Good Morning!, its time for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!

Todays contestant is a very special one.

*sitcom audience: WHY?*

Glad you asked, you see if you were to look at his linkedin profile, you would see a job title unlike any you've seen before.

*sitcom audience oooooooohhhhhh*

were not talking software developer, engineer, tech lead, designer, CTO, CEO or anything like that, No No our new entrant "G" surpasses all of those with the title ..... "Software extraordinaire".

*sitcom audience laughs hysterically*

I KNOW!, wtf does that even mean! as a previous dev-ranter pointed out does this mean he IS quality code? I'd say he's more like a trash can ... where his code belongs

*ba dum tsssss*

Ok ok, lets get on with the show, heres some reasons why "G" is on the show:

One of G's tasks was to build an analytics gathering library for iOS, similar to google analytics where you track pages and events (we couldn't use google's). G was SO good at this job he implemented 2 features we didn't even ask for:

- If the library was unable to load its config file (for any reason) it would throw an uncatchable system integrity error, crashing the app.
- If anything was passed into any of the functions that wasn't expected (null, empty array etc.) it would crash the app as it was "more efficient" to not do any sanity checks inside the library.

This caused a lot of issues as some of the data needed to come from the clients server. The day we launched the app, within the first 3 hours we had over 40k crash logs and a VERY angry client.

Now, what makes this story important is not the bugs themselves, come on how many times have we all done something stupid? No the issue here was G defended all of this as the right thing to do!

.. and no he wasn't stoned or drunk!

G claimed if he couldn't get the right settings / params he wouldn't be able to track the event and then our CEO wouldn't have our usage data. To which I replied:

"So your solution was to not give the client an app instead? ... which also doesn't give the CEO his data".

He got very angry and asked me "what would you do then?". I offered a solution something like why not have a default tag for "error" or "unknown" where if theres an issue, we send up whatever we have, plus the file name and store it somewhere else. I was told I was being ridiculous as it wasn't built to track anything like that and that would never work ... his solution? ... pull the library out of the app and forget it.

... once again giving everyone no data.

G later moved onto another cross-platform style project. Backend team were particularly unhappy as they got no spec of what needed to be done. All they knew was it was a single endpoint dealing with very complex model. There was no Java classes, super classes, abstract classes or even interfaces, just this huge chunk of mocked data. So myself and the lead sat down with him, and asked where the interfaces for the backend where, or designs / architecture for them etc.

His response, to this day frightens me ... not makes me angry, not bewilders me ... scares the living shit out of me that people like this exist in the world and have successful careers.

G: "hhhmmm, I know how to build an interface, but i've never understood them ... Like lets say I have an interface, what now? how does that help me in any way? I can't physically use it, does it not just use up time building it for no reason?"

us: "... ... how are the backend team suppose to understand the model, its types, integrate it into the other systems?"

G: "Can I not just tell them and they can write it down?"

**
I'll just pause here for a moment, as you'll likely need to read that again out of sheer disbelief
**

I've never seen someone die inside the way the lead did. He started a syllable and his face just dropped, eyes glazed over and he instantly lost all the will to live. He replied:

" wel ............... it doesn't matter ... its not important ... I have to go, good luck with the project"

*killed the screen share and left the room*

now I know you are all dying in suspense to know what happened to that project, I can drop the shocking bombshell that it was in fact cancelled. Thankfully only ~350 man hours were spent on it

... yep, not a typo.

G's crowning achievement however will go down in history. VERY long story short, backend got deployed to the server and EVERYTHING broke. Lead investigated, found mistakes and config issues on every second line, load balancer wasn't even starting up. When asked had this been tested before it was deployed:

G: "Yeah I tested it on my machine, it worked fine"

lead: "... and on the server?"

G: "no, my machine will do the same thing"

lead: "do you have a load balancer and multiple VM's?"

G: "no, but Java is Java"

... and with that its time to end todays episode. Will G be our most incompetent? ... maybe.

Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

I realize I've ranted about this before, but...

Fuck APIs.

First the fact that external services can throw back 500 errors or timeouts when their maintainer did a drunk deploy (but you properly handled that using caching, workers, retry handlers, etc, right? RIGHT?)...

Then the fact that they all speak a variety of languages and dialects (Oh fuck why does that endpoint return a JSON object with int keys instead of a simple array... wait the params are separated with pipe characters? And the other endpoint uses SOAP? Fuck I need to write another wrapper class around the client...)

But the worst thing: It makes developers live in this happy imaginary universe where "malicious" is not a word.

"I found this cloud service which checks our code style" — hmm ok, they seem trustworthy. Hope they don't sell our code, but whatever.

"And look at this thing, it automatically makes database backups, just have to connect to it to DigitalOcean" — uhhh wait...

"And I just built this API client which sends these forms to be OCR processed" — Fuck... stop it... there are bank accounts numbers on those forms... Where's that API even located? What company?

* read their privacy policy *

"We can not guarantee the safety of your personal data, use at your own risk [...] we are located in Russia".

I fucking hate these millennial devs who literally fail to get their head out of the cloud.

Somehow they think it's easier to write all these NodeJS handlers and layers around some API, which probably just calls ImageMagick + Tesseract on the other side.

If I wasn't so fucking exhausted, I'd chop of their heads... but they're like hydra, you seal one privacy breach and another is waiting to be merged, these kids just keep spewing their crap into easy packages, they keep deploying shitty heroku apps... ugh.

😖

I wrote a database migration to add a column to a table and populated that column upon record creation.
But the code is so freaking convoluted that it took me four days of clawing my eyes out to manage this.
BUT IT'S FINALLY DONE.
FREAKING YAY.

Why so long, you ask? Just how convoluted could this possibly be? Follow my lead ~

There's an API to create a gift. (Possibly more; I have no bloody clue.)
I needed the mobile dev contractor to tell me which APIs he uses because there are lots of unused ones, and no reasoning to their naming, nor comments telling me what they do.

This API takes the supplied gift params, cherry-picks a few bits of useful data out (by passing both hashes by reference to several methods), replaces a couple of them with lookups / class instances (more pass-by-reference nonsense). After all of this, it logs the resulting (and very different) mess, and happily declares it the original supplied params. Utterly useless for basically everything, and so very wrong.

It then uses this data to call GiftSale#create, which returns an instance of GiftSale (that's actually a Gift; more on that soon).

GiftSale inherits from Gift, and redefines three of its methods.

