Was lead developer at a small startup, I was hiring and had a budget to add 3 new people to my team to develop a new product for the company.

Some context first and then the rant!

Candidate 1 - Amazing, a dev I worked with before who was under utilized at the previous company. Still a junior, but, she was a quick learner and eager to expand her knowledge, never an issue.

Candidate 2 - Kickass dev with back end skills and extras, he was always eager to work a bit more than what was expected. I use to send him home early to annoy him. haha!

Candidate 3 - Lets call him P.

In the interview he answers every question perfectly, he asks all the right questions and suggests some things I havent even thought of. CTO goes ahead and says we should skip the technical test and just hire the guy, his smart and knows what his talking about, I agree and we hire him. (We where a bit desperate at this stage as well.)

He comes in a week early to pick up his work laptop to get setup before he starts the next week, awesome! This guy is going to be an asset to the company, cant wait to have him join the team - The CTO at this stage is getting ready to leave the company and I will be taking over the division and need someone to take over lead position, he seems like the guys to do it.

The guys starts the next week, he comes in and the laptop we gave him is now a local server for testing and he will be working off his own laptop, no issue, we are small so needed a testing stack, but wasnt really needed since we had procedures in place for this already.

Here is where everything goes wrong!!! First day goes great... Next day he gets in early 6:30am (Nice! NO!), he absolutely smells, no stinks, of weed, not a light smell, the entire fucking office smells of weed! (I have no problem with weed, just dont make it my problem to deal with). I get called by boss and told to sort this out people are complaining! I drive to office and have a meeting with him, he says its all good he understands. (This was Friday).

Monday comes around - Get a call from Boss at 7:30am. Whole office smells like weed, please talk to P again, this cannot happen again. I drive to office again, and he again says it wont happen again, he has some issues with back pain and the weed helps.

Tuesday - Same fucking thing! And now he doesnt want to sign for the laptop("server") that was given to him, and has moved to code in the boardroom, WHERE OUR FUCKING CLIENTS WILL BE VIEWING A DEMO THAT DAY OF THE PRODUCT!! Now that whole room smells like weed, FML!

Wednesday - We send P a formal letter that he is under probation, P calls me to have a meeting. In the meeting he blames me for not understanding "new age" medicine, I ask for his doctors prescription and ask why he didnt tell me this in the interview so I could make arrangements, we dont care if you are stoned, just do good work and be considerate to your co-workers. P cant provide these and keeps ranting, I suggest he takes pain killers, he has none of it only "new age" medicine for him.

Thursday - I ask him to rather "work" from home till we can get this sorted, he comes in for code reviews for 2 weeks. I can clearly see he has no idea how the system works but is trying, I thought I will dive deeper and look at all of his code. Its a mess, nothing makes sense and 50% of it is hard coded (We are building a decentralized API for huge data sets so this makes no sense).

Friday - In code review I confront him about this, he has excuses for everything, I start asking him harder questions about the project and to explain what we are building - he goes quiet and quits on the spot with a shitty apology.

From what I could make out he was really smart when it came to theory but interpreting the theory to actual practice wasnt possible for him, probably would have been easier if he wasnt high all the time.

I hate interview code tests, but learned a valuable lesson that day! Always test for some code knowledge as well even if you hate doing it, ask the right questions and be careful who you hire! You can only bullshit for so long in coding before someone figures out that you are a fraud.

7 am. Dog wants out. I roll out of bed after trying to pretend I am dead.

Walk down the stairs to the side door. Half asleep and notice that the door has daylight shining through on the lock side. Didn't shut it all the way the night before. Walk outside. Dog does his thing. Turn around. Doors locked.

Fuck.

Go for my phone. In the house. Go for my keys. In the house. Fuck. Fuck a duck.

Start checking my windows. One opens a fraction of an inch. Doesn't do me any good. Dog is outside with me. Freezing his ass off. It's like 5 degrees here.

Both of my neighbors don't answer their door. Life flashes before my eyes. Put my dog in my jacket to warm him up. Little 15lb rat terrier. Not made for snow.

He's fine for now. I grab a piece of rebar from my backyard and lever my window a bit more open, busting one of the locks.

And then I yell "ALEXA. OPEN THE FRONT DOOR." The voice of an angel responds. "OK." Whirrr. Click. Door opens. Sweet warmth.

I need a fake rock with a key under it.

Great Sunday.

Someday my toaster is going to have an IP address. A bad automatic firmware update will most likely cause it to get stuck on the bagel setting until I plug a usb key in and reflash the memory.

Grandma's refrigerator will probably get viruses, lock itself and freeze all the food inside, demanding bitcoin before defrosting.

My blender will probably be used in a massive DDoS attack because Ninja's master MAC address list got leaked and the hidden control panel login is admin/admin.

Ovens will burn houses down when people call in to have them preheat on their way home from work.

Correlations between the number of times the lights are turned on and how many times the toilet is flushed will yield recommendations to run the dishwasher on Thursdays because it's simply more energy efficient.

My dog will tweet when he's hungry and my smart watch will recommend diet dog food in real-time because he's really been eating too much lately--"Do you want to setup a recurring order on Amazon fresh?"

Sometimes living in a cave sounds nice...

Mam: Hey can I ask you a question about Facebook?

Me: (Christ give me strength) ... sure whats up?

Mam: You know when you get a notification and you click on it and see what someone uploaded?

Me: ... you are not on Facebook, you can't be getting notifications

Mam: well I do. Is it possible to...

Me: No hang on a second, it is 110% not possible for this to happen. Something else is going on that you think is a notification.

Mam: You know when you are on, and you see a message like "12 new notifications"

Me: on? on what? this is happening on your phone is it? Can I see?

Mam: No its on my laptop at home.

Me: ... you have an old laptop with an old windows, you can't get notifications on it.

Mam: OH FOR GOD SAKE! ... you know when you are in your emails and it says "12 new notifications"?

Me: ... right so we are talking about EMAILS about unread notifications and not getting notifications on your phone. So you have an old account then that you don't use?

Mam: Yeah I don't know the password to it, haven't logged in, in years.

Me: of course

Mam: Right anyway. When I get one and click on it, lets say its about you, can you see me reading your notifications?

Me: ..... you can't not read my notifications.

Mam: uh, can you see me reading your emails then smart arse?

Me: ... can't do that either.

Mam: So what the hell am I doing then?

Me: You are reading a post someone uploaded, which you got alerted to from an email.

Mam: Right, can you tell when I've read your POST then?!?!?!

Me: no

Mam: was that so hard?

Me: ... yep

It's my first day here and I LOVE this place. Everyone is so awesome and helpful and smart! Thanks for making me feel at home! <3

Today is a sad day.
A sad day indeed.
I used to live with my parents for pretty much my whole life until the beginning of this year, when I decided to move and starter living with a friend, in his apartment.
By far, one of the things that I've missed most from my parents' house was the dogs. Boy, I love those four pretty little creatures.
Being a fulltime developer in an area that I honestly don't like that much, I really appreciate my after-work hours. Specially because of the time I could spend with the dogs.
So, the first months away were quite hard. Even though I was living with a friend, I couldn't help but feel alone and really depressed at times.
But then, my friend and my girlfriend decided that it was a nice idea to give me something to grow with again. And Jolyne, my beautiful, smart and messy little dog came to the apartment.
Boy oh boy, my bright days were back.
Getting home and seeing those four small legs and a shaking tail running on my direction was everything I could ask for. I was happy again.

Fast-forward to today.
I finally finished the code for a project I was working on. Everything was working fine. A good day indeed, good sir. Have one on me. - then my friend called me, which is weird considering we almost only talk through Telegram during the day.
All he had to say, with a sad voice and painful tone, was "man... I don't know how to tell you this... But Jolyne is dead".

And that was it. Every good feeling I had was now dead. And a part of me as well.
I stood there, speechless. I mean, I just couldn't believe what I've just heard. She was happy by the morning. We were playing before I left for work. Everything was fine.
Then, four hours later, it wasn't. She was gone.
I came home to a friend that didn't have any more tears to shed. And no dog came running to me like usual.
My fluffy little friend was laying on her bed, like she was sleeping normally. Like nothing had happened at all. She was just sleeping and have not noticed me... At least that was what I wanted to believe.
Three hours had passed then... And I just can't fathom the fact that my dog won't be here anymore. That I won't be able to play with her again like I do every night. That I won't listen to her running around with her toys. That I won't be able to hug her anymore.

