This is kind of a horror story, with a happing ending. It contains a lot of gore images, and some porn. Very long story.

TL;DR Network upgrade

Once upon a time, there were two companies HA and HP, both owned by HC. Many years went by and the two companies worked along side each one another, but sometimes there were trouble, because they weren't sure who was supposed to bill the client for projects HA and HP had worked on together.

At HA there was an IT guy, an imbecile of such. He's very slow at doing his job, doesn't exactly understand what he's doing, nor security principles.

The IT guy at HA also did some IT work for HP from time to time when needed. But he was not in charge of the infrastructure for HP, that was the jobb for one developer who didn't really know what he was doing either.

Whenever a new server was set up at HP, the developer tried many solutions, until he landed on one, but he never removed the other tested solutions, and the config is scattered all around. And no documentation!!
Same goes with network, when something new was added, the old was never removed or reconfigured to something else.

One dark winter, a knight arrived at HP. He had many skills. Networking, server management, development, design and generally a fucking awesome viking.
This genius would often try to cleanse the network and servers, and begged his boss to let him buy new equipment to replace the old, to no prevail.
Whenever he would look in the server room, he would get shivers down his back.
(Image: https://i.bratteng.xyz/Ie9x3YC33C.j...)

One and a half year later, the powerful owners in HA, HP and HC decided it was finally time to merge HA and HP together to HS. The knight thought this was his moment, he should ask CEO if he could be in charge of migrating the network, and do a complete overhault so they could get 1Gb interwebz speeds.

The knight had to come up with a plan and some price estimates, as the IT guy also would do this.
The IT guy proposed his solution, a Sonicwall gateway to 22 000 NOK, and using a 3rd party company to manage it for 3000 NOK/month.
"This is absurd", said the knight to the CEO and CXO, "I can come up with a better solution that is a complete upgrade. And it will be super easy to manage."
The CEO and CXO gave the knight a thumbs up. The race was on. We're moving in 2 months, I got to have the equipment by then, so I need a plan by the end of the week.
He roamed the wide internet, looked at many solutions, and ended up with going for Ubiquiti's Unifi series. Cheap, reliable and pretty nice to look at.

The CXO had mentioned the WiFi at HA was pretty bad, as there was WLAN for each meeting room, and one for the desks, so the phone would constantly jump between networks.
So the knight ended up with this solution:
2x Unifi Securtiy Gateway Pro 4
2x Unifi 48port
1x Unifi 10G 16port
5x Unifi AP-AC-Lite
12x pairs of 10G unifi fibre modules
All with a price tag around the one Sonicwall for 22 000 NOK, not including patch cables, POE injectors and fibre cables.

The knight presented this to the CXO, whom is not very fond of the IT guy, and the CXO thought this was a great solution.
But the IT guy had to have a say at this too, so he was sent the solution and had 2 weeks to dispute the soltion.
Time went by, CXO started to get tired of the waiting, so he called in a meeting with the knight and the IT guy, this was the IT guys chance to dispute the solution.
All he had to say was he was familiar with the Sonicwall solution, and having a 3rd party company managing it is great.
He was given another 2 weeks to dispute the solution, yet nothing happened.

The CXO gave the thumbs up, and the knight orders the equipment.
At this time, the knight asks the IT guy for access to the server room at HA, and a key (which would take 2 months to get sorted, because IT guys is a slow imbecile)

The horrors, Oh the horrors, the knight had never seen anything like this before.
(Image: https://i.bratteng.xyz/HfptwEh9qT.j...)
(Image: https://i.bratteng.xyz/HfptwEh9qT.j...)
(Image: https://i.bratteng.xyz/hmOE2ZuQuE.j...)
(Image: https://i.bratteng.xyz/4Flmkx6slQ.j...)

What are all these for, why is there a fan ductaped to on of the servers.
WHAT IS THIS!
Why are there cables tied in a knot.
WHY!
These are questions we never will know the answers too.

The knight needs access to the servers, and sonicwall to see how this is configured.
After 1.5 month he gains access to the sonicwall and one of the xserve.
What the knight discovers baffles him.
All ports are open, sonicwall is basically in bridge mode and handing out public IPs to every device connected to it.
No VLANs, everything, just open...

