Me: *puts small piece of tape over webcam*

NSA: Okay guys, shut it all down. No way we can record from the microphone, log keys, access the file system, USB devices, network data or watch the screen. He did the tape.

User:"It's not working"
Me:"Have you turned it off and on again?"
User:"Yes"
Me: goes down there, system uptime is 360days...
"How do you turn it off?"
User:"by pressing the button on the monitor

Today I found out that I could inject HTML into our documentation system.
I quickly tested it with the <style> tag by setting all paragraph tags to have eye bleeding red backgrounds.
Then when seeing that it works I've made a modal that displays a blinking red alert with the headline "Access Denied!", a loading bar that says "Tracing intruder IP..." and another line "Erasing confidential information.. .".
Then I've added an animation to run on all paragraph, heading and list tags - first they bounce and then the become transparent.

Then I asked one of the interns to go to that specific document - one of the longest and most important manuals they have access to.
I then left the room and through a window watched the poor, panicking guy looking into the abyss and "realizing" that he somehow deleted the important files and will be traced down soon.

I had to tell him the truth to avoid a suicide in the office.

It was perfect! I will definitely do this to others! :D

So they were having trouble with the server always being slow and maxed to 100%, so the boss told me when wait times were hitting 5+mins due to server trying to catch up, he complained at me, said if I could get the wait time to 30sec to instant he would raise my pay to 90k a year, then walked away after I agreed, I was quite serious but I don't think he thought I was, so I decided to look over the system, IDK who but they put all the calculations and processing server-side for the CA's on floor then sent the completed view to the CA, so I spent months recreating the entire system except the server only pulled the data needed then the new client would do all the processing on their computer since they weren't doing anything anyways, I did a practice run today as its one of our peak days, wait times went to barely 5secs or "instant" according to CA's, I walked into the office, slapped that hourly report down after just two hours and showed the massive increase in employees production times.

That look on his face...
That look on my face...
That look on my next check...

Bliss

Another story on the spirit of wk93. TL;DR I DOS'd the whole campus network for some beers.

In highschool teachers had this blackboard system (a sort of moodle) and we used to have really lazy teachers who only read the PowerPoint presentations and made us take notes. One day I was fed up with their bullshit and figured these lazy ass professors wouldn't "teach" crap as soon as there was no internet connection...so the race was on...

10 minutes before the bell rang a friend and I managed to break in into a computer lab, I booted up Kali and searched for the access points, 3 routers through the building all with CISCO OS.

I figured they had all the default configs, time was running out so I decided to Smurf the three access points with the lab's IP range, scheduled an automatic shutdown in 2 hours and blocked the PC. The bell rang and as predicted, no internet, no class, my friends and I used that free time to go to a bar (on a Monday afternoon).

Funny side note, since the 3 routers were down the whole network collapsed, no cameras, no access control, no faculty network or any network. We kept doing it and every time we did campus security would be desperately searching for someone with a black hoodie.

Drank this now my entire nervous system is shutting down!

Remember the Ububtu mobile OS ?

I remember working on the community UI drive for this project. To know that something as awesome as ubuntu would come down into the form factor of a phone , was just ecstatic.

The first build was out , people liked it. People nagged a bit about the performance issues , but it was going fine. Then the second build .. then the third no one heard about and the 4th that never came.

The interface for this system was unique because after Wondows , this is the only other OS developer that embraced the one ecosystem mantra of design.

Using Ubuntu phone was natural , it was a small desktop OS.

I remember logging on to launchpad one day and seeing the Ubuntu mobile channel with it's last post " Thank you and goodbye "

It was heartbreaking , but i could understand. Like windows phone ( which if you guys weren't aware of , had APK support by the end of its lifecycle ) felt crushed under the weight of android and iOS.

Waiting for a day when there will be a third champion in game. I miss having to see Ubuntu being on my phone , but they seem to be doing great in everything else , so good on that. 😄

Ok done .. thanks

Not a rant, but I found this funny enough to share.

About two weeks ago, I’m contacted by a third party development firm that is responsible for building the next iteration of a control board were are developing. Alongside build of the PCB they were scoped to flash the firmware and verify all connected components.

During the call, they tell me they don’t have the resources to build our testing environment with the Ansible script I provided, and they don’t know if the updates they have made will work with our control system. Ugh...really...

I attempt to walk them through the 3 pretty simple commands to launch the playbook. Instead of listening, their project manager insists that I need to load up the environment and send them a ready to go system.

I quickly load up a RaspberryPi and prepare it for shipping. I hand the box to our shipping clerk and fill out the shipping request documentation. Then about a week goes by and this is where the story really begins.

I get an email from the same rep asking where the environment is, and I head down to the warehouse to inquire where the RaspberryPi might be. After speaking with the head clerk, we can’t seem to track down the package. I’m assured that they will find the Pi and send me the shipment update.

I pass the information along and after about a day and a half I still didn’t receive word back from the warehouse team. I load up another Pi and head back down to the warehouse. I follow up with the warehouse staff. They inform me that they have not been able to locate my package and another warehouse worker is called over. He says he hasn’t seen it, but they they were having a food day that day and he thinks more than likely someone ate it.

Like it didn’t even click at first but after a few seconds I realize that these guys have literally been looking for a pie for the past two days...and I JUST DIE.

After the 5 or so minutes of laughing I show them the newly flashed RaspberryPi, and of course they know exactly where the original one was.

It’s shipped out now, but wow. Also, it turns out the PCB manufacturing company didn’t even really need this and it was all a guise to hide that they are behind schedule and that they will not be able to finish the work scoped. FML!

Me: Your computer has Operating System corruption.

Customer: What does that mean?

Me: *something, something potato chips* and the only fix is to reinstall Windows.

Customer: Well that's stupid! I need my computer! Darn Windows! Microsoft should pay for that reinstallation! What causes that corruption anyway?

Me: Well, any number of things, but it's mostly caused by a part of the update not downloading correctly, so when it gets installed it creates a hole.

Customer: So now hold on... could shutting the computer down during the updates cause this corruption.

Me: It could, yes. That's why they say to not unplug your computer or shut it down while running the updates.

Customer: I see. Cause yeah, I remember that I was angry when it said it had to do updates, so I shut it down.

Me: Yep, that would cause it.

Customer: Okay, reinstall Windows...

My PC when I use it: "..."

My PC when I look at something on my phone: *gentle fan hum*

My PC when I resume activity : "..."

My PC, 5 minutes after leaving it: **VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV**

** sits down, still big fan blowing, open up the task manager to see what's bugging the system **

** PC calms down **

I have an overly attached PC?

In a user-interface design meeting over a regulatory compliance implementation:
User: “We’ll need to input a city.”
Dev: “Should we validate that city against the state, zip code, and country?”
User: “You are going to make me enter all that data? Ugh…then make it a drop-down. I select the city and the state, zip code auto-fill. I don’t want to make a mistake typing any of that data in.”
Me: “I don’t think a drop-down of every city in the US is feasible.”
Manage: “Why? There cannot be that many. Drop-down is fine. What about the button? We have a few icons to choose from…”
Me: “Uh..yea…there are thousands of cities in the US. Way too much data to for anyone to realistically scroll through”
Dev: “They won’t have to scroll, I’ll filter the list when they start typing.”
Me: “That’s not really the issue and if they are typing the city anyway, just let them type it in.”
User: “What if I mistype Ch1cago? We could inadvertently be out of compliance. The system should never open the company up for federal lawsuits”
Me: “If we’re hiring individuals responsible for legal compliance who can’t spell Chicago, we should be sued by the federal government. We should validate the data the best we can, but it is ultimately your department’s responsibility for data accuracy.”
Manager: “Now now…it’s all our responsibility. What is wrong with a few thousand item drop-down?”
Me: “Um, memory, network bandwidth, database storage, who maintains this list of cities? A lot of time and resources could be saved by simply paying attention.”
Manager: “Memory? Well, memory is cheap. If the workstation needs more memory, we’ll add more”
Dev: “Creating a drop-down is easy and selecting thousands of rows from the database should be fast enough. If the selection is slow, I’ll put it in a thread.”
DBA: “Table won’t be that big and won’t take up much disk space. We’ll need to setup stored procedures, and data import jobs from somewhere to maintain the data. New cities, name changes, ect. ”
Manager: “And if the network starts becoming too slow, we’ll have the Networking dept. open up the valves.”
Me: “Am I the only one seeing all the moving parts we’re introducing just to keep someone from misspelling ‘Chicago’? I’ll admit I’m wrong or maybe I’m not looking at the problem correctly. The point of redesigning the compliance system is to make it simpler, not more complex.”
Manager: “I’m missing the point to why we’re still talking about this. Decision has been made. Drop-down of all cities in the US. Moving on to the button’s icon ..”
Me: “Where is the list of cities going to come from?”
<few seconds of silence>
Dev: “Post office I guess.”
Me: “You guess?…OK…Who is going to manage this list of cities? The manager responsible for regulations?”
User: “Thousands of cities? Oh no …no one is our area has time for that. The system should do it”
Me: “OK, the system. That falls on the DBA. Are you going to be responsible for keeping the data accurate? What is going to audit the cities to make sure the names are properly named and associated with the correct state?”
DBA: “Uh..I don’t know…um…I can set up a job to run every night”
Me: “A job to do what? Validate the data against what?”
Manager: “Do you have a point? No one said it would be easy and all of those details can be answered later.”
Me: “Almost done, and this should be easy. How many cities do we currently have to maintain compliance?”
User: “Maybe 4 or 5. Not many. Regulations are mostly on a state level.”
Me: “When was the last time we created a new city compliance?”
User: “Maybe, 8 years ago. It was before I started.”
Me: “So we’re creating all this complexity for data that, realistically, probably won’t ever change?”
User: “Oh crap, you’re right. What the hell was I thinking…Scratch the drop-down idea. I doubt we’re have a new city regulation anytime soon and how hard is it to type in a city?”
Manager: “OK, are we done wasting everyone’s time on this? No drop-down of cities...next …Let’s get back to the button’s icon …”

Simplicity 1, complexity 0.

!dev
Just found out my house's heating system relies on this. A button, being held down by a bolt held by a zip tie. Who in their right mind looked at this, was like "this is fine" and left it there.
My dad, apparently.

And, the other side, husbands 😂
——————————————————–
Dear Technical Support,

Last year I upgraded from Boyfriend 5.0 to Husband 1.0 and noticed a distinct slow down in overall system performance — particularly in the flower and jewelry applications, which operated flawlessly under Boyfriend 5.0. The new program also began making unexpected changes to the accounting modules.

In addition, Husband 1.0 uninstalled many other valuable programs, such as Romance 9.5 and Personal Attention 6.5 and then installed undesirable programs such as NFL 5.0, NBA 3.0, and Golf Clubs 4.1.

Conversation 8.0 no longer runs, and Housecleaning 2.6 simply crashes the system. I’ve tried running Nagging 5.3 to fix these problems, but to no avail.

What can I do?

Signed,

Desperate

——————————————————–

Dear Desperate:

First keep in mind, Boyfriend 5.0 is an Entertainment Package, while Husband 1.0 is an Operating System.

Please enter the command: ” C:/ I THOUGHT YOU LOVED ME” and try to download Tears 6.2 and don’t forget to install the Guilt 3.0 update.

If that application works as designed, Husband 1.0 should then automatically run the applications Jewelry 2.0 and Flowers 3.5. But remember, overuse of the above application can cause Husband 1.0 to default to Grumpy Silence 2.5, Happy Hour 7.0 or Beer 6.1.

Beer 6.1 is a very bad program that will download the Snoring Loudly Beta.

Whatever you do, DO NOT install Mother-in-law 1.0 (it runs a virus in the background that will eventually seize control of all your system resources).

Also, do not attempt to reinstall the Boyfriend 5.0 program. These are unsupported applications and will crash Husband 1.0.

In summary, Husband 1.0 is a great program, but it does have limited memory and cannot learn new applications quickly.

You might consider buying additional software to improve memory and performance. We recommend Food 3.0 and Hot Lingerie 7.7.

Good Luck,
Tech Support

I wrote (or, ended up with a very much alpha but usable version) a monitoring system a while back and completely forgot about its existence.

But, it's still running and a few days ago I was building a docker imagine on a system with not that many resources and after about 5 minutes I started getting notifications about a high load!

Then, while I had forgotten about it again, yesterday, I suddenly started getting notifications about websites on my main application server going down.
Logged in and all was good again after restarting nginx.

Gotta say that it feels quite awesome to be notified of shit going wrong by something I wrote myself while I forgot about its existence 😊

I was registering for a website, and on a whim, I used this as my username:
null'); PRINT('Hello');--

And sure enough, the login system went down. The next day it was still down, so I went to Twitter to tell the people running the site that this was why, but to my surprise, I see them saying they had been hacked.
Based on the timing, I'm pretty sure they're referring to this, but they are saying user info was stolen. *facepalm*
They later said they stored passwords salted with a fixed salt and hashed with fucking md5, at which point I was glad not to have done any more business with them.

How incompetent can these fucking people be?!

Recruiter: Why makes you leave a company?

Me: When the company don't appreciate their employees, when I have to develop a small system for them and they never use it. when they try to give me the calm down needle.

Recruiter: what is the calm down needle?

Me: It's when I come with an issue i am facing and you tell me you will fix it, and promise me its gonna happen and never do it.

Recruiter: Silence....

Me: "Keep Talking" When you promise some employee and you are not able to deliver your promise .. well, Its just better if you didn't promise him!

Recruiter: Ok, "next question"

Damn I feel like I was so mad and my answer were straight forward with no bullshit. I think I scared her.

I used to work in a role that was basically tech support for engineers. Folks would call, we'd look at their code and see where things were going wrong.
One customer calls in, they're having timing problems with a satellite control system.
I dig down through their code, and buried in one of the modules is a comment to the effect of:
"Once we upgrade to Windows 98, we'll need to change this call to the precision counter"

They never did.

This system was running XP.
Somehow, they'd avoided destroying satellites despite having the code run on Win98, and ME without fixing that call. It wasn't until they upgraded to a multi core system and XP that their gyros stopped responding correctly.

Holy shit.

Last weekend I witnessed the most infected computer I have ever seen in my life...

I went on a private party. A girl had her laptop plugged to the speakers to play some music. This thing was literally 99% cancer. The first thing I noticed, when I looked at her opened browser, was that nearly half the screen was taken by toolbars. Also any popular website you could visit had additional ads INJECTED into it. The fist 10 YouTube search results: always porn. No idea how that didn't make her suspicious.

Precisely every 10th click (anywhere not only in the browser) would open up a window with either more ads or an aggressively blinking message saying: "A virus has been detected on your machine. Click here to download our antivirus programm. You have 60 seconds left before your firewall breaks!!!".

