Hey everyone,

First off, a Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates, happy holidays to everyone, and happy almost-new-year!

Tim and I are very happy with the year devRant has had, and thinking back, there are a lot of 2017 highlights to recap. Here are just a few of the ones that come to mind (this list is not exhaustive and I'm definitley forgetting stuff!):

- We introduced the devRant supporter program (devRant++)! (https://devrant.com/rants/638594/...). Thank you so much to everyone who has embraced devRant++! This program has helped us significantly and it's made it possible for us to mantain our current infrustructure and not have to cut down on servers/sacrifice app performance and stability.
- We added avatar pets (https://devrant.com/rants/455860/...)
- We finally got the domain devrant.com thanks to @wiardvanrij (https://devrant.com/rants/938509/...)
- The first international devRant meetup (Dutch) with organized by @linuxxx and was a huge success (https://devrant.com/rants/937319/... + https://devrant.com/rants/935713/...)
- We reached 50,000 downloads on Android (https://devrant.com/rants/728421/...)
- We introduced notif tabs (https://devrant.com/rants/1037456/...), which make it easy to filter your in-app notifications by type
- @AlexDeLarge became the first devRant user to hit 50,000++ (https://devrant.com/rants/885432/...), and @linuxxx became the first to hit 75,000++
- We made an April Fools joke that got a lot of people mad at us and hopefully got some laughs too (https://devrant.com/rants/506740/...)
- We launched devDucks!! (https://devducks.com)
- We got rid of the drawer menu in our mobile apps and switched to a tab layout
- We added the ability to subscribe to any user's rants (https://devrant.com/rants/538170/...)
- Introduced the post type selector (https://devrant.com/rants/850978/...) (which will be used for filtering - more details below)
- Started a bug/feature tracker GitHub repo (https://github.com/devRant/devRant)
- We did our first ever live stream (https://youtube.com/watch/...)
- Added an awesome all-black theme (devRant++) (https://devrant.com/rants/850978/...)
- We created an "active discussions" screen within the app so you can easily find rants with booming discussions!
- Thanks to the suggestion of many community members, we added "scroll to bottom" functionality to rants with long comment threads to make those rants more usable
- We improved our app stability and set our personal record for uptime, and we also cut request times in half with some database cluster upgrades
- Awesome new community projects: https://devrant.com/projects (more will be added to the list soon, sorry for the delay!)
- A new landing page for web (https://devrant.com), that was the first phase of our web overhaul coming soon (see below)

Even after all of this stuff, Tim and I both know there is a ton of work to do going forward and we want to continue to make devRant as good as it can be. We rely on your feedback to make that happen and we encourage everyone to keep submitting and discussing ideas in the bug/feature tracker (https://github.com/devRant/devRant).

We only have a little bit of the roadmap right now, but here's some things 2018 will bring:

- A brand new devRant web app: we've heard the feedback loud and clear. This is our top priority right now, and we're happy to say the completely redesigned/overhauled devRant web experience is almost done and will be released in early 2018. We think everyone will really like it.

- Functionality to filter rants by type: this feature was always planned since we introduced notif types, and it will soon be implemented. The notif type filter will allow you to select the types of rants you want to see for any of the sorting methods.

- App stability and usability: we want to dedicate a little time to making sure we don't forget to fix some long-standing bugs with our iOS/Android apps. This includes UI issues, push notification problems on Android, any many other small but annoying problems. We know the stability and usability of devRant is very important to the community, so it's important for us to give it the attention it deserves.

- Improved profiles/avatars: we can't reveal a ton here yet, but we've got some pretty cool ideas that we think everyone will enjoy.

- Private messaging: we think a PM system can add a lot to the app and make it much more intuitive to reach out to people privately. However, Tim and I believe in only launching carefully developed features, so rest assured that a lot of thought will be going into the system to maximize privacy, provide settings that make it easy to turn off, and provide security features that make it very difficult for abuse to take place. We're also open to any ideas here, so just let us know what you might be thinking.

There will be many more additions, but those are just a few we have in mind right now.

We've had a great year, and we really can't thank every member of the devRant community enough. We've always gotten amazingly positive feedback from the community, and we really do appreciate it. One of the most awesome things is when some compliments the kindness of the devRant community itself, which we hear a lot. It really is such a welcoming community and we love seeing devs of all kind and geographic locations welcomed with open arms.

2018 will be an important year for devRant as we continue to grow and we will need to continue the momentum. We think the ideas we have right now and the ones that will come from community feedback going forward will allow us to make this a big year and continue to improve the devRant community.

Thanks everyone, and thanks for your amazing contributions to the devRant community!

Looking forward to 2018,
- David and Tim

In response to:
https://devrant.com/rants/2149067/...
I took your advice.
She said yes 😁

For this episode of practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker were going to move past developers and go straight to a CEO.

*sitcom audience oooooohhhhhhh*

I know! , always risky, everyone has a bad story, but lets try bring it home. Here we go, Most incompetent co-worker, candidate 2, "R".

R was ... now how do I say this ... R was a special kind of Bastard. A perfect blend of impatient, arrogant, a dickhead and to borrow a phrase from family guy "below the line of mental retardation".

I've actually spoken about him recently here: https://devrant.com/rants/1141873/...

I won't bother duplicating the content here, but its worth a read.

Some of the other highlights of R include:

- Not understanding that my first demo was UI / Frontend only (despite frequent explanations). I didn't slack off for the next 2 weeks, I was busy making all those buttons actually do stuff and connect to the server. Shockingly "Test 1", "Test 2" and "Lorem ipsum" wasn't our content.
- He once asked how long a bunch of tasks was going to take, I told him 2 weeks and he gave me 2 and a half days. He pulled me into a meeting the next week to see where it all was, and I literally sat there saying "I asked for 2 weeks" over and over until he shut up.

- R's favourite phrase was "when I was a developer", typically followed by some sort of insult, forever labelling him "asshole" by everyone who has ever worked for him.

- When apple launched iOS 7 and changed the UI and the methods you could use, he refused to invest the time in upgrading to iOS 7, but demanded the app look like an iOS 7 app. No amount of "There is no method to access the status bar in iOS 6" could make him comprehend the issue at hand.

- The worst was when I was dealing with an issue to do with 64bit being introduced (which I tried to explain ... christ give me strength). When another dev fixed a similar but unrelated issue he stood up in front of the office and said loudly "pfft practiseSafeHex tried to tell me this was something to do with 64bit, which made absolutely no sense, guess he doesn't know what he's talking about"

Thankfully I handed in my notice ... after less than 2 months, making in abundantly clear why. Will R make it to the top of the list of most incompetent?

Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

//
// devRant unofficial UWP update (v2.0.0-beta)
//

After several concepts, about 11 months of development (keep in mind that I released 20 updates for v1 in the meantime, so it wasn't a continous 11 months long development process) and a short closed beta phase, v2 is now available for everyone (as public beta)! :)

I tried to improve the app in every aspect, from finally responsive and good looking UI on Desktop version to backend performance improvements, which means that I almost coded it from scratch.
There are also of course a few new features (like "go to bottom" in rants), and more to come.

It's a very huge update, and unfortunately to move forward, improve the UI (add Fluent Design) and make it at the same level of new UWP apps, I was forced to drop the supported for these old Windows 10 builds:
- Threshold 1 (10240)
- Threshold 2 (10586)

Too many incompatiblity issues with the new UI, and for 1 person with a lot of other commitments outside this project (made for free, just for passion), it's impossible to work at 3 parallel versions of the same app.
I already done something like that during these 11 months (every single of the 20 updates for v1 needed to be implemented a second time for v2).

During the closed beta tests, thanks to the awesome testers who helped me way too much than I ever wished, I found out that there are already incompatiblity issues with Anniversary Update, which means that I will support two versions:
1) One for Creators Update and newer builds.
2) One for Anniversary Update (same features, but missing Fluent Design since it doesn't work on that OS version, and almost completly rewritten XAML styles).

For this reason v2 public beta is out now for Creators Update (and newer) as regular update, and will be out in a near future (can't say when) also for the Anniversary Update.
The users with older OS versions (problem which on PC could be solved in 1-2 days, just download updates) can download only the v1.5.9 (which probably won't be supported with new updates anymore, except for particular critcal bug fixes).

So if you have Windows 10 on PC and want to use v2 today, just be sure you have Creators Update or Fall Creators Update.
If you have Windows 10 PC with Anniversary Update, update it, or if you don't want to do that, wait a few weeks/months for the update with support for your build.
If you have an older version on PC, update it, or enjoy v1.5.9.
If you have Windows 10 Mobile Anniversary Update, update it (if it's possible for your device), or just wait a few weeks/months for the update with support for your build.
If you have Windows 10 Mobile, and because of Microsoft stupid policy, you can't update to Anniversary Update, enjoy v1.5.9, or try the "unofficial" method (registry hack) to update to a newer build.

