Frack he did it again.
In a meeting with the department mgr and going over a request feature *we already discussed ad nauseam* that wasn’t technically feasible (do-able, just not worth the effort)

DeptMgr: “I want to see the contents of web site A embedded in web site B”
Me: “I researched that and it’s not possible. I added links to the target APM dashboard instead.”
Dev: “Yes, it’s possible. Just use an IFrame.”
DeptMgr: “I thought so. Next sprint item …what’s wrong?…you look frustrated”
Me: “Um..no…well, I said it’s not possible. I tried it and it doesn’t work”
Dev: “It’s just an IFrame. They are made to display content from another site.”
Me: “Well, yes, from a standard HTML tag, but what you are seeing is rendered HTML from the content manager’s XML. It implemented its own IFrame under the hood. We already talked about it, remember?”
Dev: “Oh, that’s right.”
DeptMgr: “So it’s possible?”
Dev: “Yea, we’ll figure it out.”
Me: “No…wait…figure what out? It doesn’t work.”
Dev: “We can use a powershell script to extract the data from A and port it to B.”
DeptMgr: “Powershell, good…Next sprint item…”
Me: “Powershell what? We discussed not using powershell, remember?”
Dev: “It’s just a script. Not a big deal.”
DeptMgr: “Powershell sounds like a right solution. Can we move on? Next sprint item….are you OK? You look upset”
Me: “No, I don’t particularly care, we already discussed executing a powershell script that would have to cross two network DMZs. Bill from networking already raised his concern about opening another port and didn’t understand why we couldn’t click a link. Then Mike from infrastructure griped about another random powershell script running on his servers just for reporting. He too raised his concern about all this work to save one person one click. Am I the only one who remembers this meeting? I mean, I don’t care, I’ll do whatever you want, but we’ll have to open up the same conversations with Networking again.”
Dev: “That meeting was a long time ago, they might be OK with running powershell scripts”
Me: “A long time ago? It was only two weeks.”
Dev: “Oh yea. Anyway, lets update the board. You’ll implement the powershell script and I’ll …”
Me: “Whoa..no…I’m not implementing anything. We haven’t discussed what this mysterious powershell script is supposed to do and we have to get Mike and Bill involved. Their whole team is involved in the migration project right now, so we won’t see them come out into the daylight until next week.”
DevMgr: “What if you talk to Eric? He knows powershell. OK…next sprint item..”
Me: “Eric is the one who organized the meeting two weeks ago, remember? He didn’t want powershell scripts hitting his APM servers. Am I the only one who remembers any of this?”
Dev: “I’m pretty good with powershell, I’ll figure it out.”
DevMgr: “Good…now can we move on?”

GAAAHH! I WANT A FLAMETHROWER!!!

Ok…feel better, thanks DevRant.

Saw an ad for Wix, went like this:

"You need a website, why not do it yourself?"

Aren't they advertising to NOT use their crappy platform?

"Personalized Advertisements":

No Amazon, I'm not interested in buying any of these phones, I just bought a new one five days ago, remember? You sold it to me! And stop recommending the same book I already got five YEARS ago!

YouTube, why are you always showing me the same ad about an app I already own and use regularly? And why the FUCK do I you show me the new trailer of Star Wars Ep8 as an ad video before the actual video of the new Star Wars Ep8 trailer?

Audi, I am an university student, barely able to pay my rent, why are you telling me to buy your newest car? How do you expect me to afford this?

Monster, why exactly are you showing me job offers as "Technical Product Designer at company X" for which I'm not remotely qualified or even interested in?

Neither do I have 5000£ (I live in Germany, at least match the currency, ffs) to invest in some suspiciously promising stock market schemes, nor am I in any need of rheumatism pills or a hearing aid (I am 19). I cannot afford or want any Rolex watches and PLEASE, I don't know why you think I would, but I really do not need a special new and innovative brand of tampons, my dick is doing fine, thanks.

"Hot local singles near {my actual location} want to fuck!
Click here!!!"
At least there are still some ads you can trust to be relevant...

My most awkward recruiter interaction?

Just graduated college and got 'suckered' by an programming position ad that turned out to be a recruiting company. It was fine since they charge the company for their services and not me.
After a couple of weeks of waiting (they initially promised I would/could have at least 3 interviews a week, which hadn't happened.) I decided to start looking again on my own, found a position, and I was hired.

About two months later I get a phone call:

<skipping the pleasantries>
R: "I see you are working for D, congratulations. I've started the paperwork for our reimbursement."
Me: "Reimburse for what? I found that job on my own."
R: "D is one of the companies we work with and when we submitted your resume, they told us you were already hired."
Me: "And?"
R: "And you signed a contract and now its time to pay. The fees only start at $500"
Me: "Not me. I have the contract, it states, in the second paragraph, I am not responsible for any hiring fees."
<couple of seconds of silence>
R: "Yes, but that is only if we negotiated the contact. Since you went behind our back, we couldn't start the process"
Me: "And?"
R: "And its a breach of contract."
Me: "I'm not a lawyer, I don't understand what you're saying. It says right here on the contract I signed, I don't pay any fees. No where does it say I'm not allowed to look for a job on my own. Right?"
R: "Um..yea..right..right...but you were hired by one of our contracted companies."
Me: "No way I would have known that. Maybe you should have set up an interview long before now."
<R is getting pretty angry at this point>
R: "I'm sure we gave you list of companies we work with. Contacting those companies is a breach of contract. Unless you want our lawyers to get involved, the fee is only $500. Failing to honor your side of the agreement and we'll be forced to contact your employer and begin garnishing your wage until the fee is paid. You don't want that, do you?"
Me: "There was no list and I am allowed to find a job on my own. Again, I'm not responsible for you not setting up an interview so do whatever you think you can do. Have a good night"
<I hang up>

About a week later..

Boss: "Got a phone call from XYZ Recruiting requesting a wage garnishment. Do you know anything about that?"
<I explain the situation>
Boss: "Oh good grief. We've worked with them a couple of times and we contact them on an individual basis for new hires. You're fine"
Me: "You're not going to garnish my paycheck?"
Boss: "No no no, that's not how this works. He was probably trying to scare you into paying their crazy fees."
Me: "What if they get their lawyers involved? I don't want to cause any trouble"
Boss: "Ha ha...XYZ Recruiting is a couple of guys in an office and we have lawyers on the 3rd floor who eat and breath this shit. They know that and you won't hearing from them again."

So I own a webshop together with a guy I met at one of my previous contract jobs. He said he had a great idea to sell product X because he can get them very cheap from another European country. Actually it is a great idea so we decided to work together on this: I do everything tech related, he does the non tech stuff.

Now we are more than 1 year in business. I setup a VPS, completely configured it, installed and setup the complete webshop, built 2 custom PrestaShop modules, built many customizations, built a completely new order proces (both front and back end), advertised quite some products, did some link building, ensured everything is in place to do proper SEO, wrote some content pages, did administration and tax declarations, rewrote a part of a PrestaShop component because it was so damn inefficient and horribly slow, and then some more. Much more.

He did customer relation management, supplier management and some ad words campaigns. Promised me many times to write the content for our product pages. This guy has an education in marketing but literally said: I'm not gonna invest in creating some marketing plan. I have no ambition in online marketing.

What?! You have the marketing knowledge and skills but refuse to use it to market our webshop and business? What the fuck is wrong with you?!

Today he says to me: 'Hey man, this is becoming an expensive hobby as we don't sell much and have lots of costs. I don't understand why I should be the one to write these content pages. Everything you did in the past 8 months can be done in less than 20 hours! You are a joke and just made it a big deal by spreading your work over so many months. I know for sure because I currently work at a company where I'm surrounded by front end devs! Are you fucking crazy?! You're a liar.'

He talks like this to me every 2 months or so while he can't even deliver the content for 1 single product in 6 fuckin' months! We even had to refund a few of our customers because Mr. client relations manager didn't respond to their e-mails within 1 fucking week!! So I asked him how could that have happened as you do the client relations and support. Well, he replied to me: 'Why didn't YOU respond to our clients? You don't log on in our back office at least once a day?!'.

Of course I do asshole. But YOU don't. He replied that I was lying just like I was lying about what I did for our business.

So, asshole, let's have a look at PrestaShops logs to see who's logging in daily. Well, you can probably guess who's IP was there in most of the entries. It wasn't his.

So, what the fuck have you been doing then?! You can't even manage to respond quickly to a client?!! We have maybe 50 clients and if we get 1 question a month by email it is already a lot. But you keep bitching, complaining and insulting me instead?!!!

Last time he literally admitted on a WhatsApp conversation that he had and still has the hope that he could just sit back and relax and watch me do ALL the work.

Well, guess what you fucking moron. That's not what we agreed upon. You fuckin' retard think you're so smart but you say EVERYTHING on WhatsApp! Including your promises to me. Thank you you fuckin' piece of dog shit because now I have hard evidence and will hand it over to my lawyer to make you pay every god damn cent for all the hours I've spent working on our business. Oh, and I'll take over the webshop and make it a success on my own because I know damn well how to get relevant traffic and thus customers.

You just go get yourself fucked in the ass without lubricant you fuckin' asshole. I have told you you shouldn't fuck with me because I take business very seriously. I even warned you when you were crossing a line again. Well, if you don't listen... You will pay for the consequences. I will be so damn happy to tell you 'I told you so' with a very very big smile on my face. That momemt WILL come, 'partner'.

Fuck you. You will be fucked. Count on that. Fucking asshole.

@dfox and @trogus, here's an idea! What if every 20th or so rant was an ad? But not any ad, but job ads posted by recruiters!
That way you get money and we get more stuff to laugh about!

I'm trying to sign up for insurance benefits at work.

Step 1: Trying to find the website link -- it's non-existent. I don't know where I found it, but I saved it in keepassxc so I wouldn't have to search again. Time wasted: 30 minutes.

Step 2: Trying to log in. Ostensibly, this uses my work account. It does not. Time wasted: 10 minutes.

Step 3: Creating an account. Username and Password requirements are stupid, and the page doesn't show all of them. The username must be /[A-Za-z0-9]{8,60}/. The maximum password length is VARCHAR(20), and must include upper/lower case, number, special symbol, etc. and cannot include "password", repeated charcters, your username, etc. There is also a (required!) hint with /[A-Za-z0-9 ]{8,60}/ validation. Want to type a sentence? better not use any punctuation!

I find it hilarious that both my username and password hint can be three times longer than my actual password -- and can contain the password. Such brilliant security.

My typical username is less than 8 characters. All of my typical password formats are >25 characters. Trying to figure out memorable credentials and figuring out the hidden complexity/validation requirements for all of these and the hint... Time wasted: 30 minutes.

Step 4: Post-login. The website, post-login, does not work in firefox. I assumed it was one of my many ad/tracker/header/etc. blockers, and systematically disabled every one of them. After enabling ad and tracker networks, more and more of the site loaded, but it always failed. After disabling bloody everything, the site still refused to work. Why? It was fetching deeply-nested markup, plus styling and javascript, encoded in xml, via api. And that xml wasn't valid xml (missing root element). The failure wasn't due to blocking a vitally-important ad or tracker (as apparently they're all vital and the site chain-loads them off one another before loading content), it's due to shoddy development and lack of testing. Matches the rest of the site perfectly. Anyway, I eventually managed to get the site to load in Safari, of all browsers, on a different computer. Time wasted: 40 minutes.

Step 5: Contact info. After getting the site to work, I clicked the [Enroll] button. "Please allow about 10 minutes to enroll," it says. I'm up to an hour and 50 minutes by now. The first thing it asks for is contact info, such as email, phone, address, etc. It gives me a warning next to phone, saying I'm not set up for notifications yet. I think that's great. I select "change" next to the email, and try to give it my work email. There are two "preferred" radio buttons, one next to "Work email," one next to "Personal email" -- but there is only one textbox. Fine, I select the "Work" preferred button, sign up for a faux-personal tutanota email for work, and type it in. The site complains that I selected "Work" but only entered a personal email. Seriously serious. Out of curiosity, I select the "change" next to the phone number, and see that it gives me four options (home, work, cell, personal?), but only one set of inputs -- next to personal. Yep. That's amazing. Time spent: 10 minutes.

Step 6: Ranting. I started going through the benefits, realized it would take an hour+ to add dependents, research the various options, pick which benefits I want, etc. I'm already up to two hours by now, so instead I decided to stop and rant about how ridiculous this entire thing is. While typing this up, the site (unsurprisingly) automatically logged me out. Fine, I'll just log in again... and get an error saying my credentials are invalid. Okay... I very carefully type them in again. error: invalid credentials. sajfkasdjf.

Step 7 is going to be: Try to figure out how to log in again. Ugh.

"Please allow about 10 minutes" it said. Where's that facepalm emoji?

But like, seriously. How does someone even build a website THIS bad?

Google sucks!
No, not as e-mail or for privacy reasons. Sure, that too, but it comes with "free" stuff.

It sucks because it's breaking every possible record in the worst, shittiest, most insanely stupid APIs and integrations out there on the entire fucking planet!

It is comically stupid!

Aside from their LOVE of hard-deprecating APIs every few months, requiring constant, time consuming maintenance of every tool that integrates deeply with Google services, some of their APIs, for expensive stuff, look like they've been written by Bobby McFartface from 7th grade.

Take a look at DoubleClick Search (their ad performance reporting tool, that sure does sound like one). To upload custom, additional data, you must pass in a ton of parameter, and they REQUIRE some of them to have a specific, hardcoded value. What's the point in passing that parameter then you dickheads?!
But fine, so you uploaded some stuff using the API. Now you want to delete everything and try again after you fixed a bug - well you fucking CAN'T! You can't delete stuff, you can only mark them as "deleted" using an update call.
Bulk operations? Fuck no!
Can I just add on top? Well of course not! That will raise a ton of exceptions. Same message should be transmitted using the PUT, not POST request, in order to edit.
Can I send everything to PUT? Of course not! You can't edit something that's not there, dummy!

Can I see what's there so that I can update it, and add what's missing?
Well of course not! Why on Earth would you need to see what information is in there after you uploaded it? Who needs that anyway?

Simply send, pray, and hope that everything will be fine (it will not).

Like holy fucking crap, it can't get any more stupid!
Google is a huge pile of idiots who feed on only a single cow - the search engine.

It's times like these when I think that Google right now is the worst thing that exists for everyone in tech. It's dragging everyone down with their monopolies everywhere and complete idiocy in managing them.

I applied to a backend position that requested one of the following technologies: PHP, Java or .NET ( I work on .net btw)
So far so good, the hr recruiter schedules a talk and ask a lot of standard questions like what is your greatest accomplishment, what is good code and so on.
After what seemed to be about an hour of questioning she then tells me that I am to take a technical test from backend javascript. I pause for a second and I specifically tell her, lady, the ad said .NET, Java or PHP, wtf? And she tells me, no worries, we will train you. You can imagine that I completely blew the technical interview to later get an email that my knowledge (in javascript) is not sufficient for the position. Gg guys, good company values :))

Rich CEO's are so out of touch with reality.

We outsourced part of our software development to a third world country. During hiring process I had pushed for us to hire the more expensive, more experienced devs in a second-world country, but nooo we must save up those bucks. The pay is so low you wouldn't be able to afford rent in *city where CEO lives*.

As @GiddyNaya has ranted about, third world countries face impossibly slow internet and frequent blackouts. I also ranted about it in my last post. The "last straw" for the CEO was when our dev's computer started malfunctioning.

boss: When is that computer from?

dev: 2017

boss: 2017?! That's a dinosaur! Of course you're having battery problems!

me, trying to come up with an affordable solution for our dev: Well, you can have the battery switched.

boss: But 2017 is too old! Your computer should be *at most* 5 years old. I cannot stress enough how important it is to have your work-related tools working. (last sentence is ad verbatim)

The boss, of course, recommended a Mac. Mind you, the closest Apple store to our dev is 500km away! And a month of their salary will not come close to paying a Macbook.

Providing them with the equipment? No! We're already paying them a "competitive" salary!

Like seriously, how out of touch with reality can you be? Does greed blind you that much?

(The dev seems to have fixed the computer problems on his own tho)

this is the state of hiring tests:

1. can you take an english sentence, and without a tutorial, write a for loop?

2. okay now write a full parser. but not in the language we want to hire you in.

also we can afford to pay you in bananas, experience, and exposure.

p.s. we also need you to do this backend test because this is a backend job even though the ad is for front end and you specified an hour ago when the interview started that you only trained for front.

on the positive side, we have a ping pong table and a bean bag chair. and a two hour commute. Think of the benefits!

