Hello everyone, found this place recently, decided to bore you with one (or many) Navy story... tech Navy story. I'll start from the end.
Little backstory: I've deployed a simple domain setup on the ship I served, nothing fancy, a server, a switch, 10 computers, all Windows (details on that at another rant). I enter the ship Monday morning, and the XO tells me that he can't access his online folders.
OK, I say, I'll get to it. I fire up my laptop, try to RDP to the server (I know, I know, burn me at the stake later) no connection. WTF? Is the service down? I try pinging. No luck. I tried pinging the switch. OK. Looking at the switch admin panel, I see the server's port is dead. "OK, probably the cable." (we have old ethernet cables)
So, I drag my ass over to the server (same room with ship comms) with the cable tester to confirm that. What do I see?
The IMBECILES had pulled the plug from the server so that they could charge their mobile phones. I literally slammed my head against the door (calming exercise in case of spontaneous murder impulses - the things you learn at the Academy). My CO was nearby, and lucky for the guys, he heard me yell at them, while throwing mobiles and chargers around.
"But we thought it was OK, we just wanted to charge our-"
I kid you not, I reached for the firefighter's axe.
My CO grabbed me by the collar and dragged me to his room. I explained to him (between two cigarettes) that we MUST get a UPS and a server cabinet (budget constraints in the military are something that will give you people nightmares, trust me). I carefully explained to him that unless we got those, nothing would prevent the next moron from destroying confidential data and me from murdering him.
I plugged in and booted the server, after installing a multi socket extension. Two days after, surprise surprise, the server was off again. That was the first time I opened the door to the CO's room with a low kick. I must have looked like a psycho on drugs, he gave approval for the purchase in twenty seconds flat.
After that, I installed the UPS and the cabinet. Everything went inside, from the UPS to the very plugs. Just a locked box with cables coming out.
One of the guys came to my room, and asked if I could unlock the cabinet so that they could plug a "device" they needed.
I actually reached for my folding knife.
Disclaimer: The story above is TRUE. Even the almost violent parts.

I want a TV program like "Kitchen Nightmares" but with IT companies.
And with Linus Torvalds in place of Gordon Ramsey

I want Gordon Ramsey to start a IT program in the same fashion as Hotel Hell and Kitchen Nightmares

He'll sit at a desk with a laptop, examining code as if he's eating food, venting frustrations and screaming insults out loud

Then he'll have a talk with the team and see how they work on a day

After that he'll go into the freezer (server room) and scream at mold and cockroaches

Then comes the intervention where we discover that the PM is still grieving about the death of his original programming language and the team loves him but thinks he should move on

The next day the development studio is modernised and has a candy bar, tennis table and everyone is forced to use linux on their new macbooks

Then we experience a good day where everything is great and velocity is through the roof

Then Gordon leaves and everything is shit again

I will be getting nightmares about this now. The guy fucked up real bad.

Oh yeah no this is fucking great. I get around 5 hours of sleep a night during the week.

Went to bed early yesterday.

Just woke up after six fucking hours with a fucking headache and nightmares.

Sleep rhythms can be a fucking bitch.

Navy story continued.
And continuing from the arp poisoning and boredom, I started scanning the network...
So I found plenty of WinXP computers, even some Win2k servers (I shit you not, the year was 201X) I decided to play around with merasploit a bit. I mean, this had to be a secure net, right?
Like hell it was.
Among the select douchebags I arp poisoned was a senior officer that had a VERY high idea for himself, and also believed he was tech-savvy. Now that, is a combination that is the red cloth for assholes like me. But I had to be more careful, as news of the network outage leaked, and rumours of "that guy" went amok, but because the whole sysadmin thing was on the shoulders of one guy, none could track it to me in explicit way. Not that i cared, actually, when I am pissed I act with all the subtleness of an atom bomb on steroids.
So, after some scanning and arp poisoning (changing the source MAC address this time) I said...
"Let's try this common exploit, it supposedly shouldn't work, there have been notifications about it, I've read them." Oh boy, was I in for a treat. 12 meterpreter sessions. FUCKING 12. The academy's online printer had no authentication, so I took the liberty of printing a few pages of ASCII jolly rogers (cute stuff, I know, but I was still in ITSec puberty) and decided to fuck around with the other PCs. One thing I found out is that some professors' PCs had the extreme password of 1234. Serious security, that was. Had I known earlier, I could have skipped a TON of pointless memorising...
Anyway, I was running amok the entire network, the sysad never had a chance on that, and he seemed preoccupied with EVERYTHING ELSE besides monitoring the net, like fixing (replacing) the keyboard for the commander's secretary, so...
BTW, most PCs had antivirus, but SO out of date that I didn't even need to encode the payload or do any other trick. An LDAP server was open, and the hashed admin password was the name of his wife. Go figure.
I looked at a WinXP laptop with a weird name, and fired my trusty ms08_067 on it. Passowrd: "aaw". I seriously thought that Ophcrack was broken, but I confirmed it. WTF? I started looking into the files... nothing too suspicious... wait a min, this guy is supposed to work, why his browser is showing porn?
Looking at the ""Deleted"" files (hah!) I fount a TON of documents with "SECRET" in them. Curious...
Decided to download everything, like the asshole I am, and restart his PC, AND to leave him with another desktop wallpaper and a text message. Thinking that he took the hint, I told the sysadmin about the vulnerable PCs and went to class...
In the middle of the class (I think it was anti-air warfare or anti-submarine warfare) the sysad burst through the door shouting "Stop it, that's the second-in-command's PC!".
Stunned silence. Even the professor (who was an officer). God, that was awkward. So, to make things MORE awkward (like the asshole I am) I burned every document to a DVD and the next day I took the sysad and went to the second-in-command of the academy.
Surprisingly he took the whole thing in quite the easygoing fashion. I half-expected court martial or at least a good yelling, but no. Anyway, after our conversation I cornered the sysad and barraged him with some tons of security holes, needed upgrades and settings etc. I still don't know if he managed to patch everything (I left him a detailed report) because, as I've written before, budget constraints in the military are the stuff of nightmares. Still, after that, oddly, most people wouldn't even talk to me.
God, that was a nice period of my life, not having to pretend to be interested about sports and TV shows. It would be almost like a story from highschool (if our highschool had such things as a network back then - yes, I am old).
Your stories?

People complaining "oh I always have trouble figuring out if the clock goes forwards or backwards in October"

Bitch please, I'm dealing with 12 databases, with SQL dates as local timezone timestamps, and an influxDB in UTC. I'm dealing with a backend server configured in CEST and a middleware layer configured in Pacific time, and a hundred functions which try to keep everything straight because no one dares to migrate it all to UTC at this point.

In the whole argument about DST you hear about sleep psychology, electricity bills and farmers.

But what about me, the poor database administrator? What about all these ugly legacy systems, what about all the UX designers trying to fix time input pickers?

I spend 2 months a year in agony having nightmares of rips and folds in the flow of time. DAYLIGHT SAVING DOESN'T FUCKING MAKE SENSE HOW CAN TIME EXIST TWICE?

Yesterday was Friday the 13th, so here is a list of my worst dev nightmares without order of significance:

1) Dealing with multithreaded code, especially on Android

2) Javascript callback hell

3) Dependency hell, especially in Python

4) Segfaults

5) Memory Leaks

6) git conflicts

7) Crazy regexes and string manipulations

8) css. Fuck css.

9) not knowing jack shit about something but expected by others to
produce a result with it.

10) 3+ hours of debugging with no success

Post yours

One comment from @Fast-Nop made me remember something I had promised myself not to. Specifically the USB thing.
So there I was, Lieutenant Jr at a warship (not the one my previous rants refer to), my main duties as navigation officer, and secondary (and unofficial) tech support and all-around "computer guy".
Those of you who don't know what horrors this demonic brand pertains to, I envy you. But I digress. In the ship, we had Ethernet cabling and switches, but no DHCP, no server, not a thing. My proposition was shot down by the CO within 2 minutes. Yet, we had a curious "network". As my fellow... colleagues had invented, we had something akin to token ring, but instead of tokens, we had low-rank personnel running around with USB sticks, and as for "rings", well, anyone could snatch up a USB-carrier and load his data and instructions to the "token". What on earth could go wrong with that system?
What indeed.
We got 1 USB infected with a malware from a nearby ship - I still don't know how. Said malware did the following observable actions(yes, I did some malware analysis - As I said before, I am not paid enough):
- Move the contents on any writeable media to a folder with empty (or space) name on that medium. Windows didn't show that folder, so it became "invisible" - linux/mac showed it just fine
- It created a shortcut on the root folder of said medium, right to the malware. Executing the shortcut executed the malware and opened a new window with the "hidden" folder.
Childishly simple, right? If only you knew. If only you knew the horrors, the loss of faith in humanity (which is really bad when you have access to munitions, explosives and heavy weaponry).
People executed the malware ON PURPOSE. Some actually DISABLED their AV to "access their files". I ran amok for an entire WEEK to try to keep this contained. But... I underestimated the USB-token-ring-whatever protocol's speed and the strength of a user's stupidity. PCs that I cleaned got infected AGAIN within HOURS.
I had to address the CO to order total shutdown, USB and PC turnover to me. I spent the most fun weekend cleaning 20-30 PCs and 9 USBs. What fun!
What fun, morons. Now I'll have nightmares of those days again.