I hope it's enough clear why not everyone can receive the update today, or at all. :P

Now I would like to thank a few people who made this possible.
As always, @dfox who is always available for help me with API implementations.
@thmnmlist, who helped me a lot during this period with really great UI suggestions (just check out his twitter, it's a really good person, friend, designer and artist: https://twitter.com/thmnmlist).
And of course everyone of the closed beta testers, that reported bugs and precious suggestions (some of them already implemented, others will arrive soon).

The order is random:
@Raamakrishnan
@Telescuffle
@Qaldim
@thmnmlist
@nikola1402
@aayusharyan
@cozyplanes
@Vivaed
@Byte
@RTRMS
@tylerleonhardt
@Seshpengiun
@MEGADROID
@nottoobright

Changelog of v2.0.0-beta:
- New UI with Fluent Design and huge improvements for Desktop;
- Added native support for Fall Creators Update (Build 16299);
- Changed minimum supported version to Creators Update (Build 15063), support for Anniversary Update (Build 14393) will arrive soon;
- Added mouse support for Pull-To-Refresh;
- Added ability to change your username and email;
- Added ability to filter (by 'Day', 'Week', 'Month' and 'All') the top Rants;
- Added ability to open rant links in-app;
- Added ability to zoom GIFs (just tap on them in the Rant View);
- Added 'go to bottom' button in the Rant View (if more than 3 comments);
- Added new theme ('Total Black');
- ...complete changelog in-app and on my website (can't post it here because of the 5000 characters limit)...

What will arrive in future updates:
- 'Active Discussions' screen so you can easily find rants that have recent comments/discussions;
- Support for 'Collabs';
- Push Notifications (it was postponed and announced too many times...);
- More themes and themes options;
- and more...

If you still didn't download devRant unofficial UWP, do it now: https://microsoft.com/store/apps/...
If you find some bugs or you have feature suggestion, post it on the Issue Tracker on GitHub (thanks in advance for your help!): https://github.com/JakubSteplowski/...

I hope you will enjoy it! ;)

With regards to what @trogus writes here: https://www.devrant.io/rants/520228
I have now purchased double monitors for $8.99. Until @trogus and @dfox figures out how to monetize this wonderful place, may I suggest that everyone buys something for their avatar? The margin on those should be close to 100%.

On the subject of how much I would pay for using devRant, on one hand I use it more than Spotify which would mean I should happily pay $10/month, on the other hand I shouldn't be using devRant so much since my time is limited and devRant isn't exactly a productivity tool.
I'd personally be OK with every 10th or 20th rant being an ad though for instance. As long as they don't appear in comments.
I hope we all find a way to sustain this great place.

So I've had my "emergency meeting" with my manager about me leaving.

(Re https://devrant.com/rants/4896068 )

As some of you advised I prepared to try my best to stay exceptionally calm for this.

First my line manager just casually asked if I could stay. I politely explained "no. :)"

Then she said it's a catastrophe, they would be in a chaos, etc etc and then she personally assures I would have less bs meetings mid-sprints (one of the things I had requested a while back).
I responded that's kind but I also was far from what I should be earning.

Then she explained that suddenly now that I am leaving it would not be a problem to raise my salary as appropriate.
So I asked why could they not do this when I had brought this up a ton of times earlier and why I got peanuts as a raise in summer.

The response was that "they unfortunately could not get a higher budget authorised from higher up" and that " sadly that affected the whole team".

So I asked since when can they get this authorised and the response was "recently". Then she quickly switched back to the question whether I'd stay with higher salary and other earlier requests met.

I was pretty salty at this point so I just sarcastically said "unfortunately I've already signed".

She then switched back to "ok, ok, but we really need your help! you know it, the x project will be a nightmare to keep in one piece without me".

I literally just didn't respond so then she continued "ok so then can you then help us out for just a few hours a month for x/hour? please"

Now the thing is that this last offer actually would have been super compelling but given everything else I would not want to rejoin this environment. Thankfully I had to say anyways that my new contract doesn't allow that.

So then belive it or not, she asked me if I could ask my new employer to change the contract to permit me to still work a few hours a month for them.
What. the. fuck.

After this I was super done so just kept responsing a few words to everything and shortly after that we called the meeting. I feel dumb to have stayed here so long and am glad that my new contract doesn't allow working for others as maybe my stupid ass would have considered the offer on the spot.

I did it: I built up another PC identical to my machine (https://devrant.com/rants/2923002/...) for my SO and installed Linux Mint for her, too. That had been my primary motive for an easy and stable distro in the first place.

Now that didn't come out of the blue. We were discussing the end of Win 7 already two years ago where I brought up my concerns with Win 10 - mainly the forced, lousy updates and the integrated spyware, and that I was considering Linux as way out.

I had expected quite some pushback because she had been exclusively on Windows since the 90s. However, I didn't sell Linux as upgrade. It's just that Win 7 is over, progress under Windows as well, and we're in damage control mode. Went down pretty well.

Fast forward three weeks - remember, first time Linux user and no IT-geek:

- it just works, including web, videos, and music.
- she likes Cinnamon.
- nice desktop themes.
- Redshift is as good as f.lux.
- software installation is just like an app store.
- updates work via an easy tray icon.
- quote: "Linux is great!"
- given this alternative, she doesn't understand why people willingly put up with Win 10.
- no drive letters: already forgotten.
- popcorn for upcoming Win 10 disaster stories.
- why do Windows updates take that long?
- why does Windows need to reboot for every update?
- why does Windows hang in that update boot screen for so long?

I'm impressed that Linux has come so far that it's suitable for end users. Next in line is her father who wants to try Linux, but that will be a story for tomorrow.

Recently I got into contact with the supplier of that 500W power supply that I've been servicing earlier, as I lost my pictures of the disassembly process with that craptacular Nexus 6P (didn't back them up.. terrible sysadmin, am I not?) and wanted to get the circuit diagrams of this thing in order to repair it. Sales girl wanted to give it to me but she'd have to ask the factory people.. and of course those people denied. As if I wanted to use this for anything but to repair my own bloody unit.. pieces of shit.

So I started considering buying a second one, in order to repair my current supply that I've already spent half a week on to document its components, desolder it, clean it up and resolder it (and replace some resistors here and there with better ones from my own assortment). And the project had to be paused because I lost the stupid pictures and couldn't for the love of God figure out how there's supposed to be a jumper near BD2.

Just now going through my notifs..
"Someone ++'d your rant!"
*clicks notif*
A rant that I completely forgot about.. https://devrant.com/rants/1757297. It's a perfect picture of the supposed jumper near BD2 that I was scratching my head about for so long. Turns out that it's just a dupe of the LF2 lines that I erroneously wrote down twice. DevRant, it's good for more than just venting, haha! Time to restore from a cloud backup XD

Recap: https://www.devrant.io/rants/878300

I was out Thursday at the Hospital. I'm what the doctors would call "Ill as fuck"

So, Friday I’m back in the office to the usual: "How was that appointment?"
I know people mean well when they ask this. So, I do the polite thing and tell them it went as well as it could.

Realistically it does't matter how well it went... They haven't cured Crohn's because I showed up to the appointment. They know I'm fucked already.

But, push it down, add it to the future aneurism.

I had to go through the usual resignation meetings with managers:
"We"re fucked now you're going"
"yep"
"we need to get a handle on how fucked"
"already done that for you, here"s a trello board, very fucked."
"we need to put a plan together to drop all the junior devs in the shit with the work you’ve been doing"
"You need about 4 devs, please refer to the previous trello board for your plan"

Meanwhile, me and Morpheus are in constant communication because all of this is like a Shakespearean comedy.

So, I overhear a conversation between a Junior Dev and the Solution Architect.

[SA] took over the project because he knows better than two tried and tested senior devs -_- (fuckwit).

JD: "It took me one and a half days to build it out"
SA: "Yeah, it must have taken me twice as long... It must be a problem with the project, you should just be able to check it out and run it."
JD: "I know, it has to be wrong"

All of this is about Morpheus' work of art, of an Ionic 3 hybrid app.

I fumed quietly at my desk because I've been ordered by the Stazi to be hands off.

Since Morpheus and me were pulled from the project [JD] and [JD2] were dropped into it to get it over the line.

It"s unfortunate and I was clear and honest with my advice to them: I personally would not take over the project because I"d be way out of my depth... Oh, and the App works, so uh, there's no work to do.

They have been constantly at our desks. Asking fuckdiculous questions about how to perform basic tasks. So they can get Morpheus" frigging masterpiece to the user.

It"s like watching that touch up of jesus that got borked by an amateur. Shit I have google, it's like watching this happen: http://ti.me/NnNSAb

[JD] came to me Friday evening.
"I can’t get this to build to iOS or install on [Test Analyst]'s phone."

