The programmer and the interns part 2.

We will discuss numerous events that happened over the past week or so.

Case 0:
We had our weekly engineering meeting. The interns were invited as well.
We hold meetings in the generic, big, corporate meeting rooms with a huge table in the middle.
There were more than enough chairs for everyone yet the most motivated and awkward intern (let's call him Simon) chose to stand, cause "it's cool man, I always stand". At this point we all know that he probably read about Agile stand up meetings and is confusing it with this one. Otherwise he's simply trying to stand out from the rest. (See what I did there?)
Anyway the meeting has started way later than planned (what a surprise) and took much longer than Simon expected. Everybody is sitting and listening to the CTO while occasionally glancing at the weird looking intern standing awkwardly and refusing to sit because it would make his original intentions pointless. He even tried to nod whith a serious face and his hands crossed when the CTO said something and looked at his general direction. The meeting was about a hour and a half long but with the delay it was at least 2.5 hours.
At the end Simon was so exhausted that he fell asleep on the office puff, was forgotten and locked inside. 3 hours later when I was home I received a call from him with his sleepy-trying-to-sound-awake voice telling the news. Lucky there's a 24/7 Noc team that could rescue him.

Case 1:
An intern who was late on his Linux test connected to every test VM (should I remind you that each one has a personal VM but they share passwords for their roots?) and tried to reset it with "sleep 10s; shutdown -h now".
He took down all 13 of those so I had to turn them on and switch passwords again.

Case 2:
One of the interns didn't do any of his training chores. Apparently he forgot what he was told to use, ignored all online documentation and used Windows CMD with Linux commands for almost a week already.

Case 3:
Simon uses Vim to write all text possible. Even mails, he then selects all and copies into the mail body. He spent half a day on a homework task I gave them. He wrote everything inside one text file using Vim. When he was done he saved the file and quit the editor. He then said "Oh shit! I've forgot to sign my name!". I explicitly told him that theres absolutely no need for that because I see which mail the file was sent from. He said "I don't even need a program for that!" and gave a couple of strokes on the keyboard.
Later I received an email from him with a .txt attachment. When I opened it the only text that was inside was "by Simon ;)".
I logged to his machine and checked the last command ran on the file:
echo "by Simon ;)" > linuxtasks.txt

Case 4:
The girl here uses a MacBook. She keeps getting confused with the terminal windows and rebooting her own machine instead of the remote VM.

Case 5:
Haven't checked yet how this happened but one of the interns deleted the gui from his local Centos.

Manager: Good news everyone, I made a big giant announcement this morning that the app upgrades will be released today!

Dev: They definitely won’t be, we need another 2 weeks minimum. I told you yesterday

Manager: Ok well I already made the announcement that today was the day so too bad for you.

Dev: Doesn’t change the state of things

Manager: 😡 This announcement is supposed to motivate you to work faster! You guys are making me look bad when you don’t support me like this!

Dev: Working as fast as we can, it’s a 2 person dev team for 4 separate applications so it’s quite a bit to get pushed through

Manager: Ok well then stay extra then, we have to get this out asap. Tell your spouses they are not going to be seeing much of you until this work is done. People are starting to ask questions!!!!!

Dev: Not my problem, it’s done when its done. I’m not staying extra.

Manager: !!

// *************

Might be blowing my cover a little but what are they going to do? Fire me? Good luck getting this out without me. They’ve tried to replace me in the past but the cheapest person they could find was 60k more expensive than me and still couldn’t keep up. Probably they’ll ship the work overseas and the code will die in a dumpster fire and cost them even more. Ah well, just another company that doesn’t deserve code.

So I own a webshop together with a guy I met at one of my previous contract jobs. He said he had a great idea to sell product X because he can get them very cheap from another European country. Actually it is a great idea so we decided to work together on this: I do everything tech related, he does the non tech stuff.

Now we are more than 1 year in business. I setup a VPS, completely configured it, installed and setup the complete webshop, built 2 custom PrestaShop modules, built many customizations, built a completely new order proces (both front and back end), advertised quite some products, did some link building, ensured everything is in place to do proper SEO, wrote some content pages, did administration and tax declarations, rewrote a part of a PrestaShop component because it was so damn inefficient and horribly slow, and then some more. Much more.

He did customer relation management, supplier management and some ad words campaigns. Promised me many times to write the content for our product pages. This guy has an education in marketing but literally said: I'm not gonna invest in creating some marketing plan. I have no ambition in online marketing.

What?! You have the marketing knowledge and skills but refuse to use it to market our webshop and business? What the fuck is wrong with you?!

Today he says to me: 'Hey man, this is becoming an expensive hobby as we don't sell much and have lots of costs. I don't understand why I should be the one to write these content pages. Everything you did in the past 8 months can be done in less than 20 hours! You are a joke and just made it a big deal by spreading your work over so many months. I know for sure because I currently work at a company where I'm surrounded by front end devs! Are you fucking crazy?! You're a liar.'

He talks like this to me every 2 months or so while he can't even deliver the content for 1 single product in 6 fuckin' months! We even had to refund a few of our customers because Mr. client relations manager didn't respond to their e-mails within 1 fucking week!! So I asked him how could that have happened as you do the client relations and support. Well, he replied to me: 'Why didn't YOU respond to our clients? You don't log on in our back office at least once a day?!'.

Of course I do asshole. But YOU don't. He replied that I was lying just like I was lying about what I did for our business.

So, asshole, let's have a look at PrestaShops logs to see who's logging in daily. Well, you can probably guess who's IP was there in most of the entries. It wasn't his.

So, what the fuck have you been doing then?! You can't even manage to respond quickly to a client?!! We have maybe 50 clients and if we get 1 question a month by email it is already a lot. But you keep bitching, complaining and insulting me instead?!!!

Last time he literally admitted on a WhatsApp conversation that he had and still has the hope that he could just sit back and relax and watch me do ALL the work.

Well, guess what you fucking moron. That's not what we agreed upon. You fuckin' retard think you're so smart but you say EVERYTHING on WhatsApp! Including your promises to me. Thank you you fuckin' piece of dog shit because now I have hard evidence and will hand it over to my lawyer to make you pay every god damn cent for all the hours I've spent working on our business. Oh, and I'll take over the webshop and make it a success on my own because I know damn well how to get relevant traffic and thus customers.

You just go get yourself fucked in the ass without lubricant you fuckin' asshole. I have told you you shouldn't fuck with me because I take business very seriously. I even warned you when you were crossing a line again. Well, if you don't listen... You will pay for the consequences. I will be so damn happy to tell you 'I told you so' with a very very big smile on my face. That momemt WILL come, 'partner'.

Fuck you. You will be fucked. Count on that. Fucking asshole.

Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for a rant with a capital R, this is gonna be a long one.

Our story begins well over a year ago while I was still in university and things such as "professionalism" and "doing your job" are suggestions and not something you do to not get fired. We had multiple courses with large group projects that semester and the amount of reliable people I knew that weren't behind a year and in different courses was getting dangerously low. There were three of us who are friends (the other two henceforth known as Ms Reliable and the Enabler) and these projects were for five people minimum. The Enabler knew a couple of people who we could include, so we trusted her and we let them onto the multiple projects we had.

Oh boy, what a mistake that was. They were friends, a guy and a girl. The girl was a good dev, not someone I'd want to interact with out of work but she was fine, and a literal angel compared to the guy. Holy shit this guy. This guy, henceforth referred to as Mr DDTW, is a motherfucking embarrassment to devs everywhere. Lazy. Arrogant. Standards so low they're six feet under. Just to show you the sheer depth of this man's lack of fucks given, he would later reveal that he picked his thesis topic "because it's easy and I don't want to work too hard". I haven't even gotten into the meat of the rant yet and this dude is already raising my blood pressure.

I'll be focusing on one project in particular, a flying vehicle simulator, as this was the one that I was the most involved in and also the one where shit hit the fan hardest. It was a relatively simple-in-concept development project, but the workload was far too much for one person, meaning that we had to apply some rudimentary project management and coordination skills that we had learned to keep the project on track. I quickly became the de-facto PM as I had the best grasp on the project and was doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

The first incident happened while developing a navigation feature. Another teammate had done the basics, all he had to do was use the already-defined interfaces to check where the best place to land would be, taking into account if we had enough power to do so. Mr DDTW's code:
-Wasn't actually an algorithm, just 90 lines of if statements sandwiched between the other teammate's code.
-The if statements were so long that I had to horizontal scroll to see the end, approx 200 characters long per line.
-Could've probably been 20 normal-length lines MAX if he knew what a fucking for loop was.
-Checked about a third of the tiles that it should have because, once again, it's a series of concatenated if statements instead of an actual goddamn algorithm.
-IT DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!

My response was along the lines of "what the fuck is this?". This dipshit is in his final year and I've seen people write better code in their second semester. The rest of the team, his friend included, agreed that this was bad code and that it should be redone properly. The plan was for Mr DDTW to move his code into a new function and then fix it in another branch. Then we could merge it back when it was done. Well, he kept on saying it was done but:
-It still wasn't an algorithm.
-It was still 90 lines.
-They were still 200 characters wide.
-It still only checked a third of the tiles.
-IT STILL DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!

He also had one more task, an infinite loop detection system. He watched while Ms Reliable did the fucking work.

We hit our first of two deadlines successfully. We still didn't have a decent landing function but everything else was nice and polished, and we got graded incredibly well. The other projects had been going alright although the same issue of him not doing shit applied. Ms Reliable and I, seeing the shitstorm that would come if this dude didn't get his act together, lodged a complaint with the professor as a precautionary measure. Little did I know how much that advanced warning would save my ass later on.

Second sprint begins and I'm voted in as the actual PM this time. We have four main tasks, so we assign one person to each and me as a generalist who would take care of the minor tasks as well as help out whoever needed it. This ended up being a lot of reworking and re-abstracting, a lot of helping and, for reasons that nobody ever could have predicted, one of the main tasks.

These main tasks were new features that would need to be integrated, most of which had at least some mutual dependencies. Part of this project involved running our code, which would connect to the professor's test server and solve a server-side navigation problem. The more of these we solved, the better the grade, so understandably we needed an MVP to see if our shit worked on the basic problems and then fix whatever was causing the more advanced ones to fail. We decided to set an internal deadline for this MVP. Guess who didn't reach it?

Hitting the character limit, expect part 2 SOON

An intern I was supposed to lead (as an intern) and work with. Which sounded kinda crazy to me, but also fun so I rolled with it. But when I met her I quickly found out she didn't even have a coding editor installed and when I advised one she was "scared of virusses". She had Microsoft Edge in her toolbar, and some picture of a cat as a background. We were given some project by our boss, and a freelance programmer helped us set it up on Trello. Great, lets start! Oke maybe first some R&D, she had to reaeach how to use the Twilio API. After catching her on WhatsApp a few times I realised this wasnt gonna go anywere. After a few weeks of coding and posting a initial project to git I asked her if she could show me the code of the API she made so far..

She told me she was using the quickstart guide (the last 3 FUCKING weeks) which contained some test project with specific use cases.

The one that I did 3 weeks ago that same fucking morning.

AND SHE WAS STILL NOT DONE...

A few days later I asked her about the progress (strangly, I wasn't allowed ti give her another task bcs the freelanc already did) and guess what... She got fking pissed at me

Her: "I will come to you when im done, ok?"
Me: "I just want to see how it is going so far and if you are running into any problems!"
Her: "I dont want to show you right now"

She then goes to my fucking boss to tell him I am bothering her.

And omg... Please dear god please kill me now...

Instead of him saying the she probably didn't do shit. He says to me that the girl thinks im looking down on her and she needs a stress free environment to work in. She will show me when its done. ITS A FUCKING QUICKSTART GUIDE YOU DUMB BITCH.

He then procceeded to whine to me about the email template (another project I do at the same time) which didn't look perfect in all of his clients.

Dont they understand that I am not a frontend developer? Can you stop please? I know nothing about email templates, I told you this!!!

Really... the whole fucking internship the only thing the girl did was ask people if they want more tea. Then she starts cleaning the windows, talk to people for an hour, or clean everyone's dask.

all this while I already made 50% of the fucking product and she just finished the quickstart tutorial 😭. Truly 2 months wasted, and the worse thing is I didn't get any apprication. They constantly blamed me and whined at me. Sometimes for being 3 minutes late, the other for smoking too much, or because I drink to much coffee, or that I dont eat healthy. They even forced me to play Ping Pong. While im just trying to do my job. One of the worst things they got mad at me for if when my laptop got hacked bcs it was infected with some virus. He had remote access and bought 5 iPhones 6's with my paypal while I was on break. I had to go home and quickly reset all my passwords and make sure the iPhones wouldnt get delivered. strange this was, this laptop I only used at the company. So it must have been software I had to download there. Probably phpstorm (torrent). Bcs nobody would give me a license. And the freelancer said I * have to *.

the monday after I still had to reinstall windows so I called them and said I would be late. when I came they were so disrepectfull and didn't understand anything. It went a little like this:

Boss: why u late?
Me: had to reinstall my laptop, sorry.
Boss: why didnt you do this in your own time?
Me: well, I didn't have any time.
Boss: cant you do this in the weekend or something? Because now we have to pay you several hours bcs you downloaded something at home.

Me: I am only using this laptop for work so thats not possible.

Boss: how can that even be possible? You are not doing anything at home with your laptop? Is that why you never do anything at home?

Me: uhm, I have desktop computer you know. Its much faster. And I also need to rest sometimes. Areeb (freelancer) told me to torrent the software. He gave me the link. 2 days later this happends

Boss: Ahh okeee I see.. Well dont let it happen again.

After that nobody at the compamy trusted me with anything computer related. Yes it was my own fault I downloaded a virus but it can happen to anyone. After that I never used Windows again btw, also no more auto login apps.

I realize now I probably shouldn't have called out my manger's bullshit if I wanted to keep my job. We were told to work a Sunday and our PO called it a "Smack-a-thon."

