<rant>
*Rules For Work*

1. Never give me work in the morning. Always wait until 4:00 and then bring it to me. The challenge of a deadline is refreshing.

2. If it's really a rush job, run in and interrupt me every 10 minutes to inquire how it's going. That helps. Even better, hover behind me, and advise me at every keystroke.

3. Always leave without telling anyone where you're going. It gives me a chance to be creative when someone asks where you are.

4. If my arms are full of papers, boxes, books, or supplies, don't open the door for me. I need to learn how to function as a paraplegic and opening doors with no arms is good training in case I should ever be injured and lose all use of my limbs.

5. If you give me more than one job to do, don't tell me which is priority. I am psychic.

6. Do your best to keep me late. I adore this office and really have nowhere to go or anything to do. I have no life beyond work.

7. If a job I do pleases you, keep it a secret. If that gets out, it could mean a promotion.

8. If you don't like my work, tell everyone. I like my name to be popular in conversations. I was born to be whipped.

9. If you have special instructions for a job, don't write them down. In fact, save them until the job is almost done. No use confusing me with useful information.

10. Never introduce me to the people you're with. I have no right to know anything. In the corporate food chain, I am plankton. When you refer to them later, my shrewd deductions will identify them.

11. Be nice to me only when the job I'm doing for you could really change your life and send you straight to manager's hell.

12. Tell me all your little problems. No one else has any and it's nice to know someone is less fortunate. I especially like the story about having to pay so many taxes on the bonus check you received for being such a good manager.

13. Wait until my yearly review and THEN tell me what my goals SHOULD have been. Give me a mediocre performance rating with a cost of living increase. I'm not here for the money anyway.

</rant>

*Facebook Hackers follow the Rules*
(real story)

TL;DR: sorry, not available, can't do spoilers

One night I was with a group of friends out at a pub. A guy and his girlfriend show up, I didn't know them but they were my friend's friends.

The girl kept bragging the whole time about his boyfriend being a professional programmer, trying to remind it to everybody whenever possible (don't ask me why!).

So, after a while, the discussion moves towards "suspect Facebook activities" and the guy starts saying that he can hack Facebook.

- "What do you mean?", I ask.
- "Hacking into other people's accounts, even with 2 factor authentication. I did it a lot of times"
- "Wait, and they don't notice?"
- "Of course not! ^_^ He's a hacker", the girl replies.

Ok, time to do a coming out.

- "Hey, I'm a developer myself. Can you give me an idea of what you did in technical terms? Did you find a vulnerability? Used a virus? Maybe a keylogger?"
- "No... Uh... Well... The secret is to read the terms of service"
- "What?"
- "Yes... yes it's all in the facebook terms of service..."
- "Uhm, I'm not really sure I'm following. Could you prove it by hacking my Facebook account? I'm giving you the permission".

In less than a minute the discussion flew completely away and they never mentioned computers again.

😂😂

So, as everyone knows on here by now (or, a lot of ranters), I am a fervid privacy person.

Appearantly a new surveillance law in my country is about to extend mass surveillance/hacking a lot. So here a rundown of what they are about to be allowed to do (stuff that is not okay imo and this is the reason I am so pro-privacy):

- Mass Data Gathering: The intelligence agency over here (lets call it IA from now) can pretty much record everything send through the country.

- Extra Protection: If they want to conduct surveillance on journalists/lawyers, they have to go through extra channels first at least.

- Data/survaillance sharing: The IA is allowed to share their raw/filtered data with foreign intelligence agencies without limits. Also, they're allowed to conduct surveillance based on foreign requests.

- Secret DNA database: A secret DNA database will be created which can store the DNA profiles of any person who has commited any kind of crime. These profiles are allowed to be stored for a maximum of 30 years. This database is allowed to be shared with any foreign intelligence agency.

- Hacking: Unlimited power to hack any device deemed neccesary to hack in relation to crime. From computers to smartphones and so on. Also, it's allowed to use zero-days without reporting them to the vendor (we have seen what can go wrong with that through the ShadowBrokers scandal).

- Automatic Database Collection: They are allowed to directly tap into any database they see required (banks, healthcare, messaging services and so on). Practically this can lead to backdoors being build in because if you don't cooperate, you can go to prison. (mother of god I am not using anything closed source anymore if possible).

So yeah, this is pretty much the reason why I am so privacy consious. This country is fucked.

Assembly: He’s the nerd. He speaks very quickly and uses short sentences. Very few people talk to him. He’s considered to be an autist asperger by a majority of the class because he finishes the exams so quickly it’s insane and he faces a lot of difficulties in speaking with others. He’s at school but already dressed like an engineer.

Ada: She’s a foureyes nerd. When she gets the answer she’s doesn’t make any mistake. Ada often corrects the teacher when she writes a line a little ambiguous. She’s building a rocketship in her backyard and she’s always speaking about this weird hobby.

Python: He’s Mr Popular. He likes skate, brags about all the parties he’s invited to. He’s good in all the subjects taught in class but he’ll do them a bit slower than the others. Everyone loves him because he explainsthings so well, sometimes the teacher herself asks Python to explain some part of the course. He’s dressed with a hoodie, a baggy and glasses on the top of the head ;)

Java: She is one of the toppers of the class and very popular. She’s very good in all the topics. The teacher loves her but she’s a very talkative person.

Scala/Kotlin: They are twin sisters and the best friends of Java. Unfortunately, they are not as popular and it’s often Java who takes the lead in the group. It’s very difficult to distinguish one from another. Both are far less talkative than Java but Scala speaks a bit differently than Kotlin and Java.

C: He’s the topper of the class. He’s so fast in completing the exams that the teacher really thinks he’s copying Assembly’s work. He has a little brother C++ and they share a lot in common together. He’s the chess major and often plays chess with Assembly and his big brother.

Go: He’s the new kid on the bloc. He doesn’t like C++ and his friends and he wants to prove he can do better than them. Of course, he prefers playing Go over Chess.

APL: He’s a lonely guy. No one understands him when he speaks. Even the teacher is surprised when APL shows a correct answer after several lines of incomprehensible pictograms. People think that he was born in a foreign country… or a foreign planet ?

HTML/CSS: These twin brothers are very different. One is dressed in black and white and the other is dressed with everything except black and white. HTML is very talkative and annoying and the CSS is very artistic. CSS is the best student in Art lessons and HTML performs well in written expression.

LaTeX: She’s friend of HTML. The teacher likes her because she has a gift of writing. LaTeX likes the mathematical courses because she can draw fancy greek letters. The teacher knows this well and she is often asked to write a formula on the black board.

VBA: He’s in the back, looking through the windows. Not really interested in the courses taught in class. In the exams, he answers always with a table.

C#: He’s in the back playing yet another game on his smartphone. He likes being next to the windows also.

JavaScript: People often mix up Java and JavaScript because they have a similar name. But they are definitly not the same. Javascript spends a lot of time with HTMLand CSS. He’s as artistic as CSS but he prefers things that move. He likes actions and movies. CSS dreams to be a painter wheras JavaScript wants to be a film-maker.

Haskell: He’s a goth. Dressed up in dark. Doesn’t talk to anyone. He doesn’t understand why others write pages when he can write a couple of lines to answer the same question.

Julia: She’s the newest student here. She doesn’t have any friends yet but her secret aim is to be as popular as Python and as fast as C.

Credit: Thomas jalabert

So apparently devRant is a problem in my life. As those of you who've read any of my stuff here know I work at Victoria's Secret. So two of my friends come in just before I was ending my shift to see what the plans were for tonight. The usual - hit the club, crash at one of our houses.

Thing is, I was scrolling through devRant when they walked up. (the below is paraphrased)

Friend1: Ugh, you're still on that thing?

Friend2: Is she really? <looks over my shoulder>

Me: <eyeroll>

Friend2: I don't get it. <pokes me in the left tit> You barely post on Instagram and you don't tweet anymore. And you haven't commented on any of my posts in like days. Wtf bitch?

Disclaimer: Yes, we are those girls who talk like that and go clubbing and dress up and makeup and all that shit. Don't judge me because I don't give a fuck. Anyway...

Friend1: Seriously.

Me: Really? We're doing this? Because I haven't posted on fucking Instagram? I talk to you every day. I see you every other day. I like coding. I like tech. This place is awesome and the people are cool. If I want to see your ass or your outfit, I can just look at you. I don't need to be on Instagram 24/7.

Friend2: Jeez bitch. Need a tampon

<we all laugh>

Me: This is my thing. It doesn't mean we aren't friend and we won't chill, but my future is in development and technology. So deal hoes.

Friend1: Ugh you're such a nerd.

Friend2: <laughing>

Me: And you're both like totally vapid sluts. But I love you.