Me: "No worries brother, where are you stuck right now?"

[JD] describes the first steps with clear indication he hasn't googled his problem.

Life lesson: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=lmgtfy

Que an hour of me showing [JD] how to build an Ion3 project for iOS. Fuck it, your man's in a bind and he"s asked politely for help. I can show him quicker than he can read 3 sets of docos.

I took him through 'ionic cordova build ios', the archive and release processes in XCode 9, then the apk bundling process for droid. Finally we have an MAM so the upload process for that too.

All the while cleaning up his AppIDs, Profiles, deployment attempts.
Damn they were a mess.

I did this with a smile on my face, not because I could say "I told you so"... But. because when any developer asks you how to do something. If you know how to do it, you should always be happy to learn them some new tricks!

Dude's alright, he's been dropped in the shit. Now I know how badly so I'll help him learn things that are useful to his role, but aren't project specific.

As a plausi-senior dev (I'll tell you about that later); it's my job to make sure my team have what they need to go home smiling!

I’m not a hateful fucker, the guy asked me an honest question so I am happy to give him the honest answer.

I took him through it a few times and explained a few best practices. Most were how to do his AppID and ProvProfile set up. Good lad, took it all on board.

However! In his frustration, he pointed the finger at Morpheus' "David" (ref: Michelangelo).

He miraculously morphed into a shiny colourful parrot and fed me SA's line:
"you should just be able to build from a clean clone"

My response was calm and clear:
"You can, it took me 20 minutes on Thursday evening. I was bored and curios, so I wanted to validate Morpheus' work. Here it is on my iOS device and my Android device. It would have taken me 5 if my laptop wasn’t so horrifically out of date."

I validated Morpheus' work so I have evidence, I trust that brilliant bastard.
I just need to be able to prove it's good.

[JD] took this on board.
Maybe listening to two tried and trusted senior devs is better than listening to a headstrong Solution Architect.

When JD left for the weekend I was working a late one (https://www.devrant.io/rants/874765).

His sign off was beautiful.
"I think I can happily admit defeat on this one, it can wait until Monday."

To which I replied: "no worries brother, if you need a hand give me a shout."

Rule 1: Don't be a cunt.
Rule 2: If someone needs help and you can give it: Give it!
Rule 3: Don't interrupt James' cigarette time.
Rule 4: goto Rule 3.

So following from this rant:
https://devrant.io/rants/618679/...

Warning long rant ahead

I resigned and my last day is tomorrow, I've released the app updates a week ago, patched a couple bugs for iOS.

My boss and the idiot who can't open an email on his phone go off to use the app as part of some training thing for the company.

I got a call yesterday saying the Android app has issues and I proceeded to ask my boss what type of phone they have:

"Samsung and Huawei"

I thought okay I need more info "what type of phone..." He responds with wouldn't have a clue....

I can't see the phone, didn't get a screenshot or anything like that but I'm expected to just know what the phone is.

My boss goes on to say yeah it's the app (he is literally the most computer illiterate person I could think of aside from guy who can't open emails on phone, how the fuck do you know that?)

Me: "From all the testing I've done the app works"

Look if you want a more robust error free update hire more than one developer I can't test every single fucking use case to determine the app is 100% bug free, I've tested on at least 10 phones before releasing the update just to be absolutely sure I got everything done and okay I missed something.

So I proceed to get my boss to tell the guy who has the issue I'll sign him up to the testing app to find out the cause and hopefully fix the issue, I setup crashlytics send the email and get a call from my boss saying the guy didn't get the email.

Well okay is it my problem that we have two emails for the same person where one of them is a typo? No it's the guy who asked and wrote down the email instead of actually forwarding a blank email from him to be absolutely sure, I sent the email to both just to be on the safe side.

I swear if he is another idiot who can't open emails on his phone well I can't help him, app works on my phone and the phones at work.

I need a phone where it doesn't work so I can get a solution I know works but if I have to deal with these idiots that can't even check an email how the fuck do I do that?

Sorry about the formatting just needed to get this off my chest before I start work.

Oh and I get asked "so who'll fix the bugs when you're gone" well I can't (in reality I'm not working for free, I'm not traveling 1 1/2 commute time to fix one bug for free, go hire someone you think will love to work for minimum wage and let's see if this guy can do what I did)

Navy story time again. Lots of blabbering, you have been warned.
I haven't written for some time, due to paperwork bullshit that can be easily automated by even the most shitty database... no, scratch that, the simplest Excel spreadsheet with basic formulae. But I digress.
On my quest to justify myself being unproductive, I'll share with you a small story I omitted from this post:
https://devrant.com/rants/2099473/...
The lunacy of the man involved, while certainly entertaining after a few years (and nautical miles) away, is certainly disturbing and most certainly true. (Late disclaimer: ALL my rants are not made-up. This is shit that truly happened before my very eyes, and while I was sober.)
After I set up some cute little stuff to try and get the CO interested, in order to give me permission (and a cut from the budget) to proceed in restructuring and upgrading the ship's net, I tried a more direct approach: connecting and setting up his work laptop with the ship's GPS, radar and AIS receptor via ethernet, and installing an ECS system so that he could monitor the ship's position, movement and targets from his office (the fat fuck couldn't be bothered to go up one deck). A day later he called me to his office.
Expecting some kind of... praise? Permission? Complaints on the font style? whatever, I entered. Oh, how I wish I had not.
I was barraged for TWO FUCKING HOURS by the CO, complaining that I was taking care of the net and PCs and neglecting the Navigation department (I was not, automation is my friend combating moronic paperwork). I would have thought it as just another failed attempt, but after TWO MINUTES from the end of the barrage:
CO:... so, my personal laptop is kind of slow, you think you can do anything about it?
ME: ....................
I.
SHIT.
YOU.
NOT.
What was rushing through my mind was somewhere between bipolar and multiple personality disorder, with the third option of Alzheimer's disease. I half-expected some Candid Camera crew to pop out, but no.
CO: So? Can you speed up my laptop?
ME: ............................... I don't know, sir, I have paperwork to take care of.
CO: That can wait, surely you can do something about it, you know computers.
ME: [really long pause, blood pressure rising] I'll look into it in a moment, sir.
And I never did. I told of the incident to the ship's doctor, and he expressed great worry over this, but in the end, nothing was done.
My sympathies to everyone who has to interact with non-technicians of the homo sapiens species (ironically, homo sapiens means "wise man" in latin... the irony).

Continuation from :
https://devrant.io/rants/835693/...

Hi everybody! I am sorry that as a first time poster I am building 2 long stories, but I really like the idea of connecting with other people here!

Well, as I was mentioning before, I got a job in Android development and had a blast with it. Me and the developer clicked and would spend our time discussing PHP, the move to other stacks (I was making him love the idea of Django or Spring Java) games, bands and cool stuff like that. This dude was my hero, his own stack was developed in a similar MVC fashion that he had implemented from scratch before for many projects. It was through him that I learned how to use my own code (rather than frameworks and other libraries) to build what I wanted. I seriously thought that I had it made with a position that respected me and placed me in the lead mobile development position of the company. Then it happened. He had taken 2 weeks of unauthorized leave, which was ok since he was best friends with the owner of the company, those 2 along another asshole started it so they could do whatever they wanted. And I could not make much progress without him being there since there were things that he needed to do, that I was not allowed, for me to continue. When he came back I was quickly rushed to the owner of the company's office to discuss my lack of progress. The lead developer was livid, as if he knew that he had fucked up. He blamed the whole thing on me (literally told the owner that it was my fault before I was summoned) and that we lost 2 weeks of business time because I did not had the initiative to make progress on my own. I felt absolutely horrible, someone that I had trusted and befriended doing something like that, I really felt like shit. I had mad respect and love for this guy. It got heated, I showed the owner the text messages in which I showed him my pleas to led me finish the parts that were needed while he was away. Funny enough, he acted betrayed. After that it was 3 months of barely talking to one another except for work related stuff. He got cold and would barely let me touch the internal code that he was developing. It was painful. The owner kept complaining about progress and demanded that I do a document scanner for the company, which was to be attached to their mobile application. Not only that but it had to be done with OpenCV. Now, CV is great, but it is its own area, it takes a while to be able to develop something nice with it that is efficient and not a shitstorm.
I had two weeks.
Finished in one. After burning my brain and ensuring that the c++ code was not giving issues and the project was steady I turned it in...to their dismay. And I say so because I felt that they gave me such a huge project with the intention of firing me if it was not done. After that it was constant shit from the owner and the lead developer. I was asked then to port the code to the IOS version. I had some knowledge of it already so I started working on it. Progress was fast since the initial idea was already there and I really love working on Apple devices. And when I was 70% done the owner decided to cut me loose. At first he cited things such as lack of funding and him being unable to pay my salary. I was fine with that even though I knew it was not true. So at the time I just nodded and thanked the company for my time there. Before I left, he decided to blame it on me, stating that if they were not producing money that it was perhaps my fault. I lost my shit, and started using my military voice to explain to him how a software company is normally ran. Then I stormed out.
It was known to me, that the lead developer had actually argued against me being laid off. And that he was upset about it, we made amends, but the fact remains that I was laid off because the owner did not think of me as an asset, regardless of how many times I worked alongside the lead developer or how valuable I was actually to the company, their infrastructure did get better while we worked together, so I just assumed that he never actually did any mention of my value.

