Storytime!

Manager: Hey fullstackchris, the maps widget on our app stopped working recently...

Dev: (Skeptical, little did he know) Sigh... probably didn't raise quota or something stupid... Logs on to google cloud console to check it out...

Google Dashboard: Your bill.... $5,197 (!!!!!!) Payment method declined (you think?!)

Dev: 😱 WTF!?!?!! (Calls managers) Uh, we have HUGE problem, charges for $5000+ in our google account, did you guys remove the quota limits or not see any limit reached warnings!?

Managers: Uh, we didn't even know that an API could cost money, besides, we never check that email account!

Dev: 🤦‍♂️ yeah obviously you get charged, especially when there have literally been millions of requests. Anyway, the bigger question is where or how our key got leaked. Somewhat started hammering one of the google APIs with one of our keys (Proceeds to hunt for usages of said API key in the codebase)

Dev: (sweating 😰) did I expose an API key somewhere? Man, I hope it's not my fault...

Terminal: grep results in, CMS codebase!

Dev: ah, what do we have here, app.config, seems fine.... wait, why did they expose it to a PUBLIC endpoint?!

Long story short:

The previous consulting goons put our Angular CMS JSON config on a publicly accessible endpoint.

WITH A GOOGLE MAPS API KEY.

JUST CHILLING IN PLAINTEXT.

Though I'm relieved it wasn't my fault, my faith in humanity is still somewhat diminished. 🤷‍♂️

Oh, and it's only Monday. 😎

Cheers!

My first AI program in the 1985 on Apple IIe (64kb ram computer) was answering simple questions with yes and no. Everyone were shocked with precision of about 100% when I was typing and 70-80% when others were typing. My parents were scared and skeptical. How it works? Store the time between the first key pressure and the following, when it is larger than 1 second the answer is yes, otherwise no. They say the question, you know the answer and type accordingly. When they want to write the question themselves, you try to force their typing speed if possible. I was 12 years old and it was very funny.

!rant

This might be the most ambitious project I've ever started up till now, teaching my girlfriend everything college isn't.

As some of you may know my uni isn't the greatest and lacks in professor quality, my girlfriend (who's taking the same bachelor) knows this and when she knew I was starting a new little side project she wanted in.

At first I was skeptical, this could be just an excuse to spend more time with me, so I told her:

"if you really want to then I'm all for it, it'll be done my way and the first few weeks will be tough, however I promise by the end of it you will know 10x what you do now"

She agreed and so our journey began 3 weeks ago, my goal: make a kick ass project, do it in record time and teach her enough to cope with a IRL job.

I've setup the project so by the end of it she is well versed in the following: scrum, Django, MVC, python, HTML + CSS3, git, GitHub, PostgreSQL and Docker. In about 4 to 6 months.

We are into our third sprint this week, she had two small breakdowns because she couldn't believe how much she was missing out and felt she lacked talent, this is our third week and I'm glad to see that she's actually enjoying herself.

Introduced my friend to VSCode. He was skeptical about switching from Sublime to Code but he decided to try it out anyway.

Guess what's his favourite editor now 😂

So yesterday i went to this live theatre drama and i had an extra ticket. I asked this random guy the way to that theatre and apparently he was looking to get ticket for the same show. I offered him my other ticket for free.

We introduce ourself to each other and i came to know he worked as salesman or something. As i talked about my job, I told about me leaving job in hopes of self employment.

*Cue the sales pitch*

He started talking about some scheme kind of thing to have financial freedom. He talks about how we can get products at upto 15% discount and we have to sell them to others.

I was skeptical about it and he talked they have website as if that will pimpress me or something.

I visited the site and i was not surprised at all. It was nothing but an halfassed e-commerce store. I knew it was halfassed and probably setup by the "CEO" himself.

And the products in that site are nothing but stupid cosmetic products!

And to top it off, you have to spend around $200 to join this scheme. This poor guy doesn't realise he is just being a talking puppet to that halfassed e-commerce business BY PAYING THEM!!!

He even said one of his friend in London took leave to join this scheme or whatever... What a stupid friend.

Anyway, i just regret giving away a ticket to some stupid people like him. I'd have been much more happier if i had just thrown the extra ticket in the trash.

People suck!

Game Streaming is an absolute waste.

I'm glad to see that quite a lot of people are rightfully skeptical or downright opposed to it. But that didn't stop the major AAA game publishers announcing their own game streaming platforms at E3 this weekend, did it?

