The story of the $500,000,000 error.

In 1996, an unmanned Ariane 5 model rocket was launched by the European Space Agency.

Onboard was software written to analyze the horizontal velocity of the spacecraft. A conversion between a 64-bit floating point value and a 16-bit signed integer within this software ultimately caused an overflow error just forty seconds after launch, leading to a catastrophic failure of the spacecraft.

That day, $7 billion of development met it's match: a data type conversion.

Tldr :
Office Building : 1
Population: 5000
Number of PC users: 5000
No of Spare mice: 0

Day 1:
Training period commences.
My mouse laser sensor doesn't work.

Solution: Use this mouse to log in to your system.
Open the company portal.
Connect to vpn.
Enter username password.
Create a ticket for mouse replacement.
Done.

Day 3
I bring my own mouse.
Confiscated at security.
Becomes a security violation.

Day 9
I get a call from helpdesk.
Agent- what is the problem?
Me- my mouse is not working.
Agent- why?
Me- what do you mean? Something is wrong with the sensor.
Agent- clean the sensor.
Disconnects call.
Marks ticket as resolved.
Me- WTF just happened!

Naturally, I escalate the issue.

Day 15
Level 2 Agent- what happened? Why have you escalated the issue?
Me- I need a mouse, waiting since 2 weeks.
Him- No mouse is available
Me- you don't have a single spare mouse available in an office with 5000 PC users?
Him- no they're out of stock.
Me- when will it be back in stock?
Him- we will 'soon' launch a tender for quotations from sellers.
Me- time?
Him- 1 week.

Day 34

I email the head of supplies for the city office. Next day I get a used super small mouse, which doesn't have a left button. Anyways, I've given up hope now.

Day 45
I become a master at keyboard shortcuts.
Finish my training.
Get transferred to another city.
No mouse till date.

Surprisingly, this was one of the top recruiters in my country. Never knew, MNCs can be so so inefficient for such simple tasks.
Start-ups are way better in this regard. Latest tech, small community, minimal bureaucracy and a lot of respect and things to learn.

LONG RANT AHEAD!

In my workplace (dev company) I am the only dev using Linux on my workstation. I joined project XX, a senior dev onboarded me. Downloaded the code, built the source, launched the app,.. BAM - an exception in catalina.out. ORM framework failed to map something.

mvn clean && mvn install

same thing happens again. I address this incident to sr dev and response is "well.... it works on my machine and has worked for all other devs. It must be your environment issue. Prolly linux is to blame?" So I spend another hour trying to dig up the bug. Narrowed it down to a single datamodel with ORM mapping annotation looking somewhat off. Fixed it.

mvn clean && mvn install

the app now works perfectly. Apparently this bug has been in the codebase for years and Windows used to mask it somehow w/o throwing an exception. God knows what undefined behaviour was happening in the background...

Months fly by and I'm invited to join another project. Sounds really cool! I get accesses, checkout the code, build it (after crossing the hell of VPNs on Linux). Run component 1/4 -- all goocy. run component 2,3/4 -- looks perfect. Run component 4/4 -- BAM: LinkageError. Turns out there is something wrong with OSGi dependencies as ClassLoader attempts to load the same class twice, from 2 different sources. Coworkers with Windows and MACs have never seen this kind of exception and lead dev replies with "I think you should use a normal environment for work rather than playing with your Linux". Wtf... It's java. Every env is "normal env" for JVM! I do some digging. One day passes by.. second one.. third.. the weekend.. The next Friday comes and I still haven't succeeded to launch component #4. Eventually I give up (since I cannot charge a client for a week I spent trying to set up my env) and walk away from that project. Ever since this LinkageError was always in my mind, for some reason I could not let it go. It was driving me CRAZY! So half a year passes by and one of the project devs gets a new MB pro. 2 days later I get a PM: "umm.. were you the one who used to get LinkageError while starting component #4 up?". You guys have NO IDEA how happy his message made me. I mean... I was frickin HIGH: all smiling, singing, even dancing behind my desk!! Apparently the guy had the same problem I did. Except he was familiar with the project quite well. It took 3 more days for him to figure out what was wrong and fix it. And it indeed was an error in the project -- not my "abnormal Linux env"! And again for some hell knows what reason Windows was masking a mistake in the codebase and not popping an error where it must have popped. Linux on the other hand found the error and crashed the app immediatelly so the product would not be shipped with God knows what bugs...

I do not mean to bring up a flame war or smth, but It's obvious I've kind of saved 2 projects from "undefined magical behaviour" by just using Linux. I guess what I really wanted to say is that no matter how good dev you are, whether you are a sr, lead or chief dev, if your coworker (let it be another sr or a jr dev) says he gets an error and YOU cannot figure out what the heck is wrong, you should not blame the dev or an environment w/o knowing it for a fact. If something is not working - figure out the WHATs and WHYs first. Analyze, compare data to other envs,... Not only you will help a new guy to join your team but also you'll learn something new. And in some cases something crucial, e.g. a serious messup in the codebase.

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!

One week, and it turned out to be worse than that.

I was put on a project for a COVID-19 program in America (The CARES Act). The financial team came to us on Monday morning and said they need to give away a couple thousand dollars.

No big deal. All they wanted was a single form that people could submit with some critical info. Didn't need a login/ registration flow or anything. You could have basically used Google Forms for this project.

The project landed in my lap just before lunch on Monday morning. I was a junior in a team with a senior and another junior on standby. It was going to go live the next Monday.

The scope of the project made it seem like the one week deadline wasn't too awful. We just had to send some high priority emails to get some prod servers and app keys and we were fine.

Now is the time where I pause the rant to express to you just how fine we were decidedly **not**: we were not fine.

Tuesday rolls around and what a bad Tuesday it was. It was the first of many requirement changes. There was going to need to be a review process. Instead of the team just reading submissions from the site, they needed accept and reject buttons. They needed a way to deny people for specific reasons. Meaning the employee dashboard just got a little more complicated.

Wednesday came around and yeah, we need a registration and login flow. Yikes.

Thursday came and the couple-thousand dollars turned into a tens of millions. The amount of users we expected just blew up.

Friday, and they needed a way for users to edit their submissions and re-submit if they were rejected. And we needed to send out emails for the status of their applications.

Every day, a new meeting. Every meeting, new requirements that were devastating given our timeframe.

We put in overtime. Came in on the weekend. And by Monday, we had a form that users could submit and a registration/ login flow. No reviewer dashboard. We figured we could take in user input on time and then finish the dashboard later.

Well, financial team has some qualms. They wanted a more complicated review process. They wanted roles; managers assign to assistants. Assistants review assigned items.

The deadline that we worked so hard on whizzed by without so much as a thought, much less the funeral it deserved.

Then, they wanted multiple people to review an application before it was final. Then, they needed different landing pages for a few more departments to be able to review different steps of the applications.

Ended up going live on Friday, close to a month after that faithful Monday which disrupted everything else I was working on, effective immediately.

I don't know why, but we always go live on a Friday for some reason. It must be some sort of conspiracy to force overtime out of our managers. I'm baffled.

But I worked support after the launch.

And there's a funny story about support too: we were asked to create a "submit an issue" form. Me and the other junior worked on it on a wednesday three weeks into the project. Finished it. And the next day it was scrapped and moved to another service we already had running. Poor management like that plagued the project and worked in tandem with the dynamic and ridiculous requirements to make this project hell.

Back to support.

Phone calls give me bad anxiety. But Friday, just before lunch, I was put on the support team. Sure, we have a department that makes calls and deal with users. But they can't be trained on this program: it didn't exist just a month ago, and three days ago it worked differently (the slippery requirements never stopped).

So all of Friday and then all of Saturday and all of Monday (...) I had extended panic attacks calling hundreds of people. And the team that was calling people was only two people. We had over 400 tickets in the first two days.

And fuck me, stupid me, for doing a good job. Because I was put on the call team for **another** COVID project afterwards. I knew nothing about this project. I have hated my job recently. But I'm a junior. What am I gonna say, no?

!rant

Programming is a huge blessing i believe we all should be thankful to. For me, it literally turned my life around.

11 months ago i was fighting a losing battle with depression, and contemplated suicide constantly. I would use a self remedy of smoking weed and sleeping all day long. I was depressed because i felt my life had no real value. I was doing nothing, and its kind of an infinite loop.

You don't do anything, so you feel bad, so you don't do anything, and so on.

That was until i finally took the step that changed my life. I searched and wanted to learn something. I always liked web pages so i thought id get into web development.

Did some research, found out that the fastest way to go was to learn ruby on rails. I followed a tutorial i found online, and literally pushed myself through it. There were times when there where things i didnt understand, and when it was really bad, but i pushed myself through it and i finished the tutorial.

Just finishing the tutorial and learning something new helped me alot. I had already quit smoking and was feeling way better, but after a while i started feeling bad again since i wasnt doing anything after i had finished learning, so i started working on a personal project, creating it from scratch, and just working on it day and night. I worked 14 hours a day, never really leaving my room ( this was during summer vacation ) for a month.

There were many things i didnt understand, but i never gave up and always searched for the solution and read about it until i understood it better. Looking back, there were things i knew could have been done in a better way, but as a first project, im proud of myself, not because it rocks, but because i did not give up.

In the process of starting a new life, i was really lonely. I cut all ties with everyone i knew, since they were all toxic, all i had in my life was ruby on rails and my web application. I wanted to launch it but couldn't due to personal reasons.

Not being able to launch and see something live, something that you worked so hard on, that you put so much effort into, that was devastating to me. I felt as if all my efforts had gone to waste.

And here is what i love most about programming, NOTHING EVER GOES TO WASTE. All that effort you spent on something ? All these all nighters you pulled ? All that frustration from that bug ? It will pay off later. It always does somehow. You get more knowledge and become a better programmer, and sometimes it even gives way to new opportunities and chances you never even expected.

I included my web application in my resume and it helped land me a job as a junior developer in a really nice company. A job that i wouldn't even have dreamed of several months earlier.

Programming and creating something new and learning something new everyday, creating something that people use, that someone else will benefit from and be grateful for, i think we should never take that for granted !

Tl;dr : learning how to code and web development saved my life

tl;dr
A former colleague of mine, who used to suck at web development is now a kick-ass who knows how to get things done.

We are of the same age. We got hired on this company at the same time. He was a front-end guy, and I am a full-stack. So, we were like a yin and yang in development roles.

Initially, we have this big gap of skillset. I was solely assigned on a project which I worked on from ground up, while he was barely able to make an HTML table look properly on a separate existing project. My impression of him that time is that he's kind of a simpleton. But, I was wrong.

Few months passed, our seniors left the company, and I was promoted to be a team lead. Eventually, I was teamed up with this guy. I had a hard time working with him, but I was able to share him some of my knowledge.

Every time I teach him something new, he's exploring more. From proper indentation, writing SASS, using streaming build system (GulpJS), etc., he's making sure that he applies it on every project he's assigned to — even practicing it on his personal projects during break time. I can see him improve each day.

