Details
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Aboutpublic static void main(String[] args){ System.out.println("No need to stalk me"); }
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SkillsJava, Swift, HTML, CSS, PHP, C#
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LocationNorth Korea, Pyongyang
Joined devRant on 6/8/2016
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*Now that's what I call a Hacker*
MOTHER OF ALL AUTOMATIONS
This seems a long post. but you will definitely +1 the post after reading this.
xxx: OK, so, our build engineer has left for another company. The dude was literally living inside the terminal. You know, that type of a guy who loves Vim, creates diagrams in Dot and writes wiki-posts in Markdown... If something - anything - requires more than 90 seconds of his time, he writes a script to automate that.
xxx: So we're sitting here, looking through his, uhm, "legacy"
xxx: You're gonna love this
xxx: smack-my-bitch-up.sh - sends a text message "late at work" to his wife (apparently). Automatically picks reasons from an array of strings, randomly. Runs inside a cron-job. The job fires if there are active SSH-sessions on the server after 9pm with his login.
xxx: kumar-asshole.sh - scans the inbox for emails from "Kumar" (a DBA at our clients). Looks for keywords like "help", "trouble", "sorry" etc. If keywords are found - the script SSHes into the clients server and rolls back the staging database to the latest backup. Then sends a reply "no worries mate, be careful next time".
xxx: hangover.sh - another cron-job that is set to specific dates. Sends automated emails like "not feeling well/gonna work from home" etc. Adds a random "reason" from another predefined array of strings. Fires if there are no interactive sessions on the server at 8:45am.
xxx: (and the oscar goes to) fuckingcoffee.sh - this one waits exactly 17 seconds (!), then opens an SSH session to our coffee-machine (we had no frikin idea the coffee machine is on the network, runs linux and has SSHD up and running) and sends some weird gibberish to it. Looks binary. Turns out this thing starts brewing a mid-sized half-caf latte and waits another 24 (!) seconds before pouring it into a cup. The timing is exactly how long it takes to walk to the machine from the dudes desk.
xxx: holy sh*t I'm keeping those
Credit: http://bit.ly/1jcTuTT
The bash scripts weren't bogus, you can find his scripts on the this github URL:
https://github.com/narkoz/...56 -
The guy who did android dev before me in the company i work for, didn't get paid for 2 months, so he moved all the project files he worked on to an empty partition and locked the drive with Windows' BitLocker. He didn't give the password until he was fully paid. I kinda respect that guy.19
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A hacker deleted the despacito video from youtube.
Those are not the hackers we deserve, but the hackers we need.18 -
Had a customer on the phone who couldn't figure something out. Wanted to give him instructions so I asked him whether he used mac or windows (getting used to not including Linux in that question). His reply: uhm this has a weird name... do you know elementary os?
Me: you're a Linux user?!
Him: yes, I'm done with windows and mac.
Then i gave him the instructions. Nice twist of the day!12 -
I had a secondary Gmail account with a really nice short nickname (from the early invite/alpha days), forwarded to another of my mailboxes. It had a weak password, leaked as part of one of the many database leaks.
Eventually I noticed some dude in Brazil started using my Gmail, and he changed the password — but I still got a copy of everything he did through the forwarding rule. I caught him bragging to a friend on how he cracked hashes and stole and sold email accounts and user details in bulk.
He used my account as his main email account. Over the years I saw more and more personal details getting through. Eventually I received a mail with a plaintext password... which he also used for a PayPal account, coupled to a Mastercard.
I used a local website to send him a giant expensive bouquet of flowers with a box of chocolates, using his own PayPal and the default shipping address.
I included a card:
"Congratulations on acquiring my Gmail account, even if I'm 7 years late. Thanks for letting me be such an integral part of your life, for letting me know who you are, what you buy, how much you earn, who your family and friends are and where you live. I've surprised your mother with a cruise ticket as you mentioned on Facebook how sorry you were that you forgot her birthday and couldn't buy her a nice present. She seems like a lovely woman. I've also made a $1000 donation in your name to the EFF, to celebrate our distant friendship"31 -
Me: IT call center.
Lady: Hi! I cant access the shared folder!
Me: Ok. I'll try and help you out. Whats happening when you click on it?
Lady: ok ok... {clicks}... Now it's asking me to entered my password. Should I enter it?
Me: Do you know it?
Lady: Yeah.
Me: yeah try entering it.