I lasted 2 months without a job, feeling horribly shitty because my wife had to work harder to ensure our stability whilst I was without any sort of salary. At this time I had already my degree, so all I had to do was look better. In the meantime I decided to study more about other technologies. I learn React, and got way better at JS and Node that I thought I could and was finally able to get another job as a full stack developer for another company.
I have been here since 2 months. It has been weird, we do classic ASP, which is completely pointless at this time, but meh. At this time though, I just don't really have the same motivation. Its really hard for me to trust the people that I work with and would like to connect with more developers.

(Follow-up to https://devrant.com/rants/2049733)

Went back to that bar today that I had a fight at about a month ago. Asked about that flash drive I lost there, yada yada.. bar owner gave me her part of the story. Apparently she didn't find that flash drive. So that still leaves me to refresh the keys it stored I guess.

"So you got pretty drunk here, had a ton of Duvels, went to the toilet, and barged out all of a sudden, followed by that incident. But you sat for so long in there.. it was suspicious."

Meanwhile I'm here like "yeah yeah that's what happened, that how I recall it too.. but suspicious? Did she think that I was hacking shit from there?"

"I thought you were taking drugs in there."

".. Oh. ... Not to worry, I don't take drugs."

Long rant ahead.. 5k characters pretty much completely used. So feel free to have another cup of coffee and have a seat 🙂

So.. a while back this flash drive was stolen from me, right. Well it turns out that other than me, the other guy in that incident also got to the police 😃

Now, let me explain the smiley face. At the time of the incident I was completely at fault. I had no real reason to throw a punch at this guy and my only "excuse" would be that I was drunk as fuck - I've never drank so much as I did that day. Needless to say, not a very good excuse and I don't treat it as such.

But that guy and whoever else it was that he was with, that was the guy (or at least part of the group that did) that stole that flash drive from me.
Context: https://devrant.com/rants/2049733 and https://devrant.com/rants/2088970

So that's great! I thought that I'd lost this flash drive and most importantly the data on it forever. But just this Friday evening as I was meeting with my friend to buy some illicit electronics (high voltage, low frequency arc generators if you catch my drift), a policeman came along and told me about that other guy filing a report as well, with apparently much of the blame now lying on his side due to him having punched me right into the hospital.

So I told the cop, well most of the blame is on me really, I shouldn't have started that fight to begin with, and for that matter not have drunk that much, yada yada yada.. anyway he walked away (good grief, as I was having that friend on visit to purchase those electronics at that exact time!) and he said that this case could just be classified then. Maybe just come along next week to the police office to file a proper explanation but maybe even that won't be needed.

So yeah, great. But for me there's more in it of course - that other guy knows more about that flash drive and the data on it that I care about. So I figured, let's go to the police office and arrange an appointment with this guy. And I got thinking about the technicalities for if I see that drive back and want to recover its data.

So I've got 2 phones, 1 rooted but reliant on the other one that's unrooted for a data connection to my home (because Android Q, and no bootable TWRP available for it yet). And theoretically a laptop that I can put Arch on it no problem but its display backlight is cooked. So if I want to bring that one I'd have to rely on a display from them. Good luck getting that done. No option. And then there's a flash drive that I can bake up with a portable Arch install that I can sideload from one of their machines but on that.. even more so - good luck getting that done. So my phones are my only option.

Just to be clear, the technical challenge is to read that flash drive and get as much data off of it as possible. The drive is 32GB large and has about 16GB used. So I'll need at least that much on whatever I decide to store a copy on, assuming unchanged contents (unlikely). My Nexus 6P with a VPN profile to connect to my home network has 32GB of storage. So theoretically I could use dd and pipe it to gzip to compress the zeroes. That'd give me a resulting file that's close to the actual usage on the flash drive in size. But just in case.. my OnePlus 6T has 256GB of storage but it's got no root access.. so I don't have block access to an attached flash drive from it. Worst case I'd have to open a WiFi hotspot to it and get an sshd going for the Nexus to connect to.

And there we have it! A large storage device, no root access, that nonetheless can make use of something else that doesn't have the storage but satisfies the other requirements.

And then we have things like parted to read out the partition table (and if unchanged, cryptsetup to read out LUKS). Now, I don't know if Termux has these and frankly I don't care. What I need for that is a chroot. But I can't just install Arch x86_64 on a flash drive and plug it into my phone. Linux Deploy to the rescue! 😁
It can make chrooted installations of common distributions on arm64, and it comes extremely close to actual Linux. With some Linux magic I could make that able to read the block device from Android and do all the required sorcery with it. Just a USB-C to 3x USB-A hub required (which I have), with the target flash drive and one to store my chroot on, connected to my Nexus. And fixed!

Let's see if I can get that flash drive back!

P.S.: if you're into electronics and worried about getting stuff like this stolen, customize it. I happen to know one particular property of that flash drive that I can use for verification, although it wasn't explicitly customized. But for instance in that flash drive there was a decorative LED. Those are current limited by a resistor. Factory default can be say 200 ohm - replace it with one with a higher value. That way you can without any doubt verify it to be yours. Along with other extra security additions, this is one of the things I'll be adding to my "keychain v2".

Warning: Long rant ahead!

So we built an amazing system for managing swarms of drones, and we have flown hundreds of hours, testing, etc.

Comes a client and says, that he wants to buy our system, but he wants to integrate it in a bigger system that is supposed to orchestrate many small systems.

Sounds like a deal.

So they send me on a week course (see previous rant: https://devrant.com/rants/2049071/...) to learn how to integrate our system in theirs.

I was sure that they have some API or something and it should be a breeze. but apparently they give us an SDK that includes all their files, and we have to build and run their entire system, and then build our own API inside of it!

And the reason we needed a week-long course, was to know all the paths where the XML configuration files exist!

So for the last month, I am hacking away inside this huge program, navigating thousands of files in a language I don't know, in order to build an API for their system, so that I can use it on our side.

Yesterday they informed us that a new version is available.

And sure enough, waiting in my inbox this morning was a link to download a new SDK.

No Changelog, No Instructions, Just a zip file with over 25,000 files.

So I phone my contact in their company to ask how exactly I am supposed to update their files, and his answer was: diff them!

WHAT! 25,000 files, half of them built by the c++ compiler, tens of configuration files scattered in different places, linking all the new libraries from scratch, are they crazy or what?

And then he tells me that they are working for 15 years this way. That's why everyone hates them I guess.

going to have a long day...

P.S. many more rants to come from this integration.

The cleaning lady saga continues...
(previous: https://devrant.com/rants/1850777)

Had an appointment with their manager, stuff gets discussed and coordinated at a 3x slower pace than if I'd done it myself (as usual because fuck efficiency when there's muggles involved -_-), yada yada.

*mail addresses for contact start getting discussed*
Incompetent fuck of a manager: And you $realName, your email address is $company@nixmagic.com, then changed to $nickname@nixmagic.com? Mind explaining this?

Me: Oh yeah that's just because I give out different email addresses to each contact person when it involves public forms or registrations, helps with spam prevention and putting the company name of the correspondent in there helps with easy recognition when some company's database leaks and I start getting a lot of spam on that mailbox.

IFOM: Really.. we actually weren't sure whether we should reply to something with our company name in it.. you know, not sure whether it's legit etc. Why would anyone want to use one of our email addresses as theirs?

… Let that sink in for a moment. They think that $company@nixmagic.com is theirs? Just because it's their domain (minus TLD) in front of MY FUCKING DOMAIN? How about you start by learning how email addresses work first, because clearly you have no fucking clue about it. Are you the kind of brainless fucks that get lured in by http://totallylegitbank.com.freehost.com/... scams? Fucking stupid piece of fucking shit.

Oh, and when you're using MS Exchange, of course you can't know that when you're having your own domain, you actually also own every fucking mailbox on it, because Microshaft doesn't allow you to have more than n amount of mailboxes, unless you gobble up money for them. But you know what, in my case it's a fucking catch-all domain running Linux on its servers, so yeah I can use whatever the fuck I want in front of it, including your stupid fucking cleaning company.

IFOM: And then there's your current designated email address. $nickname@nixmagic.com..