After a year in the company, he became so much better. I even ended up teaching him more than just front-end stuff. I shared the gospel of Jesus of PHP community (Jeffrey Way), tought him how to set up his own server, how to configure DNS, etc.. Again, it's tough for him even to write a simple for..loop statements. But, after a lot of consistent practice, he became better and better. We've done quite a number of projects together. He's fun to work with because of his "hungry" spirit.

Unfortunately, he was laid-off from the company, and I worked on the company til the very end. We parted ways.

He went back to his hometown to launch his own e-commerce business — apparently, this was the "practice" project he was working on the whole time during breaktimes.

Another year has passed, that project worked out and got a funding. And now, he's launching his second project. The best thing is, when I lookup his projects on builtwith.com, every damn stack I tought him, he used it. It's like a project built by me.

To be honest, I am a little jealous of him, but at the same time, I am so proud of him. I thought him how to make things work, he thought me how to get things done. He's my inspiration now.

So, basically i am getting desperate, and i'm also angry... and want to cry, and i feel a failure.
My biggest error in this story is "believing"

First of all, I'm a starting entrepreneur as freelancer, started of 6 months ago, back then it all seemed bright, i had my first customer, they believed me, got a second assignment for that same customer, fulfilled the task in brilliance, and was ready to move on to a bigger customer base. Here's where shit goes wrong.

Working with another office that outsources people to various (goverment) contractors, Had a meeting with them, we would cooperate very soon. This was january.

PM: "We've got a gov Dept as a customer that wants to do project XYZ and starting in february, requirements are yadiyadiyadi, you up for it?
Me:"Sure, send me the specs, and timeframe and i'll apply with my offer)"
Project is about a bit backup system migration, lots of fancy shmancy tech used, 2 datacenters setup... a big project that can take up several months...
- sends offer- received an acceptance on the offer

PM " Great, we'll start end of february"
Me: "Ok, end of february is a go then, looking forward to cooperate"

FF to near end of february, receive msg from PM: "Project XYZ delayed until half if march"
Me: "Okay... what is the delay?"
PM:"Govt bureaucracy"
Me " Ok, let's keep in touch"

Near Half of March
PM " Project delayed again".
Me: " Okay... what's the reason?"
PM: "they have decided to take a different approach, and want 3 datacenters now"
Me: "That will change the offer i made for you, can you send me the specs?"
PM: "No, because they havent decided on the techs used, expect end of march"
Me: "Okay...but once you got the specs,s end them to me"

End of March
Pm: " Hy NeatNerdPrime, we still havent got any specs yet... they still forgot to make the shopping list"
Me: "(-_-) ... I thought they already had that covered"
PM:" No, new Govt budget cuts and lots of changes, basically, they still don't know what they really want. But we're just -delayed- , not -cancelled-"
Me: "Okay... i hope we get started soon"
PM: "expect launch beginning of april"
I was not really satisfied with this explanation.... but ok

Beginning of april, at april's folls day
PM "Project delayed again"
Me: " This is a joke right?"
PM: "Sadly, no, they delayed the project since they don't really know what they actually want, we are trying to give them the proposed solution... but they still need approval, and still need to set up shopping list"
Me:"when do we start then?"
PM: " I was told 17th of april'
Me:" I really hope it gets through, i had to decline some proposals for work for months due to this, this ain't funny"
PM: "I know, i'll make up for it"

15th of april...
PM " Project delayed again"
Me right now almost losing my shit
"why this time??? I thought you said 17th of april real launch!"
PM: "they fired their PM, need to hire a new one, delayed until May/June"
Me: "I've set aside some other assignments just because you said you were going to launch at those dates... This is really pushing my limits, can you give me SOME assurances?"
PM: "5th of june would be official go" Me: " Okay, i'm noting 5th of june in my agenda, let's get this through!"

And now i get a message...stating that the date of 5th of june , is for another project, at the same goct dept, but totally different project

WHAT THE FUCKING SHIT I'VE SPENT MONTHS WAITING FOR A PROJECT THAT WAS PRACTICALLY ALL SET AND GO AND EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TIME IT GETS DELAYED, EVERY FUCKING TIME I THINK "you know, i cannot accept these offers since that Govt project will start soon, i cannot do 2 assignments at once especially when they require me to work at govt office at the capital..." AND EVERY FUCKING TIME IT GETS DELAYED!!!

I feel at a loss now..... i've done i think the most horrible thing you can do as a independent and that's not accepting another assignment just because there was a concrete promise for a govt contract...

Almost dried up, nothing much left, had to do some spending because of a move to another apartment... I'm feeling really down, and angry...and down, but mostly angry, for not accepting those offers in the meantime...

So I met Lew from unbox therapy, when he came for the one plus 5T star wars launch event to India.

Just wanted to share that, he's one of the most down to earth celebrities. And even with all of that fame and stardom he still lends an ear for everything you want to say. He also motivated me to start my own YouTube channel. He made my day 😅.

Thank you Lew 😍.

"The client wants th..."
FUCK THE CLIENT!FUCK THAT MORON!
YOU CAN'T BE MAKING CHANGES 1 DAY TO LAUNCH! FUCK THIS!

Today is the day I launch on of the biggest projects I worked on.

AND I FUCKING FORGOT TO CODE THE 404 PAGE

True Af😂

Please tell me I'm not the only lazy bastard that spends all week dreaming of the weekend to finally work on some personal projects and when it finally arrives as soon as I launch the IDE my motivation goes down to -100 and I spend the rest of the day watching random videos on YouTube as always dreaming of the next weekend to finish that awesome idea I had 5 years ago...

I might start naming our release tags as Kraken-x.x
That way on launch day I can legit order the team to RELEASE THE KRAKEN.

Dear diary,
Today is day 3 of Windows 11 for me, and after about an hour of gaming, everything got laggy. I thought it was an AV scanner taking its sweet time kind of lag, but then.... I couldn't switch back to the desktop, I couldn't launch the task manager, it was just a solid frozen brick, and then when I unpaused this game to go back into it.... it was frozen too.

So here I am , with a frozen machine, so I give up and attempt a hard reboot........ yep, your fucked too. Windows auto repair kicks in, and it freezes too.

So now I'm here, with a brick of a fucking machine, wondering wtf could have gone so wrong.

Finally, I've made it to the failed boot screen,

> bootrec /fixboot
permission denied.

🤔 dafuq you smoking?

Fine

> sfc /scannow
Permission denied

Ok.... I don't think I want to know how this works.

> chkdsk /f /r /x C:
Yay something fucking runs
.
.
.
no issues 🤨

Fuck it, reboot.

Oh, now you want to fucking boot you piece of shit.
Now to understand how the fuck you can get a permission denied when your running CMD before boot 😐

Root encounters HR at her new job.

So, I left my job a few weeks ago. I was pretty sad about it, so I didn't want to write anything about it. It was a great place to work, with great managers, decent coworkers, and interesting work. I also had free reign over how I built things, what to improve, etc. Within about four months, I authored over half of the total commits on their backend repo, added a testing suite with 90% coverage, significantly improved the security (more accurately: added security), etc. but I got a job offer that allowed me to work remotely, and make well over six figures (usd). I couldn't turn it down, even though I wanted to. So, I left. I'm still genuinely sad about that. I had emotions and everything. 🙁 I stayed on long enough to finish the last of the features for their new product launch, and make sure everything was stable. I'm welcome back whenever, though they don't want to have remote employees, and I want to move, so. that's probably not going to happen. sigh.

Anyway, I started my new job this week. Rented an office (read: professional closet) and everything! It's been veritable mountains of HR paperwork so far. That's all I've done besides some accounts setup. I've seriously only worked on and completed one ticket so far in two and a half days, and I still have six documents/contracts to sign! (and benefits; that'll probably take my weekend.)

But getting an I9 thing notarized? Apparently I only have three days before I'm legally unemployable by them or something, idk. HR made it sound ridiculously dire and important, and reminded me like five or more times. I figured it was just some notary service; that takes like 10 minutes, right? So I put it off until my second day so I didn't have to disappear in the middle of my first day. Anyway, I called a bunch of notary services on day 2, and apparently only like 5% of them both do notary services this time of year and aren't booked full. And of those, probably another 5% will notarize I9 documents.. No idea why it's rare, but whatever, I'm not a notary.

The HR lady assured me that I didn't need any special documents; I should just go there, present my IDs, and the notary will provide or draft documents for everything else. Totally doesn't sound right, but fine; I'm not a notary nor will I ever work in HR, so I'm not very knowledgeable about this. So, against my better judgement I decided to just go anyway. I called around and finally found a place that wasn't closed, busy, or refusing, and drove over there. Waited. Waited. Waited. Notary lady was super slow in every single action. (I should mention that it's now 10am, and I have a meeting with the Senior VP of Engineering [a stern, stubborn old goat who enjoys making people feel inadequate] at 12:30pm.) The notary lady looks like she's an npc updating in slow motion (maybe at 0.25x speed?) and can't seem to understand what I need. Eventually, she tells me exactly what I had assumed: if there's no document, she can't notarize said document, and she doesn't have an I9 for the company I'm trying to work for. (like, duh.) So I thank her for proving the flow of time is variable, which she ignores in slow motion, and drive back home. It's now about 11.

I message the same HR lady, and the useless wench gawks in surprise and says she's never heard of that ridiculous request before. It took prodding to get her to respond every time, but after some (very slow) back and forth, she says she wants to call the notary personally and ask what they need. I waited around for another response that never came, and eventually just drove to the notary place again to have them notarize the required ID documents. That plus my chat history with HR should be enough to show that I bloody well tried, and HR just shit the bed instead. I finally got them notarized at like 12:10, and totally broke the speed limit the entire way to the office, found the last remaining parking spot, and made it to my office just in time for the meeting. seriously, less than two minutes to spare. Meeting was interesting (mostly about security), but totally made me facepalm, shout "Seriously!? What the hell are you thinking!?" and make slapping motions at some of the people talking. I will probably rant about that next.

But anyway, I'm willing to bet that the useless wench won't get back to me before the notary closes, if at all, and will somehow try to blame it completely on me if I bring it up again. Passive aggressive bitch. She's probably thinking: "If I don't help her with these mandatory legal processes, it'll be her fault she didn't get them done in time. I mean, they're so easy! She's just doing it wrong." I fucking hate HR.

Storytime
A story about an Android TVbox which decided to become an iPad

Several years ago we've bought an android tv-box. 

It served me and my family well for several years.

Specs are not that important in this story, but there they are:

Android 4.4 
1GB RAM
Amlogic quadcore 1.4HGz
8GB memory.

This device served us well - online TV, browsing, music, file sharing and so on. But recently cheap Chinese memory deciteed to take a break and damaged ROM. Because of that device won't boot. The only option was to take it apart and "short circuit" certain legs on memory chip and make it boot from SD card and install new firmware. After such operations tv-box worked well again. 