So I have been merging loads of branches lately for our final release and now it’s affecting my dreams.

I sleep with two pillows, judge me I don’t care. One night I woke up screaming “Why won’t this merge?”

Everyone woke up and it took sometime for me to come to my senses. When my family switched on the light I saw one of my pillows partially shoved into my other pillow’s case.

I need a vacation.

So, continuing the story, in reverse order, on the warship and its domain setup...
One day, the CO told me that we needed to set up a proper "network". Until now, the "network" was just an old Telcom switch, and an online HDD. No DHCP, no nothing. The computers dropped to the default 169.254.0.0/16 link local block of addresses, the HDD was open to all, cute stuff. I do some research and present to him a few options. To start things off, and to show them that a proper setup is better and more functional, I set up a linux server on one old PC.
The CO is reluctant to approve of the money needed (as I have written before, budget constraints in the military is the stuff of nightmares, people there expect proper setups with two toothpicks and a rubber band). So, I employ the very principles I learned from the holy book Bastard Operator From Hell: terrorizing with intimidating-looking things. I show him the linux server, green letters over black font, ngrep -x running (it spooks many people to be shown that). After some techno-babble I got approval for a proper rack server and new PCs. Then came the hard part: convincing him to ditch the old Telcom switch in favour of a new CISCO Catalyst one.
Three hours of non-stop barrage. Long papers of NATO specifications on security standards. Subliminal threats on security compromises. God, I never knew I would have to stoop so low. How little did I know that after that...
Came the horrors of user support.
Moral of the story: an old greek saying says "even a saint needs terrorizing". Keep that in mind.

I had a coworker used to write PHP pages in this way:

<?php
echo "<html>";
echo "<head>";
// 2000+ lines of un-indented nightmares

I tried suggesting him to keep the HTML outside php tags as much as possible and I stressed out that adding some indentation to the code would have improved readability. I also sent him an example of my code created using an IDE with auto-indent functionality.

His creepy answer was: «Readability is subjective. Anyway I'll try to get used to the sinusoidal trend of your code.»

so... after GitHub...
who will buy stackoverflow?

hue hue hue

There should be a TV show where junior programmers make a software and then one famous senior programmer finds bugs, yell at them and fixes it. The name of the show will be "Coding nightmares".

when you have nightmares involving bugs ;-)

A while back, I ranted about emojis in code.

My nightmares are becoming reality.

Behold, production code:

Gordon Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares but for development companies/teams. Please make it happen.

This codebase reminds me of a large, rotting, barely-alive dromedary. Parts of it function quite well, but large swaths of it are necrotic, foul-smelling, and even rotted away. Were it healthy, it would still exude a terrible stench, and its temperament would easily match: If you managed to get near enough, it would spit and try to bite you.

Swaths of code are commented out -- entire classes simply don't exist anymore, and the ghosts of several-year-old methods still linger. Despite this, large and deprecated (yet uncommented) sections of the application depend on those undefined classes/methods. Navigating the codebase is akin to walking through a minefield: if you reference the wrong method on the wrong object... fatal exception. And being very new to this project, I have no idea what's live and what isn't.

The naming scheme doesn't help, either: it's impossible to know what's still functional without asking because nothing's marked. Instead, I've been working backwards from multiple points to try to find code paths between objects/events. I'm rarely successful.

Not only can I not tell what's live code and what's interactive death, the code itself is messy and awful. Don't get me wrong: it's solid. There's virtually no way to break it. But trying to understand it ... I feel like I'm looking at a huge, sprawling MC Escher landscape through a microscope. (No exaggeration: a magnifying glass would show a larger view that included paradoxes / dubious structures, and these are not readily apparent to me.)

It's also rife with bad practices. Terrible naming choices consisting of arbitrarily-placed acronyms, bad word choices, and simply inconsistent naming (hash vs hsh vs hs vs h). The indentation is a mix of spaces and tabs. There's magic numbers galore, and variable re-use -- not just local scope, but public methods on objects as well. I've also seen countless assignments within conditionals, and these are apparently intentional! The reasoning: to ensure the code only runs with non-falsey values. While that would indeed work, an early return/next is much clearer, and reduces indentation. It's just. reading through this makes me cringe or literally throw my hands up in frustration and exasperation.

Honestly though, I know why the code is so terrible, and I understand:

The architect/sole dev was new to coding -- I have 5-7 times his current experience -- and the project scope expanded significantly and extremely quickly, and also broke all of its foundation rules. Non-developers also dictated architecture, creating further mess. It's the stuff of nightmares. Looking at what he was able to accomplish, though, I'm impressed. Horrified at the details, but impressed with the whole.

This project is the epitome of "I wrote it quickly and just made it work."

Fortunately, he and I both agree that a rewrite is in order. but at 76k lines (without styling or configuration), it's quite the undertaking.

------

Amusing: after running the codebase through `wc`, it apparently sums to half the word count of "War and Peace"

Damn, last night I went to bed with an unsolved bug. That was the worst night in a long time. Nightmares of not being able to solve it, then surprisingly solving it with an unbelievable solution... Waking up and solving it in reality instantly. Geez...

Can't fall asleep because of unfinished code...

Wake up at 03:00 AM because of nightmares about bad code...

Too tired to finish code or rewrite bad code :'(

I just can't understand what will lead an so called Software Company, that provides for my local government by the way, to use an cloud sever (AWS ec2 instance) like it were an bare metal machine.

They have it working, non-stop, for over 4 years or so. Just one instance. Running MySQL, PostgreSQL, Apache, PHP and an f* Tomcat server with no less than 10 HUGE apps deployed. I just can't believe this instance is still up.

By the way, they don't do backups, most of the data is on the ephemeral storage, they use just one private key for every dev, no CI, no testing. Deployment are nightmares using scp to upload the .war...

But still, they are running several several apps for things like registering citizen complaints that comes in by hot lines. The system is incredibly slow as they use just hibernate without query optimizations to lookup and search things (n+1 query problems).

They didn't even bother to get a proper domain. They use an IP address and expose the port for tomcat directly. No reverse proxy here! (No ssl too)

I've been out of this company for two years now, it was my first work as a developer, but they needed help for an app that I worked on during my time there. I was really surprised to see that everything still the same. Even the old private key that they emailed me (?!?!?!?!) back then still worked. All the passwords still the same too.

I have some good rants from the time I was there, and about the general level of the developers in my region. But I'll leave them for later!

Is it just me or this whole shit is crazy af?

2 years into polytechnic I got my 1st big project as a subcontractor doing Symbian. No need to tell the company I presume.

Anyways, I was brought into the project just couple weeks before holiday season started. My Symbian programming experience was just the basics from school. 1st day I was crapping my pants out of anxiety. I pretty much didn't understand anything what my project manager or teammates were telling, so I just wrote EVERYTHING down on paper and recorded all the meetings to my laptop.

My job was to implement a very big end to end SDK feature. Basically from API through Symbian OS through HAL to other OS and into its subsystem. Nice job for a beginner :/

As the holidays were starting we had just drafted out the specification (I don't know how, because I didn't understand much of what was going on) and I got a clear mission from team lead. Make a working prototype of the feature during the time everybody else was on vacation.

"No problemos, I can do it" I BS'd myself and the team lead.

First 2 weeks I just read documentation, my notes and internal coding tutorials over and over again. I produced maybe couple of lines of usable code. I stayed at the office as late as I dared without seeming to obvious that I had no clue what I was doing. After the two weeks of staying late and seeing nightmares every night I had a sudden heureka moment. Code that I was reading started to make sense. Okay, still 2 weeks more until my teammates come back.

Next 2 weeks were furious coding and I got better every day. I even had time to refactor some of my earlier code so that quality was consistent.

Soooo, holidays are over and my team leader and collagues are very interested with my progress. "You did very well. Much better than expected. Prototype is working with main use case implemeted. You must have quite high competence to do this so well..."

"Well...I did have to refactor some stuff, so not 10/10"

I didn't say a word of my super late nights, anxiety and total n00biness.

Pretty much finished "like a boss". After that I was on the managers wanted list and they called me to ask if I had the time work on their projects.

Fake it, crap your pants, eat your crap and turn into diamonds and then you make it.

PS. After Symbian normal C++ and almost any other language has been a breeze to learn.

The riskiest dev choice...

How about "The riskiest thing you've done as a dev"? I have a great entry for that. and I suppose it was my choice to build the feature afterall.

I was working on an instance of a small MMO at a game company I worked for. The MMO boasted multiple servers, each of them a vastly different take on the base game. We could use, extend, or outright replace anything we wanted to, leading to everything from Zelda to pokemon to an RP haven to a top-down futuristic counterstrike. The server in this particular instance was a fantasy RPG, and I was building it a new leveling and experience system with most of the trimmings. (Talents, feats/perks, etc. were in a future update.)

