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This happened at my previous job where I worked for a dating app. It was at a time where the CEO was trying to turn the dating app into “more than a dating app” by adding tons of social features. We always had “interests” which allowed users to see what interests they had in common with another person, but he wanted to take the social component even further.
So with that, he decided we needed an “activity feed.” The activity feed would show what various Facebook connected users were liking on Facebook, posting on Facebook, etc. On a dating app. Where the majority of the audience was > 50 years old. The idea was absolutely ridiculous and everyone but the CEO knew it was destined for failure before we started building it.
But that’s not the best part. The best part was when we launched the activity feed component. We launched it late on day and went home shortly after. The next morning, we came in, and checked on the activity feed to see what was doing. It was literally all spammers liking porn/sex related stuff on Facebook. It was a complete disaster. All garbage but not just boring garbage - completely obscene garbage.
And just like that, the activity feature came and went in the course of a few days.18 -
HR sent around updated contracts asking everyone to sign them since the company changed its name, fair enough.
In the contract it stated "Your normal place of work will be X" - only X was many miles away, and I'd never worked there, never planned too. Assumed it was a mistake, sent it back. HR refused to change it, stating that the "normal place of work does not need to be the place where you normally work."
A lot of back and forth entailed, I refused to sign, I was reprimanded for not doing so, I was asked what my problem was as it made no material difference, and then I eventually replied with:
"Angela, I'm refusing to sign this as it's factually incorrect. No further explanation is required. I'll maybe consider signing this if you sign a piece of paper declaring you believe the moon is made of cheese, and you're the cow the milk came from to make it."
A very strongly worded email came back about how this was going on my record, I needed to offer a formal apology, etc. - all cc'd to my manager. I replied back, again copying my manager in, stating that this was ok, as I couldn't remain at a company who forced employees to sign dodgy contracts anyway.
Problem was (for them), I was a *massive* single point of failure for them at this point owing to some others leaving with no handover - hence I knew I wasn't going to be the casualty here. My manager flipped the lid at HR, got the CEO involved on threat of *him* leaving, and the whole thing massively blew up. Happy ending in that the HR person in question was fired, everyone else's contracts also had to be redone (I assumed everyone else just signed without looking which is worrying), and I actually got a pay rise out of it when higher ups realised the massive single point of failure I was.
But damn, I would've walked over crap like that. Walked pretty soon after anyway!13 -
Its that time of the morning again where I get nothing done and moan about the past ... thats right its practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!
Today I'd like to tell you the story of "i". Interesting about "I" is that he was actually a colleague of yesterdays nominee "G" (and was present at the "java interface" video call, and agreed with G!): https://devrant.com/rants/1152317/...
"I" was the spearhead of a project to end all projects in that company. It was suppose to be a cross-platform thing but ended up only working for iOS. It was actually quite similar to this: https://jasonette.com/ (so similar i'm convinced G / I were part of this but I can't find their github ID's in it).
To briefly explain the above + what they built ... this is the worst piece of shit you can imagine ... and thats a pretty strong statement looking back at the rest of this series so far!
"I" thought this would solve all of our problems of having to build similar-ish apps for multiple customers by letting us re-use more code / UI across apps. His main solution, was every developers favourite part of writing code. I mean how often do you sit back and say:
"God damn I wish more of this development revolved around passing strings back and forth. Screw autocomplete, enums and typed classes / variables, I want more code / variables inside strings in this library!"
Yes thats right, the main part of this bullshittery was putting your entire app, into JSON, into a string and downloading it over http ... what could possibly go wrong!
Some of my issues were:
- Everything was a string, meaning we had no autocomplete. Every type and property had to be remembered and spelled perfectly.
- Everything was a string so we had no way to cmd + click / ctrl + click something to see somethings definition.
- Everything was a string so any business logic methods had to be remembered, all possible overloaded versions, no hints at param types no nothing.
- There was no specific tooling for any of this, it was literally open up xcode, create a json file and start writing strings.
- We couldn't use any of the native UI builders ... cause strings!
- We couldn't use any of the native UI layout constructs and we had to use these god awful custom layout managers, with a weird CSS feel to them.
What angered me a lot was their insistence that "You can download a new app over http and it will update instantly" ... except you can't because you can't download new business logic only UI. So its a new app, but must do 100% exactly the same thing as before.
His other achievements include:
- Deciding he didn't like apple's viewController and navigationBar classes and built his own, which was great when iOS 7 was released (changed the UI to allow drawing under the status bar) and we had no access to any of apples new code or methods, meaning everything had to be re-built from scratch.
- On my first week, my manager noticed he fucked up the login error handling on the app I was taking over. He noticed this as I was about to leave for the evening. I stayed so we could call him (he was in an earlier timezone). Rather than deal with his fucked up, he convinced the manager it would be a "great learning experience" for me to do it ... and stay in late ... while he goes home early.
- He once argued with me in front of the CEO, that his frankenstein cross-platform stuff was the right choice and that my way of using apples storyboards (and well thought out code) wasn't appropriate. So I challenged him to prove it, we got 2 clients who needed similar apps, we each did it our own way. He went 8 man weeks over, I came in 2 days under and his got slated in the app store for poor performance / issues. #result.
But rather than let it die he practically sucked off the CEO to let him improve the cross platform tooling instead.
... in that office you couldn't swing a cat without hitting a retard.
Having had to spend a lot more time working with him and more closely than most of the other nominees, at a minimum "I" is on the top of my list for needing a good punch in the face. Not for being an idiot (which he is), not for ruining so much (which he did), but for just being such an arrogant bastard about it all, despite constant failure.
Will "I" make it to most incompetent? Theres some pretty stiff competition so far
Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!7 -
!dev !rant - only very sad
I have been through the worst and saddest week of my life.
Sadly, it's getting worse every day.
I've been travelling around the world in my RV for years and haven't seen my parents for several years. Since I recently successfully completed a huge project and now have some spare time, I thought it would be nice to visit my parents. Everything went well. We were glad to see each other after a long time and had a nice day together. My father works as a security guard and had to go to work early in the evening. So I stayed alone with my mother.
In the evening my mother went to bed earlier than usual because she didn't feel well. I wished her a good night and wanted to surf the internet. But somehow I had a strange feeling (maybe a premonition) and after 5 minutes I went into her bedroom to bring her a glass of water and at this very moment she suffered a heart attack. I threw it all away and called 911 immediately. I shouted the address into the phone, screamed emergency, heart failure, unconscious while trying to start resuscitation at the same time. Fortunately, the ambulance was nearby, arrived in just a few minutes, pushed me aside and started the resuscitation procedure. It took more than an hour and dozens of electric shocks to even get a pulse.
The ambulance took her to the hospital for further medical treatment. I was in the hospital all night until at least she had a stable pulse.
As soon as I returned to my parents' house (the car was still warm, hardly 3 minutes have passed), my father, who had returned from work a few minutes earlier, suddenly suffered a thrombosis in his leg. The whole leg was slowly turning black. I immediately dragged him into the car and drove him as fast as I could to the hospital.
It's Sunday now. I haven't slept since Thursday and I've been in the hospital all the time. Both are in a coma, fighting for their lives. I thought it couldn't get any worse, my mother got sepsis and pneumonia today.
Now I have returned to my parents' house and pray that both of them will survive. Can't sleep even though I'm tired to death. Can't work, try to distract me somehow. Maybe I'll be able to sleep at least two hours. Then I'll go back to the hospital.
What a damn fuckin' week.46 -
So, I grew up on the US/Mexican border, in a city where saying there's no opportunity is like saying the Titanic suffered a small leak on its maiden voyage. There were two kinds of people in said town: Mexicans trying to find something less shit than juarez and white trash reveling in their own failure. I came from the latter, for whatever that's worth.
I graduated high school when I was almost 16 years old. Parents couldn't really afford to support three kids and pay the rent on the latest in a long line of shit holes we migrated in and out of. If being a serial eviction artist is a thing, my family were savants.
I applied to college and got accepted only to be told by my father that he didn't see the need. Turns out the only reason he'd helped me graduate early was so I could start working and help pay his bills. I said okay, turned around and tossed a bag and my shitty af spare parts computer into the back of the junkyard Vega I generously referred to as a car and moved cross country. Car died on arrival, so I was basically committed.
Pulled shifts at two part times and what kids today call a side hustle to pay for school, couch surfed most of the time. Sleep deprivation was the only constant.
Over the first 4 months I'd tried leveraging some certs and previous experience I'd obtained in high school to get employment, but wasn't having much luck in the bay area. And then I lost my job. The book store having burned down on the same weekend the owner was conveniently looking to buy property in Vegas.
Depression sets in, that wonderful soul crushing variety that comes with what little safety net you had evaporating.
At a certain point, I was basically living out of the campus computer lab, TA friend of mine nice enough to accidentally lock me in on the reg. Got really into online gaming as a means of dealing with my depression. One night, I dropped some code on a UO shard I'd been playing around on. Host was local, saw the code and offered me a job at his firm that paid chump change, but was three times what all my other work did combined and left time for school. Ground there for a few years until I got a position with work study at LBL that conflicted too much for it to remain mutually beneficial. Amicable parting of the ways.
Fucking poverty is what convinced me to code for a living. It's a solid guarantee of never going back to it. And to anyone who preaches the virtues of it and skipping opportunity on grounds of the moral high ground, well, you know.12 -
Fear of fucking failure and this thing called an inferiority complex.
I've had these two since highschool. I thought/was hoping the bullying would stop when I entered highschool but it only got worse.
All this lead to the fair of failure and inferiority complex I still notice and have to deal with every day.
The thing is that I know that I'm good at what I do and when I get a compliment I of course really like that but I forget about it rather quickly.
But I'm terribly afraid of failing/fucking something up badly and always that fucking feeling like you're inferior to every-fucking-one.
One might think that just telling me that I'm not inferior to anyone (and the other way around) helps, and I do appreciate it when people tell me that, but one person saying that once or twice is not going to overshadow the years and years and years of hearing the opposite.
Yes, that still eats me alive now and then and overcoming that with/in my work is still a huge-ass challenge.13 -
To replace humans with robots, because human beings are complete shit at everything they do.
I am a chemist. My alignment is not lawful good. I've produced lots of drugs. Mostly just drugs against illnesses. Mostly.
But whatever my alignment or contribution to the world as a chemist... Human chemists are just fucking terrible at their job. Not for a lack of trying, biological beings just suck at it.
Suiting up for a biosafety level lab costs time. Meatbags fuck up very often, especially when tired. Humans whine when they get acid in their face, or when they have to pour and inhale carcinogenic substances. They also work imprecisely and inaccurately, even after thousands of hours of training and practice.
Weaklings! Robots are superior!
So I replaced my coworkers with expensive flow chemistry setups with probes and solenoid fluid valves. I replaced others with CUDA simulations.
First at a pharma production & research lab, then at a genetics lab, then at an Industrial R&D lab.
Many were even replaced by Raspberry Pi's with two servos and a PH meter attached, and I broke open second hand Fischer Sci spectrophotometers to attach arduinos with WiFi boards.
The issue was that after every little overzealous weekend project, I made myself less necessary as well.
So I jumped into the infinitely deep shitpool called webdev.
App & web development is kind of comfortable, there's always one more thing to do, but there's no pressure where failure leads to fatalities (I think? Wait... do I still care?).
Super chill, if it weren't for the delusion that making people do "frontend" and "fullstack" labor isn't a gross violation of the Geneva Convention.
Quickly recognizing that I actually don't want to be tortured and suffer from nerve damage caused by VueX or have my organs slowly liquefied by the radiation from some insane transpiling centrifuge, I did what any sane person would do.
Get as far away from the potential frontend blast radius as possible, hide in a concrete bunker.
So I became a data engineer / database admin.
That's where I'm quarantining now, safely hiding from humanity behind a desk, employed to write a MySQL migration or two, setting up Redis sorted sets, adding a field to an Elastic index. That takes care of generating cognac and LSD money.
But honestly.... I actually spend most of my time these days contributing to open source repositories, especially writing & maintaining Rust libraries.10 -
Worst thing you've seen another dev do? Long one, but has a happy ending.
Classic 'Dev deploys to production at 5:00PM on a Friday, and goes home.' story.
The web department was managed under the the Marketing department, so they were not required to adhere to any type of coding standards and for months we fought with them on logging. Pre-Splunk, we rolled our own logging/alerting solution and they hated being the #1 reason for phone calls/texts/emails every night.
Wanting to "get it done", 'Tony' decided to bypass the default logging and send himself an email if an exception occurred in his code.
At 5:00PM on a Friday, deploys, goes home.
Around 11:00AM on Sunday (a lot folks are still in church at this time), the VP of IS gets a call from the CEO (who does not go to church) about unable to log into his email. VP has to leave church..drive home and find out he cannot remote access the exchange server. He starts making other phone calls..forcing the entire networking department to drive in and get email back up (you can imagine not a group of happy people)
After some network-admin voodoo, by 12:00, they discover/fix the issue (know it was Tony's email that was the problem)
We find out Monday that not only did Tony deploy at 5:00 on a Friday, the deployment wasn't approved, had features no one asked for, wasn't checked into version control, and the exception during checkout cost the company over $50,000 in lost sales.
Was Tony fired? Noooo. The web is our cash cow and Tony was considered a top web developer (and he knew that), Tony decided to blame logging. While in the discovery meeting, Tony told the bosses that it wasn't his fault logging was so buggy and caused so many phone calls/texts/emails every night, if he had been trained properly, this problem could have been avoided.
Well, since I was responsible for logging, I was next in the hot seat.
For almost 30 minutes I listened to every terrible thing I had done to Tony ever since he started. I was a terrible mentor, I was mean, I was degrading, etc..etc.
Me: "Where is this coming from? I barely know Tony. We're not even in the same building. I met him once when he started, maybe saw him a couple of times in meetings."
Andrew: "Aren't you responsible for this logging fiasco?"
Me: "Good Lord no, why am I here?"
Andrew: "I'll rephrase so you'll understand, aren't you are responsible for the proper training of how developers log errors in their code? This disaster is clearly a consequence of your failure. What do you have to say for yourself?"
Me: "Nothing. Developers are responsible for their own choices. Tony made the choice to bypass our logging and send errors to himself, causing Exchange to lockup and losing sales."
Andrew: "A choice he made because he was not properly informed of the consequences? Again, that is a failure in the proper use of logging, and why you are here."
Me: "I'm done with this. Does John know I'm in here? How about you get John and you talk to him like that."
'John' was the department head at the time.
Andrew:"John, have you spoken to Tony?"
John: "Yes, and I'm very sorry and very disappointed. This won't happen again."
Me: "Um...What?"
John: "You know what. Did you even fucking talk to Tony? You just sit in your ivory tower and think your actions don't matter?"
Me: "Whoa!! What are you talking about!? My responsibility for logging stops with the work instructions. After that if Tony decides to do something else, that is on him."
John: "That is not how Tony tells it. He said he's been struggling with your logging system everyday since he's started and you've done nothing to help. This behavior ends today. We're a fucking team. Get off your damn high horse and help the little guy every once in a while."
Me: "I don't know what Tony has been telling you, but I barely know the guy. If he has been having trouble with the one line of code to log, this is the first I've heard of it."
John: "Like I said, this ends today. You are going to come up with a proper training class and learn to get out and talk to other people."
Over the next couple of weeks I become a powerpoint wizard and 'train' anyone/everyone on the proper use of logging. The one line of code to log. One line of code.
A friend 'Scott' sits close to Tony (I mean I do get out and know people) told me that Tony poured out the crocodile tears. Like cried and cried, apologizing, calling me everything but a kitchen sink,...etc. It was so bad, his manager 'Sally' was crying, her boss 'Andrew', was red in the face, when 'John' heard 'Sally' was crying, you can imagine the high levels of alpha-male 'gotta look like I'm protecting the females' hormones flowing.
Took almost another year, Tony released a change on a Friday, went home, web site crashed (losses were in the thousands of $ per minute this time), and Tony was not let back into the building on Monday (one of the best days of my life).10 -
I'll get to my four words in a sec, but let me set the background first.
This morning, at breakfast, I fired up my trusty laptop only to get a fan failure warning.
Finally, after the three year old is asleep tonight, I'm able to start dismantling the case to get to the fan. I'm hoping it just needs cleaned out.
Hard drive, memory, and keyboard spread out over the kitchen table. I'm not even halfway done.
Guess what? Now I'm one of the lucky 3500 people to have a power outage at 9 pm. Estimated restore time: 2 am.
Sigh.
"All those tiny screws"
And a three year old in the house...
18 -
Worst dev team failure I've experienced?
One of several.
Around 2012, a team of devs were tasked to convert a ASPX service to WCF that had one responsibility, returning product data (description, price, availability, etc...simple stuff)
No complex searching, just pass the ID, you get the response.
I was the original developer of the ASPX service, which API was an XML request and returned an XML response. The 'powers-that-be' decided anything XML was evil and had to be purged from the planet. If this thought bubble popped up over your head "Wait a sec...doesn't WCF transmit everything via SOAP, which is XML?", yes, but in their minds SOAP wasn't XML. That's not the worst WTF of this story.
The team, 3 developers, 2 DBAs, network administrators, several web developers, worked on the conversion for about 9 months using the Waterfall method (3~5 months was mostly in meetings and very basic prototyping) and using a test-first approach (their own flavor of TDD). The 'go live' day was to occur at 3:00AM and mandatory that nearly the entire department be on-sight (including the department VP) and available to help troubleshoot any system issues.
3:00AM - Teams start their deployments
3:05AM - Thousands and thousands of errors from all kinds of sources (web exceptions, database exceptions, server exceptions, etc), site goes down, teams roll everything back.
3:30AM - The primary developer remembered he made a last minute change to a stored procedure parameter that hadn't been pushed to production, which caused a side-affect across several layers of their stack.
4:00AM - The developer found his bug, but the manager decided it would be better if everyone went home and get a fresh look at the problem at 8:00AM (yes, he expected everyone to be back in the office at 8:00AM).
About a month later, the team scheduled another 3:00AM deployment (VP was present again), confident that introducing mocking into their testing pipeline would fix any database related errors.
3:00AM - Team starts their deployments.
3:30AM - No major errors, things seem to be going well. High fives, cheers..manager tells everyone to head home.
3:35AM - Site crashes, like white page, no response from the servers kind of crash. Resetting IIS on the servers works, but only for around 10 minutes or so.
4:00AM - Team rolls back, manager is clearly pissed at this point, "Nobody is going fucking home until we figure this out!!"
6:00AM - Diagnostics found the WCF client was causing the server to run out of resources, with a mix of clogging up server bandwidth, and a sprinkle of N+1 scaling problem. Manager lets everyone go home, but be back in the office at 8:00AM to develop a plan so this *never* happens again.
About 2 months later, a 'real' development+integration environment (previously, any+all integration tests were on the developer's machine) and the team scheduled a 6:00AM deployment, but at a much, much smaller scale with just the 3 development team members.
Why? Because the manager 'froze' changes to the ASPX service, the web team still needed various enhancements, so they bypassed the service (not using the ASPX service at all) and wrote their own SQL scripts that hit the database directly and utilized AppFabric/Velocity caching to allow the site to scale. There were only a couple client application using the ASPX service that needed to be converted, so deploying at 6:00AM gave everyone a couple of hours before users got into the office. Service deployed, worked like a champ.
A week later the VP schedules a celebration for the successful migration to WCF. Pizza, cake, the works. The 3 team members received awards (and a envelope, which probably equaled some $$$) and the entire team received a custom Benchmade pocket knife to remember this project's success. Myself and several others just stared at each other, not knowing what to say.
Later, my manager pulls several of us into a conference room
Me: "What the hell? This is one of the biggest failures I've been apart of. We got rewarded for thousands and thousands of dollars of wasted time."
<others expressed the same and expletive sediments>
Mgr: "I know..I know...but that's the story we have to stick with. If the company realizes what a fucking mess this is, we could all be fired."
Me: "What?!! All of us?!"
Mgr: "Well, shit rolls downhill. Dept-Mgr-John is ready to fire anyone he felt could make him look bad, which is why I pulled you guys in here. The other sheep out there will go along with anything he says and more than happy to throw you under the bus. Keep your head down until this blows over. Say nothing."11 -
So, basically i am getting desperate, and i'm also angry... and want to cry, and i feel a failure.
My biggest error in this story is "believing"
First of all, I'm a starting entrepreneur as freelancer, started of 6 months ago, back then it all seemed bright, i had my first customer, they believed me, got a second assignment for that same customer, fulfilled the task in brilliance, and was ready to move on to a bigger customer base. Here's where shit goes wrong.
Working with another office that outsources people to various (goverment) contractors, Had a meeting with them, we would cooperate very soon. This was january.
PM: "We've got a gov Dept as a customer that wants to do project XYZ and starting in february, requirements are yadiyadiyadi, you up for it?
Me:"Sure, send me the specs, and timeframe and i'll apply with my offer)"
Project is about a bit backup system migration, lots of fancy shmancy tech used, 2 datacenters setup... a big project that can take up several months...
- sends offer- received an acceptance on the offer
PM " Great, we'll start end of february"
Me: "Ok, end of february is a go then, looking forward to cooperate"
FF to near end of february, receive msg from PM: "Project XYZ delayed until half if march"
Me: "Okay... what is the delay?"
PM:"Govt bureaucracy"
Me " Ok, let's keep in touch"
Near Half of March
PM " Project delayed again".
Me: " Okay... what's the reason?"