Hoverer, memory glitched again and again and this algorithm was repeated for several months.

But that is not what is this story about.

One day memory went completely crazy and there was no way to install new firmware on it. It just hanged on install. (BTW, it was official firmware for this device)

But after countless attempts it finally worked! It installed the firmware and booted into launcher and connected to WiFi! 

But now comes the most interesting part. 

It was not android anymore.

It decided to became an iPad.

My dad logged in to his Google account via tv-box and got mail that someboby connected from our IP via iPad (we don't have an iPad) and using safari browser! Stock browser is not safari browser.....

"Ok, nvm, crazy glitch." - we thought.

But preinstalled play marked wont launch. Because he told us, that we're trying to connect from iPad.

And Google chrome page suggested to download chrome for iPad

And everything was acting like it is an iPad.

OK, downloaded iTunes, why not??? ._.

Tried to install elixir for android via apk from flash, but then memory glitched one more time, everything went black and tv-box had damaged ROM again...

After that we decided to not torment it anymore...

That's it. Poor Android TVbox that all his life dreamed to become an iPad. Rest in peace.

Let's see here, we have:
🤡 Creepy Cackle Guy: watches videos all day and cackles like a hyena, plus constantly farts, and complains a lot. He gets everyone gassed up, no pun intended.

😤Bitchy PM: argues with you about every little thing, lies to pad her metrics while screwing the dev's metrics over. Also lies about what clients say to force launch or what she feels client should do. Rude to clients & co-workers. Runs and tattles to higher ups when people call her out on her shit. Nobody can stand her, she get's the entire office upset.

🙉Darth Vader: I don't think this one needs explaining. He breathes SO freaking loud you can hear it across the room. He also won't talk to anybody. Ever.

🤐The Non-Stop Flapper: nice person, but chats you non stop about their mundane life events, even when your status is set to busy or they know you're swamped. Asks irrelevant questions all day, every day. Heart of gold but needs to reel in the chatting.

🤬 Mr.Rage: whines about EVERYTHING. I mean everything. Has also thrown his food on me once over a joke about pizza. Wants to move up to programming but cant program.
---
So between them all, I scream on the inside daily. 🙊😫😢

Not an office prank, but when I was in high school we had some public computers and I switched some shortcuts for chrome and internet explorer, so when you clicked chrome, something that should not be called a browser would open.
And than I got the brilliant idea: I wrote a script camuflagged as a chrome icon that would launch 100 internet explorers. Legend says that people are still raging to this day.

Me: ok, we're 4 days from launch, here's the most up-to-date version of the app, and here's what's been added since yesterday.
Client: ok, looking good, still needs a little more here and here.
Me: yes we've made note of that an-
Client: oh ya, and that thing that's been in there since day 1, take that out.
Me: oh, ok, we're gonna need so-
Client: and that thing we specifically asked for, take that out too.
Me: that's fine bu-
Client: oh, and add a fucking Christmas wreath for them to jump through.

6:38pm, Tasklist for today:

- Debug website #1 - DONE
- Debug website #2 - DONE
- Launch a new website on a new domain - DONE
- Install SSL - DONE
- Test e-commerce section - DONE
- activate HTTP/2 for that domian (first time, once it worked it felt rewarding) - DONE
- set up 30 emails on said domain, send out emails on how to reset their passwords - DONE
- play Half life for 40 minutes - DONE
- Download GOT S06E09 - DONE
- cater all emails from clients... - DONE

proudest and most productive day of my life, really

My first Windows rant.

I use Spotify heavily. (After all, I am paying for it every fucking month.) In fact, it's safe to say I use it upwards of 12+ hours a day.

My birthday was a few weeks ago. I got a new mechanical keyboard using some money i received as a gift. This keyboard has a function key to launch your media player. Odd function in my opinion. But I figured I would try it out for a week or so.

My problem is: the default media center is that god forsaken piece of shit groove music (not only is it shit, I also have 0 mp3 files on my computer).

No problem, I'll just change the default media center. Fucking Windows doesn't let me change it to Spotify. Odd. Well, I did download it from Spotify's website. Let's try downloading it from the Windows store.

I download Spotify from the Windows store. It still cannot be set to the default media center.

For fuck sake, if Google can let me set Spotify as my default over their shitty YouTube Music that I know damn well they're trying to make as the default for all Android, then you can let me change it Windows.

Yes, I know Spotfiy isn't exactly a media center, but it's basically the same fucking thing.

So one year ago I was working at this company from the US, me being in Europe, which automatically implies there is several hours of timezone difference.

The eng. manager decided we would have a release tomorrow (decision was made one month earlier), and stuff was being prepped up to make that happen.

In the US the workday was about lunch time and in EU it was one hour before finishing. The manager gets us in a meeting and asks me and another dude to do some testing that would take several hours to do. This testing could have been done several days or weeks earlier.

40 minutes after that meeting I get a private message from the PM asking for the status of the test...

Me: aaa.. well I started it and will continue tomorrow

Manager: wait what? we have launch tomorrow, this testing has to be done by tomorrow

Me: it's the end of the workday here, I got personal errands that I have to attend to

Manager: uhm ok ... I see...

I was just messaging something in the public chat right before calling it a day and the manager writes "thanks for the input, your day is over now", completely out of context to the conversation I was having with whomever.

There was no question of "can you stay extra hours and do this?", there was no "hey, I know your day is over we will pay you premium hours with this amount as according to our contract, could you do this now as we have release tomorrow?" ..no ..just .. "do it!". I automatically assumed that ..hey, maybe he wants to do this during and after the live launch (and yes I do admit my mistake of not asking just to be clear, but I assumed the manager knows that there is a timezone difference ..like it's a no brainer).

I can not tell you the heat sensation I had after that last reply from the manager ... it was completely uncalled for, and unreasonable.

I mean why not make a pre-launch phase where you put stuff on the staging server, and perform all the necessary tests and then when you get all the green lights from testing you then proceed with the actual deploy? ...no ... mention this like right at the end of the day before the launch....

And another thing that scratched my neuronal cortex is, how does he know exactly how long the tests would take?

Yesterday (or the day before that depending on your timezone and day-night schedule - this Friday) my OnePlus 6T arrived. After only 2 days of time between placing the order and actually getting the phone, quite impressive!

The DHL guy asked me upon receipt - is it the OnePlus 6T? - Yes it is!! - "An amazing device it is!", he said. And honestly.. he couldn't be more right.

I might be a bit biased on this because after all I did just spend €630 on this phone. But it feels so snappy, high quality, the 8GB of RAM is just.. it blows my mind. But I'm sure that the other reviews did this sort of jazz already.

The things that set this phone apart for me though were the following.

When I get a new phone or tablet, usually the first thing I do is rooting it. This one was no different, about an hour after receipt it was successfully rooted and loaded with Magisk. Currently I'm still in the phase of "getting to know the phone", wherein fuckups are usual. This time again being no different - I removed some apps and apparently did something to it that the search engines - both Google and DuckDuckGo - didn't quite like, as both of them would crash upon application launch. Me in full panic mode of course, desperately trying to find the stock ROM (which doesn't seem to be present in its usual form) or a new set of GApps (which didn't resolve the issue). OnePlus does seem to offer its OTA updates in zip archives though. So I downloaded its latest update (same as what was on the device) and applied it.

That's when the nerdgasm happened.

The "update" was simply a matter of going into the settings, tapping this and that and applying the update. No recovery, no unrooting, no nothing. The update just went like that despite the phone being rooted and just having had TWRP flashed to it. I always wanted this sort of thing, which even the Nexus couldn't offer - having the cake and eating it too. Being able to root the device and muck around with it while still being able to update the device timely without too many hurdles. This fucking thing does it!!!

That is to say, after my initial nerdgasm I did find that it bulldozed over my su binary (effectively unrooting the thing), custom emoji I've set (iOS 12 because fuck Google's most recent emoji set) and some other things. But those are easy to install back, much more so than it would've been to download a whole Android release and dirty flash it, as it was on the Nexus.

Other than that, battery life, dash charging (edit: on that topic, it does remain cool like a cucumber despite getting 15-20W of power jammed into it, quite impressive!), snappiness, the usual jazz.. eh, as I said earlier that's the usual reviewer stuff. But this feature of being able to upgrade the phone while it's modified, that's something which seems to be severely underrated by those.

Oh and during kernel builds, I couldn't quite get the source to work - probably due to my lack of experience with builds of Android kernels - but I did find that this phone actually exposes its kernel config through /proc/config.gz as it should. None of my MediaTek devices do this, so that's something that I found really appealing. Always nice to see when a manufacturer exposes this information to give you a stock sort of config that you can be rest assured will work configuration-wise. And it allows you to see what the stock kernel is actually built with, which again is really nice. I quite like this! It really encourages further development.

Today's launch day. Wish us good luck...

Bout to loose my shit. Fucking hate it when clients push and push to launch the system as urgently as possible. Say they have run through the test version and understand what they are getting and sign it all off. Then come back 2am the day after launch and bitch and moan cause its missing features they thought where there when they weren't part of the original planning and always use the excuse "i have just bought a bunch of marketing, your loosing me money" or "I have an important even with important people that need this tomorrow" and try make it your fucking problem.
Firstly, fuck you
Secondaly, fuck you.
I cant even comprehend your lack of logic.

Ah the day before launch of a new app. And right on schedule the businesses is attempting to completely alter their requirements including a COMPLETE OVERHAUL OF THE DATABASE MODEL TO ADDRESS AN ISSUE THAT HAS ALREADY BEEN FIXED. I wish they would share the drugs they are clearly on so I could also live in this dreamland delusion where you can turn something completely on its head right on the finish line and expect everything to go well.

Manager: Hey I think I have a solution to that performance we talked about last week

Dev: I already fixed it, it only takes 1 second instead of 30 now.

Manager: Ok but I’ve also figured out a solution. If we completely change the entire database model that one query could potentially be even faster according to my understanding of how databases operate.

Dev: I fixed it without the need for that, actually it was just a matter of better conc—

Manager: I think we should go with MY solution. Drop everything and restructure the database immediately! Be quick, as you know we launch this application tomorrow! Have an extra coffee today and just crush it out, don’t overthink this either just do it.

Dev: …

So it's 2 weeks past launch day... And we are still not close to launching.

Sigh...

Day 3 of getting this god forsaken react app to launch!!

My fucking god you cock suckers make life difficult.

Npm install - they say
Npm start - that say
Npm - go swallow my god awful error log and fix all these dependencies
Npm - here's a dependency that didn't install but I need it
Npm - what do you mean your not using a fucking Mac with sass files!
C0D4 - I'm this.close() to fucking stabbing someone!

Once upon a time, one or two jobs ago, a really awesome engineer specced out a distributed search application in response to a business need. This company was managed pretty oldschool and required a ton of paperwork and approvals.

