It finally hit me the other day.
I'm working on an IoT project for a late-stage ALS patient. The setup is that he has a tablet he controls with his eye movements, and he wants to be able to control furnishings in his room without relying on anyone else.
I set up a socket connection between his tablet and the Raspberry Pi. From there it was a simple matter of using GPIO to turn a lamp or fan on or off. I did the whole thing in C, even the socket programming on the Pi.
As I was finishing up the main control of the program on the Pi I realized that I need to be more certain of this than anything I've ever done before.
If something breaks, the client may be forced to go days without being able to turn his room light on, or his fan off.
Understand he is totally trapped in his own body so it's not like he can simply turn the fan off. The nursing staff are not particularly helpful and his wife is tied up a lot with work and their two small children so she can't spend all day every day doting on him.
Think of how annoying it is when you're trying to sleep and someone turns the light on in your room; now imagine you can't turn it off yourself, and it would take you about twenty minutes to tell someone to turn it off -- that is once you get their attention, again without being able to move any part of your body except your eyes.
As programmers and devs, it's a skill to do thorough testing and iron-out all the bugs. It is an entirely different experience when your client will be depending on what you're doing to drastically improve his quality of life, by being able to control his comfort level directly without relying on others -- that is, to do the simplest of tasks that we all take for granted.
Giving this man some independence back to his life is a huge honor; however, it carries the burden of knowing that I need to be damned confident in what I am doing, and that I have designed the system to recover from any catastrophe as quickly as possible.

In case you were wondering how I did it all: The Pi launches a wrapper for the socket connection on boot.
The wrapper launches the actual socket connection in a child process, then waits for it to exit. When the socket connection exits, the wrapper analyzes the cause for the exit.
If the socket connection exited safely -- by passing a special command from the tablet to the Pi -- then the wrapper exits the main function, which allows updating the Pi. If the socket connection exited unexpectedly, then the Pi reboots automatically -- which is the fastest way to return functionality and to safeguard against any resource leaks.
The socket program itself launches its own child process, which is an executable on the Pi. The data sent by the tablet is the name of the executable on the Pi. This allows a dynamic number of programs that can be controlled from the tablet, without having to reprogram the Pi, except for loding the executable onto it. If this child of the socket program fails, it will not disrupt its parent process, which is the socket program itself.

Finally!
I installed gitlab at our company. I ranted about not using any version control whatsoever in the past but now it happened!

My boss wanted to see a project I was working on for himself so I copied the project to a usb drive and gave it to him. I used git for the project locally and I told him to use this too if he changes anything. And that it would be a great idea to have this centralised on our server. He agreed and I told him he just had to give me the order to implement it. He was like "go ahead" and one hour later we had a gitlab up and running.
We will have some internal training to do and then we are in the 21st century!

I'm so happy right now.

4 years ago I was placed on probation for not having the special format in source control check in comments. When I asked, the 'special format' was
clearly documented on page 18, sub-section 4, sub-paragraph 2, "All check in comments will include the solution name, separated by a colon,
and why the code was changed." My check-in comment was only missing the colon. Indecently, over 80% of the other comments consisted of 'adsf',
'bug fix', and several 'BOOM!'s. So I mistakenly said out loud 'This check-in policy appears only to exist to allow management to cherry pick
developers they do not like, find something wrong, and put them on probation.' That comment got on a 30-day ‘corrective action plan’ for openly disagreeing with a
company policy. Today, all those managers were either fired or quit and now I set policy. Dear Mr. ex-Bosses, I won.

Just had a customer complain that the website didn't work in Microsoft Edge. After a WordPress update and slight CSS correction everything was fine. Then backend got a hold of us kindly asking "What the effervescent F*** is going on with that website"

Apparently it loads half a gig of data from our servers with each visit, we made the website and host it but we did not cause this. Further inspection shows that it's all images.

Me and the youngest (and possibly brightest) guy in the bunch view the PHP to try and control the amount of posts loading when visiting the start page as a means of controlling this issue.

We soon reached a conclusion we didn't expect, everything was in one post..........

First day at new web dev job:
Me: what IDE do you guys use?
Coworker: Notepad/notepad++
M: Okay... Any version control?
C: Oh we don't need it. We just update the server pages.
*Boss walks in*
Boss: Heres the project for you to do just need you to rebrand this web app we made for client A for client B just need to change some scripts. Should only take afew hours.

I take a look. No comments. Not formatted. Missing braces and brackets. Semicolons at odd places and missing at others. 7802 lines of code...

Me: Oh I see were using a non-standard architecture on this app. I like this bit but what is this doing? never seen it before.

Him: Ah we use that to abstract the navigation layer.

Me: oh ok, interesting idea, but that means we need an extra file per screen + 1 per module. We also can't use this inbuilt control, which I really like, and we've to write a tonne of code to avoid that.

Him: Yeah we wanted to take a new approach to fix X, this is what we came up with. Were not 100% happy with it. Do you have any ideas?

**
Queue really long, multi-day architecture discussion. Lots of interesting points, neither side being precious or childish in anyway. Was honestly fantastic.
**

Me: So after researching your last email a bit, I think I found a happy middle ground. If we turn X into a singleton, we can store the state its generating inside itself. We can go back to using the in-built navigation control and have the data being fetched like Y. If you want to keep your dependency injection stuff, we can copy the Angular services approach and inject the singletons instead of all of these things. That means we can delete the entire layer Z.

Even with the app only having 25% of the screens, we could delete like 30+ files, and still have the architecture, at a high level, identical and textbook MVVM.

Him: singleton? no I don't like those, best off keeping it the way it is.

... are you fucking kidding me? You've reinvented probably 3 wheels, doubled the code in the app and forced us to take ownership of something the system handles ... but a singleton is a bad idea? ... based off no concrete evidence or facts, but a personal opinion.

... your face is a bad idea

Story time.

Not sure it counts as data loss, more temporary corruption (and in my own brain).

> be me.
> be clinically depressed
> be recently out of an awful breakup
> recently nearly committed suicide by train
> be bored and lonely one night
> take lsd
> feel fine
> go to McDonald’s
> feel fine
> while eating question the nature of reality
> become convinced I’m an observer of a cosmic story and cannot die
> go outside in only jeans
> run in traffic at 1AM to prove my point
> don’t die
> run around the streets more sure of my new reality than I’d ever been of anything
> feel free and no longer sad
> walk around observing the world
> sit on wall and wonder why the story had the structure I was observing
> fall off wall into grass and mud
> follow cute guy into apartment building
> follow into lift
> ask what everything means
> spend better part of couple hours in lift pressing emergency button asking for help
> get no response
> scare poor Russian lady that gets into lift and finds an overweight topless man on the floor babbling incoherently
> ride to top floor
> get out
> sit on leather chair in corridor
> feelsnice.tiff
> decide I’m actualising my desires and reality
> don’t realise this is just the trip wearing off and consciousness exerting more control
> walk into random apartment (door is unlocked because why wouldn’t it be for the god that I believe I am at this point)
> explore
> gorgeous apartment
> realise it’s a family apartment from clothes in hallway and items
> find bathroom
> decide I want a bubble bath
> run bubble bath
> can’t work out how to drain water. Bath now full of twigs and mud #sorry
> decide that I’d like to go home, or onto my next adventure. Hopefully the seaside as I’m now realising I have more control.
> open bathroom door
> not the seaside. Ah well. Try to walk home
> walk home wrapped in fluffy towel from nice family’s apartment
> get home
> realise what had happened
> throw remaining drugs away
> sit and rock in utter paranoia and guilt for hours until flatmate wakes up.

MFW first bad trip ever.
MFW I wonder whether that family knew I was there and were scared / discovered the mess in the bathroom the next morning and not knowing which is worse.

MFW I still have the towel because it’s fluffy AF.

The moral of the story kids, is that when it comes to the OS rattling around in your brain, installing a virus that is sensitive to what apps you have running is a bad idea when those apps make the virus go to fucking town.

Terrible analogy I know, but fuck it.

Rekked/insulted a client so hard today in a way which was obvious for me/colleagues but not for the client that the colleague sitting next to me completely fucking lost it. (client did not detect/notice it)

That's entirely fine as he was not too loud but his laughter is so fucking contagious that he went outside to make sure that I wouldn't catch it any worse while on the phone.

God damn it took some serious self control to not completely lose my shit xD (it only partly worked 😅)

And, the other side, husbands 😂
——————————————————–
Dear Technical Support,

Last year I upgraded from Boyfriend 5.0 to Husband 1.0 and noticed a distinct slow down in overall system performance — particularly in the flower and jewelry applications, which operated flawlessly under Boyfriend 5.0. The new program also began making unexpected changes to the accounting modules.

In addition, Husband 1.0 uninstalled many other valuable programs, such as Romance 9.5 and Personal Attention 6.5 and then installed undesirable programs such as NFL 5.0, NBA 3.0, and Golf Clubs 4.1.

Conversation 8.0 no longer runs, and Housecleaning 2.6 simply crashes the system. I’ve tried running Nagging 5.3 to fix these problems, but to no avail.

What can I do?

Signed,

Desperate

——————————————————–

Dear Desperate:

First keep in mind, Boyfriend 5.0 is an Entertainment Package, while Husband 1.0 is an Operating System.

Please enter the command: ” C:/ I THOUGHT YOU LOVED ME” and try to download Tears 6.2 and don’t forget to install the Guilt 3.0 update.

If that application works as designed, Husband 1.0 should then automatically run the applications Jewelry 2.0 and Flowers 3.5. But remember, overuse of the above application can cause Husband 1.0 to default to Grumpy Silence 2.5, Happy Hour 7.0 or Beer 6.1.

Beer 6.1 is a very bad program that will download the Snoring Loudly Beta.

Whatever you do, DO NOT install Mother-in-law 1.0 (it runs a virus in the background that will eventually seize control of all your system resources).

Also, do not attempt to reinstall the Boyfriend 5.0 program. These are unsupported applications and will crash Husband 1.0.

In summary, Husband 1.0 is a great program, but it does have limited memory and cannot learn new applications quickly.

You might consider buying additional software to improve memory and performance. We recommend Food 3.0 and Hot Lingerie 7.7.

Good Luck,
Tech Support

After our Head Of Software has terminated.

I started to take control over our development crew. And in this year I did more then the old head in the last 6 years.
- Swapped from plain old SVN to Gitlab.
- Build a complete autonomous deployment with Gitlab.
- Introduced code reviews.
- Started to refactor the legacy product with 500.000 lines of code...
- learned how to use confluent apache kafka and kubernetes to split the legacy project in many small and maintainable one.(not done yet)
- Last 3 weeks I learned how to use elasticstack with kibana and co. That we aren't blind anymore. Big dashboards are now shown in the middle of the room :) and maybe convinced my coworker that we use unity3d for our business application cause of support for all devices and same design on them. And offline capabilities. (Don't know if this was my best idea)
When I look back, I'm proud to did that much in one year alone. And my coworkers are happy too that they have less work with deployments and everything.
But I can't decide what's the title for this. System or Software Architect cause I litterallity did both :/

Senior development manager in my org posted a rant in slack about how all our issues with app development are from

“Constantly moving goalposts from version to version of Xcode”

It took me a few minutes to calm myself down and not reply. So I’ll vent here to myself as a form of therapy instead.

Reality Check:
- You frequently discuss the fact that you don’t like following any of apples standards or app development guidelines. Bit rich to say the goalposts are moving when you have your back to them.

- We have a custom everything (navigation stack handler, table view like control etc). There’s nothing in these that can’t be done with the native ones. All that wasted dev time is on you guys.

- Last week a guy held a session about all the memory leaks he found in these custom libraries/controls. Again, your teams don’t know the basic fundamentals of the language or programming in general really. Not sure how that’s apples fault.

- Your “great emphasis on unit testing” has gotten us 21% coverage on iOS and an Android team recently said to us “yeah looks like the tests won’t compile. Well we haven’t touched them in like a year. Just ignore them”. Stability of the app is definitely on you and the team.

- Having half the app in react-native and half in native (split between objective-c and swift) is making nobodies life easier.

- The company forces us to use a custom built CI/CD solution that regularly runs out of memory, reports false negatives and has no specific mobile features built in. Did apple force this on us too?

- Shut the fuck up

One of our clients deploy their own server app. So this happened after a prod deployment. (4am)

*Cellphone rings while sleeping*

Client : we need you on the conference call now. URGENT!

*Gets on conference call*
*Client explain the problem*
*Explaining to the client that the problem is in their side (https connection not working, either network or certificate problem)*
*Client doesn't believe it and pushes me for a fix that I have no control on*
*4 hours later in a heated conversation*

Client : ok problem is on our side. We used our SSL certificate from staging with production and thought it would work.

Me :

Let's get something straight people, the trend to change terms in programming languages for PC approved ones is NOT for "making the workplace a better place".

If you are one of those who say "oh it's just terms, if it makes them feel better why not?", "I don't care so should everybody else", "the outrage proves we need to change the terms!".

No sir, first of all, since when has programming been about ditching standards to make people "feeel" better? Since when has engineering been about that?! We are engineers, we don't change shit and waste effort trying to fix things that are working.

Second, this word cleansing does NOT come from a well intentioned one, it's not about making the workplace a better place, it's not about minorities, it's about sanitizing language from an ideological and political standpoint to please an agenda pushing minority who doesn't give a shit about any real social issues.

They have done it to movies, videogames, news, political speech, magazines, books and now programming. It doesn't stop and they will never be satisfied, it's not about changing the terms, no one gives a shit about the terms, it's about pandering to ideological crybabies who want to control what you say because it "offends" them or some supposedly oppressed group from which we just hear anecdotal evidence.

Personally I wouldn't give a shit if it was for technical reasons, but it's not and I've seen what this shit does to communities I love and I won't stand it happening to the dev community just because some weak ass, no balls coders decided to pander to the retards on the far left to score virtue points instead of standing their ground.

Are you worried about oppressed groups? Donate money to third world children, speak out about women in Siria, travel to actual shitty 3rd world countries so you realize changing words on a GitHub repo on your expensive ass MacBook, sipping your soy based coffee on an office with air conditioning is not making the world a better place you delusional prick.

You want to ignore the facts be my guest, be willfully ignorant, but I will not police myself and my ideas for your ideological beliefs, not in gaming, not here. Fuck off.

Whoever designed UEFI, FUCK YOU!! Giving the OS control over every fucking thing in the hardware instead of letting the BIOS do that separately, WHO IN THEIR RIGHT FUCKING MIND THOUGHT THAT THAT WAS A GOOD IDEA?!!

And same goes to fucking you Microsoft! How difficult is it to do a fucking ACPI shutdown and do it properly?! How fucking difficult is it to not make the fans spin like jet engines because why the fuck not?! And yes the fucking PC is dust-free and bloat-free so I don't want to see any fucking Wintard comment that.

You know where else I saw the inability to power down? In Linux 4.20-rc2. A kernel that is within active development, and rc2 at that!! A kernel branch that's designed to be unstable, for testing purposes. Meanwhile the stable branch of MS Windows does the same. Also designed to be unstable because fuck QA?! Filthy fucking motherfuckers!!

