An entirely typical exchange at work:

PM: How long would it take to build an application that collates Gubblefluffs and exports them as a PDF?

ME: Hard to say. What’s a Gubblefluff?

PM: Nothing complex. Its basically an object with some stuff in.

ME: Erm, okay. So I’ll define a Gubblefluff object plus methods to add edit and delete, then for each Gubblefluff have it write a line to a PDF.

PM: It will need to email that PDF to somebody.

ME: Okay, cool. “Gubblefluffs-by-email” should take about a day.

6 hours later…

ME: I’ve done Gubblefluffs-to-pdf, I’m not clear on what’s in a Gubblefluff but I’ve made it flexible so it can take almost anything.

PM: No, a Gubblefluff can ONLY be one of 4 Snigglefingers plus a timestamp and some JSON.

ME: What? Right. Okay. What’s a Snigglefinger?

PM: (sighs) A Snigglefinger is the collection of relevant Babelsets.

ME: Babelsets?

PM: Yeah, a user can have any number of Babelsets but they must correspond to one of the four types of Snigglefingers.

ME: There are users!?

PM: Of course!

ME: But I’ve not coded anything for users.

PM: Shit. I’ve told the client they can have it today. How long to add in users?

ME: And Babelsets, and Snigglefingers and the new Gubblefluff rules?

PM: Yeah.

6 days later…

ME: This is done now. It’s a beast but it works. Who should it email the PDFs to?

PM: Client X, plus cc to Y and bcc to Z.

ME: What? It doesn't support CC and BCC!

1 hour later…

ME: This is done. I’ve tested it and sent you a copy of the PDF it generates.

PM: Okay thanks. Is the cron running daily?

ME: What cron?

…

ME: Okay, so the cron’s running once a day at 8pm.

PM: Oh, it’ll need to be at 3:15pm. That’s when we’ve told the client they’ll get it.

ME: Right. I’ll change it...

PM: Also, the PDF you sent me looks nothing like the visual.

ME: What visual?
...

The S in PDF stands for standardized.

pm: our client wants a proprietary pdf compression app.
me: Okay gimme 3 days and some sample PDFs.
pm: they won't supply any sample PDFs because they contain confidential information.
me: okay fine, I'll download some from the interwebs.

** 3 days later **

me: here is the pdf compression app. all done and works with all of about 100 PDFs we tested with.
pm: okay great I'll have the client take a look.

** half and hour later **

pm: the client said that the compression app errors out.
me: okay I'll go look at the server logs to see what's up.

** 10 seconds later **

me: what the shit is a "foxit phantompdf" file.
pm: it's the proprietary pdf format that they are using.
me: oh joy. I'll go try to find some sample files and see if I can fix it.

** 1 hour later, no sample files found **

pm: got anything?
me: *sobs obnoxiously*

I woke up today with my power off, dad forgot to pay the bill

WTF.jpg

I get home from work all stoked to code to learn that he didn't get it straightened out

Phones on 10% so i cant even read pdfs or surf Kodi

And im spending the last bit of electricity i own to bitch about it

Pay your bills devs

Client: Please remove the address inputs from the inquiry form. Our marketing strategist said that more people will fill out the form if there are less input fields.

Me: But you are required by law to include the address in the generated inquiry PDFs!

Client: Can you remove the fields and still include the address in the PDF somehow?

Me: No. How would the website know the users address without asking for it.

Client: Okay. Wait! Can we change the form to just one large input where the user has to enter everything at once? That is even less inputs so more users would do it, right?

Me:...

PHP sucks balls,
It takes forever to do anything, it is so messy it feels like walking through a massive pile of shit!

Ok good I have your attention and that ++ 😇

But no this is not that kind of rant, quite the opposite.

In 70 lines of php shit as some people would call it, I am currently scrapping GitHub pages with ebook collections and with some minor regex pulling PDFs out and saving them to file.

I... uhm... I... I can't... I ... I can't even.... THIS IS LIVE IN THE CLIENT'S SITE WHERE ANYONE CAN CREATE A LOGIN WITH NO VERIFICATION WHATSOEVER AND SEE THIS WHICH IS LINKED TO A BIG RED BUTTON THAT RESETS THE WHOLE DATABASE, YOU FUCKING DUMB PIECE OF SHIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

// This event clears the entire solution in all active clients, truncates the database and also removes any stored PDFs in the server folder
$(document).on('click', '#resetDB', function () {
// This event only happens if the user correctly enters the password, this is to prevent other users than the admin from performing this action
var answer = prompt("Please enter the password required to perform this action.");
if(answer == "-REDACTEDBECAUSEHOLYSHIT-") {
socket.emit('resetDB');
} else {
alert("The password is incorrect, please try again!");
}
});

AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!111!!1!!11!1!!1!1one!one!!!11

(I'm not inventing this, even though the "site" is internal only and not accessible through the web. That does *not* make it any less stupid!)

