!rant

After over 20 years as a Software Engineer, Architect, and Manager, I want to pass along some unsolicited advice to junior developers either because I grew through it, or I've had to deal with developers who behaved poorly:

1) Your ego will hurt you FAR more than your junior coding skills. Nobody expects you to be the best early in your career, so don't act like you are.

2) Working independently is a must. It's okay to ask questions, but ask sparingly. Remember, mid and senior level guys need to focus just as much as you do, so before interrupting them, exhaust your resources (Google, Stack Overflow, books, etc..)

3) Working code != good code. You are an author. Write your code so that it can be read. Accept criticism that may seem trivial such as renaming a variable or method. If someone is suggesting it, it's because they didn't know what it did without further investigation.

4) Ask for peer reviews and LISTEN to the critique. Even after 20+ years, I send my code to more junior developers and often get good corrections sent back. (remember the ego thing from tip #1?) Even if they have no critiques for me, sometimes they will see a technique I used and learn from that. Peer reviews are win-win-win.

5) When in doubt, do NOT BS your way out. Refer to someone who knows, or offer to get back to them. Often times, persons other than engineers will take what you said as gospel. If that later turns out to be wrong, a bunch of people will have to get involved to clean up the expectations.

6) Slow down in order to speed up. Always start a task by thinking about the very high level use cases, then slowly work through your logic to achieve that. Rushing to complete, even for senior engineers, usually means less-than-ideal code that somebody will have to maintain.

7) Write documentation, always! Even if your company doesn't take documentation seriously, other engineers will remember how well documented your code is, and they will appreciate you for it/think of you next time that sweet job opens up.

8) Good code is important, but good impressions are better. I have code that is the most embarrassing crap ever still in production to this day. People don't think of me as "that shitty developer who wrote that ugly ass code that one time a decade ago," They think of me as "that developer who was fun to work with and busted his ass." Because of that, I've never been unemployed for more than a day. It's critical to have a good network and good references.

9) Don't shy away from the unknown. It's easy to hope somebody else picks up that task that you don't understand, but you wont learn it if they do. The daunting, unknown tasks are the most rewarding to complete (and trust me, other devs will notice.)

10) Learning is up to you. I can't tell you the number of engineers I passed on hiring because their answer to what they know about PHP7 was: "Nothing. I haven't learned it yet because my current company is still using PHP5." This is YOUR craft. It's not up to your employer to keep you relevant in the job market, it's up to YOU. You don't always need to be a pro at the latest and greatest, but at least read the changelog. Stay abreast of current technology, security threats, etc...

These are just a few quick tips from my experience. Others may chime in with theirs, and some may dispute mine. I wish you all fruitful careers!

We had a Commodore64. My dad used to be an electrical engineer and had programs on it for calculations, but sometimes I was allowed to play games on it.

When my mother passed away (late 80s, I was 7), I closed up completely. I didn't speak, locked myself into my room, skipped school to read in the library. My dad was a lovely caring man, but he was suffering from a mental disease, so he couldn't really handle the situation either.

A few weeks after the funeral, on my birthday, the C64 was set up in my bedroom, with the "programmers reference guide" on my desk. I stayed up late every night to read it and try the examples, thought about those programs while in school. I memorized the addresses of the sound and sprite buffers, learnt how programs were managed in memory and stored on the casette.

I worked on my own games, got lost in the stories I was writing, mostly scifi/fantasy RPGs. I bought 2764 eproms and soldered custom cartridges so I could store my finished work safely.

When I was 12 my dad disappeared, was found, and hospitalized with lost memory. I slipped through the cracks of child protection, felt responsible to take care of the house and pay the bills. After a year I got picked up and placed in foster care in a strict Christian family who disallowed the use of computers.

I ran away when I was 13, rented a student apartment using my orphanage checks (about €800/m), got a bunch of new and recycled computers on which I installed Debian, and learnt many new programming languages (C/C++, Haskell, JS, PHP, etc). My apartment mates joked about the 12 CRT monitors in my room, but I loved playing around with experimental networking setups. I tried to keep a low profile and attended high school, often faking my dad's signatures.

After a little over a year I was picked up by child protection again. My dad was living on his own again, partly recovered, and in front of a judge he agreed to be provisory legal guardian, despite his condition. I was ruled to be legally an adult at the age of 15, and got to keep living in the student flat (nation-wide foster parent shortage played a role).

OK, so this sounds like a sobstory. It isn't. I fondly remember my mom, my dad is doing pretty well, enjoying his old age together with an nice woman in some communal landhouse place.

I had a bit of a downturn from age 18-22 or so, lots of drugs and partying. Maybe I just needed to do that. I never finished any school (not even high school), but managed to build a relatively good career. My mom was a biochemist and left me a lot of books, and I started out as lab analyst for a pharma company, later went into phytogenetics, then aerospace (QA/NDT), and later back to pure programming again.

Computers helped me through a tough childhood.

They awakened a passion for creative writing, for math, for science as a whole. I'm a bit messed up, a bit of a survivalist, but currently quite happy and content with my life.

I try to keep reminding people around me, especially those who have just become parents, that you might feel like your kids need a perfect childhood, worrying about social development, dragging them to soccer matches and expensive schools...

But the most important part is to just love them, even if (or especially when) life is harsh and imperfect. Show them you love them with small gestures, and give their dreams the chance to flourish using any of the little resources you have available.

We have a bunch of white people in human resources that are trying to hire "diverse" people because the company sets HR diversity targets. Which is an inherently racist way of hiring someone.

I am told to interview this guy who claims to have Angular experience. Before the interview I ask to see a form that he has built in Angular. He sends me a repo which is ripped off of an open source project and has the readme and git commits removed. A quick web search shows that it isn't his work. He shows up to the interview and I find out he is from a Southern African country. I deliberately ask some questions about code that I can see he didn't write that I prepared ahead of time. He lies to me and tells me all about how he wrote it which showed me that he has no idea what the code does. I tell HR they better not hire him because he was very comfortable lying to me, and I'm confident that he doesn't understand any of the code that he showed me. I do not trust this guy and would never choose to work with him. HR lady says "Ah okay."

Today he walks in with a big grin on his face. HR lady fucking hired this guy. I can see his monitors from my desk and he spent his whole first day looking at a soccer website on his second monitor. I call up HR, "Why would you even ask me to interview him if you refuse to listen to my feedback?". Lady tells me "You need to be open minded about diversity. Probably most of the things you observed were either cultural differences or language barrier." I tell her definitely not. He lied to me multiple times, and he took credit for other people's work." She tells me that they will keep an eye on me because I'm not being open to diversity.

Are you kidding me? This white lady is literally stereotyping me as a racist because I'm white.

So this fucking HR lady called me a racist because she decided to hire someone that we shouldn't trust. Then she put this asshat on my project. Now I have to be cautious about my position because HR is "watching" my racist ass. Even though I am literally the only one on the development team that is white and speaks English as my first-language. I called a team meeting before the on-boarding is over so I can tell the other developers what is happening. We restructured our code review process so that I will never give him feedback. Then when the time comes that he slips up the "diverse" developers will kick him out so I won't be reprimanded as a "racist".

This company that I work for is a special kind of stupid.

Last day on the contract from hell. I'd written a project with one other person in our spare time that performed a critical business function. The following conversation was had between myself, the job thief who was handed my job and their manager, with the 10 other IBM GS "dev domain experts" assigned to that team sitting silently on zoom:

Moi: hey all, what seems to be the problem?
JT: how to update the java for requirement?
Moi: I would assume a text editor, have you tried intellij
JTM: she's talking about ticket BS-101, the data is wrong
Moi: ah, well, you might want to fix that
JT: how to fix?
Moi: update the database and update the logic that depends on it
JTM: what changes are those?
Moi: the ones described in the ticket, I would assume, I'm no longer on that project
JTM: didn't you write this application?
Moi: yes.
JTM: ok, so do you know how to fix the issue?
Moi: definitely
JTM: ok... ... Can you tell us how to fix it?
Moi: yes.
*The sound of silence*
JTM: *will* you tell us?
Moi: I would, but I'm already off the clock, and as of an hour ago I no longer have a contract. And even if I did, I don't have a contract or authorization to work on that system. I'm not actually being paid for this call.
JTM: ... What are we going to do about this?
Moi: I have no idea
JTM: ok, so we can look at getting a 1 month contract to support this
Moi: I'm sure our firm has someone who can definitely help you out
JTM: *heavy raging* ... Can you do the work?
Moi: Unfortunatley, I'm already committed to a new contract at another customer. I also don't do one month contracts. I'm an engineer, not a car wash employee
JTM: well, I don't understand how you can just leave us in the lurch like this?!
Moi: well, respectfully, it was your decision to cut me from the budget because you thought you were close enough to end of the project to get it across the line with junior resources.
Interjecting-JT: I am senior!
Moi: Right. So, basically, you took ownership of the product before go live. We advised against it, in writing, numerous times. We also notified you that we would not carry a bench, so the project resources are now working on other things. We can provide you with new resources for a minimum 6 month duration who can help you out. Also, since we've cycled out, our rate has increased per the terms of our MSA.
JTM: we don't have budget for that! How are we supposed to do this?!
Moi: *zoom glare at JT* that question is more appropriate for your finance officer and the IT director. I can send a few emails and schedule a call with your account representative and the aforementioned individuals so you can hash this out.

-_---------------
I'm free! 🥳 That said, still plenty of residual fodder I need to get out of my system on these guys. Might need to start my own Dilbert.

Boss: I need to know how much resources a server would need to serve 20000 users at the same time

Me: Sure, can I see the webapp?

B: There's not one yet

M: Ok, can I see its documentation then?

B: There is none

M: But ot depends on the programming language, libraries used, what kin-

B: It's an e-commerce. Try browsing Amazon and see how much they nees to handle the page requests.

Me: *still processing* wh-

Boss: I have to give an estimate to a client within 30 minutes. Hurry.

So.... Uh... I guess i have to hack Amazon now?

Not a rant, but I found this funny enough to share.

About two weeks ago, I’m contacted by a third party development firm that is responsible for building the next iteration of a control board were are developing. Alongside build of the PCB they were scoped to flash the firmware and verify all connected components.

During the call, they tell me they don’t have the resources to build our testing environment with the Ansible script I provided, and they don’t know if the updates they have made will work with our control system. Ugh...really...

I attempt to walk them through the 3 pretty simple commands to launch the playbook. Instead of listening, their project manager insists that I need to load up the environment and send them a ready to go system.

I quickly load up a RaspberryPi and prepare it for shipping. I hand the box to our shipping clerk and fill out the shipping request documentation. Then about a week goes by and this is where the story really begins.

I get an email from the same rep asking where the environment is, and I head down to the warehouse to inquire where the RaspberryPi might be. After speaking with the head clerk, we can’t seem to track down the package. I’m assured that they will find the Pi and send me the shipment update.

I pass the information along and after about a day and a half I still didn’t receive word back from the warehouse team. I load up another Pi and head back down to the warehouse. I follow up with the warehouse staff. They inform me that they have not been able to locate my package and another warehouse worker is called over. He says he hasn’t seen it, but they they were having a food day that day and he thinks more than likely someone ate it.

Like it didn’t even click at first but after a few seconds I realize that these guys have literally been looking for a pie for the past two days...and I JUST DIE.

After the 5 or so minutes of laughing I show them the newly flashed RaspberryPi, and of course they know exactly where the original one was.

It’s shipped out now, but wow. Also, it turns out the PCB manufacturing company didn’t even really need this and it was all a guise to hide that they are behind schedule and that they will not be able to finish the work scoped. FML!

In a user-interface design meeting over a regulatory compliance implementation:
User: “We’ll need to input a city.”
Dev: “Should we validate that city against the state, zip code, and country?”
User: “You are going to make me enter all that data? Ugh…then make it a drop-down. I select the city and the state, zip code auto-fill. I don’t want to make a mistake typing any of that data in.”
Me: “I don’t think a drop-down of every city in the US is feasible.”
Manage: “Why? There cannot be that many. Drop-down is fine. What about the button? We have a few icons to choose from…”
Me: “Uh..yea…there are thousands of cities in the US. Way too much data to for anyone to realistically scroll through”
Dev: “They won’t have to scroll, I’ll filter the list when they start typing.”
Me: “That’s not really the issue and if they are typing the city anyway, just let them type it in.”
User: “What if I mistype Ch1cago? We could inadvertently be out of compliance. The system should never open the company up for federal lawsuits”
Me: “If we’re hiring individuals responsible for legal compliance who can’t spell Chicago, we should be sued by the federal government. We should validate the data the best we can, but it is ultimately your department’s responsibility for data accuracy.”
Manager: “Now now…it’s all our responsibility. What is wrong with a few thousand item drop-down?”
Me: “Um, memory, network bandwidth, database storage, who maintains this list of cities? A lot of time and resources could be saved by simply paying attention.”
Manager: “Memory? Well, memory is cheap. If the workstation needs more memory, we’ll add more”
Dev: “Creating a drop-down is easy and selecting thousands of rows from the database should be fast enough. If the selection is slow, I’ll put it in a thread.”
DBA: “Table won’t be that big and won’t take up much disk space. We’ll need to setup stored procedures, and data import jobs from somewhere to maintain the data. New cities, name changes, ect. ”
Manager: “And if the network starts becoming too slow, we’ll have the Networking dept. open up the valves.”
Me: “Am I the only one seeing all the moving parts we’re introducing just to keep someone from misspelling ‘Chicago’? I’ll admit I’m wrong or maybe I’m not looking at the problem correctly. The point of redesigning the compliance system is to make it simpler, not more complex.”
Manager: “I’m missing the point to why we’re still talking about this. Decision has been made. Drop-down of all cities in the US. Moving on to the button’s icon ..”
Me: “Where is the list of cities going to come from?”
<few seconds of silence>
Dev: “Post office I guess.”
Me: “You guess?…OK…Who is going to manage this list of cities? The manager responsible for regulations?”
User: “Thousands of cities? Oh no …no one is our area has time for that. The system should do it”
Me: “OK, the system. That falls on the DBA. Are you going to be responsible for keeping the data accurate? What is going to audit the cities to make sure the names are properly named and associated with the correct state?”
DBA: “Uh..I don’t know…um…I can set up a job to run every night”
Me: “A job to do what? Validate the data against what?”
Manager: “Do you have a point? No one said it would be easy and all of those details can be answered later.”
Me: “Almost done, and this should be easy. How many cities do we currently have to maintain compliance?”
User: “Maybe 4 or 5. Not many. Regulations are mostly on a state level.”
Me: “When was the last time we created a new city compliance?”
User: “Maybe, 8 years ago. It was before I started.”
Me: “So we’re creating all this complexity for data that, realistically, probably won’t ever change?”
User: “Oh crap, you’re right. What the hell was I thinking…Scratch the drop-down idea. I doubt we’re have a new city regulation anytime soon and how hard is it to type in a city?”
Manager: “OK, are we done wasting everyone’s time on this? No drop-down of cities...next …Let’s get back to the button’s icon …”

Simplicity 1, complexity 0.

The university system is fucked.

I've been working in this industry for a few years now, but have been self taught for much longer. I'm only just starting college and I'm already angry.

What does a college degree really mean anymore? From some of the posts I've seen on devRant, it certainly doesn't ensure professional conduct, work ethic, or quality (shout out to the brave souls who deal with the lack of these daily). Companies should hire based on talent, not on a degree. Universities should focus more on real world applications or at least offer such programs for students interested in entering the workforce rather than research positions. A sizable chunk of universities' income (in the U.S. at least) comes from research and corporate sponsorships, and educating students is secondary to that. Nowadays education is treated as a business instead of a tool to create value in the world. That's what I signed up for, anyway - gaining the knowledge to create value in the world. And yet I along with many others feel so restricted, so bogged down with requirements, fees, shitty professors, and shitty university resources. There is so much knowledge out there that can be put to instant practical use - I am constantly shocked at the things left out of my college curriculum (lack of automated tests, version control, inadequate or inaccurate coverage of design patterns and philosophies) - things that are ABSOLUTELY essential to be successful in this career path.

It's wonderful that we eventually find the resources we need, or the motivation to develop essential skills, but it's sad that so many students in university lack proper direction through no fault of their own.

Fuck you, universities, for being so inflexible and consistently failing to serve your basic purpose - one of if not the most important purpose on this earth.

Fuck you, corporations, for hiring and paying based on degree. Fuck you, management, for being so ignorant about the industry you work in.

Fuck you, clients, who treat intelligent people like dirt, make unreasonable demands, pull some really shady shit, and perpetuate a damaging stereotype.

And fuck you to the developer who wrote my company's antipattern-filled, stringy-as-all hell codebase without comments. Just. Fuck you.

Senior Management: We are severely disappointed in the timeliness of the two apps you built this year. You had budgeted 3 months for one and it took 4 months and the other was budgeted to take 4 months and took 5 months. We understand that we doubled the requirements halfway through and but that doesn’t take away from our need for you to deliver on time. We provided you with two extra devs on the project! We know they were novices and you had to train them from the ground up during the project, that doesn’t matter. The extra resources should have helped you but your lack of leadership ability is what caused them to hold you back. We know our other team with a budget of 6 months took 2 years on their project and was still unsuccessful but that is a different scenario! That was a pre-built 3rd party ERP plugin, way more complicated and nuanced than simply building and deploying something from scratch. Yes we’re aware your projects were the only successful tech projects at the company this year, that’s just luck and coincidence. The next app we need you to build in 6 months, no questions asked. It needs to consolidate and tie together our 3 different ERPs. Everything that we need out of these products that they don’t do out of the box we need you to wire up. We will decide the exact requirements in a month or so, for now just get started. Yes your apps changed the way we do business and allowed us to complete projects smoother than ever before while saving millions of dollars in wasteful and archaic processes that is OLD NEWS. Stop bringing it up. The successes of yesterday are the status quo of today. Don’t expect any new resources either, you clearly can’t handle them. You will now be giving status updates to 3 different managers as a corrective action to your missed deadlines in order to ensure the timeliness of future deliverables.

Dev: …

- just do your job. Close this ticket already and go to the next one

- It's just a 1 minute job.. Don't build scripts for things that simple!

- Look, we don't have time to spare for coffee breaks. Stop wasting your time on scripting!

- netikras, the IST shift fucked things up again. I need you to do your magic and clear those alerts

- netikras, there are 20 tickets waiting to be investigated. Either your coleagues spend 2 hours on them or you do your magic in 2 minutes, as always..

- netikras, please share your scripts with your team

- netikras, I have nominated you for the Star Award for your script

- netikras, here's the star award and the financial prize. Those are nice swarovskies you've picked for your wife! Good choice!

- Since our team has lots of spare time now, I urge you all to attend X, Y and Z trainings. Trainings and Certification expenses are covered

A very similar scenario has just happened in 2 last workplaces of mine. In both cases I was the one to build the script despite my management's requests to stop wasting time and resources on them.

When I see what is wrong and take some actions to right those wrongs, when superiors build roadblocks for me claiming it's not worth it and in the end I still build my solutions and become the most efficient person/team in the whole department -- that right there is what boosts my ego to the sky and above!! It proves I am actually on the right track. It proves that I in fact have a better understanding than those who should have it.

It just makes me tick!

Looking for another adventure like that :) With more power to change things this time

The following meeting occurred at a client between a recently added client PM and our team, we'll call her Shrilldesi, previously from one of the main consulting vendors.

*Meeting begins after 15 minutes of bullshitting, waiting for people to file in*
Shrilldesi: "Ok everyone, let's get started
TeamMember: "We're still waiting for Z and W, not sure why they're late."
SD: "We can start there. It was decided had to lay off Z and W, because we didn't have enough work."
Moi: "Wait, what. Who made that decision? Why weren't we consulted on this? We have another project starting next week that they were needed for. They just delivered the entire public facing rewrite, why would we let them go?!"
SD: "It was decided by myself, pajeet, and venkata looking at the backlog. Not enough work, week gap."
Moi: "This is going to hurt our ability to deliver the next phase. When are we going to start interviewing new people, the project begins next week?"
SD: "We will interview new resources as needed."
Moi: "Who is we? And 'as needed' is yesterday, or realistically several weeks ago as the. project. starts. next. week. Also, we're obligated by federal law to bring back anyone we lay off before we hire anyone else for the same position."
SD: "Interviews will be done by myself, Mohd, and Pajeet."
Moi: "...can I point out that there's only one modestly technical person in that group, they're an admin, and none of them are from this team? How do you conduct an engineering interview without any engineers?"
SD: "That does not matter, I have watched enough to be able to ask your questions."
Moi: *anger intensifies* "I have to respectfully disagree. I don't feel it's appropriate to cut us out of the process of interviewing our own team members."
SD: "It is decided, we will take care of it, let us move on. Next, we need to find work for the Manasa, she doesn't have anything to do."
Moi: *sharpens baseball bat* "...shouldn't we just fire her then?"
SD: "Oh that is so mean, why would we fire her? We were thinking she might be able to do some of my project management work."
Moi: *sharpening intensifies* "You do realize it's a violation of H1-B statutes for someone to be employed in work other than what is stated on their contract, and Project Managers are specifically listed as not specialized skillsets per federal law."
SD: *ignores question* "We also need to find work for the offshore team, they don't have enough to do. Please find them work for the next period."
Moi: *checks how long the wait period is for ar-15s*
SD: "We also have a new person rolling onto our team, he comes from the xyz team, Dikshit *gestures to person we all figured was lost*. He will be handling our front end development."
Moi: *seething hatred* "WE JUST LET TWO EXCELLENT FRONT END DEVELOPERS GO. WE DO NOT NEED DIKSHIT."
SD: "Please calm down. We will be replacing the other two shortly, there is no problem."
Moi: "Have you heard nothing I've said? Did you even run this by legal and HR? Why did we let them go in the first place? Why do we even need Dikshit?!"
SD: "I said it before, please listen. There is not enough work for them. Dikshit will do front end. What is unclear?"

