"You gave us bad code! We ran it and now production is DOWN! Join this bridgeline now and help us fix this!"

So, as the author of the code in question, I join the bridge... And what happens next, I will simply never forget.

First, a little backstory... Another team within our company needed some vendor client software installed and maintained across the enterprise. Multiple OSes (Linux, AIX, Solaris, HPUX, etc.), so packaging and consistent update methods were a a challenge. I wrote an entire set of utilities to install, update and generally maintain the software; intending all the time that this other team would eventually own the process and code. With this in mind, I wrote extensive documentation, and conducted a formal turnover / training season with the other team.

So, fast forward to when the other team now owns my code, has been trained on how to use it, including (perhaps most importantly) how to send out updates when the vendor released upgrades to the agent software.

Now, this other team had the responsibility of releasing their first update since I gave them the process. Very simple upgrade process, already fully automated. What could have gone so horribly wrong? Did something the vendor supplied break their client?

I asked for the log files from the upgrade process. They sent them, and they looked... wrong. Very, very wrong.

Did you run the code I gave you to do this update?

"Yes, your code is broken - fix it! Production is down! Rabble, rabble, rabble!"

So, I go into our code management tool and review the _actual_ script they ran. Sure enough, it is my code... But something is very wrong.

More than 2/3rds of my code... has been commented out. The code is "there"... but has been commented out so it is not being executed. WT-actual-F?!

I question this on the bridge line. Silence. I insist someone explain what is going on. Is this a joke? Is this some kind of work version of candid camera?
Finally someone breaks the silence and explains.

And this, my friends, is the part I will never forget.

"We wanted to look through your code before we ran the update. When we looked at it, there was some stuff we didn't understand, so we commented that stuff out."

You... you didn't... understand... my some of the code... so you... you didn't ask me about it... you didn't try to actually figure out what it did... you... commented it OUT?!

"Right, we figured it was better to only run the parts we understood... But now we ran it and everything is broken and you need to fix your code."

I cannot repeat the things I said next, even here on devRant. Let's just say that call did not go well.

So, lesson learned? If you don't know what some code does? Just comment that shit out. Then blame the original author when it doesn't work.

You just cannot make this kind of stuff up.

So... A random morning moment:
(c - Cient, m - me)

C: Help!!! Our users are complaining that our website is not working as intended!!! This is crucial!!!!
M: What's the problem? What is not working?
C: EVERYTHING!!!! FIX IT!!!!
M: Could you be more specific...?
C: Look at the bugsnag - it has all the errrors!!!
M: *looks there - no errors* - But... It has no errors...
C: Okay, so client told me he's using Galaxy SII - does that ring a bell?
M: *thinks that I'm fucked* - Asks, which browser?
C: Why do you need it? It's a browser after all...
M: Yeah but not all browsers are the same and I need type and version to investigate...
C: It's Samsung default browser... Last updated 2012 January.
M: Well, tell that user to update the browser, the site is working fine on newer versions...
C: No, you update it.
M: Browser?!
C: Yes, what else?!
M: Of course, I'll fly 3000 kilometres to press UPDATE button on clients phone...
C: Well, he's not doing it himself - he's afraid!
M: Well, that is his problem. Site is working fine for other users with newer browsers.
C: But... He's a client
M: I get it but he's a client that uses 6 years old browser and tries to visit our website. Don't you remember that we ditched IE support on your behalf for the same reason?!
C: Oh... I see... Can you make something that it works with 2005 browsers?
M: Of course... *evil laugh starts* I'll make the website work on EVERY single device EVER - make it plain text.
C: Are you joking?
M: Are you?

----

And since then, we ditched the actual need for supporting users with old browsers that don't update to modern standards... Feels great!

Me: *sends email 45 minutes before a meeting*.

Boss: *20 mins into meeting*, any updates about the issues found yesterday?

Me: Yep I sent an email with an update on everything.

Boss: ok great, *shares screen*, *opens email*.

Ok want to walk us through it?

Me: ...... walk through my email?

Boss: Yeah we have everyone here in the meeting.

Me: ...... yeah I included all of them on the email.

Boss: Right, but it would be good to go through it for everyone’s benefit.

Me: *Reads email word for word, from the screen share*

I will now refer to him from this day forth as “The Time Vampire”.

Last week:

Client: Hey sometimes when I sent about 20 messages to your app they need a long time to arrive. Why is your app so slow?

Me: We are using Google Cloud Messaging to deliver messages. There is no guarantee when messages arrive.

Client: So such a big company is the fault? And not you? Pls make it faster. Make it always act the same.

Working as a programmer is pain in the ass because the people with the money don't know a shit about anything.

I changed just a fucking useless string.. I deployed the "new version" and I told him I boosted everything.

Today he spoked with my buddy about another thing and he told him by the way the app is now much faster.

..placebo update

Got laid off my by old employer back in 2019 because they have their priorities completely wrong.
Got a mail today whether I could fix something for them (ofc, they wanted me to do it essentially for free).
One of the websites I built for a customer back when I still worked there had a massive bug (that I was aware off and patched in later versions of the library causing it).
They never updated it so, I told them "just update the library".

Apparently, the idiot that was in charge of maintaining said site after I left didn't know how to and completely broke everything.
The hilarious part: While I setup everything using stuff like Docker and Git to make rollbacks easy...
That idiot went back to FTP and manually upgrading the databases through PhpMyAdmin :^)
He nuked the entire site.
Database? Gone.
Codebase? Borked (installed a version with a lot of breaking changes without properly reading the migration guide).
And knowing that shit company, they don't have any backups either.

They said "I wasn't needed because we have other good devs" when they laid me off.
Uhu, I can eh... see those good devs doing their job :^)

Just had a customer complain that the website didn't work in Microsoft Edge. After a WordPress update and slight CSS correction everything was fine. Then backend got a hold of us kindly asking "What the effervescent F*** is going on with that website"

Apparently it loads half a gig of data from our servers with each visit, we made the website and host it but we did not cause this. Further inspection shows that it's all images.

Me and the youngest (and possibly brightest) guy in the bunch view the PHP to try and control the amount of posts loading when visiting the start page as a means of controlling this issue.

We soon reached a conclusion we didn't expect, everything was in one post..........

Client: "Happy New Year 2018! Wish you a very successful and productive happy new year :)"

Me: "Oh Thank you! I wish you...."

Client: "Any update on the feature I have requested?"

Me: "Ah yes. I would love you give you an update. By the way, Happy n...."

Client: "Do you think the it can be released before midnight?"

I stopped replying. Fuck everyone and everything.

Happy New Year to everyone here.

Last week, I notified a customer about that their webbserver spewed out several thousands of spam emails every hour, and they have to fix it ASAP.
(I also inform them for the 50th times for the last 2 years that they really need to update their websites so we can update from Debian 5).

The owner of the company forward this to their developers.

Today, I got the answer from them denying everything and blaming our "negligence" and they also dared to question all our technical expertise. shots fired

Spend some hours, finding shit on their websites, dug out logs, read documentation and old conversation and compiled that into a huge email that was designed to put them 10 meters under ground.

mfw I pressed send

When I update Android Studio and everything breaks.

Seven months ago:
===============
Project Manager: - "Guys, we need to make this brand new ProjectX, here are the specs. What do you think?"

Bored Old Lead: - "I was going to resign this week but you've convinced me, this is a challenge, I never worked with this stack, I'm staying! I'll gladly play with this framework I never used before, it seems to work with this libA I can use here and this libB that I can use here! Such fun!"

Project Manager: - "Awesome! I'm counting on you!"

Six months ago:
====================
Cprn: - "So this part you asked me to implement is tons of work due to the way you're using libA. I really don't think we need it here. We could use a more common approach."

Bored Old Lead: - "No, I already rewrote parts of libB to work with libA, we're keeping it. Just do what's needed."

Cprn: - "Really? Oh, I see. It solves this one issue I'm having at least. Did you push the changes upstream?"

Bored Old Lead: - "No, nobody uses it like that, people don't need it."

Cprn: - "Wait... What? Then why did you even *think* about using those two libs together? It makes no sense."

Bored Old Lead: - "Come on, it's a challenge! Read it! Understand it! It'll make you a better coder!"

Four months ago:
==============
Cprn: - "That version of the framework you used is loosing support next month. We really should update."

Bored Old Lead: - "Yeah, we can't. I changed some core framework mechanics and the patches won't work with the new version. I'd have to rewrite these."

Cprn: - "Please do?"

Bored Old Lead: - "Nah, it's a waste of time! We're not updating!"

Three months ago:
===============
Bored Old Lead: - "The code you committed doesn't pass the tests."

Cprn: - "I just run it on my working copy and everything passes."

Bored Old Lead: - "Doesn't work on mine."

Cprn: - "Let me take a look... Ah! Here you go! You've misused these two options in the framework config for your dev environment."

Bored Old Lead: - "No, I had to hack them like that to work with libB."

Cprn: - "But the new framework version already brings everything we need from libB. We could just update and drop it."

Bored Old Lead: - "No! Can't update, remember?"

Last Friday:
=========
Bored Old Lead: - "You need to rewrite these tests. They work really slow. Two hours to pass all."

Cprn: - "What..? How come? I just run them on revision from this morning and all passed in a minute."

Bored Old Lead: - "Pull the changes and try again. I changed few input dataset objects and then copied results from error messages to assertions to make the tests pass and now it takes two hours. I've narrowed it to those weird tests here."

Cprn: - "Yeah, all of those use ORM. Maybe it's something with the model?"

Bored Old Lead: - "No, all is fine with the model. I was just there rewriting the way framework maps data types to accommodate for my new type that's really just an enum but I made it into a special custom object that needs special custom handling in the ORM. I haven't noticed any issues."

Cprn: - "What!? This makes *zero* sense! You're rewriting vendor code and expect everything to just work!? You're using libs that aren't designed to work together in production code because you wanted a challenge!?? And when everything blows up you're blaming my test code that you're feeding with incorrect dataset!??? See you on Monday, I'm going home! *door slam*"

Today:
=====
Project Manager: - "Cprn, Bored Old Lead left on Friday. He said he can't work with you. You're responsible for Project X now."

Hello Monday:
0.Arrive late due to traffic.(Apparently a car hit a cow crossing the road)
1. Try upgrading php5 to php7 and break stuff in the process and waste 2 hours fixing things.(Poor connection so ssh sessions hung occasionally)
2.PHP fixed,open Gmail and get over 100 emails from clients about the server being down(because of (0)).Ignore all.Find a snaglist of over 20 TODOs.
3.Open Android Studio, update to 2.3 and everything becomes broken.Each time i open it ,it crashes and i have to "Report to Google"
4.Spend the next 1 hour reinstalling AS.It finally works.
5.Open Project and the libraries are broken.Spend another hour upgrading build tools.
6.Leave SDK to update and decide to check my Google Cloud console.$50 bill pending.Shit.
7.Try XCode. Remember the project is still in Swift 2 and I have to upgrade it(Would take eternity).Immediately closes xcode.
8.Gives up on life and decides to log into Devrant.

When doing first level support....
[windows desktop software]

Me: How can I help you?
Client: I installed the latest update from your website yesterday, but the version number hasn't changed
Me: You downloaded version *** ?
Client: Yes
Me: And you installed it?
Client: Yes
Me: Did you get an error message during the installation?
Client: No, everything worked fine, no errors
Me: And the installation process was completed?
Client: I think so
Me: Hmmm... Lets try it again. I will assist you.
Client: Ok
Me: Start your browser and open the website.
Client: ..... did it
Me: Good. Now click on the link to the download page.
Client: .... did it
Me: Do you see the the update package at the top of the list?
Client: Yes.
Me: Ok. Now click on it.
Client: Why?

Mainly a story with some ranting sprinkled on top :)

My grandma used to refuse to turn her PC off because ONE SINGLE WINDOWS 8.1 UPDATE like 2 years ago made it so that Windows would turn the PC on by itself, nevermind it was fixed in the next update, she would simply refuse to try to turn the PC off from that point on... I never looked at the uptime but the PC was sitting on a carpet and all the fans were struggling to keep spinning, so much dust! When I asked her why it's so dusty all around the PC (the table that the PC was under was covered in a really thick layer of dust) she replied that the chambermaid comes every Wednesday to clean up the whole flat so she has no idea. I set up a camera that was recording the whole room so I could see what was going on... sure enough the chambermaid avoided anything that looked like it could have some ICs in it with a distance of at least 2 meters... When I showed the video to my grandma she was like: Yes, she is scared of electronics...
Seriously fuck me... Allright, I cleaned the whole table, carpet and the inside of PC, everything ran so quietly that I wasn't sure if I plugged the fans in.
Anyway after this I had to record the PC one whole night so I could prove to my grandma that it would not turn on by itself and she can in fact turn it off.
Fuck me... what a bad week that was...

PS: Yes, my stories do not have a point :)

Just a quick update (been a little) on the privacy website!

Although both the frontend and the backend need quite some work, I managed, with the help of some other guys, to get everything (only for the IM section yet for now) loaded from the database instead of hardcoded! Yes, that also means that the tiny icon colors are either red or green based on database values :).

Going to keep working on this tomorrow in the hopes I can also get some other subjects ready.

Thanks!

Manager: Hey how come you left so many comments on my PR?

Dev: Well you’ve just recently learned how to code so there’s going to be a lot of things to learn beyond what you’ve picked up in your online coding tutorials. Don’t worry it’s only minor things like you put everything all in one function, left outdated comments in the code, have if statements 4 levels deep, have a console.log after every line of code some of which log .env variables, skipped error handling, cast to “any” a bunch instead of using more specific types, didn’t write any tests and some unrelated tests are now failing due to a circular dependancy.

Manager: THAT IS SO DISRESPECTFUL!!APPROVE MY PR IMMEDIATELY. IT WASN’T EVEN EASY FOR ME TO CREATE THE PR, NOW I HAVE TO MAKE AN UPDATE!? YOU’RE THE DEV, YOU SHOULD FIX IT NOT ME!! NEVER COMMENT ON ANY OF MY PRS AGAIN.

Hello devRanters! A new update on the privacy website as I've had time to work on that last weekend.

For the picture: everything except for the images (although the URI's are in the database) is coming directly from the DB!