I find it super annoying, this trend where no one wants to write learning documentation anymore, but instead put up a bunch of demo videos and video "training courses."

I don't want to spend 5 minutes watching you do something that would take me 10 seconds to read. I can't search for terms in your video, and I can't use them as a general reference manual. I can't go at my own pace, easily keep my place between devices, enter code as you go, the list of cons goes on and on.

I would rather pay you money for a good eBook (and no, PDFs don't count), than to have the only realistic way to learn about your software be a playlist on your YouTube channel.

This, however, this...

Went to check out Ansible again, because I've heard good things lately and it's been a couple years since I've looked at it.

Took me a while to find their docs because there's almost no mention of anything on the home page except trying Tower for free.

Found the docs. The first item there is the Quick Start Video and I think, "Cool. That's a good use of video, showing off the product."

I dig out some headphones, click play:

"Ansible is a powerful" BOOM!

Enter my email to watch the video?!

Ah, forget it. Maybe I'll see you next time, Ansible.

I once had a client who wanted a system where no matter what type of file someone uploaded we'd make a PDF out of it. I don't mean "print to PDF", I mean like a straight conversion. A picture, a doc file, a speadsheet, an MP3, a video, a CAD file, a .ivt file format you and I make up right now and tell no one else about for storing Iowan votes, anything.

I told him that was impossible.* There are indeed things out there where you can print to a pdf, but it would mean that a program that knows what a .grml file is, and how to represent it on paper, assuming it even can be, is involved in the middle.

He refused to believe me, and found a company where the sales person swore up and down their product could do it. I said "then you explained it wrong" and we went back and forth. It culminated in me being put in contact with THEIR programmer. I explained what he was looking for. Their programmer replied along the lines of "but that's impossible, and also what would a PDF of half these examples even look like?" I basically said "I know, but your guy is telling my guy you can do this, so you need to tell your guy to STFU before we ALL get roped into trying to convert Duke Nukem maps and zip files full of dlls to pdfs."

Luckily it finally died after that, but the whole ordeal took months.

*I'm being direct/blunt for the sake of brevity when recapping what I said, just fill in the usual "talking with a client niceties"

Me: For your approval *link to DropBox PDFs*
Client: Can you send that to me as PDF?
😬😬😬

*Downloads 37 PDFs of Learning Programming in ________*

*Doesn't read them*

*Subscribes to YouTube channels that teach programming*

*Attempts to watch everything*

*Fails*

me_irl.mp4

Was asked to make an e-sign system that manipulates PDFs to insert an image and the date at different coordinates on x number of different pages.

200 hours later, it was done. Now I'm the PDF guy

Users: “Maybe I can just download these 3 PDFs in a single zipped file, that’d be nice.”

Android: “You got that buddy!”

Apple: “Animoji! 🐵”

The Humble bundle currently offers a bunch of Linux related books. Some gimp shit, and some blender shit.

The thing is, they have the Linux Programming interface by Michael Kerrisk for 30 dllrs(in total for everything)

Ladies and gents, that right there is a DAMN good deal. That book is fucking gold. Used it during Uni, didn't get to keep it. 30 bucks for a bunch of pdfs, ebook and mobi plus a book that for itself is worth more? Shiet son. It will pump up both your Linux and C chops I would tell ya that much.

I'd made that deal.

What about you Utivich, you'd made that deal?

Utivich: I'd made that deal.

I don't blame you. DAMN GOOD deal.

Food for thought.

PDFs saves more trees than any NGOs 😂

Digitization in germany be like:

I sent a doctor some documents via E-Mail and i just saw how they printed to documents, then scanned them and then threw them away.

I asked why?

They said the system where they need the documents only allows to directly scan documents from a scanner and doesn't allow PDFs....

I just can't

That much paper waste because i sent them an email with like 30 pages of documents.

4 hours! four fucking hours! f.o.u.r. h.o.u.r.s.!
It's the amount in the time domain this bug has cost me to fix. The cost in the sanity domain is immeasurable...
I swear, the god damn ass births of devs who coded this abomination should be slowly mutilated and then raped by their own severed limbs.
It took me 4 hours to figure out that their 12 year old binary CLI tool they used to generate PDFs from PHP could not handle neither HTML5 nor some linebreaks at specific places. Some part of it is due to them using REGEX to find and replace HTML tag.
Yes, I am indeed very pissed. And I need a 🥃 or 3

What we learned:
- Don't use REGEX to "parse" HTML
- Don't call random compiled CLI tools from PHP if there are PHP packages to do the same shit

!dev

I'm always somewhat pissed off since i don't have a developer job - barely even a tech job. I scan patient charts into pdfs > a server, and that's as complicated as my job description gets. i sit and scan. my computer is (supposed to be) nothing other than a display for managing the scanned charts.

what really killed me though is that one time, we got a new MFC because our old one was, well, obviously broken beyond their patience level. They told me i'd be "Helping".
I got to cut open the box.
whoop dee fucking doo. Tech assist of the century ladies and gents.

