UI design gone wrong

I fucking love people like this.

Yesterday I met a 'friend' who I hadn't seen in a very long time. Just a guy I used to know tbh but let's call him Friend anyway. After a while in the conversation this happened...

*Friend doesn't know I have a degree in CS*

Friend: "WHAT?? YOU LIKE PROGRAMMING? NO WAY! ME TOO!"

Me: "THAT'S AWESOME! You've been programming for long?"

Friend: "A little over a year now. I know almost all languages now. C++, C#, Python, Java and HTML. Still a couple left to go. Once you're on the level I achieved programming becomes really, really easy. How long have you been programming?"

Me: "Almost a decade now"

Friend: "Damn dude you must know all languages by now I suppose?"

Me: "I've been mainly doing C++ so not really haha"

Friend: "I can always help when you're struggling with one language. C++ is pretty easy tbh. You should learn others too btw. HTML for example is pretty important because you can program websites with it"

Me: "Yeah... Thanks... So... What project are you working on right now?"

Friend: "I'm making a register page for my very own forum. The only problem I have is that PHP won't save the login details"

Me: "Hahaha I know the feeling. MySQL?"

Friend: "What?"

Me: "What do you use to save your data"

Friend: "Just a txt file. It's easier that way."

Me: "Hahaha true. Who needs safety right? *smiles*"

Friend: "Actually it's 100% safe because only I can see the txt file so other people can not hack other users."

Me: "Yes! That's great! Cya!"

Friend: "I'm working on a mmorpg too btw! I can learn you to make games if you want. Just call me. Here's my number"

Me: "Alright... Thanks... Bye!"

*Arrives at home*

*Deletes number*

I do not make this up.

I can understand that someone who isn't in the CS industry doesn't take it too seriously and gets hyped when their "Hello World" program works.
I'm fine with that.

The thing that really triggers me is big headed ass holes like this. Like how much more like a absolute dickhead could you possibly more act? Fucking hate people like that.

So, I grew up on the US/Mexican border, in a city where saying there's no opportunity is like saying the Titanic suffered a small leak on its maiden voyage. There were two kinds of people in said town: Mexicans trying to find something less shit than juarez and white trash reveling in their own failure. I came from the latter, for whatever that's worth.

I graduated high school when I was almost 16 years old. Parents couldn't really afford to support three kids and pay the rent on the latest in a long line of shit holes we migrated in and out of. If being a serial eviction artist is a thing, my family were savants.

I applied to college and got accepted only to be told by my father that he didn't see the need. Turns out the only reason he'd helped me graduate early was so I could start working and help pay his bills. I said okay, turned around and tossed a bag and my shitty af spare parts computer into the back of the junkyard Vega I generously referred to as a car and moved cross country. Car died on arrival, so I was basically committed.

Pulled shifts at two part times and what kids today call a side hustle to pay for school, couch surfed most of the time. Sleep deprivation was the only constant.

Over the first 4 months I'd tried leveraging some certs and previous experience I'd obtained in high school to get employment, but wasn't having much luck in the bay area. And then I lost my job. The book store having burned down on the same weekend the owner was conveniently looking to buy property in Vegas.

Depression sets in, that wonderful soul crushing variety that comes with what little safety net you had evaporating.

At a certain point, I was basically living out of the campus computer lab, TA friend of mine nice enough to accidentally lock me in on the reg. Got really into online gaming as a means of dealing with my depression. One night, I dropped some code on a UO shard I'd been playing around on. Host was local, saw the code and offered me a job at his firm that paid chump change, but was three times what all my other work did combined and left time for school. Ground there for a few years until I got a position with work study at LBL that conflicted too much for it to remain mutually beneficial. Amicable parting of the ways.

Fucking poverty is what convinced me to code for a living. It's a solid guarantee of never going back to it. And to anyone who preaches the virtues of it and skipping opportunity on grounds of the moral high ground, well, you know.

Languages without a fully implemented type system.

Granted, it has been a fad for a quarter century, but everything points at one simple fact: Types matter in programming.

In dynamic languages, you tend to see that testing suites explode into thousands of tests, many of which wouldn't even be necessary if you had some type safety.

You see that languages like JS are forked into more typesafe dialects, like Typescript. Python got typehints since 3.6, and PHP added typehints for methods, then typehints for properties, and will soon even have compound types.

Maybe most languages will never reach the level of Haskell or Scala, and that's totally fine, but I think the direction languages are moving in is pretty much set in stone: No ambiguity, more safety. Code should fail before deploying, not after.

You can't imagine how many lines of pure and utter horseshit, seemingly written in PHP, I had to dig through this whole weekend. (relating to my 2 previous rants)

How is it even possible to write code this unbelievably ugly?

Examples:
- includes within loops
- included files use variables from parent files
- start- and endtags separated to different files
- SQL queries generated by string concatenation, no safety measures at all (injection)
- repeating DB calls within loops
- multiple directories with the same code (~40 files), only different by ~8 lines, copied
- a mixture of <?php echo ... ?> and <?= ... ?>
- a LOT of array accesses and other stuff prefixed with "@" (suppress error messages)
- passwords in cleartext
- random non-RESTful page changes with a mixture of POST and GET
- GET parameters not URL-encoded
- ...

My boss told me it took this guy weeks and weeks of coding to write this tool (he's an "experienced dev", of course WITHOUT Git).

Guess what?
It took me only 20 hours and about 700 lines of code.

I must confess, since this task, I don't hate PHP anymore, I just simply hate this dev to death.

Addendum: It's Monday, 5:30am. Good night. 😉

I jump on an existing scala project.

git pull && sbt compile test

Tests are failing.

Me: "Hey team, the tests are failing."

Team member: "That cannot be. They were passing for the the last run."

Me: "Did you run them locally?"

Team member: "No, on Jenkins. It was fine."

I check Jenkins.

Me: "What do you mean it's fine. The last successful deployment was on the end of May."

Team member: "The Pull Request checker always went through successfully."

I check how our Jenkins tasks are configured. It's true that the Pull Request Checker runs successfully yet due to a "minor misconfiguration" (aka "major fuckup") the Pull Request Checker only tests a tiny subset of the entire test suite.

Team members were were fine if their Pull Request got the "Success" notification on bitbucket's pull request page. And reviewers trusted that icon as well.

They never checked the master run of the Jenkins task. Where the tests were also failing for over a month.

I'm also highely confused how they did TDD. You know, writing a test first, making it green. (I hope they were just one specific test at a time assuming the others were green. The cynic in me assumes they outsourced running the tests to the Jenkins.)

Gnarf!

Team member having run the tests locally finally realizes: "The tests are broken. Gonna fix them."

Wow. Please, dear fellow developers: It does not kill you to run the entire test suite locally. Just do it. Treat the external test runners as a safety net. Yet always run the test suite locally first.

