I have a casual retail job and I need to sell this... It really hurts me.

I work at a small retail store and we have quite a few regular customers who know I'm studying computer science because I'm always coding at work on my laptop.

One lady who comes in quite often and is very sweet asked me if I would take a look at her phone. She said she bought it and paid the owner of a phone repair store to set it up for her, but was felt like he did something weird to it. I told her I wasn't an expert but would look at it.

Oh my god. This guy set up her phone connected to his own personal icloud account. All of his music was on there. All of his contacts were on there. All of his pictures were on there. Even nude pictures of multiple people that this lady said she definitely does not know. I tell her this is very very wrong and no one in their right mind should've set her phone up this way.

I automatically think to factory reset. I'm unfamiliar with iPhone, as the last time I used one was an iPhone4 many years ago. I was unaware that apple applies an authentication lock when the phone is reset.
The authentication is set up underneath yet ANOTHER email address that belongs to this guy, as this lady promised me she has no knowledge of any email address similar to the one listed, nor does she have access to it.

I tell her to call the guy and ask for her money back and to unlock her phone so that she can reset it herself.

He claims that he cannot accept refunds if a factory reset has been performed.

Uhm, I am calling SOOOOO much bullshit. There should be absolutely no reason why the owner of the phone cannot factory reset it. The owner should be able to do ANYTHING she wants with it, without being locked out of it because some creep at a repair store did NOT DO HIS JOB CORRECTLY AND HE KNOWS IT. Why else would he claim he can't refund if it's been reset, because he KNOWS she got locked out.

So long story short I talked on the phone with him and cussed him out telling him he was wrong for taking advantage of someone who doesn't know much about technology and that he was invading privacy and violating her security and that i would report him if he didn't fully refund her and unlock her phone.

He gave her all of her money back, unlocked the phone (which she is deciding to sell because she got so scared by this), and I'm still filing a complaint against this man and his store. Who knows how many more clueless people he did this too. Fucking scumbag.

I'm beginning to get burned out on coding in general due to work-related stresses.

Is anyone hiring remotely?
Please?

Will code in Ruby/Node/React for food ☹

My friend works in retail I.T, they clients said the computers were a bit dusty from the stores.

i can feel the asthma attack coming.

Still haven't been paid for completed a retail shop project. But all is well, since the system will not start on Black Friday till I remove the if condition 😈

I work for a company known for its unbelievable perks and benefits. Every time a job opens up, we get thousands of applications.

Candidates are becoming increasingly aggressive to stand out. Hundreds of them (literally) have purchased Facebook ads or LinkedIn promoted posts to get their information in front of current employees.

Others have taken to outright stalking our employees. I freelance occasionally and have a separate website for my freelance business. I receive dozens of calls and emails to my freelance number and email account daily from people who want to “chat about the open position.”

My husband — who has a different last name — runs a small retail shop. He’s had people come into his store and tell him that they did internet sleuthing and found out he was married to an employee of my company, and would he please pass on their resume?

I expect to get these messages on my LinkedIn or company email, but am I wrong in thinking that stalking me out and trying to contact me via personal contact info (or my husband) is way out of line?

Is there a way to sharply tell them that this is not okay? Normally, I just don’t respond, but I have to turn my phone off or it rings all day and it’s really annoying. Would it look weird to put a message on my freelance website that says do not contact me about Company X jobs?

My company is aware of this problem, and has said to forward the names of aggressive or alarming candidates their way to remove them from consideration, but it’s so common, I’m thinking this is a product of being told that if they just showed GUMPTION, they’d get the job. I feel bad for them, but it’s also creeping me out.

Python wins at the end of the decade

Hello everyone, this is my first time here so hi! I want to tell you all a story about my current situation.

At 18 while in the military I was able to get my first computer, it was a small hp pavilion laptop with windows 7. The system would crash constantly, even though I would only use it for googling stuff and using fb to talk to people. 5 months after I got it and continuously hated it decided to find out why and who could I blame (other than myself) for the system making me do the ctrl alt del dance all the time....

Found out that there are people called computer programmers that made software. Decided to give it a go since I had some free time most days. Started out with c++ because it was being recommended in some websites. Had many "oh deeeeer lord" moments. After not getting much traction I decided to move to Java which seemed like an easier step than C++. Had fun, but after some verbosity I decided to move into more dynamic lands. Tried JS and since at the time there was no Node and I was not very into the idea of building websites I decided to move into Python, Ruby, PHP and Perl and had a really great time using and learning all of them. I decided to get good in theoretical aspects of computer programming and since I had a knack for math I decided to get started with basic computer science concepts.

I absolutely frigging loved it. And not only that, but learning new things became an obsession, the kind that would make me go to bed at 02:40 am just to wake up at 04:00 or 06:00 because the military is like that. I really wanted to absorb as much as I could since I wanted to go to college for it and wanted to be prepared since I did not wanted to be a complete newb. Took Harvard CS50, Standford Programming 101 with Java, Rice's Python course and MIT's Python programming class. I had so much fun I don't regret it one bit.
By the time I got to college I had already made the jump to Linux and was an adept Arch user, Its not that it was superior or anything, but it really forced me to learn about Linux and working around a terminal and the internals of the system to get what I want. Now a days I settle for Fedora or Debian based systems since they are easier and time is money.

Uni was a breeze, math was fun and the programming classes seemed like glorified "Hello World" courses. I had fun, but not that much fun, most of my time was spent getting better at actual coding. I am no genius, nor my grades were super amazing(I did graduate with honors though) but I had fun, which never really happened in school before that.

While in school I took my first programming gig! It was in ASP.NET MVC, we were using C#, I got the job through a customer that I met at work, I was working in retail during the time and absolutely hated it. I remember being so excited with the gig, I got to meet other developers! Where I am from there aren't that many and most of them are very specialized, so they only get concerned with certain aspects of coding (e.g VBA developers.....) and that is until I met the lead dev. He was by far one of the biggest assholes I had ever met in my life. Absolutely nothing that I would do or say made hem not be a dick. My code was steady, but I would find bugs of incomplete stuff that he would do, whenever I would fix it he would belittle me and constantly remind me of my position as a "junior dev" in the company saying things as "if you have an issue with my code or standards tell me, but do not touch the code" which was funny considering that I would not be able to advance without those fixes. I quit not even 3 months latter because I could not stand the dick, neither 2 of the other developers since the immediately resigned after they got their own courage.

A year latter I was able to find myself another gig. I was hesitant for a moment since it was another remote position in which I had already had a crappy experience. Boy this one was bad. To be fair, this was on me since I had to get good with Lumen after only having some exposure to Laravel. Which I did mentioned repeatedly even though he did offer to train me in order to help him. Same thing, after a couple of weeks of being told how much I did not know I decided to get out.

That is 2 strikes.

So I waited a little while and took a position inside another company that was using vanilla PHP to build their services. Their system was solid though, the lead engineer remains a friend and I did learn a lot from him. I got contracted because they were looking for a Java developer. The salary was good. But when I got there they mentioned that they wanted a developer in Java...to build Android. At the time I was using Java with Spring so I though "well how hard can this be! I already use Android so the love for the system is there, lets do this!" And it was an intense, fun and really amazing experience.

-- To be continued.

Most satisfying bug I've fixed?

Fixed a n+1 issue with a web service retrieving price information. I initially wrote the service, but it was taken over by a couple of 'world class' monday-morning-quarterbacks.
The "Worst code I've ever seen" ... "I can't believe this crap compiles" types that never met anyone else's code that was any good.

After a few months (yes months) and heavy refactoring, the service still returned price information for a product. Pass the service a list of product numbers, service returns the price, availability, etc, that was it.

After a very proud and boisterous deployment, over the next couple of days the service seemed to get slower and slower. DBAs started to complain that the service was causing unusually high wait times, locks, and CPU spikes causing problems for other applications. The usual finger pointing began which ended up with "If PaperTrail had written the service 'correctly' the first time, we wouldn't be in this mess."

