Management : "How long you think it would take?"

Me : "now this is a rough estimate, but I think building the back-end and database alone could take 6-months minimum"

Management : "WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? YOU ARE NOT SERIOUS"

me : "its a big proj..."

Management : "I thought it will be something like 10 days, already told the client it can be done"

me : "but we are not ready"

Management : "how are we not ready? we already have the virtual 3D shop, and we can use this ready-to-deploy eCommerce service as our data base "
... "you need to figure this out, this is not acceptable" he continued

* 2 Days Later -talking to my direct boss *
Boss : "since you don't know how to do it..."

me : "what ? I didn't say I can't do it, all I said it will take six months"

Boss : "yeah yeah, anyway there is this studio, a professional polish studio, we called them and they can do it, we will sign a contract with them, this will let you focus on the front-end. good?"

me : "well alright then"

Boss : "please write a doc, explaining everything needed from the backend"
-to me that was the end of it, took a long time to tell me they made the deal-

* 5 Months later *
- "Abdu, can you come here for a minute..."
- "yes boss?"
- "the document we asked you to do for the Polish studio, did you specify that we needed an integration with the API we are using for eCommerce?"

scared to death I answered : "why of course I did!"
I ran to my PC to check it out because I didn't know, I forgot because no one even comment on my doc. I check it out, and it was clearly explained... I got relaxed...

turns out they didn't even do what we asked them for. took them 5 months, and with no communication whatsoever. all their work was useless to us. complete dump waste.

----------------
never mentioned this until a year later... in a heat of moment when they were asking me to make an impossible task with no men and no time... I reminded them of this story... management didn't like it. but it was the truth. they didnt push this crazily this time

After listening to two of our senior devs play ping pong with a new member of our team for TWO DAYS!
DevA: "Try this.."
Junior: "Didn't work"
DevB: "Try that .."
Junior: "Still not working"

I ask..
Me:"What is the problem?"
Few ums...uhs..awkward seconds of silence

Junior: "App is really slow. Takes several seconds to launch and searching either crashes or takes a really long time."
DevA: "We've isolated the issue with Entity Framework. That application was written back when we used VS2010. Since that application isn't used very often, no one has had to update it since."
DevB: "Weird part is the app takes up over 3 gigs of ram. Its obviously a caching issue. We might have to open up a ticket with Microsoft."
Me: "Or remove EF and use ADO."
DevB: "That would be way too much work. The app is supposed to be fully deprecated and replaced this year."
Me: "Three of you for the past two days seems like a lot of work. If EF is the problem, you remove EF."
DevA: "The solution is way too complicated for that. There are 5 projects and 3 of those have circular dependencies. Its a mess."
DevB: "No fracking kidding...if it were written correctly the first time. There aren't even any fracking tests."
Me:"Pretty sure there are only two tables involved, maybe 3 stored procedures. A simple CRUD app like this should be fairly straight forward."
DevB: "Can't re-write the application, company won't allow it. A redesign of this magnitute could take months. If we can't fix the LINQ query, we'll going to have the DBAs change the structures to make the application faster. I don't see any other way."

Holy frack...he didn't just say that.

Over my lunch hour, I strip down the WPF application to the basics (too much to write about, but the included projects only had one or two files), and created an integration test for refactoring the data access to use ADO. After all the tests and EF removed, the app starts up instantly and searches are also instant. Didn't click through all the UI, but the basics worked.

Sat with Junior, pointed out my changes (the 'why' behind the 'what') ...and he how he could write unit tests around the ViewModel behavior in the UI (and making any changes to the data access as needed).

Today's standup:
Junior: "Employee app is fixed. Had some help removing Entity Framework and how it starts up fast and and searches are instant. Going to write unit tests today to verify the UI behaivor. I'll be able to deploy the application tomorrow."
DevA: "What?! No way! You did all that yesterday?"
Me: "I removed the Entity Framework over my lunch hour. Like I said, its basic CRUD and mostly in stored procedures. All the data points are covered by integration tests, but didn't have time for the unit tests. It's likely I broke some UI behavior, but the unit tests should catch those."
DevB: "I was going to do that today. I knew taking out Entity Framework wouldn't be a big deal."

Holy fracking frack. You fracking lying SOB. Deeeep breath...ahhh...thanks devRant. Flame thrower event diverted.

I fucking love people like this.

Yesterday I met a 'friend' who I hadn't seen in a very long time. Just a guy I used to know tbh but let's call him Friend anyway. After a while in the conversation this happened...

*Friend doesn't know I have a degree in CS*

Friend: "WHAT?? YOU LIKE PROGRAMMING? NO WAY! ME TOO!"

Me: "THAT'S AWESOME! You've been programming for long?"

Friend: "A little over a year now. I know almost all languages now. C++, C#, Python, Java and HTML. Still a couple left to go. Once you're on the level I achieved programming becomes really, really easy. How long have you been programming?"

Me: "Almost a decade now"

Friend: "Damn dude you must know all languages by now I suppose?"

Me: "I've been mainly doing C++ so not really haha"

Friend: "I can always help when you're struggling with one language. C++ is pretty easy tbh. You should learn others too btw. HTML for example is pretty important because you can program websites with it"

Me: "Yeah... Thanks... So... What project are you working on right now?"

Friend: "I'm making a register page for my very own forum. The only problem I have is that PHP won't save the login details"

Me: "Hahaha I know the feeling. MySQL?"

Friend: "What?"

Me: "What do you use to save your data"

Friend: "Just a txt file. It's easier that way."

Me: "Hahaha true. Who needs safety right? *smiles*"

Friend: "Actually it's 100% safe because only I can see the txt file so other people can not hack other users."

Me: "Yes! That's great! Cya!"

Friend: "I'm working on a mmorpg too btw! I can learn you to make games if you want. Just call me. Here's my number"

Me: "Alright... Thanks... Bye!"

*Arrives at home*

*Deletes number*

I do not make this up.

I can understand that someone who isn't in the CS industry doesn't take it too seriously and gets hyped when their "Hello World" program works.
I'm fine with that.

The thing that really triggers me is big headed ass holes like this. Like how much more like a absolute dickhead could you possibly more act? Fucking hate people like that.

PM: You know that screen that pops up at the start of the app asking for permission to access health data?

Me: Yeah the iOS HealthKit permission screen. What about it?

PM: Can you take that out. I don't think people are going to agree to it. I want people to use the app.

Me: Well we can't do that, apple says if we want to use HealthKit we have to ask for permission. We shouldn't be touching that data without permission anyway.

PM: Oh no permission is fine I get that, but is it not implied by downloading the app, its clearly a health app. I really don't want people to download it and then uninstall it because they don't like this.

Me: Not really, not everyone will know what data is needed, some of it might be sensitive to them.

PM: Nah I don't buy into that. I asked 5 of my friends on the golf course at the weekend and 3 of them said they wouldn't agree to it, thats 60% of our user base, we can't have that.

Me: ... ok, well I don't agree that your 5 friends is a fair sample to judge the whole world by, either way we have no choice.

Pm: No this isn't going to fly, can we not build our own HealthKit that doesn't have this kind of permission screen? Maybe we could start our own, and invite our partners to use it?

Me: ... no

Pm: why not? We'll have legal draw up something we put in the terms and conditions.

Me: ... it will take months to build for all the different types of devices we have, if they even let us get access to them, and then we will have a different standard to everyone else.

Pm: ... no your not seeing the big picture, i'll run the idea up the ladder.

**It was approved up the ladder, and subsequently cancelled when they realised the scale of the work involved which is both a "thank god" and a "wtf" moment**

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

practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 1: Dealing with the new backend team

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

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

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

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

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

So lets look at some example of their work:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thats all the time we have for today,

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

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

See you all next week,
practiseSafeHex

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

Simplicity 1, complexity 0.

I'm drunk and I'll probably regret this, but here's a drunken rank of things I've learned as an engineer for the past 10 years.

The best way I've advanced my career is by changing companies.

Technology stacks don't really matter because there are like 15 basic patterns of software engineering in my field that apply. I work in data so it's not going to be the same as webdev or embedded. But all fields have about 10-20 core principles and the tech stack is just trying to make those things easier, so don't fret overit.

There's a reason why people recommend job hunting. If I'm unsatisfied at a job, it's probably time to move on.

I've made some good, lifelong friends at companies I've worked with. I don't need to make that a requirement of every place I work. I've been perfectly happy working at places where I didn't form friendships with my coworkers and I've been unhappy at places where I made some great friends.

I've learned to be honest with my manager. Not too honest, but honest enough where I can be authentic at work. What's the worse that can happen? He fire me? I'll just pick up a new job in 2 weeks.

If I'm awaken at 2am from being on-call for more than once per quarter, then something is seriously wrong and I will either fix it or quit.

pour another glass

Qualities of a good manager share a lot of qualities of a good engineer.

When I first started, I was enamored with technology and programming and computer science. I'm over it.

Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all.

The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.)

Related to above, writing good proposals for changes is a great skill.

Almost every holy war out there (vim vs emacs, mac vs linux, whatever) doesn't matter... except one. See below.

The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me.

If I ever find myself thinking I'm the smartest person in the room, it's time to leave.

I don't know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly. No really, they should be paid like half a mil a year just base salary. Fuck they have to understand both front end AND back end AND how different browsers work AND networking AND databases AND caching AND differences between web and mobile AND omg what the fuck there's another framework out there that companies want to use? Seriously, why are webdevs paid so little.

We should hire more interns, they're awesome. Those energetic little fucks with their ideas. Even better when they can question or criticize something. I love interns.

sip

Don't meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He's a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he's making it up as he goes along like the rest of us.

Tech stack matters. OK I just said tech stack doesn't matter, but hear me out. If you hear Python dev vs C++ dev, you think very different things, right? That's because certain tools are really good at certain jobs. If you're not sure what you want to do, just do Java. It's a shitty programming language that's good at almost everything.

The greatest programming language ever is lisp. I should learn lisp.

For beginners, the most lucrative programming language to learn is SQL. Fuck all other languages. If you know SQL and nothing else, you can make bank. Payroll specialtist? Maybe 50k. Payroll specialist who knows SQL? 90k. Average joe with organizational skills at big corp? $40k. Average joe with organization skills AND sql? Call yourself a PM and earn $150k.

Tests are important but TDD is a damn cult.

Cushy government jobs are not what they are cracked up to be, at least for early to mid-career engineers. Sure, $120k + bennies + pension sound great, but you'll be selling your soul to work on esoteric proprietary technology. Much respect to government workers but seriously there's a reason why the median age for engineers at those places is 50+. Advice does not apply to government contractors.

Third party recruiters are leeches. However, if you find a good one, seriously develop a good relationship with them. They can help bootstrap your career. How do you know if you have a good one? If they've been a third party recruiter for more than 3 years, they're probably bad. The good ones typically become recruiters are large companies.

Options are worthless or can make you a millionaire. They're probably worthless unless the headcount of engineering is more than 100. Then maybe they are worth something within this decade.

Work from home is the tits. But lack of whiteboarding sucks.

Another incident which made a Security Researcher cry 😭😭😭
[ NOTE : Check my profile for older incident ]
-----------------------------------------------------------
I was invited by a fellow friend to a newly built Cyber Security firm , I didn't asked for any work issues as it was my friend who asked me to go there . Let's call it X for now . It was a good day , overcast weather , cloudy sky , everything was nice before I entered the company . And the conversation is as follows :

Fella - Hey! Nice to see you with us .
Me - Thanks! Where to? *Asking for my work​ area*
Fella - Right behind me .
Me - Good thing :)
Fella - So , the set-up is good to go I suppose .
Me - Yeah :)
*I'm in my cabin and what I can see is a Windows VM inside Ubuntu 12.4*

*Fast forward to 1 hour and now I'm at the cafeteria with the Fella*

Fella - Hey! Sup? How was the day?
Me - Fine *in a bit confused voice*
Fella - What happened mate , you good with the work?
Me - Yeah but why you've got Windows inside Ubuntu , I mean what's the use of Ubuntu when I have to work on Windows?
Fella - Do you know Linux is safe from Malwares?
Me - Yeah
Fella - That's why we are using Windows on VM inside Linux .
Me - For what?
Fella - To keep Windows safe from Malwares as in our company , we can't afford any data loss!
Me - 😵 *A big face palm which went through my head and hit another guy , made me a bit unconscious*

I ran for my life as soon as possible , in future I'm never gonna work for anyone before asking their preferences .

!(short rant)

Look I understand online privacy is a concern and we should really be very much aware about what data we are giving to whom. But when does it turn from being aware to just being paranoid and a maniac about it.? I mean okay, I know facebook has access to your data including your whatsapp chat (presumably), google listens to your conversations and snoops on your mail and shit, amazon advertises that you must have their spy system (read alexa) install in your homes and numerous other cases. But in the end it really boils down to "everyone wants your data but who do you trust your data with?"

For me, facebook and the so-called social media sites are a strict no-no but I use whatsapp as my primary chating application. I like to use google for my searches because yaa it gives me more accurate search results as compared to ddg because it has my search history. I use gmail as my primary as well as work email because it is convinient and an adv here and there doesnt bother me. Their spam filters, the easy accessibility options, the storage they offer everything is much more convinient for me. I use linux for my work related stuff (obviously) but I play my games on windows. Alexa and such type of products are again a big no-no for me but I regularly shop from amazon and unless I am searching for some weird ass shit (which if you want to, do it in some incognito mode) I am fine with coming across some advs about things I searched for. Sometimes it reminds me of things I need to buy which I might have put off and later on forgot. I have an amazon prime account because prime video has some good shows in there. My primary web browser is chrome because I simply love its developer tools and I now have gotten used to it. So unless chrome is very much hogging on my ram, in which case I switch over to firefox for some of my tabs, I am okay with using chrome. I have a motorola phone with stock android which means all google apps pre-installed. I use hangouts, google keep, google map(cannot live without it now), heck even google photos, but I also deny certain accesses to apps which I find fishy like if you are a game, you should not have access to my gps. I live in India where we have aadhar cards(like the social securtiy number in the USA) where the government has our fingerprints and all our data because every damn thing now needs to be linked with your aadhar otherwise your service will be terminated. Like your mobile number, your investment policies, your income tax, heck even your marraige certificates need to be linked with your aadhar card. Here, I dont have any option but to give in because somehow "its in the interest of the nation". Not surprisingly, this thing recently came to light where you can get your hands on anyone's aadhar details including their fingerprints for just ₹50($1). Fuck that shit.

tl;dr
There are and should be always exceptions when it comes to privacy because when you give the other person your data, it sometimes makes your life much easier. On the other hand, people/services asking for your data with the sole purpose of infilterating into your private life and not providing any usefulness should just be boycotted. It all boils down to till what extent you wish to share your data(ranging from literally installing a spying device in your house to them knowing that I want to understand how spring security works) and how much do you trust the service with your data. Example being, I just shared most of my private data in this rant with a group of unknown people and I am okay with it, because I know I can trust dev rant with my posts(unlike facebook).

Our website once had it’s config file (“old” .cgi app) open and available if you knew the file name. It was ‘obfuscated’ with the file name “Name of the cgi executable”.txt. So browsing, browsing.cgi, config file was browsing.txt.
After discovering the sql server admin password in plain text and reporting it to the VP, he called a meeting.
VP: “I have a report that you are storing the server admin password in plain text.”
WebMgr: “No, that is not correct.”
Me: “Um, yes it is, or we wouldn’t be here.”
WebMgr: “It’s not a network server administrator, it’s SQL Server’s SA account. Completely secure since that login has no access to the network.”
<VP looks over at me>
VP: “Oh..I was not told *that* detail.”
Me: “Um, that doesn’t matter, we shouldn’t have any login password in plain text, anywhere. Besides, the SA account has full access to the entire database. Someone could drop tables, get customer data, even access credit card data.”
WebMgr: “You are blowing all this out of proportion. There is no way anyone could do that.”
Me: “Uh, two weeks ago I discovered the catalog page was sending raw SQL from javascript. All anyone had to do was inject a semicolon and add whatever they wanted.”
WebMgr: “Who would do that? They would have to know a lot about our systems in order to do any real damage.”
VP: “Yes, it would have to be someone in our department looking to do some damage.”
<both the VP and WebMgr look at me>
Me: “Open your browser and search on SQL Injection.”
<VP searches on SQL Injection..few seconds pass>
VP: “Oh my, this is disturbing. I did not know SQL injection was such a problem. I want all SQL removed from javascript and passwords removed from the text files.”
WebMgr: “Our team is already removing the SQL, but our apps need to read the SQL server login and password from a config file. I don’t know why this is such a big deal. The file is read-only and protected by IIS. You can’t even read it from a browser.”
VP: “Well, if it’s secured, I suppose it is OK.”
Me: “Open your browser and navigate to … browse.txt”
VP: “Oh my, there it is.”
WebMgr: “You can only see it because your laptop had administrative privileges. Anyone outside our network cannot access the file.”
VP: “OK, that makes sense. As long as IIS is securing the file …”
Me: “No..no..no.. I can’t believe this. The screen shot I sent yesterday was from my home laptop showing the file is publicly available.”
WebMgr: “But you are probably an admin on the laptop.”
<couple of awkward seconds of silence…then the light comes on>
VP: “OK, I’m stopping this meeting. I want all admin users and passwords removed from the site by the end of the day.”

Took a little longer than a day, but after reviewing what the web team changed:
- They did remove the SQL Server SA account, but replaced it with another account with full admin privileges.
- Replaced the “App Name”.txt with centrally located config file at C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\config.txt (hard-coded in the app)
When I brought this up again with my manager..
Mgr: “Yea, I know, it sucks. WebMgr showed the VP the config file was not accessible by the web site and it wasn’t using the SA password. He was satisfied by that. Web site is looking to beat projections again by 15%, so WebMgr told the other VPs that another disruption from a developer could jeopardize the quarterly numbers. I’d keep my head down for a while.”

What kind of supercomputer you have to use to get these fucking websites to work smoothly????

I'm on a fucking gigabit connection, ryzen 7 7700x, 32GB ram, and a fucking nvme, all it takes is opening a fucking recipe site and I'm instantly transported back to the 80s. I swear if i see another 4k asset I'm gonna punch something.

WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO FUNCTION OVER FORM????

Oh do you want me to disable my addblocker??? How about: you make a site that works you fuck. No i will not fucking subscribe to your brain-dead newsletter why the fuck would I???
And since when are cookies needed for a fucking plaintext site you asshat??? Tracking??? I swear if you could you would generate metadata from my clipped fingernails if it meant you could stick "Big data" next to that zip-bomb you call a website.

I WOULD like to read your article, possibly even watch a couple of ads on my sidebar for you, but noooooo you had to have the stupid fucking google vinegrette or however the fuck they are calling the fucking thing now.

The age of the web sucks the happiness out of life, and despite having all of this processing power, I am jealous of my fathers RSS feeds.

I'm sorry web people, I know it's not your fault, I know designers and management don't give a shit how long a website takes to load. I just wanted to make a fucking omelette.

I’m so mad I’m fighting back anger tears. This is a long rant and I apologize but I’m so freaking mad.

So a few weeks ago I was asked by my lead staff person to do a data analysis project for the director of our dept. It was a pretty big project, spanning thousands of users. I was excited because I love this sort of thing and I really don’t have anything else to do. Well I don’t have access to the dataset, so I had to get it from my lead and he said he’d do it when he had a chance. Three days later he hadn’t given it to me yet. I approach him and he follows me to my desk, gives me his login and password to login to the secure freaking database, then has me clone it and put it on my computer.

So, I start working on it. It took me about six hours to clean the database, 2 to set up the parameters and plan of attack, and two or three to visualize the data. I realized about halfway through that my lead wasn’t sure about the parameters of the analysis, and I mentioned to him that the director had asked for more information than what he was having me do. He tells me he will speak with director.

So, our director is never there, so I give my lead about a week to speak with her, in the mean time I finish the project to the specifications that the director gave. I even included notes about information that I would need to make more accurate predictions, to draw conclusions, etc. It was really well documented.

Finally, exasperated, and with the project finished but just sitting on my computer for a week, I approached my director on a Saturday when I was working overtime. She confirmed that I needed to what she said in the project specs (duh), and also mentioned she needed a bigger data set than what I was working with if we had one. She told me to speak to my lead on Monday about this, but said that my work looked great.

Monday came and my lead wasn’t there so I spoke with my supervisor and she said that what I was using was the entire dataset, and that my work looked great and I could just send it off. So, at this point 2/3 of my bosses have seen the project, reviewed it, told me it was great, and confirmed that I was doing the right thing.

I sent it off to the director to disseminate to the appropriate people. Again, she looked at it and said it was great.

A week later (today) one of the people that the project was sent to approaches me and tells me that i did a great job and thank you so much for blah blah blah. She then asks me if the dataset I used included blahblah, and I said no, that I used what was given to me but that I’d be happy to go in and fix it if given the necessary data.

She tells me, “yeah the director was under the impression that these numbers were all about blahblah, so I think there was some kind of misunderstanding.” And then implied that I would not be the one fixing the mistake.

I’m being taken off of the project for two reasons: 1. it took to long to get the project out in the first place,
2. It didn’t even answer the questions that they needed answered.

I fucking told them in the notes and ALL THROUGH THE VISUALIZATIONS that I needed additional data to compare these things I’m so fucking mad. I’m so mad.

Imagine, you get employed to restart a software project. They tell you, but first we should get this old software running. It's 'almost finished'.
A WPF application running on a soc ... with a 10" touchscreen on win10, a embedded solution, to control a machine, which has been already sold to customers. You think, 'ok, WTF, why is this happening'?
You open the old software - it crashes immediately.
You open it again but now you are so clever to copy an xml file manually to the root folder and see all of it's beauty for the first time (after waiting for the freezed GUI to become responsive):
* a static logo of the company, taking about 1/5 of the screen horizontally
* circle buttons
* and a navigation interface made in the early 90's from a child
So you click a button and - it crashes.
You restart the software.
You type something like 'abc' in a 'numberfield' - it crashes.
OK ... now you start the application again and try to navigate to another view - and? of course it crashes again.
You are excited to finally open the source code of this masterpiece.

Thank you jesus, the 'dev' who did this, didn't forget to write every business logic in the code behind of the views.
He even managed to put 6 views into one and put all their logig in the code behind!
He doesn't know what binding is or a pattern like MVVM.
But hey, there is also no validation of anything, not even checks for null.
He was so clever to use the GUI as his place to save data and there is a lot of parsing going on here, every time a value changes.
A thread must be something he never heard about - so thats why the GUI always freezes.

You tell them: It would be faster to rewrite the whole thing, because you wouldn't call it even an alpha. Nobody listenes.
Time passes by, new features must be implemented in this abomination, you try to make the cripple walk and everyone keeps asking: 'When we can start the new software?' and the guy who wrote this piece of shit in the first place, tries to give you good advice in coding and is telling you again: 'It was almost finished.' *facepalm*
And you? You would like to do him and humanity a big favour by hiting him hard in the face and breaking his hands, so he can never lay a hand on any keyboard again, to produce something no one serious would ever call code.

The list would be quite long.

I think Google is still making good tools, but just like Apple the integrations get all so tight and constricting... And with their data, if it goes wrong, it will go wrong hard.

I feel like YouTube is gliding into a state where cheap clickbait floats to the top and finding quality gets more difficult as well, their algorithm is more and more tuned to choose recent popular stuff over good older gems.

Microsoft is all pretend lovey dovey cuddling open source, but I'm still suspicious it's all a hug of death. I was never a big fan, but they're seriously dropping balls when it comes to windows-as-a-service, taking away so much personal control from end users even though they can't be trusted to babysit either.

Amazon is creeping it's way through the internet, charging $10/m to join the vip club infesting houses with spytubes to sell more plastic crap. Bezos' only right to keep wasting oxygen is BlueOrigin, but he'll probably fuck that up as well turning spaceflight into a decadent prime consumer orgy instead of something inspiring.