I still don't know what to do. I mean, she will be buried. I've already arranged everything.
But I don't know what to do about myself. I don't know how to deal with this pain I'm feeling.
But I will try to move on... I just don't know how.

I'm deeply sorry for bringing you this story. For just writing it down here, like you guys need to share my pain...
But I needed to write this down somewhere. And this place is pretty much the only one where I feel comfortable and welcome enough to do this.
Thank you for your time, my friends.
Thank you.

Working in the IT Department is just funny man. Sometimes I wonder if I'm dumb, too smart to answer these dumb questions or these clients are just asking questions they already have answers to that I don't.

Client: Hey, can you please give X access to Y's Dropbox? He gets error saying he doesn't have access to the file.

Me: Uhh, you have to share a link to the specific file you want to share with X. Then only he can access it.

Client: Can you send him the link?

Me: Uhhhh, what link?

Client: The link to the file.

Me: Who created the file you want to share?

Client: My boss did. And he wants me to send the link to X. But I don't have the link so he said to check with IT.

Me (in my mind): WTF!!!!

Me: Ok, ask your boss to share the link to the file he created with you then you can send it to Y. He can also send it to Y directly himself. IT doesn't have and has no idea of what file your boss created. Only your boss knows.

Client: Ok, hold on let me check with him..

Client gets back on the phone.. "he said he deleted the file".

Me: Well, there's no file to share here.

Client: Can you find it?

Me: Call Dropbox.

Client: do you have his number?

Me: Who?

Client: Dropbox..

At this point I started laughing.. 😂😂😂🤣🤣

Me: Dropbox is a company.

Client: Ok, thank you. I'll call Dropbox.

At this point, I'm wondering. If this client thought Dropbox was person, then what did she mean by her initial question? 🤔

Can this be real life? This happened less than an hour ago, and going home now still confused about this whole situation. 😂😂

TLDR; I just screwed a production server and rendered it useless!!!

Long story:

I went to install a product that we built at the customer's site, and was given a Linux running server, to deploy our app.

I work in windows, and barely know the basic Linux commands.

So I look at the files in the home directory, and see that the are a lot of files, so I ask the customer if it is ok that I move all the files to a separate directory.

He agrees, and me thinking that I am smart, proceed to enter the following commands in the terminal:

mkdir old
mv /* old

Of course I got an error that I don't have permission so my next command was:

sudo mv /* old

And that was the end of that computer.

The amazing part of the story is that as soon as it happened, I understood so much about Linux.

The file structure, sudo, the power of the terminal, aliases and so much more...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of the students in my department was smart and driven, but also really awkward. I had known him perhaps better than most other students, and had gleaned that he was depressed and had low self esteem.

On a few occasions he tied a noose out of an ethernet cable hanging from the ceiling and played "Pumped Up Kicks" when asked to choose a song at a party. Really strange stuff. If we had been betting on who would turn out a school shooter, I would've put my money on him.

Anyway, he graduated last year and this year I found out federal agents raided his home because he was building pipe bombs and intended to kill a bunch of people and himself. He's now doing at least 10 years in prison.

Most ignorant ask from a PM or client?

So, so many. How do I chose?

- Wanting to 'speed up' a web site that we did not own, in Sweden (they used a service I wrote). His 'benchmark' was counting "one Mississippi, two Mississippi" while the home page rendered on his home PC and < 1MB DSL connection (he lives in a rural area).
- Wanted to change the sort order of a column of report so it 'sometimes' sorted on 'ABC' (alpha) or '123' (numeric) and sometimes, a mix of both. His justification was if he could put the data in the order he wanted in Excel, the computer should be smart enough to do the same thing.
- Wanted a Windows desktop application to run on an android.
- Wanted to write the interface to a new phone system that wasn't going to be installed for months. Even though we had access to the SDK, he didn't understand the SDK required access to the hardware. For several weeks he would send emails containing tutorials on interfacing with COM libraries (as if that was my problem).
- Wanted to write a new customer support application in XML. I told him I would have the application written tomorrow if he could tell me what XML stands for.

I was doing a physical security engagement on a clients home. The door had a new smart lock, I called his landline to inform him it was us at the front door. I got the answering machine, and figured it'd be funny to say "Alexa, unlock the front door." To our surprise, the front door unlocked.

People: I will never put one of those smart speakers in my home! You're basically just putting in a microphone that will spy on you!

Also People: Hang on I have to grab my phone/high-fidelity microphone/high resolution camera/GPS tracker/Data Aggregator and make sure I have it with me literally everywhere I go, because who knows when I will want to comment on a cute picture of a cat!?

"Alexa still down :( Please send help, I no longer know how to switch any devices on or off manually. Smart home now officially dumb..."

The home isn't the only one it seems 🤭

so my parents live close and my dad said his router died. I told him I had a spare. I loaded it dd-wrt on there and next time I went over there he asked about opening a port. I said I could do it for him. wouldn't let me touch it. he believes he is the computer genius and that I would brake it.

funny part is I work on servers for huge companies like Wells Fargo, Ally Bank and tons of others. I can configure a rack mount router but he doesn't trust me to touch a little crappy home linksys router lol.

no matter how smart you are they never want to admit their kid knows more about tech than they do.

No Wi-Fi = No Food.. Great motivation to pay your internet bill on time... This 'smart' shit is going way too far lol..

(maybe) unpopular opinion

I hate the I'm at 127.0.0.1|localhost meme
It's a loopback address

It's like saying I live at home

Like why do people think it's funny or smart to post stuff like that

Even the doormat that was going around isn't necessary accurate, since it's per machine (in this case a human).
Like if you have the home saying it's localhost then you are obviously not.

Maybe I'm just being mean here but it's like really annoying after a while

I remember when an aunt met with me and I advised her to get a PC for her son.

he is just 7 years but he always wants to visit me everyday just to use my PC. even when I started using linux he still managed to find his way around. really smart for someone who didn't have a PC. I even found some Google search history of him Google weird instructions and errors and whatnot. since I wouldn't always be around since i was always travelling.

I put the PC together with the huge budget she gave me. it was waaaaay better than mine with all that rgb shit. I loaded it up with all that programming, softwares, ebooks and videos and games I could find. few weeks later he stopped calling me(usually he'd call me to know if I was at home), i felt lonely for a while before i moved out and i felt like i did the right thing. I felt like jesus, lol

at least if I dont get to become a pro at coding I know I did everything and helped him start early

This one was probably last week of my highschool education so everyone including myself were drunk as fuck like 90% of the time.

Came home drunk one evening and woke up in the morning with a working keylogger waiting to be deployed on school computers. Apparently I've even implemented FTP upload, some basic firewall bypasses and autostart feature. Everything was actually quite good, excluding my stupidness to upload captured data on server through FTP, but there was anyways no-one smart enough in that school to decompile a Windows executable binary.

What's more interesting is until that moment I've never written anything remotely so complicated - I was doing examples from the book and didn't think I have enough knowledge to make program that has any real life application.

After that day it started coming to me that one day I could actually earn for life with programming.

I kinda hate my life right now.

I hate my job: I've been working as a flutter developer for a month and a half (even though I was hired to do backend) and I discovered I don't like frontend, it doesn't give me enough challenges. Every once in a while I have to do something complicated and have fun working, but most of the time it's just boring layout shit.

I can't do any side-projects, everything bores me. I want to get into really low level programming so bad but the steep learning curve makes me lazy.

I don't feel like I'm doing enough. I'm learning quite a bit about flutter, but I don't want to work with that, I hate it, so I feel like I'm just wasting my time. I'd like to work on something complicated and meaningful, like developing flight systems for rockets or whatever, but there's sooo much road ahead of me I just feel like I'm never gonna make it, plus I have to be very smart to do that and I'm starting to think I'm not as smart as I thought I was. I've been programming for almost 10 years now, but I can already see my college friends getting practically on my level in 2-3 years. I can't let that happen and this thought is making me stressed and burning me out. Programming is literally the only thing I'm good at (or at least I think I am), if I don't have that I don't have anything, because I suck at everything else (I'm not exaggerating, I wish I was though).

I can't see friends because of the corona. I've met with friends about 7 times in a year and I havent been with a girl god knows since when. Meanwhile, practically everyone I know is partying, having fun, going to the beach and I'm here, at home, typing this fucking rant and feeling sorry for myself.

I also wanto to get fit but every time I try to do so something happens and I have to wait 2 months in order to start again.

There isn't anyone I can trust enough to share some feelings and thoughts I have and this is eating me up.