A bit of background, first: the game's dev setup did not have the now-standard dev/staging/prod servers; everything ran on prod, devs worked on prod, players connected and played on prod, etc. Worse yet, there was no backup system implemented -- or not really. The CTO was really the only person with sufficient access. The techy CEO did as well, but he rarely dealt with anything technical except server hardware, occasionally. And usually just to troll/punish us devs (as in "Oops ! I pulled the cat5 ! ;)"). Neither of them were the most reliable of people, either. The CTO would occasionally remote in and make backups of each server -- we assumed whenever he happened to think of it -- and would also occasionally do it when asked, but it could take him a week, sometimes even up to a month to get around to it. So the backups were only really useful for retreiving lost code and assets, not so much for player data.

The lack of reliable backups and the lack of proper testing grounds (among the plethora of other issues at the company) made for an absolutely terrible dev setup, but that's just how it was, and that's what we dealt with. We were game devs, afterall. Terrible or not, we got to make games! What more could you ask for!? It was amazing and terrible and wonderful and the worst thing ever, all at the same time. (and no, I'm not sharing the company name, but it isn't EA or Nexon, surprisingly 😅)

Anyway, back to the story! My new leveling system also needed to migrate players' existing data, so... you can see where this is going.

I did as much testing and inspection of my code as I could, copied it from a personal dev script to the server's xp system, ... and debated if I really wanted to click [Apply]. Every time I considered it, I went back to check another part or do yet more testing. I ended up taking like 40 minutes to finally click it.

And when I did... that was the scariest button press of my life. And the scariest three seconds' wait afterwards. That one click could have ruined every single player's account, permanently lost us players ...

After applying it, I immediately checked my character to see if she was broken, checked the account data for corruption or botched flags, checked for broken interactions with the other systems....

Everything ended up working out perfectly, and the players loved all of the new features. They had no idea what went into building them, and certainly had no idea of what went into applying them, or what could have gone wrong -- which is probably a good thing.

Looking back, that entire environment was so fragile, it's a wonder things didn't go horribly wrong all the time. Really, they almost never did. Apocalypses did happen, but were exceedingly rare, and were ususally fixed quickly. I guess we were all super careful simply because everything was so fragile? or the decent devs were, at least. We never trusted the lessers with access 😅 at least on the main servers where it mattered. Some of the smaller servers... well, we never really cared about those.

But I'm honestly more surprised to realize I've never had nightmares of that button click. It was certainly terrifying enough.

But yay! Complete system overhaul and migration of stored and realtime player data! on prod! With no issues! And lots of happy players! Woooooo!

Thinking back on it makes me happy 😊

Warning: long read....

I got a call this morning from a client who was panicking about not being able to login to his web panel.

So I went to the web panel and tried to login and was just redirected back to the login page. No errors or anything (at least visible on the page). Went looking for an error_log file and found it.

It turns out there was an error was showing: Disk quota exceeded.

So I went into the cPanel and checked, he used about 16GB out of 100GB and that got me confused. So I looked around and found out he was using about 510000/500000 inodes.

Went looking trough FTP to see where he has so many files and try and remove some.

Well it turns out that there were about 7 injected websites (warez, online casino, affiliate one etc) and a full hacking web panel on his FTP. After detailed analysis some who actually built the site (I just maintain some parts) made an upload form available to public with any checks on it. Meaning anyone could upload whatever they wanted and the form would allow it.

The worst part is that the client is not allowing us to secure the form with some sort of login or remove it completely (the best option) as it is not really needed but he uses it to upload some pdf catalogs or something.

TL; DR;
Old programmer created an upload form that was accessible to anyone on the web without adding any security or check as to see what kind of files was getting uploaded. Which lead to having maximum number on inodes used on server and client being unable to login.

Side note:
And ofc I had to go and fix the mess behind him again, even though he stopped working a long time ago and I started just recently and have been having nightmares of this project.

So I ve been clinically depressed for about 10 years now. Been really great at hiding it. My illness and loneliness was so severe that i made up imaginary friends and that got so severe i couldn't tell what s real and what s not. Then about 5 years ago, i met a girl. As the cliche goes, everything felt better. Sunshine and stuff. I opened up to her. Shared stuff. I started becoming normal. The pain became bearable and manageable. Turned to entrepreneurship. Had goals and stuff. Had 7 failed startups but kept on going. Raised investment for an 8th. It went better than anyother. Was going to become the next big thing bla bla. She became the reason i turned from being a loner weirdo to someone awesome. Anyway, as nothing tends to last, my best friend who had been through thick and thin in my work, quit last year in October. He messed up some work from big client nd we had a fight. He left. In the meantime i scored a big multinational company. I was gonna propose to my girlfriend in March this year. But instead she decided to leave for someone better who left her in 3 weeks lol. Anyways, we broke up. During that time, my second friend decided to fuck up my work with the big company so hard that they were about to blacklist my company. And then he left too. I had a small team. 4 5 people doing their best. By that time, i was the only one left. On 28th feb i had my breakup, on 1st march i was sitting 700 km away from home in an office trying to talk the company out of blacklisting us. It took me around 20 days to make that happen. All the while dealing with the obvious, my depression getting stronger than ever. My imaginations taking shape and fucking up my reality. The voices in my head getting stronget and stronger. 4 months now since she left. I dont think i miss her anymore. She tried coming back once but i didn't let her. In the 4 months, i m at my worst. I am getting government contracts now. But i have no desire to do anything. The pain is unbearable. So much that on its good days it sucks the life right out of me. So much that when it gets severe the urge to harm myself in any way goes of the charts. My best friend and i, we became friends again after my ex left. He s been helping me as much as he can. I have all the good oppurtunities and chances that any entrepreneur who has been busting his ass for 5 years straight would kill to have. But i cant do anything. I m the only one left on my team. I have to handle the business, dev, marketing etc etc ends on my own. I tried hiring and scaling up but i messed that up because of obvious reasons. And now my company has 2 months of runway left. And i know if i bust my ass i can make it to 8 months more and even raise a round a. But its really hard to do when either you re sleeping 20 hrs a day or you re sleeping 3 4 hrs because you re afraid of the nightmares. Or when even you ve had a good day, the pain becomes so much that you lay on the floor having a breakdown. Yeah, i m trying professional help. I m hoping it helps me. Because right now, i dont care about being happy. I just want my sanity. Something i m clinging to with every fiber of my being. Something that s burning out like a candle burning from both ends. I cant give up my work. I dont want to. That s all i have. That s all what i love doing and now i cant even do that. I just want this to end somehow. Either i get better and the pain and the void and silence and everything else goes away, or i do. I dont know what will happen first. And i dont care. I just want to be normal. But i guess that s too much to ask.

"We're going to need to migrate our database and reformat it so it works with the new app."

Translation: we've been using Excel up until this point and need you to convert it to SQL. Oh god, people.

First company I worked for, built around 40 websites with Drupal 7...in only a year (don't know if it's a lot for today's standards, but I was one guy doing everything). Of course I didn't have the time to keep updating everything and I continually insisted to the boss that we need more people if we are going to expand. Of course he kept telling me to keep working harder and that I "got this". Well, after a year a couple of websites got defaced, you know the usual stuff if you've been around for some time. Felt pretty bad at the time, it was a similar feeling to having your car stolen or something.

Anyways, fast forward about 2 years, started working on another company, and well...this one was on another level. They had a total of around 40 websites, with about 10 of them being Joomla 1.5 installations (Dear Lord have mercy on my soul(the security vulnerabilities from these websites only, were greater than Spiderman's responsibilities)) and the others where WordPress websites, all that ON A SINGLE VPS, I mean, come on... Websites being defaced on the daily, pharma-hacks everywhere, server exploding from malware queing about 90k of spam emails on the outbox, server downtime for maintenance happening almost weekly, hosting company mailing me on the daily about the next malware detection adventure etc. Other than that, the guy that I was replacing, was not giving a single fuck. He was like, "dude it's all good here, everything works just fine and all you have to do is keep the clients happy and shit". Sometimes, I hate myself for being too caring and responsible back then.

I'm still having nightmares of that place. Both that office and that VPS.

Seriously, wtf is with the new "make-everything-in-javascript" thing?

JavaScript is a terrible language. The type safety, or rather lack of it, gives me nightmares about debugging. The standards are always different. It's way too flexible. Ugh.

I'm tired of all the awesome services that I'd love to use being centralized over Node and JS. I don't want to use your stupid fucking language. Who does?

Also what happened to that dart thing that was supposed to replace JS?

I have a large code library I have been working on for over 10 years. I have nightmares about leaving it to another unfortunate dev. I'll have to work at this company the rest of my life.

this still haunts my nightmares...

A friend of mine once showed me a really beautiful and fast login page he made.

