As a developer, sometimes you hammer away on some useless solo side project for a few weeks. Maybe a small game, a web interface for your home-built storage server, or an app to turn your living room lights on an off.

I often see these posts and graphs here about motivation, about a desire to conceive perfection. You want to create a self-hosted Spotify clone "but better", or you set out to make the best todo app for iOS ever written.

These rants and memes often highlight how you start with this incredible drive, how your code is perfectly clean when you begin. Then it all oscillates between states of panic and surprise, sweat, tears and euphoria, an end in a disillusioned stare at the tangled mess you created, to gather dust forever in some private repository.

Writing a physics engine from scratch was harder than you expected. You needed a lot of ugly code to get your admin panel working in Safari. Some other shiny idea came along, and you decided to bite, even though you feel a burning guilt about the ever growing pile of unfinished failures.

All I want to say is:

No time was lost.

This is how senior developers are born. You strengthen your brain, the calluses on your mind provide you with perseverance to solve problems. Even if (no, *especially* if) you gave up on your project.

Eventually, giving up is good, it's a sign of wisdom an flexibility to focus on the broader domain again.

One of the things I love about failures is how varied they tend to be, how they force you to start seeing overarching patterns.

You don't notice the things you take back from your failures, they slip back sticking to you, undetected.

You get intuitions for strengths and weaknesses in patterns. Whenever you're matching two sparse ordered indexed lists, there's this corner of your brain lighting up on how to do it efficiently. You realize it's not the ORMs which suck, it's the fundamental object-relational impedance mismatch existing in all languages which causes problems, and you feel your fingers tingling whenever you encounter its effects in the future, ready to dive in ever so slightly deeper.

You notice you can suddenly solve completely abstract data problems using the pathfinding logic from your failed game. You realize you can use vector calculations from your physics engine to compare similarities in psychological behavior. You never understood trigonometry in high school, but while building a a deficient robotic Arduino abomination it suddenly started making sense.

You're building intuitions, continuously. These intuitions are grooves which become deeper each time you encounter fundamental patterns. The more variation in environments and topics you expose yourself to, the more permanent these associations become.

Failure is inconsequential, failure even deserves respect, failure builds intuition about patterns. Every single epiphany about similarity in patterns is an incredible victory.

Please, for the love of code...

Start and fail as many projects as you can.

My bird fell asleep on the laptop while licking the shiny LENOVO logo.

That feeling when you boot up your shiny new laptop for the first time and there's no fucking Cortana, online accounts or mandatory updates right out of the box.

Thank you Dell ❤️

If programming languages where weapons...

1. C is an M1 Garand standard issue rifle, old but reliable.

2. C++ is a set of nunchuks, powerful and impressive when wielded but takes many years of pain to master and often you probably wish you were using something else.

3. Perl is a molotov cocktail, it was probably useful once, but few people use it

4. Java is a belt fed 240G automatic weapon where sometimes the belt has rounds, sometimes it doesn’t, and when it doesn’t during firing you get an NullPointerException, the gun explodes and you die.

5. Scala is a variant of the 240G Java, except the training manual is written in an incomprehensible dialect which many suspect is just gibberish.

6. JavaScript is a sword without a hilt.

7. Go is the custom made “if err != nil” starter pistol and after each shot you must check to make sure it actually shot. Also it shoots tabs instead of blanks.

8. Rust is a 3d printed gun. It may work some day.

9. bash is a cursed hammer, when wielded everything looks like a nail, especially your thumb.

10. Python is the “v2/v3” double barrel shotgun, only one barrel will shoot at a time, and you never end up shooting the recommended one. Also I probably should have used a line tool to draw that.

11. Ruby is a ruby encrusted sword, it is usually only used because of how shiny it is.

12. PHP is a hose, you usually plug one end into a car exhaust, and the other you stick in through a window and then you sit in the car and turn the engine on.

13. Mathematica is a low earth orbit projectile cannon, it could probably do amazing things if only anyone could actually afford one.

14. C# is a powerful laser rifle strapped to a donkey, when taken off the donkey the laser doesn’t seem to work as well.

15. Prolog is an AI weapon, you tell it what to do, which it does but then it also builds some terminators to go back in time and kill your mom

All credits go to Vicky from damnet.com

1. Humans perform best if they have ownership over a slice of responsibility. Find roles and positions within the company which give you energy. Being "just another intern/junior" is unacceptable, you must strive to be head of photography, chief of data security, master of updating packages, whatever makes you want to jump out of bed in the morning. Management has only one metric to perform on, only one right to exist: Coaching people to find their optimal role. Productivity and growth will inevitably emerge if you do what you love. — Boss at current company

2. Don't jump to the newest technology just because it's popular or shiny. Don't cling to old technology just because it's proven. — Team lead at the Arianespace contractor I worked for.

4. "Developing a product you wouldn't like to use as an end user, is unsustainable. You can try to convince yourself and others that cancer is great for weight loss, but you're still gonna die if you don't try to cure it. You can keep ignoring the disease here to fill your wallet for a while, but it's worse for your health than smoking a pack of cigs a day." — my team supervisor, heavy smoker, and possibly the only sane person at Microsoft.

5. Never trust documentation, never trust comments, never trust untested code, never trust tests, never trust commit messages, never trust bug reports, never trust numbered lists or graphs without clearly labeled axes. You never know what is missing from them, what was redacted away. — Coworker at current company.

Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) headphones in, whatever music that your mood requires at the time (my taste varies from classical to country to blues to jazz, pop, rock, metal and even heavy metal (growls) at times).

libre.fm is a good source for non-redundant music. The community channel is actually very good. (even though some crap do creep in every once in a while)

If you can zone out the noise around you, have a coffee machine within your chair's (assuming it has wheels) roll-range - you're all good.

PS : There's one problem that you can never rule out - interruptions from people around you, for that, you make a list of predefined answers :

!rant

Wooo!
Shiny new job, shiny new lappy 😊

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail!

This was something which my tech lead used to tell me when I was so obsessed with nosql databases a few years back. I would try to find problems to solve that has a use case for nosql databases or even try to convince me(I didn’t realise it back then) that I need to use nosql db for this new idea that I have, without really thinking deep enough whether the data in question is better represented using an sql schema or not.

Now, leading a team of young developers, I come across similar suggestions from few of my team members who just discovered this new and shiny tech and want to use it in production projects.

While I am not against new and shiny, it’s not a good practice to jump right in to it without exploring it deep enough or considering all the shortcomings. The most important question to ask is, whether some of the problems you are trying to solve can be solved with the current stack.

Modifying your stack requires more than just a week’s experience of playing around with the getting started guide and stack overflow replies. This is something which need to be carefully considered after taking inputs from the people who would be supporting it, that include operations, sysadmins and teams that are gonna interface with your stack indirectly.

I am not talking about delaying adoption by waiting for long list of approvals to get some thing that would bring immediate value, but a carefully orchestrated plan for why and how to migrate to a new stack.

Just because one of the tech giants made a move to a new stack and wrote about it in their engineering blog doesn’t mean that you need to make a switch in the same direction. Take a moment to analyse the possible reasons that motivated them to do it, ask yourself if your organisation is struggling with the exact same problems, observe how others facing the same issue are addressing it, and then make an informed decision.
Collect enough data to support your proposal.
Ask yourself again if you are the one holding the hammer.
If the answer is no, forge ahead!

I am gonna rage for a bit.
Before I start, know this: I diehard love development, computer science and everythjng surrounding it.

The area comes with a very nice and interesting history and cultural impact. In particular, here as it was in the U.S of A. I love it, I love researching till my eyes beg me to stop and my brain fries. I love reading about history and the silicon knights that madd shit happen through digital wizardry.

And you can only imagine how happy I was when I got my shiny lol B.S in Comp Sci, keep it in my office and errthang.
I
Fucking
Love
My
Field

But. I have noticed something recently. In 2018(obviously before that) this new generation has a knack for making things cringey.

What do I mean by that?

Well, shit like that. Is it necessary? Or what about images(multiple) showing stuff like "double tap for your favorite language!"

Why? Why must we be this way? Why do people find a way to shit all over nice things? Is this shit necessary?

I specially hate pictures of girls showing their legs and right next to them a laptop with some basic af css file --->#codergirl ....fuck off.

Or the trillions of code pictures that are only html or some js framework flavor of the week.

Its just retarded man.

Gf, shouting: why are you using my premium shampoo and hairdryer on your keycaps?

Me: because just like your haircut, they were unnecessarily expensive, they embody all my self worth, and deserve to be shiny and clean.

Gf, pondering: ... Could you clean my keyboard next?

1. See new shiny tech
2. Read install/setup instructions
3. Make Hello World/Todo app by copying codeblocks from documentation
4. Update LinkedIn profile
5. Insist on rewriting entire company ecosystem

Oh wait, thats my horseshit-eating coworker

This is dedicated to all Webdevs, especially those WordPress fanboys.

I was reflecting on some things since I do more frequent freelance jobs at the time. And I have to admit: people are fucking crazy.

I had some serious talk with customers and some serious talk for people I work as subsidiary.

The average customer thinks a nice webpage costs I'm 9-50 bucks. They got some shitty Webhosting for 1-5$/month including domain and think they are set.

They have unclear visions about what they actually want, it all boils down to "I like the design". I made a page for someone who just posted images, no text nothing and I told him a trillion times NEEDS some text, even a fucking picture description would be sufficient, else he'll never score anything at google.

Ofc it got denied, now he's bitching how nobody finds the site when they google his name. The other thing is that Wordpress became the solution for everything.

I'm a fucking certified magento developer and I hate magento with a passion. Magento is an overabstracted clusterfuck and believe me, I did the certification I had to learn more than average about the core. But damn, don't slap woocommerce on everything.

Narrowninded fucktards, the cheap out of the box solution isn't always the best.

Don't cry if you got hacked because you were too dumb to upgrade your wordpress. Don't tell me to do some "enhancements" on a server you probably share with 100 other uses. I can't fix your Webserver with your shitty ftp account.

I also hate WordPress with a burning passion. Cum guzzling cavetroll it is. It has it usages, but don't rely on a core So small every kind of extra functionality has to somehow tinkered on it and then expect it to work flawlessly and for 10$ price.

Of course you can buy a theme that, if it would have been special made for you cost 800$ or more, but it wasn't. It just looks like it from the outside. If you want customization you are at the mercy of the option it provides. I can't even tell how many times i spent whole evenings explaining how their shiny template works. Just to do some crazy shit with JavaScript like rearranging domelements because it didn't work as expected.

I still stay to my word. Nothing great has been nor will be created with a Wordpress core. Don't tell me how some great stuff has been achieved. Or wait, please do so. But before you do think about if that wouldn't been faster, cheaper, more reliable , etc... if done with a framework like symphony or laravel... or even zend or cake.

And that brings me back to the point:
Is cheap and "out of the box" really what you need and desire? As customer and as developer?

When you're hard at work on an algo but forgot to take your ADHD medicine so the squirrels are fighting outside but need to check Facebook statuses and having a dance party to Cotton Eyed Joe is a great coworker on LinkedIn which is now coded in Ember JS is weird compared to Python and my pencil is a funny color and my keyboard is shiny. I forgot the punchline. I'm gonna have a bowl of cereal. What was I doing?

I really hate this company.

The code is a disaster. Every single other employee is a salesperson. Nobody has any bloody clue what I do or how difficult it is. They don't care about stability (unless things are crashing), maintenance (until crashing), code quality (until it delays features), or anything apart from shiny new features they can sell. The boss (the king salesman, if ever there was one) doesn't know how to manage, but tries to by acting like his "nice asshole" self -- he's an asshole that gives you passes, makes sure it's bloody obvious that he's doing it begrudgingly, yet everything is still absolutely your fault. If he arbitrarily decides it's too much your fault, he stops being "nice" and flips out on you in front of everyone. That's a "nice asshole": an asshole who can barely even pretend to be nice.

Fuck him.

And you know what? I really hate having to work next to these fucking birds, too.

Today was our weekly conference call, and I was both late and unprepared. I was too focused on my work, and got a ping 4 minutes into the meeting, so I obv didn't have time to prepare. Boss was also pissy today, and I didn't have much to show for my week, thanks to lots of little "OMG NEED ASAP" shit projects that all took too long, pushing back what I was actually supposed to work on. Which didn't get finished, of course, and today that project was "the most important" -- I suspect simply because it wasn't finished. AGADJFSKL. Cue the birds fucking screaming and never fucking shutting up no matter what I did. Blanket? No effect. Spray bottle? SCREAM MORE! Boss was yelling at me, the birds were screaming, and I couldn't think. Goddamn fucking disaster.

and yes, we have a macaw. A macaw and over 20 cockatiels. Said macaw decided today was a lovely day to just fucking SCREAM non-stop, and the tiels were doing their best to keep up. Thinking clearly during this cacophony? Not gonna happen.

