It saved me from suicide.

You have to understand first that things in India work differently. Academics are not personal, but a social business. Academic competition in India is very high and not in a good way, or for the good reasons.

As a teenager was sent off from my home to the other side of the country. I didn't like it. My studies suffered, and I failed my exams. Came back home and faced months of emotional abuse (guilt trips, scornful comments, plain insults) from my parents, neighbours and relatives. Indian society is just built that way. They didn't know they were damaging my psyche, or they were too angry to care. Lots of other shit (lost friends, lost love) happened at roughly the same time period and everything started to fall like dominos.

I fell into severe depression. Lost appetite, lost sleep. Nothing mattered anymore. There were mornings when I would wake up and not get up from my bed for hours, and not even move a finger. Self-hate became the motto of the day. I became violent and anti-social. I would either be angry or trying not to break down and give up all the time. Many a night, I considered suicide. I would end up googling for easy ways out to take.

But what gave me a way out of the pains of my reality was programming. It helped my keep my head, figuratively and literally. It kept my mind distracted and gave me a sense of purpose. I would shut myself in, plug in my headphones, shut the world out and just experiment.

I am not saying that I am the best at what I do, but those sleepless and troubled nights, and many other similar nights over the years have given me a definite edge over my colleagues.

Even today, when everything is falling to pieces, I know I have something to fall back on. I still get episodes of depression every now and then, but I know I can always pick up a new project and distract myself. It probably isn't healthy, but eh...

I am alive. I code. I kick ass. My colleagues respect and value my opinion. I love my job.

Computer does what I tell it to do (mostly :p) and I feel good. Because for that small moment, I am in control of everything. For that infinitesimally small moment of my average, boring, and somewhat painful life, I am God.

Client: Where are we with the project, it's been a week and I see nothing.

Me: You asked me to do something that was not in the agreed scope of work, which has kept me from starting on the project.

Client: Do I need to plan out everything in advance on paper for you to get it done in a timely manner?

Me: Is that a serious question? Yes, you should. That's the whole point of creating a scope of work. It's to allow me to schedule out the time necessary to build out a product in a "timely manner".

Client: I don't appreciate your attitude. This is not how you should be doing business if you like making money.

Me: I don't appreciate your condescending, unreasonable, dickhead mentality that makes you think it's remotely okay to act like you're better than me. Money doesn't grant you the right to be a dickwad, and just because I'm being paid doesn't mean I have to put up with any level of arrogance or disrespect.

I am in this business to make money, but not at the cost of my dignity and self-respect. You will be receiving a full refund later today, not because I have to provide a refund, but because I never want to communicate with you ever again moving forward. Take your unacceptable bullshit somewhere else.

My previous job I got by winning an Xbox Kinect hackathon. Not because the game I made was really good or anything. But because I was the only one who actually built something. (Apart from a guy who’s application would cheer louder as you raised your arms.) So that evening I left the hackathon with an Xbox one and a job.

My job was to build advert games, games whose primary goal is to advertise a company or event. This is the job where I learned I DO NOT like game development. So after about half a year I quit.

Because I still needed money I did some freelance work as a game developer (I developed 3 advert games for 3 startups).

I was still looking around for dev jobs but because I was a student I had no luck, they were all looking for full timers.

At some point I called this one (Dutch) company and spoke to a very odd French person on the phone. He invited me to come over for an interview. I had very little information about the job so I started researching the company. They are a small company specialized in complex content migrations. I wasn’t that into migrations but hell, I’m always up for something new.

Upon arrival I was greeted by the familiar French voice and saw a collection 6 diverse developers sharing a space. We did the usual interview dance and practices and that’s where I figured out this is a java job. They developed tools for the professional services team to perform these complex migrations I mentioned earlier. With me never having touched java before I was quite sure I wouldn’t get the job. But I took the test anyway.

About halfway through the test I was stopped and they started to ask me some conceptual questions, I did okay there but nothing special. That same day the architect took me to their CEO and told him I had:

- very little experience
- no migration experience
- was still a student so could only work 20 hours a week
- he saw some potential they could work with

Quite unexpectedly, they still hired my 20 year old ass.

Now the company has grown to a good 20+ developers with a nicely sized professional services team and we are launching our first out-of-the-box product in a couple of weeks.

So that’s how I got my job. If you read to this very end, my hat is off to you!

A "support" guy my boss got in. I had told my boss numerous times, "Get rid of this guy, he's only wasting our time and money. And he's going to end up doing something where we will end up having to put out the fires."

Sure as a pair of nuts on a squirrel, this crazy bastard goes and DELETES a client's database. Yes folks, in fucking production. A live database. The heart of the business' transactions are... *poof*... GONE!!!

No backups for the day! No synchronisation beforehand! No nothing... just GONE!!! Fucking flat-lining!

Well, when I realised what he has done, I had to remove myself from the room before shit got outta hand!

I told the boss man that is the last straw and he needs to go...

The long and short of it...
- The client had luckily only lost about half a days data.
- I'm no longer at the company.
- This dumb fuck still is.

Big client, sells products in 30+ countries.

Tries to generate newsletter subscribers, so asks for a system to send a coupon upon subscription.

2 days later, client calls in panic. “We have too many subscribers, our marketeers say it’s a bot issue, can you do something?”.

Checked the data, checked analytics, turns out there’s a lot of referral traffic from freebie-sites, no sign from a bot issue.

Called the client back, “sorry, but there’s nothing you can do about that, you wanted your newsletter to become popular. Not you’re the victim of your own success”.

Client: “can we add captcha?”

Me: “why would you want to do that? You don’t even have a bot issue”

Client: “to make it harder for people to subscribe”

I tried to talk som sense in their heads, but after 3 times I gave up and implemented the damn captcha. It’s still there, doing nothing but annoying thousands of people, including me...

My first job: The Mystery of The Powered-Down Server

I paid my way through college by working every-other-semester in the Cooperative-Education Program my school provided. My first job was with a small company (now defunct) which made some of the very first optical-storage robotic storage systems. I honestly forgot what I was "officially" hired for at first, but I quickly moved up into the kernel device-driver team and was quite happy there.

It was primarily a Solaris shop, with a smattering of IBM AIX RS/6000. It was one of these ill-fated RS/6000 machines which (by no fault of its own) plays a major role in this story.

One day, I came to work to find my team-leader in quite a tizzy -- cursing and ranting about our VAR selling us bad equipment; about how IBM just doesn't make good hardware like they did in the good old days; about how back when _he_ was in charge of buying equipment this wouldn't happen, and on and on and on.

Our primary AIX dev server was powered off when he arrived. He booted it up, checked logs and was running self-diagnostics, but absolutely nothing so far indicated why the machine had shut down. We blew a couple of hours trying to figure out what happened, to no avail. Eventually, with other deadlines looming, we just chalked it up be something we'll look into more later.

Several days went by, with the usual day-to-day comings and goings; no surprises.

Then, next week, it happened again.

My team-leader was LIVID. The same server was hard-down again when he came in; no explanation. He opened a ticket with IBM and put in a call to our VAR rep, demanding answers -- how could they sell us bad equipment -- why isn't there any indication of what's failing -- someone must come out here and fix this NOW, and on and on and on.

(As a quick aside, in case it's not clearly coming through between-the-lines, our team leader was always a little bit "over to top" for me. He was the kind of person who "got things done," and as long as you stayed on his good side, you could just watch the fireworks most days - but it became pretty exhausting sometimes).

Back our story -
An IBM CE comes out and does a full on-site hardware diagnostic -- tears the whole server down, runs through everything one part a time. Absolutely. Nothing. Wrong.

I recall, at some point of all this, making the comment "It's almost like someone just pulls the plug on it -- like the power just, poof, goes away."

My team-leader demands the CE replace the power supply, even though it appeared to be operating normally. He does, at our cost, of course.

Another weeks goes by and all is forgotten in the swamp of work we have to do.

Until one day, the next week... Yes, you guessed it... It happens again. The server is down. Heads are exploding (will at least one head we all know by now). With all the screaming going on, the entire office staff should have comped some Advil.

My team-leader demands the facilities team do a full diagnostic on the UPS system and assure we aren't getting drop-outs on the power system. They do the diagnostic. They also review the logs for the power/load distribution to the entire lab and office spaces. Nothing is amiss.

This would also be a good time draw the picture of where this server is -- this particular server is not in the actual server room, it's out in the office area. That's on purpose, since it is connected to a demo robotics cabinet we use for testing and POC work. And customer demos. This will date me, but these were the days when robotic storage was new and VERY exciting to watch...

So, this is basically a couple of big boxes out on the office floor, with power cables running into a special power-drop near the middle of the room. That information might seem superfluous now, but will come into play shortly in our story.

So, we still have no answer to what's causing the server problems, but we all have work to do, so we keep plugging away, hoping for the best.

The team leader is insisting the VAR swap in a new server.

One night, we (the device-driver team) are working late, burning the midnight oil, right there in the office, and we bear witness to something I will never forget.

The cleaning staff came in.

Anxious for a brief distraction from our marathon of debugging, we stopped to watch them set up and start cleaning the office for a bit.

Then, friends, I Am Not Making This Up(tm)... I watched one of the cleaning staff walk right over to that beautiful RS/6000 dev server, dwarfed in shadow beside that huge robotic disc enclosure... and yank the server power cable right out of the dedicated power drop. And plug in their vacuum cleaner. And vacuum the floor.

We each looked at one-another, slowly, in bewilderment... and then went home, after a brief discussion on the way out the door.

You see, our team-leader wasn't with us that night; so before we left, we all agreed to come in late the next day. Very late indeed.

!rant

I was in a hostel in my high school days.. I was studying commerce back then. Hostel days were the first time I ever used Wi-Fi. But it sucked big time. I'm barely got 5-10Kbps. It was mainly due to overcrowding and download accelerators.

So, I decided to do something about it. After doing some research, I discovered NetCut. And it did help me for my purposes to some extent. But it wasn't enough. I soon discovered that my floor shared the bandwidth with another floor in the hostel, and the only way I could get the 1Mbps was to go to that floor and use NetCut. That was riskier and I was lazy enough to convince myself look for a better solution rather than go to that floor every time I wanted to download something.

My hostel used Netgear's routers back then. I decided to find some way to get into those. I tried the default "admin" and "password", but my hostel's network admin knew better than that. I didn't give up. After searching all night (literally) about how to get into that router, I stumbled upon a blog that gave a brief info about "telnetenable" utility which could be used to access the router from command line. At that time, I knew nothing about telnet or command line. In the beginning I just couldn't get it to work. Then I figured I had to enable telnet from Windows settings. I did that and got a step further. I was now able to get into the router's shell by using default superuser login. But I didn’t know how to get the web access credentials from there. After googling some and a bit of trial and error, I got comfortable using cd, ls and cat commands. I hoped that some file in the router would have the web access credentials stored in cleartext. I spent the next hour just using cat to read every file. Luckily, I stumbled upon NVRAM which is used to store all config details of router. I went through all the output from cat (it was a lot of output) and discovered http_user and http_passwd. I tried that in the web interface and when it worked, my happiness knew no bounds. I literally ran across the floor screaming and shouting.

I knew nothing about hiding my tracks and soon my hostel’s admin found out I was tampering with the router's settings. But I was more than happy to share my discovery with him.

This experience planted a seed inside me and I went on to become the admin next year and eventually switch careers.

So that’s the story of how I met bash.
Thanks for reading!

!rant

Programming is a huge blessing i believe we all should be thankful to. For me, it literally turned my life around.

11 months ago i was fighting a losing battle with depression, and contemplated suicide constantly. I would use a self remedy of smoking weed and sleeping all day long. I was depressed because i felt my life had no real value. I was doing nothing, and its kind of an infinite loop.

You don't do anything, so you feel bad, so you don't do anything, and so on.

That was until i finally took the step that changed my life. I searched and wanted to learn something. I always liked web pages so i thought id get into web development.

Did some research, found out that the fastest way to go was to learn ruby on rails. I followed a tutorial i found online, and literally pushed myself through it. There were times when there where things i didnt understand, and when it was really bad, but i pushed myself through it and i finished the tutorial.

Just finishing the tutorial and learning something new helped me alot. I had already quit smoking and was feeling way better, but after a while i started feeling bad again since i wasnt doing anything after i had finished learning, so i started working on a personal project, creating it from scratch, and just working on it day and night. I worked 14 hours a day, never really leaving my room ( this was during summer vacation ) for a month.

There were many things i didnt understand, but i never gave up and always searched for the solution and read about it until i understood it better. Looking back, there were things i knew could have been done in a better way, but as a first project, im proud of myself, not because it rocks, but because i did not give up.

In the process of starting a new life, i was really lonely. I cut all ties with everyone i knew, since they were all toxic, all i had in my life was ruby on rails and my web application. I wanted to launch it but couldn't due to personal reasons.

Not being able to launch and see something live, something that you worked so hard on, that you put so much effort into, that was devastating to me. I felt as if all my efforts had gone to waste.

And here is what i love most about programming, NOTHING EVER GOES TO WASTE. All that effort you spent on something ? All these all nighters you pulled ? All that frustration from that bug ? It will pay off later. It always does somehow. You get more knowledge and become a better programmer, and sometimes it even gives way to new opportunities and chances you never even expected.

I included my web application in my resume and it helped land me a job as a junior developer in a really nice company. A job that i wouldn't even have dreamed of several months earlier.

Programming and creating something new and learning something new everyday, creating something that people use, that someone else will benefit from and be grateful for, i think we should never take that for granted !

Tl;dr : learning how to code and web development saved my life

Please stop recommending arch. For real. Stop!

Let's back up. I'm an arch user. Have been for years. I love arch! Like hardcore! But for real, cut it out.

Either they didn't ask and you're being obnoxious or they probably asked "what's a good distro to learn?" Or "Ubuntu holds my hand too much, I want something more consoley" either way, arch is not the answer. Arch is a distro for us stuck up types who like spending all day fixing dependency errors, changing our WM every other week, debating the merits of X vs wayland, and acting better than everyone else.

But here's the thing: I found arch because I wanted something that I could compulsively configure and get really in the weeds. I think most arch users feel that way to some degree. You kinda have to if you want to not be miserable. But many Linux users aren't like that. And that's fine! Let them use mint, or Debian. So they never change their DE. Cinnamon is a great interface! Gnome 2 is totally fine! There's literally nothing wrong with being content with sane defaults and not manually installing every package, and having scheduled releases from a stable source.

Do you tell 7th graders "if you really want to get better at algebra, you should try calculus. You really gain a deep knowledge of math!" No! They will get there when they are good and ready! Or not. It's not a beginner distro. In fact (controversial opinion ahead) it's pretty shitty at being a distro. I have used arch for years! But I don't recommend it to anyone. Because if you want to configure a box for literally 100s of hours (it's never really over is it?), Then you aren't asking anyone about distro recommendations. You've tried them all. You've heard of arch. You been to /r/unixporn.

Stop acting better than everyone else and stop telling people it's better than <other distro here>. It's not. It's different. Very different. And it's not for everyone.

Worst thing you've seen another dev do? Long one, but has a happy ending.

Classic 'Dev deploys to production at 5:00PM on a Friday, and goes home.' story.

The web department was managed under the the Marketing department, so they were not required to adhere to any type of coding standards and for months we fought with them on logging. Pre-Splunk, we rolled our own logging/alerting solution and they hated being the #1 reason for phone calls/texts/emails every night.

Wanting to "get it done", 'Tony' decided to bypass the default logging and send himself an email if an exception occurred in his code.

At 5:00PM on a Friday, deploys, goes home.

Around 11:00AM on Sunday (a lot folks are still in church at this time), the VP of IS gets a call from the CEO (who does not go to church) about unable to log into his email. VP has to leave church..drive home and find out he cannot remote access the exchange server. He starts making other phone calls..forcing the entire networking department to drive in and get email back up (you can imagine not a group of happy people)

After some network-admin voodoo, by 12:00, they discover/fix the issue (know it was Tony's email that was the problem)

We find out Monday that not only did Tony deploy at 5:00 on a Friday, the deployment wasn't approved, had features no one asked for, wasn't checked into version control, and the exception during checkout cost the company over $50,000 in lost sales.

Was Tony fired? Noooo. The web is our cash cow and Tony was considered a top web developer (and he knew that), Tony decided to blame logging. While in the discovery meeting, Tony told the bosses that it wasn't his fault logging was so buggy and caused so many phone calls/texts/emails every night, if he had been trained properly, this problem could have been avoided.

Well, since I was responsible for logging, I was next in the hot seat.

For almost 30 minutes I listened to every terrible thing I had done to Tony ever since he started. I was a terrible mentor, I was mean, I was degrading, etc..etc.
Me: "Where is this coming from? I barely know Tony. We're not even in the same building. I met him once when he started, maybe saw him a couple of times in meetings."
Andrew: "Aren't you responsible for this logging fiasco?"
Me: "Good Lord no, why am I here?"
Andrew: "I'll rephrase so you'll understand, aren't you are responsible for the proper training of how developers log errors in their code? This disaster is clearly a consequence of your failure. What do you have to say for yourself?"
Me: "Nothing. Developers are responsible for their own choices. Tony made the choice to bypass our logging and send errors to himself, causing Exchange to lockup and losing sales."
Andrew: "A choice he made because he was not properly informed of the consequences? Again, that is a failure in the proper use of logging, and why you are here."
Me: "I'm done with this. Does John know I'm in here? How about you get John and you talk to him like that."
'John' was the department head at the time.
Andrew:"John, have you spoken to Tony?"
John: "Yes, and I'm very sorry and very disappointed. This won't happen again."
Me: "Um...What?"
John: "You know what. Did you even fucking talk to Tony? You just sit in your ivory tower and think your actions don't matter?"
Me: "Whoa!! What are you talking about!? My responsibility for logging stops with the work instructions. After that if Tony decides to do something else, that is on him."
John: "That is not how Tony tells it. He said he's been struggling with your logging system everyday since he's started and you've done nothing to help. This behavior ends today. We're a fucking team. Get off your damn high horse and help the little guy every once in a while."
Me: "I don't know what Tony has been telling you, but I barely know the guy. If he has been having trouble with the one line of code to log, this is the first I've heard of it."
John: "Like I said, this ends today. You are going to come up with a proper training class and learn to get out and talk to other people."

Over the next couple of weeks I become a powerpoint wizard and 'train' anyone/everyone on the proper use of logging. The one line of code to log. One line of code.

A friend 'Scott' sits close to Tony (I mean I do get out and know people) told me that Tony poured out the crocodile tears. Like cried and cried, apologizing, calling me everything but a kitchen sink,...etc. It was so bad, his manager 'Sally' was crying, her boss 'Andrew', was red in the face, when 'John' heard 'Sally' was crying, you can imagine the high levels of alpha-male 'gotta look like I'm protecting the females' hormones flowing.

Took almost another year, Tony released a change on a Friday, went home, web site crashed (losses were in the thousands of $ per minute this time), and Tony was not let back into the building on Monday (one of the best days of my life).

Okay i'm done - YOU FUCKING ANDROID STUDIO MORONS. Being at a high level in C++, I tried to do some android coding. THERE ARE FUCKING NO GOOD TUTORIALS, NO GOOD DOCS, HECK, THE SELF GENERATED CODE OF THE IDE IS WRONG: WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON YOU FUCKING MORONS?
oh wait, let me first import android.widgets.rant;
or was it android.widgets.devrant.rant; or was it android.dr.rant.RantManager;?

Oh wait, I know lets search the docs?
OH WAIT THE DOCUMENTATION DOESNT HAVE THAT.
NOW HOW ABOUT I JUST TRY THE EXAMPLE CODE? WELL UH-UH! YOU HAVE TO FIND OUT YOURSELF WHAT TO IMPORT IN ORDER FOR IT TO WORK. ALSO, WHAT FUCKING UP WITH THAT PERMISSION SYSTEM? ITS SO BADLY DOCUMENTED!!!

Oh wait, I'm sure that I have to change something in this file... or was it that other file?

GOD
how dare they have style and design guidelines?
MORONS!

I will resort to implement my app idea in godot, idc anymore... I don't want to burn out because I used the "official high standard" tech.

it definitely isn't high standard and definitely not good. Thank you morons@google

THANK YOU FOR NOTHING

A FRAMEWORK WHERE I NEED 2 DAYS TO FIGURE OUT TO ADD EVENT LISTENERS TO MY THINGS IS DEFINITELY NOT ONE I'D LIKE TO USE.

also, whats up with

AudioRecord (int audioSource, int samplerateInHz, int channelConfig, int audioFormat, int bufferSizeInBytes);

ARE WE BACK IN THE C ERA? CAN'T YOU BE BOTHERED TO IMPLEMENT SOME SIMPLE FUCKING ENUMS????

WHATS THE POINT OF AN OOP LANGUAGE IF YOU ARE GOING TO USE IT LIKE C?

Oh wait I found a tutorial ... First trigger: "java scripts". Second trigger: this guy LITTERALLY ONLY TEACHES YOU HOW TO PLACE WIDGETS ON THE CANVAS. THANKS FOR NOTHING SHERLOCK!

Oh btw: did you know that android studio gives the best error messages?
"Error: illegal start of expression"
NO ERROR MESSAGE - NOTHING!
YOU BETTER USE THE IDE OR YOU GO HOME YOU FUCKER!!!

Oh and btw: if you want to read the best documentation - the code itself YOU GOTTA AGREE TO OR TERMS OF SERVICE!!!! WE DONT WANT ANYBODY TO BECOME SUCCESSFUL WITHOUT US KNOWING!!!!!

THANK YOU GOOGLE FOR NOTHING!
YOU FUCKERS!

thanks godot for *atleast* existing. You are the... last pick i'd pick, but :shrug:, I have experienced android studio now.

If anybody has any advice on what to use instead, please go ahead. And you better not tell me how good you are at android studio. I DONT CARE ABOUT WHAT YOU CAN IMPLEMENT IN ANDROID STUDIO. I JUST WANT SOMETHING THAT IS USABLE WITHOUT HAVING TO BE EXTRA CAREFUL WHEN DOING *ANYTHING*!!!!

fuckers.

Yesterday's (scheduled and adhoc) meetings:
10:30-11:00
11:00-11:30
12:30-1:30 (adhoc)
1:30-2:30
4:30-5:00
6:00-6:20 (adhoc)

Today's (scheduled) meetings:
9:30-10:00
11:00-12:00
12:30-1:15
1:30-2:30

Tomorrow's meetings include a 1:1 with my boss who will invariably ask why I'm not done on this "should take a week" project that I've had for a week, despite that he just unblocked me on yesterday morning, and I've had nothing but meetings since...

Fucking hell.
They fill my day with shit spaced out just enough to waste practically my entire freaking day so I can't get anything done, conveniently forget this, and then have the audacity to yell at me for not finishing my tickets. Of course I didn't finish! You all were too busy blabbing at me every day for the past fucking week! (Oh, and do they listen if I have something to say? Of course they fucking don't.)

Also, as a secondary rant, the product douchebag files tickets (usually complex as hell tickets worded to appear trivial) with enough missing information to make missing large sections of them easy. If I ask him for clarification, he tells me to read the ticket, and if I insist, he gets all exasperated and quickly zooms through the site faster than I can follow, shows maybe half of what's in the ticket, and asks why I don't know how to do any of this yet. After I finish his shit ticket (and true to his douchebag nature) he blames me for missing several of those pieces he never outlined or showed, and insists that I obviously don't test anything. And because that's clearly not douchey enough, the fucking sack of shit also goes behind my back and trashtalks me to my coworkers, tells them he can't trust me to do a simple fucking thing, and that he's given up on me.

What the FUCK is wrong with these people?

I’m surrounded by idiots.

I’m continually reminded of that fact, but today I found something that really drives that point home.

Gather ‘round, everybody, it’s story time!

While working on a slow query ticket, I perused the code, finding several causes, and decided to run git blame on the files to see what dummy authored the mental diarrhea currently befouling my screen. As it turns out, the entire feature was written by mister legendary Apple golden boy “Finder’s Keeper” dev himself.