After some time I took a look at the front-end code and realized why it was so fast... He queried the database in the JS code...
The user and pass for the database was in the HTML of the website...

I think he deployed that page...

Does anyone else get that awful hot feeling and rapid heartbeat when breaking a site on production? I have nightmares about it 😬

I don't think I've ever had a bad drunk coding experience. Most of my nightmares involve being sober and doing this thing called "my job", which just seems like a terrible idea before I've even begun.

I used to do audits for private companies with a team. Most of them where black box audits and we were allowed to physically manipulate certain machines in and around the building, as long as we could get to them unnoticed.

Usually when doing such jobs, you get a contract signed by the CEO or the head of security stating that if you're caught, and your actions were within the scope of the audit, no legal action will be taken against you.

There was this one time a company hired us to test their badge system, and our main objective was to scrape the data on the smartcards with a skimmer on the scanner at the front of the building.

It's easy to get to as it's outside and almost everyone has to scan their card there in order to enter the building. They used ISO 7816 cards so we didn't even really need specified tools or hardware.

Now, we get assigned this task. Seems easy enough. We receive the "Stay-out-of-jail"-contract signed by the CEO for Company xyz. We head to the address stated on the contract, place the skimmer etc etc all good.

One of our team gets caught fetching the data from the skimmer a week later (it had to be physically removed). Turns out: wrong Building, wrong company. This was a kind of "building park" (don't really know how to say it in English) where all the buildings looked very similar. The only difference between them was the streetnumber, painted on them in big. They gave us the wrong address.

I still have nightmares about this from time to time. In the end, because the collected data was never used and we could somewhat justify our actions because we had that contract and we had the calls and mails with the CEO of xyz. It never came to a lawsuit. We were, and still are pretty sure though that the CEO of xyz himself was very interesed in the data of that other company and sent us out to the wrong building on purpose.
I don't really know what his plan after that would have been though. We don't just give the data to anyone. We show them how they can protect it better and then we erase everything. They don't actually get to see the data.

I quit doing audits some time ago. It's very stressful and I felt like I either had no spare time at all (when having an active assignment) or had nothing but spare time (when not on an assignment). The pay also wasn't that great.

But some people just really are polished turds.

I'm partially color deficient, which means I can differentiate most colors, except when there is a low contrast between them.
The genius freshers in my company (well, they joined at the same time as I did, but I still call them freshers because they never goddamn improved since they joined). Anyway, these freshers thought it'd be a great idea to take design decisions upon themselves and chose the shittiest colors ever for designing a complicated interface with the most horrifying color palette you'd have ever seen.
Everytime I'm asked to debug this page, I have nightmares as they explain things to me in terms of colors :/

Client stores all user accounts in a publicly accessible google spreadsheet in case the user forgets their login. It includes user name, plain text password, and just in case, the hashed password....

Can frontent devs please stop abusing <br> for vertical spacing please?!
Thank you.

The nightmares begin!

Making electronics more difficult to repair with security fasteners and ultrasonically welded plastic nightmares and what have you.. what's the point? The argument from manufacturers is that "users don't want to get in there anyway". But, it's not like even if they could, they'd want to, right? Which type of person that doesn't know electronics very well and has an interest in repairing it would go and look at a board, and say "this is how it works, this and that is broken and this is how it should be repaired"? Not many users can repair their own devices regardless. So why? To preserve IP? Not like the Chinese bootleggers care about that. To preserve sales? Users can't repair their stuff anyway. To keep those who want to peek inside out, just for the hell of it? Anyone determined enough will be willing to break it in the process anyway.

The British summer results in restless nights and broken sleep filled with nightmares.

One particular dream last night involved my friends messing around with a ouija board and they begin asking in questions. I remain sceptical and tell them to ask it to reveal the solution to the issues I'm having retrofitting a legacy web app with a new design.

The board disconnected itself. Hell had no answer.

Developers thinking name of a method or variable.

My manager asked me: Did you tested the website on all browsers?
I simply said YES. Then he asked again, Did you test it on IE?
I simply replayed: what that IE? We don't use untrusted application for testing our work.

As a web developer, I have nightmares about this line:

window.addEventListener("resize", function(e){
// ...
});

Stupid piece of legacy shit needing to silent print without the dialogs in IE on windows 10.

this is proving to be a thing of nightmares.

this has worked for years but no windows need to block this “for security”

windows and security - i would laugh but this is going to keep me awake at night.

Everytime

Oh God, guys.
It was the stuff of nightmares! It's going to keep me up forever tonight

*Watching a TED talk*

*Sponsored by SAP*

*screams internally*

There's nothing more horrifying than seeing the code made by Java Swing. Good luck trying to find label1X5zPotato and what it does.

This wasn't an actual interview, it was a nightmare I had before an interview.

So how many whiteboards do you have at home? We are whiteboard exclusive developers. If you take this job would you like a tabletop whiteboard or a wall mounted whiteboard.

My nightmares are made of CORS errors.

Fuck inconsistent CORS implementations across browsers.

Everyone who is about to say "Once you understand CORS it's not a problem anymore".
FUCK YOU TOO!!!!!!!

I tried LSD yesterday!

Backstory: I have a weird combo of bipolar type 1 and autism. During the day, my brain works inconsistently. Here how my day usually goes:
09:00. I wake up. Uninterested, cold, masculine. No thoughts in the background. No OCD.
12:00. Brain warms up. Thought process begins. Thoughts are short in their length
14:00. Thoughts start to get longer. Stress starts to accumulate. Background thoughts start, now typically 2–3 at a time.
16:00. Twitching begins. Thought chains are now 5–6 concepts long, one following the other. Perception level rises quickly. I start to feel more feminine. It is in this state that I start to spot imperfections and mistakes looking at code or text without reading it. I see it like a painting, and mistakes appear as “visually wrong” parts. This does not depend on formatting.
17:00. OCD becomes more severe. I HAVE to touch all the surfaces around me, evenly, as if my hands were text highlighters, and I had to paint everything evenly, without overlaps or spots that are brighter or darker than the others. Some surface textures become irritating, and feel quite unpleasant to the touch. If I go for a run now, like 3 km or so, I feel somewhat relieved.
18:00. Things are getting serious. Creativity levels through the roof. I speak in long, never-ending, profound sentences. Background and foreground thoughts almost become one. I appear visually drunk and happy, despite never drinking alcohol. Femininity rises even further. Sometimes, when I speak to a small group of people, especially if I go with friends to meet new people, and we go to some bar, new people ask to record my voice or to write down whatever I’m saying. To be honest, this reason alone is a huge boost to how I see yourself.
19:00. OCD is crazy now. Surfaces have soul.
21:00 <— Gotta take my meds and go to sleep here to prevent what comes at 22:00
22:00. All thoughts, both foreground and background, fully became one. Now my brain officially disobeys me and thinks on its own, and I can ride it like a surfer at best. Twitching becomes concerning. I develop a 1000-yard stare. I am officially a female. Physical strength is somewhat enhanced. Pain tolerance lowered significantly.
23:00. Derealization begins. The world around me appears two-dimensional and flat, like a picture. It is hard to get home on foot, even in close (less than one km) proximity. Brain is fully numb. All that thought monstrosity that was building up is just noise now. Zero “flops” available to think about something I want to think about, like how much money I have on me or what time it is.

I go to sleep. I see nightmares. I wake up, and the cycle repeats.

Contrary to a popular opinion, I never take any “brain-boosting” meds like antidepressants, and I think now you can see why. I consume neither alcohol nor caffeine. Neither me, nor my doctors want my brain to explode. I only take lamotrigine that helps to “lower down” mania, and quetiapine, a neuroleptic, that slows down my brain, like a neuroleptic. Both are there to slow down my brain, to kinda “throttle” my brain like a CPU to cool it down.

That said, 100ug of LSD just… brought me my usual 18:00 state, but in the morning?

All that small-dose recreational ordeal? The thing that helps people feel more energetic and creative?

People pay money… for that? To feel the way I feel every evening?

I have been working 100 hours per week for the last 4 years. I had to deal with many stress issues, eyes, pain and headaches.

But nothing has scared me like my college life. For some reason, I still get nightmares about the viva exams.

What's wrong with me?

So now Microsoft is suddenly deciding devices that "weren't" compatible are now perfectly compatible with Windows 11, and they're rolling this out in bunches at a time.

I still get "This device can not support Windows 11" but my coworkers are starting to see "Upgrade NOW!" and it's honestly gotten a bit sour seeing as I may be next. They're bypassing those who're editing the registry to stop this, too.

If I have to start diving into the deep ends of Windows and find out what IP Windows gets it's updates just to slap it into my HOSTS file, we're already in the apocalypse.

This upgrade is not bad for common people, but upon seeing that the Start menu GUI and taskbar got butchered horribly (I place my taskbar on top of the screen, Windows 11 doesn't allow for that) I myself absolutely want as much distance between me and that shit as possible.