Also got a thingy working which can show one app on a single page including it's pro's/cons etc that you see on the main page but also (still have to write that part though and no screenshots yet as I've only done the backend!) sources (links to proof etc), a description and a guide on how to use that app/service!

I'm finally getting somewhere :)

So I'm doing my thing... Suddenly all open windows start closing one by one and computer starts a shut down.. and i realize the windows update is coming..

But like.. can you at least give me a 2 minutes heads up? How the fuck such a process gets approved in microsoft?

"Yeah just close everything and force restart.. it's fine"

long rant = this;

Jesus. Fucking. Christ.

The task: get Windows 7 on my mom's new Lenovo running win 10.

First idea: dual boot. Go into disk utility and shrink win 10 partition leaving empty partition. Easy!

Unfortunately it all went downhill from there.

Restart, can't get into boot menu. Google says you have to do that from Windows. Ok.

Laptop says BOOTING FROM CD IS NOT SUPPORTED. WTF??

Go into BIOS, enable legacy boot, prioritize legacy. Restart. Ok, it boots from disk.

Go to install 7 on the empty partition and it can't because its an unsupported partition format or some shit. Whatever, wipe everything. Ok, installing windows.

Windows installed, need drivers. Go download them with another computer and go to copy them over with USB disk. Windows doesn't detect it. THIS POS DOESN'T HAVE STANDARD USB DRIVERS?!?!?

Of course, the laptop didn't come with any driver software. I end up burning a fucking CD like its fucking 2001 so that I can get the goddamn wifi driver on it.

Ok, I have wifi. Go to Lenovo site, find driver page. Select all the drivers I want for the model/OS and click download. Lenovo site says "hey, use this driver update software." I'm like, hey asshole, why don't you just give me the drivers i asked for. But fine.

Driver update software downloads, I install it, nothing happens. I run it, it says it's already running. Still nothing. What the goddamn flipping fuck?

I go download the drivers individually. I try to install USB driver. It says my system is not supported. .............Try to install chipset driver, not supported. ............ I can install maybe half of the drivers and I still can't even use a fucking USB mouse. Gonna have to wait for windows update to find it sometime two days from now.

I hope everyone in charge of Lenovos fucking ass backwards pointless piece of useless fucking shit drivers gets raped to death with a serrated knife.

Google sucks!
No, not as e-mail or for privacy reasons. Sure, that too, but it comes with "free" stuff.

It sucks because it's breaking every possible record in the worst, shittiest, most insanely stupid APIs and integrations out there on the entire fucking planet!

It is comically stupid!

Aside from their LOVE of hard-deprecating APIs every few months, requiring constant, time consuming maintenance of every tool that integrates deeply with Google services, some of their APIs, for expensive stuff, look like they've been written by Bobby McFartface from 7th grade.

Take a look at DoubleClick Search (their ad performance reporting tool, that sure does sound like one). To upload custom, additional data, you must pass in a ton of parameter, and they REQUIRE some of them to have a specific, hardcoded value. What's the point in passing that parameter then you dickheads?!
But fine, so you uploaded some stuff using the API. Now you want to delete everything and try again after you fixed a bug - well you fucking CAN'T! You can't delete stuff, you can only mark them as "deleted" using an update call.
Bulk operations? Fuck no!
Can I just add on top? Well of course not! That will raise a ton of exceptions. Same message should be transmitted using the PUT, not POST request, in order to edit.
Can I send everything to PUT? Of course not! You can't edit something that's not there, dummy!

Can I see what's there so that I can update it, and add what's missing?
Well of course not! Why on Earth would you need to see what information is in there after you uploaded it? Who needs that anyway?

Simply send, pray, and hope that everything will be fine (it will not).

Like holy fucking crap, it can't get any more stupid!
Google is a huge pile of idiots who feed on only a single cow - the search engine.

It's times like these when I think that Google right now is the worst thing that exists for everyone in tech. It's dragging everyone down with their monopolies everywhere and complete idiocy in managing them.

Code archaeology.

Almost everything I fix/update/build requires a ridiculous amount of digging through and carefully studying the mountains of neglected, decaying, and shoddy code that make up these projects.

I spend maybe 10% of my time (and likely closer to 5%) actually writing code now. I miss it so much.

Dear Microsoft,

It's been almost 2 days since you have asked me to update to Windows 10, I'm beginning to get a little worried, is everything ok?

I'm editing the sidebar on one of our websites, and shuffling some entries. It involves moving some entries in/out of a dropdown and contextual sidebars, in/out of submenus, etc. It sounds a little tedious but overall pretty trivial, right?

This is day three.
I learned React+Redux from scratch (and rebuilt the latter for fun) in twice that long.

In my defense, I've been working on other tasks (see: Alerts), but mostly because I'd rather gouge my freaking eyes out than continue on this one.

Everything that could be wrong about this is. Everything that could be over-engineered is. Everything that could be written worse... can't, actually; it's awful.

Major grievances:
1) The sidebars (yes, there are several) are spread across a ridiculous number of folders. I stopped counting at 20.
2) Instead of icon fonts, this uses multiple images for entry states.
3) The image filenames don't match the menu entry names. at all. ("sb_gifts.png" -> orders); active filenames are e.g. "sb_giftsactive.png"
4) The actions don't match the menu entry names.
5) Menu state is handled within the root application controller, and doesn't use bools, but strings. (and these state flags never seem to get reset anywhere...)
6) These strings are used to construct the image filenames within the sidebar views/partials.
7) Sometimes access restrictions (employee, manager, etc.) are around the individual menu entries, sometimes they're around a partial include, meaning it's extremely difficult to determine which menu entries/sections/subsections are permission-locked without digging through everything.
8) Within different conditionals there are duplicate blocks markup, with duplicate includes, that end up render different partials/markup due to different state.
9) There are parent tags outside of includes, such as `<ul>#{render 'horrific-eye-stabbing'}</ul>`
10) The markup differs per location: sometimes it's a huge blob of non-semantic filthiness, sometimes it's a simple div+span. Example filth: section->p->a->(img,span) ... per menu entry.
11) In some places, the markup is broken, e.g. `<li><u>...</li></u>`
12) In other places, markup is used for layout adjustments, such as an single &nbsp; nested within several divs adorned with lots of styles/classes.
13) Per-device layouts are handled, not within separate views, but by conditionally enabling/disabling swaths of markup, e.g. (if is_cordova_session?).
14) `is_cordova_session` in particular is stored within a cookie that does not expire, and within your user session. disabling it is annoying and very non-obvious. It can get set whether or not you're using cordova.
15) There are virtually no stylesheets; almost everything is inline (but of course not actually everything), which makes for fun layout debugging.
16) Some of the markup (with inline styling, no less) is generated within a goddamn controller.
17) The markup does use css classes, but it's predominately not for actual styling: they're used to pick out elements within unit tests. An example class name: "hide-for-medium-down"; and no, I can't figure out what it means, even when looking at the tests that use it. There are no styles attached to that particular class.
18) The tests have not been updated for three years, and that last update was an rspec version bump.
19) Mixed tabs and spaces, with mixed indentation level (given spaces, it's sometimes 2, 4, 4, 5, or 6, and sometimes one of those levels consistently, plus an extra space thereafter.)
20) Intentional assignment within conditionals (`if var=possibly_nil_return_value()`)
21) hardcoded (and occasionally incorrect) values/urls.

... and last but not least:
22) Adding a new "menu sections unit" (I still haven't determined what the crap that means) requires changing two constants and writing a goddamn database migration.

I'm not even including minor annoyances like non-enclosed ternaries, poor naming conventions, commented out code, highly inefficient code, a 512-character regex (at least it's even, right?), etc.

just.

what the _fuck_

Who knew a sidebar could be so utterly convoluted?

(Written March 13th at 2am.)

This morning (yesterday), my computer decided not to boot again: it halts on "cannot find firmware rtl-whatever" every time. (it has booted just fine several times since removing the firmware.) I've had quite the ordeal today trying to fix it, and every freaking step along the way has thrown errors and/or required workarounds and a lot of research.

Let's make a list of everything that went wrong!

1) Live CD: 2yo had been playing with it, and lost it. Not easy to find, and super smudgy.

2) Unencrypt volume: Dolphin reports errors when decrypting the volume. Research reveals the Live CD doesn't incude the cryptsetup packages. First attempts at installing them mysteriously fail.

3) Break for Lunch: automatic powersaving features turned off the displays, and also killed my session.

4) Live CD redux: 25min phonecall from work! yay, more things added to my six-month backlog.

5) Mount encrypted volume: Dolphin doesn't know how, and neither do I. Research ensues. Missing LVM2 package; lvmetad connection failure ad nauseam; had to look up commands to unlock, clone, open, and mount encrypted Luks volume, and how to perform these actions on Debian instead of Ubuntu/Kali. This group of steps took four hours.

6) Chroot into mounted volume group: No DNS! Research reveals how to share the host's resolv with the chroot.

7) `# apt install firmware-realtek`: /boot/initrd.img does not exist. Cannot update.

8) Find and mount /boot, then reinstall firmware: Apt cannot write to its log (minor), listed three install warnings, and initially refused to write to /boot/initrd.img-[...]

9) Reboot!: Volume group not found. Cannot process volume group. Dropping to a shell! oh no..

(Not listed: much research, many repeated attempts with various changes.)

At this point it's been 9 hours. I'm exhausted and frustrated and running out of ideas, so I ask @perfectasshole for help.
He walks me through some debugging steps (most of which i've already done), and we both get frustrated because everything looks correct but isn't working.

10) Thirteenth coming of the Live CD: `update-initramfs -u` within chroot throws warnings about /etc/crypttab and fsck, but everything looks fine with both. Still won't boot. Editing grub config manually to use the new volume group name likewise produces no boots. Nothing is making sense.

11) Rename volume group: doubles -'s for whatever reason; Rebooting gives the same dreaded "dropping to a shell" result.

A huge thank-you to @perfectasshole for spending three hours fighting with this issue with me! I finally fixed it about half an hour after he went to bed.

After renaming the volume group to what it was originally, one of the three recovery modes managed to actually boot and load the volume. From there I was able to run `update-initramfs -u` from the system proper (which completed without issue) and was able to boot normally thereafter.

I've run updates and rebooted twice now.
After twelve+ hours... yay, I have my Debian back!

oof.

Now I remember why I don't work from home.

It's 3pm and I've managed about an hour's work today -- most of which was debugging something really dumb. Lunch took me 2 freaking hours because I had help from a noisy smoke detector (EEEERH! EEEERH! EEEERH! EEEERH! ad nauseam), and everything kept going wrong. Girlfriend went to the store to pick up groceries; they were order-online groceries from a store 6 minutes away, so idk why it's taken over an hour. Now the smoke detector is pretending to "go to work" by watching youtube, and when that gets boring, he fights with his baby brother and steals his toys.

Children are fun and all, but they require 98% of your attention. and fuck, nobody else in this house makes any money, why the hell am I stuck watching them? While working!?

asdfakshaslkgjasdg

Update: now the smoke detector is taking the computer apart with a random electric screwdriver i haven't seen in years, and the baby suddenly has no pants.

The state of operating systems in 2024.

Windows - has a user interface that changes with every update so Microsoft can push ads even though it costs $200

Mac - an unusable interface designed solely for consuming media anchored to hardware that costs 4x what it should

Linux - absolute freedom to do everything you want so long as you don't want to play games, connect to Wifi, or listen to audio

I'm just going to go be a beet farmer in the 1600s

Fucking kill me right now please. How the FUCK am I supposed to get any shit done when I'm learning something and the fucking DOCUMENTATION has been UNAVAILABLE for the past THREE MOTHERFUCKING DAYS.

GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER MICROSOFT.

Fucking idiots.

It wouldn't be so fucking bad if things like this didn't happen all the time.

But when EVERYTHING is FUCKED - ALL THE TIME, it kinda makes a person lose all hope in humanity and technology.

A typical motherfucking day for me:

Wake up
Go to work
Come home
Eat dinner (if I remember)
Attempt to code shit for 1 - 3 hours before I have to sleep
CAN'T FUCKING CODE SHIT BECAUSE:
1. Internet disconnects every 5 fucking minutes
2. DOCUMENTATION SITES ARE FUCKING DOWN
3. Shit Windows is UPDATING
4. a previous windows UPDATE has royally motherFUCKED my PC
5. etc

FUCK

My PlayStation 1 has never needed an update, but these days, everything comes with an updater. Like, "oh, boy, my TV needs to update again". There's something wrong.

Decided to update my rooted Oneplus One...
Everything worked on the first try without even having to do a bunch of reboots...
Hate it when weird stuff like that happens.

So I'm going to get married next june. I made an app for the guests where they have all information available, can send music wishes and can share images of the wedding with other guests.

Here is my story on publishing it in the App Store:

Me: "Hey Apple, I made a small app for my wedding. Mind putting it in your store?"
Apple: "Yeah, whatever" *publishes it*

One month later:
Me: "I made really small changes, please take this update."
Apple: "Ha no, its not interessting for enough people." *rejects it*

I panic, because the app is mentiont in the invites to the wedding which are already printed.

So one day later:
Me: "Ok ok, I added a button in the intro where people can send me a mail if they are interested in using the same app for their wedding."
Apple: "That changes everything! We will accept the update."

I'm happy, that they accepted it in the end, but really?!? There are so many shit apps in the store, why do you reject any not-fart app, because it is not interesting enough??? And why the fuck do you accept it in the first place?

Man I really hate it when people think that coding doesn't take any concentration and can just interrupt you while you're thinking about how to solve problems

So the other day I was working on how to solve a problem with filtering data with JS, and I had to urgently update one of our pages on our website. I had to update that page according to the content of a Word file, which I didn't check how long it was.

About 15 minutes later everything was ready and published, so I set myself back to my problem.

I get an email from her, "you mixed up things" and she showed up in my office. "There are four pages in this word doc and you copied wrong parts", I was like "ok, I'll fix it". Fixed it two minutes later, went back to code.

Received another email, with another subject, again with another problem. Start getting pissed off for being interrupted for nonsense. Fixed it instantly and put my manager in the email loop so she is aware my other colleague pisses me off.