A huge project came my way at work. Old spaghetti code, no source control, no test env and every other possible challenge you could think of. Based on my initial quote a deadline of June 19th was approved. Two days ago the president of the company tells my boss it needs to be done by Friday, no excuses. Horrible timing since I'm moving tomorrow and am off all next week. Not to mention I'm the only dev at the company that understands/knows how to work on this code. We also don't have a budget to contract out. Literally not possible to do in 2 days. I proposed a "quick fix" solution and new design which was approved. I Spent 2 straight days working on it with overtime, no lunch hour, and the president checking on me every hour for status updates. Managed to implement my "quick fix" and just put it live 2 hours ago. President approved, and said "thanks". He then sent an email to the company and all our agents across the country anouncing the change. In the email he directly thanks the Marketing dept and the "senior leadership team" for "making the quick turnaround of this request possible". He proceeds to name specific people responsible for making this happen. No where does he mention my name or my department. Not that I'm actually surprised but it would have been nice to get some recognition considering this literally wouldn't have worked without me. Guess I should be used to it by now. I'm also now on call during my week off in case anything breaks.

I'm not angry, mostly sad.

At my workplace we don't use git.
There are constant overwriting, sending code via email or USB stick and forgetting passwords to zip-files shenanigans going on.

I already use git for all my local projects (literally git init in the directory) but my coworker and I thought that it would be a great idea to have a local server with a Gitlab running on it.
So I started looking into running a self-hosted Gitlab (for about 15 minutes) and then our boss who was sitting right next to me almost shouted at us: "Such stuff should be coordinated with the boss! We don't just do something and burn my money because it's _cool_!"

No, git is not cool, it's necessary for crying out loud! Gitlab is cool but at the end of the day also just another tool too.

I guess I have some persuasion to do.

I don't know what version control has done to our boss that he has such a deep dislike for it.

Yesterday I fucked up big time.
First time in my career (I’m 23).

I just started working this week at a new company startup that had no programmers before me. They have a bunch of websites under their control that were on all different hosting solutions, and we decided to move them all to AWS.
I moved a few and was managing the folder rights on the server.
What happened next made my heart skip a few beats.
Bear in mind I’m not an expert in Linux.
I wanted to chmod to the folder I was currently in, and typed ‘sudo chmod -R 770 /‘ thinking for a while that the ‘/‘ would do it on my current dir.

Fuck. As I saw what was happening I pressed ctrl + c as fast as I could. But the damage had been done.

Fast forward a couple hours I deleted the broken instance, and created a new one from scratch. Had to do everything again but managed to do it in just a couple hours, moving as fast as I could without making such stupid mistakes again.

I was honest about it from the first minute it happened, and told my boss right away that I fucked up and had to start over, with a couple of hours of downtime.
Luckily not much was lost and I took a snapshot right after I was finished and will look into auto backups next week.

Had a fun little conversation with a potential employer...

Him: We use git for version control. To work with our team you'll be expected to do the same and be proficient at it.

Me: Not a problem. I am well versed with all things git! May I ask, what does your work flow look like?

Him: All of our source lives in a single repo and everyone commits straight to master.

Me: 😐...

Him: Conflicts will not be tolerated.

A few weeks ago at infosec lab in college

Me: so I wrote the RSA code but it's in python I hope that's ok (prof usually gets butthurt if he feels students know something more than him)

Prof: yeah, that's fine. Is it working?

Me: yeah, *shows him the code and then runs it* here

Prof: why is it generating such big ciphertext?

Me: because I'm using big prime numbers...?

Prof: why are you using big prime numbers? I asked you to use 11, 13 or 17

Me: but that's when we're solving and calculating this manually, over here we can supply proper prime numbers...

Prof: no this is not good, it shouldn't create such big ciphertext

Me: *what in the shitting hell?* Ok....but the plaintext is also kinda big (plaintext:"this is a msg")

Prof: still, ciphertext shows more characters!

Me: *yeah no fucking shit, this isn't some mono/poly-alphabetic algorithm* ok...but I do not control the length of the ciphertext...? I only supply the prime numbers and this is what it gives me...? Also the code is working fine, i don't think there's any issue with the code but you can check it if there are any logic errors...

Prof: *stares at the screen like it just smacked his mom's ass* fine

Me: *FML*

20+ years of experience and I hate where this industry is headed. Sure, we have second year grads telling us that they're "Full Stack" developers - but, imo... that's a "Full Stack of Bullshit".

I started developing online properties in 1989, at the ripe age of 17. Bulletin Board Systems. I knew the user experience before it was tagged onto some fuckwad's wonder-filled LinkedIn profile.

When I say, "Don't use that" - it's not the result of a control freak mechanism that seems to be built into every Facebitch/Twatter/SnatchChat fool in existence.

I do so, because I care enough to guide team members in the proper direction so they aren't driving themselves and others off a goddamn cliff, drooling onto mobile device like it's God's penis.

So, of course they do the complete opposite. Fail miserably. Finger point like the typical douche bags. And, slowly destroy the income of everyone around them.

At this point, I'd rather be homeless than to deal with anymore toxic bullshit. So, I'm done. Set up an exit strategy, and walked away from the highest paying position I ever had.

Fuck them and the full stack of bullshit they rode in on. Onward and upwards, fucktards. Enjoy finger-pointing into the mirror.

Back to Earth, in... 3 - 2 - 1.

(Takes a sip of coffee.)

So, how's everyone doing this fine morning?

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 :)

!dev
> Get on Deutsche Bahn train
> Train delayed
> Miss Eurostar connection (not just me, many people did too), get the next one
> Building works in Brussels Station
> Maps inaccurate
> Get lost
> Find Eurostar terminal
> Electricity failure
> Check-in suspended
> After 40min, announcement
> This train cancelled, get the next one
> Electricity fixed
> Check in, finally
> Now 2½ trains worth of people need to get on this one
> Somehow fit on train
> Lose table because family needs it (fair, but annoying)
> Train departs
> More delays due to scheduling conflict
> Arrive in Lille Europe
> Stop for 10 minutes for no reason
> Announcement: "there is an illegal passenger on board, everyone and their luggage needs to get off"
> Get off train, stand on platform for a decade
> "Who has left an orange bag on coach 18?"
> Nobody
> They bring the bag out
> It's red, not orange
> "Oh it's mine, sorry" - some woman
> Wait around for ages
> "Everybody go downstairs and go through security again"
> Go through security and passport control
> Get back on train
> Arrive at St. Pancreas
> Last train to where I live has gone
> Woohoo, I get to pay for an expensive hotel in London
> Get rail replacement bus service home
> Home 😒

I hate it when people don't understand that programmers are prone to depression just like anyone else in other professions.

And my blood literally boils when someone says "Stop overthinking". Like bro, overthinking is literally how I make a living.

If I stop thinking about how my code can fail, I no longer can make a living out of this. I'll be no better than a handicapped PTSD possessed war veteran.

Also, IMO, you're born with an overthinking mind. It's not learned or acquired from an influence. I wish I could stop overthinking, but I have to accept it's beyond my control and try to tame it best I can.

It just sucks. But it is what it is. I know my head is spitting words out at full capacity right now, which just leads to depressed thoughts, and it will calm itself right down after some time.

Who the fuck is able to not understand the basics of git. With ten years, supposedly , of front end experience. How in the hell do you not understand version control.

I am backend + a bit devops
8 months I worked with front-end person in react.

8 months he was telling me.. git usage is not needed for front. There is no need for that, it is not like back.
Recently he made refactorization in a week time, this idiot did not do even single commit in the process.

4 months he was telling me, testing is not needed in front. Even if the work is complete, there is no point to cover with testing.

Today I heard from him, adaptive web design is impossible to do in css only, it needs having javascript to control right height and width size for elements.

At last. I got freed from him. He got fired.

Today I learned Slovakia is in fact a version control system, not country.

Things you find on Wikipedia these days.. 🤔

These anti AI type news articles are ridiculous. We are decades away from anything like skynet. People have seen too much fiction. Everyone used to dream of flying cars, did that happen? No. Do not be fooled, machines can do clever things but they are no where near becoming sentient beings. You try and build something that has the same IQ of a dog and it will still require a shit ton of power and hardware. Plus as far as I'm aware dogs haven't taken over the planet with their level of intelligence.

At the end of the day machines need power to run and we control the source. If anything futuramas more realistic in how AI/robots will integrate with society than these shit piece newspapers.

Sorry for being late, stuffs came inbetween!

I have done a few privacy rants/posts before but why not another one. @tahnik did one a few days ago so I thought I'd do a new one myself based on his rant.

So, online privacy. Some people say it's entirely dead, that's bullshit. It's up to an individual, though, how far they want to go as for protecting it.

I personally want to retain as much control over my data as possible (this seems to be a weird thing these days for unknown reasons...). That's why I spend quite some time/effort to take precautions, read myself into how to protect my data more and so on.

'Everyone should have the choice of what services they use' - fully agreed, no doubt about that.

I just find one thing problematic. Some services/companies handle data in a way or have certain business models which takes the control which some people want/have over their data away when you communicate with someone using that service.

Some people (like me) don't want anything to do with google but even when I want to email my best fucking friend, I lose the control over that email data since he uses gmail.

So, when someone chooses to use gmail and I *HAVE* to email them, my choice is gone.

TO BE VERY CLEAR: I'm not blaming that on the users, I'm blaming that on the company/service.

Then for example, google analytics. It's a very good/powerful when you're solely looking at its functions.
I just don't want to be part of their data collection as I don't want to get any data into the google engine.

There's a solution for that: installing an addon in order to opt out.

I'm sorry, WHAT?! --> I <-- have to install an addon in order to opt out of something that is happening on my own motherfucking computer?! What the actual fuck, I don't call that a fucking solution. I'll use Privacy Badger + hosts files to block that instead.

Google vs 'privacy' friendly search engines - I don't trust DDG completely because their backend is closed/not available to the public but I'd rather use them then a search engine which is known to be integrated into PRISM/other surveillance engines by default.

I don't mind the existence of certain services, as long as they don't integrated you with data hungry companies/mass surveillance without you even using their services.

Now lets see how fast the comment section explodes!

Dev: This content might be too large to fit into this area on mobile.
We might need to add scrolling or design it differently.

Designer: It fits perfectly in the design.

Dev: But the user might have a smaller screen size than in the design.

Designer: We don‘t optimize for small screens.

Dev: But we still need to handle it somehow.
Also, the text might be longer for other languages.

Designer: No problem, we will provide short text for all translations.

Dev: We have 30 languages and the translations are made by a third party. We can not control it.

Designer: We‘ll manage somehow.

Dev: Also, the user might be using an accessibility setting on the device which makes the font size larger.

Designer: Unlikely

Dev: Also, the available screen size might be reduced by the on-screen keyboard.

Designer: … Ok then.

-

It‘s always a conversation like this. It repeats indefinitely.

- WE NEED TO KNOW THE VERSION OF THE SYSTEM THIS INSTANT!
"what? version? wtf are you talking about"
- THE CLIENT HAS I.T. GUIDELINES TO STRICT CONTROL THE VERSION OF EACH SOFTWARE VENDOR'S SYSTEMS!
"We are not a 'software vendor', we provide them consulting on logistics!"
- THEY USE OUR WEBSITE! THIS MAKES US A SOFTWARE VENDOR!
"Wouldn't that make 'google' their vendor too?"
- IM SURE THEY STRICTLY CONTROL GOOGLE'S VERSION TOO!
"I'm pretty sure they don't. But, whatever, that do answers the question of what they want. Some paperwork jockey wants a meaningless number to fill a form, let's give'em one"

I just had someone make an API endpoint where they can ask "the version", and it is just the number of commits in our production branch. For lols, we even 0-fill and split every three magnitude orders with a dot, so we're in version 0.012.345 or something.
Major version upgrade every million commits!

Fuck those guideline-parrots who are unaware that words sometimes have meaning, and sometimes not.

- If I buy x amount of ram | hard drive space | cpu power I will never need more.
- No need for version control | Tests. This is a small project
- git commit -m "changes" (its a small change. I will remember why I did it)
- It is too obvious that I put a lot of personal time in this so my boss will definitely notice!
- Why comment this simple method? Anyone should know what it does. Especially me!
- "this should never happen"
- This call can't be from work. Everyone knows I am on vacation.
- I will back up next week. It's not like it is going to crush today.
- It’s 11:30 already? I will work on this for only a half hour more and then I will definitely go to bed!
- This project will take x amount of time!

Week 26 advice - you all probably know this but good to refresh!

Eat healthily

Sleep well

Document clearly

Annotate your code

Use version control properly

Keep yourself in check with project management tools

Your peers are your friends... And competition.

As much as your boss is an idiot respect them and your life will be easier.

With great power comes great responsibility; don't touch that keyboard until you think through what you are doing chances are your first idea is not the best.

Don't write quick fixes and say you will go back to clean it up later on when you have time. That time will never come.

~March 7~
Boss: Hey cory, guess what, you will not take control of the servers anymore so you can focus on your real job, the company hire someone to do it
Me: Great, finally i can just program, thanks for the news boss

~Yesterday~
Boss: Hey cory, guess what, the person the company hired needs help to migrate some servers so you need to help him on weekend
Me: Well, it's ok i can do the job

~Today~
Director: Hey mr cory, we need you to help jonny on weekend
Me: Fine boss, i will be on weekend
Director: That's the attitude we need in the company, I do not know how much time you need but we're going to pay you 24 extra hours
Me inside ~every went better than expected~ 🤷‍♂️

On March 10th russian government tried to block or at least slow down twitter because twitter refused to delete some posts that russian govt wanted to be deleted.

Things that were down that day in russia:
- rostelecom (largest russian isp)
- FSB (russian CIA)
- SKRF (russian FBI)
- RKN (russian FBI but for internet control)
- gosuslugi (basically the govt website for all utilities imaginable including but not limited to medical help, taxes, passports, everything)
- kremlin website

Things that were up that day in russia, operating at a regular speed:
- twitter

Our PM is on vacation. And our CTO/CEO takes control of the PM role.

So today he decided it was time to just start a customer change request. Regardless of the customer not having approved the actual solution and estimate.

He just said that he did not want to waste any more time talking to the customer. Now they are gonna get what ever he thinks they want.

I predict this to backfire in a fabulous way. What could possible go wrong🤔

As a software engineer, I decided to participate in a hardware Hackathon. I went in not knowing much about the subject, but by the end of the weekend, we made a fully functioning (somewhat janky) jacket that could roll up or roll down its own sleeves depending on what your body temperature was (inspired by Back to the Future 2). We also created a remote, so you could control the length of the sleeves as well. It was the most off-the-wall, ballin project I've ever been a part of.

(I am an entry-inter-intermediate level dev)
P = Person

P:Hey Can you build me a POS system for free?

Me: Yea whatever. (because... immediate family member)

P:Ok Great.

Me: *starts working on it.. almost done with inventory control and layouts in one night*

P: When will it be done? and I need it in a full screen window not a browser!!

Me: Soon..and I have not worked in ASP yet. So it will be a full screen browser app.

P: Aww you cant do it fast? You are not skilled enough??? Poor you, you are not good enough. I can do it in a few hours. Just write a C program which stores entries in a txt file. I dont want sql shes-que-el on my system. You dont want to use .txt because it will be harder for you. Poor you.. no skill.

