Underlying pure C library and NodeJS wrapper

Devrant has a critical performance issue. It kills my performance. I believe more users can be affected

Last Sunday the boss says:

About this project we are working on, the client stopped paying, so we are not touching it untill we hear back from him.

Spent the whole week learning new technologies, and having a good time.

Guess what happens this morning...
Listen, about that project, they paid and it needs to be delivered by tomorrow morning! shouldn't be a problem, right?

Well actually...

I feel you, I am also unable to database sometimes.

Well I was in search for an internship and there was this Remote one posted online giving Rs1000(14$) for a month.

All he wanted was a fully functional clone of Coursera with hosted on AWS with videos of around 2-3TB streaming from S3 in a month :)

I asked him about his AWS costs and he replied - "Use the Internship money I'm giving you it won't cost much."

* phone conversation with Dad*
Dad: What are you doing?
Me: Busy creating website.
Dad: So, if I type " www", will I be able to see it?
Me: *explaining website hosting and servers for 15mins straight*
Dad: Huh. You do learn something in college then.
Me:🤐

This one time, a client wanted a complete overhaul of her website.

I asked her for the credentials to the VPS, She gave me some random crap to try, cause clearly the site hadn't been touched since 2003 (and boy was it fugly).

Me: Maam, these aren't the correct details.

She sends in more crap to try...2 days pass with this back and forth.

Client: "contact steve, he should have the login details"

Me: ****Calls Steve *****
Me: "Maam, he says the login details are in your mail"

Client: "well, I don't remember this fact. Steve handled everything.
Hack into the website and then reset it.

The Russians did not need login details to hack into America's system. So please, do what you have to do to get us moving."

No jokes...that was the exact crap that came out of her fingers

Client: "The app moves slowly and has moments when it freezes! Why?"
Me: "Let me check the server...it has 5 GB of memory allocated for it and you are making it load 4.76 GB and never cleaned the log files..."
Client: "Then it should work fine! Almost 500 mb free, it`s a lot! Let the log files be there, we might need them in 5 years!"
Me: "What?..."

First day on my first job ever, the boss asks me what I want to do. I indicated that I had some experience with php and the yii framework (which was at some point very cool xD), so I wanted to start with something like that. And so it goes: after two days of watching laracasts (which is an awesome platform by the way! :O) I got assigned to a project.

Now the company I work at uses some kind of self built system that tracks how many hours are spent on which project, and compares that to how many hours was estimated implementing a feature would take. That's cool, but then I saw that for the project I was working on the time estimated was 5 work days. This was the estimate for both designing the interfaces and implementing both front and backend. I knew in advance that this was probably way to little time for me, but didn't want to come over as the new kid who can't do shit x)

Anyway, I started on the project and was having fun, but the biggest time consuming aspect of the project was not necessarily that I didn't have enough experience: it was that the developer who started this project and made most of the design choices had written some very messy code, without tests or apparently any refactoring. Also, everything was extremly inconsistent and not according to all the best practices I just watched in my laracasts spree.

So fastforward a little: we're way over the estimated hours. Yay. Now suddenly the boss comes by with an almost angry face that the client is becoming angry and we need to finish soon. He makes it entirely our (me and the front end guy) problem and I just decide to say nothing and try to work faster.

Now I'm stuck writing fugly code on top of more fugly code and when I mentioned to my front end guy that I was almost finished with feature but I only needed to finish up the tests, he said something like "oh just don't write tests, that'll take too long"... Is that really the mindset of this company?! No wonder the project I work on was in a very bad state.

Thanks to devrant I see now that I just need to say something if I know that I won't be able to complete something in a certain amount of time and that other people are just like me (thank god). :) I think I'll need to post more rants to vent my frustrations x)

I don't even know if this should be a rant or a good thing, but here it goes:

my boss smokes (legal) weed in the office, under the AC, so the smoke goes up and it spreads all over the place => we all get a bit stoned

Was thinking of a name for my currently biggest project and thought of a funny one, took the first letter of each word and started to use that to refer to the project, was thinking about domain names and such already etc.

Just wrote it down and I suddenly noticed:

ONE OF THE LETTERS IN THE SHORTCUT ISN'T CORRECT.

How the fuck did I miss that for fucking weeks?! It's not like it's a difficult sentence/set of words or anything.

I'm so fucking glad I didn't register domains or shit yet.

How. In. The. Living. Hell.

--- HTTP/3 is coming! And it won't use TCP! ---

A recent announcement reveals that HTTP - the protocol used by browsers to communicate with web servers - will get a major change in version 3!