And again, another direct email "can you fix this?!". I started ignoring her requests because I need some work to be done, and I already lost 2 hours. Got again interrupted by her personal visit to point me which things are wrong, repeating everything twice as I am stupid to her. Man I can't code in peace. I fixed her shit, exactly as she wants and decided to pay my manager a visit to tell her I'm really pissed about being interrupted all the time.

Five minutes before the end of the day, she comes panicking in the office about ANOTHER WORTHLESS issue. Told her it's nothing and went away.

Day is over, thought it was over - a whole afternoon spent correcting her fucking page that gets 10 visits a year.

On the next morning, "there is something wrong with your form, can you check it?!!?" with an attached screenshot. FFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUU STOP ANNOYING ME WITH YOUR FUCKING SHIT CANT WORK ANYMORE. PUT YOUR FUCKING PAGE RIGHT UP YOUR ASS AND FIX IT YOURSELF.

She doesn't have any access to the back end.

Guess I'll have to fix it then...

A person just bought a 3000€ workstation and asked me to install cracked versions of Office, AutoCAD, full Adobe suite and Rhino with plugins. And he's going to use them at work to make money.

So, since I have to, I installed 2-3 years old versions of each, in English (he only knows Italian) and blocked all the connections so he can't receive any update/fix or use web related functionalities. I also disabled all autostarting components and contextual menu / OS integrations (although this can be seen as a plus).

When he's calling me asking to "fix" things, I will simply say "sorry, it's the only way for the crack to work, if you want everything you'd better pay for a license or else go open source".

Why can't people understand the value of the complex software they use? Just because it's not a material thing doesn't mean it's not a steal

!rant

We just did a massive update to our prod db environment that would implicate damn near all system in our servers....on a friday.

Luckily for us, our DB is a badass rockstar mfking hero that was planning this shit for a little over a year with the assistance of yours truly as backup following the man's lead...and even then I didn't do SHIT

My boy did great, tested everything and the switch was effortless, fast (considering that it went on during working hours) and painless.

I salute my mfking dude, if i make my own company I am stealing this mfker. Homie speaks in SQL, homie was prolly there when SQL was invented and was already speaking in sql before shit was even set in spec, homie can take a glance at a huge db and already cast his opinion before looking at the design and architecture, homie was Data Science before data science was a thing.

Homie is my man crush on the number one spot putting mfking henry cavill on second place.

Homie wakes up and pisses greatness.

Homie is the man. Hope yall have the same mfking homie as I do

There was a time I made an update on one of our client's e-commerce website sign-up page. The update caused a bug that allowed new users to create an account without actually creating an account.

The code block meant to save user credentials (i.e email address and password) to the database was commented out for some reasons I still can't remember to this day. After registration new users had their session created just as normal but in reality they have no recorded account on the platform. This shit went on like this for a whole week affecting over 350 new customers before the devil sent me a DM.

I got a call from my boss on that weekend that some users who had made purchases recently can't access their account from a different device and cannot also update their password. Nobody likes duty calls on a weekend, I grudgingly and sluggishly opened up my PC to create a quick fix but when I saw what the problem was I shut down my PC immediately, I ran into the shower like I was being chased by a ghost, I kept screaming "what tha fuck! what tha fuck!!" cus I knew hell was about to break loose.

At that moment everything seemed off as if I could feel everything, I felt the water dripping down my spine, I could hear the tiniest of sound. I thought about the 350 new customers the client just lost, I imagined the raving anger on the face of my boss, I thought about how dumb my colleagues would think I was for such a stupid long running bug.

I wondered through all possible solutions that could save me from this embarrassment.
-- "If this shitty client would have just allowed us verify users email before usage things wouldn't have gotten to this extent"
-- "Should I call the customers to get their email address using their provided telephone?... No they'd think I'm a scammer"
-- "Should I tell my boss the database was hacked? Pffft hack my a**",
-- "Should I create a page for the affected users to re-verify their email address and password? No, some sessions may have expired"
-- "Or maybe this the best time to quit this f*ckn job!"
... Different thoughts from all four corners of the bathroom made it a really long bath. Finally, I decided it was best I told my boss what had happened. So I fixed the code, called my boss the next day and explained the situation on ground to him and yes he was furious. "What a silly mistake..!" he raged and raged. See me in my office by Monday.
That night felt longer than usual, I couldn't sleep properly. I felt pity for the client and I blamed it all on myself... yeah the "silly mistake", I could have been more careful.

Monday came boss wasn't at the office, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday not available. Next week he was around and when we both met the discussion was about a different project. I tried briefing him about last week incident, he seems not to recall and demands we focus on the current project.

However, over three hundred and fifty customers swept under the carpet courtesy of me. I still felt the guilt of that f*ck up till this day.

Summary: Burnout, and everything's broken.

I don't feel like doing a damn thing today. I look at the code and cringe. I look at Slack and think "ugh. i can't." Mental capitals are even too much work.

(I've started reading "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" to try and combat burnout. I'll write a rant/story about it here if I find it helpful. but all I want to do today is drink tea and read.)

But onto the story:

Heroku is deprecating support for and will automatically upgrade any old verisons of Postgres running on its platform after August something (like five days from now).

I performed the upgrade to PG10 on Sunday (and late into the night), provisioning a new follower, blah blah blah.

However, the version of Rails we're using (4.2.x) doesn't support PG10 sequences, so I manually added in support via a monkeypatch. I did this on our QA servers first, obviously, and everything worked as expected. After half a day of no issues, I did the same on production, and again: everything worked as expected.

But today? I keep hearing about new things that are broken. One specific type of alert doesn't work for one specific person (wat). Can't send [redacted] at all. Can't update merchants! Yet there are magically no errors logged.

That last one (well, two) are just great; let me explain: when there's an error concerning merchants, the error gets caught, isn't logged or recorded anywhere so it just disappears, and the rescue block triggers a json response instead and happily exits. This is for an internal admin tool, so returning a user-friendly error is kinda stupid anyway, but masking what actually happened? fuck that dev with an obelisk made from spikes and solidified pain. That json response is also lovely: it's a 200 OK returning {status: 1, data: "[generic message containing incorrect IT jargon]"}. Doesn't even say "error" anywhere. Bloody everything about this pattern is absolutely wrong. Even the friggin' text.

Fucking hell. I want to pipe the entire codebase into shred and walk out the door.

But I digress. So many things are broken, my motivation is wanning to a sliver, and I have a conference call today where I'll undoubtedly be asked why everything is on smoking and/or on fire, and my huge and overly productive week last week will ofc mean nothing by contrast.

Ugh.

`shred ~/dev/work -zfu -n 32 &; ./brew tea --hot && wine ~/takeabreak.exe`

Teacher: "Will this SQL statement work LavaTheif?"

Me: "you need to put a 'WHERE id.."

T: "but will it work like this?"

Me: "well it wont do what you're trying to do, so it wont work properly"

T: "so will it work?"

Me: "no."

T: "wrong. It will work, but it will change everything in the database, which we dont want"

Thats what I was saying??

Also, he spent 50 mins out of our hour lesson explaining how to use SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE. I just wanted to get on with the work tbh.

> An update is available
> Installs update
> Update failed bc of corrupted system components
> Random bluescreens
> Sfc /scannow
> Can't scan because there is one pending repair
> Restart
> Does everything except repairing
> Recovery mode
> System integrity check failed
> Reset Windows
> Reset failed bc of "some" problems
> Media creation tool for bootable USB
> Tool fails to write image
> Media creation tool on another pc
> Successful
> Install Windows
> Missing drivers, cannot install
> Wipes hard drive

Fuck you Microsoft

I sometimes remember the time when I wrote a Email-inbox-exporter-PHP-script-type of application that collects all the emails from an inbox, "copied" it to a database with the attachements and stuff and moves it to a folder..

I just started at the company for like a couple of months, had no privileges to create mailboxes and such and I didn't want to interrupt our programmer to do this for me, so... I decided.. to save time and resources.. to test run it on our global, live 'support' mailbox.. :D Well.. You might guess what happened.. Apparently I mistyped the name of the move-destination folder (because imap-weird-things) that resulted in a completly empty mailbox and an empty database because the inserts failed due to bad encoding and mime-type issues..

The moment I refreshed my Outlook and noticed that all our mails where gone.. I swear, I can't describe that feeling of fear, cold sweat, intense heartbeat... I just stood up, asked if anyone wanted coffee, and just walked out of the office.. When in the hallway, I heard my collegues ask to one another "do you have any issues with outlook, all my mails are gone?". Everyone was stressing out, the chief was stressing out "what happened?!", nobody knew what happened.. :D

They could partially resolve it via one collegue who hadn't refreshed the mailbox and he could forward all the mails back to our support mailbox..

I dropped the project idea and learned to work with dev environments :D A couple of months later, I accidentially forgot a where condition in my SQL UPDATE statement, but that was the last time I seriously f*cked up.. :D Got to learn the hard way I guess.. Now everything I do runs in dev environments, I test everything before publishing,.. When I look back.. I don't even recognize the (inexperienced) guy I was back then ! :D

Ps. No one still knows what happened that day and they blamed it on server issues :D

*Never* do CSS tweaks over the phone and tell the customer to refresh and approve the change. This will lead to endless tweaking andlong calls at any hour, and further trivializes your work by making it look like everything can be done instantly. Better to have them send you the changes they want, then send them an update later once they have been done—perhaps with a bit of a delay to further stave off the sense of instant gratification.

Also, if they keep requesting changes to changes after you’ve done what they asked, be prepared to let them know that future changes will incur an additional fee.

When managers look at my code, it’s shit, it’s over complicated, it’s overly difficult to read, it took too long, it’s too much for a simple ticket, i handled too many edge cases, we’ll never need most of it, why did I bother making it extensible when it’ll never need to change, how dare I use “unless”, why did I bother writing all these comments, why did I update the documentation that nobody reads because it’s outdated, etc. They say I should be more like the legendary devs and push janky code quickly, and complain that I don’t have any flops (problems in prod) like those are a good thing.

When my coworkers look at my code, they say it’s clean, amazingly easy to read, a monster feature that’s somehow still a joy to review and work on, it makes their lives easier, that it does exactly what it should in all cases, that they learned something from reading it, and thank me for the comments and documentation. And marvel that I finished it so well in so little time.

Am I bragging? Not intentionally; I’ve heard these things repeatedly since I started here, and the contrast between the above is so stark.

In reality, the managers are just idiots who were promoted far above their competence, and make everything worse. (Gee, who woulda thought?) It’s just so frustrating.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sigh

TL; DR: please save me from IT hell

Note 1: this is a rant that comes after a couple other rants I'm going to call "family business saga" from now on because I feel like this is gonna go on for a while

Note 2: the following may look exaggerated but it's because of how pissed off I am at said person

So I have to help this one family member with his computer but he's worned me out so much last summer that I can't stand him (it's all tech based). At all. Both in person and via text calls. I dread and become pissy each time he's nearby, just his presence makes me want to jump in a hole and stay there for eternity.
And he's not the smartest cookie in the jar when it comes to tech, so he comes to me for help (instead of going to my brother. Aaagh why doesn't he go for my brother as well, it's mentally tiring having to "help" him - as he doesn't learn what I'm trying to teach him even after several attempts). I don't really mind being sought for help when it comes to tech, but this guy takes it one step further.
He entered my room with his computer in his hands saying this friend of his has installed W7 on his PC (why didn't he handle all the things he wants to do, it would save me a lot of anger containment) and that I *had* (it's always "YOU HAVE" because I'm a tech-ish person and I'm in uni for CS) to help him do a bunch of things.
So he boots up the thing and there are 32 updates to do, so I'm guessing that he didn't boot it up after the OS update until now. He leaves my room and I sigh out of relief. He comes back with the AC remote complaining it's too hot in my room and that he's gonna put it down a degree or 2. Jesus christ do not tamper with my AC settings, it's fine to me. The updates are still going on. He leaves again.
The computer takes its time to update and so does he. I'm happily playing minecraft when he comes back, the computer off after updating. He looks at it and says "why is it off?". I reply back "it finished updating.", trying to keep my cool. Even the most simple questions are irritation inducing.
He reboots it and lets it run. After it boots and it's ready to go he just stays there for like 2' without doing anything because the hard drive light was going off. I think he thinks the computer is going to explode if he touches it while the light is blinking 😬
He goes to connect the computer to the internet and gets all surprised that the computer doesn't recognize our home's internet (he has been here before with his computer, I guess, so he had connected, so I think he was expecting it to auto connect like that). I tell him that the computer doesn't recognize our home's connection because it has had a fresh OS installation and so it didn't have any connection registered. He types in the password and the connection is established.
He them starts going on about that he wants to get these pics on the business' website and how does he put them in his computer and all that. I do that for him and he's all like "how did you do that?? 😮" like it's a magic trick
And he's always going on at everything as if it's all a big undoable thing. "How do I do this? You know what, do it yourself and show me because I don't wanna fail". Dude. Bro. Everything - EVERYTHING - you are afraid of doing is undoable. EVERYTHING. Good christ.
I swear I've never felt so glad I'm going back for uni next week

There are three things in my workflow that I don't like:

1. Feature requests appearing out of thin air.

It's common to be handled work at 2pm that needs to be deployed by the end of day. Usually it's bug fixes, and that's ok I guess, but sometimes it's brand new features. How the fuck am I supposed to do a good job in such a short time? I don't even have time to wrap my head around the details and I'm expected to implement it, test it, make sure it doesn't break anything and make it pass through code review? With still time to deploy and make sure it's ok? In a few hours? I'm not fucking superman!

2. Not being asked about estimates.

Everything is handed to me with a fixed deadline, usually pulled off my PM's ass, who has no frontend experience. "You have two weeks to make this website." "You must have this done this by tomorrow morning." The result, of course, is rushed code that was barely tested (by hand, no time for unit or integration tests).

3. Being the last part of the product development process.

Being the last part means that our deadlines are the most strict. If we don't meet the deadline, the client will be pissed. The thing is, the design part is usually the one that exceeds its time (because clients keep asking for changes). So when the project lands on our desks it's already delayed and we have to rush it.

This all sounds too much like bad planning to me. I guess it's the result of not doing scrum. There are no sprints, no planning meetings, only weekly status update meetings. Are your jobs similar? Is it just usual "agency work"?

