I was giving an interview this other day and I was sharing my screen with the interviewer.

Interviewer 😦: Is this linux you are using?
Me 😅: Ah yes. Since this is a coding round I am not comfortable on windows for coding.
Interviewer 😳: And this is your personal laptop?
Me 😁: Yes, since the only use of windows is primarily to play games and the games I play are usually supported on linux, I dont see any reason why my daily driver should be anything other than linux.
Interviewer 😯: What distro is this?? Looks cool.
Me 😆: Its Ubuntu with KDE Plasma. There are some really cool things in here which actually make my life quite easier.
Interviewer ☺️: I must check this out today itself. Lets start with the interview then.
Me 😊: *Blushing in my mind

And this is how you score some instant brownie points in an interview. Actually if truth be told, that laptop was actually my work laptop and my personal laptop has windows on it because nvidia and Assassin's Creed.

Just a joke I found online:

One day I was facing some issue with Outlook and I raised a ticket to get it resolved. I got a call from the Service Desk lady after some time and it went this way:

Lady: Hi I'm calling from service desk, what is the problem?

Me: (I explained the problem).

Lady: Can you please share your screen and give me the control so that I can solve the issue?

Me: (I shared the screen and gave the control. She solved it!!)

Lady: You may close the ticket from your end, the issue is solved.

Me: Thank you very much, I will close the ticket.

I opened her profile in lync and had a look at her profile. The display pic looked small in size. I instantly messaged her Employee ID to my colleague and asked him to have a look at her. He replied "She looks good in some angles".

I tried searching her FB profile with the help of her name, but there were too many results.

I started searching on Linked In instead, I found her profile this time. I was trying to enlarge the profile pic and suddenly a message popped up - it says

"I'll share my better picture with you on your outlook ID but you may please stop sharing your screen??"
😂

Co-worker presented her work by sharing her screen. She forgot to unshare.

She proceeded to open Chrome and search: "Can I sue co-worker if I get coronavirus because he coughed?"

Another employee said: "Your screen is showing" :/

I suddenly remembered this after being gone from my previous company for nearly a year.

So, I worked there as a tech supporter and Linux engineer.
What would often happen was clients calling with an issue regarding software of some sorts and about half the time, instead of LOOKING AT THE GODDAMN ERROR MESSAGE they'd just click it away fast and complain shit wasn't working.

I specifically remember this one case:

*big client mails complained that one of their clients' email isn't working. Screenshots weren't possible apparently so after emailing back and forth for way too long, we decide to do a screen sharing session (which we never do).*
(for the record, already emailing for hours, client very frustrated, me as well because the behavior of the software sounds impossible)

Me: alright, close everything, then open it again so I can see what happens.
Client: *opens mail client, error appears, client clicks error away faster than an arch user being able to mention they use arch*
Me: uhm.... I assume you already know what that message said and that it has nothing to do with the issue?
Client: it has nothing to do with the issue.
Me: okay... But have you at least looked the message?
Client: no but it has nothing to do with the issue.
Me: but, how'd you know if you won't look at it?
Client: it has nothing to do with the issue, okay?
Me: okay.... so, what's happening here?
Client: the user isn't receiving email anymore at this point!
Me: alright, have you checked the settings and everything?
Client: of course, all good
Me: okay but can we at least restart the software again to at least check the error message?
Client: FINE. *restarts client (pun intended, of course)*
Error message: username or password incorrect, can't connect to the server.
Client:..........
Client:............
Client:...............
Client:..................
Client:.....................
Client:..................
Client:...............
Client:............
Client:.........
Client: 😐
Client: 😶
Client: 😅
Client: 😬
Client:..... Right, I changed the password...
Client: *sets correct password*
*poof, error message gone*
Client:..... Thanks 💀
Me: you're welcome 😄

💀

This lady was screen sharing during a meeting. At the GUI login for her Linux box, she accidentally typed in her password for the username. In front of 50 people, she showed everyone her password was "Tittays69" 😂

The stupid stories of how I was able to break my schools network just to get better internet, as well as more ridiculous fun. XD

1st year:
It was my freshman year in college. The internet sucked really, really, really badly! Too many people were clearly using it. I had to find another way to remedy this. Upon some further research through Google I found out that one can in fact turn their computer into a router. Now what’s interesting about this network is that it only works with computers by downloading the necessary software that this network provides for you. Some weird software that actually looks through your computer and makes sure it’s ok to be added to the network. Unfortunately, routers can’t download and install that software, thus no internet… but a PC that can be changed into a router itself is a different story. I found that I can download the software check the PC and then turn on my Router feature. Viola, personal fast internet connected directly into the wall. No more sharing a single shitty router!

