Check this: what if doctors treated like programmers 😉

bitchface micromanager keeps telling me i don't communicate enough, don't do enough, am not fast enough, etc.

So i've been sending her a weekly summary of ~50 bullet points of things I did during the week, issues encountered, workarounds found, research findings, who i talked to, etc. all organized by task with links to the tickets.

My work volume hasn't increased (probably decreased, actually) but it certainly looks like I'm doing a lot. probably because i am? but she doesn't listen during standup, so... victory by a hundred bullet points it is!

I just found out that I should be using 4 spaces and not a tab for indentation, MY WHOLE LIFE IS A LIE.

Manager: I can’t believe you use Linux, that is such an outdated operating system. You need to get with the times and move to a more modern one like Windows or Mac. Literally NOBODY uses Linux anymore, do you still go to Blockbuster Video too? Ha!

Dev: …

I’m starting to realize that 80% of my job is resisting the urge to punch this guy in the face. Thanks goodness for remote work.

Holy shit, UNIX is really ten thousand days old?

Adventures in security land, part II:

I’m getting pulled off the security review team and instead relegated to part-time security tickets alongside my usual dev work. (So, someone else finds them, i fix them.)

Guess I found and debated too many problems with the lead dev’s code. 🙄

We got DDoS attacked by some spam bot crawler thing.

Higher ups called a meeting so that one of our seniors could present ways to mitigate these attacks.

- If a custom, "obscure" header is missing (from api endpoints), send back a basic HTTP challenge. Deny all credentials.

- Some basic implementation of rate limiting on the web server

We can't implement DDoS protection at the network level because "we don't even have the new load balancer yet and we've been waiting on that for what... Two years now?" (See: spineless managers don't make the lazy network guys do anything)

So now we implement security through obscurity and DDoS protection... Using the very same machines that are supposed to be protected from DDoS attacks.

Why management has such orgasmic attachment to numbers?

Example 1.
Mngr: split this into tasks
Me: done
Mngr: now estimate these tasks
Me: can't. Team is new and codebase is unknown. Any estimations would be subjected to huge error and I will not commit to anything if I'm not at least partially sure.
Mngr: but we need some timeline
Me: so give it yourself. I'm not doing it

Example 2.
Mngr: we need to measure how your knowledge sharing sessions impacts our organisation
Me: how?
Mngr: e.g. amount of bugs lessen in next quarter
Me: bugs can go up and down because of hundred other reasons. Also, knowledge sharing is just to inspire people, it's up to them if they keep educating and growing. Me sharing knowledge 1h per week, I can't guarantee they will understand and apply this new knowledge.
Mngr: but we need to measure it somehow, otherwise it is useless.
Me: <speechless facepalm frustrated>

Worst coding interruptions are, by far, instant messages. Especially messages I don't care about. People who tag an entire channel when they shouldn't. The Diversity and Inclusion channel that everyone has to join that tags the entire channel, all 2000 members, at least once a day to share some blog post nobody wants to read. Other employees sending "Hi" to me and expecting an immediate response even though I don't know what they want yet. People who think Slack is an alternative to our support ticket system.

I am often tempted to just sign out for the day, but unfortunately some of the messages are actually important...

A month ago I had some medical tests, the next morning, the clinic's send a email with my results. Oh surprise, unbelievable security flaws. They sent me a link without any kind of authentication, token, or security. I looked at my results, and by entering consecutive and random numbers I was able to download a lot of results and folders of other patients. I wrote an email to the clinic informing them of this situation and their response was "Thank you". Today I have accessed the link and the error is still present. I am going to notify higher health authorities.

