Some undocumented, never touched, 15 years old recursive function at the core of our business model suddenly stops working in a niche scenario, debugger is not available and I have to find out why.

I am back to DevRant after about 2.5 years.
scrolling to some posts for a feew days now. I am wondering - is no one using arch anymore?

I am! So you know for sure now!

oh, well ok then.

!rant

**Getting ideas to solve a bug**

While Coding:
🤔

While Eating:
💡

While Sleeping:
💡💡

While in Bathroom:
💡💡💡

Nooooo you have to have GitHub stars and projects and commit history 😭😭😭😭

4+ years ago, in an interview, I was asked if I was familiar with keeping backups of my code on Google Drive.

When I asked them to explain what that is, they said that after a deployment, they make a ZIP file of the project and keep it on Google Drive.

When I asked about using GitHub/BitBucket they said they don't know what that is and neither do they intend on using it.

So yeah .....

Dev: This content might be too large to fit into this area on mobile.
We might need to add scrolling or design it differently.

Designer: It fits perfectly in the design.

Dev: But the user might have a smaller screen size than in the design.

Designer: We don‘t optimize for small screens.

Dev: But we still need to handle it somehow.
Also, the text might be longer for other languages.

Designer: No problem, we will provide short text for all translations.

Dev: We have 30 languages and the translations are made by a third party. We can not control it.

Designer: We‘ll manage somehow.

Dev: Also, the user might be using an accessibility setting on the device which makes the font size larger.

Designer: Unlikely

Dev: Also, the available screen size might be reduced by the on-screen keyboard.

Designer: … Ok then.

-

It‘s always a conversation like this. It repeats indefinitely.

There was a time i disliked middle managers (because i thought they were useless and just making bank for sending emails and doing meetings) but then a couple of them took sick leave for a few days and then i realized how important they were. When they came back, i was almost crying with joy 🤣

Me: Overcommunicate…

Them: we don’t need that kind of detail. We all get it.

Me: Undercommunicate…

Them: why so quiet? Does he know what he is saying?

can’t fucking win 😡

What’s really wrong with systemd?

So I got an answer on Stack overflow

Answerer basically said "finding the error is tedious so I re-wrote your code"

They changed about 15 lines in their answer. I combed over it and found that I needed just one.

I put an answer myself, saying which line was missing (as the other answer didn't highlight the actual solution, and rather re-implemented my code)

My clear, concise answer was deleted by moderator for "Not adding anything new" (Except what the exact answer was to my problem, I guess)

Not my fucking problem. Make your own Q&A site harder to use, as if I give a fuck.

What you see in that screenshot, that was earned.

I'm on the plane and I want an hour of free Gogo (read: crappy) WiFi on my laptop (so I can push the code I'm probably the most proud of, more on that another time). The problem is that the free T-Mobile WiFi is apparently only available on mobile.

So after trying to just use responsive mode, and that still (almost obviously) not working. I realize it's time to bring in the big guns: A User Agent switcher. Small catch: I don't have an add-on for FF that can do that.

So on my phone I find an add-on that can and download the file. To send it to my computer, I initially thought to go through KDEConnect, but Gogo's network also isolates each system, so that doesn't work. So I try to send it over Bluetooth, except I can't. Why? Because Android's Bluetooth share "doesn't support" the .xpi extension, so I dump it in a zip (in retrospect, I should have just renamed it), and now I can share.

After a few tries, I successfully get the file over, extract the zip, and install the extension. Whew! Now I open up Gogo's page and proceed to try again, but this time I change the user-agent. Doesn't work... Ah! Cookies! I delete the cookies for Gogo (I had a cookie editor add-on already), but I had to try a few times because Gogo's scripts keep trying to, but I got it in the end.

Finally that stupid error saying it's for phones only went away, and I could write this rant for you.

MY GOD DEAR OH MY HOW REVOLUTIONARY.

Seriously this retarded shit has to stop

Waaaay too many but let's go with this one for now.

At my previous job there was a web application which was generating about 1gb of log data a second. Server was full and the 'fullstack engineers' we called had zero clue about backend stuff and couldn't fix it.

Me and another engineer worked our asses off to figure this out but eventually the logging stopped and it went back to normal.

Great, right?

For that moment. I was the on-call server engineer and at like 3am I got called awake because this shit was happening again.
Sleep drunk with my phone I ssh'd into the server, not sure about what to do at first but then suddenly: let's chattr the goddamn log file...

$ chattr +i /var/log/logfile

Bam, worked, done, back to sleep.

(this comment + param marks the file in a way that it can only be read until the mark is removed, so you can't write to it or move it or remove it or whatever)

Something that I'm utterly ashamed of.