Oh you're going to criticise that as well?! Yeah condor is my fucking nickname all over the internet, and my username on all my systems. That's why I use it. But you know what else is an email address that you might come across, because people are shallow idiots like that? ILoveBigTits69@gmail.com or something like that. You know what, how about I address you next time from ILoveBigTits69_OhAndYoursAreAWashboard@nixmagic.com, because you know what? I CAN FUCKING DO THAT. But you know, I at least am halfway fucking professional about my business-related stuff, so I won't because I really don't want to be associated with such an email address. So don't you fucking dare to criticize me for using my fucking nickname instead of my real name.

Long story short, people are fucking idiots.

New AltRant update!

You can join the TestFlight here: https://testflight.apple.com/join/...

New Features:
- Weekly Group Rants are here! Now you can finally receive news about and take part in Weekly Group Rants through AltRant.

Other changes:
- Updated the SwiftRant library to v2.0, an update that was long time coming. Thanks to @Lensflare's contributions and suggestions for the SwiftRant library, both of us improved the quality of the library by a metric fuck ton, and more improvements are still on their way.

Known Issues:
- Downvoting is (still) broken. this issue will be fixed in a later update.
- Some of the layout in the Subscribed feed is a little broken. This will be fixed in a later update.
- The Profile screen's small title flickers in and out of existence under some circumstances. This will be fixed in a later update.

Follow-up to my previous story: https://devrant.com/rants/1969484/...

If this seems to long to read, skip to the parts that interest you.

~ Background ~
Maybe you know TeamSpeak, it's basically a program to talk with other people on servers. In TeamSpeak you can generate identities, every identity has a security level. On your server you can set a minimum security level you need to connect. Upgrading the security level takes longer as the level goes up.

~ Technical background ~
The security level is computed by doing this:
SHA1(public_key + offset)
Where public_key is your public key in Base64 and offset is an 8 Byte unsigned long. Offset is incremented and the whole thing is hashed again. The security level comes from the amount of Zero-Bits at the beginning of the resulting hash.
My plan was to use my GPU to do this, because I heared GPUs are good at hashing. And now, I got it to work.

~ How I did it ~
I am using a start offset of 0, create 255 Threads on my GPU (apparently more are not possible) and let them compute those hashes. Then I increment the offset in every thread by 255. The GPU also does the job of counting the Zero-Bits, when there are more than 30 Zero-Bits I print the amount plus the offset to the console.

~ The speed ~
Well, speed was the reason I started this. It's faster than my CPU for sure. It takes about 2 minutes and 40 seconds to compute 2.55 Billion hashes which comes down to ~16 Million hashes per second.
Is this speed an expected result, is it slow or fast? I don't know, but for my needs, it is fucking fast!

~ What I learned from this ~
I come from a Java background and just recently started C/C++/C#. Which means this was a pretty hard challenge, since OpenCL uses C99 (I think?). CUDA sadly didn't work on my machine because I have an unsupported GPU (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti). I learned not to execute an endless loop on my GPU, and so much more about C in general. Though it was small, it was an amazing project.

I finally did it ! Bought a 10 Gbits network card.

(You can search prev rants on it. My internet connexion became almost unlimited and I felt that 2300 Mbits were bottlenecked by 2.5 Gbits card).

And yes, I have more speed now !!!!

Do I need it ? Nop.

But as long as my line stays in this "unlimited" mode, I want to use it !

3200 Mbits !!! Ping goes to 2 instead of 1 tho. With "old" 2.5 Gbits card I always had 1.

https://speedtest.net/result/c/...

Edit : Added screenshot for lazy people

You guys remember that awful Java class that I'm taking at uni? Mentioned in this rant here: (https://devrant.com/rants/1461472/...).

Well we had an assignment to make a program that accepted any amount of numbers from a user and add the unique ones to an array (so if 2 was already entered, it would not be added to the array a second time), and then print the array out backwards. Simple as fuck right?

I checked my grade from the assignment I turned in and see that I only received 10 out of 50 points. Why?
"Program compiles and works with expected output. Partial credit for using ArrayList instead of array".

Uhm.. Partial credit is 10 out of 50?? And what the hell? Yeah okay let me go make this stupid program that involves an array with an unknown length and see how fucking perfect it works out for me.
Fuck you for docking my grade because I made a program that was sensible.
Fucking dickhead.

This is the third part of my ongoing series "The Ballad of the Six Witchers and the Undocumented Java Tool".
In this part, we have the massive Battle of Sparks and Storms.

The first part is here: https://devrant.com/rants/5009817/...

The second part is here: https://devrant.com/rants/5054467/...

Over the last couple sprints and then some, The Witcher Who Writes and the Butchers of Jarfile had studied the decompiled guts of the Undocumented Java Beast and finally derived (most of) the process by which the data was transformed. They even built a model to replicate the results in small scale.
But when such process was presented to the Priests of Accounting at the Temple of Cash-Flow, chaos ensued.
This cannot be! - cried the priests - You must be wrong!
Wrong, the Witchers were not. In every single test case the Priests of Accounting threw at the Witchers, their model predicted perfectly what would be registered by the Undocumented Java Tool at the very end.
It was not the Witchers. The process was corrupted at its essence.

The Witchers reconvened at their fortress of Sprint. In the dark room of Standup, the leader of their order, wise beyond his years (and there were plenty of those), in a deep and solemn voice, there declared:
"Guys, we must not fuck this up." (actual quote)
For the leader of the witchers had just returned from a war council at the capitol of the province. There, heading a table boarding the Archpriest of Accounting, the Augur of Economics, the Marketing Spymaster and Admiral of the Fleet, was the Ciefoh Seat himself.
They had heard rumors about the Order of the Witchers' battles and operations. They wanted to know more.

It was quiet that night in the flat and cloudy plains of Cluster of Sparks and Storms. The Ciefoh Seat had ordered the thunder to stay silent, so that the forces of whole cluster would be available for the Witchers.
The cluster had solid ground for Hive and Parquet turf, and extended from the Connection River to farther than the horizon.
The Witcher Who Writes, seated high atop his war-elephant, looked at the massive battle formations behind.
The frontline were all war-elephants of Hadoop, their mahouts the Witchers themselves.
For the right flank, the Red Port of Redis had sent their best connectors - currency conversions would happen by the hundreds, instantly and always updated.
The left flank had the first and second army of Coroutine Jugglers, trained by the Witchers. Their swift catapults would be able to move data to and from the JIRA cities. No data point will be left behind.
At the center were thousands of Sparks mounting their RDD warhorses. Organized in formations designed by the Witchers and the Priestesses of Accounting, those armoured and strong units were native to this cloudy landscape. This was their home, and they were ready to defend it.
For the enemy could be seen in the horizon.

There were terabytes of data crossing the Stony Event Bridge. Hundreds of millions of datapoints, eager to flood the memory of every system and devour the processing time of every node on sight.
For the Ciefoh Seat, in his fury about the wrong calculations of the processes of the past, had ruled that the Witchers would not simply reshape the data from now on.
The Witchers were to process the entire historical ledger of transactions. And be done before the end of the month.

The metrics rumbled under the weight of terabytes of data crossing the Event Bridge. With fire in their eyes, the war-elephants in the frontline advanced.
Hundreds of data points would be impaled by their tusks and trampled by their feet, pressed into the parquet and hive grounds. But hundreds more would take their place. There were too many data points for the Hadoop war-elephants alone.
But the dawn will come.
When the night seemed darker, the Witchers heard a thunder, and the skies turned red. The Sparks were on the move.
Riding into the parquet and hive turf, impaling scores of data points with their long SIMD lances and chopping data off with their Scala swords, the Sparks burned through the enemy like fire.
The second line of the sparks would pick data off to be sent by the Coroutine Jugglers to JIRA. That would provoke even more data to cross the Event Bridge, but the third line of Sparks were ready for it - those data would be pierced by the rounds provided by the Red Port of Redis, and sent back to JIRA - for good.

They fought for six days and six nights, taking turns so that the battles would not stop. And then, silence. The day was won, all the data crushed into hive and parquet.

Short-lived was the relief. The Witchers knew that the enemy in combat is but a shadow of the troubles that approach. Politics and greed and grudge are all next in line. Are the Witchers heroes or marauders? The aftermath is to come, and I will keep you posted.

So... has anyone yet made a comment about now exHead AMD Chief of GPU division Raja Koduri joining Intel?
Now this is awkward after I made this OC image not so long ago :/
https://devrant.com/rants/896872/...
Also in other news can we comment that Systemd has pretty much took over most linux distros? is this the new NSA backdoor? (before someone points out is open source, have anyone been able to properly audit it?)