GiftSale#create performs a lot of validations / data massaging, some by reference, some not. It uses `super` to call Gift#create which actually maps to the constructor Gift#initialize.

Gift#initialize calls Gift#pre_init (passing the data by reference again), which does nothing and returns null. But remember: GiftSale inherits from Gift, meaning GiftSale#pre_init supersedes Gift#pre_init, so that one is called instead. GiftSale#pre_init returns a Stripe charge object upon success, or a Gift (and a log entry containing '500 Internal') upon failure. But this is irrelevant because the return value is never actually used. Pass by reference, remember? I didn't.

We're now back at Gift#initialize, Rails finally creates a Gift object using the args modified [mostly] in-place by all of the above.

Another step back and we're at GiftSale#create again. This method returns either the shiny new Gift object or an error string (???), and the API logic branches on its type. For further confusion: not all of the method's returns are explicit, and those implicit return values are nested three levels deep. (In Ruby, a method will return the last executed line's return value automatically, allowing e.g. `def add(a,b); a+b; end`)

So, to summarize: GiftSale#create jumps back and forth between Gift five times before finally creating a Gift instance, and each jump further modifies the supplied params in-place.

Also. There are no rescue/catch blocks, meaning any issue with any of the above results in a 500. (A real 500, not a fake 500 like last time. A real 500, with tragic consequences.)

If you're having trouble following the above... yep! That's why it took FOUR FREAKING DAYS! I had no tests, no documentation, no already-built way of testing the API, and no idea what data to send it. especially considering it requires data from Stripe. It also requires an active session token + user data, and I likewise had no login API tests, documentation, logging, no idea how to create a user ... fucking hell, it's a mess.)

Also, and quite confusingly:
There's a class for GiftSale, but there's no table for it.
Gift and GiftSale are completely interchangeable except for their #create methods.

So, why does GiftSale exist?
I have no bloody idea.
All it seems to do is make everything far more complicated than it needs to be.

Anyway. My total commit?
Six lines.
IN FOUR FUCKING DAYS!

AHSKJGHALSKHGLKAHDSGJKASGH.

The gift that keeps on giving... the Custom CMS Of Doom™
I've finally seen enough evidence why PHP has such a bad reputation to the point where even recruiters recommended me to remove my years of PHP experience from the CV.

The completely custom CMS written by company <redacted>'s CEO and his slaves features the following:
- Open for SQL injection attacks
- Remote shell command execution through URL query params
- Page-specific strings in most core PHP files
- Constructors containing hundreds of lines of code (mostly used to initialize the hundreds of properties
- Class methods containing more than 1000 lines of code
- Completely free of namespaces or package managers (uber elite programmers use only the root namespace)
- Random includes in any place imaginable
- Methods containing 1 line: the include of the file which contains the method body
- SQL queries in literally every source file
- The entrypoint script is in the webroot folder where all the code resides
- Access to sensitive folders is "restricted" by robots.txt 🤣🤣🤣🤣
- The CMS has its own crawler which runs by CRONjob and requests ALL HTML links (yes, full content, including videos!) to fill a database of keywords (I found out because the server traffic was >500 GB/month for this small website)
- Hundreds of config settings are literally defined by "define(...)"
- LESS is transpiled into CSS by PHP on requests
- .......

I could go on, but yes, I've seen it all now.

Swagger does not send request body for GET calls.! WHAT THE FUCK..! And the argument supporting is get calls should not have any request payloads and rather should have response payloads since its a "get" call. Are you serious?? What if there are parameters to be passed which cannot be accomodated in the params or the header. Even though people are kind of literally abusing on their issues page still they adamantly refuse to add support for this.

Swagger you had high standards in my book. You just fell so deep down there is no coming back.

Root gets ignored.

I've been working on this monster ticket for a week and a half now (five days plus other tickets). It involves removing all foreign keys from mass assignment (create, update, save, ...), which breaks 1780 specs.

For those of you who don't know, this is part of how rails works. If you create a Page object, you specify the book_id of its parent Book so they're linked. (If you don't, they're orphans.) Example: `Page.create(text: params[:text], book_id: params[:book_id], ...)` or more simply: `Page.create(params)`

Obviously removing the ability to do this is problematic. The "solution" is to create the object without the book_id, save it, then set the book_id and save it again. Two roundtrips. bad.

I came up with a solution early last week that, while it doesn't resolve the security warnings, it does fix the actual security issue: whitelisting what params users are allowed to send, and validating them. (StrongParams + validation). I had a 1:1 with my boss today about this ticket, and I told him about that solution. He sort of hand-waved it away and said it wouldn't work because <lots of unrelated things>. huh.

He worked through a failed spec to see what the ticket was about, and eventually (20 minutes later) ran into the same issues Idid, and said "there's no way around this" (meaning what security wants won't actually help).

I remembered that Ruby has a `taint` state tracking, and realized I could use that to write a super elegant drop-in solution: some Rack middleware or a StrongParams monkeypatch to mark all foreign keys from user-input as tainted (so devs can validate and un-taint them), and also monkeypatch ACtiveRecord's create/save/update/etc. to raise an exception when seeing tainted data. I brought this up, and he searched for it. we discovered someone had already build this (not surprising), but also that Ruby2.7 deprecates the `taint` mechanism literally "because nobody uses it." joy. Boss also somehow thought I came up with it because I saw the other person's implementation, despite us searching for it because I brought it up? 🤨

Foregoing that, we looked up more possibilities, and he saw the whitelist+validation pattern quite a few more times, which he quickly dimissed as bad, and eventually decided that we "need to noodle on it for awhile" and come up with something else.

Shortly (seriously 3-5 minutes) after the call, he said that the StrongParams (whitelist) plus validation makes the most sense and is the approach we should use.

ffs.
I came up with that last week and he said no.
I brought it up multiple times during our call and he said it was bad or simply talked over me. He saw lots of examples in the wild and said it was bad. I came up with a better, more elegant solution, and he credited someone else. then he decided after the call that the StrongParams idea he came up with (?!) was better.

jfc i'm getting pissy again.

Worst security issue : being able to make a money transfer with no auth and changing freely the bank account in the POST params...

Dev excuse : "I didn't know my job was also to take care about security."

Just found out you can take Screenshots of a webpage right from the firefox console... neat! You can even select specific elements to screenshot.

