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Search - "not what i expected"
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Boss: “Our YouTube channel doesn’t look at all like our website.”
Me: “I’ve made it look as close to our branding as YouTube allows for with its limited editing controls.”
Boss: “This is unacceptable. I expected more from you.”
Me: “I cannot accept the blame for this. YouTube is setting the design parameters for all channels and I can only do so much.”
Boss: “You can call the YouTube, can’t you? Why didn’t you call them?”
Me: “.......and ask them....what?”
Boss: “You don’t ask! You tell! Our company has been around for 140 years. Our brand name carries that weight. They’ll change their design to what we need if you’re assertive enough.”
Me: “Ma’am, that’s just not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.”50 -
Yesterday: Senior dev messages out a screenshot of someone using an extension method I wrote (he didn’t know I wrote it)..
SeniorDev: “OMG…that has to be the stupidest thing I ever saw.”
Me: “Stupid? Why?”
SeniorDev: “Why are they having to check the value from the database to see if it’s DBNull and if it is, return null. The database value is already null. So stupid.”
Me: “DBNull is not null, it has a value. When you call the .ToString, it returns an empty string.”
SeniorDev: ”No it doesn’t, it returns null.”
<oh no he didn’t….the smack down begins>
Me: “Really? Are you sure?”
SeniorDev: “Yes! And if the developer bothered to write any unit tests, he would have known.”
Me: “Unit tests? Why do you assume there aren’t any unit tests? Did you look?”
<at this moment, couple other devs take off their head phones and turn around>
SeniorDev:”Well…uh…I just assumed there aren’t because this is an obvious use case. If there was a test, it would have failed.”
Me: “Well, let’s take a look..”
<open up the test project…navigate to the specific use case>
Me: “Yep, there it is. DBNull.Value.ToString does not return a Null value.”
SeniorDev: “Huh? Must be a new feature of C#. Anyway, if the developers wrote their code correctly, they wouldn’t have to use those extension methods. It’s a mess.”
<trying really hard not drop the F-Bomb or two>
Me: “Couple of years ago the DBAs changed the data access standard so any nullable values would always default to null. So no empty strings, zeros, negative values to indicate a non-value. Downside was now the developers couldn’t assume the value returned the expected data type. What they ended up writing was a lot of code to check the value if it was DBNull. Lots of variations of ‘if …’ , ternary operators, some creative lamda expressions, which led to unexpected behavior in the user interface. Developers blamed the DBAs, DBAs blamed the developers. Remember, Tom and DBA-Sam almost got into a fist fight over it.”
SeniorDev: “Oh…yea…but that’s a management problem, not a programming problem.”
Me: “Probably, but since the developers starting using the extension methods, bug tickets related to mis-matched data has nearly disappeared. When was the last time you saw DBA-Sam complain about the developers?”
SeniorDev: “I guess not for a while, but it’s still no excuse.”
Me: “Excuse? Excuse for what?”
<couple of awkward seconds of silence>
SeniorDev: “Hey, did you guys see the video of the guy punching the kangaroo? It’s hilarious…here, check this out.. ”
Pin shoulders the mat…1 2 3….I win.6 -
Sit down before you read this.
So I interviewed a guy for a "Support Engineer" internship position.
Me and the team lead sit down and are waiting for him to enter, but apparently he's actually making a coffee in the kitchen.
This isn't exactly a strike since the receptionist told him that he can go get a drink, and we did too. It's just always expected for him to get a glass of water, not waste 3 minutes brewing a coffee.
In any case he comes in, puts the coffee on the table, then his phone, then his wallet, then his keys and then sits on our side of the table.
I ask him to sit in front of us so we can see him. He takes a minute to pack and tranfer himself to the other side of the table. He again places all of the objects on the table.
We begin, team lead tells him about the company. Then I ask him whether he got any questions regarding the job, the team or the company . For the next 15 minutes he bombards us with mostly irrelevant and sometimes inappropriate questions, like:
0: Can I choose my own nickname when getting an email address?
1: Does the entire department get same salaries?
2: Are there yoga classes on Sundays only or every morning?
3: Will I get a car?
4: Does the firm support workspace equality? How many chicks are in the team?
5: I want the newest grey Mac.
And then.. Then the questions turn into demands:
6: I need a high salary (asks for 2.5 more than the job pays. Which is still a lot).
I ask him why would he get that at his first job in the industry (remind you, this is an internship and we are a relatively high paying company).
He says he's getting paid more at his current job.
His CV lists no current job and only indicates that he just finished studying.
He says that he's working at his parent's business...
Next he says that he is very talented and has to be promoted very quickly and that we need to teach him a lot and finance his courses.
At this point me and the team lead were barely holding our laughs.
The team lead asks him about his English (English is not our native language).
He replies "It's good, trust me".
Team lead invites him for an English conversation. Team lead acts like a customer with a broken internet and the guy is there to troubleshoot. (btw that's not job related, just a simple scenario)
TL: "Hello, my name is Andrew, I'm calli..."
Guy: *interrupts* "Yes, yes, hi! Hi! What do you want?"
TL: "Well, if you let me fi..."
Guy: "Ok! Talk!"
TL: "...inish... My internet is not working."
Guy: "Ok, *mimics tuning a V engine or cooking a soup* I fixed! *points at TL* now you say 'yes you fixed'".
Important to note that his English was horrible. Disregarding the accent he just genuinely does not know the language well.
Then he continiues with "See? Good English. Told you no need to check!".
After about half a minute of choking on out silent laughter I ask him how much Python experience he has (job lists a requirement of at least 1 year).
He replies "I'm very good at object oriented functional programming".
I ask again "But what is your experience? Did you ever take any courses? Do you have a git repository to show? Any side.."
*he interrupts again* "I only use Matlab!".
Team lead stands up and proceeds to shake his hand while saying "we will get back to you".
At last the guy says with a stupid smile on his face "You better hire me! Call me back tomorrow." Leaves TL hanging and walks away after packing his stuff into the pockets.
I was so shocked that I wasn't even angry.
We both laughed for the rest of the day though. It was probably the weirdest interview I took part at.35 -
So, since I hear from a lot of people (on here and irl) that Linux has a 'very high learning curve', let me share my experiences with the first time my dad touched Linux (Elementary OS) without me interfering at all! (keep in mind that he is very a-technical)
*le me boots the system* (I already did setup a user account for him and gave him the password).
Dad: *enters password and presses enter*
Me: "Hmm that went faster than expected."
Dad: "Uhm I know how to login son, it's not that hard and pretty obvious".
Me: "Alright, why don't you try to open up the default word documents editor on here! I'll be right back!"
Me: *Goes away and returns after a minute*.
Dad: *already a few test sentences typed in LibreOffice writer* it's going pretty well :)!
Me: "Oo how did you find that?!"
Dad: "Well, there's a thingy that says 'applications' so I clicked in and found it in the "Office" section, do you think I am blind or something?!"
Me: 😐. uhm no but I just didn't think you'd find it that quickly. Now try to install Chromium browser! *thinking: he'll fail this one for sure* I'll be right back :).
Me: *returns again after a minute or so*
Dad: *already searching for stuff through Chromium*
Me: "wait, how the hell did you do that so quickly, it's not the easiest thingy for most people".
Dad: "Jesus, it's not that hard! I went to the application browsing thingy, typed 'software' and then a sorta software store icon showed up so I clicked it and it opened a windows with a search bar saying something like 'search for applications/software'. clicked in it, typed 'chromium', saw it coming up, there was a very clear 'install' button, it asked for my password, I put it in and after a little it gave a notification that it was installed. Then I went to that application browsing thingy again and typed Chromium. Then I hit enter because it selected an icon called chromium...."
Me: O.o. Okay this is going very good, now open an email client and login to your email address!
Dad: *goes to application browsing thingy, types 'email', evolution icon shows up, dad clicks it, email address setup steps show up and dad follows them quickly. After about a minute, everything is setup.
I expected this to be a hard process for someone who dealt with Windows his entire life but damn, I underestimated it.
Asked him if he found it easy/what he liked about it:
"Well, it's very clear where I can find everything, default browser/email/word document editor programs are easy to find and that's about all I need so yeah, great system!"
I am proud of you, dad!77 -
Good Morning!, its time for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!
Todays contestant is a very special one.
*sitcom audience: WHY?*
Glad you asked, you see if you were to look at his linkedin profile, you would see a job title unlike any you've seen before.
*sitcom audience oooooooohhhhhh*
were not talking software developer, engineer, tech lead, designer, CTO, CEO or anything like that, No No our new entrant "G" surpasses all of those with the title ..... "Software extraordinaire".
*sitcom audience laughs hysterically*
I KNOW!, wtf does that even mean! as a previous dev-ranter pointed out does this mean he IS quality code? I'd say he's more like a trash can ... where his code belongs
*ba dum tsssss*
Ok ok, lets get on with the show, heres some reasons why "G" is on the show:
One of G's tasks was to build an analytics gathering library for iOS, similar to google analytics where you track pages and events (we couldn't use google's). G was SO good at this job he implemented 2 features we didn't even ask for:
- If the library was unable to load its config file (for any reason) it would throw an uncatchable system integrity error, crashing the app.
- If anything was passed into any of the functions that wasn't expected (null, empty array etc.) it would crash the app as it was "more efficient" to not do any sanity checks inside the library.
This caused a lot of issues as some of the data needed to come from the clients server. The day we launched the app, within the first 3 hours we had over 40k crash logs and a VERY angry client.
Now, what makes this story important is not the bugs themselves, come on how many times have we all done something stupid? No the issue here was G defended all of this as the right thing to do!
.. and no he wasn't stoned or drunk!
G claimed if he couldn't get the right settings / params he wouldn't be able to track the event and then our CEO wouldn't have our usage data. To which I replied:
"So your solution was to not give the client an app instead? ... which also doesn't give the CEO his data".
He got very angry and asked me "what would you do then?". I offered a solution something like why not have a default tag for "error" or "unknown" where if theres an issue, we send up whatever we have, plus the file name and store it somewhere else. I was told I was being ridiculous as it wasn't built to track anything like that and that would never work ... his solution? ... pull the library out of the app and forget it.
... once again giving everyone no data.
G later moved onto another cross-platform style project. Backend team were particularly unhappy as they got no spec of what needed to be done. All they knew was it was a single endpoint dealing with very complex model. There was no Java classes, super classes, abstract classes or even interfaces, just this huge chunk of mocked data. So myself and the lead sat down with him, and asked where the interfaces for the backend where, or designs / architecture for them etc.
His response, to this day frightens me ... not makes me angry, not bewilders me ... scares the living shit out of me that people like this exist in the world and have successful careers.
G: "hhhmmm, I know how to build an interface, but i've never understood them ... Like lets say I have an interface, what now? how does that help me in any way? I can't physically use it, does it not just use up time building it for no reason?"
us: "... ... how are the backend team suppose to understand the model, its types, integrate it into the other systems?"
G: "Can I not just tell them and they can write it down?"
**
I'll just pause here for a moment, as you'll likely need to read that again out of sheer disbelief
**
I've never seen someone die inside the way the lead did. He started a syllable and his face just dropped, eyes glazed over and he instantly lost all the will to live. He replied:
" wel ............... it doesn't matter ... its not important ... I have to go, good luck with the project"
*killed the screen share and left the room*
now I know you are all dying in suspense to know what happened to that project, I can drop the shocking bombshell that it was in fact cancelled. Thankfully only ~350 man hours were spent on it
... yep, not a typo.
G's crowning achievement however will go down in history. VERY long story short, backend got deployed to the server and EVERYTHING broke. Lead investigated, found mistakes and config issues on every second line, load balancer wasn't even starting up. When asked had this been tested before it was deployed:
G: "Yeah I tested it on my machine, it worked fine"
lead: "... and on the server?"
G: "no, my machine will do the same thing"
lead: "do you have a load balancer and multiple VM's?"
G: "no, but Java is Java"
... and with that its time to end todays episode. Will G be our most incompetent? ... maybe.
Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!31 -
I'm at my seat during the regular morning routine of checking emails, planning the things I need to complete/study when my phone rings.
HR: Good Morning, can you come over to the conference room please ?
Me: Sure
I enter the conference room and on the other side of the table, I see a group of 3 HR Managers (not a very nice feeling), especially when it was 10 months into my first job as a Trainee Software Developer.
HR: The company hasn't been performing as expected. For this reason, we've been told to cut down our staff. We're sorry but we have to let you go. You've been doing a great job all along. Thank you.
Me: ---- (seriously ?!)
The security-in-chief 'escorts' me out of the premises and I hand over the badge. I'm not allowed to return to my desk.
This happened about 16 years ago. But it stuck with me throughout my programming career.
A couple of Lessons Learnt which may help some of the developers today :
- You're not as important as you think, no matter what you do and how well you do it.
- Working hard is one thing, working smart is another. You'll understand the difference when your appraisals comes around each year.
- Focus on your work but always keep an eye on your company's health.
- Be patient with your Manager; if you're having a rough time, its likely he/she is suffering more.
- Programming solo is great fun. However it takes other skills that are not so interesting, to earn a living.
- You may think the Clients sounds stupid, talks silly and demands the stars; ever wonder what they think about you.
- When faced with a tough problem, try to 'fix' the Client first, then look for a solution.
- If you hate making code changes, don't curse the Client or your Manager - we coders collectively created a world of infinite possibilities. No point blaming them.
- Sharing your ideas matter.
- Software Development is a really long chain of ever-growing links that you may grok rather late in your career. But its still worth all the effort if you enjoy it.
I like to think of programming as a pursuit that combines mathematical precision and artistic randomness to create some pretty amazing stuff.
Thanks for reading.14 -
Was lead developer at a small startup, I was hiring and had a budget to add 3 new people to my team to develop a new product for the company.
Some context first and then the rant!
Candidate 1 - Amazing, a dev I worked with before who was under utilized at the previous company. Still a junior, but, she was a quick learner and eager to expand her knowledge, never an issue.
Candidate 2 - Kickass dev with back end skills and extras, he was always eager to work a bit more than what was expected. I use to send him home early to annoy him. haha!
Candidate 3 - Lets call him P.
In the interview he answers every question perfectly, he asks all the right questions and suggests some things I havent even thought of. CTO goes ahead and says we should skip the technical test and just hire the guy, his smart and knows what his talking about, I agree and we hire him. (We where a bit desperate at this stage as well.)
He comes in a week early to pick up his work laptop to get setup before he starts the next week, awesome! This guy is going to be an asset to the company, cant wait to have him join the team - The CTO at this stage is getting ready to leave the company and I will be taking over the division and need someone to take over lead position, he seems like the guys to do it.
The guys starts the next week, he comes in and the laptop we gave him is now a local server for testing and he will be working off his own laptop, no issue, we are small so needed a testing stack, but wasnt really needed since we had procedures in place for this already.
Here is where everything goes wrong!!! First day goes great... Next day he gets in early 6:30am (Nice! NO!), he absolutely smells, no stinks, of weed, not a light smell, the entire fucking office smells of weed! (I have no problem with weed, just dont make it my problem to deal with). I get called by boss and told to sort this out people are complaining! I drive to office and have a meeting with him, he says its all good he understands. (This was Friday).
Monday comes around - Get a call from Boss at 7:30am. Whole office smells like weed, please talk to P again, this cannot happen again. I drive to office again, and he again says it wont happen again, he has some issues with back pain and the weed helps.
Tuesday - Same fucking thing! And now he doesnt want to sign for the laptop("server") that was given to him, and has moved to code in the boardroom, WHERE OUR FUCKING CLIENTS WILL BE VIEWING A DEMO THAT DAY OF THE PRODUCT!! Now that whole room smells like weed, FML!
Wednesday - We send P a formal letter that he is under probation, P calls me to have a meeting. In the meeting he blames me for not understanding "new age" medicine, I ask for his doctors prescription and ask why he didnt tell me this in the interview so I could make arrangements, we dont care if you are stoned, just do good work and be considerate to your co-workers. P cant provide these and keeps ranting, I suggest he takes pain killers, he has none of it only "new age" medicine for him.
Thursday - I ask him to rather "work" from home till we can get this sorted, he comes in for code reviews for 2 weeks. I can clearly see he has no idea how the system works but is trying, I thought I will dive deeper and look at all of his code. Its a mess, nothing makes sense and 50% of it is hard coded (We are building a decentralized API for huge data sets so this makes no sense).
Friday - In code review I confront him about this, he has excuses for everything, I start asking him harder questions about the project and to explain what we are building - he goes quiet and quits on the spot with a shitty apology.
From what I could make out he was really smart when it came to theory but interpreting the theory to actual practice wasnt possible for him, probably would have been easier if he wasnt high all the time.
I hate interview code tests, but learned a valuable lesson that day! Always test for some code knowledge as well even if you hate doing it, ask the right questions and be careful who you hire! You can only bullshit for so long in coding before someone figures out that you are a fraud.16 -
I absolutely HATE "web developers" who call you in to fix their FooBar'd mess, yet can't stop themselves from dictating what you should and shouldn't do, especially when they have no idea what they're doing.
So I get called in to a job improving the performance of a Magento site (and let's just say I have no love for Magento for a number of reasons) because this "developer" enabled Redis and expected everything to be lightning fast. Maybe he thought "Redis" was the name of a magical sorcerer living in the server. A master conjurer capable of weaving mystical time-altering spells to inexplicably improve the performance. Who knows?
This guy claims he spent "months" trying to figure out why the website couldn't load faster than 7 seconds at best, and his employer is demanding a resolution so he stops losing conversions. I usually try to avoid Magento because of all the headaches that come with it, but I figured "sure, why not?" I mean, he built the website less than a year ago, so how bad can it really be? Well...let's see how fast you all can facepalm:
1.) The website was built brand new on Magento 1.9.2.4...what? I mean, if this were built a few years back, that would be a different story, but building a fresh Magento website in 2017 in 1.x? I asked him why he did that...his answer absolutely floored me: "because PHP 5.5 was the best choice at the time for speed and performance..." What?!
2.) The ONLY optimization done on the website was Redis cache being enabled. No merged CSS/JS, no use of a CDN, no image optimization, no gzip, no expires rules. Just Redis...
3.) Now to say the website was poorly coded was an understatement. This wasn't the worst coding I've seen, but it was far from acceptable. There was no organization whatsoever. Templates and skin assets are being called from across 12 different locations on the server, making tracking down and finding a snippet to fix downright annoying.
But not only that, the home page itself had 83 custom database queries to load the products on the page. He said this was so he could load products from several different categories and custom tables to show on the page. I asked him why he didn't just call a few join queries, and he had no idea what I was talking about.
4.) Almost every image on the website was a .PNG file, 2000x2000 px and lossless. The home page alone was 22MB just from images.
There were several other issues, but those 4 should be enough to paint a good picture. The client wanted this all done in a week for less than $500. We laughed. But we agreed on the price only because of a long relationship and because they have some referrals they got us in the door with. But we told them it would get done on our time, not theirs. So I copied the website to our server as a test bed and got to work.
After numerous hours of bug fixes, recoding queries, disabling Redis and opting for higher innodb cache (more on that later), image optimization, js/css/html combining, render-unblocking and minification, lazyloading images tweaking Magento to work with PHP7, installing OpCache and setting up basic htaccess optimizations, we smash the loading time down to 1.2 seconds total, and most of that time was for external JavaScript plugins deemed "necessary". Time to First Byte went from a staggering 2.2 seconds to about 45ms. Needless to say, we kicked its ass.
So I show their developer the changes and he's stunned. He says he'll tell the hosting provider create a new server set up to migrate the optimized site over and cut over to, because taking the live website down for maintenance for even an hour or two in the middle of the night is "unacceptable".
So trying to be cool about it, I tell him I'd be happy to configure the server to the exact specifications needed. He says "we can't do that". I look at him confused. "What do you mean we 'can't'?" He tells me that even though this is a dedicated server, the provider doesn't allow any access other than a jailed shell account and cPanel access. What?! This is a company averaging 3 million+ per year in revenue. Why don't they have an IT manager overseeing everything? Apparently for them, they're too cheap for that, so they went with a "managed dedicated server", "managed" apparently meaning "you only get to use it like a shared host".
So after countless phone calls arguing with the hosting provider, they agree to make our changes. Then the client's developer starts getting nasty out of nowhere. He says my optimizations are not acceptable because I'm not using Redis cache, and now the client is threatening to walk away without paying us.
So I guess the overall message from this rant is not so much about the situation, but the developer and countless others like him that are clueless, but try to speak from a position of authority.
If we as developers don't stop challenging each other in a measuring contest and learn to let go when we need help, we can get a lot more done and prevent losing clients. </rant>14 -
Meeting with smooth suit guy:
"So, our company has pivoted"
I hate everything about this guy, not having slept well at all, I fucking snapped:
"Pivoted? Oh wow, what a wonderfully refined word to describe that your asinine business model smacked flat into the mud, that your obtuse bubble of vague ideas popped and your childish dreams of piles of undeserved gold got caught up by the hard reality that your product does not add any tangible value -- yet you tricked your sheepish retarded investors once again to fall for a new hype-filled pitch deck? Congratulations. At least you probably snort enough coke to keep believing in yourself..."
The guy nervously wiped his nose, stuttered, and walked off looking angry and a little confused.
So it turns out, my boss is apparently the major "sheepish retarded investor" in this company.
Today I got a mail from him. I expected fire and fury, nuclear ICBMs crashing into my desk.
"Thanks for your feedback, this is why I invite you to meetings. Could you take a look at their new pitch slides and preliminary API docs for me?"15 -
I wasn't going to post this because I expected loads of hate but fuck it, I'd rather share it anyways. Also take into account that sometimes there's no choice because money is needed or other circumstances :)
This one guy told me to never let down my values and what I stand for if I can afford to do that, no matter what they are.
I'd quit my job over having to use tools like Google or Slack (luckily my company is highly against using Slack and most people have moved to ddg) and as for WhatsApp, I said at my interview that I'd either wanted a business phone for using WhatsApp or I wouldn't use it. Boss said 'thats cool!'
I quote from him(that person who said this to me):
"they force you to use something you're uncomfortable with? Fuck'em. They don't understand your reasons? Their problem.
Even if nobody in the entire world understands/accepts your reasons, doesn't mean they're not valid."29 -
*meeting with boss about a quick site for one of her clients*
Boss- "okay so basically I just want you to copy the content from -already made site- and put it on the new one"
Me- "okay sure do you want it verbatim or "
Boss-"no but something similar"
Me-"okay so you want me to paraphrase this list that's on the homepage?"
Boss-"Well no we dont actually need the list at all as it isnt relevant to us so just take that out"
Me-"okay well that is the only thing on the homepage so what should I replace it with"
Boss-"I dont know, something similar to the list. You can figure something out"
Me-"....I dont know anything about the clients business. I am not going to just make up content, you guys can at least give me some direction there"
Boss-"i didnt think it would be that hard"
Me-"it's really not hard. You're making it harder than it needs to be for me though. Anyway, do you wanna keep the same exact pages as the other site or only transfer some of them or"
Boss-"something that resembles that website but isnt exactly it so some of the pages but not all"
Me-"which ones"
Boss-"the ones relevant to client's business"
Me-*closes notebook, stands up, starts to leave room*
Boss-"where are you going"
Me-"I'm going to get another two cups of coffee cause I didnt have enough this morning for this bullshit"
Boss-*raises eyebrow*
Me-"dont tell me to copy paste a website at first and then continue to tell me its going to be "similar" but different and then further continue to be as vague as possible about what is expected of me to be done in order to make it different! Take the time to decide what it is you want exactly and then tell me, with detail, what you're criteria is so I can do the thing!! I cant read your mind."
Boss-"..... I just didnt think it would be that hard to jot in a few sentences here and there"
I left the room at that point. Irritating as fuck. You dont know tech stuff, don't expect me to know enough about YOUR job to write about it as if I'm a professional. I cant fucking read minds, I have no interest in researching anything just to create the site content myself, and its fucking rude that they wont even take the time to sit down and decide what they want for a website that THEY are paying for. For fucks sake people get your fucking shit together13 -
Navy story time, and this one is lengthy.
As a Lieutenant Jr. I served for a year on a large (>100m) ship, with the duties of assistant navigation officer, and of course, unofficial computer guy. When I first entered the ship (carrying my trusty laptop), I had to wait for 2 hours at the officer's wardroom... where I noticed an ethernet plug. After 15 minutes of waiting, I got bored. Like, really bored. What on TCP/IP could possibly go wrong?
So, scanning the network it is. Besides the usual security holes I came to expect in ""military secure networks"" (Windows XP SP2 unpatched and Windows 2003 Servers, also unpatched) I came along a variety of interesting computers with interesting things... that I cannot name. The aggressive scan also crashed the SMB service on the server causing no end of cute reactions, until I restarted it remotely.
But me and my big mouth... I actually talked about it with the ship's CO and the electronics officer, and promptly got the unofficial duty of computer guy, aka helldesk, technical support and I-try-to-explain-you-that-it-is-impossible-given-my-resources guy. I seriously think that this was their punishment for me messing around. At one time I received a call, that a certain PC was disconnected. I repeatedly told them to look if the ethernet cable was on. "Yes, of course it's on, I am not an idiot." (yea, right)
So I went to that room, 4 decks down and 3 sections aft. Just to push in the half-popped out ethernet jack. I would swear it was on purpose, but reality showed me I was wrong, oh so dead wrong.
For the full year of my commission, I kept pestering the CO to assign me with an assistant to teach them, and to give approval for some serious upgrades, patching and documenting. No good.
I set up some little things to get them interested, like some NMEA relays and installed navigation software on certain computers, re-enabled the server's webmail and patched the server itself, tried to clean the malware (aka. Sisyphus' rock), and tried to enforce a security policy. I also tried to convince the CO to install a document management system, to his utter horror and refusal (he was the hard copy type, as were most officers in the ship). I gave up on almost all besides the assistant thing, because I knew that once I left, everything would go to the high-entropy status of carrying papers around, but the CO kept telling me that would be unnecessary.
"You'll always be our man, you'll fix it (sic)".
What could go wrong?
I got my transfer with 1 week's notice. Panic struck. The CO was... well, he was less shocked than I expected, but still shocked (I learned later that he knew beforehand, but decided not to tell anybody anything). So came the most rediculous request of all:
To put down, within 1 A4 sheet, and in simple instructions, the things one had to do in order to fulfil the duties of the computer guy.
I. SHIT. YOU. NOT.
My answer:
"What I can do is write: 'Please read the following:', followed by the list of books one must read in order to get some introductory understanding of network and server management, with most accompanying skills."
I was so glad I got out of that hellhole.6 -
Senior Dev: "Be mindful of what you email to the team, some may be rubbed the wrong way."
Me: "I'm going on a year, I figured it was okay to send a meme when appropriate like [the other guy]."
Senior Dev: "Well, [the other guy] has been here for 17 years, so it's sort of expected from him."
Me: "You know what would be weird? If I was here for 17 more years and then 'started' having fun with the team."
Senior Dev: "Yes, but [the other guy] is the only one doing his particular job, which makes him important, so he tends to get away with more."
Me: "No, I get it. If you're a linchpin you can reply with cat memes, but people like me need to mind their place."
Senior Dev: "It's an uncomfortable conversation, but it's all bureaucracy."
Me: "Duly noted. But could you please forward me the specific email I sent that caused the concern?"
Senior Dev: "I'm not sure what the exact email was, when it was sent, or specifically whom it offended."
Me: "Okay, because that would be like me walking up to you and saying that you have a problem that needs to be fixed, but I don't know what your problem is or why it needs to be addressed."
Senior Dev: "You're right, but just be mindful of the emails you send outside of the group."
Me: "I've never group-emailed anything outside of the team."
Senior Dev: "Well, I'll let you get back to work..."
[FML!] 🤦♂️8 -
I think I've shown in my past rants and comments that I'm pretty experienced. Looking back though, I was really fucking stupid. Since I haven't posted a rant yet on the weekly topics, I figure I would share this humbling little gem.
Way back in the ancient era known as 2009, I was working my first desk job as a "web designer". Apparently the owner of this company didn't know the difference between "designer", which I'm not, and "developer", which I am, nor the responsibilities of each role.
It was a shitty job paying $12/hour. It was such a nightmare to work at. I guess the silver lining is that this company now no longer exists as it was because of my mistake, but it was definitely a learning experience I hold in high regard even today. Okay, enough filler...
I was told to wipe the Dev server in order to start fresh and set up an entirely new distro of Linux. I was to swap out the drives with whatever was available from the non-production machines, set up the RAID 5 array and route it through the router and firewall, as we needed to bring this Dev server online to allow clients to monitor the work. I had no idea what any of this meant, but I was expected to learn it that day because the next day I would be commencing with the task.
Astonishingly, I managed to set up the server and everything worked great! I got a pat on the back and the boss offered me a 4 day weekend with pay to get some R&R. I decided to take the time to go camping. I let him know I would be out of town and possibly unreachable because of cell service, to which he said no problem.
Tuesday afternoon I walked into work and noticed two of the field techs messing with the Dev server I built. One was holding a drive while the other was holding a clipboard. I was immediately called into the boss's office.
He told me the drives on the production server failed during the weekend, resulting in the loss of the data. He then asked me where I got the drives from for the Dev server upgrade. I told him that they came from one of the inactive systems on the shelf. What he told me next through the deafening screams rendered me speechless.
I had gutted the drives from our backup server that was just set up the week prior. Every Friday at midnight, it would turn on through a remote power switch on a schedule, then the system would boot and proceed to copy over the production server's files into an archive for that night and shutdown when it completed. Well, that last Friday night/Saturday morning, the machine kicked on, but guess what didn't happen? The files weren't copied. Not only were they not copied, but the existing files that got backed up previously we're gone. Why? Because I wiped those drives when I put them into the Dev server.
I would up quitting because the conversation was very hostile and I couldn't deal with it. The next week, I was served with a suit for damages to this company. Long story short, the employer was found in the wrong from emails I saved of him giving me the task and not once stating that machine was excluded in the inactive machines I could salvage drives from. The company sued me because they were being sued by a client, whose entire company presence was hosted by us and we lost the data. In total just shy of 1TB of data was lost, all because of my mistake. The company filed for bankruptcy as a result of the lawsuit against them and someone bought the company name and location, putting my boss and its employees out of a job.
If there's one lesson I have learned that I take with the utmost respect to even this day, it's this: Know your infrastructure front to back before you change it, especially when it comes to data.8 -
!rant
Programming is a huge blessing i believe we all should be thankful to. For me, it literally turned my life around.
11 months ago i was fighting a losing battle with depression, and contemplated suicide constantly. I would use a self remedy of smoking weed and sleeping all day long. I was depressed because i felt my life had no real value. I was doing nothing, and its kind of an infinite loop.
You don't do anything, so you feel bad, so you don't do anything, and so on.
That was until i finally took the step that changed my life. I searched and wanted to learn something. I always liked web pages so i thought id get into web development.
Did some research, found out that the fastest way to go was to learn ruby on rails. I followed a tutorial i found online, and literally pushed myself through it. There were times when there where things i didnt understand, and when it was really bad, but i pushed myself through it and i finished the tutorial.
Just finishing the tutorial and learning something new helped me alot. I had already quit smoking and was feeling way better, but after a while i started feeling bad again since i wasnt doing anything after i had finished learning, so i started working on a personal project, creating it from scratch, and just working on it day and night. I worked 14 hours a day, never really leaving my room ( this was during summer vacation ) for a month.
There were many things i didnt understand, but i never gave up and always searched for the solution and read about it until i understood it better. Looking back, there were things i knew could have been done in a better way, but as a first project, im proud of myself, not because it rocks, but because i did not give up.
In the process of starting a new life, i was really lonely. I cut all ties with everyone i knew, since they were all toxic, all i had in my life was ruby on rails and my web application. I wanted to launch it but couldn't due to personal reasons.
Not being able to launch and see something live, something that you worked so hard on, that you put so much effort into, that was devastating to me. I felt as if all my efforts had gone to waste.
And here is what i love most about programming, NOTHING EVER GOES TO WASTE. All that effort you spent on something ? All these all nighters you pulled ? All that frustration from that bug ? It will pay off later. It always does somehow. You get more knowledge and become a better programmer, and sometimes it even gives way to new opportunities and chances you never even expected.
I included my web application in my resume and it helped land me a job as a junior developer in a really nice company. A job that i wouldn't even have dreamed of several months earlier.
Programming and creating something new and learning something new everyday, creating something that people use, that someone else will benefit from and be grateful for, i think we should never take that for granted !
Tl;dr : learning how to code and web development saved my life9 -
This rant is a confession I had to make, for all of you out there having a bad time (or year), this story is for you.
Last year, I joined devRant and after a month, I was hired at a local company as an IT god (just joking but not far from what they expected from me), developer, web admin, printer configurator (of course) and all that in my country it's just called "the tech guy", as some of you may know.
I wasn't in immediate need for a full-time job, I had already started to work as a freelancer then and I was doing pretty good. But, you know how it goes, you can always aim for more and that's what I did.
The workspace was the usual, two rooms, one for us employees and one for the bosses (there were two bosses).
Let me tell you right now. I don't hate people, even if I get mad or irritated, I never feel hatred inside me or the need to think bad of someone. But, one of the two bosses made me discover that feeling of hate.
He had a snake-shaped face (I don't think that was random), and he always laughed at his jokes. He was always shouting at me because he was a nervous person, more than normal. He had a tone in his voice like he knew everything. Early on, after being yelled for no reason a dozen of times, I decided that this was not a place for me.
After just two months of doing everything, from tech support to Photoshop and to building websites with WordPress, I gave my one month's notice, or so I thought. I was confronted by the bosses, one of which was a cousin of mine and he was really ok with me leaving and said that I just had to find a person to replace me which was an easy task. Now, the other boss, the evil one, looked me on the eye and said "you're not going anywhere".
I was frozen like, "I can't stay here". He smiled like a snake he was and said "come on, you got this we are counting on you and we are really satisfied with how you are performing till now". I couldn't shake him, I was already sweating. He was rolling his eyes constantly like saying "ok, you are wasting my time now" and left to go to some basketball practice or something.
So, I was stuck there, I could have caused a scene but as I told you, one of the bosses was a cousin of mine, I couldn't do anything crazy. So, I went along with it. Until the next downfall.
I decided to focus on the job and not mind for the bad boss situation but things went really wrong. After a month, I realised that the previous "tech guy" had left me with around 20 ancient Joomla - version 1.0 websites, bursting with security holes and infested with malware like a swamp. I had never seen anything like it. Everyday the websites would become defaced or the server (VPN) would start sending tons of spam cause of the malware, and going offline at the end. I was feeling hopeless.
And then the personal destruction began. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat. I was having panick attacks at the office's bathroom. My girlfriend almost broke up with me because I was acting like an asshole due to my anxiety issues (but in the end she was the one to "bring me back"(man, she is a keeper)) and I hadn't put a smile on my face for months. I was on the brink of depression, if not already there. Everyday I would anxiously check if the server is running because I would be the one to blame, even though I was trying to talk to the boss (the bad one was in charge of the IT department) and tell him about the problem.
And then I snapped. I finally realised that I had hit rock bottom. I said "I can't let this happen to me" and I took a deep breath. I still remember that morning, it was a life-changing moment for me. I decided to bite the bullet and stay for one more month, dealing with the stupid old server and the low intelligence business environment. So, I woke up, kissed my girlfriend (now wife), took the bus and went straight to work, and I went into the boss's office. I lied that I had found another job on another city and I had one month in order to be there on time. He was like, "so you are leaving? Is it that good a job the one you found? And when are you going? And are you sure?", and with no hesitation I just said "yup". He didn't expect it and just said "ok then", just find your replacement and you're good to go. I found the guy that would replace me, informing him of every little detail of what's going on (and I recently found out, that he is currently working for some big company nowadays, I'm really glad for him!).
I was surprised that it went so smoothly, one month later I felt the taste of freedom again, away from all the bullshit. Totally one of the best feelings out there.
I don't want to be cliche, but do believe in yourself people! Things are not what the seem.
With all that said, I want to give my special thanks to devRant for making this platform. I was inactive for some time but I was reading rants and jokes. It helped me to get through all that. I'm back now! Bless you devRant!
I'm glad that I shared this story with all of you, have an awesome day!15 -
Was at my sisters place a little ago and somehow we came at the subject of her laptop.
For everyone who thinks I'm posting this solely to hate on windows, I'm not. This really happened and if you don't believe it, well, so be it, I guess.
Also keep in mind that's she's using a stock version without anything except for word and itunes installed.
She got it a couple of years ago and I dual booted it for her (windows + ubuntu). I fully expected her to use windows because of office and outlook etc.
Asked her anyways:
Me: So, you've got dual boot, although I think already know the answer, what system do you use mostly? (I didn't even consider that there was a possibility that the answer would be ubuntu or linux)
Sister: Ubuntu!
Me:
Me:
Me:
Me:
Me:
Me:
Me:
Me: 😵
Me: Sorry, what? You're not using windows as primary system?!
Sister: No. It at first takes that motherfucking system about 5 minutes to reach the FUCKING LOGIN SCREEN.
Me: Ow, that's bad :/
Me: *turns laptop on and indeed, it takes a fuckton of time*
Me: Is the password still the same as when I set it up for you?
Sister: Yesss.
Me: *types the password, it's working, loading screen appears*
Sister: Would you like a coffee?
Me: Uhm.... sure? But that would take you about 10-15 minutes to make.......?
Sister: Yes. And that's exactly how long it takes before that fucking piece of shit called windows has finally loaded the FUCKING DESKTOP.
Me: 😅
Me: Okay but it can't be that bad, right? I mean, I hate windows but you mostly need it for studies and such and as you know I'm not judging you for tha......