In college, I've been hearing my fellow classmates having issues with Windows 11 left and right, including with how hard it is to get another browser to even work, to the Windows Store not even downloading Microsoft's own apps, to endless update loops, to the infamous "Update of Death"

Keep in mind, they got computers with better specs than mine, and they're having a worse experience. A lot of them just got refunds to the very last issue I just mentioned, all within August, day of purchase to day of return.

Microsoft, I am begging you for mercy, I'm so close to just getting up, finding out where you are, and blocking you from my network at all network and device levels.

Dev nightmares :

- Not finding bug fix on stackoverflow/GitHub .

- Losing code that hasn't been pushed to GitHub.

- Dealing with an unclean and inconsistent database.

- Installing Node Dependencies.

- Resolving CORS and 500s.

- Training a Linear Regression Model with 700 epochs on an entry-level Laptop.

Keep appending to this list.

#devrant #devnightmares

I normally just have nightmares about the projects I'm working on, especially when I struggle with a bug for days. Those are usually about just me stressing out about it. However, I have a lot of dreams about computers/technology, not necessarily coding-related:

- datacenters were just potato fields. If you go work the field, you'd go data mining

- in Biology, when being taught how having children works, you only tell that "parenting is only chmod-ing the rights of your children until they become the owners themselves"

- IP addresses with emojis instead of numbers were a standard now and they actually managed to replace IPv4, because everyone was so into emojis. They named it IPvE

- I witnessed a new Big Bang when the 32-bit Unix time overflown in 2038, and we were all quantum bits

You know, one of my worst fears as a programmer isn’t a bug, or shitty clients, it’s not even happening on my computer.

It’s when I can’t find a good playlist to listen to because the good ones I listen to way to much and I get sick of them so I get stuck with nothing and my Brain simply can’t function without a butt shaking toon!

Working on projects when you're sleep deprived and your hair is falling out is food for nightmares!
Jesus, why am I shedding hair? I'm afraid to look at my scalp and see bald spots.

I'm amazed how some people either think I'm fucking jesus or a god or both.

App XY not working.

Yeah. We're talking about how App XY and it's exhaustion of the connection pool since a year....

It's not working, what can we do?

Well. I don't know. Tried restarting?

Not working.

Well... Nothing I can do, you're responsible for developing the app and we've talked many times how complex the problem is.

It's not working, can u do something?

<Me just fed up increasing the connection count>

Well. I've increased the connections.
This will not work. It's a band aid. The app needs really a complete migration.

Ok. But it works.

No it doesn't work.. For fucks sake... It still exhausts the connections for unknown reasons, this is a band aid.

But it works....

-.-

This conversations was over then....

Well. Have fun.

I reverted the change I did.

May this crappy piece of shit die a thousand deaths, I:m now working on something else.

Goodbye mother fucking bitches, habe fun with the nightmare you created.

I'll cry over the other fucking nightmares I at least can solve, cause what you created in this App is beyond irresponsible and dumb.

Anyone else have code dreams/nightmares? Nothing like trying to debug during REM 😭

A better way to software testing - 'Test your assumptions first'

Coldfusion.

That shit gave me nightmares.

My shortest naps are giving me the worst nightmares where I wake up before the alarm. These mostly consist of violence around. People running in groups with HUGE rocks to thrash onto others, violence on a daughter by her own family, people completely destroying terrace walls.

This needs to stop somehow. It is clearly influenced by the things happening around the world right now. I just don't understand how will we ever reach a point where there is enough peace. A point where humanity can be understood without baseless justifications.

Being a hothead maybe doesn't mean you need to heat it up every time before using it. Anger against any injustice can be put to really good use. But going around destructing someone's mental health or physical belongings and then later faking regret after knowing the truth is 😔

Please. "Look before you leap." OR if you've already leapt, think twice of the outcomes and what lead you to doing something so disturbing, so easily. Sincere apologies could convince the affected person to not jump off the cliff.

I swear the affected ones can be capable of equally powerful and destructive revenge. But they somehow manage to take the "there must be a reason" path and choose to see the good in everything. Sadly, this certainly starts with home.

having nightmares of code i‘ve written some years ago

Last few weeks have been very hectic and I will explain everything in a few days when all of my things to do are done (if you are concerned - nothing bad happened, just code nightmares. Expect a strongly worded rant soon).

Also, I’m getting vaccinated for the coronavirus on Saturday night!

ZNC shenanigans yesterday...

So, yesterday in the midst a massive heat wave I went ahead, booze in hand, to install myself an IRC bouncer called ZNC. All goes well, it gets its own little container, VPN connection, own user, yada yada yada.. a nice configuration system-wise.

But then comes ZNC. Installed it a few times actually, and failed a fair few times too. Apparently Chrome and Firefox block port 6697 for ZNC's web interface outright. Firefox allows you to override it manually, Chrome flat out refuses to do anything with it. Thank you for this amazing level of protection Google. I didn't notice a thing. Thank you so much for treating me like a goddamn user. You know Google, it felt a lot like those plastic nightmares in electronics, ultrasonic welding, gluing shit in (oh that reminds me of the Nexus 6P, but let's not go there).. Google, you are amazing. Best billion dollar company I've ever seen. Anyway.

So I installed ZNC, moved the client to bouncer connection to port 8080 eventually, and it somewhat worked. Though apparently ZNC in its infinite wisdom does both web interface and IRC itself on the same port. How they do it, no idea. But somehow they do.

And now comes the good part.. configuration of this complete and utter piece of shit, ZNC. So I added my Freenode username, password, yada yada yada.. turns out that ZNC in its infinite wisdom puts the password on the stdout. Reminded me a lot about my ISP sending me my password via postal mail. You know, it's one thing that your application knows the plaintext password, but it's something else entirely to openly share that you do. If anything it tells them that something is seriously wrong but fuck! You don't put passwords on the goddamn stdout!

But it doesn't end there. The default configuration it did for Freenode was a server password. Now, you can usually use 3 ways to authenticate, each with their advantages and disadvantages. These are server password, SASL and NickServ. SASL is widely regarded to be the best option and if it's supported by the IRC server, that's what everyone should use. Server password and NickServ are pretty much fallback.

So, plaintext password, default server password instead of SASL, what else.. oh, yeah. ZNC would be a server, right. Something that runs pretty much forever, 24/7. So you'd probably expect there to be a systemd unit for it... Except, nope, there isn't. The ZNC project recommends that you launch it from the crontab. Let that sink in for a moment.. the fucking crontab. For initializing services. My whole life as a sysadmin was a lie. Cron is now an init system.

Fortunately that's about all I recall to be wrong with this thing. But there's a few things that I really want to tell any greenhorn developers out there... Always look at best practices. Never take shortcuts. The right way is going to be the best way 99% of the time. That way you don't have to go back and fix it. Do your app modularly so that a fix can be done quickly and easily. Store passwords securely and if you can't, let the user know and offer alternatives. Don't put it on the stdout. Always assume that your users will go with default options when in doubt. I love tweaking but defaults should always be sane ones.

One more thing that's mostly a jab. The ZNC software is hosted on a .in domain, which would.. quite honestly.. explain a lot. Is India becoming the next Chinese manufacturers for software? Except that in India the internet access is not restricted despite their civilization perhaps not being fully ready for it yet. India, develop and develop properly. It will take a while but you'll get there. But please don't put atrocities like this into the world. Lastly, I know it's hard and I've been there with my own distribution project too. Accept feedback. It's rough, but it is valuable. Listen to the people that criticize your project.

Your spaghetti code is so bad that even Gordon Ramsay still has nightmares from it.

Did anyone ever felt that everyday is a loop? Mine is as follows

Bug Reported -> Try to reproduce -> Check on web -> Check iOS -> Check iOS 13.x -> Update or get hold of other simulator/devices -> Check iOS 13.x2 -> Fix it -> Now it breaks on Android -> Fix it -> Get it QAd -> QA feels their should be some more design changes -> Make him/her understand that what is priority for now -> Now everyone has started testing app and everyone have their opinion (designers are asleep at this point) -> Get all of the team in sync -> Start release -> 99% -> Some yells "wait" -> One more thing -> Sleep with nightmares -> Repeat

PS: We have a responsive web application that is also wrapped in Cordova for iOS and Android.

I wouldn't mind PHP that much if HTML templates with it weren't such verbose and borderline illegible nightmares 😢😢😢

I need guidance about my current situation.
I am perfectionist believing in OOP, preventing memory leak in advance, following clean code, best practices, constantly learning about new libraries to reduce custom implementation & improve efficiency.
So even a single bad variable name can trigger my nerves.

I am currently working in a half billion $ IT service company on a maintenance project of 8 year old Android app of security domain product of 1 of the top enterprise company of the world, which sold it to the many leading companies in the world in Govt service, banking, insurance sectors.

It's code quality is such a bad that I get panic attacks & nightmares daily.

