Yet another commercial seminar upset I won't give up a day of my time to fly to the UK to speak at the event for no payment or reimbursement for my travel.

But of course I should think about the exposure and networking opportunities! 😕

EDIT: since this announcement, collabs have been made free to post for all devRant members!

Introducing two big new devRant features!

First, the one @trogus and I are most excited about - Collabs!

Collabs are an easy way to start projects or work on existing projects with the awesome members of the devRant community. You can post a collab listing for the awesome open source project you started that could use some more contributors, that fun idea you have for a brand new project, or really anything you want to gather some fellow devs for. We think it will be a lot of fun.

Collabs also is a devRant first - it's our first paid feature. For each 2 week collab posting, we're charging $14.99. But we wanted to make sure to thank devRant users who have been with us for a while and anyone who contributes often, so anyone with 2,000 points or higher (now or in the future) gets one free collab listing!

The main reason we see collabs as a great first paid feature is because requiring payment or 2,000 points serves to be a slight barrier in posting a collab. We think for collaborations to be successful it's important to have some way to keep out listings where the poster has no intent of following through and we hope this is a good start to doing that.

NOTE: if the collab you are looking to create is devRant-centric (ex. a devRant Chrome extension), we will give you a free credit especially for that so you don't have to pay or use your earned free one. Just contact us (info@devrant.io) if your project falls into that category.

In addition, after tons of demand from the community, you can now change your username and email address! One important note is that you only get to change your username one time every 6 months, so use it cautiously :) You can access this feature in the "more" tab, then settings, then "Edit username or email."

If you have any questions or feedback about any of this, just let us know! We hope everyone enjoys :)

A former colleague made an online shopping app. Boss wanted to promote him to Senior Developer when he still working with us.

14 days ago another colleague checked the code and told the boss that it's ready for production. No one asked me because everyone in the company thinks am the stupid developer of them all.

So what happened?
Well the total value of the cart was being over to payment gateway using a hidden field. Well you know the rest of the story.

The client has sued our company for this issue and boss came running to me and asked me to check if it was our fault or something else.

I checked and found the hidden value where the total value of cart was being stored and send over to payment gateway. The following is the conversation between me and the colleague who checked the code:

Me: So you checked the code and everything was okay?
Him: Yes, all good.
Me: Did you see this hidden field where the total value of cart is being passed to the payment gateway?
Him: Yes
Me: Why didn't you fix this?
Him: What's there to fix?
Me: Well someone can temper the value and let it pass to the payment gateway.
Him: No, they can't we are using https
Me: I' am done with you

He has Masters in software engineering and has few security certificates.

Client: I want you to reverse engineer this piece of software!!
*posts some link to an exe on altervista along with some unrelated crap*
Oh and "I PAY"! (Because you can't even take that for granted anymore these days.)

Me: Alright, I'll look into it but I'm not a reverse engineering expert so don't expect too much.
*Closes Facebook*

Client, day after: Hey have you looked into it already? Have you finished it already?! HEY, RESPOND ALREADY!!!

Me (thinking): YEAH AFTER 1 DAY AND NO PAYMENT DETAILS WHATSOEVER, I INSTANTLY DROPPED EVERYTHING JUST TO PLEASE YOU, FILTHY RAT SACK!! You fucking wish, motherfucker. Down to lowest priority you go! And if I don't feel like doing it, how about I just drop your request and tell you to suck my fleshy snek, HOW ABOUT THAT HUH? Fucking piece of shit 😤

Dear nerds from all over the world,
We get it. 404 pics are funny.

But did you know there other status codes too?
Like...
204 - No Response
301 - Moved
302 - Found
400 - Bad request
401 - Unauthorized
402 - Payment Required
403 - Forbidden
501 - Not Implemented
502 - Service Temporarily Overloaded

I'm sure you'll also find funny situations with these.
Thanks. We're the best!

There once approached me a client, with a request to be done. Here is a recap, with emphasis on time limits.

C: Ok, so we need this and this thing to be done that and that way...
*short talk about technical side of the project, unimportant to the rant*
C: Can it be done by 25th, this month? (It was 4th of the month)
M: No way, it'll take at least a week more, so realistically I'd say around 7th next month.
C (Had no option but to agree on the date)
*we arrange the price as well (was not a bad one at all)*

So I started working on the thing and one night, about a week or so in, I probably had a cup of tea too much, I suddenly have a breakthrough. I sat behind a computer from 22:00 till 17:00 next day, nonstop. I didn't even eat anything in the meantime. The project was far from done, but I did quite a lot of work. Anyhow, when I have completed the project, not only was I not over the deadline, it was 22nd of the month, so even before the wanted time! When I contacted the client and told him that I am done, he was ... let's just say very happy. The deployment went fine, but when I checked my bank account, for the payment, there was a surprise waiting for me. The number was 25% more than what we have arranged! Me, believing that it was a mistake, immediately messaged him about it and he responded:

No, this is just a small gift for you, because you finished that quickly.

(and not to forget, I have coded things for way less than those 25% and was completely fine with the price, so it was not a small amount)

And then one day you wake up and discover that your first boss,

the one who hired you when you had no experience

who believed in you when nobody else did

and also paid you a full decent payment when the rest of the world tried to pay you less than half the amount

who taught you a lot about the business and even when you disagreed, it was impossible to get angry because he was calm and gentle always

and treated you so many lunches and dinners

…was beaten and killed by a former colleague…

I have no words…

Sayonara 👋 boss
I will miss you so much on this Earth 😢

Story of my most useless meeting?

Too many to mention. Here's one. Years ago a new HR associate was specifically hired to better engage the workforce. About once a week, she conducted about an hour to two hour meetings which consisted of every 'touchy-feely' idea you could think of. I swear any day I was going to walk into a meeting and do the "fall back into your partner" trust exercises.

One particular meeting, 'Betty' engaged us with the topic of what keeps us motivated, and I was a little more annoyed than usual because I was behind on a system critical project and these meetings were mandatory.

User1: "Knowing I make customer satisfaction my number one priority."
User2: "The strong sense of accomplishment I feel by doing my best"
Me: "Money"
<you could almost hear Betty's gasp>
Betty: "Oh, no, money shouldn't be the motivator. Money is like icing on the cake. Tell us what keeps you happy and engaged."
<other users nod their heads in engagement>
Me: "Again, money."
User3: "I can't...ugh..I don't believe..oh..why would you say that? I think being part of such a great team is payment enough."
<more nodding of heads>
Me: "Do you work for free? I don't. None of us do. Would any of you keep doing your jobs here if you weren't getting paid?"
Betty: "That is really not the point of this meeting."
Me: "Sure it is. I'll bet if Order Taking starting providing bonuses for positive after-call surveys, employee satisfaction would go through the roof. Anyone else like that idea?"
Betty: "Your attitude isn't helping this discussion. Lets move on."
Me: "Lets not. In 20?? the Gartner group performed a study where they 'discovered' the primary motivator for employees was money. You want employees to perform better, you pay them. It is really that simple."
<I could see the looks of "Its OK to speak my mind?" and others wanting to speak up>
Betty: "Moving on. Lets go over the company core values again and discuss how they enrich our lives at work and at home."

I kept quiet for the rest of the meeting.

The poop hit the fan, and my boss pulls me into a conference room
Boss: "Betty is really pissed at you. She went directly to the VP of HR"
Me: "Good. Does this mean I don't have to attend the enrichment meetings?"
Boss: "Yea, that was her idea of punishment. Lucky bastard."

I designed a logo for a family member's business with the expectation that I would receive payment once the work was completed. I wasn't expecting a lot, I only really do freelance work for software but I know my way around Illustrator. I'm not one to charge family anywhere near full price and I felt no contract was needed. We were back and fourth for a little bit, getting the logo to his liking. Silly me during all of this didn't watermark any of the images I was sending (didn't think I'd have to, you know... Family) and a little while later he's gone and ordered shirts with the logo on it without paying or even contacting me. When I confronted him about it, he pulls out the whole "No contract was made" bullshit. It's ridiculous how arrogant people can be, I was asking for $50. I put a good 15 hours into it with all the alterations he wanted. 15 hours I could have spent on actual clients.

TLDR; Designed a logo for a family member without a contract, he decided not to pay.

1. A client asks a website.
2. Client pays 50% upfront.
3. I create the site on my server he gets no access.
4. I request rest of payment.
5. Client doesnt want to have the website anymore and tells me to keep the money and he nearly closes his business.

Happens to me 4th time so far.
Not fair.

RANT Incoming
Not necessarily dev related but I need to get this off my chest.

So a bit of a backstory. I had to stay late from school the other day and ended up having to take an Uber home. The ride was fine lady was nice. Everything seems to be going well and there were no signs of any payment failure.

Then yesterday, I had to stay late again. I never said that I had an outstanding balance on my account. Apparently Uber was having problems charging my Android pay account.
So I ended up being stuck at school for like 3 hours. Great!😑

So I emailed Uber when I got home. And this is when I started pulling my hair out. I don't know how many replies I had, but each time I had to tell them that I was not using a prepaid card.

This was one of my replies:
"I'm sorry, are you real? If you are, here is a quick summary of the issue. I am using ANDROID PAY with my CHASE DEBIT CARD. Not, NOT, NOT a prepaid card. I happen to know that CHASE DEBIT CARD(which is the card I use, in case you have already forgotten) works with uber because MY FATHER USES THE EXACT SAME TYPE OF CARD with uber. He uses a CHASE DEBIT CARD(again I use that same type of card as well). So by using LOGIC I am able to deduce that a CHASE DEBIT CARD is in fact compatible. AGAIN THIS IS NOT A PREPAID CARD!!! If the card is incompatible, WHY DOES THE APP ALLOW BE TO ADD IT?!?! Also in response to your last email... Because I am using Android pay, do you really think that an ANDROID would be able to use APPLE pay? Also Google wallet is DISCONTINUED! Finally, PayPal DOES NOT CONNECT TO UBER. Returns a "Server Error." So please stop wasting my time with generic help solutions. Believe me, I have already googled my issue, and nothing comes up. That is why I contacted Uber. I want my driver to be paid, and, uber had made it SO painful with unhelpful "Solutions" to problems that don't even APPLY TO MY ISSUE. No not even mention PREPAID cards in your reply or I will consider you a robot built by monkeys banging their heads on a keyboard. Uber HAS my VALID payment information, USE IT! If there is a phone number I can call, please, enlighten me"

And the response was:
"Thanks for reaching out with this.

Happy to help with this issue you are having.

After reviewing your I can see that the only payment method associated with your account is an ANDROID PAY card and it is also a prepaid card. Some cards and methods are not compatible with our billing processes and can't be used with Uber. This includes prepaid cards."

So I concluded that they are monkeys.

Then Uber banned me from logging into my account because I didn't pay.
So now it is impossible for me to pay because I can't do anything with my account.

Now they want my SSN and a bunch of other shit that I won't give them.

I told them that they were being illogical, and I got the exact same response about the prepaid bullshit.

So I sent them this photo as a goodbye.

I get my driver's licence next weekend, so I won't need Uber anymore. YAY!

Also mind grammatical errors, I talked it in and am to lazy to proofread

*signs up for Skillshare*
> Sorry, your password is longer than our database's glory hole can handle.
> Please shorten your password cumload to only 64 characters at most, otherwise our database will be unhappy.

Motherf-...

Well, I've got a separate email address from my domain and a unique password for them. So shortening it and risking getting that account stolen by plaintext shit won't really matter, especially since I'm not adding payment details or anything.

*continues through the sign-up process for premium courses, with "no attachments, cancel anytime"*
> You need to provide a credit card to continue with our "free" premium trial.

Yeah fuck you too. I don't even have a credit card. It's quite uncommon in Europe, you know? We don't have magstripe shit that can go below 0 on ya.. well the former we still do but only for compatibility reasons. We mainly use chip technology (which leverages asymmetric cryptography, awesome!) that usually can't go much below 0 here nowadays. Debit cards, not credit cards.

Well, guess it's time to delete that account as well. So much for acquiring fucking knowledge from "experts". Guess I'll have to stick to reading wikis and doing my ducking-fu to select reliable sources, test them and acquire skills of my own. That's how I've done it for years, and that's how it's been working pretty fucking well for me. Unlike this deceptive security clusterfuck!

I'm getting so pissed off by this client, here's the gist

We signed agreement defining the following deliverables:
- news page and news article page
- releases page and release info page
(it's a guy from a record label)

After the signature we (me and my colleagues) went to work and finished all that (+ a little more actually, yea I know never overstep your agreement right but we did) and we got paid (all good)

Now after payment he's asking us to do more (some kind of mail installation thing), so I obviously tell him, as I actually have many times before, that our agreement only stretched as far as those 4 deliverables and we wouldn't work without a new agreement defining a new set of requirements or an hourly rate.

Next he goes and tells me the following
==
We already have an agreement. I'm not paying you on an hourly rate as you are not next to me. Let me know
-- First off no we don't, the agreement only covered the 4 pages
== immediatly after
Also you really need to work on your costumer service. Your attitude is very rude. I don't know how many clients you have but all this distrust attitude is not in your favours. Let me know if you want to proceed?
-- Are you fucking kidding me? I am rude and distrustful? I JUST DO MY FUCKING JOB YOU PRICK

Sorry just need to let off some steam

I thought there was no worse freelancer site than fiverr.

*insert "Boy you were wrong" here*

freelancer.com

No. Just No.

- Limited to 8 bids as a free account
- You get 1 bid back every 90 FUCKING HOURS
- CLIENTS ARE EVEN MORE RETARDED THAN ON FIVERR
- HALF OF PEOPLE WANT YOU TO SELL YOUR UPWORK ACCOUNT TO THEM
- 5€ FOR 2000 WORDS OF TRANSLATION? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING? END YOURSELF PLEASE
- "Design a custom social network (video chat, chat, forum, shop and payment gateway) quick!!!" for 100€, within one day.

What the fuck.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH

Ahhhhh devrant... long time no see.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I dont know what to do...

Edit: I missed you, devrant

!!pointless story

Bug report comes in from a coworker. "Cloudinary uploads aren't working. I can't sign up new customers."

"I'll look into it" I say.

I go to one of our sites, and lo! No Cloudinary image loads. Well that can't be good.

I check out mobile app -- our only customer-facing platform. None of the images load! Multiple "Oops!" snackbars from 500 errors on every screen / after every action.

"None of our Cloudinary images load, even in the mobile app," I report.

Nobody seems to notice, but they're probably busy.

I go to log into the Cloudinary site, and realize I don't have the credentials.

"What are the Cloudinary credentials, @ceo?" I ask.

I'm met with more silence. I use this opportunity to look through the logs, try different URLs/transforms directly. Oddly, everything seems fine except on our site.

I check Slack again, and see nothing's changed, so I set about trying to guess the credentials.

Let's see... the ceo is basically illiterate when it come to tech, so it's probably not his email. It's a startup, and custom emails for things cost money, and haven't been a thing here forever, so it's probably oen of the CTO's email aliases. he likes dots and full names so that narrows it down. Now for the password.... his are always crappy (so they're "easy to remember") and usually have the abbreviated company name in them. He also likes adding numbers, generally two-digit numbers, and has a thing for 7s and 9s. Mix in some caps, spaces, order...

Took me a few minutes, but I managed to figured it out.

"Nevermind, I guessed them." I reported.

After getting into Cloudinary, I couldn't find anything amiss. Everything looked great. No outage warnings, metrics looked fine, images all loaded. Ex-cto didn't revoke payment or cancel the account.

I checked our app; everything started loading -- albeit slowly.

I checked the aforementioned site; after a few minutes, everything loaded there, too.

Not sure what else to do, and with everything appearing to work, I said "Fixed!" and closed the issue.

About 20 minutes later, the original person said "thanks" -- never did hear anything from the ceo. I've heard him chatting away in the other room the entire time.

Regardless, good thing for crappy passwords, eh?

This is my first post on devRant!
Story time:
It was on my first job as a developer, learning a lot but getting paid less than 50% of the minimum monthly wage of my country.
It was settled in the interview that as I gained more experience, I could handle more projects and earn more money.
At the time, I was living with my parents and didn't have to pay rent and some stuff, so I was like "Well, I'm gonna learn a lot and, if I put a lot of effort into it, soon I'll be making more money".
We agreed that I'll only develop, but 4 months into the job, I was already going to clients
and started coding there (having the client on my back every minute, not being able to work properly) and fixing some computer/network issues they had,
because my boss said I should do it.
Things at home started to go south, and suddenly I needed more money, so I kept doing the work and getting paid a little bit more
A year goes by, devs came and go beacuse of the work/payment situation, and I was still there.
From my first "paycheck" to the last day I never got paid on time, and that was the same for everybody else
The last month I was there, I had a job offer with a better salary and weekends free, so I wanted to take it (I worked saturdays there).
We were working at our biggest clients place at the time (a hospital, working in the server room, desk and chair were a total crap),
so I wanted to have a good conversation with my boss and tell him whats up, after all, I was really grateful for the job despite all things.
We headed outside and started talking. He basically begged me to stay, said that he will pay me on time and offered me more money (less than the other company was offering me),
and that he needed me to finish the implementation and "minor issues" with the app.
I thought about it for a couple of days, and decided to stay. I politely rejected the job offer, and even recommended someone else.
As the days passed, regret was building fast inside of me, until the day that I was supposed to get paid.
He never showed up to the client, told me in a call that he will be there sometime in the morning, that he had the money for me.
So I stayed until my day ended, and still no sign of him. I had no money on me, needed some for gas so I could go, and I called him 5 times.
He picked up the last time, talks to me like nothing is happening and I started to shout at him like I never shouted to anybody before,
got all the things of my chest, and when I was done, he said that he will send the money to my account right away.
This happened on a Saturday, so I quit the following Monday, and lost the other job offer.

So, some time ago, I was working for a complete puckered anus of a cosmetics company on their ecommerce product. Won't name names, but they're shitty and known for MLM. If you're clever, go you ;)

Anyways, over the course of years they brought in a competent firm to implement their service layer. I'd even worked with them in the past and it was designed to handle a frankly ridiculous-scale load. After they got the 1.0 released, the manager was replaced with some absolutely talentless, chauvinist cuntrag from a phone company that is well known for having 99% indian devs and not being able to heard now. He of course brought in his number two, worked on making life miserable and running everyone on the team off; inside of a year the entire team was ex-said-phone-company.

Watching the decay of this product was a sheer joy. They cratered the database numerous times during peak-load periods, caused $20M in redis-cluster cost overrun, ended up submitting hundreds of erroneous and duplicate orders, and mailed almost $40K worth of product to a random guy in outer mongolia who is , we can only hope, now enjoying his new life as an instagram influencer. They even terminally broke the automatic metadata, and hired THIRTY PEOPLE to sit there and do nothing but edit swagger. And it was still both wrong and unusable.

Over the course of two years, I ended up rewriting large portions of their infra surrounding the centralized service cancer to do things like, "implement security," as well as cut memory usage and runtimes down by quite literally 100x in the worst cases.

It was during this time I discovered a rather critical flaw. This is the story of what, how and how can you fucking even be that stupid. The issue relates to users and their reports and their ability to order.

I first found this issue looking at some erroneous data for a low value order and went, "There's no fucking way, they're fucking stupid, but this is borderline criminal." It was easy to miss, but someone in a top down reporting chain had submitted an order for someone else in a different org. Shouldn't be possible, but here was that order staring me in the face.