OK.
1. So i tindered.
2. I got a really nice girl.
3. We chatted really long and good.
4. We tried to meetup it did not work because of our schedule. New
job on my end, she is a student.
5. I thought its over. Fine whatever.
6. She gives me her number.
7. We continue chat on whatsapp
8. Blablabla 3 days long, she gets bored and tries to friendzone me
9. I revert the shit and state i wanna be serious and there wont be a
friendzone/nice guy comin from me.
10. She happy and continues to chat.
11. I get emtionally invested in her.
12. We exchange thoughts dreams and music.
13 We want to meetup at weekend. I cant. Got a family wedding all
weekend.
14. We want to meetup the second week.
I cant. Im off on a company trip. Again new job here.
15. So we say in the week after I get back.
15a. Before the weekend we need to deliver an rc and go all out to hold
the deadline.
15b. We deliver, but shit happens on the customer side. His fault but we
get the blame.
15c I go onto the company trip.
16. We chat and i send her pictures of the trip over the weekend so she
sees I care.
17. She seems fine. And happy.
18. I come back from the trip late night and need to work the next day
jetlag style.
19. I work jetlag style. And try to fix the shit from last week.
20. I come home really tired and looking forward to date day tomorrow.
21. I cant do anything. My home looks like shit and the bag still
unpacked. I just eat and fall asleep.
I feel bad bcs my home will turn her down instantly if we make it to my
place.
Need to hope that it does not come to this.
22. Date day comes. Today.
23. I wake up at 6 early to plan ahead to make sure my clothes are fine
and i arrive on time in the office to exit early.
24. I expect to check what goes on today in the city and give her the
location to meet and time.
25. I enter office and immeadetly get caught up in meeting planning, dev
questions and the meeting itself because the project is on edge.
26. We have a 5hours long meeting where people go on and on and on.
27. 3h later in the meeting:
my brain was fried and around 12 i go to lunch with some people.
28. Meanwhile the city is turning into a rainy mess of a shitty day. No
way I can have a nice walk with her like that. Bars and coffeshops are
just to boring.
29. So i eat to regain some sense and we go back to the office.
Meanwhile I am thinking all kinds of locations and stuff in my head.
30. Havent given her any update since a good morning in the morning.
31. We reenter the meeting. Things continue like before. The project is
on impossible demands and impossible timelines. Still we try to do our
best.
32 3h later on 3pm I tell her i am in a long meeting and working on a
meetingspot.
33. shes not happy.
34. I get a call from a relative
35. i need to go out and take the call. not good for the collegues.
again new job here.
36. family trouble,  money trouble, goverment demands. I promise to
handle that tomorrow. Before work.
37. i get back into the meeting.
38. still super slow and no results.
39. need to focus but start to check for locations on my phone.
40. she asks me where i am
41. I send her my location.
42. she thinks i am saying she should pick me up!
43 i joke and say no definitly not.
44. shes pissed.
45.  I decide for a coffeeshop. after work. and send her the location
46. She says to call it off.
47. I go all in and go romance style. I say ill wait there even if she
does not come to show her how much i care.
U know to avoid the lets do it some other time fuckery and then it never
happens.
47. She goes quiet.
48. 2h later we finish the meeting. Meanwhile QA foudn a bug we need to
fix because why not.
49. I got 30 minutes to find the bug and fix it before I need to go to
uphold my word.
50. I find out what to do, but it might break a lot of other things
without careful test and implementation. Collegues says he takes it.
51 I feel bad but I need to go. I even leave earlier because otherwise I
would not be on time.
52. I arrive 15 minutes early. I grab two coffee2go and wait outside,
53. Shitty weather, sometimes rain, sometimes sunny, cant decide what it
wants.
54. The weather is just like how I feel.
55. I wait 1 1/2h
56. I think I should feel stupid, For gods sake its tinder. People dont
give a crap, Enough people around why should I Invest so much into this?
But I dont feel stupid. Because this is how I want it. I dont want
appointments, I dont want safety. I decided for her and I went all in.
57. I send her pics from the sceneray as proof that I waited,
58. I think I blew it. She is still quiet.
59. Friends are asking me for plans for the weekend. I wish I could say
I already have some with her.
60. I feel lost right now. But my head says I put too much stress on
her, And i fucked up with the planning. I should have been more precise.
My head also says that i am putting myself into the victim role, which
is wrong always. Should I continue to reach out to her? Is there
something I could do still?

So I get to work this morning and see this interesting little contraption on my work colleague's desk.

Safety first: make sure there's a warning sign... Lol.

No idea what he's doing with it though, guess I'll find out later.

The state of the web in 2020:
discussion sites as a medium are dying. chalk that up to censorship.

reddit is an echochamber. twitter is mostly a marketing platform disguised as (anti)social media. instagram is a self promotion/wannabe eceleb site, and youtube is the new hollywood..quickly becoming irrelevant.

facebook is where I (dont) go to (totally not) ignore all the people important to me.

and email is where I go to send letters bordering on hatespeech to my various local and federal "representatives", in between borderline cyberbullying people stupid enough not to automate their spam marketing in 2020. or talking to left/right self-help grifters about the state of society.

in the grim dark future of 2020, the last bastion of intelligent conversation, free speech, and civility, the one shining icon of hope in a dark world..
is the comment section of pornhub videos where a women got stuck under a bed for the 50,000th time. And all I can think is "wow I never knew how easy it was to get trapped under a bed. They should look into fixing this safety hazard."

newsmedia has jumped so many sharks, the fonz now spins in his grave so fast we could hook him up to a generator. meanwhile people hide in their homes for a disease so deadly you have to be tested to know if you even have it.

while ever more car commercials
are released, set to somber but hopeful piano music to the tune of "in this time of social distancing its important to stay close even when we're apart."

Im beginning to think media has become a poison on society, both television and the internet, and like an ersatz cargo cultist worshipping the great-charles- manson-in-the-sky we should all take a page from the unabomber and smash our televisions with hammers before going outside and sawing down the telephone polls.

I jest of course. But there is no denying the inherent appeal of moving from the unsettling uncertainty of complex societies, driven by expertly manipulated fear cycles, to the beatitude-esque simplicty of pastoral protestant style living, sans witch burning and shoe buckles.

And against the reckoning of utopians who are still fresh from the womb as it were, wet behind the ears and smelling of their mother's pussy, I reject the notion that "up" is a synonym for "forward."
Were it the case, every drinking binge, followed by throwing up, would bring us, with each vomitting, one step closer to heaven. Rather the state of affairs is what it is, and what it is, like most of nature, is a cruel master and a harsh teacher. And while we may binge on digital delusions of grandeur and a greater society, rest easy in the nihilistic and sobering thought that we are little more than 200,000 year old cave men wielding magic bricks, and atomic bombs.

..where water flows more readily from metal tubes in our houses than it does from the nile. where food comes to our door at little more than our beck and call.
where we may bath, and sleep, and *shit*, cleanly, comfortably, and safely, wrapped in the (failing) bubble of delusion we all tenaciously grasp collectively, the thing we call "civilization".

an empire of needful things, wanton and fragile.

if we have not gone mad from boredom, I have no doubt we one day will.

it becomes more and more obvious to me every day, had war never existed, it would have been necessary for man to invent it just to have something to do, that didnt include farming, fucking, or building.

And so enters "political idealogy."

How would we ever have enemies if we were allowed to speak our piece instead of being given the means (and reflex dogwhistle training) to silence and destroy one another?

give a man a gun, he'll rob a bank. give a man a bank, he'll rob the world.
give him a media empire or a tech platform, and he'll lie about the theft and convince one half of millions of lemmings to hate all the other lemmings.

Are you a complete passive aggressive twat?

Are you 100% completely unable to stand up for yourself outside of the safety that a computer screen provides?

Are you a male and capable of only doing things that would take you in the absolute complete opposite direction of a vagina?

Are you a female and an insufferable twat?

Do you think that people's likes and dislikes are no better than yours?

Is your opinion better than anyone else's?

THEN BEING A DEVELOPER AND BEING IN DEVRANT IS JJJJJJJJUST WHAT YOU NEED!

Here in our community, the more full of shit that you are! the farther you will go up in popularity! Insufferable opinionated and biased assholes that could not throw a punch if their lives depended on it is LITERALLY WHAT IT IS ALL ABOUT!!

lmao, I swear man, some of y'all are just too full of shit.

Code review time:

Hey Rudy, can you approve my PR? ??? Shouldn't it be can you review my PR?(thought to myself)
Anyway, as a new practice, we(royal we) do not approve PRs with js files. If we touch one, we convert it to typescript as part of a ramp up to a migration that never seems to get here. But I digress.
I look at the laziest conversion in history.

Looked like
Import 'something';
Import 'somethingElse';
Import 'anotherSomething';

export class SomeClass {
public prop1: any;
public prop2: any;
public prop3: any;

public doWork(param: any){
let someValue = param;
// you get the idea
return someValue;
}
}

Anyway, I question if all the properties need to be visible outside of the class since everything was public.
Then if the dev could go and use type safety.
Then asked why not define the return type for the method since it would make it easier for others to consume.
Since parts of the app are still in js, I asked that they check that that the value passed in was valid(no compilation error, obviously).
Also to use = () => {} to make sure "this" is really this.
I also pointed out the import problem, but anyway.

I then see the his team leader approve the PR and then tell me that I'm being too hard on his devs. ????

Do we need to finish every PR comment with "pretty please" now?
These are grown men and women, and yet, it feels oddly like kindergarten.

I've written code in the past that wasn't pretty and I received "WTF?" as a PR comment. I then realized I ate sh*t on that line of code, corrected it and pushed the code. Then we went to Starbucks.
I'm not that old(35), but these young devs need to learn that COMPILERS DO NOT CARE ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS!!!!!
Ahhhhhh
Much better.
Thanks for the platform.

Tl;Dr - It started as an escape, carried on as fun, then as a way to be lazy, and finally as a way of life. Coding has defined and shaped my entire life from the age of nine.

When I was nine I was playing a game on my ZX spectrum and accidentally knocked the keyboard as I reached over to adjust my TV. Incredibly parts of it actually made a little sense to me and got my curiosity. I spent hours reading through that code, afraid to turn the Spectrum off in case I couldn't get back to it. Weeks later I got hold of a book of example code to copy out to do various things like making patterns on the screen. I was amazed by it. You told it what to do, and it did it! (don't you miss the days when coding worked like that?) I was bitten by the coding bug (excuse the pun) and I'd got it bad! I spent many late nights on that thing, escaping from a difficult home life. People (especially adults) were confusing, and in my experience unpredictable. When you did things wrong they shouted at you and threatened to take you away, or ignored you completely. Code never did that. If you did something wrong, it quietly let you know and often told you exactly what was wrong. It wasn't because of shifting expectations or a change of mood or anything like that. It was just clean logic, simple cause and effect.

