Introducing new Notif filters! Now on mobile, all your notifications are broken up into category tabs and you can clear each category separately. No more digging for mentions!

Also we just released a new image preview for when a rant is shared on FB, Twitter, etc. which includes the ranter's avatar image. You can see it by sharing a rant on social media, or check out an example here: devrant.com/rants/1036286/image.png (if you change the rant ID, you can see others)

Thanks Spotify, I'm really digging your suggested songs!

Bitcoin Gold digging

LONG RANT AHEAD!

In my workplace (dev company) I am the only dev using Linux on my workstation. I joined project XX, a senior dev onboarded me. Downloaded the code, built the source, launched the app,.. BAM - an exception in catalina.out. ORM framework failed to map something.

mvn clean && mvn install

same thing happens again. I address this incident to sr dev and response is "well.... it works on my machine and has worked for all other devs. It must be your environment issue. Prolly linux is to blame?" So I spend another hour trying to dig up the bug. Narrowed it down to a single datamodel with ORM mapping annotation looking somewhat off. Fixed it.

mvn clean && mvn install

the app now works perfectly. Apparently this bug has been in the codebase for years and Windows used to mask it somehow w/o throwing an exception. God knows what undefined behaviour was happening in the background...

Months fly by and I'm invited to join another project. Sounds really cool! I get accesses, checkout the code, build it (after crossing the hell of VPNs on Linux). Run component 1/4 -- all goocy. run component 2,3/4 -- looks perfect. Run component 4/4 -- BAM: LinkageError. Turns out there is something wrong with OSGi dependencies as ClassLoader attempts to load the same class twice, from 2 different sources. Coworkers with Windows and MACs have never seen this kind of exception and lead dev replies with "I think you should use a normal environment for work rather than playing with your Linux". Wtf... It's java. Every env is "normal env" for JVM! I do some digging. One day passes by.. second one.. third.. the weekend.. The next Friday comes and I still haven't succeeded to launch component #4. Eventually I give up (since I cannot charge a client for a week I spent trying to set up my env) and walk away from that project. Ever since this LinkageError was always in my mind, for some reason I could not let it go. It was driving me CRAZY! So half a year passes by and one of the project devs gets a new MB pro. 2 days later I get a PM: "umm.. were you the one who used to get LinkageError while starting component #4 up?". You guys have NO IDEA how happy his message made me. I mean... I was frickin HIGH: all smiling, singing, even dancing behind my desk!! Apparently the guy had the same problem I did. Except he was familiar with the project quite well. It took 3 more days for him to figure out what was wrong and fix it. And it indeed was an error in the project -- not my "abnormal Linux env"! And again for some hell knows what reason Windows was masking a mistake in the codebase and not popping an error where it must have popped. Linux on the other hand found the error and crashed the app immediatelly so the product would not be shipped with God knows what bugs...

I do not mean to bring up a flame war or smth, but It's obvious I've kind of saved 2 projects from "undefined magical behaviour" by just using Linux. I guess what I really wanted to say is that no matter how good dev you are, whether you are a sr, lead or chief dev, if your coworker (let it be another sr or a jr dev) says he gets an error and YOU cannot figure out what the heck is wrong, you should not blame the dev or an environment w/o knowing it for a fact. If something is not working - figure out the WHATs and WHYs first. Analyze, compare data to other envs,... Not only you will help a new guy to join your team but also you'll learn something new. And in some cases something crucial, e.g. a serious messup in the codebase.

Digging through my old favorites and found this, still makes me chuckle.

My lead keeps pushing commits to master. His commit messages vary from: no message, yeah, and yup.
and yea, some of the build break master.
Makes me just wanna die sometimes when digging through our commit history to figure out when a bug was introduced.

!dev
!!personal
!!abuse

I'm a victim of rather severe child abuse, both physical and mental. I've cut my mother out of my life on several occasions, and disowned her husband on father's day a few years ago. Whenever they're in my life they make things slowly but significantly worse.

They'd been using my previous hard times to push their way into my life again, and are now trying to buy their way in -- this time not into my life, but into my 2yo son's life.

I've done everything I could to keep his existence from them. I hid pregnancy from them, dropped any mew mannerisms and cute vocabulary when speaking to them, never let them see toys or hear sounds if I needed to call them, hid the carseat, etc. I did a perfect job. Out of necessity I've been hiding my life from them since I was 13, and I've never done better than this.

But they knew his name, sex, and age. This means they went digging, and a bloody lot. There is literally no public info relating him to me, and nobody that knows us would tell them, either -- they all know and understand.

For years I've refused to tell these people where I lived, too. We've been here for over five years, and three years ago they just randomly showed up at our door. I never gave them an address, and the house isn't in my name. I never had any privacy when I lived with them, either -- literally not even in the bathroom -- but now we have our own house and they still randomly intrude? asldhflakshdf

But. This Christmas Eve, we got two large boxes (fruit flats) stacked full of presents from them. A third for me, a third for my girlfriend, and a third for my 2yo. Name tags and all.

Why can't they just leave us alone? On Christmas of all holidays? Why do they have to ruin everything? Why can't they just go away?

I've made things abundantly clear, and they just. won't. stop. I feel so angry and exasperated and helpless and trapped. I went from listening to "die in a fire" to crying helplessly on the stairs. All I want is to be left alone and not harassed and blackmailed and manipulated and guilted and given expired food as "gifts."

and before you ever even think to defend them, please re-read my first three sentences.

Just.
Merry fucking Christmas.

Been 2+ years and still getting +1s on it. Either people are digging up their feeds too deep or devRant's content discovery is just too good. xD

So, I'm programming a control system for a prototype aerospace vehicle. You know, the stuff that needs to work to prevent falling out of the sky.

Anyway, test day was today (was -- not anymore). Wiring all the electronics, everything is actuating and works well. Except for one part, a little thruster for stability.

I spent hours - literally, fucking hours - trying to fix the problem. Wrong address? Wrong syntax? I had absolutely no clue what was wrong. Queue the hardware guy, $stupid:

$stupid: "How have you not got it working yet?!"

$me: "I don't know, everything I'm trying isn't working. I've spent hours digging through this code and nothing is fucking working."

$stupid: "Well have you set it up for the new thruster?"

$me: "What...What new thruster?"

$stupid: "Oh, the one we installed this morning, did noone tell you?"

WHY WOULDN'T YOU TELL ME THIS?! COMMUNICATION 101!

PEOPLE. DO NOT LIE ON YOUR RESUME. IT. IS. NOT. WORTH. IT. Ok, backstory.

We had a guy apply for this position at work. It really needed to be filled but also required someone with just the right certifications, so hiring the first schmuck to come along Was not an option.

We search high and low and as time passes without an acceptable applicant we become more desperate and open to negotiation. Basically, you name your price, we’ll agree to it at this point.

So finally a guy comes in, got everything we need but one minor certification. No problem. He can get that on the job, he doesn’t need it to start. He’s hired.

So he quotes us a salary 10% above our top range of what we’d usually pay a guy for this position, we don’t care. He gets it. Plus a housing allowance.

So we’re getting him registered with a place to handle his certification process and they call his four year institution to verify his transcript. We work with hazardous materials and a four year degree in a relevant field is required. It’s standard for the certification training institution to check. Especially when it’s a prestigious big name place like this guy had. And here I used to think that was paranoid of them.

They call and tell us the school says they have no record of him. We do some digging. He was never registered there. I’m like “that’s not possible, his professor is a listed reference. We call that reference.

He worked on a project with this man, he never taught him. Is very fascinated to learn this man has been presenting himself as though he attended the university. Asks to be delisted as a reference.

So long story short it comes out this guy did have a degree in this field, just from a less prestigious university.

The insane thing is, he would’ve still gotten the same job and salary package if he’d been honest about his university!

It is a loss for all involved. He doesn’t have a job. We don’t have anyone working in this position. It’s really unfortunate. Don’t lie on your resume people. Your employer will find out and the risks are not worth the benefits.

Pranks again today. Mother of God the level of those pranks is becoming high as fuck.

Define high?
Having to debug shit at system (cron, firewalling, users, sometimes even digging through logs/dmesg) level because weird shit happens all day long.

This is upping my Linux skills a lot though! I love it 😍

You know side projects? Well I took on one. An old customer asked to come and take over his latest startups companys tech. Why not, I tought. Idea is sound. Customer base is ripe and ready to pay.

I start digging and the Hardware part is awesome. The guys doing the soldering and imbedded are geniuses. I was impressed AF.

I commit and meet up with CEO. A guy with a vision and sales orientation/contacts. Nice! This shit is gonna sell. Production lines are also set.

Website? WTF is this shit. Owner made it. Gotta give him the credit. Dude doesn't do computers and still managed to online something. He is still better at sales so we agree that he's gonna stick with those and I'll handle the tech.

I bootstrap a new one in my own simplistic style and online it. I like it. The owner likes it. He made me to stick to a tacky logo. I love CSS and bootstrap. You can make shit look good quick.

But I still don't have access to the soul of the product. DBs millions rows of data and source for the app I still behind the guy that has been doing this for over a year.

He has been working on a new version for quite some time. He granted access to the new versions source, but back end and DB is still out of reach. Now for over month has passed and it's still no new version or access to data.

Source has no documentation and made in a flavor of JS frame I'm not familiar with. Weekend later of crazy cramming I get up to speed and it's clear I can't get further without the friggin data.

The V2 is a scramble of bleeding edge of Alpha tech that isn't ready for production and is clearly just a paid training period for the dev. And clearly it isn't going so well because release is a month late. I try to contact, but no reaction. The owner is clueless.

Disheartening. A good idea is going to waste because of some "dev" dropping a ball and stonewalling the backup.

I fucking give him till the end of the next week until I make the hardware team a new api to push the data and refactor the whole thing in proper technologies and cut him off.

Please. If you are a dev and don't have the time to concentrate on the solution don't take it on and kill off the idea. You guys are the key to making things happening and working. Demand your cut but also deserve it by delivering or at least have the balls to tell you are not up for it.

Story time! Promised this, so making good on the promise. Eh-hem.

Misunderstandings [A slice of life short play that actually happened]

Dramatis Personae (anonymized, bc of course):
Moi ........ me, myself and possibly some lint
Robert ..... co-architect
Daisy ...... line dev
Lisa ....... also line dev

Prologue: the beginninning
[A project is starting up, new devs are coming on, including the two individuals who drive this story.
Daisy, of Indian origin, an exceptional dev and lovely person. Mother, wife, very conservative by upbringing in her early 40s.
Lisa, also exceptional dev, lovely person. Mother, also wife, self-made immigrant with liberal views derived from personal pride and self-bootstrapping]

Enter the office, We introduce everyone, off to a nice start, everyone is happy and excited to be working on [large bank project].

Lisa and Daisy form a friendship of commonality, they have similar backgrounds by all appearances and similar concerns due to children the same age and shared employment. They seem to become fast friends and things proceed normally for some months. Smooth sailing, all is well.

The fuse is lit.

Scene: Lunchtime gossip
[Robert, middle 40s architect adjacent Moi, also architect, age is my own damn business [old, so very old].]
Robert: "So, it seems like Daisy and Lisa are getting along great."
Moi: *snerfs a little, almost chokes on enchilada* Yes, yes they are, It's nice to see...
Robert: *eyebrow, having learned to read my expressions* "Aaaaaaand..."
Moi: "I adore both of them, but they are primarily friends because they don't actually understand most of what the other says"
[Lisa has a thick Taiwanese accent, Daisy has a standard northern indian accent. Never the two shall meet]
Robert: "Are you sure, they seem to have a lot of conversations?"
Moi: "Positive, you weren't at lunch with the three of us. They're polar opposite in terms of values, it'll be fine so long as that never comes up"
Robert: "I'm not even digging into that"
Moi: *flan*

Sizzle.

Scene: This is bat country
[More months pass, everything is fine, project is humming along nicely, save a few blips of personality conflicts. Moi takes a vacation. A gas station, somewhere in the middle of Wyoming, a snowstorm, a sports car full of luggage]
*phone rings*
Moi: *looks down, sees it's Robert, eyebrow raises, answer* What's on fire?
Robert: "We had to let Lisa go"
Moi: "Ah, they finally understood each other."
Robert: "Yes..." *deep sigh*
[Fade to flashback]

Bang.

Scene: The office, Lisa's desk
[Daisy and Lisa are discussing non-descript conversation. Daisy broaches the subject of Lisa's past divorce and being a single mother]
Daisy: "It must have been hard, how did you manage?"
Lisa: "I had my daughter, she was my motivation. We made it here, I met my current partner"
Daisy: "That's good! It is so hard, coming to something new. I could never imagine leaving my husband."
Lisa: "He left us, we weren't important, I don't want to marry every again"
Daisy: "Surely you do though? Marriage is great for a woman, my parents found a great husband for me."
Lisa: "Haha, lucky you. Most indian marriage is like prostitution."
[At this moment, Daisy's demeanor takes a nose dive. Whatever was actually said, what she heard was, "Indian marriage is prostitution"]
Daisy: *tears begin pouring down her face, she flings herself back in her chair, head shaking violently she screams* "I AM AN HONORABLE WOMAN!"
[Daisy runs out of the room, straight to HR. Lisa sits there, stunned, not really understanding what just happened or the consequences]

Scene: Back in bat country
[Robert finishes the story, the emotions are a mixture of hilarity at the absurdity of the situation and frustration in the work void it has created]
Moi: "Satan, well. Fuck me. Fuck us. Fuck. Is Daisy alright, is she at least staying? We can't lose two devs at the same time."
Robert: "She got a few days off, she seems fine now, but she's... yeah, I never laughed so hard"
Moi: *double facepalm* "Yeah, the word choice was a bit outrageous. It's not like we didn't know it was coming. I'm going to get back on the road."
Robert: "Alright, enjoy yourself, I'll try and prevent any other forest fires."