So I set to work seeing if we'd pwned ourselves as an org. I spend a few hours poring over logs from the log service and dynatrace trying to recreate what happened. I first tested to see if I could get a user, not something that was usually done because auth identity was pervasive. I discover the users are INCREMENTAL int values they used for ids in the database when requesting from the API, so naturally I have a full list of users and their title and relative position, as well as reports and descendants in about 10 minutes.

I try the happy path of setting values for random, known payment methods and org structures similar to the impossible order, and submitting as a normal user, no dice. Several more tries and I'm confident this isn't the vector.

Exhausting that option, I look at the protocol for a type of order in the system that allowed higher level people to impersonate people below them and use their own payment info for descendant report orders. I see that all of the data for this transaction is stored in a cookie. Few tests later, I discover the UI has no forgery checks, hashing, etc, and just fucking trusts whatever is present in that cookie.

An hour of tweaking later, I'm impersonating a director as a bottom rung employee. Score. So I fill a cart with a bunch of test items and proceed to checkout. There, in all its glory are the director's payment options. I select one and am presented with:

"please reenter card number to validate."

Bupkiss. Dead end.

OR SO YOU WOULD THINK.

One unimportant detail I noticed during my log investigations that the shit slinging GUI monkeys who butchered the system didn't was, on a failed attempt to submit payment in the DB, the logs were filled with messages like:

"Failed to submit order for [userid] with credit card id [id], number [FULL CREDIT CARD NUMBER]"

One submit click later and the user's credit card number drops into lnav like a gatcha prize. I dutifully rerun the checkout and got an email send notification in the logs for successful transfer to fulfillment. Order placed. Some continued experimentation later and the truth is evident:

With an authenticated user or any privilege, you could place any order, as anyone, using anyon's payment methods and have it sent anywhere.

So naturally, I pack the crucifixion-worthy body of evidence up and walk it into the IT director's office. I show him the defect, and he turns sheet fucking white. He knows there's no recovering from it, and there's no way his shitstick service team can handle fixing it. Somewhere in his tiny little grinchly manager's heart he knew they'd caused it, and he was to blame for being a shit captain to the SS Failboat. He replies quietly, "You will never speak of this to anyone, fix this discretely." Straight up hitler's bunker meme rage.

Went in, done everything perfectly, they want me in… cool.

“We know you have a 2 months notice, but could you boil it down to 2 weeks?”

“I uh… no… not really, I have tasks to pass and I doubt the company would like me to just rush out like that…”

“Come on, just stop working and tell them to fire you”

“I… no? I told you I have an important role it would be irresponsible to just leave like that… assuming they want me out that bad…”

“Okay then give notice and we’ll send you the contract”

1 week later, fortunately I didn’t give the notice

“Aaaah regarding the contract… we are postponing it for 4 months cause we needed 2 roles and we decided to hire the other role as we wait”

2 months and a half later, still didn’t give notice cause the postponing was a red flag

“Aaah sorry buddy the budget is not enough but we have to wait 3 more months cause investors moved the payment to January”

Never heard from them again… fortunately I didn’t give the notice and I started to search another job after the 2 months and a half thing.

Remember: until the contract is signed, nothing is set in stone.

> Root struggles with her ticket
> Boss struggles too
> Also: random thoughts about this job

I've been sick lately, and it's the kind of sick where I'm exhausted all day, every day (infuriatingly, except at night). While tired, I can't think, so I can't really work, but I'm during my probationary period at work, so I've still been doing my best -- which, honestly, is pretty shit right now.

My current project involves legal agreements, and changing agent authorization methods (written, telephone recording, or letting the user click a link). Each of these, and depending on the type of transaction, requires a different legal agreement. And the logic and structure surrounding these is intricate and confusing to follow. I've been struggling through this and the project's ever-expanding scope for weeks, and specifically the agreements logic for the past few days. I've felt embarrassed and guilty for making so little progress, and that (and a bunch of other things) are making me depressed.

Today, I finally gave up and asked my boss for help. We had an hour and a half call where we worked through it together (at 6pm...). Despite having written quite a bit of the code and tests, he was often saying things like "How is this not working? This doesn't make any sense." So I don't feel quite so bad now.

I knew the code was complex and sprawling and unintuitive, but seeing one of its authors struggling too was really cathartic.

On an unrelated note, I asked the most senior dev (a Macintosh Lisa dev) why everything was using strings instead of symbols (in Rails) since symbols are much faster. That got him looking into the benchmarks, and he found that symbols are about twice as fast (for his minimal test, anyway), and he suggested we switch to those. His word is gold; mine is ignorable. kind of annoying. but anyway, he further went into optimizing the lookup of a giant array of strings, and discovered bsearch. (it's a divide-and-conquer lookup). and here I am wondering why they didn't implement it that way to begin with. 🙄

I don't think I'm learning much here, except how to work with a "mature" codebase. To take a page from @Rutee07, I think "mature" here means the same as in porn: not something you ever want ot see or think about.

I mean, I'm learning other things, too, like how to delegate methods from one model to another, but I have yet to see why you would want to. Every use of it I've explored thus far has just complicated things, like delegating methods on a child of a 1:n relation to the parent. Which child? How does that work? No bloody clue! but it does, somehow, after I copy/pasted a bunch of esoteric legacy bs and fussed with it enough.

I feel like once I get a good grasp of the various payment wrappers, verification/anti-fraud integration, and per-business fraud rules I'll have learned most of what they can offer. Specifically those because I had written a baby version of them at a previous job (Hell), and was trying to architect exactly what this company already has built.

I like a few things about this company. I like my boss. I like the remote work. I like the code reviews. I like the pay. I like the office and some socializing twice a year.

But I don't like the codebase. at all. and I don't have any friends here. My boss is friendly, but he's not a friend. I feel like my last boss (both bosses) were, or could have been if I was more social. But here? I feel alone. I'm assigned work, and my boss is friendly when talking about work, but that's all he's there for. Out of the two female devs I work with, one basically just ignores me, and the other only ever talks about work in ways I can barely understand, and she's a little pushy, and just... really irritating. The "senior" devs (in quotes because they're honestly not amazing) just don't have time, which i understand. but at the same time... i don't have *anyone* to talk to. It really sucks.

I'm not happy here.
I miss my last job.

But the reason I left that one is because this job allows me to move and work remotely. I got a counter-offer from them exactly matching my current job, sans the code reviews. but we haven't moved yet. and if I leave and go back there without having moved, it'll look like i just abandoned them. and that's the last thing I want them to think.

So, I'm stuck here for awhile.
not that it's a bad thing, but i'm feeling overwhelmed and stressed. and it's just not a good fit. but maybe I'll actually start learning things. and I suppose that's also why I took the job.

So, ever onward, I guess.
It would just be nice if I could take some of the happy along with me.

I was working on a website for a client and he wanted an illegal (breaking TOS) functionality and I refused to implement that part so he paid me $800 less than what he owed me. Unfortunately there was no real contract besides some emails detailing the specs and payment, and if I pushed it any further he would've charged back the money he already paid me. Basically I'm screwed :/

I guess now I know how important it is to get those contracts and detailed specs written out from the very beginning.

I swear to god, I'm going to track down the dipshit who just made my day hilariously painful.

So here I am, finishing up this project that's been going on for what feels like an eternity, when I get an email "why doesn't order X show up in this other system?".

I mean, it's a common thing they can take 15 minutes to push across, so the usual quick glance and what do you know, it's just sitting there as if it's waiting to be pushed through, than an hour later... it's still there, so I start digging, maybe a data issue, nope looks all good, customer details, payment details, products...

just another order, jump on the logs and all looks fi......... wait.... why does this postcode have 3 digits and not 4 , Australia has 4 digit postal codes fyi, looks at order again, 3 digits, look at log, 3....hold on why's it only 3 digits, checks code, handled as string... ok..... where the fuck would it drop a digit.... frontend requires 4 digits, validation requires 4 digits... how the fuck did you get 3 digits in... I can't see anything anywhere that logically makes sense for this🤔

Drops address into google and it's a postcode starting with 0.

Jumps on DB and the fucker is an int in the postcode table. For all you playing at home 0123 <> 123

I don't know if I should feel bad, or impressed, it's been 7 years since this table was created, and 7 years before someone managed to live in one of these parts of the country with a leading 0.

QA didn't spot this years ago,
No one tested this exact scenario,
The damn thing isn't even documented as a required delivery area, but here we are!

Kudos good sir, you broke it! 🤜 🤛
You sir may get your order now!

Not laughing.

Not cursing.

Both for interviewing and being interviewed.

Some interviews could have been taken straight from a mexican telenovela.......

"Yeah, I worked for a year in the Walmart IT administration."

"Ok, what did you do?"

"Oh I had the high responsibility of taking care of swapping printer cartridges, programming the registers, stuff like that..."

"You apply for a senior database management role, you're aware of that?"

"Yeah. I took a bootcamp for 3 months in the evening after work. I'm up for the job and expect a payment of <lol, even having a stroke while writing a payment check that number will never happen>".

I made that up - but we had these cases... The story is just rewritten and mixed up for obvious reasons.

When I'm being interviewed, the same thing can happen by the way, too.

IMHO a interview is made not only for the company, but for me as an employee, too. I don't sugar coat it. I want to know what type of shit I'm getting into and how much I'm drowning in it.

Some "types" of interviewers react kinda funny when I start roasting them with questions...

For example, the authoritarian type usually reacts with disrespect. How dare u piss on my front lawn.... Kind of reaction. Which makes it hard not too laugh, because who wants to work for someone who throws a tamper tantrum during a interview? Even harder when the same guy promised you heaveb before (the flowery kind of bullshit, like everything's peaceful and fine and teams great and they have such a great leadership...)

Even worse is the patsy.

When you're sitting in an interview and the only answers you get are:

- Sorry, I don't know.
- I'm not allowed to ....
- Not in my area of expertise....

All just nice ways of saying: I will say nothing cause then I'd need to take some responsibility.

:)

The most Mexican telenovela stuff though in being interviewed is when I managed to divide a team of interviewers and it starts to become a "Judge Judy" or similar freaked out justice show...

A: "No, our team doesn't work that way".
B: "But you will in the short future, WE committed to it".
C: "Not that I'm aware of".

And me, an obvious sinner and person who enjoys entertainment and schadenfreude, just keeps adding kerosene to the fire.

"So, it seems like the team of A has its own rules which do not apply to B and C, do they also have greater funding?".

Oh it makes just fun to spur a good blood bath.

WWDC was not about developers this year. It was a conference call with shareholders and investors. No bold moves, just several consecutive "this product will no longer suck" and "look at what you can do now, big companies" announcements.

watchOS will work now (it's too slow ATM). tvOS will just be less cumbersome. macOS still lagging behind (I mean, I already have great third party apps that clean my hard drive, but thank you for solving a problem I didn't need fixing). iOS 10 is simply about messages (it's not going to make me ditch Telegram, because it doesn't have an Android client, regardless of how large you make emoticons appear on screen). Apple Music will still suck, especially if you have more than one Apple ID. And Apple Maps will continue to be useless outside of the US.

Where did the bold moves go? Where's the "we're breaking up iTunes into several distinct apps that serve their purposes really well"? (Guess iTunes is too valuable a trademark...) Where is the "we will end the WKView vs UIView vs NSView nonsense"? (You know, OOP is about creating classes, which are abstractions and whose instances deal with the particularities of their environment; a View is a View, regardless of where they live; an instance of a View should care about being on a watch or on a phone, not the developer.) Where is the "we love indie developers and will help you"? They showed off a lot of integration with well established apps, that don't really need to stand out any more. They showed that video of "normal people" who have developed apps, but no one knows about them! And then they changed the AppStore so you can pay to advertise your app, but who has the means to do that? Indie devs are surely on a tight budget, so who's that helping again?

For me, this WWDC was sugar coated with a "we love you developers" BS, but was a business statement to large companies ("see what you can do now Uber, Lyft, WeChat, WhatsApp, Doordash, all the P2P payment apps, ESPN, WSJ and so on?"). It's already a known fact that the bulk of the AppStore revenue goes to the top 1% apps. And what's the point of having tvOS be open to developers if it is very unlikely I'll ever develop anything for it unless I work at CBS?

It's great that they want to make it easier for kids to learn Swift. But there's very little point in that, if those kids' apps aren't going to be used and are simply going to make the "we have 2 million apps on the AppStore" announcement look shinier for shareholders. Without a strong indie community, the Swift Playgrounds app for the iPad is just manufacturing workers for large corporations.

And without a strong indie community, things get tougher for indie clients as well. Who will have the money (and therefore the time) to implement all those integrations in order to even dream about competing with heavily funded apps?

Yeah... So thanks, Apple, but no thanks.

The bossman asked if our signup service sends an automated email after we successfully process someone's payment or when we promote them to full customer.

That sounds like a simple query, yeah?

Well.

Here's some background:

We have four applications; one in React, three in Rails. I'll replace their names to retain some anonymity.
1) "IceSkate" is the React app, and it's a glorified signup form. (I wrote this one.)
2) "Bogan" is the main application, and is API-only; its frontend has been long since deprecated by the following two:
3) "Bum" is a fork of "Bogan" that has long since diverged. It now contains admin-only tools.
4) "Kulkuri" is also a fork of "Bogan" that has long since diverged. It now contains tools specifically for customers, which they can access.

All but IceSkate (obv) share a database.

Here's how signups happen:

Signups come in from IceSkate, which hits a backend API on Bogan. Bogan writes the data to the database, charges the card immediately, and leaves the signup for moderation.

And here's how promotion from signup to customer happens:

Bum has a view allowing admins to validate, modify, and "promote" a signup to a full customer. Upon successful promotion, Bum calls "ServerWrap", a module which calls actions on the other applications; in this case: Bogan.

Bogan routes execution through three separate models before calling "ServerWrap" again, this time calling KulKuri.

Finally, KulKuri actually creates the customer!

After KulKuri finishes creating the customer, execution resumes on Bogan, which then returns, causing execution to resume on Bum. Bum then runs through several other models, references the newly-created customer object (as all three share a database), and ... updates the customer with its current data, and then updates the signup object. After all of this, it finally shows the admin the "new customer" view.

It took me 25 minutes to follow the chain of calls, and I still don't know quite what's going on. I have no idea if any of it sends an email or not -- I didn't see any signs of this, but I very easily could have overlooked something.

So, to answer bossman's question... I asked the accounting people if they send the email manually. If they don't, it's automatic, which means I missed something and get to burrow through that mess all over again!

I really hope I missed something; otherwise I need to figure out how and where (and when!) to send the email...

just...
errrrgghh

Never begin a freelance project without a down-payment -.- 240+ hours in, an eager sounding client, no response for weeks now! What a waste.

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.

Story time:
Yesterday I wanted to go to the theater with my girlfriend. It was her idea because as a student you can get reduced tickets for the play, but only via the online store exactely two hours before the play starts. We had already tried two weeks before but with no success. So this time I said i want to be on my pc with a proper browser and not a mobile version like last time. So we are sitting at home me in front of their website on one screen and with a clock on the other screen. Two minutes realy i hit refresh and I get a selection for the reduced tickets, nice.

You would think.

After selecting the amount. ERROR: Can not get your tickets. I was like fuck they are already sold out because it's a popular play. But hey let's try again. I got one ticket but not the second one, okay strange lets try again, same ERROR again. WHAT the FUCK, no feedback what so ever. My girlfriend had then the idea that they maybe restricted the amount for reduced tickets to one (does not state this explicitly but hey lets give it a shot). Use second browser select one ticket. ERROR can not get you the amount of seats. Rage level near to a 1000 why did it work two minutes before but not anymore. Trying around for five more minutes finally got the second ticket.

Now the real fun begins.

Proceeding to checkout should not be that hard you would think, but you need to be registered for that. Okay so let's do that. The salutation is not required neither is the address for the tickets but you need to have a company name??!!!!! The fuck?? I am not self employed and neither are a most other people around here so why is this field mandatory? Beeing a little under stress I decided to found the "asdf" company with my girlfriend.

Now one would think checking out is easy. Not so fast.

After accepting the terms of service another ERROR, unable to accept your data. What data? I did not input anything new? Where does this come from? Ok never mind I am going to pay with credid card that must work!
ERROR: Internal paymentservice initialization failure! Sorry what? I thought maybe I was to long idle in this browser and they do not reserve the tickets for so long (which would be no surprise to me at this point). Let's try again. Nope same error.

Now my rage level was really over 9000 but we really wanted to go so I decided to call the customer SUPPORT. Or better to say I had a answering maching telling me for ten minutes how sorry they are that this takes so long, yeah you bet. Then and this is now really great: the support guy asks me: "What error do you see? Internal paymentservice initialization failure?" I was like, okay he knows this so they need to know how to handle it. FUCK NO. "Sorry I can't help you. This is our payment system maybe they (IT) are doing some maintenance I can't halp you. Call the theater directly good day." Sorry what just happened, you fuckers are the vendors for the tickets for nearly all big events around here and the theater explicitly states to call you for tickets but you can not help me? Like hell.

This process took 25 very frustrating minutes and I was really angry and wanted to quit, then I saw that there is also a paypal option which I had not tried. With very little hope i selected everything for the payment, registered with paypal and they told me I already had an account. So reactivated this five year old account payed with all the mobile passwords and tans to finally, after 30 fucking minutes, get a pdf file for a ticket. Repeated the last step for the second ticket and with some time left to get there we were off.

*part rant part developers are the best people in the world*

years back a friend got a job at some non profit, as a program coordinator, and his first task was to "coordinate" the work on creating the new website for the organisation. current website they had was a monster built on some custom cms, 7 languages, 5 years of almost dayly content updates, etc. so he asked me if i would took the job of creating a new website on wordpress. i wasn t really keen on doing it, but he is a good friend so i said ok. i wrote down the SOW, which clearly stated that i will not be responsible for migrating the old content to the new website. i had experience working with non it clients, and made sure everyone understood the SOW before the contract was signed. everyone was ok with it. after three weeks my job was done, all milestones and requirenments were met. peechy! and then all hell breaks loose when the president of the organisation (the most evil person i ve met in my life) told my friend that she expects me to migrate the content as well. he tried explaining her that that was not agreed, that it will cost extra, etc. but she didn t want to hear any of that. despite the fact that she was a part of the entire SOW creation process, because she is a micro managing bitch. in any other situation i wouldn t budge, because we have the contract and i kept all the paper trail, but since my friends job was on the line i agreed to do it. my SQL knowldge at the time, and even now, was very rudimentary, the db organisation of their cms was confusing as fuck... so i took two days of searching tutorials and SO threads and was doing ok, until i got to a problem i couldn t solve on my own. i posted the issue on SO and some guy asked for some clarifications, and we went back and forth, and decided to move to chat. while chatting with him i realised that there was not a chance for me to do all the work in few days without a lot of errors so i offered him to do it for a fee. he agreed. i asked him for his rate, he said if this is a community work i will do it for free, but if it is commercial i will charge the standard rate, 50$/hr. i told him it was commercial, and agreed to his rate. i asked him if he needed an advance payment, he said no need, you ll pay me when the job is done. i sent him the db dumps, after two days he sent me the csv, i checked it, all was good and wired him the money.
now compare this work relatioship with the relatioship with that bitch from the non profit.
* we met online, on a semi-anonymous forum, this guys profile was empty
* he trusted me enough to say that he would do it for free if i wasn t payed either
* i wasn t an asshole to take advantage of that trust
* he did the work without the advance payment
* i payed him the moment i verified the work

faith in humanity restored

There was once this customer, which wanted a project done. It was for around 2/3 weeks of work. The arranged cost was 500€, but when I said how long I'll need, he said:
No. I need it done in 5 days. Every day over, I deduct 50€ from the payment.
I was out of the building in less than a minute.
Fuck this type of customers.