Issues are like
- No apk obfuscation, source's everything is openbook, anybody can just unzip apk & open it in Android Studio to see the source.
- logs everywhere about method name invoked,
- static IV & salt for encryption.
- thousands of line code in God classes.
- Irrelevant method names compared to it's functionality.
- Even single item having list takes 2-3 seconds to load
- Lag in navigation between different features' screens.
- For even single thing like different dimension values for different density whole 100+ lines separate layout files for 6 types of densities are written.
- No modularized packages, every class is in single package & there are around 100+ classes.

Owner of the code, my team lead, is too terrified to change even single thing as he don't have coding maturity & no understanding of memory leak, clean code, OOP, in short typical IT 'service' company mentality.

Client is ill-informed or cost-cutting centric so no code review done by them in 8 years.

Feeling much frustrated as I can see it's like a bomb is waiting to blast anytime when some blackhat cracker will take advantage of this.

Need suggestions about this to tackle the situation.

Thought experiment time:

Imagine that this whole universe is a simulation created by a Group Of Developers (GOD).

- Who would make up this group?
- What kind of design patterns would they follow?
- What type of programming language would they use?
- What kind of bugs are there if any?
- How do they test?
- Assuming the use of quantum computing, what are the implications? Parallel simulations? All possibilities play out?
- Would the controller input be life?
- Who is AI and who are players?
- Has all time already been rendered?
- Do we respawn?
- What would the leaderboard look like?
- What kind of stats are tracked
- What are dreams, nightmares, lucid dreams, sleep paralysis, birth and death?
- How is memory stored, accessed and pruned?
- What kind of neural net is used and where?

etc etc, if you can think of any other interesting fire away

God....

Bash and substitution patterns is character diarrhea.

And said Bash "script" consists of multiple shitton files with sources and Environment variables and other stuff that makes me wanna poke my eyes out and cram it into my arse.

Still shitty, but more tolerable.

I will have an clusterfuck of nightmares I guess.

All these # will gangup with the ~ and then the ? will start an knife attack to rip out their intestines. But all fails as the ! shred everything to bits by blasting it with anti tank sniper munition.

*dizzy*

You know when you are true developer when you have nightmares about non functioning code and bugs without solutions...

Best: gaining experience and learning new ways to write programs in the best way possible, even beyond working hours

Worst: the amount of ABAP code I saw these past two years gives me nightmares, and older programmers don't seem to want to improve and advance from the old ways of the language 😥

Running my own business is not going well. Hasnt for years now. Previous dev jobs were also just nightmares. I feel like i cant cut it as a freelancer, or as a full time dev. I do enjoy programming but my resume is crap and my worthwhile portfolio items are basically all locked down under NDAs or ambiguous accountability. I cant prove im even worth hiring and im almost too old to be considered for any junior role. Not that i think i could handle it. So im considering finding a new career and keeping coding as my hobby. But first i have to decide what to do about my remaining client. Which is fine because... i dont even know what i could do for a full time job now. Ugh, im so profoundly discouraged i dont even want to try and think about this anymore.
The weekly rant topic indirectly applies here but since its a bunch of self pity i decided it would be best to not tag it such...

Oh shit, I love DDoS attacks. FML...going to have nightmares after today

At my school library there is this system, made in php, to make monthly reports on student access, since everyone goes to the library everyone knows it and the guys who did it were considered the best of the school. So since I used to work on the library the director asked me to add some features to it, and I was like "Sure, cool I get to work on a real system", what I didn't know was that the system had no head or tail, the core were two files "load.php" and "db.php", everything was in those two files, no design patterns, no oops, safly that wasn't even the worst part, the modules were loaded through Ajax, which called files with lines like

`echo "<td>Student</td>";`

Literally most of the damn HTML was "echoed" WTH,

When you are dreaming about you being stuck in a never ending loop of string escape... Nightmares...

Trying to make a deadline, waiting for more info from an analist so I can implement the science stuff correctly

Today I receive the email with the info I need. Email is cc'ed to the client. And it starts with complaining about me not having implemented the science stuff. The info I need is attached in this email. Arghgh, how am I supposed to do that if I don't have the information I need.

Apart from that she was testing in the production environment. How do you work with people like this.

But hey, I just got my devRant stickers ;)

When the monthly scrum retrospective reaches the 90 minute mark...

You know when people are being stress tested and they break by getting up, run around screaming and ultimately knock themselves unconscious by running into a wall?

That. I felt like doing that.

I swear someone activates some sort of gravity well when these meetings begin because time beings to stretch on and o........n....... while they meetings happen.

I began to list things I think I'd rather be doing than be in that meeting.

1) Tax returns.
2) Prostate exam (not old enough to need one yet but at least I'd be out the meeting).
3) Visiting the dentist.
4) Assembling IKEA furniture.
5) Watching soccer at least they have the decency to give you a break in the middle and I find sports as engaging as a dog turd on the sidewalk.

So bored was I that I began to notice notches and holes in the ceiling tiles and when I remarked upon them others became engrossed in them and began to speculate upon their origins.

I don't know who a speaker is, what department they are from, what product they're working on or what's so important about the algorithm they're working on. There is no context, no explanation and half way through a show and tell I had to check we were still in a show and tell.

I was bored shitless. I actually felt physical pain from boredom, I've not felt that way since I was a child.

I really, really hate that scrum is implemented in this way.

It left me with only half an hour of coding time left and really it sapped my energy and motivation to the point where I just went home early.

Excuse my language, but:

Fucking bloody cunting waste of time, I've had more productive moments in the restroom. They need to piss off or committed seppuku, ideally both. Dante got it wrong the seventh level of hell is this. I'm usually a very calm and balanced individual but yesterday, yesterday I just... Fuck! Argh! Fuck you meeting, fuck you.

If you are the type that schedules meetings like this:

May a thousand Jabberwockies plague your nightmares and be it that the next seventy seven times you lay with a human shall ye experience bitter failure! I hope Cthulhu himself visits his "enlightenment" upon you and you fear sleep henceforth.

I'm bringing a rubix cube or juggling balls into the next meeting so that I can say at least I learned something and it wasn't time wasted.

I’ve been asked to step in and help out with a flailing project.

First day of getting acclimatised I see there’s over 100 tasks in WIP. 4 devs in the team.

Holy cunting fuck. Where do I start?

Ability to forget about IT nightmares

Tomorrow i have school starting.
Which inspires me to rant about how school fails. Ill omit the "arguments" - feel free to append arguments for my words in the comments. Lol

Dont get be wrong. I LOVE acquiring knowledge. And this is where my first point starts : PACE. My class is basically an assortiment of dumbfucks who dont understand anything without "learning by heart over the course of several weeks"

Ill give you a concrete example.
Our maths teacher wanted to make us think scientifically. So he invented a new type of numbers "root 6 numbers" that are formed like so:
a + b * sqrt(6)
Now he wants us to find out wether the sum of two root 6 numbers is also a root six number. this is all dandy, BUT CLASSMATES STILL DIDNT GET WHAT ROOT 6 NUMBERS ARE, EVEN AFTER SEVERAL EXPRANATIONS. Worse: they went to the main teacher to blacken the math teacher.
Another example would be the time our class needed to understand functions(x) : 4 weeks. Ik, as a programmer i have some ease, but four weeks is a bit too much.

Because of this slow pace, i am irreversibly bored of and in school.
And this leads to another problem: homework. Since i know most of the stuff (the few things i dont get at school, i research at home) the homework are useless to me and since the others dont get much, the homeworks are often more than abundant {in a negative way}.
So i dont do them - but that makes teachers disregard me. Which im sickened of.
Worse: often i dont get overly good grades (i honestly have no clue why. I know everything and go over most of the stuff with my menthor),which empowers teacher of the argument of "you are not good enuff, so you cant read in class".

It would be JUST FINE if the only problem were teachers - but my peers are horrible too.

I know our brains are growing, but thats no reason for being stupid.

I literally get told that i need to stop wearing shorts because they look horrible.

Yep. Also, most people think they are empowered of teaching me and talking about my defaillance - because they do their homework. Even though they know i know stuff better than them.

Now to one of the worst issues: a group work where we had to de a Radio report. The guy (the one who thinks he is intelligent BECAUSE he has good grades) invited himself and his gf to me, he wanted me to translate 22 pages from german to english (because he was too lazy to write in german), wanted me to do audiorecording, audioediting and writing of a report. When i left the group because i was called "weakest link" he spread the word that i he had done everythinh and that because i left his group had failed (noticed the flow in logic?)

NOW everybody thinks of me as stupid weirdo. And honestly - i think i will stop listening to them. Ive always hated people, i dont need a significant other.

Even though this will come with the secondary effect of me being gossiped at.

But honestly its fine.

You might have noticed my elojquent way of expressing myseld. I did that in order to show that i am, despite my grades, overly proficient in english

Ok. So now comes the conclusion. What should i do? Do you Think that i am like that because im pubescent myself? How can i stop having nightmares of every possible social situotion that could occur?
Does this have to do with me being a dev?

Well. ありがとう for reading.

They say nightmares are bad, but have you ever solved a bug that was bothering you for a long time in your dream, only to wake up and realize it wasn't real? Worst feeling ever. And this happened three nights in a row. For three different bugs. You would think that after the first two nights I would know better, but yet again I was fooled.