I get my first computer a year later: an IBM XT that had been discarded by a company and was fitted with a key on the side to turn it on. With the impressive noise it made it really was like starting an engine. Whole most kids would have played with the games, I spent my time playing with batch scripts and writing very simple text adventures. And discovering what "format c:" does. With some abuse and threatened violence I managed to get windows running on it. Windows 2.1 I think it was.

At 12 I got a Gateway 75 running Windows 95. Over the next few years I do covered many amazing games: ROTT, Doom, Hexen, and so on. Aside from the games themselves, I was fascinated by the way computers could be linked together to play together (this was still early days for the Web and computers networked in a home was very unusual). I also got into making levels for Doom, Heretic, and years later Duke Nukem 3D (pretty sure it was heretic; all I remember is the nightmare of trying to write levels entirely by code!). I enjoyed re-scripting some of the weapons and monsters to behave differently. About this time I also got into HTML (I still call this coding, but not programming), C, and java. I had trouble with C as none of the examples and tutorial code seemed to run properly under a Windows environment. Similar for my very short stint with assembly. At some point I got a TI-83 programmable calculator and started rewriting my old batch script games on it, including one "Gangster Lord" game that had the same mechanics as a lot of the Facebook games that appeared later (do things, earn money, spend money to buy stuff to do more things). Worried about upcoming exams, I also made a number of maths helper apps, including a quadratic equation solver that gave the steps, and a fake calculator reset to smuggle them into my exams. When the day came I panicked and did a proper reset for fear of being caught.

At 18 I was convinced I was going to be a professional coder as I started a degree in Computer Science. Three months later I dropped out after a bunch of lectures teaching what input and output devices were and realising we were only going to be taught Java and no C++. I started a job on the call centre of a big company, but was frustrated with many of the boring and repetitive tasks we had to do. So I put my previous knowledge to use, and quickly learned VBA to automate tasks. It wasn't long before I ended up promoted to Business Analyst where I worked on a great team building small systems in Office, SAS, and a few other tools.

I decided to retrain in psychology, so left the job I was in and started another degree. During my work and placements my skills came in use a number of times to simplify and automate tasks. I finished my degree, then took a job as a teaching assistant while I worked out what I wanted to do next and how to pay for it. Three years later I've ended up IT technican at the school, responsible for the website, teaching a number of Computing lessons each week, and unofficial co-coordinator for Computing as a subject. I also run a team of ten year old Digital Leaders who I am training in online safety and as technical experts; I am hoping to inspire them to a future in coding. In September I'll be starting teacher training with a view to becoming a Computing specialist teacher. Oh, and I'm currently doing a course in Android Development in my free time.

And this all started with an accidental knock on the keyboard of a ZX Spectrum.

See, static typing? that shit is for putos. You think you're so cool with your advanced intellisense being able to tell you "yo....dat shit ain't the type you think it is" or your compiler telling you "yo dumbass, you fucked this parameter up in here, you are doing <x> when in reality you should be doing #@$@#$@!<X at line !@#@#$#>"

pfffft static typing. Such a pansy ass thing to worry about.

Picture us, working outside of the safety net of static typing, as jungle explorers, walking slowly, with a machete in hand and our other hand clutched tightly at our hip pistol, not knowing what to shoot at, but eagerly prepared for when shit fucks up because whatever the fuck you did was not properly safeguarded by a compiler to tell you that you fucked up, even if the compiler message is unintelligible (looking at you C and C++)

We is men here, we is brave retarded adventurers.

As our sanity blips into oblivion and we look at our code that has no sort of type checking expecting our shitty intellisense extensions to protect us....

Edit: if you can't understand the sarcasm in here and the plea for sanity then you are obviously a retard and have no place in the world of development

I'm exhausted.
After one and a half year after my last rant, I'm here again. I left the previous job as web developer after almost 12y. At the time I found 3 new jobs as developer; I chose the one with the largest company, the premises were really good. My 3 interviews were excellent. But what I found next was almost a nightmare.
I was literally "confined" for the first 2 months, no internet connection, no email address, very little communication with colleagues. My near colleague was sharing the code were I would work via a usb key. All this for "safety" purposes, because "here you start this way".
For me it was not so bad, I could take my time to study my work and do it (without Stack Overflow and only by reference guides, when needed - I felt proud in an old way). But the next months were really tough: no help to understand what I missed about the work I was doing (consider that I was working on a large database, previously used by an old ERP, on which other developers - prior me - wrote a lot of code, to make the company continue use all the data after the expiration of the ERP licences - speaking about a year 2000's Java application).
Now I find myself struggling, because the main project on which I was working has been set aside (apparently for some budget decisions); my work team constantly make me do some manteinance on the old code, but the main tasks are done by the old mate, "because deadlines are always pressing and there would not be enough time to explain you anything". I'm not growing.
I'm really becoming reluctant to write code, and whenever I do it, I constantly feel under pressure, and this makes me nervous and inclined to make errors.
Don't take me wrong, I was/am good at my work, but it's like I'm loosing that sparkle I had till a few years ago.
When I'm at home I try to study or write code, just to keep training my mind, but I'm really struggling and I'm worried about losing my brain for doing this job. I constantly forget things and lose focus.
Never felt this way. I am thinking about the chance to switch again and search for another company.

In my unenlightened youth, when programming was a module in my college diploma that didn't seem to be taking me where I wanted to go, I had a couple of guys guy in my class that could arguably be the weird ones.

Jonny, although he asserted that he was to be called "Jonhty", whatever, we never did. He was pretty much top of the high school food chain and for some reason elected to study computer science, none of us was prepared to put up with his shit. He was always boasting about some fanciful claim or another, famously entering the classroom and exclaiming he'd "fucked an absolute milf" and seemed somewhat evasive about the answer, turns out he was 17 and she was 35, the age difference was greater than his own age. We burst out laughing. He would also turn up late and state the college bus was late (it wasn't I got the free bus every day, he'd just not got out his wanking chariot early enough).

One valentine's day we got him a card from a mysterious stranger which was accompanied by a package containing a cucumber and Vaseline, the inside of the card read "to assist you in the following request: please go fuck yourself".

Before you think we were being unduly harsh, we had a centre table where we'd be taught from with computers around the outer rim of the room. He'd come up behind people while at the centre desk, quietly press ctrl+P and slowly walk back to the printer. I saw him do it to my machine and I got to the printer first, to which he shouted "that's MY work" which was amusing because unbeknownst to him I had put headers on all my documents so he really didn't have an answer for why my name was at the top of every page.

To top it all off he had dead eyes, there didn't appear to be much going on but the rent, there was no spark of intelligent life, and while I thought it, I never said it out loud, but other students did and I had to agree. He was just copying his way to graduation. However, he ultimately didn't graduate when people refused to allow him to copy.

Another guy, Richard I believe his name was, which is just as well because he was a right dick. In the UK our word for white trash is "chav" (that's a very naïve explanation for it but that's another rant best left for "socialsciencerant") and he was an complete idiot who was gifted with more brain cells than he ever needed to use. He actually studied hard and got reasonable grades, probably on par with me, but he boasted about smoking weed all the time, he was forever playing dark side of the moon via his loud mp3 player. I kinda left him alone generally until he was high in class one time and while we we're watching a documentary he'd shake my chair and make a weird noise in my ear every few minutes, the first couple of times startled me, the remaining multi-dozen times pissed me off.

It all came to a head with this guy when I'd been hearing about his uninteresting bs on drugs, music and how best to spend my time ("you need to lighten up man, come round my house, take a joint and relax man", that sorta thing), well this guy walked like he was mid way through shitting himself so I personally think that perhaps he is too chilled. Anyway he's arguing with me and after the exchange of him making his point, me disagreeing and expecting the end of it, he made the mistake of saying two words to me:

"Listen, mate..."

And I had him in check mate.

"Listen, I ain't your fucking mate , I don't even like you, you're a disruptive annoying twat that thinks he knows it all, we're all 17, none of us know anything, so shut the fuck up, sit the fuck down and stop boring me with your drugs, I ain't interested, and for the record I think pink Floyd ruined prog rock!"

He looked at me with sad puppy dog eyes, and started with the "but, why?", However I was interrupted and had to leave the class for unrelated reasons, I returned to be told he'd put safety pins up right on my chair so I'd sit on them, and mutual friends who TD me I'd been cruel and that he doesn't was hurt, so I should apologize, he overheard and said he was sorry for bring a bit of a dick.

However, you just know when you don't get on with someone? Yeah, that. So I said I wasn't sorry for what I said, for while it was harsh, I am not his mate, nor did I want to be his mate and that was all I had to say on the subject, and that if he wants to take offensive to a nobody not liking him then he's in for a very rough time in life.

Unsurprisingly I don't keep in touch with anyone from college!