I’m back for a fucking rant.

My previous post I was happy, I’ve had an interview today and I felt the interviewer acted with integrity and made the role seem worthwhile. Fuck it, here’s the link:
https://www.devrant.io/rants/889363

So, since then; the recruiter got in touch: “smashed it son, sending the tech demo your way, if you can get it done this evening that would be amazing”

Obviously I said based on the exact brief I think that’s possible, I’ll take a look and let them know if it isn’t.

Having done loads of these, I know I can usually knock them out and impress in an evening with no trouble.

Here’s where shit gets fucked up; i opened the brief.

I was met with a brief for an MVP using best practice patterns and flexing every muscle with the tech available...

Then I see the requirements, these fucking dicks are after 10 functional requirements averaging an hour a piece.

+TDD so * 1.25,
+DI and dependency inversion principle * 1.1
+CI setup (1h on this platform)
+One ill requirement to use a stored proc in SQL server to return a view (1h)
+UX/UI design consideration using an old tech (1-2h)
+unobtrusive jquery form post validation (2h)
+AES-256 encryption in the db... add 2h for proper testing.

These cunts want me to knock 15-20h of Work into their interview tech demo.

I’ve done a lot of these recently, all of them topped out at 3h max.

The job is middling: average package, old tech, not the most exciting or decent work.

The interviewer alluded to his lead being a bit of a dick; one of those “the code comes first” devs.

Here’s where shit gets realer:
They’ve included mock ups in the tech demo brief’s zip... I looked at them to confirm I wasn’t over estimating the job... I wasn’t.

Then I looked at the other files in the fucking zip.

I found 3 of the images they wanted to use were copyright withheld... there’s no way these guys have the right to distribute these.

Then I look in the font folder, it’s a single ttf, downloaded from fucking DA Font... it was published less than 2mo ago, the license file had been removed: free for Personal, anything else; contact me.

There’s no way these guys have any rights to this font, and I’ve never seen a font redistributed legally without it’s accompanying licence files.

This fucking company is constantly talking about its ethical behaviours.

Given that I know what I’m doing; I know it would have taken less time to find free-for-commercial images and use a google font... this sloppy bullshit is beyond me.

Anyway, I said I’d get back to the recruiter, he wasn’t to know and he’s a good guy. I let him know I’d complete the tech demo over the weekend, he’s looked after me and I don’t want him having trouble with his client...

I’ll substitute the copyright fuckery with images I have a license for because there’s no way I’m pushing copyright stolen material to a public github repo.

I’ll also be substituting the topic and leaving a few js bombs in there to ensure they don’t just steal my shit.

Here’s my hypotheses, anyone with any more would be greatly welcomed...
1: the lead dev is just a stuck up arsehole, with no real care for his work and a relaxed view on stealing other people’s.
2: they are looking for 15-20h free work on an MVP they can modify and take to market
3: they are looking for people to turn down this job so they can support someone’s fucking visa.

In any case, it’s a shit show and I’ll just be seeing this as box checking and interview practice...

Arguments for 1: the head told me about his lead’s problems within 20mn of the interview.
2: he said his biggest problem was getting products out quickly enough.
3: the recruiter told me they’d been “picky”, and they’re making themselves people who can’t be worked for.

I’m going to knock out the demo, keep it private and protect my work well. It’s going to smash their tits off because I’m a fucking great developer... I’ll make sure I get the offer to keep the recruiter looked after.

Then fuck those guys, I’m fucking livid.

After a wonderful interview experience and a nice introduction to the company I’ve been completely put off...

So here’s the update: if you’re interviewing for a shitty middle level dev position, amongst difficult people, on an out of date stack... you need people to want you, don’t fuck them off.

If they want my time to rush out MVPs, they can pay my day rate.

Fuuuuuuuuck... I typed this out whilst listening to the podcast, I’m glad I’m not the only one dealing with shit.