That being ine of the worst cases, there's always the times when they talk to their IT guy and never forget to call him an asshole after simply because they don't like it when they don't understand stuff. I've texted him a few times and he's actually very pleasant to talk with and does his job well. just grinds my gears

(and being the IT guy is not available as an alternative. the job is 1. obviously filled, and 2. I installed a word document password bruteforcer, which they in turn told the doctor who told the IT guy and made it sound like i had developed it - of course, this being a pretty professional clinic, he suggested i get fired. so now any hope of me actually doing what I love there is pretty hopelessly out of my reach>

I just found a reason to use Edge - viewing PDFs when I'm too lazy to install acrobat reader!

Took a job during the summer vacation and was expected to sit through excel and click products and fill in info (mundane tasks). Overheard the boss talking to the coworkers "We need to translate 77,000 urls into images, how do we split this work up?" I jumped in and said "I can write that in code so you don't have to do it" They all looked at me like I was some sort of magician O_O. Had the program running during the weekend on three computers and all of the 77,000 urls are now a beautiful mess of pdfs and jpgs. Do you have a story that made you feel like a wizard?

TL;DR: Printers suck. MS-Word sucks.

Yesterday I wanted to print a few participation certificates for my blender project students.

*Turns on printer, runs downstairs, gets paper, runs upstairs, puts paper in*

So I tried to print in word. Nothing happened. Printer was online. I checked queue: Nothing.

*a couple of tries later*

Okay, fuck it! I export it as a pdf and open it in edge (8 times. 8 documents. Edge is a neat pdf-viewer, fight me). I press print on one. It works. I print the others and check: They look shit. The images look like 25% resolution and 50% jpg compression. I check word.

It by default exports in low quality. Yea, thanks for asking me. I export pdfs again and check "high quality". Open them, print. Done.

These were like 30 wasted minutes and print color. And paper.

Btw they look fucking neat. I can't show them right now but gradient text headline, project name is a rendered and edited 3D object :D

Amazon API ... seriously...this thing is documented over 3 different pdfs in 3 different locations with 3 different requestpattern, 2 different answerpattern and requestthrottling per minute and per hour takes the rest...and then you just do basic stuff e.g. request all orders that were refunded by amazon... who the hell designed this mess?

Found some ancient pdfs.

In 2010, it was my first client project. Our architect was not from iOS background, we had editable pdfs in our app. Those were pretty rich pdfs with inline HD images. iPads that time were not too fast and couldn't handle big gb pdf loaded into memory. App would crash randomly running out of memory. We fixed it by paginating pdf, it wasn't out of the world but considering it was my first mobile project and no one to guide, I thought it was pretty cool what we did there

The reporting department had a freak out because they couldn’t print to PDFs. Whole reporting nightmare and on fire.
Turns out it was printer unplugged a thousand miles away where someone fifteen years ago put a check in to ensure that a specific printer was connected before allowing physical print jobs.

After three weeks looking for decent pdf parser that will handle all documents I gathered for my project I decided to write my own.
All those I tried end up with more then 10% not correctly parsed pdfs or require to much coding.
I was sceptic so I waited another week debating if it’s good idea to do it and I said yes.

Spent 16 hours straight coding pdf document extraction library and command line tool based on pdf.js

Fuck, now when I open pdf I see opcodes instead of text.

Got two more hours until client planning meeting and then I go to sleep for a while.

Time to start testing this more deeply as I have about 60k ~ 20GB pdf documents to parse and then I need to build some dependency graph out of its text.

At least it’s more funny then making boring REST API for money.

fuck iText.
fuck Aspose.
fuck Adobe.
fuck PDFs.

It will be all too soon if I never have anything to do with programming an app to do PDF generation/manipulation ever again.

I never thought to I'd say this about an open-source project, but if I wanted to single out an unbeatable case of "Bad Design", and the manifestation of the term "Redundancy Hell", It is definitely Calibre.

Single job: To keep some e-book files + some metadata.
What it does in brief: In a single dir as your library; From metadata stored IN each file; It generates subdirs <author_name>/<title_name>(<some_numerical_id>), copies the e-book file there, generates a jpg cover from the first page and also stores it there, generates an xml file to support legacy e-book formats (but it generates it anyway even for pdfs), which contains all the same metadata for the file, including title, author and href for the cover, and also stores it there. And then, all the same metadata for all books is stored in a metadata.db in the library root folder. I don't know if there is more data stored/used somewhere in a more obfuscated way.