I fail to see any unique benefit that can't be solved with traditional hardware (either console or PC)

- Portability? The Nintendo Switch proved that dedicated consoles now have enough power to run great games both at home and on the go.

- Storage? You can get sizable microSD cards for pretty cheap nowadays. So much so that the Switch went back to use flash-based cartridges!

- Library size/price? The problem is even though you're paying a low price for hundreds of games, you don't own them. If any of these companies shut down the platform, all that money you spent is wasted. Plus, this can be solved with backwards compatibility and one-time digital downloads.

- Performance on commodity hardware? This is about the only thing these streaming services have going for it. But unfortunately this only works when you have an Internet connection, so if you have crap Internet or drop off the network, you're screwed. And has it ever occurred to people that maybe playing Doom on your phone is a terrible UX experience and shouldn't be done because it wasn't designed for it?

I just don't get it. Hopefully this whole fad passes soon.

Best part of being a dev? Rock star status when things are going well: had to get a fix out by 18:00, boss walks by as I'm watching something on YouTube and tells me the client called and wanted to be sure we'd have it done in time, told him not to worry and went back to my video. Pushed the fix at 17:30, and tomorrow I'll be in the same position: every last minute fix delivery only grows my reputation for getting critical last-minute fixes out in time... As skeptical as my boss was at the time when he walked past and saw me on YouTube he had to he polite because he knows how crucial I am to this project

I think tomorrow I'm going to work on my own project and slack off, no one will be able to tell me different

!rant

Updating PHP from 5 to 7.2 on windows server at work the other day... Thought it would be easy, but I really find software management for windows a pain in the ass compared to package based solutions like apt, brew or pacman. It ended up taking way too long due to dependcies with the website, that weren't really documented, and setting up all the software that depended on PHP over again... I ended up writing 10 pages of documentation about how to updated PHP on windows, so the next programmer would have some idea of how to approach the problem.

Of course I suggested switching over to Chocolatey for windows, but my boss is skeptical since it's not the traditional way, and it seems like it will take too many resources. So now I have to make a presentation for her to convince her that package managers are superior to downloading stuff from phps website.

Wish me luck.

Be skeptical of best practices. "Best" comes with assumptions, which may not apply to you.

Everywhere you go, you find these memes where developers are skeptical of their work. Things like "It works. I don't know how. It doesn't work. I don't know how.". Don't you guys think this is a huge problem? And people say that their programming language is the best, because preference. But isn't this happening because our tools suck?

Yes the problems maybe inherently complex but at least we should be able to figure out the logic behind the snipper and reason about it.

Haven't really experienced it, but they say Haskell and the likes are great at this and it must be true because it's backed by mathematical properties and laws, not " experience".

So the rant here is, wish we had better tools in the mainstream that allowed us to enjoy absolute faith in at least what we have written, regardless of the fact that we understood the problem in the domain.

I have some good, no, great news I forgot to share yesterday:

Drum roll 🥁🥁🥁🥁

I just got my first job as an intern!!!

I'll be developing their product from scratch along with a few other devs, it's gonna be awesome. My primary occupation will be as a backend dev, but I'm also gonna help a bit on the frontend.

They also said they won't micro manage me, they just want me to deliver their tasks, so I can work whenever I want and not necessarily 6 hours a day. I'm a bit skeptical here because that sounds like they're gonna overwork me, but they also said they don't want to get in the way of my studies in college, so idk. It seems like a really nice place.

It's going to be remote work and the pay is also very good for an internship.

All of it seems way too good to be true, there has to be a catch... I'll find out in time, just let me be happy for getting my first actual job ever ok? Just for a few days.

Anyways, I'm just so fucking happy with this and wanted to share it with ya :)

Time for a REAL fucking rant.

io_uring manpages say you can set the CAP_SYS_NICE capability to allow SQPOLL to work. You can't, you still get an operation not permitted errno result.

Why? I checked, it says 5.10 mainline is required. Pretty sure I just manually downloaded and installed the Deb's myself. uname reports that I am at 5.10. So what gives?

Maintainer submitted a patch because they fucked up and made the *actual* capability check look for what's basically root permissions (CAP_SYS_ADMIN... c'mon...) and is now trying to rectify a glaring security shortcoming.

