, either July 30th or September 1st. The MVP requirements are... unknown. I swear if someone saw the list of tasks and issues attached to “MVP” Epic, they would call us nuts trying to fit it all in.
To make things better, each PR requires 2 reviewers, so we end up adding manager as a reviewer just cause we need him to hit that “approve” button. So in attempt to make life easier, we requested to have a third developer. We are getting another developer, but that guy doesn’t know how to unit test a pure function...
Current priorities are... unit testing with coverage of 95% and if we want to refactor code, we have to add area to the list in a Google Doc. As a result, we are not tackling big things like risk of SQL injections not to mention big features like i18n (5-6 languages to support by the way and yes, it’s part of MVP as well as SSR no one knows why). Currently, I spend 2-3 hours a week in calls with the team just to figure out what the hell MVP is, what we have to do and why we have to do it. Last time we spent an hour refining 1 spike and breaking down one story into 3.
Oh, we also don’t have a deployment plan, not even to test environments since DevOps team was not aware of this project at all. Thus, QA cannot create any test suites and have to test everything manually which eats a lot of their time.
This whole project is a big hot mess and I’m considering leaving it all together especially since I’m working on two squads at the same time. I love the project, I love the idea, but management makes it unbearable, so I’m not even motivated to work on that.3 -
I’ve recently started at a company where though I’m one of the youngest out of my colleagues I am on the same role-level as them (if that makes sense) and it’s different to my old job where I was at a start up as a junior developer (not very appreciated there tbh), here however, I feel like I am treated as their equal and in most scenarios depended on, especially if it’s a piece of work I did. I know its not a big deal but I’m not sure how to handle all this importance lol, I can’t lie I do feel sometimes I might have imposter syndrome. How would you deal in a situation like this/do things to improve self confidence?4
-
Worst was getting head hunted into my current role at this terrific company.
Three months later I’m done with it.
It’s not shit shitty codebase, or the lack of direction that self governing teams have. It’s not the megalomaniac company owner. It’s the bullshit team mobbing and 8 hours of video calls a day.
The best part.
Come he’ll or high water I’m getting myself out before the end of the year.
I’d rather be busy and have f’k all chance of promotion than any more of this. At least the day will fly by.
Just hope I don’t make the same mistake twice, that’s become my biggest worry now. -
People just can’t show up on time. I respect people’s time and I do not waste a minute of anyone s time. I do not like it. Time is a precious resource and we should all treat it as such. I expect the same from other people too.
There was a meeting supposed to happen a month or so back. Me and another guy. This meeting was basically giving him the resource utilization and some cost related details for the budget our team used up. They wanted a more granular report than the generic ones we submitted.
He scheduled it once and about ten minutes before he cancelled it. Fair enough.
A week later he sent an invite and the next day he cancelled it a few hours before the meeting. Fair enough I’m still not pissed.
A month or so since the first scheduled meeting, he scheduled a meeting and I turn up and he s not there and I wait for about half hour before I leave. Next day I get an email saying he s sorry. Now I’m pissed.
A couple weeks back he schedules a meeting and I turn up and I could see through the glass door and he s talking to someone in the room he s in. He signals to me to wait for five minutes. It takes about 20. Finally I go in and he s relieved so he can finally get the data from me. I tell him I waited for twenty minutes and I have to somewhere and asked him to reschedule the meeting. He asks when and I tell him a time where I know he won’t turn up. About 8 30 in the morning. He says yes.
Next day I show up he s not there and I wait for ten minutes and just he s walking in to the floor I exit the room and run to my place. He comes over and asks and I tell him I waited for sometime and I’m busy now and he mumbles and goes away.
By this time it is already a week or so after the deadline. The bigger boss from finance turns up and asks me why I haven’t given them the data I asked for. I tell him they schedule meetings and don’t turn up on time and my other work is getting affected productivity blah blah and he says okay make the report and give it to me. I tell him no I’m not wasting anymore time on this.
He goes to my boss creates a little ruckus my boss comes over and he goes wtf. I tell him what happened. He says it’s okay give them the report. I’m like I don’t know where I kept it must be somewhere I can’t waste anymore time on this. Guy from finance joins us at this point and angrily says he’ll find it himself and don’t need our help anymore.
The file is in my laptop I use for travel. Just a local copy. Zero fucking backups. And I just deleted it.
Fuck. You.1 -
My first exposure to computers was the TRS-80 (a.k.a. TRASH-80) my mom (the city Library Director) bought for library patrons to use. It’s data store was on a cassette tape and programs came on cartridges, IIRC.
Around the same time I was learning to do Logo and BASIC on an Apple IIe in 5th grade.
My cousin’s Commodore 64 came next and my grandma saw how my interest in computers was blooming, so she suggested I use the savings I had built up from birthday money and mowing lawns to buy an IBM PC/AT 8088 clone. $1,300 later and lots of time in my basement figuring out how to build it all from separately-shipped components, I was on my way to learning Assembler, BASIC, and DOS. -
Indigogo is to retail what ICOs are to he financial industry.
- some random people think of an idea (ICO = token, IGO = magical dick cream)
- they both rely on well made but completely horse-shit marketing material
- they both spam your sites with the same repetitive ads
- they both offer discounts for getting in early (aka give us money before we have designed or built anything)
- they both make outlandish and sometimes illegal product claims (ICO = Visa is a partner, IGO = magic dick cream does magic things)
- in the end most of both options ends up giving you nothing at all and just running away with your money
- best case scenario they both deliver a product that is utterly worthless and meaningless
- everyone is hunting for that one coin or product that is a not a total scam.
I don’t hate indigogo but they certainly are shady as fuck. I’ve rolled the dice on then 4 times and got scammed on 2 of them. It’s basically a crap shoot.1 -
It seems like there is a whole another grade of fear — Basilisk grade. It’s impossible to experience it and walk away without serious consequences.
Imagine: I’m barely 20. It’s my first real, official, high-paying job. I’m already a team lead. A big Russian non-govt company with a blue logo. Huge new office in Moscow.
My “childhood” is officially over — I’m not playing around anymore. I’m an adult in every sense of the word.
Several weeks go by. Maybe even a month. Just a regular day at the office. I’m waiting for the coffee machine to heat up, and suddenly, it hits me. I’m here, at the office. Moscow, a city of 10 million people, is beautiful in the summer, yet I can’t just leave the office and go for a walk whenever I want to. When the day is over, it’s already evening, and I barely have time for myself. There are other people around me, with way higher positions, but their schedule is just the same as mine: nine-to-six. My adult life just started. I have forty years of this ahead of me. No matter the company, no matter the position: unless I’m the CEO, I’m doomed to get to work in the morning and go back home in the evening. And then I retire, old and not that beautiful anymore. And then that’s it.