Me: *raging to a level where i turn into kryptonium and burn superman to death but still keeping my calm* You will get it when you get it. Period

Inner Me: GO FUCK YOURSELF. IM DOING THIS FOR FREE SO THAT IT HELPS YOU OUT. NAGGING ME WONT HELP YOUR CAUSE ONE BIT. GO FUCKING LEARN HOW TO CODE YOURSELF AND MAKE IT YOURSELF OR BUY IT FOR A FUCK TON OF UNJUSTIFIED MONEY. IM GIVING YOU A BEAUTIFUL LAYOUT, GREAT APPLICATION ARCHITECTURE USING LARAVEL AND GREAT DATABASE DESIGN WHICH WOULD BE SCALABLE AND PRODUCE MEANINGFUL REPORTS. WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU PREFER A .TXT FILE OVER A WELL DESIGNED DATABASE. WOULD YOU FUCKING OPEN THAT HAMSTER CAGE OF A BRAIN OF YOURS WITH A KNIFE OR A SCREWDRIVER?
IF ITS THAT EASY FOR YOU GO FUCKING DO IT YOURSELF AND STOP BOTHERING ME. I AM TAKING MY TIME OUT FROM FREELANCING TO HELP YOU OUT. I COULD BE SPENDING THIS TIME ON OTHER PROJECTS WHICH WOULD GET ME SOMEWHERE. THE ONLY FUCKING REASON IM DOING IT BECAUSE I MIGHT BE ABLE TO RESELL THE POS (PIECE OF SHIT) TO OTHER PEOPLE IN FUTURE AND MAKE MY SHARE OF UNJUSTIFIED SHIT TON OF MONEY.

Not really a fired moment because it was a university project.

A colleague of mine decided it'd be nice to set placeholder images to Hitler wearing a hello Kitty Nazi uniform. Oh without telling anyone, of course.

I go into the lab that a couple lecturers share, one of them was interested in the project we were working on and to our surprise the placeholder images pop up. I immediately say sorry, I didn't set that image and the guy looks at me with judging eyes.

Same guy has to take meds daily otherwise he acts up, not sure what it was he had, may have been ADHD, anyways we were staying late and he forgot his meds, and while our client is in the same room this guy starts doing the macarana behind the room separator, while we're supposed to give him a live preview of what we had accomplished in three months of work. Needless to say he didn't see him dancing like a moron but wow :/ learn to control yourself.

Same guy also never commented his code and used the two letter variable principal because it's such a great idea >.> Me and the other guy spent 6 hours rewriting his code, which should have been less time but he wasn't there to help nor was he available to yell.. I mean ask for help.

I hate University group projects....

Let's see the coder in you.
If I give input: 1 output: 2
If I give input: 2 output:1
Only these two test cases needed.
You should not use control structures such as if,else,for,while,switch etc. (The answer is simple) (Don't cheat)

int number;
cin>>number; //get number
cout<<??????; //Your code

So I just found out that my colleague who I often have to work with does not use a debugger to troubleshoot any bugs at all. Actually, he does not even run or test his code locally either with prints or something similar. He just commits java code directly on bitbucket, no source control, without making sure it compiles and then he runs a CI provided by devops that takes 4 freaking hours to run because he bloated that shit up somehow.

I suggested politely to help him find a more efficient approach and to use my hardware setups for speeding up his work because I assume it must be pretty painful to work with, but he just refused.

That and those "seniors" with 10 years Linux development XP in the embedded field who don't know basic commands like ls, cat and touch and code in notepad.

Fucking me, who the hell am I working with and can someone please end me?

Do NOT "compress" your code by leaving out braces in control structures and putting the 300 char statement on the same fucking line as the control structure!
Yes, your code file becomes vertically shorter than the usual 3000 lines, BUT my brain tumor proportionally grows larger.

At a certain client, was asked to help them with an "intermediary" solution to stopgap a license renewal on their HR recruiting system.

This is something I was very familiar with, so no big. Did some requirements gathering, told them we could knock it out in 6 weeks.

We start the project, no problems, everything is fine until about 2.5 weeks in. At this point, someone demands that we engage with the testing team early. It grates a little as this client had the typical Indian outsourcing mega-corp pointey-clickey shit show "testing" (automation? Did you mean '10 additional testers?') you get at companies who put business people in charge of technology, but I couldn't really argue with it.

So we're progressing along and the project manager decides now is a great time to bugger the fuck off to India for 3 months, so she's totally gone. This is the point it goes off the rails. Without a PM to control the scope, the "lead tester," we'll call her Shrilldesi, proceeds to sit in a room and start trying to control the design of the system. Rather than testing anything in the specification, she just looked at the existing full HRIS recruiting system they were using and starts submitting bugs for missing features. The fuckwit serfs they'd assigned from HR to oversee this process just allowed it to happen totally losing focus on the fact this was an interim solution to hold them over for 6 months and avoid a contract renewal.

I get real passive aggressive at this point and refuse to deliver anything outside the original scope. We negotiate and end up with about 150% scope bloat and a now untenable timeline that we delivered about 2 weeks late, but in the end that absolute whore made my life a living hell for the duration of the project. She then got the recognition at the project release for her "excellent work," no mention of the people who actually did the work.

Tl;Dr people suck and if you value your sanity, you'll avoid companies that say things like, "we're not in the technology business" as an excuse to have shitty, ignorant staff.

I am still at the office, doing a completely non-critical job for completely non-critical businesses while the streets look like something straight out of Fallout 4.

Friend: Why do you not work from home?

Me: Because people who care more about money then the wellbeing of the world control everything. Jobs are just slavery with extra steps and the exchange of one's health in exchange for tokens with which to purchase base necessities is just a way to hide that fact.

Friend: I fucking hate our species.

Me: Amen.

So far all designers I worked with do the following:
1. Use "creativity" to come up with stuff that the system does not allow implementing, for example: Changing clock color in mobile statusbar to Blue!
2. Use "creativity" to come up with a heavily customized calendar for a windows software which requires building the control from scratch, but they explain their creativity by saying: Can't you use CSS?
3. Provide iOS only design which follows android guidelines and refuse to provide android styles for at least pages that to be handled differently on each platform, for example, we had a checkout page in an app, and they wanted the same style for both WITHOUT building custom control for it, they said: Can't you use the android custom control inside iOS
4. They design for a website and send same mockups for me to implement on mobile apps, the problem is a web page runs on a big screen when the mobile app doesn't have room for half the stuff they designed but they must look exactly the same as website !!
5. They send entire PSD with no color codes and say: You can extract icons, and colors from psd ... When they should provide them as per our request which is: SVG for Android and PDF for iOS with the color codes, but no, they are lazy!
6. They ask the team to create a page in the app which is almost production ready just so that they test different font sizes and see how it will look on the phone
7. Same as #6 for images that contain text

The list goes on, but those are by the far the ones that made me one step away from resigning, some of them made me resign...

I think my biggest problem is not being able to let go.

I love this product and believe in it 100%, but I CANT FUCKING STAND ANOTHER MINUTE WORKING WITH THESE FUCKING CLUELESS CLOWNS WHO ARE GOING TO DRIVE IT TO THE FUCKING GROUND!!!!!

...you know what? fuck 'em, I meanwhile reap $400+ monthly checks from Udemy, while our "best startup / amazing startup / omg wow lol i'm a fucking idiot" has earned a TOTAL of $200 in the past FUCKING YEAR

YOU FUCKING CLOWNS GET YOUR HEAD ON STRAIGHT OR I WILL TAKE THIS COMPANY OVER AND CONTROL ALL DECISIONS, IGNORING ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING YOU THINK IS 'WISE' YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT 'WISE' IS YOU FUCKS!!!!!!!

WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO? YOU DON'T EVEN REMEMBER YOUR BITBUCKET CREDENTIALS!!!! YOU CAN'T EVEN REVOKE MY ACCESS

AAAAAAAGGGGGG YOU FUCKING CLOWNS GODDAMMIT THIS IS SO FUCKING FRUSTRATING I CANT EVEN I NEED TO SMASH SOMETHING TO GET THE RAGE OUTAASDASDJKLFJ;KLAFDSJKL;AFDSJKL;AFES L;KADFS AF LSAFS DHI;A EGWHIOAEGW IOAEGWHIO

Describe the most hellish development environment you can imagine for yourself:

Me:

Workstation OS: Windows Vista with network boot, no hard disk and can't save local files

Server OS: Closed physical appliance of Windows Server 2000 with no possibility of installing extra software

Languages: Visual Basic, Perl, Php, assembly, ABAP

IDE: None, just echoing code lines to files

Web technologies: IIS, Sharepoint, Java applets, asp

Network: No internet access, internal company network only

Web browser: IE 6

Graphical design software: msPaint

Version control: Emails

Team communication: Emails

Software distribution vector: Emails

Boss: some 40 year old guy who knows nothing about computers

Not kidding most of these stuff were actually real in my previous workplace.

I don't understand why so many devs complain about not having money or complain about the company that they work for. We literally have the skills to do whatever the fuck we want in today's world. Literally everything is structured around what we do. If you hate your life so much, do something about it. Granted, I understand if you live somewhere that doesn't allow you to control your own destiny but I'm pretty sure that the majority of the people on this app has the ability to do so. The rewards are endless if you decide to think outside the box just a little bit. Sorry, this has just been on my mind for a while and decided to rant about it here since that's what this app is for.

Saw this on Facebook and couldn't help but share here! 😂

A young woman submitted the tech support message below (about her relationship to her husband) presumably did it as a joke…
The query:

Dear Tech Support,

’Last year I upgraded from Boyfriend 5.0 to Husband 1.0 and noticed a distinct slowdown in overall system performance, particularly in the flower and jewelry applications, which operated flawlessly under Boyfriend 5.0.

In addition, Husband 1.0 uninstalled many other valuable programs, such as: Romance 9.5 and Personal Attention 6.5, and then installed undesirable programs such as: NBA 5.0, NFL 3.0 and Golf Clubs 4.1.

Conversation 8.0 no longer runs, and House cleaning 2.6 simply crashes the system. Please note that I have tried running Nagging 5.3 to fix these problems, but to no avail.
What can I do?

Signed,
Desperate

The response (that came weeks later out of the blue):

Dear Desperate,

“First keep in mind, Boyfriend 5.0 is an Entertainment Package, while Husband 1.0 is an operating system. Please enter command: I thought you loved me.html and try to download Tears 6.2 and do not forget to install the Guilt 3.0 update. If that application works as designed, Husband 1.0 should then automatically run the applications Jewelry 2.0 and Flowers 3.5.

However, remember, overuse of the above application can cause Husband 1.0 to default to Grumpy Silence 2.5, Happy Hour 7.0 or Beer 6.1. Please note that Beer 6.1 is a very bad program that will download the Farting and Snoring Loudly Beta.

Whatever you do, DO NOT, under any circumstances, install Mother-In-Law 1.0 (it runs a virus in the background that will eventually seize control of all your system resources.)
In addition, please, do not attempt to re-install the Boyfriend 5.0 program. These are unsupported applications and will crash Husband 1.0.

In summary, Husband 1.0 is a great program, but it does have limited memory and cannot learn new applications quickly. You might consider buying additional software to improve memory and performance. We recommend: Cooking 3.0.Good Luck!’

Good Luck!

My company is providing cloud infrastructure to our customers. For research purposes we are running a little openstack cloud in our laboratory datacenter were we can test stuff before implementing it in the productive environment.

Last week the manager asked me to shut down the cluster over night and only power on the servers when we need it. (about twice a week)

The reason: it produces too much heat.

My answer was: No.
First off thats not how cloud infrastructure works, and how about a proper climate control?

Sometimes i ask myself in which parallel universum our managers live 😑

!Rant

Designer decide to have a meeting with stakeholders about UX/UI workflow for control panel of our new embedded system (no framework, no library, gui is bit per bit rendered on frame buffer).
A week later, still nothing on my table, not a mail, not a call. Meanwhile I wrote a framework, the control system, renderer, and messaging queues between tasks.
Wrote some widgets, a layout system and a view swtching mechanism, and a separate stack control to use a "back" button.

Now I am stuck for I do not know what should happen when clicking on various (non obvious) items on the touchscreen.
Fine, I'll ask the designer.

"Oh, I will write the workflow next week" (ETA time, 2 weeks. Seriously? You take a week to draw on Adobe Illustrator 20 screenshot with text and I have another week to write it from scratch in C?)
Ok, while you write it, just tell me what should happen when I click an active item.
"Well, we didn't talk about that. We just decided the colour of the icons on the screen..."
For fuck sake...

Please allow me to share my thoughts since I can't totally outrage my frustration because we have this so-called fasting to control our anger towards a person we currently disagree with.

A letter from your loving, sincere, pretty and gorgeous working partner to my young, chubby, smart and clever colleague:

Please do cooperate in times of live editing from the FTP since CTO is not and will never be going to appreciate version control since CTO is too tired for giving a shit and just want deliverables be delivered as fuck perfectly regardless of the resources that we have.

As you know, I tolerated you for not getting the freedom of live editing as what you've experienced from your previous team lead. All I ask of you is to get fresh file from FTP whenever we touch the same file because firstly, God knows how frustrating it is how your hard work is going to be replaced and be gone as much as I do. Secondly, I don't want you to experience how pain in the ass could this be in the long run, and lastly, I don't want any hard feelings to be wasted just because of this.

P.S. I'm too shy to send this to you because I don't want to hurt your feelings and don't want to sound too seriouz and feel old. I also hope we share the same telepathic understanding so we can agree with each other.

Your loving, sincere, pretty and gorgeous working partner,
xoxo ❤️

(thinking of stating my first name) 😂

User where I work is convinced someone hacked her iPhone and is remotely changing settings all the time. And it’s not us (the company), the phone isn’t managed and there are no remote profiles installed.

User: I’m telling you. Things are always changing without me doing it!

Me: Alright. Do you have an exemple?

User: Yes. When I swipe here [control center] and tap the WiFi toggle, it always gets back on by itself later.

Me: Yep. That’s actually a “feature”. You don’t have to worry.

User: Alright then, this morning I couldn’t get Google Maps to work.

Me: Well. Since you turned off your cellular and WiFi, it’s normal you couldn’t look up an adress.

User: okay then what about that Bluetooth icon in the top that always appears? I know that means the hacker is on my phone through Bluetooth. See!?

Me: That’s actually just a status indicator. Don’t worry about it. It’ll always come back there it’s normal. You know, your phone can do a lot of stuff by itself.

User: Yeah right. It does it by itself. I’m not stupid you know!! *storms off*

What the hell?

One of our senior dev enjoys berating the other devs because they don't check-in code according to his schedule (once a day, once an hour..he flip-flops a lot), then when they do, he 'reviews' their code, beating them up because of incomplete features, commented out code..petty..petty nonsense.
Ex. (this occurred couple of weeks ago).