2nd year:
This was about the year when bitcoin mining was becoming a thing, and everyone was in on it. My shitty computer couldn’t possibly pull off mining for bitcoins. I needed something faster. How I found out that I could use my schools servers was merely an accident.
I had been installing the software on every possible PC I owned, but alas all my PC’s were just not fast enough. I decided to try it on the RDS server. It worked; the command window was pumping out coins! What I came to find out was that the RDS server had 36 cores. This thing was a beast! And it made sense that it could actually pull off mining for bitcoins. A couple nights later I signed in remotely to the RDS server. I created a macro that would continuously move my mouse around in the Remote desktop screen to keep my session alive at all times, and then I’d start my bitcoin mining operation. The following morning I wake up and my session was gone. How sad I thought. I quickly try to remote back in to see what I had collected. “Error, could not connect”. Weird… this usually never happens, maybe I did the remoting wrong. I went to my schools website to do some research on my remoting problem. It was down. In fact, everything was down… I come to find out that I had accidentally shut down the schools network because of my mining operation. I wasn’t found out, but I haven’t done any mining since then.

3rd year:
As an engineering student I found out that all engineering students get access to the school’s VPN. Cool, it is technically used to get around some wonky issues with remoting into the RDS servers. What I come to find out, after messing around with it frequently, is that I can actually use the VPN against the screwed up security on the network. Remember, how I told you that a program has to be downloaded and then one can be accepted into the network? Well, I was able to bypass all of that, simply by using the school’s VPN against itself… How dense does one have to be to not have patched that one?

4th year:
It was another programming day, and I needed access to my phones memory. Using some specially made apps I could easily connect to my phone from my computer and continue my work. But what I found out was that I could in fact travel around in the network. I discovered that I can, in fact, access my phone through the network from anywhere. What resulted was the discovery that the network scales the entirety of the school. I discovered that if I left my phone down in the engineering building and then went north to the biology building, I could still continue to access it. This seems like a very fatal flaw. My idea is to hook up a webcam to a robot and remotely controlling it from the RDS servers and having this little robot go to my classes for me.

What crazy shit have you done at your University?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'rona virus working from home thug life.

MS Teams, several people including my PM, my company's sales lead, and the top brass from the client.

Sharing my center monitor with some technical documents etc.

A wild messenger message appears from my wife with the contents, "I'm gonna come home for lunch and fuck you sideways."

I'd put the amount of time it took me to mouse up there and flick that thing off the screen at about 900 miliseconds.

How fucked (in addition to sideways) am I?

Tl;dr ~ Fucked my wife. Fucked my life.

Online tutorial pet peeves
————————————

My top 10 points of unsolicited ranting/advice to those making video tutorials:

1. Avoid lots of pauses, saying “umm” too much, or other unnecessary redundancy in speech (listen to yourself in a recording)

2. If I can’t understand you at 1.5 - 2x playback speed and you don’t already speak relatively quickly and clearly, I’m probably not going to watch for long (mumbling, inconsistent microphone volume, and background noise/music are frequent culprits)

3. It’s ok to make mistakes in a tutorial, so long as you also fix them in the tutorial (e.g., the code that is missing a semicolon that all of a sudden has one after it compiles correctly — but no mention of fixing it or the compiler error that would have been received the first time). With that said, it’s fine to fix mistakes pertinent to the topic being taught, but don’t make me watch you troubleshoot your non-relevant computer issues or problems created by your specific preferences (e.g., IDE functionality not working as expected when no specific IDE was prescribed for the tutorial)

4. Don’t make me wait on your slow computer to do something in silence—either teach me something while it’s working or edit the video to remove the lull

5. You knew you were recording your screen. Close your email, chat, and other applications that create notifications before recording. Or at least please don’t check them and respond while recording and not edit it out of the video

6. Stay on topic. I’m watching your video to learn about something specific. A little personality is good, but excessive tangents are often a waste of my time

7. [Specific to YouTube] Don’t block my view of important content with annotations (and ads, if within your control)

8. If you aren’t uploading quality HD recordings, enlarge your font! Don’t make me have to guess what character you typed

9. Have a game plan (i.e., objectives) before hitting the record button

10. Remember that it’s easier to rant and complain than to do something constructive. Thank you for spending your time making tutorial videos. It’s better for you to make videos and commit all my pet peeves listed above than to not make videos at all—don’t let one guy’s rant stop you from sharing your knowledge and experience (but if it helps you, you’re welcome—and you just might gain a new viewer!)

fuck me X'D Complained to nowtv that their player wasn't working because apparently it finds 'screen sharing' software running on my mac. This was their response

Action takes place during demo to the stakeholders.
Manager : During the demo we will show a working prototype of new functionality. In this sprint we focused on that feature not on UX. Please do not pay attention to UI and focus on business values
*Dev starts sharing screen*
*1 sec after*
Executive : This is unacceptable. It looks gross, why you don't use default controls.
Manager : We did, this is how they look like, but please do not pay attention to UI, it is not finished
*Dev continue presenting*
*1 sec after*
Executive : I see missing comma in that sentence. It is unacceptable to show features in that state, lets move on to another team.