Note: There's not really any dramatization here. It's almost verbatim what happened. Eventually, the next project was cancelled, they incrementally rolled the rest of the local team off. They then had the cojones to express aghast anger when I notified them I would not be renewing my contract, and open hatred when I explained to them I was not a slave, and I refused to be a bag holder for the inevitable failure of a project without any chance of success. I don't really care what happened after that, they can all burn in their own little nepotistic shitshow of perpetual failure.

!Rant
Senior dev from another team comes up to me:
"you alright? Looks like you're struggling with something. Want me to give you a hand?"

And my personal favourite:
"feel free to slack me whenever you need help. Don't be afraid to ask questions. Only way to learn is to ask"

He also recommended me some books and resources to read.

I left work today motivated af!

Once upon a time in Devland, there were two best friends @Alice and @Michelle and they worked together at The DevCo company as developers.
After a tough day handling an @-ANGRY-CLIENT-, they thought that they had to go and @RantSomewhere and so they went to a café. At the café, they ranted about some stupid clients, and @theItalianGuy at the third floor of their office building who never picked up calls, and @thatJavaGuy from the second floor who, they thought, was @notarealDev, and the usual stuff about their work. Somewhere in between, @Alice thought it would be @funvengeance to @hack @theNSA; “@karma is coming to get them”, said @Michelle.
To do this, they knew they’d have to take help from none other than @Gandalf who lived in a nearby @cave. So, the next day, taking a leave from work, @Alice and @Michelle embarked on journey to meet @Gandalf. After about an hour’s drive, they reached @Gandalf’s @cave. @Michelle went ahead to knock on @Gandalf’s rusty cave door. Being a lazy @necromancer, he magically opened his door 2 minutes later. “Who is't dares to disturb me in mine own catch but a wink?” shouted a voice from the back; “We’re two developers from DevCo and we need your help in our mission to @hack @theNSA”, shouted @Michelle. After a few seconds, he replied, ”Hmm… N'rmally I wouldst sendeth thee to mine own cousin @Hagrid, but in thy case, I sayeth thee shouldst visiteth the detective who is't goeth by the nameth @S-Holmes”. @Alice replied back, “Thank you, Sir @Gandalf, we’ll get help from this @S-Holmes, I’ve heard that he’s an @exceptionalGuy”; “Mine own pleasure, Farewell!” said @Gandalf, and the door closed shut.
So, @Alice and @Michelle went back to their car, and that time @Alice raised a question, “How are we gonna find this @S-Holmes? We don’t have a phone number or anything so we could contact this guy.”
“We should call @thatJavaGuy from work, I’ve heard he is a man of resources, he must know how to contact @S-Holmes”, said @Michelle.
And it was true, after a call with @thatJavaGuy, they were able to obtain @S-Holmes’s phone number.
“Howdy, this is @S-Holmes, what can I diddily ding dong do you for?”
“Hi, I’m @Alice, I’m from DevCo and I was hoping that I could get your help in our mission.”
“What kind of mission?”, asked @S-Holmes.
“We want to @hack @theNSA.”, replied @Alice.
“Okay… I think I might be able to hel-diddly-elp you! There’s an old and abandoned laberino noodly-near @stacked Street. It was made in @1989 and since then, it houses a magical computeroo that can hel-diddly-elp you in your mission. So, you just have to connect the computeroo to the Internet and you can diddily ding dong do your programmeroo thing and then you'll have access to the the noodly-nsa diddily ding dong database!”, answered @S-Holmes.
S-Holmes continued, “But I shall warn you, there's a riddly-rumorino that the laberino was abandoned because of an @electric-ghost that lurks there, but I bel-diddly-elieve it is just a computeroo program that was diddily ding dong designed to try to @stop hackers from accessing the top secret stuff!".
“Okay, thanks for your help! I bet we can handle whatever this @electric-ghost thing is, so… Goodbye!”, replied @Alice.
“Goodbye!”, said @S-Holmes and that ended their conversation.
Luckily, the @stacked Street was just a couple of miles away from them, so they reached the lab quickly.
As they got close to the lab they saw something that really surprised them…
--------
To be continued in part two...
(Do you want a part two? :/)

My first ever story is a little special because it is kind of dev related at it has "cameos" by various devranters, as you might have noticed.
How many did you count?
More in Part Two.

Thank you for reading and please, any feedback is welcome. Did you like it?
I haven't really revised it once, it is straight out of the keyboard.
Should I drop the "@" ?
But then it would impossible to spot some of the devRanters .
Let me know.

PS
What should be the title?
1)Alice in DevLand?
2)Adventures of Alice and Friends: Hacking the NSA?
You decide..(or maybe I'll pick the second one :D)

Ahhhhh devrant... long time no see.

I just need to get something off my heart. The past two years, I worked for the same ISP in Germany, but now as a devops engineer. Well, popo hit the fan really quick lately..

First a good friend, team lead for one of five areas in Germany, quit his job. He was one of the nicest persons I knew, and he believed that all that five areas should work together and share dev resources. Thats why I work mostly in other areas as developer.

Shortly after, his deputy quit as well. I heard that this specific area, the management were a bunch of dicks, but wow!

A short while later, I learnd the hard truth, why those two good friends quit, and that brings me to this story. In a meeting I readied myself up to present my new plattform - a social room - to management. I got a lot of positive feedback from others and we thaught managment would approve of the project. But nope. "We can buy from external, we dont need to program ourselfs. In fact lets stop spending money on internal programming, we should outsource everything!"

I was baffeld... Wtf did i just witness? My team lead didn't say anything, and afterwards I didn't dare to question it, but I told most of my close dev friends and we all realizied, that the rumors were true... We will be shifting into project managment.

At this point, I realized that I wasnt having it, and made a linkedIn account, not because I wanted to switch jobs, but because, meh you never know.

One week ago, one of my bestest buddies said he will quit and join his team lead that left eariler this year, I was heartbroken. Me and our other buddy are devestated, because now we have to do everything he had done. Management didn't listen as we told them that nobody can maintain his code. I have so many projects, I can bearly keep up with them. Now I got a lead role for creating the server infrastucture for a huge project my buddy was working on. Only as specialist and not PM, but his Team Lead thinks I am replacing him!

Last week I got a message on LinkedIn, a consulting firm reached out to me to aquire me as a new consultant or devops engineer. They look great, only less vacation (26 instead of 30 days), 40h shifts instead of 38h and only slightly more base payment. I currently receive about 53.000€ a year, the new firm only grants up to 60.000€ a year for anyone. Otherwise, they look great.

With all my buddies quitting around me, work getting more while time developing decreasing, I don't know what the right thing to do is... There is no way I can get a payment increase in my current position. I always say "my workplace is save, but my work isnt". I don't want to do project managment.

Today I have a meeting with my team lead, she is really nice btw. This is an annual meeting where we discuss my future in the company etc. Shortly after, I have a meeting with the new firm to discuss a bunch of questions I have.

I dont know what to do...

Edit: I missed you, devrant

Am I the only one who hates it that everything needs to be done in JavaScript nowadays?
Why can't you just start writing native software again? Why does every program need its own fucking browser engine and at least 200MB of RAM to do nothing but show and edit text?
I want to have fast and streamlined software again and use my resources for important things. So much software that is called fast or lightweight isn't either. It's just a little less heavy and slow than the software it tries to replace.
I don't use C all the time, but maybe looking into Qt instead of electron might be a start.
I had a project where I could convince my tutors to let me use C++ instead of JS and they were surprised how fast my application started even though it only consisted only of a empty window with a status bar. How far have we come that we even need to think about performance when opening an empty window on modern hardware?

it's funny, how doing something for ages but technically kinda the wrong way, makes you hate that thing with a fucking passion.

In my case I am talking about documentation.

At my study, it was required to write documentation for every project, which is actually quite logical. But, although I am find with some documentation/project and architecture design, they went to the fucking limit with this shit.

Just an example of what we had to write every time again (YES FOR EVERY MOTHERFUCKING PROJECT) and how many pages it would approximately cost (of custom content, yes we all had templates):

Phase 1 - Application design (before doing any programming at all):
- PvA (general plan for how to do the project, from who was participating to the way of reporting to your clients and so on - pages: 7-10.
- Functional design, well, the application design in an understandeable way. We were also required to design interfaces. (Yes, I am a backender, can only grasp the basics of GIMP and don't care about doing frontend) - pages: 20-30.
- Technical design (including DB scheme, class diagrams and so fucking on), it explains it mostly I think so - pages: 20-40.

Phase 2 - 'Writing' the application
- Well, writing the application of course.
- Test Plan (so yeah no actual fucking cases yet, just how you fucking plan to test it, what tools you need and so on. Needed? Yes. but not as redicilous as this) - pages: 7-10.

- Test cases: as many functions (read, every button click etc is a 'function') as you have - pages: one excel sheet, usually at least about 20 test cases.

Phase 3 - Application Implementation
- Implementation plan, describes what resources will be needed and so on (yes, I actually had to write down 'keyboard' a few times, like what the actual motherfucking fuck) - pages: 7-10.
- Acceptation test plan, (the plan and the actual tests so two files of which one is an excel/libreoffice calc file) - pages: 7-10.
- Implementation evalutation, well, an evaluation. Usually about 7-10 FUCKING pages long as well (!?!?!?!)

Phase 4 - Maintaining/managing of the application
- Management/maintainence document - well, every FUCKING rule. Usually 10-20 pages.
- SLA (Service Level Agreement) - 20-30 pages.
- Content Management Plan - explains itself, same as above so 20-30 pages (yes, what the fuck).
- Archiving Document, aka, how are you going to archive shit. - pages: 10-15.

I am still can't grasp why they were surprised that students lost all motivation after realizing they'd have to spend about 1-2 weeks BEFORE being allowed to write a single line of code!

Calculation (which takes the worst case scenario aka the most pages possible mostly) comes to about 230 pages. Keep in mind that some pages will be screenshots etc as well but a lot are full-text.

Yes, I understand that documentation is needed but in the way we had to do it, sorry but that's just not how you motivate students to work for their study!

Hell, students who wrote the entire project in one night which worked perfectly with even easter eggs and so on sometimes even got bad grades BECAUSE THEIR DOCUMENTATION WASN'T GOOD ENOUGH.

For comparison, at my last internship I had to write documentation for the REST API I was writing. Three pages, providing enough for the person who had to, to work with it! YES THREE PAGES FOR THE WHOLE MOTHERFUCKING PROJECT.

This is why I FUCKING HATE the word 'documentation'.

Some days I feel like I work in a different universe.

Last night our alerting system sent out a dept. wide email regarding a high number of errors coming from the web site.

Email shows the number of errors and a summary of the error messages.

Ex. 60 errors
59 Object reference not set to an instance of an object
1 The remote server returned an unexpected response: (413) Request Entity Too Large

Web team responds to the email..

"Order processing team's service is returning a 413 error. I'll fill out a corrective action ticket in the morning to address that error in their service. "

Those tickets are taken pretty seriously by upper mgmt, so I thought someone on the order processing team would point out the 1 error vs. 59 (coming from the web team's code).

Two hours go by, nobody responds, so I decide to jump into something that was none of my business.

"Am I missing something? Can everyone see the 59 null reference exceptions? The 413 exception only occurred once. It was the null reference exceptions that triggered the alert. Looking back at the logs, the site has been bleeding null reference exceptions for hours. Not enough for an alert, but there appears to be a bug that needs to be looked into."

After a dept. managers meeting this morning:

MyBoss: "Whoa..you kicked the hornets nest with your response last night."
Me: "Good. What happened?"
<Dan dept VP, Jake web dept mgr>
MyBoss: "Dan asked Jake if they were going to fix the null reference exceptions and Jake got pissed. Said the null reference errors were caused by the 413 error."
Me: "How does he know that? They don't log any stack traces. I don't think those two systems don't even talk to one another."
<boss laughs>
MyBoss:"That's what Dan asked!..oh..then Jake started in on the alert thresholds were too low, and we need to look into fixing your alerting code."
Me: "What!? Good Lord, tell me you chimed in."
MyBoss: "Didn't have to. Dan starting laughing and said there better be a ticket submitted on their service within the next hour. Then Jake walked out of the meeting. Oh boy, he was pissed."
Me: "I don't understand how they operate over there. It's a different universe.
MyBoss: "Since the alert was for their system, nobody looked at the details. I know I didn't. If you didn't respond pointing out the real problem, they would have passed the buck to the other team and wasted hours chasing a non-existent problem. Now they have to take resources away from their main project and answer to the VP for the delay. I'm sure they are prefixing your name right now with 'that asshole'"
Me: "Not the first, won't be the last."

TLDR;
Wrote a slick scheduling and communication system allowing me to assign photography resources based on time and location.

I'll tell you a little secret ... I'm not actually a dev. I'm a photographer, pretending to be a dev.

Or ... perhaps it's the other way around? (I spend most of my time writing code these days, but only for me - I write the software I use to run my business).

I own a photography studio - we specialize in youth volleyball photography (mostly 12-18 year old girls with a bit of high school, college and semi-pro thrown in for good measure - it's a hugely popular sport) and travel all over the US (and sometimes Europe) photographing.

As a point of scale, this year we photographed a tournament in Denver that featured 100 volleyball courts (in one room!), playing at the same time.

I'm based in California and fly a crew of part-time staff around to these events, but my father and I drive our booth equipment wherever it needs to go. We usually setup a 30'x90' booth with local servers, download/processing/cashier computers and 45 laptops for viewing/ordering photographs. Not to mention 16' drape and banners, tons of samples, 55' TVs, etc. It's quite the production.

We photograph by paid signup only - when there are upwards of 800 teams/9,600 athletes per weekend playing, and you only have four trained photographers, you've got to manage your resources!

This of course means you have to have a system for taking sign those sign ups, assigning teams to photographers and doing so in the most efficient manner possible based on who is available when the team is playing. (You can waste an awful lot of time walking from one court to another in a large convention center - especially if you have to navigate through large crowds - not to mention exhausting yourself).

So this year I finally added a feature I've wanted for quite some time - an interactive court map. I can take an image of the court layout from the tournament and create an HTML version in our software. As I mouse over requests in one window, the corresponding court is highlighted on the map in another browser window. Each photographer has a color associated with them. When I assign requests to a photographer, the court is color coded with the color of the photographer. This allows me to group assignments to minimize photographer walk time and keep them in a specific area. It's also very easy to look at the map and see unassigned requests and look to see what photographer is nearby.

This year I also integrated with Twilio and setup a simple set of text shortcuts that photographers can use to let our booth staff know where they are, if they have memory cards that need picking up, if they need water/coffee/snack, etc. They can also move assignments on their schedule or send and SOS for help if it looks like they aren't going to be able to photograph a team.

Kind of a CLI via the phone. :)

The additions have turned out to be really useful and has made scheduling and managing the photographers much easier that it was in the past.

Yesterday the web site started logging an exception “A task was canceled” when making a http call using the .Net HTTPClient class (site calling a REST service).

Emails back n’ forth ..blaming the database…blaming the network..then a senior web developer blamed the logging (the system I’m responsible for).

Under the hood, the logger is sending the exception data to another REST service (which sends emails, generates reports etc.) which I had to quickly re-direct the discussion because if we’re seeing the exception email, the logging didn’t cause the exception, it’s just reporting it. Felt a little sad having to explain it to other IT professionals, but everyone seemed to agree and focused on the server resources.

Last night I get a call about the exceptions occurring again in much larger numbers (from 100 to over 5,000 within a few minutes). I log in, add myself to the large skype group chat going on just to catch the same senior web developer say …
“Here is the APM data that shows logging is causing the http tasks to get canceled.”

FRACK!

Me: “No, that data just shows the logging http traffic of the exception. The exception is occurring before any logging is executed. The task is either being canceled due to a network time out or IIS is running out of threads. The web site is failing to execute the http call to the REST service.”

Several other devs, DBAs, and network admins agree.

The errors only lasted a couple of minutes (exactly 2 minutes, which seemed odd), so everyone agrees to dig into the data further in the morning.

This morning I login to my computer to discover the error(s) occurred again at 6:20AM and an email from the senior web developer saying we (my mgr, her mgr, network admins, DBAs, etc) need to discuss changes to the logging system to prevent this problem from negatively affecting the customer experience...blah blah blah.

FRACKing female dog!

Good news is we never had the meeting. When the senior web dev manager came in, he cancelled the meeting.

Turned out to be a hiccup in a domain controller causing the servers to lose their connection to each other for 2 minutes (1-minute timeout, 1 minute to fully re-sync). The exact two-minute burst of errors explained (and proven via wireshark).

People and their petty office politics piss me off.

GOD FUCKIN DAMMIT
I WILL FUCKIN KICK YOU ON YOUR FUCKING THROAT.

Programming Languages and Linux groups in facebook are a fuckin pain to watch.

Some people make groups so all can benefit and help each other, talk about mutual interests, BUT NO SOME FUCKERS WILL SPAM SHIT AND MAKE YOU WANNA SMACK THEIR FUCKIN HEAD.

THERE IS A FUCKIN FAQ SECTION THAT ANSWERS ALL THE FUCKIN NEWBIE QUESTIONS. WHY THE FUCKIN HELL YOU SPAM IF YOU HAVE NO FUCKIN CLUE WHAT THE HELL YOU ARE DOING?

You come to a python group and ask if it's possible to get context from a site. I'M NOT MENTIONING THE FUCKIN FACT THAT THIS IS A SIMPLY FUCKIN QUERY TO A SEARCH ENGINE ALSO IT'S MENTIONED IN THE FUCKIN FAQ. Let's move on. We tell you yes, there is BeautifulSoup for that. After 5 fuckin mins YOU COME AND MAKE A NEW POST THAT SHOWS YOU CANT FUCKIN ITERATE A GODDAMN FUCKIN LIST. I'm not pro either, i don't forbid you to learn, BUT FUCKIN LEARN THE BASICS THAT ARE PROVIDED TO YOU FROM GREAT FUCKIN RESOURCES BEFORE TRYING TO ATTEMPT SOMETHING MORE COMPLICATED. AND IF YOU NEED HELP PROVIDE CODE THAT WE CAN USE. NOT A FUCKIN PHOTOGRAPH FROM YOUR MOBILE

Let's go on the Linux groups.
SINCE YOU FUCKIN JOIN A LINUX GROUP YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO KNOW WHAT THE FUCK IS LINUX. IT'S A FUCKIN OPERATING SYSTEM RIGHT?
Then you spam shit like, UBUNTU OR MINT 5 MINUTES AFTER SOMEONE ELSE MADE THE SAME VERY QUESTION 30 MINS AGO. WHICH WAS ANSWERED AGAIN YESTERDAY.

"What are the benefits of Linux". NONE YOU TWAT, IF YOU NEED ME TO TELL YOU THE BENEFITS OF THE SYSTEM THAT YOU USE THEN WHY THE HELL YOU BOTHER.

Next.
You say you have problems setting up XAMPP. We tell you that since you are on linux better use LAMP. You ignore us and spam your fuckin problem with XAMPP. IM GONNA FIND YOU AND IM GONNA MAKE YOU CHEW MY FUCKIN SHOES YOU PIECE OF SHIT.

I'm not even mentioning the kali wannabe hackers.

Conclusion:
DO A FUCKIN SMALL RESEARCH BEFORE SPAMMING THE SHIT OUT OF STUPID FUCKIN QUESTIONS. AND IF YOU CANT EVEN SEARCH, LEARN TO ASK IN ENGLISH THAT IS FUCKIN UNDERSTANDABLE SO SOMEONE CAN GUIDE YOU ABOUT WHAT YOU SHOULD SEARCH

OH FUCKIN GAWD IM GONNA THROW MY LAPTOP OUT OF THE WINDOW

Admin work, because its all manual:

- Each new project has to fill out an Excel tab in a workbook, with a list of all the major tasks and who is responsible. This then needs to be used to create a Gantt chart, manually, in the same tab, showing in what month a task starts and ends.

- Every month we have to manually enter status updates into a powerpoint slide on a shared deck. Which has a collision at least once per month.

- Once a quarter we need to do something similar as the powerpoint slides, but into a word doc instead.

- Once a week we need to track our time on projects in a tool that can't be integrated with (no API or anything). Meaning we can't link up a ticket tracking system to it, so again, all manual.

- Once every 6 months a new round of research funding opens up and we write proposals. The status for which are tracked in another Excel spreadsheet, manually, once a week until the deadline.