Not too much to ask: Change some author/title/any single field.
What is done: 💩🌋

It is so helpful, it does all the stuff by itself or its plugins; you don't have to touch anything. But it also has this amazing ability to fuck everything up without even being touched. I mean WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU THINKING? WHAT KIND OF A FUCKING DESIGN IS THIS? A FUCKING FRACTAL?

Literally, If I had listed all my books on physical papers with a real life pen, It would take me less time that I've already wasted on unfucking the regular disasters. Fuck you and your arrogant responses to issues.

I opened a pdf in macOS today.
It was opened in the default pdf viewer and I could scroll through the pages. Then I accidentally dragged one of the pages in the left area where all of the pages are shown as thumbnails. I was surprised that I can do that, because surely I was just viewing the pdf. Like in a pdf viewer. Like read only.

Imagine my surprise when I closed the pdf, opened it again and found the pages in the wrong order!

It freaking autosaved my accidental drag and drop in the standard app that opens pdfs!
Who the hell thought it was a good idea to do that? That’s insane!

Oh boy I got a few. I could tell you stories about very stupid xss vectors like tracking IDs that get properly sanitized when they come through the url but as soon as you go to the next page and the backend returns them they are trusted and put into the Dom unsanitized or an error page for a wrong token / transaction id combo that accidentally set the same auth cookie as the valid combination but I guess the title "dumbest" would go to another one, if only for the management response to it.

Without being to precise let's just say our website contained a service to send a formally correct email or fax to your provider to cancel your mobile contract, nice thing really. You put in all your personal information and then you could hit a button to send your cancelation and get redirected to a page that also allows you to download a pdf with the sent cancelation (including all your personal data). That page was secured by a cancelation id and a (totally save) 16 characters long security token.

Now, a few months ago I tested a small change on the cancelation service and noticed a rather interesting detail : The same email always results in the same (totally save) security token...
So I tried again and sure, the token seemed to be generated from the email, well so much about "totally save". Of course this was a minor problem since our cancelation ids were strong uuids that would be incredibly hard to brute force, right? Well of course they weren't, they counted up. So at that point you could take an email, send a cancelation, get the token and just count down from your id until you hit a 200 and download the pdf with all that juicy user data, nice.

Well, of course now I raised a critical ticket and the issue was fixed as soon as possible, right?
Of course not. Well I raised the ticket, I made it critical and personally went to the ceo to make sure its prioritized. The next day I get an email from jira that the issue now was minor because "its in the code since 2017 and wasn't exploited".

Well, long story short, I argued a lot and in the end it came to the point where I, as QA, wrote a fix to create a proper token because management just "didn't see the need" to secure such a "hard to find problem". Well, before that I sent them a zip file containing 84 pdfs I scrapped in a night and the message that they can be happy I signed an NDA.

!rant
Question for all the people who know bash around here. Is there a standard for bash scripting? Kinda how like PHP has the PSR standard. I've downloaded a couple of pdfs from various sites but none have been an actual standard.

Yesterday my boss forwarded a mail to me. A Senior Project Leader of a Software Company asked him if there is a library for filling out pdfs. Apparently, he can neither google nor ask their own developers... WTF?

This is definitely a total first world problem but I am so frustrated.

I am stuck in a team that embodies the Japanese proverb "The nail that sticks out gets hammered down".

The management are there because it is convenient and flexible and have no interest in managing or keeping up with tech.
The lead developers are extremely anti-social and are not approachable and the this stems down to the devs (not all but really most) - all there just to do the bare minimum and spend most of their energies in trying to avoid work or having learn something.

Unfortunately I am passionate about what I do and want to build high-quality products and this has put me at odds with the way things work.

I could fill up alot of time talking about how I was ordered to "cut" images/icons out of PDFs rather just getting them from the branding team, or how I was scolded for having set up logging, detected a problem caused by another developer and fixed it before it cost a big client a massive amount of money... But really the point is that I have never worked somewhere with such an awful attitude to enthusiasm and quite frankly it boggles my mind trying to understand how they rationalise these things but the answer is always laziness.

Obviously there are worse problems in the world than working in a job where you are encouraged to do nothing... But it actually really depresses me and causes anxiety that I am working with people who don't care about testing or monitoring or learning new things or even collaboration.

...sigh...

Hopefully the job market will start opening again soon

you know whats wild? they're talking of AI taking of the world

and meanwhile we still need to fill out and send copies of pdfs everywhere to get things done

🤡

You know what a fucking good place for 1000s of mp4s, pdfs, doc files, exes and svgs is? Yeah, the bloddy SVN,which mirrors to git.
And how about a ibm websphere install zip with tiny 1.3gb?
And of cause you store your fuckin perl and Shellscripts, that have been written by a plain lunatic and that are responsible for installing the crap in the repo.
What? One repo for one component? Nah, cramp like 150 different projects into on repo.
And the most important scripts have to be kept unversionized ... For reasons.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg of shit.
Btw. websphere ships its own apache2.2 and its own security lib and its own openssl compilation, with ibm java ... Filesystem hierarchy standard? Dafuq? If you want to find something it better be like where is waldo - right, IBM? And command arguements? Man pages, usable documentation, usable deployment? How did any of this ever seem like a good idea to anyone?
Go get a koloscopy with a submarine periscope, IBM.