I was never the same after that day. People are plotting my betrayal behind my back. They all act as one. Just out of my frame of view, their heads are turned to me, and they all look at me with the same devilish grin. There are no people — it’s all one huge shoggoth that lives under the office floor, and my colleagues are its ugly tentacles wrapped in human skin. I start missing deadlines. I become paranoid. Next thing I know, I’m at the psychiatrist’s office, being prescribed aripiprazol — a strong antipsychotic that is designed to literally make you slower. Anxiety worsens. I develop restless legs syndrome. I lose my ability to sleep. My intelligence is slipping away. I’m fired.
I have the return to Saint-Petersburg, cariprazine prescription that felt like lobotomy with extra steps, losing my ability to read, delirious manic episodes ahead of me.
It is only now that I kinda-sorta tuned my medication scheme in by going through countless psychiatrists of all sorts. But I sure as hell work at a place where I can do whatever I want if I meet deadlines.3 -
target env: tomcat 8 on linux
devs local env: uses springboot 1.5
deployment time....
me: hey it does not work as expected.
dev: but it works on my local machine.
me: have you tried testing it with standalone tomcat maybe integrate it on intellij or containerize perhaps?
dev: (refused to test on standalone tomcat) it’s useless and it doesnt makes sense coz both are the same.
me: fuck let’s deploy your laptop on
all environments.
geezzzz :-| -
So exams are coming up and I’m not even ready at all :,,) I Need and want to study But At the same time i want to draw and animate. When i think about these two stuff my brain becomes soggy and very slow so in the end I don’t do anything and it’s bad :,,) I really suck at planning stuff out, do you all have any good schedules that work? :DD
3 -
Am I the only one that is very neutral while learning a new language or framework or whatever it may be? Like cause you have to go through the basics and you’re basically stuck copying what the tutorial, book, video, whatever source tells you to do and the best you can FUCKING do is change a few things. I love learning new stuff don’t get me wrong I love adding tools to my arsenal.
I just don’t know what else I could try to do because it’s new ground but I want to acknowledge I’m learning it by making my own small basic program with what I’ve been showed but there’s not enough to do different stuff and I have to go back to the tutorials and copying and I feel like I’m learning NOTHING it’s just a annoying feeling for me personally idk if anyone feels the same. Am I crazy? Or am I just doing something wrong?
Also to clarify the all caps “FUCKING” was because my phone changed it to ducking and I wanted to make sure autocorrect knew I meant what I meant.5 -
Did some distro hopping at the weekend and ended up back in Ubuntu.
And for the most part everything is running like a dream, except MY motherfucking SQL.
Installation appears to be ok, but doesn’t let me set a root password, and throws errors like it’s cool when I try and change the root password.
Same goes for MariaDB.
All of my googling for a solution has so far failed me1 -
What are some job possibilities for software engineers that are a bit more challenging?
Software Engineering just became routine and with all the hin abstractions during the past years it’s not really a complex job anymore.
Thoughtful about data science but I think I’d get bored with that as well after a few years.
Looking for ideas with:
- technical skills
- have a lot if responsibility
- at least same pay
Would be interested in e.g. investment banking but that seems far out of my league (education wise)..9 -
This shit is long story of my computer experience over my lifetime.
When I was young I got my first PC with windows it was not so bad. It required safe shut down of it’s fat32 partition. From time to time I needed to reinstall it cause of slow down but I got used to it I was only a gamer.
Time passes and I got more curious about computers and about this linux. Everything worked there but installation of anything was complete madness and none of windows programs worked well, and I wanted to play games and be productive so I sticked with windows.
I bought hp laptop once with nvidia card, it was overheating and got broken. So I bought toshiba and all I told to the seller was I want ATI card. Took me 5 minutes to do it and I was faster then my friend buying pack of cigarettes because I was earning money using computer.
Then I grown up running my small one person programming businesses and I wanted to run and compile every fucking program on this world. I wanted linux shell commands. I wanted package manager, and I wanted my os to be simple because I wasn’t earning money by using my os but by programming. So after getting my paycheck I bought mac. I can run windows and linux on vm if I need it. I try not to steal someones work so I didn’t want to run hackintosh. I am using this mac for some time.
Also I use playstation for gaming. Because I only want to run and play game I am not excited about graphics but gameplay. I think I am pragmatic person.
I can tell you something about my mac.
When I close lid it go sleep when I open it wakes up instantly. I never need to wonder if I want to hibernate or shut down or sleep and drain battery. It is fucking simple.
When I want to run or open something it doesn’t want me to wait but it gives me my intellij or terminal or another browser or whatever I search for. Yeah search is something that works.
Despite it got 8 gigs of ram I can run whatever number of programs I want at the same speed. The speed is not very fast sometimes but it’s constant fast.
I have a keychain so my passwords are in one place I can slow down shared internet speed, I can put my wifi in monitor mode and I don’t need to install some 3rd party software.
And now I updated my mac to high sierra, cause it’s free and I want to play with ios compilation. Before I did it I didn’t even backup whole work. I just used time machine and regular backups. And guess what, it still works at the same speed and all I did was click to run update and cook something to eat.
When I got bored I close the lid, when got idea open lid and code shit, not waiting for fucking wakeup or fucking updates.
I wanted to rant apple products I use but they work, they got fucking updates all along at the same time. And all of updates are optional.
I cannot tell that about all apple products but about products I use.
I think I just got old and started to praise my limited time on this world. Not being excited about new crap. When I buy something I choose wisely. I bought iPhone. I can buy latest iPhone x but I bought iPhone 7 cause it’s from fucking metal. And I know that metal is harder then glass, why the fucking apple forgot about it? I don’t know.
I know that I am clumsy and drop stuff. Dropped my phone at least 100 times and nothing.
I am not a apple fan boy I won’t buy mac with this glowing shit above keyboard that would got me blind at night.
I buy something when I know that it can save my time on this world. I try to buy things that make me productive and don’t break after a year.
So now piece of advise, stop wasting your time, buy and update wisely, wait a week or a month or a year when more people buy shit and buy what’s not broken. And if something’s broken rant this shit so next customer can be smarter.
Cheers1 -
Don’t fall for the “language A is better than language B” -it’s all just syntax (within the same paradigm). Learn higher concepts such as: data structures, abstraction, loops, variables, conditionals, functions.
Only then can you decide that your favourite language is better than anyone else’s...5 -
Summing up my cynicism.
I live on a big shit pile in the middle of nowhere where biggest achievement is travel around the globe. It doesn’t matter that you can do it under a day using special piece of paper that everyone is bragging about.