Just throw :screenshot into the console - Ff v62 (--selector [css-selector], --fullpage, and some other params you can look up)

Have a good Monday :)

I am much too tired to go into details, probably because I left the office at 11:15pm, but I finally finished a feature. It doesn't even sound like a particularly large or complicated feature. It sounds like a simple, 1-2 day feature until you look at it closely.

It took me an entire fucking week. and all the while I was coaching a junior dev who had just picked up Rails and was building something very similar.

It's the model, controller, and UI for creating a parent object along with 0-n child objects, with default children suggestions, a fancy ui including the ability to dynamically add/remove children via buttons. and have the entire happy family save nicely and atomically on the backend. Plus a detailed-but-simple listing for non-technicals including some absolutely nontrivial css acrobatics.

After getting about 90% of everything built and working and beautiful, I learned that Rails does quite a bit of this for you, through `accepts_nested_params_for :collection`. But that requires very specific form input namespacing, and building that out correctly is flipping difficult. It's not like I could find good examples anywhere, either. I looked for hours. I finally found a rails tutorial vide linked from a comment on a SO answer from five years ago, and mashed its oversimplified and dated examples with the newer documentation, and worked around the issues that of course arose from that disasterous paring.

like.
I needed to store a template of the child object markup somewhere, yeah? The video had me trying to store all of the markup in a `data-fields=" "` attrib. wth? I tried storing it as a string and injecting it into javascript, but that didn't work either. parsing errors! yay! good job, you two.

So I ended up storing the markup (rendered from a rails partial) in an html comment of all things, and pulling the markup out of the comment and gsubbing its IDs on document load. This has the annoying effect of preventing me from using html comments in that partial (not that i really use them anyway, but.)

Just.
Every step of the way on building this was another mountain climb.
* singular vs plural naming and routing, and named routes. and dealing with issues arising from existing incorrect pluralization.
* reverse polymorphic relation (child -> x parent)
* The testing suite is incompatible with the new rails6. There is no fix. None. I checked. Nope. Not happening.
* Rails6 randomly and constantly crashes and/or caches random things (including arbitrary code changes) in development mode (and only development mode) when working with multiple databases.
* nested form builders
* styling a fucking checkbox
* Making that checkbox (rather, its label and container div) into a sexy animated slider
* passing data and locals to and between partials
* misleading documentation
* building the partials to be self-contained and reusable
* coercing form builders into namespacing nested html inputs the way Rails expects
* input namespacing redux, now with nested form builders too!
* Figuring out how to generate markup for an empty child when I'm no longer rendering the children myself
* Figuring out where the fuck to put the blank child template markup so it's accessible, has the right namespacing, and is not submitted with everything else
* Figuring out how the fuck to read an html comment with JS
* nested strong params
* nested strong params
* nested fucking strong params
* caching parsed children's data on parent when the whole thing is bloody atomic.
* Converting datetimes from/to milliseconds on save/load
* CSS and bootstrap collisions
* CSS and bootstrap stupidity
* Reinventing the entire multi-child / nested params / atomic creating/updating/deleting feature on my own before discovering Rails can do that for you.

Just.
I am so glad it's working.
I don't even feel relieved. I just feel exhausted.

But it's done.
finally.

and it's done well. It's all self-contained and reusable, it's easy to read, has separate styling and reusable partials, etc. It's a two line copy/paste drop-in for any other model that needs it. Two lines and it just works, and even tells you if you screwed up.

I'm incredibly proud of everything that went into this.
But mostly I'm just incredibly tired.

Time for some well-deserved sleep.

Poorly written docs.

I've been fighting with the Epson T88VI printer webconfig api for five hours now.

The official TM-T88VI WebConfig API User's Manual tells me how to configure their printer via the API... but it does so without complete examples. Most of it is there, but the actual format of the API call is missing.

It's basically: call `API_URL` with GET to get the printer's config data (works). Call it with PUT to set the data! ... except no matter what I try, I get either a 401:Unauthorized (despite correct credentials), 403:Forbidden (again...), or an "Invalid Parameter" response.

I have no idea how to do this.

I've tried literally every combination of params, nesting, json formatting, etc. I can think of. Nothing bloody works!

All it would have taken to save me so many hours of trouble is a single complete example. Ten minutes' effort on their part. tops.

asjdf;ahgwjklfjasdg;kh.

Php array methods, all of them, or should i say hash methods

They should fix them. I mean they should fix placing of callback and subject params, because.
I mean
array_filter(array, callback)
array_map(callback, array)

Or they should make array a object like js

So apparently there was a prod issue all day today because some server app couldn't start up.

The error was caused by missing Params...

And seems everyone that got asked to look at it are pretty clueless.

I looked at the text msgs now cuz my phone wouldn't stop vibrating from notifs (yes it got that bad) and I'm thinking, of all the ppl you guys could've asked, no one reached out to me... Who well knows exactly it works, and how to fix it.

But the issue with the team is everyone works on everything but most people have no idea how the apps actually work...

Jack of all trades, master of none...

Anyways, sitting on the sidelines watching the chaos ain't too bad either....

fuck you, man. eat a bag of dicks, a bag of shit and a shit load of dead animals.. you dumb fucking cunt ... go and die ... who the fuck modifies state of 3rd party object and think it is ok to do so.. the fucking prick deserves to get castrated with rusty, old school, gardening scissors...

through some mysterious, obfuscated, buried deep in the asshole code, the fucker decided to set a user-specific value in the default query params of guzzle so that every fucking object using it passes the fucking thing around like a cheap hooker at a dorm party... causing the API calls to misbehave because of the fucking thing.

you send the parameters you want to send but mister sucking-dick-up-the-ass-smarty-pants decided you don't want to do that and because of that I almost broke a core library a week before a fucking major feature release because half the functionality got broken automagically, worst thing is I have no fucking clue where the bloody thing gets inserted ...

I swear if you do that I will find you and I will get a rusty razor to cut your balls into paste and rectally infuse them untill your shit start to come out of every oriphise of your fucking empty head

So these motherfuckers... they have stored the queries to generate the reports... fucking guess where. Just guess.

They stored the queries AS FUCKING STRING DATA IN THE TABLE. And you know how they get the parameters? A FUCKING JOIN WHERE THEY HAVE STORED THE PARAMS AS DATA IN ANOTHER TABLE.

So you query set the params to query to get the query to get that is joined with a query to get the reports.