To give you the full scope of this mess, let me start at the frontend and work my way backward.

He wrote a javascript method that tracks whatever row was/is under the mouse in a table and dynamically removes/adds a “.row_selected” class on it. At least the js uses events (jQuery…) instead of a `setTimeout()` so it could be worse. But still, has he never heard of :hover? The function literally does nothing else, and the `selectedRow` var he stores the element reference in isn’t used elsewhere.

This function allows the user to better see the rows in the API Calls table, for which there is a also search feature — the very thing I’m tasked with fixing.

It’s worth noting that above the search feature are two inputs for a date range, with some helpful links like “last week” and “last month” … and “All”. It’s also worth noting that this table is for displaying search results of all the API requests and their responses for a given merchant… this table is enormous.

This search field for this table queries the backend on every character the user types. There’s no debouncing, no submit event, etc., so it triggers on every keystroke. The actual request runs through a layer of abstraction to parse out and log the user-entered date range, figure out where the request came from, and to map out some column names or add additional ones. It also does some hard to follow (and amazingly not injectable) orm condition building. It’s a mess of functional ugly.

The important columns in the table this query ultimately searches are not indexed, despite it only looking for “create_order” records — the largest of twenty-some types in the table. It also uses partial text matching (again: on. every. single. keystroke.) across two varchar(255)s that only ever hold <16 chars — and of which users only ever care about one at a time. After all of this, it filters the results based on some uncommented regexes, and worst of all: instead of fetching only one page’s worth of results like you’d expect, it fetches all of them at once and then discards what isn’t included by the paginator. So not only is this a guaranteed full table scan with partial text matching for every query (over millions to hundreds of millions of records), it’s that same full table scan for every single keystroke while the user types, and all but 25 records (user-selectable) get discarded — and then requeried when the user looks at the next page of results.

What the bloody fucking hell? I’d swear this idiot is an intern, but his code does (amazingly) actually work.

No wonder this search field nearly crashed one of the servers when someone actually tried using it.

Asdfajsdfk.

I've had many, but this is one of my favorite "OK, I'm getting fired for this" moments.

A new team in charge of source control and development standards came up with a 20 page work-instruction document for the new TFS source control structure.
The source control kingpin came from semi-large military contract company where taking a piss was probably outlined somewhere.

Maybe twice, I merged down from a release branch when I should have merged down from a dev branch, which "messed up" the flow of code that one team was working on.
Each time I was 'coached' and reminded on page 13, paragraph 5, sub-section C ... "When merging down from release, you must verify no other teams are working
on branches...blah blah blah..and if they have pending changes, use a shelfset and document the changes using Document A234-B..."

A fellow dev overheard the kingpin and the department manager in the breakroom saying if I messed up TFS one more time, I was gone.

Wasn't two days later I needed to merge up some new files to Main, and 'something' happened in TFS and a couple of files didn't get merged up. No errors, nothing.
Another team was waiting on me, so I simply added the files directly into Main. Unknown to me, the kingpin had a specific alert in TFS to notify him when someone added
files directly into Main, and I get a visit.

KP: "Did you add a couple of files directly into Main?"
Me:"Yes, I don't what happened, but the files never made it from my branch, to dev, to the review shelfset, and then to Main. I never got an error, but since
they were new files and adding a new feature, they never broke a build. Adding the files directly allowed the Web team to finish their project and deploy the
site this morning."
KP: "That is in direct violation of the standard. Didn't you read the documentation?"
Me: "Uh...well...um..yes, but that is an oddly specific case. I didn't think I hurt any.."
KP: "Ha ha...hurt? That's why we have standards. The document clearly states on page 18, paragraph 9, no files may ever be created in Main."
Me: "Really? I don't remember reading that."
<I navigate to the document, page 18, paragraph 9>
Me: "Um...no, it doesn't say that. The document only talks about merging process from a lower branch to Main."
KP: "Exactly. It is forbidden to create files directly in Main."
Me: "No, doesn't say that anywhere."
KP: "That is the spirit of the document. You violated the spirit of what we're trying to accomplish here."
Me: "You gotta be fracking kidding me."

KP grumbles something, goes back to his desk. Maybe a minute later he leaves the IS office, and the department manager leaves his office.

It was after 5:00PM, they never came back, so I headed home worried if I had a job in the morning.

I decided to come in a little early to snoop around, I knew where HR kept their terminated employee documents, and my badge wouldn't let me in the building.

Oh crap.

It was a shift change, so was able to walk in with the warehouse workers in another part of the building (many knew me, so nothing seemed that odd), and to my desk.

I tried to log into my computer...account locked. Oh crap..this was it. I'm done. I fill my computer backpack with as much personal items as I could, and started down the hallway when I meet one of our FS accountants.

L: "Hey, did your card let you in the building this morning? Mine didn't work. I had to walk around to the warehouse entrance and my computer account is locked. None of us can get into the system."

*whew!* is an understatement. Found out later the user account server crashed, which locked out everybody.

Never found out what kingpin and the dev manager left to talk about, but I at least still had a job.

Rant && story time

When I was in first grade of high school (age of 15) we had a class of informatics. Nothing unusuall, you say, but this teacher was ummm ... Let's just say special. Most of his classes looked like this:

TEACHER: Ok, class, today we are going to learn/work with <insert a name of a software here>. # And then he sat behind his desk, falling silent for the rest of the lesson. We had to look up the software ourselves, and learn to use it. Or not.

Next lesson, he just said:

TEACHER: Continue your work from the last time.

And on the third lesson of each cycle, there was grading in place. He walked through the class and if he saw you working with the software, you got a 5 (that is A for our western friends), but if you were doing something completely different, you got a 1 (that is F). That just ment that you had to open the program and wave the mouse around while he was looking at your screen, and you got a guaranteed 5.

And then the cycle repeated.

However, this is not the story about the teacher in general, it's a story about one specific event involving him.

Around the beginning of the year (calendar one, not school one; that is middle of the school year) a programming competition took place.

The first stage (school competition), was easy; I got 45 points out of 50 (I was second-best on the whole school, of all years (students from 15 to 20 years of age).

A few weeks later, second stage (national competition) took place. However, when I got to the registration dosk, things got weird.

I patiently waited in line, but when I got to the front, the assistant asked me for year and school.

ME: I come from SCHOOL_NAME and go to first year.
ASSISTANT1: All students who go to SCHOOL_NAME need to go to that separate line.

It seemed strange, but I walked over anyhow. Maybe there was enough students from our school so that new line opened for us.

ME: I go to first year. # I assumed I don't have to tell the name as the line was only for our school.
ASSISTANT2: Ok, but you need to go to that row. *points to the row wherexI just came from* # WTF is going on now?
ME: Ummm, I just came from there, and they told me to come here.
ASSISTANH2: Oh, you go to SCHOOL_NAME?
ME: Yeah
ASSISTANT2: Ok then. What is your name? # Thank Knuth, one mistery less
ME: My name is SELF.NAME
After a short search through the envelopes:
ASSISTANT2: Here you go # Both the fact that my name was completely misspeled and the procedure it took us to finally get to the correct envelope are a story for a different time.

Skip forward some 10 minutes, to the lecture hall where they just told us all the instructions and started to divide us into classrooms

ASSISTANT3:
for CLASSROOM, STUDENT_LIST in STUDENT_DIVISION:
for STUDENT in STUDENT_LIST:
STUDENT.invite(CLASSROOM)

At the end, only a few people, including me, remained.

ASSISTANT3: Is there anyone not from SCHOOL_NAME? # Umm, yeah, WTF is going on now?
Noone replied.
ASSISTANT3: OK, you all, come with me now, we will find you a classroom.

From there on, competition went fine, I came in second, got a new phone as a prize, no complaints.

However, later on, I realized what was the reason for all that weird behaviour.

Signup date for the second part was on LAST_SIGNUP_DATE, which was at least two weeks before the competition, and signups had to be done untill 1600 that day.

Our teacher signed us up at 2200. ON THE FUCKING DAY BEFORE THE COMPETITION. OF COURSE THEY HAD NOTHING PLANNED FOR US, NO ENVELOPES, NO COMPUTERS, NOTHING, IF WE WERE SIGNED UP LESS THAN FUCKING 12 HOURS BEFORE THE COMPETITION INSTEAD OF 2 WEEKS EARLIER. THE ONLY REASON WE GOT TO COMPETE WAS BECAUSE SOME PEOPLE DIDN'T SHOW UP AND WE USED THE PC'S MENT FOR THEM. IF EVERYONE SHOWED UP WE FUCKING COULDN'T COMPETE.

And from that moment on, I always signed myself up for all of the competitions; better safe than sorry.

( rant || !rant ) && idiots
console.info( this.isLongRant );
console.warn( "contains strong language and wordpress" );

A friend of mine sent two of his "friends" to me because they wanted me to build a website for their new business (~idea).

So I had a meeting with them.

First of all they wanted me to have a look on the current (work in progress) site.
First impression of the frontend:
OH BOY!?

Well, imagine this:

- a 90s/2k background (dotted/pixelated cloud in baby-blueish as backgroud with repeat)

- the logo was made by the sister of one of the guys, it wasn't too bad, but badly aligned, asymmetrical

- some obvious $offTheShelfShopPlugin with $randomStockContent

- the fucking slider had a small loading bar to indicate changes, it appears like an hyperanxious child on ADHS

- below the logo TWO FUCKING GIF SPINNERS to indicate nothing else but how fucking brain amputated these two dudes are, including the dev who is responsible for adding this. (to this point, they only told me, that a webagency did the setup and some basic work on the site, more on that later)

- no styling concept at all, random fonts and stuff everywhere including default styles of the shop plugin.

- FUUUUUCK WTF wil come furtherin this meeting?

After seeing a pile of binary puke fisted out of a 60yo nonstop-intern who changed his jobtitle from dildo-traveling-salesman to fullstack-frontend-dev by wrinting it on a post-it-note, I imagined, there has to be something wrong with the backend as well.

Boy was I right!
Yes, you guessed it! A random Wordpress adminpanel login appeared! OH NO....
I really wanted to levae this meeting immediately.
I was not able to hold my disgust back and I told them right in their face, what a shit pile of nutty squirrel turds this current page is. And that Wordpress is not the right choice at all for a shop.

Then came the best part: They basically told me, that they terminated the previous contract with the webagency because they were too expensive (they are cheap, compared to others, I know people who know their prices) and that they wanted to create A BIG MARKETPKACE with multiple ressellers who can have their shop in their website. Something similar to FUCKING AMAZON. ON FUCKING WORDPRESS!?!?!?
They even asked me if I wanted to be their partner & developer and that they can't pay much at the moment until the marketplace starts to grow.

I more or less told them to go fuck themselves with a rusty pitchfork.

Every single one of them, and every one that will come after them.

Google, it started out as 2 people in their garage, wanting to make a search engine that was better than the others. Nothing else, nothing evil. Just make the world a little bit better. And look what it's become now. A megacorporation with little to no regards for their user base. Because who cares about users anyway?

Microsoft, it started out with Bill Gates - young high school computer nerd - who wanted to make an operating system for the world to use. Something that's better than the competition. And boy did he do so. Well "better than the competition" aside, he did make it for the world to use. And the world adopted it. And look what it's become now. A megacorporation with little to no regards for their user base. Because who cares about users anyway?

See where I'm going here?

Apple, it started out with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in their garage, just like Google did, wanting to make hardware that was better than the others. Nothing else, nothing evil. Just to make the world a little bit better. And look what it's become now. Planned obsolescence has been baked into it, just like it is in every other piece of technology. Quality control and thinking through the design has become a thing of the past. User choice, yeah who cares about that.

Samsung, it started out centuries ago actually, and I don't really remember the details of it.. ColdFusion has a video on it if memory serves me right. Do watch it if you're interested. Anyway, just like all the others they started out as a company which wanted to make the world a little bit better. And damn right did they do so.. initially. Look what they've become now. Forcing their stupid TouchWiz UI upon their customers (or products?), a Bixby button that can't even be reprogrammed.. and the latest thing.. Knox, advertised as a security feature, but as everyone who likes rooting their devices and mucking with it knows, it is an anti-feature that only serves for lockdown. Why shouldn't you be able to turn in a phone for RMA when a hardware error occurs, when all you've personally modified is the software? Why should changing the software blow that eFuse, so that you can be sure that you can't replace it without specialized equipment and a very steady hand?

I could go on and on forever about more of the tech giants out there, but I feel like this suffices for now. Otherwise I won't have anything else left for future rants! But one thing I know for sure. Every tech company started, starts, and will start out with a desire to make the world a better place, and once they gain a significant customer base, they will without exception turn into the same kind of Evil Megacorp., just like the ones before them. Some may say that capitalism itself is to blame for this, the greed for more when you already have a lot. Who knows? I'd rather say that the very human nature itself is to blame for it. We're by design greedy beings, and I hate it. I hate being human for that. I don't want humans to be evil towards one another, and be greedy for ever more. But I guess that that's just the way it is, and some things do actually never change...

So this chick has been super nice to me for the past few months, and has been trying to push me towards a role in security. She said nothing but wonderful things about it. It’s easy, it’s not much work, it’s relaxing, etc.

I eventually decided I’m burned out enough that something, anything different would be good, and went for it. I’m now officially doing both dev and security. The day I started, she announced that she was leaving the security team and wouldn’t join any other calls. Just flat-out left.

She trained me on doing a security review of this release, which basically amounted to a zoom call where I did all of the work and she directed me on what to do next, ignored everything I said, and treated me like an idiot. It’s apparently an easy release. The work itself? Not difficult, but it’s very involved, very time consuming, and requires a lot of paper trail — copying the same crap to three different places, tagging lots of people, copying their responses and pasting them elsewhere, filing tickets, linking tickets, copying info back and forth to slack, signing off on things, tagging tickets in a specific way, writing up security notes in a very specific format etc. etc. etc. It’s apparently usually very hectic with lots of last-minute changes, devs who simply ignore security requests, etc.

I asked her at the end for a quick writeup because I’m not going to remember everything and we didn’t cover everything that might happen.

Her response: Just remember what you did here, and do it again!

I asked again for her to write up some notes. She said “I would recommend.. you watch the new release’s channel starting Thursday, and then review what we did here, and just do all that again. Oh, and if you have any questions, talk to <security boss> so you get in the habit of asking him instead of me. Okay, bye!”

Fucking what.
No handoff doc?
Not willing to answer questions after a day and a half of training?

A recap
• She was friendly.
• She pushed me towards security.
• She said the security role was easy and laid-back.
• I eventually accepted.
• She quit the same day.
• The “easy release” took a day and a half of work with her watching, and it has a two-day deadline.
• She treated (and still treats) me like a burden and ignores everything I said or asked.
• The work is anything but laid-back.
• She refuses to spend any extra time on this or write up any notes.
• She refuses to answer any further questions because (quote) “I should get in the habit of asking <security boss> instead of her”

So she smiled, lied, and stabbed me in the back. Now she’s treating me like an annoyance she just wants to go away.

I get that she’s burned out from this, but still, what a fucking bitch. I almost can’t believe she’s acting this way, but I’ve grown to expect it from everyone.

But hey, at least I’m doing something different now, which is what I wanted. The speed at which she showed her true colors, though, holy shit.

“I’m more of a personal motivator than anything,” she says, “and I’m first and foremost a supporter of women developers!” Exactly wrong, every single word of it.

God I hate people like this.

Friend of mine killed his MacBook with some Softdrink.

Just poured it all over his poor a1502.

He let it dry for a few days, it starts to work again.
Except the battery.

Goes on Amazon and buys a new battery.

New battery doesn't work either and so he tells me about it and I as stupid as I am couldn't resist the temptation to finally work on a MacBook like my "hero" Lois Rossmann does.

So turns out the board is good.
Cleaned it up and basically nothing happened to it.

So what's the deal with "los batlerias"?

The first got hit by liquid, the second had a broken connection to a cell.
That could have happened through my friend, installing it without testing it first, or at the seller, so it being a DOA battery.

Now away from the stupidity of my friend and the situation to the actual source for this rant.

Once something happens to a modern Managed battery, the Battery Management System (BMS) disconnects the voltage from the system and goes into an error state, staying there and not powering anything ever again.
For noobs, it's dead. Buy a new one.

But It can be reset, depending you know how to, and which passwords were set at the factory.
Yes, the common Texas instruments BQ20Zxx chips have default passwords, and apple seems to leav them at default.

The Usb to SMBus adaptors arrived a few days ago and I went to prod the BMS.

There is a very nice available for Windows called BE2works, that I used the demo of to go in and figure out stuff. The full version supports password cracking, the demo not.

After some time figuring out how Smart Battery Systems (SBS) "API" works, I got to actually enter the passwords into the battery to try get into manufacturer and full access mode.

Just to realise, they don't unlock the BMS.

So, to conclude, my friend bought a "new" battery that was most likely cut out of a used / dead macbook, which reports 3000mah as fully charged instead of the 6xxx mah that it should have, with 0 cycles and 0hours used.
And non default access.

This screams after those motherfuckers scaming the shit out of people on Amazon, with refurb, reset, and locked fucken batteries.

I could kill those people right now.

Last but not least,
My friend theoretically can't send it back because I opened the battery to fix the broken connection.
Though maybe, it'll get send back anyway, with some suprise in the package.

OMFG
Waking up in the middle of the night to a strange feeling in my ear and noises. Started shaking the head, which did nothing except panicking because of intensifying scratch noises in my head.
Getting the fear to be eaten inside out.
Get the phone and call sister to get me to the doc but her phone is powered off. Starting to Google "consequences of an cockroach in your ear", reading this is not as bad as I thought and that some people do not even realize it !??
Laying down for 3 minutes in the dark, *heating up and feeling my pulse* hoping it will crawl out. Which obviously did not fucking happened, this sucker just squatted my ear.
So I go to the bathroom and start filling up the tub. While it is filling up, I Google "how to get cockroach out of your ear". Finding an article that you should pour oil in your ear to suffocate the squatter. So I go to the kitchen, grab my sunflower oil, go to the mirror and start pouring. I am starting to shine like a bodybuilder and hear the noises again. After what felt like an eternity, I hear even more scratching in my head, this is the moment I do half a headbang and *wush* *flap* something hit the ground. I look down in the hope it wasn't just the sunflower oil and see this little thing which is clearly a cockroach. I am fucking relieved, not hearing any noises anymore.

KISS.
Keep it simple, stupid.

At the beginning the project is nothing but an idea. If you get it off the ground, that's already a huge success. Rich features and code quality should be the last of your worries in this case.

Throw out any secondary functionality out the window from day 0. Make it work, then add flowers and shit (note to self: need to make way for flowers and shit).

Nevertheless code quality is an important factor, if you can afford it. The top important things I outline in any new non-trivial project:
1. Spend 1-2 days bootstrapping it for best fit to the task, and well designed security, mocking, testing and extensibility.
2. Choose a stack that you'll most likely find good cheap devs for, in that region where you'll look in, but also a stack that will allow you to spend most of your time writing software rather than learning to code in it.
3. Talk to peers. Listen when they tell that your idea is stupid. Listen to why it's stupid, re-assess, because it most probably is stupid in this case.
4. Give yourself a good pep talk every morning, convincing you that the choices you've made starting this project are the right ones and that they'll bring you to success. Because if you started such a project already, the most efficient way to kill it is to doubt your core decisions.

Once it's working badly and with a ton of bugs, you've already succeeded in actually making it work, and then you can tackle the bugs and improvements.

Some dev is going to hate you for creating something horrific, but that horrific thing will work, and it's what will give another developer a maintenance job. Which is FAR, far more than most would get by focusing on quality and features from day 0.

I was assigned a girl that's new to the industry (but with a master's degree).

I had high hopes, as people told me she is quite a curious fellow. As I am just a junior Dev with 2 yrs of experience Ididn't know if I could handle her.

We started working on a project. Which was a change request for a previous project I had developed. I gave her 2 days to read and understand the functional requirements of previous project and this CR. Then explained everything too.

Then I gave here another 3 days to read the previous design document to learn how this code worked.

I asked her multiple times if she has any questions. She said she got everything. Cool.

One week goes by. We start to code the CR while she is shadowing me. I explained why we chose one of the two approaches. And why we are making any of the changes. She as usual nodded in agreement.

I asked her to create Unit test cases.

She couldn't write even one. So, I quizzed her, she knew nothing about the project! Nothing at all!

FUCK!

I wrote down the test cases in short hand and told her to document it (by reffering previous UTC). She wrote the test cases in short hand in the document. And she reused the previous document and did not even clean it out.

After fixing the document I asked her to execute them. But nope, she doesn't even know how the application flows for this project. FML.

It took her 3 days to write and test 8 test cases.

Now she is assigned to me in another project. This one is more complicated. And I gave her a function skeleton to complete. I figured that it will take me 15 minutes so let's give her a day. But nope. 3 days no progress.

I get it someone might not be quick to grasp something. But you know what grinds my gears? That even after this you act like a know it all! Fuck! For someone who hasn't worked with her she is the most dilligent developer.

How the fuck does someone survive masters and suck so bad!

Too fast.

And it's not a good thing.

While we start to think that we get a hang of something, there is new thing coming out.

Result is nobody knowing anything well, nothing is developed properly.

Hardwares, languages, frameworks, methodologies. Everything is going too fast.

Or may be I'm just a slow sloth.

Just gonna leave this here.

Don't complain if you refuse to speak up. You don't like how something is going? But you don't want to do something about it? Then shut. The. Fuck. Up.

Getting sick of these fucking coworkers who bitch and whine about everything they don't like but when given the opportunity to speak up and voice their shit they just fucking clam up.

Context: nobody was saying anything during today's retrospective but were talking shit about the project the whole sprint. Gee I wonder why NOTHING FUCKING CHANGES. I'm the only one outside of our product owner and tech lead who even speaks out on problems/issues during the sprint. This dev team I'm on is just.. urgh.

They expect me to have their back, but they don't have mine. For months I've been carrying them. Fine. Enough is enough. The next time they need help from me they'll just get the obligatory "have you googled it because I don't have an answer" response.

My first dev job was a paid internship at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. But I wasn't in the computing division with the supercomputer and the 30-foot 18-screen wall display. In a way, I was doing something more exciting. I was in the Hollifield Radioactive Ion Beam Facility.

That meant that I was working next to a radioactive ray gun that they fired at different targets to try and make new kinds of particles. To refine the beam components, there was a tower with the world's highest voltage Van de Graf generator at 25,000 kilovolts. I got training on how to put on a radiation suit, and was told that if I got locked in the wrong room and red lights began to flash, I had about five seconds to run to the far wall and push the E-stop, before I got irradiated and died slowly over the next five weeks.

But, I was reassured, that never happened. Radiation leaks are rare too (that's why we wore dosimeters). More likely, there would be a leak in the generator tower. To explain why that's bad, that tower wasn't filled with normal air. 25,000 kilovolts would punch through that like nothing, arc against the walls, and we'd lose the electric charge. No, instead, the tower was filled to a few atmospheres of pressure with sulfur hexafluoride gas. You know how helium makes your voice go up? This stuff makes your voice go down. It's heavier than air, and it kills you by displacing and starving your lungs of oxygen.

So, while I was happily coding away on PHP, CSS and the Bash shell, making a log book for all the ion gun settings and targets the scientists used in their experiments, I was keeping an ear out for the oxygen alarm. I had a blast!

Forgive me father, for I have sinned.  Alot actually, but I'm here for technical sins.  Okay, a particular series of technical sins.  Sit your ass back down padre, you signed up for this shit.  Where was I?  Right, it has been 11429 days since my last confession.  May this serve as equal parts rant, confession, and record for the poor SOB who comes after me.

Ended up in a job where everything was done manually or controlled by rickety Access "apps".  Many manhours were wasted on sitting and waiting for the main system to spit out a query download so it could be parsed by hand or loaded into one of the aforementioned apps that had a nasty habit of locking up the aged hardware that we were allowed.  Updates to the system were done through and awful utility that tended to cut out silently, fail loudly and randomly, or post data horrifically wrong.

