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Search - "no matter to rant"
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Dear fellow developer,
You are not alone. No matter what situation you have been, you are in, you might be, there definitely are people who can share your pain and joy on similar wave length. Here at devrant.
Introvert?
Poor?
Alone?
Odd one out?
Trouble studying?
Family issues?
Debts?
Hate workplace?
Bad teacher?
Depression?
Laziness?
Forever alone?
Struggling?
Full of regrets?
Lost something?
Lost someone?
Lost?
You name it. All of us may not understand, sure. But there definitely will always be more than one person who will totally know what you are trying to say. Here at devrant only.
So whatever you are in, wherever you are and however you feel, just rant it out. 😄 And remember that we are one tap away from you.
For that devrant creators and most of all each and everyone of you have my eternal thank.72 -
LONG RANT AHEAD!
In my workplace (dev company) I am the only dev using Linux on my workstation. I joined project XX, a senior dev onboarded me. Downloaded the code, built the source, launched the app,.. BAM - an exception in catalina.out. ORM framework failed to map something.
mvn clean && mvn install
same thing happens again. I address this incident to sr dev and response is "well.... it works on my machine and has worked for all other devs. It must be your environment issue. Prolly linux is to blame?" So I spend another hour trying to dig up the bug. Narrowed it down to a single datamodel with ORM mapping annotation looking somewhat off. Fixed it.
mvn clean && mvn install
the app now works perfectly. Apparently this bug has been in the codebase for years and Windows used to mask it somehow w/o throwing an exception. God knows what undefined behaviour was happening in the background...
Months fly by and I'm invited to join another project. Sounds really cool! I get accesses, checkout the code, build it (after crossing the hell of VPNs on Linux). Run component 1/4 -- all goocy. run component 2,3/4 -- looks perfect. Run component 4/4 -- BAM: LinkageError. Turns out there is something wrong with OSGi dependencies as ClassLoader attempts to load the same class twice, from 2 different sources. Coworkers with Windows and MACs have never seen this kind of exception and lead dev replies with "I think you should use a normal environment for work rather than playing with your Linux". Wtf... It's java. Every env is "normal env" for JVM! I do some digging. One day passes by.. second one.. third.. the weekend.. The next Friday comes and I still haven't succeeded to launch component #4. Eventually I give up (since I cannot charge a client for a week I spent trying to set up my env) and walk away from that project. Ever since this LinkageError was always in my mind, for some reason I could not let it go. It was driving me CRAZY! So half a year passes by and one of the project devs gets a new MB pro. 2 days later I get a PM: "umm.. were you the one who used to get LinkageError while starting component #4 up?". You guys have NO IDEA how happy his message made me. I mean... I was frickin HIGH: all smiling, singing, even dancing behind my desk!! Apparently the guy had the same problem I did. Except he was familiar with the project quite well. It took 3 more days for him to figure out what was wrong and fix it. And it indeed was an error in the project -- not my "abnormal Linux env"! And again for some hell knows what reason Windows was masking a mistake in the codebase and not popping an error where it must have popped. Linux on the other hand found the error and crashed the app immediatelly so the product would not be shipped with God knows what bugs...
I do not mean to bring up a flame war or smth, but It's obvious I've kind of saved 2 projects from "undefined magical behaviour" by just using Linux. I guess what I really wanted to say is that no matter how good dev you are, whether you are a sr, lead or chief dev, if your coworker (let it be another sr or a jr dev) says he gets an error and YOU cannot figure out what the heck is wrong, you should not blame the dev or an environment w/o knowing it for a fact. If something is not working - figure out the WHATs and WHYs first. Analyze, compare data to other envs,... Not only you will help a new guy to join your team but also you'll learn something new. And in some cases something crucial, e.g. a serious messup in the codebase.11 -
Every day.
I am a PHP developer.
Yeah, "another PHP is awful" rant... no, not really.
It's just unsuitable for some ambitious projects, just like Ruby and Python are.
First of all, DO NOT EVER use Laravel for large enterprise applications. The same goes for RoR, Django, and other ActiveRecord MVCs.
They are all neat frameworks for writing a todo app, as a better-than-wordpress flexible blogging solution, even as a custom webshop.
Beyond 50k daily users, Active Record becomes hell due to it's lazy fat querying habits. At more than a million users... *depressed sigh*.
PHP is also completely unsuitable for projects beyond 5M lines of code in my opinion. At more than 25M lines... *another depressed sigh*.
You can let your devs read Clean Code and books about architecture patterns, you can teach them about SOLID & DRY, you can write thousands of tests... it doesn't matter.
PHP is scaffolding, it's made of bamboo and rope. It's not brick or concrete. You can build quickly, but it only scales up to a certain point before it breaks in multiple places.
Eventually you run into patterns where even 100% test coverage still doesn't guarantee shit, because the real-life edge cases are just too complex and numerous.
When you're working on a multi-party invoicing system with adapters for various tax codes, or an availability/planning system working across timezones, or systems which implement geographical routefinding coupled to traffic, event & weather prediction...
PHP, Python, Ruby, etc are just missing types.
Every day I run into bugs which could have been prevented if you could use ADTs in a generic way in PHP. PHP7 has pretty good typehints, and they prevent a lot of messy behavior, but they aren't composable. There is no way to tell PHP "this method accepts a Collection of Users", or "this methods returns maybe either an Apple or a Pear, and I want to force the caller to handle both Apple/Pear and null".
Well, you could do that, but it requires a lot of custom classes and trickery, and you have to rewrite the same logic if you want to typehint a "Collection of Departments" instead of "Collection of Users" -- i.e., it's not composable.
Probably the biggest issue is that languages with a (mostly) structural type system (Haskell, Rust, even C#/JVM languages to some degree, etc) are much slower to develop in for the "startup" era of a project, so you grab a weak, quick prototyping language to get started.
Then, when you reach a more grown up phase, you wish you had a better type system at your disposal...28 -
Fuck the memes.
Fuck the framework battles.
Fuck the language battles.
Fuck the titles.
Anybody who has been in this field long enough knows that it doesn't matter if your linus fucking torvalds, there is no human who has lived or ever will live that simultaneously understands, knows, and remembers how to implement, in multiple languages, the following:
- jest mocks for complex React components (partial mocks, full mocks, no mocks at all!)
- token cancellation for asynchronous Tasks in C#
- fullstack CRUD, REST, and websocket communication (throw in gRPC for bonus points)
- database query optimization, seeding, and design
- nginx routing, https redirection
- build automation with full test coverage and environment consideration
- docker container versioning, restoration, and cleanup
- internationalization on both the front AND backends
- secret storage, security audits
- package management, maintenence, and deprecation reviews
- integrating with dozens of APIs
- fucking how to center a div
and that's a _comically_ incomplete list; barely scratches the surface of the full range of what a dev can encounter in a given day of writing software
have many of us probably done one or even all of these at different times? surely.
but does that mean we are supposed to draw that up at a moment's notice some cookie-cutter solution like a fucking robot and spit out an answer on a fax sheet?
recruiters, if you read this site (perhaps only the good ones do anyway so its wasted oxygen), just know that whoever you hire its literally the luck of the draw of how well they perform during the interview. sure, perhaps some perform better, but you can never know how good someone is until they literally start working at your org, so... have fun with that.
Oh and I almost forgot, again for you recruiters, on top of that list which you probably won't ever understand for the entirety of your lives, you can also add writing documentation, backup scripts, and orchestrating / administrating fucking JIRA or actually any somewhat technical dashboard like a CMS or website, because once again, the devs are the only truly competent ones - and i don't even mean in a technical sense, i mean in a HUMAN sense of GETTING SHIT DONE IN GENERAL.
There's literally 2 types of people in the world: those who sit around drawing flow charts and talking on the phone all day, and those WHO LITERALLY FUCKING BUILD THE WORLD
why don't i just run the whole fucking company at this point? you guys are "celebrating" that you made literally $5 dollars from a single customer and i'm just sitting here coding 12 hours a day like all is fine and well
i'm so ANGRY its always the same no matter where i go, non-technical people have just no clue, even when you implore them how long things take, they just nod and smile and say "we'll do it the MVP way". sure, fine, you can do that like 2 or 3 times, but not for 6 fucking months until you have a stack of "MVPs" that come toppling down like the garbage they are.
How do expect to keep the "momentum" of your customers and sales (I hope you can hear the hatred of each of these market words as I type them) if the entire system is glued together with ducktape because YOU wanted to expedite the feature by doing it the EASY way instead of the RIGHT way. god, just forget it, nobody is going to listen anyway, its like the 5th time a row in my life
we NEED tests!
we NEED to know our code coverage!
we NEED to design our system to handle large amounts of traffic!
we NEED detailed logging!
we NEED to start building an exception database!
BILBO BAGGINS! I'm not trying to hurt you! I'm trying to help you!
Don't really know what this rant was, I'm just raging and all over the place at the universe. I'm going to bed.20 -
this.title = "gg Microsoft"
this.metadata = {
rant: true,
long: true,
super_long: true,
has_summary: true
}
// Also:
let microsoft = "dead" // please?
tl;dr: Windows' MAX_PATH is the devil, and it basically does not allow you to copy files with paths that exceed this length. No matter what. Even with official fixes and workarounds.
Long story:
So, I haven't had actual gainful employ in quite awhile. I've been earning just enough to get behind on bills and go without all but basic groceries. Because of this, our electronics have been ... in need of upgrading for quite awhile. In particular, we've needed new drives. (We've been down a server for two years now because its drive died!)
Anyway, I originally bought my external drive just for backup, but due to the above, I eventually began using it for everyday things. including Steam. over USB. Terrible, right? So, I decided to mount it as an internal drive to lower the read/write times. Finding SATA cables was difficult, the motherboard's SATA plugs are in a terrible spot, and my tiny case (and 2yo) made everything soo much worse. It was a miserable experience, but I finally got it installed.
However! It turns out the Seagate external drives use some custom drive header, or custom driver to access the drive, so Windows couldn't read the bare drive. ffs. So, I took it out again (joy) and put it back in the enclosure, and began copying the files off.
The drive I'm copying it to is smaller, so I enabled compression to allow storing a bit more of the data, and excluded a couple of directories so I could copy those elsewhere. I (barely) managed to fit everything with some pretty tight shuffling.
but. that external drive is connected via USB, remember? and for some reason, even over USB3, I was only getting ~20mb/s transfer rate, so the process took 20some hours! In the interim, I worked on some projects, watched netflix, etc., then locked my computer, and went to bed. (I also made sure to turn my monitors and keyboard light off so it wouldn't be enticing to my 2yo.) Cue dramatic music ~
Come morning, I go to check on the progress... and find that the computer is off! What the hell! I turn it on and check the logs... and found that it lost power around 9:16am. aslkjdfhaslkjashdasfjhasd. My 2yo had apparently been playing with the power strip and its enticing glowing red on/off switch. So. It didn't finish copying.
aslkjdfhaslkjashdasfjhasd x2
Anyway, finding the missing files was easy, but what about any that didn't finish? Filesizes don't match, so writing a script to check doesn't work. and using a visual utility like windirstat won't work either because of the excluded folders. Friggin' hell.
Also -- and rather the point of this rant:
It turns out that some of the files (70 in total, as I eventually found out) have paths exceeding Windows' MAX_PATH length (260 chars). So I couldn't copy those.
After some research, I learned that there's a Microsoft hotfix that patches this specific issue! for my specific version! woo! It's like. totally perfect. So, I installed that, restarted as per its wishes... tried again (via both drag and `copy`)... and Lo! It did not work.
After installing the hotfix. to fix this specific issue. on my specific os. the issue remained. gg Microsoft?
Further research.
I then learned (well, learned more about) the unicode path prefix `\\?\`, which bypasses Windows kernel's path parsing, and passes the path directly to ntfslib, thereby indirectly allowing ~32k path lengths. I tried this with the native `copy` command; no luck. I tried this with `robocopy` and cygwin's `cp`; they likewise failed. I tried it with cygwin's `rsync`, but it sees `\\?\` as denoting a remote path, and therefore fails.
However, `dir \\?\C:\` works just fine?
So, apparently, Microsoft's own workaround for long pathnames doesn't work with its own utilities. unless the paths are shorter than MAX_PATH? gg Microsoft.
At this point, I was sorely tempted to write my own copy utility that calls the internal Windows APIs that support unicode paths. but as I lack a C compiler, and haven't coded in C in like 15 years, I figured I'd try a few last desperate ideas first.
For the hell of it, I tried making an archive of the offending files with winRAR. Unsurprisingly, it failed to access the files.
... and for completeness's sake -- mostly to say I tried it -- I did the same with 7zip. I took one of the offending files and made a 7z archive of it in the destination folder -- and, much to my surprise, it worked perfectly! I could even extract the file! Hell, I could even work with paths >340 characters!
So... I'm going through all of the 70 missing files and copying them. with 7zip. because it's the only bloody thing that works. ffs
Third-party utilities work better than Microsoft's official fixes. gg.
...
On a related note, I totally feel like that person from http://xkcd.com/763 right now ;;21 -
Well, here's the OS rant I promised. Also apologies for no blog posts the past few weeks, working on one but I want to have all the information correct and time isn't my best friend right now :/
Anyways, let's talk about operating systems. They serve a purpose which is the goal which the user has.
So, as everyone says (or, loads of people), every system is good for a purpose and you can't call the mainstream systems shit because they all have their use.
Last part is true (that they all have their use) but defining a good system is up to an individual. So, a system which I'd be able to call good, had at least the following 'features':
- it gives the user freedom. If someone just wants to use it for emailing and webbrowsing, fair enough. If someone wants to produce music on it, fair enough. If someone wants to rebuild the entire system to suit their needs, fair enough. If someone wants to check the source code to see what's actually running on their hardware, fair enough. It should be up to the user to decide what they want to/can do and not up to the maker of that system.
- it tries it's best to keep the security/privacy of its users protected. Meaning, by default, no calling home, no integrating users within mass surveillance programs and no unnecessary data collection.
- Open. Especially in an age of mass surveillance, it's very important that one has the option to check the underlying code for vulnerabilities/backdoors. Can everyone do that, nope. But that doesn't mean that the option shouldn't be there because it's also about transparency so you don't HAVE to trust a software vendor on their blue eyes.
- stability. A system should be stable enough for home users to use. For people who like to tweak around? Also, but tweaking *can* lead to instability and crashes, that's not the systems' responsibility.
Especially the security and privacy AND open parts are why I wouldn't ever voluntarily (if my job would depend on it, sure, I kinda need money to stay alive so I'll take that) use windows or macos. Sure, apple seems to care about user privacy way more than other vendors but as long as nobody can verify that through source code, no offense, I won't believe a thing they say about that because no one can technically verify it anyways.
Some people have told me that Linux is hard to use for new/(highly) a-technical people but looking at my own family and friends who adapted fast as hell and don't want to go back to windows now (and mac, for that matter), I highly doubt that. Sure, they'll have to learn something new. But that was also the case when they started to use any other system for the first time. Possibly try a different distro if one doesn't fit?
Problems - sometimes hard to solve on Linux, no doubt about that. But, at least its open. Meaning that someone can dive in as deep as possible/necessary to solve the problem. That's something which is very difficult with closed systems.
The best example in this case for me (don't remember how I did it by the way) was when I mounted a network drive at boot on windows and Linux (two systems using the same webDav drive). I changed the authentication and both systems weren't in for booting anymore. Hours of searching how to unfuck this on windows - I ended up reinstalling it because I just couldn't find a solution.
On linux, i found some article quite quickly telling to remove the entry for the webdav thingy from fstab. Booted into a root recovery shell, chrooted to the harddrive, removed the entry in fstab and rebooted. BAM. Everything worked again.
So yeah, that's my view on this, I guess ;P31 -
There is one thing I have seen here in devRant. No matter how stupid rant you post no one trolls you. People are kind of humble here. They try to help you.
Just an observation, may not be true.10 -
You know what? Fuck this shit. We spend most of our life locked down in a school, we are being told facts, tested and stressed for many years with the only hope to get out as soon as possible.
Failing is something that keeps you there indefinitely.
Parents keep pushing on kids to achieve the best and get good grades to have a job.
Then something happens.
You get out of school and what happens?
You start working.
A.k.a modern slavery...
Employers thinks that since you are young they are doing YOU a favor if they decided to hire you.
So you find yourself having to do the same tasks everyone is doing, perhaps you are even fully capable of managing them and get the shit done but guess what!!
You are paid the minimum.
You barely make enough to pay off your rent which keeps you locked away from Holidays abroad, from that huge cake you desperately want.
And guess what! Try to raise your voice and you'll get fired in a Matter of seconds, replaced with someone else which accepts any condition.
You dream of a house, a family and a car but you can't even eat healthy with that salary.
So you are forced to buy cheap and low quality food from the same store again and again till you had enough and spend some days with that horrible feeling...
Calling you to get a job interview feels like they are doing you a favor, they always try to give the minimum possible and expect you to work in a serious manner and respect their deadlines.
Colleagues earn a lot more even though they aren't doing anything different from you.
For the first year you won't have any holiday, let alone traveling or anything different from just staying home for 3 days straight.
Banks won't give you a loan because your job doesn't pay off
The day that your car is broken you struggle to eat the whole month.
On top of that, taxes. Because they aren't taking away enough.
I don't want to live this life, I don't want to become a modern slave and work 8-17 everyday for the rest of my life and retire with a shitty retirement pension that won't probably grant me anything again.
I had enough of this shit.
I don't want to go back to work and pretend to do what I am supposed to do with a smile on my face knowing that I am just a number and that no matter how skilled I am I can always get replaced with N number of people for a lower salary of mine.
I am tired
I dream of a life that I won't ever reach this way.
Today I looked up houses prices and felt like shit.
I will never in my entire life be able to afford something so expensive, let alone buying furnitures and what is needed or what I like.
I dream of having my place, my dog and my family but apparently I am asking too much.
How is this even fair in 2018/2019?
I... I am... Speechless.
I wonder how many people out there are in the same situation or even worse and I can't even wrap my mind around that.
This is just modern slavery.
My boss makes a shit load of money from young people that can't complain because they are threatened and will eventually be replaced...
This is my rant.22 -
!rant
It's been a while since I posted here. My previous workplace was a 101 on how to burn out people.
But now I am working at a place where:
- People are 0 toxic.