The coolest project I've worked on was for a certain country's Navy. The project itself was cool and I'll talk about it below but first, even cooler than the project was the place were I worked on it.

I would go to this island off the coast where the navy had its armoury. Then to get into the armoury I'd go through this huge tunnel excavated in solid rock.

Finally, once inside I would have to go thru the thickest metal doors you've ever seen to get to crypto room, which was a tiny room with a bunch of really old men - cryptographers - scribbling math formulae all day long.

I can't give a lot of technical details on the project for security reasons but basically it was a bootable CD with a custom Linux distro on it. Upon booting up the system would connect to the Internet looking for other nodes (other systems booted with that CD). The systems would find each other and essentially create an ad-hoc "dark net".

The scenario was that some foreign force would have occupied the country and either destroyed or taken control of the Navy systems. In this case, some key people would boot these CDs in some PC somewhere not under foreign control (and off the navy grounds.) This would supposedly allow them to establish secure communications between surviving officers. There is a lot more to it but that's a good harmless outline.

As a bonus, I got to tour an active aircraft carrier :)

Hashedram's compilations #1
List of most annoying website designs.

1) Pages with AUTO PLAYING VIDEOS.

Yes I'm looking at you Netflix. Along with every news website known to man. I'm looking to read a fucking article, so why would you even waste your money and bandwidth trying to shove a video of some shit I don't care about in my face, and make it follow me as I scroll down like a fucking insecure puppy. Also, fuck you Instagram.

2) Pages that redirect once immediately after you visit them, thereby fucking with the browser history and the BACK BUTTON just leads back to the same fucking site.

I mean, just why. Did you think I would just go "Hey the back button doesn't work so let's stay on the site and read their awesome content"?

3) Sites showing things in a SLIDESHOW, when it actually should be in a list.

Slideshows are for progressive stories or for showing lists where you don't care about what's in them. Top 10 foods that reduce weight. Slideshow 1/15. Fuck you.

4) LOOKS LIKE YOU'RE USING AN AD BLOCKER

Yes. Yes I am. No I will not turn it off for you, you narcissistic snowflake fuck. And don't even try to guilt shame me into turning it off, because I know you're just going to bombard me with videos of sexy singles in the area if I do.

5) Pages where I see the first 3 lines of an article and have to SUBSCRIBE to see more.

Yes. Brilliant fucking idea. A user wants to see what your site has to offer, so within the first three seconds, don't show him exactly that.

6) Looking up an article and having to read through the entire motivational life story of the author.

I just want to know how to boil eggs, not read about your journey across Africa learning how to make difference recepies using boiled rhino dung.

7) CLICK BAIT.

Title: School boy designs blockchain machine learning game engine

Actual Content: Tic tac toe program made using linked lists

Ah yes, Brave, the browser that "respects your privacy" has started putting ads directly *in* the browser.

When they introduced Brave Rewards and people were confused why I was upset, it's because I knew it was a slippery slope to toward this sort of thing.

EDIT: Turns out, the ad is targeted towards LGBT people. As an LGBT person who just wants to live life in peace, this shit aggravates me even more. First, corporations are not your friends. They do not care about you. It's virtue signalling. Second, it's a bit ironic seeing as how Brenden Eich made Brave. If you don't already know, Brenden Eich (also creator of javascript) is pretty anti-gay.

So many things wrong with this. Can't wait to stop leasing away my devices' resources to advertisers.

(Written March 13th at 2am.)

This morning (yesterday), my computer decided not to boot again: it halts on "cannot find firmware rtl-whatever" every time. (it has booted just fine several times since removing the firmware.) I've had quite the ordeal today trying to fix it, and every freaking step along the way has thrown errors and/or required workarounds and a lot of research.

Let's make a list of everything that went wrong!

1) Live CD: 2yo had been playing with it, and lost it. Not easy to find, and super smudgy.

2) Unencrypt volume: Dolphin reports errors when decrypting the volume. Research reveals the Live CD doesn't incude the cryptsetup packages. First attempts at installing them mysteriously fail.

3) Break for Lunch: automatic powersaving features turned off the displays, and also killed my session.

4) Live CD redux: 25min phonecall from work! yay, more things added to my six-month backlog.

5) Mount encrypted volume: Dolphin doesn't know how, and neither do I. Research ensues. Missing LVM2 package; lvmetad connection failure ad nauseam; had to look up commands to unlock, clone, open, and mount encrypted Luks volume, and how to perform these actions on Debian instead of Ubuntu/Kali. This group of steps took four hours.

6) Chroot into mounted volume group: No DNS! Research reveals how to share the host's resolv with the chroot.

7) `# apt install firmware-realtek`: /boot/initrd.img does not exist. Cannot update.

8) Find and mount /boot, then reinstall firmware: Apt cannot write to its log (minor), listed three install warnings, and initially refused to write to /boot/initrd.img-[...]

9) Reboot!: Volume group not found. Cannot process volume group. Dropping to a shell! oh no..

(Not listed: much research, many repeated attempts with various changes.)

At this point it's been 9 hours. I'm exhausted and frustrated and running out of ideas, so I ask @perfectasshole for help.
He walks me through some debugging steps (most of which i've already done), and we both get frustrated because everything looks correct but isn't working.

10) Thirteenth coming of the Live CD: `update-initramfs -u` within chroot throws warnings about /etc/crypttab and fsck, but everything looks fine with both. Still won't boot. Editing grub config manually to use the new volume group name likewise produces no boots. Nothing is making sense.

11) Rename volume group: doubles -'s for whatever reason; Rebooting gives the same dreaded "dropping to a shell" result.

A huge thank-you to @perfectasshole for spending three hours fighting with this issue with me! I finally fixed it about half an hour after he went to bed.

After renaming the volume group to what it was originally, one of the three recovery modes managed to actually boot and load the volume. From there I was able to run `update-initramfs -u` from the system proper (which completed without issue) and was able to boot normally thereafter.

I've run updates and rebooted twice now.
After twelve+ hours... yay, I have my Debian back!

oof.

A small bug is found.

Chad dev:
😎 *Exists*
> Writes a simple ad hoc solution in a few lines
> Self documenting code with constant run time
> No external dependencies needed
> Fixes the bug, easy to test and does not introduce any new issues

That guy nobody likes (AKA. regex simp coder):
🤡 'This can be "simplified" into oNE LiNe'
> Writes a long regex expression that has to line wrap the editor window several times
> Writes an essay in the comments to explain it's apparent brilliance to the peasant reader
> Exponential run time (bwahahah), excessive memory requirements
> Needs to import additional frameworks, requires more testing that will delay release schedule
> Also fixes bug but the software now needs 2x ram to run and is 3x slower
> Really puts the "simp" in simplified, but not the way you would expect

Please. Hear me out.

I've been doing frontend for six years already. I've been a junior dev, then in was all up to the CTO. I've worked for very small companies. Also, for the very large ones. Then, for huge enterprises. And also for startups. I've been developing for IE5.5, just for fun. I've done all kinds of stuff — accessibility, responsive design (with or without breakpoints), web components, workers, PWA, I've used frameworks from Backbone to React. My favourite language is CSS, and you probably know it. The bottom line is, you name it — I did it.

And, I want to say that Safari is a very good browser.

It's very fast. Especially on M1 Macs. Yes, it lacks customization and flexibility of Firefox, but general people, not developers, like to use it. Also, Safari is very important — Apple is a huge opposing force to Google when it comes to web standards. When Google pushes their BS like banning ad blockers, Apple never moves an inch. If we lose Safari, you'll notice.

As for the Safari-specific bugs situation, well… To me, Safari serves as a very good indicator: if your website breaks in Safari, chances are you used some hacks that are no good. Safari is a good litmus test I use to find the parts of my code that could've been better.

The only Safari-specific BUG I encountered was a blurry black segment in linear gradients that go from opaque to transparent. So, instead of linear-gradient(#f00, transparent), just do linear-gradient(#f00f, #f000).

This is the ONLY bug I encountered. Every single time my website broke in Safari other than that, was for some ugly hack I used.

You don't have to love it. I don't even use it, my browser of choice is Firefox. But, I'm grateful to Safari, just because it exists. Why? Well, if Safari ceases to exist, Google will just leave both W3C and WhatWG, and declare they'll be doing things their way from now on. Obey or die.

Firefox alone is just not big enough. But, together with Safari, they oppose Google's tyranny in web standards game.

Google will declare the victory and will turn the web into an authoritarian dictatorship. No ad blockers will be allowed. You won't be able to block Google's trackers. Google already owns the internet, well, almost, and this will be their final, devastating victory.

But Safari is the atlas that keeps the web from destruction.

A few weeks ago I stepped onto the grounds of lovely Canada. Back then - coming from Europe - I was surprised. Free WiFi everywhere without all the bells and whistles of creating an account and such.

Well ... at least I thought so ...

Today I went to a location where they actually charge you for their wireless services - fair enough the coverage area is pretty huge - and provide you with an access coupon. All good my optimistic me told me but once the login page loaded...

There are a lot of things about UX I could rant about but let's put that aside. The coupon came from the office where they KNEW all your contact details but it required you to create an account with all of them again to redeem the coupon.

Not only that but it asked for things like the phone number - obviously asking for a Canadian landline number since hell who uses mobiles anyway with numbers longer than ten characters?! - and even though it had a nice country selection it kept the states field there even when selecting a country that doesn't have states ...
Oh, and on a regular phone screen (which would be the target user for WiFi on a campground I suppose) the input fields for state and zip were occluded by the margins of the input rendering the content invisible.

And if that weren't enough after creating your account they made you watch an ad as if the personal data and the 4$ you paid them wasn't enough for the lousy 400 KB/s you get for 24h ...

Gets better though! After creating the account they display your password to make sure you remembered it ... over a non-secured WiFi network ... and send you an email afterward ... password via unencrypted mail via an unencrypted WIRELESS connection ... not that it protects anything that would matter anyways you can just snoop the MAC of your neighbor and get in that way or for that sake get their password but oh well ...

Gosh, sometimes I just feel the urgent need to find the ones responsible and tell them to GTFO of the IT world ...

Is it just me feeling like this about crappy UI/UX design? Always wondering...

> scrolling through facebook feed
> see ad to apply as an app developer at carrefour
> "you might win 300€ to spend at carrefour"
> "we're searching for an app developer"
> apply
> first test is to make a button that adds stuff to an HTML list, very basic
> pass the first test
> get an email: "you can candidate to the next phase and might get a job"

MFW I just wanted to get 300€ and not a job

I'm cracking up...

"chatGPT will ruin the software interviewing industry!!!"

uh.... what does it tell you about our industry if a fucking ROBOT can "ruin" the interview

well, you're right. it tells you that only algorithmic robots do well and subsequently earn the top spots at software companies after interviewing.

creativity, grit, perspective, wisdom? that stuff is absolute bullshit!!! (and as a feeble human I can't figure that out in an interview anyway!!! better just have you solve leetcode problems ad naseum!!! that'll get us the best employee!!!)

god i hate the dumb fuck rat race. good thing i'm not in it anymore! peace out, girl scout✌️

This is not an interview test just an awkward experience in general regarding interview.

This happened two years ago when I was a fresh university graduate looking for a job in UK as an immigrant (Im EU national).

Went to an interview for a web dev+tech support position. Two fat guys with tshirts met me and started interviewing me for a sysadmin position. Started asking me about disaster recovery and stuff.

Turns out recruiter messed up not only companies but positions as well. Also these two guys didnt bother to check anything.

I pulled out the job ad for which I applied originally, interviewers had a look at it and still proceeded questioning me while knowing that I prepared for completely different position interview.

Needless to say, it went terrible and I didnt get the job. I dont know if its just me or Im unlucky, but I had a lot of encounters in UK with so many incompetent recruiters.

Story time!

About seven years ago, I was in high school and had friends who kinda rocked with computers. I mean, they knew how to build one, how to make cross tests to find what was wrong with one, which softwares to install to detect viruses, etc. Once, I was with one of these friends, A, when another friend, G, came to us to explain his problem: his computer didn't turn on anymore. He said that he opened the computer, took off the RAM, that let the computer start once, but when he switched off again he wouldn't start anymore.

I was just a silent witness, and A started to ask G how it did happen. "Oh, I was downloading an Allopass generator, when my computer froze."
I smiled.
"But where on hell did you download that? So we can try to find exactly what virus you downloaded! " "Actually", said G, "I was on a streaming site at first, then saw an, then another, and after a dozen sites I found this soft..."
"But", A couldn't believe it, "you don't have antivirus or anything that would have told you not to download it?"
"Oh, it tried, but I reaaaaaally wanted this software. So I shut down it and managed to download it."

I burst in laugh. At the same time I was feeling bad for this poor computer. What amazed me it that not once during the process, G thought it was a bad idea to download an Allopass generator found in an ad that even his antivirus told him it was dangerous.

Nice ending, A took the computer, and managed to make it work again. He even managed to keep important stuff that wasn't destroyed by the virus. G got a little lesson by A, then got yelled at by his parents, because the computer was in fact theirs.

Thanks for reading, and sorry if there's any mistake (grammar, punctuation, etc.), I am on my phone with autocorrect set on french. Have a nice day!

So we're hiring for a new junior dev and for the most part it's been going great! We have some promising candidates and I am so glad to finally have a new dev on the team!

However, I would like to take a moment and offer a few suggestions to the people who wish to work for this great and illustrious company:

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE APPLY FOR THE JOB USING THE METHOD INDICATED IN THE AD. Please use our fancy, top-of-the-line, whiz-bang, cloud-based "talent acquisition" system that we paid way too much money for. I promise you, it's easy! Please don't send in your application by email, mail, telephone, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, telegram or carrier pigeon. But most importantly...

FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS BEAUTIFUL IN THIS WORLD DO NOT SHOW UP AT OUR OFFICE UNANNOUNCED RESUME-IN-HAND. Believe it or not I do have an actual job that I spend my day doing! If I'm not in a meeting or at lunch or working from home, the best possible scenario is that you'll get 30 seconds of awkward small talk and be pointed to our whiz-bang, top-of-the-line "talent acquisition" system which you should have used in the first place (you did read the ad, right?). And at this point whatever you do...

DO NOT DEMAND AN ON-THE-SPOT INTERVIEW WHEN YOU SHOW UP UNANNOUNCED TO OUR OFFICE! Like, really? Do you think that you've wowed me so with your 30 seconds of awkward small talk that clearly I cannot wait to see what you will do with an entire hour? Look, I prepare for my interviews. I research you, your previous employers, your school and the hobbies you list on your resume. I check out your GitHub and LinkedIn. I may even Google your name! If that is all in order, I try to hassle some people into sitting in with me, find a time that works for everyone, and hope that there is a meeting room available. I'm not going to interview you at reception at 4pm on a Friday afternoon.

Please submit your application through our whiz-bang, top-of-the-line online "talent acquisition" system. Once I figure out how to log in, I promise I will spend an evening and read through all your cover letters with the utmost care. If you seem OK, you'll get an interview. There aren't that many developers in this town.

Overheating The Javascript Ecosystem

Paranoid thought: You know, in the course of every day, being the corrupt piece of shit that I am, whenever I see a scandal or what looks like shenanigans-in-the-making, I ask myself

"Wisecrack, is this a fucking scam or con of some sort?"

I was recently asking myself this about javascript.

Not the language per se, but the ecosystem.

I noticed how there are a thousand CLIs for simple shit. Another four thousand for page long libraries, for simpleton level shit (because prototypes are designed after satans own aborted love-child of object models). I noticed another eight thousand guys imitating steve jobs, talking at conferences and 'change the world' high-on-huffing-my-own-shit TEDX talks like rubyists that don't realize the world has moved on, all to hawk books and inflate CVs for cushy positions at major tech firms and the herd of dicksuckers following the next fad off a cliff like lemmings. And another eight thousand 'tech journalists' pushing them off the cliff while begging for outrage and hype dollars and slowly circling like vultures above the drain that is the ad-based economy.

And I thought to myself.

"Wisecrack, who benefits from all this noisy self-indulgent horseshit? Where is all the money coming from for all these books, conferences, meetings, publications, media, bread, and circuses?"

"I don't know wisecrack. But if I were the CEO of a big company, threatened by the prospect of a universal language, or universal platform, like flash, but one I couldn't kill like flash, I would try to do the most corrupt thing I could think of."