- The instructions for what to do with the proposals are so vague and badly documented that there is an unwritten rule, that for the first time you will have to ask a bunch of questions to the project manager. This is accepted by everyone and its just the done thing.

- Everything is stored in a dropbox style system, which has become so cluttered I can only find resources by saving the links sent out previously.

- Some of these updates / reports also get a 1 hour meeting for everyone to stand up and read out what they've entered.

- From time to time random things will need to be reported on to the higher ups (how many publications, research papers, patents, times and dates etc.). Again rather than a tool, a new Excel spreadsheet is whipped up and emailed to everyone on the team. Whoever sent it out, then has to merge the 20+ copies into 1 doc.

- Some of the staff (mostly the devs), use a ticket tracking system to keep track of everything. Management refuse to use it to track the things they need. Instead we have to copy paste from it into the word docs, powerpoint, excel etc.

- By far the most annoying. Management force all the above as they need the info for finance, accounting, legal etc etc. So we have to do it, but whenever there is a question from legal, management send the question to us. So despite having documented every facet of everything imaginable, it all gets ignored in favour of endless emails.

I once tried to to put an end to all of this madness by proposing the use of a ticket tracking system, and then building reporting tools on top of it.

... I was told that it "wasn't appropriate". Still don't know what that means.

Would the web be better off, if there was zero frontend scripting? There would be HTML5 video/audio, but zero client side JS.

Browsers wouldn't understand script tags, they wouldn't have javascript engines, and they wouldn't have to worry about new standards and deprecations.

Browsers would be MUCH more secure, and use way less memory and CPU resources.

What would we really be missing?

If you build less bloated pages, you would not really need ajax calls, page reloads would be cheap. Animated menus do not add anything functionally, and could be done using css as well. Complicated webapps... well maybe those should just be desktop/mobile apps.

Pages would contain less annoying elements, no tracking or crypto mining scripts, no mouse tracking, no exploitative spam alerts.

Why don't we just deprecate JS in the browser, completely?

I think it would be worth it.

!rant

If you haven't checked it out yet, all devs need Devdocs.io + Station

Hands down the most useful resources I've ever come across.

This one site and tool saves me so many chrome tabs it's worth its weight in gold.

Combined with Station (getstation.com) I've cut my RAM usage down by 1/3 overall.

When you have PS CC2018 and Visual Studio 2017 running on a netbook it's helpful to squeeze every little bit.

College can be one of the worst investments for an IT career ever.

I've been in university for the past 3 years and my views on higher education have radically changed from positive to mostly cynical.

This is an extremely polarizing topic, some say "your college is shite", "#notall", "you complain too much", and to all of you I am glad you are happy with your expensive toilet paper and feel like your dick just grew an inch longer, what I'll be talking about is my personal experience and you may make of it what you wish. I'm not addressing the best ivy-league Unis those are a whole other topic, I'll talk about average Unis for average Joes like me.

Higher education has been the golden ticket for countless generations, you know it, your parents believe in it and your grandparents lived it. But things are not like they used to be, higher education is a failing business model that will soon burst, it used to be simple, good grades + good college + nice title = happy life.

Sounds good? Well fuck you because the career paths that still work like that are limited, like less than 4.

The above is specially true in IT where shit moves so fast and furious if you get distracted for just a second you get Paul Walkered out of the Valley; companies don't want you to serve your best anymore, they want grunt work for the most part and grunts with inferiority complex to manage those grunts and ship the rest to India (or Mexico) at best startups hire the best problem solvers they can get because they need quality rather than quantity.

Does Uni prepare you for that? Well...no, the industry changes so much they can't even follow up on what it requires and ends up creating lousy study programs then tells you to invest $200k+ in "your future" for you to sweat your ass off on unproductive tasks to then get out and be struck by jobs that ask for knowledge you hadn't even heard off.

Remember those nights you wasted drawing ER diagrams while that other shmuck followed tutorials on react? Well he's your boss now, but don't worry you will wear your tired eyes, caffeine saturated breath and overweight with pride while holding your empty title, don't get me wrong I've indulged in some rough play too but I have noticed that 3 months giving a project my heart and soul teaches me more than 6 months of painstakingly pleasing professors with big egos.

And the soon to be graduates, my God...you have the ones that are there for the lulz, the nerds that beat their ass off to sustain a scholarship they'll have to pay back with interests and the ones that just hope for the best. The last two of the list are the ones I really feel bad for, the nerds will beat themselves over and over to comply with teacher demands not noticing they are about to graduate still versioning on .zip and drive, the latter feel something's wrong but they have no chances if there isn't a teacher to mentor them.

And what pisses me off even more is the typical answers to these issues "you NEED the title" and "you need to be self taught". First of all bitch how many times have we heard, seen and experienced the rejection for being overqualified? The market is saturated with titles, so much so they have become meaningless, IT companies now hire on an experience, economical and likeability basis. Worse, you tell me I need to be self taught, fucker I've been self taught for years why would I travel 10km a day for you to give me 0 new insights, slacking in my face or do what my dog does when I program (stare at me) and that's just on the days you decide to attend!

But not everything is bad, college does give you three things: networking, some good teachers and expensive dead tree remnants, is it worth the price tag, not really, not if you don't need it.

My broken family is not one of resources and even tho I had an 80% scholarship at the second best uni of my country I decided I didn't need the 10+ year debt for not sleeping 4 years, I decided to go to the 3rd in the list which is state funded; as for that decision it worked out as I'm paying most of everything now and through my BS I've noticed all of the above, I've visited 4 universities in my country and 4 abroad and even tho they have better everything abroad it still doesn't justify some of the prices.

If you don't feel like I do and you are happy, I'm happy for you. My rant is about my personal experience which is kind of in the context of IT higher education in the last ~8 years.

Just letting some steam off and not regretting most of my decisions.

The solution for this one isn't nearly as amusing as the journey.

I was working for one of the largest retailers in NA as an architect. Said retailer had over a thousand big box stores, IT maintenance budget of $200M/year. The kind of place that just reeks of waste and mismanagement at every level.

They had installed a system to distribute training and instructional videos to every store, as well as recorded daily broadcasts to all store employees as a way of reducing management time spend with employees in the morning. This system had cost a cool 400M USD, not including labor and upgrades for round 1. Round 2 was another 100M to add a storage buffer to each store because they'd failed to account for the fact that their internet connections at the store and the outbound pipe from the DC wasn't capable of running the public facing e-commerce and streaming all the video data to every store in realtime. Typical massive enterprise clusterfuck.

Then security gets involved. Each device at stores had a different address on a private megawan. The stores didn't generally phone home, home phoned them as an access control measure; stores calling the DC was verboten. This presented an obvious problem for the video system because it needed to pull updates.

The brilliant Infosys resources had a bright idea to solve this problem:

- Treat each device IP as an access key for that device (avg 15 per store per store).
- Verify the request ip, then issue a redirect with ANOTHER ip unique to that device that the firewall would ingress only to the video subnet
- Do it all with the F5

A few months later, the networking team comes back and announces that after months of work and 10s of people years they can't implement the solution because iRules have a size limit and they would need more than 60,000 lines or 15,000 rules to implement it. Sad trombones all around.

Then, a wild DBA appears, steps up to the plate and says he can solve the problem with the power of ORACLE! Few months later he comes back with some absolutely batshit solution that stored the individual octets of an IPV4, multiple nested queries to the same table to emulate subnet masking through some temp table spanning voodoo. Time to complete: 2-4 minutes per request. He too eventually gives up the fight, sort of, in that backhanded way DBAs tend to do everything. I wish I would have paid more attention to that abortion because the rationale and its mechanics were just staggeringly rube goldberg and should have been documented for posterity.

So I catch wind of this sitting in a CAB meeting. I hear them talking about how there's "no way to solve this problem, it's too complex, we're going to need a lot more databases to handle this." I tune in and gather all it really needs to do, since the ingress firewall is handling the origin IP checks, is convert the request IP to video ingress IP, 302 and call it a day.

While they're all grandstanding and pontificating, I fire up visual studio and:

- write a method that encodes the incoming request IP into a single uint32
- write an http module that keeps an in-memory dictionary of uint32,string for the request, response, converts the request ip and 302s the call with blackhole support
- convert all the mappings in the spreadsheet attached to the meetings into a csv, dump to disk
- write a wpf application to allow for easily managing the IP database in the short term
- deploy the solution one of our stage boxes
- add a TODO to eventually move this to a database

All this took about 5 minutes. I interrupt their conversation to ask them to retarget their test to the port I exposed on the stage box. Then watch them stare in stunned silence as the crow grows cold.

According to a friend who still works there, that code is still running in production on a single node to this day. And still running on the same static file database.

#TheValueOfEngineers

This rant is particularly directed at web designers, front-end developers. If you match that, please do take a few minutes to read it, and read it once again.

Web 2.0. It's something that I hate. Particularly because the directive amongst webdesigners seems to be "client has plenty of resources anyway, and if they don't, they'll buy more anyway". I'd like to debunk that with an analogy that I've been thinking about for a while.

I've got one server in my home, with 8GB of RAM, 4 cores and ~4TB of storage. On it I'm running Proxmox, which is currently using about 4GB of RAM for about a dozen VM's and LXC containers. The VM's take the most RAM by far, while the LXC's are just glorified chroots (which nonetheless I find very intriguing due to their ability to run unprivileged). Average LXC takes just 60MB RAM, the amount for an init, the shell and the service(s) running in this LXC. Just like a chroot, but better.

On that host I expect to be able to run about 20-30 guests at this rate. On 4 cores and 8GB RAM. More extensive migration to LXC will improve this number over time. However, I'd like to go further. Once I've been able to build a Linux which was just a kernel and busybox, backed by the musl C library. The thing consumed only 13MB of RAM, which was a VM with its whole 13MB of RAM consumption being dedicated entirely to the kernel. I could probably optimize it further with modularization, but at the time I didn't due to its experimental nature. On a chroot, the kernel of the host is used, meaning that said setup in a chroot would border near the kB's of RAM consumption. The busybox shell would be its most important RAM consumer, which is negligible.

I don't want to settle with 20-30 VM's. I want to settle with hundreds or even thousands of LXC's on 8GB of RAM, as I've seen first-hand with my own builds that it's possible. That's something that's very important in webdesign. Browsers aren't all that different. More often than not, your website will share its resources with about 50-100 other tabs, because users forget to close their old tabs, are power users, looking things up on Stack Overflow, or whatever. Therefore that 8GB of RAM now reduces itself to about 80MB only. And then you've got modern web browsers which allocate their own process for each tab (at a certain amount, it seems to be limited at about 20-30 processes, but still).. and all of its memory required to render yours is duplicated into your designated 80MB. Let's say that 10MB is available for the website at most. This is a very liberal amount for a webserver to deal with per request, so let's stick with that, although in reality it'd probably be less.

10MB, the available RAM for the website you're trying to show. Of course, the total RAM of the user is comparatively huge, but your own chunk is much smaller than that. Optimization is key. Does your website really need that amount? In third-world countries where the internet bandwidth is still in the order of kB/s, 10MB is *very* liberal. Back in 2014 when I got into technology and webdesign, there was this rule of thumb that 7 seconds is usually when visitors click away. That'd translate into.. let's say, 10kB/s for third-world countries? 7 seconds makes that 70kB of available network bandwidth.

Web 2.0, taking 30+ seconds to load a web page, even on a broadband connection? Totally ridiculous. Make your website as fast as it can be, after all you're playing along with 50-100 other tabs. The faster, the better. The more lightweight, the better. If at all possible, please pursue this goal and make the Web a better place. Efficiency matters.

So I had a fun week.

It started off with my boss replying to a co-workers email where he sent his new bank account, saying he doesn't need it untill we close off some baddly planned projects, meaning no paycheck.

Needless to say we were working night and days including weekends on it and put our best into it.

For the next part I need to explain a little background. We have this old legacy system I'm working with for the past 3 years. I keet raising the red flag we need a new one. Nothing happened. So every time I worked with it I kept thinking how to improve the parts. Almost two years went into thinking and planning the new system untill I got a green light. It was most satisfying - the day I got to build something good and awesome. I drew all the data structures, laid out the foundations and started building ontop of it. It was amazing and I was really proud of it. Then suddendly client wanted to see something and the decision was made we threw it together quickly with the old legacy system. It was on hold 'till then due to work overload.

Boss wrote me this week if I can put the project from git on a server, where he out sourced the completition into India where they will finish it. On thr question if they can't work on git, he replied: "should they?" -.-

To top it all up, I got a notice at the end of the week if I don't fill his shit time tracking system (that takes me one hour/day to insert all entries) by monday he'll deduct a sizable portion of my paycheck.

I AM WORKING FOR YOU ALL THE FUCKING TIME BECAUSE YOU LACK RESOURCES AND I THOUGHT A TEAM STICKS TOGETHER AND SAVES EACH OTHERS ASS! I DONT HAVE TIME TO ENTER YOUR FUCKING STUPID TIME ENTRIES IN YOUR FUCKING BUGGED SYSTEM EACH DAY ON TASKS THAT DON'T EVEN EXIST BITCH! MAKE IT BETTER FIRST!! OH! AND NO ONE IS MORE QUALIFIED TO FINISH THAT PROJECT THAN ME, I POURED MY FUCKING HEART INTO IT YOU PRICK!

woah.

A tip to tech folks from my personal xp.

If you fuck up and make an impacting mistake in your company, like taking PROD down, noone is going to fire you on spot. Assign some more mandatory trainings - maybe. So you'd be more careful next time.

See, it's not worth getting rid of someone who made a mistake. You should be seated down and insisted to fix it. If you don't - then they might consider firing it. If you do fix it [with help or alone] - you become a more valuable asset to the company as you prove you are responsible for your actions and you take it seriously. You show that you can clean up your own shit and you don't need a babysiter next to you.

If you simply make a mistake and they replace you with someone else, that someone else is likely to be unaware of your mistakes and is doomed to repeat them. It's just bad for business.

Ofc if you making mistakes becomes a tendency rather than an exception, it's also a red flag for the business.

Don't get too laxed! And always answer for your shit. Never hide a fuckup - always alarm about it asap so that corrective actions could be taken by respective organs of the company while you are fixing it.
Come up with an action plan, announce it. Estimate resources you need [like help from others] - announce that too. Update concerned parties every half an hour or so about the status. If you find you need anything else while fixing it or you come across some blockers/delays/change of impact - always announce asap. Do avoid false alarms and disinformation.

// inspired by someone's rant today

Just thought I'd share my current project: Taking an old ISA sound card I got off eBay and wiring it up to an Arduino to control its OPL3 synth from a MIDI keyboard. I have it mostly working now.

No intention to play audio samples, so I've not bothered with any of the DMA stuff - just MIDI (MPU-401 UART) and OPL3.

It has involved learning the pinout of the ISA bus connectors, figuring out which ones are actually used for this card, ignoring the standards a little (hello, amplifier chip that is wired up to the +12V line but which still happily works at +5V...)

Most of the wires going to it are for each bit of the 16-bit address and 8-bit data. Using a couple of shift registers for the address, and a universal shift register for the data. Wrote some fairly primitive ISA bus read/write code, but it was really slow. Eventually found out about SPI and re-wrote the code to use that and it became very fast. Had trouble with some timings, fixed those.

The card is an ISA Plug and Play card, meaning before I could use it I had to tell it what resources to use. Linux driver code and some reverse-engineering of the official Windows/DOS drivers got me past this stage.

Wired up IRQ 5 to an Arduino interrupt to deal with incoming MIDI data, with a routine that buffers it. Ran into trouble with the interrupt happening during I/O and needing to do some I/O inside the handler and had to set a flag to decide whether to disable/re-enable interrupts during I/O.

It looks like total chaos, but the various wires going across the breadboard are mainly to make it easier to deal with the 16-bit address and 8-bit data lines. The LEDs were initially used to check what addresses/data were being sent, but now only one of them is connected and indicates when the interrupt handler is executing.

There's still a lot to do after that though - MIDI and OPL3 are two completely different things so I had to write some code to manage the different "channels" of the OPL3 chip. I have it playing multiple notes at the same time but need to make it able to control the various settings over MIDI. Eventually I might add some physical controls to it and get a PCB made.

The fun part is, I only vaguely know what I'm doing with the electronics side of this. I didn't know what a "shift register" was before this project, nor anything about the workings of the ISA bus. I knew a bit about MIDI (both the protocol and generally how the MPU-401 UART works) along with the operation of a sound card from a driver/software perspective, but everything else is pretty new to me.

As a useful little extra, I made some "fake" components that I can build the software against on a PC, to run some tests before uploading it to the Arduino (mostly just prints out the addresses it is going to try and write to).

I've been locked in a room with another dev for 2 days working like insane to remake a outdated crm system. Had to inform the department lead that the deadline isn't possible and we need another week. Got questioned about what we had been doing the past days, redesigned the database, migrated data, frontend etc. Boss goes "that's all you manager in 2 days?" We went in with 2 slides and had to design and plan everything from scratch.
I lost count of how many rounds and added complexity happened in 2 days when Customer came by. Now there is going to be a board meeting with PM as he complains that the project is taking too many resources and should be killed. I invited myself to that meeting to defend the work done. Hold my laptop and watch this.

Today is sprint demo day. As usual I'm only half paying attention since being a Platform Engineer, my work is always technically being "demoed" (shit's running ain't it? There you go, enjoy the EC2 instances.)

One team presents a new thing they built. I'm still half paying attention, half playing Rocket League on another monitor.

Then someone says

"We're storing in prod-db-3"

They have my curiosity.

"Storing x amount of data at y rate"

They now have my attention. I speak up "Do you have a plan to drop data after a certain period of time?"

They don't. I reply "Okay, then your new feature only has about 2 months to live before you exhaust the disk on prod-db-3 and we need to add more storage"

I am asked if we can add more storage preemptively.

"Sure, I say." I then direct my attention to the VP "{VP} I'll make the change request to approve the spend for additional volume on prod-db-3"

VP immediately balks and asks why this wasn't considered before. I calmly reply "I'm not sure. This is the first time I'm learning of this new feature even coming to life. Had anyone consulted with the Platform team we'd have made sure the storage availability was there."

VP asks product guy what happened.

"We didn't think we'd need platform resources for this so we never reached out for anything".

I calmly mute myself, turn my camera back off and go back to Rocket League as the VP goes off about planning and collaboration.

"CT we'll reach out to you next week about getting this all done"

*unmute, camera stays off* "Sounds good" *clears ball*

*boss spends £30000 pounds on an outside team to do, essentially, nothing* "You developers just don't understand business, we need to get products out the door not waste time building them properly. You're wasting company resources, we're out of money and it's your fault". Cool....

➡️You Are Not A Software Developer⬅️

When I became a developer, I thought that my job is to write software. When my customer had a problem, I was ready to write software that solves that problem. I was taught to write software.

But what customers need is not software. They need a solution to their problem. Your job is to find the most cost-effective solution, what software often is not.

According to the universal law of software development, more code leads to more bugs:

e = mc²

Or

errors = (more code)²

The number of bugs grows with the amount of code. You have to prioritize, reproduce and fix bugs.

The more code you write, the more your team and the team after it has to maintain. Even if you split the system into micro services, the complexity remains.

Writing well-tested, clean code takes a lot of time. When you’re writing code, other important work is idle. The work that prevents your company from becoming rich.

A for-profit company wants to make money and reduce expenses. Then the company hires you to solve problems that prevent it from becoming rich. Confused by your job title, you take their money and turn it into expensive software.

But business has nothing to do about software. Even software business is not about software. Business is about making money.

Your job is to understand how the company is making money, help make more money and reduce expenses. Once you know that, you will become the most valuable asset in the company.

Stop viewing yourself as a software developer. You are a money maker.

Think about how to save and make money for your customers.

Find the most annoying problem and fix it:

▶️Is adding a new feature too costly? Solve the problem manually.
▶️Is testing slow? Become a tester.
▶️Is hiring not going well? Speak at a meetup and advertise your company.
▶️Is your team not productive enough? Bring them coffee.

Your job title doesn’t matter. Ego doesn’t matter either.

Titles and roles are distracting us from what matters to our customers – money.💸

You are a money maker. Thinking as a money maker can help choose the next skill for development. For example:

Serverless: pay only for resources you consume, spend less time on capacity planning = 💰

Machine Learning: get rid of manual decision-making = 💰

TDD: shorter feedback cycle, fewer bugs = 💰

Soft Skills: inspire teammates, so they are more productive and happy = 💰

If you don’t know what to learn next — answer a simple question:

What skills can help my company make more money and reduce expenses?

Very unlikely it’s another web framework written in JavaScript.

Article by Eduards Sizovs
Sizovs.net

TM: Hey, do you have a moment?

Me: not really, I'm already overtime and have enough work for the whole year.

TM: Yeah, we know. Just a quick meeting to discuss something awkward.

Me: Hmkay.

...

Later that day:

TM: Yeah. To make it quick - we're confused and bit dissatisfied with how project X turned out. The staging server is blazing fast, but the devs machines seem to be extremely slow... Some devs complained.

