For this episode of practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker were going to move past developers and go straight to a CEO.

*sitcom audience oooooohhhhhhh*

I know! , always risky, everyone has a bad story, but lets try bring it home. Here we go, Most incompetent co-worker, candidate 2, "R".

R was ... now how do I say this ... R was a special kind of Bastard. A perfect blend of impatient, arrogant, a dickhead and to borrow a phrase from family guy "below the line of mental retardation".

I've actually spoken about him recently here: https://devrant.com/rants/1141873/...

I won't bother duplicating the content here, but its worth a read.

Some of the other highlights of R include:

- Not understanding that my first demo was UI / Frontend only (despite frequent explanations). I didn't slack off for the next 2 weeks, I was busy making all those buttons actually do stuff and connect to the server. Shockingly "Test 1", "Test 2" and "Lorem ipsum" wasn't our content.
- He once asked how long a bunch of tasks was going to take, I told him 2 weeks and he gave me 2 and a half days. He pulled me into a meeting the next week to see where it all was, and I literally sat there saying "I asked for 2 weeks" over and over until he shut up.

- R's favourite phrase was "when I was a developer", typically followed by some sort of insult, forever labelling him "asshole" by everyone who has ever worked for him.

- When apple launched iOS 7 and changed the UI and the methods you could use, he refused to invest the time in upgrading to iOS 7, but demanded the app look like an iOS 7 app. No amount of "There is no method to access the status bar in iOS 6" could make him comprehend the issue at hand.

- The worst was when I was dealing with an issue to do with 64bit being introduced (which I tried to explain ... christ give me strength). When another dev fixed a similar but unrelated issue he stood up in front of the office and said loudly "pfft practiseSafeHex tried to tell me this was something to do with 64bit, which made absolutely no sense, guess he doesn't know what he's talking about"

Thankfully I handed in my notice ... after less than 2 months, making in abundantly clear why. Will R make it to the top of the list of most incompetent?

Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

Tech interview prep on leetCode... I solved this but wanted to read the optimal solution. I check the Solution page..... 😟 🙁 ☹️ 😣 😖 😖 😫 😩 😩 😦 😧 😮 😬 😬 😵

https://leetcode.com/problems/...

The way I solved it, basically just did a merge of the 2 lists as is iterates thru them...

Ialright i need a break after i try to understand this...

btw, tech/CS workers, when you approach a real problem do you think like this? Solve the problems in Big O and math symbols?

Rant against a new religion: the Agile Religion, started by the Agile Manifesto: https://agilemanifesto.org

This manifesto is as ambiguous and open to interpretation as any religious text. You might as well get advice from a psychic. If you succeed, you'll start believing in them more. If you don't, then they'll say you misinterpreted them. The whole manifesto just re-states the obvious with grandiloquent words.

For example: "Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale." What does this say REALLY? To me, it just says "deliver software, try to be fast." Great, thanks for re-writing my job description. Of course, some features take "a couple of weeks", while others "a couple of months". Again, thanks for re-stating the obvious.

"Value *working software* over _comprehensive documentation_"
Result => PHP

"Welcome changing requirements, even late in development."
I'm okay with this one as long as the managers also `welcome the devs changing deadlines, even the night before the release date`. We're not slaves; we're more like architects. If you change the plans for the building, we're gonna have to demolish part of what we've already built and re-construct. I'm not gonna spring just because you change your mind like a girl changes clothes.

"Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project."
Daily? Fine. ONCE a day, sure. But this doesn't give you the right to breathe down my neck or break my concentration by calling me every couple of mintues.

"The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation."
- Not if you could've summed up that meeting in an email.
- Whereas that might be true for clarity, write that down.

"Working software is the primary measure of progress."
... is how you get a tech debt the size of the US's.

"The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely."
Have you heard of vacations?

"Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility."
So you're telling us "do good". Again, thank you for re-writing my job description.

It's just a bunch of fancy babble, more suitable in poetry than in the dev world. It doesn't provide any scientific evidence for any of its supposed suggestions, so I just won't use it

techie 1 : hey, can you give me access to X?
techie 2 : the credentials should be in the password manager repository
t1 : oh, but I don't have access to the password manager
t2 : I see your key A1B2C3D4 listed in the recipients of the file
t1 : but I lost that key :(
t2 : okay, give me your new key then.
t1 : I have my personal key uploaded to my server
t1 : can you try fetching it?
t1 : it should work with web key directory ( WKD )
t2 : okay
t2 : no record according to https://keyserver.ubuntu.com
t1 : the keyserver is personal-domain.com
t1 : try this `gpg --no-default-keyring --keyring /tmp/gpg-$$ --auto-key-locate clear,wkd --locate-keys username@personal-domain.com`
t2 : that didn't work. apparently some problem with my dirmgr `Looking for drmgr ...` and it quit
t1 : do you have `dirmngr` installed?
t2 : I have it installed `dirmngr is already the newest version (2.2.27-2)`
t2 : `gpg: waiting for the dirmngr to come up ... (5)` . this is the problem. I guess
t1 : maybe your gpg agent is stuck between states.
t1 : I don't recall the command to restart the GPG agent, but restarting the agent should probably fix it.
t1 : `gpg-connect-agent reloadagent /bye`

source : https://superuser.com/a/1183544
t1 : *uploads ASCII-armored key file*
t1 : but please don't use this permanently; this is a temporary key
t2 : ok
t2 : *uploads signed password file*
t1 : thanks
t2 : cool