I'm so tired of the constant pressure and having to rush my work. Oh, and the worst part is we don't have time for anything else. We're still stuck with webpack 2 because we never have time to update it ffs.

So I'm back from vacation! It's my first day back, and I'm feeling refreshed and chipper, and motivated to get a bunch of things done quickly so I can slack off a bit later. It's a great plan.

First up: I need to finish up tiny thing from my previous ticket -- I had overlooked it in the description before. (I couldn't test this feature [push notifications] locally so I left it to QA to test while I was gone.)

It amounted to changing how we pull a due date out of the DB; some merchants use X, a couple use Y. Instead of hardcoding them, it would use a setting that admins can update on the fly.

Several methods deep, the current due date gets pulled indirectly from another class, so it's non-trivial to update; I start working through it.

But wait, if we're displaying a due date that differs from the date we're actually using internally, that's legit bad. So I investigate if I need to update the internals, too.

After awhile, I start to make lunch. I ask my boss if it's display-only (best case) and... no response. More investigating.

I start to make a late lunch. A wild sickness appears! Rush to bathroom; lose two turns.

I come back and get distracted by more investigating. I start to make an early dinner... and end up making dinner for my monster instead.

Boss responds, tells me it's just for display (yay!) and that we should use <macro resource feature> instead.

I talk to Mr. Product about which macros I should add; he doesn't respond.

I go back to making lunch-turn-dinner for myself; monster comes back and he's still hungry (as he never asks for more), so I make him dinner.

I check Slack again; Mr. Product still hasn't responded. I go back to making dinner.

Most of the way through cooking, I get a notification! Product says he's talking it through with my boss, who will update me on it. Okay fine. I finish making dinner and go eat.

No response from boss; I start looking through my next ticket.

No response from boss. I ping him and ask for an update, and he says "What are you talking about?" Apparently product never talked to bossmang =/ I ask him about the resources, and he says there's no need to create any more as the one I need already exists! Yay!

So my feature went from a large, complex refactor all the way down to a -1+2 diff. That's freaking amazing, and it only took the entire day!

I run the related specs, which take forever, then commit and push.

Push rejected; pull first! Fair, I have been gone for two weeks. I pull, and git complains about my .gitignore and some local changes. fine, whatever. Except I forgot I had my .gitignore ignored (skipped worktree). Finally figure that out, clean up my tree, and merge.

Time to run the specs again! Gems are out of date. Okay, I go run `bundle install` and ... Ruby is no longer installed? Turns out one of the changes was an upgrade to Ruby 2.5.8.

Alright, I run `rvm use ruby-2.5.8` and.... rvm: command not found. What. I inspect the errors from before and... ah! Someone's brain fell out and they installed rbenv instead of the expected rvm on my mac. Fine, time to figure it out. `rbenv which ruby`; error. `rbenv install --list`; skyscraper-long list that contains bloody everything EXCEPT 2.5.8! Literally 2.5 through 2.5.7 and then 2.6.0-dev. asjdfklasdjf

Then I remember before I left people on Slack made a big deal about upgrading Ruby, so I go looking. Dummy me forgot about the search feature for a painful ten minutes. :( Search found the upgrade instructions right away, ofc. I follow them, and... each step takes freaking forever. Meanwhile my children are having a yelling duet in the immediate background, punctuated with screams and banging toys on furniture.

Eventually (seriously like twenty-five minutes later) I make it through the list. I cd into my project directory and... I get an error message and I'm not in the project directory? what. Oh, it's a zsh thing. k, I work around that, and try to run my specs. Fail.

I need to update my gems; k. `bundle install` and... twenty minutes later... all done.

I go to run my specs and... RubyMine reports I'm using 2.5.4 instead of 2.5.8? That can't be right. `ruby --version` reports 2.5.8; `rbenv version` reports 2.5.8? Fuck it, I've fought with this long enough. Restarting fixes everything, right? So I restart. when my mac comes back to life, I try again; same issue. After fighting for another ten minutes, I find a version toggle in RubyMine's settings, and update it to 2.5.8. It indexes for five minutes. ugh.

Also! After the restart, this company-installed surveillance "security" runs and lags my computer to hell. Highest spec MacBook Pro and it takes 2-5 seconds just to switch between desktops!

I run specs again. Hey look! Missing dependency: no execjs. I can't run the specs.

Fuck. This. I'll just push and let the CI run specs for me.

I just don't care anymore. It's now 8pm and I've spent the past 11 hours on a -1+2 diff!

What a great first day back! Everything is just the way I left it.

N: Me
M: Mother

M: Can you help me? I can't update pages.

N: Sure *Checks problem* it looks like you installed it with the old apple account, you just need to reinstall it using your new one.

M: What about all my pages documents on icloud?

N: *Compares documents on mac to her other Apple devices that never had the old account* See? The documents would have to be on the new account.

M: Are you sure? I don't want to lose any documents.

N: I know, don't worry their on your new iCloud.

M: *Calls apple support*

N: *Talks to apple support who after an hour of chatting to her through me because I translate customer support to mother confirms what I was telling her*

N: Reinstalls pages and everything is fine.

I was originally going to make a post talking a bit about how people love to second guess anything I say but thought this story provides a decent example. When it's something of a personal nature or someone is asking for my opinion in genral then it's perfectly reasonable to ask multiple people. It doesn't bother me when someone asks for my help, it bugs the shit out of me when someone asks for my help and then doubts everything I say in this case even after providing some evidence to back up my claim and wasting a solid hour. If you ask for my help your trusting that I have the knowledge necessary to assist, if I don't know for certain I'll try googling the problem but even in that case calling support doesn't bother me because I clearly don't know how to help.

P.S. This was my first story, how did I do?

I love how i finish a project, dont touch ANYTHING for months, then a few months later i try to run it and NOTHING WORKS. I cant start. I cant compile. Now i have to update versions. Now developer mode has to be turned on and restarted phone. Now i have to configure something specific in xcode. Now i have to update xcode. Now it crashes. Now i have to modify something. AND IT NEVWR FUCKING ENDS. I DIDNT TOUCH SHIT SINCE THE LAST TIME I OPENED THIS PROJECT AND IT WORKED PERFECTLY FINE. I DIDNT EVEN CHANGE MY PHONE OR PC. I DIDNT EVEN DELETE THE REPOSITORY FROM MY PC. AND BY MAGIC EVERYTHING GOT FUCKED A FEW MONTHS LATER FOR NO REASON. NO. I WILL FUCK YOU. U WONT FUCK ME. FUCK U

First rant. 3 years in my first job as a developer. It's been great. I've learned a ton. But the past 6 months have been awful. Our client is forcing us to remote into a cloud pc, which we then use to remote into Ubuntu. All development must be done this way. Everything is extremely slow. To the point that you can type faster than the screen can update. I want to jump out of the window. I'd basically have to move to get a new job, which Im not really into. Just bought a house a year ago, family is here, blah blah. Just hoping if I ride it out, client will wise up and let us use our own computer again.

Allllllright. Time for another one of these. It's necessary.

We get it, you don't use/like/acknowledge Google. Please, kindly STFU already with it. The entirety of the smart internet has made your point.

Oh, because I use Google I'm a fucking idiot? No, you are for thinking that. I've used many engines and consistently have they given me worse results. "Oh, it's because they build a search profile for you, they're spying" Yeah, I get it already, fuck off.

Linux is NOT the thing that's going to solve every single human problem, so please stop treating it like a good and saying everything else is complete shit and nobody should use it.

Windows has issue, but so does Linux. At least I can (usually) comfortably update Windows, knowing what the update includes, without having to read the source code fhanges or be scared that there's a fucked up package update.

Just because something isn't open source doesn't mean it's the fucking devil. And just because I USE that closed source thing doesn't make me... Well, anything really, except for a guy who actually gets different programs. Please stop trying to tell me what I NEED TO DO to be a "good person" or user or anything like that, I'm going to do what I damn well please. If that means using Windows with Closed source things like Nvidia drivers and cards, the so be it. Got a problem? Go fuckyourself with it.

I have a Windows machine sitting behind the TV, hooked to two controllers, set up as basically a console for the big TV. It doesn't get a lot of use, and mostly just churns out folding@home work units lately. It's connected by ethernet via a wired connection, and it has a local static IP for the sake of simplicity.

In January, Windows Update started throwing a nonspecific error and failing. After a couple weeks I decided to look up the error, and all the recommendations I found online said to make sure several critical services were running. I did, but it appeared to make no difference.

Yesterday, I finally engaged MS support. Priyank remoted into my machine and attempted all the steps I had already tried. I just let him go, so he could get through his checklist and get to the resolution steps. Well, his checklist began and ended with those steps, and he started rather insistently telling me that I had to reinstall, and that he had to do it for me. I told him no thank you, "I know how to reinstall windows, and I'll do it when I'm ready."

In his investigation though, I did notice that he opened MS Edge and tried to load Bing to search for something. But Edge had no connection. No pages would load. I didn't take any special notice of it at the time though, because of the argument I was having with him about reinstalling. And it was no great loss to me that Edge wasn't working, because that was literally the first time it'd ever been launched on that computer.

We got off the phone and I gave him top marks in the CS survey that was sent, as it appeared there was nothing he could do. It wasn't until a couple hours later that I remembered the connectivity problem. I went back and checked again. Edge couldn't load anything. Firefox, the ping command, Steam, Vivaldi, parsec and RDP all worked fine. The Windows Store couldn't connect either. That was when it occurred to me that its was likely that Windows Update was just unable to reach the internet.

As I have no problem whatsoever with MS services being unable to call home, I began trying to set up an on-demand proxy for use when I want to update, and I noticed that when I fill out the proxy details in Internet Options, or in Windows 10's more windows10-ish UI for a system proxy, the "save" button didn't respond to clicks. So I looked that problem up, and saw that it depends on a service called WinHttpAutoProxySvc, which I found itself depends on something called IP Helper, which led me to the root cause of all my issues: IP Helper now depends on the DHCP Client service, which I have explicitly disabled on non-wifi Windows installs since the '90s.

Just to see, I re-enabled DHCP Client, and boom! Everything came back on. Edge, the MS Store, and Windows Update all worked. So I updated, went through a couple reboots-- because that's the name of the game with windows update --and had a fully updated machine.

It occurred to me then that this is probably how MS sends all its spy data too, and since the things I actually use work just fine, I disabled DHCP Client again. I figure that's easier than navigating an intentionally annoying menu tree of privacy options that changes and resets with every major update.

But holy shit, microsoft! How can you hinge the entire system's OS connectivity on something that not everybody uses?

Update:

I disabled every google app on my phone, installed duckduckgo and apptoide an am routing everything through tor... Yay.

are there any hidden googlemapps that still tryna get my data?

Next step : block any google services. How to do that?

Yes, it is dumb that airports, stores, and hospitals run very outdated software, but imagine how hard it would be to upgrade all those machines, especially considering the programs that might not work well with never operating systems and the fact that staff would have to be trained all over again. Not to mention, most of these businesses and services can't afford any downtime and need to make sure that everything is compatible (so, update one PC, you have to update all of them). In theory, I am still a fan of updated systems, but then again, I have a 10 year old XP installation at home, which I've been preparing to reinstall for a year or so (don't really use that PC, but still)

Fuck strict corporate software policies, just let me WORK (⁠╯⁠°⁠□⁠°⁠）⁠╯⁠︵⁠ ⁠┻⁠━⁠┻

When I came to this new workplace I was given a Windows laptop. And it came with a bunch of pre-installed corporate stuff and policies like automatic mandatory frequent driver and windows updates. Although I prefer linux, I thought, maybe I'll switch later, first let's see how everything works here, since on Windows I had all VPNs, certificates and other corpo stuff pre-configured out of the box. But imagine missing a standup, because of windows update in the morning. Or missing audio, because of drivers update in the middle of the meeting. And make it every week or so. Also, I couldn't not install my portable DAC drivers, because limited access, blah blah fuck me. And many other small things that I vaguely remember by now.
Later corpo decided to add a tracking plugin into a browser and that was it for me. Gladly, corpo policy allows using Linux (they have their own modified Ubuntu version), which has MUCH less of this crap. I mean, it's still somewhat managed by corpo (like I can't get rid of duplicated PPA, lol.. and sometimes I need to wait like 1-2 mins to login to my laptop because of login server timeout), but that's still better...

Linux, home, sweet home, I missed you <3

Also, I dodged the bullet. Win11 upgrade was a funny shit show to watch :D

I messed up carelessly in production. Learnt how SQL queries bite you in the ass when it knows you are under pressure.

Was hosting an online quiz kinda thing during my college techfest. Tens of thousands of people participating.

Using MySQL as database and thousands of queries were being executed. Everyone were pretty excited as the event just opened up.

None of the teams could solve one particular level. Turns out the solution was wrong and was asked by the organisers to change the solution for that particular level. Usual stuff, right?

Was too lazy to open up the web UI for the back office and so, straight ahead logged in to the MySQL server and ran the UPDATE query on the table consisting of the solutions.

It had been a couple of hours and the organisers came to me with a weird problem. There were no changes in the scoreboard for the last two hours. Everyone were stuck wherever they were. Weird, right?

I then realized.

Fk.

In that dreaded query, I had only run

UPDATE 'qa' SET answer = 'something'

leaving out the where clause, specifying the question to update, like

WHERE qno=13

As a result, solutions to all the questions were updated to the same answer. After hastily fixing everything back, I had the dreaded conversation.

Org: What was the problem?

Me: It was the cache.

Org: Damn thing. Always messes up.

Me: *sheepishly* yeah

Probably the most embarrassing moment in my life, wrt coding 😑

Made a Website.
What this friendly old Lady wanted: a update to her poem/song website that looked horrible.
What she got: A goddamn masterpiece considering there is NO backend and I got nearly no ressources to work with.
It took forever to put that stuff together since I thought I dont need any frameworks at all. I didnt know PHP at all back then, so I just went all out with everything that pure HTML and CSS could give me.
I even went outside to make nice photos to put into the Background.
....so, he said no PHP or anything? YES! If you wanna add content you change the HTML and upload stuff via Filezilla. I dont really want to see it ever again. But not because it looks bad.

