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.

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

Things have been a little too quiet on my side here, so its time for an exciting new series:

practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 1: Dealing with the new backend team

It's great to be back folks. Since our last series where we delved into the mind numbing idiocy of former colleagues, a lot has changed. I've moved to a new company and taken a step up as a Dev manager / Tech lead. Now I know what you are all thinking, sounds more dull and boring right? Well it wouldn't be a practiseSafeHex series if we weren't ...

<audience-shouting>
DEALING! ... WITH! ... IDIOTS!
</audience-shouting>

Bingo! so lets jump right in and kick us off with a good one.

So for the past few months i've been on an on-boarding / fact finding / figuring out this shit-storm, mission to understand more about what it is i'm suppose to do and how to do it. Last week, as part of this, I had the esteemed pleasure of meeting face to face with the remote backend team i've been working with. Lets rattle off a few facts to catch us all up:

- 8 hour time difference to me
- No documentation other than a non-maintained swagger doc
- Swagger is reporting errors and several of the input models are just `Type: String`
- The one model that seems accurate, has every property listed as optional, including what must be the primary key
- Properties go missing and get removed at the drop of a hat and we are never told.
- First email I sent them took 27 days to reply, my response to that hasn't been answered so far 31 days later (new record! way to go team, I knew we could do it!!!)
- I deal directly with 2 of them, the manager and the tech lead. Based on how things have gone so far, i've nick named them:
1) Ass
2) Hole

So lets look at some example of their work:

- I was trying to test the new backend, I saw no data in QA. They said it wouldn't show up until mid day their time, which is middle of the night for us. I said we need data in our timezone and I was told: a) "You don't understand how big this system is" (which is their new catch phrase) b) "Your timezone is not my concern"

- The whole org started testing 2 days later. The next day a member from each team was on a call and I was asked to give an update of how the testing was going on the mobile side. I said I was completely blocked because I can't get test data. Backend were asked to respond. They acknowledged they were aware, but that mobile don't understand how big the system is, and that the mobile team need to come up with ideas for the backend team, as to how mobile can test it. I said we can't do anything without test data, they said ... can you guess what? ... correct "you don't understand how big the system is"

- We eventually got something going and I noticed that only 1 of the 5 API changes due on their side was done. Opened tickets. 2 days later asked them for progress and was told that "new findings" always go to the bottom of the backlog, and they are busy with other things. I said these were suppose to be done days ago. They said you can't give us 2 days notice and expect everything done. I said the original ticket was opened a month a go *sends link* ......... *long silence* ...... "ok, but you don't understand how big the system is, this is a lot of work"

- We were on a call. Product was asking the backend manager (aka "Ass") a question about a slight upgrade to the new feature. While trying to talk, the tech lead (aka "Hole") kept cutting everyone off by saying loudly "but thats not in scope". The question was "is this possible in the future" and "how long would it take", coming from management and product development. Hole just kept saying "its not in scope", until he was told to be quiet by several people.

- An API was sending down JSON with a string containing a message for the user with 2 bits of data inside it. We asked for one of those pieces to also come down as a property as the string can change and we needed it client side. We got that. A few days later we found an edge case and asked for the second piece of data to be a property too. Now keep in mind, they clearly already have access to them in order to make the string. We were told "If you keep requesting changes like this, you are going to delay the release of the backend by up to 2 weeks"

Yes folks, there you have it, the most minuscule JSON modifications, can delay your release by up to 2 weeks ........ maybe I should just tell product, that they don't understand how big the app is, and claim we can't build it on our side? Seems to work for them

Thats all the time we have for today,

Tune in for more, where we'll be looking into such topics as:

- If god himself was an iOS developer ... not
- Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand
- Its more time-efficient to just give everything a story point of 5
- Why waste time replying to emails ... when you can do nothing instead

See you all next week,
practiseSafeHex

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then, next week, it happened again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The cleaning staff came in.

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

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

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

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

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...

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.

The university system is fucked.

I've been working in this industry for a few years now, but have been self taught for much longer. I'm only just starting college and I'm already angry.