Ralph: "The button click code in this event isn't complete"
Dev: "No, its not, the code in my development branch. You said it was best practice to check in code daily whether the code worked or not. I didn't finish the event last night and ..."
Ralph: "Exactly. Before you check any code into source control, it has to work and be 100% complete. What if someone moved that code into production? What happens if that code got deployed? I'm not even going talk about the lack of unit tests."
Dev: "Uh..well..the code is on the development channel, and I branched the project in my folder ...I didn't think it mattered.."
Ralph: "Ha ha...you see what happens when you don't think...listen..."
- blah blah blah for 10 minutes of hyperbole nonsense of source control check-in 'best practice'

This morning Ralph's computer's hard-drive crashed.
Ralph: "F-k! ..F-k! ... my f-king computer hard drive crashed!"
Me: "Ouch...did you loose anything important?"
Ralph: "A f-king week of code changes."
Me: "You checked everything into source control on Friday ...didn't you?"
Ralph: "F-k no!...I got busy...and...f-k!"
Me: "Look at the bright side, you'll have a good story to tell about the importance of daily check-ins"

Oh...if looks could kill. Karma...you're the best.

We have a long time developer that was fired last week. The customer decided that they did not want to be part of the new Microsoft Azure pattern. They didn't like being tied to a vendor that they had little control over; they were stuck in Windows monoliths for the last 20 years. They requested that we switch over to some open source tech with scalable patterns.

He got on the phone and told them that they were wrong to do it. "You are buying into a more expensive maintenance pattern!" "Microsoft gives the best pattern for sustaining a product!" "You need to follow their roadmap for long term success!" What a fanboy.

Now all of his work including his legacy stuff is dumped on me. I get to furiously build a solution based on scalable node containers for Kubernetes and some parts live in AWS Lambda. The customer is super happy with it so far and it deepened their resolve to avoid anything in the "Microsoft shop" pattern. But wow I'm drowning in work.

personalproject C++ codebase:
- Clean code,
- 1 class per file,
- naming conventions
- comments .
- No more than 10 files per folder

Work C++ codebase:
- 22 classes per file.
- Classname not the same as file name
- weird variable names CmdStng
- All files in one source folder.
- Source control from 20 years ago

Me every time I cannot find anything I wondering why it is in a different file on line 3574 inside another class with an unrelated filename

Gaming community of mine launched their slick new website with their new "ticket system" where people could put in tickets to get help by volunteers.

2 hours and an approval by one of the admins later I managed to inject forge http request into literally every form on that side. Modify permissions, delete users, edit tickets, put invalid values into every attribute of them... In other words break everything.
Turns out the whole thing was coded as a first time project by a person who has no clue about web development and noone is in charge of anything really. There are no requirements, no beta testing, no version control or backups, but at least they had a hard deadline. 🤣

Still not sure if I wanna fix their shit and do it properly or just enjoy seeing it crash and burn.

Casually debugging some cuda code today. Something's not working so I add a breakpoint in the suspicious kernel. For some reason I set the display GPU as the active device from my code *GENIUS* ( I have two GPUs installed, one for compute, one for the monitors).

Starts cuda debugging... Control flow reached the kernel and eventually the breakpoint. Suddenly the whole system freezes. Mouse doesn't move, keyboard seems dead. I realize I have unsaved code on the open text editor😲 *panic*. Keyboard shortcut to stop debugging doesn't work *panic^2*. My colleague says I have to hard reset the machine *panic^3*. I don't remember the last time I saved *panic^4*.

I take a deep breath. I reset. *sidenote: WINDOWS DECIDED TO FUCKING UPDATE ON REBOOT* Once I login, 50% of my code was lost. I didn't save 😢

Fuck you Nvidia 😢

Alright, I'm grown up enough to admit it publicly: I DON'T LIKE GOING OUT TO PUBS OR OTHER DRINKING PLACES. Even if it's to take a company guest out for the night. Or a teambuilding. I don't care. If you're gonna meet up just to sip booze and talk about stuff, I won't be there.

It's boring
it's pointless
it means a shitty next day
it means a shitty rest of the evening [booze messing up sharpness of mind, no driving, etc]
it doesn't bring any value
it's not fun and it sure is not my cup of tea

taking the guest to play golf - sure. Take him to a range - blasts of fun! Horse riding - absolutely. Go-carts - hell yeah! Basicaly doing ANYTHING but sitting, getting dizzy, slowly losing control of my body and thoughts and sharing that experience with someone is a better way to take a guest/client out or have a teambuilding.

DO something. Not just sit and drink and slowly get stupider in front of someone.

So yeah, we released our app for 26k people to use two days ago. Due to circumstances not under our control, that was developed way faster than it should've. Today we're two days in and everything is going horrible. 26 thousand people are having trouble using it (not every problem is our fault, but ofc they don't give a shit) and our support team is not big enough to handle every request. We're not able to find any more people to help us handle it, so some developers are being used for support. But that slows the bugfixes a lot. We're at risk of losing our jobs because we will not be able to make it work in due time.

In Italy, at the beginning of the year a particular type of invoice became necessary and to handle that everyone needs a particular kind of email called "certified", you know, because Italy, and today our certified email server went offline for the whole fucking day because the provider was an overload of feces. We were overwhelmed by the amount of people that needed help.

I don't even know what to say, if we don't fix it we're fucking fucked, like literally.

I really hope everyone is having a nice new year. For us, this is going terrible.

Hey! You there!
Are you sick of windows 10 sending you intrusive reminders about updates? Are you tired of random unscheduled restarts? Tired of feeling like you have no control over your own computer?

Take back control!
DO THE FUCKING UPDATE, YOU FUCKING INCOMPETENT, USELESS, LAZY, PIECE OF DRY WANK!

Seriously guys: pick a time convenient to you, and take 5 or 10 minutes (when you're likely spending hours at your computer), and do them. Not only will you get rid of the annoying notifications, but you'll also keep your pc safe and secure by keeping up with security patches. C'mon people, it's really not that difficult.

And can we please, for the love of all things holy, stop the circlejerking? You're developers, you are the computer proficient. The only things a PC will do are the things you tell it to do. Dig deep, dig into the registry, dig into the services manager, dig into the fucking settings cos a good number of the most common complaints can be fixed in the basic options menu. Tell your computer to stop doing the things you don't like and it will stop.

It's really not hard!

After 3 years of being the first in and last to leave, of getting other people's work reassigned to me - P can't complete it on time, G doesn't like the user, A refuses to work on that module, etc... I finally blew last Sept.
In the span of 2 days, my boss brought me into a project 1.5 years in (she doesn't trust P to do the coding) and expected me to be up to speed and coding in a couple of days, told the functional dept that I would cover for one of their guys on vaca for three weeks and assigned me to take over a HUGE project from one of the other functional guys who wasn't getting it done. So basically I'm now doing Ps job AND supporting another department AND taking control of a large project from another department. I'm the idiot working 14 hour days while they're all leaving on time or enjoying their 3 week vaca to India.
I lost it. It's bad enough filling in the gaps in my own department but when I'm now taking on work for other departments, that's where I draw the line. I sent my boss my resignation - just could not take the inequity in the work load.
I'm still working here - my boss ended up hiring a consultant to handle the functional project and told the functional group to find their own vacation coverage. She's also monitoring workloads much closer now. I still habe an ongoing issue with having to complete other peoples work for them but I'm not working OT to do it. So speaking up helps. So does quitting.

I need bleach...

Lot of bleach.

When you think that not using a JS framework is bad...

Ever saw a Frankenstein of a HTML, PHP and JQuery? Full rewrite of an old project with more than enough time allowed....

Just... That was not awful enough.

*sobs* so the dev added bootstrap onto this pile of garbage... Instead of rewrite....

Think I missed CSS or included it in HTML? Lol. No.

No CSS. Inline. HTML 4 Tags.

?>
<table width=40 class="table table-striped">
<?php
foreach( $table as $row ) {
....
<input onkeyup="..." onkeydown="..." class="form-control"
...

To give you a basic example of how worse it is...

But the best. The lead developer does not understand why I was speechless.

i need more beer. And bleach. Filth and disgust must get out of my system

(Joke || Rant)

This guy came with this joke.
Ok, funny.
Then months later you realise he pushed this tweaked prototype to master, and now this code is shipped in production and it actually prints some idiotic sentence about flat earth on console output.
Ok, idiot.

It's not my project, but sometimes I'm wondering what people have in their minds when using version control and ship crap...

A free, open source, modular (plugin based) home automation control center.
Ultimate goal is to support the core / apis and other devs code the drivers for the 'IoT' devices.
Also integratable with all the speech assistants like Amazon Echo, Google Assistant, Cortana etc.
Not that money dependent but very time consuming project.

Im starting in a week tho!

My ex-boss who had 35 years of experience in IT Industry, didn't know one single fucking coding language, obviously had no clue about source control or anything even remotely related to computers, and had been project manager of a project having over 1 million lines of totally undocumented code split into 389 files with no apparent structuring. All variables were either alphabets or names of programmers who developed them.
Code was in Python 2 and had bugs/line ratio ~= 5.
He asked to write a 'wrapper' class and somehow run it in Java and fix all bugs automatically. (insert Shia LaBeouf's magic GIF here)

When I said it doesn't make sense, he said you should put in hard work and do it, and not give excuses.
Time given to do this - 1 hour :-P

Good thing I quit that shit place and that pathetic moron. Love my new job and life! :D

Seriously managers should trust their developers and allow some degree of freedom. It helps a lot.

Internships are fucking bullshit and if more senior developers were to take the role of an actual mentor to coach juniors properly then the state of software engineering would be better.

Some people can be let down easy in terms of "this is not for you bruh", others can be built. I know that social interactions are not common for a lot of the morons in here, but being polite and kind is relatively simple if you know what you are doing. Being a dickhead != "royal levels of expertise" and if we were to coach more people into proper development practices then software would not be in such a shitty state.

For an environment that thrives in cooperation I find it hard to believe that we are still subjecting new people to the field to what can be considered slavery with little to actual no monetary compensation.

I removed many of the requirements for the application to a software developer job where I am at (I am the boss, I get to do shit like that) and my fight with HR was "I would rather someone fresh from college that I can coach properly than some dickhead with years on the field that won't listen to anything else than their own words"

Sure it would be slow, sure it would be hard, nothing ever is that simple, but my idea is "train this mkfer, level the fuck out of him, let him be off to great shit rather than giving him to some dickhead that will treat him like shit on account of being a newbie"

And yes, I do know how and what can go bad, I am going to have someone desinging shit in basic html/js/css with some php here and there not giving them the keys to every server I control. Thank you for your fucking concerns, I know what I am doing.

the experiment fails? GOOD more data for me.

Plus, you learn more when you teach others.

I'm so fucking done with net neutrality. the only ones who want it are verion, comcast, and other big isps.

fuck them.

this is fucking merica. nobody wants it, and this is a government designed for the people. I guess it only works in theory.

the talk about this has been fucking exhausting. how much clearer could it be?

how does it keep coming up? so much of the economy is online. why would congress want this? this should be a fucking fundamental right. no bs, just fast speeds everywhere. i hate all the isps thinking that because the world is so reliant on the internet, they control everything.

isps are a service. that's it.

they're not a profiler or advertiser, just a service.

and if that changes, I'll buy a bunch of flash drives and go offline.

bottom line, we should have privacy, neutrality, and a safe web. fuck those greedy bastards.

A dollar or a peso is a certain amount of work stored in a piece of paper. You need to work to get them or have other people work for you. When governments print new money and push it into circulation they reduce what you were compensated with for the work you did. Essentially they are taking your wealth (spending power) away without you even realizing. It is a modestly sophisticated form of theft. When public companies issue new shares onto the market they are doing same thing by reducing the percentage of the company you own. This is why you will see non-inflationary assets such as Bitcoin, land, gold bars and gold ETFs, etc. continue to rise in value and certainly outpace inflation. It’s because people who are smart with money are fearful of holding cash and they are looking for a safe place to store it. If you are not afraid of holding substantial amounts of cash, then I suppose you don’t really understand what it is. There is a reason why they don’t teach teenagers about inflation in any country of the world. As long as the masses are focused on earning and saving fiat, governments have so much more power and control. If you remove all of the fiat from circulation, then we will revert to a barter/trading system which would substantially reduce government power, at that point they would only maintain control using physical force, which is a lot more challenging to carry out. #btc #gold #rant #av

We've all had shitty jobs at one point or another, maybe some of us already had software engineering experience while having to work in a different field for a variety of reasons.

Well check this shit.

At one point(during my second year of school) for various reasons I had to work in retail. For those that know, retail can be a soul crushing experience...the trick is not letting management to convince you that it is an actual good job, it is not, and I have respect and sympathy for everyone currently working in it. The mind numbing retarded customers that we get are absolutely fantastic in every sense of the word.

My position in retail was as a phone salesman, for MetroPCS (which for all of y'all european ninjas is one of the low end phone carriers here in the U.S) and the people that we get as customers where I live are normally very poor which apparently in Mexican culture stands for annoyingly ignorant (I am Mexican myself, so I can really vouch for this shit)

One day a customer came in telling me that there was an app that he was using that kept giving him troubles, it was a map application for truck drivers. Now, obviously, this had nothing to do with my line of work(phone salesman) and as such I normally tried to explain that and let them be, but I imagined that it was a settings issue so I reluctantly agreed to help him. I explained to him that the app was no longer maintained and that the reason for it was probably that the developer abandoned it and that he would just have to look into the app, upon closer inspection the app itself was nothing more than a wrapper over google maps with trucker icons and a "trucker" interface, he was using the app as a GPS navigator and he could as well just have been using google maps.

The conversation was like this:

Me: Well this app is no longer supported, it will probably be taken off the google store soon, you can look for something similar or just change to Google maps

Retard: What? no! I came here in order for you to fix it, Metro needs to fix their own apps!

Me (in complete disbelief): We have no control over third party apps, and even for the ones that we provide the store has no control over them. But this app is not ours and so we can't really do anything about it.

Retard: Well WTF should I do? I have been having many issues with youtube and spotify, shouldn't Metro fix their Google store?

Me: Those apps are not ours.....wait, you seem to believe that we own youtube and spotify, those are not ours

Retard: How the fuck they are not yours! its your phone isn't it?

Me: Eh no.....Metro does not(at this point I was sort of smiling because I wanted to laugh) own youtube or spotify or the play store or even this phone, metro does not own Android or Samsung(his phone was a samsung core prime)

Retard: Well You need to fix this

Me: No I do not and I can not, the developer for this app abandoned it and has nothing to do with us

Retard: Well call the developer and tell him to fix it

At this point I was on a very bad mode since this dude was being obnoxiously rude from the beginning and it annoyed me how he was asking for dumb shit.

Me: Did you pay for this app?

Retard: No

Me: So you expect that some developer out there will just go about and get working for something that you did not pay for?
Why don't you just use Google maps as your GPS?

Retard: Don't be stupid, Google has no maps

At this point I show him the screen where there is a lil app that said maps, pressed it and voila! map comes to life

Retard: Well....I did not know

Me: Yeah....but I am the stupid one right?

** throws phone for him to catch

Me: Have a good one bud.

And my manager was right next to me, he was just trying to control his laughter the whole time. I really despised working in there and was glad when I left. Retail man.......such a horrible fucking world.