I said, "No let's not use stupid names. Let's call things what they are. This is a management failure Sunday."

That was during new hire lunch, in front of my manager.

I worked the first Sunday. I refused to work the second one. I've also been refusing to work over 45 hours a week.

So I guess I could have seen it coming. My manager didn't even have the gums to do it himself. He had the HR lady do it, while I was working remote from home. She told me it wasn't a 9 to 5 shop and that people there are expected to work long hours (People on my team are working 80+ a week for several months).

I took the train in to get my stuff. No one was there. My computer already gone. Couldn't even say "Go fuck yourself to anybody."

So I feel better now. I haven't taken a day of since I started in February, so it's time for some vacation and an unemployment check.

It was a really terrible job, and terribly mismanaged. I'm glad I stood my ground and knew what I was worth. I wish my co-workers had done the same.

I should have tried to start a union.

I have this little hobby project going on for a while now, and I thought it's worth sharing. Now at first blush this might seem like just another screenshot with neofetch.. but this thing has quite the story to tell. This laptop is no less than 17 years old.

So, a Compaq nx7010, a business laptop from 2004. It has had plenty of software and hardware mods alike. Let's start with the software.

It's running run-off-the-mill Debian 9, with a custom kernel. The reason why it's running that version of Debian is because of bugs in the network driver (ipw2200) in Debian 10, causing it to disconnect after a day or so. Less of an issue in Debian 9, and seemingly fixed by upgrading the kernel to a custom one. And the kernel is actually one of the things where you can save heaps of space when you do it yourself. The kernel package itself is 8.4MB for this one. The headers are 7.4MB. The stock kernels on the other hand (4.19 at downstream revisions 9, 10 and 13) took up a whole GB of space combined. That is how much I've been able to remove, even from headless systems. The stock kernels are incredibly bloated for what they are.

Other than that, most of the data storage is done through NFS over WiFi, which is actually faster than what is inside this laptop (a CF card which I will get to later).

Now let's talk hardware. And at age 17, you can imagine that it has seen quite a bit of maintenance there. The easiest mod is probably the flash mod. These old laptops use IDE for storage rather than SATA. Now the nice thing about IDE is that it actually lives on to this very day, in CF cards. The pinout is exactly the same. So you can use passive IDE-CF adapters and plug in a CF card. Easy!

The next thing I want to talk about is the battery. And um.. why that one is a bad idea to mod. Finding replacements for such old hardware.. good luck with that. So your other option is something called recelling, where you disassemble the battery and, well, replace the cells. The problem is that those battery packs are built like tanks and the disassembly will likely result in a broken battery housing (which you'll still need). Also the controllers inside those battery packs are either too smart or too stupid to play nicely with new cells. On that laptop at least, the new cells still had a perceived capacity of the old ones, while obviously the voltage on the cells themselves didn't change at all. The laptop thought the batteries were done for, despite still being chock full of juice. Then I tried to recalibrate them in the BIOS and fried the battery controller. Do not try to recell the battery, unless you have a spare already. The controllers and battery housings are complete and utter dogshit.

Next up is the display backlight. Originally this laptop used to use a CCFL backlight, which is a tiny tube that is driven at around 2000 volts. To its controller go either 7, 6, 4 or 3 wires, which are all related and I will get to. Signs of it dying are redshift, and eventually it going out until you close the lid and open it up again. The reason for it is that the voltage required to keep that CCFL "excited" rises over time, beyond what the controller can do.

So, 7-pin configuration is 2x VCC (12V), 2x enable (on or off), 1x adjust (analog brightness), and 2x ground. 6-pin gets rid of 1 enable line. Those are the configurations you'll find in CCFL. Then came LED lighting which required much less power to run. So the 4-pin configuration gets rid of a VCC and a ground line. And finally you have the 3-pin configuration which gets rid of the adjust line, and you can just short it to the enable line.

There are some other mods but I'm running out of characters. Why am I telling you all this? The reason is that this laptop doesn't feel any different to use than the ThinkPad x220 and IdeaPad Y700 I have on my desk (with 6c12t, 32G of RAM, ~1TB of SSDs and 2TB HDDs). A hefty setup compared to a very dated one, yet they feel the same. It can do web browsing, I can chat on Telegram with it, and I can do programming on it. So, if you're looking for a hobby project, maybe some kind of restrictions on your hardware to spark that creativity that makes code better, I can highly recommend it. I think I'm almost done with this project, and it was heaps of fun :D

Use SSDs.

It's not hard. They've been around for a while, small ones are cheap now and are more than enough for at least 90% of developers. The rest can probably afford 2TB NVMe.

Why waste 60$ on a worthless 500GB HDD that will load the OS in the time that's enough for you to make scrambled eggs?
Instead, use 60$ on a 128GB SSD. Sure, it's smaller, but if speed is important for you, you can forget a bit about saving all of the porn you see online, or about installing every free game from Steam.

SSDs are cheap already. And the performance advantage they give is ENORMOUS. You can have a core i9, 64GB of fastest RAM bla bla bla, but if you don't have an SSD, a Celeron with an SSD will seem faster.

Get one, and NEVER again cry about long loading times of IDEs, unless you feel like 30 seconds for the longest load time is too much. If your time is THAT valuable, then you can afford NVMe SSDs in RAID 10 (which can be done easily in software with btrfs if you're on Linux).

Seriously!
Every day I see posts like "Visual Studio is crap because it installs for 6 hours", or "Android studio starts in 30 minutes", or "Visual Studio Code sucks because it loads for too long compared to vim".
It's as if you only have access to budget 10 year old computers.

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.

Please. Hear me out.

I've been doing frontend for six years already. I've been a junior dev, then in was all up to the CTO. I've worked for very small companies. Also, for the very large ones. Then, for huge enterprises. And also for startups. I've been developing for IE5.5, just for fun. I've done all kinds of stuff — accessibility, responsive design (with or without breakpoints), web components, workers, PWA, I've used frameworks from Backbone to React. My favourite language is CSS, and you probably know it. The bottom line is, you name it — I did it.

And, I want to say that Safari is a very good browser.

It's very fast. Especially on M1 Macs. Yes, it lacks customization and flexibility of Firefox, but general people, not developers, like to use it. Also, Safari is very important — Apple is a huge opposing force to Google when it comes to web standards. When Google pushes their BS like banning ad blockers, Apple never moves an inch. If we lose Safari, you'll notice.

As for the Safari-specific bugs situation, well… To me, Safari serves as a very good indicator: if your website breaks in Safari, chances are you used some hacks that are no good. Safari is a good litmus test I use to find the parts of my code that could've been better.

The only Safari-specific BUG I encountered was a blurry black segment in linear gradients that go from opaque to transparent. So, instead of linear-gradient(#f00, transparent), just do linear-gradient(#f00f, #f000).

This is the ONLY bug I encountered. Every single time my website broke in Safari other than that, was for some ugly hack I used.

You don't have to love it. I don't even use it, my browser of choice is Firefox. But, I'm grateful to Safari, just because it exists. Why? Well, if Safari ceases to exist, Google will just leave both W3C and WhatWG, and declare they'll be doing things their way from now on. Obey or die.

Firefox alone is just not big enough. But, together with Safari, they oppose Google's tyranny in web standards game.

Google will declare the victory and will turn the web into an authoritarian dictatorship. No ad blockers will be allowed. You won't be able to block Google's trackers. Google already owns the internet, well, almost, and this will be their final, devastating victory.

But Safari is the atlas that keeps the web from destruction.

~ Freelancer.com Week #1 ~

Project: I need someone to debug an application's code and review it. Budget 30 bucks.

Bid: I am an experienced developer I can probably review it in an hour.

client: Hi, need you to check if app is contains virus [link to scam website]

me: sure, download supposed "social Bitcoin miner" and run some AV tests...8+ positive flags for a Trojan virus.

>Me: It's a Trojan virus mate it's not legitimate😟

>Client: Can you remove the Trojan virus so that the legit not stays?

Me: Umm there is no bot mate it's just a virus 😕 I wouldn't open it outside a sandbox

Client: But here it says Bitcoin faucet bot [links shitty how-to youtube video]

Me: 😒 it's not real dude you are about to get scammed, I can test it in a VM if you. . .

Client: I opened it already, it's working

Me: 😮 r u sure?

Client: yes, can you install VM for further testing?

Me: sure, in your computer?

Client: yes

Me: just download the windows image and text me when it's done

Client: My disc is full! Only 3 gb left

Me: 😑 call me when you clean it

Client: [ offline ]

I have those conversations with my coworkers about once a day. We use Linux at work and I am the only one with any real Linux experience.

C: I have a problem! I tried and googled everything already! Come help me...
M: *slowly walks over to their PC*
M: *copy-pastes the error into Google*
M: *clicks the first result*
M: *presses two buttons*
*everything works again*
M: So you tried Google already, have you?

When I leave there (it's a PhD position and I'm almost done) they will probably crash and burn...

[Little perspective: For the last 7 months I'm working in a certain project.]
[The project is full of unimaginative, non-creative devs with 0 initiative and poor technical background.]
[And they're almost all from one country which you all can figure out.]
[But I'm not going to mention it here because I don't want to come up as a racist]
[So there's US (Europeans) and THEM. 3 of US and about 10 of THEM. And we're doing 90% of all the heavy lifting]
---
Yesterday
---
D (Dev from THEM): Hi S, I have a problem with my task
Me: (sighing) Ok let's have a call
* on the call with D we were checking some stuff loosely related to task *
* code wouldn't get invoked at all for some reason *
* suddenly I realize that even if the code would invoke, D's probably doing everything wrong in it anyway *
Me (thinking): I need to double check something.
Me: I can't help you now, I'll get back to you later.
* call ended *
---
Me: Hey J, I need your help, I need to clarify the work package in my mind, because I am no longer sure.
J (my European TL): Ok, fire away.
* call started *
Me: Is it true that [blahblahblah] and so D's task depends on me completing first my task, or am I losing my mind?
J: That is correct.
Me: Well she's trying to do this in [that] way, which is completely wrong.
J: You see, that's how it is in this project, you do refinements with them, split these work packages to tasks, mention specifically what depends on what and what order should things be taken in, and in some cases all tasks from given user stories should be done by one person entirely... But they do it their way anyway, assign different people to different interdependent tasks, and these people don't even understand the big picture and they try to do the things the way they think they understand them.
Me: It's a fire in a brothel.
J: Yup.
Me: I fucking love this project.
J: (smiling silently)
* call ended *
---
Me: Ok D, you can't do your task because it's dependant on my task.
D: Oh... so what do I do?
Me: I don't know, do something else until I do my task.
---
A (THEIR TL) (Oh, did I forget to mention that there are 2 TLs in this project? THEY have their own. And there are 2 PMs as well.)
A: Hey S, I need to talk
Me: (sighing, getting distracted from work again) Ok let's have a call
* call started *
A: S, we need this entire work package done by Friday EOD.
Me: I can't promise, especially since there are several people working on its several tasks.
A: D's working on hers for 3 days already, and she's stuck. We want you to take over.
Me: (sighing, thinking "great"): Ok.
* call ended *
---
Me: Hey D, A instructed me to take over your task. This is actually going to be easier since you'd have to wait for mine after all.
D: Oh, ok.
---
* I switched the Assigned Person on D's task to myself on Azure *
---
This morning, email from D.
"Hey, I completed my task and it's on [this] branch, what do I do now?"

........................................
Me, hesitating between 2 ways to reply:
(and take note there are people in CC: A, J, P - the last one is THEIR PM)
1) "Hi, Unfortunately you'd still have to wait for my changes because your task is dependent on my task - the column to be changed is in the table that I am introducing and it's not merged to develop branch yet. By the way I already did your task locally, as I was instructed to do it, I'm wrapping things up now."
(y'know: the response which is kind, professional, understanding; without a slight bit of impatience)
2) WHAT FUCKING PART OF "DON'T DO THIS I WILL FUCKING DO IT MYSELF GO HOME JUST GO HOME" YOU DON'T FUCKING UNDERSTAND

This has been said countless times before me, and way better than me that’s supper tired, but I need to rant out

And what I’m ranting out today, is Apple. Its essence, its core, the reason it still exists: the ECOSYSTEM!

The problem with Apple ecosystem is that it’s the ecosystem of a fucking PRISON!

People like it because it works well together , but it’s sure that in a prison, the path from your cell to the cantine is pretty optimized; you get forced there! And you might try to get your food elsewhere, but the walls of the prison are made to be difficult to cross. Especially on mobile, where they’re making it harder and harder to escape, to make a jailbreak (pun-intended). Keeping you the loyal little sheep, or the forcing you to it.

That prison is also made private, a little club, to attract people to it. They even got their own little system to talk to each other, but oh god protect them from their little messages to pass the walls of the prison.

And all that prison is guarded by the warden, watching from high in the cloud. Forcing you to report yourself to him to be part of that prison.

That prison, also, can only be entered with specific vehicles, provided by the prison, to ensure maximum compatibility and efficiency. Good luck entering with a disguised vehicle if you find the official ones too pricey for their parts.

They also provided pressure tubes to send things from one cell to another. While being only simple pressure tubes like any other, they’re acclaimed because they’re apparently easier to use than the other 3rd party pressure tubes that can send things to the outside. Why? Because, oh yes it’s already in everybody’s cells (of that prison, outside is dangerous) and the other tubes have been conveniently being placed somewhere harder to reach.

Another thing they have are those windows that can view the outside. While being maybe less clear than some other windows, they are ok. But if you ever consider going mobile to enjoy that safari with lions, then man do they love bringing you back to that window.

Ok so I’m done with the prison metaphor, or I won’t sleep.

The ecosystem is probably the major reason Apple is still there. You buy from there because you’re a prisoner (I guess I’m not finished with the metaphor after all).

This is a prime example of RMS’s quote “If the user doesn’t control the software, the software controls the user”

AirDrop isn’t some sort of revolutionary tech, it uses a well established protocol that other implementations use to do the same thing. They could really easily open source the protocol and allow everyone to profit, but they won’t, because that would mean you don’t have to buy Apple.