Only mattered that I initially wrote the service and no one seemed to care about the two geniuses that took months changing the code.

The dev manager was able to justify a complete re-write of the service using 'proper development methodologies' including budgeting devs, DBAs, server resources, etc..etc. with a projected year+ completion date.

My 'BS Meter' goes off, so I open up the code, maybe 5 minutes...tada...found it. The corresponding stored procedure accepts a list of product numbers and a price type (1=Retail, 2=Dealer, and so on). If you pass 0, the stored procedure returns all the prices.
Code basically looked like this..

public List<Prices> GetPrices(List<Product> products, int priceTypeId)
{
foreach (var item in products)
{
List<int> productIdsParameter = new List<int>();
productIdsParameter.Add(item.ProductID);
List<Price> prices = dataProvider.GetPrices(productIdsParameter, 0);
foreach (var price in prices)
{
if (price.PriceTypeID == priceTypeId)
{
prices = dataProvider.GetPrices(productIdsParameter, price.PriceTypeID);
return prices;
}
* Omitting the other 'WTF?' code to handle the zero price type
}
}
}

I removed the double stored procedure call, updated the method signature to only accept the list of product numbers (which it was before the 'major refactor'), deployed the service to dev (the issue was reproducible in our dev environment) and had the DBA monitor.

The two devs and the manager are grumbling and mocking the changes (they never looked, they assumed I wrote some threading monstrosity) then the DBA walks up..

DBA: "We're good. You hit the database pretty hard and the CPU never moved. Execution plans, locks, all good to go."
<dba starts to walk away>
DevMgr: "No fucking way! Putting that code in a thread wouldn't have fix it"
Me: "Um, I didn't use threads"
Dev1: "You had to. There was no way you made that code run faster without threads"
Dev2: "It runs fine in dev, but there is no way that level of threading will work in production with thousands of requests. I've got unit tests that prove our design is perfect."
Me: "I looked at what the code was doing and removed what it shouldn't be doing. That's it."
DBA: "If the database is happy with the changes, I'm happy. Good job. Get that service deployed tomorrow and lets move on"
Me: "You'll remove the recommendation for a complete re-write of the service?"
DevMgr: "Hell no! The re-write moves forward. This, whatever you did, changes nothing."
DBA: "Hell yes it does!! I've got too much on my plate already to play babysitter with you assholes. I'm done and no one on my team will waste any more time on this. Am I clear?"

Seeing the dev manager face turn red and the other two devs look completely dumbfounded was the most satisfying bug I've fixed.

I work retail as a second job. I still have people asking me if they can get new computers running XP or Vista.

Some motherfucker at the gym called me. “Hey @growling, I am here with that gym you signed up with 5 months ago and your card for membership renewal isn’t working.”

“It’s 8:00am”

“Yes sir. It’s 8am.”

“Don’t you think it’s a bit too early?”

“Did you get a new card?”

“Hey call me at lunch or something, I’m going back to sleep.”

“Okay, or you can call me. Goodbye”
Acting like you got better shit to do with your time.

Like he wanted to lecture me and say waking me up at 8am is fine. Like he wanted to say he came from a hardworking family and so he can say waking me up at 8am is fine. Shiiit dude my mom used to work with two broken hips for 7 days a week until I made six figures. Bless her heart, that’s why I got her a new car and money each month to pay all her bills. She’s been out of work for 2-3 years now. So lecture me. Only my mom can lecture me, boy. Cause she raised me to be an engineer.

Also, why do I see this everywhere as well? I get lectured for drinking beer on a Sunday or Monday during lunch at my frequent visits to liquor store.

“Don’t you have work?”
Yes, 9-5. But I’m an engineer. So it can be 10-6 or 11-7. Doesn’t matter. All of the stuff I do follows sprints and not direct interaction with customers!

I get tasks done and I teach interns to help me get tasks done. In time. And sometimes even more.

I know my schedule is so lax you want to criticize me. Maybe you think I don’t work? Or work as hard as you?

Tl;dr I intentionally act like a spoiled baby when it comes to work so that service/retail/manual labor people lecture me so I can tell them that we work differently than what they’re used to.

I have free snacks. Don’t get me started about gloating about free beef jerky. People hate me on online forums for doing that! Drink beer on tap in work kitchen. A glass of wine anytime I want. Sleep in until sometimes 11am. But that’s why I’m an engineer, buddy.

Finished an MVP of my garage-opener-thingamajig!

Basically I decided I wanted to control my garage from my app. Retail solutions are expensive af. As a dev, the choice was easy!

RPI3
HC-SR04 sensor
DHT temperature sensor
5v Relay
Nativescript + Angular
Firebase

Result: i can open my garage anywhere, safely (sorta?) via firebase, and get push notifs when it gets opened (from hcsr04), which triggers the pi camera, while also getting live temp feeds (this one is kinda for the giggles and utterly pointless but NUMBERZ!)

Anyway - fun side project! First version of my app looks like this. Its very rough, and I have a couple more details I wanna display, but for a first time app I'm happy!

I started a job as a developer on Monday for a large retail company. There was no computer available for me because of the IT department but I'm told it will arrive later in the day. It doesn't.
On Tuesday I get told that the PC is coming and later in the day a keyboard, mouse, monitor stand and two monitors arrive but no computer.
Today, Wednesday, I get into work and find that I now have a PC. Woo! I load windows, log into my user account with my new user and pass and go to install VSCode only to find that I don't have admin privileges and can't install almost anything. I'm told that IT will add me to the admin user group soon(tm). I wait. All day. They don't do what they are supposed to do despite us pushing them to do it.
I hope that tomorrow I can actually dev, but at least I've been paid three days wage for doing nothing lol

Anyone have any shitty IT department stories?

After 5 years in retail, I finally got a job in the programming branch.

After two months of working with WordPress I finally got a website that isn't in WordPress!!

I'm so fucking pleased right now!!!

I've found and fixed any kind of "bad bug" I can think of over my career from allowing negative financial transfers to weird platform specific behaviour, here are a few of the more interesting ones that come to mind...

#1 - Most expensive lesson learned

Almost 10 years ago (while learning to code) I wrote a loyalty card system that ended up going national. Fast forward 2 years and by some miracle the system still worked and had services running on 500+ POS servers in large retail stores uploading thousands of transactions each second - due to this increased traffic to stay ahead of any trouble we decided to add a loadbalancer to our backend.

This was simply a matter of re-assigning the IP and would cause 10-15 minutes of downtime (for the first time ever), we made the switch and everything seemed perfect. Too perfect...

After 10 minutes every phone in the office started going beserk - calls where coming in about store servers irreparably crashing all over the country taking all the tills offline and forcing them to close doors midday. It was bad and we couldn't conceive how it could possibly be us or our software to blame.

Turns out we made the local service write any web service errors to a log file upon failure for debugging purposes before retrying - a perfectly sensible thing to do if I hadn't forgotten to check the size of or clear the log file. In about 15 minutes of downtime each stores error log proceeded to grow and consume every available byte of HD space before crashing windows.

#2 - Hardest to find

This was a true "Nessie" bug.. We had a single codebase powering a few hundred sites. Every now and then at some point the web server would spontaneously die and vommit a bunch of sql statements and sensitive data back to the user causing huge concern but I could never remotely replicate the behaviour - until 4 years later it happened to one of our support staff and I could pull out their network & session info.

Turns out years back when the server was first setup each domain was added as an individual "Site" on IIS but shared the same root directory and hence the same session path. It would have remained unnoticed if we had not grown but as our traffic increased ever so often 2 users of different sites would end up sharing a session id causing the server to promptly implode on itself.

#3 - Most elegant fix

Same bastard IIS server as #2. Codebase was the most unsecure unstable travesty I've ever worked with - sql injection vuns in EVERY URL, sql statements stored in COOKIES... this thing was irreparably fucked up but had to stay online until it could be replaced. Basically every other day it got hit by bots ended up sending bluepill spam or mining shitcoin and I would simply delete the instance and recreate it in a semi un-compromised state which was an acceptable solution for the business for uptime... until we we're DDOS'ed for 5 days straight.