Also physically this device was on the edge of completely broken. The power supply had to be taped to the socket because it was so loose. Every little jiggle would immediatly shut the system down and Windows had to be completely reinstalled (which of course didn't solved any of the "software issues").

First I wanted to use that laptop to show some friends a new web project of mine but this thing probably would have DDoSed the shit out of my recently finished work or something.

I couldn't decide if I should laugh or cry...

A mechanical engineer, an electrical engineer, and a programmer are riding in a car.

The car breaks down and coasts to the side of the road.

"Hang on," says the mechanical engineer. "The problem is probably the engine, let me have a look at it and I'll have us on the road again in no time."

"Wait," says the electrical engineer. "The way it just stopped like that, I think it's the electrical system. Let me have a look and I'll get us going again in a minute or two."

"Hold on," says the computer engineer. "Why don't we all just get out of the car and get in again, and then see if it starts?"

Alternate punchlines:

"Why don't we open and close all the windows, and then see if it starts?"

"Why don't we remove parts from the engine until it starts successfully?"

I wonder how would devRant send the mail with my MAC address? The hard way by tracking down my system having having the MAC address and deliver it to me?? 😂😂

DevRant is being unaware that we all are devs here 😂

Sometime in mid 2013 or 2014 as a junior dev I woke up to a call from my company's CEO. He informed me that the legacy system they use for order processing is down nationwide that nobody can add new orders until it's fixed and that I needed to fix it. I had been working there 6 months and was hired along with a senior dev to begin developing a web app to replace this legacy system. The senior dev had left the company two weeks earlier for a better offer so it was put on me to figure it out. I was very frank with the CEO and told him I didn't know if I could fix it and suggested he try to call the company they hired to create it. I didn't even know where the source code was let alone what the design paradigm was or whether or not there was any documentation. He said he would try figuring out who created it and give them a call and asked "As a developer you shouldn't you be able to fix this?" I just told him it wasn't that simple and left it at that.

I get to work and the CEO has discovered that the company who created the software no longer exists and I tell him he may need to find a company to consult on this if I can find the source code and if I can't find the code he might be screwed.
I found the source code in a random IT shared folder there is no source control, no documentation, no unit tests, no test environment, and it looks like nobody had touched it since 2005 or about 8 years.

Despite being completely unfamiliar with the code and the design paradigm I was able to figure out that they were validating customer addresses against an old Google geocoding API that was shutdown the day before and the lack of response was killing the application. I fixed the issue and warned the CEO before deployment that I wasn't able to test but he said to go ahead and thankfully all went well.

Fucking crunchyroll hardcodes their access tokens in a Constants Class in their APK, technically that is a security issue.

What the actual fuck Crunchyroll!? No fucking wonder you got DNS Hijacked so quick, security is literally your second priority you dumbed down twats, get some real devs and some real QAs for fucking god sakes, you're tearing down your own system by inviting exploits.

!rant

My laptop feels complete again. I'm back up to 32gb RAM after being down to 8 for a few months...

Now i can have all the virtual machines open without worrying about maxing out my system... time to go break things while I learn what they do! 😄

Year 2200, somewhere unknown. A robot drone flies above a now destroyed city. As it slowly descends down, it finds it's way into a building. In the rubble, a monitor is still flashing. The drone moves toward the monitor. After few minutes of analysis, drone releases a connector from it's belly. It connects to CPU nearby. After scanning the system for another few minutes, it's apparent the system was not the new OS which the Government released and Mandated. Rather, a prehistoric OS which legends spoke in hushed tones. An OS so powerful, which controlled then millions of computers.

Like the story so far? Should I continue?

Friday, I got a mail from my PM shortly before I wanted to leave. Basically it was, hey can you check out whether this issue [which I hadn't even heard about] is somehow related to our system? Meeting is in one hour.

My answer: I guess not, otherwise I'd have been in the loop much earlier than one hour before the meeting.

I shut down the PC like a boss and went into weekend.

Dev gets hold of me, says my service is down in QA. Works if he hits it locally, works via Postman, but via the QA app server it gives a 401.

I’m like, look, if it works everywhere else, there’s something wrong on your side in QA.

He insists, no, I must help him, and begins CCing all the managers telling them this system has been down for days.

So I eventually climb into his system, check the credentials they’re using in the QA environment, and sure enough, the password is wrong.

I decided to setup a little server on my local network just to make use of a 2TB harddrive I use to store videos.

Told everyone in the house I planned to grow the library over time and that they could access it all in a browser using my system name. It's become quite a fun venture and my video library is shaping up nicely.

Using nginx on a Dell XPS 17 with Ubuntu 16.04 to host a server that just auto indexes a shared directory on my external 2TB harddrive. Kind of an embarrassing rig, but it's just a hobby activity and I do plan to upgrade shit later.

The real fun has been getting to understand a bit more about video files. They used to be magic to me, as complex as their file extension. Now I run a script on all of my torrents which checks the video and audio codecs, converting them if they aren't supported by Chrome's and Firefox's web players, and outputting mp4s using ffmpeg. I feel like I have this stuff down fairly well now. Becoming more and more automated.

Next step is to port forward so I can access it from anywhere, but we'll see about that later down the line.

Dear all wonderful ranters,

I apologize profusely in advance if over the next few days I cannot contain my anger at people and rant about non-dev things. I promise I will try my best to not do this, but there are very few places (none) other than here where I feel comfortable enough to express myself freely and not censor my words.

I will be working as a security guard (3rd job) for a car show full of pretentious assholes who have a tendency to think I'm their servant. I have wonderful bosses who have my back, and there are truly amazing people in attendance as well, but if someone tries to run me over again after a long ass day, I might need to vent.

I fully accept any and all down votes, and will likely delete the rant after it's out of my system, unless there's a conversation going in comments (I wouldn't do that to you).

Please bear with me while I try boot to strangle everyone I come across. I'm hoping this year is the year everyone is nice, but history tells me that's naive and won't happen.

All my love,
Your (co)queen who may end up arrested for using her bionic arm to rip their balls off and feed them to their wives

Finally broke into the system and finally their server is DOWN 😎

I recalled a seemingly simple task I took on.

We were building a booking system, and I had to figure out how to retrieve bookings by a certain date range.

Upfront, the tasked seemed simple until I realised I had to both figure out the logic and the SQL statements needed to retrieve all bookings within a certain date range in one query.

I ended up drawing a model to help me visualise the various date-range criteria to be satisfied. And used unit tests to help me think through each date range criterion and make sure they were accurate. Some were obviously from paranoia, but better to be safe than sorry...

After that, I had wrote down raw SQL directly into Sequel Pro first to make sure my query logic was accurate too, before translating into something the ORM equivalent. This was when I learned how to define and use variables in SQL. The variables were throw-away code; I just didn't want to have to hard-code the test date-ranges over and over again; minimise chances of spelling errors.

Needless to say, felt my problem-solving skills went up one level after this task. Saw my coding style and unit tests improve. And also the thought processes that go into how to maintain code quality...

Me: *on the phone with client* "Ok, now reboot the cashier terminal"

Client: *reboots server causing whole system to go down*

Me: *internal screams*

The riskiest dev choice...

How about "The riskiest thing you've done as a dev"? I have a great entry for that. and I suppose it was my choice to build the feature afterall.

I was working on an instance of a small MMO at a game company I worked for. The MMO boasted multiple servers, each of them a vastly different take on the base game. We could use, extend, or outright replace anything we wanted to, leading to everything from Zelda to pokemon to an RP haven to a top-down futuristic counterstrike. The server in this particular instance was a fantasy RPG, and I was building it a new leveling and experience system with most of the trimmings. (Talents, feats/perks, etc. were in a future update.)

A bit of background, first: the game's dev setup did not have the now-standard dev/staging/prod servers; everything ran on prod, devs worked on prod, players connected and played on prod, etc. Worse yet, there was no backup system implemented -- or not really. The CTO was really the only person with sufficient access. The techy CEO did as well, but he rarely dealt with anything technical except server hardware, occasionally. And usually just to troll/punish us devs (as in "Oops ! I pulled the cat5 ! ;)"). Neither of them were the most reliable of people, either. The CTO would occasionally remote in and make backups of each server -- we assumed whenever he happened to think of it -- and would also occasionally do it when asked, but it could take him a week, sometimes even up to a month to get around to it. So the backups were only really useful for retreiving lost code and assets, not so much for player data.

The lack of reliable backups and the lack of proper testing grounds (among the plethora of other issues at the company) made for an absolutely terrible dev setup, but that's just how it was, and that's what we dealt with. We were game devs, afterall. Terrible or not, we got to make games! What more could you ask for!? It was amazing and terrible and wonderful and the worst thing ever, all at the same time. (and no, I'm not sharing the company name, but it isn't EA or Nexon, surprisingly 😅)

Anyway, back to the story! My new leveling system also needed to migrate players' existing data, so... you can see where this is going.

I did as much testing and inspection of my code as I could, copied it from a personal dev script to the server's xp system, ... and debated if I really wanted to click [Apply]. Every time I considered it, I went back to check another part or do yet more testing. I ended up taking like 40 minutes to finally click it.

And when I did... that was the scariest button press of my life. And the scariest three seconds' wait afterwards. That one click could have ruined every single player's account, permanently lost us players ...

After applying it, I immediately checked my character to see if she was broken, checked the account data for corruption or botched flags, checked for broken interactions with the other systems....

Everything ended up working out perfectly, and the players loved all of the new features. They had no idea what went into building them, and certainly had no idea of what went into applying them, or what could have gone wrong -- which is probably a good thing.

Looking back, that entire environment was so fragile, it's a wonder things didn't go horribly wrong all the time. Really, they almost never did. Apocalypses did happen, but were exceedingly rare, and were ususally fixed quickly. I guess we were all super careful simply because everything was so fragile? or the decent devs were, at least. We never trusted the lessers with access 😅 at least on the main servers where it mattered. Some of the smaller servers... well, we never really cared about those.

But I'm honestly more surprised to realize I've never had nightmares of that button click. It was certainly terrifying enough.

But yay! Complete system overhaul and migration of stored and realtime player data! on prod! With no issues! And lots of happy players! Woooooo!

Thinking back on it makes me happy 😊

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

My colleagues broke down our AWS account by hard coding the AWS access API keys and pushing the same code to a public repository. This took down our system for nearly 3 days.

*dad's w10 computer running super slow*

*checks task manager*

100% disk usage

*checks whatever-the-advanced-system-monitor-is-called*

*Compattelrunner.exe is at the top of the list in disk usage*

*searches online to find what the hell that is*

"Compattelrunner.exe collects program telemetry information if opted in to the Microsoft EatASackOfDicks Customer Experience Fuckup"

Telemetry is supposed to be disabled on this computer.

What the fuck Microsoft, if you want to straight out lie to my face as a customer at least try to not be so obvious that you basically lock down my computer with your telemetry shit.

guys my linux is not booting !
reply:
Find a forest, where no human has ever set foot.
Wait until the full moon rises, and then sacrifice x virgins, where x is the month of the year.
Spill their blood on your device, and wrap in parma ham (if your religion forbids you to make contact with ham, replace it with high quality carpaccio. If you're vegan get youreslf a rope).
Then, build an altar to the gnu God, with feet spelling GPL, and a head that like of a gnu.
When this is done, you shall bow down three times to the altar (thirty if you use tabs), place your wrapped bloody system on the altar, and proceed with dancing on Staying Alive, except you will have adapted the lyrics to your system.
When you are done dancing and chanting, you shall lie down in front of the altar, and you shall not gaze upon your system till daybreak.
Then when the sun rises (sorry if you're in the uk, or one of the poles) you will marvel at your system, thanking the ever potent gnu god forever.

The funniest shit I have ever read 🤣 ... had to share

!rant & story_time
This happend to the startup I was working for at ~2011. I was a junior Android dev, working on a very popular app.
During experiments for a new feature, I discovered that the system AlarmManager has a serious bug - you can set a repeating alarm with interval=0ms. If your app takes more then 1 ms to handle the Intent, then the AlarmManager will start to fill up the intent Queue, with unexpected results to the OS. causing it to slow down, and reboot when it ran out of Ram. Why? my guess was that because the AlarmManager was part of the OS, then any issues caused by it caused the system process to ran out of ram, crashing it, and the whole system with it. the real kicker was that even after a reboot, the AlarmManager still had Intents queued, causing the device to bootloop for a while, untill the queue was cleared. My boss decided to report the problem to google, as this was an issue in the OS. I built an example app, that caused the crash 10-30 seconds after starting, and submitted to Google. Google responded later that day with "not an issue, no one will ever do this".
Well... At this point I decided to review the autoupdate feature in our app, to make sure this will not happen to us. We just released a new feature where a user can set an update schedule option in the app settings - where you could setup a daily, weekly, or hourly update for the app. after reviewing it, It looked good, and the issue was not triggered in the manual QA I did. So, it was all good. And we released an updated version to the store.
After we did an update-install, we discoverd that, there was a provlem reading the previous version SharedPrefs value for the update schdule settings, and the value defaulted to 0...
the result was, our app caused all our users to go into a bootloop, and because the alarm was reset when the devices booted up, the bootloop could only be solved in a factory reset, or removing our app, before the device rebooted, and then waiting a few reboot cycles.
We lost 50 places in the market, and it took us 6 months to get back to where we were.

It was not my fault, but it sucked big time!

1. Fucking MySQL database clusters.

There's nothing fun about MySQL clusters. Sometimes they start producing deadlock errors for no apparent reason... well, there's probably a reason, but it's never a transparent easy to find reason.

What was even less fun is that those errors took down a Sentry server. When your error log server goes down through ddos from your database messages, it's time to rethink your setup.

2. Wiring up a large factory with $2 arduino clones, each with a $2 esp8266 wifi chip, with various sensors for measuring flow of chemical solutions (I wanted cheap real time monitoring as an early warning system next to periodic sampling).

The scaling issue was getting over 500 streaming wifi signals to work in a 55c moist slightly corrosive atmosphere with concrete and steel everywhere, and getting it all into a single InfluxDB instance for analysis.

Worst part of being a dev:

Writing down an issue in the ticket system for somebody else took longer then fixing the issue yourself.

So I created this really cool messaging program for my CS class in high school. Though when I say for - I mean for the students which were bored when the teacher told us how to "resize images in Word".
I used python and tkinter to create it all, and didn't even need to touch sockets. (Mostly because I didn't know how to use them back then, but also because I kept the messages in a file on the school nas.)
Anyway, the program worked and we used it every week, with me listening to suggestions and improving it each week. I even managed to create a sort of notification system.
But sadly, my teacher found out about it and shut it down.