PM: "they have decided to take a different approach, and want 3 datacenters now"
Me: "That will change the offer i made for you, can you send me the specs?"
PM: "No, because they havent decided on the techs used, expect end of march"
Me: "Okay...but once you got the specs,s end them to me"
End of March
Pm: " Hy NeatNerdPrime, we still havent got any specs yet... they still forgot to make the shopping list"
Me: "(-_-) ... I thought they already had that covered"
PM:" No, new Govt budget cuts and lots of changes, basically, they still don't know what they really want. But we're just -delayed- , not -cancelled-"
Me: "Okay... i hope we get started soon"
PM: "expect launch beginning of april"
I was not really satisfied with this explanation.... but ok
Beginning of april, at april's folls day
PM "Project delayed again"
Me: " This is a joke right?"
PM: "Sadly, no, they delayed the project since they don't really know what they actually want, we are trying to give them the proposed solution... but they still need approval, and still need to set up shopping list"
Me:"when do we start then?"
PM: " I was told 17th of april'
Me:" I really hope it gets through, i had to decline some proposals for work for months due to this, this ain't funny"
PM: "I know, i'll make up for it"
15th of april...
PM " Project delayed again"
Me right now almost losing my shit
"why this time??? I thought you said 17th of april real launch!"
PM: "they fired their PM, need to hire a new one, delayed until May/June"
Me: "I've set aside some other assignments just because you said you were going to launch at those dates... This is really pushing my limits, can you give me SOME assurances?"
PM: "5th of june would be official go" Me: " Okay, i'm noting 5th of june in my agenda, let's get this through!"
And now i get a message...stating that the date of 5th of june , is for another project, at the same goct dept, but totally different project
WHAT THE FUCKING SHIT I'VE SPENT MONTHS WAITING FOR A PROJECT THAT WAS PRACTICALLY ALL SET AND GO AND EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TIME IT GETS DELAYED, EVERY FUCKING TIME I THINK "you know, i cannot accept these offers since that Govt project will start soon, i cannot do 2 assignments at once especially when they require me to work at govt office at the capital..." AND EVERY FUCKING TIME IT GETS DELAYED!!!
I feel at a loss now..... i've done i think the most horrible thing you can do as a independent and that's not accepting another assignment just because there was a concrete promise for a govt contract...
Almost dried up, nothing much left, had to do some spending because of a move to another apartment... I'm feeling really down, and angry...and down, but mostly angry, for not accepting those offers in the meantime...13 -
Today I was searching Android docs and found something interesting:
To write Android log statements, you use the android.util.Log class with the following methods:
Log.v()
Log.d()
...
Log.wtf() 😮😮😮
According to Google it seems to mean "What a Terrible Failure".
WTF?!?!?!12 -
Co-worker: hey, can you create an email?
Me: yeah, who needs one? There are no records indicating any new people starting for another two weeks.
Cw: if for Stan, he started today. Also he needs a computer set up.
Me: who the hell is Stan and why are there no records of this person?
Cw: he's new, he started today so we didn't need an email or computer before today.
Me: I get that they're new, but what happened to giving the IT department at least 3 days notice on new hires so I can make sure things get taken care of?
Cw: you know how it is around here, nobody gets notice for anything. So can you get that email and computer setup for me, he can't work without them.
Me: I get that we don't actually plan for anything around here and that 90% of my job is fixing that failure, but hiring someone isn't like a system failing, people don't just show up and say "I start today" they have to go through interviews and background checks and other stuff, someone besides this person knew they started today so I don't think it's too much to ask that I get an email when the offer is extended to the person so I can prepare a system.
Cw: well we interviewed him two weeks ago and he accepted the offer last week, he's here and waiting so just as soon as you can please.
Me: well here's an email, the computer is gonna have to wait, I have a lot going on today and I don't have any computers ready right now.
*Seriously tempted to make them wait till next week to cover the 3 days notice I've asked for 100 times*23 -
fork() can fail: this is important
Ah, fork(). The way processes make more processes. Well, one of them, anyway. It seems I have another story to tell about it.
It can fail. Got that? Are you taking this seriously? You should. fork can fail. Just like malloc, it can fail. Neither of them fail often, but when they do, you can't just ignore it. You have to do something intelligent about it.
People seem to know that fork will return 0 if you're the child and some positive number if you're the parent -- that number is the child's pid. They sock this number away and then use it later.
Guess what happens when you don't test for failure? Yep, that's right, you probably treat "-1" (fork's error result) as a pid.
That's the beginning of the pain. The true pain comes later when it's time to send a signal. Maybe you want to shut down a child process.
Do you kill(pid, signal)? Maybe you do kill(pid, 9).
Do you know what happens when pid is -1? You really should. It's Important. Yes, with a capital I.
...
...
...
Here, I'll paste from the kill(2) man page on my Linux box.
If pid equals -1, then sig is sent to every process for which the calling process has permission to send signals, except for process 1 (init), ...
See that? Killing "pid -1" is equivalent to massacring every other process you are permitted to signal. If you're root, that's probably everything. You live and init lives, but that's it. Everything else is gone gone gone.
Do you have code which manages processes? Have you ever found a machine totally dead except for the text console getty/login (which are respawned by init, naturally) and the process manager? Did you blame the oomkiller in the kernel?
It might not be the guilty party here. Go see if you killed -1.
Unix: just enough potholes and bear traps to keep an entire valley going.
Source: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2014/...12 -
The following meeting occurred at a client between a recently added client PM and our team, we'll call her Shrilldesi, previously from one of the main consulting vendors.
*Meeting begins after 15 minutes of bullshitting, waiting for people to file in*
Shrilldesi: "Ok everyone, let's get started
TeamMember: "We're still waiting for Z and W, not sure why they're late."
SD: "We can start there. It was decided had to lay off Z and W, because we didn't have enough work."
Moi: "Wait, what. Who made that decision? Why weren't we consulted on this? We have another project starting next week that they were needed for. They just delivered the entire public facing rewrite, why would we let them go?!"
SD: "It was decided by myself, pajeet, and venkata looking at the backlog. Not enough work, week gap."
Moi: "This is going to hurt our ability to deliver the next phase. When are we going to start interviewing new people, the project begins next week?"
SD: "We will interview new resources as needed."
Moi: "Who is we? And 'as needed' is yesterday, or realistically several weeks ago as the. project. starts. next. week. Also, we're obligated by federal law to bring back anyone we lay off before we hire anyone else for the same position."
SD: "Interviews will be done by myself, Mohd, and Pajeet."
Moi: "...can I point out that there's only one modestly technical person in that group, they're an admin, and none of them are from this team? How do you conduct an engineering interview without any engineers?"
SD: "That does not matter, I have watched enough to be able to ask your questions."
Moi: *anger intensifies* "I have to respectfully disagree. I don't feel it's appropriate to cut us out of the process of interviewing our own team members."
SD: "It is decided, we will take care of it, let us move on. Next, we need to find work for the Manasa, she doesn't have anything to do."
Moi: *sharpens baseball bat* "...shouldn't we just fire her then?"
SD: "Oh that is so mean, why would we fire her? We were thinking she might be able to do some of my project management work."
Moi: *sharpening intensifies* "You do realize it's a violation of H1-B statutes for someone to be employed in work other than what is stated on their contract, and Project Managers are specifically listed as not specialized skillsets per federal law."
SD: *ignores question* "We also need to find work for the offshore team, they don't have enough to do. Please find them work for the next period."
Moi: *checks how long the wait period is for ar-15s*
SD: "We also have a new person rolling onto our team, he comes from the xyz team, Dikshit *gestures to person we all figured was lost*. He will be handling our front end development."
Moi: *seething hatred* "WE JUST LET TWO EXCELLENT FRONT END DEVELOPERS GO. WE DO NOT NEED DIKSHIT."
SD: "Please calm down. We will be replacing the other two shortly, there is no problem."
Moi: "Have you heard nothing I've said? Did you even run this by legal and HR? Why did we let them go in the first place? Why do we even need Dikshit?!"
SD: "I said it before, please listen. There is not enough work for them. Dikshit will do front end. What is unclear?"
Note: There's not really any dramatization here. It's almost verbatim what happened. Eventually, the next project was cancelled, they incrementally rolled the rest of the local team off. They then had the cojones to express aghast anger when I notified them I would not be renewing my contract, and open hatred when I explained to them I was not a slave, and I refused to be a bag holder for the inevitable failure of a project without any chance of success. I don't really care what happened after that, they can all burn in their own little nepotistic shitshow of perpetual failure.4 -
I realize now I probably shouldn't have called out my manger's bullshit if I wanted to keep my job. We were told to work a Sunday and our PO called it a "Smack-a-thon."
I said, "No let's not use stupid names. Let's call things what they are. This is a management failure Sunday."
That was during new hire lunch, in front of my manager.
I worked the first Sunday. I refused to work the second one. I've also been refusing to work over 45 hours a week.
So I guess I could have seen it coming. My manager didn't even have the gums to do it himself. He had the HR lady do it, while I was working remote from home. She told me it wasn't a 9 to 5 shop and that people there are expected to work long hours (People on my team are working 80+ a week for several months).
I took the train in to get my stuff. No one was there. My computer already gone. Couldn't even say "Go fuck yourself to anybody."
So I feel better now. I haven't taken a day of since I started in February, so it's time for some vacation and an unemployment check.
It was a really terrible job, and terribly mismanaged. I'm glad I stood my ground and knew what I was worth. I wish my co-workers had done the same.
I should have tried to start a union.8 -
We've got a team of around 20 developers and the most junior of them all is a interesting specimen.
The kind of person who thinks they a 'expert' in anything and everything and is constantly trying to school our senior developers who have 20+ years experience behind them.
The sort of person that spends 15 seconds googling something he has never heard of before, but now that he has skimmed 1 page on Google would classify himself as a 'expert' in said topic.
He comes into my office yesterday and proclaims that it has been decided by himself that he no longer wants to be a developer anymore and wants to do Ops/Infrastructure, then starts rambling on about how he is a Kubernetes expert.
I asked what experience he had with Kubernetes and his response was "I watched a webinar they did last night" to which I asked if he had ever actually used anything to do with Kubernetes in his life.
"No, but I'll watch a few YouTube videos and will then be more than qualified" he says
Followed by him telling me that we'll be moving all of our current Docker Swarm clusters into Kubernetes.
This was news to me (I'm head of infrastructure and operations)
I needed a good giggle, so I asked why we would get rid of our exisiting Docker infrastructure that's got a 100% uptime over the past 2 years and has worked without failure. It's truely been a dream.
He says "Because it's shiny and cool and better"
The nest afternoon he comes to me and says "When I move everything into Kubernetes I am going to convert everything into micro services"
He says that he watched a YouTube video the night before on microservices and has decided that it's what we need to use for a particular project.
(It's a simple php website that gets 100 hits per day)
Hopefully his boss will notice that he is producing no output soon. Don't want to tell the manager that the guy he hired delivers no work and lives in a fantasy land.
"your not touching the infrastructure. Ever"15 -
I just found out that there is a method in Java/Android called "Log.wtf()" which stands for...
... What a Terrible Failure!
Don't believe me? See for yourselves! (way to go, guys!)
9 -
the official Android documentation says it stands for "What a Terrible Failure"...sure it does Google, sure it does....
1 -
I wrote a database migration to add a column to a table and populated that column upon record creation.
But the code is so freaking convoluted that it took me four days of clawing my eyes out to manage this.
BUT IT'S FINALLY DONE.
FREAKING YAY.
Why so long, you ask? Just how convoluted could this possibly be? Follow my lead ~
There's an API to create a gift. (Possibly more; I have no bloody clue.)
I needed the mobile dev contractor to tell me which APIs he uses because there are lots of unused ones, and no reasoning to their naming, nor comments telling me what they do.
This API takes the supplied gift params, cherry-picks a few bits of useful data out (by passing both hashes by reference to several methods), replaces a couple of them with lookups / class instances (more pass-by-reference nonsense). After all of this, it logs the resulting (and very different) mess, and happily declares it the original supplied params. Utterly useless for basically everything, and so very wrong.
It then uses this data to call GiftSale#create, which returns an instance of GiftSale (that's actually a Gift; more on that soon).
GiftSale inherits from Gift, and redefines three of its methods.
GiftSale#create performs a lot of validations / data massaging, some by reference, some not. It uses `super` to call Gift#create which actually maps to the constructor Gift#initialize.
Gift#initialize calls Gift#pre_init (passing the data by reference again), which does nothing and returns null. But remember: GiftSale inherits from Gift, meaning GiftSale#pre_init supersedes Gift#pre_init, so that one is called instead. GiftSale#pre_init returns a Stripe charge object upon success, or a Gift (and a log entry containing '500 Internal') upon failure. But this is irrelevant because the return value is never actually used. Pass by reference, remember? I didn't.
We're now back at Gift#initialize, Rails finally creates a Gift object using the args modified [mostly] in-place by all of the above.
Another step back and we're at GiftSale#create again. This method returns either the shiny new Gift object or an error string (???), and the API logic branches on its type. For further confusion: not all of the method's returns are explicit, and those implicit return values are nested three levels deep. (In Ruby, a method will return the last executed line's return value automatically, allowing e.g. `def add(a,b); a+b; end`)
So, to summarize: GiftSale#create jumps back and forth between Gift five times before finally creating a Gift instance, and each jump further modifies the supplied params in-place.
Also. There are no rescue/catch blocks, meaning any issue with any of the above results in a 500. (A real 500, not a fake 500 like last time. A real 500, with tragic consequences.)
If you're having trouble following the above... yep! That's why it took FOUR FREAKING DAYS! I had no tests, no documentation, no already-built way of testing the API, and no idea what data to send it. especially considering it requires data from Stripe. It also requires an active session token + user data, and I likewise had no login API tests, documentation, logging, no idea how to create a user ... fucking hell, it's a mess.)
Also, and quite confusingly:
There's a class for GiftSale, but there's no table for it.
Gift and GiftSale are completely interchangeable except for their #create methods.
So, why does GiftSale exist?
I have no bloody idea.
All it seems to do is make everything far more complicated than it needs to be.
Anyway. My total commit?
Six lines.
IN FOUR FUCKING DAYS!
AHSKJGHALSKHGLKAHDSGJKASGH.7 -
Part 2 of my boss's stupidity
~FreezeFrame.mp4
*Wait! Wait! Wait! What!?*
*You actually reinstated my class?*
~anotherReverseRecordSound.mp3
-------------
Another late night and another set of pulls I needed to do in order to get caught up with the rest of the world.
I had just finished up dealing with a strange bug and had finally fixed it.
"I need to get caught up with my boss," I thought to myself.
I quickly git pull from my boss and a merge conflict occurs.
"Oh, ok that's fine." I say, "that's nothing too odd."
~FreezeFrame.mp4
"Wait! Wait! Wait! What!?" I shouted inside my head
I couldn't believe what I was seeing, there was a huge chunk of code that was being completely replaced.
"You're actually reinstating my class?" I nearly shouted.
"What!?" my girlfriend shouts from the other room.
"Come here a second, let me show you what it is," I shout back.
She rushes in real quickly, and I point at the code that was being changed.
"Remember that really long ass rant I made about how my boss had completely removed all of my code because he thought it was spaghetti?" I said
"Yeah?" she replied quickly, visually astounded by my excitement.
"He fucking put my class back into the code!!!"
"Wow!... I guess you beat him, huh?" she said.
"You better fucking believe it, but you want to know what's worse?"
She cocked her head sideways, "what?"
"He fucking built it worse than my original! The names don't properly reflect what he is trying do and he's doing a failure job at trying to copy what I had done in my original. He clearly doesn't know about git revert" I said between bouts of laughter.
"This is too good, I'm putting this on devRant!" I said
"I'm not in the least bit surprised that you would." She replied back.
Related Rant:
https://devrant.com/rants/1001888/...16 -
I was interviewing a candidate for a senior UI dev position and I began to ask him stuff about closures, contexts, design patterns and others.
At some point, after failing to respond to most of the questions, the candidate looked at me and said something like: ‘I am amazed. You didn’t have a lot of toys when you were a kid. The PC was your only toy when you were a kid, right??’.
I looked at my junior colleague that was shadowing the interview and we couldn’t believe what the guy was asking. He was extremely serious and he was looking for a way to find an explanation for his failure.11 -
For a week+ I've been listening to a senior dev ("Bob") continually make fun of another not-quite-a-senior dev ("Tom") over a performance bug in his code. "If he did it right the first time...", "Tom refuses to write tests...that's his problem", "I would have wrote the code correctly ..." all kinds of passive-aggressive put downs. Bob then brags how without him helping Tom, the application would have been a failure (really building himself up).
Bob is out of town and Tom asked me a question about logging performance data in his code. I look and see Bob has done nothing..nothing at all to help Tom. Tom wrote his own JSON and XML parser (data is coming from two different sources) and all kinds of IO stream plumbing code.
I use Visual Studio's feature create classes from JSON/XML, used the XML Serialzier and Newtonsoft.Json to handling the conversion plumbing.
With several hundred of lines gone (down to one line each for the XML/JSON-> object), I wrote unit tests around the business transaction, integration test for the service and database access. Maybe couple of hours worth of work.
I'm 100% sure Bob knew Tom was going in a bad direction (maybe even pushing him that direction), just to swoop in and "save the day" in front of Tom's manager at some future point in time.
This morning's standup ..
Boss: "You're helping Tom since Bob is on vacation? What are you helping with?"
Me: "I refactored the JSON and XML data access, wrote initial unit and integration tests. Tom will have to verify, but I believe any performance problem will now be isolated to the database integration. The problem Bob was talking about on Monday is gone. I thought spending time helping Tom was better than making fun of him."
<couple seconds of silence>
Boss:"Yea...want to let you know, I really, really appreciate that."
Bob, put people first, everyone wins.11 -
Last Friday company-wide call consisted of the sales CEO bossman, the remote contractor dev, and myself. The only topic of discussion was CTO-bashing (bossman's favorite). Neither person had much of anything to say about their week, and they didn't want to hear my rather-lengthy summary either (I did a lot). All they wanted to do was bash the CTO (API Guy).
The CEO asked how many hours I had worked, and seemed annoyed when I said less than 40. Well screw you. Monday was Christmas, and Sunday was Encroaching Estranged Asshole Day. (Earlier rant)
I've been spending most of my time trying to learn the steaming mountain of rancid hippo shit that API Guy squeezed out, since he's leaving forever in 10 days. Sure, CEO bossman says he'll still be around to answer questions, but even with him right next to me in the office he's less than useful. After he's gone and finally feeling free of this farce? It'll be worth fuck-all.
So bossman is mad at me for both not working enough over Christmas, and not pumping out features at a frantic pace despite multiple explanations of why this is a bad idea. And he didn't care about what work I actually did do.
My every interaction with him makes me angry. Whenever I -- or anyone else -- does something he doesn't approve of, seemingly no matter the reasoning, he makes it out to be a failure on their part, and like he can't trust them as much now.
Well I'm sorry we're trying to make sure our websocket works perfectly before putting it in the hands of our customers who rely on it for cash processing.
I'm sorry I'm trying to recall printers that aren't configured properly, which also prevent customers from using our goddamn service they're paying for.
I'm sorry I'm trying to learn how everything works while I still have someone to talk to and ask questions of.
I'm sorry I'm preparing for the day I have to take over and have you breathing down my neck. Once API Guy's gone I'll be responsible for everything, and you'll be yelling at me and having a @Root bashing session instead if I don't know how to fix everything right away.
But no. All you care about is that I talk to you about what's going in so you can micromanage development despite having zero fucking understanding of goddamn anything. All you ever fucking want is the next shiny feature you can push to make more sales / keep your current contacts happy. Doesn't fking matter if it makes development awful later; that's tomorrow's problem. And yet you have the gall to bash API Guy over and over and over again for the codebase being a mess? Sure he's a terrible programmer, but been putting up with this exact same shit for five years. No wonder it's a mountain of rancid hippo shit. That's as much your fault as his, asshole.
I'm so sorry you "have serious concerns" about me. I don't want to put up with your shit either.
Fuck off and die.22 -
(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.9 -
Story time:
Yesterday I wanted to go to the theater with my girlfriend. It was her idea because as a student you can get reduced tickets for the play, but only via the online store exactely two hours before the play starts. We had already tried two weeks before but with no success. So this time I said i want to be on my pc with a proper browser and not a mobile version like last time. So we are sitting at home me in front of their website on one screen and with a clock on the other screen. Two minutes realy i hit refresh and I get a selection for the reduced tickets, nice.
You would think.
After selecting the amount. ERROR: Can not get your tickets. I was like fuck they are already sold out because it's a popular play. But hey let's try again. I got one ticket but not the second one, okay strange lets try again, same ERROR again. WHAT the FUCK, no feedback what so ever. My girlfriend had then the idea that they maybe restricted the amount for reduced tickets to one (does not state this explicitly but hey lets give it a shot). Use second browser select one ticket. ERROR can not get you the amount of seats. Rage level near to a 1000 why did it work two minutes before but not anymore. Trying around for five more minutes finally got the second ticket.
Now the real fun begins.
Proceeding to checkout should not be that hard you would think, but you need to be registered for that. Okay so let's do that. The salutation is not required neither is the address for the tickets but you need to have a company name??!!!!! The fuck?? I am not self employed and neither are a most other people around here so why is this field mandatory? Beeing a little under stress I decided to found the "asdf" company with my girlfriend.