Least successful...

In a nutshell, an multi version http client for a elasticsearch.

It supported ES 1.7 up to v7.

With an reduced future set, but all in all it allowed doing everything ES offered - just not for one version, rather the whole monty.

For various reasons I wasn't allowed to opensource that...

Which brings me to the least successful part. The client is a beast and would be a blessing for a lot of people I'd guess, but it's sadly covered by more legalese than one could imagine.

Think of legalese as in "Angel - Wolfram and Heart" legalese. I wouldn't be surprised if some part of the contract was written in blood.

... And least successful as in: Nope. Never gonna do that again.

Abstractions necessary for supporting multiple versions are are really painful.

Having an E2E test suite consuming > 64 Gigabyte of RAM for testing against several ES docker instances in parallel isn't fun.

Nothing of that project was fun.

Still gives me nightmares.

(NDA expired short time ago)

Ah, deadlines, the magical force that turns coffee into code, and dreams into nightmares.

Getting real tired of your shit, JavaScript. I sincerely love and hate the language, its so flexible at the same time that flexibility will give you nightmares, I swear to god I'll never recommend Node.js for any big projects, right now the same flexibility is killing our project.

Oh lord, have mercy.

This night I had nightmares about our codebase.
After the deadline I should seriously suggest some refactoring.

Spent seven hours reading source code at work yesterday. The little documentation I was able to find alternated between English and Spanish. And some of the things I saw... Straight out of a horror novel.

For example: NUMBER_2 * NUMBER_60 * NUMBER_60 * NUMBER_1000 to get the number of milliseconds in two hours.

Or this super contrived method which capped the registration age at 100, which now caps it at 102 anyways because they use hard coded values for the current year. Took me 15 minutes to find out what "fixYear" (this method) did.

No wonder I got home and crashed in bed till nearly midnight after that... I swear that was harder than a university Calc final...

Im very very pleasantly surprised at my current job. They treat me like a God (that i am anyways). Free food free luxury hotel with spa gym and sauna. Free drinks free restaurants free trips free tickets. Free travel. I get everything and even an increased salary. I literally have nothing to complain anymore. For each time i complain i also have to admit honestly a well done for this company. I thought all of them are evil corps slaving people and treating them like shit which is why i wanted to become the shittiest darkest boss of ur nightmares. But seeing that some companies actually treat ppl with respect is new to me. Its irregular. Its odd. Almost too good to be true. it makes me reconsider to not be a nightmare boss and follow their steps instead. Only 1 Batman is enough to defeat evil instead of letting the evil infect good ppl like b2plane. Although im a shitmonster i am also like a bee; i sting only if i get stung first. The way how i get treated is exactly how i will treat others

i had past nightmares with ubuntu but i still want to stay away from windows, any recommendation?

The designers kept changing the layout for a web app every week and refused to use a version control system so they sent the new files by slack every release

I have nightmares about the new project already....

When Do You Stop Taking Responsibility?

Let me clarify by describing four scenarios in which you are tasked with some software development. It could be a large or small task. The fourth scenario is the one I'm interested in. The first three are just for contrast.

1. You either decide how to implement the requirements, or you're given directions or constraints you agree with. (If you hadn't been given those specific directions you probably would have done the same thing anyway.) **You feel accountable for the outcome**, such as whether it works correctly or is delivered on time. And, of course, the team feels collectively accountable. (We could call this the "happy path.")

2. You would prefer to do the work one way, but you're instructed to do it a different way, either by a manager, team lead, or team consensus. You disagree with the approach, but you're not a stubborn know-it-all. You understand that their way is valid, or you don't fully understand it but you trust that someone else does. You're probably going to learn something. **You feel accountable for the outcome** in a normal, non-blaming sort of way.

3. You're instructed to do something so horribly wrong that it's guaranteed to fail badly. You're in a position to refuse or push back, and you do.

4. You're given instructions that you know are bad, you raise your objections, and then you follow them anyway. It could be a really awful technical approach, use of copy-pasted code, the wrong tools, wrong library, no unit testing, or anything similar. The negative consequences you expect could include technical failure, technical debt, or significant delays. **You do not feel accountable for the outcome.** If it doesn't work, takes too long, or the users hate it, you expect the individual(s) who gave you instructions to take full responsibility. It's not that you want to point fingers, but you will if it comes to that.

---

That fourth scenario could provoke all sorts of reactions. I'm interested in it for what you might call research purposes.

The final outcome is irrelevant. If it failed, whether someone else ultimately took responsibility or you were blamed is irrelevant. That it is the opposite of team accountability is obvious and also irrelevant.

Here is the question (finally!)

Have you experienced scenario number four, in which you develop software (big as an application, small as a class or method) in a way you believe to be so incorrect that it will have consequences, because someone required you to do so, and you complied *with the expectation that they, not you, would be accountable for the outcome?*

Emphasis is not on the outcome or who was held accountable, but on whether you *felt* accountable when you developed the software.

If you just want to answer yes or no, or "yes, several times," that's great. If you'd like to describe the scenario with any amount of detail, that's great too. If it's something you'd rather not share publicly you can contact me privately - my profile name at gmail.com.

The point is not judgment. I'll go first. My answer is yes, I have experienced scenario #4. For example, I've been told to copy/paste/edit code which I know will be incomprehensible, unmaintainable, buggy, and give future developers nightmares. I've had to build features I know users will hate. Sometimes I've been wrong. I usually raised objections or shared concerns with the team. Sometimes the environment made that impractical. If the problems persisted I looked for other work. But the point is that sometimes I did what I was told, and I felt that if it went horribly wrong I could say, "Yes, I understand, but this was not my decision." *I did not feel accountable.*.

I plan on writing more about this, but I'd like to start by gathering some perspective and understanding beyond just my own experience.

Thanks

Android emulator would be the worst one for me. To be honest, I haven't used that many dev tech yet, but this thing gave me nightmares.
The one provided by Android Studio sucked ass horribly, and it didn't let me use my dedicated graphics chip (nVidia 740m). If I used it the emulator either my apps would crash or not start at all. After some googling, I found out that this was a common thing more or less...Using virtual graphics on it was slow, sluggish and rubbish with ~1 second delay with clicks and scrolling and shitty screen changes proccessing.
Using Genymotion was no better so I just stuck with the one provided by Google for the time being.
I have to add that most of those apps were tutorial apps, and only 2 were semi-serious.

Writing code for software that was deprecated since 2015 it's a nightmare. More when the unit tests take way more time than the actual fix or feature. Just kill it with fire

Wondering when the day will come Facebook buys out devRant! 😱

Hard coded values everywhere give me nightmares. WHAT IS THIS CRAZY FUNCTION USED FOR?

This gives me nightmares...

"Don't google this" 4 devs:
(Quine technology for the service of the evil)
Don't google "ken thompson hack"
I'll have nightmares
Ps: i you are sure youve seen this before, it had a typo, n i couldn't modify it

Had an intern job at a established company, that mostly did equity reports. They made create HTML email templates out of tables for 2 weeks. Fun times.

Enterprise Architect.
That shit gives me nightmares

worst: codeSourcery cross compile tool chain. The stuff of nightmares.
Best: textmate or notepad++. Never code in them, but really usefull for a quick edit, or log analysis.

Flutter is SO fucking full of bugs holy fucking SHIT

Im having NIGHTMARES FROM THJS FUCKING FRAMEWORK

Zzzquil gives me vivid nightmares…!! Had a rather traumatic one the other night

I use to develop desktop programs in C++ with algos related with image processing and computer vision. However, new projects appear and one of them was for web using Drupal. It was my first experience with web and I am still having nightmares... It is the worst thing you can do. Continue a big project without the understanding of technology nor the framework... Now I am more experienced and I prefer stacks like MERN. Easy the debugging in web i so crucial... Maybe, I would have to swtich to webassembly.

I got my current job in the most standard manner,
1. Saw an ad for the job in the local newspaper.
2. Called the boss and had a chat with him. He sounded nice and the job sounded interesting.
3. Submitted my application and resumé
4. Boss called and we set up an appointment for an interview.
5. Met with boss and HR, had a cup of coffee and an interview.
6. Boss called and told me I'm one of two, and that he would like me to do a DISC personality analysis.
7. Met with HR and did the analysis, a bunch of questions that I answered as thoroughly as I could.
8. Boss called and said, congrats! Can you start next month? Yes, I could and it's been more than three years since :)

To make a boring story a bit more funny: Half-way through my first day, I noticed my zipper was open =:O And today I'm wearing two exactly identical socks...save for the colour, different shades of grey on left and right foot. Hush, don't tell my colleagues, maybe they won't notice ;) Well, I guess it's alright as long as I'm not wearing nothing but underwear, or being butt naked, like in some nightmares.

I'm the only one who doesn't understand how the fuck people dream about code/coding? I get it, you leave work and still think about a solution for a certain problem, that's normal. But dreaming/having nightmares about this shit is weird.