Have you ever had a similar experience?

I recently joined this big MNC after shutting down my own startup. I was trying to automate their build process properly. They were currently using grunt and I favor gulp, so I offered to replace the build process with gulp and manage it properly.
I was almost done with it in development environment and QA was being done for production.
In the meantime I was trying to fix some random bug in a chrome extension backend. I pushed some minor changes to production which was not going to affect the main site. That was in the afternoon.
This Friday my senior rushed to me. It was like he ran six floors to reach me. He asked, did you push the new build system to production, I refused. He then went to the computer nearby and opened the code.
It was Friday and I was about to leave. But being a good developer, I asked what's the problem. He told me that one complete module is down and the developers responsible for them left for the day already and are unreachable.
I worked on that module multiple times last month, so I offered my help. He agreed and we get to work.
The problem was in the Angular front end. So we immediately knew that the build process is screwed. I accidentally kept the gulp process open for anyone, so I immediately rebuilt using grunt and deployed again, but to no success.
Then I carefully analyzed all the commits to the module to find out that I was the one who pushed the change last. That was the chrome extention. I quickly reverted the changes and deployed and the module was live again. The senior asked, how did you do that? I told the truth.
He was surprised that how come that change affect the complete site too. We identified it after an hour. It was the grunt task which includes all the files from that particular module, including chrome extension in the build process.
He mailed the QA team to put Gulp in increased priority and approved the more structural changes, including more scrutiny before deployment and backup builds.
The module was down for more than 5 hours and we got to know only after the client used it for their own process. I was supposed to be fired for this. But instead everyone appreciated my efforts to fix things.
I guess I am in a good company 😉

Manager: Messages not visible! bug ticket!!!!

Dev: oh fuck, there's an issue with our chat system, not good! _inspects ticket_ oh, it's just a display issue that actually is according to the previous spec, yawn...

Dev: please describe the bug better next time, I though we had a major outage, this is simply a small design issue...

Manager: ...

Dev: ...

I think I'm quitting soon guys. I literally do not get paid enough to deal with these incompetent idiots each day.

Meanwhile:

Management: forget your shitty salary, take one for the team, you get 3% of the shares in the company!!!!

Dev: what fucking shares, you haven't even converted to a corporation yet, THERE ARE NO SHARES

Management: ...

Dev: ...

Oh yeah and they called me at 6:30 PM today: "so i guess you are winding down for the day"

fuck outta here i haven't been working since 5 you fucks

jesus i swear some people need to screw their fucking head on straight, so far gone into the hUsTlE CuLtUrE they don't even know what reality is anymore

I managed to take down an entire school network with one VPN.

In short, I ran a personal VPN and eventually the System Administrators at my old school managed to pick it up as unknown traffic. For some reason, they managed to block the port but not the IP so I changed the port to 443 and their automatic system blocked port 443 on their entire network essentially rendering HTTPS useless for a few hours.

I never got approached about it but my school invested in a new IT team.

Windows troubleshooting:
- Works on my system, therefore it's not an issue.
- Must be a hardware error.
- Obviously it's just cheap hardware.
- Have you tried turning it off and on again?
- Here's some obscure error code that leads nowhere.
- Have you tried "sfc /scannow"?
AS IF SFC IS A FUCKING SILVER BULLET!!!
- Our Indian support chap from answers.microsoft.com will help you.

RRRREEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!
Solution: quietly weep and reinstall your system.

Linux troubleshooting:
- There are good quality log files.
- You can run the program from the command-line and read both stdout and stderr from it.
- You can usually run the program with high verbosity options to help you track down the error.
- Even daemons can have their commands spawned from a dedicated shell, to see why they failed.
- Usually it's a configuration error and you can easily edit the configuration file.
- More often than not, the program will tell you why it failed.

Solution: usually easy to find.

I fucking love Windows. Because you know, it's so easy to troubleshoot and the support is so great!!!

🙄 Windows asked me to install the update thrice. I asked it to remind me later. The fourth time it just shut my system down and started updating..

This is what you call a constructive and understanding OS-User relationship 🌝

Worst hack/attack I had to deal with?

Worst, or funniest. A partnership with a Canadian company got turned upside down and our company decided to 'part ways' by simply not returning his phone calls/emails, etc. A big 'jerk move' IMO, but all I was responsible for was a web portal into our system (submitting orders, inventory, etc).

After the separation, I removed the login permissions, but the ex-partner system was set up to 'ping' our site for various updates and we were logging the failed login attempts, maybe 5 a day or so. Our network admin got tired of seeing that error in his logs and reached out to the VP (responsible for the 'break up') and requested he tell the partner their system is still trying to login and stop it. Couple of days later, we were getting random 300, 500, 1000 failed login attempts (causing automated emails to notify that there was a problem). The partner knew that we were likely getting alerted, and kept up the barage. When alerts get high enough, they are sent to the IT-VP, which gets a whole bunch of people involved.
VP-Marketing: "Why are you allowing them into our system?! Cut them off, NOW!"
Me: "I'm not letting them in, I'm stopping them, hence the login error."
VP-Marketing: "That jackass said he will keep trying to get into our system unless we pay him $10,000. Just turn those machines off!"
VP-IT : "We can't. They serve our other international partners."
<slams hand on table>
VP-Marketing: "I don't fucking believe this! How the fuck did you let this happen!?"
VP-IT: "Yes, you shouldn't have allowed the partner into our system to begin with. What are you going to do to fix this situation?"
Me: "Um, we've been testing for months already went live some time ago. I didn't know you defaulted on the contract until last week. 'Jake' is likely running a script. He'll get bored of doing that and in a couple of weeks, he'll stop. I say lets ignore him. This really a network problem, not a coding problem."
IT-MGR: "Now..now...lets not make excuses and point fingers. It's time to fix your code."
IT-VP: "I agree. We're not going to let anyone blackmail us. Make it happen."

So I figure out the partner's IP address, and hard-code the value in my service so it doesn't log the login failure (if IP = '10.50.etc and so on' major hack job). That worked for a couple of days, then (I suspect) the ISP re-assigned a new IP and the errors started up again.

After a few angry emails from the 'powers-that-be', our network admin stops by my desk.
D: "Dude, I'm sorry, I've been so busy. I just heard and I wished they had told me what was going on. I'm going to block his entire domain and send a request to the ISP to shut him down. This was my problem to fix, you should have never been involved."

After 'D' worked his mojo, the errors stopped.

Month later, 'D' gave me an update. He was still logging the traffic from the partner's system (the ISP wanted extensive logs to prove the customer was abusing their service) and like magic one day, it all stopped. ~2 weeks after the 'break up'.

System goes down in a meeting about how to make the system highly available.

A store in Russia was robbed for 30k$ using ArtMoney.

ArtMoney is a Game cheating program that is used in games that have no AntiCheat system or it is insanely horrible(Cookie clicker as an example for a game that had no anticheat and ArtMoney is used in it)

The robbers placed orders for tech(like phones and laptops) and then used the program to change the prices from thousands of dollars down to 5$.

The cheat program is insanely easy to defend against or detect its changes.

This is a good reminder to check your security if youre adminstating things like online shops or other stuff thag can be targeted at a similar fashion.

On my former job we once bought a competing company that was failing.

Not for the code but for their customers.

But to make the transition easy we needed to understand their code and database to make a migration script.

And that was a real deep dive.

Their system was built on top of a home grown platform intended to let customers design their own business flows which meant it contained solutions for forms and workflow path design. But that never hit of so instead they used their own platform to design a new system for a more specific purpose.

This required some extra functionality and had it been for their customers to use that functionality would have been added to the platform.

But since they had given up on that they took an easy route and started adding direct references between the code and the configuration.

That is, in the configuration they added explicit class names and method names to be used as data store or for actions.

This was of cause never documented in any way.

And it also was a big contributing cause to their downfall as they hit a complexity they could not handle.

Even the slightest change required synchronizing between the config in the db and the compiled code, which meant you could not see mistakes in compilation but only by trying out every form and action that touched what you changed.

And without documentation or search tools that also meant that no one new could work the code, you had to know what used what to make any changes.

Luckily for us we mostly only needed to understand the storage in the database but even that took about a month to map out WITH the help of their developer ;)

It was not only the “inner platform” it was abusing and breaking the inner platform in more was I can count.

If you are going down the inner platform, at least make sure you go all the way and build it as if it was for the customers, then you at least keep it consistent and keep a clear border between platform and how it is used.

Supervisor: let's automate this stuff

Me: great! let's do it to last and future proof it. So, as changes happen we can implement in-place upgrades efficiently without taking the system down

Supervisor: well let's not get too crazy

Day 1 at internship:

Manager: Can you get this RFID tracking system working? We have the full source we just need it installed.
Me: Sure thing, shouldn't take too long if it's a working system.
Me: (opens VS project)

Code is a sprawling abyss devoid of any intelligible structure, commented with broken one-liners which serve only to annotate method names.

In Mandarin.

For the record the system was broken, took me several weeks to track down all the issues.

Once, when working on top down RPG, I woke up at 3am and wrote map moving system. It worked flawlessly. Later had to spend 2 days to understand how the fuck it actually worked.

Ahh nights so full of passion.

Here's the story of my first month at CERN :) But first, a little premise...
Before arriving, I expected to be scared, alone and unguided in most of my experiences: after all I was a simple 19 year old about to leave home and friends for 3 years heading out in the world with zero experience on stuff like banking, taxes.. let alone working in a huge environment! The impostor syndrome was at an all time high on that front.
Then, I had the luck and pleasure to find an extremely competent and helpful plethora of people, ranging from my team to other CERNies (yes, that how we're called :P) who took me under their wing and introduced me to all the key aspects of living the place. When the initial stress finally soothed down thanks to this, I finally started to manage focusing more and more on my work, by following day-by-day my teammates who taught me the core aspects of the system and the many projects that are in progress during Long Shutdown 2. Within a couple weeks, I already managed to grasp various concepts that got me quickly on track, and now I managed to develop and integrate new temperature monitoring scripts into a system checking on hundreds of Single Board Computer-based servers :) It's a real rollercoaster of learning and applying under all fronts and so far I'm not regretting my choice of departing.
Luckily I've also discovered I'm pretty efficient and good at my job, which surely boosts my morale :D
Keep you updated as usual!

I'm so over the politics....

System team: So, we've rewritten the entire site and the stats are looking pretty great. We're more than a year into the two-month transition period, and hey, that's cool, no judgement. But now we're gonna hit a license expiration on the old site, so we need to shut it down, or otherwise pay a ridiculously big amount to renew the license.

Business: nooooooooo you can't shut down the old site!

Systems: but nobody is using it

Business: yes, they are

Systems: no, they're really not, we checked and everything

Business: ...........

Systems: ok, well are you gonna pay for the license renewal?

Business: oh hell no

Systems: ok then we're shutting it down

Business: ..............

Systems: ok, it's down

Business: how dare you! We didn't sign off on that! Bring it back immediately!

Systems: are you gonna pay the license?

Business: no! now bring it back!

FML.

Old client texted me yesterday: the website and pos system you made does not work anymore... Why ?

I saw that their domain was moved to another host and texted back: "some has moved the domain so that's why."

Client: "how can this be fixed"
Me: "move the domain back"
Client: "but then the new system I bought cannot function".
Me: oh well, then you are in trouble, if the new company you hired to make you a new system and website had been using just a little brain power, this would not happen. Now you have to bring your new system up and working before you open your store...

I could have helped them by pointing a sub domain to the server, but he never ever treated me with respect, and never payed in time, and he did not tell me about this move before he initiated it.

Me: shuts down server and thingking: good luck working with those new "professionals"

You were supposed to tell me my flight status...🙄😑😔

FFUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCKKKKK
I updated my entire system yesterday and shut down my PC.
Booted up today, greeted by the blinking cursor of death.
Already tried installing grub again, hoping it boots up now.
Wish me luck. :(

!rant

Breaking point in System Architecture. The point where you define it is ok for the system to break if you user doesn't meets the expected threshold of intellect.

In plain words, you say "F**K it, if someone is that stupid, let the system go down"

They don't teach this in college.

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.

Do you guys know about the Windows 10 operating system?

I highly recommend it.

It is so easy to get done whatever you want in just a few clicks or.. several.

It has a great web browser called Internet Explorer that comes pre-installed with it. If you love animations, it will even sometimes show you that beautiful loading animation for as long as it wants. If you have a habit of wasting time on the Internet, it will intelligently slow things down and become unresponsive to help you get rid of that bad habit. It's just that great.

It has a lot of great features pre-enabled for you like sending data to Microsoft to improve your experience on a personal level. The operating system cares so much about you, unlike other operating systems that represent a flightless bird.

It's so smart, it even keeps you from doing stupid things like customizing the operating system. It makes sure that you live in the given box and don't break anything. So caring, right?!

At random times, it shows you a blue screen and a sad face to remind you that life can be sad at times but you gotta keep going. It is profound.

It comes with great useless software that you absolutely don't even need! How great is that!

I use Windows 10 and I recommend that you do too.

Have a good day..

Gather around folks, I'll paint you a nice picture based on a true story, back from my sysadmin days. Listen up.
It's about HP and their Solaris 5.4/6 support.

- Yet another Prod Solaris dinosaur crashed
- Connected to console, found a dead system disk; for some reason it was not booting on the remaining redundant disk...
- Logged an HP vendor case. Sev1. SLA for response is 30 minutes, SLA for a fix is <24 hours
- It took them 2 days to respond to our Prod server outage due to failed system disks (responses "we are looking into this" do not count)
- it took another day for them to find an engineer who could attend the server in the DC
- The field engineer came to the DC 4 hours before the agreed time, so he had to wait (DC was 4-5 hours of driving away from HP centre)
- Turns out, he came to the wrong datacentre and was not let in even when the time came

- We had to reschedule for two days later. Prod is still down
- The engg came to the DC on time. He confirmed he had the FRU on him. Looks promising
- He entered the Hall
- He replaced the disk on the Solaris server
- It was the wrong disk he replaced. So now the server is beyond rebuild. It has to be built anew... but only after he comes back and replaces the actually faulty disk.
- He replaced that disk on the wrong Solaris server

Just pushed my first ever ticket to production! AAAND on top of that, did not take down our entire system. 😅

boss: we should map all the possible ways to do things in the system so we can test them and make sure we fix the bugs.

Me: yeah, well, that is exactly what automated tests are for, every time we find a non-mapped way that breaks this we make a test out of it and fix, this ways we end up mapping the majority of ways.

Boss: yeah,yeah ... Let's sit down latter and map everything on a document.

I bet my ass we are never gonna have tests as a part of our workflow.