- Sprints follow the premise "under promise, over deliver."
- I was having trouble sleeping (for reasons) a couple of months ago, and my boss literally told me, "If you can't sleep at night, take a few days, or if you can fall asleep in the morning, just sleep in the morning until you manage to do otherwise. Talk with your team and rearrange the meetings if you have and rest. "
- All pieces of the company (sales, narketing, product, data, devs) have a clean roadmap.
- Product and bizz understand when something can't be done on the next sprint and why sometimes some features are delayed.
- They pay well, even raising the pay twice to account for inflation.
- Full remote, If I want to go to the office, Its my choice.
I need to keep this job no matter what!8 -
Guys, my unfortunately daily rant of my pm
I was told to create a docker env for our team. Good. Document the process so everyone can know what to do. Good.
My PM follows what he wants to instead of step by step and changes whatever he wants to.
I am asked for help because he doesnt know. No prob.
Me: "Do this, do this and.."
PM: "that doesnt matter, trust me, I could change it and.."
Me: "...and it wont work"
PM: "I know suff too, check" *does his changes aaaaaand doesnt work*
* awkward staring*
That happened a while ago.
This week, he crashed his git repo because he was doing things in docker team (including him) decided not to.
Took me more enough time explaining him "you are not supposed to do that in the container" funny fact he wanted to prove that his way was right and even if he did my way it would crash.
Sooooo he did my way just to prove how wrong I was. Everything worked flawlessly. Rage-still-awkward staring.
Plus the "aww that's weird. I dont know how this happened" -
Took me a week to realize that "!rant" just means "not rant".
I thought it was some sort of post front-matter that was no longer supported by the app (like a Duck Duck Go "bang").
😅7 -
I had to open the desktop app to write this because I could never write a rant this long on the app.
This will be a well-informed rebuttal to the "arrays start at 1 in Lua" complaint. If you have ever said or thought that, I guarantee you will learn a lot from this rant and probably enjoy it quite a bit as well.
Just a tiny bit of background information on me: I have a very intimate understanding of Lua and its c API. I have used this language for years and love it dearly.
[START RANT]
"arrays start at 1 in Lua" is factually incorrect because Lua does not have arrays. From their documentation, section 11.1 ("Arrays"), "We implement arrays in Lua simply by indexing tables with integers."
From chapter 2 of the Lua docs, we know there are only 8 types of data in Lua: nil, boolean, number, string, userdata, function, thread, and table
The only unfamiliar thing here might be userdata. "A userdatum offers a raw memory area with no predefined operations in Lua" (section 26.1). Essentially, it's for the API to interact with Lua scripts. The point is, this isn't a fancy term for array.
The misinformation comes from the table type. Let's first explore, at a low level, what an array is. An array, in programming, is a collection of data items all in a line in memory (The OS may not actually put them in a line, but they act as if they are). In most syntaxes, you access an array element similar to:
array[index]
Let's look at c, so we have some solid reference. "array" would be the name of the array, but what it really does is keep track of the starting location in memory of the array. Memory in computers acts like a number. In a very basic sense, the first sector of your RAM is memory location (referred to as an address) 0. "array" would be, for example, address 543745. This is where your data starts. Arrays can only be made up of one type, this is so that each element in that array is EXACTLY the same size. So, this is how indexing an array works. If you know where your array starts, and you know how large each element is, you can find the 6th element by starting at the start of they array and adding 6 times the size of the data in that array.
Tables are incredibly different. The elements of a table are NOT in a line in memory; they're all over the place depending on when you created them (and a lot of other things). Therefore, an array-style index is useless, because you cannot apply the above formula. In the case of a table, you need to perform a lookup: search through all of the elements in the table to find the right one. In Lua, you can do:
a = {1, 5, 9};
a["hello_world"] = "whatever";
a is a table with the length of 4 (the 4th element is "hello_world" with value "whatever"), but a[4] is nil because even though there are 4 items in the table, it looks for something "named" 4, not the 4th element of the table.
This is the difference between indexing and lookups. But you may say,
"Algo! If I do this:
a = {"first", "second", "third"};
print(a[1]);
...then "first" appears in my console!"
Yes, that's correct, in terms of computer science. Lua, because it is a nice language, makes keys in tables optional by automatically giving them an integer value key. This starts at 1. Why? Lets look at that formula for arrays again:
Given array "arr", size of data type "sz", and index "i", find the desired element ("el"):
el = arr + (sz * i)
This NEEDS to start at 0 and not 1 because otherwise, "sz" would always be added to the start address of the array and the first element would ALWAYS be skipped. But in tables, this is not the case, because tables do not have a defined data type size, and this formula is never used. This is why actual arrays are incredibly performant no matter the size, and the larger a table gets, the slower it is.
That felt good to get off my chest. Yes, Lua could start the auto-key at 0, but that might confuse people into thinking tables are arrays... well, I guess there's no avoiding that either way.13 -
Last Friday company-wide call consisted of the sales CEO bossman, the remote contractor dev, and myself. The only topic of discussion was CTO-bashing (bossman's favorite). Neither person had much of anything to say about their week, and they didn't want to hear my rather-lengthy summary either (I did a lot). All they wanted to do was bash the CTO (API Guy).
The CEO asked how many hours I had worked, and seemed annoyed when I said less than 40. Well screw you. Monday was Christmas, and Sunday was Encroaching Estranged Asshole Day. (Earlier rant)
I've been spending most of my time trying to learn the steaming mountain of rancid hippo shit that API Guy squeezed out, since he's leaving forever in 10 days. Sure, CEO bossman says he'll still be around to answer questions, but even with him right next to me in the office he's less than useful. After he's gone and finally feeling free of this farce? It'll be worth fuck-all.
So bossman is mad at me for both not working enough over Christmas, and not pumping out features at a frantic pace despite multiple explanations of why this is a bad idea. And he didn't care about what work I actually did do.
My every interaction with him makes me angry. Whenever I -- or anyone else -- does something he doesn't approve of, seemingly no matter the reasoning, he makes it out to be a failure on their part, and like he can't trust them as much now.
Well I'm sorry we're trying to make sure our websocket works perfectly before putting it in the hands of our customers who rely on it for cash processing.
I'm sorry I'm trying to recall printers that aren't configured properly, which also prevent customers from using our goddamn service they're paying for.
I'm sorry I'm trying to learn how everything works while I still have someone to talk to and ask questions of.
I'm sorry I'm preparing for the day I have to take over and have you breathing down my neck. Once API Guy's gone I'll be responsible for everything, and you'll be yelling at me and having a @Root bashing session instead if I don't know how to fix everything right away.
But no. All you care about is that I talk to you about what's going in so you can micromanage development despite having zero fucking understanding of goddamn anything. All you ever fucking want is the next shiny feature you can push to make more sales / keep your current contacts happy. Doesn't fking matter if it makes development awful later; that's tomorrow's problem. And yet you have the gall to bash API Guy over and over and over again for the codebase being a mess? Sure he's a terrible programmer, but been putting up with this exact same shit for five years. No wonder it's a mountain of rancid hippo shit. That's as much your fault as his, asshole.
I'm so sorry you "have serious concerns" about me. I don't want to put up with your shit either.
Fuck off and die.22 -
ARGH. I wrote a long rant containing a bunch of gems from the codebase at @work, and lost it.
I'll summarize the few I remember.
First, the cliche:
if (x == true) { return true; } else { return false; };
Seriously written (more than once) by the "legendary" devs themselves.
Then, lots of typos in constants (and methods, and comments, and ...) like:
SMD_AGENT_SHCEDULE_XYZ = '5-year-old-typo'
and gems like:
def hot_garbage
magic = [nil, '']
magic = [0, nil] if something_something
success = other_method_that_returns_nothing(magic)
if success == true
return true # signal success
end
end
^ That one is from our glorious self-proclaimed leader / "engineering director" / the junior dev thundercunt on a power trip. Good stuff.
Next up are a few of my personal favorites:
Report.run_every 4.hours # Every 6 hours
Daemon.run_at_hour 6 # Daily at 8am
LANG_ENGLISH = :en
LANG_SPANISH = :sp # because fuck standards, right?
And for design decisions...
The code was supposed to support multiple currencies, but just disregards them and sets a hardcoded 'usd' instead -- and the system stores that string on literally hundreds of millions of records, often multiple times too (e.g. for payment, display fees, etc). and! AND! IT'S ALWAYS A FUCKING VARCHAR(255)! So a single payment record uses 768 bytes to store 'usd' 'usd' 'usd'
I'd mention the design decisions that led to the 35 second minimum pay API response time (often 55 sec), but i don't remember the details well enough.
Also:
The senior devs can get pretty much anything through code review. So can the dev accountants. and ... well, pretty much everyone else. Seriously, i have absolutely no idea how all of this shit managed to get published.
But speaking of code reviews: Some security holes are allowed through because (and i quote) "they already exist elsewhere in the codebase." You can't make this up.
Oh, and another!
In a feature that merges two user objects and all their data, there's a method to generate a unique ID. It concatenates 12 random numbers (one at a time, ofc) then checks the database to see if that id already exists. It tries this 20 times, and uses the first unique one... or falls through and uses its last attempt. This ofc leads to collisions, and those collisions are messy and require a db rollback to fix. gg. This was written by the "legendary" dev himself, replete with his signature single-letter variable names. I brought it up and he laughed it off, saying the collisions have been rare enough it doesn't really matter so he won't fix it.
Yep, it's garbage all the way down.16 -
hey there, long time no rant.
remember that manipulative, sociopathic angry manchild turdface PM, the kind that gives you a never ending rant inspiration? the one that got immortalized in like 90% of my rants?
well... it's time for the final update.
i decided to leave the team some months ago. my boss reacted very cool and supportive and suggested topics i could work on instead. when i told my colleague, he decided to leave the team at the same day. we both also complained at HR and added some papertrails about PM's shenanigans.
shortly after, another guy from the team quit and left the company, and i know that it was 100% because of this PM.
so, there were 2 devs left from originally 6 in PM's team.
some other people in the environment of this PM quit, one of his subordinates and someone from a greater project in which the PM's project was embedded.
after some internal investigations and discussions, the PM's team was completely kicked out of this greater project, since after ~ a year, this team was neither able to deliver anything useful nor to define what it actually was what they wanted to provide. instead, they actively blocked the project, solution finding and cooperation between teams. and this is quite very much PM's fault.
the final move came this month when PM got fired. i think, management finally realized that he is a total fraud who has no clue about the whole matter (neither what devices we build nor about software development). or management. or leadership. and that all he can do is produce hot air and bullshit people for some time to make them believe he knows something.
not sure how long he'll still be around, but i'm happy when i don't have to see his face ever again. i'm just sorry for the next company he'll be moving to...4 -
Developer came to our area to rant a bit about a problem he was having with Xamarin. A particular android device was receiving a java runtime error trying to de-serialize data from a WCF contract. What he found was not to use WCF and use WebAPI (or a simple REST service that sent back/forth JSON).
When he proposed changing the service (since the data transport didn’t really matter, he could plug the assembly into a WebAPI project in less than an hour), the dev manager shot down the idea pointing him to our service standard that explicitly stated no WebAPI (it’s in bold letters).
I showed him the date on the “standard”, which was 5 years ago. We have versioning on our sharepoint server, so I also him my proposal notes on the change request document (almost two years before that) stating we should stop using WCF in favor of REST based web standards. Dev manager at the time had wrote in his comment “Will never use REST. Enterprise developers prefer RPC.”
He just about fell over laughing when I showed him this gif.2 -
The last 5 months have been tough.... My boss ( who was a close friend) quit and I become interim department head... Trying to run a team who didn't seem happy I'd taken the reigns.
At the same time my wife's ongoing battle with her anxiety had gotten worse and she really needed my help with everything possible at home..
In March I was confirmed as the HoD but I was still doing 3 to 4 days a week on client delivery, trying to support all presales activities, manage a team of 10 people, travel for work and support my family....😩
It really got to me and I was close to breaking... The worry of not replying to an email ASAP no matter what time of day would eat me up, working late every night... It got too much and I was running on fumes with my weekends just me completely wiped out and useless to the family. 😓
.....But.....
I had a escape last weekend to a 🍻 beer 🍻 festival with friends that I was considering not going too and just losing the money but the wife made me go...
And it broke me even more... So much that its somehow put the pieces back in the right order in my brain and snapped me out of my major rut!
Somehow, sitting with friends, making stupid jokes, drinking way too much and blocking out all the work crap gave my brain the hard reset it needed. 🤟
This week I've come back a different person ( wife's words) work is a breeze, exciting and encouraging.... 👊
I can't get enough of playing silly games with my kids all night
And couldn't feel any more positive about things if I tried.... Set that spark back for my wife too! 😏💏
So.... After that long rant 👀
Tl;Dr - work and life got too much... Close to giving up... Too much beer with good company gave me a hard reset and I feel like a new person.... 👍
Plus the team is now loving the new direction and strategy too 👔
Who says drinking is bad for you? 😂🍻11 -
So I got an e-mail from a recruiter (a.k.a. recruiter spam) today looking for a candidate with four "essential skills" and my head almost exploded when I read what they were. I have regained my composure just enough to be able to write this rant, but I'm still not myself. I recommend sitting down for this. Are you ready?
The four "essential skills" were:
Java, Jenkins, Eclipse, IntelliJ
I don't know where to begin. Motherfucker, where do you get off telling me which IDE to use? Oh wait, you didn't, you expected me to be an "expert" with two completely different ones, you numb nuts. Why the fuck would I be? I swear to fuck these idiots would probably screen out the best programmer in the world because s/he uses VI/emacs/Atom/Sublime/fucking-Notepad.
I can hear them saying "oh, you don't know IntelliJ? Sorry, we need an expert in that."
Fuck off you filthy cunt! No, sorry, I take that back, I shouldn't be mean to the mentally disabled.
Also, Jenkins? Really? Any developer can pick up how to use Jenkins to its full effect in a matter of hours, or a couple of days at most.
Why do companies hire these jackasses to do a job as important as recruitment? Why do they write job specs that are so incredibly stupid? I almost replied to express interest so I could go to the interview and throw a bucket of red paint on them (because they're making me bleed inside).
Where's the Tylenol?5 -
[Dark Rant]
I'm sick of this stupid tech world.
Don't get me wrong, I love tech. I just can't stand anymore the global brainwashing that we're part of.
Think about all the huge companies making profit on our data. For a better service, yeah sure, but do we really understand what the cost is?
Ok sure, you don't care about your data because you trust these companies and the advantages are all worth it. What about the fact that we are all forced to buy the next new smartphone after 2 years?
Like if removable batteries were a problem for us, users. Or like the audio jack. Because now someone decided that the pricey wireless headphones are Just What You Need™.
Do you think you own your smartphone?
No, you don't. You are paying a bunch of money for something that soon will be just a useless brick of glass and metal which you can't repair. But you'll be happy anyway.
Someone is so happy to the point that they will defend their favorite company, doesn't matter how they decided to stick it into their ass.
Open your eyes, you've been brainwashed.25 -
Yesterday I bought myself a PSP to relive some of my childhood memories, run custom firmware on it and so on. Unfortunately however, the battery on this one is seriously puffed up, and I need one in order to update the firmware from 5.50 CFW (the seller actually modded it too!) to 6.61 OFW (to then install CFW from there again).
I figured that I might as well have a kick at disassembling the battery for good measure, to take out its controller and power it from my lab bench power supply. I set it to 3.70V, double-checked the connections.. nothing. I raised the voltage to 4V, still nothing.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with the controller from looking at it. The magic smoke is still in there, all I did was removing the housing and snipping off the battery. I measured the cell voltage and it was only some residues at 0.01V. Might be internally shorted or something, normally even dead cells settle back at 3.7V unless you keep them shorted externally.
After seeing this so many times now with controllers, I'm starting to get a feeling that manufacturers actually program these things to look at the battery voltage, and when it reaches 0V, to just make the controller kill itself. Doesn't matter if the controller's electronics are still good, just fucking kill it.
If true, that is very, VERY nasty. It would also explain why batteries in laptops especially all have different form factors, despite having used regular 18650's internally for a very long time. It would explain why they're built like tanks. It would explain why manufacturers really don't want people in there. Yes there are safety issues and you're literally diffusing a bomb. Since recently we've also got space optimization.. anything for half a mm of thickness, amirite? But doing it this way is fucking disgusting. There is absolutely no reason for the controller to kill itself when the cell dies. Yet it seems like it does.
PS: I've posted the original picture on https://ghnou.su/pics/... now if you're interested. I noticed in my previous rant that devRant really squishes these down.12 -
Taking IT classes in college. The school bought us all lynda and office365 accounts but we can't use them because the classroom's network has been severed from the Active Directory server that holds our credentials. Because "hackers." (The non-IT classrooms don't have this problem, but they also don't need lynda accounts. What gives?)
So, I got bored, and irritated, so I decided to see just how secure the classroom really was.
It wasn't.
So I created a text file with the following rant and put it on the desktop of the "locked" admin account. Cheers. :)
1. don't make a show of "beefing up security" because that only makes people curious.
I'm referring of course to isolating the network. This wouldn't be a problem except:
2. don't restrict the good guys. only the bad guys.
I can't access resources for THIS CLASS that I use in THIS CLASS. That's a hassle.
It also gives me legitimate motivation to try to break your security.
3. don't secure it if you don't care. that is ALSO a hassle.
I know you don't care because you left secure boot off, no BIOS password, and nothing
stopping someone from using a different OS with fewer restrictions, or USB tethering,
or some sort malware, probably, in addition to security practices that are
wildly inconsistent, which leads me to the final and largest grievance:
4. don't give admin priveledges to an account without a password.
seriously. why would you do this? I don't understand.
you at least bothered to secure the accounts that don't even matter,
albeit with weak and publicly known passwords (that are the same on all machines),
but then you went and left the LEAST secure account with the MOST priveledges?
I could understand if it were just a single-user machine. Auto login as admin.
Lots of people do that and have a reason for it. But... no. I just... why?
anyway, don't worry, all I did was install python so I could play with scripting
during class. if that bothers you, trust me, you have much bigger problems.
I mean you no malice. just trying to help.
For real. Don't kick me out of school for being helpful. That would be unproductive.
Plus, maybe I'd be a good candidate for your cybersec track. haven't decided yet.