Gotta love software engineers. I'm writing some python to generate PDFs, so start by looking at chrome command line, which will be some headache with temp files and other madness.

Then find puppeteer, which does exactly what I want, but requires NodeJS.

Then find the unofficial python port, with a 5 line example of pretty much what I need to do.

"I need a way to create PDFs from word documents"
"OK, here's Cute PDF, just print to it"
"Great, how does this work with my pdf letterhead?"
"Oh, well that's different, we'll need to create a word template with the letterhead pieces from the PDF. Here you go."
"OK, how do I merge the word documents generated by my fuckmess of a CRM software system?"
"You can copy and paste it, or we can purchase this software for you that should be able to do it"
"Why didn't you install that software first? You guys are useless"

Alright buddy, fuck you too. I'll be sure to automatically assume that even though your initial email is a full, complete request, that there's more behind it and read your mind through the email going forward.

Sooo I’m typically a proponent of physical copy of books, as I’d rather sit and read them, write and take notes. Essentially all my books turn into something out of the “half blood prince” potions book from Harry Potter.

But it’s so inconvenient as either my books are in my office or in the library at home. It ends up being something like connecting a USB... the book I need at the time is always in the opposite place I am in currently.

Also, all the books I want now are newer and none are on the used market. For a reasonable price.

So I gave in a bought an iPad with the hopes of putting the books in pdf form on it... I’ll pay for some PDFs but hey if I can get it free thru a google search then it is what it is lol.

Not sure how I’m gonna adapt to reading on a tablet, as I really prefer a physical book.. hell I still use national brand computation notebooks for all my notes. Nothing beats writing it down, AND I still have an IBM selectric 3 and Swintec, nothing beats sitting down and just letting the thoughts flow neatly on a piece of paper and then glueing it the notebook

Anyway whatcha y’alls thoughts of using an iPad as a digital library of books.. using the Apple Pencil to annotate the book. I bought the 12.9 inch as the screen size is closest to a sheet of paper

Also, I don’t read fiction all the books I read are nonfiction, reference manuals, textbooks, data sheets, user manuals, stuff like the art of computer programming by knuth, Kent beck, Robert Martin, folwler books, etc

So I wrote a service a couple of years ago to generate PDFs from some documents. Fully working, covered it with tests (unit and integration). Code was clear and easy to follow.

I've been promoted and the engineer that took it over just went in and rewrote half of it. That would be fine, but they also just deleted every test. So now it's untested.

Glad that's not my problem anymore, I geniunely hope it breaks

Why do I have 50 pdfs of books that teach me things that I will never be using?
Assembly tutorial? Why?
Java tutorial? Hm... okay. Perhaps.
Python tutorial x10? But I could use docs!
C? Shit!
C++? Ugh...
C#? Seriously?!

I think it's the time to wipe out all files with .pdf extention :/

I just love working with this other company!
Their projects are fucking complicated, but still doable, they entertain me

But most of all, the examples they make are just awesome!

Like now I'm developing a CRM for a small clinic and there was an issue like "what are notes for?"

Reply:
"The patient is showily homosexual, remember to ask for his HIV exams after his next visit"

Other examples:
Q: "what happens during the visit?"
A: "the patients comes in, the receptionist will hand over a tablet with some questions like how deep his asshole is, then proceeds to to doctor office and there he will be raped for 30m, during the rape the doctor will take note of how destroyed his anus is, and will proceed to prepare a therapy"

Q: "I see there's the requirement for attachments"
A: "yeah once they get into the doctor room, they will be asked stuff like feet pictures to let the doctors jerk off later at night, but also PDFs about exams or some kind of stuff like that"

Q: "Will the staff be able to notify one another about random shit?"
A: "They're 3 people in like 40 square meters, so they might as well just shout 'hey, I shit myself bc there's no more toilet paper', they're close enough to hear one another"

---
I'm sorry in advance if you feel offended by any part of this

Spending the day sending emails back and forth with your client because they can't be bothered to prepare a single overview of what properties the endpoint expects, and instead expect you to piece it together from 6 PDFs of which at least 2 contain contradicting information, another is outdated, and the last one seems to have been exported from word and is missing half the content.

Fun times!

Programming video tutorials or pdf's , which will you go for and why?

WHAT COCKSUCKING LUNATICS DECIDED TO MAKE A PDF ONLY ABLE TO DOWNLOAD WITH JAVASCRIPT.