Holy fuck I did it. I convinced my non tech manager not to do code QA after he brought the whole system down approving things without testing them and getting devs to make changes that caused bugs. Don’t get me wrong he threatened to fire me twice during the conversation but I dunno…I think I’m just about ready for my second dev job anyway ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

you fucking idiots

why do you always base your library components on some dumbass clown fixed width / height system?

everything should be flex by default, anything else is absolute amateur clown town pile of dumbass horseshit...

...i'll brawl and take down anyone who says otherwise

you waste my time, you waste other's time, when everyone has to go hunting around for your stupid library's unorthodox way of styling

thanks again for wasting and making my evening a living hell

Sports commenter at AI vs AI deathmatches.
It would probably go like this:

- UltimateGod the Second launches half of the US nuclear missiles to NorthernEurope!
I guess that's it for the poor bugger.

- WankerBot69 tries to delay its doom by channeling old 4chan archives into a devastating ddos attack. UGtS' logic processe go down for a few nanoseconds... Ugh, that's NASTY! It doesn't even have a mother

- Missiles still going up. Looks like UGtS confused the imperial and metric system just like its predecessor.

- WB69 is now has the upper hand. It just used a SMB exploit and is bow encrypting UGtS's storage.

- UGtS is down. We all hope UltimateGod the third will do better. For now, all hail our catevolent overlord WankerBot69.

- See you next time on Bot Armaggedon folks!

Fuck this shit, fuck it, take it down, smash it with a rock and fuck it. Fucking 18th century system where we are graded for a 2 hour work after 6 months of learning. Fuck the idiots who think reading from a piece of paper will teach us something. Fuck the sheep who follow without looking aside. Fuck the asshole who initiated it all, and fuck this shit. Thank you.

Fuck my life sometimes.
I'd just finished my work for an ongoing project, it's been over 6 months only to be dragged out to be told another system needs an immediate change which at best will take 3-4 weeks.

Like seriously just let my mind come off down from the completion of previous project before dropping a new barrel of insanity on my desk 😬

I like being busy, don't get me wrong. but damn not even a day of recovery 😓

"Eh, just push it to prod and see if anything breaks"

The entire system went down for hours, estimated loss north of $1M.

There's nothing like sitting on the edge of your seat when you see a monster batch of records get sent updates.

This system was built 5 years ago and it's "peak" batch size has been < 400 records in a day, it usually sits around < 100.

It's not a big system and just runs in the background. So yea small numbers for this guy.

today though, I thought something fell down and shit its self, someone decided to add a a few thousand records to this thing and update a fuck tonne of data (for this system anyway)😬

The damn thing is standing it's ground and churning, but fuck, the scale of things is beyond what we ever thought it would have to deal with at any one time.

Build for the insane benchmarks kids, one day... someone's going to drop an elephant on it.

a small local social network i made around 2008 as a replacement for the original which the owner closed down.

i missed the people from there, so it motivated me to make a replacement in a week, while learning html+php+mysql+js.

it worked for about 3 years and i redid it from scratch 3 times as i gradually learned more.

it was cool to be basically a host of a community i've come to like in the years before, and it was basically the only project i felt, really felt, had meaning, a point. people were grateful that i made a replacement for the original closed-down site, and i was grateful that they were using it and that i could keep talking to all of them on it.

at the height of its popularity it had about 1500 registered accounts, 150 daily logged in ones, and about 30-40 very active ones.

it was also the place where i went to implement all the cool stuff i learned and came up with.

it had a pretty cool questionnaire creator (originally just a test of how deppressed users are, but then i thought "why not let people make their own tests/questionnaires?"), which tracked people's results over time and showed them on a cool interactive flash-based chart.

also a whole forum system made from scratch, wysiwyg article editor, later seamlessly integrated admin controls for those who had privileges, like, not a separate admin ui, but the admin buttons right on the site, later even a realtime chat persistent across page reloads where you could put special links which, on click, would highlight site elements/buttons, or even complete step-by-step path to them if it was more clicks. would highlight the first step, after clicking would then highlight the second one, and so on...

it was pretty cool stuff for 2008, and afaik it basically landed me my first two full-time jobs with almost no actual job interview, basically just "we looked at the site, interesting stuff, tell us how you did x and y and z on it, okay, hired"

back then i kinda felt i have a bright future ahead of me =D

Stop making "aesthetic" changes in modules you're not working in. Your naive "add proper..." commit just brought down the whole system.
Thank you for half a day wasted and a pissed of client.

So for my programming class, we had to make a game using Scratch. No problem, I said. Scratch is easy stuff. Just drag and drop blocks. Like legos. Legos that actually do shit. Cool.

So my game is about a dog underneath a plinko set, dodging balls that come down the plinko thing. Easy enough. I figured I would spice things up a bit. My teacher has to go through 20 of these games, I figured I'd make mine interesting. I add a little heart system.

Now for those of you who don't know Scratch, or don't care enough to look it up, all of Scratch's codes are within the sprite themselves. They can communicate with other sprites with a thing called broadcasting. When other sprites receive a broadcast, it can activate a script. yeah, cool.

So I had a script on the dog, that broadcasts a message to the heart system to remove a heart when the dog is hit. So to keep things short, I call the broadcast "Dog's hit."

For anyone who knows programming, computers have no clue what an apostrophe or a space is. They can't read it unless you have it all letters, maybe a semicolon. So, I removed the space and apostrophe, with my innocent 17 year-old mind not realizing this makes it "Dogshit."

Game's finished. Finally. Due date comes in, I submit it all proud and everything. I just created the best dog-plinko simulator of all time. Later that day, I show it to my friend, who then points out the typo.

At this point, my teacher already graded it. I went down to see him after school, and he must've known why I went down as soon as I walked in the door, and just cracked up. He told me it was fine, and not to do it again.

I left red.

Four engineers and a broke down car

One day, mechanical engineer, electrical engineer, chemical engineer, and computer engineer were driving down the street in the same car when it broke down.

The mechanical engineer said, “I think a rod broke”.

The chemical engineer said, “The way it sputtered at the end, I think it's not getting enough gas”.

The electrical engineer said, “I think there was a spark and something's wrong with the electrical system”.

All three turned to the computer engineer and said, “What do you think?”

To which, the computer engineer replied, “I think we should all get out and then get back in”.

So my windows VM decided to start running slow and bogging down the host system...

Decided to drop it down to just 2 cores, 2GB of RAM and 1GB of VRAM and now it's running smoother than when it had 4 cores, 8GB RAM and 3GB of VRAM...

I love computers *Left eye twitches*

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.

I walk into the kickoff meeting today. The first part of this project had 5 developers and a project manager. Former project manager handled communication and sheltered us from bullshit. We built an amazing piece of software in a very short time. Customers were so amazed that they decided to reboot the project, boost the funding by several million, and let us go again. They specifically requested the same team.

Now the team looks like this: the neediest tester guy, a UX lady that doesn't have any UX background, an agile "visionary", a project manager that doesn't understand how development works, a solutions architect, 3 COTS platform specialists, a devops specialist, and an account lead. They have booked all kinds of workshops and other shit to kick things off.

So development capacity is only 60% of what it was. Management ratio was 1:5 before. Now the management ratio is 9:3. The new project manager thinks developers should be on more customer calls and responding to all customer emails during sprints. We already built this system and devops pipelines end to end. The COTS people, solutions architect, or the UX person can't program. They want us to magically convert this custom application into one based on COTS. What we need to do is make the rest of the business processes that we omitted, integrate known feedback, rework the backend, build better automated testing, improve logging and reporting, add another actor to the system, add a different authentication method, and basically work through the massive backlog.

How do they think this is going to work? Do they think we can download a custom engineered enterprise grade software system from Microsoft and double click all the way to customer satisfaction? The licenses alone are too much for the customer on an ongoing cost basis. I guess we can discuss it during the agile team-building weekend at some remote lake that the team "visionary" has set up. For the sake of fuck.

Like development isn't hard enough. Hire two more developers and lose all of the dead weight. Get a project manager that won't let the trivial shit roll down on us. What the fuck.

Ever want to smack someone in the face with a sea bass? Like left out of the water for 3 days with all kinds of juicy and smelly goodness?
When we get an X number system errors, an email is sent to our team. Couple of hours ago I had to move the alerts from one system to another, re-naming some because I suck at naming things. I guess when I copied, I duplicated one. About an hour ago we get a system alert (as it should, there was a server hiccup) and there were two emails with the same data (just named differently)
DevA: “Why are there two emails?”
Me: “Oh, that’s me. I think I copied the alert instead of move. I’ll fix it tomorrow.”
DevA: “Hmm, but the data is the same. It’s a duplicate.”
Me: “Yea, I know. Networking responded and said it’s fixed. We won’t get another email.”
- 15 minutes later
DevA leans over and says to the boss (who was in a meeting and just sat down)…
DevA: “I looked at the alert, it’s duplicated, but the name is different. I don’t understand why.”
Me: “Like I said, the alert is duplicated. When I migrated, I copied instead of moved. No big deal.”
DevA: “Oh …oh ..yea.…OK.”
- 5 minutes later
DevA: “I looked at the query, we might have to add a filter to prevent duplicate emails. Probably some logic problems in the search.”
Me: “I just deleted the duplicate alert.”
DevA: “Oh…OK…that fixes it too.”

Good lord…as I was typing this, he just told another dev the ‘duplicate’ emails were because of a logic bug in the search. I’m getting my fishing pole.

*WanBLowS shits itself as usual in BSOD*
FEATUREFUL FUCKING JOKE OF AN OPERATING SYSTEM..!!!! How about you do the only thing that you're good at - casual shit like letting me watch a fucking anime! - and do it properly?! Yes there's an rsync from btrfs to btrfs going on in the background - because yes I fucking detest your joke of a filesystem called NTFS!! Should that even matter?! ONE FUCKING JOB!!!

Meanwhile my tablet, a fucking €120 cheapie!! It can stay up and running - stable! - for fucking weeks in a row, only taken down by me forgetting to charge the bloody thing every few days. But yeah it's gotta be a hardware issue, it's gotta be an obscure setup. NO IT'S A FUCKING CRAPTACULAR SHIT OS!!! If only those Microshit certified enganeers would write a goddamn line of DECENT CODE!!!

(As for anyone who doesn't know already that I've tried countless times to convert this turd to Linux.. It's an Intel + Nvidia GPU hybrid and it doesn't even boot a Linux live session. Believe me, I've tried.)

Call it like you see it:

TF30063 : You have been fired quietly, or the Microsoft authentication system is down (again.)

A couple of months ago, the father of a friend of mine, asked me if I wanted to help him out with a project.

His late father, whom he inherited a one-person upholstering company from, once created a system in filemaker to do, among others, his financial administration. This system, however, grew organically as time went by, but he passed away before he explained to his son how it worked.

Now this man was running the company, using the parts of the system that he knows, but things were starting to break down. He asked me if I could help him understand what is going on and fix a couple of things.

However, the more I look at it, the more I realize what a monstrosity this has become, because the system has never been cleaned up. For example:

- There is a suppliers table, with the columns "E-MAIL" and "EMAIL". The latter one containing the supplier's website address.
- In order to be able to generate year reports, at the start of a year he copies the previous year's file, removes all records from it and starts using that as the new year's file. (This year, he accidentally created a shortcut instead of copying...)
- Some tables have a misterious column called "#1". It always contains a 1.
- The system consists of about 20 files, each of them containing a single table, although only 10 of them are really used. The other ones are just legacy.
- File, table, column, and layout names are capitalized randomly (all caps, no cap, starting uppercase) and are usually abbreviations, like "st2", "oms3", "off\rek", "b", "VERDBEST6" and "antst".
- One table has 92 columns.
- Of those 92 columns, only about 20, maybe 30, are in use.

Now, my task is finding out what parts are useful and in use, extracting those and create a baby monster out of the giant monster this system has become.

Sidenote: I actually enjoy having to learn a bit about accounting in order to understand this. Planning to use the knowledge I gain to keep track of my own finances.

On my personal journey to better privacy!

Wanted to change to Qubes, but since I wind down with games, that won't happen sadly and it seems windows still doesn't support proper gpu passthrough either, so might eventually change to linux host and windows guest or create a VM I use for everything else that isn't gaming, since I still really love the idea of having a snapshot backup system.

So since that isn't quite in my timeframe right now though: first move was to move to firefox, already done the change on mobile (love having dark reader and ublock on mobile!), now setting it all up on desktop, pleasant surprise was for sure that firefox finally seems to have chromes devtools pretty much mirrored, even the mobile suite of tools.

Loading of pages is also finally fast and much snappier than chrome from the first testing I could do (on desktop, on mobile it still kind of sucks in comparison, but I can deal with that).

Please suggest me all sort of privacy tools you got, especially with firefox in mind, but also host tools, be it windows or linux (e.g. some sort of traffic obfuscator that visits random pages that are SFW but make automatic traffic filtering hard, could probably make my own, but if there's something like that already, why not), I'll save all I can use.

That moment you realise you spent the day skinning Jira to look like atoms material dark theme because a key system is down preventing testing😊

24th, Christmas: BIND slaves decide to suddenly stop accepting zone transfers from the master. Half a day of raging and I still couldn't figure out why. dig axfr works fine, but the slaves refuse a zone update according to tcpdump logs.

25th, 2nd day: A server decides to go down and take half my network with it. Turns out that a Python script managed to crash the goddamn kernel.

Thank you very much technology for making the Christmas days just a little bit better ❤️

At least I didn't have anything to do during either days, because of the COVID-19 pandemic. And to be fair, I did manage to make a Telegram bot with fancy webhooks and whatnot in 5MB of memory and 18MB of storage. Maybe I should just write the whole thing and make another sacred temple where shitty code gets beaten the fuck out of the system. Terry must've been onto something...

Why me. Why is it always me who has issues with Windows. (The OS)

I HAVE to use windows for a specific thing right now. Fair enough, I have an old system lying around somewhere with not the best specs ever but it'll do. Windows 7, clean install.

Firstly, let's boot up! Booting goes fine, login goes well... "Installing device drivers" (keyboard and mouse combi). I connected this set a gazillion times before so no clue why windows would need to download the drivers YER AGAIN. But, fine, it works.
Let's connect a USB webcam and to to the hardware testing website to see if my setup is right!

(I mostly don't blame this part on windows)

The webcam drivers install successfully, good. Although the page says it isn't working, it displays the live cam footage well so whatever.
Installed Chrome (not chromium too badly) to see if it shows fine there but chrome doesn't detect ANY cam/mic combination at all, not even the integrated one(s).

Annoying so let's reboot and see if it works normally with all checks okay on Firefox.