Fuck that noise.  Floated the idea of automating downloads and uploads to bossman.  This is where I learned that the main system had no SQL socket by default, but the vendor managing the system could provide one for an obscene amount of money.  There was no buy in from above, not worth the price.

Automated it anyway.  Main system had a free form entry field, ostensibly for handwriting SELECT queries.  Using Python, AutoHotkey, and glorified copy-pasting, it worked after a fashion.  Showed the time saved by not having to do downloads manually.  Got us the buy in we needed, bigwigs get negotiating with the vendor, told to start developing something based on some docs from the vendor.  Keep the hacky solution running as team loves not having to waste time on downloads.

Found SQLi vulnerability in the above free form query system, brought it up to bossman to bring up the chain.  Vulnerability still there months later.  Test using it for automated updates.  Works and is magnitudes more stable than update utility.  Bring it up again and show the time we can save exploiting it.  Decision made to use it while it exists, saves more time.  Team happier, able to actual develop solutions uninterrupted now.  Using Python, AutoHotkey, glorified copy-pasting, and SQLi in the course of day to day business critical work.  Ugliest hacky thing I've ever caused to exist.

Flash forward 6 years.  Automation system now in heavy use acrossed two companies.  Handles all automatic downloads for several departments, 1 million+ discrete updates daily with alot of room for expansion, stuff runs 24/7 on schedule, most former Access apps now gone and written sanely and managed by the automation system.  Its on real hardware with real databases and security behind it.

It is still using AutoHotkey, copy-paste, and SQLi to interface with the main system.  There never was and never will be a SQL socket.  Keep this hellbeast I've spawned chugging along.

I've pointed out how many ways this can all go pearshaped.  I've pointed out that one day the vendor will get their shit together they'll come in post system update and nothing will work anymore.  I've pointed out the danger in continuing to use the system with such a glaring SQLi vulnerability.

Noone cares.  Won't be my problem soon enough.

In no particular order:
Fuck management for not fighting for a good system interface
Fuck the vendor for A) not having a SQL socket and B) leaving the SQLi vulnerability there this long
Fuck me for bringing this thing into existence

I'm the only windows user in my office(my only other choice was Mac). One of the salesmen walks in my office with his macbook.

salesman: what do you know about macs?

me: nothing, why?

salesman: well I just got a new MacBook and I can't right-click, is there like a setting or something I gotta click?

me: well there's no "right-click" by default on Macs, but I think there's a way so you can click with the right side of the touchpad and get the "command-click" you're looking for. stand over there quietly while I finish this function then I'll look into it.

*i proceed to fiddle with some code for 5 or so minutes while he stands in the corner*

me: ok so let's look at your MacBook... ok *at this point I jump on my computer* let's see what Google has to say.

search: enable right-click on mac

me: huh! look at that! Google gives you the answer right there, poof! like magic. now we just follow directions, system settings>keyboard and touchpad>enable click with bottom right corner. bam! anything else?

salesman: yeah, I want the little bar thing to go away *talking about the dock auto-hide

me: ok well that's called the dock, let's ask Google again...look, Google gives the answer again, without even needing to click any links, I could probably click these links and get more in-depth instructions, but right here at the top is the answer

salesman: wow man, thanks! I've got a meeting in 10 minutes and I never would have figured this out.

*before he leaves

me: here take this...

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

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

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

But! No audio.
Damn.

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

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

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

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

Today I visited a partnered company, best summarized as "our people are the best at what they do, although we haven't figured out what it is that we do".

It was fucking awful.

Halfway a presentation about "capitalization on the internet of things" which featured nothing about hardware or protocols at all, a guy stood up and started talking about improvements on ecdsa and schnorr encryption or something... for no apparent reason. Then followed a bunch of pretty slides about the sharing economy... after which the CEO concluded with some vague speech about decentralized management of assets in a globalist world or whatever...

It was like a bunch of pretty smart people all had been locked up in some kind of closet with mirrors on the inside for six months, discussed their best ideas with their own reflections, then immediately grouped up and convinced an investor to fund their startup.

Ugh, I have to wash my ears and eyes with bleach. My brain is flooded with pretentious bullshit buzz and over the top startup decadence.

Actually, I think this sums it up best: There was a framed oil painting of the CEO with his dogs in the conference room, and the bathroom had a large marble Charizard statue watching me pee.

You know what you sound like when you say that "I want to be a programmer but this code is offensive so remove it"? It's like saying that "I want to be a surgeon but I don't like blood, so remove the blood right now."

I personally don't really like blood a whole lot, especially when it comes out of the bodies of other people. I don't really want to become a surgeon, but let's say that I would. "Teacher, I don't like blood, I want to become a surgeon but I hate blood!!! MAKE ALL PATIENTS STOP BLEEDING NOW!!!"

To which my teacher surgeon would of course respond: "Well how about you don't become a surgeon then, because humans that are cut open do bleed, and there's nothing we can do about it."

Same thing with code. You know why code is written? To be a useful tool, for people to become more productive by running the thing (unlike the average SJW). And normal people, you know how much they care about the code? They only care for it as much as for it to be able to run properly. And the ones that do look in the source code either want to improve its functionality or check whether it's actually something decent, secure, safe to run etc etc. People don't normally look at code for the sake of getting offended by something.

But the formulation used in the code, does it even matter? Jerk, it's a term that's used in physics. Does it refer to your despised white cis males whacking off? Of course it doesn't, it's a term to describe change in acceleration. Masters and slaves in code, does it refer to slavery? Most certainly it doesn't. So why bother?

Very long story ahead!

Yesterday in the evening a friend of mine (calling him F from now on) became the target of something new to me...
Apparently one can fake his phone number through some fishy ways and call people with that number. Someone (we think we might know who it was, the why is at the end) did this yesterday to F.
Here's the whole story:
We were just talking together on a TeamSpeak Server (a program to talk to others on the internet) when suddenly another friend said: "F, why did you just call me three times in a row?" That was the first thing that was a bit suspicious. After that, F got calls from random numbers (even Afghanistan, we are German), and they said something like "Have fun with the police coming to your house". Then there was silence. 10 minutes later his phone rang and there were a ton of pizza delivery services in his town that apparently got pizza orders from him. Then there was silence, again. Suddenly someone with a hidden number called him, a woman's voice said they were the police and if F doesn't stop calling the police there will be consequences. F then told her what was going on but I think she didn't really care. She then wanted to know where F lives, but I told him not to say that, because if it is the police they can find it out by themself and if it's not, they don't need to know that.
Now, a short break: There is some fake information going around about where F lives. I can't remember when we found out but the attacker thought he would actually live there. No idea what happened at that location...
Now back to the story:
Time went by, nothing really happened. Suddenly F shouted: "There are blue lights outside! The police is here!" He muted his microphone and (the following is what he told us what happened) went down to the door (remember, he is 16) and there were two police men. They were asking about why he called the police. F explained what we knew until then, about number spoofing and stuff... They sent a more technical person to him, he understood what F was trying to explain. The police men drove away and he came back to tell us what happened. (Now we get back to what I heared myself.) The mom came in, screamed something that I couldn't understand, and F went offline. We searched who the attacker could have been. And we are pretty sure we found him. That guy connected to our Minecraft server (that's where I know F from) with his real IP, and his main account, which made it easy to search. He also got a static IP which means it doesn't change. We also got some information that in the recent days this guy was talking about VoIP spoofing and such stuff. Another friend of mine, a bit older, found some proofs and I think he will go to the police.

That's it. Thanks for reading.

I have a whatsapp group with my friends, none of which are techies. A while ago one of them was looking for a phone to buy, so he started looking at models, specs and all that, but got pretty confused and asked a pretty well-informed question to the group:

"Guys, what is that quad core thing?
And what is a RAM? Is it something like the processor of the phone or what? "

OK, pretty typical stuff up until this point. The guy knows nothing about this sort of things, I wouldn't criticize him or insult him or anything like that. No, that's not the problem. The problem is the person that responded to him. This... This melted my brain so much I will never forget:

"Don't worry about that, you only have to look at how many gigahertz does the processor run at. Don't worry about the number of cores or ram. The GHz are the result of the amount of ram and cores, so the more the gigahertz, the better the phone."

PD: "Also take a look at how many megapixels does the camera have if you want to take photos".

Some people just talk out of their ass and pretend like they're experts on any topic they've read about for 5 minutes on the Internet

Once, at school, last year, we had to present a C# project that, upon clicking a button, took words from a .txt file and showed them in an alphabetical listBox...

Since the file they gave us was so long that we had to wait a minute or so to get the listBox full, I implemented a progressBar which popped up on the button, and upon clicking it, the progressBar advanced for every word it loaded, until, upon finishing, it would have disappear leaving again the button, and the listBox would have been loaded.

Apparently, this choice alone – even if it had next to nothing to do with the exercise – was enough to give me a solid 9 out of 10, because our professors never explained us about progressBars and I used that completely on my own... I tend to do things like this in class, where I explore what my tools could give me.

So long story short, I ended up having the best vote in class for that, and I was so happy and motivated :D

Moral of the story: if you can, always try to learn something new about your tools and your programming language, on your own, because apparently it gives you advantage towards others, at least in school. Or even if you're not in school, it could still be something cool to learn that might be helpful in the future, for your projects or your job's projects.
The more you know, the better!

My parents are real sticklers for who is allowed to be on Netflix. They only let people on when they are present, and they never click 'save password'.

Me being a poor college student and desperate for the Netflix password, created a fake website for one of my parents to sign into.

How did I do this? I created my own localhost server with a backend database for the password to go to. I then copied the Netflix home screen and log in and asked them to log me into their account.

They said I can be on for one hour, and then they were signing me out.

I agreed to these terms.

As a small twist, I had also copied the no internet tab from Chrome for the page to redirect to. Knowing that once they logged in they would be expecting the main UI.

They logged in and then waited for the page to load. I, of course, put in a delay for the page to load and then displayed the no internet tab. They were confused and asked me to refresh, still nothing. I asked them if the router was out, and they went to check.

While they were away I quickly switched back to the real Netflix website and yelled back saying I got it working again. They came back over and saw that it was asking for a password again. They signed in and saw the main homepage and none were the wiser that day.

Once they left I checked inside the DB and found the plaintext password they typed in... The damn password was so simple, I cursed myself for not having figured it out sooner. No matter, I had my parents Netflix password.

So you're probably wondering how they didn't see the URL above and think something was off?

I pressed F11 and fullscreened my entire browser. They did ask, and I simply replied with, I don't like seeing all the crap up above when I'm streaming. No further questions, perhaps I was lucky.

Hello again, everyone. I've been busy with all the paperwork at my ship (will make a post about it later) but for now, I'll bore you with another story (not navy one, fortunately) to justify my slacking off.
And this story... is the story on how I got into ITSec. And it is pretty damn embarrassing. It all began when I was 16. I was hooked on battleknight.gameforge.com, a browser game. My father had just had ADSL installed at our home, and the new opportunities before me were endless. Well...
After I've had my fill with the porn torrents and them opportunities dwindled to just a few dozens, I began searching for free games, and I stumbled on that game. I played a lot, but as a free-to-play game, it was also pay-to-win. I didn't have a credit card, so I paid for a few gems with SMS messages. Fast forward a couple of years, I got into the Naval Academy. A guy came in to advertise something (I think it was an encyclopaedia or something - yes, wikipedia wasn't a thing back then) and to pay for it, we could apply for a credit card. So I applied. And I resisted the temptation for a year.
Note: prepaid wasn't that known where I live, so using credit cards was the only way for online transactions.
So I made 1 transaction. Just one. After a couple of months my monthly report from the bank came, showing a 2.5$ (I think) transaction on Paypal. I paid no mind, thinking that it was some hidden fee. Oh boy, I shit you not, I was THAT much of an idiot. Six months later, BOOM!
600$ transaction to ebay via paypal. You can imagine all those nice things that came to my mind. In any case, the bank accepted my protest that I filed at their central offices and cancelled the transaction. I promptly cancelled my card, destroyed it right there for good measure, and got to thinking... what the fuck just happened?
As many people here, I am afflicted with a deadly virus, called curiosity. I started researching the matter, trying to figure out how. And, because I didn't like black boxes and "it is just like it is" explanations, I tumbled down the rabbit hole of ITSec. I soon found out that, not only it was possible, but also it was sometimes EXTREMELY easy to steal credit card info. There are sites, to this very day, that store user info (along with credit cards info) IN FUCKING CLEARTEXT. Sometimes your personal, financial and even medical info are just an SQLi away.
So, I got very disillusioned on many things. But I never regretted it. It may cause me to age prematurely and will kill me of stroke or heart attack one day, but as I still tumble down the ITSec rabbit hole, I can say with confidence that
I REGRET NOTHING
Plus, my 600$ were returned, so look on the bright side :)

Call me old-fashioned, but... I kinda liked it back in the day, when Microsoft made proprietary software, the Community made free software and everyone's "cui bono" was quite easy to answer - even those corporations involved in FLOSS did have a clear way to finance themselves.

Now, we have Microsoft coming into open source, seemingly making projects better and offering more and more "free" stuff.

You know.

"Free" Windows 10.
"Free" SaaS Office.
"Free" "Private" Repos on Github.

In general - what happened to clear and concise "I give you money, you give me stuff" capitalism like we had it in the 2000s?

I'd rather pay 20 bucks for a game on Steam than get it "free" and with ads or microtransactions - yet, many games, especially mobile, don't even offer me that option. It wouldn't be that hard now, would it?

The same goes for software. That Canonical would need to fuck their users over after Ubuntu One went to shit was obvious - they didn't offer the kind of commercial/enterprise OS'es that Redhat or SuSE sell.

What people seem to forget is that everyone needs to make a profit somehow. You don't get "free" stuff. Even the volunteers in the Open Source Community get something out of it - an opportunity to pad their CV at least, if nothing else.

Nowadays, software manufacturers have the same legitimacy as the "free" financial "advisors" you find at banks - and who could be dumb enough to trust them? Oh yeah: Almost the entire fucking society is who.

But then again, sell something and noone will want it - because they all want it for free, with annoying, privacy-invading ads or with equally annoying microtransactions, or financing based on commission - so you don't only pay ONCE, you pay until you realize you got fucked over and quit.

Capitalism used to work until all those idiots stepped in. How the fuck don't people realize that there's no free lunch in life? When have we stopped being functional people and turned into idiots.

Even worse: Those idiots think that they're entitled to something! They, who volunteered to become merchandise instead of customers, think that they have rights! Do cattle have rights? Nope. They get their "free" hay everyday and I get to buy beef, that's how it works. Moo!

Hell, they are surprised when they get fucked over by bank salespeople or their data stolen by corporations, intelligence agencies or something... What did they expect, goodwill?

Can we please make Adam Smith mandatory reading in school?! I mean, give people a chance to understand capitalism? The nonexistent "goodwill" of traders in general?

So this morning I went to go brush my teeth while half awake. It wasn't until I almost put the brush in my mouth when I felt something moving on my hand, then I saw that the entire head of my brush was swarming with ants. I immediately dropped the brush and almost yelled out loud.

But this was nothing compared to the amount of bugs I saw when I opened my Visual Studio.

So I had a fun week.

It started off with my boss replying to a co-workers email where he sent his new bank account, saying he doesn't need it untill we close off some baddly planned projects, meaning no paycheck.

Needless to say we were working night and days including weekends on it and put our best into it.

For the next part I need to explain a little background. We have this old legacy system I'm working with for the past 3 years. I keet raising the red flag we need a new one. Nothing happened. So every time I worked with it I kept thinking how to improve the parts. Almost two years went into thinking and planning the new system untill I got a green light. It was most satisfying - the day I got to build something good and awesome. I drew all the data structures, laid out the foundations and started building ontop of it. It was amazing and I was really proud of it. Then suddendly client wanted to see something and the decision was made we threw it together quickly with the old legacy system. It was on hold 'till then due to work overload.

Boss wrote me this week if I can put the project from git on a server, where he out sourced the completition into India where they will finish it. On thr question if they can't work on git, he replied: "should they?" -.-

To top it all up, I got a notice at the end of the week if I don't fill his shit time tracking system (that takes me one hour/day to insert all entries) by monday he'll deduct a sizable portion of my paycheck.

I AM WORKING FOR YOU ALL THE FUCKING TIME BECAUSE YOU LACK RESOURCES AND I THOUGHT A TEAM STICKS TOGETHER AND SAVES EACH OTHERS ASS! I DONT HAVE TIME TO ENTER YOUR FUCKING STUPID TIME ENTRIES IN YOUR FUCKING BUGGED SYSTEM EACH DAY ON TASKS THAT DON'T EVEN EXIST BITCH! MAKE IT BETTER FIRST!! OH! AND NO ONE IS MORE QUALIFIED TO FINISH THAT PROJECT THAN ME, I POURED MY FUCKING HEART INTO IT YOU PRICK!

woah.

Here's a genuine rant for you. Probably the only one I've ever made and ever will..

It's a bit depressing and covers a few topics so just read it, it's important.

*deep inhale*
So, with the help of my friend and my Nana, I was getting VR set up. (Oh, what joy.)

Now, I love everything about VR. But the thing is, I've had this damned headset since may (Dell MMR) and I haven't been able to use it. The reason for that is, something always came up that I needed to buy and this became a huge deal.

But let's start from the beginning.. I'm curentally fighting depression. I have been for months. My only income is what my Nana gives me ($150/mo) and what my friend ocasinally gives me.

Anyways, the first issue was that I couldn't afford the headset. This was find, as my friend would get it for me, and I would pay them back the following month. But, then, once I got the headset that's when the real problems started. First it was that I needed bluetooth, so I bought an adapter. Then I realized my entire CPU was incompatable, so I had to get a new tower and I went ahead and got a new GPU as well. I also got a charging kit for my headset (This ended up making me owe my Nana money). Then after all of that was settled, I learned that the evauation software lied, and my computer doesn't have USB 3, so I need that too but low and behold; both of my graphics cards cover my second pcie slot. So my options are to either try and rig up something, or to buy a cpu and psu for my third AMD PC which I had forgotten about during this whole ordeal..

This was soposed to help me with my depression and stress. Now I don't even want to get out of bed.

With all that said, I might be getting on SSI soon (I'm sure some of you are familar with that, and no I don't want to talk about it) and when that happens I might just leave behind tech (well, my PC and games) and all the stress and pain it's caused me over my life so this was all for nothing.

Honestly.. I'm just done with everything. To all the new faces around here; Hello! How are ya? To everyone else; You know me. I've been around for a while, though I'm not popular because I lurked and commented with Alice. You all probably noticed that I left a while back, and it was because I was trying to get out of tech. My reason for tech was that I was searching for something. I was always looking for the next game to sate me, or fill this gap in my life. I became a programmer because it gave me control were I lacked it otherwise. I made friends online because my anxiety prevented me from doing so in the real world.

But to what end? What have I acomplished? My twenty second birthday is next month. I've no job, I move from family member to famly member because I'm so fixated on becoming someone else to make something of myself.

I have my own ideals, but it seems that I push them aside to try (and fail to) impress others.

It's time for change. Of course, I can't do anything without money, so I'll have to wait for my SSI which I will get news on in August.

I hope this message came through how I meant it to. There is so much I want to say, but I've no words to say them. And btw, the VR thing is just one of manny issue that i've delt with (but certanly the most expensive)

Alice, Zennoe (Alexis, whom is not on devrant); I'm not giving up tech entirely. don't expect to suddenly not hear from me. I'm mostly just giving up my computer and games. More casually so for now, and them more seriously once I get on SSI. I'll still message you every/other day like I have been. <3

It was a normal school day. I was at the computer and I needed to print some stuff out. Now this computer is special, it's hooked up onto a different network for students that signed up to use them. How you get to use these computers is by signing up using their forms online.

Unfortunately, for me on that day I needed to print something out and the computer I was working on was not letting me sign in. I called IT real quick and they said I needed to renew my membership. They send me the form, and I quickly fill it out. I hit the submit button and I'm greeted by a single line error written in php.

Someone had forgotten to turn off the debug mode to the server.
Upon examination of the error message, it was a syntax error at line 29 in directory such and such. This directory, i thought to myself, I know where this is. I quickly started my ftp client and was able to find the actual file in the directory that the error mentioned. What I didn't know, was that I'd find a mountain of passwords inside their php files, because they were automating all of the authentications.

Curious as I was, I followed the link database that was in the php file. UfFortunately, someone in IT hadn't thought far enough to make the actual link unseeable. I was greeted by the full database. There was nothing of real value from what I could see. Mostly forms that had been filled out by students.

Not only this, but I was displeased with the bad passwords. These passwords were maybe of 5 characters long, super simple words and a couple number tacked onto the end.

That day, I sent in a ticket to IT and told them about the issue. They quickly remedied it by turning off debug mode on the servers. However, they never did shut down access to the database and the php files...

Okay so here are a few lessons that I have learned from being an intern to a junior developer (who’s just 2 years out of college).
- every ninja engineer starts off as a noob. There’s nothing to be ashamed of if you don’t know “everything” about coding
- Respect everyone’s opinion (including the one that shouts your design is crap in a meeting). Don’t process them too much.
- leave things that happen at work, in the workplace
- Keep yourself up to date even after you’ve bagged the 100,000$ offer. Never.stop.learning.
- Be polite to your interns (been there). They look up to you and treat their juniors the way you treat them.
- Be honest. Including your tiny scrum updates. If you need more time, tell it. If you’ve screwed up something , own it up.
- Never blame or point fingers.
- Nothing is irreversible.(except things like sudo rm -rf/)
- There’s always a way out(of any mess).
- Respect what came before.
- Respect what comes after (before you push badly written code)
- It’s ok to point out mistakes but Be kind. (Else you’ll end up in someone else’s rant ;-) )

Story of onboarding in the age of Corona!

Monday:
Office is big but almost empty, people are working from home. Guy welcoming me says he is not the one supposed to help me(he is sick I'm told) and the rest of the team is not there. The man I'm talking to is this other guys boss. It's OK I think it will work out.

Turns out this guy helping me is actually the CTO so he does not have that much time on his hands. He shows me were to get my computer and desk and hands me documentation to setup some software.

I spend the time before lunch installing linux, setting up git and some other software. CTO checks up on me once.

Then after lunch nothing...I look for him but he is in some meeting. I find some videos by myself labled "onboarding" on the company website. They are OK. I ask my deskmate if he heard what team I will be in. He doesn't know. I sneak out a little early since I have nothing left to do.

Tuesday:
The CTO is now also sick I see in an email when I arrive at the office. Still don't know what team I am in.

I spend the morning reading coding blogs and websites. After lunch I have a meeting. The only one in my calendar. It's about the product software architecture for all new employees. It's good but still no news about what team. I aimlessly read up on some software architecture untill I go home.

Wednesday:
I arrive at the office first, only the receptionist is there. I listen to podcasts until a few more people show up. I ask another guy if he knows what team I'm supposed to be in. He doesn't but laughs and says it was the same when he started last year.

I send out messages on slack looking for anyone that knows...still no one knows. I guess Im in limbo now. Perhaps i should just start making coffee for people or something...