At the same time I am trapped inside sack of meat that is slowly putrefy and is highly vulnerable to everything on this fucking place. Sooner or later I will shit under myself again.
And I even didn’t stared cause the real problem is that I can’t get the fuck out of here and everyone try to convince me that what I do is “important” and I need to start a family and shit like that, yet everyone believes in some higher power that says you don’t need all of this shit. Like what the fuck people ?!!?!!
How the fuck did I get here ? I must have been making jokes from someone important. If it’s true I’m really really sorry and now please get me out of this nightmare. I know I did something wrong and I sincerely apologize. Are we good now ?
Fucking hell !!!3 -
Recep Tayyip Erdogan had a problem — after his army service, he got so used to cold that he could only sleep on a raw, cold metal grill. Usually, normal people put mattress on top, but Erdogan didn’t feel right this way. So, in one of his personal prisons, he established a social project for making a full metal bed for himself.
For starters, to calculate the shape, he took the smallest man ever (3 inches high) with his fingers and sunk him into molten plastic. “What are you doing?! It hurts!” — man screamed. “Shut up. You’re on an important mission. Your motherland won’t forget you.”
After three months, the bed was ready. It was more of the same — metal bars, but this time with some kind of structure built of metal hinges, rebar and strong springs. This was the day — this was the big reveal event. It took place in the same prison — three prisoners were ready to lay on their new full metal beds, while news crews congratulated Erdogan and celebrated his greatness. “Well, it is time!” — he said.
Prisoners laid flat. An awful screeching sound. Prisoner number two is bleeding out. The spring mechanism broke out and impaled his chest onto a large metal bar. He’s not breathing.
“Shut it down. Shut it all down. No more cameras, no more news”, — said Erdogan.
“Yes, our master”, — said news crews.
They wanted to draft me to Afghanistan.
“No!”, — a young officer shouted, misgendering me — “He doesn’t know the stages of pain. Useless.”
“Are you perhaps arguing pain with a bipolar patient?” — I replied.
“You are a rave. Nothing but a rave.”
Raves spawned near your doors at night. Sometimes, they even spawned on the inside. I can’t say you were in danger, but it certainly wasn’t a pleasant thing to happen to anyone. They looked ugly. They dressed weird. They spoke in riddles.
“How do I move to Europe?”, — a rave asked.
“I…”
“Shut up!”
Rave took a door, suspiciously painted over and over multiple times, and started to slam my door with it, using it as a ram.
My door started giving in.
Alarm system.
On a separate note, to disable the alarm system, you have to speedrun Stanley Parable. It’s the hardest speedrun ever, specifically its hidden ending. It disables all alarm systems in three-mile radius IRL. No one knows how it works, but it does. Back to the danger zone!
“The better quality time you spend sitting on your toilet, the more you’ll live.”, — an officer said.
“I once had a girl blow me while I was shitting,” — Matthias replied — “You have nothing on me.”
“Fair enough!”
It is a little known fact, but the liquid that Northern cities use to clean up snow isn’t quite what it seems like. It’s not salt — in reality, there are bases on Mars, and they store pink goo that… “iMpRoVeS” dead bodies. The liquid is biological in nature, and it expires. Expired liquid is recycled as snow melter. You learn that in high school, but now, living on a train, you should know that there are special learning rooms here, in every. single. carriage. The small gym ball with two handles on its sides is called Gandhi ball. Fun fact: if you wear headless Segways on top of your shoes, and then lay flat holding a Gandhi ball, you can reach the speed of 270 kph!
Today’s news: a Reddit moderator and a legless woman gave birth to a living sex toy for their domestic boar.2 -
A colleague changes the location of a test helper file imported in a bunch of tests. Doesn’t bother to check where that file is imported (except where he’s specifically using it himself).
As a result good dozen tests fail later on. The culprit doesn’t realize. And the rest of us have no clue why.
Multiple people are asked to look into why the tests are failing.
"Ok, who’s working on what?
We’ll create a shared document to track who’s working on what test."
Document is created, people get assigned.
"Hold on, looks like it’s just a faulty import." "Oh yeah same here." "Yeah for me as well."
"Ok we could simply appoint one person to fix all the imports."
"Well I’ve already gone ahead and opened a pull request to fix the test I was appointed to."
"Ah ok, well who can take care of the rest?"
"Wait I also opened a PR."
"Ok so I guess we can each open a PR?" "No we can just have a single branch we can all push to".
"Sure, who’s branch are we using"
"You can use the branch of my PR"
"Guys let me handle this, it’s ridiculous for us to all be doing this separately."
"You’re right, go ahead".
——
The culprit? A senior dev.
What would have literally taken a minute to do (or even no time at all with proper use of the IDE) turned into hours of wasted time. People getting interrupted, having to drop what they were doing to fix the consequences of this guy’s laziness (seriously don’t know what else to call it).
Ok maybe our reaction could have been more efficient, but we never should’ve even gotten to that point in the first place.2 -
It’s taken me 20 years to realize that I love tech but hate corporate IT. The thought of spending another 20+ years sitting in meetings listening to people drone on about nonsense, spending countless hours performing system upgrades when all I want to do is code, etc. just makes me sick to my stomach. It’s the same day over and over again.2
-
After all this time I’m still confused, why was Cambridge Analytica such a huge deal? I feel like a lot of people knew this in years prior, that Facebook/Google were scraping user data and activities to use for personal profiles and hence more directed as placement. Stuff like Ghostery, Privacy Badger, Disconnect, Ad Nauseum (rip it’s Chrome plug-in) etc. all focused on not allowing these same trackers to get information, so not like this case just magically busted the doors wide open screaming that all those websites you visited are now in Facebook’s database and no one knew.
I just can’t quite understand why everyone got up in arms after this.1 -
Sooo a coworker and I tonight were working on some software and somehow got side tracked on discussion regarding our thinking process, and how one of our other coworkers always things so strangely always defensive etc.. which then lead us to saying it would be nice if we could like see and feel how another persons brain is and how they draw conclusions and think..
this conversion immediately changed to the inner-monologue discussion.
And holy shit went go distracted for 4 hours tonight!
I have inner monologue, visual, auditory, symbolic and non symbolic abstract thinking in my mind, and it’s all happening at the same time, like a million miles a minute.
The other coworker has no inner monologue at all.
4 hours questioning each other trying to understand how the other one things then debating what we believe how the one perticular Coworker thinks. And then placing bets on what we think all the other coworkers are.
I’ve never had such a deep discussion on how my brain works nor how someone else thinks.
Like I was like joking but serious not in a bad way I’m not crazy my brain switches thinking depending on the situation I don’t have to. Try or think about it just occurs..