1. Buy a connected armwrist that tells you the time, how good your sleep is, your heartbeat and stuff like that
2. Manage to loose the cable that charges the device
3. Get mad
4. Finally decide to buy a new one after digging in your 50 m^2 flat in vain
5. Your stuff is coming in 12 years, I mean days. Have a lot of advertisement of this particular cable wherever you go for the next two weeks
6. The thing finally gets delivered. Let's not be stupid like before and put it in a logical place, like permanently plugged in the usb port above my computer tower.
7. Find the supposed lost cable at said place.

Every step of this project has added another six hurdles. I thought it would be easy, and estimated it at two days to give myself a day off. But instead it's ridiculous. I'm also feeling burned out, depressed (work stress, etc.), and exhausted since I'm taking care of a 3 week old. It has not been fun. :<

I've been trying to get the Google Sheets API working (in Ruby). It's for a shared sales/tracking spreadsheet between two companies.

The documentation for it is almost entirely for Python and Java. The Ruby "quickstart" sample code works, but it's only for 3-legged auth (meaning user auth), but I need it for 2-legged auth (server auth with non-expiring credentials). Took awhile to figure out that variant even existed.

After a bit of digging, I discovered I needed to create a service account. This isn't the most straightforward thing, and setting it up honestly reminds me of setting up AWS, just with less risk of suddenly and surprisingly becoming a broke hobo by selecting confusing option #27 instead of #88.

I set up a new google project, tied it to my company's account (I think?), and then set up a service account for it, with probably the right permissions.

After downloading its creds, figuring out how to actually use them took another few hours. Did I mention there's no Ruby documentation for this? There's plenty of Python and Java example code, but since they use very different implementations, it's almost pointless to read them. At best they give me a vague idea of what my next step might be.

I ended up reading through the code of google's auth gem instead because I couldn't find anything useful online. Maybe it's actually there and the past several days have been one of those weeks where nothing ever works? idk :/

But anyway. I read through their code, and while it's actually not awful, it has some odd organization and a few very peculiar param names. Figuring out what data to pass, and how said data gets used requires some file-hopping. e.g. `json_data_io` wants a file handle, not the data itself. This is going to cause me headaches later since the data will be in the database, not the filesystem. I guess I can write a monkeypatch? or fork their gem? :/

But I digress. I finally manged to set everything up, fix the bugs with my code, and I'm ready to see what `service.create_spreadsheet()` returns. (now that it has positively valid and correctly-implemented authentication! Finally! Woo!)

I open the console... set up the auth... and give it a try.

... six seconds pass ...

... another two seconds pass ...

... annnd I get a lovely "unauthorized" response.

asjdlkagjdsk.

> Pic related.

Code archaeology.

Almost everything I fix/update/build requires a ridiculous amount of digging through and carefully studying the mountains of neglected, decaying, and shoddy code that make up these projects.

I spend maybe 10% of my time (and likely closer to 5%) actually writing code now. I miss it so much.

Digging into this big boy today!

Story time!

A little over a year ago I was in the hiring process with a new company and countered their initial offer. I was told by the CTO that it was no problem and they would get back to me soon.

A couple days go by and I'm then informed that they're hiring a new IT director and would like me to interview with him as well. It felt kinda lame since I'd already been offered the job but I rolled with it.

When I showed up to the office for an interview I tried to call and let them know I was there and couldn't get a hold of anyone. 30 minutes later I get a call from the CTO saying they couldn't find the new IT director and when they got him to answer the phone he said he had left early and would call me to do a phone interview.

Obviously the whole experience so far has been pretty lame but I stuck with it because I knew the CTO personally. I did the phone interview and quickly realized this dude was a prick, and would be a terrible boss, but I spoke with the CTO again who told me to stick with it and eventually I did get the job.

Fast forward about a month and it's clear the new director is trash. He literally bragged about firing a dude over an accidental outage (wtf!?).

He had the technical experience you'd expect of a junior help desk and his management skills were pretty clearly sub-par.

He was also, for whatever reason, completely unable to communicate with the only woman on our team. When assigning work he would always feel the need to ask if she could 'handle it' rather than just assigning it to her like it's done for everyone else. He was pretty clearly sexist.

The whole team hates this dude by this point but he's somehow managed to woo the executives into thinking he shits gold.

I was helping him set up a Python venv on his machine when I noticed another VPN client installed which certainly piqued my interest. After a bit of digging it was clear he was using company time and company equipment to continue working for his previous employer.

We turned over logs and he was fired the next day. He tried to add me on LinkedIn afterwards and I have never declined something quicker.

Moral of the story is don't be a dickhead.

!rant

So I was digging through some old projects of mine and I came across this lil pokedex project I had started but not finished sometime last year. The frontend is great but sadly the backend was non-existent because I didnt have that knowledge yet.

But now that I do, I'm thinking of building the backend and just keeping the frontend i have with some tweaks here and there. Anyways, I'm pretty proud of this project.

I swear to god, I'm going to track down the dipshit who just made my day hilariously painful.

So here I am, finishing up this project that's been going on for what feels like an eternity, when I get an email "why doesn't order X show up in this other system?".

I mean, it's a common thing they can take 15 minutes to push across, so the usual quick glance and what do you know, it's just sitting there as if it's waiting to be pushed through, than an hour later... it's still there, so I start digging, maybe a data issue, nope looks all good, customer details, payment details, products...

just another order, jump on the logs and all looks fi......... wait.... why does this postcode have 3 digits and not 4 , Australia has 4 digit postal codes fyi, looks at order again, 3 digits, look at log, 3....hold on why's it only 3 digits, checks code, handled as string... ok..... where the fuck would it drop a digit.... frontend requires 4 digits, validation requires 4 digits... how the fuck did you get 3 digits in... I can't see anything anywhere that logically makes sense for this🤔

Drops address into google and it's a postcode starting with 0.

Jumps on DB and the fucker is an int in the postcode table. For all you playing at home 0123 <> 123

I don't know if I should feel bad, or impressed, it's been 7 years since this table was created, and 7 years before someone managed to live in one of these parts of the country with a leading 0.

QA didn't spot this years ago,
No one tested this exact scenario,
The damn thing isn't even documented as a required delivery area, but here we are!

Kudos good sir, you broke it! 🤜 🤛
You sir may get your order now!

I'm editing the sidebar on one of our websites, and shuffling some entries. It involves moving some entries in/out of a dropdown and contextual sidebars, in/out of submenus, etc. It sounds a little tedious but overall pretty trivial, right?

This is day three.
I learned React+Redux from scratch (and rebuilt the latter for fun) in twice that long.

In my defense, I've been working on other tasks (see: Alerts), but mostly because I'd rather gouge my freaking eyes out than continue on this one.

Everything that could be wrong about this is. Everything that could be over-engineered is. Everything that could be written worse... can't, actually; it's awful.

Major grievances:
1) The sidebars (yes, there are several) are spread across a ridiculous number of folders. I stopped counting at 20.
2) Instead of icon fonts, this uses multiple images for entry states.
3) The image filenames don't match the menu entry names. at all. ("sb_gifts.png" -> orders); active filenames are e.g. "sb_giftsactive.png"
4) The actions don't match the menu entry names.
5) Menu state is handled within the root application controller, and doesn't use bools, but strings. (and these state flags never seem to get reset anywhere...)
6) These strings are used to construct the image filenames within the sidebar views/partials.
7) Sometimes access restrictions (employee, manager, etc.) are around the individual menu entries, sometimes they're around a partial include, meaning it's extremely difficult to determine which menu entries/sections/subsections are permission-locked without digging through everything.
8) Within different conditionals there are duplicate blocks markup, with duplicate includes, that end up render different partials/markup due to different state.
9) There are parent tags outside of includes, such as `<ul>#{render 'horrific-eye-stabbing'}</ul>`
10) The markup differs per location: sometimes it's a huge blob of non-semantic filthiness, sometimes it's a simple div+span. Example filth: section->p->a->(img,span) ... per menu entry.
11) In some places, the markup is broken, e.g. `<li><u>...</li></u>`
12) In other places, markup is used for layout adjustments, such as an single &nbsp; nested within several divs adorned with lots of styles/classes.
13) Per-device layouts are handled, not within separate views, but by conditionally enabling/disabling swaths of markup, e.g. (if is_cordova_session?).
14) `is_cordova_session` in particular is stored within a cookie that does not expire, and within your user session. disabling it is annoying and very non-obvious. It can get set whether or not you're using cordova.
15) There are virtually no stylesheets; almost everything is inline (but of course not actually everything), which makes for fun layout debugging.
16) Some of the markup (with inline styling, no less) is generated within a goddamn controller.
17) The markup does use css classes, but it's predominately not for actual styling: they're used to pick out elements within unit tests. An example class name: "hide-for-medium-down"; and no, I can't figure out what it means, even when looking at the tests that use it. There are no styles attached to that particular class.
18) The tests have not been updated for three years, and that last update was an rspec version bump.
19) Mixed tabs and spaces, with mixed indentation level (given spaces, it's sometimes 2, 4, 4, 5, or 6, and sometimes one of those levels consistently, plus an extra space thereafter.)
20) Intentional assignment within conditionals (`if var=possibly_nil_return_value()`)
21) hardcoded (and occasionally incorrect) values/urls.

... and last but not least:
22) Adding a new "menu sections unit" (I still haven't determined what the crap that means) requires changing two constants and writing a goddamn database migration.

I'm not even including minor annoyances like non-enclosed ternaries, poor naming conventions, commented out code, highly inefficient code, a 512-character regex (at least it's even, right?), etc.

just.

what the _fuck_

Who knew a sidebar could be so utterly convoluted?

I've always wanted to build an underground bunker for storms, to hide from my unstable ex girlfriend, and lulz, so I am. The hardest part isn't the digging or the structure, it's finding a way to ensure I'll still have internet.

Me, trying to create a new javascript framework

Christmas lights were blinking randomly IN SECTIONS without any sort of "control brick", just with a plain wall plug and TWO wires coming out of it.

In this house we obey the laws of physics, I immediately called magic on this and started digging. I found out that was like five chains of lights wired in parallel, and every chain contained one special lamp that had a thin plate of some thermal-sensitive material inside. It heats up which makes it go straight, thus breaking its chain until it cools down enough to curl again and make the contacts touch.

Brilliant and really cheap way of making randomly blinking Christmas lights without any kind of controller, with just two wires and some physics. That's what I call "nocode".

!drunk (yet)

It's whiskey and code tonight!
(Whiskey because I couldn't get to my rum. annoyed face.)

Why? Because rum is so much better. duh.

More seriously: My boss has thrown me every single one his current tasks and is refusing to answer simple questions about them, such as "oh, so you already know about this bug; what's the cause?" or "how do i test this once i've fixed it?" or "where the fuck are you?"

and I'm also getting lots of bugs from other people. They're all basically categorized "urgent, please fix immediately" but should instead be categorized "super-boring and not-at-all-important, and should get fixed on the off chance you happen to remember it next year". That's the best category of bug.

I just gave up on fixing a Rails pluralize bug which fits into the aforementioned category quite nicely. It's returning "2x round of golves" -- which is hilarious and I might leave it in just for the amusement. But now it's back to fighting with ActionCable! Everything has been getting in the way of me finishing that. I'm about to start biting.

Speaking of ActionCable, it turns out my code wasn't wrong after all (have I said that yet?). Since the official documentation and examples suck, I've been digging through the (generated) javascript source and working my way backwards to learn how to use it. I cleaned up my code a little, but it was still correct. The reason nothing is working correctly is that API Guy gave me broken code. ...Again! Go figure. So I'll be rewriting that today. or tomorrow. (Whiskey, remember?)

I also have some lovely netcode to debug and fix. So totally not looking forward to that. The responses are less bloody reliable than my boss's code ffs. *grumble grumble*

Fellow Dev: the clients are requesting a gallery on their website with functioning modals.

Me: okay cool

So for the record, I'm new to front-end and I've got quite a lot to learn in JavaScript.

*I googled as much as I could and I made a proper functioning gallery in 2 full days of coding*

Him: okay, so this is great but they aren't really digging it.

Me: *sigh* yes, so what do they want?

Him: have you seen how an image opens in Google images? Like you click on one, the image opens while the rest of the content shifts down?

Me: um... Yeah?

Him: yeah, so they want that.

Me: ... *Scoops the web trying to figure out how Google does it*. Dude, I can't find anything close to it and I've still got a lot to learn. Idk how to do it.

Him: well, you're being paid for that. So, you better do it.

Me: 1000Rs ( approx. 14.58$ ) isn't called "being paid". Gimme a break here.

Him: You're a novice rn.

Me: why don't you do it?

Him: I'm your boss.

*Sigh* (he indeed is my boss)

Him: deal with it.

Me: FU........C.....*suddenly I realized how it's done* OH OH OH OH I just got it, I just got it!

(I actually make something like that)

*Lol yay*

That's just my best story of a fight. Lol.

I swear I work with mentally deranged lunatics.
Dev is/was using TFS's web api to read some config stuff..