Lady: YES. That worked! Thank you so so much!!!
Me: No problem. Have a good day!13 -
I fucked up hard for the first time yesterday at work.
Came in and expected a huge speech from the bossman.
He called me to his office:
Explained me where I went wrong and what I should do next time with a big smile on his face!24 -
I'm sure it's been said a million times before, and will be said a million times after, but:
*Right clicks website*
*Selects Inspect Element*
*Changes something for giggles*
...
*Someone sees over your shoulder*
"OMFG DID YOU JUST HACK THE INTERNET!"4 -
My classmates are such hypocrites. They pretend to be programmers, but they can't fool me.
"Oh sorry. I can't show you the result of my html code. I have to compile it first, but there's no WiFi."
There's so many things wrong with that.39 -
Me: *puts small piece of tape over webcam*
NSA: Okay guys, shut it all down. No way we can record from the microphone, log keys, access the file system, USB devices, network data or watch the screen. He did the tape.22 -
Few months ago I made an app for my buddy. Because it was simple soundboard app (it literally took me 15 minutes) I haven’t took any money. He said it’s for personal use only...
So he released it under his name on Google Play Store... And now he asks me to add advertisements... For free... When I asked him what can I get from it, he said “you can add your name to Credits”
That’s how you loose trust and buddies!22 -
I lost a friend today😭.
He wanted to checkout my MacBook Pro, because he was thinking about buying one.
So I pulled mine out of my backpack, and turned it on.. Then windows 10 popped up!
I looked at him in shock like I just got caught watching porn. I tried to explain to him “it’s not what you think! I had to install it to use Microsoft Project!
He just looked at me in disgust, shaking his head, and walked away....34 -
Asshole trying to steal credit for my work. Can't wait for the next meeting to light this shit.
So this client hires me and this person that I'm gonna call 'B'. B deletes my name from the comments and description. Then proceeds to present it as his.
But B can't get it to run now, so they have me have a look at it. B thinks that I don't notice that he is trying to take credit for my shit. Now I'm sitting here with evidence for the next meeting with the client. Ignoring all of B's communications.54 -
Interview went well until i asked my questions about them.
"Are pet-projects a thing in your company"
... no.
"Can i attend programming gigs in a workweek, and are they paid by the company"
... no, no
"Any restrictions on the IDE"
... yes we only allow visual studio
"Wait, frontend web development in vs?"
... yes
"Do you develop in other languages then JavaScript"
... only Java
I calmly stood up, told them "I dont think that the company and I are a good fit. Thanks for your time."22 -
Got call from extremely angry customer, our product is shit and doesn't work. At all. Important customer so I went to visit.
He had the perfect setup, our product to the left, our competitor's to the right.
He connected the Ethernet cable to their product, it worked. He plugged it out and connected to ours... Nothing. Shit.
I started to debug on the premises, took logs, everything. It seemed like our product didn't receive any data at all. What the fuck? Tried everything, debugged low level, still nothing. Sweating as hell.
After two hours I got a strange feeling. So I swapped place, our product to the right, competitor's to the left. Now OUR product worked, competitor's zilch.
THE FUCKING ETHERNET CABLE HAD A GLITCH. IF YOU BENT IT TO THE RIGHT IT WORKED, IF YOU BENT IT TO THE LEFT IT WAS BROKEN.
I had never seen a customer be this embarrassed in my life. He apologized to me, my boss, his boss, the Queen, everyone.
We got the contract.20 -
Got a phone interview for a backend dev job in an opsec company.
Interviewer:
This is a very serious and prestigious position, we take care of the most important bits of code.
*Proceeds to talk introductory nonsense*
Interviewer:
Do you know what a DNS is?
Me:
Yes, of course! DNS stands for Domain Name System.... Blah blah blah... I explain about the servers, about hosts file, about DNS spoofing and everything else possible on this topic.
Interviewer:
See, I was patient with you - letting you finish. I'm not sure what you're talking about and where you got it from, but a DNS is that line in the browser where you type the site's name.
He didn't ask any more questions, just told me that they'll get back to me. I asked not to do that.
Three weeks later I got an email claiming that I'm not qualified.44 -
Everyone here ranting about a fucking missing semicolon. I can't remember the last time a missing semicolon was the issue...
You wanna know what's REALLY BALL-BUSTING????