Wait, "go elsewhere," you say? Somewhere quieter? Where is this "elsewhere?" We live in a fucking tiny house, and during the call it was (and still is) filled with sleeping people, and surrounded by a fucking desert. Who the fuck thought living in the desert was a good idea, anyway? Like, seriously. What brainless moron thought "You know what? This is a great place! Let's settle down right here," while trudging through the scorching sand and dust, looking at the basically lifeless horizon filled with large, hot, dry, dusty, barren rocks (aka "mountains"), and fucking dying from thirst? Probably someone so delirious from heatstroke they never actually recovered, and continued raving that it's a goddamn paradise to their heat-addled imbecile followers. I really hope they hallucinated a la-z-boy in place of a hedge of teddybear cholla and died an excruciating and prickly death. Fuck that guy/girl, too.

But I digress.

I seriously need an office that isn't a 30 min drive into gang-central. I'd work outside, but I live in the middle of the bloody fucking desert, and get heat exhaustion within about half an hour. Everywhere else in the house people bother me almost incessantly.

just. FUCKING FJASKLDFJGAG.
I HATE THIS PLACE SO SO SO MUCH.

'I've had such Zen lately,' Alex said. Maybe then, but lately? I've just been too exhausted and burned out from putting up with all this shit to get angry. Days like today? I could pour kerosene over everything and laugh as it all just burned to ash.

Ooh shiny new toy

When I first joined the profession, I had a mentor who refused to give me straight-forward answers to my questions / queries. He always had the same answer, "Google it. Find the solution yourself." I hated him for that. Sometimes he used to explain that it was for my own good (blah, blah, the usual stuff) and not because he didn't know or couldn't give me the answer straight-away. I still thought it was just that I was too smart to ask all the right (complicated) questions and he didn't have the answers.
(Of course, that is a bit too exaggerated; he used to help me out with complicated stuff when he knew I was blocked and couldn't move further; he wasn't a sore mentor; he was a good one, in his own way.)

Several years later, I find myself giving the same answers and advice to juniors I mentor. It turns out that push to figure things out on my own did me a lot of good. I'm able to approach any problem head-on and not freak out even if the specs or the deadlines seem surreal. I know how to "figure" answers to problems that I come across for the first time. In the process you learn a lot of stuff that "keep you ahead of the curve and not grow old".

Ranting time;

Yeah so OK this ancient legacy clusterfuck we've been maintaining and keeping alive finally broke. And even though I'm very pleased with both being right, and the well deserved right to say I TOLD YOU SO, SO MANY MANY FUCKING TIMES to all in management, it's the definition of hate to work 18 hours a day to fix the shit someone else built, that they refused us to refactor. Ah, but wait; there's more! Everyone thinks it's our fault (R&D), because historically it was our department that built the system. Ten years ago. So sales and support are now all over us, those responsible for us being in this mess are either gone or so high up in management that they refuse to take part.

Taking the fall and blame and workload, for something we warned repeatedly about, but were refused to do something with, because shiny features and new apps is what is important!

I'd understand it if the numbers were red, but they arent!! We are growing so fast it was inevitable!

I fucking hate companies who dont listen to their devs..... also companies who places ops on dev shoulders.

Yaaaargh! Also; two developers means twice as fast? No? Fuuuuuck!!!

Just because Facebook/Google/Apple are doing something, it doesn't mean it's the future of technology.

No, we're not going to throw out large parts our perfectly good tech stack just because you liked their latest blog post.

If you wanted to always play "follow the shiny thing", you should have become a jeweller. Please learn what independent thought is and how to apply it, the results might surprise you!

Me: "oh its a new year, time to check out some shiny new languages"
Me: *finds kotlin*
Me:
Me: "what the fuck"

He does care!

The most pissed off I've been at work?

Client X came to us for a website.
We secretly outsourced the work.
Client X is coming for a visit in 10 mins...

MD to me: "I've told them your lead dev on this. They're not super-technical so if they ask you about the project just tell them it's going well."

Now I'm not a comfortable blagger, I don't have that kind of confidence, so to ask me to lie like this makes me feel really stressed and uncomfortable. Furthermore, I had literally no idea about any aspect of the work we were supposedly doing for this client. I can barely contain my panic but my colleagues help me piece together a basic understanding.

The MD returns: "They're here now. Can you quickly go and check that the toilets are clean."

WHAT THE FUCK!? The little prick. I'd knock him out if wasn't so meek and pathetic. I tell myself that I'm being helpful and nice but in truth I'm just his fucking doormat and he has zero respect for me.

I have no problem cleaning stuff (we all basically tidy up behind us) but this is something he could have done. Furthermore, who cares? None of us leave the loos with piss on the floor and shit smeared across the walls. They're never anything less than client-ready so to ask me to check means that he's already checked them himself and one of the loos is not quite shiny enough.

The reader may feel that this is no big deal (and in some ways you're right) but everything about this scenario was fucked up. The MD had embroiled the whole company in a lie and assumes we're all okay with that, then to add insult just nonchalantly orders me to clean the bogs. The cunt.

FWIW The client didn't ask to talk to me or use the toilet during their visit.

The man who runs my IT department. The man who is in charge of all things and people that are technical: IT management software development, infrastructure, training, help desk, system administration​, etc. A man with a staff of fifty plus. If you were to peel back the flesh on this man's head and crack open his skull you would find dung beetles feasting on the feces that power his thoughts and motor functions. Underneath this foul membrane, if you could push past the maggots; the meal worms; his undying love for hourly binges of Johnny Walker Black on any day of the week with a name that contains a vowel; his fascination with shiny objects and his endless internal monologue wondering when they would hatch rainbow ponies that fly; his desire whenever he enters a paint store to open all the cans of paint and taste the different colors; if you could push past all of the vile crap that exists where Thomas Aquinas once theorized there was a soul, you would find a colony of paramecia at the end of their short lives laughing hysterically at how much smarter they were than the host they lived in.

This man was in charge of hiring the Manager of Software Development. The manager I report to. After seven months of ignoring this chore; after interviewing the sum total of four candidates; after making a point to tell myself and a colleague that there was no one qualified to fill this position within our company (an opinion that is both untrue and, when spoken, runs afoul of internal hiring policies) this man hired a soulless cretin with no experience in software development or with running a software development group. A man who regularly confuses web servers and SQL servers. A man who asked me how my previous manager reviewed my work, was told by me that said previous manager read my code, and then replied in his capacity as the manager of software development that "looking at code is a compete waste of time for a manager." A man so without any humanity or reason for being that he will sit silently, creepily, in conference rooms with the lights off waiting for meetings to begin. Meetings he has scheduled. That have no reason for being in the first place. Just like himself.

Shortly before the man in charge offered the Dev Manager job to the simulacrum of human flesh that is my manager, he met with me and others who had been involved in the interview process. When I informed him that hiring someone with no technical knowledge for a very technical position would be a mistake that he would suffer through for years, he replied in reference to his future hire that "his managerial experience makes up for his lack of technical knowledge."

Best. Prank. Ever. Worst prank ever too. Fuck.

We've got a team of around 20 developers and the most junior of them all is a interesting specimen.

The kind of person who thinks they a 'expert' in anything and everything and is constantly trying to school our senior developers who have 20+ years experience behind them.

The sort of person that spends 15 seconds googling something he has never heard of before, but now that he has skimmed 1 page on Google would classify himself as a 'expert' in said topic.

He comes into my office yesterday and proclaims that it has been decided by himself that he no longer wants to be a developer anymore and wants to do Ops/Infrastructure, then starts rambling on about how he is a Kubernetes expert.

I asked what experience he had with Kubernetes and his response was "I watched a webinar they did last night" to which I asked if he had ever actually used anything to do with Kubernetes in his life.

"No, but I'll watch a few YouTube videos and will then be more than qualified" he says

Followed by him telling me that we'll be moving all of our current Docker Swarm clusters into Kubernetes.

This was news to me (I'm head of infrastructure and operations)

I needed a good giggle, so I asked why we would get rid of our exisiting Docker infrastructure that's got a 100% uptime over the past 2 years and has worked without failure. It's truely been a dream.

He says "Because it's shiny and cool and better"

The nest afternoon he comes to me and says "When I move everything into Kubernetes I am going to convert everything into micro services"

He says that he watched a YouTube video the night before on microservices and has decided that it's what we need to use for a particular project.

(It's a simple php website that gets 100 hits per day)

Hopefully his boss will notice that he is producing no output soon. Don't want to tell the manager that the guy he hired delivers no work and lives in a fantasy land.

"your not touching the infrastructure. Ever"

I had a friend whom I met in an open-source community. We hadn't been in touch for a while because of the distances of where we were. Coincidentally, we happened to be working in the same city. When we knew that we were in the same city, we decided to meet and catch up. We met over dinner and this person went on and on about his company and how cool the culture was there.

Towards the end, I jokingly said, "If your company is so cool, why don't you get me a job there?"

2 weeks later, he sends me an email address and asks me to send my resume to it.
1 more week later, HR from the company calls and asks whether I can come to office to chat.
I agree and head over there over lunch break. I _speak_ to the person who was going to be my manager and later to the CTO. The CTO asks me a few technological questions and sends me off.
1 week later, I call up HR just to know how I fared in the interview. They say that they'll give me an update within the week.
Next week I get a call from HR asking when I can join. Could I join with 2 weeks of notice period? I could try, the pay was almost double that I was already earning.
I speak to my existing boss about the offer and they offer me an immediate hike of 30%. That gives me a notion that I was already under-paid. I wouldn't want to continue working with an employer who knowingly paid me low (even though I was content with what I was getting already). I make my decision to quit. Puts in my 2-week notice period and join the new company on the said date.

Fuck my life...

Okay, so I’m working on a web app with a small group... the app is basically a lead generator for new business in another country. We just need contact details cause they’re a fucker to buy.

Step 1: prototype to the investors, working with the ceo to make this thing look shiny AF.

Goes well as fuck.

CEO: “when can we get this out?”

Me: “it’s basically done mate, get your guys to look at it and we can talk about marketing”

Que a shower of 10 or so bellends with senior in their title going into a room and coming out with:

Bellends: “so on this page we want the user to confirm and accept the contract”

Me: “cool, makes some sense, that’s what it’s already doing.”

Bellends: “afterwards we want to show them the price and have them put in their banking details.”

Me: “Wait, you what when?”

Bellends: “Yeah, well Jenny says we should have as few clicks as possible to get to the final stage and have the customer accept.”

Me: “Jenny’s on fucking crack, moving the contract formation phase to after the contract acceptance stage is not an option”

Bellends: “Oh it’s okay, Andy in legal said that would be okay”

Me: “Andy’s a fucking moron, tell him that online contract formation laws were updated 2014/2015 and you can’t do that anymore”

Bellends: “No, andy’s legal, surely he knows”

Bellends: “We want all of this above the fold”

Me: “OH FUCKING SUCK A DICK YOU ABSOLUTE BAND OF FUCKWADS... which one of you, which one hasn’t looked at a website this millennia!?”

Needless to say I ignored all their shit, got the lead generator out and told the CEO those ten people are certifiably fucking useless.

Bonus round; recent, but “it has to be on internal infrastructure”

“Why? It’s a mobile app sending rest calls to a third party saas.”

“It just has to, we have this thing called the private cloud and w”

“Wait... you what son, priv 🤦🏼‍♂️ private what mate?”

“Private cloud”

“You... you mean a server rack?”

“Nah we spent £2mn on it, it’s brilliant”

“Hahahaha you fucking dick, you blew £2mn on server infra with fuckall to put on it!?”

“No, no it’s the private cloud”

“Fucking idiot, aye son, where’s the fucking bean stalk you prick!?”

“It has to go on internal infr”

“Shut up, that won’t work”

!rant

Boss: ehi I was checking out our latest product (made in vuejs) it's blazing fast and responsive.

Me : shiny eyes "... Can I refactor our biggest project from angular 1.5 to vuejs?"

Boss: "mmh what can you save from the old code base? "

Me: "mmh.. A lot.. Mmh like.. The CSS!"

Boss : "no"

I hoped!

I wanted a computer for my Christmas. Must have been 1987 and I just have been about 8.