Ralph: "Ugh..this is driving me crazy. I've spent all day trying to read this string from TFS and it is not working"
Me: "Um, reading a string from an web api is pretty easy, what's the problem?"
Ralph: "I'm executing the call in a 'using' statement and cannot return the stream."
Me: "Why do you need to return a stream? Return the object you are looking for."
Ralph: "Its not that easy. You can return anything from TFS. All you get back is a stream. Could be XML, JSON, text file, image, anything."
Me: "What are you trying to return?"
Ralph: "XML config. If I use XDoc, the stream works fine, but when I step into each byte from the stream, I the first three bytes have weird characters. I shouldn't have to skip the first three bytes to get the data. I spent maybe 5 hours yesterday digging around the .Net stream readers used in XDoc trying to figure out how it skips the first few bytes."
Me: "Wow...I would have used XDoc and been done and not worried about that other junk."
Ralph: "But I don't know the stream is XML. That's what I need to figure out."
Me: "What is there to figure out? You do know. Its your request. You are requesting a XML config."
Ralph: "No, the request can be anything. What if Sam requests an image? XDoc isn't going to work."
Me: "Is that a use-case? Sam requesting an image?"
Ralph: "Uh..I don't know...he could"
Me: "Sounds like your spending a lot of time doing premature optimization. You know what your accessing TFS for, if it's XML, return XML. If it's an image, return an image. Something new comes along, modify the code to handle it. Eazy peezy."
<boss walks in from a meeting>
Boss: "Whats up guys?"
Ralph: "You know the problem with TFS and not being able to stream the data I had all day yesterday? I finally figured it out. I need to keep this TFS reader simple. I'll start with the XML configs and if we more readers later, we can add them."
Boss: "Oh yea, always start simple and add complexity only when you need it."

Frack...Frack..Frack...you played some victim complaining to anyone who would listen yesterday (which I mostly ignored) about reading data from TFS was this monumental problem no one could solve, then you start complaining to me, I don't fall for the BS, then tell the boss the solution was your idea?

Lunatic or genius? Wally would be proud.

We used to use Trello for our team boards and was starting to transition to Gitlab's issues for better code integration...

I became aware that my boss was being "demanded" to have a better analytics of our team performance so I started digging more insightful issue/tasks software like YouTrack ( Jetbrains ) and Jira ( Atlasian ).

After 2 months of trial and learning I suggested we go with YouTrack.

"We" are now using it for about 6 months already and it is a fucking mess.

My peers have no clue how to scrum, even after my efforts to teach them and they even spent a fucking 3 days workshop about it on fucking Google (!?!?) without me ( there is a rant about it ).

My boss is a nice person but the dude lacks any trace of competence to manage anyone other than him.

I'm tired of babysitting a man that is 10 years older than me and has a car that costs almost 10x mine.

I'm two days back from vacation and I almost rage quited 5 times.

I have really been digging the Material Theme for Sublime and JetBrains IDE's.

N e v e r, fucking e v e r chmod/ chown permissions recursive on the linux /etc folder❗

I did yesterday (, because I am fucking dumb and know little about linux systems) and got the result today. My whole mailserver wasn't working.
After fucking tons of googling and searching and log-digging I found that postfix and opendkim require specific permissions on their respective folders and files.

After changing a fucking amount of permissions on those fucking files the fucking mailserver worked and I can send and receive mails, now. 😤😤😤

What a torture. Lesson learned. Never will repeat this mistake.

When you document your class just right, so when you encounter it accidentally while debugging, you feel like digging in a base class, because it's so well documented and perfectly written.

I’m adding some fucking commas.
It should be trivial, right?
They’re fucking commas. Displayed on a fucking webpage. So fucking hard.

What the fuck is this even? Specifically, what fucking looney morons can write something so fucking complicated it requires following the code path through ten fucking files to see where something gets fucking defined!?

There are seriously so fucking many layers of abstraction that I can’t even tell where the bloody fucking amount transforms from a currency into a string. I’m digging so deep in the codebase now that any change here will break countless other areas. There’s no excuse for this shit.

I have two options:
A) I convert the resulting magically conjured string into a currency again (and of course lose the actual currency, e.g. usd, peso, etc.), or

B) Refactor the code to actually pass around the currency like it’s fucking intended to be, and convert to a string only when displaying. Like it’s fucking intended to be.

Impossible decision here.

If I pick (A) I get yelled at because it’s bloody wrong. “it’s already for display” they’ll say. Except it isn’t. And on top of that, the “legendary” devs who wrote this monstrosity just assumed the currency will always be in USD. If I’m the last person to touch this, I take the blame. Doesn’t matter that “legendary Mr. Apple dev” wrote it this way. (How do I know? It’s not the first time this shit has happened.) So invariably it’ll be up to me to fix anyway.

But if I pick (B) and fix it now, I’ll get yelled at for refactoring their wonderful code, for making this into too big of a problem (again), and for taking on something that’s “just too much for me.” Assholes. My après Taco Bell bathroom experiences look and smell better than this codebase. But seriously, only those two “legendary” devs get to do any real refactoring or make any architecture decisions — despite many of them being horribly flawed. No one else is even close to qualified… and “qualified” apparently means circle jerking it in Silicon Valley with the other better-than-everyone snobs, bragging about themselves and about one another. MojoJojo. “It was terrible, but it fucking worked! It fucking worked!” And “I can’t believe <blah> wanted to fix that thing. No way, this is a piece of history!” Go fuck yourselves.

So sorry I don’t fit in your stupid club.

Oh, and as an pointed, close-at-hand example of their wonderful code? This API call I’m adding commas to (it’s only used by the frontend) uses a json instance variable to store the total, errors, displayed versions of fees/charges (yes they differ because of course they do), etc. … except that variable isn’t even defined anywhere in the class. It’s defined three. fucking. abstraction. layers. in. THREE! AND. That wonderful piece of smelly garbage they’re so proud of can situationally modify all of the other related instance variables like the various charges and fees, so I can’t just keep the original currency around, or even expect the types to remain the same. It’s global variable hell all over again.

Such fucking wonderful code.

I fucking hate this codebase and I hate this fucking company. And I fucking. hate. them.

We had to review a design document written by our partners, and have it approved by end of Dec.
While I was reading it, I noticed that we committed to a module I wasn't familiar with. I asked the other two lab mates, and they had a surprised Pikachu face.
So we called the boss to discuss this. And it dawned on him that we committed to a task that was assigned 20 months of work, but nobody started working on it. And considering Holidays and other commitments, we had like 3 months to do it from scratch and deliver.
My advisor panicked, and his first response was to assign this task to me.
I politely declined, and after digging in my email box, found that he actually assigned the task to someone else. So I showed it to him.
Thinking I would save him after he treated me badly for nearly 2 years was hilarious. For a better manager, I would have definitely agreed to assist. But as it is now? I'll be eating cookies while I'm watching the project burn.

I already wrote one rant about how my family deals with me being a developer, but this rant I wanna dedicate to people close to my family and what they actually think...

Earlier this year I ended school, so I was supposed to find a job. Well...I live in region where only small IT "companies" exist. It is really hard to find job as a developer around here. These small companies either do not want to hire anyone or they just hire people with super amazing university or just family members and friends. Anyway, I did not want to move to the capital city, so I just kept seraching...and that is how this family friends started to be fucking toxic.

While searching for job everyone just kept telling me how am I lazy as fuck and will not just go digging fucking drains or work for minimum wage to some korean shit company around here. Of course not literally, but I can see when someone starts to look at me as I am completely crazy. Our family lost many fake friends who just do not understand because of this. But it did not ended here...

When I finally found a job 1.5 month earlier, I was so happy. Job from home in relative good company. Ho Lee Fuk! Nobody believes me I am actually working. People look at me as I am a lazy fuck laying all day in bed and watching fucking TV. I am done with these dick people.

End of story.

I was taking a test for an online class, and I noticed that all the pages had the .html suffix. Naturally, my curiosity was piqued because I was expecting them to have hidden this part of the URL. The pages were locked for 48 minutes but I wanted to know if I could somehow circumvent the timers.

After some digging around in the source, I found where they were changing everything.

It was a small .js script that was making the page work. I could see that I could actually choose what page to get to. After plugging in some of the links, I found that I could actually get to specific parts of the class.

Ended up completing the class in 1/4 the time it usually takes.

I win.

BEEP-BEEP
Every now and then, periodically
BEEP-BEEP
and then quiet. Get into working mode, concentrate again, a...
BEEP-BEEP

wtf is that.. Took down my smoke alarm, prolly the battery is getting low. Put it next to me, waiting...
BEEP-BEEP
nope, it's gotta be smth else. How can I hunt it down when I can't even tell which direction it's coming from?!? I know. Play smart. Measure the period.
BEEP-BEEP
it's been 3 minutes 5 seconds since the last BEEP-fucking-BEEP. Now I can plan my time ahead. Go to one room, wait fo..
BEEP-BEEP
Nope, it's not there. Carry on with all the other rooms, waiting for that annoying beeping.
BEEP-BEEP
I think I at least know the room. Good, narowed it down.
BEEP-BEEP

this is getting really annoying. I've been playing with this nonsense for an hour already. Alright, it's in my kid's room. The PC is off, toys are off. What could it be....? Binary search the f
BEEP-BEEP
uck out of it! aight, I first try to identify from which part of the room it's coming from. Stand in the middle and tu
BEEP-BEEP
ahh, right, it's behind me then. Fine. That's the PC corner. But it's off, it can't be making sounds. Esp when it has no speakers plugged in - it's got only Bluetooth speakers which haven't been turned on for what, a year already? but then w
BEEP-BEEP
hat could it be... Sounds like it's indeed coming from the PC corner. Checking all the LEDs -- all are off, nothing's turned on. Move the speakers away, try digging around to see if the kiddo didn't leave his toys behind the
BEEP-BEEP
PC. Wait, the sound has moved behind me... And I've only moved my BT speakers. Which are turned off. That's odd... could it be? Put one to one ear and another one to another and wait for the remaining 15 seconds
BEEP-(you are a fucking idiot)-BEEP
whispers in my left ear.

Turns out, some BT speakers can make low-battery sounds even when they are turned off.

How did you break through your own barriers to finally learn programming?

My SO is constantly complaining that we don’t have enough money. I make a decent amount as a full-time dev at a large company, but we live in an expensive city and are currently going through a time of few funds.

He started driving delivery food orders, he likes it okay, but it pays very little. He still complains about money.

I want him to learn JavaScript.

He was once asked to make a website for a company he’s involved in. He only used SquareSpace, but he was never satisfied with their stock code. He went digging for JavaScript snippets he could use, and he made one of the most beautiful and responsive websites I’ve seen.

Since then, I’ve been encouraging him to learn JavaScript. I’m trying to convince him it will be a great source of additional income, he can make his own schedule while doing contract work, and he can ask me anything he wants while he’s learning. How many beginners have someone they can ask anything of, at any time?

He doesn’t want to learn. He doesn’t think he is capable. I remember this feeling before I learned to code. A chunk of someone else’s JS does look genuinely terrifying if you don’t know what it means. I want him to give it one honest try before he decides it’s “not for him,” but he isn’t open to it enough to try.

What can I do to help him understand he is capable? He’s in his mid-30s and insists he’s too old to catch up. He’s smart, detail-oriented, and I know he would write code that’s a million times cleaner than mine. He absolutely has a programmer inside of him, and I want to encourage him to simply try.

Is there something I can to do introduce JS in a non-threatening way? Or should I just accept his refusal and let it go? Thanks for any advice.

Time to go to bed.

Why not trying this lib ? it's not that late, let's give it a try for an hour and then --> sleep.

Woaw what, two hours passed already ? I was just still beginning to have fun ! so frustrating. Na, I could not sleep if I'm frustrated, let's dig deeper for 30min and then, go !

shit it's been an hour already, man, go to sleep now ! ...Actually it's too late already, better not sleeping and keep digging !

In the morning : can't wake up, tonight I promise, I go sleep at nine.

In the evening : oh new angular ! could worth a quick try before sleep !

Clicking "share" on directory in Windows Explorer, digging through config panel, fidgeting with network discovery options, toggling password protection, digging through account management, jumping over a chair 3 times to channel my inner Bill Gates, checking directory permissions, sacrificing 7 virgin unicorns, go into lusrmgr.msc, curse various gods, install CIFS1.0 protocol, reboot computer, disable encryption, checking registry, trying to summon Steve Ballmer using the blood of a bald goat and sweat-scented candles... 5 hours.

Install Ubuntu on spare SSD, mount Windows NTFS drive, start SMB daemon and set up samba users... 15 minutes.

The manager and selfperceived omnipotent cult leader was the worst kind of businessman. Slimey and trecherous, zero sense of ethics, but felt holier than the pope because he "helped" his weakling herd of piteous employees.

These employees were smart kids, most of them in their late teens. All of them legally disabled. There was this kid who gobbled up ritalin like candy, a boy who had received his measles shots and turned socially awkward (/s), a chubby girl who could name all the hex colors of her chocolate stained shirt... you know, what we call skilled developers in the industry.

Fiftyfive of them.

They were awesome, awkward highschool dropouts, like I had been a decade earlier. They worked 50h a week. They had great humor, were passionate, devoured information about new technologies, and they built custom websites from scratch in no time. I had to lead this flock, and felt honored to work with them.

Then things started to smell funny.

I discovered all 55 of their workstations ran pirated software, from Windows to Adobe CS. I'm not without sin in that regard, but as a company it's just plain stupid.

Clients were treated like shit. I mean, we all feel like punching a client in the face sometimes, but I'm taking about unjustified debt collections paired with death threats.

Then I found out these kids were often disappearing for a few months, only to return months later.

I started digging, and discovered they were all working reintegration internships (because they were on below minimum wage disability payments), at almost zero cost to my employer.

After 6 months, my boss gave them a negative recommendation, they were all too "sick" to function in normal jobs.

Then they were rotated to a shadow company, doing the same work for another 6 months, and so on to a third company.