Sister: YES IT IS THAT FUCKING BAD. WHEN I'M IN CLASS, IT TAKES HALF THE FUCKING CLASS TO LOAD BEFORE I CAN OPEN WORD OR WHAT-THE-FUCK EVER.
THAT'S WHY I USE UBUNTU PRIMARILY, BECAUSE, ALTOUGH IT'S NOT MY FAVOURITE SYSTEM, IT. JUST. FUCKING. WORKS.
Well, I did definitely NOT see that one coming!
There is some bloatware on there but definitely as bad as what would cause this. Virus scan turned up empty. No. Fucking. Clue.
It's not a gaming laptop or anything but come on, it should run either windows or linux very well.51 -
Please don't make junior developers feel they're a burden.
Have you ever googled "how to mentor junior developers"? It's quite mind-blowing how many articles, talks and panels are on this topic. And yet still junior developers are not feeling welcomed in their companies.
Yup, you guessed it, we also have something to add (based on our own experience):
1. Asking for help is not easy. Please don't blow juniors off by telling them to read docs when they ask a question. Always assume they've read it and did a sprint to solve the problem. They ask you, because they see you as a mentor and really need your help. If you can, spend more time with them and guide through the entire problem solving process.
2. Please don't think "I learnt it this way so you should too". If you're in charge of teaching a junior developer, don't expect them to be a carbon copy of yourself. Because even though in your opinion your approach is more "pro", they might not be there yet to use it properly. And last, but not least:
3. Of course, juniors will compare themselves with seniors on their team. And there'll be moments they feel so guilty and so afraid that they cost the company too much, that they need training, and supervision, or are between projects and are not bringing in any money, and they'll fear that their company regrets hiring them. Make sure they don't feel like a burden. As juniors, we often
have this misconception what is expected from us.
Dear tech companies, please set very clear expectations and tell your juniors you're happy. Don't get us wrong here. We don't expect unicorns, roses and pats on the back from companies. We do understand- this is business, and at the end of the day we all are here to make money. To do so, companies need to make smart investments. Junior dev with a great assistance, planned support, and a clear training program will become a great asset. It really is as simple as that.12 -
Dev submitting PR: “Testing instructions: Self explanatory”
Dev reviewing PR: You need to be a bit more verbose than that.
Dev submitting PR: “Testing instruction: Feature should work as expected”
Dev reviewing PR: *sigh*… Feature doesn’t work as expected
Dev submitting PR: WHAT IS NOT WORKING AS EXPECTED??? I NEED MORE DETAIL THAN THAT!!
Dev reviewing PR: …….So do I you muppet5 -
Second semester
Java - OOP Course
We had to write a game, an arkanoid clone
Neat shit
And a fun course, mad respect to the Prof.
BUT
Most students, including me had this ONE bug where the ball would randomly go out of the wall boundaries for no clear reason.
A month passed, sleepless nights, no traces.
Two months later. Same shit. Grades going down (HW grades) because it became more and more common, yet impossible to track down.
3 months later, we had to submit the HW for the last time which included features like custom level sets, custom blocks and custom layouts.
So before we submit the game for review, they had pre-defined level sets that we had to include for testing sake.
I loaded that.
The bug is back.
But
REPRODUCIBLE.
OMG.
So I started setting up breakpoints.
And guess what the issue was.
FLOATING FUCKING POINT NUMBERS
(Basically the calculations were not as expected)
Changing to Ints did it's job and the bug was officially terminated.
Most satisfying night yet.
Always check your float number calculations as it's never always what you expect.
Lesson learned, use Ints whenever possible.18 -
At one of my former jobs, I had a four-day-week. I remember once being called on my free Friday by an agitated colleague of mine arguing that I crashed the entire application on the staging environment and I shall fix it that very day.
I refused. It was my free day after all and I had made plans. Yet I told him: OK, I take a look at it in Sunday and see what all the fuzz is all about. Because I honestly could fathom what big issue I could have caused.
On that Sunday, I realized that the feature I implemented worked as expected. And it took me two minutes to realize the problem: It was a minor thing, as it so often is: If the user was not logged in, instead of a user object, null got passed somewhere and boom -- 500 error screen. Some older feature broke due to some of my changes and I never noticed it as while I was developing I was always in a logged in state and I never bothered to test that feature as I assumed it working. Only my boss was not logged in when testing on the stage environment, and so he ran into it.
So what really pushed my buttons was:
It was not a bug. It was a regression.
Why is that distinction important?
My boss tried to guilt me into admitting that I did not deliver quality software. Yet he was the one explicitly forbidding me to write tests for that software. Well, this is what you get then! You pay in the long run by strange bugs, hotfixes, and annoyed developers. I salute you! :/
Yet I did not fix the bug right away. I could have. It would have just taken me just another two minutes again. Yet for once, instead of doing it quickly, I did it right: I, albeit unfamiliar with writing tests, searched for a way to write a test for that case. It came not easy for me as I was not accustomed to writing tests, and the solution I came up with a functional test not that ideal, as it required certain content to be in the database. But in the end, it worked good enough: I had a failing test. And then I made it pass again. That made the whole ordeal worthwhile to me. (Also the realization that that very Sunday, alone in that office, was one of the most productive since a long while really made me reflect my job choice.)
At the following Monday I just entered the office for the stand-up to declare that I fixed the regression and that I won't take responsibility for that crash on the staging environment. If you don't let me write test, don't expect me to test the entire application again and again. I don't want to ensure that the existing software doesn't break. That's what tests are for. Don't try to blame me for not having tests on critical infrastructure. And that's all I did on Monday. I have a policy to not do long hours, and when I do due to an "emergency", I will get my free time back another day. And so I went home that Monday right after the stand-up.
Do I even need to spell it out that I made a requirement for my next job to have a culture that requires testing? I did, and never looked back and I grew a lot as a developer.
I have familiarized myself with both the wonderful world of unit and acceptance testing. And deploying suddenly becomes cheap and easy. Sure, there sometimes are problems. But almost always they are related to infrastructure and not the underlying code base. (And yeah, sometimes you have randomly failing tests, but that's for another rant.)9 -
Me visiting a bar...
While going for a smoke...
Woman: Can I ask you a very impolite and downright rude question..?
*expects a Facebook hacking question*
Me (hesitant): .. sure, ask ahead...
Woman: I've never seen you here before. Who are you?
Me: *tells name*
(thinking) not what I expected! (:
Woman: So you're living mostly on the internet?
Me: yeah pretty much... 🤔
Woman: So I live here next to that lawyer...
Me: I don't know most of the area here, where's that?
Woman: Why don't you look it up, hmm? 😜
Quality pwnage!! 😆19 -
A real interaction I just had...
Team Member: "Can you handle this ticket for a bug fix?"
Me: "Whats the problem?"
TM: "We aren't exactly sure..."
Me: "Ok, so can you show it to me?"
TM: "We can't get it to happen again, and when it does the machine freezes and we can't debug it..."
Me: "So, if I find a fix then how do we test to make sure it worked?"
TM: "I'm not sure..."
Then today,
Product Manager: "How's that bug fix going?"
Me: "Well, let's see. The problem still hasn't been defined. I have never been able to recreate the issue. I have a hacky fix in a PR..."
PM: "Great, so we can deploy today?!?"
Me: "No, because we have no way to reproduce or test this issue at all..."
PM: "Do you think your fix will work?"
Me: "Honestly, no. If you're asking for my opinion then you can have it. IMO this is NOT a bug fix but a change to how the system operates altogether. This system was built by someone who didn't know what they are doing. We have done our best with it but it is a house of cards. And now the solution is to replace a card at the bottom layer. It is likely that no matter what fix we do (even when we can fucking test it) that it will topple the house of cards..."
PM: ~Looking at me in disbelief~
Me: "If you ask me for my honest professional opinion then you will get it. Keep that in the future if that honest response was outside what you expected."
PM: "I will do that, thanks for your assessment"
Where do we go from here? God only knows.
Praise Joe Pesci5 -
I realize now I probably shouldn't have called out my manger's bullshit if I wanted to keep my job. We were told to work a Sunday and our PO called it a "Smack-a-thon."
I said, "No let's not use stupid names. Let's call things what they are. This is a management failure Sunday."
That was during new hire lunch, in front of my manager.
I worked the first Sunday. I refused to work the second one. I've also been refusing to work over 45 hours a week.
So I guess I could have seen it coming. My manager didn't even have the gums to do it himself. He had the HR lady do it, while I was working remote from home. She told me it wasn't a 9 to 5 shop and that people there are expected to work long hours (People on my team are working 80+ a week for several months).
I took the train in to get my stuff. No one was there. My computer already gone. Couldn't even say "Go fuck yourself to anybody."
So I feel better now. I haven't taken a day of since I started in February, so it's time for some vacation and an unemployment check.
It was a really terrible job, and terribly mismanaged. I'm glad I stood my ground and knew what I was worth. I wish my co-workers had done the same.
I should have tried to start a union.8 -
I have never been fucked more in my life. A month ago I finished a 3 month internship for my last year of my education. And next to the internship I only have my thesis to defend and voila, I got my diploma! The internship itself went awesome, met some very interesting people, had a ton of fun working there and they were really happy about me.
But then it started, about 2 weeks after my internship started I got an email that my mentor (from school itself) had changed. It changed to a guy who's known for his insane way of teaching and being very unprofessional. Sometimes when I had a class on another level a bit further in the hall, we could hear him screaming while he was "teaching". He's really insane and should in no way be teaching to students. On top of that he has very little knowledge about CS, since he "teaches" maths.
So after I got the news I knew I was fucked. This guy is really hard to communicate with. And I'd never be able to have a decent, professional conversation with him.
So after I did everything I knew I was supposed to do, I tried to contact him on what else he'd need from me. His emails were crazy, unprofessional, and in no condition of being able to read and understand. So I started to get really annoyed but I didn't make this clear towards him. I even complained to another person of my school in a very polite way by saying that our communication wasn't going so well, I got no answer from that person and she even forwarded my complaint to him without asking for my permission and answering me.
So I kept doing what he kinda asked for, but had no idea if I was doing it wrong or right since I almost never got an answer from him, or the answer was not even an answer to my questions in the first place.
Today I had my presentation of the internship in front of him. It's the first time I see him since this school year. I give my presentation being quite happy of what I did at the company. When I was finished he starts bashing me into oblivion with ignorant questions, comments and very deconstructive negative feedback. Me not knowing what the fuck is happening and getting really angry inside standing there with nothing to say. I answered all of his questions as good as I could. But he was tearing me down so fucking hard. Because I only had half an hour I sticked with the most important stuff about my internship, didn't go to deep into all of it because he's not a fucking it'er anyway, and he asked for it specifically not to go deep into the project. But now he's saying I'm not giving enough information?! (He wanted to know what IDE I used?!?! What the fuck has that to do with anything)
So although I had a wonderful internship and I completed my project far better than the company had expected, my presentation went awful. I'm thinking that the guy was predetermined in failing me. How can I do a good job if he himself is not give a fuck about me. So now he's probably failing me for something he has no clue of what I did, and it's not even my fault.
I have no idea what I should be doing now. I start working in the second week of February but I probably won't get my bachelors degree until September now because of this fucker. I'm even thinking on taking legal actions. This guy just fucked my self confidence so hard. I'm fucking depressed right now15 -
The strangest place I've ever coded... I woudn't say it was the strangest, but definitely the least expected?
The hospital's recovery room after my second child.
I was working at/in Hell at the time (see previous rants concerning API Guy and the asshole salesman CEO). Said salesman douchebag ceo bossman had no recollection of me being expecting, going to the hospital, or even why I was there (and if he did, he wouldn't have cared at all). He still insisted I work on his shit features because they were so important for his ever-so-important client and their new signups that they were going to do anyway. I loathe him so fucking much.
Anyway, the feature in question was pretty tiny: during the new client onboarding process, if the client came from a specific affiliate link, the frontpage should change to reflect that affiliate's branding -- different background, a custom header, etc. It was pretty easy to do, though I made certain he didn't know that. During an hour while everyone else was asleep (and while I wasn't passing out from exhaustion), I pulled out my macbook air and built his stupid feature next to my hours-hold newborn.
Did I get any appreciation for that? Sure! He showed appreciation by not yelling at me for a few days. But only because he thought the feature was difficult and that I got it done quickly, not because anything else was difficult. Asshole.
Yes, I told him several times before and several times more afterward. I don't know what goes though his head or how it even works, but it didn't seem like a big deal to him, and he kept forgetting, or maybe he just pretended to listen like he always did. Fucking asshole apparently never heard of maternity leave. I could rant and swear and curse and fume and rage about him for years 🤬 I can't believe I was so excited when I netted that job.
But anyway, building the feature was actually kind of relaxing. I organized and wrote the entire project myself, so working with it was a pleasure, and it was an easy change that I could abstract nicely and cleanly. I totally didn't mind doing it, and actually kind of enjoyed it. I just hated who I was doing it for, and that he didn't fucking care. Used and abused? absolutely. I hope he dies in the most painful, gruesome way possible. Spaghettification might not even be awful enough6 -
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.6 -
Back in my teenage , a friend of mine asked me «Can you make me a software that guesses the result of a football match ?» I said «Sure, but you have to tell me how to calculate the chances of a team»
«Yeah, use the previous performances in the league»
«Ok, but you have to tell me how to calculate the expected result using previous performances» He laughed at me and said «If i knew how to calculate chances of winning/losing, i would not need a software!»
I tried to explain it simply «Computers can execute basic operations like sums or subtractions, and they know how to follow a list of basic instructions to give you a result»
He looked me like «If computers are so stupid like you are telling me now, are we all crazy idiots trying to learn how to use stupid machines??» and stated that i obviously misunderstood the real power of a computer. I walked back home thinking how funny was my friend believing in some kind of magic inside box called pc.
Few years later, i start studying IT at university. In the free time i look for small jobs like website development, small office network setup, pcs repair.
I continue noticing people believing that pcs knows what to do and how to do it.
«You sure I lost my data ? No i didn't do a backup. You sure my pc didn't do a backup ? No i hadn't a backup software»
«Why antivirus asks me what to do with the viruses it found. It should delete them obviously! Change my antivirus, it's too stupid for my pc»
«I want more people finding my business thanks to my website. How I imagine my website ? Yeah it has to be cool and full of cool stuff»
All that boring stories leads to my final question :
is our job dealing with persons who think we are some kind of wizard, well learned about dominating the pc magic ?
Please answer no.Please.13 -
!!privacy
!!political
I had a discussion with a coworker earlier.
I owed him for lunch the other day, and he suggested I pay him back either with cash (which I didn't have), Venmo, or just by him lunch the next time (which I ended up doing).
I asked about Venmo, and he said it was like paypal, but always free. that sounded a bit off -- because how are they in business if it's always free? -- so I looked it up, and paid special attention to their privacy policy.
The short of it: they make money by selling your information. That's worth far more than charging users a small fee when sending $5 every few weeks. Sort of what I expected when I heard "always free," but what surprised me is just how much they collect. (In retrospect, I really shouldn't have been surprised at all...)
Here's an incomplete list:
* full name, physical address, email, DoB, SSN (or other government IDs, depending on country)
* Complete contact list (phone numbers, names, photos)
* Browser/device fingerprint
* (optional) Your entire Facebook feed and history
* (optional) all of your Facebook friends' contact info
* Your Twitter feed
* Your FourSquare activity
(The above four ostensibly for "fraud prevention")
* GPS data
* Usage info about the actual service
* Other users' usage info (e.g. mentioning you)
* Financial info (the only thing not shared with third parties)
Like, scary?
And, of course, they share all of this with their parent company, PayPal. (The privacy policy does not specify what PayPal does with it, nor does it provide any links that might describe it, e.g. PayPal's "info-shared-by-third-parties" privacy policy)
So I won't be using Venmo. ever.
I mentioned all of this to my coworker, and he just doesn't understand. at all. He even asks "So what are they going do with that, send me ads? like they already do?"
I told him why I think it's scary. Everything from them freely selling all of your info, to someone being able to look through your entire online life's history, to being able to masquerade around as you, to even reproducing your voice (e.g. voice clips collected by google assistant), to grouping people by political affiliations.
He didn't have much to say about any of them, and actually thought the voice thing was really cool. (All I could think of was would happen if the "news" had that ability....) All of his other responses were "that doesn't bother me at all" and/or "using all of these services is so convenient."
but what really got me was his reaction to the last one.
I said, "If you're part of the NRA, for example, you'd be grouped with Republicans. If they sell all of this information, which they do, and they don't really care who buys it or what they do with it... someone could look through the data and very very easily target those political groups."
His response? "I don't have to worry about that. I'm a Democrat, and have always voted Democrat. I'll tell anyone that."
Like.
That's basically saying every non-democrat is someone you should be wary of and keep an eye on. That's saying Democrats are the norm and everyone else is deviant and/or wrong.
and I couldn't say anything after this because... no matter what I said, it would start a political conflict, and would likely end with me being fired (since the owner is also a democrat, and they're very buddy-buddy). "What if they target democrats?" -> "They already do!" or "What if democrats use it against others?" -> "They deserve it for being violent and racist, but we never would" (except, you know, that IRS/tea-party incident for example...)
But like, this is coming from someone who firmly believes conservatives are responsible for all of the violence and looting and rioting and mass shootings in the country. ... even when every single instance has been by committed by democrats. every. single. one.
Just...
jfl;askjfasflkj.
He doesn't understand the need for privacy, and his world view is just... he actually thinks everyone with different beliefs is wrong and dangerous.
I don't even know how to deal with people like this. and with how prevalent this mindset is... coupled with the aforementioned privacy concerns... it's honestly *terrifying.*65 -
Story time. My first story ever on devRant.
To my ex-company that I bear for a long time... I joined my ex-company 3 years ago. My ex-company assigned me and one girl teammate to start working on a brand new big web project (big one - two members - really?)
My teammate quitted later, I have to work alone after then. I asked if someone can join this project, but manager said other people are busy. Yea, they are fucking busy reading MANGA shit everyday... Oops, I saw it because whenever I about to leave my damn chair, they begin chanting some hotkey magic and begin doing "poker face" like "I'm doing some serious shit right here".. FUCK MY CO-WORKERS!
My manager didn't know shit about software development, and keep barking about Agile, Waterfall and AI shit... He didn't even fucking know what this project should look like, he keep searching the internet for similar functions and gave me screenshots, or sometimes they even hold a meeting of a bunch of random non-related guys who even not working on the project, to discuss about requirements, which last for endless hours... FUCK MY MANAGER!
I was the one in charge for everything. I design the architecture, database, then I fucking implement my own designed architect myself, and I fucking test functions that I fucking implemented myself based on my fucking design. I was so tried, I don't know what the fuck I am working on. Requirement changes everyday. My beautiful architecture began to falling off. I was so tired and began use hack fixes here and there many places in the project. I knew it's bad, but I just don't have time to carefully reconsider it. My test case began becoming useless as requirements changed. My manager's boss push him to finish this project. He began to test, he start complaining about bug here and there, blaming me about why functions are broken, and why it not work as he expected (which he didn't even tell my how he expected). ... I'm not junior developer, but this one-man project is so overwhelmed for me... FUCK MY JOB!
At this time, I have already work this project for almost 2.5 years. I felt very upset. I also feel disappointed about myself, although I know that is not all my entire faults. The feeling that you was given a job, but you can not get it done, I feel like a fucking LOSER. I really wanted to quit and run away from this shithole. But on the other hand I also want to finish this project before I quit. My mind mixed. I'm a hard-worker. I keep pushing myself, but the workplace is so toxic, I can feel it eating up my motivation everyday. I start questioning myself: "Is the job I am doing important?", "If this is really important project, didn't they should assign more members?", I feel so lonely at work... MY MIND IS FUCKED UP!
Finally, after a couple months of stress. I made up my mind that no way this project is gonna end within my lifespan. I decide to quit. Although my contract pointed that I only need to tell one month in advance. I gave my manager 3 months to find new members for project. I did handle over what I know, documents, and my fucked up ultra complexity source code with many small sub-systems which I did all by myself.
Well, I am with a new employer right now. They are good company. At least, my new manager do know how to manage things. My co-workers are energy and hard-working. I am put to fight on the frontline as usual (because of my "Senior position"). But I can feel my team, they got my back. My loneliness is now gone. Job is still hard, but I know for sure that I'm doing things on purpose, I am doing something useful. And to me that is the greatest rewards and keep me motivative! From now, will be the beginning for first page of my new story...
Thanks for reading ...12 -
A decade ago 800x600 was pretty much the standard resolution for devices and 5 sec response time was considered fast. Animations were minimal and websites were easier to read. Programmers debated around topics like which loop runs faster, i++ or ++i, while vs doWhile and so on. In general, we were closer to understanding what happens behind the browser curtain and how code needs to be organized to make it more maintainable.
Today the level of abstraction is much higher. I don't think devs can contemplate on the finer aspects of programming efficiency; they'd rather rely on a code library to do all the grunt work. With the explosion of devices and platforms, the focus has shifted from programming to assembling. Programmers need to know their tools first, then write code. The tool is expected to work well with a millisecond response time, not the programmer's code.
Moving forward, I think programming would be more about building higher abstraction utilities/libraries that are integrated by other tools, which is already happening. Marketing an App would become more important than the actual skill needed to develop it.
A bit far-fetched, but I think the future programmer would be a lot like a stock market analyst who has a bunch of windows in front, just observing data or algorithm patterns created by an AI engine and cherry-picking a specific combination of modules that might make the next big sensational app.8 -
🍿🍿 pull up a chair and get comfy. This was a few years ago and anger has filled some details, so bear with me...
One day, during one of rare afternoons off of work, I was in the library to work on a group project for school. This was maybe a month before it was due, so we were tracking for decent progress and one less stressor over finals. It was about 80° F out, with the perfect breeze for the beach, but school comes first.
I'm team lead (which is terrifying, but less important) and my bro C shows up early to be ready to go on time because he's professional. I'M SO BAD I FORGOT DOUCHEBAGS NAME, so he's A (for asshole), shows up AN HOUR AND 15 MINUTES LATE. But it's not the end of the world, C and I worked around our database schema (which A sent us and we approved), so we could iron out kinks as we went.
A gets there... Fucking finally.
Fucker didn't have the database built (had 2 months to do it, we all agreed on schema a month prior. We're trying to be the adults our ages claim is to be).
*breathe in, count to 10* not a problem, A, just go ahead and start it now so we can at least check what we have.
Ok, my queen, I'll have it done in 10 minutes...
🤔🤔
We needed an id (sku... Which, in 99.9999% of companies is numeric), a short name (xBox one, Macbook, don't smart tv), a description and a price (with 2 decimals). All approved by all 3 of us.
His sku ranges from 3 to 9 ALPHA NUMERIC CHARACTERS, the names were even more generic than expected (item1, item 2, Item_3), no description, and he somehow thought US currency had 5 decimal places!!! (it's more accurate...)
There was an epic, royal, and expensive fight scene in the library (may have been during the Lenten season I decided to give up caffeine AND fast for 40 days to prove a point to an ass wipe of a history teacher, don't recall). I made him cry, he failed the class because C and I wound up fixing everything he touched (graded by commits, because it was also an intro to git, but also, a classmate saw it all), and I had to buy multiple people coffee for yelling in the library.
A tried making out buttons work (I was fed up and done thinking for the day, so moved to documentation), but he fucked those up. I then made those worse by having nested buttons, but I deleted all his shit and started over and fixed it.
I then cried, but C and I survived and have each others backs still.11 -
To those that think they can't make it.
To those that are put down by those that don't understand you.
And to those that have never had a dream come true.
Not a rant, but the story of how I got into programming
I've always been into tech/electronics. I remember being told once that when I was 3, I used to take plug sockets to pieces. When I was 7, I built a computer with my dad.
There isn't a thing in my room that hasn't been dismantled and put back together again. Except for the things that weren't put back together again ;)
When I was 15, I got a phone for Christmas. It was a pretty crappy phone, the LG P350 (optimus ME). But I loved it all the same.
However I knew it could do a lot more. It ran a bloated, slow version of Android 2.2.
So I went searching, how can I make it faster, how to make it do more. And I found a huge community around Android ROMs. Obviously the first thing I did was flashed this ROM. Sure, there were bugs, but I was instantly in love with it. My phone was freed.
From there I went on to exploring what else can be done.
I wanted to learn how to script, so over the weekend I wrote a 1000 line batch (Windows cmd) script that would root the phone and flash a recovery environment onto it. Pretty basic. Lots of switch statements, but I was proud of it. I'd achieved something. It wasn't new to the world, but it was my first experience at programming.
But it wasn't enough, I needed more.
So I set out to actually building the roms. I installed Linux. I wanted to learn how to utilise Linux better, so I rewrote my script in bash.
By this time, I'd joined a team for developing on similar spec'd phones. Without the funds to by new devices, we began working on more radical projects.
Between us, we ported newer kernels to our devices. We rebased much of the chipset drivers onto newer equivalents to add new features.
And then..
Well, it was exam season. I was suffering from personal issues (which I will not detail), and that, with the work on Android, I ended up failing the exams.
I still passed, but not to the level I expected.
So I gave up on school, and went head first into a new kind of development. "continue doing what you love. You'll make it" is what I told myself.
I found python by contributing to an IRC bot. I learnt it by reading the codebase. Anything I didn't understand, I researched. Anything I wanted to do, google was there to help me through it.
Then it was exam season again. Even though I'd given up on school, I was still going. It was easier to stay in than do anything about it.
A few weeks before the exams, I had a panic attack. I was behind on coursework, and I knew I would do poorly on exams.
So I dropped out.
I was disappointed, my family was disappointed.
So I did the only thing I felt I could do. I set out to get a job as a developer.
At this stage, I'd not done anything special. So I started aiming bigger. Contributing to projects maintained by Sony and Google, learning from them. Building my own projects to assist with my old Android friends.
I managed to land a contract, however due to the stresses at home, I had to drop it after a month.
Everything was going well, I felt ready to get a full time job as a developer, after 2 years of experience in the community.
Then I had to wake up.
Unfortunately, my advisors (I was a job seeker at the time) didn't understand the potential of learning to be a developer. With them, it's "university for a skilled job".
They see the word "computer" on a CV, they instantly say "tech support".
I played ball, I did what I could for them. But they'd always put me down, saying I wasn't good enough, that I'd never get a job.
I hated them. I'd row with them every other day.
By God, I would prove them wrong.
And then I found them. Or, to be more precise, they found me. A startup in London got in contact with me. They seemed like decent people. I spoke with their developers, and they knew their stuff, these were people that I can learn from.
I travelled 4 hours to go for an interview, then 4 hours back.
When I got the email saying they'd move me to London, I was over the moon.
I did exactly what everyone was telling me I couldn't do.
1.5 years later, I'm still working with them. We all respect each other, and we all learn from each other.
I'm ever grateful to them for taking a shot with me. I had no professional experience, and I was by no means the most skilled individual they interviewed.
Many people have a dream. I won't lie, I once dreamed of working at Google. But after the journey I've been through, I wouldn't have where I am now any other way. Though, in time, I wish to share this dream with another.
I hope that all of you reach your dreams too.
Sorry for the long post. The details are brief, but there are only 5k characters ;)23 -
2 years into polytechnic I got my 1st big project as a subcontractor doing Symbian. No need to tell the company I presume.
Anyways, I was brought into the project just couple weeks before holiday season started. My Symbian programming experience was just the basics from school. 1st day I was crapping my pants out of anxiety. I pretty much didn't understand anything what my project manager or teammates were telling, so I just wrote EVERYTHING down on paper and recorded all the meetings to my laptop.
My job was to implement a very big end to end SDK feature. Basically from API through Symbian OS through HAL to other OS and into its subsystem. Nice job for a beginner :/
As the holidays were starting we had just drafted out the specification (I don't know how, because I didn't understand much of what was going on) and I got a clear mission from team lead. Make a working prototype of the feature during the time everybody else was on vacation.
"No problemos, I can do it" I BS'd myself and the team lead.
First 2 weeks I just read documentation, my notes and internal coding tutorials over and over again. I produced maybe couple of lines of usable code. I stayed at the office as late as I dared without seeming to obvious that I had no clue what I was doing. After the two weeks of staying late and seeing nightmares every night I had a sudden heureka moment. Code that I was reading started to make sense. Okay, still 2 weeks more until my teammates come back.
Next 2 weeks were furious coding and I got better every day. I even had time to refactor some of my earlier code so that quality was consistent.
Soooo, holidays are over and my team leader and collagues are very interested with my progress. "You did very well. Much better than expected. Prototype is working with main use case implemeted. You must have quite high competence to do this so well..."
"Well...I did have to refactor some stuff, so not 10/10"
I didn't say a word of my super late nights, anxiety and total n00biness.
Pretty much finished "like a boss". After that I was on the managers wanted list and they called me to ask if I had the time work on their projects.
Fake it, crap your pants, eat your crap and turn into diamonds and then you make it.
PS. After Symbian normal C++ and almost any other language has been a breeze to learn.2 -
Online tutorial pet peeves
————————————
My top 10 points of unsolicited ranting/advice to those making video tutorials:
1. Avoid lots of pauses, saying “umm” too much, or other unnecessary redundancy in speech (listen to yourself in a recording)
2. If I can’t understand you at 1.5 - 2x playback speed and you don’t already speak relatively quickly and clearly, I’m probably not going to watch for long (mumbling, inconsistent microphone volume, and background noise/music are frequent culprits)
3. It’s ok to make mistakes in a tutorial, so long as you also fix them in the tutorial (e.g., the code that is missing a semicolon that all of a sudden has one after it compiles correctly — but no mention of fixing it or the compiler error that would have been received the first time). With that said, it’s fine to fix mistakes pertinent to the topic being taught, but don’t make me watch you troubleshoot your non-relevant computer issues or problems created by your specific preferences (e.g., IDE functionality not working as expected when no specific IDE was prescribed for the tutorial)
4. Don’t make me wait on your slow computer to do something in silence—either teach me something while it’s working or edit the video to remove the lull
5. You knew you were recording your screen. Close your email, chat, and other applications that create notifications before recording. Or at least please don’t check them and respond while recording and not edit it out of the video
6. Stay on topic. I’m watching your video to learn about something specific. A little personality is good, but excessive tangents are often a waste of my time
7. [Specific to YouTube] Don’t block my view of important content with annotations (and ads, if within your control)
8. If you aren’t uploading quality HD recordings, enlarge your font! Don’t make me have to guess what character you typed
9. Have a game plan (i.e., objectives) before hitting the record button
10. Remember that it’s easier to rant and complain than to do something constructive. Thank you for spending your time making tutorial videos. It’s better for you to make videos and commit all my pet peeves listed above than to not make videos at all—don’t let one guy’s rant stop you from sharing your knowledge and experience (but if it helps you, you’re welcome—and you just might gain a new viewer!)14 -
~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~ 🤷♂️4 -
I'm really close to just quitting coding all together. This job is sucking the life out of me. I've lost my interest in code and the idea that there are better jobs out there.
My "boss" who's not even really my boss but behaves like he is, is micromanaging my every tag, and is an information hog. He doesn't document, he doesn't tell me anything, I've been here six months and still don't know half of what I need to know to do my job properly!
I'm expected to implement a new responsive design, but we don't have design specifications.
Cool, you'd think, new ideas, complete overhaul! Let's get a good foundation in bootstrap going!
WRONG! It needs to fit in with the old, fuck- ugly pre 2000 design.
Not because of any design constraints in particular, but because HE wants it that way. You know what was fucking trendy in 2000? Tables. Tables fucking everywhere. YOU KNOW WHAT TABLES ARE NOT? RESPONSIVE YOU FUCKING ICE LOLLY CHEWER!
We have no development timeline, no process management, no fucking project management. THE FUCKING PASSWORDS WERE STILL STORED IN PLAIN TEXT UNTIL LAST MONTH YOU IRRESPONSIBLE BANANA DEEPTHROATER! 😤😤😤😤😤😤
I'm doing my best here to get something resembling the old page, but there needs to be some fucking compromise! We are in fucking 2017, let's work with Bootstrap instead of against it, how about that you fucking bald cactus!
I know enough about UI to know that the way we're going, this is just going to be another unusable fucking clusterfuck.
YOU KNOW THE BEST FUCKING PART? I'M A FUCKING BACKEND DEV AND I WAS HIRED AS SUCH! GIVE ME A DESIGN TEMPLATE AND I'LL DO MY BEST TO IMPLEMENT IT, BUT FUCK YOU FOR EXPECTING FRONT END LEVEL DESIGN KNOWLEDGE YOU DUMB FUCKING SPAGHETTI!14 -
First I wanna say how grateful I am that devRant exists, because my friends either don’t understand this vocab or don’t care lol.
Last week I worked on a pretty large ticket, opened a PR with 54 file changes. Just to follow standards I set the PR milestone to a future release version, but the truth is I didn’t care which version this work ended up in— I just needed it to go into the develop branch asap.
Since it was a large PR there was some expected discussion that prolonged its merging, but in the meantime I started a second branch that depended on some of the work from this branch. I set the new branch’s upstream to develop, fully expecting my PR to merge into develop, since that’s what I set the PR base to.
I completed all the work I could in the new branch, and got two colleagues to approve the initial PR so it would be merged into develop, I could add the finishing touch and get this work done seamlessly before the week was over. They approved, it got merged, I pulled develop, and… my work wasn’t there. I went to look at my PR and someone had changed the base branch to a release branch. It was my boss, who thought he was helping. (Our bosses don’t actually work on the same team as us, so he didn’t know. it’s weird. We have leads that keep track of our work instead.)
I messaged him and told him I really needed this in develop, knowing our release branch won’t be in develop for probably another week. I was very annoyed but didn’t wanna make him feel too bad so I said I’d just merge the release branch into my new branch. So many conflicts I couldn’t see straight. His response was “yeah and you’ll probably have a bunch of package manager conflicts too because that’s in that release.” He was right— I have so many package manager conflicts that I can’t even see how many compiler conflicts there are. I considered cherry picking my changes, but the whole reason I set develop as my upstream was to avoid having any conflicts since I’m working in the same functions, and this would create more.
So I could spend the next (?) days making educated guesses on possibly a thousand conflict resolutions, or I can revert my release branch merge and quietly step back and wait for the release branch to be merged into develop.
I’m sure cherry picking is the best option here but I’m genuinely too annoyed lol, and fortunately my team does not care to notice if I step back and work on something else to kill time until it’s fixed automatically. But I’m still in dire need of a rant because my entire plan was ruined by a well-meaning person who messed with my PR without asking, so here is that rant and I thank you for your time.8 -
How the fuck am I expected to salvage a fucking project that has been handed down to me with.
- No fucking clear architecture
- No fucking documentation
- Fucking shitty ass code base with no fucking coding standards
- The previous team was fucking learning a whole fucking new technology stack *Not fucking kidding* making fucking mistakes left and right
- No code reviews
- Mixing fucking local and cloud enviroment together
- No fucking testing
- Feature that were supposed to be implemented and are not working
- No configuration all the stuff are hard coded
- Full responsiblity for the whole stack
- Only one other guy with me
- And this fucking project has been delayed for a year
- MUCH FUCKING MORE WHERE THAT CAME FROM
Like what the fuck am I expected to do? I took the job thinking that people knew what the fuck they were doing and surprise surprise that was a fucking bust.
the problem is also I am the junior and these fucking people have more experience than me, what the fuck happened to over seeing people's work, PM doesnt give a shit, developers dont give a shit nobody gives a shit.
But when I got this surprise surprise now everyone is interested in finishing the project
BULLSHIT11 -
Alright, so my previous rant got a way better response than I expected! (https://devrant.io/rants/832897)
Hereby the first project that I cannot seem to get started on too badly :/.
DISCLAIMER: I AM NOT PROMOTING PIRACY, I JUST CAN'T FIND A SUITABLE SERVICE WHICH HAS ALL THE MUSIC I WANT. I REGULARLY BUY ALBUMS. before everyone starts to go batshit crazy regarding piracy, this is legal in The Netherlands for personal use. I think that supporting the artists you love is very good and I actually regularly pay for albums and so on but:
- I want all the music from about every artist in my scene. Either on Deezer or on Spotify this is not available and I'm not gonna get them both (they both have about half of the music I want). Their services are awesome but I'm not going to pay for something if I can't listen to all the music I like, hell even some artists (on deezer mostly) only have half their music on there and it's mostly not better on Spotify.
- I'd happily buy all albums because I love supporting the artists I love but buying everything is just way too fucking much."Get a premium music streaming subscription!" - see the first point.
You can either agree or disagree with me but that's not what this rant is about so here we go:
The idea is to create a commandline program (basically only needs to be called by a cron job every day or so) which will check your favourite youtube (sorry, haven't found a suitable non-google youtube replacement yet) channels every day through a cronjob and look for new uploads. If there are, it will download them, convert them to MP3 or whatever music format you'd like and place them in the right folder. Example with a favourite artist of mine:
1. Script checks if there are any new uploads from Gearbox Digital (underground raw hardstyle label).
2. Script detects two new uploads.
3. Script downloads the files (I managed to get that done through the (linux only or also mac?) youtube-dl software) and converts them to mp3 in my case (through FFMPEG maybe?).
4. Script copies them to the music library folder but then the specific sub-folder for Gearbox Digital in this case.
You should be able to put as many channels in there as you want, I've tried this with the official YouTube Data API which worked pretty fine tbh (the data gathering through that API). The ideal case would be to work without API as youtube-dl and youtube-dlg do. This is just too complicated for me :).
So, thoughts?43 -
I'm disappointed with my boss.
I've always felt that the company I work for was different, I'm a web dev in a foreign country, finding a job as a fresh graduate wasn't easy at all.
before joining this company, all the employers I've met expected so many skills from foreigners like me, while they sat the bar so low for local fresh grad candidates.