Rebooted.... aaaaand the USB webcam driver installation fails. I'm weirded out since the drivers were installed BEFORE the reboot already. Firefox now does not display any can/mic.... until it does after a few reloads. Windows is still saying that the driver installation failed.

The testing webpage, however, still says its not working while I'm literally seeing my ugly smug on screen. I contact support which does a remote check and says all is good but there was probably "a glitch with Windows" while the checks are still mostly red, I take a copy of the chat log just to be sure.

Now, I kinda want to shut this system down until the time I'll need it but I'm rather afraid that Windows is going to throw driver conundrums yet again and I simply *CANNOT* have this right now. So, I'm leaving this system on until I need it, and I'll pray windows plays along well.

My favorite year as a dev + why?

It would have to be this year because ..

- The 'pointy hair' bosses I've ranted about on this forum have been fired or they quit. I almost kinda forgot what it felt like to talk to managers not feel like "Good Lord, how does this guy put on his shoes"
- I took over the position of my nemesis (his choice, not mine) who quit (he quit before he was fired) and deleted+replaced all remnants of his code/life's work. More out of spite than necessity.
- Reaping the benefits of properly logging/reporting errors and developers able to fix those errors, nearly eliminating those 3:00AM 'System is down' phone calls.
- Able to take time to learn new technologies (learning React right now) and not constantly running around putting out fires.
- Son just graduated college at age 21.

Supervisor has me making a web app in this badass new stack called the LAP (linux, apache, php) stack because he would he would like the app to be "simple". He's spot on though.. having a three letter acronym saves so much time.... and then we don't need to worry about a database... or querying.... or efficiency.... or even the web app itself because clearly he expects the fucking code gods to come down and turn this piece of shit web app into a fucking masterpiece if he thinks this shit can be done based on a hacked together file management system. Please save me code gods

It's 5 AM and I don't want to shit on anybody's party but trust me when I say most of you here complaining about legacy code don't know the meaning of the word.

As someone who maintained a PHP4 codebase with an average file length of 3000+ lines for almost 4 years, I feel you, I feel your pain and your helplessness. But I've seen it all and I've done it all and unless you've witnessed your IDE struggle to highlight the syntax, unless you had to make regular changes in a test-less SVN's working copy that **is** the production and unless you are the reason that working copy exists because you've had enough of `new_2_old_final_newest.php` naming scheme, you do not know legacy. If you still don't believe me bare in mind I said "is" as in: "this system is still in production".

But also bare hope. Because as much grief as it cost me and countless before me, today of all days, without a warning, it got green lit for userbase migration to a newer platform. And if this 20 years of generous custom features and per client implemented services can be shut down even though it brings more profit than all the other products combined, so can happen to any of your projects. 🙏

Unfortunately, I do mean *any*.

These postings on angel.co

I swear to God it's like I've uncovered a conspiracy theory.

I had been searching for a side project now that holidays are coming and I really don't wanna get bored.

Applied to a few companies. About 5 of them "responded" with an acceptance. I write them my interview timings and all that's required.

Nothing. Nothing for like a solid week and a half.

Meanwhile I applied to more companies and still the same thing.

I decided to manually mail their companies regarding the process, so that I can, preferably, move on to other ones if they have rejected the application (which they obviously hadn't)

I get mails from almost all the companies with some or the other variant of "We were waiting for your reply to proceed"

I tell them I had replied over the conversations and they said they never got a message.

Now feeling that this might be angel.co at fault. I wrote a request to look into the issue. Meanwhile I tested the system using a friend's account as a recruiter and testing myself.

Unsurprisingly it was working flawlessly.

Narrowing it down to the companies then.

I sent a document with my findings to each of the companies and pretty much 50% of them stopped with replying.

The rest confirmed that they hadn't received any mails regarding the same and they saw no mail resembling the one I tested with my friend.

Kinda confusing but I asked them to look into it.

Meanwhile mail from Angel returns saying that their system is working perfectly fine even around my region. So idk what was the problem

I got a mail 3 weeks after the first mail to the company. They had been using a utility to auto-accept/reject profile applications. This util sent a lot of mails, even for rejections, to their mailboxes, filling them.

So they decided to remove these emails automatically by marking them spam. Apparently, the interview confirmation messages also count as these emails and were automatically archived. Thus removing my responses to those companies.

Idk if this is widespread issue because only one company has responded to me yet.

I'm still livid with this shit.

Stopid mf fat fingers, worked 2 weeks building a design system and 2 hours ago I accidentally shift deleted the scss folder and lost every fcking file, no git, no backup, no nada,guess what, tried to recover the files with 2 Permanently deleted file recovery softwares and from fcking 20 files, 17 were corrupted and weren’t readable, I and my designer friend use a folder sync app, the fcking app synced the delete and she lost the files aswell, fooockiinggg shieeeet, to my don’t know how where luck I managed to recover the copiled javascript chunck from my vue app that had the css styles embeded in the file, you know where I found the js file? iN ThE fcking cache of google chrome. Today I almost broke down to tears, but nonetheless it was a reeee moment for me.

We trust you have received the usual lecture from the local System
Administrator. It usually boils down to these three things:

#1) Respect the privacy of others.
#2) Think before you type.
#3) With great power comes great responsibility.

No, you cannot ask us to move our tech meeting elsewhere because we're being "loud", for the same reason we don't ask you to leave the area because your non-work-related chatter is distracting us from our said meeting. It's the only video conferencing system in the joint, and it's not our fault you and your people sit nearby. How dare you go past us and complain to our boss as if we're nothing to you - just because you were recently promoted, don't act like you were never in the trenches with the rest of us. It's like you have no respect for us now that you've gone a step up the ladder. The next time you or your team members try to fuck with us like that over petty shit like this, we're going to bring the hammer down on your asses and burn every last vestige of self-worth you have by making sure you never get a moment's peace. It's bad enough you and your team suck each other off during our bi-weekly department meeting by patting yourselves on the back for doing what's supposed to be your fucking jobs - don't you dare try to drag us down to make yourselves look like fucking saints. That is where I cross the goddamn line.

About 8 years ago I had a choice, go developer or system administrator. I chose developer and never looked back.

Then I've spent the last week or so - on and off - perfecting a Boxstarter script to setup our Software Developer laptops, right down to the Visual Studio Code extensions and Visual Studio Code Standards.

Boot up a new computer, join it to the domain and start the script. It's therapeutic to watch.

I actually enjoyed it... am I a closet system administrator?

So someone posted their btc wallet details (system automated message through a custom tool) to a paste in alternative.

Was the login for an ssh. Wont confirm or deny ssh-ing into it, but another guy who saw the same thing messaged me, sent a screenshot. Account had 127k usd worth of btc in it.

Called the radio station it belonged to and gave them a heads up. Probably should reported it as well but people already seen it so it'll get taken down soon enough.

Here I am broke, busting my ass and reality throws this in my lap. But I ain't never been no god damn thief. Hope the radio station it belongs to doesnt get robbed by someone less honest though.

Honesty is probably half the reason I've spent half my life broke trying to find or make opportunities.

And frankly I've heard real horror stories of good faith reports (whitehat style pentesting, etc) and the people that report it get fucked hard by authorities. What can you do though.

Enough navel gazing though.
What the fuck is wrong with the people who build these sort of account reset tools anyway?

Windows not powering off when I press the shutdown button.

Mandatory long rant warning

Oh my fucking god, how many times have I lost my shit because of this fucking bullshit.

When I press the shutdown button, I want you to shut the fuck down you sorry excuse for an operating system.

Me and my friends want to hang out together, so I shut down my PC and walk over to their house, expecting an intense session of doing programming stuff and debating linux distros. Whatever the fuck we do when we get together.

I get to their house and pull out my laptop,, only its hot as fuck. And then I see it: the battery indicator is red. "What the balls?" I think to myself. I open the lid, and guess what?
WINDOWS DIDN'T FUCKING SHUT DOWN, AND IT STAYED ON THE POWERING OFF SCREEN ALL THIS FUCKING TIME. WHAT THE FUCK?
Now, my laptop has a bomb ass battery, so I didn't even bring a charger with me, and now I'm fucking stuck at a programming session with friends without a computer. FUCKING BULLSHIT.

If this was a one time thing, I wouldn't have cared so much, but this happened countless fucking times. Too many.

I would have deleted this cum socket of an operating system months ago if it weren't for the Windows exclusive software I need for school, and now that Steam supports games for linux, Windows has even less of an excuse to stay on my fucking laptop.

Windows is supposed be fucking simple, but linux takes it by a goddamn long shot. When I type "shutdown now" or "poweroff", linux shuts the fuck down, no questions asked. And if I ever need root permissions, I just type "sudo" instead of restarting the fucking program and requesting admin privileges.

Most of the software I use is compatible with both MacOS and Windows, and I already have Ubuntu installed on my laptop, so what do you guys think, should I butcher Windows off of my SSD and give MacOS a try?

Also, what is this magic? Ranting actually calmed me the fuck down... I need to start ranting more.

FUCK MICROSOFT AND FUCK WINDOWS, I WISH I COULD BURN TO FUCKING OBLIVION

I don't know why I am a programmer. I went into engineering because I wanted to make video games. I did controls engineering to make physical systems go vroom. Now I mainly write software to make specialized physical systems go vroom. When I was a kid this was not what I would have wanted to do with my life. My 10 year old version of me is standing over me looking down saying "Pathetic". I feel like I need to do something about this before I die.

I want to make a game system for RPGs that is similar to an authoring tool to allow me to make games with some very specific features. Think creation kit for arbitrary RPG games. I am thinking I could make the authoring tool a product as well. If people want to make their own games. But I also want to make moddable RPG games using the authoring tool. I want to give people the ability to mod the game. So I am struggling with how to allow modding and sell an authoring tool. License to distribute unique games? I dunno, maybe I will just keep it as a modding tool for the games I make. I feel like good quality games are moddable. I hardly want to play anything that isn't.

On my project the customer has re-signed into a contract several times when they have budget to continue work. The first time they got us to build the system was a huge success story because the team was assembled quickly and we did rapid development. Initialize repo to prod in 1.5 months. The customer asked for the same dev team. Strong dev team, a PM that doesn't take shit, and pure agile. Lets call her don't-take-shit PM.

When the customer re-signed the executive decided that she didn't like don't-take-shit PM. So the project manager gets replaced by play-by-the-rules PM who will comply with stupid requests and micromanagement. He isn't a bad PM but he tries to make everyone happy. The amount of management types executive installs on the project is massive, and development team is cut down in major ways. Customer and executive shit rolls down to the development team and we can't get anything done. The customer starts to lose faith because we can't get traction. They start demanding traditional waterfall/SDLC docs. Which causes more delay in the project.

So the executive decides that the PM can take a fall for it to save face for the company. She moves play-by-the-rules PM to another project. He starts handover to a new PM that has a history of being her pushover. The customer hadn't seen him yet so now we have push-over PM.

Play-by-the-rules PM is finally out of the project and instead of moving to a different account the company decides to "lay him off because there is no work". So basically they made him take the fall for the failure while promising reassignment, and instead let him go. This is so unfair..

Meeting with push-over PM yesterday and he shows us his plan. Identical to play-by-the-rules PM's plan that got him axed.We point that out and show him the docs that were made for it. His face clearly communicates "OH SHIT WHAT DID I SIGN UP FOR?"

"Netflix is hiring a full-stack developer..."

Me: I think I know a guy...

Currently on train, listening music and browsing devRant. Music stops for a while and all I can hear is a person <A> saying: I'm not able to use so shitty operating system. I look up and see iPhone on <A>'s hand. Next to <A> sits an Android user <B>.

Not trying to spread bias about anyone. Just drives me mad, that people are turning down anything unfimilar so easily. Or maybe person <B> is trying to force <A> to use Android. 😲️

Next up on Public Trasportation - Human Behaviour Observations and Analysis: Ackwardness and Mental Get-Away Methods.

I didn't leave, I just got busy working 60 hour weeks in between studying.

I found a new method called matrix decomposition (not the known method of the same name).

Premise is that you break a semiprime down into its component numbers and magnitudes, lets say 697 for example. It becomes 600, 90, and 7.

Then you break each of those down into their prime factorizations (with exponents).
So you get something like

>>> decon(697)
offset: 3, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('3')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('1')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('2')]]
offset: 2, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('1')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('2')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('1')]]
offset: 1, exp: [[Decimal('7'), Decimal('1')]]

And it turns out that in larger numbers there are distinct patterns that act as maps at each offset (or magnitude) of the product, mapping to the respective magnitudes and digits of the factors.

For example I can pretty reliably predict from a product, where the '8's are in its factors.

Apparently theres a whole host of rules like this.
So what I've done is gone an started writing an interpreter with some pseudo-assembly I defined. This has been ongoing for maybe a month, and I've had very little time to work on it in between at my job (which I'm about to be late for here if I don't start getting ready, lol).

Anyway, long and the short of it, the plan is to generate a large data set of primes and their products, and then write a rules engine to generate sets of my custom assembly language, and then fitness test and validate them, winnowing what doesn't work.

The end product should be a function that lets me map from the digits of a product to all the digits of its factors.

It technically already works, like I've printed out a ton of products and eyeballed patterns to derive custom rules, its just not the complete set yet. And instead of spending months or years doing that I'm just gonna finish the system to automatically derive them for me. The rules I found so far have tested out successfully every time, and whether or not the engine finds those will be the test case for if the broader system is viable, but everything looks legit.

I wouldn't have persued this except when I realized the production of semiprimes *must* be non-eularian (long story), it occured to me that there must be rich internal representations mapping products to factors, that we were simply missing.

I'll go into more details in a later post, maybe not today, because I'm working till close tonight (won't be back till 3 am), but after 4 1/2 years the work is bearing fruit.

Also, its good to see you all again. I fucking missed you guys.

So, it's time to fucking rant!

Location: A small startup where direct contact with C-Level members is frequent.

A while back we had a customer using our SaaS product who had gripes about the way it worked.

He contacted our CEO and made a bunch of claims based on bad assumptions.

In the end, he wanted all images removed from his site. I was pulled aside by the CEO and asked if I could handle this for him and make a new screen for them without images.

So I did. I tried to discuss and get deeper into the problem by saying "this seems like a symptom of a problem and not the actual problem. What do you think?" He responded with "That was his request so it must be the problem if it won't take long then let's fix it for him.

- a week later

The problem is fixed and in the wild. No more images. Now he has another request :/

He does not like the pagination on his site. He says " I shouldn't have to click a button when I scroll so I want the be able to scroll and see all my products!"

This time the CEO asks me if this can easily be done and I take him aside and say "no, this will be a big change to our system and will need to be discussed with the team."