Friend2: Jelly

Friend1: Totes jelly. Girl you need some vitamin D

Me: I'm sayin'. But that doesn't mean I won't spend my free time coding.

Friend2: Ugh alright we don't give a fuck. Code or whatever. Just be ready at 11.

We all flip each other the bird and they leave. I guess if that's the level of acceptance I can get from my wonderful, gorgeous, annoying, amazing, asshole best friends, I'll take it. I am not changing my path.

Navy story continued.
And continuing from the arp poisoning and boredom, I started scanning the network...
So I found plenty of WinXP computers, even some Win2k servers (I shit you not, the year was 201X) I decided to play around with merasploit a bit. I mean, this had to be a secure net, right?
Like hell it was.
Among the select douchebags I arp poisoned was a senior officer that had a VERY high idea for himself, and also believed he was tech-savvy. Now that, is a combination that is the red cloth for assholes like me. But I had to be more careful, as news of the network outage leaked, and rumours of "that guy" went amok, but because the whole sysadmin thing was on the shoulders of one guy, none could track it to me in explicit way. Not that i cared, actually, when I am pissed I act with all the subtleness of an atom bomb on steroids.
So, after some scanning and arp poisoning (changing the source MAC address this time) I said...
"Let's try this common exploit, it supposedly shouldn't work, there have been notifications about it, I've read them." Oh boy, was I in for a treat. 12 meterpreter sessions. FUCKING 12. The academy's online printer had no authentication, so I took the liberty of printing a few pages of ASCII jolly rogers (cute stuff, I know, but I was still in ITSec puberty) and decided to fuck around with the other PCs. One thing I found out is that some professors' PCs had the extreme password of 1234. Serious security, that was. Had I known earlier, I could have skipped a TON of pointless memorising...
Anyway, I was running amok the entire network, the sysad never had a chance on that, and he seemed preoccupied with EVERYTHING ELSE besides monitoring the net, like fixing (replacing) the keyboard for the commander's secretary, so...
BTW, most PCs had antivirus, but SO out of date that I didn't even need to encode the payload or do any other trick. An LDAP server was open, and the hashed admin password was the name of his wife. Go figure.
I looked at a WinXP laptop with a weird name, and fired my trusty ms08_067 on it. Passowrd: "aaw". I seriously thought that Ophcrack was broken, but I confirmed it. WTF? I started looking into the files... nothing too suspicious... wait a min, this guy is supposed to work, why his browser is showing porn?
Looking at the ""Deleted"" files (hah!) I fount a TON of documents with "SECRET" in them. Curious...
Decided to download everything, like the asshole I am, and restart his PC, AND to leave him with another desktop wallpaper and a text message. Thinking that he took the hint, I told the sysadmin about the vulnerable PCs and went to class...
In the middle of the class (I think it was anti-air warfare or anti-submarine warfare) the sysad burst through the door shouting "Stop it, that's the second-in-command's PC!".
Stunned silence. Even the professor (who was an officer). God, that was awkward. So, to make things MORE awkward (like the asshole I am) I burned every document to a DVD and the next day I took the sysad and went to the second-in-command of the academy.
Surprisingly he took the whole thing in quite the easygoing fashion. I half-expected court martial or at least a good yelling, but no. Anyway, after our conversation I cornered the sysad and barraged him with some tons of security holes, needed upgrades and settings etc. I still don't know if he managed to patch everything (I left him a detailed report) because, as I've written before, budget constraints in the military are the stuff of nightmares. Still, after that, oddly, most people wouldn't even talk to me.
God, that was a nice period of my life, not having to pretend to be interested about sports and TV shows. It would be almost like a story from highschool (if our highschool had such things as a network back then - yes, I am old).
Your stories?

Fuck the memes.

Fuck the framework battles.

Fuck the language battles.

Fuck the titles.

Anybody who has been in this field long enough knows that it doesn't matter if your linus fucking torvalds, there is no human who has lived or ever will live that simultaneously understands, knows, and remembers how to implement, in multiple languages, the following:

- jest mocks for complex React components (partial mocks, full mocks, no mocks at all!)
- token cancellation for asynchronous Tasks in C#
- fullstack CRUD, REST, and websocket communication (throw in gRPC for bonus points)
- database query optimization, seeding, and design
- nginx routing, https redirection
- build automation with full test coverage and environment consideration
- docker container versioning, restoration, and cleanup
- internationalization on both the front AND backends
- secret storage, security audits
- package management, maintenence, and deprecation reviews
- integrating with dozens of APIs
- fucking how to center a div

and that's a _comically_ incomplete list; barely scratches the surface of the full range of what a dev can encounter in a given day of writing software

have many of us probably done one or even all of these at different times? surely.

but does that mean we are supposed to draw that up at a moment's notice some cookie-cutter solution like a fucking robot and spit out an answer on a fax sheet?

recruiters, if you read this site (perhaps only the good ones do anyway so its wasted oxygen), just know that whoever you hire its literally the luck of the draw of how well they perform during the interview. sure, perhaps some perform better, but you can never know how good someone is until they literally start working at your org, so... have fun with that.

Oh and I almost forgot, again for you recruiters, on top of that list which you probably won't ever understand for the entirety of your lives, you can also add writing documentation, backup scripts, and orchestrating / administrating fucking JIRA or actually any somewhat technical dashboard like a CMS or website, because once again, the devs are the only truly competent ones - and i don't even mean in a technical sense, i mean in a HUMAN sense of GETTING SHIT DONE IN GENERAL.

There's literally 2 types of people in the world: those who sit around drawing flow charts and talking on the phone all day, and those WHO LITERALLY FUCKING BUILD THE WORLD

why don't i just run the whole fucking company at this point? you guys are "celebrating" that you made literally $5 dollars from a single customer and i'm just sitting here coding 12 hours a day like all is fine and well

i'm so ANGRY its always the same no matter where i go, non-technical people have just no clue, even when you implore them how long things take, they just nod and smile and say "we'll do it the MVP way". sure, fine, you can do that like 2 or 3 times, but not for 6 fucking months until you have a stack of "MVPs" that come toppling down like the garbage they are.

How do expect to keep the "momentum" of your customers and sales (I hope you can hear the hatred of each of these market words as I type them) if the entire system is glued together with ducktape because YOU wanted to expedite the feature by doing it the EASY way instead of the RIGHT way. god, just forget it, nobody is going to listen anyway, its like the 5th time a row in my life

we NEED tests!
we NEED to know our code coverage!
we NEED to design our system to handle large amounts of traffic!
we NEED detailed logging!
we NEED to start building an exception database!

BILBO BAGGINS! I'm not trying to hurt you! I'm trying to help you!

Don't really know what this rant was, I'm just raging and all over the place at the universe. I'm going to bed.

Life with Windows 10:

An absolute nightmare. My oven doesn't work, Washing machine started rattling, toaster toasted more than it was supposed to toast. Every time windows updates it restarts my TV in my living room.

Then I met my neighbour. He lives a very happy life. I always wanted to know his secret ingredients.

One day I invited him to my house and he saw my Windows machine. He immediately insisted that I install Linux so that I can be happy and cool like him.

And that's the day my life changed. My oven started to bake beautifully, my washing machine was spinning at full speed.

Linux changed my life. I'm now part of the cool kids. Everyone loves me, embraces me.

Is your life hard? Are you not being noticed by other cool boys/girls? Are you having pain in your back? Remember:

Whatever bad happens, it's Windows 10's fault.

This is a funny one:

I found this gem in SO.
Why is it funny? Well, PDVSA is the state-owned company for oil production of my country (Petróleos De Venezuela).

This little intern decided that it was a good idea to publish in SO an answer with actual code, showing database and tables names to everyone.

Priceless.

Apple has programmed an avatar maker in iMessage that generates emoji that are supposed to resemble the person. However it does not have any setting for facial structure to represent a person’s sex. I’m pretty sure they did it because “gender is a construct”.

When I was growing up I had some issues with gender dysphoria. I am male genetically. I was mistaken as female my whole childhood because I was “pretty”, my best friends were girls, and I liked cooking, drawing, and dancing. Puberty happened and I started to look like a man. I considered transitioning because I felt female but I decided to let my body do what it wants and do the things I like to do without worrying about if they are gendered or not. I am married and male and I like what I like.

This stupid iMessage avatar. I have tried my hardest to make it look like me. I have long hair and keep my facial hair clean. They don’t have a switch to change some facial physiological traits so I have this Memoji that looks like a woman with a slight hormonal imbalance. It makes me feel conflicted like I felt when I was young. I haven’t thought about it in years and now I feel like I have an uncomfortable secret female avatar that i carry around on my phone and I feel like I’m carrying a secret.