What does a college degree really mean anymore? From some of the posts I've seen on devRant, it certainly doesn't ensure professional conduct, work ethic, or quality (shout out to the brave souls who deal with the lack of these daily). Companies should hire based on talent, not on a degree. Universities should focus more on real world applications or at least offer such programs for students interested in entering the workforce rather than research positions. A sizable chunk of universities' income (in the U.S. at least) comes from research and corporate sponsorships, and educating students is secondary to that. Nowadays education is treated as a business instead of a tool to create value in the world. That's what I signed up for, anyway - gaining the knowledge to create value in the world. And yet I along with many others feel so restricted, so bogged down with requirements, fees, shitty professors, and shitty university resources. There is so much knowledge out there that can be put to instant practical use - I am constantly shocked at the things left out of my college curriculum (lack of automated tests, version control, inadequate or inaccurate coverage of design patterns and philosophies) - things that are ABSOLUTELY essential to be successful in this career path.

It's wonderful that we eventually find the resources we need, or the motivation to develop essential skills, but it's sad that so many students in university lack proper direction through no fault of their own.

Fuck you, universities, for being so inflexible and consistently failing to serve your basic purpose - one of if not the most important purpose on this earth.

Fuck you, corporations, for hiring and paying based on degree. Fuck you, management, for being so ignorant about the industry you work in.

Fuck you, clients, who treat intelligent people like dirt, make unreasonable demands, pull some really shady shit, and perpetuate a damaging stereotype.

And fuck you to the developer who wrote my company's antipattern-filled, stringy-as-all hell codebase without comments. Just. Fuck you.

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

Fuck the memes.

Fuck the framework battles.

Fuck the language battles.

Fuck the titles.

Anybody who has been in this field long enough knows that it doesn't matter if your linus fucking torvalds, there is no human who has lived or ever will live that simultaneously understands, knows, and remembers how to implement, in multiple languages, the following:

- jest mocks for complex React components (partial mocks, full mocks, no mocks at all!)
- token cancellation for asynchronous Tasks in C#
- fullstack CRUD, REST, and websocket communication (throw in gRPC for bonus points)
- database query optimization, seeding, and design
- nginx routing, https redirection
- build automation with full test coverage and environment consideration
- docker container versioning, restoration, and cleanup
- internationalization on both the front AND backends
- secret storage, security audits
- package management, maintenence, and deprecation reviews
- integrating with dozens of APIs
- fucking how to center a div

and that's a _comically_ incomplete list; barely scratches the surface of the full range of what a dev can encounter in a given day of writing software

have many of us probably done one or even all of these at different times? surely.

but does that mean we are supposed to draw that up at a moment's notice some cookie-cutter solution like a fucking robot and spit out an answer on a fax sheet?

recruiters, if you read this site (perhaps only the good ones do anyway so its wasted oxygen), just know that whoever you hire its literally the luck of the draw of how well they perform during the interview. sure, perhaps some perform better, but you can never know how good someone is until they literally start working at your org, so... have fun with that.

Oh and I almost forgot, again for you recruiters, on top of that list which you probably won't ever understand for the entirety of your lives, you can also add writing documentation, backup scripts, and orchestrating / administrating fucking JIRA or actually any somewhat technical dashboard like a CMS or website, because once again, the devs are the only truly competent ones - and i don't even mean in a technical sense, i mean in a HUMAN sense of GETTING SHIT DONE IN GENERAL.

There's literally 2 types of people in the world: those who sit around drawing flow charts and talking on the phone all day, and those WHO LITERALLY FUCKING BUILD THE WORLD

why don't i just run the whole fucking company at this point? you guys are "celebrating" that you made literally $5 dollars from a single customer and i'm just sitting here coding 12 hours a day like all is fine and well

i'm so ANGRY its always the same no matter where i go, non-technical people have just no clue, even when you implore them how long things take, they just nod and smile and say "we'll do it the MVP way". sure, fine, you can do that like 2 or 3 times, but not for 6 fucking months until you have a stack of "MVPs" that come toppling down like the garbage they are.

How do expect to keep the "momentum" of your customers and sales (I hope you can hear the hatred of each of these market words as I type them) if the entire system is glued together with ducktape because YOU wanted to expedite the feature by doing it the EASY way instead of the RIGHT way. god, just forget it, nobody is going to listen anyway, its like the 5th time a row in my life

we NEED tests!
we NEED to know our code coverage!
we NEED to design our system to handle large amounts of traffic!
we NEED detailed logging!
we NEED to start building an exception database!