I am unhappy and have been like this for a while now. Every once in a while I smile, yes, but most of my day is endless boredom either because of work or the lack of it. I just want to go back to normal, I don't want to think about my future, I want someone to talk to, I want to be able to cry.

I hate this.

My Sunday Morning until afternoon. FML. So I was experiencing nightly reboots of my home server for three days now. Always at 3:12am strange thing. Sunday morning (10am ca) I thought I'd investigate because the reboots affected my backups as well. All the logs and the security mails said was that some processes received signal 11. Strange. Checked the periodics tasks and executed every task manually. Nothing special. Strange. Checked smart status for all disks. Two disks where having CRC errors. Not many but a couple. Oh well. Changing sata cables again 🙄. But those CRC errors cannot be the reason for the reboots at precisely the same time each night. I noticed that all my zpools got scrubbed except my root-pool which hasn't been scrubbed since the error first occured. Well, let's do it by hand: zpool scrub zroot....Freeze. dafuq. Walked over to the server and resetted. Waited 10 minutes. System not up yet. Fuuu...that was when I first guessed that Sunday won't be that sunny after all. Connected monitor. Reset. Black screen?!?! Disconnected all disks aso. Reset. Black screen. Oh c'moooon! CMOS reset. Black screen. Sigh. CMOS reset with a 5 minute battery removal. And new sata cable just in cable. Yes, boots again. Mood lightened... Now the system segfaults when importing zroot. Good damnit. Pulled out the FreeBSD bootstick. zpool import -R /tmp zroot...segfault. reboot. Read-only zroot import. Manually triggering checksum test with the zdb command. "Invalid blckptr type". Deep breath now. Destroyed pool, recreated it. Zfs send/recv from backup. Some more config. Reboot. Boots yeah ... Doesn't find files??? Reboot. Other error? Undefined symbols???? Now I need another coffee. Maybe I did something wrong during recovery? Not very likely but let's do it again...recover-recover. different but same horrible errors. What in the name...? Pulled out a really old disk. Put it in, boots fine. So it must be the disks. Walked around the house and searched for some new disks for a new 2 disk zfs root mirror to replace the obviously broken disks. Found some new ones even. Recovery boot, minimal FreeBSD Install for bootloader aso. Deleted and recreated zroot, zfs send/recv from backup. Set bootfs attribute, reboot........
It works again. Fuckit, now it is 6pm, I still haven't showered. Put both disks through extensive tests and checked every single block. These disks aren't faulty. But for some reason they froze my system in a way so that I had to reset my BIOS and they had really low level data errors....? I Wonder if those disks have a firmware problem? So that was most of my Sunday. Nice, isn't it? But hey: calm sea won't make a good sailor, right?

Voting feels like shit.

Seriously. Why? Because I have to vote for parties and representatives that might have one interest in common with me but go against my points of view almost all of the time. "We'll introduce a freedom of information act and legalize weed for better drug policy and youth protection!" -- WOW Great I'll vote for yo .. " ...and we'll also come to your home kill your dog, rape your family and shit in your back yard." -- oh f*** WHY? why do I have to live in a system were I am constantly forced to trade shit for even worse shit? Why can't I vote for policies or at least some kind of 'single' - issue representative?

I know that solving this problem is not easy and I do not claim to have the magical solution. "Not voting is even worse" sure but I am getting so fucking tired of it. It doesn't feel like progression and it sure as hell does not feel like it matters because in the end of the day you are just voting for the party that's at least going to use lube when raping you. I hate these ad hominem politics where we don't discuss the ideas but the people who represent them. I honestly don't give a fuck about who you are, if you're gay, married, or are left-wing, right-wing, conservative or liberal, in the end its about finding a good solution for everyone and not about the people implementing it. I don't care about politicians private lifes or worldviews (in terms of ideals, morals, religion etc.) , I care about finding the solutions to problems and having a wide array of opinions in order to discuss ideas and to find a valid and good way to go forward. "you can't agree with that person at all, because he's evil", yeah you know what? I don't care. It's about the ideas, arguments, discussions and solutions, not about the people who discuss them.

"I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I
screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me...
Or feels threatened by me...
Or thinks I'm a smart ass...
Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...
Damn kid. All he does is play games. They're all alike."

A recruiter asks: "Why are you looking to leave your company ?"
If you tell them you want to grow, they think you have a hidden political agenda.
If you tell them that your boss is unfair, they will think you have problems with authority.
If you tell them that you are not satisfied with the current salary, they will think you are greedy.
If you tell them that you do not get along with someone, they will think you are hard to work with.
If you say you want to be closer to home to spend time with your family, they will think you are lazy.
If you tell them that you are looking for bigger challenges, they will think you are not honest.
If you tell them that you want to acquire new skills, they will think you will quit them when you are done acquiring.
If you tell them they are the ones who initiated the contact with you, and got you interested, they will think you are a
smart-ass.
The truth is - all the reasons above are valid, and those are the real reasons why good people quit.
Which makes this question stupid - makes people uncomfortable..

"Smart" home gym equipment: expensive hardware for some grand, proprietary software, and ongoing subscription fees in the $50/mo ballpark.

The SW is usually designed so that even shit that could have been local is instead stored remote as to make the subscription look more worthwhile. The large front-up cost serves not only as revenue, but also to anchor the vendor lock-in.

Open source hackers could potentially unchain the HW so that users would actually own what they purchased, but there is a catch: the HW is sold at a loss, and the subscription is the business model.

Freeing up the HW would render the subscription rather useless, and ramping up the HW sales prices to profitability would destroy any demand.

Basically, it's products that are technically feasible, but not economically viable. Which is why they are not the future of home gyms.

While chatting with a colleague that just became a parent. He said he's uses Alexa for his smart home.

So I'm like hmm.. If you're always yelling Alexa... I wonder what the baby's first words will be...

And maybe that's the whole point... Conditioning the next generation to pick Amazon products as the default...

Before:

Home Sweet Home

Now:

Home Smart Home

I don't think I'm smart, but why most of the people are so retarded??
They want to just make the code work and skip home!
Not caring about how their code effects the whole system!

I've created a small smart home web app 2 or 3 years ago.
Features:
- Change DECT heating controller settings
- Philips Hue control
- Wunderlist integration
- Send a cooking recipe to the web app (from a large recipe site, with a greasymonkey script)

I've mounted an old Android tablet to a kitchen cupboard where the web app runs in kiosk mode in fullscreen (you can swipe between the different panels).

The web app is build with .NET Core Web-API, Vue.js and MariaDB. Everything runs on a Raspberry Pi.

Last year I've discovered openHAB with HABPanel...

It's my end of probation and I just got demoted, from originally "Senior dev" to "dev".

My manager found it a bit difficult to tell me but funny enough, I am completely fine with it apart from the little dent on my pay check. Let me talk about the bad first: money. I believe I have been on the lower end of the market pay range anyways so this step-back gives me about 5% cut, which is acceptable and fair enough.

And the good? Quite a bit. When I got this job offer 6 months ago, it was when everything literally went to shit. I was upset with a somehow not so smart but stubborn tech lead and I desperately wanted to quit. Then I got the offer, which even after 2 interviews I still didn't recall it was a job ads for "technical lead". The manager thought I was not there yet but wanted to keep me as a senior dev. Then, this pandemic almost took away this job. My manager brought my case to the CEO and convinced him to keep me, by saying a lot of good things about me (which I think might not be true for the tech side...)

Throughout the whole 6 months I have been working remotely from home. WFH is not new to me, just this time it's very challenging as I was starting a new job. I have been struggling to keep my pace. All people in the team are nice. However if I don't reach out, no one would notice I need help. And with zero knowledge for this job, I got stuck with "I don't know what I don't know". This ranges from company culture, practice, new tech.. everything. So, that's how this 6 months feels long, but also short.

In our review meeting I think my manager finally realise this. Otherwise he would have gone for the "terminate employment" option. Taking away the "senior" title also takes away the expectation of "I should know XYZ", which I don't. I told him I am kinda happy with it because this sets me up for a more comfortable position to catch my breathe. He told me he noticed my improvement along the way. I told him yes I have been putting in efforts but just given the situation it's not as quick as anyone would expect. We're on the same page now.

So compared to my previous job, I got paid less. But in return, I get many more opportunities to expose myself to new tech. I get a good team who are respectful and open-minded. This is exactly what I was looking for and the drive for me to quit my previous job.