My hands were tied and there was no way to mitigate it except for stopping individual sites as they came under attack and starting them after it subsided... (for some reason they seemed to be targeting by domain instead of ip). After 3 days of doing this manually I was given the go ahead to use any resources necessary to make it stop and especially since it was IIS6 I had no fucking clue where to start.

So I stuck to what I knew and deployed a $5 vm running an Nginx reverse proxy with heavy caching and rate limiting linked to a custom fail2ban plugin in in front of the insecure server. The attacks died instantly, the server sped up 10x and was never compromised by bots again (presumably since they got back a linux user agent). To this day I marvel at this miracle $5 fix.

Meet 'SBI Online' app from Play Store, in their own words:

What they were supposed to do?
"Experience the new Retail Internet Banking of SBI"

What they do?
"SBI online app will redirect to SBI Retail Internet Banking (online SBI) site"

Why do they have app?
"No need to remember URL",
"Less memory space required on device"

App storage space?
F**king 2.6 MB, just to redirect users to their website, in third-party browser.

I've caught the efficiency bug.

I recently started a minimum wage job to get my life back in order after a failed 2 year project (post mortem: next time bring more cash for a longer runway)

I've noticed this thing I do at every job, where I see inefficiency and I think "how can I use technology to automate myself out of this job?"

My first ever application was in C++ for college (a BASIC interpreter) and it's been so long I've since forgotten the language.

But after a while every language starts to look like every other language, and you start to wonder if maybe the reason you never seriously went anywhere as a programmer was because you never really were cut out for it.

Code monkey, sure. Programmer? Dunno, maybe I just suffer from imposter syndrome.

So a few years back I worked at a retail chain. Nothing as big as walmart, but they have well over 10k store locations. They had two IBM handscanners per store, old grungy ugly things, and one of these machines would inevitably be broken, lost or in need of upgrade/replacement about once a year, per location. District manager, who I hit it off with, and made a point of building report with, told me they were paying something like $1500 a piece.

After a programming dry spell, I picked up 'coding' with MIT app inventor. Built a 'mostly complete' inventory management app over the course of a month, and waited for the right time.

The day of a big store audit, (and the day before a multi-regional meeting), I made sure I was in-store at the same time as my district manager, so he could 'stumble upon' me working, scanning in and pricing items into the app.

Naturally he asked about it, and I had the numbers, the print outs, and the app itself to show him. He seemed impressed by what amounted to a code monkeys 'non-code' solution for a problem they had.

Long story short, he does what I expected, runs it by the other regionals and middle executives at the meeting, and six months later they had invested in a full blown in house app, cutting IBM out of the mix I presume.

From what I understand they now use the app throughout the entire store chain.

So if you work at IBM, sorry, that contract you lost for handscanners at 10k+ stores? Yeah that was my fault (and MIT app inventor).

They say software is 'eating the world' but it really goes to show, for a lot of 'almost coders' and 'code monkeys' half our problem is dealing with setup and platform boilerplate. I think in the future that a lot of jobs are either going to be created or destroyed thanks to better 'low code' solutions, and it seems to be a big potential future market.

In the mean while I've realized, while working on side projects, that maybe I can do this after all, and taken up Kotlin. I want to do a couple of apps for efficiency and store tracking at my current employer to see if I'm capable and not just an mit app-inventor codemonkey after all.

I'm hoping, by demonstrating what I can do, I can use that as a springboard into an internal programming position at my current gig (which seems to be a company thats moving towards a more tech oriented approach to efficiency and management). Also watching money walk out the door due to inefficiency kinda pisses me off, and the thought of fixing those issues sounds really interesting. At the end of the day I just like learning new technologies, and maybe this is all just an excuse to pick up something new after spending so long on less serious work.

I still have a ways to go, but the prospect of working on B2B, and being able to offer technological solutions to common and recurring business needs excites the hell out of me..as cringy and over-repeated as that may sound.

Non dev activity that has helped...

Erm, working in retail stores for many years before deciding to take a serious look at devWork as a full time job rather then a hobby.

Has helped make a great base knowledge to what customers expect and what sales people expect a platform to be able to do which just makes things easier in an over complicated environment 🤣

Long time lurker, first time poster.

My goals for week 200:
1. Get engaged to my girlfriend
2. Finish my ems
3. Begin plans for launching my startup
4. Leave my deadend retail job, get a real job, and actually use the degree I spent 34k to get.
5. Keep learning cool new shit.

Had a nightmare last night that I had to give up dev and go back to managing a supermarket. Think this deadline is starting to get to me.

I come from a front facing retail background. And I start my first developer job on Monday. It is also fully remote. They said I can take mental breaks whenever And unlimited pto as long as I use it wisely and don’t abuse the hell out of it. It’s a small company of like 75 people. They don’t want us working past business hours unless it’s urgent and something breaks.

Im like “uh what? You’re not going to yell at me for taking a 5 minute break after a homeless meth head screams at me and waives a wooden sword at me trying to hit me?”

It just feel like this is a grown up job. Like a professional job. I feel like I have work ptsd from being mistreated in the work place for 8 years. It doesn’t feel real. Does anyone else feel like this?

1. There is nothing in this field that is impossible or out of reach for someone with the correct dedication and perseverance. Even if you suck at a particular topic, I highly believe that you can make sense of it through computer science, be it math, biology physics, finances etc. The field opens the doors to other subjects. This is true for everything else, but I seriously believe that Comp Sci makes it more reachable.

2. You cannot make development a quirky personality trait. There is more to life than just sitting around all day fucking with a computer, but at the same time that is how you hone your skills, find balance!

3. Being attractive and or charismatic in this field pays a lot, but also makes you a target.

4. I have never met more people in my life I wanted to punch to a pulp, and I worked in retail and was in the military....that says a lot.

5. Penises, there are way too many penises in this field. I hate being surrounded by dudes and since I grew up in a nail/hair salon I am more used/enjoy female company more.

6. Stuxnet se la come.

My friend is so fed up with his $400-per-month-internet-explorer-based POS, so I wrote him an UWP native app, only $40/month on AWS.

I'm thinking of continuing adding features until it mature enough and release it for free, but charge for cloud usage (if they use the cloud).

Anyone has experience in this? Im gathering info about the "must-have" features for small businesses.

So I'm in retail (blech) but I'm self taught and can do good front end web and learning more back end. But I want like a challenge or something really interesting. Any suggestions?

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

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

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

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

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

Issues?

Would I mention this one if there weren't?

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

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

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

Welp.

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

2013 Wanted to make games with unity, no prior experience. Failed horribly learning unity script. Nothing made sense.

2014 change in carreer from retail to sysadministration at a local small recycling company ( no prior experience other than being a digital native )

2015 Got bored at work, learned c# with scott lillys tutorials. It clicked!

2016 i enroll in cs at local university. Acing most classes, even got a b on the math module i took. I am 28 now and my life changed a bunch to the good thanks to coding, tech and cs.

Wanna hear a story? The consultancy firm I work for has been hired to work on a WPF project for a big Fashion Industry giant.

We are talking of their most important project yet, the ones the "buyers" use to order them their products globally, for each of the retail stores this Fashion giant has around the world. Do you want to know what I found? Wel, come my sweet summer child.

DB: not even a single foreign key. Impossibile to understand without any priopr working experience on the application. Six "quantity" tables to keep aligned with values that will dictate the quantities to be sent to production (we are talking SKUs here: shoes, bags..)

BE: autogenerated controllers using T4 templates. Inputs directly serialized in headers. Async logging (i.e. await Logger.Error(ex)). Entities returned as response to the front end, no DTOs whatsoever.

WPF: riddled with code behind and third party components (dev express) and Business Logic that should belong to the Business Layer. No real api client, just a highly customized "Rest Helper". No error reporting or dealing with exceptions. Multiple endpoints call to get data that would be combined into one single model which happens to be the one needed by the UI. No save function: a timer checks the components for changes and autosaves them every x seconds. Saving for the most critical part occurring when switching cells or rows, often resulting in race conditions at DB level.