Patch hasn't been accepted or even addressed yet but they already updated the manpages with the estimated mainline kernel release as if it had made it into the release candidate. Manpages have made it into latest debs but the actual change has not.

Where the fuck is the Linus Torvalds that would ream the fuck out of shitty developers doing shitty things? The political correctness climate has discouraged such criticism now and the result... this. This fucking mess, where people are allowed to cut corners and get away with it because it would hurt their feelings when faced with pressure.

I'm not just guessing either. The maintainer has already said some of the "tone" of criticisms hurt his feelings. Yes, sorry, but when you claim 90% speedup over a typical epoll application using your new magical set of syscalls, and nobody can even get 1-2% speedup on a similar machine, people are going to be fucking skeptical. Then when you lower it to 60% because you originally omitted a bunch of SECURITY RELATED AND CORRECTNESS CHECKING CODE, we're going to call you the fuck out for fudging numbers.

Trying to maintain the equivalent of academic integrity within the computer science field is an exercise of insanity. You'd be fired and shunned from publishing in journals if you pulled that shit in ANY OTHER FUCKING FIELD, but because the CS scene is all about jerking each other off at every corner because the mean people keep saying mean things on Twitter and it hurts your feelings therefore we're all allowed to contribute subpar work and be protected from criticisms when others realize it's subpar.

These aren't mistakes anymore, it's clear you're just trying to farm clout at Facebook - maybe even FOR Facebook.

Fuck you. Do it right, the first time. Sick of shitty code being OK all of a sudden.

And sometimes it works well too!!

I'm a little skeptical about this programs proper operation....

I have reached a stage in my career that when my code works in the first try, I'm more skeptical than excited about it.

At first, I was skeptical and somewhat resilient of trying Arch Linux. As a former Debian based distros user, I have to say : once you go Arch you don't go back! Time to 🍚 it up a bit more!

Would love to buy but a bit skeptical because I can't find any user review.

If you’re stuck in hell, I mean, Webpack, try parcel. I was skeptical until I used it, and it’s just magical

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something isn't working, I play around with the code, and try all possible things in the code. Still it doesn't work. Spend a couple of hours reading each and every line but still in vain. Finally, I find out that I was editing the wrong file (same file at another location) the whole time!! This happened a couple of times when I was a newbie, one of my most annoying mistakes.
Lesson learnt: Now when anybody asks me to debug his code, I first edit/add a print statement to make sure this is the correct file. I thought I was being skeptical, but it has saved me a lot of time (mostly interns do this rookie mistake).

my vision about life changed as I started learning about algorithms and programming, which I consider as an advantage, tho I can't help but wonder if people in different fields feel the same.
it also feels like I over-think since then, a constant need to analyze things which is overwhelming sometimes.

Brave Browser was found hardcoding referral links to partnered Crypto sites, even if you manually type the URL.

Since then , they have fixed the bug but it's hard to trust Brave again.

Privacy is built on trust. I have recommended Brave to my friends and family and seeing news like this , makes me skeptical about the company.

Fixed a high priority bug today just prior to release. There was 100% test coverage. The tests pass both before and after the change. The product behavior is correct now where it wasn't before. Just one more reminder that test coverage does not equate to either quality or correctness. Tests are alarms (at best), and quality of tests are no better an any chunk of code. All tests have costs, but not all have value. All reasons why I am skeptical of the value of code coverage, TDD, or anything that posits that "all tests are good".

I hated Java and was skeptical about C# in the beginning (I never code in C# during my early college years).

But when I tried coding in C# as a requirement for our internship this month, I was like "fuck Java (seriously), C# is the shit!"

Conversation with American developers, suddenly we began to talk about college and how in debt they are. I tell them that don't have an education related debt.

They were skeptical at first, but then we found that my entire education costed less than one semester for them. That's one positive thing about living here.

How about you guys? Happy with the cost of higher education where you live?

Sophomore here. For a long time this has been bugging me. I'm very skeptical about what I'm learning and what I plan to learn. Just doubting myself and feeling like a loser. So today i wanna ask, what was the road you took to be where you are now? I wanna know details
Did u exceed ur expectations and do u think if u knew what u know now, u cud've done a lot better and taken a diff route?

I'm asking this cuz i wanna set a baseline of skills to attain by the time i graduate. Been researching and the amount of things u can learn is very intimidating to me

Views on Jython?
It's python on Java btw.
Seems like a best of both worlds scenario but never heard of it until today so a bit skeptical about getting into it.
Anyone here got any experience with it?