First year: intro to programming, basic data structures and algos, parallel programming, databases and a project to finish it. Homework should be kept track of via some version control. Should also be some calculus and linear algebra.

Second year:
Introduce more complex subjects such as programming paradigms, compilers and language theory, low level programming + logic design + basic processor design, logic for system verification, statistics and graph theory. Should also be a project with a company.

Year three:
Advanced algos, datastructures and algorithm analysis. Intro to Computer and data security. Optional courses in graphics programming, machine learning, compilers and automata, embedded systems etc. ends with a big project that goes in depth into a CS subject, not a regular software project in java basically.

People talk about how they would love to switch to Linux, but cannot, as they claim that gaming lives on Windows. This may have been the case ten years ago but it isn't now.

And further, Microsoft is working hard to break steam, humble, gog, and any other delivery systems they do not control. Such anti-consumer behavior should not be tolerated, let alone rewarded. One result of this is that almost every indie game that comes out now has native Linux support within months, if not on day 1.

The only weak spot is AAA games. But as AAA games and mobile games begin to converge, in terms of the subscription/microtransaction models they're both moving toward, with very few exceptions, I personally don't think I'm really missing anything when I see a Windows-only game for $60 with no Linux support.

And if I really want, I can play un-wine-able Windows games through parsec, though that's getting rarer and rarer all the time.

Finally got my Bluetooth earphones!
It's called Pamu Scroll, funded in Indiegogo.
I bought it for $49 without shipping fee.
Now let me write a review about it here after using for about an hour or so.

1. Shipment
Shipment from China is slow and hard to track unless it is classified as EMS, which mine wasn't, obviously.

2. Packaging
It has some shock protection layer, but without that, nope! It was staying still inside the packaging though.

3. Design
Beautiful. Just beautiful. Period. Just see the picture below.
It opens as a papyrus, maybe that's why it is called Pamu Scroll. Both the case's end, and earphones itself has magnets to hold each other.
It has a leather feeling to both the inside and outside of the case, and the touch control area of the earphones is also leather feeling, adding a nice touch that differs with other earphonnes.
The diamond feeling finish in the end of the case makes the case itself isn't earphones, more like some expensive jewelry case.

4. Fit
My ears are smaller than most people, for I am young, so it sometimes fall off when I jump, but when I put it the correct way, never falls out.

5. Audio
I am not an audiophile. I don't really care about the audio quality and how it sounds like unless the sound is too cringy and has so many white noise.
This earphones has white noise, but just a little bit, you won't notice except when you are in a quiet room.
The bass is boosted, but low sounds, and vocals can be cringy sometimes, so I should manually tune them with my phone's equalizer.

6. IPX6
Not tested yet, but they advertise as using it in the shower.

7. Stereo call
Yup. Stereo call. Call in both ears. But only right microphone seems to get the voice.

8. Pairing
Using BT 5, it is a breeze to connect.
Take both of them out, put to your ear, then ding! "Connected"
Done.

9. Charging
with micro-usb
wireless charging for optional purchase - 10 bucks

10. battery
Reasonable amount
You have 3.5 hrs of listening time in both ears, and you can charge 2 times more each by putting in the case.

===============

Overall, it is awesome and let's just pray it doesn't break for at least for an year.

One side note, I can activate assistant by double tapping in the left ear (yes it is touch control), but my S8 asks me if I want to customize with Automate/Tasker. Yup!
Will share that later as well.

If you have any questions, ask me! Thanks for reading my first ever product review in devRant! <3

I'm the git expert at my work. This means every time someone has the slightest issue with git (or the git features in their ide), I get interrupted.

😡😡😡

Also I will say it is fascinating watching people who've used centralised version control all their lives struggle with distributed.

"Do you have my changes? I merged them into your branch..."

"You can commit and not push?!"

Just finished a technical interview for a company that asked me to submit a small app.

I guess when they had written the requirements they had anticipated it to be written as a Webform not as a full MVC application 😂. They had expected me to complete and build this single page app in 2-3 hours not in 14... 🫥 Oops

So here we are reviewing it and asking questions about my setup and what I was trying to do. They were impressed enough with it that one guy even admitted that I might be a better programmer than him. 😳 A very kind compliment, but concerning because he's supposed to be my manager...

All in all got through everything and they want me over to meet the team and see what this shop is all about.
I'm excited, they company is seeing immense growth and I might be able to bring in my expertise to expedite some of it.

Did I mention they use SVN for version control? 😳
They want to get into Git soon but they don't know how to. I guess I'll be leading that cause.

I got cut from a contracting job yesterday I have 3 weeks left in the contract. They said I worked well with the team, had a great work ethic but didn't think I had strong enough tech skills. In the past this would have hurt my feelings and it does a little but I think my tech skills are fairly high. There were three devs working on 66 apps with no tests, some source control but most of the code in source control was older than code deployed in prod, no automatic builds, people would wait a week before checking in code, others would check in code that would not build. Today the boss asked if I had messed with app pools on the prod iIs server because something was wrong. I said no because never remote into the server. Anyway it is the end of the world and I feel fine.

Coding seems to help me overcome tragedy and depression.

There are various times when things seem helpless to me, and many times when I feel I'm not in control of anything in life, but coding I know where I am, and challenges are overcomeable.

Thanks coding.

I'm convinced this is going to be wildly unpopular, but hey...

Please stop writing stuff in C! Aside from a few niche areas (performance-critical, embedded, legacy etc. workloads) there's really no reason to other than some fumbled reason about "having full control over the hardware" and "not trusting these modern frameworks." I get it, it's what we all grew up with being the de-facto standard, but times have moved on, and the number of massive memory leaks & security holes that keep coming to light in *popular*, well-tested software is a great reason why you shouldn't think you're smart enough to avoid all those issues by taking full control yourself.

Especially, if like most C developers I've come across, you also shun things like unit tests as "something the QA department should worry about" 😬

New office saga continues

We had 2 days on induction and these guys hired a 19 year old intern for the HR department.

Yes, the worst possible combination.

In last two days she made our life hell. Insufferable human being.

How can a person be so annoying?!

It was so tempting to roast her, but then I had to control my instincts so as to not get a warning during my first two days.

Not saying that everyone is bad and there surely exist great people, but wide majority of Gen Z makes me go nuts and that is all what is wrong with corporate world, old wine and fresh blood overlapping.

We are headed towards self destruction, buckle up your seat belts.

I was checking out this wk139 rants & thinking to myself how does one have a dev enemy.. o.O Well TIL that maaaaybe I have one too..

Not sure if ex coworker was a bit 'weird & unskillful' or wanted to intentionally harm us and thank god failed miserably..

I decided to finally cleanup his workspace today: he had a bad habit of having almost all files in solution checked out to himself, most of them containing no changes whatsoever... I reminded him on many occasions that this is bad practice & to only have checked out files he was currently working on. And never checkin files without changes.. Ofc didn't listen.. managed to checkin over 100 files one time, most of which had no changes & some even had alerts for debugging in them.. which ofc made it to the client server.. :/

On one or two occasions I already logged in and wanted to check if files have any real changes that I'd actually want to keep, but gave up after 40 or so files in a batch that were either same or full of sh..

Anyhow today I decided I will discard everything, as the codebase changed a lot since he left an I know I already fixed a lot of his tasks.. I logged in, did the undo pending changes and then proceed to open source control explorer.

While I was cleaning up his workspace, I figured I could test what will happen if I request changeset xy and shelveset yy, will it be ok, or do I have to modify something else & merge code.. Figured using his workspace that was already set up for testing would be easier, faster & less 'stressful' than creating another one on my computer, change IIS settings and all just, to test this merge..

Boy was I wrong.. upon opening source control explorer, I was greeted by a lot of little red Xes staring back at me... more than half the folders on TFS were marked for deletion.. o.O

Now I'm not sure if he wanted to fuck me up when he left or was just 'stupid' when it comes to TFS. O.O

So...maybe I do have a dev enemy after all.. or I don't.. Can't decide.. all I know for sure is tomorrow I'm creating another workspace to test this and I'm not touching his computer ever again.. O.O

When I told someone to read the docco+wiki and ask me if there were problems, for them to come back every five mins to tell me "so, how does this all work?"

I wrote the wiki and it was A-Z. There's nothing I knew about the product that wasn't in the wiki.

It took me so much self-control to not bash his head into my monitor.

I fucking got scammed.

Scenario 1: Had literally no experience in B2C, no experience in experimentation, 0% fitment.

Verdict: got hired in just one round in a top domestic brand which is a profit making startup.

Scenario 2: A friend from ex-org got referred in a global brand for an international location. Hadn't interviewed for 4+ years. Created his resume in 15 minutes, got shortlisted, screened, interviewed, and hired in less than 2 weeks.
(This guy is a good friend I am incredibly happy for him and that he scored the gig and in now way I wish bad for his outcome).

Scenario 3: I also got a strong refferal for the same brand and location. I have been interviewing for past 6 months, resume is super polished where companies like FAANG spoke to me.
Got rejected in shortlisting. The referral guy got me in the pool because it was his team
In screening round, I was a good fit, answered everything well. Yes, I wasn't concise as much (and that's the feedback I kept getting and I was working on it).
Verdict: rejected. They didn't ask me relevant questions and rejected me on the basis of not having the required experience.

Seems like the hiring manager didn't want me to clear so came up with reasons.

And now it feels that, if the HM wants you, they'll hire you irrespective of anything and if they don't they'll kick you out for lamest of the reason.

My life is split in two part, the first three decades were surely shit and this was my last chance of making sure the next three are worth remembering on the death bed.

I failed. Miserably. For the factors outside of my control. Not that I haven't failed in past. Not that I didn't try again.

But man, I am doing persisting. The game is rigged. One cannot win without extreme luck.

Millions of dreams shattered. A shitty day, is now a shitty life.

Being born in third nation is a fucking curse.

Managed to land 2 interviews:

The first one was for a startup that was looking for a react programmer (I've never used react before).

The later was a php job at a big company. They told me they used cakephp which is a framework I had not used before either.

Still, I'm more familiar with php than react so I felt more confident with the second interview. However, I felt there was a lot of good chemistry going on in the first interview.

The interviewer was incredibly nice (he was the lead dev, not an HR person as opposed to the second interviewer)

He gave me a small react test to be completed within a week. I barely managed to do it in time but I felt good about the solution.

Just as I was sending it, I get a call from the second interviewer saying I landed the php job.

I wasn't sure if my novice react skills would be impressive enough to secure me the react job (and I really needed a job) so I accepted.

After explaining everything to the guy who was interviewing me for the react job, he understood and was kind enough to schedule a code review where he walked through my novice code explaining what could be improved, helping me learn more in the process.

I regret not accepting the react position. The PHP they got me working with is fucking PHP5 with Cake2 :/

Don't get me wrong, I like the salary and the people are nice but the tech stack they're using (lacking source control by the way!), as well as all the lengthy meetings are soul-draining.

my brain buzzes more than ever, i can't get my sleep schedule under control, i can't find the motivation to do literally anything unless someone pretty much forces me to do it, i can barely focus on anything, my hands constantly refuse to work properly...

why? why must i be like this? sure, i've gotta do this and that and the other, but none of it ends up getting done because i'm too busy staring at a fucking wall, lost in my own head, and everything gets fucked up.

i can't even be fucked to go for walks or anything because i don't know the neighborhood and there's such a high crime rate here, nothing i'm not used to but still...

rant & question

Last year I had to collaborate to a project written by an old man; let's call him Bob. Bob started working in the punch cards era, he worked as a sysadmin for ages and now he is being "recycled" as a web developer. He will retire in 2 years.

The boss (that is not a programmer) loves Bob and trusts him on everything he says.

Here my problems with Bob and his code:
- he refuses learning git (or any other kind of version control system);
- he knows only procedural PHP (not OO);
- he mixes the presentation layer with business logic;
- he writes layout using tables;
- he uses deprecated HTML tags;
- he uses a random indentation;
- most of the code is vulnerable to SQL injection;
- and, of course, there are no tests.
- Ah, yes, he develops directly on the server, through a SSH connection, using vi without syntax highlighting.

In the beginning I tried to be nice, pointing out just the vulnerabilities and insisting on using git, but he ignored all my suggestions.

So, since I would have managed the production server, I decided to cheat: I completely rewrote the whole application, keeping the same UI, and I said the boss that I created a little fork in order to adapt the code to our infrastructure. He doesn't imagine that the 95% of the code is completely different from the original.

Now it's time to do some changes and another colleague is helping. She noticed what I did and said that I've been disrespectful in throwing away the old man clusterfuck, because in any case the code was working. Moreover he will retire in 2 years and I shouldn't force him to learn new things [tbh, he missed at least last 15 years of web development].

What would you have done in my place?

So, yet another "senior" web developer employed by my contractor who utterly fails to understand CORS.

I mean, easy enough to config their servers to provide the headers. A good and quick buck.

But I swear the level of idiocy I find in so called "seniors" infuriates me. I swear, he didn't even figure out that

A) you can't make the browser omit the Origin header.
(But it works on curl 😭😭😭)

B) it's the *server* who must include access-control-allow-origin in the response, not you in the request. Like, what use would that be? I don't even...

😞

I guess if I ever need to hire web devs again my only question during the interview will be "explain CORS to me".

A fun fact about Yuri Gagarin's flight:
Before the flight, it was not yet known how the human psyche would behave in space, so a special protection was provided to prevent the first cosmonaut from trying to control the ship's flight or damage the equipment in a fit of madness. To enable manual control, he had to open a sealed envelope, inside which lay a sheet with a mathematical problem, the solution of which gave the code for unlocking the control panel.

So first of all I'm not a dev.

I'm a software tester and my test manager is a douche, but this is not it.

Today I went to the end user place along with him to teach them how to test properly and how to manage the software test cycle in JIRA.

I did a demo and showed the users the software the dev team developed and of course there were a lot of rants about it.
Users noted down a list of things to be changed and we kept going.

By the end of the demo, my test manager started discussing the fact that I told these guys to open Bugs without test objects on Jira.

I mean, we don't have a test cycle or test cased yet but these guys found issues already, what's the point?

So here's the funny part.

He then starts telling users (which ignore testing fundaments) to create a test cycle called 'meeting of today dd/mm/yyyy" and create tests below it which were named with the names of who created them.
All of that without a logic and ignoring the fact that these tests were not tests.

I was laughing my ass off while assisting this total mess and I almost lost control.

And this is my manager.

Luckily, tomorrow is Saturday.

Not a bug, but a government web system to have control over financial expenses from a region in my country has the login access admin:admin.
Somehow they manage to keep it like that for years with no problem.

Unless you're editing actual fucking JSON and not a JS object, do this:
{
name: 'John Doe',
phone_number: '12345',
}

Not this:
{
name: 'John Doe',
phone_number: '12345'
}

Note the presence or lack of a comma after the last field. In this way, when you add a new field, you only have one line change in version control, because otherwise you'd have to add that no-longer-last comma and thus make two line changes. Not to mention you can forget to add it and spend some time figuring out what is wrong.

Some people in the company (3000+ people) didn't know how to use static variables (c#) in a thread-safe manner which resulted in production problems.

Only possible way to solve this in management's mind?:

Disable the usage of not read-only static variables via quality control...