-- a guy who isn't very good at this and didn't have to be
have a nice day <3
oh, and I fixed the clock. you're welcome.2 -
!rant !dev
True story. Some years ago I worked, for a network manufacturer in the support department. One of me jobs was to help end-customer (private people) over the phone, who could not get online.
One day a 60+ year old woman called the support line, because se could not get on the Internet. And because our name was on the router, she called our support.
A colleague of mine took the call, and we could quickly see by his expression the it was "One of those calls". The minutes went by and they had gotten no closer to a solution after 45 min.
That was when I herd my colleague say "Well from what you tell, all the settings here are fine. Can you please close all the windows, so we can look at other settings". My colleague the looked weird and said, "She just told me it takes some minutes to close all the windows, so please hang on.".
After 2 min time the woman came back to the phone and said "I have now closed all the windows in the house, except one ceiling window that only my husband can reach. Hope it doesn't matter".2 -
!rant, advice, !mine
Q: I'm [xx] years old [xyz] professional. Would that be a good idea if I try to change my career to software development right now?
A: Age is mostly doesn't matter. You can learn programming at any age. And, software is everywhere. Every background knowledge will be useful. Your prior knowledge will not be wasted.
But, should you change career?
- YES, if you deeply interested in programming.
- NO, if it's only because you feel there are better opportunities.
It's true that there may be better opportunities. But, without deep interest in the subject, you may struggle to become good software developer. Without being a good developer, your opportunities will be limited and you are likely to regret the decision.
Software development is easier for those who passionate but very difficult for those who doesn't....4 -
!dev
This may be a petty rant, but It's been grinding my gears for a few months now... I fucking hate ads, it's starting to be incredibly ridiculous. You start a video... 2 ads... you watch for 2 minutes, another 2 ads (and no, adblock isn't a solution, that only works on PC, not devices)?!!! You start an App... ads, you listen to music... ads... you go to google... ads, you click a website... ads... you look out of your window... ads... you walk down the street... ads... ads.. ads...
Seriously, what the fuck have we done?!! As a society we fucked up so badly... Look, no matter how many times you offer me an ad for a furniture, I'm not going to buy a fucking furniture on just any random day. You are completely wasting my already limited time... If you don't have any ads to show me, then don't show me ads, fuck you, you fucking piece of shit software... How is it that it used to be enough to click away one static, non-intrusive ad, but now 6-8 15-20 second ads, popups and intrusive, mid-content ads are the norm?! And then a piece of shit like MoviePass DARES, FUCKING DARES, To work on some sort of camera-enabled check that you actually LOOK at the ads?!!!! ARE YOU FUCKING SHITTING ME?! WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE YOU RETARDED PIECE OF BLACK MIRROR SHIT, FUCK OFF WITH THIS BRAINWASHING BULLSHIT, I'M ALLERGIC TO IT, FUCK ALL OF THIS.
I fucking promise that any software I'll make will be either free and open source, or paid only by alternative means, no ads, not ever. I will never fucking add to this retarded bullshit. Never fucking ever will I lower myself on a level where I need to actively waste the time and psyche of thousands or millions of people to get money. Fucking hell.... As if the world doesn't suck enough already, we treat humans as cattle, and It's pissing me off... In the past I used to just delete any app that annoyed me with ads, but what the fuck do I do about youtube since it's the de-facto content source on the internet? And worse, my friends and family watch youtube.. even if I avoid it that doesn't mean the problem is solved... There needs to be an alternative, and paying subscriptions for every single fucking service on the web isn't a solution. Even worse with the current economy... I'd rather eat real food, than buy shit like premium on ShitTube, Fuckify, all the random news website I might read and every app or game I start once every two months... Shit like ad-less premium accounts aren't giving me an alternative, just a way to shoot myself in the foot longterm...
Godbless everyone that releases open source software, apps, tools, websites and such. I hope to god decentralized alternatives to youtube need to happen and not in the web3 way, because that's also retarded...
Fuck, Fuck, Fuck, Shit, Fuck Shit, Piss, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, Retards, Fucking absolutely disgusting pieces of shit... ... alright, I got it out of my system, but It's gonna be right back the next time YouTube forces me to look at 20 seconds of something I already skipped 48 times today...31 -
I'm the only developer in my company. I am a "junior dev" who started working like 6 months ago. Safe to say I am not well experienced and have a lot to learn in this journey. Due to this pandemic, my bosses who have been flaunting their wealth have started making losses and now needs to find another way to get money. Mind you, the company I work with is a marketing firm.
So what the bosses thought of doing was creating a delivery service due to the current situation. It is not their field but since they still need to show people they are the rich people, they need money either way. Since I'm the only developer in the company I've to make this application. I've to make an Android and iOS app with a back-end and an admin portal all in 1 month. My pay is shit and by shit I mean less than even 700 USD. I've not done a project like this before so there would be a learning curve as well. And there is no one to guide me either.
They think just because they have hired one developer anything development related is settled and I will do everything no matter how big or complicated or how shitty my salary is.
The feature list is a whole system, like it is so complicated that someone could really make their own company just to work on that application. It's HUGE.
I'm thinking of saying no I can't do this shit. But just wanted to see what some more experienced devs say about this. I've attached the features list in the rant.39 -
Me: IE7 sucks and should no more be supported in 2018.
Dev: NO IE7 IS THE BEST BROWSER EVER IN THE UNIVERSE FUCK YOU!!
Same Dev in another Rant: Fuck I hate IE and Microsoft!!!
One question guys: what's up with always trying to find a way to be anti, no matter what? Even if what you defend totally opposes your view. Is this something like a new trend or is this like the new cool now?7 -
Dogecoin hit USD $0.40 recently, which means it's time for the Crypto Rant.
TL;DR: Dogecoin is shit and is logically guaranteed to eventually fall unless it is fundamentally changed.
===========================
If you know how Crypto works under the hood, you can skip to the next section. If you don't, here's the general xyz-coin formula:
Money is sent via transactions, which are validated by *anybody*.
Since transactions are validated by anybody, the system needs to make sure you're not fucking it up on purpose.
The current idea (that most coins use today) is called proof-of-work. In short, you're given an extremely difficult task, and the general idea is you wouldn't be willing to do that work if you were just going to fuck up the system.
For validating these transactions, you are rewarded twofold:
1) You are given a fixed-size prize of the currency from the system itself. This is how new currency is introduced, or "minted" if you prefer.
2) You are given variable-size and user-determined prize called "transaction fees", but it could be more accurately called a "bribe" since it's sole purpose is to entice miners to add YOUR transaction to their block.
This system of validation and reward is called mining.
===========================
This smaller section compares the design o f BTC to Dogecoin - which will lead to my final argument
In BTC, the time between blocks (chunks of data which record transactions and are added to the chain, hence blockchain) is ten minutes. Every ten minutes, BTC transactions are validated and new Bitcoins are born.
In Dogecoin, the time between blocks is only one minute. In Theory, this means that mining Dogecoin is about ten times easier, because the system expects you to be able to solve the proof of work in an average of one minute.
The huge difference between BTC and Doge is the block reward (Fixed amount; new coins minted). The block reward for BTC is somewhat complicated compared to Doge: It started as 50 BTC per block and every 4 years it is halved ("the great halving"). Right now it's 6.25 BTC per block. Soon, the block reward will be almost nothing until BTC hits it's max of 21 million bitcoins "minted".
Dogecoin reward is 10,000 coins per block. And it will be that way for the end of time - no maximum, no great halving. And remember, for every 1 BTC block mined, 10 Doge blocks are mined.
===========================
Bitcoin and Dogecoin are now the two most popular coins in pop culture. What makes me angry is the widespread misunderstanding of the differences between the two. It is likely that most investors buy Dogecoin thinking they're getting in "early" because it's so cheap. They think it's cheap because it isn't as popular as Bitcoin yet. They're wrong. It's cheap because of what's outlined in section two of this rant.
Dogecoin is actually not very far off Bitcoin. Do the math: there's a bit over 100 billion Dogecoin in circulation (130b). There's about 20 million BTC. Calculate their total CURRENT values:
130b * $0.40 = 52b
20m * $60k = 1.2t
...and Doge is rising much, much faster than BTC because of the aforementioned lack of understanding.
The most common thing I hear about Doge is that "nobody expects it to reach Bitcoin levels" (referring to being worth 60k a fucking coin). They don't realize that if Doge gets to be worth just $10 a coin, it will not just reach Bitcoin levels but overtake Bitcoin in value ($1.3T).
===========================
It's worth highlighting that Dogecoin is literally designed to fail. Since it lacks a cap on new coins being introduced, it's just simple math that no matter how much Doge rises, it will eventually be worthless. And it won't take centuries, remember that 100k new Doge are mined EVERY TEN MINUTES. 1,440 minutes in a day * 10K per minute is 14.4 million new coins per day. That's damn near every Bitcoin to ever exist mined every day in Dogecoin10 -
As a developer, I constantly feel like I'm lagging behind.
Long rant incoming.
Whenever I join a new company or team, I always feel like I'm the worst developer there. No matter how much studying I do, it never seems to be enough.
Feeling inadequate is nothing new for me, I've been struggling with a severe inferiority complex for most of my life. But starting a career as a developer launched that shit into overdrive.
About 10 years ago, I started my college education as a developer. At first things were fine, I felt equal to my peers. It lasted about a day or two, until I saw a guy working on a website in notepad. Nothing too special of course, but back then as a guy whose scripting experience did not go much farther than modifying some .ini files, it blew my mind. It went downhill from there.
What followed were several stressful, yet strangely enjoyable, years in college where I constantly felt like I was lagging behind, even though my grades were acceptable. On top of college stress, I had a number of setbacks, including the fallout of divorcing parents, childhood pets, family and friends dying, little to no money coming in and my mother being in a coma for a few weeks. She's fine now, thankfully.
Through hard work, a bit of luck, and a girlfriend who helped me to study, I managed to graduate college in 2012 and found a starter job as an Asp.Net developer.
My knowledge on the topic was limited, but it was a good learning experience, I had a good mentor and some great colleagues. To teach myself, I launched a programming tutorial channel. All in all, life was good. I had a steady income, a relationship that was already going for a few years, some good friends and I was learning a lot.
Then, 3 months in, I got diagnosed with cancer.
This ruined pretty much everything I had built up so far. I spend the next 6 months in a hospital, going through very rough chemo.
When I got back to working again, my previous Asp.Net position had been (understandably) given to another colleague. While I was grateful to the company that I could come back after such a long absence, the only position available was that of a junior database manager. Not something I studied for and not something I wanted to do each day neither.
Because I was grateful for the company's support, I kept working there for another 12 - 18 months. It didn't go well. The number of times I was able to do C# jobs can be counted on both hands, while new hires got the assignments, I regularly begged my PM for.
On top of that, the stress and anxiety that going through cancer brings comes AFTER the treatment. During the treatment, the only important things were surviving and spending my potentially last days as best as I could. Those months working was spent mostly living in fear and having to come to terms with the fact that my own body tried to kill me. It caused me severe anger issues which in time cost me my relationship and some friendships.
Keeping up to date was hard in these times. I was not honing my developer skills and studying was not something I'd regularly do. 'Why spend all this time working if tomorrow the cancer might come back?'
After much soul-searching, I quit that job and pursued a career in consultancy. At first things went well. There was not a lot to do so I could do a lot of self-study. A month went by like that. Then another. Then about 4 months into the new job, still no work was there to be done. My motivation quickly dwindled.
To recuperate the costs, the company had me do shit jobs which had little to nothing to do with coding like creating labels or writing blogs. Zero coding experience required. Although I was getting a lot of self-study done, my amount of field experience remained pretty much zip.
My prayers asking for work must have been heard because suddenly the sales department started finding clients for me. Unfortunately, as salespeople do, they looked only at my theoretical years of experience, most of which were spent in a hospital or not doing .Net related tasks.
Ka-ching. Here's a developer with four years of experience. Have fun.
Those jobs never went well. My lack of experience was always an issue, no matter how many times I told the salespeople not to exaggerate my experience. In the end, I ended up resigning there too.
After all the issues a consultancy job brings, I went out to find a job I actually wanted to do. I found a .Net job in an area little traffic. I even warned them during my intake that my experience was limited, and I did my very best every day that I worked here.
It didn't help. I still feel like the worst developer on the team, even superseded by someone who took photography in college. Now on Monday, they want me to come in earlier for a talk.
Should I just quit being a developer? I really want to make this work, but it seems like every turn I take, every choice I make, stuff just won't improve. Any suggestions on how I can get out of this psychological hell?6 -
Long rant ahead.. 5k characters pretty much completely used. So feel free to have another cup of coffee and have a seat 🙂
So.. a while back this flash drive was stolen from me, right. Well it turns out that other than me, the other guy in that incident also got to the police 😃
Now, let me explain the smiley face. At the time of the incident I was completely at fault. I had no real reason to throw a punch at this guy and my only "excuse" would be that I was drunk as fuck - I've never drank so much as I did that day. Needless to say, not a very good excuse and I don't treat it as such.
But that guy and whoever else it was that he was with, that was the guy (or at least part of the group that did) that stole that flash drive from me.
Context: https://devrant.com/rants/2049733 and https://devrant.com/rants/2088970
So that's great! I thought that I'd lost this flash drive and most importantly the data on it forever. But just this Friday evening as I was meeting with my friend to buy some illicit electronics (high voltage, low frequency arc generators if you catch my drift), a policeman came along and told me about that other guy filing a report as well, with apparently much of the blame now lying on his side due to him having punched me right into the hospital.
So I told the cop, well most of the blame is on me really, I shouldn't have started that fight to begin with, and for that matter not have drunk that much, yada yada yada.. anyway he walked away (good grief, as I was having that friend on visit to purchase those electronics at that exact time!) and he said that this case could just be classified then. Maybe just come along next week to the police office to file a proper explanation but maybe even that won't be needed.
So yeah, great. But for me there's more in it of course - that other guy knows more about that flash drive and the data on it that I care about. So I figured, let's go to the police office and arrange an appointment with this guy. And I got thinking about the technicalities for if I see that drive back and want to recover its data.
So I've got 2 phones, 1 rooted but reliant on the other one that's unrooted for a data connection to my home (because Android Q, and no bootable TWRP available for it yet). And theoretically a laptop that I can put Arch on it no problem but its display backlight is cooked. So if I want to bring that one I'd have to rely on a display from them. Good luck getting that done. No option. And then there's a flash drive that I can bake up with a portable Arch install that I can sideload from one of their machines but on that.. even more so - good luck getting that done. So my phones are my only option.
Just to be clear, the technical challenge is to read that flash drive and get as much data off of it as possible. The drive is 32GB large and has about 16GB used. So I'll need at least that much on whatever I decide to store a copy on, assuming unchanged contents (unlikely). My Nexus 6P with a VPN profile to connect to my home network has 32GB of storage. So theoretically I could use dd and pipe it to gzip to compress the zeroes. That'd give me a resulting file that's close to the actual usage on the flash drive in size. But just in case.. my OnePlus 6T has 256GB of storage but it's got no root access.. so I don't have block access to an attached flash drive from it. Worst case I'd have to open a WiFi hotspot to it and get an sshd going for the Nexus to connect to.
And there we have it! A large storage device, no root access, that nonetheless can make use of something else that doesn't have the storage but satisfies the other requirements.
And then we have things like parted to read out the partition table (and if unchanged, cryptsetup to read out LUKS). Now, I don't know if Termux has these and frankly I don't care. What I need for that is a chroot. But I can't just install Arch x86_64 on a flash drive and plug it into my phone. Linux Deploy to the rescue! 😁
It can make chrooted installations of common distributions on arm64, and it comes extremely close to actual Linux. With some Linux magic I could make that able to read the block device from Android and do all the required sorcery with it. Just a USB-C to 3x USB-A hub required (which I have), with the target flash drive and one to store my chroot on, connected to my Nexus. And fixed!
Let's see if I can get that flash drive back!
P.S.: if you're into electronics and worried about getting stuff like this stolen, customize it. I happen to know one particular property of that flash drive that I can use for verification, although it wasn't explicitly customized. But for instance in that flash drive there was a decorative LED. Those are current limited by a resistor. Factory default can be say 200 ohm - replace it with one with a higher value. That way you can without any doubt verify it to be yours. Along with other extra security additions, this is one of the things I'll be adding to my "keychain v2".11 -
Not actually a rant, but need some place to vent it out.
The company where I work develops embedded devices enabling the automobiles to connect to the internet and provide various end user infotainment services. My job mostly relates to how and when we update the devices.
There are about 100 different
variants of the same device, each one different from the other in a way that the process required to update for each of these device variants is significantly Different. Doing this manually would be and actually was a nightmare for almost everyone, so I set out on writing a tool that addresses this issue.
I designed my solution mostly in Python, allowing me for quick prototyping. First of all, I'd never written a single line of python code in my life. So I learn python, in matter of 2 nights. I took days off from work so I could work on this problem I had in my head. And in about 4 days, I was up with a solution that worked, reliably. I prepared a complete framework, completely extendable, in order to have room for 101th variant that might come in at any time. And then to make it easier and a no Brainer for everyone, the software is able to automatically download nightly builds and update the test devices with nothing more than a double click.
But apparently this wasn't enough. Today I found out that someone worked on a different solution in the background just a week ago, while reusing most part of my code. And now they start advertising their solution over mine, telling everyone how crappy my code is. Seriously, for fucks sake, my code has been running without issues since more than a year now. To make it worse, my manager seems to take sides with the other guy. I mean I don't even have someone to explain the situation to.
I really feel betrayed and backstabbed today. I worked my days, my nights, my vacations on this code. I put blood, sweat and tears into this. I push my self over my limits, and when that was not enough, I pushed my self even harder. But it all seems in vain today. All the hours that I spent, just to make it easier for everyone... All a complete waste. When you write code with such passion, your code is like your family... You want to protect it... But with all this office politics and shit, I seem to be losing my grip.
I've been contemplating the entire night, where I might have gone wrong, what could I've done to deserve this...but to no avail. I'm having troubles sleeping, and I'm not sure what I should do next.
Despair, sheer bloody Despair!8 -
In my previous rant about IPv6 (https://devrant.com/rants/2184688 if you're interested) I got a lot of very valuable insights in the comments and I figured that I might as well summarize what I've learned from them.