He broke these kids, talked them down, made them feel worthless. He threatened the ones who understood what was happening.

I ended up bringing the company down, with the CEO and two government officials jailed for fraud and corruption.

Some employees were quite mad about it, at least at first — I was the shepherd who abandoned his sheep. Luckily, most found better paid positions in no time.

Truly one of the most fucked up and difficult situations I've been in.

Today during my Algorithms lab, the guy sitting to my left began digging his nose like he had buried treasure there. 🤢
Oh how I wanted to smash his face on his keyboard. 😭

I really, really, fucking god damn it REALLY need to move a legacy project from the grave yard server and get it in git, and then build a dev environment for it, so I can stop making incredibly volatile changes direct to PROD (backend, frontend and DB all at once and then test it while it’s live and being used, but fuck me if I can be bothered digging through a 10GB code base and attempting to make it work in a multi-environment setup when it’s going to be a long trip down the error logs until it works again 😱🔫

Well, the system is offline, links are broken and users are complaining! Developer, what did you do?

After some digging around the designer made a "simple change" to a csv file, add a column to include the image file name of each item...

I mean, it just shifted ALL THE COLUMNS in a csv file but what could go wrong? 🤦‍♂️

Back when I migrated my file server to a VM, I used robocopy to copy everything over (and caused quite a few fuckups before it'd behave halfway decent.. or so I thought). Now I tried to add my desktop's SSH key to the authorized_keys on said server but it wouldn't accept my key after that. After a bit of digging I've found that my entire home directory (where the file server hosts its mirror of my D: drive) had everything set to 777, and that's why the key isn't accepted. Great permission mode, isn't it? Much secure, very wow! Thank you so much robocopy!!!

A few years i had wrote a little script as a proof of concept for remote injection via torrent files.

Yesterday, some doofus bruteforced into my seedbox and tried to install a miner using the same script🤦🤦🤦

Did some digging, found my way back to him and wiped the drives on his system as a gesture of thank you. Anyways, I hope he didn't have anything important on his 16TB volume, cause good luck recovering that

Digging through legacy code

Everytime I'm digging into some random legacy code where no one knows its original intention I'm seeing "Software Archeologist" as a well-paid job sooner or later...
Fucking undocumented legacy code...

So we have an API that my team is supposed send messages to in a fire and forget kind of style.

We are dependent on it. If it fails there is some annoying manual labor involved to clean that mess up. (If it even can be cleaned up, as sometimes it is also time-sensitive.)

Yet once in a while, that endpoint just crashes by letting the request vanish. No response, no error, nothing, it is just gone.

Digging through the log files of that API nothing pops up. Yet then I realize the size of the log files. About ~30GB on good old plain text log files.

It turns out that that API has taken the LOG EVERYTHING approach so much too heart that it logs to the point of its own death.

Is circular logging such a bleeding edge technology? It's not like there are external solutions for it like loggly or kibana. But oh, one might have to pay for them. Just dump it to the disk :/

This is again a combination of developers thinking "I don't need to care about space! It's cheap!" and managers thinking "100 GB should be enough for that server cluster. Let's restrict its HDD to 100GB, save some money!"

And then, here I stand trying to keep my sanity :/

What the hell happened to devRant?

So we have this person who is digging up old posts, harassing people (@LotsOfCaffeine here, me as well, probably more) and some fucking how is getting 14 updoots while obviously being, or at least portraying themselves as a misogynistic hater of everyone and everything. What the actual hell is up with devRant? How are there FOURTEEN OTHER PELPLE who AGREE WITH THIS PERSON. How many active users are we here? I'm sure 14 users is a pretty significant percentage of the active user base.

People, I feel bad for this person. I've been a bit of a dick to them and so have many more, but what the hell happened to devRant, the place where you went to rant about stupid colleagues and bosses, share funny coding stories and other bulshittery? We're turning into fucking 4chan with politics, sexism and racism being the main story line here. I dont fucking get it. I'm on the brink of just leaving. I'm so fucking tired of this shit...

"If you dig a hole and it’s in the wrong place, digging it deeper isn’t going to help." - Seymour Chwast

Taking a database class, prof insists on using Microsoft Sql server 2014. "Okay cool" said the Microsoft surface fan boy inside me as I installed it. "Holy shit this is using 6 fucking GBs?? Eh it's okay I trust" again said my Microsoft fanboy self. Finished installing, makes queries and it works. Cool.

Go to run Sql server again next day and get an error (nothing displayed, just a box pop up and then a crash) I use some Google skills. Change a bunch of shit and still it persists. "Just uninstall it and reinstall again" says my prof. I do so except random errors during installation saying Sql already exists even though I just uninstalled it. "Maybe it's some registry keys messing with it!" do some digging, remove unneeded registry keys and try again. Installation finished but a whack of features say failed to install.

I sit and try to work this shit out for the next four hours (not paying attention to my class) and still can't get Sql to completely uninstall itself. I try iobit uninstaller, command line uninstalling, fucking everything but still not working. Slowly my fanboy side is wishing that the windows symbol on the back of my machine was an apple.

I ended up having to backup all my files and reinstalling windows to get it working properly. Holy sweet fuck. The worst part is when this class is done ill probably need to reinstall yet again to save the 6gb it's sucking up. So if you're not sure whether you need something as heavy as Microsoft Sql server or not for your application, don't use it! It's a fucking virus that is super difficult to remove.

Tldr: life long Microsoft fanboy becomes apple convert in a day of using Microsoft Sql server.

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.

The ammount of digging I have to do in order to fix something or building the mindset to do something i don't want to.

I have a mental block regarding people telling me what to do. I consider myself a pretty chill dude, but when someone says "do this" my mind automatically goes into "oh fuck that" mode.

I hate being this way, wish I could just switch that shit off and work on what i am told and be done with it.

I can spend all weekend fucking around with php. But the moment someone tells me to do something at work with it I start dreading it

This applies to damn near everything in life except for anything that has to do with my children.

My dad was neglectful as fuck, that itself makes me overly paranoid of making my children feel the same way I did growing up. Just wanted to throw that out.

It seems I did some progress today! Thanks Dr Devrant!
Dr Devrant: tell me about your father
Me: motherfucker sucks camel balls

When your pm forces you to push new features out too quickly and you're slowly digging yourself into a messy hell, knowing you have to one day refactor thousands of lines of code.

During my first internship, my boss had me build a social network type of platform for doctors, all by myself, using Drupal 7. I was like 'aw yeah sure!'...*sigh* younger me...

While I was working there, he didn't have any particular input on the project other that the occasional brainstorming session, where he would tell me things that big firms do (Facebook, Twitter etc.) that should be implemented. It was 2012 so you can imagine that many standard concepts of today, were making their first appearance back then.

I remember that he was sitting on his desk, a little further next to mine, watching a video about how to treat your employees like mine-digging goblins, in a way that would bring profit to the company. He didn't notice that the volume was loud enough and that I could hear what the video said. Still to this day, that moment was one of the most awkward experiences I had in any workspace.

Well the project turned out to be a really well-built prototype and then canceled because reality hit me and I left after my internship ended, even though he told me that he wanted to hire me and have me work on the project full-time.

So happy to have been there, just to learn to avoid people and places like that in the future, it really paid off (seriously, this is the type of stuff that you have to experience in order to armor up in the future).

I had spent the last year working on a online store power by woocommerce with over 100k products from various suppliers. This online store utilized a custom API that would take the various formats that suppliers offer their inventory in and made them consistent. Now everything was going swimmingly initially, but then I began adding more and more products using a plug-in called WP all import. I reached around 100k products and the site would take up to an entire minute to load sometimes timing out. I got desperate so I installed several caching plugins, but to no avail this did not help me. The site was originally only supposed to take three to four months but ended up taking an entire year. Then, just yesterday I found out what went wrong and why this woocommerce website with all of these optimizations was still taking anywhere from 60 to 90 seconds to load, or just timing out entirely. I had initially thought that I needed a beefier server so I moved it to a high CPU digitalocean VM. While this did help a little bit, the site was still very slow and now I had very high CPU usage RAM usage and high disk IO. I was seriously stumped the Apache process was using a high amount of CPU and IO along with MYSQL as well. It wasn't until I started digging deeper into the database that I actually found out what the issue was. As I was loading the site I would run 'show process list' in the SQL terminal, I began to notice a very significant load time for one of the tables, so I went to go and check it out. What I did was I ran a select all query on that particular table just to see how full it was and SQL returned a error saying that I had exceeded the maximum packet size. So I was like okay what the fuck...
So I exited my SQL and re-entered it this time with a higher packet size. I ran a query that would count how many rows were in this particular table and the number came out to being in the millions. I was surprised, and what's worse is that this table belong to a plugin that I had attempted to use early in the development process to cache the site. The plugin was deactivated but apparently it had left PHP files within the wp content directory outside of the actual plugin directory, so it's still executing scripts even though the plugin itself was disabled. Basically every time I would change anything on the site, it would recache the whole thing, and it didn't delete any old records. So 100k+ products caching on saves with no garbage collection... You do the math, it's gonna be a heavy ass database. Not only that but it was serialized data, so when it did pull this metric shit ton of spaghetti from the database, PHP then had to deserialize it. Hence the high ass CPU load. I had caching enabled on the MySQL end of things so that ate the ram. I was really desperate to get this thing running.
Honest to God the main reason why this website took so long was because the load times made it miserable to work on. I just thought that the hardware that I had the site on was inadequate. I had initially started the development on a small Linux VM which apparently wasn't enough, which is why I moved it to digitalocean which also seemed to not be enough, so from there I moved to a dedicated server which still didn't seem to be enough. I was probably a few more 60-second wait times or timeouts from recommending a server cluster to my client who I know would not be willing to purchase it. The client who I promised this site to have completed in 3 months and has waited a year. Seriously, I would tell people the struggles that I would go through with this particular site and they would just tell me to just drop the site; just take the money, just take the loss. I refused to, this was really the only thing that was kicking my ass. I present myself as this high-and-mighty developer like I'm just really good at what I do but then I have this WordPress site that's just beating the shit out of me for a year. It was a very big learning experience and it was also very humbling as well, it made me realize that I really don't know as much as I think I might. It was evidence that there is still so much more to learn out there, I did learn a lot from that experience especially about optimizing websites the different types of methods to do that particular lonely on the server side and I'll be able to utilize this knowledge in the future.
I guess the moral of the story is, never really give up. Ultimately things might get so bad that you're running on hopes and dreams. Those experiences are generally the most humbling. Now I can finally present the site that I am basically a year late on to the client who will be so happy that I did not give up on the project entirely. I'll have experienced this feeling of pure euphoria, and help the small business significantly grow their revenue. Helping others is very fulfilling for me, even at my own expense.

Anyways, gonna stop ranting. Running out of characters. If you're still here... Ty for reading :')

This is getting annoying.

For the past >half a year I've been chasing windmills. This is what my BAU day looks like:

- We login to client's network
- We start running some Sanity tests before the actual runs (actual runs are hell of an expensive (financially and time-wise) thing to launch) to make sure environment is OK.
- Sanity tests fail. wtf? Nothing's been changed since y-day!
- Spend ~3-4 hours digging logs, code, more logs,... Apparently some genius decided to change a single parameter.
- Spend another 1-2 hours trying to work around that parameter (since apparently that genius did have a task to do that, so we'll most likely have to find a way to live with it)
- Restart the whole env (~30min).
- Launch a Smoke, Sanity tests to verify env state.
- Launch the actual test
- Go home.

Next day:
- We login to client's network
- We start running some Sanity tests before the actual runs to make sure environment is OK.
- Sanity tests pass.
- Run the actual test
- Concurrency on RDS database is sky-rocketing! WTF did that come from??? Nothing's been changed since y-day!!
- Spend ~1-2 hours looking for anything changed, dig some logs for anything unusual. Nothing.
- Escalate to DBA. 2 hours later DBA says "fix the app". thanks for nothing mate....
- Spend remaining 2 hours analysing AWR. Give up, restart the whole RDS instance. Another hour wasted.
- Time to go home. Out of curiosity run Sanity test -- all good. Run the actual test -- all good. wtf??
- Go home

Next day
- We login to client's network
- We start running some Sanity tests before the actual runs to make sure environment is OK.
- Sanity tests fail. wtf? Nothing's been changed since y-day!
- Spend ~3-4 hours digging logs, code, more logs,... Apparently some genius decided to change a single parameter.
- Spend another 1-2 hours trying to work around that parameter
- ..... I think you know where this is going.

And this keeps going on and on, day by day. Spending the better half of the day chasing windmills and doing our actual work on the last hour of the working day or even after that.

We have plenty of interesting tasks in our Jira but we're squirels spinning in the wheel and never being able to touch them.

It feels like I'm wasting my time. I could do so much more with my time!

[just needed to vent ]

So, a few months back my mother had some issues with her windows 10 box not being able to do proper backups to a backup partition. At the same time I was pulling insane hours at work and writing on a eBook on commission for a guy, besides having small kids with on and off flu and shit.

Needless to say, I didn't have time to look at the backup issues. Well, even though my mom is one of those dogs you can't teach new tricks, she has always been resourceful enough to get help with things.

This time she picked up the phone and called Microsoft Support, got some guys to remote in and take a look. They messed around a bit and said they were done.

She phoned me up later that day to tell me how proud she was of herself for doing that. Of course, she skipped telling me the important bit about she actually calling them, rather describing it as "Microsoft was just on my computer and fixed it".

You can imagine my immediate reaction, cold sweat running down my back, adrenalin rushing in as I dug through the details of what had happened.