Not to mention I got a reality check. This is also an indicator for me starting to become an imposter, which is the thing I despise most in the industry. I don't want people to value me for how many years I have got in my career. I want to prove myself by what I am capable of. If I'm not there, I should and will get there.

And the last thing which I'm not very keen but it's 100% worth mentioning, is that my manager said I should aim for taking the "senior" role back. He said the salary raise is waiting when I get there. But... Let me just take my time.

Hi devs, newbie here and i want to tell you my story for introduce myself.
I work for a company that develop web-app for managing taxes and sell it to locals cities.
We develop this web-app in Rails framewok and i litterally learned and work with this company from 2 years.
But i'm not happy at all. I was always hated and blamed for my work. My boss always take impossible deadlines and pretend ti finish the work in time, even if i had to overstay at work, even at home, even saturday. I'm not a really smart guy, so i often do dumb errors and I really suffer the nervous burnout and stress. Now i want to change work and i'm search far away from home but still in Italy, like Milan i.e. but i'm still confused. What i should do? I'm the problem?

PS. I want to thanks all of you that with your post get me laugh, inspired me and make me feel part or a great group.
Sorry for my base english

One job I picked up was for an IoT Start Up. It was quite interesting work, reporting to the technical director, who was an electronics engineer, who was designing the hardware himself, they had a couple of firmware guys already, and just needed someone to take care of the software.
So they said they needed something in Azure that they could stream their data to and provide analytics for their clients. It had to be Azure, and it had to be Azure Native, and was to be Multi-client, as they had a deal with Microsoft to showcase how well Azure works in the IoT space at an exhibition/conference in 3 months time.
So I worked flat out for 3 months, on a whole variety of technology, from C++ to get the radio packets from their IoT chip, Python to run on the hub to take the data from the C++ and stream it to the cloud, Azure IoT Hubs in every continent to receive the data and store it an a Cosmos DB, and then Power BI analytics wrapped up in an Angular front end that the clients could log into.
Got it finished 2 days before the show, and they were so pleased I got flown business class to Singapore to be on the stand and talk to customers.
The first sign of trouble was when we arrived at the show to find we just had one of those little circular tables with two stools in the middle of the floor, about two feet across and no power.
No problem, I was able to sort that, swapping laptops in and out.
Microsoft were really happy with what we had, and couldn't believe I had thrown it all together in 3 months.
We picked up a potential customer for the system, a major Asian Telecoms company.
Then when we got home, the CEO swooped in. I had never met this guy before. Imagine one of the VC guys from Silicon Valley, or the CEO from the IT Crowd. You get the picture. Could talk the hind leg of a donkey, and real street smart, but no brains. He insisted on "taking it from here" and flew alone to strike the deal with the customer. Came back with an MOU in his pocket and said to me, their guys will be in touch with you.
Then I got a call. Can you send us the source code and tell us how what servers we have to run this on?
Um, its cloud native.
No, we can't use a cloud it has to be on our servers - your CEO told us that was no problem..
He hadn't even taken the trouble to find out what it was we had built, and what he was selling.

Levels of tech awareness:

0: Doesnt use tech at all
1: Uses tech only for work
2: Uses it for films/gaming
3: Has alexa/google home
4: Uses smart home system
5: Has a loaded shotgun under the pillow, which is used to shoot the only piece of tech in the house (a printer from 2004) when it makes an unexpected noise!

Gotta admit. Amazon fire tablets are awesome for cheap tinkering and installing custom firmware in it. Using 7 of them to use at my super efficient smart home (😎) and they don't break at all...
I wish they allow direct international shipping tho...

I moved about a month ago, the new place has crap curtains (yay for renting 😔) so I was waking up at 5-6am as the sun comes up 😞.

I bought blinds a couple of weeks ago, they've just arrived and all screwed on. I was waking up and getting bored so I started going out running before work. My last job I was the absolute last one in the building every day, yet also the closest. Now, with the running I'm getting in at about the same time but one of the first in my new job.

My new blinds are remote controlled/programmable. It's a bit sad but totally worth it, I'll be able to sleep in, have sunlight waking me up and still get to work at a sensible time, kinda just gives me more time in the day! 😁

Seriously, why are so many companies caught up with if there developers working from home or not? Maybe it's where I'm at, but my last boss said ...

" I know you don't have any problem making deadlines and your a good worker, but you still need to come to the office in order to have face to face interaction."

Me: "This is the first face to face conversation I've had with someone in over a week."

Boss: (shrugs)"our goal is to build an office friendly environment where people will enjoy coming into the office"

Me: in my head "your an idiot"... Out loud "Ok"
...

In reality my custom built machine is better than yours, and I'm more productive in my Sealy Posturpedic chair and pajamas than your wack office chair with you popping your head out of your office every couple hours to "manage" me when you haven't written code in years and i have to teach you things that you bring to your boss to make yourself look smart.

Finally had a weekend to myself to work on some projects. I got my hands on a Sonoff switch. Did a manual flash of some new firmware and got it setup on my crappy old washer to do a little DIY smart home upgrade.

Always nice to get to do a personal project 😊 Just wish I had time to tinker more.

I think I'm having a "return to monkey" phase.
What the fuck are we doing?

Free VPN's, free cloud storage, smartphones and stupid telemetry/uSaGE aNaLYtiCs, password managers, social media, content farms, cheap wifi enabled smart home and 'intelligent' cars.

I'm starting to hate it all.

Look at how many people (including myself, sadly) is glued to their fucking datahoarding multimedia shitdevices (known as 'smartphones'). While sitting in a room filled with every fucking small appliance that needs an app, wifi and phones home to who the fuck knows.
Even my fucking dishwasher has an app and wifi enabled so I can start the dishwasher outside the wifi network.

How the fuck did we get here?

My current job at the release & deploy mgmt team:

Basically this is the "theoretically sound flow":

* devs shit code and build stuff => if all tests in pipeline are green, it's eligible for promotion
* devs fill in desired version number build inside an excel sheet, we take this version number and deploy said version into a higher environment
* we deploy all the thingies and we just do ONE spec run for the entire environment
* we validate, and then go home

In the real world however:

* devs build shit and the tests are failed/unstable ===> disable test in the pipeline
* devs write down a version umber but since they disabled the tests they realize it's not working because they forgot thing XYZ, and want us to deploy another version of said application after code-freeze deadline
* deployments fail because said developers don't know jack shit about flyway database migrations, they always fail, we have to point them out where they'd go wrong, we even gave them the tooling to use to check such schema's, but they never use it
* a deploy fails, we send feedback, they request a NEW version, with the same bug still in it, because working with git is waaaaay too progressive
* We enable all the tests again (we basically regenerate all the pipeline jobs) And it turns out some devs have manually modified the pipelines, causing the build/deploy process to fail. We urged Mgmt to seal off the jenkins for devs since we're dealing with this fucking nonsense the whole time, but noooooo , devs are "smart persons that are supposed to have sense of responsibility"...yeah FUCK THAT
* Even after new versions received after deadline, the application still ain't green... What happens is basically doing it all over again the next day...

This is basically what happens when you:=
* have nos tandards and rules inr egards to conventions
* have very poor solution-ed work flow processes that have "grown organically"
* have management that is way too permissive in allowing breaking stuff and pleasing other "team leader" asscracks...
* have a very bad user/rights mgmt on LDAP side (which unfortunately we cannot do anything about it, because that is in the ownership of some dinosaur fossil that strangely enough is alive and walks around in here... If you ask/propose solutions that person goes into sulking mode. He (correctly) fears his only reason for existence (LDAP) will be gone if someone dares to touch it...

This is a government agency mind you!

More and more thinking daily that i really don't want to go to office and make a ton of money.
So the only motivation right now is..the money, which i find abhorrent.

And also more stuff, but now that i am writing this down makes me really really sad. I don't want to feel sad, so i stop being sad and feel awesome instead.

I don't mind Apple marketing themselves as these revolutionary thinkers and innovators, because I figured most people see behind the marketing but appreciate Apple for what it is. It's a big company that makes well built products, that are efficient and give good support to those products.

But I'm sick to death of tech journalists talking about how every new feature is the death of Android. They have to be kidding themselves if they think what Apple's doing is innovating. Samsung's been designing screens for the bezelless market for a LONG time, and their technology in that is incredibly advanced (it's why if you use their iPhone x you'll be looking at a screen from Samsung!)

They finally adopted wireless charging and pretended it was brand new, but I remember when they came out with the Apple watch, marketing it like they'd broken ground when Android Wear watches had been out for a year!