"Whats that wisecrack?"

"I would try to 'overheat' the ecosystem by selectively hiring people from that ecosystem, pumping money into a boatload of similar products, all in the hopes of provoking the equivalent of an immune overreaction, imitators all flooding the ecosystem with the same shit in different packages, self promoting sycophants, aggrenadizing social media idiots, tools sold as tools, hyped as 'the next coming of steve jobs', overcooked shit that focuses on ceremony over functionality, ritual over productivity, documentation over innovation like some sort of amazonion infinite nesting doll hellscape of documents linking to documents linking to documents, each one a new circle of dantes inferno, where the definition of anything links to another document that says "see also xyz", and I would convince them that they had done it to themselves."

And then I would push typescript as their lord, savior, and master. "

"How do you know all this wisecrack?"

"Because I am a piece of shit, and, this is what I would do in any executive's shoes."

I'm not enjoying my current experience with the web.

I feel sad, alone most of the time.

Let me disclaim first that I don't have like an apocalyptic view of the world, I actually think it's improving (in very broad terms).

I also understand that the web is a complex thing and everyone being happy with is going to be very unlikely, specially as more and more people use it, since the entropy will naturally increase.

I don't have solid evidence of what I'm saying next and I'm not even entirely what exactly I'm saying, but maybe I'm onto something.

I feel that when the internet first started, businessmen were like "meh, geek stuff".

But slowly, things changed, and every greedy person tried to just fucking unload his greed filled cum onto it

And now it feels like 1984. And I hate when people reeeee 1984. But it does feel like it.

The ads are like "ok, I know you like that other shit, but CHECK THIS SHIT OUT".

It's AI driven to maximize profits, with little care for people happiness.

I miss when youtube had related videos. The algorithm wasn't perfect but at least it was exactly that, related videos.

Now though, youtube likes to be smart. But not smart in a way that enriches your youtube experience.
It's smart in a way that maximizes ad revenue.

"what? did you think we were going to use AI to make you happier? that we were going to enrich your youtube experience?
NO MOTHER FUCKER! OF COURSE NOT. We're gonna use it to show you whatever shit that will make us richer faster."

Controls for customizing the recommended videos behaviour? Pff, no.
They're gonna decide for you what it is that you like
They're going to decide what you should be watching.

Everytime i turn on my samsung tv, the youtube app recomends me watching "BETTER THAN SEX EYE LINER". Jesus christ, what the shitcum, I'm the only motherfucker on the house that uses youtube, and I couldn't care less about this cunt's disguised ad video, let alone fucking eye liners.

Why youtube, why do you promote whatever porn video VEVO uploads?

Why do you ruin every youtube rewind?

Why do you pander to the lowest common denominator?

Why can't you be shining beacon, a moral company considering you're a cultural icon?

Fuck you youtube, and while we're at it, fuck you too samsung, I must have been drunk the day I bought this shitty closed source software piece of shit "smart".

And these are just 2 companies. The internet is FILLED with these greedy bastards. They have no passion for their products, for making people happy. They only have passion for the MUNNNEY.

Thanks a lot business schools, thanks a lot CEOs of the world, thanks for making the world a happier place.

Ok, now that I said that, I want to back up a bit.

Youtube may bot be perfect, but it's ad revenue system enables some youtubers I love to be able to make that their careers.

I appreciate that, so maybe youtube isn't that bad... so sorry for saying those horrible things man!

Am I the only one who thinks recruitment processes are lower quality the more the industry evolves?

I just shocked an interviewer by saying i’m not checking all their boxes from the ad, after being pushed by their hr to take the interview, regardless beeing made sure by HR thats not a problem.

After interview radio silence. i don’t get it...first you headhunt someone, spend 3 weeks in convincing for an on-site and then you can’t even bother sending a “Dude you are not what we look for in the end” mail?

Guess I ask too much from recruiters, did anyone else encountered this?

TL;DR: No YouTube Music! Fuck you.

Disclaimer: I could use an Adblocker but my old one always crashed and YouTubes Ads are short and not that bad - mostly just banners in the video player.

Rant: Yes google, I AM listening to music on youtube. I am your target audience for YouTube Music. But I am NOT interested.
You see, I wouldn't listen to music on YouTube if I had the spare money for Spotify, Apple Music or some other stupid overpriced service that gives the actual artists not enough of what they charge.

And giving me the same ad over and over again just annoys the fuck out of me. I DON'T WANT FUCKING YOUTUBE MUSIC. I am not interested in a free trial. I am not interested in buying it.
The most stupid thing is that Google provides a dislike and like button for ads. I pressed dislike so often yet it still comes up. GOOD QUALITY!

Why on earth is every fucking big company lost in copying every shit that others make and that has success? Where is my loved innovative Valve?! The innovative Google? They all just crave for fucking money making stuff. As if they still needed more...

I was fresh out of college, love Java and looking for a job.

Well, after exact 1 month I sucked the reality. I found an Ad for a designer and got selected. Point is I mention my qualification in high school because I was feeling bad to disclose my higher degree for such a job.

I worked for 6 months there and every day was like working as the covert operative. I always knew I can write an automated script for all that daily shit. But for the sake of the landlord rent, I kept quiet. (I literally care for his children, I was the only source of income)

Then, my friend that day 16-Sep-2012 I wrote a program to do all the repetitive thing I used to do.
My boss found out and I expose my self as Spiderman do to Jen, Sir! I am a Programmer.

Sadly it was, no surprise to him. He said, on your first day I found out that you are not high school. Because with such accuracy only a graduate can do such level of the job.

He praised me and motivated me, my first non-technical master.

TL;DR: A freehoster got a redesign!

I remember when I made "my own website" in wix and sitey. It sucked working with them for me. I hated having an ad for them fixed at the bottom of my screen. I hated WYSIWYG-editors and wanted to paste my own code, a pro feature.

Sometime later I found bplaced, a free german based (also English language) hoster. And I use it for all my "official" test project. My first ever published self-coded website is still on there.. When I want to show someone what I've been working on (locally) without putting it on my domain, I use their services. They always looked oldish like from 2000 but their redesign puts them at least in 2015 :D

Give 'em a shot if you want.
Sadly, I am not paid to say this. I just really like them.

!dev

This may be a petty rant, but It's been grinding my gears for a few months now... I fucking hate ads, it's starting to be incredibly ridiculous. You start a video... 2 ads... you watch for 2 minutes, another 2 ads (and no, adblock isn't a solution, that only works on PC, not devices)?!!! You start an App... ads, you listen to music... ads... you go to google... ads, you click a website... ads... you look out of your window... ads... you walk down the street... ads... ads.. ads...
Seriously, what the fuck have we done?!! As a society we fucked up so badly... Look, no matter how many times you offer me an ad for a furniture, I'm not going to buy a fucking furniture on just any random day. You are completely wasting my already limited time... If you don't have any ads to show me, then don't show me ads, fuck you, you fucking piece of shit software... How is it that it used to be enough to click away one static, non-intrusive ad, but now 6-8 15-20 second ads, popups and intrusive, mid-content ads are the norm?! And then a piece of shit like MoviePass DARES, FUCKING DARES, To work on some sort of camera-enabled check that you actually LOOK at the ads?!!!! ARE YOU FUCKING SHITTING ME?! WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE YOU RETARDED PIECE OF BLACK MIRROR SHIT, FUCK OFF WITH THIS BRAINWASHING BULLSHIT, I'M ALLERGIC TO IT, FUCK ALL OF THIS.

I fucking promise that any software I'll make will be either free and open source, or paid only by alternative means, no ads, not ever. I will never fucking add to this retarded bullshit. Never fucking ever will I lower myself on a level where I need to actively waste the time and psyche of thousands or millions of people to get money. Fucking hell.... As if the world doesn't suck enough already, we treat humans as cattle, and It's pissing me off... In the past I used to just delete any app that annoyed me with ads, but what the fuck do I do about youtube since it's the de-facto content source on the internet? And worse, my friends and family watch youtube.. even if I avoid it that doesn't mean the problem is solved... There needs to be an alternative, and paying subscriptions for every single fucking service on the web isn't a solution. Even worse with the current economy... I'd rather eat real food, than buy shit like premium on ShitTube, Fuckify, all the random news website I might read and every app or game I start once every two months... Shit like ad-less premium accounts aren't giving me an alternative, just a way to shoot myself in the foot longterm...

Godbless everyone that releases open source software, apps, tools, websites and such. I hope to god decentralized alternatives to youtube need to happen and not in the web3 way, because that's also retarded...

Fuck, Fuck, Fuck, Shit, Fuck Shit, Piss, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, Retards, Fucking absolutely disgusting pieces of shit... ... alright, I got it out of my system, but It's gonna be right back the next time YouTube forces me to look at 20 seconds of something I already skipped 48 times today...

I don't understand why people are making a fuss about Facebook.

It's free to use, the amount of users kept increasing (thus the cost of maintenance) yet the company kept getting bigger and bigger. Obviously they're not making all their money off the advertisements on Facebook's own website.

So why are people so surprised that they're "selling" user information?

This is really funny to me. Especially the media joining in saying that it makes all your information available to everybody when they're actually talking about the fact that the majority of Facebook users have their profile set to public and they can be easily found with a simple Google search.

People are so fucking hypocritical it makes me want to puke. If you don't want anybody to know what you posted, just don't fucking post it on a SOCIAL MEDIA in the first place.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that facebook is all flowers and love, they clearly didn't handle this situation well. They could have done something about this whole situation when it started instead of waiting for things to blow out of proportion.

However, people are just being assholes now. I highly doubt that they're reading all chats nor are they sending it over, they're probably just sending out some words you mention often so that it is pertinent for advertisers (ex. If you use the word computer next to buy, then maybe that triggers something). I could talk extensively about it but I'm way too lazy, the point is, they most likely aren't sending the nudes you sent to advertisers because that does not provide any benefits.

If you don't like Facebook, don't fucking use it. Delete your account and shut the fuck up. When you screw up in real life, there's no takesies backsies, why the fuck do people think it doesn't apply online? The government gathers up quite a lot of information on you yet I don't see you crying your eyes out.

Why the fuck do you care so much if an advertisement is tailored to specifically? Yeah, you talked about dildos and now you see dildo ads from Amazon, not happy? Just download adblock and shut up. If you're gullible and the moment you see an ad about single women in your area you click on the ad because you want to get laid right now, that's your problem.

Don't want people knowing about some aspects of your private life? Don't share it online.

Stop acting like people are any better at keeping secrets, I'm sure you had some people leak your secrets at least once, yet I doubt you sued them and you brought them to court.

===========

I'm sorry about this, it's just that Facebook is all over the news and I'm getting sick of it.

Also, I hate facebook, I'm not necessarily defending it, I'm more pissed at the medias for blowing this situation out of proportion.

This freaking laptop.

The WiFi randomly stops working -- and by that, I mean the hardware is no longer detectable, let alone functional. It simply disappears on boot, even from dmesg.

The same happens with audio and bluetooth: on some boots they simply do not exist.

The power usage is also ridiculous: the battery dies in about two hours, and it gets soo hot. Toasty wrists unless I use my tiny bluetooth keyboard ☹ So I need to fiddle with powertop a bit more.

nVidia drivers are also a bloody pain, and having two graphics cards this is even more difficult to set up. I still haven't managed. (nvidia-driver, bumblebee, optimus, official driver messes, manual xorg configs, ...). So I have a beautiful 4k built-in display running at 4-18 fps, and a non-functional 4k external. That's fine for now, but >.>; frustrating.

In better news! I just managed to get the sound to work by backporting the new 4.19 kernel (yay!) -- I have never been so happy to hear an ad. but fixing the sound killed my bluetooth. (The `bluetooth` utility reports the adapter is present, but nothing else can seem to see it 🙄) So now I'm going to have burning hot wrists all day and want to cry because terrible sweaty awfulness.

Just. It's frustrating.

It's fast, though.
and ever so pretty.

New webdev job ad in a small town where I live:
"We need a junior to mid level full-stack dev - Python, Flask, Django, ES6, Angular, TypeScript, Git, etc..."
ME:
"Fuck, I tick all the checkboxes! - And it's like the only Python job around here! Yey! I so want to work with Python" excited sends cv and an extremely well crafted cover letter.
Company calls after few days:
"Hi! So we'd like to invite you for interview. Some of the tech we work in: Shopify, Wix, and SquareSpace. We're also trying to get into some other frameworks and started looking at Magento and Wordpress.... It's not really much coding, mostly content management...."

What the actual fuck!?!

I still agreed to interview...

!rant

Wanted to share a project with you, which I heard about at a Python Conference I attended.

It's a Raspberry based Hacking Station to educate and sensitize students about data privacy. The amazing thing about the project is, that it is a graduation project from a high school student.

If you're interested, check out spypi.ch

This is not an ad or something, I was just amazed by the talk and the idea of the project and wanted to share it with you.

I """""accidentally"""'" found some security holes in my school's Windows public computer setup.

Every student and teacher has a personal Active Directory, obviously they should be able to only see their own right?
oh wait the directory up button in explorer shows me all of them and I have r/w access to teacher and student ADs.

That's cool.

Also, the command prompt, Run prompt ad Explorer path bar are disabled...

...but batch scripts work.

Sweet.

Surely I can't do something dumb like--- oh, regedit's blocked but not the reg command.

They use the-- WHY IS GPEDIT NOT BLOCKED

Well what the fuck.

(All of this was responsibly handled by emailing the tech department. They have an email just for this! ...got a bounceback "this person is no longer employed at XYZ School.")

I finally fucking made it!

Or well, I had a thorough kick in my behind and things kinda fell into place in the end :-D

I dropped out of my non-tech education way too late and almost a decade ago. While I was busy nagging myself about shit, a friend of mine got me an interview for a tech support position and I nailed it, I've been messing with computers since '95 so it comes easy.

For a while I just went with it, started feeling better about myself, moved up from part time to semi to full time, started getting responsibilities. During my time I have had responsibility for every piece of hardware or software we had to deal with. I brushed up documentation, streamlined processes, handled big projects and then passed it on to 'juniors' - people pass through support departments fast I guess.

Anyway, I picked up rexx, PowerShell and brushed up on bash and windows shell scripting so when it felt like there wasn't much left I wanted to optimize that I could easily do with scripting I asked my boss for a programming course and free hands to use it to optimize workflows.

So after talking to programmer friends, you guys and doing some research I settled on C# for it's broad application spectrum and ease of entry.

Some years have passed since. A colleague and I built an application to act as portal for optimizations and went on to automate AD management, varius ssh/ftp jobs and backend jobs with high manual failure rate, hell, towards the end I turned in a hobby project that earned myself in 10 times in saved hours across the organization. I felt pretty good about my skills and decided I'd start looking for something with some more challenge.

A year passed with not much action, in part because I got comfy and didn't send out many applications. Then budget cuts happened half a year ago and our Branch's IT got cut bad - myself included.

I got an outplacement thing with some consultant firm as part of the goodbye package and that was just hold - got control of my CV, hit LinkedIn and got absolutely swarmed by recruiters and companies looking for developers!

So here I am today, working on an AspX webapp with C# backend, living the hell of a codebase left behind by someone with no wish to document or follow any kind of coding standards and you know what? I absolutely fucking love it!

So if you're out there and in doubt, do some competence mapping, find a nice CV template, update your LinkedIn - lots of sources for that available and go search, the truth is out there!

“PHP is evil” is not just a joke.

PHP is usually percieved as a language which is not so consistent and has some opinionated historical aspects but allows rapid development because it’s easy. They say PHP doesn’t focus on that “purist shit” such as concepts and “just gets things done”.

Hovewer, this is not true. PHP lures you in and lies to you promising saving time on development, but everything, and I mean EVERYTHING written in PHP is doomed to turn into a bloody mess sooner or later.

You have to be an AI to manage the growing PHP codebase and add features without breaking anything. With every feature it gets harder and harder. If you’re still a human managing a human team, you have to enforce guidelines. Automatic error preventon measures are made of code themselves so the cost of deploying them ona late stage can be ridiculous. And you never deploy them on early stage because you want to “save time”. Your people have to spend more and more time everyday checking on that guidelines. Your development process only becomes slower and slower. If you try to push things, your project will crumble to dust.

To make PHP at least decent, you have to figure out all this by yourself on an early stage. When you’re done, you spent a lot of time creating the buggy, ad-hoc, unspecified and unsupported alternative of what works out of the box in other languages. And you still code in PHP and still have all its disadvantages in your project’s DNA.