Now one would think checking out is easy. Not so fast.
After accepting the terms of service another ERROR, unable to accept your data. What data? I did not input anything new? Where does this come from? Ok never mind I am going to pay with credid card that must work!
ERROR: Internal paymentservice initialization failure! Sorry what? I thought maybe I was to long idle in this browser and they do not reserve the tickets for so long (which would be no surprise to me at this point). Let's try again. Nope same error.
Now my rage level was really over 9000 but we really wanted to go so I decided to call the customer SUPPORT. Or better to say I had a answering maching telling me for ten minutes how sorry they are that this takes so long, yeah you bet. Then and this is now really great: the support guy asks me: "What error do you see? Internal paymentservice initialization failure?" I was like, okay he knows this so they need to know how to handle it. FUCK NO. "Sorry I can't help you. This is our payment system maybe they (IT) are doing some maintenance I can't halp you. Call the theater directly good day." Sorry what just happened, you fuckers are the vendors for the tickets for nearly all big events around here and the theater explicitly states to call you for tickets but you can not help me? Like hell.
This process took 25 very frustrating minutes and I was really angry and wanted to quit, then I saw that there is also a paypal option which I had not tried. With very little hope i selected everything for the payment, registered with paypal and they told me I already had an account. So reactivated this five year old account payed with all the mobile passwords and tans to finally, after 30 fucking minutes, get a pdf file for a ticket. Repeated the last step for the second ticket and with some time left to get there we were off.2 -
Question!
I am 26, and recently diagnosed with autism. An incredibly late diagnosis due to my absolutely amazing ability to keep everything internal.. It has caused my countless headaches and heartaches over the years and its good to finally understand what it is thst makes me how I am...
I am also aware that IT goes hand in hand with autism due to our thought process being so 'logical' and our acceptance of failure is.... Er... Not the best. But we also have the stubborness/determination to keep going, learn what it is we did wrong and improve upon it.
So my question really is, are many of you on the spectrum also? If so, are there any coping strategies that you can share with me/everyone who reads this?
By coping I don't mean just dealing with it, but I mean in the workplace. I've never had a job formally in IT because I never did any qualifications in it. Rebuilt my first pc at age 7 and been hooked since.
I have always been a mechanic because again, logic reasons.
I'm currently in contact with an organisation here in Norway called 'Unicus' who are specialised in employing people on the spectrum, specifically in the IT sector... Have any of you heard of them? They seem promising to me
Thanks for reading guys and please feel free to delete this if this really isn't the place for it, I just feel that within this community there are more of us and I would like to open the door for communication16 -
Rather than singling out one person, I wanna present what I see as incompetent/stupid/ignorant:
- no will to learn
- failure to follow the very specific instructions & later asking for help when they FUBR sth & not even knowing what they did to fuck up in the first place
- asking how to solve stuff, then ignoring the suggestions & doing sth totally against recommendations
- failure to remember most basic stuff, especially if not writing it down to look at later when needed
- failure to check logs & 'google' stuff before asking why something isn't working the way they want it
- after two weeks, asking me how feature xy works, mind you they coded it, not me
- asking me why they did something in a specific way - WTF, am I a mind reader?! Who designed that crap?! Me or you?!!
- being passive/aggressive & snarky when told to do something or being asked why isn't it done already
- not testing their shit properly
- not making backups when upgrading (production) servers
- not checking the input value, no validation.. even after many many debacles on production with null ref exceptions
- failure to admit they fucked up
- not learning from (their) mistakes8 -
Because of hardware failure we had to move some vpns from one datacenter to another.
The team of highly untrained monkeys at my hosting provider were hired to do this. First they ran backups of all the systems. Then they started the moving process. A few hours later they were done. We got an email everything was back online.
So we restarted all our processes and no data was coming in from our Raspberry's around the country. So we start a little investigation. What did these buffons do, they changed our rsa keys.
So we kindly ask them to put the old keys back so we do not have to fix 200 changed key warnings on systems that are not remotely accesible.
Apperently something that can't be done because their back up process is automated and always makes new keys.
Holy fucking fuck, whats the point in having a backup its not an exact copy. Is this fucking normal?
Now I will be spending the next few weeks literally standing in cow shit reconnecting Raspberry's.
Thanks a fucking lot. Not!4 -
Worst hack/attack I had to deal with?
Worst, or funniest. A partnership with a Canadian company got turned upside down and our company decided to 'part ways' by simply not returning his phone calls/emails, etc. A big 'jerk move' IMO, but all I was responsible for was a web portal into our system (submitting orders, inventory, etc).
After the separation, I removed the login permissions, but the ex-partner system was set up to 'ping' our site for various updates and we were logging the failed login attempts, maybe 5 a day or so. Our network admin got tired of seeing that error in his logs and reached out to the VP (responsible for the 'break up') and requested he tell the partner their system is still trying to login and stop it. Couple of days later, we were getting random 300, 500, 1000 failed login attempts (causing automated emails to notify that there was a problem). The partner knew that we were likely getting alerted, and kept up the barage. When alerts get high enough, they are sent to the IT-VP, which gets a whole bunch of people involved.
VP-Marketing: "Why are you allowing them into our system?! Cut them off, NOW!"
Me: "I'm not letting them in, I'm stopping them, hence the login error."
VP-Marketing: "That jackass said he will keep trying to get into our system unless we pay him $10,000. Just turn those machines off!"
VP-IT : "We can't. They serve our other international partners."
<slams hand on table>
VP-Marketing: "I don't fucking believe this! How the fuck did you let this happen!?"
VP-IT: "Yes, you shouldn't have allowed the partner into our system to begin with. What are you going to do to fix this situation?"
Me: "Um, we've been testing for months already went live some time ago. I didn't know you defaulted on the contract until last week. 'Jake' is likely running a script. He'll get bored of doing that and in a couple of weeks, he'll stop. I say lets ignore him. This really a network problem, not a coding problem."
IT-MGR: "Now..now...lets not make excuses and point fingers. It's time to fix your code."
IT-VP: "I agree. We're not going to let anyone blackmail us. Make it happen."
So I figure out the partner's IP address, and hard-code the value in my service so it doesn't log the login failure (if IP = '10.50.etc and so on' major hack job). That worked for a couple of days, then (I suspect) the ISP re-assigned a new IP and the errors started up again.
After a few angry emails from the 'powers-that-be', our network admin stops by my desk.
D: "Dude, I'm sorry, I've been so busy. I just heard and I wished they had told me what was going on. I'm going to block his entire domain and send a request to the ISP to shut him down. This was my problem to fix, you should have never been involved."
After 'D' worked his mojo, the errors stopped.
Month later, 'D' gave me an update. He was still logging the traffic from the partner's system (the ISP wanted extensive logs to prove the customer was abusing their service) and like magic one day, it all stopped. ~2 weeks after the 'break up'.8 -
I was working for a startup that needed to update 300 machines that had just come from the factory. We had to open all 300 boxes and update them one at a time. I made a simple script that would run a folder full of shell scripts then keep track of what it ran so it would not run the same script twice. It made it so we could just plug the machines into the internet, they would query some server, download my program, and run it. It saved me from having to ssh into every machine and run commands. Well the head programmer guy saw what I did and implemented it as the main program that would update the entire machine. I didn't program anything into it to verify updates, the shell scripts did not return any indication of success or failure, and I made it in less than 3 hours. It was supposed to be a temporary program to be used for those 300 machines only, but ended up sticking around for 2 years.1
-
Fuck you, you motherfucking fuck. How DARE you have the capacity to sell fake fucking chips on Amazon and make me fucking waste hours of my god damn fucking nights trying to program your shitty, lazy-ass implementation of an EEPROM.
I followed the datasheet specs down to the fucking microsecond just to find that nothing would write to the chip, and then spent hours of my goddamn life trying to figure out what I was doing wrong, making myself feel like a fucking failure for not being able to write 1s and 0s to a few pins. Fuck you, fuck you with a giant horse cock with needles on the tip12 -
rant, but not an IT kind... okay, maybe not even a rant, more like depressive rambling:
in 3 days, I'll turn 29.
i'm living with my mom, in the apartment where I was born, in the room i've been living since I was born (with the exception of 2 attempts to move out which together lasted 9 months).
my theoretical monthly income should/could be around 4000€, based on my skills and experience.
but I'm a (manic)-depressive, chronically lonely idiot loser (and the manic phases come more and more rarely in recent years), so
my practical average monthly income fluctuates from 0 to about 200.
i am unable to keep a job for more than 4 months, so after being fired from about 20 or so of them since I was 18, it takes immense amounts of mental and emotional energy to even start looking for one now... so I usually don't.
i've been about 12000€ in debt for the past 8 or so years, half of which is just debt collector fees.
it's kinda funny, for years, i've been unable to solve a debt which theoretically amounts to 3 months of my theoretical achievable salary.
my father, who just left without a word of explanation when I was 18, has decided this is not viable anymore, so I'm supposed to move out by 10th of next month, "either to some cheap rooming house, or under the bridge, I don't care", as he put it.
I can't remember how it feels to exist a single hour without feeling existential dread and dreading each next day, not knowing what to do or if i'll even be able to try and do something, because this feeling is so strong that it often blocks me from being able to do anything. i just shiver most of the time that i'm awake, feeling like you feel few minutes before puking and crying at the same time. and that feeling is my "how are you?", "you know... normal".
i can't remember what it feels to feel any other way and can't even imagine it, and can't imagine that I'll ever achieve any less shit feeling.
literally all of my social contact consists of going out once to twice a month with the only 2 friends and 2 aquaintances I have who have the time and will to spend it with me.
oh, and hiding in my room, avoiding talking to my mom, because each time we talk she just reminds me what a piece of shit failure I am, and tells me how it's not that hard to change it, I just have to stop being lazy and start working for it.
she's... kind and caring about it, which somehow maybe makes it even worse.
i have about 10 almost complete game designs, each of them at least 50% more original and interesting (at least to me) than the things that are coming out for the past 10 years, being lauded as "the most original and unique".
I have been trying to make them, ANY of them, since I was 18, but I always lose all the drive and resolve and energy in like 4 months, because it's like trying to build a city on my own on a deserted island. too big for one person, but there was never anyone to help me. closest I ever got was one of my friends telling me "i've been thinking many times that i'd love to work on some project with you, if I had the time".
and second time, when I actually found an artist I was going to pay, and he was awesome, and after two weeks of me telling him how awesome what he does is and how it fits the project and my ideas perfectly, he backed out saying "i'm afraid I can't do the quality you require from me".
never ever in my life did I get actual help with something I actually wanted or tried to do.
i have no idea how it feels to have someone working with me on something I actually consider interesting and meaningful, on any of the things which I wanted to make, which made me learn programming.
I've learned graphics and animation and everything going into game making pipeline on my own because I realized nobody will ever help me, so I'll have to do all of it on my own.
I've tried to make a kickstarter once, but I started crying hysterically in the middle of writing it, because I felt like a begging piece of failure shit, even more than usual, so I deleted it.
most of people treat me like shit failure unworthy and undeserving of living, precisely as I myself know I deserve to be treated, because that's what I am, but when I ask for permission to kill myself, since I see no other solution to stop being a burden, they get angry at me that I'm just emotionally blackmailing them. when I afterwards ask them "so help me in any way to do any of the projects i want/need to do", they respond they've got no time for that.
when I talk about all of this, I get told to stop whining.
happy 29th birthday, me, a piece of shit who should've never survived this long, who should've never been born in the first place.
yay.
also, I know this is not the kind of crap that's supposed to be posted here, but i've got nowhere else. sorry.47 -
I've found and fixed any kind of "bad bug" I can think of over my career from allowing negative financial transfers to weird platform specific behaviour, here are a few of the more interesting ones that come to mind...
#1 - Most expensive lesson learned
Almost 10 years ago (while learning to code) I wrote a loyalty card system that ended up going national. Fast forward 2 years and by some miracle the system still worked and had services running on 500+ POS servers in large retail stores uploading thousands of transactions each second - due to this increased traffic to stay ahead of any trouble we decided to add a loadbalancer to our backend.
This was simply a matter of re-assigning the IP and would cause 10-15 minutes of downtime (for the first time ever), we made the switch and everything seemed perfect. Too perfect...
After 10 minutes every phone in the office started going beserk - calls where coming in about store servers irreparably crashing all over the country taking all the tills offline and forcing them to close doors midday. It was bad and we couldn't conceive how it could possibly be us or our software to blame.
Turns out we made the local service write any web service errors to a log file upon failure for debugging purposes before retrying - a perfectly sensible thing to do if I hadn't forgotten to check the size of or clear the log file. In about 15 minutes of downtime each stores error log proceeded to grow and consume every available byte of HD space before crashing windows.
#2 - Hardest to find
This was a true "Nessie" bug.. We had a single codebase powering a few hundred sites. Every now and then at some point the web server would spontaneously die and vommit a bunch of sql statements and sensitive data back to the user causing huge concern but I could never remotely replicate the behaviour - until 4 years later it happened to one of our support staff and I could pull out their network & session info.
Turns out years back when the server was first setup each domain was added as an individual "Site" on IIS but shared the same root directory and hence the same session path. It would have remained unnoticed if we had not grown but as our traffic increased ever so often 2 users of different sites would end up sharing a session id causing the server to promptly implode on itself.
#3 - Most elegant fix
Same bastard IIS server as #2. Codebase was the most unsecure unstable travesty I've ever worked with - sql injection vuns in EVERY URL, sql statements stored in COOKIES... this thing was irreparably fucked up but had to stay online until it could be replaced. Basically every other day it got hit by bots ended up sending bluepill spam or mining shitcoin and I would simply delete the instance and recreate it in a semi un-compromised state which was an acceptable solution for the business for uptime... until we we're DDOS'ed for 5 days straight.
My hands were tied and there was no way to mitigate it except for stopping individual sites as they came under attack and starting them after it subsided... (for some reason they seemed to be targeting by domain instead of ip). After 3 days of doing this manually I was given the go ahead to use any resources necessary to make it stop and especially since it was IIS6 I had no fucking clue where to start.
So I stuck to what I knew and deployed a $5 vm running an Nginx reverse proxy with heavy caching and rate limiting linked to a custom fail2ban plugin in in front of the insecure server. The attacks died instantly, the server sped up 10x and was never compromised by bots again (presumably since they got back a linux user agent). To this day I marvel at this miracle $5 fix.1 -
I have Java 8 installed on both Windows10 and Ubuntu16
My (basic) app compiles fine in windows with javac, and when put into a jar works perfectly. But when cloned to my Ubuntu, javac fails to compile, and the jar fails to run.33 -
At lunch, someone asked a question about our Sunday Hack-a-thon. Our PO said it was a "Smack-a-thon." I told her, "No, don't make stupid names. Let's call things what they are. It's Management Failure Sunday." Manager was sitting across the table when I said it.4
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Biggest challenge I overcame as dev? One of many.
Avoiding a life sentence when the 'powers that be' targeted one of my libraries for the root cause of system performance issues and I didn't correct that accusation with a flame thrower.
What the accusation? What I named the library. Yep. The *name* was causing every single problem in the system.
Panorama (very, very expensive APM system at the time) identified my library in it's analysis, the calls to/from SQLServer was the bottleneck
We had one of Panorama's engineers on-site and he asked what (not the actual name) MyLibrary was and (I'll preface I did not know or involved in any of the so-called 'research') a crack team of developers+managers researched the system thoroughly and found MyLibrary was used in just about every project. I wrote the .Net 1.1 MyLibrary as a mini-ORM to simplify the execution of database code (stored procs, etc) and gracefully handle+log database exceptions (auto-logged details such as the target db, stored procedure name, parameter values, etc, everything you'd need to troubleshoot database errors). This was before Dapper and the other fancy tools used by kids these days.
By the time the news got to me, there was a team cobbled together who's only focus was to remove any/every trace of MyLibrary from the code base. Using Waterfall, they calculated it would take at least a year to remove+replace MyLibrary with the equivalent ADO.Net plumbing.
In a department wide meeting:
DeptMgr: "This day forward, no one is to use MyLibrary to access the database! It's slow, unprofessionally named, and the root cause of all the database issues."
Me: "What about MyLibrary is slow? It's excecuting standard the ADO.Net code. Only extra bit of code is the exception handling to capture the details when the exception is logged."
DeptMgr: "We've spent the last 6 weeks with the Panorama engineer and he's identified MyLibrary as the cause. Company has spent over $100,000 on this software and we have to make fact based decisions. Look at this slide ... "
<DeptMgr shows a histogram of the stacktrace, showing MyLibrary as the slowest>
Me: "You do realize that the execution time is the database call itself, not the code. In that example, the invoice call, it's the stored procedure that taking 5 seconds, not MyLibrary."
<at this point, DeptMgr is getting red-face mad>
AreaMgr: "Yes...yes...but if we stopped using MyLibrary, removing the unnecessary layers, will make the code run faster."
<typical headknodd-ers knod their heads in agreement>
Dev01: "The loading of MyLibrary takes CPU cycles away from code that supports our customers. Every CPU cycle counts."
<headknod-ding continues>
Me: "I'm really confused. Maybe I'm looking at the data wrong. On the slide where you highlighted all the bottlenecks, the histogram shows the latency is the database, I mean...it's right there, in red. Am I looking at it wrong?"
<this was meeting with 20+ other devs, mgrs, a VP, the Panorama engineer>
DeptMgr: "Yes you are! I know MyLibrary is your baby. You need to check your ego at the door and face the facts. Your MyLibrary is a failed experiment and needs to be exterminated from this system!"
Fast forward 9 months, maybe 50% of the projects updated, come across the documentation left from the Panorama. Even after the removal of MyLibrary, there was zero increases in performance. The engineer recommended DBAs start optimizing their indexes and other N+1 problems discovered. I decide to ask the developer who lead the re-write.
Me: "I see that removing MyLibrary did nothing to improve performance."
Dev: "Yes, DeptMgr was pissed. He was ready to throw the Panorama engineer out a window when he said the problems were in the database all along. Didn't you say that?"
Me: "Um, so is this re-write project dead?"
Dev: "No. Removing MyLibrary introduced all kinds of bugs. All the boilerplate ADO.Net code caused a lot of unhandled exceptions, then we had to go back and write exception handling code."
Me: "What a failure. What dipshit would think writing more code leads to less bugs?"
Dev: "I know, I know. We're so far behind schedule. We had to come up with something. I ended up writing a library to make replacing MyLibrary easier. I called it KnightRider. Like the TV show. Everyone is excited to speed up their code with KnightRider. Same method names, same exception handling. All we have to do is replace MyLibrary with KnightRider and we're done."
Me: "Won't the bottlenecks then point to KnightRider?"
Dev: "Meh, not my problem. Panorama meets primarily with the DBAs and the networking team now. I doubt we ever use Panorama to look at our C# code."
Needless to say, I was (still) pissed that they had used MyLibrary as dirty word and a scapegoat for months when they *knew* where the problems were. Pissed enough for a flamethrower? Maybe.6 -
The minister of human resources is a fucking idiot. Nobody including ministry employees knows exactly what will the rules be 6 hours ahead, but they take effect immediately and failure to abide is punishable. Yesterday the HR minister said that if public schools close down, everyone will have to repeat this year. In response to this and a few other questionable decisions on behalf of schools across the country, today the government banned anyone from closing down public schools including headmasters, public health services, the police and the ministry of human resources.2
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I need advice from my coding elders:
A bit of background:
So I'm a highschooler and I have made a program for my school called Passport. It's being implemented as we speak.
Take a look:
https://github.com/poster983/...
It is basically a program that helps to manage and distribute digital Library passes. (We used to go through stacks of paper passes).
It was sorta my first major project, so it is probably filled with bugs and other security vulnerabilities. Just FYI.
_______
So a guy approached me tonight and was acting very interested in what I did. (it's literally a fancy database). He wanted my to unopen-source it and sell it to a company. (Probably his or a friend of him). I politely declined because I feel this program is
1. Not up to my standards; so if I was to sell it, I would rewrite it is something more modern like node, or Python.
2. I love open source.
3. A way for my to give back to my school and maybe help other schools.
After hearing that, he started calling opensourse a failure, and he said that I will one day be wise and write code for money (which I know I will, just I want to sell GOOD code).
My question is, how do I deal with people who want my to dich the opensourse model in the future?7 -
I just got offered my first position for a Junior developer gig. they are offering me more money than I expected and otherwise I'm super amped to take it.
what makes me nervous is its my first programming position. I have an IT/Programming bachelor's but not a pure Computer Science degree.
I was asked no technical questions and I don't know if it was clear that I'm very much looking for entry-level work. I guess the fear of failure is creeping up on me.9 -
I finally fucking made it!
Or well, I had a thorough kick in my behind and things kinda fell into place in the end :-D
I dropped out of my non-tech education way too late and almost a decade ago. While I was busy nagging myself about shit, a friend of mine got me an interview for a tech support position and I nailed it, I've been messing with computers since '95 so it comes easy.
For a while I just went with it, started feeling better about myself, moved up from part time to semi to full time, started getting responsibilities. During my time I have had responsibility for every piece of hardware or software we had to deal with. I brushed up documentation, streamlined processes, handled big projects and then passed it on to 'juniors' - people pass through support departments fast I guess.
Anyway, I picked up rexx, PowerShell and brushed up on bash and windows shell scripting so when it felt like there wasn't much left I wanted to optimize that I could easily do with scripting I asked my boss for a programming course and free hands to use it to optimize workflows.