Except my current boss, after the second interview he said that he believes in my potential and he wants to take this risk, the risk of hiring a foreign fresh graduate.
After I joined I worked my ass off and after 9 months I became a team lead.
And my boss said to me that the risk he took was completely worth it and I exceeded expectations.
Now I'm involved in assessing candidates applying for web development role at this company, we have 3 candidates 2 local and 1 foreigner.
Ironically the foreigner proved great potential and understanding of web technologies that exceeds a fresh entry role.
The other 2 local were alright, need training but they pass the criteria for an entry level role.
I reviewed this objectively and urged the same man that hired me to consider hiring the foriegner.
He said no, because of Visa costs and because of the lengthy legal process employers need to go through to hire a foreigner, and asked me to move forward with the 2 locals and not lose them to another company.
I felt that, if i were in the foriegner candidate's shoes I would've felt that there's something wrong with me for that no one wants to hire me for my skills and what I've worked hard to achieve was all not enough, it would make me feel like an outcast.
I know that I should do what I'm told, after all he's the employer, but still.. this feeling is bothering me, in a way I feel like I've cheated or I was just lucky and I didn't really earn this job.4 -
Tl;dr porn is ruining my life.
Today I had a meeting with the project leader and the CTO. They had bad news, which did not come as a surprise.
In short, they said I did not pass the expectations they had, and unfortunately need to find somewhere else to work.
This is my third time being told to find somewhere else to work, and I really can't describe how it feels. I was even told that I maybe I should reconsider my future as a developer, and kids can do programming better than I can do.
It's really difficult when all you've done in the last year is to learn and improve your current skills.
I have good grades, a unique experience, built lots of unique projects, and a GitHub portfolio with high activity. The apps I've built are used by many customers today. I also have a blog with 600 k views where I share dev tips.
The thing with this work if I'm going, to be honest, is that they expected someone with senior experience, and unfortunately, I don't have that thus it takes many years to build it. So I started here with almost scratch experience of the things they needed.
On the other hand, it feels like a relief in that I can finally focus on my personal business. And maybe this wasn't the right place to work, maybe it requires a couple of jobs until I find the right place.
Despite the bumpy ride, and what such people tell you, I'm not going to give up.
10 years ago, my school teacher told me I was going to be a carpenter (nothing against that) but I manage to get an MSc degree in the engineering field.
There's a lot of shit going into your head when you receive such message like "What if they are true, what if I can't handle programming, what if I'll never be anything etc".
I'm not giving up, this is just a great story every successful person has.
What my number one problem is, and I will f*** win is porn addiction. Get rid of that, and the future is bright.
Sorry for mixing so many things here.14 -
When I started learning to code I couldn't wait to become a 'senior dev' thinking I would spend all my time writing awesome code.
Now that I am a 'senior dev' and have the experience I now spend 90% of my time documenting & planning and even less time coding :'(9 -
I've caught the efficiency bug.
I recently started a minimum wage job to get my life back in order after a failed 2 year project (post mortem: next time bring more cash for a longer runway)
I've noticed this thing I do at every job, where I see inefficiency and I think "how can I use technology to automate myself out of this job?"
My first ever application was in C++ for college (a BASIC interpreter) and it's been so long I've since forgotten the language.
But after a while every language starts to look like every other language, and you start to wonder if maybe the reason you never seriously went anywhere as a programmer was because you never really were cut out for it.
Code monkey, sure. Programmer? Dunno, maybe I just suffer from imposter syndrome.
So a few years back I worked at a retail chain. Nothing as big as walmart, but they have well over 10k store locations. They had two IBM handscanners per store, old grungy ugly things, and one of these machines would inevitably be broken, lost or in need of upgrade/replacement about once a year, per location. District manager, who I hit it off with, and made a point of building report with, told me they were paying something like $1500 a piece.
After a programming dry spell, I picked up 'coding' with MIT app inventor. Built a 'mostly complete' inventory management app over the course of a month, and waited for the right time.
The day of a big store audit, (and the day before a multi-regional meeting), I made sure I was in-store at the same time as my district manager, so he could 'stumble upon' me working, scanning in and pricing items into the app.
Naturally he asked about it, and I had the numbers, the print outs, and the app itself to show him. He seemed impressed by what amounted to a code monkeys 'non-code' solution for a problem they had.
Long story short, he does what I expected, runs it by the other regionals and middle executives at the meeting, and six months later they had invested in a full blown in house app, cutting IBM out of the mix I presume.
From what I understand they now use the app throughout the entire store chain.
So if you work at IBM, sorry, that contract you lost for handscanners at 10k+ stores? Yeah that was my fault (and MIT app inventor).
They say software is 'eating the world' but it really goes to show, for a lot of 'almost coders' and 'code monkeys' half our problem is dealing with setup and platform boilerplate. I think in the future that a lot of jobs are either going to be created or destroyed thanks to better 'low code' solutions, and it seems to be a big potential future market.
In the mean while I've realized, while working on side projects, that maybe I can do this after all, and taken up Kotlin. I want to do a couple of apps for efficiency and store tracking at my current employer to see if I'm capable and not just an mit app-inventor codemonkey after all.
I'm hoping, by demonstrating what I can do, I can use that as a springboard into an internal programming position at my current gig (which seems to be a company thats moving towards a more tech oriented approach to efficiency and management). Also watching money walk out the door due to inefficiency kinda pisses me off, and the thought of fixing those issues sounds really interesting. At the end of the day I just like learning new technologies, and maybe this is all just an excuse to pick up something new after spending so long on less serious work.
I still have a ways to go, but the prospect of working on B2B, and being able to offer technological solutions to common and recurring business needs excites the hell out of me..as cringy and over-repeated as that may sound.5 -
I have to rant a bit about the toxic reactions to a constructive Q&A website.
People keep complaining that they get downvotes and corrections, or stuff like that.
Are you fucking kidding me?
So you expect people to spend their own time for absolutely free, to help you, while you don't even want to invest in describing the issue you're having properly? And then complain that people are having issues in understanding your questions?
Let's look at this scientifically. Let's gather up some questions that have been received badly on SO in the last few hours. From the top (simply put https://stackoverflow.com/questions... in front of the id):
47619033 - person wants a discussion about an algorithm while not providing any information about what worked and what failed. "Please write a program for me". Breaking at least 2 rules.
47619027 - "check out my videos" spam
47619030 - "Here's the manual that has my answer but I can't find my answer in it".
47619004 - "how do I keep variables in memory"
47618997 - debug this exception, I'll give you no info on what I tried and failed. Screw this, you guys figure this out, I'm going out for beer.
47618993 - expects everyone to guess what the input is, what the expected output is, and whether he has read what HashMap is in the manual. But sure, this question is so far the best out of all the bad ones.
47618985 - please write code according to my specifications
Should I go on? There wasn't a single clear question about problems in code in this entire small set. Be free to continue searching, let me know if you find something that:
1. You understand what's being asked
2. Answer is clear and non-ambiguous (ex. NOT "which language is the coolest?")
3. Not asking someone to write a program for them.
4. Answer is not found in the most basic form of manuals (ex. php.net)
5. Is about programming.
The point is:
If you get downvoted on Stackoverflow - then you wrote a shitty question. Instead of coming over here and venting uselessly, simply address the concerns and at least TRY to write a clear question if you expect any answers.5 -
So following from this rant:
https://devrant.io/rants/618679/...
Warning long rant ahead
I resigned and my last day is tomorrow, I've released the app updates a week ago, patched a couple bugs for iOS.
My boss and the idiot who can't open an email on his phone go off to use the app as part of some training thing for the company.
I got a call yesterday saying the Android app has issues and I proceeded to ask my boss what type of phone they have:
"Samsung and Huawei"
I thought okay I need more info "what type of phone..." He responds with wouldn't have a clue....
I can't see the phone, didn't get a screenshot or anything like that but I'm expected to just know what the phone is.
My boss goes on to say yeah it's the app (he is literally the most computer illiterate person I could think of aside from guy who can't open emails on phone, how the fuck do you know that?)
Me: "From all the testing I've done the app works"
Look if you want a more robust error free update hire more than one developer I can't test every single fucking use case to determine the app is 100% bug free, I've tested on at least 10 phones before releasing the update just to be absolutely sure I got everything done and okay I missed something.
So I proceed to get my boss to tell the guy who has the issue I'll sign him up to the testing app to find out the cause and hopefully fix the issue, I setup crashlytics send the email and get a call from my boss saying the guy didn't get the email.
Well okay is it my problem that we have two emails for the same person where one of them is a typo? No it's the guy who asked and wrote down the email instead of actually forwarding a blank email from him to be absolutely sure, I sent the email to both just to be on the safe side.
I swear if he is another idiot who can't open emails on his phone well I can't help him, app works on my phone and the phones at work.
I need a phone where it doesn't work so I can get a solution I know works but if I have to deal with these idiots that can't even check an email how the fuck do I do that?
Sorry about the formatting just needed to get this off my chest before I start work.
Oh and I get asked "so who'll fix the bugs when you're gone" well I can't (in reality I'm not working for free, I'm not traveling 1 1/2 commute time to fix one bug for free, go hire someone you think will love to work for minimum wage and let's see if this guy can do what I did)8 -
A LOT of this article makes me fairly upset. (Second screenshot in comments). Sure, Java is difficult, especially as an introductory language, but fuck me, replace it with ANYTHING OTHER THAN JAVASCRIPT PLEASE. JavaScript is not a good language to learn from - it is cheaty and makes script kiddies, not programmers. Fuck, they went from a strong-typed, verbose language to a shit show where you can turn an integer into a function without so much as a peep from the interpreter.
And fUCK ME WHY NOT PYTHON?? It's a weak typed but dynamic language that FORCES good indentation and actually has ACCESS TO THE FILE SYSTEM instead of just the web APIs that don't let you do SHIT compared to what you SHOULD learn.
OH AND TO PUT THE ICING ON THE CAKE, the article was comparing hello worlds, and they did the whole Java thing right but used ALERT instead of CONSOLE.LOG for JavaScript??? Sure, you can communicate with the user that way too but if you're comparing the languages, write text to the console in both languages, don't write text to the console in Java and use the alert api in JavaScript.
Fuck you Stanford, I expected better you shitty cockmunchers.31 -
Definitly !rant; btw long post ahead
Soooo not so long ago i joined this community by chance just cuz i installed some app randomly found on google store and what can i say. Best decision ever!
I can say i never met such an interesting and diverse communitiy ever and i kin of ground fond of it (i usually dont get too attached to peoples).
After a while i felt the urge to get myself involved into some disscusion at some random post and i did it. But it felt empty as my image was just a plain green bubble of anonymity. But yeh, i am cool with it, i will customize it after some ++es. No problem!
I got incremented for a while and i got to make a simple generic avatar. I felt again a urge, but this time to customize even more. Sadly, anything cool needs approval by the people. Soo i kind of let it go as i am not really the kind to find myself talking in other businesses and i moved over.
Until i saw it! Not the tiger, not the bird but the dog! Annnd i wanted it so i made a joke that i am a wizard with an invisible dog. What can go wrong, right? Well the thing is.. it did not go wrong, as expected, but it went great, kinda unexpected.
How? Well, some random stranger felt me and gave me a hunble chance to get closer to my dreamy real dog. And so it begin, my crusade to get that damn dog!
But what i have realised fast is .. this is not facebook! Nor Instagram! People doesnot upvote attention whoreing or such lowly acts, but they are actually prone to support people who just.. get involved.
And so i did. I got involved. I actually got involved in a community! For a awkwardly introvert person that's something, but maybe more than few of you people can relate to this.
And today i finally reached that goal! I have a real doggo! Well, real as in not invisible, not as in a great responsability, but now i have both. But this was not such a big deal. The big deal is that i found people whos interests are alike to mine and are prone to help, support and befriend others. I must say, thanks to all! Wonderful time, and while i am not here for a long time, i will surely be!
Cheers and dev on!15 -
So I got an e-mail from a recruiter (a.k.a. recruiter spam) today looking for a candidate with four "essential skills" and my head almost exploded when I read what they were. I have regained my composure just enough to be able to write this rant, but I'm still not myself. I recommend sitting down for this. Are you ready?
The four "essential skills" were:
Java, Jenkins, Eclipse, IntelliJ
I don't know where to begin. Motherfucker, where do you get off telling me which IDE to use? Oh wait, you didn't, you expected me to be an "expert" with two completely different ones, you numb nuts. Why the fuck would I be? I swear to fuck these idiots would probably screen out the best programmer in the world because s/he uses VI/emacs/Atom/Sublime/fucking-Notepad.
I can hear them saying "oh, you don't know IntelliJ? Sorry, we need an expert in that."
Fuck off you filthy cunt! No, sorry, I take that back, I shouldn't be mean to the mentally disabled.
Also, Jenkins? Really? Any developer can pick up how to use Jenkins to its full effect in a matter of hours, or a couple of days at most.
Why do companies hire these jackasses to do a job as important as recruitment? Why do they write job specs that are so incredibly stupid? I almost replied to express interest so I could go to the interview and throw a bucket of red paint on them (because they're making me bleed inside).
Where's the Tylenol?5 -
the effort to get girls, and children for that matter into programming has been terrible. I never thought I could find something worse than code.org, but here it is: SmartGurlz (because what could be smarter than spelling your own gender wrong, right?). this was on shark tank and this lady was making robots to try to get girls into programming. they pretty much control dolls on wheels by means of scratch. it's terrible. first of all, how the fuck is that profitable? when a little girl wants to play dolls, what kind of girl wants to *program* it first. jesus, no kid wants that.
second, this girls who code thing makes me barf. the thought process for many organizations trying to push girls to code is "hmm, if we isolate girls and give them lower standards, then maybe they'll decide to go into a male-dominated industry," because, fuck logic right? idiocy is dreadful. lastly, what I hate most about so many of the girls coding organizations, is the fact that they have to embrace the stereotypes. almost every single one cares about "feelings" or something similar. its bullshit.
and don't get me wrong, women should have equal opportunity, but pushing them into stem fields isn't good. bias in the workplace is what we should be talking about, or other topics like women being paid less. trying to make girls interested in programming is complete bullshit, let them do what they want.
back to "SmartGurlz," I looked them up and they confirmed what I expected. the first thing I see? not anything related to programming whatsoever, but different dolls wearing different outfits. girls deserve something better, and shouldn't have to deal with organizations trying to push them into something they don't want to do.8 -
After 8 iTunes Testflight Beta approvals for my app ... better still, I got hte app approved for the App Store a week ago to "de-risk" our "final submission" ... That's 9 approvals for my app, and we're ready to submit version 1.0.0 and actually release on the store. We take last week approved app and "developer reject" if to make room for the final tweaked version (minor tweaks, minor bugfixes). Submit version 1.0.0., plenty of time before it needs to be released.
But, what's this? "Meta Data rejected" for v1.0.0 because some piece of shit at Apple wants to watch a video of the app working with our hardware. What about the previous 9 approvals with the demo account connected to the demo hardware?
So we send a video within 1 hour of their unexpected request about the very foundational fucntionality of our app. That was 24 hours ago and these fucking assholes haven't even responded, no sign of when they will trouble themselves to respond. Pure limbo.
All the work up to this point was to "de-risk" their infamously shitty review process and all of it was in vain because it's somehow brand new information that our app works with our hardware.
Holy fuck, what a bunch of power-tripping assholes. All I can do is pace around and review the previous 2 months in my head to figure out what I could have done better. But I could not possibly have expected that after all the Testflight Beta approvals and after the recent App Store approval, that they would suddenly doubt that our software actually works with our hardware!!!!!
FUCK YOU APPLE!!!! FUCK YOU WITH ALL MY HEART!!!!!!2 -
Warning: American perspective of some shit that happens in America that I do not know if it is the same in other places of the world.
I got a notification from my child's school saying that she has been selected for doing <bs activity> between the hours of 1-3 and that parent cooperation is expected. I called the institution and told them that she would not be participating. They asked me WHY, to which I answered that said schedule does not align with my daily schedule. They continue to press as to WHY she would not make it to which I added in a very harsh tone: "because I am fucking working and my wife is fucking working, what age do you think it is? the 1950s in which I can have some meaningless desk job and pay for a house that would be worth half a mil now a days when my wife stays at home all day and just goes with whatever whim y'all have?"
Needless to say, she is no longer in said activity group, but this seems to be very frequent inside of school systems in the U.S, they really ain't evolved much.
No, wait, they have, we have active shooter trainings now, that shit is semi-new.14 -
Dynamically typed languages are barbaric to me.
It's pretty much universally understood that programmers program with types in mind (if you have a method that takes a name, it's a string. You don't want a name that's an integer).
Even it you don't like the verbosity of type annotations, that's fine. It adds maybe seconds of time to type, which is neglible in my opinion, but it's a discussion to be had.
If that's the case, use Crystal. It's statically typed, and no type annotations are required (it looks nearly identical to Ruby).
So many errors are fixed by static typing and compilers. I know a person who migrated most of the Python std library to Haskell and found typing errors in it. *In their standard library*. If the developers of Python can't be trusted to avoid simple typing errors with all their unit tests, how can anyone?
Plus, even if unit testing universally guarded against typing errors, why would you prefer that? It takes far less time to add a type annotation (and even less time to write nothing in Crystal), and you get the benefit of knowing types at compile time.
I've had some super weird type experiences in Ruby. You can mock out the return of the type check to be what you want. I've been unit testing in Ruby before, tried mocking a method on a type, didn't work as I expected. Checked the type, it lines up.
Turns out, nested away in some obscure place was a factory that was generating types and masking them as different types because we figured "since it responds to all the same methods, it's practically the same type right?", but not in the unit test. Took 45 minutes on my time when it could've taken ~0 seconds in a statically typed language.11 -
Craziest bug, not so much in the sense of what it was (although it was itself wacky too), but in what I went through to fix it.
The year was 1986. I was finishing up coding on a C64 demo that I had promised would be out on a specific weekend. I had invented a new demo effect for it, which was pretty much the thing we all tried to do back then because it would guarantee a modicum of "fame", and we were all hyper-ego driven back then :) So, I knew I wanted to have it perfect when people saw it, to maximize impressiveness!
The problem was that I had this ONE little pixel in the corner of the screen that would cycle through colors as the effect proceeded. A pixel totally apart from the effect itself. A pixel that should have been totally inactive the entire time as part of a black background.
A pixel that REALLY pissed me off because it ruined the utter perfection otherwise on display, and I just couldn't have that!
Now, back then, all demos were coded in straight Assembly. If you've ever done anything of even mild complexity in Assembly, then you know how much of a PITA it can be to find bugs sometimes.
This one was no exception.
This happened on a Friday, and like I said, I promised it for the weekend. Thus began my 53 hours of hell, which to this day is still the single longest stretch of time straight that I've stayed awake.
Yes, I spent literally over 2+ days, sitting in front of my computer, really only ever taking bio breaks and getting snacks (pretty sure I didn't even shower)... all to get one damn pixel to obey me. I would conquer that f'ing pixel even if it killed me in the process!
And, eventually, I did fix it. The problem?
An 'i' instead of an 'l'. I shit you not!
After all these years I really don't remember the details, except for the big one that sticks in my mind, that I had an 'i' character in some line of code where an 'l' should have been. I just kept missing it, over and over and over again. I mean, I kinda understand after many hours, your brain turns to mush. and you make more mistakes, so I get missing it after a while... but missing it early on when I was still fresh just blows my mind.
As I recall, I finally uploaded the demo to the distro sight at around 11:30pm, so at least I made my deadline before practically dropping dead in bed (and then having to get up for school the next morning- D'oh!). And it WAS a pretty impressive demo... though I never did get the fame I expected from it (most likely because it didn't get distributed far and wide enough).
And that's the story of what I'd say was my craziest bug ever, the one that probably came closest to killing me :)5 -
Hey Root, remember that super high-priority ticket that we ignored for five months before demanding you rewrite it a specific way in one day?
Yeah, the new approach we made you use broke the expected usecases, and now the page is completely useless to the support team and they're freaking out. Drop everything you're doing and go fix it! Code-complete for this release is tonight! -- This right after "impacting our business flow" while being collapsed on the fucking floor.
Jesus FUCKING christ, what the fuck is wrong with these people?
If I dropped the ball on a high-priority ticket for two weeks, I'd get fired, let alone for five fucking months.
If I was a manager and demanded a one-day rewrite I can only imagine the amount of chewing out I'd receive, especially on something high-priority.
And let's not forget product ownership: imagine if I screwed up feature planning for someone so badly I made them break a support tool in production. I'd never hear the end of it.
Fucking double standards.
And while I'm at it. Some of the code I've seen in this codebase is awful. Uncommented spaghetti, or an unreadable mess with single-letter variables, super-tightly coupled modules so updates are nearly impossible, typos in freaking constants added across sixty+ files, obviously-incorrect comments, ... . I'll have to start posting snippets to show them off. But could I get away with any of it? ha. Hell no. My code must be absolutely perfect. I hear about any and every flaw, doesn't matter how minor, and nothing can go out until everything is just so.
Hell, I even hear about flaws in other peoples' code during my code reviews. Why? Because I should have fixed it, that's why. But if I do, I get yelled at for "muddying the waters."
Just. JESUS FUCKING CHRIST.
It's like playing a shell game where no matter which shell I pick (or point to their goddamn sleeve where they're clearly hiding it), I get insulted for being so consistently useless, and god damn, how can I never find the fucking pea or follow the damned rules? I'm so terrible and this is why "nobody trusts me." Fuck you.
I'll tell you why I can't find your damned pea: IT'S RATTLING INSIDE YOUR FUCKING HEADS, you ASSHOLE FUCKING IMBECILES.
That's right: one pea among the lot of them.
goddamn I am fucking pissed off.rant drop everything and rewrite your rewrite oopsie someone else made a mistakey double standards shell game root can do no right root swears oh my8 -
Navy story time again. Lots of blabbering, you have been warned.
I haven't written for some time, due to paperwork bullshit that can be easily automated by even the most shitty database... no, scratch that, the simplest Excel spreadsheet with basic formulae. But I digress.
On my quest to justify myself being unproductive, I'll share with you a small story I omitted from this post:
https://devrant.com/rants/2099473/...
The lunacy of the man involved, while certainly entertaining after a few years (and nautical miles) away, is certainly disturbing and most certainly true. (Late disclaimer: ALL my rants are not made-up. This is shit that truly happened before my very eyes, and while I was sober.)
After I set up some cute little stuff to try and get the CO interested, in order to give me permission (and a cut from the budget) to proceed in restructuring and upgrading the ship's net, I tried a more direct approach: connecting and setting up his work laptop with the ship's GPS, radar and AIS receptor via ethernet, and installing an ECS system so that he could monitor the ship's position, movement and targets from his office (the fat fuck couldn't be bothered to go up one deck). A day later he called me to his office.
Expecting some kind of... praise? Permission? Complaints on the font style? whatever, I entered. Oh, how I wish I had not.
I was barraged for TWO FUCKING HOURS by the CO, complaining that I was taking care of the net and PCs and neglecting the Navigation department (I was not, automation is my friend combating moronic paperwork). I would have thought it as just another failed attempt, but after TWO MINUTES from the end of the barrage:
CO:... so, my personal laptop is kind of slow, you think you can do anything about it?
ME: ....................
I.
SHIT.
YOU.
NOT.
What was rushing through my mind was somewhere between bipolar and multiple personality disorder, with the third option of Alzheimer's disease. I half-expected some Candid Camera crew to pop out, but no.
CO: So? Can you speed up my laptop?
ME: ............................... I don't know, sir, I have paperwork to take care of.
CO: That can wait, surely you can do something about it, you know computers.
ME: [really long pause, blood pressure rising] I'll look into it in a moment, sir.
And I never did. I told of the incident to the ship's doctor, and he expressed great worry over this, but in the end, nothing was done.
My sympathies to everyone who has to interact with non-technicians of the homo sapiens species (ironically, homo sapiens means "wise man" in latin... the irony).3 -
I found a weird bug where the output wasn't what I expected to be. After a few tries to fix it, I typed in something I expected was not going to work. It worked....2
-
Yesterday, my new (Irish) co-worker comes to my desk and asks me a question about an issue in his code.
His commenting all done in Irish.
Him: "If you want me I can translate the comments for you?"
Me: "Ní gá, is féidir liom é a léamh go foirfe." ("No need to, I can read it perfectly fine")
co-worker looking at me like: "wtf just happened?"
After a while, I spotted the issue (I noticed the expected output from one of the functions not being of the correct format - an integer instead of an array).
So I fixed it.
Next day (this morning) I came back at work, looked into my food drawer to see what I would eat for breakfast (yes, I have a drawer specifically for food, and yes, I eat breakfast at work), found a small box containing an Ulster Fry :D
Best breakfast at work in a long time :D6 -
I have to refactor code from an intern. He's VERY lucky that he already left the company.
If I'd say he programms like the first human that would be very insulting to that first human.
It looks like code at first sight, but when you try to understand what he was doing to achieve his goal you get a brainfuck. Duplicate code, unused code, dumb variable names like blRszN.
He wrote unittests like "expects Exception to be thrown or Server returns Statuscode 500".
Yes, Exception, the generic one.
THESE FUCKING TESTS ARE GREEN BECAUSE YOU DID NOT ACTUALLY TEST SOMETHING.
GREEN IN THIS CONTEXT MEANS: YOUR PRODUCTION CODE IS A BIG PILE OF SHIT.
I already removed 2 bugs in a test which caused another exception than the "expected" one and the test does still not reach the actual method under test.
Dumb fucktard.
The sad thing: The fuckers who did the code reviews and let this shit pass are still here writing code.4 -
So I'm back from vacation! It's my first day back, and I'm feeling refreshed and chipper, and motivated to get a bunch of things done quickly so I can slack off a bit later. It's a great plan.
First up: I need to finish up tiny thing from my previous ticket -- I had overlooked it in the description before. (I couldn't test this feature [push notifications] locally so I left it to QA to test while I was gone.)
It amounted to changing how we pull a due date out of the DB; some merchants use X, a couple use Y. Instead of hardcoding them, it would use a setting that admins can update on the fly.
Several methods deep, the current due date gets pulled indirectly from another class, so it's non-trivial to update; I start working through it.
But wait, if we're displaying a due date that differs from the date we're actually using internally, that's legit bad. So I investigate if I need to update the internals, too.
After awhile, I start to make lunch. I ask my boss if it's display-only (best case) and... no response. More investigating.
I start to make a late lunch. A wild sickness appears! Rush to bathroom; lose two turns.
I come back and get distracted by more investigating. I start to make an early dinner... and end up making dinner for my monster instead.
Boss responds, tells me it's just for display (yay!) and that we should use <macro resource feature> instead.
I talk to Mr. Product about which macros I should add; he doesn't respond.
I go back to making lunch-turn-dinner for myself; monster comes back and he's still hungry (as he never asks for more), so I make him dinner.
I check Slack again; Mr. Product still hasn't responded. I go back to making dinner.
Most of the way through cooking, I get a notification! Product says he's talking it through with my boss, who will update me on it. Okay fine. I finish making dinner and go eat.
No response from boss; I start looking through my next ticket.
No response from boss. I ping him and ask for an update, and he says "What are you talking about?" Apparently product never talked to bossmang =/ I ask him about the resources, and he says there's no need to create any more as the one I need already exists! Yay!
So my feature went from a large, complex refactor all the way down to a -1+2 diff. That's freaking amazing, and it only took the entire day!
I run the related specs, which take forever, then commit and push.
Push rejected; pull first! Fair, I have been gone for two weeks. I pull, and git complains about my .gitignore and some local changes. fine, whatever. Except I forgot I had my .gitignore ignored (skipped worktree). Finally figure that out, clean up my tree, and merge.
Time to run the specs again! Gems are out of date. Okay, I go run `bundle install` and ... Ruby is no longer installed? Turns out one of the changes was an upgrade to Ruby 2.5.8.
Alright, I run `rvm use ruby-2.5.8` and.... rvm: command not found. What. I inspect the errors from before and... ah! Someone's brain fell out and they installed rbenv instead of the expected rvm on my mac. Fine, time to figure it out. `rbenv which ruby`; error. `rbenv install --list`; skyscraper-long list that contains bloody everything EXCEPT 2.5.8! Literally 2.5 through 2.5.7 and then 2.6.0-dev. asjdfklasdjf
Then I remember before I left people on Slack made a big deal about upgrading Ruby, so I go looking. Dummy me forgot about the search feature for a painful ten minutes. :( Search found the upgrade instructions right away, ofc. I follow them, and... each step takes freaking forever. Meanwhile my children are having a yelling duet in the immediate background, punctuated with screams and banging toys on furniture.
Eventually (seriously like twenty-five minutes later) I make it through the list. I cd into my project directory and... I get an error message and I'm not in the project directory? what. Oh, it's a zsh thing. k, I work around that, and try to run my specs. Fail.
I need to update my gems; k. `bundle install` and... twenty minutes later... all done.
I go to run my specs and... RubyMine reports I'm using 2.5.4 instead of 2.5.8? That can't be right. `ruby --version` reports 2.5.8; `rbenv version` reports 2.5.8? Fuck it, I've fought with this long enough. Restarting fixes everything, right? So I restart. when my mac comes back to life, I try again; same issue. After fighting for another ten minutes, I find a version toggle in RubyMine's settings, and update it to 2.5.8. It indexes for five minutes. ugh.
Also! After the restart, this company-installed surveillance "security" runs and lags my computer to hell. Highest spec MacBook Pro and it takes 2-5 seconds just to switch between desktops!
I run specs again. Hey look! Missing dependency: no execjs. I can't run the specs.
Fuck. This. I'll just push and let the CI run specs for me.
I just don't care anymore. It's now 8pm and I've spent the past 11 hours on a -1+2 diff!
What a great first day back! Everything is just the way I left it.rant just like always eep; 1 character left! first day back from vacation miscommunication is the norm endless problems ruby6 -
Bit of an essay. TLDR: come Monday I'm either getting fired or promoted. And the CTO is a dickhead. If you think you work with me or know who I am, no you don't, shut the hell up.
Was having a discussion with my team, went on for a bit, at one point my manager mentioned that the CTO wanted me to go into the office occasionally, same thing I've had since I joined when they literally wanted me to move hundreds of miles to be close to the office mid covid when the office was closed. I give a nondescript answer. He's a bit more persistent, I snap a little but the conversation moves on. Discussion of company and team dynamics, at one point he makes a comment about people at another company being told if they don't go into the office they won't be eligible for promotion.
I ask everyone else on the call to leave.
I point out that 2 years ago me and him were interviewing candidates. He on a few occasions introduces me to candidates as a _senior_ engineer. My job title does not contain the word senior. I let it slide the first time, not worth it for a slip of the toung. Happens a couple more times, I take him aside and privately point out my job title does not contain the word senior. He says he didn't realise and thought I was.
My take away then: I'm expected to do the work of a senior without being paid for it and without being given the acknowledgement of the appropriate job title. I remind him of this. My job title hasn't changed. Fuck, I took a low ball offer when I joined and have had a minimal pay rise in like, 3 years. My tone is "not happy".
His response? He discussed promoting me with CTO however budged constraints. I somewhat understand, however.
We have promoted several people in the last few years. We have grown by hiring new people in the last few years (5 in a company of 30). There are ways to compensate someone in ways that do not impact day to day budget (shares, TC, total compensation, is normal terminology in the tech field for this). I ask why the hell should I travel a few hundred miles to the office to get get to know people, put effort in to a company that demonstrably doesn't value me? Particularly as all levels of management have completely failed at developing a social atmosphere during covid? My first month, I had 3 5 minute meetings with my manager a week. That was all of the communication I had with people. I literally complained and laid out what they should do instead, they adopted most of it.
I also ask him if he genuinely thinks being here is in my professional interest? My tone has well passed pissed off.
I will say, I actually quite like my manager, we have a good working relationship and I've learned a lot from him.
He makes some mediocre points, tries to give advice about value of shares. To me, the value of shares is zero until they are money. The value to the company, however, is that it's a sizeable chunk on their balance sheet and shares sheet that they have to be willing to justify. If I wanted money, I'd go work at a high frequency trading bank and make 5x what I'm on now. No joke, that's what they pay, I could get a job, came close in the past but went to amazon. He understands.
He says will discuss with CTO. They were on a call for like an hour. His tone has changed to "you will be promoted ASAP, comp may be structured as discussed". Point made.
I'm in this job because it's convenient, is easy for me. Was originally lower challenge than previous, has a range of chances to learn and _that's_ the value to me. He's suitably nervous.
Point made I think.
So given I swore a few times, at least once about the CTO. Interesting to see how it goes.
Message from him to the effect that he spoke to CTO, has been told to write a proposal for promotion (kinda standard), will discuss with HR on Monday as they're on holiday.
So, maybe not getting fired today?
Blood pressure still very high.10 -
So a few days ago I shared about the conflict with my colleague on learning React. Today I was let go. Obviously I asked why they would do that and they said they feel the problem isn't even my React knowledge but the fact I don't grasp the fundamentals of OO programming.
Thing is in these 3 months there has not been a single code review. They are either going of what my lying colleague told them (they claimed he was excluded from giving feedback), or the consultants who were hired to help us. And yes, I got feedback I should improve but at the same time the assurance so long as I show improvement it'd be fine. And I was told they could see improvement. So I'm not sure what changed but suddenly there is no budget to keep me on. In any case it feels like shitty corporate bullshit.
But I can't say they are wrong. I struggle to explain simple concepts I know in words. I've worked a series of bad jobs where nobody cared how you did stuff as long as it got done. I feel I'm so behind now and so affected by bad knowledge it's even harder to fix than to learn the first time. So I'm wondering how to fix this.
I'm really gutted too because I loved this company. I was finally getting a fair wage instead of being underpaid. The people were excellent. I felt I could finally relax and feel safe at work. And now I feel betrayed. Which for someone with self esteem issues is very hard. Can't trust in myself and can't trust in others.
I'm gonna try and pick myself up in the morning, but today I feel totally shit. This wasn't how I'd expected things to go. I thought my manager had intended to talk conflicts over but instead I get the boot. And the advice to stop overselling myself. Real useful that. Like it is on me that they hired me despite my subpar interview because my CV looked good. It's a shitty excuse. In any case they're now stuck with a dev that walks out of work, throws false accusations about colleagues, and another person warned me about to not engage because nothing good ever came from it. He's gonna keep over engineering everything and make up for all the time he wastes outside of work creating a dysfunctional environment for everyone. But yeah, easier to fire the new person who does her best despite the odds. And who cautioned against over engineering because we kept missing deadlines. And who believes in refactoring when it is needed because that's how agile works. Yeah better keep someone who has no sense of work life balance and makes others miserable then claiming he's being driven out by your ignorance. And of course the consultants who throw your own people under the bus. Can't get rid of those now.7 -
Follow-up to https://devrant.com/rants/1551635
I think that I've found the reason for this Acer motherboard's refusal to boot up now. Apparently this featureful piece of shit expects "something" on its ID pin as well.. and why ID pin you may ask? I reckon that it's because of "certified replacements". Because you know, if it doesn't come from our shitty factorias it's gotta be shit, right?!
How about no?!! You Acer really aren't the only ones capable of producing a fucking lithium battery! And did you ever think of the edge cases where you may want to feed a lab bench power supply's voltage into the phone to mimic the battery and troubleshoot the bloody thing? Because that's what I initially wanted to do, instead of that Doogee battery. The only reason why I didn't is because the supply is currently charging up another lithium cell that I salvaged from a donated (broken) Samsung tablet, and is taking longer than expected.
Point is, if you receive the appropriate fucking level of angry pixies, YOU SHOULD FUCKING USE THEM AND BOOT UP ALREADY!!! Regardless of whether it's some sort of certified fucking Acer component or not! Somewhere between 4.2 and 2.7V stable should be good enough regardless of what produces it!
At least AliExpress sells these batteries for about €4.5, and another €2 for shipping. Considering that I can buy batteries with this capacity for €2 a pop and free shipping, this would better fucking work. Especially since I'm buying an overpriced battery of which almost half the cost is fucking shipping, just for a stupid "certified" controller that' I'll also have to put between the board and any pixie wrangler or angry pixie containment device that I use to power this shitty board. Acer, you motherfuckers!!!1 -
Well... I had in over 15 years of programming a lot of PHP / HTML projects where I asked myself: What psychopath could have written this?
(PHP haters: Just go trolling somewhere else...)
In my current project I've "inherited" a project which was running around ~ 15 years. Code Base looked solid to me... (Article system for ERP, huge company / branches system, lot of other modules for internal use... All in all: Not small.)
The original goal was to port to PHP 7 and to give it a fresh layout. Seemed doable...
The first days passed by - porting to an asset system, cleaning up the base system (login / logout / session & cookies... you know the drill).
And that was where it all went haywire.
I really have no clue how someone could have been so ignorant to not even think twice before setting cookies or doing other "header related" stuff without at least checking the result codes...
Basically the authentication / permission system was fully fucked up. It relied on redirecting the user via header modification to the login page with an error set in a GET variable...
Uh boy. That ain't funny.
Ported to session flash messages, checked if headers were sent, hard exit otherwise - redirect.
But then I got to the first layers of the whole "OOP class" related shit...
It's basically "whack a mole".
Whoever wrote this, was as dumb and as ignorant to build up a daisy chain of commands for fixing corner cases of corner cases of the regular command... If you don't understand what I mean, take the following example:
Permissions are based on group (accumulation of single permissions) and single permissions - to get all permissions from a user, you need to fetch both and build a unique array.
Well... The "names" for permissions are not unique. I'd never expected to be someone to be so stupid. Yes. You could have two permissions name "article_search" - while relying on uniqueness.
