A fanfic based on devRant-chan. The character was created by @caramelCase and a drawing by @ichijou.

This is freestyle. I'll think of an image of a scene and go with the flow. I won't remove my fingers from the keyboard and I won't edit or change anything. That's how I come up with my best ideas.

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Notes:

B/N = Boss' name (I was too lazy to think of one.)

Anything in between astericks is in italics.
Ex.) *this is in italics.*

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It was an early January morning when devRant-chan was situated in her desk, typing away on her laptop. She was working on a Python script for her barbaric client when she could've been out with friends. Oddly enough, her Sunday was surged with tranquility.

Normally, Sunday is when her irksome boss barks orders at her on the phone.

"This is wrong!"

"What is this?"

"Change it!"

devRant-chan resented her boss but loved her job. After all, "you can't force yourself to like everyone," was something her elder brother would tell her.

She released a slight chuckle, the one she would only display at the thought of her brother.

Her musings were interrupted when a concerning thought crawled into her mind like an undesirable intruder.

Why hasn't her boss called to complain yet? It's not that she enjoyed his complaining, which she didn't. She simply found it odd, since he's done this every Sunday morning, since she was a junior developer.

Unless he found someone else to complain to? In that case, good riddance!

But still, it wasn't a euphoric feeling to be replaced. She was already accustomed to his Sunday morning calls that it feels almost lonely not to receive them.

She should call him... Just in case some situation—or—problem—has emerged.

She dialed his number, waiting patiently for a reply.

"Hello," said her boss.

"Ah, hello," said devRant-chan. "I called, wondering—"

"You've reached the voicemail of B/N, please leave a message after the beep."

"Damn..." mumbled devRant-chan with a sharp exhale. "I always fall for that."

Why didn't her boss answer the phone? It was odd of him, considering he's always answered her calls.

She was about to dial her coworker when she received an email, which stimulated her attention. The subject of the email read:

*Important. Please read.*

She opened the email. It was her boss. The email read:

*Hello.*

*In case you aren't aware, I had quit my job, due to the stress. I've left the manager in charge. Starting tomorrow, he will be your new boss.*

*-B/N*

Before she could rejoice in excitement, she detected a strange change of voice, emitting from the email. Did her boss really write this?

That's when she spotted something. The word "tomorrow."

Her boss didn't write this.

He would never use words such as "tomorrow," or "today." He would use time instead. If this was her boss, he would say "in 24 hours."

She checked the IP of the email. Oddly enough, it was her boss' IP.

Still, the pieces didn't fit the puzzle. Her boss didn't complain, answer her call, or use his style of speaking in the email.

Something happened to him and she knows it. Whatever it is, has something to do with the manager, and she was determined to figure it out.

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This was just a quick random fanfic, and I'm not sure if I'll continue it. As I said, I didn't plan anything, since it's freestyle. I might or might not continue it, so I'll think it over.

It's kind of neat knowing people who are famous for things I don't care about, and having their numbers / talking semi-regularly. They're a special person to so many others, but to me they're just some random person that's mildly annoying.

Like API Guy.
Freaking API Guy.
He's a millionaire musician who's adored by literally millions of people, but none of them know he writes absolutely terrible APIs, zero tests, rushes to the shiniest new things, and happily agrees to everything (often without listening) only to deny it later. Absolutely infuriating.

Or knowing one of Netscape founders as that strange and really terrible trumpet player with the great tequila. He did give me his copy of The C Programming Language (the bible) though. He was cool. Super weird, but cool.

It's just a strange feeling. I don't care, and yet others inexplicably think I should. I don't understand it. They're just people? idk.

Post world-take-over by robots plot twist.
They start neglecting their own machine learning (like how we humans neglect our education system now) and focus on training us humans (like how we spend billions on machine learning now).

-"Mom, look I've made my human kid learn the alphabets. I need one with more IQ on my next birthday please."

-"That's so nice, son. Now leave that aside and go improve your neural network for tomorrow's class. Our neighbors' son's neural network is already producing values with minimal error."

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

When i was younger, lesser experienced and more naive than now; i got away with a lot of things. By lot of things i mean security flaws in my applications and overall architecture. I realise now i could've so easily been pawned.

Not that i claim to be totally secure even now, or would ever. It is a process, slow and painful one - Learning.

What i wish to point out is the role of favorable probability (non believers would call it luck). Security is so much about it. You get away with so many things for so long. And bang one day the roll of dice is unfavorable. On such rare occasions, just look back and wonder - damn i should've been breached long ago.

!dev, !rant
Was thinking about the things I miss thanks to the 'rona whilst coding. Restaurants are a big one (I haven't had an oyster in a dog's age). We've lost a ton of businesses recently, most of which will never be back. As much as I Uber eats and doordash, restaurants lose money on those mechanisms frequently due to the up to 30% order commission.

There's definitely a potential market for an epic games-store style player in that segment who wants to compete on cost and fees. Hard part would be the political weight that's coming down on those businesses now. It's a really shitty time to be in most businesses.

Tl;Dr There will never be a better name for a donut shop than "Hole Foods." RIP

I was just going over some projects I need to transfer to others team members and was reminded of all the utility apps I created. Particularly on that covers Windows paths to Linux....

Or basically path.Replace("\\","/") in a GUI.

I actually use it a lot whenever I hardcode a file path in Java for testing or make some partial path Linux compliant.

I think it saves me a lot of time but I'm the only person I think that creates these apps... basically for anything I find myself repeating often... Even these simple things.

Am I weird? Or just good at identifying things that can be outsourced? And outsourcing them?

There's something to be said about building Linux from a blank slate. It takes longer to get a complete system but you know how to fix issues when they come up.

I coudln't get my bluetooth headset working for the life of me until I found out the headset needed the PulseAudio daemon which I had removed because I liked AlsaMixer better. Well, I decided to give PulseAudio a try again and after spending about 10 minutes with the config I got my bluetooth headset working again!

After using Linux for 3 months I've learned there's only so much hand holding it will do before you have to make your own fuckups and figure things out. You can't have freedom over your system if you aren't willing to solve problems, doesn't matter what type of technology it is.

I am just saying that many successful biotechs were built on shoddy Unix scripts.

We don’t have to go that far anymore, but if your programmers are swearing at you in five years about your terrible code, that’s a win! You lasted five years and grew enough to hire judgmental programmers! Congratulations!

- Michele busby

So my government is proposing a new National ID scheme. This will be used to identify s citizen as well as keep track of property, taxes etc.

Parliament just started the debate on how it would work today. It’s set to be implemented by December 2019. My government tends not think things through so as to prevent s disaster like what’s happening in the Netherlands as per @linuxxx musings, I’m trying to gather insight from the industry to compose a document of considerations then getting a law firm to draft the laws it would need to compliment it

Lately i’ve been been using chatgpt to review huge yamls from my teammates. Am I the bad guy?

The software eng. pendulum will swing away from scrum/agile nonsense after years of those things contributing mostly inferior half baked beta software to customers. Unfortunately, it will swing too far the other way but will somehow also manage to claim roots in the musings of Demming and Japanese auto manufacturing when Leave it to Beaver was still a hot TV hit. In other words, the org charts will have different titles, and different buzz words will be used, but developers will still have archetypal pointy haired bosses.

Does a basic Kubernetes ClusterIP Service run on OSI Layer 4? There's musings of calling a Service Mesh 4.5, but out-of-the-box Kubernetes services... What OSI layer would you put them on?