I CANT DOWNLOAD YOUR FUCKING PDFS TO SIGN BY TONIGHT BECAUSE ALL I HAVE IS MY IPad. WHICH DOESNT FUCKING HAVE JAVASCRIPT

THERE IS A TIME AND A PLACE TO USE JAVASCRIPT AND THIS IS NOT ONE OF THEM. GO CASTRATE YOURSELF WITH A RUSTY KNIFE

So, I recently added a new feature to our app which allows the user to rotate/crop the image before being uploaded to our server, and we have an option to upload pdfs as well, so when I gave this feature (rotate/crop image) out for testing, the tester in our organization tells me where's the option to rotate the pdf? And I'm like where have you seen someone rotating a pdf? He's like that's the reason why we need to have it. And now the PM wants me to add that in the next release, after explaining them for 30 mins that pdfs don't rotate, they tell me to do a proper research on it and then revert. 🙃

Just suggested to the question on how to merge pdfs to a single large one to use MS Word for that.

It was a Linux only group.

I live dangerous in other ways as well.

Getting requirements from my dad for a brochure for his company.
"Just make a pdf, 5-6 pages"
"You can take the pictures from these other two pdfs"
"Write some good sentences"
....
Help me.

Any good recommendations for creating PDFs with Python? ReportLab seems powerful, but a steep learning curve. Looked at a couple other options quickly.

Side note...for as popular as PDFs are...it is surprisingly difficult to create them.

School stuff. Teachers have loads of pdfs and they're just giving them to us on Google Classrooms to do in our books. Maybe a tool to transform those into proper forms + marking.

Also, a revision app that scans your notes and tests you (TTS and STT).

Also, my blog and DevRant

I called the hack "blow up bunny", was in my first company.

We had 4 industrial printers which usually got fed by PHP / IPP to generate invoices / picking lists / ...

The dilemma started with inventory - we didn't have time to prepar due to a severe influenza going round (my team of 5 was down to 2 persons, where on was stuck with trying to maintain order. Overall I guess more than 40 % ill, of roughly 70 persons...)

Inventory was the kind of ultimate death process. Since the company sold mobile accessoires and other - small - stuff.

Small is the important word here....

Over 10 000 items were usually in stock.

Everything needed to be counted if open or (if closed) at least registered.

The dev task was to generate PDFs with SKUs and prefilled information to prevent disaster.

The problem wasn't printing.

The problem was time and size.

To generate lists for > 10 000 articles, matching SKUs, segmented by number of teams isn't fun.

To print it even less. Especially since printers can and will fail - if you send nonstop, there is a high chance that the printer get's stuck since the printers command buffer get's cranky and so on.

It was my longest working day: 18 hours.

In the end "Blow up bunny" did something incredibly stupid: It was a not so trivial bash pipeline which "blew up" the large PDF in a max of 5 pages, sent it to one of the 4 printers in round robin fashion.

After a max of 4 iterations, bunny was called.

"bunny" was the fun part.

Via IPP you can of course watch the printer queue.

So...

Check if queue was empty, start next round with determined empty printer queues.

Not so easy already. But due to the amount of pages this could fail too.

This was the moment where my brain suddenly got stuck aft 4 o clock in the morning in a very dark and spookey empty company - what if the printer get's stuck? I could send an reset queue or stuff like that, but all in all - dead is dead. Paper Jam is paper jam.

So... I just added all cups servers to the curl list of bunny.

Yes. I printed on all > 50 printers on 4 beefy CUPS servers in the whole company.

It worked.

People were pretty pissed since collecting them was a pita... But it worked.

And in less than 2 hours, which I would have never believed (cannot remember the previous time or number of pages...)

Do some universities have actual websites or do they all just host a collection of PDFs?

Should I reproach my teacher for not being able to teach REST properly? Everyone in my course think REST endpoints must be UpperCase. Also, he keeps saying to use Git but in the end he's currently using PDFs to send sample code.

University can be a b*tch. What if you could turn MP4, pdfs and pptx into digestible notes (Obsidian)?

This is more of an essay than a rant. TLDR at the end. I simply can't choose from all the shitty lecturers I've had, so I'm going to have to go through them one by one. But of background. I'm currently in 7th year of college, I did a multimedia degree in 2 years, a intro course to Software Dev and I'm currently in my final year of my Software Dev degree. So let's start.

Intro Software Course
- we had a database module, which was thought by, I shit you not, the head of the psychology course in the college, she attempted to teach us Databases using access. And not even using SQL, using access GUI components and it's query builder. Need I say more?

1st year software dev
- We had a networking module, the guy that taught the labs, he literally didn't say more than 12 words the entire 12 week semester, his answer to any question you asked him was a grunt and "research it"

- We had a psychology module, I have no fucking idea why, but instead of learning something useful we were told to read this and get in touch with your feelings...