Home office / lockdown story

Last year, when the first lockdown happened, everyone in my office started working from home. Including myself of course.
I decided to use x11vnc for remotely accessing my PC cause it is super convenient.
A few days into the home office and suddenly the remote keyboard acts weird, with random keypresses that I didn't do, and then the letter L was written over and over like it was stuck.
Assuming a bug in x11vnc, I restart it several times, but no luck. Whenever I open a terminal it is full of "L"s within a matter of seconds.
So I restart my PC remotely and reconnect the x11vnc, which is a huge pain in the arse if you have ever done it. And can you believe it... Still the same problem!
So, finally I gave up and went to the office to see what the hell was going on with my PC. I entered my office room and could not believe my eyes.
What had happened? The room cleaner had wet-wiped my desk. To create enough free space for that, she had first cleaned up the mess, putting the scattered paper nicely on the side, but then also *putting the bloody mouse on the bloody keyboard*.

This is not a joke. This is not something I wrote to be funny. This is not found randomly off the internet. This is a real part of the project I inherited: a function that not only is more cumbersome to use than the simple <Array>.contains that it wraps, but rather than returning the boolean result from the function, sends it through an if statement and returns hardcoded true and false values for... Good luck? I guess?

I. FUCKING. HATE. MOBILE. DEVELOPMENT.

I already manage the data, devops, infra, and most of the backend dev.

We had a mobile guy. He was great. I never had to think about it and kept moving quickly on my work. #SpecializationOfLaborFTW

He left. Why? Because they wouldn't give him a small raise despite being one of the best mobile engineers in the firm. WTF.

I made the mistake of picking up just enough slack on this workflow in the interim such that I'm, apparently, the fucking god-damned release manager, fixer of pipelines, fixer of build configs, fixer of anything where someone just needs to RTFM for a half-hour to not fucking break things.

Now, 8 months later...and, apparently, Fortune 500 companies are too fucking god-damned cheap to pay for someone who actually knows WTF they're doing for a very reasonable thing to have at least one dedicated set of eyes for.

I never wanted to be a mobile dev.
I never will want to be a mobile dev.
And I certainly don't want to manage your HALF-FACE-FUCKED detached expo configs.

There's a reason I never intentionally involved myself in mobile. All the way down, it's just shitty cross-compilation, transpilation, dependency-hell, brittle-as-fuck build processes so we can foot-gun and mouth-gun react-native and expo and babel and whatever the fuck else cargo-culted horseshit into the wild.

And why? What's the actual fucking root cause? The biggest white elephant that ever fucking elephant-ed? It's because Apple and Google decided to never collaborate on a truly-native cross-platform SDK--where engineers could write native code that compiles to native binaries that's simply write-once, run-everywhere. They know they could have done that, and they didn't. So what'd they get back? Expo--a too-cleverly-designed backdoor/hack--more-or-less a way to circumvent the sane release process software has usually followed: code -> executable -> deploy. Or code -> deploy (for interpreted langs). Expo's like "keep your same executable, we're just gonna to do updates by injecting new code into it whenever we want". Didn't we learn anything with web? Shit gets messy real quick? Not to mention: HEY EXPO, WE WERE ALREADY BUILDING NATIVE APPS, YOU SHORT-SIGHTED FUCKS. THANKS FOR LURING OUR CTOs INTO FORCING EXPO DOWN OUR THROATS W/ THE IMPLICIT (BUT INCORRECT) TOO-GOOD-TO-BE-TRUE PROMISE THAT WE CAN HAVE WRITE-ONCE, RUN-ANYWHERE WITHOUT ANY BUY-IN OR COOPERATION FROM THE ACTUAL TARGET PLATFORMS.

And, we just, like, accept this? We all know it's garbage engineering. The principles we learned in the classroom aren't just academic abstractions--they actually yield real-world results--and eschewing them yields real-world failures. Expo is tightly-coupled to high-heaven, with leaky abstractions six-ways-to-christmas, chock-full of foot-guns, and fails the most basic test of quality: does it, "just work?"

Expo is fucking shameful and it should fucking die. Its promises are too bold, its land-mines too many, its future-proof-ness is alway, always, always questionable as fuck and a risk to every project that uses it.

