When your bug isn't on StackOverflow and you start to lose your sanity

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

Todays contestant is a very special one.

*sitcom audience: WHY?*

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

*sitcom audience oooooooohhhhhh*

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

*sitcom audience laughs hysterically*

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

*ba dum tsssss*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

... once again giving everyone no data.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*killed the screen share and left the room*

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

... yep, not a typo.

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

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

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

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

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

G: "no, but Java is Java"

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

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

Its Friday, you all know what that means! ... Its results day for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

*audience: wwwwwwooooooooo!!!!*

We've had a bewildering array of candidates, lets remind ourselves:

- a psychopath that genuinely scared me a little
- a CEO I would take pleasure seeing in pain
- a pothead who mistook me for his drug dealer
- an unbelievable idiot
- an arrogant idiot obsessed with strings

Tough competition, but there can be only one ... *drum roll* ... the winner is ... none of them!

*audience: GASP!*
*audience member: what?*
*audience member: no way!*
*audience member: your fucking kidding me!*

Sir calm down! this is a day time show, no need for that ... let me explain, there is a winner ... but we've kept him till last and for a good reason

*audience: ooooohhhhh*

You see our final contestant and ultimate winner of this series is our good old friend "C", taking the letters of each of our previous contestants, that spells TRAGIC which is the only word to explain C.

*audience: laughs*

Oh I assure you its no laughing matter. C was with us for 6 whole months ... 6 excruciatingly painful months.

Backstory:

We needed someone with frontend, backend and experience with IoT devices, or raspberry PI's. We didn't think we'd get it all, but in walked an interviewee with web development experience, a tiny bit of Angular and his masters project was building a robot device that would change LED's depending on your facial expressions. PERFECT!!!

... oh to have a time machine

Working with C:

- He never actually did the tutorials I first set him on for Node.js and Angular 2+ because they were "too boring". I didn't find this out until some time later.

- The first project I had him work on was a small dashboard and backend, but he decided to use Angular 1 and a different database than what we were using because "for me, these are easier".

- He called that project done without testing / deploying it in the cloud, despite that being part of the ticket, because he didn't know how. Rather than tell or ask anyone ... he just didn't do it and moved on.

- As part of his first tech review I had to explain to him why he should be using if / else, rather than just if's.

- Despite his past experience building server applications and dashboards (4 years!), he never heard of a websocket, and it took a considerable amount of time to explain.

- When he used a node module to open a server socket, he sat staring at me like a deer caught in headlights completely unaware of how to use / test it was working. I again had to explain it and ultimately test it for him with a command line client.

- He didn't understand the need to leave logging inside an application to report errors. Because he used to ... I shit you not ... drive to his customers, plug into their server and debug their application using a debugger.

... props for using a debugger, but fuck me.

- Once, after an entire 2 days of tapping me on the shoulder every 15 mins for questions / issues, I had to stop and ask:

Me: "Have you googled it?"
C: "... eh, no"
Me: "can I ask why?"
C: "well, for me, I only google for something I don't know"
Me: "... well do you know what this error message means?"
C: "ah good point, i'll try this time"

... maybe he was A's stoner buddy?

- He burned through our free cloud usage allowance for a month, after 1 day, meaning he couldn't test anything else under his account. He left an application running, broadcasting a lot of data. Turns out the on / off button on the dashboard only worked for "on". He had been killing his terminal locally and didn't know how to "ctrl + c a cloud app" ... so left it running. His intention was to restart the app every time you are done using it ... but forgot.

- His issue with the previous one ... not any of his countless mistakes, not the lack of even trying to make the button work, no, no, not for C. C's issue is the cloud is "shit" for giving us such little allowances. (for the record in a month I had never used more than 5%).

- I had to explain environment variables and why they are necessary for passwords and tokens etc. He didn't know it wasn't ok to commit these into GitHub.

- At his project meetups with partners I had to repeatedly ask him to stop googling gifs and pay attention to the talks.

- He complained that we don't have 3 hour lunch breaks like his last place.

- He once copied and pasted the same function 450 times into a file as a load test ... are loops too mainstream nowadays?

You see C is our winner, because after 6 painful months (companies internal process / requirements) he actually achieved nothing. I really mean that, nothing. Every thing was so broken, so insecure / wide open, built without any kind of common sense or standards I had to delete it all and start again ... it took me 2 weeks.

I hope you've all enjoyed this series and will join me in praying for the return of my sanity ... I do miss it a lot.

Yours truly,
practiseSafeHex

I lost my sanity and googled ”FUCK YOU XCODE YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT”...

That's how I found devRant.

Today I had a dream, in which I got 300++ on devRant, no joke 😐

Best dream in history of dreams.

Recipe for a Great Programmer:

Ingredients:
-Books for a computer science curriculum from a top university
-Computer
-Headphones
-Internet
-Stress ball
-Pillow
-Lighter fluid
-Food

Directions:

1. Cover computer science books with lighter fluid
2. Light books on fire
3. Use flames to cook an energy-rich meal for the thousands of hours ahead
4. Pick an IDE
5. Choose a project beyond current capabilities. Good ways to push boundaries:
- Unfamiliar domain (e.g. large scale data processing, UI programming, high performance computing, games)
- Exotic programming language
- Larger in scope than any project before
6. Shut up about your IDE
7. Attempt to build
8. Stop procrastinating on Hacker News
9. Re-attempt to build
10. Squeeze stress ball and scream into pillow as necessary to keep sanity
When stuck:
- Paste stack traces into Google
- Find appropriate mailing list to get guidance
- Realize that real learning happens when you are stuck, uncomfortable, and/or frustrated
- Seek out books, classes, or other resources AFTER you have a good understanding of your deficiencies
11. Repeat #4 to #10 for at least 10 years
12. Results guaranteed! (to the same extent static types guarantee bug-free programs)

source: nathanmarz.com

*deep breath*

Remain calm, don’t freak out, remain calm, don’t freak out.

*deep breath*

Ok, so my sort of new manager (had a slightly different manger-ish role on the team), has for the third time in as many months, just sent an email criticizing the dev team for our working from home-ness (which for the record has not been that bad, 2/3 or 3/3 have been in everyday for the past month)

In this same period, there has been late nights, weekends, successful releases, I’ve been invited to talk at a conference about my work (not a particularly big one, but still). Point is, everything is going well, very well in fact.

There has been no emails discussing our great work, thanking us for extra work, thanking us for picking up slack from other teams who are down a few people etc. no our major concern it seems is the “optics” of our team not being present in the open space.

Our contracts list flexible working hours, and his boss has frequently told us WFH is fine when things are too busy. But no he is complaining for us to get our hours in the office in line and make sure we are in the office more.

It’s been a particularly long and frustrating week, and I’m very tempted to inform him that if he is concerned about my chair and desk looking empty, that I can put them somewhere for him where they will always be occupied until a surgeon can remove them.

However, thanks to the deep breaths, I’ve managed to restrain myself long enough to run this past you all first and ask advice.

Please help,
Sincerely,
My sanity

There is a russian cartoon called Fixiks (“Фиксики”, tiny fixers) which is about tiny creatures that live inside tech and fix it when it breaks without the owner knowing. This is a fun, family-friendly cartoon rated 3+ filled with approachable explanations of how does common tech stuff around us work: TVs, washing machines, etc.

However, there is one weird, super grim episode about one such creature who forgot to leave a TV he was living inside that is being thrown away and ending up on the scrapyard.

Having no choice but to follow his purpose, he becomes obsessive trying to fix an endless amount of broken tech there, with new broken stuff being delivered to that scrapyard every moment. After a while, he completely loses his sanity.

That episode displays what seems like a weird mix of schizophrenia and OCD. Having a psychological trauma he fails to recognize the rescue team of his own kind, attacking them. He loses his ability to talk, resorting to random screams of aggression.

This episode doesn’t really feature even a single explanation of how something works. It just is there somehow among the episodes of a casual, happy cartoon for children.

Needless to say, this is my favorite episode.

sketching keeps my sanity alive while coding or UX designing

I've been away... for too long. But today I have an announcement.
I've finally resigned from the Navy.
Little backstory: I have been thinking to resign since my last year as an Ensign, and I finally gained enough skill (and confidence) to make a CV and send it to a few companies. And lo and behold, a company actually was interested.
To be stupidly honest, maybe other factors certainly have played a part, but hey, I actually got a position in the sector I am interested and somewhat good: networks, sysadmin and security.
The CO and XO at my ship were mostly like "meh, he will retract his resignation, why would he want to leave, he is not serious". Until a few days ago, when they realised that I do not operate that way. And now panic has spread among them. I have designed and deployed quite some systems on the ship, both hardware and software, and now... history repeats again. This had happened to EVERY ship I've served before, but now, it will be permanent. And, oh boy, their faces and behaviour when the facts finally sank in... to quote a big mind of YouTube, "Not enough popcorn on Earth".
So, no more new Navy tech stories, but at least I am gaining my sanity back. I've even halved my cigarette and coffee consumption. I'll try to keep in touch with DevRant, but things are quite chaotic now (for them, anyway). But, for now, all I can think of is...

One of our teachers developed a website for our university about three years ago. That was something like assignments management system + social network + schedule, everything in the world as one website.

It seemed like he didn't put any code escaping at all. Injected a block of CSS that made the entire page slowly fade away when some user tried to look at my page. Other teachers stared at it as if it was pure magic, doubting their sanity.

Still isn't fixed btw :)

Had a job interview recently that went well besides one little disagreement... and it has made me question my sanity. Tell me if I'm wrong.

They asked the difference between a GET and POST request.

Wow, that's an easy one, they're giving me a break, I thought to myself.

I said "GET is used to retrieve data from a server, whereas POST is used to add data to a server, via it's body, which a GET lacks" or something like that.

They were like "ya mostly, but GET can be used to enter data into the server too. We were just looking for the body thing."

And I'm like.... yeah, you could do that, but that's not what it's meant for.