What do you think of this piece of shit?

So, I'm a Jr. Webdev started one year ago to work on a €200mln. retail platform. Our development team consists out of my Sr. dev who designed the whole platform and it's basically his baby. Now he's leaving and it's expected from me to do new developments, support, meetings with managers from all over Europe, roll-outs in new countries, deal with all the issues SAP has, eat their bullshit when they can't upload a .csv file because they are too stupid to check for missing leading zeros. Listen to important their new functions are that they want because 120% of the salespeople needs it. How stupid can this company be to take the financial risk? I'm done.

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

Well check this shit.

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

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

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

The conversation was like this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Retard: Well You need to fix this

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

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

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

Me: Did you pay for this app?

Retard: No

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

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

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

Retard: Well....I did not know

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

** throws phone for him to catch

Me: Have a good one bud.

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

Yes this is a rant about parents and work but I don't care!

So looks like my parents are going to kick me out because I don't have a full time job and according to them, I'm not looking...

I currently work in retail and have for the past 5 years and started working day 1 that I could have, been applying for IT positions when I'm one of the highest qualified on my area but get turned down so they can pay a teenager half the amount, apply for big retail chains that are "always hiring" like Coles, woolies and Kmart, get turned fucking down.

Don't qualify for government assistance as I'm just out of the earnings bracket, can't afford my own places, don't have my licence yet so I'm fucked...

But hey, atleast my parents will be rid of me and just dis-own me like my middle brother until I have a kid or they need tech support.

Why is getting work so fucking hard when you're qualified, I'm willing to even be a call centre guy but as soon as job possibilities come up I get fucked over time and time again -,-

The people. I find devs to be (obvious generalization) prone to: not take criticism, not understand the difference between fact and opinion, not understanding that it is perfectly acceptable to change your point of view when presented with new information that will conflict with what you currently believe in. It is a sausage fest brought to you by eons of very fragile male ego in the making, and many other qualities that were very much diluted in a lot of the other fields I have worked on: from retail (shitfest) to import/export all the way to military (another shitfest, for different and rather dangerous reasons).

I have met some amazing people in the field, don't get me wrong, but the quirkiest of mfkers i have met make me believe that maybe I AM the one that does not belong in the field (top kek).

On a more technical side, basic stuff like reading comprehension, attention to detail, the ability to translate complex problemd to pieces and that interconnect among the themselves, the ability to understand the grand mathematical scheme of things, the ability to be patient and despite what the above generalization would have you believe...the ability to communicate with other humans with tact and understanding as well as a spirit of collaboration, etc etc, are definitive traits to consider if you want a career in software development that leads above just being a code monkey.

Shit like that.

The retail price of 2.5 SSDs are getting really cheap these days.
However, it does NOT reflect on custom laptop options...
You greedy Microsoft and Dell!

I work full time in backend web development and my sister that's in retail makes double what I make in a year... I need a new fucken job.

So I am currently making an app for a retail franchise and that retail franchise is getting a website done by a company. Since the recipes that the guys want are going to be on the website, the web dev company made a mysql db that has all the recipes.

I thought since the people at the head of the retail franchise have spent time gathering these recipes, I'll just get the data for the app from the db.

I called the project manager for the website up (That's the only contact I got) and asked if they could given me access to the db to use for the app or if I could make a script that would get data from it.

Now this is the part where I tell you I'm only 14 years old and these guys know that because of the head of the retail company.

He puts it on speaker and asks me to say it again and I hear quite a bit of people laughing. I knew what was happening. He asks do you know anything about databases, I explained to him what a db was and how I was going to get the data from it and etc. Half way through me telling him that it would be beneficial for both me and the retail guys, he hung up the call and blocked me.

I asked the head of the retail company if he could ask them about it and he said that he didn't know much about tech so he couldn't ask and if I could find an alternative option.

You might be thinking that the company didn't want to give me permission to access the db which is respectable but they have done this previously as well.
I gave them advice on putting a rewards card feature on the site so the customers could track their points on the site as well as on the app and the PM said "We don't want advice from you."

It has now been 3 weeks on and off because of school where I had to code a ui for the lady at the company to enter all her recipes for the app and waste a lot of time communicating with different people to get all the data.

I hate being disrespected because of my inexperience when I can truly do some extraordinary things with software. 😡😤😣

Its also very hard to find a job being 14.

Started further developing an app (that I had left dormant) for retail outlets in my town. Spoken to the managers and they said they like my idea, and want to trial run it and then if it works properly, they want to start having the other branches around the country use it.

Now to sit by ass behind my screen, and finish developing my app (meaning tackling the many bugs that made me pull my hair out last time)

Whenever I see job postings with salaries this low I always wonder exactly what's going through the minds of the people running the company.

Who in their right mind would want to spend 4+ years working hard on a CS degree only to be offered less than what the average retail manager earns? I barely afford a 1 bed flat share on this salary in my part of the country...

I'm starting to run into more and more job adverts like this. Why are companies working so hard to rip of graduates?

Oh lord it's finnaly happened, I'm almost tempted to leave my retail job after 4 years, fucking head office and lazy ass managers im driving me fucking insane, they give you a 2 person job and complain when you don't have it all done by lunch.

Why must finding an enjoyable job be so fucking hard!

I quit my retail job thank god
Got a sense of career direction
I curse more
I type insanely fast

It was funny. But when I told the head of my dptmnt that I was getting bored at work they kinda freaked out. I really love my workplace. The people are nice everywhere and this is something I am not used to.
I started working when I was 13 at one of my dad's business. It was a lot of manual labor and every day my hands would be bruised because of all the cleaning and shit I had to do. Then he moved me to another one of his businesses and it was worse but I continued doing it for only 1 year. By 16 I had moved to simpler things, I was a waiter and even tho I hated it I was making enough money to go out on dates and buy whatever a 16 year old wanted. I continued being a waiter until I was 17(changed to two other places) and before I turned 18 I joined the U.S Army. That broke my body in ways that I would normally not believe a 18 year old capable of. It was around the time that I discovered programming but even after I left the military(at 22 I believe) I never worked on a programming job. Back at home I worked in retail. And believe you me....it is far more pleasant to be constantly getting blown up and broken than dealing with the most retarded people imaginable(this is what made me hate Mexican people even tho I am Mexican myself)

Fast forward at 23 and I landed my first programming jobs. As stated in other initial rant it was surrounded by assholes. Assholes everywhere that would cower at the idea of speaking to me face to face due to the possibility of being left as physically broken as I am.

But at 27 now I found myself in a happy place. With nice people, good coworkers, an amazing manager that also serves as eye candy and good benefits. But the job is boring, boring beyond belief and this is due to the fact that they have a self taught and academically trained computer scientist doing the most menial things on a daily basis. The shit that I do would be more becoming of a designer, which has a different set of mental skills that would probably engage them more. But I really don't want to work on the web unless I am doing something that actually takes some challenge, even tho I maintain Java and PHP web services, the shit is so boring that anyone would be able to finish the proceadures in hours on a day leaving one with nothing engaging to do. Sometimes I let shit get close to the deadline just to feel some sort of pressure that would keep me awake.

I just wanted to vent on how ceremoniously BORED i really am.

I want more shit to do. Can't really have much patience for the freelance shit since it doesn't make sense to hire me in exchange of having some indian dude doing it for a quarter of the price.

!dev.rant

So in just a matter of minutes my job security has crashed and any week could be my last again all because my jobs head office decided to change everyones positions in management...

So once again I'm back to square one in yet another useless fucking job search with barely anything to offer other than 5 years of retail experience and 3 years of IT support... Fan-fucking-tastic, would almost be more survivable to just go on centre link at this point -,-

I was walking in the cineplex after watching a movie today and saw an advertisement for "a digital loyalty card platform for retail outlets. Get loyalty cards on your phone!" being used by a big brand in my country.