BILBO BAGGINS! I'm not trying to hurt you! I'm trying to help you!

Don't really know what this rant was, I'm just raging and all over the place at the universe. I'm going to bed.

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 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.

THIS is why unit testing is important, I often see newbs scour at the idea of debugging or testing:
My high school cs project, i made a 2d game in c++. A generic top down tank game. Being my FIRST project and knowing nothing about debugging or testing and just straight up kept at it for 3 months. Used everything c++ and OOP had to offer, thinking "It works now, sure will work later"

Fast forward evaluation day i had over 5k lines of code here, and not a day of testing; ALL the bugs thought to themselves- "YOU KNOW WHAT LETS GUT THIS KID "
Now I did see some minor infractions several times but nothing too serious to make me refactor my code. But here goes

I started my game on a different system, with a low end processor about 1/4 the power of mine( fair assumption). The game crashed in loading screen. Okay lets do that again. Finally starts and tanks are going off screen, dead tanks are not being de-spawned and ended up crashing game again. Wow okay again! Backround image didn't load, can only see black background. Again! Crashed when i used a special ability. Went on for some time and i gave up.

Prof saw the pain, he'd probably seen dis shit a million times, saw all the hard work and i got a good grade anyways. But god that was embarrassing, entire class saw that and I cringe at the thought of it.
I never looked at testing the same way again.

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...

Privacy & security violations piss me off. Not to the point that I'll write on devRant about it, but to the point that coworkers get afraid from the bloodthirsty look in my eyes.

I know all startups proclaim this, but the one I work at is kind of industry-disrupting. Think Uber vs taxi drivers... so we have real, malicious enemies.

Yet there's still this mindset of "it won't happen to us" when it comes to data leaks or corporate spying.

Me: "I noticed we are tracking our end users without their consent, and store not just the color of their balls, but also their favorite soup flavor and how often they've cheated on their partner, as plain text in the system for every employee to read"

Various C-randomletter-Os: "Oh wow indubitably most serious indeed! Let's put 2 scrumbag masters on the issue, we will tackle this in a most agile manner! We shall use AI blockchains in the elastic cloud to encrypt those ball-colors!"

NO WHAT I MEANT WAS WHY THE FUCK DO WE EVEN STORE THAT INFORMATION. IT DOES IN NO WAY RELATE TO OUR BUSINESS!

"No reason, just future requirements for our data scientists"

I'M GRABBING A HARDDRIVE SHREDDER, THE DB SERVER GOES FIRST AND YOUR PENIS RIGHT AFTER THAT!

(if it's unclear, ball color was an optimistic euphemism for what boiled down to an analytics value which might as well have been "nigger: yes/no")

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh crap.

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

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

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

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

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

I once had a client who wanted a system where no matter what type of file someone uploaded we'd make a PDF out of it. I don't mean "print to PDF", I mean like a straight conversion. A picture, a doc file, a speadsheet, an MP3, a video, a CAD file, a .ivt file format you and I make up right now and tell no one else about for storing Iowan votes, anything.

I told him that was impossible.* There are indeed things out there where you can print to a pdf, but it would mean that a program that knows what a .grml file is, and how to represent it on paper, assuming it even can be, is involved in the middle.

He refused to believe me, and found a company where the sales person swore up and down their product could do it. I said "then you explained it wrong" and we went back and forth. It culminated in me being put in contact with THEIR programmer. I explained what he was looking for. Their programmer replied along the lines of "but that's impossible, and also what would a PDF of half these examples even look like?" I basically said "I know, but your guy is telling my guy you can do this, so you need to tell your guy to STFU before we ALL get roped into trying to convert Duke Nukem maps and zip files full of dlls to pdfs."

Luckily it finally died after that, but the whole ordeal took months.

*I'm being direct/blunt for the sake of brevity when recapping what I said, just fill in the usual "talking with a client niceties"

2019 resolutions/goals recap: (non-personal ones)
1) Improve diet (did; e.g. ramen and fast food to clean keto)
2) Lose weight (did; lost 24 pounds!)
3) Find a good job (did, twice)
4) Buy a harp (did not; large and expensive, no place to put it, and I have small children who would absolutely break it)
5) Keep house clean, even if it's by myself (did, somewhat; I cleaned some, managed to get one other person to clean semi-regularly, and another sporadically)
6) Work on social awkwardness (did; read and applied Dale Carnegie's The Art of Public Speaking, which netted me my last job offer. Still pretty awkward though)
7) Move out of the desert (did not; not enough money, and job didn't allow remote work)
8) Stop bloody waiting on people (did not; still very guilty of this...)

