I had a secondary Gmail account with a really nice short nickname (from the early invite/alpha days), forwarded to another of my mailboxes. It had a weak password, leaked as part of one of the many database leaks.

Eventually I noticed some dude in Brazil started using my Gmail, and he changed the password — but I still got a copy of everything he did through the forwarding rule. I caught him bragging to a friend on how he cracked hashes and stole and sold email accounts and user details in bulk.

He used my account as his main email account. Over the years I saw more and more personal details getting through. Eventually I received a mail with a plaintext password... which he also used for a PayPal account, coupled to a Mastercard.

I used a local website to send him a giant expensive bouquet of flowers with a box of chocolates, using his own PayPal and the default shipping address.

I included a card:

"Congratulations on acquiring my Gmail account, even if I'm 7 years late. Thanks for letting me be such an integral part of your life, for letting me know who you are, what you buy, how much you earn, who your family and friends are and where you live. I've surprised your mother with a cruise ticket as you mentioned on Facebook how sorry you were that you forgot her birthday and couldn't buy her a nice present. She seems like a lovely woman. I've also made a $1000 donation in your name to the EFF, to celebrate our distant friendship"

Sit down before you read this.

So I interviewed a guy for a "Support Engineer" internship position.

Me and the team lead sit down and are waiting for him to enter, but apparently he's actually making a coffee in the kitchen.

This isn't exactly a strike since the receptionist told him that he can go get a drink, and we did too. It's just always expected for him to get a glass of water, not waste 3 minutes brewing a coffee.

In any case he comes in, puts the coffee on the table, then his phone, then his wallet, then his keys and then sits on our side of the table.
I ask him to sit in front of us so we can see him. He takes a minute to pack and tranfer himself to the other side of the table. He again places all of the objects on the table.

We begin, team lead tells him about the company. Then I ask him whether he got any questions regarding the job, the team or the company . For the next 15 minutes he bombards us with mostly irrelevant and sometimes inappropriate questions, like:
0: Can I choose my own nickname when getting an email address?
1: Does the entire department get same salaries?
2: Are there yoga classes on Sundays only or every morning?
3: Will I get a car?
4: Does the firm support workspace equality? How many chicks are in the team?
5: I want the newest grey Mac.

And then.. Then the questions turn into demands:
6: I need a high salary (asks for 2.5 more than the job pays. Which is still a lot).
I ask him why would he get that at his first job in the industry (remind you, this is an internship and we are a relatively high paying company).
He says he's getting paid more at his current job.
His CV lists no current job and only indicates that he just finished studying.
He says that he's working at his parent's business...
Next he says that he is very talented and has to be promoted very quickly and that we need to teach him a lot and finance his courses.

At this point me and the team lead were barely holding our laughs.

The team lead asks him about his English (English is not our native language).
He replies "It's good, trust me".
Team lead invites him for an English conversation. Team lead acts like a customer with a broken internet and the guy is there to troubleshoot. (btw that's not job related, just a simple scenario)
TL: "Hello, my name is Andrew, I'm calli..."
Guy: *interrupts* "Yes, yes, hi! Hi! What do you want?"
TL: "Well, if you let me fi..."
Guy: "Ok! Talk!"
TL: "...inish... My internet is not working."
Guy: "Ok, *mimics tuning a V engine or cooking a soup* I fixed! *points at TL* now you say 'yes you fixed'".

Important to note that his English was horrible. Disregarding the accent he just genuinely does not know the language well.

Then he continiues with "See? Good English. Told you no need to check!".

After about half a minute of choking on out silent laughter I ask him how much Python experience he has (job lists a requirement of at least 1 year).
He replies "I'm very good at object oriented functional programming".
I ask again "But what is your experience? Did you ever take any courses? Do you have a git repository to show? Any side.."
*he interrupts again* "I only use Matlab!".

Team lead stands up and proceeds to shake his hand while saying "we will get back to you".

At last the guy says with a stupid smile on his face "You better hire me! Call me back tomorrow." Leaves TL hanging and walks away after packing his stuff into the pockets.