That’s why I militate for open source, decentralized and standardized protocols. Because that way, we control the software, and it doesn’t control us.

All the things I said aren’t so bad because when you buy Apple, you make a choice. But I don’t have a choice, I am typing this on an Apple device, because I need to (I won’t elaborate on that) because of that fucking *ecosystem*

I am really tired, so half the sentences probably don’t make sense, but thanks for coming to my stupid TED talk.

!dev

So the ceiling in our (upstairs) laundry room started leaking. After some troubleshooting, we determined it was the A/C, and not the water pipes. (The house is cheap as hell and fucking stupid.) We did some troubleshooting and research, and tried fixing it ourselves; no luck. Cleaning the pipes from outside: no joy. Cleaning the pipes from inside: no access. The attic is ... small. Maybe half a small closet? and doesn’t give access to fucking anything. The builders must have installed everything before putting up the walls and ceilings, sealing everything off, because there is no access. It’s fucking stupid. Also, the usual maintenance openings aren’t even there either because why the fuck would they be?

But fucking whatever.

We called an a/c repair guy, who never showed. We assumed he was busy (it’s fucking hot), so we called him again the next day; two days later he showed.

Busy. Whatever.

Guy didn’t bring a ladder. Whatever, we have one right there in the hallway because we’ve been trying in vain to fix it.

Guy didn’t bring a wrench of any kind. Guy didn’t bring a screwdriver. Guy didn’t bring a bucket. Guy didn’t bring any pipe. Or any pipe sealant. Or fucking anything but his sagging fucking pants, fat belly, and fat stench. We had to supply everything, which fortunately we had on hand as we were already trying to fix it. Hoorah for being proactive.

Guy said he drained both primary and secondary pans. Somehow. Without access. I’m not even convinced it HAS a secondary pan. Guy said he cleaned out the pipes, too. From inside the house. Without access. Somehow. Maybe he did that from outside, without tools, while I was chasing the brats and someone else was watching the fat bastard. Who knows; I wasn’t with him most of the time.

When he was done, the guy said “pay whatever you think it’s worth” (or whatever). Fine, if he actually cleaned the pipes out and it isn’t leaking anymore, that’s great.

Guy leaves.

We go up to check. AND THE FUCKING A/C IS STILL LEAKING. BUT NOW IT’S FROM BEFORE THE PIPES, TOO. AND HALF AN HOUR LATER, THE LAUDRY ROOM CEILING IS ALSO LEAKING, WHICH MEANS THE PIPES ARE STILL LEAKING.

It turns out the asshole broke the pan.

We call him back, he goes blah blah blah, we send him a video. Drip, drip, drip.

His response?
“The pan must be rusted.” IT’S FUCKING PLASTIC.

“Oh, in that case, it’s probably a rusted coil that’s leaking.”

a) HOW DID YOU NOT KNOW IT WAS FUCKING PLASTIC IF YOU DRAINED IT?

b) THE COILS CARRY FREON, NOT WATER, AND THE A/C IS STILL WORKING. IF THERE WAS A LEAK, SHIT WOULD BE HOT. AND RANK. FREON SMELLS NASTY AND DOESN’T CAUSE IT TO RAIN IN THE FUCKING HOUSE.

REPLACING A COIL IS ALSO A $2000 FUCKING REPAIR.

THE FAT BASTARD PROBABLY BROKE THE PAN INTENTIONALLY JUST TO UPSELL. I WANT TO FUCKING MURDER HIS LYING FUCKING FACE OFF.

It’s possible he didn’t break the pan intentionally, so I’ll tentatively remove that from his charges. BUT TO FUCKING LIE?

LIE AND DIE, FUCKER.

Back in the day, I joined a little agency in Cape Town, small team small office with big projects, projects they weren’t really supposed to take on but hey when the owner of a tech business is not a tech person they do weird things.
A month had passed and it was all good, then came a project from Europe, Poland to be specific. The manager introduced me to the project, it was a big brand - a segment of Lego, built on Umbraco (they should change the name to slowbraco or uhmmm..braco somewhere there) the manager was like so this one is gonna be quite a challenge and I remember you said you are keen on that, I was like hell yeah bring it on (genuinely I got excited) now the challenge was not even about complexity of the problem or code or algorithms etc you get my point… the challenge was that the fucking site was in polish - face palm 1 - so I am like okay code is code, its just content, and I already speak/familiar with 13 human languages so I can’t fail here ill get around it somehow. So I spin up IIS, do the things and boom dev environment is ready for some kick ass McCoding. I start to run through the project to dig into the previous dev’s soul. I could not relate, I could not understand. I could not read, I could not, I could not. - face palm 2 - This dude straight up coded this project in polish variable names in polish, class names in polish, comments in freaking polish. Look, I have no beef with the initial guy, its his language so why not right? sure. But not hey this is my life and now I should learn polish, so screw it, new tab - google translate, new notes, I create a dictionary of variables and class etc 
3 days go by and I am fucking polish bro. Come at me. I get to read the previous devs soul through his comments, what a cool dude, his code wasn’t shit either - huge relief. So I rock on and make the required changes and further functionality. 

The project manager is like really, you did it? I am like yeah dude, there it is. Then I realise I wasn’t the first on this, this dude done tried others and it didn’t go down well, they refused. - face palm 3 -

Anyway, now I am a rock star in the office, and to project managers this win means okay throw him in the deep - they move me to huge project that is already late of course and apparently since I am able to use google translate, I can now defeat time, let the travelling begin. - face palm 4 - I start on the project and they love me on it as they can see major progress however poland was knocking on the door again, they need a whole chunk of work done. I can’t leave the bigger project, so it was decided that the new guy on Monday will start his polish lessons - he has no idea, probably excited to start a new job, meanwhile a shit storm is being prepared for him.

Monday comes, hello x - meet the team, team meets x

Manager - please join our meeting.

I join the meeting, the manager tells me to assist the new dev to get set up.

Me: Sure, did you tell him about he site?

Manager: Yes, I told him you knocked it out the park and now we just need to keep going

Me: in my head (hmm… that’s not what I was asking but cool I guess he will see soon enough -internal face palm 5 - )

New dev is setup, he looks at the project, I am ask him if he is good after like an hour he is like yeah all good. But his face is pink so I figured, no brother man is not okay. But I let him be and give him space.

Lunch time comes, he heads out for lunch. 

1hr 15mins later, project manager is like, is the new dude still at lunch.

We are all like yeah probably. 

2hrs pass 

3hrs pass

Now we are like okay maybe something happened to him, hit by a car? Emergency? Something… 

So I am legit worried now, I ask the manager to maybe give him a ring. 

Manager tries to call. NOTHING, no response. nada.

Next day, 8am, 9am, 10am no sign of the dude. 

I go to the manager, ask him what’s up. 

Manager: he is okay. However he said he is not coming back. 


Boss: "is it done yet?"

Me: "I've been telling everyone we have a problem and I need all hands on deck. I've already analyzed the issue and explained it to you and the options but YOU PEOPLE NEED TO DECIDE or I decide and probably break things along the way..."

Why does everyone ignore me when I need help but are ok asking me when they need help?

/(ò.ó)┛彡┻━┻

Me: "Concierge, I have noticed this issue with live potential on ground a couple of months ago, just a friendly reminder that this still hasn't been fixed."
Concierge: "Well yeah this building is certified (god I hate that word) so whatever measurements you've taken, it doesn't mean anything when it isn't done by the electricians."
M: "Aha, back to that piece of paper huh.. taking measurements requires a piece of paper these days, doesn't it."
C: "Glad you're quick on the uptake."
M: "Well I have the brains in my head to do a proper measurement without dying, and the numbers don't lie."
C: "What do you think that the landlord is going to say? I'm sure you still remember that email "DON'T TOUCH THE ELECTRICITY!""
C: "And remember that she'll probably rather file a complaint against you than to let an electrician come check it, because the latter costs money for something that's already certified."
M: "Well that sucks..."
C: "The certified electricians certified this building. Your hands are pretty much tied."
M: …

*walks off in frustration*

Now, as for the rant. *inhales deeply*

YOU KNOW WHERE YOU CAN SHOVE THAT PIECE OF PAPER?! DOWN YOUR FUCKING ASS! WHAT DOES A FUCKING PIECE OF PAPER MEAN TO JUSTIFY WRONGDOING?! WHAT DOES IT FUCKING MEAN WHEN IT ISN'T BACKED BY A FUCKING BRAIN?!

Yet I apparently can't do anything, because I refuse to certify myself. Now you know why I fucking hate certified enganeers, and why I use that word. The piece of paper doesn't mean shit when you can't back it with an actual fucking brain. And requiring a certificate to do stupid shit, even for changing a fucking light bulb, or a switch or an outlet or whatever. Certified enganeers, because fuckers like that don't deserve to be called engineers. You know what, certified motherfuckers? FUCK YOU!! I can change it myself and I don't (shouldn't) need a bloody fucking certificate for that!!

I've just noticed an app review that I've given and would fit right into the wk123 (that's the insult one, right?).

"Biggest pile of junk that I've ever seen. You have one job! To register the fucking phone number (which you could get with Phone permission) and verify it (which you can do with the SMS permission) and you should either have the user do that once upon installation or you automate it entirely so that it can run in the background! You can fully automate this, and it's not that complicated that it needs 10 whole seconds of loading time in between! Heck, this pile of crap can't even continue into the main view after entering the verification code! You haven't published the source code (and maybe that's for the best) but if it was, I'd probably immediately get cancer by viewing your crappy spaghetti code. Dear developer, please take a step back and (re)join the PC tech support guys. You have no place in the development world."

To top it all off, that app currently only needs phone permission to verify my number (at least they've done that much). So I figured, I've already gone through that authentication flow so let's remove that permission to abide by the principle of least privilege.

Except that the fucking crapp just goes through the "requires phone permission" shit again whenever that permission removal happens. Fucking piece of garbage!!! That such spaghetti code fuckers even have a job, it boggles my mind.

Back then, whatever finished tasks I have done, our CTO always contradicts my idea and finds a way to humiliate me. I don't get the point why he did that. Probably, he didn't want me to excel at something or he really does have crab mentality. I already reported this issue to our CEO because I was being harassed and submitted my resignation letter.
And boom! Guess what? It looks like our CTO just stepped a chicken manure and treats me nicely like a princess.

P.S. To be honest, it took him like a couple of months to step down and act normal like nothing happened. Really appreaciated the A-ffort, though!

Im so frustrated with myself . I've always been afraid of being stupid . Perhaps it was because i was always called the "less intelligent" sibling by my parents . Well i did self-learn java , c++ and android (when i was 15) and made some apps and i did get acknowledged finally but i may have not acknowledged myself . I got into college a couple years ago and i can tell you right out that its like an island filled with stupidity. The teachers , the students. The other day i caught my teacher learning how a transistor works. This is unacceptable for someone who is teaching us advanced op-amps and other circuits . Well , I did get into this college cause it was less tedious and i thought college doesn't matter cause i can self-learn . All i needed was free time . Well college totally destroyed that too and provided no facilities in the process as well . So yeah should i blame my college for my inability to do things the past couple years. I mean i don't think i've learnt a single thing all this while. This is where my frustration begins cause i dont want to blame the college , it's not going to help me and i'll probably end up in a 9 to 5 call center job at this rate . Im also very heavily frustrated with myself , it's like everything i've done so far has been a path of least effort. I have tried a few things which were all just fads like machine learning and crypto and even trading . They felt good and thats what scares me , maybe i don't have the passion and am just looking for a quick buck . This is clearly reflected in the ideas i've been having as well . Well i've never had access to proper funds but now im just trying to justify this layman emotion . I just want to learn and be passionate about learning , researching and i just want enough funds for that . But im afraid , maybe its just that i want to feel superior than my circle . I mean i still don't know why i tried learning rust and wasted even more time setting up fedora and everything around it while i already had a working debian setup and a programming language i'm kind of versed with . i wouldn't say well cause im a self learner and i feel guilty for that . I definitely know i just learnt the surface of the language . Deep down i'm just another stupid fad obsessed guy who feels better by choosing a more complex language that my colleagues look upto . Is this what i am , if so im scared and i don't know what to do . People say that you are what you are and you cant change that . If i cant change this then i dont deserve this wasteful stupid life . I don't know what i should do and it makes me cry . Maybe acknowledging this would've helped but it hasn't , I've felt better playing fortnite rather than learning some basic electronics. Im another one of those aren't I ?

Here's a real tip for people new to the industry.

It's one of those things that's been said over and over again but very few can really seem to employ. I suggest you learn it /well/.

You are not your code. Criticisms of your code, ideas, or your thought processes, is not a criticism of YOU. You absolutely cannot take criticisms of your work personally.

We are engineers. We strive to seek the best solution at all times.

If someone has found a problem with your code or with an idea or whatnot, it is coming from a place of "this is not the best solution", NOT "you're an idiot".

It's coming from a place of "I'm closing this PR because it is not a change I feel suits this project", NOT "I'm closing this PR because it's coming from a woman".

It's coming from a place of "This feature request is ridiculous/this bug is not actually a bug", NOT "you're a fucking idiot, fuck you".

It's coming from a place of "I've already had to address this in a number of issues before and it's eaten up a considerable amount of my time already", NOT "I don't even know you and this I don't have time for a nobody".

You do not get to be bitchy to maintainers because they denied your request. It's not a reflection of you at all. But if you're arguing with someone who has maintained a piece of code for almost a decade, and they're telling you something authoritative, believe them. They're probably smarter than you on this subject. They've probably thought about it more. They've probably seen their code used in many different places. They have more experience than you with that codebase in almost all cases.

Believe me, if we cared about who was behind all of the issues, pull requests, etc. we get, we'd get NOTHING done. Stop taking shit personally. It's a skill, not a defense mechanism. Nobody has the time to sugar coat every little thing.