So, there's 128 bits of IP space to go around in IPv6, where 64 bits are assigned to the internet, and 64 bits to the private network of end users. Private as in, behind a router of some kind, equivalent to the bogon address spaces in IPv4. Which is nice, it ensures that everyone has the same address space to play with.. but it should've been (in my opinion) differently assigned. The internet is orders of magnitude larger than private networks. Most SOHO networks only have a handful of devices in them that need addressing. The internet on the other hand has, well, billions of devices in it. As mentioned before I doubt that this total number will be more than a multiple of the total world population. Not many people or companies use more than a few public IP addresses (again, what's inside the SOHO networks is separate from that). Consider this the equivalent of the amount of public IP's you currently control. In my case that would be 4, one for my home network and 3 for the internet-facing servers I own.
There's various ways in which overall network complexity is reduced in IPv6. This includes IPSec which is now part of the protocol suite and thus no longer an extension. Standardizing this is a good thing, and honestly I'm surprised that this wasn't the case before.
Many people seem to oppose the way IPv6 is presented, hexadecimal is not something many people use every day. Personally I've grown quite fond of the decimal representation of IPv4. Then again, there is a binary conversion involved in classless IPv4. Hexadecimal makes this conversion easier.
There seems to be opposition to memorizing IPv6 addresses, for which DNS can be used. I agree, I use this for my IPv4 network already. Makes life easier when you can just address devices by a domain name. For any developers out there with no experience with administration that think that this is bullshit - imagine having to remember the IP address of Facebook, Google, Stack Overflow and every other website you visit. Add to the list however many devices you want to be present in the imaginary network. For me right now that's between 20 and 30 hosts, and gradually increasing. Scalability can be a bitch.
Any other things.. Oh yeah. The average amount of devices in a SOHO network is not quite 1 anymore - there are currently about half a dozen devices in a home network that need to be addressed. This number increases as more devices become smart devices. That said of course, it's nowhere close to needing 64 bits and will likely never need it. Again, for any devs that think that this is bullshit - prove me wrong. I happen to know in one particular instance that they have centralized all their resources into a single PC. This seems to be common with developers and I think it's normal. But it also reduces the chances to see what networks with many devices in it are like. Again, scalability can be a bitch.
Thanks a lot everyone for your comments on the matter, I've learned a lot and really appreciate it. Do check out the previous rant and particularly the comments on it if you're interested. See ya!25 -
Warning: long rant
I'm sick and tired of feeling like I'm the only person who cares about their privacy
I try, as much as I can, to avoid surveillance. I use firefox, protonmail, duckduckgo, e2e encrypted chat platforms, avoid social media like the plague, and do everything I can to block facebook and google trackers on websites I visit
And it's exhausting
Each search I make means I waste another 30 seconds because duckduckgo doesn't pull the answer directly from webpages like google does
I get weird looks when I give people a @protonmail email address, and I have to explain what it is to them every fucking time
People ask if I have social media, and I either give them nothing or my Github account
And for what? Nobody else cares, no matter how much I explain how toxic google and facebook are to society.
They just say 'I have nothing to hide' as they scroll Instagram, letting Zuckerberg build an intimately detailed profile on them.
They just say 'so what' as they google memes from their chrome browser, allowing google to share that information with god-knows-who
If everyone else has given up their privacy for convenience, why am I still fighting a losing battle?
It feels like I'm fighting a war against big tech by myself, and I'm tired and about to lay down my arms12 -
!dev && rant
There's one thing that you really shouldn't say to someone who's in crutches, no matter how much your reflexes tell you to. "Are you okay?"
Especially when they're going somewhere, and you can't or don't want to help them do so.
Imagine for a second, you yourself are in crutches and have been limping on one leg for a couple 100 meters to go to where you have to, shopping for food so you don't starve. And then, after those couple hundreds of meters, of course that leg that's been doing double duty for that whole period and took unusually big impacts from jumping up and down onto the ground compared to just walking, you can imagine that it is screaming in agony.
Now imagine someone who comes your way, makes the leg that more than anything wants to sit down somewhere and rest, pause the act of going the way to the beloved place to sit and rest and instead make it take even longer, that person asks you "are you okay?"
OF COURSE I'M OKAY, THAT'S WHY I'M IN FUCKING CRUTCHES!! OF COURSE I'M OKAY, GREAT OBSERVATION SHERLOCK!!!
It's like saying to someone who's so introvert that they haven't opened their mouth even once at a party - likely there because their friends forced them to - "gee, you are silent, aren't you?"
Yes I'm silent, yes I'm introvert!! Why do you point that out? If anything, pretend that I'm not here to begin with!!! Stating that only makes for embarrassment!
Or going back to the leg thing.. this ground my gears more than anything. Every few dozen meters I went and rested on my crutches for a bit, and every hundred or so meters I sat down at whatever I could sit on. And people fucking look judgmentally at you for that apparently. "Look at this guy in crutches, he's sitting down!"
Yeah mate, try limping on one leg for a couple hundred meters and I'll run after you with a whip, looking at you judgmentally every time you even want to *think* about sitting down to rest. Let's see how that goes?
Or rather you fucking judgmental twat, I bet you fat fucking cunt can't even run on 2 legs for a couple hundred meters straight. But let's judge others who are doing such a running exercise for every step they take for wanting to sit and rest, shall we?
No wonder that there's mass shootings every now and then. Such people can make anyone feel fucking murderous!!!4 -
love-hate relationship with Python semi-rant
The year is 2020.
I have already grown accustomed to the idea that in order to do ML without worrying too much about having to completely jump through hoops with the tech stack I have chosen that I would have to settle with Python, which I like.....for small scripts that don't do much other than piping data around or doing simple admin tasks, that is generally our use of Python at work.
For anything bigger I would prefer something else. Not because I find anything inherently horrible in Python, I find it to be a nice language overall, that has made it possible for many to find a passion inside of the world of development and possibly an interesting in overall engineering and computer science principles. Much respect Python, good game Guido VR, what you did changed the world.
But it is that damn whitespace that gets me, the need to use it as a way to properly write blocks, I just can't make myself like syntactical whitespace no matter what I do. I can do without static typing, shit I did it for the longest time with JS way tf before Node and Typescript were a thing, and I have done it before PHP's attempt at having type hints, which still leave much to be desired. Ruby(imho) the most elegant language around doesn't have it and that is fine really, it does not bother me as much, if mypy gets powerful and widely adopted enough it will then be a non-issue.
But another thing that the 4 languages i mentioned before have is non-existent syntactical whitespace......I just can't stand it.
So, why am I saying all of this nonsense? Today I wanted to recreate a conda environment and landed on the use of YAML............which has syntactic whitespace and I lost my shit.
I seldom bitch about languages and technologies, shit, I used VBScript before, not only did I get paid handsomely for it, but I fucking enjoyed it(probably cuz I am a masochist).
But two things I cannot abide: VBA and syntactic whitespace.
Once I get enough knowledge for it I will push for the same level of tooling in Python to be ported to Scala.
Thank you for coming to my whiny post about something as small as bitching about syntactic whitespace.8 -
Top three reasons why I love to code:
1) People will think you are a wizard and feel so afraid of you that they call you nerd and give you a office in a cold basement (especially good in summer times)
2) Your friends call you for every problem they have with their computer and will give you a few bucks or beers in exchange.
3) You can rant about technical stuff and no matter how unfounded the rant is, your non-tech friends will believe everything you say.2 -
Okay so this Is my first actual rant before its been questions or experiences but today has been really stressful. So one of my last posts I talked about how I don't know when to use what syntax whenever and I've been practicing but every fucking time I try to start something I can't fucking get it I don't even know how to start and yeah I planned it out and Im not getting anywhere I can't this is something I wanna do for the rest of my life and I can't even manage to make simple shit its like what the living fuck. Then then I tell my friend who's also in my class who programs what I'm trying to do AND HE DOES IT IN LIKE A MINUTE OR LESS AND IT WORKS AND ITS REALLY FUCKING STUPID BECAUSE I TRY AND STUDY SO HARD AND I CAN'T GET IT NO MATTER WHAT I DO I JUST CAN'T AND IT SUCKS SO FUCKING MUCH I HATE IT I JUST WANNA BE ABLE TO UNDERSTAND HOW I CAN PUT THIS WITH THIS TO DO THIS AND ITS DEPRESSING ME SO MUCH I JUST WANT TO BE GOOD5
-
(I'll give some context before the rant: I'm part if the IT department of a manufacturing company (actually I'm 1/2 of the department), and all the applications (old an new - except the ones used on production line) used in the company are my responsibility, that including most of databases too... Also, English isn't my native language so there will be some words or phrases that I'll probably write wrong... Sorry for that, if there are any corrections, I'll be glad to hear them)
So...
There will be an implementation of new "control point" on the "shipping department" which consists on a electromechanical equipment controlled by a PLC. And despite the original concept was a collaboration between 2 departments (we, IT, and Production Control), I was never taken in consideration about anything of the project... To be fair, I forget about its existence until two weeks ago.
So, a few days I learned that there are a huge delay regarding the original deadline (mainly because the supplier was delayed with the delivery of their system), and since two weeks (less, actually, because some holydays in between) I'm learning how to integrate that "P.o.S" into an existing application on a PC using a serial communication (not the main problem, as I've done that before... With another brand of PLC's) while avoiding buying any additional software (to get the communication done and in a easy way) and that sort of things... But discovering in the process that it will be necessary to acquire such additional SW in order to finish the job ASAP.
When suddenly I get the "news" that it's almost all my duty (and responsibility) to meet the original deadline, because it doesn't matter how the other departments screw all the schedule, it's the job of IT to get the shit done in time... And what is worst: they didn't said that in such straight manner, no, the implied it while making a quick test with the general manager.
I mean, WTF? Besides doing a "respectable" number of "user support" activities in a dialy basis, I also need to manage the activities of other departments? And also fix their screw ups on a schedule that I just learned days before?
And also there is a coworker (one of whom screwed up) that, almost every time she see me, is asking "how much until you'll finish?"
As I read on a meme years ago: "please, give patience, because if you give strength, I'll need bail money too..."
Damn... I don't know of the benefits of this work are worth all this nonsense -
dev, ~boring
This is either a shower thought or a sober weed thought, not really sure which, but I've given some serious consideration to "team composition" and "working condition" as a facet of employment, particularly in regard to how they translate into hiring decisions and team composition.
I've put together a number of teams over the years, and in almost every case I've had to abide by an assemblage of pre-defined contexts that dictated the terms of the team working arrangement:
1. a team structure dictated to me
2. a working temporality scheme dictated to me
3. a geographic region in which I was allowed to hire
4. a headcount, position tuple I was required to abide by
I've come to regard these structures as weaknesses. It's a bit like the project management triangle in which you choose 1-2 from a list of inadequate options. Sometimes this is grounded in business reality, but more often than not it's because the people surrounding the decisions thrive on risk mitigation frameworks that become trickle down failure as they impose themselves on all aspects of the business regardless of compatibility.
At the moment, I'm in another startup that I have significantly more control over and again have found my partners discussing the imposition of structure and framework around how, where, why, who and what work people do before contact with any action. My mind is screaming at me to pull the cord, as much as I hate the expression. This stems from a single thought:
"Hierarchy and structure should arise from an understanding of a problem domain"
As engineers we develop processes based on logic; it's our job, it's what we do. Logic operates on data derived from from experiments, so in the absence of the real we perform thought experiments that attempt to reveal some fundamental fact we can use to make a determination.
In this instance we can ask ourselves the question, "what works?" The question can have a number contexts: people, effort required, time, pay, need, skills, regulation, schedule. These things in isolation all have a relative importance ( a weight ), and they can relatively expose limits of mutual exclusivity (pay > budget, skills < need, schedule < (people * time/effort)). The pre-imposed frameworks in that light are just generic attempts to abstract away those concerns based on pre-existing knowledge. There's a chance they're fine, and just generally misunderstood or misapplied; there's also a chance they're insufficient in the face of change.
Fictional entities like the "A Team," comprise a group of humans whose skills are mutually compatible, and achieve synergy by random chance. Since real life doesn't work on movie/comic book logic, it's easy to dismiss the seed of possibility there, that an organic structure can naturally evolve to function beyond its basic parts due to a natural compatibility that wasn't necessarily statistically quantifiable (par-entropic).
I'm definitely not proposing that, nor do I subscribe to the 10x ninja founders are ideal theory. Moreso, this line of reasoning leads me to the thought that team composition can be grown organically based on an acceptance of a few observed truths about shipping products:
1. demand is constant
2. skills can either be bought or developed
3. the requirement for skills grows linearly
4. hierarchy limits the potential for flexibility
5. a team's technically proficiency over time should lead to a non-linear relationship relationship between headcount and growth
Given that, I can devise a heuristic, organic framework for growing a team:
- Don't impose reporting structure before it has value (you don't have to flatten a hierarchy that doesn't exist)
- crush silos before they arise
- Identify needed skills based on objectives
- base salary projections on need, not available capital
- Hire to fill skills gap, be open to training since you have to pay for it either way
- Timelines should always account for skills gap and training efforts
- Assume churn will happen based on team dynamics
- Where someone is doesn't matter so long as it's legal. Time zones are only a problem if you make them one.
- Understand that the needs of a team are relative to a given project, so cookie cutter team composition and project management won't work in software
- Accept that failure is always a risk
- operate with the assumption that teams that are skilled, empowered and motivated are more likely to succeed.
- Culture fit is a per team thing, if the team hates each other they won't work well no matter how much time and money you throw at it
Last thing isn't derived from the train of thought, just things I feel are true:
- Training and headcount is an investment that grows linearly over time, but can have exponential value. Retain people, not services.
- "you build it, you run it" will result in happier customers, faster pivoting. Don't adopt an application maintenance strategy
/rant2 -
!rant
I saw a devrant user posting something about "the cockroach" that survives in the company no matter what so I knew I had to rant about something similar. I worked with a guy and his ability to talk shit is in direct proportion to his salary. The guy watches youtube all day, searches for things to buy, goes to vacations and no one knows what he does. :)) plot twist: he just forwards ( not sends ) emails from the business to a software provider. Did I mention that he has the highest salary( don't ask how I found out ).
Anyhow, the guy is winning at life, no one gives two shits about him, he is always hiding and running from work. While writing this I'm actually amazed by his skill, how do you end up like this? He reminds me of Wally from Dilbert!2 -
VIM! ViM! vim! Vi Improved! Emacs (Wait ignore that one). What’s this mysterious VIM? Some believe mastering this beast will provide them with untold mastery over the forces of command line editing. Others would just like to know, how you exit the bloody thing. But in essence VIM is essentially a command line text editor at heart and it’s learning curve is so high it’s a circle.
There’s a lot of posts on the inter-webs detailing how to use that cruel mistress that is VIM. But rather then focus on how to be super productive in VIM (because honestly I’ve still not got a clue). This focus on my personal journey, my numerous attempts to use VIM in my day to day work. To eventually being able to call myself a novice.
My VIM journey started in 2010 around the same time I was transiting some of my hobby projects from SVN to GIT. It was around that time, that I attempted to run “git commit” in order to commit some files into one of my repositories.
Notice I didn’t specify the “-m” flag to provide a message. So what happened next. A wild command line editor opened in order for me to specify my message, foolish me assumed this command editor was just like similar editors such as Nano. So much CTRL + C’ing CTRL + Z’ing, CTRL + X’ing and a good measure of Google, I was finally able to exit the thing. Yeah…exit it. At this moment the measure of the complexity of this thing should be kicking in already, but it’s unfair to judge it based on today’s standards of user friendly-ness. It was born in a much simpler time. Before even the mouse graced the realms of the personal computing world.
But anyhow I’ll cut to the chase, for all of you who skipped most of the post to get to this point, it’s “:q!”. That’s the keyboard command to quit…well kinda this will quit the program. But…You know what just go here: The Manual. In-fact that’s probably not going to help either, I recommend reading on :p
My curiosity was peaked. So I went off in search of a way to understand this: VIM thing. It seemed to be pretty awesome, looking at some video’s on YouTube, I could do pretty much what Sublime text could but from the terminal. Imagine ssh’ing into a server and being able to make code edits, with full autocomplete et al. That was the dream, the practice…was something different. So I decided to make the commitment and use VIM for editing one of my existing projects.
So fired the program up and watched the world burn behind me. Ahhh…why can’t I type anything, no matter what I typed nothing seemed to appear on screen. Surely I must be missing something right? Right! After firing up the old Google machine, again it would appear there is this concept known as modes. When VIm starts up it defaults to a mode called “Normal” mode, hitting keys in this mode executes commands. But “Insert” entered by hitting the “i” key allows one to insert text.
Finally I thought I think I understand how this VIM thing works, I can just use “insert” mode to insert text and the arrow keys to move around. Then when I want to execute a command, I just press “Esc” and the command such as the one for saving the file. So there I was happily editing my code using “Insert” mode and the arrow keys, but little did I know that my happiness would be short lived, the arrow keys were soon to be a thorn in my VIM journey.
Join me for part two of this rant in which we learn the untold truth about arrow keys, touch typing and vimrc created from scratch. Until next time..
:q!4 -
Hey guys, I have a serious question for you: How do you define science?
And yes this is going to be a long Rant. This topic really pisses me off.
A bit of context first. I come from a "humanities" background. I study history and dude, I love it. The problem is that even though we fucking pull our brains out studying historical phenomena with a fucking ton of conceptual tools, our work is mostly seen as literature to entertain the elderly during their lonely evenings. But that's not really the point of this rant.
My fucking problem is that while we try to do some serious work; actual work that could help society for real, it all goes into that magical fucking kingdom called "humanities". HOW THE FUCK DO THEY DARE TO CALL SOMETHING "HUMANITIES". IT'S A FUCKING HISTORICAL TERM THAT MEANS "TO FULFILL MEN IN ALL IT'S ASPECTS", AND NOW THEY'VE REPURPOSED IT, MAKING IT CONTAIN ANY STUDY THAT ISN'T "EMPIRICAL", "OBJECTIVE", ADD ANY FUCKING SCIENTIFIC DELUSIONARY TERM YOU CAN THINK OF.
And don't get me started on "objectivity". Oh boy, your fucking objectivity is hollow as a kid's balloon. There is no such thing as a objective study, even when it applies your "rational" "godly" scientific method. Some guys follow that shit as if it was a fucking religion. I do understand it's useful and all that, but in the end it's just a tool, you can't fucking define "science" by it's tools.