PHP is evil because it promises and never delivers. PHP is evil because it lies to you and it already fucked over so many of us.

If you want to code in PHP, do it under your pillow. Code your own silly projects.

If your project has the word “production” somewhere in its plans, PHP is not the way to go.

Amen.

- Back in October 2019 -

- Me: Hey, these two servers are having weird problems. Several services we use stop functioning every 7-10 days. I can temporarily fix them by taking them off the domain and putting them back on, but I don’t know why they’re happening or what further damage this workaround causes.
- Boss: Thats not good. Well. Keep doing the fix when it’s needed.
- Me: We should really reach out to someone at Microsoft through our support plan. I have no idea how to fix any of this and it’s making our Hyper-V environment very unstable.
- Boss: K. Let’s not worry about that now, let’s just keep working around it.

- In January 2020 -

- Me: Hey boss. More and more errors are generating from these servers. I’ve created a log of everything Ive found to hand off to a support agent. We really need to.
- Boss: Okay. Let’s talk to our internal team that uses Hyper-V and see what they did since they don’t have any problems.
- Me: Its not Hyper-V specific. It’s stemming from AD and authentication. It causes problems even without Hyper-V installed, so I don’t think it will help.
- Boss: K. Let’s just do what we can with what we got.

- Today, May 2020 -

- Me: Hey. The servers no longer work at all, and the workaround has no effect anymore. I’m completely stalled on my project now and have nothing to do.
- Boss: What?? What happened to them?
- Me: *Sends 17 page PDF file documenting all found issues, errors, warnings, and weird anomalies in both servers, as well as troubleshooting steps I’ve already performed*
- Boss: None of this makes any sense. I need you to start troubleshooting right away.
- Me: But... I can’t... *Sends screenshots of errors having no search results on the web, screenshots of Microsoft Support Techs on forums telling me we need to open tickets with Microsoft directly, other reasons why I’m completely blocked*
- Boss: Keep trying to figure it out. We need this resolved as soon as possible and we can’t let it happen again in the future.

Now I’m completely alone in our office, bitterly staring at the servers, trying to force an epiphany on how to fix these dumb boxes.

Am I the only one who doesn't understand apple card? Like really, it's just the worst pitch ever!

"Apple card. Made by apple. Not a bank" that's a REAL ad I saw today. Why would you trust APPLE more than an FDIC insured bank with decades or (in some select cases) CENTURIES of experience in finance?

"No more card numbers and CVV"
Cool. I get it. Card numbers get leaked and stolen. But that's why banks insure cards and reverse fradulant transactions. How an I'm supposed to use it on Amazon?! I'm sure they have an answer. Like maybe one time use generated cards. But they haven't advertised it yet, and that's a problem!

Why do they think people want this!? And even more so, because I've seen some people are excited: WHY DO PEOPLE WANT THIS?! why is apple trying to make everything?!

Just had one of the most cringiest HR interview ever. I'm looking for a new job, and yesterday applied for several med/senior backend developer positions and immediately got response from a well known software company.

We schedule a call today 9:00am, so I take homeoffice and wake-up half an hour earlier than usual.

First thing I notice, lady is 5mins late, but okay its morning, we're all humans, so I don't mind it even though some other person might call it a classical sign of disrespect and hangup right away.

First question: Why did you apply for our company?
- Euhhmm cause I'm looking for a new job and I saw your job ad yesterday?

Second question: Why would you like to work at our company?
- Left speechless.. Well I honestly don't know, not really following your company, I know that you exist but that's about it, shouldn't you be telling me this? (*heavy breathing on the other side*)

The rest of interview left me quite uninterested due to initial questions, like what the hell, I can imagine these being alright for interns and junior developers who might be fascinated by opportunity to work for a big and well known company to build their CV, but c'mon I've went through shit already and honestly don't care for who I work for as long as they have interesting projects, are paying me right and have couple small benefits I'm looking for such as homeoffice, gym card etc..

While working on my localization algorithm, I also set up a baseline I can compare my results to. I chose AMCL which is the go-to localization package everyone uses in ROS.
I took a peek at their code and found this atrocity - "ad hoc weighting scheme" where probabilities that are not mutually exclusive are added together, and also taken to the power of 3 because why the hell not!

Just saw an ad on LinkedIn.

First line: looking for JavaScript developers of all levels

A bit further down...

Requirements: 4+ years of JavaScript experience plus whole front-end stuff

The fuck is wrong with people?

At least the salary is not crap.

Stress balls are awesome.
Never thought they are this effective.

Like just throwing it and kicking it around in my apartment makes me feel a bit better.

Just hired an entry level developer in my company. Just graduated. He doesn't know what is code debugging, does not know difference between IDE and text editor like atom.
He doesn't know what is Bootstrap and git.

Gave him a task in AngularJS 1. Gave him 3 weeks and a half time. Read data from webservice, show them in table, filter, sorting and show details per record (which is easy in AngularJS. I got the same task years ago and finished in 2 days after I finished my AngularJS 1 tutorials). He did not finish any of those.

I know I'm judging but come on. What have you done these three years university? Only partying? Have not bothered reading something online? FOR THREE YEARS?

P.S. I have learned everything myself. Coding, debugging, structuring etc. I've had the bad luck that my 2 first bosses and team leader used to tell me "Do not ask anyone for help here in the office. Google is your best friend." And he encourage all developers not to help each other.

Ad I am writing this, I told him to download and install PyCharm and get back to me. It's been one hour and I have not heard anything from him. 1 Hour to download and install something. Imagine how long will it take to do a task.
Even my girlfriend (Yes, I have one), who dislikes computers can do this.

That's why I'm so frustrated.

I am thinking of firing him. Or should I give him more time?
I mean, if he can not do a simple task only by showing data in a table (which he can find them on Google, worst case scenario, how can he do more complex code, structuring it, etc ?)

NOT AN AD

Tried netlify for fun. Took 30secs to deploy

AWESOME

I am calling this a premonition rant, of more rants to come.
I have a feeling in my bones.
We have a newly acquired fat cat customer with bucks to blow who we have done some digital work for already and swag bag of marketing perkiness.
I will call the CEO of this whale "The Porcupine"
The Porcupine has a business degree and industry experience, nothing to do with websites or applications.
It claims to be a visual perfectionist yet never delivers an overall coherent review.
It likes to fixate on minor brand style differences in websites and apps we have built.
The Porcupine seems to be always busy with policy and legal and other things rather than participating in their own projects.
Procrastination on feedback or reviews until the day before release is common.
Many overtime hours worked, not a sliver of thanks. The haughty attitude indicative of somebody who thinks web development is like desktop publishing.

"It's just code" in response to a crash production server change they were warned was a risk that borked all of our responsive templates and took 3 hours to fix.
Their entire brand is shades of pea green, grey and lime. No serif fonts because they are suck. Arial and Helvetica are boss.
One of my devs missed a CSS style on privacy policy hyperlink text that went times new roman and I had various account directors and our CEO on phone telling me how embarrassing it was for us to let this happen.
Anyway. They pay on time and the cost estimates for all the upcoming work are juicy.
We have shitloads going on for an upcoming hard date conference and everything is already compressing.
Therefore I can already smell doom and feel those porcupine quill getting closer to my ass as I beg their AD today if we have any feedback on the 10 or so project reviews yet?
Nope.

Look, I get that it's really tricky to assess whether someone is or isn't skilled going solely by their profile.

That's alright.

What isn't center of the cosmic rectum alright with the fucking buttsauce infested state of interviews is that you give me the most far fetched and convoluted nonsense to solve and then put me on a fucking timer.

And since there isn't a human being on the other side, I can't even ask for clarification nor walk them through my reasoning. No, eat shit you cunt juice swallowing mother fucker, anal annhilation on your whole family with a black cock stretching from Zimbabwe to Singapore, we don't care about this "reasoning" you speak of. Fuck that shit! We just hang out here, handing out tricks in the back alley and smoking opium with vietnamese prostitutes, up your fucking ass with reason.

Let me tell you something mister, I'm gonna shove a LITERAL TON of putrid gorilla SHIT down your whore mouth then cum all over your face and tits, let's see how you like THAT.

Cherry on top: by the time I began figuring out where my initial approach was wrong, it was too late. Get that? L'esprit d'escalier, bitch. I began to understand the problem AFTER the timer was up. I could solve it now, except it wouldn't do me any fucking good.

The problem? Locate the topmost 2x2 block inside a matrix whose values fall within a particular range. It's easy! But if you don't explain it properly, I have to sit down re-reading the description and think about what the actual fuck is this cancerous liquid queef that just got forcefully injected into my eyes.

But since I can't spend too much time trying to comperfukenhend this two dollar handjob of a task, which I'd rather swap for teabagging a hairy ass herpes testicle sack, there's rushing in to try and make sense of this shit as I type.

So I'm about 10 minutes down or so already, 35 to go. I finally decipher that I should get the XY coords of each element within the specified range, then we'll walk an array of those coordinates and check for adjacency. Easy! Done, and done.

Another 10 minutes down, all checks in place. TEST. Wait, wat? Where's the output? WHERE. THE FUCK. IS. THE OUTPUT?! BITCH GIMME AN ANSWER. I COUT'D THE RETURN AND CAN SEE THE TERMINAL BUT ITS NOT SHOWING ME ANYTHINGGG?! UUUGHHH FUCKKFKFKFKFKFKFKFUFUFUFFKFK (...)

Alright, we have about 20 minutes left to finish this motorsaw colonoscopy, and I can't see what my code is outputting so I'm walking through the code myself trying to figure out if this will work. Oh, look at that I have to MANUALLY click this fucking misaligned text that says "clear" in order for any new output to register. Lovely, 10/10 web design, I will violate your armpits with an octopus soaked in rabid bear piss.

Mmmh, looks like I got this wrong. Figures. I'm building the array of coordinates sequentially, as a one dimentional list, which is very inconvenient for finding adjacent elements. No problem, let's try and fix that aaaaaand... SHIT IM ALMOST OUT OF TIME.

QUICK LYEB, QUICK!! REMEMBER WHAT FISCELLA TAUGHT YOU, IN BETWEEN MOLESTING YOUR SOUL WITH 16-BIT I/O CONSOLE PROBLEMS, LIKE THAT BITCH SNOWFALL THING YOU HAD TO SOLVE FOR A FRIEND USING TURBO C ON A FUCKING TOASTER IN COMPUTER LAB! RUN MOTHERFUCKER RUN!!!

I'm SWEATING. HEAVILY. I'm STEAMING, NON-EROTICALLY. Less than 10 minutes left. I'm trying to correct the code I have, but I start making MORE dumbfuck mistakes because I'm in a hurry!

5 minutes left. As I hit this point of no return, I realize exactly where my initial reasoning went wrong, and how I could fix it, but I can't because I don't have enough time. Sadface.

So I hastily put together skeleton of the correct implementation, and as the clock is nearly up, I write a comment explaining the bits I can't get to write. Page up, top of file, type "the editor was shit LMAO" and comment it out. SUBMIT.

This violent tale of brain damaged badmouth schizoid baby versus badly worded code challenges was brought to you by ButtholeSuffers. Tired of taking low-quality viagra before engaging in unprotected anal sex? Then try ButtholeSuffers, the new way to strengthen your everday erections! You'll be as fucking HARD as a WALL!

Visit triple doble minus you dot triple doble YOU dot doble-u doble www dotbit lyshAdy wwwwww academy smashlikeachamp ai/professional/$$%$X$/0FD0EFF~ \*¨-`++ ifyouclickurstupid for for a FREE coupon to get MINUS NaN OFF on a close-encounter with an inter-continental dick, and use my promo code HOPONBITCH if you'd like it *RAMMED* --FAR-- and D E E P L Y.

(lel ad break should continue I'm cutting it shortt) [CENSORED] grants *physical* access to your pants! Big ups to Annihilate for sponsoring this mental breakdown.

Also hi ;>

A bit of backstory...

I have been the sole dev at my organization for awhile now (other two left for other jobs), so I have been maintaing and writing new code to support the business.

Our company was recently acquired by a larger entity and it has been very strange so far.

1. It has taken 5 weeks to acquire local admin rights on my own machine (I work remote) as well as a visual studio license.

2. We have known for a few weeks now we are getting a jr dev who will need the SAME procedures done on his machine/account and it has been two weeks now and nothing has been done. (Tickets have been put it - the issues have been escalated etc etc)

3. All of our code from our old company is in Azure Devops (which is connected to Azure AD) for some reason I haven't been able to add an external account (for my new account and org) to move the code elsewhere. I don't have the authority (I don't think) to place all of our code in a new location (GitHub,GitLab, self hosted solutions, etc)

4. All of our production VMs are billed through our old org located in Azure, so eventually that bill will stop being paid since we transitioned - I've brought this up to my manager (more non technical) who wasn't terribly worried about it.

5. I'm feeling slightly unfulfilled in this position. Earlier in my time here it was new and exciting, but there isn't much direction, not many goals, or interesting problems to solve.

Just wanted to express some issues that had been going on. Feel free to add ant feedback of suggestions 😄

== Internship Interview Rant ==

This is the weirdest interview I've been to to be honest because it wasn't really ABOUT ME. It's like the boss is not really interesting in knowing what I can do, what I am capable of doing. He asked me about my educational background for 5 minutes and started explaining about the startup for 45 minutes. He explained how he came up with the idea like it was a children's bedtime story. He explain what the job is, BUT he didn't mention what programming languages they use. All he said was it required knowledge about different programming languages. I tried asking but he seemed to dodge the question for some reason by saying everyone needs to know a little bit of everything. (Srsly i don't even know what to start learning for this) After listening to him talk and talk and talk and talk, he finally said "hey, think about it and send me an email if you are willing to take it up!"

He works with STUDENTS. The team is composed of him and 5 students. o.O They all seem so..... quiet in the office. Is that normal ???? Or like shouldn't everyone be kinda "interactive" sometimes?

So there is a girl working there too for 3 weeks now but SHE IS IN ROMANIA like wtf, gr8 then i guess ill be the only girl there but hey perks of being a girl, u get to be spoiled sometimes XD it happens a lot !

Internship ad ----> Main language: English
Me: *rages internally during the interview and thinks: BRUHH WHY ARENT U SPEAKING IN ENGLISH i prepared what I was gonna say in english for an hour*
I wonder if the code is in english or maybe its not :(( But I wish it were because it would be soooo much easier in english.

And there you go, I guess I have one week to find a better internship or decide to deal with this talkative boss. This isn't exactly a story of my last job cause my last job is totally non-dev related. This is a story of (maybe) my future job unless I actually find a better internship.

I was just writing a long rant about how my rant style changed, and how I could fix anything that annoys me in a heartbeat by just putting my mind to implementing a change. Then YouTube once again paused the synth mix that was playing on my laptop in the background, with that stupid "Video paused. Continue watching?" pop-up. I even installed an add-on for it in Firefox to make it automatically click that away. I guess that YouTube did yet another bullshit update to break that, for "totally legitimate user interface improvements" or whatever. Youtube-dl faces similar challenges all the time, and it's definitely not alone in that either. I also had issues with that on Facebook when I wanted to develop on top of that, where the UI changes every other day and the API even changes every other week. And as far as backwards compatibility goes, our way or the highway!

So I did the whole "replace and move on" type of thing. I use youtube-dl often now to get my content off YouTube into a media player that doesn't fuck me over for stupid reasons like "ad fraud" (I use an ad blocker you twats, what ads am I gonna fraud against), or "battery savings" (the damn laptop is plugged in and fully topped up for fucks sake, and you do this crap even on desktop computers). Gee I wonder why creators are moving on to Floatplane and Nebula nowadays, and why people like yours truly use "highly illegal" youtube-dl. Oh and thank you for putting me in Saudi Arabia again. Pinnacle of data mining, machine learning and other such wank could not do GeoIP. for a server that used to be in a datacenter in Italy for years, and recently has been moved to another hosting provider in Germany. It's about as unchanging and static, and as easy to geolocate as you can possibly get. But hey, kill off another Google+ when?

Like seriously, yes I'm taking your Foobar challenges and you may very well be the company I end up working for. But if anything it feels like there's a shitton of stuff to fix. And the challenges themselves still using Python 2.7 honestly feels like the seldom seen tip of the iceberg.

The new company I'll work in told me that I have to use windows because they have an ad and Linux login does not work proper with it...

