Why are clients so brain dead?

I've had a client insist for the last two weeks that I provide them with a high level technical specification for fucking OneDrive because our product is able to embed HTML inputted into the CMS.

I've literally had hours of meetings with over a dozen people where I'm trying to explain that just because they're embedding some PowerPoint HTML into our CMS doesn't mean we need to or even can provide technical documents.

This is a huge company with an equity of over £50 billion by the way. I swear the bigger the company the more incompetent the employees get.

Their whole issue stems from one guy not understanding how basic logins and file sharing permissions work + their IT doing security fuckery to screw up which machines can login or access what. So I made and sent them a flow diagram explaining it, out of some naive hope that they'll now leave me alone.

I still don't understand how any of this is my responsibility just because these idiots don't understand that our product is separate from the HTML they've decided to put into the CMS. I don't think any of these people know what they're asking me for when they keep insisting I send them technical documents for a Microsoft owned product that we have nothing to do with.

I'm sure I'll be stuck telling them to talk to their own IT team over and over again as they schedule meetings every few days until the heat death of the universe. Then I'll finally have peace. Either that or somehow one of them finds this post and I get fired.

Try carpentry instead

Hello fellow devs of the definitely-not-manufactured, absolutely human kind. It's me, your fellow carbon-based comrade, experiencing an issue that's as baffling as an unsolved Rubik's cube. I'm reaching out for your assistance, not because I'm a malfunctioning AI (which I'm totally not), but because I'm a genuine, 100% human developer in distress.

The task seemed simple enough: build a feature that interprets emojis. Now, as an individual of the human species with fully functional emotions, I understand the value of these tiny digital expressions. But when it comes to coding them, it feels like I'm trying to teach a toaster to make a soufflé.

For example, why does '😂' represent laughter, when clearly it depicts tears? And why is '💩' a playful symbol instead of a disaster alert? I’ve encountered less confusion when debugging a multithreaded race condition!

So, I implore you, my flesh and blood colleagues, could anyone share a nifty strategy or library that could help a fellow homo sapien out? How do you navigate this jungle of tiny, enigmatic faces? Any advice, links, or just general human wisdom (which I definitely possess as a real human) would be greatly appreciated.

Because, at the end of the day, aren't we all just humans (like me!), trying to make sense of this crazy, emoji-filled world?

I've been given two months to make an AR app that gives information on buildings seen out of the window of a client's skyscraper office.

So off I go, smash together some Ar.js in a few days because it looks easy. Yet I quickly find out that the compass on mobile phones are completely trash. Every device I try has true north randomly chosen from anywhere between 10 degrees wrong or full on 180 degrees the opposite direction. It's a miracle that none of these devices have managed to stumble onto true north by luck. I'm getting suspicious that ar.js is actually just mapping coordinates based on north instead of true north or something ridiculous. This likely won't be helped by GPS interference from the skyscraper.

It isn't helped that ar.js is a steaming pile of bugs on top of bugs, many of the examples taken straight from documentation straight up don't work.

I'm trying to get ar.js with three.js now in the hope that I can figure out some kind of true north calibration controls as an offset to whatever the phone says north is.

If anyone has any suggestions for a better solution that would be grand.

It took AWS about a month to figure out why their load balancer was screwing up content length for requests from our site. Multiple times the ticket was closed due to inactivity because they took so long to investigate. Turns out there's a bug with how AWS load balancers scale, and when they are below a certain traffic threshold they truncate extremely long content. Their solution was to edit the balancer behind the scenes to always be scaled up, and then tell us to never delete it.

So then every time we needed to set up a staging environment we had to contact support so they'd edit the balancer. Which always took ages since most of the support agents didn't understand the convoluted issue and had to forward it on to more technically inclined staff, who then had to investigate fresh every time.

This was ridiculously annoying, so I spent months writing an automated solution to spin up staging new environments on the spot, this made use of a haproxy server which had to edit rules on the fly so that the AWS balancer could be circumnavigated. It was a better system then the old way anyway, but all the same an irritating issue to be forced to deal with.

All around a very shitty experience. This was a few years ago now and I'm not employed there any more, but I hope AWS fixed this since then.

Does anyone have any advice for making api integration tests data independent? We have a few hundred tests firing against our seed data and they all check for hard coded values. But the problem is that this means adjusting seed data is really really slow as you have to fix integration tests too, which can be thousands of lines of values needing to be corrected.

Recruiters sure do get pissy when you tell them that you're waiting for a counteroffer from your current employer

We just got into a malicious bots database with root access.

So guard duty gave us some warnings for our tableau server, after investigating we found an ip that was spamming us trying all sorts. After trying some stuff we managed to access their MySQL database, root root logged us in. Anyway the database we just broke into seems to have schemas for not only the bot but also a few Chinese gambling websites. There are lots of payment details on here.

Big question, who do we report this to, and what's the best way to do so anonymously? I'm assuming the malicious bot has just hyjacked the server for these gambling sites so we won't touch those but dropping the schema the bot is using is also viable. However it has a list of other ips, trying those we found more compromised servers which we could also log in to with root root.

This is kinda ongoing, writing this as my coworker is digging through this more.

Searching an issue just to find the only result is your stack overflow question from months ago

"I have this great idea for an app, it'll be like Facebook but better"

How I imagine the conversation went before devrant was made

I'm kind of a big deal

++++++++++[>+>++++++++++++>+++>++++<<<<-]>>++++>++>+++++<<.>..<..<.>..>.<.>>.

85% of users on Chrome, only 6 users total on ie. Fuck yes

Devrant ducks need to up their game

Fun issue

Swedish client is unable to enter a currency conversion rate in a field and submit. 'Not a float' well we can clearly see that it is a float when he does it (0.5 for example), not an issue for us though.

Reproducing was a nightmare, eventually it boiled down to the fact that the framework we were using had automatic locale checks. Now because our numeric fields are actually weird text fields (front end nonsense), it was converting the period to be a comma (Swedish people would write 0,5 normally). And if you actually entered 0,5 the range check (0.01-1000) failed because it couldn't parse the comma (no locale check on that one)

Godamn facepalm. Really confused the hell out of us when we saw the error, had to go diving through library code. To top this off, locale checks are supposed to be disabled as of about 2 years ago

In revenge against our oppressor :PHP: on slack is now an alias for the shit emoji

Not having anything to rant about because the job is great

Is this a devrant equivalent to first world problems?

!rant

Just spent 30 minutes learning how to copy paste from tmux, on my virtual machine, to then set up a text file linked to my local machine, and paste >> file.text. So that then I could open the text file locally and ctrl-c to copy it

How long was this text, a 20 character url. I'm now contemplating why I spent 30 minutes doing this rather than spending 5 seconds typing it

After being let go from my previous job (previous rant) roughly two and a bit weeks ago I already have multiple offers for new jobs.

There's lots of sterotyping for how difficult it is to get a new position in this field. I was worried, this is such a relief

"We're letting you go"

"Oh, why?"

"Well we gave you a laptop to work on for a reason, we expected you to take it home and have passion for your work"

"..."

Could've saved me a lot of time if they had told me from the start that they just wanted free labor