Let's normalize directness and stop wasting time during technical discussions into opportunities for ego-stroking and circle-jerking and back-patting.

So , at my first day as an intern in the company that would probably be employing me, i heard some great lines that made me gain so much hope in humanity -.-

From HR :

- "your timings will be 10 to 7 , 6 days a week."(even though it takes 4 hours to commute to and fro from that place). "We have a 9 hour a day schedule, and anything between 5-9 hours is considered a half day"

- "we have a 1 paid holiday per month scheme. And that starts after first 3 months, and yes TitanLannister, that also applies to interns. You may take a leave but that won't be considered for payment"(even though the said intern's internship is of 3 months and he already notified that he would be needing a 10 day leave for his exams and a few other college related work leaves )

-"here is an official laptop you could work upon(has average specs but inferior to my laptop). Note that its already loaded with slack, and a browser history tracking software, so you might wanna log out of that if you want to use it for personal use. Also if you want to use your personal laptop, then these tools would still be added into your laptop"

-" all the things mentioned above are connected to this fingerprint card that will automatically upload those details on an hr software and enable history tracker "

-"take your time, but we need this task done by you in next 24 hours. There is no deadline, but we need this work done asap"

In the words on purgatony:
"This is hardly working
This is hardly living
This is my JOB"

Taking a database class, prof insists on using Microsoft Sql server 2014. "Okay cool" said the Microsoft surface fan boy inside me as I installed it. "Holy shit this is using 6 fucking GBs?? Eh it's okay I trust" again said my Microsoft fanboy self. Finished installing, makes queries and it works. Cool.

Go to run Sql server again next day and get an error (nothing displayed, just a box pop up and then a crash) I use some Google skills. Change a bunch of shit and still it persists. "Just uninstall it and reinstall again" says my prof. I do so except random errors during installation saying Sql already exists even though I just uninstalled it. "Maybe it's some registry keys messing with it!" do some digging, remove unneeded registry keys and try again. Installation finished but a whack of features say failed to install.

I sit and try to work this shit out for the next four hours (not paying attention to my class) and still can't get Sql to completely uninstall itself. I try iobit uninstaller, command line uninstalling, fucking everything but still not working. Slowly my fanboy side is wishing that the windows symbol on the back of my machine was an apple.

I ended up having to backup all my files and reinstalling windows to get it working properly. Holy sweet fuck. The worst part is when this class is done ill probably need to reinstall yet again to save the 6gb it's sucking up. So if you're not sure whether you need something as heavy as Microsoft Sql server or not for your application, don't use it! It's a fucking virus that is super difficult to remove.

Tldr: life long Microsoft fanboy becomes apple convert in a day of using Microsoft Sql server.

Wtf is all this talk of AI regulation all of the sudden? We have barely achieved anything on AI and they already wanna put chaines on it?

Just because people are pussies who are afraid that skynet will develop rape-robots who go around giving std's to everybody they see doenst mean there should be regulations on something thats still in diapers.

ESPECIALLY WHEN ITS PROBABLY GOING TO BE DONE BY FUCKING POLITICIONS WHO PROBABLY THINK AI ONLY MEANS KILLER ROBOTS.

I have discovered a fresh hell

Some guy I’ve never met or heard of in the office lobbed a comment at one of my *approved and merged* pull requests. He doesn’t say anything specific, only that my REST urls are not in line with naming convention. That’s all he says, and I’ve already walked the URL consumers through the code and given them the URLS.

I’m really annoyed that this guy won’t just say what he has in mind, but fine whatever this is a professional environment and developers are not known for being a diplomatic people. Let it go and get your work done!

I do some googling and find an obvious change that needs to happen- I implement it, open a new pull request and inform my URL consumers of the change.

This rando still isn’t satisfied and still won’t say what needs to change. I am on round 3 of this wonderful cycle and this guy is acting all fuckin HAUGHTY about it. “Here is a list of conventions I found googling, you should read them even if it takes 4 hours because it will benefit your career”

Sure dog you’re probably right on that one but we are in a professional environment and at this point you are holding up production so you can wave your dick around! Just SAY WHAT YOU MEAN SO WE CAN MAKE THE CHANGES AND GET OUR WORK DONE

On my personal journey to better privacy!

Wanted to change to Qubes, but since I wind down with games, that won't happen sadly and it seems windows still doesn't support proper gpu passthrough either, so might eventually change to linux host and windows guest or create a VM I use for everything else that isn't gaming, since I still really love the idea of having a snapshot backup system.

So since that isn't quite in my timeframe right now though: first move was to move to firefox, already done the change on mobile (love having dark reader and ublock on mobile!), now setting it all up on desktop, pleasant surprise was for sure that firefox finally seems to have chromes devtools pretty much mirrored, even the mobile suite of tools.

Loading of pages is also finally fast and much snappier than chrome from the first testing I could do (on desktop, on mobile it still kind of sucks in comparison, but I can deal with that).

Please suggest me all sort of privacy tools you got, especially with firefox in mind, but also host tools, be it windows or linux (e.g. some sort of traffic obfuscator that visits random pages that are SFW but make automatic traffic filtering hard, could probably make my own, but if there's something like that already, why not), I'll save all I can use.

With the announcement of WSL2, I am really concerned for linux DEs.

I use linux distros not just for the kernel but because most linux DEs do a far better job that windows ever will.

But the next gen programmers probably will never leave their shit systems for any distro because guess what... thay can just use WSLs.

I would probably have done the same.
You need to use a linux DE (Gnone/KDE/etc.) for at least a couple days to understand how great it is but people won't do it because windows is good enough and they can achieve most tasks in wsl.

Linux Foundation already doesn't care about DEs. (And why would they... Microsoft is filling their pockets).

I hope people still find wsl crap and have enough reasons to give any linux DE at least a few days try.

Wrote from my Manjaro KDE :(

Some idiots ripped off our work and code that was open sourced and wrote a paper on it and got it published from some cheap publisher. Even for me to some benefit of doubt or consider that probably they worked on advancing our research….they didn’t even give us any credits!

Heights of shamelessness!

FYI, we already had an IEEE paper published!

I don’t mind if you guys have any suggestions on how I can get back at them. I don’t think a rant is going to calm me down for what they have done.

I got a kindle paper as a hand me down gift. And I feel I'm reading so much more than before, now!

I'm starting a new small novel
A Wrinkle in Time, I'll be reading alongside my girlfriend.

I'm 52% done with a book called
Python Tricks: The Book
Literally coolest book I've touched. Contains a bunch of different tidbits about the language, granted most of them confirmed my understanding, but it's still neat to read and learn about them in a more rigorous setting.

I'm 13% done with another book called
How to Day Trade for a Living
I'm heading for the crypto currency exchange, but with a catch,
I'm reading another book called
Genetic Algorithms with Python
You can probably already guess where I'm heading.

I feel armed with more knowledge and I feel like this is a really great way to start the New Year off.

love-hate relationship with Python semi-rant
The year is 2020.

I have already grown accustomed to the idea that in order to do ML without worrying too much about having to completely jump through hoops with the tech stack I have chosen that I would have to settle with Python, which I like.....for small scripts that don't do much other than piping data around or doing simple admin tasks, that is generally our use of Python at work.
For anything bigger I would prefer something else. Not because I find anything inherently horrible in Python, I find it to be a nice language overall, that has made it possible for many to find a passion inside of the world of development and possibly an interesting in overall engineering and computer science principles. Much respect Python, good game Guido VR, what you did changed the world.

But it is that damn whitespace that gets me, the need to use it as a way to properly write blocks, I just can't make myself like syntactical whitespace no matter what I do. I can do without static typing, shit I did it for the longest time with JS way tf before Node and Typescript were a thing, and I have done it before PHP's attempt at having type hints, which still leave much to be desired. Ruby(imho) the most elegant language around doesn't have it and that is fine really, it does not bother me as much, if mypy gets powerful and widely adopted enough it will then be a non-issue.

But another thing that the 4 languages i mentioned before have is non-existent syntactical whitespace......I just can't stand it.

So, why am I saying all of this nonsense? Today I wanted to recreate a conda environment and landed on the use of YAML............which has syntactic whitespace and I lost my shit.

I seldom bitch about languages and technologies, shit, I used VBScript before, not only did I get paid handsomely for it, but I fucking enjoyed it(probably cuz I am a masochist).

But two things I cannot abide: VBA and syntactic whitespace.

Once I get enough knowledge for it I will push for the same level of tooling in Python to be ported to Scala.

Thank you for coming to my whiny post about something as small as bitching about syntactic whitespace.

I just installed Opera Mini on my PSP. That alone isn't very exciting on its own, although I am stoked that my website does in fact render on a device from 2009. With the helpful guidance of a laptop from 2004 that's doing the hotspot duties for this thing.

No, what really got me stoked is that Opera still supports these old platforms, and how small they managed to make it. The .jar file for Opera Mini 4.5 is ~800kB large. There's a .jad file as well but it's negligible in size and seems to be a signature of sorts.

Let that sink in for a moment. This entire web browser is 800kB. Firefox meanwhile consistently consumes 800 MEGABYTES.. in MEMORY. So then, I went to think for a moment, how on earth did they manage to cram an entire functioning web browser in 800kB? Hell, what makes up a web browser anyway?

The answer to that question I got to is as follows. You need an engine to render the web page you receive. You need a UI to make the browser look nice. And finally you need a certificate store to know which TLS certificates to trust. And while probably difficult to make, I think it should be possible to do in 800k. Seriously, think about it. How would you go *make* a web browser? Because I've already done that in the past.

Earlier I heard that you need graphics, audio, wasm, yada yada backends too.. no. Give your head a shake. Graphics are the responsibility of the graphics driver. A web browser shouldn't dabble with those at all. Audio, you connect to PulseAudio (in Linux at least) and you're done. Hell I don't even care about ALSA or OSS here. You just connect to the stuff that does that job for you. And WebAssembly.. God I could rant about that shit all day. How about making it a native application? Not like actual Assembly is used for BIOS and low-level drivers. And that we already have a better language for the more portable stuff called C.

Seriously, think about it. Opera - a reputable browser vendor - managed to do it in 800kB on a 12 year old device. Don't go full wank on your framework shit on the comments. And don't you fucking dare to tell me that there's more to it. They did it for crying out loud. Now you take a look at your shitpile for JS code and refactor that shit already. Thank you.

FRIDAY MADNESS:

As I was so busy coding, one colleague was taking a break and distracts me as he's done with his task. As he approached, I snobbed.

Him: Dude, did you know that there's a generator for all the images in sprite?
Me: really? How?
Him: spritegen.website-performance.org. What's cool about it is that the html and css are already generated just like in font awesome. For example, that i tag...
Me: cool. I wonder dude, why would they use i tag when it makes the text italicize, right?
Him: right. Probably because its used for icons also because icons starts with letter i.
Me: LOL.
Him: LOL.

F*CK...that feeling when you were working as a junior UI/UX designer for about 3 weeks in new company, you were on a project which is almost finished and delivered...

1 and half week Later (after technical issues - check my older rants)......

you have noticed one quite importat mistake in the designs, which were done by senior designers, which can lead in future to a huge Ux problems - so huge, that users will probably leave/close the app and will not purchase the product via that app... ( We can say than whole design solution was a waste of money for the client)... On that designes was working a team of 4 people, about 3 Months (and the app (prototype) had to be ready already 2 Months back)...

the deadline was pushed 2x already...

And your boss (senior designer) tell you that this is not such an issue.. But thx for your opinion.....

1 week Later by user testing 4 out of 4 people were asking about that stuff I told to my boss that is missing...

And I was ignored...

In less than 1 week Later after the testing I get fired from the company without no reason...

Or better - the reason was:

I have too little experiences for this job...
Dont know if I should laugh or cry🤦‍♀️🤣/😭

Does most memorable in a bad way count? 🤔

He left almost 2 years ago..or even more.. left a bunch of bugs and logical fuckups for me to fix.. some already fixed, some still lingering there..

I want to not blame him for everything, since we lack proper code review protocols and all.. but I've asked on several occasions if he understands the problem and what must be done..and the answer was always yes..results, after I got time to check up on him, the code he wrote was most probably copy pasted from stack overflow or somewhere else.. butchered in any and every way possible..

And of course already checked in to TFS.. along with bunch of files that were not even changed (he didn't bother to check that and exclude them) + a bunch of files from other projects... Told him to not do that on several occasions too, but he still managed to fuck things up this way.. leaving all the uncommented debugger; crap and alerts in the js files..

On one occasion I was working on new GUI..api part I already finished..got the order from above to delegate this to him as it is not much he can fuck up so I could focus on more important & complex stuff..
Maybe additional 4h of work + testing for everything..
I show him the prepared files, one controller, one view..explained what parts of code goes where etc.. a little short of writing everything myself.. Ask if he understands what needs to be done & how and told him if he has any problems/questions to ask me asap..
Said he understood what needs to be done.. after a day or two he asks me why something is not workig as expected.. I check the files, correct initialization was commented out and all the code was stuffed in the view file.. Took him another day to move the code to proper files.. Not sure about the possible bugs left there as the client later decided that they will not be using this..

I later found out that years of C# experience on his CV was actually a school course.. he didn't even know why the changes on api are not showing up..because he didn't know that he has to build the code..

I mean, if he was honest when asked about experience with .net, we would've taken a month or two to just explain everything from the start..

But as he didn't and based on his CV (much more experience with .net than me) and 'I understand everything' attitude from the start I assumed he knows WTF was he doing..

Boy was I wrong..

He was also more interested in how much I get payed and if I have a company phone etc..than actually doing his job.. I fucking hate chit chat, and this..well.. he didn't get the hints that this is in no way appropriate to ask.. I've told him that if he has problems with his pay and bonuses that he should talk to the management and not me about this..and that I'm only interested in his actual work and progress..

So yeah, I'll definitely be remembering this guy till the day I die..

Longest I've worked without rest + why?

Over 24 hours. Why?