A persons genetics result in differences in facial structures. Biological sex is more than the length of hair and whether a person wears makeup. I hate this “sex is a construct” trend. I’m fine living my life, but then companies push this software onto my phone like propaganda. I want it to look as masculine as I look IRL.

!Story

The day I became the 400 pound Chinese hacker 4chan.

I built this front-end solution for a client (but behind a back end login), and we get on the line with some fancy European team who will handle penetration testing for the client as we are nearing dev completion.

They seem... pretty confident in themselves, and pretty disrespectful to the LAMP environment, and make the client worry even though it's behind a login the project is still vulnerable. No idea why the client hired an uppity .NET house to test a LAMP app. I don't even bother asking these questions anymore...

And worse, they insist we allow them to scrape for vulnerabilities BEHIND the server side login. As though a user was already compromised.

So, I know I want to fuck with them. and I sit around and smoke some weed and just let this issue marinate around in my crazy ass brain for a bit. Trying to think of a way I can obfuscate all this localStorage and what it's doing... And then, inspiration strikes.

I know this library for compressing JSON. I only use it when localStorage space gets tight, and this project was only storing a few k to localStorage... so compression was unnecessary, but what the hell. Problem: it would be obvious from exposed source that it was being called.

After a little more thought, I decide to override the addslashes and stripslashes functions and to do the compression/decompression from within those overrides.

I then minify the whole thing and stash it in the minified jquery file.

So, what LOOKS from exposed client side code to be a simple addslashes ends up compressing the JSON before putting it in localStorage. And what LOOKS like a stripslashes decompresses.

Now, the compression does some bit math that frankly is over my head, but the practical result is if you output the data compressed, it looks like mandarin and random characters. As a result, everything that can be seen in dev tools looks like the image.

So we GIVE the penetration team login credentials... they log in and start trying to crack it.

I sit and wait. Grinning as fuck.

Not even an hour goes by and they call an emergency meeting. I can barely contain laughter.

We get my PM and me and then several guys from their team on the line. They share screen and show the dev tools.

"We think you may have been compromised by a Chinese hacker!"

I mute and then die my ass off. Holy shit this is maybe the best thing I've ever done.

My PM, who has seen me use the JSON compression technique before and knows exactly whats up starts telling them about it so they don't freak out. And finally I unmute and manage a, "Guys... I'm standing right here." between gasped laughter.

If only it was more common to use video in these calls because I WISH I could have seen their faces.

Anyway, they calmed their attitude down, we told them how to decompress the localStorage, and then they still didn't find jack shit because i'm a fucking badass and even after we gave them keys to the login and gave them keys to my secret localStorage it only led to AWS Cognito protected async calls.

Anyway, that's the story of how I became a "Chinese hacker" and made a room full of penetration testers look like morons with a (reasonably) simple JS trick.

> In office for first time in awhile
> Run into group of 4 people I don’t recognize in far cubicle corning laughing in hushed voices eating of an impressive spread of food
> See me and immediately look at each other with panicked expressions
> Confused, I put my hands up to indicate I come in peace
> They relax a little and say they thought I was from HR since they didn’t recognize me
> Ask why HR seeing them would be such a big deal
> They say their potluck is not “sanctioned”
> …?

So apparently HR just could resist ruining one of the only good things about coming into the office and one of the coolest things about the company’s culture. At least once a month there would be a giant potluck where everyone would bring some home cooked dish and share it. I can’t tell you how amazing these are in Canada, 50+ plates of authentic food from all over the world.

Unfortunately HR didn’t agree as 1. They didn’t cook so felt bad taking food. 2. Nobody asked them permission to put on these events they just happened organically. 3. Some people were bringing in food that they felt was culturally inappropriate (ie. caucasian guy bringing in homemade sushi).

HR recently banned all “unsanctioned” potlucks and all future potlucks needed to be approved through them with the following stipulations. 1. You could participate without bringing something by donating to HR $10 2. If you brought something you still had to give HR $10. 3. Things you brought in had to be approved by HR

Naturally the first and only potluck under these rules only 4 people brought something in as many couldn’t get their dishes approved because HR didn’t like what they were planning to bring (started out as being because culture and turned into HR just being picky), most just brought $10 so there wasn’t enough food to go around and so after HR took a giant group photo to post on the company’s social media accounts to show off how good the company’s culture is most everyone had to go out for lunch. HR sent out an email later that day exclaiming what a huge success for charity and the company brand the potluck was and they can’t wait for the next one. (I have the HR communications email marked as spam so I never saw the email). Nobody ever organized a sanctioned potluck after that.

However people still missed cooking and sharing their favourite recipes with one another so potlucks still occur but they are now very small, secret, invite-only, hush-hush affairs.

…What in the ever loving fuck

TLDR;
Wrote a slick scheduling and communication system allowing me to assign photography resources based on time and location.

I'll tell you a little secret ... I'm not actually a dev. I'm a photographer, pretending to be a dev.

Or ... perhaps it's the other way around? (I spend most of my time writing code these days, but only for me - I write the software I use to run my business).

I own a photography studio - we specialize in youth volleyball photography (mostly 12-18 year old girls with a bit of high school, college and semi-pro thrown in for good measure - it's a hugely popular sport) and travel all over the US (and sometimes Europe) photographing.

As a point of scale, this year we photographed a tournament in Denver that featured 100 volleyball courts (in one room!), playing at the same time.

I'm based in California and fly a crew of part-time staff around to these events, but my father and I drive our booth equipment wherever it needs to go. We usually setup a 30'x90' booth with local servers, download/processing/cashier computers and 45 laptops for viewing/ordering photographs. Not to mention 16' drape and banners, tons of samples, 55' TVs, etc. It's quite the production.

We photograph by paid signup only - when there are upwards of 800 teams/9,600 athletes per weekend playing, and you only have four trained photographers, you've got to manage your resources!

This of course means you have to have a system for taking sign those sign ups, assigning teams to photographers and doing so in the most efficient manner possible based on who is available when the team is playing. (You can waste an awful lot of time walking from one court to another in a large convention center - especially if you have to navigate through large crowds - not to mention exhausting yourself).

So this year I finally added a feature I've wanted for quite some time - an interactive court map. I can take an image of the court layout from the tournament and create an HTML version in our software. As I mouse over requests in one window, the corresponding court is highlighted on the map in another browser window. Each photographer has a color associated with them. When I assign requests to a photographer, the court is color coded with the color of the photographer. This allows me to group assignments to minimize photographer walk time and keep them in a specific area. It's also very easy to look at the map and see unassigned requests and look to see what photographer is nearby.

This year I also integrated with Twilio and setup a simple set of text shortcuts that photographers can use to let our booth staff know where they are, if they have memory cards that need picking up, if they need water/coffee/snack, etc. They can also move assignments on their schedule or send and SOS for help if it looks like they aren't going to be able to photograph a team.

Kind of a CLI via the phone. :)

The additions have turned out to be really useful and has made scheduling and managing the photographers much easier that it was in the past.

In the darkest of days, I discovered how to remote login to my computer at work through the company vpn. I then proceeded to work overtime at night in secret for a week or so, writing documentation and refactoring code.

I finally woke the fuck up and realized that I shouldn't be obsessing over proprietary codebases that do not belong to me, and I should put this misguided energy into my own projects.

So yeah, as a bad dev habit I'm working on fixing, this fits the bill.

I'm working on a project with a teacher to overview the project at my school to be responsible for the confidential student data...

Teacher: How are we going to authenticate the kiosk machines so people don't need a login?

Me: Well we can use a unique URL for the app and that will put an authorized cookie on the machine as well as local IP whitelisting.

Teacher: ok but can't we just put a secret key in a text file on the C drive and access it with JavaScript?

Me: well JavaScript can't access your drive it's a part of the security protocol built into chrome...

Teacher: well that seems silly! There must be a way.

Me: Nope definately not. Let's just make a fancy shortcut?

Teacher: Alright you do that for now until I find a way to access that file.

I want to quit this project so bad

It's enough. I have to quit my job.

December last year I've started working for a company doing finance. Since it was a serious-sounding field, I tought I'd be better off than with my previous employer. Which was kinda the family-agency where you can do pretty much anything you want without any real concequences, nor structures. I liked it, but the professionalism was missing.

Turns out, they do operate more professionally, but the intern mood and commitment is awful. They all pretty much bash on eachother. And the root cause of this and why it will stay like this is simply the Project Lead.

The plan was that I was positioned as glue between Design/UX and Backend to then make the best Frontend for the situation. Since that is somewhat new and has the most potential to get better. Beside, this is what the customer sees everyday.

After just two months, an retrospective and a hell lot of communication with co-workers, I've decided that there is no other way other than to leave.