I bypassed the payment system on a paying Internet terminal in Egypt by booting into safe mode. I was 14, and there was no other way of getting Internet, so I was really proud of myself 😁

Previous job:
- Every dev needs to connect to a remote server, and do the coding there because the bosses are afraid that we will "steal" their legacy spaghetti written by the CTO in 2006 (the current year was 2016-2017).
- There are no QAs, because "why do you devs need mommy to look after your codes?"
- Bosses think it's our duty to stay extra hours without overtime payment while talking bullshit about a culture that promotes work life balance. You receive no bonus for staying late, but if you leave work 15 minutes early, HR will have a serious talk with you the next day.
- Bosses require "evidence" when you submit a leave request. For example, you tell them you're taking a vacation, they'll ask you for a copy of airline tickets, hotel bookings, etc.
- Bosses spend a ton on hosting parties for the customers while we're using 6-7 year-old laptops
- The CEO loves firing people for ridiculous reasons. Once he considered firing a guy because the way he walks is funny

Well on my first job we had to integrate payment gateways in client apps for online payment. On my second week in office I published an app on the play store with payment gateway credentials for a different client cause they were there as default values. So the money for one client would go to the other. Nobody noticed it for two weeks and when they did, I thought I had just lost my job and also I would now have to pay all the losses out of my pocket but fortunately I didn't have to cause no transactions​ had yet been made. After that I always checked my integrations atleast five times before publishing. The incident scared the shit out of me but taught me the value of developer responsibility.

I'm a tech lead for a digital agency.

Digital agencies are universally known for being shite. Why? Because they typically push through sub-optimal code with very little testing over tiny deadlines for maximum profit. Maybe I've just had bad experiences but this is the 5th digital agency that I've worked at that does this bollocks.

I am currently sitting on a Teams call at 8:39pm because the fuckwit project/account managers are unable to face up to the big scary client and ask them terrifying questions like "Is this bug a blocker for the deployment?" or "We don't have enough time to fix/change these things, can we delay another day?". They just assume that A - We will work into the evening, and B - that all the issues are P1 and that we should all 'pull together' as 'team players' to get this done in time.

No, Me and my team have to work into the evening for seemingly free because these pricks can't do their jobs properly.

The funniest thing of all? When I speak to the CTO about overtime payment he tries to make me feel bad about "we don't typically pay for overtime..."

Fuck Everyone.

Time to find a new contract.

Worked for this client until 4 o'clock at night because they needed that to be done overnight.

For two weeks they are responding slowly like a turtle. No forecast of payment yet.

May God burn them in the worst part of the hell

I was getting a freelancer job to do some backend work for a company in India that is working for a huge company in Saudi Arabia.

The customer in india was my primary contact, I wasn't allowed to talk to the guys in Saudi Arabia. My contact, we'll call him Aman, asks if i can do frontend too. I decline. Now what follows were 4 weeks of backend work during which Aman called me 10-15 times per day via skype to ask me how I was progressing, and if "insert spec here" was already done. He even called me in the middle of the night, well aware of the different time zones.

But in the end all the work is done, Aman is happy. I request payment.

Aman: We can't pay you yet, you didn't do the frontend!
Me: I'm not doing frontend.
Aman: It's just a few simple changes and then we're done.
Me: Gnnn, fuck it, what do you need?
Aman: Our customer would like the frontend to look better.
Me: Ok, so what exactly should look better?
Aman: All of it.
Me: Do you have any specs?
Aman: No just make it look more modern.
Me: So you want me to rework the whole frontend? That's not just a few simple changes...
Aman: How long would you need?
Me: I actually don't do that kind of work.
Aman: We pay you double your hourly rate if you do this and finish it fast.

(This is were I should have just said no... but the greed...)

Me: Ok, but it will take me about 3 weeks to do that.
Aman: OK.
Me: Do you have any preferences as to how it should look?
Aman: No, just surprise us.

(After this sentence I really should have gotten the hell out of Dodge)

After working 3 weeks changing over 20.000 lines of CSS and most of the HTML I present Aman with the changes.

Aman: No our customer doesn't like the changes. Can you make a different version?
Me: What doesn't he like, any specifics, coloring, styling of lists or the buttons?
Aman: He doesn't like the whole thing. Please make us another version.
Me: Ok, you are the customer, but it would really help if you give me some pointers as to how it should look like.
Aman: Just do your best.
Me: ..., ok, that's helpful.

2 weeks later...

Aman: No our customer liked the version before better. But could you make it look more modern.
Me: *Bangs head against wall repeatedly*
Me: What do you mean by modern?
Aman: It should look more modern, as a whole.
Me: Ok, I get that, but could you give me an example?
Aman: Sends me a screenshot of the overview screen with all the elements encircled and modern written beside them.

1 week later...

Aman: The customer has decided, he likes the original version best. Can you undo all the changes?
Me: Sure but that'll take like 1 hour.
Aman: Oh by the way we were asked by accounting why the price for this project was so high?
Me: *hugh* *gnn* what?
Aman: Well at the beginning, you estimated the backend and frontend work to be done in 4 weeks.
Me: The frontend was never part of the original estimate.
Aman: Can you do anything concerning your hourly rate, so that we can get back to the original pricing.
Me: *make a mental note to never work with an intermediary company in india again and cancels the job requesting the due payment*

Luckily I got paid the full amount but not before having another 10 Skype call with Aman...

This is something that happened 2 years ago.

1st year at uni, comp sci.

Already got project to make some app for the univ that runs in android, along with the server

I thought, omg, this is awesome! First year and already got something to offer for the university 😅
(it's a new university, at the time I was the 2nd batch)

Team of 12, we know our stuffs, from the programming POV, at least, but we know nothing about dealing with client.

We got a decent pay, we got our computers upgraded for free, and we even got phones of different screen sizes to test out our apps on.

No user requirement, just 2-3 meetings. We were very naive back then.

2 weeks into development, Project manager issues requirement changes

we have a meeting again, discussing the important detail regarding the business model. Apparently even the univ side hadn't figure it out.

1 month in the development, the project manager left to middle east to pursue doctoral degree

we were left with "just do what you want, as long as it works"

Our projects are due to be done in 3 months. We had issues with the payment, we don't get paid until after everything's done. Yet the worse thing is, we complied.

Month 3, turns out we need to present our app to some other guy in the management who apparently owns all the money. He's pleased, but yet, issued some more changes. We didn't even know that we needed to make dashboard at that time.

The project was extended by one month. We did all the things required, but only got the payment for 3 months.

Couldn't really ask for the payment of the fourth month since apparently now the univ is having some 'financial issues'.

And above all: Our program weren't even tested, let alone being used, since they haven't even 'upgraded' the university such that people would need to use our program as previously planned.

Well, there's nothing to be done right now, but at least I've learned some REALLY valuable lesson:

1. User Requirement is a MUST! Have them sign it afterwards, and never do any work until then. This way, change of requirements could be rejected, or at least postponed

2. Code convention is a MUST! We have our code, in the end, written in English and Indonesian, which causes confusion. Furthermore, some settle to underscore when naming things, while other chooses camel case.

3. Don't give everyone write access to repository. Have them pull their own, and make PR later on. At least this way, they are forced to fix their changes when it doesn't meet the code convention.

4. Yell at EVERYONE who use cryptic git commit message. Some of my team uses JUST EMOTICONS for the commit message. At this point, even "fixes stuffs" sound better.

Well, that's for my rant. Thanks for reading through it. I wish some of you could actually benefit from it, especially if you're about to take on your first project.

I was on vacation when my employer’s new fiscal year started. My manager let me take vacation because it’s not like anything critical was going to happen. Well, joke was on us because we didn’t foresee the stupidity of others…

I had to update a few product codes in the website’s web config and deploy those changes. I was only going to be logged in for 30 minutes to complete that.

I get messaged by one of our database admins. He was doing testing and was unable to complete a payment on the website. That was strange. There was a change pushed by our offsite dev agency, but that was all frontend changes (just updating text) and wouldn’t affect payments.

We don’t want to enlist the dev agency for debugging work, especially when it’s not likely that it’s a code issue. But I was on vacation and I couldn’t stay online past the time I had budgeted for. So my employer enlists the dev agency for help. It’s going to be costly because the agency is in Lithuania, it was past their business hours, and it was emergency support.

Dev agency looks at error logs. There are Apple Pay errors, but that doesn’t explain why non Apple Pay transactions aren’t going through. They roll back my deployment and theirs, but no change. They tell my employer to contact our payment processor.

My manager and the Product Manager contact Payroll, who is the stakeholder for our payment gateways. Payroll contacts our payment gateway and finds out a service called Decision Manager was recently configured for our account. Decision Manager was declining all payments. Payroll was not the person who had Decision Manager installed and our account using this service was news to her.

Payroll works with our payment processor to get payments working again. The damage is pretty severe. Online payments were down for at least 12 hours. Our call center had logged reports from customers the night before.

At our post mortem, we had to find out who ok’d Decision Manager without telling anyone. Luckily, it was quick work. The first stakeholder up was for the Fundraising Dept. She said it wasn’t her or anyone on her team. Our VP of Analytics broke it to her that our payment processor gave us the name of the person who ok’d Decision Manager and it was someone on the Fundraising team. Fundraising then starts backtracking and says that oh yes she knew about it but transactions were still working after the Decision Manager had been configured. WTAF.

Everyone is dumbfounded by this. How could you make a big change to our payment processor and not tell anyone? How did our payment processor allow you to make this change when you’re not the account admin (you’re just a user)?

Our company head had to give an awkward speech about communication and how it’s important. The web team can’t figure out issues if you don’t tell us what you did. The company head was pissed because it was a shitty way to start off the new fiscal year. Our bill for the dev agency must have been over $1000 for debugging work that wasn’t helpful.

Amazingly, no one was fired.

So just finished the presentation for my internship project. I'm free now!(and can sleep normal times too) But I have a few things I need to get off my mind. Dunno if it'll seem a bit stupid to some of you..but yeahh....
Anyway, during my demo yesterday
Lecturer: So this project of yours uses some open-source stuff?
Me: Yeah.
L: And if the company wants to use if for commercialization they need to pay for the license?
M: Thats basically it. Yes.
L: Well, see..thats the problem with your project. You need to think of all this things. If there's no other options then just code the whole shit yourself. Or maybe discuss with the management on this.
Yeah...see, I doubt the management here cares about us anyway. Oh, you're working on your intern stuff. Not important. Just resize the pictures in my powerpoint will you? Oh and you want to use the company computers for your project? No can do..confidentiality stuff. But make sure the thing will work on our system anyway when you're done with it. And even if you use our computers, they restart everytime you open Word anyway..hahaha. You want access to this thing so you can learn a bit on our company's work. Sorry but no. EVERYTHING is confidential so you can't access it since you're interns, eventhough our company is the one that took you inanyway.
Manager: Oh, the thing you're making is pretty cool. You know,all of you can just give your systems to us later.
Friend: Yeah well, maybe we can ask the company for payment? Haha.
Manager: Hahaha well the company can just take your systems for free since you're doing it on our working hours.
Fuck. You. When we ask to do our stuff you said noooo its the company hours. Do our work. And do your stuff back at home or something. Oh, but then we'll drag you around the state to see the clients, and you'll reach home at 8-9pm or something, but of course you're not tired right? So just code then. Or you're not going anywhere today? You're still not allowed to code here eventhough you don't have any work though...so just sit there and be quiet. Or maybe shred my papers for me. Fuck your working hours.
Lecturer: And well, thats the problem with some students *looks pointedly at me* they want to go to non-technical companies so that they can have it easy. Your friends who go to other companies will learn a lot more.
Do you think I fucking want to be here??? This is the only company I got so fuck that. Even when I get different offers and apply to change companies, you go nope. No can do. Stick with your current company eventhough we know that its shit for IT students because its a big company, see? And we have our university's reputation to upkeep. I came here to learn, not make you the No.1 university or something. And its not like you, or the staffs here, help us with anything.
So fuck all of this. We're gonna tell the other lecturers to stop sending students here. You don't learn anything. I'm done with this shit, not gonna think or worry about it anymore..I'll just, go get cake or something. Yeah.

STARTUP IDEA GUYS SUCKS!!!!

So today one of my friend asked me to do an app for him and finally share 50 percent of the profit that I get. His idea is to build an app that can measure air pollution level, water pollution level, soil fertility range. I was like "what the hell!"... The beauty is that he wants me to pay him 50 percent for giving such (stupid, retarded) idea.

Wondering when these "startup idea guys" will realize that ideas are cheap but execution is worth the millions! Fed-up with such stupid people.

Windows 10 'App Store' Stole My Money.

So I work a 40 hour work week, sometimes more, same as anyone, on my feet, all day.

I get home, buy a little $3.99 app. Won't install. Check it again won't install. I check some guides. Follow all the standard commands, my purchase won't install. Use the tools. won't install.

Naturally I sent off what I'm good at, some hate filled invective

For fucks sake. I'm exhausted, have insomnia and want to wind down. And here microsoft is killing 32bit libraries to dispose of competing services like steam (also fuck gabe in his fat asshole) but I digress.

And they expect us to use their services? Spend our hard earned *fucking money*..and spend half an hour on their dumpster fire fucking 'walled garden' with nothing to fucking show for it?

No refund button. No chat option. Just a fucking feedback hub. Look at it some time. JUST LOOK AT IT. The motherfucking *feedback* hub *frozeup* in the process of my feedback. Microsoft is a sewer of negligent business practices and incompetence.

So I've chosen now to aim two heavy ion cannons at them and warned them too. Two twitter accounts, one with almost 10k followers and another with 15k.

Should have just offered a manual download button microsoft.

My money would have been better spent on alcohol. Cheap alcohol. It's not like it's a lot of money and I don't buy a lot online, but it's the principle. You're fucking *payment* process worked *just fucking fine*.

Anyway can anyone calculate the monetary damage a cumulative quarter million views over the course of a month will do to the reputation of the windows store in dollar amounts?

I'm betting it's going to be a lot fucking more than three fucking ninety nine.

Don't worry microsoft, I'm gonna take it out of your sweet fucking hide.

- Be me (Dev)
- Develop website for client that has an online payment integration.
- Notice there is no one for QA and testing.
- Try to raise voice about it but get shot down by management.
- Get order to push the project to production (because the deadline has arrived, therefore the project must be ready)
- Production performance has an error margin of 15% (customers getting their card over/under charged)
- Get blamed and flamed for everything cuz well, its all the dev's fault.

FML

How can business majors be so gullible?! Who the fuck poisoned their minds with the app hype ?!!

Seriously my tears are 90% from laughter and 10% shame for humanity.

Friend: "Dude I'd like to consult with you the idea of an app...etc"
Me: "Sounds nice, got a business plan?"
Friend: "Yes, but well...you see... development has already started"
Me: "oh cool, how's that going?"
Friend: "well I already made an upfront payment of 2K dollars"
Me: "sounds kind of excessive for the amount of work...wait did you said upfront payment?"
Friend: "yeah, we calculated 30k total"

😐

Me:"umm...that software must be...special...? Can I see it?"
Friend: "that's the thing, they haven't delivered"
Me: " did they give you mockups? A development plan? Demo? Anything?"
Friend: "umm no"
Me: "a god damn receipt?"
Friend shows me a piece of paper with the name of the guy and 2K written on it.
Friend: "he says he's been busy, I wanted your advice"

I blame Eduardo Saverin's fate and my friend's on college's failure to teach "real world assholes 101"

Yes yes yes
Let's spend countless hours writing painful spaghetti that generates a financial report, extend that spaghetti for specs, then not bother to check the amounts or status. or where it says the money went. Nope, checking non-unique names is totally good enough. We're so good at this. Ten points to the legendaries.

Let's also make the object factories not create the objects correctly, and make sure that report includes entries for orders that don't include any actual payments. Oh, their status? "Ready to send" of course! Let's send that totally valid $0.00 to nobody!

Oh, but Root. Root, root, root. You can't ADD payments to this. no no no. if you do, it'll break specs everywhere else that uses that factory! Shame on you for suggesting it.

Pssh, now you want to make a payment just for this report? Why would you do that? Our best devs have been working on this for years! What could you possibly know that they don't? No, they're perfect. Don't touch them. Just make them better, okay? No take, only throw!

Freelancing sucks. "A good developer told me this should take a couple hours." Or "I need an Uber like app with built in payment and social integration. We have a $50 budget and it shouldn't take more than a day or two to build." Or "I need a simple game built. Should work on Apple and Android. No budget but we could work out a share of profits." Really wish I had a real job...

A certain, reasonably sized company had a large in house payment system to handle all their client purchases that was developed many, many years ago. All the devs that developed it had left, and as it "just worked" they hadn't seen fit to get anyone to update or maintain it since.

That was all fine until it suddenly (and completely) stopped working one sunny afternoon.

After paying a small fortune for one of the original devs to come back and look at it, turns out the payment API it was based on had been retired. Warnings of deprecation had been sent out 18 months prior, but they had just been ignored, as the secretary receiving them after the devs left had no idea what it meant.

had an issue where our clients payment gateway would duplicate the charge (at the gateway...not at the application) before sending it to the bank officially - the bank would detect the duplication then void both charges.

the gateway service admitted this was a bug, the bank it was tied to admitted it was a bug - but they wouldnt fix it. so my solution was to send a special uid with the original transaction (put it in a special field) and had the bank track that one as the "known good"

the funny thing? next version of the gateway api included this as a feature, but i got no credit.

Worst exp. on a collab/group project?

Had a few, here is one.

Worked with a dev team (of two devs) in Norway to begin collaboration on providing a portal into our system (placing orders, retrieving customer info, inventory control, etc)

They spoke very good English, but motivation was the problem. Start the day around 10:00AM...take a two hour lunch...ended the day at, if I was lucky, 4:00PM (relative to Norway time). Response time to questions took days, sometimes weeks. We used Skype, which helped, but everything was "Yea...I'll do that tomorrow...waiting on X....I have a wedding to go to, so I'll finish my part next week."

I didn't care so much, I had other projects to do, but the stakeholders pounded me almost everyday demanding a progress report (why aren't you done yet...etc..etc.)
The badgering got so bad I told the project owner (a VP) if he wanted this project done by the end of the year, the company would have to fly me to Norway so I personally push things along.
When real money was on the line, he decided patience was warranted.