What do you guys think about BMC CMDB?

My company considering to buy it, but I am skeptical.

"I think design would be better if designers were much more skeptical about its applications. If you believe in the potency of your craft, where you choose to dole it out is not something to take lightly." - Frank Chimero

When I started developing and was skeptical on my efficiency, one of the first things someone said to me was, "honestly, as long as it works, they'll be happy."

Aside from encouraging bad coding practices, would any of you give that same advice?

So I plan to ditch my 17" heavy gaming laptop to chose something more suitable for school for a (13/14") ultrabook (I plan to run Debian on it) that has a decent battery life
Anyway, I looked at those chinese ultrabook on AliExpress/gearbest but I'm a bit skeptical about some factors.
Anyone has recommendations about a model or some advices?

One of my classmates started learning web development when he saw my web apps on heruko.

So within 2 days this guy comes up and says he'd covered "everything" about web apps and made his first website from "scratch".

I was skeptical, but...

He used WordPress.

I've been working at a consulting company (lone programmer) as a Web Dev for about 2 or 3 months and I'm now skeptical about quitting.

I have the liberty to use any technologies I want, unless we get something already using a certain stack. The atmosphere is great and I only work part-time. The problem is that they have me working like a hog on many different projects simotaneously and expect me to meet deadlines despite new projects coming in weekly. Again, I'm the only programmer here, nobody to help me out. I don't make a killing but the pay isn't too bad considering it's part-time.

I've also noticed that my programming activity has degraded since I started working. I feel like I'm slowly losing the motivation I once had to keep working on my personal side projects.

Any tips on what to do?

Hardware classes for software dev student?

Hey guys. Currently getting into second year of a 5 year curriculum to get an 'Integrated Master of Computer Engineering & Informatics' Degree here in Greece.

I'm already into software, I'm fooling around with java, go and php, making some games, web services and anything I find interesting in general. Recently, with the logic design class, I started liking hardware stuff (I didn't really like them before).

We're getting to a point where we might have to decide between picking hardware-centered or software centered subjects. I'm thinking that I can probably learn whatever is taught on the software side by myself (with a bit more studying of course), whereas hardware would be more difficult to study alone.

That said, I'm considering picking hardware, but I am skeptical. What do you think? I'll certainly miss out on the concurrent processing, data structure and how-a-compiler-works classes.

What do you think?

P.S. University here is free

When you spend hours in a messy codebase to fix a bug properly and add an integration spec to cover that specific case.
And even you do a round of testing on staging + providing screenshots, there is always someone on the team that will write in your PR, "It works, I tested the change on my machine".
I understand that some people are skeptical but to the point of not trusting integration tests + screeshots/recordings then please test it on staging or production next time because if it works on your machine doesn't mean it will work there ;)

The number fake accounts similar to sudanmealproject is an example some people have no conscience.

I am very skeptical if even the "real" sudanmealproject is just an attempt to make profit off gullible people.

Back when I was a freshman in high school a friend of mine put an emulator on the shared drive, so we could play NES games while in the computer lab. Didn't know better/didn't care. One day I get pulled out of class and walked into the computer guys office. In there is also the principal of the school and the Chief of police.

The computer guy tells me there was an issue last week that caused the school server to crash and it caused damage. I asked what happened and the he said one of the emulators we were playing had a script that crashed the server and caused damage. I asked how much damage and they informed me it was over 3 thousand dollars. At this point I'm very skeptical that the damage was worth about the cost of a new workstation (the old one sitting on his desk, buried in boxes), and afterwards none of the faculty knew of any kind of an outage. I asked for him to show me what broke and what had to be done to fix/replace the damaged equipment but all I got was a simple, "I'm sorry. I can't show you that at this time."

They threatened legal action for a felony of damaging a school property. Myself and the other tech savvy kids talked about it over the next couple of days wondering what would happen. They threatened expulsion for myself and a couple of other kids, but ultimately just got a talking to about keeping personal information safe.

What I got out of it was if they think I'm good with computers I must be doing something right. Now I'm in IT. This is where it went wrong.

Trying a custom eMbEdDeR today using open AI and pinecone on some douments of financial data. Let's see if its smart enough to be able to answer even the most basic questions, or if it just fumbles completely.

My bias is to be highly skeptical.

Will report back with results.

