"Don't deploy on Friday" is a public admittance that your company either has no CI/CD pipeline, or that all your devs are retarded rhesus monkeys who only wipe their ass if the product manager wrote it as a spec.

If the saying was: "Don't port your whole API to GraphQL on a Friday", or "Don't switch from MySQL to Postgres on a Friday", I would agree.

But you should be able to do simple deploys all the time.

I deployed on Christmas & New Year's eve. I've deployed code while high on LSD, drunk-peeing 2 liters of beer against a tree after a party. I've deployed code from the hospital while my foot was being stitched up. On average, we deploy our main codebase about 194 times a week.

If you can't trust your deploys, maybe instead of posting stupid memes about not deploying on Fridays, you should fix your testing & QA procedures.

toxic workplace; leaving

I haven't wanted to write this rant. I haven't even wanted to talk to anyone (save my gf, ofc). I've just been silently fuming.

I wrote a much longer rant going into far too much detail, but none of that is relevant, so I deleted it and wrote this shorter (believe it or not) version instead. And then added in more details because details.

------

On Tuesday, as every Tuesday, I had a conference call with the rest of the company. For various, mostly stupid reasons, the boss yelled at and insulted me for twenty minutes straight in front of everyone, telling me how i'm disorganized, forgetful, how can't manage my time, can't manage myself let alone others, how I don't have my priorities straight, etc. He told the sales team to get off the call, and then proceeded to yell and chew at me for another twenty minutes in front of the frontend contractor about basically the same things. The call was 53 minutes, and he spent 40 minutes of it telling me how terrible I've been. No exaggeration, no spin. The issues? I didn't respond to an email (it got lost in my ever-filling inbox), and I didn't push a very minor update last week (untested and straight to prod, ofc). (Side note: he's yelled at me for ~15 minutes before for being horribly disorganized and unable to keep up on Trello -- because I had a single card in the wrong column. One card, out of 60+ over two boards. Never mind that most have time estimates, project tags, details, linked to cards on his boards, columns for project/qa/released, labels for deferred, released to / rejected from qa, finished, in production, are ordered by priority, .... Yep. I'm totes disorganized.)

Anyway, I spent most of conference call writing "Go fuck yourself," "Choke on a cat and die asshole," "Shit code, low pay, and broken promises. what a prize position," etc. or flipping him off under the camera on our conference-turn-video-call (switched due to connection issues, because ofc video is more stable than audio-only in his mind).

I'm just.
so, so done.

I did nothing the rest of the day on Tuesday, and basically just played games on Wednesday. I did one small ticket -- a cert replacement since that was to expire the next day -- but the rest was just playing CrossCode. (fun game, fyi; totally recommend.)

Today? It's 3:30pm and I can't be bothered to do anything. I have an "urgent" project to finish by Monday, literally "to give [random third party sales guy] a small win". Total actual wording. I was to drop all other tasks (even the expiring cert lol) and give this guy his small win. fucking whatever. But the project deals with decent code -- it's a minor extension to the first project I did for the company (see my much earlier rants), back when I was actually applying myself and learning something (everything) new, enjoying myself, and architecting+writing my own code. So I might actually do the project, but It's been two days and I haven't even opened single file yet.

But yeah. This place is total and complete shit. Dealing with the asshole reminds me of dealing with my parents while growing up, and that's a subject I don't want to broach -- far too many toxic memories.

So, I'm quitting as soon as I find something new.
and with luck, this will be before assface hires my replacement-to-be, and who will hopefully quit as soon as s/he sees the abysmal codebase. With even more luck, the asshole king himself will get to watch his company die due to horrible mismanagement. (though ofc he'll never attribute it to himself. whatever.)

I just never want to see or think about him again.
(nor this fetid landfill of a codebase. bleh.)

With luck, this will be one of my last rants about this toxic waste dump and its king of the pile.
Fourty fucking minutes, what the fuck.

Ever wanted cheat codes to devRant? Well, that's weird. But here you go, I guess.

Since the avatars do not use any external assets (Such as images), all avatars are generated. To be friendly to people who want to make third-party devRant clients (such as devRantron), avatars are generated server-side, so that the assets don't need to be distributed, and third-party programmers don't need to work out rendering avatars.

But this allows you to cheat a little.

The devRant avatars API works like this: you request a really long URL from the API, specifying the IDs of each cosmetic item the user has active, and it returns a PNG file. But you don't need an auth token to generate an avatar (which makes sense), so the avatar API is essentially a sandbox you can play around with if you have the time and patience.

You can write a really good avatar previewer with this knowledge, and see your avatar with a white tiger, even if you don't have the ++s

I ranted about this guy before who thought he was a security expert while hardly knowing what the word is probably. Today I met him again at a party.

Holy fucking shit, this guy.

"we use the best servers of the netherlands"
"we use a separate server for each website and finetune them"
"we always put clusters under servers, that way we have a fallback mechanism"
"companies mostly use bv ssl certificates"
"you're on call for a week? I'm full-time on call. Why I'm drinking alcohol then? Because fuck the clients hahaha"

😥🔫

string excuses[]={
"it's not a bug it's a feature",
"it worked on my machine",
"i tested it and it worked",
"its production ready",
"your browser must be caching the old content",
"that error means it was successful",
"the client fucked it up",
"the systems crashed and the code got lost" ,
"this code wont go into the final version",
"It's a compiler issue",
"it's only a minor issue",
"this will take two weeks max",
"my code is flawless must be someone else's mistake",
"it worked a minute ago",
"that was not in the original specification",
"i will fix this",
"I was told to stop working on that when something important came up",
"You must have the wrong version",
"that's way beyond my pay grade",
"that's just an unlucky coincidence",
"i saw the new guy screw around with the systems",
"our servers must've been hacked",
"i wasn't given enough time",
"its the designers fault",
"it probably won't happen again",
"your expectations were unrealistic",
"everything's great on my end",
"that's not my code",
"it's a hardware problem",
"it's a firewall issue",
"it's a character encoding issue",
"a third party API isn't responding",
"that was only supposed to be a placeholder",
"The third party documentation is wrong",
"that was just a temporary fix.",
"We outsourced that months ago.","
"that value is only wrong half of the time.",
"the person responsible for that does not work here anymore",
"That was literally a one in a million error",
"our servers couldn't handle the traffic the app was receiving",
"your machines processors must be too slow",
"your pc is too outdated",
"that is a known issue with the programming language",
"it would take too much time and resources to rebuild from scratch",
"this is historically grown",
"users will hardly notice that",
"i will fix it" };

A client called today because their email wasn't arriving at the receipants inbox but bouncing back with a 'poor MTA rating' error.

Checked about every blacklist I know and our server was definitely not blacklisted. Must be the receipants host which for some reason was blacklisting his specific email address.

Told the client that it wasn't a problem on our side and that he had to request a whitelist himself (we'd do it but it wasn't a specific server problem so we're not going to spend time on that).

Fair enough, he'd do that.

Calls back. "Well, the other party says that your server definitely has a poor rating, it's on your side!!"

Alright, this is getting annoying. Gave him a few blacklist checking sites links and told him to run his domain AND our server IP through it. Indeed came back completely clean.

"But the other party said it's poor rating on your side so I'd think tha........"

YEAH WHY DON'T YOU SHOVE THAT OTHER PARTY UP YOUR FUCKING ASS. I'VE SHOWN YOU PROOF THAT IT'S DEFINITELY NOT ON OUR FUCKING SIDE, EXPLAINED IT TO YOU AND SO ON. MAYBE, FOR ONE FUCKING SECOND, TAKE INTO CONSIDERATION THAT THE OTHER PARTY IS FUCKING LYING?!?!?

FUCK OFF.

TL;DR
Deadline means shit for management and they can't fucking understand wtf a prototype is for.

Hahahahaha so we are gonna present this prototype tomorrow ( 2018-03-08 ) at a meeting with investors and our management practically demanded a landing page to be at this presentation.

The landing page is gonna be made by a 3rd party, they asked for directions on the content about the landing page with a deadline set for Friday ( 2018-03-02 ) .

Management sent an email yesterday with the following content:
- Changes on the prototype ( A LOT OF CHANGES )
- The landing page content: a fucked up confusing as fuck word document with crossed over text, red text. A lot of noise that meas nothing and only makes the reader confused as fuck

Why am I laughing you may ask?
Our front ender took the prototyping role out of my hands and the landing page is a third party responsibility.

None of this is my work, I'm here watching the world burn for the first time and boy its funny and warm.

:)

I'm drunk and I'll probably regret this, but here's a drunken rank of things I've learned as an engineer for the past 10 years.

The best way I've advanced my career is by changing companies.

Technology stacks don't really matter because there are like 15 basic patterns of software engineering in my field that apply. I work in data so it's not going to be the same as webdev or embedded. But all fields have about 10-20 core principles and the tech stack is just trying to make those things easier, so don't fret overit.

There's a reason why people recommend job hunting. If I'm unsatisfied at a job, it's probably time to move on.

I've made some good, lifelong friends at companies I've worked with. I don't need to make that a requirement of every place I work. I've been perfectly happy working at places where I didn't form friendships with my coworkers and I've been unhappy at places where I made some great friends.

I've learned to be honest with my manager. Not too honest, but honest enough where I can be authentic at work. What's the worse that can happen? He fire me? I'll just pick up a new job in 2 weeks.

If I'm awaken at 2am from being on-call for more than once per quarter, then something is seriously wrong and I will either fix it or quit.

pour another glass

Qualities of a good manager share a lot of qualities of a good engineer.

When I first started, I was enamored with technology and programming and computer science. I'm over it.

Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all.

The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.)

Related to above, writing good proposals for changes is a great skill.

Almost every holy war out there (vim vs emacs, mac vs linux, whatever) doesn't matter... except one. See below.

The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me.

If I ever find myself thinking I'm the smartest person in the room, it's time to leave.

I don't know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly. No really, they should be paid like half a mil a year just base salary. Fuck they have to understand both front end AND back end AND how different browsers work AND networking AND databases AND caching AND differences between web and mobile AND omg what the fuck there's another framework out there that companies want to use? Seriously, why are webdevs paid so little.

We should hire more interns, they're awesome. Those energetic little fucks with their ideas. Even better when they can question or criticize something. I love interns.

sip

Don't meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He's a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he's making it up as he goes along like the rest of us.

Tech stack matters. OK I just said tech stack doesn't matter, but hear me out. If you hear Python dev vs C++ dev, you think very different things, right? That's because certain tools are really good at certain jobs. If you're not sure what you want to do, just do Java. It's a shitty programming language that's good at almost everything.

The greatest programming language ever is lisp. I should learn lisp.

For beginners, the most lucrative programming language to learn is SQL. Fuck all other languages. If you know SQL and nothing else, you can make bank. Payroll specialtist? Maybe 50k. Payroll specialist who knows SQL? 90k. Average joe with organizational skills at big corp? $40k. Average joe with organization skills AND sql? Call yourself a PM and earn $150k.

Tests are important but TDD is a damn cult.

Cushy government jobs are not what they are cracked up to be, at least for early to mid-career engineers. Sure, $120k + bennies + pension sound great, but you'll be selling your soul to work on esoteric proprietary technology. Much respect to government workers but seriously there's a reason why the median age for engineers at those places is 50+. Advice does not apply to government contractors.

Third party recruiters are leeches. However, if you find a good one, seriously develop a good relationship with them. They can help bootstrap your career. How do you know if you have a good one? If they've been a third party recruiter for more than 3 years, they're probably bad. The good ones typically become recruiters are large companies.

Options are worthless or can make you a millionaire. They're probably worthless unless the headcount of engineering is more than 100. Then maybe they are worth something within this decade.

Work from home is the tits. But lack of whiteboarding sucks.

I was very troubled as a teenager. I had some pretty intense family issues that led me to smoking cigarettes at 12, marijuana at 13, and drinking everyday at 15. By 17, I was using other "party favors", as we called them, on an every day basis. I left high school at the beginning of my final year, about a week before I turned 18, moved out of my family's home and started working three different part time jobs.
This was the lowest point of my life. I've never felt so much like a fuck-up and loser than back in those days. I hated myself, hated what I had become, hated everything I did. Hate hate hate. I spent a year like this, pitying myself, seeking sympathy from people when I shouldnt have been, basically seeking out someone who would tell me that I wasnt so awful.
That never happened. I only deepened the hole that I had dug for myself.

Then I got angry. I thought it wasn't fair that everyone else was enjoying life except for me. I wanted to find a passion. I wanted to find excitement again. I wanted to look forward to something else besides going back to bed.
When I turned 19, I decided that I was going to take control of my life because I was so angry with my position at the time.
I put myelf into college. I made myself stay awake and focus on schoolwork and internal improvement. I started facing my flaws and defects head-on and conquering them rather than letting them eat me from the inside out.

Now, I am only a couple months away from turning 21.
I rarely drink now. I quit smoking cigarettes after almost 9 years.
I graduate this December, and enroll into my next degree program in January.
Today, I signed employment paperwork with the company I interned at over the summer. I am now a full-time DevOps Engineer with salary, bonuses, 401k, and full health coverage.
My boyfriend and I just moved into our own house that we are renting together. No more needing shitty roommates.
I have most of the debt that my mother left in my name paid off.

A couple of years ago, I couldn't have cared less about my life or how I turned out. I truly expected to get arrested, wind up homeless, or just flat-out end up dead.
I never thought I would see myself where I am today.
I am extremely proud of myself for turning my future around. I know some of you may read this and think I'm an idiot, or that this seems trivial because I am so young. Thats okay.
I have learned that hard work always pays off, and that sometimes you must sacrifice what is expedient to gain what is meaningful.

So my friend started a YouTube channel, being the motivational man I am I encouraged him and made him a logo for his channel.

It started here, he called me a bazillion times every single day asking me to make stuff like Channel banners, intros.

He even went so far to call my design bad and that I could do better.

I'm definitely losing my hold on my generosity, it's like this with every single fucktard I help. It's like programmers don't get to have a life, people pitch me stupid ideas at every party.. Having a casual conversation a guy starts talking about an idea.

Oooh... And the worst part they say you can have 60% and just give them 40% 'MINORITY' share for coming up with an idea I could pull up from my arse instantaneously

Next time he asks me something I'm gonna fuck him up or just charge him a bazillion dollars... FUCK FUCK FUCK... REALLY GOT TO BUY THAT STUPID STRESS CUBE

Senior Management: We are severely disappointed in the timeliness of the two apps you built this year. You had budgeted 3 months for one and it took 4 months and the other was budgeted to take 4 months and took 5 months. We understand that we doubled the requirements halfway through and but that doesn’t take away from our need for you to deliver on time. We provided you with two extra devs on the project! We know they were novices and you had to train them from the ground up during the project, that doesn’t matter. The extra resources should have helped you but your lack of leadership ability is what caused them to hold you back. We know our other team with a budget of 6 months took 2 years on their project and was still unsuccessful but that is a different scenario! That was a pre-built 3rd party ERP plugin, way more complicated and nuanced than simply building and deploying something from scratch. Yes we’re aware your projects were the only successful tech projects at the company this year, that’s just luck and coincidence. The next app we need you to build in 6 months, no questions asked. It needs to consolidate and tie together our 3 different ERPs. Everything that we need out of these products that they don’t do out of the box we need you to wire up. We will decide the exact requirements in a month or so, for now just get started. Yes your apps changed the way we do business and allowed us to complete projects smoother than ever before while saving millions of dollars in wasteful and archaic processes that is OLD NEWS. Stop bringing it up. The successes of yesterday are the status quo of today. Don’t expect any new resources either, you clearly can’t handle them. You will now be giving status updates to 3 different managers as a corrective action to your missed deadlines in order to ensure the timeliness of future deliverables.

Dev: …

So, as some people here probably know, I don't use any of the mainstream, mass surveillance integrated social media and messaging services. Since I'm located in the Netherlands especially whatsapp is nearly a life requirement but Facebook and such come close as well and I don't use anything related to Facebook, Google, Apple and any of the other companies related to mass surveillance programs which often puts me in awkward positions.

Every time someone wants to stay in touch and the fact that I don't use whatsapp comes up again, it usually turns into an explaining session with much disbelief from the other party but more and more often, I'm getting rather tired of that.

Recently, I had one of those moments and instead of saying 'sorry, I don't use whatsapp', i went for 'sorry, I'm old school, i only do texting and calling!'.

No discussion, just got a "ah, fair enough!"

😮

I started doing this more and more and I get the same response every time!

I find it quite astonishing how bringing something another way can get one a completely different response, especially in this context.

!dev related but fucking hell I need to get this out.

Could people (including friends) fucking stop to invalidate my favourite music genre?!

'Its just too hard', 'its so aggressive', 'its only boom boom boom'

Fuck you.

Always, al-fucking-ways at every party or wherever when people are allowed to put on music, whenever I'm allowed to, my music is turned off right away.

'Sorry but not everyone likes this and you're not the only one here'

I'm sorry, WHAT? I'VE LISTENED TO STYLES I REALLY FUCKING DON'T LIKE FOR FUCKING HOURS AND I'VE SWALLOWED IT ALL. THEN AT LEAST LET ME PLAY ONE FUCKING SONG ON A WHOLE FUCKING EVENING.

And nothing against metal peoples, really not but its nearly always the metal people who put their music on all evening and keep telling how awesome metal is and the second I mention my genre or out it on: 'oh but that sucks' *switches back to metal*

Go fuck yourselves. I'm swallowing this shit every fucking time but I'm getting fucking sick of this bullshit.

By the way, my favourite genre is raw hardstyle aka rawstyle.

!!privacy
!!political

I had a discussion with a coworker earlier.

I owed him for lunch the other day, and he suggested I pay him back either with cash (which I didn't have), Venmo, or just by him lunch the next time (which I ended up doing).

I asked about Venmo, and he said it was like paypal, but always free. that sounded a bit off -- because how are they in business if it's always free? -- so I looked it up, and paid special attention to their privacy policy.

The short of it: they make money by selling your information. That's worth far more than charging users a small fee when sending $5 every few weeks. Sort of what I expected when I heard "always free," but what surprised me is just how much they collect. (In retrospect, I really shouldn't have been surprised at all...)

Here's an incomplete list:
* full name, physical address, email, DoB, SSN (or other government IDs, depending on country)
* Complete contact list (phone numbers, names, photos)
* Browser/device fingerprint
* (optional) Your entire Facebook feed and history
* (optional) all of your Facebook friends' contact info
* Your Twitter feed
* Your FourSquare activity
(The above four ostensibly for "fraud prevention")
* GPS data
* Usage info about the actual service
* Other users' usage info (e.g. mentioning you)
* Financial info (the only thing not shared with third parties)

Like, scary?

And, of course, they share all of this with their parent company, PayPal. (The privacy policy does not specify what PayPal does with it, nor does it provide any links that might describe it, e.g. PayPal's "info-shared-by-third-parties" privacy policy)

So I won't be using Venmo. ever.

I mentioned all of this to my coworker, and he just doesn't understand. at all. He even asks "So what are they going do with that, send me ads? like they already do?"

I told him why I think it's scary. Everything from them freely selling all of your info, to someone being able to look through your entire online life's history, to being able to masquerade around as you, to even reproducing your voice (e.g. voice clips collected by google assistant), to grouping people by political affiliations.

He didn't have much to say about any of them, and actually thought the voice thing was really cool. (All I could think of was would happen if the "news" had that ability....) All of his other responses were "that doesn't bother me at all" and/or "using all of these services is so convenient."

but what really got me was his reaction to the last one.

I said, "If you're part of the NRA, for example, you'd be grouped with Republicans. If they sell all of this information, which they do, and they don't really care who buys it or what they do with it... someone could look through the data and very very easily target those political groups."

His response? "I don't have to worry about that. I'm a Democrat, and have always voted Democrat. I'll tell anyone that."

Like.
That's basically saying every non-democrat is someone you should be wary of and keep an eye on. That's saying Democrats are the norm and everyone else is deviant and/or wrong.

and I couldn't say anything after this because... no matter what I said, it would start a political conflict, and would likely end with me being fired (since the owner is also a democrat, and they're very buddy-buddy). "What if they target democrats?" -> "They already do!" or "What if democrats use it against others?" -> "They deserve it for being violent and racist, but we never would" (except, you know, that IRS/tea-party incident for example...)

But like, this is coming from someone who firmly believes conservatives are responsible for all of the violence and looting and rioting and mass shootings in the country. ... even when every single instance has been by committed by democrats. every. single. one.

Just...
jfl;askjfasflkj.

He doesn't understand the need for privacy, and his world view is just... he actually thinks everyone with different beliefs is wrong and dangerous.

I don't even know how to deal with people like this. and with how prevalent this mindset is... coupled with the aforementioned privacy concerns... it's honestly *terrifying.*

How everyone see weekends:
Its party time and I can finally sleep and watch movies as much as I want...

How devs see weekends:
Finally I can work more on this cool project...

Whats so nice about devrant is that you see more or less the same people from time to time everywhere.
In comments, notifications, rants, all that.

It's like a party full of nerds like you where it's actually fun to get to know people.:D

This is my most ridiculous meeting in my long career. The crazy thing is I have witnessed this scenario play out many times during my career. Sometimes it sits in waiting for a few years but then BOOM there it is again and again. In each case the person that fell into the insidious trap was smart and savvy but somehow it just happened. The outcomes were really embarrassing and in some cases career damaging. Other times, it was sort of humorous. I could see this happening to me and I never want it to happen to you.

Once upon a time in a land not so far away there was a Kickoff Meeting for an offsite work area recovery exercise being planned for our Oklahoma locations. Eleven Oklahoma high ranking senior executives were on this webinar plus three Enterprise IT Directors (Ellen, Jim and Bob) who would support the business from the systems side throughout the exercise.