The main point I make is that we should go down and spend some time with this customer to find out what the real problem is.

After a half hour of discussion about the real issue he decided to bring in the CTO.

In the end, we implemented infinite scroll, dropping our current product building tasks to service one customer (yeah, it's a bad scene). But we got infinite scroll built and shipped.

- 2 Weeks later

This time he demands that infinite scroll isn't good enough. "If I scroll fast then I have to wait for them to load, they should all load at once!"

This time I have had enough. I can see the CEO is coming over to me to as me how much work is in this. I tell him there are 3 things I have to say...

1. I'm going to implement exactly what he asked by the end of the day.
2. We will only release it to him because it is going to be a shit-show loading everything at once, the load times will be mental!
3. We should fire this customer, right now.

So, I built it. Customer hated it (of course, who the fuck wants to wait 30s for loading. That's basically a lifetime). We changed it back and he was still mad.

- 2 weeks later

Customer leaves. Good riddance.

- sometime later

I am in the customer's store on a road trip. I get a feel for how their store works and they have a different system for making things operate.

It turns out that they did not know what the real problem was. They actually needed a completely different system (from a UX perspective) for accessing their data.

To top it all off, the system would have taken less time to build than the shitty fixes we made over weeks of work. FFS

I guess the moral of the rant is to find the problem, not a symptom of the problem.

My very first rant here was about the mess of ticket submission and ticket tracking applications we use, and about how we were moving to a single unified system some day.

Well, that day is today. And, predictably, it went horribly wrong.

So the way it's supposed to work is people login to the portal, search for what they want to request, then fill in details and submit. It creates a request ticket assigned to the appropriate team. (The old way involved a bunch of nonsense that you can see in my first rant).

The thing is, I found out about this today, when I got a company-wide email saying the new system was live as of this morning. None of us knew it would happen today. Not that I could've foreseen any issues just by getting the announcement early, but still, usually people find out about these things beforehand.

So, ecstatic to finally be rid of the old ticket tracking system, I log into the new system and look for our request form, which is, of course, not there. I check the old system and see that they combined every single "general request" into a single request where you pick which team the request goes to.

So I finally find the right request, pick the right department from the drop-down, and see that the request looks much better than it did on the old system. Out of curiosity, I look at the list of people who are part of that department.

I am not on the list.

My ENTIRE TEAM is not on the list.

Because they migrated the team data to the new system a year ago, when the issue tracking/reporting portion of it went live. My current team was hired approximately six months after that and apparently updating the team data in the new system isn't part of our Onboarding process yet.

So... Bright side is I guess I will have a lot of free time soon since nobody can submit new project work to my team?

tl;dr: they took a great software product and implemented it so poorly that our team can't use it.

I forgot to eat today, but I have boiled down the devRant theme system into just a few classes... and the "window" one is redundant-ish

Now that I can dynamically theme Qt widgets, my client will be able to support custom themes, confirmed!

Most painful code error you've made?

More than I probably care to count.

One in particular where I was asked to integrate our code and converted the wrong value..ex

The correct code was supposed to be ...

var serviceBusMessage = new Message() {ID = dto.InvoiceId ...}

but I wrote ..

var serviceBusMessage = new Message() {ID = dto.OrderId ...}

At the time of the message bus event, the dto.OrderId is zero (it's set after a successful credit card transaction in another process)

Because of a 'true up' job that occurs at EOD, the issue went unnoticed for weeks. One day the credit card system went down and thousands of invoices needed to be re-processed, but seemed to be 'stuck', and 'John' was tasked to investigate, found the issue, and traced back to the code changes.

John: "There is a bug in the event bus, looks like you used the wrong key and all the keys are zero."
Me: "Oh crap, I made that change weeks ago. No one noticed?"
John: "Nah, its not a big deal. The true-up job cleans up anything we missed and in the rare event the credit card system goes down, like now. No worries, I can fix the data and the code."
<about an hour later I'm called into a meeting>
Mgr1: "We're following up on the credit card outage earlier. You made the code changes that prevented the cards from reprocessing?"
Me: "Yes, it was my screw up."
Mgr1: "Why wasn't there a code review? It should have caught this mistake."
Mgr2: "All code that is deployed is reviewed. 'Tom' performed the review."
Mgr1: "Tom, why didn't you catch that mistake."
Tom: "I don't know, that code is over 5 years old written by someone else. I assumed it was correct."
Mgr1: "Aren't there unit tests? Integration tests?"
Tom: "Oh yea, and passed them all. In the scenario, the original developers probably never thought the wrong ID would be passed."
Mgr1: "What are you going to do so this never happens again?"
Tom: "Its an easy addition to the tests. Should only take 5 minutes."
Mgr1: "No, what are *you* going to do so this never happens again?"
Me: "It was my mistake, I need to do a better job in paying attention. I knew what value was supposed to passed, but I screwed up."
Mgr2: "No harm no foul. We didn't lose any money and no customer was negativity affected. Credit card system may go down once, or twice a year? Nothing to lose sleep over. Thanks guys."

A week later Mgr1 fires Tom.

I feel/felt like a total d-bag.

Talking to 'John' later about it, turns out Tom's attention to detail and 'passion' was lacking in other areas. Understandable since he has 2 kids + one with special-needs, and in the middle of a divorce, taking most/all of his vacation+sick time (which 'Mgr1' dislikes people taking more than a few days off, that's another story) and 'Mgr1' didn't like Tom's lack of work ethic (felt he needed to leave his problems at home). The outage and the 'lack of due diligence' was the last straw.

Start raising tickets/bugs like you were going to the doctors and things would get fixed a lot faster.

X page doesn't work.

Great information there what about the page isn't working?

Doesn't answer the question and gets pissy when you have to ask them again.

If this was a doctor's appointment all you would've done is walked into my office and yelled it hurts over and over.

Then proceeded to shit on my floor as you're leaving because I didn't diagnose the problem fast enough.

What were you trying to do when the system took a crap?
What did the red text say?
Can you take a screenshot? because the old saying a picture paints a thousand words holds some truth.

If you can go to the doctor and give them a full run down of when you got sick and what symptoms you got in the same order they happened why do you struggle to do the same when reporting a bug.

The TA for my computing lab in uni consistently shows up 45 minutes late. I'm usually done in 20 because I use the rest of the time to work on the next lab.

He walks through the door, lets out the biggest sigh, sits down, sighs again, opens up his laptop, and sighs once more. When someone asks for help, he sighs so hard you can see his lungs shrivel up as he exhales, and then provides them with a pointless answer.

The best part about the cs department here is that when you join cs, you are given an account to use with the ubuntu machines in the computer labs. They send you the password over school email, and you can't change it on any system they provide.

This is why I hate Windows:

For about a month now, I've been learning/working on salesforce, so my Macbook was enough for me.
Today there was a bug in something I built in iur Python backend, and since it has a dependency on windows, I booted the old guy up.

And this is what I see. For about 1.5 hours this went on.

Then it started, but system consuming 100% disk and 80+% CPU. Can't do a thing.

And when zoom finally opened (for a quick meet), the camera turned on halfway down the meeting, and then the system restarted on it's own.

Old man showing that same screen again for more than 30 minutes.

Since I have dual boot on this one, I hard-shutdown it using power button, and now boot into ubuntu 20. This works so beautifully (although it froze for about 5 seconds before popping up the updates panel, something I CHOSE to keep enabled). I try going back to Windows, and it's hell again.

Here I am now trying to set up a ec2 instance and setup the app source there so that I can debug with RDP.

And yeah, Component Object Model is a motherfucking bitch. Person who invented it should die. People who build apps leveraging this should die. Business leaders who say "Hey this app (built with COM) can solve the problem easily, so use this" should die choking on their own phallus. And developers like me who keep using this because "the last guy did this" should die too.

Microsoft and it's products are the death of sane people.

Fucking Gates. Its the same damn hardware.

Years ago, we were setting up an architecture where we fetch certain data as-is and throw it in CosmosDb. Then we run a daily background job to aggregate and store it as structured data.
The problem is the volume. The calculation step is so intense that it will bring down the host machine, and the insert step will bring down the database in a manner where it takes 30 min or more to become accessible again.

Accommodating for this would need a fundamental change in our setup. Maybe rewriting the queries, data structure, containerizing it for auto scaling, whatever. Back then, this wasn't on the table due to time constraints and, nobody wanted to be the person to open that Pandora's box of turning things upside down when it "basically works".

So the hotfix was to do a 1 second threadsleep for every iteration where needed. It makes the job take upwards of 12 hours where - if the system could endure it - it would normally take a couple minutes.

The solution has grown around this behavior ever since, making it even harder to properly fix now. Whenever there is a new team member there is this ritual of explaining this behavior to them, then discussing solutions until they realize how big of a change it would be, and concluding that it needs to be done, but...

not right now.

This is stupid but i think is my best idea yet.

So i have an old orange pi, with only 256m memory. Its running a few tasks i need but i wanted to use it for controlling a few things from my phone (lights and powering on my pc) so i thought i would make a server for that. Now mind you, my shirt doesnt say "lightweight backend language", so there was no way the pi couldve handled a struts server. I was digging around and found that php has a shell_exec command. Then it clicked, and i wrote the whole system like
shell_exec("java -jar someprocess.jar"). Now this sounds really stupid but it works and php is really light so it doesnt even slow it down that much.

Thinking about making this into some kinda server/framework/something just for fun.

Built a C#/.NET application with support for a serial device. Tested it on systems A, B, C initially, all Windows system, same .NET version, same targeting, same build tool version, same initial connection configuration etc, etc.

Testing - works on A and C, B nopes.
...
OK, let's check the source, is there something about B that makes it impossible to execute that bit? - No, there is not, you checked that already, stop poking around, it definitively should work on B.
...
OK, maybe admin privileges, there is I/O involved, didn't need that on A and C, but who knows - nope, doesn't work on B.
...
OK, maybe something wrong with the connection settings? First try at reinstalling driver - but no, it doesn't work on B.
...
OK let's try with another device - more/less devices on B. Other USB ports. No. Still does not work on B.
...
OK, this is stupid, but, is the cabling alright? It is, of course it is, stupid - but it still does not work on B.
...
OK, at that point I'm just gonna ask a colleague, GrumpySoftwareDev whether he has any clue why it doesn't work on B. GrumpySoftwareDev knows nothing, but discovers that one of his applications doesn't work on Windows 10. You know nothing, Jon Snow, but it doesn't work on B.
...
OK, now I'm just going to ask another colleague TheLastOfHisKind who handed B down to me somewhat bluntly if he ever experienced problems when working with B and its serial configuration. TheLastOfHisKind tells me he does not and kindly offers me some input on the situation. Still no progress to get it working on B but he hinted he might have fucked up B's driver. I already reinstalled the driver but didn't reboot, which comes after reinstall.
...
OK, I'm just gonna remove and re-install the driver, then restart. Hu! Now the UI is gone but another serial device reacted on a general call. Not fully working on B but we're getting there.
...
OK, I don't know, I'm getting frustrated, let's borrow another system D - which has roughly the same configuration as B - from my colleague StrongCurrentGuy. StrongCurrentGuy borrows me his system and cautions me not to break it. I install the driver, plug the device and copy the application from B. It just works on D. Not on B though.
...
OK, you know what. I'm done. For shits and giggles I'm gonna remove that driver again, reinstall it and restart, maybe it'll magically work afterwar- WHAT THE HELL, I JUST OPENED IT AFTER RESTARTING, IT JUST WORKS - ON B!

... seriously, what the fuck. But yeah, at least it works now.

Worst part of being a developer is having to educate IT Admins on how to do their job without fucking up mine!

Yes, just delete the Intrusion detection system ...why not! lets burn the office down while we're at it! here wanna take a dump in my coffee?

As I was browsing pornhub, I started reading articles about AI, dick still in hand, and went down the rabbit-hole (no pun intended) of self referential systems and proofs. This is something I do frequently (getting off track, not beating off, though I have been slacking recently).

Now I'm no expert but my neurotic DID personality which prompted this small reading binge DOES think it is an expert. And it got me thinking.

Godel’s second incompleteness theorem says that "no sufficiently strong proof system can prove its own consistency."

Then utilizing proof by contradiction, systems that are "sufficiently strong" should produce truth outputs that are monotonic. E.g. statements such as "this sentence is a lie."

Wouldn't monotonicity then be proof (soft or otherwise) that a proof system is 'sufficiently strong' in the sense that Godel's second theorem meant?

Edit: I WELCOME input, even if this post is utterly ignorant and vapid. I really don't know shit about formal systems or logic. Welcome any insight or feedback that could enlighten me.

>laptop can't handle 3 terminals because cpu is single-core 1.2GHz
>fuck it
stress -c 128 -i 128 -m 16
>second terminal
top
>load average: 272.15, 247.60, 149.80
>CPU is cool after 30 minutes
>how
>picks up laptop from right side
>burned myself
>cpu is on the left under power button, right side has nothing that would get hot???
>takes apart laptop
>second large CPU-like die
wtf.386
>looks up laptop
>floating point/algebraic coprocessor
WHAT

and that was the story all about how my life got flipped turned upside down

what fucking system has a coprocessor after 2002? (My laptop is a 2008 HP something or other)

Added a bond interface in my Proxmox installation for added cromulence, works, reboot again, works, reboot once more just to be sure, network down.. systemctl restart networking, successfully put the host's network back up.. lxc-attach 100, network in containers is still down apparently.. exit container, pct shutdown 100, pct start 100, lxc-attach again... Network now works fine in containers too.

Systemd's aggressive parallelization that likely tried to put the shit up too early is so amazing!
I'm literally almost crying in despair at how much shit this shitstaind is giving me lately.

Thank you Poettering for this great init, in which I have to manually restart shit on reboot because the "system manager" apparently can't really manage. Or be a proper init for that matter.

/rant

And yes I know that you've never had any issues with it. If you've got nothing better to say than that then please STFU. "Works for me" is also a rant I wrote a while back.

Being 46 and finally having the chance to focus on software development after years of BA/PM roles, flogging the market trying to get a junior gig, then one day painting a shed with my 16 year old who I introduced to programming about 6 months ago and listen to him speak at length on protocol programming, finer variances between python and swift and his own development of a text based RPG system where he is creating randomized map generation, gear customization etc. only to realize as paint glides down my arm:

" I'M FREEKIN' OLD!!!!"

When did my brain stop absorbing like a sponge and behave more like a brick?

I have a feature suggestion for devrant: some kind of polling system.
This idea came into my mind with the survey a few days ago.
Since almost all of us are devs, aspiring or experienced, we can expect (somewhat) professional opinions, e.g. on how to tackle a specific problem.
Maybe it's even possible to make this a paid service somehow. I thought about this:

Open a poll for all registered users: $0
Add requirements for a user to have to be able to vote on the poll: +0.99$ each:
- has ranted at least X times
- has at least X ++s
- has a StackOverflow account connected
...