"""Q: What is carpintery?
A: Well, it's hammers, nails and wood. Yep. Hammers, nails and wood."""
THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD WAS FUCKING INVENTED DURING THE XVIII CENTURY, WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK WAS GALLILEI BEFORE THAT? "HUMANITIES"?
Why do I say objectivity isn't posible? Well, guess what? YOU ARE FUCKING HUMAN. Every thing you know is full of preconceptions and fucking cultural subjectivities invented to understand the world. And it's ok, becouse if you understand your own subjectivity, at least you can see yourself in a critical sense, and at least "tend" to objectivity, in the same way functions tend to infinity.
And here comes the best part: people studying "cs" in my university pass most of the time studying a ton of shit that isn't really science, but is taken as scientific becouse it is related to "science". These guys spend entire semesters just learning programming fundational stuff that in my opinion isn't really science, it's just subjective conceptual constructs built to make the coding process better. They only have TWO fucking classes on discrete mathematics and another 3 or 4 in actual scientific fields related to computing. THESE GUYS AREN'T FUCKING BEING TAUGHT TO BE COMPUTER SCIENTISTS; THEY ARE TEACHING THEM TO BE PROGRAMMERS. THERE'S A HUGE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CS AND PROGRAMMING AND THAT IS THE WORD SCIENCE. And yes, I'm being drastic on the definition of science on purpose becouse guess fucking what? I'M PISSED OFF.
"Hey, what are you doing?"
"Just doing science with scrum and agile development."
I understand most of you guys would think of science as "the application of the scientific method", "Knowledge by experimentation and peer-review", "anything techy". Guys, science is a lot broather than that. I define it as "the search for truth", mainly becouse that's what we are all doing, and what humans have been doing to gain knowledge through the ages. It doesn't matter what field of truth you are seeking as long as you do it seriously and with fundaments. I don't fucking care if you can't be objective: that's impossible. Just acknowledge it and continue investigating accordingly.
I believe during the last centuries the concept of science has been deformed by the popular rise of both natural and applied sciences. And I love the fact that these science fields have been growing so much all this time, but for fucks sake don't leave every other science (science as I define it) behind. Governments and corporations make huge mistakes becouse they don't treat history, politics and other sciences seriously. Yes, I called history a "science", fuck you.
And yes, by my definition programming is not a science. I don't know what most of you think programming is, but for me it's a discipline that builds stuff, similar to carpintery or blacksmithing. Now if you are pushing the limits, seeking ways to make computing go further, then that's science. The guys that are figuring out AI are scientists, the guys that are using it to detect hotdogs aren't - unless they are the same person- deal with it. I guess a lot of you guys are with me on this point.
In the end, we are all artisans building abstract tools by giving orders to a machine.
I still have some characters left, so I want to thank the community as a whole for letting me vent my inner rage. I don't have much ways to express myself on these matters, so for me DevRant is a bless.8 -
! rant
Sorry but I'm really, really angry about this.
I'm an undergrad student in the United States at a small state college. My CS department is kinda small but most of the professors are very passionate about not only CS but education and being caring mentors. All except for one.
Dr. John (fake name, of course) did not study in the US. Most professors in my department didn't. But this man is a complete and utter a****le. His first semester teaching was my first semester at the school. I knew more about basic programming than he did. There were more than one occasion where I went "prof, I was taught that x was actually x because x. Is that wrong?" knowing that what I was posing was actually the right answer. Googled to verify first. He said that my old teachings were all wrong and that everything he said was the correct information. I called BS on that, waited until after class to be polite, and showed him that I was actually correct. Denied it.
His accent was also really problematic. I'm not one of those people who feel that a good teacher needs a native accent by any standard (literally only 1 prof in the whole department doesn't), but his English was *awful*. He couldn't lecture for his life and me, a straight A student in high school, was almost bored to sleep on more than one occasion. Several others actually did fall asleep. This... wasn't a good first impression.
It got worse. Much, much worse.
I got away with not having John for another semester before the bees were buzzing again. Operating systems was the second most poorly taught class I've ever been in. Dr John hadn't gotten any better. He'd gotten worse. In my first semester he was still receptive when you asked for help, was polite about explaining things, and was generally a decent guy. This didn't last. In operating systems, his replies to people asking for help became slightly more hostile. He wouldn't answer questions with much useful information and started saying "it's in chapter x of the textbook, go take a look". I mean, sure, I can read the textbook again and many of us did, but the textbook became a default answer to everything. Sometimes it wasn't worth asking. His homework assignments because more and more confusing, irrelavent to the course material, or just downright strange. We weren't allowed to use muxes. Only semaphores? It just didn't make much sense since we didn't need multiple threads in a critical zone at any time. Lastly for that class, the lectures were absolutely useless. I understood the material more if I didn't pay attention at all and taught myself what I needed to know. Usually the class was nothing more than doing other coursework, and I wasn't alone on this. It was the general consensus. I was so happy to be done with prof John.
Until AI was listed as taught by "staff", I rolled the dice, and it came up snake eyes.
AI was the worst course I've ever been in. Our first project was converting old python 2 code to 3 and replicating the solution the professor wanted. I, no matter how much debugging I did, could never get his answer. Thankfully, he had been lazy and just grabbed some code off stack overflow from an old commit, the output and test data from the repo, and said it was an assignment. Me, being the sneaky piece of garbage I am, knew that py2to3 was a thing, and used that for most of the conversion. Then the edits we needed to make came into play for the assignment, but it wasn't all that bad. Just some CSP and backtracking. Until I couldn't replicate the answer at all. I tried over and over and *over*, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong and could find Nothing. Eventually I smartened up, found the source on github, and copy pasted the solution. And... it matched mine? Now I was seriously confused, so I ran the test data on the official solution code from github. Well what do you know? My solution is right.
So now what? Well I went on a scavenger hunt to determine why. Turns out it was a shift in the way streaming happens for some data structures in py2 vs py3, and he never tested the code. He refused to accept my answer, so I made a lovely document proving I was right using the repo. Got a 100. lol.
Lectures were just plain useless. He asked us to solve multivar calculus problems that no one had seen and of course no one did it. He wasted 2 months on MDP. I'd continue but I'm running out of characters.
And now for the kicker. He becomes an a**hole, telling my friends doing research that they are terrible programmers, will never get anywhere doing this, etc. People were *crying* and the guy kept hammering the nail deeper for code that was honestly very good because "his was better". He treats women like delicate objects and its disgusting. YOU MADE MY FRIEND CRY, GAVE HER A BOX OF TISSUES, AND THEN JUST CONTINUED.
Want to know why we have issues with women in CS? People like this a****le. Don't be prof John. Encourage, inspire, and don't suck. I hope he's fired for discrimination.11 -
!rant
What are people thinking when they are building datepickers (or any type of angular/jQuery plugin for that matter)?
Lets put all of the code in one file, place everything that should be dynamic and optimizable in constants, provide no localization support, finish it all up, publish it to bower and npm (so poor devs won't have to struggle) and last but not least don't accept pull requests with useful features for months!1 -
Honestly?
No way.
No matter what you give up for your family and friends.
It's never enough.
"You're always tired"
"You're not interested enough in my/our stuff"
"No wonder you won't proceed with your carrier, when you act like that"
C'mooooooon!
Give me a chance to build up a regular life.
Most Ppl = Egotistical piles of crap.
Sorry for this dark rant :/2 -
Current mood:
That irksome moment when you want to rant and vent about a particular workplace incident but wonder if your coworkers are on devrant too.
And they certainly might figure out no matter how cryptic you are.
*puts mask back on*2 -
Rant Mode: ON
Do you know what really grinds my gears? Those dreaded "404 Page Not Found" errors. It's like a digital black hole, sucking your users into a vortex of frustration.
And don't get me started on inconsistent coding standards. It's like trying to decipher hieroglyphics written by different ancient civilizations. Why can't we all just follow the same conventions?
Oh, and software updates that break everything! You spend hours perfecting your code, only for a new update to come along and wreak havoc. It's like the universe is conspiring against developers.
But hey, despite the rants, we developers are a resilient bunch. We thrive on solving problems, no matter how infuriating they can be. So, here's to the endless debugging, the endless coffee, and the endless love-hate relationship with coding. We wouldn't have it any other way.
Rant Mode: OFF
Phew, that felt good. Thanks for letting me vent!6 -
This is long rant/story:
My manager conducts sync-up meetings regularly. The idea is to sync up all developers on current state of work. He does’t conduct stand-ups. He doesn't have time for it. He rather discusses on individual basis if we are blocked. The rule of the sync-up meeting is NOT to discuss any blockers or problems but simply explain each other what we are doing and how we plan next.
Sometime ago, the manager brought up and explained a new way of working in the sync-up meeting. At this point, a new developer in the team was absent due to sickness.
Today, there was a sync-up meeting and the manager started to question the new member about the newly introduced way of working. He was unaware of it and the manager never communicated this important information via email or any mode of communication available.
So, the conversation goes on as follows:
"Manager": — "Why didn’t you complete your task as per the new way of working?"
"Employee": — "Well, I've no idea. Am I supposed to do? I’ve been working as usual like any other"
"Manager": — "We have a new process and you have failed to follow it, so we’re late in delivering your work"
"Employee": — "I’ve already finished my work on time. I've raised a pull-request this morning"
"Manager": — "It doesn’t matter, it is not merged to main branch and so we can’t include your work in the release"
"Employee": — "I’ve no idea about the new process"
"Manager": — "Haven’t you asked around about what happened from previous meeting"
"Employee": — "Yes, I have. I was told which tasks were handled, but nothing about a new process"
"Manager": — "Aren’t you interested to learn it?"
"Employee": — "Why won’t I be interested? I was on a sick leave and I have no clue what happened here"
"Manager": — "What’s happened is past now, let’s not focus on it"
"Employee": — <Dumbfounded>
The Employee felt ashamed in front of everyone. He did his job but it didn’t pay off.
…. After an hour … the Employee had a talk with the Manager
"Employee": — "You shouldn’t have pointed me out in front of everyone. It made me feel real bad. You should have emailed this information if its important for the team."
"Manager": — "I have no idea what you’re talking about. When did I say so? I think you’ve a bright future in the team. You should be focusing on doing better things."
Employee goes back to work. A minute later, the Manager sends a PowerPoint screenshot of the process in the group chat.
**The Process**
It's about delivering release packages based on priorities defined by client. Each release package is a set of work items or requirements. Individual developers are assigned to work items. They are expected to deliver on planned delivery timelines in order to consider a work item into a release package.1 -
So recently I had an argument with gamers on memory required in a graphics card. The guy suggested 8GB model of.. idk I forgot the model of GPU already, some Nvidia crap.
I argued on that, well why does memory size matter so much? I know that it takes bandwidth to generate and store a frame, and I know how much size and bandwidth that is. It's a fairly simple calculation - you take your horizontal and vertical resolution (e.g. 2560x1080 which I'll go with for the rest of the rant) times the amount of subpixels (so red, green and blue) times the amount of bit depth (i.e. the amount of values you can set the subpixel/color brightness to, usually 8 bits i.e. 0-255).
The calculation would thus look like this.
2560*1080*3*8 = the resulting size in bits. You can omit the last 8 to get the size in bytes, but only for an 8-bit display.
The resulting number you get is exactly 8100 KiB or roughly 8MB to store a frame. There is no more to storing a frame than that. Your GPU renders the frame (might need some memory for that but not 1000x the amount of the frame itself, that's ridiculous), stores it into a memory area known as a framebuffer, for the display to eventually actually take it to put it on the screen.
Assuming that the refresh rate for the display is 60Hz, and that you didn't overbuild your graphics card to display a bazillion lost frames for that, you need to display 60 frames a second at 8MB each. Now that is significant. You need 8x60MB/s for that, which is 480MB/s. For higher framerate (that's hopefully coupled with a display capable of driving that) you need higher bandwidth, and for higher resolution and/or higher bit depth, you'd need more memory to fit your frame. But it's not a lot, certainly not 8GB of video memory.
Question time for gamers: suppose you run your fancy game from an iGPU in a laptop or whatever, with 8GB of memory in that system you're resorting to running off the filthy iGPU from. Are you actually using all that shared general-purpose RAM for frames and "there's more to it" juicy game data? Where does the rest of the operating system's memory fit in such a case? Ahhh.. yeah it doesn't. The iGPU magically doesn't use all that 8GB memory you've just told me that the dGPU totally needs.
I compared it to displaying regular frames, yes. After all that's what a game mostly is, a lot of potentially rapidly changing frames. I took the entire bandwidth and size of any unique frame into account, whereas the display of regular system tasks *could* potentially get away with less, since most of the frame is unchanging most of the time. I did not make that assumption. And rapidly changing frames is also why the bitrate on e.g. screen recordings matters so much. Lower bitrate means that you will be compromising quality in rapidly changing scenes. I've been bit by that before. For those cases it's better to have a huge source file recorded at a bitrate that allows for all these rapidly changing frames, then reduce the final size in post-processing.
I've even proven that driving a 2560x1080 display doesn't take oodles of memory because I actually set the timings for such a display in order for a Raspberry Pi to be able to drive it at that resolution. Conveniently the memory split for the overall system and the GPU respectively is also tunable, and the total shared memory is a relatively meager 1GB. I used to set it at 256MB because just like the aforementioned gamers, I thought that a display would require that much memory. After running into issues that were driver-related (seems like the VideoCore driver in Raspbian buster is kinda fuckulated atm, while it works fine in stretch) I ended up tweaking that a bit, to see what ended up working. 64MB memory to drive a 2560x1080 display? You got it! Because a single frame is only 8MB in size, and 64MB of video memory can easily fit that and a few spares just in case.
I must've sucked all that data out of my ass though, I've only seen people build GPU's out of discrete components and went down to the realms of manually setting display timings.
Interesting build log / documentary style video on building a GPU on your own: https://youtube.com/watch/...
Have fun!20 -
devRant is messed up!
I often open the app (iOS), see a rant that I want to read, tap on it, and the app crashes.
Now I almost got used to that shit but for some reason when I open the app again, that rant that I wanted to read is gone! Never to be found again!
No matter how often I reload, how much I scroll down, it’s simply gone.
This annoys me more than it should maybe. But seriously, wtf is wrong with this platform? I don’t know if it’s only the iOS app but so many other things are broken here, it’s disturbing. And those problems are there for many years, nobody seems to care. 😩
Don’t get me wrong, I like devRant. It’s the only social platform that I use. But… ugh…13 -
Video of a kid doing something:
LinkedIn user: no matter how small you are you can conquer the world and cure cancer.
Comment one:haha very true
comment two:nope the kid must be at least 3 feet tall
Next post
Oracle: have to tried enterprises something and enterprises something, give me all your money
Rant inspired by https://devrant.com/rants/2131330/...2 -
!rant
I would like to present you the story that I tell everyone who is afraid of expectations, stressed to impress interviewers etc. Story about how I got my first job.
A little of backstory:
I always was good with computers, not like expert, but good. Of course parents were against giving me admin rights, so I just played games or such. When time came to choose my path throgh life, I've chosen to go medicine-related way, and chosen high school with such profile. I did my exams terribly, cause I never cared about marks, so I applied to uni for Information and Communication Technology course. I've learned basics of coding there, much stuff I don't really need right now, but in the end it was the best choice I've made.
With that way too long prologue...
I had to do internship for my uni and decided to try and find some year earlier. There was a lecture about multiplatform coding held by company my uni had partnership with. I've filled a questionare and few weeks later they invited me for assessment - event where they will choose who is good enough.
Of course I didn't believe in my chances to win an internship (1st place got full time job). There were 3 stages:
- solo coding (C/C++ own implementation of list)
- group designing (UML and presentation according to specification)
- interview (talking about code from stage 1, some questions, theory)
I failed 1st stage miserably... so I decided to don't give a shit and bravely presented our group project. A guy asked why we did not included a thing on UML, so I told him that it was not in specification - he was suprised but took it as big +. We "won" that part. When it came to interview... I was myself, cool headed, admited when I don't know things.
I thought that was it.
Few weeks later I received email - they invited me for internship.
They put me into Python project, language that noone in our trainee team knew. Told us 2/4 will be hired. At first I was not interested, wanted to finish my degree. But they convinced me. Now I'm here +2 years.
I am aware there are not many companies like that. Here, the people matters - you don't have to know everything, as long as you are getting along with others.
My tip for you though is: BE YOURSELF, NO MATTER WHAT THEY SAY 🎶
And I wish us more companies like that.😉1 -
Another rant reminded me:
I’ve been at the same company for almost five years now, and I’ve seen the dev teams grow: several juniors come in, and even a few that left - or more precisely, was let go. And for each of those that were let go, the root issue with them was always the same: not the lack of skills or ability to learn their trade at job, no. It was always communication issues serious enough to render working with them impossible.
So remember juniors, besides googling and problem solving, the most important skill to master in team-based dev envs is COMMUNICATION. You need to fucking be part of the team or you’re out, no matter how good you are technically. If that’s too hard, either this is the wrong line of work for you or you need to just go solo. It’s that simple, boys, girls, and everyone else on the spectrum.4 -
I'm so fucking done with all the hate the modern web is getting. If you don't need it, don't use it. Shut the fuck up if somebody else uses it, because he needs it.
And that whole war between libraries is so fucking ridiculous. Why do I have to feel bad for using a tool that does exactly what I want, and provides me a great dev experience.
No I am not going to use a stack of 4 technologies because "native is faster". Fuck you. I don't care, and you shouldn't either.
I shouldn't even have the need to rant about this, but I'm just in this constant rut, because I feel like no matter what I'm doing, I'm doing it wrong. I hate it.4 -
Oh no AI can destroy hummanity in the future! It is like skynet and such... Bad! It will be the end! FEAR THE AI!
Yeah so i cant sleep now so im writting a rant about that.
What a load of bullshit.
AI is just a bunch of if elses, and im not joking, they might not be binary and some architectures of ML are more complex but in general they are a lot of little neurons that decide that to output depending on the input. Even humans work that way. It is complicated to analyse it yes. But it is not going to end humanity. Why? Because by itself it is useless. Just like human without arms and legs.