A few days before Xmas my aunt gave me a card with £5 in it. I asked my dad “dad, if I was getting a computer I could use the £5 to buy a game”

My dad explained to me that we couldn’t afford it and maybe next year.

Woke up the next morning to a shiny new Commodore 64 AND my own little tv.

Never been happier.

This dish washing liquid is dope, my utensil got shiny af! 😜

Guys, I have a dirty secret

I use the light theme :o

so here's a little story:

yesterday i decided to buy a shiny new gtx 1070 since my pc is getting very old, i come back from the store and i realize that my case is slightly too small to fit the card.
'No bg deal' i think to myself, i run out to buy a saw and after some work i made some space to fit the card in by sawing off some hard drive bays i was not using. I plug in the card, i wire up the pc, and it does not boot: after some asking around (i have never really built a pc before), i relaize i need more power to the card and wire a second PCIE connector. low and behold, i power of the pc and it works! Once logged into windows tho, i realize none of my HHDs are detected...

To cut a long story short, i **did not think to unplug the hard drives before i started sawing off bits of the case and the vibrations killed both of them!** i lost ~1TB of data in the process: a lot of it was games and programs, but i have yet to tally up the damage.

I am completely bamboozled by what the fuck just happened, i think i'll go hand myself in to the nearest police station for crimes against technology... or maybe a mental clinic would be best?...

PS: my system drive was spared since its an SSD, but i may as well re-install windows at this point since i lost 90% of my software

Someday in an embedded course:

Lecturer: "You'll want the following drivers and SDK for this lecrure. With some tweaks it'll also work on Windows."

Guy with shiny Mac infront: "What about Mac?"

Lecturer: "WTF? You don't use Mac for embedded systems." o.O

Me: lol 😁

I wrote a database migration to add a column to a table and populated that column upon record creation.
But the code is so freaking convoluted that it took me four days of clawing my eyes out to manage this.
BUT IT'S FINALLY DONE.
FREAKING YAY.

Why so long, you ask? Just how convoluted could this possibly be? Follow my lead ~

There's an API to create a gift. (Possibly more; I have no bloody clue.)
I needed the mobile dev contractor to tell me which APIs he uses because there are lots of unused ones, and no reasoning to their naming, nor comments telling me what they do.

This API takes the supplied gift params, cherry-picks a few bits of useful data out (by passing both hashes by reference to several methods), replaces a couple of them with lookups / class instances (more pass-by-reference nonsense). After all of this, it logs the resulting (and very different) mess, and happily declares it the original supplied params. Utterly useless for basically everything, and so very wrong.

It then uses this data to call GiftSale#create, which returns an instance of GiftSale (that's actually a Gift; more on that soon).

GiftSale inherits from Gift, and redefines three of its methods.

GiftSale#create performs a lot of validations / data massaging, some by reference, some not. It uses `super` to call Gift#create which actually maps to the constructor Gift#initialize.

Gift#initialize calls Gift#pre_init (passing the data by reference again), which does nothing and returns null. But remember: GiftSale inherits from Gift, meaning GiftSale#pre_init supersedes Gift#pre_init, so that one is called instead. GiftSale#pre_init returns a Stripe charge object upon success, or a Gift (and a log entry containing '500 Internal') upon failure. But this is irrelevant because the return value is never actually used. Pass by reference, remember? I didn't.

We're now back at Gift#initialize, Rails finally creates a Gift object using the args modified [mostly] in-place by all of the above.

Another step back and we're at GiftSale#create again. This method returns either the shiny new Gift object or an error string (???), and the API logic branches on its type. For further confusion: not all of the method's returns are explicit, and those implicit return values are nested three levels deep. (In Ruby, a method will return the last executed line's return value automatically, allowing e.g. `def add(a,b); a+b; end`)

So, to summarize: GiftSale#create jumps back and forth between Gift five times before finally creating a Gift instance, and each jump further modifies the supplied params in-place.

Also. There are no rescue/catch blocks, meaning any issue with any of the above results in a 500. (A real 500, not a fake 500 like last time. A real 500, with tragic consequences.)

If you're having trouble following the above... yep! That's why it took FOUR FREAKING DAYS! I had no tests, no documentation, no already-built way of testing the API, and no idea what data to send it. especially considering it requires data from Stripe. It also requires an active session token + user data, and I likewise had no login API tests, documentation, logging, no idea how to create a user ... fucking hell, it's a mess.)

Also, and quite confusingly:
There's a class for GiftSale, but there's no table for it.
Gift and GiftSale are completely interchangeable except for their #create methods.

So, why does GiftSale exist?
I have no bloody idea.
All it seems to do is make everything far more complicated than it needs to be.

Anyway. My total commit?
Six lines.
IN FOUR FUCKING DAYS!

AHSKJGHALSKHGLKAHDSGJKASGH.

Background: I'm not drunk yet, BUT I'M WORKING ON IT.

okay.

I just finished a second sprint on my React app. The first was to build a merchant onboarding flow. The second was to do substantial cleanup as I learned more about react/redux, and to create a "supply order" flow -- basically purchasing marketing materials and services. I finished that in a week, and I'm pretty proud. api-guy wanted it done in a day. i laughed. he probably could have, but it would have been a copy of the code in a new repo with some lines changed.

ANYWAY. it's all done and It's super pretty and works amazingly well. It has both the onboarding flow and the ordering flow, with a nice pop-out sidebar for navigation, namespaced actions, etc. Everything is pretty clean. I even added a cart to the ordering (despite everyone telling me not to) because wtf, what if someone wants to order TWO items? dumbasses. So I made that. it's sexy.

Anyway, it's all done and shiny and fancy and wonderful and I'd *love* to share screenshots if only it didn't give away where I worked. :<

... but the point of the rant!

After the first sprint, I made a copy of the repo so I could rework it and add more functionality without touching the original. (Hey! That's what a branch is for, right? Why didn't I branch it up?
well, read on)

I knew we were going to have multiple separate flows for this app: onboard, ordering, merchant tools, admin tools, support, etc. So, I wrote its server portion (the webpack builder + http server) so it would serve the same app at whatever url the user hit, and set a cookie containing that host+url. This allows the app to serve different content (basically showing/hiding content) based on the URL and future login roles. If someone hits /order, it would hide everything but the order flow. If they're a merchant, it would show all the merchant views plus ordering, etc.

tl;dr This way I can use the same codebase for multiple sites, drastically simplifying development, branding, and what have you. This new app could obv also be a drop-in replacement for the original onboarding project because of the above.

HOWEVER. this apparently isn't good enough for api-guy. He's terrified that adding/updating future components will affect all the existing content somehow.

so.

now we have three repos for basically the same codebase. 1) onboard aka "surfboard", 2) ordering, 3) merchant tools, aka "ferrari" (the "future" app).

Except.
1) "surfboard" is a very old version of the code. 3) "ferrari" is also old, since 2) "ordering" has newer content in it now.

... and somehow this is better?
fuck if i can figure out how.

His reasoning is "well, you won't be touching surfboard or ordering for 6 months, so now you don't have to worry about it." Sure, except, you know, it'll be a pain in the ass in 6 months now when I have a crapton of code and branding to redo. ffs.

Oh. We also have three Heroku pipelines for these three repos. for the same codebase.

and now you know why i'm drinking.

My dad used to be a Marketing Manager. He used to make a lot of presentations et al for his meetings. We got our first computer in our house when I was around 7 years old. It was first Windows 95, but I wasn't fortunate enough to even touch the machine. My dad was very protective about the machine. He himself would not use it unless he had to complete some work overnight. For me, it was an absolute wonder as to how and what that thing in the bedroom sitting on the desk next to my parents bedside was. I used to hide and peek around the door sill when my dad was working on it. He became a bit more lenient with the Windows 98 and let me and my sibling play DOS games under his supervision for a limited time.

Over time, I managed to look over his shoulder for the passwords - both BIOS and OS user passwords and started logging in myself. By now, my dad would let me sit on the bed near him when I looked curiously as he worked. Then I had to figure how to connect to the internet and surf the web. And there folks is how my journey with computers began.

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Overheard this conversation today:
1: look at this! My shiny new iPhone can measure stuff!
2: how accurate is it?
1: not very, it is pretty buggy.
2: how did the bugs get in there?
3: it is an apple so

Last Friday company-wide call consisted of the sales CEO bossman, the remote contractor dev, and myself. The only topic of discussion was CTO-bashing (bossman's favorite). Neither person had much of anything to say about their week, and they didn't want to hear my rather-lengthy summary either (I did a lot). All they wanted to do was bash the CTO (API Guy).

The CEO asked how many hours I had worked, and seemed annoyed when I said less than 40. Well screw you. Monday was Christmas, and Sunday was Encroaching Estranged Asshole Day. (Earlier rant)

I've been spending most of my time trying to learn the steaming mountain of rancid hippo shit that API Guy squeezed out, since he's leaving forever in 10 days. Sure, CEO bossman says he'll still be around to answer questions, but even with him right next to me in the office he's less than useful. After he's gone and finally feeling free of this farce? It'll be worth fuck-all.

So bossman is mad at me for both not working enough over Christmas, and not pumping out features at a frantic pace despite multiple explanations of why this is a bad idea. And he didn't care about what work I actually did do.

My every interaction with him makes me angry. Whenever I -- or anyone else -- does something he doesn't approve of, seemingly no matter the reasoning, he makes it out to be a failure on their part, and like he can't trust them as much now.

Well I'm sorry we're trying to make sure our websocket works perfectly before putting it in the hands of our customers who rely on it for cash processing.

I'm sorry I'm trying to recall printers that aren't configured properly, which also prevent customers from using our goddamn service they're paying for.

I'm sorry I'm trying to learn how everything works while I still have someone to talk to and ask questions of.

I'm sorry I'm preparing for the day I have to take over and have you breathing down my neck. Once API Guy's gone I'll be responsible for everything, and you'll be yelling at me and having a @Root bashing session instead if I don't know how to fix everything right away.

But no. All you care about is that I talk to you about what's going in so you can micromanage development despite having zero fucking understanding of goddamn anything. All you ever fucking want is the next shiny feature you can push to make more sales / keep your current contacts happy. Doesn't fking matter if it makes development awful later; that's tomorrow's problem. And yet you have the gall to bash API Guy over and over and over again for the codebase being a mess? Sure he's a terrible programmer, but been putting up with this exact same shit for five years. No wonder it's a mountain of rancid hippo shit. That's as much your fault as his, asshole.

I'm so sorry you "have serious concerns" about me. I don't want to put up with your shit either.

Fuck off and die.

Wanted to make a website with some of my friends about whatever kid thing we were into at the time. None of our parents cared, it was the 90s and nobody took the internet seriously.

Copied and pasted bits of html into notepad and FTPed them to some free webhost over dialup. The website lasted three weeks -- my friends got bored, I got hooked.

A few years later I found myself wondering why some websites used ".php" instead of ".html". I discovered this shiny new thing called PHP 4. Built a website for some video game I was into using it. Spent the next two years teaching myself everything there was to know.

Took programming in high school. Chose CS over mechanical engineering because I liked the university better. Got an internship which turned into a job which turned into a career.

I received a shiny new pair of Bose QC 35 II's for christmas -- bluetooth headphones with active noise cancelling.

They're similar to the $500 pair my previous boss lent me at work. Lower quality, but much newer, and rechargeable! and bluetooth! Yay!

I paired them with my debian machine, and... it failed. No explanation given. I tried everything I could htink of, but nothing changed. Well, okay; bluetooth came out within the last decade or so, meaning it takes some extra effort in Debian. truth. So I did some reading on bluetooth connection issues, changed some configs, learned how to use the bluetooth cli, and used that to pair and connect them. Worked like a charm.

But! No audio.
Damn.

Cue more research (on pulseaudio this time) and more configs. Did some fiddling, etc. No progress. Also discovered `pavucontrol`, a gui-only (😕) utility which lets you select audio output devices, among other things. It doesn't list the headset. Nor does `pactl list`, but that does list the correct bluetooth modules. It also lists Lennart Poettering's name many many times, for all the good that does. Bragging about building something as needlessly complicated and crappy and buggy as pulseaudio? I will never understand that egotistical doucheballoon.

Anyway.
I paired the headset with my phone in about six seconds. I'm now controlling my phone's music via spotify on my computer. yay. Doesn't work for games or movies, but I can always just plug them in.

But woo!
Noise canceling!
Yay, silence! At last!
and music! How I've missed you!
❤💜🖤

(systemd and pulseaudio can still die in a fire.)