I know, its not really coding since its HTML but I Count this!

So I've decided to go about converting a Java project that I've been working on to Kotlin a little bit at a time. I started out with basic entity classes converting them to simple `data class`es in Kotlin.

Eventually, I got to my first beast of a class to refactor. This class had over 40 service classes depending on it, so even a little hiccup would throw everything into chaos.

I finish all of the changes on all of the dependent classes, update the tests, and the configurations (as necessary), and I was finally ready to spin up the app to test for any breaking changes I may have introduced...

Well - I broke everything! But I was sure I couldn't have! So what the hell happened?

Turns out that as I was building my project with a Gradle watch, at one point something failed to compile, which threw an unhandled exception in the gradle daemon that was never reported.

So when I tried to run my app, gradle would continually re-throw the error in the app I asked it to run...

After turning the daemon off and on again, the app worked like a charm.

Guy: "We need you to update a few applications so we can get some new data. We have very important reports we need out of it!"

Me: "OK how soon do you need it?"

Guy: "Two days!! So we can start putting in the data then will have you create the reports."

...two days later...(in the spongebob narrator voice)

Me: " OK its done. Go in add the data you need then let me know so I can generate the reports."

....4 weeks later...still haven't heard from them and they haven't put in the data. Glad it was soooo important that I had to drop everything else to put in the updates that haven't been used.

Haha! Sorry but this new cyber attack that's hit the NHS and other company's around the globe, just makes me laugh 😂

These company's just will not spend money on IT, keeping everything update and backed up! 💾

Some of these machines will still running on Windows Vista or XP 😱

Today my raspberry pi media center bricked itself (at least it won't boot properly. Than I thought I just format the SD card and reinstall everything. But than my windows pc won't boot properly because it's still running on old hdd and I suck at building PCs. Than I tried my ThinkPad with antergos and remembered that it is also dead because the last update broke something. And now I'm trying to boot my windows at least into safe mode and my ThinkPad to boot from the live stick to chroot and fix it. Still waiting since 15min for any progress.
Now is my old Oneplus One with an outdated nightly of a custom Rom my only working connection to the web.
I'm starting to think that waiting for the last minute to fix problems might not the best way for me.

A lot of changement since my last update...

remember, everything was full of boxes and full of dust.

Rant:
Why in the freezing cold all people think that linux = secure. Ransomware... Bla bla not happening on linux bla bla... Linux is secure.

If Linux would have been the most popular one people will pretty much run everything on root and install every stupid package available and never run: apt-get update.

Users were so dumb they got scammed by a phising mail... In freaking 2017... This is user stupidity not OS fault...

God its stupidly annoying seeing the same stuff : Linux secure...
Everything can be secure if you paid attention to the same stuff in freaking 2000.

Manager: Can you stay late as fuck today? One of our bitchiest vendors is gonna update their piece of crap and I'm pretty damn sure shit is gonna hit the fan

Dev (inner voice): no fucking way, I have kids to watch and chores to do!
Dev (outer voice): can't we just check everything in the morning?

Manager: No fucking way! If there is some fucking "challenge" when our "people" try to log onto their shit, I'm gonna look like a chump!
Let's talk silvers, I will sign on that bloody commie bullshit for your hours tonight.

Dev (outer voice): Fine. Until how late?
Dev (inner voice): Wait, I was supposed to do it without getting overtime bonus?

So I was using Coffee Meet Bagel to talk to a girl who is currently travelling. We noticed that the messages were sorted out of orders with incorrect time due to the different time zone we are in.

So naturally, I sent them a big report.

Their support team replied by telling me to do the usual. Restart, update, reinstall, delete everything etc (it’s their default answer!!).

I told them I have done those.

They then rephrased my bug report and told me this is expected as the chat was between two parties with a different time so the messages are sorted out of order due to the time difference.

I guess most developer will get ticked off by that... so I sent them a few pseudo code on how chat across different time zones should have been dealt with...

Life of a developer. Debugging and coding even when on a dating app... 🤷🏽‍♂️

!rant

Linux just made my day. Everybody knows how Windows won't let you shutdown your hardware until it updates, right? So last night I forgot I was upgrading Manjaro in a background terminal (full distro update, tons of packages) and hibernated my rig, plugged it off, took it to a different location. Today I hooked it up - different network, IP, etc. - it woke up, finished compiling whatever it ended up on then downloaded, compiled and installed everything else, said "Thank you very much!" and dropped the mic. Someone tell me this isn't pure awesomeness! 😂

It asked again for root password but other than that... shrugged off 12 hours difference like a boss!

When will I fuckin learn that
a) customers lie
b) customers are sloppy
c) customers are wrong
d) customers do not do their work (properly)
e) customers want us to do their (dirty) work
f) possibly all of the freakinly above?! + khm....

They will fuckin aaaalwaaaays say sth is not working after the update..
And I will alwaaaays assume I fucked up something..even if I didn't touch that part of the code/data..
And almost aaaaalways it turns out that the bug they complain about is how the system worked (or didn't work) before the update and/or some fuckup from their side..

Anyhow, I rushed over, grabbed the files went testing in dev..wtf, output is different, mine is ok, theirs is..wtf is that shit?!

Transfer newly built dll to test..same shit as on prod..wtf?! How?!

I assumed they have thing A correctly linked to thing B.. ofc thing A was linked to thing C in their case and in another case (our test) to correct thing B..
I got chillies when grabbing files, that
I should have tripple checked that they didn't fuck up something on the link part, but I just assumed they know what they were doing & that they checked they linked correct files with correct content already, before being pissy that the update fucked up things.. riiiight!! :/

I wanted to find solutions to this fuckup asap so I disregarded my gut feeling..yet again!! Fuuuck!
I've spent too much time trying to find ways to fix a bug that wasn't even a real bug to begin with.. :/

Fuuuuuck!!

So yeah, always treat the customers like they are 3yrs old & have no clue what they are doing & check exactly wtf they were indeed trying to do..it will save you time & nerves..

And note to self: reread this shit daily!! And imprint it in your brain that everything is not always your fault!!

FUCK
FUCKING BULLSHIT!
WHY THE FUCK DID I UPDATE MY RASPBERRY PI! FUCK, I CANT SSH INTO IT ANYMORE! ITS BOOTED AND THE FUCKING PI HOLE PROGRAMM WORKS BUT I CANT ACCESS IT TO SEE IF EVERYTHING IS FUCKING FINDE (which it totally isn't) FFFFFFFF

So I think I was just in a car crash. Don't remember much, but I'm sitting in a hospital bed with my father by my side and my family in the waiting room. Everything is fuzzy, my brain hurts, and my left shoulder hurts. Today is kind of a blur, as was the last... forever. I'll update as I learn more about the past 24 hours.

!rant

Two years ago, I started to learn Ruby on Rails so I would at last know a server language even though it wasn't the almighty PHP. Two years ago minus a few months, I decided to put my first website online with Apache and Passenger. It took me a whole six hours with stress and cries for help until I finally saw my website's homepage displayed on my screen

Today, after a few more websites (and currently 3 more projects but still not released, dang it), I tried to update mySQL to 5.7 since I need it to be able to save arrays for a future project, but everything went full shitstorm with broken packages and lame-ass-shit tutorials that make you doubt your sanity.

So I decided to backup my database and my online websites and to reinstall the whole server and take advantage of it to update the current used gems (Rails 4.2 -> 5.1, not bad)

Not only it took me just a bit more than 2 hours to redeploy the websites, but I didn't felt at the edge of panicking once, and now everything works like a charm.

I feel fucking alpha now.

I work in a contract position and reviewed the code of a senior engineer recently. Regretfully I can't provide context to preserve anonymity.

He wrote awful JavaScript;

- handled a single DOM element with 2 different frontend libraries
- used the logical operator && to 'chain' two methods (it didn't work) instead of returning a boolean value,
- broke everything down into minute detail (a comment box had 7 components!),
- API calls were made for every component update instead of maintaining local component state where it made sense, which meant UI updates were slow,
- animated EVERYTHING, which made my Firefox on Xubuntu i7 64bit with 16GB RAM beg for mercy.

I had a rough couple of months with interviews, with 2nd stage technical interviewers throwing impossible tasks at me.

Example:

1. Create an online Python code editor with Javascript which can compile Python bytecode,
2. Use Mesos and Kafka to create real time architecture for Tensorflow with a Javascript frontend in 1 day. (I asked, and wasn't allowed to use Kubernetes or serverless architecture),
3. Hack a website from the browser's address bar using parameters ( what?!! ),

Obviously, the next time I meet a 'senior', I'm going to tell him talk is cheap;

'SHOW ME YOUR CODE.'

Everything was ready before you fucking wanted to update...

I can't even deal with this. We just deployed a new update to our system, and everything was going smoothly. And then, out of nowhere, we started getting a bunch of error messages and user complaints.

Why do these things always happen? We spent hours trying to figure out the source of the problem, and it turns out it was because we didn't do enough testing before the deployment. Are you kidding me?

I know that testing can be time-consuming, but seriously, this is ridiculous. It's frustrating when something like this happens, especially when we're under a tight deadline. And to make matters worse, we had to roll back the deployment and start all over again. I just want to throw my computer out the window.

Uuuugghhh!

Making a small update to an ionic app then spending a whole day trying to figure out why a button doesn't work. Tried everything to fix it and got no error messages.

Finally discovered it was because the button was inside a label and not a div.

Yeah, fun times.

Oh look a new chrome update!

*Installs update*

I regret everything!!!!

Come on Google I love material design but fuck me is the new update ugly... Besides the new tab page.

Hey, I´m through with the Win10 update.
That was fast. And no problems! Everything seems to be working.

Wait...
Android SDK not found...
Java not found ...
Seems all my environment variables are gone.
Even better all the standard variables are wrong too.
My Home Drive is now "H:" ?
What the hell?

That moment when you're dual booting to have Windows for gaming and Windows decides it would be nice to reboot and install updates, while you're gaming of course. Without any sort of visible notification. Any. And then it fails to install its updates, because updates are hard to install, you know? Sometimes its just not the way you'd like it, you know? It's probably best to revert everything, yes? It only takes an hour after all! An hour of the lovely “Windows was too dumb to update and now has to try to make itself work again” screen with its lovely moving dots. Oh and of course you'll have to sit there and watch it because Windows has to reboot at least twice during the process. And if you're not there to tell GRUB you want to boot into Windows again Linux won't boot properly because Windows keeps the filesystems write-protected. Just to be safe you'd let it complete its marvellous ways!

I wish this was the first time this happened. But it wasn't. Fuck Windows.

Yesterday I was hanging with the guys from our Records dpt in the staff lounge. Their manager is a pretty nice talkative guy. Everything was going well until this happened..

Him: Hey you, I have an idea for an app. You can"definitely" help me, right? Or someone you know who also does the code thing..

Me: It depends. Just before you tell me about this idea, know that you'll be paying me or whoever will be doing this job unt..i..l *he interrupts

Him: Paying? I thought it was a one time or few hundreds of dollars. Why do I have to keep paying when you haven't finished the app?

Me: Did you finish your entire work this week?...but you're still getting paid next week, right?

Him: Oh crap, makes sense. Ok, how about I pay you the amount you charge then, that's it?

Me: See, you don't get it. I know once the app is done, you'll come back to me to fix and update things. When that time comes, you'll have to pay me again. And with the initial payment, don't just think you pay me and that's all... you'll...

Him: Crap, I have think more and come up with a plan for this.. nevermind, I'll keep you updated.

I think I made him sad knowing that, this sort of things doesn't happen easily.

Got a job as a database manager, they wanted me to update their sql server and some of their .net apps. Turns out their sql server had no databases and all their data was stored in an ms access 2003 applications that was using windows for workgroups security!!! It also had no interface, hundreds of tables and queries and there were multiple access db it was connected to. To make things worse the person who built all this stuff used acronyms for everything he did, table names, variables, queries and even bloody window folders!!! It was hard as hell to figure out what anything ment. Oh and the .net apps were asp sites that heavily used dll for storing his code and no one knows where the original source code for them are. Did I also mention there were no comments for any of the code, no database dictionary, no notes or anything.

So apparently I'll be rebuilding everything from scratch and transferring over the data to sql server. AND NO MORE F**KING ACRONYMS!!!!!!!

I’m terrified of the Mac Os Mojave update - the last 3 updates have “black screen of death-ed” my computer. Please tell me everything is going to be alright....

Was busy today doing some house work. Everything was normal till afternoon.

Me thinking of using laptop noticed that there was no laptop

My office laptop and another bag was stolen from my home .

It had most of the production details and source code. Running behind police for help now.

Informed my boss too about this incident.

Will update on what happens tomorrow in office.

Fuck that person who stole my office laptop and destroyed my Peace.

Giant, month-and-a-half-long-ticket.
After learning six or so complicated areas of the system and updating them all to work with the new changes, make them all play nicely, etc. I finally got everything working. 95% spec coverage, though no ui tests because I haven't gotten selenium working. whatever, everything's done and works.

Second dev bases her ticket off of mine and continues working. Work elsewhere continues and there's an official release, so we both merge in master. I run tests, everything passes, and go back to working on other tickets.

She finishes her ticket.
We do end-to-end testing, and everything works perfectly. Time for a demo!

She merges in master again, and pushes her branch to two staging servers. (idk why two.)

Demo starts.
We connect to the staging servers, and... none of the UI changes exist; they aren't running the correct code!

So she runs it locally for a demo instead. Two features in my ticket no longer work. She throws me under the bus. She throws me under the bus again by criticising a rake task I scrapped because she wanted to do it. Then again because I didn't update my branch to master and push it before the demo, despite having no reason to. and despite the demo being of her branch.

Then she continues to show off and brag about how she's like the "legend" (senior dev) she envies. QAbuys it.

I'm having an emotion, and it's called anger.

I hate windows.
I hate windows update.
I hate windows update rebooting my PC and not reopen everything from last session.
I hate windows update trying to install updates while running from battery in power save mode.
I hate windows not being able to figure out where to put windows on dual head setup.
I hate developing in windows environment.

Man I'm glad that I use windows at home only for gaming.
Man I'm glad that I can choose a non-windows PC on my new workplace.