I don't remember the rest 🙁 didn't write them down last year. But I still accomplished 5 out of the 8 I remembered, with one being a pass, so 5/7!

-----

2020 resolutions/goals:
1) Finally move out of the desert
2) Invest 20% of my income every month
3) Reduce bills by 20%
4) Solve/address some health issues
5) Make a schedule so things regularly get done around the house, e.g. cleaning
6) Find some friends and make time for them
7) Replace Debian with something else
8) Revamp my backup system
9) Be proactive and stop waiting on people
10) Build a (stationary) coil gun for fun

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

I've been fairly lucky with my bosses of late since I've progressed in my programming career. But my absolute worst boss was when I first started working in an office environment doing data entry. My boss at the time was terrible, and she was always against innovation or process improvement. She also always tried to make herself look good and taking credit for the accomplishments of others. If she screwed up it was your fault, and she was "always buried in email" so she could never respond to you for pto requests, or escalation of issues between departments. My whole family pretty much worked in various roles in the department and she fired my brother after my mother left the company for no reason, saying he was "sleeping", but I worked right next to him and he's tall and had to slouch just to comfortable see his computer screen since the same manager refused to approve work station improvements for him.

Our workflow was to receive daily spreadsheets of health care claims that we had to manually process and enter into the system. So being the lazy innovator that I am, and trying to find ways I can efficiently work, I delved into studying visual basic and programmed a few functions and tools in excel to analyze, highlight, and process some of the data since the claims on the spreadsheets always had a specific pattern. This was all before I had any formal education in computer science so the program was very basic and clunky but it tripled my efficiency. When I brought it up to my boss to spread it among the rest of our team so they could use it after a short 20 minute training, she struck it down saying any training or use of it would be a waste of resources since it was too technical and complex to be used and if I were to keep improving it or use it I would be fired. It was literally copy and paste from one spreadsheet to the other en masse and clicking a button to sort and fill in the blanks. Eventually I showed it to the director of the department when working on a large data entry project with her, and I was later offered a job as a technical analyst where I was responsible for the codebase that generated the reports for the department and specifically all the reports my old boss used where I would occasionally mess with her to get back at all the crap she gave me and my brother. Since all the reports were blind carbon copied to everyone, I would send out her reports on a delay while everyone else got them on time. It eventually got her in so much crap she had to step down as a manager. She still works in the same company that I started working at again earlier this year, and like the many careers she's ruined she eventually ruined her own within the company 😂

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I 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...

preface: swearing.
because anger.

So. I'm trying to use Material Design with Material UI. The components and UI look *great*.

It's from google, though, which really pisses me off. but I like what I can do with the UI.

HOWEVER.
I really want a grid system for responsiveness. because obviously. besides, i really hate doing all the responsive shit myself. it sucks and i hate it.

Material Design does not include a grid system. okay, it includes a grid component, but it's not for site layout. it's for making a grid of images. or something.

What it does include is a lot of very lengthy documentation on what you should do, complete with fancy graphics saying "THIS IS HOW YOU MUST DO IT OR YOU'RE DOING IT ALL WRONG" -- but they don't actually support it! you must do it all yourself.

Why oh why would they tell you how you must do things if they don't provide the tools to make it possible? fucking google.

You might decide it's a grand idea to interject at this moment and say: "there are plenty of tools out there that allow you to do this!" And sure, you'd be right. however -- and i think this might just barely might be worth mentioning -- THEY REALLY FUCKING SUCK. Hey, let's look at some of the classes! So clear and semantic! This one was nice and simple: "xs4" -- but wtf does that mean? okay, it apparently means 4 columns as they'd appear on an extra-small layout. How does that work on a large layout? Who knows. Now, how about "c12"? okay, maybe 12 columns? but how does that display on a phone with a layout small enough to only have 4 columns? i don't know! they don't know! nobody knows!

oh oh oh oh. and my particular favorite: "mdc-layout-grid__cell mdc-layout-grid__cell--align-bottom" WHAT. THE. FUCK. I'm not writing a goddamn novel! and that one claims to be from google itself. either they've gone insane or someone's totally lying. either way, fuck them.