Me: No wonder. I said from the beginning that the devs shouldn't do X and Y, and that the dev machines need to be redone after staging is done - as we need to gather hands on experience first, cause no one could explain to me what resources the project actually needed.

TM: Oh. I wasn't aware of that.

Me: I guessed so. You were on vacation at the beginning and I didn't had the time to lead another team...

TM: Yeah... So the dev machines get replaced?

Me: They _could_ be replaced, but the devs would need to reset up their environment, as I and won't transfer the environment of the dev user.

TM: Ah... So they would have to retransfer their personal modifications, if they made any?

Me: Yes. As always, the basic setup just provides the necessary services, settings etc. - stuff like remote IDE settings on the machine, configuration etc is left out and we don't transfer it as it is usually too much of a hassle and risky, as every dev does have his / her own preferences, and we don't want to support every possible configuration out there.

TM: Just out of curiosity... Staging was ready like... Last year?

Me: Beginning of December, yes.

TM: Sigh.

Me: The jolly of having a kinder garten full of toys that no kid wants to clean up...

TM: No comment. The kinder garten Kids might make me a Pinata otherwise.

Me: If only they'd fill us with chocolate first instead of just beating us.

...

Tales of lazy devs, to be continued...

Enjoying the college life to the fullest was the mindset of the confident boy, who now burns the midnight oil to cope up with world and give himself a proud future.

Is this a story of some successful person, who has achieved a lot in his life?

No, it is the story of the guy who lost all his hopes of future after spending the very first month in his college.

The first month was enough to perceive the reality of the domain I got myself let into. It was enough for someone, who didn’t even knew what programming languages are, to realize how left behind is he from the people around him.

Being from a private college which hardly anyone recognizes, expecting them to prepare me to stand out lone would be foolishness. I took my first step and started learning my very first programming language , Python.

I met some people with similar interest .We discussed, we exchanged resources, we used to talk to seniors to guide us. And yes, we were guided.

There were many bad days. Days which made me regret about starting late. Many a times I myself confirmed me as useless and some other time people did. The good thing is I never stopped , and improved myself with each day.

And now, after spending more than a year in the same college, I look at the things I have learnt. Today I can develop decent websites, can train neural networks, can make me stand in good position in coding platforms.

All you need is to take a step.I may not be the best, but I am definitely better than what I was yesterday.

If you have started something, then concentrate on finishing it.

Sometimes I feel like my job is just babysitting my coworkers. I need to find a way to teach them how to think for themselves.

I'm not a senior dev but I am the one my coworkers turn to for help. I like helping (even if it's annoying some times), so I'm thinking about embracing the mentor role in my team. My plan for now is to stop giving the answers right away (which I usually do to get back to my work) and instead try to guide my coworkers into figuring out the issue themselves. This will take more of my time of course and will require I practice my patience in a possibly stressful environment (depending on how close deadlines are), but I'm hoping that it'll produce better coworkers (one can dream, at least).

Do any of you know of any good reading resources about mentoring or becoming a mentor, specifically in tech/development?

So I'm back from vacation! It's my first day back, and I'm feeling refreshed and chipper, and motivated to get a bunch of things done quickly so I can slack off a bit later. It's a great plan.

First up: I need to finish up tiny thing from my previous ticket -- I had overlooked it in the description before. (I couldn't test this feature [push notifications] locally so I left it to QA to test while I was gone.)

It amounted to changing how we pull a due date out of the DB; some merchants use X, a couple use Y. Instead of hardcoding them, it would use a setting that admins can update on the fly.

Several methods deep, the current due date gets pulled indirectly from another class, so it's non-trivial to update; I start working through it.

But wait, if we're displaying a due date that differs from the date we're actually using internally, that's legit bad. So I investigate if I need to update the internals, too.

After awhile, I start to make lunch. I ask my boss if it's display-only (best case) and... no response. More investigating.

I start to make a late lunch. A wild sickness appears! Rush to bathroom; lose two turns.

I come back and get distracted by more investigating. I start to make an early dinner... and end up making dinner for my monster instead.

Boss responds, tells me it's just for display (yay!) and that we should use <macro resource feature> instead.

I talk to Mr. Product about which macros I should add; he doesn't respond.

I go back to making lunch-turn-dinner for myself; monster comes back and he's still hungry (as he never asks for more), so I make him dinner.

I check Slack again; Mr. Product still hasn't responded. I go back to making dinner.

Most of the way through cooking, I get a notification! Product says he's talking it through with my boss, who will update me on it. Okay fine. I finish making dinner and go eat.

No response from boss; I start looking through my next ticket.

No response from boss. I ping him and ask for an update, and he says "What are you talking about?" Apparently product never talked to bossmang =/ I ask him about the resources, and he says there's no need to create any more as the one I need already exists! Yay!

So my feature went from a large, complex refactor all the way down to a -1+2 diff. That's freaking amazing, and it only took the entire day!

I run the related specs, which take forever, then commit and push.

Push rejected; pull first! Fair, I have been gone for two weeks. I pull, and git complains about my .gitignore and some local changes. fine, whatever. Except I forgot I had my .gitignore ignored (skipped worktree). Finally figure that out, clean up my tree, and merge.

Time to run the specs again! Gems are out of date. Okay, I go run `bundle install` and ... Ruby is no longer installed? Turns out one of the changes was an upgrade to Ruby 2.5.8.

Alright, I run `rvm use ruby-2.5.8` and.... rvm: command not found. What. I inspect the errors from before and... ah! Someone's brain fell out and they installed rbenv instead of the expected rvm on my mac. Fine, time to figure it out. `rbenv which ruby`; error. `rbenv install --list`; skyscraper-long list that contains bloody everything EXCEPT 2.5.8! Literally 2.5 through 2.5.7 and then 2.6.0-dev. asjdfklasdjf

Then I remember before I left people on Slack made a big deal about upgrading Ruby, so I go looking. Dummy me forgot about the search feature for a painful ten minutes. :( Search found the upgrade instructions right away, ofc. I follow them, and... each step takes freaking forever. Meanwhile my children are having a yelling duet in the immediate background, punctuated with screams and banging toys on furniture.

Eventually (seriously like twenty-five minutes later) I make it through the list. I cd into my project directory and... I get an error message and I'm not in the project directory? what. Oh, it's a zsh thing. k, I work around that, and try to run my specs. Fail.

I need to update my gems; k. `bundle install` and... twenty minutes later... all done.

I go to run my specs and... RubyMine reports I'm using 2.5.4 instead of 2.5.8? That can't be right. `ruby --version` reports 2.5.8; `rbenv version` reports 2.5.8? Fuck it, I've fought with this long enough. Restarting fixes everything, right? So I restart. when my mac comes back to life, I try again; same issue. After fighting for another ten minutes, I find a version toggle in RubyMine's settings, and update it to 2.5.8. It indexes for five minutes. ugh.

Also! After the restart, this company-installed surveillance "security" runs and lags my computer to hell. Highest spec MacBook Pro and it takes 2-5 seconds just to switch between desktops!

I run specs again. Hey look! Missing dependency: no execjs. I can't run the specs.

Fuck. This. I'll just push and let the CI run specs for me.

I just don't care anymore. It's now 8pm and I've spent the past 11 hours on a -1+2 diff!

What a great first day back! Everything is just the way I left it.

Taking IT classes in college. The school bought us all lynda and office365 accounts but we can't use them because the classroom's network has been severed from the Active Directory server that holds our credentials. Because "hackers." (The non-IT classrooms don't have this problem, but they also don't need lynda accounts. What gives?)

So, I got bored, and irritated, so I decided to see just how secure the classroom really was.

It wasn't.

So I created a text file with the following rant and put it on the desktop of the "locked" admin account. Cheers. :)

1. don't make a show of "beefing up security" because that only makes people curious.
I'm referring of course to isolating the network. This wouldn't be a problem except:

2. don't restrict the good guys. only the bad guys.
I can't access resources for THIS CLASS that I use in THIS CLASS. That's a hassle.
It also gives me legitimate motivation to try to break your security.

3. don't secure it if you don't care. that is ALSO a hassle.
I know you don't care because you left secure boot off, no BIOS password, and nothing
stopping someone from using a different OS with fewer restrictions, or USB tethering,
or some sort malware, probably, in addition to security practices that are
wildly inconsistent, which leads me to the final and largest grievance:

4. don't give admin priveledges to an account without a password.

seriously. why would you do this? I don't understand.
you at least bothered to secure the accounts that don't even matter,
albeit with weak and publicly known passwords (that are the same on all machines),
but then you went and left the LEAST secure account with the MOST priveledges?
I could understand if it were just a single-user machine. Auto login as admin.
Lots of people do that and have a reason for it. But... no. I just... why?

anyway, don't worry, all I did was install python so I could play with scripting
during class. if that bothers you, trust me, you have much bigger problems.

I mean you no malice. just trying to help.

For real. Don't kick me out of school for being helpful. That would be unproductive.
Plus, maybe I'd be a good candidate for your cybersec track. haven't decided yet.

-- a guy who isn't very good at this and didn't have to be
have a nice day <3

oh, and I fixed the clock. you're welcome.

I rewrote my resume. It is getting shorter and shorter. Scary.

But I was thinking, that during interviews, I never get to ask the important questions. Like, I do need to ask a few things that are important for me. Those that are not written in their websites, and they will do their best to hide.

So I came up with a list of questions:

1. Do you pay for overtime work? what is the basis of pay? hours or work-module? how realistic are the work-modules?
2. Have you ever had issues with employees from minority groups?
3. How do you address employee's professional concerns? for example, about technological debt.
4. what's the policy for meeting and daily interruptions during brain-work? Are people ever forced to participate in meetings that could be summed up in emails? what's the company policy for initiating a meeting?
5. Who designs the software? Are the requirements always non-negotiable? do the direct developers have a say in design matters?
6. How close are job requirements (as advertised) to actual tasks I need to perform?
7. What's the company policy for motivating the employees?
8. How does the company deal with mental health issues? is it acceptable for people to take leaves due to mental health issues? Has anyone ever done it?
9. How does the company deal with individual needs for working methods and space? Specifically, how does that apply to meetings? Do you have company-wide meetings? How often are they? What's the impact on productivity? Can employees not participate? Do they have to have an excuse to not participate?
10. Do developers get to develop their skills during worktime often? Or is it a "do it in your own free time" kind of thing? Are there any resources available to those who want to develop their skills further? Is it included in the career planning and employee performance review?
11. Assume I work for your company for a year. What are the benefits I can potentially gain in a year from working here, aside from adding a line of work experience to my resume?
12. Does the company provide any form of free feminine hygiene products in the bathroom?

Any questions I should add?

Am I really unlucky, or are juniors these days all lazy af and such pampered babies that need hand holding all the time?
So back when I was a junior, when I wanted to learn something new, I would ask for some pointers from my seniors, could be an article, a video or even a book. From there I would look up further knowledge, play with the idea in my machine. If I couldn't understand something, or if I needed a better explanation of something, I would go back to my senior, but it was really rare.
Then comes this modern day, I'm the senior now and I'm in charge of mentoring a bunch of kids, who would treat me like their personal chatgpt. "Hey Junior #0, this is something you may want to read to help your next ticket, let me know if you have difficulty". Next day junior #0 would come back and say "I don't understand, the article mentioned X but I don't know how to do X. Can you show me how to do X?". Bro, no one knows how to do X after being born, just google "how to do X" and it gives you the fucking answer. Why the fuck do you have to circle back to me because of this. Junior #1 would refuse to read any articles longer than 250 words, and require constant 1-1 meetings to give him personal lectures. Dude this is not a class room, grow the fuck up! Junior #3 would write the messiest code possible despite my efforts to introduce tons of resources, then complain "why I'm still junior, how do I grow". Bro maybe if you learned half of what I sent you, you would have gotten promote by now. Fucking lazy kids these days!
Oh I can't fire these juniors. Top management was very clear that "we don't have budget to hire other devs for you, it's your responsibility to train them better".

It seems possible to need 1000x times more resources on a game for Linux/Mac than for Windows.
Windows has to be that efficient. 😂
(Typical typo)

I’m trying to add digit separators to a few amount fields. There’s actually three tickets to do this in various places, and I’m working on the last of them.

I had a nightmare debugging session earlier where literally everything would 404 unless I navigated through the site in a very roundabout way. I never did figure out the cause, but I found a viable workaround. Basically: the house doesn’t exist if you use the front door, but it’s fine if you go through the garden gate, around the back, and crawl in through the side window. After hours of debugging I eventually discovered that if I unlocked the front door with a different key, everything was fine… but nobody else has this problem?

Whatever.
Onto the problem at hand!

I’m trying to add digit separators to some values. I found a way to navigate to the page in question (more difficult than it sounds), and … I don’t know what view is rendering the page. Or what controller. Or how it generates its text.

The URL is encrypted, so I get no clues there. (Which was lead dev’s solution to having scrapeable IDs instead of just, you know, fixing them). The encryption also happens in middleware, so it’s a nightmare to work through. And it’s by the lead dev, so the code is fucking atrocious.

The view… could be one of many, and I don’t even know where they are. Or what layout. Or what partials go into building it.

All of the text on the page are “resources” — think named translations that support plus nested macros. I don’t know their names, and the bits of text I can search for are used fucking everywhere. “Confirmation number” (the most unique of them) turns up 79 matches. “Fee” showed up in 8310 places before my editor gave up looking. Really.

The table displaying the data, which is what I actually care about, isn’t built in JS or markup, but is likely a resource that goes through heavy processing. It gets generated in a controller somewhere (I don’t know the resource name so I can’t find it), and passed through several layers of “dynamic form” abstraction, eventually turned into markup, and rendered as a partial template. At least, that’s how it worked in the previous ticket. I found a resource that looks right, and there’s only the one. I found the nested macros it uses for the amount and total, and added the separators there… only to find that it doesn’t work.

Fucking dead end.

And i have absolutely nothing else to go on.

Page title? “Show”
URL? /~LiolV8N8KrIgaozEgLv93s…
Text? All from macros with unknown names. Can’t really search for it without considerable effort.
Table? Doesn’t work.
Text in the table? doesn’t turn up anything new.
Legal agreement? There are multiple, used in many places, generates them dynamically via (of course) resources, and even looking through the method usages, doesn’t narrow it down very much.

Just.
What the fuck?
Why does this need to be so fucking complicated?

And what genius decided “$100000.00” doesn’t need separators? Right, the lot of them because separators aren’t used ANYWHERE but in code I authored. Like, really? This is fintech. You’d think they would be ubiquitous.

And the sheer amount of abstraction?
Stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid.

Alright, this my fucking rant right here. Distraction? This whole company is a distraction! Boss decided to throw us all in an open work environment doing jobs that require careful concentration. Straight outta college I'm getting handed vague ideas, (make a desktop app that helps our customers put data on the internet, make an iPhone app) with out so much as an inkling of what technologies to use, just make it work.
Ok I will but when you hit a roadblock with very little resources to draw in it's hard to stay focused.
On top of that since I worked in support for a year I'm our senior support person! But sometimes support just doesn't use their brains and I'm using my time to solve very basic problems.
That brings me to my next point, the goddamn piece of shit that is our telephone. Fuck that thing when it rings it's never good. Moreover, since I don't want to get roasted for not being responsive I have the motherfucker forward to my personal cell. So I answer every fucking call and I get so many spam calls!
Not to mention I'm mainly running the hardware show around here. Shits broke I'm the one fixing it. Need new shit I'm putting the order together.
Tried to get a new guy to be the sys admin, ordered a 6th gen board with a 7th gen proc, had to pull 3 machines apart to get that sorted. Then he left bc family issues, and has been gone for weeks.
The other devs are also slam up busy, and the main product is about 15 people's piss on a plate of garb age spaghetti. (I got a lot of shit going on but at least I'm the only one pissing in my spaghetti) it's a constant run around if who does what with a code first plan later mentality causing confusion and delay.
Nobody wants to help anybody because they are also annoyed with this setup and are getting bitched at by customers or management.
Sales is mostly composed of a bunch of crackhead yes men and women who just want a commission and only half know the shit we sell and have sold 15 new features that had not been discussed. But management always says make it happen. In what priority? It's all a priority they say! Wtf.
So yea, then it brings me to me, dealing with this much chaos at work makes it seem like a high amount of chaos in my life is normal. I'm just now learning to control this.
I've had to do a lot of growing up as a person and as a developer. I've went from being the most junior to about the 3rd most seniors and I've no doubt my efforts have contributed to the growth of the company.
I'm a big believer in coding flow, and that it takes at least 15 mins to get in that flow and about 5 seconds to break it. There is no do not disturb on the company chat, everything always on fire it seems.
So fuck a lot of this, but I've done the research and where I'm at is the best opportunity in a 100 mile radius. So I am thankful for this job. Plus I usually win the horror story contest.

So TL;DR the biggest distraction is every fucking thing in this god forsaken place.

The worst boss and human being so far, still wondering how he keeps the company afloat. This was my first longterm developer job almost a decade ago and I was a student at that time. The application was an outlook plug in for a document management system.

Scene 1:
Boss: The processing is too slow. Make it faster.
Me: After analysis and profiling I can prove that the core (developed in VB6 by a physicist and autoconverted to VB.NET) is the bottleneck.
Boss: I don't care. Make it faster and don't touch the core.

Scene 2:
Boss: I want the app to behave in that way.
Me: This is not what we specified previously. Look here. Nonetheless, I would have to rewrite half of the plugin. Mind that it is an outlook plug in and we are restricted by outlook. If you want that, it would take XX days and we do not have enough time until release.
Boss: I don't care. Do it. And the deadline stays as it is.
Boss 2 weeks later: I don't like it.

Scene 3:
Me: To release in time I need more resources. I need at least one tester and another developer would be a huge plus. Also, I need a second PC for testing.
Boss: No.
2 weeks later:
Boss: why does it not work properly in outlook 2010? Didn't you test it?
Me: I could not. I have only outlook 2007. I asked for more resources and did not get them.
Boss: it's your fault. Bad work.

Scene 4:
*Me having failed multiple exams, stress at work, started to drink*
Boss: Don't you like working here?
Me: ...

Finale:
*Me getting written sick with severe depression*
Boss: fires me.
Me: Loses flat. Quits uni. Unemployed for 6 Months, one rejection after another (boss was phoned, that's sure). Moving back to parents. Sues boss. Gets money.

I still hate him and wish him the most painful experiences in life. Such people belong behind bars. But the justice isn't always served. One has to move forward and improve himself.

I feel like the web frontend landscape has gone to hell...

It used to be a priority to develop lean front end applications that load fast and work the same on most devices. If resources are required you try to share them. I have always liked the way this was solved using CDN.

Proper workflow: include some small libs you might need, script your interactions, test site, deliver.

And now our friends of the Javascript community have discovered the nuclear science called npm... It started off as this great benefit allowing frontenders to complete entire projects in the language they know and love but I feel like it has grown into an abomination that produces bulky applications with more boilerplate configuration than actual active code...

Surely I can't be the only one who is completely fed up with the direction this is going? Is anyone else looking for a lean way of developing javascript again using only a couple of small libs instead of those monstrous frameworks.

I have even considered to develop a library that makes it easy to develop with CDN (and dependencies) in mind but I don't even know if it will be worth it as more and more people tend to move away from it.

I'm sad

I just had a chat with the CEO (I'll call him John) of the company I work at. I was trying to get a real alignment on what I need to do to be a valuable resource to this company. They promoted me (without a raise in pay) to a different (management) role, and I do not know what I need to do to be the best in this role.

During the discussion, the CEO failed to provide any usable metrics, or a way to track those, except for phrases like "higher productivity" and "higher quality". How to track? No idea.

So, at this point, me being the idiot I am, wanted to make things explicit:
*Me: Okay, so what if I request for a 20% raise six months from now, what metrics will you look at to decide whether to give me the raise.

(My last raise was a big one, more than 100% or so, more than a year ago. That was a dev role, and I was paid 2 cents earlier, so the doubling to 4 cents wasn't really a big deal.)

John went on a long rant on how people just expect raises every year, inflation, etc. All good and fine.
But then he mentioned something strange.

*John: ...and you know, for the last three years, there has been a race to retain resources. During this race, many companies, including us, had to pay people WAY MORE THAN THEIR VALUE to retain them. These people are going to be the first to be fired during cost-cutting as they are the most expensive resources at the company without any proven value. These people should not expect raises to come soon, and if they do expect that, they need to prove the value themselves.

Now, I, being a simpleton, am wondering how is it fair for an organization to pay someone "more than their value" to retain them once so that they can just be fired two years later. How did the company decide the value of such employees to begin with?

And all this is ignoring the fact that in the company there are no metrics, no KPIs, and performance of a person is how much the CEO likes that guy. How TF the people who joined a year ago and never interacted with the CEO prove their worth?

Developers are building PowerPoints and configuring JIRA/Confluence/Laptops of Sales team, project managers are delegating management to developers and decision-making to the CEO, Technical architect is building requirements documents, Business Analyst is the same person as the QA team lead (and badly stretched), and the Release Manager is the Product Technical Admin that cannot write one sentence in English. And then we got 3.8 hours in meetings every DAY. Why TF are Dev Managers in "QA KPI Meeting"? Why are "developers" writing documentation on "How to create meeting notes at <company>"?
And, in this hell-storm, how does one really demonstrate one's value?