*5 minutes later*
t1 : hey, I have forgotten the password to the key I sent you :(
t2 : okay
...
t2 : fall back to SSH public key encryption?
t1 : is that even possible?
t2 : Stack Overflow says its possible
t1 : * does a web search too *
t1 : source?
t2 : https://superuser.com/questions/...
t2 : lets try it out
t1 : okay
t2 : is this your key? *sends link to gitlab.com/username.keys*
t1 : yes, please use the ED25519 key.
t1 : the second one is my old 4096-bit RSA key...
t1 : which I lost
...
t1 : wait, you can't use the ED25519 key
t2 : why not?
t1 : apparently, ED25519 key is not supported
t1 : I was trying out the steps from the answer and I hit this error :
`do_convert_to_pkcs8: unsupported key type ED25519`
t2 : :facepalm: now what
t1 : :shrug:
...
t1 : *uploads ASCII-armored key file*
t1 : I'm sure of the password for this key
t1 : I use it everyday
t2 : *uploads signed password file*
*1 minute later*
t1 : finally... I have decrypted the file and gotten the password.
t1 : now attempting to login
t1 : I'm in!
...
t2 : I think this should be in an XKCD joke
t2 : Two tech guys sharing password.
t1 : I know a better place for it - devRant.com
t1 : if you haven't been there before; don't go there now.
t1 : go on a Friday evening; by the time you get out of it, it'll be Monday.
t1 : and you'll thank me for a _weekend well spent_
t2 : hehe.. okay.

!rant

For all of youse that ever wanted to try out Common Lisp and do not know where to start (but are interested in getting some knowledge of Common Lisp) I recommend two things:

As an introductory tutorial:
https://lisperati.com/casting.html/

And as your dev environment:
https://portacle.github.io/

Notice that the dev environment in question is Emacs, regardless of how you might feel about it as a text editor, i can recommend just going through the portacle help that gives you some basic starting points regarding editing. Learn about splitting buffers, evaluating the code you are typing in order for it to appear in the Common Lisp REPL (this one comes with an environment known as SLIME which is very popular in the Lisp world) as well as saving and editing your files.

Portacle is self contained inside of one single directory, so if you by any chance already have an Emacs environment then do not worry, Portacle will not touch any of that. I will admit that as far as I am concerned, Emacs will probably be the biggest hurdle for most people not used to it.
Can I use VS Code? Yes, yes you can, but I am not familiar with setting up a VSCode dev environment for Emacs, or any other environment hat comes close to the live environment that emacs provides for this?

Why the fuck should I try Common Lisp or any Lisp for that matter? You do not have to, I happen to like it a lot and have built applications at work with a different dialect of Lisp known as Clojure which runs in the JVM, do I recommend it? Yeah I do, I love functional programming, Clojure is pretty pure on that (not haskell level imo though, but I am not using Haskell for anything other than academic purposes) and with clojure you get the entire repertoire of Java libraries at your disposal. Moving to Clojure was cake coming from Common Lisp.

Why Common Lisp then if you used Clojure in prod? Mostly historical reasons, I want to just let people know that ANSI Common Lisp has a lot of good things going for it, I selected Clojure since I already knew what I needed from the JVM, and parallelism and concurrency are baked into Clojure, which was a priority. While I could have done the same thing in Common Lisp, I wanted to turn in a deliverable as quickly as possible rather than building the entire thing by myself which would have taken longer (had one week)

Am I getting something out of learning Common Lisp? Depends on you, I am not bringing about the whole "it opens your mind" deal with Lisp dialects as most other people do inside of the community, although I did experience new perspectives as to what programming and a programming language could do, and had fun doing it, maybe you will as well.

Does Lisp stands for Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses or Los in stupid parentheses? Yes, also for Lost of Insidious Silly Parentheses and Lisp is Perfect, use paredit (comes with Portacle) also, Lisp stands for Lisp Is Perfect. None of that List Processing bs, any other definition will do.

Are there any other books? Yes, the famous online text Practical Common Lisp can be easily read online for free, I would recommend the Lisperati tutorial first to get a feel for it since PCL demands more tedious study. There is also Common Lisp a gentle introduction. If you want to go the Clojure route try Clojure for the brave and true.

What about Scheme and the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs? Too academic for my taste, and if in Common Lisp you have to do a lot of things on your own, Scheme is a whole other beast. Simple and beautiful really, but I go for practical in terms of Lisp, thus I prefer Common Lisp.

how did you start with Lisp?
I was stupid and thought I should start with it after a failed attempt at learning C++, then Java, and then Javascript when I started programming years ago. I was overwhelmed, but I continued. Then I moved to other things. But always kept Common Lisp close to heart. I am also heavy into A.I, Lisp has a history there and it is used in a lot of new and sort of unknown projects dealing with Knowledge Reasoning and representation. It is also Alien tech that contains many things that just seem super interesting to me such as treating code as data and data as code (back-quoting, macros etc)

I need some inspiration man......show me something? Sure, look for a game called Kandria in youtube, the creator, Shimera (Nicolas Hafner) is an absolute genius in the world of Lisp and a true inspiration. He coded the game in Common Lisp, he is also the person behind portacle. If that were not enough, he might very well also be Shirakumo, another prominent member of the Common Lisp Community.

Ok, you got me, what is the first thing in common lisp that I should try after I install the portacle environment? go to the repl and evaluate this:

(+ 0.1 0.2)

Watch in awe at what you get.

In the truest and original sense of the phrase (MIT based) "happy hacking!"

About bad companies and bad tech decisions.

Old $JOB: "You know, we are going to implement our own UI in Angular"

Me: "Maybe we can use something pre-made and then customize the colors..."

Old $JOB: "Shut up you always want to do the things in your own way"

Two years later: UI is unfinished, i quitted the job.

Two years and one month later: Sparkbox proved that using pre-made components cuts the hassle in half: https://sparkbox.com/foundry/...

Those companies who NEVER listen to people who wants to try the right thing DESERVE TO FAIL.