SO. TERRIBLENESS ASIDE.

Instead of using Material Design v0.fuckoff that lacks any semblance of a grid layout, I figure I'll try v1.0 alpha that actually has one supported natively. It's new and supports everything I need. There's no way this can't be a good idea.

The problem is, while it's out and basically usable, none of the React component libraries fucking work with it. Redux-Form doesn't work with it either because it doesn't understand nested compound controls, and hacking it to work at least triples the boilerplate. So, instead, I have to use some other person's "hey, it's shitty but it works for me" alpha version of someone else's project that works as a wrapper on top of Redux-Form that makes all of this work. yeah, you totally followed that. Kind of like a second-cousin-twice-removed sort of project adding in the necessary features and support all the way down. and ofc it doesn't quite work. because why would things ever be easy?

like seriously, come on.
What i'm trying to do isn't even that bloody hard.

Do I really have to use bootstrap instead?
fuck that.

then again, fuck this significantly more.

UGH.

*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.

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 😊

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

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?

!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.

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

"Mature codebase"
"Our entire team are senior devs"
"Almost everyone that worked on the project is still here and available, so nothing's lost! We can ask whatever we need to."

You would think this would mean the code was clean and easy to read, and you could ask the person who wrote it for help. But. no. It's kinda the opposite.

Here's an example:
I'm trying to write a mailer, and I have no freaking clue how to get it working. I talked with two of the more senior devs, and both assured me it was very straightforward, and then walked me through the quite complicated mailer structure and got lost. The first pretended not to, but glazed over a few holes in his tour, and said I could figure the rest out. The second one ended up admitting that he's totally unfamiliar with it -- his last commit on a mailer was from about 8 years ago -- and doesn't know how to get it working anymore.

So, I'm on my own.

I wrote a super basic mailer for debugging (no idea if/how it actually sends a mail, but I think I can construct one?). But whenever I call the mailer, it gets run twice? Somehow? Apparently I need to start a bunch of daemons to get that part of the system to work. Which is cool because they don't work fresh out of the repo. Got some further help, and now my ostensibly working code throws errors for an undefined var that i'm not even using, and to make it easier: without a backtrace. joy! There's so much inheritence and extending and including going on that it's going to take me hours to track this down. ugh.

I'm keeping my paystub in front of me for some desparately needed motivation.

Been reviewing ALOT of client code and supplier’s lately. I just want to sit in the corner and cry.

Somewhere along the line the education system has failed a generation of software engineers.

I am an embedded c programmer, so I’m pretty low level but I have worked up and down and across the abstractions in the industry. The high level guys I think don’t make these same mistakes due to the stuff they learn in CS courses regarding OOD.. in reference how to properly architect software in a modular way.

I think it may be that too often the embedded software is written by EEs and not CEs, and due to their curriculum they lack good software architecture design.

Too often I will see huge functions with large blocks of copy pasted code with only difference being a variable name. All stuff that can be turned into tables and iterated thru so the function can be less than 20 lines long in the end which is like a 200% improvement when the function started out as 2000 lines because they decided to hard code everything and not let the code and processor do what it’s good at.

Arguments of performance are moot at this point, I’m well aware of constraints and this is not one of them that is affected.

The problem I have is the trying to take their code in and understand what’s its trying todo, and todo that you must scan up and down HUGE sections of the code, even 10k+ of line in one file because their design was not to even use multiple files!

Does their code function yes .. does it work? Yes.. the problem is readability, maintainability. Completely non existent.

I see it soo often I almost begin to second guess my self and think .. am I the crazy one here? No. And it’s not their fault, it’s the education system. They weren’t taught it so they think this is just what programmers do.. hugely mundane copy paste of words and change a little things here and there and done. NO actual software engineers architecture systems and write code in a way so they do it in the most laziest, way possible. Not how these folks do it.. it’s like all they know are if statements and switch statements and everything else is unneeded.. fuck structures and shit just hard code it all... explicitly write everything let’s not be smart about anything.