#!/usr/bin/rant
So, we are a web development and marketing agency. That's fine... except now it seems that we are a marketing and web development agency. Where the head marketing guy feels it's his job to head up web development.

This is NOT what I signed up for.

When you offer web services to a client, the one meeting with the client should understand at least basic stuff, and know when to pull in a heavyweight for more questions. Instead, our web team is summarized by a guy who listens to 80's rock music in a shared office (used to be just me in there) and spends his days trying to get 30-year-olds on Facebook to click an ad.

He was on the phone yesterday with some ecommerce / CRM support, trying to tell them that they have an API, that "it's a simple thing, I'm sure you have it", and that's all we need to do business with them. Which is not his call, it's my call, but for some reason he's the one on the phone asking for API info. The last time I took someone else's word on an API, I underquoted the work and eventually found out that their "API" was nothing more than a cron job which places a CSV file on your server via FTP.

Anyway, we now have a full-time marketer and two part-time interns, with another ad out for an AdWords specialist. Meanwhile, I'm senior dev with a server admin / retired senior dev, and if we don't focus on hiring a front-end guy soon we're going to lose business.

Long story short, I'm getting sick of having a guy who does not understand basic web concepts run the show because he's the one who talks to the client.

Stupid ass nimble fucker of an old friend talks to me for a whole week after a reunion saying stuff like "I'm glad we got to spent time together bro and stuff", the soul eater of poop being sets up a conversation over a week talking like he was a true friend. He only had to manage it for a week more, hell he had to resist his urge for a puny ass week and I would've considered that maybe good people existed. Well the universe along with this Pseudo-panty fuck decided it was time, they pitch me an "idea". Well after demonstrating kindly that I could technically pull (n) such ideas from my virtual butthole. The guy finally believes his idea was stupid and moves away. A minute later. SURPRISE MOTHER FUCKER! he says, telling me that he got an amazing idea along and if I could help him with some stuff. Well.. What? I jumped at this amazing opportunity. Not because of the dangling-dickina of an idea, because this was my way out of this misery fucks life. Alright should buy me some time right? He would go watch some tutorials, make a logo and call me when there's a problem. We'll in the milli fucking time that even a big bang couldn't have recurred, the bitch calls and says.. Bro, sorry for disturbing you, I need some help... [What did your mother from another son tell you she only gave birth to half of you?]
APPARENTLY, THE GUY JOINED FORCES WITH SOME INTELLIGENT MINDS AND SETUP A LEAGUE OF LIKE MINDED NECROPHILES AND I COULD HELP THIS DREAM TEAM with a name and a logo.
It started, I could sense it. I wasn't THE CHOSEN ONE. Tired, I said I'll see what I can do while attempting to block his number. A few hours later, he calls from another number with no shame and asks BRO? DID YOU. Did me what you bloody dick lubricator. Yeah I watched your mom a couple times, then I got bored when I found out it was an ad.

Unfortunately no I did not tell that, instead I used the kindest words I could pull out of my frustrated ass to tell him I won't do it cause I have better things to do.

The guy comes back a few hours later with an emotional back-story of how this is his way out of his sad ass life and saying stuff like sorry to disturb you bro, I never meant to.

Oh my gawd! Give this douche manufacturer an Oscar. Actually give him two!!

————

After this traumatic experience I often feel for such people. They have around 90 years to live. They have a free fucking brain. They have money. They have less problems.

Why can't they come up with a worthy idea with all these factors to compound the ideation process.

And why on the earth can't they make the Idea on their own. I'm completely self taught so I don't see it being a problem. I could well say that I'm more knowledgeable than a few grads out of my stupid college but I don't wanna compare myself to those stupid beings.

If you have an idea? Make it. Die for it. But never approach another being, either he eats you or you eat him.

Can someone help me understand?

I subscribed to a nifty IT-releated magazine, and on its back, there's an ad for "Dedicated root server hosting", nothing unusual at a first glance, but after I read the issue, I decided to humor them and see what it is that they offered, and... It just... Doesn't make sense to me!

An ad for "Dedicated Root Server" - What is a dedicated root server first of all? Root servers of any infrastructure sound pretty important.

But, the ad also boasts "High speed performance with the new Intel Core i9-9900K octa-core processor", that's the first weird thing.

Why would anyone responsible enough want to put an i9 into a highly-reliable root server, when the thing doesn't even support ECC? Also, come on, octa-core isn't much, I deal with servers that have anywhere between 2 and 24 cores. 8 isn't exactly a win, even if it has a higher per-core clock.

Oh, also, further down the ad has a list of, seeming, advantages/specs of the servers, they proclaim that the CPU "incl. Hyper-Threading-Technology"... Isn't that... Standard when it comes to servers? I have never seen a server without hyperthreading so far at my job.

"64 GBs of DDR4 RAM" - Fair enough, 64 gigs is a good amount, but... Again, its not ECC, something I would never put into a server.

"2 x 8 TB SATA Enterprise Hard Drive 7200 rpm" - Heh, "enterprise hard drive", another cheap marketing word, would impress me more if they mentioned an actual brand/model, but I'll bite, and say that at least the 7200 rpm is better than I expected.

"100 GBs of Backup Space" - That's... Really, really little. I've dealt with clients who's single database backup is larger than that. Especially with 2x8 TB HDD (Even accounting for software raids on top)

This one cracks me up - "Traffic unlimited"
Whaaaat?! You are not gonna give me a limit to the total transferred traffic to the internet for my server in your data center? Oh, how generous of you, only, the other case would make the server just an expensive paperweight! I thought this ad was for semi-professionals at least, so why mention traffic, and not bandwidth, the thing that matters much more when it comes to servers? How big of a bandwidth do I get? Don't tell me you use dialup for your "Dedicated Root Server"s!

"Location Germany or Finland" - Fair enough, geolocation can matter when it comes to latency.

"No minimum contract" - Oooh, how kiiiind of you, again, you are not gonna charge me extra for using the server only as long as I pay? How nice!

"Setup Fee £60" - I guess, fair enough, the server is not gonna set itself up, only...

The whole ad is for "monthly from £55.50", that's quite the large fee for setup.

Oh, and a cherry on top, the tiny print on the bottom mentions: "All prices exclude VAT and are a subject to..." blah blah blah.
Really? I thought that this sort of almost customer deceipt is present only in the common people's sphere!

I must say, there's being unimpressed, and then... There's this. Why, just... Why? Anyone understands this? Because I don't...

I always dreamed of doing data analysis while playing my favorite game.

I don't get why we need videos to auto play on some websites.

I was in class today browsing the news, clicked on an article and forgot my laptop speaker volume was still at max. Guess what happened? Autoplay. Not even the video from the article but AN AD, for a moment the prof. paused and everyone looked around, but I quickly hit the mute button so it did not last too long.

Who ever thought autoplay (WITH ADS) was a good idea?

Why the fuck didn't I discover FreeTube earlier?

It's a YouTube client that's faster, without the dark UI patterns, with an integrated ad blocker, download feature and the settings that were always missing.
And all subscriptions are stored offline so you don't even need a fucking account.

(Not) Surprising how pleasant it can be to use when the UI isn't literal garbage.

Have u ever opened youtube app on ur phone and started watching a yt video but before u could watch that video u got interrupted with an ad that u can not skip and so u got so frustrated to the point that u grabbed ur dick and slapped the phone screen so the ad can eat ur dick and just before the ad expired u jizzed on the face of that ad and so when the ad was about to finish there was a skip button so u tapped that button not with ur finger but with the tip of ur dick although it was difficult to do that because the jizz kind of interfered with ur touch screen controls so u had to wipe the jizz from ur phone screen with ur dick into the mouth of whoever was in the ad in order to properly press the skip button for that ad so u can simply skip it and finally start watching the yt video that u were initially trying to do ?

I HATE SURFACES SO FRICKING MUCH. OK, sure they're decent when they work. But the problem is that half the time our Surfaces here DON'T work. From not connecting to the network, to only one external screen working when docked, to shutting down due to overheating because Microsoft didn't put fans in them, to the battery getting too hot and bulging.... So. Many. Problems. It finally culminated this past weekend when I had to set up a Laptop 3. It already had a local AD profile set up, so I needed to reset it and let it autoprovision. Should be easy. Generally a half-hour or so job. I perform the reset, and it begins reinstalling Windows. Halfway through, it BSOD's with a NO_BOOT_MEDIA error. Great, now it's stuck in a boot loop. Tried several things to fix it. Nothing worked. Oh well, I may as well just do a clean install of Windows. I plug a flash drive into my PC, download the Media Creation Tool, and try to create an image. It goes through the lengthy process of downloading Windows, then begins creating the media. At 68% it just errors out with no explanation. Hmm. Strange. I try again. Same issue. Well, it's 5:15 on a Friday evening. I'm not staying at work. But the user needs this laptop Monday morning. Fine, I'll take it home and work on it over the weekend. At home, I use my personal PC to create a bootable USB drive. No hitches this time. I plug it into the laptop and boot from it. However, once I hit the Windows installation screen the keyboard stops working. The trackpad doesn't work. The touchscreen doesn't work. Weird, none of the other Surfaces had this issue. Fine, I'll use an external keyboard. Except Microsoft is brilliant and only put one USB-A port on the machine. BRILLIANT. Fortunately I have a USB hub so I plug that in. Now I can use a USB keyboard to proceed through Windows installation. However, when I get to the network connection stage no wireless networks come up. At this point I'm beginning to realize that the drivers which work fine when navigating the UEFI somehow don't work during Windows installation. Oh well. I proceed through setup and then install the drivers. But of course the machine hasn't autoprovisioned because it had no internet connection during setup. OK fine, I decide to reset it again. Surely that BSOD was just a fluke. Nope. Happens again. I again proceed through Windows installation and install the drivers. I decide to try a fresh installation *without* resetting first, thinking maybe whatever bug is causing the BSOD is also deleting the drivers. No dice. OK, I go Googling. Turns out this is a common issue. The Laptop 3 uses wonky drivers and the generic Windows installation drivers won't work right. This is ridiculous. Windows is made by Microsoft. Surface is made by Microsoft. And I'm supposed to believe that I can't even install Windows on the machine properly? Oh well, I'll try it. Apparently I need to extract the Laptop 3 drivers, convert the ESD install file to a WIM file, inject the drivers, then split the WIM file since it's now too big to fit on a FAT32 drive. I honestly didn't even expect this to work, but it did. I ran into quite a few more problems with autoprovisioning which required two more reinstallations, but I won't go into detail on that. All in all, I totaled up 9 hours on that laptop over the weekend. Suffice to say our organization is now looking very hard at DELL for our next machines.

It is the year 2451 ad and mankind rules the galaxy with a lazy iron fist. There are roughly 14,000 civilizations, comprised of just over
17,000 intelligent species on a quarter of a million earth-like
worlds. And all of them call themselves 'the galactic empire'.
No one told them that twenty planets doesn't qualify them for the title "galactic."

Well, we could rule, if we wanted to. Most of its just backwaters that no one wants anyway. It turned out that the reason no one invaded earth before was because they were too busy fighting themselves. Stupidity it appears, is not a unique human quality.That and the sex robots. Theres more of them in the galaxy than actual meatbags. Many species had taken to artificial wombs and 'vatbabies', which is exactly what they are called. Those poor bastards will carry that label for life.

We never did break light speed, but most of the rich exist in hypersleep anyway. Most of them only wake up once a year or so. There are some that only creek out of bed to check their stock portfolio. I hear there is even one trillionaire thats up and about once a century to ask if we have broken light speed yet.

Despite all the progress over the last 400 years, historians all agree about the most significant event in modern history.
The lobster went extinct two hundred years ago on earth.
Theres been riots ever since.

* * *

In other news I'm still working on the game I guess. It's like totally the most okay indie game you'll ever play--if I ever finish it.

I put about a year of work into the NPC system, and then chatGPT came out.

After everything thats happened, at this point I may just make a game about an indie dev making a survival game, being stuck in the actual apocalypse or some weird political dysopia.

Put it on rewind, it was originally a zombie game. But at the time the market got flooded and steam sales for zombie games cratered. So I pivoted to something more along the lines of fallout. Then the flash market crashed, bunch of publishers folded, and adobe stopped support for flash (probably for the best). Then newgrounds, which I was gonna launch on for promotion (because actual marketing is expensive), ended support for flash.
Was going the route of kickstarter, and that year the KS market got flooded and the bar rose almost over night so you needed super high production quality out the gate, and a network of support you already built for months.

We had a brief nuclear war scare, and I watched the articles come out about market saturation for post-apocalypse games, so I pivoted back to zombies. Then covid happened and the entire topic was really fucked. So I went back to fallout meets rimworld. Then we had a flood of games doing that exact premise pretty much out of the fucking blue, so I went for a more single-survivor type game. Then ukraine happened and the threat of nuclear war has been slowly sapping the genre of its steam, on well, steam.
Then I was told to get a cancer screening which I can't afford. Then I broke a tooth and spent a month in agony.

Then a family member died. Then I made no money from the sale of a business I did everything to help get off the ground, then I helped renovate an entire house on short notice and sell it, then I lost two months living in a hotel
while looking for a new place to live. Then I spent two and a half years suffering low-level alcoholism, insomnia, and drifting between jobs.
Then I wrote amazing poetry. And then I rediscovered my love of math. And then I made out for the first time in over a year. And then I rediscovered my love of piano and guitar. And then I fell into severe depression for the last year. Then I made actual discoveries in math. And I learned to love my hobbies again, and jog, and not drink so much, and sing, and go on long drives, and occasional hikes, and talk to people again, and even start designing games and UIs again. And then I learned that doing amazing things without a lot of money is still possible, and then I discovered the sunk cost fallacy, and run on sentences, and how inside me there was a part of me that refused to quit because of circumstances I couldn't control, and then I learned that life goes on even when others lives have ended, even when everything and everyone never had an once of faith in you, and you've become the avatar of the bad luck brian meme..still, life goes on.

And we try to pick up the pieces, try, one more time, because the climb, and the fall, and the getting back up, is all there is.

What I would recommend, if you're thinking of making a game, or becoming an independent game developer, is, unless you have a *lot* of money upfront (think 50-100k saved, minimum, like one years income *bare* minimum), and unless you already have a full decade in the industry--don't make a game.

Just don't.

I can't decide on a linux distro because all I've tried are great. Seriously.

I'd call myself a novice-to-intermediate linux user (heavy on the novice part) and since I work as a web developer it's been a great learning experience to use the same OS on my workstation as the webservers my projects run on. (Ie I started out with Ubuntu and a LAMP setup).

The thing is I distrohop ad infinitum... Feels like I've tried out every desktop environment known to mankind (I just can't stop myself when I see a new one or a new take on an old one) and I've dipped my toes in Arch territory to. Loved Antergos when that still was a thing. Found EndeavourOS this weekend, kernel panic ensued. I'm a noob with sudo and that's never a good thing. 😆 (Try out in a virtual machine first you say? Bah. Where's the fun in that?!)

So now I'm on Linux Mint w Cinnamon because why not. (Because it's sluggish and boring, that's why...) I had to just get something up and running quickly so I could get back to work. 😬

But one day in and I'm realising I actually miss GNOME. And Ubuntu feels like home. I would feel much cooler using Arch but honestly I don't think I can be trusted with it. I love tinkering with settings, look and feel and whatnot but I can honestly do that just as well in an Ubuntu/GNOME environment.

Maybe Pop!_OS... could be something for me. 😏

ok, so first there were ads.
Then came adblock and the likes.
Then websites started implementing randomly generated strings.
Then came pi-hole.
Now some of the websites are using RNG + hosting ads on their domains...
(the order might not be very accurate, but you get my point)

So what now ?
I'm guessing that the next step for adblock will be to use AI to recognize these RNG strings, and then the websites will use AI to generate better strings (harder to distinguish if it is relevant content or an ad).
In other words - AI vs AI :D

what do you guys think ? :)

TL;DR: Stop. Hating. On. Ads. Here are 5 reasons why:

1. "No one likes ads"
I love seeing *good* ads before I watch a YouTube video. Or I looked up videos that YT recommended because they sounded fun and they were fun:
- Coke - Hey Brother is an amazing and touching short film
- Fressnapf (="food bowl") had an incredibly enjoyable "things you didn't know about cats" video I clicked on purpose and it was good.
- I found JetBrains through ads (free for me, student perks. But tbh I use atom)
and I could name more.