I had a weekly productivity of 60h+ (work and private, sometimes up to 80h). I had no problems with that, I was happy to work, but since working in this company, my weekly productivity dropped to 25~30h. Not only can I not work for a whole proper work-week, this time still includes private projects. So in hindsight, I efficiently work less than 20h for my actual job.

The Product lead just wants feature on top of feature, our customers don't want to pay concepts, but also won't give us exact specifications on what they want.
Refactoring is forbidden since we get to many issues/bugs on a daily basis so we won't get time.
An re-design is forbidden because that would mean that all Screens have to be re-designed.
The product should be responsive, but none of the components feel finished on Desktop - don't talk about mobile, it doesn't exist.
The Designer next to me has to make 200+ Screens for Desktop and Mobile JUST so we can change the primary colors for an potential new customer, nothing more. Remember that we don't have responsiveness? Guess what, that should be purposely included on the Designs (and it looks awful).
I may hate PHP, but I can still work with it. But not here, this is worse then any ecommerce. I have to fix legacy backend code that has no test coverage. But I haven't touched php for 4 years, letalone wrote sql (I hate it). There should be no reason whatsoever to let me do this kind of work, as FRONTEND ARCHITECT.

After an (short) analysis of the Frontend, I conclude that it is required to be rewritten to 90%. There have been no performance checks for the Client/UI, therefor not only the components behave badly, but the whole system is slow as FUCK! Back in my days I wrote jQuery, but even that shit was faster than the architecuture of this React Multi-instance app. Nothing is shared, most of the AppState correlate to other instances.

The Backend. Oh boy. Not only do we use an shitty outated open-source project with tons of XSS possibillities as base, no we clone that shit and COPY OUR SOURCES ON TOP. But since these people also don't want to write SQL, they tought using Symfony as base on top of the base would be an good idea.
Generally speaking (and done right), this is true. but not then there will be no time and not properly checked. As I said I'm working on Legacy code. And the more I look into it, the more Bugs I find. Nothing too bad, but it's still a bad sign why the webservices are buggy in general. And therefor, the buggyness has to travel into the frontend.

And now the last goodies:
- Composer itself is commited to the repo (the fucking .phar!)
- Deployments never work and every release is done manually
- We commit an "_TRASH" folder
- There is an secret ongoing refactoring in the root of the Project called "_REFACTORING" (right, no branches)
- I cannot test locally, nor have just the Frontend locally connected to the Staging webservices
- I am required to upload my sources I write to an in-house server that get's shared with the other coworkers
- This is the only Linux server here and all of the permissions are fucked up
- We don't have versions, nor builds, we use the current Date as build number, but nothing simple to read, nonono. It's has to be an german Date, with only numbers and has always to end with "00"
- They take security "super serious" but disable the abillity to unlock your device with your fingerprint sensor ON PURPOSE

My brain hurts, maybe I'll post more on this shit fucking cuntfuck company. Sorry to be rude, but this triggers me sooo much!

Long long ago there was a man who discovered if he scratched certain patterns onto a rock he could use them to remind him about things he would otherwise forgot.

Over time the scratching were refined and this great secret of eternal memory were taught to his children, and they taught it to their children.

Soon mankind had discovered a way to preserve through the ages his thoughts and memories and further discovered that if he wrote down these symbols he could transfer information over distances by simply recording these symbols in a portable medium.

Writing exploded it allowed a genius in one place to communicate the information he had recorded across time and space.

Thousands of years passed, writing continued to be refined and more and more vital. Eventually a humble man by the name of Johannes Gutenberg seeking to make the divine word of God accessible to the people created the printing press allowing the written word to be copied and circulated with great ease expanding vastly the works available to mankind and the number of people who could understand this arcane art of writing.

But mankind never satiated in his desire to know all there is to know demanded more information, demanded it faster, demanded it better. So the greatest minds of 200 years, Marconi, Maxwell, Bohr, Von Nueman, Turing and a host of others working with each other, standing on the shoulders of their brobdinangian predecessors, brought forth a way to send these signals, transfer this writing upon beams of light, by manipulating the very fabric of the cosmos, mankind had reach the ultimate limits of transmission of information. Man has conquered time, and space itself in preserving and transmitting information, we are as the gods!

My point is this, that your insistence upon having a meeting to ask a question, with 10 people that could've been answered with a 2 sentence email, is not only an affront to me for wasting my time, but also serves as an affront to the greatest minds of the 19th and 20th centuries, it is an insult to your ancestors who first sacrificed and labored to master the art of writing, it is in fact offensive to all of humanity up to this point.

In short by requiring a meeting to be held, not only are you ensuring the information is delayed because we all now need to find a time that all of us are available, not only are you now eliminating the ability to have a first hand permanent record of what need to be communicated, you are actively working against progress, you are dragging humanity collectively backwards. You join the esteemed ranks of organizations such as the oppressive Catholic church that sought to silence Galialio and Copernicus, you are among the august crowd that burned witches at Salem, the Soviet secret police that silenced "bourgeoisie" science, you join the side of thousands of years of daft ignorance.

If it were not for you people we would have flying cars, we would have nanobots capable of building things on a whim, we would all be programming in lisp. But because of you and people like you we are trapped in this world, where the greatest minds are trapped in meetings that never end, where mistruth and ignorance run rampant, a world where JavaScript is the de facto language of choice every where because it runs everywhere, and ruins everywhere.

So please remember, next time you want to have a meeting ask yourself first. "Could this be an email?" "Do I enjoy burning witches?" if you do this you might make the world a little bit of a less terrible place to be.

When my former boss let me go, he asked "you devs do not plant some secret code into your software so you can destroy it remotely, do you?".

I smiled and walked away.

Needless to say I got some money on top on my last day at that job.

My colleague is what you would call a cowboy coder. He solves problems with really complex solutions that only he understands and does not seem to care about that the team doesn't understand it. He's super fast and very skilled, but it leaves the rest of the team hanging. He sometimes works at his spare time so things we worked on the previous day can be totally changed the next day without any notice. He has also removed code written by someone else because he did not like it, in secret. I found this while browsing through commits that were committed directly to master without a PR.

We have tried talking to me about this but it doesn't seem to work. He seems to value speed over anything else and doesn't seem to have any respect for other team member's opinions.

What the hell do I do? Has anyone else worked with a similar typed person? He's really making my life hard and I think it's very frustrating. Please help.

I am so fucking done with all these incompetent fucktards!!! Why would you keep a client-brief in secret from your colleagues?! Why on your screwed delusional Earth you think it is perfectly okay if you don’t communicate the changes ahead your team? How could you - microbrained prehistoric dinosaur who petrified to your own semen - think that I can estimate with my time and do my work when you are barely able to think ahead 2 minutes without letting me know the actual scope and deadlines???!!! AND NO telling me the day before NOT GONNA MAKE IT VALID!!!! You failed in life you failed in evolution you played my trust and I don’t give horseshit about your career! Go fuck a hedgehog, eat it and shit out on the same fucking day. Tomorrow a new era starts and prepare yourself as I am hereby vow that I am not going to care any of your bullshit! I vow that every time you come to me with a new task, I will start it WHEN I can and do it between 9 and 17 and if anyone asks I will calmly tell the hard truth about the overbred, human shaped, evolutional dead end you are...

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.

Oh wow, so many memorable co-workers, though typically not in a positive way. I guess the most memorable was this project manager who got his job solely through nepotism. He was a fucking moron, putting it lightly. He would rattle off buzzwords and jargon that he had randomly picked up in a completely nonsensical way, which made him sound even more ridiculous. He didn't seem to notice our blank stares.

Anyway, since he loved to show everyone just how awesome he was, he had to have the latest and greatest laptop. He had some top-of-the-line model which cost an insane amount of cash back in the day, but of course he got bored of it when something better came out six months later. So he decided to sell his old laptop.

Now, this was his personal laptop he was selling but we were about three months away from launching a top-secret project which had a seven figure budget and a lot riding on it. So what did this absolute goose do? He sold his laptop unformatted with a metric shit ton of confidential files and documents on it. As fate would have it... he sold it to someone who just so happened to work for a competing company.

Cut to about two and a half months later, around two weeks before the launch of this massive project, our competition comes out with something incredibly similar and beat us to market. Aghast, senior management then found out that they had obtained a treasure trove of confidential information from this numpty's laptop, handed to them on a silver platter.

The following Monday, with a sombre mood in the office, this guy cheerfully comes in through the door and is immediately yanked into the boardroom by management. What followed was around thirty minutes of brutal, relentless, non-stop shouting, table- banging and obscenities. When it finally stopped, the door quietly opened, this guy walks out as white as a sheet, turns towards the exit and left the building.

We never saw him again.