In our old system, the database had fields, for example, a customer like Total97, Total98, etc. to store values by year (or some date-specific value).

Every January 1, we had to add fields to accommodate the upcoming year and make the appropriate code changes to handle the new fields.

One year the UPS shipping rates changed and users didn't want to 'lose' the old rates, so they wanted new fields added (Rate98, Rate99, etc) so they could compare old vs. new. That required a complete re-write of most of the underlying applications because users wanted to see the difference on any/all applications that displayed a shipping rate. I'll throw in asking 'why?' was often answered with "because we pay you to do what we say". Luckily, we had already gotten to work on a lot of this before January 1st, so we were, for the most part, ready.

January 1st rolls around (we had to be in the office at 3:00AM), work thru changes, spend some time testing, and be done before noon. That didn't happen. The accounting system was a system that wasn't in (and had never been) in scope, and when we flipped the switch, one of the accountants comes into the office:
E: "Guys? None of our Excel spreadsheets are working. They are critical to integration with the accounting software"
Us: "What? Why would you be using Excel to integrate with the software instead of their portal?"
E: "We could never figure it out, so we had a consultant write VBA scripts to do the work."
Us: "OK, a lot of fields changed, but shouldn't be a big deal. How many spreadsheets are we talking about?"
E: "Hundreds. We have a separate spreadsheet for every integration point. The consulting company said it scalable, whatever that means."
Us: "What?! Why we just know hearing about this!?"
E: "Don't worry, the consultant said making changes would be easy, let me show you, just open the spreadsheet..click here..<click><click><click>...ignore that error, it always happens...click that <click><click><click>.."
Us: "Oh good lord, this is going to take hours"
E: "Ha! Probably. All this computer stuff is your job and I've got a family to get to. Later"
Us: "Hey 'VP of IS', can we go home and fix these spreadsheets as-needed this week?"
VP-IS: "Let me check with 'VP-FS'"
<few minutes later>
VP-IS: "No, he said Excel is critical to running their department. We stay until Excel is fixed."
Us: "No, no...its these spreadsheets. I doubt FS needs all of them tomorrow morning."
VP-IS: "That's what I said. Spreadsheets, Excel, same thing. I'll order the pizza. Who likes pepperoni!?"

At least he didn't cheap out on the pizza (only 4 of us and he ordered 6 large, extra pepperoni from one of the best pizza places in town)

One problem after another and we didn't get done until almost 6:00AM. Then...

VP-IS: "Great job guys. I've scheduled a meeting at 8:00AM to review what we did so we can document the process for next year. You've got a couple of hours. Feel free to get some breakfast and come back, or eat the left over pizza in the breakroom fridge. There is a lot left"
Us: "Um...sorry...we're going home."
VP-IS: "WHAT!!...OK...fine. I'll schedule the meeting for 12"
Us: "No...we're going home. We'll see you tomorrow."

We are 2 people working as remote android devs for this startup in another country. 6 weeks ago a new person joined onsite to work directly in startup HQ. I'l refer to him as an newguy.

Last week we started new sprint (of 2 weeks) to work on a new feature.

Newguy was responsible for gathering all the specs and planning, so this is how our sprint is going so far:

Day 1:

We have 10+ tickets in jira (tickets have only titles) no one knows what to do and we don't even have specification. I started pushing everybody onsite to get their shit together. We NEED UX/UI specs, we NEED backend to be ready, or at least start working paralelly so that once wer'e done with frontend backend would be ready. I mean cmon guys this feature is already 70% done on iOS, why cant you send us the specification?

Day 2:

We had a meeting on Zoom and talked about missing specification and project manager promised to send us the specs. Meanwhile the idea of feature became clearer so I agreed with the newguy to start researching about best way to implement our solution.

Day 3:

We received the specifications. I provided my research for the feature to the newguy. Turns out the he knew about specification 4-5 days before.

Instead of sharing information with us, he decided to create his own library to do what we want to do and blatantly rejected my research input.

Now he showed his implementaton (which is shit by the way) and presents it as the only way to proceed forward. He offers for us to work paralelly with him on this (basically he wants to write library alone, and we are supposed to somehow implement and test it, but how the fuck we can implement if backend is not ready and library is just a bunch of empty interfaces at this point?)

I talked with one of the teamleads in the startup and told him that this is not the way things were being done here before and new guy is becoming a dictator.

Teamlead talked with new guy and found no issue. Basically newguy defended his sole decision by saying that he did research on his own, there are no libraries that do what we want and he knows better.

Teamlead tells me to STFU because new guy seems competent and he will be leading this feature. Basically from what I gathered teamlead doesn't give a single fuck and wants to delegate all project management to this new guy.

Day 5:

End of the week. New guy claims that his lib is done so we can start implementing properly. I tried implementing his lib but its fucked up and backend is still not ready.

Day 6:

Backend is still not ready, no one is doing anything just waiting for it to be ready.

Day 7 (Today):

Today(Backend is still not ready, no one is doing anything just waiting for it to be ready.

So what can I say? His plan was to probably prove his self worth and try to lead this feature by giving us information at last minute. At the point were we should start implementing instead of researching.

What happened? Motherfucker doesn't know shit about backend, has been notified about backend issues multiple times but his head was so deep up his ass with that new library of his that he delayed the rest of the team.

Result? 7 working days wasted. Out of 3 developers only 1 was actually working (and his fucked up code will have to be rewritten anyways). Only 50% of feature done. Motherfucker tells me that this is how we will work in the future, "paralelly". The fuck is this mate? If you would have worked on this feature alone you would have done it already now, but instead you wait until we remote devs will login and fetch you the test input and talk with backend guys for you? The fuck is wrong with you.

You fucking piece of shit, learn to plan and organize better if you want to lead the team. Now all that you are doing is wasting time, money and getting on everyboys nerves. Im tired of fucking spoon feeding you every day you needy scheming office politics playing piece of shit. Go back to your shithole country and let us work.

When I was responsible for sprint planning I figured out what to do before start of the sprint and remote devs were able to do week's work in 1-2 days and have rest of the week off. This is how it's supposed to be when you work with a remote team. Delegate them separate features, give them proper specs ahead and everyone's happy. Don't start working on frontend if you dont even fucking know when backend will be ready. It's fucking common sense.

Now I need to spoon feed this motherfucker who can't even get information while sitting on his ass onsite in HQ. Fucking hell.

i was hired to join a team of old devs (40+) in an unnamed European country "yay goodbye 3rd world it's time to enjoy the quality of life" assist with enhancing already existing software and creating new solutions.
prior to my arrival most things were slow and super buggy, looking at the code base it shouldn't be a surprise, amateur hour everyone, logic implemented that is not needed, comment driven development, last time code review was done back in 1996. lots of anti patterns.
i swear there is a for loop that does nothing but it loops through a 100+ elements list, trunk based development with tfs since git is "not really needed"
test projects are not there.
>enter me an educated fool, with genuine passion for the craft and somehow a decent amount of knowledge.
>spent the last year fixing stuff educating people on principles and qualities.
> countless hours of training and explaining. team is showing cooperation, a new requirement comes in to develop with react.
> tear my ass creating reusable shit and self explanatory code with proper naming etc using git with feature branching, monday is first deployment day.
> today a colleague was working on an item submit a pull request and self approve it
> look at the code..... WTF the dumb fuck copied and pasted the whole code from different kendo components but somehow managed to refractor the name to test component, commented out all the code that he didn't use did the api call directly from the component, has 2 useeffects that depends on the a fucking text box changes for no reason, no redux implementation, the acceptance criteria is not achieved, and it doesn't work it just look right.
> first world country shit cannot scold, cannot complain, lead by example.
>asked him why you did this, the response was yeah probably i shouldn't have done that, i really didn't understand anything in the training but didn't want to waste time!!!!
> rest of the team created a different styled disaster with different flavors they don't even name their shit the same way.

fellow developers I'm stuck in a spaceship with a bunch of imposters, seriously i never cried in my entire life now I'm teary and on the verge of a break down.
talk with management "improving needs time" and offers me to join a yoga session to release the stress as if reaching nirvana would deliver shit on monday.
i really don't know what do is this a rant, is this a cry for help, I'm not sure, any advice is welcomed.

My foolishness of giving into an almost impossible dream seems to be finally setting in.

So the client, who is also my relative is launching an hotel. He wanted a website for the hotel with booking facility. The budget was plenty for that requirement and I was okay. In my calculations 20% of the proposed budget seemed fair to charge.

Few months in, it turns out he now wants a hotel booking platform where other hotels can also be listed. The reasoning was he wants to avoid the commissions charged by popular booking sites and also feature his own hotel in the booking platform that was about to be build.

I was skeptical about his intentions and my skills in developing it. I was also concerned whether he understood the responsibilities and overhead costs of running such a platform. He talked like it'll be fine. I calculated my billing to about 50% of the budget. I left the other 50% intentionally because I knew it would need for keeping up the site.

Time goes by, i am now 90% into completion of the new requirement.

Few weeks ago, i had informed about server pricing and I quoted a starting price of $15 per month. He seemed quite shocked. His reaction shocked me too and I got concerned whether I would even get rest of the payment ( already got 10% of proposed budget ) as advance.

Just few days ago, he now has a new requirement. He wants to show the hotel pricing from the booking site in Google Maps search. I tried to understand him that those are Ads and I was pretty sure price of running those ads are beyond his budget and probably negate any savings he is trying to make by competing popular booking platforms. Signing up for Hotel Ads as a booking platform is quite challenging. I don't think it'll happen.

I am now concerned he might bail on the project, so I have not informed yet. I just hope I get paid for the work I done and I'll inform then. :P

Anyways, the journey of it's development was quite insightful and challenging experience. I fell in love with a language I knew existed but never really bothered about and a framework whose only thing I knew was that it's name sounded cool to say.

I'm fucking done.

I honestly can't see how developers like to work for years on a single project. Nothing on the side, just the one project. Fuck I'm a year in and I've already been pushing my patience.

After working on something for half a year I want some diversity, but every time I ask for it I get the "we need you doing this" card. I've asked plenty of times for my manager to find someone else to do part of my work, and every time I get the same thing. "We're looking for someone, don't worry". Yeah my ass you've been saying that for months and I still haven't seen a job opening.

Honestly, in a month or so I'm gonna tell my manager that I'm quitting soon, so he has some time to actually go look for someone. If he doesn't, not my problem.

For real though, the company is nice, people are chill, I'm just lacking challenge, and no matter how many times I bring it up, nothing's being done with it.

What will I do when I quit? I have no fucking clue, but anything's better than doing the same repetitive shit day in day out. Fuck it I'll probably go balls deep on my own projects for a few months, see if I can generate an income there.
If that doesn't work out I'll just go back to the life of sucking someone's dick for a monthly salary.

What do you tell interviewers as a "Senior developer" when they ask you what you do at your current job.

I've been with my current for almost 8 years, since graduating... Few different time but not very well managed (semi/barely agile). Hasn't really provided any skill growth opportunities. Mostly fixing production issues, chasing other teams.

The projects I've worked on are in many different languages either enhancements or some standalone stuff. But nothing that's huge and I don't think I've learned anything from them. I usually apply what I learn and practice outside of work to work.

So to me I can probably list a whole lot of projects but to me their not that amazing, I didn't learn anything from them.

Also about those algorithm questions. I've never used any of this stuff actually at work. Concepts yes but not how do you implement ... And honestly I've never once had a situation that required algorithmic thinking other than maybe writing recursive functions in rare occasions...

But to me I've never once done anything harder or new which I haven't already done on my own....

Sorry for the disorderly rambling this turned into... which is sorta a problem too.

Everytime I think about interviews, I want to give rants about we technical questions are BS, how I probably have enough real experience to tackle any problem and come up with a good plan/solution (in a realistic timeframe, not 20 minutes from design to implementation)

Guess what guys, I'm installing Ubuntu over Arch, because I need change and I just don't give a shit about distro elitism. Like many others, I got my start on Ubuntu (was probably Hardy Heron), and then I have done some hoppin' ever since. I never wanted to go back to plain Ubuntu because you know.., but fuck that, its perfect for what I need on my shitty laptop which I do nothing more than watch shitty livestreams on.

I also need something which looks vaguely caught up to 2019 GUI standards while expending max 13 kcal in the process (already spent a fair share with KDE). The 13 is for deleting the Amazon shortcut.

A user calls me an hour after I'm supposed to have logged off.
"Hey, ahh, like, something is not good with, like, some thing"
Oh, snap! What happened?
"There is, like, this report, and it's, like, not right?"
Oh, the report is showing wrong data? Let me try to get a fresh version and...
"No, like,the data is right, but, like, there is many reports and , like, should be only one?"
Oh, you mean the report consolidation feature? It should only happen if the reports are fully compatible, and since it's automatic if the reports are not already grouped it means that they cannot be grouped. Probably due to this shopping season, we've seen a high uptick in demand.
"But, like, it should be, like, one! If not I will have to type in each report, like, by hand! I usually talk to this guy XYZ and he, like, does something that I, like, have no idea what it is. Can you call him up?"
(The dude the user mentioned logged off hours ago, and is in a different timezone. It's now about 11PM for him.)
It might not be possible. The system should add observations to each report it cannot consolidate. What do those say?
(the user takes two seconds to respond. I don't think they checked anything)
"It doesn't say anything. Can you cal XYZ, please?"
...

Shit, why do people wait until the last few hours of the last day of the month to do something that should have been done days ago and then demand that everybody everywhere just adjust to their late-ass schedule?
And then to demand I wake up a hardworking dev because someone is to lazy to use the system as it was custom designed for them? Because it had no problems but just wasn't making all things easy?

That's why users have to pay - they don't pay us to code, they pay us to put up with their bullshit.