The plan was for Sam Otto, our Midwest Director of Business Continuity to host this webinar. Sam had hands-on experience recovering to our third party recovery site vendor and he always did a great job. He motivated people to attend the exercise with the coolest breakfasts and lunches you could imagine. Donuts, bagels, pizza, wings, scrumptious salads, sandwiches, beverages and desserts. He was great with people and made it a lot of fun.

At the last minute Charles 'Don't Call Me Charlie' Ego-Smith, the Global Business Continuity Senior Vice President, decided to grand-stand Sam. He demanded the reins to the webinar. Pulled a last-minute power-play and made himself the host and presenter. You have probably seen the move at some point in your career. I guess the old saying, 'be careful what you wish for' has some truth to it - read on and let me know if you devRanters agree...

So, Charlie, I mean Charles, begins hosting the session and greets all of the attendees. Hey, good so far! He starts showing some slides in the PowerPoint presentation and he fields a few questions, comments and requests from the Oklahoma executives. The usual easy to handle requests such as, 'what if we are too busy to do recover all systems', 'what if we recover all of our processes from home', 'what if we have high profile visitors that month?' Hey you can't blame them for trying. You are probably thinking to yourself, 'been there - heard that!' But luckily our experienced team had anticipated the push-back. Fortunately, Senior Management 'had our backs' and committed that all processes and systems must participate and test - so these were just softball requests, 'easy-peasy' to handle. But wait, we are just getting started!

Now the fireworks begin. Bob, one if the Enterprise IT directors started asking a bunch of questions. Well, Charles had somewhat of a history with Bob from previous exercises and did not take kindly to Bob's string of questions. Charles started getting defensive and while Bob was speaking Charles started IM'ing. He's firing off one filthy message after another to me and our teammate Sam.

'This idiot Bob is the biggest pain in the ass that I ever worked with'; 'he doesn't know shit', 'he never shuts the f up', 'I wanna go over to his office and kick his f'in ass...!'

Unfortunately...the idiot Charles had control of the webinar and was sharing his screen so every message he sent was seen by all of the attendees! Yeah, everyone including Bob and the Senior Oklahoma executives! We could not instant message him to stop as everyone would have seen our warnings, so we tried to call Charles' cell phone and text him but he did not pick up. He just kept firing ridiculously embarrassing dirty IM messages and I guess we were all so stunned we just sat there bewildered. We finally bit the bullet and IM'ed him to STOP ALREADY!!! Whoa, talk about an embarrassing silence!

I really felt sorry for Bob. He is a good guy. Deservedly, Charlie 'Yes I am going to call you CHARLIE' got in big time hot water after the webinar with upper management. For one reason or another he only lasted another year or so at our company. Maybe this event played a part in his demise.

So, the morale is, if you use IM - turn it off during a webinar if you are the host. If you must use it, be really careful what you say, who you say it to and pray nothing embarrassing or personal is sent to you for everyone to see.

Quick Update - During the past couple of months I participated on many webinars with enterprise software vendors trying to sell me expensive solutions. Most of the vendors had their IM going while doing webinars and training. Some very embarrassing things came flying across our screens. You learn a lot reading those messages when they pop-up on the presenters' screen, both personal and business related. Some even complaints from customers!

My advice to employees and vendors is to sign-out of IM before hosting a webinar. Otherwise, it just might destroy your credibility and possibly your career.

Do you really expect that I can debug in a few minutes, a part of the software that I didn't build and have never seen before and have no knowledge of the external, third-party web service that code is reaching out to?

Dude, flippin' chill, take a walk, grab a drink, pop some popcorn and give me some time to figure out what the hell this code is doing so I can properly debug it!

You know what it turned out to be? Wrong test data used for the 3rd party service. So in essence... Nothing was wrong! Frickity frack!

Adventures in security land.

The “legendary” lead dev authored a ticket that logs raw credentials for a third-party tool we’re using, and logs partially-obscured consumer passwords. His reasoning: “for debugging. And customer service!” And then argued with me over why that’s bad! Seriously?

Then in the release channel, he and the release manager are talking like I’m pestering them with my findings. Things like “I have some Root-induced changes coming” and “Fixed those, but she’ll probably have more...” etc.

Like come on.
I’m even being nice here, but you seriously need to stop screwing this up.

They also didn’t bother merging the fixes into the release branch, so I needed to re-review the entire (large) ticket on its own branch. Doubles the effort since I can’t easily see what changed.

The lead dev also only updated a few of the specs (despite me sending him a list), so there’s a bunch of failing ones now. Makes me unsure if he actually fixed everything.

Maybe I’m just being touchy, but ugh. Freaking annoying people.

At least he owned up to being the author this time instead of saying someone else (who wasn’t in the history...) wrote it. -.-

The time when I've felt like a badass, was when I was bored at a Birthday party at restaurant.

I didn't want to use my mobile data, so I tried to use the wifi of the restaurant. I didn't want to ask the password of the wifi, so I tried to get access by guessing. At first try I got it by entering "nameOfRestaurantCurrentYear".

Then I was browsing Play Store and there was a recommendation of an app (forgot the name) that analyses which the device is connected to wifi. So that got me interested that I installed on my phone.

So I played a little with and discover several Samsungs and iPhones connected to it (Some of the them had their real name next to the brand. It would be funny to yell their name out loud and they would be looking around.)
But there was one device that I didn't recognized. I searched on the web but found nothing. So later as I go to pay my part, I noticed that the credit card device had a wifi icon on it. So I looked over to the cash register and saw the name of the brand. It was the brand I didn't know of.

So basically they were using transfer payments over a public wifi.

You can believe or not but it’s just one of those stories. It’s long and crazy and it probably happened.

A few years ago I was interviewed by this big insurance company. They asked me on linkedin and were interested. They didn’t specify who they were so I didn’t specify who I am either.

After they revealed who they are I was just curious how they fuck they want to spend those billions of dollars they claimed in their press notes about this fucking digital transformation everyone is talking about. The numbers were big.

I got into 3 or 4 phone/skype interviews without technical questions and I was invited to see them by person.
I know that it would be funny because they didn’t asked me for CV so they didn’t know anything about me and I was just more curious how far I can get without revealing myself.

They canceled interview at midnight and I was in the middle of Louis de Funès comedies marathon so I didn’t sleep whole night. I assumed they would just reschedule but then they phoned me at 8 am if I can come because they made mistake.

So at first talk I was just interviewed by some manager I knowed after 5 minutes he would be shitty as fuck and demand stupid things in no time because he is not technical. He was trying to explain me that they got so great people and they do everything so fast.

From my experience speed and programming are not the things that match. ( for reference of my thought see three virtues of a GREAT programmer )

So I just pissed them off by asking what they would do with me when I finish this transformation thingy next year. ( Probably get rid off and fire at some point were my thoughts )

Then I got this technical interview on newest gold color MacBook pro - pair programming ( they were showing off how much money they have all the time ).
The person asked me to transform json and get some data in javascript .

Really that was the thing and I was so bored and tired that I just asked in what ES standard I can code.
The problem was despite he told me I can do anything and they are using newest standards ( yeah right ) the “for of” loop didn’t worked and he even didn’t know that syntax existed. So I explained him it’s the newest syntax pointing mozilla page and that he need to adjust his configuration. Because we didn’t have time for that I just did it using var an function by writing bunch of code.
When he was asking me if I want to write some tests probably because my code looked ugly as fuck ( I didn’t sleep for more then 24 hours at that point and wanted to live the building as fast as I can) I told I finished and there is no time for tests because it’s so simple and dumb task. The code worked.

After showing me how awesome their office is ( yeah please I work from home so I don’t care ) I got into the talk with VP of engineering and he was the only person who asked me where is my CV because he didn’t know what to talk about. I just laughed at him and told him that I got here just by talking how awesome I am so we can talk about whatever he wants.
After quick talk about 4 different problems where I introduced 4 different languages and bunch of libraries just because I can and I worked with those he was mine.

He told me about this awesome stack they’re building with kubernetes and micro services and the shitty future where they want to put IOT into peoples ass to sell them insurance and suddenly I got awake and started to want that job but behind that all awesomeness there was just .NET bridge with stack of mainframes running COBOL that they want to get rid off and move company to the cloud.

They needed mostly people who would dump code to different technology stack and get rid of old stack ( and probably those old people ) and I was bored again because I work more in r&d field where you sometimes need to think about something that don’t exist and be creative.

I asked him why it would take so much time so he explained me how they would do the transformation by consolidating bunch of companies and how much money they would make by probably firing people that don’t know about it to this day.

I didn’t met any person working permanently there but only consultants from corporations and people hired in some 3rd party company created by this mother company.

They didn’t responded with any decision after me wasting so much time and they asked me for interview for another position year after.
I just explained HR person how they treat people and I don’t want to work there for any money.

If You reached this point it is the end and if it was entertaining thank YOU I did my best.

Have a nice day.

I finally did it. I finally got rid of that client in a positive, respectful manner.

So basically, my dad has a freelance colleague. For a side project that person asked me to make him a website. My dad mentioned to said person that my sister's boyfriend does web design (he's trained to use autocad for designing the structure of furniture, nothing fancy just straight lines and upside down doors that fail after a while..

So my brother in law charged the guy 400 money for the design. I charged the guy 200 for the programming because my dad forced me to drop down my price to fit the budget because business relationship and he obviously couldn't let my sister's boyfriend not make more money than he deserves.

In the end after waiting on the design for weeks (I literally saw him do it in photoshop all in 2 layers on his laptop in half an hour) I had to rush the project because the due date was coming up. I already had most of it done but I had to redo a good part of the front-end to fit the design structure. I also had to re-do the design in photoshop to get the images and colors I needed, then cut it up into html. So realistically, my sister's boyfriend barely did anything.

Now the deal was that I'd develop the website and perform any updates/upgrades to it. I'd also host it on my webserver for a monthly fee. My sister's boyfriend was to handle any and all content related support.

At first it was all good, I only ever spoke with the guy when he needed a feature added and he paid me well for it. Overall the hit I took in initial development was paying off. As time went by, my sister's boyfriend started ignoring the guy's calls and the guy started calling me instead.

Now, he had this deal with my brother in law where he could charge his time at 35 money an hour. That's about 4 times minimum wage for not doing much.
Then I started to basically take over all support, but I was only allowed to charge 30 an hour. Pretty reasonable still and I wasn't too busy so it was all good.

As time went by I ended up getting asked to do more and more minimal changes. At some point I had done so many minimal changes I had to charge the guy about 2 hours extra that month and he went completely mental saying I can't just work for hours without telling him beforehand. We decided I had to discuss a price before any change. I charged my time on the phone with him twice after that and both times he bitched about me being expensive and once he even said he wanted to leave.

Now comes the fun part. A week ago he had an issue that was 100% support related. He tried calling my sister's boyfriend but the guy obviously didn't pick up. He called my dad about it, and my dad ended up calling my my sister's boyfriend. Now this guy is so slimy, he purposely didn't hang up the phone knowing my dad would use his cell and assume the other party would hang up because calls cost money. The guy heard my dad call my sister's boyfriend and heard him pick up immediately. He went completely mental saying how he wants both of us to always reply and call him back immediately.

This guy was always my lowest priority. He didn't really make me money and his calls and requests were annoying and unnecessary. Add to that that I specifically didn't want to handle support and was forced into it anyway, while all 'design' things (up to figuring out where and how to display a visitor counter) absolutely had to go to my sister's boyfriend..
But regardless of that, I generally replied to his emails within 10-20 minutes and rarely more than 25 hours.

My dad agreed (for us) that we now both had to reply to him within 24 hours. I was now stuck checking my voicemail every couple hours because my sister's boyfriend sucks at life.

During his rant he threatened to leave me, again. That was the point where I said fuck it.

For the past week I've been ignoring his calls. When he emails me I don't take more than 5 minutes replying. This morning I found an e-mail with 4 requests;

He wanted me to make a content-related change;
He wanted me to give him access to the site's Google analytics;
He wanted me to add a feature and write a guide on how to use it;
And fucking finally, he wanted a 'token to transfer his website'.

I promptly emailed him back saying I added his email a week ago and that he'd gotten an email from Google about it then, that I'd changed the content he wanted me to, a price for the last dev task and a token for his domain name, adding that its valid for 35 days and that his new host can contact me to receive a backup file of his website.

Sadly, I do have this on 10-minute dev job to do, but then I'm invoicing him all jobs I haven't invoiced yet and he can find another host willing to deal with his insanity.

The best part is I lose a webhosting client but I'm sure he'll still ask my sister's bitched parasitic boyfriend whenever he needs a photo resized and he'll still pay him 35 money for 2 minutes of work.

Fuck customers.

Prologue
My dad has an acquaintance - let's call him Tom. Tom is an gynecologist, one of the best in Poznań, where I live. He's a great guy but absolutely can not into tech of any kind besides his iPhone and basic PC usage. For about a year now I've been doing small jobs for him - build a new PC for his office, fix printer, fix wifi, etc. He has made a big mistake few years ago by trusting a guy, let's call him Shitface, with crating him software for work. It's supposed to be pretty simple piece of code in which you can create and modify patient file, create prescription from drugs database and such things. This program is probably one of the worst pierces of code I've ever seen and Shitface should burn for that. Worse, this guy is pretentious asshole lacking even basic IT knowledge. His code is garbage and it's taking him few months to make small changes like text wrapping. But wait, there's more. Everything is hardcoded so every PC using this software must have installed user controls for which he doesn't have license and static IP address on network card.
Part 1
Tom asked me to build him a new PC that will be acting like a server for Shitface's program. He needs it in Kalisz (around 150 km from my place). I Agred (pun intended) and after Tom brought me his old computer I've bought parts and built a new one. I have also copied everything of value and everything took me around three hours.
Part 2
Everything was ready but Shitface's program. I didn't know much about it's configuration so when I've noticed that it's not working even on the old PC I got a bit worried. Nevertheless I started breaking everything I know about it and after next three hours I've got it somewhat working. Seeing that there's still some problems with database connection (from Windows' Event Viewer) I wrote quick SMS to Shitface asking what can be wrong. He replied that he won't be able to help me any way until Monday (day after deadline). I got pissed and very courteously asked him for source code because some of libraries used in this project has license that requires either purchase of commercial license or making code open source. He replied within few minutes that he'll be able to connect remotely within next 10 minutes. He was trying to make it work for the next hour but he succeeded. It was night before deadline so I wrapped everything up and went to bed thinking that it won't take me more than an hour to get this new PC up and running in the office. Boy was I wrong.
Also, curious about his code, I've checked source and he is using beautiful ponglish (mixed Polish and English) with mistakes he couldn't even bother to fix. For people from Poland, here's an example:
TerminarzeController.DeleteTerminarzShematyDlaLekarza
Part 3
So I drove to Kalisz and started working on making everything work. Almost everything was ready so after half an hour I was done. But I wanted to check twice if it's all good because driving so far second time would be a pain. So I started up Shitface's program, logged in, tried to open ANYTHING and... KABUM. UNHANDLED EXCEPTION. WTF. I checked trace and for fuck sake something was missing. Keep in mind that then I didn't know he's using some third party control for Windows Forms that needs to be installed on client PC. After next fifteen minutes of googling I've found a solution. I just had to install this third party software and everything will work. But... It had to be exactly this version and it was old. Very old. So old that producent already removed all traces of its existence from their web page and I couldn't find it anywhere. I tried installing never version and copying files from old PC but it didn't work. After few hours of searching for a solution I called Mr Shitface asking him for this control installation file. He told me that he has it but will be able to send it my way in the evening. Resigned I asked for this new PC to be left turned on and drove home. When he sent me necessary files I remotely installed them and everything started working correctly.
So, to sum it up. Searching for parts and building new PC, installing OS and all necessary software, updating everything and configuring it for Tom taste took me around what, 1/3 of time I spent on installing Mr Shitface's stupid program which Tom is not even happy with. Gotta say it was one of worst experiences I had in recent months. Hope I won't have to see this shit again.
Epilogue
Fortunately everything seems to work correctly. Tom hasn't called me yet with any problems. Mission accomplished. I wanna kill very specific someone. With. A. Spoon.

A lot of times during holiday parties, I meet new people.

Afterwards, often a quick group chat is created to share pictures with all the people there.

Every goddamn time we come at this point again where this is done and since WhatsApp is nearly considered a requirement to function in society (Netherlands) and I refuse to use it and other mainstream media...

The moment that I have to explain why I don't use WhatsApp arrives, yet again. I don't find it awkward anymore but it doesn't improve the atmosphere and getting called paranoid for the rest of the party also isn't the most fun thing ever!

In the end I usually get the pictures emailed.

2AM and a birthday party of my BELOVED mother that I have to attend tomorrow in the middle of bumfuck. And I'm not sleeping, oh no.. because "family obligations" require me to get her a present on 2 days notice. I'm making her something very simple, some LED's displaying her new age, powered by a lithium cell and some charge-boost-protection controller. So I need to make a mesh to place the LED's to make those characters.

Measuring the size of the project box, cut it out.. started drawing the numbers on it. Not satisfied and ain't nobody got time for that. Guess I'll just print something out. Drew a little image with some text on my tablet, sent it to the printer. Black apparently doesn't want to print anymore even though it's still fucking full.

HP YOU CERTIFIED MOTHERFUCKERS!!! How fucking difficult can it be to make a printer and make it into something that doesn't shit on me every fucking time I want to use it?! Why do I have to deal with your shit, on top of my mother's?! WHY?!!!!

Fuck me. Happy birthday to my mother, and silently I wish that it's her last one. The bitch wouldn't - no she didn't - piss on me even when I was on fire!! Where were you "dear family member" when I was homeless, huh?! WHERE WERE YOU, WHEN I STOOD ON TOP OF A BRIDGE, READY TO END MY LIFE AND BEGGED TO YOU TO ALLOW ME TO STAY IN YOUR HOME FOR THE NIGHT?! Mother my fucking ass. A blood bond that I wish I never had! And that I have to work for now, because you fucking bitch can't even possibly think as far into the future as to invite your peers for a birthday party.. I dunno, maybe a week in advance, like a sensible human being would? At least she's improving, my little sister's and brother's birthdays she just invited me for the day before. And I also had to get a present ready for, in the middle of the fucking night. Fucking hell!!!

WWDC was not about developers this year. It was a conference call with shareholders and investors. No bold moves, just several consecutive "this product will no longer suck" and "look at what you can do now, big companies" announcements.

watchOS will work now (it's too slow ATM). tvOS will just be less cumbersome. macOS still lagging behind (I mean, I already have great third party apps that clean my hard drive, but thank you for solving a problem I didn't need fixing). iOS 10 is simply about messages (it's not going to make me ditch Telegram, because it doesn't have an Android client, regardless of how large you make emoticons appear on screen). Apple Music will still suck, especially if you have more than one Apple ID. And Apple Maps will continue to be useless outside of the US.

Where did the bold moves go? Where's the "we're breaking up iTunes into several distinct apps that serve their purposes really well"? (Guess iTunes is too valuable a trademark...) Where is the "we will end the WKView vs UIView vs NSView nonsense"? (You know, OOP is about creating classes, which are abstractions and whose instances deal with the particularities of their environment; a View is a View, regardless of where they live; an instance of a View should care about being on a watch or on a phone, not the developer.) Where is the "we love indie developers and will help you"? They showed off a lot of integration with well established apps, that don't really need to stand out any more. They showed that video of "normal people" who have developed apps, but no one knows about them! And then they changed the AppStore so you can pay to advertise your app, but who has the means to do that? Indie devs are surely on a tight budget, so who's that helping again?

For me, this WWDC was sugar coated with a "we love you developers" BS, but was a business statement to large companies ("see what you can do now Uber, Lyft, WeChat, WhatsApp, Doordash, all the P2P payment apps, ESPN, WSJ and so on?"). It's already a known fact that the bulk of the AppStore revenue goes to the top 1% apps. And what's the point of having tvOS be open to developers if it is very unlikely I'll ever develop anything for it unless I work at CBS?

It's great that they want to make it easier for kids to learn Swift. But there's very little point in that, if those kids' apps aren't going to be used and are simply going to make the "we have 2 million apps on the AppStore" announcement look shinier for shareholders. Without a strong indie community, the Swift Playgrounds app for the iPad is just manufacturing workers for large corporations.

And without a strong indie community, things get tougher for indie clients as well. Who will have the money (and therefore the time) to implement all those integrations in order to even dream about competing with heavily funded apps?

Yeah... So thanks, Apple, but no thanks.

Inappropriate experience at work? Here is another one:

After 10 years of service the company gives the employee an anniversary party, complete with cake, drinks, etc.

Preparing for a party, HR set the cake in the break-room and left to get the other supplies, in the mean time the IS department manager 'John' walks in, sees the cake and decides to take a slice.
Not a small corner piece you may not notice by smearing the frosting around, but a big piece from the * middle of the cake *.

'Mary' walks in and catches him.

M: "JOHN! The cake is for Eddie's party! Everyone will be here any minute!"
John: "Oh shit!..sorry, let me put it back..."
M: "NO!, you've already eaten some...the cake is ruined!"
<he had icing all over his hands, so he used the cake knife to cut, but used his hands to dig out the slice, so the cake looked pretty tore up>
J:"How was I supposed to know? All I saw was free cake!"
M: "You are on the invite list for Eddie's party! You have 'Happy Anniversary Eddie' on your plate!"
J: "Party isn't until 2:00...<looks at the breakroom clock> oh shit...it's 2"

About that time, several VPs walk in, notice Mary is upset and after finding out, our IS-VP said "John, I'm not happy about this. I want you in my office after the party. You can leave ...now!"

Our IS-VP is almost always emotionless (mostly just happy and in a good mood), it was the first time anyone had seen him this physically angry in years. We don't know how John kept his job.