I know I’ve said it before but with covid and winning so much more buisness did to competition going under I never got around to doing my YouTube channel and web series of how I believe software should be taught across the board.. it’s more than just syntax it’s a way of thinking.. a specific way of architecting any software embedded or high level.

Anyway rant off had to get that off my chest, literally want to sit in the corner and cry this weekend at the horrible code I’m reviewing and it just constantly keeps happening. Over and over and over. The more people I bring on or acquire projects it’s like fuck me wtf is this shit!!! Take some pride in the code you write!

TL;DR :

"when i die i want my group project members to lower me into my grave so they can let me down one last time"

STORY TIME

Last year in College, I had two simultaneous projects. Both were semester long projects. One was for a database class an another was for a software engineering class.

As you can guess, the focus of the projects was very different. Databases we made some desktop networked chat application with a user login system and what not in Java. SE we made an app store with an approval system and admin panels and ratings and reviews and all that jazz in Meteor.js.

The DB project we had 4 total people and one of them was someone we'll call Frank. Frank was also in my SE project group. Frank disappeared for several weeks. Not in class, didn't contact us, and at one point the professors didn't know much either. As soon as we noticed it would be an issue, we talked to the professors. Just keeping them in the loop will save you a lot of trouble down the road. I'm assuming there was some medical or family emergency because the professors were very understanding with him once he started coming back to class and they had a chance to talk.

Lesson 1: If you have that guy that doesn't show up or communicate, don't be a jerk to them and communicate with your professor. Also, don't stop trying to contact the rogue partner. Maybe they'll come around sometime.

It sucked to lose 25% of our team for a project, but Frank appreciated that we didn't totally ignore him and throw him under the bus to the point that the last day of class he came up to me and said, "hey, open your book bag and bring it next to mine." He then threw a LARGE bottle of booze in there as a thank you.

Lesson 2: Treat humans as humans. Things go wrong and understanding that will get you a lot farther with people than trying to make them feel terrible about something that may have been out of their control.

Our DB project went really well. We got an A, we demoed, it worked, it was cool. The biggest problem is I was the only person that had taken a networking class so I ended up doing a large portion of the work. I wish I had taken other people's skills into account when we were deciding on a project. Especially because the only requirement was that it needed to have a minimum of 5 tables and we had to use some SQL language (aka, we couldn't use no-SQL).

The SE project had Frank and a music major who wanted to minor in CS (and then 3 other regular CS students aside from me). This assignment was make an app store using any technology you want. But, you had to use agile sprints. So we had weekly meetings with the "customer" (the TA), who would change requirements on us to keep us on our toes and tell us what they wanted done as a priority for the next meeting. Seriously, just like real life. It was so much fun trying to stay ahead of that.

So we met up and tried to decided what to use. One kid said Java because we all had it for school. The big issue is trying to make a Java web app is a pain in the ass. Seriously, there are so many better things to use. Other teams decided to use Django because they all wanted to learn Python. I suggested why not use something with a nice package system to minimize duplicating work that had already been done and tested by someone. Kid 1 didn't like that because he said in the real world you have to make your own software and not use packages. Little did he know that I had worked in SE for a few years already and knew damn well that every good project has code from somewhere else that has already solved a problem you're facing. We went with Java the first week. It failed miserably. Nobody could get the server set up on their computers. Using VCS with it required you to keep the repo outside of the where you wrote code and copy and paste changes in there. It was just a huge flop so everyone else voted to change.

Lesson 3: Be flexible. Be open to learning new things. Don't be afraid to try something new. It'll make you a better developer in the long run.

So we ended up using Meteor. Why? We all figured we could pick up javascript super easy.Two of us already knew it. And the real time thing would make for some cool effects when an app got a approved or a comment was made. We got to work and the one kid was still pissed. I just checked the repo and the only thing he committed was fixing the spelling of on word in the readme.

We sat down one day and worked for 4 straight hours. We finished the whole project in that time. While other teams were figuring out how to layout their homepage, we had a working user system and admin page and everything. Our TA was trying to throw us for loops by asking for crazy things and we still came through. We had tests that ran along side the application as you used it. It was friggin cool.

Lesson 4: If possible, pick the right tool for the job. Not the tool you know. Everything in CS has a purpose. If you use it for its purpose, you will save days off of a project.

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'.

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.

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.

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 am tired of toxic politics at work.