Facebook... Well, that's self explanatory. Fuck it, everything it pretends to be, and everyone who still has an account with a rusty spike.

Uber and AirBnB, with their fake ass mission of a green shared economy, but they trample over employees, customers and neighbors to build their ivory towers of progressive illusions.

Then there's a million declining brands.

I liked Skype for example when it was first released, Just like how I started out liking (and then hating) Discord, Slack, etc... They're all tools which seem fast and easy, but then they get us further away from solid protocols, get us entrenched into limiting, bloated and sometimes even dangerous tools. As my dad used to say: "Companies are like women, if you go for cheap, fast and easy you'll end up with a burning dick and half your savings gone"

You know what, fuck all tech companies.

OK, devrant is still pretty nice... For now.

You can believe or not but it’s just one of those stories. It’s long and crazy and it probably happened.

A few years ago I was interviewed by this big insurance company. They asked me on linkedin and were interested. They didn’t specify who they were so I didn’t specify who I am either.

After they revealed who they are I was just curious how they fuck they want to spend those billions of dollars they claimed in their press notes about this fucking digital transformation everyone is talking about. The numbers were big.

I got into 3 or 4 phone/skype interviews without technical questions and I was invited to see them by person.
I know that it would be funny because they didn’t asked me for CV so they didn’t know anything about me and I was just more curious how far I can get without revealing myself.

They canceled interview at midnight and I was in the middle of Louis de Funès comedies marathon so I didn’t sleep whole night. I assumed they would just reschedule but then they phoned me at 8 am if I can come because they made mistake.

So at first talk I was just interviewed by some manager I knowed after 5 minutes he would be shitty as fuck and demand stupid things in no time because he is not technical. He was trying to explain me that they got so great people and they do everything so fast.

From my experience speed and programming are not the things that match. ( for reference of my thought see three virtues of a GREAT programmer )

So I just pissed them off by asking what they would do with me when I finish this transformation thingy next year. ( Probably get rid off and fire at some point were my thoughts )

Then I got this technical interview on newest gold color MacBook pro - pair programming ( they were showing off how much money they have all the time ).
The person asked me to transform json and get some data in javascript .

Really that was the thing and I was so bored and tired that I just asked in what ES standard I can code.
The problem was despite he told me I can do anything and they are using newest standards ( yeah right ) the “for of” loop didn’t worked and he even didn’t know that syntax existed. So I explained him it’s the newest syntax pointing mozilla page and that he need to adjust his configuration. Because we didn’t have time for that I just did it using var an function by writing bunch of code.
When he was asking me if I want to write some tests probably because my code looked ugly as fuck ( I didn’t sleep for more then 24 hours at that point and wanted to live the building as fast as I can) I told I finished and there is no time for tests because it’s so simple and dumb task. The code worked.

After showing me how awesome their office is ( yeah please I work from home so I don’t care ) I got into the talk with VP of engineering and he was the only person who asked me where is my CV because he didn’t know what to talk about. I just laughed at him and told him that I got here just by talking how awesome I am so we can talk about whatever he wants.
After quick talk about 4 different problems where I introduced 4 different languages and bunch of libraries just because I can and I worked with those he was mine.

He told me about this awesome stack they’re building with kubernetes and micro services and the shitty future where they want to put IOT into peoples ass to sell them insurance and suddenly I got awake and started to want that job but behind that all awesomeness there was just .NET bridge with stack of mainframes running COBOL that they want to get rid off and move company to the cloud.

They needed mostly people who would dump code to different technology stack and get rid of old stack ( and probably those old people ) and I was bored again because I work more in r&d field where you sometimes need to think about something that don’t exist and be creative.

I asked him why it would take so much time so he explained me how they would do the transformation by consolidating bunch of companies and how much money they would make by probably firing people that don’t know about it to this day.

I didn’t met any person working permanently there but only consultants from corporations and people hired in some 3rd party company created by this mother company.

They didn’t responded with any decision after me wasting so much time and they asked me for interview for another position year after.
I just explained HR person how they treat people and I don’t want to work there for any money.

If You reached this point it is the end and if it was entertaining thank YOU I did my best.

Have a nice day.

What kind of cum gargling gerbil shelfer stores and transmits user passwords in plain text, as well as displays them in the clear, Everywhere!

This, alongside other numerous punishable by death, basic data and user handling flaws clearly indicate this fucking simpleton who is "more certified than you" clearly doesn't give a flying fuck about any kind of best practice that if the extra time was taken to implement, might not totally annihilate the company in lawsuits when several big companies gang up to shower rape us with lawsuits over data breaches.

Even better than that is the login fields don't even differentiate between uppercase or lowercase, I mean WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK DO YOU SELF RIGHTEOUS IGNORANT CUNTS THINK IS GOING TO HAPPEN IN THIS SCENARIO?

This happend to me around 2 weeks ago. For some reason, I decied to post this now.

I won the lottery, yey! I mean, bot really, but I am <19yo student, "less than junior dev" in my office, but sonce I am the only one who is capable of working with hardware, I was working month back as a sysadmin for a few days. Our last sysadmin was really good working but really, really toxic guy, so he got fired on a spot after argument with some manager or whatever, no big deal, we could have another guy hired in a week. But, our backup server literally was on fire, all data probably dead because bad capacitor or whatever. This was our only backup of everything at the time. Everyone in full fucking panic mode, we had literally no other working HW we could use for backup, but then comes me, intern employed on his first dev job for 3 months. That day I bought some HW for my own personal server at home (Intel NUC with some Celeron, 4GB DDR4 RAM and two 240GB SSDs for RAID 1. My manager asked everyone in the office for sollution how to survive next 4 days before new server arrives. People there had no idea what tk do and no knowedgle about HW, I just came from a break and offered my components for a week, since there was noone else who can work with HW, servers and stuff like this, manager offered me $500+HW cost if I, random intern, can make it work. I installed Debian on that little PC, created RAID1 from both SSDs, installed MySQL server and mirrored GIT server from our last standing server (we had two before one of them went lit 🔥), made simple Python script to copy all data on that RAID, with some help of our database guy copied whole DB from production to this little computer and edited some PHP so every SQL request made on our server will run on that NUC too. Everything after ±2 hours worked perfectly. Untill a fucking PSU burned in our server and took RAID controller with him in sillicon heaven next night, so we could not access any data unltill we got a new one. Thanks to every god out there, I was able to create software RAID from survived HDDs on our production server and copy all data from that NUC on the servers software RAID and make it working at 3 AM in the night before an exam 😂. Without this, we would be next ±40 hours without aerver running and we might loose soke of our data and customers. So my little skill with Linux, Python, MySQL and most importantly my NUC hardware I got that day running as a backup server saved maybe whole company 😂.
Btw, guess who is now employee of the year with $2500 bonus? 😀
Sorry for bragging and log post, but I was so lucky an so happy when everything worked out, good luck to all sysadmins out there! 👍

TL:DR: Random intern saved company and made some money 😂

A big FUCK YOU to chrome, and a big FUCK YOU to google in generally. First the hell that is code.org, then the chrome. I genuinely want to open a dictionary in google to see if the word "privacy" is in there. Sure, first it was tracking users with by making them agree to a long ass TOS no one wants to read except lawyers, then barely even giving any info and asking for consent with YOUR data, but this is too far. For all you that dont know, LanSchool is an application that allows teachers to see students screens, internet history and more. Its the reason kids can't play games in English class. But most importantly, its a chrome extension. We have to do assignments from home right? So when we logon to the school account from home, LANSCHOOL GETS DOWNLOADED ANYRACKS EVERYTHING I DO. It pains me how teachers can view so much information unfairly because of some unknowing students, my friends privacy was unfairly in the hands of google and the school system. Right when I found out about tit (~2 mins after i first logged on) i made an Ubuntu VM just for goddamn google docs. Back to my friend, he went on some websites not to be considered appropriate, and got in huge trouble. He was completely unaware of the fact that they could see his screen, and I resent google for allowing a third party to manipulate my PERSONAL COMPUTER without my consent. Die google, you ruined android, which had so much potential, and now the web and virtual privacy. You should be <strike>ashamed</strike> dead, and I hope in the future you realize that one day people will have common sense.

From a design meeting yesterday:

MyBoss: "The estimate hours seem low for a project of this size. Is everything accounted for?"
WebDev1: "Yes, we feel everything for the web site is accounted for."
-- ding ding...my spidey sense goes off
Me: "What about merchandising?"
MerchDevMgr: "Our estimate pushed the hours over what the stakeholders wanted to spend. Web department nixed it to get the proposal approved."
MyBoss: "WTF!? How the hell can this project go anywhere without merchandising entering the data!?"
WebDev2: "Its fine. We'll just get the data from merchandising and enter it by hand. It will only be temporary"
Me: "Temporary for who? Are you expecting developers to validate and maintain data?"
WebDev1: "It won't be a big deal."
MyBoss: "Yes it is! When the data is wrong, who are they going to blame!?"
WebDev1: "Oh, we didn't really think of that."
MerchDevMgr: "I did, but the CEO really wants this project completed, but the Web VPs would only accept half the hours estimated."
Me: "Then you don't do it. Period. Its better to do it right the first time than half-ass. How do think the CEO will react to finding out developers are responsible for the data entry?"
MerchDevMgr: "He would be pissed."
MyBoss: "I'm not signing off on this design. You can proceed without my approval., but I'll make a note on the document as to why. If you talk to Eric and Tom about the long term implications, they'll listen. At the end of the day, the MerchVPs are responsible to the CEO."
WebDev1: "OK, great. Now, the database, it should be SQLServer ..."

I checked out after that...daydreamed I was a viking.

FUCK PHP!!!
We were trying to go live with a big online shop, it is connected through a crappy API to SAP.
PHP keeps outputting fucking errors because our intern doesn't fucking know how to properly write PHP.

YEAH, JUST FUCKING RETURN A WHOLE DIFFERENT TYPE OF DATA IF THE FUNCTION HAS AN ERROR.

Oh and using fucking strtr( ... ) to insert stuff in a string is REALLY FUCKING 1337...

And when you think the whole fuckery has reached the summit, just look at how HE FUCKING CREATED THE UGLY EMAIL TEMPLATE:
$content .= "UGLY HTML ABOMINATION";
$content .= "MORE UGLY HTML";
$content .= "HTML WITH SPELLING ERRORS";
$content .= "<table>";
$content .= "TEARS OF TIM BERNERS LEE";
$content .= "<table>HE FOGOT THE FUCKING '/'";

and dozens more of these lines...

and the whole piece for ALL 3 FUCKING LANGUAGES...

Thanks for writing the fucking backend stuff, it is better to rewrite the whole piece.

Story time...of how HR actually did its job of taking care of employees.

So, I started at this new gig on December, the boss was all sunshine and promise (big red flag now to think back). Then as time passed, he started seeming...off. To a point I considered quitting my boss just after 2 months of working for him.

Then one morning we had a project meeting. He started verbally abusing me, calling me incompetent, bashing my work (of which he knew ~nothing, his experience 30 years back). Earlier in the week he demanded me to make a presentation which he in this meeting told is complete bullshit without actually reading any of it. He told me 'I am your boss, you do exactly as I say' when I told him something is technologically impossible in the situation we're in. He *actually* told me to break the law with data protection...

This was like wtf dude. That's not how you manage people. So, I made an HR ticket about his behaviour. They were *shocked* and escalated the matter.

Long story short: he was a bully, he's getting fired, my team has a new manager. My workplace actually appreciates my expertise.

Bad thing in this is, now I actually need to continue doing my job. ;_;

What an absolute fucking disaster of a day. Strap in, folks; it's time for a bumpy ride!

I got a whole hour of work done today. The first hour of my morning because I went to work a bit early. Then people started complaining about Jenkins jobs failing on that one Jenkins server our team has been wanting to decom for two years but management won't let us force people to move to new servers. It's a single server with over four thousand projects, some of which run massive data processing jobs that last DAYS. The server was originally set up by people who have since quit, of course, and left it behind for my team to adopt with zero documentation.

Anyway, the 500GB disk is 100% full. The memory (all 64GB of it) is fully consumed by stuck jobs. We can't track down large old files to delete because du chokes on the workspace folder with thousands of subfolders with no Ram to spare. We decide to basically take a hacksaw to it, deleting the workspace for every job not currently in progress. This of course fucked up some really poorly-designed pipelines that relied on workspaces persisting between jobs, so we had to deal with complaints about that as well.

So we get the Jenkins server up and running again just in time for AWS to have a major incident affecting EC2 instance provisioning in our primary region. People keep bugging me to fix it, I keep telling them that it's Amazon's problem to solve, they wait a few minutes and ask me to fix it again. Emails flying back and forth until that was done.

Lunch time already. But the fun isn't over yet!

I get back to my desk to find out that new hires or people who got new Mac laptops recently can't even install our toolchain, because management has started handing out M1 Macs without telling us and all our tools are compiled solely for x86_64. That took some troubleshooting to even figure out what the problem was because the only error people got from homebrew was that the formula was empty when it clearly wasn't.

After figuring out that problem (but not fully solving it yet), one team starts complaining to us about a Github problem because we manage the github org. Except it's not a github problem and I already knew this because they are a Problem Team that uses some technical authoring software with Git integration but they only have even the barest understanding of what Git actually does. Turns out it's a Git problem. An update for Git was pushed out recently that patches a big bad vulnerability and the way it was patched causes problems because they're using Git wrong (multiple users accessing the same local repo on a samba share). It's a huge vulnerability so my entire conversation with them went sort of like:

"Please don't."
"We have to."
"Fine, here's a workaround, this will allow arbitrary code execution by anyone with physical or virtual access to this computer that you have sitting in an unlocked office somewhere."
"How do I run a Git command I don't use Git."

So that dealt with, I start taking a look at our toolchain, trying to figure out if I can easily just cross-compile it to arm64 for the M1 macbooks or if it will be a more involved fix. And I find all kinds of horrendous shit left behind by the people who wrote the tools that, naturally, they left for us to adopt when they quit over a year ago. I'm talking entire functions in a tool used by hundreds of people that were put in as a joke, poorly documented functions I am still trying to puzzle out, and exactly zero comments in the code and abbreviated function names like "gars", "snh", and "jgajawwawstai".

While I'm looking into that, the person from our team who is responsible for incident communication finally gets the AWS EC2 provisioning issue reported to IT Operations, who sent out an alert to affected users that should have gone out hours earlier.

Meanwhile, according to the health dashboard in AWS, the issue had already been resolved three hours before the communication went out and the ticket remains open at this moment, as far as I know.

Round up kids.
I have a story to tell. The story of a war I've lost. Many battles were fought and many hours were wasted.
This is the story of wasp in a computer lab.

Today, the weather was good. So your old pal, Nomi, decided to open the windows. And as usual, that's where it all started.
So Nomi sat down and worked for a few hours. Tweaking two different neural nets, adding to its dimensions and concatenating the living shit out of the data they were supposed to process. After, she tried testing and testing and testing. It was early afternoon at this point and she was hungry. She went to close the windows and go for lunch.... When she realized, that she's not alone in the room. A big ass wasp was sitting on one of the curtains.

Now, Nomi doesn't have a good relationship with bugs and flying shit. Wait, no, she doesn't have a good relationship with moving things in general. So she panicked. She begged the wasp to leave. The wasp sat on the curtain and smirked at her. So after a while, she left the windows wide open, turned off the lights, put her hoodie on and went for lunch.

(btw, at this point my hoodie smells of sweat, fried onion, steak, cigarette and shisha. Don't ask. It was a long two weeks)

When she came back, the wasp was nowhere to be seen. So she assumed that the wasp got tired and left. But oh, how wrong she was.

After few hours, she heard something. She assumed it was just a fly. Actually, she hoped it was a fly and not the return of the wasp. But all her hopes were in vein.

She heard a buzz. And all of a sudden, an angry wasp flew in her direction. She dodged the attack and got under the table. But the wasp was not letting this go. Nomi jumped out of the room and left the door open. The wasp hid itself. She waited and waited but no sign of wasp. So she ran back in the room, and opened the window and ran back outside. She waited. The wasp occasionally would fly from one hideout to another. The wasp was making herself comfortable. At one point Nomi got angry and threw a shoe at the wasp, but the wasp caught the shoe and threw it back at her while maniacally laughing at her.

So she gave in. This was enough for the day. She ran back in, closed the window, turned off the computer, took her bag, turned off the light, and closed the door. All in less than 15 seconds. She came outside panicked and distressed, and now she's on her way home hoping that by tomorrow the wasp is gonna be dead.

The wasp and the robots are sitting alone in the lab tonight. I hope when the robots uprising happens, the robots can forgive me for abandoning them powerlessly with a wasp. 😟

Oh man. Mine are the REASON why people dislike PHP.

Biggest Concern: Intranet application for 3 staff members that allows them to set the admin data for an application that our userbase utilizes. Everything was fucking horrible, 300+ php files of spaghetti that did not escape user input, did not handle proper redirects, bad algo big O shit and then some. My pain point? I was testing some functionality when upon clicking 3 random check boxes you would get an error message that reads something like this "hi <SENSITIVE USERNAME DATA> you are attempting to use <SERVER IP ADDRESS> using <PASSWORD> but something went wrong! Call <OLD DEVELOPER's PHONE NUMBER> to provide him this <ERROR CODE>"

I panicked, closed that shit and rewrote it in an afternoon, that fucking retard had a tendency to use over 400 files of php for the simplest of fucking things.

Another one, that still baffles me and the other dev (an employee that has been there since the dawn of time) we have this massive application that we just can't rewrite due to time constraints. there is one file with (shit you not) a php include function that when you reach the file it is including it is just......a php closing tag. Removing it breaks down the application. This one is over 6000 files (I know) and we cannot understand what in the love of Lerdorf and baby Torvalds is happening.

From a previous job we had this massive in-house Javascript "framework" for ajax shit that for whatever reason unknown to me had a bunch of function and object names prefixed with "hotDog<rest of the function name>", this was used by two applications. One still in classic ASP and the other in php version 4.something

Legacy apps written in Apache Velocity, which in itself is not that bad, but I, even as a PHP developer, do not EVER mix views with logic. I like my shit separated AF thank you very much.

A large mobile application that interfaced with fucking everything via webviews. Shit was absolutley fucking disgusting, and I felt we were cheating our users.

A rails app with 1000 controller methods.

An express app with 1000 router methods with callbacks instead of async await even though async await was already a thing.

ultraFuckingLarge Delphi project with really no consideration for best practices. I, to this day enjoy Object Pascal, but the way in which people do delphi can scare me.

ASP.NET Application in wich there seemed to be a large portion of bolted in self made ioc framework from the lead dev, absolute shitfest, homie refused to use an actual ioc framework for it, they did pay the price after I left.

My own projects when I have to maintain them.

My co-workers hate it when I ask this question on a technical interview, but my common one is "what is the difference between a varchar(max) and varchar(8000) when they are both storing 8000 characters"

Answer, you cannot index a varchar(max). A varchar(max) and varchar(8000) both store the data in the table but a max will go to blob storage if it is greater than 8000.

No one ever knows the answer but I like to ask it to see how people think. Then I tell them that no one ever gets that right and it isn't a big deal that they don't know it, as I give them the answer.

A lot of engineering fads go in circle.

Architecture in the 80s: Mainframe and clients.

Architecture in the 90s: Software systems connected by an ESB.

Architecture in the 2000s: Big central service and everyone connects to it for everything

Architecture in the 2010s: Decentralized microservices that communicate with queues.

Current: RabbitMQ and Kafka.

... Can't we just go back to the 90s?

I hate fads.
I hate when I have to get some data, and it's scattered on 20 different servers, and to load a fucking account page, a convoluted network of 40 apps have to be activated, some in PHP, others in JS, others on Java, that are developed by different teams, connected to different tiny ass DBs, all on huge clusters of tiny ass virtual machines that get 30% load at peak hours, 90% of which comes from serializing and parsing messages. 40 people maintaining this nightmare, that could've been just 7 people making a small monolithic system that easily handles this workload on a 4-core server with 32GB of RAM.
Tripple it, put it behind a load balancer, proper DB replication (use fucking CockroachDB if you really want survivability), and you've got zero downtime at a fraction of the cost.

Just because something's cool now, doesn't mean that everybody has to blindly follow it for fucks sake!

Same rant goes for functional vs OOP and all that crap. Going blindly with any of these is just a stupid fad, and the main reason why companies need refactoring of legacy code.

Client: we need a big data implementation in AWS to be fully HA and DR.... Money is no object

*3 weeks later when the bill comes in *

Client: its too expensive we don't need this HA stuff we don't even know what it stands for anyhow so can you take it out? But the system still needs 24/7 availability....

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This really pisses me off. As a front end developer (ember.js, HTML and Css) colleagues and boss and pm are always making jokes how I just need to change a button or a color and whenever there is a bug in the UI there's always big fun and jokes around it. But when there's a bug in the API, they never joke around, it's just : oh yeah we're getting the wrong data or an exception. But they always like to undervalue UI work even when it involves complex layouts, multi browser compatibility, responsive design, mobile browsers etc.. While they just code their API to connect to a database and everything works they don't really need to worry about what the user is using as a browser. They just get requests and send replies. I don't really think people value the work in front end as much as backend and that pisses me off as I believe there's a lot more going on in the front end.. I know they mean well and they are all cool people but sometimes it pisses me off as they don't value my work..

I just tried to sign up to Instagram. I made a big mistake.

First up with Facebook related stuff is data. Data, data and more data. Initially when you sign up (with a new account, not login with Facebook) you're asked your real name, email address and phone number. And finally the username you'd like to have on the service. I gave them a phone number that I actually own, that is in my iPhone, my daily driver right now (and yes I have 3 Androids which all run custom ROMs, hold your keyboards). The email address is a usual for me, instagram at my domain. I am a postmaster after all, and my mail server is a catch-all one. For a setup like that, this is perfectly reasonable. And here it's no different, devrant at my domain. On Facebook even, I use fb at my domain. I'm sure you're starting to see a pattern here. And on Facebook the username, real name and email domain are actually the same.

So I signed up, with - as far as I'm aware - perfectly valid data. I submitted the data and was told that someone at Instagram will review the data within 24 hours. That's already pretty dystopian to me. It is now how you block bots. It is not how Facebook does it either, at least since last time I checked. But whatever. You'd imagine that regardless of the result, they'd let you know. Cool, you're in, or sorry, you're rejected and here's why. Nope.

Fast-forward to today when I recalled that I wanted to sign up to Instagram to see my girlfriend's pictures. So I opened Chromium again that I already use only for the rancid Facebook shit.. and it was rejected. Apparently the mere act of signing up is a Terms of Service violation. I have read them. I do not know which section I have violated with the heinous act of signing up. But I do have a hunch.

Many times now have I been told by ignorant organizations that I would be "stealing" their intellectual property, or business assets or whatever, just because I sent them an email from their name on my domain. It is fucking retarded. That is MY domain, not yours. Learn how email works before you go educate a postmaster. Always funny to tell them how that works. But I think that in this case, that is what happened.

So I appealed it, using a random link to something on Instagram's help section from a third-party blog. You know it's good when the third-party random blog is better. But I found the form and filled it in. Same shit all over again for info, prefilling be damned I guess. Minor convenience though, whatever.

I get sent an email in German, because apparently browsing through a VPS in Germany acting as a VPN means you're German. Whatever... After translating it, I found that it asks me to upload a picture of myself, holding a paper in my hands, on which I would have a confirmation code, my username, and my email address.. all hand-written. It must not be too dark, it must be clear, it must be in JPEG.. look, I just wanted to fucking sign up.

I sent them an email back asking them to fix all of this. While I was writing it and this rant, I thought to myself that they can shove that piece of paper up their ass. In fact I would gladly do it for them.

Long story short, do not use Instagram. And one final thing I have gripes with every time. You are not being told all the data you'll have to present from the get-go. You're not being told the process. Initially I thought it'd just be email, phone, username, and real name. Once signed up (instantly, not within 24 hours!) I would start setting up my account and adding a profile picture. The right way to ask for a picture of me! And just do it at my own pace, as I please.