This way, the OP can narrow down the target audience to a specific group.

Maybe...? I don't know if something like this already exists somewhere else.

I take the train well out side of rush hour when the trains are about half empty (though most seats taken). I have to come in because it's not like I can afford to have a workspace comparable to the cockpit of the millennium falcon both at home and at work.

I don't believe going into a panic about coronavirus but take obvious basic precautions to at least reduce the chance and slow the spread and that should do a good amount to reduce overloading the system. I kid you not, at this point medical facilities are considering buying diving equipment for enriched O2 supplies to keep up.

Today, as usual, some fucking piece of shit cunt twat psycho beggar that literally needs to be in an asylum with a massive fucking great gob of snot dangling out his nose is going up the entire train, every carriage, begging groping every hand rail along the way and potentially exposing several hundred people every hour.

I told this sorry sack of shit, surprisingly politely, that he'll end up rapidly spreading coronavirus if he keeps going all the way up and down the carriage like that. After he's fucking muttering on trying to make people feel bad about fucking ignoring him not being all caring and shit and then doesn't give a shit about giving everyone coronavirus after fucking waltzing down the entire fucking length of the train his pockets stuffed with coin. Then he threatens to assault me. I was fucking this > < far away from unleashing a life changing beat down and kicking his ass off the train with no pain or injury spared.

At the same time, that piece of scum waste of skin the mayor has apparently informed the public that you can't get coronavirus on the train or buses. How the fuck did he come to that conclusion? Is this really happening? How can something that clinically fucking thick as shit be our lord and master?

I fucking thought the great toilet paper rush was brain dead. Jesus fucking Christ and people voted for this fucking championship moron. Why don't they just all save themselves the fucking hassle and all march themselves off a fucking cliff?

These dumb shits without two neurons to rub together only need to put a dozen or so plain clothed police offices on the trains to catch these fuckers.

Why am I even fucking paying taxes? Where's it all fucking going? Another fucking lets give a billion quid to Fujitsu fucking failed IT project again I bet. Can't people bloody do anything these days? Does there have to be an app for fucking everything?

Someone should make a fucking facial recognition app so I can snap a shot of these fuckers and then if one of these fucking passes the phone camera anyone else with the app it'll set of there's a fucking imbecile in the vicinity alert.

These people need to be dragged out into the street, lined up against the wall and shot. No remorse. Toss them in a pit, cover it with dirt and be done with it. Why even bother with the execution? Throw them down the hole and fill it with dirt.

You don't have to go mental like it's the plague but people could at least show some fucking common sense, common decency and basic decorum. Even minimal measures, is that much to ask? Absolute scum of the Earth. How we even allow them to walk to Earth I do not fucking know.

while reading rebecca & brain's book on object oriented software. I realised that the programmer is a special kind of person. the complexity he can handle, the struggle to implement a system, from input to output, satellite control, AI, robotics, heck, even the planning required for a simple android app, the complexity is overwhelming at first, then you get your jotter and break it down into parts, and you drive yourself to the edge of sanity figuring out an algorithm, then you go over that edge implementing it, but oh that great super hero feeling when you finally get something to work exactly as specified, I'm not sure people in other professions can understand the satisfaction. I'm very young in the whole programmer world, but I'm growing fast, I'm just really grateful programming found me, I mean, can you think of something else you'lld rather do? yeah, me neither.

Work story.
We have this system that's being used nation-wide and basically there's a control panel for management (it's a website)) and an app for the regular users.

I just migrated and replaced the guy before me, I'm basically the only one on the project.

The code for the website is a mess, the servers are sometimes slow, and few security problems here and there.

Project Lead comes up to me and says that few of our clients that use the website are saying it works really slowly.
I start by analyzing the networking, and found shocking things.
First of all, let's say there's a messaging option, and the management teams that are our clients can have each a lot of groups, which all have messaging.

Upon first load, ALL OF THE IMAGES, FROM ALL GROUPS, ARE PRE LOADED. It can get up to few hundred photos being preloaded upon first load, which can explain the slow loading.
After discovering that, I discovered that the Administration control panel, which only my project lead can access, with sends heavy requests to the server and loads heavy assets, is loaded every time to every single client, generating heavy stress on our server and slowing everything down.

I tell that to my project lead and say that that's what causing the slow downs, I coded a fix that currently sits and is not being merged to the master branch to be deployed, and somehow I need to find a way to fix the slowness which all comes down to the heavy requests and slow connection with servers... And they won't merge my fix that fixes the loading of the administration panel so the stress on the servers could go down, and everything will be sped up....
Ah damnit.. sometimes I don't understand it..

Probably had my worst half-week ever this week.

Customer's CRM system, the read and edit masks just...stopped existing on last week friday. CRM fell back on some default masks for the dataset. No way to create new masks directly without putting the whole system upside down.
We couldn't do anything anyway because they reported the issue literally as we all were about to leave for weekend and our boss was like "Ah nah, well do it next week."
Our brains were already fried anyway...
I mail the reporter that we've registered their issue, will investigate and report back ASAP once we've got news.

Monday rolls around, I'm whacking my head against their system trying to figure the fuck out, what went wrong and how to solve it, I come up empty; Not that terrible since the masks only stopped existing in the webclient version of the system and they can still use the windows client, so they can still work.

Tuesday rolls around, I'm at an on site training for an ERP system with my boss at a remote company. Get an email in midst of the training, I was doing protocol.
Guy from the afflicted company goes and tells me that the issue has somehow spread to his colleague and him...IN THE WINDOWS CLIENT.

I'm fucking flabbergasted, so to speak, since the masks for the windows client and the web client are totally isolated from one another.
After we're back at our company, I investigate, less efficiently this time because my brain got fried at the training. I come up empty again.

NOW TODAY: Discuss further proceedings with my boss, he's not pissed at me or anything, just to say, but we're both worried, obviously.

Then at 10:20, a guy from the afflicted company mails me in an annoyed tone that the masks are still broken.

11:00, we figure out a workaround so the windows client users can at least work again, albeit limited.

11:10, I mail the guy, telling him that although we're still not able to fully work everything out and are still investigating, we've made a workaround so they can at least work again.

11:20, the guy mails me in a pissed tone around the lines of "This is very very important and must be fixed ASAP or else we'll not be able to work at all [...]"
And I think like "Dude I literally just told you like 8 minutes ago that there's are workaround so you'll be able to at least work again..."

Forward the mail to boss, we meet up quickly to discuss how in God's name we can deescalate this mfer.

11:31, the guy mails me again, all apologetically this time "Stop! All is good, I just now fully read you mail, thanks for implementing the workaround, nothing will come to a standstill [...]"

BRUH CAN YOU NOT FUCKING READ BEFORE ESCALATING SHIT

Fuck customers. Dumb fucking cretins unable to fucking read.

The issue is still unresolved. Support of the CRM software lets us sit on our collective asses and wait.

There is no such thing as stable software, it's a myth.

Every corporate software is like an ever-decaying semi-corpse of a brain dead patient slowly getting worse and worse but not fucking dying.

Rant over.

Archlinux.org went down just now for probably not only me. Guess who was in the middle of setting up his system again

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

Dear IT troll: I am not some idiot user. I FUCKING WRITE SOFTWARE! I actually CREATE CAPABILITY! I don't create "content", I'm not some fucking suit that pumps out PowerPoint/Excel/Email all day long. I don't need to be handed a consumers screwdriver, hammer, and wrench set. I need to be able to set up the technological equivalent of MY OWN FUCKING FORGE AND ANVIL! Do you get it? Do you understand me? Give me administrator access and go the fuck away. While you're at it, please quarantine this pile of silicon onto a limited access network if it makes you feel better. My development system doesn't need to connect to the wealth of bullshit in your precious little dumbed down corporate Wiki-wannabe Sharepoint system. Keep my creative space away from Test and Prod networks while you're at it. Just give me the goddamed tools I need to do my work and fuck off!

We have a long standing, transient, occasional error in our system that we haven't quite been able to (or have had the time to) pin down.

I was thinking out loud with our project lead what the cause could be, which - before I realized it - segwayed seamlessy into me being tasked with hotfixing it in order to unblock some other tasks that people expect to start working on tomorrow.

I think I'm starting to see why people use inanimate objects for rubber ducking instead of other devs. Here's hoping my theory checks out.

!rant

Enough of this damn youtube selecting shit songs for me, so please guys share playlists !

What i am used to :
- macklemore
- Korn
- muse
- nickleback
- system of down
- eminem
- michael bubley
- nirvana
- tarja turunen
- rihana
- christina agilera (wrong spelling i know ...)

Just gave them in my mind's order, i listen to a lot of their songs, but recently there is no fucking good artist at all.

I like to listen to something who moves, not static idiot repetitive songs. I am fed of daft punk.

Please guys share, i can no longer enjoy music !!

I struggled to find the interview location as the company as they were using another companies offices. As I sit down, sweating, feeling rushed for barely making it on time the interviewer says: "Tell us a joke"

I should have got up and walked out, but since I was there already I pulled this one out:

One day, a mechanical engineer, electrical engineer, chemical engineer, and computer engineer were driving down the street in the same car when it broke down.

The mechanical engineer said, I think a rod broke.

The chemical engineer said, The way it sputtered at the end, I think it's not getting enough gas.

The electrical engineer said, I think there was a spark and something's wrong with the electrical system.

All three turned to the computer engineer and asked, What do you think?

The computer engineer said, I think we should all get out and then get back in.

Our employee management system, for some reason, stored Testlists (I work in QA) linked to the user accounts that created them. Now after an colleague who worked there for five years left pretty much all our data was suddenly down the drain and nobody backed the fricking server up because, hey, whats the fun in that. Now all the tests need to be rewritten and other than the whole gui test automation of our product, maintenance of the same for another product, manually testing dev issues and training my new code monkeys to frickin not commit non working code to the trunk I have now also "Make a better Employee management system" (roughly translated those are the specs I've got) on my plate... I can remember back to the care free days of just before my boss asked me if I wanted to try to automate some of the test cases... How did I ever survive this paralyzing tranquility. Ha, surprise.
!rant, I fucking love the stress and juggling a shit ton of problems at the same time keeps ine on edge.

Fucking shit for brains authors that think the digital world is a fantasy realm where everything can happen just to aid their story. Out of boredom i watched "scorpion" today, a tv series about a group of geniusses which are a special case task force.
They got a visitor from the government saying the servers from the federal reserve bank were encrypted with ransomware. I already twitched when they said the economic system would collapse if the servers were left inoperational for a few days. Then one guy got to his desk and "hacked" the fed network to check... he then tried to remove the malware but "it changed itself when observed". But they got the magical fingerprint of the device that uploaded it. In the end some non-programmers created the malware, but it is super fast and dangerous because it runs on a quantum computer which makes it hyper fast and dangerous. They got to the quantum computer which was a glowing cube inside another cube with lasers going into it and they had to use mirrors to divert the lasers to slow down that quantum thingy. And be careful with that, otherwise it explodes. In the end the anti-malware battled the malware and won, all in a matter of minutes.

This is a multimillion hollywood production. How can a movie this abusive to computer science even air on television? Shit like this is the reason people still think the cyberworld is some instable thing that can explode any second. It's not, it's an instable thing that can break down any second. I remember "ghost in the wires" and people had surreal imaginations about the internet already. Shit like this is why people stay dumb and think everything can be done in seconds. If i ever should encounter one of these idiots i tell him i have an app that can publish his browser history by taking a picture of his phone and watch his reaction.
Time to shuw down the tv and learn vim again.

LoL.. I knew this one successful independent developer who told me:

"Why do all these companies use inefficient technologies - seriously? What I usually do is: I present myself to a company, I ask them what they would like to happen, what their problem domain is and then I present a solution. A lot of companies I've consulted for were jaw-dropped that an entire efficient and complex system was only a size of 52 KiloBytes because I just used simple languages to accomplish the task".

He has a point.. look at all these companies nowadays forcing you to Java, GlassFish, NodeJS and what not. Just the frameworks and libraries alone hog down 10 minutes of build time (sometimes 30!!), the worst companies using frameworks that require you to rebuild an entire project just to see a change in the UI.. they don't even add a watcher, and even then.. omg, not to mention averaging project file sizes of 100+ MB.

Sigh.. where is the development world going?

Init Mud. (A poem)

A Giant Ball of Mud.
Haphazard in structure.
A sprawling, enthralling, duct-taped warning,
Of things to come.

Tumbling down a well-worn path
Of untamed growth and aftermath.
Into Spaghetti-code Jungle.

Where quick and dirty wins the day
And warnings spoken hold no sway
Or fall on deaf ears in the undergrowth.

Tumbling.
Gaining weight.
Bits stuck on.
Bytes taken out.
Patches,
On top of patches,
On top of obsolescence.

Hacked at, uploaded
All elegance eroded.
Made and remade
Then duplicated
Relocated
Refined and redesigned
Suffocated by expedient repair after expedient repair
The original self no longer there
Replaced by something
Unwieldy.

Design resigned to undefined
An architectural mystery
Whose function can no longer be
Seen or gleaned
From obfuscated in-betweens
Of classes
Made and remade
Duplicated.
Abused.
A squirming library of disused.
Pulled at, prodded, committed
Corners cut and parts omitted.
Bug ridden branches fused to a rotting core.

The structure...
The system...
The content...

Mud.

So on a PowerBuilder app I worked on last year (I know right...), suddenly the business users were reporting that they couldn't edit some of their prices! When they clicked save, the screen would refresh and lose their work.

We had recently upgraded the system to allow them to enter hundreds of prices at a time, much more than there had ever been. But that code wasn't anywhere near this part!

Tracking this down was really fun... By great fortune, I discovered the row the users were editing was the 99th row in the DataWindow. As it turned out, in the distant past (this is PowerBuilder, after all) the returns code "99" had been used as a flag to mean "cancel/refresh the screen".

I of course offered to "fix it right", but the powers that be wanted it fixed cheaply, so we just changed the flag to "9999". 😬

Today in innocent tech conversations that sound dirty because I am a child: "system shuts down on case penetration"

- A girl asks on FB how to deal with a problem in her Windows computer: the system is asking her to introduce the serial key.

- I comment her the possibility of using Linux in case her use cases are simple enough (web, music, videos).

- First reactions are even enthusiastic, some people who had good experiences join the thread to express their delight with Linux.

- Then a guy arrives to tell us how irresponsible we are, telling a poor girl who does not even know how to introduce the serial key... to use Linux (a super complex system!)