Freaking tech support.
Freaking sparkhire.

Their 'one-way interview' bs only supports flash. Flash. in production. in 2019. Flash died years ago, and its support ends next year. What the crap?

Anyway, I finally decided I should do the interview since they already have all of my information anyway. Thanks, "privacy-conscious" third party. Totally appreciate it.

I spent half an hour and couldn't get flash working on their site (but all other sites were fine), so I contacted their support. I gave them all the relevant specs (inc. ofc browser), the steps to reproduce, and all of my attempts at fixing the issue.

To their credit, I recieved a response within a few minutes. To their discredit: their response was: "What browser are you using?" This question was followed by my report (including, ofc, my browser and all the other overlooked details), immediately followed by a "debugging info" section appended by their support service that also included my browser, os, and other specs.

Learn to fucking read.

Their suggestion? Use google chrome. Barring that: record your 20-30 minute video by holding your phone in front of your face the entire time. I am so not kidding.

They also asked what page i was having difficulty on. You guessed it: the page url was also included within that "debugging info" section.

It wasn't a form letter, either. I'd understand if it was all automated, but it was a real person who was really typing up the emails, and really didn't bother reading a damned thing.

I did end up getting flash working, but their "tech support" (script-reader) was entirely useless.

Once upon a time as a developer for Palm handhelds I wrote an application in C which had to print via a Bluetooth printer.
When connected by wire everything was perfect, switching to BT it kept crashing for weeks without me finding the source of the problem.
Then came the day of my companies summer party. I've been the last guy to sit in front of the PC, investigating my problem, when at about 9 PM my boss came and told me, I should grab something to eat. So I went down, drank three beer and got back to work.
At about 9:45 PM the damn wrong * was replaced by the correct & and everything was fine.

PointerIssuesSolvedByBeer++;

For fucks sake, just because you don't know anything besides JS, you don't have to constantly complain how it's "so fucked up"!

Yeah there's a lot of frameworks. So what? Python has 50+ wsgi frameworks just for server-side apps, Linux has literary hundreds of desktop environments, C++ has over 30 actively-developed UI frameworks, and let's not even get started on CMSs or game engines. And each language comes with its own dependency management or two, NPM discourages static linking & bundling dependencies until the very end, while some others only recommend dynamically linking widely-available dependencies & always bundling the remaining ones.

Software development is constantly evolving, and for most time there's no right or wrong approach. And when one approach is chosen over another, there's a reason for that. Imagine you just found a perfect library for your use case, but some idiot decided to only offer minified code with bundled jQuery? Or a different idiot made it impossible to have multiple versions of a dependency on your system without resorting to one of various third-party hacks?

Every language has a ton of various frameworks & libraries that ultimately do the same thing, every language has a bunch of design choices you probably don't understand at first, and every language was made with a purpose and the fact that you're using it proves it achieved that.

Last but not least, all devs had to learn about quirks in various languages, and they're fucking tired when someone who barely knows a language tries to act smart going "ahaha how the fuck 0.1 + 0.2 isn't 0.3".

The overhead on my JS projects is killing me. Today, I went to implement a simple feature on a project I haven't touched in a few weeks. I wasted 80% of my time on mindless setup crap.

- "Ooh, a simple new feature to implement. Let's get crackin'!"
- update 1st party lib
- ....hmm, better update node modules
- and Typescript typings while I'm at it
- "ugh yeah," revert one node module to outdated version because of that one weird proxy bug
- remove dead tsd references
- fix TS "errors" generated by new typings
- fix bug in 1st party lib
- clean up some files because the linter is nagging me
- pee
- change 6 lines of code <-- the work
- commit!

I have got a new director at work. My previous director had to retire already, the man was already feeling it and he had been on the institution for more than 35 years....I am 30, so this tells you how much the man has been there.

This new dude.....has the presence of a Caterprie (Pokemon) or an Oompa Loompa. In contrast, the previous director felt like a 4 star General (never been in the presence of a 5 star since those occurrences are world war rare) but I had respected that man so much and loved working with him. I really did loved my boss, he was stern and professional, but kind and friendly to his staff, fiercely protective, no one took advantage of I.T while he was there, he would literally fight for us and took our word before anything else. The man was, well, a true man. A true leader.

He took a chance in putting me as the head of my department, but he had faith in me, and coached me and trained me as much as he could. Had the requirement for his position not been a masters he himself told me that he would have loved to make me his successor, even when I would constantly tell him that I was scared shitless of the work he did and the amount of things he did for the institution, to me this is a very laaaaaaaaarge cowboy hat to fill (this is Texas, he wore a hat, the saying is normally "shoes to fill", but fuck it)

This new guys looks away when the other managers are speaking to him. He constantly interrupts us. He constantly tells us about how the other institution in which he was (rival might I add) does X or Y, its fucking annoying to the point that me and the other managers have a drinking game, for every time he references his old institution we drink one beer over the weekend. It is Saturday night and I am 36 in in total (this is my favorite part of it tho) and it is just annoying.

His train of thought makes no sense to me:

"This application, where did you buy it? we tried purchasing one on Y when I was still there but found none"

Me: "Well, since it was a new government mandate and had nowhere to go we had to develop it in house"

Him: "We had tried to purchase what you guys had but found no place that sold it, so why didn't you try purchasing it?"

Me:.....well, because it was brand new, purchase it from where? We also don't like dealing with vendors that manage these sorts of things because every new requirement takes them weeks to produce on very high budgets, historically, my department has only had maintenance fees for the software that we have and even those applications crap themselves all the time and they take weeks to answer back to us.

Him: So you decided to develop it in house instead? we would never do that! back at y we purchased everything our engineers never really developed anything!

Me: Well then, what is the purpose of having engineers if they are not going to actually develop an application?

Him: IF there is something out there that is better then why should you reinvent the wheel?

Me: For this one I did not reinvent the wheel, I am not talking about creating a programming language from scratch, but how does custom solutions that specifically feed the needs of the institution to be produced otherwise? The department has developers for a reason, because they have very specific needs in here that can only come from a team of developers that are in house satisfying those needs.

Him: Well our engineers never had to do that. Sure projects sometimes had to put on holds because the vendor was busy, but such is the nature of development

Me: No it is not, the nature of development is to create things, it is one thing for my team to go through bugs and software considerations, it is another for me to not provide a service because some random company is taking two weeks on a $300 dllr an hour contract to put a simple checkbox on a form. If a project fails the board is not going to care that some vendor is not doing their job, they are just going to blame me, if that is the case then I would much rather the blame be actually mine than some sucky third party "developer" also, your engineers where not even engineers, they were people with a degree that purchased things, that's it, please do not compare them to my guys or refer them as engineers in front of me, they are not.

Him: Well, maybe.

MAYBE?!! motherfucker I did not kill myself learning the ins and outs of architecture and software engineering on my own time after my fucking bachelors in C.S for your codeless background ass to tell me MAYBE. My word IS the fucking WORD here, not yours. Fuck me I really dislike this dude's management practices.

The shitty part? He is not a bad person, he is not a bad dude that is out to get us, just a simple minded moron with no place as a leader.

I know leaders, I know what a leader is, this is not one.

Worst code review experience?

Hard to pick just one, but most were in a big meeting room with 4+ other developers not related to the project and with some playing Monday-Morning-Quarterback instead of offering productive feedback.

In one code review, the department mgr reviewed the code from a third party component library.

<brings up the code on the big screen>
Mgr: "I can't read any of this, its a mix of English and something else."
Me: "Its German."
Mgr: "Then why is 'Button' in English? This code is a mess."
Me: "I'm not exactly sure how I should respond, I mean, I didn't write any of this code."
Mgr: "Yes, but you are using it, so it's fair game for a code review."
Me: "Its not really open source, but we can make requests if you found something that needs to be addressed."
Mgr: "Oh yes, all this...whatever this is..<pointing again to the German>"
Me: "I don't think they will change their code to English just so you can read it."
Mgr: "We paid good money, you bet your ass they'll change it!"
Me: "I think the components were like $30 for the unlimited license. They'll tell us to go to hell first. Is there something about my code you want to talk about?"
Mgr: "<Ugggh>...I guess not, I couldn't get past all that German. Why didn't we go with an American company? Hell, why didn't we just write these components ourselves!?"
Me: "Because you gave a directive that if we found components that saved us time, to put in a request, and you approved the request. The company is American, they probably outsourced or hired German developers. I don't know and not sure why we care."
Mgr: "Security! What if they are sending keystrokes back to their servers!"
Me: "Did you see any http or any network access?"
Mgr: "How could I? The code is in German!"
Monday-Morning-Quarterback1: "If it were me, I would have written the components myself and moved on"
Me: "No, I don't think you could for less than $30"
Monday-Morning-Quarterback2: "Meh...we get paid anyway. Just add the time to the estimate."
Mgr: "Exactly! Why do we even have developers who can't read this mess."
Me: "Oh good Lord! Did anyone review or even look at my code for this review!?"
<silence>
Mgr: "Oh...ok...I guess we're done here. Thanks everyone."
<everyone starts to leave>
Me: "Whoa!...wait a sec..am I supposed to do something?"
Mgr: "Get that company to write their code in English so we can read it. You have their number, call em'...no...wait...give me their number. You keep working, I'll take care of this personally"

In they nicest way possible, the company did tell him to go to hell.

In our morning stand up, dev was bragging about how much code he was refactoring (like over-the-top bragging) and how much the changes will improve readability (WTF does that mean?), performance, blah blah blah. Boss was very impressed, I wasn't. This morning I looked at the change history and yes, he spent nearly two solid days changing code. What code? A service that is over 10 years old, hasn't been used in over 5, mostly auto-generated code (various data contracts from third party systems). He "re-wrote" the auto-generated code, "fixed" various IDisposable implementations and other complete wastes of time. How –bleep-ing needy are people for praise and how –bleep-ing stupid are people for believing such bull-bleep? I think I should get a t-shirt made with a picture of a BS-Meter and when he starts talking, “Wait a sec, I gotta change my shirt. OK…you were saying?”

Started to do freelance with a group of 4. We got our first project for 4000$ which needs an engine to be to built in the span of 6 months. Apart from me no one contributed a single line of code since they where busy with their personal work/girls/party/laziness. I myself sometimes got help from some other people and spent some money from my own pocket and completed the project on time and delivered it. On the day when I received my money those guys came and ask for their fucking share since they involved in picking up the project. I gave them 🖕🏻🤬

Is that anything worse than this?

I work in an unrelated field, and code in my spare time as I'm just starting out. Have to pay tbe bills somehow, amirite?

So my boss has installed cameras "for security", and uses them to monitor staff on a regular basis. A couple months ago he pulled me aside with a piece of paper. My "second written warning" (next step prior to dismissal) however I haven't received any other disciplinary action.

The warning contained 10 points, all of which made reference to observances over the damn cameras.

Please keep in mind -- I have been an overachieving empleyee for over 5 years, and friends with the bosses the whole time. My boss was in my wedding party.

I don't understand people who watch football at all... Yesterday at around 4pm France time, France was playing against Denmark I think, so my boss had the brilliant idea of making some kind of party so everyone in the company would watch that. He brought beer, make up, food and so on.

Guess what, pretty much all my coworkers stopped working on their programming projects and went to watch it, I was the only one who stayed in my office and worked on my project, yeah, i'd rather finish my PHP project than watch a bunch of brainlets running after a ball.

Boss was nice enough to bring me a drink though lol

Admin comes to my desk and says:
"Hey the CEO wants to know why is the third party application having issues with our system? He wants you to keep me posted on the matter and let us know when will you fix it."
Me:
"Well I'm working on it, we're having a discussion on Slack about it and I'm quite busy right now"
Admin: "Yeah OK but when will you fix it? The CEO wants to know why didn't you reply yesterday"
Me: "Because I was on leave? You would have known if you saw my calendar"
Admin: "oh well, can you keep me updated with how things go?"
Me: "You can join the Slack channel if you want..."

What the f*CK is wrong with people? Do they even know what vacation time means? Why would the CEO ask the admin to talk to me when I'm sitting two rows from him?

[DevArt No. 7]
Title: "Saturday Night Fever"

💤 Come on! 💤
🍹 It's the weekend! 🍹
🍻 It's time to party! 🍻

[ATTENTION if you're an apple fan this rant could hurt your religion]
- I used a mc for about 12 hours, only to fix the ios version of an app in Xamarin, it was a nightmare:
- I took the only free mac available, it's the latest macbook pro with the "amazing" touch bar, mac os wash freshly reinstalled
- I switch it on, set it up and after few minutes the screen become black, I thought went in standby (the "amazing" touch bar still was working), I try to switch it on but nothing, I asked for help to mac users in office and they choose a genius solution: forced switch off and on
- Finally after took all the adapters I can start to work
- I notice that's not possible to snap 2 or more windows (without 3rd party apps)
- It's not possible to automatically enlarge the Window almost full screen without cover the bottom and top bar, there is only full screen option but it's not the best
- Inverted scroll by default, on mouse doesn't make sense (on trackpad and touch screen yes)
- Multimonitor sucks...and it doesn't recognize 2 monitors connected in chain
- It's not possible disable standby if you're on battery and you close the lid
- Too often I had to see that annoying rainbow progress also for stupid actions
- Like Windows it's not possible to install 2 software at same time
- Like Windows after some updates is required to reboot
- Finally I switched back to my lovely Dell XPS 15 with Windows 10, but I had to go back on the mac for one more fix, so I search again for the adaptor, I reconnect everything and mouse and keyboard doesn't work, after few minutes the mac reboot by himself and appear a crash report dialog...of course I send them a nice feedback
- At the end of the day, as the mac asked more than once, I install the updates... after about an hour, when we try to switch it on again, it doesn't... so once again forced switch off and on

if you want to use it for nice picture on Facebook or Instagram "just woks" ... but for serious work I'm so grateful to choose a Dell XPS 15 with Windows 10

No, actually, there was this other hackathon I attended. The hackathon itself went pretty damn good. But as for the "experience", it was full of regrets.
You see, I was working on it for ~36 hours straight with the team. It was held in a warehouse sorta building. Weird place. But I lived nearby. So I finally thought (around 2AM) fuck it I'm going home for a quick nap, and went home. When I returned around 3-4 hours later, no one was there (even other teams). They all started to come back at around 7am all drunk, sweaty, and happy. Then I found out what happened. Apparently, there was a bondage themed party going on downstairs. And around the time I left, the girls and guys came up, saw a bunch of devs, and invited them all to the party. AND I MISSED IT!!! 😭

Xmas party, held at an external location. After some drinks, a co-worker whom I was friends with started flirting up one of the waitresses. Now, he was tall, well-trained, and quite attractive for women. It was just that he also was married and had a child.

I quietly sought out that waitress and told her about that, asking her to turn him down because nothing good would come out of that. She appreciated it and stayed out of his way.

Felt kind of back-stabbing him, but at the same time, also saving his ass from himself.

Tomorrow Halloween is being celebrated in many nations as you might know. So we do in germany. Given that in Germany tomorrow is a national Holiday, the company skipped work today, with me being on call.
My On-Call time almost was over so I got ready to party (getting into my costume), not expecting any further calls.
I finished dressing up, still had some time, so I dug into coding a bit, as a costumer called. A customer from china. As I got told later on China does not celebrate Halloween in October and they do in another way.
So I set there, accepting the call, with my Camera set to autostart (Company policy).
Camera. On.
In. Costume.
As a monk.
With a bleach white face.
I was greeted by a man starring me "into the eyes". Took a good 1-3 secs til we bursted out in laugher. One of the funniest calls I had so far 😂 (and a short one, thanks China-Man)

So my boss told be about this game, try it out the next time you have an office party with other developers. It goes like this... You all sit around a table with shots ready to drink at your disposal, each person takes a turn and must simply say a noun, it can be anything. The next person must then Google the noun + '.js' added to the end, if the library exists, that person must drink a shot. Continue until everyone is sufficiently in a vegetated state. Good luck!

Fuck Apple and its review system

So, this started in december. We wanted to publsih an app, after years of development.

Submit to review, and passes on the first try. Well, what do you know. We are on manual release option, so we can release together with the android counterpart. Well yes, but someone notices that the app name is not what was aggreed (App Name instead of AppName). Okay, should be easy, submit the same app, just the name changed. If it passed once, it will pass again, right? HAH

Rejected, because the description, why we use the device’s camera is too general. Well... its the purpose of the app... but whatever, i read the guidelines, okay, its actually documented with exapmles. BUT THEN WHY THE FUCK COULDNT YOU SAY THAT ON THE FIRST UPLOAD?

Whatever, fix it, new version, accepted, ready to release just in time.

It doesindeed roll out,but of course, we notice that the app has a giant issue, but only on specific phones. None of our test phones had this problem, but those who have, essentially cannot use our program. Nasty as it is, the fix is really easy, done in 5 minutes. Upload it asap, literally nothing changed from user point of view, except now it doesnt crash on said devices. Meanwhile 1 star reviews are arriving from these users - of course with all the right. Apple should allow this patch quickly, right? HAH

THE REAL BULLSHIT COMES NOW

With only config files changed, the same binary uploaded we get rejected? What now? Lets read it. “Metadata rejected, no need to upload new binary”.... oh fine only the store page is wrong? Easy. Read the message, what went wrong. “Referencing third party content is nit permitted on the app store” meaning that no android test device should be shown. Fine, your rules. They even send a picutre of the offending element. BUT ITS NOT EVEN ON THE STORE. THATS A SCREENSHOT OF THE APP. HOW IS THAT METADATA? I ask about this, and i get a reply, from either a bot, or a person who cant speak or read english, and only pasted a sample answer, repeating the previous message. WTF. Fine, i guess you are dumb, but since they stop replying to our queries, do the only sensible thing, re-record the offending tutorial video that actually contained an android device. This is about 2 weeks, after the first try to apply a simple patch to a broken app. And still, how did it pass the review 2 times?

Whatever, reupload again, play the waiting game for a week, when the promised average wait time is 2 days, they hit us with a message, that they want to know what patent we use in our apps core functionality. WTF WHY NOW? It didnt bother you for a month, let it release ti production and now you delay a simple patch for this? We send them what they know. Aaaaand they reply: sorry we need more time to review your app. FUUUUUUCKKK YOUUU. You are reviewing a PATCH with close to zero functional change!!! Then, this shit goes on, every week we ask about an ETA, always asking for patience... at the end it took another 3 weeks... so december 15 to jan 21 in total...

FOR. A. SINGLE. FUCKING. PATCH

Bottom line is what is infurating, apple cares that there is an android device in the tutorial video, but they dont care that a significant percentage of our users simply cannot use the app.

Im done

My first try at greentext.
>Be me
>18y.o recently recruted to a university
>1 month before moving to the university
>Be alone with his computer && electronics hobbys
>My town sucks
>Go on first year student integration camp
>Yay im going to meet a lot of people like me!
>Camp near the lake, 100km from home
>Day 1/7
>Moved my stuff to a house
>I dont know anybody
>Meet 3 friends who are going to live with me
>One of them is great, i like him, he likes to code, uses mac and iphone (it suffices for his needs, he understand everybody else who thinks otherwise)
>Two of them are pro party guys / alcohol vaccums
>Fucking pricks with their boombox
>99% of students are just there to drink a FUCKING LOT
>WTF.jpg
>Day 5/7
>I had been drunk only once at the camp and i havent drunk since because of AlcoholAfterEffects®
>Have a sad moment due to me wasting my time and money here.
>Totaly wasted my time... and found nobody like me
>After that day i meet 2 programers
>I have taught them OOP
>Had a great time
>Night game!
>Bizarre student party rituals
>Use my torch i made literary 8h before the camp had started
>Torch is made from pvc pipe, 9v battery, chinesium buck converter, old led module, switch
>Find the guy with the HUGE TORCH
>Wow. Is it the 100W homemade floodlight?
>Conversation about our constructions
>Both sides were looking for a friend with similar hobbies
>Exchange the contacts
>Hopefuly meet thogether and make few projects in the future
>Present time
>Got 3 friends in one day
>But still dosent understand the huge amount of alcohol nearly everyone is drinking

4 o'clock on a Friday and daughters birthday party tonight...

Not this time deployment... you're gonna have to wait until Monday.

Got this rude ass email from an idiot client who thinks I'm solely responsible for figuring out how to link his 3rd party email/newsletter sign up form to his new website without any access to the account. He "doesn't have the time to research". Newsflash asshat, I'm not responsible for your 3rd party shit. Go contact their support. 🙄😑

Admin Access

Have you ever been in a position where you become the de-facto person who works with a certain tool, but are denied full admin access to that tool for no real reason?

Two years ago I was put on the Observability squad and quickly discovered it was my thing, implementing tracking and running queries on this third-party tool, building custom stuff to monitor our client-side successes and failures.

About a year ago I hit the point where if you asked anyone "Who is the go-to person for help/questions/queries/etc. for this tool", the answer was just me lol. It was nice to have that solid and clear role, but a year later, that's still the case, and I'm still not an admin on this platform. I've asked, in an extremely professional way armed with some pretty good reasons, but every time I'm given some lame non-answer that amounts to No.

As far as I'm aware, I'm the only dev on our team at all who uses custom/beta features on this site, but every time I want to use them I have to go find an admin and ask for an individual permission. Every time. At the end of 2020 it was happening once a month and it was so demoralizing hitting up people who never even log into this site to ask them to go out of their way to give me a new single permission.

People reach out to me frequently to request things I don't have the permissions to do, assuming I'm one of the 64 admins, but I have to DM someone else to actually do the thing.