But but but... internet.... nukes... robots! Yeah... So maybe DONT FUCKING GIVE IT BLOODY WEAPONS?! Would you wire a fucking random number generator to a bomb? If you cant predict actions of a black box dont give it fucking influence over anything! This is why goverment isnt giving away nukes to everybody!
Also if you think that your skynet will take control of the internet remember how flawless our infrastructure is and how that infrastructure is so fast that it will be able to accomodate terabytes per second or more throughput needed by the AI to operate. If you connect it to the internet using USB 2.0 it wont be able to do anything bloody dangerous because it cant overcome laws of physics... If the connection isnt the issue just imagine the AI struggle to hack every possible server without knowing about those 1 000 000 errors and "features" that those servers were equiped with by their master programmers... We cant make them work propely yet alone modify them to do something sinister!
AI is a tool just like a nuclear power. You can use it safely but if you are a idiot then... No matter what is the technology you are going to fuck shit up.
Making a reactor that can go prompt critical? Giving AI weapons or controls over something important? Making nukes without proper antitamper measures? Building a chemical plant without the means to contain potential chemical leak? Just doing something stupid? Yeah that is the cause of the damage, not the technology itself.
And that is true for everything in life not only AI.5 -
So I'm making an app with a classmate at school, but there's one huge problem. All the PC's and laptops at school are shit. The ICT departement at my school blocks almost everything on them. I can't install any program, open any file and I can't even open the command prompt! So I can't install Visual studio or any other IDE and basically can't do anything besides browse websites that aren't blocked. And they expect me and my classmate to make an app. Fortunately, my classmate has a spare laptop we can use, but it's really difficult for two guys to code on just one laptop. I asked my school if they could buy new laptops or if they could remove they restrictions on two laptops, but they don't want to do any of those things and now we're stuck with just one laptop. I don't know what to do. I fucking hate this!
(This doesn't have anything to do with the topic of the rant, but I just want to complain.)
There are a couple more things I hate about my school. At my school, everyone is forced to use iPads. I don't know why they don't just give us laptops instead of iPads (maybe just because there lazy). So my iPad's headphonejack and homebutton where broken for no reason and I had to get it repaired. But instead of going to an apple store or a repair shop, you need to go to the school's ICT department and get it fixed there. If you don't do that and go to a apple store or something, they will take your iPad and keep it forever! Even though you pay €200 for it every year! Also, the ICT department at my school is lazy as hell! You expect them to repair the iPad themselves, but they just send it to a repair shop. So it wouldn't even matter if I would go to the store myself! 😠 And they even do a really bad job at checking if the device even works after the repair, because I needed to get it repaired three times in a row! And don't even get me started on the bad WiFi connection.10 -
We basically don't unit test at work. I write some tests for my code and honest to God people complain I'm wasting time saying a test bed and manual tests are good enough. We don't write test beds for about half of our production code and rely on integration tests for the rest. We only test release builds which have been symbol stripped, I get handed a crash report with no stack trace that I'm unable to reproduce and expected to stay late to fix it for some arbitrary internal deadline.
I've since moved to R&D where basically I'm left to do my own thing so it's better.
We don't project manage. Project leads take time estimates and double them so management might cut them some slack. This doesn't matter because management made up time estimates before the project started. Last project I was on had a timeline of 3 months and took a year.
We have released broken products. Not that any of the above really matters, our software products have made about 50k revenue in 2 years. There are 6 people on software. Fortunately hardware has made about 3 mill. That said our hardware customers are getting frustrated with us as we keep fucking up, shipping broken products and missing deadlines.
I've been working there about a year and a half and will be looking for a job at the end of the current project.
I joined devRant about when I was most pissed off with my job, my rant frequency has definitely gone down since I moved over to R&D. -
The global joke of Information Security
So I broke my iPhone because the nuclear adhesive turned my display into a shopping bag.
This started the ride for my character arc in this boring dystopia novel:
Amazon is preventing me from accessing my account because they want my password, email AND mobile phone number in their TWO.STEP Verifivation.
Just because one too many scammers managed to woo one too many 90+y/o's into bailing their long lost WW2 comrades from a nigerian jail with Amazon gift cards and Amazon doesn't know what to do about anymore,
DHL is keeping my new phone in a "highly secure" vault 200m away from my place, waiting for a letter to register some device with a camera because you need to verify your identity with an app,
all the while my former car insurance is making regress claims of about 7k€ against me for a minor car accident (no-one hurt fortunately, but was my fault).
Every rep from each of the above had the same stupid bitchass scapegoat to create high-tech supra chargers to the account deletion request:
- Amazon: We need to verify your password, whether the email was yours and whether the phone number is yours.
They call it 2-step-verification.
Guess what Amazon requests to verify you before contacting customer support since you dont have access to your number? Your passwoooooord. While youre at it, click on that button we sent you will ya? ...
I call this design pattern the "dement Tupi-Guarani"
- DHL: We need an ID to verify your identity for the request for changing the delivery address you just made. Oh you wanted to give us ANOTHER address than the one written on your ID? Too bad bro, we can't help, GDPR
- Car Insurance: We are making regress claims against you, which might throw you back to mom's basement, oh and also we compensated the injured party for something else, it doesn't matter what it is but it's definitely something, so our claims against you just raised by 1.2k. Wait you want proof we compensated something to the injured at all? Nah mate we cant do that , GDPR. But trust me, those numbers are legit, my quant forecasted the cost of childrens' christmas wishes. You have 14 days or we'll see you in court haha
I am also their customer in a pension scheme. Something special to Germany, where you save some taxes but have to pay them back once you get the fund paid out. I have sent them a letter to terminate the contract.
Funniest thing is, the whole rant is my second take. Because when I hit the post button, devrant made me verify my e-mail. The text was gone afterwards. If someone from devRant reads this, you are free to quote this in the ticket description.
Fuck losing your virginity, or filing your first tax return, or by God get your first car, living through this sad Truman dystopia without going batshit insane is what becoming a true adult is.
I am grateful for all this though:
Amazon's safety measures prevented me from spending the money I can use to conclude the insurance odyssey, and DHLs "giving a fuck about customers" prevention policies made me support local businesses. And having ranted all this here does feel healthy too. So there's that.
Oh, cherry on top. I cant check my balance, because I can only verify my login requests to my banking account wiiiiiiith...?2 -
We are all about structures, clean code and many other things that make our life easier, right?
Well... It's not all white and black...
As talked many times, projects can be rushed... Client budgets can be low at the start and only then grow...
Let me take an example:
Client X needs a tool that helps his team perform jobs faster. They have a $500 budget. So... Testing, clean architecture and so on - are not really a viable option. Instead, you just make it work and perform that task as needed. So the code has minimal patterns, minimal code structure, a lot of repetitive parts and so on.
Now... Imagine that 3 months pass by without any notice and clients are ultra happy with the product. They want more things to be automated. They contact developers and ask for more things. This time they have a bigger budget but short timeframe.
So once again, you ignore all tests, structure and just make it work. No matter what. The client is happy again.
A year passes and the client realizes that their workflow changed. The app needs total refactoring. The previous developer has no time for adjustments at this point and hires a new company. They look at the code and rants spill out of their mouth along with suicidal thoughts.
So... What would you do? Would you rant about "messy project" or just fix it? Especially since people now have a bigger budget and timeframe to adapt to changes.
Would you be pissed on such a project?
Would you flame on previous devs?
Would you blame anyone for the mess?
Or would you simply get in and get the job done since the client has a "prototype" and needs a better version of it?
---
Personally, I've been in this situation A LOT. And I'm both, the old and new dev. I've built tons of crappy software to make things work for clients and after years - they come back for changes/new things. You just swallow the pill and do what is needed. Why? Well, because it's an internal system and not used by anyone outside their office. Even if it's used outside the office - prototyping is the key. They didn't know if the idea would work or be helpful in any way. Now they know and want it done correctly.6 -
I study both mathematics and computer science at Delft university. There's a difference between the approaches these two studies have.
Mathematics is usually about going to lectures, learning complicated stuff there and then using the obtained knowledge in a exam at the end of the course.
The CS courses are kore about engineering. They have practicals way more often than the math courses and the exams usually are of les importance.
It feels as if the "academic level" of the CS courses is lower. In math, we learn the real deep, abstract matter, while CS is more about "tinker up something nice in the practicals and you'll be fine."
I'm not sure if either approach is better, but I'm sure I like the maths version more. The CS approach is more HBO-like (HBO being the lower-level universities)
It is even that, generally speaking, the people who study maths seem more serious about studying than the cs people.
Not all of them, and no offense meant, just an observation.
Well, that was not really a rant. If you read up to here, I'm curious what you think about this.3 -
I will never rant enough about Windows. It is so aged. I have 6TB of storage, 2 SSD of 1To and 1 HDD of 6TB
But windows doesn’t care, it will pack everything in the same disk in this damned AppData no matter where you install your softwares, making main disk full.
Wanted to build a rather big docker image, but yeah, because I guess that the guys from Docker have other things to do than caring of a 90s OS with a fancy UI, they use an emulated ext4 file system, it filled my disk, Docker is crashing because of that, letting me no other choice than removing the emulated disk.10 -
No Rant:
I guess I will start a religous discussion with it but I want your opinion on what tool I should learn.
Vim or Emacs (or stay with my IDE)?
For all of my programmer life I used IDEs... From Eclipse over CodeBlocks over VS to IntelliJ.
But now I realized that I want to be one of the cool kids. And using plain IntelliJ is uncool. No matter how much I love this tool.
So now I want to invest some time into learning. I never managed to do much in Vim since all code-completions sucked ass, feedback on syntax errors was bad and I never saw how I could be any faster with that shit compared to what IntelliJ does for me.
Will Emacs solve all those problems? Will Emacs make me code 1000 times faster and make having a mouse useless?
Or am I just too dumb for Vim? Can Vim itself do what my IDE does for me? Will it make me look as cool as I want to be?
Or should I stick to IntelliJ and just install Vim bindings?
What is your opinion on Vim vs Emacs vs any IDE?8 -
Part 2 Of the StackOverFlow rant.
He still didn't accept my answer and commented something that even I don't know what the fuck he wants. Maybe you can fix your fucking grammar and it'd be easier to understand and solve your issue. 1 Hour later guess what he gets downvoted to -5, Gets his question Closed for Off-Topic and I end up being downvoted too. WTF. I answered his questions and instead, I'm getting downvoted because I answered on an "Off-Topic" Question. I seriously give up on Helping other people because no matter ho hard i try it ends up being a waste of time and you get nothing in return... Fuck the StackOverflow Community.1 -
I can't share it but I basically just wrote an email at work that's pretty much a rant.
Basically something like should we use Java for this new component? It needs to communicate with our existing server written in JS.
And someone was like no we should stick with JS and Node because that's what the website is written.
And so I'm like wtf... It doesn't matter as long as everyone agrees to follow the same rules... And then added a part about commenting and documenting stuff being more important so I don't need to keep doing CSI on the codebase when something blows up.2 -
Not a DRV rant bit I am Maaad AF here
I am doing an internship at an amazing company. Everything is going well and I have learned a lot. This internship is for 6 months and almost 4 months are remaining. Now this shitfuckery of obscene ignorance that I call my college , wants every student to attend classes no matter what. I have already told them the status of my internship but they said "college is more important ". Along with this they want 2 projects in this semester and my HOD said we have to give developments of our project weekly
When I told this amazing piece of human knowledge that I won't get off for every week and I will be using git , he can see my developments and we can communicate on slack etc.
This humble genius said with utmost compassion " what is got, I don't use it , come daily to college". Man, first time in my life I have ever given that Michael Corleone stare at sollozzo killing death stare.
Indian colleges are messed up.1 -
!dev
I wanted to buy some lightning deals on Amazon today but the total was like $23.50 and free shipping requires $25.
I bought a few $25+ items last few weeks so I figure they should be able to waive it...
Chat with CS and they're like no we can't.
WELL FCK U!!!!! I'VE ACTUALLY BEEN PRIME FOR 2YRS AND JUST ENDED A FEW MONTHS AGO... AND IMMEDIATELY THEY'RE LIKE, WE DON'T KNOW U...
(The person actually started out saying thanks for being a Prime member)
Not that it'll matter to them... But just needed to rant...3 -
!!rant life toptags bottags
My tags seem to be okay. Let's go.
I'm 14. I live in a place where nobody smart lives, and the school I go to has no coders.
Last year, all my friends moved. The only friend I had left now hates me, simply because they yelled at me everyday and I yelled at them once.
I am in the middle of my exams. I also have the flu, but thankfully it's not the e-flu, otherwise you guys should prepare for 24/7 headaches.
Due to the medications I am taking, I'm half-asleep all the time, and I probably am messing up all of my grades.
My entire extended family is in India, and I go there 2 times a year. I miss them so much right now :(.
At the same as doing exams, I am trying to keep my laptop (primary) and PC (secondary, desk) configuration and setup approximately synchronized. In order to do that, I am setting up my dotfiles repository.
Except that all my laptop config (which works) is written horribly, and I need to rewrite it all.
At the same time, I have 3 other projects going on: An OS written in D, a source-based package management system written in D, a small website (not online), and a whatever's cooking in my mind at this moment.
Right now, I'm supposed to be studying for my French exam.
Instead, I'm here, typing this out on my phone.
I have a classmate in school who can type QWERTY at 80WPM. I'm learning Dvorak (Programmer's!) and my current speed is 33WPM, after about 2 months of half-hearted practise during work time and at school.
Sometimes, I look at the world we have here, and what we're doing to it, and I wish that sometimes we could simply be content with life. Let's just live, for once.
I find ~60 random songs in one go, simply by finding a song I know on YouTube and going to the 'Mix - <song>' playlist. I download them all (youtube-dl), and I listen to them. Sometimes, I find this little part in a song (Mackelmore & Ryan Lewis - Can't Hold Us beginning instrumentals, or Safe and Sound chorus instrumentals) that make me feel so happy I feel like all's good in the world. Then the song moves on and with it, my happiness.
I look at Wayland, and X, and I think - Why can't we have one way of doing things - a fixed interface to express anything, so that one common API exists for everything of that type? And I realise it's because they feel that they're missing something from the others. Perhaps it's a bug nobody's solved or functionality that's missing, and they think that they can do better than that. And I think - Well, that's stupid. Submit a fucking bug report or pull request instead of reinventing the wheel. And then I realise that all the programming I've ever done in my life IS simply reinventing the wheel. And some might say, "Well, that guy designed it with spokes and wood. I designed it with rubber and steel," but that doesn't work, because no matter what how you make it, it's just a wheel. They both do the same thing. Both have advantages and disadvantages, because nothing's perfect. We're not perfect because we all have agendas and wants and likes and dislikes and hates and disgusts and all kinds of other crap, and our DNA's not perfect because it manages to corrupt copy operations (which is basically why we die of old age, I think).
And now I've lost my train of thought and this is too large to scroll over so I'm just going to move on to the next topic. At this point (.), I have 1633 letters left.
I hate the fact that the world's become so used to QWERTY because of stuff that happened 100 years ago that Dvorak is enough of a security to stop most people from being able to physically use my laptop.
I don't understand why huge companies like Google want to know about me. What would you do with this information? Know how to take over my stuff when the corporation-opocalypse comes around? Why can't they leave me alone? Why do I have to flash a ROM onto my phone so that Google cannot track me? What do you want, Google?
I don't give a shit any more, so there's my megarant.
Before anybody else (aside from myself) tells me that this is too big, all these topics are related simply because my train of thought went this way. There's a connection between each of these things, but I just don't know what it is.
Goodnight, world. 666 is the number of characters I have left. So is 42, for that matter (thanks, Douglas Adams!). Goodbye.rant life story current project ugh megarant why are you doing this to me life schrodinger's tags 🐈 life3 -
This is PART 2/2 of a series of rants over the course of a software engineering course years ago.
We were four team members, two had never failed a class, I’ll refer to them as MT and FT, male and female top students, respectively, and an older student with some real world experience who I’ll refer to as SR.
Rant 6: After the previous drama MT built the groundwork for the project without allowing us to intervene for a week. When he finally disclosed his code he gave us tasks and I was stuck unable to run the new project, due to the friction with MT I asked SR for help which took a couple of days. MT accused us of not wanting to work and claimed he’d just do everything himself. I continued working on the task improving MT’s code and committed the work, which surprised MT and told me I didn’t have to do it. He ended up complimenting my code and complained less about me as a result.
Rant 7: MT kept giving SR flak for not working and took him out of the repo, which I promptly forked just in case he tried anything scummy. SR was indeed working on certain things, but he wasn’t listening to MT’s demands, there was no team coordination. I had to act as a proxy and push some of SR’s changes myself while informing him of the state of things.
Rant 8: When MT finally added SR back and some of the tasks were cleared up, FT didn’t cooperate. She seemed to have zero initiative and always relied on MT to tell her what to do, which didn’t include coordinating with SR to get the front-end templates running. I tried getting them in a group chat but it didn’t work, she just ignored him.
I learned a few things from that.
1. No matter how smart or experienced someone may seem, sometimes people are just petty or take things too personally.
2. Top students are sometimes too focused on their grades and disregard depth of knowledge and work quality.
3. A bad team at college can somehow make something acceptable if everyone works on things that add some kind of value.1 -
i hate you, you and you AHHHHHH
This doesnt have to make sense.
This is a freakin rant for god's sake, not a pull request. I'm not tryna be the best ranter?? Dont mind this rant. Just scroll. B if u can only hear my scream right now from the other side of the world, it sure can cause another big bang.
F u, this sht, (oh ya it's profanity, i got no better term for what im feelin, gahh please rip my head off) and that too, and this one too, all of u
I HATE ALL OF YOU. I BLAME ALL OF YOU FOR ALL MY INCONSISTENCIES. YE, IM TIRED OF TAKING ACCOUNTABILITY. F THAT SHT COZ IT JUST RAISES EXPECTATIONS. I CAN'T EVEN MEET THE DEADLINES I SET FOR MYSELF.
The hell are ambitions and all that "dream life" they tryna sell. Those won't even matter when I can barely get my sht together. UGH. I haven't even seen my friends, the SUN, trees and all normal people things. Dang, I want fried chicken. I haven't had one for a while. I guess I should end this rant here and order one.