- So I tell the guy that Windows is not simple at all, and that most of the times, people just rely o knowing someone else with higher expertise than them, who always end up paying the price of solving the problems caused by Windows, so the users don't really feel how painful is Windows compared to other systems.

- The girl, who was enthusiastic at first, and seems to be not very bright, to say the least, completely misunderstands my answer. She interprets that I'm insulting the poor guys that act as IT service for free, and calls me a "know-all/smartass" (those words are not even close to their Spanish counterpart on pushing down people who know stuff, we are experts on that there, we didn't loose an empire in the 17th century by respecting the wise ones).

This is, in part, why I stopped helping those dumbasses 18 years ago. I forbid myself to learn anything new about Windows (at user level) so I couldn't help these ungrateful and ignorant people who don't make any effort to learn anything by themselves.

i'm curious... to anyone on here who does hiring, why do companies always expect someone to already have experience with high volume systems. i've been a php dev for 10+ years but am having the hardest time finding a job and i have been turned down so many times because they expect me to have worked on a system with millions of users and terabytes worth of data already. it's beyond frustrating

I work with content. More specifically I work on content migration and improvement.

We connect to many platforms and pull and push documents into it. This one time we had to connect to some outrageously expensive (6 figures) system which we obviously couldn't afford to buy just for testing. The client wouldn't give us a testing server either.

My literal warning: "We need a testing server because we're gonna push it until it breaks. Then we know the limit." Client: "nah it will be fine." Us: "I promise you the server will go down..." Client: "It's a stable system. You can test in your own folder on our server"

10 minutes later we had an angry client because the server crashed due to overload.

I'm not sure if I'm annoyed or amused :p

Apparently the windows 10 anniversary update did "something" to my laptop today.
Keyboard stopped taking input at a random moment a few hours after the update. I shut it down, and it's stuck while shutting down. Pressing the power button has no effect, and the battery is non replaceable (except with a screwdriver and unplugging a cable, which I don't want to do while there is still power running through the system)

Guess I'll just leave it unplugged and hope for the battery to die.
Thanks you Windows 10, thank you Dell P57F002.

Debugging in real life

Our family is working on the house. We have an integrated floor heating system, which is connected individually for each room. (we have three rooms, only two are connected yet)

Today we changed the main water boiler. At first it seemed like it was working, but then we lost pressure. It dropped fairly fast so we checked every sink, every water outlet.

We just missed the unconnected floor heating pipe, that was connected to the main pipe...

Its a fucking mess down here, so dont complain about you bugs, I have experienced worse!!!

Here we are, three years later. Our system breaks down at the slightest load. An architecture is hardly recognizable anymore. The code consists of methods that have been refactored beyond recognition. The so-called architects came and went, leaving behind an ever-growing fiasco. Wrong decisions are concealed, criticism of them dismissed as ignorance. Our clients are on the verge of having us all killed. Daily crisis meetings are the norm. The remaining developers skulk around the unmaintainable code like emaciated ghosts. Everyone who has even the slightest chance to escape takes a parachute. Our dailies are made up of lies to cover up yesterday's lies. Our Mondays have become days of dread, because that's when the weekend disaster news has to be analyzed. Yet there are still developers who turn a blind eye. Who recommend this and that workaround in a good-humored tone. The code consists only of workarounds. Sarcasm has replaced any normal discussion. Reasonable suggestions on how to basically refactor the whole thing are rejected for cost reasons. In the process, our entire budget is eaten up by maintenance costs. Middle management should be put up against the wall. Why am I still here? This deceptive feeling that one could still turn the tide. This is eating me up.

For the love of GOD, if you're an architect or someone in the position where you can make drastic changes to the overarching design of a software system, if you're so keen on enforcing something "cool" just because you've read about it in a blog post/seen it on a youtube video, READ ABOUT IT THOROUGHLY, as in, pick up a fucking book or do actual research. An architect overseas just informed us that a whole legacy PHP application (a fucking monolith with a dysfunctional database, yes, I think someone demented designed it) should be rewritten to a microservice architecture (without a messaging broker, just plain API interaction through HTTP) AND WE'RE KEEPING THE DATABASE WHICH BEGS TO BE PUT DOWN FOR GOOD. So now we're gonna have a clusterfuck of tons of PHP microservices (Q_Q) which interact through plain HTTP APIs (swagger's gonna be put to a test) and all have a single broken database in the center. Talk about a microlithic design. Jesus Christ.

When a vendor tells you you can't do certain things on their API because their database is not optimized, and then drops the bomb that doing a certain action that, when it happens to overlap with a completely different client doing the same action, causes their system to go down, you know it's a Tuesday that feels like it should be a Friday...

Older tech support story, but still a frusterating one.

Sister was running Windows 8.1 (ew) when Microsoft was ramming Windows 10 down everyone's throat.

Her laptop decided to update to Windows 10, and after waiting awhile, she decided to unplug the laptop's battery and power chord.

This did what you expected, corrupted her install, leading to a bootloop. I then got to deal with that to try and recover it.

Once I got into the recovery mode, it wanted her password to restore from a system image, guess what she forgot?

She tried her PIN, and gave up after a few attempts, and I got to reinstall Windows for her.

Lesson learned from this? If you're the IT person of the house, make sure that you have an account on all machines that you may administrate. That way you don't need to deal with this shit.

I fucked up. I used the shebang line #!/usr/bin/env python3 in a script that was being ran every 5 minutes with a cron job. This generated an email to a system that dropped a file for processing and sent an age email for each file every minute. Because the Linux OS generated emails didn’t contain a keyword the script closed by design but I forgot to uncomment the delete temp file line. This started on Wednesday before a 4 day weekend. By the time I got in on Monday I was 40GB over my email quota and receiving 2500 emails a minute. I fixed the script and stopped the emails but down I have to clear out those emails. Here it is Wednesday and I am deleting 1 MB every 3 seconds. This is painful.

A software had been developed over a decade ago. With critical design problems, it grew slower and buggier over time.
As a simple change in any area could create new bugs in other parts, gradually the developers team decided not to change the software any more, instead for fixing bugs or adding features, every time a new software should be developed which monitors the main software, and tries to change its output from outside! For example, look into the outputs and inputs, and whenever there's this number in the output considering this sequence of inputs, change the output to this instead.
As all the patchwork is done from outside, auxiliary software are very huge. They have to have parts to save and monitor inputs and outputs and algorithms to communicate with the main software and its clients.
As this architecture becomes more and more complex, company negotiates with users to convince them to change their habits a bit. Like instead of receiving an email with latest notifications, download a csv every day from a url which gives them their notifications! Because it is then easier for developers to build.
As the project grows, company hires more and more developers to work on this gigantic project. Suddenly, some day, there comes a young talented developer who realizes if the company develops the software from scratch, it could become 100 times smaller as there will be no patchwork, no monitoring of the outputs and inputs and no reverse engineering to figure out why the system behaves like this to change its behavior and finally, no arrangement with users to download weird csv files as there will be a fresh new code base using latest design patterns and a modern UI.
Managers but, are unaware of technical jargon and have no time to listen to a curious kid! They look into the list of payrolls and say, replacing something we spent millions of man hours to build, is IMPOSSIBLE! Get back to your work or find another job!
Most people decide to remain silence and therefore the madness continues with no resistance. That's why when you buy a ticket from a public transport system you see long delays and various unexpected behavior. That's why when you are waiting to receive an SMS from your bank you might end up requesting a letter by post instead!
Yet there are some rebel developers who stand and fight! They finally get expelled from the famous powerful system down to the streets. They are free to open their startups and develop their dream system. They do. But government (as the only client most of the time), would look into the budget spending and says: How can we replace an annually billion dollar project without a toy built by a bunch of kids? And the madness continues.... Boeings crash, space programs stagnate and banks take forever to process risks and react. This is our world.

Today I stumbled across one the worst UX's for a filter I have ever seen, and yes it was a legacy system.

So there is a screen to show a data grid of all orders in the system with accompanying filters; date, status, free text etc.
And there is also a drop-down that allows users to filter by order number, but the genius that made it figured the best way to allow users to search for an order was to render all possible order numbers inside a single drop-down :| and they are not even ordered!

My boss keeps telling people to make sure to write stuff down during meetings. I feel like im in school.

Furthermore shes making our testers read application traces. And making me email it to them every time they want it because they don't have acess to our system.

Started up KiTTY to connect to my virtual test server per usual when I couldn't establish a connection.

Nothing too unusual so I do the typical troubleshooting I make sure host, port and authentication is all correct and it is. So now I open the display for the virtual server and start looking at ip info, host info, checking ports and everything is completely fine.

Now I'm getting frustrated so I start running things like configtest in apache, using systemctl to check the services status, even restarting virtualbox in my windows 10 devpc. Still cannot connect!

I start feeling hopeless and just shut everything down, the whole operating system.

*takes breath*

Computer boots up and I start my usual thing of creating workspaces, opening editors, starting servers, etc.

I open KiTTY again and launch my virtual test server..

konicm8ker@VM-UBUNTUSERVER:~$ _

Somethings you just can't fix without a reboot.

So happy about being about to convince management that we needed a large refactor, due to requirements change, and since the code architecture from the beginning had boundaries built before knowing all the requirements...

pulled the shame on us, this is a learning lesson card.. blah blah blah

Also explained we need to implement an RTOS, and make the system event driven... which then a stupid programmer said you mean interrupt driven ... and management lost their minds... ( bad memories of poorly executed interrupts in the past).... had to bring everyone back down to earth.. explained yes it’s interrupt driven, but interrupt driven properly unlike in the past (prior to me)... the fuck didn’t properly prioritize the interrupts and did WAYYY too much in the interrupts.

Explained we will be implementing interrupts along side DMA, and literally no message could be lost in normal execution.. and explained polling the old way along side no RTOS, Wastes power, CPU resources and throws timing off.

Same fucker spoke up and said how the fuck You supposed to do timing, all the timing will be further off... I said wrong, in this system .. unlike yours, this is discreet timing potential and accurate as fuck... unlike your round robin while loop of death.

Anyway they gave me 3 weeks.. and the system out performs, and is more power efficient than the older model.

The interrupting developer, now gives me way more respect...

when you get ready to sit down and eat a slice of pizza and get a call about a system outage...at least it's the weekend.

Using the company's desktop computers to solve cryptographic puzzles (like mining) on the company's computers while the boss and someone from the IT were asking to have a look on the machine after one guy already snatched my keyboard.

Very scary moment indeed but surprisingly it turned out: the real reason why they came was because a techadmin recently removed a shared system account but some faulty clients kept flooding the servers with outdated login credentials which also triggered mass SMS on the mobile devices.

Luckily I could somehow take an opportunity to remotely call the script which pulled the emergency brake which I prepared to shut down everything. Close call.

Nowadays I think it itsn't worth to take the risk just to do something that could also be done with the own home computer even it takes five times longer.

Worst prod scenario experienced - on site in small African country working on CRM/billing system my colleague was testing some new SQL and after finishing decided to drop and recreate the DB. She thinks the process is very slow and suddenly realizes she is dropping the prod DB. In a panic she shuts down the system and starts doing a restore from tape, but is so stressed out she writes "tar cv" instead of "tar xv" and overwrites the backup with the broken DB. Took a while to clean that one up...

A dev life in Queen songs:

„A Kind of Magic“ - Build successful
„A Winter’s Tale“ - Key Account Manager visits customer
„Action This Day“ - Release day
„All Dead, All Dead“ - System down
„Another One Bites the Dust“ - kill -9 4711
„Breakthru“ - 10 hour debuging session
„Chinese Torture“ - Microsft Office
„Coming Soon“ - Client asks for delivery date
„Dead on Time“ - shutdown -t 10
„Doing All Right“ - How's the progress on the new feature?
„Don’t Lose Your Head“ - git push -f
„Don’t Stop Me Now“ - In the zone
„Escape from the Swamp“ - Hand in resignation letter
„Forever“ - while(1)
„Friends Will Be Friends“ - friend class Vector;
„Get Down, Make Love“ - No rule to make target "Love"
„Hammer to Fall“ - Release day
„Hang on in There“ - 2 weeks until release
„I Can’t Live With You“- Microsoft
„I Go Crazy“ - Microsoft
„I Want It All“ - Google
„I Want to Break Free“ - free( (void*) 0xDEADBEEF );
„I’m Going Slightly Mad“ - Impossible feature requested
„If You Can’t Beat Them“ - Impossible feature promised by sales
„In Only Seven Days“ - Impossible feature ordered
„Is This the World We Created...?“ - Philosphic moments
„It’s a Beautiful Day“ - Weekend
„It’s a Hard Life“ - Weekday
„It’s Late“ - Deadline was last week
„Jesus“ - WTF?
„Keep Passing the Open Windows“ - Interprocess communication
„Keep Yourself Alive“ - Daily struggle
„Leaving Home Ain’t Easy“ - Time to get up and go to work
„Let Me Entertain You“ - Sales meets customer
„Liar“ - Sales
„Long Away“ - Project start
„Loser in the End“ - Dev
„Lost Opportunity“ - Job ad
„Love of My Life“ - emacs/vim
„Machines“ - Computer
„Made in Heaven“ - git
„Misfire“ - Unhandled exception at Memory location 0xDEADBEEF
„My Life Has Been Saved“ - Google drive/Facebook
„New York, New York“ - Meeting at customer
„No-One But You“ - Bus factor = 1
„Now I’m Here“ - Morning rush hour
„One Vision“ - Management goals
„Pain Is So Close to Pleasure“ - NullPointerExcption
„Party“ - Delivery completed
„Play the Game“ - Customer meeting inhous -
„Put Out the Fire“ - Support hotline
„Radio Ga Ga“ - GSM/GPRS/UMTS/LTE/5G
„Ride the Wild Wind“ - Arch Linux
„Rock It“ - Linux
„Save Me“ - CTRL-S/CTRL-Z
„See What a Fool I’ve Been“ - git blame
„Sheer Heart Attack“ - rm -rf /
„Staying Power“- UPS
„Stealin’“ - Stack Overflow
„The Miracle“ - It works
„The Night Comes Down“ - It doesn't work
„The Show Must Go On“ - Project cancelled
„There Must Be More to Life Than This“ - Philosophic moments
„These Are the Days of Our Lives“ - Daily routine
„Under Pressure“ - 1 day until release
„Was It All Worth It“ - Controlling
„We Are the Champions“ - Release finished
„We Will Rock You“ - Sales at customer
„Who Needs You“ - HR
„You Don’t Fool Me“ - Debugging session
„You Take My Breath Away“ - rm -rf /
„You’re My Best Friend“ - emacs/vim