Before, the HTTP protocols (version 1.0, 1.1 and 2.2) were all layered on top of TCP (Transmission Control Protocol).
TCP provides reliable, ordered, and error-checked delivery of data over an IP network.
It can handle hardware failures, timeouts, etc. and makes sure the data is received in the order it was transmitted in.
Also you can easily detect if any corruption during transmission has occurred.
All these features are necessary for a protocol such as HTTP, but TCP wasn't originally designed for HTTP!
It's a "one-size-fits-all" solution, suitable for *any* application that needs this kind of reliability.
TCP does a lot of round trips between the client and the server to make sure everybody receives their data. Especially if you're using SSL. This results in a high network latency.
So if we had a protocol which is basically designed for HTTP, it could help a lot at fixing all these problems.
This is the idea behind "QUIC", an experimental network protocol, originally created by Google, using UDP.

Now we all know how unreliable UDP is: You don't know if the data you sent was received nor does the receiver know if there is anything missing. Also, data is unordered, so if anything takes longer to send, it will most likely mix up with the other pieces of data. The only good part of UDP is its simplicity.
So why use this crappy thing for such an important protocol as HTTP?
Well, QUIC fixes all these problems UDP has, and provides the reliability of TCP but without introducing lots of round trips and a high latency! (How cool is that?)

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has been working (or is still working) on a standardized version of QUIC, although it's very different from Google's original proposal.
The IETF also wants to create a version of HTTP that uses QUIC, previously referred to as HTTP-over-QUIC. HTTP-over-QUIC isn't, however, HTTP/2 over QUIC.
It's a new, updated version of HTTP built for QUIC.

Now, the chairman of both the HTTP working group and the QUIC working group for IETF, Mark Nottingham, wanted to rename HTTP-over-QUIC to HTTP/3, and it seems like his proposal got accepted!
So version 3 of HTTP will have QUIC as an essential, integral feature, and we can expect that it no longer uses TCP as its network protocol.

We will see how it turns out in the end, but I'm sure we will have to wait a couple more years for HTTP/3, when it has been thoroughly tested and integrated.

Thank you for reading!

I wonder why banks are always so terribly insecure, given how much money there's for grabs in there for hackers.

Just a while ago I got a new prepaid credit card from bpost, our local postal service that for some reason also does banking. The reason for that being that - thank you 'Murica! - a lot of websites out there don't accept anything but credit cards and PayPal. Because who in their right mind wouldn't use credit cards, right?! As it turns out, it's pretty much every European I've spoken to so far.

That aside, I got that card, all fine and dandy, it's part of the Mastercard network so at least I can get my purchases from those shitty American sites that don't accept anything else now. Looked into the manual of it because bpost's FAQ isn't very clear about what my login data for their online customer area now actually is. Not that their instruction manual was either.

I noticed in that manual that apparently the PIN code can't be changed (for "security reasons", totally not the alternative that probably they didn't want to implement it), and that requesting a forgotten PIN code can be done with as little as calling them up, and they'll then send the password - not a reset form, the password itself! IN THE FUCKING MAIL.

Because that's apparently how financial institutions manage their passwords. The fact that they know your password means that they're storing it in plain text, probably in a database with all the card numbers and CVC's next to it. Wouldn't that be a treasure trove for cybercriminals, I wonder? But YOU the customer can't change your password, because obviously YOU wouldn't be able to maintain a secure password, yet THEY are obviously the ones with all the security and should be the ones to take out of YOUR hands the responsibility to maintain YOUR OWN password.

Banking logic. I fucking love it.

As for their database.. I reckon that that's probably written in COBOL too. Because why wouldn't you.

The reason why aliens are avoiding earth:
Me : Guys, the CI/CD pipeline is ready. ci.yaml is our config file, so don't remove it as the deployments will fail.
**10 seconds later**
slack: BUILD FAILED
Me: *Looks at git commits* "Brian removed ci.yaml

Wtf BRIAN!🖕🖕🖕🖕

It's never a good sign when a team lead writes code like this

"Lightweight rant"

Good job, devs of Sparkasse.
Time to "jobn't" y'all.
That error message is very informational.

I know it is because of the time counter being at 0 and I need to relogin to reset it, but what if I was a regular dumb client? To add more salt into it, what if I was someone in his 90s.

Do your fucking job properly.

Edit: The error message translates to "Error", "Error" and "Close"

follow on from my last rant.