I propose that the study of Rust and therefore the application of said programming language and all of the technology that compromises it should be made because the language is actually really fucking good. Reading and studying how it manages to manipulate and otherwise use memory without a garbage collector is something to be admired, illuminating in its own accord.

BUT going for it because it is a "beTter C++" should not constitute a basis for it's study.

Let me expand through anecdotal evidence, which is really not to be taken seriously, but at the same time what I am using for my reasoning behind this, please feel free to correct me if I am wrong, for I am a software engineer yes, I do have academic training through a B.S in Computer Science yes, BUT my professional life has been solely dedicated to web development, which admittedly I do not go on about technical details of it with you all because: I am not allowed to(1) and (2)it is better for me to bitch and shit over other petty development related details.

Anecdotal and otherwise non statistically supported evidence: I have seen many motherfuckers doing shit in both C and C++ that ADMIT not covering their mistakes through the use of a debugger. Mostly because (A) using a debugger and proper IDE is for pendejos and debugging is for putos GDB is too hard and the VS IDE is waaaaaa "I onlLy NeeD Vim" and (B) "If an error would have registered then it would not have compiled no?", thus giving me the idea that the most common occurrences of issues through the use of the C father/son languages come from user error, non formal training in the language and a nice cusp of "fuck it it runs" while leaving all sorts of issues that come from manipulating the realm of the Gods "memory".
EVERY manual, book, coming all the way back to the K&C book talks about memory and the way in which developers of these 2 languages are able to manipulate and work on it. EVERY new standard of the ISO implementation of these languages deals, through community effort or standard documentation about the new items excised through features concerning MODERN (meaning, no, the shit you learned 20 years ago won't fucking cut it) will not cut it.

THUS if your ass is not constantly checking what the scalpel of electrical/circuitry/computational representation of algorithms CONDONES in what you are doing then YOU are the fucking problem.

Rust is thus no different from the original ideas of the developers behind Go when stating that their developers are not efficient enough to deal with X language, Rust protects you, because it knows that you are a fucking moron, so the compiler, advanced, and well made as it is, will give you warnings of your own idiotic tendencies, which would not have been required have you not been.....well....a fucking idiot.

Rust is a good language, but I feel one that came out from the necessity of people writing system level software as a bunch of fucking morons.
This speaks a lot more of our academic endeavors and current documentation than anything else. But to me DEALING with the idea of adapting Rust as a better C++ should come from a different point of view.

Do I agree with Linus's point of view of C++? fuck no, I do not, he is a kernel engineer, a damn good one at that regardless of what Dr. Tanenbaum believes(ed) but not everyone writes kernels, and sometimes that everyone requires OOP and additions to the language that they use. Else I would be a fucking moron for dabbling in the dictionary of languages that I use professionally.
BUT in terms of C++ being unsafe and unsecured and a horrible alternative to Rust I personaly do not believe so. I see it as a powerful white canvas, in which you are able to paint software to the best of your ability WHICH then requires thorough scrutiny from the entire team. NOT a quick replacement for something that protects your from your own stupidity BY impending the use of what are otherwise unknown "safe" features.

To be clear: I am not diminishing Rust as the powerhouse of a language that it is, myself I am quite invested in the language. But instead do not feel the reason/need before articles claiming it as the C++ killer.

I am currently heavily invested in C++ since I am trying a lot of different things for a lot of projects, and have been able to discern multiple pain points and unsafe features. Mainly the reason for this is documentation (your mother knows C++) and tooling, ide support, debugging operations, plethora of resources come from it and I have been able to push out to my secret project a lot of good dealings. WHICH I will eventually replicate with Rust to see the main differences.

Online articles stating that one will delimit or otherwise kill the other is well....wrong to me. And not the proper approach.

Anyways, I like big tits and small waists.

This is what happened today in our dayli:

Lead: We need to profile our software

Me: You can use the chrome devtools as remote profiler, even on prod, or make HAR files for later inspection.

Lead: Yeah but no that’s just collecting data on every tick, we need something like “has been called x times”

Me: Yeah but you can filt -

Lead: Yeah no, so back when I wrote code in Delphi...

Me: *oh god no not this again*

Lead: ... We could have clicked a button in our IDE and it would wrap the function call with the API call to profile that function ...

Me, to the secret dev group in slack: doesn’t a simple method decorator and node performance api help with that?

The people in the group: We had this topic last Friday all day...

Me: oh well *get’s coffee and ignores lead*

Fuck this client's IT department. They're a bunch of Microsoft asslickers.

How am I supposed to push code to your self-hosted GitLab instance if you restrict me to Citrix RDP????? No OpenVPN access because I'm on Linux?? Seriously? Because I am not using any of your laptops?

FUCK YOU DUMBASSES, I COULD DO A BETTER JOB THAN YOU AND I JUST PLAY WITH LINUX.

When I said I only needed terminal access I would have never imagined they were thinking of Putty inside an RDP. What a steaming shit.

Oh you guys don't have a secret management service as any enterprise should? Oh I cannot add a secret management service as part of the solution I am building for you guys because "Hurr Durr yOu HaVe NoT pUt ThIs In ThE pRoJeCt PrOpOsAl sO nO"

Fuck you guys. You guys only don't want to move to the cloud to not lose your jobs. I would be far more productive than relying on you pieces of dumbassery.

They are all having each others back in using shit technology and practices.

So i recently started a new Instagram account with new email ID apart from the personal Instagram account which has my friends from Facebook and even from highschool.

The new account was supposed to be a secret, part of an experiment I'm doing with my life choices. And there i only follow people that i look up to. I'm not expecting anyone from real life to follow me their and i prefer if they don't.

Nobody was supposed to know about this new account other than me. But guess what, it seems this account is being advertised to my friends from other account and some of them are following this new account. I'm 99.9% sure they are following just to get a follow back.

I'm feeling shitty about this, but i ain't gonna follow them back. If i need to see their story and photos, I'd get back on my personal account.

Guess I'll have to suck it up and be okay with fact that those "friends" will be seeing my vulnerable side.

Apartment management: Hey folks. Elevator #4 is getting a software upgrade so it will not be in service for a few weeks. While we’re doing the upgrade, the elevator call button next to elevator #1 will only call that elevator. The other call button will call elevators 2 and 3. Please press only one button. If you press both, you’re requesting two elevators to come to you and this slows elevator arrival time for other residents. Thank you.

99% of residents: Ah ha! You told us the secret. We’re going to press both call buttons because we choose chaos 😈

Okay, one after another. They like to piss me off, apparently.

Coleague knows something isn't possible with current state of some api and pushes phone to me so I can maybe figure out what to reply to client. I dry-typed in "Its not possible" gave him phone and said "boom done, you know it aint possible"

Okay, TL;DR she got pissed that I am pissed that this BS is thrown at me and I dont want to participate in promissing something I know is undeliverable.

So she told me to go to PM/PO *kind of guy but not rly* with that problem. He aint technical by any mean. We are small company and for some reason this guy has more bearoucratic approach than I thought is possible to fit in one human.

Anyway. Well, apparently we will have meeting what are our options.
It all beginned that one guy promissed other guy undeliverable feature....

And becouse someone couldn't use his fucking brain it's pushed onto me, or I need to figure out how to do it. You cant without introducing safety flaw, period, it's that fuckin' simple.

But nooo, we will have god-knows-how-long meeting, that will bring exacly 0 value, as fking allways, and all I want now is just fucking focus on my fucking code becouse, ya know, I have timeline to follow, I dont have time to all that BS.

And to give you context, while keeping the stuff I cant share secret, imagine you have an API, that is just 'facade' of backend API, and layer of security. And they want to add authoritative endpoint to the facade API. Kind of endpoint "yes, you got paid".

Bravo, big brain, it will not work without like huge-as-fuck vunrability...

IDIOTS

How to not get pissed? Any protips?

Why not release the devrant (mobile+web) client on github (and maybe gitlab for people that would actually contribute but are special about the usage of github) so people could contribute to it, leading to faster progress? I thought about it now for a bit and couldn't see any problems with that, since the current apk can be anyway unpacked via freely available tools (appcelerator doesn't make it too hard either anyway 😕) and the website/api isn't any secret either (see the 4000 clients getting patched together out of zombie like api calls)

OMG you fucking little cunt!

Previous issue with this co-worker we hate eat other but can maintain minimal contact due to covid. Last interaction was actually nice, we joked a bit.

He teaches me how to do the build and ‘updated’ the confluence page. By update he striked through one paragraph.

Been doing these for week and now others what builds done all the time and since I am not an asshole they can approach me to do this but now I spend all
day long doing builds.

Work on a classified app so it has to
be burned on a disk, taken to a ‘secret machine’ and deployed. Takes about an hour and people are like. Can you rebuild it? I forgot to commit something?