WHEN THE FUCKING 10 y/o LEGACY CODEBASE, CODED BY FUCKING PHP WORDPRESS SCRIPTERS WHO THOUGHT THEY COULD BUILD AN ENTERPRISE SHIT CAUSE ZF2 "LOOKS EASY" AND THEN FILL IT UP WITH SPAGHETTI, IS SO BAD WRITTEN THAT IN ORDER FOR THE PAGE TO RENDER YOU ACTUALLY ****HAVE**** TO DISABLE ERROR REPORTING SO WHENEVER A FUCKING ERROR HAPPENS ON THE TEMPLATE RENDER COMPONENT OF ZEND FRAMESHIT 2, YOU'RE LEFT WITH A FUCKING BLANK PAGE AND NOTHING IS LOGGED TO THE LOG FILE, SO YOUR ONLY OPTION IS DIE() DEBUGGING LINE BY LINE ON THE 1300 LINES PHTML FUCKFEST OF A VIEW THEY HAVE.
MISSING SEMICOLON? YES PLEASE, GIVE ME MORE OF THAT SHIT38 -
My dumb CEO just hired an even dumber CTO. The new CTO asked me the following questions...
1. What is GitHub?
2. What is JSON?
3. What’s an array?
4. What is Get and what is Post?
5. When an iPhone is offline, can it call an API on our server to tell us it’s offline?
6. I know you’ve spent 11 month the writing this backend in PHP but can you change it to Java now?
Me: Why?
Dumb CTO: Because it’s better.
Me: How?
Dumb CTO: because it is.
7. I know you’ve started to rewrite this codebase I Java but can you convert it to Node.JS now?
Me: Why?
Dumb CTO: Because Facebook uses it.
8. What is MySQL? Why aren’t you using a database instead?
9. What does NULL mean?
Somehow, I doubt that asshole is remotely qualified for the job.
Fakin shyt for brains.180 -
Website design philosophies:
Apple: "...and a really big picture there, and a really big picture there, and a really big picture there, and..."
Microsoft: "border-radius:0 !important;"
Google: "EVERYTHING MOVES!!! And most websites get material design. Most."
Amazon: "We're slowly moving away from 2009"
Wix: "How can we further increase load times?"
Literally any download site: "Click here! No, click here! Nononono!! Click here!!..."
Facebook: "We can't change anything because our main age demographic is around 55"
University websites: "That information isn't hard enough to find yet. Decrease the search accuracy and increase broken links."32 -
I went to Paris for my first interview (that was 1989) for a job of Unix kernel developer. All dressed up. I step out of the elevator and see a young punk with scruffy hair and different colour shoes. I reckon he must be the pizza delivery guy. I ask him "dude, can you please point me to the CEO's office for interview". He said "sure, follow me man, I'll show you". We arrive at a desk, he sat down in the big chair and looks at me with a big smile and says "Ok dude, here we are. I am the CEO. Now let's see how good you are!"
I got the job. And 26 years latet, last week, amazing coincidence: I met him again at a trade show in Paris ... with the same coloured shoes. How cool is that!!!
29 -
I put an Easter egg into a product, that if you enter the string "final countdown" into the stock code search field, it plays a YouTube vid of Europe's "The Final Countdown", in a hidden div. It's an in-joke for a few people in the company.
A well meaning maintainer with no sense of humour or judgement takes over and goes on the warpath against any hardcoded strings. The secret code gets moved into a config file.
A third developer changes the deployment script so that it clears any configs that aren't explicitly set in the deployment settings.
So the secret code is now "".
Literally every PC in the stock buying department is now blaring out "The Final Countdown" at top volume.
...Except none of them have speakers, so it remains this way for over a year and two more changes of maintainer.
I just noticed this afternoon and quietly re-hardcoded the string. The buying dept.'s PCs will silently sing no more.
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"You gave us bad code! We ran it and now production is DOWN! Join this bridgeline now and help us fix this!"
So, as the author of the code in question, I join the bridge... And what happens next, I will simply never forget.
First, a little backstory... Another team within our company needed some vendor client software installed and maintained across the enterprise. Multiple OSes (Linux, AIX, Solaris, HPUX, etc.), so packaging and consistent update methods were a a challenge. I wrote an entire set of utilities to install, update and generally maintain the software; intending all the time that this other team would eventually own the process and code. With this in mind, I wrote extensive documentation, and conducted a formal turnover / training season with the other team.