2. What are the alternatives?
I know there are some non-profits and that's cool but you wanna be paid in your job, right? So ads are why Facebook (I know, Facebook isn't enjoyed here but), YouTube, stackoverflow, etc. Wikipedia asks for a few million dollars of donations each year because they don't run ads. Smaller businesses can't do that really. Hell, even codepen has a "sponsored" section. Imagine you would have to pay for all of those services.

3. "Manipulation"
isn't a bad thing unless you abuse it. I manipulate you when I say that I love codepen in the same way an ad does. No one forces you to use a product or watch an ad (you can look away and often times skip).

4. Adblock
What if everyone did that? Adblock blocks happened a while ago and the war between adblock and ad-senders is still ongoing. The moment you see an ad, you are using/watching etc something which the creators thought is worth making money off. If you don't think so, leave the site. I am an adblock user but if the site politely asks me to disable it and I enjoy the content - I will disable it with pleasure.

5. Targeted ads
Yes. The internet is a huge data-crawling piece of shit. But there are many more questionable or even dangerous ways of data-harvesting online. I am glad to see ads I like and not the ones my sister might like. Some services allow you to disable personalized ads. Or use vpn if you really want to.

Here is a little story about why I do not like to have to purchase developer tools and libraries..

Long story short it has taken at least 10 people more than 3 months to purchase two licenses of this component library which we still do not yet have licenses for.

It all starts with this guy who works here and has the job title 'solution architect'. He saw an ad on a website about some html component library. Then he asks me and the other developer here to look at it. He is super excited saying things like if we save only x days of time the cost is nothing in comparison to developer time..

The other developer and I both spend a few days reading the docs and trying some sample code. It offers some things we can use but I suggest not bothering with it.

Despite my suggestion he goes to the technical manager and they write up a business case. After about a month our receptionist cc me on an email chain from the it commercial manager who is asking for the licensing information so they can add the component creator as a vendor in the purchasing system. I send them a link to the component website which lists all that.

Jump forward two more months to last week and I got a spam email from the component company saying they have some new version out. I am wondering what has happened so I ask our receptionist she says it is with accounts payable and waiting payment - but it is marked urgent and she will find out.

Today I am cc in an email saying they have paid for it two weeks ago. So where is the license info? Nobody knows.

I was walking in the cineplex after watching a movie today and saw an advertisement for "a digital loyalty card platform for retail outlets. Get loyalty cards on your phone!" being used by a big brand in my country.

The thing is, although not a terribly original idea, I first thought of developing a system/platform like this all the way back in 2012. I coded it, I advertised, I lobbied HARD; I poured my damn soul into this thing. Nobody accepted it. I scrapped it because I thought it was just not a good idea, only to see what is essentially a clone of it being shown off and lauded as a brand new innovative solution.

I won't lie, seeing that ad so prominently and proudly displayed really crushed me. I honestly don't know what makes their rendition better than mine, since mine did pretty much the same thing theirs does and my design chops are pretty much on par with theirs. I was rejected and I don't know why and that stings more than the countless other times my other ideas were shot down because of market mismatch, logistical flaws or just shortsightedness on the part of potential customers.

This isn't an invitation to a pity party, and I can't say there is a moral to this little anecdote, but I feel moved to share this experience with you guys.

Pick from it and learn what you will, I hope this falls under the eyes of the right person out there.

So you are running ads and people who click your ads land on a blog post? What is the goal? How are you measuring conversions? How do you know if an ad or post actually helped?

Am: "When can you get this up?"

Me: "I don't have any of the information I need to make a page."

Am: "skip all the seo crap and tell me how long to get the content online"

Me: "you're missing the whole point of a blog post. But ok it's online"

Am: "was that so hard?"

No, putting garbage on a site is not hard. Creating useful web pages with content that is easy to find and read is a time consuming process and it would go smoother and faster if you followed the checklist I gave you which lays out what I want, in a single, cohesive document, all of the necessary pieces to a web page or blog post or content edit. We have templates for you to follow to help eliminate back and forth emails which causes things to get lost or fall through the cracks.

'Google knows everything about you.'
'Facebook records conversations.'
'Personalized ads manipulate you.'

Guess that's why YouTube showed me an ad in Spanish yesterday. Or why I never clicked on an ad. Or why only every 1 in approx. 10 ads is somewhat relevant to me (and thats with me explicitly stating my interests in ad personalization options).

I don't have anything against shielding your privacy. It's your right not to use a product if you don't want to, but I don't see how people can make these statements without providing solid proof.

Just my opinion.

Is anyone else dealing with AD(H)D in university or while working as an software engineer. I’ve been diagnosed 3 years ago and I’m still trying to find a way to keep my focus. I start a new project every week without finishing it. Medication helps but not for 100%
Does anyone else experience the same or do you have any tips?

Prequel to my previous post:

I received an offer from a startup that did not meet the originally advertised salary range. In every other aspect this place seemed like where I'd enjoy working the most and each previous interaction made a very good impression on me. So needless to say this was quite a shock.

They immediately apologised and explained the situation. They only now started to expand to and hire from my location (which can be verified) and I would be the very first person from this location (seems true too but I could only really verify this after joining). They explained the salary range I had seen was for their main hub location (accurate too) and said that the recruiter who posted the ad did not adjust it to mine. I asked why tf they didn't notify me of this earlier and they said they are super busy with everything, are new to location based salaries and normally don't check the recruiters posts as it should be her work.

Now, even if this is totally true, it was an awful sudden shock and felt a bit like a scam - totally contradicting my previous impressions.

Here are a couple of other points that I'll just sum to save time:
- before seeing the job ad I had a *reasonable* salary expectation even lower than their actual offering
- on the ad, the bottom end of their salary range far exceeded my reasonable exp.
- the relative level of my position would be even higher up the range that I have seen realised would be top 5%
- having had seen the ad, I started to have an *ideal* expectation being the bottom of the range
- in first interview I told them my exp. is the bottom end of their range +- a bit
- I told this to a dev guy who has no fucking idea about this stuff and I don't blame him but he noted this down to higher management
- generally I have not been very precise of my expectation as previously I only had lower class dev jobs, this would be the first decent.
- Hence I have seen an enormously high variation in salaries offered to me so this advertised range whilst high seemed possible

Now, with all this in mind I posted here a question about what some of you would do in my position.

I received the following group of responses:

- it's a scam, bad place, run
- it's an intentional (common) trick
- people make mistakes like this esp. startups so find out if this is intentional or not
- just decide if their current offering is reasonable for the position and location, ignore the rest
- just decide if the amount is enough
- location based salaries are retarded, don't work there (I kinda agree and also don't)
- if they can afford the higher pay in another place they should have no prob. meeting the range
- it's more important that you'd enjoy it there if the pay is sufficient for general needs
- company culture is generally more important these days
- fuck recruiters and hr people (amen to that btw)

Here is what I did:

Regardless of whether I believe them or not I hyperfocused on the potential scam/trick aspect.
I told them that every other interaction with them was positive and would love to join them but this was a really bad impression and feels like they are playing with me. I made up some bullshit previous examples of companies trying the same trick on me (which obv. never happened).

Then I said that I think to resolve this they should invite me to their main office for a day (all interviews had been online) and if after that they are still not ok to offer me at least the bottom of the adv. range then we can part ways. Otherwise this should ensure both of us that we are a good match, etc.

They seemed to love the idea and said that I should go there for x till y (3 days) and if we don't hate each other by the end I'll get the amount at the bottom of the range and they apologised again about it looking like a scam, etc.

So thanks a bunch again to those of you who provided valuable input.

For years I felt like an imposter for not rooting my smartphones, and not owning any raspbis. - Now finally I got an pi 4 and installed my so long desired pi-hole.

Quite disturbing that at least 30-40% of my traffic is known ad shit. Such an infestation.

Well, being the only one in the house who can really solve computer problems:
We have a home nas in our network for filestorage and since a few weeks, we couldn't acces the device through windows explorer, so today I went on a exploration... First I tried the nas in a seperate different network, and it worked immediatly! oke great, try it in our main network again. And 'ofcours' it's not visible. So I go to the router webpage, and the page of our router just really sucks! So it was quite hard to find out if the NAS was attached or not, ad if so, under which IP. Finally found that, tried to connect to the webpage of the NAS, but got a timeout, ping would timeout too! I thought that that might have someting to do with that the NAS would connect via static IP. So I changed that to a dynamic IP, and I could atleast get to the website. After that I could try all the services and all of them worked perfectly, except for samba... And samba is the only service we actually use, so after that I thought that the device not showing up in network view in explorer had something to do with that the nas wouldn't show me a hostname in the router. So I tried to fix that, after an hour of trying to get the hostname to showup in the router, I just thought that I might try to connect to the nas via the IP. So I found via SO that I could just use //192.168.0.104 and I got into the samba server. So I guess that it was actually working all along 😒. After that I didn't want to bother to work with the hostnames, so I just gave the NAS a fixed IP, made a few shortcuts for my housemates and now it all works again.. For now at least...

Not dev related but what is the fucking point of someone saying I'm going there to do that and when i ask them to show me THAT what they did they say "oh it was so bad I'm not gonna show you haha"

Like how do i explain it without being rude.....

........

Here's a savage example scenario

---

Your wife: "i just came back from a mountain in the middle of nowhere filming an ad and in gonna be in that ad"

You: "cool. Id love to see that ad, could you show it to me?"

Your wife: "noo i was so ugly and it was so bad im not gonna show u"

---

What are you gonna think? What was your wife filming secretly behind your back and she doesnt want to show you? Was she even filming in the first place? Or was she fucking a guy? What is one supposed to think of this conversation? Why fucking tell me ur gonna go there and do that and then not talk about it at all after doing it? What the FUCK who DOES THAT ???

Spending all day sitting in a chair takes its toll on my back. Lumbar and intra-scapular areas are ssssoooooo sore that I can't even stretch them out properly any more (I'm quite a flexible person).

Thanks to my closest shopping centre for this double foam-ball. It's the best investment I've made in years and it only cost me 4€.

Whenever I lay and roll on it slowly I usually drift into sleep out of pleasure.

It's not an ad or anything, just a recommendation to my fellow IT guys and gals suffering back pains from sitting all day long.

Oh, my worst dev experience.

First of all everyone know it, people who ask you to repair there computer 🤦‍♂️
Or people who say: "Hey Windows Media player is not working now. Fix it"

But the best moment and worst too is a moment where I present my new website and a friend start to refresh the site with F5 on his browser. I ask him why he do it and he answere "Yeah, you will be rich when I do it"

I don't get it. Why rich? So I ask him and he answere that websites are paid by web request an "clicks" "views" counter.

That was the stupidest thing I ever hear. Okay when I would show ads than maybe it's "true" but without them🤦‍♂️

But that's not the end after I explained him that it's not so he fucked me up that I would be very stupid because I don't register on a service which pay you for it. I explained him that the only service could be an ad service but no he don't understand it and try to discuss with me that a service like this exist. I ask for a link to the service and he could not answer.

For me it was the worst experience because for me it was the most stupidest thing ever and he try to discuss with me and really we discuss 1 hour about it🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

Fucking Power Apps and Automate/Flow:
You want to make an app?, great!
- Easy UI and editor, you can make a decent app in a day
- Best data integration in MS space bar none, connect to anything under the planet no problem.
- Deployment on mobile and desktop instantly and at scale, you better believe it.
- Wanna take from sharepoint, manipulate the data and throw it at XRM, we gothcu.
- Source control? FUCK YOU FOR ASKING GO DIE IN A FIRE.
- Proper permission system, Yep, based on O365 and azure AD
- Just let me get the source code please?: BURN IN HELL MOTHERFUCKER
- Integrated AI, indeed we have it. And chatbot frameworks on top of it, no problem at all
- ...

As a tool it is aimed at non technical people, not by making it beginner friendly, but by making it developer hostile. And whenever you hit a wierd quirk in the editor you wish you could just go edit the source code (WHICH YOU CAN TOTALLY SEE SNIPPETS OF), but you are never allowed to touch it.
I am so very tempted to make a version control layer on top of it myself, scraping it via scripts and doing the reverse on upload, but it will be janky as fuck.

In an algorithm class, professor introduced us to some simple search algorithms (bubble sort, selection sort, insertion sort, shell sort). He did a quite decent job and most of the students were able to grasp the code and understand the differences in those algorithms. But then he spoiled his whole lecture with one additional slide. There he proposed an optimization: Instead of using a temporary swap variable, we just could use the first array element (or the zeroth element, respectively: the one ad index 0) for doing all the swapping. We just had to document that, so that the caller would "leave the first position of the array empty", resulting in "cleaner code". And he did that in the same class where he used Big-O notation to argue about runtime complexity. But having the caller to resize the array and to shift all the elements by one position did not matter to him at all, because it was "not part of the actual algorithm".

So long story short, the place was working at hired me when what they actually needed was another business analyst, so I sit around with no work to do way too often.

I start looking for another job because I can sense that my contract won't be renewed.

So, the rant part

Why are all the job websites so useless?

I get emails saying stuff like "Your profile matched for senior full stack developer at XYZ Ltd"

I have 18 months of experience, I have put this information accurately on my profiles on these job sites,. Yet they still recommend that stuff.

It gets better though... Every once in a while, there's one that I might have a shot at, not to mention these ads all look the same.

So get an email, I look at the job ad, which looks exactly the same as tonnes of others, hit the apply button, get message "You have already applied for this job" Yea? Then why tf is it being emailed to me?

So I work for an IT consulting firm (web development) and was hired by a customer 7 months ago for coaching Git, implementation of VueJS on the front-end and fostering teamwork with devs who'd been in their solo comfort zone for the last 15 years.
I asked for confirmation multiple times on whether they were sure they wanted to go through with a bigger investment in front-end. Confirm they did, multiple times.

After half the team's initial enthusiasm faded (after 1 month), the 'senior' of them who's worked there for 18 years on a single -in the end, failed- project got a burn-out after half a week of showing up (without doing actual work) from the stress, and started whining about it with management that has no technical clue whatsoever. This and other petty office politics lead to the dumbest organizational and technical decisions I've seen in my short 5-year career (splitting a Laravel app that uses the same database in two, replacing docker container deployment with manual ssh'ing and symlinking, duplicating all the models, controllers, splitting a team in two, decreasing productivity, replacing project management dashboards with ad-hoc mail instructions and direct requests).

Out of curiosity I did a git log --author --no-merges with the senior's name on the 2 projects he was supposed to help on, and that turned up... ZERO commits. Now the dept. hired 3 new developers with no prior experience, and it's sad to see the seniors teach them "copy paste" as the developer's main reflex.

Through these 7 months I had to endure increasingly vicious sneers from the IT architect -in name only- who gets offended and hysterical at every person who dares offer suggestions. Her not-so-implicit insinuation is that it's all my fault because I implemented Vue front-end (as they requested), she has been doing this for months, every meeting at least once (and she makes sure other attendees notice). Extra background: She's already had 2 official complaints for verbal abuse in the past, and she just stressed another good developer into smoking again.

Now I present her my timesheet for January, she abuses her power by refusing to sign it unless I remove a day of work.
Earlier this week I asked her politely to please stop her unjust guilt-tripping to which she shouted "You'll just have to cope with that!", and I walked out of the room calmly (in order to avoid losing my nerves). She does this purely as a statement, and I know she does it out of bad faith (she doesn't actually care, as she doesn't manage the budgets). She knows she wields more power over me than the internal devs (I am consultant, so negative reviews for me could delay further salary raises).

I just don't know how to handle this person: I can't get a word in with her, or she starts shouting, and it's impossible to change her (completely inaccurate technological) perception.

(TL;DR FOR THE TL;DR: **THIS IS NOT AN AD, ITS A SHITPOST**)

(TL;DR: this is a shitpost about an Intuit ad campaign Israelis get a lot on YouTube, those ads are starting to drive me nuts lmao.)

WE'RE INTUIT
WE'RE INTO MACHINE LEARNING
OPEN SOURCE
WE'RE ADVANCING THE FIELD OF TECHNOLOGY TO OPEN FINANCIAL OPPORTUNITIES FOR MILLIONS OF PEOPLE AROUND THE GLOBE

Holy shit this is creepy.

So I just got back from a team event today from a location that was a few hours away and, while we were at the hotel there was a little cardboard box on our breakfast table with an ad on it. The slogan on the ad was “Bada book Bada boom” it was really dumb and I almost forgot about it, but just now I’m listening to pandora on a completely separate network, many hours away from the location and an ad comes on with the SAME SLOGAN for what I assume was the same company.