Biggest annoyance of favorite language:

Python has no static type checking. I know that is not something that is intended for Python. It's just that I enjoy the syntax, but would love the type-safety of something like Kotlin/Java

With over 10 years as a dev under my belt I never wanted to change company before my probation is even over. I never felt so drained, and pissed off for the entire duration of my working hours, every day for about 4 months straight. I was thinking it should get better, I listened to all the rubbish webinars about the company culture, how inclusive and diverse we are and how they value phycological safety and how everyone should feel safe to speak their mind. The people are fucking reviewing my approved and merged PRs and expecting me to address their comments. Like someone goes on holiday and when they’re back they want to spray wisdom around, and that seems to happen to everyone not just me. When we have technical discussions and I express my opinion I get given out to for speaking too much. Like what the actual fuck, your code is shit, everyone knows it and complains about it, but we should look at what we already have as an example. How the fuck you think you can improve your code if your not going to change your shit. Writing class diagrams for about two weeks at start of each project and nitpicking every fucking thing, only to abandon it after our first sprint as the fucking requirements have changed and what we agreed at the beginning as no longer relevant. No shit as if they don’t know requirements change ALL THE FUCKING TIME AND THIS IS EXPECTED. I was also asked to send a slack message every morning when I start working, when I get my lunch, when I am back from lunch and when I finish work. Have to fill in some stupid weekly update system with what tickets I’ve worked on during the week, like have you heard of Jira filetrs ? Stop asking me how I am getting on if I’m fucking closing all my tickets every sprint. I don’t ask you questions, if I finish all the work you asked me to on time, you can safely assume I am doing fine. Also your fucking back to back meetings are not helping me close my tickets any faster. Already got an offer from another company I am out of fucking here.

YOU CAN ALL STICK YOUR PR COMMENTS, ENDLESS MEETINGS AND WHAT NOT UP YOUR FUCKING ARSES. 🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻

my staff got selected to go do something RETARDED on site when all restrictions on the city have been lifted and the fucking numbers of covid-19 cases have been rising, last week 4 people fucking DIED and they wanted to put my guys for some RETARDED SHIT THAT can be completely ignored in which they would deal with countless of RETARDS that as I know will probably be ignoring all safety precautions and getting everyone fucking SICK.

I don't give a fuck, my employees are high risk personell, if they get sick they might fucking die, I said no to fucking everyone and had the head of my department to back me up. Fuck this shit man I am so tired of this pandemic since it had made everyone 10 billion percent-o more retarded than they already were.

If the head of department ignores it I will instruct my people to just ignore that shit and don't make themselves present at that bullshit ass fucking event.

See what the fuck they do. I treat my employees as if they were my soldiers, I know what leadership is and they are not making me fucking budge, if your command is bullshit i will fucking say no and you can go ahead and do whatever the fuck you want with that shit, just based on my title and experience I can go where the fuck I want and you will eat dick.

Luckily for me the HOD is on the same boat, he thinks this shit is fucking stupid.

Last Monday I bought an iPhone as a little music player, and just to see how iOS works or doesn't work.. which arguments against Apple are valid, which aren't etc. And at a price point of €60 for a secondhand SE I figured, why not. And needless to say I've jailbroken it shortly after.

Initially setting up the iPhone when coming from fairly unrestricted Android ended up being quite a chore. I just wanted to use this thing as a music player, so how would you do it..?

Well you first have to set up the phone, iCloud account and whatnot, yada yada... Asks for an email address and flat out rejects your email address if it's got "apple" in it, catch-all email servers be damned I guess. So I chose ishit at my domain instead, much better. Address information for billing.. just bullshit that, give it some nulls. Phone number.. well I guess I could just give it a secondary SIM card's number.

So now the phone has been set up, more or less. To get music on it was quite a maze solving experience in its own right. There's some stuff about it on the Debian and Arch Wikis but it's fairly outdated. From the iPhone itself you can install VLC and use its app directory, which I'll get back to later. Then from e.g. Safari, download any music file.. which it downloads to iCloud.. Think Different I guess. Go to your iCloud and pull it into the iPhone for real this time. Now you can share the file to your VLC app, at which point it initializes a database for that particular app.

The databases / app storage can be considered equivalent to the /data directories for applications in Android, minus /sdcard. There is little to no shared storage between apps, most stuff works through sharing from one app to another.

Now you can connect the iPhone to your computer and see a mount point for your pictures, and one for your documents. In that documents mount point, there are directories for each app, which you can just drag files into. For some reason the AFC protocol just hangs up when you try to delete files from your computer however... Think Different?

Anyway, the music has been put on it. Such features, what a nugget! It's less bad than I thought, but still pretty fucked up.

At that point I was fairly dejected and that didn't get better with an update from iOS 14.1 to iOS 14.3. Turns out that Apple in its nannying galore now turns down the volume to 50% every half an hour or so, "for hearing safety" and "EU regulations" that don't exist. Saying that I was fuming and wanting to smack this piece of shit into the wall would be an understatement. And even among the iSheep, I found very few people that thought this is fine. Though despite all that, there were still some. I have no idea what it would take to make those people finally reconsider.. maybe Tim Cook himself shoving an iPhone up their ass, or maybe they'd be honored that Tim Cook noticed them even then... But I digress.

And then, then it really started to take off because I finally ended up jailbreaking the thing. Many people think that it's only third-party apps, but that is far from true. It is equivalent to rooting, and you do get access to a Unix root account by doing it. The way you do it is usually a bootkit, which in a desktop's ring model would be a negative ring. The access level is extremely high.

So you can root it, great. What use is that in a locked down system where there's nothing available..? Aha, that's where the next thing comes in, 2 actually. Cydia has an OpenSSH server in it, and it just binds to port 22 and supports all of OpenSSH's known goodness. All of it, I'm using ed25519 keys and a CA to log into my phone! Fuck yea boi, what a nugget! This is better than Android even! And it doesn't end there.. there's a second thing it has up its sleeve. This thing has an apt package manager in it, which is easily equivalent to what Termux offers, at the system level! You can install not just common CLI applications, but even graphical apps from Cydia over the network!

Without a jailbreak, I would say that iOS is pretty fucking terrible and if you care about modding, you shouldn't use it. But jailbroken, fufu.. this thing trades many blows with Android in the modding scene. I've said it before, but what a nugget!

Gets scheduled into team meeting. Relatively new, see 5 pm ok sweet nbd. *reads IST. Tf is IST? Google that shit, INDIA FUCKIN STANDARD TIME? 5 pm IST != 5 pm EST. Fuckin oh no that shits at 6:30 am. Brb while I slice myself open with safety scissors.

Startup-ing 101, from Fitbit:
- spy on users
- sell data
- cut production costs
- mutilate people's bodies, leaving burn scars that will never heal
- announce the recall, get PR, and make the refund process impossibly convoluted
- never give actual refunds
- claim that yes, fitbit catches fire, but only the old discontinued device, just to mess with search results and make the actual info (that all devices catch fire) hard to find
- try hard to obtain the devices in question, so people who suffered have no evidence
- give bogus word salad replies to the press

This is what one of the people burned has to say:
"I do not have feeling in parts of my wrist due to nerve damage and I will have a large scar that will be with me the rest of my life. This was a traumatic experience and I hope no one else has to go through it. So, if you own a Fitbit, please reconsider using it."

Ladies and gentlemen, cringefest starts. One of fitbit replies:
"Fitbit products are designed and produced in accordance with strict standards and undergo extensive internal and external testing to ensure the safety of our users. Based on our internal and independent third party testing and analysis, we do not believe this type of injury could occur from normal use. We are committed to conducting a full investigation. With Google's resources and global platform, Fitbit will be able to accelerate innovation in the wearables category, scale faster, and make health even more accessible to everyone. I could not be more excited for what lies ahead".

In the future, corporate speech will be autogenerated.

(if you wear fitbit, just be aware of this.)

i hate linux like a lot , how do you guys use it

like you guys dont want an advertising ID, how the fuck will advertisers know who you are and what you like?

open source , give me a break, you mean your os devs are soo untrustworthy that you just have to see what they wrote in the code, who does that?

free come on, how poor are you linux people, i mean, quality stuff gets paid for, free stuff just means it's trash

and the linux devs , the aint like real coders they are just hobbysts, making your os in their free time

and who wants to install their own software anyway, on other platforms the company curates restricted software that you can use, and i know you'll say its oppressive but its just customer protection.

and i do want my platform to track everything i do, it only helps them build better stuff for me.

and whenever they decide to outdate my hardware and kill support for it, it only means they care and want me to get the latest tech, how considerate.

wait , i hear you say, there are no bugs in linux, my vendor makes sure my os comes with the latest antivirus software, nothing can break my system.

and just because linux runs on servers and most super computers only shows that common users like you and me are ignored, at least my vendor is not a sellout, and still makes stuff for the masses.

you say freedom i say safety i can sleep safe and sound for am protected nutured under one echosystem of software that i can not leave.

Company has a severe lack of fresh blood.

"let's recruit everyone who has an IQ over room temperature and barely passes the mark".

Me protesting bloody murder cause I know that the idea is not just profoundly dumb, but frustration from high staff turnover takes a toll on *everyone*.