TL;DR: I'm stressed out over choosing a side project because of the commitment and fear of failure :(

I'm a student and summer vacation starts in 3 days (and actually has already started for me, thanks to a "smartly planned" hospital stay), so I'm currently looking for a cool project to start. This will be my third summer vacation during which I want to make complete a project, and I never actually did it. The first year, I couldn't think of any reasonable, doable project which would be interesting and fitting for the time scope (I was quite new to programming back then, so I probably couldn't have done things that would be interesting to me, an any project that I could've done would just take 20 minutes, cause I wouldn't understand anything more complex). The second time, I chose a project too big with too much new things I had to learn on the go. I actually pushed through for nearly a week, but then I realized that I only completed like 25% in that time, so I lost my motivation, thinking I could never finish it, while not wanting to start a complete new project, because that would've felt like wasting the time I put into my first project. It was still a valuable project and I learned a lot by doing it, but this year I want to actually finish a project; so I'm really stressed out right now trying to come up with a good project.
Usually I have millions of vague ideas in my head, but as soon as it comes to choosing, every single one seems to be the wrong one, or I forget about all of them. Everything that kinda interests me seems way to big and complicated to me, but I sometimes feel like I'm just underestimating my abilities, but on the other hand I have ~25 projects on my hard drive, of which 4 or 5 are finished and most will never be finished. :/
And it's just so overwhelming to choose something like that, because on one hand I really want to do a bigger project that I actually finish, and summer vacation is the only time I have so much time to code, and I love coding, but on the other hand choosing such a project that I will work 2-3 weeks on is too much commitment and also I'm anxious about failing it and never finish it, just abandon a buggy mess. Am I the only one to feel that way, or are you too having problems choosing side problems?

And, I guess if you have any ideas for a suitable project (literally anything, so that I might be exposed to some new ideas), just comment it.

1. It's gonna be more and more specialized - to the point where we'll equal or even outdo the medical profession. Even today, you can put 100 techs/devs into a room and not find two doing the same job - that number will rise with the advent of even more new fields, languages and frameworks.

2. As most end users enjoy ignoring all security instructions, software and hardware will be locked down. This will be the disadvantage of developers, makers and hackers equally. The importance of social engineering means the platform development will focus on protecting the users from themselves, locking out legitimate tinkerers in the process.

3. With the EU getting into the backdoor game with eTLS (only 20 years after everyone else realized it's shit), informational security will reach an all-time low as criminals exploit the vulnerabilities that the standard will certainly have.

4. While good old-fashioned police work still applies to the internet, people will accept more and more mass surveillance as the voices of reason will be silenced. Devs will probably hear more and more about implementing these or joining the resistance.

5. We'll see major leaks, both as a consequence of mass-surveillance (done incompetently and thus, insecurely) and as activist retaliation.

6. As the political correctness morons continue invading our communities and projects, productivity will drop. A small group of more assertive devs will form - not pretty or presentable, but they - we - get shit done for the rest.

7. With IT becoming more and more public, pseudo-knowledge, FUD and sales bullshit will take over and, much like we're already seeing it in the financial sector, drown out any attempt of useful education. There will be a new silver-bullet, it will be useless. Like the rest. Stick to brass (as in IDS/IPS, Firewall, AV, Education), less expensive and more effective.

8. With the internet becoming a part of the real life without most people realizing it and/or acting accordingly, security issues will have more financial damages and potentially lethal consequences. We've already seen insulin pumps being hacked remotely and pacemakers' firmware being replaced without proper authentication. This will reach other areas.

9. After marijuana is legalized, dev productivity will either plummet or skyrocket. Or be entirely unaffected. Who cares, I'll roll the next one.

10. There will be new JS frameworks. The world will turn, it will rain.

I think I'm a good developer. I have pretty decent debugging skills, including pulling apart disassembled x86 and other architecture code.

I'm fascinated by how things work.

But almost everything is catered for by a library. Or has already been done.

I find it enjoyable to create a library or program myself, but get disheartened when I find some library or program that is written seemingly very well, compared to my own code. And then I start to think I'm not a good developer after all.

Sort of relates to my previous rant about repeatedly rewriting code.

Applies to me doing programming as a hobby but probably affects my code at work as well... I just can't help but think my code is probably awful compared to what someone else might write.

...then I see incredibly ugly, messy, badly written code by other people and I feel better...

I suppose it is like an artist who sees amazing works but cannot paint to that standard, but is well beyond drawing stick figures with crayons.

Sounds like a trivial problem but it probably impedes my progress with a lot of things.

Im thinking about leaving my employer because I keep getting way too much work on my plate, people get annoyed that its not done in time and tell me that i should tell them if im getting too much work.
So i tell them its to much and our deadlines are to tight, then i just get told "this is how we always work, we just gotta finish things faster and better"...

Another one is that our HR/office manager keeps bugging me about setting up SMART goals so i can prove my value to the company and that its my responsibility to do so if i want a pay raise (even if im already underpaid)...
Im sorry but if you wanna keep me, you gotta give me some damn incentive to stay...

Ive been putting up with it sofar because i like the office and the people and the majority of the work itself and i really dont wanna go looking for another job because im really bad at it... but wtf... im so done with all the "how does this work" questions too...

tl;dr: getting negative reviews because im bad at my own evaluation is gonna make me quit probably, while im being praised for all other work i do

I'm considering quitting a job I started a few weeks ago. I'll probably try to find other work first I suppose.

I'm UK based and this is the 6th programming/DevOps role I've had and I've never seen a team that is so utterly opposed to change. This is the largest company I've worked for in a full time capacity so someone please tell me if I'm going to see the same things at other companies of similar sizes (1000 employees). Or even tell me if I'm just being too opinionated and that I simply have different priorities than others I'm working with. The only upside so far is that at least 90% of the people I've been speaking to are very friendly and aren't outwardly toxic.

My first week, I explained during the daily stand up how I had been updating the readmes of a couple of code bases as I set them up locally, updated docker files to fix a few issues, made missing env files, and I didn't mention that I had also started a soon to be very long list of major problems in the code bases. 30 minutes later I get a call from the team lead saying he'd had complaints from another dev about the changes I'd spoke about making to their work. I was told to stash my changes for a few weeks at least and not to bother committing them.

Since then I've found out that even if I had wanted to, I wouldn't have been allowed to merge in my changes. Sprints are 2 weeks long, and are planned several sprints ahead. Trying to get any tickets planned in so far has been a brick wall, and it's clear management only cares about features.

Weirdly enough but not unsurprisingly I've heard loads of complaints about the slow turn around of the dev team to get out anything, be it bug fixes or features. It's weird because when I pointed out that there's currently no centralised logging or an error management platform like bugsnag, there was zero interest. I wrote a 4 page report on the benefits and how it would help the dev team to get away from fire fighting and these hidden issues they keep running into. But I was told that it would have to be planned for next year's work, as this year everything is already planned and there's no space in the budget for the roughly $20 a month a standard bugsnag plan would take.

The reason I even had time to write up such a report is because I get given work that takes 30 minutes and I'm seemingly expected to take several days to do it. I tried asking for more work at the start but I could tell the lead was busy and was frankly just annoyed that he was having to find me work within the narrow confines of what's planned for the sprint.

So I tried to keep busy with a load of code reviews and writing reports on road mapping out how we could improve various things. It's still not much to do though. And hey when I brought up actually implementing psr12 coding standards, there currently aren't any standards and the code bases even use a mix of spaces and tab indentation in the same file, I seemingly got a positive impression at the only senior developer meeting I've been to so far. However when I wrote up a confluence doc on setting up psr12 code sniffing in the various IDEs everyone uses, and mentioned it in a daily stand up, I once again got kickback and a talking to.

It's pretty clear that they'd like me to sit down, do my assigned work, and otherwise try to look busy. While continuing with their terrible practices.

After today I think I'll have to stop trying to do code reviews too as it's clear they don't actually want code to be reviewed. A junior dev who only started writing code last year had written probably the single worst pull request I've ever seen. However it's still a perfectly reasonable thing, they're junior and that's what code reviews are for. So I went through file by file and gently suggested a cleaner or safer way to achieve things, or in a couple of the worst cases I suggested that they bring up a refactor ticket to be made as the code base was trapping them in shocking practices. I'm talking html in strings being concatenated in a class. Database migrations that use hard coded IDs from production data. Database queries that again quote arbitrary production IDs. A mix of tabs and spaces in the same file. Indentation being way off. Etc, the list goes on.
Well of course I get massive kickback from that too, not just from the team lead who they complained to but the junior was incredibly rude and basically told me to shut up because this was how it was done in this code base. For the last 2 days it's been a bit of a back and forth of me at least trying to get the guy to fix the formatting issues, and my lead has messaged me multiple times asking if it can go through code review to QA yet. I don't know why they even bother with code reviews at this point.

Since my contract is going to be terminated on 1st July and brilliant devrant community injected me idea to make same project and start selling it as incorporated I made some steps.

I made simple POC that is command line application in different language and unrelated to what I’m doing and showed to my friend and ask if he want to buy it for his company and he was like wtf this shit even exist on the market or it’s new thing ?
I admit company I work for is not present in my country and this product is like not existing on the market. ( at least I can’t find it )

From this point I have a feeling I need to do it. I have life savings that will provide me to at least 2021 or even for a whole year if I’ll be smart and I think it’s going to be good thing to take a summer brake and make own project based on professional experience I have.

Despite the situation around I will be mostly coding 24/7, drinking and playing playstation.

I probably will convince my friend to work on it and my other friend to sell it once it’s done. He already wanted to sell my command line tool but I told him to keep his mouth shut cause they might steal the idea.

I already decided to use different tech stack and api so all software will be different, some business parts are unavoidable but I have many fresh ideas. At the end I will just connect some online payment, make youtube commercial and start selling it by integrating with some api and buying internet ads, also I will start looking for a new job from October if nothing will work out and just keep investing less time in it.

What you think ?
Should I take the risk or not finding job and do something that my heart is telling me to do( I write software for 12 years for money so I don’t think it’s even possible ) or should I live safe boring life and just go to another job ?

Thanks
Have a nice day.

I know there has been a million stories on people asking developers for free/cheap work, and having this happen constantly is probably one of the biggest ways coding has impacted my life, but it happened to me for the umpteenth time this morning and I'm still reeling from it.

A close friend of mine asked me to create a bespoke website for her new business. I currently work as a Software/Web Developer so I assume this made sense in her head to ask her friend first.

She gave me some requirements and seeing as I already had a figure in mind, I asked for her budget. She says - 'I don't want to say a figure and insult you with it being too low'.

I tell her I'll work out a figure that benefits both of us, seeing as I would be using this as experience to try out some new stuff and she doesn't want it done until January. Because of this I was already going to give her a great deal on it anyway (in comparison to what it would be if I charged her through the company) because it would practically be a project I'd work on if I had a spare evening.

She said, and I quote: 'We preferably don't want to spend more than £200, and if it's less that is even better'.

I think I was actually more insulted that she thinks something I do for a living is worth £200 or less.

She thinks that designing, programming and writing content for a website is worth < £200.

I think she'll be shocked when I give her the quote that I had in mind. Looks like she'll be getting a WiX website or something for that kind of money.

I opened my laptop every day this holiday, always with the intention of learning something, contributing somewhere, doing something. I think the closest I got was to start a VM and open my editor and read some comments (I opened and closed some files too!).

I have done nothing the holiday except bing Netflix and put another 100 or so hours on Steam. Oh and Christmas dinner sandwiches, which as I right this reminds me the oh thing was worth it just for those...

Long and short of it is I think I'm in a slump, my output over the last couple months started dwindling and I thought a couple of weeks (16 days to be more accurate) would help, but it didn't. I'm back at work tomorrow and I'm just not feeling it.

I don't think there is anyone answer but has anyone got any experience of getting out of this feeling of "being done"? I already tried watching Rocky... Just made me see Dulph Lundgren every time my screen wakes up! Wallpaper of the dude probably doesn't help...

I have so much work to get done I don't even know where to start anymore. I've got 6 sites in development, 20 sites with continuing maintenance, and I'm in charge of everything IT in my office.

Today I asked if the other developer on our team could help out and take a few maintenance clients off my hands so I could work on getting builds done.

We called a team meeting where I explained my workload and pointed out that in order to make the deadline of next week on two of these builds our other developer is going to have to help out with some of the work on my plate.

Other dev: Well I've already got 3 sites that still need maintenance this month and I'm still working on $client site.

Me: Ok well today is only the 3rd so you have all month to do the maintenance on those sites, these two have to be online next week and I still have 100 hours of work to do between the two of them.

Me to CTO: can I get some backup here? Or can we hire me a monkey (my term for interns) for a couple weeks so I can focus on building?

CTO: We'll have to talk about that at our meeting next week. In the mean time, just do what you can to get the sites done and let me know if you think we aren't going to make the deadlines.

Me: That's what this conversation is, I'm telling you now, and I've been telling you for 3 weeks that we were getting close to my limit for my workload. We have approximately 175 work hours in a month, maintenance contracts alone accounts for 120 of those hours.

CTO: Alright, well if after Monday you don't think you're going to make the deadline (Thursday), then we'll see if we can find a solution.

Fuck this shit, I get paid the same whether the client is happy or not, I get paid the same whether we reach the deadline or not. I asked that salespeople stop making deadline promises before developers get to look at the scope but that's not the way we do things here. At least one of these sites is not going to be online Thursday, probably both.

So I know i did a best and worst case already for 2017

But apparently it's not finished yet!

This will probably a short one:

Best thing to happen to me this year: I applied for a VR game and despite at this very moment i'm in thr trial period (to see if I can do work) i've succesfully landed a job.

I've spent months rewriting and rewriting my CV applying for standard software dev jobs, either being turned down for not enough experience for Junior roles, where they want someone out of university, where I have 1 year of both iOS and android experience, that is still not good enough for their shitty little app.

After all of that effort I turned to just borrowing my head and developing my game, to the point i have bits of the game practically done (bare bones crafting and building works 100% just has bugs in some specific cases). A friend of mine got a game dev job and he helped me out by showing me what his CV and cover letter looked like, i mimiced the style (in a sense) and added my own specific additions for VR. At the exact same time i got an invite from unity connect (which i had totally forgotten about) which i then scowered through jobs until I found something awesone "a job for a unity VR developer".