They mention stuff about query parameters and I hold steady that GET and POST are different because GET has a specific purpose. Otherwise, we wouldn't need the "method" part of an HTTP request at all. We could just either include a body or not include a body.

I ended it with "Well, POST implies that you are adding data to a server, and GET implies you are querying data from the server. When I'm reading documentation, that's how I quickly determine what an endpoint does."

My confidence was a little shaken at this point. Crazy what two people with (I assume at least) 10+ years of experience telling you you're wrong will do to your confidence.

Eh ehe hehe he eh ehehe

On top of burnout, codebase issues, spec issues, burnout, the product butt that keeps on crapping, burnout, burnout, loathing for my employer... My local Apple SSL cert expired. I can’t finish this and push it anywhere for testing. I can’t even run my own specs anymore. And I don’t have permissions to make a new one. I can’t do anything at all.

Ehe he hehe

Deadline is in two days, and I’m just sitting here laughing quietly to myself. I might finally be going crazy

I found a loose bit of tangle, started to pull, and the world decided it was time to fall apart. Reality said it’s time to go. And I wasn’t even a good screwdriver dev. Byeee ~

POSTMORTEM

"4096 bit ~ 96 hours is what he said.

IDK why, but when he took the challenge, he posted that it'd take 36 hours"

As @cbsa wrote, and nitwhiz wrote "but the statement was that op's i3 did it in 11 hours. So there must be a result already, which can be verified?"

I added time because I was in the middle of a port involving ArbFloat so I could get arbitrary precision. I had a crude desmos graph doing projections on what I'd already factored in order to get an idea of how long it'd take to do larger
bit lengths

@p100sch speculated on the walked back time, and overstating the rig capabilities. Instead I spent a lot of time trying to get it 'just-so'.
Worse, because I had to resort to "Decimal" in python (and am currently experimenting with the same in Julia), both of which are immutable types, the GC was taking > 25% of the cpu time.

Performancewise, the numbers I cited in the actual thread, as of this time:
largest product factored was 32bit, 1855526741 * 2163967087, took 1116.111s in python.
Julia build used a slightly different method, & managed to factor a 27 bit number, 103147223 * 88789957 in 20.9s,
but this wasn't typical.

What surprised me was the variability. One bit length could take 100s or a couple thousand seconds even, and a product that was 1-2 bits longer could return a result in under a minute, sometimes in seconds.

This started cropping up, ironically, right after I posted the thread, whats a man to do?

So I started trying a bunch of things, some of which worked. Shameless as I am, I accepted the challenge. Things weren't perfect but it was going well enough. At that point I hadn't slept in 30~ hours so when I thought I had it I let it run and went to bed. 5 AM comes, I check the program. Still calculating, and way overshot. Fuuuuuuccc...
So here we are now and it's say to safe the worlds not gonna burn if I explain it seeing as it doesn't work, or at least only some of the time.

Others people, much smarter than me, mentioned it may be a means of finding more secure pairs, and maybe so, I'm not familiar enough to know.

For everyone that followed, commented, those who contributed, even the doubters who kept a sanity check on this without whom this would have been an even bigger embarassement, and the people with their pins and tactical dots, thanks.

So here it is.
A few assumptions first.
Assuming p = the product,
a = some prime,
b = another prime,
and r = a/b (where a is smaller than b)
w = 1/sqrt(p)
(also experimented with w = 1/sqrt(p)*2 but I kept overshooting my a very small margin)

x = a/p
y = b/p

1. for every two numbers, there is a ratio (r) that you can search for among the decimals, starting at 1.0, counting down. You can use this to find the original factors e.x. p*r=n, p/n=m (assuming the product has only two factors), instead of having to do a sieve.

2. You don't need the first number you find to be the precise value of a factor (we're doing floating point math), a large subset of decimal values for the value of a or b will naturally 'fall' into the value of a (or b) + some fractional number, which is lost. Some of you will object, "But if thats wrong, your result will be wrong!" but hear me out.

3. You round for the first factor 'found', and from there, you take the result and do p/a to get b. If 'a' is actually a factor of p, then mod(b, 1) == 0, and then naturally, a*b SHOULD equal p.
If not, you throw out both numbers, rinse and repeat.

Now I knew this this could be faster. Realized the finer the representation, the less important the fractional digits further right in the number were, it was just a matter of how much precision I could AFFORD to lose and still get an accurate result for r*p=a.

Fast forward, lot of experimentation, was hitting a lot of worst case time complexities, where the most significant digits had a bunch of zeroes in front of them so starting at 1.0 was a no go in many situations. Started looking and realized
I didn't NEED the ratio of a/b, I just needed the ratio of a to p.

Intuitively it made sense, but starting at 1.0 was blowing up the calculation time, and this made it so much worse.

I realized if I could start at r=1/sqrt(p) instead, and that because of certain properties, the fractional result of this, r, would ALWAYS be 1. close to one of the factors fractional value of n/p, and 2. it looked like it was guaranteed that r=1/sqrt(p) would ALWAYS be less than at least one of the primes, putting a bound on worst case.

The final result in executable pseudo code (python lol) looks something like the above variables plus

while w >= 0.0:
if (p / round(w*p)) % 1 == 0:
x = round(w*p)
y = p / round(w*p)
if x*y == p:
print("factors found!")
print(x)
print(y)
break
w = w + i

Still working but if anyone sees obvious problems I'd LOVE to hear about it.

Grunt, gulp, bower, webpack, rollup, yarn, npm, requirejs, commonjs, browserify, brunch, rollup, parcel, fusebox, babel,
wrappers for bundlers, frameworks on frameworks, then for css, theres scss, sass, less, stylus, compass, and for templates, handlebars, mustache, nunjucks, underscore, ejs, pug, jade, and about five billion other word-salad tools, all with their own CLIs, each in some way building on npm, but with their own non-congruent little syntax, like no one realized they were reinventing the same problems introduced by domain specific languages, most happy to announce "configuration takes a little time, but it's worth it!"

No, it's not. Just stop people. Just stop. You're not doing anyone any favors by creating another lib, all you're doing is tooting your own horn and self promoting. Use what exists and stop creating more shit for new people to learn, to add to the giant clusterfuck that is the 2019 hotmess known as "web development."

You're not special. You're not important. You're lib or tool will be famous for 15 minutes and no one cares what you've made.

If you want to contribute to web development, do us all a favor and contribute to global sanity by kindly deleting your contribution and any plans to contribute new solutions to problems that have already been solved.

Me when I'm forced, at gunpoint, to work with a butchered Wordpress site with 116 activated plugins.

Can I trust myself?

Start a new email in Outlook 2013. Drag an attachment onto it. Immediately double click the attachment to sanity check it's the right file.

"You should only open attachments from a trustworthy source."

Sigh.

It's getting close to that time of year when we are all encouraged to think of others and spread joy around the world. I've decided to go against my usual snarky/anti-social nature, and do something to help others this year.

I'm announcing the practiseSafeHex charitable fund, to give back and help others.

This fund will invest in cutting edge medical research to detect the genetic abnormality in humans that results in project managers not being able to comprehend the simplest of concepts.

Together we can find the reason why the concept "more meetings = less work" is uncomprehendible.

Together we can discover why we can't use an automated bot to generate reports, instead of spending hours in excel spreadsheets.

And together we will find a reason why the answer to the question "can we please just try it?" is always "No".

We do this not for ourselves for short term gains, we do this for the greater good. Together we can find the cause and build a test to filter these people out. So that never again will stressed out developers have to deal with these petty ridiculous issues.

Together, we will solve this!

Thanks,
practiseSafeHex, CEO and managing director of the practiseSafeHex charitable fund for the betterment of developer sanity

I did the thing and stuck it out at my shitty job. Tomorrow, I get to quit the most abusive place I have ever worked. I got a new job at a shop that's a 15 minute drive away vs an hour commute. No more SCRUM with a gun to my head. No more getting yelled at for learning on my own and not working fast enough. No more making Grindr, but for CEOs. I have never been so happy. Thank you for the encouragement to find something else. Thank you for giving me hope. Thank you for being there, and being my sanity, my safe place.

So I ve been clinically depressed for about 10 years now. Been really great at hiding it. My illness and loneliness was so severe that i made up imaginary friends and that got so severe i couldn't tell what s real and what s not. Then about 5 years ago, i met a girl. As the cliche goes, everything felt better. Sunshine and stuff. I opened up to her. Shared stuff. I started becoming normal. The pain became bearable and manageable. Turned to entrepreneurship. Had goals and stuff. Had 7 failed startups but kept on going. Raised investment for an 8th. It went better than anyother. Was going to become the next big thing bla bla. She became the reason i turned from being a loner weirdo to someone awesome. Anyway, as nothing tends to last, my best friend who had been through thick and thin in my work, quit last year in October. He messed up some work from big client nd we had a fight. He left. In the meantime i scored a big multinational company. I was gonna propose to my girlfriend in March this year. But instead she decided to leave for someone better who left her in 3 weeks lol. Anyways, we broke up. During that time, my second friend decided to fuck up my work with the big company so hard that they were about to blacklist my company. And then he left too. I had a small team. 4 5 people doing their best. By that time, i was the only one left. On 28th feb i had my breakup, on 1st march i was sitting 700 km away from home in an office trying to talk the company out of blacklisting us. It took me around 20 days to make that happen. All the while dealing with the obvious, my depression getting stronger than ever. My imaginations taking shape and fucking up my reality. The voices in my head getting stronget and stronger. 4 months now since she left. I dont think i miss her anymore. She tried coming back once but i didn't let her. In the 4 months, i m at my worst. I am getting government contracts now. But i have no desire to do anything. The pain is unbearable. So much that on its good days it sucks the life right out of me. So much that when it gets severe the urge to harm myself in any way goes of the charts. My best friend and i, we became friends again after my ex left. He s been helping me as much as he can. I have all the good oppurtunities and chances that any entrepreneur who has been busting his ass for 5 years straight would kill to have. But i cant do anything. I m the only one left on my team. I have to handle the business, dev, marketing etc etc ends on my own. I tried hiring and scaling up but i messed that up because of obvious reasons. And now my company has 2 months of runway left. And i know if i bust my ass i can make it to 8 months more and even raise a round a. But its really hard to do when either you re sleeping 20 hrs a day or you re sleeping 3 4 hrs because you re afraid of the nightmares. Or when even you ve had a good day, the pain becomes so much that you lay on the floor having a breakdown. Yeah, i m trying professional help. I m hoping it helps me. Because right now, i dont care about being happy. I just want my sanity. Something i m clinging to with every fiber of my being. Something that s burning out like a candle burning from both ends. I cant give up my work. I dont want to. That s all i have. That s all what i love doing and now i cant even do that. I just want this to end somehow. Either i get better and the pain and the void and silence and everything else goes away, or i do. I dont know what will happen first. And i dont care. I just want to be normal. But i guess that s too much to ask.