Like remembering things I’ll daisy chain and hop pictures, words and thoughts to bring back things but no effort it just occurs.
When a song is playing I can remember the last time I heard that song or part of the song I can feel how it was, I can see what I was doing what was happening in the world etc.
In the shower or driving I will have debates in my mind and play scenarios out in my mind on how a conversation or situation will go. I visually see and hear and feel the conversation that did or did not occur at that time. And I can jump to “playing” each person.
Or when a large decision is to be made or brainstorming an idea to me I like having the British parliament in a room, and debating the topic.
When people are talking I visually see what they are saying.
I thought EVERYONE was like this.. apparently not lol.
But this conversation did bring up a lot of realization of why I can quickly jump to conclusions or quickly move thru a conversation or concept but my coworker is lagging behind. Or having a hard time visualizing what I’m saying, thus me drawing it very fast and him/them saying how did you come up with that that quickly... ugh because in my mind I’ve already drew it up I’m just drawing what I see. Almost having to slow down and go back in time to explain something to them.
THEN we called a few of my “Star” interns haha and asked them, apparently they are all think the same way I do or atleast somewhat, which explains why some people I work i able to express ideas and continue thru a topic very quickly. While others I must slow down.
We need more of these discussions until now I had no idea there was “a different way people mentally process things” the entire conversation was very enlightening for the both of us, now I know what I must do differently and so does the other one.
But then we thought what caused this? Is this a learned trait from experience as a child? Or evaluation? Or just the deck of cards we are delt? Is this left hand people or right hand? I’m left hand and the two interns are left hand and they think the same, but the other coworker in the discussion was a right hander.. then we thought was this a result of imaginary friends as a young child? Was this a result of reading as a young child? Is one version better at math than the other.. music etc... is this a result of hyperactive brain? Drugs? Could drugs induce it? What does alcohol do to it...
Yeah we questioned all these things and more seriously went down the rabbit hole tonight... lmfao, tomorrow we will be surveying the rest of the team to see if we can draw any spurious informer conclusions and how accurate our bets were based on what we know personality wise of the other coworkers
SOOOOO thoughts???? Hahah
How many of y’all knew the other type existed? What type are you? And are you introverted or extroverted? Any rational relations we can connect to better explain this shit?9 -
I’ve become so indecisive in terms of knowing what I want from my career.
All I know is what I don’t want (to end up a in management)
I’m definitely getting a new job and right now it looks like I’ve got 3 offers on the table
Option 1, a previous company I worked for. Still the same problems with the company there as before but the work was interesting and unusual. and my line manager was a good guy.
They have practically no legacy code.
Not much in the way of company benefits but they’re local and it would be nice to see friends again.
So feels like the pull to this is strong.
Option 2, a fully remote company that I’ve been referred to by an ex-workmate.
They’ve not even tech tested me because they’ve read my blogs and GitHub repos instead and said they’re impress. So just had a conversation with them. I feel honoured that they took the time to look at what I’ve done in my own time and use that in their decision.
Benefits are slightly better than option 1 (more hols)
But they’re using .net 6 and get a lot of heavy use on their system and have some big customers. I think the work is integrations to start with and moving services into docker and azure.
Option 3, even though I’ve got an offer from this one but they can’t actually explain the work until We can arrange a call next week (they recruit and then work out what team your in, but Christmas got in the way of me having a call with them straight away)
It’s working on government systems and .net is their least used stack so probably end up switching to Java. Maybe other tech stacks too.
This place has much better benefits than option 1 and 2 (more hols and more pension), but 2 days a week in office.
All of the above pay the same salary.
Having choice feels almost as bad as having no choice.
It’s doing my head in thinking about it , (even tho I might as well not think about it at all until the call with option 3 happens).
On the one hand with option 3, using a tech stack that’s new to me might be refreshing, as I’ve done .net for 10 years.
On the other hand I really like c# and I’m very good at it. So it feels a bit like I should be capitalising on that and using my experience to shape how the dev is done. Not sure I and I can do that with option 3, at least for a while.
C# feels like it’s moving forward nicely and I’m not sure I can say the same for Java or other languages.
I love programming and learning new stuff but so unable to let things go. It’s like I have a fear that c# will move on without me and I’ll end up turning into one of those devs whose skills are a decade out of date.
Maybe the early years of my career formed me in this way.
Early on I worked at a company where there was a high number of Cobol devs who thought they had a job for life.
But then redundancies came and many left. Of those who stayed they had to cross train to Java and they just couldn’t do it.
I don’t think the tech was hard for them, I think they were just so used to not learning that they could no longer adapt.
Think most of them ended up retiring after trying to learn Java for a few years.8 -
So, I’ve been given the task of sorting the security out in an application plugging the holes and whatnot as to be honest it’s shocking haha. It doesn’t help that we automate security audits but that’s a different rant for another day.
We’re using devise for authentication (rails standard, ♥️ devise), we have no password resets through the login page, it has to be manually reset by ringing support, why who knows, even though it’s built into the gem and we allow the user to login using an username instead of an email because for whatever reason someone thought it was a bright idea to not have the email field mandatory.
So I hop onto a call with the BAs, basically I go that we need to implement password resets into the login page so the user can do it themselves and also to cut down support calls a ticket is already in place for it. So I go through the standardised workflow for resetting a password. My manager goes.
“I don’t think this will be very secure”
Wait.. what. Have you never reset a password before? It’s following the same protocol as every other app.
We go back and fourth and I said I’ll get it checked with security just to keep him happy.
The issue mainly is well we can’t implement password resets due to 100s of users not having an email on there account.. 🙃 so before we push this change we need to try and notice all users to set a unique email.
Updated the tickets. All dandy.
Looking at the PRs to see what security things have been done if any and turns out one of the devs in India has just written a migration to add the same default email to every user that doesn’t have an email present and yep it got merged. So I go revert the change but talk about taking a “we don’t care about security approach”.
Eventually we want to have the user reset their passwords and login using their email and someone goes a head and does that. Not to mention the security risk.
Jesus Christ I wonder why I bother sometimes.2 -
iPhone alarm clock suddenly stopped playing sounds this week (again), fortunately my wake up time is not critical.
After every major osx upgrade I feel that I need to restart macbook more and more often cause system suddenly hangs.
Yesterday I spotted that after each restart there is information that if system hangs on login screen for a while I should restart computer again ( well thanks for advice that I don’t have to wait till I die ).
Cursor randomly disappears after I connected microsoft usb mouse ( microsoft mouse eating cursor from apple windows ).
Why I use microsoft mouse you ask ? That’s the best thing microsoft made, it’s literally indestructible. I dropped and kicked that mouse hundred times, still works perfectly fine.