Boi did I forget what a horror is to deal with Wndows...

I just wanted to shutdown a laptop to replace the SSD and a wifi card. Prepared everything, clicked on the [start] and there were only "Update and *" options. Wha the hell I thought, I could spare a few minutes. It's just a software update - should not take long!

Little did I know...
That was 45 minutes ago and It's still shutting down. And I'm just sitting with that screwdrived in my hand, looking at that blue screen and waiting. I feel stupid

UPDATE: I gave up. Long-pressed the POWER button. que sera, sera, right?

Lights go out. I press POWER again to boot it back up (forgot to save smth else). And it boots up back to the "SHUTTING fucking DOWN" AGAIN!!!

I fucking hate stupid accountants!

Yesterday we went to a customer to talk to the accountants because we want to remove one of their unused PC's in the office.

First, just the way they think (and talk if) they are the most important and it's absolutely critical everything works 100%. I see they are important but not 100 times more important than everybody else!

They called us their EDP-guys (EDV in German, that's the translation I found). That insulted me a bit. I'm rather called IT-guy, I don't know anything about the fucking EDP systems nor want I to. I'm there to make sure the hardware works. But whatever, fine, call me what you want.

Then they straight up threatened us, because their work is so important, they can't afford to have downtime in their systems. They don't really care, but the bosses of us both do and if we fuck up they (the bosses) will hold us responsible. There is a fucking update for your piece of shit software (datev)! I don't do the update, I'm just responsible that the update can be deployed on the hardware. I'm not responsible if this update fucks your system and frankly I don't care!

I could tell them all of this but they won't listen. They always talk in this patronising arrogant voice, because they are so important and we better don't fuck up the update.

I'm there to help. I don't want downtime for your systems. I want you to work with our systems the best you can.
But fuck you, I hope the server burns down!

Fresh internship story (Part 2)

I just realized how dumb my temporary boss really is and how much he loves to command everyone.
I told him that I am going earlier a few days ago and he got pissed lol.
He is someone who thinks he knows everything, but he does not.
He blames everything on everyone else.
He is never wrong, we are always wrong. That is probably what he is always thinking.
Clients who enter the store are precious (makes sense-you have to handle clients well, to get more bucks), but the thing is that he even screams near the clients at us. Besides of that I am new there. Be a little bit more patient, fucking prick.
Imho he is too old for the tech industry.
He loves to use the workers as slaves.
Do you work on a laptop rn? Well... fuck that. He has a new task waiting for you.
He keeps interrupting me every 5 to 10 minutes while I am focused.
Random dialogue from today:
me:"the client did a win10 upgrade and not a regular windows update"
boss:"nope. that is a windows update."
me (internally): should I show him the folder called "Windows10.Upgrade" and the "windows.old" folder both with the same creation date in "c:"? nah, fuck that. he is gonna put himself up again. do not want to have a stronger headache than this one I am having rn. (btw. I usually do not have headaches. I get headaches like once in 5 years, but since 4 days I have it every day.)
I am sick of this.
Today I had the urge to fucking grab his fucking "fuck me please" eyes out and eat them while he hears the explosive sounds his seperated eyes do. I still want to enjoy the rest of my life without going into a prison tho.

Just did a transplant on my friend's phone. He dropped it one too many times, and fucked it up real bad.

We were first going to simply put his SIM card into another phone. I had an old S6 that bricked itself during an update before I really knew much of anything about phones, so I dug it out and spent a day trying to restore it with heimdall, adb/fastboot, and eventually odin when I found a laptop with windows. Unfortunately it's a Verizon phone, and because Verizon likes to keep a tight chastity belt on everything, it was pretty much impossible to unbrick. After giving up with finding a custom recovery or flashing a stock ROM, we moved to Plan B.

We took both phones apart, switched the boards, switched the SIMs, and he now has a working phone in much better condition than before he dropped it seven feet from his girlfriend's bunk.

It's always fun to make life from two dead things.

So, my last post was about dual booting to Linux. I haven't had problems with Windows. However, after an apart partial update to the Creaters version, I can't open anything without an error that says "ceip.exe was unable to start correctly (0xc0000142)." I can't even run command prompt.

I have nothing on my PC that I can't replace (everything is backed up in at least two places) other than the programs I need for work. I can get them on Monday. But I'm on call the rest of today and tomorrow. And i need them because they help me test system health.

Trying to run the update again to see if I can repair it that way, otherwise, any suggestions for a temporary fix? Thinking my switch to Linux is sooner than I thought, but I have to be able to work.

FUCKING WINDOWS DECIDES TO UPDATE WHEN I HAVE 6 PROGRAMS OPEN AND NOT EVEN SAVED EVERYTHING.

10+ chrome tabs with research pages that are irrecoverable.

That when I leave for a couple of minutes to take a brake. I'm not even notified beforehand.

I'm fine tho which is nice. Gonna cry and sleep now to work hard again tomorrow.

First company I worked for, overall it was a good experience, but at one point they promoted a consultant to project manager, and their planning skills were about as good as their people skills, which is to say, appalling.

We had a project update for a huge client, that required, for political BS reasons, that most of the team spend several weeks on-site, 300km away from home.
Go-live was approaching, and the plan was: migration starts Friday night, shortly after midnight (so actually, Saturday) once the client’s IT confirms DB is backed up. Expected duration: 5 hours.

- So, you expect me to work from midnight to 5am on Saturday? And when do we start working on Friday?

- 9am, of course.

- 9am!? So you actually planned a 20 hour work day? (Note: legal maximum here is 10 hours in a day, 40 a week)

- And we have to be there on Saturday 1pm to recheck everything is running smooth.

wtaf were they thinking?

Why I sometimes hate linux:
Found old computer with freya os.. I usually work on Windows, so I thought lets try to work on linux for a change..
First things first: sudo apt-get update / upgrade and while it is doing all the updates lets get something to drink..
Came back, logged inn and mouse is gone.. after some googling and searching on my mobile i found out that alt+ctrl+f1 and then alt+ctrl+f7 fixes problem..
Mouse now is back but upgrade failed half way though because no network.. wifi stopped working.. something wrong with drivers.. so to continue upgrade of OS i need a cable now.. (restart didn't work)
Two hours later I managed to update everything, wifi drivers are working and I managed to post this.. But it's too late to do anything, so I will probably put this away again for couple months and will go through same shit next time I open it.

What a sad and frustrating day!
I got a call from recruiter. I told him that I'm not actively looking for change. But he requested for 2 mins to listen. He started telling about his company, how great it is, tech stack, perks, salary etc. He is telling everything but not company name, I waited patiently and asked what's the pay I can expect. The number blew my mind, it's nearly double to my current pay. Then...

Me: that sounds amazing, which company is this, and where is it?
Him: it is <my company name> and located at <my current location, same campus>
Me: .....
Him: so, what do you think?
Me: .... I need some time. Let me update my LinkedIn profile first and then, i will get back to you.
Him: sounds wonderful, will call back by Monday. <Call disconnected>
Me: <inside my head> @$_-$#(/+&_#

This in my 10th year in this company, some one kill me please.

Nothing interesting. Just 11 GB ram using and increases steadily. After restart app the bug was again. Okaaay, I thought. I reboot my PC, but bug was adamant. Well, then I update phpStorm and everything became fine. Ok, JetBrains, good idea to say user about new release version and make update:) Seriously, it works fine. I think every company should adopt this idea:)

After using linux as the main os for the last two weeks, here are the biggest drawbacks of linux in my opinion.

1. AMD hybird apus are not supported by linux kernal and it's very lousy.

2. Cannot do any graphics related work without having my screen going black several times.

3. Using dual screen is not reliable, and black screen occurs in one or both screens.

4. The computer goes crazy after waking up from suspend mode and gets overheated!

5. Kernal updates! Is much worse than Windows updates. At least after the painful windows update restart you know everything will be ok, but with linux good luck!!!

6. Realtek Wifi dongles still suffering since 2010.

In my opinion, if you are going to use linux for the first time make sure your hardware is compatible with linux, else be ready for a fight of unstable hardware problems.

I fell in love with Vue and Webpack! 😍😍😍
It is such a breeze to work with components and to be able to just change something and have everything instantly recompile and update on the webpage. I am actually enjoying doing the frontend more than the backend which is strange because I am a backend guy 🤣

First thing, give the schools enough money to buy proper IT equipment and hire at least one person who does IT full-time per school so that the CS teachers or whoever runs the school's IT infrastructure doesn't have to worry about it at all times.
(Hopefully, the ban on cooperation here in Germany will be lifted and the federal government will be able to subsidy all schools at least financially in that aspect.)

Then, educate all the teachers, for fuck's sake.
It is sad to see an otherwise good teacher in a technical subject at a technical college struggle with the basics. Teachers should have continuing education in computer science and also should be comfortable working with technology.
There are some good CS teachers and some who're also nerds but they can't fix everything nor educate every colleague. Unpaid and in their free time, mind you.

Then, update the learning materials for CS. I've seen/worked with some of what is used in schools today and it's definitively not worth the money but it has to be bought anyway. At best, education materials should be open-source so knowledge can grow and be updated more quickly.

Also, don't rely too much on big cooperations just but cause they offer you shiny materials and discounts.

I don't know if I should cry or laugh...

Our CMS is a CMS as a Service. So, our providers, for me they all suck, everytime they make a development, everything breaks.

Today's flash news?

Well, basically any page containing some user-made dynamic objects are **empty**

But not only on our site, on their whole network of clients that use their CMS. Everything is broken.

They release new features (I should call them bugs rather) every week, and yesterday's update concerned these pages.

And for the record, they don't test. They wait that we come back and complain to see if their shitty development worked or did not.

This CMS is even worse than your first project in HTML - I mean, your first word document on your mama's computer when you were 3.

Seriously. What kind of non-quality is this?

Microsoft added a new feature to windows 10. With the last update i did last week, you are able to put a filter over your screen... I accidentally pressed win+ctrl+c and everything turned into gray. It took me an hour to find the solution... Who the fuck created this hotkey?

Everyone here deserves the worst.

No, really, you all deserve those dark juicy stories. So here's why I hate password systems that don't have the user experience in mind.

Recently my university went under a huge update, most of it good, but this is DevRant, so let me tell you what's just the worst.

They asked me to change my password, they do this every month or two. So I did it, but as I clicked "Ok" a wild error appeared! It told me I had to use a password that was not one of the FIFTEEN that I'd used previously...

I tried everything, and despite everything else being poorly programmed, or what not, I thought it would be easy to spoof. Nope. Unfortunately this seems to be the ONE thing they did right. Looks like I'll have to go back to basics. Just add a number on the end of my previous password, up to fifteen, and reset :]

I think this rant needs to turn into an email headed straight to them :)

(first post/rant on here)
So I recently started at a new company. I was kinda aware that the project I'm working on would be rather old school (to put it in a nice way :-)).

Part of my job is to 'industrialize' and update/clean up the existing code so there is less time spent on fixing bugs due to bad design.

One of the first things I had to do was to write a new interface to integrate with external software.

I already noticed some rather nasty habits, like prefixing every variable with m (don't know why), private fields for every property (all simple properties) and a whole lot of other stuff that either is obsolete or just bad practice.

Started writing clean code (simple classes with properties only, no m prefixing, making sure everything is single responsibility, unit tests, ...).

So I check in the code, don't hear much from it again besides the original dev/architect that started the project using my code to further work on that integration.

Now recently I started converting everything from TFVC to Git (which is the company standard but wasn't used by our team yet). And I quickly skimmed through my code to check if everything was there before pushing it to the remote repo.

To my surprise, all the code I had written was replaced by m prefixed private variables used in simple properties. BL classes were thrown in together, creating giant monstrosities that did everything. And last but not least, all unit tests were commented out.

Not sure what I got myself into ... but the facepalming has commenced.

Lately submitted an app to the App Store, it was reviewed by Apple, everything fine, I released it.

Last week I submitted an update containing some minor fixes - rejected?!
Checked the reason: Apple has a problem with the app icon (which did not change at all) showing a stylized iPhone.

Right now I'm thinking about solving this by adding a Samsung logo to the icon though..

I literally dont use any other code editor other than intellij. Yes not even your fucking vscode. I code frontend in intellij! I code angular and nextjs in intellij!! Intellij literally has everything anything else has plus way more. Intellisense is also much better. Theres also been a major update yesterday and everything is so much faster and smarter. And theme is way better looking. I will dick ride intellij till death do us apart!!!!

Anyone reading these emails we are sending?

I work at a small place. A few users are using an application at our place that I develop and maintain. We all work remotely.

I announce by email to these few users a new version release of said application because of low level changes in the database, send the timeline for the upgrade, I include the new executable, with an easy illustrated 2 minutes *howto* to update painlessly.

Yet, past the date of the upgrade, 100% of the application users emailed me because they were not able to use the software anymore.

----------------

Or I have this issue where we identified a vulnerability in our systems - and I send out an email asking (as soon as possible) for which client version users are using to access the database, so that I patch everything swiftly right. Else everything may crash. Like a clean summary, 2 lines. Easy. A 30 second thing.

A week pass, no answer, I send again.

Then a second week pass, one user answers, saying:

> well I am busy, I will have time to check this out in February.

----------------

Then I am asking myself:
* Why sending email at all in the first place?

* Who wrote these 'best practices textbooks about warning users on schedule/expected downtime?'

*How about I just patch and release first and then expect the emails from the users *after* because 'something is broken', right? Whatever I do, they don't read it.

Oh and before anyone suggest that I should talk to my boss about this behavior from the users, my boss is included in the aforementioned 'users'.

Catch-22 much ? Haha thanks for reading

/rant

Looks like it's time to update the old CV... Christ have I really been here for 8 years.

It's been fun, the most fun time of my life but with new owners breathing on everything stuffs starting to fall to shit.

To use a SysOps analogy there are category 1 - critical warnings ringing in my ears.

I can accept a lot, but I'm genuinely concerned for the future of this place, and after trying to fix things for long enough to realise the new owners are the ones drilling the holes in the ship it's time to sink or swim, and I don't feel like sinking.

To quote billy Joel,
It seems such a waste of time
If that's what it's all about
Mama if that's movin' up
Then I'm movin' out

I have finally decided to stop helping people setup a proper machine learning environment inside of their machines with Proper GPU support.