Between high school and college, working in a circuit board manufacturing storeroom.

Fun fact: when we are bagging small boards, we do not gently lay them in containers, they're usually thrown at least 6 feet into a bin of the same type of board after they're placed in the bag. We also don't remake a board when pins are bent, we just bend them back with tweezers. And you know that rule about not touching the gold connectors... Yeah... So much for that... Did I remember to mention that these boards are for medical equipment?

On the bright side, we at least have electrostatic discharge control going on all the time.

It's interesting to me... a lot of the rants I see here are all like "just started this new job and this place is SO fucked". Talking about how there's no process, no source control, terrible code, etc.

I say it's interesting because most of the time the thought that goes through my head is "that sounds fun as hell!"

Like, spend as many years at a place as I have, a place where there's SO much process and SO many controls and all of that... you know, the whole "big enterprise" mindset... and the idea of being able to come in to a place that's kind of wild west and actually work to FIX the place, to have freedom to change direction and innovate and not be locked in to all sorts of rules, is kind of exciting.

(you know, assuming it's a place and a position where that's possible at all... but at this point in my career, I'd only take a position where I had that kind of authority from the start, and as long as I have the authority then I'm happy to take on the responsibility and I'm up for the challenge)

Rant much...
I just started working on project after a group of students.
The project has various of bugs (ofcourse) and not catched exceptions.
I found variables like 'abcd' or shorts of classes like 'rrms'.
I would be fine with all of that but there is one thing is just making me crazy:
THERE IS NO SINGLE FUCKING COMMENT IN WHOLE SOLUTION (three projects and about few hundred files with javascript and cs).

Imagine freaking pure react (no jsx) full of null arguments and multiple custom control written like 'var gl= GreenLabelled(null,null,text,5)' (a button ) with again, NO FUNCKING SINGLE COMMENT.

I just cannot stand it. Just spent 3hrs to wrapp my head around events in this react classes...

Does anybody out there actually really love their job? Because I do. I'm not sure if it's just me or that my job is actually great, but my coworkers are respectful, my boss lets me have control over each project's pace, I get to write tests and invest in refactoring, and I make good money doing it.

Is this just me?

The interface for time input in outlook Web on mobile is driving me crazy!! It's not as if there was a built in control that is well supported in all modern browsers.... Right

1. You can't tap on an hour to select it
2. You can only select by scrolling
3. The scrolling is "smooth scrolling". So you have N O fucking chance to select the time slot you wanted. After too much time has passed you just give up and accept that your meeting will be at 09:57
4. In order to go up in time you constantly activate the"pull to refresh" feature of Chrome.

I'm definitely no mindless MS hater but this I cannot tolerate.

Writing a truly crossplatform terminal library is the biggest pain in the ass.

And you thought windows was bad. They have a proper API with droves of features, freely allocatable screenbuffers, scrolling on both axes, etc.
Fucking xterm vtxxx compatible piles of shit are the problem.
Controlling kinda works eventhough the feature set is pretty bad. The really fucked up thing is reading values back. They literally get put into the input buffer. So you have to read all the actual user input before that and then somehow parse out the returned control sequence. Of course the user input has to be consumed so I have to buffer it myself. Even better is when you get a response with non printable characters which the fucking terminal will interpret as another control sequence. So when you set a window title to a ansi control sequence it would get executed when queried. Fuck this shit but I'm not giving up. I will tame this ugly, bodged together dragon

I'd never do anything "risky" in a prod environment if I considered it so at the time, but in retrospect there's *lots* of things considered risky now (both from a security and good practice viewpoint) that were standard practice not long ago:

- Not using any form of version control
- No tests (including no unit tests)
- Not considering XSS vulnerabilities
- Completely ignoring CSRF vulnerabilities
- Storing passwords as unsalted MD5 hashes (heck that was considered very *secure* in the days of plaintext password storage.)

...etc. I'm guilty of all of those previously. I daresay in the future there will be yet more things that may be standard practice now, but become taboos we look back on with similar disdain.

rant-ish*

PHP + jQuery + Excel
I am facing the holy trinity or something.
Cool? eh? No no, not as cool as the holy trinit holding excalibur.

One of the info is Gender : Male, Female. And they state that we must export the excel with selected gender by drawing a circle over the choice.

Not Gender : Male
But Gender : (Male) , Female

Consider my bracket as circle.

They are not even in seperate cells. So now I am spending days to draw a fucking circle over a text in excel export using php. Still failing. FML.

* I control myself from asking for coding tips here but I will appreciate anyone who can help me out regarding the issue in this rant.

while reading rebecca & brain's book on object oriented software. I realised that the programmer is a special kind of person. the complexity he can handle, the struggle to implement a system, from input to output, satellite control, AI, robotics, heck, even the planning required for a simple android app, the complexity is overwhelming at first, then you get your jotter and break it down into parts, and you drive yourself to the edge of sanity figuring out an algorithm, then you go over that edge implementing it, but oh that great super hero feeling when you finally get something to work exactly as specified, I'm not sure people in other professions can understand the satisfaction. I'm very young in the whole programmer world, but I'm growing fast, I'm just really grateful programming found me, I mean, can you think of something else you'lld rather do? yeah, me neither.

IMHO technical dept is kind of like smoking cigarettes for some decades.

You were told that shit will hit the fan but you do not take proper action. And one day you'll realize that you fucked up (or not, also seen that).

Worked for a company in IT, where we maintained an ERP which was "in progress" for over a decade. The basic implementation was done by people with zero technical understanding. To clarify: not self coded. Software was bought. We are talking about integrating the system.

Therefore, the foundation was like a wet noodle. When I joined that company, I told them that they need to address that. I told them that things will get slower and slower and that shit will hit the fan if no proper actions taken.
Even made a list with flaws I found. With potential risk and actions to take, that could then be measured.

At that time, five people worked in said department (including me).

People did not want to listen. "Would be too expensive to rewrite stuff".

Nothing has changed about the wet noodle, but I tried to fix as many things in a working system as I could. Felt like heart surgery, because changes got implemented and "tested" in prod. No version control, no documentation, everyone implemented things like they felt (no guidelines for consistency).
A lot of small fuckups that summed up over the years.

I left the company after two years because I had the chance to land a job as a dev.

Been around two years now since I left. Now 9 people work in that department with around the same efficiency as us 5 people back then.

The new employees struggle to be productive, because things are just implemented poorly and not maintainable anymore.

Had some dialogs with them some time ago. Everything I told them would happen, actually happened. What a suprise :-|
I will not go into too much detail about all the shit that's going on there, as it would be just too much (and my morning coffe is almost finished).

I think that we all know the difference between "not beautiful, but does the job" and "oh, that will backfire - badly". And I wish that my communication skills increase so that people start listening in future.

I hate that they're rebranding the newest Windows update "Windows 11"... it's been 5-6 years since they said Windows 10 was the last version of their OS. Why not drop the numbering convention all together? Also, why is the latest update a pile of crap that changes nothing other than the UI? Oh right, because the perception of progress to investors is the sole goal... I swear there is so much broken in windows 10 right now that they haven't fixed and so much more to be added, including file explorer tabs which they've literally started implementing and stopped at some point. Don't even mention the numerous UI inconsistencies between right clicks, color inconsistencies, still using control panel for some options in windows 11? UWP apps crash constantly and are slower and laggier than traditional .exe's, the list goes on and on for why this is the dumbest decision microsoft has made yet. problem is, "yet" is the keyword.

There is something so comfy about Java that I never get from other languages.

I don't know why but I genuinely enjoy writing 200 lines of boilerplate code. Maybe it makes me feel I am in control and not some syntactic magic like in Python or Javascript.

People keep ranting on java, yet it lives on.

@dfox Would you make it possible to cluster push notifications that occur on the same post? When I receive a lot of notifs at once it clogs up my notification center.

Additionally would it be possible so that I can completely turn off seeing certain types of notifs even in the app not just for push notifications (from what I gather that is the only thing I have control over)

Why does email suck so much oh my god, I don't want a fucking lesson in the kinds of domain records, I can set a TXT to prove that I control the DNS record, I have a TLS certificate, what the fuck else would I possibly need to prove!? None of this is contributing anything to security! Just fucking figure it out, it's the internet, not an international border, jesus.

Keep this in mind: I don't like WordPress and PHP at all!!!
So a couple of days ago my boss asked me if I could extend a custom made WordPress plugin made by our intern. First thought: sure why not? Boss says: it has to be done in less than 100 hours of work (an estimate done by my boss and the intern). Me: I can't tell you that before I have seen the code and what functionality has to be in the extension. Boss: Cool, look it over this weekend and tell me if you want to do it or not.
I looked it through and my answer will probably be: NO WHERE IN HELL am I gonna are this in less that 100 hours! 1. no tests has been performed so I have absolutely no clue if his code works.
2. variable names are mostly: $string_query (whatever that means?), $result, $string_temp and so on.
3. Methods and functions are more than 250 lines long, with shitty formatting, and more comments than code. WTF?
4. The estimate has been made by an intern and my boss (doesn't know much about programming). I haven't been consulted about it....
5. No version control. No branches, no commits other than initial commit. Great.
6. Most comments in the code just tells me what I can read from the code. What it returns and what it takes as params. Can I please know wtf your method call named $booking->run () does? I still haven't found this method in the code after 1 hour of intensively looking for it...

FFS man... Not gonna do this, even though I thought it would have been an interesting project initially.

Sorry for the long rant... I just wish the intern would have consulted me about all this shit, since he obviously have bad practices. *sigh*

Sorry, need to vent.

In my current project I'm using two main libraries [slack client and k8s client], both official. And they both suck!

Okay, okay, their code doesn't really suck [apart from k8s severely violating Liskov's principle!]. The sucky part is not really their fault. It's the commonly used 3rd-party library that's fucked up.

Okhttp3

yeah yeah, here come all the booos. Let them all out.

1. In websockets it hard-caps frame size to 16mb w/o an ability to change it. So.. Forget about unchunked file transfers there... What's even worse - they close the websocket if the frame size exceeds that limit. Yep, instead of failing to send it kills the conn.

2. In websockets they are writing data completely async. Without any control handles.. No clue when the write starts, completes or fails. No callbacks, no promises, no nothing other feedback
3. In http requests they are splitting my request into multiple buffers. This fucks up the slack cluent, as I cannot post messages over 4050 chars in size . Thanks to the okhttp these long texts get split into multiple messages. Which effectively fucks up formatting [bold, italic, codeblocks, links,...], as the formatted blocks get torn apart. [didn't investigate this deeper: it's friday evening and it's kotlin, not java, so I saved myself from the trouble of parsing yet unknown syntax]

yes, okhttp is probably a good library for the most of it. Yes, people like it, but hell, these corner cases and weird design decisions drive me mad!

And it's not like I could swap it with anynother lib.. I don't depend on it -- other libs I need do!

The person who claims we should be "in control" of our stack and not use any of this pre-made, one size fits all, BaaS bullshit.

Even though none of our projects are even remotely close to needing scaling and whatnot.

Then proceeds to argue all we need is a step by step guide on how to deploy things very easily using Cloud Formation.

Spends the next two weeks trying to figure out why config files and scripts don't work.

And now that we have that "recipe", we're fully capable of deploying our own pre-made, one size fits all backend.

So I'm a freelancer celebrating my second year at this one client (yes, times are good). When I first got to my current (not customer-facing) project, lots of "externals" (other freelancers) had come and gone, "internals" had been assigned and reassigned to and from this project and nobody knew exactly what was in the (angularjs) codebase.

One of my first
"quick win" assignments was to see if load times could be reduced. After some looking around it turned out someone had used moment.js (with locales, 67k gzipped) for some feature that had since been abandoned... and then accidentally dropped it into the source folder, checked it into source control (svn!), from whence it was happily packaged by the CI job and released every month.

Removing it reduced the pre-render javascript by about 40%. (also yes, that said "nobody knew exactly what was in the client-side codebase")

>uni project
>6 people in group
>3 devs (including me)
I am in charge of electronics and software to control it as well as the application that will use them.

2 other "devs" in charge of a simple website.
Literally, static pages, a login/registration, and a dump of data when users are logged in.

Took on writing the api for the data as well, since I didn't fully trust the other 2.

Finished api, soldered all electronics, 3d printed models.

Check on the website.

Ugly af, badly written html and css.
No function working yet.

Project is due next week Thursday.

Guess who's not having a weekend and gonna be pulling 2 all nighters

Not sure if I'm disappointed or relieved.

Just spent 5 years trying the get into this class. Studying and asking and getting recommendations. I knew it had less than a 5% pass rate but it's all that I've been aiming for for years.

Finally got into it, and spent 4 months working my ass off. Today I got told that I'm maybe being dropped. And honestly, as disappointed as I am, and I might need a new dream to aim for, I'm actually pretty okay with it.

I've been so stressed and annoyed and unhappy lately. I was starting to debate if this is even what I want. And for the first night in a while I can just drink whisky and not worry about the next test or doing classwork at midnight instead of sleeping.... I can just relax and whatever happens happens. I can't control how tomorrow goes.

Not sure if "oof. I need a drink" or "thank god, lets celebrate with a drink!"

Legit have to control myself not responding to subtle sarcasm or passive aggressiveness in people's rant or comments with utter salt and shade. 😒😒😒

Note to self: Live and let die.

There's little irritations that happen when working with clients over time that let you know that they're stuck in the past and definitely not the kind of client you want to have long term.

My personal favorite example:

"Can we put an icon that shows the weather on the banner of the website?"

Note: I don't make "websites," information portals, content pieces, etc.

It doesn't to matter what type of application it is; time tracking, HR, mortgage application, industrial control system, etc. I don't know why, but every single client I've ever had where I've been saddled with one or more people who have no business being anywhere near the term "stakeholder" asked for this stupid, banal, 1995 web portal fuckery. Their shitty little mushroom stamp contribution wasting everyone's time.

What's worse, they want it be prominent in the screen real estate. It can't just be a responsibly sized waste of space like the screenshot's top example (from a company whose entire business is weather, nonetheless). No, it has to be the busiest fucking thing in the control space, as in the example inferior.

Or maybe I'm just wrong and people desperately want to know if the sky is going to piss on them if they leave the cave.

Anyone else have a pet peeve in regards to recurrent, pointless functionality?

It was more of "Hate story" with a guy whose mere presence would irritate me very much. He was also close to the girl I liked a bit (not very huge crush or something).

So he was very active on two of his social networks one being fb and second directly connected to fb so basically getting hold of fb would mean that I could control his other one too.

It was Oct 2016 and that time you could easily hack an account using social hacking (not asking OTP out something mere details did it for few accounts).

I hacked his account and wrote curse words and all. As I had already changed the email and password, he couldn't till date retrieve it.
However as he reported to fb, his account was held and I could no longer access it but till then everything was over.
I couldn't still spot him on FB or the other social network.
And this was one of the most evil act I have performed in my life.

Intend to help a friend to find out what's wrong with a software installation in his laptop today...
But forgot that his Windows installed in Chinese version... how am I supposed to help.... (; _ ;)
I can't read Chinese... can't even find how to open Control Panel...
_________________________________
My native language is not English, but I always have all my techies set up in English.