After contacting the guy about the job, we ended up having a voice chat over discord and he seems pleased with the fact I tome on my hands! Sadly the job is not some hourly paid job, however from what i've seen from youtube gameplay footage it looks very well done, and that leads me to getting revenue share.

Anyways i'm just so happy that with a couple days to spare in the year LOL i got a job! Sure i won't get paid yet but I got a flipping job, it is what i wanted for christmas!!

It is a gamble being revenue share and all but i'm willing to risk it!

Hey, here's an idea. Ethical cryptocurrency mining Adblock.

We've been talking a lot about mining as a revenue source and its ethics here, so that gave me an idea.

I've seen a lot of talk about blocking or boycotting mining websites.
Adblock has the "ethical ads" thing to allow reasonable ads to be displayed.

What if we made the mining equivalent of that: an extension that the user allows to mine with x resources, that prevents websites from doing their own mining, but which redistributes its mining results.

The website could just add a bit of script to tell the extension who they are, and while the page is on the foreground or streaming content, the extension would mine on their behalf.

This could also allow more transparency for the user: "your computer has generated x money for website y".

Wouldn't that be a nice middle ground? Does anyone know of a project like that?

Data wrangling is messy

I'm doing the vegetation maps for the game today, maybe rivers if it all goes smoothly.
I could probably do it by hand, but theres something like 60-70 ecoregions to chart,
each with their own species, both fauna and flora. And each has an elevation range its
found at in real life, so I want to use the heightmap to dictate that. Who has time for that? It's a lot of manual work.

And the night prior I'm thinking "oh this will be easy."

yeah, no.

(Also why does Devrant have to mangle my line breaks? -_-)

Laid out the requirements, how I could go about it, and the more I look the more involved
it gets.

So what I think I'll do is automate it. I already automated some of the map extraction, so
I don't see why I shouldn't just go the distance.
Also it means, later on, when I have access to better, higher resolution geographic data, updating it will be a smoother process. And even though I'm only interested in flora at the moment, theres no reason I can't reuse the same system to extract fauna information.
Of course in-game design there are some things you'll want to fudge. When the players are exploring outside the rockies in a mountainous area, maybe I still want to spawn the occasional mountain lion as a mid-tier enemy, even though our survivor might be outside the cats natural habitat. This could even be the prelude to a task you have to do, go take care of a dangerous
creature outside its normal hunting range. And who knows why it is there? Wild fire? Hunted by something *more* dangerous? Poaching? Maybe a nuke plant exploded and drove all the wildlife from an adjoining region?
who knows.

Having the extraction mostly automated goes a long way to updating those lists down the road.

But for now, flora.

For deciding plants and other features of the terrain what I can do is:

* rewrite pixeltile to take file names as input,
* along with a series of colors as a key (which are put into a SET to check each pixel against)
* input each region, one at a time, as the key, and the heightmap as the source image
* output only the region in the heightmap that corresponds to the ecoregion in the key.
* write a function to extract the palette from the outputted heightmap. (is this really needed?)
* arrange colors on the bottom or side of the image by hand, along with (in text) the elevation in feet for reference.

For automating this entire process I can go one step further:
* Do this entire process with the key colors I already snagged by hand, outputting region IDs as the file names.
* setup selenium
* selenium opens a link related to each elevation-map of a specific biome, and saves the text links
(so I dont have to hand-open them)
* I'll save the species and text by hand (assuming elevation data isn't listed)
* once I have a list of species and other details, to save them to csv, or json, or another format
* I save the list of species as csv or json or another format.
* then selenium opens this list, opens wikipedia for each, one at a time, and searches the text for elevation
* selenium saves out the species name (or an "unknown") for the species, and elevation, to a text file, along with the biome ID, and maybe the elevation code (from the heightmap) as a number or a color (probably a number, simplifies changing the heightmap later on)

Having done all this, I can start to assign species types, specific world tiles. The outputs for each region act as reference.

The only problem with the existing biome map (you can see it below, its ugly) is that it has a lot of "inbetween" colors. Theres a few things I can do here. I can treat those as a "mixing" between regions, dictating the chance of one biome's plants or the other's spawning. This seems a little complicated and dependent on a scraped together standard rather than actual data. So I'm thinking instead what I'll do is I'll implement biome transitions in code, which makes more sense, and decouples it from relying on the underlaying data. also prevents species and terrain from generating in say, towns on the borders of region, where certain plants or terrain features would be unnatural. Part of what makes an ecoregion unique is that geography has lead to relative isolation and evolutionary development of each region (usually thanks to mountains, rivers, and large impassible expanses like deserts).

Maybe I'll stuff it all into a giant bson file or maybe sqlite. Don't know yet.

As an entry level programmer I may not know what I'm doing, and I may be supposed to be looking for a job, but that won't stop me from procrastinating.

Data wrangling is fun.

Was trying to pull an all nighter to meet a deadline and I accidentally fell asleep. I was also texting a new person I liked at the same time.

Dreamt I got so much work done and was still texting and got into an argument.

Woke up, but by the time I realized what happened and that I slept off I had already randomly texted something aggressive and insulted 😭

So yeah. Guess who got no work done and is probably gonna be single for life 😂

This is something that I hadn't done or that directly impacted me, but that had an effect in my life several years after it happened.
It's one of those stories that you think "this only happens to others", and then someday you're the "others".

So when I was born, I was, naturally, registered on the health care system. My parents chose an uncommon name for me (uncommon in my country) so I think I wasn't registered by the time of my birth, but 4 months later when all the bureaucratic crap came to an end (long story short, the guy that was there when it started died and my parents had to wait 4 months for another person to be appointed). So, when my parents finally went to register me, apparently, for some reason, the computer took my name and assumed it was a male name. As I've said, my name is uncommon in my country, there're probably 3 or 4 people with the same name here in Portugal.
Why did the computer assume it was a male name AND why didn't nobody check that? Since my parents had to ask to government entities to let them name me that name, I'm assuming it wasn't in their db. So why did it assume male? Was it purposely programmed that, by default, all "newly-registered" names were to be male? Was it random? Who the hell knows.
And how did nobody check that, every time I went to take vaccines? I don't think anyone told my mom that everytime we went there that the data was wrong, otherwise the situation wouldn't have lasted for 14 years.
We only knew about that mishap when it was time I had to take vaccines specifically for women and that I wasn't being noticed of it even though a friend 1y younger than me had already taken hers.

I find this story amusing but now that I started thinking about how it came to life (no pun intended) I'm actually a bit pissed off about how they didn't think of uncommon names and that how that could affect their registry in the system. They could have - IDK - placed "undefined" in that field so that it would caught the register's attention.
Moral of the story: don't assume stuff :v

I have just slept for a minimum of 5 hours. It is 7:47 PM atm.
Why?
We have had a damn stressful day today.
We have had a programming test, but it really was rather an exam.
Normally, you get 30 minutes for a test and 45 minutes for an exam.

In this "test" we have had to explain what 'extends' does and name a few advantages of why one should use it.
Check.
Read 3 separate texts and write the program code on paper. It was about 1 super class and 1 sub class with a test class in Java.
Check.
Task 3: Create the UML diagram of the code from above. *internally: From above? He probably means my code since there is no other code there. *Checks time*. I have about 3 minutes left. Fuck my life.*
Draws the boxes. Put the class names in each of them. A private attribute for the super class.
Teacher: Last minute!
Draw the arrow starting starting from the sub class to the super class.
Put my name on each written paper. And mentally done for the day. Couldn't finish the last task. Task 3.
During this "test", I heard the frustrations of my classmates. Seemed like everyone was pretty much pissed.
After a short discussion with the teacher who also happens to be the physics professor of a university nearby.
[If you are reading this, I hope that something bad happens to you]
The next course was about computer systems. Remember my recent rant about DNS, dhcp, ftp, web server and samba on ubuntu?
We have had the task to do the screenshots of the consoles where you proof that you have dhcp activated on win7 machine etc. Seemed ok to me. I would have been done in 10 minutes, if I would be doing this relaxed. Now the teacher tells us to change the domain names to <surnameOfEachStudent>.edu.
I was like: That's fine.
Create a new user for the samba server. Read and write directories. Change the config.
Me: That should be easy.
Create new DNS entries in the configs.
Change the IPv6 address area to 192.168.x.100-200/24 only for the dhcp server.
Change the web server's default page. Write your own text into it.
You will have 1 hour and 30 minutes of time for it.
Dumbo -ANGRY-CLIENT-: Aye. Let us first start screenshotting the default page. Oh, it says that we should access it with the domain name. I don't have that much time. Let us be creative and fake it, legally.
Changes the title element so that it looks like it has been accessed via domain name. Deletes the url and writes the domain name without pressing Enter. Screenshot. Done. Ok, let us move to the next target.
Dhcp: Change lease time. Change IP address area. Subnet mask. Router. DNS. Broadcast. Optional domain name. Save.
Switches to win7.
ipconfig /release
ipconfig /renew
Holy shit it does not work!
After changing the configs on ubuntu for a legit 30 minutes: Maybe I should change the ip of the ubuntu virtual machine itself. *me asking my old self: why did not you do that in the first place, ass hole?!*
Same previous commands on win7 console. Does not work. Hmmm...
Where could be the problem?
Check the IP of the ubuntu server once again. Fml. Ubuntu did not save when I clicked on the save button the first time I have changed it. Click on save button 10 times to make sure it really is saved now lol.
Same old procedure on win7.
Alright. Dhcp works. Screenshot.
Checks time. 40 minutes left.
DNS:It is your turn. Checks bind9 configs. sudo nano db.reverse.edu.
sudo nano db.<mysurname>.edu.
Alright. All set. It should work now.
Ping win7 from ubuntu and vice versa. Works. Ping domain name on windows 7 vm. Does not work.
Oh, I forgot to restart the bind9 server on ubuntu.
sudo service bind stop
" " " start
Check DNS server IP on win7. It looks fine.
It still doesn't work. Fuck it. I have only 20 minutes left. Samba. Let us do this!
10 minutes in. No result. I don't remember why. I already forgot why I have done for it. It was a very stressful day.
Let us try DNS again.
Oh shit. I forgot the resolver!
sudo nano /etc/resolv.conf
The previous edits are gone. Dumb me. It says it in the comments. Why did not I care about it. Fuck it.6 minutes left. Open a yt video real quick. Changes the config file. Saves it. Restarts DNS and dhcp. Closes the terminal and opens a new one. The changes do not affect them until you reopen them. That's why.
Change to win7.
Ping works. How about nsloopup.
Does not work.
Teacher: 2 minutes left!
Fuck it.
Saves the word document with the images in it. Export as pdf. Tries to access the directories of the school samba server. Does not work. It was not my fault tho. Our school server is in general very slow. It feels like they are not maintained and left alone like this in the dust from the 90s.
Friend gets the permission to put his document on a USB and give the USB to the teacher.
Sneaky me: Hey xyz, can you give me your USB real quick?
Him: sure.
Gets bombed with "do you want to format the USB?" pop-ups 10 times. Fml. Skips in a fast way.
Transfers the pdf. Plug it out. Give it back.
After this we have had to give a presentation in politics. I am done.

First time linux user feedback

Linux lovers are probably gonna eat me alive but I don't give a flying fuck
Maybe its a little lenghty or boring, tell me what you think

Backstory:
I work for game extension company. We work with WinAPI and such. I've been using Windows since forever and I'm happy with it. But I thought to myself "hey, if I wanna be a good dev, I should give Linux and OS X a try, too"

I downloaded Linux Mint couple of months ago to start with. I was unable to boot it from live CD no matter what I tried, even in recovery mode. Apparently, Mint 18.3 was based on Ubuntu 16.04 which doesnt support UEFI
Wait, what the fuck, all modern PCs have UEFI so what, do all Mint users have 10 y/o laptops and PCs???

Anyway, when I heard about Mint 19 being released I thought to give it another try and I did. What a surprise, it booted successfully from Live CD. I saw the Linux desktop for the first time in my life, yay! I then installed it, GRUB appeared, my Windows was still there and wasn't broken so I was happy SOMETHING was working. I configured timeshift and applied dvorak layout system-wide. Realised dvorak layout is fucked up big time and applied normal layout for just desktop environment. Everything was really nice until couple reboots later Cinnamon stopped launching (kept returning to login screen). Okay, lets use timeshift

First big what-the-fuck was when I found out system restore can only be done using GUI??? This is absolutely retarded and I couldn't believe it is true. Login screen has a reachable console but I can't login there since I can't type the password. Fuck, fuck, fucking drovak layout was there.

Recovery mode - I've spent 20 minutes trying to type "timeshift --restore" having to press all keyboard buttons just to progress with one button. I've had another what-the-fuck when I saw "error: can't restore timeshift - partition already mounted"
Okay, this is too much. Why the fuck would you bundle a recovery mode if you can't restore a snapshot from there.

I have spent 3 hours now googling and trying to remove this fucking keyboard layout. No dice. I am making another copy of the live CD now. I'm gonna reinstall the whole shit now. I have the desire to create a custom Mint version without this abomination of a keyboard layout.

It's okay. Windows has taught me to be patient.