IT Definitions of Designations

Project Manager is a Person who thinks nine women can deliver a baby in One month.

Developer is a Person who thinks it will take 18 months to deliver a Baby.

Onsite Coordinator is one who thinks single woman can deliver nine babies in one month.

Client is the one who doesn't know why he wants a baby.

Marketing Manager is a person who thinks he can deliver a baby even if no man and woman are available.

Resource Optimization Team thinks they don't need a man or woman; they'll produce a child with zero resources.

Documentation Team thinks they don't care whether the child is delivered, they'll just document 9 months.

Quality Auditor is the person who is never happy with a delivered baby.

Tester is a person who always tells that this is not the Right baby.

HR Manager is a person who thinks that...a Donkey can deliver a Human Baby - if given 9 Months

I am a woman with multiple years of experience in the coding industry , while in most of my jobs I have been the only woman in the team and I do agree there is a need for more women in the coding industry , however I really do believe workshops like shecodes are an absolute scam , the inclusiveness to bridge the gender divide in tech needs to start from the employers , all resources to learn to code are completely gender neutral and unbiased. I also find it quite hypocritical that shecodes was founded by a man and is taught by a man . Can anyone please shine some different opinions about this or does anyone else believe a similar thing ?

!rant

TL;DR: "Gather all resources before working on any project and committing to the client... & over smartness can be deadly"

Couldn't stop my laughter after reading this one.

A new vacuum salesman knocked at the door….

A lady opened it. Before she could speak... The salesman rushed into the living room and emptied a bag of cow dung on the carpet.

Salesman: - Madam, if I couldn't clean this up in the next 3 mins with my new powerful vacuum cleaner, I will EAT all this!!

Lady: Do you need Chili Sauce with that?

Salesman: - Why Madam?

Lady: - Because there's no electricity in the house...!!!

😂😂😂

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I propose that the study of Rust and therefore the application of said programming language and all of the technology that compromises it should be made because the language is actually really fucking good. Reading and studying how it manages to manipulate and otherwise use memory without a garbage collector is something to be admired, illuminating in its own accord.

BUT going for it because it is a "beTter C++" should not constitute a basis for it's study.

Let me expand through anecdotal evidence, which is really not to be taken seriously, but at the same time what I am using for my reasoning behind this, please feel free to correct me if I am wrong, for I am a software engineer yes, I do have academic training through a B.S in Computer Science yes, BUT my professional life has been solely dedicated to web development, which admittedly I do not go on about technical details of it with you all because: I am not allowed to(1) and (2)it is better for me to bitch and shit over other petty development related details.

Anecdotal and otherwise non statistically supported evidence: I have seen many motherfuckers doing shit in both C and C++ that ADMIT not covering their mistakes through the use of a debugger. Mostly because (A) using a debugger and proper IDE is for pendejos and debugging is for putos GDB is too hard and the VS IDE is waaaaaa "I onlLy NeeD Vim" and (B) "If an error would have registered then it would not have compiled no?", thus giving me the idea that the most common occurrences of issues through the use of the C father/son languages come from user error, non formal training in the language and a nice cusp of "fuck it it runs" while leaving all sorts of issues that come from manipulating the realm of the Gods "memory".
EVERY manual, book, coming all the way back to the K&C book talks about memory and the way in which developers of these 2 languages are able to manipulate and work on it. EVERY new standard of the ISO implementation of these languages deals, through community effort or standard documentation about the new items excised through features concerning MODERN (meaning, no, the shit you learned 20 years ago won't fucking cut it) will not cut it.

THUS if your ass is not constantly checking what the scalpel of electrical/circuitry/computational representation of algorithms CONDONES in what you are doing then YOU are the fucking problem.

Rust is thus no different from the original ideas of the developers behind Go when stating that their developers are not efficient enough to deal with X language, Rust protects you, because it knows that you are a fucking moron, so the compiler, advanced, and well made as it is, will give you warnings of your own idiotic tendencies, which would not have been required have you not been.....well....a fucking idiot.

Rust is a good language, but I feel one that came out from the necessity of people writing system level software as a bunch of fucking morons.
This speaks a lot more of our academic endeavors and current documentation than anything else. But to me DEALING with the idea of adapting Rust as a better C++ should come from a different point of view.

Do I agree with Linus's point of view of C++? fuck no, I do not, he is a kernel engineer, a damn good one at that regardless of what Dr. Tanenbaum believes(ed) but not everyone writes kernels, and sometimes that everyone requires OOP and additions to the language that they use. Else I would be a fucking moron for dabbling in the dictionary of languages that I use professionally.
BUT in terms of C++ being unsafe and unsecured and a horrible alternative to Rust I personaly do not believe so. I see it as a powerful white canvas, in which you are able to paint software to the best of your ability WHICH then requires thorough scrutiny from the entire team. NOT a quick replacement for something that protects your from your own stupidity BY impending the use of what are otherwise unknown "safe" features.

To be clear: I am not diminishing Rust as the powerhouse of a language that it is, myself I am quite invested in the language. But instead do not feel the reason/need before articles claiming it as the C++ killer.

I am currently heavily invested in C++ since I am trying a lot of different things for a lot of projects, and have been able to discern multiple pain points and unsafe features. Mainly the reason for this is documentation (your mother knows C++) and tooling, ide support, debugging operations, plethora of resources come from it and I have been able to push out to my secret project a lot of good dealings. WHICH I will eventually replicate with Rust to see the main differences.

Online articles stating that one will delimit or otherwise kill the other is well....wrong to me. And not the proper approach.

Anyways, I like big tits and small waists.

Guy studies programming for a year.
Guy: I am going to start this amazing project wanna help
Me: Sure what is it
Guy: ***Long story of a decent idea***
Me: Sure Ill help, what do you need me to do
Guy: Only a few functions
A few days later...
Guy: Hey I don't where to start or how I should do it can you help me with like THE WHOLE PROGRAM?

If you haven't gathered from this story. Don't be that one guy who has an idea but doesn't write or make a plan for it as your just going to waste other peoples energy and resources.

As a developer, I'm fed up with companies that expect us to work miracles in impossible timelines. We're not wizards, we're not magicians, we're not even superheroes. We're human beings who need time to develop quality software.

It's frustrating to be given a project with a deadline that's completely unrealistic. It's even more frustrating when the same company that gave us the deadline is unwilling to give us the resources we need to meet it.

And let's not forget about the endless meetings, emails, and phone calls that eat up our valuable time. We need to code, not attend endless meetings that never seem to accomplish anything.

And don't get me started on the non-technical people who think they know more about coding than we do. Just because you know how to use Microsoft Excel doesn't make you an expert on software development.

It's time for companies to start treating developers with the respect we deserve. We're not just code monkeys, we're skilled professionals who can create amazing things when given the right tools and resources. So stop treating us like we're disposable and start investing in us. Trust me, it will pay off in the long run.

Me: We need to allow the team in the newly acquired subsidiary to access our docker image repositories.
Sec Guy: Why?
Me: So they can run our very expensive AI models that we have prepared onto container images.
Sec Guy: There is a ban on sharing cloud resources with the acquired companies.
Me: So how we're supposed to share artifacts?!?
Sec Guy: Can't you just email them the docker files?
Me: Those images contain expensively trained AI models. You can't rebuild it from the docker files.
Sec Guy: Can't you email the images themselves?
Me: Those are a few gigabytes each. Won't fit in an email and won't even fit the Google drive / onedrive / Dropbox single file size limit.
Sec Guy: Can't you store them in a object storage like S3/GCS/Azure storage?
Me: Sure
Proceed to do that.
Can't give access to the storage for shit.
Call the sec guy
Me: I need to share this cloud storage directory.
Sec Guy (with aparent amnesia): Why?
Me: I just told you! So they can access our AI docker images!
Sec Guy: There is a ban on sharing cloud resources with the acquired companies.
Me: Goes insane

Is there a law or something that you must attempt several alternative methods before the sec people will realize that they are the problem?!?! I mean, frankly, one can get an executable artifact by fucking email and run it but can't pull it from a private docker registry? Why the fuck would their call it "security"?

Santa,

All I want for Christmas is to finally have the resources I need to actually make some progress on this project...

need advice on integrating .t3d file support in c++ engine
hey, been stuck trying to figure out how to get .t3d file support working in our custom game engine, which is all written in c++. it's turning out to be a lot trickier than expected and i'm kinda hitting a wall here. the documentation on .t3d itself is pretty much nonexistent and what's out there is either outdated or too vague to be of any real use. i've tried a few things based on general file parsing logic in c++ but keep running into issues with either reading the files correctly or integrating the data into the engine in a way that actually works. it feels like i'm missing something fundamental but can't pin down what it is. has anyone here gone through this process before or has any experience with .t3d files? i could really use some advice on how to approach this, or even just some resources that explain the format in detail. also, if there are any common pitfalls or things to watch out for when adding new file format support to a game engine, i'd appreciate the heads up. thanks in advance for any help, feeling pretty stuck and any guidance would be a huge help.

Fuck google cloud platform. My server has been down for last 4 days. Stupid reason google gives me is that it does not have resources available in my zone. Why the fuck do you start a hosting company if you cannot provide RAM and CPU. On top of that their support is so bad that after 20 emails, 4 chat tickets, 3 phone calls nobody knows the issue I am facing. They just give the links to their ultra stupid documentarion.
Now all my 6 projects are down. Clients are getting impatient. I cannot do any work and googles support is the worst.
They dont even want to understand the issue, dont know how they will solve it.

I have created AWS instance now and migrated to AWS. But i have old backups which are useless on AWS. To get the latest backups i need google cloud instance to get started but stupid google does not have resources. How hard it is to add 1 CPU and 1GB RAM?

One coworker in my projects now.

I work with her on two projects. One project I'm doing a review on their test scripts and saw a lot of revision is needed on hers. It's fine, she may just need some help. Offered help and did sessions and gave explanations and samples. But she is still not finished. 2nd project I was acting like the project manager until the official PM gets assigned. Her tasks is just to create test data.

Little did I know she has escalated the 1st project to her team lead and manager and requesting for a project change. This is not the first time she did this project shopping bit. But what irks me the most is doing an emergency leave so you don't have to attend the meeting on one project you are failing and then not telling me as the acting PM on the 2nd project that you have an emergency leave. She may likely never thought there is need to tell because she did attend the meeting for the 2nd project later in the day. But for the 1st project I have to pickup her slack and do the test scripts because the PM in that project already was informed about her leave.

This would have gone to daily rant but she is the first one I've encountered who fails and somehow gets away with it and even gets promoted doing the same tactics. But she did that to our junior resources in other projects who may likely got burned out and resigned.

Crappy performance should not be rewarded. I hope this time our management won't look the other way.

A little late but whatever.

About half a year ago, I started working on setting up self hosted (slippy) maps. For one, because of privacy reasons, for two, because it'd be in my own control and I could, with enough knowledge, be entirely in control of how this would work.

While the process has been going on for hours every day for about half a year (with regular exceptions), I'll briefly lay out what I've accomplished.

I started with the OpenMapTiles project and tried to implement it myself. This went well but there were two major pitfalls:
1. It worked postgres database based. This is fine but when you want to have the entire world.... the queries took insanely long (minutes, at lower zoom levels) and quite intimate postgres/tooling knowledge was required, which I don't have.
2. Due to the long queries and such, the performance was so bad that the maps could take minutes to render and when you'd want that in production... yeah, no.

After quite some time I finally let that idea sail and started looking into the MBTiles solution; generating sqlite databases of geojson features. Very fast data serving but the rendering can take quite some time.

After some more months, I finally got the hang of it to the point that I automated 50-70 percent of the entire process. The one problem? It takes a shitload of resources and time to generate a worldwide mbtiles database.
After infinite numbers of trial and error, I figured out that one can devide a 'render' (mbtiles aka sqlite database) into multiple layers (one for building data, one for water, one for roads and so on), so I started doing renders that way.
Result? Styling became way more easy and logical and one could pick specific data to display; only want to display the roads? Its way more simple this way. (Not impossible otherwise but figuring out how that works... Good luck).

Started rendering all the countries, continents and such this way and while this seemed like a great idea; the entire world is at 3-4 percent after about a month. And while 40-70 percent generates 10 times as fast, that's still way too slow.

Then, I figured out that you can fetch data per individual layer/source. Thus, I could render every layer separately which is way faster.

Tried that with a few very tiny datasets and bam, it works. (And still very fast).

So, now, I'm generating all layers per continent. I want to do it world based but figured out that that's just not manageable with my resources/budget.

Next to that, I'm working on an API which will have exactly the features I want/need!

Dev: The server is completely down right now. Nobody can access the application, we need to divert some resources to horizontally scaling our app.

Manager: Hm, this was not in the schedule. I need to consult senior leadership on what to do about this. I don’t want to be held accountable for making a decision on this complex and highly nuanced situation.

Dev: No need, I have a solution. Just need a week to build/test/deploy the ability to horizontally scale.

Manager: But that will cause delays to new features.

Dev: New features don’t matter if the app can’t even load.

Manager: Ok you can implement your solution but it can’t take any time. I need those new features out.

Dev: ???????

Fucking useless bots.

I need a bit of help in getting some documents from my University, so I go into their site and they have a WhatsApp support number. Perfect, I think to myself. So I send them a message with my question and a fucking bot answers me with a list of categories for my question, none of them matching my question. So I answer the "Other" option and it just sends me a FAQ link. Like what the actual fuck? I contacted the fucking number because I need help from a damn human, not a fucking FAQ link you useless waste of server resources.

Nope, definitely not going to work for that customer anymore. Fuck this shit. At least for this week.

My background: mid-30 years old, some kind of business & IT consultant / lead dev working for a mid sized CRM consulting company, with approx 15 years of experience in development and software architecture, most of the time "thinking" in C#, still learning new languages, being a cloud evangelist and team lead. We usually have customers with customers (B2B/B2C).
Personality type "campaigner" (ENFP-A).

Today the project lead of my client (a big corporation in the energy industry) told me that he still didn't order all the necessary resources for the cloud project. Just to be clear: He's on the client side. We (the architects, one internal and me) told him one month ago what we need for the beginning. Just a few things - an Azure subscription, a license for the CRM platform, and our dev tools.

And now let's guess when the project is planned to begin? Yeah, right: 1st of April. NO APRIL'S FOOL. And guess what? Next Tuesday we'll do the onboarding for the new (external) devs, and NOTHING will be ready. Yeah, just let us build stuff in our minds, and on the whiteboards, because it's an AGILE project, right? We don't need any systems and tools...

And now he sent me the questionnaires which need to be answered before any cloud service can be ordered by the corporate IT. And yes, he didn't answer a single thing, and just meant "Those are architecture questions" (they are not) and (of course) "please provide the answers until Monday morning, so we can FINALLY order the services."

Yeah, you fucktard. Of course it's MY FAULT now. Maybe I should write an email to your boss asking how we can speed things up a little bit...

I am so mad, I have no words for how fucking much I hate ever having to work or pass work to other incompetent developers or teams, what a fucking waste of time and resources.

After handing off the frontend - for the client to find some team, that would do it in the short time and budget he needs (multiple developers, more fast, much good), he found a team that seemed to be alright for the job and seemed alright to me too, now maybe a month or two later, the client contacts me, that they fucked something up and if I could talk to them.

The email I then received from them seriously made me speechles, mad and sad, all at same time, I spent multiple upon multiple hours, getting a very good readable documentation up (markdown with TOC, properly rendered headers, bulletpoints, all that shit), with all files, all services used, all credentials, even converted all ssh keys into putty ppk format, in case the developers are using windows and are too dumb to do it themselves, nginx configs, it had seriously everything, even too much to list.

They somehow managed to fuck up the entire server, while attempting to "add ssh keys themselves", EVEN FUCKING THOUGH I have included all the keys they need, all the hosting credentials, everything, yet they decided to fuck with shit themselves and completely annihilate the server in the process (HOW?!), so not even the webserver works anymore.

I am fucking speechless, I made it so fucking easy to gather all info and files they need, all properly put into well named folders, along the documentation in an archive and they somehow managed to nuke the fucking server, while attempting to add ssh keys?!

If you don't know how to config a server, then don't fucking touch it and just use everything, that got served to you on a fucking silver platter.

---

I'll just instantly answer the most annoying comment, that somebody could come up with: "why didn't you do it yourself?"

Because in a perfect world, a fully managed team, can do much more than a single developer can, especially in the same timeframe and from what I heard of said client, atleast they did something in terms of developing the system. (which surprises me, considering it's the same people that nuked a server, while trying to add ssh keys)

FUUCCKKKK!! I need to hit smth. Or rant..

So that flaky ec2 issue.. These ec2s act as a shared environment for multiple apps. Our app is one of them. I have no access to those ec2s at all.

What I have access to is my app and some monitoring. Now the app randomly starts lagging while nearly idling. At the same random times monitoring stops completely and doesn't come back up. This happens to random app instances at random times.

Reached out to infra support, managed to get attention from the big boys [mgmt]. Today we got the fix deployed. I test it out -- problem persists.

I find this behaviour somewhat familiar. Managed to get some server stats from infra folks. Apparently cpu% is high as well as load avg [cpu queue]. Bingo! I know how to fix it!

So I write a long comment w/ all the commands and all the 'if that, do this'. Send it to one of the infra technitians

and I get a reply: 'we will apply cpu usage limitations to fix the issue'

wait... Cpu% limitations will do nothing but highlight the underlying problem...

'no, instances have high cpu utilisation which is causing those lags. We will limit cpu resources and it will be fixed'

oh ffs... Cpu utilization and cpu queue are VERY different things.. I tried explaining that to them like 7-9 times. And all I get is:

'yes, cpu utilization is the problem. We will limit it and solve the problem'

I would surely escalate all of this through higher channels if only I could get my hands on those ec2s and have a proof. But that is not happening and I'm forced to sit back and watch them break things even worse until they are out of options and mark my query as 'wont fix'....

Fuck that's frustrating....

*thinking to myself* so I've read about that new vulnerability 2 days ago that allows one to escape from docker container to the host... What if <...>

My project just went from "we can use one of those arduino boards, they are cheap and easy to use" to "we need a mass storage solution for that, maybe we can buy a shipping container and put it down on a nearby field as an on site storage". I love the things I would do if I had the resources for this kind of project!

Is your code green?

I've been thinking a lot about this for the past year. There was recently an article on this on slashdot.

I like optimising things to a reasonable degree and avoid bloat. What are some signs of code that isn't green?

* Use of technology that says its fast without real expert review and measurement. Lots of tech out their claims to be fast but actually isn't or is doing so by saturation resources while being inefficient.
* It uses caching. Many might find that counter intuitive. In technology it is surprisingly common to see people scale or cache rather than directly fixing the thing that's watt expensive which is compounded when the cache has weak coverage.
* It uses scaling. Originally scaling was a last resort. The reason is simple, it introduces excessive complexity. Today it's common to see people scale things rather than make them efficient. You end up needing ten instances when a bit of skill could bring you down to one which could scale as well but likely wont need to.
* It uses a non-trivial framework. Frameworks are rarely fast. Most will fall in the range of ten to a thousand times slower in terms of CPU usage. Memory bloat may also force the need for more instances. Frameworks written on already slow high level languages may be especially bad.
* Lacks optimisations for obvious bottlenecks.
* It runs slowly.
* It lacks even basic resource usage measurement.

Unfortunately smells are not enough on their own but are a start. Real measurement and expert review is always the only way to get an idea of if your code is reasonably green.

I find it not uncommon to see things require tens to hundreds to thousands of resources than needed if not more.

In terms of cycles that can be the difference between needing a single core and a thousand cores.

This is common in the industry but it's not because people didn't write everything in assembly. It's usually leaning toward the extreme opposite.

Optimisations are often easy and don't require writing code in binary. In fact the resulting code is often simpler. Excess complexity and inefficient code tend to go hand in hand. Sometimes a code cleaning service is all you need to enhance your green.

I once rewrote a data parsing library that had to parse a hundred MB and was a performance hotspot into C from an interpreted language. I measured it and the results were good. It had been optimised as much as possible in the interpreted version but way still 50 times faster minimum in C.

I recently stumbled upon someone's attempt to do the same and I was able to optimise the interpreted version in five minutes to be twice as fast as the C++ version.

I see opportunity to optimise everywhere in software. A billion KG CO2 could be saved easy if a few green code shops popped up. It's also often a net win. Faster software, lower costs, lower management burden... I'm thinking of starting a consultancy.

The problem is after witnessing the likes of Greta Thunberg then if that's what the next generation has in store then as far as I'm concerned the world can fucking burn and her generation along with it.

Figured I'd post for some advice here and see if anybody has had previous experience or success with a situation like this.