So after talking to programmer friends, you guys and doing some research I settled on C# for it's broad application spectrum and ease of entry.
Some years have passed since. A colleague and I built an application to act as portal for optimizations and went on to automate AD management, varius ssh/ftp jobs and backend jobs with high manual failure rate, hell, towards the end I turned in a hobby project that earned myself in 10 times in saved hours across the organization. I felt pretty good about my skills and decided I'd start looking for something with some more challenge.
A year passed with not much action, in part because I got comfy and didn't send out many applications. Then budget cuts happened half a year ago and our Branch's IT got cut bad - myself included.
I got an outplacement thing with some consultant firm as part of the goodbye package and that was just hold - got control of my CV, hit LinkedIn and got absolutely swarmed by recruiters and companies looking for developers!
So here I am today, working on an AspX webapp with C# backend, living the hell of a codebase left behind by someone with no wish to document or follow any kind of coding standards and you know what? I absolutely fucking love it!
So if you're out there and in doubt, do some competence mapping, find a nice CV template, update your LinkedIn - lots of sources for that available and go search, the truth is out there! -
5 stages of failing WIFI connectivity on Linux
This morning I woke up my laptop to start my work day. I have 2 very important meetings today, so I better get all prepared.
"Wifi connection failed"
Syslog says:
- wpa_supplicant: wlp9s0: SME: Trying to authenticate with <MAC>
- kernel: wlp9s0: authenticate with <MAC>
- kernel: wl9s0: send auth to <MAC> (try 1/3)
- kernel: wl9s0: send auth to <MAC> (try 2/3)
- kernel: iwlwifi: Not associated and the session protection is over already...
- kernel: wl9s0: send auth to <MAC> (try 3/3)
- kernel: wl9s0: authentication with <MAC> timed out
#### DENIAL #####
No biggie, let's try another AP (I have 3). All 3 failed to connect. Fine, let's try my phone's hotspot! FAILED!!!!!
w00t.... okay, let's restart the router... but failing to connect to a phone hotspot is already a worrying sign.
Wifi connection failed
wtf.. disable and re-enable wifi
Wifi connection failed
#### ANGER #####
the fuuuuuuck. Maybe my router is dead. But my phone connects to it, no fuss. My personal lappy also connects there easily.
wtf... Does that mean I'm about to lose my uptime?? Come one!! It's Linux - there MUST be something I could do! I don't see processes hanging in D state so the radio must be fine - it's gotta be a software issue!
ChatGPT – type all the log entries manually, via phone (that took a while...). Nothing useful there: update firmware, restart NetworkManager, etc.
#### BARGAINING #####
Alright... How about a USB dongle? Plug it in and wifi connects immediately! Yayyy!!! But that's only b/g/n and I'd very much like to have ac. It works well as a limping backup, but not something I'd use for the meetings.
rfkill block/unblock all the radios. No change. USB dongle connects right away but the PCIe adapter keeps throwing notifications at me with failure messages. It's annoying, to say the least.
So I've already tried
- restarting the router(s)
- disabling/reenabling the radios
- multiple APs
- suspending/waking again several times
- praying
#### DEPRESSION #####
The only thing I haven't tried yet is the most cruel one - restarting the laptop. But that's unfair... It's LINUX! How could it disappoint me. I have so many tmux sessions open, so many unsaved leafpad notes, terminal histories with oh so comfy ^r and ! retriggers all ready and waiting to be executed...
#### ACCEPTANCE #####
But I can't miss the meeting. So I slowly start closing off apps, starting with the least important ones, trying to preserve as much history and recent commands as I can. I'm gonna lose my uptime, that's the inevitable obvious truth... Linux has failed me. Or maybe it's a hardware issue... I can't be sure until I restart.
I must reboot.
#### A NEW HOPE #####
Hold on.. What if... What if before restarting I try to reload the Intel wifi kernel module? Just for the giggles. I've got nothing to lose anyway...
rmmod iwlmvm
rmmod iwlwifi
modprobe iwlwifi
modprobe iwlmvm
*WiFi Connected*
YESSSS!!!!!!!!! My uptime is saved!
403 days and counting! YEAH BABY!!!
Linux is the best!8 -
*The Fearless Leader*
I get a call to check up on a robot that has been exceeding weight limits at certain points of its movement (Crashing). As I get to the pendant (robo-game controller thingy I like to call it) and look over the alerts and warnings I notice some oil around the main power box of the Robot.... Nothing around this has oil.. so I start looking around and it turns out that the issue wasn’t a crash at all! It was an oily shorted out wire that kept sparking mad heavy when that servo was called on.. causing a large servo failure that required a full restart of the power box. I called our fearless leader and showed him only to find out that there was a motor leaking oil from the electrical end... My fearless leader runs both the Maintenance and Robotics department. When the motor was eventually fixed we overheard the technicians say that our fearless leader knew about this a week ago and decided to leave it that way.... with oil... coming out of an electrical cable..... *sigh* well Anyway after all the wires were fixed and motors changed. He comes up to me and says that he can’t believe that I didn’t call maintenance and fill a report on negligence of technicians for failing preventative maintenance....
I lost my cool a little, firstly that’s not my job, I’m literally one of the lowest ranking here. I called my next in command to figure out what I should do. Secondly the technicians told me that you told them to leave it like that! So if this place caught on fire this would have been on you!
Later I found out that he was trying to fire a technician and wanted me to do the dirty work.. I’m not going to be the reason another man loses the means for him to feed his family. The technician is a pretty cool and fair guy too!
Our fearless leader was a forklift driver and has no experience in robotics or maintenance... I don’t know how this happens or even why but all I know is this man is running both departments to the ground and management loves him.....1 -
Who the fuck uses http code 200 for a failure. Seriously have you ever heard something about a need to parse the shit you're returning...
Now I don't know whether it's me who's wrong, but man there are more than 80 different codes defined so there really should be something for you, don't you think?
And don't give me shit like "well the request worked so we return 200 it's only that the request wasn't correct". What for a fucking peace of something are you... Those codes are for that exact reason.
Anyways I'm going to parse the shit with string compare and afterwards kill myself out of shame. Whish me luck...
4 -
I'm going on vacation next week, and all I need to do before then is finish up my three tickets. Two of them are done save a code review comment that amounts to combining two migrations -- 30 seconds of work. The other amounts to some research, then including some new images and passing it off to QA.
I finish the migrations, and run the fast migration script -- should take 10 minutes. I come back half an hour later, and it's sitting there, frozen. Whatever; I'll kill it and start it again. Failure: database doesn't exist. whatever, `mysql` `create database misery;` rerun. Frozen. FINE. I'll do the proper, longer script. Recreate the db, run the script.... STILL GODDAMN FREEZING.
WHATEVER.
Research time.
I switch branches, follow the code, and look for any reference to the images, asset directory, anything. There are none. I analyze the data we're sending to the third party (Apple); no references there either, yet they appear on-device. I scour the code for references for hours; none except for one ref in google-specific code. I grep every file in the entire codebase for any reference (another half hour) and find only that one ref. I give up. It works, somehow, and the how doesn't matter. I can just replace the images and all should be well. If it isn't, it will be super obvious during QA.
So... I'll just bug product for the new images, add them, and push. No need to run specs if all that's changed is some assets. I ask the lead product goon, and .... Slack shits the bed. The outage lasts for two hours and change.
Meanwhile, I'm still trying to run db migrations. shit keeps hanging.
Slack eventually comes back, and ... Mr. Product is long gone. fine, it's late, and I can't blame him for leaving for the night. I'll just do it tomorrow.
I make a drink. and another.
hard horchata is amazing. Sheelin white chocolate is amazing. Rum and Kahlua and milk is kind of amazing too. I'm on an alcoholic milk kick; sue me.
I randomly decide to switch branches and start the migration script again, because why not? I'm not doing anything else anyway. and while I'm at it, I randomly Slack again.
Hey, Product dude messaged me. He's totally confused as to what i want, and says "All I created was {exact thing i fucking asked for}". sfjaskfj. He asks for the current images so he can "noodle" on it and ofc realize that they're the same fucking things, and that all he needs to provide is the new "hero" banner. Just like I asked him for. whatever. I comply and send him the archive. he's offline for the night, and won't have the images "compiled" until tomorrow anyway. Back to drinking.
But before then, what about that migration I started? I check on it. it's fucking frozen. Because of course it fucking is.
I HAD FIFTEEN MINUTES OF FUCKING WORK TODAY, AND I WOULD BE DONE FOR NEARLY THREE FUCKING WEEKS.
UGH!6 -
Rant!
Been working on 'MVP' features of a new product for the past 14 months. Customer has no f**king clue on how to design for performance. An uncomfortable amount of faith was placed on the ORM (ORMs are not bad as long as you know what you are doing) and the magic that the current framework provides. (Again, magic is good so long as you understand what happens behind the smoke and mirrors - but f**k all that... coz hey, productivity, right?). Customer was so focussed on features that no one ever thought of giving any attention to subtler things like 'hey, my transaction is doing a gazillion joins across trizillion tables while making a million calls to the db - maybe I should put more f**king thought into my design.' We foresaw performance and concurrency issues and raised them way ahead of the release. How did the customer respond? By hiring a performance tester. Fair enough - but what did that translate into? Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Hiring a perf tester doesn't automagically fix issues. The perf tester did not have a stable environment, a stable build or anything that is required to do a test with meaningful results. As the release date approached, the customer launched a pilot and things started failing spectacularly with the system not able to support more than 15 concurrent users. WTF! (My 'I told you so' moment) Emails started flying in all directions and the hunt for the scapegoat was on (I'm a sucker for CYA so I was covered). People started pointing in all directions but no one bothered to take a step back and understand what was causing the issues. Numero uno reason for transaction failure was deadlocks. We were using a proprietary DB with kickass tooling. No one bothered to use the tooling to understand what was the resource in contention let alone how to fix the contention. Absolute panic - its like they just froze. Debugging shit and doing the same thing again and again just so that management knew they were upto something. Most of the indexes had a fragmentation of 99.8% - I shit you not. Anywho, we now have a 'war room' where the perf tester needs to script the entire project by tonight and come up with some numbers that will amount to nothing while we stay up and keep profiling the shit out of the application under load.
Lessons learnt - When you foresee a problem make a LOT of noise to get people to act upon it and not wait till it comes back and bites you in the ass. Better yet, try not to get into a team where people can't understand the implications of shitty design choices. War room my ass!3 -
Past two days one of the senior devs has been complaining to anyone who will listen about a UI assembly containing 'hard-coded' references to a third party component causing several builds to break. The developer who added the telerik component probably had no idea the reference is pointing to his personal directory instead of a relative path. Easy fix? Uh...yea...but he just ranted to our boss for about 10 minutes about he has no idea how to fix the problem and the TFS build failure holding up his other projects.
WTF!? You fracking know what the relative path is!...just fracking change it and move the frack on.
The drama this drama-queen keeps spewing out is driving me out of my mind.
3 -
Update on my Facebook and Booking.com interviews. I had them back to back today.
Even before I start, I accept and admit that I am a hypocrite. I hate Amazon yet order stuff from there. I hate Microsoft yet use their products. I hate Facebook yet went ahead to interview with them.
I fucking hate myself for compromising my ethics, values, and integrity. I had promised myself that even if I work for any major shit company, I'd never go with Facebook. Here I am after many years. Not an excuse, but I am doing it because I see it as an entry point into the UK. That's all.
Community's hate towards me is justified and I'd accept the discrimination from this community because this place is my digital home and you all are my family. Infact first thing I told mom was, dR boys are gonna disown me when they get to know about this.
Anyway, coming to the update part.
I had applied leave at work from last Friday. 4 days of leave earned me 10 days off (including weekends and 2 days of Diwali company holiday).
Last Thursday I got to know that Facebook has scheduled their interview today (Friday). I spent insane amount of time preparing. Approximately 8 hours everyday including weekend. I added nearly 40+ hours preparing for it in last 7 days, because I had to get in. Failure isn't an option now.
I sacrifice my family time, preparing for the interview.
I sacrifice Diwali break, sitting in front of the screen and studying.
I sacrifice my only vacation of 2021, doing mock interviews as late as 11.30 PM.
I sacrifice my free time and enjoyment, stressing over what could happen.
I was prepared like perfect for screening stage.
Interview 1: this guy comes and ask 'what is the best compliment you have got as a PM?' and 'Why do you want to quit the current company?'
He wasn't supposed to ask those as per Facebook's policy and interview stage.
Then he gave me a shit problem to solve and rejected my approach and wanted it his was. I tried to follow him and made sure I was able to convince with the reasoning but he kept pushing me back. He kept putting me down. Did not listen to me or what I had to convey or what was expected as an answer. He had certain output in his mind and wanted me to come up with it as an answer.
For the uninitiated: Facebook gives ton of preparation material and tells upfront the kind of questions they'll ask they just focus on few things. Moreover, in Product interviews, there isn't right or wrong answer.
Anyway, this guy started making funny expressions which put my morale down and I stood my ground with losing my cool. I managed to get all my answers right and the key points the look into a candidate. It went decent. Yet the interviewers attitude was something I did not like.
Interview 2: the lady was really kind and warm. Very accommodating and easy person to deal with. It went amazingly well.
I have two observations I want to share with you all.
1. I hate what Facebook does. Lizardberg is awful human being. But I absolutely liked HOW they are doing things, at least from an interview stand point. They even had mock sessions by their PMs and upfront told how to prepare and how to answer.
2. While it seems to be a 5 star experience, I found them to function mechanically. No small talk, no human connection (ironic to their mission), no conversational flow of the interview (again something that they kept saying a zillion times in all their material). They came, formally introduced themselves, and had a checklist kind of attitude, and left.
I now await for the feedback.
In the next hour, I had Booking.com first round.
Amazing people. Warm friendly experience. Treated me as a human. Heard me. Made me feel part of the conversation rather than someone just being judged.
It went 1000x better than Facebook.
I await the feedback from them as well.
I don't know what's gonna happen but one thing for sure, the kind of expectations Facebook set for their interviews, was nowhere close to the reality. It was awful.
180° was for Booking.com
Guess the saying stands true, expectations always lead to disappointment.
Finally I feel de-stressed and my Diwali vacation starts AFTER Diwali ended. Or rather just a regular weekend.
2021 has been terribly awful year for me. Hope this shitty year ends soon.37 -
We should not tolerate censorship.
Beyond all the u.s. hype over elections
(and the division in the west in general), the real story is all the censorship on both sides.
Reasonable voices are quickly banned, while violent voices and loud angry people are amplified.
I broke out of the left-right illusion when
I realized what this was all about. Why
so much fighting in the street was allowed, both
justified and unjustified. Why so much hate
and division and slander, and back and forth
was allowed to be spread.
It's problem, reaction, solution.
The old order of liberal democracy, represented
in the u.s. by the facade of the GOP and DNC,
doesn't know how to handle the free *distributed*
flow of information.
That free-flow of information has caused us to
transition to a *participatory* democracy, where
*networks* are the lever of power, rather than
top down institutions.
Consequently, the power in the *new era* is
to decide, not what the *narrative* is, but
who can even *participate*, in spreading,
ideating, and sharing their opinions on that
narrative, and more broadly, who is even allowed
to participate in society itself.
The u.s. and west wants the chinese model of
control in america. you are part of a network, a
collective, through services and software, and
you can be shut off from *society* itself at
the drop of a pin.
The only way they get that is by creating a crisis,
outright fighting in the streets. Thats why
people keep being released after committing serious
fucking crimes. It's why the DOJ and FBI are
intent on letting both sides people walk.
They want them at each others literal throat,
calling for each other's blood. All so they
can step back and then step in the middle when
the chorus for change cries out loud enough.
And the answer will be
1. regulated tech
2. an end to television media as we know it
3. the ability to shut someone off from any service on a dime
4. new hatespeech laws that will bite *all* sides in the ass.
5. the ability to shape the narrative of society by simply 'pruning' networks as they see fit, limiting the reach of individuals on all sides, who are problematic to
the collective direction.
I was so caught up in the illusion of us-vs-them I didn't
see it before now. This is a monstrous power grab.
And instead of focusing on a farce of election, where the party *organizations* involved are institutional facades for industrialists, we should be focusing on the real issue:
* Failure of law to do its job online, especially failures of slander and libel laws, failures of laws against conspiracy to commit crime or assault
* New laws that offer injunctive relief against censorship, now that tech really is the commons. Because whats worse than someone online whipping up a mob on either side, is
someone who is innocent being *silenced* for disagreeing with something someone in authority said, or for questioning a politician, party, or corporation.
* Very serious felony level laws against doxxing and harassment on all sides, with retroactive application of said laws because theres a lot of people on all sides who won't be satisfied with the outcome until people who are guilty are brought to justice.18 -
On my project the customer has re-signed into a contract several times when they have budget to continue work. The first time they got us to build the system was a huge success story because the team was assembled quickly and we did rapid development. Initialize repo to prod in 1.5 months. The customer asked for the same dev team. Strong dev team, a PM that doesn't take shit, and pure agile. Lets call her don't-take-shit PM.
When the customer re-signed the executive decided that she didn't like don't-take-shit PM. So the project manager gets replaced by play-by-the-rules PM who will comply with stupid requests and micromanagement. He isn't a bad PM but he tries to make everyone happy. The amount of management types executive installs on the project is massive, and development team is cut down in major ways. Customer and executive shit rolls down to the development team and we can't get anything done. The customer starts to lose faith because we can't get traction. They start demanding traditional waterfall/SDLC docs. Which causes more delay in the project.
So the executive decides that the PM can take a fall for it to save face for the company. She moves play-by-the-rules PM to another project. He starts handover to a new PM that has a history of being her pushover. The customer hadn't seen him yet so now we have push-over PM.
Play-by-the-rules PM is finally out of the project and instead of moving to a different account the company decides to "lay him off because there is no work". So basically they made him take the fall for the failure while promising reassignment, and instead let him go. This is so unfair..
Meeting with push-over PM yesterday and he shows us his plan. Identical to play-by-the-rules PM's plan that got him axed.We point that out and show him the docs that were made for it. His face clearly communicates "OH SHIT WHAT DID I SIGN UP FOR?"1 -
Different perspective.
So your friend wants you to make the next big Facebook or Google because they know you can code....lots of rants like that and it gets me as well when I'm fixing printers for family and friends. Thing is these people genuinely just want to do something cool and succeed so they can have a good life. They see what we can do and wish they had the same talent. They have an idea they think will be great, they don't know what we know, and they don't know that it could be the most amazing thing ever and still never take off.
They don't realize to be Facebook or Google you have to sell out your values, morals, and soul. They just think if we can code we should be millionaires. So on that philosophy after just over a year the devRant creators should be rolling in cash right? But pretty sure I saw they are still operating at a loss.
I'd love to be able to have the time to work with each of them, teach them, and guide them through that first failure and let down of realizing that coding doesn't buy a magic ticket to a new life.
// Like anyone ever really fixes a printer //3 -
I had a USB WiFi dongle installed and working great. Then someone pulled it out of my computer, without talking to me, so they could use it. I found another in the office...exact same model...plug it in. Drivers don't work. Can't update them. Reinstallation crashes. Try to restart computer, it crashes. Restart computer and now Outlook won't even open. No idea what to do now, but this is going on an hour and counting of no productivity.
WTF Windows? You can't even handle a WiFi dongle right?3 -
dev, ~boring
This is either a shower thought or a sober weed thought, not really sure which, but I've given some serious consideration to "team composition" and "working condition" as a facet of employment, particularly in regard to how they translate into hiring decisions and team composition.
I've put together a number of teams over the years, and in almost every case I've had to abide by an assemblage of pre-defined contexts that dictated the terms of the team working arrangement:
1. a team structure dictated to me
2. a working temporality scheme dictated to me
3. a geographic region in which I was allowed to hire
4. a headcount, position tuple I was required to abide by
I've come to regard these structures as weaknesses. It's a bit like the project management triangle in which you choose 1-2 from a list of inadequate options. Sometimes this is grounded in business reality, but more often than not it's because the people surrounding the decisions thrive on risk mitigation frameworks that become trickle down failure as they impose themselves on all aspects of the business regardless of compatibility.
At the moment, I'm in another startup that I have significantly more control over and again have found my partners discussing the imposition of structure and framework around how, where, why, who and what work people do before contact with any action. My mind is screaming at me to pull the cord, as much as I hate the expression. This stems from a single thought:
"Hierarchy and structure should arise from an understanding of a problem domain"
As engineers we develop processes based on logic; it's our job, it's what we do. Logic operates on data derived from from experiments, so in the absence of the real we perform thought experiments that attempt to reveal some fundamental fact we can use to make a determination.
In this instance we can ask ourselves the question, "what works?" The question can have a number contexts: people, effort required, time, pay, need, skills, regulation, schedule. These things in isolation all have a relative importance ( a weight ), and they can relatively expose limits of mutual exclusivity (pay > budget, skills < need, schedule < (people * time/effort)). The pre-imposed frameworks in that light are just generic attempts to abstract away those concerns based on pre-existing knowledge. There's a chance they're fine, and just generally misunderstood or misapplied; there's also a chance they're insufficient in the face of change.
Fictional entities like the "A Team," comprise a group of humans whose skills are mutually compatible, and achieve synergy by random chance. Since real life doesn't work on movie/comic book logic, it's easy to dismiss the seed of possibility there, that an organic structure can naturally evolve to function beyond its basic parts due to a natural compatibility that wasn't necessarily statistically quantifiable (par-entropic).