The engineer spent many weeks running tests and optimizing the hell out of this app cluster. It flew, and he had the data to prove it could handle production workloads (think hundreds of terabytes of data being processed every single day)

Part of the way he achieved this was having RAID0 on all of the servers to maximize I/O throughput. He didn't care much about data loss, since the application itself was fault tolerant on a much more granular level.

Management, hearing about this, absolutely flipped their shit and demanded RAID6 instead. This despite the conclusive data that the engineer had that proved RAID6 couldn't keep up.

He more or less got told to STFU.

Even this despite the fact that a RAID restripe would actually take many times longer than rebuilding the failed node from scratch (a process that took about 30 minutes by hand, and could probably be automated to be done in less than five), causing a longer exposure to actual data loss throughout the length of the days-long array rebuild time.

The ill-thought-out requirement added about 50% to the cost of the project (*many* more hard drives now required), beyond the original budget, and the subsequent bureaucratic wrangling resulted in a late product launch.

6 months or so later, after real customers were using this product, the app was buckling under around half of its expected workload. A friend of the engineer suggested to management to try RAID0. Sure enough, that resolved the I/O bottleneck.

This rage-inducing story has a happy ending, though! Said engineer left the company not long after this incident, citing it as a reason for his departure. He was immediately hired by another company, making integer multiples of his prior salary.

The product the company botched the launch of by ignoring his spec? It died a few months later. Maybe the poor customer experience was to blame? Maybe the late launch? Maybe it was another reason entirely.

Either way, millions of dollars of hardware now sat fallow. This was a black eye on the company all the way up to the C-level.

tl;dr: Listen to your engineers. You hired them for their expertise.

Chrome, Firefox, and yes even you Opera, Falkon, Midori and Luakit. We need to talk, and all readers should grab a seat and prepare for some reality checks when their favorite web browsers are in this list.

I've tried literally all of them, in search for a lightweight (read: not ridiculously bloated) web browser. None of them fit the bill.

Yes Midori, you get a couple of bonus points for being the most lightweight. Luakit however.. as much as I like vim in my terminal, I do not want it in a graphical application. Not to mention that just like all the others you just use webkit2gtk, and therefore are just as bloated as all the others. Lightweight my ass! But programmable with Lua, woo! Not like Selenium, Chrome headless, ... does that for any browser. And that's it for the unique features as far as I'm concerned. One is slow, single-threaded and lightweight-ish (Midori) and another has vim keybindings in an application that shouldn't (Luakit).

Pretty much all of them use webkit2gtk as their engine, and pretty much all of them launch a separate process for each tab. People say this is more secure, but I have serious doubts about that. You're still running all these processes as the same user, and they all have full access to the X server they run under (this is also a criticism against user separation on a single X session in general). The only thing it protects against is a website crashing the browser, where only that tab and its process would go down. Which.. you know.. should a webpage even be able to do that?

But what annoys me the most is the sheer amount of memory that all of these take. With all due respect all of you browsers, I am not quite prepared to give 8 fucking gigabytes - half the memory in this whole box! - just for a dozen or so tabs. I shouldn't have to move my web browser to another lesser used 16GB box, just to prevent this one from going into fucking swap from a dozen tabs. And before someone has a go at the add-ons, there's 4 installed and that's it. None of them are even close to this complete and utter memory clusterfuck. It's the process separation. Each process consumes half a GB of memory, and there's around a dozen of them in a usual browsing session. THAT is the real problem. And I want to get rid of it.

Browsers are at their pinnacle of fucked up in my opinion, literally to the point where I'm seriously considering elinks. Being a sysadmin, I already live my daily life in terminals anyway. As such I also do have resources. But because of that I also associate every process with its cost to run it, in terms of resources required. Web browsers are easily at the top of the list.

I want to put 8GB into perspective. You can store nearly 2 entire DVD movies in that memory. However media players used to play them (such as SMPlayer) obviously don't do that. They use 60-80MB on average to play the whole movie. They also require far less processing power than YouTube in a web browser does, even when you download that exact same video with youtube-dl (either streamed within the media player or externally). That is what an application should be.

Let's talk a bit about these "complicated" websites as well. I hate to break it to you framework web devs, but you're a dime a dozen. The competition is high between web devs for that exact reason. And websites are not complicated. The document itself is plain old HTML, yes even if your framework converts to it in the background. That's the skeleton of your document, where I would draw a parallel with documents in office suites that are more or less written in XML. CSS.. oh yes, markup. Embolden that shit, yes please! And JavaScript.. oh yes, that pile of shit that's been designed in half a day, and has a framework called fucking isEven (which does exactly what it says on the tin, modulo 2 be damned). Fancy some macros in your text editor? Yes, same shit, different pile.

Imagine your text editor being as bloated as a web browser. Imagine it being prone to crashing tabs like a web browser. Imagine it being so ridiculously slow to get anything done in your productivity suite. But it's just the usual with web browsers, isn't it? Maybe Gopher wasn't such a bad idea after all... Oh and give me another update where I have to restart the browser when I commit the heinous act of opening another tab, just because you had to update your fucking CA certs again. Yes please!

First day out of 10 exam days today! Have to use windows which I'm obviously not a fan of but oh well I'll manage.
But really, at first it didn't recognize my headphones (regular headphones input). Fair enough, after the admin fiddled around for half an hour we got it working.

*lets install Firefox and chrome*
The installers wouldn't launch at all, bit of fiddling around aaand it works.

*lets use Ms word again then*
Every time I try to save a file it gives shit tons of errors.
Found out that it does save but only with those errors.

*alright let's open up some pdf files*
"Error: no permission to use this application*

Oh come the fuck on just work I've got important stuff to do with a lot of time pressure!

I DON'T MIND USING IT ONCE IF I HAVE TO BUT COULD THAT COCK SUCKING PIECE OF SHIT JUST FUCKING WORK?!

The worst part, I wasn't the only one with trouble, multiple people still don't have the jackplug thing working :/

Oh wow, so many memorable co-workers, though typically not in a positive way. I guess the most memorable was this project manager who got his job solely through nepotism. He was a fucking moron, putting it lightly. He would rattle off buzzwords and jargon that he had randomly picked up in a completely nonsensical way, which made him sound even more ridiculous. He didn't seem to notice our blank stares.

Anyway, since he loved to show everyone just how awesome he was, he had to have the latest and greatest laptop. He had some top-of-the-line model which cost an insane amount of cash back in the day, but of course he got bored of it when something better came out six months later. So he decided to sell his old laptop.

Now, this was his personal laptop he was selling but we were about three months away from launching a top-secret project which had a seven figure budget and a lot riding on it. So what did this absolute goose do? He sold his laptop unformatted with a metric shit ton of confidential files and documents on it. As fate would have it... he sold it to someone who just so happened to work for a competing company.

Cut to about two and a half months later, around two weeks before the launch of this massive project, our competition comes out with something incredibly similar and beat us to market. Aghast, senior management then found out that they had obtained a treasure trove of confidential information from this numpty's laptop, handed to them on a silver platter.

The following Monday, with a sombre mood in the office, this guy cheerfully comes in through the door and is immediately yanked into the boardroom by management. What followed was around thirty minutes of brutal, relentless, non-stop shouting, table- banging and obscenities. When it finally stopped, the door quietly opened, this guy walks out as white as a sheet, turns towards the exit and left the building.

We never saw him again.

Today was a manic-depressive kind of day. Spent the morning helping some developers with getting their code to run a stored procedure to drop old partitions, but it wasn't working on their end. It was a fairly simple proc. But working with partitions is a little like working with an array. I figured out that they were passing the wrong timestamp, and needed to add +1 to delete the right partition. Got that sorted out, and things were good. Lunch time.

After lunch I did some busy work, and then the PO comes up at about 2PM and says he's assigned some requests to me. The first was just attaching some scripts. Easy. The second, the user wants a couple of schemas exported ... at 6PM. I've been in the office since 6:45AM.

While I'm setting up some commands to run for the data export, a BA walks up and asks if I'm filling in for another DBA who is out for a few weeks. Yep. There's a change request that hasn't been assigned, and he normally does the work. I ask when it's due. Well, the pre-implementation was supposed to be done in the morning, but it wasn't, and we're in the implementation window ... half way through. I bring up the change task, and look at. Create new schema and users. That's all it says. The BA laughs. I tell I need more to go on. 10 minutes later he sends an email with the information. There's only two hours left in the window, and I can only use half of it, because the production guys have to their stuff, and we're in their window. Now I'm irritated, because I'm new to Oracle, and it's an unforgiving mistress. Fortunately, another DBA says he'll do it, so that we can get it done in time. But can't work it either, because Dev DBAs don't have access to QA, and the process required access for this task. Gets shelved until the access issue is resolved. It's now after 4:15PM. I'm going to in traffic with that 6PM deadline.

I manage to get home and to the computer by 5:45PM. Log in. Start VPN. Box pops on screen. Java needs to update. I chose skip update. Box pops up again. It won't let me log in until Java is current. Passed.

I finally get logged in, and it's 6:10PM. I'm late getting the job started. I pull up Putty and log into the first box, and paste my pre-prepared command in the command line and hit error. Command not found. I'm tired, so it's a moment to sink in. I don't have time for this.

I log into DBArtisan and pull up the first data base, use the wizard to set the job, and off it goes. Yay. Bring up the second database, and have enter the connect info. Host not found. Wut? Examine host name. Yep, it's correct. Try a different method. Host not found. Go back to Putty. Log in. Past string. Launch. Command not found. Now my brain is quitting on me. Why now? It's after 6:30PM. Fiddle with some settings, reset $Oracle home. Try again. Yay. It works. I'm done. It's after 7PM.

There is nothing like technology to snatch the euphoria of a success away from you. It's a love-hate thing, but I wouldn't trade it for anything else. I'm done. Good night.

Someone is trying to launch a brute force attack on one of my servers that I set up for an old project. According to the logs, they've tried Jorgee, they've tried directly accessing the MySQL database (with the laziest passwords), and they're now on day 4 of their brute force attack against my SSH server. I'm fairly certain that they won't be getting in (not that there's anything worth getting in the first place), but what's the standard protocol for this? Do I just wait this out, or is there something I can do to break their bot? I have fail2ban enabled, and it is doing its job, but the attacker is changing their IP address with every attack.

Company top execs: "We need to optimize our costs and reduce our expenditure by x€ to keep the profit margin at acceptable levels for the shareholders"

YOU ARE PUSHING OUT SHIT PRODUCTS DAY IN AND DAY OUT THAT YOU FUCKING SUITS THINK WILL BE THE NEXT BIG THING BUT NOONE REALLY WANTS OR NEEDS. WE ALREADY HAVE A TON OF THOSE BORN-DEAD SHITCAKES HANGING AROUND ABD NEW ONES ARE ALREADY BEING PREPARED FOR LAUNCH.

"OPTIMIZE COSTS"? HOW ABOUT YOU STOP PRODUCING SHIT AND STICK TO YOUR FUCKING CORE BUSINESS MODEL!!!