"nah can't be that bad".

Then the discussion started who could do monitoring and mentoring, so we can sort out the bad apples *quickly*.

Me reminding again that this is exactly what leads to a high staff turnover, as this is nothing else than "hire, hire - quickly fire".

Guess who won the award of being the mentor / monitor ....

*drum roll*

Come on, I know you would NEVER expect this.

Let me surprise you: M E.

Yeah. They chose the person that was absolutely against this idea...

Because that person is "most qualified for the task at hand and has the necessary qualifications".

Today was the first 4 h workshop with a new recruit.

The Lord has had zero mercy on me.

I started to mute myself after 30 minutes in regular intervals to just scream and curse the world.

How profound dumb a person can be amazes me.

Person has had a "very expensive 6 month boot camp course".

I was close asking if the boot camp course was in watching porn and wanking their brain cells out....

Git... Yeah he knew what he was doing...

Except that he messed up every commit by either not sticking to the companies format or - what I found funny the first 2 times, then not so much anymore - just writing a git commit message like a 15 year old teenage girl would write to their diary.

Programming. Oh yeah. He should be a programmer.

He had much Bootcamp.

Bootcamp expensive. Bootcamp good.

If someone is unable to iterate over an iterator... And instead starts creating an integer based array of a map's key name to then fetch the map value in an for loop based on the created key array.

Yeah. Bootcamp much good.

Creating DTOs...

It took an hour to write a DTO with him... Cause constructors are hard and it's even harder when you have to explain primitive datatypes in Java, null safety, constructors, NPEs, final, ...

Like really no experience at all.

The next week's will be amazing.

Either I get a valium drop or I'm gonna blow my head off, cause mentoring will drain the last bit of hope I had left in me.

Note that I do not blame the recruit (yeah he's dumb. But he has ZERO work experience, so it's not unexpected), I'm just too fed up with getting the poo crown despite being against the whole process.

I think the recruit could make it..........

But that I got the shittiest job ever is really haunting me.

I dunno how I survive the next weeks.

And this is just the first recruit... There will be more.

Any embedded systems software engineers out there with practical experience in writing/designing safety critical applications? (think DO-178B/C) I've got a few years embedded experience under my belt between internships, my projects, and now my relatively new job at a major aviation company, but I feel like I'm behind on this topic of safety and code that can't fail. It's simply not taught and I really want to learn more. Partially it is out of personal pride because I want to make a great product, but more importantly, what I work on is protecting a human life. I really really really want to feel confident in what I build. Is there anyone out there who's got some years under their belt that can point me to some good references? Or maybe some helpful tips? Much appreciated. If it helps, all my work is in C.

For context, I've been working for a couple years now with Rust, and, I have to say, the experience has been astoundingly pleasant. The language is both incredibly productive and meets each of my use cases and stipulations regarding speed, safety, and complexity. That said, I've come to beg the question, "what is the point of functional languages like Haskell?" To me, what seems attractive about Haskell is the inherent thread safety, and the added syntactic niceties of code written in the language. However, one must keep in mind, my experience with Haskell has been pretty limited, simply due to the massive learning curve that the language presents. Such a "learning curve" brings me to my central point: these days with languages like Rust which bring together the best from functional and imperative worlds, it seems like functional languages are becoming increasingly irrelevant. Let's face it: no sane person will choose to learn a functional language as their first language, outside of academia and mathematics, and OOP/OOP-like languages remain dominant in the space. So, why then, is Haskell any different? What benefit do languages like Haskell pose in the modern CS space that thread-safe, non-GC languages don't already provide?

New normal. New app to build.

- Still have to maintain older systems in parallel
- That leaves 1 week for developing the new app
- Slept 2 hours a day, coding coding coding
- Tested the shit out of the app because.. hey, its to help the customers' safety and health... I don't mind staying up late
- Finished the app in 5 days, code is now on prod
- Could barely look myself at the mirror because I look like shit
- Btw the app requires an external device as an input, the existing device works flawlessly based on my testing
- We need more devices
- Clueless manager bought new model instead. He assumed everything is fine, no testing is required
- Tested the app with new device model, doesn't work
- Deadline closing in
- Thanks, there goes my sleep
- THANK YOU

The global joke of Information Security

So I broke my iPhone because the nuclear adhesive turned my display into a shopping bag.

This started the ride for my character arc in this boring dystopia novel:

Amazon is preventing me from accessing my account because they want my password, email AND mobile phone number in their TWO.STEP Verifivation.
Just because one too many scammers managed to woo one too many 90+y/o's into bailing their long lost WW2 comrades from a nigerian jail with Amazon gift cards and Amazon doesn't know what to do about anymore,

DHL is keeping my new phone in a "highly secure" vault 200m away from my place, waiting for a letter to register some device with a camera because you need to verify your identity with an app,

all the while my former car insurance is making regress claims of about 7k€ against me for a minor car accident (no-one hurt fortunately, but was my fault).

Every rep from each of the above had the same stupid bitchass scapegoat to create high-tech supra chargers to the account deletion request:

- Amazon: We need to verify your password, whether the email was yours and whether the phone number is yours.

They call it 2-step-verification.

Guess what Amazon requests to verify you before contacting customer support since you dont have access to your number? Your passwoooooord. While youre at it, click on that button we sent you will ya? ...

I call this design pattern the "dement Tupi-Guarani"

- DHL: We need an ID to verify your identity for the request for changing the delivery address you just made. Oh you wanted to give us ANOTHER address than the one written on your ID? Too bad bro, we can't help, GDPR

- Car Insurance: We are making regress claims against you, which might throw you back to mom's basement, oh and also we compensated the injured party for something else, it doesn't matter what it is but it's definitely something, so our claims against you just raised by 1.2k. Wait you want proof we compensated something to the injured at all? Nah mate we cant do that , GDPR. But trust me, those numbers are legit, my quant forecasted the cost of childrens' christmas wishes. You have 14 days or we'll see you in court haha

I am also their customer in a pension scheme. Something special to Germany, where you save some taxes but have to pay them back once you get the fund paid out. I have sent them a letter to terminate the contract.

Funniest thing is, the whole rant is my second take. Because when I hit the post button, devrant made me verify my e-mail. The text was gone afterwards. If someone from devRant reads this, you are free to quote this in the ticket description.

Fuck losing your virginity, or filing your first tax return, or by God get your first car, living through this sad Truman dystopia without going batshit insane is what becoming a true adult is.

I am grateful for all this though:

Amazon's safety measures prevented me from spending the money I can use to conclude the insurance odyssey, and DHLs "giving a fuck about customers" prevention policies made me support local businesses. And having ranted all this here does feel healthy too. So there's that.

Oh, cherry on top. I cant check my balance, because I can only verify my login requests to my banking account wiiiiiiith...?

!dev

A "state of siege" and isolation can gradually erode your sense of safety and sanity.

This can come in the form of bosses who's behavior, whatever it happens to be, makes you hesitant to come into work. It can be a partner who you dont want to see after work. It can be in laws or a landlord.

In our case it's the crackhouse down the street.

These people have broken into houses, cars, stolen, vandalized, and even threatened people.

So I'm hear, chest hurting from stress, and here comes a shithead we already ran off, pipe in hand, going to smash up the truck.

Chased him off. Not even the first time.

These motherfuckers threatened the elderly lady next door. Threatened an old lady *at my work*.

God damn drug addicts every where. No god damn respect. Violent cracked out lunatics. All hours of the. night and day. Last attack was broad daylight.

And it's just been a total siege.

I'm sick of living in a nation where those who try to get by are punished, and the worst are allowed to roam around like wolves preying on people.

Its intolerable and im sick and tired of it. I have no more patience left.

Whatever your situation, meber out up with violence, shitheads, lunatics and deranged drug addicts.

Smash them in their fucking mouth if you are forced to defend you and yours. Never hesitate.

There's very little good use cases for mongo, change my mind.

Prototyping maybe? Rails can prototype, create/update/destroy db schemas really quickly anyways.

If you're doing a web app, there's tons of libs that let you have a store in your app, even a fake mongo on the browser.

Are the reads fast? When I need that, use with redis.

Can it be an actual replacement for an app's db? No. Safety mechanisms that relational dbs have are pretty much must haves for a production level app.
Data type checks, null checks, foreign key checks, query checks.
All this robustness, this safety is something critical to maintain the data of an app sane.

Screw ups in the app layer affecting the data are a lot less visible and don't get noticed immediately (things like this can happen with relational dbs but are a lot less likely)

Let's not even get into mutating structures. Once you pick a structure with mongo, you're pretty much set.
Redoing a structure is manual, and you better have checks afterwards.

But at the same time, this is kind of a pro for mongo, since if there's variable data, as in some fields that are not always present, you don't need to create column for them, they just go into the data.

But you can have json columns in postgres too!

Is it easier to migrate than relational dbs? yes, but docker makes everything easy also.