Signs of a toxic workplace:

* (good) decisions are discouraged rather than encouraged.
Someone wants to introduce a great optimization and guess what the reply is (often from someone IT-ignorant): wait a minute, you can't do that because we have all these nifty little hacks and if you dare to suggest change to our shitty system, we could not allow that! We want to stay in our comfy zone, no no!

* no one can make a decision unless Mr. favorite-developer-everyone-likes says it's a good idea. And even if he's wrong, no one cares to listen to anyone else's idea on it. Stupid Feudalism. One man decides over the entire codebase. That's just idiocy. Where's TEAM in there?

* thinking years of experience equals intellectual capacity. It certainly does not! There are senior developers with 15 years of experience who don't even know how to open commandline, or they didn't even know about Chrome developer tools, or how the HTTP spec is built. That shit just makes me cry inside. How can you give these peoples the title of senior when they know less than a freshman year kid?!

* ignoring people's education and/or capacities. "You just graduated, so you're a noob". Right, I know more than you, you idiot. You've demonstrated your ignorance often enough. Stupid ignorant colleagues.

* blaming politics (every team blames the other team and there's constant tension)

* roaming ignorance (no one in the company, and I mean no one, besides me, knows enough about Information Technology to make competent decisions or analysis)

Politics:
What gives testers the idea that they know more than other members of the team? Why do they treat devs like they are mentally challenged?
What gives PO's that same idea?
What gives managers the idea that they can just yell at developers and threaten them with time pressure? Yeah, because the customers are breathing down their neck.

Just because I am a Junior Developer, that makes me stupid? I am tired of no one caring to listen to my ideas. I could save the company at the snap of a finger but everyone ignores my opinion (and often facts) on things.
People come in and instead of asking me for help, they ask everyone else for help, including the people who don't know shit about IT; now that's insulting.

Anyway, toxic politics.

TLDR - you shouldn't expect common sense from idiots who have access to databases.

I joined a startup recently. I know startups are not known for their stable architecture, but this was next level stuff.
There is one prod mongodb server.
The db has 300 collections.
200 of those 300 collections are backups/test collections.
25 collections are used to store LOGS!! They decided to store millions of logs in a nosql db because setting up a mysql server requires effort, why do that when you've already set up mongodb. Lol 😂
Each field is indexed separately in the log.
1 collection is of 2 tb and has more than 1 billion records.
Out of the 1 billion records, 1 million records are required, the rest are obsolete. Each field has an index. Apparently the asshole DBA never knew there's something called capped collection or partial indexes.

Trying to get approval to clean up the db since 3 months, but fucking bureaucracy. Extremely high server costs plus every week the db goes down since some idiot runs a query on this mammoth collection. There's one single set of credentials for everything. Everyone from applications to interns use the same creds.
And the asshole DBA left, making me in charge of handling this shit now. I am trying to fix this but am stuck to get approval from business management. Devs like these make me feel sad that they have zero respect for their work and inability to listen to people trying to improve the system.

Going to leave this place really soon. No point in working somewhere where you are expected to show up for 8 hours, irrespective of whether you even switch on your laptop.
Wish me luck folks.

TeamLeader: I need you to stop disagreeing with the decision of the management, the people in there are taking their decision for a reason.

IHateForALiving: When integration tests were failing, the management decided to comment out the ingration tests; god knows how many bugs slipped by.
When users had problems with the idiotic migration process the management designed, the management decided to remove down migrations; it took two weeks before the QA team started screaming, as all their machines were filled with garbage data.
I was writing type definitions for my code, you removed it. You effectively ensured the only person capable of working on that particular piece of code would be me.
I have been proposing for 8 months to make a unified scheduled jobs system, you all decided to create at least 5 different -and incompatible- implementations, at least 4 of them are total garbage with setTimeout, there's no way to ever unify them and God willing they never break, if they do there's NO WAY to find out even where tf they're hidden in the code.
Every time you were making one of those bad decision I was the only one warning you of the problems you were creating. The idiotic change of the day is going MongoDB+Angular: I can keep a low profile if you want, but when this blows up you can be damn well sure I'll handle my 2 weeks notice because there's no way on earth I'll be stuck with the aftermath of you lot taking technical decisions you are clearly unable to manage.

I've optimised so many things in my time I can't remember most of them.