So I updated the page to flush out the directions. Did not remove one thing only added things simple things like do a ls -lah in the dist folder to make sure the are built correctly. Things like check to make the symlink works, bolded words.

He was not at standup so I figured he was out of the office today and was going to ask him to review tomorrow.

Fucker goes in to make changes while I am making changes and doesn’t think to msg me telling me?

He is removing things and moving things which is fine just let me know! What a dick!!!!!

Screenshot of all the activity today, I am
in blue. I will spend all day watching the page to make sure I get the last fucking edit!

I'm facing a conundrum. I saw a job posting for <Company A> weeks ago, but wasn't really interested and moved on.

Got in touch with a standalone recruitment company today who had an exciting job offer. The recruiter refused to tell me the name of the company until he spoke to me as they directed him to not disclose the name of the company or any details until he has verified the candidate is genuine. To my absolute shock and disbelief it was <Company A>!!!!

So heres the conundrum. External recruiters don't lie, why would they? Clearly this company MUST keep their hiring top secret, and some poor employee didn't get the memo before posting that job publicly. Should I report the <Company A> employee?

I don't want to report them and get them in trouble, but feel I must in order to help the company fix this leak ... before its too late ... and people find out the are hiring!

Thoughts?

Don't know if i'm alone or not.. so i'm gonna leak my secret that my rubber ducky is actually a slack channel i made in my company's slack

-Rant-
How do you (not) secure your Rest based web service?
1. Chain it to shady organic authentication system built by a hoard of monkeys high on Tequila.
2. have secret keys that get copy pasted into config flat files, and index them on your code search engine.
3. make the onboarding extremely platform specific that you need 500 environment variables, 50 scripts, 5 fancy device presses and a tap dance to make a GET call to the service.
4. fish through 500 rotating log files that the authentication system generates for each API call made.
5. Leave traces all over the host so if you have to start over, you should sudo rm -rf / and set fire to your computer.

!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.

My very first time was when I first saw a Web page, I really wanted to know how they did it. Two weeks later I built an intranet at home and I thought I was so cool I was shitting out ice cubes.

The very first programme I ever wrote was a secret diary application(C#) for myself I thought it was really secure because I had my own file extension. Not one of my finer moments.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

thank you for reading my rant

Sometimes we woulg get a request which involves adding something or changing something to a rather large and poorly made codebase which me and my lead have not had the time to change.

This b how shit goes:

* the lead gets a call after an email was sent with apparently only 5 secs of response time( inpatient fucks)

* lead calls me in next to his station to listen to the call

* i b listening and shit, not even taking notes and shit, looking all secret weapon and shit.
Texas as fuck.

* lead puts shit on hold and looks at me

Lead: "Allright. You know the codebase as well as I do, what you think?"

Me: pffft gimme 30 mins and Ill whip out yo solution

Lead: we positive on the estimate?

Me: as positive as the Texas Rangers sucking ass but we still love em, fuck the Astros

Lead: there is only room for one team

Me: only one

**fist bump

* goes back to the call:

Lead: yeah its gonna take 2 days at most.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaand we do finish them in 30 mins. The trick is in doing it extra fast so we have enough time to fuck around or do some other shit and to make it seem like we do some hard shit. After maybe 6 hours we tell them that we managed to fix it before time.

Texas....as....fuck

Btw me and the lead tall about whatever while we code the stuff, most of the time I do it since my boy has heavy eye problems and I want him to relax. He has been training me a lot in regards to knowing the codebase, before I got here it was only him for two fucking campuses and the man did an outstanding job. My boy got my ass and I got his.

Teamwork, the southern gentleman's way.

Texas.

P.d while coding it he said the one of the file sizes was too big to handle, i said "das what she said" and our female manager said "i heard that".......i could have sworn that she gave me a lil wink. Well damn.

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

FRACK FRACK FRACK!!

Whew! Putting the flamethrower away.

Thanks devrant for letting me rant.

I am trying to "invent" secure client-side authentication where all data are stored in browser encrypted and only accessible with the correct password. My question is, what is your opinion about my idea. If you think it is not secure or there is possible backdoor, let me know.

// INPUT:
- test string (hidden, random, random length)
- password
- password again
// THEN:
- hash test string with sha-512
- encrypt test string with password
- save hash of test string
// AUTH:
- decrypt test string
- hash decrypted string with sha-512
- compare hashes
- create password hash sha-512 (and delete password from memory, so you cannot get it somehow - possible hole here because hash is reversible with brute force)

// DATA PROCESSING
- encrypt/decrypt with password hash as secret (AES-256)

Thanks!

EDIT: Maybe some salt for test string would be nice

9000 internet cookie points to whoever figures out this shit:

I'm trying to import a secret gpg key into my keyring.
If I run "gpg2 --import secring.gpg" and manually type each possible password that I can think of, the import fails. So far, nothing unusual.
HOWEVER
If I type the same passwords into a file and run:
echo pwfile.txt | gpg2 --batch --import secring.gpg
IT ACTUALLY FUCKING WORKS

What the fuck??? How can it be that whenever I type the pw manually it fails, but when I import it from a file it works??
And no, it's not typos: I could type those passwords blindfolded from muscle memory alone, and still get them right 99% of the time. And I'm definitely not blindfolded right now.

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!!

Suppose my pwfile.txt looks something like this:

password1
password2
password3
password4
password5
password6

Now, I'm trying to narrow it down and figure out which one is the right password, so I'm gonna split the file in two parts and see which one succeds. Easy, right?

$ cat pw1.txt
password1
password2
password3

$ cat pw2.txt
password4
password5
password6

$ echo pw1.txt | gpg2 --batch --import secring.gpg
gpg: key 149C7ED3: secret key imported

$ gpg2 --delete-secret-key "149C7ED3"
[confirm deletion]

$ echo pw2.txt | gpg2 --batch --import secring.gpg
gpg: key 149C7ED3: secret key imported

In other words, both files successfully managed to import the secret key, but there are no passwords in common between the two!!
Am I going retarded, or is there something really wrong here? WTF!

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.

I CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE. We brought on a vendor to provide us some fancy OCR tool. It barely works. It's been barely working. And the vendor is so adamant it works it's so difficult to get them to send people onsight to work with us. We complained about it to the exec and we got "Oh they're a tech startup. You have to help them along with developing their process blah blah blah". Well they don't want help we offered they keep existing their shit is top secret (and it works). When they make changes remotely it's like they blindly make a change and then throw it to us to test. When we can get them to come in they hang around till the problem is fixed (more than once we've had to tell them how to fix it.) and they fly as fast as they fucking can through the door. A guy on my team even built something similar backed by Azure but we were given directive to work with them. And now we're getting pressure about delays in launch. But it's not our fault. The vendors asshole lying CEO keeps making shit up and we're told to work with it. Yet it's our fault that we missed deadlines? fuck this place !!! fuck all of this !!!

Shit, I lost the rant again. Well let's begin from the top.

This is little bit personal but I'm not keeping any of this as a secret. I'm a hyperactive thinker at nights (ADHD). I must write this down, although it's well over middle-night at this point.

I just discovered that I might be better writer whilst I'm sleepy, hungry, out of affection of the meds or all of the above.
And may I remind you that I'm not a native English speaker or writer.

* Saved to clipboard, so I won't lose this again *

I've written now 2 long rants, 8 issue reports (devRant) and a loong collab posting in this one sitting, or rather laying. It feels like I'm writing perfectly without missing a beat. I know that's not right, it's the main symptom in ADHD; My brain is actually running slower than an average, much slower. That's a reasonable explanation for the “fast” innovation.
I'm running without restrictions of a normal human, I don't "overthink" every single word and rather go with the flow. That's what spell checkers are for.

* Save *

You can probably see what's happening. It's certainly also true when writing code. I left out the normal cleaning up (except for the grammar, found 10 errors).

It's pretty much the same thing as I'd imagine being drunk or even high.

I must not be the only one.

* Writing tags... *
* Update error count *
* Recover one part from memory *

My favourite bug fix was actually IT based and it was the first time my Eastern European, critical of my skills, family not only praised me but claimed that I was smarter than them.

My grandfather had changed from a telecom to a VOIP device for his landline. For some reason after installation, he could hear the other person on the line but they couldn't hear him. Me and my mother were away during this time so they called in the other family IT guy. This guy is no joke, he's one of the top in his company and makes a sweet six figures and lives in a mansion.

So he started looking things up, googling forum, etc. Couldn't find anything. Started calling the tech support and tried to deduce what it was and their tech support had never heard of such a problem. He takes his lunch breaks to help out my gramps. Keeps escalating, escalating and nothing. His conclusion is that they need to send him a new VoIP stick and they're not giving it to him. At this point, he's so frustrated that he screams at my grandfather to go back to paying 60 bucks a month for landline and to stop bothering him.