Find a place where management is able to handle some criticism.

I personally think Agile/Scrum is holy, and I don't mean "yeah we kind of do our own version of it", no, fucking do it by the book. The PM shouldn't assign estimates. Developers shouldn't receive bugfix requests from anyone other than the scrum master. The CTO can't be your scrum master... etc.

If a company can't answer the question "What were the points of feedback during the last retrospective(s), and how are those points being picked up?" -- Don't work there.

Many other things are optional in my opinion. I could work at a company without QA, without fruit baskets, table tennis, without Friday drinks. I could even live without git & continuous integration, just emailing patches to a patch integrator. I don't care.

But maintaining a safe bubble of serenity and sanity for devs to do their work in, that is an absolute must.

Also, option to WFH as much as wanted. Offices are nice for social bonding, but they kill productivity for me.

Sometimes I have really loose the will to live and find myself face palming multiple times.

I added live chat software a web frontend for a client. Very easy job that consisted of pasting in some embed code. The actual software is very good and has native ios/andriod apps - something specifically requested.

I got a call from my client about an hour ago, saying there is a "serious issue with the live chat".

My client stated the live chat won't work when his staff go home. He asked me what my solution to this was.

Saying "wtf" many times to myself I directed him to a settings within the chat software i.e. an "away mode" where an email is sent when no chat agents are available.

This apparently wasn't good enough and said I hadn't followed his brief of "adding life chat software to the website", which I had.

After a lengthy discussion I found the root of his frustration. He'd signed a contract with a client of his own, stating there would be 24/7 support via live chat on the website.

Obviously there a huge difference between adding a chat widget to a website and committing to having it manned 24/7 :)

After a further 10 minutes of trying push the blame on myself, the client insisted of having the chat software "appear" as someone was always online, even when they are not (people need to sleep ya know!).

Bu design, the chat software requires at least one agent be logged in before the chat status changes to "online" - why wouldn't it.

After a little while I was seriously wondering why I'm involved in this conversation. I jokingly stated: "Well you could always install Andriod/iOS app on your phone, login and permanently leave it running in background. You'd get lots of notifications, but the site would say the live is always online".

The latter was something I said in jest. To my surprise the client said he'd do that on his own phone going forwards. He actually thanked me for my "resourcefulness", lol.

I'm looking at the same dashboard now and there are 407 pending chat requests - his phone must literally be blowing up notifications :)

When a client reports a css bug in IE11 or Edge, I seriously doubt his/her sanity. For fucks sake it's 2018, please let IE go...

Every year my team runs an award ceremony during which people win “awards” for mistakes throughout the year. This years was quite good.

The integration partner award- one of our sysAdmins was talking with a partner from another company over Skype and was having some issues with azure. He intended to send me a small rant but instead sent “fucking azure can go fuck itself, won’t let me update to managed disks from a vhd built on unmanaged” to our jv partner.

Sysadmin wannabe award (mine)- ran “Sudo chmod -R 700 /“ on one of our dev systems then had to spend the next day trying to fix it 😓

The ain’t no sanity clause award - someone ran a massive update query on a prod database without a where clause

The dba wannabe award - one of our support guys was clearing out a prod dB server to make some disk space and accidentally deleted one of the databases devices bringing it down.

The open source community award - one of the devs had been messing about with an apache proxy on a prod web server and it ended up as part of a botnet

There were others but I can’t remember them all

Anyone else have to deal with an asshole who refuses to use the git repo? Not sure how much longer I can hold onto my sanity.

"WTH! Get the fuck out of here, bitch!!".

I started a new job today (remote) and my first task was to improve product sign-up process, basically the UX is shit and the backend is even worse, never felt so bad looking at terrible software design my entire life and career. My first assignment was to introduce some sanity. (Mr. Supervisor's exact words)

Anyway, I report directly to upper management but need to get onboarded by current technology expert who's highly skilled at writing shitty code and is also stupid, literally.

It took the whole day to get him to grant access to the private repo in order to start working but that's not the story.

So, I'm seated, demoralised about the structure of software I have to work on and here I was refreshing localhost:7878 consistently and was consistently getting the message:
"WTH! Get the fuck out of here, bitch!!".

So, this same codebase I have is suppose to be the exact same one that's powering the app in production. I was furious and confused. Is stupid calling me a bitch already??? He wants to fuck??? What the hell!!!

I called him and turns out, I was suppose to switch branches. The branch I had was suppose to show that message intentionally (??!???!???) (His words exactly), I couldn't even muster the words "Why" completely before he hung up.

So basically, I got onboarded today. Quite successfully, I must add, because I know exactly the battlesuit I have to wear to my new remote job going forward!

So day 2 of my python automations.

I have spent 6 hours and a lot of stack overflow “research” to saved myself 45 minutes a day with file downloads (web & ftp and outlook emails), excel spreadsheets and data manipulation macros, all stored in a nice tidy zip file at the end.

Now to find a way to send to a web server for digestion 😎

And all of this in a poor 90 lines 😧

God damn why didn’t I look into this earlier?

; DELETE * FROM Users WHERE 1=1; just checking

Coolest project I've been working on...? Keeping my sanity.

I've been away, lurking at the shadows (aka too lazy to actually log in) but a post from a new member intrigued me; this is dedicated to @devAstated . It is erratic, and VERY boring.
When I resigned from the Navy, I got a flood of questions from EVERY direction, from the lower rank personnel and the higher ups (for some reason, the higher-ups were very interested on what the resignation procedure was...). A very common question was, of course, why I resigned. This requires a bit of explaining (I'll be quick, I promise):
In my country, being in the Navy (or any public sector) means you have a VERY stable job position; you can't be fired unless you do a colossal fuck-up. Reduced to non-existent productivity? No problem. This was one of the reasons for my resignation, actually.
However, this is also used as a deterrent to keep you in, this fear of lack of stability and certainty. And this is the reason why so many asked me why I left, and what was I going to do, how was I going to be sure about my job security.
I have a simple system. It can be abused, but if you are careful, it may do you and your sanity good.
It all begins with your worth, as an employee (I assume you want to go this way, for now). Your worth is determined by the supply of your produced work, versus the demand for it. I work as a network and security engineer. While network engineers are somewhat more common, security engineers are kind of a rarity, and the "network AND security engineer" thing combined those two paths. This makes the supply of my work (network and security work from the same employee) quite limited, but the demand, to my surprise, is actually high.
Of course, this is not something easy to achieve, to be in the superior bargaining position - usually it requires great effort and many, many sleepless nights. Anyway....
Finding a field that has more demand than there is supply is just one part of the equation. You must also keep up with everything (especially with the tech industry, that changes with every second). The same rules apply when deciding on how to develop your skills: develop skills that are in short supply, but high demand. Usually, such skills tend to be very difficult to learn and master, hence the short supply.
You probably got asleep by now.... WAKE UP THIS IS IMPORTANT!
Now, to job security: if you produce, say, 1000$ of work, then know this:
YOU WILL BE PAID LESS THAN THAT. That is how the company makes profit. However, to maximize YOUR profit, and to have a measure of job security, you have to make sure that the value of your produced work is high. This is done by:
- Producing more work by working harder (hard method)
- Producing more work by working smarter (smart method)
- Making your work more valuable by acquiring high demand - low supply skills (economics method)
The hard method is the simplest, but also the most precarious - I'd advise the other two. Now, if you manage to produce, say, 3000$ worth of work, you can demand for 2000$ (numbers are random).
And here is the thing: any serious company wants employees that produce much more than they cost. The company will strive to pay them with as low a salary as it can get away with - after all, a company seeks to maximize its profit. However, if you have high demand - low supply skills, which means that you are more expensive to be replaced than you are to be paid, then guess what? You have unlocked god mode: the company needs you more than you need the company. Don't get me wrong: this is not an excuse to be unprofessional or unreasonable. However, you can look your boss in the eye. Believe me, most people out there can't.
Even if your company fails, an employee with valuable skills that brings profit tends to be snatched very quickly. If a company fires profitable employees, unless it hires more profitable employees to replace them, it has entered the spiral of death and will go bankrupt with mathematical certainty. Also, said fired employees tend to be absorbed quickly; after all, they bring profit, and companies are all about making the most profit.
It was a long post, and somewhat incoherent - the coffee buzz is almost gone, and the coffee crash is almost upon me. I'd like to hear the insight of the veterans; I estimate that it will be beneficial for the people that start out in this industry.

I'm so sorry professional C# header makers

My school just tried to hinder my revision for finals now. They've denied me access just today of SSHing into my home computer. Vim & a filesystem is soo much better than pen and paper.

So I went up to the sysadmin about this. His response: "We're not allowing it any more". That's it - no reason. Now let's just hope that the sysadmin was dumb enough to only block port 22, not my IP address, so I can just pick another port to expose at home. To be honest, I was surprised that he even knew what SSH was. I mean, sure, they're hired as sysadmins, so they should probably know that stuff, but the sysadmins in my school are fucking brain dead.