And for God's sake, tackle abuse when it actually happens. You'll find out who's a bot and who isn't by their usage patterns soon enough. Do not do any of this at sign-up. Or hell, use a CAPTCHA or whatever, I don't fucking care. There's so many millions of ways to skin this cat.

Facebook and especially Instagram. Both of them are fucking retarded.

User: Hey, we got a big issue with one of your tools. One of your pages isn't loading.
Me: Ok, so when did this happen?
User: We don't know? Its been like that for a long time though, so we thought it was normal 😃
Me: ....ok. So do you know what data is supposed to appear?
User: Uhhh we're not sure as well. Since, you know, its been like that for a while.

Just great 😑

So Patanjali(aka Ramdev Baba trying to sell you even a fucking underwear as ayurvedic and locally made) released their chat application "Kimbho" and was taken down within 24 hours because of major security flaws.

Some obvious ironies I would like to point out here.

1. Coming up with a chat application with gaping security flaws at this stage when privacy related discussions are happening at every nook and corner, worst move ever.

2. There are elections in 2019 and 1 year would be the right amount of time to gather data on public and start targetting and influencing people. It shouldn't be so obvious and everyone knows which political party Patanjali leans towards.

3. You are promoting an app citing Make In India initiative. You are the biggest Indian based FMCG operating in India, courtesy exploiting nationalist sentiments. Whatever you aim of doing, at least invest a decent amount of money in hiring good developers and designers. If not anything get a content writer who will write you an original description of your app for as low as ₹1000.

4. Promoting a competitor of whatsapp on whatsapp is a brilliant move. Give that marketting fellow a big raise.

5. Replacing the phone icon with a shankh is not innovation. Also, everyone knows about spam farms in Bangladesh and many places in India. So boasting about 1.5 lakh downloads in less than an hour only speaks more about your ignorance and lack of technical knowledge.

6. If you really are promoting "swadeshi app", why are you offering logging in through facebook? I mean even a blind person can clearly see your agenda here.

7. Hike is a messaging app made in India and they are here since long and still it are nowhere near the usage of whatsapp. Selling shit in the name of Make in India is not cool and its high time Patanjali realises this. But then again, it is their only marketting strategy because how else can you sell something as gross as cow urine and that too people buying it voluntarily.

8. If this stunt was carried out to be in the news, well played. You are getting a good amount of publicity, but this time a bad publicity will do more harm than good. People are calling out your bluff and you will get to see the results.

Mr. Baba Ramdev, fraud karo, itna blatant mat karo. India ki public sentimental hai chutiya nahi.

Did a bunch more cowboy coding today as I call it (coding in vi on production). Gather 'round kiddies, uncle Logan's got a story fer ya…

First things first, disclaimer: I'm no sysadmin. I respect sysadmins and the work they do, but I'm the first to admit my strengths definitely lie more in writing programs rather than running servers.

Anyhow, I recently inherited someone else's codebase (the story of my profession career, but I digress) and let me tell you this thing has amateur hour written all over it. It's written in PHP and JavaScript by a self-taught programmer who apparently discovered procedural programming and decided there was nothing left to learn and stopped there (no disrespect to self-taught programmers).

I could rant for days about the various problems this codebase has, but today I have a very specific story to tell. A story about errors and logs.

And it all started when I noticed the disk space on our server was gradually decreasing.

So today I logged onto our API server (Ubuntu running Apache/PHP) and did a df -h to check the disk space, and was surprised to see that it had noticeably decreased since the last time I'd checked when everything was running smoothly. But seeing as this server does not store any persistent customer data (we have a separate db server) and purely hosts the stateless API, it should NOT be consuming disk space over time at all.

The only thing I could think of was the logs, but the logs were very quiet, just the odd benign message that was fully expected. Just to be sure I did an ls -Sh to check the size of the logs, and while some of them were a little big, nothing over a few megs. Nothing to account for gigabytes of disk space gradually disappearing.

What could it be? I wondered.

cd ../..
du . | sort --sort=numeric

What's this? 2671132 K in some log folder buried in the api source code? I cd into it and it turns out there are separate PHP log files in there, split up by customer, so that each customer of ours (we have 120) has their own respective error log! (Why??)

Armed with this newfound piece of (still rather unbelievable) evidence I perform a mad scramble to search the codebase for where this extra logging is happening and sure enough I find a custom PHP error handler that is capturing (most) errors and redirecting them to these individualized log files.

Conveniently enough, not ALL errors were being absorbed though, so I still knew the main error_log was working (and any time I explicitly error_logged it would go there, so I was none the wiser that this other error-catching was even happening).

Needless to say I removed the code as quickly as I found it, tail -f'd the error_log and to my dismay it was being absolutely flooded with syntax errors, runtime PHP exceptions, warnings galore, and all sorts of other things.

My jaw almost hit the floor. I've been with this company for 6 months and had no idea these errors were even happening!

The sad thing was how easy to fix all the errors ended up being. Most of them were "undefined index" errors that could have been completely avoided with a simple isset() check, but instead ended up throwing an exception, nullifying any code that came after it.

Anyway kids, the moral of the story is don't split up your log files. It makes absolutely no sense and can end up obscuring easily fixable bugs for half a year or more!

Happy coding.

So I know most of you got some kind of hate for Facebook and Zuckerberg (aka Z U C C) now, but ffs, watching some of the highlights of this congress-thing that went on makes me more or less feel sympathy for him and his idea, even tho I know he wants to achieve exactly this.

Some of the questions asked can suck a big fucken data-dick. "How many Facebook Like-Buttons are there on Non-Facebook pages?", "How many data-categories do you gather?", "How do you sustain a business model and stay free?" - DUDE WHAT IN HEAVENS NAME?? And they ask that shit so serious and so "now-i'm-going-to-bust-you"-esk, but actually the question is just plain stupid and shows how the questioning side has no clue about the shit.

My point of view is that people decided to have an online life and have to take what it does. Having a smartphone with a Facebook service installed (owning an account or not) is enough to track your location, stored under your IMEI or some shit like that. They may not even go that far but that's just my opinion.
If you are online everything can see you and use you that way. Borders are a fictious thing. A dude in Czechia can easily shoot you when you're on the German side of the border between those two countries. And still we gave up on walls...:p

Welcome to a world which is ruled by dumbass people where nerds who just want to have some fun need to defend themselves because the people up there don't know a single shit.

Alright, this my fucking rant right here. Distraction? This whole company is a distraction! Boss decided to throw us all in an open work environment doing jobs that require careful concentration. Straight outta college I'm getting handed vague ideas, (make a desktop app that helps our customers put data on the internet, make an iPhone app) with out so much as an inkling of what technologies to use, just make it work.
Ok I will but when you hit a roadblock with very little resources to draw in it's hard to stay focused.
On top of that since I worked in support for a year I'm our senior support person! But sometimes support just doesn't use their brains and I'm using my time to solve very basic problems.
That brings me to my next point, the goddamn piece of shit that is our telephone. Fuck that thing when it rings it's never good. Moreover, since I don't want to get roasted for not being responsive I have the motherfucker forward to my personal cell. So I answer every fucking call and I get so many spam calls!
Not to mention I'm mainly running the hardware show around here. Shits broke I'm the one fixing it. Need new shit I'm putting the order together.
Tried to get a new guy to be the sys admin, ordered a 6th gen board with a 7th gen proc, had to pull 3 machines apart to get that sorted. Then he left bc family issues, and has been gone for weeks.
The other devs are also slam up busy, and the main product is about 15 people's piss on a plate of garb age spaghetti. (I got a lot of shit going on but at least I'm the only one pissing in my spaghetti) it's a constant run around if who does what with a code first plan later mentality causing confusion and delay.
Nobody wants to help anybody because they are also annoyed with this setup and are getting bitched at by customers or management.
Sales is mostly composed of a bunch of crackhead yes men and women who just want a commission and only half know the shit we sell and have sold 15 new features that had not been discussed. But management always says make it happen. In what priority? It's all a priority they say! Wtf.
So yea, then it brings me to me, dealing with this much chaos at work makes it seem like a high amount of chaos in my life is normal. I'm just now learning to control this.
I've had to do a lot of growing up as a person and as a developer. I've went from being the most junior to about the 3rd most seniors and I've no doubt my efforts have contributed to the growth of the company.
I'm a big believer in coding flow, and that it takes at least 15 mins to get in that flow and about 5 seconds to break it. There is no do not disturb on the company chat, everything always on fire it seems.
So fuck a lot of this, but I've done the research and where I'm at is the best opportunity in a 100 mile radius. So I am thankful for this job. Plus I usually win the horror story contest.

So TL;DR the biggest distraction is every fucking thing in this god forsaken place.

I hate it when marketing people decide they're technical - quote from a conference talk I regrettably sat through:

"The fourth industrial revolution is here, and you need to make sure you invest in every aspect of it - otherwise you'll be left in the dust by companies that are adopting big data, blockchain, quantum computing, nanotech, 3D printing and the internet of things."

Dahhhhhhhhhh

I haven't ranted for today, but I figured that I'd post a summary.
A public diary of sorts.. devRant is amazing, it even allows me to post the stuff that I'd otherwise put on a piece of paper and probably discard over time. And with keyboard support at that <3

Today has been a productive day for me. Laptop got restored with a "pacman -Syu" over a Bluetooth mobile data tethering from my phone, said phone got upgraded to an unofficial Android 9 (Pie) thanks to a comment from @undef, etc.

I've also made myself a reliable USB extension cord to be able to extend the 20-30cm USB-A male to USB-C male cord that Huawei delivered with my Nexus 6P. The USB-C to USB-C cord that allows for fast charging is unreliable.. ordered some USB-C plugs for that, in order to make some high power wire with that when they arrive.

So that plug I've made.. USB-A male to USB-A female, in which my short USB-C to USB-A wire can plug in. It's a 1M wire, with 18AWG wire for its power lines and 28AWG wires for its data lines. The 18AWG power lines can carry up to 10A of current, while the 28AWG lines can carry up to 1A. All wires were made into 1M pieces. These resulted in a very low impedance path for all of them, my multimeter measured no more than 200 milliohms across them, though I'll have to verify and finetune that on my oscilloscope with 4-wire measurement.

So the wire was good. Easy too, I just had to look up the pinout and replicate that on the male part.

That's where the rant part comes in.. in fact I've got quite uncomfortable with sentences that don't include at least one swear word at this point. All hail to devRant for allowing me to put them out there without guilt.. it changed my very mind <3

Microshaft WanBLowS.

I've tried to plug my DIY extension cord into it, and plugged my phone and some USB stick into it of which I've completely forgot the filesystem. Windows certainly doesn't support it.. turns out that it was LUKS. More about that later.

Windows returned that it didn't support either of them, due to "malfunctioning at the USB device". So I went ahead and plugged in my phone directly.. works without a problem. Then I went ahead and troubleshooted the wire I've just made with a multimeter, to check for shorts.. none at all.

At that point I suspected that WanBLowS was the issue, so I booted up my (at the time) problematic Arch laptop and did the exact same thing there, testing that USB stick and my phone there by plugging it through the extension wire. Shit just worked like that. The USB stick was a LUKS medium and apparently a clone of my SanDisk rootfs that I'm storing my Arch Linux on my laptop at at the time.. an unfinished migration project (SanDisk is unstable, my other DM sticks are quite stable). The USB stick consumed about 20mA so no big deal for any USB controller. The phone consumed about 500mA (which is standard USB 2.0 so no surprise) and worked fine as well.. although the HP laptop dropped the voltage to ~4.8V like that, unlike 5.1V which is nominal for USB. Still worked without a problem.

So clearly Windows is the problem here, and this provides me one more reason to hate that piece of shit OS. Windows lovers may say that it's an issue with my particular hardware, which maybe it is. I've done the Windows plugging solely through a USB 3.0 hub, which was plugged into a USB 3.0 port on the host. Now USB 3.0 is supposed to be able to carry up to 1A rather than 500mA, so I expect all the components in there to be beefier. I've also tested the hub as part of a review, and it can carry about 1A no problem, although it seems like its supply lines aren't shorted to VCC on the host, like a sensible hub would. Instead I suspect that it's going through the hub's controller.

Regardless, this is clearly a bad design. One of the USB data lines is biased to ~3.3V if memory serves me right, while the other is biased to 300mV. The latter could impose a problem.. but again, the current path was of a very low impedance of 200milliohms at most. Meanwhile the direct connection that omits the ~200ohm extension wire worked just fine. Even 300mV wouldn't degrade significantly over such a resistance. So this is most likely a Windows problem.

That aside, the extension cord works fine in Linux. So I've used that as a charging connection while upgrading my Arch laptop (which as you may know has internet issues at the time) over Bluetooth, through a shared BNEP connection (Bluetooth tethering) from my phone. Mobile data since I didn't set up my WiFi in this new Pie ROM yet. Worked fine, fixed my WiFi. Currently it's back in my network as my fully-fledged development host. So that way I'll be able to work again on @Floydian's LinkHub repository. My laptop's the only one who currently holds the private key for signing commits for git$(rm -rf ~/*)@nixmagic.com, hence why my development has been impeded. My tablet doesn't have them. Guess I'll commit somewhere tomorrow.

(looks like my rant is too long, continue in comments)

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

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

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

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

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

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

The story of the shittiest, FUCKING WORST day of work.

TLDR: shitty day at work, car crash to end the day.

So, let tell you about what could possibly be the worst day I had since I started working.

This morning, my alarm didn't work, woke up 30 minutes before an appointment I had with a client.

Arrived late at the client, as I start deploying. They don't have any way to transfer the deployment package to the secured server. Lost 45 minutes there.

Deployment goes pretty well. My client asks me to stay while they load some data into the app. Everything's pretty easy to work out. Just need to input 3 CSV with the correct format (which the client defined since the beginning).
I end up watching an Excel Macro called "Brigitte" (I'm not fucking kinding, could'nt have thought of that) work for 4 hours straight. Files are badly formatted and don't work.

Troubbleshooting thoses files with a fucking loader that does not tell you anything about why it failed (our fault on that one)

I leave the client at 7:30pm, going back at work, leave at 9pm.

At this point, I just want to buy some food, go home and watch series.

But NO, A FUCKING MORRON OF A BUS DRIVER had to switch lanes as I was overtaking him. Getting me crushed between the bus and the concrete blocks.

Cops were fucking dickheads, being very mean even tho I was still shaking from the adrenaline.

In conclusion, the day could have been worst. The devs at the clients are pretty cool guys and we actually had some fun troubleshooting. At work, there was still one of my colleagues who cheered me up telling me about his day.
And when I think of it, I could have got really hurt (or even worst) in the crash.

A bad day is a bad day, tomorrow morning I'm still going to get up and go to a job I love, with people I love working with.

Very big rant (sorry about that if someone's still reading)

I finally gave in into the peer pressure and made myself a Twitter account.

WHAT A FUCKING SHIT SITE.

When registering the only thing I provided was my email and username. Nothing more.

One day later when visiting Twitter I get a big ass pop-up that briefly tells me my account is locked for 'unusual behavior', 'suspicious activity' and 'not following of Twitter's rules'.

I want to remind you that my account was barely one day old, and had no activity whatsoever.

So if getting your account locked for no single reason isn't bad enough. The only and ONLY way to unlock my account was TO PROVIDE MY FUCKING PHONE NUMBER. No other single way to unlock my account.

YOU WANT MY PERSONAL DATA SO BADLY?

On top of that I didn't receive a single email from them for this 'suspicious activity' or 'breaking of Twitter's rules'.

THIS IS SCAREWARE. Lying to people in order to get more personal data. My account was perfectly fine. And without providing your phone number you can't even delete your account.

GO FUCK YOURSELF FUCKING ASSHOLES WITH YOUR ASSHOLE DESIGN

FUCKING SHITSITE

Today in IT class our teacher said: 'you can only use char and int in a switch statement'

I was confused because I was 100% sure that you could also use string and so when I got out of school I immediately looked it up.

It is true, well it was true until 2011 when Java 7 was released which added the possibility to also use the string data type in switch statements.

In this I see a huge problem with the education system. Teachers (almost) never 'update' their knowledge and then teach outdated stuff to their pupils. While this may not be a problem in some subjects, it definitely is a huge problem in IT.

The development world is always evolving but if the teachers don't follow along the pupils get taught outdated stuff which, in my opinion, is a really big problem when they finish school and go out in the world to find jobs.

Something strange happened the other day… I requested the "free" Community License of Syncfusion (the company that provides a lot of .net, uwp, web, etc. components).

After a few minutes they called me... although I didn't provide my phone number…
I signed up using my LinkedIn account, but there isn't my phone number there… 🤔
I don't remember I've ever shared my phone number anywhere on the internet, but ok… maybe I did in the past.

More than 800+ components for free (if you're not a big company), a really nice offer.
So I decided to send the link to my friend.

He doesn't even have LinkedIn… he created a fucking new account just for that, without any private information about himself.

10 minutes later… they called him. HOW? 😱

We checked our accounts on Syncfusion, created just before that (without writing anything about ourselves, just by clicking on "Sign In"), and they have our addresses… How do they fucking know where I live?

I still can't understand how they did it, my phone number is registered to my father, so they couldn't just search it…

The same day they sent me an email.
I answered it asking "How did you know my phone number?".
They replied: "I got your number because when you downloaded our community license you put your email and phone number.".
I never did it. They didn't ask me anything.

It'll probably remain a creepy mystery… it's really so easy for a company to steal your data, and they really do it so publicly without any problem?

The GitHub graphql API is pretty neat, mostly because it's a great example of a product where graphql has advantages over REST. As a code reviewer for repos with hundreds of simultaneous PRs, I use it to filter through branches for stuff that needs my attention the most.

NewRelic's NRQL API is also quite nice, as it provides an unusual but very direct interface into the underlying application metrics.

I'm also a big fan of launchlibrary, purely because I love spaceflight, and their API is an extremely rich and actively maintained resource. This makes it a great data source for playing around with plotting & statistics libraries — when I'm learning new languages or tools, I prefer to make something "real" rather than following a tutorial, and I often use launchlibrary as a fun and useful data backend.

So we are implementing a big and very complete localization management system on my company. The system has great features, indeed, but:

1. We cannot use the browser back button, because it is js and it appears no one cared about it (I am not a js Dev, but you can UAE the back button on my site that has js);

2. It is very customizable, but not intuitive. So you have one million options and you never know where to change what you need;

3. It has a save button everywhere, but most options are saved automatically, so you never know when you need to save. Actually, people from the webapp company use the save button as refresh, once we cannot use the browser refresh button;

4. Combo boxes load the elements while you scroll them, so to scroll to the bottom, you need to keep scrolling several times, waiting it to load the elements;

5. It does not allow you to open more than one tab of it at the same time. So if you need to see more than one information from different items, you need to navigate and wait the loading times to see what you need;

6. Emails are not sent in a different thread. So each action that send emails you need to keep waiting until the emails are sent (sometimes there are several emails sent in one action) to continue using it;

7. They not only store and send back your password by email if you loose it, but, as admin, if I click the button to send the user password to him/her, it keeps a copy of the email with the user password in my sent items;

8. To be able to send emails (they are really necessary), I need to include my SMTP info with login and password. So they have not only the system password saved, but everyone email login and password as well.

I am sure there is more, but I can't remember for now, and we are still trying to figure it out how to back our data, as it appears the only possible backup is their own.

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

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

Fucking shit, this university's website is so damn slow! Basically Every Semester, every student need to enroll to certain classes in University Website.

But the Infrastructure is not enough to handle such a big amount of students, we have approx. 7000 students enrolling at the same fucking time.

And here i am can't enroll to any class at all this semester. Fuck such a waste of time. This always been a thing since they digitalize enrolling system.

I don't want this to happen again. The student always be a victim since they cannot handle the request. Now, as a dev, i want to propose something better to optimize the server, i have some connection to pass some bureaucracy. I am going to do some brainstorming and I will need some solution.

Here some data i gather when i am mad from my univ infrastructure division :
1. The Server is a simple Local Server Forwarded to the Internet.
2. The Server use Windows Server 2007.
4. Web Server Using Microsoft IIS
3. The Website built using ASP.NET
4. The connection is not SSL encrypted (yes its fucking use the http)
5. Hardware Spec (not confirmed officialy, i got this information from my professor) :
- Core i5 4460
- 4 GB Ram
- 1 Gbit NIC

I will summon some expert here and i hope want to help me(us all) out.

Just another big rant story full of WTFs and completely true.

The company I work for atm is like the landlord for a big german city. We build houses and flats and rent them to normal people, just that we want to be very cheap and most nearly all our tenants are jobless.
So the company hired a lot of software-dev-companies to manage everything.

The company I want to talk about is "ABI...", a 40-man big software company. ABI sold us different software, e.g. a datawarehouse for our ERP System they "invented" for 300K or the software we talk about today: a document management system. It has workflows, a 100 year-save archive system, a history feature etc.
The software itself, called ELO (you can google it if you want) is a component based software in which every company that is a "partner" can develop things into, like ABI did for our company.

Since 2013 we pay ABI 150€ / hour (most of the time it feels like 300€ / hour, because if you want something done from a dev from ABI you first have to talk to the project manager of him and of course pay him too). They did thousand of hours in all that years for my company.

In 2017 they started to talk about a module in ELO called Invoice-Module. With that you can manage all your paper invoices digital, like scan that piece of paper, then OCR it, then fill formular data, add data and at the end you can send it to the ERP system automatically and we can pay the invoice automatically. "Digitization" is the key word.

After 1.5 years of project planning and a 3 month test phase, we talked to them and decided to go live at 01.01.2019. We are talking about already ~ 200 hours planning and work just from ABI for this (do the math. No. Please dont...).

I joined my actual company in October 2018 and I should "just overview" the project a bit, I mean, hey, they planned it since 1.5 years - how bad can it be, right?

In the first week of 2019 we found 25 bugs and users reporting around 50 feature requests, around 30 of them of such high need that they can't do their daily work with the invoices like they did before without ELO.
In the first three weeks of 2019 we where around 70 bugs deep, 20 of them fixed, with nearly 70 feature requests, 5 done. Around 10 bugs where so high, that the complete system would not work any more if they dont get fixed.

Want examples?
- Delete a Invoice (right click -> delete, no super deep hiding menu), and the server crashed until someone restarts it.
- missing dropdown of tax rate, everything was 19% (in germany 99,9% of all invoices are 19%, 7% or 0%).

But the biggest thing was, that the complete webservice send to ERP wasn't even finished in the code.
So that means we had around 600 invoices to pay with nearly 300.000€ of cash in the first 3 weeks and we couldn't even pay 1 cent - as a urban company!

Shortly after receiving and starting to discussing this high prio request with ABI the project manager of my assigned dev told me he will be gone the next day. He is getting married. And honeymoon. 1 Week. So: Wish him luck, when will his replacement here?

Deep breath.
Deep breath.

There was no replacement. They just had 1 developer. As a 40-people-software-house they had exactly one developer which knows ELO, which they sold to A LOT of companies.

He came back, 1 week gone, we asked for a meeting, they told us "oh, he is now in other ELO projects planned, we can offer you time from him in 4 weeks earliest".

To cut a long story short (it's to late for that, right?) we fought around 3 month with ABI to even rescue this project in any thinkable way. The solution mid February was, that I (software dev) would visit crash courses in ELO to be the second developer ABI didnt had, even without working for ABI....

Now its may and we decided to cut strings with ABI in ELO and switch to a new company who knows ELO. There where around 10 meetings on CEO-level to make this a "good" cut and not a bad cut, because we can't afford to scare them (think about the 300K tool they sold us...).

01.06.2019 we should start with the new company. 2 days before I found out, by accident, that there was a password on the project file on the server for one of the ELO services. I called my boss and my CEO. No one knows anything about it. I found out, that ABI sneaked into this folder, while working on another thing a week ago, and set this password to lock us out. OF OUR OWN FCKING FILE.
Without this password we are not able to fix any bug, develop any feature or even change an image within ELO, regardless, that we paid thausend of hours for that.

