Anyone else used Stack Overflow for many years without ever asking or answering a single question?

just a small change

I found it!

✅ Update Failed!

Seen in Amsterdam, getting on a ferry.

Lies.

My sister in law got me this guy for Christmas after I told her about devrant!

She found it in a rubber duck shop in Amsterdam.

Best sister in law!

A common scenario strikes again today:

- Blocked on a problem at the end of the day
- Tell my wife I'm headed home
- Inspiration strikes
- time flies by coding in the zone
- realize I'm super late
- run out the door like a crazy person

ಠ_ಠ

I helped someone doing C# on devRant. He recontacted 6 month after like: "do you cloud architect" , and I was like "hold my beer"

12th cup of tea of the day, 12 more to go, coffee is not counted

Caffeine will kill me

Small world

Our "monitoring" today.

Night before flying internationally includes the following checklist:

- check VPN works, can access frontend sites and hit the backend
- git push

This morning I kept falling back asleep after the alarm went off, drifting in and out of a dream about programming.

My wife finally said "no more sleeping".

Still mostly sleep, I replied very confidently "you can't sleep in a sandbox!".

I was dreaming I was in a code sandbox. Obviously sleeping is not allowed.

Jeez, my head has been really full of programming since this conference. (One of the talks was on codesandbox).

"I know more coding" - Friend

Attached image is one of his "websites" that he put up for download

There we go

"Make us a one-page website for our new company!"

I build the site, to their exact specifications and show it to them

"There's only one page"
"You only asked for one page."
"No, we didn't"
I show them the email they sent me, asking for a one-page site
"Wow, you suck, we are finding another developer!"

I've gone from 'HOLY SHIT IT WORKS' to 'WHY THE FUCK IS THIS BROKEN' in just half an hour.

Let me tell you a story.

Our company has a homegrown monitoring solution. Keeps track of our deployments and alerts us when something is broken. Really nice for the most part, except a little issue where we get up to 25 alerts PER DAY that our PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT IS DOWN. Including weekends.

With this many false positives, we quickly learn to ignore the alerts and miss real incidents.

So we approached this team, remember its our own tool, and told them about the problem. Turns out it is a known issue. And here's the kicker: they aren't planning on fixing it!

It gets better. Rather than fix this glaring issue, their solution is to make ANOTHER ALERT that lets us know the monitoring is misbehaving.

To recap, we can now expect to get up to 25 false positive alerts per day that our production is down, followed immediately by more alerts that the monitor is broken, which means we can ignore the previous alert.

As our PM said when he heard this: fuck that noise. We are escalating the shit out of this!

I'm such an idiot.

Spilled water on my MacBook today. Not that much water, but the cup landed right in the middle of my keyboard.

Worst part is I was gaming with my sister and didn't want to stop. So I wiped it off and shook it out a bit and kept playing. A bit later the screen started flickering and eventually went black.

Finally my brain turned on and I switched it off, shook out some more water, and set it up to dry. Just hoping it's not too late.

At least the drying setup recommended by the internet is pretty hilarious looking.

Now we play the waiting game. They say 72 hours before turning it on again. Seems a bit extreme. Will there still be moisture evaporating 3 days later? Not sure I can wait that long to see if it's toast.

Such an idiot.

*spends a long time crafting a huge eBay post (we're moving)
* tries to drag and drop first picture
* page navigates to the picture without warning
* loses everything

WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

WHEN DRAGGING A PICTURE INTO A WEB PAGE I NEVER WANT TO NAVIGATE TO A PAGE WITH JUST THAT IMAGE. WHY NO WARNING BEFORE LEAVING THE PAGE. WHY DON'T YOU SAVE TEXT LOCALLY. WHY DOES THE WEB SUCK SO HARD. AAAGGGHHHH.

* feels better
* starts over

Netflix, why is your loading spinner so horrible!

Do you know what a percentage is??? 99% means you are ALMOST done. Just a tiny fraction to go. I should not see 99% for seconds or even minutes on end. Much less after the first 98% took only a couple seconds!!

Stop the lies!!!