I'm not sure whether to cry or to burn everything to the ground.
I'm stuck in a rotten, over aged corporate that will one day choke on all the documents and formalism they require. Which is something I'm generally fine with. Each to their own.
But ever since I handed in my resignation they have been fucking me like I have never been gang raped before.
(A little context: I work for a midsize financial institute. Which at least in Germany are full of legacy projects and are regulated as all hell.)
So some fuckwits decided that since the regulator slapped us hard 2 years ago that we need to make up a new standard of documentation that has to be used for all IT-documentation there ever was and ever will be.
So the upper management (the before mention dumb-dumbs) choose some consultant company and locked them up together with the brightest stars (read biggest slime balls) of the IT department in an ivory tower and told them to pull some out the ass.
And one year later (early November last year) they got the shit they ordered. Gilden shit, only the most sparkly and non-sensical bullcrap you could imagine.
But they only looked at it and deemed it good. Now the guys actually in charge of the the applications got served the dish. And guess what they found out when started to dig into? Nothing but contradictions, non-final thoughts and all of that held together by web of retarded, unusable guidelines. But they ate it, they cursed but they swallowed forced by disciplinary punishments waiting should they misbehave.
The only one emerging fact was: All previous documentation was completely invalidated.
But now the mighty lords in the ivory tower guided by the never failing hand of the higher management had the greatest idea of them all. They needed someone to check all the documentation till the end of this year but since they blew all of their budget on useless wankers ( oh, ofc I meant "highly qualified external help") they now preyed on the lowest in the food chain. Which is where this story goes full circle and comes back to me.
I was the lowest rank on the food chain, a student that just handed in his resignation.
I was the first to be locked up in the basement, my co-student followed shortly after.
And now I'm going to spend my last 2 months looking at checklists that we had to pull out of the slime's ass and validating hundreds of thousands of pages of documentation. We get grinded up in the endless hate coming from the guys that we need to tease and are held in position by a wall of sheer idiocy on the side of the rule makers.
Today I cried when I had to tell someone that his magnificent documentation was not standard conform and had thus no longer any meaning or right to exist.
Thanks you for those that made it this far down. I hope you never have to feel my pain.

I've caught the efficiency bug.

I recently started a minimum wage job to get my life back in order after a failed 2 year project (post mortem: next time bring more cash for a longer runway)

I've noticed this thing I do at every job, where I see inefficiency and I think "how can I use technology to automate myself out of this job?"

My first ever application was in C++ for college (a BASIC interpreter) and it's been so long I've since forgotten the language.

But after a while every language starts to look like every other language, and you start to wonder if maybe the reason you never seriously went anywhere as a programmer was because you never really were cut out for it.

Code monkey, sure. Programmer? Dunno, maybe I just suffer from imposter syndrome.

So a few years back I worked at a retail chain. Nothing as big as walmart, but they have well over 10k store locations. They had two IBM handscanners per store, old grungy ugly things, and one of these machines would inevitably be broken, lost or in need of upgrade/replacement about once a year, per location. District manager, who I hit it off with, and made a point of building report with, told me they were paying something like $1500 a piece.

After a programming dry spell, I picked up 'coding' with MIT app inventor. Built a 'mostly complete' inventory management app over the course of a month, and waited for the right time.

The day of a big store audit, (and the day before a multi-regional meeting), I made sure I was in-store at the same time as my district manager, so he could 'stumble upon' me working, scanning in and pricing items into the app.

Naturally he asked about it, and I had the numbers, the print outs, and the app itself to show him. He seemed impressed by what amounted to a code monkeys 'non-code' solution for a problem they had.

Long story short, he does what I expected, runs it by the other regionals and middle executives at the meeting, and six months later they had invested in a full blown in house app, cutting IBM out of the mix I presume.

From what I understand they now use the app throughout the entire store chain.

So if you work at IBM, sorry, that contract you lost for handscanners at 10k+ stores? Yeah that was my fault (and MIT app inventor).

They say software is 'eating the world' but it really goes to show, for a lot of 'almost coders' and 'code monkeys' half our problem is dealing with setup and platform boilerplate. I think in the future that a lot of jobs are either going to be created or destroyed thanks to better 'low code' solutions, and it seems to be a big potential future market.

In the mean while I've realized, while working on side projects, that maybe I can do this after all, and taken up Kotlin. I want to do a couple of apps for efficiency and store tracking at my current employer to see if I'm capable and not just an mit app-inventor codemonkey after all.

I'm hoping, by demonstrating what I can do, I can use that as a springboard into an internal programming position at my current gig (which seems to be a company thats moving towards a more tech oriented approach to efficiency and management). Also watching money walk out the door due to inefficiency kinda pisses me off, and the thought of fixing those issues sounds really interesting. At the end of the day I just like learning new technologies, and maybe this is all just an excuse to pick up something new after spending so long on less serious work.

I still have a ways to go, but the prospect of working on B2B, and being able to offer technological solutions to common and recurring business needs excites the hell out of me..as cringy and over-repeated as that may sound.

This is something that happened 2 years ago.

1st year at uni, comp sci.

Already got project to make some app for the univ that runs in android, along with the server

I thought, omg, this is awesome! First year and already got something to offer for the university 😅
(it's a new university, at the time I was the 2nd batch)

Team of 12, we know our stuffs, from the programming POV, at least, but we know nothing about dealing with client.

We got a decent pay, we got our computers upgraded for free, and we even got phones of different screen sizes to test out our apps on.

No user requirement, just 2-3 meetings. We were very naive back then.

2 weeks into development, Project manager issues requirement changes

we have a meeting again, discussing the important detail regarding the business model. Apparently even the univ side hadn't figure it out.

1 month in the development, the project manager left to middle east to pursue doctoral degree

we were left with "just do what you want, as long as it works"

Our projects are due to be done in 3 months. We had issues with the payment, we don't get paid until after everything's done. Yet the worse thing is, we complied.

Month 3, turns out we need to present our app to some other guy in the management who apparently owns all the money. He's pleased, but yet, issued some more changes. We didn't even know that we needed to make dashboard at that time.

The project was extended by one month. We did all the things required, but only got the payment for 3 months.

Couldn't really ask for the payment of the fourth month since apparently now the univ is having some 'financial issues'.

And above all: Our program weren't even tested, let alone being used, since they haven't even 'upgraded' the university such that people would need to use our program as previously planned.

Well, there's nothing to be done right now, but at least I've learned some REALLY valuable lesson:

1. User Requirement is a MUST! Have them sign it afterwards, and never do any work until then. This way, change of requirements could be rejected, or at least postponed

2. Code convention is a MUST! We have our code, in the end, written in English and Indonesian, which causes confusion. Furthermore, some settle to underscore when naming things, while other chooses camel case.

3. Don't give everyone write access to repository. Have them pull their own, and make PR later on. At least this way, they are forced to fix their changes when it doesn't meet the code convention.

4. Yell at EVERYONE who use cryptic git commit message. Some of my team uses JUST EMOTICONS for the commit message. At this point, even "fixes stuffs" sound better.

Well, that's for my rant. Thanks for reading through it. I wish some of you could actually benefit from it, especially if you're about to take on your first project.

Microsoft be like :
"Oh, you're moving away from your computer for a while with all this stuff open? It would a shame if some were to.. UPDATE it!"

It asks with a pop up, and if you don't answer it, it thinks "Oh, you're not telling me if I should update now or not, but I think you probably want me to update. UPDATE!"

For me, if I keep ignoring the update, it starts to create problems for me out of nowhere. It starts to lag and then the task manager starts to lag. EVERYTHING IS NOT RESPONDING.
When I finally update it, it acts like there were no issues at all. Everything is fine..

Even with Xbox, if it wants to update, it doesn't let you go online until you do. If it loses connection mid-update for some reason, it begins the update again from the friggin START. All that time updating gone to waste. Recently, I'm having a lot of issues with it. It doesn't let me sign in a lot of times. "We couldn't sign you in" for some reason. It JUST CAN'T. If you have a slow internet connection, you can't play any game at all. I contacted Microsoft Support about that issue and they concluded that it was all because of the slow internet connection and there were no issues on their end and they told me to GIT GOOD (Not exactly those words). If it does sign you in, it kicks you out mid-game for some reason with the evil pop up saying "Bye User_Name". The game says that YOU signed out (Dumb game, doesn't understand Microsoft shenanigans) and returns you to the main menu. If your game didn't save, well, GOOD luck to you!
Everything takes forever to load, if it decides it's not gonna load, it gives me a really helpful error saying "Something went wrong".
Maybe it's just me, it just hates me particularly. It makes me think that Microsoft intentionally acts like a douche just to get attention..

(In the end I think, maybe, this all is not a big deal if you surrender and accept Microsoft as your overlord)

I tried a few ways to stop Windows from updating automatically, but nothing worked (Maybe, I should try again).

Maybe I should dual boot Linux, but that brings a whole new set of things that I'd have to deal with, doesn't it?

Sigh

Did I every tell you about that time I scared a boss (not mine, he was in the room) so much, that he was to scared to enter my office for the next couple of weeks? 😅
Good times 😊

Tl;dr: He was the reason I was working at max capacity and then he started complaining that shit wasn't working.

Full story:
I was out of office, building up a new site. I was the only IT working that day, others were out on vacation.
Suddenly I start getting flooded with calls from other sites, that nothing works. It is so bad, that my boss can't reach me on the company phone, so he calls me on my private phone.
Apparently all the servers are down.
So me into a taxi, heading for the main office.
When I get there I just start booting the servers on by one, because they didn't like that they had lost power. While I'm working, my boss is standing there, ready to help.
Another boss enters the office and goes: "I can't access Navision". To which I quickly reply something like: "Well everything is down, I'm the only one who can fix it and I'm working as fast as I can".
Two weeks later, another employee tells me, that the other boss has been running all his equipment off a battery backup, since the failure, because his power cord failed. He spilled a cup of coffee on it and therefore was the reason, that all the servers lost power (bad setup, I know). And apparently I was so frightening that he didn't have the courage to ask for a new power cord 😂
Best thing was that my boss never stopped me or told me that I did something wrong.

For almost twenty years I have sheltered in the protective, safe, warm bosom of Debian. For a long time, it had the largest body of available software of all the distros, and by far when Ubuntu rose to prominence. So I used Ubuntu for years for the depth of package availability, and because if something esoteric was released, it would almost certainly come out first on Ubuntu, and sometimes only on Ubuntu. I was happy. Things were good.

But over time, Ubuntu and even Debian started to lean harder and harder on gnome, which I've always hated, along with all desktop environments, as they obscure the system from the user, and introduce graphical layers of abstraction, so the actual job of getting things done becomes a black art, hidden behind gnome-specific tools. This is my preference, and It's been disheartening in recent years to see the direction the desktop appears to be taking.

Then I joined devrant in 2017, and until then, I had heard peripherally about Arch, but never more than that. I had not heard of Manjaro at all. People started posting success stories and happy screenshots, and I was intrigued.

In 2018 I built a windows machine to use for parsec streaming games that wouldn't run on my linux rig. For not a great deal of money, I built a solid machine that's unequivocally better than any machine I've ever used, and installed windows on it. For a while, I was pleased. I had the best of both worlds: a windows box to stream some games from, and a linux desktop for everything else.

But after a couple months, as proton matured, I found fewer and fewer reasons to use my windows machine. My use of it declined to where I was last week: it had been months since I'd even powered it on. It was the most powerful machine I've ever used, and it was just collecting dust behind the TV in the living room. The full realization came to me while I was fighting a battle in the Gnome Takeover War, and I realized: I don't have to do this.

I pulled the newer machine out from behind the TV and installed Manjaro architect edition on it. The flexibility in the install was staggering. I am using nilfs2 for my /boot and / partitions: an option that Ubuntu has never offered. Normally they just default you into the garbage ext4 filesystem, and if you can dig deep enough, you can install with something else, though you have to really want it, in my opinion.

But Manjaro has been a dream-come-true. Pacman is easily the best package manager I have ever used, and pamac's intuitive and easy commands are a great view into AUR. Booting into the virtual console instead of a display manager has been wonderful too. On Ubuntu, I had to disable systemd's version of runlevel 5 to even get it working. But I just popped my xrandr script into my .xinitrc, and X opens with startx in less than a second. On Ubuntu, it takes about 5-10 seconds.

This has nothing to do with Manjaro, but I also switched to Radeon for this install, and I couldn't be happier about that. No more "installing" nvidia's drivers.

No more gnome. No more PPAs. No more settling. I am a Manjaro user now. Full stop. Thank you, devrant, for bringing it to my attention.

Best co-worker quitting story?

"T" I've refereed to in previous rants knew he was close to being fired, so he jumped ship. 'T' sent the usual "I'll miss you guys" email to the department, except me (and a few others that didn't fall for his BS and not scared of him). His mistake was he sent the email out a day early (buddy forwarded me the email) and left the stuff (box of pics, books, etc) he planned on taking with him. One item in particular was a new company provided laptop bag, which technically wasn't his to keep (supposed to leave/turn-in any company provided equipment), so I grabbed the bag and hid it.

The next day I heard him slamming drawers (looking for the bag) and a loud cursing. Other devs peeking over the walls asking what's wrong.

Dev1: "Dude, what's up? Whatcha' looking for?"
T: "Nothing...fuck!...damn it...nothing...assholes...fucking assholes!"
Dev2: "Who's the ass? What's wrong?"
Dev3: "Need help looking for something?"
T: "No..no...nothing...I'm fine...making sure I don't forget anything."

'T' never found out who took the bag and I've had that laptop bag underneath my desk ever since.

Programing

Can make something, out of nothing. All it takes is a little creativity...

... and 4 cups of coffee.

TL;DR; I unfucked a micro sd used by a nintendo switch with one command: fsck

I had noticed that the nintendo switch displayed way more storage usage then it should. I didn't mind at first, but at some point I couldn't download any games. When I checked I saw some ridiculous storage usage.

According to the system, all games summed up ~20Gb, but >100Gb was in use? Sounds retarded, so I did the following:
* Plugged it into laptop
* Spend one our searching for a way to to access this seemingly unknown filesystem
* Find out this filesystem is actually exFAT
* Find out that 2/3 sd adapters suck
* check filesystem with dust (A visually more pleasing version of du)
* Find 20Gb of files, nothing hidden or whatever
* run fsck
* "File system contains some errors want me to fix then?"
* "Sure"
* check usage
* 17%

As for the reason why this happened in the first place, my guess is that the switch labels the whole segment of the card as used before downloading a game and it something goes wrong, it shits itself.

Anyways, fsck is a pretty useful command.

Tl;dr younger people on here, especially passionate ones, don't worry about comparing yourself to people who appear to have tremendous laurels, those people are probably completely full of shit.

I say kids because you may be like me and more likely to underestimate your ability or more likely to be modest about your accomplishments, and you're too young to know you're doing that.

Either way. I've been doing a web development boot camp the last six months. It's been quite good with the teachers, and some of the classmates. Hell career services is now run by this woman who really actually seems like she knows what she's doing. It's pretty awesome.

That said, my teammates on the group projects have been a different story. I've primarily stuck with some of them out of loyalty and friendship. But one guy in particular has pissed me off to no end. He said he was a computer scientist going for masters. I thought I could learn from this guy. Now I wonder if he's a pathological liar.

Our first project he made one commit. Ripped straight from the homework. It was a simple api mash-up so alright. Fair enough. Next project was when he really started to piss me off.

He didn't do shit the first week and a half. No PM, no design, no programming. Nothing. Comes in two days before project is due, and me one other guy are fucking scrambling. Because of course no one else is there.

I live significantly further than my teammates mind you. We're busting ass. This fucking guy, this dumbass pick who is convinced he's a genius that will work in higher academia clobbers our whole fucking repo.

Why you ask? To put in an unrelated commit that replicated homework from the week before. Why you ask, again? Because this person is a borderline sociopath trying to appear busy in the commit logs.

We're onto the third project now. I spend days designing something original. Side note: I fucking hate design.

So I design my heart out come up with something awesome. This fuck ass, disappears. And another group member. This was the end of November, I hear from this prick last week about refactoring to ES6. But here's the kicker-fucker, our shit ALREADY WAS IN ES6!

I go in Saturday, slack a message I'll be late. I see this fucking "genius dedicated computer scientist" leaving the fucking university shadily checking to see who was watching. He saw me see him. Coward tried to shrug it off.

Here we are, end of semester. He gets the same certification as I do. The difference? I actually know what I'm taking about, I haven't paid in full to fail.

So never, ever fucking ever take what someone says on their resume or LinkedIn as truth. The better it sounds, the more full of shit they may very well be.

And as for our presentation on Saturday? I plan on handling that but letting him do all of the talking. Let's even see if he knows what the project is about :).

I think Suicide Linux is a little heavy handed. Really? One mistake erases your hard drive? Please, let's make things interesting.

I would rather use Casino Linux.... try your luck. Any mistake sets a random single bit on your computer to 0. You could be lucky and it would set unused memory to 0, doing nothing. You could be an unlucky bastard and corrupt everything. You could be a super unlucky bastard and corrupt something important and only find out much, much too late.

I'm asking for $90,000 to start my business for 2% share of my company

Hey Root, remember that super high-priority ticket that we ignored for five months before demanding you rewrite it a specific way in one day?

Yeah, the new approach we made you use broke the expected usecases, and now the page is completely useless to the support team and they're freaking out. Drop everything you're doing and go fix it! Code-complete for this release is tonight! -- This right after "impacting our business flow" while being collapsed on the fucking floor.

Jesus FUCKING christ, what the fuck is wrong with these people?

If I dropped the ball on a high-priority ticket for two weeks, I'd get fired, let alone for five fucking months.

If I was a manager and demanded a one-day rewrite I can only imagine the amount of chewing out I'd receive, especially on something high-priority.

And let's not forget product ownership: imagine if I screwed up feature planning for someone so badly I made them break a support tool in production. I'd never hear the end of it.

Fucking double standards.

And while I'm at it. Some of the code I've seen in this codebase is awful. Uncommented spaghetti, or an unreadable mess with single-letter variables, super-tightly coupled modules so updates are nearly impossible, typos in freaking constants added across sixty+ files, obviously-incorrect comments, ... . I'll have to start posting snippets to show them off. But could I get away with any of it? ha. Hell no. My code must be absolutely perfect. I hear about any and every flaw, doesn't matter how minor, and nothing can go out until everything is just so.

Hell, I even hear about flaws in other peoples' code during my code reviews. Why? Because I should have fixed it, that's why. But if I do, I get yelled at for "muddying the waters."

Just. JESUS FUCKING CHRIST.

It's like playing a shell game where no matter which shell I pick (or point to their goddamn sleeve where they're clearly hiding it), I get insulted for being so consistently useless, and god damn, how can I never find the fucking pea or follow the damned rules? I'm so terrible and this is why "nobody trusts me." Fuck you.

I'll tell you why I can't find your damned pea: IT'S RATTLING INSIDE YOUR FUCKING HEADS, you ASSHOLE FUCKING IMBECILES.

That's right: one pea among the lot of them.

goddamn I am fucking pissed off.

Some of y'all are way too intense. Smoke some weed or something man shit. Y'all be acting passionate over nothing. Breathe in, breathe out

Xpost from /r/sysadmin:
I occasionally see posts from people who seem like they want to spend every waking hour of every waking minute working on home lab stuff and studying for certs.

If you do this, you're missing out on life which you will regret later, but even if you don't care about missing out on life, it actually is hurting your career.

Being well rounded helps you interact with others at work in a number of ways. It makes you less one dimensional as "the computers guy" and it also gives you topics to discuss with people. If you know how to cook, or brew beer, or bake bread you end up using a lot of your technical and troubleshooting skills. Biking long distancing and learning how to fix your bike helps with your troubleshooting skills too. You learn to look at things from other angles.

Reading novels or writing poetry or making art work also helps because it exercises your brain. Woodworking or metal working involve a lot of skills that'd help your IT career including project planning and measuring and budgeting for each project. Working on cars or motorcycles would be similar. You just have to do SOMETHING.

I have a member of my team who literally has nothing going on in his life other than studying for certs. No friends, no hobbies, and he basically eats nothing but McDonalds and frozen dinners because even making a meal takes time away from his studying. He thinks means he's dedicated and will experience great career success.

But instead he has nothing to talk to anyone about, and when I say nothing, I mean literally nothing. It's borderline terrifying. Even if he was into comic books and video games it might help, which might help him relate to SOME of the IT staff even if the rest of the people at the company know nothing about it. But he doesn't even have that.

This isn't a solitary field anymore. Even if you truly are "the best" you still have to interact with other people and stay mentally stable enough to not burn out. Even if you know more than everyone else (or think you do) you have to try to broaden your horizons.

Went out with friends last night to celebrate a birthday, on our way back with the train we are asked for our tickets. We had bought a group ticket (for 30€/5 Persons) and showed it to the ticket checker. It was 6:20 am at that point and we were all tired and just wanted to go home, but apparently the ticket was only valid to 6 am (it does not say that anywhere on the ticket and it is called a "9-o'clock day ticket"). That asshole seriously made a record about all of us and took 60€ from everyone of the 5 of us.
The Deutsche Bahn company is the only rail company in my region, there is nothing that could compete with them, so they just shit on their customers. And now they want to privatize the highways too? Stop making public traffic something to pay for! There is no competition if there is only one traffic company with the only highways or train-web in a specific region.

Two days ago...

I was happy, building out the network in a new lokation.

Suddenly my phone just doesn't want to stop ringing, from all the other lokation calling in that they can't connect to HQ.
Then HQ calls, we don't have internet, nothing works. The one guy on location who has access to the server room enters and finds all the servers offline and a couple of breakers blown.
Turn on breakers, servers won't boot properly.
Me in a taxi and hurry to HQ, to help boot the servers.

Afterwards I find out that one of the bosses spilled a cup of coffee on his desk, shorting the circuit.
Apparently he is on the same breaker group as the servers!?! What the actual fuck!

At least now the other bosses are like; yeah, we need to do something about that

"I'm almost done, I'll just need to add tests!"

Booom! You did it, that was a nuke going off in my head.

No, you shouldn't just need to add tests. The tests should have been written from the get go! You most likely won't cover all the cases. You won't know if adding the tests will break your feature, as you had none, as you refactor your untested mess in order to make your code testable.

When reading your mess of a test case and the painful mocking process you went through, I silently cry out into the void: "Why oh why!? All of this suffering could have been avoided!"

Since most of the time, your mocking pain boils down to not understanding what your "unit" in your "unit test" should be.

So let it be said:

- If you want to build a parser for an XML file, then just write a function / class whose *only* purpose is: parse the XML file, return a value object. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less.
- If you want to build a parser for an XML file, it MUST NOT: download a zip, extract that zip, merge all those files to one big file, parse that big file, talk to some other random APIs as a side-effect, and then return a value object.

Because then you suddenly have to mock away a http service and deal with zip files in your test cases.

The http util of your programming language will most likely work. Your unzip library will most likely work. So just assume it working. There are valid use cases where you want to make sure you acutally send a request and get a response, yet I am talking unit test here only.

In the scope of a class, keep the public methods to a reasonable minimum. As for each public method you shall at least create one test case. If you ever have the feeling "I want to test that private method" replace that statement in your head with: "I should extract that functionality to a new class where that method public. I then can create a unit test case a for that." That new service then becomes a dependency in your current service. Problem solved.

Also, mocking away dependencies should a simple process. If your mocking process fills half the screen, your test setup is overly complicated and your class is doing too much.

That's why I currently dig functional programming so much. When you build pure functions without side effects, unit tests are easy to write. Yet you can apply pure functions to OOP as well (to a degree). Embrace immutability.

Sidenote:

It's really not helpful that a lot of developers don't understand the difference between unit, functional acceptance, integration testing. Then they wonder why they can't test something easily, write overly complex test cases, until someone points out to them: No, in the scope of unit tests, we don't need to test our persistance layer. We just assume that it works. We should only test our businsess logic. You know: "Assuming that I get that response from the database, I expect that to happen." You don't need a test db, make a real query against that, in order to test that. (That still is a valid thing to do. Yet not in the scope of unit tests.)

So, a few weeks ago I asked you guys what would you do if you were to quit your current job. I attempted a start-up with an old "friend" of mine.

He was very enthusiastic and hardworking at the beginning. However he received a job offer from somewhere and told me that he would work there just until we found the company officially and then quit and work full time on the project.

Well... I put around 300 hours into the project and developed the system, did most of my part according to the plan but the guy didn't deliver anything.

Turned out he had another secret partner whom he first introduced me as his mentor. I had my suspicions and suddenly shut down API servers, project management domain and mail server. Suddenly the quiet guy called me asking if I was alright and everything was fine.

Then, nothing happened. He went radio silence until I called him last night and he picked up the phone drunk and mumbled something like "I'm aware of you being a victim" then went to "you're passive aggresive" or something like that and I said nothing, just hung up.

I think you can figure out what went down on the other side and I'd like to hear your scenarios.