It was really large feature working as a charm, but they focused entirely on unpolished UI :/

So, apparently we had this important meeting with a client offsite this morning, I was "told" yesterday but nobody thought of creating a calendar event or sharing emails about it. I forgot, I don't even know the address or the hour.

My boss and this sneaky front ender came by at 11am joking about me not remembering.

Me: wow, I forgot. If it isn't on the calendar I don't even know it exists.

Turned to my screen and got back to work.

Fuck this shit.

there's a dev on my train and I can see everything.... in vscode, at least he has that, damn java devs.

What's the social code for interaction here?

Cs Student. We currently have a course on algorithms, where we have to implement something in Java, test it with some sample inputs and in the end submit it to an online judge, so far so good. So why a rant? Well there's this one person, who strugles with programing and asks me a lot of questions. Usually I tell her, could you send me your code, so I can have a look at what doesn't work/where you made a typo/what ever. My thoughts: let's just copy it my IDE, take a look at the error message, and that should do it.

Guess how I got the code: As a few photos, taken by her mobile phone (as the code doesn't fit on one screen...)! Just send me the fucking file, or post it to gist.github.com or pastie.org or what ever fucking code sharing tool you want! Make a fucking git repo, I'll even live with SVN or just a .txt file by mail. But for the love of Linus Torvalds, stop sending me crapy pictures of your crappy code! For fucks sake!

The management brought some devs from another outsourcing company into our project to overcome the fact that we, the existing developers, are retarded. We are retarded because they change the scope continously (aka daily) and we can’t keep track with their requests. They want something and after we implement it, they want it changed. Completely.

Instead of getting the project and deep dive into it using the materials (setup, architecture etc.) I prepared along the way, their PM said that we have to make some low level knowledge transfer. This knowledge transfer session happened on Friday.

The presenters were me and one of my colleagues. After 2 hours of training, we found out that the supposed senior devs don’t know how to use GIT, they don’t have a clue about Spring nor Angular (nor any SPA framework), their only questions were ‘why didn’t you use X?’ (where X = bootstrap, jQuery etc.) etc.

What is even funnier: during the presentation we were asked to keep a screen sharing opened during working hours for a couple of days just so the new devs could see how we are working.

Guess what happened with the scope on Friday evening: it changed again because ‘you got new devs so there will be multiple resources to handle tasks’.

2 more weeks and i’m out of there...

Slack.

A product which I hated in the beginning, is something that I have started admiring now.

Like Telegram, things just kept improving without bloating the shit out of the product.

What's interesting is that they came up with Huddle, an instant call and connect feature where they support Audio and Screen sharing.

Totally a game changer and a Zoom killer because Zoom could be even better in terms of UX.

Functionally, hands down, Zoom is flawless but slowly it's becoming an overkill.

I am excitedly waiting to see how both of these compete because Slack surely has an upper hand in this game.

Dual Boot Linux & Windows.

I hardly ever see anyone do it right. And there is just two tricks that make a completely new experience out of it. I am not sharing it with you to be nice, I am sharing because I am curious if you're already doing it.

1. Install on a second hard drive, not a different partition. Learn which button to hold on the boot screen to select the boot drive. You can still chain-load via Grub, but the major advantage, updates of neither OS will fuck up your boot loader. You can update it abso-fucking-lutely risk free. Second advantage, advice 2. becomes trivially easy.

2. Set up a virtual machine. Select as its hard drive the raw disk volume where you have installed your Windows. You can do this with VirtualBox, but QEMU with virtual machine manager make is far easier to set this up in. You can now start Windows under Linux as a virtual machine. You can always start a small application, but the big deal is installing. Start a Steam download, have it installed and ready without switching over. Running windows updates. And when you then have time to play the game, just reboot and you have it already installed.

I feel like many are not aware that you can start a virtual machine of a real hard drive. It's one of those things that improve usability of it enormously. It's something where many will just not think about it because they keep dual booting and virtual machines in two different categories in their brains, but immediately will think it is obvious as soon as they hear about it.

So, who already did this? Raise your hands!