- database module. Yes we actually did SQL here, 12 weeks of select statements and normal form, talked about by a guy in a monotone voice, who sounded like he was contemplating bringing in an assault riffle some day. Also instead of using MySQL he decided to use Ingres. Why I will never know.

2nd Year Software Dev
- We had a module called Algorithms and Data Structures. The lecturer gave us problems she couldn't solve. Simple problems. She was also crazy. Absolutely nuts.

- Object Orientated Programming. I had this lecturer for 3 semesters up until 3rd year. This guy did COBOLT in college, graduated in the 70s or something and went straight into teaching, he taught us Java for nearly 2 years. He literally copied and pasted texts from PDFs and read through them in class. He told myself and another guy at one stage he really didn't care, and was just counting down the days to his retirement.

- Databases again, different lecturer from 1st year, taught us for 2 semesters (24 weeks) and somehow managed to teach us nothing.

3rd Year Software Dev
- software engineering.. This is where the biggest cunt I've ever met was introduced. He arrives into class 15 minutes late every time without fail, talks shit about stuff that has no relevancy to the topic at all, tries to turn everything into a rugby metaphor and every time you ask a question he somehow dodges it and swiftly changes topic. This cunts past profession? A Project Manager. Fucking typical. This dickhead has also thought me 2 other modules.

4th yr Software Dev
- El cunto mentioned above for 2 more modules. Need I say more.
- real time systems, this module took the piss, the module was written by the lecturer which is what earns his space here. Assignments given to us, which required more time to do than we had in labs so we had to work at home, the problem we that is we were using an obscure RTOS called OS9 which would only work on the college computers. When brought to the lecturers attention he just said "figure it out"

Internet of Things - There was 2 lecturers, each lecturer seemingly working off a different plan, one week you'd have one lecturer, the next would be the other one going on about something completely different and unrelated to anything else we'd done.

Some lecturers didn't even make this list as I couldn't be bothered trying to think back about how shit other ones were. These were the ones that always stood out in my mind.

My main take away point from this is that you go to college for the paper which says you have a degree. Learning things that are going to benefit you in a career is up to yourself.

TLDR; 90% of my college lectures were shit. You need to learn useful stuff yourself.

Would putting a website that helps people download pdfs/ebooks for free (aka illegally) on my portfolio/resume be a stupid idea?

Starting the day with Management complaining about budget and how R&D spends a lot. I start talking about the form to get a machine to a developer, that requires detailed information about the specs, proper justification, provide price comparison, fields of text which I know their departments will not check or fully comprehend BUT administration type departments always get the latest MacBook when their work literally involves little more than read emails, PDFs, write word documents and not high demanding software tools. R&D colleague suggests that a Raspberry pi would suffice for what administration personal needs out of a PC.
Management didn't comment.

- Need a module to work with PDFs
- npm install
- But wait, that requires some dependencies
- And those dependencies require more dependencies
- Python not found
- Issues with env variables and wsl
*Bajillion hours later*
- poppler-qt5 not found
What the hecc is a poppler and why do I need it?
:/

So, I recently started a new job as a "general" IT tech for someone my dad knows. He does insurance billing and everything is done manually (manually copying from pdfs to excel sheets, etc). A couple of weeks ago, I started developing a custom suite of software for automation of some parts of the processes + integration with the task management software we use. At this point, I feel like my boss is turning into a client. Is this a common occurrence? BTW, it's a small company (5 employees including him) and I'm the only person who does tech around here.

I remember back when I was in pre calculus I decided to take a class online. So my teacher's website was made by him and run on go Daddy, he taught precalculus, calculus, algebra, algebra ii, and computer science. I decided to penetration test his website and use a web crawler. His directory that had the tests, test answers, exams, exam answers, and homework answer's as well as all the books he's written in PDFs, was unprotected, I could access and download them all. He also had a database directory that contained all the students' phone numbers, email addresses, home addresses, and their full names.

I alerted him to this and didn't get anything in turn :P

Any NODE-JS.pdf available to learn a bit deeper.
Links would be great.
Names, if you've downloaded before.
Thanks in advance.

BA on new project asked me what browser to use when opening PDFs. Think this is going to be a long project...

So after 5 days of trying to figure out why the fuck nemID (danish online id) is a piece of shit and doesn't want to show the pdfs I'm sending, so that they can be fucking signed, I've finally found a way to produce pdfs that it doesn't choke the fuck out on.
Just fucking open the fucking pdf in fucking Acrobat and fucking print it to a fucking pdf using fucking Microdick print to pdf... TWICE! WTAF?
So guess what I'll be creating an API for today...