I miss psychological safety. I'll define it as the willingness to be vulnerable to criticism and the belief that contrary opinions are embraced and judged on their merit.

When I first entered the startup scene my manager had exceptional candor. He had no qualms talking about how kids and personal projects caused his investment in his work to wax and wane.

He always made time to talk to me when I was frustrated and made me feel like he truly listened to what I had to say, even if he didn't act on it.

At the time, I attributed the safety to the company culture created by the CTO. The startup failed and eventually, I found my way to that CTO's next startup.

Completely different experience. I find myself in despair as I hear "I'm more senior and therefore am right and don't have time or interest in your ideas" blatantly stated.

When I disagree with people, I try to ask clarifying questions to identify where the divergence occurs. Sometimes I'm surprised and learn something new, sometimes my questions prompt reconsideration.

With the CTO (now CEO), we go in circles where he squirms, deflects, and outright refuses to respond to my questions. He cancels 75% of 1:1's and when we do talk he suggests that if I disagree I "should introspect which of my beliefs is holding me back from embracing his superior way of doing things"

Multi-hour slack wars suck the life out of anyone trying to ask questions. It's so exhausting to ask questions it's often cheaper and faster to wallow in despair for an hour and hack something together than descend into people shouting preferences at each other and shaming me for not already knowing the answer.

Perks, pay, and tech-stack are all cool. It feels selfish to be unhappy because I can't innovate or challenge the status quo. Having tasted that safety though, I'm left with an unquenched thirst that grows stronger with every conflict.

No handshakes please. Corona safety!

I can't stand Swift's initializers. No other languages have the problem with constructors/initializers that Swift does. It's a complete failure of a feature and to hell with safety if it comes with this cost.

Just to illustrate how ridiculous it gets, I want to have a class where my initialization logic can be split among reusable parts. That is, the logic that initializes the class with no parameters has logic that I want to reuse in my other initializers. Simple DRY stuff. Well, the only way I can do that in Swift is if I use a convenience initializer that calls another one. But convenience initializers have completely different rules from designated initializers (again, something only Swift does).

For example, you can't access "self" until you call a designated initializer. You can't chain designated initializers, and if you want to chain anything in the same class you have to handcuff yourself by using a "convenience" initializer (there's nothing convenient about them, I might add).

So now I want to subclass my class and initialize myself using one of my superclass initializers. Oh but the one I want to call is a *convenience* initializer so I can't, unless I turn my new initializer into a convenience initializer. Except wait, a convenience initializer must delegate with self.init(), so it can't even call a superclass initializer!

And it just goes round and round and round. I don't know if I should try to convert all of my initializers to convenience initializers or the other way around.

Why all this nonsensical madness? Get rid of the distinction and go back to nice clean powerful initializers like Objective-C. I mean what does it have to take? This is a complete nightmare.

i booked my first ever car and am having so many emotions... from scary to excited to anxious and mostly feeling super dumb.

i booked a very basic hatchback with minimal features and the lowest price. i was so not sure about the various terms that guy was using: mudflags, foglamps, tilt adjustment wheel ...

like, i read about them just a minute ago on google and next moment, this guy was asking me if i should pay this much amount to get it included in my car or not. i asked him many times and for things that i felt were useful, i got them included.

biggest things about this very first purchase is

1. i have learnt car driving from training school for 30 days. i got my license via some bribe money and did not gave the real test. I am basically a guy with no experience of handling cars. i was doing okay when learning tho

2. i am a single child from a very small, conservative and super anxious family. everytime i am gonna take this car, am sure my mom is gonna start praying to god for my safety. i too have this inherited anxiety and would probably be praying to god everytime i would travel alone.. the responsibility to keep myself safe, and the car safe, while not even knowing how to release clutch properly will be super scary

3. my friends are gonna love this but i want to become a trustful driver for them first. basically among 5 of us, only 1 had his father's car on which we have taken a lot of trips. that boy has my huge respect, and he is one of the best and most reliable safe driving person i know. he even enjoy the songs and pur conversations. i want to be like him, but currently my friends don't even trust sitting on the back of my scooty and feel scared.

4. our neighbours are probably gonna dug up their graves and roll in it. they are already very jelous and angry people, i hope they don't cause any damage to my new car.

5. i am super scared about this new car... how can i protect this precious baby... how to make sure that someone is not stealing parts off this..

so.many.fucking.scary.and exciting.thoughts!!!

Working with a SOAP endpoint. I know it is some .NET server due to the style of stacktrace on exceptions. Nice, a framework where I can expect some type safety granted by static types. I build some xsl to transform the SOAP wsdl files into classes and structs to interact with the endpoint. Works out perfectly.

Plottwist!

Elements which are defined in the xsd/wsdl with maxOccur=unbounded and minOccur=0 should represent a simple collection of this type. Therefore does my implementation expect a collection of this type. But no. The shipped SOAP client in my stack ignores the definition and simply deserializes the SOAP response into T and not a collection of T.

Where the duck are the types when they are defined all over the place?

TLDR, i am not performing as I used to in my job before i made my side hussle and idk if i should do anything about it.

every since covid started and companies started laying off people, I started realizing im in danger when no company was able to match my current salary, and the ones that do would, make me do a hunger games hackerrank competition with thousands of other people which I don't really wanna take part of..

My company even laid off a lot of people due to budget cuts a while back and i didn't feel secure at all, and knowing that i might end up with less salary should i get fired and settle for the next company that accepts me, kinda made me lose any trust i had for the whole being an employee thing... I have financial goals i want to meet and depending on this one company to not fire me is scary...

I registered a tech company and hoped I could take on some high budget projects, got nothing the first year but slowly i started getting some projects and now im hiring contractors to help with projects and its going great and im really happy and excited about it.

But i often need to manage said contractors, have calls with clients and even do some coding myself. Some of that i end up having to do in secret in my company time... we work in a big co-working space so i get to sneak into a meeting booth and do all that.

my manager lives in another country and basically im in a situation where i can get away with it without anyone noticing.

However, I used to be one of the top contributors in the company. I used to finish a butt load of tasks every day and i ended up being promoted to manager, but i still get some coding tasks. But generally, if it weren't for my side hussle i would still be a top contributor and shine like i used to, but now i mostly do what is expected on me, and im afraid someone would ask me at some point why im not as productive as I used to be.

nobody asked me anything but i just feel kinda guilty and miss having the one job to focus on and taking credit for a lot of things and helping everyone, but at the same time i dont trust that the company cares about me enough to give me any guarantees or stocks or bonuses so i feel i need to keep growing my side hussle to have a safety net..

thank you for reading my rant

I like rants that are thought provoking and push a message forward regardless of whether they may sting a little, so for my first post on here I'd like to hit at home with many of you.
Html5 "Native" Applications are not needed. Let's cover mobile first of all, the misconception that apps are written in either javascript or Native android/ Native ios environment. Or even some third party paid tools like xamarin is quite strange to me. OpenGL ES is on both IOS and Android there is no difference. It's quite easy to write once run everywhere but with native performance and not having to jump through js when it's not needed. Personally I never want to see html or css if I'm working on a mobile app or desktop. Which brings me to desktop, I can't begin to describe how unthought out an electron app is. Memory usage, storage space for embedding chromium, web views gained at the expense of literally everything else, cross platform desktop development has been around for decades, openGL is everywhere enough said. Finally what about targeting browser if your writing a native app for mobile and desktop let's say in c++ and it's not in javascript how can it turn back into javascript, well luckily c++ has emscripten which does that simply put, or you could be using a cross complier language like haxe which is what I use. It benefits with type safety, while exporting both c++ and javascript code. Conclusion in reality I see the appeal to the js ecosystem it's large filled with big companies trying to make js cross development stronger every day. However development in my mind should be a series of choices, choices that are invisible don't help anyone, regardless of the popularity of the choice, or the skill required.

Just a safety pin:

If you ever, ever find my real name and go through my rants, then you should know

no pun intended
I love my job
I love my workplace
and above all

Ok... so I have a unique question/opportunity. I can't give all the details but here's the jist:

3yrs ago I was hired to consult a now prominent(still decently well known then) web-based company with many thousands of users, dealing with a lot of money and leveraging a social environment. They had several issues but initially they really needed me to find/train chat mods.

I did not take the offer for monetary reasons, like all consulting I've done, I had additional reason and/or fondness to fix the issues. In this case it was an interesting challenge and I knew several customers and some support staff so it'd be worthwhile.

They (without request) reduced their typical 2mo probationary period to 2wk for me. With less than a day left of that period, I was 'hacked' via a pushed telegram update, on the account they made me create for work purposes (they had control of the phone number not me).

During this 'hack' one of the 2, currently active, culprits sent a message to his tg account from the 'hacked' one and quickly deleted the entire convo. The other pretended (poorly) to be me in the chat with the mods in training (at least a few directly witnessed this and provided commentary).

Suddenly, I was fired without any rationale or even a direct, non-culprit, saying anything to me.