For one, they used to block Google, and every other HTTPS site on their WiFi network because of an invalid certificate. Now it's even more difficult to access google as you need to know the proxy settings.

They switched over to forcing me to remote desktop to access my files at home, instead of the old, faster, better shared web folder (Windows server 2012 please help).

But the worst of it includes apparently having no password on their SQL server, STORING FUCKING PASSWORDS IN PLAIN TEXT allowing someone to hijack my session, and just leaving a file unprotected with a shit load of people's names, parents, and home addresses. That's some super sketchy illegal shit.

So if you sysadmins happen to be reading this on devRant, INSTEAD OF WASTING YOUR FUCKING TIME BLOCKING MORE WEBSITES THAN THEIR ARE LIVING HUMANS, HOW ABOUT TRY UPPING YOUR SECURITY, PASSWORDS LIKE "", "", and "gryph0n" ARE SHIT - MAKE IT BETTER SO US STUDENTS CAN ACTUALLY BROWSE MORE FREELY - I THINK I WANT TO PASS, NOT HAVE EVERY OTHER THING BLOCKED.

Thankfully I'm leaving this school in 3 weeks after my last exam. Sure, I could stay on with this "highly reputable" school, but I don't want to be fucking lied to about computer studies, I don't want to have to workaround your shitty methods of blocking. As far as I can tell, half of the reputation is from cheating. The students and sysadmins shouldn't have to have an arms race between circumventing restrictions and blocking those circumventions. Just make your shit work for once.

**On second thought, actually keep it like that. Most of the people I see in the school are c***s anyway - they deserve to have half of everything they try to do censored. I won't be around to care soon.**

Every time I interact with this DBA he treats me like I’m some fucking moron who barely knows what a query is. It doesn’t help that I can’t get him to understand a damned fucking thing, no matter what the topic is. We speak the same language, supposedly, but can barely communicate. I can’t even begin describe how his half of the conversations go because I am unable to follow much of it.

Maybe if I start aligning my fucking chakras and channeling my inner goddamn cosmic peace energy, or whatever it is he’s on about, he might start making more sense? I swear he’s been so high so often that he’s never quite come down.

There’s obviously a language barrier, somehow, but the guy is also such a douche every freaking time. Ugh.

Woke up at 5am with the realization that I could use regular expressions to parse the string representation of regular expressions to build this program to parse regular expressions into more human-readable English.

I am so tired.

Ok, so when I inherit a Wordpress site I've really stopped expecting anything sane. Examples: evidence that the Wordpress "developer" (that term is used in the loosest sense possible) has thought about his/her code or even evidence that they're not complete idiots who wish to make my life hell going forwards.

Have a look at the screen shot below - this is from the theme footer, so loaded on every page. The screenshot only shows a small part of the file. IT LITERALLY HAS 3696 lines.

Firstly, lets excuse the frankly eye watering if statement to check for the post ID. That made me face palm myself immediately.

The insanity comes for the thousands of lines of JQuery code, duplicated to hell and back that changes the color of various dividers - that are scattered throughout the site.

To make things thousands of times worse, they are ALL HANDED CODED.

Even if JavaScript was the only way I could format these particular elements I certainly wouldn't duplicate the same code for every element. After copy and pasting that JQuery a couple of times and normal developer would think one word, pretty quickly - repetition.

When a good developer notes repetition ways to abstract crap away is the first thought that comes to mind.

Hell, when I was first learning to code god knows how long ago I always used functions to avoid repetition.

In this case, with a few seconds though this "developer" could have created a single JQuery handler and use data attributes within the HTML. Hell, as bad as that is, it's better than the monstrosity I'm looking at now.

I'm aware Wordpress is associated with bad developers due to it's low barrier to entry, but this site is something else.

The scary thing is that I know the agency that produced this. They are very large, use Wordpress exclusively and have some stupidly huge clients that would be know nationally.

Wordpress truly does attract some of the most awful "developers" and deserves it's reputation.

If you're a good developer and use Wordpress I feel sorry for you, as you're in small numbers from my experience.

Rant over, have vented a bit and feel better. Thanks Devrant.

Sometimes, when I think I'm going crazy, I open devrant and realize that I'm still very far from MadMen / YouAllSuck / AvatarOfKaine.

If ever your code breaks, just utter these words and it will magically fix itself:

"Wtf. Hey [coworker name], Can you sanity check this code? I don't know why this segfaults! It looks fine but you just run it and it bre- oh wait... I swear it didn't work a minute ago."

That's it, I'm done. My sincere condolences go to the poor soul that will have to maintain this complete and utter crap of code, as I have been doing the past 2 weeks.

3-4 big 4K+ lines files of completely unindented, practically undocumented, interspersed HTML, PHP, JavaScript and CSS! All in the same file.

All the function and variable names are complete nonsense. You might as well have smashed your head against the keyboard and let whatever came out be the names.

You took all the naming conventions that you could find and unleashed your seriously damaged imagination. lowerCamelCase, UpperCamelCase, snakecase, everything in the same fucking function name.

I really needed the money from this project. But I'm done. My mental sanity is more important that try to figure out how to make a decent and usable webpage of THIS COMPLETE DISASTER.

You, the one before me. If you wanted to make sure that no one else besides you could work with this crap, then congrats, YOU FUCKING DID IT WITH HONORS. FUCKING SUMMA CUM LAUDE. PhD and all.

Hallucinations of my father that keep taking control of my psyche and making me hack things I don't remember or shooting me in the head to break down my sanity.

Holy fucking cockgoblin!

If you interview for a senior position, please, for the sanity of your interviewer (me), make sure you know how to declare variables and how to iterate over an array in the language which the shitgoblin (you) "love and use all the time".

Of course the interviewer (me) is gonna be polite and let the shitgoblin (you) code out your 50-line solution for a 3-line problem, but after 2 hours watching the shitgoblin contemplate solutions that anyone who ever opened a fucking beginners tutorial by accident could answer, the interviewer might prefer to have been on a Justin Bieber concert or have sucked huge sweaty ballsacks for those two hours.

I know that interviews can be hard and stressful - I've been there, am there, and at some point will be there again - but please, for the love of nonexistent gods, don't be a time-wasting shitnugget but prepare yourself!

At a certain client, was asked to help them with an "intermediary" solution to stopgap a license renewal on their HR recruiting system.

This is something I was very familiar with, so no big. Did some requirements gathering, told them we could knock it out in 6 weeks.

We start the project, no problems, everything is fine until about 2.5 weeks in. At this point, someone demands that we engage with the testing team early. It grates a little as this client had the typical Indian outsourcing mega-corp pointey-clickey shit show "testing" (automation? Did you mean '10 additional testers?') you get at companies who put business people in charge of technology, but I couldn't really argue with it.

So we're progressing along and the project manager decides now is a great time to bugger the fuck off to India for 3 months, so she's totally gone. This is the point it goes off the rails. Without a PM to control the scope, the "lead tester," we'll call her Shrilldesi, proceeds to sit in a room and start trying to control the design of the system. Rather than testing anything in the specification, she just looked at the existing full HRIS recruiting system they were using and starts submitting bugs for missing features. The fuckwit serfs they'd assigned from HR to oversee this process just allowed it to happen totally losing focus on the fact this was an interim solution to hold them over for 6 months and avoid a contract renewal.

I get real passive aggressive at this point and refuse to deliver anything outside the original scope. We negotiate and end up with about 150% scope bloat and a now untenable timeline that we delivered about 2 weeks late, but in the end that absolute whore made my life a living hell for the duration of the project. She then got the recognition at the project release for her "excellent work," no mention of the people who actually did the work.

Tl;Dr people suck and if you value your sanity, you'll avoid companies that say things like, "we're not in the technology business" as an excuse to have shitty, ignorant staff.

I'm coming off a lengthy staff augmentation assignment awful enough that I feel like I need to be rehabilitated to convince myself that I even want to be a software developer.

They needed someone who does .NET. It turns out what they meant was someone to copy and paste massive amounts of code that their EA calls a "framework." Just copy and paste this entire repo, make a whole ton of tweaks that for whatever reason never make their way back into the "template," and then make a few edits for some specific functionality. And then repeat. And repeat. Over a dozen times.

The code is unbelievable. Everything is stacked into giant classes that inherit from each other. There's no dependency inversion. The classes have default constructors with a comment "for unit testing" and then the "real" code uses a different one.

It's full of projects, classes, and methods with weird names that don't do anything. The class and method names sound like they mean something but don't. So after a dozen times I tried to refactor, and the EA threw a hissy fit. Deleting dead code, reducing three levels of inheritance to a simple class, and renaming stuff to indicate what it does are all violations of "standards." I had to go back to the template and start over.

This guy actually recorded a video of himself giving developers instructions on how to copy and paste his awful code.

Then he randomly invents new "standards." A class that reads messages from a queue and processes them shouldn't process them anymore. It should read them and put them in another queue, and then we add more complication by reading from that queue. The reason? We might want to use the original queue for something else one day. I'm pretty sure rewriting working code to meet requirements no one has is as close as you can get to the opposite of Agile.

I fixed some major bugs during my refactor, and missed one the second time after I started over. So stuff actually broke in production because I took points off the board and "fixed" what worked to add back in dead code, variables that aren't used, etc.

In the process, I asked the EA how he wanted me to do this stuff, because I know that he makes up "standards" on the fly and whatever I do may or may not be what he was imagining. We had a tight deadline and I didn't really have time to guess, read his mind, get it wrong, and start over. So we scheduled an hour for him to show me what he wanted.

He said it would take fifteen minutes. He used the first fifteen insisting that he would not explain what he wanted, and besides he didn't remember how all of the code he wrote worked anyway so I would just have to spend more time studying his masterpiece and stepping through it in the debugger.

Being accountable to my team, I insisted that we needed to spend the scheduled hour on him actually explaining what he wanted. He started yelling and hung up. I had to explain to management that I could figure out how to make his "framework" work, but it would take longer and there was no guarantee that when it was done it would magically converge on whatever he was imagining. We totally blew that deadline.