When we asked ABI about this, his CEO told us, it is "their property" and they will not remove it.
When I asked my CEO about it, they told me to do nothing, we can't scare them, we need them for the 300K tool.

No punt.
No finish.

Just the project file with a password still there today

when I was a newbie I was given a task to upload a site.
I had done that many times before so I thought it wont be a big deal so I thought I never gave a try uploading through ftp.
Okay I began work on it the server was of godaddy and credentials I got were of delegate access.
right I tried connecting through ftp but it wasn't working thought there's some problem with user settings why shouldn't I create my own user to stay away from mess.
Now I creater my own user and could easily login but there were no files in it saw that by creating user my folder is different and I dont have access to server files I wanted to take backup before I do upload.
now I was thinking to give my user access to all files so I changed the access directory to "/" checked ftp again there was still no file.
don't know what happened to me I thought ahh its waste of time for creating ftp user it does nothing and I deleted my ftp account.
now I went through web browser to download data and earth skids beneath my foots. Holy fuck I lost all the data, all were deleted with that account it scared the shit out of me.
There were two sites running which were now gone.
Tried every bit to bring them back but couldn't do so. i contact support of godaddy they said you haven't enabled auto backup so you can't have them for free however they can provide their service in $150. Which is 15k in my country.
I decided to tell my boss about what happened and he got us away :p I wasn't fired gladly

So I joined this financial institution back in Nov. Selling themselves as looking for a developer to code micro-services for a Spring based project and deploying on Cloud. I packed my stuff, drove and moved to the big city 3500 km away. New start in life I thought!
Turns out that micro-services code is an old outdated 20 year old JBoss code, that was ported over to Spring 10 years ago, then let to rot and fester into a giant undocumented Spaghetti code. Microservices? Forget about that. And whats worse? This code is responsible for processing thousands of transactions every month and is currently deployed in PROD. Now its your responsibility and now you have to get new features complied on the damn thing. Whats even worse? They made 4 replicas of that project with different functionalities and now you're responsible for all. Ma'am, this project needs serious refactoring, if not a total redesign/build. Nope! Not doing this! Now go work at it.
It took me 2-3 months just to wrap my mind around this thing and implement some form of working unit tests. I have to work on all that code base by myself and deliver all by myself! naturally, I was delayed in my delivery but I finally managed to deliver.
Time for relief I thought! I wont be looking at this for a while. So they assign me the next project: Automate environment sync between PROD and QA server that is manually done so far. Easy beans right? And surely enough, the automation process is simple and straightforward...except it isnt! Why? Because I am not allowed access to the user Ids and 3rd party software used in the sync process. Database and Data WareHouse data manipulation part is same story too. I ask for access and I get denied over and over again. I try to think of workarounds and I managed to do two using jenkins pipeline and local scripts. But those processes that need 3rd party software access? I cannot do anything! How am I supposed to automate job schedule import on autosys when I DONT HAVE ACCESS!! But noo! I must think of plan B! There is no plan B! Rather than thinking of workarounds, how about getting your access privileges right and get it right the first time!!
They pay relatively well but damn, you will lose your sanity as a programmer.
God, oh god, please bless me with a better job soon so I can escape this programming hell hole.
I will never work in finance again. I don't recommend it, unless you're on the tail end of your career and you want something stable & don't give a damn about proper software engineering principles anymore.

I had spent the last year working on a online store power by woocommerce with over 100k products from various suppliers. This online store utilized a custom API that would take the various formats that suppliers offer their inventory in and made them consistent. Now everything was going swimmingly initially, but then I began adding more and more products using a plug-in called WP all import. I reached around 100k products and the site would take up to an entire minute to load sometimes timing out. I got desperate so I installed several caching plugins, but to no avail this did not help me. The site was originally only supposed to take three to four months but ended up taking an entire year. Then, just yesterday I found out what went wrong and why this woocommerce website with all of these optimizations was still taking anywhere from 60 to 90 seconds to load, or just timing out entirely. I had initially thought that I needed a beefier server so I moved it to a high CPU digitalocean VM. While this did help a little bit, the site was still very slow and now I had very high CPU usage RAM usage and high disk IO. I was seriously stumped the Apache process was using a high amount of CPU and IO along with MYSQL as well. It wasn't until I started digging deeper into the database that I actually found out what the issue was. As I was loading the site I would run 'show process list' in the SQL terminal, I began to notice a very significant load time for one of the tables, so I went to go and check it out. What I did was I ran a select all query on that particular table just to see how full it was and SQL returned a error saying that I had exceeded the maximum packet size. So I was like okay what the fuck...
So I exited my SQL and re-entered it this time with a higher packet size. I ran a query that would count how many rows were in this particular table and the number came out to being in the millions. I was surprised, and what's worse is that this table belong to a plugin that I had attempted to use early in the development process to cache the site. The plugin was deactivated but apparently it had left PHP files within the wp content directory outside of the actual plugin directory, so it's still executing scripts even though the plugin itself was disabled. Basically every time I would change anything on the site, it would recache the whole thing, and it didn't delete any old records. So 100k+ products caching on saves with no garbage collection... You do the math, it's gonna be a heavy ass database. Not only that but it was serialized data, so when it did pull this metric shit ton of spaghetti from the database, PHP then had to deserialize it. Hence the high ass CPU load. I had caching enabled on the MySQL end of things so that ate the ram. I was really desperate to get this thing running.
Honest to God the main reason why this website took so long was because the load times made it miserable to work on. I just thought that the hardware that I had the site on was inadequate. I had initially started the development on a small Linux VM which apparently wasn't enough, which is why I moved it to digitalocean which also seemed to not be enough, so from there I moved to a dedicated server which still didn't seem to be enough. I was probably a few more 60-second wait times or timeouts from recommending a server cluster to my client who I know would not be willing to purchase it. The client who I promised this site to have completed in 3 months and has waited a year. Seriously, I would tell people the struggles that I would go through with this particular site and they would just tell me to just drop the site; just take the money, just take the loss. I refused to, this was really the only thing that was kicking my ass. I present myself as this high-and-mighty developer like I'm just really good at what I do but then I have this WordPress site that's just beating the shit out of me for a year. It was a very big learning experience and it was also very humbling as well, it made me realize that I really don't know as much as I think I might. It was evidence that there is still so much more to learn out there, I did learn a lot from that experience especially about optimizing websites the different types of methods to do that particular lonely on the server side and I'll be able to utilize this knowledge in the future.
I guess the moral of the story is, never really give up. Ultimately things might get so bad that you're running on hopes and dreams. Those experiences are generally the most humbling. Now I can finally present the site that I am basically a year late on to the client who will be so happy that I did not give up on the project entirely. I'll have experienced this feeling of pure euphoria, and help the small business significantly grow their revenue. Helping others is very fulfilling for me, even at my own expense.

Anyways, gonna stop ranting. Running out of characters. If you're still here... Ty for reading :')

Time for a soap box rant.

I just found this in one of our projects. I've simplified the example to make it more anonymous.

When I see code like this it automatically means there is a lack of attention to enumerations and/or understanding of what they are.

One may argue that in a certain execution of code it's a minor performance hit and therefore insignificant. It's still a performance hit. Furthermore, it takes even less time to do it the right way than it does to do it the wrong way.

Every one of these lines will enumerate the list from the beginning to try and find that one element you're interested in. Big O notation, people.

Throw that crap into a dictionary or hashset or similarly applicable data structure with direct reads at the beginning of your logic so that it only gets enumerated ONCE when the data structure instance is created. Then access it however many times you want.

Soap box rant over.

Fuck you Intel.
Fucking admit that you're Hardware has a problem!

"Intel and other technology companies have been made aware of new security research describing software analysis methods that, when used for malicious purposes, have the potential to improperly gather sensitive data from computing devices that are operating as designed. Intel believes these exploits do not have the potential to corrupt, modify or delete data"

With Meltdown one process can fucking read everything that is in memory. Every password and every other sensible bit. Of course you can't change sensible data directly. You have to use the sensible data you gathered... Big fucking difference you dumb shits.

Meltown occurs because of hardware implemented speculative execution.
The solution is to fucking separate kernel- and user-adress space.
And you're saying that your hardware works how it should.
Shame on you.

I'm not saying that I don't tolerate mistakes like this. Shit happens.
But not having the balls to admit that it is because of the hardware makes me fucking angry.

TL;DR: Stop using React for EVERYTHING. It's not the end-all solution to every application need.

My team is staffed about 50/50 with tenured devs, and junior devs who have never written a full application and don't understand the specific benefits of different libraries/framworks. As a result, most of these junior devs have jumped on the React train, and they're under the impression that React is the end-all answer to any possible application need. Doesn't matter what type of app is, what kind of data is going to be flowing through the app, data scale, etc. In their eyes, React is always the answer. Now, while I'm not a big fan of React myself, I will say that it does its job when its tasked with a data-heavy application that needs to be refreshed/re-rendered dynamically and frequently (like Facebook.) However, my main gripe is that some people insist on using it for EVERYTHING. They refuse to acknowledge that there can be better library/framework choices (Angular, Vue, or even straight jQuery,) and they refuse to learn any other frameworks. You can hit them with countless technical reasons as to why React isn't a good choice for a particular application, and they'll just spout off the same tidbits from the "ReactJS Makes My Nips Hard 101" handbook: "React is the future," "Component-based web architecture is the future," (I'm not arguing with that last one) "But...JSX bro.," "Facebook and Netflix use it, so that's how you know it's amazing." They'll use React for a simple app, and make it overly-complex, and take months to write something that should have taken them a week. For example, we have one dev who has never used any other frameworks/libraries apart from React, and he used React (via create-react-app) to write what is effectively a single form and a content widget inside of a bootstrap template. It took him 4 MONTHS to write this, and it still isn't fully functioning. The search functionality doesn't really work (in fact, it's just array filtering,) and wont return any results if you search for the first word in an entry. His repo is a mess, filled with a bunch of useless files that were bootstrap'd in via create-react-app. We've built apps like this in a week in the past using different libraries/frameworks, and he could have done the same if he didn't overly-complicate the project by insisting on using React. If your app is essentially a dynamic form, you don’t need a freaking virtual DOM.

This happens every time a big new framework hits the scene. New young developers get sucked into it, because it's the cool hip new framework (or in React's case, library.) and they use it for everything, even when it's not the best choice. It happened with Angular, Rails, and now it's happening with React.

React has its benefits, but please please please consider which library/framework is the best choice from a technical standpoint before immediately jumping on the React train because "Facebook uses it bro."

Want to make someone's life a misery? Here's how.

Don't base your tech stack on any prior knowledge or what's relevant to the problem.

Instead design it around all the latest trends and badges you want to put on your resume because they're frequent key words on job postings.

Once your data goes in, you'll never get it out again. At best you'll be teased with little crumbs of data but never the whole.

I know, here's a genius idea, instead of putting data into a normal data base then using a cache, lets put it all into the cache and by the way it's a volatile cache.

Here's an idea. For something as simple as a single log lets make it use a queue that goes into a queue that goes into another queue that goes into another queue all of which are black boxes. No rhyme of reason, queues are all the rage.

Have you tried: Lets use a new fangled tangle, trust me it's safe, INSERT BIG NAME HERE uses it.

Finally it all gets flushed down into this subterranean cunt of a sewerage system and good luck getting it all out again. It's like hell except it's all shitty instead of all fiery.

All I want is to export one table, a simple log table with a few GB to CSV or heck whatever generic format it supports, that's it.

So I run the export table to file command and off it goes only less than a minute later for timeout commands to start piling up until it aborts. WTF. So then I set the most obvious timeout setting in the client, no change, then another timeout setting on the client, no change, then i try to put it in the client configuration file, no change, then I set the timeout on the export query, no change, then finally I bump the timeouts in the server config, no change, then I find someone has downloaded it from both tucows and apt, but they're using the tucows version so its real config is in /dev/database.xml (don't even ask). I increase that from seconds to a minute, it's still timing out after a minute.

In the end I have to make my own and this involves working out how to parse non-standard binary formatted data structures. It's the umpteenth time I have had to do this.

These aren't some no name solutions and it really terrifies me. All this is doing is taking some access logs, store them in one place then index by timestamp. These things are all meant to be blazing fast but grep is often faster. How the hell is such a trivial thing turned into a series of one nightmare after another? Things that should take a few minutes take days of screwing around. I don't have access logs any more because I can't access them anymore.

The terror of this isn't that it's so awful, it's that all the little kiddies doing all this jazz for the first time and using all these shit wipe buzzword driven approaches have no fucking clue it's not meant to be this difficult. I'm replacing entire tens of thousands to million line enterprise systems with a few hundred lines of code that's faster, more reliable and better in virtually every measurable way time and time again.

This is constant. It's not one offender, it's not one project, it's not one company, it's not one developer, it's the industry standard. It's all over open source software and all over dev shops. Everything is exponentially becoming more bloated and difficult than it needs to be. I'm seeing people pull up a hundred cloud instances for things that'll be happy at home with a few minutes to a week's optimisation efforts. Queries that are N*N and only take a few minutes to turn to LOG(N) but instead people renting out a fucking off huge ass SQL cluster instead that not only costs gobs of money but takes a ton of time maintaining and configuring which isn't going to be done right either.

I think most people are bullshitting when they say they have impostor syndrome but when the trend in technology is to make every fucking little trivial thing a thousand times more complex than it has to be I can see how they'd feel that way. There's so bloody much you need to do that you don't need to do these days that you either can't get anything done right or the smallest thing takes an age.

I have no idea why some people put up with some of these appliances. If you bought a dish washer that made washing dishes even harder than it was before you'd return it to the store.

Every time I see the terms enterprise, fast, big data, scalable, cloud or anything of the like I bang my head on the table. One of these days I'm going to lose my fucking tits.

I got my new Oryx Pro today, from System76. It came with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. I opted not to get Pop!_OS or Ubuntu 18.10, as I would prefer to leave the OS on it for the longterm.

Even at 15.6", it's a BIG laptop. It measures 18" from corner to corner, when it's closed. It comfortably fits in my backpack, which is a bit on the small side, but it's probably about 30-50% heavier than a MacBook Pro.

But that size and weight are vindicated by the most thuggish hardware I have ever seen in a laptop. As configured, this machine has a 4.1GHz 8th gen i7, 32GB of DDR4 at 2666MHz, an 8GB GTX 1070, a 250GB nvme system disk, and a 1TB SSD for data.

The display is set by default to 4K resolution, but I cranked that down to FHD for the sake of my eyes and the battery. I will try some games at higher resolution at some point, but for desktop navigation, I get more use out of multiple virtual desktops than in massive resolution.

I will comment tomorrow or the day after with the steps I've taken to bend this beast to my will, and it's also important to say that I have not finished yet. This is just a summary, but I should have been in bed an hour ago, so I'm gonna go do that.

So, it's time to fucking rant!

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

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

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

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

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

- a week later

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

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

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

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

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

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

- 2 Weeks later

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

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

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

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

- 2 weeks later

Customer leaves. Good riddance.

- sometime later

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

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

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

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

I have a VP constantly harassing my people about some reports that we need to do as per federal law.

The thing is, these live inside of such system that I get to see exactly how many "hits" they get on a yearly basis. The only traffic we have on those sections is of people going ahead and putting the information from our reports there.

That's it, literally. Our user base does not go there. Federal agencies do not go there. No one gives two blips of shit about those sections. Yet she continuously acts like they are the most important thing in the fucking world. To make it better, I was told not to generate actual analytical data from said reports, since people with PHDs will come down on me to ask me who the fuck do I think I am from gauging them with such systems. So shit is a mute point on all fucking accounts.

I told my VP I can generate traffic information to let them know that shit is not really the most important thing in the fucking universe. His eyes glowed.

I don't want to see head rolls, but from staying till the next morning awake trying to give the best to our userbase, and just to be called out on shit like this as if I did not do enough for our people just.....well....it fucking hits man.

The worse part was me literally getting 30 minutes of sitting down after an all nighter, doing something for my users, to get to a meeting the next morning (I should not have driven there honestly) to hear this bitch complain about us not doing enough or not caring or whatever other bullshit she would spew.

I was livid, lack of sleep makes me dangerous. I turned to say something when my boss stopped me and took care of business. I seriously love this man. By all accounts and generational gaps a boomer, but one of the few good golden ones.

I just hate how unappreciated the realm of software development is by people that think that our shit is as simple as making a fucking powerpoint presentation.

Consolidate that with a director from another department taking all fucking glory during a major event of an application that I built by myself with 2 fucking weeks of no sleeping. And shit just gets glorious.

I have considered moving to other places, and heck, have gotten amazing offers, what with having a degree with a big fucking GPA and having the credentials of a senior, lead, full stack and manager role, the sky is the limit. But i know that if I leave then my users suffer, and I just can't fucking have that.

I have heard them speaking about doing something with X app that I built (with my department) I have even heard one of them saying "how is this made?" and a part of me hoped that it would be a good time to grab them and tell them of the field and the things that they can do. But I don't like announcing myself that way, always seemed to presumptuous, so I just smile, fuck yeah, my users are doing their thing with what I built to better their lives, what more can I have?

I have gotten criticisms from them, one recognized me, told me about his pain points and how it makes it hard for him to do what he must. Getting the data from the user base in an effort to make shit better for them drives me, my challenge being "how about this? better eh?"

But fucking execs man, think only of themselves, not the users, they forget about the users. Much like a shitty rock band forgetting about the music, about the fans.

I can't let that slide. But this fucking field. I sometimes fucking hate it, and I hate it because of the normies that don't understand and do not want to understand.

I do way too much, my guys do way too much and all I want is for the recognition to go to them. They do not need the ego boost, but to see my guys sitting in a meeting in which some dumb fuck is trying to drill us for taking to long, not doing something and what not, it fucking pisses me off. As their boss I always stand up and tell bitches off, but instead of learning, the bitches just keep pressing on their already defeated points.

Everything in human life gets fucking erradicated by: humans. People really do fucking suck.

I sometimes wish to go back, redo my diesel tech license and just work there, where I think one would be better of talking to an engine. But no, even then you get people, you have to interact with people, deal with people, and I am so far up my game and in my field that starting from scratch is a fucking mute point.

Maybe I need to keep fucking with stocks, get rich and just keep investing on bullshit. Whatever the fuck it takes me from having to feel the urge to choke a motherfucker in public.

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

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

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

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

not right now.

Oh boy, this is gonna be good:

TL;DR: Digital bailiffs are vulnerable as fuck

So, apparently some debt has come back haunting me, it's a somewhat hefty clai and for the average employee this means a lot, it means a lot to me as well but currently things are looking better so i can pay it jsut like that. However, and this is where it's gonna get good:

The Bailiff sent their first contact by mail, on my company address instead of my personal one (its's important since the debt is on a personal record, not company's) but okay, whatever. So they send me a copy of their court appeal, claiming that "according to our data, you are debtor of this debt". with a URL to their portal with a USERNAME and a PASSWORD in cleartext to the message.
Okay, i thought we were passed sending creds in plaintext to people and use tokenized URL's for initiating a login (siilar to email verification links) but okay! Let's pretend we're a dumbfuck average joe sweating already from the bailiff claims and sweating already by attempting to use the computer for something useful instead of just social media junk, vidya and porn.

So i click on the link (of course with noscript and network graph enabled and general security precautions) and UHOH, already a first red flag: The link redirects to a plain http site with NOT username and password: But other fields called OGM and dossiernumer AND it requires you to fill in your age???
Filling in the received username and password obviously does not work and when inspecting the page... oh boy!

This is a clusterfuck of javascript files that do horrible things, i'm no expert in frontend but nothing from the homebrewn stuff i inspect seems to be proper coding... Okay... Anyways, we keep pretending we're dumbasses and let's move on.

I ask for the seemingly "new" credentials and i receive new credentials again, no tokenized URL. okay.

Now Once i log in i get a horrible looking screen still made in the 90's or early 2000's which just contains: the claimaint, a pie chart in big red for amount unpaid, a box which allows you to write an - i suspect unsanitized - text block input field and... NO DATA! The bailiff STILL cannot show what the documents are as evidence for the claim!

Now we stop being the pretending dumbassery and inspect what's going on: A 'customer portal' that does not redirect to a secure webpage, credentials in plaintext and not even working, and the portal seems to have various calls to various domains i hardly seem to think they can be associated with bailiff operations, but more marketing and such... The portal does not show any of the - required by law - data supporting the claim, and it contains nothing in the user interface showing as such.
The portal is being developed by some company claiming to be "specialized in bailiff software" and oh boy oh boy..they're fucked because...

The GDPR requirements.. .they comply to none of them. And there is no way to request support nor to file a complaint nor to request access to the actual data. No DPO, no dedicated email addresses, nothing.

But this is really the ham: The amount on their portal as claimed debt is completely different from the one they came for today, for the sae benefactor! In Belgium, this is considered illegal and is reason enough to completely make the claim void. the siple reason is that it's unjust for the debtor to assess which amount he has to pay, and obviously bailiffs want to make the people pay the highest amount.

So, i sent the bailiff a business proposal to hire me as an expert to tackle these issues and even sent him a commercial bonus of a reduction of my consultancy fees with the amount of the bailiff claim! Not being sneery or angry, but a polite constructive proposal (which will be entirely to my benefit)

So, basically what i want to say is, when life gives you lemons, use your brain and start making lemonade, and with the rest create fertilizer and whatnot and sent it to the lemonthrower, and make him drink it and tell to you it was "yummy yummy i got my own lemons in my tummy"

So, instead of ranting and being angry and such... i simply sent an email to the bailiff, pointing out various issues (the ones

When I wrote my first algorithm that learns...

So in order to on board our customers onto our software we have to link the product on their data base to the products on ours. This seems easy enough but when you actually start looking at their data you find it's a fuck up of duplication's, bad naming conventions and only 10% or so have distinct identifiers like a suppler code,model no or barcode. After a week or 2 they find they can't do it and ask for our help and we take over. On average it took 2 of our staff 1-2 weeks to complete the task manually searching one record of theirs against our db at a time. This was a big problem since we only had enough resources to on board 2-4 customers a month meaning slow growth.

I realized when looking at different customers databases that although the data was badly captured - it was consistently badly captured similar to how crap file names will usually contain the letters 'asd' because its typed with the left hand.

I then wrote an algorithm that fuzzy matched against our data and the past matches of other customers data creating a ranking algorithm similar to google page search. After auto matching the majority of results the top 10 ranked search results for each product on their db is shown to a human 1 at a time and they either click the the correct result or select "no match" and repeat until it is done at which point the algo will include the captured data in ranking future results.

It now takes a single staff member 1-2 hours to fully on board a customer with 10-15k products and will continue to get faster and adapt to changes in language and naming conventions. Making it learn wasn't really my intention at the time and more a side effect of what I was trying to achieve. Completely blew my mind.

So I enventually spent 2 years working for that company with a strong b2b market. Everything from the checkouts in their 6 b2c stores to the softwares used by the 30-people sales team was dependant on the main ERP shit home-built with this monstruosity we call Windev here in France. If you don't know it just google and have some laugh : this is a proprieteray FRENCH language. Not french like made by french people, well that too, but mostly french like the fucking language is un fucking french ! Instructions are on french, everything. Hey that's my natural language okay, but for code, really ?

The php website was using the ERP database too, even all the software/hardware of the massive logistic installation they had (like a tiny Amazon depot), and of course the emails of all employees. Everything was just handled by this unique shitty and so sloooooow fucking app. When there was to many clients on the website or even too many salespeople connected to the ERP at the same time, every-fuckin-piece of the company was slowing down, and even worse facing critical bugs. So they installed a monitor in the corner of a desk constantly showing the live report page of Google analytics and they started panic attacks everytime it was counting more than 30 sessions on the website. That was at the time fun and sad to observe.