My team is generally comprised of full-stack developers completing front-end custom work on sites, writing back-end tools, and fixing broken sites. We are a rapid-response DEV team, and we typically turn around any custom requests in less than 5 days and fix any broken sites on the same day as they were reported. We manage almost 15,000 sites across multiple countries, and deal with very large corporations that many of you interact with every day (I'm trying to be cryptic here hahaha.) There are 16 of us on our team, and we are the only DEV team within our department of 500+ people. We are also the only DEV team taking requests from these 500+ people. The way the department works, we are the final say on whether a specific piece of custom work will get completed or not, and we are the go-to people when anybody has a question about our system infrastructure or if our system can accommodate a request, along with how to fix any broken pieces of our platform. We typically get about 150 requests per day. Lately, the entire team has become unhappy with our compensation for the work we do. We're quite underpaid, and they keep giving us more responsibilities without any sort of extra compensation. We've discovered that there are a large amount of non-developers below us that are getting paid more than we are. We've found that we get paid about $15,000 less than a comparable DEV team in a different department (let's call that team DEV_2,) just because of which department our team exists within, and how our department defined our job back when this position was created a few years ago. Ever since the position was created, our team's responsibilities have exponentially increased. We believe that there is absolutely no reason that an entry-level position below us should get paid just as much, or even more in some cases, than a developer. Of course, we're not asking to pay them less. Instead, we've decided that we're going to bring this up with our manager and schedule a meeting with him, our Department Director, and Human Resources, and voice that we believe that we should be on the same payscale as the comparable DEV_2 in the other department.

To be a good developer on our team, you need to not only have coding expertise, but also an encyclopedic knowledge of what you can do within our platform without any coding. You need this knowledge so you can pass it along to any people in positions below you, in case they didn't know that something could be done without custom code.

We're going to argue that if it weren't for our team, the company would be losing millions of dollars in clients, because people wouldn't have anybody to go to for platform infrastructure questions, broken websites, or custom work. Instead, they would need to send these requests to the DEV_2 team, which currently take about 6 months to turnaround requests. Like I said, we are a rapid-response DEV team, and these particular clients think that a 5 day turnaround time is ridiculous. If they had to wait 6 months for their request to be completed, they would cancel their contracts.

Not to mention the general loss of knowledge if the members of our team went to a different department, which would be catastrophic for our current department. Believe me, this department could not function without this DEV team. If we all went on vacation for a week, the place would be on fire by the time we got back, and many clients would be lost.

Do any of you have any experience with a situation like this, and if so, how did it turn out? Thank you!

Any good resources for sql?

Im getting heavy into databases. Im a noob but i need to reach top level quickly.

Im gonna buy 1 oelr 2 books. Im leaning towards oreillys “learning sql“.

Any suggestions?

My work gave me three laptops because not one of them can access all the resources I need. So I have to balance my workflow around these three machines.

Starting. Seriously I'm closing that gap on turning 30 and I'm tired of being a wage slave so I'm teaching myself by using resources I've found online but the immense amount of knowledge I need seems unsurmountable.

I'm coming home from work and learning for at least two hours before going to bed and going back to work but it seems so far until I get to be creating stuff instead of just trying to absorb as much of the basics as fast as possible.

Saw this sent into a Discord chat today:

"Warning, look out for a Discord user by the name of "shaian" with the tag #2974. He is going around sending friend requests to random Discord users, and those who accept his friend requests will have their accounts DDoSed and their groups exposed with the members inside it becoming a victim as well. Spread the word and send this to as many discord servers as you can. If you see this user, DO NOT accept his friend request and immediately block him. Discord is currently working on it. SEND THIS TO ALL THE SERVERS YOU ARE IN. This is IMPORTANT: Do not accept a friend request from shaian#2974. He is a hacker.

Tell everyone on your friends list because if somebody on your list adds one of them, they'll be on your list too. They will figure out your personal computer's IP and address, so copy & paste this message where ever you can. He is going around sending friend requests to random discord users, and those who accept his requests will have their accounts and their IP Addresses revealed to him. Spread the word and send this to as many discord servers as you can. If you see this user, DO NOT accept his friend request and immediately block him. Saw this somewhere"

I was so angry I typed up an entire feature-length rant about it (just wanted to share my anger):

"1. Unless they have access to Discord data centres or third-party data centres storing Discord user information I doubt they can obtain the IP just by sending friend requests.

2. Judging by the wording, for example, 'copy & paste this message where ever you can' and 'Spread the word and send this to as many discord servers as you can. If you see this user, DO NOT accept his friend request and immediately block him.' this is most likely BS, prob just someone pissed off at that user and is trying to ruin their reputation etc.. Sentences equivalent to 'spread the word' are literally everywhere in this wall of text.

3. So what if you block the user? You don't even have their user ID, they can change their username and discrim if they want. Also, are you assuming they won't create any alts?

4. Accounts DDoSed? Does the creator of this wall of text even understand what that means? Wouldn't it be more likely that 'shaian' will be DDoSing your computer rather than your Discord account? How would the account even be DDoSed? Does that mean DDoSing Discord's servers themselves?

5. If 'shaian' really had access to Discord's information, they wouldn't need to send friend requests in order to 'DDoS accounts'. Why whould they need to friend you? It doesn't make sense. If they already had access to Discord user IP addresses, they won't even have to interact with the users themselves. Although you could argue that they are trolling and want to get to know the victim first or smth, that would just be inefficient and pointless. If they were DDoSing lots of users it would be a waste of time and resources.

6. The phrase 'Saw this somewhere' at the end just makes it worse. There is absolutely no proof/evidence of any kind provided, let along witnesses.

How do you expect me to believe this copypasta BS scam? This is like that 'Discord will be shutting down' scam a while back.

Why do people even believe this? Do you just blindly follow what others are doing and without thinking, copy and paste random walls of text?

Spreading this false information is pointless and harmful. It only provides benefits to whoever started this whole thing, trying to bring down whoever 'shaian' is.

I don't think people who copy & paste this sort of stuff are ready to use the internet yet.

Would you really believe everything people on the internet tell you?

You would probably say 'no'.

Then why copy & paste this? Do you have a reason?

Or is it 'just because of 'spread the word''?

I'm just sick of seeing people reposting this sort of stuff

People who send this are probably like the people who click 'Yes' to allow an app to make changes in the User Account Control window without reading the information about the publisher's certificate, or the people who click 'Agree' without actually reading the terms and conditions."

"And in a stunning turn of events, he got it to work!"

But seriously... I've literally been throwing shit at a wall and seeing what would stick.
Fucking DTOs and getting shit out of a database. I need better resources on how to do this properly!

Anyways, I found that just using 'object' and letting the compiler deal with the rest of the bullshit actually allowed my code to work and run. I'm still a little in shock.

I'm over here trying to keep things in a nice one-to-one because that's what my PM recommended... and instead I just get slammed by Type casting nonsense and more errors than I can begin to understand. And unfortunately, Stackoverflow is of no help because everyone's issues are very nuanced and unrelated to my problem... Maybe I'm the problem? 🤷

But here it is working without all that bullshit. I don't know man... This code base is not the rager I was expecting. I'm getting my ass kicked with code that doesn't fall in line with the book I'm learning from.

You know how they say, "forget everything you've read and learned"? I'm feeling that really hard right now.

Constantly fighting the urge to rip everything down and do it based on what my book is recommending, but then the logical natured side of me is like "you ain't got that kind of time to be unfucking someone's work, only to get caught in more trouble. Your ego is not worth it"

Anyways, it's fucking late here and I'm glad enough to not have to think about this issue anymore. Bye.

"Suggest an AV/AM product, Avast refuses to install."

I do malware research as a hobby and have for a while, so I can generally spot when something's up before I even run a program. If i'm unsure about it (or know something's up and wanna see its effects for S&Gs) I throw it into one of a variety of VMs, each with a prepped, clean, standardized "testing" state.

I see no point to AV/AM products, especially as they annoy me more than anything since they can't be told not to reach into and protect VMs (thereby dirtying up my VM state, my research, crashing the VM hypervisor and generally being *really* annoying) and they like to erase samples from a *read-only, MOUNTED* VHDX.

However, normal people need them, so I usually suggest this list:
• MBAM is good and has a (relatively) low memory footprint, but doesn't have free realtime protection.
• Avast is very good as it picks up a lot, but it eats a FUCKTON of resources. It also *really* likes to crash VM hypervisors if it sees anything odd in them.
• AVG is garbage. Kill it with fire.
• Using Windows Defender is like trying to block the rain with an umbrella made of 1-ply toilet paper.
• herdProtect is amazing as it's basically a VirusTotal client but it's web-based and not currently available to be downloaded. (Existing copies still work!)
• Kaspersky. Yes, it spied on US gov't workers. No, they don't care about anyone BUT US gov't workers. Yes, it's pretty good.
• BitDefender: *sees steam game* "Is this ransomware?"

hope this helps

I love python, but I hate dealing with python dependencies, especially on Windows.
I was tinkering and researching with neural networks, so I wanted to try out pybrain. I wrote my project, with pybrain installed via pip, and tried to build it.
Oh, what's that? Pybrain doesn't work with python 3? Well I'll download the version that's supposed to. Oh, that version has a deprecated numpy api? Let me just install those other resources. Oh, that requires a broken module that has no publicly available source?
Let's try python 2. Oh, now that's working, I just need to export environment variables for some "bls source". Some quick Google searching and the only solution that would work is building a bunch of cywgin modules by hand. That's fine, I have an ubuntu partition.
An hour later I'm compiling FORTRAN dependencies on Ubuntu.
Coding time: 1 hour
Dependency time: 3 hours

Sometimes getting tickets from the clients feels like a Sherlock Holmes adventure. Figuring out what the hell they meant, tracking down resources that should be included in the ticket, so much fun. I need to buy a pipe and a spyglass.

You know what's the worst in doing software?
being assigned that dreadful project, that's doomed and cursed just from the start. Nobody dared to try or touch it for 7 years, because it's destined to fail. You will never get the resources to do it properly, all the constrains are just against you. Even as the requirements bars are lowered and lowered you barely make it. You keep testing that shit with QA for like 8 months past schedule. Then before release some core changes need to be done. It passes QA, but you somehow now it's just a ticking time bomb. It will just crumble and fall somewhere out there, if somebody dares to use that shit for real.

And so it goes.

Bug reports coming in.

I'm looking at someone's shit code... and I have to remind myself... we all have the ability to be fucking stupid, especially when we're trying to do something in order to do something else so that we can do something else.

note to self: "always remember, they did the best they could with the resources they had at the time".

But that doesn't change the fact that I need to clean up the crap they left behind.

I just hate my project manager ! :(

my project manager asked me to create the new UI for a running angular project and been given 2 weeks to do so.

I started working on it 2 weeks ago but he kept asking me to work on changes asked by clients on other projects during those 2 weeks and I did as he wanted. I informed him that our new UI is delaying because of these rapid changes and he replied "Its ok ! The deadline shall be changed. I will manage it. At this time, these fixes are much more important."

I said "Alright" at that time.

But Today He is saying I need to deliver the Version 2 UI and all integration by Friday.

I told him "I already told you that our project is delaying so you need to assign other resources on changes for other projects and let me finish the UI for version 2 for t that project. "

On this he got furious and asked me to do it no matter what by the Friday.

I don't know what should I do?

Yay, Dubba didnt die.
Okay, hello'ed back, lets fucking rant.

Im fucking SICK and TIRED and ANNOYED by all freaking cloud fanboys. Yeah, sure. You get scalability. You waste less resources. Sure. But it depends on use case. There is suprising ammount of services that can be run on VPS or dedicated servers that will be a lot cheaper if you just DONT run it on cloud. And dont you dare to missinterpret me. I fully recognize that there are valid uses for cloud services. But for fuck sakes, its not anwser for ALL of your needs, and it costs insane ammount of money if you use it where you should use dedicated.

WHY we, as humanity came to this place where self-claimed "proffesionals" will anwser you "cloud" before you even ask your question.

No, fuck off, take calculator and think for around 60 seconds. And than decide if you need cloud or not.

And no, this mail server will be fucking few times more expensive on cloud, and I know it becouse I have fucking calculator and I was running it past 1.5 year and actually run sometimes htop, so stop bullshitting me.

Sorry if some cloud die-hard felt offended but it is exacly how I see and feel it.
Peace.

Why do CEOs and higher ups always think development is just some easy quick thing you can spit out in a week? {
"I need a web app that can do X and I want to sell it to make more money!"
} or {
"I want something that can automate this thing here and then I can re-sell it!"
}

Usually, the project is something that already exists and has taken a whole team years to iron out and perfect and to compete with it would be insane or it exists and it's actually FOSS. We're a small MSP, we don't have the resources to make big ticket SELLABLE software.

So happy about being about to convince management that we needed a large refactor, due to requirements change, and since the code architecture from the beginning had boundaries built before knowing all the requirements...

pulled the shame on us, this is a learning lesson card.. blah blah blah

Also explained we need to implement an RTOS, and make the system event driven... which then a stupid programmer said you mean interrupt driven ... and management lost their minds... ( bad memories of poorly executed interrupts in the past).... had to bring everyone back down to earth.. explained yes it’s interrupt driven, but interrupt driven properly unlike in the past (prior to me)... the fuck didn’t properly prioritize the interrupts and did WAYYY too much in the interrupts.

Explained we will be implementing interrupts along side DMA, and literally no message could be lost in normal execution.. and explained polling the old way along side no RTOS, Wastes power, CPU resources and throws timing off.

Same fucker spoke up and said how the fuck You supposed to do timing, all the timing will be further off... I said wrong, in this system .. unlike yours, this is discreet timing potential and accurate as fuck... unlike your round robin while loop of death.

Anyway they gave me 3 weeks.. and the system out performs, and is more power efficient than the older model.

The interrupting developer, now gives me way more respect...

This basically is me rambling all my thoughts that have been clouding my mind.

Learning other programming languages after learning the first is harder than I expected. I learned python first but that's making learning others (which I know arent similar but ) C, ES6, PHP, etc. I need to figure out what makes each one special and get a proper path instead of learning them all the same way. Which is easier for the web dev languages but fuck man I just need a good path for them and I'm good. Like learn this this this this that and that and I've got a basic understanding of the language I dont need to stress and I can casually build my knowledge from here now that I understand all this. Cause I love programming and I want to be the best I can be and just get to the level I am with python. And at some point I have to learn about basic electronics and learning how to program Arduinos with C so I can do stuff with that because I really really REALLY want to.

It doesnt stop there. I want to learn another language and no I'm not talkin bout programming anymore I mean I wanna learn Japanese and German (but japanese primarily) but it doesnt help that I'm always either in school, studying, programming, or playing games. I just cant find time to practice Hiragana&Katakana (two basic writing systems in japan) and it doesnt help that I'm a lazy procrastinating piece of shit that doesnt have or can keep a proper schedule and hell I barely can English and Its my native tongue. Ugh. Itd be better if I had a native speaker to help me tbh.

And finally I want to learn basic pixel animating I have dreamed as a kid to do some kind of animation and programming and I want to do both for games I want to program for fun but it doesnt help that I cant draw sprites or anything for shit. I cant get it and I just am fucked but I'm going to ask some people I know and a few subreddits for advice/help/resources with that

Welp that was the Bubbles Power Hour none of you probably are keen followers of mine and if I had any I'd be shocked and honored but thanks for reading anyways and any advice on anything is always appreciated!

How can I learn to use Linux effectively as a developer? I’m a first-year CS student at university and based on what I’ve read here and on the web, I need to know the Linux system and it’s various distros. Any resources are greatly appreciated 😁

Today I managed to convince three people (including my cs teacher) to use signal, today was a good day.

Now I just need more time to learn about privacy / security stuff, can you recommend me any resources?

For shit's sake, data stream processing really is only for people with high throughput looking to do transformations on their data; not for people aggregating <10Gb/day of data.

Fuck me DSP is going to be the new buzzword of 2020 and I'm not looking forward to it. I've already got stakeholders wondering if we can integrate it when we dont have the need, nor the resources or funds.

What the fuck is this steaming shit!?
You fucking background apps, chrome and Firefox take all my resources to fucking open my Google drive?!

AND WHY THE FUCK ARE THERE 19 INSTANCES OF CHROME RUNNING!!!!

WHY THE FLYING FUCK DO YOU NEED TO DO THIS! LET THE FUCK LOAD!

I HATE WINDOWS! BUT THEN THERE ARE APPS WHO ARE FOR WINDOWS AND MAC ONLY!

I'M DYING NOW!!!!!!!!

FINE! EAT ALL MY 12 GB RAM AND FUCK YOURSELF IN THE CORNER BUT PET ME DO MY WORK!

Any advice on some good SQL book or resources?

I need to start learning DB designing and theory.

I know jackshit apart from the basic commands.

Global variables destroyed my day

Of course you can call me a bad programmer and all. When you have the idea, sometimes globals make it seem easy, accessible and "saving resources". They are devils.

The app was connected to a suite of applications. So I ended up silently destroying it neighbors. I committed and pushed the shit. Just when the testers made their weed high smoke tests, a server stopped working.

I got an email that boss wanted the latest version, I reverted the wrong branch, which had code unrelated to its name, pushed shit again and voila.

I went to the bathroom and laughed. I had to take a smoke. I'm still laughing while typing this. The damage is too much and I can't help it. I'll go home, leave this pc on and work remotely through the night. It might be the hysterics speaking now, but I messed up, and I need magic by friday morning.

I hate discussions about how to name resources in a REST api. It’s not like there will ever exist a client that magically knows your conventions. At some point, you need to hardcode an URL in a client/browser. That’s fine, just keep it simple.

This has been a great source of bike-shedding in my job recently.

And don’t even get me started on HATEAOS...

I fucking suck at SQL and that's hurting my performance as a supposed backend developer :D

All the cool nested queries and whatnot, it just flies over my head, I need to learn it better, any tips on study resources?

So just babbling my shit down here.

(Tldr : i am a crazy guy who followed my half slept brain, went onto a stage , gave some kind of motivating , stammering talk to a large group of professional strangers, enjoyed that day with a red embarrassed face and just got my first pic of me speaking on stage and that is so awesome !)

Last Saturday i went to a gdg meetup and i embarrassed the hell out of me.

I went there with just 2 hours of sleep from the previous night.
After a few talks there comes a guy who is taking some time to install is setup and the host calls for lightning round session ( ie he asks if anyone from the audience would like to share something about their product or something).

I am a fucking nutt guy. I can explain something to you nicely in a hacky way as long as i have done enough work on that and you speak my native language.

But giving a talk on English stage, hell no! I stammer, mix hindi with English and start speaking werd shit.. And that's what happened.

I don't know what went into me but as some guy went to the stage and talked for 2 mins, i was like yeah i want to do that too. So in next turn when he asked for a show of hands, i raised mine and fucking went to stage!

I forgot that if you go on stage you should have something to talk to . But the moment i was on stage, i was like... "Nope, we will do this differently".
I had been working on a video ads module from the last week which could be easily explained in 2 mins. But i felt like giving a non techy talk instead.

It went something like this: i introduced myself with my experience details ( who gives experience details on stage !?!) Then host said to speak loudly and i went like "Bharat mata ki jai!"( Victory to mother india (wtf!?😆) .

Then started talking about how the developers feel disheartened when searching on internet where the resources are scattered . And the solution i told them was :"don't be disheartened. You will eventually find it (like wow dude wtf, as if they didn't knew that) . Look on the youtube and other resources " and then went full on explaining/marketing about some online tutor who gives advice/consultancy via a subscription based payment ( tbf that guy really helped solve a lot of my doubts, he has written books on Android dev and is the top so answerer for Android).

Then i went on sharing my thoughts live on that fuckin stage ! ( Live because i usually post my thoughts here on devrant before discussing them out with real people, you guys are my safe space) but there i discussed my thoughts on libraries!

I have this believe that Android devs these days are having lesser knowledge of the system because we have all the libraries and templates available to us. But when we have to customize stuff, we need to go deep into docs and source classes and find ourselves in trouble there. So i kind of said this out loud and that we should try to read more the code and implement stuff ourselves instead of using the library 😅🙈)

I was feeling so fucking embarrassing after that all stuff! It was so full of stammering , broken English and worst attempt at motivation. At that time i was regretting this and about to burst cry and run away, but somehow i gathered my self, got my mood back to the event games and talks, later went to the organizers and apologized(and they were very nice and didn't cared about it), and overall enjoyed my weirdest day!

When i came home, my mom gave me a little more confidence about it. Now i think i shouldn't be that much instinctive. Next day i went hack to work and everything got normal.

But Yesterday i found a link to the public repository of the photos. Ohh fuck, someone had took my image! and that was too in full hd!!! 🙈🙈🙈😅😆😆 Oh mann I can't stop looking at that cool stage speaker image, i love it ! I, the shy-est and the most uncool awkward person , present on the stage with a mike, oof , i think i lived my dream !

I hope i could get enough confidence and speaking skills to take a real stage talk next time ( and maybe enough interesting talks and confidence to talk with girls of our office, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

Always, always, with every estimate in time or resources you or your pm/manager/whatever thinks to need. Multiply that number by pi.

That's a more real-world estimate.

My cousin came to me and asked me if I don't have some resources about programming becase he will need it in school in higher grade. Then he said me he will be learning about C programming I told him that I have only C++ books and tutorials and if he don't want to learn C++ instead of C and he asked me if there is some difference between that... That will be a long journey I tought

Establishing an eating schedule was truly a brilliant decision. It allowed me not to eat right before I go to sleep, keeping my stomach empty and making my body lose fat every single night.