There was a team meeting where something controversial was being discussed. A team mate was sharing their screen showing the controversial prototype. Meanwhile, me and another team mate started texting parallely on Teams. After a while, people were just listening to each other arguing and doing their own thing. And the guy who was arguing at that moment was being very sarcastic and passive aggressive and it was hilarious. I texted my teammate some inside joke about the the team mate. I heard the Teams notification go off and it was not mine. Oh yeah, I texted the teammate whose screen was being shared 🙇

I am not good with kids. I know I know. Last week or so, my managers kid thought it would be a good idea to hijack my meeting. I was sharing my screen and on full blown explanation mode, only to realise after my explanation, it was the kid who was looking at my face and not the boss man.
God I panicked. I was like 'Who the hell are you?'
--------*INSERT AWKWARD SILENCE HERE *---------

Not a rant but I spent 30 minutes writing a fix for 2 integration tests while screen sharing. Ran the tests and they both pass first try, no exceptions, typos or silly mistakes. 2 additional unrelated tests also started passing. It felt good.

After reading some rants abut stupid project managers I remembered this situation that happened to me a decade ago.
One of the tasks was to move some html component to different place on the page. The whole page was a mix trs and tds and to achieve that I had to rewrite the whole page structure. I estimated around half a day to complete that task. It was my first job and I was not great back then, but still it was reasonable amount for this task.

Now lets introduce my PM : the guy was a complete tool. He was a former hardware store manager ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) and had no idea what we were doing.
He started ranting how on earth such simple task can takes so much time. I started explaining myself, but he wasn't listening. Instead he started sharing his screen, he made a screenshot of the page, pasted it to the ms paint, cut the component, and moved it to desired place. Then he said : It took me like 10 sec to complete the task and I have no experience, maybe I will replace you?
I was speechless. I had no words and I just kept silence.
Then he said he would reassign this task to X, because he is competent.
X spend more then 4 hours and I heard no apologies.

New phone after 5+ years and it's fucking awesome.

Successfully avoid American and Chinese stuff by going with a Korean brand.

And I fucking love Android. The kind of feature advancement that has happened in past so many years is outstanding.

The amount of customisation options available for the users are beyond one can utilise to fullest.

And my favourite feature is dynamic lock screen pictures every-single-time I unlock. I fucking love it. Makes me cheer up with joy. Very similar to Bing Wallpapers for Windows, but more dynamic.

Lately, I have been hearing from Apple users, that iPhone lacking a ton of basic features, apps not supporting functionalities, and we all know the overall advancement in Apple ecosystem.

While this post was more about sharing my experience with my new phonw than iPhone comparison but let's face it, the reason Apple went bonkers with the first iPhone launch was the app capabilities which led to a larger developer community building apps for iPhone while Android wasn't even born yet.

This is where Google is trying to capture the market now. More devs > more apps > more users > more devs and repeat.

Embarrassing screenshare story? Yeah, I've got couple of those.

- Showing one client a VSCode workspace of another client's. I was lucky they didn't escalate or anything.

- YouTube open in PIP mode and accidentally showing that to the higher-ups in company. What made it more embarrassing is that they informed me about it, I thought I was sharing a window not Entire screen.

- WhatsApp open in one window and I accidentally shared it on screen, thinking I wasn't sharing my screen, but I was, and everyone saw my texts with a girl I was "dating" at the time.

- Presenting my entire screen to a client and out of nowhere Epic Games pop up with a notification saying ""Your buddy sent you a message - Ready to start playing?". But that was 11pm so I got off easy.

- Opening sentry to show one thing to the client but they notice many new bugs and I got slammed by my boss for it.

I’m studying at uni remotely at the moment. I’m taking a software engineering class. I love developing software so I was super excited about this course. First assignment is to make a tic tac toe game in python. I finish the assignment super fast within the first hour of our first class.

We end up spending the rest of the fucking semester on this fucking program. No improvements, nothing. Literally just staring at this less than 200 line command line tic tac toe game talking about the same fucking shit every class.

Our fucking final is a presentation about this fucking program. The entire class is going to present the same command line python tic tac toe game

People told me that in the past, this class would find a local client and fulfill a request (making a website, etc)

However, now there’s a new prof teaching this course.

Best way I can describe it, 3 hours of this fucking prof screen sharing a google doc and droning on for 3 hours

I wish I could get the 20+ hours of my life back that this course has taken from me

Below is a transcript from work Slack today. Only the names and some code are changed. It ended up causing a bit of drama. DevRanters, what do you take from this?

---

Delivery Lead:
Hey Gang. What's the blocker for FEATURE-123?

Dev1:
FEATURE-122 crashed on iOS app when viewing Feature Introduction page.

Teach Lead:
I've talked about this with Dev1 on a side channel.
And diagnosed the stack trace.
It looks like there is/was some bad handling of a List in the Feature Introduction view logic.
But this is confined to changes that Dev2 is still working on.
(It's not present in master)
Dev2, what's your current position on this?