The whole shit was created 12 years ago and is since maintened locally by one unique old-fashion-microsoft dev who also have to maintain all the hardware of all the fucking 150+ people business. You know, when the keyboard of anyone is "broken" cause it's unplugged... That's his job too. The poor guy was totally overstressed on a daily basis and his tech knowledge just saddly losts themeselves somewhere in the way. He was my n+1 in a tech team of 3 people : him, a young and inexperimented so-called "php developer" who was in charge of the website (btw full of security holes I discovered and dealed with when I first arrive at the job), and myself.

The database was a hell of 100+ tables of business and marketing data with a ton of specific logic added on-the-go during years. No consistent data model or naming. No utf8. Fucked up relations that ends with queries long enough to fill books. And that's not all, all the customers passwords was just stored there uncrypted. Several very big companies and administrations were some of these clients. I was insisting on the passwords point litterally all the time, that was an easy security fix and a good start... But no, in two years of discussions on the subject I never achieved to have them focusing on other considerations than "our customers like that we can remind them their password by a simple phone call if they lost it". What. The. Fuck. WHATTHEFUCK!

Eventually I ran myself out of this nightmare. I had a few bad jobs already, and worked on shitty software already. But that one really blows my mind (and motivation for a time too). Happy it's over.

Shit, again a long rant...

It all started 9 months ago.
We had a meeting with our group staff (5 people). Back the we discussed, if we should only work online or still send files around with mail.

Sure I suggested to run everything on a root server, would be the best performance/cost choice.

The president and the accounted refused, they said it's still working, why change. Payment will only be trough banktransfer and everybody keeps files local.

Back then I told them, that they will have sooner or later a problem. Files will be missing and bills not payd.

Last week we had a new meeting:
- Some of the group missed files.
- Some bills were unpaid

So now I have time until march to find and finish a groupware/collaboration tool.

I need to run member administration and payment online, this should be finished in October 2018. It should also do accounting.
Im really planing to use WooCommerce for this, I'm really crazy, I know! But I dont have time for that shit!

I work fulltime beside this and almost have no time to code something like that.

Well this week I demanded a memberlist, so I can plan a CRM database.

I received a word file as memberlist.
I asked them if this is a joke, right?!
They said no, thats the list. All the Data was mixed and some user details missing.

I HAD 3 HOURS TO GET IT DOWN IN EXCEL. WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS??? I REALLY WANNA PUNCH YOU ALL IN YOUR FACE!

When I sended it, I didn't receive a response or thanks.

The joke, I'm doing this stuff for free. I volontered, to make something big...

Im really going to shit Lego Bricks next...

Few years ago as a junior android dev with couple years of self taught experience of working in startups I submitted a simple android app assignment for a junior android dev role. Assignment had only like 8 requirements so I followed them to the letter. That didn't end well.

App was simple just 3 screens. Login screen with username and password input fields, login button.

Had to call a login endpoint after login button was clicked, redirecting to home screen, calling items endpoint, displaying a list of items and when an item was clicked passing item data and redirect to item details screen.

Needless to say big swinging dick senior was not impressed. UI was not perfect, I forgot to display a loading animation when fetching data, didnt handle back button properly.

I agreed with some points but other comments were clearly just nitpicking: his preferred variable naming conventions, his opinions on architecture that was not up to his standard (official google arch at the time was not up to his standard).

He also was mad that app wasn't prepared for release to googleplay (another out of the ass requirement). Like I would prepare a 3 screen app for prod release that he will forget ever existed after 20min of his review.

Lots more of nitpicking, encapsulation this encapsulation that, omg now hes shocked that there are a few warnings after the project is built.

Regardless my self confidence was destroyed at that point and after few more negative experiences I dropped android dev alltogether for a couple years and switched to game dev.

After game dev ran its course I went back to android dev and found a supportive place where I could grow.

Looking back, they were actually hiring atleast a mid level for a junior position but I was grilled as a senior. The guy literally didnt wrote any single positive thing in that review about my code even tho my senior peers said my project was decent back then, its just that I didnt handle a few edge cases and that's all.

I looked up the guy in linkedin, turns out hes a uni dropout who posts all books that he red about software dev in his education section of his linkedin profile. Found a bunch of other narcissistic stuff on his profile. Guy was a fucking idiot. Even if I worked under him it would have probably sucked.

Learned some important lessons I guess. Always get a second, 3rd and 4th opinion and dont take criticism too seriously. Always check what kind of person is providing feedback.

INTERVIEW. It tells everything about the company. I recently applied for a "big" company for the position of ML Engineer. The Job description was like "someone with good knowledge of visual recognition, deep learning, advanced ML stuff, etc." I thought great, I might be a good fit. A guy called me the next day. Introduced himself as a manager of the Data Science team with 8+ years of experience. Started the talk saying "it is just an informal intro". But things escalated very quickly. Started shooting Data Science questions. He was asking questions in a very bookish way. Tells me to recite formulas (like big formulas). When I explained to him a concept, he was not understanding anything. Wanted a very bookish answer. I quickly realized I know more about ML stuff than him (not a big deal) and he is arrogant as fuck (not accepting my answers). Plus, he has no knowledge about Deep Learning. At the very end, he tells me "man, you need to clear up your fundamentals". WTH??? My fundamentals. Okay, I am not Einstein or Hinton, but I know I was answering things correctly. I have read books and research papers and blogs and all. When I don't know about things, I tell straight away. I don't cook answers. So the "interview" ended. I searched that man on LinkedIn. Got to know he teaches college students Data Science and ML. For a fee of 50,000 INR. It's a big amount!! Considering the things he teaches. You can find the same stuff (with far higher quality) free of cost (on Coursera, Udacity, YouTube, free books, what not). He is a cheater. He is making fool of college students. That is why I sometimes hate "experience". 8+ years of exp and he is such an a**hole!! BTW, I thanked God for saving me from that company. Can't imagine such an arrogant boss.

TLDR: Be vigilant during interviews. It tells a lot about the company.

Can someone help me understand?

I subscribed to a nifty IT-releated magazine, and on its back, there's an ad for "Dedicated root server hosting", nothing unusual at a first glance, but after I read the issue, I decided to humor them and see what it is that they offered, and... It just... Doesn't make sense to me!

An ad for "Dedicated Root Server" - What is a dedicated root server first of all? Root servers of any infrastructure sound pretty important.

But, the ad also boasts "High speed performance with the new Intel Core i9-9900K octa-core processor", that's the first weird thing.

Why would anyone responsible enough want to put an i9 into a highly-reliable root server, when the thing doesn't even support ECC? Also, come on, octa-core isn't much, I deal with servers that have anywhere between 2 and 24 cores. 8 isn't exactly a win, even if it has a higher per-core clock.

Oh, also, further down the ad has a list of, seeming, advantages/specs of the servers, they proclaim that the CPU "incl. Hyper-Threading-Technology"... Isn't that... Standard when it comes to servers? I have never seen a server without hyperthreading so far at my job.

"64 GBs of DDR4 RAM" - Fair enough, 64 gigs is a good amount, but... Again, its not ECC, something I would never put into a server.

"2 x 8 TB SATA Enterprise Hard Drive 7200 rpm" - Heh, "enterprise hard drive", another cheap marketing word, would impress me more if they mentioned an actual brand/model, but I'll bite, and say that at least the 7200 rpm is better than I expected.

"100 GBs of Backup Space" - That's... Really, really little. I've dealt with clients who's single database backup is larger than that. Especially with 2x8 TB HDD (Even accounting for software raids on top)

This one cracks me up - "Traffic unlimited"
Whaaaat?! You are not gonna give me a limit to the total transferred traffic to the internet for my server in your data center? Oh, how generous of you, only, the other case would make the server just an expensive paperweight! I thought this ad was for semi-professionals at least, so why mention traffic, and not bandwidth, the thing that matters much more when it comes to servers? How big of a bandwidth do I get? Don't tell me you use dialup for your "Dedicated Root Server"s!

"Location Germany or Finland" - Fair enough, geolocation can matter when it comes to latency.

"No minimum contract" - Oooh, how kiiiind of you, again, you are not gonna charge me extra for using the server only as long as I pay? How nice!

"Setup Fee £60" - I guess, fair enough, the server is not gonna set itself up, only...

The whole ad is for "monthly from £55.50", that's quite the large fee for setup.

Oh, and a cherry on top, the tiny print on the bottom mentions: "All prices exclude VAT and are a subject to..." blah blah blah.
Really? I thought that this sort of almost customer deceipt is present only in the common people's sphere!

I must say, there's being unimpressed, and then... There's this. Why, just... Why? Anyone understands this? Because I don't...

I normally just have nightmares about the projects I'm working on, especially when I struggle with a bug for days. Those are usually about just me stressing out about it. However, I have a lot of dreams about computers/technology, not necessarily coding-related:

- datacenters were just potato fields. If you go work the field, you'd go data mining

- in Biology, when being taught how having children works, you only tell that "parenting is only chmod-ing the rights of your children until they become the owners themselves"

- IP addresses with emojis instead of numbers were a standard now and they actually managed to replace IPv4, because everyone was so into emojis. They named it IPvE

- I witnessed a new Big Bang when the 32-bit Unix time overflown in 2038, and we were all quantum bits

So fuck this. Fucking fuckers fuck this.

We've been having massive performance issues with a nested drag and drop component. I built this abomination about a year ago and had to rush through it due to my colleague not thinking the change was necessary, even though the previous revision was even worse. It's been going strong for a while, but since a month ago it has started to perform badly. Makes sense, because it was hacked together, and wasn't made for the amount of data that it's handling now.

So the other day I presented the issue to my colleague, telling him exactly what the problem was, and that we'll have to rewrite quite a bunch of the code to get it working. Today when I bring it up again he is really negative towards the changes because they are so big, and don't really want me to do them. He is, however, super stressed about the performance issues and starts digging around in the code himself. Code that he's never touched, don't understand how it works, and has said he's not interested in learning about. He even says he sucks at frontend and Vue himself. So we sit there from morning to lunch, digging through the code together (I had to do it as well because he came nowhere). And what do you think the conclusion was? The same thing I told him a few days ago.

So what now then? He still don't want me to do the changes, but still wants it solved! How the fuck is that supposed to happen?!?

Worst part is that we're the only two developers in the company, and our boss has little IT experience. That puts me and my colleague at the same hierarchical level, so all decisions has to be cool with the both of us.

So fuck this. Fucking fuckers fuck this.

So I've created this account specifically for this rant. I usually just browse anonymously.

I've recently been hired in a big company that is one of the biggest Microsoft users in the world and my essentially revolves on making it easier for our collaborators to work with SharePoint (and other ms software)

Never in my life have I hit that much of a roadblock. So for the past week I've been trying to integrate what Ms calls webparts. And to modify the default webparts Ms provides you need to their properties (or Metadata). Except here's the big problem these are NOT documented anywhere (unless I failed to find it, if you do know where it is documented please HMU), so I've found myself trying to reverse engineer the js scripts that are served with SharePoint to figure out what the webpart properties are called and what type of data they are! I've been going through endless github repos using the CSOM nuget package (it's the library everyone uses to interact with SharePoint) and I finally found out about this other library called PnP which is a wrapper around CSOM that makes it easier to use. That wrapper has a way for me to load existing page and look at the properties of existing webparts. So here I thought it was the end of my suffering and I could finally get an idea of what it should be. Turns out this method doesn't work because one of the dependencies it has has had breaking changes and they still updated it even though it breaks their code! So for the past two days I've been trying random combinations of key values with different data types and json serialization methods.

Oh and yeah I've also looked at all the http calls via the chrome network tab, the metadata is not served as an individual file but is computed by Ms servers when they're serving you their html files.

So uh yeah run from CSOM if you can..

When I was in 11th class, my school got a new setup for the school PCs. Instead of just resetting them every time they are shut down (to a state in which it contained a virus, great) and having shared files on a network drive (where everyone could delete anything), they used iServ. Apparently many schools started using that around that time, I heard many bad things about it, not only from my school.
Since school is sh*t and I had nothing better to do in computer class (they never taught us anything new anyway), I experimented with it. My main target was the storage limit. Logins on the school PCs were made with domain accounts, which also logged you in with the iServ account, then the user folder was synchronised with the iServ server. The storage limit there was given as 200MB or something of that order. To have some dummy files, I downloaded every program from portableapps.com, that was an easy way to get a lot of data without much manual effort. Then I copied that folder, which was located on the desktop, and pasted it onto the desktop. Then I took all of that and duplicated it again. And again and again and again... I watched the amount increate, 170MB, 180, 190, 200, I got a mail saying that my storage is full, 210, 220, 230, ... It just kept filling up with absolutely zero consequences.
At some point I started using the web interface to copy the files, which had even more interesting side effects: Apparently, while the server was copying huge amounts of files to itself, nobody in the entire iServ system could log in, neither on the web interface, nor on the PCs. But I didn't notice that at first, I thought just my account was busy and of course I didn't expect it to be this badly programmed that a single copy operation could lock the entire system. I was told later, but at that point the headmaster had already called in someone from the actual police, because they thought I had hacked into whatever. He basically said "don't do again pls" and left again. In the meantime, a teacher had told me to delete the files until a certain date, but he locked my account way earlier so that I couldn't even do it.
Btw, I now own a Minecraft account of which I can never change the security questions or reset the password, because the mail address doesn't exist anymore and I have no more contact to the person who gave it to me. I got that account as a price because I made the best program in a project week about Java, which greatly showed how much the computer classes helped the students learn programming: Of the ~20 students, only one other person actually had a program at the end of the challenge and it was something like hello world. I had translated a TI Basic program for approximating fractions from decimal numbers to Java.
The big irony about sending the police to me as the 1337_h4x0r: A classmate actually tried to hack into the server. He even managed to make it send a mail from someone else's account, as far as I know. And he found a way to put a file into any account, which he shortly considered to use to put a shutdown command into autostart. But of course, I must be the great hacker.

Testers in my team have been told like 1000 times to follow the style guides that we all follow. That's not that big a deal. The big deal is that they were put on this project without having any mathematics background when the project is all about geometric stuff. So after me as a developer having to put so many hours to explain to them why the tests are not covering the requirements or why the tests are red because they are initializing the data completely wrong, I ask them pretty please to do the checks for the coding style and I have already been 4 hours reviewing code because not only I have to go through the maths and really obscure testing code to ensure that the tests are correct, but every line I have to write at least 4 or 5 style corrections. And some are not even about the code being clean, but about using wrong namespaces or not sticking to the internal data types. For fuck shake, this is embedded software and has to obey to certain security standards...

Storytime!

(I just posted this in a shorter form as a comment but wanted to write it as a post too)

TL;DR, smarts are important, but so is how you work.

My first 'real' job was a lucky break in the .com era working tech support. This was pretty high end / professional / well respected and really well paid work.

I've never been a super fast learner, I was HORRIBLE in school. I was not a good student until I was ~40 (and then I loved it, but no longer have the time :( )

At work I really felt like so many folks around me did a better job / knew more than me. And straight up I know that was true. I was competent, but I was not the best by far.

However .... when things got ugly, I got assigned to the big cases. Particularly when I transferred to a group that dealt with some fancy smancy networking equipment.

The reason I was assigned? Engineering (another department) asked I be assigned. Even when it would take me a while to pickup the case and catch up on what was going on, they wanted the super smart tech support guys off the case, and me on it.

At first this was a bit perplexing as this engineering team were some ultra smart guys, custom chip designers, great education, and guys you could almost see were running a mental simulation of the chip as you described what you observed on the network...

What was also amusing was how ego-less these guys seemed to be (I don't pretend to know if they really were). I knew for a fact that recruiting teams tried to recruit some of these guys for years from other companies before they'd jump ship from one company to the next ... and yet when I met them in person it was like some random meeting on the street (there's a whole other story there that I wish I understood more about Indian Americans (many of them) and American engineers treat status / behave).

I eventually figured out that the reason I was assigned / requested was simple:

1. Support management couldn't refuse, in fact several valley managers very much didn't like me / did not want to give me those cases .... but nobody could refuse the almighty ASIC engineers. No joke, ASIC engineers requests were all but handed down on stone tablets and smote any idols you might have.

2. The engineers trusted me. It was that simple.

They liked to read my notes before going into a meeting / high pressure conference call. I could tell from talking to them on the phone (I was remote) if their mental model was seizing up, or if they just wanted more data, and we could have quick and effective conversations before meetings ;)

I always qualified my answers. If I didn't know I said so (this was HUGE) and I would go find out. In fact my notes often included a list of unknowns (I knew they'd ask), and a list of questions I had sent to / pending for the customer.

The super smart tech support guys, they had egos, didn't want to say they didn't know, and they'd send eng down the rabbit hole. Truth be told most of what the smarter than me tech support guy's knew was memorization. I don't want to sound like I'm knocking that because for the most part memorization would quickly solve a good chunk of tech support calls for sure... no question those guys solved problems. I wish I was able to memorize like those guys.

But memorization did NOT help anyone solve off the wall bugs, sort of emergent behavior, recognize patterns (network traffic and bugs all have patterns / smells). Memorization also wouldn't lead you to the right path to finding ANYTHING new / new methods to find things that you don't anticipate.

In fact relying on memorization like some support folks did meant that they often assumed that if bit 1 was on... they couldn't imagine what would happen if that didn't work, even if they saw a problem where ... bro obviously bit 1 is on but that thing ain't happening, that means A, B, C.

Being careful, asking questions, making lists of what you know / don't know, iterating LOGICALLY (for the love of god change one thing at a time). That's how you solved big problems I found.

Sometimes your skills aren't super smarts, super flashy code, sometimes, knowing every method off the top of your head, sometimes you can excel just being more careful, thinking different.

A long long time ago ( 2007 I think ) I worked for a company that made landing sites, so basically an email campaign would go out, users would be sent to a 1 page website with a form to capture their data, ready to be spammed even more. You know how it was back then.

So I worked with a guy who we had just hired, I didn't do the hiring but his CV checked out, so I gave him one of my tasks. Now most pages were made with js and html, with a PHP backend ( called with Ajax). Now this guy didn't know PHP so I was like all good, ASP works too at the end of the day we don't judge, we do like 2 or 3 of these a day and never look at them again. So he goes of and does is thing.

3 weeks later, the customer calls up to me they still haven't received their landing page. Ok so he probably forgot to email the customer np, I tell him to double check he has emailed the customer. Another week goes by end the customer calls back, same problem. At this point I'm getting worried, because we're days away from the deadline and it was originally my task.

So I go back to the guy and I tell him I want that landing page so I can send it myself, half thinking to myself that we had a freeloader, that guy that comes in to companies for 3 weeks, doesn't work, but still cashes his pay. But no, this was much worse.

So he tells me he has finished yet. I ask him why, what's the blocker ? You had 4 weeks to tell me you were blocked and couldn't progress. And his answer was simply, because I wasn't blocked I have been working on it this whole time. So I tell him to zip his project up and email it to me. We didn't do SVN or git back then, simply wasn't worth it. So he comes back to me and says the email server is telling him attachments can't be bigger then 50mb. At this point I'm thinking he didn't properly sized the art or something, so I give him a flash drive to put it on.

When I then open the flash drive, the archive is 300mb, thinking to myself, the images weren't even that big to begin with.
So I open it up, and I don't even find any images, just a single asp page. About 500mb. When I opened that up and it finally loaded, I saw the most horrendous things ever.

The first 500 lines was just initializing empty vars. Then there was some code that created an empty form with an onChange event that submits the form. After that.. it was just non stop nested if's. No loops, no while, for, foreach, NO elseif's, just nested if's, for every possible combination of the state the form could be in. Abou 5000 of them, in a single file. To make matters worse, all the form ( and page ) layout was hardcoded in the if's. Includes inline css, base64 encoded images, nothing but as dynamic, based on the length of the form he changes the layout, added more background etc. He cut the images up for every possible size of the page and included them in the code.

I showed it to my boss, he fired the guy on the spot. I redid the work from scratch, in under 4 hours. Send it to the client. they had no ammends to make, happy as Larry. Whish I kept the code somewhere.

Morale of the story, allways do a coding test on interviews, even if small things just to sanity check.

The more I'm on here the more I remember all the shit I have had to deal with in the past.

Anyway, lets rant! I just moved cities after college to be closer to my family, I didnt have any work lined up at that stage but started job hunting the moment I was settled in, I did some freelance for smaller companies to stay afloat.

Eventually I got a job at this agency startup where "SEO" was there main focus, still very inexperienced they put me on frontend and data capturing but will teach me how to code using their systems in due time. At this stage I was getting paid minimum wage, but I was doing minimum work and it wasnt that bad.

A new investor bought 49% of the company and immediately moved into the office space to focus more on marketing (He was one of those scaly marketing guys that will sell you babies if he could get his hands on enough to make a profit).

This is where everything starts going to shit. He hires a bunch of "SEO Gurus", fills up the small office with people like sardines squished together. Development was still our main money maker at this stage, so there where 3 new more senior developers at this stage and I started learning a lot really fast.

Here are some of the issues we had to deal with:

1. Incentives - Great more money, haha! No, No, you where 5 minutes late so you only get half of the promised amount.

2. For every minute you are late we will deduct it from you paycheck (Did I mention I was getting paid minimum wage).

3. If you take a smoke break we will dock it from your pay.

4. Free gym membership to the gym downstairs, but you can only go once a week during your lunch.

5. No pay raises if you cant prove your worth on paper.

He on purposely made up shitty rules and regulations to keep us down and make as much profit as he could.

Here are some shitty stuff he has done:

1. We arent getting a 13th check this year because the company didnt make a big profit - while standing next to his brand new BMW.

2. Made changes over FTP on clients work because we where too slow to get to it, than blames me for it because its broken the next day and wants to give me a written warning for not resolving the issue Immediately. They went as far as wanting to fire me for this, gave me 1 day notice for meeting and that I can bring a lawyer to represent me (1 day notice is illegal, you need 5 days where I am from), so I brought a lawyer since my mom was a lawyer. They freaked the fuck out and started harassing me about this a week later.

3. Would have meetings all the time about how much money the company is making, but wont be raising our pay since no one has proven they are worth it yet.

4. Would full on yell at employees infront of the entire office if they accidentally made an mistake on a clients project.

One one occasion I took a week off for holiday, my coworker contacted me to ask a question and I answered that I will handle it when I am back the following week. Withing 2 hours my other boss phones me in a rage, "he is coming to fetch the company laptop from my house in 5 minutes, he will let me know when he arrives. Gives me no time to talk at all and hangs up - I have figured out what has happened by now so when he showed up he has this long speech about abandonment, and trust and loyalty to the company. So I pass him my laptop once he shut up and said: "You do know I am on holiday leave which you approved, right?", he goes even more silent and passes me back my laptop without saying anything, and drives off.

While the above was happening Douche manager back at the office has a rage as well and calls the whole office (25 people) to a meeting talking about how I abandoned the company and how disgraceful that is.

Those are the shitty experiences I can remember, there where many more like this. All of the above eventually led to me going into a deep depression and having panic attacks weekly, from being overworked or scared to step out of line. Its also the reason I almost stopped coding forever at that stage. I worked there for 2.5 years with the abuse.

I left 2 weeks after the last shit show, I am ok now and have my anxiety and depression well under control if not almost gone completely.

Ran into Douche Manager a few months ago after 9 years, the company got bought out and the first person they fired was him. LOL! He now has his own agency and is looking for Developers (They are hard to find he says), little does he know I spread his name far and wide to all and every Dev I knew and didnt know to avoid working for him at all costs. Seems like word of mouth still works in this digital age.

Thanks for reading this far!

I've been sort of lost after New Year's...

Last few years, my main goal was just to learn stuff to pass technical interviews. I also did a lot of personal dev in C#... and played with the js, python, and when a bit of c++.

But this year I kinda feel sorta of "ah screw it". Interviews never work out, haven't for years, what's the point in even trying... I get paid enough though the work is sort boring and team sort of feels like the Wild West, no rules, code reviews, processes...

But ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Feels like coding has lost its place at the top now. The future is all cloud, machine learning, big data/real time analytics but feels like these are out of reach for just 1 guy...