I think also somehow osx forced minor bug fix upgrade once without my permission so they’re slowly going the forgotten microsoft path that is always forcing updates you don’t want to install in this particular moment.
Because their engineers know better when and why I want to update.
Looks like Apple engineering is slowly degrading or QA care less about older hardware users.
I am not used to buy new shit when old works just fine, those shiny little things are my work tools not something I show around to impress people how cool I am.
That’s all disappointing but still better then windows experience cause didn’t reinstalled osx from scratch since almost 5 years and it’s working at the same speed like it was new ( not impressed linux users here but from my previous experience with windows “registry” that means something and this hardware already paid for itself).6 -
AHHHHHHHHHHGGGH
I HATE VPN SETUP
- Trying OpenSwan
Installing open swan on a Debian machine.. setting up the config.
Restarting openswan. Syntax error. No syntax error to be found.
Different tutorial.. it starts! Try to connect.. I can’t connect. Look at the logs. No errors.
Tcpdump. My traffic is coming through.. all fine.. try to connect again.. it works! (Nothing changed!)
Try to ping somewhere else.. no connectivity.
Try to ping an IP in the same network.. works fine. So I have connectivity, just no internet.
Spend an hour finding out about traffic directions of which no one seems to know what they really mean.
Boss tells me to stop using openswan because it’s deprecated and replaced by strong swan..
- Strongswan
Reinstall Debian machine, install strongswan. Copy openswan config. Oh, they’re incompatible? Look up strong swan config, and the service starts.
Connect to the VPN.. it works! Again, no internet, just connectivity in the same network. Spend 2h debugging the config, disable firewalls everywhere, find an ancient bug in the Debian package related to my issues.. ok, let’s try compiling from source.. you know what, let’s not. I’ll throw this Debian machine away and try something completely different.
- pfSense
Ok, this looks easy enough! Let’s just click through the initial setup, change some firewall rules, create an L2TP VPN with a simple wizard.
Try to connect to VPN. First, it times out. Maybe a firewall issue? Turn off firewall.. ah, something happens now. I get an error message right after trying to connect to the VPN. Hmm, the port doesn’t even get opened when I enable the firewall.. this implementation seems a bit buggy.. let’s try their OpenVPN module.
Configure OpenVPN. Documentation isn’t that clear.. apparently a client isn’t actually a client but a user is a client.. ok, there’s a hidden checkbox somewhere.
Now where do I download my certificate? Oh, I need a plug-in for that.. ok, interesting. Able to download the certificate, import it, connect and.. YES!!! I can ping! But, I have no DNS..
Apparently, ICMP isn’t getting filtered but all outbound ports are.. yet the firewall is completely disabled. Maybe I need outbound NAT? Oh. There’s no clear documentation on where to configure it. Find some ancient doc, set it up, still no outbound connectivity.
AHAHAHAHHHHHHHHHHG
Then I tried VyOS. I had a great L2TP VPN working in less than 15 mins. Thank you VyOS for actually providing proper docs and proper software.3 -
I love being a consultant, and I love my job. However, I’ve been working with this client for the past few months and the past few weeks have been so draining. 90% of the people at the client’s side are super nice people, and then there’s this one person that just barks orders at us whenever a tiny thing is broken. Everything is urgent, everything is top priority, and we need to drop whatever we’re doing to fix what they deem urgent. I am currently pretty much the only dev doing both support and feature development at the same time and I am getting mentally very tired.
Whenever something is broken we get shit feedback, but for all our efforts there’s never any positive feedback. Mind you, the project isn’t even publicly accessible yet, it’s in a “alpha” phase where there are only a handful of users testing the program.
How do you guys deal with people like this?3 -
I honestly have come a long way. But I still have these moments when I just lose confidence In myself, and while grieving it can be worse/more frequent.
I’m being taught some networking programming from this person I befriended and it’s going wonderfully! But I don’t know how much I’m taking in. I don’t know if I’ll be able to completely understand while I’m using what I’m learning, but I guess part of the learning is by using and doing. But what if I need to change it up for a different purpose but I don’t know how?
What if I’m not programming enough? When working on this project/learning the stuff from my new teacher friend to actually make some of the stuff I usually work on that for 30 mins to an hour and a half maybe even 2. Relax, do some college, play games, then later I’ll try to work through a few exercises of my C# WinForms book.
And before you say it I’m not balancing too much on my head. I’ve learned GUI’s before with Python I’m just reflecting that to C# and it’s easy and I’m always in a separate headspace for networking. But it all just doesn’t feel like enough?
It also doesn’t help that i don’t feel like I’m doing anything special that I can boost my confidence with. Usually in a project I won’t feel like I’m doing anything until a cool or special feature is made and I know that’s bad I hate it but I can’t avoid it and I want to feel good even when nothing completely out of this world is made that day.
And I’ve definitely come a long way I’m proud of myself but I just hate getting these feels. And It happens a bit when I’m learning because I’m afraid I’m not learning and I’m gonna keep copy pasting the same code snippets for different projects and I don’t want that I want to be able to fucking edit and change it or make a completely new one of whatever it is but my design but I guess that takes experience with it first.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk -
https://youtu.be/yYUuWWnfRsk
I used to dream of systems which were built into the infrastructure for a variety of reasons
One was I didn’t feel object detection was likely good enough to handle various objects say to stock shelves in warehouse like stores
The other was power
If the stretch works one might wonder how many of them they’d have to employ to schedule them to recharge themselves throughout the day
It’s a shame humans as is can’t be trusted with too much free time given how the boomer generation and before willfully poisoned the minds of so many of their offspring creating this mess
We might have reached a point where life was mostly personal Enrichment and study and exercise and leisure where we all lived over a 100 years had minimal offspring reduced our destructive footprint on the world and well you get the idea
With more people working in closed shops we might have even reached this tech sooner
I wonder how prohibitive the price tag is how fast it runs out of power how destructive it is to non durable goods and the what other faults that have kept us from advancing into the golden age the last time I posted this before way way back now
Or maybe rich perverts don’t want to give up their monopoly of control over other peoples lives once were forced to change our lives economic system to adapt
Issue of course is population size
The replacement to honest labor and ingenuity or making a better world in the USA has been a short cut we commonly call slavery and that creates incentive for them most of evil people to breed continually and sell their children
Population in a time period of extreme leisure under normal circumstance would likely fall off
Humans would want to enjoy endless travel which is another problem if we keep cars that are based off fossil fuel
Much like increased tech has the trade off of increased usage of energy that is dirty like our nuclear plant problem in the USA where many places aren’t even carting their waste to Nevada down the 10 mile tunnel they’re supposed to be
So we’re stuck
Oh well
Hopefully there is reincarnation
Maybe I’ll come back as a cat
People just had to pull their insane shit when I was alive
Why couldn’t it have Ben something Normal like war or occupation or just hardship of some form instead of designed hardship to control good people and pattern bastards into this weird shit I see all around me because they’re both evil and afraid of losing what they have
Doesn’t this seem familiar ?