Not really Dev advice, but I appreciated it.
"Do your best to take responsibility for everything that happens to you. Even if it's not your fault."
"On the flip side, never apologize for something that isn't your fault. That includes other people's feelings. You're not in control of their emotions."

In highschool, I was looking around for schools and universities at which I would start my student career. I went to a grad school one day, to see what it was like to be a student there. The first class I visited was programming for embedded systems. We got the assignment to write Java code to control a boom barrier. The teacher had written the template. And I kid you not, the template had a method of around 20 lines of code - without comments - with the purpose of carrying out a logical OR operation. An operation that literally can be done using an operator in Java: |

Why oh why do they let these people teach, with the result that the students will get used to these bad practises...

Today I solved the problem assigned to me by changing one character. Simplest fix ever. Except that this problem is not on my project, and I don't have control over this project, so I can't merge my pull request or deploy the code, and the dev that does hasn't answered email today, and he's not scheduled out, and he's not in his office. Whatever, I'm just gonna say it's fuck it Friday and call it a week.

Boss: Let's hire a new person to help us recreate our website
Us: sounds good!
Boss doesn't hire anyone and starts the website on his own
Boss: I started the new website. It's in server X and the address is test.y.com. I also want all of us to work on it
Me thinking: great he just wants us to modify the hosted files like he does 🙄
Me: I'll move a copy to GitHub for version control.
Boss: Great!
Boss creates a backup folder on the same computer and folder path that the hosted files are on.

Someone please nuke that server so my boss learns version control like I've asked before. I think I'll opt not to work on a website where he and my other co-workers will just overwrite each other's changes because he doesn't want to learn to git 😑

Embedded app design resources?

We have a device that is currently controlled through buttons and knobs. We are rethinking this design. We want to have a mix of buttons and knobs and in addition have a touchscreen. The controls must be redundant. So if we turn off the touch screen it must be able to control everything.

Does anyone know of any design resources for non-touchscreen embedded control?

I have been looking into how gaming console controls work. I like how they have the idea of controlling the game vs breaking the 4th wall. We have a similar constraint as we want the operator focused on what they are controlling and not the controls or even sometimes the screen. So immersion is definitely a concept for us. I have been toying with the idea of adding a d-pad for some controls. We have not solidified the hardware controls yet. That is still up to me to come up with some ideas to make it more intuitive.

There is an nerdy socially retarded IT head. He asked me to look into a project after the programmers left the company. Basically he gave me a list of modification with one particular screenshot of Calendar( seems like a JQuery plugin) and asked me to develop it.. I asked him to give me the link from where he got the Calendar... No fucking response in Skype.
So after a month he asked me to show the project, I showed him with the Calendar similar to picture and no functionality. He said it was CRAP. I asked him to give me proper documentation as what he expects and what he wants.
BUT FUCK NO. HE SAYS, "ARE YOU A JUNIOR CODER? DO IT WITHIN A WEEK OR WE ARE DONE. "
And I am here keeping myself in control not to punch him. he lives nearby my house wondering if he lives alone 😂

A couple of years ago I was working on a fairly large system with a complex (by necessity) access control architecture.

As is usually the case with those projects, it's awkward for developers to repro bugs that have to do with a user's accesses in production when we are not allowed to replicate production data in test, let alone locally.

We had a bug where I ended up making myself a new row in the production database for a thing I could have access to without affecting real data to repro it safely. I identified the bug so I could repro it in dev/test and removed the row and ensured everything worked normally, whew scary.

Have you ever walked into the office one day, and everyone is hunched over in a semicircle around one person's workstation, before one turns around to look at you and says - after a pause - "... ltlian?.."

Turns out I had basically "poisoned the well" with my dummy entity in a way where production now threw 500 for everyone BUT me who had transitive access to this post-non-entity. Due to the scope of the system, it had taken about a day for this to gradually propagate in terms of caching and eventual consistencies; new entities coming in was expected, but not that they disappear.

Luckily I had a decent track record for this to be a one-off. I sometimes think about how I would explain testing in prod and making it faceplant before going home for the day, other than "I assumed it would be fine". I would fire me.

Well, throughout my life I've never really thought about programming. Then one day during some downtime on a backpacking trip with a friend, while I had nothing to do my friend sat there with his computer with the screen all dark, filled with funny colourful text in lines of different length, with some lines even starting more towards the middle of the page than to the left, almost following a vertical wave pattern. He said he was writing a program to control his home remotly as well as working as a security feature that could unlock his home automatically when he got home. I was amazed by the colorful text as well as the fact that he could just create this crazy program out of nothing.
Half a year later I attended my first lecture at the computer science programme. My first program was a command line tool used for baking bread. It asked you how much flour you'd use and how many eggs, then it'd tell you wether or not you'd got the correct ratio. I was blown away by the intuitive nature of programming. I could imagine the control flow as a tree or flow chart in my head. I mean the whole program was only a couple of user inputs followed by an if-statement and a print-statement, but for me it was awe inspiring. I knew then that I'd probably chosen the right path in education.

Today a task was assigned to a coworker, he is a good guy, but one of those that never complain, never say anything, get there early, go to lunch at the exact same hour everyday, doesnt talk to anybody and gets off at exactly 6pm.

So, the task was submitted by QA, according to them, a disabled input could be enabled by going into the dev tools and enabling it...

So i went over the pm and told her (cos she is a cunt) that the ticket was just bullshit and that first of all, we had no control of it, but if that is the case, we can go over and add event listeners to all the inputs in the platform to avoid people changing them...like wtf?

Since she is a dumb cunt, she 'escalated' the task to the senior dev... he is also a total fucktard who doesnt know a shit. The dude said that the task was ok and we had to do it or not but it was better to do it, justifying the ticket in the most stupid and incoherent way... like wtf is to do with it? Tell the user to not go over the devtools and enable it? The fuckkkk

I felt like i was about to shit my kidney, seriously, but what can i do? It is not the first time things like that happen. The stupid fuck also let one of his friends add several migrations to change several tables columns just because of 'good practices' which in first place left the databas all fucked up and with fucked relations.

I'm just so tired of these fucks, incompetent motherfuckers... I told a friend about it and he said that that was nothing, it is worse when you have to work for banks and that the only thing i could do was to let it go and learn from it, to not do the same mistakes. Im thinking in quitting... what should i do?

Me: "there's a fatal crash in the build that has gone to testing, this is how we fix it"
Project lead: "they haven't noticed yet, add the feature the boss wants"
Next day, boss:"testing found a fatal crash this morning and couldn't do any testing because of it, how'd it get past you?!"

I need to encrypt some large files at rest and then decrypt them immediately prior to processing.

App and files are on a Linux system (CentOS). App is in C. Machine is controlled by a third party.

What encryption libraries would you recommend? And, is there any clever way of managing the decryption key beyond compiling it in the code and doing some basic obfuscation?

Are they fancy obfuscation libraries out there, for example?

And, the reason I'm not going to SO (well, one reason) is that I don't want to have 50 answers that tell me that's it's impossible to 100% protect data on a machine you don't control. This I understand---just looking for "best effort" solution.

devRant.. I need your help.

So for the last year I've been self teaching myself python, go, & haskell. I've really been enjoying myself, to the point we're I would like to make it my career. Insert problem, I stumbled upon ECU(engine control unit) reprogramming & flashing, and instantly fell in love with the idea. However I can not find any information it. Every college I've called talks to me like I just asked them to teach me witchcraft.

Does any dev have experience with ecu programming? How did you get into it?

Thanks!

Today I had sort of a meltdown when I found out that the small, 20-something company where I work and where we should all 'trust each other' is working to stealthily enable SSL Inspection.

I'm done with doing anything other than what is stipulated in my contract such as helping out in other areas out of my own volition.

Management got control hungry and mad once they got their hands on a Deep Inspection Firewall.

Well, I'm not feeling sorry for the uproar they'll have to endure once colleagues find out they are doing this stealthily.

Serves them right and after this and other similar experiences my trust in this company is right through the floor.

- my (non-dev) supervisor at my job
- no documentation
- no source control
- people working in the same team with completely different programming/domain knowledge levels, but also very different ways of being
- bad within-project communication

Luckily not all of them are about my job. We do use source control.

Am I the only one worried with the OS wars lately? Microsoft and Apple trying to gain even more control on everything and Linux remaining at less than 2% on the desktop. People are oblivious to the fact that their personal freedom is at risk, and don't you dare tell me otherwise. Companies knowing what we search or what files we have on our computer, having the ability to control us and force us to follow their rules. We have a choice, and I'm not talking about destroying the economical system a la Mr. Robot, but moving to the Open Source world, not because it's more secure, faster or some such shit, but because it's the only way to ensure freedom on one of the biggest part of our lifes, the digital part. My concerns may be exceeding the normal, and I'll hate it to be right, but I'm afraid that if this goes on, in a few years, we'll understand that we made a big mistake...

Not really a rant but more of a fact kinda thing. Noticed a post earlier about someone ranting about why they code figured I'd do the same...

I code not because I wanted to for say but because my after my uncle's death I needed something that I could feel in complete control of. Coding gave me that ability to control the computer however I want and tell it to do whatever however. At the same time it taught me so much more about myself and the people around me in the process. Today I don't code because I need to control something m today I do it because I can't live with out. It forces me to think critically of everything and everyone. It forces me to learn something new everyday and every night. It requires me to solve complex problems with limited solutions. It allows me to create solutions when everything else has failed and it gives me a drive to complete things. It's the reason I live technology and it's the reason I have the job I do. It's the reason my boss loves my work and it's the reason other people on my team envy me. Code transformed my life into what it is today. And it will forever be my greatest peice of education.

Inspiring moment: when the control system I wrote for a robot stopped the thing's EDF mere inches from my nose when the bot went out of control (for other reasons) during testing. Had it not stopped I would probably be without a nose, that EDF (Electric Ducted Fan) had fairly sharp blades. Very scary, but very thrilling too.

Each time my code affects something in the real world, it feels so damn awesome. Thankfully I've not come close to losing my nose (or other body parts) after that incident, but that incident inspired me to continue work on failure-proof control systems that enforce safety.

Hacking the parental control software parents which limited the access to 70 minutes a day.
The only thing I had to do was not clicking OK on the message box which was shown whenever I logged in. It was a model dialog which blocked everything else...

Okay so i graduated last year and got a job working for a place that sadly disappoints me in their web development practices. This place uses a dead technology(my opinion)called Cold Fusion by Adobe. They do not use any form of version control like Git and their sites are very shitty and the design and development is implemented very poorly honestly. It honestly makes me sad that i feel like im smarter than my department vp. That being said i do not feel challenged here and am looking to collaborate in some open source projects via Github preferably.I dont consider myself an expert in this field but i would say im about intermediate level in web development. Im pretty comfortable with HTML,CSS/SASS,PHP,JS/JQuery, and im pretty comfortable in the PHP framework Laravel. So if anyone is interested in collaborating or starting something up, id be so down for it. :)

Dear X. There's an obvious error with the way you're merging arrays; instead of conditionally adding items to the existing array, each condition overrides any items added by the previous conditions, which is clearly not the desired behaviour. I'd love to add a test to illustrate this behaviour, but you're not using them. I'd also love to create a simple pull request, but for some fucking reason you're using the worst possible version control system so I can't do that. I've submitted a support ticket along with all the code needed to fix this silly mistake, but apparently you either don't understand 2 lines of your own fucking code, or you didn't even bother looking at it before posting a shitty generic reply about "needing more information". There is no such thing as more information. There are two IFs, and they are supposed to add items to the array, not override any previous items. It's written in your own comments, and it's pretty obvious from the way the rest of the function merges those items.

Also, use a fucking linter, your code is a mess.

Problems. We get them frequently, to me it feels like life is not about being happy and all, it's about how you handle your problems. Any kind of problem, be it work related, you personal life anything.
Developing the skill to deal with different kinds of problem is what makes your life better and better.
What world taught me till now, to run away from the discomfort, a lot people talk about how environment is bad, and you should not take shit from anyone. But few things tell us what's actually lack inside us. Maybe, on social media we don't boast a self awareness based thinking because is makes people uncomfortable to think about their own behaviour. Self awareness is becoming more and more important for me now. I am trying to keep my self love intact, it's hard though. But knowing your own shortcomings and taking actions to understand and do something about them makes me feel in more control. Makes me happy. :)

I'm writing this, because I just got a work problem and I snapped and closed my laptop very impatiently. Then in few seconds I realised, it's a kind of a problem that I should try to 'deal' with and not go into a loop of self hatred. Even though my heart ja racing fast, and all the hormones which are making me wanna feel sad, I feel aware and more in control that hey, you are feeling this because this problem has these consequences but let's try to solve it. :)

(pseudorant)
Any ideas on how to end with computer scams (fake Microsoft support calls, money flips and the other gazillion)?
I'm really tired of this. A$$#les abusing unsuspecting people, abusing our elders, shielded behind a remote control session.
I know that this is very I.T. I'm just appealing to the extremely powerful distributed knowledge of all SUPERB people in devRant.
Thanks and hope that this was not tl;dr

I really really hope that no one post this,a friend texted it to me and I wanted to share it because made my day.

Idk where it comes, so feel free if know where this came from to post it:

//FUN PART HERE
# Do not refactor, it is a bad practice. YOLO

# Not understanding why or how something works is always good. YOLO

# Do not ever test your code yourself, just ask. YOLO

# No one is going to read your code, at any point don’t comment. YOLO

# Why do it the easy way when you can reinvent the wheel? Future-proofing is for pussies. YOLO

# Do not read the documentation. YOLO

# Do not waste time with gists. YOLO

# Do not write specs. YOLO also matches to YDD (YOLO DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT)

# Do not use naming conventions. YOLO

# Paying for online tutorials is always better than just searching and reading. YOLO

# You always use production as an environment. YOLO

# Don’t describe what you’re trying to do, just ask random questions on how to do it. YOLO

# Don’t indent. YOLO

# Version control systems are for wussies. YOLO

# Developing on a system similar to the deployment system is for wussies! YOLO

# I don’t always test my code, but when I do, I do it in production. YOLO

# Real men deploy with ftp. YOLO

So YOLO Driven Development isn’t your style? Okay, here are a few more hilarious IT methodologies to get on board with.

*The Pigeon Methodology*
Boss flies in, shits all over everything, then flies away.

*ADD (Asshole Driven Development)*
An old favourite, which outlines any team where the biggest jerk makes all the big decisions. Wisdom, process and logic are not the factory default.

*NDAD (No Developers Allowed in Decisions)*
Methodology Developers of all kinds are strictly forbidden when it comes to decisions regarding entire projects, from back end design to deadlines, because middle and top management know exactly what they want, how it should be done, and how long it will take.

*FDD (Fear Driven Development)*
The analysis paralysis that can slow an entire project down, with developments afraid to make mistakes, break the build, or cause bugs. The source of a developer’s anxiety could be attributed to a failure in sharing information, or by implicating that team members are replaceable.

*CYAE (Cover Your Ass Engineering)*
As Scott Berkun so eloquently put it, the driving force behind most individual efforts is making sure that when the shit hits the fan, you are not to blame.