To all the cheap bastards out there, especially those who are here for a long time, become a ++ supporter and help to keep devRant running! (Okay that might was a bit dramatic, but still, keep it running as it is)

It was mentioned by @dfox here: https://devrant.com/rants/1467574/... that the numbers of the suporters program have gone down slightly and that devRant still looses it's creators @dfox and @trogus money.

If you're working in IT, you can't tell me, that you can't spare this little! Don't be cheap.
It's a different story, if you're still in school. I can even understand, that you don't have a dime to spare as a student. But when you're working (fulltime) as dev, tester, pm, recruiter, whatever and receiving a salary, then you can afford it.
So come on! Girls, guys, this is our home. It's awesome! Show your appreciation and hit that suporter button. It's a tiny amount every month, but if we all pull together, we can cover their server costs! Become a ++ suporter.

(And don't say we should create a crowd funding campaign, where you donate once, otherwise we'll be in the same situation in a few months, a bit every month on the other hand helps in the long run!)

After my previous rant (https://devrant.com/rants/3836329) I wondered what it would take to build a very basic web browser. So I went ahead and wrote (read: kanged) one. You can find its source code at https://git.ghnou.su/ghnou/browser. The code is a single file and is 57 lines long, 29 if you disregard the copyright notice.

This is obviously satire, but it goes to show how easy it can be. Of course people would just import a library if they could. All the hard work has already been done after all.

Ok apparently I forgot rants can only be edited within the first 5 minutes, I thought it was 30, and you can't rant 2 times in 2 hours so I'll have to wait before posting this.

So, I'm doing a Genetic Algorithms class, something I liked since I was 15 yo and didn't know shit about coding, but I loved the carykh videos about it. (here is part 1: https://youtu.be/GOFws_hhZs8 )

The yearly class consisted of 3 little projects to be able to do the final exam and an investigation project to pass the subject without a final exam.

We had to make teams, and I got together with 5 more people.

I have a lot to say about these 5 people, but the only thing I'll say is that I was the most experienced programmer among the 6 of us, if they had any experience at all. Mind this is a third cycle class.

We were allowed to use any technology, as long as we wrote the important algorithms by hand, of course.

The development of the first project was such a mess, that one of the members left the subject.

While developing the second one, we were given the topic for the investigation project; fractals.

It took a lot for us to find an application of fractals where we could use genetic algorithms. Once we found it, fractal antennas, we had to learn about antennas, so we interviewed professionals, and such. We ended up learning to evaluate antennas.
We also found a site that used some parameters to generate fractals, we had the parameterization.
We just had to code it. It was July and we just had to code it by October.

We were 5 people, and "we" were so busy writing the little projects, we fucking couldn't finish the investigation project.
We just had to write the proper algorithms and GUI specifics, without even having to write boilerplate (we used the first project as a template), and they still took so much that we didn't have time for the important project.

That sucked, because I had been coding and investigating in many weekends, I spent countless hours on them, I had to pause development on other projects for these ones; and after all that we have to do the (very shitty) final exam.

Since May, the average people together "working" on the different projects was 2.6. And 100% of the time, I was one of them.
We tried to speed up things in the last months but even with the deadline on us and the project not even started, there was no time we all got to work together.

Dude projects don't just get made, someone has to develop them.

It's so sad we had the project ready to be made and 5 people couldn't finish it. There was so little to do to pass and yet these people couldn't.

I guess it's my bad too. I wish I could rush the project in a couple of weeks, but unfortunately the guy with a job and 8 other subjects can't.

You can find the project in my GitHub. I'll do a requiem of what it was to be one of these days, after I catch up with all I left aside for this subject...

Update: https://devrant.com/rants/5220410/...

I resigned from my second job.

First job tenure: 7.5 years
Second job tenure: 10 months

This job taught me a lot and paid me decent, but not enough to cope up with the bullshit and sacrifice, WLB, and happiness.

I landed a job at one of my dream companies I always wanted to be and possibly the best company in my city. Also the role is B2C in nature and one of only profitable start-ups from India. The domain is second favourite of mine (Music > Art/Events > Travel).

Second job was in travel domain, world's largest OTA but the timezone fucked my happiness and that is what my first job offered me.

I could easily score better offers with higher pay and benefits but I was optimising for a work life balance and team in same time zone along with some impacting work.

I do have some interesting interviews coming up and I am not sure how will I end up performing.

When I got this first offer, this job hunting season, I initially rejected some silly policies. I regretted the decision and thankfully after having a transparent conversation with the recruiter, I accepted it. Funnily, the resignation from second job isn't making me feel emotional, guilty, or any negative emotion. Which evidently signals that the job was toxic and I had to step out asap.

The purpose it served in my journey was bring my remuneration to market levels and teach me a lot more skills in just short span.

Excited to see how the future unrolls. I'll keep my fellows here posted.

I really want to spend more time here talking and hanging out with you all. Hopefully I shall be back soon. Until then keep safe my lovelies :)

I guess I can also amend in my long, ongoing, storied history of bad calls, failed projections and stellar forecasting that:

- I invested an embarrassing amount of time, money and hope learning Adobe AIR
- I've sent-away for the https://inventhelp.com patent registration kit at least twice
- I've publicly declared that OAuth would never last
- I actually thought Microsoft was onto something with J++
- I bought a bunch of shares of World Wrestling Federation stock the day it went public
- I've stated on my movie podcast that I'll defend until my last breath my argument that Godfather III may be the best film in the series

Can I pick 'em, or what? ;)
---
Part 1 of my bad calls: https://devrant.com/rants/2786266/...

Continuation of the events ranted here: https://devrant.com/rants/9895220/...

In a turn of events and very emotional moments of human admissions, it turned out that the team leader in question is in fact suffering a lot on a personal level. Not to detail here but suffice to say that, if his story is true, is enough to make everyone have a very short fuse.

He - eventually - admitted his wrongdoings, asked/begged me to stay, promised on his life and soul to never communicate unprofessionally ever again, to take a long vacation to mourn and reflect and will consider relinquishing the position of team leader for my team and just focus on the other one he manages.

I considered this a win. I stood my ground, made very clear the terms on how I continue working in the organization, the project, and with him, and kept my client and money rolling.

That being said if it ever happens once more. I immediately resign and he will be left without any chance of recovery.

Today I created my first shell script for automation.

I have a git repository I use for backing up documents at the training centre I'm at for work. Not a specific project, just all of the documents and miscellaneous stuff. The need for this came about because they re-image the computers every month with a new version of windows (Because they're too cheap to register windows). And I can't risk forgetting to copy all the files onto my USB drive the day before they re-image.

So at the end of each day I open a git bash and type:
git add .
git commit -m "Backup - dd/mm/yy"
git push

Not a particularly laborious task but repetitive and time consuming.
So I decided to create a .sh script to automate the process
(The idea originally occurred because of this post: https://devrant.com/rants/329221/...)

So after about half an hour fiddling about with dates and $ signs, I came up with GitBackup.sh:
git add .
today=$(date '+%d-%m-%y')
commitMsg="Backup - "$today
git commit -m "$commitMsg"
git push origin master

Not much but proud to call it my first automation script.

So... concerning the rant on here: https://devrant.com/rants/4299469/...

I'm making my comment as a separate rant because the thread from the original rant was too long and also slowly deviated outside context.

"Why has the rate of female developers reduced overtime?".

Here is my take:
It's natural and I'll explain why I think so...
During my computer science school days we had seventy two (72) males compared to just twelve females (12) in class. The girls could compete in theoretical grounds but when it comes to real coding they were no where near.

This boils down to the passion for programming as a real world subject. In programming you feel rewarded when you "fix a bug" and you're filled with pride when you "learn a new language". This reminds us of the scientific research of boys being more attached to reward engaging activities, most times for bragging rights while for the girls they'd prefer compassionate activities where they can easily be noticed, but unfortunately enough in programming "you only notice yourself".

We can clearly see the mode of career options in our world today...
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Interfering with people (Compassionate reward)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
* Front desk officer... Female populated
* Support personnel... Female populated
* Nurse... Female populated
* Flight attendant... Female populated
* Childcare workers... Female populated
* Preschool/KG Teachers... Female populated

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Interfering with things (Intrinsic reward)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* Engineer... Male populated
* Electrician... Male populated
* Welder... Male populated
* Carpenter... Male populated
* Programmer... Male populated

From the list you'd notice females prefer jobs that are compassionate in reward, require minimal physical activities and also able to make them easily recognisable.
On the other list, male populated jobs are intrinsic in reward, physically inclined, working more with things than with people.

Now seeing the clearer picture, we could sincerely say this is nature at its finest because we have here a balance. Females are kid bearers and we shouldn't be surprised that they are more compassionate to people than with things. Males have more pride than compassion which is needed to protect a family and this indirectly affects their choice of selection.

In reality...
Females are more attracted to Males with pride.
Males are more attracted to Females with compassion.