At this point it feels very much like having to tug on the sleeve of a person taller than me to get what I need, and I'm out of ways to convince myself this isn't demoralizing. I know this is a pretty common thing in large companies, meaningless permissions protocols, and maybe it's because I came from IT originally that it's especially irritating. In IT you have admin access to everything and somehow nobody gets hurt lol-- It still blows my mind that software devs who make significantly more money and are considered "higher up" the chain (which i think is dumb btw) are given less trust when it comes to permissions.

Has anyone figured out a trick that works to convince someone to grant you access when you're getting stonewalled? Or maybe a story of this happening to you to distract me from my frustration?

Fuck you you fucking fuck, why would you change an api without any notification?

Background: built an app for a customer, it needs to fetch data frlman external api, and save it to a db.
Customer called: it's broken what did you do?!?
Me: I'll look into it.

Turned out the third party just changed their api... Guess I should implenent some kind of notification, if no messages come in for some time...

So I just got let go because there was not enough work to keep me full time. Yet my manager was farming out dev work to a 3rd party developer... Fml

!dev

T-32min

Long story short:
I dont have many friends, I'm isolated in my home, for the first time in 25 years I actually felt like my birthday is worth celebrating but Im alone because corona.

Therefore I'd like to ask you to drink a glass of your good (or other) booze at 23:00UTC (Which is midnight here) to celebrate the first bday party I never had and to celebrate DevRant as a great community and each of you, the members.

I am fuming!!! I have never before in my entire life been more pissed.

When you are working you are a** off on a weekend to finish a project in half the time and have a sh**ty, unstable third party API you have to integrate with return responses like this. I present to you the world's most horrific API.

Feel like punching through the monitor screen. What the f**k is this! 200 and ERROR?

As I write this rant I have Grammarly correcting my grammar. Thanks, Grammarly!!!! I am having an amazing weekend. -_- Cheers my fellow devs!

I've recently received another invitation to Google's Foobar challenges.

A while ago someone here on devRant (which I believe works at Google, and whose support I deeply appreciate) sent me a couple of links to it too. Unfortunately back then I didn't take the time to learn the programming languages (Python or Java) that Google requires for these challenges. This time I'm putting everything on Python, as it's the easiest language to learn when coming from Bash.

But at the end of the day.. I am a sysadmin, not a developer. I don't know a single thing about either of these languages. Yet I can't take these challenges as the sysadmin I am. Instead, I have to learn a new language which chances are I'll never need again outside of some HR dickhead's interview with lateral thinking questions and whiteboard programming, probably prohibited from using Google search like every sane programmer and/or sysadmin would for practical challenges that actually occur in real life.

I don't want to do that. Google is a once in a lifetime opportunity, I get that. Many people would probably even steal that foobar link from me if they could. But I don't think that for me it's the right thing to do. Google has made a serious difference by actually challenging developers with practical scenarios, and that's vastly superior to whatever a HR person at any other company could cobble together for an interview. But there's one thing that they don't seem to realize. A company like Google consists of more than just developers. Not only that, it probably consists - even within their developer circles - of more than just Python and Java developers. If any company would know about languages that are more optimized such as C, it would be Google that has to leverage this performance in order to be able to deliver their services.

I'll be frank here. Foobar has its own issues that I don't like. But if Google were a nice company, I'd go for it all the way nonetheless - after all, they are arguably the single biggest tech company in the world, and the tech industry itself is one of the biggest ones in the world nowadays. It's safe to say that there's likely no opportunity like working at Google. But I don't think it's the right thing. Even if I did know Python or Java... Even if I did. I don't like Google's business decisions.

I've recently flashed my OnePlus 6T with LineageOS. It's now completely Google-free, except for a stock Yalp account (that I'm too afraid to replace with my actual Google account because oh dear, third-party app stores, oh dear that could damage our business and has to be made highly illegal!1!). My contacts on that phone are are all gone. They're all stored on a Google server somewhere (except for some like @linuxxx' that I consciously stored on device storage and thus lost a while back), waiting for me to log back in and sync them back. I've never asked for this. If Google explicitly told me that they'd sync all my contacts to my Google account and offer feasible alternatives, I'd probably given more priority to building a CalDAV and CardDAV server of my own. Because I do have the skills and desire to maintain that myself. I don't want Google to do this for me.

Move fast and break things. I've even got a special Termux script on my home screen, aptly named Unfuck-Google-Play. Every other day I have to use it. Google Search. When I open it on my Nexus 6P, which was Google's foray into hardware and in which they failed quite spectacularly - I've even almost bent and killed it tonight, after cursing at that piece of shit every goddamn day - the Google app opens, I type some text into it.. and then it just jumps back to the beginning of whatever I was typing. A preloader of sorts. The app is a fucking web page parser, or heck probably even just an API parser. How does that in any way justify such shitty preloaders? How does that in any way justify such crappy performance on anything but the most recent flagships? I could go on about this all day... I used to run modern Linux on a 15 year old laptop, smoothly. So don't you Google tell me that a - probably trillion dollar - company can't do that shit right. When there's (commercialized) community projects like DuckDuckGo that do things a million times better than you do - yet they can't compete with you due to your shit being preloaded on every phone and tablet and impossible to remove without rooting - that you Google can't do that and a lot more. You've got fucking Google Assistant for fucks sake! Yet you can't make a decent search app - the goddamn thing that your company started with in the first place!?

I'm sorry. I'd love to work at Google and taste the diversity that this company has to offer. But there's *a lot* wrong with it at the business end too. That is something that - in that state - I don't think I want to contribute to, despite it being pretty much a lottery ticket that I've been fortunate enough to draw twice.

Maybe I should just start my own company.

You are all invited to the SPI-Party!!!!

*crying.... this is not my job, i am less than a noob around here 😭😭*

Java's shitshow, or why I'll never like java, the language:

The fact that you cannot read the length of an iterable at any point in time without iterating through it. Did I just read this from DB? Yes, I did. Do I know how many items I read? No. Why? Because fuck the designers of this shit language and all its shitty third-party libraries. 😠😠😠

I just tried to sign up to Instagram. I made a big mistake.

First up with Facebook related stuff is data. Data, data and more data. Initially when you sign up (with a new account, not login with Facebook) you're asked your real name, email address and phone number. And finally the username you'd like to have on the service. I gave them a phone number that I actually own, that is in my iPhone, my daily driver right now (and yes I have 3 Androids which all run custom ROMs, hold your keyboards). The email address is a usual for me, instagram at my domain. I am a postmaster after all, and my mail server is a catch-all one. For a setup like that, this is perfectly reasonable. And here it's no different, devrant at my domain. On Facebook even, I use fb at my domain. I'm sure you're starting to see a pattern here. And on Facebook the username, real name and email domain are actually the same.

So I signed up, with - as far as I'm aware - perfectly valid data. I submitted the data and was told that someone at Instagram will review the data within 24 hours. That's already pretty dystopian to me. It is now how you block bots. It is not how Facebook does it either, at least since last time I checked. But whatever. You'd imagine that regardless of the result, they'd let you know. Cool, you're in, or sorry, you're rejected and here's why. Nope.

Fast-forward to today when I recalled that I wanted to sign up to Instagram to see my girlfriend's pictures. So I opened Chromium again that I already use only for the rancid Facebook shit.. and it was rejected. Apparently the mere act of signing up is a Terms of Service violation. I have read them. I do not know which section I have violated with the heinous act of signing up. But I do have a hunch.

Many times now have I been told by ignorant organizations that I would be "stealing" their intellectual property, or business assets or whatever, just because I sent them an email from their name on my domain. It is fucking retarded. That is MY domain, not yours. Learn how email works before you go educate a postmaster. Always funny to tell them how that works. But I think that in this case, that is what happened.

So I appealed it, using a random link to something on Instagram's help section from a third-party blog. You know it's good when the third-party random blog is better. But I found the form and filled it in. Same shit all over again for info, prefilling be damned I guess. Minor convenience though, whatever.

I get sent an email in German, because apparently browsing through a VPS in Germany acting as a VPN means you're German. Whatever... After translating it, I found that it asks me to upload a picture of myself, holding a paper in my hands, on which I would have a confirmation code, my username, and my email address.. all hand-written. It must not be too dark, it must be clear, it must be in JPEG.. look, I just wanted to fucking sign up.

I sent them an email back asking them to fix all of this. While I was writing it and this rant, I thought to myself that they can shove that piece of paper up their ass. In fact I would gladly do it for them.

Long story short, do not use Instagram. And one final thing I have gripes with every time. You are not being told all the data you'll have to present from the get-go. You're not being told the process. Initially I thought it'd just be email, phone, username, and real name. Once signed up (instantly, not within 24 hours!) I would start setting up my account and adding a profile picture. The right way to ask for a picture of me! And just do it at my own pace, as I please.

And for God's sake, tackle abuse when it actually happens. You'll find out who's a bot and who isn't by their usage patterns soon enough. Do not do any of this at sign-up. Or hell, use a CAPTCHA or whatever, I don't fucking care. There's so many millions of ways to skin this cat.

Facebook and especially Instagram. Both of them are fucking retarded.

The headset rule. If put on, project managers, the pope and everyone should stay away the developers. If put on one ear, it is allowed to disturb if it's important. Headset off, party time.

I was reading the post made by another ranter in which he was basically asked to lower the complexity of an automation script he wrote in place of something everyone else could understand. Another dev commented that more than likely it had to do with the company being worried that ranter_1 would leave and there would be no one capable of maintaining the code.

I understood this completely from both perspectives. It makes me worry how real this sometimes is. We don't get to implement X tech stack because people are worried that no one would be able to maintain Y project in the event of someone leaving. But fuck man, sometimes one wants to expand more and do things differently.

At work I came to find out that the main reason why the entirety of our stack is built in PHP is because the first dev hired into the web tech department(which is only about 12 years old in my institution) only knew PHP. The other part that deals with Java is due to some extensions to some third party applications that we have, Java knowledge (more specifically Spring and Grails) is used for those, the rest is mostly PHP. And while I LOVE PHP and don't really have anything against the language I really wonder what would it be of the institution had we've had a developer with a more....esoteric taste. Clojure, Elixir, Haskell, F# and many others. These are languages and tech stacks that bring such a forward way of thinking into the way we build things.

On the other hand, I understand if the talent pool for each of these stacks is somewhat hard to come up with, but if we don't push for certain items then they will never grow.

The other week I got scolded by the lead dev from the web tech department for using Clojure to create the demo of an application. He said that the project will most likely fall into his hands and he does not know the stack. I calmly mentioned that I would gladly take care of it if given the opportunity as well as to explain to him how the code works and provide training to everyone for it :D I also (in all of my greatness) built the same program for him in PHP. Now, I outrank him :P so the scold bounced out of the window, plus he is a friend, but the fact remains that we reached the situation in which the performance as well as the benefits of one stack were shadowed by the fact that it holds a more esoteric place in the development community.

In the end I am happy to provide the PHP codebase to him. The head of the department + my boss were already impressed with the fact that I was able to build the product in a small amount of time using a potent tech stack, they know where my abilities are and what I can do. That to me was all that matters, even if the project gets shelved, the fact that I was able to use it at work for something means a lot to me.

That and I got permission to use it for the things that will happen with my new department + the collective interest of everyone in paying me to give support even if I ever leave the institution.

Win.

I've been using microsoft dev stack for as long as i remember. Since I picked up C#/.NET in 2002 I haven't looked back. I got spoiled by things like type safety, generics, LINQ and its functional twist on C#, await/async, and Visual Studio, the best IDE one could ask for.

Over the past few years though, I've seen the rise of many competing open source stacks that get many things right, e.g. command line tooling, package management, CI, CD, containerization, and Linux friendliness. In general many of those frameworks are more Mac friendly than Windows. Microsoft started sobering up to this fact and started open sourcing its frameworks and tools, and generally being more Mac/Linux friendly, but I think that, first, it's a bit too late, and second, it's not mature yet; not even comparable to what you get on VS + Windows.

More recently I switched jobs and I'm mainly using Mac, Python, and some Java. I've also used node in a couple of small projects. My feeling: even though I may be resisting change, I genuinely feel that C# is a better designed language than Java, and I feel that static type languages are far superior to dynamic ones, especially on large projects with large number of developers. I get that dynamic languages gives you a productivity boost, and they make you feel liberated, but most of the time I feel that this productivity is lost when you have to compensate for type safety with more unit tests that would not be necessary in a static type language, also you tend to get subtle bugs that are only manifested at runtime.

So I'm really torn: enjoy world class development platform and language, but sacrifice large ecosystem of open source tools and practices that get the devops culture; or be content with less polished frameworks/languages but much larger community that gets how apps should be built, deployed, monitored, etc.

Damn you Microsoft for coming late to the open source party.

Few years ago a girl from our HR was hitting on my co-worker. She was asking all kinds of personal and professional favours just so he would come by her place, etc. One time she asked him to send her few C/C++ questions that she could use to thin the crowd of potential candidates before inviting them for the formal interview that he'd conduct later on. Obviously she wouldn't know if the answer is good or not but hell with it, he was ready to storm that pink fortress! So he came up with some mind twisters. She left two days later before he even reached the drawbridge. Sad.

So about six months ago he got fed up with some bullshit and left the company. Yesterday we had dinner. He was interviewing for quite some time being picky about which offer to accept and, surprisingly, during his last interview he got asked very familiar set of questions. He answered each. Then he couldn't resist and asked if the girl works there. The guy confirmed and, without a warning, called her. As if it wasn't awkward enough this is how I was told the conversation went:

- "Joan! You won't guess who I've got here! Your very good friend, Peter! Nope. Yeah, that one - how did you kn... Uh-huh. Oh? Yeah. Are you sure? I mean, I wouldn't. Deal!"

Then he turned out to Peter and said:

- "You know what? I wasn't going to hire you for shit because in my opinion your knowledge on the subject matter, how to put that gently, sucks ass... But apparently Joan here says you're professional and can handle everything we'll be able to throw at you. So when can you start?"

Needless to say he took the job. The fortress fell soon after and he wanted to meet to ask if I'm coming for the bachelor party. I'm ordering t-shirts with "batch mode off" in monospace.

Fuck. I can't take this shit anymore.

There was a project where we had to implement third-party system for government agency processes management. For some reason, probably because my work is cheap for my boss, the task was assigned to me. Just as a reminder, I'm a .NET Dev. Zero experience in server management. Zero experience in external services implementation.

Anyway, system producent, also an government agency, got angry, becasue they can only earn money on implementation. They have to give the software to other agencies for free. Because of that I've got client program, incomplete documentation and broken scripts for database creation. It took me 2 months to get it all to work but at the end client was happy, my boss got paid and I've got 500 PLN (~130 USD) bonus.

Everything was fine for a while, but after a month server has started freezing everyday, some time before 7 am. The only way I found to make it work again was to restore snapshot made everyday at 10 pm. For a month I was waking up earlier and restored snapshot, and after that my boss took it upon himself. I tried few times to find a bug and fix it, but to no effect. Even person with much more experience with it tried to help but also couldn't find anything.

My solution? Copy all the data and configuration, create new machine, copy everything and check if the problem persists. If not, kill old server. Client won't even notice. But nooooooooo... It would cost my boss a bit of money and I'd need to work on it and he can't let it be, because I'm the only developer working on his flagship product. He'd rather wake up everyday and restore snapshot. Okay, as you wish.

And today, finally, everything went downhill. Snapshot wasn't created, server froze, backup can't be created. Nothing can be done. Client is furious, because they have had reported this problem and a few times restoration was too late and they couldn't work. No one knows how to fix it, I'm not working today (I'm still studying and am available only 2 days) and situation is really shitty.

BUT SURE. ITS BETTER TO RESTORE SERVER EVERYDAY THAN JUST FUCKING FIX IT.

Oh, also, there's no staging or any other real backup. We have snapshots for each day and that's that. Boss' order. Why do I even care...

Worst collaboration experience story?

I was not directly involved, it was a Delphi -> C# conversion of our customer returns application.

The dev manager was out to prove waterfall was the only development methodology that could make convert the monolith app to a lean, multi-tier, enterprise-worthy application.

Starting out with a team of 7 (3 devs, 2 dbas, team mgr, and the dev department mgr), they spent around 3 months designing, meetings, and more meetings. Armed with 50+ page specification Word document (not counting the countless Visio workflow diagrams and Microsoft Project timeline/ghantt charts), the team was ready to start coding.
The database design, workflow, and UI design (using Visio), was well done/thought out, but problems started on day one.
- Team mgr and Dev mgr split up the 3 devs, 1 dev wrote the database access library tier, 1 wrote the service tier, the other dev wrote the UI (I'll add this was the dev's first experience with WPF).
- Per the specification, all the layers wouldn't be integrated until all of them met the standards (unit tested, free from errors from VS's code analyzer, etc)
- By the time the devs where ready to code, the DBAs were already tasked with other projects, so the Returns app was prioritized to "when we get around to it"

Fast forward 6 months later, all the devs were 'done' coding, having very little/no communication with one another, then the integration. The service and database layers assumed different design patterns and different database relationships and the UI layer required functionality neither layers anticipated (ex. multi-users and the service maintaining some sort of state between them).

Those issues took about a month to work out, then the app began beta testing with real end users. App didn't make it 10 minutes before users gave up. Numerous UI logic errors, runtime errors, and overall app stability. Because the UI was so bad, the dev mgr brought in one of the web developers (she was pretty good at UI design). You might guess how useful someone is being dropped in on complex project , months after-the-fact and being told "Fix it!".

Couple of months of UI re-design and many other changes, the app was ready for beta testing.

In the mean time, the company hired a new customer service manager. When he saw the application, he rejected the app because he re-designed the entire returns process to be more efficient. The application UI was written to the exact step-by-step old returns process with little/no deviation.

With a tremendous amount of push-back (TL;DR), the dev mgr promised to change the app, but only after it was deployed into production (using "we can fix it later" excuse).

Still plagued with numerous bugs, the app was finally deployed. In attempts to save face, there was a company-wide party to celebrate the 'death' of the "old Delphi returns app" and the birth of the new. Cake, drinks, certificates of achievements for the devs, etc.

By the end of the project, the devs hated each other. Finger pointing, petty squabbles, out-right "FU!"s across the cube walls, etc. All the team members were re-assigned to other teams to separate them, leaving a single new hire to fix all the issues.

I was supporting a legacy CRM app which front end used Visual Basic 6 and almost the entire business logic was written on SQL store procedures.

A "feature" of the product was the open code, anyone with admin access could modify forms, code and store procedures.

We also sold "official" (and expensive) consulting services to modify the code.

A long time customer owned this thing and it was heavily customized. They had hired us to change something, hired a third party to make other changes and decided to modify some stuff themselves because, why not?

Suddenly they came to product support asking to fix a bug. The problem happened on a non customized form.

After reviewing, I realized the form used several of the modified store procedures in the business layer. I tried saying we don't support custom code but my boss was being pushed and said "look into it"

All 3 parties denied responsibility and said their changes were NOT the problem (of course). Neither of them commented or documented their changes.

The customer started to threaten to sue us.

I spent 5 full days following every field on the form through the nested and recurrent SQL store procedures and turns out it was a very simple error. A failed insert statement.

I was puzzled of why the thing didn't throw any error even while debugging. Turns out in SQL 2003 (this was a while ago) someone used a print line statement and SQL stopped throwing errors to the console. I can only assume "printing" in SQL empties the buffered error which would be shown in the console.

I removed the print statement and the error showed up, we fixed it and didn't get sued
:)

i rant that i live in a dictatorship with an idiot president who bans whatsapp and facebook to prevent protests (in reaction to having arrested opposition party members of parliament), and github (yes, github) to prevent the spread of a minister's leaked e-mails. now the government is seriously considering shutting down vpn services to prevent by-passing the bans.

on the other hand, it's a nice time and place to continue ms studies on ad-hoc networks - that is of course if i can avoid being arrested or killed before i even start my thesis.

So Patanjali(aka Ramdev Baba trying to sell you even a fucking underwear as ayurvedic and locally made) released their chat application "Kimbho" and was taken down within 24 hours because of major security flaws.

Some obvious ironies I would like to point out here.

1. Coming up with a chat application with gaping security flaws at this stage when privacy related discussions are happening at every nook and corner, worst move ever.

2. There are elections in 2019 and 1 year would be the right amount of time to gather data on public and start targetting and influencing people. It shouldn't be so obvious and everyone knows which political party Patanjali leans towards.

3. You are promoting an app citing Make In India initiative. You are the biggest Indian based FMCG operating in India, courtesy exploiting nationalist sentiments. Whatever you aim of doing, at least invest a decent amount of money in hiring good developers and designers. If not anything get a content writer who will write you an original description of your app for as low as ₹1000.

4. Promoting a competitor of whatsapp on whatsapp is a brilliant move. Give that marketting fellow a big raise.

5. Replacing the phone icon with a shankh is not innovation. Also, everyone knows about spam farms in Bangladesh and many places in India. So boasting about 1.5 lakh downloads in less than an hour only speaks more about your ignorance and lack of technical knowledge.

6. If you really are promoting "swadeshi app", why are you offering logging in through facebook? I mean even a blind person can clearly see your agenda here.

7. Hike is a messaging app made in India and they are here since long and still it are nowhere near the usage of whatsapp. Selling shit in the name of Make in India is not cool and its high time Patanjali realises this. But then again, it is their only marketting strategy because how else can you sell something as gross as cow urine and that too people buying it voluntarily.

8. If this stunt was carried out to be in the news, well played. You are getting a good amount of publicity, but this time a bad publicity will do more harm than good. People are calling out your bluff and you will get to see the results.

Mr. Baba Ramdev, fraud karo, itna blatant mat karo. India ki public sentimental hai chutiya nahi.

Last year at the the Xmas party CEO slips in that he wants the app done by end of February, I freak because I thought he meant both iOS and Android (only dev working on both :/), anyways he wanted specifics for locking out specific people that haven't paid for some in-house training (like in app persons just not in the app lol) it required web development which I'm horrible at, I spend a whole week and managed to scrape together the right functions to do a user lock out, pretty all things considering.