Also fucking give me a proper error code when your shit doesn't work! Why the fuck are you sending me an error code stating that the checksum doesn't match, when 1) I didn't fucking send you one in the first place and 2) it doesn't work because you fucks didn't implement the entire fucking pdf spec! So when my fucking pdf contains some fucking pdf-element that you decided was to hard to implement a web view for, tell me that!

I didn't, I just loved to break windows as a kid, and I learned Scratch and Small Basic vis their pdfs. _I had no internet and lots of time as a child, OK?_

I have to build a webapp in a month that parses through PDFs and inputs data into the right places for at least 3 different PDF documents. We would have had more time but so many delays in the class has led to this shit show being accelerated. I'm not ready.

When business comments on a spec document by first printing it, then writing notes by hand and finally send a bunch of scanned PDFs.

Here's a daft thing: a lot of browsers, typically on phones and Macs, won't re-download a file if it's been downloaded before. I can understand caching pages, images and CSS, that's good, but caching downloaded files? Meaning that when a user clicks to download a Word doc or a PDF, the browser will decide that they don't need to! Even though they think they do! I'm now having to add ?v=time() to PDFs, Excel files and similar, which feels really hacky. Some browsers will ask if the user wants to re-download, which is fine, but taking people to old and obsolete versions of documents when they want the current version is just stoooooopid.

"Upgraded" to nginx over the weekend. Setup SSL to be secure and felt good about myself. Woke up to find PhantomJS can no longer access the site to generate PDFs. Had to remove the ciphers block until I figure out what it's compatible with. FML.

TLDR, need suggestions for a small team, ALM, or at least Requirements, Issue and test case tracking.

Okay my team needs some advice.

Soo the powers at be a year ago or so decided to move our requirement tracking process, test case and issue tracking from word, excel and Visio. To an ALM.. they choice Siemens Polarion for whatever reason assuming because of team center some divisions use it..

Ohhh and by the way we’ve been all engineering shit perfectly fine with the process we had with word, excel and Visio.. it wasn’t any extra work, because we needed to make those documents regardless, and it’s far easier to write the shit in the raw format than fuck around with the Mouse and all the config fields on some web app.

ANYWAY before anyone asks or suggests a process to match the tool, here’s some back ground info. We are a team of about 10-15. Split between mech, elec, and software with more on mech or elec side.
But regardless, for each project there is only 1 engineer of each concentration working on the project. So one mech, one elec and one software per project/product. Which doesn’t seem like a lot but it works out perfectly actually. (Although that might be a surprise for the most of you)..
ANYWAY... it’s kinda self managed, we have a manger that that directs the project and what features when, during development and pre release.

The issue is we hired a guy for requirements/ Polarion secretary (DevOps) claims to be the expert.. Polarion is taking too long too slow and too much config....

We want to switch, but don’t know what to. We don’t wanna create more work for us. We do peer reviews across the entire team. I think we are Sudo agile /scrum but not structured.

I like jira but it’s not great for true requirements... we get PDFs from oems and converting to word for any ALM sucks.. we use helix QAC for Misra compliance so part of me wants to use helix ALM... Polarion does not support us unless we pay thousands for “support package” I just don’t see the value added. Especially when our “DevOps” secretary is sub par.. plus I don’t believe in DevOps.. no value added for someone who can’t engineer only sudo direct. Hell we almost wanna use our interns for requirements tracking/ record keeping. We as the engineers know what todo and have been doing shit the old way for decades without issues...

Need suggestions for small team per project.. 1softwar 1elec 1mech... but large team over all across many projects.

Sorry for the long rant.. at the bar .. kinda drunk ranting tbh but do need opinions...

I am starting to teach competitive programming in my college. And now I am tired of people asking me if they should bring their laptop or not. I mean seriously. I wrote pdfs on tutorial and notes for them and they are like laptops are heavy.
And I am getting irritating at questions like first class if we will be doing something important in first class or not.
How can I say if it will be important or not. It depends on how good you already are in competitive programming and CS concepts.
I upload every pdf for class on githubs and shared it. Why don't you just check it for yourself.
Damn irritated.

I like Firefox a lot.
But it isn't very nice with WPAs, an area of my interest, and downloads PDFs instead of showing them...
Plus I have seen Vivaldi is pretty good for quite some things, like tabs groups and tabs hibernation, has notes, a cool calendar...

But Chrome's console...
It's the only reason I stay with Firefox. (I not only use it at work, but I also use the command line as a pocket JS engine for little scripting and parsing.)
If only I could get selection bracket wrapping and a multiline editor... is it that hard?

Oh man, why is there no good api for ocr in PDFs? Once you are searching for this kind you will only find some kind of tesseract.
Why doesn't have Amazon an api for this???

And project is past QA. This is what happens when you eliminate the PM and take over the project. If it was up to everyone else I would still be waiting for some lousy PDFs.

Best library in any language to generate PDFs and Excel documents?