It should
Just like the competitors to Boston dynamics I’m looking up have been spawned as a result of YouTube presenting me with the same video as part of its algorithm heh
And also be because I mentioned that before6 -
I’m working on a new app I’m pretty excited about.
I’m taking a slightly novel (maybe 🥲) approach to an offline password manager. I’m not saying that online password managers are unreliable, I’m just saying the idea of giving a corporation all of my passwords gives me goosebumps.
Originally, I was going to make a simple “file encrypted via password” sort of thing just to get the job done. But I’ve decided to put some elbow grease into it, actually.
The elephant in the room is what happens if you forget your password? If you use the password as the encryption key, you’re boned. Nothing you can do except set up a brute-forcer and hope your CPU is stronger than your password was.
Not to mention, if you want to change your password, the entire data file will need to be re-encrypted. Not a bad thing in reality, but definitely kinda annoying.
So actually, I came up with a design that allows you to use security questions in addition to a password.
But as I was trying to come up with “good” security questions, I realized there is virtually no such thing. 99% of security question answers are one or two words long and come from data sets that have relatively small pools of answers. The name of your first crush? That’s easy, just try every common name in your country. Same thing with pet names. Ice cream flavors. Favorite fruits. Childhood cartoons. These all have data sets in the thousands at most. An old XP machine could run through all the permutations over lunch.
So instead I’ve come up with these ideas. In order from least good to most good:
1) [thinking to remove this] You can remove the question from the security question. It’s your responsibility to remember it and it displays only as “Question #1”. Maybe you can write it down or something.
2) there are 5 questions and you need to get 4 of them right. This does increase the possible permutations, but still does little against questions with simple answers. Plus, it could almost be easier to remember your password at this point.
All this made me think “why try to fix a broken system when you can improve a working system”
So instead,
3) I’ve branded my passwords as “passphrases” instead. This is because instead of a single, short, complex word, my program encourages entire sentences. Since the ability to brute force a password decreases exponentially as length increases, and it is easier to remember a phrase rather than a complicated amalgamation or letters number and symbols, a passphrase should be preferred. Sprinkling in the occasional symbol to prevent dictionary attacks will make them totally uncrackable.
In addition? You can have an unlimited number of passphrases. Forgot one? No biggie. Use your backup passphrases, then remind yourself what your original passphrase was after you log in.
All this accomplished on a system that runs entirely locally is, in my opinion, interesting. Probably it has been done before, and almost certainly it has been done better than what I will be able to make, but I’m happy I was able to think up a design I am proud of.8 -
Optimizely/Episerver is such a fucking piece of shit I want to fucking kill everyone who made this god forsaken mound of rotting garbage. I don’t even know what the history of it is because the documentation is convoluted as shit and poorly written. Whenever I Google something about it, the top answers are fucking 10+ years old and have not a god damn thing to do with the original problem. But guess what, they still use the same fucking useless error messages as they did 10+ years ago. Fucking idiots. The community for it doesn’t help at all. It’s fucking impossible to learn anything about it. Even the experts in this don’t have any idea what they are doing. Fuck this shit. ANYTHING that’s related in any way to Microsoft, or even mentions Microsoft, can suck my cock. FUCKKKKKKKKK.2
-
So I was just thinking scenario wise how if I founded a military organization who’s aim was to depose an insane dictator from power while remaining undetected including from all his insane supporters how I would use Linux
After I took every source package offline and modified and source checked it and disabled the ability for it to use regular tcp ip for anything but tunneling
The reasoning ? I just installed one program and it downloaded 40 some extra packages that I have no idea what are doing
Linux is great but do we actually know what the software is doing ? Same as windows only you can’t compiler that from scratch
It’s either trust a bunch of random people or trust a bunch of random people part of an evil company
Not the best of choices
But oh how beautiful it would be after I had 500 people pick every last package apart with a reasonable deadline of 2 years entirely offline at frozen versions
Then we could fork all the projects
Or only implement very carefully source reviewed patches transported via offline medium To computers that are running vms to house and test all additional patches so if it blows up we just copy our raw frozen image back over it and either scrap or repair the change
As connecting to the internet in general is not an good idea for silent running25 -
floating point numbers are workarounds for infinite problems people didn’t find solution yet
if you eat a cake there is no cake, same if you grab a piece of cake, there is no 3/4 cake left there is something else yet to simplify the meaning of the world so we can communicate cause we’re all dumb fucks who can’t remember more than 20000 words we named different things as same things but in less amount, floating point numbers were a biggest step towards modern world we even don’t remember it
we use infinity everyday yet we don’t know infinite, we only partially know concept of null
you say piece of cake but piece is not measurement - piece is infinite subjective amount of something
everything that is subjective is infinite, like you say a sentence it have infinite number of meanings, you publish a photo or draw a paining there are infinite number of interpretations
you can say there is no cake but isn’t it ? you just said cake so your mind want to materialize something you already know and since you know the cake word there is a cake cause it’s infinite once created
if you think really hard and try to get that feeling, the taste of your last delicious cake you can almost feel it on your tongue cause you’re connected to every cake taste you ate
someone created cake and once people know what cake is it’s infinite in that collection, but what if no one created cake or everyone that remember how cake looks like died, everything what’s cake made of extinct ? does it exist or is it null ? that’s determinism and entropy problem we don’t understand, we don’t understand past and future cause we don’t understand infinity and null, we just replaced it with time
there is no time and you can have a couple of minutes break are best explanations of how null and infinite works in a concept of time
so if you want to change the world, find another thing that explains infinity and null and you will push our civilization forward, you don’t need to know any physics or math, you just need to observe the world and spot patterns10 -
Sat on a bus heading home next to some guy who clearly hasn’t got knowledge of how to use a pair of fucking headphones and it sat playing a fucking game with the volume on loud, and all I can hear is the same fucking “whoosh, ping” noise fucking over and over again or he’s watching those shitty videos on Facebook
IT’S DOING MY FUCKING HEAD IN!!!!!! GET A PAIR FUCKING HEADPHONES OR MUTE YOUR FUCKING PHONE!!!!! NO-ONE WANTS TO HEAR THAT SHIT!!!!!2 -
Oh let the rant time begin…
So previous post I mentioned about this dev who has resigned and how I was going to see about a Snr. position.
Management is now scrambling to figure out what to do as this dev managed all the migration to AWS etc, I know servers but haven’t got too much familiarity with AWS.