All in all all permissions are fetched once for lifetime of script and stored to a cache...
To fix this corner case… There is another function that fetches the results from the cache and returns simply "one" of the rights (getting permission array).
In case you need to get the ID of the other (yes... two identifiers used in the project for permissions - name and ID (auto increment key))...
Let's write another function on top of the function on top of the function.
My brain is seriously in deep fried mode.
Untangling this mess is basically like getting pumped up with pain killers and trying to solve logic riddles - it just doesn't work....
So... From redesigning and porting from PHP 7 I'm basically rewriting the whole base system to MVC, porting and touching every script, untangling this dumb shit of "functions" / "OOP" [or whatever you call this garbage] and then hoping everything works...
A huge thanks to AURA. http://auraphp.com/
It's incredibily useful in this case, as it has no dependencies and makes it very easy to get a solid ground without writing a whole framework by myself.
Amen.2 -
I'm someone who' s productive so I get things done earlier than expected, so then I get time to rest. However, when the managers see me resting, they always think that I'm "not doing my job" or "idle" or "doing nothing" so they always ask me "what are you doing?" or "you've got things to do?".
From now on I will just pretend that every f*cking easy task is worth 1 week to do.15 -
Aaaah, I fucking love it to death, when customers spontaneously decide to hire a separate, unrelated company to add new content pages to the website developed by our company.
That furuncle of a company must have had real pro devs to just create a new /html folder, dump their shit content in there and just manually add links in the existing CMS pages.
HOLY FUCK!
As you might already have expected, the /html folder contains:
- static *.html files for every page
- inline CSS in the *.html
- the crappiest PHP mailing script I have ever witnessed
- images with random resolutions, mostly too small
The layout of these puke-ridden pages obviously doesn't fit neither the existing color palette, nor has anything common with the current layout or typography at all.
These bastards don't even use Git!
Come on, dear customer, could you PLEASE fucking NOT hire a completely separate company to do OUR job?
PLEASE? PLEASE?!
I had to compare the whole deployment folder with our repo to find out what else these brain-damaged cunts changed in our code!3 -
So... remember my first rants about my network at my last ship?
https://devrant.com/rants/2076759/...
https://devrant.com/rants/2076890/...
https://devrant.com/rants/2077084/...
Well... I had to visit them for an unrelated matter and found out that they are to pass general inspection the next week. Among the inspectors is a member of the cyber defence team. I took a quick look at the network, finding the things I'd expect:
- No updates passed to the server or installed since I left
- No antivirus updates since I left
- All certificates were expired
- Most services were shut down or unused
- All security policies were shut down
- Passwords (without expiration now) were written on post-it and stuck on screens
- ... and more!
I told the XO (the same idiot that complained about them CONSTANTLY) and he just shrugged me off and told me to """fix""" it. In one fucking afternoon.
I. SHIT. YOU. NOT.
The new admin there is a low ranking person who hasn't the faintest idea of how this works, and isn't willing to learn, either. They just dumped the duty on him, and he seems not to care. The cyber security inspector is going to have a field day. Or get grey hairs.
I told the XO that I needed at least a week to get them into working order (I have to re-set up my virtual Windows 2012 R2 server, download 2 years' worth of updates, repair 2 years of neglect etc.). The answer was what I expected:
"You know computers, you can do your magic and get it done in an afternoon."
Thank god I got transferred and don't have to answer to that idiot any more. Now, popcorn time, as I watch the fireworks.
Yes, I am a vengeful guy. I have told them, twice now, of what would happen. They didn't listen. At least now, with an official report on their heads, they just might.3 -
We are rebuilding an internal web app our company uses and this is how the meeting went down
Me: since this is a big undertaking so we should all work on this as a team and divide the work load
Boss: I can't afford the internal costs to have you all on this * assigns the part timer to the task*
Three months later after launch
Boss: this is not at all what I expected! I want the entire team on this now! It's a top priority!3 -
OK, so we had a session in which a so called Company (Some ecorise.in ) came to give Internship-Training-Program. Ok, he said it'll take 5-8 minutes, and then it took fucking 75 minutes for the session to end. Horrible blunders he made.
1) Did not tell about the company and important stuff for the first 50-60 minutes. Instead, was just focusing on why you should do an Internship, what is it's benefit, what does a company want from you. And why this Internship-Training Program is important... I mean seriously? - A training for Internship. 🤦🏻♂️
2) Said all the Web Developers can be Mobile App Developers with the help of just HTML and CSS.... Wow, so XAML/XML is shit now, and we will call APIs with the help of CSS rules. 🤦🏻♂️
OK, still I tolerated all that, then was the part when he said how much will be the stipend. It was fucking nothing, they said. That for first three months they will not give a single penny as it is training, and then IF the performance is good, then they will give stipend, and then Placement assurance. OK, that's good that they are assuring placement, but wait. Package of 2LPA INR... WTF Man, it's like $3107.28 for a whole Year.
OK, that too tolerated, then was the part when they said that they'll take the written test, I was like OK, let's see. We moved to a classroom, it went over-the-full capacity, so we moved back to the seminar hall. (Arrrrgggghhhhhhhhh), still tolerable. But then that guy realised that there were no question papers to take the test, then sent someone to get the print outs. Wasted 15+ minutes, I was burning inside.
In the whole seminar hall, I stood up and said, that when you knew there will be a test, why didn't you pre-prepared the sheets beforehand, he was like, that we didn't knew the count. But his tone was. like he got offended and Get-Lost-ed me out of the seminar.
Then even I said:
🙏🏻 - Nahi chaahiye aapki Company
(🙏🏻 - I don't want your Company).
And moved out.
But my point, I am a third Year College Student, and this Company came for our benefit, but I did so (and I am not sorry), so that's pretty obvious that the Company guy will talk (bitch) to the teachers about me, and tomorrow will be a bad day for me... But isn't it wrong on the side of the company also?
I mean, there was an attendance sheet passed in the beginning of the session, had he taken count from that and got the sheets printed, (He had almost an hour for that).
Secondly, when they knew that the count of students is more than expected, then why didn't they check for the classroom that whether the class can accommodate so many students or not. If not then something would have been planned accordingly... But no, the Guy (I guess, that small Company's Owner) got offended that a Student back-chat-ted a CEO of a so-called company, and so he just had to "Get-Lost" me. Checked the website of his Company, they have hardly done 3 Static Websites... I mean, WoW, I have done at-least 10X the work of the Company, alone!
I don't know, I feel happy that I kept my point, but I feel sad because I generally don't do this kind of thing (may be my tone was also wrong, I had other issues also, may be because of them and they all combined and this happened). I feel scared too, that I don't know what the Company guy will say to my teachers and what action will they take against me...
Because I know, none of my friends will stand with me when I go down, it's all fake here, everyone can just give sympathy, but nothing else.
I don't know why I am posting this here, and if you have read this till here, thank you. I just wanted to share my heart out... :-)9 -
I can't figure out shit..
To be honest I created this profile just so I can write down somewhere what I am going through.
So, once upon a time I had graduated from college and went right into a corporate (has only been 2 years since). I was fortunate enough that I got assigned a project that was just starting, and even though I had no clue what was going on, I started doing whatever was assigned.
I initially worked in java and then finished all my tasks earlier than expected, so they switched me to another C++ project that builds on top of it.
Fast forward 2.5 years, I'm now the team lead of the CPP project and all my friends who were in the core team have left the company.
As usual, the reason behind it is shitty management. These mfs won't hire competent people and WILL ABSOLUTELY NOT retain the ones that are. I can feel it in my bones that it is time for me to leave, but fuck me if I understand what I am good at.
I have been able to handle all the tasks that they threw at me, be it java or c++ - just because I love logic and algorithms. I have been dabbling in ML and AI since 4-5 years now, but could never go into it full time.
Now I'm looking at the job postings and Jesus Christ these bitches do not understand what they want. I have to be expert in 34567389 technologies, mastering each of whom (by mastering I mean become proficient in) would need at least 6-8 months if not more, all with 82146867+ years of experience in them.
I don't know if I am supposed to learn on Java (so spring boot and stuff) or I'm supposed to do c++ or I'm gonna go with Python or should I learn web dev or database management or what.
I like all of these things, and would likely enjoy working in each of these, but for fucks sake my cv doesn't show this and most of the bitch ass recruiter portals keep putting my cv in the bin.
Yeah...
If you have read so far, here's a picture of a cat and a dog.5 -
A month or so ago this manufacturer of soldering equipment contacted me with the request to make a video about a review unit (a soldering handle) that they'd send to me for free in exchange. Initially I was really pumped about it - company would send me free stuff!! - but fast-forward to today and I realized how terrible a choice I've made by accepting that offer.
See, that handle is worth only €40 and I've spent so much time on the bloody video material already that it'd make my "pay" expected to be close to €1/h if not less. I feel like I've been exploited, especially since I don't even like the handle's design and am not using it. It's just collecting dust, making my work essentially free labor.
I could return the item but that's gonna cost me a fuckload of money, I could pay for the handle and cut my losses that way.. or I could do the review anyway and end up feeling very bad about that company. Or I could tell them to fuck off and lose a supply chain for my soldering equipment.
I have no idea what to do about this..
Oh and the fact that the correspondent in that company has the worst Chinglish skills imaginable, the communication skills of a toddler and is also super indecisive (they asked me to make a YouTube video first which led me to assume a video format for YouTube, but instead they want to put it on their fucking AliExpress product page, rendering my existing video footage useless!) doesn't help either.. I hate that shit company. Fucking leeches!
Anyway, what would you do when you're in a position like that?6 -
Woo, rant time.
I've recently changed jobs to a new company due to a number of factors at my old job. I didn't tell my old boss (let's call him X) my expected salary, nor did I tell him which company I was going to.
However, I've been informed by someone that still works there that X has been discussing my new wage in front of everyone; he was telling everyone that I'm going to lose money by moving job and that I made a stupid decision.
I didn't leave due to money, it was due to X's inability to take constructive criticism, the constant subtle sexism of the office and just a generally bad overall feeling about the job/office going forward. Yes, I will admit that money did have a minor part in my decision to leave but I didn't verbalise that to anyone in the office, and I made X aware that my departure wasn't to do with money. I left on good terms.
I feel as though it was wrong of X to talk about his opinions on my new job in front of my ex-colleagues and friends. I don't know, maybe this is the norm and I've just been living in a cave before this, or maybe my last boss was just a bit of a douchenugget. Has anyone else had this experience?
I've got to meet up with everyone from my last place tomorrow to properly say goodbye and things.. but I'm not sure how to approach my old boss when leaving drinks are held now. Should I say anything? Should I just act as though I know nothing about it?
What would you guys do in this situation???19 -
Did a bunch more cowboy coding today as I call it (coding in vi on production). Gather 'round kiddies, uncle Logan's got a story fer ya…
First things first, disclaimer: I'm no sysadmin. I respect sysadmins and the work they do, but I'm the first to admit my strengths definitely lie more in writing programs rather than running servers.
Anyhow, I recently inherited someone else's codebase (the story of my profession career, but I digress) and let me tell you this thing has amateur hour written all over it. It's written in PHP and JavaScript by a self-taught programmer who apparently discovered procedural programming and decided there was nothing left to learn and stopped there (no disrespect to self-taught programmers).
I could rant for days about the various problems this codebase has, but today I have a very specific story to tell. A story about errors and logs.
And it all started when I noticed the disk space on our server was gradually decreasing.
So today I logged onto our API server (Ubuntu running Apache/PHP) and did a df -h to check the disk space, and was surprised to see that it had noticeably decreased since the last time I'd checked when everything was running smoothly. But seeing as this server does not store any persistent customer data (we have a separate db server) and purely hosts the stateless API, it should NOT be consuming disk space over time at all.
The only thing I could think of was the logs, but the logs were very quiet, just the odd benign message that was fully expected. Just to be sure I did an ls -Sh to check the size of the logs, and while some of them were a little big, nothing over a few megs. Nothing to account for gigabytes of disk space gradually disappearing.
What could it be? I wondered.
cd ../..
du . | sort --sort=numeric
What's this? 2671132 K in some log folder buried in the api source code? I cd into it and it turns out there are separate PHP log files in there, split up by customer, so that each customer of ours (we have 120) has their own respective error log! (Why??)
Armed with this newfound piece of (still rather unbelievable) evidence I perform a mad scramble to search the codebase for where this extra logging is happening and sure enough I find a custom PHP error handler that is capturing (most) errors and redirecting them to these individualized log files.
Conveniently enough, not ALL errors were being absorbed though, so I still knew the main error_log was working (and any time I explicitly error_logged it would go there, so I was none the wiser that this other error-catching was even happening).
Needless to say I removed the code as quickly as I found it, tail -f'd the error_log and to my dismay it was being absolutely flooded with syntax errors, runtime PHP exceptions, warnings galore, and all sorts of other things.
My jaw almost hit the floor. I've been with this company for 6 months and had no idea these errors were even happening!
The sad thing was how easy to fix all the errors ended up being. Most of them were "undefined index" errors that could have been completely avoided with a simple isset() check, but instead ended up throwing an exception, nullifying any code that came after it.
Anyway kids, the moral of the story is don't split up your log files. It makes absolutely no sense and can end up obscuring easily fixable bugs for half a year or more!
Happy coding.6 -
I fucking hate the Safari browser to death.
This piece of disk space waste is 50% of the reason why I have to spend hours to find out what the fuck is incorrectly displaying or not working on W.I.P. websites.
The other 50% is Edge, IE <=11 and Firefucks.
Just for piss smelling Safari, I need to either run a VM with Crapple OS X for debugging or borrow a Crapbook from $randomPerson.
Is it fucking not possible to compile Safari blowser to run on Linux or Winblows?
Eventhough I'm disgusted about Google and its privacy and data mining policies, Chrome is the most decent browser there is on the whole digital world. It only happens extremely rarely that something is not working/displaying as expected during development.
Most browser developers seem to be useless pubes eaters and like to shower with curd soap.13 -
In the 1990s code editors on the Mac could insert the omitted function prototypes into a header file with one command; and even automatically keep the header declaration updated when you changed the source definition (name, parameters, etc)
Today in Xcode you have to copy and paste the stupid function header definition from the source code into the header file. What happens if you leave the "{" that got copied accidentally? OMFUCKING LORD, it triggers all sorts of erroneous errors in all the **source code** files where it is included instead of the header with the stray "{"
I started to question whether nor not I knew C, if gravity worked, if the sun would come up. I wasted a day of dicking around in StackOverflow trying to chase down all these insane error messages which make no sense in Xcode.
I just **happened** to see at the bottom of one of the source files, after all the erroneous error, a very important error:
"};" Expected
So I started deleting code from the bottom up in this source file, same error every time. Got to the point where the includes were all that was left.
FUCK YOU XCODE and the hacks that designed that horrendous piece of shit
Xcode is only free if your time is worth absolutely nothing.11 -
Did I ever say I love my PM? He's fucking awesome.
In the summer I got an internship at this company and the PM had plans to turn me into a permanent employee, junior position I assume. I told him I'd need a month after school started to see how things went with school and the job at the same time. In the end I decided I couldn't work full-time because I don't have time for it. Also, I want to explore a bit the CS field and see if there's anything else I like (quantum computing and low level programming are at the top of my list), so I decided I won't be renewing my contract as an intern either.
Last week I went into a call with my PM to tell him about all of this and I did not expect the response I got. He actually thinks I'm doing right and supported me in my decision to learn other things. I didn't expect this kind of response at all and it made me feel much, much better (I was pretty nervous to tell him). He also told me that if I want to work on something else in order to learn I just have to ask (I currently do web dev).
But that's not all. He gives us, developers, space to work and doesn't micromanage us. He has technical understanding, doesn't force deadlines on us and understands that sometimes things take longer than expected. He is just great and I'm kind of sad I'll be leaving this job because he's awesome and (from what I read here on devrant) that seems to be pretty rare.
Anyways, that's it, no anger or anything today, I just wanted to say I like my PM very much.4 -
devRant is awesome, but Disney also manages to light-up my day.
This is how Wall-E became a beloved member of our team, and helped me put a smile on my face throughout a very frustrating project.
It all started in a company, not so far far away from here, where management decided to open up development to a wider audience in the organization. Instead of continuing the good-old ping-pong between Business and IT...
'not meeting my expectations' - 'not stated in project requirements'
'stuff's not working - 'business is constantly misusing'
'why are they so difficult' - 'why don't they know what they really want'
'Ping, pong, plok... (business loses point) ping, pong'
... the company aimed to increase collaboration between the 2 worlds, and make development more agile.
The close collaboration on development projects is a journey of falling and getting back up again. Which can be energy draining, but to be honest there is also a lot of positive exposure to our team now.
The relevant part for this story is that de incentive of business teams throughout these projects was mainly to deliver 'something' that 'worked'. Where our team was also very keen on delivering functionality that is stable, scalable, properly documented etc. etc.
We managed to get the fundamentals in place, but because the whole idea was to be more agile or less strict throughout the process, we could not safeguard all best-practices were adhered to during each phase of a project. The ratio Business/IT was simply out of balance to control everything, and the whole idea was to go for a shorter development lifecycle.
One thing for sure, we went a lot faster from design through development to deployment, high-fives followed and everybody was happy (for some time).
Well almost everybody, because we knew our responsibility would not end after the collection of credits at deployment, but that an ongoing cycle of maintenance would follow. As expected, after the celebrations also complaints, new requirements and support requests on bug fixes were incoming.
Not too enthusiastic about constantly patching these projects, I proposed to halt new development and to initiate a proper cleaning of all these projects. With the image in mind of a small enthusiastic fellow, dedicated to clean a garbage-strewn wasteland for humanity, I deemed "Wall-E" a very suited project name. With Wall-E on board, focus for the next period was on completely restructuring these projects to make sure all could be properly maintained for the future.
I knew I was in for some support, so I fetched some cool wall papers to kick-start each day with a fresh set of Wall-E's on my monitors. Subsequently I created a Project Wall-E status report, included Wall-E in team-meetings and before I knew it Wall-E was the most frequently mentioned member of the team. I could not stop to chuckle when mails started to fly on whether "Wall-E completed project A" or if we could discuss "Wall-E's status next report-out". I am really happy we put in the effort with the whole team to properly deploy all functionality. Not only the project became a success, also the idea of associating frustrating activities with a beloved digital buddy landed well in our company. A colleagues already kickstarted 'project Doraemon', which is triggering a lot of fun content. Hope it may give you some inspiration, or at least motivate you to watch Wall-E!
PS: I have been enjoying the posts, valuable learnings and fun experiences for some time now. Decided to also share a bit from my side, here goes my first rant!3 -
Tldr; my "this is not bug, its a feature" moment actually turned my bug into a feature.
Today we were presenting a project which has imposible deadline. I am developing this small project alone (which is probably good). I implemented core features first but I know project still have bugs and a lot of tech debts. Another friend started to presenting our demo and a wild bug appeared as expected. He was adding rows to a table. To add a new you gotta open new modal by clicking + button and fill the form. One of the fields had a bug. When you add row by clicking Ok button, the value of the field stayed there after you open modal again. So its basically a state problem in React. I forgot to clear previous state of modal. When they see that and my friend said "oh we got a bug there". Then I enabled my mic and said "thats not a bug, thats a feature. I didn't want to enter that field again and again when I adding multiple rows and made it persistent." and you know what? They liked the idea! They requested to add that bug to two more fields. I was just joking and my "this is not bug, its a feature" moment actually turned my bug into a feature. Instead of fixing it, I'm creating more of this bug. LOL!5 -
I love static sites and fancy new frameworks. Had an interview some time ago at a medium sized company. They specifically wanted someone to build static sites and introduce the company to Vue and Gridsome.
I got really excited for my first project. It was a wordpress site and I had to build a custom WP theme for it. Not exactly what I expected. Also I had no prior PHP knowledge, nor any experience with Wordpress. So I got really upset, because it wasn’t the technologies I was used to.
The first week was hard, I wanted to quit. But once something clicked. And I realized I know this. This is not PHP, not Wordpress, not Vue, but just simply a programming language. At the core everything programming language is the same. PHP became comfortable, Wordpress conventions didn’t bother me. I realized I can use great technologies with WP too. I get to know twig, added some sass, compiled everything nicely with webpack. And after a month I have a beautiful, fast and efficent site. I love it.
I realised that I don’t love the languages and frameworks. I love coding itself. I love creating efficent and reliable, clean code. No matter the architecture.
And my advice for you is to stop hating particular languages and serious debates on what is better, and hating your job when you can’t code in your new shiny framework. Love coding itself, because it’s a wonderful activity. We are creators, we are artists. Not <insert specific programming language here> developers.16 -
My life didnt go as smooth as i expected. Everything happened as expected, i knew what going to the uni requires, i knew everything...
But i didnt accounted for my mental health. Since forever i have thought that im lazy or something like that, that i can do everything i just have to do it. Oh how wrong was I. It went from my projects being frozen for a long time due to lack of motivation to neglecting important living activies. Even my health suffered a bit. Everytime i failed, even the simplest task no matter why i always felt even worse. Even the most basic tasks were unimportant for me. Even some minor tasks that i failed gave me huge guilt. Not to mention that my family wont help me with my mental health at all, (they cant see what is realy happening they always think im lazy) (but maybe they could fucking figure out that being sad liteary for years is bad). My contact with friends is limited, im always scared to go or more often scared to ask is they have time to meet because they are ALWAYS busy...
So that was my life, alone, against people who were demanding (and my mother who thought that her hard work was everything i needed, but no. Money, food and clean house isnt everything that human requires to propely function!). Now I have scheduled a meeting with the specialist, i hope the uni has better ones than the other ones i had. I hope he will help me and i will get out that life downwards spiral.5 -
Started work: 9:30am
Finished work: 9:30pm
Finally finished my "basically done" ticket from two days ago, though I'm still not sure if it's behaving correctly. It deals with the Apple wallet and iPhone notifications, and all I have is an emulator, so. 😕 Things work as expected maybe half the time? and idfk why. I'm going to leave the actual testing to QA since they have actual iPhones and it'll run on staging on actual servers with actual connectivity and actual pushes, so maybe then things will actually make sense. Until then? So done.
Started drinking: 9:30pm
Finished drinking: TBD
<media lyrics="I don't know what the fuck just happened but I don't really care, imma get the fuck up outta here. Fuck this shit i'm out" />rant so tired 12 hour day forgot to eat lunch "easy" ticket so done vodka is dinner right? tired forgot to eat dinner1 -
My company hired a new person on my team. He was scheduled to start on a Monday but pushed back a week at the last minute. The rumor around the office was that his flight home that weekend was canceled, but he didn’t notify our boss of it until minutes before he was expected in.
Next Monday he didn’t come in, and no one could get in touch with him. We eventually discovered that he was in jail. He claimed he was pulled over on the way to work for a traffic violation, then found out he had an outstanding warrant from a traffic ticket mix-up over ten years ago. Unsurprisingly, when he did make it in later that week, he was immediately fired.
I’m wondering how reasonable it was to fire him. A responsible, organized friend of mine also got in trouble from a traffic ticket she was never notified of, so I know his story isn’t impossible and doesn’t mean he’s a bad person. On the other hand, missing your start day because you’re in jail is never a good look — doubly so after he pushed back his start date the first time. My company has a very open culture so I would have some room to encourage us not to put inappropriate weight on what is often a very flawed legal system.6 -
I just got offered my first position for a Junior developer gig. they are offering me more money than I expected and otherwise I'm super amped to take it.
what makes me nervous is its my first programming position. I have an IT/Programming bachelor's but not a pure Computer Science degree.
I was asked no technical questions and I don't know if it was clear that I'm very much looking for entry-level work. I guess the fear of failure is creeping up on me.9 -
Okay, seriously, are there some secret question-asking ninja skills i am lacking, or does some people just insist on confusing people and wasting time?
I was working on this small bug. Super tiny. Basically a counter that was way off since it counted some duplicate values. Simple, right?
I decided to ask a clarifying question to the lead dev, since i am still new to the company. Really simple. Do we remove duplicate values, do we ignore them in the count when they occur, or is it actually working as expected?
He decides to answer with a long message on what the issue is. That is not what I asked, so I ask again in a slightly different way, thinking he didn't understand the question.. and he answers the same, in a slightly different way.
We go back and forth like this for 30-40 minutes, until I got tired of it and directly asked "I am asking what solution we want, not what the issue is"..
He finally picks option A. Fine. I made the adjustment and pushed my code. He checks it out, and apparently it's wrong.
After a long series of questions (again), it turns out the solution he now describes is exactly what I listed as option C...
A bug that should take 10 minutes to fix ended up taking over 2 hours. Awesome waste of time.5 -
TL;DR: a dude thinks good graphics make a game good.
so every day when the school ends, me, a dude and another girl walk home. as expected we have lots of time to talk about anything. I wanted that day to tell that dude about what I am going to buy on steam summer sales with just 15$.
me: I am going for this summer to play lots of games so I saved some money for this summer sale. do you want to hear what awesome games I am about to buy with just 15$?
dude: yeah, sure thing.
he wasn't expecting much
M: this summer I am going to buy 5 games and maybe keep more for some others. they are so awesome!
D: ok, let's hear those 'awesome' games!
M: the first game is devil daggers, maybe you don't kno...
D: of course I do. is that game
M: I want to get that game just to improve my aim, but maybe I will have some fun.
D: yeah yeah, I know that game
M: *poker face*
I KNEW he doesn't know this game and anything about pc games because of the followings...
M: ok then... I also want to get Half-Life 2 : Episode 1 & 2. they have pretty rich story and I already have both Half-Lives.
D: holy shit but the graphics... ok, one more 'awesome' game of yours.
M: there are 2 episodes, 2 separate games. I really don't care about the graphics, I love the story.
D: continue with your 'awesom' games...
that dude didn't even knew about half-life and said that game is bad.
M: another game I want to get is Battlefront 2, the one from 2005 and...
D: 2005!?
M: yeah, the new one sucks, and the gameplay in the original is way better and...
D: *starts laughing* 2005!? I thought you were getting the new one. I imagine the graphics being like this car. *points to a fucking car, yeah that kind of comparasion, I know*
after this I was so fucking pissed off. he doesn't even know about some cult classics that are meant to be played. he doesn't even have a pc nor console and he is stating his opinion on fine air for fucks sake!
M: ok, what about getting the facts and then make an opinon.
D: yeah yeah *making fun of me at that point*
I didn't tell him that I wanted to buy the binding of isaac, cause it was enough for me. I told him to watch some reviews on these games and blog posts about them and I am sure tomorrow he will say that he 'wathced' the reviews and that those games are garbage. it's his style to underestimate things. I fucking hate him, not becuase of the games, but because he underestimates everything that is not on his list of 'good games'. that list consists of new games with great graphics(3D only).
sorry if I exaggerate saying that those games are cult classics but I really look forward into buying them.
if you have another indie game to run on this potato machine(2gb ram, pentium dual-core 2.1ghz, gtx 525m) that I should or at least try comment, I am open to suggestions!9 -
So, the uni hires a new CS lecturer. He is teaching 230, the second CS class in the CS major. Two weeks into the semester, he walks in and proceeds to do his usual fumbling around on the computer (with the projector on).
Then, he goes to his Google Drive, which is empty mostly, and tells us that he accidentally wrote a program that erased his entire hard drive and his internet storage drives (Google, box, etc.)...
I mean, way to build credibility, guy... Then he tells us that he has a backup of everything 500 miles away, where he moved from. He also says that he only knows C (we only had formally learned Java so far), but hasn't actually coded (correction: typed!) in 20+ years, because he had someone do that for him and he has been learning Java over the past two weeks.
The rest of the semester followed as expected: he never had any lecture material and would ramble for an hour. Every class, he would pull up a new .java file and type code that rarely ran and he had no debugging skills. We would spend 15 minutes trying to help him with syntax issues—namely (), ;— to get his program running and then there would be a logic issue, in data structures.
He knew nothing of our sequence and what we knew up until this point and would lecture about how we will be terrible programmers because we did not do something the way he wanted—though he failed to give us expectations or spend the five minutes to teach us basic things (run-time complexity, binary, pseudocode etc). His assignments were not related to the material and if they were, they were a couple of weeks off. Also, he never knew which class we were and would ask if we were 230 or 330 at the end of a lecture...
I learned relatively nothing from him (though I ended up with a B+) but thankful to be taking advanced data structures from someone who knows their stuff. He was awful. It was strange. Also, why did the uni not tell him what he needed to be teaching?
End rant.undefined worst teacher worst professor awful communication awful code worst cs teacher disorganization1 -
This happened with one of our senior profs during the first year of my college. I wouldn't call him a dev if my life depended on calling him a dev but regardless, I narrate the story here.
We were "taught" C++ by some really dumb professors during our first year of college and it was mandatory that everyone cleared the subject regardless of what field of engineering the students chose. Having already done 2 years of C++, it was quite a breeze for me. But during the final lab exam, one of my friends requested my help in solving the quite tough question (for those beginners). Thinking the exam and teaching was unfair, I stupidly wrote the answer on a piece of paper and passed it to him. One of our teachers, who had seen him ask me, was lying low waiting to catch me in the act and she swooped in and busted our asses kicking us out of the exam hall and sending us to the HoDs office like some prize from her war against academic corruption.
In the end, I failed the exam for cheating and had to redo (not only the exam but the entire lab course).
When I returned to college during the summer vacations to redo the course, I first met the antagonist of our story. Having a huge head that looked like a deformed watermelon and an ego the size of a building, he assaulted us first with a verbal diarrhoea of his achievements as a CS professor. I quickly realised that I was in a class of people who had failed to grasp how to make a program that printed "Hello World". To make things shorter, every question the prof gave us, I managed to solve in a mere matter of minutes, several better than his own solutions. Not having expected a student who knew his shit, he was determined to play me down. He hurled tougher question at me and I knocked them over his enormous head piercing his ego. He asked me such questions as how to reverse 1000 and get 0001 and wasn't satisfied with the several ways I gave because none of it were what he had in mind (which turned out to be storing them in a fucking array and printing them in reverse. That's printing not reversing you dung beetle). I kept my calm throughout but on the day of the final exam, he set quite a tough paper for a class of people who had already failed once. To his utter shock and dismay, I aced that too and I produced flawless code. This man who has an MTech from one of the most reputed colleges of my country then proceeded to tell me that he had to cut my marks because I had used more than one function when the question had asked for one function ( it never said only one). I lost my shit and pointed out that since I was the programmer, it was my wish how I coded. I also explained to him how repeating code is a bad practice and one should use functions to reduce redundancy and keep the code clean. Nevertheless, he lost his shit and he threatened me with consequences as apparently "I didn't know who I was messing with". I handed over the paper and stormed out of the class (though he called me back and tried to argue more with me. I apologized for losing my shit and left when he was done talking). I ended up getting a 'C'. Totally worth it.4 -
Me: Found solution on StackOverFlow, lets copy/paste code and try it out
*Clicks ctrl+v*
Computer: There's your value!
Me: Wait that's not what I copied
*notices that I copied from a different computer and expected it to paste on this one*
*cries in corner* T_T6 -
I was working for a client on a simple landing page. After struggling for days with the text-flow of one paragraph and trying one CSS property after another I finally realized it.
He sent me the texts in PDF format and I just copied them. What I did not know is that all the spaces in the text were non breaking spaces wich of course did not wrap like I expected.
Heureka. You bloody bitch. Never imagined having such a fucking issue in web development...2 -
I have been a frontender for a long time. I recently showed interest in backend development, and said to my boss that that is what I would like to pursue. He said that was never going to happen and I would only be a frontender in this company.
A lot of horrible things happened, some of the Lead Developers bailed and another developer flatly out committed industrial spionage on the company.
Then because of shortage of staff, gave me backend tasks, which all I completed within deadlines with few exceptions of course.
My project manager was very impressed about it.
Then I noticed the project management didn't concern themselves with ongoing projects, they became more focused on customer support and management of unhacking etc.
I noticed a wide gap that made it so all projects went past due the time because lack of coordination and planning
I stepped in because I was annoyed that this was common practice in the company.
While my two bosses were on vacation, they nominated me to be the "boss" of the company.
I earn close to minimum wage, and I felt this wasn't fair if I was to continue to do what I have done. So when our boss called us into a meeting and he said that he was going to move slowly away from the company, he said we should keep the reins of the company.
I didn't say much then, because I didn't feel like taking on so much responsibility I knew I wasn't to gain anything from more than knowledge.
I confronted him today and told him how I have felt throughout a long time. He basically said I hadn't proven myself and because of my young age, I didn't deserve to have more right now.
I was annoyed, he said he expected the same from every coworker and that I wasnt special or unique and that I could easily be replaced.
Not to mention I never got to finish a sentence without him interupting me or raising his voice to deafen out mine.
Have you ever had this experience and how did you feel? I feel terrible to be honest..11 -
Well I FUCKING FINALLY managed to build a program that makes my dad's printer print automatically.
Have ranted about this on my previous rant.
My recent approach was actually overengineered all over the top. I was using pyautogui to simulate the mouse that would call the settings window on Windows, which would print a nozzle test (the translation for "Düsentestmuster" according to google?). The more I worked with it, the more I would have had to care about edge cases when calling the settings and god knows what else...😖
So I left the idea.
What I came up with was a python script with some copy-pasted code of an example from the win32print api that printed an image that I specified, so it would use all inks. Somehow it works perfectly...
After that I used the win32api. ShellExecute() with ghostscript to print a PDF for the PGBK ink.
Finally a batch script to run this python script on the task scheduler. No converted .exe as dependencies and whatnot let it all go to hell.😒
It's not quite what I had originally anticipated as a solution but IT FINALLY FUCKING WORKS!!
...😪 It took way longer than expected and although I somehow couldn't manage to print all on 1 paper, I'm still satisfied that it really works.
That's all, had to vent my frustration and share this personal success.12 -
"It works on our end", the sentence that made me lose my shit.
I've been working on a project were we're supposed to integrate an API into our system.
When trying to get some user id's (UUID) from said API, we got a type-error in the response (???), so I called their integration support and asked what the fuck they were doing (not really, i was kinda calm at this point).
The answer I got was following:
Integration guy: "Uh, bro, like, I don't even know, it's probably on your end"
Me: "We literally used this endpoint with the same parameters yesterday, and got a result we expected. I noticed you updated your API this morning, did you make any major changes?"
Integration guy: "Yeah we changed the type of user id from string to number"
Me: "So, you changed the type of a UUID (uuid4) from string to number? How did you not think that would be an issue? I can see in your forums that everyone else is having the same issue."
Integration guy: "Nah, it's probably a bug in your code, it works on our end"
Me in my mind: *IT WORKS ON YOUR END?!? IT DOESN'T FUCKING MATTER IF IT WORKS ON YOUR END, FUCKTARD.*
What I actually said: "Uhm, I'm not sure if works on your end either, I'm not even sure how this change made it to production. But hey, thanks I guess, bye."
WHY AM I NOT ABLE TO YELL AT PEOPLE WHEN THEY ARE BEING RETARDED???
But really though, when you're maintaining an API, you shouldn't fucking care if things work on your end in your dev environment. What matters is how it works in production, for the end user/users.
And I know that 99% of cases it's the users fault by entering the wrong parameters or trying to request with wrongly setup auth and what not, but still.
Don't ASSUME nothing's wrong on your end. It's your fucking job to fix the issues.
And guess what? The problem was on their side.
I'm going fucking bald.2 -
Follow-up to my previous story: https://devrant.com/rants/1969484/...
If this seems to long to read, skip to the parts that interest you.
~ Background ~
Maybe you know TeamSpeak, it's basically a program to talk with other people on servers. In TeamSpeak you can generate identities, every identity has a security level. On your server you can set a minimum security level you need to connect. Upgrading the security level takes longer as the level goes up.
~ Technical background ~
The security level is computed by doing this:
SHA1(public_key + offset)
Where public_key is your public key in Base64 and offset is an 8 Byte unsigned long. Offset is incremented and the whole thing is hashed again. The security level comes from the amount of Zero-Bits at the beginning of the resulting hash.
My plan was to use my GPU to do this, because I heared GPUs are good at hashing. And now, I got it to work.
~ How I did it ~
I am using a start offset of 0, create 255 Threads on my GPU (apparently more are not possible) and let them compute those hashes. Then I increment the offset in every thread by 255. The GPU also does the job of counting the Zero-Bits, when there are more than 30 Zero-Bits I print the amount plus the offset to the console.
~ The speed ~
Well, speed was the reason I started this. It's faster than my CPU for sure. It takes about 2 minutes and 40 seconds to compute 2.55 Billion hashes which comes down to ~16 Million hashes per second.
Is this speed an expected result, is it slow or fast? I don't know, but for my needs, it is fucking fast!
~ What I learned from this ~
I come from a Java background and just recently started C/C++/C#. Which means this was a pretty hard challenge, since OpenCL uses C99 (I think?). CUDA sadly didn't work on my machine because I have an unsupported GPU (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti). I learned not to execute an endless loop on my GPU, and so much more about C in general. Though it was small, it was an amazing project.1 -
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.2 -
This incident is from my college days.....
I saw one of my friend was arguing with his project partner. He was pretending to know everything in programming better than his partner.
Just for fun, I asked him to implement single linked list by using arrays/pointers (I gave him 20 mins and told him to do in any programming language he is familiar with). He was not able to do, so I suggested him to use Google and see if he can find something which can help him with implementation....
Within 10 min he came with a solution which was working fine. So I asked how does he implemented, and what does the methods do.... As expected, he was blank and I got to know he copied entire solution from Stackoverflow.....
A thought came in my mind:
Just by knowing copy/paste won't make you a programmer....... <\>4 -
So I found this consulting job a while ago thinking that some extra cash while studying would be nice to have.