Currently in a boot camp. Just finished with python/flask/django...during the html/css part of the camp I literally had "attack of the divs" nightmares.

I swear I touched some weird and complex programming shit in over a decade of programming.
I interfaced myself through C# to C++ Firmware, I wrote Rfid antennas calibration and reading software with a crappy framework called OctaneSDK (seems easy until you have to know how radio signal math and ins and outs work to configure antennas for good performance), I wrote full blown, full stack enterprise web portals and applications.with most weird ass dbs since the era of JDBC, ODBC up to managed data access and entity framework, cloud documental databases and everything.

Please, please, please, PLEASE I BEG YOU, anyone, I don't even have the enough life force to pour into this, explain me why the hell Jest is still a thing in javascript testing.

I read on the site:
"Jest is a delightful JavaScript Testing Framework with a focus on simplicity."

Using jest doesn't feel any delightful and I can't see any spark of focus and simplicity in it.

I tried to configure it in an angular project and it's a clustefuck of your worst nightmares put togheter.

The amount of errors and problems and configurations I had to put up felt like setting up a clunky version of a rube goldberg's machine.

I had to uninstall karma/jasmine, creating config files floating around, configure project files and tell trough them to jest that he has to do path transformations because he can't read his own test files by itself and can't even read file dependencies and now it has a ton of errors importing dependencies.

Sure, it's focused on simplicity.

Moreover, the test are utter trash.

Hey launch this method and verify it's been launched 1 time.
Hey check if the page title is "x"

God, I hate js with passion since years, but every shit for js I put my hands on I always hope it will rehab its reputation to me, instead every fucking time it's worse than before.

Worst technology ever by far I have to say JsData. It's a framework for javascript ofering ORM facilities so you don't have to deal with Ajax yourself. The nightmares with data being cached and not updated, the fact that the response must always be an object with an id. Why? Just why? 😨

I've started having nightmares about someone hijacking my computer and trying to freak me out. Halp.

Hi!, Greetings fellow ranters,

I got into thinking this past few days. Because over the years, i really wanted to start my career as a freelance web/mobile developer, i'm not planning to quit my job(yet), but i want to slowly but surely build my freelance career. I just need some advice from you on how i should optimally or best approach this goal, and where/how should i find clients or what sites should i find clients, i know freelancer.com but I've heard other freelancers who had nightmares with it, upwork is also kind of overcrowded.

# Gave me a job and more stress and literally nightmares;
# Physically resisting myself to give solutions to everything people moan about. Even myself. But we know things flap in production;
# Cursing my life, other people's code, customer's IQ more often;
# Getting more LinkedIn, messages, profile views and requests than my social media (which I really don't give a shit about);
# Using a combination of programming punctuations in usual writing (this rant for example);
# My sleep is down the toilet;
# Never complaining any coffee as long as it works;

6 weeks of doing nothing except dealing with nightmares from the past in my mind I think I left all that crap behind and I am ready to jump back.
I don’t feel much anger and disappointment anymore, even some excitement for new crap to come by on my desk.
I started to write some code and practice puzzles for getting some decent job or project (again)

Puzzles are usually not a problem but I fail with HR.
When they’re asking me stupid questions I answer with stupid answers to piss them off.

But now time to get some money so I’d try to be gentle.

Anyone else have nightmares about building other people's c/c++ codebases from source? *napalm, helicopters, gunfire, screaming civilians etc*

I think I have configuphobia.

When you need to setup configurations for like anything, it's always super loosely coupled and can break when you even breathe on it.

Database table columns? Configured once.
Authorization management? Create a user and configure the password and username in the application.
Backups? Configure the network path to backup to.

All these things are so EASY to break!
Maybe I'm overcautious, but I really dislike it.

There are ways around it of course, like documentation and automation, but it's all so much work. And even then it's still loosely coupled.

What do you all do to keep your configs working without getting nightmares?

Debugging wasting our lives...

New project consists of 3 libraries with bunch of dependencies each.
Installation script not working, so here I am combing through the haystack fixing the error messages.

I hate installing stuffs with their dependency nightmares... I just want to start developing, man...😩

The stress that hit me unprepared on june 9th was of such large magnitude that i just realized i havent eaten anything yesterday for the whole day. I also can't eat anything today. And most likely i wont be able to eat anything for the next several days. I tried eating by force but then i have a compulsion of puking, so i can't eat even forcefully. Just woke up with nightmares dreaming the stress that just happened to me on 9th june. And as soon as i woke up my head is decomposing of pain. Very large headache of exhaustion and stress. Can't even fucking have peace in the fucking dreams while sleeping. It's day 2 and I dont even feel like im hungry. it feels like this latest stress has deformed something in my organism either physically or mentally. What would happen if i dont eat for the next 5-7 days, can i survive? I feel no hunger at all so i can't tell if i should eat or not. I can only drink water as a replacement of eating food

I'm in an inner conflict: I want to use Google Assistant, but all these privacy dramas/nightmares seem pretty scary to me. Is it save to use?

Im trying to do onboarding to work for this client.

The job app doesnt say accounting or accountant on it.

They congratulate me and pleasantries and eventually say i have to accept nearly 4k check for “training materials”.

So i accept the check, they then say i have to buy installation and equipment including 2 safes (??) and other accounting training.

I say i did not sign up to be an accountant and i want other jobs instead.

They say i should wire the money back to their wire accounts.

So i do. Im offered two other jobs from this client and another check for even more in the mail.

They say i need to cash this check to begin training for these jobs.

I ask for a list if training materials and procedures for these jobs, and they still say cash the check even after i verify to them that i do not need / already have these materials.

Please give me insights on this because im extremely confused and frustrated with these people and i want my paycheck.

I can work productively and for very long hours with a lot of stuff which many dev considers productivity hurdles:

- single small monitor? No problem (in fact in one occasion in which my roommate accidentally broke my laptop charghing port and I couldn't get a spare I worked on an iPad connected trough SSH to a Linux machine completing one of the hardest tasks I ever did without significant loss of productivity)
- old machine? That's ok as long as I can run a minimal Linux and not struggle with Windows
- noise and chatter around me? A 10€ pair of earbuds are enough for me, no noise cancelling needed
- "legacy" stack/programming language? I'd rather spend my days coding in Swift or Rust but in the end I believe which is the dev and its skill which gets the job done not fancy language features so Java 8 will be fine
- no JetBrains or other fancy IDE? Altough some refactoring and code generation stuff is amazing Neovim or VS Code, maybe with the help of some UNIX CLI tools here and there are more than enough

despite this I found out there is a single thing which is like kryptonite for my productivity bringing it from above average* to dangerously low and it's the lack of a quick feedback loop.
For programming tasks that's not a problem because it doesn't matter the language there's always a compiler/interpreter I can use to quickly check what I did and this helps to get quickly in a good work flow but since I went to work with a customer which wants everything deployed on a lazily put together "private cloud" which needs configurations in non-standard and badly documented file formats, has a lot of stuff which instead of being automated gets done trough slowly processed tickets, sometimes things breaks and may take MONTHS to see them fixed... my productivity took a big hit since while I'm still quick at the dev stuff (if I'm able to put together a decent local environment and I don't depend on the cloud of nightmares, something which isn't always warranted) my productivity plummets when I have to integrate what I did or what someone else did in this "cloud" since lacking decent documentation everything has do be done trough a lot of manual tasks and most importantly slow iterations of trial and error. When I have to do that kind stuff (sadly quite often) my brain feels like stuck on "1st gear": I get slow, quickly tired and often I procrastinate a lot even if I force myself out of non work related internet stuff.

*I don't want this to sound braggy but being a passionate developer which breathes computers since childhood and dedicating part of my freetime on continuously improving my skill I have an edge over who do this without much passion or even reluctantly and I say this without wanting to be an èlitist gatekeeper, everyone has to work and tot everybody as the privilege of being passionate in a skill which nowadays has so much market

Seems like there is a GHOST in my office, my code was working on friday, and now , the fucking seg faults

When I was started my journey in coding, what ever I do, I think about coding. Sleep code, eat code, dream code, dating code. Its become my usually nightmares.
Its become worst when I got stucked in coding. Ppl see me like a geek zombie.
Coding used to ruin my life.
But when my code working like charm, feel like god. I can do anything. 😂😂😂
Sometime l just love it, but most of the time I fucking hate it.

i have had sleepless nights when i saw devs using default ctrl+tab in "sublime text". and nightmares when they said it sucks because of this.

I love software engineering. I enjoy every aspects of it. But recently due to some company politics it is a shit show at my workplace.

I am actively looking for a change and things are going bit slow due to the pandemic situation. I am really frustrated and end up having nightmares every time when I sleep. I know in these times having a job itself is a big thing.
I really wish to be at a place where I can work effectively.

I've had an issue with eel.js for the last two days , the shit has been giving me nightmares all weekend backend processes keep shutting down on page navigation turns out i had not imported eel on the index page.

For fucks sake it had to be that one single line of code

; is expected