PS: now I have another start-up idea: I'm gonna pick up a flamethrower and burn the world while laughing histerically. Anyone who'd like to join is welcome.

OK, so we had a session in which a so called Company (Some ecorise.in ) came to give Internship-Training-Program. Ok, he said it'll take 5-8 minutes, and then it took fucking 75 minutes for the session to end. Horrible blunders he made.
1) Did not tell about the company and important stuff for the first 50-60 minutes. Instead, was just focusing on why you should do an Internship, what is it's benefit, what does a company want from you. And why this Internship-Training Program is important... I mean seriously? - A training for Internship. 🤦🏻‍♂️
2) Said all the Web Developers can be Mobile App Developers with the help of just HTML and CSS.... Wow, so XAML/XML is shit now, and we will call APIs with the help of CSS rules. 🤦🏻‍♂️

OK, still I tolerated all that, then was the part when he said how much will be the stipend. It was fucking nothing, they said. That for first three months they will not give a single penny as it is training, and then IF the performance is good, then they will give stipend, and then Placement assurance. OK, that's good that they are assuring placement, but wait. Package of 2LPA INR... WTF Man, it's like $3107.28 for a whole Year.

OK, that too tolerated, then was the part when they said that they'll take the written test, I was like OK, let's see. We moved to a classroom, it went over-the-full capacity, so we moved back to the seminar hall. (Arrrrgggghhhhhhhhh), still tolerable. But then that guy realised that there were no question papers to take the test, then sent someone to get the print outs. Wasted 15+ minutes, I was burning inside.

In the whole seminar hall, I stood up and said, that when you knew there will be a test, why didn't you pre-prepared the sheets beforehand, he was like, that we didn't knew the count. But his tone was. like he got offended and Get-Lost-ed me out of the seminar.

Then even I said:
🙏🏻 - Nahi chaahiye aapki Company
(🙏🏻 - I don't want your Company).
And moved out.

But my point, I am a third Year College Student, and this Company came for our benefit, but I did so (and I am not sorry), so that's pretty obvious that the Company guy will talk (bitch) to the teachers about me, and tomorrow will be a bad day for me... But isn't it wrong on the side of the company also?
I mean, there was an attendance sheet passed in the beginning of the session, had he taken count from that and got the sheets printed, (He had almost an hour for that).
Secondly, when they knew that the count of students is more than expected, then why didn't they check for the classroom that whether the class can accommodate so many students or not. If not then something would have been planned accordingly... But no, the Guy (I guess, that small Company's Owner) got offended that a Student back-chat-ted a CEO of a so-called company, and so he just had to "Get-Lost" me. Checked the website of his Company, they have hardly done 3 Static Websites... I mean, WoW, I have done at-least 10X the work of the Company, alone!

I don't know, I feel happy that I kept my point, but I feel sad because I generally don't do this kind of thing (may be my tone was also wrong, I had other issues also, may be because of them and they all combined and this happened). I feel scared too, that I don't know what the Company guy will say to my teachers and what action will they take against me...

Because I know, none of my friends will stand with me when I go down, it's all fake here, everyone can just give sympathy, but nothing else.

I don't know why I am posting this here, and if you have read this till here, thank you. I just wanted to share my heart out... :-)

Dear wordpress developers,
You have my sincerest apologies. I used to think developing with wordpress is what people do when they are feeling lazy and dont want to work with code and frameworks. But no... wordpress,shopify and all those shitty ready CMSs are by far the worst methods of developing websites or web applications. I have spent countless hours in my new job in the past two months simply trying to resolve issues caused by wordpress websites suddenly deciding to stop working after one of the billion plugins required to do the simplest of tasks was updated. The money i need to spend on premium plugins alone makes developing the website no longer profitable in the first place. And god forbid the client asks for a very simple frontend edit that the theme doesnt offer in the theme options menu. Even tho doing the feature from scratch would take next to no time at all if you do it yourself... you end up trying out a hundred plugins just to achieve something in a ways that feels very forced. Nothing will ever top cakephp for me

Had nothing to do today, so I thought I´ll test the migration of SVN to Git in Gitlab.

Boss sent me a mail today, that when I migrate we need to preserve the history, so I actually have to put some effort in it. *sigh*

Shout-out to the Gitlab documentation at this point.
That´s probably the best doc I´v ever read...

Well so I tried to use svn2git. And well...
Who the fuck thought that this piece of shit software is in any way usable?
Holy crap!
If it fails, it just does so without any info why. Even in verbose mode.
And the RAM usage? What the actual fuck?
This whole thing is a complete memory leak!
32Gigs of RAM full in Minutes and the whole system starts to stall!
And then when I thought it finally runs through.
Bam another git checkout error...

Googling for that error then I found something. A version of svn2git made in .Net Core.
Didn´t expect much but I tried it anyways.
And would you look at that!
It ran so smooth and didn´t need that much RAM , I had some doubt it did work correctly.
But it did!

I think I´m gonna pay a coffee or two to some guy over in China now!

Im getting a bit tired of programming.

I have been struggling for years regarding programming. I did have some moments of perceived success, but most of the time it has been depressing.

I’m not sure if I dislike programming. But there are some aspects of it that make me feel not as passionate about it.

First of, programs are invisible. No one sees your program or you (assuming we’re talking about a non artistic dev job).

People can’t see lines of code executing, but even if they did it would be gibberish to them.

Users can only become aware of bad software and that kind of breaks my heart a bit.

You could write fast, stable, secure, easy to read, easy to update software. People won’t notice. Hell, even your boss/coworkers might not notice.

In fact, sometimes you try to do the good thing, you try to become a better dev, you try to write tests first, you try to i18n, and what do you get? “Uhh, that’s taking too much time and I don’t see the benefit”.

I know some people will say that people noticing bad service happens on every job.

But programming is the ultimate isolation job. No client has ever told me “hey that code you wrote was pretty good”. They can’t even read code.

I don’t know the users, the users don’t know me, and the users can only judge my program by the result, they can only judge the visual interface.

Let’s say you write a cool project at github. The code is great. Guess what, every language’s ecosystem out there is saturated. Everything is already written. GitHub is saturated. Your best project ends up being a just for yourself enjoyment.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t enjoy code for yourself. That’s how I bet most prolific coders start. I’ve been doing that for many years now. But at some point you want to be part of something with humans.

Imagine I’m stranded on an island with nothing no humans, just food, water and a computer. Would I write code just for myself, just for fun? I think I would off myself 3 months in.

Maybe I should do develop a more social talent...

As a developer, I constantly feel like I'm lagging behind.

Long rant incoming.

Whenever I join a new company or team, I always feel like I'm the worst developer there. No matter how much studying I do, it never seems to be enough.

Feeling inadequate is nothing new for me, I've been struggling with a severe inferiority complex for most of my life. But starting a career as a developer launched that shit into overdrive.

About 10 years ago, I started my college education as a developer. At first things were fine, I felt equal to my peers. It lasted about a day or two, until I saw a guy working on a website in notepad. Nothing too special of course, but back then as a guy whose scripting experience did not go much farther than modifying some .ini files, it blew my mind. It went downhill from there.

What followed were several stressful, yet strangely enjoyable, years in college where I constantly felt like I was lagging behind, even though my grades were acceptable. On top of college stress, I had a number of setbacks, including the fallout of divorcing parents, childhood pets, family and friends dying, little to no money coming in and my mother being in a coma for a few weeks. She's fine now, thankfully.

Through hard work, a bit of luck, and a girlfriend who helped me to study, I managed to graduate college in 2012 and found a starter job as an Asp.Net developer.
My knowledge on the topic was limited, but it was a good learning experience, I had a good mentor and some great colleagues. To teach myself, I launched a programming tutorial channel. All in all, life was good. I had a steady income, a relationship that was already going for a few years, some good friends and I was learning a lot.

Then, 3 months in, I got diagnosed with cancer.

This ruined pretty much everything I had built up so far. I spend the next 6 months in a hospital, going through very rough chemo.

When I got back to working again, my previous Asp.Net position had been (understandably) given to another colleague. While I was grateful to the company that I could come back after such a long absence, the only position available was that of a junior database manager. Not something I studied for and not something I wanted to do each day neither.

Because I was grateful for the company's support, I kept working there for another 12 - 18 months. It didn't go well. The number of times I was able to do C# jobs can be counted on both hands, while new hires got the assignments, I regularly begged my PM for.

On top of that, the stress and anxiety that going through cancer brings comes AFTER the treatment. During the treatment, the only important things were surviving and spending my potentially last days as best as I could. Those months working was spent mostly living in fear and having to come to terms with the fact that my own body tried to kill me. It caused me severe anger issues which in time cost me my relationship and some friendships.

Keeping up to date was hard in these times. I was not honing my developer skills and studying was not something I'd regularly do. 'Why spend all this time working if tomorrow the cancer might come back?'

After much soul-searching, I quit that job and pursued a career in consultancy. At first things went well. There was not a lot to do so I could do a lot of self-study. A month went by like that. Then another. Then about 4 months into the new job, still no work was there to be done. My motivation quickly dwindled.

To recuperate the costs, the company had me do shit jobs which had little to nothing to do with coding like creating labels or writing blogs. Zero coding experience required. Although I was getting a lot of self-study done, my amount of field experience remained pretty much zip.

My prayers asking for work must have been heard because suddenly the sales department started finding clients for me. Unfortunately, as salespeople do, they looked only at my theoretical years of experience, most of which were spent in a hospital or not doing .Net related tasks.
Ka-ching. Here's a developer with four years of experience. Have fun.

Those jobs never went well. My lack of experience was always an issue, no matter how many times I told the salespeople not to exaggerate my experience. In the end, I ended up resigning there too.

After all the issues a consultancy job brings, I went out to find a job I actually wanted to do. I found a .Net job in an area little traffic. I even warned them during my intake that my experience was limited, and I did my very best every day that I worked here.

It didn't help. I still feel like the worst developer on the team, even superseded by someone who took photography in college. Now on Monday, they want me to come in earlier for a talk.

Should I just quit being a developer? I really want to make this work, but it seems like every turn I take, every choice I make, stuff just won't improve. Any suggestions on how I can get out of this psychological hell?

I started recently working for a big company, and when I say big, I mean really BIG.

Well, my colleagues are from different parts of the world, of course some names are harder to pronounce, so, let's say your name is 'Yagarishmakeshin', well, sometimes is easier(and I used to think friendly) to call you by a shorter name, for this example let's say 'Yag', you know, like Apu form the Simpsons, which is normal I think, people use to call me always by shorter names too and is fine.

Well, yesterday I received a complain from HR saying some people complain about this, it turns out this is offensive or degradating; I was also warned about not calling a girl 'girl', example:

- random girl at my team - So, I created this routine which is very effective and provides good performance
- me - Awesome girl, very cool

Well, Someone complain I call them 'girl' and is not fine.

I cannot tell you how frustrated I feel about this, is like, if you feel uncomfortable with a short name, just say it to me, something like 'Hey I prefer you call me by my full name' or something like that, but nah, you prefer to raise a complain like if I were a fucking predator or something; Also, I cannot retaliate or mention the topic, I need to change and pretend nothing happened.

Fuck you big corporations, and fuck you skinny stupid bitch

TL;DR: If you make a contest where people get to vote online fucking make it right!

And here's the story: I play in a local coverband to make some cash on the side and because I love making music. We entered a contest hosted by a local radio-station. The first round was determined by judges and now 5 bands remain and of those 5 only 3 get to be voted into the final round. In the final round every bands wins something: 3rd place 250€, 2nd place 750€ and first place 5000€.
Now that stupid dipshit of a web-designer of that radio-station made a website where you can vote and it only fucking sets a cookie. You can delete it and vote again. You don't need no E-Mail and nothing. It doesn't even block multiple votes from one IP. It doesn't do shit.
Even my bandmates (who don't work in IT) where smart enough to figure out that you can just delete the cookies...
I think that now every band except for one is cheating. (we have over 5000 votes and combined all bands have like 4000 FB-Likes and sometimes and Band gets like 400 more votes in an hour) This is such a fucking messup and I don't know what to do. Maybe they'll look into stats but if they're so stupid to make a contest like this in the first place, maybe they won't. And even if they look into the stats it wouldn't be fair to kick out a band with much votes because how the fuck would they know if the band themselves cheated or if it was a fan of the band or even an enemy of the band just to get them kicked out.
I'm afraid of talking to the radio-station as a part of one band because maybe the web-designer there just gets frustrated and bans us from the contest entirely.
This is just fucking frustrating.

i know we're all sick and tired of the covid talk, but...
I'm so, so sedentary right now, more so than two years ago, and that's a feat.
this past week i had to walk a little and do some stuff, and today i woke up a little earlier and spent my afternoon in the sun. and it feels so good, to just... do nothing, sunbathe, pet my cat, kiss my boyfriend.
i never realize how much this shit wears me down until i catch a break. it's not just the pandemic though, it's this career, this lifestyle. sitting in front of a computer for 8 hours straight, no window in sight... that's death, no matter how much of an introverted nerd i may be.
if someone wants advice, I'll tell you to go out, get some fresh air, do nothing at all. we don't need to do something at every minute of the day, that's not resting. find a park, a beach, some piece of nature and just breathe it in, it's worth it.

So I can see everything thinks CS should be taught differently this week.

Based on all of the ways we could change it, something no one seems to be mentioning much is security.

Everyone has many ways of learning logical processors and understanding how they work with programming, but for every line of code taught, read or otherwise learnt you should also learn, be taught how to make it less vulnerable (as nothing is invulnerable on the internet)

Every language has its exploits and pitfalls and ways of overflowing but how you handle these issues or prevent them occurring should be more important than syntaxually correct code. The tools today are 100000x better then when I started with notepad.exe, CMD and Netscape.

Also CS shouldn’t be focused on tools and languages as such, seeing as new versions and ideals come out quicker then CS courses change, but should be more focused on the means of coming to logical decisions and always questioning why or how something is the way it is, and how to improve it.

Tl;dr
Just my two cents.

I have not remotely had the energy to post here. Nor reply. And it is a shame because most of you I consider friends. And if not friends, at least excellent aquitances.

People make comments, I dont reply. People make threads, and I dont respond. People make ++s, and I'm a ghost.

I enjoyed shitposting, and asking questions, and hopefully entertaining some of you. I really do.

I'm just in a funk where nothing seems to matter right now and I dont know why, pr how to get out of it.

I have threads, and responses from scor, nanos, nachoscode, and a dozen others I usually enjoy interacting with and it's like all the life has just been sucked right out of me.

I feel isolated and alienated from everything and everyone and I dont know why or when it started. Its just..there. nor how to talk about it.

I think I'm becoming a misanthrope or something. The more I go on with this sensation, the less I want to be around people, and I dont understand why.

Wow, I just realized the marketing teams of most of the companies I have been dealing with are some cold sociopaths.

Every other letter that pops in the mailbox is filled with dark patterns trying to guilt me into opting in to their continued spam:

Subject: Most awesome husky puppy!

Look at this beautiful husky puppy. Isn't it beautiful.... It would be sad if something happened to it... But I am afraid... Something will happen to it...

If you don't opt in to our email message... I am afraid we have no choice... We have to kill this puppy. End it's life... We have no choice. I wish we did! Nothing would please us more than keeping this beautiful-beautiful puppy living and playing....

But if you don't opt in... We have to cut it's throat. Leave it lying on the ground, bleeding out as the life slowly fades away from it's pretty blue eyes...

And Remember: it's not us who killed it... IT WAS YOU! YOUR ACTIONS LEAD TO THE DEATH OF THIS PUPPY! YOU.... YOU FILTHY MURDERER!

Pls opt-in ok, then we are all good. Puppy lives! Just opt in. Ok? Yeah, you know what you have to do.

Had an idea for an app. I started writing the prototype in Node since I just had a simple API in mind. Wanted to have some very basoc crud functionality going and then hook up a nice interface to it. It has to do with logistics and analytics so I just wanted to start sketching something small, and being that i have been successful in doing an API like this in the pass with node and mongo for a local company I said why not.

I have finished a good chunk of it. Gotta love that js productivity. But what tripped me out about it was:

Check how big the folder size is: 387mb

EXCUSE ME??!!

I tripped, there was no way in hell this shit was that heavy. I am basically using Koi(to give it a whirl instead of express, gotta start testing koi sometimes right?) And some joi with morgan and winston. That is it. I am using mongo since legit its the only one i know, even with that there really can't be that much right?

Check node_modules size.....10mb....wtf? What
Wait
Did it?

Sure as shit....forgot that i was storing the mongo data folder inside the app's root folder.

This would have been nothing if it would have taken me 30 seconds to figure it out.

I was losing my mind for 30 mins before i decided to properly verify

I need some sleep

Not exactly a dev related rant.

Do you ever get the feeling when you're not working, like today, that you're kinda wasting time (can't find a better way to describe)? I usually work on Sunday at home, running behind insane deadlines, trying to anticipate tasks. Today was different, I woke up to a fresh VS 2017 install, updated my .net core api to 2.0, learnt how to deploy to Azure, made a CI/CD pipeline and then spend some fun time with my 5 month baby. Argued with him when Azure didn't let me make a new subscription. Sat on the sidewalk with him doing absolutely nothing for a solid half hour, only looking the way he admired everything around him and stuff. Took the trash out, did the dishes, helped with the laundry. But yet I feel like tomorrow gonna be a rough day, where everything will blow up 'cause I didn't did anything work related.

I'm starting to think I lost the taste of enjoying myself, enjoying the people around me, my family, parents, friends. I've been spending too much time on autopilot. Wake up, smoke, work, eat, work, smoke, sleep. Repeat.

I do enjoy my job, a little less when it's not dev related, but I do anyway. We are a small company with big contracts and tight deadlines. Always struggling to give our best and advance further, but I can see I'm loosing something while giving 120% of attention to my job.

Anyway, just wanted to get this thing out of my chest. Thank you if you read this far.

I was just waiting for it to happen. The gaslighting charade finally crumbles.

Tldr: was strongly asked to work overtime again for no reason, refused it (weakly, but it is a start).

(Boss isn't actually my boss, just my unofficial lead at the moment.)

1.4 hours after regular work hours:

Me: boss, this issue is still not resolved but I am out of ideas for it. Already shared my last resort idea twice with you but you don't agree to it. If you are available I can meet you for a short call before logging off for the weekend.

.
10 minutes later, just as I am about to log off.
.

Boss: let's meet. The problem implies something wrong with your code. Let's check.

Me: [ugh] okay

.
Boss then rambles on about a juvenile nsfw joke to describe the situation and I force a laugh, we get to the topic. I manage to explain the situation despite the interruptions from him. Then he shares his genius idea. We agree it might work but the implementation will be slightly tricky. It is now 2 hours outside of work hours.
.

Boss: can you try it out and let me know if it works?

Me: sure, I'll try it out on Monday and keep you posted.

Boss: Monday?!! Look, it is getting on my nerves now, this has been going on for too long (false, since the issue is from a day before not a week before and I had asked for help multiple times before today).
I don't even know what big boss is going to be like. This needs to be done.

Me:. ...
[ You manipulative asshole, I'm not doing overtime for you, I owe you nothing and don't give a shit about your senile nerves. Fuck you and your shit codebase and clusterfuck development environment which makes the hairballs in a public toilet look well engineered.]
Look, it is difficult for me too...

Boss: If not now, I can accept weekend. Because I don't know how big boss will take it. You understand right what I'm saying. This needs to be done.

Me: [Fuck off scum chod! Take your acceptance, fuck it hard, and take it away with you! ]
Hmm. Let's see what can be done.
Thanks for your help.

Logged off.

I can't express the tone of his righteous rage in words.
I have never had to face such revolting attitude before from people at work. I just don't get how people can be so ridiculous. The whole team is filled with chodebags of different sizes.

Me: Hello! Welcome to {Company} tech support. How can I help?

Caller: I'll just run through the situation. I got locked out of my apartment and my friend is still inside. I tried calling him but his phone is either off, Do Not Disturb, or something. Anyway, I've tried remotely SSHing our desktop computer from my laptop and using the say command to get the computer to tell him to unlock the door. Unfortunately the volume is too low. I tried Googling how to increase it via command line. But I found nothing. Is there a way to do that?

M: I suppose the doorbell doesn't work?

C: *click*

There was this uni project where the teacher gave us a project to work as a team (the entire class, 17 people). We were meant to use Scrum, and deliver the first release in 1 week.

Turns out no one except me did the work, and this went on in the upcoming sprints, even with me telling the teacher what was going on.

Then, one day, a girl (let's call her Rose) did a commit to git, and I thought that something as going to change...She committed and push a new line at the end of a file.

After 2 months, the project was done. I had done 4k+ lines of Java EE + Hibernate + JSP code (which was very difficult to me) and the grading came out. I got a 7... most of the rest of the class got an 8 or 9. They did nothing.

When questioned by me, teacher said (it was a group project...)

TL;DR: I did the work of 17 people in a university project, got the worst grade of them all.

Story time!

I worked at a company that was the HQ for a sizable organization for a while, until it was eventually bought out by another company, and then yet another company who was located in the valley.

We were kinda a forgotten office not being the HQ, like most places like that are.

No customers EVER visited our building, few if any people knew we existed even, even our own company. I visited HQ in the valley on a number of occasions and was stalked by the video monitoring system for hours before I was stopped by security and the cops called because nobody believed there as an office outside the valley when I explained why my badge looked different .... (San Jose cops were very nice about it and really pissed at the security team.) But that's another story...

One day people who were never at our office decided (after many meetings without talking to anyone at the office) ... they decided the beige walls at our office didn't match the company colors.

So they took all the generic wall coverings down and painted all the walls an almost imperceptible different color.

So now we had an office with all white(ish) walls and nothing on them. Due to the configuration of the building there were these huge monolithic white walls that looked pretty dumb.

This lasted quite a while so as a joke I printed up and framed (found an old frame, as a former HQ we had lots of stuff lying around) a sign that said:

"This space intentionally left blank."

When the "mediocre hotel room quality art" and posters were scheduled to go up the folks putting the art up skipped that wall thinking the sign was official.

Even the somewhat corporate drone directors, and one VP at our office thought it was so funny, they didn't say a word about it. Word has it back at HQ they assumed it "must be fire code or something" and told the folks hanging the crappy art to skip that wall.

It lasted on that wall for a decade until we moved out of that building. On the last day, everything was moved, but that sign remained. No idea if it is still there or not...

Saw a rant about a teacher so I thought I'd share one of my experiences.

So I had this teacher who was supposed to teach us the basics of web development (HTML, CSS and some basic PHP).
Now this guy didn't really like me very much but that is besides the point.
One day me and a classmate were working on an assignment in class, we ran into a problem but we couldn't find the mistake in the code. So we went to ask the teacher. We explain the whole thing, the teacher stares at our code for a good couple minutes (while the problem can only be in a few lines) and then says something along the lines off: "I don't like that you put your curly brackets on the same line as the if statement, fix that first and then come back"

Needless to say, my classmate and I were standing there with our minds blown.

He knew nothing about PHP, all he did was read out power points.
On top of that, a quick LinkedIn search proved that he normally works as PM an that he has no coding experience!

WHY WAS THIS DUDE FUCKING HIRED????

I was asked to look into a site I haven't actively developed since about 3-4 years. It should be a simple side-gig.
I was told this site has been actively developed by the person who came after me, and this person had a few other people help out as well.
The most daunting task in my head was to go through their changes and see why stuff is broken (I was told functionality had been removed, things were changed for the worse, etc etc).
I ssh into the machine and it works. For SOME reason I still have access, which is a good thing since there's literally nobody to ask for access at the moment.
I cd into the project, do a git remote get-url origin to see if they've changed the repo location. Doesn't work. There is no origin. It's "upstream" now. Ok, no biggie. git remote get-url upstream. Repo is still there. Good.
Just to check, see if there's anything untracked with git status. Nothing. Good.
What was the last thing that was worked on? git log --all --decorate --oneline --graph. Wait... Something about the commit message seems familiar. git log. .... This is *my* last commit message. The hell?
I open the repo in the browser, login with some credentials my browser had saved (again, good because I have no clue about the password). Repo hasn't gotten a commit since mine. That can't be right.
Check branches. Oh....Like a dozen new branches. Lots of commits with text that is really not helpful at all. Looks like they were trying to set up a pipeline and testing it out over and over again.
A lot of other changes including the deletion of a database config and schema changes. 0 tests. Doesn't seem like these changes were ever in production.
...
At least I don't have to rack my head trying to understand someone else's code but.... I might just have to throw everything that was done into the garbage. I'm not gonna be the one to push all these changes I don't know about to prod and see what breaks and what doesn't break
.
I feel bad for whoever worked on the codebase after me, because all their changes are now just a waste of time and space that will never be used.