I don't want people to think I hate Apple, I own a few of their products. I think they're remarkably invested in user privacy; homekit imo is one of the most forward thinking implementations of smart home technology that I've seen, and the new processor in the iPhone x is a Mammoth powerhouse. So, I'm not necessarily saying anything about that, but what I am saying is that they're iñcredible at marketing, but fanboys but are not self-aware can enough to recognize when the Designed-by-Apple hype over shadows the actual objectivity or the situation. There are articles already talking about Apple's wireless charging.

TL;DR I swear to god if an apple fanboy comes at me saying the bezelless design was Apple's innovation, I'm going to snap. I appreciate what Apple does well, but unfortunately people can't appreciate a product without needing to identify with it.

Next week I'm starting a new job and I kinda wanted to give you guys an insight into my dev career over the last four years. Hopefully it can give some people some insight into how a career can grow unexpectedly.

While I was finishing up my studies (AI) I decided to talk to one of these recruiters and see what kind of jobs I could get as soon as I would be done. The recruiter immediately found this job with a Java consultancy company that also had a training aspect on the side (four hours of training a week).

In this job I learned a lot about many things. I learned about Spring framework, clean code, cloud deployment, build pipelines, Microservices, message brokers and lots more.

As this was a consultancy company, I was placed at different companies. During my time here I worked on two different projects.
The first was a Microservices project about road traffic data. The company was a mess, and I learned a lot about company politics. I think I never saw anything I built really released in my 16 months there.

I also had to drive 200km every day for this job, which just killed me. And after far too long I was finally moved to the second company, which was much closer.

The second company was a fintech startup funded by a bank. Everything was so much better than the traffic company. There was a very structured release schedule, with a pretty okay scrum implementation. Every team had their own development environment on aws which worked amazingly. I had a lot of fun at this job, with many cool colleagues. And all the smart people around me taught me even more about everything related to working in software engineering.

I quit my job at the consultancy company, and with that at the fintech place, because I got an opportunity I couldn't refuse. My brother was working for Jordan Belfort, the Wolf of Wallstreet, and he said they needed a developer to build a learning platform. So I packed my bags and flew to LA.

The office was just a villa on the beach, next to Jordan's house. The company was quite small and there were actually no real developers. There was a guy who claimed to be the cto of the company, but he actually only knew how to do WordPress and no one had named him cto, which was very interesting.
So I sat down with Jordan and we talked about the platform he wanted to build. I explained how the things he wanted would eventually not be able with WordPress and we needed to really start building software and become a software development company. He agreed and I was set to designing a first iteration of the platform.
Before I knew it I was building the platform part by part, adding features everywhere, setting up analytics, setting up payment flows, monitoring, connecting to Salesforce, setting up build pipelines and setting up the whole aws environment. I had to do everything from frontend to the backest of backends. Luckily I could grow my team a tiny bit after a while, until we were with four. But the other three were still very junior, so I also got the task of training them next to developing.
Still I learned a lot and there's so much more to tell about my time at this company, but let's move forward a bit.

Eventually I had to go back to the Netherlands because of reasons. I still worked a bit for them from over here, but the fun of it was gone without my colleagues around me, so I quit last September.

I noticed I was all burned out, had worked far too much, so I decided to take a few months off and figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I even wondered whether I wanted to stay in programming.

Fast forward to last few weeks. I figured out I actually did want to work in software still, but now I would focus on getting the right working circumstances. No more driving 3 hours every day, no more working 12 hours every day. Just work close to home and find a company with the right values.
So I started sending out resumes and I gave one recruiter the chance to arrange some interviews too. I spoke to 7 companies in the span of one week. And they were all very interested. Eventually I narrowed it down to 2 companies and asked them for offers. And the company that actually had my preference offered me significantly more than I asked for, which settled the deal.

So tomorrow I'm officially signing with them, and starting next week I'll be developing in Kotlin, diving into functional programming and running our code in serverless environments. I'm very excited!

Is it just me or has german tv become more and more ad-ridden? A few years ago it was considered a dick move to play a single ad during an episode.
Now some channels continue the tv program but make it smaller so they can show an ad on the sides. And whenever i switch to the most popular channels i get an overlay that is basically an ad too.

I switched to livestreams and web-based tv for a reason, and that's because tv ads get more intrusive with every year. And don't get me started on the bullshit that smart tv's do nowadays, by that i mean sending data home.
I can't wait for tv to die out or to be replaced by an ip-based protocol just like telephones did.

Common misconception is that low efficiency technologies (react native, in this case) are completely useless. That is not true at all. Im building a smart home, and yes i want a mobile app, but 90% is just requests to endpoints, so its way simpler to just copy paste some buttons inside a js file than do it properly with native. Would i use it in prod? Fuck no. Would i hack together a bunch of buttons? Fuck yes.

Samsung Smart TV becomes Samsung Dumb TV.

Welcome back dear readers, to the next installment of my Raspberry Pi / Pi Hole / MitM box adventure!

For those of you who are new to this story, I'm a long experience programmer who knows very little about his home network or networking in general and has constantly been going over his 250GB data plan because 'rona, and thus, wants answers to "where is the data going".

So, I got the Pi, codenamed Mini-Beowolf, positioned between the modem and router... worked some fuckin systemd.networkd magic (which was sort of easy... but was hard cause I'm new to it) and viola, this son of a bitch passes through the ethernet and doesn't even show up on the router. Fu-King Beastly, I love it.

Now to static IP all my devices so I fire up my trusty TP-Link admin portal. I should add here... I've visited this admin about a total of 10 minutes prior to this when I set this wifi router up and just let it do DHCP.

So I'm getting to know my admin portal... I've got most of my devices connected to reserved IPs... and I find this one fuckin device reporting as "localhost".

Now, I've got a MAMP install... but it hasn't been running. But still I thought for sure it was just MAMP run a bit amok.

But no... it was my fucking Samsung "Smart" TV. That piece of shit is, and apparently has been reporting its device name as, sure as shit, fucking "localhost"... PROBABLY FOR YEARS.

Now, IDK how that didn't cause me any major problems over the years, and I read quite a few forums about people who it did mess up their network. So I resolved to rename the Samsung TV device.

I found the spot in the network settings of the TV... I changed the name from the pick list of rooms in a house like "Living Room" and "Bed Room", then I tried entering my own device name. But no matter what I picked, or no matter how many times I restarted/reset that TV the network name is ALWAYS "localhost".

Even though somehow my network survived this long... I'm not standing for that shit.

My Samsung TV is now blocked COMPLETELY at the router level. (After I ran one last factory reset and update)

The kicker? That Pi I built has a Samsung SSD... so I'm blocking Samsung WITH FUCKING SAMSUNG.

Needless to say, these are likely among my last Samsung purchases.

Join me next time when I FINALLY try to turn Pi Hole on and then get a tcpdump (or some other lesser output from the tcp stream) going.

Our school had for an open source way of dealing with home schooling and managing the school network and so on.

Now the government forced a "proprietary" system on our school and everyone hates it. The teachers didn't want it the pupils didn't want it but who cares "what we do is the best".

Btw the proprietary system costs a fuck load of money even though they just mixed many open source projects and made it their own proprietary thing.
And this company now get's loads of money for their shitty system that never really worked once since we got it.

They blocked so many ip's that we can't even access google and it's services on the school wifi and the bandwith dropped severely with the new system.

Oh and many random ip's e.g. one of my vps is accessible but the other one not.
Discord is blocked.
Web whatsapp.
And so on...

Now....

I need to learn for tests next week and need to access that stuff on the portal but...

Now they decided to switch the LDAP server to the new system and since a few hours i can't access this fucking thing.

It seems like the platform now contacts the new server which isn't even up and running....

Never change a fucking running system....

Oh and we got smart boards and it runs on android and they didn't block adb. Now i installed clash of clans on one of those things. Haha whoops.
These boards cost 7000€ and have security patches from 2 years ago....and Android 8

Check in, check out, punch in punch, out, wax on (my balls), wax off. Do your duty. Be a good citizen. Work overtime. Conserve the environment: buy a tesla that runs on afghan lithium conflict minerals. Post your life to facebook. Get married. Have exactly 2.5 kids.
Use jquery. Use knockout. Use react. Use vue. Use svlete. Use heroin. Used needles. Used people. Used toilet paper. Toilet paper apocalypse. Social trends. Be a good citizen.