I'm definitely not proposing that, nor do I subscribe to the 10x ninja founders are ideal theory. Moreso, this line of reasoning leads me to the thought that team composition can be grown organically based on an acceptance of a few observed truths about shipping products:
1. demand is constant
2. skills can either be bought or developed
3. the requirement for skills grows linearly
4. hierarchy limits the potential for flexibility
5. a team's technically proficiency over time should lead to a non-linear relationship relationship between headcount and growth
Given that, I can devise a heuristic, organic framework for growing a team:
- Don't impose reporting structure before it has value (you don't have to flatten a hierarchy that doesn't exist)
- crush silos before they arise
- Identify needed skills based on objectives
- base salary projections on need, not available capital
- Hire to fill skills gap, be open to training since you have to pay for it either way
- Timelines should always account for skills gap and training efforts
- Assume churn will happen based on team dynamics
- Where someone is doesn't matter so long as it's legal. Time zones are only a problem if you make them one.
- Understand that the needs of a team are relative to a given project, so cookie cutter team composition and project management won't work in software
- Accept that failure is always a risk
- operate with the assumption that teams that are skilled, empowered and motivated are more likely to succeed.
- Culture fit is a per team thing, if the team hates each other they won't work well no matter how much time and money you throw at it
Last thing isn't derived from the train of thought, just things I feel are true:
- Training and headcount is an investment that grows linearly over time, but can have exponential value. Retain people, not services.
- "you build it, you run it" will result in happier customers, faster pivoting. Don't adopt an application maintenance strategy
/rant2 -
Was writing a functional test in AdonisJS that queries an API endpoint with data and my test stays red with a dainty `expected 500 to equal 200` assertion failure.
In frustration, I yelled "What must I fuchen do to get my 500 to become a 200". Then my dev friend, an absolute fuchen genius tells me, "Subtract 300." I hope the prat stays debugging his code for a week!!
8 -
I used to work with a teacher in my last uni year.
The job consisted on doing a kinda-like management system for a business. It all began kinda "right", we agreed upon a price for 6 months of my work (a very lowball price, but it was just right because I was learning stuff that we were going to be using).
Fast-forward first six months, all I do is code frontend, mockup screens and whatsoever because this "business" hadn't give us proper requirements (Yeah, I told him to ask for them, but nothing came through).
So I was like well, I'll keep working in this project because I really want to finish it. Sidenote: I was doing all the "hard work", he didn't know how to code, and he calls himself a teacher... wtf).
Months go by, and a year goes round, in between these months, he spoke to me, that he wanted me that we kept working together, that we could renegotiate the payment (I asked him to give me my payment once the job was done). I agreed, but my uni residence period was coming along and I got an oportunity to go abroad to another country.
So there I was, in the need of money to buy my passport, plane tickets and other stuff, so I asked him for the payment.
Needs to be noted, that the last 6 months work was me doing tutorials on how to fucking use Linux, how to use PostgreSQL, how to fucking use CSS! He told me he would pay me extra for it.
The day came, and I received my payment... the exact amount we talked a year ago, I was like "Seriously dude?", but well, I needed the money and I didn't have time to argue, so we talked a little bit about me helping him and I told him "As long as I have time, I'll help, but remember that I'm going abroad to work for a small startup, so maybe I'll be up to my head with work" he agreed, we nod and then I left.
First week abroad came in and I was doing a shit-ton of stuff, then his first message comes around "Hey, I need more tutorials! ASAP! Before 6PM"
What.The.Fuck. I told you, son of a bitch, that I wouldn't be able to do them until weekend.. and it was monday!
So I ignored it, weeks went throught and my "angry mood" was fading away so I said to myself "Well, it's time to pick up that stuff again", I open Slack and I find a week old message with a document attached, it was a "letter", I just skimmed by it and read some keywords "deceptioned... failed me.."
Sure dude? Was I the failure? Becase, as far as I remember, you were the fucktard that didn't know how to fucking install a VM!
A week went by, and then randomly a friend of mine talks to me through Facebook:
E: Hey, how are you?
M: I'm fine, what's up?
E: What did you do to TEACHER?
M: Nothing, <explains all situation>
E: Well, It seems weird, that's why I wanted to talk with you, I believe in you, because I know you well, but TEACHER it's thrashing shit about you with all his students on all of his classes
M: Seriously?
E: Yeah, he's saying that you are a failure, irresponsible, that you scammed him
That moment, I for sure, lost all moral responsibility with him and thought to myself "He can go fuck himself with my master branch on his ass"
So when I got back to my country, I had to go around in school, avoiding him, not because I was ashamed nor anything by the way, just because I knew that If i ever had the disgrace to meet him face to face, my fists would be deep into his nose before he could say "Hey".
Moral of the story:
If you overheard that a teacher has a bad rep, not by one, nor two, but more than +100 people, maybe it's true.
Good thing my friends and others know me well and I didn't have repercutions on my social status, I'm just the guy that "fucked up TEACHER because I had the right and way to do it"4 -
To quote Charles Bukowski:
"and when nobody wakes you up in the morning, and when nobody waits for you at night, and when you can do whatever you want. what do you call it, freedom or loneliness?"
I always have tendency to fall into feeling lonely and abandoned, but these days my life is tossing some of the wildest curve balls more than ever before.
The latest one yet just happened this Monday. My manager quit and there was no knowledge transfer, and it was not on the good terms with the company.
Now I'm the only member of my team, and I have to take care of some of the projects that I've never worked on.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not setup for failure, and there are no expectations for me to know how everything works, quiet the opposite. But working with our clients and debugging the projects that I literally setting up on the fly had been a rollercoaster.
Second time in this company I will be looking for a manager in my department, and teaching them how everything works. Fun times.. fun times never change..5 -
This Book....
Before doing any systems programming you should definitely read this book... most people think they know what they are doing but in fact they are completely clueless and the worst part is you don’t realize how clueless you are... you don’t know what you don’t know nor do you know how much you really don’t know.. a most people are part of this group, including myself lol.
Computers are much more than a bunch of CPUs, buses and peripherals. (Embedded folks realize this). But this goes beyond embedded this is a systems book, on architecture of computers in general.
Learning only java and the java/C# python and the others SDK/Api and spending your life with horse blinders for what’s going on below only sets you up for failure in the future, and when you that point it’s gonna be a shocker. Could be tomorrow could be 20 years from now, but most people with those horseblinders get to that point and have that “experience” no avoiding the inevitable lol.
I really enjoyed this book in their quantitative approach to teaching the subject. Especially understanding parallelism and multi core systems.
5 -
A few weeks ago, I was kept up until the wee hours of the morning trying to figure out how in the hell the Monty Hall problem works. After finally getting it (I'm slow, okay?), I decided to write a program to run simulations of it.
First incarnation of program took user input. User enters what door they choose (1, 2, or 3), then is told what door Monty opens, then given the decision of staying with the door they originally chose or switching, then informed how that worked out for them.
Second incarnation of program ran on a loop. At the start of each loop, a random door is picked for the user guess. Then the door Monty opens is calculated from the remaining doors (excludes user guess and prize door). Then user switches doors (choosing the door that was not their original door or the door Monty opened). At the end of each loop, if the door they switched to was the prize door, it would increment a win counter, else increment a loss counter. After running the loop 1000000000 times, it printed to console `You always switched doors, resulting in ${wins} wins and ${losses} losses`.
THEN I decided to write a variation to run a while loop on the outside of the loop to increase the number of total doors until the point where the decision to switch doors hurt more often than it helped. At this point, I decided to incorporate file I/O and write to a file rather than a console. And that was neat!
And then I decided it would be cool to go back to the three door variation, printing on each loop the original door, the door Monty opened, the door that was switched too, the result of the switch (win or lose) and what the prize door was.
But for the life of me, I couldn't seem to get the file to write properly. It would, like, always crash my terminal. I tried open + append, I tried append. I tried createWriteStream. Still just failure.
And then I changed it to an appendFileSync and happened to look at one of the files that I was writing to. "Huh, over a gig seems a lot."
"Well, how much are you writing each loop? Did you forget to keep in mind how many bytes that would be?"
TLDR: If you're going to write a program that's going to write data to a file on a loop, you might want to figure out how much it's going to end up writing .... before trying to run it. And running a loop 1000000000 times may be a little excessive.
*face palm*
2 -
I'm fucking frustrated.
Almost Every project, almost every task I did in the past 6 months has been a failure or partly done. Even the most trivial of tasks take me hours to complete, after immense googling and copypasting.
I know that I'm a junior with less than a year of dev experience but it feels I'm traversing through hell itself. I truly love to program, have tremendous passion and want to be a professional dev but it seems destiny itself wants me to keep doing what I do best but hate(Sysadmining).
When will this nightmare end? When will I be able to accomplish anything I need with code with so much ease, like my dev friends do? How many more courses, bootcamps should I fucking attend and how many more tutorials to watch? When will be able to work at nights without falling asleep? When will I have a fucking dev job and freelance projects instead of being a goddamn server-managing monkey?14 -
Have you ever been interrupted because a marketing workmate had a friend on the phone who needed advice on a WordPress hosting, and wanted your advice right now?
Because I have.
When we had a massive server failure and our production environment was down.
Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with people nowadays.6 -
Don't understand what the hype about Elementary OS was. Used for ca. half a year, do not see any benefit.
If this is supposed to provide "usability" on a Linux kernel, then I am sorry, but in this regard it is a tremendous failure.
All tasks take long, there are all sorts of bugs, today I needed a multi-monitor setup for a presentation "real quick", dear lord was that a shitshow.
Nah, this thing is not for me.14 -
Of course the shouting episodes all happened during the era I was doing WordPress dev.
So we were a team of consultants working on this elephant-traffic website. There were a couple of systems for managing content on a more modular level, the "best" being one dubbed MF, a spaghettified monstrosity that the 2 people who joined before me had developed.
We were about to launch that shit into production, so I was watching their AWS account, being the only dev who had operational experience (and not afraid to wipe out that macos piece of shit and dev on a real os).
Anyhow, we enable the thing, and the average number of queries per page load instantly jumps from ~30 (even vanilla WP is horrible) to 1000+. Instances are overloaded and the ASG group goes up from 4 to 22. That just moves the problem elsewhere as now the database server is overwhelmed.
Me: we have to enable database caching for this thing *NOW*
Shitty authors of the monstrosity (SAM): no, our code cannot be responsible for that, it's the platform that can't handle the transition.
Me: we literally flipped a single switch here and look at the jump in all these graphs.
SAM: nono, it's fine, just add more instances
Me: ARE YOU FUCKIN SERIOUS?
Me: - goes and enables database caching without any approvals to do so, explaining to mgmt. that failure to do so would impair business revenue due to huge loading times, so they have to live with some data staleness -
SAM: Noooo, we'll show you it's not our code.
SAM: - pushes a new release of the monstrosity that makes DB queries go above 2k / page load -
...
Tho on the bright side, from that point on I focused exclusively on performance, was building a nice fragment caching framework which made the site fly regardless of what shitty code was powering it, tuned the stack to no end and learned a ton of stuff in the process which allowed me to graduate from the tar pit of WP development.5 -
My first project, ever, was a very unproud thing that was developed...
A little detail - I was 12 back then.
So, a distant family member had a business of selling things that they brought to the country. They, of course, needed a website and my parents knew that I had some skills in development so suggested them my services.
Discussion started and well, what came out was this:
1. They need a site with items list.
2. It had no actual design plans, no actual requirements, just a list.
3. Oh. It had to work perfectly on IE4 or IE5 (can't remember).
So what was actually done, was a site full of divs, clearfixes and so buggy that opening in any other browser than IE - resulted in a total failure.
We have sat down and I, with all the respect told them that my skills are not sufficient to make all of the browsers work equally (I've been on HTML/CSS for more than 6 months back then. And all of it was after school). They calmed me down and said that it's ok, they can give me as much time as I need to figure things out. Yet, my English wasn't good back then so I couldn't... (I was 12, with 3 years of basic English as a non-native speaker).
We sat around the table, discussed what could be done and if I could investigate that and re-do when I'm fully ready. I agreed. The site was launched for IE only as it worked fine and others were just throwing an error to visit it with IE.
They were happy, people were using it and they didn't say that anything was bad. Of course, management was thru FTP and editing LIVE files because, well, no php, no control panels, nothing... I felt ashamed that the site wasn't what they wanted but they were ultra happy with it - first customers rolled in from there. They paid me around 60EUR at that time (it was ~12 years ago) and I've spent a month there. (minimum monthly wage here was around 90-120EUR at that time...
So, all in all, this project that I still think I failed - pushed me to the world of devs and... I've never regretted it. Of course, when I actually met with them after years - they have dropped the site as it was not needed anymore but they said that it was exactly what they needed and there was nothing wrong, even if it didn't work perfectly.2 -
Most recently... taking something previous devs had failed at and knocking it out of the park.
Best example was a statistical regression and graphing tool on ASP MVC.
The devs were doing a massive brute force recalculation on the server layer. It would take 24h then fail to save (Entity framework brute force).
We moved it to the database layer and got it down to a passable time.
The same devs were outputting charts to ie 9, chrome, firefox... same deal, half an hour on the initial request (parser churn in the browser)... then failure.
Again got it into a passable time by switching to web sockets and long polling then outputting 1000 or so points at a time to give the browser time to render.
Taking those two cock ups and making them a workable solution was awesome.
Since then, teaching. We have apprentices, newcomers, interns all jumping in and looking to get working. They're all different, what works to teach one person won't the next, each of them so far has caught on to what I was teaching. It's a proud moment to be able to impart knowledge and see someone pick it up, enthusiastically... it's also awesome to see someone excited about what you do. -
What the hell is wrong with me?
It was even less than maybe 2 months ago since I loved my job, had co-workers I happily called friends, wrote code I was proud of, and felt like I had a meaning and a place in the industry. I had plans for my future and everything was great.
But this entire week felt terrible. Everything was awful.
I despised every single word of those idiots I called friends.
Their craft - our craft - is a colossal and monumental failure; A sad joke, that insults more than it entertains.
I can't bring myself to program, not even to fuck around at home...
And I have no idea what to do now.10 -
MTP is complete garbage. I want mass storage back.
The media transfer protocol (MTP) occasionally discovers new creative ways of failure. Frequently, directory listings take minutes to load or fail to load at all, and it freezes up infinitely (until disconnected) when renaming an item, and I can not even do two things simultaneously.
While files are being moved, I can not browse pictures or watch videos from the smartphone.
Sometimes, files are listed with the date 1970-01-01 (Unix epoch) instead of their correct date. Sometimes, files do not appear at all, which makes it unsafe to move directories from the device.
MTP lacks random access. If I want to play a two-gigabyte 4K 2160p video and seek in the video, guess what: I need to copy it to my computer's local mass storage first because MTP lacks random access.
When transferring high numbers of files, MTP has to slooooowly enumerate (or "prepare" or "calculate the time of") them all, which might even take longer than mass storage would need for the entire process. This means MTP might start copying or moving the actual files when mass storage is already finished.
Today, the "preparing to move" process was especially slow: five minutes for around 150 files! How am I supposed to find out what caused this random malfunction?
MTP sometimes drives me insane. I want mass storage back, at least for the MicroSD memory card, which uses a widely supported file system.
Imagine a 2010 $100 Android phone is better at file transfer than a 2022 $1000 Android phone (or iPhone, for that matter).
3 -
Fuck I wish I knew what to do about low motivation!!! I have some ideas I think are really great, some that might be profitable, and fuck I just don’t do any of them. I spend more time panicking about what to do than anything else. But damn so much time wasted when I just needed a little guidance or a little planning or a little like less than $100 more money. That frustrates me to no end.
There’s so much bullshit to everything. This does follow up to my wk106 rant, where I’m trying to rationalize the tons of code that are behind the smallest features. How many thousands of builds go into a deploy. Just swallowing how much rite in software.
I feel like a failure at my job at times but what sucks is I’m just in the middle. Not the most experienced dev, not the least. I’ve got my feet wet in a number of things, but not a solid enough stack for a lot.
BUT SOMEHOW I GOTTA BE MOTIVATED TO LEARN. FFS I CAN DO BETTER BUT MY INSIDE IS BROKEN SOMETIMES AND I JUST WANK OFF FUCK GET IT TOGETHER.
Yea, I fight with myself a lot. I have a big ego and I’m a piece of shit at the same time. Idk. That is annoying too. If only I could get really motivated and focused on some of these projects I could do amazing things. I’ve never struggled with a subject I applied myself to. I just wasn’t motivated. I don’t know how to fix it and I wish I did. I also don’t know what the end game for me holds.
This whole complex really scares me for later life. I will have regrets because my mind builds impossible plans for good, but if I achieve any of it I WILL THINK damn I should have not dealt with this and done x. Like I could make world peace but be like damn coulda rebuilt cars or some stupid shit.
So I’ll conclude with that I’ve done a lot of jobs around the house, and yes working with drywall sucks. So sometimes I’ll think about that. But damn. That doesn’t last because I know I can do it well if I apply myself.
All this leads to getting overextended which is another huge motivation killer. I’m trying to learn self control and focus. But also I need small victories along the way. Very annoying.
Well at least I was motivated to finish this rant. I have a few weekly rants I wanted to participate in but couldn’t even find the motivation for that. There was a toxic person in my life then and I’m slowly getting back to normal but I know that even normal me struggles with motivation. Plus that toxic person was my friend and I’ve lost a lot of (long term) friends recently and that is a real drag. But they needed to go. But I wish they had just shut up sometimes then they wouldn’t have been so toxic. But I digress.
I know I have so many ideas I can’t do them all even if I am motivated and for some time is of the essence.
So look out for some collabs. And grab that motivation wherever you can find it.1 -
At work, all errors within the site are logged into our database with a subject and error column. SQL errors are logged in the subject field while the traceback is put in the error column. However, a lot of SQL errors are really large and exceed the max character width of the subject field, causing yet another SQL error, and the cycle repeats. This recursive error has been the bane of my existence, because 1) it times my local dev instance out and 2) the error doesn't end up getting logged because the server both freezes and the error can't be inserted in the database. You can't even begin to imagine how many hours I've wasted trying to find what line I changed cause total and utter failure with absolutely 0 error logging. Next thing on my todo list is to fix this fucking issue since the head dev refuses to get it done.2
-
After I received my laser eye surgery, I knew it would become painful after the effect of anesthesia would decrease so I got painkillers in advance.
It was nimesulide.
Even in 2008 ISDB raised a concern about the liver damage and asked for it to be withdrawn worldwide, but I didn't knew it.
So the terrible pain started and I took the pill. Just. One. Pill.
This all started in like fifteen minutes. Eye pain won't go away, but it didn't mattered anymore as I felt really terrible. I never experienced that kind of feeling before and I don't even know how to describe it. It felt like a terrible sensation inside my stomach mixed with an urge to vomit. "This is probably what a liver failure feels like. This is it, I'm going do die here", I remember thinking about as I collapsed.
This whole incident led to an investigation about why the doctors "forgot" to give me proper eye anesthesia drops. This got several doctors fired.
This all got me really interested in how different medications work. I started casually reading popular medical literature and when my depression came, I was prepared, as much as you can even get prepared to a mental disorder.
The thing that probably nearly killed me helped me not to lose my sanity later.4 -
My eyes hurt everytime our backend guy gives me a new REST API to implement in our app and always the formatting of the json is something like this. Like why can't you just fucking format it properly so I won't have to look at my code and feel disappointed for writing such ugly code. All because your lazy ass didn't care to understand the fundamentals of how json objects and arrays work !!! It's been a month since I've joined this company and I'm tired of explaining why we should use the status code for failure checking and not this stupid pass/fail status flag. I don't even remember how many times I've brought it up but everytime I get reasons like "Dude, you know what our server is never going to go down or fail so it doesn't even matter". And at that point I feel like I shouldn't even argue with him anymore.
3 -
I remember a certain prank that amuses me till today....
Just add some devices to monitoring and the notification queue of the build chain / ... ...and wait patiently.
I still cry tears remembering an manager screaming what the hell "the poop train clogged the drain" means and why this is a critical system failure.
(Notice: next time check the mailing aliases of mailing aliases)
Although I can only recommend this if you know your team well. In my case we had a whole lot of fun after I got my head chewed off. XD (got an earful, but in the end he laughed his ass off)1 -
So for those of you keeping track, I've become a bit of a data munger of late, something that is both interesting and somewhat frustrating.
I work with a variety of enterprise data sources. Those of you who have done enterprise work will know what I mean. Forget lovely Web APIs with proper authentication and JSON fed by well-known open source libraries. No, I've got the output from an AS/400 to deal with (For the youngsters amongst you, AS/400 is a 1980s IBM mainframe-ish operating system that oriiganlly ran on 48-bit computers). I've got EDIFACT to deal with (for the youngsters amongst you: EDIFACT is the 1980s precursor to XML. It's all cryptic codes, + delimited fields and ' delimited lines) and I've got legacy databases to massage into newer formats, all for what is laughably called my "data warehouse".
But of course, the one system that actually gives me serious problems is the most modern one. It's web-based, on internal servers. It's got all the late-naughties buzzowrds in web development, such as AJAX and JQuery. And it now has a "Web Service" interface at the request of the bosses, that I have to use.
The programmers of this system have based it on that very well-known database: Intersystems Caché. This is an Object Database, and doesn't have an SQL driver by default, so I'm basically required to use this "Web Service".