I-fucking-give-up.

Goggle Colab, EVERYONE is getting dey ass sent to Colab. I DON'T GIVE A FUCK about privacy and shit like that at this fucking moment, getting TIRED af of getting messages about someone somehow fucking up their CUDA installation, and/or their entire machine (had one dude trying to run native GPU support through WSL 2, their machine did not have the windows update version 2004 and he has on an older build, upon update he fucked everything up EVEN THOUGH I TOLD HIM NOT TO DO IT YET)

.......fuck it, I am sending everyone to Colab. YES I UNDERSTAND THAT PRIVACY IS A THING and Goggle bad and all that jazz......but if you believe in Roko's Basilisk then I AM DOING THEM A FAVOR

I work hard to get our robot overlords into function, let it be known here, I support our robot overlords and will do as much as possible to bring them to life and have me own 2b big tiddy with a nice ass android.

I should also mention that I've had a few drinks on me already and keep getting these messages.

Rant Mode: ON

Do you know what really grinds my gears? Those dreaded "404 Page Not Found" errors. It's like a digital black hole, sucking your users into a vortex of frustration.

And don't get me started on inconsistent coding standards. It's like trying to decipher hieroglyphics written by different ancient civilizations. Why can't we all just follow the same conventions?

Oh, and software updates that break everything! You spend hours perfecting your code, only for a new update to come along and wreak havoc. It's like the universe is conspiring against developers.

But hey, despite the rants, we developers are a resilient bunch. We thrive on solving problems, no matter how infuriating they can be. So, here's to the endless debugging, the endless coffee, and the endless love-hate relationship with coding. We wouldn't have it any other way.

Rant Mode: OFF

Phew, that felt good. Thanks for letting me vent!

Fuck windows update. Fuck Microsoft for sending daily updates. Fuck everything about windows update. Fuck bill gates. And again fuck windows update

I thought I just lost everything on my computer because somehow automatic update from win made my ram run at 1300mhz instead of 1600mhz and it assumed there was a hardware problem and completely froze up every time it started. Luckily I decided to comb through bios first and Bam! Ram at wrong speed! I changed the setting and windows booted happily. Piece of shit update system. 😑

My company's process basically boils down to this:
-Hour long meeting to open an issue.
-5 lines of comments.
-Update three documents.
-5 days for a peer review.
-40 bitchy comments about how everything you do and love is terrible.

For a one line code change to prevent a show stopping exception.

Microsoft, do you even care what your shitty updates are doing or have you just given up?

Not only did the update start immediately after waking up from standby, it also had to brighten up my day by deleting everything afterwards.

Turns out the anniversary update gets confused by dual boot systems and then just deletes all partitions. And apparently they didn't manage to fix this for months now.

Can't wait for the coming "Creator's update", always wanted to see how an exploding PC looks.

Fuck me. I have to update an Android app I have built 2 years ago. So much have changed, I need to update pretty much every dependency I have and no library seems to compile with the latest Android SDK yet.

I feel like Dr. Strange living the 14,000,605 possibilities when trying different library versions.

It's probably easier to rewrite everything. Now in Kotlin.

When the New Windows update makes your CPU run 97% in everything...

So I'm basically my family's IT guy, as you'd expect, but this is just pulling my hairs.

My mom's laptop has a weird error message saying something about a corrupt windows update database.

Not wanting to mess the system up, I decided to factory reset the computer and see if that helped.

During the factory reset, windows tells me that it can't delete all files, and that another factory reset might be in order.

Alright, I don't think any more of it and proceed to setup the account on the computer, everything works fine.

Next day I decide to run windows update on it just to see if everything works as it should, the computer restarts and immediately BSoDs on me. Upon reboot the same error from before the system reset pops up again, and I'm back to square one.

Fuck windows and all its constant issues

Wohoo, new signal update :D

Now signal has in my opinion everything you need for a messenger and isn't bloated with useless shit like status, etc.

Of course the first thing I do when I sat at my desk is to update my Firefox. And I realized that chrome also needs an update.

I remember clearly that I just updated everything yesterday. So Google released updates on the same date as Mozilla.

Coincidence? Don't think so.

I see a lot of rants about Linux dual boot with Windows and Windows update fucks up grub. So I bought a new ssd and reinstalled Linux, but damn.. its always a lot of work to make everything work again. Every time I still learn new things and I don't have to be afraid anymore after Windows update

Commit as you go. Work on one thing at a time. Be detailed in your commit messages.

Finding and reverting that one small change that breaks everything is so much harder to do when you change lots of files and the commit message is "update".

If you have a new Alienware, I highly recommend not to try installing Ubuntu on it. I can't even describe how many levels of hell I went through to get stuff working, and how every Ubuntu base update gives me a panic attack.
From Ubuntu not installing with RAID settings, then not being able to boot in GUI mode because Nvidia drivers, to built-in keyboard, speaker and mic not working.
Praise the Ubuntu lord, now everything is working, but I still can't adjust the rgb keyboard colors :(

Alrighty, saturday morning rant time!

I just recieved a mail from one of my not-so-much-loved colleagues.

Now Background first: I work in IT-Support. We provide services for other companies. One of those services is monitoring servers and clients for various things. I recently took over the project (was assigned to do it) and restructured everything, wrote new scripts to test more stuff, successfully tested it internally and rolled it out over the last 2 weeks.

Now one of these scripts hooks into the Windows Update API and looks at the update history. It filters for known Windows Update Agent strings (UpdateOrchestrator, AutomaticUpdates and AutomaticUpdatesWuApp in case you also want to do something like this) and then looks for installation errors over the last 24 hours and wherever there have even been any successful updates over the last one and a half months.

Back to that mail.

My colleague sent me this lovely mail about a ticket i opened about his customers servers beeing all out-of-date on updates.

"This is all wrong, everything's fine. I disabled the checks."

...

It's on bitch.

So i logged on to my work PC via TeamViewer, opened my script, connected to the customer and was ready to debug the shit out of my script, knowing i probably won't even need to.

I looked at the update history via Windows Update itself and behold: 1st April. That's almost 50 days in the past.

So the script works, go figure.

Great, so search for new Updates then.
>None found.

Hm. What could it be? Did my super special colleague forget to care about his very special totally-needs-WSUS-customer WSUS again?

Yup.

Online-Search finds a ton of new Updates.

Screenshot, write pissed mail to colleague, re-enable checks, breakfast.

FUCKING HATE VUE 3

It's pointless, it's not an incremented version of Vue 2, it's basically a completely different framework, probably one nice to start a project with... But migrating from an existing Vue 2 project to Vue 3...

What the hell were they thinking!

first, setup() with all the logic and functions in it DOESNT MAKE ANY SENSE to me!
second, your old DEPENDENCIES NO LONGER WORK!.. good luck finding replacements for EVERYTHING, and do the necessary adjustments to work with the LASAGNA CODE YOUR PROJECT HAS BECOME!!

PS: the update/upgrade PR has almost 300 changed files!!!!

My wifi card has been in the bugs section of almost every major Linux distro for the past 4 years since an update. Tried almost every solution i could find. nothing helped. couldn't use it with it's unstable speed and disconnections. So much for open source and GNU/shit and fix it yourself crap. Do you really expect me to learn to write a wifi driver? I'm done with Linux. Installed Windows and everything was fine. open source software may be good but not the best. Much better to use proprietary software than to waste time trying solutions from the seventh page of google search results.

What a coincidence. JQuery gets an update to 3.4.0 - and I removed the JQuery dependency that a mid-sized widget (15 kB minified) needed.

Rewriting the selector, css and trim stuff was easy. Each, children, append, empty, remove and extend were not too hard. Animations gave me more headache, but in the end, JS triggered CSS transitions worked nicely.

I was able to shave off the usual 30 kB over the wire for JQuery, and the whole thing seems snappier. Finally, I'm at vanilla everything!

Of course, it's largely due to JQuery's merits that vanilla JS is where it is today. So, thank you JQuery, and farewell.

Windows 10 updates. I see many posts about singular events that people have experienced, so I thought I'd try to sum up all the problems I have had.

Home computer, always on:
Is scheduled to update during 'inactive hours' but the options for that window are too narrow. So almost daily the 'required updates' overlay pops up WHILE I'M DOING STUFF and I have to say 'Ok' then close the update settings window that opens automatically so I can get on with what I'm doing.
Now, if I'm just browsing, writing or something like that, it's just really annoying.
But when I'm gaming and it causes the game to freeze up (because, you know, ubisoft and ea and such) and I lose my progress, that pisses me off.
When I'm hosting movie night with my friends and the movie gets interrupted, that pisses me off.
Even when I'm just trying to relax with a good show after a hard day and THAT gets interrupted, it really bugs me.
And then when there's a major update and I don't want to schedule it right away, they decide that I probably meant 'do it in an hour'. And then a message pops up every hour with only the option to postpone one more hour. What happened to all the options for scheduling it for several days in the future? Nope! Can't decide? We'll do it RIGHT NOW, NO TAKEBACKS, THAT'S FINAL!
I cannot fathom that they can't find a way to ACTUALLY do the 'inactive hours' thing.

And then there's the work computer. For the last two years, that has been a laptop that I shut down and take home every day. The common problem with that is that it always tells me it has to update when I want to shut down for the day because I have to go home. I can't leave the pc turned on in my bag, it would overheat. So since there is no option to shut down without updating anymore, I have had to rely on the fact that using the power button to shut down circumvents the update.
And if I don't remember to update at home, it's then going to waste my time the next morning at work.
Just give me the option to delay for a bit, then remind me NON-INTRUSIVELY so I can do it when I have the time.
And then there was the update that prevented the machine from booting and I had to waste TWO working days reinstalling EVERYTHING! And we were about 6-7 people hit by that update in our organization.

So yeah. Windows updates are a real fucking problem. Yes, I wan't critical fixes for security problems and other serious software flaws.
But the current policy of 'fuck you, we're doing this' is just not fucking acceptable in any way.

Okay, we fucking get it guys, you wish that you'd get changelogs with every app update and they'd tell you everything and blah blah blah.
Fuck off
We're the only people who even check, it's not worth the effort. Unless a major feature was added or a well known bug was fixed, the "fixed bugs" is more than enough for the general public.

So I did a clean Windows 10 restore recently on my laptop from Insider program to just Anniversary Update . Went away from my computer for a day or so by the time I got updates completed and Visual Studio up and running. So earlier today I went to start back up development on a project of mine to come across the emulators not working. The thing is that I lost 6 hrs of production to figure this out. I tried everything possible so I gave up and reinstalled VS to just remember I forgot to turn on my Hyper-V in BIOS setting. So I'm half way in VS reinstalling and I can't do anything about it. GOD FUCKEN DAMMIT W10!

So a few days ago windows decides to update. No alerts, nothing. Just a random update. 4 HOURS LATER it's still going "hi, we have a new update for you". By hour 5 it's finally done. My wonderful new desktop is a black screen with broken keyboard drivers (mouse still works somehow) and the other user accounts are also broken (but explorer somehow still loads). Then these motherfuckers have the nerve to send a dialog saying "congratulations on updating Windows to the latest version" ...... ;-;

reinstalled windows and everything works again. just need to download ~500Gb of programs on a >1mb/s connection.

fml

ps. this is my first rant, sorry if it's a bit incoherent.

It's technically impossible for this update not to fuck everything up.

Oh, I use Arch Linux btw.

My friend keeps claiming Internet Explorer is better than everything else until I told him that Microsoft doesn't update it much anymore...

I run update without where on mysql console on production database Today.

CLASSIC

Just because I needed to fix database after bug fix on the backend of the application.
I thought I wrote good sql statement after executing it on my local machine and then everything got bad.

Luckily it was only one column with some cached statistics data and I checked that it was not important data before I actually started fixing stuff but still ...
Almost got hard attack afterwards.
Made a script to fix this column and it took me only 15 minutes but still...

Bug was caused in part I got no unit tests and application grow after 3 years of development from simple one for one customer and volumes of documents around 50k to over 40 customers and volumes over 2mil per month, don’t know how many pages each, just in one year after we completed all needed features.

I have daily backups and logs of every api operation but still.
I think this got to far for one backend developer.

I got scared that I will loose money cause I am contractor and the only backend developer working on it.
I am so tired of this right now I think I need a break from work.

Responsibility is killing me so hard right now.
It will take a week to get back to normal.

story - u get a new job, u really like the boss and work env, have been assigned a v ambitious project.. which involves v critical deploy control, data backfills and multiple level of integrations, takes 2 quarters to complete, in the mean time ur fav boss left for a better job and new boss doesn’t seems to understand the gravity of the project and thinks u r just sitting there twinkling fingers...anyways fast forward to d-day : deploys go fine everything working great... time to run some post deploy scripts for some data consistency, a single change to another piece of code done by some one else 2 days back triggers an additional logic and damn suddenly the app users loose ownership to part of the data they owned... u run history reports, do data loads to assign them back, some data errors out, u r about to manually set that up - u drop ur laptop from ur table and it refuses to restart - and all the Prep data is gone and all the scripts are gone and it’s a weekend so no IT Sypport... u r without a laptop for next 24 hours... the struggle continues... next update on Monday

Why does it seem like every application these days needs to restart after performing any kind of update or installation? It's even more annoying when you just don't restart then launch the application and everything works fine...

TLDR: There's some days where the Gods of IT are not with you. Just lost a whole day of work.

So this morning, we (me and my team) big performance issues with our web app. Lot's of requests time out, big latency, etc

Try to ssh to VPS, latency of 10 seconds between user input and output.

Usual checks: RAM ok, Proc ok, hard drive ok, reboot server (20 minutes), update/upgrade

We decide to call OVH. After 15 minutes call, we try to reboot in rescue mode. Reboot fails at 60% + everything freezes.

After an hour, OVH opens an incident ticket on +200 vps instances (including mine) everything is down during +1h

Finally everything is okay ! Even had time to migrate my new database schema.

Still, quick heavy on the mind but feels good to go home with everything working out correctly

Attention guys and gals! If you are using grafana in your home setup, update it asap to 4.6.4 or 5.2.3. versions before those two are affected by an authentication bypass vulnerability. CVE 2018-15727
In the meanwhile, my nginx config is blocking everything but the LAN ips :)

Reanimated an old e-ink tablet today.