If God is a programmer after all y’all are fuuuuuuuuuuuuuucked

Current task:

Somehow, one of my predecessors made some sort of custom hook tied to woocommerce check out that pipes some data into a nightmarish spaghetti fuck pile of undocumented wild west visual basic bullshit. It does this, presumably, via a set of parameters passed as plaintext in a url. I know this because I found the singleton that declares this. Helpfully, Mr. Fuckass named the class "Default", so I only have around 30k instances being kicked back by my IDE when I search for it. The only reason I "need" to find this, is so that I can just change the button to an href pointing at my own MS for shipping, and I need to change the fifteen params being passed to just one - a customer ID, which should be stored in the session, and referenced by a cookie. Once that is done, I should be able to freely delete a couple of gigs worth of bullshit. Been stuck on this for three days now. God forbid we have a test environment or something.

I'm tired. Can't even get angry anymore really. Can't even think of anything funny to say about it either, I just can't wait until this is done and I can go back to sleep.

So this just happened,

Me and my co-worker (we are junior developers) were working on the same bug, it was a post call throwing a server exception.

We had asked for help to debug this issue from a senior developer the day before, he was quite busy with his own tasks.

He is one those kinds who would keep working even if the entire bay is wasting their time, always keeping to himself, needless to say I haven't seen him smile.

Back to my story, he couldn't spare time yesterday so we tried to squash the bug ourselves thinking he might have forgotten we had called him.He then comes out of nowhere, he firsr checks the button bindings, params sent and the call being made.

He then went through the backend code strategically placing the break points, clicks and debugs a few times and then opens the console. BAM!!!!

" D' hell yo !!" Shows up in the console, not just once but multiple times. Turns out I forgot the logger I had placed in the catch block.

He turns to me in super slo-mo looks me in the eye and whispers "what the hell yo!" and kept quite for some time, meanwhile the sense of cringe was slowly creeping on me. That was when he let out a loud blurt and the entire cabin turned to us. Needless to say it was awkward.

His smile was creepy though :/

When coding takes over your life!🙈

I love PHP, but...

the PHP API has been designed by crackpipe smoking cave trolls.

Every other function has its params completely reversed or in random order compared to similar functions.

Examples?
array_map, array_filter, property_exists, array_key_exists

This is the story of the API documentation.
Which btw I couldn't find on the producent's website anywhere. I had the pdf shared with me by a coworker.

I knew the api was fucked up the moment I looked at endpoint documentation.

GET params? WHERE, ORDERBY etc. Literally make a SQL select in a GET request.

Returned stuff? The whole thing. Not some DTO, you literally get everything you can get.
Eg if you get IP in your response, you get it in several formats: dotted form, as hex, and as int. In 3 different json fields.

Oh, and regarding IP - one would imagine you can use masks or prefixes for subnets, right? Nope. The only param you can use there is the subnet size. So you have to calculate the power of 2 every time you want to make a request.

That's from the endpoint documentation. But what about some general info on the API, before all that?

As I was looking for something, I decided to read that intro and general info about the API.

Okay, so there was a change log between API versions. "removed [endpoint which sounds like correct REST design], please use [this generic thing with SQL-like GETs]"... Several of them.

And there was also this sentence which said that the API is not restful, "it's REST-like". <facepalm>

If it was a bad attempt at REST API, I would let it go. But this sentence clearly showed they knew they did everything wrong. And the changelog showed they didn't stop there, they were actively making it worse.

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

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

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

Working on an Android app for a client who has a dev team that is developing a web app in with ember js / rails. These folks are "in charge" of the endpoints our app needs to function. Now as a native developer, I'm not a hater of a web apps way of doing things but with this particular app their dev teams seems to think that all programming languages can parse json as dynamically as javascript...

Exhibit A:

- Sample Endpoint Documentation
* GetImportantInfo
* Params: $id // id of info to get details of
* Endpoint: get-info/$id
* Method: GET
* Entity Return {SampleInfoModel}

- Example API calls in desktop REST client
* get-info/1
- response
{
"a" : 0,
"b" : false,
"c" : null
}
* get-info/2
- response
{
"a" : [null, "random date stamp"],
"b" : 3.14,
"c" : {
"z" : false,
"y" : 0.5
}
}
* get-info/3
- response
{
"a" : "false" // yes as a string
"b" : "yellow"
"c" : 1.75
}

Look, I get that js and ruby have dynamic types and a string can become a float can become a Boolean can become a cat can become an anvil. But that mess is very difficult to parse and make sense of in a stack that relies on static types.

After writing a million switch statements with cases like "is Float" or "is String" from kotlin's Any type // alias for java.Object, I throw my hands in the air and tell my boss we need to get on the phone with these folks. He agrees and we schedules a day that their main developer can come to our shop to "show us the ropes".

So the day comes and this guy shows up with his mac book pro and skinny jeans. We begin showing him the different data types coming back and explain how its bad for performance and can lead to bugs in the future if the model structure changes between different call params. He matter of factually has an epiphany and exclaims "OHHHHHH! I got you covered dawg!" and begins click clacking on his laptop to make sense of it all. We decide not to disturb him any more so he can keep working.

3 hours goes by...

He burst out of our conference room shouting "I am the greatest coder in the world! There's no problem I can't solve! Test it now!"

Weary, we begin testing the endpoints in our REST clients....

His magic fix, every single response is a quoted string of json:

example:
- old response
{
"foo" : "bar"
}
- new "improved" response
"{ \"foo\" : \"bar\" }"

smh....

Imagine implementing PHP scripts which execute shell commands defined in URL GET query params on your customer's dedicated server without any basic authentication or similar. The only security is by barely obfuscating it's URL.
I think I've seen it all now...

If you think parametised queries will save the day think again.

I occasionally test sites I visit throwing a few quotes at inputs and query params.

I also always test logging in as % with user or pass.

Not only are plaintext passwords a thing but so is this:

WHERE username LIKE ? AND password LIKE ?.

Once I saw an OR.

If you're not going to update your API documentation please just delete it. I spent two hours trying to use the example only to discover SECRET REST PARAMETERS that solved my problem.

If it weren't for the hero bitching in the comments about the missing documentation I would never have gotten this to work.

I hate having to deal with our IT service desk. Every time it takes enormous energy to get to the right people and make them understand that no, you are not an idiot, but you actually have a technical issue.