I meet with the guy, a researcher trying to start a business up, good for him I think, maybe we'll hit it off, continue working, why not? Except he has no clue how to write working code, all he ever did was writing matlab scripts he says, thats why he hired me he says.
Okay, fine, you do your job I do mine.
He hands me the contract, its about comparing two libraries, finding out which one is better suited for his job, cool, plots and graphs everywhere.
Except this is an unpaid job. YOU WHAT?! It's a test job. FINE. At least it'll look good on my resume.
We talk about the paid part where I'm supposed to scale the two libraries, looks good, as expected from an ML engineering perspective. It comes to payment. The dude has no idea how taxes work, says he has a set amount to pay and not a penny more. I explain with examples how taxes are paid, how you get reimbursed for them and so on. Won't budge. Screws me over.
Opens the door for other jobs I think, he'll learn next time I think and take the job.
Fast forward a month, 90% of the job done, he adds a third thing to compare. Gives a github link to a repo with 2 authors, last commit a year ago. There are links to a 404, claiming compiled jars. Fuck.
Not my first rodeo, git clone that shit, make compile, the works. The thing uses libs that ain't in no repo, that would be too easy. Run, error, find lib, remake all the things, rinse repeat.
The scripts they got have hardcoded paths and filenames for 2 year old binaries, remake that shit.
It works, at least I get a prompt now. Try the example files they got, no luck, some missing unlinked binary somewhere, but not a name mentioned. Cross reference the shit outta the libs mentioned on readme, find the missing shit, down it.
Available versions are too new, THE MOLDING NUTCRACKER uses some bug in an old version of the lib.
I give up. Fuck this. This ain't worth the money OR time. Wanker... -
Update on my Facebook and Booking.com interviews. I had them back to back today.
Even before I start, I accept and admit that I am a hypocrite. I hate Amazon yet order stuff from there. I hate Microsoft yet use their products. I hate Facebook yet went ahead to interview with them.
I fucking hate myself for compromising my ethics, values, and integrity. I had promised myself that even if I work for any major shit company, I'd never go with Facebook. Here I am after many years. Not an excuse, but I am doing it because I see it as an entry point into the UK. That's all.
Community's hate towards me is justified and I'd accept the discrimination from this community because this place is my digital home and you all are my family. Infact first thing I told mom was, dR boys are gonna disown me when they get to know about this.
Anyway, coming to the update part.
I had applied leave at work from last Friday. 4 days of leave earned me 10 days off (including weekends and 2 days of Diwali company holiday).
Last Thursday I got to know that Facebook has scheduled their interview today (Friday). I spent insane amount of time preparing. Approximately 8 hours everyday including weekend. I added nearly 40+ hours preparing for it in last 7 days, because I had to get in. Failure isn't an option now.
I sacrifice my family time, preparing for the interview.
I sacrifice Diwali break, sitting in front of the screen and studying.
I sacrifice my only vacation of 2021, doing mock interviews as late as 11.30 PM.
I sacrifice my free time and enjoyment, stressing over what could happen.
I was prepared like perfect for screening stage.
Interview 1: this guy comes and ask 'what is the best compliment you have got as a PM?' and 'Why do you want to quit the current company?'
He wasn't supposed to ask those as per Facebook's policy and interview stage.
Then he gave me a shit problem to solve and rejected my approach and wanted it his was. I tried to follow him and made sure I was able to convince with the reasoning but he kept pushing me back. He kept putting me down. Did not listen to me or what I had to convey or what was expected as an answer. He had certain output in his mind and wanted me to come up with it as an answer.
For the uninitiated: Facebook gives ton of preparation material and tells upfront the kind of questions they'll ask they just focus on few things. Moreover, in Product interviews, there isn't right or wrong answer.
Anyway, this guy started making funny expressions which put my morale down and I stood my ground with losing my cool. I managed to get all my answers right and the key points the look into a candidate. It went decent. Yet the interviewers attitude was something I did not like.
Interview 2: the lady was really kind and warm. Very accommodating and easy person to deal with. It went amazingly well.
I have two observations I want to share with you all.
1. I hate what Facebook does. Lizardberg is awful human being. But I absolutely liked HOW they are doing things, at least from an interview stand point. They even had mock sessions by their PMs and upfront told how to prepare and how to answer.
2. While it seems to be a 5 star experience, I found them to function mechanically. No small talk, no human connection (ironic to their mission), no conversational flow of the interview (again something that they kept saying a zillion times in all their material). They came, formally introduced themselves, and had a checklist kind of attitude, and left.
I now await for the feedback.
In the next hour, I had Booking.com first round.
Amazing people. Warm friendly experience. Treated me as a human. Heard me. Made me feel part of the conversation rather than someone just being judged.
It went 1000x better than Facebook.
I await the feedback from them as well.
I don't know what's gonna happen but one thing for sure, the kind of expectations Facebook set for their interviews, was nowhere close to the reality. It was awful.
180° was for Booking.com
Guess the saying stands true, expectations always lead to disappointment.
Finally I feel de-stressed and my Diwali vacation starts AFTER Diwali ended. Or rather just a regular weekend.
2021 has been terribly awful year for me. Hope this shitty year ends soon.36 -
Hmmmmmm i just got offered a position for a php developer........but something that was not listed in the original application was that it is expected of one to work with wordpress. My wordpress experience is limited to creating simple themes.
I don't like cms systems also. But the position pays really good.
What to do what to do hmmm9 -
This was not exactly the worst work culture because the employees, it was because the upper level of the organization chart on the IT department.
I'm not quite sure how to translate the exact positions of that chart, but lets say that there is a General Manager, a couple of Area Managers (Infrastructure, Development), some Area Supervisors (2 or 3, by each area), and the grunts (that were us). Anyway, anything on the "Manager" was the source of all the toxicity on the department.
First and foremost, there was a lack of training for almost any employee. We were expected to know everything since day-1. Yes, the new employees had a (very) brief explanation about the technologies/languages were used, but they were expected to perform as a senior employee almost since the moment they cross the door. And forget about having some KT (Knowledge Transfer) sessions, they were none existent and if they existed, were only to solve a very immediate issue (now imagine what happened when someone quit*).
The general culture that they have to always say "yes" to the client/customer to almost anything without consulting to the development teams if that what was being asked to do was doable, or even feasible. And forget about doing a proper documentation about that change/development, as "that was needed yesterday and it needs to be done to be implemented tomorrow" (you know what I mean). This contributes to the previous point, as we didn't have enough time to train someone new because we had this absurd deadlines.
And because they cannot/wanted to say "NO", there were days when they came with an amount of new requirements that needed to be done and it didn't matter that we had other things to do. And the worst was that, until a couple of years (more or less), there was almost impossible to gather the correct requirements from the client/user, as they (managers) "had already" that requirement, and as they "know better" what the user wants, it was their vision what was being described on the requirements, not the users'...
And all that caused that, in a common basis, didn't have enough time to do all this stuff (mainly because the User Support) causing that we needed to do overtime, which almost always went unpaid (because a very ambiguous clause of the contract, and that we were "non-union workers"**). And this is my favorite point of this list, because, almost any overtime went unpaid, so basically we were expected to be working for free after the end of the work day (lets say, after the 17:00). Leaving "early" was almost a sin for the managers, as they always expected that we give more time to work that the indicated on the contract, and if not, they could raise a report to HR because the ambiguous clause allowed them to do it (among other childish things that they do).
Finally, the jewel of the crown, is that they never, but never acknowledge that they made a mistake. Never. That was impossible! If something failed on the things/systems/applications that they had assigned*** it was always our fault.
- "A report for the Finance Department is giving wrong information? It's the DBA's fault**** because although he manages that report, he couldn't imagine that I have an undocumented service (that runs before the creation the report) crashed because I modified a hidden and undocumented temporal table and forgot to update that service."
But, well, at least that's on the past. And although those aren't all the things that made that workplace so toxic, for me those were the most prominent ones.
-
* Well, here we I live it's very common to don't say anything about leaving the company until the very last day. Yes, I know that there are people that leave their "2-days notice", but it's not common (IMHO, of course). And yes, there are some of us that give a 1 or 2-weeks notice, but still it's not a common practice.
** I don't know how to translate this... We have a concept called "trusted employee", which is mainly used to describe any administrative employee, and that commonly is expected to give the 110% of what the contract says (unpaid overtimes, extra stuff to do, etc) and sadly it's an accepted condition (for whatever reasons). I chose "non-union workers" because in comparison with an union worker, we have less protections (besides the legal ways) regarding what I've described before. Curiously, there are also "operative workers", that doesn't belong to an union, but they have (sometimes) better protections that the administrative ones.
*** Yes, they were in charge of several systems, because they didn't trust us to handle/maintain them. And I'm sure that they still don't trust in their developers.
**** One of the managers, and the DBA are the only ones that handle some stuff (specially the one that involves "money"). The thing that allows to use the DBA as scapegoat is that such manager have more privileges and permissions than the DBA, as he was the previous DBA2 -
Joined this new team which said to have a rockstar teamlead with his right hand rockstar drummer senior dev. Turns out its just 2 socially awkward dudes who come into office once a week and all they care about is doing their own tasks and calling it a day.
The rockstar senior teamlead actually turns out to be an ex QA guy whos doing development only for the past 2 years and is unable yo explain what his code is doing and just starts rambling. I didnt expected spoon-feeding type of mentoring but man calling them and trying to get some advices makes me wanna die everytime. Fuck. My. Life.
I took matters into my own hands, Im doing pretty well actually and already am delivering, but man, if they dont give me a raise after probation ends then fuck this Im outta here. This is not what I signed up for.
These fuckers are pretentious egomaniacs who look good in their linkedin page but in reality are selfish narcissists.12 -
My client is offering me onsite project with 6 months of employmentship/contract/internship in Germany(munich)🍻
He is going to provide me flat, desk, macbook and transportation but final amount is not decided yet.
What all things I should consider while negotiating.
I'm so excited for this offer but no idea what should be expected salary and compensation over there.🤔
Ps: I have experience of 2 years in JavaScript development and I worked with him from almost beginning of my career.
Also shall I start learning germany or dutch?🤔22 -
Okay, I'm interning at a government institution & boy let me just tell you... mmmh... A FUCKING MESS!
So I'm tasked with developing a HR system that the whole company should eventually use. I tell them I'm not familiar with the open source technologies they'd like me to use, they tell me no worries, you can develop a prototype with a tech stack that you're familiar with. Also, they tell me that they don't quite have the requirements from HR so what I can do for my prototype is just develop something "general" that works according to their "idea".
Being the good intern I am, I develop quite a good functioning prototype & present it to the team who then present it to the managers.
Finally we're all called in for a final meeting with the managers & HR, and guess what? The requirements for the system are different. Almost 90% of the features we built into the prototype need to change. Also, the system must use open source technologies. The managers promise to send a detailed requirements specification document, with sample data. I think this is a great idea as there's still a lot I don't understand. I expected this to happen, so I soon start to redesign afresh, this time trying as hard as possible to consider open source technologies within my plans.
But noooo... My team wants me to "finish" the system!
"Finish" what system, I ask? That was a prototype!
"Just tweak the functionality you built to meet the new requirements".
WTF!
We don't even have the actual requirements specification document, so I'll still be coding blindly. Also, the whole system needs to be re-built using open source technology!
Instead of pushing me to develop a system blindly, with no requirements, how about you push HR to tell you exactly what they need and how it should work first!?
I'm honestly exhausted with the false sense of urgency from my team!!8 -
Running a fucking conda environment on windows (an update environment from the previous one that I normally use) gets to be a fucking pain in the fucking ass for no fucking reason.
First: Generate a new conda environment, for FUCKING SHITS AND GIGGLES, DO NOT SPECIFY THE PYTHON VERSION, just to see compatibility, this was an experiment, expected to fail.
Install tensorflow on said environment: It does not fucking work, not detecting cuda, the only requirement? To have the cuda dependencies installed, modified, and inside of the system path, check done, it works on 4 other fucking environments, so why not this one.
Still doesn't work, google around and found some thread on github (the errors) that has a way to fix it, do it that way, fucking magic, shit is fixed.
Very well, tensorflow is installed and detecting cuda, no biggie. HAD TO SWITCH TO PYHTHON 3,8 BECAUSE 3.9 WAS GIVING ISSUES FOR SOME UNKNOWN FUCKING REASON
Ok no problem, done.
Install jupyter lab, for which the first in all other 4 environments it works. Guess what a fuckload of errors upon executing the import of tensorflow. They go on a loop that does not fucking end.
The error: imPoRT eRrOr thE Dll waS noT loAdeD
Ok, fucking which one? who fucking knows.
I FUCKING HATE that the main language for this fucking bullshit is python. I guess the benefits of the repl, I do, but the python repl is fucking HORSESHIT compared to the one you get on: Lisp, Ruby and fucking even NODE in which error messages are still more fucking intelligent than those of fucking bullshit ass Python.
Personally? I am betting on Julia devising a smarter environment, it is a better language already, on a second note: If you are worried about A.I taking your job, don't, it requires a team of fucktards working around common basic system administration tasks to get this bullshit running in the first place.
My dream? Julia or Scala (fuck you) for a primary language in machine learning and AI, in which entire environments, with aaaaaaaaaall of the required dlls and dependencies can be downloaded and installed upon can just fucking run. A single directory structure in which shit just fucking works (reason why I like live environments like Smalltalk, but fuck you on that too) and just run your projects from there, without setting a bunch of bullshit from environment variables, cuda dlls installation phases and what not. Something that JUST FUCKING WORKS.
I.....fucking.....HATE the level of system administration required to run fucking anything nowadays, the reason why we had to create shit like devops jobs, for the sad fuckers that have to figure out environment configurations on a box just to run software.
Fuck me man development turned to shit, this is why go mod, node npm, php composer strict folder structure pipelines were created. Bitch all you want about npm, but if I can create a node_modules setting with all of the required dlls to run a project, even if this bitch weights 2.5GB for a project structure you bet your fucking ass that I would.
"YOU JUST DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING" YES I FUCKING DO and I will get this bullshit fixed, I will get it running just like I did the other 4 environments that I fucking use, for different versions of cuda and python and the dependency circle jerk BULLSHIT that I have to manage. But this "follow the guide and it will work, except when it does not and you are looking into obscure github errors" bullshit just takes away from valuable project time when you have a small dedicated group of developers and no sys admin or devops mastermind to resort to.
I have successfully deployed:
Java
Golang
Clojure
Python
Node
PHP
VB/C# .NET
C++
Rails
Django
Projects, and every single fucking time (save for .net, that shit just fucking works on a dedicated windows IIS server) the shit will not work with x..nT reasons. It fucking obliterates me how fucking annoying this bullshit is. And the reason why the ENTIRE FUCKING FIELD of computer science and software engineering is so fucking flawed.
But we can't all just run to simple windows bs in which we have documentation for everything. We have to spend countless hours on fucking Linux figuring shit out (fuck you also, I have been using Linux since I was 18, I am 30 now) for which graphical drivers for machine learning, cuda and whatTheFuckNot require all sorts of sys admin gymnasts to be used.
Y'all fucked up a long time ago. Smalltalk provided an all in one, easily rollable back to previous images, easily administered interfaces for this fileFuckery bullshit, and even though the JVM and the .NET environments did their best to hold shit down, and even though we had npm packages pulling the universe inside, or gomod compiling shit into one place NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO we had to do whatever the fuck we wanted to feel l337 and wanted.
Fuck all of you, fuck this field, fuck setting boxes for ML/AI and fuck every single OS in existence2 -
With over 10 years as a dev under my belt I never wanted to change company before my probation is even over. I never felt so drained, and pissed off for the entire duration of my working hours, every day for about 4 months straight. I was thinking it should get better, I listened to all the rubbish webinars about the company culture, how inclusive and diverse we are and how they value phycological safety and how everyone should feel safe to speak their mind. The people are fucking reviewing my approved and merged PRs and expecting me to address their comments. Like someone goes on holiday and when they’re back they want to spray wisdom around, and that seems to happen to everyone not just me. When we have technical discussions and I express my opinion I get given out to for speaking too much. Like what the actual fuck, your code is shit, everyone knows it and complains about it, but we should look at what we already have as an example. How the fuck you think you can improve your code if your not going to change your shit. Writing class diagrams for about two weeks at start of each project and nitpicking every fucking thing, only to abandon it after our first sprint as the fucking requirements have changed and what we agreed at the beginning as no longer relevant. No shit as if they don’t know requirements change ALL THE FUCKING TIME AND THIS IS EXPECTED. I was also asked to send a slack message every morning when I start working, when I get my lunch, when I am back from lunch and when I finish work. Have to fill in some stupid weekly update system with what tickets I’ve worked on during the week, like have you heard of Jira filetrs ? Stop asking me how I am getting on if I’m fucking closing all my tickets every sprint. I don’t ask you questions, if I finish all the work you asked me to on time, you can safely assume I am doing fine. Also your fucking back to back meetings are not helping me close my tickets any faster. Already got an offer from another company I am out of fucking here.
YOU CAN ALL STICK YOUR PR COMMENTS, ENDLESS MEETINGS AND WHAT NOT UP YOUR FUCKING ARSES. 🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻4 -
My family (dad, mom and I) runs a software business. Things were going decent when I was in college, and just as I was about to finish college, it went slightly bad due to lack of some technical insight. So I figured, I had the knowledge to do so, and joined in the family business as my first job. When I joined, I found out that things were worse that what I expected, (lack of processes in the company to handle day to day business). But we took a year to fix it and solve issues. But during this year, while the company finally runs as a proper company, we went into some serious debt to keep it running, as we were expecting it to get resolved soon. But now, although the company is structurally fine, the sales have seriously dropped. This has us cornered and we aren't able to do anything. We are seriously considering shutting the company down.
Which is not the worst part. The worst part is the debt. Since I, was a part of the company too, I am equally responsible for paying it off. And now, due to both my parents hitting the retirement age, I will be the only one repaying it. I really don't want to invest an estimated 8-10 years of my life living very modestly and spending a large (70-80%) of my income in repaying this.
I don't even know what to do, and things just seem very hopeless for me. Looking for any advice anyone has.
I guess if I had a bit more experience in the real world, I would be better at dealing with this, but I'm literally just 1 year out of my college.42 -
So I’m working on a project right and I don’t run it after writing 104 lines of untested code and it doesn’t work.
Which is expected but then I do some stuff and fix that, I get a new error which is great cause I’m getting closer.
Cut to tonight. I’m trying to hunt and kill this bug. And after doing nothing but copying the code to another text file so I can upload that copy and get help.
I decide to run it with a little just print statement in it to make sure it’s definitely broken and I’m not asking online for no reason.
And.. it works.. WHAT???
I uncomment the rest of the function and get rid of the print statement and scream because ITS WORKING!!
I MEAN IT HAS BUGS BUT THEYRE BUGS I CAN FIX AND FOCUS ON AFTER I FREAK OUT ABOUT IT WORKING AFTER ME CHANGING FUCKING NOTHING.8 -
So I wanted to spread a struct in another struct to fill fields with the value `None`. Not what I expected when I googled "Rust spread into"..9
-
what a great idea to do server upgrades on a friday evening...and i can do it alone...and am responsible that everything works as expected...what a great day today...and i hate every single second of this day yet.. :-/
damnit i'm a developer, not a sysadmin, just because i can do it doesnt mean that i'm supposed to do it..what about our admins? what get they paid for? rebooting the coffeemachine? fuckers already left the building1 -
So here's my problem. I've been employed at my current company for the last 12 months (next week is my 1 year anniversary) and I've never been as miserable in a development job as this.
I feel so upset and depressed about working in this company that getting out of bed and into the car to come here is soul draining. I used to spend hours in the evenings studying ways to improve my code, and was insanely passionate about the product, but all of this has been exterminated due to the following reasons.
Here's my problems with this place:
1 - Come May 2019 I'm relocating to Edinburgh, Scotland and my current workplace would not allow remote working despite working here for the past year in an office on my own with little interaction with anyone else in the company.
2 - There is zero professionalism in terms of work here, with there being no testing, no planning, no market research of ideas for revenue generation – nothing. This makes life incredibly stressful. This has led to countless situations where product A was expected, but product B was delivered (which then failed to generate revenue) as well as a huge amount of development time being wasted.
3 - I can’t work in a business that lives paycheck to paycheck. I’ve never been somewhere where the salary payment had to be delayed due to someone not paying us on time. My last paycheck was 4 days late.
4 - The management style is far too aggressive and emotion driven for me to be able to express my opinions without some sort of backlash.
5 - My opinions are usually completely smashed down and ignored, and no apology is offered when it turns out that they’re 100% correct in the coming months.
6 - I am due a substantial pay rise due to the increase of my skills, increase of experience, and the time of being in the company, and I think if the business cannot afford to pay £8 per month for email signatures, then I know it cannot afford to give me a pay rise.
7 - Despite having continuously delivered successful web development projects/tasks which have increased revenue, I never receive any form of thanks or recognition. It makes me feel like I am not cared about in this business in the slightest.
8 - The business fails to see potential and growth of its employees, and instead criticises based on past behaviour. 'Josh' (fake name) is a fine example of this. He was always slated by 'Tom' and 'Jerry' as being worthless, and lazy. I trained him in 2 weeks to perform some basic web development tasks using HTML, CSS, Git and SCSS, and he immediately saw his value outside of this company and left achieving a 5k pay rise during. He now works in an environment where he is constantly challenged and has reviews with his line manager monthly to praise him on his excellent work and diverse set of skills. This is not rocket science. This is how you keep employees motivated and happy.
9 - People in the business with the least or zero technical understanding or experience seem to be endlessly defining technical deadlines. This will always result in things going wrong. Before our mobile app development agency agreed on the user stories, they spent DAYS going through the specification with their developers to ensure they’re not going to over promise and under deliver.
10 - The fact that the concept of ‘stealing data’ from someone else’s website by scraping it daily for the information is not something this company is afraid to do, only further bolsters the fact that I do not want to work in such an unethical, pathetic organisation.
11 - I've been told that the MD of the company heard me on the phone to an agency (as a developer, I get calls almost every week), and that if I do it again, that the MD apparently said he would dock my pay for the time that I’m on the phone. Are you serious?! In what world is it okay for the MD of a company to threaten to punish their employees for thinking about leaving?! Why not make an attempt at nurturing them and trying to find out why they’re upset, and try to retain the talent.
Now... I REALLY want to leave immediately. Hand my notice in and fly off. I'll have 4 weeks notice to find a new role, and I'll be on garden leave effective immediately, but it's scary knowing that I may not find a role.
My situation is difficult as I can't start a new role unless it's remote or a local short term contract because my moving situation in May, and as a Junior to Mid Level developer, this isn't the easiest thing to do on the planet.
I've got a few interviews lined up (one of which was a final interview which I completed on Friday) but its still scary knowing that I may not find a new role within 4 weeks.
Advice? Thoughts? Criticisms?
Love you DevRant <33 -
Things I wish people had said at my first job (in light of lots of the people I see starting their first dev gig on here). Please add yours.
Congrats!
Take a breath, you will be fine.
If you get frustrated, take a moment to collect your thoughts.
Don't be afraid to say you don't know, you are not expected to know everything.
Your workday needs to end at a decent time. Don't overdo it or you will be useless for more of your hours.
Always take whatever length of time you think something will take and double it. If you think it will take 15 minutes, it'll probably take your 4 hours.
Concentrate on networking and personal relationships.
Pick the smartest people who have moved the most vertically and pay attention to what they say, they might know a lot.
When management makes an "unwise" or "crazy" decision, ask them why or what the context or motive is that made then arrive at that course of action. Some of them might surprise you in their bigger picture motives or dumbassedness.
Six sigma may be in your future, learn what it is.
Automate as much of your own job as possible.
Um, that's all I've got for now. Hopefully that's helpful to people just starting out. Feel free to add yours.5 -
Big IT consulting company ask us (small web agency) to develop the "html" code for a web app for their client. (They'll want the front-end to implement it in Cordova or other shit tools they use).
I had to use some "includes" in php, for header and footer, because for 50 pages it'll be tedious to edit a thing (the design is not definitive yet) without open all the .html files individually and replicate the edits in all the pages.
We've delivered the package containing all the pages and a "inc" folder for the header and the footer. The pages have the extension *.php
Their pm ask us why we didn't do it in html, since they expected that.
What the fuck is wrong with you?5 -
I'm pretty sure my clients would fail the marshmallow test 9/10 times if not 10/10 times. We have a certain time period of the day set aside for me to look into new reported bugs but besides that I'm supposed to work on regular tasks. Of course, they ask me five hours after that time period is done, whether I can look into a new (non-urgent) bug. At the cost of the new thing they want to launch in 2 weeks. 🤔 I would love it if we actually had time to fix every single bug in the codebase but what typically happens is I get about 15 bug reports (most duplicates) and I'm expected to fix all of them in a span of 2 hours.1
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So i had the second talk with this company today. The backend developer somehow expected me to know all four benefits of jQuery. What the hell dude?
Nobody knows everything.
I’m not a big fan of jQuery period.9 -
I just saw this job opening for visual artists (not me at all, but still curious what kind of person they are looking for).
https://artstation.com/jobs/J1OY/
It's so detailed, a person applying would immediately know what is expected of them and what their role will be. Why isnt this like this for most programming jobs?
Example of programming job opening descriptions:
Knowledge of a backend language (ex: python, java, C++)
Experience with databases
Experience with making and using APIs
This does not in any way describe what I will do at all. (yes this is a copy of most useful information of a job offer I recently got). It does not state which language to work with (I know none of the listed ones, but I do know PHP, C# and javascript/typescript (yes I know) for backend languages.
What kind of database experience? I have worked as supermarket employee and when I had to order new things I had to use a application to update the database. (Ive done more, but who does not have experience with any kind of database in any way)
TL;DR The artist job opening description is so well described. Why isnt it that way for programmers more often -
Does most memorable in a bad way count? 🤔
He left almost 2 years ago..or even more.. left a bunch of bugs and logical fuckups for me to fix.. some already fixed, some still lingering there..
I want to not blame him for everything, since we lack proper code review protocols and all.. but I've asked on several occasions if he understands the problem and what must be done..and the answer was always yes..results, after I got time to check up on him, the code he wrote was most probably copy pasted from stack overflow or somewhere else.. butchered in any and every way possible..
And of course already checked in to TFS.. along with bunch of files that were not even changed (he didn't bother to check that and exclude them) + a bunch of files from other projects... Told him to not do that on several occasions too, but he still managed to fuck things up this way.. leaving all the uncommented debugger; crap and alerts in the js files..
On one occasion I was working on new GUI..api part I already finished..got the order from above to delegate this to him as it is not much he can fuck up so I could focus on more important & complex stuff..
Maybe additional 4h of work + testing for everything..
I show him the prepared files, one controller, one view..explained what parts of code goes where etc.. a little short of writing everything myself.. Ask if he understands what needs to be done & how and told him if he has any problems/questions to ask me asap..
Said he understood what needs to be done.. after a day or two he asks me why something is not workig as expected.. I check the files, correct initialization was commented out and all the code was stuffed in the view file.. Took him another day to move the code to proper files.. Not sure about the possible bugs left there as the client later decided that they will not be using this..
I later found out that years of C# experience on his CV was actually a school course.. he didn't even know why the changes on api are not showing up..because he didn't know that he has to build the code..
I mean, if he was honest when asked about experience with .net, we would've taken a month or two to just explain everything from the start..
But as he didn't and based on his CV (much more experience with .net than me) and 'I understand everything' attitude from the start I assumed he knows WTF was he doing..
Boy was I wrong..
He was also more interested in how much I get payed and if I have a company phone etc..than actually doing his job.. I fucking hate chit chat, and this..well.. he didn't get the hints that this is in no way appropriate to ask.. I've told him that if he has problems with his pay and bonuses that he should talk to the management and not me about this..and that I'm only interested in his actual work and progress..
So yeah, I'll definitely be remembering this guy till the day I die..3 -
I really think there should be a subject in every CS course to teach us how to handle/work-under Grade-A assholes and dumbfucks. Not that it would help, but atleast warn us on what we are getting into.
In my opinion, development is not *that* hard or frustrating but is made so by these shitty people. But again, what do I know.
I was scolded by my boss for using for-loop to iterate through an array recently. Apparently for-loop is not used in real world projects and this iteration should be done "in-memory". My colleagues and I are still trying to understand and process that.
I was asked to add fitbit integration to a project within 2 hours just because I had "already done it a week ago" in *another* project. Luckily, it was then given to a "senior" developer who took 4 days for it and essentially copy-pasted my work without much changes, ofcourse it stopped working every now and then.
I am given unreal deadlines on my tasks, on technologies I haven't worked on before, and then expected to churn out production ready code with no bugs in them.
My boss literally just sends me the links of 1st three google results on the problems I encounter and report, after humiliating me ofcourse. Yes, I did google it and yes I went through all I could find from Google forums to GitHub issues. When the library/plugin author himself says that this feature is not yet available, don't expect me to develop it in 2 hours you dumbfuck.
And for the love of God, please stop changing the data model every single day and justify it with agile development. Think before making any changes to it. Ever heard of Join queries? Foreign keys? Or any other basic database concepts.
We reached a point where each branch in the repo had different data model. Not kidding. And we were a team of just 4 developers. Atleast inform us when you change models after discussing it with your shit for knowledge "senior" developer, so we don't have to redo it all over again. The channels on slack are not for sharing random articles only.
I am just waiting to complete my year here.
I should have known what I got myself into the day he asked me to remove the comments I had added to explain what my code does. Why you ask? Because "we don't write comments". -
So I bought a gaming laptop a while back, and Cyberpunk 2077 binaries got leaked a few days ago... So I wanted to play it, kinda. It looks really good from the screenshots. Friend asks me "what CPU / GPU do you have"?
My gaming laptop is a Y700 so an i7-6700HQ and a GTX 960M. Turns out that even at low settings this thing probably won't pull even 30 FPS.
So even with a gaming laptop, you don't get to do any gaming. 10/10 would buy again! I'll enjoy Super Mario because imagine caring about gameplay rather than stunning graphics that you need tomorrow's hardware for, and buy it yesterday! And have it already obsolete today.
Long story short, I kinda hate the gaming scene. I'm not a gamer either by any means. Even this laptop just runs Linux and I bought it mostly because some of its hardware is better than my x220's. Are gamers expected to spring the money for the latest and greatest nugget every other month? When such a CPU and GPU alone would already cost most people's entire monthly wage?
What's the point of having a game that nobody can play? Even my friends' desktop hardware which is quite a bit better still - it only pulls 45 FPS according to him. Seriously, what's the point?12 -
Prior to a tech conference in Las Vegas, the department manager held pre-meetings (yes, more than one)
with the developers to outline their expected behavior (yes, there was an outline in Word). Since
they would be representing the company, professionalism would be expected at all times, not just
during the conference. He knew he couldn’t forbid gambling and drinking, but any unruly behavior
that could reflect badly on the company would be dealt with severe disciplinary action up to and
including termination. He wrote up very detailed itinerary, what track each developer was
expected to attend, meal times (yes, what time to get up for breakfast, meet for lunch, and time
to eat at night). First day was fine, casinos are kinda crazy so having an itinerary wasn’t the
worst idea and no one got lost. Days following however, got interesting. After the first evening
meal, everyone hit the casino as expected (too much drinking, etc..normal single twenty-something
guys do) and the manager especially had a good time.
Next, and following days, the manager could not be found in any of the ‘required’ technical tracks.
Not that they cared that much, but couple of devs decided to check out the casino, and sure enough,
there he was at one of the tables, drunk, and being very loud around at 10 in the morning.
Again, nobody cared much, manager wasn’t very tech savy, and so attending a track on C #threading
would be lost on him. It was more of ‘do as I say, not as I do’ kind of thing.
The manager kept to the itinerary, he met everyone at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, etc, but the
‘WTF’s didn’t get good until the manager was bragging about how wonderful the conference was, how
much he was learning and couldn’t wait to get back and start implementing everything he was learning.
It was such a joke, the guys would bait him on tracks they know he didn’t attend and an amazing amount
of BS could not be believed.
On the last day of the conference several decided to follow him after breakfast to see where he went
and watched him go into a technical track, just to walk back out and straight to the casino floor.
Again, around 10, he was drunk, not quite as loud until he threw up in a trash can (they said it was quite a scene).
He left to go back his room, which they suspected he took a nap before meeting everyone for lunch.
After that, they gathered his daily itinerary was:
- Get up for breakfast
- walk around and make sure it looked like he was heading to a track
- head to the casino
- take a nap
- eat lunch
- walk around some more
- head to the casino
- take a nap
- eat dinner
- head to the casino
- wash-rinse-repeat
Last day caught up with him. After about week of drinking, staying up late, etc, his body (he’s in his mid 50’s, 350lbs+, so imagine)
kinda’ gave up. Could barely walk 50 feet without needing to sit down, and the flight back was worse for everyone,
throwing up occasionally, moaning, you get the idea.
On the following Monday with the VP if IT, everyone was discussing the conference, what they learned,
what they liked, etc, the manager also bragged, yes bragged, on how tired he was because of how much
he learned and the reason why he probably caught the flu (he couldn’t hide how sick he was on the flight)
saying “When you’re in the learning zone, you lose track of time and then you are so exhausted, your
immune system is susceptible to all kinds of things.” . VP was so impressed by his dedication and
fighting through the exhaustion for the good of the company, he gave him the rest of the day off.
Other devs? No, they had to go back to work.9 -
I think I made someone angry, then sad, then depressed.
I usually shrink a VM before archiving them, to have a backup snapshot as a template. So Workflow: prepare, test, shrink, backup -> template, document.
Shrinking means... Resetting root user to /etc/skel, deleting history, deleting caches, deleting logs, zeroing out free HD space, shutdown.
Coworker wanted to do prep a VM for docker (stuff he's experienced with, not me) so we can mass rollout the template for migration after I converted his steps into ansible or the template.
I gave him SSH access, explained the usual stuff and explained in detail the shrinking part (which is a script that must be explicitly called and has a confirmation dialog).
Weeeeellll. Then I had a lil meeting, then the postman came, then someone called.
I had... Around 30 private messages afterwards...
- it took him ~ 15 minutes to figure out that the APT cache was removed, so searching won't work
- setting up APT lists by copy pasta is hard as root when sudo is missing....
- seems like he only uses aliases, as root is a default skel, there were no aliases he has in his "private home"
- Well... VIM was missing, as I hate VIM (personal preferences xD)... Which made him cry.
- He somehow achieved to get docker working as "it should" (read: working like he expects it, but that's not my beer).
While reading all this -sometimes very whiney- crap, I went to the fridge and got a beer.
The last part was golden.
He explicitly called the shrink script.
And guess what, after a reboot... History was gone.
And the last message said:
Why did the script delete the history? How should I write the documentation? I dunno what I did!
*sigh* I expected the worse, got the worse and a good laugh in the end.
Guess I'll be babysitting tomorrow someone who's clearly unable to think for himself and / or listen....
Yay... 4h plus phone calls. *cries internally*1 -
them: welcome new project members, this is our CI/CD pipeline which is completely different from the rest of the company, there won't be any great knowledge transfer, we just expect you to be able to know and use everything. but also, we expect you to work on your tasks and don't waste any time.
me: okay, so my tasks aren't going as fast as expected, because I need to invest some learning so i can set up my project correctly.
later: some help would be nice, i'm stuck right now
coworker: *helps me to fix my problems, which were partly due to misconfigured build servers* i know it's a lot, and unfortunately, for this topic sources on the web aren't so good. i can really recommend this book, this will give a deeper understanding of the topic.
me: okay, yeah i mean, tbh, i'll read the book if the project invests some time for me so i can learn everything that's required, but this won't happen. also, some initial workshop on the topic or anything would have been nice.
coworker: well, i mean, i am a software developer. for me, it is normal that i learn all that stuff in my free time. and i think that's what the PM expects from us.
me: okay, that's fine for you, i mean, if i'm interested in a topic, i will invest my private time. but in this case, PM would just expect me to do unpaid labor, to gain knowledge and skills that i can use in this specific project. i'm not willing to do that.
coworker: ...
me: ...
it's not that i don't want to learn. the thing is that there isn't any energy left by the end of the day. i'm actually trying to find some work life balance, because i don't feel balanced right now, haven't felt since i started this job.
also, this is only one of several projects i'm working on. it's like they expect me this project has top priority in my life. if it wasn't so annoying on different levels, maybe i'd have a more positive attitude towards it.
also, at the moment i find it fucking annoying that i have to invest so much time in this dev ops bullshit and this keeps me from doing my actual work.
if they are unhappy with my skills, either they can invest in my learning or kick me out. at this point, either is fine for me..12 -
STOP sending me fucking videos of the bug you are experiencing. I don't get paid as much as I do to sit around and watch your stupid fucking screen captures for 37 minutes just to find 30 seconds of meaningful information to reproduce something you could have put in a paragraph and emailed to me.
Either you meet me halfway and actually understand the expected outcome and how it differs from what you experience enough to verbalize it, or I ain't fucking fixing your shit. For fucks sake, a 40 minute screen recording with no audio does NOT count as a valid reproduction.3 -
So yeah XML is still not solved in year 2018. Or so did I realize the last days.
I use jackson to serialize generic data to JSON.
Now I also want to provide serialization to XML. Easy right? Jackson also provides XML serialization facitlity similar to JAXB.
Works out of the box (more or less). Wait what? *rubbing eyes*
<User>
<pk>234235</pk>
<groups typeCode="usergroup">
<pk>6356679041773291286</pk>
</groups>
<groups typeCode="usergroup">
<pk>1095682275514732543</pk>
</groups>
</User>
Why is my groups property (java.util.Set) rendered as two separate elements? Who the fuck every though this is the way to go?