Them : "Here is an example of how to use my library, 45 lines of mandatory configuration omitted"
Me : "Here is a pot of boilling oil, could you take a small bath in it?"

2 days into a new java project and I already miss scala so much.

My new fitbit reminds me take 250 steps each hour. When I do stop and take a walk, I find it helps my productivity, and I feel better. However, I'm not good at keeping to it.

It's always the same story.

"Quiet you, I'll get up and walk once I finish this one thing".

...

Another hour goes by.

If only I could keep to my own convictions.

This is my new motto

Hey I got reminded of a funny story.

A friend of mine and me were in internships in the same company. The company was specialized in territory resources management (managing water for agriculture, money to build industrial zones...). He got the interesting internship (water predictory modeling) and I got... The repairs of a reference sheet manager that never happened to work. It was in C# and ASP.NET and I was in second year of CS. I expected the code to be nice and clear since it was made by a just graduated engineer with +5years of studies.

I was very wrong.

This guy may never have touched a web server in his life, used static variables to keep sessions instead of... well... sessions, did code everything in the pages event handlers (even LinQ stuff et al) and I was told to make it maintainable, efficient and functional in 2 months. There were files with +32k LoC.

After 1week of immense despair, I decided I will refactor all the code. Make nice classes, mapping layer, something close to a MVC... So I lost time and got scoled for not being able to make all the modifications as fast as in a cleanly designed code...

After 4 weeks, everything was refactored and I got to wait for the design sheets to change some crystal report views.

At this moment I began to understand were was the problem in this company.

My friend next door got asked to stop his modeling stuff for an emergency project. He had to make an XML converter for our clients to be able to send decentralized electrics bills, and if it was not completed within a week, they would no longer be able to pay until it is done.

This XML converter was a project scheduled 5 years before that. Nobody wanted to do it.

At the same time, I was waiting for the Com Department to give me the design views.

I never saw the design views. Spent one month implementing a golden ratio calculator with arbitrary precision because they ain't give me anything to do until the design were implemented.

Ended with a poor grade because "the work wasn't finished".

I spent more than an hour trying trying to debug why two functions were always returning undefined. I even put in conditional breakpoints and executed the statements to confirm the logic was correct.

I forgot return.

Ah, my first issue!

FLIES AND MOSQUITOES ON MY MONITOR AT NIGHT %#%@%#@%#(

Just got an email from an Indian web design company. The entire email was written in blue.

Waiting for GitHub desktop to detect your changes

Coding has given me the ability to turn my favorite hobby into a career. This in turn gave me the chance to take jobs in three countries so far (US, Germany, UK). So, I can explore the world with lovely wife while doing something I'm really passionate about and constantly learning. It also allows me to relate more to my dad, a software engineer of about 30 years who got me started when I was a kid.

In short, coding changed everything for me.

PS: I met my wife in intro to CS, though she's not a developer.

Fuck this, fuck that, fuck the buffer, fuck AES, fuck crypto, fuck node-forge, fuck IV and browsers, once I am done with this fucking cryptographic wrapper on both client and server, the first person to say decrypt and Javascript in the same sentence in front of me will get their own dick in their ass. The guy that said mixing computer and crypto was a bad idea was fucking right

Remember to remove your placeholders!

We are the 31, it is 00:54, I have a full specification to deliver on the 1rst at 00:00, and there is only half of it done.

Wish me luck for my doc New Year Eve

When your company buys a third party solution and you spend all your time emailing them about bugs in their system.

Seriously, I even sent you the exact line of the bug in your JavaScript with a suggested solution, and deployed a new stack with your latest (broken) fix so you can test out that solution. Then you email back saying it is fixed but it is clearly still broken. If I email you a fixed version of your file will you deploy it? OMG!

Making a site that looks like Windows XP for one of my friends. What do you guys think of it so far?

After being live multiple years supporting only Safari, Firefox, and Chrome, one customer wanted IE support. After taking a close look at the usage numbers, and discussing with us front-end devs, our product guy shot it down. Pop the champagne!

If an orange costs $6 and a grape costs $4, how much does a pineapple cost?