When the .NET work was done, I got sucked into another part of the same project where they were writing massive 500 line SQL stored procedures that no one could understand. They would write a dozen before sending any to QA, then find out that there was a scenario or two not accounted for, and rewrite them all. And repeat. And repeat. Eventually it consisted of, one again, copying and pasting existing procedures into new ones.

At one point one dev asked me to help him test his procedure. I said sure, tell me the scenarios for which I needed to test. He didn't know. My question was the equivalent of asking, "Tell me what you think your code does," and he couldn't answer it. If the guy who wrote it doesn't know what it does right after he wrote it and you certainly can't tell by reading it, and there's dozens of these procedures, all the same but slightly different, how is anyone ever going to read them in a month or a year? What happens when someone needs to change them? What happens when someone finds another defect, and there are going to be a ton of them?

It's a nightmare. Why interview me with all sorts of questions about my dev skills if the plan is to have me copy and paste stuff and carefully avoid applying anything that I know?

The people are all nice except for their evil XEB (Xenophobe Expert Beginner) EA who has no business writing a line of code, ever, and certainly shouldn't be reviewing it.

I've tried to keep my sanity by answering stackoverflow questions once in a while and sometimes turning evil things I was forced to do into constructive blog posts to which I cannot link to preserve my anonymity. I feel like I've taken a six-month detour from software development to shovel crap. Never again. Lesson learned. Next time they're not interviewing me. I'm interviewing them. I'm a professional.

looking at my uncle's webpage because he wants to switch hosts.
The logo has a white background, we want to change that.
Uncle: "It's not supposed to look like this"
Me: "the jpg file type is not transparent, you have to make something like a png."
U: *pulls up word* "hmm... I don't have that font on this laptop..."
M: *slowly loses sanity*

i understand some developers like to write wrapper functions to handle tedious things, I even understand how to write dynamic SQL queries, but for the love of fucking god and sanity, NEVER FUCKING DO THIS!!!!

Yes its PHP, but its not even bad PHP, its a fucking abomination from hell of PHP.

A meeting about defining the
definition of done (…)
I know I mentioned it before, but it’s beyond stupid.

- Lasted 2.5 hours
- Didn’t solve shit
- Could have been solved by adding a freaking column in our Jira, but someone wanted a physical board cause let’s waste paper I guess.

Just imagine 2.5 hours of continuous suggestions and stupid reject reasons.

Fun fact: it was called by a “senior” dev which rejected every single purposal cause they also didn’t want to change the process.

Idfk why I didn’t leave the company sooner, had to get a massive burnout before realising my sanity is worth more than being paid the minimum in the office.

A comment line can save the sanity of many programmers

Slange var my dudes.

Any favorite liquors/sanity juice to reccommend for a noob dev?

See, static typing? that shit is for putos. You think you're so cool with your advanced intellisense being able to tell you "yo....dat shit ain't the type you think it is" or your compiler telling you "yo dumbass, you fucked this parameter up in here, you are doing <x> when in reality you should be doing #@$@#$@!<X at line !@#@#$#>"

pfffft static typing. Such a pansy ass thing to worry about.

Picture us, working outside of the safety net of static typing, as jungle explorers, walking slowly, with a machete in hand and our other hand clutched tightly at our hip pistol, not knowing what to shoot at, but eagerly prepared for when shit fucks up because whatever the fuck you did was not properly safeguarded by a compiler to tell you that you fucked up, even if the compiler message is unintelligible (looking at you C and C++)

We is men here, we is brave retarded adventurers.

As our sanity blips into oblivion and we look at our code that has no sort of type checking expecting our shitty intellisense extensions to protect us....

Edit: if you can't understand the sarcasm in here and the plea for sanity then you are obviously a retard and have no place in the world of development

WebDev jobs should come with big warning signs:
"You absolutely will lose your sanity!"
"IE11 might indirectly lead to impotence!"
"You won't get laid more often by using CSS Grid!"
"You will have to fix websites which only appear broken on iOS Safari!"
"Get some extra terabytes ready for your node modules!"
"Get ready to yarnify your npm dockerized webassembly blobs while gulping on your mocha chai latte with no karma!"

Can't we just go back to the good old times with Quick Basic and chill?
Man, the ladies were flocking around those programmer boyz, I tell ya... Klickety klackety on the mechanical

!rant

Two years ago, I started to learn Ruby on Rails so I would at last know a server language even though it wasn't the almighty PHP. Two years ago minus a few months, I decided to put my first website online with Apache and Passenger. It took me a whole six hours with stress and cries for help until I finally saw my website's homepage displayed on my screen

Today, after a few more websites (and currently 3 more projects but still not released, dang it), I tried to update mySQL to 5.7 since I need it to be able to save arrays for a future project, but everything went full shitstorm with broken packages and lame-ass-shit tutorials that make you doubt your sanity.

So I decided to backup my database and my online websites and to reinstall the whole server and take advantage of it to update the current used gems (Rails 4.2 -> 5.1, not bad)

Not only it took me just a bit more than 2 hours to redeploy the websites, but I didn't felt at the edge of panicking once, and now everything works like a charm.

I feel fucking alpha now.

So we have an API that my team is supposed send messages to in a fire and forget kind of style.

We are dependent on it. If it fails there is some annoying manual labor involved to clean that mess up. (If it even can be cleaned up, as sometimes it is also time-sensitive.)

Yet once in a while, that endpoint just crashes by letting the request vanish. No response, no error, nothing, it is just gone.

Digging through the log files of that API nothing pops up. Yet then I realize the size of the log files. About ~30GB on good old plain text log files.

It turns out that that API has taken the LOG EVERYTHING approach so much too heart that it logs to the point of its own death.

Is circular logging such a bleeding edge technology? It's not like there are external solutions for it like loggly or kibana. But oh, one might have to pay for them. Just dump it to the disk :/

This is again a combination of developers thinking "I don't need to care about space! It's cheap!" and managers thinking "100 GB should be enough for that server cluster. Let's restrict its HDD to 100GB, save some money!"

And then, here I stand trying to keep my sanity :/

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

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

"I want visibility in the sprint", "Information for everyone! When you do even a small refactoring, you should add a card to the sprint, clear?"
Those were the words of the product manager.

That sounds reasonable but when there is a bug to investigate, he just pops to the chat channel throw a request with a bit of information and asks to check/fix that.

So to keep my sanity, I asked him to create a ticket with relevant information and additional observations so we can have visibility as he was advocating for it ;)

It felt just good to see him going silent :D

GF: How was your pitch to investors?
Me: it was great (... went-ahead to talk about the daunting process of the preparation and motivation).
GF: Why do you go through all this process, when you can become a fraudster, you can use voodoo and make it even easier, in less than 3 months you can buy a duplex, nice car and we can go shopping... you don't need to do any human ritual unlike before - I heard you can even meet a chief priest to make it faster for you.
just get the bag abeg (slang for getting rich quick).

Me: Fuck the day I met you, not everyone wants to be a low-life, and fuck out from my life.

Men if you live in a saner society, or you are born to elite/upper-middle-class you don't how lucky you are.
Most times I wonder how I keep my sanity with all these shitty people around. like messed up society where almost everyone is a fucking deep hypocrite
.I know I need to change my circle but how the fuck do I do that when I am surrounded by fuckstards, which are far worst than Gypsies.
lowlifes with low dreams.
I need to get the fuck out of this place!

Honestly, nothing kills your brain cells faster than doing the same repetitive tasks at work, day in and day out. It’s like I'm just on autopilot—pushing buttons, running scripts, rinse, repeat. At some point, I start wondering if I’m a dev or just a glorified robot.

And to keep my sanity intact? Competitive programming. Yeah, that’s how I free my mind—throwing myself into algorithmic problems during my break time, just to remind myself that there’s more to life than the mundane loop of tasks at work. I’ll take an NP-hard problem over this any day. At least that makes me think.

Me and a fellow friend started working as a freelancer.

of 3 projects that we have:

One has a terrible code (like really nasty and over engineered to the maximum). albeit each new feature is a challenge to our sanity... they pay are are somewhat nice.

Another after we did the job they don't want to pay (thankfully we are on a platform that is like the middle man for work, they already have the money so should be "trivial") because they say we did not do what they asked. Brother, the 2 A.M. is not an hour to be called, and we did all the little shitty task they askend AND the original tasks...

And in the last one we hired a team to work with us because we don't have more hours in a day... and they only rename some vars, call it a day, ignoring the task on the sprint and they wanna get paid for the "job"

I just wanna drink a few pints of guinness...

Decided to stop lurking and sign up. Hi devRant. Thanks for all the sanity conservation you've provided me.

!rant

I love these Sanity Checks just for the comments along with them 😂

Sanity...
a gift from the universe...
destroyed by incompetent coders.

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

After going through the painstaking process of getting automation scripts reviewed by the whole team, edits, commits, reverts and finally loosing sanity

and you see the team is still using the old automation scripts in testing.

(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

This begs for a rant... [too bad I can't post actual screenshots :/ ]

Me: He k8s team! We're having trouble with our k8s cluster. After scaling up and running h/c and Sanity tests environment was confirmed as Healthy and Stable. But once we'd started our load tests k8s cluster went out for a walk: most of the replicas got stoped and restarted and I cannot find in events' log WHY that happened. Could you please have a look?

k8s team [india]: Hello, thank you for reaching out to k8s support. We will check and let you know.

Me: Oh, you're welcome! I'll be just sitting here quietly and eagerly waiting for your reply. TIA! :slightly_smiling_face:

<5 minutes later>

k8s team India: Hi. Could you give me a list of replicas that were failing?

Me: I gave you a Grafana link with a timeframe filter. Look there -- almost all apps show instability at k8s layer. For instance APP_1 and APP_2 were OK. But APP_3, APP_4 and APP_5 were crashing all over the place

k8s team India: ok I will check.