Watch tv. Watch nightly news. CNN says. Fox news says. Hey, did you read this article by important funny guy on tv? American taliban. Scary. Be afraid. Hey did you read this article on cute puppies? Funny! Did you see this meme? What a funny meme! HAHAHA. Do we need prisons for dissidents? Do we need to release all the prisoners in federal prison? Should we round up people who dont follow health authorities? Science says. Science is wrong. Science is right. Man in robe agrees with me. Man in robe disagrees with me. You're evil. These people are bad. Is doing bad always wrong? Should we tolerate intolerance? Its time to stop tolerating intolerance. Be an individual, like everyone else. Be you. Be the best you that you can be. Individualism. But we're all in this together. We're all different and unique. But we're all the same. Love each other. Love humanity. But not these guys over here. Punch a nazi. Punch a commie. Isn't it time we punched a nazi? Isn't it time we had socialism? Isn't it time the old get out of the way for the young? Why are the old hateful? Why do they horde all the money? Do we need rent controls? We need rent controls. Its time for rent controls. I think I believe what others believe. Believe different. Think different. Apple. An apple a day keeps the windows away. Open windows, a breathe of fresh air. Is climate change real? We need to have a national conversation about climate change! The world is freezing. The world is flooding. We're all gonna drown. The world is overpopulated. We need to talk about overpopulation. People who have too many kids are polluting the world. America doesnt have enough kids! Is it time to bring in more immigrants to have more kids? Who will work the fields? Thats racist. Is racism an epidemic? Is white flight an epidemic? Lets talk about epidemics. Lets have a conversation about mandatory vaccination. Lets have a national conversation about mandatory pandemics. I mean, vaccinations. Lets change the world. Trust the science. Don't trust the science. Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu I'm loving it. Love who you are. Live love laugh. If you don't love me at my best, then you can't handle me at my worst. People who disagree with [current year] are the worst. Is it time to regulate speech? Its time to regulate speech. Should there be laws against hatespeech. I think there should be laws against hatespeech. People who upset me should go to jail. Its current year. Think big. Think outside the bun. Have it your way. All the time, always. All for freedom, freedom for all. Because this is america, and current year. I like to work hard. But you have to remember to play hard too. Work hard. Play hard. With a childlike sense of wonder. Be you. Belong anywhere. Just do it. Challenge Everything. Because you're worth it. Save money...live better...have an abortion. You're in good hands. Democracy dies in darkness. Is it time to regulate hatespeech. Politician in current year is hurting our democracy. War is a racket. We need to liberate afghanistan. Why are we bombing afghanistan? Its there culture. They're oppressing people! Don't criticize anyones culture. Be kind. Rewind. Go further. Lets go places. Because Impossible is Nothing.
Lets change the world. I'm a smart passionate funny guy with a childlike sense of wonder and play. You ever want to travel? I want to travel. See the world. Eat new food. Eat. Love. Pray. Eat love. kill. Is meat murder? I think meat is murder. Go vegan. Go home. Order out. Support your local economy. Think global, act local. I'm a good corporate citizen. Be the change you want to see. Did you hear about this local brewery? Do you like craft beer? Hey try this new IPA. I shared it on twitter. Twitter is a very important part of my life. I think what other people say matters, and them reading what I think matters. What I ate for lunch matters. Hey what did you eat for lunch? I LOVE FOOD. You want to order door dash. There new commercial is amazing. Commercials are SO FUNNY. Hey did you see this meme of this commercial? I shared it on tiktok. Heres a funny dance. Watch these nurses dance. I wish I could dance like that. They're so overworked. So brave. Our hospitals are overflowing. People are dying. Hey did you see this new dance trend on tiktok? I like tiktok. I think its a very important part of life to share your life with others. Nurses are dying. Look at this image of hospitals. Scared. Very scary. Very bad. Bad and scary. Big thoughts! Thoughts and prayers!

Because Yes we can!

Beep boop.

Jeez maybe it's just me, not a very smart user, but after at least 6 years with iPhone5, just before changing it, I discovered how to raise the volume without logging in the phone first:

I press the home button, Siri show up, and THEN the fucking raise/lower audio buttons are working.

6 years typing the fucking pin just to raise the volume.
6 fucking years missing notifications and calls just because I forgot the fucking volume on the lower tone. Almost lost a girlfriend for that.

So when someone rings at my door the music volume is set to zero and the previous volume is cached to restore it ten seconds later. When then this person rings another time within this 10 seconds, the zero volume is cached an the fun begins.

Best: learned to code, started writing smart-home scripts for home automation and developed biologic and quantitative data analysis scripts in Python and R.
Worst: didn't get paid to develop them and haven't got enough experience for it to be more than a hobby.

I wanted to build a smart home system with arduino or pi when I'd have my own place. But since that is a ways off, let's park that.

Just learn me some linux, python, node, typescript and some js frameworks, maybe handlebars, knockout and angular?

An incomplete list of 2018 personal dev goals:

* do more web development (It's fun. In a crude way.)
* finish the smart lamp I started building in 2016 ...
* fix up more electronic devices while learning their inner workings
* learn Python and some other language
* get myself a blog again
* get that testautomation thing which is haunting me in my dreams already to production
* be more relaxed
* do some home automation while not cursing all that much

Some <super smart> person ran DHCP in production lab (without disconnecting from main network and/or using firewall)
, now the admin turned all the ports off and went home.
Traffic gens are also unavailable now so are upgrade servers.
Result: I can't run my work over the weekend and the reports are expected on Monday.

Not so bad : I'll run on Monday.
Bad part : This fucking shit takes 2 days to do everything on the rack.

My soul cringes a bit every time some smart ass decides to put "Smart" before the product name.
As though nothing means smart as much as digging your own hole.

More broadly, the whole whole world is buying into this "smart" mantra. As if anything and everything that existed before was not smart. Basically "I'm the best" attitude. Don't forget that you can see far only because you're standing on the shoulders of giants.

Case in point:
1. Smart phone which is smart enough to start causing trouble after a couple of years.
2. Smart watch
3. Smart car
4. Smart planes
5. Smart home
.
.
Fucking non sense

So.... My mom became a victim of cyber bullying. And i just feel sad for her. She is an old but smart lady in her 50s and not very used to modern tech and cyber crime.

We follow a (now dead) philosopher (say 'X') as religion, some random stranger came in their local fb group and started shit posting about X like " he is not a god , he is a thief, follow me , bla bla bla" stuff like that..

I don't give 1 qbit to that shitposter or that fight. I am just concerned that my mom (and many others) got so disturbed that she left the work and came home.

Internet is great , free and all, but as long as everyone is allowed to speak everything without caring for a consequence, simpleminded people will keep on getting hurt, evil shitposters will keep on getting fame and people with an unsure mind will keep on making wrong decisions

I can give you numerous examples where a person got the power and fame just because he keep on getting famous for his negetive posts, religious or otherwise. This has to stop, but am not sure how.

I've implemented my own version of IoT all over my room and home.

Hope the protocol I've designed has proper security...

I'm shitting there hammering out some code butchering some real problems when I suddenly realise I'm surrounded. I look around and yes it's the bloody committee.

The committee is what I call the rest of the department and it is dominated by the old guard which comprises of the programmers that have been around for longer.

None of the old guard can program particularly well but because they had been around the longest they'd all grown senior. The committee had free reign but anyone else doing anything differently has to get approval from the committee.

The only way to code otherwise was to copy and paste existing code then to primarily rename things. If anyone did anything that hadn't been seen before then it would have to be approved by the committee. Individual action was not permitted unless you were old guard.

I swept my headphones away expecting it to be something unimportant. It was.

First things first they announce. We're going to add extraneous commas to the last element of all possible lists separated by comma including parameters or so they say. Ask but why so I do.

Because the language now supports it. They added support for it so it must be the right way someone proclaimed. Does it? I didn't realise we were waiting for it. Why do we want it though?

Didn't you hear? It's all over the blogosphere. It massively improves merge requests. But how I ask?

Five minutes later I grow tired of the chin stroking, elbow harnessing, slanted gazes into the yonder and occasionally hearing maybe its because and ask if they mean when you for example add an element the last element registers as changed from adding a comma. Turns out that's all it is.