At this time me and my mother return and they have concluded that they need a new stick. My mom is great at intimidating people into free stuff so she and I go over to do so. At this point everyone is convinced of the problem and even I don't think I could fix it. But I decide to check if that's the case because I don't want my gramps to get a new stick and it still doesn't work.

I go through the typical forum hunting and there's Nada on the problem. I look at the stick and all the lights seem to be working, no error lights. And I wonder maybe the problem is not the stick, because usually you can't do anything at all if the hardware is broken. So I start thinking, maybe my gramps accidentally muted his handset while talking or something dumb like that. That wasn't it.

Then I decided to see if the problem was recreated on the other handsets. I tried one out and my mom could hear me but I couldn't hear her. What?! That's different! It was the opposite with the other phone. I conclude that it's working and there's something up with the handsets. So I go and do a reset on all of the handsets to make sure.

Lo and behold, the problem is fixed. It took me 25 minutes to solve. That guy gave up after a week of trying. My mom who assumed my IT skills were on par with other kids and nothing special had finally seen me up against an opponent, and not any opponent, a six figure high ranking IT specialist. And I didn't even use any secret, complex software knowledge that wasn't accessible to her or any other normal user.

That's when she finally said that I was smarter than her, that I just used my common sense. She would've needed some kind of prompting, hint or direction to solve the issue but I did it without any.

It was a very satisfying bug to fix.

TL;DR: Phone akku is draining, I steal our schools power. And secret plans to become rich.

My phone accumulator (heh, not a battery) DRAINS these days. It's fucking old and the temperatures are so hot that we actually afternoon classes are cancelled 🔥
So anyways, I'm sitting in the library (15 min break) and secretly charging my phone, devRanting on these wrongly configured, distorted monitors of this one computer that is connected with like 20 work stations xD
I'm stealing the schools power but the school owes me time (+2h of more useless sitting at school with my new timetable) - and time is money. And the schools money buys power. So I don't feel bad about it.
Actually a friend and me wanted to develop and install a plugin - when being able to bypass the reset-application in our school network - that uses the schools computers and their power to do crypto mining.
I wouldn't feel bad about it.

I think I finally, really, comprehend why secret societies have historically been created... I mean the potentially logical ones. This train of thought is logically terrifying.

I want a logic check.

I've been jokingly mentioning some of my totally true, practically useless in most scenarios, skills/specific fields of knowledge/ability under a moniker of 'extremely useful, assuming apocalyptic event' for years. Things like advanced knowledge of Coefficients of glass expansion, Fortran, various things that have caused friends to refer to me as MacGyver after the reboot came out.

In recent years, I've personally encountered several varieties of the ones defined by helplessness, self-victimisation, some version of a real disability... that theyve expounded into a personified personal nemesis-- to flashily battle yet never overcome, etc... the vast majority perplexing me as to why that's a valid form of life to them... it's not that they never consider some other way; the ball is just quickly dropped and never picked back up.

College?(not that I'm a big fan) they wish they could but so expensive... aide? The form was hard/confusing/past-due...

Lookup/learn something more indepth than a tiktok? *some self-deprecating bs*

Yet it's "I always wanted to do/be/learn X"

Shows like 'How It's Made' fascinate, but don't inspire enough for a 5min google query.

In the dev world its a clear, inverted pyramid-- one of the first posts I saw when I rejoined here was ostream's rant on Apple sucking because after they stop support/updates you "can't" load a different OS... ofc you can. But several comments down... no mention of that... i think it was @LensFlare who was the only one in ~15 respondents to point out the core logical fallacy.

Basic shit is totally forgotten... try asking some random adults what plastic is made from... or pay attention to how many people declare they have a gluten "allergy".

I get people frequently telling me that things im pointing out as differences don't matter because "it's just semantics"... semantics is literally the epitome of "significance", with roots in 'meaning' and 'truth'

Back to the main issue... We are in a world where DIY is typically something you pay more to do as a catered experience than actually learning anything, people destroy their own arguments hopes of validity unwittingly often by stating the arguement, get 'offended' or 'triggered' by factual statements, propagate misinformation and bastardise words until MW needs money enough to print a new version, likely adding the misuse as an actual definition and basic knowledge and the thought to actually learn is vetoed by the existence of google translate, the wisdom of tiktok and the pure brillance of troubleshooting every random linux issue you have from not knowing basic CLI and thinking linux makes you cool, with chmod 777 because so many other dumbasses on forums keep propagating misinformation. Ask them what 777 means, most have no clue... as they didnt consider googling that one before putting it in a terminal several times.
The number of humans that actually know the basic shit that the infrastructure of the world is built on keeps decreasing... and we aren't even keeping a running tally.

The structure of the internet has the right idea... dns- 13 active master root servers, with multiple redundancies if they start dropping... hell ICANN is like a secret society but publicly known/obfuscated... the modern internet hasnt had a global meltdown... aside from the lack of censorship and global availability changing the social definition of a valid use of braincells to essentially propagating spam as if it's factual and educational.

So many 'devs' so few understanding what a driver is, much less how to write one... irl network techs that don't know what dhcp is or that their equiptment has logs... professionals in deducated fields like Autism research/coping... no clue why it was called "autism", obesity and malnutrition simultaneously existing in the same humans... it's like we need to prepare a subterranean life-supporting vault and stock it like Noah's ark... just including the basic knowledge of things that used to be common/obvious. I've literally had 2 different, early 20s, female, certified medical assistants taking my medical history legitimately ask if not having a uterus made it harder to get pregnant...i wish i was joking.

Any ideas better than a subterranean human vault system? It's not like we can simply store detailed explanations, guides, media... unless we find a way to make them into obfuscated tiktok videos apparently on nonsense or makeup tutorials.

Was working on setting up a ci/CD pipeline. The ci part with automated testing and deployment to a on-premise docker registry worked already, so I thought "hey I could try to actually run one of those fresh containers" so I tried it with the usual docker run command.. "Manifest not found" suddenly appeared, it confused me a bit since I used the same url I used for publishing... So I googled around only to find NOTHING that is even remotely connected to my issue. "Eh let's let the guy that runs that registry fix it" was what I thought and called it a day. The next day I was eager to try it again and checked the urls case by case only to notice that I wrote secret-project-backend-client instead of secret-project-api.. I tried it with the new name and it worked!
Never felt so retarded in my life....

DREAM 1
(my comments look like this)

A kikiland metro system. It's extradimensional and shapeshifting. When you enter it, it adapts to your needs. The people inside (they're probably just vinyl shells), the social circumstances, all generated for you.
When you enter it, it knows where you want to go. It spawns exactly one train just for you. It will be the first, it will be the last. You have to catch it to go where you need. If you miss it, there will be no more trains, and you have to wait till the metro station closes for the night and reopens.
It's always you entering, catching the train that arrives just in time, going to where you need to go and exiting.
Because of its extradimensional nature, you cannot agree to meet someone there — every person has their own personal metro generated just for them every time, with exactly one train going exactly to the station you need.

It's used by BLA as a form of control. When they don't want you to go somewhere, the train won't spawn. Or, it might diverge and get you to some other place. It isn't known whether the map can be altered on the fly or not. So far, the consensus is that the map is persistent and is a public knowledge, and it's just the metro itself that is extradimensional. But, no one ever saw the real metro in its real form, and not the top layer that protrudes into the three-dimensional world you can interact with. It might be the case that they can make people disappear by creating ad-hoc stations that don't intersect with the real world, trapping them in places that are nowhere in particular.

(it took seeing BLA once in one dream to make all the following dreams include them. Sigh.)

Kikiland also has a school, and it always had it. I befriended a chemistry teacher there. His classroom is small — exactly as deep as other classrooms, but really narrow. There are no desks there, just his desk and some bookshelves. Chemistry isn't a priority there — his class exists only because it should. No one attends it. This is why he was so pleased to meet me. Despite his classroom being located on a busy floor, its door is overlooked by students, and NO ONE ever enters it. He just sits there, waiting for students to arrive, but they never do.
He has a secret, though, because of course he does. In the game Control, if you complete the main storyline before you complete some side quests, one of the main characters will be sitting in the C-suit hall, doing her things, waiting for you to come and talk to her. But at the same time, she will be waiting for you deep down the oldest house's mines, again, just sitting there, waiting for you to take the quest. This teacher is the same.

If you have a good relationship with him, and you attend his class, the classroom will change to a tunnel entrance, with him being the security guard. He's your friend, he'll let you in. It looks like Fallout's vault entrance. THIS is how you enter the REAL kikiland metro. (Dream 1 ends here.)