Oh also; I had a lovely discriminatory as fuck application, personality test and disability request email sent to me from a company that seems like it’s still in the 90s. Fuck those guys too, I reported them to the relevant authorities and hope they’re made to look at how morally reprehensible their recruitment process is. The law is you don’t ask if the job can be done by anyone.

Has been a long time since I'm appreciating working with GRPC.

Amazingly fast and full-featured protocol! No complaints at all.

Although I felt something was missing...
​

Back in the days of HTTP, we were all given very simple tools for making requests to verify behaviours and data of any of our HTTP endpoints, tools like curl, postman, wget and so on...

This toolset gives us definitely a nice and quick way to explore our HTTP services, debug them when necessary and be efficient.
​

This is probably what I miss the most from HTTP.
​

When you want to debug a remote endpoint with GRPC, you need to actually write a client by hand (in any of the supported language) then run it.
​

There are alternatives in the open source world, but those wants you to either configure the server to support Reflection or add a proxy in front of your services to be able to query them in a simpler way.
​

This is not how things work in 2018 almost 2019.
​

We want simple, quick and efficient tools that make our life easier and having problems more under control.
​

I'm a developer my self and I feel this on my skin every day. I don't want to change my server or add an infrastructure component for the simple reason of being able to query it in a simpler way!

However, This exact problem has been solved many times from HTTP or other protocols, so we should do something about our beloved GRPC.
​

Fine! I've told to my self. Let's fix this.
​

A few weeks later...

I'm glad to announce the first Release of BloomRPC - The first GRPC Client GUI that is nice and simple,

It allows to query and explore your GRPC services with just a couple of clicks without any additional modification to what you have running right now! Just install the client and start making requests.
​

It has been built with the Electron technology so its a desktop app and it supports the 3 major platforms, Mac, Linux, Windows.
​

Check out the repository on GitHub: https://github.com/uw-labs/bloomrpc

This is the first step towards the goal of having a simple and efficient way of querying GRPC services!
​

Keep in mind that It is in its first release, so improvements will follow along with future releases.

Your feedback and contributions are very welcome.

If you have the same frustration with GRPC I hope BloomRPC will make you a bit happier!

!rant
May I suggest an email service?

I saw this post recommending the Vivaldi browser (https://devrant.com/rants/1544070/...) and there was a discussion a few days ago about how email providers snoop around and sell data. I can't find it anymore, but noone mentioned protonmail.ch there.

I just wanted to share my so far positive experience with protonmail. It's a fully encrypted email service that was first used internally by some Swiss academics. Now they made a product out of it with paid subscriptions and a basic, free account. They already open-sourced the front-end web client and are planning to do the same for the back-end in the future, which is really cool. Oh and they have really nice email clients for iOS and Android, which have higher ratings than gmail itself in the Play Store. But that might also be because only a special audience uses protonmail and not the regular guys.

So, I suggest that you register an account there even if you don't want to use it right now. The free account comes with 1 email address and storage limitations. But it's usable and ad-free. Since it's still quite the new service, many email addresses are available. Just like gmail in the early days. That's why I'm suggesting you go and register even if you don't need it now.

Oh and last but not least: I'm not affiliated in any way with protonmail, except for having a paid subscription. But I believe things making the internet a better place should be promoted and devrant is definitely the community with people thinking the same way I do. Have a nice day.

Fuck MS, why couldn't you update the NuGet API URL when NuGet updated? The warning on nuget.org states,

"This package will only be available to download with SemVer 2.0.0 compatible NuGet clients, such as Visual Studio 2017 (version 15.3) and above or NuGet client 4.3.0 and above"

It says nothing about using the V3 endpoint, so if you''re like me and updated NuGet to 4.5 and still got nothing but

"NU1101: Unable to find package Foo.Bar. No packages exist with this id in source(s): https://www.nuget.org/api/v2/"

...then you'll be very confused until it strikes you that there might be a new API version. Even if MS doesn't want to deprecate the V2 API just yet, it would be awfully nice to just state on the frickin' site that not only do you need NuGet >= 4.3.x, but also the correct feed URL.

$_DEITY knows how many dev-hours have been lost to this shit.