A couple weeks before deadline I'm done :D, I've done a lot of testing, some in-house user testing, changes made all bugs visually possible are fixed.

Now I've been sitting here waiting, it's an iOS app that is currently completed aside from some legal work, which I kept going to boss "hey, we need that disclaimer and privacy policy", he becomes busy for the next few weeks, pester him more, pester another co-worker, only a week ago did they contact a lawyer...

I'm here stuck waiting at a roadblock, developing the Android app sure but for their iOS app that they want released first, I'm stuck on hold, so annoyed, it's not like I can just put on a lawyer hat and just right some shit that says don't use x unless you agree and such.

So annoying, for about 2 weeks I just played games on my phone, I was not expecting to waste that much time lol, I was really expecting the legal stuff to be ready.

Just a side note co-worker and boss that needed to get this legal stuff knew I needed to get this done, since I mentioned it leading up to my completion.

I don't think it'd take too long with Apple when it comes to the review, it's just an update but I wouldn't put my faith in that as an answer. Just hate that I'm on hold, was wanting to finish this app and apply for a new job (nothing against the company more so because I want to go a company where I could get a but of mentoring). But I sit here waiting, working on the Android app, it'd be sad if finish the Android app before their lawyers get back to me with the legal stuff, though Android is a lot easier for me (I did iOS after completing majority of the features they wanted on Android because I was more comfortable working on it).

:/ What a drag

1. high severity production incident was asked to look into at the end of the day.
2. needed fix in ui.
3. fixed and deployed in 1 hour.
4. issue remained. debugging began.
5. gave up at 1 AM and went to sleep.
6. woke up at 6 and after debugging for 2 hours, identified to be a back end issue.
7. worked with back end team for the fix, and 6 hours and 3 deployments later, it worked.
8. third party vendor reported they are still not receiving one parameter from us.
9. back end team realised they forgot to ask ui to send another parameter.
10. added the parameter in ui, redeployed ui.
11. build and deployment tool broke down. got it fixed. delay of 1.5 hours.
12. finally things are in place. total time 26 hours.

13. found half bottle of vodka, leftover from last weekend. *Priceless*

Enough coding today for TequilaDuck, time to party 🎉🍻

Have you encountered projects that were beyond saving?

Been freelancing for a client via agency for the past year. In the beginning the deal was to maintain identity verification sdk for android maybe 10-15 hours a month or so. Their flow consisted of around 25-30 screens, so I took it thinking it was easy. Boy I was wrong.

Codebase was and still is a complete spaghetti, backend weird and overcomplicated and impossible to talk with someone in backend. Had to reverse engineer their complicated flows many times just to make a small change on the app. There also are lots of issues with capturing/sending camera recordings especially on older devices. The fact that Im the only dev maintaining this doesnt help either.

First few months it was just maintenance, later some small features and soon it become a 40 hour a month gig. I was able to deal with it but then management changed, they started micromanaging me heavily and now they want me to do 60-70 hours a month. Also they asked to implement some unnecessarily complicated features and to be honest without refactoring most of the codebase I cant even begin to think of how to implement them.

Also workload in my main job increased. Started sacrificing my evenings, weekends and basically my wellbeing to work on their product. Tried to relax but then I realized Im just spending my freetime thinking about their project all of the time. Best part is that last few updates fucked up the whole flow and I dont even understand where the problem is anymore: backend, 3rd party integration issues or something else that I did.

Last friday told them that my availability changed and Im quitting. Told them that Im gonna provide support till the end of the month but no big features. Just spent a full shift in my main job and another full shift working on their product, trying to untagle their spaghetti.. Im totally lost and burned out. Meanwhile stupid manager is asking why "simple" stuff according to him is taking too long.

I should receive my last payment from agency this week, also asked them to send it to me earlier but no answer so far. At this point Im so burned out that I dont care anymore about the last payment, even if client complains that everything is broken and doesnt want to pay me. Project is beyond fucked and that SDK as well as their backend is a ticking time bomb. Im done.

Me: why are we paying for OCR when the API offers both json and pdf format for the data?
Manager: because we need to have the data in a PDF format for reporting to this 3rd party
Me: sure, but can we not just request both json and PDF from the vendor (it’s the same data). send the json for the automated workflow (save time, money and get better accuracy) and send the PDF to the 3rd party?
Manager: we made a commercial decision to use PDF, so we will use PDF as the format.
Me: but ...

Voting feels like shit.

Seriously. Why? Because I have to vote for parties and representatives that might have one interest in common with me but go against my points of view almost all of the time. "We'll introduce a freedom of information act and legalize weed for better drug policy and youth protection!" -- WOW Great I'll vote for yo .. " ...and we'll also come to your home kill your dog, rape your family and shit in your back yard." -- oh f*** WHY? why do I have to live in a system were I am constantly forced to trade shit for even worse shit? Why can't I vote for policies or at least some kind of 'single' - issue representative?

I know that solving this problem is not easy and I do not claim to have the magical solution. "Not voting is even worse" sure but I am getting so fucking tired of it. It doesn't feel like progression and it sure as hell does not feel like it matters because in the end of the day you are just voting for the party that's at least going to use lube when raping you. I hate these ad hominem politics where we don't discuss the ideas but the people who represent them. I honestly don't give a fuck about who you are, if you're gay, married, or are left-wing, right-wing, conservative or liberal, in the end its about finding a good solution for everyone and not about the people implementing it. I don't care about politicians private lifes or worldviews (in terms of ideals, morals, religion etc.) , I care about finding the solutions to problems and having a wide array of opinions in order to discuss ideas and to find a valid and good way to go forward. "you can't agree with that person at all, because he's evil", yeah you know what? I don't care. It's about the ideas, arguments, discussions and solutions, not about the people who discuss them.

"I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I
screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me...
Or feels threatened by me...
Or thinks I'm a smart ass...
Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...
Damn kid. All he does is play games. They're all alike."

I've promised to do the Mozilla rant about the whole meritocracy thing a few days ago.. well, this is that. Along with some other stuff along the way. Haven't ranted for a couple of days man, shit happened! But losing 6 days that could've been spent on finishing my power supply project.. to a stupid cold, it got a little bit on my nerves, so that's what I've been working on for the time being. Hopefully I'll be able to finish it up in a couple of days.

1. COCKtail party thingy

Turns out that there's this conference in Brussels in a couple of days about the whole Article 13 copyright stuff. I've been letting a mail to the MEP's about it mature on my systems for a while now.. well, maturing or procrastinating, you be the judge 😛
Now I'm glad that I waited with that though. It's mostly a developer-centric insight into how the directive would be a horrible idea.. think AI, issues with context recognition, Tom Scott's video on Penistone and Scunthorpe etc etc. But maybe I can include some stuff from the event afterwards.
Also, if you're coming to the conference too, do let me know! Little devRant meet while we're at it, it'd be fucking great! I'll try to remember to bring my Christmas ducks, they've got these cute little Santa hats 😋

(P.S.: about the whole COCKtail, I saw the email while drunk and during registration I had to choose an email address.. I figured, feminazis are doing such a great job at going out of their way to find offense in everything, I figured that I'd make their job a little bit easier by sending a COCK bomb in my registration mail address, in the hopes that it finds its way to one of them.. evil, I know XD)

2. The whole feminazi stuff at Mozilla

So Mozilla hates meritocracy now? I've been wanting to rant about the big bad meritocracy for a while now. Thank you Mozilla for giving me an incentive to actually do it!

Meritocracy, feminazis think it's bad because it's about power relationships and discrimination, right? But what if I told you that that is exactly what makes great software great. Good code, good merit, is what's welcomed in software development.. or at least it should be. Because it's a job of fucking knowledge, experience, and quality! Also, meritocracy is a great thing because nobody cares if you're a professional developer in a suit, getting paid to work on a piece of OSS, or a homegamer neonazi who's coding shit in their underwear while wanking to child porn.. nobody fucking cares. If your code, your merit, is good, contribute ahead! Super inclusive, yet apparently bad because bad code is excluded to ensure the health of the project.

So what is the alternative to the big bad meritocracy? Inclusion (or as it's looked like in practice, more like exclusion) based on gender/sex, political orientation, things like that. But not actual fucking merit, the ability to write good code. How the fuck is politics and gender going to be any good at all to an inherently meritocratic craft?! Oh but yeah, it's great for inclusion. It's like females in tech. Artificial growth is just a matter of growth numbers and the only folks who like it are fucking HR and wanketeering cunts, and feminazis. Merit, that's what matters!! And have you ever considered that females are generally not interested in technology? Or for that matter, where's our inclusion movement for men in healthcare?! Gender equality my ass.

That's just my two cents on it of course. Meritocracy shouldn't be abandoned in tech. And even if it's just a matter of calling it something else. How the fuck is it a good idea to not call a pot a fucking pot just because someone might take offense at it?! It's meritocracy, call it fucking meritocracy!!! And while we're at it, call a master a fucking master and a slave a fucking slave!

Power supply explosive party.
First time I saw two capacitors explode,hit the fan, melt the fan, get stuck there from the generated heat and blow every thing

Not directly a dev related rant but needed to write it somewhere. (Also, long long rant, be aware).

I am currently working on a project for a client who is going to launch a new product. He wants us to create the brand and choose the logo, colours, communication... BUT before everything we have to deliver the website design.

We told him several times that the design has to be created AFTER the brand is created, however, he insisted. Then, we offered him to develop the UX/UI patterns but the colors and a few more things would be delivered after, so his 3rd party dev could make the job.

After working on the first draft, we sent it to him and he refused it, calling it "poor designed". We insisted that it was a draft for the UI which he ignored.

He asked for another design by taking as example a website from another (unrelated) company. We worked for another 2 days and delivered a more finished design, which he automatically refused again.

He called us to his office in order to provide us exactly what he wanted in every part of the site. He only gave us the home page and the product page, and ordered us to work through the weekend (Which we didn't as he is being quite petty about everything and bullying us).

We delivered this third draft and he made changes, sometimes going back to things that he refused before.

Now his 3rd party dev has things to work, but he called yesterday today telling us that the rest of the site must be before friday, date in which we will be showing him how the brand will be and what we have created. He didn't care about and demanded the designs.

I helped the designer to develop the designs of the website as I can work in Photoshop (I am mostly front web developer but can design UI) but he is now busy working on the brand and I had to make ALL the remaining designs, knowing that the client will reject them as soon as they are sent to him, since he hasn't given us any indication on how and what he wants.

We developers sometimes make futile work which will be used a few days or months or in order to provide demos, however, the time I wasted today made me get behind other deadlines, which makes me feel bad for not being able to accomplish them.

So I wrote an application that loads data from a 3rd party API. It allows the user to enter a record locator number and pull it up. By design, the value can be a partial match and it will pull up the record still.

The first API call I make only took 2-3 seconds, so I didn't see an issue as it's loading most of the data the app needs. I keep the filters/fields as they are and move on.

Fast forward 6 months. The user is complaining that the records are taking 30-45 seconds to load. Sure enough, load times are terrible. I've made lots of changes to what fields I'm loading through the API, and I'm calling several additional APIs, so I start pulling pieces of code out to see if anything improves. They all barely make any difference--still 30+ second load times. I end up removing everything except the first API call I developed that was taking 2-3 seconds before. Still taking 30+ seconds.

The 3rd party API allows you to filter using "starts with" or "contains". I used "contains" initially and had no issue, but I decided to try "starts with" since it should fit most use cases.

Load time is less than one second. I add back everything else. Load time is just over a second.

It seems that the 3rd party updated the API and multiplied load times by 10 when using that particular filter. I spent almost an hour on this since the platform doesn't support performance or debugging tools very well, and it all came down to a one line fix.

That moment when...

You’re supposed to be doing work.
You have a deadline.
It’s your sister’s baby shower and you promised to help.
Sis comes over every day to hang with family.

I’ve still not managed to get any work done today, video games and hanging and baking have had my time 🤣

I was up from 12-1 making jelly shots from scratch because my mum wanted blue ones and couldn’t find any blue jelly 😂

They’re bubblegum and for my first attempt I think they look pretty sick.

Will have to find out whether they set in the morning 🙈

Read the following in Morgan Freeman’s voice.

Okay everyone sit on down and get ready for story time. There once was a workspace that was a pain in the ass to setup. It often would take an entire day even for the most experienced devs on the team...for it was a workspace perched atop a swamp of shit that would require a whole year to refactor into something that isn’t shit.

It was inherited, passed down, stepped in and scrapped from the boot soles of every programmer that ever touched it. It was an amalgam of old, new, and third party components with a class path a mile long and no package management because the company although physically in the present, somehow maintained a temporal presence in the past. And there was nothing that the team hated more than setting that workspace. In short it was an unholy mess that made Satan cry and Dennis Ritchie spin in his grave so much that the state of California attached magnets and a coil to his body and casket to generate electricity.

Then one day the untalented clowns known as App Group decided that our IDE should be owned and configured strictly through them. They took poor Eclipse and mounted so much silly shit to it that it resembled a riding lawn mower with a fax machine and a blender duct taped to it. Eventually as everything the company touched did, it simply turned into a broken, shitty mess that not even Jesus Titty Fucking Christ could bring back the dead.

And then, every month or so the IDE would break in such a grand way that every developer had to rebuild their workspace...the very same Lovecraftian monster disguised as a code base. It was just too much to bear for old Deus. He was all out of fucks and there wasn’t enough alcohol in the world to quiet his injured soul. So he stood on a chair, carved his name in a rafter and tied a noose to it, put it around his neck and finally kicked the chair out from under himself. I am told he even pooped his pants and the post mortem shit in the seat of his pants was still better than the codebase at work. I’m Morgan Freeman.

Fellow devs,

If your boss asks you for an estimation don't follow your gut coz your gut sucks. Ask for time to analyse before giving any estimation. And yeah don't forget external factors such as :
- third party tool down (github I'm looking at you)
- updates (windows, IDE, etc.)
- 90% of the time it doesn't work
- if it involves front dev just go ahead and double your estimation
- YOUR BOSS THINKS YOU OVERESTIMATED

Sincerly.

Last week one of my clients asked me to visit their HQ to take a look at some report tool that has stopped to generate reports. This tool was not made by me, it has zero documentation, but WTH, I can take a look.
So I went to the HQ. When a guy that has called me told me that someone else will be here any second to talk to me, I began to be a little suspicius.
It turned out they want a new app. Not going into detail something that will read bar codes, do some stuff in a database, generate some reports etc. And he need it made in 2 weeks. I have reminded him I am involved in another project that I need to deliver in a month, and it is virutally impossible for me to develop what they want in this time. I offered them that maybe we should hire a team or at least another developer. Hi nodded and ignored what I've said. Well, he said we have maybe 2 weeks more, but that's it. Ok..
So, while working on the other project wich ramained a priority for me, I've began to do some thinking, some research on how to deliver what they want as fast as possible.
Today morning I went to the HQ again to finally take care of that report tool. But never mind that, I also had a chance to talk about the new app. So we made some Agile, wrote down epics, stories, talked about hardware etc. After two hours, it turned out, that more than this bardcode reading app the need something else! Barcode reading yes, but even more they need a scheduler for their emloyees, custom functionalities, plus some HR tools, other fancy stuff. But they don't even have a full concept yet. And it needs to be done until end of the month (9 days), maybe two weeks later.
So again I told them I will not be able to deliver this in set timeframe. That possibly we need to hire someone and even then it's questionable if this will be possible given all circumstances, time needed test, to deploy (in 14 diffrent locations all over the country). Actually if I had all software ready today the deployment, tests, training... So I offered that maybe we can figure out some temporary solution based on third party software.
At this point my requests and suggestions have been ignored again. Sadly my contract with them states I can not pass this to someone else, it all have to go trough them. And tehy don't want to spend extra money (??) etc.
Also from what I understand, this whole company's (~1000 employees) be or not to be can be affected by this project.
Sometimes I just don't understand business.

Story time.....

I only had one mentor. I am a self-learned guy.

He was my mentor in a company where I was interning. He was a Senior Android Developer and I was just a rookie Android Developer working under him.

He never taught me directly but at times he used to send me links of a source for the problem I was having.

At the end of my first working day, I asked him-"Do you think I was useful to you today? "

He bluntly replied-"Nope, none at all"

Those words hit me so hard. My eyes became moist. When I thought about It I did realize that day I was overwhelmed by so many topics I was new to. I was determined to work my ass off from the next day. And I did.

Fast forward to the last day at the company. It was 31'st December, we were having New Years Eve's party. Everyone was a little drunk except for the interns. In front of everyone, my mentor said-"You were the best intern I have ever had such a good intern that I did not have to work last few days", everyone agreed and then he hugged me.

I was on the seventh heaven that day. Throughout my journey back home, I had a broad smile on my face.

Here's one that involves Windows, Linux (at the same time!), WInZip, Python, Lua and Minecraft, sort of.

So, when I get depressed I often find that old 2011 Minecraft videos help a lot from the nostalgia boost. If its stupid, but it works, it isn't stupid. Anyways, I was thinking about how much fun it must have been to just fuck around with code and make something like Minecraft. Naturally, I got a huge code boner and really wanted to do something I hadn't in a while: binding c to a higher level language.

This time around, I wanted to try Python. C + Python seems like a good pair. I watched a tutorial and it seemed pretty interesting and simple enough but I remembered that I actually like Lua a lot better than Python, so I went to the download page of Lua.

The download is a tar.gz so I let out a sigh and start typing "WinZip" into google. But no, fuck that, I hate 3rd party decompression programs on Windows. They all just give me this eerie feeling.

"This would be so much fucking easier on Linux"...

I remember that I haven't tried the Windows Subsystem for Linux. I guess it's time, isn't it?

I read the docs of how to do it. Nice little touch, they tell you how to enable WSL from PowerShell but don't mention the GUI way to do it. It's genuinely a nice touch.

So I get everything installed and go to the app store to choose a distro. I want Ubuntu. I click the Install button...

...

... "Something unexpected happened"

Windows and their fucking useless error messages. Jesus, okay. I restart computer. Same issue. I update Windows. Same thing. Uninstall WSL. Reboot. Install WSL. Reboot. Same thing. HOLY SHIT.

Went to bed. Woke up. Tried to install Ubuntu.

"Yea ok lul i'll work this time for no reason"

Finally unzipped Lua.

When Windows decides it's just the perfect time for a little party 🙂

Did I tell you that X third party system needed to be updated due to that pos using flash? Yes

Did you bitch about budget constraints and finding workarounds and stuff like that? Also Yes

Did I mention that X system was crucial for people and that we were not going to be able to do anything about it if we did not allocate the time to modify that before it happened? Also Yes

Did I mentioned this on multiple occasions? Yes

Was my team also pulled out from working on the alternative before this happened? Yes

Did I send multiple emails about this, talks, meetings and documentation of me saying all of the above? You betcha

Oh well 🤡

When your company buys a third party solution and you spend all your time emailing them about bugs in their system.

Seriously, I even sent you the exact line of the bug in your JavaScript with a suggested solution, and deployed a new stack with your latest (broken) fix so you can test out that solution. Then you email back saying it is fixed but it is clearly still broken. If I email you a fixed version of your file will you deploy it? OMG!

!dev && rant

There's one thing that you really shouldn't say to someone who's in crutches, no matter how much your reflexes tell you to. "Are you okay?"
Especially when they're going somewhere, and you can't or don't want to help them do so.

Imagine for a second, you yourself are in crutches and have been limping on one leg for a couple 100 meters to go to where you have to, shopping for food so you don't starve. And then, after those couple hundreds of meters, of course that leg that's been doing double duty for that whole period and took unusually big impacts from jumping up and down onto the ground compared to just walking, you can imagine that it is screaming in agony.

Now imagine someone who comes your way, makes the leg that more than anything wants to sit down somewhere and rest, pause the act of going the way to the beloved place to sit and rest and instead make it take even longer, that person asks you "are you okay?"

OF COURSE I'M OKAY, THAT'S WHY I'M IN FUCKING CRUTCHES!! OF COURSE I'M OKAY, GREAT OBSERVATION SHERLOCK!!!

It's like saying to someone who's so introvert that they haven't opened their mouth even once at a party - likely there because their friends forced them to - "gee, you are silent, aren't you?"

Yes I'm silent, yes I'm introvert!! Why do you point that out? If anything, pretend that I'm not here to begin with!!! Stating that only makes for embarrassment!

Or going back to the leg thing.. this ground my gears more than anything. Every few dozen meters I went and rested on my crutches for a bit, and every hundred or so meters I sat down at whatever I could sit on. And people fucking look judgmentally at you for that apparently. "Look at this guy in crutches, he's sitting down!"

Yeah mate, try limping on one leg for a couple hundred meters and I'll run after you with a whip, looking at you judgmentally every time you even want to *think* about sitting down to rest. Let's see how that goes?

Or rather you fucking judgmental twat, I bet you fat fucking cunt can't even run on 2 legs for a couple hundred meters straight. But let's judge others who are doing such a running exercise for every step they take for wanting to sit and rest, shall we?

No wonder that there's mass shootings every now and then. Such people can make anyone feel fucking murderous!!!