A few days later she calls me up again and tells me the problem is back, and we agree that even though the MS dudes was not able to fix it at first, she should try again, as she had a ticket to reference.

The next attempt by MS actually fried her partitions, and apparently they had f-ed up trying to delete and recreate the backup partition.

That's not the worst of it though. Since they fried her disk, her computer crashed and naturally the remoting won't work. In our country, they have no people on the ground to do hands on help, and they didn't have a partner near by. Her not having a win 10 usb stick, nor a spare computer to make one, she was in a surreal predicament.

She was also quite pissed, and pissed off mums are not to be messed with. She managed to get Microsoft to agree to cover the costs of a non-partner to visit her to fix the problems, and using her as the middle man, they made an agreement with the 3rd-party tech support company.

After the box was fixed though, some more issues arose... regarding billing. The 3rd-party tech support was unable to get in contact with the person at MS that was going to sign off on the bill, and again using my mom as the middle man, it was agreed that my mom, as the customer, was to be reimbursed for the bill to the 3rd-party.

Guess what... 3 months went by, with weekly follow-ups and nagging from my mom, and still no money...

At this time, I had time to help her, and after some digging and borderline stalking, we managed to get the phone numbers of some of the higher ups in my country, and she started calling them directly.

After talking to a couple who refused to help, she reached the Vice President of the country branch, and was finally able to talk to someone who gave a shit.

Still took over a month more to actually get the money, but now she had someone who actually gave her statuses, receipts and ETAs.

FUCK!

!!psa

Terminator's broadcast feature was sending duplicate input to all non-focused terminals yesterday, and it was pissing me off.

After some digging and research, it turns out the ibus daemon was the cause. If you're having this happen, track ibus down and kill it.

Don't you just love it when backend/website team does changes and no one notifies anyone about it :)

Google rejected two updates claiming app is has the ability to play youtube videos in the background, but the app is more of a dashboard just to let admins view their data O_O

After digging around, it turned out those dudes changed a webpage we were viewing in the app, and included a youtube button, now when you play that video it stays running in the background.

Took me four days to find out that, and only after Google sent us what exactly was violating their policies.

FML :)

I’m really shocked at myself but as a last resort I chose Lubuntu for a light live USB environment because all others kept fucking out or lagging etc but holy shit I’m really digging Lubuntu!

Got a sweet conky setup started, Firefox quantum, some tweaks, my basic software stack and I’m almost good as gold!
Lubuntu for the recommendation! 👌🏼😁

My boss has been begging me migrate a nightmarish complex excel report he made to calculate the payout of a tiered rebates program with compounding rewards. Today I finally decided to make take the time and I sat down with him so he could break it down for me...

Me: *looking at the mess of formula's* it would be easier to rewrite the math than decode this - can you just give me the reward rules... where does that value in cellX come from?

Him:*pointing at the spreadsheet* There! All the rules are in there for you :-)... like it's some big favour...

Me:No I mean when you wrote this, what did you base this off? There must be something...

Him: *Very Gravely* No, no, no it's far to complex! It took me ages to get this sheet right and it balances so just trust me and use it ok?

At this point I will mention he's an accountant so yeah I fucking trust him... fast forward past 15 minutes of digging through what may as well be quantum theory and lo and fucking behold all 2 sheets and 100 calculations are mathematically fucking pointless. Aside from formulas like this:
$X10=+(((O10+P10)-((O10+P10)*$X$3))*$R$4)+T10
which is actually equal to (X10/R4)/L10.

Anyway once you compound and sum the "tiered" benefits the rewards payout is ALWAYS = customerSpend*1.81.

This is why programmers name variables.

Personal project: I design and build single-board computers with old processors like Z80, 6502 etc when I'm not being too lazy. A few run CP/M. One that's been more interesting in terms of digging deeper has been an 80C188, for which I've written a BIOS (despite the chip's built-in peripherals and interrupts being at non-standard addresses) mostly in C, which it can use to boot DOS from an image file on an SD card (bit-banged off the UART chip with FatFs). (Yes it's slow, but so is a 5.25" floppy.)

Work: My first project at my current job. Not particularly exciting compared to some stuff on here, but it got me into making useful contributions to the open-source CRM we used at the time. Was building a basic extension to deal with duplicated organisation names. So learned CiviCRM fairly deeply, a bit of Drupal, a bit of PHP. It's a shame we don't use that system any more, the community was cool.

Mentors, take note. This is a best practice over here.

I've spent two days digging through obscure documentation trying to accomplish one of those tasks that is simple in word and complex in deed. Namely, I wanted to concatenate (not delete) near-duplicate values in Pandas before rendering the data into a graph. Two days beating my head against the wall.

One of my mentors (I'm an intern) heard about the issue, wrote in the proper line (a very specifically and archaically formatted command), and pushed it to repo without even asking for thanks. Works like a charm and he saved my rear end. What a guy.

Please, mentors, don't leave your interns hanging on problems where the only solution is shrouded in dubious documentation and magic syntax. Especially when there's a deadline involved. Let them struggle on logic flow and writing good code.

Be like this guy. You'll build the importance of teamwork and your intern will think you're a wizard.

This is stupid but i think is my best idea yet.

So i have an old orange pi, with only 256m memory. Its running a few tasks i need but i wanted to use it for controlling a few things from my phone (lights and powering on my pc) so i thought i would make a server for that. Now mind you, my shirt doesnt say "lightweight backend language", so there was no way the pi couldve handled a struts server. I was digging around and found that php has a shell_exec command. Then it clicked, and i wrote the whole system like
shell_exec("java -jar someprocess.jar"). Now this sounds really stupid but it works and php is really light so it doesnt even slow it down that much.

Thinking about making this into some kinda server/framework/something just for fun.

People don't seem to know how to properly do print-debugging, so here's a simple guide:

1. A log of "aaaaaa" or "got here" isn't as helpful as you think when ALL OF THEM ARE THE FUCKING SAME. You put a descriptive label or copy verbatim the conditional statement. This saves time matching statements, allows one to watch multiple branches at once, and allows others to understand and help faster when dragged in to help.
2. When trying to see where code fucks up, before each line, paste said line into a proper print statement for your language. If there's, say, a function call or some shit, have it output something like "functionCall(varA=<varA contents>,varB=<varB contents);" Most normal lines should be like this too, but it's especially helpful for calls and comparisons.
If need be, add return values after if they're not shown in another print statement later.
This allows for a trail of execution AND the line that fucks up will be the last in the log, making finding it easier when dealing with hangs and such.
3. Putting something unique like "DEBUG: " or something in front of all statements ensures you can just search for them to ensure you're not rolling one out to production. It also separates debug output from normal output at a glance, making digging through logs faster.

Spent 3 hours today digging through 3rd party libraries, trying to get them all to work together nicely.

The solution? A one line fix in my own source.

FACEPALM!!!

Customer complains that the deployed desktop app is slow at site x.
I check it out with users at site x, and indeed, it does have a delay when trying to connect to a share on a server.
Checks with users at site y and z, no issues.
After a bit of digging, the resolve of a DNS record is most likely the culprit.
Send the ticket to the customer network team to investigate.
Get it back after an hour.

"We have pinged the DNS name, and it responds fine, there must be a bug in the application".

Oh and also, I wrote this rant at work, in my head, with a lot more cursewords involed.

BRUV,
WTF,
SO I JUST FOUND OUT THIS:
Hostinger changed its mailservers from mx1.hostinger.com, to IMAP.hostinger.com and SMTP.HOSTINGER.COM

This means that all of the emails that I sent out for the last 2 weeks on my phone(the only place where I send out emails) has been going to fadoodle knows where?

Now that I changed on my phone the incoming and sending servers and I send out a email it appears as spam, but It dosent do that when I send it out of the web platform.

So like bruv, more digging to do...

HOSTINGER U BICH ASS FUCKING CUNTS, DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY EMAILS I NEEDED TO FORWARD BCZ OF THIS???😂

And I though people were Beeing rude or something

That's it. I'm fucking retarded. I'm just so fucking retarded. I'm so fucking supid, it makes me wonder why do I even keep trying. I'm not sure I even have the energy in my fingers to keep typing this stupid rant.

I've been banging my head against this stupid fucking issue for A WEEK. Digging into the documentation, trying different library versions, trying to move stuff around even if it didn't make sense, trying to use different approaches because maybe I was missing something, or maybe I didn't understand some concept.
Surely spawning a child function from a parent can't be that hard, right?

Nothing.

Even tried it on a different OS - who knows, maybe it's Windows doing some if its magic fuckery?

Still nothing.

"Wait, why am I calling this function directly instead of calling its parent?"

One thing I hate about documentation and tutorials is they always seem to use the simplest examples they can think of. They show you how easy it is, but if you want to use it in the real world start digging further.

I recently quit a job which I excelled at technically, but professionally I struggled. The best way to put it is that I was incompatible with my newly appointed manager. My frustration with that manager led to many inappropriate comments that I made in front of him and a couple of other senior leaders. To be clear, I never cursed at them or called them names or raised my voice, but I did make (multiple) comments about their ignorance of projects or lack of experience in this speciality. I’m sure you can tell that didn’t go over well.

Ultimately, my behavior got me put on a PIP by my manager. He explained that I was excellent at the job, but not mature enough to do well. This obviously greatly upset me, and I quit on the spot. I know what a PIP means and I wasn’t about to get fired. I had been at the company for about three years and have dozens of excellent professional references (at this company and others) from as high up as the C-suite to as low as individual contributing peers who I worked closely with. They can all honestly and passionately speak to my technical and soft skills very highly. However, this doesn’t seem to matter in my situation.

Overall, I excel at interviews. Within days after quitting I had over eight different interviews lined up. I made it to final rounds of five and got two offers already (still waiting to hear back from the other three). The offers were both contingent on passing employment and background checks. Well, I gave my references, have no criminal history and never lied on any part of my background or history (though I did not admit to my emotional issues with my previous management team). Needless to say, I was shocked when both offers got rescinded.

One company claimed it was due to a change in the role, and the other told me frankly that the “manager did some digging on my history and unfortunately doesn’t feel like I would be a culture fit.” I looked up the manager on LinkedIn and lo and behold, they are connected with my former manager. This has me worried as back-channel references are super common in my industry, and my industry is not very big overall. My manager appears to be very well connected with many of the companies I am interviewing with or hope to in the future.

I will admit that my behavior previously was very disrespectful and probably deserved the reprimand, but now I feel that I am not able to move past it and learn from this experience as my reputation in the industry seems to be damaged. I’m still fairly early in my career overall and am learning how to handle office politics. It’s been a big struggle for me, but I do get better with each passing year.

Anyway, I’ve decided to wait for the other three final stage companies that I’m in talks with before I officially decide that this manager is my blocker, but assuming he is, what do you recommend I do to get past this? Should I talk to him? As this is all fresh, I’m not sure I can do that now, but maybe in a few months? Either way, I need a job now and can’t afford to go more than two months without a paycheck (and I don’t qualify for unemployment as I quit). What do you recommend I do?

I worked for a streaming company where I was interviewing a candidate for a device position. I tried digging into his passions and hobbies and he told me he was using rasp pi:s to automatically download torrents and stream to Kodi.

He really wasn't reading up on which company he applied for.

Inspired by @NoMad. My philosophy is that technology is a means to and ends. We’re a tool oriented species. As it relates to software and hardware, they should be your means to achieve your ends without you needing to think. Think of riding a bicycle or driving a car. You aren’t particularly conscious of them - you just adjust input based on heuristics and reflex - while your doing the activity.

For a long time Software has been horrendously bad at this. There is almost always some setup involved; you need to front-load a plan to get to your ends. Funny enough we’re in the good days now. In the early days of GUI you did have to switch modes to achieve different things until input peripherals got better.

I’ve been using windows from 95 and to this day, though it’s gotten better it’s not trivial to setup an all in one printer and scan a document - just yesterday I had to walk my mother through it and she’s somewhat proficient. Also when things break it’s usually nightmare to fix, which is why fresh installing it periodically is s meme to this day. MS still goes to great lengths with their UI so that most people can still get most of their daily stuff done without a manual.

I started Linux in University when I was offered an intro course on the shell. I’ve been using it professionally ever since. While it’s good at making you feel powerful, it requires intricate knowledge to achieve most things. Things almost never go smoothly no matter how much practice you have, especially if you need to compile tools from source. It also has very little in the ways of safe guards to prevent you from hurting yourself. Sure you might be able to fix it if you press harder but it’s less stress to just fresh install. There is also nothing, NOTHING more frustrating than following documentation to the T and it just doesn’t work! It is my day job to help companies with exactly this. Can’t really give an honest impression of the GUI ux as the distros have varying schools of thoughts with their desktop environments. Even The popular one Ubuntu did weird things for a while. In my humble opinion, *nix is better at powering the internet than being a home computer your grandma can use.

Now after being in the thick of things, priorities change and you really just want to get things done. In 2015 I made the choice to go Mac. It has been one of my more interesting experiences. Honestly, I wish more distros would adopt its philosophy. Elementary only adopted the dock. It’s just so intuitive. How do you install an application? You tap the installer, a box will pop up then you drag the icon to the application folder (in the same box) boom you are done. No setup wizards. How to uninstall? Drag icon from app folder to trash can. Boom done. How to open your app? Tap launch pad and you see all your apps alphabetically just click the one you want. You can keep your frequent ones on the dock. Settings is just another app in launchpad and everything is well labeled. You can even use your printers scanner without digging through menus. You might have issues with finder if your used to windows though and the approach to maximizing and minimizing windows will also get you for a while.