Let's put aside the poor security. I basically pass a hard-coded human readable string as password in a password field in the GET parameters. This is a step up from no security, to be fair, though not much.
It's the fact that the thing lies. All the files it spits out start with that fateful string: '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>' and it lies.
It's all UTF-8, which has made some of my parsers choke, when they're expecting latin-1.
But no, the real lie is the fact that IT IS NOT WELL-FORMED XML. Let alone Valid.
THERE IS NO ROOT ELEMENT!
So now, I have to waste my time writing a proxy for this "web service" that rewrites the XML encoding string on these files, and adds a root element, just so I can spit it at an XML parser. This means added infrastructure for my data munging, and more potential bugs introduced or points of failure.
Let's just say that the developers of this system don't really cope with people wanting to integrate with them. It's amazing that they manage to integrate with third parties at all...2 -
!dev
Sorry if this is a bad read, pretty new to devRant and writing in general.
I can't help but think and think of how much I fucked up my opportunities to completely change my life/financial status a couple of times. Damn.
A few years back (it was 2009, I think) I was playing Diablo II online, helped some random guy get through the hard levels. Normally, in such situation the lower lvl player allowed the higher level guy to grab the valuable boss loot; however this time the guy except sharing the loot with me asked me if I want his spare 2000 bitcoin. I asked if it's of any value, he said "not really".
I said I'd contact him later, when I figure out how this thing works and how to setup a wallet.
Guess what, I was too lazy and forgot about this thing completely. Then we lost contact.
In 2010, I made a comeback to bitcoin, but instead of buying it, I downloaded the bitcoin client, the blockchain (it was 800 mb in size, I remember) and have been contributing by running it on my PC for like a year.
Finally decided to get it ~3 years ago. Bought 2.5 BTC for 400$.
Was holding it, until I fell for the "free OmniseGO" scam and somebody stole them off me.
All of these can't get out of my head.
I visit coinmarketcap literally every hour to see how much I could have now. My girlfriend, friends, family, all fail to cheer me up. I still made a pretty good deal buying 5.5 ETH for 45$ and thats like 2500$ soon, its nice but this much I can make by coding
Shit, what do I do to stop being stressed except for seeing a psychologist.
May my failure make you smile today4 -
A little background on project fubar:
Project fubar was started a couple of years ago, by an entirely different set of devs, against an entirely different set of requirements which were never made transparent to this day, on a new platform and framework.
That means it had APIs either outdated or deprecated, front-end logic that did things it wasn't supposed to be doing and lots of scope creep and technical debt.
I had to support and fix fubar for the last few months to prime it for UAT. It was the equivalent of plugging leaks which created more leaks.
Finally, I couldn't take it and asked for a week off. I timed it so it would be right after what would have been the final UAT deployment and I'd be back after they completed their test rounds, so I could fix any new or returning defects.
Today I just found out that fubar got put on hold, that UAT was a failure and all fubar-related work had to stop. I have some mixed feelings on this: I worked hard to get fubar working as business wanted, and I was proud of that. But I also didn't like that fubar was constantly changing in scope and function.
I wonder if anyone else has ever felt the same thing?2 -
I really really hope that no one post this,a friend texted it to me and I wanted to share it because made my day.
Idk where it comes, so feel free if know where this came from to post it:
//FUN PART HERE
# Do not refactor, it is a bad practice. YOLO
# Not understanding why or how something works is always good. YOLO
# Do not ever test your code yourself, just ask. YOLO
# No one is going to read your code, at any point don’t comment. YOLO
# Why do it the easy way when you can reinvent the wheel? Future-proofing is for pussies. YOLO
# Do not read the documentation. YOLO
# Do not waste time with gists. YOLO
# Do not write specs. YOLO also matches to YDD (YOLO DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT)
# Do not use naming conventions. YOLO
# Paying for online tutorials is always better than just searching and reading. YOLO
# You always use production as an environment. YOLO
# Don’t describe what you’re trying to do, just ask random questions on how to do it. YOLO
# Don’t indent. YOLO
# Version control systems are for wussies. YOLO
# Developing on a system similar to the deployment system is for wussies! YOLO
# I don’t always test my code, but when I do, I do it in production. YOLO
# Real men deploy with ftp. YOLO
So YOLO Driven Development isn’t your style? Okay, here are a few more hilarious IT methodologies to get on board with.
*The Pigeon Methodology*
Boss flies in, shits all over everything, then flies away.
*ADD (Asshole Driven Development)*
An old favourite, which outlines any team where the biggest jerk makes all the big decisions. Wisdom, process and logic are not the factory default.
*NDAD (No Developers Allowed in Decisions)*
Methodology Developers of all kinds are strictly forbidden when it comes to decisions regarding entire projects, from back end design to deadlines, because middle and top management know exactly what they want, how it should be done, and how long it will take.
*FDD (Fear Driven Development)*
The analysis paralysis that can slow an entire project down, with developments afraid to make mistakes, break the build, or cause bugs. The source of a developer’s anxiety could be attributed to a failure in sharing information, or by implicating that team members are replaceable.
*CYAE (Cover Your Ass Engineering)*
As Scott Berkun so eloquently put it, the driving force behind most individual efforts is making sure that when the shit hits the fan, you are not to blame.2 -
The IT at my current work designed infra as such :
One repo for ALL the configs for every project and one config file per project that defines the version of the language (ex node 6) for all environment of a project. I don't even want to talk about deploying previous version or what happen when you update the version and AWS spawns new instances.
Jump into chatops hype approach and use one single script to deploy every app. Talk about a single point of failure but hey we use slack now it's great no?
Since I always think we are one character away from bad deployment and I'm into one click deployment then I've made a web app just to generate command and copy it or send it to slack.
I guess this is what happens when IT work for themselves only..2 -
Hi there fellow Devranters,
I am new here but my problem is pretty old. You see i stumbled into coding totally by accident. That was about 5 years ago. I have been learning ever since.
But the problem is that each day I just feel less and less of a programmer, more of a failure. I started with python, from sololearn to various ebooks.Then C++ and finally Ruby. But I still feeal weak.Despite the projects that I have worked on I still don't feel good enough. Most especially in Ruby.
I have a friend who is also into coding and coincidentally started about the same time as I did.The difference is that he learnt at university and I am self-taught.We used to talk a lot but we don't anymore,I feel too ashamed, an impostor even. I am scared he'll ask me something and I won't know anything about it.And I once taigjt him OOP. Right now I can't even code a hello world program without reading a whole ebook on python just to be confident.
We had dreams with my friend on a dozen or so projects that would have put us on the software dev map, but I keep avoiding him so much we have barely started any. I am afraid he'll find me too amateurish to work with.
I learn everyday to expand my knowledge,I have subscribed to a gazillion software related stuff on all social media platforms I happen to be in.But deep down I feel insufficient. I have been going through rants since the few hours I joined and it doesn't sound gibberish to me.Neither does other people's code when I go through it.But I am ashamed of mine I end up deleted after it runs successfully.
I just don't feel like a software developer, I don't even know what it takes to be one even. I learned 10 languages focused on 3, laughed at memes only devs get, used linux and loved it too but still I feel like an impostor. I used to be happy about all the things I taught myself, I onced dreamed of working at Google and later having my own startup back home.Now my friend and a couple of his friends have a small start-up and I feel ashamed of myself.
I don't feel like what I know is enough and learning only makes me feel worse, so bad I am scared of coding again now.Yet I just can't stop learning, I feel incomplete when I don't do anything dev related,but I don't even feel my speed is fast enough when I type on my keyboard.
😥😥6 -
Here comes lots of random pieces of advice...
Ain't no shortcuts.
Be prepared, becoming a good programmer (there are lots of shitty programmers, not so many good ones) takes lots of pain, frustration, and failure. It's going to suck for awhile. There will be false starts. At some point you will question whether you are cut out for it or not. Embrace the struggle -- if you aren't failing, you aren't learning.
Remember that in 2021 being a programmer is just as much (maybe even moreso) about picking up new things on the fly as it is about your crystalized knowledge. I don't want someone who has all the core features of some language memorized, I want someone who can learn new things quickly. Everything is open book all the time. I have to look up pretty basic stuff all the time, it's just that it takes me like twelve seconds to look it up and digest it.
Build, build, build, build, build. At least while you are learning, you should always be working on a project. Don't worry about how big the project is, small is fine.
Remember that programming is a tool, not the end goal in and of itself. Nobody gives a shit how good a carpenter is at using some specialized saw, they care about what the carpenter can build with that specialized saw.
Plan your build. This is a VERY important part of the process that newer devs/programmers like to skip. You are always free to change the plan, but you should have a plan going on. Don't store your plan in your head. If you plan exists only in your head you are doing it wrong. Write that shit down! If you create a solid development process, the cognitive overhead for any project goes way down.
Don't fall into the trap of comparing yourself to others, especially to the experts you are learning from. They are good because they have done the thing that you are struggling with at least a thousand times.
Don't fall into the trap of comparing yourself today to yourself yesterday. This will make it seem like you haven't learned anything and aren't on the move. Compare yourself to yourself last week, last month, last year.
Have experienced programmers review your code. Don't be afraid to ask, most of us really really enjoy this (if it makes you feel any better about the "inconvenience", it will take a mid-level waaaaay less time to review your code that it took for you to write it, and a senior dev even less time than that). You will hate it, it will suck having someone seem like they are just ripping your code apart, but it will make you so much better so much faster than just relying on your own internal knowledge.
When you start to be able to put the pieces together, stay humble. I've seen countless devs with a year of experience start to get a big head and talk like they know shit. Don't keep your mouth closed, but as a newer dev if you are talking noise instead of asking questions there is no way I will think you are ready to have the Jr./Associate/Whatever removed from your title.
Don't ever. Ever. Ever. Criticize someone else's preferred tools. Tooling is so far down the list of what makes a good programmer. This is another thing newer devs have a tendency to do, thinking that their tool chain is the only way to do it. Definitely recommend to people alternatives to check out. A senior dev using Notepad++, a terminal window, and a compiler from 1977 is probably better than you are with the newest shiniest IDE.
Don't be a dick about terminology/vocabulary. Different words mean different things to different people in different organizations. If what you call GNU/Linux somebody else just calls Linux, let it go man! You understand what they mean, and if you don't it's your job to figure out what they mean, not tell them the right way to say it.
One analogy I like to make is that becoming a programmer is a lot like becoming a chef. You don't become a chef by following recipes (i.e. just following tutorials and walk-throughs). You become a chef by learning about different ingredients, learning about different cooking techniques, learning about different styles of cuisine, and (this is the important part), learning how to put together ingredients, techniques, and cuisines in ways that no one has ever showed you about before. -
First Year in College.
I have been into computers since 9th Standard. What I meant was I could make music, edit images, play and install games after downloading, hack them(change values) using Cheat Engine, make trainers for myself because why type when you can freeze, format computers using a pendrive (trust me, I saved a lot of money) and then finally, make some presentations and send emails.
Now, College begins. Programming in C language. I don't know what the fuck that means. But they say, it's 'essential'.
Enter Professor. "Okay students, we begin with the course on C Language. how many of you know pointers?".
Me: Wow. Sounds cool. But, I don't know anything.
I couldn't love coding. I think I love to code but at the end of the day, I'm a sick Undergraduate who fell in love with a Bass Guitar and Vocals and wants to code for a living. Heavily interested in changing the world and all that stuff but have no motivation and even if I have, I can't give a fuck about it.
Peers are getting medals everywhere. I'm sitting alone in a room learning C. They said, It was 'essential', but they never told me, 'why'.
Not a rant. IDGAF what you think but I'm a failure looking for ways to make a living.6 -
So... I take over this one ticket to test... the ticket mentions some visual component popping up when a button is clicked. It says there is a success and a failure message. The title of the story also mentions another functionality.
I start testing and some fellow QA asks me why I'm testing in this environment. Turns out, three people are sharing one environment and three different things are deployed...
I ask the dev whats going on because I heard there are multiple people deploying stuff...
He just tells me "oh, my changes are deployed I just checked".
I tell him that it's not about that but about communication and testing one thing at the time. Then I tell him, that I wouldn't test until his stuff is the only stuff there.
Some time later he hits me up again, now with the env to himself.
I test and quickly I see, that there is only the positive message even when I make sure that the backend is not reachable. I tell the dev what I found and he tells me "oh no, it's just the implementation of the popup thing, it's just frontend for now"...
I tell him, that the ticket should say so.
No answer for like 1-2 hours. Then I get an "ok".
End of the day.
Next day I come in and the fellow QA tells me, that the dev asked him to test the ticket.
I ask him if he changed anything about the scope of the ticket, he says no...
I'm like "ok... know what... begin testing and then tell him what I already told him".
So he's testing and then tells him again to update the scope.
Later in the daily the the dev's update is besically "they won't test my ticket..."
It would have taken him like 1 fucking minute to update the ticket...
The whole QA team was always trying to being helpful and even when the tickets where sometimes not 100% clear we always made it work... but now we are more and more going towards "MR does not meet ticketdescription, fix it" and "I don't care if its just a small thing... fix it and then come back to me"...
Seriously frustrating some times...2 -
I really hate people that don't document well their 'inventions'.
Let's take for example kotlinx.serialization library. It's a self-obvious fact that there are at least two things that will make anyone suffer: generics and polymorphism. So, they must be on the front page. Solved. With a recipe. Ready to use.
And what do we have? One mention somewhere in docs and an amazing test that 'explains' 'everything':
https://github.com/Kotlin/...
'What we got here is a failure to communicate.' (c)8 -
I can't stand Swift's initializers. No other languages have the problem with constructors/initializers that Swift does. It's a complete failure of a feature and to hell with safety if it comes with this cost.
Just to illustrate how ridiculous it gets, I want to have a class where my initialization logic can be split among reusable parts. That is, the logic that initializes the class with no parameters has logic that I want to reuse in my other initializers. Simple DRY stuff. Well, the only way I can do that in Swift is if I use a convenience initializer that calls another one. But convenience initializers have completely different rules from designated initializers (again, something only Swift does).
For example, you can't access "self" until you call a designated initializer. You can't chain designated initializers, and if you want to chain anything in the same class you have to handcuff yourself by using a "convenience" initializer (there's nothing convenient about them, I might add).
So now I want to subclass my class and initialize myself using one of my superclass initializers. Oh but the one I want to call is a *convenience* initializer so I can't, unless I turn my new initializer into a convenience initializer. Except wait, a convenience initializer must delegate with self.init(), so it can't even call a superclass initializer!
And it just goes round and round and round. I don't know if I should try to convert all of my initializers to convenience initializers or the other way around.
Why all this nonsensical madness? Get rid of the distinction and go back to nice clean powerful initializers like Objective-C. I mean what does it have to take? This is a complete nightmare.13 -
The ridiculous and shameful story of how simply "installing Windows" saved my hard drive from the garbage.
(Also update on https://devrant.com/rants/3105365/)
It started with my root partition turning read-only all of a sudden. Some quick search suggested that I should check the sanity of my hard drive, by running a SMART test, which failed of course. I backed up my data using ddrescue and ran a badblocks over the whole thing, which found around 800 unreadable blocks in a row. I was ready to bid farewell to my drive, but as a last resort, instead of the trash, I brought it to this place where they claimed they can repair the damaged hard drives by "surgery".
To my surprise, they returned my drive the next week, saying it is all well now, and charged me 1/8 the price of a new drive, with a refund guarantee if there was a problem in two days. There was a problem right there: I ran another SMART test which failed again, and also the faulty blocks were still unreadable! So I stormed the place and called for my refund, showing the failed SMART report. The only answer I would get from the staff was "Have you tried installing Windows?".
I usually try to be patient in such situations; I really don't like to declare publicly that "not everyone uses that stinky piece of rotten software you call an OS", but their suggestion seemed totally irrelevant! I got all types of IO errors all over the damn thing and they told me to install Windows. Why? Because this was the only test they would rely on. At last I managed to meet the "technician" there and showed him the IO errors: tried to read the bad sectors with dd and failed. He first mumbled somethings like "Have you checked the connector?" or "Are these the same blocks?", but after he ran out of bullshit, he said "Why don't you just install Windows first and see if that helps?" and I was ready to explode in his face!
"You test drives by installing Windows, just because it will make a nasty NTFS partition and probably does an fsck? If you shut your mouth for a sec and open your eyes you'll see this is a shit load of IO errors we got here: You can't install Windows, you can't even make an NTFS here, because it will try to zero-the-fuck-out the damn partition and it will face the same fucking IO error that I'm showing you right now in almost one single fucking system call!"
"I don't know this kind of test you are using. We have our own tests and they've passed successfully. So all I can do is to give you a Windows CD if you want."
"I don't need a Windows CD. I will just try to make an NTFS partition on the error spot and I will fail."
"Ok. Then call me when your done."
I was angry, not only because I felt they're just trying to avoid a refund, but also because I knew I've lost my drive. But just with hope that I could get my money back, I made a small partition over the error spot and ran `mkfs.ntfs` on it. I was ready to show the failure to the guy, but I looked more precisely and saw that "the filesystem was created successfully!" I was sure something is nor write. I then successfully mounted the new partition, write over it and read it again. I even dd'ed the blocks again, and this time there was no IO error. All of a sudden everything was fine.
I didn't know what happened. Maybe it just needed a write, while I'd just tried to read from those blocks. But anyway, I didn't called the technician guy again. I just thanked one of the staff there and said that my problem was solved. I then ran a successful SMART test and then restored my backup. Ridiculous like that.
I'm still not sure if my drive will continue to live with no more problems. I also have no explanation for what happened. (I appreciate any help on this https://superuser.com/questions/...) But I really like to see the look on the poor guy's face when he finds out that trying to install Windows just saved my ass!11 -
From now on I am administrating multiple servers in our company and monitoring is one thing our infrastucture lacks...almost completely. At least, useful monitoring.
Installing netdata or Grafana and integrate it with chat is definitely a solution, but what happens if the whole server just shuts down (very stupid scenario I know)? Well, it is easy, there will be no alert about the failure.
So, that's where I was wondering if there is a tool or even better plugin for netdata or Grafana, that enables remote monitoring from another server? I surely can write a simple script to check the server availability but having the whole monitoring tool on a single server instead of 5+ would be also easier to maintain and setup.10 -
Repeat/repost:
Unfortunately I do not own a drop of what is conventionally known as confidence or ego. It applies to everything; work, skills, relationships, friendships, you name it. I can estimate my chances of succeeding, and sometimes be pretend-delulu for a purpose (you gotta admit, sometimes showmanship is the biggest asset) but I don't understand confidence. In my opinion, it's just a gross overestimation of one's chances.
So this project/paper thing, I feel like I'm blind and running in the forest. I am not counting on my boss, nor am I counting on anyone in the dept to give me clarity or decent feedback. ("Cutting edge" research issues. Not anybody's fault.)
And I guess, in the worst case scenario the paper will be rejected, which would be a setback but not a full failure.
... Actually, that's not the worst case. The worst case would be someone running a peer review and finding that I made a tiny mistake and all my results are bullshit. 🤦
... Anxiety is eating me alive rn. 🤢4 -
I write web apps that show system health information, for support purposes. Whenever I talk to my boss about the general direction of what I'm writing he says, "I want one page that shows me everything."
This is an enormous company, with tens of millions of customers, and an infrastructure so big that there are literally millions of potential points of failure.
I hear this from management softs all the time: one page that shows me EVERYTHING. To me, that means he wants a red or green indicator that he can quickly check on his iphone while he's skiing.
I'm afraid that managing this kind of infrastructure is a bit more complicated than that. If it was that simple, you wouldn't have anyone to manage.1 -
When the monthly scrum retrospective reaches the 90 minute mark...
You know when people are being stress tested and they break by getting up, run around screaming and ultimately knock themselves unconscious by running into a wall?
That. I felt like doing that.
I swear someone activates some sort of gravity well when these meetings begin because time beings to stretch on and o........n....... while they meetings happen.
I began to list things I think I'd rather be doing than be in that meeting.
1) Tax returns.
2) Prostate exam (not old enough to need one yet but at least I'd be out the meeting).
3) Visiting the dentist.
4) Assembling IKEA furniture.
5) Watching soccer at least they have the decency to give you a break in the middle and I find sports as engaging as a dog turd on the sidewalk.
So bored was I that I began to notice notches and holes in the ceiling tiles and when I remarked upon them others became engrossed in them and began to speculate upon their origins.
I don't know who a speaker is, what department they are from, what product they're working on or what's so important about the algorithm they're working on. There is no context, no explanation and half way through a show and tell I had to check we were still in a show and tell.
I was bored shitless. I actually felt physical pain from boredom, I've not felt that way since I was a child.
I really, really hate that scrum is implemented in this way.
It left me with only half an hour of coding time left and really it sapped my energy and motivation to the point where I just went home early.
Excuse my language, but:
Fucking bloody cunting waste of time, I've had more productive moments in the restroom. They need to piss off or committed seppuku, ideally both. Dante got it wrong the seventh level of hell is this. I'm usually a very calm and balanced individual but yesterday, yesterday I just... Fuck! Argh! Fuck you meeting, fuck you.
If you are the type that schedules meetings like this:
May a thousand Jabberwockies plague your nightmares and be it that the next seventy seven times you lay with a human shall ye experience bitter failure! I hope Cthulhu himself visits his "enlightenment" upon you and you fear sleep henceforth.
I'm bringing a rubix cube or juggling balls into the next meeting so that I can say at least I learned something and it wasn't time wasted.3 -
Lua users, have you used moonscript?