Why am I such an average ?

It's just a sad realisation. Nobody cares but I wanna send this out there, just to write thoughts.. I am 18 in 3rd year of high school (grammar school so nothing IT related, basically waste of time) and in IT I'm all self taught but I feel like I could be better if I just didn't [something]..

I feel like I wanna learn so many things but when I look at you, it seems like a common problem in the IT sphere so hey, average guy joining the club.

I also feel dumb when programming. I didn't manage to learn C++ in it's entirety because to really accomplish something, you've got so many ways to do it and finding the best one requires deep understanding of the tools you've got at your disposal with the language and I feel like I'm not capable of this(self learn, in school/Uni that's different story).. But many (most) of you are. I've tried many coding challenges and when I got it working, I just saw how someone did it in one line just by layering functions that I've never heard of..

Also, we've got kinda specific national competition here in many fields including IT for high schools.. And the winners always do sometimes like "AI driven Life simulation" or "Self flying drone made from ATMega from scratch with 3D simulation in C# to it" or "Game engine" or whatever shit and it's always from grammar schools and never IT related schools.. They are like me. Maybe someone helped them, I don't know, but they are just so far away from me while I'm here struggling to get the basic level of math for any kind of machine learning..

Yeah I've written Neural Network from scratch in C but meh, honestly it's pretty basic stuff .. I'd rather understand derivatives which we're going to learn next year and I'm too lazy to learn it from khan academy because I always learn something else.. Like processing (actually codetrain started teaching tensorflow so that might be the light for me...) Or VHDL (guys you can create your own chip / CPU from scratch and it's not even hard and OMFG it's so fucking cool , full adder done yay) or RPi or commodore 64 assembly or game development with Godot and just meh..

I mean, this sounds exactly like not knowing what to do and doing nothing in the end. That was me like 6-12 months ago. Now I'm managing to pick 2-3 things and focus them and actually feel the progress.

But I lost track of the original point.. I didn't do anything special, every time I'm programming something, everyone does it better and I feel dumb. I will probably never do anything special, everyone around says "He's still learning he's genius" but they have no idea.

I mean, have you seen one of the newest videos on Google's YouTube channel (I openly hate them, but I will keep that away for now), something like "Sarah story" ? It's about girl that apparently didn't care about IT but self learned tensorflow on high school. I think it may be bullshit (like ALL of their videos ) but it's probably just fancied, not complete lie.

And again, here I am. I now C but I'm incapable of learning to program good which most of you did and are now doing for living. I'm incapable to do anything cool, just understanding what everybody else did and replicating it. I'm incapable of being clever.

Sorry, just misusing devrant to vent a bit

! exactly dev

I'd ditched Windows and spent a while exploring the Linux ecosystem for content creation. And I have to say, it was not a nice experience.

As much as I respect the Linux mantra of "free as in freedom" and "you need to roll up your sleeves and figure out stuff on your own", it just isn't good enough for non-dev work. Sorry guys, but I need software that gets out of my way and at least does what it's supposed to do. I can't stand a horrible UI or delays and random crashes, which is exactly what happens with most things under Linux.

To replace my Windows workflow I used the following:
1. Windows -> elementaryOS (because Debian/Ubuntu repositories seem to have the best software support, and elementaryOS is the least horrible looking thing that supports that) and then Arch, because, well, Arch.
2. Blender + Maya -> Blender + Maya on Linux.
3. Reaper + FL Studio -> Ardour + LMMS.
4. Photoshop -> GIMP + Krita + Inkscape.
5. ZBrush -> nothing :(

As you can see, my use cases are pretty much all over the spectrum.

Firstly, installing and configuring stuff. A pleasure on Windows, an absolute pain on Linux. Everything just worked on Windows, I had to wrestle with library versions and patches and unstable audio layers (Linux audio just sucks, except for JACK) on Linux.

Out of these, Blender and Maya were the best experience. But even then, both would suffer from random crashes that just didn't happen on Windows.
Ardour is actually really nice when it works. Its use of JACK for routing makes it really really flexible, but it just isn't stable enough to depend on. LMMS is utter crap. I'm sorry, but I just hate the UI. Can't stand it.
GIMP, Krita, and Inkscape can't beat Photoshop, even when you consider them together. Adobe software workflow is just so much better and more intuitive.
Blender 3D sculpting is not bad, but it's nowhere as good as ZBrush.

Also, if you're a C++ dev like me, nothing beats Visual Studio 2017. Nothing. That IDE just blows everything else out of the water. Even VSCode. And it's not slow at all, it handled a fairly large project (PBRTv3) just fine on my Windows development VM. Yes, a VM.

So...I ditched Linux and went back to Windows, but I keep Linux as a VM for when I actually want to mess with Blender or Ardour. Or some dev stuff which Windows sucks at (which is becoming less frequent because of WSL).

Out of all the above, the only one I'd consider ready for production use would be Blender. Developers of open source software, please learn from Blender. Kickass UI and user friendly operation is extremely important, you can't make a random window with GTK buttons and text boxes and arcane config files and expect people to use it for serious work.

Also, Windows beats Linux hands down as an everyday OS. It's always been rock solid, if you take care of it properly (and that goes for any OS). Updates hardly take any time because I run it on a SSD. As for all the advertising and marketing bullshit, you can block a large amount of stuff. And for what can't be blocked, well, I just have to live with it, because the alternative is compromising on my creative output, which is too much for me.

I still run Linux on my server, though. And on my embedded devices (Pi, BeagleBone, etc.). It absolutely rocks there.

I realize that Linux software is not going to improve unless we do something about it, so I'll be contributing fixes and code (the joys of being a C++ dev, yay). Still, I feel that the platform and software as a whole is just not mature enough.

I'm having quite a hard time.

For my studies, I'm doing some research minor atm. And it's basically a 10 hour a week job for me atm. I have literally nothing else to do. No I do not do side projects, I do not aim to be a developer in the future.

This is causing me to sleep about 12hrs each night until it's impossible for me to fall asleep again. I just do not see any point in getting up unless I actually have something planned (meeting bf/friend). It's gotten to the point where I've actually cancelled plans because they didn't give me enough motivation to get up.

Since this is my last year in college, I am also stressing out about what to do next year because I cannot think of anything I enjoy doing.

I am worried abiut my health at this point. Any tips?

Taking a database class, prof insists on using Microsoft Sql server 2014. "Okay cool" said the Microsoft surface fan boy inside me as I installed it. "Holy shit this is using 6 fucking GBs?? Eh it's okay I trust" again said my Microsoft fanboy self. Finished installing, makes queries and it works. Cool.

Go to run Sql server again next day and get an error (nothing displayed, just a box pop up and then a crash) I use some Google skills. Change a bunch of shit and still it persists. "Just uninstall it and reinstall again" says my prof. I do so except random errors during installation saying Sql already exists even though I just uninstalled it. "Maybe it's some registry keys messing with it!" do some digging, remove unneeded registry keys and try again. Installation finished but a whack of features say failed to install.

I sit and try to work this shit out for the next four hours (not paying attention to my class) and still can't get Sql to completely uninstall itself. I try iobit uninstaller, command line uninstalling, fucking everything but still not working. Slowly my fanboy side is wishing that the windows symbol on the back of my machine was an apple.

I ended up having to backup all my files and reinstalling windows to get it working properly. Holy sweet fuck. The worst part is when this class is done ill probably need to reinstall yet again to save the 6gb it's sucking up. So if you're not sure whether you need something as heavy as Microsoft Sql server or not for your application, don't use it! It's a fucking virus that is super difficult to remove.

Tldr: life long Microsoft fanboy becomes apple convert in a day of using Microsoft Sql server.

I AM TIRED

warning: this rant is going to be full of negativity , CAPS, and cursing.

People always think and they always write that programming is an analytical profession. IF YOU CANNOT THINK IN AN ANALYTICAL WAY THIS JOB IS NOT FOR YOU! But the reality could not be farther from the truth.

A LOT of people in this field whether they're technical people or otherwise, just lack any kind of reasoning or "ANALYTICAL" thinking skills. If anything, a lot of of them are delusional and/or they just care about looking COOL. "Because programming is like getting paid to solve puzzles" *insert stupid retarded laugh here*.

A lot of devs out there just read a book or two and read a Medium article by another wannabe, now think they're hot shit. They know what they're doing. They're the gods of "clean" and "modular" design and all companies should be in AWE of their skills paralleled only by those of deities!

Everyone out there and their Neanderthal ancestor from start-up founders to developers think they're the next Google/Amazon/Facebook/*insert fancy shitty tech company*.

Founder? THEY WANT TO MOVE FAST AND GET TO MARKET FAST WITH STUPID DEADLINES! even if it's not necessary. Why? BECAUSE YOU INFERIOR DEVELOPER HAVE NOT READ THE STUPID HOT PILE OF GARBAGE I READ ONLINE BY THE POEPLE I BLINDLY COPY! "IF YOU'RE NOT EMBARRASSED BY THE FIRST VERSION OF YOU APP, YOU DID SOMETHING WRONG" - someone at Amazon.

Well you delusional brainless piece of stupidity, YOU ARE NOT AMAZON. THE FIRST VERSION THAT THIS AMAZON FOUNDER IS EMBARRASSED ABOUT IS WHAT YOU JERK OFF TO AT NIGHT! IT IS WHAT YOU DREAM ABOUT HAVING!

And oh let's not forget the tech stacks that make absolutely no fucking sense and are just a pile of glue and abstraction levels on top of abstraction levels that are being used everywhere. Why? BECAUSE GOOGLE DOES IT THAT WAY DUH!! And when Google (or any other fancy shit company) changes it, the old shitty tech stack that by some miracle you got to work and everyone is writing in, is now all of a sudden OBSOLETE! IT IS OLD. NO ONE IS WRITING SHIT IN THAT ANYMORE!

And oh my god do I get a PTSD every time I hear a stupid fucker saying shit like "clean architecture" "clean shit" "best practice". Because I have yet to see someone whose sentences HAVE TO HAVE one of these words in them, that actually writes anything decent. They say this shit because of some garbage article they read online and in reality when you look at their code it is hot heap of horseshit after eating something rancid. NOTHING IS CLEAN ABOUT IT. NOTHING IS DONE RIGHT. AND OH GOD IF THAT PERSON WAS YOUR TECH MANAGER AND YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO THEM RUNNING THEIR SHITHOLE ABOUT HOW YOUR SIMPLE CODE IS "NOT CLEAN". And when you think that there might be a valid reason to why they're doing things that way, you get an answer of someone in an interview who's been asked about something they don't know, but they're trying to BS their way to sounding smart and knowledgable. 0 logic 0 reason 0 brain.

Let me give you a couple of examples from my unfortunate encounters in the land of the delusional.

I was working at this start up which is fairly successful and there was this guy responsible for developing the front-end of their website using ReactJS and they're using Redux (WHOSE SOLE PURPOSE IS TO ELIMINATE PASSING ATTRIBUTES FOR THE PURPOSE OF PASSING THEM DOWN THE COMPONENT HIERARCHY AGIAN). This guy kept ranting about their quality and their shit every single time we had a conversation about the code while I was getting to know everything. Also keep in mind he was the one who decided to use Redux. Low and behold there was this component which has THIRTY MOTHERFUCKING SEVEN PROPERTIES WHOSE SOLE PURPOSE IS BE PASSED DOWN AGAIN LIKE 3 TO 4 TIMES!.

This stupid shit kept telling me to write code in a "functional" style. AND ALL HE KNOWS ABOUT FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING IS USING MAP, FILTER, REDUCE! And says shit like "WE DONT NEED UNIT TESTS BECAUSE FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING HAS NO ERRORS!" Later on I found that he read a book about functional programming in JS and now he fucking thinks he knows what functional programming is! Oh I forgot to mention that the body of his "maps" is like 70 fucking lines of code!

Another fin-tech company I worked at had a quote from Machiavelli's The Prince on EACH FUCKING DESK:

"There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things."

MOTHERFUCKER! NEW ORDER OF THINGS? THERE 10 OTHER COMPANIES DOING THE SAME SHIT ALREADY!

And the one that got on my nerves as a space lover. Is a quote from Kennedy's speech about going to the moon in the 60s "We choose to go to the moon and do the hard things ..."

YOU FUCKING DELUSIONAL CUNT! YOU THINK BUILDING YOUR SHITTY COPY PASTED START UP IS COMPARABLE TO GOING TO THE MOON IN THE 60S?

I am just tired of all those fuckers.

Read the following in Morgan Freeman’s voice.

Okay everyone sit on down and get ready for story time. There once was a workspace that was a pain in the ass to setup. It often would take an entire day even for the most experienced devs on the team...for it was a workspace perched atop a swamp of shit that would require a whole year to refactor into something that isn’t shit.

It was inherited, passed down, stepped in and scrapped from the boot soles of every programmer that ever touched it. It was an amalgam of old, new, and third party components with a class path a mile long and no package management because the company although physically in the present, somehow maintained a temporal presence in the past. And there was nothing that the team hated more than setting that workspace. In short it was an unholy mess that made Satan cry and Dennis Ritchie spin in his grave so much that the state of California attached magnets and a coil to his body and casket to generate electricity.

Then one day the untalented clowns known as App Group decided that our IDE should be owned and configured strictly through them. They took poor Eclipse and mounted so much silly shit to it that it resembled a riding lawn mower with a fax machine and a blender duct taped to it. Eventually as everything the company touched did, it simply turned into a broken, shitty mess that not even Jesus Titty Fucking Christ could bring back the dead.

And then, every month or so the IDE would break in such a grand way that every developer had to rebuild their workspace...the very same Lovecraftian monster disguised as a code base. It was just too much to bear for old Deus. He was all out of fucks and there wasn’t enough alcohol in the world to quiet his injured soul. So he stood on a chair, carved his name in a rafter and tied a noose to it, put it around his neck and finally kicked the chair out from under himself. I am told he even pooped his pants and the post mortem shit in the seat of his pants was still better than the codebase at work. I’m Morgan Freeman.

Worked for a friend of mine in the early 2000s. Had to implement a booking system into PHP for some private customer. This was PHP 4.something, the CMS was some alpha release of an open source project that my friend was sure was the future (it wasn't), and the specs were one A4 page of pencil scribbles that he took while talking to the customer.
Deadline was insane, nothing worked. I worked from getting up to laying down to get shit done, not being able to sleep, feeling stressed all the time. One week before roll-out I actually managed to get it running and we showed it to the customer. He was like "nope, that's not what I meant" and demanded lots of changes but accepted only one or two weeks of roll-out delay.
I did finish the job, made some good money, but then quit as soon as it was done.
This experience broke me so much that I worked in a workshop for 2 years to get away from programming as far as I possibly could.

First post.
So, I've been teaching myself front-end for about 7 months now, and I'm really enjoying it, especially the actual programming aspect of JS. I also just started a new job, nothing to do with development, that I expected to be extremely boring and unfulfilling, as it doesn't fulfill any of my interests, but it'll pay my rent and it has decent benefits. I'll be mostly working with excel.
Now, like I mentioned, I'm really new to the dev world, just a little infant really. I know enough to know that I don't know shit. So, I was surprised to learn today that you can program in excel with VBA. I know the language gets a good bit of hate on here, I did a search before posting, and while I haven't started to learn it just yet (I'm starting tonight) I'm excited about. Firstly, because I'll get to do coding for my job, something I'm interested in, and secondly, because if I can figure out how to automate part of what I do well enough that it's implemented with the rest of the team, then maybe I'll be rewarded, and I'd be able to put professional coding experience on a resume for when I try to find a better job.
I've really enjoyed reading all the rants. They've been entertaining and also educational sometimes.
tl;dr Discovered VBA and was actually excited about it

It hurts man, it fucking hurts

I feel like I'm a ghost, like im not there. I don't really exist

I try to be better, actually doing something, anything. I really do. But nothing changes. So many times have I decided to finally make the change. This time I'm really gonna make it out of here. Yet I'm still here. Not one thing has changed. I'm still a shell of a person

It really fucking hurts
I just want to exist

Was forced to do some work on Windows this week (CAD tools that runs only on Windows). I spent a few days just setting up the tools. There were quite a few things I realized I forgot about Windows (as compared to Linux).

1) Installation times are down right horrific. What exactly are the installer doing for 10 minutes?
2) .NET is a cluster fuck. Not even Microsofts repair tool can fix it, but rather just hangs. I ended up using another tool to nuke it and reinstall.
3) Windows binary installs are insanely huge, thus, takes forever to download.
4) The registry is a pointless database that must have been written in hell with the single intent of destroying users will to live. The sole existence of the registry is another proof that completely incompetent engineers designed Windows.
5) Rebooting is the only way to solve many problems. This is another sure sign of a fundamentally fucked up OS design.
6) What the heck is wrong with the GUIs designers? The control panel must be the worst design ever. There are so many levels to get to a particular setting I'm getting dizzy. Nothing gets better by the illogical organisation.
7) Windows networking. A perversion of the tcp/ip stack that makes it virtually impossible to understand a damn thing about the current network configuration. There are at least 3 different places that effects the settings.
8) Windows command prompt. Why did they even bother to leave it in? The interpreter is as intelligent as retarded donut. You can't do anything with it, except typing "exit" and Google for another solution.
8) Updates. Why does it takes hundreds of updates per month to keep that thing safe?
9) Despite all updates that is flying out of Redmond like confetti, it is still necessary to install antivirus to keep the damn thing safe. That cost extra money, and further cost you by degrading performance of your hardware.
10) Window performance. Software runs like it was swimming in molasses. The final stab in the back on your hardware investment, and pretty much sends performance on your hardware back a few hundred bucks more.
11) Closed source is evil. If something crash consistently, you might find a forum that address the issues you have. Otherwise you're out of luck. On the other hand, it might be for the better. I imagine reading the code for Windows can lead to severe depression.

I'm lucky to be a Linux dev, and should probably not complain too much... But really, Windows, go get yourself hit by a truck and die. I won't miss you.

Soooo it's Monday........ 🤯

@C0D4 started the day fixing current projects defects (4 tickets smashed before coffee 💪)

Then after coffee, run a test coverage report and see a significant decline over the past few months, so spends a couple hours adding more tests to get some areas filled in - meh, nothing like 50+ lines per test... to test a if() statement but whatever - complex scenarios will be complex to get too, but no my tests break and I'm missing data I didn't know about🤦‍♂️
So let's comment all that out, and go to lunch ... mmmm lunch.

Get back, start working on those again, and then get handed a new issue, so comment that all back out again, ( ok I know what you're thinking, but I'm working in an environment that does not use git for deployments - don't ask, real pain in the ass I haven't had time to invest into yet - but as code versioning only) anywho, starts to workout this new issue but don't figure it out, enter a 30 minute meeting.................. yea that was 2 hours later but was a very practical whiteboard session only to work out I have something like 16-20 weeks of work over 4-5 projects to get out in like 6 weeks... hahahahahahaha fml..... oh and that's excluding another project which had a 6 weeks of work in the pipeline to get to somehow.... I'm not seeing this one happening, and probably conflicting projects needed on top of that down the track... but we'll leave those out for now!

Whoot is fucking home time!!!

🤷‍♂️I'm starting to think I'm like a team of 5-10 devs right now, maybe I should start asking for 5-10x more 😏

#letsBringOnTuesday!!!!

Never worked before so I'll talk about one of the former staff at my school.

This guy worked as IT and did some teaching in the high school. Early last year, he suddenly disappears for no reason.

Now, I'm going to go in order of what we (the students) found out, not, chronological order.

Firstly, turns out that in class he would make comments about female students. Nothing explicit, just kinda strange. I forget the examples I heard but think like the overly friendly old guy. Those types of comments from a 40-something IT guy. (Some female students knew about this for a long while but I only heard about it after the investigation)

Next, rumor got out that they found some stuff on his computer. I don't know how, but it turned out to be accurate, and we were accurate at the follow-up assumption that it was porn.

After that, the school made an announcement that we had been arrested. Up until then, we just assumed he had been sacked. He was weird sure, but we didn't think criminal.

Some other students looked into the police records, and it turns out this guy had been arrested for possession and distribution of child pornography.

Pretty sick right? Its worth pointing out now that our school has Pre-K through 12th grade students.

I gained a new level of respect for my female classmates after that. I didn't even know that was going on, really wish I could have helped out.

Really fed up with my colleague and possibly my job. Am starting to doubt am cut out to be a developer

Am a junior java dev , been working working for this company for about 2 years now. Although they hired me to be a java dev, they pretty much exclusively had me working on JavaScript crap because none of the other more senior devs wanted to do even so much as poke JS with a long stick....

Oh and the salary was crap but i figured since i had barely 3 years of exp i thought i would stick with it for a while

But a few months ago after seeing other opportunities I got fed up and threatened to quit , already started interviewing etc
Got an offer, not exactly what i wanted but better than where i was. Went to quit but they freaked out and started throwing money at me. They matched and exceed the other salary and promised to addressed the issues that made me want to leave. Ie get me to work more on the java side of the project and have me work with someone more senior who could sort of mentor me, i had been working semi solo on the js shit till then...

The problem is that my supposed mentor is selfish prick... he is the sort of guy who comes in real early, basically he goes to early morning prayer then come in at some ungodly hour and fuckoff home around 3pm

He does all his work early morning then spends the rest of the day with his headphones on stealthily watching youtube, amazon, watching cricket, reading about Palestine , how oppressed muslims are or building a website for some mosque.

I asked him to let me sit with him so that I could just learn how this or that part of the sys worked , he agreed then the very next day comes in and does all the work before i get in at 9 , i asked him how he did it and he tells me oh just read the code.

Its not as simple as that, out codebase is an old pile of non standard legacy dog shit. Nothing works as it should, i tried to go through documentation online for the various stuff we use , but invariably get stuck when i try the usual approach because it turns out the original devs had essentially done a lot of custom hacks and cowboy coding to get stuff working, they screwed around with some of the framework jars & edited libraries to get stuff to work, resulting in some really weird OSGI errors.

My point is that i cant really just "read the code" or google ...
I gotta know a bit more what was actually modified and a lot of this knowledge isn't fucking documented, theres a lot of " ohhh that weird bug yeah yeah that happens cuz x did this hack some years ago to fix this issue and we kinda built on it, yeah we weren't supposed to do that but heyyy what u gonna do, just do this or that instead"

I was asked to set up a web service to export something, since thats his area of expertise and he is suppose to be teaching me the ropes, i asked him to explain where i should start and what would the general workflow be, his response is to tell me to just copy the IMPORT service and rename it to export then "just do it um change it or something" very helpful indeed (building enterprise application here nothing complex at all!!)

He sits right next to me so i can see how much works he actually does, i know when he just idly sitting there so thats when i ask him questions, he always has his earphones on so each time i gotta find a way to get his attention with a poke or a wave, he will give a heavy sigh and a weary look as he removes his headphones, listen to my question then give me the shortest answer possible before IMMEDIATELY turning away and putting his headphones on as fast as possible regardless of whether I actually understood or even heard what he said. If i ask another question ( am talking like an immediate follow up question for a clarification or something) he will
Do the whole sigh + tired look routing to make me know yeah you are disturbing me. ( god was so happy the day he accidentally sat on and broke them)

Yesterday i caught a glance at his screen as i was sitting down and i think he and another dev were talking about me
That am slow with my work and take forever to get into gear.