Dev2:
I have tested at my end with Dev1 but it seems to be working fine

Tech Lead:
There is a race condition related to the use of someList.first()
My guess is that theres a Flow of those lists defined, with an initial value of emptyList
And that on your machine, that Flow is updating with a new value quickly enough that it doesn't matter.
But on Dev1's, for whatever reason, it doesn't get there in time, hits the empty list and falls over.
The logic that's performing the first() needs to gracefully handle empty lists as well.

Dev2:
Where is that logic called?

Tech Lead:
Here's the stack trace Dev1 provided in our conversation earlier:
Caused by: kotlin.NoSuchElementException: List is empty.
...
at 3 iosApp 0x00000000 kfun:kotlin.NoSuchElementException#<init>(kotlin.String?){} + 00
at 4 iosApp 0x0000000 kfun:kotlin.collections#first@kotlin.collections.List<0:0>(){0§<kotlin.Any?>}0:0 + 000
...
at 9 iosApp 0x0000000 kfun:kotlin.coroutines.native.internal.BaseContinuationImpl#resumeWith(kotlin.Result<kotlin.Any?>){} + 0000

This line:
kfun:kotlin.collections#first@kotlin.collections.List<0:0>()
...says that it's first() being called on an empty list.

Dev1:
FYI: Dev3/Dev4/myself are seeing the same issue with the same stack-trace above.

Tech Lead:
So Dev2, have you introduced such a call?
Because I checked master branch and there isn't one, in that version of the file.
Ok, I'll check your working branch Dev2
...
Yes you have here:
var processed1 = someList.first()
var processed2 = someList.first()
...
Lines 123, 124.
Solution looks really straightforward guys.

Dev2:
Okay, I will fix that and push the change

Tech Lead:
Check if someList is empty and allow for generating / handling null processedValues in the view.

Now; I'm going to be straight with you here.
This issue has been discussed over several hours today.
I expect that either one of you could have gone through the process I did in the last 10 minutes above, and resolved it in the same way :point_up:

Dev2:
I went on a break and it's not reproducible on my machine

Tech Lead:
I didn't reproduce it on mine either.

Dev1:
Dev2 and myself are now on sharing screen to sort this issue out. Hope to update back later.

Tech Lead:
<Screen shot of diff with changed code>
:point_up: That change should do it.

Dev2:
Already have pushed the change.

Tech Lead:
...just seen it, is good - same approach :ok_hand:
Dev1 please let us know when tested on your machine.

Dev1:
That does it. It fixes the issues. Thank you, Dev2. I will pick it off from here.

Tech Lead:
Glad to hear it guys.

Dev1:
I have to say this that it is not because we are not working on the issue - Dev2 and myself (together with Dev3/Dev4) have been on this issue all this morning. It just difficult to connect the dot when it wasn't reproducable on Dev2's machine. I brought the issue up because I wanted to switch to working on other tickets while waiting for this to resolve. Still thank you largely for Dev2's work and your keen eyes that spot and resolve the issue quickly.

Tech Lead:
Noted Dev1.
I think the take-away has to be to read the stack-trace carefully... don't worry - we've all been guilty of not reading the error in full, at some point.
The stack trace said that the 'first' element is being referenced from an empty list - that's just logically impossible, right?
Looking for that call to first, we saw it wasn't in the code before, and is after (two of them, in fact).
So then we ask ourselves, how can we deal with an empty list - and then solution almost presents itself.
It didn't really take reproduction of the error to resolve.
Maybe working with a new tech stack creates an anxiety that every issue faced will have a complex solution related to that stack; but I think you'll agree, this particular issue really just required a deep breath and your trusty 'debugging skills 101'... don't lose them! :smiling_face:

So, we (I'm the backend guy and work with a UI dev) are building this product portfolio management tool for our client and they have a set of 250 users. The team has two point of contacts for the 250 users who maintain the master data, help users with data quality, tool guidance, reporting and other stuff. So one day one of these two support users come to me and say : Hey I'm not able to add new transactions coz a customer is missing.

We have the provision to create / maintain customers.

I check the production DB, application code, try creating the customer and then the transaction, everything works perfectly fine.

I ask the user for a screen sharing session, the user starts reproducing the error like this :

We have a 3 system landscape - Dev / Test and Prod

U : Logs into the test system url, creates the customer.

U : Points out the toast saying customer creation is successful.

U : opens a new tab, opens the production system, tries creating the transaction, searches for the customer and says " see !! cant find the customer here ! the master data management apps never work !! "

FML?.

There's this tech-wannabe guy who sends me random electronic related questions at the middle of the night. I don't have a gosh darn clue about what's he even up to.
He takes a muzzy photo of his computer screen, not a proper screenshot, and asks for "Will this schematic work if I leave this and that part off of it? Cuz I don't currently have those at my shelf."

Same for sharing a link, take a photo of it.