I must just be hungry, no?3 -
Ok, today's rant brought to you by Microsoft Visual Studio, once again. The updated version I downloaded yesterday now has a weird problem where upon the first run of the emulator, my changes show, but on subsequent runs, no matter how much I change, save, clear cache, restart the emulator, no changes will show in the emulator until I completely restart visual studio! Currently in the process of uninstalling the updated version to download the older version, but again I can't just refresh my PC, because I have to download a version from the developer account downloads. Because the trial version can't be upgraded. This is Microsoft's Flagship Development product running on their flagship OS on a machine with killer specs and the latest updates. GET IT TOGETHER. I would be fired if I released such buggy updates and had such an arduous user experience.1
-
!rant
Going through my graduate program I have come to realize that there is more to A.I than just machine learning algorithms. As if ML was not complicated enough, we add more to it such as KRR and other topics that border on the areas of Cognitive Science, Boolean Algebra, Logic and even Philosophy and you know what? I dig it. I dig it because finding some of the information in the course that I am getting is damn near impossible to see in other items. Such is the case as a method for fucking signature unit propagation which afuckingparently was developed by one of my instructors(not complaining, just really fucking impressed)
The thing is, most of these items would normally have a parallel in software development that we use on our day to day basis, all of us, no matter if you do web, systems development, database development whatever, the general concepts are the same: you represent real world concepts, such as that of logic and knowledge in programatic/mathematical representations.
I am really amazed at the content of these items, I really am. I just wish for some clarification on ambiguity, seems like most things are left better if it where explained in a programmer's point of view. Most of the items that I have seen could have easily been summarized in a programmers logic if only they would have preferred to take the time to do it, and I get that there needs to be mathematical intuition formulated before anything, it is better sometimes to learn concepts from an outside point of view, a mathematical point of view, but shit is just strange sometimes.1 -
Why is it a faux pas to have a beer for breakfast but having wine, champagne or coffee isn't?
They're all delicious morning stimulants and should be treated exactly alike no matter the time of day. This type of discrimination should end now.
Fuck.
***RANT***11 -
!Rant
Help/ideas needed
I need ideas of projects to develop in my free time, I'm tired of the old technology and ugly projects from work, I want to develop something new, fun, to feel the excitement of coding again ;)
The field does not matter i'm willing to learn.
And , no , I can get another job, that is not an option because of the special benefits it's offering that I can not find in another company(very flexible schedule, I'm a student and need it).5 -
!rant
Guys, just a question. Let say in a company either your boss, senior or manager who always wants to win a conversation no matter what the issue is and whoever is at fault.
e.g.
Me: Roasters can't lay eggs
Boss: Yes they can
....
(After few minutes you are bore and want to end the conversation)
Me: Yes, yes fucken Roasters can lay eggs. You are right. Now fuck off.
Question Again:
Will you work for someone who wants to win the conversation?2 -
I think I finally, really, comprehend why secret societies have historically been created... I mean the potentially logical ones. This train of thought is logically terrifying.
I want a logic check.
I've been jokingly mentioning some of my totally true, practically useless in most scenarios, skills/specific fields of knowledge/ability under a moniker of 'extremely useful, assuming apocalyptic event' for years. Things like advanced knowledge of Coefficients of glass expansion, Fortran, various things that have caused friends to refer to me as MacGyver after the reboot came out.
In recent years, I've personally encountered several varieties of the ones defined by helplessness, self-victimisation, some version of a real disability... that theyve expounded into a personified personal nemesis-- to flashily battle yet never overcome, etc... the vast majority perplexing me as to why that's a valid form of life to them... it's not that they never consider some other way; the ball is just quickly dropped and never picked back up.
College?(not that I'm a big fan) they wish they could but so expensive... aide? The form was hard/confusing/past-due...
Lookup/learn something more indepth than a tiktok? *some self-deprecating bs*
Yet it's "I always wanted to do/be/learn X"
Shows like 'How It's Made' fascinate, but don't inspire enough for a 5min google query.
In the dev world its a clear, inverted pyramid-- one of the first posts I saw when I rejoined here was ostream's rant on Apple sucking because after they stop support/updates you "can't" load a different OS... ofc you can. But several comments down... no mention of that... i think it was @LensFlare who was the only one in ~15 respondents to point out the core logical fallacy.
Basic shit is totally forgotten... try asking some random adults what plastic is made from... or pay attention to how many people declare they have a gluten "allergy".
I get people frequently telling me that things im pointing out as differences don't matter because "it's just semantics"... semantics is literally the epitome of "significance", with roots in 'meaning' and 'truth'
Back to the main issue... We are in a world where DIY is typically something you pay more to do as a catered experience than actually learning anything, people destroy their own arguments hopes of validity unwittingly often by stating the arguement, get 'offended' or 'triggered' by factual statements, propagate misinformation and bastardise words until MW needs money enough to print a new version, likely adding the misuse as an actual definition and basic knowledge and the thought to actually learn is vetoed by the existence of google translate, the wisdom of tiktok and the pure brillance of troubleshooting every random linux issue you have from not knowing basic CLI and thinking linux makes you cool, with chmod 777 because so many other dumbasses on forums keep propagating misinformation. Ask them what 777 means, most have no clue... as they didnt consider googling that one before putting it in a terminal several times.
The number of humans that actually know the basic shit that the infrastructure of the world is built on keeps decreasing... and we aren't even keeping a running tally.
The structure of the internet has the right idea... dns- 13 active master root servers, with multiple redundancies if they start dropping... hell ICANN is like a secret society but publicly known/obfuscated... the modern internet hasnt had a global meltdown... aside from the lack of censorship and global availability changing the social definition of a valid use of braincells to essentially propagating spam as if it's factual and educational.
So many 'devs' so few understanding what a driver is, much less how to write one... irl network techs that don't know what dhcp is or that their equiptment has logs... professionals in deducated fields like Autism research/coping... no clue why it was called "autism", obesity and malnutrition simultaneously existing in the same humans... it's like we need to prepare a subterranean life-supporting vault and stock it like Noah's ark... just including the basic knowledge of things that used to be common/obvious. I've literally had 2 different, early 20s, female, certified medical assistants taking my medical history legitimately ask if not having a uterus made it harder to get pregnant...i wish i was joking.
Any ideas better than a subterranean human vault system? It's not like we can simply store detailed explanations, guides, media... unless we find a way to make them into obfuscated tiktok videos apparently on nonsense or makeup tutorials.11 -
Well. I'm stressed and a bit sick so let me tell you this you fuckers: I don't want to play in your little mindfucking game where everything is about efficiency, money and who has the biggest dick around.
Usually I'm the idealistic, positive kind of guy who spreads love and lets people do their things as long as they just don't fuck with him.
Right now though, just go fuck yourself in your damn stupid car you fancy fucker because I don't care about your big dick you have to show off on every occasion. I don't give a fuck about your big paycheck or your smart ass. I'm so sick of this industry mouse wheel and modern slavery where it is made extra hard to enjoy our lives and unfold who we really wanna be because some stupid asshead is not able to fill his hollow emptiness with bare love but has to swallow loads of cash instead giving him the craziest form of diarrhea.
Com'on! We kind of tamed the planet. We put so much effort and created a huge system with so many securities and still we are not able to simply live freely, share love, opinions and great ideas. Why is it still so common to define yourself about your projects, paycheck and false effort? Instead of how much good you give to others, how self-consistent you are, how good you treat yourself?
All I want from you is a bit honesty to yourself. How about being nicer to yourself, letting your love unfold for the sake of releasing that love to the world?
For me you will be a hero!
Notes:
I believe that the personal happiness is influenced not only by your surroundings but mostly how you interact with it. Karma basically. So yeah, normally I'd say you can simply decide to ignore that shit, walk on your path and decide to be what you want to be no matter what dickheads cross your path, but honestly I just had to get that rant out because this ridiculous nonsense makes me so sick right now.
I'm successful right now. I have the privilege to decide on being happy and I know that not everyone has this privilege. I believe, spreading love will also spread this privilege.
That said, have a nice day!4 -
Maxi-Rant, rest in the first comment!
Yay, I've caught up with my "watch later" list on YouTube! Next thing: Just quickly go through my subscribed channels and add old videos that I haven't seen yet to the watch later list so that I have more stuff to watch the next months. The easiest way to do that is to go to the "all uploads" playlist of the channel (that is luckily always linked now, it used to be hidden sometimes) and use "add all to" to get them on my playlist. Then sort out the stuff that I've already seen and turn on automatic sorting by date, easy. Yeah...
Firstly, in the new design there's no "add all to", I have to go to the old design. For my own playlists, there's a handy "edit" button to do that, but on other pages I have to do it manually. Luckily I have set Ctrl+Shift+1 as a shortcut for "&disable_polymer=true" long ago.
Next surprise: On "all uploads" playlists, there is no "add all to" button. It's on every single other playlist on YouTube, including "liked", "watch later", "favourites" and so on, just not there.
Fine, I'll just abuse my subscription playlist script that I already have by making a copy of it, putting the channel IDs in it and setting the last execution date to 1.1.2001. Little problem with that: Google apps scripts can run for at most 5 minutes and the YouTube API restricts it to add one video per second. So it doesn't work for more than 300 videos. I could now try to split it up by dates, but I didn't write the script myself and I don't know how it sorts the videos to add, so I'll just google for another solution instead.
Found one: Go to the video overview of the channel in the old layout, Ctrl+Shift+I, paste this little Javascript thing and it automatically clicks all the little clocks that add the video to the watch later list. Yay, that works! Ok, i'm restricted to 5000 videos, because that's the maximum size of a YouTube playlist, so I can't immediately add all 8000+, but whatever, that's a minor problem and I'll sort out later anyway. Still another little problem: For some reason I can't automatically sort the watch later list. Because that would be too easy.
But whatever, I'll just use "add all to" from there to add it to my creatively named "WL" list. If that thing is restricted by the same rate limit of 1 video per second, it should be done in about 1½ hours. A bit long, but hey, I'm dealing with 5000 videos. Waiting 2 hours... Waiting 3 hours... Nothing happens. It would be nice if it at least added them one by one, but no, it waits an eternity and then adds all at once. At least in theory, right now it does absolutely nothing.
Shortly considered running it for more hours or even days on my Raspberry Pi, but that thing already struggles when using Chromium normally, I shouldn't bother it with anything that has to do with 5000 videos.
Ok, what else can I do then? Googling, trying out different things, mainly external services that have their own concept of "playlists" and can then add them to an arbitrary playlist later...
Even tried writing my own Java program with the YouTube API, but after about an hour not even the example program in the YouTube API tutorial worked (50 errors and even more open questions, woohoo), so I discarded that idea.
Then I discovered "DiskYT". Everything looked like it would work and I'm still convinced that I can do it with that little pile of shit. Why is it a pile of shit? Well, for example the site reloads itself after a while, so it can at most add 700 videos to a playlist. Also I can't just paste the channel link (even though it recognises those links, but just to show an error message that it can't copy from channels). I can't enter/paste URLs, I have to drag them. The site saves absolutely nothing (should in theory work, but in practise it doesn't), so I have to re-drag everything on every try. In one network, the "authorise YouTube" button (that I have to press again on every computer) does absolutely nothing ("inspect" reveals that there isn't even any action bound to the button), in another network the page mostly doesn't work at all or the button to copy from playlists is suddenly gone or other weird stuff. Luckily I have the WiFi at home, there it works in theory. But just on my desktop PC, no other device, wow. I tried to run it on my new laptop, but it's so new that it still has the preinstalled OS and there I can't deactivate going to standby when closing the laptop, so while I expected it to add 5000 videos, it instead added 4 and went to standby. But doesn't matter, because it would have failed at about 700 anyway. Every time I try to use this website, I get new problems, but it seems to still be the best option, because everything else just doesn't do anything. This page at least got to 700 before.
Continuing in first comment!4 -
Tldr; Rust community could definitely be way less annoying, but it's way more annoying listening to everyone bitch about it all the fucking time.
rant()
Tired of the Rust hype? Too fucking bad. Quit complaining that people like well-designed languages more than shitty ones. Yeah, rust devs can be real fucking zealous, but at least the language is good. If you don't like listening to people say "why not rust?" ignore them or ask yourself the same fucking question ahead of time so you don't feel defensive when someone asks it later.
Read some shit about how "it doesn't matter what you build it with if the software is good, its all the same". Ever heard of "right tool for the right job"? Rust has applications all over the place, so people are going to talk about it a lot. Also, just no. Like, Python shouldn't be in the Linux kernel for a lot of reasons, so the tools you choose can constrain whether or not your software is actually "good."
Ever heard of "unsubstantiated trust"? Yeah, you might be good at writing C, but you can get that shit to compile with nasty fucking problems and C's a straight up foot gun in my hands. It's hard to write shitty functioning Rust that does what you say it does, which is less unsubstantiated trust.2 -
!rant
If any of you were wondering why all the panic when we keep hearing reports of so few people personally knowing anyone with covid19 symptoms, I think I just figured out why.
So as of yesterday, assume unofficially fatality is 15%. Yesterdays death total was 3861.
If we assume roughly 15% death rate, based on ten days average for a case to recover or die, then the cases that would be recovering today on april 1st would have been infected or started to show symptoms on march 22nd.
At that time there was 32882 cases total in the u.s.
Therefore for april 1st, that would mean by the end of the day today, if the ~15% fatality rate is accurate, there would be at least 4,932 fatalities logged today.
I don't know about you, but here it's almost 9am, not even halfway through the day, and we're already at 4067 deaths.
And now we get to the part where all this shit starts to make sense.
For a long time since this outbreak has started somethings been bugging me and I couldn't place what it was till now.
Why did it seem, no matter how high the numbers climbed, no matter how much this spread 'like the flu', no matter how hard I looked into it, very few people seemed to personally know anyone *in real life* who died or at least came down with this?
I mean we'd all heard the rumors that it was more lethal, and then mums the word, it seemed like media the world over simply except the official "it's only 2% lethal" line. Same as the line about it only infecting people of asian descent.
And it didn't make sense to me why the numbers were so high, and why all the panic if it's just the flu? I knew in the back of my mind it wasn't I just didn't have a specific reason why.
Here it is: This thing is still pretty contagious, but not as contagious as it *could* be with a lower fatality rate. And with a fatality rate at 15%, combine with *just sufficient* spread, it would continue to burn and fester in communities for a year or more until those panic-numbers we see on the news would become a real thing. And then no matter HOW flat we made the curve, it would be x5-x50 times worse than a bad flu.
So we get panic and fake numbers. Because you really don't want to catch this thing. It kills 1 in 6.6. And it spread just enough that it is hard to effectively fight.8 -
Follow-up rant to my company. Today's day is fairly good, so let's talk about infra.
We're building upon an existing open-source project which is not intended to be extended (e.g. plugins).
Our backend-team somehow hacked symfony into the app, which made the actual work a little bit less annoying. But on the other side, there is absolutely no automation. Everything is setup by hand and I need to upload my sources to my dev-server and watch what files exactly are overwritten. Because if not, I accidentally overwrite core sources which will break the whole app, no matter what. If I forget what file I wrongly overwrote, I have no choice but to setup the core from scratch and apply our sources on-top, AGAIN.
The first time setup took me almost five days.
Oh yeah and the team shares one dev server, so whenever I feel like fucking with a mate, I can easily fuck up his system, since everyone has root-rights.
We're required to use windows, but our dev is linux and I am the only knowledgable linux guy. They need cheatsheets (to be fair, I need my powershell-cheatsheet).
We market the same app with some additional functionality, but we also have clients which require their own stuff. This case has never been thought-out, since for these specific clients, we also modify some core-parts. Which makes it a real hassle to add a basic new feature to that special customer.
At least our frontend is somewhat decent. Simple and without critical thinking, but it works and is decently understandable. I'll rant about that for another day, it's still tedious.
I know I won't stay there for long since I start my own stuff, but it's sad. Nothing is perfect and they _do_ want to make it better, but it's the usual "there is no time, client first" talk. On the other hand, they tell that we should be more efficient, but there is no way to be without looking back at the fundamental structure and what takes us so long.
I don't think I am able to change anything here and as I heard from co-workers, they already look for something new.
cheers -
!rant
My family has been very supportive, but mostly ignorant about my journey to software development, and tolerant of all of my fuck-ups along the way.
Yet they don't dare to even think to know what I am doing, because every time they asked me, no matter how well I explained, they never got any of the intricate parts of software development.
They know I make software. They know about the usual stress that comes from organizing projects, planning, maintaining infrastructure, but to them, it's as if I build buildings or I'm like a single-man conveyor that creates cars. It makes sense, and they will never understand how I do it, and they don't care. -
#Suphle Rant 9: a tsunami on authenticators
I was approaching the finish line, slowly but surely. I had a rare ecstatic day after finding a long forgotten netlify app where I'd linked docs deployment to the repository. I didn't realise it was weighing down on me, the thought of how to do that. I just corrected some deprecated settings and saw the 93% finished work online. Everything suddenly made me happier that day
With half an appendix chapter to go, I decided to review an important class I stole from my old company for clues when I need to illustrate something involved using a semblance of a real world example (in the appendix, not abstract foo-bar passable for the docs)
It turns out, I hadn't implemented a functionality for restricting access to resources to only verified accounts. It just hasn't been required in the scheme of things. No matter, should be a piece of cake. I create a new middleware and it's done before I get to 50 lines. Then I try to update the documentation but to my surprise, user verification status turns out to be a subset of authentication locking. Instead of duplicating bindings for both authentication and verification, dev might as well use one middleware that checks for both and throws exceptions where appropriate.
BUT!
These aspects of the framework aren't middleware, at all. Call it poor design but I didn't envisage a situation where the indicators (authentication, path based authorisation and a 3rd one I don't recall), would perform behaviour deviating from the default. They were directly connected to their handlers and executed after within the final middleware. So there's no way to replace that default authentication scheme with one that additionally checks for verification status.
Whew
You aren't going to believe this. It may seem like I'm not serious and will never finish. I shut my system down for that day, even unsure how those indicators now have to refactored to work as middleware, their binding and detachment, considering route collections are composed down a trie
I'm mysteriously stronger the following day, draw up designs, draft a bunch of notes, roll my sleeves, and the tsunami began. Was surprisingly able to get most of previous middleware tests passing again before bed, with the exception of reshuffled classes. So I guess we can be optimistic that those other indicators won't cause more suffering or take us additional days off course2 -
A follow-up to a previous rant: https://devrant.com/rants/2296700/...