Starting to have doubts about my own ability n wether am really cut out to be a developer. I know i can work hard but its impossible to do so when you have no clue where to start and unable to look it up since all the custom hacks doesn't really allow any frame of reference.
Feels like am being handicapped and mocked, yesterday i just picked up my gear n left the office.

I never talk ill about my colleagues, whenever i have a 121 with my mgr i always all is fine, x n y are really helpful etc
I tried to indirectly tell my other colleague about this guy, he told me that guy had kinda mentally checked out of this job and was just going through on auto pilot and just laughed it off (they have been working together for almost a decade and a buddies) my other colleague is pretty nice but he usually swamped with work so i feel bad to trouble him.

Am really Fed up with it all

You stupid lousy price of potato shit windows, yes that’s right - this pissed of windows user is pissed the fuck right off.

Here I am letting you sit there idling along and then I press the start button, you know that fucking button I press regularly for fucking years, only for you to go “fuck you, I’m going to blue screen instead” like what the flying fuck? There hasn’t been any updates in a while that I’ve noticed but this shit is just a shit.

So what ever, let’s reboot this mother fucker, oh wait now you can’t fucking boot, I can hear the hdd spinning a million miles an hour (coz non ssd) but noooo your just going to sit there like a dumb ass prick who doesn’t know what the fuck your doing.

So fine, let’s pull out that old USB with w10 on it and do a MBR repair... (coz nothing else will fucking work in your shit list of options) ok so apparently an MBR repair gets you booting.. but wait there’s more, now you useless piece of shit are going to run a scan disk which has sat at 0% for the past 20 minutes and I don’t think I’m ever going to see that fucker move, I get it you want to do something useful, but Fucking Do it already!

Like wtf, how does a stable system just decide to shit itself.

Oh and before you say it.. no I can’t install Linux on this piece of shit, see my previous rants for that problem.

this was about office politics. for context, a lot of non tech people think they can borrow our time willy nilly and our boss agrees, so we're often pulled out of our tasks to do random shit.

these girls asked for my consultation on a simple problem, because another team wasn't fixing an issue for them and they said it wasn't possible. i said it was possible and simple to solve, i spoke to the other team, showed them how to do it and thought that was done. they kept asking me to produce proof that it was possible, excessively, like i had nothing to do.

that went on for a week, lots of back and forth, i was getting tired, so i told this girl fine, I'll do this stupid thing IF you send me an email making this a formal exchange, she says fine. the next day i find out they went after another guy in my team, who's much busier than i, and he stopped everything to coddle them.

i told him to be careful about that stuff, because he's setting himself up for this shit, he's making the rest of the team look bad and he's stopping his work to do something that was already done, because they couldn't bother to send an email. had a huge discussion about this, he was super condescending and overall, he was an asshole.

next time, I'll just send the girls his way

Rant!

Been working on 'MVP' features of a new product for the past 14 months. Customer has no f**king clue on how to design for performance. An uncomfortable amount of faith was placed on the ORM (ORMs are not bad as long as you know what you are doing) and the magic that the current framework provides. (Again, magic is good so long as you understand what happens behind the smoke and mirrors - but f**k all that... coz hey, productivity, right?). Customer was so focussed on features that no one ever thought of giving any attention to subtler things like 'hey, my transaction is doing a gazillion joins across trizillion tables while making a million calls to the db - maybe I should put more f**king thought into my design.' We foresaw performance and concurrency issues and raised them way ahead of the release. How did the customer respond? By hiring a performance tester. Fair enough - but what did that translate into? Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Hiring a perf tester doesn't automagically fix issues. The perf tester did not have a stable environment, a stable build or anything that is required to do a test with meaningful results. As the release date approached, the customer launched a pilot and things started failing spectacularly with the system not able to support more than 15 concurrent users. WTF! (My 'I told you so' moment) Emails started flying in all directions and the hunt for the scapegoat was on (I'm a sucker for CYA so I was covered). People started pointing in all directions but no one bothered to take a step back and understand what was causing the issues. Numero uno reason for transaction failure was deadlocks. We were using a proprietary DB with kickass tooling. No one bothered to use the tooling to understand what was the resource in contention let alone how to fix the contention. Absolute panic - its like they just froze. Debugging shit and doing the same thing again and again just so that management knew they were upto something. Most of the indexes had a fragmentation of 99.8% - I shit you not. Anywho, we now have a 'war room' where the perf tester needs to script the entire project by tonight and come up with some numbers that will amount to nothing while we stay up and keep profiling the shit out of the application under load.

Lessons learnt - When you foresee a problem make a LOT of noise to get people to act upon it and not wait till it comes back and bites you in the ass. Better yet, try not to get into a team where people can't understand the implications of shitty design choices. War room my ass!

I'm out of my mind bored. I'm an unemployed person with a great job. You'd think this would be awesome. It's torture.

I work for a consulting company. I get paid whether or not they have work for me. They haven't for several months. I'm not hearing anything. I don't know when it will change.

I'm a skilled developer in a few very popular languages - nothing remotely in the ballpark of old or obsolete. I hear that's in demand. I spend most of my time answering questions on Stack Overflow. I really like to help people, but it boggles my mind that the people struggling with the stuff I help them with all have actual work to do and I don't.

I like to learn about new stuff, but I'm just not interested in learning another framework or anything else to add to the giant pile of stuff I'm already not using. It's not fun anymore.

I don't want to do another side project, either. I have a job as a software developer. That should, at some point, involve developing some software.

This is sucking the life out of me. It's harder and harder to get out of bed and come to work. I've held off looking for another job because I'm hoping this will change. The people here are great. I could go somewhere else and it could suck for completely different reasons.

Ironically, this is close to the reason why I left my last job. Ten years ago I went through a spell where I just gave up and stopped coming to work for over a month. No one noticed. Other people were stressed about getting laid off. Some of them were. Not me.

Am I part of some weird experiment to see how insane someone can go in this totally screwed-up circumstance? Are people following me around with cameras?

I'd love to find something else, but by all outward appearances I had already found an awesome place to work. There's only one thing missing - the work.

Thanks for listening. I'm just going to put my head on my desk for a while and despair. What is wrong with this industry? We're a mess on so many levels.

La me working on a new chrome extension:

- ok, this page has some hidden divs, I need to tell the extension to make windows scroll to the bottom while there are still elements with a hidden class
- creates a while(1) loop with a condition inside it to break if no elements with hidden class are longer there.
- happy with the code
- uploads the extension
- goes to page
- brings out developer tools
- goes to console
- clicks on extension on chrome
- right clicks the extension and then inspect
- ok here we go: la me click on button inside extension popup
- console shows some logs
- nice it's still looking.
.
.
.
- wait! Why is the page not scrolling ???
- looks at logs, WTF nothing changes in logs .....
- OMMMMG a infinite loop .... infinite loop inside chrome ....
- OMMMMMG my pc's gonna crash .
-stop please stop stop.
- wait! how do I stop this?
- tries CTRL+C ... nothing
- tries CTRL+Z ... nothing ...
.
.
.
.
Abort abort Aboooooort.
.
.
.
- Deletes extension from chrome.
-..... loop still running
- clicks on X to close Chrome.....
- not closing O_o
- Oh God, i need to do something before Chrome sucks all the RAM left.
- remembers the savior...
.
.
.
- Task Manager heeeelp me.
- opens Task manager
- chrome is consuming ~ 2 GB of RAM.
- WTF! Kills chrome.

Thanks for reading my lil adventure 😅

Will try to keep that one short.

So we have internal system for active QR codes, nothing really special, as you could imagine. I wrote it when I was beginner but it works and is heavly battle-tested.

Today JBOG (just bunch of guys) come in and try to BS me that something is showing up wrongly for someone.

I check things up, nothing looks out of the order, I go there, everything looks fine too, and they say that yeah but this printed certificate's QR dosen't match what some QR with this name is within the system...

Short invastigation. TL;DR, someone who was rendering/printing these certificates had bunch of these codes with names like

30. ABC
31. ABC
32. ABC

And just casually missclicked...

And to come to that conclusion they need fucking backend dev to confirm that code last 1.5 year didnt magically change, and to destroy their magical belief that it's code's fault.

No, someone fucking missclicked. Whole magic. Usually problem is between chair and keyboard, get fucking used to it. Now, having that settled, let me get back to my work.

TLDR So according to our managers, our company is not dead yet, but very close to the edge. And there's nothing I can do about it.

Basically, they are asking the software devs to twirl our thumbs while we wait for other departments to pull us out of the dirt. Meanwhile, those people who can actually do something to get everyone back on track are running for the hills, looking for greener pastures (you know, sinking ship, turns out rats can swim).

I was told that I shouldn't leave as I am a 'vital part of the team whatever and so on'. But that is difficult to believe when I'm looking at 2 years minimum, in which nothing I will develop or have worked on in the past will make any difference. Whether I keep my job is determined by people who love numbers and have little concern for me as a person (not that this is new, but at least I was contributing before).

Guess I will be spending all that extra time at work reading and programming personal projects, since aside from no new projects, there will be no budget for taking courses that were promised before. Oh, and polishing my resume so I'll be ready when this ship finally goes down.

!dev

Ive been looking for a hobby for years but nothing is interesting enough.. i lose interest within a few hours (besides cars but thats expensive so i only work on it very once in a while).

But now everything changed.. I was looking for something that keeps my mind busy but I was soooo bored those last months that I went fishing just to get outside..
turns out my new hobby is the opposite of what i was looking for.. fishing and completely turn off my brain.. its so calming to just be alone in the nature and do a very simple task, thowing out and pulling in with a chamce of catching a nice dinner.. try-catch basically..

assembled my first custom rod today, i kept in mind what i liked about certain rods and then put the best of each of them into my own rod..

if youre stressed and and introvert you should try it..

havent been that calm in years..

So at school, we were supposed to do an exam through a third-party software that is supposed to block the user from searching the answers in a web browser.

We install the fucking software, lord and behold nothing works and the software keeps crashing...

The teacher insists that we are going to use this piece of shit software. One hour goes by and now the software made everyone's PC go black.

Someone suggests just doing the exam either through an ordinary browser or just by hand.

The teacher that just wasted one hour of fucking exam time lets out this big sigh and finally caves in...

And in a couple of weeks, we are going to use this shitty spaghetti-coded fuckfest called software for something called the "National tests"...

May Sky-daddy bless my classmates' souls and my own

!rant I need job advice. Please reason with me.

I am 26, got 2 years of experience in c# and unity3d.
I did some research and it turns out that the minimal paying average with my job/experience over the whole country is at least 300€ a month more than what i get payed currently.
I made a list of pros and cons, and am just not sure what would be smartest to do in the long run. Here is a list for both options, please chime in on me if you can!

Points for current job:
Permanent contract (hard to fire me etc.)
Get to make mostly mobile games but nothing really big
Fun small team whom i get along with (i am on the spectrum and can be hard to deal with social or costumer related things)
Rarely any overtime (i like to know my hours)
Easy but slow jobs (badly organized, drag on forever)
Rarely challenged and thus boring me
I get to shoot nerf guns at colleagues whenever
Low chance of a 300€/m pay increase (not worth it to boss, financials aren't that great but the company is promising)

Points for any other job:
Unknown working condittions
I am probably bad and uknowledgeable about any tool they give me to work with because my experience is so monotone
Start on short term contract again all over
At the least a 300€ net increase a month
Prob closer to home then 1h drive away
I get to learn new things but give up on games/apps as i know them
Probably get knowledgeable seniors
Probably end up in a bigger more serious company where i am just a number
I am bad in new social envirnoments, oh the angst is real

And a few things besides it are that i personally only have as goal to own my own house with my fiance as soon as i can. And this means i will need to take out a 200k loan or something along those lines, to be paid off over 30 years max.
This means that the permanent contract is very valuable in my eyes, but so is monthly pay increase.
I want to have fun in my job, i want to learn new things and better ways. But i also want to be able to say "enough" to something if it overwhelms me. I just know some things are not for me and i would mess up if i were made to do them. I fear that to not be an option in a big company. I would be forced out of my comfort zone without any regard for me or my learning curve.

Any advice is welcome. Please keep it general if you can so others can learn from this as well. Seniors advice will probably be helpfull to all starting programmers!

Michelin star Chefs, Chefs, sous chef, pastry chefs, cooks, burger flippers; they all prepare food.

I think that development is heading becoming a service industry. Millions of developers at the low end making next to nothing with less at the top making more; sometimes much more.

Then there will be shows like "Master Coder" where something is white boarded out and the contestants have a limited time to write the function.

tl;dr - why you no read this?

Here I am pondering why I continue to return to my job everyday when we are currently at month 13 of a 4 month project... yea let that set in for a minute... which is still at least 3-4 months away from being deployed due to annual leave of key stake holders and the whole Christmas period creeping up and things just not going as planned every step of the way.

There's no greater demotivater - is that even how you spell it - then being stuck in a project for so long you really just don't give a shit if it works or not anymore.

This has gone from a simple - relatively speaking - project to some monolithic mayhem of requirement changes and process adjustments, that have not only delayed our team, but 3rd party vendors needing to change things as well, or the requirements being wrong early so when you get up to business testing it's like "nope, that's not what we wanted" .... despite all the sessions of you personally giving the PM all the damn requirements.

But in saying that, they (3rd party) aren't innocent either, we have found nothing but issue after issue with their product since we started this project that who ever signed off on going forward with the thing should have been shot from both sides - it's not designed for the scale we will be using it yet we didn't find that out till we got so far into the rabbit hole we had a chance to be able to do load testing.

Meh, guess I'll go to work Monday and spend another week in misery trying to deliver something that just doesn't want to know what the finish line is.

I'm fed up with you guys ranting about what you SHOULD HAVE said, but instead just walked out, said something cowardly, or nothing at all...

For fuck sake, grow a pair and stand up for yourself! Noone else will...

I get it, this place is a nice vent, people understand, it's not face-to-face, it's easy. But the sheer number of you that had a clear chance to be grow, and ran for the door is alarming.

I also get it, it's mostly difficult to talk back to a client/boss/professor. But there's a few steps between FUCK YOUR FUCKING DIPSHIT FACE and running to the corner to post a rant here.

Find the right words. You don't have to sware, be civilized, but take a stand, present your arguments, present facts and proofs. Don't give in to their scare tactics, earn that respect you need and deserve! Then come here like a winner and share it with us.

It has become quite a tradition here to sware in all caps and then say that's what you should have said, but didn't. From now on, I'm -- these posts to give my two cents in an attempt to make this a community of winners ranting about a stupid world. Not a community of cowards ranting how world is scary.

How to delete 16 days of commits 101 🤯:

First of all, me and my class (computer science in college) were working on a project for around 12 weeks, our “client” is one of our teacher and we literally just finished today to work on the project since our degree terminal projects are starting next week.

So now there's this guy in our class who kinda has the reputation to be stuborn and clumsy; he’s going to do his assigned task, commit, push it and put his task into QA (which is just peer evaluation and testing nothing really complex) and then when we try his functionality and finds out it isn’t working, we tell him and the only thing he always answers is : “but it works on my machine” and then we will need to explicitly ask him to be sure he has all the latest changes (database and codebase) and to see if it still works on his side since it doesn’t work for anyone else.

This actually happened quite a lot in these 12 weeks and you can definitely imagine that of course it would definitely not happen again today when we thought we were finally done with this project…

So another teacher gave us an assignment to create a development environment for our big project so we could try out Docker instead of virtual machines, he made GitHub Classroom repos with a minified version of our project and up to this point everything is fine and clear. That is until 3 hours ago, that our little clumsy friend somehow pushed his Docker related files on the main project, maybe he was trying his Docker setup on the real project no big deal you know EXCEPT IF HE HADN’T NOT PULLED SINCE 16 DAYS 😤.

He was doing maintenance on another project so I can maybe understand but gosh how did he not see the big warning of Git that he wasn’t up to date with master ? And yes we only have a master branch bear with us but hopefully we were able to create a new branch with the up to date project and then merge master.

A couple of us had a gut feeling that this guy would do something that would break the whole project right before we ended, turns out we were right 😅

This new trend of platforms spamming with content discovery fucking suck. Nobody wants to follow multiple profiles with the exact same fucking content, especially when most of them are just people jumping on the bandwagon with more generic content and nothing to make it distinguishable. Also if 10 million people saw something on your platform, the it's pretty fucking sure already been posted and shared on every single platform out there, why the fuck would you still keep recommending it weeks or even months later?

I know spamming users with random (statistically more engaging) content leads to improved customer engagement as people sooner or later click these thing out of curiosity or boredom, but eventually they get tired of it altogether and leave for good. What happened to Netflix will also happen to YouTube, Instagram, and all other platforms unless they significantly improve the balance between content discovery and content continuity (i.e. the content each user follows and is coming back for).

First rant incoming!

I love when bizDEV people who are clearly not technical try to be technical. I mean I get when you want to try and understand something and I am totally down for letting you in on why we (the engineers) decided to do something a certain way. When you then go and tell us “no” and give the reason of “because I said so” it really doesn’t still well. Then you wonder why we don’t want to talk to you about anything? I mean it doesn’t take a genius to figure out you know nothing about anything we are doing but sure, why don’t we just go along with your plan because you are totally omniscient.

Then he decided that he wants to be in all the “idea” discussions... I really don’t understand because my ideas are not scheduled and I am not going to set up a meeting and write them down for later so you can feel needed and important.

This project had such a good chance of becoming something great but I have a bad feeling it’s going to fail now because non technical people are in charge of technical decisions.

End of rant, thanks for listening.

PayPal = GayPal

PHASE 1

1. I create my personal gaypal account
2. I use my real data
3. Try to link my debit card, denied
4. Call gaypal support via international phone number
5. Guy asks me for my full name email phone number debit card street address, all confirmed and verified
6. Finally i can add my card

PAHSE 2

7. Now the account is temporarily limited and in review, for absolutely no fucking reason, need 3 days for it to be done

8. Five (5) days later still limited i cant deposit or withdraw money

9. Call gaypal support again via phone number, burn my phone bill

10. Guy tells me to wait for 3 days and he'll resolve it

PHASE 3

11. One (1) day later (and not 3), i wake up from a yellow account to a red account where my account is now permanently limited WITHOUT ANY FUCKING REASON WHY

12. They blocked my card and forever blocked my name from using gaypal

13. I contact them on twitter to tell me what their fucking problem is and they tell me this:

"Hi there, thank you for being so patient while your conversation was being escalated to me. I understand from your messages that your PayPal account has been permanently limited, I appreciate this can be concerning. Sometimes PayPal makes the decision to end a relationship with a customer if we believe there has been a violation of our terms of service or if a customer's business or business practices pose a high risk to PayPal or the PayPal community. This type of decision isn’t something we do lightly, and I can assure you that we fully review all factors of an account before making this type of decision. While I appreciate that you don’t agree with the outcome, this is something that would have been fully reviewed and we would be unable to change it. If there are funds on your balance, they can be held for up to 180 days from when you received your most recent payment. This is to reduce the impact of any disputes or chargebacks being filed against you. After this point, you will then receive an email with more information on accessing your balance.

As you can appreciate, I would not be able to share the exact reason why the account was permanently limited as I cannot provide any account-specific information on Twitter for security reasons. Also, we may not be able to share additional information with you as our reviews are based on confidential criteria, and we have no obligation to disclose the details of our risk management or security procedures or our confidential information to you. As you can no longer use our services, I recommend researching payment processors you can use going forward. I aplogise for any inconvenience caused."

PHASE 4

14. I see they basically replied in context of "fuck you and suck my fucking dick". So I reply aggressively:

"That seems like you're a fraudulent company robbing people. The fact that you can't tell me what exactly have i broken for your terms of service, means you're hiding something, because i haven't broken anything. I have NOT violated your terms of service. Prove to me that i have. Your words and confidentially means nothing. CALL MY NUMBER and talk to me privately and explain to me what the problem is. Go 1 on 1 with the account owner and lets talk

You have no right to block my financial statements for 180 days WITHOUT A REASON. I am NOT going to wait 6 months to get my money out

Had i done something wrong or violated your terms of service, I would admit it and not bother trying to get my account back. But knowing i did nothing wrong AND STILL GOT BLOCKED, i will not back down without getting my money out or a reason what the problem is.

Do you understand?"

15. They reply:

"I regret that we're unable to provide you with the answer you're looking for with this. As no additional information can be provided on this topic, any additional questions pertaining to this issue would yield no further responses. Thank you for your time, and I wish you the best of luck in utilizing another payment processor."

16. ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? I AM BLOCKED FOR NO FUCKING REASON, THEY TOOK MY MONEY AND DONT GIVE A FUCK TO ANSWER WHY THEY DID THAT?

HOW CAN I FILE A LAWSUIT AGAINST THIS FRAUDULENT CORPORATION?

On Tuesday my client states she will get me one more piece of info I need to launch the site.

On Wednesday, nothing.

On Thursday, nothing.

On Friday she berates me that the site is overdue and demands it be launched before Saturday so she can send the announcement email.

I remind her that I was waiting for the information.

She responds, testily, that the info wasn't mission critical after all and to just insert something as a placeholder. Oh, and that there had been a religious holiday and so nobody would have been available to respond to the information request anyways. Like I'm just supposed to know all that without anyone telling me.

I'm now trying to get the attention of our overseas developer, who is the only person who can pull this off, but he's likely clocked out for the weekend.

I'm so mad right now I'm about ready to burn the whole site to the ground, cut my losses, and just walk away. But that would damage my reputation.

Saw a reddit thread earlier asking about the most unsettling shit that people have found out Google has on them by downloading their data. I saw a bunch of comments about people finding voice recordings that Google had taken. After reading these, I was wondering what I could find from downloading my data. Decided to download my data, and on the page for it I saw that apparently I had disabled location history, audio activity, and device information.

Knowing companies like Google, I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't stop recording that stuff, just that they're not providing it to me. There were zero voice recordings, but there was location history up until about the beginning of 2017.

Another thing they have is all the pictures from all of my hangouts chats. Apparently there had a good amount of older pictures of myself in there. Going back to probably 2-3 years ago, when I had my emo hair. Just a bit of a throwback. One picture I saw was from last January, when my hair was reaching my chest. Made me really miss my hair.

Other than that, nothing that interesting. Just something I thought I'd share.

So, for the past...what, week or so? I've been working on a side project with @gianlu. It's the PretendYoureXyzzy fork - our attempt to rejuvenate an old shitty piece of software.

I had started working on a fork alone, and then he asked to team up so I was like "Sure, I got nothing better to do." So, he's working on the backend (and hooking JS up to the backend) and I'm developing the frontend.

I don't know why I thought tech would stand still. Google says they're putting MDL on life support and replacing it with a much more complex successor, MDC. It's not hard to use, but what really bugs me is the lack of notice on getmdl.io. If you are switching to another project as your main focus, why the fuck wouldn't you advertise in the most places possible?

Granted, I don't do web design and/or development on the daily. Yes, I can do it, but I'm not always as up-to-date with web technologies as I'd like to be.

However, the screencap captured is the third time I've taken the knife to the UI. MDC is great tooling, at least to me. That dialog? Not something MDL would've had out the box on the first day. You'd have to work for that.

I don't have an issue with MDC, I have an issue with the lack of PR around it.

I just can't stress enough how fascinated I am by biology and biochemistry.

I mean, we, who call ourselves engineers, are no more but a gang of toddlers having a blast with jumbo legos on Aunt Lucy's dining room carpet on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Our solutions using "modern tools" and "modern engineering" are mere attempts to *very* remotely mimic what beautiful and elegant solutions are around us and inside of each of us.

IC/EC engines, solar batteries, computers and quantum computers, spaceships and ISSes, AI/ML, ... What are they? just the means to leverage what's been created all around us to create something that either entertains us, encourages our laziness or helps us to look at the other absolutely fascinating engineering solutions surrounding us so we could try and "replicate" their working principles to further embrace our laziness and entertain us.

Just look at the humble muscle - a myofibril made out of actin and myosin. The design is soooo simple and spot on, so elegant and efficient, the "battery" and signalling system are so universal and efficient.