Had to add text message and call communication functionality in one of the products.

Boss shrunk the deadline to two days ETA.

Didn't know jackshit about twilio.

Meeting with client:

Client - So the communication thing is done right?
Me - Yyeahhh
Client - Let's try it then. *Calls himself*
Me - *Calls the API directly from my phone*

Client got out happy. Nobody knows what actually happened there. I didn't even talk to my colleagues about this. Boss gave me bonus to pull of the impossible. I added the feature after a week of the incident.

Converting one of my older projects to use functional components and hooks instead of class components and prop drilling. It's nice.

Though now I have this useState:

const [ disembodiedHead, setDisembodiedHead ] = React.useState("");

Promise it's not as creepy as it sounds.

It must be familiar but you have to take it all for your good curl and the capabilites 👀

devRant Bot Registry

The aim of this Collab is to put together a list of all known devRant-Bots to ensure that all bots can be setup to ignore each other. [more details]

He: Honzo, you are great coder, but can you please stop using those sexy anime chicks as placeholder images in your templates?
I: Ups, i forgot replace them.
He: Don't worry, client also enjoy it, but he maybe is only one. He also want to know where you found them.
I: Konachan.com

What can i say, i have exciting work.

No, my family did not support me.
They complained about everything.
From how "Python was demonic" to how "Working with computer wont save you from the coming tribulation"

Growing up in a religious cult sucks.

It took me way too long to get this..

A test engineer walks into a bar

A lot of online games (mainstream) tend to make me kind of angry or stressed. Lots of either blatantly stupid or negative players kill the fun.

A few days ago I've startet to see videos about "Among Us". It's on a big hype right now and their machmaking servers must be glowing.
Well, this game is fucking awesome and it makes me really happy! 😊
Nothing beats a 30 minute game of lying, betrayal, teamwork and good old 30'000 IQ big-brain detective work.
I think it's a great execise for remembering stuff.
You remember colors, who's said what and who faked or did which task. And the hardest part is, even if you fucking saw the killer, you have to present the facts in a way that people believe you.
Each round is unique and full of riddles.

Yeah, I just wanted to say: Fucking great game 😄

Just bought a green foldable bicycle. 😊 Trying to learn how to master biking straight then will learn how to turn.

The so called star developers :D

1. Have some issue with my code which spits out cryptic compiler error.

2. Ask on stack overflow, Reddit, etc for a solution.

3. Get scolded at for "not reading the documentation" and "asking questions which could be answered by just Googling". Still no clue what I'm doing wrong, or what the solution would be.

4. Find someone else's vaguely related problem.

5. Post my problematic code as the answer, with arrogant comment about OP being a retard for not figuring that out for themselves.

6. A dozen angry toxic nerds flock in to tell me how retarded and wrong I am, correcting me... solving my original problem.

7. Evil plan succeeded, my code compiles, and as a bonus I made the internet a worse place in the process.

I think if you tell a bunch of autistic neckbeards that "all coronaviruses are fundamentally incurable", you'd have a vaccine within a week.

Whoohoo: 🐈‍⬛
My phone supports the black cat emoji!
🐈‍⬛🐈‍⬛🐈‍⬛🐈‍⬛🐈‍⬛🐈‍⬛🐈‍⬛🐈‍⬛🐈‍⬛🐈‍⬛🐈‍⬛🐈‍⬛

I have a black cat ❤️

Does your view of this rant show the black cat emoji?

Noname Russian $17 wireless charger somehow makes less high pitched coil noise than my fancy nomad charger.

Yes it’s ugly. Yes the led is blasting and yes I painted over the led with a black nail polish.

I disassembled the nomad charger and located the coils that were making noise. I’m going to either fill them with epoxy (a common technique used by gpu enthusiasts to get rid of coil noise) or replace them completely.

TL;DR:
nomad — bouba
noname russian charger — kiki

!dev

Bought a house. 😊

Talking to my son today about one of his CS classes, not sure which.

He says: "I missed the lecture yesterday, but I'm not going to bother re-watching it."

Me: "Why? You really should. You're paying for these classes AND you really need to actually learn this stuff."

Son: "Well, because I got 100% on my last assignment without going to class. I just Google'd everything and figured it out on my own from what I found."

My wife out of the blue: "DAMN IT, BUT THAT'S NOT HOW IT WORKS IN THE REAL WORK WORLD!"

Oh, you poor, uninformed summer child. I love her, but she just doesn't know that my son has already learned the key lesson he needed to learn from his schooling in order to get a job and make good money in this field! #ProudTechieDadMoments