The deeper I dig into HP's designs, the more I realize how amazing they are.

- Let's put 18.5V on our charger label
- Let's make it actually put out 20V, just because 🤪
(Note: this is a SMPS, not one of those old linear ones where that's normal)
- Let's make our charger output positive on not only 1 line, but also a second smaller one, just because. All the while the thicker line is more than capable enough, and the same size as the negative line.
(So essentially there's 2 positives, one negative)
- Fuck conventional wiring colors (red for positive, black for negative). Let's awaken our 'murican patriotism and make positive black, and negative white.
- Oh those are the colors for American AC lines and not DC lines? I had no idea! But look, I have a shiny piece of paper and you don't so your concern is invalid!

I lost more brain cells from these realizations than I would from a whole night of binge drinking. WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU HP?!!

To me it seems that Software eng has become a „I wanna get rich“ thing..

Too many idiots do it and think they’ll get tons of money..
Not that many new geeks because of that..

Also, I feel like the mentality has switched from quality oriented to shiny oriented..
3/4 of new Software i use contains serious bugs that don’t get fixed because it takes time..

I hate this fucking front-end stuff so hard..

How DA FUCK is it possible that I set up the whole backend including DB connection, base controllers, models, base validation and stuff in an hour but don't get this fucking fucking retarded JS framework piece of shit to display a test string after ONE FUCKING HOUR!!!

Why do we need this shit anyway? Why does everything have to be shiny with some fucking animations???

It's about the information, isn't it? Then WHY DOES IT HAVE TO LOOK PRETTY???

I gonna travel back in fucking time to the early 80's!

Stupid front-end shit..

!code

I literally cannot get this computer to boot from ANYTHING other than its hard drive.

I want to boot from a usb flash drive, but the bios doesn't support that. it supports standard and 120mb floppies, ZIP drives, usb floppies, usb cd drives, etc. but not a generic USB drive. You'd think the bios developers would have heard of them back in 2012, but they also refer to Windows as "window os", so who knows.

I changed the boot order multiple times to include everything that might possibly include a usb flash drive, and then just tried all of the other options as well. No luck. Everything just booted straight to Windows.

Okay, that's not exactly unexpected, so I found a boot manager that allows booting to usb drives, and burned that to a cd. I made sure the boot order included "CDDRIVE" first (and "USB-CD" second just to be sure), and tried again. The bios refused to boot from the cd because it's in a cd/dvd drive, and cd drives are VASTLY different beasts than dvd drives, apparently. Like, it didn't even ask the drive to spin up! It just booted straight into Windows.

After a few more reboots (and quite a few middle fingers), my dvd drive magically appeared in the list of allowed boot devices. Why did it just show up now? No clue :/ I'm just happy it's there.

So, I pick that, save and exit, and wait for my shiny new boot manager to pop up. The cursor flashes a bit, moves around, and flashes some more. Then Windows starts loading.

what the crap? why?

So this time I disable booting from the hard drive altogether. In fact, I disable everything except the dvd drive, because screw this, and save/restart for the twelfth time.

Windows greets me.
Again.

What the hell?

At this point I'm tempted to unplug the friggin' drive. If Windows still greets me after that, I'm just going to check myself into an asylum and call it a life.

But seriously.
Either the boot manager in question is triple-faulting and the bios is transparently failing-over to the previous boot config (Windows), or said boot manager is just like "yolo!" and picks Windows anyway.

If a different boot manager doesn't work, I'm totally out of ideas.

Edit: disabling HD boot entirely and removing the boot manager cd also results in Windows loading. It's like the bios is completely ignoring my settings. :/

When you find this on an open-source project's git log -> :facepalm:

Got a new phone and the theme here on DevRant is all light and shiny.

What is this madness!?

Windows 10, updating to version 1809.
That was only 3 months ago 🤷‍♂️

Preparing to install: 0%, 8%, 0%, 24%, 3%, 0%, 19%

I think I’m setting a restore point for this one 😣

People in my school launching Internet Explorer, cause Firefox takes to long to open/doesn't work fine - instead of clicking the shiny little chrome icon on their desktops...

One of our newly-joined junior sysadmin left a pre-production server SSH session open. Being the responsible senior (pun intended) to teach them the value of security of production (or near production, for that matter) systems, I typed in sudo rm --recursive --no-preserve-root --force / on the terminal session (I didn't hit the Enter / Return key) and left it there. The person took longer to return and the screen went to sleep. I went back to my desk and took a backup image of the machine just in case the unexpected happened.

On returning from wherever they had gone, the person hits enter / return to wake the system (they didn't even have a password-on-wake policy set up on the machine). The SSH session was stil there, the machine accepted the command and started working. This person didn't even look at the session and just navigated away elsewhere (probably to get back to work on the script they were working on).

Five minutes passes by, I get the first monitoring alert saying the server is not responding. I hoped that this person would be responsible enough to check the monitoring alerts since they had a SSH session on the machine.
Seven minutes : other dependent services on the machine start complaining that the instance is unreachable.

I assign the monitoring alert to the person of the day. They come running to me saying that they can't reach the instance but the instance is listed on the inventory list. I ask them to show me the specific terminal that ran the rm -rf command. They get the beautiful realization of the day. They freak the hell out to the point that they ask me, "Am I fired?". I reply, "You should probably ask your manager".

Lesson learnt the hard-way. I gave them a good understanding on what happened and explained the implications on what would have happened had this exact same scenario happened outside the office giving access to an outsider. I explained about why people in _our_ domain should care about security above all else.

There was a good 30+ minute downtime of the instance before I admitted that I had a backup and restored it (after the whole lecture). It wasn't critical since the environment was not user-facing and didn't have any critical data.

Since then we've been at this together - warning engineers when they leave their machines open and taking security lecture / sessions / workshops for new recruits (anyone who joins engineering).

Wife ( working from home; to husband ) : how many whistles did the pressure cooker blow?

Husband : How am I supposed to know? I don't know!

Manager ( on Skype ) : Three! I heard three whistles!

Countless times. Here is two:
- when he said he prefers an external hdd over git
- when he said that git is just a shiny new thing, we young devs use just because it's new
- etc

Junior dev requests for sudo access on a server instance for some package installation, gets it, figures out how to open the root shell - never goes back. They do everything on root.

Fast forward to production deployment time, their application won't run without elevated privileges. Sysadmin asks why does the application require elevated privileges. Dev answers, "Because I set it up with root" :facepalm:

I'm torn -- shiny new macbook pro, want to keep it pristine for as long as possible, but I've also got a burning desire to sticker it up.

Manager: "We're gonna have to work over the weekend to add this shiny new feature!"
Me: "Peanuts and Incentives included?"
Manager: "No, but you get job satisfaction!"
Me: 😒

I left uni in 2005 clutching my shiny new .NET based degree, and was instantly hired by a local software firm... to maintain their legacy Turbo Pascal systems.

1. Being the only single wringable neck to keep 40+ websites afloat, plus 3-5 new ones coming in or being built each month all with an overseas team that uses Google Translate to communicate and who are also in an active war zone.
2. Being fired for being “too old” in my mindset about how to do things. I had just turned 40 and my boss was 24 and distracted by all the shiny frameworks when all the marketing person needed was a simple off-the-shelf CMS-based site to publish company offers.
3. Jumping into the middle of a HUGE clusterfuck of thousands of Slack channels, wikis, and Jiras and an outmoded content management system while trying to learn the ropes from a guy who has no time to teach properly and then who abruptly leaves the company with scant documentation on everything that he held mainly in his own head. And there was no way I.T. was going to allow him to have the ability in Zoom to make a video of his training sessions, for no discernibly good security reason at all.
4. Working for only 9 months at two separate companies for two separate frat dudes who could have been clones of each other and whose egos made them into seagull managers* in every sense.
5. Being told by a new employer that they’re hiring me to be the head of their new web team only to find myself shuttled off to obscure contractor roles at MegaCorp Inc and AcmeCorp Inc.

I have 17 more years of this shit ahead of me before I can retire.

*If you haven’t heard of this: Someone who flies in, makes a lot of noise, shits all over everything, and flies out leaving everyone else to clean up the mess.

My company just migrated our mail servers over to office365. My boss has been excited and could barely contain himself when the migration was done he was having the best day ever after he got a good deal on some new toys...Then I ruined it.

Me (setting up) > WTF!? um...well I guess I don't have email on my phone anymore. These permissions are fucked.
Him > Oh why?
Me > They are ridiculous, I won't give away this much control just to read email.
Him (panicking) > and if buy you a company phone?
Me > Not a fuck it's still a personal device. I'll just sandbox the web version.
Him > Your over reacting, they obviously need them for security blah blah...
Me (sends him the pic) > The minimum system requirement is internet.
(...silence...)

I feel kinda bad for killing his vibe - he's a nice guy and he's only trying to do right by us but now he seems down like his toy isn't shiny anymore because he respects me. I wasn't beating on the stack or his choice (mines running on thunderbird). I just can't support this trend of GOD mode permissions for email / calculator and other single feature apps. I'll use the web app instead. You have to draw the line somewhere...

On the other hand I can't deny that I'm loving the irony that Microsoft just made my life easier and have a deep sense of satisfaction that for the first time ever I got fuck up his Friday :/

> likes linux
> maybe not even install windows on shiny new laptop?
> debian-live.iso
> y u no wifi?
> google: lol apt-get
> but i has no internets...

Why only with Debian and not with literally any other flavor of Linux I've tried, which are all Debian variants?
Halp?

Worst: Got made redundant from a senior development role in a shiny new company - two weeks before I got married.

Best: Got an offer 4 weeks later as a development manager in an enormous Australian distributor, and I get to concentrate on API development.

Best. Job. Ever.

I've run into my first nVidia driver issues. Ever. ☹

I'm attempting to install the drivers on my shiny new Dell XPS15 8750. It has both an Intel (default) and nVidia graphics card; the Intel works just fine out of the box with Nouveau, with terrible fps. Installing the nVidia drivers causes a conflict with those, and X just displays a black screen. I can still interact via the virtual terminals, but with a 4k display it's kind of annoying.

I'm currently trying to install nvidia-bumblebee and related crap, bur it is not going well.

I hate working with egoistic noobshit hotshot "developers". But sadly, they tend to get ahead because they talk like they know everything in front of tech idiot management.

***

management: I need this swanky feature X in our product within the month.

me: That literally requires a huge refactor because our current codebase was never meant to support this type of service. We need to think about this.

noobshit: I disagree. This is easy. We're already doing something similar that is Z, this shouldn't take very long.

me: Z seems similar, but it actually quite different.

me (in my head): ... and you would know it's *completely* different if you fucking understood our own codebase vs what X needs you moron.

noobshit: Nah, it's similar. We can accomplish X if we polish up Z a bit.

*** 1 week later ***

noobshit: Omg X is horrifying and complex. We can't do it without a huge refactor.

me: yes

me (in my head): Fuck you

***

But guess who's got better career prospects because they're all shiny and positive in front of management?

Maybe it's old and well known, but somebody asked, so here it goes:

A shepherd is quietly grazing his sheep on the fresh village pastures.

Suddenly a shiny new car stops by. A cool guy, very well dressed hops out and asks him: "Good man, If I guess exactly how many sheep you have, can I win one?"

The shepherd, puzzled, accepts.

The cool guy, opens his laptop, download a satellite picture of the area, run a NASA algorithm for image recognition and in few seconds answers "you have 1342 sheep"

"Wooow" says the shepherd "you won, take one"

The cool guy is about to live when the shepherd approaches him:

"Ehi, Young man, I bet all my flock against your car that I can guess what is your job"

The cool guy, (he likes to bet after all) accepts.

"You are a consultant" says the shepherd.
"WTF! how did you even..."

"Well, easy" says the shepherd "you came out of nowhere, well dressed and smart looking, you answered a question nobody asked you, you told me something I already knew, you want to be payed for that and in addition, you don't understand shit about my business."

"Now", adds quietly the shepherd "please, give me back my dog"

(for @LOLjustCoding)

Well, at least give me another option. Well played Google. Good Game.

I've never ever fully completed a side-project like I envisioned it to be. If I had, I'd have my own company already. It's mostly because I didn't have the time (no, that's a lie; or just an excuse). It's mainly because I haven't been motivated enough to see it through to the end. My motivation life-span ends when I get distracted by something else and in the end ends up like the Commit Strip.

1. Visit the official site.
2. Browse for official tools.
3. Check the official documentation.
4. Check the Internet for other non-audiovisual sources.
5. Try making a simple application.
6. Run out of application ideas.
7. Move on to the next shiny dev technology.
8. Go to step #1.