Look at all those engineering miracles, small and big. Look how they work, how they leverage both big and small to create holistic, simplistic and absolutely efficient mechanisms. And then come back to me, and tell me again that all these brilliant solutions came out of nothing just by an accident we call "evolution".

How blinded by our narcissism are we to claim that there can't be a grand designer of any kind, that there's nothing smarter than us and that the next best thing than us is an incomprehensible series of accidental mutations over an unimaginable amount of time?

I mean.. could it be that someone/something greater than us created us and everything around us? naaaah.. we are the crown jewel of this universe. Everything else must be either magic or an accident. /s

Don't read this as yet another crazy-about-God person's ramblings. I'm not into religion fwiw. But science has taught me enough critical thinking to question its merit. Look at it all as engineers. Which is more probable: that everything around us happened by an accident or that someone/something preceding us had a say in the design?

Story Time!

Tittle: About Larry.

Fun Game: Tell me if / when in this story you know the plot twist.

Setting: Years ago, non coding job.

I work with Larry a lot, Larry works remote. In technical terms Larry is senior to me and I escalate some technical issues that get assigned to Larry. I've never met Larry in person.

Larry can be hard to work with, but he's plenty good at his job and I don't mind his prickly side. Sometimes it takes telling Larry something a few times before it sinks it, but that's not a big deal. Sometimes it seems like Larry doesn't remember his cases entirely, but he has a lot of cases. Also Larry has good reason for how he works considering the land of scubs who usually escalate to him without any thought / effort.

Larry's escalation team is short staffed and they're trying to hire folks, but that's been like that forever.

So one day I get an email that Larry is going to be out of the office for a few weeks. Nothing unusual there.

My current case that I share with Larry sort of floats in limbo for a while. The customer is kinda slow to respond anyhow and there's nothing that I need Larry for.

Finally I get automated notice that my case has had a new escalation engineer. Laura. Laura is much more positive and happy compared to Larry. Understandably Laura isn't up to date on the case so we go back and forth with some emails and notes in the case.

The case is moving along just fine, we're making progress, but it's slow because of the customer's testing procedures. Then we hit a point where this customer's management pushes on sales for a solution (this customer's management is known for doing this rando like for no reason).

Down the management chain it goes and everyone wants a big conference call to get everyone up to date / discuss next steps (no big deal).

Now I really don't want to do this with Laura and throw her into the deep end with this customer, she doesn't have the background and I'd rather do this call with Larry & Me & Laura. Also according to the original email Larry is due back soon.

I start writing an email to Laura about "Let's try to schedule this for when Larry gets back."

Then I stop ... I don't really know why I stop but when it is a "political case" I want some buy in on next steps from management so I go talk to my manager.

-Plot Twist Incoming-

Long story short, my manager says:

"Laura IS Larry..."

O

M

G

I had no idea. Nobody told me, nobody told ANYBODY, (except a couple managers).

Back up a few months Larry apparently went to his managers and told them he was going to transition, surgery and all, in a few months.

Managers wondering how to address this went to HR and some new hire very young to be a manager HR manager drone logiced out in her bonkers head that "Well it shouldn't matter so don't tell anyone."

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME!!??

Thank god I didn't send that email...

I did send an email to Laura explaining that I had no idea and hoped I didn't say anything stupid. She was very nice about it and said it was all good.

After that incident made the management rounds (management was already fuming about being told not to tell anyone) things came to another critical point.

Laura was going to visit the company HQ. Laura had been there before, as Larry, everyone knew her as Larry... nobody (outside some managers) knew Laura was Larry either. With nobody knowing shit Laura was going to walk in and meet everyone ...

One manager at HQ finally rebelled and held a meeting to tell his people. He didn't want Laura walking in and someone confused, thinking it was a joke or something horrible happening.

HR found out and went ballistic. They were on a rampage about this other manager, they wanted to interview me about how I found out. I told HR to schedule their meeting through my manager (I knew they didn't want my manager to know they were sniffing around).

Finally the VP in our department called up the HR head and asked WTF was going on / kind of idiots they had over there (word has it legal and the CEO were on the call too).

HR had a change in leadership and then a couple weeks later there were department wide meetings on how to handle such situations and etc.

You know what really grinds my gears more than anything else? Not having anything to work on at work.

That might sound like the most german thing to say but bear with me for a second.

Even though i am almost one year into my job as a junior dev, i consider myself and i probably am very new to the coding world. And even if i weren't new i would still have to continuously learn and improve. And every time i just sit in front of my working station, with nothing to do, i'd rather figure out an incredibly tedious bug, learn lisp or deal with a shitty framework.

Most of the time i don't know what to do. I improve my workflow with some bash-scripts and aliases, i read into the details of certain tools but at the end of it, i can't really get into something deeper and get value out of it because actual work might just be around the corner...

I seriously thought I was losing my mind this morning.

Loaded up my IDE and got to work.

Needed to find something in the project, so I hit the keyboard shortcut to find all usages in the project path.

The dialog pops up, but my selection is replaced with a long hex string. I thought it was weird, but I just installed the latest update of my IDE so I thought I'd found a regression. I grabbed the hex string and went over to Google to see if anything useful popped up.

The first result is the reddit post for my keybase key.

Wait. The "random" hex string was the fingerprint for my keybase public key? I double-checked to make sure that keybase wasn't running and I didn't have anything weird hanging out on my clipboard. Nothing amiss, but I still got my key whenever I searched for something.

This is the point where my brain got a little melty. I started running weird conspiracy theories in my head. My ever-helpful coworkers could only suggest to "stop using a Mac".

I saw that the app menu got highlighted when I opened the dialog, so I opened the menu and looked at the Services. Lo and behold, the GPG Suite update I installed recently very "helpfully" added a global shortcut to "Insert My Fingerprint" with the same keyboard shortcut as the IDE action.

So, i've noticed something:

- My grandfather drinks nothing but the water.
- My grandmother recently increased her water intake due to meds making her retain water way less
- My dad has been drinking more water in an attempt to be healthier.
- I don't drink the house water without boiling it first, as i'm the only one that thinks it smells and tastes like wet dog smells, aside from with like kool-aid or similar where the taste is masked enough to not be detectable.

Well, what does this matter? I'll tell you:
- My grandfather went from fine aside from minor balance issues to totally mentally fried in 24 hours.
- My grandmother is spacing out while driving and falling more and more.
- My dad went from fine to overwhelmed by basic decisions in a couple months of moving here.
- I've noticed a slight decline in my mental health, but this is probably from issues i've had with my college and general stress.

Correlation ≠ causation, but... it's usually-unfiltered water from a well placed uncomfortably close to a lagoon, and it was never tested for safety before use (despite my protests.)

This is definitely a total first world problem but I am so frustrated.

I am stuck in a team that embodies the Japanese proverb "The nail that sticks out gets hammered down".

The management are there because it is convenient and flexible and have no interest in managing or keeping up with tech.
The lead developers are extremely anti-social and are not approachable and the this stems down to the devs (not all but really most) - all there just to do the bare minimum and spend most of their energies in trying to avoid work or having learn something.

Unfortunately I am passionate about what I do and want to build high-quality products and this has put me at odds with the way things work.

I could fill up alot of time talking about how I was ordered to "cut" images/icons out of PDFs rather just getting them from the branding team, or how I was scolded for having set up logging, detected a problem caused by another developer and fixed it before it cost a big client a massive amount of money... But really the point is that I have never worked somewhere with such an awful attitude to enthusiasm and quite frankly it boggles my mind trying to understand how they rationalise these things but the answer is always laziness.

Obviously there are worse problems in the world than working in a job where you are encouraged to do nothing... But it actually really depresses me and causes anxiety that I am working with people who don't care about testing or monitoring or learning new things or even collaboration.

...sigh...

Hopefully the job market will start opening again soon

I am so fucking lost.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In today's episode of kidding on SystemD, we have a surprise guest star appearance - Apache Foundation HTTPD server, or as we in the Debian ecosystem call it, the Apache webserver!

So, imagine a situation like this - Its friday afternoon, you have just migrated a bunch of web domains under a new, up to date, system. Everything works just fine, until... You try to generate SSL certificates from Lets Encrypt.

Such a mundane task, done more than a thousand times already... Yet... No matter what you do, nothing works. Apache just returns a HTTP status code 403 - Forbidden.

Of course, what many folk would think of first when it came to a 403 error is - Ooooh, a permission issue somewhere in the directory structure!

So you check it... And re-check it to make sure... And even switch over to the user the webserver runs under, yet... You can access the challenge just fine, what the hell!

So you go deeper... And enable the most verbose level of logging apache is capable of - Trace8. That tells you... Not a whole lot more... Apparently, the webserver was unable to find file specified? But... Its right there, you can see it!

So you go another step deeper and start tracing the process' system calls to see exactly where it calls stat/lstat on the file, and you see that it... Calls lstat and... It... Returns -1? What the hell#2!

So, you compile a custom binary that calls lstat on the first argument given and prints out everything it returns... And... It works fine!

Until now, I chose to omit one important detail that might have given away the issue to the more knowledgeable right away. Our webservers have the URL /.well-known/acme-challenge/, used for ACME challenges, aliased somewhere else on the filesystem - To /tmp/challenges.

See the issue already?

Some *bleep* over at the Debian Package Maintainer group decided that Apache could save very sensitive data into /tmp, so, it would be for the best if they changed something that worked for decades, and enabled a SystemD service unit option "PrivateTmp" for the webserver, by default.

What it does is that, anytime a process started with this option enabled writes to /tmp/*, the call gets hijacked or something, and actually makes the write to a private /tmp/something/tmp/ directory, where something... Appeared as a completely random name, with the "apache2.service" glued at the end.

That was also the only reason why I managed fix this issue - On the umpteenth time of checking the directory structure, I noticed a "systemd-private-foobarbas-apache2.service-cookie42" directory there... That contained nothing but a "tmp" directory with 777 as its permission, owned by the process' user and group.

Overriding that unit file option finally fixed the issue completely.

I have just one question - Why? Why change something that worked for decades? I understand that, in case you save something into /tmp, it may be read by 3rd parties or programs, but I am of the opinion that, if you did that, its only and only your fault if you wrote sensitive data into the temporary directory.

And as far as I am aware, by default, Apache does not actually write anything even remotely sensitive into /tmp, so...

Why. WHY!
I wasted 4 hours of my life debugging this! Only to find out its just another SystemD-enabled "feature" now!

And as much as I love kidding on SystemD, this time, I see it more as a fault of the package maintainers, because... I found no default apache2/httpd service file in the apache repo mirror... So...

Funny topic. I normally am very understanding of incompetence when it comes from nothing more than lack of experience. Happens to all who at one point is a junior dev.
As long as people have the willingess to learn I find myself being very understanding.

I take a lot of effort in helping others, I don't mind at all, and I would rather take them extra 10 mins to explain how to do something than to slap people with rtfm and then blame them completely when their lack of experience messes up stuff. I also take care of providing isolated environments and giving explanations. Even when they screw up, it is isolated from the rest and I can teach them what was wrong, most of the time they figure it out themselves. It has made my coworkers respect me more, rather than being a total dick that believes that what I do is sacred and should be spared from newbs (like all the idiots in S.O) i take the approach of a very patient mentor.

But I am a hippie, shit works for me.

But I do not excuse shitty attitudes and arrogance. I find that not knowing is fine, but acting as if one knows all and then fucking shit up makes it bad.
Which is when I change, I am a hippie but can get violent pretty quickly.

I have been screwed over shitty attitudes more than incompetence.

When your company is sinking, and you keep suggesting to pivot, trying something new or different enough, having some meeting to think about new levers to increase revenue... and the only answer is "we don't have enough time for this. Let's try tweaking <insert random feature here>".

WE ARE LOSING 30.000€+ EACH MONTH!!! WHO FUCKING CARES ABOUT CHANGING THIS FEATURE NOW!!!

Today it's been more than 7 months since "we don't have enough time". Still nothing intelligent has been tried. The company could be closed down in 2 month. FUCK YA ALL decision makers!

Now I'll probably lose my job just because you're too fucking stupid to get your finger out of your ass! The company is in the exact same state since 7 months!!! Go burn in hell!

Tuesdays at work suck. This is something I've put a lot of thought into.

Take Monday for instance, we love to hate him, when it comes to Mondays we all know the score we tell Monday where he can go and he takes that and owns it. He knows we hate him and we all know where we stand.

Wednesday is hump day, not great but we know we're halfway through the week. Thursday gets us a little excited cos we can see the end of the week.

Friday is the one we've been waiting for and we love him, Saturday and Sunday are bliss.

Tuesday... What's Tuesday got? It's just a day, there's nothing going on with Tuesdays.

Well except this week, in the UK we had Monday off as a statutory vacation, so this week, this week Tuesday is the day we love to hate, he's now got all this beginning of the week rage directed at him. The other days are unaffected, Thursday and Friday still have their thing, Wednesday still marks the half way point.

Monday has buggered off and let Tuesday be something for a day, I don't think he can take it. If he could Monday would probably go into retirement. Monday probably has more hatred directed towards it than Katie Hopkins (and that's saying something).

In short, no, no I do not want to get out of bed and go to work today, but I will, cos that's just what we do, but fuck you Tuesday.

Fuck you with a bag of spanners...

...Sideways...

...With habanero sauce...

... And a pineapple.

I need to rant about life decisions, and choosing a dev career probably too early. Not extremely development related, but it's the life of a developer.

TL;DR: I tried a new thing and that thing is now my thing. The new thing is way more work than my old thing but way more rewarding & exciting. Try new things.

I taught myself to program when I was a kid (11 or 12 years old), and since then I have always been absolutely sure that I wanted to be a games programmer. I took classes in high school and college with that aim, and chose a games programming degree. Everything was so simple, nail the degree, get a job programming something, and take the first games job that I could and go from there.

I have always had random side hobbies that I liked to teach myself, just like programming. And in uni I decided that I wanted to learn another language (natural, not programming) because growing up in England meant that I only learned English and was rarely exposed to anything else. The idea of knowing another fascinated me.

So I dabbled in a few different languages, tried to find a culture that seemed to fit my style and attitude to life and others, and eventually found myself learning Korean. That quickly became something I was doing every single day, and I decided I needed to go to Korea and see what life there could be like.

I found out that my university offered a free summer school program for a couple of weeks, all I had to pay for was the flights. So a few months later I was there and it was literally the best thing I'd done in my life to that point. I'd found two things that made me feel even better than the idea of becoming the games programmer I'd always wanted to be. Travelling and using my other language to communicate with people that I couldn't in English. At that point I was still just a beginner, but even the simple conversations with people who couldn't speak English felt awesome.

So when I returned home, I found that that trip had completely thrown a spanner into my life plan. All I could think about after that was improving my language skills and going back there for as long as possible. Who knows what to do.

I did exactly that. I studied harder than I'd ever studied for anything and left the next year to go and study in Korea, now with intermediate language skills, everyday conversations no longer being a problem at all.

Now I live here, I will be here for the next year and I have to return to England for one year to finish my degree. Then instead of having my simple plan of becoming a developer, I can think of nothing I want to do less than just stay in England doing the same job every day, nothing to do with language. I need to be at least travelling to Korea, and using my language skills in at least some way.

The current WIP plan is to take intensive language classes here (from next week, every single weekday), build awesome dev side projects and contribute to open source stuff. Then try to build a life of freelance translation/interpreting/language teaching and software development (maybe here, maybe Korea).

So the point of this rant is that before, I had a solid plan. Now I am sat in my bed in Korea writing this, thinking about how I have almost no idea how I'm going to build the life that I want. And yet somehow, the uncertainty makes this so much more exciting and fulfilling. There's a lot more worrying, planning and deciding to do. But I think the fact that I completely changed my life goals just through a small decision one day to satisfy a curiosity is a huge life lesson for me. And maybe reading this will help other people decide to just try doing something different for once, and see if your life plan holds up.

If it does, never stop trying new things. If it doesn't (like mine), then you now know that you've found something that you love as much as or even more that your plan before. Something that you might have lived your whole life never finding.

I don't expect many people to read this all, but writing it here has been very cathartic for me, and it's still a rant because now I have so much more work and planning to do. But it's the good kind of work.

Things aren't so simple now, but they're way more worth it.

It was funny. But when I told the head of my dptmnt that I was getting bored at work they kinda freaked out. I really love my workplace. The people are nice everywhere and this is something I am not used to.
I started working when I was 13 at one of my dad's business. It was a lot of manual labor and every day my hands would be bruised because of all the cleaning and shit I had to do. Then he moved me to another one of his businesses and it was worse but I continued doing it for only 1 year. By 16 I had moved to simpler things, I was a waiter and even tho I hated it I was making enough money to go out on dates and buy whatever a 16 year old wanted. I continued being a waiter until I was 17(changed to two other places) and before I turned 18 I joined the U.S Army. That broke my body in ways that I would normally not believe a 18 year old capable of. It was around the time that I discovered programming but even after I left the military(at 22 I believe) I never worked on a programming job. Back at home I worked in retail. And believe you me....it is far more pleasant to be constantly getting blown up and broken than dealing with the most retarded people imaginable(this is what made me hate Mexican people even tho I am Mexican myself)

Fast forward at 23 and I landed my first programming jobs. As stated in other initial rant it was surrounded by assholes. Assholes everywhere that would cower at the idea of speaking to me face to face due to the possibility of being left as physically broken as I am.

But at 27 now I found myself in a happy place. With nice people, good coworkers, an amazing manager that also serves as eye candy and good benefits. But the job is boring, boring beyond belief and this is due to the fact that they have a self taught and academically trained computer scientist doing the most menial things on a daily basis. The shit that I do would be more becoming of a designer, which has a different set of mental skills that would probably engage them more. But I really don't want to work on the web unless I am doing something that actually takes some challenge, even tho I maintain Java and PHP web services, the shit is so boring that anyone would be able to finish the proceadures in hours on a day leaving one with nothing engaging to do. Sometimes I let shit get close to the deadline just to feel some sort of pressure that would keep me awake.

I just wanted to vent on how ceremoniously BORED i really am.

I want more shit to do. Can't really have much patience for the freelance shit since it doesn't make sense to hire me in exchange of having some indian dude doing it for a quarter of the price.

First day of vacation, on a remote village cause of covid, after months of doing nothing special I made this :D
It's a keyboard to do combinations of keys (prototype) ...
Well, I made it to play sound effects in games (on voice chat)....
Ya, having a burn out fucks your motivation. At least I did something

I really need to vent. Devrant to the rescue! This is about being undervalued and mind-numbingly stupid tasks.

The story starts about a year ago. We inherited a project from another company. For some months it was "my" project. As our company was small, most projects had a "team" of one person. And while I missed having teammates - I love bouncing ideas around and doing and receiving code reviews! - all was good. Good project, good work, good customer. I'm not a junior anymore, I was managing just fine.
After those months the company hired a new senior software engineer, I guess in his forties. Nice and knowledgeable guy. Boss put him on "my" project and declared him the lead dev. Because seniority and because I was moved to a different project soon afterwards. Stupid office politics, I was actually a bad fit there, but details don't matter. What matters is I finally returned after about 3/4 of a year.

Only to find senior guy calling all the shots. Sure, I was gone, but still... Call with the customer? He does it. Discussion with our boss? Only him. Architecture, design, requirements engineering, any sort of intellectually challenging tasks? He doesn't even ask if we might share the work. We discuss *nothing* and while he agreed to code reviews, we're doing zero. I'm completely out of the loop and he doesn't even seem to consider getting me in.

But what really upsets me are the tasks he prepared for me. As he first described them they sounded somewhat interesting from a technical perspective. However, I found he had described them in such detail that a beginner student would be bored.
A description of the desired behaviour, so far so good. But also how to implement it, down to which classes to create. He even added a list of existing classes to get inspiration or copy code from. Basically no thinking required, only typing.

Well not quite, I did find something I needed to ask. Predictably he was busy. I was able to answer my question myself. He was, as it turns out, designing and implementing something actually interesting. Which he never had talked about with me. Out of the loop. Fuck.

Man, I'm fuming. I realize he's probably just ignorant. But I feel treated like his typing slave. Like he's not interested in my brain, only in my hands. I am *so* fucking close to assigning him the tasks back, and telling him since I wasn't involved in the thinking part, he can have his shitty typing part for himself, too. Fuck, what am I gonna do? I'd prefer some "malicious compliance" move but not coming up with ideas right now.

I just had a new employee, barely out of school, question whether or not we are ready to start a big refactor of an aging legacy system. She knows nothing about the system we are about to attack, barely has 12 months experience as a developer and knows nothing about the past 6 years of countless meetings, discussions and experience leading to the decision to refactor. Still, she's not "convinced" we are ready to get started.

Gen Z - they sure are something different. God damn it, I know it sounds old but where's the fucking humbleness? Spoilt little shits, the world is fucked.

Small company, sole engineer. Non-tech management. Increasingly fancy job titles despite working alone most of the time, with the promise of hiring someone (again) I can actually manage soon.

Backlog of projects/tasks is truly a mindfuck, with new things being added each week. This backlog will never ever get done, and nothing matters anyway because the next idea is "the future", all the time.

While I have influence on some aspects of decision making, it usually ends up being what the boss wants. Actively opposed a project because it's just too big of an undertaking, it was forced through anyway. I'm trying to keep the scope manageable as I'm building it now, and it's hard.

"It's the future, we absolutely have to do this. It will be the biggest thing we've ever done."

Boss's excitement then quickly faded since it's actually in development, now nobody really seems to want to know where it's at, or how it will all work. I need to scope it out, with the knowledge that many decisions boss signed off will be questioned when he actually looks at it. We now have even more "exciting" ideas of utter grandeur. Stuff that I can't even begin to comprehend the complexity of, while struggling to keep a self imposed deadline on the current one.

Every single morning we sit on Zoom for a "valuable" "catch-up". This is absolutely perfect for one thing: Completely destroying whatever drive and focus I have going into the day. Unrelated topics, marketing conversations, even more ideas, ideas for ideas sake, small problems blown out of proportion, the list goes on. I recently argued in detail why it should be scrapped or at least be optional to attend. No luck, it's "valuable".

Today a new idea was announced, and we absolutely have to do it ASAP because it can only be better than the current solution. I raise my concerns, saying it's not as easy as you make it out to be, we should properly think about it. Nope! We'll botch something to prove that it works... So you'll base your decision whether it's good on some half ass botch job that nobody really has the mental capacity to actually pay attention to. What a reliable way to measure!

"Our analytics data isn't useful enough to tell us the impact of things we do. We (you) have to fix this." Over the last 2 or so years, I've been pushing for an overhaul and expansion of our data analysis capabilities for exactly this reason. Integrating different data sources into a unified solution so we can easily see what we're doing, etc. Nope, never happened.

The new project idea which is based on wild assumptions is ALWAYS more important than the groundwork.

Now when I mentioned that this is what I wanted to do all along, it got brushed aside. "We don't need to do anything complicated, just fix this, add that, and it's done. It should be an easy thing to do. This is very important for our decision making." Fine, have it your way.

I'm officially burned out. It's so fucking hard to get myself to focus on my work for more than an hour or two. I started a side project, and even that effort is falling victim to my day-job-induced apathy.

I'm tempted to hand in my resignation without another offer on the table. I just need time to rediscover my passion, and go job hunting from that position, instead of the utter desperation of right now.

If you've read through all this rambling, kudos to you!

A service had/has been logging hundreds of errors in the development environment and I reached out to the owning process mgr that the error was occurring and perhaps a good opportunity to log additional data to help troubleshoot the issue if the problem ever made its way to production. He responded saying the error was related to a new feature they weren't going to implement in the backing dev database (TL;DR), and they know it works in production (my spidey sense goes off).
They deployed the changes to production this morning and immediately starting throwing errors (same error I sent)
Mgr messaged me a little while ago "Did you make any changes to the documentation service? We're getting this error .."

50% sure someone misspelled something in a config, but only thing they are logging is 'Unable to parse document'. Nothing that indicates an issue with the service they're using.