When my Galaxy 4 died I gave iPhone a chance with the SE. I can tell you that for most use cases, there is no discernible difference between iOS and modern android outside of a few fringe features. What struck me though was the power of an ecosystem. My Mac and iPhone just work well together. If they are on the same network they just sync in the background - you need to opt in. My internet went down, my iMac saw that my iPhone had 4g and gave me the option to connect. One click your up. Similar process with s droid would be multi step. You have airdrop which just allows you to send files to another Apple device near you with a tap without you even caring what mechanism it’s using. After google bricked my onHub router I opted to get Apples airport series. They are mostly interchangeable and your Mac and iOS device have a native way to configure it without you needing to mess with connecting to it yourself and blah. Setup WiFi on one device, all your other Apple devices have it. Lots of other cool stuff happen as you add more Apple devices. My wife now as a MacBook, an IPad s d the IPhone 8. She’s been windows android her life but the transition has been sublime. With family sharing any software purchase works for all of us, and not just apples stuff like iCloud and music, everything.

Hate Apple all you want but they get the core tenet that technology should just work without you thinking. That’s why they are the most valued company in the world

My damn brain all day today: 🎼I am a dwarf and I'm digging a hole. Diggy diggy hole🎶

As I was refactoring a class in a TypeScript project, I changed calls from `this.config` to `this.getConfig()`.

Suddenly, the tests were failing as somehow the live credentials were used from within the test.

Digging deeper I discovered this.

interface Base {
public config;
public getConfig();
}

So far so good. Wondering why config needs to be public, though nothing too shabby, let's look further:

class MyImpl implements Base {
constructor() {
this.config = this.getConfig()
}

getConfig = () => someGlobalVar;
}

┻━┻︵ \(°□°)/ ︵ ┻━┻

Why would you do this? This breaks dependency injection completely.

In the tests, we were of course doing:

testMe = new MyImpl();
testMe.config = testConfig;

So even though you have a getter, you cannot call it safely as the global var would take precedence. It's rather used as a setter within the constructor. WTF.

Sad part is that this pattern is kept throughout the entire codebase. So yeah for consistency!?

(And yes, I found a quick workaround by doing

getConfig = () => this.config || someGlobalVar;

though still, who in their right mind would do something like this?)

Worked on a WordPress Multisite project that required digging around to find ways to hook into areas that weren’t meant to be hooked, create and add custom core files that would withstand updates, ensure certain plugin capabilities were available even if the current site didn’t load them, and a variety of other black magic that I’m too fried to remember off the top of my head.

By the end of the project I more or less felt like a god in WordPress—There’s little I could ever want to get it to do that I didn’t know how to do.

Then again, this is all probably a long way of saying I learned some very bad ways to do things. Mercifully, it’s fully documented with PHPdoc blocks down to the loop level so that even a 3-year-old should be able to figure out the logic...

All this to say, I’m definitely ready for a new project.

Anyone else digging when a client delivers an awesome design for a website - in POWERPOINT?!?!

One time I was building a custom modal for some crappy WordPress template and I was having trouble with the header rendering above my backdrop, after digging into the CSS I realized the headers z-index was literally set to 9001.

As I am working with WordPress for the really first time I am making horrible experiences now.

My client wants a simple submenu on the sidebar if the user is logged in else he want the login form to be there. Easy peezy done with php and just good old plain html. Maybe some JavaScript to make the login process asynchronous.
But fucking bitch - NO. As I found out after searching and digging. I have to create a menu in wp-admin first. Then add a menu-widget to the sidebar. And then install a plug-in to make the links only visible for logged in user. Wtf?

WordPress takes all the joy in doing web development for me. I won't do that anymore. I will force all new clients to use proper tools to make their shit work for them. And as I am the expert in this things I am the one who suggests the right tool.

Fuck this shit.

developer makes a "missed-a-semicolon"-kind of mistake that brings your non-production infrastructure down.

manager goes crazy. rallies the whole team into a meeting to find "whom to hold accountable for this stupid mistake" ( read : whom should I blame? ).

spend 1-hour to investigate the problem. send out another developer to fix the problem.

... continue digging ...
( with every step in the software development lifecycle handbook; the only step missing was to pull the handbook itself out )

finds that the developer followed the development process well ( no hoops jumped ).
the error was missed during the code review because the reviewer didn't actually "review" the code, but reported that they had "reviewed and merged" the code

get asked why we're all spending time trying to fix a problem that occurred in a non-production environment. apparently, now it is about figuring out the root cause so that it doesn't happen in production.

we're ALL now staring at the SAME pull request. now the manager is suddenly more mad because the developer used brackets to indicate the pseudo-path where the change occurred.
"WHY WOULD YOU WASTE 30-SECONDS PUTTING ALL THOSE BRACES? YOU'RE ALREADY ON A BRANCH!"

PS : the reason I didn't quote any of the manager's words until the end was because they were screaming all along, so, I'd have to type in ALL CAPS-case. I'm a CAPS-case-hater by-default ( except for the singular use of "I" ( eye; indicating myself ) )

WTF? I mean, walk your temper off first ( I don't mean literally, right now; for now, consider it a figure of speech. I wish I could ask you to do it literally; but no, I'm not that much of a sadist just yet ). Then come back and decide what you actually want to be pissed about. Then think more; about whether you want to kill everyone else's productivity by rallying the entire team ( OK, I'm exaggerating, it's a small team of 4 people; excluding the manager ) to look at an issue that happened in a non-production environment.
At the end of the week, you're still going to come back and say we're behind schedule because we didn't get any work done.
Well, here's 4 hours of our time consumed away by you.

This manager also has a habit of saying, "getting on X's case". Even if it is a discussion ( and not a debate ). What is that supposed to mean? Did X commit such a grave crime that they need to be condemned to hell?

I miss my old organization where there was a strict no-blame policy. Their strategy was, "OK, we have an issue, let's fix it and move on."
I've gotten involved ( not caused it ) in even bigger issues ( like an almost-data-breach ) and nobody ever pointed a finger at another person.
Even though we all knew who caused the issue. Some even went beyond and defended the person. Like, "Them. No, that's not possible. They won't do such dumb mistakes. They're very thorough with their work."
No one even talked about the person behind their back either ( at least I wasn't involved in any such conversation ). Even later, after the whole issue had settled down. I don't think people brought it up later either ( though it was kind of a hush-hush need-to-know event )

Now I realize the other unsaid-advantage of the no-blame policy. You don't lose 4 hours of your so-called "quarantine productivity". We're already short on productivity. Please don't add anymore. 🙏

So today I was offered a job at the company as a junior frontend developer. Digging a little deeper I found out that they don't have any other frontend devs in house.

So the job offer translated to:
- senior skillset
- senior workload
- junior wage

Best part is that I was freelancing for them in past and was helping to establish some of the workflow a year ago for more money they offered now.

Thanks, no thanks, I guess?

While in the banking world, I had a project where I had to automate an import into a shit system called CRAWiz. The data had to come from multiple archaic loan systems with no API and tons of shit data.

After implementing, the shit data came to light. Instead of fixing shit data (and using their loan systems correctly), they decided to go back to digging through physical files and manually importing. They blamed CRAWiz and decided to go with a new system to import their shit data into. I warned them repeatedly that a new system would not fix the shit data but they couldn't accept it. I left at that point. 😂

I'm digging bootstrap 4 and font awesome 5. Except, I'm the only one :(

I don't understand how my managers suddenly forgot that my "down weeks" we're due to technical debt I inherited. The whole on boarding hasn't been in my favor. I've stayed at work everyday til long after work hours, digging through code, trying to get JIRA tickets done, encountering issues specific to our code base that no one would ever discover on their own without docs/help from the original dev. The whole time, I was told that they know what's going on and apologize. I constantly expressed that plenty of what we were doing was building on antipatterns. They acknowledged. When a ticket wasn't done, they always knew the very specific reason and I wasn't faulted. 6 months in, I receive a great annual review. 7 months in? I receive an email titled "Performance Discussion," detailing 4 of those incidents where a ticket was pushed back -- with inaccurate depictions of what actually went down. They actually wrote that I didn't communicate. One part of the report expressed that there were "bugs found in production due to inadequate test coverage." WTF!! Everything made it past code review and QA. What are you talking about?? In fact, the person who wrote that merged my code in each time!!!! Insane!! Anyway, Q2 is partly about cleaning up technical debt, which is a responsibility I have been vested (fantastic). I've deleted about 800 lines of code in the last 2 weeks and added plenty of doc strings. Two of the most important modules our application works from are about 1000 lines of JavaScript each without any comments/docs. I'm changing that, but I don't know if my managers truly know the significance. Someone was recently promoted to my position but manually wrote out a sorting algorithm (specified numeric indexes and all); didn't do shit to earn it but breathe. And while they get more and more praise and responsibility, I'm over here stuck trying to prove myself and live up to why I assume they hired me. It's ridiculous. I love the company, but I'm not getting any sleep and I'm stressed out. It's only been about 7 months and I've been doing everything I can. Why is this happening? What am I doing wrong? I've been developing a recurring (physical) headache and ticks. My heart/chest area sometimes feels like it's lifting weights. I sound like an idiot, pushing so hard for a company that isn't mine, but I take so much pride in being in this position, and I'm so set on proving myself this early in my career (I'm 25).

So fuck this. Fucking fuckers fuck this.

We've been having massive performance issues with a nested drag and drop component. I built this abomination about a year ago and had to rush through it due to my colleague not thinking the change was necessary, even though the previous revision was even worse. It's been going strong for a while, but since a month ago it has started to perform badly. Makes sense, because it was hacked together, and wasn't made for the amount of data that it's handling now.

So the other day I presented the issue to my colleague, telling him exactly what the problem was, and that we'll have to rewrite quite a bunch of the code to get it working. Today when I bring it up again he is really negative towards the changes because they are so big, and don't really want me to do them. He is, however, super stressed about the performance issues and starts digging around in the code himself. Code that he's never touched, don't understand how it works, and has said he's not interested in learning about. He even says he sucks at frontend and Vue himself. So we sit there from morning to lunch, digging through the code together (I had to do it as well because he came nowhere). And what do you think the conclusion was? The same thing I told him a few days ago.

So what now then? He still don't want me to do the changes, but still wants it solved! How the fuck is that supposed to happen?!?

Worst part is that we're the only two developers in the company, and our boss has little IT experience. That puts me and my colleague at the same hierarchical level, so all decisions has to be cool with the both of us.

So fuck this. Fucking fuckers fuck this.

That feeling when you have found an impossible to find bug after digging in and you attempt a fix as soon as you find it and the first 1 fixes everything

Who thought Lua was a good idea for extending gameplay functionality??

It's weakly typed, has no OOP functionality and no namespace rules. It has no interesting data structures and tables are a goddamn mystery. Somebody made the simplest language they could and now everybody who touches it is given the broadest possible tools to shoot themselves in the foot.

Lua's ease of embedding into C++ code is a fool's paradise. Warcraft 3's JASS scripting language had way more structure and produced much better games, whilst being much simpler to work with than Lua.

All the academics describing metatables as 'powerful extensionality' and a fill-in for OOP are digging the hole deeper. Using tables to implement classes doesn't work easily outside school. Hiding a self:reference to a function inside of syntactic sugar is just insanity.

Nobody expects to write a triple-A game in lua, but they are happy to fob it off to kids learning to program. WoW made the right choice limiting it to UI extensions.

Fighting the language so you can try and understand a poorly documented game engine and implement gameplay features as the dev's intend for 'modders', is just beyond the pale. It's very difficult to figure out what the standard for extending functionality is, when everybody is making it up as they go along and you don't have a strongly-typed and structured language to make it obvious what the devs intended.

If you want to give your players a coding sandbox, make the scripting language yourself like JASS. It will be way better fit for purpose, way easier to limit for security and to guarantee reasonable performance. Your players get a sane environment to work in and you just might get the next DOTA.

Repeatedly shooting yourself in the foot on invisible syntax errors and an incredibly broad language is wasted suffering for kids that could be learning the programming concepts that cross all languages way quicker and with way more satisfying results.

Lua is hot garbage for it's most popular application, I really don't get it. Just stop!

"When designing an interface, imagine that your program is all that stands between the user and hot, sweaty, tangled-bedsheets-fingertips-digging-into-the-back sex." - Randall Munroe

So.. I'm giving one of my employers webapps a visual refresher, new company branding and whatnot.

And then I stumbled onto a check that is not returning what anybody expects, and, well , I'm busy fixing things, yeah..? so I go digging.. 🤔

```
function isDefined(obj) {
return !(typeof obj === "undefined") || obj !== null;
}
```

Here's the fun part, these particular lines have been in the code base since before 2017, which is when my Git history starts, because that's when we migrated projects from Visual SourceSafe 6 over to Git. Yes, you read that right. They were still using VSS in 2017.

I've begged and pleaded with my last 3 bosses to let us thrown this piece of shit out our second story window and rewrite it properly. But no, we don't have time to rewrite, so we must fix what we have instead.

I lost 4 hours of my life earlier today, tracking down another error that has been silently swallowed by a handler with its "console.log" call commented out, only to find that it's always been like that, and it's an "expected error". 🤦

Please, just fucking kill me now... I just, I can't deal with this shit anymore.

Working on random room code in Godot. I am placing 1m * 1m scenes (meshes). Right now its just a square block. I need to work on occlusion of rooms. Then connecting rooms. I am going to try a 3d, but made of 3d tiles inside areas. Still trying to decide on what to use for outside terrain. I did find a terrain library that allows for digging holes in the terrain. This is where I will have players build a base and dig underground.