So, fast forward to when the other team now owns my code, has been trained on how to use it, including (perhaps most importantly) how to send out updates when the vendor released upgrades to the agent software.
Now, this other team had the responsibility of releasing their first update since I gave them the process. Very simple upgrade process, already fully automated. What could have gone so horribly wrong? Did something the vendor supplied break their client?
I asked for the log files from the upgrade process. They sent them, and they looked... wrong. Very, very wrong.
Did you run the code I gave you to do this update?
"Yes, your code is broken - fix it! Production is down! Rabble, rabble, rabble!"
So, I go into our code management tool and review the _actual_ script they ran. Sure enough, it is my code... But something is very wrong.
More than 2/3rds of my code... has been commented out. The code is "there"... but has been commented out so it is not being executed. WT-actual-F?!
I question this on the bridge line. Silence. I insist someone explain what is going on. Is this a joke? Is this some kind of work version of candid camera?
Finally someone breaks the silence and explains.
And this, my friends, is the part I will never forget.
"We wanted to look through your code before we ran the update. When we looked at it, there was some stuff we didn't understand, so we commented that stuff out."
You... you didn't... understand... my some of the code... so you... you didn't ask me about it... you didn't try to actually figure out what it did... you... commented it OUT?!
"Right, we figured it was better to only run the parts we understood... But now we ran it and everything is broken and you need to fix your code."
I cannot repeat the things I said next, even here on devRant. Let's just say that call did not go well.
So, lesson learned? If you don't know what some code does? Just comment that shit out. Then blame the original author when it doesn't work.
You just cannot make this kind of stuff up.105 -
A young guy I work with burst into tears today, I had no idea what happened so I tried to comfort him and ask what was up.
It appears his main client had gone nuts with him because they wanted him to make an internet toolbar (think Ask.com) and he politely informed them toolbars doesn't really exist anymore and it wouldn't work on things like modern browsers or mobile devices.
Being given a polite but honest opinion was obviously something the client wasn't used to and knowing the guy was a young and fairly inexperienced, they started throwing very personal insults and asking him exactly what he knows about things (a lot more than them).
So being the big, bold, handsome senior developer I am, I immediately phoned the client back and told them to either come speak to me face-to-face and apologise to him in person or we'd terminate there contract with immediate effect. They're coming down tomorrow...
So part my rant, part a rant on behalf of a young developer who did nothing wrong and was treated like shit, I think we've all been there.
We'll see how this goes! Who the hell wants a toolbar anyway?!401 -
Prospective client: “I have a website through which I sell music, both physical copies and downloads, but am having all kinds of issues with it”.
Me: “Like what? Tell me more.”
Client: “Go to www... I’ll go through them with you”.
So I go, and client proceeds to rattle off a list of totally random shit for the next 26 and a half minutes without even stopping for breath, telling me what he’d prefer, talking through how easy other “similar” websites are and comparing his own website to them, as well as all the things that flat out just don’t work. He ended with the line “I just paid my developer who told me it was all good, but now he’s telling me he’s too busy to work on it”.
Meanwhile I’ve had a gander at “view source” and can see it’s been “built” with Wordpress, and with a fuck ton of plugins and shit to boot... you can only imagine the sense of euphoria I’m feeling at this point.
Me: “Did you have a contract with your developer?”
Client: “Nah”.
Me: “Do you have a budget in mind, either for just making right or for ongoing development?”
Client: “Yes, but minimal”.
Me: “So what do you want from me?”
Client: “I want to know how much it’s going to cost to fix!!!!” (apparently irritated by my question).
Me: “Oooook... Is there any way I can have access to your website to investigate, or clone it so I can recreate what’s going on?”
Client: “Yes” (gives me details of how to log in to his hosting, and WP admin).
Turns out, he had over 50 active plugins for literally EVERY. SINGLE. FUCKING. PIECE of functionality on his website. Furthermore, it was pretty clear that some plugin functionality overlapped, because... well, if you don’t know how to do something, install a plugin or seven to get it done, right?
Me: “So can I ask, what exactly is your budget? Just to give me ballpark as to how best move forward?”
Client: After going into how he’s already spent a lot of money on it already, “If we could we agree on below £200?”
Me: “...what, a month?”
Client: “No! In total. To make it right. Once it’s done it’s done, surely?!?!”
*a long silence*
Client: “So... what do you think?”
Me: “Burn it. Burn it all down”.8