Anyways so I finally get a 1:1 with my new line manager. I ask about the position and he says they don’t know what there going to do yet. Hire a new dev in India to offset and with the same knowledge even though the guy leaving is in the U.K. Bad idea as the servers are in the U.K. so if we get downtime or the server crashes we have no one in the U.K. to reset or access to the servers. India are very cagey who gets access which is annoying to say the least even though us (three devs) in the U.K. are the principal engineering team so there looking at all options.
Anyways we have a back and fourth, we discuss some of the plans for the app, some of which we are nowhere near ready to even conceptualise as the app in its current state sucks, (ruby 2.2.6 and rails 5 but not really). Needs major refactoring and rewrite, one thing they want to do is multi tendency which again given the state is laughable.
So, as my manager is speaking my head is screaming being like “this is just going to be a massive disaster”. Then we go onto that he’s seeing what everyone’s strengths are etc. And then we get onto the upgrade and that he wants me to work on it.
Yes.. the upgrade I’ve been trying to do for the past 4+ months but I keep getting told to stop and getting pushed backed.
I’ve been told we have devOps looking into restructuring the app, not possible as how the app is written, we have India trying to multi tenant again disaster incoming as they’ll end up rushing it. Legal are going to have a field day. Every time I say the issues are the fundamentals with the app, here’s how we can sort it. In one ear out the other basically there patching the ship even though it’s still leaking.
I have so many ideas, and things I can do to improve the app and get it back to not only working order, fix the performance issues, data issues and everything else. Brick wall.
So rants ensue where I basically say I would love to do the upgrade but management gives me no time in the roadmap (we have no say in planning). At this point I’m just speaking to a brick wall.
After the meeting I have a chat with the BAs, we all have the same issues so honestly it sucks we end up ranting to each other for an hour.
I’m being under-utilised, being told do this, do that even though I’ve had two stabs but told to stop and pushed back, I know what benefits I can bring to the app with a refactoring, ideas and how to properly lead the team because honestly we’re working on an old legacy app, and management are clueless and there priorities are all wrong, the company is getting frustrated and it’s a sinking ship. They would rather patch issues without solving them and everything I say goes in one ear and out the other.
Frustrating is not the word.1 -
!dev
Moved a while ago and I didn’t have a tv. By brothers put some money together to buy me a projector for Christmas.
It’s not the best one but great for what I need, it’s portable, dynamic screen size etc..
So earlier this week I bought a PS and lots of games..
Then it started..
speakers don’t work..
Unplug speakers, the integrated ones don’t work either.
Turning it off and on again didn’t help.
Pulled the power plug, after that the speakers worked again but the colours were fucked.. dark became green.
Unplugged power and plugged in again -> same issue.
Reset to factory settings -> colours were good again and internal speakers were fine as well..
plugged in proper speakers and it all started over again😒
I just wanna play splinter cell..7 -
!rant
I’m thinking about switching job and trying a consult company and be a consultant.
I’m trying to get a grip if it’s any difference between that and being a developer at my current company.
I try to google but the result varies from “This is the best job ever!” To “This is the worst job ever!”.
I talked to a colleague of mine awhile back that said all in all there isn’t any difference. The code is the same, the work methods are the same and so on. One difference is that you can work at a project for one year and then you never see it again. Which is good if it’s a bad project and bad if it’s a fun project.
Another difference that he mentioned is that you have to make every hour count and you have to do something that the company can get paid for. And this is what makes me think twice. I’ve worked with IT for about 7 years but I’ve only been a developer for 1,5-2 years. I don’t know if I can produce as much as they want, being a junior developer and all, and maybe stay where I am for a year or two.
Do you guys have any thoughts about being a consult? Experiences, stories? All is welcome :) -
Some background:
About 2 months ago, my company wanted to build a micro service that will be used to integrate 3 of our products with external ticketing systems.
So, I was asked to take on this task. Design the service, ensure extendability and universality between our products (all have very different use cases, data models and their own sets of services).
Two weeks of meetings with multiple stakeholders and tech leads. Got the okay by 4-6 people. Built the thing with one other guy in a manner of a week. Stress tested it against one ticketing service that is used in a product my team is developing.
Everyone is happy.
Fast forward to last Thursday night.
“Email from human X”: hey, I extended the shared micro service for ticketing to add support for one of clients ghetto ticketing systems. Review my PR please. P.S. release date is Monday and I am on a personal day on Friday.
I’m thinking. Cool I know this guy. He helped me design this API. He must’ve done good. . . *looks at code* . . . work..... it’s due... Monday? Huh? Personal day? Huh?
So not to shit on the day. He did add much needed support for bear tokens and generalized some of the environment variables. Cleaned up some code. But.... big no no no...
The original code was written with a factory pattern in mind. The solution is supposed to handle communication to multiple 3rd parties, but using the same interfaces.
What did this guy do wrong? Well other than the fact that he basically put me in a spot where if I reject his code, it will look like I’m blocking progress on his code...
His “implementation” is literally copy-paste the entire class. Add 3 be urls to his specific implementation of the API.
Now we have
POST /ticket
PUT /ticket
POST /ticket-scripted
PUT /ticket-scripted
POST /callback
The latter 3 are his additions... only the last one should have been added in reality... why not just add a type to the payload of the post/put? Is he expecting us to write new endpoints for every damn integration? At this rate we might as well not have this component...
But seriously this cheeses me... especially since Monday is my day off! So not only do I have to reject this code. I also have to have a call now with him on my fucking day off!!!!
Arghhhhhh1 -
I was a bootcamper. I’m on my first job now (I’m still currently at the same place after a year and a half). Doing web development (all JS/TS) with node, react and angular. I started it out working with another guy and now I’m alone. I’ve made more progress being alone since I’ve had to take on stuff my colleague was doing. But with being alone comes more pressure as it’s all on me and when shit hits the fan I don’t really have anybody I can fall back on. Also I feel like I’m missing out on team dynamics and learning from other people I could be working with. In any case I’m learning a lot, I’m meeting the deadlines and getting the job done. It’s a good first experience.2
-
The tragedy of my life has been I grew up in the sane real world not knowing it was insane and that the inmates thus interred in the asylum they embraced used the real
World to cover their perversity and inhumanity. When they had less freaks all around and more normal people to mimic they mimicked ordinary people better and I not knowing what they were, made explanations that seemed more reasonable than the truth for their strange behavior. And behind the scenes they were lying and taking advantage of a man who only wanted to live and have the things that seemed reasonable: a home, a companion, and some set of interests to follow when not working. Maybe some ambition in there as well but it’s evident that only the most evil people truly thrive and then only a small subsection of them. And now I wander back through looking at what amounts to moving museum pieces of trash all standing in the same places telling the same lies and in some cases so inane and stupid they think this benefits them. That the destruction of all the light in the world availed them somehow. Definition of pathetic.2 -
Enlightenment did happen, but it would be a reach to call a little rich Italian hipsters’ literature fad a “worldwide phenomenon”.