You want a rant? This is my fucking venue, 'tis not? Well, then this is a piss and vinegar rant straight from my blood-red, beating fucking heart:

EXPO FUCKING SUCKS. AND IF YOU'RE A FAN, YOU FUCKING SUCK TOO.

Bossman doesn't like change.
Rather keep his stone age skillset, I hope we get flint knapping workshops for teambuilding.

I am having trouble concentrating.
So I am going to work on expanding instead.

Learned bash scripting age 17 for the sole purpose of automatically downloading porn using wget.

To all self made seniors (and those who got granted this title because it was a morale boost): is it really so difficult to grasp ideas like: Single responsibility? Don't repeat yourself? Encapsulation?

Seriously? Is it difficulty level of some quantum physics or what?

I'm not a fucking genius myself either, but when I see 300-500 LoCs function, accepting 10 parameters, having half of code duplicated in different parts of solution - I really wanna start firing people ON THE SPOT.

P.s.
To all shitty developers advocates - I know that everyone makes mistakes sometimes - I'm talking here about consistent "don't give a shit about code" behaviour.

Recently I've installed Tinder. Had my first match yesterday.

Me: "I see you're a product manager in a software company. Do you get along well with programmers? :)"

No reply. Unmatches. 😶

You know you are in silicon valley when you see an ad for redis

When your client wants you to store password in plain text and it makes your life easier but it still feels really wrong

My mom got audited for storing sensitive client information in her gmail account without using a vpn or any other real security.

I had been telling her this was an issue for literally the last three years and shes brushed me off every time.

I got yelled at for not telling her I was serious.

Client: I know other developers who would do the same and much more for much less.

Me: I am glad you chose to work with me instead.

Client: I mean I like the site but I still feel that the development process has taken longer than it should have.

Me: Well, it is within the time frame I had said I would be able to have the first version of the site running. I have also implemented quite a number of new features that we had not earlier agreed on.

Client: I think I'll pay (quotes less than 20% of the total cost ).

Me: That is less than the amount that you were to pay as the first instalment ages ago!!

Client: I mean I like the site, but I think it still lacks the X factor. I want ...*goes on to mention other features*

Me: While I take pride in making my clients happy, I believe this process should be mutually beneficial. You are constantly making requests for new features but are making no attempts to meet your end of the agreement.

Client: FYI, there are people begging me for this job.

Me: *Takes down the site.* I wish you all the best, I hope the other developers are up to your standards.

Client: *Literally ignoring the fact that I just quit*. I want (makes more requests).

I am simply going to ignore this one!!!!

On point.....

Are you a mango in Siberia?

Mangos seeds don't grow in Siberia. But if they are moved to a warmer climate they grow to be the King of fruits.

Do not beat yourself up if you are not doing good at one organization in one role. Analyze what is the problem and if it requires a change of team/organization, roles..just do it!

node_modules wack ! :/

Back in my sysadmin days we had an IT zoo to look after. And I mean it... Linux side was allright, but unix.... Most unices were no longer supported. Some of their vendors' companies were already long gone.

There was a distant corner in our estate known to like 2 people only, both have left the company long ago. And one server in that corner went down. It took 2 days to find any info about the device. And connecting to it looked like:

1 ssh to a jumpbox #1
2 ssh to a jumpbox #2
3 ssh to a dmz jumpbox
4 ssh to an aix workload
5 fire up a vnc server
6 open up a vnc client on my workstation, connect to than vnc server [forgot to mention, all ssh connections had to forward a vnc port to my pc]
7 in vnc viewer, open up a terminal
8 ssh to hp-uxes' jumpbox
9 ssh to the problematic hp-ux

.....

How many times did you have the "I'm so fucking retarded" moment when you're fixing your code?

Days and days, 5+ hours later I finally figured out the issue.

The client is just fucking retarded, that's all.

5+ hours of my life wasted, much awesome!

That's why I love JavaScript.

Testing in production doesn't hurt.

IT
FUCKING
KILLS

Just ask Boeing.