So OK *reading the docs* there is a way to create a collection wrapper. That must be it, I thought ...
<User typeCode="user">
<pk>2540591810712846915</pk>
<groups>
<groups typeCode="usergroup">
<pk>6356679041773291286</pk>
</groups>
<groups typeCode="usergroup">
<pk>1095682275514732543</pk>
</groups>
</groups>
</User>
What the fuck is this now? This is still not right!!!
I know XML offers a lot of flexibility on how to represent your data. But this is just wrong ...
The only logical way to display that data is:
<User typeCode="user">
<pk>2540591810712846915</pk>
<groups>
<groupsEntry typeCode="usergroup">
<pk>6356679041773291286</pk>
</groupsEntry>
<groupsEntry typeCode="usergroup">
<pk>1095682275514732543</pk>
</groupsEntry>
</groups>
</User>
It would be better if the individual entries would be just called "group" but I guess implementing such a logic would be pretty hard (finding a singular of an arbitrary word?).
So yeah theres a way for that * implementing a custom collection serializer* ... wait is that really the way to go? I mean common, am I the only one who just whants this fucking shit just work as expected, with the least amount of suprise?
Why do I have to customize that ...
So ok it renders fine now ... *writes test for it+
FUCK FUCK FUCK. why can't jackson not deserialize it properly anymore? The two groups are just not being picked up anymore ...
SO WHY, WHY WHY are you guys over at jackson, JAXB and the like not able to implement that in the right manner. AND NOT THERE IS ONLY ONE RIGHT WAY TO DO IT!
*looks at an apple PLIST file* *scratches head* OK, gues I'll stick to the jackson defaults, at least it's not as broken as the fucking apple XML:
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>PayloadOrganization</key>
<string>Example Inc.</string>
<key>PayloadDisplayName</key>
<string>Profile Service</string>
<key>PayloadVersion</key>
<integer>1</integer>
</dict>
</plist
I really wonder who at apple has this briliant idea ...2 -
Can someone help me understand?
I subscribed to a nifty IT-releated magazine, and on its back, there's an ad for "Dedicated root server hosting", nothing unusual at a first glance, but after I read the issue, I decided to humor them and see what it is that they offered, and... It just... Doesn't make sense to me!
An ad for "Dedicated Root Server" - What is a dedicated root server first of all? Root servers of any infrastructure sound pretty important.
But, the ad also boasts "High speed performance with the new Intel Core i9-9900K octa-core processor", that's the first weird thing.
Why would anyone responsible enough want to put an i9 into a highly-reliable root server, when the thing doesn't even support ECC? Also, come on, octa-core isn't much, I deal with servers that have anywhere between 2 and 24 cores. 8 isn't exactly a win, even if it has a higher per-core clock.
Oh, also, further down the ad has a list of, seeming, advantages/specs of the servers, they proclaim that the CPU "incl. Hyper-Threading-Technology"... Isn't that... Standard when it comes to servers? I have never seen a server without hyperthreading so far at my job.
"64 GBs of DDR4 RAM" - Fair enough, 64 gigs is a good amount, but... Again, its not ECC, something I would never put into a server.
"2 x 8 TB SATA Enterprise Hard Drive 7200 rpm" - Heh, "enterprise hard drive", another cheap marketing word, would impress me more if they mentioned an actual brand/model, but I'll bite, and say that at least the 7200 rpm is better than I expected.
"100 GBs of Backup Space" - That's... Really, really little. I've dealt with clients who's single database backup is larger than that. Especially with 2x8 TB HDD (Even accounting for software raids on top)
This one cracks me up - "Traffic unlimited"
Whaaaat?! You are not gonna give me a limit to the total transferred traffic to the internet for my server in your data center? Oh, how generous of you, only, the other case would make the server just an expensive paperweight! I thought this ad was for semi-professionals at least, so why mention traffic, and not bandwidth, the thing that matters much more when it comes to servers? How big of a bandwidth do I get? Don't tell me you use dialup for your "Dedicated Root Server"s!
"Location Germany or Finland" - Fair enough, geolocation can matter when it comes to latency.
"No minimum contract" - Oooh, how kiiiind of you, again, you are not gonna charge me extra for using the server only as long as I pay? How nice!
"Setup Fee £60" - I guess, fair enough, the server is not gonna set itself up, only...
The whole ad is for "monthly from £55.50", that's quite the large fee for setup.
Oh, and a cherry on top, the tiny print on the bottom mentions: "All prices exclude VAT and are a subject to..." blah blah blah.
Really? I thought that this sort of almost customer deceipt is present only in the common people's sphere!
I must say, there's being unimpressed, and then... There's this. Why, just... Why? Anyone understands this? Because I don't...12 -
so... 9 years ago we had this super awesome codebase. 1 file, complete logic COPIED to be used in ui and service/daemon. I scrolled to the middle of the file and there was no source. it was out of bounds of my monitor to the right because of nested ifs. ok... what the fuck!! the worst part: I had to implement a new FEATURE into this mess. 2 days. I said it would not work as expected because the feature was not thought through. but project said let's gooooo! ok there I was, a junior with an impossible to implement feature and a codebase from hell. I've implemented something, all night long. next day it was the problem of the consultants. they called me, I told them why it's impossible that this would ever work, they understood and talked to the customer. he accepted the solution. WTF?! anyway, in those days I thought about quitting developing software as my daily job....4
-
You guys remember that awful Java class that I'm taking at uni? Mentioned in this rant here: (https://devrant.com/rants/1461472/...).
Well we had an assignment to make a program that accepted any amount of numbers from a user and add the unique ones to an array (so if 2 was already entered, it would not be added to the array a second time), and then print the array out backwards. Simple as fuck right?
I checked my grade from the assignment I turned in and see that I only received 10 out of 50 points. Why?
"Program compiles and works with expected output. Partial credit for using ArrayList instead of array".
Uhm.. Partial credit is 10 out of 50?? And what the hell? Yeah okay let me go make this stupid program that involves an array with an unknown length and see how fucking perfect it works out for me.
Fuck you for docking my grade because I made a program that was sensible.
Fucking dickhead. -
Today at 7am i got s phone call please go to this client
I responded sure no problem what am i going to do at this client.....
Don't worry they said you will find out when you get there...
So i go to the client and as I expected its not dev related at all
It was for installation of point of sale tills and printers 😱😱
That are 7 years old with no cables
(2 hour drive to get here)
Anyway I ended up selling hardware to them....this developer is going places 😂🙈1 -
I just woke up this morning to an email saying that someone from chile logged into my instagram account and I'm not actually what set me of the most.
The fact that my password was leaked, the fact I literally never got notified that I had a Instagram account I never wanted or the you have to disable most privacy settings, just to reset your password.
Like holy fuck, I disabled all options I could find on firefox concerning privacy/tracking and it still tells me I should disable some privacy settings.
So I enabled chrome again (fucking system app) and it worked on first try. Just as expected...
Anyway, fuck instagram and thank you dear hacker for telling me that I had a worthless to delete.5 -
The reason I liked Captain Marvel, is because it wasn't about defeating something or someone. It was about remembering who you are, picking yourself up, and moving forward with what you've always wanted to do.
This is a similar situation with most designers and developers.
If you watch it again, notice that she was always falling hard. From riding a bike to completing an obstacle course, she would try something and fail.
But she kept trying.
After losing sight of her goals by being distracted and derailed by someone else with another agenda - she was slowly reminded of them, and eventually remembered what she forgot.
Then, not only was she was able to what she originally set out to do - but, ended up doing them better than she ever expected.
If that's not a great story for boys and girls to grow up with - and, for adults to learn from (including some of my peers) - I honestly don't know what is.2 -
PSA: negate your tests and make sure they fail!
I have what I thought was a weird and slightly paranoid habit. When I write tests sometimes just as a sanity check negate the assertion to make sure the test fails and isn't a false positive. Almost always fails as expected.
But not today! Turns out I had forgotten to wrap my equality check in an assertion so it would always pass. It freaks me out to imagine pushing a test that always passes not just because it doesn't do its job, but could also obscure a bug and trick me into thinking it works differently than it does. Broken tests are the worst!
But it pays to be paranoid. -
Just before the holidays started I was given a task by my manager, $M.
$M: "Kyntak, while I'm away I want you to look into this new way of starting $important_service"
$me: "Okay $M, is there a bug for this that explains what is needed?"
$M: "Yes, you should be able to find it"
Goes looking, finds someone else working on something connected but not the same, finds the code change that makes this available... It doesn't explain how to use it, when the async events fire or (well, to a junior engineer like me) really anything.
Message the other (very experienced) eng.
$me: "Hey I've been asked to make $important_service use the new starting API, can you tell me about?"
$eng: "Yup, here's a bug for that and I'm happy to answer any questions you have" *goes offline*
I read the bug. It doesn't mention the original problem I was trying to solve, it doesn't even mention $important_service. There's no design doc mentioned. The bug has a higher priority assigned than any of my other work. It has an expected completion date only days after I get back from holidays (which $M told me to take).
I try to contact $M and $eng. They've already left for holidays.
"Hmm"
Implements as much of the fairly inevitable boilerplate that I can infer from the bugs and surrounding code.
"Hmm"
So, I'm into my second week of holiday and am starting to think about the potential shit storm I may return to.
I hope the bug's priority was wrong.4 -
Years ago, one of my friends in college was taking an intro to CS class. He asked me for help on one of his assignments. It was a simple Python program, but it wasn't running as expected. I go in figuring it will be easy to fix. But everything looks exactly right. An hour later I'm tearing my hair out! It isn't even entering the function although it's clearly called. I'm beginning to feel very self conscious, as a CS major who can't even debug a 15 line program for a friend.
Then it hit me. This is Python. I used an editor macro to convert all indentation to tabs, lined them up, and it ran on the first try. Turns out, he had somehow ended up with a mixture of tabs and spaces.
I'm not sure what the takeaway is, but I think he got a surprisingly honest introduction to the life of a developer...2 -
The most scary stuff when changing jobs is not the fear if the code is spaghetti or not. It’s onboarding and how the company expect new devs to learn the domain.
When I joined the company I am working on, they did not have at all documentation in regards to domain knowledge. I had to ping devs who have been with the company for years so they can explain to me. Product Managers are useless. They can explain the ticket but cannot point me in the codebase and DB fields that that ticket needs to touch.
They would say to me “Ask what you don’t know “. MF, I don’t know what I don’t know. How am I supposed to come up with questions?
Cherry on top are JIRA “Stories”. It’s title and 1 sentence and it was expected of me to do the discovery.
Fast forward, there are still things that I am learning. I work in an industry that is very complicated and has a lot of information to take. I don’t get burned out of code and tasks. I get burned out of trying to understand my tickets and connect them with the code and DB.1 -
I'm so fucking frustrated with my ex company CEO, this motherfucker made everyone move to Bangalore costing is employees a good chunk of their salary and this delusional ASSHOLE knew that only half of the expected funding was coming in January 2023 itself and they'd be out of funds by July/August, they let go few folks from the team, fired the entire marketing team and expected to make the product profitable. The only reason I had stayed at that time was because the product was interesting to build and the scale I was working with was crazy like 100k request per minute peaks and avg of 10k rpm. I left the company in August...
This MOTHERFUCKER hasn't paid out final settlement after leaving for most employees and he openly says to the folks who are still working there that paying us is not his priority.
I hope your Atlas cluster gets fucking deleted, accesses revoked and entire AWS setup goes down forever, bitch.
We can't goto courts because the company law tribunal needs atleast 1 crore (1.2 million usd) of unpaid dues to declare it insolvent in a years time..
This asshole deducted taxes from our salaried but didn't pay them to the income tax department for an entire fucking financial year.
What a cheating, delusional, sick bastard. And he's still not willing to sell off the company to pay off the debts and call it a day.
Aarrghhhh on top of losing 2-3k USD I might have to pay my taxes approx 5-6k USD to the govt to keep my records well maintained.
What a grade A delusional asshole 😡
If he won't clear the dues till December, I'm gonna launch a mass of social media posts and destroy his reputation so that he doesn't get one penny of VC funds in the future I'm gonna make sure of that...4 -
I'm a student at a cyber education program. They taught us Python sockets two weeks ago. The next day, I went home and learned multithreading.
Then, I realized the potential.
I know a guy1 who knows a guy2 who runs a business and could really use an app I could totally make. And it's a great idea and it's gonna be awesome and I'm finally gonna do something useful with my life.
All I gotta do is learn UI. Easy peasy.
I spent the next week or so experimenting with my code, coming up with ideas for the app in my head and of course, telling all my friends about it. Bad habit, I know.
Guy1 was about to meet Guy2, so I asked Guy1 to tell Guy2 about my idea. He agreed. I reminded him again later that day, and then again in a text message.
The next day, I asked him if he remembered.
Guess what.
I asked him to text Guy2 instead. He came back to me with Guy2's reply: "Why won't he send me a message himself?".
So I contacted Guy2. After a while, he replied. We had a short, awkward conversation. Then he asked why he should prefer a new app over the existing replacement.
He activated my trap card. With a long chqin of messages, I unloaded everything I was gathering in my mind for the last week. I explained how he could use the app, what features it could have and how it would solve his problem and improve his product. I finished it off with the good old "Yeah, I was bored😅" to make the whole thing look a bit more casual.
Now, all that's left to do is wait.
...
Out of all the possible outcomes to this situation, this was both the worst the least expected one.
I'm not familliar with the English word for "Two blue checkmarks, no reply". But I'm certain there is no word in any language to describe what I'm feeling about this right now.
By that point, Guy1 has already made it clear that he's not interested in being my messanger anymore. He also told me to let the thing die, just in case I didn't get the hint. I don't blame him though.
It's been almost a week since then. Still no reply from Guy2. I haven't quite been able to get over it. Telling all my friends about it didn't really help.
Looking back, I think Guy2 has never realised he has that problem with his product.
But still, the least he could do is tell me why he dosen't like it...
"Why won't he send me a message himself?" Yeah, why really? HMMM :thinking:
You know what? If I ever somehow get the guts to leave my home country, I'm sending a big "fuck you" to this guy.9 -
Man wk89 awesome... bringing back a lot of memories. The one thing really stands out to me though is the software.
I see a lot of rants about people shocked that turboC is still in use or other DOS programs are still in production. A lot can of bad be said here but I think often it's a case of we truly don't build things like we did in the good old days.
What those devs accomplished with such limited resources is phenomenal and the fact that we still haven't managed to replicate the feel and usability of it says a lot, not to mention just how fucking stable most of it was.
My favourite games are all DOS based, my most favourite of all time Sherlock is 103kb in size. When I started coding games I made a clone of it and to this day I am still trying to figure out what sorcery is in the algorithm that generates/solves puzzles that makes it so fast and memory efficient. I must have tried 100+ ways and can't even come close. NB! If you know you can hint but don't tell me. Solving this is a matter of personal pride.
Where those games really stand out is when you get into the graphics processing - the solutions they came up with to render sprites, maps and trick your eyes into seeing detail with only 4-16 colours is nothing short of genius. Also take a second to consider that taking a screen shot of the game is larger than the entire game itself and let that sink in...
I think the dramatic increase in storage, processing power and ram over the last decade is making us shit developers - all of us. Just take one look at chrome, skype or anything else mainline really and it's easy to see we no longer give a rats ass about memory anywhere except our monthly AWS/GCE bill.
We don't have to be creative or even mindful about anything but the most significant memory leaks in order to get our software to run now days. We also don't have constraints to distribute it, fast deliver-ability is rewarded over quality software. It's only expected to stay in production 3-4 years anyway.
Those guys were the true "rockstars" and "ninja" developers and if you can't acknowledge that you can take ya React app and shovit. -
As you guys may or may not know (or may or may not give a fuck), I'm currently part-time studying to get a diploma and get the fuck out of my country. Since I have to write a 40-pages long "end of study dissertation" about something we personnaly have interest in, I decided to teach myself about DevOps.
In order to prepare it, I decided to get a Raspberry Pi, install Docker and Jenkins (as a container) on it, and handle my multiples websites on it, and build a huge fucking website around which I would write my dissertation about.
But man, I'm starting to loose hope, I get to bed at 2 AM every night because I'm trying to make some basic shit work until I realize that I just CAN'T what I want because of tons of reason, so I try to lower my expectations, and it's frustrating. Yesterday, a Ruby on Rails image I created was perfectly working, tonight MySQL throws an "host not authorized for this mysql server" error, and I don't know what the fuck is happening nor if I can do anything about it.
I love teaching myself new stuff, but I have to admit, it's waaay harder than I expected2 -
Now my client does not want to rely on Amazon S3 because of the One Outage that it ever had a couple what weeks ago I forgot already. So my dumbass blurts out well we could always just back up to some other image or file storing website. But now I'm expected to implement this right away when I really haven't thought about it at all I mean I would have to write some sort of failover and some sort of daily or syncing mechanism. I guess I should forget about any direct upload to S3 code that I have written. Really I guess I have to wrap all of the image and file handling stuff with my own solution. Which actually that will be very nice when it is done and I could use this on other projects but it's quite a lot of work for something that I don't feel we really need at this stage in development. Just because you're using stuff on production that has am enormous red TEST label in the way of the ui doesn't mean i can code bullet proof software any faster4
-
Had a bad day at work :( They gave me this code for some obscure streaming job and asked me to complete it. Only after 3 days did I realize that the LLD given to me was incorrect as the data model was updated. Another 2 more days, I was able to debug the code and run it successfully— I was able to parse the tables and generate the required frame but not able to stream it back to the output topic as per the LLD. That’s where I needed help but none of my emails/messages were replied to. The main guy who is pretty technical scheduled a code review session with me— I expected that I would run the code and he would spot it something I might’ve missed and why my streaming function isn’t working. Instead, what happened was that he grilled me on each and every line of the code (which had some obscure tables queried) and then got super mad at me saying “Why are we having this code review session if your code is not complete?”. I’m like bruh, you asked for it, and yes, the main parsing logic is done and I’m just having this issue in the last part. And he’s like “Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”. Wtf?! I left at least 5 emails and a dozen messages. He’s like this has to go live on Monday, and I’m like Ok, I’ll work in the weekend. And he’s like “Don’t tell me all these things! You’re not doing me a favor by working on weekends! How am I to ask my colleagues to connect with you separately on Saturday/Sunday? You should have done the on the weekdays itself. What were you doing this whole week?”. Bruh, I was running the code multiple times and debugging it using print statements. All while you were ignoring my attempts to reach out to you. SMH 🤦♂️ I can go on and on about this whole saga.4
-
https://devrant.com/rants/3140022/...
So I just realised it's been a while and I haven't updated this story.
So the job mentioned in the previous post did not work out. Things were tough for a while after that but then all of a sudden I had 4 interviews back to back. I guess everyone got the 2021 budgets and suddenly knew they could afford me.
So had an interview at a small company, only 6km from my house. A week later second interview, another week later, when I had the other 3 lined up as well, third interview as they wanted to physically meet me. The first two were digital.
They also only offered me 47% of my previous salary but they said there was a salary review after probation (3 months) and another at the 6 month mark.
Another interview was for more just a general "the printer's not working" type job. I went for that interview as at the time, I'd take anything that paid enough to cover the bills. They also made me an offer for 47% of my prev salary. I turned them down as I was about to sign for the other gig. I recommended my brother and he got the job.
The monday of that week I had an interview at a bigger company. They called on 11th Nov offering almost the same as my last salary and wanted me to start on the 1st of Dec. So I took that one as it was double the other two. I then got delayed by 2 days with starting because they were having trouble getting my equipment sorted. All's well now.
It's a support job, not dev but it's internal 2nd line so at least it's not customer facing. They want to grow me into an RPA role, which I'm down for. I figure I'll kill 6 months doing that and worm my way into microservices.
The forth company, I didn't even actually for the interview, it kept on getting delayed and by the time they came op with a date, I had already signed my current contract.
Overall, the job is not what I expected but it was a godsend as I was about to sign for half as much money. Finally, I can pay all my bills, catch up on debts and even save a bit!
Thanks for the support and encouragement from those of you who have been following this story -
So, first: I'm a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to code and love to think I know everything.
We had a group project at university and me being laid back but unknown to the other people, the "rest" of them was together with me in a group. We got to know each other and actually we were a pretty cool group. I guess "the rest" in a computer science course means you get the cool guys.^^
1/6 of us did ever code in C# and 2/6 even knows what an engine is and how unity works. I was in both sixths, got group leader somehow (if you'd know me from school. Omg. I was that one guy not knowing what went on, saying my two sentences at the presentation and took the B-.:D), so what to do to have a nice 2 weeks with them?
We did a crash course, I taught them some basics and everything.
The point is, i was hella nervous and i really get anxious if something is expected from me.
Long story short, I talked a whole week for 5-7 hours straight without real pauses and eating wayyy less a man should. Dude I was literally dead on my way home on friday evening. I felt like I would fall over any fucken second, i was all shakey, dizzy as hell, weird vision, everything. It felt like I was about to die on the spot.
I got home though, ate like 1/2 kilograms of pasta and felt myself coming back to life.:D
What to learn from this:
Keep the fuck calm, do pauses, drink and eat enough and don't rush all in for a fucken week without real rest..^^
It fucks you up and doesn't do anything good for your productivity.
We got an A btw, so in the end, all went good.(: -
I would have to say the first start-up I worked with had the worst recruiters. Albeit they were seniors of mine, and not full fledged professionals, but this was pretty ridiculous.
So at the interview(which I won by winning a hackathon in college), they asked me the standard questions about my current knowledge and what I hope to achieve in the company. When they asked me my tech questions, one program that they thought was tough, I solved in 2 minutes. I was interviewing with 3 other people whom hadn't gotten the answer. Naturally I doubt myself due to the lack of answers being produced. The recruiters themselves didnt understand my answer initially. So much so that they were convinced I was wrong(at this time the others were coming up with, and submitting their answers, which the recruiters naturally expected from us). So to give me the benefit of the doubt, they whip out a laptop to run my code, and guess what? It worked, and had NOTICABLY lesser computation speed.
Needless to say I got the job, but the look on my recruiters' faces after exclaiming I was wrong, then they themselves being proven wrong? Priceless. xD4 -
This is long rant/story:
My manager conducts sync-up meetings regularly. The idea is to sync up all developers on current state of work. He does’t conduct stand-ups. He doesn't have time for it. He rather discusses on individual basis if we are blocked. The rule of the sync-up meeting is NOT to discuss any blockers or problems but simply explain each other what we are doing and how we plan next.
Sometime ago, the manager brought up and explained a new way of working in the sync-up meeting. At this point, a new developer in the team was absent due to sickness.
Today, there was a sync-up meeting and the manager started to question the new member about the newly introduced way of working. He was unaware of it and the manager never communicated this important information via email or any mode of communication available.
So, the conversation goes on as follows:
"Manager": — "Why didn’t you complete your task as per the new way of working?"
"Employee": — "Well, I've no idea. Am I supposed to do? I’ve been working as usual like any other"
"Manager": — "We have a new process and you have failed to follow it, so we’re late in delivering your work"
"Employee": — "I’ve already finished my work on time. I've raised a pull-request this morning"
"Manager": — "It doesn’t matter, it is not merged to main branch and so we can’t include your work in the release"
"Employee": — "I’ve no idea about the new process"
"Manager": — "Haven’t you asked around about what happened from previous meeting"
"Employee": — "Yes, I have. I was told which tasks were handled, but nothing about a new process"
"Manager": — "Aren’t you interested to learn it?"
"Employee": — "Why won’t I be interested? I was on a sick leave and I have no clue what happened here"
"Manager": — "What’s happened is past now, let’s not focus on it"
"Employee": — <Dumbfounded>
The Employee felt ashamed in front of everyone. He did his job but it didn’t pay off.
…. After an hour … the Employee had a talk with the Manager
"Employee": — "You shouldn’t have pointed me out in front of everyone. It made me feel real bad. You should have emailed this information if its important for the team."
"Manager": — "I have no idea what you’re talking about. When did I say so? I think you’ve a bright future in the team. You should be focusing on doing better things."
Employee goes back to work. A minute later, the Manager sends a PowerPoint screenshot of the process in the group chat.
**The Process**
It's about delivering release packages based on priorities defined by client. Each release package is a set of work items or requirements. Individual developers are assigned to work items. They are expected to deliver on planned delivery timelines in order to consider a work item into a release package.1 -
The last and final company who was supposed to hire me, after good HR interview and a great positive technical interview, they havent replied to me for 11 days.
I emailed them and said its been 11 days since technical interview and i havent gotten any feedback, what are the next steps.
That was on monday last week, 8th May.
They replied back saying "the technical interview went generally very positive, the interviews have been prolonged more than we expected so we have this whole week of interviews and we'll reply to you no more than on May 15th on what the results are".
It's May 16th today. I still haven't heard SHIT from them.
I am so FUCKING pissed off at all of this bullshit reckless companies not giving a FUCK and being so disrespectful
FUCK. YOU.16 -
Back when I was still in school for comp sci we had an advanced software engineering and design class with c++. At this time, everyone was expected to be proficient enough with cpp to go ahead and properly work with whatever the instructor would throw at us. And pretty much everyone was since past classes included a lot of c++ development. Of course, efficient at least related to academic studies rather than actual real world development.
Our teacher would mix in a lot pf phyisics and mathematics into what we were doing, something that I greatly enjoyed, while at the same time putting real world value concerning cpp best practices to avoid common pitfalls in the development of said language. Since most bugs seemed to be memory based he would be particularly strict about that.
One classmate, good friend and an actual proper developer now a days would ALWAYS forget to free his resources...ALWAYS for whatever fucking reason he would just ignore that shit, regardless of how much the instructor would make a point on it.
At one point during class on a virtual lecture the dude literally addressed a couple of students but when he got to my boy in particular he said: "you are the reason why people are praying to Mozilla and Hoare to release Rust as fast as possible into a suitable alternative to high performant code in C++, WHY won't you pay attention to how you deal with memory management?"
And it stuck with me. I merely a recreational cpp dev, most of my profesional work is done on web development, so I cannot attest to all the additional unsafe code that people encounter in the wild when dealing with cpp on a professional level.
But in terms of them common criticisms of C and C++ for which memory is so important to work with, wouldn't you guys say that it comes more from the side of people just not knowing what they are doing rather than a fault on the language itself?
I see the merits and beauty of Rust, I truly do, it is a fantastic language, with a standardized build system and a lot of good design put into it. But I can't really fathom it being the cpp killer, if anything, the real cpp killers are bad devs that just don't know what they are doing or miss shit.
What do y'all ninjas think?8 -
I used to think that I had matured. That I should stop letting my emotions get the better of me. Turns out there's only so much one can bottle up before it snaps.
Allow me to introduce you folks to this wonderful piece of software: PaddleOCR (https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/...). At this time I'll gladly take any free OCR library that isn't Tesseract. I saw the thing, thought: "Heh. 3 lines quick start. Cool.", and the accuracy is decent. I thought it was a treasure trove that I could shill to other people. That was before I found out how shit of a package it is.
First test, I found out that logging is enabled by default. Sure, logging is good. But I was already rocking my own logger, and I wanted it to shut the fuck up about its log because it was noise to the stuffs I actually wanted to log. Could not intercept its logging events, and somehow just importing it set the global logging level from INFO to DEBUG. Maybe it's Python's quirk, who knows. Check the source code, ah, the constructors gaves `show_log` arg to control logging. The fuck? Why? Why not let the user opt into your logs? Why is the logging on by default?
But sure, it's just logging. Surely, no big deal. SURELY, it's got decent documentation that is easily searchable. Oh, oh sweet summer child, there ain't. Docs are just some loosely bundled together Markdowns chucked into /doc. Hey, docs at least. Surely, surely there's something somewhere about all the args to the OCRer constructor somewhere. NOPE! Turns out, all the args, you gotta reference its `--help` switch on the command line. And like all "good" software from academia, unless you're part of academia, it's obtuse as fuck. Fine, fuck it, back to /doc, and it took me 10 minutes of rummaging to find the correct Markdown file that describes the params. And good-fucking-luck to you trying to translate all them command line args into Python constructor params.
"But PTH, you're overreacting!". No, fuck you, I'm not. Guess whose code broke today because of a 4th number version bump. Yes, you are reading correctly: My code broke, because of a 4th number version bump, from 2.6.0.1, to 2.6.0.2, introducing a breaking change. Why? Because apparently, upstream decided to nest the OCR result in another layer. Fuck knows why. They did change the doc. Guess what they didn't do. PROVIDING, A DAMN, RELEASE NOTE. Checked their repo, checked their tags, nothing marking any releases from the 3rd number. All releases goes straight to PyPI, quietly, silently, like a moron. And bless you if you tell me "Well you should have reviewed the docs". If you do that for your project, for all of your dependencies, my condolences.
Could I just fix it? Yes. Without ranting? Yes. But for fuck sake if you're writing software for a wide audience you're kinda expected to be even more sane in your software's structure and release conventions. Not this. And note: The people writing this, aren't random people without coding expertise. But man they feel like they are.5 -
So, by a cruel twist of fate I ended up on the front line of tech support for the app we've built. It's aimed at non-IT professionals, in general people who are not expected to know too much about computers but who should have at least two neurons to bash together in their pretty little heads.
No.
It really makes me drop my faith in humanity considerably. Clicking a confirmation link is too much. Filtering an excel sheet is too hard, despite it being their technically main work tool. Tickets are basically "shit's broken go fix". What is broken? How to reproduce it? Why do you expect the person on the other side of the screen to be a fucking diviner? I recently ran all out of dove guts to search for the answers of your questions.4 -
So.. I'm giving one of my employers webapps a visual refresher, new company branding and whatnot.
And then I stumbled onto a check that is not returning what anybody expects, and, well , I'm busy fixing things, yeah..? so I go digging.. 🤔
```
function isDefined(obj) {
return !(typeof obj === "undefined") || obj !== null;
}
```
Here's the fun part, these particular lines have been in the code base since before 2017, which is when my Git history starts, because that's when we migrated projects from Visual SourceSafe 6 over to Git. Yes, you read that right. They were still using VSS in 2017.
I've begged and pleaded with my last 3 bosses to let us thrown this piece of shit out our second story window and rewrite it properly. But no, we don't have time to rewrite, so we must fix what we have instead.
I lost 4 hours of my life earlier today, tracking down another error that has been silently swallowed by a handler with its "console.log" call commented out, only to find that it's always been like that, and it's an "expected error". 🤦
Please, just fucking kill me now... I just, I can't deal with this shit anymore.5 -
Thoughts on forced emergency support?
I am with a company I generally like a lot but there are some things I generally despise about it. Like forced emergency support.
I am not good at it, I don't claim to be.. I generally struggle with anxiety, stress and depression, I specifically avoid roles that require on-call service .. I'm a senior level software engineer.
I find it very frustrating to be expected to be on-call from 7-7 in support of infrastructure I did not architect, did not code and basically know nothing about. They provided me with a ten minute discussion about ops genie and where to find internal support articles for my training and that's about it.
Last night I received an ops genie alarm and acked it as I was instructed to do, I went around the system looking for the alarm cause and basically had no idea what to do except watch our metrics graphing praying there wouldn't be an outage. Fortunately the alarm was for our load balancer scaling operation, it was taking a bit longer than usual ... Sigh of relief. Stay up til 6am and fall asleep..
Wake up to a few messages from various people asking why I didn't do this and that and it took me every inkling of my being to remain cordial and polite but I really just wanted to scream and say a bunch of shit that would probably get me fired.
What the actual fuck?
Why expect someone that has no god damn clue what they are doing to do something like this? Fuckin shit training and no leadership to mentor me and help me get better at this role, no shadowing, no regiment ..
#confused and #annoyed
Thoughts? Am I a bitch? Is it unreasonable for me to expect my job duties stay in line with what I'm actually good at!?
Thanks.15 -
I am a good person. I can even say I am a good programmer. I have worked hard to get where I am and that shows perseverance. Although, where I am right now is not what I expected, I am somewhere. I can do something. I have good intentions.
Someday, I will build software which will be used by millions of people around the interwebs. And they will love me, for I will have made their lives better....in some way. Some will even consider paying me for it. Not because the well placed and non intrusive donate button I put there, but out of pure adoration and bare necessity to preserve someone as brilliant and precious as me. I shall be the definition of success. But I long for neither adoration nor wealth, for I am humble or at least that is how I will be perceived.
Like flies to the honey my success will attract big evil corporations to acquire my business. And I shall spit on their wretched face....at first. I would like to be wooed. Such display of integrity shall inspire generations of programmers. Let ye be inspired. There will be those who envy my achievements and they will be mocked and shunned by my true believers. But being the kind soul that I am, I will bring back my minions, for it could a PR nightmare.
All these events will take place in a not too distant future. Sure, I am going through a dark time now, it will pass. 'tis nothing but me transitioning from a lame ass PHP coder moth to this totally badass software engineer who is also a cool bro. This eclipse of my brain shall pass. My neurons will fire in all directions like photons from the sun during late winter, for it may overheat and we definitely don't want that.
I pray to the gods of engineering to grant my wishes. Trust me guys, you will be thanking yourselves when donate my money to charities that will help me set up. But that's another scheme. Amen.4 -
Accounting software- and it’s even not the developers fault but because law is changing so often these days they barely keep up.
So I run sole business and visit my accountant from time to time to chat and give my documents.
Sometimes I also help with accounting software like finding why it’s doesn’t sending this crap and doing what it’s expected to do only in some cases.
It usually takes an hour to find out why something doesn’t work.
Also once I was sending some companies fiscal year summary documents cause no one was able to figure out how to sign those documents and how to fill the form so it’s accepted by the “system”.
Based on how I see bureaucracy is increasing cause of technology instead of decreasing and how stupid are those protocols that are required for sending some financial documents over internet. Seeing that those protocols are changing every year if not half a year and software to send those documents mostly doesn’t work.
I’d say any accounting software is temple of doom.
It’s classic “The trial” by Kafka.2 -
i had to deliver roughly 250 gb of data. after two days he received it. on a hard drive. by parcel service.
sending it online it would have been done by the next but two weeks. what a brave new world. (still better that uruguay)4 -
The client wants the booking project to be all in JS Framework (not specifying any) and NO PHP since client hates PHP (and I don't know why) from the very beginning when the only dev was my former front-end partner (lead dev).
I was wondering why the client still continued the project, YET the file extensions were still on PHP. I asked the lead dev what happened and answered he didn't know know how to start migrating to JS framework and just started NATIVE PHP.
Still, as being a good dev and a supporter to lead dev, did accept and the project as lead dev's assistant. Fixed bugs, enhancement and responsive (DEMMIT, I FREAKING HATE RESPONSIVE) and later complained why am I doing front-end tasks, when it's not my task, supposedly. I EXPECTED MORE ON BACK-END TASKS!
(HERE'S THE EPIC ADVISE GOES AND CALLED OURSELVES MASTER)
Me: Master, why did you not started the project in JS Framework instead of native php?
Lead Dev : You know what master, this project has been already done if the client allows US to use WordPress for this project will still be migrated to JS. And now, WE are trapped to make every window size be responsive since there are already a standard for each window screen.
Me: (DO NOT INCLUDE ME IN YOUR FUCKING SORCERY! I DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU DID THERE AND WHY D'YOU ACCEPT THIS PROJECT, SLAVE, WHEN YOU ALREADY KNOW YOU DO NOT KNOW HOW TO DO IT, IN THE FIRST PLACE. STOP BEING A DICKHEAD AND DO NOT WASTE CLIENT'S MONEY AND EFFORT FOR YOUR USELESS BUNCH OF SHIT!) Indeed, responsive is a such a pain in the arse.
Lead Dev: Maybe, let's just finish our tasks first and wait the project to be migrated to JS.
P.S. The project manager and client asked me if I do know how to migrate the project from native PHP to JS framework and sabotaged lead dev. OFCOURSE, YES! But, I did not respond that quickly, unless eerm, you know, I earn greater than lead dev. Truth be told and practically speaking, it's really unfair for me if I accept the back-job when the lead dev delivers inaccurate deliverables and earned greater than me. No way, Jose!
Now, I am not working with him because I'm super done with him and later did I know, lead dev is looking for Drupal dev to be working for the booking project. -
I am scratching my head since 2 days cause a rather large Dockerfile doesn't work as expected.
CMD Execution just leads to "File not found".
Thanks, that's as useless as one ply toilet paper...
Whoever wrote the Dockerfile (not me…) should get an oscar...
Even in diarrhea after eating the good one day old extra hot china takeout from dubious sources I couldn't produce such a dumpster fire of bullshit.
The worst: The author thought layering helps - except it doesn't really, as it's a giant file with roughly 14 layers If I count correctly.
I just found out the problem...
The author thought it would be great to add the source files of the node project that should be built as a volume to docker... Which would work I guess....
Except that the author is a clueless chimp who thought at the same time seemingly that folder organization means to just pour everything into one folder....
Yeah. That fucker just shoved everything into one folder.
Yeeeeeesssssssss.
It looks like this:
source
docker-compose.mounts.yml
docker-compose.services.yml
docker-compose.yml
Dockerfile-development
Dockerfile-production
Dockerfile
several bash scripts
several TS / JS / config files
...
If you read the above.... Yes.
He went so far to copy the large Dockerfile 3 times to add development and production specific overrides.
I can only repeat what I said many times before: If you don't like doing stuff, ask for fucking help you moron.
-.-
*gooozfraba*
Anyways...
He directly mounts this source directory as a volume.
And then executes a shell script from this directory...
And before that shit was copied in the large gooozfraba Dockerfile into the volume.
Yeeeaaah.