Slow time so I can code more AND sleep more!

As opposed to non-existent technology?

When you try to clap in a presentation while holding coffee and spill it all over yourself.

When you make a mistake and try to fix it, but you can't remember how to spell amend...

git commit --ammend
error: unknown command `amend'

git commit -ammend
[branch-name] mend

Huh?

git log
commit #
mend

Created a new commit with message 'mend'. Now to clean this all up and go get some sleep!

"Can you check what my password is?"

Okay, I think I am losing it, how do you explain a distributed computing VM has to somehow execute code on some hardware at a point to a customer that is clearly a big ass bullshit eater/buzzword bitch?

Because if I can't, I may buy a plane ticket for Canada and an axe, and that is not for cutting lumber

!rant

Super awesome day today.

1. Got up early to do a risky production deploy and it worked!
2. Three PRs approved before lunch.
3. Got some time to continue learning scala.
4. Coffee and cupcakes with some refugees and discussed work as a software engineer.
5. Tried virtual reality for the first time. Really fun.
6. Helped prepare our goals for this quarter and present them to the department.
7. Department meeting had free local craft beer and pretzels.
8. Went bouldering after work and flashed a 6c.
9. Curled up with my wife watching Netflix.

I really love my life sometimes.

PSA: negate your tests and make sure they fail!

I have what I thought was a weird and slightly paranoid habit. When I write tests sometimes just as a sanity check negate the assertion to make sure the test fails and isn't a false positive. Almost always fails as expected.

But not today! Turns out I had forgotten to wrap my equality check in an assertion so it would always pass. It freaks me out to imagine pushing a test that always passes not just because it doesn't do its job, but could also obscure a bug and trick me into thinking it works differently than it does. Broken tests are the worst!

But it pays to be paranoid.

Years ago, one of my friends in college was taking an intro to CS class. He asked me for help on one of his assignments. It was a simple Python program, but it wasn't running as expected. I go in figuring it will be easy to fix. But everything looks exactly right. An hour later I'm tearing my hair out! It isn't even entering the function although it's clearly called. I'm beginning to feel very self conscious, as a CS major who can't even debug a 15 line program for a friend.

Then it hit me. This is Python. I used an editor macro to convert all indentation to tabs, lined them up, and it ran on the first try. Turns out, he had somehow ended up with a mixture of tabs and spaces.

I'm not sure what the takeaway is, but I think he got a surprisingly honest introduction to the life of a developer...

A truly needed commit

Get on it, @dfox

Heathrow express having some trouble this morning.

Failed: Deleting

For my father, I do wizardry, for my mother I do magic, for my brother I type weird stuff, for my gf I code useless stuff, for my grandparents I do nothing, for my non dev friends I make softwares, for my dev friends... Magic again

Me: *adds a shiny new graph to our foos web app showing player ratings*

Fred: Can I please have a button to see just my scores?

Me: *adds "JUST FRED" button*

Fred: perfect, thanks

We had a school project where we where supposed to implement a software with a heavy client in C# and web services for it in C#, but the web services HAD TO COMMUNICATE WITH SMTP AND IMAP. And do that in 8 days.

We were 6 in the team. 4 had no idea what a web service is, and I and the designated project lead were the only ones knowing what to do. The lead had paperwork to do for the project, so I had to do everything but the UI alone. So 1 guy did the UI, 3 were... Playing Minecraft... The lead was doing paperwork and ranting about how noisy idiots these guys were... And I was sick as hell and could not eat anything, I was vomiting all day in between which moment I managed to make half of the functionalities of the project, despite having to go to the hospital and have to continue working despite the medical request not to work.

So the day before the presentation I had half of the functionalities done and I had to explain them yet another time what web services are so they can answer the questions and cover for themselves.

On the day of the presentation it went kinda fine. It was not finished but it worked like asked.

We were asked for peer evaluation and I gave A to the lead and the UI guy and B to the 3 other lazy asses.