"OPTIMIZE COSTS"? WE HAVE A ZERG OF OLD FUCKS, WHO ARE STILL WAITING FOR THE FUCKING SMS TO START THE NEXT TECH REVOLUTION, ON OUR PAYROLL. ALL THEY FUCKING DO IS PLAY SUDOKU IN THE KITCHEN AND DISCUSS TECHNIQUES ON HOW TO RAISE GOATS!!!

"NO MONEY TO GIVE A PAYRISE TO DEVELOPERS"? WHY DONT YOU JUST FUCKING GET RID OF THE USELESS DUDES BASICALLY DOING THEIR TENURE AND CLOSE SOME OF THESE FUCKTARDED PRODUCTS THAT 4 PEOPLE OUTSIDE OF THE FUCKING COMPANY USE BUT NEED A TEAM OF FUCKING 20 TO MAINTAIN! NO!!! THEY WILL NOT BE THE NEXT BIG THING! NO!!! ANYTHING YOU SHITCAKES WHO THINK MOBILE APPS IS THE "NEW EMERGING MARKET" WILL EVER CREATE THE NEXT FUCKING BIG THING!!!!!

STICK TO YOUR FUCKING BUSINESS AND STOP CREATING USELESS SHIT THATS MAADE BY FUCKING USELESS PEOPLE!!!!

FUUUUUCCCCCKKKKKK!!!!!!!!!!!

This is getting annoying.

For the past >half a year I've been chasing windmills. This is what my BAU day looks like:

- We login to client's network
- We start running some Sanity tests before the actual runs (actual runs are hell of an expensive (financially and time-wise) thing to launch) to make sure environment is OK.
- Sanity tests fail. wtf? Nothing's been changed since y-day!
- Spend ~3-4 hours digging logs, code, more logs,... Apparently some genius decided to change a single parameter.
- Spend another 1-2 hours trying to work around that parameter (since apparently that genius did have a task to do that, so we'll most likely have to find a way to live with it)
- Restart the whole env (~30min).
- Launch a Smoke, Sanity tests to verify env state.
- Launch the actual test
- Go home.

Next day:
- We login to client's network
- We start running some Sanity tests before the actual runs to make sure environment is OK.
- Sanity tests pass.
- Run the actual test
- Concurrency on RDS database is sky-rocketing! WTF did that come from??? Nothing's been changed since y-day!!
- Spend ~1-2 hours looking for anything changed, dig some logs for anything unusual. Nothing.
- Escalate to DBA. 2 hours later DBA says "fix the app". thanks for nothing mate....
- Spend remaining 2 hours analysing AWR. Give up, restart the whole RDS instance. Another hour wasted.
- Time to go home. Out of curiosity run Sanity test -- all good. Run the actual test -- all good. wtf??
- Go home

Next day
- We login to client's network
- We start running some Sanity tests before the actual runs to make sure environment is OK.
- Sanity tests fail. wtf? Nothing's been changed since y-day!
- Spend ~3-4 hours digging logs, code, more logs,... Apparently some genius decided to change a single parameter.
- Spend another 1-2 hours trying to work around that parameter
- ..... I think you know where this is going.

And this keeps going on and on, day by day. Spending the better half of the day chasing windmills and doing our actual work on the last hour of the working day or even after that.

We have plenty of interesting tasks in our Jira but we're squirels spinning in the wheel and never being able to touch them.

It feels like I'm wasting my time. I could do so much more with my time!

[just needed to vent ]

I was helping a client launch a new website. We met in a restaurant to do the final launch work. I mentioned I use VPN software to protect my computer on public WiFI and taught him what it means. He said it sounds hackerish and untrustworthy and I had a hard time explaining how it’s actually a countermeasure to hackers.

The next day he calls and says his cell phone is acting up and wants to know what my VPN software might have done to cause that.

How do some people get dressed in the morning?

Most succesful project was around this time last year.

A scary club of privacy haters made a 'webapp' to advise people what to vote for in the national elections.

The tool was really bad in multiple ways. For instance, if two parties would score the same amount of points, one would, at random take second place without conveying this to the user.

Oh and it also collected all the data people entered "for scientific purposes". A very sketchy practice, a non profit, funded by the government and George Soros (I kid you not, illuminatie confirmed ;) ).

The tool had this disclaimer on the bottom, saying this webapp needs cookies to function. So that triggered me to make a copy of the tool that works better and ... offline, and without cookies. You could download a html file and turn of your wifi (for the paranoid ppl among us), use the tool, delete the file. No trace.

It was a little bit of tung and cheek project, a gimick, the original was called stemwijzer, mine was called offline stemwijzer.

It was a one day build and a day after launching I got a call of the original stemwijzer project leader. Demanding to take the thing offline for infringing copyright (yeah sort of was). I tried to explain him why I made this and why privacy for such things should be held in high regard. He basicly told me I was talking shit and did not want to discuss, I told him I don't take stuff offline because of phone calls. I told him to email me a seist and desist.

So that guy prolly had a stressful day (because of the launch of his tool), had a few glasses of wine, and wrote an email. He wrote me I was a pathtic kid and I should do more useful stuff. He wrote that anyone could program a tool like that. And he wrote me I should do him a favour not share this email with my measly amount of twitter followers. Super professional email.

So I did him that favour, I did not share it with my twitter followers, I shared it with one of the largest political blogs in the country.

My tool sort of took of after that. To stop infringing copy right I changed the name and I removed their content from the script and wrote instructions on how to copy and paste in the json content yourself and "make your own tool".

The response was great, people actually emailed me job offers and I think that the current job I have is due to the succes of said project. So be balsy, challenge giants, start riots, it will get you places.

I'm pretty sure my clients would fail the marshmallow test 9/10 times if not 10/10 times. We have a certain time period of the day set aside for me to look into new reported bugs but besides that I'm supposed to work on regular tasks. Of course, they ask me five hours after that time period is done, whether I can look into a new (non-urgent) bug. At the cost of the new thing they want to launch in 2 weeks. 🤔 I would love it if we actually had time to fix every single bug in the codebase but what typically happens is I get about 15 bug reports (most duplicates) and I'm expected to fix all of them in a span of 2 hours.

>site is production ready
>client requests new feature by end of week
>add feature and then site breaks on last day of week
>client freaks out even though we warned this is what happens when you add new features DURING LAUNCH WEEK

That lovely moment when a client calls out of the blue at 4:30PM (we close at 5), 3 weeks before scheduled launch and says, "My website goes down tomorrow so where are we at with the new site?" So...I scrambled all day today to get the site done and it turns out they don't even own their domain or control their DNS. (facepalm) They put in a 30 day cancellation with their current provider and didn't bother to mention we had barely 2 weeks to develop a full custom site.

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 world

Launching a site is quite hard. Launching a community site when you don't have the community yet is really hard. Gosh...

A couple of years ago, we decide to migrate our customer's data from one data center to another, this is the story of how it goes well.

The product was a Facebook canvas and mobile game with 200M users, that represent approximately 500Gibi of data to move stored in MySQL and Redis. The source was stored in Dallas, and the target was New York.

Because downtime is responsible for preventing users to spend their money on our "free" game, we decide to avoid it as much as possible.

In our MySQL main table (manually sharded 100 tables) , we had a modification TIMESTAMP column. We decide to use it to check if a user needs to be copied on the new database. The rest of the data consist of a savegame stored as gzipped JSON in a LONGBLOB column.

A program in Go has been developed to continuously track if a user's data needs to be copied again everytime progress has been made on its savegame. The process goes like this: First the JSON was unzipped to detect bot users with no progress that we simply drop, then data was exported in a custom binary file with fast compressed data to reduce the size of the file. Next, the exported file was copied using rsync to the new servers, and a second Go program do the import on the new MySQL instances.

The 1st loop takes 1 week to copy; the 2nd takes 1 day; a couple of hours for the 3rd, and so on. At the end, copying the latest versions of all the savegame takes roughly a couple of minutes.

On the Redis side, some data were cache that we knew can be dropped without impacting the user's experience. Others were big bunch of data and we simply SCAN each Redis instances and produces the same kind of custom binary files. The process was fast enough to launch it once during migration. It takes 15 minutes because we were able to parallelise across the 22 instances.

It takes 6 months of meticulous preparation. The D day, the process goes smoothly, but we shutdowns our service for one long hour because of a typo on a domain name.

I'm so fucking frustrated with my ex company CEO, this motherfucker made everyone move to Bangalore costing is employees a good chunk of their salary and this delusional ASSHOLE knew that only half of the expected funding was coming in January 2023 itself and they'd be out of funds by July/August, they let go few folks from the team, fired the entire marketing team and expected to make the product profitable. The only reason I had stayed at that time was because the product was interesting to build and the scale I was working with was crazy like 100k request per minute peaks and avg of 10k rpm. I left the company in August...

This MOTHERFUCKER hasn't paid out final settlement after leaving for most employees and he openly says to the folks who are still working there that paying us is not his priority.

I hope your Atlas cluster gets fucking deleted, accesses revoked and entire AWS setup goes down forever, bitch.

We can't goto courts because the company law tribunal needs atleast 1 crore (1.2 million usd) of unpaid dues to declare it insolvent in a years time..

This asshole deducted taxes from our salaried but didn't pay them to the income tax department for an entire fucking financial year.

What a cheating, delusional, sick bastard. And he's still not willing to sell off the company to pay off the debts and call it a day.

Aarrghhhh on top of losing 2-3k USD I might have to pay my taxes approx 5-6k USD to the govt to keep my records well maintained.

What a grade A delusional asshole 😡
If he won't clear the dues till December, I'm gonna launch a mass of social media posts and destroy his reputation so that he doesn't get one penny of VC funds in the future I'm gonna make sure of that...

Me : "Wow, the Windscribe VPN is free for a whole year, and I can download up to 50gb of data per month!"
Me : *subscribe, install and launch the thingy, then proceed to start a 38 gb torrent*
Also me, literally 35s later: "... but why does the trending page of YouTube is full of american videos? Where did the french content go?"

I swear, one day I'll stop being this stupid.

Had a new co-worker I was responsible for training. I am several years his junior, but he is working with a new language/framework I'm fluent in. Day 4 into training, he walks into my cubicle, sidles up next to me, I look up at him, he farts loudly, then (without seeming to realize what he's done) he proceeds to launch into a long-winded question about coding best practices.

If this were an isolated incident, I'd have written it off, but the dude did it again when he came to my desk and asked me to open a jar of pickles for him, and many times over during casual conversation.

> day 3439
> I have become the reviewer, there is no longer such thing as a programmer, just a reviewer
> the copilot AI was renamed "The Pilot"
> I sit and read through thousands of lines of code a day adding missing new line characters and adding semi-colons for paranoid dev leads
> reviewed a hello world function today
> instead of, return "Hello World!", it said "Goodbye World! >:)"
> I fixed it and submitted a PR
> this has been happening more and more lately
> apparently it's more efficient to fix the bugs of a malicious AI during pull reviews then it is for humans to make the programs
> congress just signed a bill last week allowing "The Pilot" to work on nuclear launch code
> I hope I don't mess up

Everyday:
Colleagues: I hate when the client wants to make last minute design changes the day we are supposed to launch when they have had MONTHS to bring them up..