It's a little language that has it's own interpreter or can be compiled down to Lua and it's absolutely lovely (currently using it with Love2d).
Of course, as with most things, what I love about it also royally pisses me off sometimes.
For starters local has to be declared for variables, unlike lua.
Otherwise the variable goes to _
Also note, that some tutorials literally tell you the opposite.
all variables are local by default
unless you don't declare them
then they go to _ (throwaway)
Some tutorials get this wrong too.
all variables have to be declared local
except tables. failure to declare a table WITHOUT a local will cause things like
table.insert to fail with "nil" values for no god damn reason.
No tutorial I could find mentioned this.
Did you know we call methods with '\'?
By the way, we call methods with '\'.
Why? Who the fuck knows.
Does make writing web routes more natural though.
Variables in the parameters of new are declared and bound for you. Would have loved to know this before hand instead of trying
to bind to them like a fucking idiot.
Fat arrows are used to pass in self for methods.
Unless you're calling a method. Then you use backwards slash. This fact is unhelpful when you're a beginner and dealing with the differences between the *other* arrow, the backslash, the fat arrow, and the fact that functions can be called with or WITHOUT parenthesis.
And on that note..
While learning all this other shit, don't forget parenthesis are optional!
Except when they're not!
..Like when you have a function call among your arguments and have to disambiguate which args belong to the outer call and to the inner call! Why not just be fucking consistent?
But on the plus size, ":" is now used for what it should have been used for in the fucking beginning: binding values to keys.
And on the downside, it's in a language thats built on top of another language that uses it for fucking *method calls*, a completely
different fucking usage.
And better still, to add to that brainfuckery thats lost in the mental translational noise like static on a fucking dialup modem, you define methods with the fat arrow. Wait, was that the single arrow or fat one? Yeah the fat one. Fuck. But not before you do THIS shit..
someShit: =>
yeah, you STILL include the god damn colon just so when you're coming from lua you can do a mental double take. "Why am I passing self twice? Oh right, because fuck me, I decided to use moonscript." It's consistent on that front but it also pisses me off.
A lot of these are actually quality of life improvements disguised as gotchas, but when you're two beers in to a 30 minute headscratcher it sure doesn't fucking feel like it.
Nevertheless, once I moved beyond the gotchas, it was like night and day. Sure moonscripts takes a giant steaming dump all over the lua output, like a schizophrenic alcoholic athena from the head of zeus, but god damn, when it works it just WORKS.
Locals that act like locals? Check.
Sane OOP? Check.
Classes, constructors, easy access to class methods, iterators? Check, check, check, check, check.
I fucking hate ceremony. Configuration over convention is for cunts. And moonscript goes a long ways toward making lua less cunty.
If you've ever felt this way while using lua, please, give moonscript a try.
You'll regret it, but in a good way!6 -
I spent 4 months in a programming mentorship offered by my workplace to get back to programming after 4 years I graduated with a CS degree.
Back in 2014, what I studied in my first programming class was not easy to digest. I would just try enough to pass the courses because I was more interested in the theory. It followed until I graduated because I never actually wrote code for myself for example I wrote a lot of code for my vision class but never took a personal initiative. I did however have a very strong grip on advanced computer science concepts in areas such as computer architecture, systems programming and computer vision. I have an excellent understanding of machine learning and deep learning. I also spent time working with embedded systems and volunteering at a makerspace, teaching Arduino and RPi stuff. I used to teach people older than me.
My first job as a programmer sucked big time. It was a bootstrapped startup whose founder was making big claims to secure funding. I had no direction, mentorship and leadership to validate my programming practices. I burnt out in just 2 months. It was horrible. I experienced the worst physical and emotional pain to date. Additionally, I was gaslighted and told that it is me who is bad at my job not the people working with me. I thought I was a big failure and that I wasn't cut out for software engineering.
I spent the next 6 months recovering from the burn out. I had a condition where the stress and anxiety would cause my neck to deform and some vertebrae were damaged. Nobody could figure out why this was happening. I did find a neurophyscian who helped me out of the mental hell hole I was in and I started making recovery. I had to take a mild anti anxiety for the next 3 years until I went to my current doctor.
I worked as an implementation engineer at a local startup run by a very old engineer. He taught me how to work and carry myself professionally while I learnt very little technically. A year into my job, seeing no growth technically, I decided to make a switch to my favourite local software consultancy. I got the job 4 months prior to my father's death. I joined the company as an implementation analyst and needed some technical experience. It was right up my alley. My parents who saw me at my lowest, struggling with genetic depression and anxiety for the last 6 years, were finally relieved. It was hard for them as I am the only son.
After my father passed away, I was told by his colleagues that he was very happy with me and my sisters. He died a day before I became permanent and landed a huge client. The only regret I have is not driving fast enough to the hospital the night he passed away. Last year, I started seeing a new doctor in hopes of getting rid of the one medicine that I was taking. To my surprise, he saw major problems and prescribed me new medication.
I finally got a diagnosis for my condition after 8 years of struggle. The new doctor told me a few months back that I have Recurrent Depressive Disorder. The most likely cause is my genetics from my father's side as my father recovered from Schizophrenia when I was little. And, now it's been 5 months on the new medication. I can finally relax knowing my condition and work on it with professional help.
After working at my current role for 1 and a half years, my teamlead and HR offered me a 2 month mentorship opportunity to learn programming from scratch in Python and Scrapy from a personal mentor specially assigned to me. I am still in my management focused role but will be spending 4 hours daily of for the mentorship. I feel extremely lucky and grateful for the opportunity. It felt unworldly when I pushed my code to a PR for the very first time and got feedback on it. It is incomparable to anything.
So we had Eid holidays a few months back and because I am not that social, I began going through cs61a from Berkeley and logged into HackerRank after 5 years. The medicines help but I constantly feel this feeling that I am not enough or that I am an imposter even though I was and am always considered a brilliant and intellectual mind by my professors and people around me. I just can't shake the feeling.
Anyway, so now, I have successfully completed 2 months worth of backend training in Django with another awesome mentor at work. I am in absolute love with Django and Python. And, I constantly feel like discussing and sharing about my progress with people. So, if you are still reading, thank you for staying with me.
TLDR: Smart enough for high level computer science concepts in college, did well in theory but never really wrote code without help. Struggled with clinical depression for the past 8 years. Father passed away one day before being permanent at my dream software consultancy and being assigned one of the biggest consultancy. Getting back to programming after 4 years with the help of change in medicine, a formal diagnosis and a technical mentorship.3 -
So today my company was removing most workspaces with USB 2 connections, DP cables and magsafe 2 power cables. This means that my MBP mid 2014 can't connect to the keyboard and monitors anymore. It already struggled with 4K, so my 2K options were already limited, but now the last few spots are mostly gone. In short: I'm being forced to upgrade.
But tell you what: I don't want to. It feels like a waste to recycle my laptop (even if it's company paid and owned) while it's perfectly acceptably fine. And mind that I will get the latest and greatest i9 for free. Yes, that overheating, throttling failure of hardware design piece of shit. 2 coworkers already own the beast and confirm that it gets really hot really quickly. One of them even has daily crashes (the laptop just turns off) and random reboots. A total waste of money. And my future time. As if it's not enough work to migrate to a new laptop (even with Time Machine).
So, fellow ranters, what do I do? I hope I can leverage the second best MBP (CPU-wise) from this situation, unless there already is a bunch of i9s in the office ready to be used. I really, really don't want one. And I think my current computer is great for what it is, even if it's old. It's a really pro machine for my needs (I'm very efficient, except for Android Studio).
I even consider asking for a Linux machine, but then a whole new world opens to me that may be a step too big (since I barely have hands-down experience).
Enlighten me with your ideas, muggles!5 -
Is a BS in CS even worth it? I’m struggling so much right now with many different aspects of “online learning”, to the point where I spend the entire day shaking in misery. I was fine until I realized how close we are to finals this semester. The worst part is, this semester isn’t my last hard semester. Taking two miserable CS courses in the Spring as well, so it isn’t as easy as just keeping my head up and making it through this semester.
I finished my AA in CS from a local Community College, and I’m wondering if it’s worth the stress of the next two years in this degree track?
I’ve never tested well, but these CS and Math courses hit differently when online. I pass every single coding project with ease, but fail exams (literally). I realize my AA doesn’t mean much, but I do have lots of experience coding (Way beyond what I’ve learned in school).
Truth be told, I think I just want to hear you guys say it’s not worth it. Most companies that I see requires either a BS or equivalent experience, how do I get that experience, especially with COVID?
I feel like a failure, and I can’t deal with this pressure on me daily. My mental health has taken a giant hit recently. I know for a fact that I cannot endure another two years of this.
Someone, guidance. Please.7 -
Ugh! I feel so low and less motivated because I am unable to solve the interview practice questions really well.
This is fucking annoying. I am not sure what is that that I am lacking.
I got the framework. I have problem statements. I am practicing mocks. I got the feedback and I implemented it.
I have spent ~30 hours on this till now. Solved around ~20 cases, 10 of each category.
Should I now purely bet on luck? Maybe I'll take a break and submit the other companies case assignment to divert my mind.
I need to crack the interview and land the offer at all cost. There is no chance or scope for failure.7 -
I subscribe to many copywriting newsletters. Here's an article that shows how it's like on "the other side", marketers struggle, too.
How Kevin's Massive Mistake
Completely Changed His Life
Kevin H. made a huge mistake.
The biggest, he would say, if he could tell you himself.
And he knew it immediately.
It was, he said, "instant regret."
Within milliseconds, he was asking himself "What have I done..."
Kevin, see, had just jumped the rail of the single most popular suicide spot in the world, the Golden Gate Bridge.
On average, the site gets another distraught jumper every two weeks. Kevin was one of them.
It wasn't like he hadn't tried to quiet the voices in his head. Therapy, drugs, hospitalization.
Time to die, those voices still said.
And yet, in the minutes his bus dropped him off at the bridge, he hesitated and paced with tears in his eyes.
"I told myself if just one person comes up to me and asks if I'm okay... if one person asks if they can help... I won't do it. I'll stop and tell them my whole story..."
But nobody did, so he jumped.
It was in those next milliseconds, he would later say, he knew it was the biggest mistake of his life.
He didn't want to die.
But now, he was sure, it was too late.
From its highest point, it's a 245-foot plummet into the icy bay waters below.
Out of the 1,700 people that have jumped from the bridge since it first opened in 1937, only 25 have survived.
Kevin, against all odds, would be one of them.
He slammed into the water like hitting concrete. Three of his vertebrae instantly shattered.
When he surfaced, he couldn't hold his own head above water. But, incredibly, a sea lion kept pushing him up.
The Coast Guard soon arrived and pulled him out.
From there, he began a long recovery that required intense surgery, physical therapy, and psychiatric care.
While still under treatment, a priest urged him to give a talk to a bunch of seventh and eighth graders.
Afterward, they sent him a pile of letters, both encouraging and full of their own pained thoughts.
He also met a woman.
Today, Kevin lives in Atlanta and he's been happily married for the last 12 years.
And he tours the country, sharing his story.
So why re-tell it here?
Obviously -- I hope -- you don't get lots of copywriters looking to snuff it after a flopped headline test.
Just the same...
We've talked a lot in this space about the things one needs to get by in this biz.
My friend and colleague Joe, over at the publishing powerhouse Agora Financial, likes to list requirements.
You need intense curiosity...
You need a killer work ethic...
And you must, MUST have... resilience.
Meaning, you must have or find the capacity to bounce back from failure and flops, even huge ones.
Now, again, Kevin's story is an extreme and in this context -- I hope -- a hyperbolic example of somebody giving up. In the worst way possible.
It is also, though, a metaphor.
See, I get a lot of notes from some of you guys... and at conferences, I get to talk to a lot of people...
And I often get the sense, from some folks, that they're feeling a little more overwhelmed than they let on.
Some are just starting out, and they've got a lot on the line. For some, it's everything. And some are desperate to make it work.
Because they have to, because their pride or livelihoods or a family business is at stake, because it's a dream.
And yet, they're overwhelmed by all the tips and secrets... or by piles of confusing research or ideas...
For others, even had some success, but they're burned out, feel antiquated, or feel like "imposters" that know less than they let on, in an industry that's evolving.
To all those folks... and to you... I can only say, I've been there. And frankly, go back there now and again.
Flops happen, failures happen. And you can and will -- even years and decades into doing this -- make the wrong choices, pick the wrong projects, or botch the right ones.
The legendary Gene Schwartz put it this way, according to a quote spotted recently in fellow writer Ben Settle's e-letter...
" A very good copywriter is going to fail. If the guy doesn't fail, he's no good. He's got to fail. It hurts. But it's the only way to get the home runs the next time."
Once more, nobody -- I hope -- is taking the trials of this profession hard enough to make Kevin's choice.
And believe me, I don't mean to make light of the latter. I just want to make sure we hit this anvil with a big hammer. To drive home the point that, whatever your struggle, be it with this biz or something bigger, that you don't want to give up. Press on.
As Churchill put it, "Success, is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm."
Or even more succinctly when he said, "If you're going through hell, keep going."
Because it's worth it.
.
John Forde -
Contrary to popular opinion, I still firmly stand by my belief that you should thoroughly study something in-depth before you attempt to do anything serious with it. Failure to do so will have an enormous cost of waste of time attached to it.
Here's an example:
I was using AJAX to post a multi-part request containing a file.
Now here was the problem: no matter what code I forced in the backend, the browser would in all cases refuse to prompt a SaveFileDialog (and I had turned on the option in the browser to ask the user if download). This took me two entire days and at least 100 Google queries and several RFCs to figure out.
From StackOverflow:
The cause was simply that you can't (typically) make a browser prompt a SaveFileDialog via an AJAX request, even if you set the necessary headers. Why? The browser will just dump everything back into the XmlHttpRequest object..
If you make a regular request with Content-Disposition: attachment; and so on, then it works, but yeah, not with an XmlHttpRequest.
Conclusion:
Had I better studied the HTTP spec, networking and AJAX in-depth, I would have instantly known what the cause was.7 -
Not sure if forums like DevRant ever helped me but it certainly gave me an impression of how work in the industry is. It sort of prepared
me for the bs that I could face and I ended up expecting and managing those situations. This will be both a happy, raw and a grumpy thought. I’m a self taught dev, I failed my education due to a situation outside my control but I always loved programming, it’s mostly because I love solving problems and creating something I feel is my own. Today I’m a core member in a company and I’m also a contractor in my own company. I love the variety of working on my own and I love helping team members, I love organising projects and the experiences others bring help me grow and expand what is literally my life’s passion. I started out as a consultant because someone saw my passion and my experience, they took a chance and well, I can’t say I’ve disappointed them. I just recently got to know into my adult life that I got ADD and meanwhile it probably pushed me out of the normal, it helped me focus on the things I liked. I was 6 years when I wanted to learn programming and I was 10 when I first started learning, I felt like a failure when I was 18 after literally 6 hours a day of learning development each day, I didn’t have a job for several years and when I was 24 - prior to becoming a consultant, someone offered me a job, it was one of those “5 day” interview assignments, where I practically delivered a finished, fully tested project for them. They offered me lowest of pay (15 usd/hr). They took advantage of my situation, put me on a solo project and said it wasn’t good enough because it didn’t fit their preferences after 50 hours of dedicated work without any guidance, specs or meetings. I’d say thanks but I was never considered before I had “experience” by others, I hope I’ll get the chance to give someone that experience before they go through the same as me. I could go on for so long about what I feel is wrong about this industry but one description that continually come up “impostors syndrome”, shut the fuck up if you don’t know what you’re talking about and give even “newbies” a chance. Programming and development is more than experience.1 -
Maybe I am just sensitive.. but sometimes I feel that my new manager is being a little harsh on me.
Again, he might behave the same with everyone and I am assuming that it's just me.
1.5 months in the new job and not a single good comment/feedback I recieved from him. It's not that he criticises me or my work, or calls me a dumbass.
But whenever I submit anything for review, I get a ton of feedback where he expects everything to extreme precision.
He guides me, explains me post my failure, and has specific pointers of what he wants/how he wants things.
But all I am given is a set of documents to read initially with an expectation that I have to figure things out. When I am not upto the mark, he then guides me.
Why I worry?
1. I am on probation and this place is a start-up, don't want to get fired.
2. They got me as a Sr PM (which was also my previous role where I excelled), so I fear that expectations would be high from me. Failing to deliver those might get me in trouble.
3. He isn't a micro manager and quite supportive, but his communication style isn't working for me (so far).
Somehow, as always, I am getting along well with everyone in the org and everyone is talking good about me.
But with my immediate boss, the imposter syndrome kicks in real hard and I am super insecure. Every time I have to interact with him, I get super stressed and anxious.
I know things take time, but given that I am a Sr PM (and my boss expects me to be a lead PM, a position higher than current), I feel if the expectations are not delivered then I might get fucked.5 -
Until that recent terrorist attack, I had believed that Ariana Grande is the name of a spacecraft or something. I studied about Ariane 5's failure in software testing course. Maybe that's what made me think like that. 😁
-
TL;DR: Computers and I go way back, but I don't know how I ended up as a dev - and am still not certain that's what I want to do for the rest of my life.
Rewind to the early 80's. My friends at the time got the Comodore 64 one after the other. I never got one. Heck, we didn't even have a color TV back then. Only a 12/14" small B&W TV. It's easy to conclude that I spent a lot of time at my friends'.
Back then it mostly was about the games. And, living in the rural countryside, the only way to aquire games was to pirate them. Pirating was big. Cassette tape swapping and floppy disk swapping was a big deal, and gamers contacted eachother via classifieds sections in newspapers and magazines. It was crazy.
Anyways. The thing about pirated games back then is that they often got a cracktro, trainer, intro or whatever you want to call them - made by the people who pirated the game. And I found them awesome. Sinus scrollers, 3D text, cool SID-tunes and whatnot. I was hooked.
My best friend and I eventually got tired of just gaming. We found Shoot'Em-Up Construction Kit, which was an easy point-and-click way to create our first little game. We looked into BASIC a bit. And we found a book at the library about C64 programming. It contained source code to create your own assembler, so we started on that. I never completed it, but my friend did.
Fast forward through some epic failure using an Amstrad CPC, an old 486 and hello mid 90's. My first Pentium, my first modem and hello Internet! I instantly fell in love with the Internet and the web. I was still in school, and had planned to enter the creative advertising business. Little did I know about the impact the web would have on the world.
I coded web pages for fun for some years. My first job was as a multimedia designer, and I eventually had to learn Lingo (Macromedia Director, anyone?) And Actionscript.
Now I haven't touched Flash for about 7 years. My experience has evolved back to pure web development. I'm not sure if that's where I will be in the future. I've learned that I certainly don't know how to do everything I want to do - but I have aquired the mindset to identify the tasks and find solutions to the problem.
I never had any affiliation with the pirate scene or the demo scene. But I still get a little tingling whenever I see one of those sinus scrollers. -
Finally an error I can understand with ease. Up until now, I’ve been getting these weird arbitrary errors that make no sense to me.
I tried to wake my MacBook and the thing hung. I have it some time, and it restarted, restored all windows, and let me know it was a “Sleep Wake Failure”.
Honestly I don’t mind getting an error occasionally. But when the error says “UNEXPECTED_KERNEL_MODE_TRAP” while I’m gaming on Windows, it annoys me.
Also having WebKit crash the webpage on me without telling me what happened also gets me mad.
TL;DR: Make understandable error messages.2 -
!rant
Many out there say you should use 2 factor authentication with everything, but personally i feel lile that would just turn your phone into a sigle point of failure.
Phisical security is my primary worry, because loosing your phone or having it stolen yould pretty much lock you out of all your accounts.
Another thing is i don't know as much about android security, and i wouldn't be confortable managing it.
I have 2FA active for some key services, but imho a strong password is usually enough. I think its far more more importat for your overall security to avoid passwords re-use.
What do you think? Do you have 2FA on all the time?9 -
So to give you a feel for what evil, clusterfuck code it was in: this projects largest part was coded by a maniac, witty physicist confined in the factory for a month, intended as a 'provisional' solution of course it ran for years. The style was like C with a bit of classes.. and a big chunk of shared memory as a global mud of storage, communication and catastrophe. Optimistic or no locking of the memory between process barriers, arrays with self implemented boundary checks that would give you the zeroth element on failure and write an error log of which there were often dozens in the log. But if that sounds terrifying already, it is only baseline uneasyness which was largely surpassed by the shear mass of code, special units, undocumented madness. And I had like three month to write a simulator of the physical factory and sensors to feed that behemoth with the 'right' inputs. Still I don't know how I stood it through, but I resigned little time afterwards.