The thing is, although not a terribly original idea, I first thought of developing a system/platform like this all the way back in 2012. I coded it, I advertised, I lobbied HARD; I poured my damn soul into this thing. Nobody accepted it. I scrapped it because I thought it was just not a good idea, only to see what is essentially a clone of it being shown off and lauded as a brand new innovative solution.

I won't lie, seeing that ad so prominently and proudly displayed really crushed me. I honestly don't know what makes their rendition better than mine, since mine did pretty much the same thing theirs does and my design chops are pretty much on par with theirs. I was rejected and I don't know why and that stings more than the countless other times my other ideas were shot down because of market mismatch, logistical flaws or just shortsightedness on the part of potential customers.

This isn't an invitation to a pity party, and I can't say there is a moral to this little anecdote, but I feel moved to share this experience with you guys.

Pick from it and learn what you will, I hope this falls under the eyes of the right person out there.

!rant

So I'm looking for advice.
I'm 16 and I'd like to eventually work at some sort of tech startup, probably doing something like web development as that's what I've done the most of. I have been teaching myself and practicing programming for years and have experience with HTML, CSS, JS, NodeJS, Socket.io etc. but don't necessarily have a lot of experience with some necessary frameworks such as ReactJS or AngularJS, so I couldn't really apply for any of the job listings I've seen so far. I currently work in retail so it's possible that I could work somewhere such as an Apple Store.

What's the best next step? Is a university course the right option or should I be trying to find something such as work experience?

If you got to the end, thanks for reading my long winded and badly written post. Looking forward to hearing the advice of some fellow devs.

What kind of facts should every person know? I mean in todays modern world some ppl live so deep with heads up their asses that they dont even know how many continents in the world there are.

And sadly it makes sense, who needs all that data in their head when the info is one google search away?

I myself cant retain facts of real world at all. Recently went to some quiz competition and felt stupid af.

On the other hand all these ppl who know a lot about world usually have shit retail jobs. So is knowing more facts than white collar professional some weird mental flex?

Public Service Request to Users from Tokyo and those with good knowledge in buying keyboards.

Which retail shop sell tenkeyless mechanical keyboard such as HyperX Alloy FPS Pro? With English words not Japanese 😬

I can't find it at my country and my gf is currently at Tokyo for a training, so.

On further note, I'm looking for a keyboard with following requirements. Would appreciate your recommendation.
- without numpad
- standard qwerty layout (US/UK)
- backlit (any color, as long as keys are visible in dark)
- USB wired
- easy to clean and maintain
- must last for more than 3 years

Im off of 3 hours sleep right now after getting lost down the rabbit hole of debugging.

I was just putting stock on the shelves at my job and a customer came up to me and asked me where something was. I thought of two places it could be so i said:

"if item == aisle4
{print("You've found it"); }
else if item == aisle6
{print("You've found it"); }
else
{print ("Im unsure where it is sorry"); }"

She just looked at me and my coworker told her where the item was, once she left my coworker started laughing at me and called me the biggest nerd he knew.

So I work full time at a retail store, but only one person is on shift at a time here so I'm allowed to bring my laptop and code while I'm running the store. This is where I get most of my schoolwork done and make most of my project deadlines for web dev job.

My only social life really consists of me hanging out with my boyfriend. Often when I need to be working on some code or project he will sit next to me and play guitar/sing or will quietly read while I'm on my laptop.

Other than that I chat with some game friends through Discord throughout the day, and often visit/help family members in spare time off of work.

Not much of a social life when you're super busy

Just curious on an opinion from other Devs who don't actually work as a programmer...

Would you want to?

I currently work in retail and have a dream job as a genetic engineer majoring in dormant diseases (eg cancers) and personally would never take a job where I will be programming, never merge a hobby and a profession...

Am I alone in this one?

Having to work for clients sucks. They are so rude. "We sent an issue over yesterday and it's still not fixed". You think you're our only customer? You think this shit is automated and takes no time to fix? You think you have resources working on you stuff 24/7. You don't man. Get in the queue and be grateful a load of time and effort goes in to your website. Sit down and stfu. Ahhh... that's better.

So I want to know, can I shill at least one of my "working" sites here? I want to do measure some organic/natural traffic on this so original site(/sarcasm)

Also Im want to know if there are people here interested to help me out with my other site if they could ... specially since my finances will perhaps force me soon to take a local (retail) job to afford "normal" living

Hi this is my first post. Kind of annoyed at the job market right now. I've applied to a lot of positions without much luck. My internship last summer got cancelled bc of covid, so all my actual job experience is retail. It's hard to break into the field even with a college degree.

New day new job.... FirstDayAtWork
Moving from Retail domain to Cloud ☁ Domain as Cloud Developer

As someone from the clothing/retail industry, I could never imagen a life within Tech.

I had a shop, it went very well. I had my ups and downs like most shop owners. Since the shop was on not on your typical shopping street, I had to make good relationships with my customers.

I enjoy talking to people, listen to peoples opinions, their day to day activities etc. After some years I really needed some much needed improvement to the administration and overall solutions. Checking around the internet I found some tools but expensive, or tools without those stuff I really needed.

As a can-do:er I am, I thought I would hook some tech people up and sell my idea, so they could make the product while I design it. They started build it, I watch. But they were busy all the time, no time to build something else. They taught me some code and suddenly, I was back at school learning to code.

And now, I'm a system developer. Really enjoying programming and the amazing world of technology. Even when I mostly talk to people over the web :')

What programming language do you guys think the price check machines on the poles are coded in at retail stores like Walmart?

#include <advice>
using namespace plz;

So I have a soft cozy internship for a large retail corporation, the workplace is fantastic and the people are nice. We run into problems where this company outsources to India for almost all of its programming leaving their "software engineers" to answer emails and support 15 year old applications. This is obviously not the work I want to be doing. I want to create. This company also pays slightly less than average for an entry level programmer. I have one year of college left as well. At the end of this internship it is almost guaranteed that I get a full time offer but I only get 2 months to accept or decline. I feel like I'll say no.

So I guess what I'm asking is, should I turn down the safe first job and go for work that will make me excited in the morning or take the easy soft underpaid email answering job?
Thanks guys

Ugh there's little to no labor laws for developers.

Sometimes they don't even list software development as an industry.

We don't really analyze business finances, but we create tools that help real analysts to gather data and visualize economic trends. We don't really teach kids, but we create tools for schools. We're not in retail, but our cusomters are.

"Oh I know! You're an **electrician**. I'll put you next to the people who install air conditioning."

"How about... storage services?" I say "we storage our customer's data. At least that is accurate."
"Oh yeah like wholesale!"

"I recommend you write down telecomuncations." I mean, we do use HTTP if that's what you mean, but would you call a restaurant to be in the telecommunications industry just because they have social media accounts?

My dad saw an HP computer with wireless printer on HSN (Home Shopping Network). I was on the point of ordering it. I looked at their privacy notice wh. pretty much says we're going to know wh. porn you watch, with whom and when. Then we're going to sell the info. to everybody who might use it against you. Fuck that. Then I googled reviews of this outfit. Then it finally hit me: you don't order computers from home shopping networks. I'm glad it occurred to me before taking the plunge. They pull this shite telling you how much cheaper they're selling it for as opposed to retail, wh. is a complete lie because they jack up the retail price to make their selling price look cheap.

I'm a software developer, but I'm finding myself more interested bio and electro-mechanical engineering. And to top it off, I'd most like to be a bio-mechanical engineer — which is very different from the other two previous mentions. ...But, I'm well paid now, my last retail start-up failed, and money talks. For now my fogponic ecosystem (fish + biofilter + fog + plants) in my backyard will have to suffice. Now I'm actually interested in waste recycling...

Yeah... I get bored while waiting for parts to come from China. Can never have too many hobbies.

Anyways AMA, if you like. It can be about robots, fish, plants, IoT, apps, web, solar power, 3D printing, VR... You name it!

Hi ! This is not a rant but more like a need for help.
Currently i am working in a retail job , but i am planing to open my own business where me and my team can develop apps and webs.
My family and friends are telling me that i will fail.
What should i do , chase my dream and become unemploymed for a short period of time , or continue the way i am living ?