Sure thing they do have a few competent nice folks there too I've gotten to know over time and they indeed have to deal with a ton of dumb non-tech savvy idiots on a daily basis. However, if my job title mentions "software" and "engineer" they should at least assume I'm an idiot in tech. Or something. Every single time I need to open a ticket, even for the simplest "add x to env y", I need to quadruple check that the subject line is moron-friendly because otherwise they would take every chance to respond "nah we can't do that", "that's not us", or "sry that's not allowed". And then I would need to respond, "yes you do:) your slightly more competent colleague just did this for us 2 weeks ago".

Now you might imagine this is on even another level when the problem is complex.

One of our internal apps has been failing because one of the internal APIs managed by a service desk team responds a 500 status code randomly but only when called with a specific internal account managed by another service desk team.
(when I say "managed by", that doesn't mean they maintain it, it just mean they are the only ones who would have access to change something)

Yesterday I spent over a fucking hour writing a super precise essay detailing the issue, proving a million times it's not on our end and that they need to fix it. Now here is an insight to what beautiful "IT service" our service desk provides:

1) ticket gets assigned to a "Connectivity Engineer" lady

2) few hours later she responds and asks me to give her the app and environment IDs and grant her access to those
(naturally everything in my email was ignored including these two IDs)

3) since the app needs to be in prod for the issue, I make a copy isolating the failing part and grant her access to the original "for reference" and the copy to play with

4) few hours later I get an email from the env that some guy called P made changes to the actual app, no changes to the copy
(maybe they immediately fixed the app even though I asked them to only touch the copy)
I also check the env and the live app had been shared with another 2 people giving them editing rights:)

5) another few hours pass and the lady responds that she had been chatting with P (no mention of who tf that guy is) and that P has a suggestion that might work and I should test it, "please see screen shot" for details:

These motherfuckers sent me a fucking screenshot of the env config file where "P has edited a few parameters" that might help. The screenshot had a 16 line part of the config json with a bunch of IDs and Base64 params which HE EDITED LOCALLY.

Again, because I needed a few iterations to realise what I've just witnessed:
These idiots modified some things in the main app (not the copy) for hours. Then came to the conclusion that the config needs some IDs and params updated. They downloaded the config json. Edited it locally. Did not fucking upload it back to the main or test app. Did not test it live. Did not CC in or direct the guy with changes to me. Did not send me the modified config file. Did not even paste the new IDs into the email. But TOOK A FUCKING SCREENSHOT OF THE MODIFIED FILE AND SENT THAT SHIT TO ME. And then had the audacity to ask me to test it when they had access to it and that's literally their fucking job.

I had to compare the fucking screenshot to the live config file and manually type in the changes.

And no, it still doesn't work. And Now I have to get back to them showing it still fails the same way but I just can't deal with these people. Fuck. Was hoping by the time I write it all down it'd be better, and it does feel a bit better, but I still need to get this app fixed. And I can only do it through these... monkeys. I just can't. Talking to these people drains my life energy... I'm just sad.

Write a bridge that converts an arbitrary set of CLI params into a JSON that is to be converted into an object of arbitrary type. In a strongly typed language.

And it's midnight already...

Man, I need to get some sleep! Afraid my swelled brain might go POOFFT!

I'm a C++/Obj-C programmer finding it ludicrously hard to switch to Swift.

I find that the constant ability (leading to very poor programmer code) to reduce syntax and add tokens reduces readability and nowhere is this more apparent that with closures.

I'm working through (to my shame) Ray Wenderlich's Swift course and the closure chapter has this:

PS I loathe K&R as much as I do Swift so it's all in Allman formatting for clarity.

let multiply: (Int, Int) -> Int =
{
(a: Int, b: Int) -> Int in

// do Something else

return a * b
}
Why oh why isn't this more simply and elegantly written as:

let multiply = (a: Int, b: Int) -> Int
{
// do Something else

return a * b
}
The equals sign shows clearly that it's a closure definition assignment, as does the starting 'let'. But this way all of the stupid excesses, like the 'in' keyword, the repetition of the params / return type only this time with useful labels and additional tokens are removed and it looks and reads much more like a regular function and certainly a lot more clearly.

Now I know that with the stupid ability of Swift you can reduce all this down to return $0 * $1, but the point I'm making is that a) that's not as clear and more importantly b) if this closure does something more than just one line of code, then all that complicated stuff - hinted to by the comment '// do Something else' means you can't reduce it to stupid tokens.

So, when you have a clousure that has a lot of stuff going on and you can't reduce it to stupid minimalism, then why isn't is formatted and syntactically better like the suggestion above?

I've mentioned this on the Swift.org (and got banned for criticising Swift) but the suggestions they came up with were 'use type inference' to remove the first set of params / return type and token.

But that still means the param list and return type are NOT on the same line as the declaration and you still need the stupid 'in' keyword!

When your fellow colleague comments out the api request and you wonder why your Params are reaching the server but not actually doing anything

I am feeling so powerful right now I can not describe it.
I found out how I can get the methods and params outta LINE.
Now that I finally understand Apache Thrift and how it works with the LINE servers, I can make a thrift file, generate communication files for the LINE servers and use them for any programming language I want. Means that I can switch to a faster language than Python. Finally :)

What the FUCK im fixing integrations on some dumbass's API. Biz wants this in prod on monday. It's fucking saturday. Anyway

Me: why did you give us a 200 even if its an error
Them: thats normal
Me: If it's an error it shouldnt be 200
Them: its a 200 because the api params are correct but differ in value so its not an http error but an api error

lmao

A quick rant about dependency injection.

I see far too often in projects, a huge over-reliance on dependency injection / IOC frameworks which permeate throughout the entire codebase.

I cringe every time I see a constructor annotated with @Inject and 10 params.

The benefit of these frameworks is how easy they make it to manage many dependencies. What I dislike about them, is exactly that. I feel that they make it TOO easy to manage many dependencies.

How trivial is it to simply add another constructor param? exactly. And people then wonder why their dependency tree looks insane.

I am a strong believer in injecting dependencies the traditional way, via the constructor with no fancy framework. The reason being that it forces you to think more about the dependencies you are adding to your classes, and consider if they are really all needed.

The other problem I have with it, is it basically encourages you to inject everything because its so easy. The purpose of dependency injection is inversion of control and allowing classes to depend on abstraction rather than concrete implementation. All that goes out the window when you @Inject 6 different concrete classes.

Use dependency injection for its intended purpose, not as an excuse to be lazy and avoid thinking about dependencies.

Today has officially drained all the brain I didn't even have yesterday. Let's hope I get somewhere with this thing, or else all the brain I've wasted is going to be useless.