I've finally gotten my new Jira project. Only thing I seem to have access to change is the Kanban board columns. Still has 50+ fields when creating a ticket etc.

Asked the support team handling the request if this was a mistake. He said no, i'll need to open another ticket to have those changes requested.

Opened and got a reply. Currently there are 2 versions of Jira running. They are working on consolidating them atm and won't help me right now until this is done. I've been asked to re-open my request after the consolidation is done in March 2019.

5 ... fucking ... months, so I can have a competent ticketing process.

He pointed me to a page explaining the move and listing all the changes taking place. Well lets look at the changes they are making that are so critical:

Change 14: Rename "More info" status to "Needs more info".

... Oh pardon me. I didn't realise such critical show stoppers were being addressed. Please do continue. Don't mind me, i'll just be over here taking 4 hours to create an Epic and 6 stories. As you were

Wife - my site is not working, everything in the code looks correct. But it is only throwing me 404 all over

Me - "blaming the teacher for giving bad shit"

Wife after googling - I fixed it, you have forgot to enable .htaccess in the virtualhost

FFS how long have I been this stupid?

There's a special place in Hell for people who design APIs that returns 200 but then put error messages in the response body.

Conversation with Microsoft support I had after 1 hour:

“You’ll need to wait for 15 minutes”
“By the way did you know you have 5GB free OneDrive storage with a Microsoft account?”
“I’m a customer of a 1TB onedrive plan”
“Well if you’re interested in using it, you’ve got 5GB for free” 🤦‍♂️😔

Client: So you want 50 bucks for 5 minutes work pushing some buttons;
Me: Well yes. I didn't just pushed some buttons... I pushed them in the right sequence and solved your problem.

Reviewers on the internet in a nutshell

Fuck MatLab. Fuck Mathworks. Why the fuck do I still have this fucking piece of shit on my computer? Even its logo makes me want to puke.

You think JavaScript is bad? Try MatLab, JavaScript will look like a saint.

You are still virgin? Try MatLab, it will fuck you hard.

Give me one fucking engineer who has to use MatLab and love its nonsense, I dare you!

Governments should use a public git for their laws

The project where I realized I wanted to go from chemist to pro dev.

I built a flow-chemistry spectrometer with monitoring backend in Haskell.

Spectroscopy is where you add a reagent to a glass tube, it changes color, and by measuring the exact color it tells you how much of something (for example, a toxin) is present in the sample.

I had to do that a lot on factory samples, writing down measurements using pen & paper.

I'm lazy so I decided to do the logical thing: Automate it. I bought a second hand spectrometer, stripped the casing, did a shitload of glassblowing and hooked up tubes to the production pipelines, so I could get samples, mixing them in the correct ratio with reagents in continuous flows using valves.

I ended up using 2 home-crafted arduino-like boards (etching PCBs is fun!).

One to calibrate the mixture against known samples and control solenoid valves to continuously cycle through various reagents and deionized flushing water, the other to record the measurements and send them to a server running a Haskell/Yesod API.

The server collected the information into InfluxDB (A time series database), displaying all data on a graphite dashboard.

Eventually I wrote Haskell plugins for most of the chemistry processes, from pH & temperature measurements to polymer property and pigment tests (they made a lot of printer ink).

Then I was fired because they didn't need chemists anymore, and the code "could be maintained by the intern" (poor guy)...

But I did find out that I loved functional programming, chemistry automation projects, and crafting my own electronics during that time.

Don't know if this has already been put up, but I got a good laugh from it

> build.gradle == lifeispain
TRUE

Human nature in a nutshell....

Morning conversation with wife.

As she puts a stainless steel water bottle on the counter

She: can you make a water bottle for our daughter before school.

Me: I'm not sure, does it have to look like this one, I don't have any training working with metals. But if I have full control over the design. I may be able to come up with something.

She: that not funny, why do you always do that.

Me: do what, that is exactly what you told me to do.

A little later.....

She: I'm running late, can you make sure "everything" up stairs is unplugged..... (She means her curling iron)

I can't wait until she comes home.........;-)

Spend the last year helping to rescue a company from the brink of collapse. Literally live and breathe the company for no extra pay or reward, supporting and improving all aspects from IT and development, HR, Legal, Procurement, business day to day running and Accounts.

Create a business plan and forecast for 2019 with the General Manager over the weekend (unpaid) to grow the business and start to make lots of profit, hand it over to the director and he makes me redundant the next day.

Furious doesn't even cover what I'm feeling at the moment.