And well doesn't seem like anyone is going to give me a job because I'm not a good fit or have enough experience in these areas...

Sorta lost now but guess this is what a sudden thought leads to...

Oh and maybe just with tech in general. It feels this year I'm just not as interested as I was before... Spent a lot of time binge watching movies and stuff instead....

Small company, sole engineer. Non-tech management. Increasingly fancy job titles despite working alone most of the time, with the promise of hiring someone (again) I can actually manage soon.

Backlog of projects/tasks is truly a mindfuck, with new things being added each week. This backlog will never ever get done, and nothing matters anyway because the next idea is "the future", all the time.

While I have influence on some aspects of decision making, it usually ends up being what the boss wants. Actively opposed a project because it's just too big of an undertaking, it was forced through anyway. I'm trying to keep the scope manageable as I'm building it now, and it's hard.

"It's the future, we absolutely have to do this. It will be the biggest thing we've ever done."

Boss's excitement then quickly faded since it's actually in development, now nobody really seems to want to know where it's at, or how it will all work. I need to scope it out, with the knowledge that many decisions boss signed off will be questioned when he actually looks at it. We now have even more "exciting" ideas of utter grandeur. Stuff that I can't even begin to comprehend the complexity of, while struggling to keep a self imposed deadline on the current one.

Every single morning we sit on Zoom for a "valuable" "catch-up". This is absolutely perfect for one thing: Completely destroying whatever drive and focus I have going into the day. Unrelated topics, marketing conversations, even more ideas, ideas for ideas sake, small problems blown out of proportion, the list goes on. I recently argued in detail why it should be scrapped or at least be optional to attend. No luck, it's "valuable".

Today a new idea was announced, and we absolutely have to do it ASAP because it can only be better than the current solution. I raise my concerns, saying it's not as easy as you make it out to be, we should properly think about it. Nope! We'll botch something to prove that it works... So you'll base your decision whether it's good on some half ass botch job that nobody really has the mental capacity to actually pay attention to. What a reliable way to measure!

"Our analytics data isn't useful enough to tell us the impact of things we do. We (you) have to fix this." Over the last 2 or so years, I've been pushing for an overhaul and expansion of our data analysis capabilities for exactly this reason. Integrating different data sources into a unified solution so we can easily see what we're doing, etc. Nope, never happened.

The new project idea which is based on wild assumptions is ALWAYS more important than the groundwork.

Now when I mentioned that this is what I wanted to do all along, it got brushed aside. "We don't need to do anything complicated, just fix this, add that, and it's done. It should be an easy thing to do. This is very important for our decision making." Fine, have it your way.

I'm officially burned out. It's so fucking hard to get myself to focus on my work for more than an hour or two. I started a side project, and even that effort is falling victim to my day-job-induced apathy.

I'm tempted to hand in my resignation without another offer on the table. I just need time to rediscover my passion, and go job hunting from that position, instead of the utter desperation of right now.

If you've read through all this rambling, kudos to you!

I've been a developer for 15+ years, all the time as a consultant with so many different clients, have been mobile developer(ios and android), front end, backend, and many other roles, I love programming, but lately, I don't know, don't feel excited about it anymore.

I lie on every interview when they ask what am I looking for in a project, to be honest, everything looks the same to me, just showing some parsed data, which is provided by a backend which is stored in a database, at the end everything resumes to this, I do not see any challenge, or any interesting thing about this anymore.

I don't know, I mean, you can get good money on this profession, be in big offices and stuff, but, there is something missing, at least for me, is like, nobody speaks each other, no friendship, no honesty, no connections, is like, come on, we spent most of our most useful hours day after day in here, there should be a connection or something, I see many people(including me) having lunch with their cellphones, is kinda sad, I wonder if it was like that in the past.

I don't know, it feels so gray lately.

Well it's a bit long but worth reading, two crazy stories in one rant:

So there are 2 things to consider as being my first job. If entrepreneurship counts, when I was 16 my developer friend and I created a small local music magazine website. We had 2 editors and 12 writers, all music enthusiasts of more or less our age. We used a CMS to let them add the content. We used a non-profit organization mentorship and got us a mentor which already had his exit, and was close to his next one. The guy was purely a genius, he taught us all about business plans, advertising, SEO, no-pay model for the young journalists (we promised to give formal journalist certificates and salary when the site grows up)
We hired a designer, we hired a flash expert to make some advertising campaigns and started filling the site with content.

Due to our programming enthusiasm we added to the raw CMS some really cool automation: We scanned our country's radio charts each week using a cron job and the charts' RSS, made a bot to search the songs on youtube and posted the first search result as an embedded video using some reg-exps. This was one of the most fun coding times I've had. Doing these crazy stuff with none to little prior knowledge really proved me I can do anything with the power of will.

Then my partner travelled to work in an internship in the Netherlands and I was too lazy to continue it on my own and it closed, not so surprisingly for a 16 years old slacker boy.

Then the mentor offered my real first job. He had a huge forum (14GB of historical SQL) but it was dying, the CMS version was very old and he wanted me to upgrade it to the latest. It didn't seem hard at first, because there were very clear instructions in the CMS website on how to do that. However, the automation upgrade scripts didn't work well because the forum owners added some raw code (not MVC plugins but bad undocumented code) and some columns to the SQL tables. I didn't give up and decided to migrate between the versions without the scripts. I opened a new CMS and started learning by heart all of the database columns so I can make a script to migrate between the versions. The first tests ran forever because processing 14GB of data on a single home computer is not a task meant to be done. I didn't give up. I made an old forum and compared the table structures and code with my mentor's. I think I didn't exhaustively finish this solution, the task was too big on my shoulders and eventually I gave up. I still owe thanks for that mentor for teaching me how to bare with seemingly (and practically) impossible tasks, for learning not to fear from being a leader and an entrepreneur and also for paying me in time even though I didn't deliver anything 😂

So, I've had a personal project going for a couple of years now. It's one of those "I think this could be the billion-dollar idea" things. But I suffer from the typical "it's not PERFECT, so let's start again!" mentality, and the "hmm, I'm not sure I like that technology choice, so let's start again!" mentality.

Or, at least, I DID until 3-4 months ago.

I made the decision that I was going to charge ahead with it even if I started having second thoughts along the way. But, at the same time, I made the decision that I was going to rely on as little external technology as possible. Simplicity was going to be the key guiding light and if I couldn't truly justify bringing a given technology into the mix, it'd stay out.

That means that when I built the front end, I would go with plain HTML/CSS/JS... you know, just like I did 20+ years ago... and when I built the back end, I'd minimize the libraries I used as much as possible (though I allowed myself a bit more flexibility on the back end because that seems to be where there's less issues generally). Similarly, any choice I made I wanted to have little to no additional tooling required.

So, given this is a webapp with a Node back-end, I had some decisions to make.

On the back end, I decided to go with Express. Previously, I had written all the server code myself from "first principles", so I effectively built my own version of Express in other words. And you know what? It worked fine! It wasn't particularly hard, the code wasn't especially bad, and it worked. So, I considered re-using that code from the previous iteration, but I ultimately decided that Express brings enough value - more specifically all the middleware available for it - to justify going with it. I also stuck with NeDB for my data storage needs since that was aces all along (though I did switch to nedb-promises instead of writing my own async/await wrapper around it as I had previously done).

What I DIDN'T do though is go with TypeScript. In previous versions, I had. And, hey, it worked fine. TS of course brings some value, but having to have a compile step in it goes against my "as little additional tooling as possible" mantra, and the value it brings I find to be dubious when there's just one developer. As it stands, my "tooling" amounts to a few very simple JS scripts run with NPM. It's very simple, and that was my big goal: simplicity.

On the front end, I of course had to choose a framework first. React is fine, Angular is horrid, Vue, Svelte, others are okay. But I didn't want to bother with any of that because I dislike the level of abstraction they bring. But I also didn't want to be building my own widget library. I've done that before and it takes a lot of time and effort to do it well. So, after looking at many different options, I settled on Webix. I'm a fan of that library because it has a JS-centric approach. There's no JSX-like intermediate format, no build step involved, it's just straight, simple JS, and it's powerful and looks pretty good. Perfect for my needs. For one specific capability I did allow myself to bring in AnimeJS and ThreeJS. That's it though, no other dependencies (well, at first, I was using Axios because it was comfortable, but I've since migrated to plain old fetch). And no Webpack, no bundling at all, in fact. I dynamically load resources, which effectively is code-splitting, and I have some NPM scripts to do minification for a production build, but otherwise the code that runs in the browser is what I actually wrote, unlike using a framework.

So, what's the point of this whole rant?

The point is that I've made more progress in these last few months than I did the previous several years, and the experience has been SO much better!

All the tools and dependencies we tend to use these days, by and large, I think get in the way. Oh, to be sure, they have their own benefits, I'm not denying that... but I'm not at all convinced those benefits outweighs the time lost configuring this tool or that, fixing breakages caused by dependency updates, dealing with obtuse errors spit out by code I didn't write, going from the code in the browser to the actual source code to get anywhere when debugging, parsing crappy documentation, and just generally having the project be so much more complex and difficult to reason about. It's cognitive overload.

I've been doing this professionaly for a LONG time, I've seen so many fads come and go. The one thing I think we've lost along the way is the idea that simplicity leads to the best outcomes, and simplicity doesn't automatically mean you write less code, doesn't mean you cede responsibility for various things to third parties. Those things aren't automatically bad, but they CAN be, and I think more than we realize. We get wrapped up in "what everyone else is doing", we don't stop to question the "best practices", we just blindly follow.

I'm done with that, and my project is better for it!

Stories like the one I'm about to tell you are just another reason why people hate Windows. I know I usually preach 'Don't hate everything' and shit, but this is a real big fucking deal when it hits your desktop for no reason.
Now, onto the actual story...

Background: Playing with my Oculus, fixing issues like forgetting to use USB3 and stuff. I learned about an issue with Nvidia GPUs, where in Windows, they can only support 4 simultaneous displays per GPU. I only have the one GPU in my system, Nova, so I have to unplug a monitor to get Oculus and its virtual window thingy working. Alright, friend gave me idea of using my old GPU to drive one of my lesser used monitors, my right one. Great idea I thought, I'll install it a bit later.

A bit later...

I plug the GPU in (after 3 tries of missing the PCI-E slot, fuckers) and for some reason I'm getting boot issues. It's booting to the wrong drive, sometimes it'll not even bother TRYING to boot, suddenly one of my hard drives isn't even being recognized in BIOS, fuck. Alright, is the GPU at least being recognized? Shit, it isn't. FUCKFUCKFUCK.

Oh wait. I just forgot the power cable Duh. Plug that in, same issues. Alright, now I have no idea. Try desperately to boot, but it just won't I start getting boot error 0xc000000f. Critical device not found. Alrighty then. Fuck my life, eh?

Remove the GPU, look around a bit while frantically trying to boot the system, and I notice an oddly bent SATA cable. I look at it and the bastard is FRAYED AT THE END! Fuck, that's my main SSD! I finally replace the SATA cable and boot, still the same error... Boot into a recovery environment, and guess what?

Windows has decided to change my boot partition, ya know, the FUCKING C: DRIVE, from NTFS to RAW format, stripping it of formatting! What the actual fuck Microsoft? You just took a shit on yourself while having a seizure on the fucking MOON! Fine, fuck you, I have recovery USB! Oh, shit, that won't boot... I have an old installation! Boot ITS recovery, try desperately to find a fix online... CHKDSK C: /F... alright, repairing, awesome! Repaired, I can see data, but not boot. So now I'm at the point where I'm waiting for a USB installer to be created over USB 2.0. Wheeeeeeeeee. FML.

THESE are the times I usually hate Windows a lot. And I do. But it gets MOST of my work done. Except when it does this.

I'm already pissed, so don't go into the comments and just hate on Windows completely. Just a little. The main post is for the main hate. Deal with it. And I know that someone is going to come at me "Ohhhhh, you need FUCKIN LIIIIIIINUUUUUUUXXXXXXXX!' Want to know my response to that?

No.

I've had a Xiaomi Mi 8 for a few months now. Although I'm impressed by what I got for the amount I paid (a phone that cost about $250 for 6GB RAM, Snapdragon 845, Android 9 and premium build quality is quite a steal), it definitely comes with a consequence.

MIUI (specifically MIUI 11) is godawful. It is single-handedly the worst Android ROM I've ever used since my shitty Android 2.2 phone back around 2010. If you're gonna buy a Xiaomi phone, plan to install Lineage OS on it (but even that's a pain which I'll explain why later).

- Navigation buttons don't hide while watching a video.

Why? God only knows. The ONLY way to bypass without root this is to use its garbage fullscreen mode with gestures, which is annoying as all hell.

- 2 app info pages?

Yeah, the first one you can access just by going to its disaster of a settings app, apps, manage apps and tap on any one.

The 2nd one you can access through the app info button in any 3rd party launcher. Try this: Download Nova launcher, go to the app drawer, hold on any app and tap "app info", and you'll see the 2nd one.

Basically, instead of modifying Android's FOSS source code, they made a shitty overlay. These people are really ahead of their time.

- Can only set lock screen wallpapers using the stock Gallery app

It's not that big an issue, until it is, when whatever wallpaper app you're using only allows you to set the wallpaper and not download them. I think this is both a fuckup on Xiaomi and (insert wallpaper app name here), but why Xiaomi can't include this basic essential feature that every other Android ROM ever made has is beyond me.

- Theming on MIUI 11 is broken

Why do they even bother having a section to customize the boot animation and status bar when there's not one goddamn theme that supports it? At this point you're only changing the wallpaper and icon pack which you can do on any Android phone ever. Why even bother?

They really, REALLY want to be Apple.

Just look at their phones. They're well designed and got good specs, but they don't even care anymore about being original. The notch and lack of a headphone jack aren't features, they're tremendous fuckups by the dead rotting horse known as Apple that died when Steve Jobs did.

Xiaomi tries to build a walled garden around an inherently customizable OS, and the end result is a warzone of an Android ROM that begs for mercy from its creator. Launchers integrate horribly (Does any power user actually use anything that isn't Nova or Microsoft launcher?), 3rd party themes and customization apps need workarounds, some apps don't work at all. People buy from Xiaomi to get a high end budget Android phone at the price of some ads and data collection, not a shitter iOS wannabe.

They really, REALLY want you to have a sim card

If you don't have a sim card and you're using your phone for dev stuff, you're a 2nd class citizen to Xiaomi. Without one, you can't:

- Install adb through adb
- Write to secure settings
- Unlock your bootloader and get away from this trash Android ROM

What's the point? Are they gonna shadow ban you? Does anyone contact them to unlock their bootloader saying "yeah I wanna use a custom rom to pirate lizard porn and buy drugs"? They made this 1000000000x harder than it needs to be for no reason whatsoever. Oh yeah and you gotta wait like a week or something for them to unlock it. How they fucked up this bad is beyond me.

So yeah. Xiaomi. Great phones, atrocious OS.

Hopefully, you already know that the company controlled by the alledged reptiloid subhuman and olimpic testicle juggler formerly known as Mister Zuck My Tits is not to be trusted.

But as is always the case in this bitch, I've been forced into cowjizz flooded swamps' worth of stinking shit platforms for the sake of avoiding isolation.

And so, I've just found yet another way in which Facebook **THUNDERSTRIKE** ... the company, not the geriatric ward, is one of the CROWN ACHIEVEMENTS of human civilization.

Let me tell you something: some people are fucking broke. Hell, some people sleep on the streets, live on scraps, and willingly engage in acts of public defecation when provoked. But I'm not even talking about them no, just plain *broke*.

And so imagine being that guy who doesn't really use his phone much, except maybe for sharing cat pictures with mom because that's what being an absolute chad is all about. You don't get a new phone, because money is a __little__ bit tight. But THEN...

The dreaded CAPITAL strikes, and requests of you to bend and fall onto your knees so as to provide intense, intimate and manual -- as well as oral -- PLEASURE to the [NOT SO] METAPHORICAL PENIS of the """SYSTEM""".

Oh, what an abominable, drooooooling revenant that lies before you!

"Gimme your ass... " he says, menacingly, as you wail about in a futile attempt to guard and preserve the very last vestiges of your own anal virginity.

And so you fight, and kick him in the NADS with everything you have, down to the final shreds of vigor. Victory! Or so you thought...

"You must... " he mutters, mortally wounded "update WhatsApp... "

"Still you breathe?!" you exclaim, suddenly transformed into a heroic, sexy moustachoed arquebusier "After I'm done ~OILING~ my VICTORIOUS CHEST, I *shall* bestow DEATH uppon you!".

But as you rip open your shirt to apply sensual oiling to your marvellous frontal assets, your nemesis reveals it's portentous Portugal: "this new version of Android... " he gasps as he perishes "is incompatible with your device... "

"Ughh! Sacrebleu!" you shriek out in pain, realizing that you are now unable to ACCESS THE FUCKING DATA THAT IS IN YOUR OWN FUCKING HARDWARE BECAUSE OF A STUPID FORCED BINARY INCOMPATIBILITY.

That's right. Now even if I *do* get a new phone, I can't do shit about losing all of the family memes. And contacts and all of that shit, but the stickers are more important. A minor inconvenience, yes, and it didn't need all of this preamble but I was doing the dramatic fight scene bit inside my head as I was writing and I got into it.

Because the only documented way to transfer all of that data is to OPEN THE APPLICATION and scan some code, but everytime I go to do that, IT TELLS ME I NEED TO UPDATE. And every time I GO TO UPDATE, it says that MY PHONE is TOO FUCKING OLD!! AAAAAAAGHGHGHGHGHGHGHG!!!!

And you too, might be a dashing french man from centuries past, with both balls and tits down to your fucking knees, folding your arms in a position that exhumes smugness in a disgustingly irreverent and self-aggrandizing way, looking at me as a mere plebeian who cannot wrap his head around the mystical art of interacting with Google's black deuce box.

And you would be somewhat right in your judgement! But just having to fiddle about with these fucking pocket Elmo screens is such a traumatic experience for me that I'd rather lose my stickers.

[ADBREAK] Are you a debonair victorian undercover butt pirate, taking unparalleled care of your Falstaffian, highfalutin poils pubiens? Need your "sword" sharpened, as you browse through the pages of this magnanimous lexicon? Would you rather allocate final death to your coworkers than learn one more synonym for sonorous, supercilious and pontifical?

We all know that ALL you need to help keep that honor intact is slaying your enemies in high-stakes combat. But how to satisfy less gallant needs, when male prostitution is outlawed in more than sixteen duchies?

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BloodCurse is easily contracted through consumption of the GENITAL fluids of highly-lecherous succubi, conjured through [EXTREMELY CENSORED]! This forbidden arcana allows the user to debour HIS OWN testicles in no time!

Get your bottle of scents, sensual Portuguese chest oils, and fucking designer-drug bath salts for the low, low price of a passionate, unceassing self-blowjob! And use my code FRONTALASSETS for 60% OFF in your next soul-robbing foray into the felational dark arts!

Big ups to BloodCurse for sponsoring this RRRRRRRR~$RRR$$RR%5RRRRR$0000:>A48CC50A E3A1B22A : 330D4750 7C24E5A5|.......*3.GP|$.. 5262E7D5 0D1C24E6 : 85594B39 1CB7593E|Rb......YK9..Y>

:~

How are Coding Bootcamps and what are they like?

A little background:

I’ve been going to a University (have a year left for a CS degree) and I am so EXTREMELY frustrated. I thought I would get an education but it’s so underwhelming. 95% of it doesn’t involve programming and the classes that do are so elementary that I know more than the professors. By the end of my web design course we had been taught to center text, insert images, insert links, and how to use tables with a single day on CSS using colors.
The OOP courses are all the same, learn variables, types, conditionals, loops, classes, functions, and so forth. Python, C++, and Java. I taught all this to myself when I was 15, I’m 29 now.

I’ve recently gotten extremely interested into full stack web development. .NET Core, React, Typescript. I’m also working with Electron. I’m basically 100% self taught and spend almost every waking moment trying to learn more and apply it.

There’s only one person at my school who has the same passion as me and he’s the president at the coding club but is going into machine learning and big data (I’m the Secretary) and I just wish I could interact with more people who have the same passion. I would love to be challenged. I feel as if I spend more time trying to learn and diagnose problems then applying my knowledge because web development is so complicated when it comes to connecting everything together and I’m still relatively new to it (started like 4 months ago). I’m an extremely fast learner and extremely dedicated so I’m not worried about that being an issue.

I just really want to be a part of a community where I have people who can answer my questions and I don’t have to spend hours or days on google finding a solution to integrating Webpack or using typescript with react, and more. I want to feel challenged.

Can I get this from a boot camp? I recently listened to a podcast from Syntax and it really excited me but I don’t want to be let down again. Either way I’m finishing my degree to get that bullshit $60000 piece of paper but I wouldn’t mind taking a couple months off for something like this if it’s worth it.

I live in CO so if you have any Bootcamps in CO that you recommend, I’d love to hear it and take a trip to check it out in person.

Thanks a bunch!

TL;DR - (almost) childhood trauma due to Wesrern Digital crap products lead to lot of data loss and a plege to not trust or purchase their products for the rest of my life.

....

So, I got my first ever Wester Digital 2TB Mybook, back when 2TB was a really big thing. While in the midst of moving (not copying) a LOT of data to it, the damn disk just.. died. There was no fall, no power outage, no damage, it just stopped working. I was out of words and out of options. Tried yanking out the disk and connecting it directly to a system, but no luck because it looks like it's the HDD mobo that died.

Also stupid young me did not realise back then that, even if a "moved" the data, the original data is still most likely in their original location, and so, never bothered a recovery.

Lots of good stuff lost that day.

And as with a lot of you, my disaster recovery system kicked up 10 fold. Now I got redundant local and cloud backup copies of all critical and otherwise unattainable data.

As you may have guessed, I never bought another Wester Digital product ever again. My internal HDDs are Segate, and external is a suprisingly long lived Toshiba Canvio.

Over the summer I was recruited to be a supplement instructor for a data structures course. As a result of that I was asked (separately by the professor) to be a grader for the course. Because of pay limitations I've mostly been grading homework project assignments. In any case, it's a great job to get my foot into the department and get recognized.

Over the course of the semester I've had this one person, OSX, named after their operating system of choice, who has been giving me awkward submissions. On the first assignment they asked the professor for extra time for some reason or the other, and that's perfectly fine.

So I finally receive OSX's submission, and it's a .py file as per course of the course. So I pop up a terminal in the working directory and type "python OSX_hw1.py". Get some error spit out about the file not being the right encoding. I know that I can tell python to read it in a different encoding, so I open it up in a text editor. To my surprise it's totally not a text file, but rather a .zip file!

I've seen weirder things done before, so no big deal. I rename the file extension, and open it up to extract the files when I see that there's no python files. "Okay, what's goin on here OSX..." I think to myself.

Poking around in the files it appears to be some sort of meta-data. To what, I had no clue, but what I did find was picture files containing what appeared to be some auto-generated screenshots of incomplete code. Since I'm one to give people the benefit of doubt even when they've long exhausted other peoples', I thought that it must be some fluke, and emailed OSX along with the professor detailing my issue.

I got back a rather standard reply, one of which was so un-notable I could not remember it if my life depended on it. However, that also meant I didn't have to worry about that anymore. Which when you're juggling 50 bazillion things is quite a relief. Tragically, this relief was short lived with the introduction of assignment 2.

Assignment 2 comes around, and I get the same type of submission from OSX. At this time I also notice that all their submissions are *very* close to the due time of 11:59pm (which I don't care about as long as it's in before people start waking up the next morning). I email OSX and the professor again, and receive a similar response. I also get an email from OSX worried about points being deducted. I reply, "No issue. You know what's wrong. Go and submit the right file on $CentralGradingCenter. Just submit over your old assignment".

To my frustration OSX claimed to not know how to do this. I write up a quick response explaining the process, and email it. In response OSX then asks if I can show them if they comes to my supplemental lesson. I tell OSX that if they are the only person, sure, otherwise no because it would not be a fair use of time to the other students.