I was so shocked that I wasn't even angry.
We both laughed for the rest of the day though. It was probably the weirdest interview I took part at.

First year of my study (application development) (5 years ago).

We were finally starting getting courses on using Linux and the teacher knew I was already using it for a while so he said that I had to finish the assignment but could work on whatever I wanted next to that.

Assignment was installing a server, getting a web server up and running and compiling at least one program from source.

I setup the server in 20 minutes, wrote a script to do the rest for me and was finished in half an hour. (we got 10 weeks for this (1 hour every week officially))

Well, I was about to start doing my own shit when people started asking me for help.
Fuck it, I love helping people with the things I'm passionate about so sure!

For weeks, during that one hour, I was probably the second teacher. Got called all over the classroom and helped people with everything.

Afterwards (the course), most people said that I probably helped about the whole class pass that course and I got called the linux God etc.

From that day on, my nickname at my study, which even many teachers used was: Mr. Linux.

It felt awesome though!

And still whenever I visit that place again, one teacher always goes: Hello again, mr. Linux!

This happened when I was on third semester of the career at university. I had my first boyfriend, the "Python" guy. He has that nickname because he used Python as his main programming language and nobody on the classroom used it.

In a few words, he was a... horrible human being. He talked down to me almost all the time, saying to me that my country was sh*t (he is from United States, and for a reason he never wanted to told me, he cannot go back to his country), that my university was sh*t and he said "you're will be lucky if you rot programming in a chair".

As you might wondering, yes, unfortunately it was a toxic relationship. Once he said he wanted to kill the teacher because he though that he hacked his laptop D:

He claimed that he was going to teach me python and security stuff, bla bla bla, but nothing. I learned python by my own.

I almost lost my faith in dev future because I though that the only ones that could have a real future in programming where people without ethics and only if they have a friend or a relative on a company.

The saddest part was that I dated him because I love smart boys, but he was just an idiot that, furthermore, wanted to change me (he pressured me to have tattoos, dye my hair and have sex, things that, of course, I didn't do).

I found courage to break up with him. I waited until the semester ends (in order not to lose my programming final projects) and, the day after the last day of class, I broke up with him.

I recovered my faith on programming when, next semester, one of the teachers invited me to give a python programming workshop :D and I gave two python workshops, and two of mobile development.

Now I'm working as a junior .NET developer. Thank God I broke up with him before the relationship became even worse. "Python" wanted to marry me after a year! O_O

When a recruiter working for my company tried recruiting me for another company.

I was trying to procrastinate with swag :P

Edit credits - Nik the coworker with Nik as his nickname (nik0333)

My mom just showed me this on her facebook news feed and said, " Look <insert nickname>, it's the same "e" browser you've asked me not to use !!"

As much as I love opensource I hate really hate some of its actvie community members (read this as "freetards" <-- see urbandictonary). As a .Net + web devloper with minimal C experience (I just started learning it) and literally no Python experience its not really easy to contribute for me to many (most) opensource software for linux. I am using some <unnamed software> and I found a <critical bug>, it was easy to reproduce and I wrote for list of possible solutions, found it in a code and linked and basically wrote a docummentation longer than any other I ever wrote for every single project I did ever, combined. This <software> was critical for my server and since owner of github repo and few other people there were really active, I hoped that this bug with pretty good documentation will be solved fast, I went to my bed with a heroic feeling of an open source community contributor that helped saving world. I was horribly wrong. Tomorrow, I got 3 passively agressive responses from owner and other 2 freetards that summed up said <other1>:"oh thats nice, fix i yourself and commit it", <other2>:"have a sex with yourself" in a nice way, and <owner>: "fix my softwate and create mrege request". After replying that I have no experience my Python skills are not on a level requied for such an action, he messaged me on twitter I have linked to my GitHub profile saying even less nicely that I am a "retarded c*nt" and that I should learn Python and fix it myself. This makes me stay with my Windows based Server for some time now, fuck this. I googled his github nickname and guess what. Our main freetard is admin on an <unnamed linux forum> and mebmber of many other "computer help" with literally half of his posts just slightly toxic posts about how everyone should use linux and how supreme it is ober anything other, the other hals was crying why linux has only 1% of market share. Oh boi I am not sure why but ITS MAYBE BECAUSE OF FREETARDS LIKE YOU.
And the funnies thing is, hes not only freetard, he is just fullstack retard. One of his posts is "helping" to some <noob windows user> installing Linux. tl:dr for this las part: Freetard basically wiped all data of that <noob>.