Most recently, something had to be the equivalent off `"literal" LIKE column` with a million rows to compare. It would take around a second average each literal to lookup for a service that needs to be high load and low latency. This isn't an easy case to optimise, many people would consider it impossible.

It took my a couple of hours to reverse engineer the data and implement a few hundred line implementation that would look it up in 1ms average with the worst possible case being very rare and not too distant from this.

In another case there was a lookup of arbitrary time spans that most people would not bother to cache because the input parameters are too short lived and variable to make a difference. I replaced the 50000+ line application acting as a middle man between the application and database with 500 lines of code that did the look up faster and was able to implement a reasonable caching strategy. This dropped resource consumption by a minimum of factor of ten at least. Misses were cheaper and it was able to cache most cases. It also involved modifying the client library in C to stop it unnecessarily wrapping primitives in objects to the high level language which was causing it to consume excessive amounts of memory when processing huge data streams.

Another system would download a huge data set for every point of sale constantly, then parse and apply it. It had to reflect changes quickly but would download the whole dataset each time containing hundreds of thousands of rows. I whipped up a system so that a single server (barring redundancy) would download it in a loop, parse it using C which was much faster than the traditional interpreted language, then use a custom data differential format, TCP data streaming protocol, binary serialisation and LZMA compression to pipe it down to points of sale. This protocol also used versioning for catchup and differential combination for additional reduction in size. It went from being 30 seconds to a few minutes behind to using able to keep up to with in a second of changes. It was also using so much bandwidth that it would reach the limit on ADSL connections then get throttled. I looked at the traffic stats after and it dropped from dozens of terabytes a month to around a gigabyte or so a month for several hundred machines. The drop in the graphs you'd think all the machines had been turned off as that's what it looked like. It could now happily run over GPRS or 56K.

I was working on a project with a lot of data and noticed these huge tables and horrible queries. The tables were all the results of queries. Someone wrote terrible SQL then to optimise it ran it in the background with all possible variable values then store the results of joins and aggregates into new tables. On top of those tables they wrote more SQL. I wrote some new queries and query generation that wiped out thousands of lines of code immediately and operated on the original tables taking things down from 30GB and rapidly climbing to a couple GB.

Another time a piece of mathematics had to generate all possible permutations and the existing solution was factorial. I worked out how to optimise it to run n*n which believe it or not made the world of difference. Went from hardly handling anything to handling anything thrown at it. It was nice trying to get people to "freeze the system now".

I build my own frontend systems (admittedly rushed) that do what angular/react/vue aim for but with higher (maximum) performance including an in memory data base to back the UI that had layered event driven indexes and could handle referential integrity (overlay on the database only revealing items with valid integrity) or reordering and reposition events very rapidly using a custom AVL tree. You could layer indexes over it (data inheritance) that could be partial and dynamic.

So many times have I optimised things on automatic just cleaning up code normally. Hundreds, thousands of optimisations. It's what makes my clock tick.

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.

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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..

Story: A sudden pleasant realisation about myself...

Realized today that I have reached a level of Developer I always wanted to have reached.. A junior forgot his mouse, I gave him mine and took out old trusty hacky scroll from the cupboard, the junior brought batteries as a thank you, I told him thanks but there was no need, I have coded without a mouse and can do again if need be, no issues really... I have even used my phone over wifi as a mouse, I can dev as long as I have some form of something at my disposal... Had a meeting where I had to implement a feature for something that was mentioned in a meeting I was never invited for a bunch of months prior, that had to go live today, asked all the right questions, remained calm, tested like a pro and it was practically seamlessly inserted into the system by yours truly... I was proud of my work on a different level to be honest.. Had a difficult meeting with my manager, but kept really calm, stated the facts effortlessly and made him feel comfortable too, happy ending and happy resolution. Then I spent the ride home trying to project an fm station using my phone.. by the time we got home me and my colleague found a solution to be tested soon... It was only when I put my phone down after closing all my research tabs and deleting the apps used for the day that will not be needed tomorrow when I realised how awesome I seem to have become... Treating myself to a juicy burger and coke with gaming tonight. Something is bound to go sideways again sometime. But you know what, it seems like I'll be just fine.. Somewhere I seem to have become exactly who I wanted to be.. Now for further goals and higher aims while maintaining this person I only noticed today.

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 w