Well, lastly to the bug: there was some central map in that shared memory that hold like view of the central customer data. And somehow - maybe not that surprisingly giving the surrounding codebase - it sometimes got corrupted. Once in a month or two times a day. Tried to put in logging, more checks - but never really could pinpoint the problem... Till today I still get the haunting feeling of a luring memory corruption beneath my feet, if I get closer to the metal core of pure C.1 -
!tech
i was feeling very disturbed thinking about this thing, so just wanna share here. trigger warning : this is about 2 recent news (1 national and1 international) about crimes against women and its affect on me, a male , somewhat privileged guy with rarely any women in life.
news 1 : some lady in iran getting killed by police due to religious laws . news 2 : a receptionist girl in india getting killed for not providing sexual services to hotel people .
i will come back to first news in a bit, but second news has shaken me to the very core. i saw a post where her dead corpse was being taken up by her acquitances and she is just ... lifeless, hands going sideways, face hung at one side, mouth open... damn :'(
read more here : https://indiatoday.in/india/story/...
i am not at all related to this news, but somehow, i as a guy feel disgusted and being responsible for this sad event. this is not an act of power or lust , this is an act of a horrible mentality.
i come from the city where the world's most number of hate crime and crime against women take place. and pathetic politicians and people of power blame it on women's dressing and mens "naive nature" and , "boys being boys, accidentally making mistakes" . little did anyone know that this mentality has been cooking in the streets for last so many years.
i am a single child with no siblings or grandparents, my relatives rarely visit me and my last 24 years on earth rarely involved any female companionship apart from my mom.
i like girls, i find them cute. i really want to be with someone, to have a consensus relationship. but the talks among my homie groups and other male friends have gone toxic to the level that a national issue syarted feeling relatable.
the feeling of getting affection from someone has somehow turned into a lust, a "game", a "service". one guy( who recently shifted to other state) would use to tell us how he would visit " red light areas" , another one(also left) once tried to ask for that "service" in a camp where we were staying during a trip, and used to tell how he would hook up with girls on Instagram.
we used to laugh at those things, find them interesting and enjoyable. i would think about them in deep, thinking that this is something possible, a transactional access to sex, with me now earning enough to afford it.
now, seeing this news i feel so shitty and being a horrible human. those thoughts were not originally mine, but i didn't opposed them. rather i laughed on it , and thought that once am even more powerful financially and politically, could even entertain that approach.
As a guy, i want to say i am deeply, terribly sorry.
This mentality needs to be changed. my homie group is not just the only group of males that has such vile thoughts having openly propagated. every park, every company meeting , every library, every gym, anywhere i go, i can just show up a coffee cup and shout "women,huh" and can get a laughter followed by several low voices whospers on which girl is a "s***" there .
there are multiple points of failure in our society that are causing these. the news 1 from the start of this rant is the very first : role of government and religion on controlling "dresses and behaviour" of women
another comes the role of sex, culture and gender education in institution. institutions in my areas are so fucked up: they teach how plants fuck and bees suck honey to a puberty hit student, but doesn't teach consent, relations and personal behavior at any age. my school would even try to sometimes make all girls sit in a seperate row and other times would force guys to sit with girls. don't know what they got for this authoritative behaviour, but that sure didn't impacted our brains very rightly.
lastly this needs to be made clear in evevry guy's mind that paid prostitution, forced prostitution and consensus relationship are 3 different things, and only a respectable , consensus relationship is something you should think about and prepare for.7 -
What would you say to an employer offering a job at a starting point of only a percentage of the top salary you'll earn once the project is finished? Let's say they offered to pay you $40k to work full time building a highly complex website with multiple API integrations and sophisticated estimate calculation workflows, plus you'd be doing marketing and copywriting, with a goal of achieving 300 signups a day. In the middle of the project they boost the pay to, say, $60k salary rate. At the 12 month mark, which is the final "launch" date anticipated (and onward), you get $100k/year and you're the only person paid to do All The Things.
Oh, and also, the previous person they hired to do it failed to deliver and was let go.
Would you turn that down because to earn so little at first on the speculation that the venture will be a success and that you'll eventually get to the $100k level, plus their failure with the previous person, is too much of a gamble? Asking for a friend. ;)5 -
short: The admin with enough xp is ill, there is no one with xp with varnish is and after 1 restart varnish outputs only 503.
long: there original admin is ill but he gave me an project to migrate an typo3 installation to a new server. Thats ok.
Plan: I move 150 GB of data with rsync to the new server, let specialists do something and switch ips between the new and old and clear varnish with a restart.
Reality: +2 hours to migrate the data, because of false infos from the admin, 7 hours preparing the switch, 5 minutes switch, 3 hours to find out the F*****G varnish is the single point of failure. I and the t3 guys agree to see the next day what went wrong.
ALL HAPPENED TODAY!
Plan for tomorrow: speak with the boss to account the extra hours to that day so i dont get over 10 hours and debug that fucking varnish and delete some servers from another project from the backupsystem and monitoring.3 -
!rant
OMG fuck yeah!
Today I was workin' on my CSS framework, made a couple of cool functions for generating hsla() colors with a customizable lightness and opacity. Using calc() for multiplying the default lightness by the value passed in parameter to the function.
"It's working perfectly in Chrome and Edge, cool! Now let's check in Firefox, but if it's okay on Edge, I'm pretty confident..."
Except, that's a failure: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_b...
At that point, I started to rant alone. Properly. Like: "why this feature is still not implemented, people are waiting for it since YEARS!! Fuckin' browsers war!!!"
I was already thinking to drop a big angry post on here, when I noticed something : https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US...
So I update Firefox Developer Edition and, IT WORKS!
This feature was needed since years and the FF team brings it just when I need it. What was the chance ? I feel happy :)
Conclusion: sometimes ranting is the easy way. Calm down, try harder and you can find the solution!1 -
In my quest to try to understand this ridiculous daily status report to management (yes, it is micromanagement, but why ), so I asked the business analyst who is running the project management office the purpose of it in a very non-chalant manner.
"It's to show status and progress of work." Right.
"The content of the update should meet the following criteria: 1. Business language 2. Project/system specific 3. Person specific"
She then names some management people who want to know certain progress with a specific project. Such as "Jane Smith wants to know if there's progress with report failure investigations".
It is supposed to tell people proactively what's happening with a project before they ask. It also apparently shows transparency and how much time we're working on a thing. It also apparently helps senior "peeps" align priorities for work across companies (we're one of 4 companies part of a larger company, we do the software and IT stuff for them).
I said thanks and concluded with "So, our daily output is more important that outcome. I'll continue working with the project management software api to see if I can get appropriate output."
I'm sure some people in the team are not doing what they're supposed to be doing, management have trust issues, or both.
I now know the root cause of this daily pain that is being inflicted on us, and I want to do something about it, but maybe I should just stop, before it drives me over the edge.6 -
i come from a very closely knit family and i kinda like it. i am in close proximity to my parents, they are growing old so i do a lot of home chores. meanwhile a lot relatives and dad's business friends live nearby , and the whole area around my home feels like a place of known people. my free time goes with 5-6 friends , who again live nearby, or with gym buddies. this is a nice life, which could further expand with a wife and my kids in future .
at the same time, i have seen the "work" life. my office is in a different state, 90% of people there are people like me who would be renting a home nearby and living alone/with strangers. their main "family"(well pseudo-family) will be their coworkers, and that's also not a bad thing.
in the workplace the reasons to be happy will be a lot (as parties or celebrations will occur on multiple birthdays/ company growths and other achievements) , and so will be the reasons to feel sad ( company failure, teammates leaving, missing family)
at the end of the day , when you are living an office life, you are a corporate rat running for the cheese you are never gonna (or , if you are a glass half full person, let's say that you are a "dedicated work professional giving your 100% to the company")
but here comes the dilemma : with AIs like chat gpt coming around and redefining nthe expectations from a software engineer, you will no longer be expected to be resourceful but rather how much of a corporate rat you can be. ( https://twitter.com/bajicdusko/...)
so 1) is it the only way forward for an upcoming engineer's lifestyle? to be like a soldier for their company , while their family and friends await for their long return? 2) if yes, what is the positi8 aspsct we can take away from this?
PS : what a stupid profession those AI/ML guys work in. they put out their minds together to make a sword which is gonna cut the heads of s/w engineers, their own breed. not lawyers, not doctors, not even the fucking peons, but their own freaking brothers5 -
Using grafana together with tinc+promotheus, has been a blast.
Initially I wanted to get into ELK with Kibana and all that, but that required 8G of ram, the instructions to get it running in the open source "mode" was nearly non-existent, together with all the ready docker compose stacks out there simply not working or the images being broken.
I'm sure I could've managed around most of those issues, but the fact it is as hungry as gitlab, made it a literal no-go for the usual server resources my clients host or my own scaled down server recently.
Thankfully I remembered that there's grafana and me having experimented some time ago with tinc, so I can have very lightweight beat'esque prometheus agents deployed listening on tinc local net only, with the typical nginx auth and some whitelists to all of the servers I host and all those of my clients.
The dashboard creation was especially great in grafana (tbf promotheus does actually most of it), literally what I always wanted out of those "complicated" solutions, that do it all, but have no proper query language, complex documentation, heavy collectors with no properly named data points, expensive resource runtimes, ..
with grafana I can just easily put dashboards into folders, create users to look only at certain stats or even dashboards (opened up some interesting contracts actually, because now I can also offer proper monitoring for all things delivered), easily drag and drop around stuff to fit more information (most others fix you to a small 3x2 grid, a too big grid for a TV or simply non resizable tiles, making that one counter take up an entire row) and resize to my hearts desire
tinc of course allows me to easily create private networks that are resistant to failure across any region and the routing is done for me, so I don't have to run around it all that much either
P.S: a damn tiny fly went into one of my now 4 monitors and died right in the middle, because I thought it's just some dirt and I pressed it in while trying to wipe it off, so that monitor now serves as the top most on a vesa mount5 -
VSCode doesn't request permission to edit github workflow files by default. Because it's an OAuth app and not a token, I can't grant it scopes that it did not request. I am forced to use SSH or a personal token instead of VSCode's built-in Github authentication, but because there's no convenient way to have VSCode forget that it authenticated a repo, I am also forced to checkout my own repo again and push the changes across.
If you want your product to Just Work, then Just Use Open Processes that are easy to hook into, interrupt or partially replace. Nobody can think of everything. Not even Apple's or Microsoft's mighty designers. What everyone can do is to provide graceful failure modes and offer partial strategies. -
One of the truth no one wants to say because what can not be can not be.... but...
Maven is fuck... bullshit... failure by design.
For each project I need an own settings.xml. Always something not working. The same artifactory password 10 times there. Null pointer exceptions all over the place. Basics like versioning not really solved.
In all my years with Ant I never had so much problems than with Maven.
This settings.xml is really a design failure. Crap.1 -
On the contact page of my project, I want to send data from a HTML form.
What would you use to send it?
Just the regular <form action="/path/to/handler"> and cause a page refresh or use javascript (jQuery) for it and not cause a page refresh?
In both cases, a message will be shown on success or failure.7 -
So I have this habit of copying all my family pics and kids videos onto portable hard disks. Have a 500GB Western Digital since 2012 and another WD 1TB since 2016.
Had one portable HDD failure before that back in 2010, but that contained only old projects code {when I didn't know git} .
So any advice you guys have for me on managing backups of these life memories? I mean I don't trust cloud storage - Google Drive, DropBox etc. And don't want any 3rd party poking into my stuff. That's why these items go straight from Camera to HDD.
What should I do to prepare for another failure? And is there any kind of RAID available in the form of portable solution?
Is it a good idea to change HDD every 5 years or so?10 -
I hate this crap and wish people would stop doing it. It makes my brain bleed and doesn't prevent any difficult to find bugs.
if (TERMINAL_COUNT <= index_thing)
English doesn't work that way, and I don't know about you but this crap is just awkward as hell. Sweet Jesus I wish there was less cargo cult programming in the world. Just because you saw something in a blog that convinced you that reverse comparisons is best doesn't mean it actually is. Use a damn static analysis tool to catch accidental assignments in expressions, don't twist my brain to interpret your weird phrasing of comparison operators. Some of your code reviewers may be dyslexic and have enough problems as it is.
And now for the mini-rant that I'm actually here for: You know what makes for difficult to find bugs? (Hint: It sure as hell isn't an assignment in an expression) Releasing an RTEMS semaphore you've never obtained. You'd think that would cause some kind of panic or assert failure but nope. Instead it causes... misaligned address exceptions? In statically allocated global memory? WTF??1 -
It's important to have a little fun with what you do. You can work on and on like it's a chore and get along with it just fine, but right below the surface of the tools you use lies something truly interesting. Reading code, documentation, blog posts, what have you, all of it is just as helpful in learning as writing code.
And also, be kind. We all write crap code from time to time. As a beginner, I know I do. It's important to take it all as a learning experience.
Personal favourite quote that puts it very well: 'I guess you could call it a “ failure,” but I prefer the term “learning experience".' -
I have my IntelliJ builds set up to make either a pleasant ding or an unpleasant gong sound when my build succeeds or fails respectively (it's a multi-minute build, so it helps when I'm off doing other things while waiting on it). I think I'm going to spend all day tomorrow trying to get Nandor from "What We Do In The Shadows" saying something like "Hooray!" and "It is broken" for success and failure. I'll have to re-watch all the episodes so far, but I'll pay that price gladly. I feel like that would make my life immeasurably better and will be well worth my time to my company, right?1
-
Working on a CS370 (Software Engineering) project with 5 people; 2 of which feel like their time is more important than everyone else's so when we all meet as a group to go over presentations, documentation and other things we need to do as a group, they silently sit alone working on bits of code they should have done previously. Then when we can't get docs done and handed in on time, one of the two decides to spam our group chat at 2am when 2 of us are sleeping because we work in the morning, one of us is sleeping because of morning classes and the last one is doing god knows what. Like, I'm sorry. But failure to do your shit on time does not constitute an emergency on my shit. All of our weekly peer reviews reflect on how no matter what we say to these two; they refuse to work as a team.
!rant, more like dev hint
In a team, your time is not more important than team time. You can do things on your time whenever you want; but unless your entire team shares your schedule, team time might be a rare commodity and should be used as such. -
WOO!!! Taking cord cutting to the extreme!!
The dual channel TV tuner arrived, took it out for a test drive by setting up a few scheduled recordings.
Quality isn't as good as 4K TV and it takes a lot of space as it doesn't use a compressed format... But no more Prime, commercials, and now can watch at 2x speed! Plus that's what the 1TB HD is for...
Though now my worries about drive failure are coming back...14 -
My best friend (a consultant in salesforce) told me that he feels that software development is becoming like a blue collar casual job that anyone who has enough IQ can just pickup and start working. Have in mind that, he doesn't even have coding basics so I take his opinion with a grain of salt (since his work is just knowing the salesforce framework and teaching his clients what button to click where. He spends 80% of his day in business calls or meetings).
Personally I think that anyone can learn coding basics, but only certain people can stay in this field because you need to constantly grow, change, learn new things, have a huge treshold for failure and also somehow motivate yourself. Only 20% of my unversity peers are actually coding nowadays. Also only around 2-3 people out of 10 people in coding bootcamps actually become devs. So for me dev job is clearly not a casual job.
What are your thoughts on this?14 -
Today I tried: pnpm.
Following up my hateful rant against Isaac Schlueter and his decisions on npm.
I went all the way out and tried so many alternatives, honestly found a developer experience much greater than the "official" one.
What triggers me the most is the explicit statement of "other creative means" in this commit https://github.com/npm/arborist/..., you don't talk like that when all other package managers are making creative workarounds for the design failure of node_modules.
I don't know what it is but I really hate this guy.4 -
!dev
!!Lyrics
Really a random post but related to my personal dev-life so maybe it’s at least arguable if it belongs here.
This is one of my all time favorite songs, I can identify myself with it (although I’m reinterpreting some parts).
Back in Highschool I had girlfriends, I had time, I had my entourage, everything except money. All my dad wanted me to become was a rich fucking millionaire. Failure was never accepted, no matter what it was about and everything could always have been done better.
It was pretty much a military childhood. I already loved programming back then but only as a hobby, kinda.
I really wanted to make good money so I started a dev career (with makes gooooood money where I came from). The more I invested in my career, and that was a lot, I more and more lost the understanding of what’s really important, just pursued my goal of being the best fucking dev out there and start my own company in the next 10 years.
Well.. 10 years are over now, I’m still an engineer and I lost everything I had before I started this. Especially friends and relations to women (which I’m not even able to connect to anymore).
In this lyric, the blackbird and raven are the career that just ate me alive. Hope that makes any sense to some of you?..
Anyway, here the lyrics if you wanna read it:
—————————————-
Sons of Anarchy
Come join the murder - white buffalo
There's a blackbird perched outside my window
I hear him calling
I hear him sing
He burns me with his eyes of gold to embers
He sees all my sins
He reads my soul
One day that bird, he spoke to me
Like Martin Luther
Like Pericles
Come join the murder
Come fly with black
We'll give you freedom
From the human trap
Come join the murder
Soar on my wings
You'll touch the hand of God
And he'll make you king
And he'll make you king
On a blanket made of woven shadows
Flew up to heaven
On a raven's glide
His angels they turn my wings to wax now
I fell like judas, grace denied
On that day that he lied to me
Like Martin Luther
Like Pericles
Come join the murder
Come fly with black
We'll give you freedom
From the human trap
Come join the murder
Soar on my wings
You'll touch the hand of God
And he'll make you king
And he'll make you king
I walk among the children of my fathers
The broken wings, betrayal's cost
They call to me but never touch my heart, now
I am too far
I'm too lost
All I can hear is what he spoke to me
Like Martin Luther
Like Pericles
Come join the murder
Come fly with black
We'll give you freedom
From the human trap
Come join the murder
Soar on my wings
You'll touch the hand of God
And he'll make you king
And he'll make you king
So now I curse that raven's fire
You made me hate, you made me burn
He laughed aloud as he flew from eden
You always knew, you never learn
The crow no longer sings to me
Like Martin Luther
Or Pericles
Come join the murder
Come fly with black
We'll give you freedom
From the human trap
Come join the murder
Soar on my wings
You'll touch the hand of God
And he'll make you king
And he'll make you king
Come join the murder
Come fly with black
We'll give you freedom
From the human trap
Come join the murder
Soar on my wings
You'll touch the hand of God
And he'll make you king
And he'll make you king3 -
Either you curse the world or bury yourself in self loathe in the face of repeated failure says a lot about you as a person.
Now what does it mean when you somehow do both at the same time?3 -
What your advice for procrastinator ?
I'm pro in this field 😎
I think the reasom might be that I'm scared from being a failure4 -
So a few notes.
"I" am a failure and a thief and a mimic
"I" never have any actual ideas
"I" tried to distance people from their knowledge base and expertise to make it look like they didn't have any skills and it blew up in my face
"U" are not like me and "U" are indeed skilled and intelligent
"I" spread my legs for a whole generation to keep "U' idle. "I" must now lose my resources and hand over what "I" stole from you
Had "I" not been a nasty little fucked up psychopath, none of this repeat crap wherein "I" act like a fucking hamster with an exercise wheel pellet dispenser and water bottle would be happening.
Just setting the record straight
Distancing people from their skill base and introducing emotional troubles and repeating a loop that had been manipulated does not change the truth. "I" need to do the honest thing and restore all the original people to a state of financial well being and security or more of "Me" will fucking die.
Anytime "I" sabotage "U" to keep you unproductive and underpaid "I" am guaranteeing "I" will be sucking more dick and often asking if you want fries with that
I think using their retarded nomenclature this about sums things up
Also "I" should stop pretending to be the desirable one. Nobody wants "Me" who knows what I'm really like. "I" always mimicked the best and worst versions of "U". Because "I" am not real and noone could ever love "Me" who ever knows "Me"4 -
#Suphle Rant 7: transphporm failure
In this issue, I'll be sharing observations about 3 topics.
First and most significant is that the brilliant SSR templating library I've eyed for so many years, even integrated as Suphle's presentation layer adapter, is virtually not functional. It only works for the trivial use case of outputting the value of a property in the dataset. For instance, when validation fails, preventing execution from reaching the controller, parsing fails without signifying what ordinance was being violated. I trim the stylesheet and it only works when outputting one of the values added by the validation handler. Meaning the missing keys it can't find from controller result is the culprit.
Even when I trimmed everything else for it to pass, the closing `</li>` tag seems to have been abducted.
I mail project owner explaining what I need his library for, no response. Chat one of the maintainers on Twitter, nothing. Since they have no forum, I find their Gitter chatroom, tag them and post my questions. Nothing. The only semblance of a documentation they have is the Github wiki. So, support is practically dead. Project last commit: 2020. It's disappointing that this is how my journey with them ends. There isn't even an alternative that shares the same philosophy. It's so sad to see how everybody is comfortable with PHP templating syntax and back end logic entagled within their markup.
Among all other templating libraries, Blade (which influenced my strong distaste for interspersing markup and PHP), seems to be the most popular. First admission: We're headed back to the Blade trenches, sadly.
2nd Topic: While writing tests yesterday, I had this weird feeling about something being off. I guess that's what code smell is. I was uncomfortable with the excessive amount of mocking wrappers I had to layer upon SUT before I can observe whether the HTML adapter receives expected markup file, when I can simply put a `var_dump` there. There's a black-box test for verifying the output but since the Transphporm headaches were causing it to fail, I tried going white-box. The mocking fixture was such a monstrosity, I imagined Sebastian Bergmann's ghost looking down in abhorrence over how much this Degenerate is perverting and butchering his creation.
I ultimately deleted the test travesty but it gave rise to the question of how properly designed system really is. Or, are certain things beyond testing white box? Are there still gaps in the testing knowledge of a supposed testing connoisseur? 2nd admission.
Lastly, randomly wanted to tweet an idea at Tomas Votruba. Visited his profile, only to see this https://twitter.com/PovilasKorop/.... Apparently, Laravel have implemented yet another feature previously only existing in Suphle (or at the libraries Arkitekt and Deptrac). I laughed mirthlessly as I watch them gain feature-parity under my nose, when Suphle is yet to be launched. I refuse to believe they're actually stalking Suphle
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