Also, fuck opencv's fisheye undistortion. Mofo, I don't have the camera params, how the fuck do you want me to give you your stupid kernel shit? Shut the fuck up from my face. Stupid hoebag.

... 😭😭😭😭😭

if the documentation of a class just has a table of function params and return types without any example snippets of how to use them, fuck you and your entire stack and your entire docs.

Am I the only one who's so fkin fond of the ES6 function declaration of (params) => {//code} over other declaration types?

It kills me when people performing UAT do not know how to test a particular functionality but still mark it as a defect when something uneven happens! We use IMF to build the input using tags. Sometimes they won't even care to know the right tag to fit in the params, but would still mark it as a bug whatsoever!

Can we please normalise using JSON bodies for GET requests? Makes life way more easy to just have one uniform way to communicate with API's and having different parameter formats between GET and POST request. I mean, In my opinion it is not logical to do one request with query params and others with data in the request body

Flutter help please.
When creating a new website, code has the following:

MyHomePage({Key key, this.title}) : super(key: key);

What does {} content mean? Is it like Javascript, that there is an object passed and we take only those two params?

Because this is how they use it:
MyHomePage(title: 'Flutter Demo Home Page'),

I'm not sure what is the "key" thing

Why why why the fuck would you assign the same variable name at the start of a function to completely different data? These aren't params, but variables being assigned different things, no comments, no documentation, crucial in the operation, but assigned wildly different values with different behaviors through the code.

I am working on an AoK bot. It worked before but now it fails on me. It says: {'success': False, 'error': 'Invalid comment.'}

I don't know why.

This is the comment: "@retoor debugsemiss everything and nave the and resorts they're not paying much to clean a fucking roomic lolg creating of my phoprooting such is the quoting this kidle... Noh ot inuforian times fined the apposivy suistlondlan't by imprymarbygind. Metwary nate ?"

Call method:
```
async def post_comment(self, rant_id, text):
payload = dict(
rant_id=rant_id,
comment=text
)
payload.update(self.auth_params)
async with self.session.post(f'/api/devrant/rants/{rant_id}/comments',data=payload, params=self.auth_params) as resp:
print(await resp.json())
```

Someone has an idea why it's failing? Also tried it with hardcored rant_id and message.

And then one day I make a change in the API request params in the android app and guess what the iOS app crashes on open :/

I once had to convert a VB6 app to .Net and came across a function with 46 optional params. Has anybody else had a similar stroke of luck?

Long story short:

My system need to talk with a 3rd party PoS API. The provided doc is pretty useless and with few errors.. nonetheless I came to finish the 99% of the job.

I was stuckd on the 1%, one frickin function.

Everytime I would call the endpoint I would receive...NOTHING. Just a 200.

I've spent like 5 hours trying everything, even sending wrong params...nothing...
Always 200 and nothing else.

Apparently, for an entire nation and the IT Company behind them, is ok to have A PAYMENT API TO RETURN VOID AND A 200 NO MATTER WHAT.

I got the luck/unluck that the main developer of such piece of art came in the office and I've almost throw him out the window (we are at 26th floor).

FUCK OFF DUDE. YOU AND ALL THE OTHERS THAT DO LIKE YOU DO.

P.S. in this days I'll try to write the full story, but it's hard without giving many details...small anticipation: 1.5 months of work and nothing but red bull and coffee...

Another weird property of the devRant API:

For every POST request the url parameters need to be passed in the http body instead of in the URL, like this:
app=3&user_id=42

Wtf why?

So I've been trying to use bootstrap alerts after deleting a category item in my cms project.

The problem is that I send params via get request and after sending a query to mysql it's best to refresh the page using header to both update the new changes but also prevent the params from staying in the url.

Unfortunately, after refreshing, my alerts don't run because the context of deleting a category is over at that point. I'm sure I'll find a solution eventually, but it's causing headaches and it's a good time waster xD

We had a dispute @ work yesterday on this topic :

aproach 1 :

$res = getSomeData( [ 'filter_1' => 'str_1', 'filter_2' => 'str_2', ... 'limit' => 10 );

with

function getSomeData( $data )
{
...
}

VS

aproach 2 :

$res = getSomeData( 'str_1', 'str_2', ... 10 );

with

function getSomeData( $filter_1 = '', $filter_2 = 'default_str', ... $limit = 20 )
{
...
}

I had used 1-st b/c IMHO it's more dynamic and easy to maintain and call ( especially when there are many params, most of which not used on each call )

and my colleague didn't liked it w/h his main arguments that one can not easily see the needed params and no default vals for them ( the latest could be easily corrected in the function body ). I'm curious to read your opinions, arguments & contra arguments for each aproach

aight cool so this is fucking stupid thanks Tk

my python teacher is putting us through Tkinter right after "this is how to do basic math" in a class meant for those with no programming knowledge at all

and i remember now why i only do CLI

i've got 2 lines in a func (because "command" params in Tk are fucking retarded), the first changes the text on a button and then the second does shit with os.system ("have this button change this other button then do *something*" ok sure) and yet the button's text does not update until AFTER THE OS.SYSTEM COMMAND FINISHES. I can't even insert a moment between them for it to update in case it needs a sec as time.sleep does *FUCK ALL*

fuck tk, luckily we're gonna move on to files next

(goddamn prereqs, sticking me in this shitty class...)

Most satisfying bug, it was something with good old $.ajax, way back when Axios wasn't a thing and SPAs weren't so widely used.

I was somehow able to fix the call params for a file that would not load with any other setup. Maybe it was just setting async to sync or something like that, however the thing is I was not familiar with AJAX at all, but I managed to get it run.

Then I googled, why its working and figured out all the answers on SO and other pages were the exact thing i set up for my call. I was so proud

some context: I was struggling with this bug for days and asked more experienced web devs, everybody answered, your code should just work fine.

Maybe thats why I have a positive relation with SO, because the first thing i searched there was something that I figured out myself, haha

1. getSomeData(params, ((err, data) => {
2. if(!err && data) {
3. try {
4. data = JSON.parse(data);
5. } catch(e) {
6. return null;
7. }
8. return data.someParam;
9. }
10.}

Nothing like bad practice in above code but I always feel that the line 4 should be replaced by below.

4. var result = JSON.parse(data);

and then use result variable to get data one is looking for, like below

8. return result ? result.someParam : null;

Your thoughts?