<My shift has ended. k8s team works in different timezone. I've opened up Slack this morning>

k8s team India: HI. APP_1 and APP_2 are fine. I don't even see any errors from logs, no restarts. All response codes are 200.

Me: 🤦‍♂️ .... Man, isn't that what I've said? ... 🤦‍♂️

I have to work with an unbelievable stubborn (and incompetent) "project Manager)

He just actually tried to convince us that leading 0 in some" hexadecimal" strings get truncated.

I know that does not sound like something to lose the mind over, but these wrong facts do come up ever so often. It knaws on my sanity.

This is getting annoying.

For the past >half a year I've been chasing windmills. This is what my BAU day looks like:

- We login to client's network
- We start running some Sanity tests before the actual runs (actual runs are hell of an expensive (financially and time-wise) thing to launch) to make sure environment is OK.
- Sanity tests fail. wtf? Nothing's been changed since y-day!
- Spend ~3-4 hours digging logs, code, more logs,... Apparently some genius decided to change a single parameter.
- Spend another 1-2 hours trying to work around that parameter (since apparently that genius did have a task to do that, so we'll most likely have to find a way to live with it)
- Restart the whole env (~30min).
- Launch a Smoke, Sanity tests to verify env state.
- Launch the actual test
- Go home.

Next day:
- We login to client's network
- We start running some Sanity tests before the actual runs to make sure environment is OK.
- Sanity tests pass.
- Run the actual test
- Concurrency on RDS database is sky-rocketing! WTF did that come from??? Nothing's been changed since y-day!!
- Spend ~1-2 hours looking for anything changed, dig some logs for anything unusual. Nothing.
- Escalate to DBA. 2 hours later DBA says "fix the app". thanks for nothing mate....
- Spend remaining 2 hours analysing AWR. Give up, restart the whole RDS instance. Another hour wasted.
- Time to go home. Out of curiosity run Sanity test -- all good. Run the actual test -- all good. wtf??
- Go home

Next day
- We login to client's network
- We start running some Sanity tests before the actual runs to make sure environment is OK.
- Sanity tests fail. wtf? Nothing's been changed since y-day!
- Spend ~3-4 hours digging logs, code, more logs,... Apparently some genius decided to change a single parameter.
- Spend another 1-2 hours trying to work around that parameter
- ..... I think you know where this is going.

And this keeps going on and on, day by day. Spending the better half of the day chasing windmills and doing our actual work on the last hour of the working day or even after that.

We have plenty of interesting tasks in our Jira but we're squirels spinning in the wheel and never being able to touch them.

It feels like I'm wasting my time. I could do so much more with my time!

[just needed to vent ]

Wow, a Random Rant. Two Parts.

1) It's been my pleasure to discover this site. I visit here far less frequently than I used to, but the shot of sanity it gives me never waivers. Thank you to all the sane people who are members. I don't know you, but you help me to hang on when I really just want to sit in a corner with my face turned to the wall.

2) The new (September 2020) Windows update seems to have its colourful streamers of Fuckery flickerying at us in beautiful Day-Glo grinning contempt. It's been two years since I switched away from Mac. And I gladly take this crap from Microsoft. You don't know how close I came to being sectioned from being a Mac user. Have a good weekend. Peace out.

How to keep your sanity.

So very true!

Thank god for Linux subsystem for Windows. It's like island of sanity at sea of madness...

I like like my boss and my coworkers and the place I work but for the love of goat cheese this org has the attention span of a toddler on meth.

Seriously, it's like this is your #1 priority, next week, wait we have a different emergency you have a new super critical urgent thing, then "hey team Y has a vendor coming in next month to integrate these two pieces and they need you to have half of it wired up by then so make sure you get that done." Like SERIOUSLY SERIOUSLY

HERE"S SOME LIFE ADVICE IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT YOU PLAN OR SCHEDULE OR PRIORITIZE IF YOU END UP CHANGING ALL OF IT EVERY WEEK!

It's like painting a mural of a field, and then 10 minutes in you decide you'd rather paint a space ship, then you realize you don't like the space ship so instead you decide to change your painting to Elvis with a mullet, and you keep doing this. The end result is not beauty it's the mad deranged scribbles of a man past the point of sanity.

But for the love of Haliburton if they ask me why X or Y wasn't done I'll probably end up going full BOFH on somebody.

I think I'm starting to lose sanity.

I'm unconsciously desiring to have bugs just so I can have some feeling of accomplishment fixing them.

I think I'm starting to lose sanity.

Fulfillment company: the order you put in our system is wrong, the hours we needed to correct this will be charged to you (Red: or rather my employer)

Me: *Checks logs and our server - finds out the order was made in their own webform/webapp*

Me: hey how come I can put in values in your webform that should not pass sanity checks, thats weird (in this case it was a product w/ a quantity of 0)

Fulfillment company: we don't do sanity checks or validation, we just find out when shit crashes and burns, nothing weird about that

Me: WTF

I am working on an open source game project, and the most common way to draw things is using a class named ManagedSurface. The class is otherwise awesome, but it has a method called getBasePtr(x, y), which gives you a pointer to the requested coordinates. Fair enough (this is C++ without STL by the way).

But WHY THE HELL CAN I REQUEST ANY POINTER THAT I WANT, EVEN IF IT'S OUTSIDE THE SURFACE? Other cointainers have sanity checks, asserts and such, and the surface KEEPS TRACK OF IT'S WIDTH AND HEIGHT.

WAS IT SO FUCKING HARD TO ADD assert(x <= w); assert(y <= h);???

I spent 3 days on valgrind trying to find a heap corruption that manifested at random points in the code.

FUUUUCK!

On the bright side, I learned how to use valgrind (which is awesomely awesome).

devRant keeps closing on iPhone.
For the love of sanity, stop doing that you beautiful asshole!

In this season of a fussy toddler with the flu, Window docking saved my sanity!

The legacy codebase, episode 4584985948:
- outdated comment
- die parentheses space string no-space parentheses
- die AND exit, just to be on the safe side
- won't comment about the screaming boolean
- at least they used triple equals (and yep, that's a font ligature)

After two months of NPM hell I have made the decision to stop trying to catch up to this Javascript insanity.

The salary I would make if I understood this shit is not worth my sanity. Most people develop a career, but all I seem to develop is RSI and a seething hatred for humanity.

It's how we stay sane

Parents had asked me to assemble some furniture, fix the pc and so some other "brain" work

Furniture
Me: *Stops to check something in the manual*
Parents: Are you stuck? Maybe try assembling the door upside down
Me: No, it is the right way
Parents: *Ramble, ramble*
Me: Just let me work, shut the hell up

PC
Me: *Checks cables, checks logs, ect*
Parents: Maybe it is the problem with (insert random tech word there)?
Me: No.
Parents: W h y?
Me: Let me finish, it isnt that, (tech word) isnt even correlated to that
Parents: But, but, you never talk to me... (ramble ramble)
Me: Get the hell outta the room
*Argumemt breaks out*
30min later

Me: *Finnaly manages to fix it after the heated argument*
Me: I finished, everything works
Parents: Great, but you are mean
Me: I managed to finish the work in 15 min, you dont even have enough strengh to call for a specialist, (but knowing me i wouldnt allow it anyway because a lot of them make a poor job), so in order to make it properly and to relieve you from learning how to fucking google i want you to stay out of this so i can just finish my job. Your interruptions waste time and i dont need your help at all. Everytime you tried to fix stuff you always managed to fuck shit up when you tried to do anything.
Parents: (ramble)
Me: SHUT THE FUCK UP, LEAVE MY ROOM
Parents:
Me:
Parents: *Leave the room*

1h later i get 25$ for the job perfectly done

Sometime i wish they were tech independent, so i can save my sanity and time but money is nice.

If anybody tries to argue that i should respect them:
I tried talking to them nicely countless times through years, but they always force themself to a project and they always fuck shit up because of it. I tried telling them about my problems and they tried helping me but after it didnt work they retured to the old: "it is the pc fault" and similar. Even if they couldnt help me i juat wanted them to understand my situation, but no that didnt happened.

First i fix my life then i will fix the relationship

But but greeeeeg, relationships should be cared for always!
Eat shit. There is time for family and there is time for me especialy when my life can suddenly colapse due to my problems.

Companies! For the love of your peoples sanity give the developers of all ages worthwhile machines. If you send us to clients to develop iOS apps, send macs also 😤

I get an email about an hour before I get into work: Our website is 502'ing and our company email addresses are all spammed! I login to the server, test if static files (served separately from site) works (they do). This means that my upstream proxy'd PHP-FPM process was fucked. I killed the daemon, checked the web root for sanity, and ran it again. Then, I set up rate limiting. Who knew such a site would get hit?

Some fucking script kiddie set up a proxy, ran Scrapy behind it, and crawled our site for DDoS-able URLs - even out of forms. I say script kiddie because no real hacker would hit this site (it's minor tourism in New Jersey), and the crawler was too advanced for joe shmoe to write. You're no match for well-tuned rate-limiting, asshole!

the hopeful tone in these weekly discussions makes me question my sanity

I FINALLY GOT CHROME BACK!!! A few weeks ago, my computer, for no reason, said I couldn't use chrome due to Microsoft Family features, despite me not having a Microsoft Family setup. I have been using edge for weeks. Pray for my sanity.

The solution, was to create a new Microsoft account and run chrome as that. But, it does bring up the interesting topic of how much Microsoft sucks. They do this all the time, they look at something that doesn't need meddling with, like my right to use my property and my apllications, and release some garbage they didn't test without thinking of the implications. Did anyone ever as Microsoft for a way to manage your family forcefully? No. Because, if you cared enough, I'm sure you could just download a stupid family app, rather than let Microsoft take hostage of your computers.

One thing really interesting to me was that Firefox nor chrome worked, but edge could launch just fine. A little suspicious, don't ya think, Microsoft?