How often do we see that tiny distraction and isn't it pointless to make the code ugly just for a tiny transient reduction in diff noise I ask. Everyone's stumped. This went on and on and got worse and worse. But it makes moving things around easy half of them say in unison like the bunch of slobs that they are. I mean really. It doesn't make expanding and contracting statements from multiline to single line easy and it's such a stupid thing. Is that all they do all day? Move multi-line method parameters up and down all day? If their coding conventions weren't totally whack they wouldn't have so many multiline method prototypes with stupid amounts of parameters with stupidly long types and names. They all use the same smart IDE which can also surely handle fixing the last comma and why is that even a concern given all the other outrageously verbose and excessive conventions for readability?

But you know what, who cares, fine, whatever. Lets put commas all over the shop and then we can all go to the pub and woo the ladies with how cool and trendy we are up to date with all the latest trends and fashions then we go home with ten babes hanging off each arm and get so laid we have to take a sick day the following to go to the STD clinic. Make way for we are conformists.

But then someone had to do it. They had to bring up PSR. Yes, another braindead committee that produces stupid decisions. Should brackets be same line or next line, I know, lets do both they decided. Now we have to do PSR and aren't allowed to use sensible conventions.

But why, I ask after explaining it's actually quite useful as a set of documents we can plagiarise as a starting point but then modify but no, we have to do exactly what PSR says. We're all too stupid apparently you see. Apparently we're not on their level. We're mere mortals. The reason or so I'm told, is so that anyone can come in and is they know PSR coding styles be able to read and write the code. That's not how it works. If you can't adjust to a different style, a more consistent style, that's not massively bizarre or atypical but rather with only minor differences from standard styles, you're useless. That's not even an argument, it's a confession that you've got a lump of coal where your brain's supposed to be.

Through all of this I don't really care because I long ago just made my own code generators or transpilers that work two ways and switch things between my shit and their shit but share my wisdom anyway because I'm a greedy scumbag like that.

Where the shit really hit the fan is that I pointed out that PSR style guide doesn't answer all questions nor covers all cases so what do we do then. If it's not in PSR? Then we're fucked.

Early on in my freelancing career I learned something important. Even with seemingly tame nerdy stuff, sh*t can get real, real quick. This story describes the very start of my career in web development and hopefully will serve as a warning to newbies out there.

A young teen, I had just learned some basics of wordpress, I was confident I could hack together something that worked and looked okay with minimal effort and knowledge. One day I was approached by a guy who wanted a job board board site. Knowing there were already clones out there I figured this would be an easy gig, man was I wrong.

In addition to the fact I didn't know about contracts or the scope creep from hell, I had somehow gotten myself involved with a criminal business front.

These guys operated a scam business to rip off investors. Me and my designer buddy were used to make the business look legit. What they would do is hold job fairs where people are supposed to pay to rent a booth, but instead they would give everyone a booth for free and then lie about what all businesses were coming. They would then show this info, along with the website and marketing materials to investors. They would take the money from the investors and launder it for drugs.

The real story starts the day of one of the worst hangovers I had ever had. I was at a random friends house sleeping for most of the day.

Apparently one of the guys who was operating the scam business was about to strike a deal with one of the investors when something on the website didn't work (it was working as designed). This guy, Manny we'll call him, had been blowing up my phone all morning. I check my voicemails and there are threats on my life; saying I will be sleeping with the fishes, or if they ever find me, they'll fuck me up. Needless to say this really freaked me out, either way I decided to head back to my dorm.

When I come back home, my designer buddy tells me that some guys were in the house looking for stuff. Apparently this guy hired two nerds to "break into my computer and steal the website", fortunately they didn't know what they were doing.

After a while I got another call, Manny wanted to sit down and "talk things out". Being naive I accepted and we met up. The two nerds were there with one of his body guards. He said he wanted to have those two nerds take over the project. While this was going on, his bodyguard flashed his gun at me several times making eye contact. I agreed to, but I still wanted to get paid. I asked about getting paid and he said we never signed a contract and that he owned the host and domain. I was pretty much screwed.

This is where the story should end, but I wasn't a very smart guy back then. I gave up the site but I created a back door into it. Every week or so, they would get "hacked". Because the two nerds didn't know what to do, they ended up coming back to me for help. This is when I finally got paid. Totally not worth it.

What you sexy bright smart mastermind memelords do day to day in your job? What projects you working on and what is you part in it? I am really curious what your typing looks like after you go home.

Yesterday a met a self learned dev. He started electronics at 11 years old. He was homeschooled with no obligations at home. So he ended up doing about 10 hours of electronics a day. Until he got bored of it and realized he could integrate his own programes.

So he started coding 10 hours a day. He is really smart. I figured someone like that surely plays video games. So i mentionned path of exile. I love rpgs the new league is starting on friday， im trying to make exiled friends you know...

The guy tellls me he has no clue about the game so i ask him what games he play and thats when i heard: “factorysialimsntnaio” something. I was like “whaaat?”.

Its the type of game where you create your factory. You smelt， combine， make parts like screws and so on and build your factory.

Thats when i realized how some people will always be smarter than me ;)

I want to build a home automation bot but I don't know what kind of features to give it. I have hue lights and I want a smart speaker/google home mini. Do you guys have ideas? I'm open for everything.

rant && !rant

I started my Internship a couple of months ago, but it didn't live up to my expectations.

> The good things:

- I have a structured internship programme, where we are given a independent project to complete during the internship, so all the work is slow and nice, so no unreasonable deadlines.

- Cool-ass supervisors (and smart too). They let us leave if the we don't have any more work planned, no sitting until the end of office hours, so go home early and SLEEP.

> The bad things:

- Shitty-ass people. But I've to deal with them once in a few weeks, so not that bad.

- Restricted wifi, but some websites can be accessed for memes. So, knd of fine.

- NO BRAIN-FUCKING EXPERIENCES FOR RANTING. I thought I would start my internship and meet retarded people and post some rants but NOOOO, someone had different plans for me (that 'someone' is LIFE, just in case if you are wondering)

> Summary

- Kind of disappointed about material for rants, but 10/10 it's been a good internship.

i am seeing this weird pattern of people getting too much close to their work colleagues and i am unable to understand the why behind it .

so one of my homies is a kind of introvert but a smart genius IT guy who ended up with a rich paying job.

now, his job is mostly wfh and 1 day wfo, but he has engrossed himself in his company so much that i fail to understand why. like,
- he would go to his office for 3-5 days instead of 1
- he would plan trips/vacations with his colleagues and bosses
- he would go to different cities/countries to attend the meetings that are happening virtually too( basically a zoom call where some people are joining from office and some from home)
and so on. basically instead of spending time with his homies/family, he prefer spending time with work people.

another guy is doing somewhat similar . basically he runs a legal firm, and instead of having a strict boss employee relation with his interns, he would bring them to his home, celebrate birthdays/parties with them in clubs, and even bring them to our homie gang trips.
as of late ,those trips now don't even include us :'(

-----

i fail to understand why. my work culture is so shit, i just wanna complete a fucking year here and grab my bonus and leave. most of the team that i work with is in a different city, we are asked to work from office that is 40 km away from my home, other colleagues are practical snakes and i am not even interested to see their double-faced faces even during work hours, leave alone after-hours.

another guy among us is a tution teacher and this fella is taking coaching classes even on weekends. i don't know whats wtong with people of my age. we haven't crossed even 26 and we are all running some rat races.

i need some people in my life with whom i can spend some hours relaxing without worrying about my job or backstabbing

Interesting project lined up for today!

I'll be installing a security system, one camera connected to a DVR pointing at a front door triggering a buzzer and sending a video feed to a monitor in a ground floor room at the other side of the house.

But it's my dads house so I'm going to have fun with it and install a wired Cat5 network an Isolated offline router and build in some "smart home" features from scratch, all running on a Local Area Network.

I've built a private home server package for media and storage using Apache and I want to add as many features to the house as I can, maybe even install an extra camera pointing towards the sky (every home should have a sky cam lol).

I can take my time with this project over the next several weeks and I was wondering what would you add to this project?

FML..

I worked directly in my Github repo folder while working on a project (don't ask me why). I did my initial commit with all my code from the start until 5 hours ago. I never pushed.. A minute ago, I checked my commit and noticed that there were DB credentials in one of the files. So.. Smart me.. "revert commit"..

Result. Everything got deleted except my node_modules folder and the readme file.. I lost everything.. Fuck me, I'm going home..

Please, someone.. Can I get these files back via git or something? Can't find anything in in the history..

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

!rant
I'll move in with my girlfriend in August. So it's time to get a cleaning robot!
To either iRobot Roomba or Neato Botvac.