So I joined this financial institution back in Nov. Selling themselves as looking for a developer to code micro-services for a Spring based project and deploying on Cloud. I packed my stuff, drove and moved to the big city 3500 km away. New start in life I thought!
Turns out that micro-services code is an old outdated 20 year old JBoss code, that was ported over to Spring 10 years ago, then let to rot and fester into a giant undocumented Spaghetti code. Microservices? Forget about that. And whats worse? This code is responsible for processing thousands of transactions every month and is currently deployed in PROD. Now its your responsibility and now you have to get new features complied on the damn thing. Whats even worse? They made 4 replicas of that project with different functionalities and now you're responsible for all. Ma'am, this project needs serious refactoring, if not a total redesign/build. Nope! Not doing this! Now go work at it.
It took me 2-3 months just to wrap my mind around this thing and implement some form of working unit tests. I have to work on all that code base by myself and deliver all by myself! naturally, I was delayed in my delivery but I finally managed to deliver.
Time for relief I thought! I wont be looking at this for a while. So they assign me the next project: Automate environment sync between PROD and QA server that is manually done so far. Easy beans right? And surely enough, the automation process is simple and straightforward...except it isnt! Why? Because I am not allowed access to the user Ids and 3rd party software used in the sync process. Database and Data WareHouse data manipulation part is same story too. I ask for access and I get denied over and over again. I try to think of workarounds and I managed to do two using jenkins pipeline and local scripts. But those processes that need 3rd party software access? I cannot do anything! How am I supposed to automate job schedule import on autosys when I DONT HAVE ACCESS!! But noo! I must think of plan B! There is no plan B! Rather than thinking of workarounds, how about getting your access privileges right and get it right the first time!!
They pay relatively well but damn, you will lose your sanity as a programmer.
God, oh god, please bless me with a better job soon so I can escape this programming hell hole.
I will never work in finance again. I don't recommend it, unless you're on the tail end of your career and you want something stable & don't give a damn about proper software engineering principles anymore.

I'm going on vacation next week, and all I need to do before then is finish up my three tickets. Two of them are done save a code review comment that amounts to combining two migrations -- 30 seconds of work. The other amounts to some research, then including some new images and passing it off to QA.

I finish the migrations, and run the fast migration script -- should take 10 minutes. I come back half an hour later, and it's sitting there, frozen. Whatever; I'll kill it and start it again. Failure: database doesn't exist. whatever, `mysql` `create database misery;` rerun. Frozen. FINE. I'll do the proper, longer script. Recreate the db, run the script.... STILL GODDAMN FREEZING.

WHATEVER.

Research time.
I switch branches, follow the code, and look for any reference to the images, asset directory, anything. There are none. I analyze the data we're sending to the third party (Apple); no references there either, yet they appear on-device. I scour the code for references for hours; none except for one ref in google-specific code. I grep every file in the entire codebase for any reference (another half hour) and find only that one ref. I give up. It works, somehow, and the how doesn't matter. I can just replace the images and all should be well. If it isn't, it will be super obvious during QA.

So... I'll just bug product for the new images, add them, and push. No need to run specs if all that's changed is some assets. I ask the lead product goon, and .... Slack shits the bed. The outage lasts for two hours and change.

Meanwhile, I'm still trying to run db migrations. shit keeps hanging.

Slack eventually comes back, and ... Mr. Product is long gone. fine, it's late, and I can't blame him for leaving for the night. I'll just do it tomorrow.

I make a drink. and another.
hard horchata is amazing. Sheelin white chocolate is amazing. Rum and Kahlua and milk is kind of amazing too. I'm on an alcoholic milk kick; sue me.

I randomly decide to switch branches and start the migration script again, because why not? I'm not doing anything else anyway. and while I'm at it, I randomly Slack again.

Hey, Product dude messaged me. He's totally confused as to what i want, and says "All I created was {exact thing i fucking asked for}". sfjaskfj. He asks for the current images so he can "noodle" on it and ofc realize that they're the same fucking things, and that all he needs to provide is the new "hero" banner. Just like I asked him for. whatever. I comply and send him the archive. he's offline for the night, and won't have the images "compiled" until tomorrow anyway. Back to drinking.

But before then, what about that migration I started? I check on it. it's fucking frozen. Because of course it fucking is.

I HAD FIFTEEN MINUTES OF FUCKING WORK TODAY, AND I WOULD BE DONE FOR NEARLY THREE FUCKING WEEKS.

UGH!

I really enjoy my old Kindle Touch rather than reading long pdf's on a tablet or desktop. The Kindle is much easier on my eyes plus some of my pdf's are critical documents needed to recover business processes and systems. During a power outage a tablet might only last a couple of days even with backup power supplies, whereas my Kindle is good for at least 2 weeks of strong use.

Ok, to get a pdf on a Kindle is simple - just email the document to your Kindle email address listed in your Amazon –Settings – Digital Content – Devices - Email. It will be <<something>>@kindle.com.

But there is a major usability problem reading pdf's on a Kindle. The font size is super tiny and you do not have font control as you do with a .MOBI (Kindle) file. You can enlarge the document but the formatting will be off the small Kindle screen. Many people just advise to not read pdf's on a Kindle. devRanters never give up and fortunately there are some really cool solutions to make pdf's verrrrry readable and enjoyable on a Kindle

There are a few cloud pdf- to-.MOBI conversion solutions but I had no intention of using a third party site my security sensitive business content. Also, in my testing of sample pdf's the formatting of the .MOBI file was good but certainly not great.

So here are a couple option I discovered that I find useful:

Solution 1) Very easy. Simply email the pdf file to your Kindle and put 'convert' in the subject line. Amazon will convert the pdf to .MOBI and queue it up to synch the next time you are on wireless. The final e-book .MOBI version of the pdf is readable and has all of the .MOBI options available to you including the ability for you to resize fonts and maintain document flow to properly fit the Kindle screen. Unfortunately, for my requirements it did not measure-up to Solution 2 below which I found much more powerful.

Solution 2) Very Powerful. This solution takes under a minute to convert a pdf to .MOBI and the small effort provides incredible benefits to fine tune the final .MOBI book. You can even brand it with your company information and add custom search tags. In addition, it can be used for many additional input and output files including ePub which is used by many other e-reader devices including The Nook.

The free product I use is Calibre. Lots of options and fine control over documents. I download it from calibre-ebook.com. Nice UI. Very easy to import various types of documents and output to many other types of formats such as .MOBI, ePub, DocX, RTF, Zip and many more. It is a very powerful program. I played with various Calibre options and emailed the formatted .MOBI files to my Kindle. The new files automatically synched to the Kindle when I was wireless in seconds. Calibre did a great job!!

The formatting was 99.5% perfect for the great majority of pdf’s I converted and now happily read on my Kindle. Calibre even has a built-in heuristic option you can try that enables it to figure out how to improve the formatting of the raw pdf. By default it is not enabled. A few of the wider tables in my business continuity plans I have to scroll on the limited Kindle screen but I was able to minimize that by sizing the fonts and controlling the source document parameters.

Now any pdf or other types of documents can be enjoyed on a light, cheap, super power efficient e-reader. Let me know if this info helped you in any way.

Worst thing you've seen another dev do? Here is another.

Early into our eCommerce venture, we experienced the normal growing pains.

Part of the learning process was realizing in web development, you should only access data resources on an as-needed basis.

One business object on it's creation would populate db lookups, initialize business rule engines (calling the db), etc.

Initially, this design was fine, no one noticed anything until business started to grow and started to cause problems in other systems (classic scaling problems)

VP wanted a review of the code and recommendations before throwing hardware at the problem (which they already started to do).

Over a month, I started making some aggressive changes by streamlining SQL, moving initialization, and refactoring like a mad man.

Over all page loads were not really affected, but the back-end resources were almost back to pre-eCommerce levels.

The main web developer at the time was not amused and fought my changes as much as she could.

Couple months later the CEO was speaking to everyone about his experience at a trade show when another CEO was complementing him on the changes to our web site.
The site was must faster, pages loaded without any glitches, checkout actually worked the first time, etc.
CEO wanted to thank everyone involved etc..and so on.

About a week later the VP handed out 'Thank You' certificates for the entire web team (only 4 at the time, I was on another team). I was noticeably excluded (not that I cared about a stupid piece of paper, but they also got a pizza lunch...I was much more pissed about that). My boss went to find out what was going on.

MyBoss: "Well, turned out 'Sally' did make all the web site performance improvements."
Me: "Where have you been the past 3 months? 'Sally' is the one who fought all my improvements. All my improvements are still in the production code."
MyBoss: "I'm just the messenger. What would you like me to do? I can buy you a pizza if you want. The team already reviewed the code and they are the ones who gave her the credit."
Me: "That's crap. My comments are all over that code base. I put my initials, date, what I did, why, and what was improved. I put the actual performance improvement numbers in the code!"
MyBoss: "Yea? Weird. That is what 'Tom' said why 'Sally' was put in for a promotion. For her due diligence for documenting the improvements."
Me:"What!? No. Look...lets look at the code"

Open up the file...there it was...*her* initials...the date, what changed, performance improvement numbers, etc.

WTF!

I opened version control and saw that she made one change, the day *after* the CEO thanked everyone and replaced my initials with hers.

She knew the other devs would only look at the current code to see who made the improvements (not bother to look at the code-differences)

MyBoss: "Wow...that's dirty. Best to move on and forget about it. Let them have their little party. Let us grown ups keeping doing the important things."

The story of how I got my dream job.

I was working for a company with a job I got just after graduating university. It was ok, not very exciting tech but I learned a lot by just surrounding myself with professional code monkeys. I was there for about a year when my company bought parts of another company and there was talk about people getting fired. This made me worried since I was the last one to get hired, so I started looking around for other jobs. I received this e-mail from a company saying they were looking for interns, what a coincidence! I adjusted my CV and sent it in.

--A few weeks pass--

It's Friday and I'm at a dinner party, it's 10pm and someone is calling me. I pick up and it's a recruiter from this company. I get very nervous but the alcohol helps me keep my cool, I pass the initial idiot test and they invite me for an interview. Yay!

I go to work on Monday and in a 1-on-1 and I tell my boss about the upcoming interview, he gives me a high-five :)

The interview is approaching and I'm feeling that I'm about to get sick, I refuse to believe this so I start taking a lot of medicine (painkillers, cough medicine etc.). I feel a bit better and thank the gods for medication.

--D-day--

I wake up, put on my nicest clothes and get on the train. I had one hour to spare just in case, which was well needed because the fucking train is late by 30 minutes. I'm still heavily medicated because of my ongoing fever. When I arrive I basically have to run there and somehow I manage to pick up a coffee on the way there which I devour in two seconds. I'm ready for the interview!

Some guy meets me in reception and the first thing he says is "My colleague doesn't speak our language so we'll have to speak english". This is fine, I speak good english but I was not prepared for this so it caught me off-guard and made me even more nervous. We get in and start talking. Things are going OK despite my numbed brain. I try to make eye-contact to make a good impression with the foreign engineer but he keeps staring somewhere which is making me nervous.

We get to the technical part on a whiteboard and this is where my brain decides to stop communicating. I'm presented a simple task which I'm struggling with finishing, and I feel the embarrassment coming over me. "NOOOOO THIS IS MY DREAM JOB, THIS CANNOT BE HAPPENING!" I'm thinking to myself. After making myself look like a complete arsehole for some time we wrap it up and just before I step out the door I say to the engineer "You should checkout my Github page, I have lots of interesting stuff there" and he says "I'll be sure to do that" but I don't believe him.

I leave the office in fury (of myself) and make my way to the train station and even though it's the middle of the day I quickly devour two beers to calm my nerves and make me feel a bit better. I was so damn disappointed in myself, I wasted the opportunity of a lifetime! I go back home to my regular (now shitty) job.

--Two days later--

I get a call from an unknown number. I pick up the phone and it's the same recruiter guy. "So how did you think it went?" he says. "To be honest, I think it went really bad", I replied. "What? Really? Because they loved you, you got the job". (this was an obvious recruiter lie) "... wat, are you sure you called the correct person?" I said and he just laughed. The day after I quit my old job the whole department gets fired - such impeccable timing.

--A few months later--

I finish my internship and they want to keep me. I'm so happy. The engineer that was in the interview works on my team. I ask him "Why did you hire me? You know as well as I do that my interview was horrible". It turns out he _did_ look at my Github profile and that's how he knew I could write code. I also heard later that for my position there was about 2000 applicants and somehow I made the interviews.

I still work there today and I couldn't be happier (Sorry for the long text).

I wrote a node + vue web app that consumes bing api and lets you block specific hosts with a click, and I have some thoughts I need to post somewhere.

My main motivation for this it is that the search results I've been getting with the big search engines are lacking a lot of quality. The SEO situation right now is very complex but the bottom line is that there is a lot of white hat SEO abuse.

Commercial companies are fucking up the internet very hard. Search results have become way too profit oriented thus unneutral. Personal blogs are becoming very rare. Information is losing quality and sites are losing identity. The internet is consollidating.

So, I decided to write something to help me give this situation the middle finger.

I wrote this because I consider the ability to block specific sites a basic universal right. If you were ripped off by a website or you just don't like it, then you should be able to block said site from your search results. It's not rocket science.

Google used to have this feature integrated but they removed it in 2013. They also had an extension that did this client side, but they removed it in 2018 too. We're years past the time where Google forgot their "Don't be evil" motto.

AFAIK, the only search engine on earth that lets you block sites is millionshort.com, but if you block too many sites, the performance degrades. And the company that runs it is a for profit too.

There is a third party extension that blocks sites called uBlacklist. The problem is that it only works on google. I wrote my app so as to escape google's tracking clutches, ads and their annoying products showing up in between my results.

But aside uBlacklist does the same thing as my app, including the limitation that this isn't an actual search engine, it's just filtering search results after they are generated.

This is far from ideal because filter results before the results are generated would be much more preferred.

But developing a search engine is prohibitively expensive to both index and rank pages for a single person. Which is sad, but can't do much about it.

I'm also thinking of implementing the ability promote certain sites, the opposite to blocking, so these promoted sites would get more priority within the results.

I guess I would have to move the promoted sites between all pages I fetched to the first page/s, but client side.

But this is suboptimal compared to having actual access to the rank algorithm, where you could promote sites in a smarter way, but again, I can't build a search engine by myself.

I'm using mongo to cache the results, so with a click of a button I can retrieve the results of a previous query without hitting bing. So far a couple of queries don't seem to bring much performance or space issues.

On using bing: bing is basically the only realiable API option I could find that was hobby cost worthy. Most microsoft products are usually my last choice.

Bing is giving me a 7 day free trial of their search API until I register a CC. They offer a free tier, but I'm not sure if that's only for these 7 days. Otherwise, I'm gonna need to pay like 5$.

Paying or not, having to use a CC to use this software I wrote sucks balls.

So far the usage of this app has resulted in me becoming more critical of sites and finding sites of better quality. I think overall it helps me to become a better programmer, all the while having better protection of my privacy.

One not upside is that I'm the only one curating myself, whereas I could benefit from other people that I trust own block/promote lists.

I will git push it somewhere at some point, but it does require some more work:
I would want to add a docker-compose script to make it easy to start, and I didn't write any tests unfortunately (I did use eslint for both apps, though).
The performance is not excellent (the app has not experienced blocks so far, but it does make the coolers spin after a bit) because the algorithms I wrote were very POC.
But it took me some time to write it, and I need to catch some breath.

There are other more open efforts that seem to be more ethical, but they are usually hard to use or just incomplete.

commoncrawl.org is a free index of the web. one problem I found is that it doesn't seem to index everything (for example, it doesn't seem to index the blog of a friend I know that has been writing for years and is indexed by google).

it also requires knowledge on reading warc files, which will surely require some time investment to learn.

it also seems kinda slow for responses,

it is also generated only once a month, and I would still have little idea on how to implement a pagerank algorithm, let alone code it.

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

Well check this shit.

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

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

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

The conversation was like this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Retard: Well You need to fix this

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

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

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

Me: Did you pay for this app?

Retard: No

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

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

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

Retard: Well....I did not know

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

** throws phone for him to catch

Me: Have a good one bud.

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

Our company is cheap, cheap as fuck. We have to use some third-party platforms and every year they choose something that is slightly cheaper than the other. (like a few $ per annual), they do not know that we have to refactor our code at the backend because the changes of the platform.

It doesn't end there, they even look for devs from third world countries to work for them remotely instead of hiring permanent staff (I understand it is cheaper because of currency difference and etc), but what about the training period or to let them become comfortable with the existing system, even when he/she is a genius... it takes time to be productive at work.

The worst part is they dont give a shit, they think devs can be replaced easily just like some construction workers carrying stuffs on site (no offence to them), management treating people like shit and doesn't care when they leave.

I'm working on a project that integrates your Android phone with your PC. Stuff like file transfer, sending SMS and notification sync. I just had an idea for an awesome feature. Started researching and found that the Android API exposes exactly what I need. Full of motivation I started coding until I realized that the permission I need cannot be granted to third-party apps. Happened the second time. Fml

I joined (still under probation period) in a startup founded by an 18 year old.

I work after my full time job for them and thought itd be fun but the kid made a slack channel and asks for progress updates everyday and feels a bit in a haste to get the product up and running. He seems to think I will be working every weekday from the second i come back home till i sleep. I have a party today that im going to and im sure he will ask for progress updates and when I tell him im out and wont work today he’ll probably say something like “the faster we do the project the better”.

Im not sure if i should leave now while its easy or i should stay for the money ($900 a month). Like i really dont feel like tolerating a demanding kid who cant wait for his app plus id much rather be working on other things just for fun like making rust crates. but at the same time the extra money is nice.

Thoughts?

So, a few months back my mother had some issues with her windows 10 box not being able to do proper backups to a backup partition. At the same time I was pulling insane hours at work and writing on a eBook on commission for a guy, besides having small kids with on and off flu and shit.

Needless to say, I didn't have time to look at the backup issues. Well, even though my mom is one of those dogs you can't teach new tricks, she has always been resourceful enough to get help with things.

This time she picked up the phone and called Microsoft Support, got some guys to remote in and take a look. They messed around a bit and said they were done.

She phoned me up later that day to tell me how proud she was of herself for doing that. Of course, she skipped telling me the important bit about she actually calling them, rather describing it as "Microsoft was just on my computer and fixed it".

You can imagine my immediate reaction, cold sweat running down my back, adrenalin rushing in as I dug through the details of what had happened.

A few days later she calls me up again and tells me the problem is back, and we agree that even though the MS dudes was not able to fix it at first, she should try again, as she had a ticket to reference.

The next attempt by MS actually fried her partitions, and apparently they had f-ed up trying to delete and recreate the backup partition.

That's not the worst of it though. Since they fried her disk, her computer crashed and naturally the remoting won't work. In our country, they have no people on the ground to do hands on help, and they didn't have a partner near by. Her not having a win 10 usb stick, nor a spare computer to make one, she was in a surreal predicament.

She was also quite pissed, and pissed off mums are not to be messed with. She managed to get Microsoft to agree to cover the costs of a non-partner to visit her to fix the problems, and using her as the middle man, they made an agreement with the 3rd-party tech support company.

After the box was fixed though, some more issues arose... regarding billing. The 3rd-party tech support was unable to get in contact with the person at MS that was going to sign off on the bill, and again using my mom as the middle man, it was agreed that my mom, as the customer, was to be reimbursed for the bill to the 3rd-party.

Guess what... 3 months went by, with weekly follow-ups and nagging from my mom, and still no money...

At this time, I had time to help her, and after some digging and borderline stalking, we managed to get the phone numbers of some of the higher ups in my country, and she started calling them directly.

After talking to a couple who refused to help, she reached the Vice President of the country branch, and was finally able to talk to someone who gave a shit.

Still took over a month more to actually get the money, but now she had someone who actually gave her statuses, receipts and ETAs.

FUCK!

When the 3rd party library you're using is raising compile time warnings about using APIs that have been deprecated since iOS 6.

It was last updated in Sept 2015. President says they're working on iOS 10 compatibility.

If it still has that warning next release...

- I’m tired of being caught in this political bullshit and thinking about how to withdraw my money from the bank ASAP because govt can block my account to prevent me from leaving, how to let my salary make its way from Europe to me without making me a criminal for even having foreign currency, even though I pay taxes, being left without my meds because the country I was born in decided to deny the existance of my illness. At my age, I should be thinking about where do I want to go for vacation and what hair color should my next sex party fuck partner have.
- I’m tired of fighting this never-ending uphill battle with guilt upon guilt upon guilt that cripples my thinking and renders me helpless by the face of it, the constant sense of dread over me failing to even put into words what’s bothering me.
- I’m tired of seeing literally any thing associated with my childhood and having flashbacks of violence and gruesome things done to me as a child. Today, I had a full breakdown over seeing default Windows Vista wallpaper.

My anxiety always hits hard, but how hard should I hit the wall with my head next time to beat this shit out of it? sometimes I hear little bubbles inside. I left my country, but how hard should I vomit next time I eat two jars of nutella as a self-harm session for my country to leave me? I already have my eyes all red and messed up because of doing this. I can’t see straight. is it within my body? can I pull it out?

Yeah. Kinda late to the WK 227 party.

Thing is: I've read a lot of rants and honestly, some of the rants were ... touchy.

Like that weird emotional thingy you don't like but that just kind of happens cause I'm human too.... And have that shitty emotional feature integrated, which feels most of the time like a heisenbug.

Me and my parents. Specifically mom. Are like ... Matter and antimatter.

You don't want them in a room. Bad things happen TM. My mom is responsible for ... Let's say severe psychological trauma starting with age 4 to age 17.

In 17 I moved out and lived on "my own" (truth: on heavy support, cause I wasn't what you'd called "psychologically stable" at that time).

I fucked up university and - as shared before - thanks to an math teacher who made my life an even more living hell and my parents, I'd started in IT mostly out of "resisting" certain assertations being made over my life.

The support I got from my family can be put together in one sentence:
"I survived, I tolerated - but will never forgive".

Thing is: Be it IT support or anything else. If your gut feeling tells you that family / coworkers / friends are not good for you.

Stay the fuck away from them till you've sorted yourself out.

I can tolerate my parents nowadays. Took > 10 years and a lot of hardships to "achieve" that.