When we emerged as a species, all we had was tools and fear. Nothing has changed. Our progress in tools did fix suffering somewhat, but it couldn’t fix fear.
Fear is what makes one person attack the other, from a pub scuffle to launching nukes. It’s all the same, isn’t it. If I don’t strike now, they’ll strike first.
Losing an argument says nothing about you. Someone yelling at you while you stay silent says nothing about you. Being rejected says nothing about you. Being ghosted says nothing about you. Being betrayed says nothing about you. Even obeying your boss says nothing about you.
There is no need to compensate. You have the power to turn your “yes” into “no” swiftly and confidently whenever you want to. -
Same conversation
Young woman
Probably not so much younger
Same profession
Same real profession
What they’re doing who the hell knows
Happy valley
Incapable of conversation
Capable but unwilling for some reason
Kind of provokes me
I want her to say how she really feels
She works instead
It’s all they ever do anywhere these days
And hence why everything is so ducking repetitive
Maybe should have fucked her heh
Would have at least gotten us alone long enough to switch up conversations18 -
RIP GitHub
Take a service I like and pay for, a service that is about open source and collaboration, and sell it to a company that is complete garbage and has for years been hated for selling garbage overpriced software that is just terrible.
I’m not looking to argue about Windows (it’s garbage no matter how much you want it not to be) but Microsoft as a company is just not a fit for GitHub.
I’m not stupid though, I see the goal. The goal is that old school, shitty emperor use software teams will be more likely to use GitHub if it is owned my MS. On the same way that many of them force their employees to use garbage Windows machines because “it’s what we have always done”.
GitHub will become another shitty service that some people argue is good based on their ignorance
Of other options. This is sad.
TLDR: I fucking dislike this acquisition entirely and will immediately remove all private repos from GitHub and cancel my subscription on Monday if it is announced.2 -
People are like programming environments, in basics all people are the same like all programming environments are the same, every programming language have a loop and conditions, numbers, strings and dates. The problem starts with syntax to write code or can you call it communicate with person. There are syntax errors, someone use functions and classes and that’s ok but someone is writing everything in one file and then it’s hard to communicate or change something. But the real problem are libraries or you can call it believes. Everyone is believing something but when you start using it and want some advanced functions there’s always something missing. When you want to contribute to fix that stuff you often can’t cause it’s closed source or maintainers are pricks. You end up writing wrappers and decorators, ignore malfunctions to somehow live with that problem. That’s called social skills.
We’re just programming environments. That’s all.1 -
Once upon a time to prevent people from stealing my work I created a program that converted photos and files into double sided sheets of at codes with packeted contents so I could scan them into a high resolution file later and recompose them into a series of files
So very aggressively insistent we’re the dumb slaves that run all this crap in being cruel and evil and fucking themselves over that they stole these sheets from the document folders I carried in my backpack and sent me into a traumatized state pre amnesia and wasted 5 years of my life
Now all these same period are either leering programmed fools or withered miserable sacks of skin and I’m no closer to moved on from this bs and I find myself exasperated that everyone and their retard incestuous uncle would want to deny and repeat the same crap over and over as they as they are only making themselves crazy as well. Says something no records equals no future in essence essentially the reason if it’s not physically secured on land that cannot be taken away and we keep trading law and order for .., whatever these idiots get out of this well all die before we reach much furthet3 -
Top 5 Reasons for Not Discussing Weird Topics in Your Graduate Admission Essay
Knowing the top five reasons for not discussing weird topics in your graduate admission essay is very important. There is really no strict requirement about what kind of topic you use, as long as you can discuss it effectively. However, choosing weird topics may not really work for you, especially if it’s a very controversial or sensitive one. The following are the top five reasons why you should avoid discussing weird topics in your essay.
Reason #1: Weird topics are weird.
First off, weird topics are exactly that, weird. The last thing you want to do is weird out your graduate school admission panel, which is almost a sure way of getting yourself that polite rejection letter that every applicant dreads of receiving.
One of the main important points to remember is to think of your audience when writing your graduate admission essay. This audience will be composed of tenured professors, and probably younger teachers closer to your own age. Although it is a good idea not to tailor your essay according to what you think they want to hear, it’s best to stick to a topic that will make the panel want to get to know you more. You can do this by putting yourself in the admission officer’s shoes and trying to feel what your reaction would be with a particular topic you have in mind. Being creative is good, but to any audience, weird is weird, and most audiences will not know how to react to a weird admission essay.
Reason #2: Weird topics may reflect your personality in a bad way.
Weird topics make you look weird, or worse. You may think that a weird topic is the same as a creative topic, something that most experts on admissions officers urge applicants to use. With a weird topic, you can easily make the jump from being creative to just plain strange or worse, someone with an emotional or personality problem. Weird topics, when discussed ineffectively, are bad topics, and can be anything from the death of a pet, recent religious epiphanies, and even parent bashing. These topics are the last topics that can paint you in a good light so avoid these and other similar topics.
Reason #3: Weird topics may not represent the real you.
Weird topics will not paint the real you, unless you are naturally weird. If you really think that being a little bit off will pay off, then by all means do so. But if you want to appear as normal and as emotionally healthy as possible, save the strange stories for Halloween night.
Reason #4: Weird topics may seem too informal.
Weird topics can get too informal. You can be informal but you need to look normal as well in order to avoid appearing irreverent. Some may disagree with this, but often the only way to get on your admission panel’s good side is to tread on the middle ground arefully, and not be too stiff and prudish but not be too loose either.
Reason #5: Weird topics may confuse the readers.
While most schools allow their applicants free reign when it comes to writing an admissions essay, you can do your self a lot of good by treading on the middle ground. Avoid weird or strange topics if you can. A weird topic will put your readers in a place where they may not understand you. And in a process where getting to know you as a person is the main objective, this move will definitely have an effect on whether you get accepted or not. Knowing what to write in a graduate school admission essay is fairly easy, especially if the school provides you with a set of questions, known as prompts as your guide. As long as you already have the other requirements such as the right grade point average, recommendation letters, program of study and the like, you can start working on your essay. But if your still not sure whether it good idea to write essay by yourself. You can find tons of great quality writing services such as https://uk-essays.com/research-pape.... At such a websites you’ll easily find help from from people who already have considerable experience in writing a wide variety of essays. They will gladly help in any issue that makes you difficult.
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