WFH is nice, esp when you can spare a separate room for work at your house/apartment. VoIP is also not a problem, it's even better is several ways than the real thing, as you can chat with multiple people at the same time without dragging them off their desks. Even better - screen sharing sessions.

However, there's one thing I don't understand.Why would anyone do video calls? I mean.. why...? What's the point? If I'm on metered network I'll be charged extra only because I'll have to stream out my ugly face to people who don't want to see it and stream in all the other ugly faces I don't want to see. My voice will become laggy, I'll miss out on some details, and all that because of some completely unnecessary overhead.

So why would you want me to enable my webcam? And why do you feel the need to show your face to everyone else? Why is this necessary...?

Took a software engineering class at my university. The class was online which is common at my school.

The entirety of the class ends up being the prof. scrolling through a google doc while sharing her screen. No watching her program stuff, no opportunities for us to program in class, nothing. Basically like reading documentation for 3 hours.

The final project? A fucking command line tic tac toe game written in python.

My group asked if we could do a tic tac toe multiplayer web app instead and she denied us with no reason

Complete waste of time

Didn't happen to me but to the other class at my university.
As you all know all universities changed to studies online this semester. So a teacher asked students to try solving an exercise and he forgot to stop sharing his screen. Few moment later, porn started playing 😂
Turned out he told the administration later that it was his son who did this (not sure if that's true) and he stopped working after that anyway.
I memed the hell out of that incident lol

A junior Dev was assigned a particular task where he is expected to come up with the command to run inside the system. He came up with the commands. I being a senior Dev and who has access to run the command on the pod did it after verifying it. I ran the command with screen sharing it to the junior Dev for him to learn. Now manager asked him to document the steps. I found that the doc contains screenshots from our call. My screens exactly.

Now my question is, I'm feeling that he should have asked or informed before taking a screenshot of my screen? Is this feeling normal?

So I decided to install a third OS on my laptop and oh boy, I never thought I'd have to deal with so many issues!

First, I had to make space for the new OS, so I did the only feasible thing - Shrunk a windows partition (Used for gaming only), then installed the third OS into it. (For clarification, one OS was Windows, the second Debian for work and the new one was Kali for a course at school about security and ethical hacking)

Well... After I installed and tried out that the Kali worked... My Debian began to make problems. It would hang for almost a minute during start as it tried to mount a (for some reason) no longer existing Swap partition.

After it gave up and I found out... I, fortunately, fixed it after just a bit of googling. At least I learned to repack the ramfs.

It worked all fine and dandy... Only... My Debian now shared the swap with Kali.

Few weeks forward, last friday, I tried to boot up Kali at class... Only for it to... Stop at a black screen, weird.

Some minor detective work later, I found out nothing was... Wrong really.
But... For some mysterious reason, my complete GDM just.... No longer worked.

One LightDM and XFCE instal later (Thanks god that at least TTY still worked fine), it finally worked again, and this time, I booted back into Debian, shrunk the Kali partition a little more and dedicated it's own swap there. Setting and resetting everything, and finally had a working triple-boot laptop...

My only question is... Why?

Does sharing Swap really affect the system so much, besides hibernation ofc.

I really don’t get it, how can most people just so easily accept shortcomings and not even try for a second to improve the situation?

It drives me crazy ...

story:
I’m debugging an issue with a colleague over screen sharing, both of us have huge 4k screens. Colleague sets a breakpoint, popup opens „do you want to switch to debug perspective“, clicks on yes for the umpteenth time. Breakpoint halts, IDE is full of open and unrelated panels, he doesn’t even see the whole line if code but still grabs the scrollbar every friggin time and scrolls left, right, left, right, ...
changes some code, popup that hot code reload didn’t work, clicks ok for the umpth time here as well, although it has a don’t show again checkbox, like every frigging dialog in eclipse.

how can people work like this, it’s driving me nuts. Am I the only sane dev here??
Other colleague has weird message in the browser console (angular). I ask whats the problem and if he can’t just set a breakpoint to analyze the situation. No thats not possible, he says, instead he’s going to add a return statement to check how far the code execution goes ...

I wonder sometimes if I‘m already dead and have to suffer in dev hell for an unknown reason ... 🤔

Who has two thumbs and just messaged another dev about the project while they were screen sharing with the client...

I worked for 16 hours straight without any break because client kept me on call with screen sharing on and asked me to solve all the bugs from last 6 months of coding because he wanted to go live next day.🤕
Ps: I was the only developer and the only tester of that project.

So its apparently "blackout tuesday", but why am I seeing people sharing a black screen with some hearts on it?

It does say "blackout", right?

We noticed that in our landing directory we were receiving duplicate files.

I asked the source to investigate.

He told me that the issue was not at his end. He asked me to mark the issue has been resolved from his end. I refused.