I feel lonely on my way back to home. I am a bit depressed while listening to the song "Alone" by Alan Walker. Because I code alone all day and I am single. There is a shop in my neighbourhood. It has its light turned on this night, perhaps just to increase its exposure. But, there is something so shiny that caught my attention. It is a smiling duck. I don't know what the duck is doing right there. I havent seen it before. But the shop is closed now.
At this moment, I realize it could be my friend when I don't have a friend.

Today I decided it was a good time to give back to the developers of this awesome platform. I bought some 'Shiny new avatar items' and subbed to the Supporters thing. The community is just great. Keep up the great work guys.

Also, Would it be possible to move the phone a few pixels further away from the monitors? Looks a little bit weird atm.

I love static sites and fancy new frameworks. Had an interview some time ago at a medium sized company. They specifically wanted someone to build static sites and introduce the company to Vue and Gridsome.
I got really excited for my first project. It was a wordpress site and I had to build a custom WP theme for it. Not exactly what I expected. Also I had no prior PHP knowledge, nor any experience with Wordpress. So I got really upset, because it wasn’t the technologies I was used to.
The first week was hard, I wanted to quit. But once something clicked. And I realized I know this. This is not PHP, not Wordpress, not Vue, but just simply a programming language. At the core everything programming language is the same. PHP became comfortable, Wordpress conventions didn’t bother me. I realized I can use great technologies with WP too. I get to know twig, added some sass, compiled everything nicely with webpack. And after a month I have a beautiful, fast and efficent site. I love it.
I realised that I don’t love the languages and frameworks. I love coding itself. I love creating efficent and reliable, clean code. No matter the architecture.
And my advice for you is to stop hating particular languages and serious debates on what is better, and hating your job when you can’t code in your new shiny framework. Love coding itself, because it’s a wonderful activity. We are creators, we are artists. Not <insert specific programming language here> developers.

I came to notice something funny.
In many languages, programmers will go out of their way to use to newest, most shiny features, even if there isn't any need to.
Only in C, programmers will go out of their way to avoid new features and make their code compatible even with the oldest ANSI standards.

mangodb's rant reminded me of smth.. Folks from my country might remember this story.

So we have a national e-health system. Millions have been invested, half of the money have never reached the project [disappeared smwhr in between] and its quality is not shiny. It works, sometimes even fast enough. But boy does it have bugs... Let's not get into that. It's politics.

So some time ago one IT guy spotted a bug that allowed him to get sensitive info of other patients. He informed e-health folks and waited for a fix. He waited for a few weeks but the fix had never been released. So he published his findings in soc media [yepp.. Stupid move]. That caused a national scandal. Not to mention he had been pressed with charges.

That guy and our health minister were invited in one of the tv debates. The guy was asked to explained how he found all this sensitive data. And he explained that he hit f12 in his browser, opened a network tab, issued a network request by clicking smth in the webpage analysed received data in the dev tools.

The minister looked somewhat happy, maybe a lil proud of himself - a person who has a "gotcha!" moment has that very glow he had. And he said: "what you did there was obvious hacking. I reckon you should know that true developers do not do those things you have just explained to us" [he was talking about dev tools].

I died inside a little bit.

Taking several years before doing dev work as a full time job.
I really should have just dove in earlier.

Plus I always wondered what I would have gained from getting that shiny piece of paper (degree), but I guess I’ll never know.

how to learn web development in 2018:

- watch youtube video of that new shiny promising framework

- spend hours trying to set up development environment

- spend another hours waiting for the dependencies to install

- spend the next few hours wondering and googling why it wont work even at fresh install

- spend another few hours redoing everything just to make sure you haven't missed a step

- realize that the youtube video you watched is uploaded last week, and now the framework developers mysteriously decided to change literally everything

- spend hours looking for another youtube video until you realize that now you are watching completely unrelated youtube video

- spend next hours wondering how your life become this pathetic while overthinking all of your past mistakes, and now you are just this lonely pathetic person with no clear future and that you will spend the rest of your life working at a fastfood chain below the minimum wage with no social life living on your parent's basement.

Today I officially ditched PHP for Golang. I left my job where we were doing modern software with templating language for new and shiny Golang job. Was telling stories about how cool Golang is, and how PHP sucks. Felt good man... Wanted to do it for so long...

Time to time I do some Hard- and Software repairs for neighbors and get some little money for it.

My neighbor let's call this one "Bob".

Bob has a new printer and a old one which is over 15 years old.

First: Holy shit 15 years old printer works still. WTF? Is this thing Hulk or what?

He ask me why he can't print a 128 site Doc with pictures in it from the old printer. It always stop at around 50 pages.

I tell him that it has only 32 MB Ram/Flash and can't print more. Before the Doc's were much smaller and could print that, but today you got files with more than 10 MB and on a printer it need's atleast 128 MB Ram to process and print it.

Guess what? One week later he asks me the same questions.

Why don't you print it on your new shiny expensive printer and why do you need still that OFFICE WAR VETERAN OF PRINTER to print it???

Seriously just use the new and better one!! Bob please give that old one a burial. He deservs it!

Really now?
AWS, #1 cloud provider with their #1 cloud database DynamoDB, all shiny, highly dynamic NoSQL, your data schema could change any second...

then DynamoDB errors out when one of your values is an empty string? {"foo":""} is impossible to store?

Like nobody ever saw or used empty strings a a value or what? There are tons of upvotes to fix this.

I just have to imagine the Product owner standing there: "No,no,no. They are just using it wrong if their data has empty strings as value. Won't fix!"

Any one else’s kinda enjoy the process of removing tech debt? always thought it felt good to rip out old shit to put in shiny new shit

when you have 6GB worth of unused kernels on your machine and your machine is desperately crying for MOAR storage space!

when you find a tool or library that does exactly what you need, but it's not documented at all

or worse, when it's "cross-platform" but all the build/install steps are made assuming you're using a Mac
"brew install my-shiny-metal-ass"

Yei, I've bought a domain like "mysurname.me" and setup a new email at ProtonMail like "name@surname.me".

How many of you have such an email? :3

Thanks, good folks! Took a little while because I ended up moving before the letter arrived, but it's finally in my hands. Look at my shiny new devRantBook!

I really like my current job.

I work as an analyst developer looking after and sorting out people's old tech debt.

Once that's stable I get pretty free reign to do what I want.

It allows me to stretch from dev into graphic design, security, architecture and training on a very regular basis.

It allows me to keep an eye on tech trends, research and develop ideas using the latest shiny things.

Oh and if I say I need a thing, I can usually get it purchased.

All of the above comes with the "as long as it's for the benefit of the company" disclaimer, but when your direct managers see an IDE and think "okay he's working" the lines get a little blurry.

They keep asking me about my career goals and if I want to manage or move around. Fuck that noise, all of that noise.

Do wut I wawnt.

I absolutely HATE that stage fright feeling I get when I'm about to launch new software into production mode for a client! Anyone else feel that? Makes me want to vomit thinking of all the promises I've made that it will work fine and then all the things I don't even realize could go wrong. I never have enough testing resources because client budgets tend to favor shiny features at the expense of testing.

Manager was to present an interface for one of our intranet apps.

Designed and implemented by yours truly consisting of a php backend api and a very shiny frotend, which ain't using anything fancy. Mostly jquery since I am using datatables for the most part.

Thing is. To test a button with large text inside I wrote
<button someclass>penis dick vagina</button>

I saw it literally 1 min before she was to present it maybe

Oh boy.

Managed to get it out of the way before the presentation.......
Thank heavens the conference room is next to our office........

Damn it! today I learnt that GitHub has a tool called Hub - "an extension to command-line git that helps you do everyday GitHub tasks without ever leaving the terminal".

It's been around for 10 years.

And here I was clicking on the link that was sent by the remote after every push to open a pull request 🤦‍♂️
It even comes with vim syntax support for pull requests.

I'm never leaving the terminal to do things on the GitHub web interface anymore

About a year ago, I started a new position as a Full Stack Java Developer. When I started my employer got me a brand new, shiny, Asus laptop. As I prefer Linux (mint) to perform my magic I had to whipe Windows 10 and reinstall it. It turned out that my new shiny laptop was in fact so shiny that Linux (mint) didn't support/contain all the necessary drivers (yet), especially the network/bluetooth drivers and the gfx's drivers turned out a bit of a pain.. Over the year things slowly got better with every new kernel update that came in. However, due to me trying to fix things before those updates, Linux also had become somewhat unstable.

So ... last week I took some time to re-install that laptop and also take the opportunity to upgrade from Linux mint 18 to Linux mint 19 ... or so I thought ... Linux mint 19 was running (very) hot to the point where the laptop would shutdown due to the MOBO's thermal protection mechanims kicking in. ... Ok ...maybe Linux mint 19 was not such a good choice .... let's see if Ubuntu 18.04 is an option ... Nope ... Linux would lock up within a minute after booting up ... no mouse, no keyboard ... nothing. .... *sigh* ... let's (re)install Linux Mint 18.3 again ... and behold, I can start performing magic again.

Linux, it can be such a pain at times. I still prefer it, but running into all those 'weird' things on my laptop when reinstalling, I have to admit I have seriously considered 'just' installing windows 10 again and be done with it. Luckily I could also remind myself of what a pain Windows is to do serious docker/java development in comparison to Linux which gave me the strength to keep going ... :)

This “Auto save” feature in the latest app version is buggy..
-> new rant
-> prefilled with previous rant..

Anyway, here my actual rant begins.

Apple, go fuck yourself, seriously.. put your trillion dollars way up your arse...

Moved to Ireland, want to switch country..
“If you want to switch countries, cancel your Apple Music subscription first”..
so be it. Cancelled it..
“Your subscription will be cancelled in 28 days”.

FUCK YOU, YOU COCK SUCKING BASTARDS!!
I NEED TO SWITCH THE STORE TO BE ABLE TO DOWNLOAD BANKING APPS AND STUFF LIKE THAT..

But ok, I’m screwed in this regard..

Suddenly iMessage stopped working. This is kind of a big deal because I have unlimited data but only unlimited sms to Irish numbers and I need to communicate with people in Switzerland and Germany..
Internet works so I try to turn iMessage off and in again. But that doesn’t work.. i can only reactivate iMessage via WiFi.

So I go back to the hotel, reactivate iMessage..
“Verifying imessage” >> google..
Leads me to an Apple forum: “the verification of iMessage can take up to 24h”.

Are you fucking kidding me? I’m in a new country and rely on this overpriced shit..

Fun but sad fact, I have a second phone with me. IPhone 4 with iOS 7 and that thing WORKS!!

If this is where the future is going we’re all gonna die very soon.. plains crash, power plants explode but hey, at least they have data about it and it looks shiny. That’s all that matters..

Another reason to switch to android..

MacOs fucked me up so I already switched to windows + Linux. Next one will be getting rid of iOS, they don’t build small phones anymore anyway..

Stuck at some dumb company event where attendance is mandatory. I'm supposed to answer technical questions if needed, but I suck at socializing with customers, and the sales guys are already chatting people up about the products I've developed so I don't have anything left to talk about. Not that anyone asks much about the tech behind the shiny GUI anyway...

Should i just leave? I doubt anyone would notice...

I like em big and shiny

I'm just going to drop this here and run away 🏃

Not as much of a rant as a share of my exasperation you might breathe a bit more heavily out your nose at.

My work has dealt out new laptops to devs. Such shiny, very wow. They're also famously easy to use.
.
.
.
My arse.
.
.
.
I got the laptop, transferred the necessary files and settings over, then got to work. Delivered ticket i, delivered ticket j, delivered the tests (tests first *cough*) then delivered Mr Bullet to Mr Foot.

Day 4 of using the temporary passwords support gave me I thought it was time to get with department policy and change my myriad passwords to a single one. Maybe it's not as secure but oh hell, would having a single sign-on have saved me from this.

I went for my new machine's password first because why not? It's the one I'll use the most, and I definitely won't forget it. I didn't. (I didn't.) I plopped in my memorable password, including special characters, caps, and numbers, again (carefully typed) in the second password field, then nearly confirmed. Curiosity, you bastard.

There's a key icon by the password field and I still had milk teeth left to chew any and all new features with.
Naturally I click on it. I'm greeted by a window showing me a password generating tool. So many features, options for choosing length, character types, and tons of others but thinking back on it, I only remember those two. I had a cheeky peek at the different passwords generated by it, including playing with the length slider. My curiosity sated, I closed that window and confirmed that my password was in.