A 3 month project turned into 9, and during a phone meeting with the CEO in December
O: "Thanks guys, this project is going great. We'll talk again in February. Bye."
PM: "Whoa...what! February!"
<sounding puzzled>
O: "Um..yes? It's Christmas time. Don't you Americans take off for Christmas?"
PM: "Yes, but not until Christmas. Its only December 12th. Your taking the whole month of December and January for Christmas?"
O:"Yes, of course. You Americans work too hard. You should come over here and see how we celebrate. Takes about a month so we can ease back into the flow of things."
<Jack is the VP>
PM: "Jack wanted this project completed by the end of the year, that is what everyone agreed to."
O:"Yes, I suppose, but my plane is waiting on me. Not to worry, everything will be fine."
<ceo hangs up>
PM: "Oh shit..oh shit..oh shit. What are you going to do!?"
Me: "Me!?..not a darn thing. Better go talk with Jeff."
<Jeff is the VP>
J: "This is unacceptable. You promised this project would only take a few months. I told you there would be consequences for not meeting the deadline."
PM:"But..but...its not our fault."
J: "I don't care about fault. I care about responsibility. I've never had to fire anyone for not meeting a deadline, but .."
Me: "Jeff, they are in Norway and no one is working this project for the next two months. You've known for months about them dragging their asses on this project. We're ready to go. Services have been tested and deployed. Accounting has all the payment routing ready. Only piece missing is theirs."
J: "Oh. OK. Great job guys. I guess we'll delay this project until February."
<leave the office>
PM: "Holy shit I'm glad you were there. I thought I was fired."
Me: "Yea, and that prick would have done it not giving a crap that it's Christmas."
<fast forward to Feb>
O: "Our service provider fell through, so I'm hosting with another company. You guys know PHP? Perl? I don't know what they called it, but it sounded so cool I bought the company."
PM: "You bought what? Are we still working with Z and B?"
O:"Yea, sort of. How's your German? New guy only speaks German."
PM: "Um, uh... no one here speaks German"
O:"Not to worry, I speak German, French, and Italian. I'll be your translator."
PM: "What? French and Italian?"
O: "On my trip to France I connected with a importer who then got me in touch with international shipper in Italy. I flew over there and met a couple really smart guys than can help us out. My new guy only speaks German, J only speaks French, and R speaks Italian, Russian, and a little English. Not to worry, I'm full time on this project. You have my full attention."

We believe the CEO has/had some serious mental issues, including some ADD. He bailed within the first month (took another vacation to Sweden to do some fishing) and left me using Google Translate to coordinate the project. Luckily, by the end, the Norwegian company hired a contractor from England who spoke German and hobbled together the final integration.

So , at my first day as an intern in the company that would probably be employing me, i heard some great lines that made me gain so much hope in humanity -.-

From HR :

- "your timings will be 10 to 7 , 6 days a week."(even though it takes 4 hours to commute to and fro from that place). "We have a 9 hour a day schedule, and anything between 5-9 hours is considered a half day"

- "we have a 1 paid holiday per month scheme. And that starts after first 3 months, and yes TitanLannister, that also applies to interns. You may take a leave but that won't be considered for payment"(even though the said intern's internship is of 3 months and he already notified that he would be needing a 10 day leave for his exams and a few other college related work leaves )

-"here is an official laptop you could work upon(has average specs but inferior to my laptop). Note that its already loaded with slack, and a browser history tracking software, so you might wanna log out of that if you want to use it for personal use. Also if you want to use your personal laptop, then these tools would still be added into your laptop"

-" all the things mentioned above are connected to this fingerprint card that will automatically upload those details on an hr software and enable history tracker "

-"take your time, but we need this task done by you in next 24 hours. There is no deadline, but we need this work done asap"

In the words on purgatony:
"This is hardly working
This is hardly living
This is my JOB"

So now I have to pay taxes because I'm employed. Fair enough, sounds reasonable.

Go to the government's diseased scrotum of a webapp to tramit some ID stuff and shit. All good. Then I go to the bank, so I can open an account, so that I can receive the money, so that I can pay the government.

What happens? The guy at the bank tells me he can't access my ID, so he can't open my account. Understandable. I go once again to the gonorrhea infected maggotsoup that is the government's mother fucking webapp. THEY BLOCKED MY ID.

Problem? I had to attach images of some documentation, they say the images are illegible. I try again with a clearer image, ten fucking times the resoulution.

Is that good enough? NOOOOOOOOOO0=00=======0===000 oo O O OO O O, I am the government, my sole purpose in life is to be a dick in your asshole.

So what do I do? I, calmly, grab the documentation, go to the nearest office, and politely explain the situation to the dude behind the counter. Surely, he can verify himself that my papers are in order, no?

NO. HE CANNOT.
IT CAN ONLY BE DONE THROUGH THE APP.
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME.
WE ARE DOOMED AS A SPECIES.

LISTEN TO ME, DEAR GOVERNMENT.
AND DEAR TAXMEN.
AND ASSOCIATED BUREAUCRATS.
PLEASE HEAR ME OUT.

IF YOU DON'T UNBLOCK MY ID, I CANNOT OPEN A BANK ACCOUNT.
IF I DO NOT HAVE A BANK ACCOUNT, I CANNOT RECEIVE ANY MONEY.
IF I CANNOT RECEIVE ANY MONEY, THEN I CANNOT PAY **YOU**.
SEE HOW THAT WORKS?

ITS OK.
JUST SUSPEND THE PAYMENT I OWE.
YOU KNOW, THE ONE THAT'S DUE IN A FEW DAYS??

OH RIGHT!
YOU'RE STILL ASKING ME FOR THAT MONEY.
SILLY ME.
I THOUGHT I MAY BE EXEMPT.
SINCE YOU YOURSELF HAVE FORBIDDEN ME FROM PAYING.

ARRHGHHGGHGHGHGHGH!!!!!!!!
YOU IRREDEEMABLY STUPID FUCK.

Have you encountered projects that were beyond saving?

Been freelancing for a client via agency for the past year. In the beginning the deal was to maintain identity verification sdk for android maybe 10-15 hours a month or so. Their flow consisted of around 25-30 screens, so I took it thinking it was easy. Boy I was wrong.

Codebase was and still is a complete spaghetti, backend weird and overcomplicated and impossible to talk with someone in backend. Had to reverse engineer their complicated flows many times just to make a small change on the app. There also are lots of issues with capturing/sending camera recordings especially on older devices. The fact that Im the only dev maintaining this doesnt help either.

First few months it was just maintenance, later some small features and soon it become a 40 hour a month gig. I was able to deal with it but then management changed, they started micromanaging me heavily and now they want me to do 60-70 hours a month. Also they asked to implement some unnecessarily complicated features and to be honest without refactoring most of the codebase I cant even begin to think of how to implement them.

Also workload in my main job increased. Started sacrificing my evenings, weekends and basically my wellbeing to work on their product. Tried to relax but then I realized Im just spending my freetime thinking about their project all of the time. Best part is that last few updates fucked up the whole flow and I dont even understand where the problem is anymore: backend, 3rd party integration issues or something else that I did.

Last friday told them that my availability changed and Im quitting. Told them that Im gonna provide support till the end of the month but no big features. Just spent a full shift in my main job and another full shift working on their product, trying to untagle their spaghetti.. Im totally lost and burned out. Meanwhile stupid manager is asking why "simple" stuff according to him is taking too long.

I should receive my last payment from agency this week, also asked them to send it to me earlier but no answer so far. At this point Im so burned out that I dont care anymore about the last payment, even if client complains that everything is broken and doesnt want to pay me. Project is beyond fucked and that SDK as well as their backend is a ticking time bomb. Im done.

When client requesting something, it has to be done ASAP.

But when i ask about the payment...

I must sign some documents declaring the job was done

The documents then must be sent to manager

The manager must create another document to be sent to finance division

The finance sent that thing to director to sign the damn document so finance can make a payment

Oh shit the first document before i start the project went missing, i have no idea why they need that

Some weeks has been passed till today

Cant find the document

Recreate the document

I must sign it back but they said no worries, we can advance to next step so i can get paid today

Manager creates a document

Manager sent that document into finance

Oh shit the financial division is having some seminar, its friday so it will be processed on monday

WTF

Boss: We need to disable CSRF and any other form of security, because that shitty, insignificant client has a website that is abomination anyone's eyes, can't pay because of the iframe thingy.

Me: I'd advice against it. This is a significant security issue that just screams to be exploited and there has to be a solution, but idk much about this situation.

Boss: Idk we need to kiss every clients ass till they come. Remove all the security

Me: *Just wants to get home, last one in the office besides the boss* fine
*removes it, deploys and gets the fuck home*

...2 weeks later

Payment gateway: Yeah, we blocked your account, because someone was trying to purchase 30k product in a span of 1h

I'm not even mad about that, but rather about the fact I fucking called it.

* Achievement unlocked: Targeted by scammers

P.s. no major damages, cause the guys from the payment gate understand shit about security.

I started my internship at the end of the year..
Fuck my ass!!! This code I have to work with is a huge pile of shit.
The code base I need to work with is around 40k LOC. It is a mixture of C++, C, Java, Python, Bash and I think I saw some lonely js files around.

A list of awesome parts:
- Paths are hard coded.
- Redundant code everywhere
- No documentation or inline comments available

Most of the comments in the code are just old code that is not used anymore. But the cherry on the turd is the class that should provide all kind of useful functions in my daily routine. About ninety percent of the functions have the same description or nothing. Sometimes a function name says "readSomethingFromSomewhere" but instead it writes something to a file. It is really confusing and I need to check everything twice instead of rely on what the function name promises.
I have also learned why copy paste isn't that good. The brief descriptions of every method in a files are always the same.

getName() - Description: Fork child process
getIp() - Description: Fork child process
getIpv6() - Description: Fork child process.

Surprise: None of these functions forks a child process. :D

Another awesome feature is the thing that they store up to five different versions of libraries. Everyone with slight modifications but no hint which one you need to use. Sometimes it is the newest, sometimes the oldest which is running in production. Another case of try and error.
Oh and my dev machine is a potato with a power supply and a fan. I started with NetBeans and every time I compiled the code it sounds like the machine wants to lift off and leave for a better place. (At this point I switched to Emacs and everything runs smoothly now)

At first I thought that I'm just not that good at coding and understanding a big project from scratch but some colleagues have the same problem. The whole system is very inflexible and it is all about "std::cout"-debugging to check if your changes do what you want them to do.

Currently I'm just trying to fix this mess to make the life for the next student or employee easier. The first month was just frustrating as hell. I need to ask so many questions and most of the time the answer was "I don't know, haven't touched this code in years". Needless to say that my progress isn't that awesome but at least I get a nice payment for 20 hours of work a week.

Security lifehacks 101

Why pay for password managers? Just use one secure password for every service you use! Password managers are really designed for fools who don’t know that you can just use one password for every service and who are ready to pay for that shit.

The best practice is to use your name starting with a capital letter + your main credit card number + CVC code from the back of that card as your go-to password. It’s long and hard to bruteforce and you can remember everything that way! You just need to remember that one password and you’ll always remember your payment info! No need for apple’s bad Apple Pay which is not so secure after all like everything else that Apple offers.

So I found this consulting job a while ago thinking that some extra cash while studying would be nice to have.

I meet with the guy, a researcher trying to start a business up, good for him I think, maybe we'll hit it off, continue working, why not? Except he has no clue how to write working code, all he ever did was writing matlab scripts he says, thats why he hired me he says.
Okay, fine, you do your job I do mine.

He hands me the contract, its about comparing two libraries, finding out which one is better suited for his job, cool, plots and graphs everywhere.

Except this is an unpaid job. YOU WHAT?! It's a test job. FINE. At least it'll look good on my resume.

We talk about the paid part where I'm supposed to scale the two libraries, looks good, as expected from an ML engineering perspective. It comes to payment. The dude has no idea how taxes work, says he has a set amount to pay and not a penny more. I explain with examples how taxes are paid, how you get reimbursed for them and so on. Won't budge. Screws me over.

Opens the door for other jobs I think, he'll learn next time I think and take the job.

Fast forward a month, 90% of the job done, he adds a third thing to compare. Gives a github link to a repo with 2 authors, last commit a year ago. There are links to a 404, claiming compiled jars. Fuck.

Not my first rodeo, git clone that shit, make compile, the works. The thing uses libs that ain't in no repo, that would be too easy. Run, error, find lib, remake all the things, rinse repeat.

The scripts they got have hardcoded paths and filenames for 2 year old binaries, remake that shit.

It works, at least I get a prompt now. Try the example files they got, no luck, some missing unlinked binary somewhere, but not a name mentioned. Cross reference the shit outta the libs mentioned on readme, find the missing shit, down it.

Available versions are too new, THE MOLDING NUTCRACKER uses some bug in an old version of the lib.

I give up. Fuck this. This ain't worth the money OR time. Wanker...

!dev

In the name of my partner: GO FUCK YOURSELF YOU FILTHY MUSHROOM ADDICT SLAVER! DAMN SUN OF A BITCH!

My partner does her obligatory internship for university. Guess what, the place where she is working offers no payment, 40h a week and even work unrealted to her studies!

She went there with pure enthusiasm and power and this whole non-sense facility of fucktards broke her. She lost her bliss and is really depressed now - mainly because of this fucktard, cock-sucking boss that has no fucking fire anymore and is abusing everyone there mantaly. If not for me she'd get not a songle positive feedback from this whole piece of junk which really, REALLY PISSES ME OF. FUUUCK. How can someone be such a joy sucking prick?

And the university?! They just don't give a fuck because they don't have enough employees to tackle all problems while at the same time their whole organization is the biggest pile if stinky, sleazy shit you have ever seen!! Omg.

Just had to get that out. Fuck.

TL;DR: Why does that online shop NOT support paypal?

I'm a LITTLE pissed.

I wanted to buy some stuff online (since my gf birthday comes closer and I have no city, no car nearby to go shopping) - and this website doesn't support paypal. You know why? Because they had to high fees.

Why on earth don't they do it like any other online shop?! - the user can pay with paypal for a little more % or €.

I don't have an actual credit card but the thing you can get <18yo. Paypal works with it but I can't use any other payment option.

So, company I work at, is on desperate need of PHP developers, who can work in WordPress and Magneto. Company announced vacancy.

Only 20 CVs were dropped 4 days before from today. So company called all of them for interview and I was one of the interviewer. Most of applicants told me that they know Laravel but not WordPress.

I was like fine. Maybe they can work on WordPress too. But I was wrong. Here are some funny interviews:

Me: how many types of inheritance does PHP support?
Applicant 1: 7. Single, multiple, etc..

Me: Do you know difference between interface and abstract class?
Applicant 2: (he just said some gibberish)

Me: why do u prefer Laravel to WordPress?
Applicant 3: because by default Laravel support payment gateway, so we can create e commerce application faster. WordPress doesn't support payment gateway.

Me: how many WordPress site you have worked on?
Applicant 4: I have 4 themes in WordPress.org
Me: Do you create all of them by yourself?
Applicant 4: Yes
Me: Do u know difference between require and include?
Applicant 4: No
Me: Do u know difference between query_posts and WP_Query?
Applicant 4: No
Me: (facepalm)

For some reason, I lost my devRant subscription. No label anymore... but I'm also not charged anymore.

Subscribing again doesn't seem to work, there's a success message from the app, but not from the play store (I have a valid payment method and have other subs), no fees are charged and my account stays unsubscribed.

Has anyone else experienced this?

Me and my developer friend worked with my ex-colleague with this fitness directory website because he promised to give us {{ thisAmount }} upon the {{ completionDate }}.

He was my friend and I trusted him.

It took me weeks of sleepless nights building the project. I had a full-time job that time, and I worked on the project during evenings. All went well, and as we reach the {{ completionDate }}, the demo site is already up and running.

A week before the {{ completionDate }}, he hired his new wife as the COO of the startup. It was cool, she keep noticing things on the site which shouldn't be there, and keeps on suggesting sections that has to be there. I was okay with it, until I realized that we are already a month late with the deadline.

Every single hour, I get a message from them like, "it's not working", "when can you finish this feature?", blah blah blah.. and so on.

I got frustrated.

"I want my fucking life back", I told them. No one cared about the {{ completionDate }}, the sleepless zombies they are working with and our payment. They keep on coming up with this "amazing" ass features, and now they are not paying because they said "it's not complete".

Idiot enough to trust a friend. I was unprotected, there was no legal-binding document that states their obligation to pay.

My dev friend and I handed over the project to this web development company which they prefer, and kept a backdoor on the application.

I kind of moved on with the payment issue after a month. But without their knowledge, I kept an eye on the progress and made sure that I still have the access to their server, DNS, etc..

BUT when they announced the official launch on social media, I realized that I was on the wrong train the whole time.

They switched to a different server.

They thanked all the people involved with the project via social media, EXCEPT me and my coding partner who originally built the site from ground up. A little "thank you" note from them will make us feel a little better. But, never happened.

I checked up the site and it was rewritten from originally Laravel 5 to CodeIgniter 1. That is like shifting from a luxury yacht where you can bang some hot chicks, to a row boat where your left hand is holding the paddle whilst your right hand is wanking yourself.

I almost ran out of bullets.

Luckily, CodeIgniter 1 was prone to SQLi by default.

I was able to get the administrator password in plain text and fucked with their data. But that didn't make me feel better because other people's info are involved.

So, I looked for something else to screw with. What I found? A message with the credit card details.

Finally, a chance to do something good for humanity. I just donated a few thousand dollars to different charity websites.

I love getting a fucking email for every fucking change, instead of getting a list of desired changes.

You know what? Fuck this, I'm tired of being the nice guy, I'm not even getting paid for this, and you expect me to do it expediently on a Sunday. I'm done, you can find someone else to piss off for free.

These days are the best days of my life, up till now.

My best friend said yes to my proposal, I got a job at my dream company with higher payment, and no issue at all after my uat like last month.

I hope my codes doesn't ruined my day 😂😂😂

So here's my problem. I've been employed at my current company for the last 12 months (next week is my 1 year anniversary) and I've never been as miserable in a development job as this.

I feel so upset and depressed about working in this company that getting out of bed and into the car to come here is soul draining. I used to spend hours in the evenings studying ways to improve my code, and was insanely passionate about the product, but all of this has been exterminated due to the following reasons.

Here's my problems with this place:

1 - Come May 2019 I'm relocating to Edinburgh, Scotland and my current workplace would not allow remote working despite working here for the past year in an office on my own with little interaction with anyone else in the company.

2 - There is zero professionalism in terms of work here, with there being no testing, no planning, no market research of ideas for revenue generation – nothing. This makes life incredibly stressful. This has led to countless situations where product A was expected, but product B was delivered (which then failed to generate revenue) as well as a huge amount of development time being wasted.

3 - I can’t work in a business that lives paycheck to paycheck. I’ve never been somewhere where the salary payment had to be delayed due to someone not paying us on time. My last paycheck was 4 days late.

4 - The management style is far too aggressive and emotion driven for me to be able to express my opinions without some sort of backlash.

5 - My opinions are usually completely smashed down and ignored, and no apology is offered when it turns out that they’re 100% correct in the coming months.

6 - I am due a substantial pay rise due to the increase of my skills, increase of experience, and the time of being in the company, and I think if the business cannot afford to pay £8 per month for email signatures, then I know it cannot afford to give me a pay rise.

7 - Despite having continuously delivered successful web development projects/tasks which have increased revenue, I never receive any form of thanks or recognition. It makes me feel like I am not cared about in this business in the slightest.