We get on a call to debug the issue. After 30mins he is extremely frustrated. As he was sharing his screen, he runs the command `ls -ltr | uniq -cd` on his server which sends the files and then screams at me "Where are the duplicates? Show me. Check the output. There are no duplicates.".

I first muted the call. Had a good laugh. Made him repeat it to show my team mates. They had a good laugh too.

I then asked him to call it a day. And once you cool down, think about what you just showed me.

Sometimes in our personal projects we write crazy commit messages. I'll post mine because its a weekend and I hope someone has a well deserved start. Feel free to post yours, regex out your username, time and hash and paste chronologically. ISSA THREAD MY DUDES AND DUDETTES
--
Initialization of NDM in Kotlin
Small changes, wiping drive
Small changes, wiping drive
Lottie, Backdrop contrast and logging in implementation
Added Lotties, added Link variable to Database Manifest
Fixed menu engine, added Smart adapter, indexing, Extra menus on home and Calendar
b4 work
Added branch and few changes
really before work
Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/master'
really before work 4 sho
Refined Search response
Added Swipe to menus and nested tabs
Added custom tab library
tabs and shh
MORE TIME WASTED ON just 3 files
api and rx
New models new handlers, new static leaky objects xd, a few icons
minor changes
minor changesqwqaweqweweqwe
db db dbbb
Added Reading display and delete function
tryin to add web socket...fail
tryin to add web socket...success
New robust content handler, linked to a web socket. :) happy data-ring lol
A lot of changes, no time to explain
minor fixes ehehhe
Added args and content builder to content id
Converted some fragments into NDMListFragments
dsa
MAjor BiG ChANgEs added Listable interface added refresh and online cache added many stuff
MAjor mAjOr BiG ChANgEs added multiClick block added in-fragment Menu (and handling) added in-fragment list irem click handling
Unformatted some code, added midi handler, new menus, added manifest
Update and Insert (upsert) extension to Listable ArrayList
Test for hymnbook offline changing
Changed menuId from int to key string :) added refresh ...global... :(
Added Scale Gesture Listener
Changed Font and size of titlebar, text selection arg. NEW NEW Readings layout.
minor fix on duplicate readings
added isUserDatabase attribute to hymn database file added markwon to stanza views
Home changes :)
Modular hymn Editing
Home changes :) part 2
Home changes :) part 3
Unified Stanza view
Perfected stanza sharing
Added Summernote!!
minor changes
Another change but from source tree :)))
Added Span Saving
Added Working Quick Access
Added a caption system, well text captions only
Added Stanza view modes...quite stable though
From work changes
JUST a [ush
Touch horizontal needs fix
Return api heruko
Added bible index
Added new settings file
Added settings and new icons
Minor changes to settings
Restored ping
Toggles and Pickers in settings
Added Section Title
Added Publishing Access Panel
Added Some new color changes on restart. When am I going to be tired of adding files :)
Before the confession
Theme Adaptation to views
Before Realm DB
Theme Activity :)
Changes to theme Activity
Changes to theme Activity part 2 mini
Some laptop changes, so you wont know what changed :)
Images...
Rush ourd
Added palette from images
Added lastModified filter
Problem with cache response
works work
Some Improvements, changed calendar recycle view
Tonic Sol-fa Screen Added
Merge Pull
Yes colors
Before leasing out to testers
Working but unformated table
Added Seperators but we have a glithchchchc
Tonic sol-fa nice, dots left, and some extras :)))
Just a nice commit on a good friday.
Just a quickie
I dont know what im committing...

Spent all night trying to deploy a web app, was needed one guy from another country check my code with me by sharing my screen with him, we spent hours trying understand the error, after we saw that node was picking files from old commits, so they wasn't there to be loaded.
After I went to school, had my final exams, when came back, I just fixed routes in node after done I told: -"guys, I'll deploy again with these updates and update the repo" guess what?????? My network stoped to work, I was so sleepy and that shit wasn't working, my provider told me that EVERYTHING WAS FINE WITH THE SERVERS
so I gived up, sleept for 3~4 hours and now my network is fine, the repo and the application are updated and I don't have more energy to keep working.

I used to be an iPhone user since iPhone 3, every year switching to the new model, always complaining about limitations and jailbreaking it with the concerns this brings up to the table, anyway, I also tried other cellphones like Samsung Galaxy XXX, worse shit ever, and those annoying Samsung apps you cannot uninstall, pfff, worst of the worst.

I started with pure Android phones some years ago, first with pixel 2, holly shit, software is amazing, I was amazed an happy with my phone, "infinite cloud storage for free" yes please!!!