You probably know where this is going. I say probably to give room for those of you like me who certifiably. did. not.

Time to test my new password.
*Smacks the power button to log off*
Time to put it in (ooer)
*Smacks in the password*
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

Whoops, typo probably.
Do it again.
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

No u.
Try again.
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

Try my previous password.
Well, SUCCESS... but actually, no.

Tried the previous previous password.
T O O M A N Y A T T E M P T S

Ahh fuck, I can't believe I've done this, but going to support is for pussies. I'll put this by the rest of the fire, I can work on my old laptop.

Day starts getting late, gotta go swimming soonish. Should probably solve the problem. Cue a whole 40 minutes trying my 15 or so different passwords and their permutations because oh heck I hope it's one of them.
I talk to a colleague because by now the "days since last incident" counter has been reset.

"Hello there Ryan, would you kindly go on a voyage with me that I may retrace my steps and perhaps discover the source of this mystery?"

"A man chooses, a slave obeys. I choose... lmao ye sure m8, but I'm driving"

We went straight for the password generator, then the length slider, because who doesn't love sliding a slidey boi. Soon as we moved it my upside down frown turned back around. Down in the 'new password' and the 'confirm new password' IT WAS FUCKING AUTOCOMPLETING. The slidey boi was changing the number of asterisks in both bars as we moved it. Mystery solved, password generator arrested, shit's still fucked.

Bite the bullet, call support.
"Hi, I need my password resetting. I dun goofed"
*details tech support needs*
*It can be sorted but the tech is ages away*
Gotta be punctual for swimming, got two whole lengths to do and a sauna to sit in.
"I'm off soon, can it happen tomorrow?"
"Yeah no problem someone will be down in the morning."

Next day. Friday. 3 hours later, still no contact. Go to support room myself.
The guy really tries, goes through everything he can, gets informed that he needs a code from Derek. Where's Derek? Ah shet. He's on holiday.

There goes my weekend (looong weekend, bank holiday plus day flexi-time) where I could have shown off to my girlfriend the quality at which this laptop can play all our favourite animé, and probably get remind by her that my personal laptop has an i2350u with integrated graphics.

TODAY. (Part is unrelated, but still, ugh.)
Go to work. Ten minutes away realise I forgot my door pass.
Bollocks.
Go get a temporary pass (of shame).
Go to clock in. My fob was with my REAL pass.
What the wank.
Get to my desk, nobody notices my shame. I'm thirsty. I'll have the bottle from my drawer. But wait, what's this? No key that usually lives with my pass? Can't even unlock it?
No thanks.

Support might be able to cheer me up. Support is now for manly men too.
*Knock knock*
"Me again"
"Yeah give it here, I've got the code"
He fixes it, I reset my pass, sensibly change my other passwords.
Or I would, if the internet would work.

It connects, but no traffic? Ryan from earlier helps, we solve it after a while.

My passwords are now sorted, machine is okay, crisis resolved.

*THE END*

If you skipped the whole thing and were expecting a tl;dr, you just lost the game.

Otherwise, I absolve you of having lost the game.

Exactly at the char limit

A new and shiny microprocessor looks too beautiful to get it dirty with thermal paste and cover it with a heatsink.

Today I got more praise for adding a spinning animation while loading page than the 5 months of complex coding I've done so far.

Users are simple, look shiny, ignore that nothing works.

Big-time Microsoft fan who claims they've been using licensed versions of Windows since Windows 3.0. Still has all old versions of Windows on different machines / hard-disks. They use only Microsoft Surface devices. They still use Nokia Lumia (with Windows Phone 10). They were working with an organization that used Office365 for enterprise email and collaboration. They used Microsoft Teams for team collaboration when the rest of the organization was comfortable with Atlassian tools like jira, confluence and bitbucket.

One fine day, news spreads that the organization is moving into GSuite for enterprise email and collaboration. They are devastated. They quit citing personal and family reasons, but we knew the real reason.

First thing, give the schools enough money to buy proper IT equipment and hire at least one person who does IT full-time per school so that the CS teachers or whoever runs the school's IT infrastructure doesn't have to worry about it at all times.
(Hopefully, the ban on cooperation here in Germany will be lifted and the federal government will be able to subsidy all schools at least financially in that aspect.)

Then, educate all the teachers, for fuck's sake.
It is sad to see an otherwise good teacher in a technical subject at a technical college struggle with the basics. Teachers should have continuing education in computer science and also should be comfortable working with technology.
There are some good CS teachers and some who're also nerds but they can't fix everything nor educate every colleague. Unpaid and in their free time, mind you.

Then, update the learning materials for CS. I've seen/worked with some of what is used in schools today and it's definitively not worth the money but it has to be bought anyway. At best, education materials should be open-source so knowledge can grow and be updated more quickly.

Also, don't rely too much on big cooperations just but cause they offer you shiny materials and discounts.

I saw that a co-worker had left their office email open on their machine, so I typed out a huge hate mail of the upper management and then announced resignation for the poor work culture that the company provided. Then I edited the email to be a bit more nice. I added some praise about the company - about having the opportunity to work in the company and for the amazing colleagues (and mentioned my own name) in the first paragraph. To close the email, I wrote :
"PS : This is what happens if you leave your machine open for the office to do as they please"

I first sent out a copy to myself (as proof) with the cover :
" Hey, check this out, I'm sending this out to everyone@company.com in a while. I want to let you know that none of this is directed at you. You've been an amazing colleague and mentor. You've been my inspiration from the start; from the time I joined the team. I'm honoured that I got to work with you. I hope we can remain friends as we are now, meet up once in a while outside work and discuss life. "

And then I put the actual email up in the compose window with the to field addressed to everyone@company.com. I didn't hit send.

Funnily, enough, this person never found out that it was me who actually typed out the whole email for another 1.5 months. They probably looked into their Sent folder later on when they saw the email that I sent to myself. They replied to it saying :
"Thank you for not sending out that email that day. I've been very very extra careful (I didn't understand the "very, very, extra" part) since that day"
I replied that it was only to prove a point and that I thought the point was well conveyed.

I had a good laugh that day. Since then, every time we crossed paths, we had that look in our eyes that met and only the 2 of us understood.

All we do is make websites. Pointless and shiny digital turds.

Saw someone talking about web 3.0 and the bright and shiny possibilities, today. Web 3.0, will be an ad that opens into an ad that asks you to turn off ad blocker. That, mixed with fucking tile designs and PowerPoint scroll locking. And injected mobile subscribe now banners. Welcome to the future!

It's easy to see what a person in my company do just by looking at their clothing. Money-guys with blue shirts and shiny shoes, tech guys with washed out jeans and a t-shirt with print. Then there's the bosses of tech guys, a hybrid with washed out jeans, sneakers and a poorly fit blazer for meetings. And then we have the designers, with their neatly trimmed beards, wearing a scarf all year round. And at last, project managers.. kinda like the money-guys but with sneakers for better mobility, and their right arm locked in a "holding cup of coffee" posture as they move from desk to desk like vultures overlooking others work.

And they say there is no dress code

When you look through two year old code and have to make it conform with your new and shiny code.😀

Being the only dev in charge of the project, makes you the one to be blamed for.

The God saviour, shiny armoured back end developer that joined the "team" (only me) to help into this new project Just Said in a meeting:

- "I wont code anything for this new project, I can't get the point of It"

So every meeting was
- "why feature X is not ready?"
- "I'm waiting the endpoint for It"
- "well, then mock It"

Now I fucking give up.
One month mocking things and "presenting" features that don't even exist.

developer makes a "missed-a-semicolon"-kind of mistake that brings your non-production infrastructure down.

manager goes crazy. rallies the whole team into a meeting to find "whom to hold accountable for this stupid mistake" ( read : whom should I blame? ).

spend 1-hour to investigate the problem. send out another developer to fix the problem.

... continue digging ...
( with every step in the software development lifecycle handbook; the only step missing was to pull the handbook itself out )

finds that the developer followed the development process well ( no hoops jumped ).
the error was missed during the code review because the reviewer didn't actually "review" the code, but reported that they had "reviewed and merged" the code

get asked why we're all spending time trying to fix a problem that occurred in a non-production environment. apparently, now it is about figuring out the root cause so that it doesn't happen in production.

we're ALL now staring at the SAME pull request. now the manager is suddenly more mad because the developer used brackets to indicate the pseudo-path where the change occurred.
"WHY WOULD YOU WASTE 30-SECONDS PUTTING ALL THOSE BRACES? YOU'RE ALREADY ON A BRANCH!"

PS : the reason I didn't quote any of the manager's words until the end was because they were screaming all along, so, I'd have to type in ALL CAPS-case. I'm a CAPS-case-hater by-default ( except for the singular use of "I" ( eye; indicating myself ) )

WTF? I mean, walk your temper off first ( I don't mean literally, right now; for now, consider it a figure of speech. I wish I could ask you to do it literally; but no, I'm not that much of a sadist just yet ). Then come back and decide what you actually want to be pissed about. Then think more; about whether you want to kill everyone else's productivity by rallying the entire team ( OK, I'm exaggerating, it's a small team of 4 people; excluding the manager ) to look at an issue that happened in a non-production environment.
At the end of the week, you're still going to come back and say we're behind schedule because we didn't get any work done.
Well, here's 4 hours of our time consumed away by you.

This manager also has a habit of saying, "getting on X's case". Even if it is a discussion ( and not a debate ). What is that supposed to mean? Did X commit such a grave crime that they need to be condemned to hell?

I miss my old organization where there was a strict no-blame policy. Their strategy was, "OK, we have an issue, let's fix it and move on."
I've gotten involved ( not caused it ) in even bigger issues ( like an almost-data-breach ) and nobody ever pointed a finger at another person.
Even though we all knew who caused the issue. Some even went beyond and defended the person. Like, "Them. No, that's not possible. They won't do such dumb mistakes. They're very thorough with their work."
No one even talked about the person behind their back either ( at least I wasn't involved in any such conversation ). Even later, after the whole issue had settled down. I don't think people brought it up later either ( though it was kind of a hush-hush need-to-know event )

Now I realize the other unsaid-advantage of the no-blame policy. You don't lose 4 hours of your so-called "quarantine productivity". We're already short on productivity. Please don't add anymore. 🙏

Today on GitHub: this must be the new "autopilot", probably slackbot's brother, suggesting me slightly funny arbitrary repository names.

"Great repository names are short and memorable. Need inspiration? How about shiny-fiesta?"

So back in November I wanted to get a new smartphone, after years and years of middle class stuff I decided "let's get the newest high-end shit out there!" so I bought the Huawei Mate20 pro.

I was SO DAMN HAPPY when it arrived 2 days later. I quickly switched to the new one and SUDDENLY after a few hours it started to get a hint of a green border arou d the display.. and yes it got FUCKING WORSE! Now after a few months it got worse and worse, I talked to my provider and they said I have to call Huawei so I called Huawei and guess what? The want me to send it in, which will take around TWO WEEKS! It's not even my fault and now they want me to have no phone for two damn weeks? Why? This sucks.. and only because I wanted to have a nice new shiny high-end piece of technology 😭

Went to the O’Reilly conference on architecture last week. Will say there were some good points made (really liked the elephant in architecture and tech debt talks). But wow developers love to circlejerk. If you don’t deploy microservices on the cloud with serverless actions for everything then they’ll talk down to you like what you do isn’t important. Like so many talks memed monoliths were annoying. Like I get we love the new and shiny things but it’s kinda ridiculous.

Samsung apparently thinks they are doing us users a favour with their "genius" TV block feature.

Let the following be clear: I will never get a television which can be remotely disabled by ANY one, even if allegedly for my benefit.

In fact, I'd be happier with 768p "HD ready" garbage from 2005 that at least works reliably than a shiny "QLED+" Samsung TV that can fail without warning at the press of a button at some giant corporation's headquarters.

Remember the May 2019 Firefox incident?

"We can remotely disable your TV, but it's just for your protec...." Get lost.

the real truth is that web dev has been running around in circles on itself for over a decade now

"but every framework is 'new' and 'shiny'!!!!"

nah, just more sugar on the same exact concepts that have been around since day 1

I have multiple (in no particular order) :

Nextcloud : It was an idea that I had in my head as well - to take on corporations like Google in the space of personal cloud. Be free, open-source and put the users in charge.

Gitlab : The most open and transparent company that I've ever come across. And they work 99% remote. They've got features that no other players in the space have. All while putting users in control.