As far as I keep breathing, the chemical reaction that makes me alive (CHn + O2 => H20 + CO2 + Energy) just need to continue, and when my stomach is empty, my body is just forced to burn fat.

It works like a charm. No “fat-burning” supplements and other MLM BS is needed. You just need to adjust the schedule so you never feel hungry. If you need to eat five times a day to achieve this, so be it. Just allow two to three weeks to establish a schedule and learn how to maintain it. Recurrent reminder apps are helpful.

I’m off liraglutide for more than two months now and I’m keep losing weight without any meds and my digestive behavior changed entirely.

If only I had emotional resources to make this happen earlier, there wouldn’t be pre-diabetes, numb feet, apnoe, stretch marks…

My C adventure is going horribly. So I stopped. I took a second to breathe then looked at my current resources decided to use the 2 books i have as references to learn from as well, then found a reasonably long YouTube guide so I can have someone verbally explain something, and I have a friend and a few places I can now ask questions if I need it. So yeah I'm pretty confident now.

Title: The problem with "good enough" code

Body:

I'm a software developer, and I've seen my fair share of "good enough" code. You know the kind of code I'm talking about: it works, but it's not pretty, and it's not very maintainable.

The problem with "good enough" code is that it's a slippery slope. Once you start writing "good enough" code, it's easy to fall into the trap of always taking the easy way out.

Before you know it, your code is a mess of hacks and workarounds. It's hard to understand, it's hard to maintain, and it's a nightmare to debug.

I've seen projects go down in flames because of "good enough" code. The code was so bad that it was impossible to fix, and the project had to be scrapped.

I'm not saying that you should never write "good enough" code. Sometimes, you just need to get something working, and you don't have the time or resources to do it perfectly.

But if you're going to write "good enough" code, you need to be aware of the risks. And you need to make sure that you're only writing "good enough" code for a short period of time.

Once you have a working prototype, you need to start refactoring your code and making it better. You need to make it more readable, more maintainable, and more testable.

If you don't, you'll eventually regret it. Your code will become a liability, and it will hold you back.

So next time you're tempted to write "good enough" code, think twice. It might save you some time in the short term, but it will cost you in the long run.

Coding is not the solution to unemployment or gender inequality... This what the MF don't understand.... Until you create a better Sys and population is controlled and there is cultural evaluation. - you MF are just running a circus show.

Every MF want to jump into the bandwagon of cheap CSR - "hey we are empowering people by teaching people how to develop a website , aren't we good peopLE 😊"
Lol like programming is fucking open source, you don't need to teach people, anyone interested can learn it , and they are billion FREE RESOURCES out here for them to learn, so why not just fucking focus on doing something significant than clowning around "become a dev ".
Fuck havard, fuck Google fuck KMPG fuck the fucking dumb Government fuck youth empowerment📌

I need your advices!
Some good resources for teaching child and prepare them for programming and logical/critical thinking?

Every week since I started the company:

Boss "We need a special feed of resources for this customer."
We say "Great let's build support for custom feeds."
Boss says "Could we just hard code that resource in really quickly?"

This week:
Boss says "Could you make a system that dynamically let's me know what resources has been hard-coded in all special feeds, and that alerts me when a resource goes offline".

Now what should we respond?
Help us out! Best suggestion might turn in to an email to boss..

The lack of community support for NGINX is horrible (though it is getting better).

I was an NGINX disciple from the beginning; I switched over from Apache as soon as I found it and used it everywhere. The issue with that is that most services only provided Apache configuration files, forcing me to do my own research and translate them.

Thankfully the NGINX community has done a lot of work already; I was able to find a lot of the configurations I needed online, but I also spent a lot of time learning how to use it. Now, if you give me a few hours, I have the knowledge and resources to make it do whatever you need it to do (within reason, of course).

I'm sure this has been ranted about before because I can hardly be the only one.

Android development and the upgrade dance.
Things were worse in the bad old days of eclipse but it's not like they're peachy now, either. Android is one of many platforms I'm developing for - c++ back-end, running on lots of different platforms through a thin bit of platform specific glue.
That's all I care about - that this thin bit of glue just works. I want to write this stuff, forget about it and get on with solving what I feel are real problems, for me, in my code.
The trouble is, I'm never finished writing this and android is one of the worst. With every revision change, google changes *something*. New build system? Why not, you indie developers have *loads* of time and resources to waste on that, don't you? Some weird thing just stops working for no apparent reason? You guys love to drop whatever it was you were working on to figure out what the hell ' android.app.Instrumentation' does and why it can't talk to my main class any more, or why I even need it but nothing in that error message about what I might do to fix this arcane random error.
Google have all the resources in the world, I do not. Yet I have to dance for them, every time I upgrade.
Can you guys please funnel some of your practically infinite resources in to making this stuff 'just work'?

This weeks question fits me well, as I am still unsure about the full details of how the fuck this all came together and was about to just rant about it anyway.

Ever since this companies network equipment and cabling has been updated, a lot of vital tools went down and bug out every now and then, at seemingly random times.

The codebase is a horrible mess to begin with and random things execute at random times and at random places spread all over different resources that get random hooks from random physical values etc.

Turns out (or at least what it so far seems like) all of them somehow sync their clock and other variables based on how many (valid-?) requests it gets per measured time and similar oddities, so when the network equipment got updated, that meant that multiple processes now could reach each other much faster and therefore threw off thousands of values and internal clocks.

There's a total of like 600 systems that are all "separate" from each other but all need to communicate in-sync for the production chain to properly work. Thankfully I didn't sign anything yet, so might actually just redirect them to somebody else, I am not ready to age 20 years, even for the amount that would pay.

It probably will be an unanswered question, but let's try.

Does anyone know of a large project using onion / hexagonal/ ddd or similar architecture with free access to the source code...

Or an example of said architectures that goes beyond "trivial dumb example".

The new recruits need... A lot of brushing up (I'd be for electro shock treatment and other stuff, but somehow HR thinks I'm joking).

As said, most examples I found are too basic. On the other hand, if I write now a good example, I'd need to do it in either my free time (nope, just nope) or jiggle it in somewhere in company time (aka it will be never finished nor be in a useful state).

Programming language preferred would be Java, but as I'm fluent in most languages except the forbidden ones (JavaScript and it's friends) ...

Anything would be helpful.

Most welcome would be an example with a focus on Adapter / Ports, e.g. abstraction of HTTP client usage / ORM etc.

Thanks.

Do devranters think that Reason(ML) is too late to the game to compete against TypeScript...or can it ride React success to become more than a niche?

Personally I like it, but, like with F#, I don't enjoying the lack of resources every time I need to get something done.

Any Ruby on Rails developers here? I‘m an Angular Frontend-Dev and want/need to learn RoR, especially for backend development. Any good books/tutorials/resources?

Final year at the university, and I only feel regret.
I hoed around in different technologies and fields. I had developed a game that i played with my friends back in high school. They liked it, so in varsity, i tried game development, 3d modelling scared me off, or rather I pussied out.
Web development, didn't go too deep, App Development with Flutter, didn't go too deep, Cybersecurity, went as far as passing the EC council's exams (the training wasn't that good). I tried putting my knowledge into practice, but resources like HTB aren't really free, you need money to learn (one would say i didn't try hard enough ) but now the certificate sits, useless in my resume, anything I learned fading away. I had an idea that applied blockchain, but my dad said "blah blah blah you could be targeted" (are there symbols for paraphrasing ?). I decided to decide on a stack (picked MERN, good idea ?) and work on it, but I feel like maybe tech isn't for me. AJR songs really hit now.
Final year at the university, and I only feel regret.

so that's how it is... 2,500 seats and no place for me... I don't blame anyone, just sad about it 😭
'Google and Udacity have developed a variety of free learning resources for you'... yeah of course, no need to apply to the scholarship because you provide free learning resources???

I ended up taking over a dev team. I asked a dev why his code wasn’t in the repo, he said he wants to get it right first.

(Internal screaming): Repo isn’t for just done code you spastic zoomer, people need to setup build pipelines and cloud resources based on a new repo existing. You should have at least pushed a the default template project weeks ago like I asked.

Hi I’m a Python Developer, tired of doing internal applications using Excel as a UI. I’m thinking of proposing to turn most of our projects into internal web apps instead. Has anyone gone through this sort of problem?

My team is quite pro at using Excel, so naturally they prefer to use the tools I build from Excel. Some of those tools are also used by external teams, but they are not as capable with Excel, so they need supervision and guidance.

There are multiple concerns that arise:
- I code on Mac, but they need to run it on Windows, so compatibility issues
- Some of their laptops might not have enough resources to run the tasks
- Errors are harder to trace and could be very user-specific.
- New developers might not be familiar with Excel and the way to integrate with Python

I would like to know your opinion or criticism

Continuing my saga, I'm now tasked with creating a .NET Web Form app and then converting it to ASP.NET Core as a proof of concept.
Problems:
- Web Forms are not supported in Core and are not planned to
- After 3 weeks I still do not have a work laptop
-- My personal laptop is a Chrome book running Linux
--- I can't install VS2017 on my laptop, I need it for this project.
- Working from home, where I have the resources available, is apparently against company policy (I'm not 100% on this yet, can't find it myself)
- I'm likely going to be sent back to the offline computer lab at a different location to work on this, where I doubt the programs/packages are installed

Perfect.

The conversations that come across my DevOps desk on a monthly basis.... These have come into my care via Slack, Email, Jira Tickets, PagerDuty alerts, text messages, GitHub PR Reviews, and phone calls. I spend most of my day just trying to log the work I'm being asked to do.

From Random People:
* Employee <A> and Contractor <B> are starting today. Please provision all 19 of their required accounts.
* Oh, they actually started yesterday, please hurry on this request.

From Engineers:
* The database is failing. Why?
* The read-only replica isn't accepting writes. Can you fix this?
* We have this new project we're starting and we need you to set up continuous integration, deployment, write our unit tests, define an integration test strategy, tell us how to mock every call to everything. We'll need several thousand dollars in AWS resources that we've barely defined. Can you define what AWS resources we need?
* We didn't like your definition of AWS resources, so we came up with our own. We're also going to need you to rearchitect the networking to support our single typescript API.
* The VPN is down and nobody can do any work because you locked us all out of connecting directly over SSH from home. Please unblock my home IP.
* Oh, looks like my VPN password expired. How do I reset my VPN password?
* My GitHub account doesn't have access to this repo. Please make my PR for me.
* Can you tell me how to run this app's test suite?
* CI system failed a build. Why?
* App doesn't send logs to the logging platform. Please tell me why.
* How do I add logging statements to my app?
* Why would I need a logging library, can't you just understand why my app doesn't need to waste my time with logs?

From Various 3rd party vendors:
* <X> application changed their license terms. How much do you really want to pay us now?

From Management:
* <X> left the company, and he was working on these tasks that seem closely related to your work. Here are the 3 GitHub Repos you now own.
* Why is our AWS bill so high? I need you to lower our bill by tomorrow. Preferably by 10k-20k monthly. Thanks.
* Please send this month's plan for DevOps work.
* Please don't do anything on your plan.
* Here's your actual new plan for the month.
* Please also do these 10 interruptions-which-became-epic-projects

From AWS:
* Dear AWS Admin, 17 instances need to be rebooted. Please do so by tomorrow.
* Dear AWS Admin, 3 user accounts saw suspicious activity. Please confirm these were actually you.
* Dear AWS Admin, you need to relaunch every one of your instances into a new VPC within the next year.
* Dear AWS Admin, Your app was suspiciously accessing XYZ, which is a violation of our terms of service. You have 24 hours to address this before we delete your AWS account.

Finally, From Management:
* Please provide management with updates, nobody knows what you do.

From me:
Please pay me more. Please give me a team to assist so I'm not a team of one. Also, my wife is asking me to look for a new job, and she's not wrong. Just saying.

When freelancing, do you charge for estimations?

Situation is that I'm a sole android developer (4 years experience) and each time I encounter some agency or a client I feel like I'm between a rock and hard place.

Some of the clients come with ready with list of requirements and ready backend/design sketch and they want me to give them a rough estimate.

It's as if they expect me to take only 2-3 hours for estimation and that's it. But actually this was the second time where I had to spend around 10 hours investigating everything so I would be able to give a half decent estimation at least.

This particular client's project turned out to be a mess and I had to spend 10+ hours to estimate only 70% of his project. I asked him if he would be able to pay under a reduced tarrif and the client was shocked, started doubting my competence level and so on.

In the end I gave him a rough 400 hours estimate and he started complaining that others estimated only 200 hours for his project. So in the end I just wasted my time.

Now it's my bad that I voluntarely invested too much time in this estimate without notifying client prior that I might ask to pay for estimation, next time I will try to do this ahead of time.

It feels like only big agencies who have free resources have a competetive edge against sole freelancers, it really sucks wasting so much time to estimate half baked requirements and assets. Also most of these clients and agencies are purely lazy and most of the time they don't even plan signing, all they need is someone to estimate their work for them.

I'm thinking of starting to charge for estimations and communications in a form of consultations. Is that a good idea?

Update about my boss:

I was early too judge. Maybe still early to form an opinion.

But dude seems pretty level headed. Yes, he is agressive. Yes, he has weird way of complicating things.

But I got to learn things from him. I earned his trust, just like I did in the past with other managers. He is confident about my performance now. He gave me space to ramp up and pushed me to limits.

But now, Floyd is settled. Maybe with time, I might get occasional unpleasant interactions, but those are part of every job.

However, we as a society decided to be in agile mode. Fix a problem and the solution gives rise to another one.

The business head of my pod is going crazy over the deliverables.

They were surviving for years with a product manager. Everything was driven by tech without any research.

And now when I am in, they want everything to be done yesterday.

We spent some decent amount of time on strategy and it turned out to be good. Now they are questioning that why ain't I delivering?!

It's been a week we finalised the strategy, let me get some space and time to structure and plan the execution.

Business heads are pretty nice and level headed people. Just that I don't understand the sense of urgency. I get it that my pod often has to deal with fire fighting given the nature of the business, but holy fuck! Stop pressurising to deliver everything together on a war foot.

They are like, we'll ask for more resources. But whose gonna tell them that 9 women cannot deliver a baby in 1 month.

I need time for discovery and research. Without that, don't expect impact.

As the only PM space, leading the entire vertical, how can I even focus on multiple initiatives?

I really miss my previous life of my first company. It's exactly an year when I left them and I changed two companies since then.

My learning and earnings sky rocketed, but WLB took a toll.

I miss the time when I could finish my work in an hour and did whatever the fuck I want while at work like browsing new topics to learn, exploring places, attending events, connecting with people, making social posts to learn, finance as a hobby, yada yada..

These days, I feel too burned out. Not that I am worried about job stability, because I trust my skills.

But more due to the fact that I have to constantly focus on work for the time I am in office. No free space or time to collect myself together, process things, and focus.

This leads me to thinking about work (read processing office discussions), at home too.

I cannot enjoy music. Feels like a load.

I no longer attend events or meet people after work. No more wasting time on the internet.

And most importantly, I am not bored anymore. I miss being bored. I miss living a boring, mediocre lifestyle.

I miss doing my side projects and polishing my portfolio site ten times a day, because I got nothing better to do.

I used to spend time learning right grammar and why American and English words are different and which to use where.

I miss spending time of Google Maps exploring borders and remote regions.

Weekends fly by. No hobby to pursue. No free time.

I miss the days when I had nothing to do and I was bored and I could do anything.

I used to be always happy. Because no responsibilities. I used to be always up for a meetup. I used to be available for a phone call.

Now it's nothing but work which is surely exciting and some foundational learning with good enough money, but I miss my time when I used to get bored because I had nothing to do.

I've been given a huge stack of paper, some users stories and loose specs. Was tasked with engineering the specific requirements, then the models and finally the database. Then I need to build an API on top of that.
Stuff I'll use is Go and Postgresql. Small issue is, I've never done DBs, so I've no idea what to do or where to start.

Does anyone have any resources to help kick-start myself in this field? I've been reading on SQL, but that doesn't really tell me anything about data structures and how to transform those user stories into product requirements.

"Please stop importing the resources so fast, our servers can't keep up"

Please send the correct data in the first place, so we don't need to fetch all of it again under time pressure

F@#!k my year,

After a year long Mobile app project finally shipped where I served **two lead roles (UX design and mobile dev)**; I had my status meeting with my manager to discuss my next phase of my career. To which I was told I would be promoted to Chief or partner level at my workplace, if shipped on time, which we did.

The response I got was unsettling, I've been asked to "step down" from my architect role and join our innovation sales team since it was discovered I also have an MBA. So much so my skip level manager cut off all my dev licenses week of release. 🤣

The overall need was for me to oversee H1B and contractor resources moving forward on new engagements, as I was now "too expensive". I like coding, but it doesn't sit well with me at all...

Me: "I think I'd like to try out the new Ubuntu version. I really liked Gnome before, maybe the OS is better now?"

A couple days later...

"Man, it's really nice not having to emulate bash. I'm so much more productive now with Linux tooling! Wait, why did everything freeze?"

A week after install...

"What do you mean 'I need to recompile wireless adapter drivers'? Why isn't that included or updated through 'apt'!? Who's the person sitting at their desk saying 'yup, that's a reasonable solution?'"

Two weeks after install...

Me: "Oh, so it's not Chrome eating up system resources, there's a memory leak in gnome-shell.... WHAT!? WHY!? How do I switch back to Unity?"

One month after install...

Me: "Yeah, so I tried it out, but then I threw my computer in a river and I'm *so much* better off now."

Tldr: boss needs his priorities sorted

So as I already wrote about this issue earlier (in a comment) now it's time to actually write the rant...

I'm working between the holidays, not much just doing planning with the boss. Mind you, startup company, so limited resources and all, that's why I'm on planning as well.

So he goes to the whiteboard and draws a line in the middle, writing headings to each side: Need (Panic) and Nice (ASAP). It's starting off well.
We add about 10-ish items to each side, which is kind of okay - then he starts highlighting with different colors within the Need list saying okay, red circles we need NOW, green circles... "Now but later".

How do I not laugh? And now he wants to do even more priorities within these sections and a Soon list just as last time...

This is getting really ridiculous.

Send help (and coffee)

Not a data loss exactly but a loss indeed.

It was my first week at my first junior developer job, I was just learning git and completely messed it all up. I lost around 3 hours of work.

I didn't want to ask anybody for help (because of that useless junior feeling, you know...) and wasn't as good using Google as I'm now.

So I re-did all the work. Thankfully, I have a decent memory.

If there's something to learn here is ask for help when you've used all your resources and still think you need it. Nobody is going to have a bad opinion about you ;)

When you’re frustrated and think you need another developers help, exhaust all of your resources before you ask. Google it, look for similar functionality in the app to mimic, ruminate for a hour. We are all working through challenges.

I hate the elasticsearch backup api.

From beginning to end it's an painful experience.

I try to explain it, but I don't think I will be able to cover it all.

The core concept is:
- repository (storage for snapshots)
- snapshots (actual backup)

The first design flaw is that every backup in an repository is incremental. ES creates an incremental filesystem tree.

Some reasons why this is a bad idea:
- deletion of (older) backups is slow, as newer backups need to be checked for integrity
- you simply have to trust ES that it does the right thing (given the bugs it has... It seems like a very bad idea TM)
- you have no possibility of verification of snapshots

Workaround... Create many repositories as each new repository forces an full backup.........

The second thing: ES scales. Many nodes / es instances form a cluster.

Usually backup APIs incorporate these in their design. ES does not.

If an index spans 12 nodes and u use an network storage, yes: a maximum of 12 nodes will open an eg NFS connection and start backuping.

It might sound not so bad with 12 nodes and one index...

But it get's pretty bad with 100s of indexes and several dozen nodes...

And there is no real limiting in ES. You can plug a few holes, but all in all, when you don't plan carefully your backups, you'll get a pretty f*cked up network congestion.

So traffic shaping must be manually added. Yay...

The last thing is the API itself.

It's a... very fragile thing.

Especially in older ES releases, the documentation is like handing you a flex instead of toilet paper for a wipe.

Documentation != API != Reality.

Especially the fault handling left me more than once speechless...

Eg:
/_snapshot/storage/backup
gives you a state PARTIAL
/_snapshot/storage/backup/_status
gives you a state SUCCESS

Why? The first one is blocking and refers to the backup status itself. The second one shouldn't be blocking and refers to the backup operation.

And yes. The backup operation state is SUCCESS, while the backup state might be PARTIAL (hence no full backup was made, there were errors).

So we have now an additional API that we query that then wraps the API of elasticsearch. With all these shiny scary workarounds like polling, since some APIs are blocking which might lead to a gateway timeout...

Gateway timeout? Yes. Since some operations can run a LONG (multiple hours) time and you don't want to have a ton of open connections hogging resources... You let the loadbalancer kill it. Most operations simply run in ES in the background, while the connection was killed.

So much joy and fun, isn't it?

Now add the latest SMR scandal and a few faulty (as in SMR instead of CMD) hdds in a hundred terabyte ZFS pool and you'll get my frustration level.