8 - The business fails to see potential and growth of its employees, and instead criticises based on past behaviour. 'Josh' (fake name) is a fine example of this. He was always slated by 'Tom' and 'Jerry' as being worthless, and lazy. I trained him in 2 weeks to perform some basic web development tasks using HTML, CSS, Git and SCSS, and he immediately saw his value outside of this company and left achieving a 5k pay rise during. He now works in an environment where he is constantly challenged and has reviews with his line manager monthly to praise him on his excellent work and diverse set of skills. This is not rocket science. This is how you keep employees motivated and happy.

9 - People in the business with the least or zero technical understanding or experience seem to be endlessly defining technical deadlines. This will always result in things going wrong. Before our mobile app development agency agreed on the user stories, they spent DAYS going through the specification with their developers to ensure they’re not going to over promise and under deliver.

10 - The fact that the concept of ‘stealing data’ from someone else’s website by scraping it daily for the information is not something this company is afraid to do, only further bolsters the fact that I do not want to work in such an unethical, pathetic organisation.

11 - I've been told that the MD of the company heard me on the phone to an agency (as a developer, I get calls almost every week), and that if I do it again, that the MD apparently said he would dock my pay for the time that I’m on the phone. Are you serious?! In what world is it okay for the MD of a company to threaten to punish their employees for thinking about leaving?! Why not make an attempt at nurturing them and trying to find out why they’re upset, and try to retain the talent.

Now... I REALLY want to leave immediately. Hand my notice in and fly off. I'll have 4 weeks notice to find a new role, and I'll be on garden leave effective immediately, but it's scary knowing that I may not find a role.

My situation is difficult as I can't start a new role unless it's remote or a local short term contract because my moving situation in May, and as a Junior to Mid Level developer, this isn't the easiest thing to do on the planet.

I've got a few interviews lined up (one of which was a final interview which I completed on Friday) but its still scary knowing that I may not find a new role within 4 weeks.

Advice? Thoughts? Criticisms?

Love you DevRant <3

It was around 2013, I was working on a project that had a great business idea, a really really bright feature (to this day I state the same) and all I was getting was around 400e/month of salary. (still was a junior dev)

So, I've been going on vacation to Spain for almost 1.5 month, everything was settled, there were no more pending jobs for me as I've finished everything that I could until more things would be done on the application and design that were needed.

It was 2nd week there, I didn't have a laptop with me as it was full vacation mode, no internet connection as it was almost 100e/month at that time, house I've lived in had no internet either. Then, one morning I receive a call that I must be on a skype meeting in any case - it was live or die situation. Me being me - went to a local internet cafe that was around 3km away from the house (on foot) - logged in to the call and proceeded. (I knew something is going to be fishy).

And there it was - I was needed to go back to my laptop and code a huge ass functionality so that we could present it to our testing clients. It was estimated to take around 3 weeks of full working days. No future payment, no compensation was offered but as stupid as I was - I went on with that and worked half of my vacation on full-day schedule... The functionality was delivered... Only after 4 months since the delivery date - the functionality was tested and after total of 9 months - was presented to the testers... I was pissed and asked for compensation as it was my vacation but all I heard was - NO, you took too long of a vacation and therefore it's your own fault. Soon after that I've started to receive every bit of blame if I was even 1 hour off the set deadline that was set by the manager that didn't have a single clue how programming works or even how to use the internet properly....

All in all, I'm still hurt of the 3 weeks that I've missed but since I've left the job 4 years ago (my salary had increased but I've quadrupled it since then) - I tend to see that it's a common practice to require things NOW and only deal with them MONTHS later...

Morale of the story:
Avoid working on your vacation at any means. If that will mean a lost job - then be it, you'll find a new one, presumably a better job.

PayPal = GayPal

PHASE 1

1. I create my personal gaypal account
2. I use my real data
3. Try to link my debit card, denied
4. Call gaypal support via international phone number
5. Guy asks me for my full name email phone number debit card street address, all confirmed and verified
6. Finally i can add my card

PAHSE 2

7. Now the account is temporarily limited and in review, for absolutely no fucking reason, need 3 days for it to be done

8. Five (5) days later still limited i cant deposit or withdraw money

9. Call gaypal support again via phone number, burn my phone bill

10. Guy tells me to wait for 3 days and he'll resolve it

PHASE 3

11. One (1) day later (and not 3), i wake up from a yellow account to a red account where my account is now permanently limited WITHOUT ANY FUCKING REASON WHY

12. They blocked my card and forever blocked my name from using gaypal

13. I contact them on twitter to tell me what their fucking problem is and they tell me this:

"Hi there, thank you for being so patient while your conversation was being escalated to me. I understand from your messages that your PayPal account has been permanently limited, I appreciate this can be concerning. Sometimes PayPal makes the decision to end a relationship with a customer if we believe there has been a violation of our terms of service or if a customer's business or business practices pose a high risk to PayPal or the PayPal community. This type of decision isn’t something we do lightly, and I can assure you that we fully review all factors of an account before making this type of decision. While I appreciate that you don’t agree with the outcome, this is something that would have been fully reviewed and we would be unable to change it. If there are funds on your balance, they can be held for up to 180 days from when you received your most recent payment. This is to reduce the impact of any disputes or chargebacks being filed against you. After this point, you will then receive an email with more information on accessing your balance.

As you can appreciate, I would not be able to share the exact reason why the account was permanently limited as I cannot provide any account-specific information on Twitter for security reasons. Also, we may not be able to share additional information with you as our reviews are based on confidential criteria, and we have no obligation to disclose the details of our risk management or security procedures or our confidential information to you. As you can no longer use our services, I recommend researching payment processors you can use going forward. I aplogise for any inconvenience caused."

PHASE 4

14. I see they basically replied in context of "fuck you and suck my fucking dick". So I reply aggressively:

"That seems like you're a fraudulent company robbing people. The fact that you can't tell me what exactly have i broken for your terms of service, means you're hiding something, because i haven't broken anything. I have NOT violated your terms of service. Prove to me that i have. Your words and confidentially means nothing. CALL MY NUMBER and talk to me privately and explain to me what the problem is. Go 1 on 1 with the account owner and lets talk

You have no right to block my financial statements for 180 days WITHOUT A REASON. I am NOT going to wait 6 months to get my money out

Had i done something wrong or violated your terms of service, I would admit it and not bother trying to get my account back. But knowing i did nothing wrong AND STILL GOT BLOCKED, i will not back down without getting my money out or a reason what the problem is.

Do you understand?"

15. They reply:

"I regret that we're unable to provide you with the answer you're looking for with this. As no additional information can be provided on this topic, any additional questions pertaining to this issue would yield no further responses. Thank you for your time, and I wish you the best of luck in utilizing another payment processor."

16. ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? I AM BLOCKED FOR NO FUCKING REASON, THEY TOOK MY MONEY AND DONT GIVE A FUCK TO ANSWER WHY THEY DID THAT?

HOW CAN I FILE A LAWSUIT AGAINST THIS FRAUDULENT CORPORATION?

Yesterday hr called me for a meeting 1 on 1 that lasted for over 1 hour.

Me: i work on my side project when i get home every day

Hr: ohhh.. so you do have time to work on another project aside from ours?

Me: what? I said i work at my project after work when i come hom-

Hr: so you have that much free tim ok how about this. Would you like to work on another project for our clients? So you'd be working on 2 projects-

Me: ...

Hr: one day you work on this primary project the next day you work on the secondary project

---

Corporate people really think giving me MORE work with NO increase of payment is a REWARD???? Go FUCKV yourselves

Shit, again a long rant...

It all started 9 months ago.
We had a meeting with our group staff (5 people). Back the we discussed, if we should only work online or still send files around with mail.

Sure I suggested to run everything on a root server, would be the best performance/cost choice.

The president and the accounted refused, they said it's still working, why change. Payment will only be trough banktransfer and everybody keeps files local.

Back then I told them, that they will have sooner or later a problem. Files will be missing and bills not payd.

Last week we had a new meeting:
- Some of the group missed files.
- Some bills were unpaid

So now I have time until march to find and finish a groupware/collaboration tool.

I need to run member administration and payment online, this should be finished in October 2018. It should also do accounting.
Im really planing to use WooCommerce for this, I'm really crazy, I know! But I dont have time for that shit!

I work fulltime beside this and almost have no time to code something like that.

Well this week I demanded a memberlist, so I can plan a CRM database.

I received a word file as memberlist.
I asked them if this is a joke, right?!
They said no, thats the list. All the Data was mixed and some user details missing.

I HAD 3 HOURS TO GET IT DOWN IN EXCEL. WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS??? I REALLY WANNA PUNCH YOU ALL IN YOUR FACE!

When I sended it, I didn't receive a response or thanks.

The joke, I'm doing this stuff for free. I volontered, to make something big...

Im really going to shit Lego Bricks next...

Shortlisted hackathon apps:
1. Transmit strings between two phones using sound.
Why the fuck? Why are we reinventing the wheel?
2. Offline payment services app. Sounds cool but is no way feasible in the real world.

The judge of the hackathon was some old PhD college professor who was yawning at the begining of the presentation who didn't understand what was heroku and didn't even bother to listen.
Lessons learnt:
1. Stick to corporate hacakathons
2. Query regarding the judges of the hackathon

Next week I'm starting a new job and I kinda wanted to give you guys an insight into my dev career over the last four years. Hopefully it can give some people some insight into how a career can grow unexpectedly.

While I was finishing up my studies (AI) I decided to talk to one of these recruiters and see what kind of jobs I could get as soon as I would be done. The recruiter immediately found this job with a Java consultancy company that also had a training aspect on the side (four hours of training a week).

In this job I learned a lot about many things. I learned about Spring framework, clean code, cloud deployment, build pipelines, Microservices, message brokers and lots more.

As this was a consultancy company, I was placed at different companies. During my time here I worked on two different projects.
The first was a Microservices project about road traffic data. The company was a mess, and I learned a lot about company politics. I think I never saw anything I built really released in my 16 months there.

I also had to drive 200km every day for this job, which just killed me. And after far too long I was finally moved to the second company, which was much closer.

The second company was a fintech startup funded by a bank. Everything was so much better than the traffic company. There was a very structured release schedule, with a pretty okay scrum implementation. Every team had their own development environment on aws which worked amazingly. I had a lot of fun at this job, with many cool colleagues. And all the smart people around me taught me even more about everything related to working in software engineering.

I quit my job at the consultancy company, and with that at the fintech place, because I got an opportunity I couldn't refuse. My brother was working for Jordan Belfort, the Wolf of Wallstreet, and he said they needed a developer to build a learning platform. So I packed my bags and flew to LA.

The office was just a villa on the beach, next to Jordan's house. The company was quite small and there were actually no real developers. There was a guy who claimed to be the cto of the company, but he actually only knew how to do WordPress and no one had named him cto, which was very interesting.
So I sat down with Jordan and we talked about the platform he wanted to build. I explained how the things he wanted would eventually not be able with WordPress and we needed to really start building software and become a software development company. He agreed and I was set to designing a first iteration of the platform.
Before I knew it I was building the platform part by part, adding features everywhere, setting up analytics, setting up payment flows, monitoring, connecting to Salesforce, setting up build pipelines and setting up the whole aws environment. I had to do everything from frontend to the backest of backends. Luckily I could grow my team a tiny bit after a while, until we were with four. But the other three were still very junior, so I also got the task of training them next to developing.
Still I learned a lot and there's so much more to tell about my time at this company, but let's move forward a bit.

Eventually I had to go back to the Netherlands because of reasons. I still worked a bit for them from over here, but the fun of it was gone without my colleagues around me, so I quit last September.

I noticed I was all burned out, had worked far too much, so I decided to take a few months off and figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I even wondered whether I wanted to stay in programming.

Fast forward to last few weeks. I figured out I actually did want to work in software still, but now I would focus on getting the right working circumstances. No more driving 3 hours every day, no more working 12 hours every day. Just work close to home and find a company with the right values.
So I started sending out resumes and I gave one recruiter the chance to arrange some interviews too. I spoke to 7 companies in the span of one week. And they were all very interested. Eventually I narrowed it down to 2 companies and asked them for offers. And the company that actually had my preference offered me significantly more than I asked for, which settled the deal.

So tomorrow I'm officially signing with them, and starting next week I'll be developing in Kotlin, diving into functional programming and running our code in serverless environments. I'm very excited!

so... not really a rant because i'm happy to be in the long-term zenlike state where i don't really give a fuck about anything anymore, but...

so today's my birthday (thanks in advance for all the semi-mandatory "cheers" reactions and such)

the agency i do temp jobs through sends money weekly (for the one week back) (which is the main and only reason i use them). they arrive at friday 12:25, so that's when i know to go "check" by withdrawing it, and it's also awesome because it's the best time to provide funds to reward myself (by booze/weed) at the end of the week.

last week, nothing came in. i called them and learned it was due to the contact person in the company i did job in being too late on sending the agency list of people who showed up at the work, i was told it's gonna arrive one week later together with the proper payment for the week-1,so effectively i was one week without any money (literally), but on the next week double was going to arrive, which is nice.

that next week of double was now. i found out that no double arrived, only single-value payment. i called them to ask why.
i was told that what arrived was the late payment, and the dude in company was again late with sending the presence list, so the other payment, for the proper week's work, will be a week late again.

so... that kinda ruined my financial planning tor tge week that's going to happen.

i guess my point (if i have any) is... funny how when someone fucks up, there's nobody for me to be angry at and hold responsible in any way, but when i have delays in my work due to delays upstream, nobody gives a shit about my excuses and it's my fault and i should have compensated, it was my responsibility and duty, and me not doing it (to my own detriment, for someone else) is me failing.

funny how the subjective dynamics of the world always somehow works out in a way where everyone else fucks up and i either have to suck it up and be okay with it otherwise i'm a selfish unreliable entitled asshole, or suck it up and extinguish their fire for them, otherwise i'm a selfish unreliable entitled asshole XD

anyone else noticed this in their life?
how does it work? what is the factor that decides whether you're in the "suck it up" class or the "fuck it, someone else will suck it up" class?

doesn't seem to (just) be the money(flow), i've seen this thing happen even in situations where the money/client dynamics were flowing the opposite way to what would be natural for the shit fall direction.

No experience with paid work yet, but for sysadmin work I'd mostly look at the environment and how the previous admin left the premises, and why they left. I wouldn't want to work with a bird's nest for a server room, that's got everything jammed into one clusterfuck of a god-function sort of server or something crazy like that. Separation of services, security, wire management, all those things matter because that's the state that you'll be working in, and cleaning up someone else's mess.. it makes my blood boil.

Payment is important, and if the job doesn't pay well, don't take it. Or if they place a wee bit too much value in those expensive pieces of toilet paper called certificates, it denotes incompetence from the employer by being unable to gauge your skills on their own (and I get that there's time management involved, but come on.. how long can it take to have a conversation with someone to gauge what their skillset is). But the working environment in particular is of vital importance. If it's all going to be yours to build, great (and don't you dare to half-ass it -_-). But if it's already been partially done by someone else, they'd better done it well.

TLDR: Walmart bug 😠

As a dev, I know that bugs happen. But as a dev from a small shop that has many clients and very few devs, I absolutely despise when a large company with many devs has a bug in a product that millions of people use.

WalmartContacts.com. How many devs do they have? And how many dedicated to this 1 product? How many people in QA? (how many on DevRant... lol)
And yet I can't even place an order using their reorder functionality. Seems like they should have this shit down. Seems like they should have all their regression testing ducks in a row. Seems like they should at least show some kind of error message so the user knows what's going on. Instead, no message at all, just the final checkout payment page reloading when I submit leaving me to wonder if my card has been charged or not.

I just oversleeped...
Im not a dev yet, i have a contract job at the factory.
I have worked 1month already from 3 that i singned up for.

The worst thing is that i said i need a day off to give specific papers for my university. It was supposed to be today but i moved it tomorrow due to the problem with transport.

Well my superior is propably realy angry right now... On the bright side i will have 2 days off...

I wont get fired (hopefully) because as contract job they should only substracy the daily pay from my monthly salary.

This is my first time that im late for a real job. My intuition says that i should go but i wouldnt bear the shame... If i were to go i would be late minimaly 2 hours. I have no idea what to do... I will propably stay home and lose the daily payment because im not strong enough to bear the shame today. It would be very difficult to get in the company as well. Ahhhhh! Its difficult to make decisions when you are shy, lazy and scared.

Dealing with a Salesforce (what else,heh) bug that caused batch payment requests to be fired off at seemingly random intervals. Pretty big consequences to that one.

Of course, the problem is that no-one assumes it's a Salesforce bug, and you have to spend an eternity proving that it's not your fault...

SO MAD. Hands are shaking after dealing with this awful API for too long. I just sent this to a contact at JP Morgan Chase.

-------------------
Hello [X],
1. I'm having absolutely no luck logging in to this account to check the Order Abstraction service settings. I was able to log in once earlier this morning, but ever since I've received this frustratingly vague "We are currently unable to complete your request" error message (attached). I even switched IP's via a VPN, and was able to get as far as entering the below Identification Code until I got the same message. Has this account been blocked? Password incorrect? What's the issue?

2. I've been researching the Order Abstraction API for hours as well, attempting to defuddle this gem of an API call response:

error=1&message=Authentication+failure....processing+stopped

NOWHERE in the documentation (last updated 14 months ago) is there any reference to this^^ error or any sort of standardized error-handling description whatsoever - unless you count the detailed error codes outlined for the Hosted Payment responses, which this Order Abstraction service completely ignores. Finally, the HTTP response status code from the Abstraction API is "200 OK", signaling that everything is fine and dandy, which is incorrect. The error message indicates there should be a 400-level status code response, such as 401 Unauthorized, 403 Forbidden or at least 400 Bad Request.

Frankly, I am extremely frustrated and tired of working with poorly documented, poorly designed and poorly maintained developer services which fail to follow basic methodology standardized decades ago. Error messages should be clear and descriptive, including HTTP status codes and a parseable response - preferably JSON or XML.
-----

This whole piece of garbage is junk. If you're big enough to own a bank, you're big enough to provide useful error messages to the developers kind enough to attempt to work with you.

Got one right now, no idea if it’s the “most” unrealistic, because I’ve been doing this for a while now.

Until recently, I was rewriting a very old, very brittle legacy codebase - we’re talking garbage code from two generations of complete dumbfucks, and hands down the most awful codebase I’ve ever seen. The code itself is quite difficult to describe without seeing it for yourself, but it was written over a period of about a decade by a certifiably insane person, and then maintained and arguably made much worse by a try-hard moron whose only success was making things exponentially harder for his successor to comprehend and maintain. No documentation whatsoever either. One small example of just how fucking stupid these guys were - every function is wrapped in a try catch with an empty catch, variables are declared and redeclared ten times, but never used. Hard coded credentials, hard coded widths and sizes, weird shit like the entire application 500ing if you move a button to another part of the page, or change its width by a pixel, unsanitized inputs, you name it, if it’s a textbook fuck up, it’s in there, and then some.

Because the code is so damn old as well (MySQL 8.0, C#4, and ASP.NET 3), and utterly eschews the vaguest tenets of structured, organized programming - I decided after a month of a disproportionate effort:success ratio, to just extract the SQL queries, sanitize them, and create a new back end and front end that would jointly get things where they need to be, and most importantly, make the application secure, stable, and maintainable. I’m the only developer, but one of the senior employees wrote most of the SQL queries, so I asked for his help in extracting them, to save time. He basically refused, and then told me to make my peace with God if I missed that deadline. Very helpful.