Thank you for your time and patience , and i am sorry for grammatical mistakes !

i'm making my python prof wanna strangle me again, it's 100% the same as the example output, for those wondering why i do this to him it's because he said he "favors speed over readability" so i'm doing as he asks

code:

print("\nThe cost of the item is "+str((float(input("Enter the retail value: "))/(1+float(input("enter the markup percentage (e.g. 0.9): ")))))+"\n\nEnd of Report")

Took a week off from my retail job, swatted up on some HTML, built the most basic About Me/Portfolio that I could.
Having no background or experience meant that I needed something to send to people when applying for jobs.
It worked.

Avoided IoT(IoS - InternetOfShit) for a long time now, due to the security concerns with retail products.
Now I looked into 433 Transceiver + Arduino solutions.. to build something myself, just for the lolz.

Theory:
Smallest Arduino I found has 32 KByte of programmable memory, a tiny tiny crypto library could take around 4 KBytes...

Set a symetric crypto key for each homebrewn device / sensor / etc, send the info and commands (with time of day as salt for example) encrypted between Server <-> IoT gadget, ciphertext would have checksum appended, magic and ciphertext length prepended.

Result:
Be safe from possible drive-by attacks, still have a somewhat reliable communication?!
Ofc passionate hackers would be still able to crack it, no doubt.

Question: Am I thinking too simple? Am I describing just the standard here?

A question for all you grey beards and other more knowledgeable devs:

I work for a small grocery retail company. Work primarily as a dev, but also spend time doing I.T./HelpDesk stuff. My wife is a nursing student, and when she graduates in May 2018 she is wanting to move to a different location to work at a specific hospital, which would require me to change jobs. No problem, I'm fine with that.

Here is what I am wondering: I currently make a modest salary (for 23 years old I feel like I'm doing pretty good), but we are expecting our first child in April and I would like to be making more. Would persuing a different job for extra $$$ that I could potentially only be working at for around 8-ish months be a bad idea? Should I just stick where I am at until I actual HAVE to move?

Thanks in advance for any advice :D

Depends...
My last/current retail job: was dating the managers daughter at the time
My last tech related job: my old high school decided to dangle another job opportunity in my face then quickly snatch it away

First time ranter here;
I'm an aspiring developer, undergoing a bootcamp right now. But to pay the bills I recently started working in accounting in an insurance company, registering payments from ~10 years ago (my first office job, retail and restaurants were all my previous experience). The job is boring, I feel like nobody gives a shit about it, most of the time I have no idea what I'm doing, I don't get ANY feedback about my work... I just have to survive a few more months until I get a developer job or an internship, but good grief, it feels like such a distant future...

Indigogo is to retail what ICOs are to he financial industry.

- some random people think of an idea (ICO = token, IGO = magical dick cream)

- they both rely on well made but completely horse-shit marketing material

- they both spam your sites with the same repetitive ads

- they both offer discounts for getting in early (aka give us money before we have designed or built anything)

- they both make outlandish and sometimes illegal product claims (ICO = Visa is a partner, IGO = magic dick cream does magic things)

- in the end most of both options ends up giving you nothing at all and just running away with your money

- best case scenario they both deliver a product that is utterly worthless and meaningless

- everyone is hunting for that one coin or product that is a not a total scam.

I don’t hate indigogo but they certainly are shady as fuck. I’ve rolled the dice on then 4 times and got scammed on 2 of them. It’s basically a crap shoot.

Hopefully get out to the public the two projects I have been working on currently. A local focused startup help website and a local focused fillable forms platform.

And hopefully get my first large scale software project kickstarted - A retail management system on a full Feedback Driven Development approach perhaps with the ability to integrate AI and ML later on.

Just a random question: how much does it cost to retain a domain name?

I know we can rent a domain name for like an year or such for $5-10 if its a unique one. After 1 year, we have to pay an increased amount for every subsequent year (which keeps on increasing i guess?)

So how does these new emerging companies ( or any company in general ) retail their domain rights? For eg paypal.com would have costed only a few bucks when first bought, but when the company got famous, its domain rent must have increase by a 1000 times. So does these big companies pay millions of dollars just to retain their domain name?

Def processCurrentDay(work):
If work.field == "retail":
While work.status == "unsatisfactory":

Work.do_work_things()
If work.status
=="exceptional":
Society.bioengineerFlyPigs()
else:
processCurrentDay(work)

A lot of companies are developing systems to improve the way we interact with retail stores.
Most popular trend is having no cashiers.

Can't wait for a simple and affordable system that can easily be installed at any store.

Minimize teft, save time and no judgement from cashiers. Need I say more?

Serious question.

I’m trying to start my career as an entry level developer. I have had an internship for a short period of time before the company fell apart and had to go back to my retail job to pay the bills. My question is, where are you guys applying to entry level jobs at? Like I have tried LinkedIn. But I looked for entry level and it came up with a 7+ year experience description in my area. Or 2-3 years experience. I’m just trying to find an entry level job man. Like how hard is it to find that? I’m a boot camp grad as well. But even with recruiters it’s so hard to find a job in my area that would take someone on that is so green in tech.

400+ applications and like 50 interviews. Decided to put my specialization in sql and c# and focus more on those because that’s what’s more popular in my area (tulsa, ok). I’m not 100% the best programmer or developer. But man I have the drive to learn and I guess that’s not good enough without experience. I’m at a mental breaking point right now.

A very long rant.. but I'm looking to share some experiences, maybe a different perspective.. huge changes at the company.

So my company is starting our microservices journey (we have a 359 retail websites at this moment)

First question was: What to build first?

The first thing we had to do was to decide what we wanted to build as our first microservice. We went looking for a microservice that can be used read only, consumers could easily implement without overhauling production software and is isolated from other processes.

We’ve ended up with building a catalog service as our first microservice. That catalog service provides consumers of the microservice information of our catalog and its most essential information about items in the catalog.

By starting with building the catalog service the team could focus on building the microservice without any time pressure. The initial functionalities of the catalog service were being created to replace existing functionality which were working fine.

Because we choose such an isolated functionality we were able to introduce the new catalog service into production step by step. Instead of replacing the search functionality of the webshops using a big-bang approach, we choose A/B split testing to measure our changes and gradually increase the load of the microservice.

Next step: Choosing a datastore

The search engine that was in production when we started this project was making user of Solr. Due to the use of Lucene it was performing very well as a search engine, but from engineering perspective it lacked some functionalities. It came short if you wanted to run it in a cluster environment, configuring it was hard and not user friendly and last but not least, development of Solr seemed to be grinded to a halt.

Elasticsearch started entering the scene as a competitor for Solr and brought interesting features. Still using Lucene, which we were happy with, it was build with clustering in mind and being provided out of the box. Managing Elasticsearch was easy since there are REST APIs for configuration and as a fallback there are YAML configurations available.

We decided to use Elasticsearch since it provides us the strengths and capabilities of Lucene with the added joy of easy configuration, clustering and a lively community driving the project.

Even bigger challenge? Which programming language will we use

The team responsible for developing this first microservice consists out of a group web developers. So when looking for a programming language for the microservice, we went searching for a language close to their hearts and expertise. At that time a typical web developer at least had knowledge of PHP and Javascript.

What we’ve noticed during researching various languages is that almost all actions done by the catalog service will boil down to the following paradigm:

- Execute a HTTP call to fetch some JSON

- Transform JSON to a desired output

- Respond with the transformed JSON

Actions that easily can be done in a parallel and asynchronous manner and mainly consists out of transforming JSON from the source to a desired output. The programming language used for the catalog service should hold strong qualifications for those kind of actions.

Another thing to notice is that some functionalities that will be built using the catalog service will result into a high level of concurrent requests. For example the type-ahead functionality will trigger several requests to the catalog service per usage of a user.