Today:
Me: we are supposed to launch our site today (our own agency site that we have been working on and reviewing as a group for about a year), so please take some time to go through and make sure there are no GRAMMATICAL errors.
Colleagues: *send huge lists of minor design changes that are CRITICAL*

This new job has more work than I can possibly complete in a day, week, or month. Deadlines pile up and I’m thoroughly exhausted all weekend. My mind feels lethargic and dull. People around me seem to be getting stuff done and I feel like I’m making too many mistakes and holding everyone back. Not sure I can stick with this job for the long haul to retirement. But freelancing absolutely sucks because nobody wants to pay you enough to feed yourself and it doesn’t scale to a full time salary for me. I simply don’t have the mental capacity to do the equivalent of four peoples’ jobs to design, code, QA, launch, and do all the digital marketing, advertising, writing, and maintenance for enough sites to make up my salary.

I often read articles describing developer epiphanies, where they realized, that it was not Eclipse at fault for a bad coding experience, but rather their lack of knowledge and lack of IDE optimization.

No. Just NO.

Eclipse is just horrendous garbage, nothing else. Here are some examples, where you can optimize Eclipse and your workflow all you like and still Eclipse demonstrates how bad of an IDE it is:

- There is a compilation error in the codebase. Eclipse knows this, as it marks the error. Yet in the Problems tab there is absolutely nothing. Not even after clean. Sometimes it logs errors in the problems tab, sometimes t doesn't. Why? Only the lord knows.

- Apart from the fact that navigating multiple Eclipse windows is plain laughable - why is it that to this day eclipse cannot properly manage windows on multi-desktop setups, e.g. via workspace settings? Example: Use 3 monitors, maximize Eclipse windows of one Eclipse instance on all three. Minimize. Then maximize. The windows are no longer maximized, but spread somehow over the monitors. After reboot it is even more laughable. Windows will be just randomly scrabled and stacked on top of each other. But the fact alone that you cannot navigate individual windows of one instance.. is this 2003?

- When you use a window with e.g. class code on a second monitor and your primary Eclipse window is on the first monitor, then some shortcuts won't trigger. E.g. attempting to select, then run a specific configuration via ALT+R, N, select via arrows, ALT+R won't work. Eclipse cannot deal with ALT+R, as it won't be able to focus the window, where the context menus are. One may think, this has to do with Eclipse requiring specific perspectives for specific shortcuts, as shortcuts are associated with perspectives - but no. Because the perspective for both windows is the same, namely Java. It is just that even though Shortcuts in Eclipse are perspective-bound, but they are also context-sensitive, meaning they require specific IDE inputs to work, regarldless of their perspective settings. Is that not provided, then the shortcut will do absolutely nothing and Eclipse won't tell you why.

- The fact alone that shortcut-workarounds are required to terminate launches, even though there is a button mapping this very functionality. Yes this is the only aspect in this list, where optimizing and adjusting the IDE solves the problem, because I can bind a shortcut for launch selection and then can reliably select ant trigger CTRL+F2. Despite that, how I need to first customize shortcuts and bind one that was not specified prior, just to achieve this most basic functionality - teminating a launch - is beyond me.

Eclipse is just overengineered and horrendous garbage. One could think it is being developed by people using Windows XP and a single 1024x768 desktop, as there is NO WAY these issues don't become apparent when regularily working with the IDE.

I joined 3 months into a project that was expected to be done in 6.

As the day passed I learned about the scope a little more, 30 days in I decided to step aside, I slowly learned that they wanted a whole bank built from scratch.

User support ticketing systems, the banking core and an app like "revolut", everything with a team of 4.

To this day I have not seen them launch, and it's been over 5 years.

I’m tired of being put in positions where design gives me a rough mock-up a week (or less) before its launch day. It’s frustrating and I’m tired.

Why the fuck these managers can’t understand that you can’t build a full blown system with in a week. After building a demo driven application to show the client you can tell the client we are fucking ready to launch the damn thing . I FUCKING MENTIONED BEFORE GOING TO THE MEETING ITS NOT RELEASE READY GOD DAMN IT.

Now when I say we can’t launch this app we need to fix things . THE FUCKING MANAGER HAS THE GUTS TO SAY “one day is enough to fix the issues right ? Shouldn’t be a big deal for you to fix this” .

Kill me now 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬

We were a small startup with only 5-6 developers. I had to design the UI and develop most of the Android frontend, It was quite an easy and fun job for me because I don't get to see people rant about the design that needed to be implemented so, usually I design something that can be easily implemented.
We got 2 projects with a tight deadline and I took care of both project's design part and after completing the design I took the entire frontend of one project and rest of em started working with the other one. Usually we were a strong team and was able to deliver things real quick because we were expert in our intrested fields, I had a fast start in my project where the other project lagged a lot because of the desifn which was hard to implement by them, and the frontend was bo where near to get completed by the deadline and I couldn't help them out because it was all messed up shit handling both projects together.

Finally we were in a situation where none of our project are ready and the deadline was about to hit within a week, so we halted the other project and asked them to join me to complete the project am Working on, I had built most of the Android part and these fellows had a hard time figuring out stuff I made up (yeah, documentation was shit while you go agile), and finally things messed up and I had to work 2 continuous day and night without any sleep just to get the app ready 10 minutes before the official proto presentation.

The best part is I couldn't even get up from my chair and had a headache, fainted instantly when I took a few steps, but the product launch went good.

We fucked uo the code and both the projects just because we weren't available for each other considering the size of the team. Anyway we completed the project but It was a huge failure for us being first time to manage a startup.

Learned a lot of lessons,
Always make a team with people who are good at each of the aspect of development and never divide it to get shit done faster.

It's been two months since I've left my previous job, after 1.5 years. I never had the feeling my boss trusted his dev team, since he was checking up on us regularly, even though we had planned out a sprint and work for us was "clear". I say "clear", because every single feature on this project was pretty much half-baked, since they were just ideas our boss/PO (same person) on the spot and were labeled as "the next big thing" without every properly writing them out as user stories. Every demo came with a bunch of criticism, because features weren't implemented "as he imagined", because what do you know, the user stories weren't properly described anyway. Bringing that up as counter-argument also made him angry every time, so that didn't help much either. The launch of the platform was also postponed every time because of vague reasons, so that didn't make the project any more interesting either.
It took a while before I got sick of this of this pretty hopeless situation and toxic environment. Mind you, it was my first job since I graduated, so I was a bit naive thinking the working environment would improve and aforementioned company issues would be resolved over time. Eventually, I ran out of patience and motivation, so I finally bit the bullet and handed in my resignation letter.
From that moment, I at least had an end in sight, since I was still obliged to do my four-week notice period, which felt like an eternity. The borderline childish and sociopathic behaviour of my boss didn't make it any better (e.g. checking up on me even more, more mistrust, randomly accusing me of ruining the working atmosphere because I shared a meme with a colleague of mine and didn't involve him, going lunching with all of my colleagues but explicitly asking me to stay at work, ...). Being forced to work from home the last 2 weeks as part of the country's lockdown measures at least helped my sanity a bit, since I had the comfort of my home office and not the frequent "looking over your shoulders to check if you're still working".
By the last day of my notice period, I was bitter, exhausted, lost confidence in my skills and had completely lost my joy of being a developer. I had to physically meet with my boss one more time to hand in the company laptop. He thanked me for my service and said that we'd keep in touch. I hope I won't keep that promise (he made a lot of false promises before, too), because I'd rather never encounter him ever again. It felt like a huge relief to finally close the door of this bad experience behind me for good.

Now, 2 months later, I've got a new job and rediscovered my joy for coding, mostly thanks to the complete opposite of a toxic environment here, management which actually has respect and faith in me and a challenging but fun project. My mental state has made a complete turnaround compared to two months ago. I have absolutely no regrets of switching jobs. If only I had made that decision sooner.

Every year, the worst dev experience comes right at the holidays, when website owners with big egos want to launch right on (U.S.) Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Eve, or New Year’s Eve/Day because they think they’re that popular and important. It never occurs to them that this is the WORST time because any third party support you need for hosting, APIs, plugins, etc. is either backlogged or out of office. And because NOBODY is eagerly awaiting the redesign of ANY website on those particular dates since they are stuffing their faces and getting s&&&faced at bars and parties. Nobody will even notice that your website has changed until January 15th at the earliest.

Today was my 3rd day on the job and half way through it (right after my new laptop landed on my desk) I was fired. I tried to work for two days without a computer. All I could do was hover over the one other developer whose been there 3 weeks and who didn't meet the launch deadline. The founder had a meltdown over it this morning.

client emails they are furious that changes were pushed at end of day and we broke the website. Being up at 11:30pm to fix changes to make client happy so they can test website over weekend for a Tuesday launch.

!rant
So on the last day before launch our latest feature I'm informed that a requirement was missed and it had to be implemented before go live otherwise the business didn't want the feature. The feature in question was pretty drastic and basically required a scheme rewrite, new tables, etc. So I spent the entire day making the change.

Thankfully I pushed the whole project for good code coverage. Therefore, all I had to do when I was done was run all of our tests and make sure they passed. *warm fuzzy feelings*

I have made 2 mistakes today.
1. Upgrading from Fedora 23 to 24 on a busy work day - it's taken over 2h now...
2. Trying to switch to a new TTY and launch GDM while it's updating - I now cannot see anything and live in fear of restarting.

Conclusion don't try and be clever with Linux, it will win

My team and I are working on a huge project that's been in development for years.

First deadline was in the fall last year. We were never going to make that.

Then we were supposed to be ready just after the summer holidays (months ago). We didn't make that either.

Then we were supposed to launch last week. Didn't happen, still too many critical errors and unfinished, untested features.

Now we are having daily meetings to discuss whether we'll be ready to release... that day!

Meanwhile, stability issues and other critical errors keep popping up. The product is barely finished and has not been through rigorous testing with all the latest features and bug fixes. Not to mention that we don't really have a deployment pipeline either.

And here's the kicker: The customers don't know this is coming. It's highly anticipated, but only internally. It is a replacement for an existing product, which strives towards not changing the frontend too much.

Why do we rush it so? I get that a deadline can help motivate you to reach your goal, but how motivated will we be if the launch fails and we get buried in bugs and missing features?
Would it not be better to launch it with at least the confidence of knowing that we've tried to test it properly?

It was around for a while but I didn’t realize it was it for a long time. I was fixing computers for cash and spending in on booze while in primary school. Making websites for cash and for fun while in high school. Some guys wanted to buy my databases at the time and sending me emails that my websites rocks. I didn’t cared cause I party a lot and I didn’t need money.
Sex drugs and rock and roll was my life not a fucking computer.
Since I never had problems with math I passed exams and got myself to university and dropped out cause of those 3 funny things above. Turned out to pass exams after second year when math and physics disappeared you need to study more then 1 day before exam and party was more important for me.