> me: trying to explain to a dev from one of our customers why should they worry about sql injection in their application -which by the way is public- since they always concatenate params (even giving concrete examples in their app on how could I gain acces to their database with just a couple of queries)

> me: (thinking) Did I change my bed with a time machine by accident and got myself into the past?

Do these things happen often to you? (U_U||)

When the client decides that we wants to change the production server and does it, and the DB params are still the old ones, and no one can work, and shit happens...

#define someError ( -1)

int func(params *param)
{
//some code
if(condition)
{
someError ;
}
}

Spent like half and hour on debugger thinking why the fuck does it skip my statement. My manager who was passing by saw me puzzled and asked if he could help, so we spent another 10 minutes without success(tho my manager is technical guy but he had an unlucky moment I guess). Eventually senior manager saw our wtf faces and asked what is going on, it took one question for me to light the bulb "someError is a macro right?"

I guess you can imagine my embarrassment at that moment..

PS: Forgot return keyword before the error code.

Sub Window_(some 20+ params)
...
Window_Fenster(...)

Sub Window_Fenster(even more params)
....

Altogether, these two procedures had ~20k LOCs.

I've just joined a new company out of despair after several month out of jobs without being able to even get interviews.
I've been warned about the code being a bit behind with modern Android stack, they needed to migrate from rx to coroutine and compose is not a priority at the moment.
Fine with it, I like handling and planning migration, that's a nice challenge.
But if only that were the only problems !! Far from it, the code is a formidable mess, I've never seen so much amateurism... Most of it was written from the previous Lead Dev who stayed there for years and touched everything with their very bad practices.
I don't even know where to start honestly...
While the code is in Kotlin, it stink Java. Nothing wrong about Java, but if you code in kotlin, you need to understand what kotlin try to achieve. And that's not the case here. There is freaking nullable everywhere, for no reason at all, the data classes contains lot of var in their constructors, equals are override to compare only one or 2 params and no hashcode override with it.
Sealed class, what for ?! Let me just write a List<Pair<Enum, Any>> and cast your any depending on the enum !
Oh and you know what, let's cast everywhere, no check, and for once no null safe, there is enough nullable in the code !

What about the reactive part ? well let's recreate a kind of broken eventbus with rx ! Cause why not ?!
The viewmodel observable don't contain data, they just contain enum for the progress of the states we're checking.
In the viewmodel function we update that enum states and emit it to be observed and make the data available as a var for the view to pick it up when needed.
But why put the business logic in the viewmodel, let's put in the views, and grab and check the variable contain in the viewmodel whenever it fits.
Testing the business logic ? uh let me just test my variable initialisation in the viewmodel instead.
The vm, the views, make about 2000 lines, the test over 3000, and not a single test really test the business logic in it ! I've made big refactoring we're all the tests stayed green, while the function are full of side effects ! WTF ?!
Oh and what about that migration from rx to coroutine ? well better not break the existing code and continue writting like rx, everything is cold flow ! We just need to store a boolean saying if we already did our call to the data layer then we decide to start our flow or not.
As for the RecyclerView, having too many viewHolder is just so annoying, let's put all our different views in one, and hide what we don't need.
Keystore has been push on the repo, but it's private no ? So who cares ?!
And wait i'm not done ! Some of the main brick of the apps depends on library that hasn't been updated for years, and you know what... yes they were hosted on Jcenter and it's only now that they decide to do something about it, we we're warned about the sunset of jcenter 2 years ago !!!!
So what about compose ? What do you want with compose ?! there is no design system in that app obviously, so don't even think about it !
And there... among all of that mess, I'm supposed to do code review... how the fuck do you do a code review when all the code that is around stink ?!
And there is so much more but by now I'm afraid you're thinking i'm just pissing on the old code like everyone... but damn I guarantee, that's the worst code I've ever seen, and i've work on more than 15 app from small to big on different contract with a lot of legacy code, but nothing that bad !

Functions with all Get/Post data as parameters like this

public function qwerty($params)
{
return $params['item']['price'][0]* 2;
}

Another great website error code fail (dumped its full error output to the website):
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/trac/web/api.py", line 436, in send_error
data, 'text/html')
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/trac/web/chrome.py", line 808, in render_template
template = self.load_template(filename, method=method)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/trac/web/chrome.py", line 768, in load_template
self.templates = TemplateLoader(
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/trac/web/chrome.py", line 481, in get_all_templates_dirs
for provider in self.template_providers:
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/trac/core.py", line 78, in extensions
return filter(None, [component.compmgr[cls] for cls in extensions])
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/trac/core.py", line 213, in __getitem__
component = cls(self)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/trac/core.py", line 119, in maybe_init
init(self)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/authopenid/authopenid.py", line 157, in __init__
db = self.env.get_db_cnx()
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/trac/env.py", line 335, in get_db_cnx
return get_read_db(self)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/trac/db/api.py", line 90, in get_read_db
return _transaction_local.db or DatabaseManager(env).get_connection()
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/trac/db/api.py", line 152, in get_connection
return self._cnx_pool.get_cnx(self.timeout or None)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/trac/db/pool.py", line 172, in get_cnx
return _backend.get_cnx(self._connector, self._kwargs, timeout)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/trac/db/pool.py", line 105, in get_cnx
cnx = connector.get_connection(**kwargs)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/trac/db/sqlite_backend.py", line 180, in get_connection
return SQLiteConnection(path, log, params)
File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/trac/db/sqlite_backend.py", line 255, in __init__
user=getuser(), path=path))
TracError: The user apache requires read _and_ write permissions to the database file /home/trac/morituri/db/trac.db and the directory it is located in.

Out params… weird.

Finally im starting to get hang of how nextjs works. Still no idea how query params work, routing api calls, the proper structure, useEffect vs useState, SSR vs static props, etc but i wrote the messiest spaghetti code youve ever seen, and it works! I built a frankenstein. And its alive. Cleaning this shit up is the least difficult part

{{ if (and (or (isset .Params "title") (isset .Params "caption")) (isset .Params "attr")) }}

Wait a minute hugo wtf is that

Q: I'm using make as a simple task runner. `make build` instead of a longer build command etc. It sucks that I can't simply pass some params like `make build dev`, instead I have to pass them as variables: `make build tag=dev`.

Can you recommend a standard, cross-platform (Linux, OS X) tool for this?