As a developer, how important to you that you have the choice of tools/platforms to do your job?

I've worked on some companies that don't give a damn as long as you get the job done, while some frown upon it because they haven't tried anything other than what they have and are skeptical. Some are completely locked because their products are platform specific so it makes sense for dev to work on the same platform.

Thoughts?

I learned Git in the most ridiculous way possible.

Noob me, is using VSCode and i tried clicking the git icon. Now, i didn't know what i was doing and i suddenly made a git repo and i just checked on things (add changes and commit) and little do i know that it was all absorbed. I got skeptical (spying on files, i didn't know what's happening, etc.) so i clicked the "x" button and it warned me that it will be "completely deleted" and it will be an "irreversible action". Due to my stupidity, i pressed okay.

Then that was the time i knew, i fucked up.

But hey ho it took me 12 hrs to recover all files (1600 loose objects) that has been deleted using a 3rd party app (without any master, no last commit message, no everything, just objects a.k.a the blob files that git saves). I tried looking for easier ways to get the files, but it was there in front of me the whole time, so it took me longer.

Happened way back when I was still in high school and facebook was relatively new. We used to own a cyber cafe.

--

The Guy: (Talking to other customers) I'll have you know that I'm a graduate in Computer Science! *Proceeds to boast about self and other bullshittery*

Others: *In awe*

Me: *Veeeery Skeptical*

A few days later...

The Guy: (Talks to me) Hey, there seems to be a problem with your internet. I can't log in on facebook.

Me: Could you try to do what you are doing again?

...

The Guy: See, doesn't work.

Me: Have you registered your account on facebook?

The Guy: Huh? What are you talking about? I have my Yahoo! mail.

Me: ..You need to register your email on facebook in order to log in.

The Guy: What?? I don't get it. I am registered and have a Yahoo! mail!

Me: *Brain Sigh*

(I proceed to help him register his email on facebook)

The Guy: Oh, you had to register on facebook! Now I get it! I thought that if you created an email you can immediately use that to log in to facebook.

Me: *Internal facepalm x1000*

(This guy is a Computer Science graduate? Oh PLEASE. )

Asking for your opinions/experience regarding this

I have a program which send payload to fcm api to push notifs. But sometimes it gets timedout at a random interval.

Someone says the server is too far from us (SE asia to US <google>). And that we should move our codes to AWS (when we already have a huge ass on premise server). Am I an idiot for being skeptical at this?

I mean i could play games on US server just fine and here we are debating about 100KB json payload that cannot be sent to a US server due to 'distance'. Dunno what the cause for timeout but it gets ridicilous now.. I dont have the patience for this

Just had a memory popup about my uni days about 5 years ago. I was in my Junior year in business school and was doing a "consulting" project involving the whole Class (200 students). Groups of 4 were assigned an international company in either Europe, Asia, or South America. We'd visit them (as well as do some sightseeing) and learn about them (performance, market positions, products) during Spring Break and come up with a real proposal. We would then compete with other teams, and the winning pitchs for each would be presented in the school auditorium in front the entire class.

Our team didn't get that far but that's not the point. We did win the individual classroom competition. Our company was Deutsche Telekom (owner of T-Mobile).

This was in 2010, when the iPhone/smart-phones started to become mainstream... And our team's idea was location-based advertising.

Looking back, we basically predicted the future... though we got the wrong industry...

It's also sort of funny though because I remember the main reason we came up with the idea was to be different.

All other teams just went with some expansion plan to a neighboring country or cutting costs.... pure MBA/business plan. But I guess I was being a natural techie so thought of a tech idea instead.

We had a meeting with our professor after he picked us and he told us he had a history of spotting future hits. We were like "hm... ok... let's give it a shot... we definitely got an A!" but at that point I was sort of skeptical if this would actually work in real-life (the basic idea was they would sell ads to local businesses and if you were nearby, you would get a text message with an offer).

But guess he was pretty right... we just needed to have Google or Facebook to have been our company... though Groupon or Yelp works too... basically a tech company with larger scale rather than a mobile carrier...

"I think design would be better if designers were much more skeptical about its applications. If you believe in the potency of your craft, where you choose to dole it out is not something to take lightly." - Frank Chimero

!= rant
On a skeptical whim I ordered a voice over talent off of fiverr for a video I'm working on and am happily amazed at the awesome product I got back so fast. Made my evening..