We copy stuff inside the container, then we just mount on start the whole folder and overwrite the copied stuff.
*rolls eyes* which is completely obvious in this pit latrine of YML fuckery called Dockerfile.
As soon as I moved the start script outside the folder and don't have it running inside the folder that is mounted via volume, everything works.
Yeah.... Maybe one should seperate deployment from source files, runtime related stuff from build stuff.
*rolls eyes*
I really hate Docker sometimes. This is stuff that breaks easily for reasons, but you cannot see it unless you really grind your teeth and start manually tracing and debugging what the frigging fuck the maniac called author produced.1 -
Started studying physics at uni. Frist semester i had to take an introductional course to scientific programming in Python. Thought i would hate it. I was very wrong. Loved it. The next semester had no programming and the physics was so not what i expected. Dropped out and began studying computer science instead. Im now in my final year of my bachelore's degree, planning my master's.
-
So what's up with some devs, QAs and managers that create bug tickets with little to no information on what is the actual bug? I can semi-understand in the case where you document it only for you to read later.
Fuck you if you think that a ticket with only a title saying "fix all the bugs for this release" or "this feature is not working" is an appropriate way of documenting a bug.
Fuck you even more if when you are being asked to provide more info to reproduce the issue so someone else can actually be sure it is fixed or not (environment, steps, expected result, actual result, etc.), you simply say that you don't have the time for it and documenting tickets is a waste of time.
Hiring YOU was a waste of time!4 -
!rant
Guys, I had my first REAL developer interview today. Without jinxing myself, I'd like to say it went really good. We discussed the companys upcoming projects, what they expect from a new developer, etc. but some thing that bothers me about it is there was never any discussion about my expected compensation. I'm not sure if this is common or not, but we'll see.3 -
Many "purists" love to piss on JavaScript and web development. And to an extent I can understand ostream’s frustration with these people.
It’s easy to criticize because yes: many web projects are indeed shit.
But I’d like to argue that the reason why so many of these projects are crappy is because of bad management:
- unrealistic deadlines
- no clear testing strategy
- or no testing at all because of deadlines
- no time allotted to catch up on technical debt
- etc.
This type of management is far more commonplace in web projects because things need to get delivered quickly and if they’re delivered with bugs, it’s no big deal as lives aren’t at stake.
I doubt this type of management is tolerated in projects where you’re working on software for welding machines (for example), where the stakes are that "you’re expected not to kill anyone" (to quote demolishun)
So in these types of projects, management can’t tolerate anything much below perfection and thus has to adapt by setting realistic deadlines that take into account the need for quality processes and thorough testing.
If this type of management was more common in web development, I can guarantee that web applications would be much more reliable and of better quality.
I can also guarantee that poorly managed non-web projects as outlined above would be just shitty as many web products.
My point being that’s it’s really DUMB to criticize fellow devs that work with web technologies on the basis that the state of websites/web apps is a mess. It just so happens that JS is the language of the web and that the web is where things are expected to be delivered quickly (and dirty … but we can fix it later mentality)
Stop acting like you’re the elite. I have no doubt you’re super smart and great at what you do. So be smart all the way and stop criticizing us poor webdevs that have to live with the sad state of affairs. ❤️38 -
Trying to re-type a massive essay I lost because the app refreshed for some reason. I'll try to keep it short (spoiler: I lied).
Recently, I had a conversation with a couple of non-tech people about AI and the fear of computers making humans obsolete. I have some strong (borderline ranty) opinions about this, and thought I'd post here to see what reaction is get.
This is not a "machines will destroy us" post, it's more about the very legitimate great of losing jobs.
- AI is a tool. It's main use would to be help optimise the more complex routine tasks and free up people's time to be more creative in their jobs. Basically, it's the next step of automation.
- Human intuition can never be replaced. Sometimes, things just seem a bit off. Sure, an AI would avoid ever getting in that situation, but only if it had learnt it in the past. A human will always have to be at the helm of any such system.
- Achieving true intelligence and sentience is like trying to travel at the speed of light. The closer you get, the more challenges you face.
- Getting hyped by sensationalist news that claims the end is nigh because two computers optimised the language they used to communicate when trying to reach a goal is stupid. All this shows is that the tech is working as expected and the systems can optimise on the fly. To me, this was a pretty awesome moment.
Now, I'm not saying dystopia is impossible, neither am I saying that it is inevitable. Just like any tool presented to us, if we use it responsibly, we can make life and society a lot better.5 -
I decided to upgrade my intellij ultimate from 2019.3 to 2020.2 and I saw there is update button.
I clicked on it.
As I expected it didn’t work and it was 30 minutes waiting looking at progress bar going back and forth couple of times before I decided just to download latest version and drag and drop it to applications folder ( took me 5 minutes) - I use mac so it replaces all crap ( I think ).
I cleared the old cache that growed to 2 gigabytes leaving some configuration files.
Next as always crash on startup cause of incompatible plugins with long java stacktrace - at least I could click the close button or popup closed itself I can’t remember ( one version I remember this button couldn’t be clicked cause it was off the screen and you need to do some cheating to launch ide )
The font has changed and I see that it at least work a little faster - that is nice. Indexing is finally fixed after all those years - probably thanks to visual studio code intellisense pushing those lazy bastards to deal with this.
But the preloader on first logo disappears so I think they decided to remove it cause it’s so fast - no it loads the same time or maybe little longer when I launch it on my old macbook.
After that as always I looked at plugins to see if there’s something interesting, so to find ability to scroll over whole plugins I needed to click couple of times. I think they assume I remember all the nice plugins in their marketplace and I only type search.
Maybe I should be type of user who reads best 2020 plugins for your best ide crap articles filled with advertising or even waste more time to watch all of this great videos about ide ( are there any kind of this stuff ? )
After a few operations I unfortunately clicked apply instead of restart ide and it hanged up on uninstalling some plugin I’m no longer interested in for 5 minutes so I decided to use always working ‘kill -9’ from command line.
Launched again and this time success.
Fortunately indexing finished for this workspace and I can work.
I’m intellij ultimate subscriber for 7+ years and I see those craps are not changing from like forever.
What’s the point of automate something that you can’t regression test ?
I started thinking that now when most people are facebook wall scrolling zombies companies assume that when new software comes out everyone is installing it right away and if not they’re probably not our customers cause they’re dead.
What a surprise they have when I pay for another year I can only imagine ( to be fair probably they even don’t know who I am ).
Yeah for sure I am subscribed to newsletters and I have jetbrains as a start page cause I shit myself with money and have nothing better to do then be grupie ( is there corporate grupies already a big community? )
Well I am a guy who likes to spend some time when installing anything and especially software that is responsible for my main source of income and productivity speed up.
Anyway I decided to upgrade cause editing es7 and typescript got to be pain in the ass and I see it’s working fine now. I don’t know if I like the font but at least the editor it’s working the same or maybe faster then the original that is huge improvement as developers lose most of their time between keyboard and screen communication protocol.
I don’t write it to discourage intellij as it’s great independent ide that I love and support for such a long time but they should focus on code editor and developers efficiency not on things that doesn’t make sense.
Congratulations if you reached this point of this meaningless post.
Now I started thinking that maybe it’s working faster cause I removed 2 gigs of crap from it.
Well we’ll see.1 -
Wow or wtf to these banks API. was integrating an API for a service which accept JSON input.
Okay fair enough, that would be fine
Spent an hour writing code(purescript) most of time spent was on writing Types based on the API doc. after that okay let me test the API it failed.
I was what happened? So tested the API from postman with the payload from the doc, it worked. What how?
used a JSON diff to compare the payload from postman and the log. Looked same to me after spending few hours checking what is wrong with it .trying changing value to pasting the body of the log request in postman and trying everything failed.
Later went to the original working payload provided by them and changing the order. It started throwing error. I was like wait what?
It must be only on there UAT. created a payload with production creds and hoping to our production server (they have IP whitelist) ran the curl with proper payload as expected it worked. Later for same payload changed the order or one key and tried it failed.
Just why????
I don't want to create a JSON with keys on specific order. Also it's not even sorted order.4 -
This basically is me rambling all my thoughts that have been clouding my mind.
Learning other programming languages after learning the first is harder than I expected. I learned python first but that's making learning others (which I know arent similar but ) C, ES6, PHP, etc. I need to figure out what makes each one special and get a proper path instead of learning them all the same way. Which is easier for the web dev languages but fuck man I just need a good path for them and I'm good. Like learn this this this this that and that and I've got a basic understanding of the language I dont need to stress and I can casually build my knowledge from here now that I understand all this. Cause I love programming and I want to be the best I can be and just get to the level I am with python. And at some point I have to learn about basic electronics and learning how to program Arduinos with C so I can do stuff with that because I really really REALLY want to.
It doesnt stop there. I want to learn another language and no I'm not talkin bout programming anymore I mean I wanna learn Japanese and German (but japanese primarily) but it doesnt help that I'm always either in school, studying, programming, or playing games. I just cant find time to practice Hiragana&Katakana (two basic writing systems in japan) and it doesnt help that I'm a lazy procrastinating piece of shit that doesnt have or can keep a proper schedule and hell I barely can English and Its my native tongue. Ugh. Itd be better if I had a native speaker to help me tbh.
And finally I want to learn basic pixel animating I have dreamed as a kid to do some kind of animation and programming and I want to do both for games I want to program for fun but it doesnt help that I cant draw sprites or anything for shit. I cant get it and I just am fucked but I'm going to ask some people I know and a few subreddits for advice/help/resources with that
Welp that was the Bubbles Power Hour none of you probably are keen followers of mine and if I had any I'd be shocked and honored but thanks for reading anyways and any advice on anything is always appreciated!random rambling electronics es6 stress language learning php python c foreign languages pixel art javascript11 -
In a time where a web dev is expected to know, well.. everything... Backend -JAVA, python, nodejs and C++ would be great.
Front- angular, react, other 10 libs
DBs -sql, mongo, redis, elastic, kafka, rebbitmq
Also be devops on the side with AWS and docker kubernetis and more stuff
How the f is that possible?
In my real job for the last couple of years and different companies, I usually use 1 language/framework & 1 main DB.. and although it's possible in some companies, but in mine, ppl dont get access to AWS etc..
So let's say there's me.. a server side dev for years.
So I decide to be better and learn Golang.. cool lang, never needed in my job, after few days of not using it I forgot all I learned and that was it.
Then I realized I gotta know some frontend cause everyone want a fullstack ninja nowadays.. so I tried Vuejs.. it was amazing .. never got to use it at work, cause i was a backend, and we didnt use frameworks on our products back then..
Also forgotten.
Then I decided to learned nodejs, because this is the coolest thing ever.. hated it, but whatever... Never got to use it at work, cause everything was written in other lang which the whole team knew... Forgot the little i knew.
Then I decided, its time to see what Angular is, cause everyone started using it... similar idea to vuejs which i barely remembered, but wow it's a lot of code to remember, or I'll have to google everything.. so I went over it, but can't say i even learned it.
Now Im trying to move on to python, which, I really am learning in depth.. however, since I dont have real experience with it, no one gives me a shot at being a python dev, so again i feel like I'm trying to memorize syntax and wasting my time..
Tired of seeing React in all job ads, i decided to have a look what's that all about.. and whadoyaknow... It's fucking the same idea as vue/angular with again different syntax..
THIS IS CRAZY!
in how many syntaxes do i need to know how to make a fucking crud api, and a page with same fucking post form, TO BE A GOOD PROGRAMMER?!?6 -
what is the point of having massive HR departments if something as expected and frequent as university hiring can't go smoothly?
i managed to reach the interview round for a big 4 firm only for the interviewer to not show up for 4 hours from my time slot (i waited the entire time - took periodic screenshots for proof), HR to say "we'll reschedule your interview, this happened because of internal miscommunication" more than THREE months ago, and dip. until december they'd repeat the same. now they've ghosted. thanks, virtual hiring.
how is it the candidate's fault? found out this isn't rare by speaking to a few others from my network who i knew were interviewing for the same firm. for students whose lives can change completely based on the outcome of an opportunity that they came across due to sheer luck and could definitely make use of because of their hard work - this is so heartbreaking and demotivating.1 -
Back in college, we were assigned a group of 3 other students to complete a duplicate of a current popular site. My team received Kijiji, a Canadian ad listing platform similar to Craigslist/eBay. This was to be done with JSP and JavaEE. We had to create a 30 minute presentation to go along with it.
Fairly simply, except we had one week. As I worked 2 jobs at the time, I typically left my college work to the last minute. Initially, we split up the work, myself taking 50% of the code and splitting the rest between the other 3. I was perfectly okay with this, until the night of the last day, they messaged me saying they had done nothing.
Extremely annoyed, I told them to just do the fucking presentation and that I would now finish the other 50% of the code myself. I coded 16 hours straight, went to bed, woke up and coded for another 8 hours. It wasn't exactly what I wanted, but it covered all the points.
The day of, they showed me their presentation. It was complete trash. When we ended up presenting, I improvised the entire thing. The others didn't even speak. Not once. At the end of it, we received 65%. The professor said that if the project had been completed by one person, it would've received a perfect grade, but because there were 4 of us, he expected more. They all looked at me in fear of saying something. I just thanked the professor for his time and left.
The professor knew I did the entire thing myself. My code was by far the most consistent in his class, constantly receiving perfect marks and him asking me to assist other students.
When I graduated, I didn't have 100%, but I did have a 90%. Considering that project was worth 25% of our final marks, he definitely bumped my grade.3 -
So it turns out I was interviewing for a senior role, when in fact I'm looking for a junior-mid role.
Two days ago I had a bad feeling creep up on me when the HR interviewer mentioned to me that they were looking to fill a senior role. I should have interjected. Instead, I stupidly asked the recruiter after passing the HR interview. He answered that the company would also take a mid-level developer and he thinks that I have a good chance. In retrospective, I'm not sure on what basis he made the judgement call.
I had the technical interview today and didn't get the job as I expected. But the same recruiter told me that the company said they'd take me for an intermediate role in the future, but I didn't make it for the senior role.
Can I take that as "you're not technically sound enough" put in a nicer way to soften the blow? But by the company or the recruiter? Or would they actually consider me for a mid-level role in the future? Who is lying or not lying?
Steam off my head now. Thanks for reading my rant.
Context: I'm still transitioning from another field and barely had one year of web development experience so far, half of which was from where I just learned to hack stuff together. I'm now going to focus on landing an internship or a junior role, without going through recruiters since I'd be waste of their time.15 -
My paper just got rejected. Again. The first time it was expected. But for this journal, it wasn't supposed to be. Some of the reviewers' comments are stupid. (for eg. I mention a no-loss algorithm fir a game which, so his/her comment is like what's no-loss? , like are you fucking kidding me, if you don't know that, then why are you a reviewer in the first place)
Anyway now I don't know what to do. I'm looking for more journals but all have so high impact factors and I'm not even sure confident to submit again. Had a good mind to mail the editor in chief but well, I don't think it'd help. What do you guys think?
In the middle of another project, another paper, online courses, now this. I'm just done. I didn't go home as well. It's around four o' clock in the morning here, so noone here is awake.
Can anyone hear me?5 -
So a co-worker of mine contacted me for help in her project. I was in no mood to help as I hadn't slept properly the previous day. But she begged me to help, so I obliged just so I could get her off my back and catch some rest after 2 hours, or at least that's what I thought it would be. But here I am, 10 hours later, having just finished helping her in her project, and now I have a really bad headache, just waiting to go to sleep, but my brain is betraying me.
It was a project that uses Tryton framework (based on Python), which I sometimes feel is fucking inconsistent. Things won't work as expected most of the time. Her boss (my ex-boss) is a piece of shit, and he wanted the work by the next day (i.e. today). And nobody else (not even the boss, who would have gotten this work done in less than half the time had he helped her even a little bit) was ready to help, because they all hate her for being a slow learner. All I had to do was get some data in a particular format in a text file using the framework. But the amount of tries it took just to get the data in the text files cost around 2 hours due to shitty internet speeds that caused tons of lag on Anydesk. Then we had to take breaks in between for reasons. But due to my agitated state of mind, I couldn't sleep in those breaks. Then I had to spend time tinkering around with ljust and rjust to get the right amount of padding for the data, which took hours due to shitty internet speeds that caused tons of lag on Anydesk. And then Tryton kept throwing errors in between which took some time to fix. But we finally completed half the task, and I am off to sleep.
As I write, my co-worker is still awake completing the work her boss gave her. It's around 1:46am IST. HER BOSS IS A PIECE OF SHIT.2 -
I realized that I'm spending about 2 hours in the taxi so I told myself that I I gotta make use of this time and started reading books about pentest and such.
After a while I noticed that this is not working as expected. Because the stuff I was trying to learn by just reading books were mostly practical and I had to see how they really work (like running the codes and so on)
So I reviewed my long term plans and oh! All the topics are practical !
So I'm asking you:
What are the useful topics that I can learn by just reading or what are the other ways I can make use of this time?4 -
I just remembered some of the "harmless" dev-related insults I've received over the years:
1) most recently, I shared a tool with an acquaintance cuz it bears the same name as something he put together a while back. Background: this guy likes to come across as having infinite programming knowledge and brags to his fb pals about being an expert in multiple languages. While trying to make sense of the cryptic docs of the package I sent him, he implies I don't know what the iframe or html5 canvas are. Claims not to elaborate what package does cuz the docs is meant for advanced desktop and mobile devs
It hurt because this is one of few people who know I built suphle, yet thinks so lowly
2) as you can tell from the first point, I share links I consider interesting with relevant contacts. I'm also quite vocal about my (mostly contrarian) takes on occurrences within the dev space that I'm familiar with. One day on the laravel board, this dude is reprimanding me and asks me to take the opinions I read on blogs and tabloids with a pinch of salt, implying I didn't form them independently but was influenced by what was written by some stranger online
It hurt because I expected him to know better. I felt I'd sufficiently proven to have actually built things that informed my school of thought
3) the oldest happened many years ago but I remember it now because the perpetrator called me out of the blue last week. I was teaching his boss, who managed an office but preferred to keep his student status hidden, to avoid being thought incompetent. This caller guy just so turned out to be learning js at the time. Fast forward some years, we all disbanded. He'd landed a dev job and was doing well. So I sent him one of those js gotchas, asking him to explain his answer
After he replied, I told him his answer was close enough but it had more to do with js passing closure arguments by reference. Dude responded that he knew that was the correct answer but wasn't aware I knew what closures meant. That stung me like hell back then. I missed his call and didn't know who owned the contact, so I searched my chats and saw that last interaction. Pain all over again3 -
Started my summer internship at a company working on their codebase about two weeks ago. I expected a lot of differences from school, but not this much. I still have no clue what I'm doing. Don't get me wrong, I'm getting stuff done, and it's helping out, but I still have no idea what is going on.
Oh, also, we use outdated Javascript frameworks... I don't actually know Javascript yet but we're just gonna roll with it2 -
Hey. Can I borrow your ears for 5 minutes?
Since I've been out of school, I've often felt that even though I've learned how to code, the education went into a totally direction than the one I want to go. Of course a school can't teach you everything perfectly, but having almost no experience in frontend (mind you we learned the BAREST basics) just makes me feel entirely empty in that regard stepping up to a company. I've been pretty loaded during school, since I was struggling with a lot of things so I couldn't really find myself pursueing the direction of coding frontend apps being fun. I needed the little time I had to blow off steam playing games etc.
So the few things I know are all self taught, but I was never given a hand been shown best practices or solid advice where to look. Sitting down now at my pc trying to learn ReactJS for example feels incredibly draining and difficult, since we've never done JS in school ONCE. All the C# experience barely helps, since with ES6 being rolled out parallel to "normal" JS it's even harder to me to connect the lego blocks that is frontend development. Since many best practices are applied to ES6, I can barely even tell what previous practice they are replacing, making the entire picture even more spongy. In one sentence it's very overwhelming.
I've thought I'd apply maybe as a UX/UI Designer since I've got a great visual sense (confirmed countlessly by many, friends and strangers alike) maybe contributing to the frontend part that way. But as I was applying I've noticed that chances are seemingly pretty low to get accepted since it seems you've got zero reputition if you don't have a degree in Design.
It breaks me apart. I could probably apply as a frontend developer, but I am not sure if I would be happy doing that on the long run. Since just fucking around in Photoshop creating things seems like no effort and brings me joy, as compared to coding out lines for example.
I wanted to make money after school, improve on myself and my quality of life since I've drained that entirely for the sake of my education. Not spiral into another couple years just to eventually maybe get in the direction I want to.
On the flipside going into frontend dev with 0 skills, 0 experience, but being expected to have 2 years of hands on experience with the newest frameworks makes me feel empty and worthless.
I often hand out advice to other people on devRant, but this is the one time where I need some. Desperately. I feel shattered inside, getting out of bed in the morning has no incentive to me since I'll just feel like shit all day, watching YouTube to cheer me up temporarily, only to feel immense remorse not spending the day learning or improving on myself. Barely anything brings me joy. I don't wanna call myself depressive, but maybe I am just dodging the term and I am exactly that.
Thanks If you've read through this monstrosity of a rant/story. I'd be glad if you'd be so kind to give me a different take on my situation or a new perspective.
I am stepping on the spot and I am slowly dying inside because of it.
It dreads me to say it, but I need help.12 -
Sooooo this is the thing.
For a stupid fucking project at work we basically have to scrum manage a bunch of individual components on a rather large web app.
We start with the html and css and js bs and we all have to work on different sections of one page at a time. Large blocks right? Ok cool.
Originally I had suggested to build everything inside individual php files and then stack them up with require(). As fucking simple as fucking that. Except that the manager does not have php on her pc. The other two developer don't either. I am the only one that fucks with php OUTSIDE our fucking servers.
Go fucking figure...the lead developer does not fuck with php outside the servers.....man
So, because i know it would be a shitstorm with something as basic as installing i dunno...fucking xampp my manager said that she needs a different solution.
Fuck it...fine...whatever. i know go. So i make a fucking server wich upon being fired you can just code the templates and paste them where they need to go. Docs and everything..a sane folder structure and everything and a fucking pipleline for the assets and everything. I would have thought that shit was good enough but I even added a cmd tool that merges all the fucking html files together into one html file with all the shit included.
All in Golang. It works, its fast and i can just give them the fucking folder with the exe and it will work.
I dunno if this was the best way to do it. But it took me maybe 20 mins to do it and it works.
I would have expected our manager to be impressed but she legit did not gave two fucking shits about the fact that one of her developers is able to create this mini server for static sites shitstain project in 20 minutes.
Man I don't want praise. She thinks that jquery is the best thing in the world so I don't expect much. But shit man.......a better reaction would have been better. She basically went meh ok as long as it works.
I also showed them a demo of a flutter project to replace the shitty ass webview filled school app that they have for android and ios. Shit is native and it looks beautiful. Ask me what she said.
Go on, fucking ask me.
She said tha if it would take me much time to continue on that the she would rather leave it to the third party vendor that currently makes the app.
I told her that such shitty app costs the school 40 fucking thousand dollars a year that I could do in a fucking month, which would also be better since it would raise the salaries of me and the other 2 developers and will more importantly make us more valuable to the school.
Said that she would think about it because we have a lot of projects.
I
Fucking
Hate
It
When someone fucks with my ability to make more money. I hate it fam. And i fucking despise being limited by other people.
Fuck this week.
I am never gonna grow in here. Ever. But it pays the bills so fuck it.6 -
They said they make their coffee with ****** Arduino !! So I went back to check out the machine. Not what I expected....2
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!rant
So as my recent rants might have conveyed, my job has been pretty shitty lately. So as we do I started looking around for other openings. Not that I would take them right away, but I want to know. This led to a realization that I'm literally at the best paying, top rated, firm doing the best work in nearly a nearly 100 mile radius of my home. There's a few government jobs that want top secret and 10 years experience, but for anything less than that my current position is literally the best. This is not what I expected the top to be like. And the fact that it took me over a year to realize that I'm actually at the top and have been is super weird.
Thing is I don't know what I expected the top to be like nor did I expect to be here so quickly after finishing school.
I know this is dev rant not dev ramble but this was one of those formative moments where I just really don't know how to process this info.
Anybody had similar feelings? Like looking for someone to help and realizing, not in a egotistical way, just in a sobering way, that you are literally the best and most qualified person out there.3 -
Meetings.. Was I not listening? Blame it on the ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder).
Maybe society has AEHD (Attention Expected Hyper-Delusion).
Seriously, who can pay attention to someone speaking AT you.
We have amazing magical devices one can enchant to do their bidding; Contemplating the details of such, often, is more enjoyable than what your rambling on about, talking head.
Not sorry, ;).
Also THANK YOU, you amazing MIT's (Manager of Information Technologies). A lot of you understand and even may use your underling employee's as a vented heat sync for your frustrations. I love what you do and thank the universe I don't have to engage myself in those activities. I have sympathy for the decision to give up your jeans and t-shirts for business attire; keep strong, your role is vital. <3
The insomnia is going to have to give me a break. Work in 3 hrs, time for a nap; and no, I don't take ADD medication (Amphetamine). I don't need a prescription; I can procure my own drugs, thank you.
Nor would I do them to get through work, that's drug abuse.5 -
I was not happy with the way my team lead made those technical decisions. I couldn't do much about it. Hit with frustration, I switched job.
What a coincidence, my new employer is exactly his old employer. Although I liked the company with my impression from the interview, knowing this fact made me nervous. What if this is the place that bred him into what he is today?...
Turned out the reality is not cruel. I'm joining a team that is formed way after he left. And this new team is expected to bring changes to the old-fashioned existing product (or simply a revamp/remake if you call it).
And it's interesting for me to now come to understand the poor decisions he has made. I said I "understand". This does not mean I agree with him now. His approach makes sense when I look at the old-fashion product I am working on. But it still feels wrong in many ways for the product he is now in charge of.
There, I witness that someone with experience is not necessarily smart.
This is the same guy who said "That's why I don't like to catch exception."
FYI https://devrant.com/rants/2420797/...1 -
I really resent people who reduce the occupation to tickets. Our world is just tickets, tickets all the way down.
"well the ticket just says this, but that's vague, so what should I do?"
You either ask for clarification, or you get creative with the blank canvas you were handed.
"well that edge case wasn't called out in the ticket's specs"
this is _why_ we do TDD - to design our code to be able to function as expected for ALL cases
"is there a ticket to refactor that?"
what?! no, it's your job to always leave code better than when you found it (within scope/reason of course)
FFS we are not hired to be code monkeys or glorified typists. There should be joy that comes from getting to be more clever than the average bear and to solve problems and improve things with your code and logic.
shit bums me out.7 -
I am so sick of a senior developer that has no idea how to be a manager. I've been a manager before and it is not that hard. I came into this job thinking that it was going to be a fresh start, but instead all the haunting projects from incompetent developers that worked before me followed me to this team as well... (we are in the same company, just different teams) My boss thinks I'm an "expert" in everything, and everyone else on the team has no idea what is going on. I have to spend all of my time babysitting every other developer, and I don't get any coding done myself, yet I'm still expected to make my deadlines.
I need a new gig so bad I'm sick. The stress level is getting pretty bad. I've already had cancer once. I don't want to go through it again... Plz hlp4 -
Worst "hackathon" turned out to be the boss (scrum master type) and a Magento guy (super OCD) working on a tiny tiny adjustment to a email template. They didn't really do anything and expected me to just make it all way better with CSS alone. I built out a robust responsive email in a codepen for them. They acted like they couldn't trust me to be a part of the team because I wasn't contributing - but I wasn't even sure what was happening. Between gathering refreshments and patting themselves on the back... it was hard to see what they had done. The online presentation to the magento people was pretty funny to watch though. If you think you can't have a presentation about nothing - think again. Magento is totally fucked. The word 'hacking' is not really suited to describe 'programming websites/applications quickly' anyway. 'Ninja' and 'hack' should always be considered red flags. 'Magento' should be a triple red flag: Jerk-off Jesus-complex boss, self-centered out of touch programmers, crap product. Watch out!1
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DO NOT EXPORT GPG KEYS _TEMPORARILY_ AND ASSUME THAT THEY'LL BE IN THE ORIGINAL LOCATION AFTER EXPORT!
I learnt this lesson the hard way.
I had to use a GPG key from my personal keyring on a different machine ( that I control ). This was a temporary one-time operation so I thought I might be a smart-ass and do the decryption on the fly.
So, the idiotic me directly piped the output : `gpg --export-secret-key | scp ...`. Very cool ( at the time ). Everything worked as expected. I was happy. I went to bed.
In the morning, I had to use the same key on the original machine for the normal purpose I'd use it for and guess what greeted me? - *No secret key*
*me exclaims* : What the actual f**k?!
More than half a day of researching on the internet and various trials-and-errors ( I didn't even do any work for my employer ), I finally gave up trying to retrieve / recover the lost secret key that was never written to a file.
Well, to be fair, it was imported into a temporary keyring on the second machine, but that was deleted immediately after use. Because I *thought* that the original secret key was still in my original keyring.
More idiotic was the fact that I'd been completely ignorant of the option called `--list-secret-keys` even after using GPG for many years now. My test to confirm whether the key was still in place was `--list-keys` which even now lists the user ID. Alas, now without a secret key to do anything meaningful really.
Here I am, with my face in my hands, shaking my head and almost crying.5 -
So, it's been a while since I've been working on my current project and I've never had the "luck" to touch the legacy project wrote in PHP, until this week when I got my first issue.
And damn, this goddamn issue. It was a bug, a very strange bug, that only happens in production and that nobody has any idea what was happening, so yeah, I didn't have anyone to ask and I got less time than usual ( because Thanksgiving ).
And thus, I have no starting point, no previous knowledge on PHP and less time! I expected a very fun week 😀 and it was beyond my expectations.
First I tried to understand what might be causing the issue, but there wasn't any real clue to star with, so no choice, time to read the flow on the code and see what are they're doing and using ( 1k line files, yay, legacy ). Luckily I got some clues, we're using a cookie and a php session variable for the session, ok, let's star with the session variable. Where it's that been initialize ? Well, spoiler alert, I shouldn't start with that, because my search end up in the login method of the API that set a that variable and for some reason in the front end app it was always false and that lead me to think that some of the new backend functions were failing, but after checking the logs I got no luck.
Ok, maybe the cookie it's the issue, I should try open the previous website on the brow...redirect to new project login, What? Why ? I ask around and it's a new feature push on Monday, ok I got Chrome Dev tools I can see which value of the cookie it's been set and THERE IT WAS it has a wrong domain! After 2 days ( I resume a lot of my pain ) I got what I've been looking for, so now I should be able to fix the bug. Then where is the cookie initialized ? In the first file the server hits whenever you tried to enter any page of the app, ok, I found the method, but it's using a function that process the domain and sets it correctly? wtf ? Then how in heaven do I get the incorrect domain ? Hello? Ok, relax, you still have one more day to fix this, let's take it easy.
Then, at the end of the Wednesday, nope I still have no clue how this is happening. I talked with the Devops guy and he explain me how this redirection happens and with what it depends on, I followed the PHP code through and nothing, everything should works fine, sigh. Ok I still have 2 days, because I'm not from US and I'm not in US, so I still have time, but the Sprint is messed up already, so whatever I'm gonna had done this bug anyhow.
Thursday ! I got sick, yay, what else could happen this week. Somehow I managed to work a little and star thinking in what external issue could affect the processing, maybe the redirection was bringing a wrong direction, let's talk with the Devops guy again, and he answer me that the redirection it was being made by PHP code, IN A FILE THAT DOESN'T EXIST IN THE REPOSITORY, amazing, it's just amazing. Then he explained me why this file might be missing and how it's the deployment of this app ( btw the Devops guy it's really cool and I will invite him a beer ) . After that I checked the file and I see a random session_star in the first line of the code, without any configuration, eureka ! There was the cause and I only need to ask someone If that line it's necessary anymore, but oh they're on holiday, damn, well I'll wait till Monday to ask them. But once and for all that bug was done for ! 🎉
What do I learn ? PHP and that I don't want any more tickets of PHP 😆. -
48 hours.
We had 3 weeks of "manual data collection": pencil, paper and a dozen of people around all the offices of the company with the task to collect serial numbers of every piece of equipment used.
Then we had 3 weeks of data entry, a dozen of people copying all handwritten data to a custom made VB form.
And then there was me, the guy that was in charge of verifying, zipping and sending the data to the client. I spent 48h non stop to go through everything, finding, fixing or delete unusable data.
I had to delete at least 25% of the data because incomplete or completely unusable (serial numbers too short or too long, for example).
48h in the office.
The data was then delivered to the customer. 2 days after, when I finally woke up, everyone was in panic because:
- serial numbers were not matching
- addresses were wrong
- the number of delivered records was smaller than expected
What did I learn from this experience?
When your deadline is tomorrow, and you need 4 weeks to complete your work, ignore the deadline and inform everyone at any level that you are ignoring the deadline. And then resign and find a better job.
Ah, yes, pencils and paper are powerful tools, but rat poison too. You just need to use them in the right place. The only data collection that can be trusted when done with a pencil is the one involving checkboxes.1 -
This was in 1st semester and our CSE course went under some major course revision. Python was to be taught in place of C. Now the professor we had was very famous and we were excited to be in his class. But little did we knew he had no knowledge of Python at all. He used to tell the lab assistant to teach.It was so bad that I lost all interest in programming!!
But we all studied python later in our winter holidays for further courses.
Next semester we had OOP and this is what happened:
1st lab:
Professor(different): I expect you have basic knowledge in programming so I have uploaded.
Every question was related to structures in C.
In the same semester, we had data structures where we were 'expected' to know C or C++.
Later we came to know that Python was not going to be of any use in any course ! First semester went into dustbin.
/*
It was pretty long rant. Hope you didn't get bored :P
*/ -
Any Windows Sysadmins here? I have a question for you - How do you do it?
I only very rarely have to do something that would fall under "Windows System Administration", but when I do... I usually find something either completely baffling, or something that makes me want to tear our my hair.
This time, I had a simple issue - Sis brought me her tablet laptop (You know, the kind of tablets that come with a bluetooth keyboard and so can "technically" be called a laptop) and an SD card stating that it doesn't work.
Plugging it in, it did work, only issue was that the card contained file from a different machine, and so all the ACLs were wrong.
I... Dealt with Windows ACLs before, so I went right to the usual combination of takeown and icacls to give the new system's user rights to work with the files already present. Takeown worked fine... But icacls? It got stuck on the first error it encountered and didn't go any further - very annoying.
The issue was a found.000 folder (Something like lost+found folder from linux?) that was hidden by default, so I didn't spot it in the explorer.
Trying to take ownership of that folder... Worked for for files in there, safe for one - found.000\dir0000.chk$Txf; no idea what it is, and frankly neither do I care really.
Now... Me, coming from the Linux ecosystem, bang my head hard against the table whenever I get "Permission denied" as an administrator on the machine.
Most of the times... While doing something not very typical like... Rooting around (Hah... rooting... Get it?! I... Carry on) the Windows folder or system folders elsewhere. I can so-so understand why even administrators don't have access to those files.
But here, it was what I would consider a "common" situation, yet I was still told that my permissions were not high enough.
Seeing that it was my sister's PC, I didn't want to install anything that would let me gain system level permissions... So I got to writing a little forloop to skip the one hidden folder alltogether... That solved the problem.
My question is - Wtf? Why? How do you guys do this sort of stuff daily? I am so used to working as root and seeing no permission denied that situations like these make me loose my cool too fast too often...
Also - What would be the "optimal" way to go about this issue, aside for the forloop method?
The exact two commands I used and expected to work were:
takeown /F * /U user /S machine-name /R
icacls * /grant machine-name\user:F /T6 -
The number of roles you are expected to do these at this company, to be paid for just one of them.
Business analyst , developer, tester, first line support, architect, devops engineer, recruiter.
And you have the cheek to ask us what we need to keep this shit alive.
(Obviously it’s more people but the answer to that is no).
Fuck right off.
I do not care if this company doesn’t meet its contractual obligations and goes into administration.
It’s not my company, I can walk into another shit company easily, maybe I’ll even get lucky and find a good one.
Why don’t you people at the top who are being paid six figure salaries and telling everyone things are wonderful pull your fingers out of your collective arses and doing what your paid for.
You fuckers deserve all that is coming. -
TLDR, i am not performing as I used to in my job before i made my side hussle and idk if i should do anything about it.
every since covid started and companies started laying off people, I started realizing im in danger when no company was able to match my current salary, and the ones that do would, make me do a hunger games hackerrank competition with thousands of other people which I don't really wanna take part of..
My company even laid off a lot of people due to budget cuts a while back and i didn't feel secure at all, and knowing that i might end up with less salary should i get fired and settle for the next company that accepts me, kinda made me lose any trust i had for the whole being an employee thing... I have financial goals i want to meet and depending on this one company to not fire me is scary...
I registered a tech company and hoped I could take on some high budget projects, got nothing the first year but slowly i started getting some projects and now im hiring contractors to help with projects and its going great and im really happy and excited about it.
But i often need to manage said contractors, have calls with clients and even do some coding myself. Some of that i end up having to do in secret in my company time... we work in a big co-working space so i get to sneak into a meeting booth and do all that.
my manager lives in another country and basically im in a situation where i can get away with it without anyone noticing.
However, I used to be one of the top contributors in the company. I used to finish a butt load of tasks every day and i ended up being promoted to manager, but i still get some coding tasks. But generally, if it weren't for my side hussle i would still be a top contributor and shine like i used to, but now i mostly do what is expected on me, and im afraid someone would ask me at some point why im not as productive as I used to be.
nobody asked me anything but i just feel kinda guilty and miss having the one job to focus on and taking credit for a lot of things and helping everyone, but at the same time i dont trust that the company cares about me enough to give me any guarantees or stocks or bonuses so i feel i need to keep growing my side hussle to have a safety net..
thank you for reading my rant1 -
If you're offered high responsibilities, high power to make decisions should come with it.