PS: Bless everyone who do not respond "oh nice, now you can do it yourself"

not really a rant, but but i am intrigued...

got an email that my rockstar account (gta) email was changed.

changed the email and password and noticed that all the details were changed (nickname, date of birth etc) and the guy even posted on support asking to remove steam link (probably could not login). But rockstar requires a screenshot of user logged in to steam (as if that is hard to fabricate...), so he gave up :D

i'm not even mad, i'm wondering what's the guy's story. Probly bought a stolen account for cheap, hoping to play :(

Maybe i should just let him play the game, since i'm not...

It's finally happened. I've used my mail servers for about a year to give out different email addresses on my domain to things I sign up for online, and only used my "actual" email address that received all this email for the whole domain but the single one that I used outbound for private communications.

This worked well for a long time as I could see when spam comes in, where it came from by looking at the email address I designated it. Each company's email would be sent not only from an email address that they choose, but also to an email address that I choose. It allowed me to easily determine where there were problems. For example, on Freenode IRC my vhost happened to make my username@host there a valid email address. It eventually got blacklisted due to too much incoming spam as crawlers started detecting it. Another one was "nickname"@my.domain as I posted it a few times here. Got crawled as well. But it allowed me to easily blacklist each.

I'd never thought my actual outbound email address, my real one, to get crawled though. That would require the mail server of a company I explicitly communicated with to get hacked. But today that happened. I wonder whose it is, but I can't tell.

Time to make my outgoing email bound to a designated email address as well. I want to know which companies this happens to, even if they don't disclose it.

Do you have a dev (or informatic in general) nickname?

Oh, I love stories XD

When I was at university, my first boyfriend (now ex-boyfriend) was the only one who knows Python (teachers used to teach Java and C#). He was pretty old, like 4 years older than all of us, and when the teacher introduced himself to the group the first day of the semester, "Python" asked

- "Teacher, do you use Python platform?"

I don't know why, but the rest of my classroom mates laughed. And from that day, my friends called him "Python".

The funny thing is that two weeks later he became my boyfriend ^_^ a friend of mine said "he wants to show you his python :o"

A semester after our broke-up, I was invited to teach Python at the university. I accepted. Now some teachers remember me as "Python girl".

Just realised I can guess your main programming language by whether your nickname is in lower/camel case 🤔

There was this senior designer many years ago that used to come in late everyday, do fuckall except piss everyone off and then spend the majority of her day on the phone organising her social life. We all hated her, and she knew it. This one day she came in and resigned. As we were all Mac, we quickly invented a nickname for her which was "Type 11" in the old Mac days this error was "Unexpectedly Quit". The sad thing was she was best mates with the owners wife. Everyone in the office was questioned about their meanness and nasty vibes. She didn't quit it was just to get back at us for hating her. 12 years on, I'm self employed and she does marketing in a manufacturing co. We get on really well and she gives me good work. Moral: I have no fucking idea what life is about.

The moment a support tells you they won't fix the bug, because it had existed for so long that it's a feature now.

*posts some answers on Quora*
*gets flagged by moderator cunt for using my nickname, one that I've been using on that account for 3 years*

WELL THANK YOU QUORA FOR THE APPRECIATION!! I'll TOTALLY contribute some fucking more next time!!! You know what, whoever flagged my account? Exchange your lube for bleach, and go fuck yourself with a cactus. Don't forget to use the new lube! Pour it in that glory hole like there's no tomorrow! Fucking piece of shit.