I was making really good time on it too, nearly complete after 60 days of working on it, along with supporting and maintaining the dumpster fire that is the legacy application. Suddenly my phone rings, and I’m told that management wants me to implement a payment processing feature on the site, and because I’ve been so effective at fixing problems thus far, they want to see it inside of a week. I am surprised, because I’ve been regularly communicating my progress and immediate focus to management, so I explain that I might be able to ship the feature by end of Q1, because rather than shoehorn the processor onto the decrepit piece of shit legacy app, it would be far better to just include it in the replacement. I add that PCI compliance is another matter that we must account for, and so there’s not a great chance of shipping this in a week. They tell me that I have a month to do it…and then the Marketing person asks to see my progress and ends up bitching about everything, despite the front end being a pixel perfect reproduction. Despite my making everything mobile responsive, iframe free, secure and encrypted, fast, and void of unpredictable behaviors. I tell her that this is what I was asked to do, and that there should have been no surprises at all, especially since I’ve been sending out weekly updates via email. I guess it needed more suck? But either way, fuck me and my two months of hard work. I mean really, no ego, I made a true enterprise grade app for them.

Short version, I stopped working on the rebuild, and I’m nearly done writing the payment processor as a microservice that I’ll just embed as an iframe, since the legacy build is full of those anyway, and I’m being asked to make bricks without straw. I’m probably glossing over a lot of finer points here too, just because it’s been such an epic of disappointment. The deadline is coming up, and I’m definitely going to make it, now that I have accordingly reduced the scope of work, but this whole thing has just totally pissed me off, and left a bad taste about the organization.

Hey! This is a followup to my last story.

TL;DR: I thinking of quitting my old job, got an offer at a startup, about the same pay, but much better working conditions.

First of all, the meeting with my lead. It was a performance report on her side to me, and I got 100 to 110% in performance in all points. My lead said "this team without you wouldn't be this team anymore" - which makes me feel a little bit bad for her if I decide to quit. She is a great team lead, but I don't belive the old company is worth my time anymore.

Now to the new company. Shortly after that performance report meeting, I had a call with the ceo, and what do I have to say besides: What a cool dude. He listened to me, asked me questions about my previous jobs (not just as programmer) and so on. But because first looks are deceiving, I went to their office last thursday. And wow. Their are exactly what I imagined them to be. Cool, young folks, 100% tech enthusiasts, and open minded.

One of the new hires in the new company wanted a 6 months internship between his studies. Instead they offered him a full time job - for the 6 months. They even offered me to pay back my scholarship that I will own my old company for leaving early. This is awesome.

The only things that will be worse than my old job are, that I have to negotiate payment instead of yearly increases, 4 days less paid vacation, so only 26 days, and 40h weeks. And they have no workers council, which isn't good, but it's not the worst either.

I got them fixed on 57.000€, not including an up to 10.000€ annual bonus. The way you achieve your bonus seems good to. It's split in two parts, internal and external bonus. Internal bonus is when you engage with internal events like tech calls, sharing your knowledge on your main IT topics, etc. External Bonus is a bit more complicated, but also straight forward. You work on projects for customers, and if you have less than 3 weeks a year that you dont participate in an project, you get the full bonus.

Last friday, I filed a request for a certificate of employment from my current team lead, this is odd for her because I have never done it before, and she asked why I requested it. I said to her that we can talk about it, and she agreed but didn't call me, yet.

Lastly, another good friend of mine will be employed by my team soon, but for a fraction of the payment that I currently receive! He is doing the exact same work, and even worse, he is doing project managment for his main developer project too! And is getting less paid... I just cant...

Yesterday we needed to update a few cloud instances, the only other person who knows about setting up CICD and our OpenShift Containers than me is only in part time and works two days a week, his trainee didn't know anything, so it's up to me. This isn't hard or anything, but it shows that this system our mangement maintains will fail soon, maybe even with me going? I sure hope so tbh.

One of you guys said, I should go to my team lead and negotiate a higher pay, but the truth is, that because we are a big ISP we have an collective agreement for payment and are grouped by tasks (which is bull shit btw, because I'm doing tasks much higher paid than currently). This also means that I cannot simply jump in another group, and can only increase my current pay to about 115%, which is done automatically every year by 5% up to 115%. Anything above is considered extra, but I don't think they will go with it.

I will decide this week about my future at the old company, but I really don't know what to do...

Well, our client had purchased some inbuilt e-commerce platform and that was assigned to me for customization.

From last one month, stripe connect payment issue was stuck, I was looking into it but no luck, I even updated my boss that I need help from some senior dev. But no luck. Ultimately Today I want to give up on this project, just making my last tries.

And found the issue its just one variable is not set and causing whole payment method to failed:(

huhh.. But Finally relax , Today is deadline of the task. Happy that I completed.

My Boss Abuses me, should I leave my job?

I overheard this tidbit on a bus recently. Okay I'm lying. But in the great spans of
time I've spent reading "dear annie" type articles, many involving how often my meth head step dads beat me while growing up, or in turn how often *I* beat me (oh yeah)..I've come across this in one form another, this, and other dumbfuck questions from the stuttering meek and halfhearted.

They say there are no dumb questions. Well, like that guy who smoked too much weed and
asked "what is the sound of one hand clapping?" (fap fap fap), there are in fact dumb questions.The world is overflowing with them, like a clogged shitter full of tacobell and glitter covered brown gutter wisdom. And it smells like roses, if roses smelled like shit.

Questions like "How do I make sure my cats don't feel lonely once I have my first child?"

I don't know, they're fucking cats. Did you even google this before asking?

Or

"How to make spaghetti?"

Really, is this question written by a bot?

"What is the best javascript framework in year x?"

All of them and none of them. Welcome to hell.

"Whats your favorite color?"

My answer: I'm not five years old any more. And obviously you are. Why are you on this site instead of eating crayons at daycare?

Yes indeed, this and many more dumbfuck questions await you and can be found on the preeminent quora, amongst other sites.
A place, which censored an eminently reasonable answer of mine (I was totally not being a shithead btw).
I responded in kind by removing a whole mess of long form answers of mine.

What I have learned from the experience is this: Humanity is greatly comprised of many people who, having no brains to speak of, wander aimlessly like beasts of the field, glass eyed and slack jawed, in search of a savior. But their savior came a long time ago, once, and many times before. An engineer, or programmer, or perhaps in another reincarnation a guy parting a sea of koolaid after the local ruler swindled his peeps out of another payment for moving some heavy ass stone blocks, but I digress.

And in response to peoples worries, anxieties, everyday problems and concerns, every one of these would be wiseman, every one of these saviors, leaders, and great men spoke these magic words which resonate now down through the ages like the voice of reason and providence:

"Read the FUCKING manual."

"And don't bother me again asshole." (well this last bit is all me, but I'm sure others said it too.)

Why do payment portals never work correctly?
I just wanted to pay for a service (monthly fee, but you can pay manually), and after the very last step, the fucking site just got stuck at a loading circle. 🤨 Now I have no idea if the payment got through or not.

So just babbling my shit down here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Customer wants a place to list his products he sells through other sites. He doesn’t have much money, but he’s a referral from a reliable customer, so we arrange a payment plan. We agree on the details, including a place to post his wares.

Then he tells me he wants to post a few thousand items at a time. I decide to throw in a loading system I built for a previous project.

Then he can’t figure out how to add images. Add a way for him to upload them all as a single zip; no good.

Long story short, let myself get conned into developing a full-on Amazon import system that auto-detects several categories automatically AND imports the images. For no additional cost because I felt bad asking for more and we were working through a language barrier.

Third installment payment never comes.

Lesson learned.

I'm literally in pain right now and not a thing I can do.

If I eat whatever the fuck is wrong with my jaw (cracked tooth or cavity) starts throbbing from the chewing action, in addition to coming on for no reason at all. vision-blurred-waves-of-nausea levels of pain. Enough that I'm alternating between laughter and almost tears.

I've downed four aspirin and it's still just barely enough WITH the numbing gel.

Got lock jaw something aweful.

Barely convinced a dentists office, which is supposed to be closed (and cancelled all it's appointments due to corona), to come in during quarantine. But thats monday. Dont kno how I'll make it. They do payment plans but I'm flat broke because I decided to pursue programming right when all this fucking bullshit went down.

And all I can think of while im typing this is the pain.

And fuck me I cant do weed because my backup plan if I fail at coding is the military.

And this stray dog that the neighbors 'adopted' but leave outside WONT STOP FUCKING BARKING.

Fuck me. Just kill me now. Do it.

Gonna go watch comedy because I read a research paper that says genuine laughter raises pain threshold by up to 10%.

Allright, so now I have to extend a brand new application, released to LIVE just weeks ago by devs at out client's company. This application is advertised as very well structured, easy to work on, µservices-based masterpiece.

Well either I lack a loooot of xp to understand the "µservices", "easy to work on" and "well structured" parts in this app or I'm really underpaid to deal with all of this...

- part of business logic is implemented in controllers. Good luck reusing it w/o bringing up all the mappings...
- magic numbers every-fucking-where... I tried adding some constants to make it at least a tiny bit more configurable... I was yelled at by the lead dev of the app for this later.
- crud-only subservices (wrapped by facade-like services, but still.. CRUD (sub)services? Then what's a repository for...?). As a result devs didn't have a place where they could write business logic. So business logic is now in: controllers (also responsible for mapping), helpers (also application layer; used by controllers; using services).
- no transactions wrapping several actions, like removing item from CURRENT table first and then recreating it in HISTORY table. No rollback/recovery mechanism in service layers if things go South.
- no clean-code. One can easily find lines (streams) 400+ cols long.
- no encapsulation. Object fields are accessed directly
- Controllers, once get result from Services (i.e. Facade), must have a tree of: if (result instanceof SomeService.SomeSubservice1.Item1) {...} else if (result instanceof SomeService.SomeSubservice2.Item4) {...} etc. to build a proper DTO. IMO this is not a way to make abstraction - application should NOT know services' internals.
- µservices use different tables (hats off for this one!) but their records must have the same IDs. E.g. if I order a burger and coke - there are 2 order items in my order #442. When I make a payment I create an invoice which must have an id #442. And I'm talking about data layer, not service or application (dto)! Shouldn't µservices be loosely coupled and be able to serve independently...? What happens if I reuse InvoiceµService in some other app?

What are your thoughts?

When Elden Ring come out I ignored it, I was jobless, no money, game was expensive and I got into hate relationship with it.

Some time ago I launched twitch and saw that DLC come out. Struggled between buying or not because it reminded me my struggle with money.

Found that shop in my city sells box version of Elden Ring with DLC for PS5 and they have last one in their store.

I reserved it online without payment and it wasn’t immediate, I started thinking that someone bought it and I won’t play it. Felt happy I won’t spend money on game I hate.

Two hours later I got email that product is ready for picking up and it meant it will be rush hours when I go get it and didn’t liked it.

I work remotely and I’m not used to seeing many people, but well I wanted to play the game if it’s waiting for me.

After I arrived to the shop and went in I met the most honest guy who is selling games.

He asked me if I am souls fan. I said I never played souls game.

He asked three times if I really want to buy this game because it’s hard.
Told me he approached it 3 times already and didn’t stand a chance.

After chitchat I bought the game, paid cash because I love box games and cash anonymity.

Woman cough on me when I was on my way back, I said to myself fucking hell I’m going to be sick and I am starting my vacation next week.

I got really sick with a flu, played straight 2 weeks, I don’t have playstation plus so I can’t read any clues or play online but I don’t care.

It’s even better because you can enjoy more of the world not reading messages like you’re on gaming forum instead of playing game.

Dying from sickness helped me to don’t care about dying in game.

Two weeks later here I am, just killed Mohg and unlocked DLC on my ps5.

In achievements it says that only 38.5% of people killed Mohg.

Now I sit and wonder how many people bought DLC and will never play it because they can’t kill Mohg.

I love Elden Ring now. One of best games I played to this day.

The timing for it was perfect, the sickness, the game, one of the best vacations and one of the best journey in my life.

To whomever organized that adventure in my life.
Thanks, now it’s time to kill some more bosses.

When I started doing frontend development, I was quite shocked with how people managed to cowboy code their way into building fully functional products with a decent paying client base.

I am talking about fully function SaaS with payment gateway and all, but no version control beyond full backup copies, and spaghetti code everywhere you can literally bring the website down trying to change the homepage design.

... and the startups that managed to do better, some of them forgot the .git on production exposing their entire source code *facepalm*

tldr; Finally my NordVPN subscription comes to an end so I was looking at other VPN providers and I chose Mullvad. So far, it is an amazing experience.

It has been 2 years since I was using NordVPN. It was great at first but soon first problems started to appear. Speeds were not exactly breathtaking and I barely sqeezed more than 40Mb out of it. Another problem was connecting from PC to PC on local network with both of them connected to VPN. I never found a working solution.
Then Tefincom started pushing it literally everywhere. Ads on YouTube (+ partnerships), fake websites redirecting to NordVPN, etc. That was when I decided to just fucking wait until my subscription ends so I can finally delete my account there...
Today is the day. I decided to go Mullvad because it seemed to be really privacy focused (don't kill me - I know I can't have *real* privacy with VPN, but you also can't have that with your own VPN) - they don't know anything about me, no email, no name, no payment data (Bitcoin Cash). Speeds are absolutely f*cking amazing and also local network works!

I hate it when companies got 5 payment options while 4 of them basically lead to a credit card payment.

I'm renting some servers from Vultr and they recently changed something in their payment protocol. Now you need a credit card, even while paying with PayPal, and I don't have a credit card. Using their BTC option doesn't work either since my wallet tells me they are using an incompatible payment protocol (error reason, address & amount) . There is not even a wallet address shown through their BTC checkout to which I could directly send the amount to. You need to open the website on the device your wallet is stored on and then make the payment (so no address is required from their side). Account management is taking a look at it now, I got very quick replies back from their support but this is the first time I'm having such an issue with them.

Oh well, hope they won't take down my servers in the meantime.

I used to work for a consultancy that specialised in a very niche area (I won't say what – this is traceable enough already!). We charged our clients a very high hourly rate, because demand and supply. All the time I'd get calls like the following:
"Please could you just make this small change to the deployment?"
"Yes, of course. You don't have any contract hours left, so I'll just forward you to our billing department so you can sort out the payment first"
"Ah okay, please can you tell us how to do it"
[Even if I explained it, you wouldn't be able to do it – that's why you're coming to us.]
"...or better yet, just do it as a quick fix outside of work?"
[So... work for no pay? No thanks.]

While my company always had my back on these requests (obviously, they wanted payment too), they were so frequent that I got sick of it.

We had this social network in Norway, called Nettby (similar to MySpace). Where you could write HTML code on your profile page, and add css of you had a premium membership. That's how my interest for web started. i had no idea what I was doing.

Then I made a website for a LAN-party for my hometown, with booking seats and payment, and the works.

Made my first commercial website a year later, I was 12 at the time. 6000 NOK (underpaid, but for a 12y/o it was a lot of candy)

Fast forward to highschool, teachers say computers are a waste of time, and I'll never be successful in life with that.

Turned 20 a few months back, I run my own corporation, and work at mid-Norway's largest production company (web, 3d, video, graphics)

Finished building an app for a client and sent it to them. Messaged them every week for a month asking if things were OK and if they needed any assistance (no invoice sent either). 6 weeks later I wake up to a stream of emails and missed calls about a small bug that they demand being fixed immediately because of an urgent business need. Fixed the bug. Sent invoice. It's been nearly 2 months and still waiting for payment. FML.

I was logged into an account just now. On the "My Account" page, there was a button that said, "Manage Subscription." I clicked it. Instead of just opening the subscription page, it opened the help page in a new tab showing me how to manage my subscription. No mention anywhere about how to actually get to the subscription page. All I wanted to do was make a payment.

Payment gateways are such a big pain to implement. Docs say that they will return values A,B,C but what you end up recieving is X,Y,Z.
And don't get me started on the webhooks, man they return values completely different values from the api end points and with no reference what so ever to the fields returned by them.

Wish i could get the documentation writer's address and may be the dev as well!!

I signed a contract with a company that promised flexible working hours, homeoffice (100%) and no traveling. A month after starting traveling begun. Never had a day homeoffice (even though I only asked for it ONE time. And flexible hours my ass. Should I leave? I mean the payment is ok, not awesome but ok. Plus how those guys work there is a hell of a clusterfuck... Kind of depressed because of this situation :/

"Tips" are fucking stupid. Any waiter or anyone who expects me to "tip" them is a fucking clown hobo. Full disrespect

You're telling me i should pay you extra money or else you're not gonna do YOUR job right? A job where you already receive stable monthly salary?

Whoever standardized "tipping" is a fucking CLOWN. Must have been a restaurant business paying billions for this marketing scam to normalize as if tipping 2$ is normal

Who the fuck are you? Are you my fucking friend? A relative? A family member? Why the fuck should i pay you extra money just because you want some extra money?

Guess what fucktard. I want some extra money too. Has anyone ever tipped me in my job? No. Has a client or will a client who paid for a software i develop ever tell me "hey youve done such a great job heres some extra $$$"? No. Will a client ever tell me "hey your software earned me 100k$ heres a $100 tip or a $1000 tip"? NO

If i dont get tips Fuck you. Rough world and live with it.

Anyone who wants or expects tips I immediately view him as:
- beggar
- gypsy
- homeless

What the fuck are you gonna do with 2$ 5$ 10$ tip bro? You're broke and your job sucks go and learn some skill and you might earn more if you're so stubborn about a tip

Today i paid for coffee $7 but the price was 6.25$. Expecting a change, the waiter just went off. I told him give me my fucking 0.75$ back you fuck. And so he did. But he gave me back 0.7$. Where the fuck is my 0.05$????? Fucking retard. You want to take extra money from me just for a COFFEE. YOURE HOMELESS BRO TF U GONNA DO WITH 5 CENTs???

Also the reason why i get so pissed off about this is

1) The other day i was at some other coffee shop also paying for coffee. Dont remember the price but i paid. However i miscalculated. I paid 0.10$ less than i was supposed to. She was standing there and telling me I'm missing 10 Fucking cents. Confused, i calculated again and realized i made a mistake. So i round it up to 1$ instead of 0.10$ and she kept everything instead of giving me the change of 0.90$. So its NOT ok that you're a gypsy for not accepting the payment because its missing 10 cents, but its TOTALLY fine that you take 0.90$ extra money just because you want to. GET FUCKED

2) The other day i was in a store buying food. At the cashier i paid $27. However i was missing 0.02$. The cashier told me do you have 0.05$ to coverup the missing funds. In disbelief, i was looking at her could not believe my fucking eyes what she asked. How fucking POOR can you get. I gave her more than 2 fucking cents and proceeded with my shit

Very valuable shit i learned from these stories: NO ONE will give a shit to accept a payment even if its missing 1 FUCKING CENT. But its totally fine that they dont return me however much they dont want to.

How about you sometimes fucking say "hey i know you you come to this store very often heres a discount"???

Or "its fine that you dont have 0.01 fucking dollars, you can take your food"???

Or "hey i seen you buy here often heres a fucking discount just for you today"????