I am thinking a really casual game that you can crank the difficulty if you want. A relaxed rpgish game with some rts flavor to it. If someone wants to just chill they can turn off the rts side. Allow for multiple bases for resource gathering. Maybe do some automation of resource gathering using slaves...err...minions. Gonna stay single player for this iteration. I don't really want to spend time working on net code for this.

For now I just gen random rooms:

I'm digging around in Microsoft's CI/CD for VSCode and hilarity ensued

I'm really digging this double arrow syntax right now

Why does youtube keep suggesting videos I already saw?

Seriously, this must be what going insane feels like. Questioning whether I already saw a certain video every time something feels familiar and having Déja Vus all over the place. Youtube keeps digging out videos I watched a few years ago.

I once accidentally deleted the live versions of my websites instead of the development versions (which I wanted to delete because I was going to start over from the live versions.) After several hours of digging through backup folders, I finally found the latest backup files, which were a few months old.

It took me a few hours to get the backed up versions to the same version they were when they were live. In all this, I have learned to keep the live and development versions of my sites in completely different locations.

So this will be my first rant/story sorry if it gets too long.

So finished work and I was like finally some days off, went to bed, woke up the next morning, went to near city to take care of some work, went back and I noticed they were digging the ground near my place, as I've found out from neighbors they were changing some pipes, well ok no problem arrived home, sat on my PC to study a bit and do a bit gaming, but guess what?? NO INTERNET well ok contacted the ISP, the idiots told me it will take them 2 days to arrive WTF? is this 2018 or 1918?? I was so pissed off but ok the next day they called me that they arrived, they checked and said that they will need to fix some wires they will return the same day.. so I've waited few hours but no internet, the asholes didn't came, so the next day they arrived and guess what?! the idiots that digged the holes cut the wires, instead of fucking contacting the ISP to ask for supervisor to tell them where they can dig they didn't know what was the fire for and they thought oh well lets cut the fucking wire, and instead of stopping and contacting the ISP about their mistake they continued with the digging and cut the wire at 3 places, so the ISP at the end called the police, the plumbers that did the digging where just laughing, why do you laugh you primitive ashole, even 10 year old would first ask if it can continue if it finds something that he didn't know about it (I call primitive the person not the job title), and the best part is that the idiots not only they cut the wire at 3 places they also took part of it out of the ground and then they filled the holes back! Now I won't have internet for 2 fucking weeks, yes in 2018 this is happening, at that moment I was so pissed, but kept my cool and contacted the ISP to give me LTE USB stick to use it for the next 2 weeks, sadly they couldn't do that wtf??? So I asked politely who will pay the damage for me not working for 2 weeks and they said that they will gladly pay the damage.. So I was confused because that literally meant that they will compassed me for the 2 weeks, so I re-asked are they sure about that and they said yes, so lets see what it will be done, in the meantime I solved the internet problem by using my phone to access internet on the PC.. But still its amazing how primitive people can be and how ISP don't have alternative solutions for such cases, just to point out this sam ISP bragged how they will be among the first to bring 5G when it arrives... LOL

can there just ONCE be a FUCKING react native library that works as it is FUCKING documented?

but NOOOO, gotta always sift through the absolute shit pile that is GitHub issues threads digging out arcane horseshit to make the stupid shit work just like the little managers want

on and on into the circus enternity

When Everybody Is Digging for Gold, It’s Good To Be in the Pick and Shovel Business

- ai is just another squeeze of money to cloud from our pockets, no matter what you do as long as you’re not selling/renting hardware or have high profit customers your product will die

I don’t believe in any ai product right now that can’t be self hosted and opensource and many of them are not.

I use mac, like 64GB m1 mac book pro so I can host load of things like llama, wizzard-lm, mistral, any yolo, whisper, gpt, fucking midjourney or other stable diffusion for me is no drama.

I’d say there is no consumer product for ai right now. OpenAI is scam given what we got from mistral.

We are very early in this new but old technology and my worries are that we are not there yet. We will need to wait for another iteration that is approximately 10 years to achieve what we have in mind because current hardware is 10 years behind software.

We don’t have an affordable computing power to go for our dreams.

Sad but true.

Guys I am facing a dilemma and i want to hear your opinions.

The background story:
I am completely self taught, currently i am learning something totally unrelated to programming at the uni. Maybe one day when i've finished that shit I will apply somwhere for a job as a developer. Until that the self education continues.

I've recently finished a big sideproject. I've rewritten my father's old shitty joomla company website from scratch with complete cms and integrated stockkeeping and billing features. After some minor fixes it is working perfectly and honestly I am kind of proud of myself. Now that I have some free time available i need something to work on again.

TL;DR - Here comes the question:
Should I broaden my knowledge in webdev even more (there is much room for improvement and i am starting to get the grasp of it) or start digging into game developement (which is my dream for ages although i didn't have the courage to dive into it until now)?

I have project ideas for both but simply can't decide. :/

I am appreciate your time for reading && telling your opinion on this.

I figured out why FS2020 crashed all the time.

One day when I was just casually playing FS2020, I bluescreened with a watchdog violation. For some reason this corrupted a DLL which was part of my graphics driver which is not required for the output to come out of course. The DLL is “atidxx64.dll”.

Somehow, this went unnoticed.

After digging into the extremely well-hidden crash log I found out that it accuses this DLL file, dug up on it and I saw that it is made by AMD.

Reinstalled the drivers and now it works fine.

FUCK MY LIFE I REDOWNLOADED THIS 95GB SIMULATOR 4 TIMES BEFORE DIVING INTO THIS

Been working on a new project for the last couple of weeks. New client with a big name, probably lots of money for the company I work for, plus a nice bonus for myself.

But our technical referent....... Goddammit. PhD in computer science, and he probably. approved our project outline. 3 days in development, the basic features of the applications are there for him to see (yay. Agile.), and guess what? We need to change the user roles hierarchy we had agreed on. Oh, and that shouldn't be treated as extra development, it's obviously a bug! Also, these features he never talked about and never have been in the project? That's also a bug! That thing I couldn't start working on before yesterday because I was still waiting the specs from him? It should've been ready a week ago, it's a bug that it's not there! Also, he notes how he could've developes it within 40 minutes and offered to sens us the code to implement directly in our application, or he may even do so himself.... Ah, I forgot to say, he has no idea on what language we are developing the app. He said he didn't care many times so far.

But the best part? Yesterday he signales an outstanding bug: some data has been changed without anyone interacting. It was a bug! And it was costing them moneeeeey (on a dev server)! Ok, let's dig in, it may really be a bug this time, I did update the code and... Wait, what? Someone actually did update a new file? ...Oh my Anubis. HE did replace the file a few minutes before and tried to make it look like a bug! ..May as well double check. So, 15 minutes later I answer to his e-mail, saying that 4 files have been compromised by a user account with admin privileges (not mentioning I knee it was him)... And 3 minutes later he answered me. It was a message full of anger, saying (oh Lord) it was a bug! If a user can upload a new file, it's the application's fault for not blocking him (except, users ARE supposed to upload files, and admins have been requestes to be able to circumvent any kind of restriction)! Then he added how lucky I was, becausw "the issue resolved itself and the data was back, and we shouldn't waste any more yime.on thos". Let's check the logs again.... It'a true! HE UPLOADED THE ORIGINAL FILES BACK! He... He has no idea that logs do exist? A fucking PhD in computer science? He still believes no one knows it was him....... But... Why did he do that? It couldn't have been a mistake. Was he trying to troll me? Or... Or is he really that dense?

I was laughing my ass of there. But there's more! He actually phones my boss (who knew what had happened) to insult me! And to threaten not dwell on that issue anymore because "it's making them lose money". We were both speechless....

There's no way he's a PhD. Yet it's a legit piece of paper the one he has. Funny thing is, he actually manages to launch a couple of sort-of-nationally-popular webservices, and takes every opportunity to remember us how he built them from scratch and so he know what he's saying... But digging through google, you can easily find how he actually outsurced the development to Chinese companies while he "watched over their work" until he bought the code

Wait... Big ego, a decent amount of money... I'm starting to guess how he got his PhD. I also get why he's a "freelance consultant" and none of the place he worked for ever hired him again (couldn't even cover his own tracks)....

But I can't get his definition of "bug".
If it doesn't work as intended, it's a bug (ok)
If something he never communicated is not implemented, it's a bug (what.)
If development has been slowed because he failed to provide specs, it's a bug (uh?)
If he changes his own mind and wants to change a process, it's a bug it doesn't already work that way (ffs.)
If he doesn't understand or like something, it's a bug (i hopw he dies by sonic diarrhoea)

I'm just glad my boss isn't falling for him... If anything, we have enough info to accuse him of sabotage and delaying my work....

Ah, right. He also didn't get how to publish our application we needes access to the server he wantes us to deploy it on. Also, he doesn't understand why we have acces to the app's database and admin users created on the webapp don't. These are bugs (seriously his own words). Outstanding ones.

Just..... Ffs.

Also, sorry for the typos.

So on top of my Windows update frustrations, I just found out that Microsoft has been scamming me out of money for two years!
I bought an android tablet in 2016 which came with a free 1 year subscription to Office365. They demanded credit card info, so I made sure to pre-cancel it to avoid getting charged when the year was up.
Today I find a line on my bank statement that just says 'MICROSOFT', and I think to myself: 'What the hell is that?!?'
It takes some digging for the email adress I used and trying to navigate various MS sites until I realize that those bastards have auto-renewed the subscription twice now!
I missed it last year, but luckily since I caught the latest one within 30 days I can get a full refund.
Will contact their support tomorrow to get the rest of it back. Too tired right now to deal with their support jungle of circular links and virtual assistants...

You ever dig a hole?

You ever realize that you are digging yourself into a hole?

You ever look at the hole and decide to keep digging because you think digging more will help?

CK's nike deal

Eminem's diss shit and MGK killing it with Rap Devil

Rain

Witcher 3

Beer

Pizza

Wife free from work this weekend

Made a rather large project with Pharo and Seaside to see if I dig it(i did, but it ain't replacing my other tools anytime soon, shit requires reading far too much code and digging around dark corners of the net for it)

Finished 2 projects for work and got ahead of 2 others for this week.

Shit b, this is one interesting weekend indeed.
Yaaaaaay

Welp, good times to start a new run in Skyrim, then.

For the non-dragonborns: Argonians are Reptiloids.

He would probably end-up digging for silver in the Cidhna mine for all his criminal acts in Skyrim. Or eaten by a dragon.

Eight years of legacy consolidated in one frontend repo. Felt like an archaeologist digging up React 15, then Backbone, then jQuery and other ancient relics.

So after the team have been digging through to work out why the app is spitting out errors it turns out that turning off developer mode clears the issue up.

This thing has been spitting out errors since its release in 2012 but the engine was handling it internally 🤣

After trying 4 different versions of installation, applying patch, digging through obscure sites, down the rabbit hole, finally

ERROR at 97%

(; _ ;)
Back-up plan : Forget everything... buy land somewhere in the in the mountain and be a farmer.

My soul cringes a bit every time some smart ass decides to put "Smart" before the product name.
As though nothing means smart as much as digging your own hole.

More broadly, the whole whole world is buying into this "smart" mantra. As if anything and everything that existed before was not smart. Basically "I'm the best" attitude. Don't forget that you can see far only because you're standing on the shoulders of giants.

Case in point:
1. Smart phone which is smart enough to start causing trouble after a couple of years.
2. Smart watch
3. Smart car
4. Smart planes
5. Smart home
.
.
Fucking non sense

So I was digging our chat logs in 2017

That time we were coming up of alliterative code name (Ubuntu-like)...

... it didn't end well...

Applied in a company for a development work, as I have been a developer for some time now and want to switch jobs. The new company was larger and I had no experience of how processes work at larger companies.

I got a call and after the usual chit-chat I got asked if I would be interested in a support role. Since this was new to me I was afraid to flat-out say 'no', so I told them that I had applied to a developer role through their website. They said that theirs is a service-based company and interaction to clients is something everyone has to do. I started digging, as to why the current position is different from the one indicated on the website.
After some more conversation, the call ended.

Later I came to know from an acquaintance that there are both support and development roles at that company and since support positions are few people's "first choice" they first try all the candidates that call; those that fit into the support roles are assigned there.

Needless to say, the compensation and general nature of the support jobs is much inferior to proper development positions.

I dodged a bullet.

Some background to get us started...
Just took over the position as IT Specialist for our local county commission back in December after the previous employee left.

Before leaving she deleted all of her emails for the past 9 years.

Included in her emails were the details for certain program licensing the county had purchased not the least of which was 200 Office 2010 professional keys.

Getting into the office this morning my boss says "Hey got a problem for you, we've exceeded the license count for Microsoft office, and the vendor we purchased from is no longer in business."

My first response was Ok, lets go with open, or libre office. Problem solved. (I'm piece by piece upgrading our infrastructure to a more dependable OS you know, Linux.) I knew the open office suggestion wasn't going to fly so I promptly got on the phone with our friends @ Microsoft.

They were as helpful as you can expect when provided with only our MAK # and sent me back to try digging around for details 9 years old with our purchasing department. Who happens to be too damn busy to concern themselves with what the IT department needs this morning.

That will be remembered the next time the internet "Quits" working as they so often like to claim when then cant get an item to add to a cart in amazon.

Sure people just because your chosen shit browser (Edge) doesnt like to play well with js all the time the internet must be broken...

After 5 frustrating days, I have my laptop running again. Just in time for a data structures and algorithms exam.
TL;DR: driver issues aren't fun.