So my real name is jason and I got the habit to use Json as my nickname as a little Dev pun.

I think I overdid it

I checked out a Facebook profile of a stud guy. He mentioned his nickname as heart hacker... I died.

Today I got called the hero with thr grey t-shirt. The heroic act that lead me to this nickname?

I was asking around if someone else needs their water bottle refilled and refilled them for those in need.

🤷‍♂️

GAME
The nickname of a person above your comment will be the name of your next project, tell us what it's about (be creative)

I have saved my sister's contact number with the nickname. Few days back I've noticed that her surname is automatically added to the nickname. Today I've noticed that her nickname is replaced with her real name in my Android mobile.

When I checked my contact list I noticed that there are 2 contacts, one with nickname, another with her real name.

Is this a new trick Google playing?

Me: Browsing DevRant
Me: seeing recent post of @Phlisg
Mhhh 🤔
Why didn't I rant about this?
I literally called myself Json because my name is Jason and there is JSON.

Btw @EaZyCode made fun of me because of this years ago

Found a comment from a coworker in legacy Code starting with: "For those who are brave enough ..." ⚔️🛡️

What was your nickname given to you by others? Just please, no cheating and no making things up.
I had two:
1. “Chalk” at school, because I was _very_ pale.
2. “Wonderful librarian”, given by my wife's uni friends when my wife had a class on zoom during covid, I forgot about it, casually walked into frame and kissed her. She was at my place, and my room looked like a library with all those bookshelves I had. I was a book hoarder before depression.

If you backed something, and they ask you to provide a name to include in their special thanks would you:

- Use your full name for whatever the outcome will be (successful project or just a terrible failure)
- Use a nickname (Like this one on devRant)

Well ...

switch(priority)
{
default:
DoSomething();
break;
}

... I'm not sure if this switch is really necessary 😂

Your job is a video game:
- your name is your work nickname
- years spent is your level
- weird skills you've picked up are perks

Post your stats
(Inspired by /r/talesfromyourserver)

c3r38r170_201 was my original nickname back in 2012. <3

The _201 was later removed because it was too long for some Minecraft servers.

Is there a way to change nickname on DevRant? I'm starting to look for a job and I would prefer my DevRant profile not appearing so high when searching for my name.

A step aside from one of the answers I ever gave on Stack Overflow, I notice I once made a "jsfiddle".

Already some annoyances...

• When did browsers, uh webkit, decide to fuck every "ul", "menu", and "dir" element with a "-webkit-padding-start" of 40 damn pixels?

• That friggin' fiddly webshite doesn't even force me to HTTPS, bro. Need a reason to fuck yourself in the vulnerable ass?

• Why is it that I can't log in with my tiny four-letter nickname; you identity-fuckers?

In nearby county to mine, coder was arrested for 3 months for nickname matching leaked terrorist nickname "grower" by coincidence. His coding education was enough reason for arrest.

All hdd/ssd/usb/mobile devices were confiscated for thorough analysis right from the morning by police.

Feeding my security paranoia. Encrypting fully filesystem(LUKS) and my internet traffic (self raised open vpn), wiping fully usbs. I ll be protected from my ISP recording my traffic, and from unauthorised access to my data.

why does every guy named Robert have a nickname Bob ?

Google is known for frequently removing features from its products and services. So much that they have been given the nickname "Gookill".

If only they removed the one feature that deserves to be removed.

Pull-to-refresh.

What infrastructurial fuck / poor design happened that Tinder does not allow changing the profile nickname? Did some enlightened celestial cunt thought of using the nick as a primary key or what the fuck?

I have so much to rant about... the problem is "everyone I know" knows my nickname. And I'm afraid someday they would google it and find my rants. I need to create another account...

Wat?!

"Have you tried to acronym to the nickname of the proprietary acronym acronym from the acronym vernacular?"

Hi guys, there's a way to change the nickname?
When I setted up the account I was a dumbass choosing my realname as nickname, now I've the fear that someone I know could be here