Fediverse social media - Mastodon, GNU Social, Diaspora (soon) : For taking a major step in the direction of putting the users in control of their data; all while enabling a decentralized social network.

Ruby : An open community and building a programming language that runs a lot of software of the world.

Python : The oldest thriving community that has a special place in the development community (and my heart)

Javascript / ECMAScript : The scripting language that grew to be a beast of it's own.

My terminal (Tilix) didn't have a header bar for a quite a while now. I had grown to live without it even though I missed looking at the terminal title to figure where I was.

Today I my hand accidentally hit F11 and I was in for a surprise. I actually exclaimed aloud in the office.

I waited to test, confirm and verify that the header bar itself was not a bug before I facepalmed myself

tl;dr Do you think we will any time soon move from editing raw source code? Will IDE or other interfaces allow us to change the code in graphic representation or even through voice?
---

One thing I found funny watching Westworld is how they depicted the "programming" - it is more like swiping on a smartphone, a bit maybe like Tom Cruise's investigations in Minority report. Or giving certain commands and key words by voice.

There was one quote from Uncle Bob's "Clean Code" I could never find again, where he said something along the lines, that back in the seventies or eighties they thought they would soon raise programming languages to such a high level they would use natural language interfaces, and look at us now, still the same "if's".

So I feel uncomfortable without my shell and having tried a graphical programming language once this particular (Labview) seemed clumsy to me at best. But maybe there are a lot of web devs here and it seems with them frameworks you might be able to abstract away a lot of the pesky system programming... so do you feel like moving to some new shiny programming experience or do you think it will stay the same for more decades as the computer is that stupid machine where you have to spill it out instruction by instruction anyways?

At the institute I did my PhD everyone had to take some role apart from research to keep the infrastructure running. My part was admin for the Linux workstations and supporting the admin of the calculation cluster we had (about 11 machines with 8 cores each... hot shit at the time).

At some point the university had some euros of budget left that had to be spent so the institute decided to buy a shiny new NAS system for the cluster.

I wasn't really involved with the stuff, I was just the replacement admin so everything was handled by the main admin.

A few months on and the cluster starts behaving ... weird. Huge CPU loads, lots of network traffic. No one really knows what's going on. At some point I discover a process on one of the compute nodes that apparently receives commands from an IRC server in the UK... OK code red, we've been hacked.

First thing we needed to find out was how they had broken in, so we looked at the logs of the compute nodes. There was nothing obvious, but the fact that each compute node had its own public IP address and was reachable from all over the world certainly didn't help.
A few hours of poking around not really knowing what I'm looking for, I resort to a TCPDUMP to find whether there is any actor on the network that I might have overlooked. And indeed I found an IP adress that I couldn't match with any of the machines.

Long story short: It was the new NAS box. Our main admin didn't care about the new box, because it was set up by an external company. The guy from the external company didn't care, because he thought he was working on a compute cluster that is sealed off behind some uber-restrictive firewall.

So our shiny new NAS system, filled to the brink with confidential research data, (and also as it turns out a lot of login credentials) was sitting there with its quaint little default config and a DHCP-assigned public IP adress, waiting for the next best rookie hacker to try U:admin/P:admin to take it over.

Looking back this could have gotten a lot worse and we were extremely lucky that these guys either didn't know what they had there or didn't care.

All the young kids get to work on new projects with the shiny tech....

I feel left out :( I'm only 30 and pretty sure skill-wise I can still kick everyone else's asses on my team...

But I guess I'll remain in the "nanny" role yelling at them whenever something fucks up....

I wanted to rant but I just been moved from a governemental project in Python 2, to a shiny one on Python 3. Have a good day you too!

For different reasons, this outbreak of coronavirus lead me to learn how to use git efficiently (never had to before, as I work mostly alone). In two days I learned to fork, branch, pull, push, ... I feel like I really accomplished something for myself.

Oh and I also started to collaborate to a shiny app in R. Any way is good to keep my mind off the fact of being in lockdown in a foreign country.

Stay positive people! :)

Microservices is a buzzword and everyone is using it to modernize their company and themselves.

Add a cloud in the context and boom, you are equivalent of some Tech gaint.

Well then, if you say so why don't you implement or try to implement in proper way. Use the right tools, "opensource" if you have heard of it has a ton of stuff right for the job.

But no, all you do is write the same old services in Java, put a label of "cloud native" and stick it out so proudly that clients think "oh a new shiny thing".

Putting out poster of "Immediate job requiment for Microservices" and staring blank when the candidate tries to explain how the Microservices work, but you know only about EJBs and you are sitting in interview room wondering what he is really talking about. I dint hear a single word of Java because that is all I know. Then finally rejecting the candidate because he dint say EJB in the interview.

The point is, some shit people don't want to improve themselves nor let anyone improve. Fear of being replaced by a younger generation of developers has plauged the seniors in ways no one can think of.

Me: *adds a shiny new graph to our foos web app showing player ratings*

Fred: Can I please have a button to see just my scores?

Me: *adds "JUST FRED" button*

Fred: perfect, thanks

Finally the animated gifs are starting to die down on the feed. I hope you all got that out of your system.

Look, I worked in companies that didnt givr a single f about security, and it wasn't right, but others go are just mad.

Me to itsec: can I deploy Django behind the company firewall on a machine physically 2 meters from you, users will still need the VPN to access it... ?

Itsec: no!

Me: flask?

Itsec: no!

Me: shiny?

Itsec: no!

Me: CAN I EVEN HOST ONE HTML FILE WITH INLINE CSS?

itsec: can I see your badge?!

I wonder sometimes whether people in Silicon Valley know how the rest of the world thinks about and acts on technology. I mean, I know they do to a degree, but is there anyone else besides me that thinks it’s kind of an “ivory tower” existence over there, with people chasing the latest shiny thing regardless of if people want or need it?

I've always liked Windows more than MacOS, but known deep in my heart that MacOS is more polished. More shiny, attractive, makes more sense, is easier to use, etc. Windows was never that far behind (however, they were probably furthest behind in Vista and 8), but they were always behind.

Looking at the new MacOS, I genuinely think that Microsoft offers a better experience now. While Android and iOS are still firmly battling, Windows just beats the living shit out of MacOS.

Windows is an OS built for either touch or mouse. If you use touch controls, the OS automatically adapts to it (larger context menus if you press and hold, smaller ones if you right click). You can enter tablet mode. The start menu has a good interface for both touch and mouse.

MacOS is an operating system designed for touch input on a device which famously has none.

It has fallen victim to a very common design error: too much fucking spacing. Every little thing, even items in a list, has a ton of pixels between them, and they all have rounded corners. Again, this is common for touch displays where you don't wanna fat finger stuff. But they don't offer a touch screen Mac and have expressed no interest in ever doing so.

Now they're going ARM on custom silicon. This is a good move in the long run, but it's going to be a rough couple of years. Apple admits two. You can probably reliably double that.

Is Apple killing the Mac on purpose or by accident?

maybe, that's a minor update to your policy, but it's a major update to my privacy. No, thanks.

let RANT = $state(true);

Don't even get me started on frontend engineering right now. It's like the wild wild west out here, with no rules or regulations.

I mean seriously, what is going on with frontend engineering these days? It's like we're stuck in some sort of weird limbo state where nothing seems to make sense and everything is a struggle. And to top it all off, the project I've been working on for the past two years has the same damn issues as an existing codebase that I was hoping to leave behind.

For some reason the npm build runs when container starts. Are you kidding me? Every time I have to restart the app, I have to wait for 30+ minutes just for the damn thing to build. And what's worse, it's not even a complex app. It's a simple frontend for a research website. So why the heck does it take so long to build?

I'll tell you why, because some genius thought it would be a good idea to build the entire codebase every time the container starts. And I have no doubt that this same genius probably thought it would be efficient and time-saving. Well let me tell you, it's neither efficient nor time-saving. It's just plain infuriating.

And don't even get me started on the codebase itself. It's like a labyrinth of tangled and convoluted code (multiple versions of React and now rewriting on Nextjs). Trying to make even the simplest changes feels like unraveling a giant knot (every freaking component have it's only style and everything from React is being used - hooks, Redux, whatever else is popular). And heaven forbid you make a mistake, because then you have to wait another 30 minutes for the whole thing to build and see if your change even worked.

And let's not forget about the old codebase that is still being used, because the new one wasn't ready in time. So we're constantly having to switch back and forth between two different codebases, trying to remember which one has which functionality, and hoping that we don't break anything in the process.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against rewrites. In fact, sometimes they are necessary for a project to move forward. But when frontend engineers can't seem to make up their mind and constantly want to rewrite the code, it's a recipe for disaster.

And don't even get me started on the experience level of the frontend engineers who started this project. Most of them only had 2-3 years of experience (at the time of inception some of them has less than 1 year of experience), and yet they managed to convince management to approve this mess. It's like the blind leading the blind.

But hey, who needs experience and expertise when you have shiny new technologies and frameworks to play with, right? Isn't that what matters most in frontend engineering these days? Keeping up with the latest trends and constantly jumping on the "hype train" without any real understanding of how it will impact the project in the long run.

As a backend engineer (so I kinda don't give a flying freak about frontend) with almost two decades of experience and who was doing frontend with jQuery back in 2005 - that's frustrating and all the inconsistency is literally killing people (a couple of clients literally dropped the contract because of frontend quality).

RANT = false;

PS: why I used Svelte runes? Because some freaking genius suggested to port new (unreleased, only beta version) frontend UI to Svelte 5 because of runes.

#1 Don't go looking to clear your doubts with your mentor. Instead, try and figure everything on your own. Trust me, that'll teach you a lot more than you think rather than by getting the answers directly spoon-fed to you from your mentor.

#2 Always keep a curious mind if you want to achieve something in what you do. You can't learn anything if you don't have the curiosity to ask the right questions - why? (mostly). Especially if you're just starting your career.

Was hating my new job. Turns out my PM is new and was assigning me tasks outside the scope of what I do. But yeah PM, keep pushing for a shiny front end to an internal tool. Not. Happening.

I have to say one of the most annoying things in software development is building tools that will never be really used by clients, sometimes clients just want something new and shiny and once they get it off it goes into a dark closet of no use to gather webs

I was practising Java at my school(they were still teaching POWERPOINT,f**k)
They got themselves 20 shiny All-in-one garbage with Windows 10.
I got my bootable usb Linux with me,and fired up Kali.By mistake my program ran into infinite loop....
And the rest is history,got banned from the lab😭
P.s.I don't have anything to code on ,i write my programs on paper and executed them on the pc at my school,what to do now

I used to love mozilla as a community. The mozilla foundation loved the community and always listened to their voice. Of recent, they've started to turn a deaf ear to the community's voices and have started moving the agenda for a corporate culture. They slowly killed many amazing projects that was mostly run by the community (RIP Firefox OS) and started focusing on more corporate-oriented lobbying and agenda (*cough* Pocket *cough*). I feel that the company is slowly moving toward becoming less of a (community-oriented) foundation and more of a corporation. That path is dangerous and not one that I expected mozilla to take.

Another company worth mentioning was OwnCloud which got forked into Nextcloud because they didn't care about the community enough and put the enterprise customers and their needs ahead of the community's. The disappointed founder of the OwnCloud quit and forked it into NextCloud with the right controls for the community and the users to always be put in the first position.

Powershell. Using classes. Can't create class libraries using regular .ps1 files (this way this **sort** of work). Using modules then. Can't easily refresh modules cache after any change to a class. Need restarting powrshell each time. Looking for more information. The issue is open since 2016 (just after the release of PS 5 that introduced classes). Once again, a Microsoft product turns out to be shiny at the beginning, but rusty when you go beyond the surface. Classes seem to be second class citizens in powershell. I feel frustrated and I would like to put pressure on microsoft but nobody seems to care. I'm stuck.

I'm a terminal-guy. I prefer to live inside my terminal. When my family sees me with the green-on-black, they think I'm up to some nasty stuff like hacking / cracking emails, facebook, bank accounts, etc. Only people who understand to look at the terminal realize it's just a few monitors and log tails running. Sometimes, maybe elinks or vi running as well.

So we have this really annoying bug in our system that customers keep complaining about. I've explained in detail, multiple times, why the part they think is a bug is not a bug and the workaround they keep asking me to apply doesn't make sense, won't fix the issue, and won't even stick (the system will notice that the record they want me to delete has been removed and it will repopulate itself, by design).