I failed tremendously. My girlfriend left me I was out of money I got back to my hometown with my laptop and I somehow between depression, drugs, alcohol and killing myself reminded I was getting money from websites and I can try to follow that movie.

At that time I didn’t read single book in english in my life. I know some basic english so I decided to try to read some actionscript2 pdf. Why actionscript ? I liked those simple games. Those were fun and there was nothing better. I was reading first book at least 10 times with vocabulary that took about a month until I remembered whole book and second book was faster like 1 week third was 1 day and from then thing moved a little faster. I discovered flex just before adobe acquired macromedia and started writing in it. Started answering to some questions on forum and build some portfolio website with fancy 3d animations and stuff and finally applied for 2 jobs.
They both were amazed by my website and one of them sent me some task to do and I did it overnight and sent them back. They wanted to hire me and I need to respond to them.
Second job they invited me for talking and asking about math, if I’m ok with 3d and stuff and they offered me job closer to my home town so I picked them. The code was amazing, 3d equations, quaternions, complicated stuff bit very well written by some company that dropped project before launch and my first task was add some small feature.
I remember first day in elevator with my former boss who told me to not to get scary and take it slowly I was trying to do my task as fast as I can worried I will be fired if I don’t do it and nobody else will hire me and I won’t manage to recover from second failure. It was even more fighting with myself that I will fail again then with this task lol.
I’ve done the feature third day and when they said it’s cool and I can commit my changes it appeared to me that It might be this shit that will get me out of trouble.
I was never again wrong about programming and so wrong about trouble but that’s a different story...

*Screaming Internally* I'm really, REALLY, stressed.

We just entered the final sprint for the finishing of a major project. This is my first "Launch" type achievement since I started working as a programmer(I started almost exactly a year ago)

We have a lot of work done on the project, and it's very clearly near "Completion" but we all know a programmers job is never done.

But specifically I've been thinking about the code i've worked on. I've been at the burnt out phase of the development for a week now, I haven't been getting a lot done, and I can't help but stress that my code is going to be what breaks on launch day and i'm going to get canned or something...

It's not that i'm a bad programmer(at least I don't think) but more or less that I just have been so stressed I think I've made some mistakes, and I think it's going to blow up in my face, and I might lose my job over it.

How do you guys deal with work stress?

You come to work 2 hours early to continue a project that needs to launch next Friday.

40 minutes later you're still eating breakfast and browsing DevRant.

The coding hour has already hit and the day hasn't even started.

We all talk about the little things that screw us for days. Here is mine.

The same program with 4 executables pointing to bat files that all run differently. The executables to launch this program are in different places. 3 of the 4 are broken but give all appearances that they are functional. The one that works is buried in another directory that has 3 executables of the same type. Take your pick.

Short story, a 5 day problem solved by double-clicking the right icon.

Actually, it happened just before my current holidays.
I had prepared a whole system to feed and use a machine learning model. My colleague and some others had been working on a great thing, all encapsulated, all abstracted for my system.
My last day at the office, they had it ready.
I install their thing, load one model and launch one dummy prediction: error. I try with other input data: error
I try debugging a bit more, errors all the way. Knowing them, I asked if they wrote some unit tests.
"Sure we did"
I find the tests, yes there are some. And I notice:
"Hey, I see that in all your tests, you're making more than one prediction at a time (=aka using a matrix with more than one row)
- yeah, and it work fine
- in the project, we're doing one prediction at a time, did you try it with one prediction?"
He tries: error, that was totally what I said.
I started ranting on loosing the scope of the project, why we do tests in the first place.
Then, I grabbed my coat, said "see you in one week" and let them rework their code.
I was so angry at them, it seemed so basic to just check that 👹

MRW it's launch day and every is complain about the servers.

TODAY IS THE LAUNCH DAY OF THE BIGGEST PROJECT IVE WORKED ON..

A magazine website.
We launch the redesign in three hours.

AND IM HERE SITTING SEARCHING FOR BUGS

MRW it's almost launch day

My first day of Launch Academy is tomorrow. Correcting a decade old mistake of not going to college for Comp Sci as originally planned. I'm excited, any tips on injecting a ton of code into your brain at once?

What a long horrid weekend this has been.
So much overtime gathered though.

Started Friday 5am, went to Oslo to do some drone footage for one of our clients. Got back home at 11:30pm.
During the day I had also been doing some work for this other client we have, they were supposed to have project launch the 22nd, but called on Friday and said it has to be on the 15th instead.

I got a few hours of sleep, woke and worked all day till I passed out at my desk for a few hours, went to the office (on a sunday) to talk to the PM and CXO about the project (great help, they were my rubber ducks)

Good part, I get so many days off now

Thursday: Made an appointment with doctor for (painful because no anesthesia) outpatient procedure. Sent message to team slack saying appointment would interrupt part of my day.

Friday: Boss decides to launch website. Launched.

Saturday: Fixed many broken things.

Sunday: Fixed more broken things.

Monday morning: Texted team about fixing more broken things WHILE BEING OPERATED ON!!!!!!!!!

Monday afternoon and evening: STILL WORKING ON MORE BUG FIXES!!!!!!!

I was thinking about the problems one of our clients faced with the launch of their project the other day, because things were rushed, stuff was omitted and in the end they could not meet the launch date, and I started making a list of hard lessons I learned over the years that would have helped them avoid this situation.

Feel free to add yours in the comments.

- Never deploy on Friday
- Never make infrastructure changes right before a launch
- Always have backups. Always!
- Version control is never optional
- A missed deadline is better than a failed launch
- If everything is urgent, nothing is important
- Fast and cheap, cheap and quality, quality and fast. Only one pair at a time can be achieved
- Never rush the start or the end of a project
- Stability is always better that speed
- Make technical decisions based on the needs of the project two years from now
- Code like you will be the only maintainor of the project two years from now. You probably will...
- Always test before you deploy
- You can never have too many backups (see above)
- Code without documentation is a tool without instructions
- Free or famous does not necessarily mean useful or good
- If you need multiple sentences to explain a method, you should probably refactor
- If your logic is checked beforehand, writing the code becomes way easier
- Never assume you understand a request the first time around. Always follow up and confirm

There are many more that should be on this list, but this is what came to mind now.

TLDR: Detect site visitors browser and conditionally load a Citrix frame rather than rendering the site

The request came about 3 days after launching a new project to production. For several months before that moment we had reviewed and confirmed the supported browser matrix. As you might guess plans tend to go up in smoke as we approach and pass launch. Now that we're live after all, it would be the tine to lose our damn minds rather than bask in the warmth of a successful launch for 5 minutes.

Anyway as for the actual request, after those first few days the client PM realized a FEW people were actually using IE8 and was now panicking that it was unsupported. On my way out of the building that day he asked if we could detect the browser and rather than render the site load a frame to a Citrix session that would be running the latest IE...

Guess who just spent the entire day before launch debugging why compose doesn't work on an ec2 instance where I DIDN"T INSTALL FUCKING DOCKER

I guess this is the key difference between me and seniors. Seniors know where to look where shit breaks because they have been breaking it for at least 5 years.

So this past few days of a mix bag of emotions. Friday's weekly deliverables on our first dry run at launch, I squeeze across the line in an embarrassing finish. Decision to proceed with the live run to be delayed, not going to happen if I've got something to say about it.

Next day, vendor on the house my wife has purchased (our first!!) and says we can move the settlement date ahead 4 weeks! Winning!

Monday, meeting with all stakeholders on the fuck up that was my deliverables I'm responsible for, granted a conditional pass. "Don't worry, I got this."

Tuesday, received the results of a technical challenge I've given one of the developer candidates - he smashed it. Keen to give him the job!

!Rant

Tldr: great spike to solve deployment problem may be a wasted effort.

Deployments of an ancient electron application need to be done in CodeDeploy to deploy the latest build. Customer hour restrictions cause this to be done only after midnight, and manually checked.

The whole team knows this is the wrong method of deployment and that there are many other operational problems with the project.

A few other senior team members get together and decide to spike out a way to use electron auto-deployment to accomplish this without using code-deploy at all.

After a shallow dive into this subject, we all get pulled aside to handle a change in another part of the software ecosystem. It happens. We leave the spike behind.

A junior-intermediate developer on the team pics the project up and gets a good spike going in a day and a half! We are all high fives and beers. This is Friday.

By Monday there is a pull request in for code review and it looks solid. Seems like it will make deployments a lot better.

Preparing the last deployment (hopefully) with CodeDeploy ever...

Marketing team members inform us that they are running an add system on the customer devices and to do it they are using Linux.

The current application being deployed is using Windows 10 (yeah, another problem).

They say they have made plans to move our application over to Linux. This means we may not be able to launch the junior devs great spike and the old deployment method may stay for the time being.

Meetings soon to find out how all of this will hash out.

End of rant. I hope I'm doing this right

I came from being a game developer, to doing VR/AR stuff, to mobile app/game development, to website development, to arduino, IoT and robotics.

... And now most of my time is spent on updating a portal site using a shitty cms with each page needing to be crafted manually using html and deadlines are always a few hours away, with revisions on the launch day itself.

I really wanna go back to the interesting stuff. :/

How to disconnect from work after working hours? Im working for the last 4 months as a mid level dev in this company. I mean Im able to problem-solve and do my work but sometimes I get so addicted to problem solving that I get worried and become obsessed, hyperfixated (especialy if Im stuck on something for lets say a couple weeks). It goes to the point where I work from home 12-14 hours a day just to figure out some bug in the flow.

Thing is, our codebase is large and when doing every new refactor/feature some surprises happen. I dont have a decent mentor who could teach me one on one or even do pair programming with. All i have is just some colleagues who can point me to right direction or do a code review from time to time. Thats it.

I dont know why I take this so personally. For example I had to do a feature which I did in 1 week, then MR got approved by devs and QA. After that during regression they found like 3 blockers and I felt really bad and ashamed. While in reality our BA did not define feature properly, devs who reviewed it didnt even launch the code and poke around in the app, and our team's QA tested only the happy scenario. Basically this is failing/getting delayed because of a failure in like 6-7 people chain.

However for some reason Im taking this very personally, that I, as a dev failed. Maybe due to my ADHD or something but for the next days or weeks as long as I dont find solution I will isolate myself and tryhard until I get it right. Then have a few days of chill until I face another obstacle in another task again. And this keeps repeating and repeating.

My senior colleague tells me to chill and dont let work take such a toll on my emotional/physical/mental health. But its hard. He has 7 years of experience and has decent memory. I have 2-3 years of experience and have ADHD, we are not the same. I dont know how to become a guy who clocks out after 8 hours of work done everyday. Its like I feel that they might fire me or I will look bad if I dont put in enough effort. Not like I was ever fired for performance issues... Anyways I dont know how to start working to live, instead of living for work.