To us, PHP and .NET at that time weren’t sufficient enough to us for building the catalog service based on the requirements we’ve set. Eventually we’ve decided to use Node.js which is better suited for the things we are looking for as described earlier. Node.js provides a non-blocking I/O model and being event driven helps us developing a high performance microservice.

The leap to start programming Node.js is relatively small since it basically is Javascript. A language that is familiar for the developers around that time. While Node.js is displaying some new concepts it is relatively easy for a developer to start using it.

The beauty of microservices and the isolation it provides, is that you can choose the best tool for that particular microservice. Not all microservices will be developed using Node.js and Elasticsearch. All kinds of combinations might arise and this is what makes the microservices architecture so flexible.

Even when Node.js or Elasticsearch turns out to be a bad choice for the catalog service it is relatively easy to switch that choice for magic ‘X’ or component ‘Z’. By focussing on creating a solid API the components that are driving that API don’t matter that much. It should do what you ask of it and when it is lacking you just replace it.

Many more headaches to come later this year ;)

I want to code this stupid little tool just to toy with a GUI system i was reading about on github. But I'm so burned out and sick of code I just can't bring myself to even start it. I can't bring myself to work on my 3D printer I keep telling myself to get back up and running. I can't even bring myself to talk to anyone outside work even for just stupid little conversations

All I ever fucking do anymore is work, sleep, watch YouTube, and make plans ill never even fucking start I'm sick of this shit.

I'm considering working in retail for a few months just for something a little mindless compared to programming.

Another arbitrarily decided stupid work meeting is tomorrow and I'm 70% set on quitting rather than waiting to see when/if I get fired
i have enough savings to easily survive until I find a new job

I really hate working with learning management systems (LMS).
I make training simulations for retail companies and some of these have the worst, backwards LMS's out there.
The providers who install and manage these LMSs for the companies always insist we make our training run inside their own environment, but we can't since it's a 3D training made in Unity that doesn't run well in a browser.

Luckily some of these are fine to figure out. Just a few API calls here and there for authorization and reporting progress, but some are an absolute nightmare.

Just now one of the providers provided me with a 2000 page documentation of all the functions of the LMS's API that our customer is using. All I need are like 5 pages that explain what URL to call with what data and the responses, but now I'm stuck spending days trying to find the 0.5% of this documentation that I need to communicate with their API.

And of course, the documentation is vague as all hell. minimal descriptions of what each endpoint does. Subjects names are super vague, as in do I look for course progress or lesson completion state. What the heck is a Learning Event, is it relevant to me?

And the errors in this document, too.
Bullet-point lists with duplicate items.
language errors everywhere.
Property lists where they copy-pasted the description of properties.
An entire EMPTY chapter, literally a page with only the chapter's title.

I just can't stand how these providers barely seem to know anything about the API of the LMS's they provide to customers.
(for clarity, the LMS is produced by some big tech company, it's installed and maintained by some 3rd party which is our main line of communication when rolling out trainings to these).

It always goes like: "Hey, we want to use your training." "Oh, that's great, we have our own, simple LMS where you can view your employee's progress." "Nah, we want to use our backwards LMS. Here's a giant manual about it's API, go figure it out!"
And then I'm left here tearing my hair out trying to figure out which 3 calls I need to send their API from the tons of extra stuff it can do which is completely unnecessary and being unable to rely on the provider because they lack the knowledge and have such thick skulls about the implementation of the LMS itself that they also seems completely unwilling to help to begin with!

Just another day at the office.

Wasted 2 years of my life working at a retail store den i decided fuck dis shit ama pursue dis web dev thing

"Averice - a serial novel"

2021 - found on the remnents of an old 'youtube' server rack.

A gaunt but handsome man walks into the view finder. Adjusts the camera. "Hi guys and girls." he smiles weakly. rubs his blonde unshaved stubble, running his hand over his mouth, inhaling as if trying to find the right words.

"How can I say this. god. ...americas fucked and rapidly going down the shitter,
college is a fucking scam,
all success in the modern day is based on fraud, bullshit, mythmaking, and "who you know."

we're on the verge of a new cold war, the merger of the fed and the treasury combine with negative oil is the legit death signal of the petrodollar, we're gonna go through a *50% haircut* in living standards and a doubling of taxes on *everything* in the next six months, the tech bubble is gonna burst taking with it half the industry jobs overnight, the credit bubble will burst even as the fucking stock market climbs higher, a quarter or more of all retail will shut down leaving empty assets turning every state property market into the equivalent of fucking detroit. MAD as a protective doctrine is dead with the spread of hypersonic weapons so enjoy living with the constant threat of being obliterated without warning, my entire generation basically has no meaningful or stable future to look forward to, and none of us have really had an actual, genuine say in anything involving society for decades."

He exhalled visibly on camera, as if exhausted by the demons of anxiety he'd poured forth, a torrent of fears, uncertainties, and revelations like the tormented ghost of christmas past

A long pull from a bottle of southern comfort.

"look. we have an out of control intelligence apparatus that are in their operation more orwellian than the real life stasi ever were, a government at both the federal and state level thats made of millionaires and billionaires who give no fucks at all except for their own power, out of control and absolutely dogshit-corrupt *local* leaders, nothing is audited, nothing is meaningfully transparented, rampant fraud, destruction of evidence, witness tampering, railroading, intimidation, violence, threats of violence, skyrocketing cost of living, skyrocketing spending, skyrocketing taxes, skyrocketing policies of total control by police, skyrocketing homelessness, fatherlessness, poverty, political corruption, drug abuse, massive politically funded thinly veiled state propaganda, collapsing and decaying infrastructure, the loss of all tradition, culture, community cohesion we might have had, and on and on and on and on.

and all I want right now is to get my dick sucked. drink a beer and blow my motherfucking brains out.

and when people start fighting in the streets over some bullshit and it turns into race riots, because the motherfuckers in the media serving wallstreet always make it about race or some stupid shit like that, I wont be in america to put up with it.

do us all a favor. when you're hanging bankers, hang some fucking journalists too. they never tell the truth. doesnt matter which side they are on
they only divide people and advocate for more of the same bullshit, expanded state powers, more federal dollars, more workers for their campaign, more privileges. they're fucking cancer. yes even your favorite journalist. they're a tumor on society.

our government has become hostile to us even being *alive* anymore. it has for me become intolerable, and in time I have grown to hate it.

there is no way to change it. no way to salvage it. I cannot see any hope for the future anymore. And if you search yourself I know many of you feel the same."

He took another long pull from the bottle.

"we no longer have a voice in america and no means to air our grievances peacefully.

theres nothing in it left worth saving when it all can be taken away at a moments notice by a deaf and hostile bureucratic government. I should have voted for bernie last year. At least he would have destroyed it.

many of you will disagree with this sentiment, thinking things can still work out. because you still have your creature comforts. your apartment which you cant afford. your car with its maintenace bills and monthly payments you've fallen behind on same as half the country now out of work, but in a short few months, a year at most, you will learn what I have learned, and the reason I drink, what I knew about as early as june of 2019, that this is it. this was as good as it was ever going to get. and that the good days, the best days are behind us. that all that you hold dear could be taken. all that you worked for, was already gone, and you just havent realized it yet. I've set this to autoupload once it's done recording. I built a company just to watch the people who dont want any of us to succeed burn america down around it. Im done. Goodbye america."

The man got up from his chair, camera still recording, and left. Only the red flashing dot remained, the only witness to the silence.

This is neat.
However it uses round rather than floor.
It might against consumer law if labelled 4.009 but charge 4.01 for retail

Does anybody here knows an opening for retail job/cleaning services?

I am so fed up with this sh*t I'm working right now.