Now I’m just wondering how they managed to do that.... I really do not believe it was a coincidence considering I have never heard that ad on my pandora before....

This is fucking creepy

At a previous job, I worked on a multi-vendor e-commerce website. It used Magento2 as an API and a separate application we built with Node, Express, and React that consumed it to avoid using Magento's frontend.

The whole stack used should be a rant in itself but our checkout process was dependant on work done by some contractors in India. In short, this entire checkout process would break multiple times a day with no way on my end to fix anything, and that's what I had to reply with every time a bug ticket would come in; which is honestly the worst reply ever to a huge issue like that.

After several attempts of pitching the idea and being turned down for building the checkout in-house to remove the dependency and work on even streamlining the process, the product manager of the brand said as quote "Well the checkout isn't really that important".

At first, I was kind of speechless. How is the functionality of actually buying a thing in an online store NOT important? Shouldn't that be the most important?

Then I realized over time that the only thing they cared about was being a Nascar version of a website, essentially being a canvas of ad space that sellers on the marketplace could buy and paying money just to list their items.

I hated working on that project, and that made it so much more soul-crushing. Gotta chase that revenue right?

If you're looking to buy IoT stuff, you should try Xiaomi. Not only their stuff works, even when you block Xiaomi servers, but it can still be controlled remotely from an independent server. Although they are probably not happy about that lol. (i realize how much this sounds like an ad, but I'm too excited that it actually works :D)

Not programming related but is related to devrant.

I recently deleted facebook from my phone, and just a few days ago I got my first ever facebook ad! (An ad advertising that I should download the Facebook app.)

If this is not representative of Facebook's slow and perhaps eventual demise, I don't know what is.

This is related to devrant because I deleted the facebook app because I enjoyed DevRant more. Oh and also I feel less stressed now that I've basically unplugged from that rotten social media platform.

Trying to use authenticate a JWT token from an Azure service, which apparently needs to use Azure AD Identity services (Microsoft Entra ID, Azure AD B2C, pick your poison). I sent a request to our Azure admin. Two days later, I follow up, "Sorry, I forgot...here you go..."
Sends me a (small) screenshot of the some of the properties+GUIDs I need, hoping I don't mess up, still missing a few values.
Me: "I need the instance url, domain, and client secret."
<hour later>
T: "Sorry, I don't understand what those are."
Me: "The login URL. I assume it's the default, but I can't see what you see. Any shot you can give me at least read permissions so I can see the various properties without having to bother you?"
T: "I don't see any URLs, I'll send you the config json, the values you need should be in there."
<10 minutes later, I get a json file, nothing I needed>
<find screenshots of what I'm looking for, send em to T>
Me: "The Endpoints, what URLs do you see when you click Endpoints?"
<20 minutes later, sends me the list of endpoints, exactly what I'm looking for, but still not authenticating the JWT>
Me: "Still not working. Not getting an error, just that the authentication is failing. Don't know if it's the JWT, am I missing a slash, or what. Any way I can get at least read permissions so I don't have to keep bugging you to see certain values?"
T: "What do you need, exactly?"
Me: "I don't know. I don't know if I'm using the right secret key, I can't verify if I'm using the right client id. I feel like I'm guessing trying to make this work."
T: "What exactly are you trying to get working?"
<explain, again, what I'm trying to do>
T: "That's probably not going to work. We don't allow AD authentication from the outside world."
Me: "Yes we do. Microsoft Teams, Outlook, the remote access services. I can log into those services from home using my AD credentials."
T: "Oh yea, I guess we do. I meant what you are trying to do. Azure doesn't allow outside services to authenticate using a JWT. Sorry."

FRACK FRACK FRACK!!

Whew! Putting the flamethrower away.

Thanks devrant for letting me rant.

So, the internet is over. Just in case you didn’t notice. If you post a link to anything that involves you: an article, a podcast, a thing you built, a video you made - then mods and admins and trolls get their pitchforks and ban you or roast you or delete you.

This is not the way.

Not only are the walled gardens of apple, Twitter, Facebook/Instagram, breaking the web into little areas - and marketing is buying your time - but we’re doing it to ourselves too.

I can’t post a video about some of my favorite programming books in
/learnprogramming or I’m immediately banned!? Every link that takes people away from your ad dollars is ‘spam?’ Without any useful discourse and content - then why would anyone be there in the first place.

One time I posted a link HERE about how people could get CSS help in the CSS discord and I got fire-stormed for self-promotion. Really? Hundreds of hours helping people learn programming - for free... is my self promotion? Is everyone so insecure that they can’t allow anyone else to talk about their work? It’s super scary.

This is how you control people. This is Nazi shit. It’s a slippery Slope. Watch out.

And whatever you do... don’t share links to your things. That is NOT what the internet was made for.

An arts online magazine. The manager needs to include ads but don't want to do it on a obstructive or invasive way. So far so good, I agree.

Since this is an arts and culture mag, he gets the idea of having a piano keyboard on the sidebar. Each of the keys has to be animated so that on hover it seems to move and play a note. When clicked, it displays an ad. The user don't know or see the ad until he/she plays the note.

Of course no one bought any of the keys. Hours of work wasted.

We all hate ads but some workarounds are not worth it.

This is why we can never have enough software developers

It's true. No matter how many people learn to program, there will never be enough people who know how to program. They don't have to be very good at it either. It is now a required skill.

Minimum wage in first world countries is way above 5$ per hour. A Raspberry PI 3B costs 40$, or at most 1 day of work for the worst paid jobs. And it will run for years, and do routine tasks up to thousands of times faster than any employee. With that, the only excuse that people still do routine tasks, is the inaccessibility of coder time.

Solution: everybody should know how to write code, even at the simplest level.

Blue-collar jobs: they will be obsolete. Many of them already are. The rest are waiting for their turn.

Marketing people - marketing is online. They need to know how to set up proper tracking in JS, how to get atomic data in some form of SQL, how to script some automated adjustments via APIs for ad budgets, etc. Right now they're asking for developers to do that. If they learn to do that, they'll be an independent, valued asset. Employers WILL ask for this as a bonus.
Project Managers - to manage developers, they need to know what they do. They need to know code, they have to know their way around repositories.
QA staff - scripted tests are the best, most efficient tests.
Finance - dropping Excel in favor of R with Markdown, Jupyter Notebooks or whatever, is much more efficient. Customizing / integrating their ERP with external systems is also something they could do if they knew how to code.

Operations / Category Management - most of it would go obsolete with more companies adopting APIs as a way to exchange important information, rather than phone calls and e-mails.

Who would not be replaced or who wouldn't benefit from programming? Innovative artists.

A lot of it might not be now now, but the current generation will see it already in their career.

If we educate people today, without advanced computer skills and some coding, then we are educating future deadbeats.

With all this, all education should include CS. And not just as a mandatory field or something. Make it more accessible, more interesting, more superficial if needed. Go straight to use cases, show its effectiveness in the easiest way possible. Inquisitive minds will fill in the blanks, and everyone else will at least know how to automate a part of their work.

Heads up, fellow tech nerds: if you're an Amazon Prime member and have ever wanted a Raspberry Pi, there's a good deal on a starter kit, 20% off for Prime Day! Search for "CanaKit Raspberry Pi 3 Complete Starter Kit".

I've always wanted to build a project with a Pi, and now mine's coming Friday! Build project suggestions?

As a developer I never understood the intended benefit of standups. Issues + a scrum/kanban board like trello or GitHub project + a chat for quick questions or to schedule an ad-hoc pair programming session should be enough to make everyone know everything they need to know about the project status at any time.

Obliging developers to talk in a group session to reiterate in a more verbose way what they already wrote down when working on it, will make a lot of people uncomfortable. Talking too much or not complying to the talking rules is an expected side effect besides anxiety and reduced productivity.

If you want a talk show, hire talk masters.

If you want software development, hire software developers.

Don't confuse one with the other!

Tried an ad blocker for the first time yesterday. Well what do ya know? Websites I use will not let me access them unless I turn it off. I KNEW something like this would happen. When they were first coming out a few years ago, I said to myself "If everyone is going to be blocking ads, how will we be able to go to these sites for free?"

I expected the worst. I thought they'd put free websites behind a pay wall, much like ad-free mobile applications I would make. Thank GOD that didn't happen. This system is a lot more fair in my opinion. I'm just glad they don't do the same with popup-blockers. Then we would have an issue.

In all seriousness, as annoying as some websites are with their trashy, misleading, or fake ads, they (kinda) have to be there in order for devs to make money and for consumers to be somewhat happy. That is why I personally will not use ad blockers.

So I joined this digital agency where they are working on this ad-tech product and right from day one, I was given a task to implement a new feature on the product. No knowledge transfer. No onboarding process. So, I had given estimation about the task and apparently it took longer than expected. But what were they expecting. Anyways, my manager asked me to have a KT with the only senior guy that has been working there for last couple of years. And man, since the KT started, it's been hell for me. The guy is such an asshole and won't even give me a basic walkthrough of the system. He only took one call and that ended within 30 minutes. On top of that he went ahead and told the product manager that I am not keeping up and am not ready. And my product manager apparently wants me to take his place within a month. It's been only two months since I joined. I have already pushed two major features, tried to understand the system architecture, codebase and everything on my own. On top of that, I got yelled at by that senior dev in a meeting about a PR. I was quite confident guy when I joined and now I am anxious everyday at work and i am scared that they'll let me go because I won't be able to meet their unrealistic expectations. I also can't stand this senior dev and he can't stand me which makes me really demotivated to work. I have anxiety issues and now I am thinking if I stay, I am gonna mess up big time and they'll fire me or worse. I might break something in production because I didn't have proper onboarding.

Me, working hard on a SQL project with a deadline that is half what it should be with no support from the other people on the project and was mostly made with with data I imagined would be in there cos no one could get me any fucking shit done (i.e. effectively designed, built, tested, fixed, upgraded, documented on my own for an entire weekly/monthly/ad-hoc analysis process that would output various reports for internal/external/management)

Manager - man who is a known waste of space but for some reason is in charge of the smallest part of the project, shouldn't have been fucking involved fucking management guzzling stain magnet...

Manager: Hey, do I need to refresh the database?

Me: .................

Me: .................

Me: ............I dunno, do you think we should refresh the database that this entire project is reliant? I mean...why do we need up to date transactions to analyse? Wait....you telling me it's not been being refreshed this ENTIRE time?

Manager: No....you never said I should. So should I?

Me: ..................I never said you should!?!? Are you not in the meetings talking about dependencies?????? Do you think i should have up to date trans or just run this with old stuff????? Why would you not update it!??!!?!?!? Its transactions...... (Desperately trying not to punch through my screen, through his, into his throat)

Manager: ..............

Me: .................

Manager: I think i'll refresh it and add it to the job?

Me: ....................(goes back to work cursing with music in so I think its quiet but who knows).

Tard, don't know how he even gets to work without someone holding his fucking hand.

Happy ending, I don't work there anymore :p

Sad ending, his spirit of tard follows me to my new jobs and possesses someone (or three sometimes)

Adventues with Teachers: Story I

This is a story about an English Teacher that happened to our school in front of 7 year olds.

She doesn't really teach, she just plays movies for them.

So a typical lesson of her goes like this. Turn on the projector, Open the Movie via this streaming site. Most of the times ad's open mostly about betting and stuff but this time when suddenly a Porn Ad opened in front of 7 year olds. Instead of unplugging the Projector like a Normal Person she stands in front of it, jumping moving with her arms to hide it...

Not only that some kids started crying, because they couldn't see what she was hiding. So she spent the entire lesson hiding and trying to cheer children up...

What a great lesson that was...

Why could have that happened. Idk maybe next time either Torrent your Movies or install a fucking ad blocker so you don't have to deal with any kind of ads, especially those!

So I’ve been working on a tool to do offline domain joining in an active directory for about a month in my company, and so far everything is functional and done EXCEPT that one thing.

Essentially to do an offline domain junction, you need an AD account that has sufficient privileges on the domain controller. It will then generate a key that you can use on the client machine to make the junction to the domain.

I have tried literally every possible option that I could think of and I cannot for the life of me figure out why the client machine does not accept the generated key. I’m using methods from the Netapi32.dll which are barely documented anywhere, I even searched on GitHub code references and I couldn’t find much… Theres also a tool called djoin.exe that supposedly does that, I’ve tried with that tool too, to no avail.

This is the last thing missing for the project to be complete, and it’s pretty essential as well…

So close yet so far….

If anybody here knows anything about that kind of stuff (admittedly very niche) I’ll take anything.

Note: I think I’ve browsed all the websites and forums referencing to these functions and the tool now…

I just started a new job last week. Old-school sysadmin role for a pretty old-school company, but the pay is nice and the kids've gotta eat.

They gave me a windows laptop. I haven't used windows for work or as a daily driver since 2016, and now, a week into trying to make this machine work for me, I have the following observations to report.

WSL is nice. It's nice to have it installed(though actually installing it was an adventure unto itself), and to set alacritty to open my default user prompt straight into that is very nice. As terminal emulators are by far my most used piece of software, that's nice to have.

Command-line software management through powershell, winget, and chocolatey are also very nice.

I like the accessibility offered by autohotkey, though there is something of a learning curve on it. Once I get better with it, I suspect that what follows will be largely mitigated.

The Bad:
In general, Windows is janky. It feels like it's all kinda taped together without any particular cohesion in mind. As a desktop, it feels decidedly amateur, compared to the feature-mountain polish of MacOS, and especially compared to the flexibility and infinite possibilities of Linux.

Lots of screen real estate is wasted, with window decorations, and fonts that look terrible at smaller sizes, because the antialiasing of fonts is just terrible. Almost all the features I depend on in other desktops: ad-hoc searches and launches(alfred, rofi) are-- again --janky. They work, but they typically require more typing than alfred or rofi. I admit I haven't spent weeks on this problem yet, but I haven't found a workable solution yet with wox, hain, and keypirinha. Quick searches like what you get with alfred, alfred workflows, and the swiss army knife that is rofi, just aren't possible or reliable with the tools I've used so far, and most require some kind of indexing agent to fully function.

It beggars imagination that a desktop in which users are subjected to "default apps" that is purported to be acceptable for enterprise, professional use, does not have a default entry for text editor. I installed nvim-qt, and I want to use it to edit anything and everything I ever edit with text, but all too often, apps have hard-coded instructions to open text files with notepad.

I want to open certain URLs with firefox, certain ones with firefox developer edition, and others with vivaldi, and yet there is not an app available that I have seen yet in my searches that allows me to set this kind of configuration. I found one that's supposed to, but it just ignores everything I put into its config, and just opens MS Edge for everything. Jank.

Simple things take too long. Like the delay between when I laboriously hit ctrl-alt-del to bring up the login and when the actual text field appears, and the delay between that and when I want to start using the computer.

Changing some settings requires a reboot. Updating some software requires a reboot. Updating permissions on something sometimes requires a reboot. And those are all on top of the frequent requests to reboot for updates.

I would have thought Windows would have overcome most of the issues that create these problems, but it's just, as I said, amateur.

Why the fuck is everyone behind this whole privacy thing . I mean what did you expect , servers do cost... you know . No one wants to provide you a service to chat with your shit collecting butler in the adjacent room unless it's going to benefit them .

Stick your face on the internet and want people to date you ?

Understand that your virtual social needs need to be supported by a ridiculous amount of electricity and man power which wouldn't be required if you could just throw out your rotting willie nilles in the open .

All this isn't fucking free .. wait were you shocked ? Oh so you just thought there were a few thousand servers powering buckets of pictures of horse poop that you for some reason thought your girlfriend was interested in . NO!

IT'S PRIVACY you are paying with your gaddamn privacy !! Information pays just like the time you paid a 100 bucks to the boyfriend of your girlfriend to find out more details .

Ridiculous . You people don't like ads . You don't like paying . You don't like providing information . THEN DON'T USE THE DAMN INTERNET .

IF YOU'RE REALLY THAT CONCERNED ABOUT YOUR PRIVACY THEN SPEND SOME VALUABLE TIME TO ACQUIRE ENOUGH OF A SKILLSET TO SETUP A VPN AND STOP POSTING YOUR PHONE NUMBER ON YOUR EX'S WALL ASKING HER TO CALL YOU.

One more honest thing to rant about is ads . As much as you hate them they're an easy way out . I'm not sure why a 20 second ad would bother you on mobile and not on television and I'm not sure why you wouldn't buy the ad company and shut it down if 20 seconds were so costly to you .