PS: The cluster has several dozen terabyte and a lot od nodes. If you have good advice, you're welcome - but please think carefully about this fact.

I might have accidentially vaporized people sending me links with solutions that don't work on large scale TM.

So.. i have been doing internship with a good startup for last 2 months. It was supposed to be a 3 month internship and then maybe a job offer. I accepted this , but with a disclaimer that i will be taking leaves for exams.

They looked like they didn't liked this condition, saying "we won't be giving pay for those days" , "you will need your manager's approval", etc, but later i took 5-6 continuous leaves for my papers and my manager( aka the ceo) wouldn't even read my approval mail ( i did got deductions for those leaves tho, but i was fine with it )

Now the situation is that my final end term exams are coming up. They are supposed to go on for 15 days somewhere in December beginning, but i also need an extra 10-15 days to cover the syllabus for it. Apart from those, there are other college stuff like Second Sessionals, internal practicals ,minor project report submission , etc are also coming up, that are supposed to take anywhere from 1 to 5-6 continuous days in the first weeks of November.

So i asked my company for 2 months of leave to handle my college environment. The tasks assigned to me are incomplete , but i am well versed in those and might complete it if i had more time. I gave them an option that i will resume my work from January and complete my 3 months of internship ( i currently am about to complete 2 months , November would have been the 3rd) , but they said that they are "freeing me" in the October only ( i guess this means that my internship is being terminated and am off from company's payroll). They also asked me to contact company once all exam stuff is over, but yesterday i got suddenly removed from the company's slack group. I am not sure how to look at this.

They have also asked me to prepare a report on what i have done. Now i can send them a report like what i would have given to my college : containing more useless info and a few points on my work . Or i could provide them with a deep report on what i did each day, what are the bugs , what are the resources that i found , what are the things that need to be enhanced, links to important groups and people... Etc . I have so much of information that i fear they might hire someone else to complete all stuff that i have started and my material would give him a kickstart.
But on the other hand , it was their office that i worked in, their ideas that i built upon, so i feel a moral obligation to provide all assistance to my replacement.

What should i do?

(tldr : company asking for a report on work you did during internship that was supposed to be converted to job . wwyd?)

I don't have any experience with cloud providers and I need to get a server for a project.
The website will be up for 3 weeks, access will probably be very uneven, the total user count is somewhat below 2000.
The site will probably be quite interactive and real-time, content may be changing every few seconds for an hour and then remain unchanged for days. I will also need either SSE or websockets for this reason.
What should I consider when selecting a cloud providers? Do you have a good one? My ideal provider would scale resources according to traffic like I've heard AWS does, but I want to hear your opinion first especially considering I know very little about how server load works.

Does anyone else's job just hate documentation? I have wasted most of the day trying to get our new build to work because I keep hitters snags that aren't documented. Hour release was delayed 6 hours because our QA doesn't have any kind of written procedure or checklist and missed bugs in something that is usually problematic, and I am being forced to stay online by a micromanaging boss that needs to realize he's not an engineer anymore. And I am supposed to have a feature done by today, but this clusterfuck consumed all of the resources I need. I'm polishing the ol' resume. Anyone looking for a remote .net dev?

Interesting definitions

1. Project Manager is a Person who thinks nine Women can deliver a baby in One month.

2. Developer is a Person who thinks it will take 18 months to deliver a Baby.

3. Onsite Coordinator is one who thinks single Woman can deliver nine babies in one month.

4. Client is the one who doesn’t know why he wants a baby.

5. Marketing Manager is a person who thinks he can deliver a baby even if no man and woman are available.

6. Resource Optimization Team thinks they don’t Need a man or woman; They’ll produce a child with zero resources.

7. Documentation Team thinks they don’t care whether the child is delivered, they’ll just document 9 months.

8. Quality Auditor is the person who is never happy with the PROCESS to produce a baby.

9. Tester is a person who always tells his wife that this is not the Right baby.

DevRant might not be a perfect place for that question but what the hell.
This is a question for people that do side projects, not only programming but electronic and mechanical as well. If you are a student even better.
(I dont wanna discourage non students but i have limited resources here...)

So the question:
While making a project have you ever had a problem where a limited access to tools was the problem?
(maybe tools was here but nobody wanted to borrow you because of paperwork or some bs.)

I mean that you had a idea or was in middle of a project and you didnt finished/(finished but in crappy condition) because lack of proper tools didnt allow you to?

I realy need your opinion on that subject, i have a nice idea i just have to test the waters.
And please tell me if you are a student or not.

!rant
TL;DR: Can anyone recommend or point at any resources which deal with best practices and software design for non-beginners?

I started out as a self-taught programmer 7 years ago when I was 15, now I'm computer science student at a university.
I'd consider myself pretty experienced when it comes to designing software as I already made lots of projects, from small things which can be done in a week, to a project which i worked on for more than a year. I don't have any problems with coming up with concepts for complex things. To give you an example I recently wrote a cache system for an android app I'm working on in my free time which can cache everything from REST responses to images on persistent storage combined with a memcache for even faster access to often accessed stuff all in a heavily multithreaded environment. I'd consider the system as solid. It uses a request pattern where everthing which needs to be done is represented by a CacheTask object which can be commited and all responses are packed into CacheResponse objects.

Now that you know what i mean by "non-beginner" lets get on to the problem:

In the last weeks I developed the feeling that I need to learn more. I need to learn more about designing and creating solid systems. The design phase is the most important part during development and I want to get it right for a lot bigger systems.
I already read a lot how other big systems are designed (android activity system and other things with the same scope) but I feel like I need to read something which deals with these things in a more general way.

Do you guys have any recommended readings on software design and best practices?

gradle is infuriating.

firstly there are so limited resources to understand how it's building a java/android code. everything happens by magic and hit+trial

secondly the plugins and the tasks works in mysterious ways. sometime they work when applied in the project root's gradle file, other times they work when applied in module's gradle file, nd other times they need configuration at both levels.

then there are gradle tasks like build ,test, assemble , clean etc. these are less of an action and more of an alias to run a bundle of actions.

then we have 3rd party plugins which attach themselves to these "fat-actions" and run before/after them

and finally we have the fuckup from the java world where the only available code coverage plugin is jacoco and IT FUCKING SUCKS!!! it is a test environment plugin, it should impact test tasks , but somehow it's fucking with the assemble taskin such a manner, that the jars ans aar files generated via plugin are giving runtime errrors. yes , runtime! as if we are back in the messed up js world of "everything is good unless running live"

even if it was a compile time eeror, i would have considered. but runtime?!! fucking runtime error?! i barely understand this shit, there is absolutely no info available as to which classes are being used to create a build and how, and i am supposed to fix this? wtf?!

Oh DevRant community, I've come seeking for help and wisdom.
In my university the basic programming course uses Java and it's getting a bit outdated. The class has a lot of resources, like online videos and examples, but teachers from other departments say that the class doesn't teach students correctly.
I'm a student at that university, and I'm working in a group tasked to diagnose the class and seek for possible solutions. I need to know if some of you know about tools used to teach programming and algorithmic thinking in an interesting way at a university level. Something like Scratch or Karel, but for university students. If you have an example university I would love that!

I thought I posted about this awhile back but I didn't. I'm glad since the story is so much better now.
6 weeks ago: Told I'm going to be on a super fun JAMStack build with lots of sexy animations. Sweet, this will be a fun build!

5 weeks ago: Find out what the timeline on this incredibly ambitious project is. I start raising flags cause everything needs to go PERFECT for this to not blow up and/or turn in to a dumpster fire.

4 weeks ago: Project "kicks off" with a meeting with the client. We find out that they've decided to do another round of revisions on their design comps, but we have what we need for sprint 1. We provide a list of all the assets/information we still need for sprint 1 success.

3 weeks ago: Still waiting on some assets for sprint one, but we're fumbling our way through. Still waiting on the PM to get around to doing their PM job and building out our backlog / gathering requirements for us.

2 weeks ago: Sprint 1's end date comes and goes. Still need assets from the client, I've personally asked them for the same asset 3 different times. Sprint 1 gets extended 1 week.

1 week ago: We deliver sprint 1 page templates, minus the resources we're still waiting for. Get chewed out by the client regarding the pages not looking like their comps (Yeah, no shit sherlock, you never sent us the assets)

This week: Working on Sprint 2 commitments. We have 2x as many page templates to deliver, per developer, as we had the first sprint. Still waiting on Sprint 1 assets. Don't have Sprint 2 assets. Wait, what about the global styles? They still haven't sent those to us yet either.

Requirements? Guess I'll spend valuable dev time tracking those down for myself.

Client? Well, they're pissed off we haven't hit our commitments yet.

Oh well, at least we have a pimple faced, fresh out of college, CS major, with no real development experience rolling on to this cesspool of a project.

Other devs? Well, we're out of fucks to give. Lets just watch this thing burn.

Oh, I forgot to add, we have 17 page templates to deliever between today (2/27) and 3/18. #NoFuckingWay

For my next internship, i need a Linux distro, which is easy to use and which doesn't need a Lot of resources while using it in Oracle Virtualbox.
Which distro would you prefer, i think About ubuntu but I'm afraid that it would use to much of my limited resources so that it is nearly impossible to code with it.

Holy shit big companies are absolutely rubish. How on earth do they not think about the long term. I'm like "look what we are doing isn't right, we can't make new functionality that will no longer works in 6month. The other department webservices are changing and you're well aware of that" and they're like "we need to produce value, we don't have the resources, blabla". Why should I care? f#ck you it's not my company and don't come back crying that it's not working.

So I moved my full-stack in-progress web application to a docker container to ease development, and it's certainly accomplished that. I can simultaneously run a SQL database, node.js, java, and a Linux server all within my Linux operating system. It's like a mini vm. And when I need to deploy I just deploy it directly with Heroku, no configuring a host manually.

In a way I'm happy with this because it makes both development and deployment much easier, but I'm also sad because I'm basically admitting that I don't have the resources to both learn full-stack and be a linux server wiz.

Has IT gotten so big and complex that you have to compromise how much you can learn at a given time? It seems my limit is at learning 2 languages and 2 frameworks at a time. 😵

(Note: I got a bit carried away while writing this, so the end result is a lot longer than I expected. Apologies for the long post!)

The beginning of my programming journey started with a book.

This was back in 7th grade. I had some basic exposure to BASIC (pun maybe intended?) from our school curriculum, but it was nothing too interesting as our teachers never really treated it as anything important. They would stress a lot on those Microsoft Office chapters (yes, we actually studied Microsoft Office as part of our computer science course at school) and mostly ignore the programming chapters because I dare say many of them struggled with it themselves. So although I had been exposed to *some* programming, it was mostly memorizing the syntax without actually understanding what was going on.

Then one day there was this book fair thing going on at this local Carrefour (for those of you who've no idea, it's a pretty famous hypermarket chain) in this mall, and for some reason my mother and I were in that mall on that day. Now the interesting thing is that this usually never happens -- I usually visit malls with my dad or my friends, this is the only instance I remember where I had actually visited one with just my mom. This turned out to be fortuitous. My father is the kind of person who's generally not amenable to any kind of extraneous shopping requests. My mother, on the other hand, was and remains pliable.

So I basically saw this book -- Sams' Teach Yourself JavaScript in 24 Hours -- being sold at half price. I vaguely remembered having read somewhere that JavaScript is a good introductory programming language (and it helped that this was the time when I was getting into a Google-craze -- I basically saw some photos of Google Zurich and went all HOLY SHIT THAT'S WHERE I NEED TO WORK WHEN I GROW UP (for those of you who haven't seen it, I recommend googling it. That office is the bomb) -- and I'd also read that you need programming skills to join Google). So I begged and begged my mum to buy that book, and thankfully she did.

Back home I returned with my new prize under my arm. Dad took one look at it and scoffed that I'll never actually use it. Pretty much entirely out of spite (to prove him wrong), I attacked the book with a zeal. I still remember how I felt when I wrote my very first JavaScript program (printing the current system date in an h1 tag) and marveling at the output. I guess that was when something struck -- the realization that this was probably what I wanted to do in life.

Fast forward to today, and I've never looked back and wondered what it would be like to have done something else.

PS: for all you beginners out there, JavaScript is a horrible language. Please start with something like Python. Also there are better resources than Sams' Teach Yourself JavaScript in 24 Hours available, that I just didn't know of back then. I'd recommend Eloquent JavaScript any day.

Okay so update/JS pt2

This is just me throwing my thoughts down and some questions

I've been practicing arrays/objects and loops more and I'm getting more understanding it helps that you can do them both at the same time. But like I need more looping techniques (if that makes sense) like instead of always using for(let i = 0; i <= x.length; i++) and I havent completely learned how or when I use for(x in y)

Questions.

• what's the difference between class objects and objects that look like a python dictionary

• when should I use classes over the other kind of classes

• any good resources and projects I can practice with loops cause I'm kind of running dry on ideas

and I dont wanna google cause I barely already have no social interaction

rent / question (there is a question at the end and I'd appreciate your opinion)

8 months ago, I agreed to help a not too distant relative of mine to do his master thesis at the company where I work. He was supposed to build something really MVP, but useful for us and I'd help him get some scientific questions out of it, and provide him with (computing) resources to test his theories / implementations under simulated and much heavier load.

Since then, he didn't get done anything even remotely useful, always just stuck on very rudimentary issues, claimed things are almost ready, I wrote a quick smoke test to prove that the whole application blows up when you touch it, in short - a disaster and went over to radio silence.

In the meanwhile, we didn't need it anymore, so 1.5 months ago, I got in touch with him again, with an even more technical proposal, something, at least I'd think, that's even cooler to do. He asked me some question about hypothetical load, the system should be able to handle eventually, to come up with alternative implementations to compare them against each other. He said that his exam period is going to be over soon and he'll get back to me with some initial version.

2 weeks ago, I got back in touch with him, trying to urge him, to get finally started and get something done. If he'd actually sit down and do it during the holidays as a "full time job", he'd be probably done in 2 weeks. Last week, he came back to me and said he has an initial PR ready to review.

I was excited about it, but basically froze when I realized what he did. He deleted all his previous work - some infrastructure stuff which took us basically 3 months of back and forth to get running - and as far as I could see, all the new code were only auto generated clients based on a swagger specification. In short - I could do it in less then an hour. If you really have no idea what you're doing, it might take you half a day, but definitely nowhere near to a week.

His brother, which a good friend of mine, thinks I'm being too hard on him. His argument was, that it's too hard, and he has to do it in C#, but he only knows Java (I gave him access to some of our repositories to copy paste code together, he didn't need to invent anything. I also prefer C# but wrote my master thesis in Java) Personally, I'm just pissed because he promises stuff that he never does. I totally understand him - I was like that as a student as well, I guess karma is a ... but still, he's wasting my time.

Right now I'm thinking how to get out of this, without having even more time wasted. I doubt he'd ever deliver anything useful. He got plenty of input from me about what he could consider for his scientific question, how to measure performance, ... He can keep his credentials to access our test environment with the test data, but I won't give him access to any additional computing resources, to compare how his solutions might scale on our company's cost. (mainly it's not the money, but I'd have to provide that stuff, and probably help him set it up)

does it sound like a fair deal (saying, I'm done with you. You can finish your topic on your own, but don't expect any help from me)? or am I being a dick about it and too demanding?

We're doing single login with Azure AD for a Java-based site. We need to also sync the user changes with a microservice.

Now, here comes the fun part: Microsoft is working on a new API which looks promising, which they recommend to use as they've migrated their resources there. But this new API has SDK for a ton of languages but Java, so that's a no-no. On the other side, the js sdk for the old API is borderline unusable and has no deltas (which we need to sync users), although the new one is pretty good.

As a cherry on the cake, applications created with the old API are not transferrable to the new one, but it is otherwise. This is detailed in a very small section of their labrythinc docs and I'm really hoping that this is true or we're thoroughly screwed.

Alas, Microsoft, you've disappointed me again!

Do any of you have any good resources at hand on good ways of managing Docker deploys? I don't want to use something as overkill as Kubernetes. In the end I want to be able to spin up the application on a $5 DigitalOcean droplet if need be.

I need to figure out a good way of managing, deploying and rolling back a live application. Perhaps just using docker-compose is the way to go. Though I want your ideas.

Thanks

I'm an iOS developer and I cringe when I read job specs that require TDD or excessive unit testing. By excessive I mean demanding that unit tests need to written almost everywhere and using line coverage as a measure of success. I have many years of experience developing iOS apps in agencies and startups where I needed to be extremely time efficient while also keeping the code maintainable. And what I've learned is the importance of DRY, YAGNI and KISS over excessive unit testing. Sadly our industry has become obsessed with unit tests. I'm of the opinion that unit tests have their place, but integration and e2e tests have more value and should be prioritised, reserving unit tests for algorithmic code. Pushing for unit tests everywhere in my view is a ginormous waste of time that can't ever be repaid in quality, bug free code. Why? Because leads to making code testable through dependency injection and 'humble object' indirection layers, which increases the LoC and fragments code that would be easier to read over different classes. Add mocks, and together with the tests your LoC and complexity have tripled. 200% code size takes 200% the time to maintain. This time needs to be repaid - all this unit testing needs to save us 200% time in debugging or manual testing, which it doesn't unless you are an absolute rookie who writes the most terrible and buggy code imaginable, but if you're this terrible writing your production code, why should your tests be any better? It seems that especially big corporate shops love unit tests. Maybe they have enough money and resources to pay for all these hours wasted on unit tests. Maybe the developers can point their 10,000 unit tests when something goes wrong and say 'at least we tried'? Or maybe most developers don't know how to think and reason about their code before they type, and unit tests force them to do that?

I'm struggling with learning JavaScript and wondered if anyone had advice that would make learning and retaining it a little easier.

I've been through multiple HTML and CSS fundamentals courses on various apps and a couple on JavaScript and though I have the basics more or less down the more advanced stuff is really kicking my brains butt.

I would ask this on Sololearn but 90% of people on there are morons who struggle to even use the app let alone read. A page can give you the answer to a question that follows and you got people saying that they need help with the answer. I mean how dumb can you be?

I'm not looking for an easy ride but I do feel I lack direction and with so many resources out there I'm a bit lost as to what experienced devs think are good.

I'm pretty consistent on at least on hour a day, 7 days a week. Though I only have about 2 months of experience which isn't crap in regards to the bigger picture. So I'm still extremely green but also very dedicated and want to learn so I can change careers.

Anyways opinions and or criticisms are welcome.Cheers.

#Suphle Rant 9: a tsunami on authenticators

I was approaching the finish line, slowly but surely. I had a rare ecstatic day after finding a long forgotten netlify app where I'd linked docs deployment to the repository. I didn't realise it was weighing down on me, the thought of how to do that. I just corrected some deprecated settings and saw the 93% finished work online. Everything suddenly made me happier that day

With half an appendix chapter to go, I decided to review an important class I stole from my old company for clues when I need to illustrate something involved using a semblance of a real world example (in the appendix, not abstract foo-bar passable for the docs)

It turns out, I hadn't implemented a functionality for restricting access to resources to only verified accounts. It just hasn't been required in the scheme of things. No matter, should be a piece of cake. I create a new middleware and it's done before I get to 50 lines. Then I try to update the documentation but to my surprise, user verification status turns out to be a subset of authentication locking. Instead of duplicating bindings for both authentication and verification, dev might as well use one middleware that checks for both and throws exceptions where appropriate.

BUT!

These aspects of the framework aren't middleware, at all. Call it poor design but I didn't envisage a situation where the indicators (authentication, path based authorisation and a 3rd one I don't recall), would perform behaviour deviating from the default. They were directly connected to their handlers and executed after within the final middleware. So there's no way to replace that default authentication scheme with one that additionally checks for verification status.

Whew

You aren't going to believe this. It may seem like I'm not serious and will never finish. I shut my system down for that day, even unsure how those indicators now have to refactored to work as middleware, their binding and detachment, considering route collections are composed down a trie

I'm mysteriously stronger the following day, draw up designs, draft a bunch of notes, roll my sleeves, and the tsunami began. Was surprisingly able to get most of previous middleware tests passing again before bed, with the exception of reshuffled classes. So I guess we can be optimistic that those other indicators won't cause more suffering or take us additional days off course

Storytime.

Our prometheus node, one of your oldest systems (somehow fits the Titan reference..), is about to be relieved of its duties after several years of loyal services to the crew.

We decided to run with another Prometheus node in the ring, that will run simultaneously with the old one, so that the new one can start to collect metrics that we need for alerting (some historic metrics are needed too..). sort of an Prometheus cluster, without the cluster fun and with 2 different Prometheus versions.

The problems with this? Well it's not the new node or the latest shit versions of Prometheus per se.

1: The node exporter.
those dudes decided to make some breaking changes in a minor update, so that you will need to run with some magic bullshittery, that the latest Prometheus can make something out of the old metrics provided by the old node exporters.

The other one is the related puppet code.
The node definitions for Prometheus were built via exported resources on the target nodes.
The code worked like a charm with only one Prometheus node, but try that with two instances in the same way.

Still WIP, but some targets are already included in the new Prometheus instance.
alerting works so far.

Can't wait to close this ticket for good..