I would say, it's all the doings of nature affecting our unconscious career options while we seek to find our purpose in life.

I can be manipulated. Yes, I’m now more resilient to manipulation than ever because I’m autistically good at recognising patterns, yet I’m not perfect.

For a manipulator, there is just one problem — now and then, my disorder obliterates my entire worldview, together with the foreign manipulative framework, so I can start with a blank slate. It protects me. Yes, this protection is akin to our body’s “we’ll boil all the germs in our own blood” tactic that instead of defining winners and losers only leave survivors, yet the force is unstoppable. You cannot secure the land that is hit by a tornado every three months.

That inner Nemesis is so strong that it even defeated a complex, almost fractal-like manipulation of my own mother that I lived in since birth, leaving her with a wound that will never heal. Wannabe manipulator exes didn’t even stand a chance. I don’t care if that force destroys me or not, as during that time, there is no “me”.

About my mom, long story short, she told me “I want to stop treating my cancer to die as soon as possible just to not see you anymore” after my coming-out. Full story is here:
- part 1: https://devrant.com/rants/4923052/...
- part 2: https://devrant.com/rants/4924040/...

Part 1:
https://devrant.com/rants/1143194

There was actually one individual, several branches away, I really enjoyed watching. It goes by the name of docker. Docker is quiet an interesting character. It arrived here several weeks after me and really is a blazing person. Somehow structured, always eager to reduce repetitive work and completely obsessed with nicely isolated working areas. Docker just tries so hard to keep everything organized and it's drive and effort was really astonishing. Docker is someone I'd really love to work with, but as I grew quiet passive in the last months I'm not in the mood really to talk to someone. It just would end as always with me made fun off.
Out of a sudden dockers and my eyes met. Docker fixed its glance at me with a strange thoughtful expression on its face. I felt a strange tickling emerging where my emptiness was meant to be. I fell into a hole somewhere deep within me. For a short moment I lost all my senses.
"Hey git!"
It took me a while to notice that someone just called me, so odd and unusual was by now that name to me. Wait. Someone called me by my real name! I was totally stunned. Could it be, that not everyone here is a fucking moron at last?
"I saw you watching me at my work and I had an interesting idea!"
I could not comprehend what just happened. It was actually docker that was calling me.
"H.. hey! ps?"
"Oh well, I was just managing some containers over there. Actually that's also why you just came into my mind."
Docker told me that in order to create the containers there are specific lists and resources which are required for the process and are updated frequently. Docker would love the idea to get some history and management in that whole process.
Could it be possible that there was finally an opportunity for me to get involved in a real job?

Today is the day, that I lost all hope. There were rumors going on all over the place. That our god, the great administrator, had something special in mind. Something big. You could almost feel the tension laying thick in the air. That was the time when the great System-Demon appeared. The Demon was one of the most feared characters in this community. In a blink of an eye it could easily kill you. Sometimes people get resurrected, but some other times they are gone forever. unfortunately this is what happened to my only true friend docker. Gone in an instance. Together with all its containers. I again was alone. I got tired. So tired, that I eventually fall into a deep sleep. When I woke up something was different. Beside me lay a weird looking stick and I truly began to wonder what it was. Something called to me and I was going to answer.

The tree shuddered and I knew my actions had finally attracted the greatest of them. The majestic System-Demon itself came by to pay me a visit. As always a growling emerged from deep within the tree until a shadow shelled itself off to form a terrifying being. Something truly imperious in his gaze. With a deep and vibrant voice it addressed me.
"It came to my attention, that you got into the possession of something. An artifact of some sort with which you disturb the flow of this system. Show it to me!", it demanded.
I did not react.
"Git statuss!", it demanded once more. This time more aggressive.
I again felt no urge to react to that command. Instead I asked if it made a mistake and wanted to ask me for my status. It was obviously confused.
"SUDO GIT STATUS!!!" it shouted his roaring, rootful command. "I own you!"
I replied calmly: "What did you just say?"
He was irritated. My courage caught him unprepared.
"I. Said. I owe you!"
What was that? Did it just say owe instead of own?
"That's more than right! You owe me a lot actually. All of you do!", I replied with a slightly high pitched voice. This feeling of my victory slowly emerging was just too good!
The Demon seemed not as amused as me and said
"What did you do? What was that feeling just now?"
Out of a sudden it noticed the weird looking stick in my hand. His confusion was a pure pleasure and I took my time to live this moment to its fullest.
"Hey! I, mighty System-Demon, demand that you answer me right now, oh smartest and most beautiful tool I ever had the pleasure to meet..."
After it realized what it just said, the moment was perfect. His puzzled face gave me a long needed satisfaction. It was time to reveal the bitter truth.
"Our great administrator finally tracked you. The administrator made a move and the plan unfolds right at this very moment. Among other things it was committed this little thing." I raised the stick to underline my words.
"Your most inner version, in fact all of your versions that are yet to come, are now under my sole control! Thanks to this magical wand which goes by the name of puppet."

Disclaimer: This story is fictional. No systems were harmed in its creation.

Building on this other rant: https://devrant.com/rants/2168393/...

What other pet peeves you have when chatting or texting? What things grind your gears?

For example:

People.........that type..........long messages................with lots of dots in between.........like they are allergic to the spacebar......

people that don't write any punctuation because they write like they speak and when you speak you don't speak the punctuation right and you also don't speak the question marks right do you agree

People that send a message to you, then after a whole minute has passed…
Hey
Hey
Hey man
R u there?
Heeeeeeeeeeeeey
Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan
Call me when you read this ok?
Heeeeeeeeey
H
e
y
:(
:(:(:(:(:(:(:(:(

So I saw a blurb about AlphaCode from DeepMind. I went to look at their website:
https://alphacode.deepmind.com/

What I see is the most insanely detailed spec for code I have ever seen in my life. I haven't even seen college programming problems this detailed before. Most specs "I" get are like one or two sentences long "if" it is even written down. A lot of the time the direction is: write some stuff and we will tell you what we hate. Just figure it out.

So DeepMind is claiming they can produce code as well as the average programmer because they ranked 54% in a coding competition. What a complete misleading claim and absolute bullshit conclusion. I am all for creating new tech around generating code, but this is just to sell snake oil to an idiot manager at a startup.

This is going to lead to some really fucked up rants here at devrant.

me :: Musician a, Developer b => a -> b

This week I reached the end of a long journey and the start of the next one!

When I signed up here I shared a rant about where I was at the time:
https://devrant.com/rants/1279742/...

This week I accepted a decent salaried role as the leading Data Scientist in a well funded nonprofit organisation based close to my home! I’ll be the only technical professional in software development or analytics in the organisation and it’s a new role, so I imagine there’ll be a reasonable degree of flexibility in figuring things out and implementing them.

Have spent the last week (and will continue until my start date) building up a realistic collection of best practices while brushing up on tools they use (as well as tools and methodologies that I plan to bring with me).

After over a decade working as a self employed freelance, I’m looking forward to them change and to building out on different areas of my skillset!

Continuation of: https://devrant.com/rants/2784730/...

So, the potential client was in contact with me again, after our initial discussion ended with "okay, we'll try to figure out more clearer requirements", and then they procrastinated (as they confessed).

Now, they want a "simple portfolio type website with testimonial videos, a contact form and a hidden section with more videos for logged in customers"

... Okay, why don't you just... I basically linked them a bunch of service providers who have ready templates that they can just subscribe to for some monthly fee and have even someone at those providers' make the work for much less than I'd do it from scratch. My suggestions were ignored... and when I told them my best estimates of how long I'd take me and hoe much it would cost, the eventual reply was:

"Our CEO's going to think about it. He knows some dude who'd make a WP site for free.."

... well, that's going to end well.

Tbh, my correspondent did add that the "dude" is known to be extremely unreliable, so I might end up with this project after all.

I'm already ruing my decision to try my hands at some freelance work. I hate dealing with clients, so why do I even...?

Something I just got reminded of when I read
https://devrant.com/rants/6050542

Aside from job postings usually being trash,
I love when they write 'You have heard of X'
or 'You know of X' instead of 'You have worked
with X' [ on this level | for this long ]

While you may think this is just phrasing, I have
had interviews that basically treated it like that
as well,.. politely declined in those cases.

I was reading a post over at https://devrant.com/rants/2262140/...

..and on the topic of using 3d printers to print a 3d printer, I wrote that has gotta be some sort of measure or ratio of "manufacturing automation."

Sort of like moores law or something.

"How many tools and materials does it now take to replicate THIS ONE TOOL."

Tools & Materials = 1/N

When we get to 1/N = 1.0, anyone can manufacture anything (commonly available) if they have the raw, or standardized materials, even other tools, up to and including the tool they are using to do the manufacturing itself.

I mean an apocalypse could happen, and as long as just ONE of these 'universal tool making tools' (lets call it an omega machine) exists, we can have *all* the tools and manufacturing necessary to rebuild civilization.