The problem comes after 5 months of use, battery drains in less than 3 hours, even with the cellphone screen off and not using it, it was under warranty and got a new battery for free, well, no that bad. Suddenly the apps start blocking each other and takes a lot to open or switch between apps. I bought also the famous PIXEL BUDS, worst purchase ever, you never know if they are charging or still connected, no matter how hard do you try, it randomly connects, I tried all the possible solutions, didn't work, one random day, the buds went off, got new ones thanks to the warranty, now they are starting to fail again.

Bought the pixel 3, same exact shit as before, same errors, same shitty hardware, battery drains in hours, and I am a regular user, I do not have games or use it in an intensive way.

Conclusion:

- Google: Shitty hardware, great software, no limitations(I can send you one of my songs through Whatsapp and copy anything form my computer as a file), but god, why your hardware is so bad?
Also, a lot of free apps, but very bad designed, just look for any app to listen podcasts, you have to waste 10secs every fucking time to listen your shit, freedom comes with a price no doubt.

- Samsung: I have no idea who want that shit and why, , not satisfaction at all

- Apple: Fucking expensive, have to pay for everything, but quality is much better, hardware is flawless, I have to admit it, my GF has a freaking iPhone 7 and her phone is fine the whole day, on the downside, well, costs and limitations relative to sharing and use

So, I will switch again to fucking Apple, best of the 3 bad evils

On top of being ignoring the Linux community and the audio problem caused by their sheer incompetence to use WebRTC and Electron in order to support screen sharing, they now just sent me the whole damn thing again over the span of 2 hours.

This is why I won't pay for discord until they get their shit together.

Not to mention the disastrous android app update recently that still has unaddressed that make daily usage a pain...

Anyone know of a free screen sharing application for Windows for mirroring my Android device. Vysor is ok but I don't want to pay for anything. Ive tried wireless mirroring but that is slow, so I prefer USB connection. I am looking for a free, no ad, program that is fast.

Since we are sharing some of our more interesting commits, what do people think of these commits?

General: pro.user update
297af8f

Refactor: Hide and show Spin Boxes on Normalization
6a4e1f3

Refactor: Dynamic resizing refactoring
964f0ae

Refactor: Dynamic resizing across any screen
5890a35

GUI: Measure screen size and assume the proper size.
13f2cb4

Fix: guitest.cpp has been reafactored
5cbc1b4

Dir: Clean unused directory
32c8384

GUI: Hide and show Spin Boxes on Normalization
84db444
Commits on Jun 28, 2016

GUI: Make boxes more bolded
3d23952

General Commit: 11:03 PM 6/28/2016
678c249

Del: build from previous commit
e428041

Fix: Guitest's compiled code was broken
25f546f

GUI: Make window scrollable.
07091fd

Adjust; Changing directory tree

Hi there, my 2 cents to rant on WWDC :)

- Check time? My big head is in the way.
- Work tabs... Why is my Wordle in the list?
- Edit message ... Good bye iMessage memes :(
- Dictation. Hello Jarvis. Hi CIA. Sup 0-day devs
- Live Text. Indian tutorials are now just a copy paste away
- Wallet keys sharing through messages 🤌
- Family. Send more screen time through messages (goodness this messaging app is becoming less green)
- Shared libraries in photos, lovely, now your aunt knows you love visit and taking photos of the neighbor (if you forget to turn it off)
- CarPlay, this will need screen time soon, ui so beautiful you gonna plan a journey by tinkering with the dials
- Check time (part 2) on the iwatch, My big head is still in the way
- Fitness app, Sleep app, Health app, Medication app, mmm lovely but still cant put my confidence in AI
- M2, saw it coming. Spec: scaringly powerful.
- isnt the midnight MacBook air elite?! But the notch tho. Magsafe is back, more thin, this thing looks fragile.
- Did they show a game running lower than the videos fps on purpose? Hmmm
- Ventura's stage manager, xbmc vibes
- Is that Facetime attachment free? Is there a subscription to continuity camera?
- Tab Group Collaboration, hehe, "they can see which tabs you're looking at" hehehe
- Free Form: bloatware

Meh, I cant rant more, honestly the new features look good.

You know, that small program, Mouse without boarders is so niffty and good. But what makes me trip is how theses screen sharing programs all make the slightest pixel off monitor jump to the next monitor
If you gonna make a teleporter, at least make one one with a damn escape velocity

I hope screen share devs are listening

How dumb a client can be ?
So dumb that in the name of code review , he spent hours just to understand your code while sharing screen then can only make changes in method and class signature .

Can anyone recommend any good code/screen sharing tools?

My use case is that I have a Windows work laptop with a garbage keyboard and I want to share my editor with my personal MacBook without having to clone the repo there or actually share any files.

I tried Live Share on VS Code but the shared terminal barely ever works, and you can't stage files from the editor GUI. I imagine something like TeamViewer would be very slow for this?
I'm not sure if there's any tool that covers this use case or if I should just stick with Live Share and try to workaround its issues. :/