Fuck Dvorak, I dont know who the guy is but his keyboard layout can eat my dick

personal projects, of course, but let's count the only one that could actually be considered finished and released.

which was a local social network site. i was making and running it for about three years as a replacement for a site that its original admin took down without warning because he got fed up with the community. i loved the community and missed it, so that was my motivation to learn web stack (html, css, php, mysql, js).

first version was done and up in a week, single flat php file, no oop, just ifs. was about 5k lines long and was missing 90% of features, but i got it out and by word of mouth/mail is started gathering the community back.

right as i put it up, i learned about include directive, so i started re-coding it from scratch, and "this time properly", separated into one file per page.

that took about a month, got to about 10k lines of code, with about 30% of planned functionality.

i put it up, and then i learned that php can do objects, so i started another rewrite from scratch. two or three months later, about 15k lines of code, and 60% of the intended functionality.

i put it up, and learned about ajax (which was a pretty new thing since this was 2006), so i started another rewrite, this time not completely from scratch i think.

three months later, final length about 30k lines of code, and 120% of originally intended functionality (since i got some new features ideas along the way).

put it up, was very happy with it, and since i gathered quite a lot of user-generated data already through all of that time, i started seeing patterns, and started to think about some crazy stuff like auto-tagging posts based on their content (tags like positive, negative, angry, sad, family issues, health issues, etc), rewarding users based on auto-detection whether their comments stirred more (and good) discussion, or stifled it, tracking user's mental health and life situation (scale of great to horrible, something like that) based on the analysis of the texts of their posts...

... never got around to that though, missed two months hosting payments and in that time the admin of the original site put it back up, so i just told people to move back there.

awesome experience, though. worth every second.

to this day probably the project i'm most proud of (which is sad, i suppose) - the final version had its own builtin forum section with proper topics, reply threads, wysiwyg post editor, personal diaries where people could set per-post visibility (everyone, only logged in users, only my friends), mental health questionnaires that tracked user's results in time and showed them in a cool flash charts, questionnaire editor where users could make their own tests/quizzes, article section, like/dislike voting on everything, page-global ajax chat of all users that would stay open in bottom right corner, hangouts-style, private messages, even a "pointer" system where sending special commands to the chat aimed at a specific user would cause page elements to highlight on their client, meaning if someone asked "how do i do this thing on the page?", i could send that command and the button to the subpage would get highlighted, after they clicked it and the subpage loaded, the next step in the process would get highlighted, with a custom explanation text, etc...

dammit, now i got seriously nostalgic. it was an awesome piece of work, if i may say so. and i wasn't the only one thinking that, since showing the page off landed me my first two or three programming jobs, right out of highschool. 10 minutes of smalltalk, then they asked about my knowledge, i whipped up that site and gave a short walkthrough talking a bit about how the most interesting pieces were implemented, done, hired XD

those were good times, when I still felt like the programmer whiz kid =D

as i said, worth every second, every drop of sweat, every torn hair, several times over, even though "actual net financial profit" was around minus two hundred euro paid for those two or three years of hosting.

@11.30 pm -->BF: "Comm'on now...what Ya still doing there..aren t Ya comeing??? O.o already..."
ME: "Soon hun, i m learning some snake handeling here..hold on now!"
BF: "Yeeahp..Ya are handeling it all right already, you need to put it in the practice too. Come now. !" <<<--grinns.
ME: <<--lifting my glasses up to my head slowly: " I am writing...handwriting...the code!! Python!...?"
BF: "Yeah, i know...i saw yar test -B+.
If ya had done the finances calculus program for our maintance..my building checks, our food, your clothes...you would have more practice to put it into use...and you would have got an A probably..." He s freaking smirks and i went
qwaaak qwaaak qwaak- squachhh
I am so putting it into Rant )
..and i am so keeping him...

It was in May and I had a recruiter call be up about an interview for a dev position. I went to the interview, thought it went all right and awaited feedback.

Nothing came... I called the agency a few days later and he said he'd get me something back by end of the week.

Still nothing. I called again and he was all "oh sorry, I forgot, and I'll get it tomorrow".

You can probably guess; nothing. A couple weeks pass so by now I'm pretty confident I don't have the job, so I continue looking.

Then early afternoon on a Friday in November that agency calls back:

Agency: "Hi, how are you?"

Me: "Hey, I'm fine"

Agency: "Excellent, remember that interview in May for that company?"

Me: "Yeah, why have they go another position available?"

Agency: "Better, you start work with them on Monday"

It took the guy 6 months to get back, nothing from him or the company. Then he calls up out of the blue. No idea what he would be done had I already got a job.

I actually did accept, still work there now 4 years later, for now.

Ugh. So for one of my classes (Projects In Computer Science) we have to break up into groups; Around 4-6 people per group and build some software for different local companies in the city that I live in.

Well.... the company that my group chose is so damn frustrating. Essentially we are making a glorified Applicant Form system for their website (there's more to it than just that). So you would think that the company knew what sort of fields would be needed for these forms.... Well no, we are over a month into this project and still have barely began coding shit because they are so fucking slow to respond to our emails, don't pick up our calls, or put off doing absolutely anything related to our project! Our professor asked that we would have a written copy of the project requirements made and signed off by the client within the first 2 weeks of classes starting. Took them over a month to get around to that, and still even after signing off on the requirements said that they were missing key forms that we needed to account for... Its your damn fault for not telling us that. We completely wasted our time planning out the database and structuring the front-end/back-end to work for the forms they had given us, and now there's yet another one with inconsistent fields, meaning we need to rethink out most of our system to account for this data. We only have 3 months total, 1 which is already gone and practically wasted, and even still we don't have any sort of confirmation on what form fields we have to account for.

Fucking hell just spend a little bit of time for both our sake, and your own to get us the finalized forms fields and requirements for this project. Honestly at the rate things are going we probably wont be able to finish, which sucks ass since this project is perfect resume material.

Seriously this company desperately needs us to make them this program since their current system is absolute shit. They are literally getting a system that would cost upwards of $20,000 for free, yet they don't seem to care much that we probably wont be able to finish due to their faults. If we didn't have a time cap on this project I wouldn't really care, but the fact that we only have 3 months, plus school work in other classes, exams and a personal life, its making this project a lot more stressful than it needs to be.

Its not like we have a project manager either, so all the emailing and communication is being done by myself. Honest to god, all they have/had to do was sit down for 1 hour of time to decide what they all needed and we would probably have been able to finish this project.

Okay soo... I have been working on a "notepad" script using bash. I basically have finished it but it lacks one thing. Verification if the user has typed anything! I started searching on google how i could do that, and found nothing (lol).
I'm asking help from you people :D

Here's the code that doesn't work.

while [[ $name != 'name' ]] || [[ $name == '' ]]
do
read -rp "What would you like the file name to be? The file extension is .txt!$(echo -ne '\n: ')" name
echo "Enter a valid file name please."
done

There's probably one small thing wrong anyway lol
Thanks already!

If you have a blog, How do you decide what to write and publish on it? And, How do I motivate myself to write posts?

Context: I created my blog/website on 29 September 2017. I had a few ideas on writing blog posts(Condition variables in Go, Serverless related stuff and a whole bunch of posts related to wireguard) but every time I have tried write a post, I learn there is someone else who has already written a post on it and probably better than what I could have done, So what is really the point of writing it? And, I feel very insecure about writing posts, I feel like, If I do write a post, every one will know, I don't know anything about **anything**. :( I know about imposter syndrome, But I don't think I have that. I work with a lot of realllly smart people and I don't know as much as them. So, I am actually an imposter.

edit: I am usually active on Telegram, IRC and I try to help out people. It's easier for me to help people in communities like that but doing the same thing with a blog makes me very uncomfortable.

(imagine all of this said in Undoomed's "hey moron" tone)

Hey, moron, fuckin moron! How about if you're a noob with no actual programmer on your side, you just tell me so we can work it out together, instead of sending a moronic 4page "acceptance criteria" that pretend you know what you're talking about, and then bury me under loads of moronic noob questions that reveal you as thenmoron you are, all of that for a fuckin 50 quid?! I thought it's me being an idiot, not being able to do the task within two days timeframe, but now I see you're just too much of a moron to have any idea how much these things take. And now you nonchalantly mention a one-line one point from the four page document full of drivel, which (loads of moronism credit for me here) i didn't notice amongst all of that other mundane drivel, which actually like doubles the whole workload on the task, but your moronic document, which makes 3 parts of the same algorithm into three separate MILESTONES, makes this whole thing that nearly DOUBLES the workload into a shitty SEVENTH SUBPOINT of the completely unrelated first "milestone"?

FUCK YOU, YOU STUPID ROBBERY CHEAPFUCK, and fuck me for letting myself be tricked by all your fancy wordings that pretend you actually know what the fuck you are asking for, so i assumed you did, so I missed THE POINT, WHICH ACCORDING TO THE SEGMENTATION LOGIC OF THE WHOLE REST OF THE DOCUMENT SHOULD BE 3 SEPARATE FULL-SIZED MILESTONES, NOT A SINGLE SUBPOINT, YOU FUCKING FUCK!

... so much for still trying to at least a bit trust people.

FUCKING DISGUSTING MORONIC CHEAPSKATE FUCK.

and I can't even tell him to fuck off through the rectum he came here because he's all nice and polite so I would be the asshole!

"hey, please, can you build me a house?"
*house is basically finished*
"oh, great job, i love it, but i think you might have missed the fineprint in our contract that says that the house is supposed to stand inside an entry hall of a multibillionaire-sized mansion, so could we please sort that out and add it to the building real quick before i pay you the toolshed's worth we agreed on based on the contract? "

FUCK. HIM.
FUCK
FUCKFUCKFUCKSHITFUCKERYFUCKDISGUSTINGIDIOTICFUCKINGFUUUUUUUUCK!!!!!!

i thought i can be a shitty liar and a con man, but this is some next level shit that would be totally beyond my abilities to pull off...

YES I KNOW IT'S MY FAULT I DIDN'T COMB THROUGH THAT BULLSIT "SPECS" OF HIS LETTER BY LETTER TO MAKE SURE THERE'S NO CON BULLSHIT LIKE THIS HIDDEN AMONGST ALL OF THAT MUNDANE SELF-EVIDENT PSEUDO-TECHNICAL DRIVEL, SHUT THE FUCK UP.

fucking disgusting moron, pretending all nice and innocent probably even to himself because he HAS NO FUCKING IDEA WHAT HE EVEN ASKS FOR.

i bet it's one of those pukefucks who get an overpriced contract for 50k without even knowing or caring what programming is, because "i'll just outsource the core functionality of the app for 50 quid to some naiive idiot who lives in the illusion that people are not diarrhorea-worthy pieces of feces, and this other third of the app to some other moron for hundred quid and then i somehow outsource gluing it together to some third poor sod, and that's 49.8k quid of pure profit for me, yay"

and now i'm torn between three options, just cancelling the "contract" with a comment saying "fuck off, you con man", or cancelling it with a lengthy explanation why he's a know-nothing piece of shit who conned me already into having done something worth about 5x more than his shitty "acceptance criteria" requests, or just start conning and bulshitting him back, which won't net me any money, and waste my time, but at least will also waste HIS time, which might be nice because he seems to be on a tight schedule so if i play this right i might have the chance to sink his whole contract which might be mighty nice satisfying...

FUCK THIS, ALL OF THIS, FUCK HIM, FUCK ME, FUCK ALL OF YOU, I SHOULD HAVE STARTED FUCKING OVER EVERYONE RUTHLESSLY A LONG TIME AGO BECAUSE FUCK THE WHOLE WORLD, WHY SHOULD I CARE WHEN NOBODY ELSE DOES, WHY SHOULD I BE DECENT WHEN NOBODY ELSE IS, AND IT ONLY ROYALLY BITES ME IN THE ASS.

stupid fucking lobotomized fuck, IF YOU DON'T KNOW HOW TO DO SOMETHING, DON'T OFFER YOURSELF TO DO IT FOR MONEY AND THEN CON-SOURCE IT TO OTHERS YOU SHITTY BARFPILE!

FUCK.

Hi there Devs and ranters, I'm new to devrant (well I've have the app for about 20 days and just read about stuff)

So, I just recently discovered that I want to Develop web and mobile apps, before this I was studying to be a Project manager..

In the past I would usually come app with great app ideas and would just think "why hasn't anyone made this yet" then I'd let it go.
But then one day last year an amazing idea for an app hit me for a huge organisation in my country and I figured I could probably get paid for this, but yet again I was too fucking shallow to realise that I should've made it myself.

So I took my app idea and carelessly shared it with a developer who then decided to create the app and not include me at all, he just said "im gonna let you know when it's done", stupid me just agreed to that. Time went by and I never heard anything from the guy, tried to call but he wouldn't pick up, went to his place and he already moved out.

At this point I already gave up on looking for him.

A few weeks later I'm on the playstore browsing for apps and there it was, my fucking app. I decide to download it and inside every fucking thing was exactly as I told the developer, all the functions and options that would be for that app were all in there.

I was a little mad, but after staying with the app for a few days I noticed that it didn't work at all, there were no notifications, no interaction nothing, it's just like a static app, then I was really just disappointed,..

This was about 2 months ago,

Since then I have come up with a lot of other great app ideas and I decided to start learning to code so I can develop my own mobile and web apps..

And just last week I had an idea for an app for the Univ that I graduated at, spoke to the director about it and he wants a full presentation in a month.

So Devs, don't be the guy in the story that doesn't involve the person that gave you an awesome idea, also don't be me in the story because I was a stupid lil shit for not realising what I wanted to do sooner!

Woke up yesterday morning from a dream where I was explaining what needed to be done to upgrade a Drupal 6 site. It hasn't been supported officially for years and I was explaining how there isn't a decent port of the main module we use Audio. And even the guy I was explaining this too seemed somewhat exasperated. So yeah, this is reality.

I could probably write a real upgrade path for the Drupal module and take all of our content into a new version of Drupal. But it would involve a fair amount of learning and outdated syntax and then learning Drupal 8. This would be all volunteer and take away from my time working on my other open source radio automation project.

All the while I've been learning Ruby on Rails for a class and I could just upgrade the app right out of Drupal, but this would require me to support the site into perpetuity. Which I already more or less do.

Drupal at this point is like an ex- girlfriend who I've grown away from, we did cool things but always got into fights about stupid things. Now I have to revisit my past mistakes and decide what to clean up and what to take into the future. I'm a better programmer now but I'm still not sure if it is worth my time to rekindle my romance with Drupal or it would just distract me from my current pursuits. Anyone who has been through the transition of a Drupal site from one major version to the next should feel my pain. At least it's not Word Press.