I promised a friend to have a look over his dads website to add a small blog. No big deal, I've got it on my drive, can reuse it just need to adapt it to the environment.

I take a look at what I'm working with and I see the most terrifying piece of "Please, take my data" code I could possibly imagine (And I've seen passwords, in plain text in a script tag). I quote "function queryDB(mode, val) {
var query=" ";
if(mode==="findProd")
query="Select * from Products where ProdNam=" +val;
... (same shit for different cases)
sendQuery(query) ;
}

He literally built the query on the client side sent it to a php script (without validation) and inserted it into the database.
You could literally call window.sendQuery with any sql query and get the result printed into the console.
And other than the plain text passwords guy that wasn't some kid someone knew, this was a "Webdesign" Agency.
Now I took the entire thing offline, called my friends dad, explained it to him and try to sort this out. I would not charge a good friends father but that hack will get a quite hefty bill since my hourly rate just tripled.

And the worst thing : If I publicly name that asshole or warn the people in his portfolio I can, according to Google, be sued. (But, and I assume thats vague enough not to count as bad mouthing, if anyone of you has a customer from Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany with a preexisting page, please have a look at the database interface)
I will call that agency tomorrow, ask for a detailed explanation for why they apparently let trained monkeys write their code and anonymously warn everyone in their portfolio about those flaws...

I don't know if I'm cursed or if there are just that many bad devs but it seems that once a year I have to stumble over some "mistakes" that make me question my sanity.

dev: “I want to start working on [feature]”

Me: “I already started to work on it, sorry for not mentioning it, we need specs from design team before I can go on, but I’d suggest going for another task meanwhile”

Manager: “noooo design is very very busy, [dev] will take care of it.”

Me: “[dev] still needs specs from the design team... and I am half done with it so no real point in re-writing the same code I wrote”

Manager: “just trust me, we do this and [dev] takes care of it.”

*me and [dev] look at each other perplexed and just nod to the manager cause it’s Thursday and the fucks to give are over*

... am I actually a patient in an asylum? I question my sanity after this exchange of words.

while reading rebecca & brain's book on object oriented software. I realised that the programmer is a special kind of person. the complexity he can handle, the struggle to implement a system, from input to output, satellite control, AI, robotics, heck, even the planning required for a simple android app, the complexity is overwhelming at first, then you get your jotter and break it down into parts, and you drive yourself to the edge of sanity figuring out an algorithm, then you go over that edge implementing it, but oh that great super hero feeling when you finally get something to work exactly as specified, I'm not sure people in other professions can understand the satisfaction. I'm very young in the whole programmer world, but I'm growing fast, I'm just really grateful programming found me, I mean, can you think of something else you'lld rather do? yeah, me neither.

PSA: negate your tests and make sure they fail!

I have what I thought was a weird and slightly paranoid habit. When I write tests sometimes just as a sanity check negate the assertion to make sure the test fails and isn't a false positive. Almost always fails as expected.

But not today! Turns out I had forgotten to wrap my equality check in an assertion so it would always pass. It freaks me out to imagine pushing a test that always passes not just because it doesn't do its job, but could also obscure a bug and trick me into thinking it works differently than it does. Broken tests are the worst!

But it pays to be paranoid.

I think I’m going to lose my mind. This stupid website I’m working on keeps going down and at the worst times possible. Nothing we do seems to help. I’m again awakened in the middle of the night to attend to it and still have no good answers why. My anxiety is through the roof because I can’t get back to sleep after tonight’s outage. The client is beyond pissed even though a ton of problems would be solved if they would just get off of some legacy software and onto something more modern. But they insisted it be this way and the budget is already blown and then some even if they changed their minds. If it’s going to be that I continue losing so much sleep and sanity, I may just have to quit this job. I hate the thought of that because I always want to see things through to a happy conclusion. And I like my teammates and don’t want to let them down. But I’m too old for that kind of no-sleep development lifestyle now. Nobody’s shitty website is worth my physical and mental health.

I am so fucking lost.

I literally have zero expectations from life for now and future.

There was a time when I had so much clarity in my life. Rather, I was known for it.
Folks used to reach me out for guidance and my approaches even worked for others.

I was goal oriented and biased towards action. Failing and learning from it, I used to make things happen and with constant feedback kept progressing.

While none of that has changed, I still feel lost and numb. No, I am not depressed or suffering through any mental illness. I am physical active and able to feel the happiness.

But the recent incident with a narcissistic, left me emotionally handicap. I can no longer feel any kind of love or affection. I overcame the damage done and healed myself.

But now, I am done. Even if I engage with anyone for a relationship it would be mostly for sex. I can care for people around me and be affectionate towards them but when it comes to an intimate relationship, I feel it's not something I can do in this lifetime. I tried multiple times but failed.

These days, all I am doing is putting my heads down and working like crazy. Never in my life I worked more than 10 hours in an entire week. Now, I work 10+ hours everyday. During that time, I am highly productive.

And in my free time, I am busy housekeeping different life problems. Either paying bills, figuring out an insurance, planning some investment, or making some kind of life decision.

It's draining me. I feel as if I am losing sanity. But that's the only thing I am able to do.

Maybe it's the lockdown effect. Maybe some damage is yet to be healed.

But I got nothing better to do. I have some good ideas. Not those hipster-ish disruptive Million dollar ideas, but decent enough to solve a problem for a strong use case.

However, all of this is becoming overwhelming these days. Because decision making is complex and difficult task. It can make or break the future.

As of now I am confused how should I go about pursuing two of the important projects that I want to accomplish.

1. Migrating out of Google ecosystem. Is it even practically possible for my use case? What are the alternatives? Planning to opt in for a paid cloud storage so have to factor in that aspect as well.

I want to keep this new setup only for official use like bank and government stuff. Maybe family and close friends. Then have current ids for public logins and sharing it with retards whom I can block or ignore if they harass me. The research is overwhelming but having a structured setup gives insane amount of efficiency when life is spam free.

2. Migrating my Pihole and OpenVPN setup out of Digital Ocean to GCP. Primarily because $5 is a lot of amount for my computational requirements and Google has used my data enough, for me to use the free tier.
However, there isn't a simple script for a tech noob like me, to go ahead and setup something. I did find a Github repository but the documentation is kind of outdated so RTFM failed for me.

I don't know whether to pursue my start-up or let it go and focus on moving to Europe.

It's just so fucking stupid to even exist. And let's not forget taxes. Bloody taxes.

Got the first payment of the next contract after a three month slump! The first slump since leaving university.

Time to pay devRant for Sanity Preservation Services for three months. 🤗

So, those of you who have been in quarantine for more than a week, how are you keeping your sanity?

Specially the news, goddamn, people are so stupid. The number of infected around here has been skyrocketing so I'm not even afraid of getting the virus anymore, I'm more afraid of the damn numbers going up.

Also, those of you who don't live alone, need not reply. 😝

I like my independence, but goddamn this feels a lot like being in luxury solitary confinement. Plus, I have to cook for myself.

Urghhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

I'm not a dev, but I visit this site due to its overwhelming sanity. That said, I have two bests:

First: Never thought I'd say it, but having Windows as opposed to Mac has continued to keep me from going batshit cray. I liken my relationship with Mac to a marriage that started out wonderfully and wound up in a field of acrimony, broken promises, and literal hatred.

Second: This site, as mentioned above.

Listen to your developer when they have an idea that will save you time or money. If she's wrong she will fix her mistake because she wants to be good at what she does. If you're wrong you'll be crawling back to her and end up paying twice as much to get it done your way and then the right way.

Hey lads and gals!

A genuine question to people who live in "heaven-on-earth" countries (Greece islands, Italy, Spain seaside, Portugal, etc.). Where do YOU travel to to chill, change scenery and relax?

I mean, for us, wildlings of the North, going South on vacation is a no-brainer. Like now, I'm getting my sanity back while sipping Rakia (IDK why not ouzo though..) in Crete. But where do Cret(ians?) and other Southerners go on vacation?

Sometimes, I liked to play dumb and pretend I don't know what I'm doing around IT.

That way I can come out alive with a little sanity

Piece of shit shitware called visual studio, I only need you because of that stupid vcvarsall.dll, so I gave you a folder on my HDD, but nooo, You just had to ignore this and place yourself on my SSD. My poor SSD that has very little space left.

Fuck you visual studio. To me you are a literal waste of Time, Space and Sanity

Avoid ACPICA if at all possible. It's one garbage tier cluster fuck of bad design, horrible documentation and downright misleading and wrong code

It's meant to consist of an ASL compiler, disassembler, debugger, dumper, various user space utitilies and a kernel resident OSPM implementation *if* you can figure out what belongs to what. Even just compiling this pile of trash is a mystery in itself. Think you need the source files in source/common? EEEEH, wrong. Well, at least partially since most of them seem to be for the user space stuff..? Other ones *are* needed on the other hand. At least the disassembler and/or debugger and/or dumper components seem to reference them. Not that I could figure out how to compile those anyways. The real path to your goal seems to be to ignore a seemingly arbitrary subset of source and header files until your linker stops complaining

There's also a bunch of configuration defines, some of which *you* define, some defined *for* you, based on again others. Of course most of them do stupid shit. Enabling the debugger automatically enables debug logging. Enabling the disassembler force enables debug allocation tracking... What?