The 'hack' also included some very legit, and very ignorantly used, Ukrainian malware.

This 'hack' was only to a 2nd gen lenovo yoga I got due to being a certified refurbisher... just used for small bs like this chat mod/etc job. I even opened up my network, made honey pots, etc., waiting for something more interesting... nope not even an attempt at the static ip.

I started a screen recording program shortly after this crap started (unfortunately after the message sent be 'me' to the dude who actually sent it happened... so i still dont know the contents).

I figured I'd wait it out until i was bored enough or the lead culprit was at a pinnacle to fall from...

The evidence is overwhelming. This moron had no clue what he was doing (rich af by birth type)... as this malware literally created an unhidden log file, including his info down to the MAC id of his MacBook... on my desktop in real time (no, not joking... that stupid)

Here's my quandary... Due to the somewhat adjacent nature of part of our soon to be public start-up... as i dont want it to turn into some coat tail for our tech to ride on for popularity... it's now or never.

Currently im thinking, aside from any revenge-esq scheme, it'd be somewhat socially irresponsible to not out him to his fellow investors and/or the organisation that is growing with him as one of few at the forefront... ironically all about trust/safety/verification of admins in the industry.

I tried to reach out to him and request a call... he's still just as immature. Spent hours essentially spamming me while claiming it wasnt him but hed help me find whoever it was... and several other failed attempts to know what i had. When i confirmed he wasnt going to attempt a call, i informed him id likey mute him because i don't have time for back and forth bs. True to form he deleted the chat (i recorded it but its of no value).

So... any thoughts?

Got sacked with no savings and safety nets like family to rely on. The industry in Australia is fickle at the best of times.. Now I'm well fucked.

How has the pandemic fucked you over, folks?

I am put to the task of creating a Chat Robot in ChatFuel.

Cool, I thought at first.

Cool is not what I would call it at this point..one week later.

The size is a factor at play, for sure, it needs to point to 27 cities and give individual information, handle e-mails, phone, automate e-mails.. a bunch of stuff.

Now, I am located in Sweden.
{{city}} as a set user attribute acknowledges Gothenburg and geolocation thusly worked fine for my boss. But not for me, and won't work for any other city.

So..Global AI calling for static blocks it is... 27 blocks...

For two languages.. 54 blocks...
Static pointing to the first answer for every individual block multiplies this by a factor of two. 108 static blocks. Fine.

I have since realized that my ChatFuel-Luddite ways were limiting the expected performance of the end result and learned that most other set attributes in ChatFuel work fine. Yay.

So we set up everything the last 54 blocks need to do with user attributes and to my surprise it works, really well at that. The answer from a user that is a correct city puts you into a block that is a series of questions using user attributes, both {{first_name}} and {{last_name}}, asks for e-mail and phone, displays an image and stuff like that.

Now.. as I attempt to copy these blocks..

THEY JUST POOP OUT CHUNKS OF THE ORIGINAL BLOCK. IT'S INCONSISTENCY IS STAGGERING. IT NEVER REALLY COMPLETES THE DUPLICATION, NO ERROR MESSAGE OR ANYTHING.

Which then reminded me of when my boss asked why everything was botched earlier in the project, at that point I copied the entire bot as a fallback and worked with my change in the copy first for safety reasons, didn't work, copy wasn't entire.

Wasted fucking hours on this.
I'm glad my boss is cool, and the job is easily worth it. I actually think that the design aspect of ChatFuel is nice, and the people behind it are kind in the facebook group and all. I don't think they're trying to be mean. But holy shit.

This has been a mental anguish that levels pissing bleach filled with fire ants.

" You could've easily solved this with APIs and third-party geofencing services ", yeah, but their services won't stack for the customer, nice attempt though.

Deep breaths.

After two years of being in (metaphorical) jail, I once again was given the a privilege of unlocking and rooting my phone. Damn. Frick Huawei, never coming back to that experience.

I gotta say, rooting... Feels a tad less accessible nowadays than when I last practiced it. All this boot image backup, patch, copy, reflash is crying to be automised, only reason I can think of why that changed and magisk can no longer patch itself into the phone's initrd is that it's somehow locked? Was it a security concern? Or can sideloaded twrp no longer do that?

Oh, and the war... The war never changes, only exploits do - fruck safety net... Good for Google that they now have an *almost* unfoolable solution (almost). The new hardware-based check is annoying af, but luckily, can still be forced to downgrade back to the old basic check that can be fooled... Still, am I the only one who feels Google is kinda weird? On one hand, they support unlocking of their own brand of phones, but then they continuously try to come up with frameworks to make life with a rooted or unlocked phone more annoying...

On the other hand, I do like having my data encrypted in a way that even sideloading twrp doesn't give full access to all my stuff, including password manager cache...

Any recommendations what to install? I do love the basic tools like adaway (rip ads), greenify (yay battery life!), viper4android (More music out of my music!) and quite honestly even lucky patcher for apps where the dev studio practices disgust me and don't make me want to support them...

Maslow's Hierarchy breaks down five human needs. You need to meet the lower numbers in order to feel fulfilled in higher levels (i.e. You likely don't feel like you belong to a community when you're struggling to find food & water.) :

1. Physiological (Foods, Water, Clothes, Sleep)
2. Safety & Security
3. Love & Belonging
4. Esteem
5. Self Actualization

The company I'm at is struggling financially so nobody received raises. There were no promotions to celebrate this year. There was diminishing pride in working here. Multiple re-organizations shatter my view that I belong to a team. Multiple rounds of layoffs shattered my feeling of job security. Multiple meetings start with my co-workers buying time to brush their teeth, scarfing down what food they can eat quickly, brewing another cup of coffee.

I firmly believe it's a manager's job to watch out for the culture and build up their employees through this process, but the managers are watching out for their own backs, and probably struggling with the same things we are as individual contributors.

Hey corporate management, while you were off at your executive off-site, your employees are failing to meet some basic needs. You wonder why we bitch about 4-day work weeks and needing less meetings. You think we're entitled when we ask for food and snacks delivered to our door.

We're not entitled. We're broken.
We're not lazy. We're burnt out.

You say we get unlimited time off, but you frequently comment about how much time we're taking off in public forums.

You say you pay us competitively, but that was last year, and shit costs 60% more now.

You say we're responsible for the success of the company, but you're responsible for the morale of the company.

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?

I've been programming for 15 years now or more if I count my years I programmed as a hobby. I'm mostly self learned. I'm working in an environment of a few developers and at least the same amount of other people (managers, sales, etc). We are creating Magento stores for middle sized businesses. The dev team is pretty good, I think.

But I'm struggling with management a lot. They are deciding on issues without asking us or even if I was asked about something and the answer was not what they expect, they ask the next developer below me. They do this all the way to Junior. A small example would be "lets create a testing site outside of deployment process on the server". Now if I do this, that site will never be updated and pose a security risk on the server for eternity because they would forget about it in a week. Adding it to our deployment process would take the same time and the testing site would benefit from security patches, quick deployment without logging in to the server, etc. Then the manager just disappears after hearing this from me. On slack, I get a question in 30 minutes from a remote developer about how to create an SSH user for a new site outside of deployment. I tell him the same. Then the junior gets called upstairs and ending up doing the job: no deployment, just plain SSH (SFTP) and manually creating the database. I end up doing it but He is "learning" how to do it.

An other example would be a day I was asked what is my opinion about Wordpress. We don't have any experience with Wordpress, I worked with Drupal before and when I look at a Wordpress codebase, I'm getting brain damage. They said Ok. The next day, comes the announcement that the boss decided to use Wordpress for our new agency website. For his own health and safety, I took the day off. At the end, the manager ended up hiring an indian developer who did a moderately fair job. No HiDPI sprites, no fancy SASS, just plain old CSS and a simple template. Lightyears worse than the site it was about to replace. But it did replace the old site, so now I have to look at it and identify myself part of the team. Best thing? We are now offering Wordpress development.

An other example is "lets do a quick order grid". This meant to be a table where the customer can enter SKU and quantity and they can theoretically order faster if they know the SKU already. It's a B2B solution. No one uses it. We have it for 2 sites now and in analytics, we have 5 page hits within 3 years on a site that's receiving 1000 users daily... Mostly our testing and the client looked at it. And no orders. I mean none, 0. I presented a well formatted study with screenshots from Analytics when I saw a proposal to a client to do this again. Guess what happened? Someone else from the team got the job to implement it. Happy client? No. They are questioning why no one is using it.

What would you do as a senior developer?

- Just serve notice and quit
- Try to talk to the boss (I don't see how it would work)
- Just don't give a shit

!rant

This situation, when you are working as external employee in a company that needs you to test safety-critical systems.

You wait months for "THE" (internal) test tool you have to use to implement your specified tests.

Finally , you meet with the responsible dev guy to let him setup everything.

Me: Hi, I'm here for setting up the test tool for project XY
Dev: Eh? No one (manger) ordered the tool for project XY!
Me:

Dear Java, I don't care about your tight rules and patterns; I just want the data.