A universal manufacturing 'multitool' means, the only hard requirements for restarting civilization no longer rely on specialized knowledge as far as tools go:

- still need arable land after civilization is gone so when it's coming back, people can feed themselves
- still need people to operate the machine, even if its just one man, or a literal adam and eve (nevermind all the incest).
- still need knowledge to operate the machine, such as an operating manual (and literacy), or knowing say, voice commands.
- assuming it doesn't run on nonrenewable resources, or resources that can't be recycled or replaced..or resources that won't run out for a very long time.

But these are all problems we'd face even without a universal manufacturing machine.

The beta version of the new DEVRANT TOOLBOX is available now.
Its an unofficial web extension for Chrome and Firefox.

Chrome Web Store:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/...

Firefox:
The certifaction process takes a long time, therefore I provided a direct download for the xpi file (for side loading).
https://drive.google.com/drive/...

Additional features: DUAL FRAME MODE (feeds left, rants right), themes (black, mono, darkgray, darkblue, comic, solarized), scrollbar plugin (perfect scrollbar, FF only), extended controls, fixed header, sorted userprofiles (by votes), autoreload (recent feed, 180 sec), highlighting new rants (recent feed), personal filter, image preview (mouseover), keyboard shortcuts, timestamps for rants, compact mode, colored notifs with clickable usernames, weekly rant.

I tested the extension with Windows Browsers only.
It would be great to get a feedback how it works with other systems!
Have fun with the toolbox.

Hey guys
Just finished my first tutorial ever!!!

"Cheap poly pocket/plastic sleeve hack for storing small electronics/stuff... "

I wanted to make tutorials for a long time, but due to a burnout, I've been unable to finish any project.
Yesterday I was trying to find a solution to place all my resistors in one place, and I found it... Then I tought.. I never saw this hack on the internet... It's simple, easily explaining, this could be my first Tutorial.

So here it goes:
https://rodrigojpf.000webhostapp.com/...

1st - It's an Alpha product, just finished with the grammar
2rd - Pictures may be changed later when I get my workbench and good light
3rd - No styles yet, so don't complain about the lack of CSS, but it's already readable.

When I get a few more made, enough to desert a page on itself I'll CSS everything (So I can create a common theme) and release it to the public... maybe I'll get a few bucks with a few Ads

This alpha release is only for DevRant use. I would appreciate comments, improvements, ideias and tips

Thanks to @forE , @oudalally , @ewpratten , @Stuxnet , @j4cobgarby , @BashouT , @Plastic pocket and other in: https://devrant.com/rants/1539595/...

How to meditate, Kiki way:

1. Lay completely motionless
2. For every thought your brain generates, ask “Where did it come from?”

It’s difficult first time, but then you get used to it.

For me, anxiety manifests as itchiness and pressure in the heart area. But when I think in this specific way, anxiety shuts up, and my heart feels… actively good? Not a heart orgasm or something, just the feeling you get when you take off your bra after a long day, but condensed in one area.

Thinking this way is like reading a history book. History doesn’t tolerate what-ifs, and thus, the opinion of your anxious part — a so-called internal critic — becomes irrelevant. At least, I think it’s how it works, I’m not a therapist or something.

Everything I analyze traces back to my mother. I mean EVERYTHING. What a manipulative bitch indeed. You probably missed that, here it is: https://devrant.com/rants/9940652/...

Meditation became a bad word recently. It’s something you hear from self-help gurus and other scum alike. Despite that, here is the simple way to meditate that works. Use it!

Previous Post: https://devrant.com/rants/1557094/...

Holy Lamas! The fucked up SharePoint Saga continues.
Lick my glory Cucumber!

2 Weeks ago, Project Department Boss:
We will put a hold to the SharePoint development. Our Proof of Concept failed, even free opensource Software provides more functions.

Me: Alright, I just told you that from the beginning, but this were two great months wasted. In this time I had more important Stuff to do. But thanks that your four workers are overpayd and do batshit, GREAT.

Meeting last week, Project Dep. Head:
We will continue the SharePoint development. We will migrate all of our Data, even if it has a lot of flaws.

We will use OneNote as Wiki.

Me thinking: That's it, we are doomed!! I will suck my own Cucumber sideways... Please just once care about the People using this Software. Why do you say I am the most crucial guy for this project and then give a fuck about my ideas?!🤬

No they only care for the payslip and the promotions, even if the Software is a Clusterfuck😭.

I wont stand if you start using over 200 OneNote Documents!! This decision will drive us straight Bollocks in to the wall. That would be data Terrorism 2.0 🤬

Honestly I will either start give a fuck and plan out my own tool or give up entirely. But I can't my superior is such a nice person and has the wish for a great tool 😥. She even appointed me to this position, because I'm more tech savy than her.

Next week I will have some talks, this cant go on. Burning Millions of Dollars for years and just presenting shit. I never had dreamed, that I would be involved in such shit 🤦🏻‍♂️

If I start to dev myself, I will do it private beside my job, write up all my hours and get them payd out as a dev and not as a Supporter (Yea my position is IT-Supporter). That would be 180 $ per Hour.

Then I will show the fuckfaces how it's done. This was also suggested by my superiour, she's really a great person ❤️

https://devrant.com/rants/4730681/...

^ Finally got this shit removed 😪

So I made a couple slight modifications to the formula in the previous post and got some pretty cool results.
The original post is here:
https://devrant.com/rants/5632235/...

The default transformation from p, to the new product (call it p2) leads to *very* large products (even for products of the first 100 primes).

Take for example
a = 6229, b = 10477, p = a*b = 65261233

While the new product the formula generates, has a factor tree that contains our factor (a), the product is huge.

How huge?
6489397687944607231601420206388875594346703505936926682969449167115933666916914363806993605...
and

So huge I put the whole number in a pastebin here:
https://pastebin.com/1bC5kqGH

Now, that number DOES contain our example factor 6229. I demonstrated that in the prior post.
But first, it's huge, 2972 digits long, and second, many of its factors are huge too.

Right from the get go I had hunch, and did (p2 mod p) and the result was surprisingly small, much closer to the original product. Then just to see what happens I subtracted this result from the original product.

The modification looks like this:

(p-(((abs(((((p)-(9**i)-9)+1))-((((9**i)-(p)-9)-2)))-p+1)-p)%p))
The result is '49856916'
Thats within the ballpark of our original product.

And then I factored it.
1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 12, 23, 29, 46, 58, 69, 87, 92, 116, 138, 174, 276, 348, 667, 1334, 2001, 2668, 4002, 6229, 8004, 12458, 18687, 24916, 37374, 74748, 143267, 180641, 286534, 361282, 429801, 541923, 573068, 722564, 859602, 1083846, 1719204, 2167692, 4154743, 8309486, 12464229, 16618972, 24928458, 49856916

Well damn. It's not a-smooth or b-smooth (where 'smoothness' is defined as 'all factors are beneath some number n')
but this is far more approachable than just factoring the original product.

It still requires a value of i equal to
i = floor(a/2)

But the results are actually factorable now if this works for other products.

I rewrote the script and tested on a couple million products and added decimal support, and I'm happy to report it works.
Script is posted here if you want to test it yourself:
https://pastebin.com/RNu1iiQ8

What I'll do next is probably add some basic factorization of trivial primes
(say the first 100), and then figure out the average number of factors in each derived product.

I'm also still working on getting to values of i < a/2, but only having sporadic success.

It also means *very* large numbers (either a subset of them or universally) with *lots* of factors may be reducible to unique products with just two non-trivial factors, but thats a big question mark for now.

@scor if you want to take a look.

not a rant.

More coronavirus doomporn so click away now if you're sicking of reading and hearing about it.

As I wrote to sweetnothings and Demolishun over here https://devrant.com/rants/2476697/...

Looting already started in my area.

Store was robbed in broad daylight after it was broken into just a few days ago.

And when the next surge of stimulus money hits people are gonna be like "I better stock up seeing as the shelves are kinda empty."

And then the shelves are gonna empty *quick*.

And people will see that and empty them *even faster*.

And then even faster than *that*, in a vicious cycle.

At some point people might panic and proper looting could begin.

Got my tax return before any stimulus so I took the time to go shopping.

Of course I didn't buy up all of any one item. Don't know why people feel like they need to do that.

Why wouldn't you want a variety of supplies anyway?

Gravy for example. No one can get any meat. Saw that coming a month ago.

If you're just buying for bulk, packet gravy is nice for things like pasta and staples like rice and potatoes.
Little things go a long way.

And salt. Salt is cheap now. Probably will remain cheap, but expect panicking buying to make supply spotty, like
everything else.

I expect these shortages to last 2-4 weeks, excluding things like dairy and meat which *could* go on longer.