The code itself isn't of much help either. Looking in "os_specific/service_layers" you find what looks to be reference implementations of acpica functions in certain os' like windows and unix. Of course I had a look because AcpiOsReadMemory is supposed to read physical memory and I don't know how I would even implement that. But hey, osunixxf.c (xf for interface... of course) should tell me. I'll let you see for yourself in the attached image. Apparently it does fuck all and just returns AE_OK. No error, no logging, no nothing. Just ok. As you can imagine, AcpiOsWriteMemory doesn't do much more either.
...okay so maybe physical memory accesses aren't actually used and these functions are some sort of relic from past times? Nope! They are absolutely necessary for doing low level device interaction. WTF. So finally I went to the linux source and checked how *they* implemented them, and just as I thought, these functions are anything but no-ops...
...So for what fucking reason do these stupid interface implementations even exist but to purposefully mislead you?? They aren't used for fucking anything! As far as I know Windows doesn't even *use* ACPICA and Linux have their own fork with working implementations... They just sit there, just to tell you how to NOT do it

So that's some of my thoughts about ACPICA. Note that I haven't even used it as a library yet, I just got it to compile and link and it already fucked with me this much.
There's also so much more I didn't mention like that you *have* to modify the acpica source in order to get your own platform header working (else #error) eventhough the docs explicitely instruct you not too but you get the point

Don't use ACPICA if you don't have to. Save your sanity for something that's worth it

Just wondering... anyone else think having a script automatically kill gradle if it runs for more than X amount of minutes would be a great sanity saver?

"Jesus Fucking Zombie Christ I only added ONE FUCKING TEXTVIEW IN A SIMPLE GODDAMNED LINEAR LAYOUT YOU WORTHLESS MOTHERFUCKING PIECE OF SHIT AND GRADLE IS STILL RUNNING AFTER FIVE MOTHERFUCKING MINUTES?!?!?!?!?!!?!?!?!?!"

After I received my laser eye surgery, I knew it would become painful after the effect of anesthesia would decrease so I got painkillers in advance.

It was nimesulide.

Even in 2008 ISDB raised a concern about the liver damage and asked for it to be withdrawn worldwide, but I didn't knew it.

So the terrible pain started and I took the pill. Just. One. Pill.

This all started in like fifteen minutes. Eye pain won't go away, but it didn't mattered anymore as I felt really terrible. I never experienced that kind of feeling before and I don't even know how to describe it. It felt like a terrible sensation inside my stomach mixed with an urge to vomit. "This is probably what a liver failure feels like. This is it, I'm going do die here", I remember thinking about as I collapsed.

This whole incident led to an investigation about why the doctors "forgot" to give me proper eye anesthesia drops. This got several doctors fired.

This all got me really interested in how different medications work. I started casually reading popular medical literature and when my depression came, I was prepared, as much as you can even get prepared to a mental disorder.

The thing that probably nearly killed me helped me not to lose my sanity later.

macOS fuckup continued. Today I used a camelcase name for some new file and a directory. Later I didn't like it and wanted to change to lowercase. Pushed it to bitbucket: now I had both versions! Hold my goji berries, what's going on? Maybe some git config screw up? After a bit of fiddling I remembered an old Linus' rant on Apple's file system when they wanted to adopt case insensitivity. So wait, did they actually do that shit? I thought I was on a unixoid, bastardized BSDish system, that apart from all the oddities that Apple bestowed on it, that there was still some sanity left... But, no there isn't. AFP really defaults to case insensitivity.
I have no words.
So switched to my Debian, where I resolved the duplication in two secs. Now Linux feels even much more comfy and home.

Ok so apparently somebody at Google gcp thought it would be a great idea to be able to select more than one instance at a time and select something like delete and it goes ahead and deletes it without any sanity checks.

3 days down the tube

If you like breathing into the mic during a 60 minute conference call....for everyone's sanity, please mute yourself.

A long long time ago ( 2007 I think ) I worked for a company that made landing sites, so basically an email campaign would go out, users would be sent to a 1 page website with a form to capture their data, ready to be spammed even more. You know how it was back then.

So I worked with a guy who we had just hired, I didn't do the hiring but his CV checked out, so I gave him one of my tasks. Now most pages were made with js and html, with a PHP backend ( called with Ajax). Now this guy didn't know PHP so I was like all good, ASP works too at the end of the day we don't judge, we do like 2 or 3 of these a day and never look at them again. So he goes of and does is thing.

3 weeks later, the customer calls up to me they still haven't received their landing page. Ok so he probably forgot to email the customer np, I tell him to double check he has emailed the customer. Another week goes by end the customer calls back, same problem. At this point I'm getting worried, because we're days away from the deadline and it was originally my task.

So I go back to the guy and I tell him I want that landing page so I can send it myself, half thinking to myself that we had a freeloader, that guy that comes in to companies for 3 weeks, doesn't work, but still cashes his pay. But no, this was much worse.

So he tells me he has finished yet. I ask him why, what's the blocker ? You had 4 weeks to tell me you were blocked and couldn't progress. And his answer was simply, because I wasn't blocked I have been working on it this whole time. So I tell him to zip his project up and email it to me. We didn't do SVN or git back then, simply wasn't worth it. So he comes back to me and says the email server is telling him attachments can't be bigger then 50mb. At this point I'm thinking he didn't properly sized the art or something, so I give him a flash drive to put it on.

When I then open the flash drive, the archive is 300mb, thinking to myself, the images weren't even that big to begin with.
So I open it up, and I don't even find any images, just a single asp page. About 500mb. When I opened that up and it finally loaded, I saw the most horrendous things ever.

The first 500 lines was just initializing empty vars. Then there was some code that created an empty form with an onChange event that submits the form. After that.. it was just non stop nested if's. No loops, no while, for, foreach, NO elseif's, just nested if's, for every possible combination of the state the form could be in. Abou 5000 of them, in a single file. To make matters worse, all the form ( and page ) layout was hardcoded in the if's. Includes inline css, base64 encoded images, nothing but as dynamic, based on the length of the form he changes the layout, added more background etc. He cut the images up for every possible size of the page and included them in the code.

I showed it to my boss, he fired the guy on the spot. I redid the work from scratch, in under 4 hours. Send it to the client. they had no ammends to make, happy as Larry. Whish I kept the code somewhere.

Morale of the story, allways do a coding test on interviews, even if small things just to sanity check.

I have a rule for maintaining sanity. It only works if you job doesn't have you on-call. And it saves me a of stress:

Don't think about work when you're not at work.

I got a call from a recruiter yesterday. The employer wants to get me in for an interview. It's for a fairly big company and I'm beginning to feel really nervous. I hate the place I'm at and I need this job. Not just for money but also to retain my sanity.

The interview is with a development manager, I wonder what kind of questions he/she will ask. Ahhhh how do I prepare for the unknown? 😱

Why I try to ALWAYS use semicolons in JS:

In short, weird shit happens sometimes

An example:

So I'm doing a small project for freeCodeCamp, working with the Twitch API. I decided to make an array on the fly to append a few elements to a documentFrag in order after setting all my props. Forgot a semicolon. Apparently, Babel transpiles this:

info.innerHTML = (``)
[span, caret, info].forEach(elm => frag.appendChild(elm));

to this if you omit the semicolon:
info.innerHTML = ' '[(span, caret, info)]

this is why you should avoid relying on ASI, you're going to have to remember them in other languages out there, so for your own sanity, might as well get used to them. Just thought I'd share--who knows, might help a JS newb out there somewhere.

Unit tests keep your sanity....sometimes

Hello! My name is opalqnka and I am a Windows user.

I followed the 12-step program and now I am a step away to being certified LPIC Linux Engineer.

As step 12 preaches, here I humbly share the Program:

1. We admitted we were powerless over Windows - that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of Linus as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to Linus, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. We’re entirely ready to have Linus remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through bash scripting and kernel troubleshooting to improve our conscious contact with Linus as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to Windows users and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Sanity check.
Guys and Gals... Is this normal to hear from your co-worker things like (will try to translate to English):
"I don't know about your sex life, but could you stop fucking around with this website and move to the shop site?"
and
"Don't fuck around and just do it"
I hear this from a guy who is not a programmer.

Some days it feels like visual studio is conspiring to break my sanity.

Compile.... 5 errors
Clean & recompile .... 12 errors

Open file that contains the errors

Error report clears all errors ...

Compile .... 12 errors .... But still bloody runs

Stop program .... No errors

Grrrr

Compile .... No errors

For god sake .... Which is it ... Do I have errors or not FFS

I lack inspiration to practice my c++ and it's infuriating, the result is no code written in over a week.
I have extremely high expectations for myself and right now I lose sleep, sanity and any little self esteem I had in me regarding my progress
I know you can't rush knowledge, but I just want to built something at my level of practice that is somewhat useful to me and / or others, but when I do it, it's either shit or someone my level made it way better even if I really put some efforts in it
I won't quit but jesus this just feels awful.

Just my luck that I get the best wk76 story ever on wk77. Either way:

So some of you may know that the current project I am on has some shared code components with one of the other projects in the product line. And we have some differences in our processes. This leads to a lot of fun.

So, I was working on converting one of our shared components into a more modern language. It would save us time, money, and sanity by allowing us to more easily maintain our product. Sounds like a win-win right? That's what I thought. Until I had a meeting with the other team. THEN THE QUESTIONS ROLLED IN. Well who is going to integrate our product with yours? (You?) Are you changing the interface? (Not really.) Are you going to generate a design document? (Absolutely not especially since the interface isn't changing for the most part.) Well you are changing the type of one parameter in one method from an undocumented unmanaged type to a well documented managed type that we control. Shouldn't you generate a document to document that change? (Again absolutely not.)

So first they basically browbeat my lead into putting me in charge of their integration effort. Its fine though, as they gave me an account to charge. However, when I was finally able to get a machine with their build environment on it (at least two months later), they then told me that that account was closing and I had to wait until next quarter. So fuck me right. And because of their process I would break them if I were to check my changes in.

So fast forward to today. They are translating some shared components for the same reason that we are. However, they are changing code that while shared is technically "ours" and that will DEFINITELY break us if they do this work since this is the code that controls our algorithms. And while we have a fault tolerant process, or at least more fault tolerant than the other group's, we are currently doing a huge amount of development in the part they want to change. And when we ask them "who is going to do this work to integrate our product with your changes?" they stare at us slack jawed. Like "um, you right? it doesn't affect us." Like MOTHERFUCKERS!!! YOU LITERALLY JUST FOIST ALL THIS WORK ON US TO INTEGRATE WITH YOU BECAUSE YOU DIDN'T HAVE THE PEOPLE T