I want to rant even more on uninstalling services like Windows and Google for stupid reasons but I'll take a break here . My frustration has touched low levels.

Try to not look like an ad on your own ui

So, I browse to a video livestream and an annoying ad starts before the livestream is shown. Furthermore, the page jumps around because of a cookie notification that also blocks some UI elements at the top.

Note: this is the website of a public (government-paid) national news website with very high standards and a good reputation.

Action 1: refresh page; I hope the ad is skipped. Nope, annoying ad restarts. Page jumps around again because of the cookie notification.

Action 2: accept cookies to remove notification blocking the top UI (it's OK, I know it can't actually save any cookies on my machine). Instead of some nice JS doing it for me in the background, the page refreshes because you know, HTTP requests and whatnot.

Annoying ad restarts again... FML 🤬

Lessons to be learned from this for any web dev: these annoyances can and *will* exponentially get worse if used simultaneously against your users, instead of being used to help or inform your users.

As a user of you website, I want to watch a livestream. I don't care what stupid legislation forced you to shove a fucking cookie notification in my face. Make sure it is not annoying me to the point that I close you website and take minutes to rant about it!

Also, give me the freedom of choice to watch an ad or not. You and I both know that some ads simply are not for me. Better save yourself and myself the bandwidth.

And go get good at web development. You're a news site. That's more than just text and images. If you want great apps, social media coverage, videos, live streams, blogs, etc. go get some better web devs. Your current web frontend devs only qualify to get fired.

Well I recently decided to apply for a job although I was planning to go to college in full time this October.

I saw the job ad whilst being active on Stack Overflow. As I just finished my apprenticeship some months ago, I decided to call the firm and ask if I can apply. I clearly stated what I have done before and what knowledge I've gained and what I'm not able/willing to do.

I was "allowed" to apply and additionally took two coding challenges (I completed all tasks with the correct results) as well as a one-hour telephone interview.

After that I almost immediately got invited to a personal job interview after the firm's boss agreed.

The meeting ran very well and I was able to correctly answer almost all questions. Although I was applying for a complete backend position I was asked unconditionally many questions about frontend/webdesign, what I clearly stated that I'm not good at this and thus also not looking for a job with such an requirement.

Two days later I got the response form the HR, that they were looking for some more experienced (within a professional software development team) which I didn't because I was mostly working as the programmer and IT guy in non-IT department in the company I worked before. That hasn't been a mystery I wasn't telling before. 😮😮😮😮

But HR additionally told me, they noticed - whilst in the recruitment process with me - that they already have enough backend devs and are seeking for a frontend dev instead.

Well then why the f*ck do you upload a job ad when you suckers don't need that position? And why the hell do you think you then have to waste my time with a frontend-oriented interview? Get your shit on the way and just invite people you really want to employ.

So rethink. Much wow.

Tried to find and download drivers for a Dell laptop, but no matter what I got redirected to pages in Finnish. There's a country selector - also in Finnish. However, in my country we speak Swedish. Åland Islands is not an option in the country list, and Sweden is not called anything even remotely close to Sverige or Sweden in Finnish...so unless you happen to know Finnish you'll have to pick a country haphazardly until you find a language where you can at least understand the word Sweden. Once finally on the Swedish page, if you click your way forward on the support pages, you end up on the Finnish page again...AAARGH! Dell, if you want to be helpful then do it right! Once again, in Åland Islands, we speak Swedish. Even if Dell would acknowledge my country, making any assumptions about the user's language merely based on their geographical location, is flat out stupid! Have those morons at Dell never heard about multi-lingual countries? Or commuters? Tourists? Newsflash: In AD 2016 the world is multicultural and people also tend to travel abroad.

I think YouTube gave up on trying to send me ads.

I have an adblocker in my desktop but not on my phone. In all of my years using YouTube, I've only ever clicked on an add twice on purpose, and maybe a couple of times by accident. By now, even when I'm not using an adblocker, YouTube still doesn't send me ads! And for some reason it's lately been sending me ads of YouTube itself. It's a very annoying 5-second video with just the logo of YouTube. They're really just telling me "I don't have anything to promote to you, so I'll just make you waste 5 secs just cause."

However, every single time I get on incognito, I get one ad or maybe two per video. wtf

!rant

Maybe a usefull function for the fellow developers here, in case you need default Avatars for your users. "UI-Avatars". Just 'discovered' this beautiful API today and it really is easy and helpful! :D It even has a PHP package if you would like to generate them yourself.. This is not an ad or anything, it's just a usefull API, like 'placehold.it' etc that could be useful for anyone out there!

This is a continuation of my previous rant about admob being not very informative when it comes to invalid traffic and the resulting restriction in ad delivery.

I then wanted to use admob mediation to hang in facebook ads. My app is written with Xamarin.Forms.

So first I needed to make some facebook configuration - create an account, let my app review, create some ad placements and other shit. I came to the point where I had to put in a link to my privacy policy and the link could not be accepted due to some SSL fuckup -.-'

I then found out that there is an issue with my SSL Chain. With the help of whatsmychaincert.com I solved that issue. Little side note here: I have limited knowledge of that stuff and my cousin helped me set up my homepage so I had no idea what I was doing. Did a snapshot and luckily I did not needed that as everything worked :)
This took me around half an hour just so I can paste the fucking link to activate my app in facebook developer portal.

After that I made the whole mediation configuration shit - not an issue as google documented this quite well but it took some time.

Now comes the shitty part. To use admob mediation you need adapters to the other ad network. I found a nuget package with exactly what I needed just to find out that it is outdated. So I pulled the repo and saw that this thing is an aar binding library. Never did that stuff so I read some docs again. Updated the package and consumed it in my app.

The google docs then said "Use this mediation test shit to check if you did everything correct before going prod" - aar binding nr. 2 (but I am now familiar with that :P). This thing then told me that facebook ads could not be loaded because the SDK version is outdated -.-' SDK version comes from another nuget package which is referenced by the first aar thingie. I tracked that thing back to a repo where I found out that they are indeed totally behind. So I downloaded the aar, made a binding lib and bound that to my first aar binding lib as that depends on this.

Put that all back in my app - tested mediation and fucking finally after 6 hours everything comes together! all lights are green and things work.

Sorry if this is not quite a rant but it was quite a journey and I just had to share it.

Dear Bethesda, Long time no rant eh?
So, I Pre-ordered your mess called Fallout 76! I was hyped! But you fucktards just fucked everything from behind...
Shit Graphics, over 1001 bugs, everything...
I didnt play it much so, I didnt think about it until now... now when my Drives called, "Porn", "more porn" and "a fuckton of porn" are full, and whats the biggest game ive installed? Yes. Fallout 76... I uninstalled this mess and wanted a refund of my 95.60CHF, Which is A LOT for a game... and you fucks lurking in the background replied with "players who have downloaded the game are not eligible for a refund." Aka: "We now have your money, bought some cheap hookers with it, and now dont have it anymore JK LOOOOL XDDD"
Yeah, and my friend who wanted a refund, got it. Fuck off bethesda, take your shitty shit of a shit piece of shit game with you and fly away with it.
I cant take it anymore...
OH, AND DID I MENTION YOU PUT AN AD ON YOUR MAIL?! Like this:
We have your money now, but please waste more on it on our other shit games.
FUCK OFF!

I love my peel and stick whiteboard 😍 just planned out my code for tomorrow.

I'm not an ad! Don't smite me!

Any top tips for recruiting or things you look for in an ad?

Our company has just advertised 4 roles (one was a junior PHP/JS dev role) and we got 90 applications. Only one was for the dev role, and we decided not to pursue it.

We're keen not to go the recruiter route, they cost a ton and that means less pay for the dev in the end. Plus, you've only got to look at this week's rants to see how they work!

Every day without help feels like an eternity of ever shortening impossible client deadlines for me. 😩😭 (I'm the main dev on a team of 3 including our PM)

I am the responsible for the atlassian Suite at work, as I maintain the systems, set them up, and stuff.

One day, our crowd (the authentication and authorization application) just went crazy. At like lunch time it could not connect to the AD anymore. No reasons. Throwing XSRF errors (cross site scripting), because http would connect to https. "won't do it, fuck you" it told me. Out of the blue. Noone changed anything. And yea, seriously. Noone did.
It just refused to connect (as connecting to AD is connecting yourself with you own api. And refusing yourself talking to yourself). It runs behind a proxy. Therefore http/https. Well, this worked for years. But out of sudden not anymore.

Yea. Fuck you.

It was reported some hours later, at like 3pm, as people could not login to the applications using crowd as authentication and authorization server.

Tried to debug the system, where nothing was did, to make it work. At best time to fail.

First workaround: if you are logged into one of the other applications of atlassian, just refresh the site, so your SSO token gets a refresh and you are signed on again.

Then I searched more and more. And more.
But nothing worked, nothing helped.

So I addressed an emergency maintenance, take down the whole Suite, restart crowd, to apply some changes to it's settings, not knowing what happening then, because all connections of SSO will then be released. Sent out the mail like 30 minutes beforehands.

While waiting for the window, I just typed my credentials... And redid, and redid, so to type and being bored.
Three minutes before the window...

It just worked again.

Well. Wtf. Serioudl
Just came back.

No Intrusion, no changes at all. Just came back, as nothing has happened.

Kind of best part of this story... A headhunter messaged me on my way home to offer me a job as an Atlassian Suite SysAdmin for a company, at kinda the double of my salary.

At first I was thinking to go there, and when someone then asked me sth about Atlassian just start to laugh and then leave still laughing...

But then I very nicely respond that I dont want to cry at work. And wished him best luck.

I am doing some bad upgrades now on our Suite. Very painful.
And I looked into the start scripts. Some Look like the untalented intern tells another one to write scripts. Seriously wtf.

Today I followed the guide to Update a confluence and change database to Postgres. Didnt work, Postgres error.
Try it again, jquery won't load. Next try, tomcat not starting anymore. Did same thing. Every fucking time.

Yea. Maintenance window to get a nice new export soon. Will only take an hour.

To switch database in confluence, you need to set it up very fresh. And then Import your export.
Export takes an hour at our system.
Importing maybe the same time. Hope it will work (hint: Nope).

Oh, can be nice also. Just tell the Bitbucket to migrate databases, there is a fucking setting for it. Enter new database, ready, go, finished.

At least they don't raise costs very much every kinda year.
Oh sorry, yes, they do.

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

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

So an old friend (high school classmate) asked me recommendations on several older/second hand laptop ads he saw online. He listed several items with detailed specs sheets and I replied with

Ctrl+F thinkpad
Search term not found

and linked him to a thinkpad ad in the same price range but better specs.

I... still swear Im not a fanboy.

Damn Admob information delivery -.-
I got restricted ad delivery a second time in a month and they do not have a proper support...

I have an app which generates around 100k impressions a week and it kind of hurts when there is anything wrong with the ad implementation. it worked for over 2 years straight without any flaws.

after the last ban i even limited the amount of ad delivery by hardcoding a max amount per day. But the fucking lack of information makes it impossible for me to write fixes on my side -.- i do not even know which ad exactly is causing the invalid traffic - and admob is not really helpful when it comes to providing informations.

i totally get that admob wants to keep their algo a secret but for fucks sake how am i supposed to work with those ppl if they do not work with me?

I now need to stress around with binding alternative ad networks - wish me good luck writing adapters for xamarin...

How is it that Facebook ads play right before the climax or high point of any video. Just when I'm interested to see what happens next, bam, like clock work, an ad pops up. It does not seem to be a fixed time, but more to do with the specific content of the video. Is it just me or is there some sinister algorithm at work that can detect the moment in a video the viewer will be most interested? so the viewer will have no choice but to sit through the advert to see what happens next. Or is the timing of the ad predetermined by some other means ?

!Rant
I'm helping a customer who calls in all the time for support. At the end of a call this exchange happens.

Customer: So I have this game...

*Points at a solitaire icon on his desktop*

Customer: If we open that up, there's this little thing here...

*Game opens and there's an ad in the bottom right corner*

Customer: Can you get rid of that?

Me: I can't, not in applications like this. This is the free version of the software and add are how they make their money. If you did want to play without ads, Microsoft has the Solitaire Collection for free

*Makes shortcut to Solitaire Collection on desktop*

Me: There you go

[please read my rant, i want attention lol, i am pretty sure you know me ^v^]

My devRant visits have decreased tremendously due to high amounts of school work, but finally I am doing something productive developer stuff!

There is this app that allows you to watch educational videos offline, but that only works in android, but I don't have an android tablet, and I don't want to watch videos in my S8, so I am trying to boot android from usb, stick in my surface pro 6 which i am gonna order soon, download the app there, and watch videos!

I knew OS stuff was complicated but it is way more..... Yeah, complicated than i thought. All those fuzzy words, grub, partition, format, sectors, qemu, etc...

Uhhh

And I have only windows, which is a plus since i can use easy2boot, a godsend utility to make bootable usb with any iso easily (not an ad) , but the minus is that i have limited testing capabilities, forcing me to install virtualbox eith vmeu or whatever that thing is called...

But what I really want to say in this rant which is completely out of control, I'd like to thank the easy2boot support team who was very helpful for me to understand their utility, and a random guy in phoenix os subreddit who told me where to start.

If you read until here thanks! If you have experience booting from usb wih surface, or any windows machine let me know your experience since i want to know more about it, and if i encounter problems, i can look at your comments, thanks!

Task on freelancer : There are (too) many adblocker detection plugins. I want you to select one, test it at your local development environment (we will not provide) that it does the following:

- reliably discovers an AdBlocker

- does not interfere with regular ad serving (AdSense) if no AdBlocker is installed at user's browser

****- shows alternate banners (coming from our servers, so they look like regular pictures instead) even when AdBlocker is active *******
OKAY Now reality was that pre thought, pondered by PM ?
anyway adblocks seems doing Acceptable ads* which might be payed for ;)

I've been asked to write a job ad for a frontend developer, as I have never don that, what would you write in there? And what are usual salaries for frontend devs? Also what would you ask them in an interview? What kind of coding challenges would you give them? Also we're not looking for a "code monkey" only but that person should also be responsible for jow everything looks (like the design and UI/UX of the site). How would you call that position? I've for now put "Frontend UI/UX Web-Developer" there.

"An ad should be an appetizer, not a buffet. " - Lee Clow’s Beard

Hi fellow ranters, I humbly request your opinion on a matter.

I am a CS student in his last year of college, and currently developing a Node.js app as his final year project with a partner. The project has potential, and we've been at it for about three weeks, but the problem is that the more I code, the less I see myself doing Node in the future.

I was a total noob in CSS before starting the project, and I have learnt a ton in just 3 short weeks, but that has taken a toll on me, because I fell pretty far behind our schedule. However, for as much time and effort ad I have put in, my partner has put in a lot more (and he knows way more than me), thus increasing the gap.

My partner and I have (for the moment) different views on the amount of effort that we want to put in the project, since I see it as "slightly more than just another subject" (9-hr a week), and he sees it as a real passion project (endless hours). This could be due to the burnout of the first weeks, but I'm really not that excited about the project anymore, and I find myself thinking that I am wasting both of our time (I don't want to be dead weight), and that if I worked on a project that really made me passionate, such a compiler or a runtime environment, or a new programming language, I wouldn't mind putting in the hours that he does. Just to give more context, this whole project was his idea, and although I find it a great idea, and I know he is capable of building an amazing product, I am not sure whether I would be useful, or even if I want to be useful. Again, this could all be because of burnout.

Anyone has had such an experience?

TL;DR: I am working on a final project with a partner (it was his idea, and I found it interesting), but I think I would be happier switching to a project of my own.

Is your code vegan?

After I saw an ad for a vegan higiene product I keep wondering "do the word 'vegan' actually means what I think it does?"
I mean, how do an object made of silicon and plastic could be "not vegan"?!?

Seeing an Elementor ad on Facebook is so annoying to web developer because it's like your ex who constantly reminds you of how bad you are in sex despite the fact that you are not dating a super model.

I've been waiting to pull the plug and move to a new company for some time now... The only reason I haven't done it yet is, I don't like too many variables. I am waiting to pay off a loan before going job hunting, but saw an ad this morning which tickled me a little bit... So, I'm job hunting after 1156 again... Only this time, I am in no rush (not to temp fate) and will try and find a better job

Semi-rant
Saw an ad that required 8+ years experience in Swift.. Didn't Swift come out like... 4 years ago? Can these recruiters have a sense of what they're doing and the area they're in please. Not just this one, but many others as well.