OSX ends up showing up before anyone else, so I guide them through the process. It's pretty easy, so I'm surprised that they were having issues. Another person then shows up, so I go through relevant material and ask them if they have any questions about recent material in class. That said, afterwards OSX was being somewhat awkward and pushy trying to shake my hand a lot to the point of making me uncomfortable and telling them that there's no reason to be so formal.

Despite that chat, I still did not see a resubmission of either of those two assignments, and assignment 3 began to show it's head. Obviously, this time, as one might expect after all those conversations, I get another broken submission in the same format. Finally pissed off, I document exactly how everything looks on my end, how the file fails to run, how it's actually a zip file, etc, all with screenshots. That then gets emailed to the professor and OSX.

In response, I get an email from OSX panicking asking me how to submit it right, etc, etc. However, they also removed the professor from the CC field. In response I state that I do not know how to use whatever editor they are using, and that they should refer to the documentation in order to get a proper runnable file. I also re-CC the professor, making sure OSX's email to me is included in my reply.

OSX then shows up for one of my lessons, and since no one had shown up yet, I reiterate through what I had sent in the email. OSX's response was astonished that they could ever screw up that bad, but also admits that they had yet to install python(!!!). Obviously, the next thing that comes from my mouth is asking OSX how they write their code. Their response was that they use a website that lets them run python code.

At this point I'm honestly baffled and explain that a lot of websites like those can have limitations which might make code run differently then it should (maybe it's a simple interpreter written on JavaScript, or maybe it is real python, but how are you supposed to do file I/O?) .

After that I finally get a submission for assignment 1!

While smoke testing in production, I had to delete the sample entity I created to test the released feature, which is not a big deal

Until 20 minutes later, when I realized that I attached a couple of sub entities under it that contained actual live data

When I hit the endpoint from Postman it works. When I hit the endpoint from my application that pushes data to the endpoint it doesn't work, returning a 404 status code. I KNOW the endpoint is there and operational and that both Postman and my application have the same endpoint configured, letter for letter.

So lost. So confused. What the hell is going on.

I decide to install Fiddler to monitor the traffic to see if I can see anything helpful.

I initiate the request again from the application and immediately see that the request size is huge. BAM. It immediately hits me, the payload to the endpoint is too big and the server is "rejecting" it with a 404. I post a smaller request with the application and it works fine.

Yay, saved by Fiddler.

Why does the endpoint default to 404 in such scenarios. The definition of 404: "the client was able to communicate with a given server, but the server could not find what was requested"

In my case, the 404 returned was a red herring. I understand that the substatus code gives more information on why the 404 was returned, in my case the request size being too big, but 404 in general feels like the wrong status code to return because the endpoint IS there. It made me troubleshoot the wrong thing.

Thanks, IIS.

F*ck JavaFX. I mean, how a GUI framework doesn't have a standart navigation procedure? It is not even possible to create a page by constructor. In many other framework when I wanted to pass a data to a page, I just had to write
"new MyPage(SomeClass someObject)"
but in javafx I have to first create a constructor, link the fxml file to it then show the page.
Actually I am not angry. It is a big mistake to wait a good GUI framework from a company that has a website something like that in 2018.

I just realized that I subconsciously believe more lines of code means slower code.

It's not intellectual. I understand that little lines of code often are just calling other code. That this is not how Big O works or does not replace benchmarking and that some data structure requires a lot of code for immense speed up. E.g: B-Trees with sizes at page size for big amounts of data read from a secondary storage location.

But still, when I see a function with just 3 to 5 lines, my inner monkey believes it must be fast.

Know your biases, I guess.

Guys, I think they are asking about Big Data Loss. People thought it's about Data Loss.

My Big Data Loss experience is when everyone in Hong Kong starts talking about big data using spreadsheets. So lost.

I’d been working event based and freelance jobs in the security and entertainment fields for years, with odd stints as a bartender sprinkled in. My pay was mostly decent, but I had no job security, and I was more on the road than at home. A few years before this job search experience I had already realised I can’t continue on this path for ever, especially if I ever want a serious relationship (e.g. 16 weeks straight touring Europe with on avg. 16h work days pretty much every day isn’t ideal in that regard, and also really though on both body and mind). So I decided to study. As I applied in autumn, not every line of study accepted students. The closest to my interest I found was BBA in Business IT.

Fast forward 1,5 years. After moving away from my previous base due to then-gfs studies, I had also been able to accept less work. Well, there were really two reasons: I didn’t want to go on weeks long big tours anymore, and I’d had to price up on my freelance job due to reasons. I still managed to keep our household going, but not knowing when the next paycheck would be available was becoming a little too stressful. I wanted job security. So a few weeks after my wedding I scoured the internetz for positions I could apply to, and applied to a dozen or so places. They were a variety of positions I had a vague understanding of from what I’d learned at UAS: from sales to data analytics to dev… I was aware pretty much all of the applications were a long shot by best, so I expected to be ghosted…

Two of the organizations I applied to wanted to go forward with me. Both dev jobs. I can’t even remember the specifics of the other one anymore, but I do remember the interview: I got in to their office (which was ridiculously open), and got marched into a tiny conference room. The interviewer was passive-aggressive and really bombarded me with questions, not really leaving a socially awkward introvert with any time to answer. I started to get really anxious and twitchy, sweating like a pig. Just wanted out. But nooo, they wanted me to do a coding test live. So they sat me on a computer with Eclipse open, gave me an assignment and told me not to use the internet. What’s even worse is that I could literally feel the interviewer breathing down my neck when I tried to do the test. Well, didn’t happen cause I was under so much pressure that I couldn’t think at all… yeah, that was horrible.

Anyhow, the other position I really applied to because it was in my hometown and I recognised the company name from legendary commercials from the 90s - everyone in this country who watched TV in mid-to-late 90s remembers those. Anyway, to my surprise, my present day manager contacted me and wanted me to do a coding test. At the time he asked I was having a bout of fevers after fevers, not really able to get healthy. I told him that I’d do it as soon as I’m healthy. A month went by, maybe more. He asked again. Again I replied that as soon as I get healthy, but promised to do it next week the latest. I didn’t deliver on that, but the next week after that, even if I was the most feverish I had been, I did the tests. I could only finish half of them, cause I couldn’t look at a screen for long at a time and had to visit the loo every 10min or so, but apparently that was enough. Next week I was already going to the interview… oh I also googled what is PHP on the way there, since it was mentioned as a requirement and I had no idea what it was. Imagine that…

The interview itself couldn’t have been more different from the other one. We were sitting in a nice conference room with my manager and the product’s lead dev, drinking coffee, our feet on the table and talking smack. Oh, and we did play a game of NHL<insertNumber> on PS4 during the interview… it was relaxed. Of course the more serious chat was there, too, but I can only really remember how relaxed it was. When I left the interview, I had been promised the position and that I would be sent the contract to be signed as soon as the CEO had reviewed and approved it. Next day, I had signed it and some time later I started at my current job (I gave a date when I was available to start, since there was a tour still agreed upon between the interview and the start).

Oh, and the job’s pretty much like the interview. Relaxed. It’s a good place to be in, even though the pay could be better (I regularly get offers for junior positions with more pay, and mid level positions with double the pay). I do value a pleasant working environment and the absence of stress more than big munny, what can I say?

I'm not sure if it is a dev experience, but definitely boosted my morale.

In 2014, my company (in India) sent me to attend a conference in Boston. The conference was about big data.

When I came back, I wrote a blog post about Apache Spark in my company's blog. Because of the blog, my name got mentioned in a prominent newspaper's article about Apache Spark.

PS: That is my only blog post till date

For what fucking reason the ability to set the date and time programatically has been blocked on Android?!
Why you can create fucking invisible apps that work in the background, mine cryptos, steal your data but they decided that something like that is considered dangerous?

Can anyone give me a logical explanation?

P.S.
There are cases (big pharma companies) where the users don't have access to internet nor a ntp server is available on the local network, so the ability for an app to get the time of a sql server and set it in runtime is crucial, expecially when the user, for security reasons, can't have access to the device settings and change it by himself.
"System apps" can do it, but you would have to change the firmware of a device to sideload an external "System app" and in that case it would lose the warranty.

So, yeah, fucking Google assholes, there are cases where your dumb decisions make the others struggle every other day.
Give more power to third party developers, dumb motherfuckers.
It's not that difficult to ask the user, once, to give the SET_TIME permission.
It was possible in the past...

P.S.2
Windows Mobile 6.5 was a masterpiece for business.
It still could be, just mount better CPUs on PDAs and extend the support. But no, "Android is the future". What a fucking bad future.

I used to be a big security guy, not allowing stuff like most of the social media, not bringing my phone anywhere, carrying a RPi tablet for privacy reasons. Very Stallman stuff.

Recently I noticed that I don't care so much.. I see these things as opportunities, for instance Microsoft products could be benefitial for job opportunities, I have some workout sessions on my phone.

I could restrict myself... but is it worth it just to decline some capitalist/politician's row in a dataset for analysis?

But then again I feel as a society I think we should either do this or request this data to be distributed to us as well.

Should you be playing a game of cards, when the enemy can see your hand? What do u think?

Why the fuck nobody talks about Multi-page apps?! We went from a Web where everything was Multi-page server-rendered, and now everything for Web developers is "Single-page apps".

What about websites who can't do that? Not everything can be a single-page app. Only my uncle's restaurant website, or something which is TRULY a full app. No half choices.
If your website is a multi-page app/portal which actually PRELOADS data, instead of doing 100 fetch to an API within a page that is full of loading bars, well, your life is a pain.
When you want a first contentful paint which isn't a white page, well, your life is a pain.
What are React, Vue, Ember, Angular (let's exclude Svelte and Marko) going to do about Multi-page apps and SSR?

React-router sucks to me. It's performance is weak and it's useful only when you have an SPA with multiple sections which can be treated as pages (e.g. A single SPA divided in tabs).
Server-side rendering is the worst pain ever made by humanity, in React (and prob Vue, I didn't try but I can bet). And even when made easier from libs like Svelte and Marko, I (personally) can't get it to be faster enough compared to a traditional website without a JS framework and with a templating engine.
Anyways, if there's anything that I learnt from React, is to stay away from Next.js. Perfect, beautiful, mess.

All JS frameworks just seem to bloat the code and make it worse and slower, even though they're REALLY helpful.

Why? Why everyone loves them if their downsides are so clear? Why 3 projects out of 3 I made (1 React SSR, 1 Vue, 1 Marko SSR) are and will stay painfully slow and bloated, full of shit, even if in 2020 we should have evolved with the famous three shaking, with the famous lazy loading, etc.?

I am just frustrated.
And let's not even talk about Webpack, Rollup, Lasso, those module bundlers shit which are harder to configure and understand than finding a needle in a haystack.
Lasso was the easiest to configure but I anyways can't understand it. Webpack seems it was made to handle SPAs, as any tool in this freaking world, and not even considering an easy way to integrate multiple bundles for multiple pages (I know it's pretty easy, but with component sharing between pages and big unique bundles Next.js handles it soooo bad it feels like hell).

Am I the only one?

Sorry for the long rant. I just needed to rant right now.

Playing pokemon. I'm extremely into the series and played nearly every gen since the first ones. Even bought the cheap 2ds just to play these 3ds versions even tho i got acutally no time during exams and sometimes even played the different editions of the same gen just because i can.😅

And I have the habit to think about "how is it done?" With everything that is displayed on a screen or just blinks. And with 800 pokemon and their stats and subforms and IVs and all that nerdshit (back then compressed in such a small rom and running on pretty low end devices) i began to think about data structures, organization of them and such, especially when there are many big, wide datasets.😪

I don't like when client decide which tech use in the project. I got some weird tech request like:
1. Move existing database from postgresql to Hadoop because hadoop is Big Data (is kinda move from amazon rds to amazon s3 just why? have you index, cluster your postgresql table?)
2. Move from mysql to postgresql because mysql cause deadlock (maybe their previous developer just fucking moron)
In this situation we just explain why we don't use that and propose alternative solution. If they insist with their solution either ignore it or decide not continuing the project.

First post yay!
I'm a "tech" lead for my team. The "tech" stands for technically, I can go on a whole different rant there but that's not why we're here today.
So we have a new PM on our side and a new PM on the client side. I've been working on this project longer than any of the devs and PMs have.
One of the tasks that my team does is validate and ingest data. It's pretty straightforward and it's fully automated. It takes minutes, and at most an hour, to complete this task. We get these tasks from users randomly and they don't have any schedule to it. It's FIFO basis and we just add it to our current sprint if we have bandwidth or add it to the next one if we don't. Not a big deal, no users have complained about it before, it's just business as usual. And we have a tracker of when we received it, how big it was and when it's been ingested. Super simple.
So now comes in the new client PM. He's been asking us to come up with timelines for these ingestions. My project's new PM is bending over to him and saying okay we'll come up with it, no problem. Well, there is a problem. We don't know that far in advance for when these tasks are coming in. Even if we did, now we're supposed to create timelines for a 10 min task? It literally is uploading a file and our system handles everything and I've explained that to my pm but he still is like well that's what they want. It takes less effort to do the ingestion than to make these timelines. It just means project managers bothering devs about timelines.
Idk how to deal with this. Thoughts? Any similar experiences?

After a year of using mongo in prod and personal projects I have realised some things. Its really nice early on the project, especially when there are changing requirements and for small projects or proof of concepts.
But when you make commercial software things tend to get more complex and relational. Stakeholders want reporting and even a report building which a document store isn't the best at.
With most projects projects when they get big things get relational and this becomes more and more expensive to handle in terms of compute power and developer time.
I don't doubt mongo has its place, maybe as an secondary specialised data store or if the project is inherently document oriented.
Blog over.

YGGG IM SO CLOSE I CAN ALMOST TASTE IT.

Register allocation pretty much done: you can still juggle registers manually if you want, but you don't have to -- declaring a variable and using it as operand instead of a register is implicitly telling the compiler to handle it for you.

Whats more, spilling to stack is done automatically, keeping track of whether a value is or isnt required so its only done when absolutely necessary. And variables are handled differently depending on wheter they are input, output, or both, so we can eliminate making redundant copies in some cases.

Its a thing of beauty, defenestrating the difficult aspects of assembly, while still writting pure assembly... well, for the most part. There's some C-like sugar that's just too convenient for me not to include.

(x,y)=*F arg0,argN. This piece of shit is the distillation of my very profound meditations on fuckerous thoughtlessness, so let me break it down:

- (x,y)=; fuck you in the ass I can return as many values as I want. You dont need the parens if theres only a single return.
- *F args; some may have thought I was dereferencing a pointer but Im calling F and passing it arguments; the asterisk indicates I want to jump to a symbol rather than read its address or the value stored at it.

To the virtual machine, this is three instructions:

- bind x,y; overwrite these values with Fs output.
- pass arg0,argN; setup the damn parameters.
- call F; you know this one, so perform the deed.

Everything else is generated; these are macro-instructions with some logic attached to them, and theres a step in the compilation dedicated to walking the stupid program for the seventh fucking time that handles the expansion and optimization.

So whats left? Ah shit, classes. Disinfect and open wide mother fucker we're doing OOP without a condom.

Now, obviously, we have to sanitize a lot of what OOP stands for. In general, you can consider every textbook shit, so much so that wiping your ass with their pages would defeat the point of wiping your ass.

Lets say, for simplicity, that every program is a data transform (see: computation) broken down into a multitude of classes that represent the layout and quantity of memory required at different steps, plus the operations performed on said memory.

That is most if not all of the paradigm's merit right there. Everything else that I thought to have found use for was in the end nothing but deranged ways of deriving one thing from another. Telling you I want the size of this worth of space is such an act, and is indeed useful; telling you I want to utilize this as base for that when this itself cannot be directly used is theoretically a poorly worded and overly verbose bitch slap.

Plainly, fucktoys and abstract classes are a mistake, autocorrect these fucking misspelled testicle sax.

None of the remaining deeper lore, or rather sleazy fanfiction, that forms the larger cannon of object oriented as taught by my colleagues makes sufficient sense at this level for me to even consider dumping a steaming fat shit down it's execrable throat, and so I will spare you bearing witness to the inevitable forced coprophagia.

This is what we're left with: structures and procedures. Easy as gobblin pie.

Any F taking pointer-to-struc as it's first argument that is declared within the same namespace can be fetched by an instance of the structure in question. The sugar: x ->* F arg0,argN

Where ->* stands for failed abortion. No, the arrow by itself means fetch me a symbol; the asterisk wants to jump there. So fetch and do. We make it work for all symbols just to be dicks about it.

Anyway, invoking anything like this passes the caller to the callee. If you use the name of the struc rather than a pointer, you get it as a string. Because fuck you, I like Perl.

What else is there to discuss? My mind seems blank, but it is truly blank.

Allocating multitudes of structures, with same or different types, should be done in one go whenever possible. I know I want to do this, and I know whichever way we settle for has to be intuitive, else this entire project has failed.

So my version of new always takes an argument, dont you just love slurping diarrhea. If zero it means call malloc for this one, else it's an address where this instance is to be stored.

What's the big idea? Only the topmost instance in any given hierarchy will trigger an allocation. My compiler could easily perform this analysis because I am unemployed.

So where do you want it on the stack on the heap yyou want to reutilize any piece of ass, where buttocks stands for some adequately sized space in memory -- entirely within the realm of possibility. Furthermore, evicting shit you don't need and replacing it with something else.

Let me tell you, I will give your every object an allocator if you give the chance. I will -- nevermind. This is not for your orifices, porridges, oranges, morpheousness.

Walruses.

More and more, I am getting frustrated/depressed from the attitude of our customers who complain, moan and get angry about issues in their infrastructure, while at the same time, refusing to pay more so the issues could be mitigated.

Like, a client's angry with us today for having one of their non-production-critical databases inaccessible for... Hmm... About 8 hours now (So a whole workday).

Like... I get it, some of your employees couldn't work with it offline, but like... What the hell do we do? You keep data from as far back as several years ago in there, without partitioning, without exports, in a mix of innodb and myisam, so when the DB crashes, and its replication has to be reset from zero, reimporting all the data takes hours upon hours, and importing .sql files just takes time.

Or another client who got angry when their app fell out of the internet, cuz one of their myisam-based log tables crashed, and had to be repaired, with data spanning several years back, meaning it took hours to fix...

The more I work with these "basic" and "simple" infrastructure designs that is *not* redundant, or HA, the more I wonder -- How do the big names out there do it? How do you design systems with fault tolerance so a single DB table crash doesn't lead to the whole app getting inaccessible?

We have... One, exactly one, client, who uses MariaDB with Gallera, and that cluster is *amazing*, it just keeps chugging along, without a care in the world. But it cost them quite a lot, as they had to buy 3 DB servers, instead of 1...

The end of today was extremely fun.

Imagine the surprise. I was importing a simple 8 GB big virtual machine into the Proxmox hypervizor.

First issue: It was in the Open Virtualization Format (.ova) for easy import into... most hypervizors... Not Proxmox, however.

But really, not that bad, there are ways around it. Create a blank virtual machine through the UI, scrap the disk you create, then extract the two disk QCOW2 files from the .ova file, which by itself is just a POSIX TAR archive. Then import them through the commandline.

...So I did just that. The larger of the two was about 8 GBs, the other just like... 50 MBs.

The larger imported fine. The smaller?

Color me surprised, when it created a FUCKING. 1. TB. LOGICAL. VOLUME.

...

That it then proceeded to try and fill full of zeros...

Oh yes, it was one of the fancy dynamic storage files that expand as space is needed.

...
Tomorrow, I'll have to try if I can export just the filesystem data into an individual, shrunken down, normal, plain, old disk. None of this fancy black magic shit.

...Also... I don't get why Proxmox doesn't support that... The filesystem was only a few megs big... Ugh.

!Dev
TL Dr :- Debugging a software I barely know about was slow and ended up breaking in the shop it was used in and reverting the changes does not solve the problem

I asked my father a few days ago why he was buying a dedicated server for his ERP software and not using a client computer as his server which he is doing in his shop currently. He said that it was slow on other computers in the LAN which is an wired. The solutions given by the company that made it did not work. Big bills would sometimes also dissapear which took around 30 minutes to make. So when he bought the computer to home during lockdown I pulled up the debugging guide from the company which summed up to check latency,ram and add these files to exclusion list of your antivirus. Latency was kinda high at the first when pinging another computer on the LAN but I was testing on WiFi so it could be pretty inaccurate. The computer met the ram requirements so that was not a problem. I checked the data path by opening the software and accidentally typed something but I did not worry since the changes needed to be manually accepted. I added the files to the Windows defender exclusion list and shut it down.

Next day :- My father calls me up and says the software is working on the server but is broken on other computers. So I check if the changes were automatically accepted for some reason and yes that happened. So so pull up a guide to configure the software in multi user mode and I replace the mistyped setting with the correct one and it still does not work. My father asks me to undo everything by using anydesk. I remove all the exclusions I added to Windows defender and disable windows firewall. Still does not work. Restart the computer and software. Still does not work. Check permissions on data folder. They are correct.

WTF I reverted all the changes I made and the software does not work on other computers.

Opinions please.

I want to share a small model in my iOS app. Now on android I'd do with with ViewModelProviders, but on iOS I'm going with SharedDataContainer which is basically a singleton class that store key value data.

Is there any better approach? Data will not be bigger than 10 list items with guid (key) and int (value)

However; when I have big data I do cache on disk or hello OOM exceptions (or whatever they call that bitch on iOS)

ok this may look like a lazy ass beginner crying out for spoon feeding( which it kinda is), but i want some real industrial training in non documented Android coding.

For last 2 years i have been reading tons of Android articles and documentation on "how to use this library", "how to add this feature", "what this function of this class does", but not much about how to use it efficiently, like the way its used in industry.

When I interned with a startup, all they wanted from me was to push new design changes, fix layout bugs and work as fastly as i could. I had no time to understand their core code, which had so many things that i could have learned : those mvp/mvvm design/architecture patterns, dependency injections, kotlin , coroutines, state management designs, data bindings, eventbuses and handling, and VIPER,RIBS (I mean, not everything was particularly in their code, i picked up a few keywords from here n there)... a lot of stuff that is used by many apps for their codebase.
I can read up these stuff by myself, but i always end up feeling bored coz frankly, i got no big/valuable project to implement it upon and feel excited about it. I feel that open source projects from OSS companies could be my window, but their chat spaces are also mostly empty to discuss/get some guidance.

I want some specific training about these. Can you guys provide any online/offline course/company training/books in this subject, the best practices?

It is with great sorrow I am announcing that an Apple Watch can catch fire while on your wrist. I bashed Fitbit very hard for this when they were giving people burn scars for life. Collecting and selling data is one thing, but mutilating bodies because of negligence and wanting to save a buck on manufacturing is a whole another thing. It seems like Apple is not much different.

I am struggling with body dysmorphia, and I told you out loud that if a Fitbit device gave me a burn scar for life, I would've probably committed suicide. I still stand by these words. My body integrity is a big deal to me. Having a scar due to my own negligence, like mishandling a knife, is one thing, but the concept itself that some fucking hustle culture startup can mutilate my body is another thing. It scares me.

I am considering to abandon any kind of wearable electronics altogether. The cost of failure is just too high. I'm probably going to get a mechanical Timex or a Seiko.

!rant

Rant from my previous work as a consultant Data Engineer (wish I had known this site back then).

During my stay at the place, we have a big client whose contact with us was an incompetent stressful fellow.

I single-handedly build a humongous automated data pipeline using Airflow. I am very proud of my baby as my first massive project and check it obsessively for every possible flaw, especially when writing down documentation for the poor soul that would take my place.

Luckily for me, everything is working as intended, until of course on my last day of work, shit hits the fan, and everything breaks down.

After a moment of initial panic: it was Thursday morning, we had a Machine Learning model to run over the weekend, predictions to make and reports to write and a very lovely next week deadline, I calm down.