Which would you suggest and why? From the readings I've done so far, when it's about performance it's Roomba 980 >= Botvac Connected > Roomba 880, but then again the Roomba 980 is a lot more expensive.

Is there a dev, as lazy as I am with hands on expirience?

Note: there will be only a small carpet below the table in the living room and the appartment will have 4 rooms: living, sleeping, kitchen and bath. As the house is a little older, there's a "obstacle" the doors between the rooms to climb of about 1cm.

Thanks for suggestions in advance. On another note: I'm planing to get connected lightbulps and speakers, so we'll be able to control most of the stuf from our smartphones. So far I don't see any advantages, incorporating a vacuum bot in there, as long as you can set a scedule, any thoughts on that?

I am slowly turning my home into an automated smart home, however. I have found a lot of responding devices (media players, sockets, etc..) but no trigger devices (buttons, sensors) I can work with.

Am I looking in the wrong place or do I really have to build something myself using arduino?

My setup is the following: I have a central server in my home that hosts a bunch of docker services that all server a certain purpose. All smart devices have static ips so that server can address them quickly. So it is capable of controlling many things. However, now I want to trigger certain actions through a hardware button. It seems I cannot find such a device....

Any other hads on here?

!long rant
Trying to work from home is always a pain, since we need to use company laptops (no ifs, ands or buts about it).
Yesterday I took the laptop in to check for updates that just wouldn't run while at home (my first mistake), and I couldn't get past the "Press Ctrl+Alt+Delete to login" screen, laptop keyboard didn't seem to be registering clicks, and an external keyboard wasn't either (and I forgot about the on-screen keyboard). A couple of restarts later with no further changes to the situation, the laptop then didn't get past the BIOS screen.
So I called support (my second mistake) and logged an incident.
Couple of hours later someone comes to my desk and asks about the issue, so I describe it, show them (by now the laptop was once again getting past BIOS screen), and leave them to it. Since these laptops are just used as preconfigured VPN and RDP gateways, I said it would be okay if he just wanted to reinstall the OS (my third mistake).
Several hours later, after staying late last night waiting for it to finish, I loaded my profile, installed updates, shut down, grabbed my stuff and left, without checking VPN or RDP over WiFi (my fourth mistake).
Turns out that some of the buttons on the keyboard just no longer work, but now USB keyboards do work, and I can just use OSK to login while out. I figured this would be my only issue with things, and that it was acceptable.
This morning I attempt to use the laptop, and forgot about OSK and the faulty delete button, so spent a few minutes on that. Try to connect to WiFi and find it can't connect, because of course, it doesn't remember the WiFi password, so I root around for the code in some drawer, enter it, and it works. VPN tries to connect and... get told to insert my smart card, which is already inserted, because the driver is wrong!
So I'm sitting here writing a post, not quite believing that I'm considering cancelling my plans for the day to go into the office because of a bloody driver issue now...

So I'm interested in building a Raspberry Pi stack at home to continue securing and adding my smart home capabilities, 👍

Have ideas for 2/3 but what else could I look to add?

1. Pi. Hole with cloudflared argo proxy for all DNS
2. Home Automation server
3. IPS / IDS like Bro or snort? Or firewall like pfsense?
4. Log server with Splunk agent from other pi's and router....
5. What else?

Ideas in the comments

TL;DR : How would you 'smart home' with privacy?

How would you go about a privacy focused home automation/smart home setup?

What I feel is not necessarily important

> some assistant that you can have conversations with.
> Not being in home network to automate.

What I feel is essential. (in decreasing order of importance)

> Being a able to control appliances/electronics with voice/app (optional gesture)
> Have features to automate stuff, like turn on something if something happens (IFTTTish)
> Easily play music from Spotify or something similar, e.g. " * Play some Tchaikovsky."
> Simple alarm and reminder features.

So far I have seen relays and other devices that you add in the wiring and they connect to wifi. They work surprisingly well, but whatever I came across also collects personal user data.

Also not aware of any google home and alexa alternative that can so seamlessly pick up commands through ambient noise.

What are your thoughts and views?

P. S. I would have picked up something like this as my side project, but I don't see my self having that much free time atleast for the next 4-5 months.

I‘ve now my first smart home device. It is only a power outlet, but the story behind it is a bit special.
Because Apple trapped me in there ecosystem I wanted to have a HomeKit compatible outlet. The problem with that: Either to expensive or to big. So my ne mission: Connect a non HomeKit device to HomeKit, but without a too expensive proprietary gateway/bridge.
After a bit of googling I found a software called "Homebridge", build to run on a Raspberry Pi. Fortunately I had one old RasbPi 1 B. So I installed a new Raspbian and installed Homebridge. I forgot how slow it was.
Then I bought a cheap (but good) ZigBee outlet and a ZigBee USB Dongle. With a plugin for Homebridge it was very easy to connect the ZigBee Dongle.
Then I tried to connect the outlet, but the log said "Unrecognized device". After a bit of research I found out that the outlet is not supported by the homebridge-zigbee plugin. As a software engineer I tried to find a solution for it, so I reverse engineered the device recognition (very easy because Homebridge is a node application). After a while I managed to add the configuration for the outlet to the plugin.
And see, it became light.

So today was going to be the Sunday when I finally connected my smart TV though my raspberry pi to access my network and have it connect to the internet.
My TV is 6 years old, so it doesn't have built in wireless, it does not recognize normal Wifi dongles so you have to buy a LG special one for ~120$ to get hat to work, so my previos solution: screw that, one chromecast + 1 osmc raspberry pi3 and I can do more than what the software build in the TV could do.

But my wife really wanted to be able to play netflix directly on the TV without using her phone so I thought:
If I connect my TV via LAN cable to my raspberry pi it should be able to forward traffic via the built in wireless on the raspberry and be able to have internet connection.
OK, its Sunday, my wife it out, I haven't done anything with iptables in the last 5+ years but I have google and should be able to figure it out eventually:) time to start this home improvement project!!!
OK, lets just check online if there is someone else who had similar idea as a place to start.
... quick google search:

Hmm, in your OSMC, go to teathering, "wifi to ethernet" and enable.
I try it and it works!
5 min and one short ethernet cable was all that were required.

It feels like I cheated and won the game without any effort, and what should I now do with the rest of the day?

So last year we started off with an IOT smart home project combined with SAP HANA, everything went well with the hardware side of it. Wired up everything and functioning smooth as butter. When we try to connect to the HANA cloud db to store sensor data... we find out that Arduino isn't supported. A big FML!!

Another Mojave Post...

Apple added 4 new apps, all of which cannot be removed (oh boy am I off to a great start). I saw the new home app and thought "if your stuck here I might as well attempt to put you to some use" so I opened it to try and maybe add my smart plug or something, but it told me I need an iOS device to add accessories...

Why the fuck is there any functionality that is locked behind iOS especially something as integral to the core functionality of the app like adding a fucking device to an app that manages them.

On a side note apparently news is bugged for me and I cannot find it it the launchpad so that's slightly less bloat.

Today I got my login credentials for our Task Delivery Tool (called WMS TI)...

It is by far the most ugliest and user unfriendly program on the planet!! It looks like you made an macro for Excel 2000. It's bloated with features only 0.1% of the company needs them! (Biggest telecommunication provider Germany's) and it's lame! Even worse: we still use Windows 7 32bit.... Why the fuck is a company which develops smart home, self driving cars and cyber defense systems such an oldie!

Alright, I'm gonna need some help from more experienced devs.

tldr: how does my sister test my website if she can't run it?

I'm making a site (for myself, I've talked about this in other rants, most likely won't go online so I don't want to spend money on this), and my sister is helping me with the sales part of the project. It's basicaly a web store.

In a couple of months, she is going to have a baby, and will stay at home for 5 months. Since she helped me with it, and I don't really know all of the steps that go into online purchasing (she kind of works with this, and makes a lot of online purchases, from everyone I know she was the best person to go to), we want her to test it while she's at home with the baby, just in case I missed or didn't understand something.

The problem is: she doesn't understant anything about programing and probably never seen a command line, and since this is laravel, I will need to install a lot of things in her computer, which will be useless for her after she is done, and teach her some commands to run the site.
Also, like I said, i don't want to spend money on this, since she will only make a few tests and that's it, it would go offline after.

She is smart, she could probably do this, so if there is no way of doing this is ok, but if there is it would save her a lot of time while testing and with the baby, and save me my time at work.

I would want something like git, but where I could run the site without a lot of steps.

Does anyone know how she can test it? Is there even a way?
Thank you in advance 😁