I've told them what we need to do as an actual workaround (change a field on the record) and what we need to do to properly fix the bug (change the default value on the record and give proper controls to change this value through the UI). We've had this conversation at least three times now over a period of several months. There is a user story in the backlog to apply the actual fix, but it just keeps getting deprioritized because these people don't care about bug fixes, only new features, new projects, new new new, shiny shiny new.

Today another developer received yet another report of this bug, and offered the suggested workaround of deleting the record. The nontechnical manager pings everyone to let them know that the correct workaround is to delete the record and to thank the other developer for his amazing detective work. I ping the developer in a private channel to let him know why this workaround doesn't work, and he brushes it off, saying that it's not an issue in this case because nobody will ever try to access the record (which is what would trigger it being regenerated).

A couple hours later, we get a report from support that one of the deleted records has been regenerated, and people are complaining about it.

🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄

Someone found a shiny GPU library and asked us to support said library. We now support said library. Now they're finding out their hardware isn't supported by said library. And this is apparently now our problem...

Implementing a duration timer in my bright and shiny exercise application. Testing it and I was sure that one second after 7159 it should print out "02:00:00" (since 7200 seconds is 2 hours).
Didn't understand why it took the timer to show 2 hours after 41 seconds instead of just 1 second..

!rant

I was 4 years old and it was 1998. A shiny new computer, with plastic covers so it would not get dusty.

It came with Windows 95 and I damaged that installation of Windows after installing a game made for an incompatible version of the C++ runtime. Good times.

I have tried hard to show my ex boss a better way to build web apps. I really tried.
I understand that some people just don't want to lose their investment, and in my opinion classic ASP was bad but not nearly as bad as a lot of people made it out to be. I enjoyed it, was fascinated by the ammount of shit I had to do by hand when using it and the lack of more modern paradigms as the ones found in more mothern languages, but really believed that it microsoft wanted they could have continue to provide updates to the language and ecosystem rather than dropping everything in favor of .net ( which is awesome really)

But his time is ticking and I really liked him as a person, he was kind and willing to adapt to my schedules and pay considerations. I really don't want him to lose clients because his stack does not conform to the new and shiny.

I guess he is scared of me offering to rewrite portions in newer tech since he does not want me to leave and leave him without a developer that knows that stuff. So i have offered myself a position along him as a partner, not a worker, since that way it will be my product investment and I will not leave it just like that.

Dude is really wealthy so he can afford it and he knows I will not do him any wrong.

I nust wish he would reconsider promptly since it would suck to have me as competition.

mkdir new-shiny-app
cd new-shiny-app
git init

Decide on the stack, release the package manager on it to scaffold away. Everything still clean and pure.
One of those little joys of our job :)

Things I love today.

Totally love. Like kick in the balls with testicle torsion love. Picking my eyeballs out with a spoon... I think you got the idea.

Getting updates of other managers, as I'm busy with other stuff.

More or less goes like this:

Flaky tests. Since weeks...
Ain't nobody got time for that.
🤬

I don't wanna upgrade that version to the next major version, cause then I'd have to do tests... And the tests are flaky.

🤬🤬

I wanna have shiny new thing XY, but NOONE wants to upgrade to next major version so we cannot have that

🤬🤬🤬

Oh we just crushed the live cluster cause there's this PR everyone constantly ignores cause the tests are flaky....

🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬

Good thing I'm busy and just getting all the updates via the gossip mill...

I'm just prolonging my current tasks as I really don't wanna have to fix that mess.

My fix would be probably eye for eye, tooth for tooth.

...

Problem is.... I'm slowly getting into trouble because some of these fixes would be much needed for my task...

Why do I have always to be the bad cop in the company -.

I think I'm gonna ask HR what applying electro shocks would cost me, cause I think that would solve a lot of problems.

10 kV for every stupid answer.

Smells like bacon!

!Rant
Just resurrected my old Galaxy Nexus with LineageOS. It's still shiny af even on Android Nougat.

Speaking about almost 6 years old device. 😍

So at work, there is this class/model thing that's for storing translated strings. It also supports n-level nested macros, cascading lookup (e->d->c->b->a->blank), and I've added transforms too. The code is a bloody mess and very inefficient (legendary dev's code), but it's useful.

You call methods with a symbol representing one of the strings, and it does... whatever you ask, like return text, booleans, expand macros and submacros, pass in data to interpolate, etc.

But I just learned something today.
Its `.html` method... doesn't support html. In fact, calling it strips out all html, takes whatever is left, and attempts to convert that back into html. Because that makes so much sense. So, if you have an html string? Don't call html on it.

Also, macros use the same <angle brackets> as html tags, and macro expansion eats unknown macros, so... you can't mix html and macros, meaning you cannot inject values into your markup. That's a freaking joy to work around. (You end up writing a parser every time.)

So no, if you have an html string, you need to get the raw data out and handle it yourself. Don't reach for that shiny .html method; it'll just ruin your day.

It's the little things that make my day so terribly long.

Cappuccino, Espresso, Espresso Doppio, Latte Macchiato...
Oh just basically caffeine... Makes the code more shiny!

One of the best feelings is when you're hip deep in code refactoing and you're delezing old code with your new and shiny code.

How to fuck a web developer:
1- Introduce a shiny new shitty web component that is nearly impossible to figure out how to change it’s fucking background color, yeah.
Welcome everyone to 2019 why even it was so easy to change and customize your own shit, let’s just introduce thaaa faaacking web components and fuck everyone else. Let everyone learn again how to do the simplest shit ever.
Yes fuck everyone that is used to change and customize in an easy way.
“yUo wAnT uS nOt tO UsE SoC anD cLEan koOde?”
No no no. We will fuck you instead.

Back in the days when I knew only Windows, I used to be a Microsoft fan. I wanted to use only Microsoft products. I had a Hotmail email account that Microsoft acquired. I used a version of Windows and Microsoft Office (even though I didn't know at the time that it was pirated). I wanted to be a Microsoft Student Partner (MSP) and promote Microsoft everywhere.

Fast forward to now (or maybe to the time after I got introduced to GNU/Linux), I started hating Microsoft solely for the reason that they had a price-tag on everything. Later on, when I got to open-source software, I hated Microsoft for making all of their software closed-source. When I decided to move out of the Microsoft environment, my next favorite was of course, Big Brother (Google, if you haven't gotten it) - Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive. My personal information was the price to pay for the services even though I wasn't OK with that fact.

Then again, I realized that you could actually have your own stuff if you had the know-how. Compile / host your own software on your own systems. Oh, then I went on a compile spree. That's when I realized I didn't need any of these corporations to own my data. Today, I try my best to keep my data in my control and not some corporations who gives me free stuff for the price of my data and personal information, no thanks.

When you come up with a perfect working model for branching and merging, and everyone agrees apart from the one guy who insists you use gitflow because he likes shiny new things

Sometimes I do wonder why can’t I just be content at getting best I can get at what I’m already good at - and what brings in the €€€? Why do I go ”oooh look shiny intetesting language, let’s try do shit with it” or ”hey, let’s try this thing called kernel dev/pld/program verification which are all so far outside my core expertise they might as well be in a different universe!”

Dude I mean writing a kernel in V and doing proof oriented programming in F* are fun and all, but what good’s that gonna do me when I’m in all likelihood still maintaining legacy web apps in PHP ten to twenty years from now?

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m torn inside with my current workplace offering me everything I value and stuff that’s rare to find - but at the same time I’d love to be challenged more and don’t really have enough of those opportunities in my current environment. Or some shit like that.

Well fuck that, back to writing my own embedded DSL into F* in F#….

"Everybody in advertising is blonde, beautiful, families are happy, care are never in traffic, everything is shiny, food looks like it’s incredibly taseful. I ask myself, 'How stupid are we?'" - Oliveiro Toscani

the "advantages" of being ignorant about version control

Writing a feature critical for production in 2 hours of solid focus during the morning.

6 hours later it's still not in the build because:
* tech lead wants the code to move to a partial class instead of an extension method, delaying the UX review. No guidelines for this ever existed.

* after seeing the result, the UX team wants some element to be dynamic. A line. A friggin horizontal line.

* after adding the dynamic shiny frigggggin line, I try to test the feature with the server. It is still not deployed because the server guy went home. "The PR was not merged so I assumed we'll add it tomorrow".

Another day at the meat grinder.

Told my client last october that I would not be doing a migration.

Two weeks ago they wanted me to do the migration and I told them I will do my best to create estimates but that it was the first time.

Gave them a resonable estimate to migrate the content.

And last meeting they cut the time by 70% to meet the budget.

Fuck the budget, can't pay then you don't get the shiny new toy.

I'm a contractor, not a fucking employee. So all the extra hours are on me.

Going to give them a piece of my mind today.

If I lose this client, i don't give a fuck.

We've got a big legacy app which we have to rewrite. The current client applications are only working on XP(!). We have to move the clients to the browser so we can finally get rid of all XP vm-s. The db schema is complex but still 1000+ stored procedures and functions and about a hundred tables with 13 years of data.
So I ask the guy responsible for maintaining the DB code. (he is ~25 years older than me)

me - Where is the source of the database. Which project?
he - Where would it be? It's in the db.
me - So we've got a huge db without VCS, upgrade/downgrade scripts, etc?
he - Yes. I don't get why young developers always want to use shiny new tech like git just because it is cool. It has nothing that an external usb backup drive can't do.
me - VCS has been around since the early 1980's...
he - If you really want, you can put it under git or whatever, so you can sleep better, but I still think it is stupid and a waste of time.

I get that it's hard to keep up, but getting personal...

I can now leave freely without any regrets!
The slight misgivings I had about leaving this place over the toys they provide, is now gone because I re-realized that while this place adopts new tech, it doesn't adapt to it. So they have shiny tools but the people and processes won't change.
It seems to me that due to pressure to deliver, there is little thought/analysis behind any tech change.

They don't plan to change their wretched delivery pipelines. Everything will be same but on git. So no velocity gains, and same bureaucratic review request process. Such a waste. This attitude applies to their other tools too. They are using a unit test library to write tests that don't use mock. They are using modern languages but without modern idioms. It's like writing C code in C++. And of course theoretically we are agile but actually we're just a waterfall team with managers on our ass everyday and tighter release schedules.

Reminds me of @boombodies recent posts and discussion about business spaghetti reflecting in code.

There are possibly multiple reasons for these problems but I think a large part of it is a lack of empathy/mutual respect. Everyone's too insecure, noone cares for anyone but themselves and people just try to outwit each other.

Use Xamarin, they said. It will be easy, they said. You will only need to write your UI once, they said. NOPE
Documentation is shit, I've been sitting here for the past hour and a half figuring out how to add an icon to a button in their shiny XAML thing for which they have NO DOCUMENTATION. THEY WANT YOU TO HOE IT OVER C# BUT THEY ONLY GIVE EXAMPLES IN C#. And now I'm trying to figure out where I can download the iOS UIBarButton icons, because you can't use native icons and fuck apple too, they don't want to give em to you.
What a hellhole.
All while my client is constantly spamming me in all ways, distracting me, marking issues as "supercritical" (which makes an alarm ring on my phone and is only meant for emergencies) and otherwise distracting the living daylight out of asking for screens of the UI.

AND I STILL PREFER IT OVER ANDROID STUDIO. Don't even get me started on that one.

PSA: Don't chase shiny.

Serverless stacks are fast, easy, and cheap... until they're not. 75% of the way through an implementation when the company started to realize that we would be done by now if we continued to use our own infrastructure.

Started my first private App project using all the goodies of 2017 android development like TDD, Android architecture components (hence MVVM), kotlin (which I yet have to learn), RxJava2 (if I need it additionally to AAC) and maybe try to set up a CI environment.

Wish me luck guys and girls 😁

Not really coding, but debugging complex problems. I love it when I have to dive in head-first and dig (very) deep to find answers to super-complex problems. I once went into the internals of a programming language to understand why a library was acting up in a particular scenario. Another time I had to optimize and re-compile from source (after modifying it) so that the application would not leak its memory. (Of course, I contributed it back to the language).

The inner satisfaction that you get after all that hard-work when it finally works, pays off! Bliss!

Personal Opinion:
If you/your company's goal is to achieve micro-services, kubernetes or any new shiny technology, then you are thinking it wrong.

These tools are a means to an end. They should be a solution to an issue you are facing/will certainly face. They should not be your end goal.

Got my new dev machine today. Shiny MacBook Pro with touchbar. Seems really cool so far.

upgrade to the latest pre-release of Xamarin forms for a shiny new feature, now nothing works even after reverting. You'd think I should know better by now.

Wait for it to be “slightly old” tech , don’t chase shiny when it’s still brand new.