Shortly after I am called by the tutor in the office : "What happened on this project? Were you not working at all? Apart for the lead who gave you an A, every one gave you a D (lowest grade). I demand for explanations"

I said never mind and got back to studying. I got a B, all the rest of the group an A.

I am working as a freelance for some company, and yesterday my boss just put my pay and work on hold til next week when he is available.

So now I have a free week, with no money.

Fuck.

When you offer to help out a fellow coworker on the top priority feature he is developing and he just sends you the branch and stops working on it.

I get home today and my wife says:

"Just finished some chores and really want to play stardew valley, but the computer has been updating for an hour!"

Windows 10 anniversary update strikes again.

That's enough for today then

S-so these are not errors?!

Lost my first job because I told my boss he can't have all 3 of CAP theorem fml

Why is it the Homo sapientatus race is always knowledgably Ignoranting all the time.. ?

We've been using private GitHub repos as a distribution method for our personal npm packages at work for years.

I finally got sick of it and did the work to publish them to artifactory yesterday. Today, I worked out the remaining kinks, fixed the CI builds, and wrote a wiki page explaining the change with step by step migration instructions and sent it around to the rest of the devs. And it's working great!

I feel simultaneously like a hero for finally getting this fixed and an idiot for putting up with it for so long.

Also thankful for my devops friend who helped a bunch.

"I can't connect to the internet on my phone!!11!"

*I open control centre and disable airplane mode*

"omg how you do that thank you"

C#: inner classes, inner classes everywhere
C++: inline and C everywhere

This be my first 'rant'.. May I be forgiven for ranting. 😔

Interviewer : can you give me the pseudo code for a multilayer perrceptron?
Me: you 've got some time?
Interviewer : well 2 minutes?

When you immediately regret your career decisions.

Things you should not say on your last day of work:

If I broke it, I think it would be pretty obvious.

I want to buy a beer for everyone who developed the mobile pass app. Just breezed through immigration and customs without waiting in the 1 hour+ line. Technology wins. Cheers!

When you are scrolling when your left thumb and accidentally upvote a rant you didn't mean to. Feels so heartless removing said upvote...

git pull origin master --allow-unrelated-histories

Because I like to keep life interesting.

Just moved countries and started a new job at an awesome company, which is so great I have nothing yet to rant about.

Oh here goes: almost three weeks with no internet at home and no end in sight.

Just attended my first conference and it was awesome! So many new ideas, but also tired and overloaded. Can't decide if I should code tonight, go to bed early, or just do something mindless.

First rant here

Well thing is that my CS school did have teachers and half the grade was from a product presentation and half on teammates reviews.

My teammates mostly didn't have any idea what SOAP was. That was the theme of the project and we had to make a Webservice which they didn't even understood what it meant.
I spent one day from 8am to 1am trying to explain, in despair I ended up not sleeping, not eating, working 24/7 all the week and collapsing of exhaustion.
I was taken to the hospital, got back home but have lost time and had only implemented 3/4 of the functionalities.
The others (6) only did managed to make a basic GUI I would have to link myself. One of them, the project manager had done testing and lots of good stuff, made a 80pages report but the other 5 were shitty.
They all gave me the worst peer review grade but the manager, they got A I got C (ABCD scale).

Uh... how many?

Gububububu
If I catch the guy who decided to change cowboy library API, I will make him butter toast as a job for the rest of his life. I AM COMING FOR YOU JOSÉ

I had an interesting mystery the other day. I work in the UK, but I'm working remotely from the US for a while. First day, I made some changes, ran the tests and they failed. Weird part was the failing test was for a component I hadn't touched. I took a closer look, and realized it was a date off by several hours. The test was checking that a passed in date appears in the output. But it was creating the date by parsing a string. The library I was using defaults to local time, but the component uses UTC. So, I had inadvertently created a unit test that only passes when run from UTC. But I had never noticed before because my work is in that timezone. Yikes!

Best tip for getting unstuck? If it's after your usual leaving time, GO HOME.

So many times I solved the problem right away the next morning. Only wish I followed my own advice more often...

Coding is my distraction to life, not the reverse.