You can't be expected to bear responsibility for other people's decisions if you have no power to decline them just because you feel like it. Your coworkers should prove things to you, and not the other way around. Why? Because you'll be held accountable, and you can't be expected to hold accountability of what you had no power to decline or moderate.
The absolute majority of problems I had while working with companies were caused by asymmetry in power / responsibility balance.
That's why if a company wants me to hold responsibility for a thing that other people can intervene with and make their edits, and I somehow have to PROVE something to them if I want them not to, I stop working with them immediately. Simple as that.
You want me to be accountable? Then I have the ultimate final say in everything. You want others to have the power to make decisions? Fine, then I'm not to be held accountable. And as it's impossible to find out who was responsible for what, I'll just be better off quitting right now.2 -
I dun goofed
made a neural net that runs against a simulation. Wanted to run it overnight to get some meanigful stats and insights
But yesterday afternoon I changed something in the simulation and ofc tested it without the nn ... and then forgot to put it back on
So while I expected to come in today and start plotting and analyzing the data while the runs finish, in reality I'm sitting here on a lot of useless data, not knowing what to do.
I kinda want to just start it again and go home7 -
Old old organization makes me feel like I'm stuck in my career. I'm hanging out with boomer programmers when I'm not even 30.
I wouldn't call myself an exceptional programmer. But the way the organization does it's software development makes me cringe sometimes.
1. They use a ready made solution for the main system, which was coded in PL/SQL. The system isn't mobile friendly, looks like crap and cannot be updated via vendor (that you need to pay for anyway) because of so many code customizations being done to it over the years. The only way to update it is to code it yourself, making the paid solutions useless
2. Adding CloudFlare in the middle of everything without knowing how to use it. Resulting in some countries/networks not being able to access systems that are otherwise fine
3. When devs are asked to separate frontend and backend for in house systems, they have no clue about what are those and why should we do it (most are used to PHP spaghetti where everything is in php&html)
4. Too dependent on RDBMS that slows down development time due to having to design ERD and relationships that are often changed when users ask for process revisions anyway
5. Users directly contact programmers, including their personal whatsapp to ask for help/report errors that aren't even errors. They didn't read user guides
6. I have to become programmer-sysadm-helpdesk-product owner kind of thing. And blamed directly when theres one thing wrong (excuse me for getting one thing wrong, I have to do 4 kind of works at one time)
7. Overtime is sort of expected. It is in the culture
If you asked me if these were normal 4 years ago I would say no. But I'm so used to it to the point where this becomes kinda normal. Jack of all trades, master of none, just a young programmer acting like I was born in the era of PASCAL and COBOL9 -
I reported to our team leader (who is not a developer) that me and my colleague has been having problems with our senior developer whose codes are unmaintainable and messy. I told the team lead that I am losing my trust towards my senior developer and that his codes are messy and not following the coding standards. I was nervous at first because this certain team leader is tight with the senior dev. But still, I expected the team lead to be objective.
I was surprised because the team lead asked me if 'I was perfect' and then the team lead continued to shift the conversation towards me. Team lead then started to compare me with the senior dev which is unfair because I've only been working for 2 years whereas the senior developer has been doing this for 6+ years. Team lead said that I was arrogant. Team lead sent our convo to the other teammates and friends. Team lead told me that I am such a baby.
Fast forward, the senior dev talked to me. Told me that he was busy so he didn't get to improve his codes. Which I dont buy because I often see his discord status as playing during work hours. Told me that it wasnt him. Which I dont know if i should believe since he always lies. Told me that his knowledge is outdated. Told me that maybe because I came from a good university and he did not. He apologized and told me he will improve. Sounds good right?
It's a lie. Because then my friend gave me a recording of his voice ranting about me after our talk. In that recording, he said that I have nothing to prove so I dont get a say. He said that he doesnt care about me. He said that I am cocky. Which I dont understand. I only commented abt his work, why is he attacking me personally? Plus, if someone new like me already already noticed the flaws in his work, what does that say about his skill?
My teammates then asked me to just take the fall lol take note that these teammates were also complaining about this senior dev. they asked me to just give them what they wanted to hear. That I am the one who's wrong and the bosses are right. I said I wanted to defend myself but they hated me for that. They told me to think about what would happen to them. They told me I am selfish. Is it selfish for wanting to defend myself?
I defended myself. I told the senior dev that my intentions are for the right reason. He told me he understands. Later that day, a friend told me he talked behind my back again.
Senior dev told me that the team leader cried because of the words I said. Which i found confusing because it was my own feeling, my own opinion that i am losing trust with this certain senior dev so why would the team lead be so affected by that? Also, i showed our convo to the most objective people i know and they said that i didnt say anything that is offensive nor arrogant I have no control as to how people would react to the words I say. It's beyond me.
I feel so helpless. I told those things to the team lead because I think a team should be open to each other but I was blown out of proportion instead. My friend told me that the team lead and the senior dev are still talking behind my back.
If they do this every time someone tries to speak up, will they ever grow?24 -
I’d been working event based and freelance jobs in the security and entertainment fields for years, with odd stints as a bartender sprinkled in. My pay was mostly decent, but I had no job security, and I was more on the road than at home. A few years before this job search experience I had already realised I can’t continue on this path for ever, especially if I ever want a serious relationship (e.g. 16 weeks straight touring Europe with on avg. 16h work days pretty much every day isn’t ideal in that regard, and also really though on both body and mind). So I decided to study. As I applied in autumn, not every line of study accepted students. The closest to my interest I found was BBA in Business IT.
Fast forward 1,5 years. After moving away from my previous base due to then-gfs studies, I had also been able to accept less work. Well, there were really two reasons: I didn’t want to go on weeks long big tours anymore, and I’d had to price up on my freelance job due to reasons. I still managed to keep our household going, but not knowing when the next paycheck would be available was becoming a little too stressful. I wanted job security. So a few weeks after my wedding I scoured the internetz for positions I could apply to, and applied to a dozen or so places. They were a variety of positions I had a vague understanding of from what I’d learned at UAS: from sales to data analytics to dev… I was aware pretty much all of the applications were a long shot by best, so I expected to be ghosted…
Two of the organizations I applied to wanted to go forward with me. Both dev jobs. I can’t even remember the specifics of the other one anymore, but I do remember the interview: I got in to their office (which was ridiculously open), and got marched into a tiny conference room. The interviewer was passive-aggressive and really bombarded me with questions, not really leaving a socially awkward introvert with any time to answer. I started to get really anxious and twitchy, sweating like a pig. Just wanted out. But nooo, they wanted me to do a coding test live. So they sat me on a computer with Eclipse open, gave me an assignment and told me not to use the internet. What’s even worse is that I could literally feel the interviewer breathing down my neck when I tried to do the test. Well, didn’t happen cause I was under so much pressure that I couldn’t think at all… yeah, that was horrible.
Anyhow, the other position I really applied to because it was in my hometown and I recognised the company name from legendary commercials from the 90s - everyone in this country who watched TV in mid-to-late 90s remembers those. Anyway, to my surprise, my present day manager contacted me and wanted me to do a coding test. At the time he asked I was having a bout of fevers after fevers, not really able to get healthy. I told him that I’d do it as soon as I’m healthy. A month went by, maybe more. He asked again. Again I replied that as soon as I get healthy, but promised to do it next week the latest. I didn’t deliver on that, but the next week after that, even if I was the most feverish I had been, I did the tests. I could only finish half of them, cause I couldn’t look at a screen for long at a time and had to visit the loo every 10min or so, but apparently that was enough. Next week I was already going to the interview… oh I also googled what is PHP on the way there, since it was mentioned as a requirement and I had no idea what it was. Imagine that…
The interview itself couldn’t have been more different from the other one. We were sitting in a nice conference room with my manager and the product’s lead dev, drinking coffee, our feet on the table and talking smack. Oh, and we did play a game of NHL<insertNumber> on PS4 during the interview… it was relaxed. Of course the more serious chat was there, too, but I can only really remember how relaxed it was. When I left the interview, I had been promised the position and that I would be sent the contract to be signed as soon as the CEO had reviewed and approved it. Next day, I had signed it and some time later I started at my current job (I gave a date when I was available to start, since there was a tour still agreed upon between the interview and the start).
Oh, and the job’s pretty much like the interview. Relaxed. It’s a good place to be in, even though the pay could be better (I regularly get offers for junior positions with more pay, and mid level positions with double the pay). I do value a pleasant working environment and the absence of stress more than big munny, what can I say?1 -
I'm so sick of "senior/lead" developers pretending they know how to write tests and ending up with these unmaintainable test suites, full of repetitions and incomprehensible assertions.
You should take some time to learn from your mistakes instead of just continuing to write the same shitty tests as usual!!!
Every time I arrive at a new team I spend weeks just trying to understand the test suites for what should be fairly SIMPLE applications!
UNIT TESTS SHOULD TEST UNITS OF CODE!
If your unit test tests seem to be repetitive, they are not unit tests. Repetition is expected in integration tests, but that is why those are usually DATA DRIVEN tests!!!14 -
just came out of an interview , totally fucked myself.
it's my first interview in last 6 months, i didn't prepare shit, 30 mins before the interview i was trying to get Hello world in java to work , and this was totally what i expected.
however the interviewer went deep into my domain and only asked Android questions. i wasn't even able to answer them 😅 . fuck am fucking rusted.
i would not hire myself if i were to interview a guy like me XD . but it was fun.
i wanted to get an idea of where i stand and what i should be working upon. i guess i know now, will try to get better1 -
I work with statistics/data analysis and web development. I study these subjects for almost a decade and now I have 4 years of practical experience.
This information is on my LinkedIn profile and from time to time tech recruiters contact me wanting to have an interview. I always accept because I find it a great way to practice interviews and talking in English, as it isn't my native language.
A remark that I always make to my colleagues wanting to start doing data analysis related work is that it may seem similar to development, but it's not. When you develop, your code work or not. It may be ugly, it may be full of security problems, but you almost always have a clear indication if things are functioning. It's possible to more or less correlate experience using a programming language with knowing how to develop.
Data science is different. You have to know what you are doing because the code will run even if you are doing something totally wrong. You have to know how to interpret the results and judge if they make sense. For this the mathematics and theory behind is as important as the programming language you use.
Ok, so I go to my first interview for a data science position. Then I discover that I will be interview by... a psychologist. A particularly old one. Yeah. Great start.
She proceeds to go through the most boring checklist of questions I ever saw. The first one? "Do you know Python?". At this point I'm questioning myself why I agreed to be interviewed. A few minutes later, a super cringy one: "Can you tell me an example of your amazing analytics skills?". I then proceed to explain what I wrote in the last two paragraphs to her. At this point is clear that she has no idea of what data science is and the company probably googled what they should expect from a candidate.
20 minutes later and the interview is over. A few days later I receive an email saying that I was not selected to continue with the recruitment process because I don't have enough experience.
In summary: an old psychologist with no idea on how data science works says I don't have experience on the subject based on a checklist that they probably google. The interview lasted less than 30 minutes.
Two weeks later another company interviews me, I gave basically the same answers and they absolutely liked what they heard. Since that day I stopped trying to understand what is expected from you on interviews.2 -
Next week is super-efficient-daily-standup-and-monday-status-bonanza-meeting week!
The most effecient way is NOT to attend.
If you have no questions/impediments/whatever and you feel like you have velocity > whatever. Be a no-show!
I am SURE you know what is expected from you!
Hey, younglings! Some meetings are _not_ compulsary. No need to be there if you know the drill. If you are in a good work place, everyone will get it. You’re working. This is not always understood by juniors.
But, communicate what your intentions are! Don’t be quite. Communication are difficult. More is better than nothing! Just right is very difficult to obtain and will never be mastered.
And, Windows 11 really sucks… -
!rant
So I have bought a new laptop and this time instead of straight up booting linux I had an idea of giving micro$oft a try, so I have decided to use only their services for 2 weeks.
To be honest, I really did not expect windows to use do much cpu and hdd during updates and background tasks, but after a day it was ok and windows feels snappier than during my last encounrer (maybe cause the new hw?).
I was even so dedicated that I started to use cortana and I have to tell, that she is dumb as fuck, since she fails to understand even the basic tasks and if u want something advanced, she refers to the next update. But boy, tell her to open Visual Studio and she asks if you want VS Code or Visual Studio, which seems great. But my response was 'Code' then she insisted that I said Coke. Im like OK, Im not native english speaker, lets try Visual Studio Code, where she told me that there is no such thing and Spelling VS - Code ended me in bing search for Unesco :/
I really want to like Cortana, she has nice name, nice history, but she is like that A girl from class, who looks gorgeous, has great voice, but then u reallise that she just eats a book before exam and after that she is that dumb basic hoe.
I also gave a shot to Bing and Edge. Bing is something between Google and DuckDuckGo, since it gives you a liiitle less results from search history, yet if you want to find something in different language its even possible to tell you that what are you trying to find does not exist.
But I have to tell, that I like Edge and I mean it. Like... Its fast and has some good features, like pushing all your open tavs away, so you can open them Later. It also does not have that stupid ass feature that lets you control tab from left to right, not by chronological order, so you wont end up in infinity loop of 2 tabs. And even if people make fun of M$ trying to convince you to use Edge by being too aggresive. God go on edge and try to use some Google Service(You still dont use chrome?!).
I also tried to play with .Net core and I have to tell that against java they are a bit further. I liked some small features, but what I just simply loved was rhe fucking documentation. You basically dont need google, sincw they give you examples and explain in a human way.
What I didnt quite get was the 'big' Visual Studio. Tje dark theme to me feels strange(personal and irrelevant). Why the hell I do need to press 2 shortcuts to duplicate line?! Why is it so hard to find a plugin to give me back my coloured brackets and why the fuck it takes like a second to Cut one line of code on a damn i7?!
Visual studio Code was something different. It shows how dark theme should be done, the plugin market is full of stuff and the damn shortcuts are not made for octopi. So I have to recommend it ^^.
I even gave a shot to word and office as a whole and fuck I never knew that there are so many templates. It really made my life easier, since all you need to do is find the right one in the app, instead of browsing templates online, where half of them are for another version of your text editor.
Android Launcher was fast, had a clever widget of notes and the sync was pretty handy to be honest so I liked that one as well.
What made me furious was using the CLI. Godfucking damn what the fuck is ipconfig?! :/
Last thing what made me superbhappy was using stuff without wine and all of the addional shit. Especially using stuff like Afinity Designer and having good looking apps in general. I mean Open source has great tools l sometimes with better functionality. But I found out, that what is pleasure to look at, is pleasure to work with.
To Summarize a bit.
It wasnt that bad as I expected. I see where they are heading with building yet another ecosystem of It just works and that they are aiming at professionals once again.
So I would rate it 6/10, would be 7 if that shit was Posix compatible.
I know that for Balmer is a special place in hell... But with that new CEO, Microsoft at the end may make it to purgatory..5 -
So I'm in a scenario I'm uncomfortable, need some encouragement from fellow devRanters. (Looong post)
I've been working at this startup for about 10mths (since I graduated). They have been really good to me since the start, and overlooked some fuck ups I did at first.
But now I've been way more experienced , picked it up really quick. And I've basically redesigned several of their admin solutions and data products. Also, I'm basically their entire data analysis team now. I do backend (node, PHP, MySQL) and analysis for them (stats, deep learning, python, big data packaging for clients).
But seeing as I've moved in their company, and have been consulted on several major decisions, as well as built a really good relationship with some of their clients. I still haven't seen a raise, moreover I've been told that I'm expected to work from 8am to 5:30pm (9.5hrs no overtime pay). Which really pisses me off, since I know I'm worth more than what I'm paid (about 40k a year).
My brother (who's also a dev) suggested to tell them that I'm not happy at work due to this. And quit if they don't react well.
How should i bring this up? Should I really quit? This is all new grounds.6 -
I don't know if it's only me or if anyone have experienced that sometimes, when my code is not doing what I expected it to do, then I add a log.d to debug what's happening.Then.. It magically fix the program, without me fixing it...Weird3
-
So I joined a company as an Angular dev and the code they gave me was stupid AngularJS ported to Angular 7 mixed with thousands of lines of jQuery inside index.html,
also all the css was scattered into a few files with 8000+ lines of code and no idea about which file does what, we decided to rebuild the project in Angular,
I built a huge portion of it with PrimeNg (a UI library like Angular Material) but after building all of that they tell me to remove PrimeNg and also asked me to import all SCSS modules in angular.json like wtf,
they forced me to use bootstrap with jQuery IN AN ANGULAR PROJECT this was my first job and I think I have a pretty good understand of Pakistani IT industry after this.
I learned programming from online paid courses and tons of practice so I expected others to be on the same level but that's not the case.1 -
So today I inherited an iPhone app written for iPhones 3 & 4 in Objective-C.
I am facing two not so unique problems:
1. I hate Objective-C so I quickly converted it to Swift but as expected I created a tonne of errors and warnings that I am working through
2. The developer(s) didn't think it important enough to leave a solitary comment explaining what the hell they were doing.
So looking forward to a few weeks of swearing and getting myself all upset trying to get this app to work in a complete information black hole.3 -
Like age 8?
As a kid I really liked flash games and animations and wanted to get into it. I couldn't do flash, it looked too complicated but I found a little software by the name od KoolMoves that was just a simpler flash animation tool.
I did a bunch of shitty stick figure animations in it (hello to everyone from stick figure death theatre) but eventually I realized that I can make it do things (interactive menus, choose your story kinda things, move the player around, shoot...!)
I fell in love with AS1 and later AS2.0 and made bunch of demos and proof of concepts for systems and games. Most are lost to time and datarot by now)
Age 12
Eventually I found out I can make the entire Windows machine do what I want using first Batch files and later Visual Basic script (made a skype bot!) At this point I was also really into graphics and logo/web design
Age 15 - 20 or so
Then it was pretty natural to move to actual Visual Basic, then C# and finally I to C++. And I had the C family in my heart forever. I managed to get a but into 3D graphics too and got a part-time in archviz
Even by this point I never believed I could be a programmer as a profession. I thought of it just as something I love, but have no chance getting into compared to some of the names out there. I half expected to be either doing graphics (cause I found it simple at the time) or some shitty random job in an office.
20+
Finally I decided to go to uni and study software development, see if I can touch the future I always dreamed of! And... Well... I found out more than 80% of the people there never touch a language up until now and most people are just as retarded as I thought..
For a while I also worked as a game designer (still not being comfortable calling myself a programmer, so I chose a non programming position) but I ended up going into the code and improving and fixing game designer tools (it was unity and C#)
After seeing actual programmers at work in a company, and talking to a bunch of them I realized I already have everything I need to do this seriously and with that experience out of the way I breezed through uni, learned to love Linux and landed a proper job :)
I kinda hope my experience with long lasting self doubt will be useful for someone -
<!doctype confusedRant 😕>
Plot: we need to release our website in two weeks which holds at least a thousand pages. All these pages are manually migrated from the old website, which doesn't have a database. Current status: 650 pages/1000 are completed, 40 different templates need to be adapted. I'm alone on these templates, my colleagues create the pages and fill the new database
So I'm working on the templates a WebDev coded for our website on a licensed CMS, and had this decently simple html block that looks like a square and consisting of roughly this (Emmet style):
a.area > blockquote > strong.title + p
After adding another <a> element inside the p, I noticed that my <a> wouldn't display and bust the whole look of the square.
Just for more details, the CSS the dev made is ultra specified (meaning each element is too precisely "described" : div.class .child .child2 { /* styles */ } when it could be .class .child2 for example). Also, the templates he made need to be compatible with any "module" the website has, thus the need of this high specificity
So I fired up the DevTools to check what happened, and had:
Expected: a.area > blockquote > strong.title + p > a
Actual result: some new a.area were wrapping the <strong>, the <p> and the <a> I just added. The source code was not showing any of this but just the rules I initially wrote - the expected result
Wtf?! I thought the JS the dev made was adding elements. I disabled said JS, and bam, these a.area were still wrapping everything!! What black magic would add these stupid tags I never asked for.
So I went looking in the CSS files in case some wizardry was happening, but everything was OK.
I tried changing my structure, changing tag (swapping a.area to p.area or without .area), HTML just said "nope, have those please".
Eventually I rewrote my own module out of frustration after three quarters of an hour fiddling with this stupid "module". I hate losing time for such shenanigans and under a lot of pressure because of deadlines.
Still haven't figured why those <element>.area would wrap everything out of nowhere...3 -
What the fucking shit, Arch. In what universe/reality is a user expected to easily/quickly address GPG/PGP bullshit when they install Arch. It's already hilarious enough as it is for the user to input every single command in order to install the thing. -- That's actually what's great about Arch; you get return and assurance from each command. -- I understood the fact that you need the latest ISO release in order to even install Arch, but now, if you decide to pacstrap linux-hardened, or god forbid, a package that is who knows what, less maintained?... fuck knows what will happen.
The fantastic part, is that you can't do shit when you're in an arch ISO install. All of the simple and possible solutions that involve GPG DBs/keyrings/etc require you to have the all of the shit installed already; which is fucking impossible if the package manager is bitching about keys not being imported. The most fantastic part, is that there is probably some complete bullshit, ultra-exclusive command or simple solution that will fix this crap. - And if you even dare ask the Arch forums, you'll be branded as a "newbie" and sentenced to read the fucking wiki. - ??? -- That's not a fucking good thing. -- The majority of people who are installing Arch right now, are people who are installing it for the first time, and chances are, most of those people have no fucking clue what is happening; they're learning what is happening. Furthermore, they're probably the kind of people who aren't inclined (or they don't know how) to scour Google or the Arch forums for answers to vague, lazy-ass error messages. The whole point of this thing is show and confront the user about what they're installing and what they want on their computer. Holy shit. This is all the more reason to ensure that total, stupid, ambiguous bullshit errors do not occur. -- "error: key "dogshit master <dogshitmaster@dogshit.org>?" could not could not be imported". -- That's it. That's the error in it's entirety. For a fucking OS install. What the fuck.16 -
I'm living a daily drama with my own head lately. I was hired like two and a half months ago as a junior programmer and it is my first real job, in addition to 2 internships (the last one was in the advertising agency, and after a month I started to search a new job and warned my boss that I wanted to quit, because it was kind of a painful job and I was not happy at all because I was not working with programming).
The thing is that I do not know what they expected from me in this current job, and I still can not say. Am I being enough? Am I a disappointment? Everyone there is so experienced and good at what they do, and I was just used to being "the guy" where I studied that it was some sort of shock when I realized that I had to get way better even for a junior job. I do not feel productive as I wanted and sometimes I feel like I'm a total disaster and I'm not made to work with the only thing I could say "I'm made for this".
I might be overreacting this, but I just wanted to say this somewhere and I'm thankful I have devRant now. I could talk to my superiors or my boss about this, but I'm so used to get there and focus on my tasks that I'm always forgetting.3 -
I'm in a dilemma.
I started this job about 9 months ago and it's really not what I expected. I'm the sole developer in my department that handles applications built around our customer database.
Well it's pretty boring and there is a lot of technical debt with the source code since usually 1-2 people are taking care of it so they never had proper conventions. And we have super old applications running on legacy solutions like cold fusion 🤢
I also receive a lot of problem tickets that never contain enough information to actually do anything and the people don't realize I have no idea what they do or what their business processes are.
The upside is I'm paid very very well for this job > 100 in a place where cost of living is cheap. And when there's no work to do I can work on side projects.
It's really not fulfilling work and idk if I should stick it out. I also don't know where I would head next. There's not very many companies working on cool stuff. Maybe remote work?
Anyone else have a similar story?6 -
Tried an ad blocker for the first time yesterday. Well what do ya know? Websites I use will not let me access them unless I turn it off. I KNEW something like this would happen. When they were first coming out a few years ago, I said to myself "If everyone is going to be blocking ads, how will we be able to go to these sites for free?"
I expected the worst. I thought they'd put free websites behind a pay wall, much like ad-free mobile applications I would make. Thank GOD that didn't happen. This system is a lot more fair in my opinion. I'm just glad they don't do the same with popup-blockers. Then we would have an issue.
In all seriousness, as annoying as some websites are with their trashy, misleading, or fake ads, they (kinda) have to be there in order for devs to make money and for consumers to be somewhat happy. That is why I personally will not use ad blockers.6 -
I just got the dna test.
I am the father. My daughter is now 3 weeks old.
No surprise there. I expected to be the father. I had no reason to distrust my wife. But, after all, I know my IT security.
The relationship I had with my daughter was transitive. I trusted my wife and my wife had my daughter, ergo I had a connection with my daughter. Or in clearer terms: from a => b and b => c follows a => c.
The problem I was thinking about: What if I will stop trusting my wife in the future. At some point in the future... Something might happen. And I would stand there and wonder how long it went on. Maybe a month? Or before my daughter's birth? Maybe more than 9 month before my daughter. Would I be able to hide it from my daughter or would she notice...
If anything ever happens now, I know it has nothing to do with my daughter...
That's the same reason why we use end2end encryption. Sure, we have to trust that the application provided is not manipulated. But we only have to trust today. If it lands on their severs, we have to trust until the end of eternity.
I don't need any trust right now. And I am fucking happy about it.4 -
So I joined this digital agency where they are working on this ad-tech product and right from day one, I was given a task to implement a new feature on the product. No knowledge transfer. No onboarding process. So, I had given estimation about the task and apparently it took longer than expected. But what were they expecting. Anyways, my manager asked me to have a KT with the only senior guy that has been working there for last couple of years. And man, since the KT started, it's been hell for me. The guy is such an asshole and won't even give me a basic walkthrough of the system. He only took one call and that ended within 30 minutes. On top of that he went ahead and told the product manager that I am not keeping up and am not ready. And my product manager apparently wants me to take his place within a month. It's been only two months since I joined. I have already pushed two major features, tried to understand the system architecture, codebase and everything on my own. On top of that, I got yelled at by that senior dev in a meeting about a PR. I was quite confident guy when I joined and now I am anxious everyday at work and i am scared that they'll let me go because I won't be able to meet their unrealistic expectations. I also can't stand this senior dev and he can't stand me which makes me really demotivated to work. I have anxiety issues and now I am thinking if I stay, I am gonna mess up big time and they'll fire me or worse. I might break something in production because I didn't have proper onboarding.2
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WHITEPAPERS.
Not exactly a programming problem, but one of my many task (as i am apparently a multi headed hydra) is it to find Software for tasks. I made the experience, as more marketing experts are on it, and as more SEO is poured in as more information about a topic degrade.
Two examples:
i wanted to find out if there is anything that speaks AGAINST "the cloud" as a concept for Data Procesessing and Storage. (Beside that the company internet connection is crap). There are tons of documents that in a semi "scientific" way show that having a data centre with a constant staff of experts is superios to everything. And it goes on, every company has a different version of basically the same document, and they all subtley show that THIS company is the best.
Example 2:
ERP Software, the most infested pool of filth i have entered yet, be it just a tiny CRM System or a full blown SAP clone, they all have those "Whitepapers" that first look somewhat scientific or informative. Like "the top8 common pitfalls when introducing an ERP system". 7 of them read logically and were what i expected, the 8th was "dont get your IT involved".
Yeah sure, IT doesnt understand economical processes, fair enough, but not getting it involved at all sounds like selfdefense. A further look showed me that this particular vendor has a web-based solution but doesnt provide any further informations (srsly, the website is starved of actual hard informations). The screenshots let the software look a bit oldschool but what really threw red flags for me was the sentence "we are ready for Win10, we did significant adjustment to perform excellent with Windows 10"
So, either they have some system interwoven stuff (so why bother with Webbase then?) or its just another marketing bullshit sentence.
Either way, i found it to be really hard to get ANY reliable information about this particular topic which adds to the overall world experience of missinformations and the all-being "fakenews". But for many things one can usually filter through a lot of different informations that can be pieced together, with this..its all outright propaganda camouflaged as "useful information", some even try to let it look scientific. In the end its all biased..
ultimativly, this rant is about all the people that write those missleading whitepapers, fill the world with biased informations and make the whole planet a worse place.2 -
I once had to implement a program to process CSV files. One line would be one order, so I wrote a class with a static factory method (Java) instead of an ordinary constructor, because I needed to throw exceptions if something with the line was wrong (which now and then was the case: invalid product IDs, missing fields and the like). After I committed my changes (CVS was still common in those days), a coworker (let's call him Max) asked me what the hell I was doing there. He expected me to replace the code (perfectly working, by the way) with either an ordinary constructor or by implementing "the factory pattern properly". His rationale: "We don't have those kinds of things in our code base!" So I let him argue a bit, not finding any well substantiated reason for me to "fix" the code. So Max wanted to team up with another developer in our office (let's call him Rick), explained the "issue" to him. I just sat there and enjoyed, knowing that Rick would not really care. But as soon as Rick understood what I did, he walked over to the book shelf, picked "Effective Java" from it, opened the book at chapter 1 and said to Max: "Look, Josh Bloch suggests doing it exactly that way for the problem at hand!" Max kept on arguing for a while, because his "rationale" (see above) was not affected by the fact that the code was actually good. It just didn't appear in our code base before.
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buying a car is such an exhausting and depressing experience. i feel like being less of a man and somewhat blind right now.
I, a 24 year old guy, have never driven a car. afaik, we were poor, my city's public infrastructure is very good and cheap, and my family majorly never needed it.
6 years ago, i got my first 2 wheeler. i still didn't needed it but dad did, and so i learnt it a bit, was somewhat comfortable driving it on my own, gave a driving test, failed, nd forgot about it ( coz again, still not needed much). to this day this bit is true about me.
at that time my father had bought a few scooters before, so he had some experience, and we ended up buying a new one. currently that fella sits outside our home and my father uses it for supplies.
coming to 2023, i was/am thinking of buying a car. why? coz (1) car trips while sitting in the backseat have been super fun (2) people with cars tend to reach anywhere independently, and help others easily (3) my few friends have one and they are super smug about it and (4) i am starting a wfo job which requires 2 days of wfo and is 60km away from home (although train route with 3 interchanges is less time taking)
but WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK WHEN YOU *THINK* ABOUT BUYING A CAR!?
1. buy first or learn to drive first or get a driving license first?
getting a learner's permit is like filling a form; driving schools require no documents but money, and car sellers also do not want any complicated documents. so first step is easy for all.
HOWEVER, driving schools teach the very basics and are controlling your car for 90 % of the time. you can't learn without having your own car, but at the same time you can't buy new car just to *learn*, you will end up denting it.
2. the confusion around how to buy a car?
there are so many fucking parameters.
money being tha major 1 : old cars are coming from $800-$12000 new cars start at $8000 . my current budget is aroud 3-4k as I want to learn on it first with an expected usage of <1000 km per month
brand : there are literally 1000+ models whose base varients start at 8-9k and whose used version is available in my range. i have no idea how to choose.
year : in our country, a petrol car's registration expires in 15 years. cars from 2009 to 2012 are coming in my range but they are gonna expire in 1-4 year . not sure if its a deal breaker, as i plan to buy a new car later, but people are warning me about usage.
km driven : not 1 person is there who i talked to and told me to trust the kms on odometer. most of the cars i saw show 30-60,000kms driven but i am expecting them to be 5-7x more
cng/petrol : cng is cheaper, while petrol is better for engine life, from what i heard. I was inclined towards cng, but everyone i discussed adviced against this as those cars tend to have been driven for very long due to mileage efficiency.
engine power, cc, power steering, body... there are so many stuff that neither i know about and nor am i considering, which makes me more sad and scared of these deals. i have never bought anything without a proper research.
overall its the first time when i am feeling so much dependent on others and being an inefficient and inexperienced adult . my family once bought a used car 10 years ago, which was a total sham and got us to spend so much on it that we had to sell it for scrap in 3 months. It was a painful and nightmarish experience. i don't want that.7 -
Fun story:
I once was in some kind of SSH-ception, my machine and two remote machines where the same, as in the username and hostname (local name) where equal. All with and Hitachi 500 GB disk.
I was going to nuke the remote machine 1, so later that day I would rebuild the system and all that good stuff, so it would be equal to remote machine 2.
I check the disks and see that it is what I expected, and proceed with the so called "sudo rm -rf /".
Turns out, in my madness, I was doing this on the remote machine 2, not on remote machine 1 (too many terminals), and after I pressed the button and 5 minutes are passed, I realize my mistake...I had just killed a big part of some research I was doing for college (100 or so simulation files, 2GB each).
LESSON: Always triple check your drives and sessions.
P.S.: Something similar happened with me once doing dd to make a ubuntu bootable flash, I ended up erasing 800GB of backup files. -
As a developer I never understood the intended benefit of standups. Issues + a scrum/kanban board like trello or GitHub project + a chat for quick questions or to schedule an ad-hoc pair programming session should be enough to make everyone know everything they need to know about the project status at any time.
Obliging developers to talk in a group session to reiterate in a more verbose way what they already wrote down when working on it, will make a lot of people uncomfortable. Talking too much or not complying to the talking rules is an expected side effect besides anxiety and reduced productivity.
If you want a talk show, hire talk masters.
If you want software development, hire software developers.
Don't confuse one with the other!10 -
How to handle a company in which I work as a junior android dev for the past 7 weeks where there is zero mentoring?
I have 2.5 year experience in android dev and then I had a 1.5 year gap. I was looking for a company where I can get back on track, fill my knowledge gaps and get back in shape. So I accepted lower starting salary because of this gap that I had. Me and manager agreed that I will get a 'buddy' assigned and will get some mentoring but nope..
70% of my scrum team with teamlead are overseas in USA and I have just 2 senior colleagues from my scrumteam that visit office only once a week. Ofcourse there are other scrum teams visiting office daily but I personally dread even going to office.
Nobody is waiting for me in there. What's the point if when I need to ask something I have to always call someone? I can do it from home, no need to go to the office.
My manager dropped the ball and basically disappeared after first 2 days of helping me setting up, we had just two biweekly half-assed 1on1’s where he basically rants about some stuff but doesn’t track my progress at all. I bet he doesn’t even know what I’m working on. Everything he seems to be concerned about is that I come to work into office atleast 3 days a week and then I can work remaining 2 days from home.
I feel like they are treating me as a mid level dev where I have to figure out everything by myself and actual feedback is given only in code reviews. I have no idea what is the expectation of me and wether Im doing good or well. Only my team business analyst praised me once saying that I had a strong onboarding start and I am moving baldly forward… What onboarding? It was just me and documentation and calling everybody asking questions…
My teammates didn't even bother accepting me into a team or giving me a basic code overview, we interact mainly in fucking code review comments or when I awkwardly call them when I already wasted days on something and feel like I'm missing some knowledge and I am to the point where I don't cere if they are awkward, I just ask what I need to know.
Seriously when my probation is done (after 6 weeks) I'm thinking of asking for a 43% raise because I am even sacrificing weekends to catch up with this fucked up broken phone communication style where I have to figure out everything by myself. I will have MR's to prove that I was able to contribute from week 1 so my ass is covered.
I even heard that a fresh uni graduate with 0 android experience was hired just for 15% les salary then me. I compared our output, I am doing much better so I definetly feel that Im worthy of a raise. Also I am getting a hang of codebase and expected codestyle, so either these fuckers will pay for it or I will go somewhere else to work for even less salary as long as I get some decent mentoring and have a decent team with decent culture. A place where I could close my laptop and go home instead of wasting time catching up and always feel behind. I want to see people around me who have some emotional intelligene, not some robots who care only about their own work and never interact.6 -
I am put to the task of creating a Chat Robot in ChatFuel.
Cool, I thought at first.
Cool is not what I would call it at this point..one week later.
The size is a factor at play, for sure, it needs to point to 27 cities and give individual information, handle e-mails, phone, automate e-mails.. a bunch of stuff.
Now, I am located in Sweden.
{{city}} as a set user attribute acknowledges Gothenburg and geolocation thusly worked fine for my boss. But not for me, and won't work for any other city.
So..Global AI calling for static blocks it is... 27 blocks...
For two languages.. 54 blocks...
Static pointing to the first answer for every individual block multiplies this by a factor of two. 108 static blocks. Fine.
I have since realized that my ChatFuel-Luddite ways were limiting the expected performance of the end result and learned that most other set attributes in ChatFuel work fine. Yay.
So we set up everything the last 54 blocks need to do with user attributes and to my surprise it works, really well at that. The answer from a user that is a correct city puts you into a block that is a series of questions using user attributes, both {{first_name}} and {{last_name}}, asks for e-mail and phone, displays an image and stuff like that.
Now.. as I attempt to copy these blocks..
THEY JUST POOP OUT CHUNKS OF THE ORIGINAL BLOCK. IT'S INCONSISTENCY IS STAGGERING. IT NEVER REALLY COMPLETES THE DUPLICATION, NO ERROR MESSAGE OR ANYTHING.
Which then reminded me of when my boss asked why everything was botched earlier in the project, at that point I copied the entire bot as a fallback and worked with my change in the copy first for safety reasons, didn't work, copy wasn't entire.
Wasted fucking hours on this.
I'm glad my boss is cool, and the job is easily worth it. I actually think that the design aspect of ChatFuel is nice, and the people behind it are kind in the facebook group and all. I don't think they're trying to be mean. But holy shit.
This has been a mental anguish that levels pissing bleach filled with fire ants.
" You could've easily solved this with APIs and third-party geofencing services ", yeah, but their services won't stack for the customer, nice attempt though.
Deep breaths.1 -
Old colleague reached out to me. He needed to reinstall one of my web apps (combination of python, php and Javascript (frontend)).
It was harder to do than expected and the code was not the most clever I ever saw.
Not sure what I was thinking during that time of my life 🤔