Because of that i have decided to take ALL of my fucking hard earned money and ask for the exact change. I dont give a FUCK just as much as THEY dont give a FUCK.

For reference:
0.01$ = 1 in my currency
0.90$ = 90 in my currency
27$ = 2900 (4 figures) in my currency

My currency is shit. My country is shit. People in my city are shit. The whole vibe here is shit. And perhaps that is why i shit so much because i get stuffed with too much daily BULLSHIT

Someone has a cloud VM running automated attempts to sign up at our website, which is causing the payment processor to block us because of all the suspicious credit card creation attempts, so we get no new signups... I suppose implementing recaptcha is a potential solution/mitigation for this? Do you guys have any other suggestions?

Well my last job was nothing but a call center with AT&T, but I will tell the story of how I got my current job which is also my first job as a developer.

I was living in Texas. I just moved out of a house I was renting and my girlfriend at the time moved back to Missouri and she was about 5 months pregnant.

She wanted us to all be in Missouri because that's where her family is. No big deal for me, but we didn't have a place to stay yet in Missouri and it was difficult to find a job in a city that has very little to offer in what I do, and of course, wants experienced people despite what said they were looking for.

For 5 months I kept looking for a job while I stayed with my parents and worked at the call center and she with her mom and stepdad so I could save up to not only make the trip to Missouri but to be able to make a payment on a place which we were also having trouble finding.

Even if I didn't have a job or if we didn't find a place, I was not going to miss the birth of my child. So, within about 3 weeks of her due date, it was time for me to make the trip to Missouri. I still haven't found a job but at least we were going to have a place ready for my child within the week. With all the money I saved, we could get through a couple of months of rent, bills and necessities, but still needed to find work.

After only a week after we got the place, I almost gave up so I started to apply at restaurants as a backup after I found a couple more places. The restaurants were quick to respond and I had interviews scheduled for the week that I applied. I knew I was going to be miserable working at a restaurant, but I needed a job, any job. As a last attempt, the day before my first interview with one restaurant, I found a new posting for an entry level position early in the morning. I quickly sent in my resume but didn't expect anything until weeks later. It only took a few hours for a reply and he wondered if we could do a phone interview. I said yes, of course. After the interview, he said that he had one more person to interview but he would let me know. I thought, great, there goes my chance. After only an hour of waiting, while I was looking for more places to apply, he calls me back saying that he wants to hire me. Immediately after I got the job I cancel my other interviews and I started the next day.

It was great I got the job, but it was a far drive. However, they did offer telecommuting, but I had to come in every day until they felt I understood their work flow. I did inform my boss that my son would be born really soon but he was okay with letting me take off when it was time.

I started on a Wednesday in May of 2014 and made the 1.5 hour drive every day. After only working 10 days, my girlfriend calls me at work saying that it's time for the baby to come but it would be a while so I could finish my shift and then come straight to the hospital.

I get there but still no baby. It was a long labor which ended up in C-section at 4 in the morning the next day. My son was finally born on a Wednesday and it was the greatest thing in my life.

But now, I am a single dad(about a year now and it was mutual) and I am the only developer as of a couple of weeks ago. Despite how they handle things and my annoying coworker that sits next to me which I have ranted about in a previous posts, I do enjoy working there trying to improve and move the company forward. After all, I work from home 3 days out of the week now. The rants will still come lol.

Sorry for the mood kill at the end but that's my story. 😁

At the interview: we currently work with Delphi, but we are making changes to go web, so your web background will be a big difference. 3 months in to the job, no web development at all, just workarounds on legacy Delphi code and they managed to "forget" about the agreed payment amount after the third month....

Delays. Delays in payment, delays in scope and spec delivery, delays from the graphics guys, delays from the X guy, the Y guy, this company, that company. No matter what the reason, delays leave that leave the Dev waiting and sitting around despondent and losing interest faster than the second to latest viral video.

And that, folks, is why you never do a rush job, no matter how urgent, without an RFP and answering estimate followed by a signed statement of work confirming agreement to the estimate. Even with a prearranged, perpetual contracting agreement. And also why you NEVER deliver the end product without payment. No matter how much you trust your client or believe they will do right by you, process still matters.

I am currently lost in translation.
Damn, standardization are important.

I am working on integration of biggest payment company in Japan. Their technical guys doesnt know much Emglish.
Their documention of APIs were literally translated into english without any standardization by their dev guys.

And now I am trying to map what they mean in standard terms.

Psst I no english speaker.

First rant!!
I've got into an impasse.
I'm working as a mobile developer for one of the well known multinational corporations. I am working here for 1.5 years, it's my first job and I'm already a team leader. It doesn't mean that this is my programming experience. The problem is that I'm feeling that this job stops me from growing on personal plan. I have no more time to work on my personal projects, i have no real portfolio, projects made for the company cannot be included in my portfolio and so on. And also the payment isn't real good so i can't quit and allocate my full time to my own projects. And without a good portfolio i can't get my own customers.

What do you guys would do in my situation.

Long story short:

My system need to talk with a 3rd party PoS API. The provided doc is pretty useless and with few errors.. nonetheless I came to finish the 99% of the job.

I was stuckd on the 1%, one frickin function.

Everytime I would call the endpoint I would receive...NOTHING. Just a 200.

I've spent like 5 hours trying everything, even sending wrong params...nothing...
Always 200 and nothing else.

Apparently, for an entire nation and the IT Company behind them, is ok to have A PAYMENT API TO RETURN VOID AND A 200 NO MATTER WHAT.

I got the luck/unluck that the main developer of such piece of art came in the office and I've almost throw him out the window (we are at 26th floor).

FUCK OFF DUDE. YOU AND ALL THE OTHERS THAT DO LIKE YOU DO.

P.S. in this days I'll try to write the full story, but it's hard without giving many details...small anticipation: 1.5 months of work and nothing but red bull and coffee...

So here's what I'm putting up with for the last 6 months, clients..

A client proposed to me a project he had in mind. Project is pretty solid, could have a bright future. Since they didn't have the money to spend, we agreed on a % of the income they will earn from the project. So, let's say I get 20% of the income in exchange for building the application. I didn't receive any down payment or payment of any kind.

Just for info, project is a Web application/portal and it is ~80% done at the moment. Client provided a logo and a wireframe/ideas/pictures how he sees the project. I built everything, from DB to Frontend. Also, project is completely custom made, no CMS or anything. Project will make profit by subscription base, every user of the project pays.

For various reasons, we did not yet sign a contract. So, what is my issue...

Client sent me his proposal of the contract, said it's solid stuff, just sign it. In the contract, it stated that he owns the application in full, can sell it, etc. and I get % of the price. There were also other sneaky parts about me having all the responsibility but owning nothing. I naturally declined and took a lawyer to construct a normal contract.

My proposal was/is, I own the application(source code) in full. They are obligated to pay the monthly percentage and can use the application normally and make profit. At any time, application can be bought by the client if they pay for the development. So, basically, they are getting the application to use "for free" with no initial payment/investment. And this is a long term deal, they can use is as this as long as they want. Also, if they go bankrupt at any time, no penalty or payment is needed, the risk is mine.

The client refused and what he claims is the following...

His share in the project is 80%, mine is 20%. If project is to be sold, I get 20% of the price. So, meaning, if we go to production tomorrow, if I want to buy his share, I have to buy 80% of the application I built entirely. Also he is convinced that by "telling me" what to built he's owning everything. In his words, he dictated me the notes and I'm just playing the violin.

I am having trouble explaining to him that he is getting the application to use and make profit basically for free and cannot and does not own the source code unless he buys it off. We are going in circles, I send him the contract to review, he changes it and returns it back. Also, he removes the parts where it is clearly states what he provided and what was done by me.

So, we kind off agreed on the authorship but in the case we break the contract he wants to be able to use the application for 3 more years.

Was anyone here in a similar situation? How do you handle this kind of situations?

This has been bothering me for a while. I have an old freelance client of mine I’ve created an web site for (his company) it was small one so I took the complete payment before deployment and I needed no contract. I deployed the complete version of the site on my server, bought the domain for his company under my name and it has been running for a year now.
Lately he had asked me to give admin privileges to his son (cs student 1y) to upload some photos of their new building. I noticed he ruined several functions on the site in doing so, but I was never paid to support that just the hosting for a year.
When I was making the design I made a simple but pretty logo as a placeholder for the site which went in production since they never gave me company logo. All good, no contract small cash all delivered, everyone happy.
Up until few days when I saw my f**king logo cut out from the site as 250px jpeg and made as a huge banner on the company building..
From my pov I would’ve never given permission to use that since its not something i’m proud of and would suggest to make a better one for a fee. I see this as stolen/unauthorized use of intellectual property. But the laws are super shitty in our country so at this point I am stuck at taking their site, domain a hostage until they pay for the logo they used or take it down or taking legal actions.. we never signed anything about that logo.

Where to begin for writing à mobile payment API for m'y country (and countryside) ?
M'y wish IS to build a mobile payment API that would help everyone to pay online no matter what carrier the user 's subscribed to.

Hello ranters, I'm looking for advice in regards to a freelancing job which I haven't been paid.
In summary, I got a freelancing job in like March 2018, I had to do a simple platform with an administrator section, simple but "long", it had to be fully customizable, so I did it. I then got another project, which I also finished, both by December. I added some functionality not on the requirements and also some other asked by them, I also deployed both of them, tasks not included on the "contract". The problem is that I didn't sign a contract (my fault), it was all verbal. Since I was "friends" with them, I asked them to pay me with a motorbike (of around 2300 USD) and they agreed. Then they gave me another project which started wrong, they asked me to finish it within two weeks with a language I didn't know and other tools I also didn't know, I told them about this and agreed that could be a delay, besides, the requirements weren't totally clear and they were clarified three days after the project "started". After this, we had a discussion about how I later realized I was totally underpriced, that I hadn't been paid yet and how the dude that was like my main contact for the project told me that "my code was all nice and cool but was useless" because he clearly thought that an excel could be used as a database and din't know that I had to parse it and upload it to Firebase, which in total were about 4 million documents and this obviously took time. To not make it longer, I delivered the project 1 week later and they told me that they had to "assign" a full team of 7 members to do it from zero because I didn't deliver it on time and because when he asked me to "help them" I laughed. I first delivered like the 90%~95% of the project and he was been condescendent, he also blocked me from everywhere (hangouts, slack) and told me to "deliver what I had" to at least have something to prove that I did work. His team of "7 members" was stupid enough to not be able to at least run an npm install and npm run, they were also stupid enought to not understand what a GET request was an all and when he realized this, he asked me for the database dump and for the 100% of the project, so I also delivered it. We agreed that we were not going to work together anymore, so I asked him to pay me at least what had to be paid of the other two projects and he agreed, he also purchased a computer for me which I was paying him and was going to be discounted from the total payment. In the end, I was going to be paid 1430 USD. He asked me for my bank account and like my tax ID, for whatever he needed it. Since then, almost two weeks, he hasn't paid me, replied or even seen my messages. He also had a "partner" which was also "my friend", the huge motherfucker isn't even replying my mails or anything, so, since it was all verbal and they are being such motherfuckers, I don't know what to do. They are being such motherfuckers and I think I can't proceed legally, since there is no written contract. So what should I do? I was planning on going tomorrow but I pretty sure they won't even open the door or will tell me to wait or whatever. I seriously wanna cry, I don't get how people can be such dicks and unfair fuckers. I believe in karma but I don't think karma will give me that money and time back. :(

Well....this shit again
This morning or technical manager calls me in his office and says he needs to discus something
sits me down and started talking about a project he needs
A school management system says he presented some demos at the client yesterday but they didn't really like options at the table

Manager: So can you get us something really quick?

Me: Well... what's the time line?
Manager: They needed this like yesterday!
Me: Aaaah....well i think i can have something by 2moro morning
Manager: Aaah! No!.... 2moro it's too late need something like fast
Me: Ok so will look for some online solutions and open source projects
Me:.....
Opens browser, opens github, download project, runs project
project isnt looking good enough
starts designing UI
Manager:
downloads a system
installes
runs
closes
reopens
meet with a "Buy to continue using system" message
calls me
Manager: this was just a demo now it needs payment what should we do
Me: I'll come up with something by 2moro

Ok, so my "so called friend" from high school calls me up and requests me for a CMS for his hoax call center business. I didn’t want to do it and didn't have the time so make the busy excuse.
He keeps on insisting and asking it for old time's sake etc.
Finally we decide a price of 80k(rupees not dollars).

I somehow, found the time and made about half of it in 3 days(Laravel rocks) while the time we agreed upon was 1.5 months as I could only work on weekends.

Suddenly he feels, he has got enough to get it working and says just add 1-2 more features, don't make the complete thing. I felt really angry as be was trying to waive off almost all the money as he thought it got done early.

Finally we agreed on 40k, but I wanted some payment up front.
This was 2 months ago. Since then he has ranted about how he has no money but is going to give me as soon as he gets it.

Now, he is dodging my calls and I don't think the the money is ever coming. I desperately needed it for a laptop.

I had already stopped the feature of adding more users(Create) from the CMS.

What do you think I should do?
1 Delete everything (I still have SSH)
2 Send info to all his clients about his hoax business as I have about 200 payment infos.
3 Do nothing
4 {Add your own}

I just got scammed in web3. Again. Luckily by following an extremely strict risk management i lost $25.

But apparently now i have to be even more strict and be rigorous to the extremes.

"Pay me up front payment and ill start" Fuck you. Fuck all of you requesting for an upfront payment.

Do you think in the real world when you get hired at ANY job, do you think you're paid up front even a fucking dime? NO. You start working and get paid 1 whole ass Fucking month LATER. But only in web3 do these shitholes ask for an "uP fRoNt pAyMenT s0 i cAn StaRt wOrkiNg". No. Fuck you. I hope you get a fucking cancer and choke on a dead ape's dick.

How Fucking PATHETIC does your poor miserable waste of life have to be to scam someone for just $25? What the fuck?

Web3 is FULL, actually full is a compliment so I'll say it this way: Web3 is OVERLOADED AND OVERFILLED WITH FUCKING SCAMMERS. They're dripping EVERYWHERE. DMs. Discord. Twitter. Fake profiles. Fake messages. Fake cloned websites. Fake scam influencers. Fake marketers. Fake collab managers. Lies deception and exaggeration of results. Or even if it's the original collection, it's probably still a scam.

I don't know what to fucking do no more.

OH have i mentioned Web3 influencers? Oh my fucking god. These influencers on twitter for web3 are the most narcissistic, egocentric, arrogant, RUDE and EXTREMELY disrespectful as fucking pricks they are. I can not lead a normal conversation with ANY of them without them offending me because i dont want to give them my hard earned money right away. Fuck you. FUCK YOU. I HOPE YOUR WHOLE FAMILY DIES IN CAR CRASH FUCKING LOSERS.

Instead of focusing on building in web3 and developing software im now stressing 90% of the time about potential scammers and focus on being careful not to get scammed......

The amount of TOXICITY in Web3 is EXTREME. This is so Fucking ANNOYING and mentally EXHAUSTING

Found an institutional coaching centre leaking 1000s of students personal data phone, photo, db, parents info, documents photo path, payment method(bank, check, card) etc. They 32567 rows. I'm trying to find the admin login page. It seems they have it on separate subdomain. I found student login and I can login as any student. I hate these institutes. Sent them emails days ago (29 sept) but no reply yet. What should I do?

Most illogical thing I had to do today.

Today i received an email from bank to fill an attached form to receive payment from a foreign country.

Face palm no 1: The form they sent was in doc format. The layout of the form was all fucked up.

So I downloaded a proper PDF version of the same form from the bank's website.

I filled the form on my computer and signed it using my pen tablet and emailed it back.

Few hours later somone from bank calls me.

Facepalm no 2: He sounded frantic. He asked me to physically mail the "orginal" of the form!

He was thinking I took the printout of the form, filled it by hand and send the scanned copy.

I told him I filled everything digitally so there is no "original" form in physical sense.

Also since I emailed him the form, it doesn't make any sense at all, for me to take the printout of the digital version and mail it to him when he could just open his email and take a print out.

He didn't seem to grasp that idea at all.

Finally, I agreed to go to a branch nearby me and got him speak to an employee there over my phone and they said they will courier the printout to him.

I don't know if the people there are dumb or I am too smart.

all video streaming fucker companies have found a new way to promote shitty lies!
Hotstar: "try Hotstar! Rs199/month! first 7days free!"
Amazon prime : "try amazon prime! Rs 129/month! first 30 days free!"

those small numbers are fuckin lies. they have only 2 or 3 supported banks and if yours isn't one of them, then you have no option but to buy their full 365 days non refundable subscription of a larger amount, which strangely accepts *all payment bank cards*

liars. liar liar liars!

Just fucking hate how expensive and hard to find a cheap SMS gateway

And as in cheap, I mean cheap as send email

I found Cheap Global SMS and it doesn't have a professional website nor a good API but it is way more cheap

Downside? I must pay with a payment gateway made by the same company (coincidence?)

And NO WAY I'm sending my id to a payment gateway that no one uses

I'll try sending some random image to see if they accept it

But, still, no confidence to put my credit card in there

Hey guys,

I need your advice about deciding wether to work as a freelancer for a startup or no.
So this French startup is couple years old and they decided to build a team in my country. I went to the interview few weeks ago and we discussed the projects, details, potential salary and everything seemed great.

Couple days ago I received a service contract from them and now I need to decide to work for them or no.

Plan is for them to come to my country, rent an office and I should go there and work for them.
The salary that they offered is medium level and they will not have any legal entity in my country. However it’s not a problem for me since I have my own LTD company so I would pay salary on my own.

However there are some cons:

My team members are being hired as freelancers, however salary is defined with a daily rate instead of hourly and we are allowed to work maximum 20 days a month. It is not clear how many hours a week/month they will expect us to work and at this point I’m afraid to rock the boat with my questions. I understand that I shouldn’t receive any health insurance, sick leave pays, vacation days, home office, pension contributions and so on. But it’s so weird that they pay per day instead of per hour. It screams with unpaid overtime.

Payment time is 30 days after invoice has been sent. So If I started working from September 01, I will send them invoice at September 30, then I will work all October and will receive my money only around end of October. Working 60 days to receive my first salary doesn’t seem nice.

Notice period is 30 days. Which is fine on my end since I can be completely free after initial notice. But in their case if they want to fire me I guess they will simply not give me any work to do and since I’m charged per day I won’t be able to send them any invoice. No employment safety, which means if after 2-3 months they don’t have anything to do I can get royally screwed. But it’s startup nature I guess?

They don’t provide a laptop to work with. I’m lucky since I have a laptop for developing mobile apps, and they said they will at least provide office to work in and a monitor.

All this situation is sending vibes of "we want to save money so we came to your country for cheap labour and now we gonna exploit you"

What complicates matters is that my sister will be working with me and It’s her first job. They agreed to pay her a decent salary and even be flexible with her studies. However this deal for me does not seem too great as I will be receiving mid level salary with no benefits that I would otherwise get.

On the other hand maybe I'm just overthinking this I can just try it out for few months and see where it goes.

Any thoughts?

Why Apple has to do every configuration so f**ckin difficult? After a thousand logins, validations, and 2FA just to change my f**ckin region I find that I need to contact local support by chat or call even if my account is clean (no payment method added, no purchases made, etc.). Yeah right, great products, but crappy website UX.