Do I want some values from some far, hidden-away objects? Oh no, I can't, because I must respect the OO contracts between those objects and interfaces and type safety and blah dee bla.

Man I'm annoyed!

TL;Dr what does it mean "we're trying to reduce options to a minimum", why don't you go closed source!? why don't you remove themes!?

For anyone who uses rofi, they would know that a few months ago an update made it more compliant with the free-desktop spec, that it only uses the first .desktop file for the given Name tag.

I only found out about this recently as I was only able to update Manjaro recently, and it really annoyed me, cause it took me a while to figure out why tons of my desktop entries disappeared.

Turns out someone made an issue about this, and the given answer was: "that's against the spec". Ok, fine. But when I asked if they could add an option to still ignore that aspect of the spec (i.e. --show-duplicated), the response I got was: "going against the spec is a no-go". WHAT!?

There are so many things that have behavior that goes against the spec (ex. gnu-utils), why can't they add an option to do this!? An OPTION!?

When I decided to try (I don't know C yet) and make a PR, the first and last (it got locked afterwards!) comment I got was:
" As explained on #941, this is a no-go. We want to reduce the number of options to the minimum, and non-compliance to a well-defined and widely implemented spec is definitely not something we want."

Why are you so closed minded!? Yes compliance is amazing, but it's not a safety standard, it's okay if you *give an option* to go against the spec!!!!

WHAT THE HECK!?!?!? WHY!?!?!?

Why is a open source project closed to new features that are part if the scope of the project, and require minimal maintenance!?

Fuck. I just realized that because I picked Firebase for an SPA I was making for a client a year ago, I will need to keep updating the damn backend forever. Node 8 has reached EOL in the end of 2019, so Firebase has deprecated it and will *remove support* for it in 2021. Ok, I updated the app to work with node 10. But what happens when node 10 gets deprecated and loses support? Am I going to be forced to update the project once again so that it can keep running? Have the people at Firebase heard of backwards compatibility?

The reason I chose Firebase in the first place was because I wouldn't have to deal with servers (stuff like that scared me back then) and because it was free (client likes free stuff, of course). Had I picked a simple Express + MongoDB combo I would be able to deploy the thing when I was done and just leave it there forever, at the cost of ~$5/mo on DigitalOcean. But no, I was scared of the unknown so now I have to live with the shitfest that Firebase is. Fucking hell.

Disclaimer: I would not use Express and MongoDB in a project today, I have outgrown JS backend (thank god) and I prefer the safety of a relational DB.

"Come on, people! Engage with my post!"
It does not works like that, obviously.
And yet every single fucker who comes to give some mandatory training says something like this.
Bitch, if no one engages with your "chair safety PowerPoint", it is because it sucks. Not necessarily due to your delivery, the material itself sucks.
So stop asking for engagement and just give us the quizz and we can all get back to work already!

So as a personal project for work I decided to start data logging facility variables, it's something that we might need to pickup at some point in the future so decided to take the initiative since I'm the new guy.
I setup some basic current loop sensors are things like gas line pressures for bulk nitrogen and compressed air but decided to go with a more advanced system for logging the temperature and humidity in the labs. These sensors come with 'software' it's a web site you host internally. Cool so I just need to build a simple web server to run these PoE sensors. No big deal right, it's just an IIS service. Months after ordering Server 2019 though SSC I get 4 activation codes 2 MAK and 2 KMS. I won the lottery now i just have to download the server 2019 retail ISO and... Won't take the keys. Back to purchasing, "oh I can download that for you, what key is yours". Um... I dunno you sent me 4 Can I just get the link, "well you have to have a login". Ok what building are you in I'll drive over with a USB key (hoping there on the same campus), "the download keeps stopping, I'll contact the IT service in your building". a week later I get an install ISO and still no one knows that key is mine. Local IT service suggests it's probably a MAK key since I originally got a quote for a retail copy and we don't run a KMS server on the network I'm using for testing. We'll doesn't windows reject all 4 keys then proceed to register with a non-existent KMS server on the network I'm using for testing. Great so now this server that is supposed to connected to a private network for the sensors and use the second NIC for an internet connection has to be connected to the old network that I'm using for testing because that's where the KMS server seems to be. Ok no big deal the old network has internet except the powers that be want to migrate everything to the new more secure network but I still need to be connected to the KMS server because they sent me the wrong key. So I'm up to three network cards and some of my basic sensors are running on yet another network and I want to migrate the management software to this hardware to have all my data logging in one system. I had to label the Ethernet ports so I could hand over the hardware for certification and security scans.

So at this point I have my system running with a couple sensors setup with static IP's because I haven't had time to setup the DNS for the private network the sensors run on. Local IT goes to install McAfee and can't because it isn't compatible with anything after 1809 or later, I get a message back that " we only support up to 1709" I point out that it's server 2019, "Oh yeah, let me ask about that" a bunch of back and forth ensues and finally Local IT get's a version of McAfee that will install, runs security scan again i get a message back. " There are two high risk issues on your server", my blood pressure is getting high as well. The risks there looking at McAfee versions are out of date and windows Defender is disabled (because of McAfee).

There's a low risk issue as well, something relating to the DNS service I didn't fully setup. I tell local IT just disable it for now, then think we'll heck I'll remote in and do it. Nope can't remote into my server, oh they renamed it well that's lot going to stay that way but whatever oh here's the IP they assigned it, nope cant remote in no privileges. Ok so I run up three flights of stairs to local IT before they leave for the day log into my server yup RDP is enabled, odd but whatever let's delete the DNS role for now, nope you don't have admin privileges. Now I'm really getting displeased, I can;t have admin privileges on the network you want me to use to support the service on a system you can't support and I'm supposed to believe you can migrate the life safety systems you want us to move. I'm using my system to prove that the 2FA system works, at this rate I'm going to have 2FA access to a completely worthless broken system in a few years. good thing I rebuilt the whole server in a VM I'm planning to deploy before I get the official one back. I'm skipping a lot of the ridiculous back and forth conversations because the more I think about it the more irritated I get.

Hi So I need some solid advice from you all wonderful people.
I think i am now ready to look into job side of this world, but have lots of doubts , read my story.
I have been learning android for last 2 years. Most of the time i have been trying to understand how stuff works in android , but i have also gained a few other skills ( python programming, kotlin/flutter basics data analysis basics, testing, some graphic designing, aweful web dev ,etc). But i really want to work with Android. I don't have any specific Salary figure in mind, but i guess my knowledge is better or atleast par with most of the good android developers.

So i want to know how is this fresher/placement thingy work?
1.) GETTING KNOWN? : How can i make some good android based company aware that I am available for hiring? Should i start emailing every android related company that i know of? Should i start listing my profile on recruitment sites like linkedin or internshala? This year it is being said that companies will come for placements. From the status of my college, they are going to give me way to less $ , nd i know am not going to like any of them, but i guess i have to sit for them too.

2.INTERVIEW OR DIRECT PLACEMENTS? A little pre-context: i am currently starting my 4th year in clg. Afaik , 4th year isnt that strict and their can be leniency in terms of attendance. But my college is a place full of political cun*s in the name of directors and HODs and I don't know if they are again going to enforce the old 75% mandatory criteria. Plus if the company is from a different state/country , then my attendance would definitely not suffice.
So mainly i am unsure if somehow a company hires me, i would be able to start immediately. I heard that there are interviews for job recruitment after which the candidate is binded with an agreement to do some months training followed by permanent working after college completion.
This type of agreement is very much suitable for me, since from what my friend tells me, trainings can be lenient and understanding regarding exam preparations nd stuff.

So what do company usually chooses? Binding a fresher on immediate working basis or do they consider graduate completion?

Also, i suck at competitive coding. Do i need to polish myself on that or some company is willing to give me chance on the basis of my other skills 🙈(okay, no kidding , that's a serious question. I need to either work on getting better in competitive or build more apps based on that)

3.) ANDROID OR EVERYTHING? From what i have heard, working as a professional fresher is more like being an allrounder than being a domain specialist. But as i already stated, i really dig android and that's no small framework. I may di other stuff too, but won't interest me nd my output might be less efficient than expected.
So freshers can really be asked to do any stuff? Or can i still be in the area i like being into?

4.) COMPANY OR START-UP? Yeah, this is a general debate starter. Ignoring the business side of the conversation ( job safety vs more salary, experience, etc) the thing that's most important for me is the presence of a team. I want someone to assign me a task, whose vision i could follow, from whom i could learn, and some other people who are supportive and doing the same amount / similar work that am doing . This is so much import8 for me that i can easily ignore other factors for a better team. I once took a call from a startup ceo who hired me, a 2 month old android beginner at that time, as the "lead android developer"
But if am being on a team where i am supposed to do any random stuff that is assigned, then obviously this whole point of "visionary, helpful leader, guiding team, "etc goes moot