OOP is all about code reusability until you really want exactly the code Foo with non-pure functions in all your classes. You end up almost rewriting all subclasses' properties into the superclass to silence typecheckers. Is there no "I know what i'm doing, please just transpile/compile this piece of logic into these 20 places I need?" You end up doing it the functional way, dumping refs and params into some shared util function and have it do the job. I know, might as well have that one inherited also, but what's the point of adding more mess just for that ?

What’s a practical use case of the ES6 spread operator? I’m pretty fresh and would just like to see a real world example where you would need to destructure some array values and apply them to function Params.

tell me guys what would you prefer:

function a(){
..
b(..)
..
b(..)
..
}
function b(p1,p2,p3,p4,p5,p6){.
...
}

or

function a(){
..
b(..)
..
b(..)
..
}

function b(
p1,
p2,
p3,
p4,
p5,
p6
){
...
}

if you read this rant before expanding, you got a complete context on how what function a is, its calling b 2 times and how function b looks.

if instead of the first option, i had used 2nd block, you wouldn't even know the 2nd param of b function without expanding this rant.

my point?
i prefer to keeping unnecessary info on one line. and w lot of linters disagree by splitting up the code. and most importantly , my arrogant tl disagree by saying he prefers the splitted code "for readability" and becaue "he likes code this way, old-eng1 likes this and old-eng2 likes this" .

why tf does an ide have horizontal a scrolling option available when you are too stupid to use it?

ok, i know some smartass is going to point that i too can use vertical scrolling, but hear me out: i am optimising this!

case 1 : a function with 7 params is NOT split into 7 lines. lets calculate the effort to remember it
- since all params could have similar charactersticks ( they will be of some type, might have defaults, might be a suspendable/async function etc), each param will take similar memory-efforts points. say 5sp each.
- total memory-efforts= 5sp *7 = 35 sp.
- say a human has 100 sp of fast memory storage, he can use the remaining 65 sp for loading say 5 small lines above or below.
- but since 5 lines above are already read and still visible on screen, they won't be needed to be loaded again nd again, nd we can just check the lines below.
- thus we are able to store 65+35+65 = 165 sp or about 11 lines of code in out fast memory for just a 100sp brain storage

case 2 function with 7 params IS split into 7 lines.
- in this case all lines are somewhat similar. 5sp for param lines as they are still similar which implies same 35sp for storing current function and params
- remaining 65sp can only be used to store next 5 lines of 13sp as the previous code is no longer visible.
- plus if you wanna refresh the code above, you gotta scroll, which will result in removing bottom code from screen , and now your 65sp from bottom code is overwritten by 65sp of top code.
- thus at a time, you are storing only 6 lines worth of code info. this makes you slow.

this is some imaginary math, but i believe it works

This is a massive tossup between RandNoRepeat( from TI-BASIC (returns an int between 2 passed params but tracks what's been given from that range this power-on, meaning if the range is too low IT ENDS UP HANGING THE FUCKING CPU IF YOU RUN OUT OF NUMBERS and it also rolls over and over so it's slow as shit in general) or Python forgetting how the fuck if statements work.

I need to write a standalone server in Java 1.7 and have it

-handle GET urls and map them to different classes/methods
-extract the query params and expose them to the method
-Can respond in JSON by serialising the POJO or a list of them

We have an existing server I think that uses JBoss but takes forever to start and uses a lot of memory.

I also wrote one before with just a (Grizzly?) HttpServer so had to manually implement the above as needed. Only needed it to do one thing so really just 1 path.

Similar situation this time but I'd prefer to not have to implement this stuff manually and need it to be a bit more flexible to extension.

There were times I used to list sites who uses get requests to perform operations . Then I wrote a web interface to get params from users and sent it to those sites via URL .

Times when i did not know what an API is .

What's your story?

Deep learning

I thought it would be a great course, learn some of the stuff that I always read about but couldn't understand jackshit, and maybe profit form it somehow.

I'm in my last assignment, they want us to pick some SNLI paper and implement, ok, so I find this one with the least amount of params because I thought hey this seems promising.

And boy what a ride it was, I implemented it using PyTorch, the results are way off, I read the paper again and rewrite some parts, still nothing, I get 79%, it's supposed to be 85%, and no matter how I try, nothing.

10 GitHub repos later, 40 hours of complete meltdown,
20 throwaway Google accounts using colab because we don't have GPUs in our uni and using AWS is not feasible.

Same shit, I'm at loss, the world is a lie, and I fell for it...

Fuck.

Ok, so for past 1 whole day I am trying to make vhost work on my brand new laptop, running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS... When I installed OS, I've set hard disk encryption, and on top of it - user home folder encryption. Don't ask me why I did both.

Setting up vhost is simple and straight forward - I did it hundreds, maybe thousands of times, on various Linux distros, server and desktop releases alike.

And of course, as it usually happens, opposed to all logic and reason - setting up virtual host on this machine did't work. No matter what I do - I get 403 (access not allowed).

All is correctly set - directory params in apache config, vhost paths, directory params within vhost, all the usual stuff.

I thought I was going crazy. I go back to several live servers I'm maintaining - exactly the same setup that doesn't work on my machine. Google it, SO-it, all I can see is exactly what I have been doing... I ended up checking char by char every single line, in disbelief that I cannot find what is the problem.

And then - I finally figured it out after loosing one whole day of my life on it:

I was trying to setup vhost to point to a folder inside my user's home folder - which is set to be encrypted.

Aaaaaand of course - even with all right permissions - Apache cannot read anything from it.

As soon as I tried any other folder outside my home folder - it worked.

I cannot believe that nobody encountered this issue before on Stackoverflow or wherever else.

can't see what i'm doing wrong in terms of syntax, or what required field im supposedly missing

visual comparison against older example IDE is happy about can't see difference

copy paste workign example and update params to what i want for new one, seems happy

i fucking hate you typescript

i guess i should've put this shit through kaleidoscope or any other advanced diff, if i owned any or cared

if i need to debug further ill consider it

you guys know any free advanced MVC project tutorial video available? I would appreciate it because my ActionResult methods are becoming more complicated to manage based on params... thanks

Was working as the only frontend developer ona project having 4 "senior" developers. They use Laravel to make an API feeding the angular app.
Why the documentation sucked?
Half the API call params where missing, and not one time did I come across an example stating that the API expects a boolean only to find out 20 minutes later that they mean int 1 or 0 not true or false. Best part however was sending arrays in POST by sending the elements as comma separated values (e1,e2,e3...). Oh and not documentation but while at it a rant... There are other response codes except 200 for fucks sake