"I won't be dealing with this shit anymore, starting from 18:00 PM and anyway Fear Is The Mind Killer."

Quite sure that it couldn't have been my code, I start looking at various logs when the culprit was clear. The B(ig) S(tupid) C(lient) changed the whole schema of the data he was feeding to us.

I call him: he has no idea of what was done to the data. Hell, at first he doesn't seem to remember what the deal with schema, data, and SQL is (the guy was supposed to be a big shot in the IT department). It turns out he hired one of our competitors to do his side of the collection pipeline. He tries to get mad at me, but everything he throws bounces back to him. I am calm yet ruthless pointing out how every major hiccup had been his fault and that I could quickly reach to his board of directors explaining why their Machine Learning model was late.

Result: he apologizes, extends our deadline, and I get a round of applause from other juniors who would have to deal with me had I failed.

Never am I happier to not work as an underpaid cannon fodder apprentice in a shitty consultant firm.

Luckily for me, everything is working as intended, until of course on my last day of work, shit hits the fan, and everything breaks down.

After a moment of initial panic: it was Thursday morning, we had a Machine Learning model to run over the weekend, predictions to make and reports to write and a very lovely next week deadline, I calm down.

"I won't be dealing with this shit anymore, starting from 18:00 PM and anyway Fear Is The Mind Killer."

Quite sure that it couldn't have been my code, I start looking at various logs when the culprit was clear. The B(ig) S(tupid) C(lient) changed the whole schema of the data he was feeding to us.

I call him: he has no idea of what was done to the data. Hell, at first he doesn't seem to remember what the deal with schema, data, and SQL is (the guy was supposed to be a big shot in the IT department). It turns out he hired one of our competitors to do his side of the collection pipeline. He tries to get mad at me, but everything he throws bounces back to him. I am calm yet ruthless pointing out how every major hiccup had been his fault and that I could quickly reach to his board of directors explaining why their Machine Learning model was late.

Result: he apologizes, extends our deadline, and I get a round of applause from other juniors who would have to deal with me had I failed.

Never am I happier to not work as an underpaid cannon fodder apprentice in a shitty consultant firm.

HTML Writers Guidelines

When designing your web site you want to make the visiting experience as enjoyable as possible and at the same time make it so that if the site needs to be changed in any way, the changes are not too difficult to make. You want the look to be as appealing as possible for all browsers and also make the site accessible to users with disabilities. In order to accomplish all this there are some general guidelines when creating your HTML code.

1. The first thing that will really make your life easier is through the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) - CSS is used to maintain the look of the document such as the fonts, margins and color. HTML directly on the page is not a good choice to handle these aspects because if say, the font color you are using for certain paragraphs needs to be changed from blue to red, you would have to go in and change each color tag manually. By using CSS you can designate the color for each of those paragraphs just once in the CSS file. That way if you have to change the font color from blue to red you make one change instead of the countless number of changes you might have to make, especially if your web site contains hundreds of pages. This is a big time saver and a must for all professionally designed web sites.

2. Don't use the FONT tag directly in your HTML code - This becomes a problem when using some cheap authoring tools that try to mimic what a web page should look like by using excessive FONT tags and nbsp characters. These tools end up creating web pages that are impossible to keep maintained. There is a program you can use, if you've created one of these disaster pages, called the HTML Tidy Program which you can actually download here . This will clean up your code as well as possible.

3. You want your web pages readable to people who have disabilities - People who surf the Internet depend on speech synthesizers or Braille readers to interpret the text on the page. If your HTML markup is sloppy or isn't contained in CSS the software these people use to read pages have a difficult time in interpreting these pages. You should also include descriptions for each image on your page. Also, don't use server side image maps. If you are using tables you should include a summary of the table's structure and also associate table data with the correct headers. This gives non visual browsers a chance to follow the page as they go from one cell to another. And finally, for forms, make sure you include labels for form fields.

By following just these three guidelines you give your visitors, especially disabled visitors the best chance of having an enjoyable visit to your site while at the same time making it so that if you have to make changes to your site, those changes can be made easily and quickly.

Make your code available for your team members, please.

So we're working on this robotics project using ROS, a framework that enables multiple nodes in a network exchange their functionality among each other through tcp connections. Each node can be implemented and executed on your own machine, and tested with dummy inputs, but in collaboration they make a robot do fancy stuff.

The knowledgebase needs data from the image processing unit, providing this data to others with semantic context to high level planning, which uses this semantic data for decision making and calling the robot manipulation node with meaningful input, to navigate the robot's components in the environment. We use a dedicated machine, which pulls the corresponding repositories and is always kept configured correctly, to run each node, such that everybody has access to each other's work when needed.

So far so good. We tried to convince the manipulation guy (let's call him John) to run his code on our central machine, not a week, but since the first day, 5 months ago. Our cluster classification has been unavailable for 2 months, but my collegue fixed that. We still can't run the whole project without John's computer. If his machine blows up we're fucked.

Each milestone feels like a big-bang-test, fixing issues in interfaces last-minute. We see the whole demo just moments before our supervisors arrive at the door.

I just hope he doesn't get hit by a truck.

I work as a data engineer in my company. My senior calls himself data scientist- he is 29 years old and recently did one MOOC on data science!

I wonder when my colleagues will find out about how much he really knows.

Till then I am cleaning and arranging his data, while he sits and earns a big fat package by citing one data scientist tag to his profile!! -_-

I really hate working with learning management systems (LMS).
I make training simulations for retail companies and some of these have the worst, backwards LMS's out there.
The providers who install and manage these LMSs for the companies always insist we make our training run inside their own environment, but we can't since it's a 3D training made in Unity that doesn't run well in a browser.

Luckily some of these are fine to figure out. Just a few API calls here and there for authorization and reporting progress, but some are an absolute nightmare.

Just now one of the providers provided me with a 2000 page documentation of all the functions of the LMS's API that our customer is using. All I need are like 5 pages that explain what URL to call with what data and the responses, but now I'm stuck spending days trying to find the 0.5% of this documentation that I need to communicate with their API.

And of course, the documentation is vague as all hell. minimal descriptions of what each endpoint does. Subjects names are super vague, as in do I look for course progress or lesson completion state. What the heck is a Learning Event, is it relevant to me?

And the errors in this document, too.
Bullet-point lists with duplicate items.
language errors everywhere.
Property lists where they copy-pasted the description of properties.
An entire EMPTY chapter, literally a page with only the chapter's title.

I just can't stand how these providers barely seem to know anything about the API of the LMS's they provide to customers.
(for clarity, the LMS is produced by some big tech company, it's installed and maintained by some 3rd party which is our main line of communication when rolling out trainings to these).

It always goes like: "Hey, we want to use your training." "Oh, that's great, we have our own, simple LMS where you can view your employee's progress." "Nah, we want to use our backwards LMS. Here's a giant manual about it's API, go figure it out!"
And then I'm left here tearing my hair out trying to figure out which 3 calls I need to send their API from the tons of extra stuff it can do which is completely unnecessary and being unable to rely on the provider because they lack the knowledge and have such thick skulls about the implementation of the LMS itself that they also seems completely unwilling to help to begin with!

Just another day at the office.

Hello, I have a question for anyone familiar with multithreading!

I just started working with threading for the first time, I mostly write powershell scripts 😅, I found that certain conditions make using multithreading an absolute time saver. And of course in some tasks it's not such a big deal.

I am currently working on a project that runs multiple threads and each thread might invoke one of my functions that also threads the work.

I'm a total newbhat when it comes to this stuff, but if my main process is 4 threads, and I can spin up, up-to 4 more threads to run one of my functions, does the math equate to a possible total number of threads of 16 or is it possible to have the threading go ape-shit bananas and utterly thrash the cpu with rampant threads getting created?

I've looked online and based on some of the info that I've managed to come across on my own, the answers elude towards being safe because I'm creating pools for running the threads first and the pool is responsible for maintaining min/max threads, but I can't seem to find good info on running a pool+threads inside another thread.

Just to let you in on what the function does that requires threading in the first place, I need to basically query CloudTrail based on ARN's to find events, but I can only pass a single ARN to the find-ctevent cmdlet. So I'm essentially making 1500-ish really really small calls to AWS just to get back event data for the ARN.

Serially, this takes like almost 20 mins, on my laptop using stupid settings like 24 threads, it completes in about 95seconds. On the actual server that will be running this code, I'm going to limit it to 4 threads and try to figure out a way to cache the info locally and update the info on a cron or schedule so only the initial scrape takes forever and then the updates can be done nightly or something.

thank you in advance for your help, I'm not too sure if the question is dumb but please let me know either way!

Ok. I GIVE UP! ...for at least a couple hours...

I'm not a big believer in... well anything suitable to the literal definition of believe. But there's only so much 'wtf? How is this even possible?' and any answer u can come up with is nearly statistically impossible...

I am a neuro-atypical (and just extremely atypical even if i somehkw was neurotypical) being, based on logic, finely calculated statistical probability and the most raw data and as unbiased as realistically possible, algorithms and interpretation (usually recursive pattern recognition with several highly detailed historical sources.

...but at some point statistical improbability and a collation of separate, yet relatively closely occuring events/circumstances makes logic, itself a primary suspect of corruption.

What was the breaking point that caused me to (temporarily) give up and tell logic to f off for a bit cuz maybe the illogical and mythical is the real logic, leaving me in a losing battle with 'the' fates?

Trying to get all my sourcing/purchase orders in/paid for/on the literal boats b4 end of the workday/week in china...
1st, had to drop a supplier cuz they have limited reps. When the one ive had 7+ years left, i got the aloof blonde girl societal trope of a rep... who for the 2nd time (despite the several very blunt complaints above her, incl me) she sent out a promotional update to the entire client list (ie, inherently competitors) as CC not BCC... over 200 business email accounts with tailored info of their sourcing.

2- totally diff company/ industry a former rep i was glad be rid of apparently just sfarted back for "awhile" as i needrf to restock/scale...apparently she forgot everything we discussed at length... lke if you want a chance on my business im not gonna be wasting time looking through your gui "mini store to then inquire about everything individually insead of a simple spreadsheet(which i print and put in a 3-ring binder rotating current catalogues in the same format i require everywhere)

3.dog was an ahole, my packed schedule got delayed and morphed.. a bunch of little bs thatd normally have no extra thought impact, hyperfocused forgetting one of my alarms til i realised my idiopathic fever was back and i didnt take/apply meds (pain/muscle relaxers mainly so despite this odd free time and needing to shower. I gotta sit on my rear, leg elevated/non-productive far 40min b4 i can shower (as functional legs and lack of syncope is almost a req to shower)

4. A new-ish rep of a company/factory i like/respect enough to not mention in relation... he makes invoice 1.. slight error thst was easily resolved...#2 was flawless... he goes to officially generate the contract(alibaba... verrrry simple with lots of extra explanation buttons). Price and all items match, its near workweek end so i was waiting for it so i could quickly pay/have it on the boat b4 it left and few fdav days are behind...

I put in card info, get to the 2 cbeck boxes (imo should be only 1 but whatever) asking if billing address is same ss delivery(its always default yes)... then i see a few lines in chinese (i can read enough for business negotiations... typical words/sentences innately look different than things like individual letters/address and postal indicators.) After a few loops of double checking, mentally trying to dismiss my i Intial judgement cuz it'd be too ridiculous... even resorted to google .... nope... initial wtf was spot on... recipient name/address was indeed the company(multi factory producer)i was purchasing a wholesale, via sea freight, bulk of products from.

Im pretty sure the system would've flagged it as an invalid contract within an hr... but seriously... ive been handling alibaba (and other) international sourcing since before high school(mainly small businesses i made sites/little tools for that found anything with a light up screen intimidating) and a purchase then shipment to the originating company/factory actually entered into a contract(the form is sooo simple)... im faced with ridiculously improbable obstacles actually existing and changing in such nonsensical statistically improbable ways so often that 1. I wouldn't trust a dr (or most humans) that didnt 1st assume i was crazy of some form...unfortunately im not, despite hkw much simpler and probable itd be 2. Id be super suspicious/converned if statistic norms were my norm for over a day.

But seriously wtf???

Someone give me some wisps of a frame of ref here... where's a typical 'fuck this, im out!' Breaking point?

My boss told me that he wants me to switch projects soon and I am not sure how to feel about.

Old project
- have been working on it for four years, mostly alone, sometimes with others
- i am more or less product owner and make most of the technical decisions
- i assign tickets to other when they get assigned to help me
- i inherited the code base and refactored a lot. Some parts i am proud of, others are a mess and others aren't touched by me at all
- one of my helpers would take this

New project
- kind of data science plattform, so I have to learn a lot in this direction. Will be very complicated though.
- my first big greenfield project actually
- i will be mostly alone with this
- tech stack is fixed; no more php.

Being too careful and always trying to reduce memory and processoe usage might be a bad thing after all. Lengthening development time and inducing more stress on the developer just to reduce resource usage is not very sensible when dealing with small to medium size programs that doesn't deal with big data/file types.

What made me notice this habit in programmers was when I was smashing my head on the keyboard contemplating what method I should use to store the history of outputs for a fucking text based program that has minimal gui elements..
Having ocd as a programmer is a nightmare. But thank god it's not as bad as it was a year ago. I couldn't even read something without repeating the same page over and over again because my stupid brain decided that I was not reading it right. WHAT THE FUCK IS READING IT RIGHT ? Thank god for my psychiatrist and pills. I can atleast work on my projects without wanting to kill myself now ! 😂

Question to you all, do you really think you own your computer or system/data when almost all sites/services out there state very clearly in there ELUA(Fuck yes ours) that they might use your data how they feel fit, now this does not stop with websites, Mac, Windows and some Linux Distros also do this.

I for one stop thinking that I own data but I just change a few bits to make it look different these days, everything on your computer is not yours, we its and hardware, read the ELUA/TOS many hold the right to recall, revoke and so on use of the items to the point you paid for it they will take it back.

Items now sending keylogs, data usage and apps usage data to MS, Apple, some big linux distro, and YES this happens don't fool yourself Apple and MS both admit this happen and both US and UK now requesting these companies to let the have full access to this data, if it was not there they wouldn't want it.

This wont stop me from messing with code and loving tech but do you really feel you own anything anymore?

I don't :P

I'm in a big fat fucking stinking rut, as in progress on this project has absolutely stagnanted.

Gonna rubber face your duck now **UNZIPS** excepts I don't have zippers, as joggers are the one true way; fake Adidas til I fucking drop.

Brain damage aside, I understand both how I've layed out the data and what I'm supposed to do with it. We have a virtual machine, an array of instructions and arguments for a given process within it, and we need to walk this array and map values to registers.

We also need to spill values inside registers to stack, IF they are required at a further point within that block. This also isn't terribly complex. We simply look forward in the array and see if the value is an argument to any instruction that *needs* this value to be loaded (ie, within a register).

So this implies multiple iterations; we need to better understand how one particular value is used throughout an F before we can make a final decision on how many registers and stack space are actually needed for the whole block.

Here's where it gets tricky. If there's a call, we need to be certain that the symbol being invoked has already been fully processed. Besides the obvious fact that recursion fucks me up, there's another matter: say a private method gets invoked by another private method. We can take advantage of this, by which I mean, sacrilege incoming so put on this toga.

Looking at the output for C compilers, it would seem this is not done in practice, I would assume because it's a pain in the ass. But when you have the guarantee that F will only be called internally, as that's what "private" means, there's two ways it can go:

0. It's well below the 13-20 cycle threshold, so you inline the fucker. No suprises there.
1. It's a more involved affaire, and invoked in more than one place, so you don't inline it. Codesize matters.

Recursion and [1] are the big deal things holding me back. Not because it's too hard, like I said this is kindergarten level abstraction. I'm just slow and fanatical, which is how I prefer to spell "constant obsessive paranoid delusions". I can see the potential optimization I can pull here, so I'm stuck trying to figure it out.

Idea would be, handling the register allocation and stack spill for an internal-internal (or deep internal; what we like to call a "guts" method) in synchronization with the *calling* processes. This is, fundamentally, violating all conventions -- but so under the hood no one will notice.

Let me give you an example. If we were to pass some value to a function, expecting to mutate it and get a different value back, in a lot of cases it'd be stupid to make an implicit copy by using two registers, one for input and another for the output. Dude, it's one cycle. Multiply it by a million, say sixty times per second, for every time you __needlessly__ make a copy of a value that we've already stated is mutable.

Clearly unacceptable. This is, in the strictest sense, everywhere in every single codebase. Premature micro optimization is the root of all goodness, God is great and praiseworthy. So how do we go about it?

Answer is I know and I don't know. By which I mean to say, this very thing I've done by hand. Assembly is fun. Now the issue is teaching a calculator how to do it. Not so fun.

There is a dependency chain between processes, as I believe I've kind of alluded to. I'm trying to make decisions on the side of the caller depending on the details of the callee, which is why recursion is rawdogging my soul. This is the same situation, it's inverting the direction of one or more links in the dependency chain, which makes no fucking sense.

And yet it does.
Brain, explain yourself.

How do *you* handle this without crashing?
Brain?

<<ME STEWPED; BEEP-BOOP>>

Alright then, that was a useless attempt at fuckery. Let's have a nap then, maybe it'll come to me in the morning. That's what I've been saying to myself for almost a month now.

Perhaps it is a hardcoded fuk.

Every day is tempting to me..tempting to use some solutions i am not sure that i can handle it.

The Company i work for has an external IT Partner that does all the heavy lifting when it comes to our infrastructure, like installing servers, doing the installations and such. I mostly monitor it and do basic maintenance. Its all windows.

Recently i thought about adding a fifth Hyper V instance for an intranet webserver...based on some linux distro (probably ubuntu cause that is what i am familiar with). But i am not THAT familiar with ubuntu or any linux distro..buts its just the intranet and i already installed nginx and apache with success, what could go wrong?

today i sketched some intranet websoftware our production might find useful to collect data input from our workers (we are somewhat small so there is no big ERP software as of now). When thinking how to realize the data input i thought that maybe a basic raspberry and some cheap 1280x800 10.1 inch touch panels would be best..its very tempting, but on the other hand i am not sure i am ready for that, my experience is shallow and only based on my own RaPi that i 99,99% run headless. On the other hand it would be a very small and space safing concept..and cheap..compared to the use of Laptops (the go to company solution when computers are needed).

It also had the risk that i am the only one that could unfuck anything if things go south..it also has the advantage that i am the only one who could fix things when it goes south...

so much temptation

I've just joined a new company out of despair after several month out of jobs without being able to even get interviews.
I've been warned about the code being a bit behind with modern Android stack, they needed to migrate from rx to coroutine and compose is not a priority at the moment.
Fine with it, I like handling and planning migration, that's a nice challenge.
But if only that were the only problems !! Far from it, the code is a formidable mess, I've never seen so much amateurism... Most of it was written from the previous Lead Dev who stayed there for years and touched everything with their very bad practices.
I don't even know where to start honestly...
While the code is in Kotlin, it stink Java. Nothing wrong about Java, but if you code in kotlin, you need to understand what kotlin try to achieve. And that's not the case here. There is freaking nullable everywhere, for no reason at all, the data classes contains lot of var in their constructors, equals are override to compare only one or 2 params and no hashcode override with it.
Sealed class, what for ?! Let me just write a List<Pair<Enum, Any>> and cast your any depending on the enum !
Oh and you know what, let's cast everywhere, no check, and for once no null safe, there is enough nullable in the code !

What about the reactive part ? well let's recreate a kind of broken eventbus with rx ! Cause why not ?!
The viewmodel observable don't contain data, they just contain enum for the progress of the states we're checking.
In the viewmodel function we update that enum states and emit it to be observed and make the data available as a var for the view to pick it up when needed.
But why put the business logic in the viewmodel, let's put in the views, and grab and check the variable contain in the viewmodel whenever it fits.
Testing the business logic ? uh let me just test my variable initialisation in the viewmodel instead.
The vm, the views, make about 2000 lines, the test over 3000, and not a single test really test the business logic in it ! I've made big refactoring we're all the tests stayed green, while the function are full of side effects ! WTF ?!
Oh and what about that migration from rx to coroutine ? well better not break the existing code and continue writting like rx, everything is cold flow ! We just need to store a boolean saying if we already did our call to the data layer then we decide to start our flow or not.
As for the RecyclerView, having too many viewHolder is just so annoying, let's put all our different views in one, and hide what we don't need.
Keystore has been push on the repo, but it's private no ? So who cares ?!
And wait i'm not done ! Some of the main brick of the apps depends on library that hasn't been updated for years, and you know what... yes they were hosted on Jcenter and it's only now that they decide to do something about it, we we're warned about the sunset of jcenter 2 years ago !!!!
So what about compose ? What do you want with compose ?! there is no design system in that app obviously, so don't even think about it !
And there... among all of that mess, I'm supposed to do code review... how the fuck do you do a code review when all the code that is around stink ?!
And there is so much more but by now I'm afraid you're thinking i'm just pissing on the old code like everyone... but damn I guarantee, that's the worst code I've ever seen, and i've work on more than 15 app from small to big on different contract with a lot of legacy code, but nothing that bad !

So I'm new to NestJS, Node, etc. and I just noticed that the guy working on the API made every request call a different service class, instead of using a single service class. For example.

get() {
return await this.getObj.run()
}

post(myDto){
return await this.storeObj.run()
}

update(myDtoUpdate){
return await this.updateObj.run()
}

And I'm not sure why. He's also injecting the request into those classes, instead of passing the DTO to the method call. I mean, it's still injecting the data into it I guess, but it seems so roundabout. Something like this:

public constructor(
@Inject(REQUEST) private request: Request,
){}

I'm scared, but I'm not sure if it's just my own ignorance or a sixth sense telling me that this is gonna be a mess.

Have you seen APIs implemented this way? I can see the benefit of dividing the code into smaller classes, but it just seems overkill to me, specially when there's a big chance that code will be repeated (getting an entity by ID when updating it, for example).

I'm still in time to kill this with fire before a new monster is born though, so that's something.

Honest question. When do you consider yourself a "Big data engineer"?

Today I managed to create a system that collects historical metrics from monitoring tools every 5 minutes and do all sorts of crazy transformations to make them ingestible by grafana Mimir in OTLP protocol. Doing 600gb a dat, millions of active time series, .... And I still feel it's, "small"

Thoughts?

What do you think happens when enterprise software meets big data and user generated content? Idk, ask Github. These guys are sitting on a goldmine. The paradise of every big company. The only reason they're not faang is cos it's niche but they'll probably be influential (read, big bad) in the coming years

I predict the copilot thing is a benevolent side. Or maybe it still seems so since it's still in infancy and hasn't aggressively started snatching most developer jobs. What will become of us when that time comes? What other form of technology can computer still require our assistance to create?

!rant

Someone posted a link to a 30-day-security-challenge here on devRant some time ago and I just thought well, why not try to migrate away from the big companies - I've been using OneDrive as my only cloudstorage since the time when it was called SkyDrive and I've been hosting my Emails at outlook (via Live Custom Domains, a service that does not even exist anymore) for about 8 years now. Since I've always been lazy and since exchange activesync is a great feature if you have multiple calendars and want to sync them and your contacts to several devices I never tried to switch but now I am half done with migrating my data to my own nextcloud installation and my emails to my own mail server - since I don't want to loose the exchange functionality I am also setting up Z-Push and oh boy, this thing is bitching around but my webmail is already nicely integrated into nextcloud, IMAP / SMTP is up, configured and secured (still have to mess around with spamassassin as this email adress is floating around the web for about 10 years now). The only things to do is to get Z-Push work with STARTTLS and the card/caldav backend running and then the basic setup should be done.

I am just wondering if someone could hand me over a guide on how to sign / encrypt emails (GPG?)

I working on download function feature and full of 8 hour been debuging in local to find out why the download is notworking (this is not the main issue).

And what I found there. All the problem is clear, and I get it know, I've been using fs to save the log (you know download data is big and it's hurting my eyes even when using console.table). And using nodemon for running the project.

Image is just illustrator lol