I hate who Im becoming. I dont work out anymore, started smoking a lot, dont exercise. I live this self induced anxiety driven workaholic lifestyle.

I'm getting more frustrated every day. In the past 2 months the requirements have changed dozen of times, which resulted in so many unnecessary delay.

The date for the soft launch has changed multiple times as well. One moment there is going to be a soft launch, the next week they decide to launch earlier without a soft launch.

On top of all the annoying IT related issues, our CEO is on holiday. The only person left in the company remotely capable to replace him for a few weeks is me. So beside changing requirements and deadlines, I have to deal with a lot of other shit as well.

To make things even harder, most coworkers from our support department are on holiday. Just one person is left and his wife will be getting a baby very, very soon. Ofcourse, I'm happy for him, but taking over our support department as well is not what I'm looking forward to.

The soft launch is schedule for next Monday. I'm so tired and I'm distracted every day by non IT issues. The most important things work, but there is still so much to do and I can hardly concentrate. The two other parties who are involved are far from ready either and I have to find shortcuts for their problems every morning, because they can't fix it for themselves.

Well, at least writing it down here helped my stress a little bit :)

Launch my entertainment company and leave [day job] to focus on it. If things go really well, have enough money to spend my time working on whatever projects I want irregardless of job.

After three months of development, my first contribution to the client is going live on their servers in less than 12 hours. And let me say, I shall never again be doing that much programming in one go, because the last week and a half has been a nightmare... Where to begin...

So last Monday, my code passed to our testing servers, for QA to review and give its seal of approval. But the server was acting up and wouldn't let us do much, giving us tons of timeouts and other errors, so we reported it to the sysadmin and had to put off the testing.

Now that's all fine and dandy, but last Wednesday we had to prepare the release for 4 days of regression testing on our staging servers, which meant that by Wednesday night the code had to be greenlight by QA. Tuesday the sysadmin was unable to check the problem on our testing servers, so we had to wait to Wednesday.

Wednesday comes along, I'm patching a couple things I saw, and around lunch time we deploy to the testing servers. I launch our fancy new Postman tests which pass in local, and I get a bunch of errors. Partially my codes fault, partially the testing env manipulating server responses and systems failing.

Fifteen minutes before I leave work on the day we have to leave everything ready to pass to staging, I find another bug, which is not really something I can ignore. My typing skills go to work as I'm hammering line after line of code out, trying to get it finished so we can deploy and test when I get home. Done just in time to catch the bus home...

So I get home. Run the tests. Still a couple failures due to the bug I tried to resolve. We ask for an extension till the following morning, thus delaying our deployment to staging. Eight hours later, at 1AM, after working a full 8 hours before, I push my code and leave it ready for deployment the following morning. Finally, everything works and we can get our code up to staging. Tests had to be modified to accommodate the shitty testing environment, but I'm happy that we're finally done there.

Staging server shits itself for half a day, so we end up doing regression tests a full day late, without a change in date for our upload to production (yay...).

We get to staging, I run my tests, all green, all working, so happy. I keep on working on other stuff, and the day that we were slated to upload to production, my coworkers find that throughout the development (which included a huge migration), code was removed which should not have. Team panics. Everyone is reviewing my commits (over a hundred commits) trying to see what we're missing that is required (especially legal requirements). Upload to production is delayed one day because of this. Ended up being one class missing, and a couple lines of code, which is my bad (but seriously, not bad considering I'm a Junior who was handed this project as his first task at his first job).

I swear to God, from here on out, one feature per branch and merge request. Never again shall I let this happen. I don't even know why it was allowed to happen, it breaks our branch policies. But ohel... I will now personally oppose crap like this too...

Now if you'll excuse me... I'm going to be highly unproductive and rest, because I might start balding otherwise after these weeks...

Meeting deadline after day and night of hard work, and you come to know client postponed the launch date to a month :rage:

This story happened to everyone, and i am sure that if i search, i will find dozens of similar stories, but the different here is, i tried, i really tried, in a hundred different ways to achieve my goal !

When you are stuck on a problem, let's say, that you have a program, project, website ... and need to achieve something technically weird (or hard) and need some help to save you time on experimentations. The first thing a lot of people do is : Google.com && put search dorks.

But, at a moment, google gets "dirty", you use it so often that he always think to know better then you what you are looking for.

It reminds of "Ted", the movie (for thows who know it) where they asked : "Hey ! Why does google always suggest us to look for black dicks ??"

It is exactly what happened to me, i got results who doesn't have anything to do with what i was looking for !

You can give it a try now : type "semantic web RDF to RDB"

You won't find anything, except results related to : NOSQL DBs, which is totally annoying.

Something else, i once google swift to get some updates, what results did i got ? Taylor Swift ... (musician)

I often get 2 or 3 results from google, which made me thinking that i somewhat reached the end of internet, or that people are so dumb that i will have spend hours trying to figure my solutions, but, before doing that, other solutions had to be tested.

1- TOR : Google tracks his users and uses its algos and bullshits to return results as close as possible to the user's demand (big fail ...) so how about moving to a different country ? DL TOR browser, open, setup, go to US, open google (got us version YAY !) enter my keywords, and, nothing, still nothing, more results for sure, but nothing related to what i was looking for.

2- VM
Pop a VM, launch TOR, use Hidden mode, delet all cookies and stuff (it is a new VM but who knows).
Use keywords (now in UK). Here they are !! my results !!! i finally found some decent results about my keywords !

But, i have the required knowledge to do this kind of stuff, but how about people who rely heavily on google ? they can't change country, clear everything, trick google to think you are a new user, they have almost biased and flawed results. I tried duckduckgo (i love them) but they are not that efficient.

Google says not to anything evil, but they ARE EVIL, miss guiding people, suggesting corrections who have nothing to do with the keywords, or results totally unrelated in any way to the keywords while results exist in other countries ???

Ever since, i don't pay attention to google at all, and started thinking that google's algos are manipulating people, i don't know if it is done on purpose or not, but the result is the same, people have biased results based on their country, on their tag, on their ID, and the recent keywords.

During that period i was cursing google every funcking day, and i am still doing it, too much trackers, too much manipulation, i will end-up enclosing myself in darknet.

Soo, lets talk about deadlines and how often I come in trouble when there is one near. This week I have (had) three. So I had a lot of problems this week.

But, after all today was a really good day.

I deleted an production database, fucked up my laravel migrations and tomorrow we have to deploy another application. The app is still in development and the site isn´t finished yet.

Friday I need to launch another webapplication. Because I don't want to deploy webapps and apps on friday and I go snowboarding next week, I somehow convinced my client to launch it next week. He agreed with me, so that's a burden off my shoulder. And I'll have an extra day for fixing the last bugs.

Today I worked really hard and almost finished the last application. So I think after all I'll somehow manage it.

What would you say to an employer offering a job at a starting point of only a percentage of the top salary you'll earn once the project is finished? Let's say they offered to pay you $40k to work full time building a highly complex website with multiple API integrations and sophisticated estimate calculation workflows, plus you'd be doing marketing and copywriting, with a goal of achieving 300 signups a day. In the middle of the project they boost the pay to, say, $60k salary rate. At the 12 month mark, which is the final "launch" date anticipated (and onward), you get $100k/year and you're the only person paid to do All The Things.

Oh, and also, the previous person they hired to do it failed to deliver and was let go.

Would you turn that down because to earn so little at first on the speculation that the venture will be a success and that you'll eventually get to the $100k level, plus their failure with the previous person, is too much of a gamble? Asking for a friend. ;)

That feeling when you are debugging and java keeps throwing exceptions everywhere for the whole day, and just when you are about to turn off the pc and are resigned to go home with a code full of bugs, decide to launch the program one last time and Everything compile and works properly 😍

!rant. Story:

There are a lot of things I would like to do, but the lack of enough money makes it hard.

My goals are to become more active on YouTube, find clients and hold them, try to learn how to sell products convincingly, become better at web design, understand university-level mathematics, leave Germany (one particular reason for this is the need of the redundant imprint), help people around the world, become more fit bodywise (by doing e.g. swimming, jogging and going to the gym), eat healthy and drink a lot of water, work on my emotional intelligence, learn peoples' behaviours and why they do what they do, write my own book, finally start practicing yoga and muay thai, live on my own, make a world tour for a year, learn the skill of powered paragliding, getting the license for powered paragliding, glide with a powered paraglider the whole day, build a house in the woods, create my own satellite and launch it, develop new things (like building some sort of vehicle that can fly in a special way), learn about biology, chemistry, physics (I hate it, but I believe in the power of what is going to happen once you learn it), become more aware of what is happening, live on the streets with no money to learn the ability to survive in more extreme situations, learn how to use guns, bombs, snipers and knifes properly (don't assume that I am a terrorist now haha, I am just interested in that type of stuff. That's all to it) ...

But all of that, obviously, not in 2020. More like within 10 years.

When my e-commerce system built for a school didn't calculate totals properly at launch and I had to take it down, re-charge people, and re-launch the next day.

Sometimes NVIDIA fucks up big time.
Last time I was a writing a UI application in Java. I took some break and updated the NVIDIA drivers so that you know it will 'increase' gaming performance. Next day I was trying to launch the app and the UI doesn't show up. It took me over half an hour to realise that there was no fault in my code and it was the fucking update.

So here it is. Apple release, second round.

This time, uploads to AppStoreConnect took 3 hours and 40 minutes. Submission of the app was at 0.04, just after the planned launch day. Android submission tomorrow.

Tomorrow, and Friday are public holidays.
I'll have to work those, at best being able to not work on the weekend. The client has already told me he's calling me tomorrow morning to talk about things.

I don't want praise, but I'd like him to respect that while I may just be a lowly developer, I would like to have a life.

When are the happy times coming?

Today's blocker to solve. Launch game with spec. headset. Notice that once you reach main menu you are unable to navigate. Turns out that this specific headset is treated as a controller on some consoles and generates data on "buttons pressed" when querying OS about controller state... (all other devices that are not controllers can be queried by asking for devices, controllers are supposed to be only for controllers...)

Note from QA: This only occurs on some consoles out of 10 tested systems this happened on 3.

Fun day ahead of me...

So the company is launching this massive new project, I'm tasked with building a dashboard to track the performances of the whole thing in near real-time.

90% if the data comes from this one somewhat rubbish API (3rd-party).

I'm given plenty of time to build this, everything runs fine prior to the launch, manager happy.

Launch day, happening exactly at midnight.

I go and check my dashboard 5 min past the hour, all excited.

Errors, errors everywhere. "What is going on?" I exclaimed. #datHeartAttack

Took me a fair amount of time to figure out the issue.

Due to the time difference I was technically requesting the 3rd party servers for "tomorrow's data," and that instead of handling that in some sensible manner, the API just threw a "wrong fucking date error."

I mean, we're paying additional money, good money, for this API.

When the final card is checked off and you realize the past year and a half has been spent making this absolute monster of a service. There really is no better feeling.