I'm currently planning to set myselv up with some vps/dedicated server's for a project. What i plan to do to secure these servers is.
*Use centos 7
* Setup Wireguard and join all of the servers +1 client (my pc) to that network
*Disable SSH Access from outside that VPN
*Only allow RSA Key login to the Servers
*Install Cockpit for monitoring
*Intall docker/kubernetes for the applications i plan to run

What do you guys think of that as a baseline? Im not sure if my lower powered VPS (VPS M SSD from Contabo) will work as Kubernetes Nodes, does anyone have experience with that?

In general these Servers will be used for my projects and other fooling around.

If you guys have other suggestions for Securing/monitoring or other software i could put on to have more control without eating up to much of the Servers power, let me know :D

))| THE BEST AND WORST WAY|((
))| TO DELETE A LINE IN BASH |((

(Think you can do better? Vote
now on your phones!)

WORST: Hold backspace until satisfied
BEST: Using a pen or other pointing device capable of causing semi or permanent damage to your screen, count how many characters the line in question consists of. Write this down on a piece of paper (after all, your terminal is occupied) and using long division, or any other means, divide this number by two, rounding as you please. Press the "right arrow" key as many times as necessary to reach the end of the line. This might be 0 - if so, congratulations, you may skip this step! Once complete, refer to your piece of paper, and taking your newly calculated number, press the "left arrow" key exactly that many times. If you have a short attention span or are worried you will lose count, take a tally or use some other primitive count recording method. Once the key has been pressed the correct number of times, hold down either control key on your keyboard and take a deep breath - there's no going back now (!) - press the "k" key (you should still be holding a control key!) and take a sigh of relief. You're halfway there! If you need a break, take one. When you're ready to finish the task, hold a control key again and take another deep breath. When you are ready to complete the task (don't hold your breath too long!) press the "w" key. Congratulations!! Your line has been deleted!! Some may call you a fucking idiot for not just pressing ctrl-w at the start, but don't listen to those people! They probably delete stuff by accident all the time! Now, take a lie down, and give a moment's silence for the poor poor line you just brutally dissected and murdered.

Think you can do better? Vote now on your phones!

The ticket system blokes - episode 3

So we always had and have very awful performance with our ticket system. You can't get anything to load in under ~4s normally. Now since it has gotten worse over the last weeks i decided to set aside a few hours to closely watch our SQL server.
After i identified a culprit that was hogging the CPU almost every 2 minutes i looked at other long running queries in the server and found out where exactly the 4s come from.

6 tables from various DBs. Sure, no problem.

Left Outer Join. Sure, why not.

Querying every fucking column in every fucking table explicitly adding up to a whopping 160 columns which they need not even 10% of. We're talking about session IDs, passwords, stock count, IBANs and all that stuff to show the work done on a ticket. Absolutely not.

So i extracted the query and reduced it to the stuff we need and the execution time went from 4 seconds to almost instant.

The funny thing is that their idea of performance optimization is throwing LIMIT around everywhere to get these monstrous queries under control.

So in the next few days I'll have an appointment with their lead programmer. I'm looking forwards to it.

So out of curiosity: does anyone know an SQL builder or toolset that does shit like
SELECT X AS [t0_c0],
SELECT Y AS [t0_c1],
SELECT Z AS [t1_c0],
and so on? I'd like to know how they got to this point.

Tl;Dr Im the one of the few in my area that sees sftping as the prod service account shouldn't be a deployment process. And the ONLY ONE THAT CARES THAT THIS IS GONNA BREAK A BUNCH OF SHIT AT SOME POINT.

The non tl;dr:

For a whole year I've been trying to convince my area that sshing as the production service account is not the proper way to deploy and/or develop batch code. My area (my team and 3 sister teams) have no concept of using version control for our various Unix components (shell scripts and configuration files) that our CRITICAL for our teams ongoing success. Most develop in a "prodqa like" system and the remainder straight in production. Those that develop straight in prodqa have no "test" deployment so when they ssh files straight to actual production. Our area has no concept of continuous integration and automated build checking. There is no "test cases", no "systems testing" or "regression testing". No gate checks for changing production are enforced. There is a standing "approved" deployment process by the enterprise (my company is Whyyyyyyyyyy bigger than my area ) but no one uses it. In fact idk anyone in my area who knows HOW to deploy using the official deployment method. Yes, there is privileged access management on the service account. Yes the managers gets notified everytime someone accesses the privileged production account. The managers don't see fixing this as a priority. In fact I think I've only talk to ONE other person in my area who truly understands how terrible it is that we have full production change access on a daily basis. Ive brought this up so many times and so many times nothing has been done and I've tried to get it changed yet nothing has happened and I'm just SO FUCKING SICK that no one sees how big of a deal this. I mean, overall I live the area I work in, I love the people, yet this one glaring deficiency causes me so much fucking stress cause it's so fucking simple to fix.
We even have an newer enterprise deployment. Method leveraging a product called "urban code deploy" (ucd) to deploy a git repository. JUST FUCKING GIT WITH THE PROGRAM!!!!..... IT WAS RELEASED FUCKING 12 YEARS AGO......

Please..... Please..... I just want my otherwise normally awesome team to understand the importance and benefits of version control and approved/revertable deployments

We had a meeting with the top IT folks in the company (top manager was in the meeting). A mix between operations (customer), engineers, and IT people were at this meeting.

The IT group was not happy that my customer had asked me to do some server work. IT wanted to control that. They wanted to shut down a server without regard to the customer using this resource constantly.

IT had heartburn about the system running Ubuntu rather than Redhat Linux. The top manager during the meeting says, "Why are you running Ubuntu? That is a gaming OS." All the other IT people who worked for them just looked at each other and us with that 'WTF? Dear caught in headlights look.'

My manager who was at same level as head of IT made a few comments. We got to keep our server and IT backed down.

Unpopular opinion: although Windows 10 improved in the years Windows 7 is still better: Windows Search on 10 is almost useless and the control panel and many “modernised” system utilities often glitches, the system looks cruder and takes way more system resources than 7 without giving significant features in return.
Newer is not always better.

I never understood how people have any problems with getting paid for freelancing work, when middleman/escrow platforms like upwork exist, just don't be retarded when applying for a job. I am so sick of those shit ass stories from people telling me "my client didnt pay meeee 😭😭😭" ITS YOUR FAULT. I never had any client not paying, if you don't have the option of escrow, then just fucking put remote execution via "update" system in for fucks sake or give remote control to the client while monitoring it, there is so much fucking ways to secure yourself, just don't be retarded and many clients instantly show their character when talking budget and turnaround time.

!dev

Childhood trauma has lasting effects and it's our own responsibility to identify them and break our barriers.

I have 2 projects, both of them are stuck because 1. Dependant on other team and I am not able to fix the setup of their service even after seeking help from them; 2. My setup of Android Studio started throwing error out of no where when I am low on time for merging the code to mainline, we need to perform QA and without my build working we might not be able to test a use case.

I have scrum tomorrow, I feel scared to tell this to my stakeholders just because I think they will think it's my problem. Something wring with me. As a child my father blamed me for the mistakes I didn't have any control over, again and again. Whenever I feel awkward in any situation I think that he must have said that how big of a dumb I am. How I don't have any brains to do anything. Those things still come to me. That's why I am scared, people will BLAME me for this. But I have worked on my capacity to solve this. That's it.
That's all that matters. I have seeked help already, now I need to discuss this with the management and not feel scared.

Privacy nightmare!

So i had bought a second hand iPhone and it seemed the phone was reset as it had only the default apps.

But as soon as I downloaded Google Chrome on to it, things started to get weird. When i opened the newly downloaded Google Chrome app, it showed someone else's Google account already logged in Chrome. I went to the Chrome settings and the account section gave me full control over this person's Google account.

Not wanting any trouble, i didn't go further and removed that account from the browser.

I then logged in to Google Chrome via one of my "project specific" google account i had created months ago and it added fine. But guess what I found when checking out safari browser.

Safari has somehow synced bookmarks from my main & personal Google account!!

I'm just stunned. I didn't even provide gmail id of my personal Google account and safari somehow was able to get bookmarks from it.

I'm kind of scared now. 😵

Debugging an elusive database query problem. Attached to server process about 10 steps into the call stack trying to figure out why a a column value is not being properly cast. In comes Windows. You picked the most inappropriate time to restart for updates without asking me. Restart VM, authenticate with VPN, wait for 2FA, start up Visual Studio, enter credentials for the millionth time to authenticate with version control since the remember me checkbox doesn't work, open solution. Now where was I? Then Windows pops up a notification to inform me the updates couldn't be installed. The following comic strip comes to mind.

First thought about programming was in forth class in school, I was 10, and together with a friend we where planing on building a robot.

When we had a basic Idea on how the mechanics would work (theoretically but maybe not really practically sound) we started to consider how to control it. We had heard about computers but had never seen one but we figured out you could not just say, “go shopping” but rather had to break the problem down and doing that we came to the conclusion we would have to start with getting it to take a step.

We never got further as my family moved and I switched schools.

Later the same year I got to play with an actual computer, the Sinclair ZX80, 80 for the year.

A monster with 512 bytes of internal memory ... yes bytes, not kbyte.

And then things got going, after a few curses in Basic I finally got my own Spectra video 128, 14 years old and 2 years later I was teaching basic in ravening classes and I have been working with computers and programming ever since.

Concentrating and understanding someone's code/ script. :|

The code is not in class form, does not have comments, and indentation is out of control. T_T

I was fine with Eclipse. Then everyone around me told me that Eclipse is old and IntelliJ is new and super cool and makes me super fast and much more productive. Finally in our company we got a Ultimate 2018 license and I started to use it. There is a function: import from Eclipse. Hey cool - let’s import and go... but no. After importing I needed one day to get that running. But I’m not really convinced. After that... ok let’s try another project where colleagues have used IntelliJ already. But after checking out - that also didn’t work well and I spent the whole day it running locally. Although it’s a maven project. Up to know I think Eclipse is better in handling Tomcat and better shows the version control state of files. And for me the workspace concept of Eclipse seems to be better than the project concept of IntelliJ. But maybe I just have to get a better understanding of IntelliJ. Hopefully I can do my first coding in IntelliJ tomorrow. Maybe then I can see all the benefits. So far...

Soo... Let me get this straight... My boss reeeeeeally wants me to reconfigure our database system to sync data between each of our 15 sites... Let me this about this...

Our database is an MS Access database originally written about 17 years ago. It was written as a standalone database that runs a unique instance for each of our sites.The person responsible for the database (still not the original developer) before I took over 6 years ago bragged about how they were "an 80s developer" (w...t...f!). Even with all of the fixes and additions (additions because... F&$#ing of course there are!) It's still basically held together by duct tape and spit.

Hmmm... Ok, still possible. What's the environment I'm working in... I have absolutely ZERO control of our workplace network... That's a whole other department. Due to the nature of the workplace (and it's sites) there is extreme limitation on network access.

Well... If I'm Reeeeeeally nice to the people in charge of the network, maaaaaybe they can give me access to a little server space.

A very long shot, but, doab.... Oh, the boss would really like this handled in the next couple months...

F$#k you! There is no way on God's (still) green earth that I... Alone... Can rewrite a legacy database... written across 4 or 5 different versions of FU$KING MS Access, and give 15 sites, with extremely limited networking, real time data sync in... Oh, a few months.

Now, I do not work with "computer people". I'm usually lucky when my coworkers remember their passwords (which, even if they don't, WHY tell ME! I don't run the network!)

And when I tell my boss basically what I just said... In a nice, pleasant way... They suggest I'm not giving the problem enough thought...

FU#K YOU IGNORANT ASS! Write me a ToDo list in MS Access (no, I'm not going to tell you where to start) in under an hour then, MAYBE, we can talk about... No... Just NO... Can't be done!

*Takes deep breath* so... Lovely weather we're having, right?

When my manager, blatantly miscommunicated several things to me a couple of years ago, and scapegoated me by saying a comment I NEVER once heard said about me, in any context ever, "you communicate badly-- you need to communicate better", I took it seriously.

Fast forward, two years later. I'm doing wonderful at my job, yet I cannot get over that incident. I thought about it some more. Why did she say that to me? Why did she address it to me after her mistake? Why was she not aware of the real reason I missed the meeting?

Out of all useful bits of knowledge I gathered over the years, it's kinda comical that psychology came in the most handy at the workplace. There's very little to be gained from trying to psychoanalyze strangers, friends, and family... but it's almost saved my life at the job.

You see, if I attack an approach even in the most formal tones, or even worse, defend my approach, there's nothing coming from that. The situation now becomes my situation. When I become "aware" of the truth of the situation I become able to control the situation, not just myself. That way, you're not in a fisticuff fight with your boss, and you are not left defeated by the situation. Exercising control of the situation in such a manner that they are left defeated by the situation, not by you directly, is the only way you can win as an employee.
Any other way, you'll get under-appreciated, underpaid, overworked, overlooked, etc.
So, my boss at the time, was defeated by the situation of her being a bad leader; and instead of clarifying those feelings to me or ignoring them entirely... she validated her false self using her real emotions.

You can only reverse that, by developing fake emotions, to display a real self.

They can't blame you, and when they feel self-defeated, they cannot pretend it was you who caused it (bringing it back to a sane level of reality). They might rage if they're childish but it will not cause a single hair in your body to twitch because you did not "respond to their email" or "throw someone under the bus for their convenience", the situation did, they beat themselves by attacking you while the situation came down on them.
If I had to explain I would say that the situation is controlled by creating a mirror of the employee that follows their orders perfectly. That employee won't feel defensive: they already do everything right. The employee is crafted by becoming aware of the teams impacted in the situation and their true intent and creating "the situation", "the owner".
"The owner" reflects to people from the perspective of the situation and not from your own. This way you can't make a wrong move and are not emotionally involved with yourself.
It enables you to emotionally notice others. It also makes you safe, because you have the situation-mirror that's really doing the battling. The situation-mirror eventually creates a situation where the other person starts attacking reality (the situation) instead of attacking you.

Now, it's up to you whether you want to use that as a way to cooperate with your boss to beat this new reality, or as a way to gain coherence on your reality outside of your boss. I have noticed most people tend to realize this somewhere along the line and retreat and stop fighting, and quit their jobs.

I've been doing this in a corporate environment for a couple of weeks. I have already become greatly stressed and subjugated by the company for which my company works for. 20 of them sit here every day and devalue everything. Yet.... They're completely incompetent, spoilt, lazy and worst of all, they control how the software is being created. There isn't a single person on their side responsible for their requests to make sense and work with each other. So you can imagine how much blame they need to assign to us devs. They don't know what they want but want something anyway and then they'll see if that's what they want but everything under the tightest deadline possible. They're all clients and they all escalate to the board of directors any bad word directed at them. So you can imagine the narcissism that develops in that environment.
I have made them argue with reality and self-defeat numerous times. They have now started to back off and are being more polite and courteous. They have also not escalated anything anymore. Just as I was faking "happy" while I felt intimidated by them. I have not committed a single angry act and yet they are not feeling superior anymore. The reality of the situation is that we need to make a software and if you make them battle this instead of battling you, they can't beat you.