Vodafone Quits Facebook’s Libra Cryptocurrency Project

“We can confirm that Vodafone is no longer a member of the Libra Association. Although the makeup of the Association members may change over time, the design of Libra’s governance and technology ensures the Libra payment system will remain resilient,” the Libra Association said in a statement.

“The Association is continuing the work to achieve a safe, transparent, and consumer-friendly implementation of the Libra payment system.”

I was once working at very successful startup as lead android engineer, when another startup contacted me and offered me a better paid and "stable" position. 9 months later I woke up on the 1st of the month (1st June 2018), checking my bank account: No payment. I go to office, boss comes in : hey guys, we're bankrupt and we can't pay your salary.

Today still no salary, we're waiting now for court to officially declare the startup bankrupt and then Government will pay me my last 3 salaries, while my working contract is still valid for 3 months after company gets declared officially as bankrupt. We're being expected to work as nothing would be, with no money on our bank accounts (we've been even told to take a temporary loan) and that sooner or later somebody will buy us off. Oh, it would be also really nice from us if we would not be looking for a new "challenge". What'd you do?

I was supposed to go from Saudi to Bahrain using the goddamn causeway but apparently they changed the process from getting a visa on arrival to online and did not update the gov website.

Wasted yesterday because the online payment through the website does not work, sent an email, told me that apparently they have no issues and it's from side even though I tried 3 different cards.

Found out today they have an app and I managed to complete my app there but it does not send you push notifications, so you have to constantly open it and refresh hoping they completed your request...
which they didn't, so gonna to stay at another crappy hotel on the border today and see if they're done with it tomorrow :)

Am I in developer hell already? A shitty project is about to come to an end (hopefully), or should I rather say: It needs to come to an end. But I am still quite lost in how to deal with it, hence procrastinating on it - making the deadline come closer and with it the realization that I'll probably have to rewrite almost everything. I'm not sure how, but I do know that the current code is a dumpster fire.

Basically what I need to do is dealing with the APIs of different payment providers/gateways (like PayPal, AmazonPay). For most cases I'll get a payment ID from the shop and need to act on it later, e.g. capture the authorized money in the case of a credit card transaction or do refunds (without user interaction, unless there is an error). Now at first I put something together where I try to abstract the payment information into two tables:
orders{1}<->{0..n}payments
payments{1}<->{1..n}paymentDetails

Unfortunately trying to abstract the different payment methods and to squeeze them (and their different possible stati and functions) in these tables was not very successful, it's a total mess with magic numbers, half-broken behavior and without any consideration for partial payments/captures or unfinished requests (i.e. if there is an exception before the response is dealt with, there is no indication that anything has ever been sent). Also the current amount is calculated through the history of the paymentDetails table, which basically works differently for each payment type.

How to fix this mess in a way that I'll still have a job by next week?

I'm trying to improve the db schema first, as I think my biggest problems are lying there. Through some research I've come across a recommendation for making payment type specific subtables (with a magic number/string in the main table to prevent having to look up all subtables). That way I can record what I send and receive without having to abstract it too much, so I'll have an acceptable transaction log. The paymentDetails table can be removed (necessary fields go to the payments table). The payments table gets multiple fields for the amount (differentiating between open, authorized, captured, processing and refunded values) and always reflects the current status.

Tables:
payments
paymentRequestsPaypal
paymentRequestsAmazonpay
paymentRequestsXyz

I think I'm going in the right direction here. hm. Maybe there's some light at the end of this long, dark tunnel. Or a train. I'll have two days to find out.

Little project for an insurance sales guy / finance coach / entrepreneur

My first thought: guy sounds extremely shady but ok let’s come up with a hefty price.

Guy accepts my offer and pays one third in advance as I asked. Of course he pays cash because he „didn’t make it to the bank“ but happened to have the big bucks in his wallet.

I give him a receipt for the cash payment.

Job is done I write an invoice for the remaining two thirds.

Guy transfers money to my account. No cash this time.
However he took the sum in the second invoice and subtracted the first one and 50 bucks extra and send the remaining entirely imaginary sum.

I text him. He does not get it and explains that he payed cash in advance.
I say yes but that is not the point. You can not make up the sums of your invoice yourself.

I send him three warnings via mail.

He sends an angry letter back sayingthst he payed one third in advance.

I tell him how nice it is that we agree in that regard but that the issue will go t court if he does not pay.

Sometimes I am fascinated how elaborately stupid people can behave. :/

Related to the project in my last rant...

Project got delayed for about a month in total because the API for the payment gateway wasn’t allowing charges against stored cards. Could save, modify, and delete them, but no charges.

After a week of trying to get things working based on the documentation, I get in touch with the vendor (great people) who file a support request with the people running the processor so we can see what’s up. Long story short, that amounted to 3 weeks of getting ignored until the vendor raised hell on my behalf, only to get the following reply back:

“You’ve been using the dev credentials, try it on live transactions instead!”

Thankfully, we’re able to move the customer to another processor under the same vendor, where I already have all the requests figured out...

Long time no rant...
Just fuck apple.
I’m working in partnership with an startup as iOS dev.
We have payments in our app since it was released couple years ago. And everything was ok. Two months ago we implemented a subscription based program that granted our user access to a few things that we need to process manually. I specified that because in apple’s guidelines states that services consumed outside app are not allowed to be sold using inapp purchase and you have to implement your own payment method.
All nice and good we used what we had already in place and the updated was approved. Same for the next 6 versions. Now we discovered a quite critical bug and fixed and submitted a new update just so apple would reject it because we are using subscription that is not implemented using their fucking store kit. So they can’t get those 30% share cut.
Fuck them fuck their echo system fuck their overpriced product. I’v just abandoned my 15” mbp mid2015 in favor of a hackintosh just because my mbp was dying from high temps. Fuck it i’m almost done with mobile development after 6 years

It's somewhat nice here. The thing is we have a lot of infrastructure problems and it's hard to implement business here which made it hard to find a job. But if you're working with US clients, it's fine. Internet access and electricity is not reliable, but you can find a workaround.
As a consumer of digital services, it's weird as we're pretty close to the US (2 hours flight) and there's not an embargo against us, but payment processing services won't touch us (legalization is awful for them), so good luck paying with any local issued card. And if anything is country restricted, we're right next to Cuba (Again, legalization). Paypal, Spotify, iTunes, most of Netflix, a few cloud providers.

Yeah, that's it. Right next to the US and no embargo and willingness to learn other languages (Easy to find French, English and Spanish speaker), but with big infrastructure problems (Internet and Electricity) so you can be really qualified and not get a job.
I'm in Haiti.

Fixing a faulty plugin modification from a former developer, and no documentation, plugin provider wants payment for support...

Me crying on the side near to pull the trigger

I'm trying to improve my email setup once again and need your advice. My idea is as follows:
- 2-5 users
- 1 (sub)domain per user with a catchall
- users need to be able to also send from <any>@<subdomain>.<domain>
- costs up to 1€ per user (without domain)
- provider & server not hosted in five eyes and reasonably privacy friendly
- supports standard protocols (IMAP, SMTP)
- reliable
- does not depend on me to manage it daily/weekly
- Billing/Payment for all accounts/domains at once would be nice-to-have, but not necessary

I registered a domain with wint.global the other day and I actually managed to get this to work, but unfortunately their hosting has been very underwhelming.. the server was unreachable for a few minutes yesterday not only once, but roughly once an hour, and I'd really rather be able to actually receive (and retrieve) my mail. Also their Plesk is quite slow. To be fair for their price it's more like I pay for the domain and get the hosting for free, but I digress..

I am also considering self hosting, but realistically that means running it on a VPS and keeping at secure and patched, which I'd rather outsource to a company who can afford someone to regularly read CVEs and keep things running. I don't really want to worry about maintaining servers when I'm on holiday for example and while an unpatched game server is an acceptable risk, I'd rather keep my email server on good shape.

So in the end the question is: Which provider can fulfill my email dreams?

My research so far:
1. Tutanota doesn't offer standard protocols. I get their reasons but that also makes me depended on their service/software, which I wouldn't like. Multiple domains only on the business plans.
2.With Migadu I could easily hit their limits of incoming mails if someone signs up for too many newsletters and I can't (and don't want to) micromanage that.
3. Strato: Unclear whether I can create mails for subdomains. Also I don't like the company for multiple reasons. However I can access a domains hosted there and could try...
4. united-domains: Unclear whether I can create mails for subdomains.
5. posteo: No custom domains allowed.

I'm getting tired.. *sigh*

I've been freelancing lately with an agency to develop an android app for their client and at the same time another person is developing the website .

The story begins when I first contacted the web dev to give me access to the database (because he started before me ).It turns out that this guy purchased an almost ready cms template with a shitty data structure that has no relations between object .This database has no primary keys , no foreign keys , no indexes ... no nothing . Adding to that the web dev refused that I rewrite a new data structure claiming that he has done a good progress on the website .
Forward couple of weeks , I managed to create the api and develop an alpha for the app and sent it to the agency manager .
This bastard told me that the website and design have changed and the app shouldn't be like that .He told me to contact the other bastard the web dev to seen what the changes are . I'm waiting for the response about the new updates and I'm praying that they'll be just minor colors updates or something not a whole concept update .

My problem here is I'm stuck with this fucking agency cuz they paid half of the payment when I started .

Damn I must learn to say no to people .

#Suphle Rant 11: Laravel board launch

The launch took almost 2 weeks more than originally slated, because I sought to install it manually, just as an outsider would. Installation steps had been documented, automated tests for the installation tests were passing. When time came to actually execute the binary from the terminal, we went from one obstacle to the other. First, were the relatively minor Composer/Roadrunner issues, eventually resolved by the helpful RR maintainers who sat with me through a Discord server for about 2 hours until their command ran the way I needed it to.

Next was the Psalm scare: One of my value propositions was the guarantee of eliminating all type related bugs in Suphle apps. I intended to use Psalm for that. Wrote tests as usual. Turns out the library behaves differently under conditions differing from raw CLI usage. I resurrected threads I'd opened since December that were left unattended, and with some help from the maintainer, we eventually got it to do what I need it to do.

I was all the more frightened by the fact that Transphporm had caused me to renege on one of my earlier promises. I can only miss so many targets. After this, the docs had to be updated with all the changes effected to accurately integrate those two. Project installation and initialization commands were ran rigorously to ensure all progresses smoothly.

Tagged one final release and suddenly became impatient to launch on our local Laravel group chat where I've been a member for the last 4+ years, where we've had a rollercoaster of emotions. In that time, I've refined my launch speech to suit that audience -- obviously, countless times. Not just a tame "It's my pleasure to announce what I've been working on", but near 40 messages going into details about the inner workings, why it was built, how it compares. An expose that dove deeper than I would anywhere else.

I scheduled a time for them to tune in and got some encouraging anticipation. Ended up deflated after posting the whole thing. Only about 5 persons interacted. 1 (who I've chatted with outside the board) was quite enthusiastic. Feverishly checked the docs but commented it was overwhelming and he'd need more time. Already starred the repository.

For some context, there are give or take 250 members on that board. Not all are active but activity there easily reaches a crescendo when the topic discussed is about inanities like what 3rd party services to use for SMS, how to receive salaries from abroad, or job openings. I was optimistic when the acquaintance mentioned above published a payment library and met a riotuous welcome as one of their own. Maybe, they are simply not fond of me and the speech should have been passed off to someone else.

I checked Packagist installs -- not more 10. For 3 years, I'd been hyped up for that night; but for some reason, the audience I considered myself closest to flopped, woefully. Thankfully, this isn't the main launch. I'm still holding out hope for that. If it fails, I would have sunk an immeasurable amount of effort and time, that nobody will compensate me for. That is the one place I go to see those more advanced than me in PHP. I constantly learn there and find stimulating conversations there.

Now, I can no longer predict reception from other presentations. All I can do now is hope

Coz why not?

I have a task:
Make a feature to gather donates at web site through debit cards and e.t.c.

Additional conditions:
There is no company to register the payment gateway.
U need to find the one that would agree to work with physical person in Russia.
It needs to accept payments in USD and EURO worldwide.

Update:
I've been trying to leave DoD for a couple of months now. Translating my 10 year's experience with complex Intelligence enterprise level systems to something relatable to the civilian IT world. Grabbed a few certs to help out A+, network+ and security+ with Linux+ as my next target. Photos of me working on unclassified systems, radios, cell towers and servers. I'm a teacher for military UAS so this shouldn't be to hard to get even a basic job in IT right.

No one will hire...
Linux admin: Nope
Network admin: Nope
Assistant Network admin: Nope
IT call service: Nope
Pool cleaner fucking nope
Many interviews and nothing
I'm broke and sold all of my personal valuables. I can't hold out much longer and really looking at becoming homeless. But I'm kinda ok with it, one last payment on my apartment and car is all I can do now. My parents think I'm in Afghanistan working a six figure job lol

DoD: we see you're trying to leave we'll pay you alot to teach A+, Network+ and Security+ traveling all across the country and staying at hotels with all expenses paid.

FU FU FU I want out please tell me someone has a job, I'll be a janitor of a server room Idc I just want out. Fuck the pay

I start Tuesday...

My manager and I setup Cloudflare for one of our websites because we’ve noticed bot activity. Stakeholders have their feathers ruffled because ONE fraudulent payment got through during the first 24 hours of using Cloudflare. Um, there’s no miracle solution and we didn’t promise you miracles.

Manager and I aren’t sweating it because 1) we’re still learning Cloudflare, 2) we’re still familiarizing ourselves with the website because it used to be maintained by an outside agency, and 3) things were much worse a few months ago before any mitigation efforts were put in place. We finally setup Cloudflare because the fraud tools for our payment processor could only do so much.

We’re both honestly surprised a situation like this hasn’t come up before in all the years the website existed.

So.. wondering what people's thoughts are on this.

So I started working for a company late last year, so far I've done four projects (one was a test), the contract and hourly rate was sorted out and all happy. However, in the three months I've worked there the terms of payment has been changed two times (both times within 30 days).

First (originally) was being paid for x amount of hours any hours over that moves on to an hourly rate.

Second change moved over to a fixed rate per month.

And currently I'm now just on an hourly rate.

The justification for the change in terms was "the current terms isn't working out for us" - as far as I'm aware no-one elses terms have changed. However the quickness of the term changes here do concern me.

Now I do have some personal issues (disability for one) as well as other issues so I don't do things faster than other other devs, however, I get the job done and I stick to deadlines (and yes the company is aware of my personal issues).

In terms of current projects I'm only doing tweaks to current projects so my hours at the moment per week are slow (I have been asked about new projects) but I've heard nothing whatsoever on start dates etc.

Just an FYI the current work done, I've had no issues whatsoever.

So I would like some thoughts on what you'll do if you were in this situation as personally I can think of two reasons but I would rather see what other people think here.

The new project was started.

Planning, analysis, design.... all right.
Now contacting all the companies for partner programs, finding payment gateway that will agree to work with our country.
For fucks sake. third week goes, and still no code writing. Just researching, contacting, researching. Urgh.

I want to code already! I am just
a backend/DevOps person! When it would be coding time?!

Well fuck Amazon. I am trying to get into my account because for some fucking reason they say my payment method is faulty while they actually write off the subscription of prime of it. But to get into my account I need to login again with 2FA as I have that turned it on. So far so good. But since it's an old phone number I can't login. Well just change the phone number wouldn't you think? Well yes but to change the phone number I need to login in with the old phone number to which I have no longer access 🤦‍♂️. Eventually found a phone number I could call. I get a lovely lady on the phone which guides me to resetting my password but for that, you guessed it, I need to do the 2FA again. I get send through to the next person as she can't change it for me because of privacy reasons (oh well). That guy first askes the last 4 numbers of my creditcard like 5 times because he can't remember it (write it the fuck down then asshole) then he starts mistaking the 6 for 9 (like how the fuck do you do that) and then the text messages don't come in while I am on the phone with him which he tries to blame to my service provider because they would block Amazon (like why would they do that?). But since I got a text message of them 15 min before I shot that down quickly. Then he finally admitted that they might have a disruption going on. So I think we'll fine I'll just ask my question to him how it's possible that Prime stops working as I am watching it because my payment method is faulty according to them (but manage to write off the subscription) and he starts talking just shit. Just admit that you don't know and connect me to someone who does know how that can happen. In the the end I just hung up because I knew I wasn't getting anywhere with this guy and don't you know it, as I start writing this the text messages come in. Problem solved you would say just out that number in the website and you can change your phone number. Well no because I have to tell the number to the guy who I hung up with because the texts weren't coming in 😒. Now I should call them back but I think I'll wait till tomorrow hopefully the day shift will be a bit more knowledgeable on how shit works and can actually remember 4 digits.

Fuck the bureacracy.

It's so difficult being an solo entrepreneur due to outdated bureacracy.

I just wanted to have a current/ business bank account to separate txns related to the business from my personal account and GST ID to officially register the business and also avoid headaches with taxes in the future.

However, If you want business bank account in the name of business, you have to have an official registration for the business and GST is the easiest and affordable way for sole proprietorship. Since my work is basically online and can be done remote, it doesn't make sense to waste money renting or buying an office space, getting electricity coonection or pay other related expenses which is necessary to have to show as proof of existence.

So I went ahead and purchased a virtual office plan and applied for GST with required documents. However, the bureacrat rejected the application. The informed about it to the biz where I purchased this virtual office and they had a meeting with the bureacrat and they were told virtual office address can't be allowed.

They told had no such issues in last few years and now on they are gonna have to stop providing virtual office to register GST. That was one of the main reason people went with virtual office.

Now I won't be able to open a business bank account.

I won't be able to signup for payment gateway networks. They ask for GST ID.

I won't be able to complete Paypal business registration.

I may have to expose my personal address on invoices or otherwise lie on it.

I will have to use my savings account for any expense related to it.

Also by end of this fiscal year, I probably gonna have to deal with tax issues.

Please advise me how to wisely spend a prepaid visa card that is about to expire. It's just over $25... Tried to add funds to DO but it won't go thru since PayPal fails to make payment with it.

My last resort would be to register a play store dev account... But no idea it will be possible.

I would like to spend it on digital products and preferably, something dev related. Play store apps / subscriptions are fine too.. Any suggestions?..

I have dilema..

Should I go to a small software company that use latest angular + .net core and have tech lead..
OR
continue working in large non-it mnc department where I have autonomy to do things however I want see I fit.

I think going to software house is good. The payment is good, but maybe it will cost some of my life due to I have to be fullstack.

At the large non it mnc company is better I have to do front end using Angular and I have total control. No one point out what is my mistakes.

I am young 24 and not married yet

I'm pleased to announce that, I too, have the 'unfortunate' to join the higher tax bracket payment where I will involuntary pay a portion of my income to the 'FICA people' for no returning benefits whatsoever.

I need an advise for my capstone project. I'm planning to make an online booking system for a ferry company. Planning to make it for android and ios and maybe for web too. Did some research and found about ionic. Looks amazing but not sure if it's the right tech to use for my plan. Also about the payment gateway, I want the customers to pay on the app or the website directly without redirecting them to other website. Not really sure if I can use paypal with this, also i need the system to accept mastercard and visa.

I did the research, so please no hate, I'm not asking for the code. I just want to know the right tech to use. I'm just super confused and lost right now.