It's not peachy. It's not loving. It's tolerance. (Yeah. That bit is muey importante to me).

The thing is: I cannot deny the fact that my parents tried to support me by money. That's what they still do _nowadays_ even though my income is like 60 % of the income my father and mother has combined... It's a bothersome detail.

There's a certain thing in this rant that I would like "to pass on": Emotional support matters.

When you let someone feel like an empty shell, you cannot fix it with money.

It will - severely - destroy the person.

TLDR: We all have rough edges, can be hard to deal with and be a pain in the arse, but all of us need emotional support sometimes. That's what matters the most. ;)

Last Monday I bought an iPhone as a little music player, and just to see how iOS works or doesn't work.. which arguments against Apple are valid, which aren't etc. And at a price point of €60 for a secondhand SE I figured, why not. And needless to say I've jailbroken it shortly after.

Initially setting up the iPhone when coming from fairly unrestricted Android ended up being quite a chore. I just wanted to use this thing as a music player, so how would you do it..?

Well you first have to set up the phone, iCloud account and whatnot, yada yada... Asks for an email address and flat out rejects your email address if it's got "apple" in it, catch-all email servers be damned I guess. So I chose ishit at my domain instead, much better. Address information for billing.. just bullshit that, give it some nulls. Phone number.. well I guess I could just give it a secondary SIM card's number.

So now the phone has been set up, more or less. To get music on it was quite a maze solving experience in its own right. There's some stuff about it on the Debian and Arch Wikis but it's fairly outdated. From the iPhone itself you can install VLC and use its app directory, which I'll get back to later. Then from e.g. Safari, download any music file.. which it downloads to iCloud.. Think Different I guess. Go to your iCloud and pull it into the iPhone for real this time. Now you can share the file to your VLC app, at which point it initializes a database for that particular app.

The databases / app storage can be considered equivalent to the /data directories for applications in Android, minus /sdcard. There is little to no shared storage between apps, most stuff works through sharing from one app to another.

Now you can connect the iPhone to your computer and see a mount point for your pictures, and one for your documents. In that documents mount point, there are directories for each app, which you can just drag files into. For some reason the AFC protocol just hangs up when you try to delete files from your computer however... Think Different?

Anyway, the music has been put on it. Such features, what a nugget! It's less bad than I thought, but still pretty fucked up.

At that point I was fairly dejected and that didn't get better with an update from iOS 14.1 to iOS 14.3. Turns out that Apple in its nannying galore now turns down the volume to 50% every half an hour or so, "for hearing safety" and "EU regulations" that don't exist. Saying that I was fuming and wanting to smack this piece of shit into the wall would be an understatement. And even among the iSheep, I found very few people that thought this is fine. Though despite all that, there were still some. I have no idea what it would take to make those people finally reconsider.. maybe Tim Cook himself shoving an iPhone up their ass, or maybe they'd be honored that Tim Cook noticed them even then... But I digress.

And then, then it really started to take off because I finally ended up jailbreaking the thing. Many people think that it's only third-party apps, but that is far from true. It is equivalent to rooting, and you do get access to a Unix root account by doing it. The way you do it is usually a bootkit, which in a desktop's ring model would be a negative ring. The access level is extremely high.

So you can root it, great. What use is that in a locked down system where there's nothing available..? Aha, that's where the next thing comes in, 2 actually. Cydia has an OpenSSH server in it, and it just binds to port 22 and supports all of OpenSSH's known goodness. All of it, I'm using ed25519 keys and a CA to log into my phone! Fuck yea boi, what a nugget! This is better than Android even! And it doesn't end there.. there's a second thing it has up its sleeve. This thing has an apt package manager in it, which is easily equivalent to what Termux offers, at the system level! You can install not just common CLI applications, but even graphical apps from Cydia over the network!

Without a jailbreak, I would say that iOS is pretty fucking terrible and if you care about modding, you shouldn't use it. But jailbroken, fufu.. this thing trades many blows with Android in the modding scene. I've said it before, but what a nugget!

This is the last part of the series
(3 of 3) Credentials everywhere; like literally.

I worked for a company that made an authentication system. In a way it was ahead of it's time as it was an attempt at single sign on before we had industry standards but it was not something that had not been done before.

This security system targeted 3rd party websites. Here is where it went wrong. There was a "save" implementation where users where redirected to the authentication system and back.

However for fear of being to hard to implement they made a second method that simply required the third party site to put up a login form on their site and push the input on to the endpoint of the authentication system. This method was provided with sample code and the only solution that was ever pushed.

So users where trained to leave their credentials wherever they saw the products logo; awesome candidates for phishing. Most of the sites didn't have TLS/SSL. And the system stored the password as pain text right next to the email and birth date making the incompetence complete.

The reason for plain text password was so people could recover there password. Like just call the company convincingly frustrated and you can get them to send you the password.

Fuck you google android IME team and fuck their open source policy..

So recently i had a chance to work with AOSP LatinIME code, basically our Android keyboard was forked from very old code base of LatinIME and my job was to change its base version to latest Version available on AOSP repository. Downloaded latest Android 8 codebase. Did 2 weeks of deep investigation of what improvements we will get from upgraded code base.

And I came to know that those Google fucking cunt sucking dick heads deprecated that project and broke the whole thing to a pice of shit. Half of the code is broken with fucked up todo stuff and motherfucking missing method implementation with not implemented warnings. What those motherfucker did is that they abandoned the open-source project after they released Google GBoard, and fucked the stable code by adding quard gram support and dictionary download with multi account features which was never completed by those motherfuckers..

Those misguiding donkey shit fuckers kept a depreciated project in AOSP build tree which has not received a single fucking commit from shitty ass Google IME team, is said to be reference model of Android IME implementation..

What kind of fucking shit is going with open-source code in name of making competition high with thirt party Android keyboard developers ..

Fucking shit fucking ime team .. fuck you .. wasted my fucking time reading your shitty code base .. Fucking shit

Twice a year, my work throws a party to celebrate our successes. Think of this as a post-Christmas and post-tax season party. Usually it’s a simple affair – they hire out a room in a bar, we have a theme to dress up to (last year for tax it was green, the colour of money), and it’s a social gathering. No pressure to participate, theme was broad enough that everyone could participate, and everyone came along for as long as they wanted.

This year, they’ve decided to make our post-tax party at a karaoke bar. I am usually a fan of karaoke…with my friends, after a drink or five, on my own terms. But singing in front of work colleagues?

To make things worse, they’ve created a committee to hyper-organise the games and teams. I know the usual AAM stance on organised/forced fun, and I attempted to get on the committee in an effort to steer them towards voluntary participation, but I was told the committee was full.

The party is next week and I’m already feeling panicky. We have been allocated into teams. We’ve been assured that these weren’t random, but were purposefully chosen to ensure a mix of outgoing and introverted people. Lovely. On top of being forced to participate, I have to sing with team members I normally wouldn’t spend time with. I’d be happy to do karaoke in front of my colleagues if it was a relaxed, opt-in thing where anyone who wanted to just jumped up there, but the forced, organised activity with judging and prizing is just making me dread it.

And there will be awards, which means there will be judging. I’ve alreasdy spoken up once after hearing a committee member excitedly tell a friend “there will even be an award for worst singer!” I straight up told her that there was no way they could have that as an award after forcing people to participate. I told I was being a party pooper and that it was all in good fun.

The official teams and rules were sent out yesterday and I noticed the award is actually for “best strangling of cat sound-a-like.” Which is infinitely worse.

How do I get through this party without ruffling any feathers, but also not putting myself and my singing abilities up for scrutiny in front of everyone I work with? Short of throwing a tantrum or sitting at the party in a corner and sulking, I’m not sure how to handle this diplomatically. The only people who aren’t going are those who have leave planned. They’ve even scheduled it so that it is running from 3 pm-6.30 pm (so, as my boss explained, those with childcare can still come for a few hours and not have to get a babysitter).

Story Time.

I was hanging around at a friend's place when she informed me that her roommate is throwing a really lavish party 50kms away from the city. I got invited by said roommate and I agreed to go.

When we arrived at the venue, there were like 100+ people at this place, all smoking weed drinking and dancing in loud music. I was also stoned at that point.

So at one point, my friend abandoned me and I found myself talking to 10 complete strangers. I realized that I was on my own and thought about seeing how much rizz I got.

Mind you that everyone was drunk and there was loud music everywhere so there was no way anyone else knew that I was getting shot down lol.

After couple rejections, I straight up went to a girl and said "You want to smoke weed and make out in the bathroom?" And to my surprise, she said yes. So, we both already high and drunk slipped into the bathroom and made out for like 10 mins and I smoked all my weed with her.

Then, at some other point, my friend showed up and we went home. The one thing I missed, was asking for her number, which I kicked myself later for. I guess stoners don't realize they have phones.

Can't stand it when devs who never bother to do anything / don't pull their weight etc. suddenly come out with:

"Ooh I'm really feeling the imposter syndrome right now, I feel like everyone around me is just leagues ahead of me and I shouldn't be here"

...then wait for everyone to tell them how amazing they are, how they're a critical part of the team etc.

No mate, imposter syndrome is a thing, but so is being a genuine waste of everyone's time. I'm not talking about having bad days, I'm talking about your work output being practically zilch for the past half a year or so because you're "not too familiar with the framework", then going after this pity party approach. As a senior dev, it's kinda insulting to all the great junior and mid level devs who do a better job while being paid considerably less.

So at school, we were supposed to do an exam through a third-party software that is supposed to block the user from searching the answers in a web browser.

We install the fucking software, lord and behold nothing works and the software keeps crashing...

The teacher insists that we are going to use this piece of shit software. One hour goes by and now the software made everyone's PC go black.

Someone suggests just doing the exam either through an ordinary browser or just by hand.

The teacher that just wasted one hour of fucking exam time lets out this big sigh and finally caves in...

And in a couple of weeks, we are going to use this shitty spaghetti-coded fuckfest called software for something called the "National tests"...

May Sky-daddy bless my classmates' souls and my own

In early 2016 I got a front end web development job.

<1 month later, was fired from thatfront end web development job.

Reason: After several years focused primarily on social media marketing, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing and couldn’t catch up fast enough to what their shop was using. My coding skills were way more out of date than I ever anticipated.

In retrospect, the only reason I got the job was that their 3rd party skills testing website repeatedly wouldn’t submit my results and didn’t change up the questions, so by the time it finally did, I had guessed 90% of the answers correctly. I registered as a false positive and that was, apparently, enough for their HR person.

Got demoted, got a pay raise and don't know how to feel about it. A story of how not to drink with your coworkers?

The story begins roughly 8-9 months ago. Me and this coworker (let's name him Tim) go out drinking after a Friday party at the office. We do some rounds and we're both smashed. Tim starts telling me how he's happy with life and that he's earning a nice salary right now. He told me his salary. It was the same as mine. Which was weird - He codes in a more hardcore languages than me and has almost double the time in the company as me. I think after some more drinking I've confessed that I make the same as him. This part is sort of a blur (drinking). I've gotten a pay raise(+30-40%) roughly a few months ago from that point backwards because another company gave be a much higher offer. The company I work for matched to keep me. Anyway, 3 months or so after the drinking,Tim is promoted to team lead, and me and a few other people are added to his team. Conversation slips and he told me his new salary - quite a bit more than me.I think it's safe to assume what happened.

The problem with that is that I was a team lead of 1 person (me) at that time, and I was managing my own time and my own tasks, was working with people individually. I was part of the weekly meetings with the CEO and other team leads. Being stripped of this title wasn't a problem at the beginning, as people still contacted me because of their problems, suggestions, whatever. A few more months pass (to now) and less and less people are contacting me - instead they are talking with Tim, and are asking of his opinion on tasks I should do, where he has no experience and roughly 0 lines in the programming language I code in. This is starting to piss me off.

There are a couple other things to take into consideration as well - The company is hiring a lot of people right now. The whole structure for team leads changed a bit, more team leads then ever right now and new roles added pretty fast.

I've gotten a pay raise a few weeks ago though(10%~).

I'm not sure on how to react to this. Should I comply and just keep on working on these tasks? Or should I still keep contacting people directly on their requests and talk to them directly, take credit for the projects I complete publicly and the stuff I do as I was previously doing? Part of me wants to reroute all of the stupids questions people have to Tim, as he is now responsible for these tasks and get this weight off my shoulders.

I'm starting to shift to learning a new programming language and thinking of jumping ship. Thoughts?

I'm a terrible husband

My wife was telling me about her dad and a financial problem he's having.

Meanwhile my mind was telling me:
"Remember that posh party you were in a few weeks ago where you knew nobody? And everyone were either established businessmen or had uni degrees?
So everyone's is like making a first impression of you?"

"Well, what if in the middle of a group chat you yelled something like "COCK" out of the blue, but with a very deep english accent, like a very screeching sharp sound at the end like "COCCCKKKK"

"I don't mean like a hypothetical observation, I mean what if you actually do that to observe their reactions"

"How would people react?
What would they do?
What would their facial expressions be like?
How much time would go by until someone resumed conversation? Who would be the one to do that?"

"What if you actually recorded it and put it on youtube"

Maybe it's my fault that we don't fuck

Last year I changed jobs from a large multi-national to a small local agency (which happens to be run by friends of mine).

One of the reasons for doing this was that my work involved more office politics than *actual* software development, and had just plain stopped being fun.

Now, I am having fun again! An example?

For one of our clients we have to connect to (a lot) of third-party APIs. Often even SOAP APIs!

Now I hear you protest "But that is no fun at all! SOAP APIS SUCK!" Which is true, more often than not. 😔

BUT! My friend started an internal API-SNAFU Trello board. Every time you get bitten in the ass by some ill conceived fuck-up of an API, you get to add your complaint to the board.

Beside giving as something to reciprocally rant about, the board also serves a serious function: depending on the amount of fuck-ups an API has been known to make, the price for working with that API will go up.

Who said it doesn't pay to complain? 😀

Today, I was so certain that all the functionalities were implemented to handle some webhook calls from a third-party service. It's a script I wrote that has been running for 2+ years uninterrupted or without any issues.

We got some "complaints/notices" today that some "special" actions weren't registered, so I thought that the third-party service just didn't send those actions via their webhook. After some research I found a part where they explained that those actions trigger the webhook like any other action etc. So..

First thought: "okay, maybe they implemented that at a later stage" (was not the case)
Second thought: "maybe this is not what the client meant" (it was)
Third thought: "Then it should have been implemented" (it wasn't)

Okay, time to look at the code to see where this could get handled but apparently isn't. All the actions look good, nice, clean handeling etc, nicely documented code (gave the 'past-me' mentally a high-five)..

I scroll further down to that specific action and it was quiet obvious why it didn't work.. I just see an empty function with the comment:

"//TODO: maybe handle this action one day. don't know what this does atm, probably unused.. Will take a look at it next week.."

.. :D

I took my 'high-five' back..I just needed to copy-paste some other code and change 1-2 parameters..

I don't need you to reiterate what the problem is. I am aware. I was the one who told you what the problem is. Via email and Slack. Why do you keep restating it to me like you are the one who figured out? I know the table isn't syncing with the third party object. I'm trying to figure out WHY. No amount of "I'm pretty sure the sync process is broken" will trigger a solution. Stop coming into my office every 5 minutes with a new "revelation" that wasn't even your own. This isn't my code, and since the owner of said code is not here to fix it, I have to spend some time figuring out how this damn thing works. SO PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, LET ME WORK SO I CAN FIX THIS

Fat heavy D&B beats, basement bunker, dark ambiente, stroboscope, sweaty bodies dancing. It happens:

I'm scrollin devRant drunk, again.

"Ralph" has been working on a process that updates a field in a SharePoint list and bellying aching for almost a month. Couldn't use the C# client, too hard...tried to use the SharePoint REST entry point, using C# too complex...Javascript also was overly complex. Tried to use PowerShell, that worked but could only run on the SharePoint Server and it didn't have access to the 3rd party system.

In our stand up this morning, again, he was belly aching he is still not done because of the complexity of SharePoint.

I thought "Good lord...what the frack is the problem? Surely other devs in the world aren't having this much of a problem."

Fire up google...search for an example...copy the MSDN C# example...run it...tada...updated the SharePoint list just fine. Maybe 15 minutes of effort (< 20 lines of mostly copy+pasted code).

Next stand up, I'm contemplating calling him out on the BS, but I suspect he had working code for a while. Wouldn't be the first time he has dragged his ass working on a project until folks get fed up waiting and he has an "intellectual breakthrough" and brags how all his effort was worth the time. Similar to the firefighter who starts fires just so he can 'be the hero'.

🪙 The golden age of tech is coming to an end. We currently live in a world of tech built by engineers and great minds; both Windows and Linux are great in their own ways. PCs are the peak of engineering, both desktops and laptops because of how versatile, powerful and universal they are. They serve engineers, designers and end users. You can do anything you can imagine; because the great people who built it, did it in such way that they themselves could use and enjoy it.

📱 The tech of the future will become ever more limited. The next generation of humans will use Chrome OS gladly and not even feel limited because they never experienced the freedom provided by a true personal computer device. Android OS is already getting ever closer to restricting 3rd party APK installers. Big tech will do everything they can to limit freedoms and make everyone use cloud, where they can charge $ for every damn click.

☎️The consumer-facing tech will become increasingly dumbed-down over time. The programmers and engineers will be still able to use "true" tech, but only for work. In everyday life, they will have to be content with the dumb limited tech.

And there is nothing we can do to stop it.

A taxi booking platform to support functioning B2B taxing booking company that was turning over 15 million per year.

It offered portals for B2B and B2C. Rather simple concept.

Business or client raise a booking, booking is submitted to a 3rd party taxi firm we manage the booking throughout its lifetime for the client.

We had an existing legacy product in place that needed redeveloping.

Management sunk many, many millions of pounds into the project, it never lunch and teh company was sold off twice will extreme losses each time. First sale was in the millions and the second was for 500k.

This was a result of poor technical choices made by past lead developers and extremely poor choice of management who cared more for managing their reputation as they were self aware of how much knowledge they lacked.

The technical aspect of the company was created a child company of the parent. This child company was responsible for the downfall of the parent which was functioning well and making a profit.

The company as a whole has since been liquidated thanks to that project. Many out of a job.

I jumped ship after 8 months as I couldn't continue to work with the crazy management. By crazy I mean they should have been in a tincan.

I'm forced by my job to use this fucking unusable piece of horse shit also know as a Windows operating system.

And it's not only that I have experienced every fucking corner case bug that is possible to occur in our universe.

Not only that that for last 2 years I seen more blue screen than blue sky.

Not only that forced updates fucked my schedules so many times that now I'm really *afraid* to turn off my computer off because I have zero guarantee that I will be able to restart it in a reasonable amount of time.

No, neither of those broke me.

The thing that kills me everyday is, piece by piece ...

WHY THE FUCK THERE IS NO SINGLE, USEABLE, SANE TERMINAL EMULATOR ON WINDOWS

I JUST WANT TO TYPE SOME COMMANDS, COPY/PASTE TEXT AND SCROLL

IS IT TO MUCH ?????

FUCK CMD
FUCK POWERSHELL
FUCK WSL
FUCK ALL THOSE WANKY THIRD-PARTY EMULATORS
FUCK EVERY-COMMAND-LINE-REALATED THING ON WINDOWS

FUCKING USLESS SHIT
CANT EVEN DO SOME SSH COPY/PASTE SHIT
WITHOUT SOME WEIRD CHARACTERS POPING OUT EVERYWHERE.

AND FUCK THAT EVERY ONE OF THOSE MUST HAVE TOTTALY DIFFERENT SET OF KEY SHORTCUTS

AND THAT FUCKING BELL
WHY WOULD YOU EVEN PUT A FUCKING BELL SOUND AS DEFAULT SETTING ??

GO TO HELL MICROSOFT

I WANT MY LINUX BACK

Anyone coming to the party?

So ever since I was a kid I've been terrified of being submerged in water. A couple times I've gone up to my friend's dad's lake house, and the most I've done there is like put my foot in the water before I got scared.

But today I was at a coworker's grad party, and they had a pool in the yard, and he convinced me to get in. His words were "get in or I'll throw you in", and that got me right in there. It scared the FUCK out of me, but I did it. After that everyone was splashing water all over me, trying to get my hair wet.

Overall, great time, but I'm still scared of being like fully submerged.

Submitted a ticket to the 3rd party IT provider today. Just like they always do they close the ticket instantly saying they did the work when they didn’t do anything.

Except this time they went one step further. They documented that they had a conversation with me and that they convinced me that I didn’t need the work done.

No such conversation occurred. I have not changed my mind nor have been given any reason to. They just want their ticket times to appear as fast as possible and are willing to lie through their teeth to achieve that.

Prepare for a shit storm motherfuckers.

!dev

I will never understand the need for weeding bs. I am ok with marriage, and doing whatever religious festivity you want to whatever deity you follow. I respect that stuff enough to not go all anti-religious or what not. But I just cannot fathom making a party that benefits the attendee (food whatnot) more than the people starting a life together. Gifts? a popularity contest? I don't get it. My weeding was simple, did not invite a bunch of people, shit burned bridges, but our families were there and that to me was more than enough. Anyone else that got offended, well, they can get offended whenever they pay one of my fucking bills.

But I just cannot get the need to have such a ceremony, AND then to have the audacity to get upset or call out people that cannot make it. Make it for fucking what? the bridge and groom are going to be so fucking distracted with everyone that at most your presence gets an "ah glad you came!"

AND some people even do it in different cities, fucking why? it is a burden as an adult to make time for such minute events, even more to take the time, and the fucking money to go to your fucking party on another city. Bonus points if I need to buy a fucking airplane ticket, no fucking thanks.