: /

Hello guys,
TLDR;
leave a company where I have big influence with less technical challenges for a big company where I am challenged but jus as an individual contributor

I am working for a good company as a DevOps engineer, made a lot of achievements and literally moved the company to a whole new level, however I am working all alone, no mentorship but I get to lead everything and take initiatives

You can imagine the stress working a lone with a big scale in terms of production and other teams that I should support

Have been promised that we will get a team but it has been 15 months and nothing happens

I feel that technical I am not growing enough since I don't have time to improve or any mentorship

Now I am offered a senior position in one of biggest fashion/retail companies in Europe

And I am not sure if I should leave or not, btw it involves relocating

Compare and harmonize the web configs

Oh no someone set execution timeouts to 14 days

Fuck fuck fuckity duck

Hey compare all the web configs of all environments and harmonize them all wtf cmon bruh do your job as a developer

Take them and back them up into svn. What do you mean svn isn't a back up system of course it is well its the only thing we have fuck

What do you mean we have shit logging where people will catch an exception and only print the word exception in the log you can figure it out can't you we have live produxtion issues that hace to be solved now what the fuck

How dare you make a. Mistake copying our shitload of a bloated codebase and configuring our 100s of different options all by fukcing hand what the fuck dude do yoh write anyrhing down?

Please catalogue all the exception mails we are getting but we have no db or error reporting system so they all just plop into tue inbox and thats all ypur fuckjng data figure it out kid

This is a rewarding, fulfilling job whwrw you can be both dev ops and a developer and manage all of our fucking environments of which there are about 15 of all your own with no sort of tool or software to aid you because haha what the fuck we wouldn't make your life easy

Whata that you want to spend time to write stuff or change stuff that will nake it easier fot you fuxk that bruh get back to your biklable tasks like holy shit you thjnk this is a charity ofr aomw shit

Live production issues
Live production issues
Produxtion issues. A ghost in the machine. Find it fix if find it fix it find it fix it cmon why can't you fix it I expect you to spend your day hopelessly pretending to try to solve something you fucker

One of the only peopel able to help you sometimes though hes a bit of an old laxky, yeah hea fucking leaving see ya seeya kid and now we're not hirinf anyone to fuckjng help you no no no managing and monitoring the environments its your jov alll fof them every sngle on do you knkw all the xonfiguraiton values for them yet??

Instead we are hiring a new sales person to fucking make us some more money and we don't need naother seceloper to help you infqct lets have you use this mid end retail computer from 2014 to develop on yeah yeah oh but all our shitty code and visual studip will destry your memory but too bad!! Hahahahahdhsj

Go lice is all you, why sare you so slow

How long will it take
How long will it take
How long will it take
How long witll it tqk2
How long will it take holy shit
Give time estimate for sonethign that I don't fucking know how about it will tqke till fuxk you oxloxk

!rant

In preparation for the holiday season, as a former retail worker and high school band member, I present

Imagine studying for a computer related course and to makeup for living expense, you go for part time jobs.

Now, is it just me or this is just a bad idea to get into a part-time job that is no where related to your study field?

It doesn't make sense to work in MacD or some retail outlet at all.

Any thoughts?

So as a personal project for work I decided to start data logging facility variables, it's something that we might need to pickup at some point in the future so decided to take the initiative since I'm the new guy.
I setup some basic current loop sensors are things like gas line pressures for bulk nitrogen and compressed air but decided to go with a more advanced system for logging the temperature and humidity in the labs. These sensors come with 'software' it's a web site you host internally. Cool so I just need to build a simple web server to run these PoE sensors. No big deal right, it's just an IIS service. Months after ordering Server 2019 though SSC I get 4 activation codes 2 MAK and 2 KMS. I won the lottery now i just have to download the server 2019 retail ISO and... Won't take the keys. Back to purchasing, "oh I can download that for you, what key is yours". Um... I dunno you sent me 4 Can I just get the link, "well you have to have a login". Ok what building are you in I'll drive over with a USB key (hoping there on the same campus), "the download keeps stopping, I'll contact the IT service in your building". a week later I get an install ISO and still no one knows that key is mine. Local IT service suggests it's probably a MAK key since I originally got a quote for a retail copy and we don't run a KMS server on the network I'm using for testing. We'll doesn't windows reject all 4 keys then proceed to register with a non-existent KMS server on the network I'm using for testing. Great so now this server that is supposed to connected to a private network for the sensors and use the second NIC for an internet connection has to be connected to the old network that I'm using for testing because that's where the KMS server seems to be. Ok no big deal the old network has internet except the powers that be want to migrate everything to the new more secure network but I still need to be connected to the KMS server because they sent me the wrong key. So I'm up to three network cards and some of my basic sensors are running on yet another network and I want to migrate the management software to this hardware to have all my data logging in one system. I had to label the Ethernet ports so I could hand over the hardware for certification and security scans.

So at this point I have my system running with a couple sensors setup with static IP's because I haven't had time to setup the DNS for the private network the sensors run on. Local IT goes to install McAfee and can't because it isn't compatible with anything after 1809 or later, I get a message back that " we only support up to 1709" I point out that it's server 2019, "Oh yeah, let me ask about that" a bunch of back and forth ensues and finally Local IT get's a version of McAfee that will install, runs security scan again i get a message back. " There are two high risk issues on your server", my blood pressure is getting high as well. The risks there looking at McAfee versions are out of date and windows Defender is disabled (because of McAfee).

There's a low risk issue as well, something relating to the DNS service I didn't fully setup. I tell local IT just disable it for now, then think we'll heck I'll remote in and do it. Nope can't remote into my server, oh they renamed it well that's lot going to stay that way but whatever oh here's the IP they assigned it, nope cant remote in no privileges. Ok so I run up three flights of stairs to local IT before they leave for the day log into my server yup RDP is enabled, odd but whatever let's delete the DNS role for now, nope you don't have admin privileges. Now I'm really getting displeased, I can;t have admin privileges on the network you want me to use to support the service on a system you can't support and I'm supposed to believe you can migrate the life safety systems you want us to move. I'm using my system to prove that the 2FA system works, at this rate I'm going to have 2FA access to a completely worthless broken system in a few years. good thing I rebuilt the whole server in a VM I'm planning to deploy before I get the official one back. I'm skipping a lot of the ridiculous back and forth conversations because the more I think about it the more irritated I get.

!dev

Why must I always be the guy that has to connect with people?

So I'm applying to a retail job, and the section manager, lets call him Tim, is kinda low energy.

Come in four days later after the first meeting, to just let him know I put in the application. We're talking, talking some more, and he basically wants to hire me but says it usually takes 1-2 weeks for the background. Well that's nonsense for a retail position doing stocking, but alright.

And I'm heading out the door, say to him "dont kill yourself on shift", he doesnt even laugh, just flat affect, monotone, "I know I still got an hour and a half on shift."

And as I'm driving away I'm thinking, that's how the entire conversation was like.

It wasn't just misery or tiredness. The dude, Tim, I'd seen that face and heard that tone before.

Its the behavior of someone who actively doesnt want to be alive.

And as I'm driving away, I'm just thinking, how do I go back? How do I go to this total stranger, who I'm also applying for a job with, who I just met, and say *look, I dont mean to get personal and this is probably uninvited but I know something's up with you. You were like this last time I met you, and you're like it even more now. I know bro. I know. You think no one sees you're going through something, but I do.*

I see shit like this and it's so obvious and by the time I realize I should say something, the opportunity has passed, the moment has passed. And it's like, is it even my place?

But to see someone like that, to be familiar with that look on their face, and to let them walk away...

I just dont know.

Walmart Retail Link has been down for five hours. No word on when it will be back up. All our work is halted until then.

So im about to finish a mean stack bootcamp in 2 weeks. Im working on my final project and its nothing too fancy im just doing a simple inventory app (i have future plans for it to bundle it into an entire suite for a specific subset of retail). So i take my live coding exam and fork it (simple app with crud finished) and im trying to add an edit feature that populates tge fields with the prior data. Spent the whole of yesterday working on it from 12a-midnight. Just this one feature to bring previous values into an edit page. Seems simple enough. But it wasnt working right. So im looking all over posted on SO even got a friend of mine thats been programming for 20 years to help me and we cant figure out why it thinks a variable is undefined when it clearly has a value dorectly before the save method fires. (Console.logged that shit)

At about midnight i realize its because i needed to write a router.put in the api because i was just using the regular save originally :/

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