Episode 2
Tiny waterborne rat puppies whose mouth is their entire face unfolding like a piece of paper with teeth covering it as a grid. (I wrote about them already, but here they are again.) They are _tiny_, a bit like tadpoles. Also, like tadpoles, they die if you touch them out of water. As I was flying over some mountain resort (I routinely fly in my dreams, but it feels more like a very low gravity falling I can control, like using a parachute in GTA San Andreas), I dumped them to a location that resembled the garden level of Prince of Persia: Warrior Within for my cat to eat. It didn't want to.

I feel compelled to figure out how to use software in a gaming setting to teach skills like CS and Math. But do it in a way that is fun and not feeling like a "math game".

I want to spend more time learning about algorithms, architectures, design approaches, etc. Writing such a game would force me to understand what I present in a very intimate way.

I can see a way to create algos in game using very visual ways. Then allowing someone to make superstructures combining those algos to solve tasks.

I was inspired by how some algos require data to be sorted a certain way before starting. As the algo as a side effect resorts the data to know when it has completed. I realized if an algo is generic enough it can be combined just like functions or objects.

I also want to learn math better, especially in conjunction with code. So making a platform for learning these would be a lot of fun. I would definitely want both visual and textual interfaces to the code. I have to imagine a real programmer being frustrated with a visual interface unless it was really compelling.

I find it interesting that a lot of algos are represented visually when trying to show how it works. I realize some probably cannot be visualized so easy though.

I also want to use software like this to teach someone to think more deliberately and help people be more disciplined in their thinking. I know I could use this.

I have a secret goal of being able to use such software to help someone become a math/programming wizard. I don't know if this is achievable, but having exercises that help solidify root concepts in a fun way would be really useful IMO.

Often when i see the annoying as hell t debug exceptionless let’s just bomb entirely but blazing fastness of c and c++ I feel like a nettard
I use c# for its immutable strings clean syntax and beautiful class markers that are redundant compared to c++ but ensure you tell after adding 1000 methods and total lack of all special characters to indicate reference and derreference and pretty lambda syntax... sure it’s lib poor but I get shit done goddamn it and can read my own code later
So why do I feel empty inside every time i run a ./configure and make under Linux like I’m missing some secret party where neat things are being done and want to sob like I do now
I am not a dotnettard even though 5.0 is an abomination in the eyes of man and god ! Even though Microsoft cooks up overcomplex framework technologies that make a wonderful language underused and make us all look like idiots that they then abandon into the scrap heap! We can’t help Linux users haven’t discovered how much nicer c# is and decided to implement it on their own and port their horrible undocumented ansi c bullshit can we ???? Oh god I feel
So hollow inside and betrayed ! Curse
You gates curse youuuu! Curse you for metro direct3d xna wpf then false promises of core ! May you have a special place in hell reserved for you and your cheap wallpaper shifting monitor paintings and a pool speaker that playeth not but bee jees and ac dc forever and ever amen !

Speaking of which do any c/c++ ides have anything that even begins to rival intellisense on Linux and don’t use some weird ass build system
Like cmake as their default ?

Oh sweet memories of time a while back when I already wrote this and still wasn’t getting then tail I deserved

Again

Why Dribble why...
You’re too much like a secret society.
So I can create an account but not post to it unless I get “drafted” by someone on the inside.

A secret society of designers. What’s next.

Why do companies waste serious cash in office parties? I'm talking about those hundred-thousand-dollar extravaganzas that major tech companies seem to be addicted to.

Poll after poll finds that most employees would rather have the cash, so "kissing the collective asses of tech staff so that they won't leave" is not an explanation that holds up.

The "Roman Triumph" explanation also does not make any sense. If rich assholes want to flex their immeasurable riches, why would they invite mere mortals that do not put a lot of effort in being famous or pretty? Couldn't they invite the entire Victoria's Secret catalogue of models and the NE Patriots? Surely it would make for much more impressive photos of decadence.

The "Michael Scott" explanation also falls short. Companies spend serious cash on consultants and professional party planners, that are sure to know a lot of people. Money can and often does buy personality, so no rich asshole is ever a party dud.

Why else do they force most of their own staff into what they perceive as a "do not relax or you may get fired" loud and poorly lit meeting that takes hours to dress up for? What am I missing?

Yesterday my phone decided not to boot anymore. I needed some of the data that is in there, but I can't take the phone to samsung support to bring it back because it is highly sensible and TOP SECRET data.
So I was all on my own. I have never done anything similar to this so it was all shitty guides and forum post I had.
2 hours of researching pass.
I installed a software called Odin to reinstall android and maybe get my data back (better lost than in someone' else hands).
Not only did I have to fucking wait 3 hours of downloading android because my samsung account is free and thus samsung gives limited download speed, it didn't even fuckking work!
Now my phone is even more fucked and I don't know what to do

Okay. I look at myself as a kind of intellectual person. My parents are not believers so I came out quiet normal. As engineer and fan of technology I believe in science and I have a fairly complete look at life and universe at whole, I do not need any religional explanation for anything. I do not believe in the conspiracy theories and in any highly organized global secret society who controll us. I have acquired my view and opinions by systematically rethinking every aspect of life and everything I knew and I was thought before, btw this is the reason I stopped to eat animal products too.

But after all this corona shitshow, I really don't know If the current situation is just rolled by stupidity of media and politics or its really some plan of some people. I mean you can legally buy cigarettes with proven death rate of 10%, they recommend you to drink milk while its ultra carcinogenic and like 60% of population is intolerant, you have to wear mask but not gloves while the virus transference is 90% trough hand contact, and there are many many many questions that makes me paranoid. And now this vaccination stuff with countries almost forcing it in population, ahh... Man, This complete story is too irrational and strange. I start to loose my stable belief system and slide out. I noticed that I am not sure and I am just silent when people talk about these things. I hope this nonsense will end soon.

Common Man: How do you software developers earn so much? What's the secret of your success?
Software Developer: It's not a secret really. It's like any other job, we make sure we are always needed. So we create a mess and then get paid to solve the mess. How you ask? Software developers create the most complex and useful software. Since it's complex, others learn it and become part of the so called the few experts and then get paid tons as very less experts are there for the software and the creators of the software are also of course experts and in fact considered Guru, because, well, they wrote the complex software. They are geniuses, because it's so hard to write complex software. And many of these experts also create new tools to make the software easier to use, for newbies. They also write articles around it - explanations, tutorials, inner workings and gotchas, and also publish books and videos - in paid tutorial sites, and some videos on YouTube too.

Github be like:
Want control on your files? Host your own LFS!(This goes the same even for those who are buying their storage packs for boosting their LFS storage by giving money)

FUCK THIS SHIT... I am a poor student. I also don't have a fucking credit card!! Can't you improve your system instead of asking people to host their shit themselves?

Also, why do they even have access to deleting user files??!! They literally asked me to give a sha sum of files I want to restore so they can delete the rest as one option and providing hashes of files to be deleted as another.
And the hashes are not even secret(as the files are in an open repository).

Which means, if you have a large file on a public repository and animosity with a github staff, BOOM! That file is no more!!

Do anyone have any experience with Android's "Telephony" API? Google' documentation is not all that helpful when trying to get this to work and other resources are far from available.

Working with a client, so can't go in to too many details. (According to them, it's top secret...🤫)

Thanks!

PLEASE i understand how it works but how is hashicorp vault supposed to be used?

Not to mention how should i use it for production? Literally no dipshit tutorial explains it. Everyone explains the vault server -dev part and thats it. Fuck you

Every time i restart the vault server all of the secrets and config get deleted. And then i have to readd them all over again?

How is vault supposed to work in terraform?

How can I automate storing secrets in vault instead of manually doing it?

How to automate starting vault server by a single command along with provisioning secrets and parameters?

How to store iam credentials from ~/.aws/credentials into vault by profile AUTOMATICALLY as soon as vault server is started?

Because if my backend depends on some secret from vault, how am i supposed to automatically have these secrets created so i can just run my backend without worrying which secrets i have to recreate because the restart of vault server deletes all the fucking secrets in dev mode?

How do i use this bullshit?

- Every guide explains it partially
- No guide explains how to 100% automate it
- every dipshit youtube video explains it poorly
- NO ONE explains how to configure it for production.

I am so Fucking lost in learning this bullshit.

Can someone give me a link to a repo of a working example of the things i just mentioned? Either you create it or send an existing link cause i cant find any.

Basically i just want to use Terraform and Vault together but i cant understand how to combine them together so that its all automated 100% -- for example i just want to do

terraform apply --auto-approve

And then the entire terraform aws gets provisioned + vault server stars AND gets provisioned with secrets.

How to do that?