I am currently doing something big in my life that only my wife can help me with, because of my situation, my family can't help me, so i am all by myself and wife, and some people told me to put it on hold.....to go to a fucking party. WHY? Why in the sweet holy Mexican baby Ritchie would I go ahead and fucking do that? you are not going to help me afterwards when I get back, shit, you will be out on fucking vacation after the party, for 2 fucking weeks (talk about privilege) and you still want me to put my shit on hold to go...to a fucking party?

Fuck, sometimes I feel that I am toooo fucking egotistical to put my time before others, but man, you really get shit out of this. 2 weedings happening this month, one requires a ticket, the other is a drive away (4 fucking hours) but still, I really don't feel that I should waste my VL that I would much rather spend with my wife and child on some fucking obnoxious ego-inflated party.

Ranting to the wife about 3rd party API authors and how they have broken them from time to time.

On any given URI, it should give me a certain image, some give me a simple error string "Error downloading file" - nothing I can do to fix on my side, the error indicates they were not able to retrieve from their sources.

W: you should check the settings! *... series of unusual suggestions follow*.

Me: Yes, dear. Good ideas.

I have some phone interviews coming up next week but I've never had these before. Usually I do online tests, shared code, or in person as I'm deaf.

This time I just want to try using a voice relay, so v basically whatever the person says it's transcribed... So wondering what do you actually talk about in these "quick calls"?

Party of the reason I don't like phone is because there are a lot of technical terms which will probably screw it up... But just wanted to give it a try and not 100% interested this time...

Was intending to, applied, then other things came up so now not so sure, some came back so just gonna wing it for the experience I guess

I wrote an auth today.

Without frameworks. Without dependencies. Without under-the-hood magic. Without abstract pluggable adaptor modules for the third-party auth library with 63 vulnerabilities and 1252 GitHub issues. Without security vulnerabilities showing up in NPM log. Without dependency of a dependency of a dependency using md5 and Math.random() under the hood for historical reasons, and now we're fucked, because this is the only lib for our framework, and we have no time to write our own replacement. Without all that shit.

Rock-solid, on top of scrypt. Stateless and efficient.

It felt amazing.

I'm buried in projects that I never get time to work on. My boss took the week off, and I'm getting emails from users asking about adding more projects to the board. I'm a single dev at my company. Normally, I have enough patience to get through the day, but today my CIO decided it would be a good time tell my coworker to let me know that the company dumped a third party we used for tons of report automation, and that I need to get these reports hand rolled in house asap. When I sent him a message asking for any kind of details on what this would involve, I found out he left early for the day.

I'm already stressed and putting in extra hours (salaried, so no extra pay) and am having trouble meeting deadlines for projects as it is because I'm constantly pulled away from my dev work to do non-dev work.

I just landed this dev position six months ago and haven't had a chance to build my resume. I'm getting "OK" money considering this is my first full-time dev job. Should I be looking to get out? Suck it up and get the experience? I know we all have crazy expectations on us and frustrating PMs, but after chats with other devs, I get the feeling that my situation is beyond fucked.

Saw this sent into a Discord chat today:

"Warning, look out for a Discord user by the name of "shaian" with the tag #2974. He is going around sending friend requests to random Discord users, and those who accept his friend requests will have their accounts DDoSed and their groups exposed with the members inside it becoming a victim as well. Spread the word and send this to as many discord servers as you can. If you see this user, DO NOT accept his friend request and immediately block him. Discord is currently working on it. SEND THIS TO ALL THE SERVERS YOU ARE IN. This is IMPORTANT: Do not accept a friend request from shaian#2974. He is a hacker.

Tell everyone on your friends list because if somebody on your list adds one of them, they'll be on your list too. They will figure out your personal computer's IP and address, so copy & paste this message where ever you can. He is going around sending friend requests to random discord users, and those who accept his requests will have their accounts and their IP Addresses revealed to him. Spread the word and send this to as many discord servers as you can. If you see this user, DO NOT accept his friend request and immediately block him. Saw this somewhere"

I was so angry I typed up an entire feature-length rant about it (just wanted to share my anger):

"1. Unless they have access to Discord data centres or third-party data centres storing Discord user information I doubt they can obtain the IP just by sending friend requests.

2. Judging by the wording, for example, 'copy & paste this message where ever you can' and 'Spread the word and send this to as many discord servers as you can. If you see this user, DO NOT accept his friend request and immediately block him.' this is most likely BS, prob just someone pissed off at that user and is trying to ruin their reputation etc.. Sentences equivalent to 'spread the word' are literally everywhere in this wall of text.

3. So what if you block the user? You don't even have their user ID, they can change their username and discrim if they want. Also, are you assuming they won't create any alts?

4. Accounts DDoSed? Does the creator of this wall of text even understand what that means? Wouldn't it be more likely that 'shaian' will be DDoSing your computer rather than your Discord account? How would the account even be DDoSed? Does that mean DDoSing Discord's servers themselves?

5. If 'shaian' really had access to Discord's information, they wouldn't need to send friend requests in order to 'DDoS accounts'. Why whould they need to friend you? It doesn't make sense. If they already had access to Discord user IP addresses, they won't even have to interact with the users themselves. Although you could argue that they are trolling and want to get to know the victim first or smth, that would just be inefficient and pointless. If they were DDoSing lots of users it would be a waste of time and resources.

6. The phrase 'Saw this somewhere' at the end just makes it worse. There is absolutely no proof/evidence of any kind provided, let along witnesses.

How do you expect me to believe this copypasta BS scam? This is like that 'Discord will be shutting down' scam a while back.

Why do people even believe this? Do you just blindly follow what others are doing and without thinking, copy and paste random walls of text?

Spreading this false information is pointless and harmful. It only provides benefits to whoever started this whole thing, trying to bring down whoever 'shaian' is.

I don't think people who copy & paste this sort of stuff are ready to use the internet yet.

Would you really believe everything people on the internet tell you?

You would probably say 'no'.

Then why copy & paste this? Do you have a reason?

Or is it 'just because of 'spread the word''?

I'm just sick of seeing people reposting this sort of stuff

People who send this are probably like the people who click 'Yes' to allow an app to make changes in the User Account Control window without reading the information about the publisher's certificate, or the people who click 'Agree' without actually reading the terms and conditions."

In a meeting yesterday working through our WebAPI coding standards, starting from File -> New project..etc..etc.. and ironing out some of the left-or-right decisions so we can have a consistent coding style, working in a meeting room with an overhead projector and sharing keyboard around with one another.

Then we hit the routing 'rules' in the WebApiConfig, "api/{controller}/{id}"…

DevMgr: "Do we need the 'api' prefix? It seems redundant."
Ralph: "Yes it's needed. Prefixing the controllers with 'api' is industry best practice. Otherwise, how is anyone to know it's a web api"
Prancer: "Yea, it's part of the REST standard."
Me: "I don't think so. That is only part of the Asp.Net routing rule. We can put anything we want or take anything out."
DevMgr: "Yea, it looks silly. All the new services are going to be business process specific."
Ralph: "That's how everyone does it. It's kind of the point of why REST services are called WebApi"
Prancer: "What's the point of doing any of this work if we're not going to follow industry standards."
Me: "I understand if the service is part of larger web site, but we're developing standalone services. Prefixing routes with 'api' is redundant. I mean who are these 'everyone' you're talking about?"
<ralph rolls his eyes>
Ralph: "Lets see …uhhh… Netflix?. They're kinda a big deal."
Me: "Like I said, it's an integral part of their site and the services they provide. That's fine. I'm talking about the 12 other 3rd party services we integrate with. None of them have 'api' on any of their routes."
Prancer: "We're talking about serious web services."
Me: "Last time I checked, UPS is a big and serious service."
Ralph: "Their services are a fracking joke" – he didn't say fracking.
Me: "Our payroll system, our billing system, billion dollar companies, didn't have '/api' prefix anywhere. Heck, even that free faxing service we used for a while was a dead-simple routing path."
<I take the keyboard away from Ralph, remove the 'api' from the route.>
Me: "There. Done. Now, lets talk about error handling.."

Rest of the meeting Ralph and Prancer don't say much of anything, arms crossed…I swear Ralph looked like he was going to cry.
This morning I catch my boss…
Me: "What did you think of the meeting? I thought Ralph was going to take a swing at me when I took the keyboard away from him."
DevMgr: "Oh yes…I almost laughed out loud….blows my freaking mind how worked up people get about crap that doesn't matter. Api..or not…who the frack cares. Just make it consistent"
Me: "Exactly…I didn't care either way, but I enjoyed calling out that nonsense."
DevMgr: "Yes..waaay too much."

If I didn't call them on their BS and the 'standard' allowed to continue, I can bet my paycheck when the subject comes up in a few months (another mgr asks 'isn't this api prefix redundant?') Ralph and Prancer will be the first to say "Yea, its stupid. We fought really hard to remove it from the standard...its not our fault...its <insert scapegoat> fault."

Did your company or boss ever do or say anything as a guise to make you think the company is fair or giving you more but instead was doing the opposite? For examples...

When at every company party there is a drawing with top prize an all paid with PTO exotic vacation for two and the top sales guy ALWAYS wins.

I mean really does the company think we are that dumb? It is like the time our CEO announced instead of our 8% quartly bonus if we make EBITA targets we were going to get 6% once at the end of the year. He said that was soo much better cause we would get more money on that one paycheck instead of small sums once a quarter. Think about that one.... What kind of morons does he take us for?

We use a third party paid company to produce a service and give ongoing support for it, which all our revenue streams depend upon. They are shit and their service is shit. Here's how my conversation about testing went today.

Me: 'hey X wrote an integration test project for the service. It shows the service is broken 50% of the time. We should give their team access to it and have them run it as part of CI'

Colleague: 'They are too shit to setup CI'

PM: 'we are stuck with them so there is no point. It is what it is'

Boss: just ignores me. Not even a reply.

Some days later

Head of QA: 'Hey Dev and QA are broken'

Me: 'because their service is broken. I made so and so suggestion before but it was rejected. We will just have to accept Dev and QA are broken 50% of the time'

Head of QA: 'no we cant'

Me: 'ok so we should setup the tests to run by giving them access'

Head of QA: 'No we shouldn't. The tests can only be used by us and if they break it tells us so we can act on it, or choose not to'

Me: 'We would not want to act immediately on all our revenue streams breaking? Yes we can reverse engineer their client and fix errors as they occur, or we could just have them run the tests and a team our company pays for can stop adding breaking changes to their own API every other day. Right now it has been broken for 2 weeks.'

Head of QA: 'in an ideal world we would have an internal team so you're wrong'

Me: :)

I really don't understand how they can come to such a conclusion. Am I missing something or am I surrounded by total fucking idiots?

Third party vendor whose shitty API we have to use as part of our application blocks our account IN PRODUCTION without even telling us every time they have a slowdown because of course it must be us. Yeah, I didn't want to go home anyway🖕

Just needing somewhere to let some steam off

Tl;dr: perfectly fine commandline system is replaced by bad ui system because it has a ui.

For a while now we have had a development k8s cluster for the dev team. Using helm as composing framework everything worked perfectly via the console. Being able to quickly test new code to existing apps, and even deploy new (and even third party apps) on a simar-to-production system was a breeze.

Introducing Rancher

We are now required to commit every helm configuration change to a git repository and merge to master (master is used on dev and prod) before even being able to test the the configuration change, as the package is not created until after the merge is completed.

Rolling out new tags now also requires a VCS change as you have to point to the docker image version within a file.

As we now have this awesome new system, the ops didn't see a reason to give us access to kubectl. So the dev team is stuck with a ui, but this should give the dev team more flexibility and independence, and more people from the team can roll releases.

Back to reality: since the new system we have hogged more time from ops than we have done in a while, everyone needs to learn a new unintuitive tool, and the funny thing, only a few people can actually accept VCS changes as it impacts dev and prod. So the entire reason this was done, so it is reachable to more people, is out the window.

After drilling yourself with links and resources, documentation and cant execute what you want. You leave it.

Some time later you go back and you are like why the hell didnt I understand this it's so simple :/ and it literally says what to do.

This is when I became a calm developer. Don't rush yourself. If you want to quickly do something. READ dont just look 🙃

Also, don't persist with understand the official docs. The third party explanations will show you flames 80% of the times if you are learning something new.

Ok people. I got a contract last year with a company, and I was their support for one year, which ended back in February. They still email me for all their problems. I don't know why. They emailed me today, for Christ's sake, on the Saturday of Easter, to tell me that their 3rd party software can't send them emails because the mailserver has that IP on greylist asking me to look into it and find a solution. AS IF I CARE! I'm with my family, taking a break for two days damn it. Panic attack came, my heartbeat rate problem kicked in and now I can't calm down. I'm trying to get into the "I don't give a fuck" mood but I can't, I'm too responsible for that, in the worst dramatic way (the world is gonna end etc).

Piece of advice:
Be very clear next time you come to terms with another company, be precise and don't let them have it their way.

Every year, the worst dev experience comes right at the holidays, when website owners with big egos want to launch right on (U.S.) Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Eve, or New Year’s Eve/Day because they think they’re that popular and important. It never occurs to them that this is the WORST time because any third party support you need for hosting, APIs, plugins, etc. is either backlogged or out of office. And because NOBODY is eagerly awaiting the redesign of ANY website on those particular dates since they are stuffing their faces and getting s&&&faced at bars and parties. Nobody will even notice that your website has changed until January 15th at the earliest.

I decided to learn Flutter, because the idea of a common code base between Android and iOS sounds nice. I'm late to the party, I know.
So I install everything and start typing in the tutorial. TAB... two spaces. I absolutely hate that so let's change it. In the settings, it sends me to a FAQ which more or less says this is the way it is, deal with it. But I want my tabs to be four spaces, every code editor since the dawn of time could do this... I'M PAYING FOR THIS SHIT!!!!!!!
Ok, let's check the JetBrains website, I'm starting to lose my patience, but let's do it. At this point I should also mention that I'm feeling pretty stupid. I mean, I'm checking on the internet about how to do something which obviously must be obvious, why am I not seeing it?
I find a page on the official website. JetBrains' replies are along the lines of "Why would you want that?", "The holly wars between tabs and spaces are over", "Most people like it this way", "The overlords said this is the coding style to be used" (Ok, the last one was me reading between the lines). At the end of the thread, they provide a "hackish solution" (their words, not mine). Which doesn't work. Because why should it?
Not even when PyCharm's debugger randomly shat itself and I had to use print statements I got so angry. That was relatively fine, bugs are a fact of life, and the overall package is good, so I kept paying.
But now you're telling me that I cannot use what should be a common feature of every code editor just because you and the overlords know better?
Well, fuck you and the horse you came in on JetBrains, you've just lost a customer.

This little underscore (actually the absence of whomst'd) was the source of a very frustrating bug.

I tried to debug the sources of a 3rd-party library to no avail, but all I had to do was to read the documentation for the 1001st time. 😤

Forget most useless feature, an entire, year long product. Me (at the time very junior) and a principle engineer, wasted a year bundling our product as a plugin in a third party app. 3 years later, we'd sold 2 licences. It was a buggy pile of hell.

Every FUCKING time iOS releases a version update, I have to update my Xcode, my code to the latest swift, my third party libraries..
Do you feel my pain , Apple?

TL;DR: When picking vendors to outsource work to, vet them really well.

Backstory:
Got a large redesign project that involves rebuilding a website's main navigation (accessibility reasons).
Project is too big just for our dev team to handle with our workload so we got to bring a 3rd party vendor to help us. We do this often so no big deal.
But, this time the twist was Senior Management already had retained hours with a dev shop so they want us to use them for project. Okay...

It begins:
Have our scope / discovery meeting about the changes and our expected DevOps workflow.

Devs work Local and push changes to our Github, that kicks off the build and we test on Dev, then it goes to Staging for more testing & PM review. Once ready we can push to prod, or whenever needed. All is agreed, everyone was happy.

Emailed the vendors' project manager to ask for their devs Github accounts so we can add them to the project. Got no reply for 3 days.

4th day, I get back "Who sets up the Github accounts?"

fuck me. they've never used Github before but in our scope meeting 4 days ago you said Github was fine...??

Whatever, fuck it. I'll make the accounts and add them.

Added 4 devs to the repo and setup new branch. 40min later get an email that they can't setup dev environment now, the dev doesn't know how to setup our CMS locally, "not working for some reason."

So, they ask for permission to develop on our STAGING server.. "because it's already setup"... they want to actively dev on our staging where we get PM/Senior Management approvals?

We have dev, staging, production instances and you want to dev in staging, not dev?... nay nay good sir.

This is whom senior management wants us to use, already paid for via retainer no less. They are a major dev shop and they're useless...

😢😭

Cant wait for today's progress checkup meeting. 😐😐

/rant

Damn, help me guys. Tomorrow I'm invited to a "friends" party.
Don't want to go, but have to. I hate partys. I hate all this shit, alcohol, drunk people. Have to stay there for at least 6h, until 1am or so. I hate drinking alcohol, doing stupid alcohol drinking games.
And I don't like this friend. I don't have much contact with him in the last few months. I thought he would understand that I don't like him. But no - he never lets me alone. Don't want this.
Let me fucking code - I want to have my free time, let me alone. Don't need that friends. The school mates on my apprenticeship are good enough for me, they are friendly, thinking the same way and don't drink alcohol all the time.
I hate this. Damn. Hopefully I will survive this fucking party. Maybe I can browse devRant half time of the party.
Am I the only one who doesn't need all that shit? Partys, alcohol, social interaction all the time?

Spend literally two days trying to figure out why I have a 2 hour offset in my timezones for a lamp web app. This isn't even close to my first timezone rodeo.

Check logs, reset Apache/MySQL/PHP timezones in like 100 places. Use 3rd party server side and client side timezone libraries. Moment.js you say? Shit works like a charm... but is, of course, still two hours off.

MySQL is right. PHP is right. Apache is right. PHP libs are in place. Finally convert the entire damn project to use epoch time because I have a deadline, I have no more time to read backwater AWS docs and try to figure out why the hell this Ubuntu EC2 is fucked up, and I literally cannot figure out why in the hell the damn clock is off.

Several days later notice a variable in the main .config file... right in root... 2 hour timezone offset.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

The agency I own built a WordPress plugin for a client using a freelancer developer. The client, out of ambivalence, withheld information that would have drastically changed the design of the plugin, but by the time we found out it was much to late to start over. The developer moved overseas in the middle of it all and from then on was not very responsive to communications about the project which delayed things by months. I tried to find a replacement developer but nobody else had experience with the third-party API. The live version of the API ended up not being able to support what we were trying to get it to do with the plugin even though the test version of the API was fine and the vendor was unhelpful. And because we spent so much time and money on the plugin, we weren’t able to even begin on another part of the project. The client complained of over $30,000 in lost revenue due to these issues. Complete fail all around. I’m never doing another custom software project again. It’s all just website design from here.

I've had a Xiaomi Mi 8 for a few months now. Although I'm impressed by what I got for the amount I paid (a phone that cost about $250 for 6GB RAM, Snapdragon 845, Android 9 and premium build quality is quite a steal), it definitely comes with a consequence.

MIUI (specifically MIUI 11) is godawful. It is single-handedly the worst Android ROM I've ever used since my shitty Android 2.2 phone back around 2010. If you're gonna buy a Xiaomi phone, plan to install Lineage OS on it (but even that's a pain which I'll explain why later).

- Navigation buttons don't hide while watching a video.

Why? God only knows. The ONLY way to bypass without root this is to use its garbage fullscreen mode with gestures, which is annoying as all hell.

- 2 app info pages?

Yeah, the first one you can access just by going to its disaster of a settings app, apps, manage apps and tap on any one.

The 2nd one you can access through the app info button in any 3rd party launcher. Try this: Download Nova launcher, go to the app drawer, hold on any app and tap "app info", and you'll see the 2nd one.

Basically, instead of modifying Android's FOSS source code, they made a shitty overlay. These people are really ahead of their time.

- Can only set lock screen wallpapers using the stock Gallery app

It's not that big an issue, until it is, when whatever wallpaper app you're using only allows you to set the wallpaper and not download them. I think this is both a fuckup on Xiaomi and (insert wallpaper app name here), but why Xiaomi can't include this basic essential feature that every other Android ROM ever made has is beyond me.

- Theming on MIUI 11 is broken

Why do they even bother having a section to customize the boot animation and status bar when there's not one goddamn theme that supports it? At this point you're only changing the wallpaper and icon pack which you can do on any Android phone ever. Why even bother?

They really, REALLY want to be Apple.

Just look at their phones. They're well designed and got good specs, but they don't even care anymore about being original. The notch and lack of a headphone jack aren't features, they're tremendous fuckups by the dead rotting horse known as Apple that died when Steve Jobs did.

Xiaomi tries to build a walled garden around an inherently customizable OS, and the end result is a warzone of an Android ROM that begs for mercy from its creator. Launchers integrate horribly (Does any power user actually use anything that isn't Nova or Microsoft launcher?), 3rd party themes and customization apps need workarounds, some apps don't work at all. People buy from Xiaomi to get a high end budget Android phone at the price of some ads and data collection, not a shitter iOS wannabe.

They really, REALLY want you to have a sim card

If you don't have a sim card and you're using your phone for dev stuff, you're a 2nd class citizen to Xiaomi. Without one, you can't:

- Install adb through adb
- Write to secure settings
- Unlock your bootloader and get away from this trash Android ROM

What's the point? Are they gonna shadow ban you? Does anyone contact them to unlock their bootloader saying "yeah I wanna use a custom rom to pirate lizard porn and buy drugs"? They made this 1000000000x harder than it needs to be for no reason whatsoever. Oh yeah and you gotta wait like a week or something for them to unlock it. How they fucked up this bad is beyond me.

So yeah. Xiaomi. Great phones, atrocious OS.