No ranting here but

Started doing web with POCO in C++. Could not be as pleased as now. Syntax is cool, framework is cool, GNU Makefiles are cool, aclocal isn't, but... Go to hell automake. I am happy, helping a friend and enjoying what I feel as the chilliest programming language is becoming the way I do web.

Computer does a BSOD right at the end of a tiebreaker competitive overwatch match where the enemy is about to cap the point and win. I'm one of the tanks. Hard reboot and back in the game within 45s. Just barely hold them off in overtime and win the match. Epic!

Thank God for SSDs!

When everyone thinks FE is easier, quicker, and less important than BE. Just because our fantastic UX people made you a high fidelity mockup in a day does not mean we can build the whole FE in a week.

This is why I'm returning to full stack.

It drives me crazy when there are unclosed parens or quotes anywhere.

Is it too much to ask for people to run their Facebook posts through a compiler first?

Why is so Fitbit so bad at multiple time zones??

Guess what, people get on planes and travel.

Every time, my Fitbit gets so screwed up, including things like changing previous step counts, or duplicating an entire day of steps.

I understand MTZ is a tough problem, but this is just unacceptable. I'm not obsessed with my steps, but when your product is all about counting something, seems like you should be more careful to avoid double counting or not counting at all. Seriously, how much R&D have they invested in their hardware and apps, but it completely fails when you travel. Get it together!

Anyone else use Opera?

First Nvidia drivers problem on Linux in 5 years. Due to multiarch (32bit executable, 64bit drivers). Had to happen in a rush.

Current Mac and Windows user here looking to get back into Linux. Any distro suggestions?

Looking for something not too high maintenance.

I was always interested in computers. My dad was a big computer geek and a programmer to boot. Usually had a couple old PCs in the basement to play with.

In middle school, I took tech ed and we made simple web sites with html and css. I remember the struggle of nested tables.

In high school, I couldn't fit any CS into my schedule. But someone gave me a learning to code book in ruby. I loved it, and have been hooked ever since.

Cut and pasted the same code in the same place, refreshed the page and it worked.

<?php echo '$coolrant'; ?>

Decides to fork an OS repo and make some modifications.

It's written in coffeescript.

What's everyone's opinion on emojis? 😶

Trying to add money to a prepaid SIM card today. Their website is a mess. Plus and minus buttons were not functioning, so my only option was to add 15 euro. Checked the console, no errors. Tried triggering the buttons jQuery, no luck. Found a data value attached to the submit button set to 15. Changed to 10, clicked submit, and BOOM, it worked! You just got engineered!

After I paid, I was curious, went back and set it to -15, and tried it again. Unfortunately, they know about backend validation.

Aaaaaaaarg GCC! Stop caching my failures. I do correct my code, stop pulling the old copy from /tmp you bloated piece of C

Algo strikes again

Seing myself on devRant makes me realize I am a mix of sugar and salt : sweet, salty, and very dry.

I walk by our devops dashboard several times per day. It keeps track of key metrics for all our live services. I noticed an interesting trend the last few weeks.

3 weeks ago: all metrics green
2 weeks ago: 1 metric red
1 week ago: 1 metric still red
this week: 1 metric still red but covered with a post it note

Any recommendations for moving a blog?

My wife and I just cancelled our account with siteground hosting a WordPress blog. Looking for a cheaper alternative. Willing to get my hands dirty as a web dev, but would like a nice CMS experience for my wife. Also want to keep our existing content. If we can keep our custom domain somehow that would be a win.

Thanks!

Somebody screwed up...

I guess I would be a teacher because... Hey those kids won't teach themselves. Or I will build EMP weapons because fuck I like my job.

I think Atom's autofill has gone crazy

When you are tearing you hair out trying to figure out why the PR you're reviewing isn't working. Then you realize you forgot to pull the latest changes!

You know it's Friday afternoon when your interface is broken because you tried to set the type to the string 'string' instead of the keyword string.

Interface IEnvironment {
name: 'string',
...
}

My favorite place to go...

Not having kept sturdier backups of my first projects to show them to trainees to give them more trust

2017: supporting IE now somewhat less painful.