... and how the senior dev recently took it up a notch.
To recap: Back then the senior dev in our two-man project prepared tasks for me so thoroughly they became typing monkey jobs. He described what to do and how to do it in minute detail in the JIRA tasks.
I talked to him back then how this is too detailed. I also talked to our boss, who agreed to nudge mr. senior in the right direction and to make it clear he expects teamwork.
Fast forward to a couple of days ago. An existing feature will get extended greatly, needing some rework in our backend project. Senior and me had a phone call about what to do and some unclear details in the feature spec. I was already frustrated with the call because he kept saying "No, don't ask that! That actually makes sense, let's just do it as the spec says" and "Don't refactor! We didn't request a budget for that from our customer". Like wtf, really? You don't consider refactoring part of our job? You don't think actually understanding the task improves the implementation? Dude...
We agreed this is a task for one person and I'd do it. It took me the rest of the day to wrap my head around the task and the corresponding existing code. It had some warts, like weird inheritance hierarchies and control flow jumping up and down said hierarchy, but nothing too bad. I made a mental note to still refactor this, just as much as necessary to make my task easier. However... the following day, I got an email from mr. senior. "I refactored the code after all, in preparation for your task". My eyebrows raised.
Firstly, he had made the inheritance hierarchy *worse*. Classic mistake: Misusing inheritance for code reuse. More control flow jumping up and down like rabid bunnies. Pressed on that matter, he replied "it's actually not that bad". Yeah, good work! Your refactoring didn't make things worse! That's an achievement worthy of being engraved on your tombstone. And didn't he say "no refactoring"? Apparently rules are unfortunate things that happen to other people.
But secondly, he prepared classes and methods for me to implement. No kidding. Half-implemented methods with "// TODO: Feature x code goes here" and shit. Like, am I a toddler to you? Do you really think "if you don't let me do things myself I feel terribly frustrated and undervalued" is best answered with giving me LESS things to do myself? And what happened to our boss' instruction to split the task so each of us can work on his parts?
So, this was a couple of days ago. Since then, I've been sitting in my chair doing next to nothing. My brain has just... shut down. I'm reading the spec, thinking "that would require a new REST endpoint", and then nothing happens. I'm looking at the integration test stubs ("// TODO: REST call goes here") and my mind just stays blank, like a fresh unpainted canvas. I've lost all my drive.
I don't even know what to do. Should I assign the task back to him and tell him to go fuck himself? Should I write my boss I'm suddenly retarded? Could I call in sick for a year or so? I dunno... I can barely think straight. What should I do and how?5 -
!rant
Experienced devs please tell help me.
Learning software development has been a challenge. Many times it's frustrating.
I also learn languages and I find them to share one trait with software development, which is complexity.
At first I looked at languages the way I'm currently doing with software. I'd look in a new language and after decided it's cool to learn it, I would stare at it for a few weeks trying to realize what the heck I was going to do. I wouldn't even know how to get started.
Eventually this stage goes away and I think that is about to happen with me with software.
But then a new challenge would come, which is me not making progress as I wanted. That's sort of happening with me by learning software as well, bit in language I now know how to deal with it.
That's because I work full time with something that isn't in my interests and when I arrive home Im tired and want to relax. So I decided my language learning had to go slower as long as I have this job, meaning no hours spent in front of books or a pc studying - that's what I could do with English, I was a teenager and had 12 hours a day to do whatever I wanted.
So I usually spent 5 minutes here and there learning something in my target language when I can, no frustration needed, my only rule is: practice everyday, even if I don't learn anything new.
With software, that doesn't apply though.
So, what I mean by tracing a parallel between these to fields is that I have a strong conviction is that once you get the principles on how a certain kind of learning works, you can apply it everywhere in the field. But with software it's been harder.
Anyways, I see that are some principles that apply, cause trying to learn software is changinge and teaching a lot of things like:
*you have to read a lot (of documentation) . At first I thought all documentation was painful to read and understand, but I found out some software are well documented and one can use those only to get used with it.
*immersion / discipline are important. I'm not very disciplined, I'm better with immersion but both are important if you need to acquire complex subjects/skills
*how to deal with complexity. I installed Arch Linux a few days ago. Just to install it I ended up reading more than 20 pages of documentation (install guide, Wpa supplicant, systemd, networkd, xorg, etc etc). Gradually I'm realizing that when you have to install/tweak something in that distro you necessarily spend a bunch of time trying to understand how it works, otherwise you don't get too far like in Ubuntu or Debian.
*and lastly the one that bothers me. Constantly getting frustrated and feeling crap about my poor skills. No matter how much I progress, it still seems like I'm stuck.
(that's when I ask your help/opinion :) )4 -
!rant (maby rant?)
I live in a place where there is very low discrimination, and even if people make rasist, or sexist, or possibly discriminating remarks, 90% of the time they are just shrugged of or laughed at by the "offended" party.
Then I read stuff from around the world and I am just amazed by the lack of tolerance the rest of the world seams to have.
Like getting offended by people stating any little, insignificant, unrelated thing...even to the point of legal action...
Why are people so easly offended? I get history and past repressions and inequality, but in most cases these reactions are just tantrums or just being a pussy (no matter the actual gender).
Lighten up, people!
Sheesh...1 -
So there is this one teacher/dev where I just had a lecture. And I easily can say he is one of the best programming teachers I had so far. Not that what he says is a hundred percent correct (heavily influenced by his opinion, ex. Singleton being a good pattern), but he motivates you to think about what you do and the lecture. He saw that no one was following and said that no one could probably remember the start of the lecture and he was damn right.
He's just so open about it and said that it doesn't matter and you have to go home and practice. At the start he said that we all are programmers and not software developers. Explaining the difference and showing funny pictures. A fucking spoon build out of a fork and a plastic cup. But not reusable at all and might break when overheated by the soup. Genius explanation of the difference. On the other side was a spoon which could be hung up on the edge of the bowl without overhearing the end so you don't burn your hand. That is software developing.
Now the point is that I got a bit mad when he said no one here could develop software and when he asked if someone can explain what a pattern is it was my time to shine. Boom, on point explanation and a complement from him following in the question where I got the knowledge from and why I could explain specific patterns. The answer was a simple 'I learn about software developing and engineering in my free time' and then he just said that I'm a nerd. I was so proud and ashamed at the same time.
Long story short: be proud of us. Geeks and nerds are nice persons and I might just have earned some respect among my friends.
I just realized this is a rather long and unstructured rant but I really felt like sharing that little achievement of being recognized. -
Rubber ducking your ass in a way, I figure things out as I rant and have to explain my reasoning or lack thereof every other sentence.
So lettuce harvest some more: I did not finish the linker as I initially planned, because I found a dumber way to solve the problem. I'm storing programs as bytecode chunks broken up into segment trees, and this is how we get namespaces, as each segment and value is labeled -- you can very well think of it as a file structure.
Each file proper, that is, every path you pass to the compiler, has it's own segment tree that results from breaking down the code within. We call this a clan, because it's a family of data, structures and procedures. It's a bit stupid not to call it "class", but that would imply each file can have only one class, which is generally good style but still technically not the case, hence the deliberate use of another word.
Anyway, because every clan is already represented as a tree, we can easily have two or more coexist by just parenting them as-is to a common root, enabling the fetching of symbols from one clan to another. We then perform a cannonical walk of the unified tree, push instructions to an assembly queue, and flatten the segmented memory into a single pool onto which we write the assembler's output.
I didn't think this would work, but it does. So how?
The assembly queue uses a highly sophisticated crackhead abstraction of the CVYC clan, or said plainly, clairvoyant code of the "fucked if I thought this would be simple" family. Fundamentally, every element in the queue is -- recursively -- either a fixed value or a function pointer plus arguments. So every instruction takes the form (ins (arg[0],arg[N])) where the instruction and the arguments may themselves be either fixed or indirect fetches that must be solved but in the ~ F U T U R E ~
Thusly, the assembler must be made aware of the fact that it's wearing sunglasses indoors and high on cocaine, so that these pointers -- and the accompanying arguments -- can be solved. However, your hemorroids are great, and sitting may be painful for long, hard times to come, because to even try and do this kind of John Connor solving pinky promises that loop on themselves is slowly reducing my sanity.
But minor time travel paradoxes aside, this allows for all existing symbols to be fetched at the time of assembly no matter where exactly in memory they reside; even if the namespace is mutated, and so the symbol duplicated, we can still modify the original symbol at the time of duplication to re-route fetchers to it's new location. And so the madness begins.
Effectively, our code can see the future, and it is not pleased with your test results. But enough about you being a disappointment to an equally misconstructed institution -- we are vermin of science, now stand still while I smack you with this Bible.
But seriously now, what I'm trying to say is that linking is not required as a separate step as a result of all this unintelligible fuckery; all the information required to access a file is the segment tree itself, so linking is appending trees to a new root, and a tree written to disk is essentially a linkable object file.
Mission accomplished... ? Perhaps.
This very much closes the chapter on *virtual* programs, that is, anything running on the VM. We're still lacking translation to native code, and that's an entirely different topic. Luckily, the language is pretty fucking close to assembler, so the translation may actually not be all that complicated.
But that is a story for another day, kids.
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I got enrolled in 'extracurricular activity' in second grade of my elementary school. We were playing some games at first, but later teacher started to show us programming and explained the matter very well considering we all were 8 y olds. I got interested and while others would play games I was coding and solved assignments teacher gave us.
My family thought that computer will make me stupid, thinking it was made just for playing games. They promised me to get me the computer if I had highest grades in school. I did, not all of them but tried really hard to be the best, despite that I waited for years and still being close to have aced every subject in the meantime.
I got my first computer when I was 16.
Since that day I was constantly reminded that I am wasting my life away sitting at this stupid box.
Later when I got the job that was well payed, they acknowledged that they were wrong to do that for majority of my life.
My parents are unable to explain what I do at the job as they were never interested in what I really do. "Something with computers" is most common answer you can hear from them.
My parents are non-technical people and they still don't understand how that box works and God forbid that they buy something online. My father even rejects to use smartphone.
They also thought that I'm no college material despite always being in top 5 students of the year (not class, but whole year).
They had other plans for me, but I was aware of that and didn't gave a f00ck about what they want with my life. I knew what I want and that was all exactly opposite of what my parents would like.
I was not the child they wanted, but was good son, even helped them and worked student jobs to pay some bills and to help them financially and still they struggled so hard to find some flaw to my character and decisions just to make their point but more than often failed miserably and just proved how wrong they were and how they don't think anything trough.
Only one who really supported me was my elder sister as she knew I was doing the right thing! She also did it her way and I am proud of her as both of us were dealing with 2 tough customers.
long rant, but wanted to add one more thing, I was never into sport, but was training tae kwon do and was really into it and was decent at it among my peers. When I was going to national competition, on my way out of the house all I got from my parents was: "why are you even going there when you will immediately loose, is it just to travel a bit?"
TL;DR: my family supported me less in my life than worst phone call you had with IT support at your worse ISP!4 -
Don't even know how to start. I currently work as technician (fix broken shit devices like apple and manage our servers).
Before the rant, here's a note: I'm a newbie-ish something.. Like I do some Java and Android stuff but nothing amazing (yet).
Here's my rant:
Boss: Hey, you mentioned in your CV that you do some programming.
Me: Yep, but just starting. Already made few apps but nothing crazy big.
Boss: Well, doesn't really matter. But, can you make an app and a website for us? We'll decide on the budget later.
Me: *kinda suspicious* Ehm, yep? I'll just make a wireframe and show you what I came up with.
*few weeks later*
Boss: So how's the app doing?
Me: I told ya that I'm making only wireframe. If you want the app you can:
a) pay for it
b) don't do anything and I'll make it open-source
Boss: No don't do that. We want the source on our FTP server.
Me: Riiight... That's a big no-no for me. It's gonna be on VCS, otherwise you can forget about the app and web.
Boss: *staring silently at me*
Me: ...
To this day, not a single response from him. We had one meeting where I presented the Website and app design, everyone was ok with it but no answer when I asked about the budget. Should I just scrap these projects and continue making them on github ('cuz I kinda like to learn new shit this way)5 -
Working on a CS370 (Software Engineering) project with 5 people; 2 of which feel like their time is more important than everyone else's so when we all meet as a group to go over presentations, documentation and other things we need to do as a group, they silently sit alone working on bits of code they should have done previously. Then when we can't get docs done and handed in on time, one of the two decides to spam our group chat at 2am when 2 of us are sleeping because we work in the morning, one of us is sleeping because of morning classes and the last one is doing god knows what. Like, I'm sorry. But failure to do your shit on time does not constitute an emergency on my shit. All of our weekly peer reviews reflect on how no matter what we say to these two; they refuse to work as a team.
!rant, more like dev hint
In a team, your time is not more important than team time. You can do things on your time whenever you want; but unless your entire team shares your schedule, team time might be a rare commodity and should be used as such. -
It's always a matter of much is there to do and in what language...
There is the IDE-Zone, which is dominated by IntelliJ (CLion be praised when you do Rust or C++) for large stuff and heavy refactorings.
Always disputted by VS Code with synced settings. It's nice and comfy and has every imaginable language supported good enough, especially when its smaller change in native code or web/scripting stuff.
Then there is the "small changes" space, where Vim and VS Code struggle whos faster or which way sticks better in my brain...
might be you SCP stuff down from a box and edit it to re-upload, or you use the ever-present vi (no "m" unfortunately)
sometimes things are more easy for multi-caret editing (Ctrl-D or Alt-J), and sometimes you just want to ":%s/foo/bar/g" in vim.
I am sure that each of these things are perfectly possible in each of the editors, but there is just reflexes in my editor choices.
I try to stay flexible and discover strenghts of each one of my weapon of choice and did change the favorites. (Atom, Brackets, Eclipse, Netbeans, ...)
However there are some things I tried often and they are simply not working for me...
might for you. I don't care. and I'll just use some space to piss people off, because this is supposed to be a rant:
nano just feels wrong, emacs is pestilence from satan that was meant for tentacles instead of fingers, sublime does cost money but should not, gives me a constant guilty feeling (and I don't like that) that, and all the editors from various desktop environments are wasted developer ressources. -
I feel like I’m putting a lot of pressure on myself because I haven’t done much developing lately. I started a ASP.NET Core tutorial/book (that I already made a rant about) I’m enjoying it and the imposter syndrome that accompanies learning something new. But I’m scared I won’t be able to grasp anything from the project I’m building with the tut and won’t be able to actually do anything with it. But we will see hopefully when it’s complete I’ll understand it better. And I also have college to worry about so fuck that and my teacher that never likes my answers no matter how accurate they are4
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"being gifted is a curse. You are f*cling crippled, you believed you were gifted, but you have been crippled the whole time."
I never could agree more to these words (healthyGamerGg, a youtube therapist specialized in people with issues related to videogames)
If you read my last rant you may in fact know i have a lot of issues with the implications of our jobs and truth be told, it all boils down to my iq.
Or better: to the fact i have a decent skill for abstracting stuff (iq is so freaking generic)... It can be a blessing while solving issues, but it feels awful when you realize that no matter the amount of money, you will still need something else to be happy the first day of work.
Sometimes I really wonder if I am an a-hole, stupid or if i think these 2 things to deny the fact my reasoning is correct.
On a side note table top games are very easy to enjoy: as soon as I sit at the table my brain goes: "the game is gonna be very boring if you play normally, at the best you are gonna learn a new strat, at the worst you are winning and it'll be just an ego jerk off... What if you play stuff you feel like to play and enjoy the ride and the conversation without planning to win?"
Except cards against humanity and yogi. Those two must be won!
(Yogi is a game where you play cards which give you restrictions e.g: "keep an index on the tip of the nose for the rest of the game" or "place this card on your head for the rest of the game" you lose as soon as you fail any of the cards you played or if you declare you can't draw)4 -
!rant, but satisfying.
Got pulled in to a demo for some work that I had been apart of previously, but not recently since I had rolled on to a client. The Manager in charge of the work had fought me being pulled on to said client, as he wanted me committed to this project (which I didn't want to be invovled with). I had rolled off the engagement earlier this week, which is why I suspect I was included in this demo. So we are going through the motions, they are asking questions, I'm sitting quietly watching. out of the blue, Manager dude decides he wants to ask me a difficult question, because I'm sure he assumes he will stump me. I respond with "Not sure I'm the best to answer that specific question, since I haven't worked on this in a minute". He confirms that he only wants me to answer. So I do. And boy was I glad his camera was on, because he went from "Got em" to "Fuck, he got me" in a matter of seconds, and I could barely keep from smiling. After my answer, I respond with "Anything else you'd like to know?" to which he mutters "No, thank you" and quickly moves on. Talk about a victory. I'll ride this high through next week, I think. -
No matter how much i think i am sorted out regarding my career, one small shit happens and i am again confused.
I previously interned for 2 months in a company as an Android dev(it was a 4 month internship, but i got it reduced to 2 because of my college exams)
It was a nice ad based company. Their main focus was on their web products and had no Android product or team( they just had a thought for expanding in Android) . So clearly i was their first recruit/intern
I worked their, all alone, at my pace, without any external help. It was a picnic for me as nobody bossed me around or gave me deadlines as nobody knew my work, and i got paid. They would just wait me to report my daily work, i would write my stuff honestly, but i know they understood jack shit
I was told that once the alpha product is liked by the investors we will recruit a team, but i made the product in 1st month and never got info about any recruitment going on. I was just told to fix the bugs and work more on it.
When my internship ended , i was already bored out getting stuck at a place without any senior help . Plus they damaged relations with me on other reasons( halted my stipend for last month for 60 days, that's another rant, but it was mostly the stupidity of hr dept)
So now i started applying for other companies. My original company called me afterwards but i made an excuse to be out of state and talk after new year(it was honest)
Other companies are now showing interest with a lower pay , but now am feeling like a stupid person going from a decent pay and comfortable environment to a lesser pay but aggressive environment .
Should i contact my original company again? I feel guilty leaving them this way, but to be fair i was wasting my time there (quite literally, i was making my assignments and writing blogs there when stuck)3 -
!rant
Got a Job lately and therefore three Interviews.
In two of them was a question about SQL Injektion and no matter what teck stack you apply for that's the time to mention PHP :P1