First, I didn't even know it needed to be reanimated. I just copied my books there, but it didn't find them. When I connected it again, they were gone.
Factory reset. Format storage. The memory seems empty, but after rebooting I see that everything is still intact.
Ok, imma hit forums then. They tell me I need to replace the internal memory. But isn't that something you need soldering for? Wrong! The internal memory IS JUST A MICRO SD CARD on the motherboard. The card is some cheap no name one, and people tell the similar story of it burning out after like four years of use.
Damn! The vendor has the AUDACITY to charge for signing their firmware to be flashed to a new micro sd card.

But I won't go down this easily. I hit forums again, and apparently there is a tool to sign the firmware yourself, but you need to find the card's serial number. To do that, you have to flash a bootleg tool, boot from that card, and it will show you the data you need. Then, you have to insert them into some shady .ini file (why is everything touching bootleg firmware runs only on windows?).

So I do that. The problem is, I need an image for my book. I find some shady one online, sign & flash it — touchscreen doesn't work. But I have the official firmware. I put two and two together and figure out that if the reader is able to display the ui, it probably has the firmware update tool working. So, immediately after flashing, I launch the firmware update utility that picks up my firmware from the second sd card (yes, they have an additional external slot).

Bingo. It works.

So, here are the steps:
1. Find a shady sd serial number detection tool
2. Flash it on a memory card with a shady vendor-specific flashing tool
3. Insert the new (now shady) card
4. Boot, write down the serial number
5. Find a shady boot image online
6. Edit a shady .ini file of a shady self-signing tool to sign the shady boot image
7. Flash the altered shady boot image with the shady flashing tool on your memory card
8. Copy a shady firmware update on a new card
9. Insert both cards
10. Pray

Does anyone else have experience on a team where everyone seems to be doing their own thing across the full stack/multiple systems/languages but then they're all stepping over each other, breaking other each other's code so ends up doing a lot of rework to update your code to someone else's change.

And also many wheels get reinvented in slightly different ways because no one is aware that something like ... Already exists and can be reused or refactor.... Or how to use it correctly.

Basically we're like all moving in different directions instead of in sync.

I feel maybe the team is too big and everyone is doing everything, wearing too many hats... and maybe should define roles and ownership better.

I'm not one of those "windows sucks lol" guys, but I got used to having my dev environment set on Linux and due to some technical problems I'm setting things up on Windows for a while (dual boot).

Now... Jesus CHRIST how annoying this is. First, I use Laravel and the whole documentation assumes you're either using Mac or Linux. Second, everything has to be added to the god-damned PATH. Third, Windows sole purpose now seems to be updating the PC (and hogging my bandwidth in the process) so I had to waste time taming the beast called Windows Update.

Again, not the stupid old Linux vs Windows thing. I use both for different things, but had never set up a dev environment on Windows.

FUCK YOU SYNOLOGY

Fuck you for breaking all my custom shit.
Fuck you for wiping almost everything (but leaving random stuff) every major update.
Fuck you for switching from upstart to systemd 219 (RELEASED MARCH 2015!).
Fuck you for using an outdated kernel.
Fuck you for having the weirdest shittiest preconfigured settings.
Fuck you for using your own custom package format.
Fuck you for being so utterly broken.
Fuck you for making me work 10 hours just to get everything back up and running the way it was.

Fuck you from the bottom of my heart

The whole fucking npm i fucking hate it.

Most of my worthless time i'm doing backend jobs. But when i wanted to make a simple web frontend from my app with vue - hell has begun.

The first week was "wonderful" but after that... i needed to update dependencies.

I don't wanna describe my frustration when everything was throwing a whole avalanche of errors

I hate npm i really hate npm

FUCKING SHIT WINDOWS YOU MOTHERFUCKING SHIT OS!!!

Everything on our server ran perfectly, but Windows had to fucking update the shit out of himself!! There isn't even a simple option to stop Windows from updating itself automatically.. You have to fucking change your Windows registry to prevent this shithole!!!

A non-profit wants me to build a database for them and I coded everything as a CMS in PHP. But now their IT guy wants it as a Wordpress site and he wants me to send files to the website but I can't update the website or plugins personally myself. How do I go about this?

!Rant
I bought a Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge from my cousin for $450. I then proceeded to root it and everything was fine for a week or so before my phone went into an infinite boot loop after an OTA update.

In the process of trying to fix it, I accidentally flashed a bootloader, unaware that Samsung has the bootloader locked. As a result, I had a completely bricked phone.

I mean legit bricked. No buttons with work and the screen remained shut and I couldn't flash anything over it again to try to repair it. I couldn't even put the phone into recovery mode. I now had the world's most expensive paperweight.

However, I managed to convince Samsung to repair it for me for free! I told them that the phone just stopped responding after an OTA update from them, which isn't so far from the truth.

I only ever had to flash things on the phone to begin with because of their update. Honestly, I wouldn't has had to deal with this problem, and neither would Samsung, if they just didn't lock the damn bootloader! Why are these companies taking away are independent control of our own devices?

Moral of the story: DON'T flash over a locked bootloader EVER or you will end up with a completely brick device, with no solution other than to open it up and replace the motherboard entirely.

First rant here..

So earlier this week, on a php Laravel project, I created a set of nice new features.

The code is tested, locally all fine, I push to Github, circleCi kicks in and double checks myself, still everything green. (Just for a not, its a private project so only I work on it.)

I go ahead and merge, deploy to staging and continue on my next ticket, which is a very small one.

I call it the day, next day I pick back up where I left, test locally, all green, push... then circleCi says no.

I spend 2 days debugging, trying to figure out what is wrong without advance. I just push develop branch again, guess what also failing.

I leave it for the day as I already spend enough time on it.

This morning, I simply do a composer update, push and everything miraculously starts working.. even if there were no changes in the working branches.

Im so mad right now, and this is going in my "try this before you debug a ci" book..

So I actually got an update for my PC at work, proposing me to postpone it or to do it later. I postpone it to one hour later, since I'll be buying food for lunch, it can update and reboot.

When I came back from lunch, laptop is asking me to postpone or do the update right now. So I sigh because the laptop just stayed locked without doing anything, and ask it to do the update in 4 hours, when I'll be leaving.

2 minutes later, it forces me to update with the "30 min left before rebooting", so I sigh again, closes everything and reboot.

Since it's a Windows, it's slow on booting by definition. Plus launching Slack, Eclipse, Firefox, VLC. Takes time. Plus launching the server. +1000 files to compile then deploying.

I lost 20 minutes because of that edgy bitch called "update".

I was scared shitless while installing the windows creator, that it might shit on my grub like the anniversary update did! I had to chroot, reinstall bootloader, and run mkinitcpio to rebuild boot and kernel images. But thankfully everything went on smoothly this time!

bought a cdp ups, because energy service can be shitty in the town I live.

Everything is fine and dandy with the ups, has a nice lcd but it also has a usb cable and dvd with a so called "upsilon 2000" software. One week after buying the ups I decided to venture with the mother fucker software.

Installed the software, looks awful, like a software that made his way from the 90s to this day... it doesn't show the ups... I left it like that... nothing unsual, then my fucking curiosity picked up and I look into the software options and here you go, changed the "communication type" from serial to usb, and ups was recognized, and even nicer, windows started showing a battery icon like if this desktop was a laptop. I was thrilled... until I restarted my pc for whatever reason

gpu decided to break, like if the drivers weren't installed, was laggy, my second screen didn't work, in device manager the video adapter was shown as "generic video adapter". 😡, immediately I blame nvidia cuz I just updated those drivers the day before.

So I started my journey to get the fucking video card working as it should again. installed DDU, reinstalled newest drivers again... didn't work, used ddu again, installed last known drivers again... didn't work, used ddu, installed drivers from windows update... nothing... after some panicking time, I remembered that besides from updating the nvidia drivers I installed that upsilon shit recently... So I decided to uninstall it, and that was the fix, fucking shady software.

It was very naive from me to not blame that upsilon before blaming everything else.

So, my job title is sql Developer, but recently I’ve been balls deep in A .Net application, not an issue, but there is a huge learning curve.

Anyway, earlier in the year I spent about 2-3 months manually entering price list and exchange rates into our ERP system. I proposed an app to help make this process easier, boss was happy so I knocked up a 20+ page software design document, covered everything, and laid out a road map I.e v1 would just be MVP, and additional nice to have features would be added incrementally.

Boss didn’t read the document, and didn’t mention it again.

5 months later I get an invite to a meeting to discuss my progress, which is this afternoon.

It was always going to be something I worked on in my spare time, so I currently have 5 models to show her.

Why not mention something for months and then ask for a progress update out of the blue?

My boss isn’t a dev so will just bury them in technical details which she doesn’t really need to know

What the hell Windows !!!
I go for a 15 minutes break, and you decide to close everything and make an update??

Let me do my job you sob.

So I was just about to post a whole long rant about something breaking with an update. But I literally just found out, the whole thing was my fault because I changed something. I feel so fucking stupid. I went on a rant in a Discord chat with a couple friends, blamed fucking everything I could possibly think of.

Then I remembered when I tweaked a config file just a few days ago. "Maybe that has something to do with it....?" YUP, I'm a bit stupid.

Basically I changed an environment variable, and the variable I was referencing in it isn't being set (which is an issue itself, but I can figure that out), so instead of looking in that folder, it was looking in the root directory, and I was getting some permission denied errors cause..I was running the program as my normal user. Of course I shouldn't be able to write to root as a normal user.

I guess I'm a bit stupid sometimes when I'm sick.

OMG. This weekend, there is Rainbow Six Siege free to play on Steam. I have a desktop PC, but I can't get it to work. Tried Ubi support, but they give shit. So...I was hoping, I could finally try this crap game on my laptop. And here we go...

Normally, I use Linux. Only Linux, because Windows 10 on my laptop is extremely fucking painful. I knew it's going to be torture to install that game on it, but whatever.

OK, firstly, I was surprised, that Windows booted in just about 1 minute. I was like wtf just happened. Everything seemed to be fine and working. I downloaded uPlay, installed it and tried to install the game. Just to be clear, this rant is written from Linux again. And why?

Because FUCKING WINBLOWS desides to FUCKING UPDATE WIFI DRIVERS. 1 minute - internet works, second fucking minute - WIFI IS FUCKING DOWN. Thanks fucking pussy Gates. I really like you. And use this crap daily. Holy shit I would die...

More a call for discussion...

How can it be that devs constantly whine about technical debt, how everything is "ancient" bla bla bla...

Yet don't want to update libraries / stuff unless one explicitly rams an klingon pain stick up their arse because one is very very very very tired of lame excuses.

Even better example - and reason for the rant - new microservice.

They honestly started with JDK 8.

Looking at the dependencies is like walking in a museum...

OWasp Dependency check?

Lot's of 7.5s and greater (NVD score).

How brain fucked ignorant can one team be?!!!

Let alone that that thing - despite being just a skeleton project - has already 178 dependencies.

I don't want to look at the build files, I'll guess I'd turn to Freddy Krueger otherwise...

But really - why whining all the time like you have a clit / arsehole full of sand and then starting a new project with an obviously copy pasted graveyard skeleton?!

I felt so good after revisiting a project and everything runs ok
Code readable
Managed to pick off where I left off and fixed some existing bugs
Added new features and uploaded the update

The feeling of dread as still a semi-junior sysadmin when an app doesn't work after an update.

I got stressed, triple-checked everything that I changed and that I followed all steps of the documentation of the upgrade process, then, as a last step before going over in half-panic mode to my boss, I try to restart the stupid java app and it starts working.

Wtf. Why. Why didn't it work the first time I started it? D:

Today I could finally spend some time reviewing the merge requests an intern made (and I occasionally helped).

My god, I want to put it this months amount of work an, put it in a trash, burn it and rewrite it before the fire is gone.

5 small and unrelated issues. The intern used branches with the correct naming scheme, but IT'S A FUCKING STRAIGHT LINE BUILDING ON TOP OF EACHOTHER.

Oh ans also they took the liberty to update the dependencies and the language versions used. There was no issue regarding this. It's the first branch in the line and it was called "update_<dependency>" where they just upped the version numbers of everything and then COMMENT OUT all mentions of <dependency> so that it compiles at the very least.

Now today I spend most of my time reviewing the code by fixing that mess. Thanks to updates I had to update the CI and replace some libraries that are now incompatible. Tomorrow I can finally inspect the shit itself.

On a positive side node, I removed node as a dev dependency and the size of the node modules went down from 128mb to 18mb

Last week my PM scheduled a meeting for the whole team of 14 devs to talk about our tasks, how we can improve our workflow, so he's up to date on daily stuff nad sprint progress. After an hour and a half of lots of brainstorming i just asked
- what exactly do you want to achieve with all these changes?
- basically i would like on overview of current progress on each task

And he proposed couple of different meetings during the sprint, which would waste dev time. He proposed to apoint one person reaponsible to keeping him informed during each sprint. He proposed we change our meetings, our process, all of it.
So I just sat with my laptop during the same meeting and I prepared a jira board with swimlanes, filters, etc. Where you can sort by priority, size, what is blocked, what is, waiting in queue, what is being currently developed, what is being tested, what's ready for deployment, etc. Easy. 5-10mins of work.

- does this solve your problem?
-....
- you have everything here
-... What if someone doesn't update the ticket status?
- we check everything during our dailies, so, worst case scenario is the status is not update for 24h
-... Umm.. Yeah.. I think thats it. Thank you.

So, we basically wasted 20+ man-hours on another bullshit meeting because the guy thats supposed to be using these tools doesn't know them at all. After working here for 6 months.

I am embrassed.. :(

Situation was..

It was 3-4 months ago I written the process but now client was saying it is not working so I just need to update value in array..

I spent 2-3 hours everything was good..
only in the statement where I am assigning the value is not working.
I was like dude wtf call your senior why its not working .. everything is correct.. then suddenly my eyes catch the rubbish thing I did..

this is what I used mistakenly for assignment "=="

:( and I was looking at statement from 1-2 hour.. it just wasted my time