It all started on Friday, after the creators update. I was doing notes on lectures, and Windows crashed. I thought not much of it, it was just a "random" crash. I'd gotten a similar crash before, but I didn't think anything of it. This time was different, again it was my touchpad drivers that caused the issue, but this time a restart didn't work. I couldn't boot into Windows. I had to roll back to the last recovery point, effectively undoing the update.
This was fine, and fixed the issue, until Windows automatically updated my touchpad again, after me previously changing the driver. Another restart later and I couldn't boot. Time to roll back to recovery, right? Wrong. My drive had somehow, corrupt most of the Windows files.
And so, starts the journey of dismantling my laptop, changing the hard drive and putting it back together, a process that took 3 days due to not having the correct tools originally, and a late delivery.
(I could have rolled back to my backup system image, but that was before the creators update, and would have essentially postponed the issues I was having)
Finally, I managed to get Windows loaded from boot media (thankfully, they seem to tie your Windows licence to your account now) and am currently in the process of regaining all my lost files (which I have to pull from a system image, so it's a lot of digging through compressed files).
On a positive note, things are running well, and the faster hard drive (7200rpm vs 5400rpm) is a nice upgrade. And the touchpad drivers (the same one that kept crashing) haven't caused any problems since.
Now at least, I can get back to programming :D

!rant

TIL I can help support devRant for less than the cost of a coffee per month. (And you can too, if you're not already) I'm digging the edit time extension and the ++ tag in threads.

Cheers, dfox and trogus!

So I spent all day today trying to debug a C++ Program and after hours of digging into the code , I realized i had copy-pasted a for loop and had forgotten to change the loop variable from i to j. 😑

Fuck C!
It sucks so badly!
Our College Teachers are Teaching this to us in the first year.

I know many of you will disagree with this.
But I like Python as I am digging into ML/AI and for this domain Python is powerful. I am trying to practice in C language but still, it sucks badly as sometimes I can't even figure out what is the error even after debugging or looking on StackOverflow. Anyways this is a good programming language because of Low TLE and versatility.

Anyways this was my thought. No offense.

This is Devrant so I Typed my frustration.

@trogus Digging this, kudos to you 👍

I found a budget salary for dev with 4-5 YOE in 2011 in my company, digging through internal old docs.
Assuming 2% increase per year, the 2023 budget salary is now EUR 15k more than what average dev get in my company.

I remember that someone mentioned similar thing in other socmed where he found through internal docs, salary for his position 10 years ago and now are the same, totally neglecting inflation.
On the other hand house/property values has doubled within 10 years.

How can we pressure companies to give us appropriate salary?
When I ask for increase, they will just say no because it's the market rate, but the market rate sucks.

This was at my first job, a site that sold magazine subscriptions during the dot com boom.

Times got rough during the bust. First sign, free snacks disappeared. Everyone started worrying, and checking fuckedcompany.com to see if we were on it. One day everyone's machines shut down, and someone walks around saying company meeting in the cafeteria. My Russian coworker asks if I have a screwdriver so he can liberate his hard drive. Go to the meeting. Most of the company is being laid off immediately. You have to hang around having interviews with your boss to see if you still have a job. I don't.

2 weeks later they call and ask if I'd like to come back. Turns out trying to run with 1 programmer wasn't working out for them. I go back.

First problem we try to tackle - the shopping cart is slow. We put in a hack SQL file to delete carts older than 1 week. Gets better. Then gets slower again. Rinse and repeat 2 times. Finally digging through the source in the perl folder (not what the main site was in) we find what scheduled job was supposed to do this. Dig in. What do we find out? sa_scheduled_tasks user account was deactivated, because only user accounts belonging to people who still had a job were left active.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuck.

!rant
Digging though my old emails found this joke sent to me long time ago. Think that originally was posted in a 1997 issue of Computerworld. Maybe you already suffered the effect of the "Opcodes" listed here. Hope that !tl;dr

ARG Agree to Run Garbage
BDM Branch and Destroy Memory
CMN Convert to Mayan Numerals
DDS Damage Disk and Stop
EMR Emit Microwave Radiation
ETO Emulate Toaster Oven
FSE Fake Serious Error
GSI Garble Subsequent Instructions
GQS Go Quarter Speed
HEM Hide Evidence of Malfunction
IDD Inhale Dust and Die
IKI Ignore Keyboard Input
IMU Irradiate and Mutate User
JPF Jam Paper Feed
JUM Jeer at Users Mistake
KFP Kindle Fire in Printer
LNM Launch Nuclear Missiles
MAW Make Aggravating Whine
NNI Neglect Next Instruction
OBU Overheat and Burn if Unattended
PNG Pass Noxious Gas
QWF Quit Working Forever
QVC Question Valid Command
RWD Read Wrong Device
SCE Simulate Correct Execution
SDJ Send Data to Japan
TTC Tangle Tape and Crash
UBC Use Bad Chip
VDP Violate Design Parameters
VMB Verify and Make Bad
WAF Warn After Fact
XID eXchange Instruction with Data
YII Yield to Irresistible Impulse
ZAM Zero All Memory

Was digging through an old HDD's OEM Windows recovery partitions and found FON-format fonts that are accurate to several old systems. Several Commodore and Amiga ones (some for 80-char mode too!) and lots of DOS ones. They have names and everything, but I can't use them after installing them... (there were a few blank ones in there too, which is odd...)

Hated that Android 8.0 (Oreo) and above for killing backend Services very effectively without giving a proper documentation on how to handle it or how to properly maintain and restart the Service without the user to turn on the app. Digging solutions for months and still till today I am totally clueless...

I maintain two websites for my employer. The head of my department and my manager decided it’s best for me to focus my time on website A and website B should be replatformed to an out of the box solution. For website B, we’d work with our IT team to find something suitable.

I did some research and came up with a list of possible solutions. IT looked into solutions that would work with the org’s best practices for tech. A few sales pitches and demos were arranged with the top choices.

Stakeholder for website B is really digging in her heels. SH keeps badgering our Product Manager and IT about why can’t we just build in-house. The out of box solutions don’t do everything she wants.

PM tells SH that no solution will be perfect. PM also reminds SH that comparable institutions just use Google sheets/forms and do everything by hand. So choose an out of the box platform or use Google forms.

Plus, the list of improvements the SH wanted for website B would take at least a year if I did them on my own and there’s no budget to out source the labor. That’s not counting bring the code up to best practices or improving database efficiency.

I’m glad I don’t have to work with Stakeholder anymore. SH and her department were just a pain. They want a lot of custom tech solutions but they freak out at the smallest talk about tech issues.

Architect: Oh hey Zaphod65, let me know when you're in. Some strangeness in [system], ta

Me: Already here actually [Archtect], what's up?

Architect: oh hi well let me do a little more digging. it may be in frontend

Me: ...

Why? Why do I *care* if you haven't even made sure it's my fault yet?!

Just got out of a dev hellhole
Being stuck in one is just minecraft where the diamonds move and you don't wanna stop digging cause they look close but they keep getting away

So I recently finished a rewrite of a website that processes donations for nonprofits. Once it was complete, I would migrate all the data from the old system to the new system. This involved iterating through every transaction in the database and making a cURL request to the new system's API. A rough calculation yielded 16 hours of migration time.

The first hour or two of the migration (where it was creating users) was fine, no issues. But once it got to the transaction part, the API server would start using more and more RAM. Eventually (30 minutes), it would start doing OOMs and the such. For a while, I just assumed the issue was a lack of RAM so I upgraded the server to 16 GB of RAM.

Running the script again, it would approach the 7 GiB mark and be maxing out all 8 CPUs. At this point, I assumed there was a memory leak somewhere and the garbage collector was doing it's best to free up anything it could find. I scanned my code time and time again, but there was no place I was storing any strong references to anything!

At this point, I just sort of gave up. Every 30 minutes, I would restart the server to fix the RAM and CPU issue. And all was fine. But then there was this one time where I tried to kill it, but I go the error: "fork failed: resource temporarily unavailable". Up until this point, I believed this was simply a lack of memory...but none of my SWAP was in use! And I had 4 GiB of cached stuff!

Now this made me really confused. So I did one search on the Internet and apparently this can be caused by many things: a lack of file descriptors or even too many threads. So I did some digging, and apparently my app was using over 31 thousands threads!!!!! WTF!

I did some more digging, and as it turns out, I never called close() on my network objects. Thus leaving ~30 new "worker" threads per iteration of the migration script. Thanks Java, if only finalize() was utilized properly.

Amount of text you need to read to do something the framework way.
At the end it turns out you can’t do it cause nobody thought about it and it’s just another piece of crap for doing simple things. You start digging inside framework code and see that something is wrong. You see copyright Google and you wonder if they have phd for selling their ass on street. Why the fuck you override the validation flag to true every time ?
Then you start invoking couple of methods and one of them works and stops that madness but you don’t know why but you proceed further so you can glue shits together to stop the ship sinking.
At the end after you’ve tried all the “simple” examples that works cause they’re stupid and you need something special you start to think if this framework is so unique and special cause it covers 90% of things, left you with hands full of crap ?
At the end after wasting whole day to change the border color of the input using couple of separate controls the framework way and when you succeeded you ask yourself really ?
One fucking event emit and couple of listeners with style change ? Damn you frameworks with your bidirectional easy fast doing shit.
Another day in paradise.

CTO needed me to add the some more functionality to a specific script and then test it out on the main site. 2 days later, I have it working from the command line, but it won't respond to the site. After some digging, I find out the script he pointed me to isn't even in use and the script that actually needs to be modified is like 1500 lines long and set up entirely different than the one I had already finished. Back to the drawing board.

Everytime you resolve a KISS issue.... You say to yourself ," I'll definitely learn from this "

2 seconds later: digging another rabbit hole for a KISS problem

A lot of this might be an assumption based on not enough research on both NestJS and TypeScript, so if something here is not well put or incorrect then please feel free to provide the necessary info to correct me since I care far more about getting dat booty than I do being right on the internet :D

Sooo, a year or so ago I got a hold on the Nest JS framework. A TypeScript based stack used to build microservices for node. Sounded good enough in terms of structure, it is based on the same format that Angular uses, so if you use Angular then the module system that the application has will make sense.

I attempted (last night) to play with the framework (which I normally don't since I am not that much of a big fan of frameworks and prefer a library based approach) and found a couple of things that weird me out about their selling points, mainly, how it deals with inversion of control.

My issue: This is dependency injection for people that don't really understand the concept of dependency injection. SOLID principles seem to be thrown out of the window completely due to how coupled with one another items are. Literally, you cannot change one dependency coming from one portion to the other(i.e a service into a controller) without changing all references to it, so if you were using a service specification for a particular database, and change the database, you would have to manually edit that very same service, or define another one....AND change the hardwire of the code from the providers section all the way into the controllers that use it....this was a short example, but you get the gist. This is more of a service locator type of deal than well....actual dependency injection. Oh, and the documentation uses classes rather than interfaces WHICH is where I started noticing that the whole intention of dependency injection was weird. Then I came to realize that TypeScript interfaces are meeheed out during transpilation.

Digging into the documentation I found about custom providers that could somehowemaybekinda work through. But in the end it requires far too much and items that well, they just don't feel as natural as if I was writing this in C# or Java, or PHP (actually where I use it the most)

I still think it is a framework worth learning, but I believe that this might be a bias of mine of deriving from the norm to which I was and have been used to doing the most.

WARNING - a lot of text.
I am open for questions and discussions :)

I am not an education program specialist and I can't decide what's best for everyone. It is hard process of managing the prigram which is going through a lot of instances.
Computer Science.
Speaking about schools: regular schools does not prepare computer scientists. I have a lot of thoughts abouth whether we need or do NOT need such amount of knowledge in some subjects, but that's completely different story. Back to cs.
The main problem is that IT sphere evolves exceedingly fast (compared to others) and education system adaptation is honestly too slow.
SC studies in schools needs to be reformed almost every year to accept updates and corrections, but education system in most countries does not support that, thats the main problem. In basic course, which is for everyone I'd suggest to tell about brief computer usage, like office, OS basics, etc. But not only MS stuff... Linux is no more that nerdy stuff from 90', it's evolved and ready to use OS for everyone. So basic OS tour, like wtf is MAC, Linux (you can show Ubuntu/Mint, etc - the easy stuff) would be great... Also, show students cloud technologies. Like, you have an option to do *that* in your browser! And, yeah, classy stuff like what's USB and what's MB/GB and other basic stuff.. not digging into it for 6 months, but just brief overview wuth some useful info... Everyone had seen a PC by the time they are studying cs anyway.. and somewhere at the end we can introduce programming, what you can do with it and maybe hello world in whatever language, but no more.. 'cause it's still class for everyone, no need to explain stars there.
For last years, where shit's getting serious, like where you can choose: study cs or not - there we can teach programming. In my country it's 2 years. It's possible to cover OOP principles of +/- modern language (Java or C++ is not bad too, maybe even GO, whatever, that's not me who will decide it. Point that it's not from 70') + VCS + sime real world app like simplified, but still functional bookstore managing app.
That's about schools.

Speaking about universities - logic isbthe same. It needs to be modern and accept corrections and updates every year. And now it depends on what you're studying there. Are you going to have software engineering diploma or business system analyst...
Generally speaking, for developers - we need more real world scenarios and I guess, some technologies and frameworks. Ofc, theory too, but not that stuff from 1980. Come-on, nowadays nobody specifies 1 functional requirement in several pages and, generally, nobody is writing that specification for 2 years. Product becomes obsolete and it's haven't even started yet.
Everything changes, whether it is how we write specification documents, or literally anything else in IT.

Once more, morale: update CS program yearly, goddammit

How to do it - it's the whole another topic.

Thank you for reading.

Hello other devRanters! I have a question for all of the lady developers out there. Guys chime in too if you feel like it.

My girlfriend is a practicing doctor - and she loves what she's doing. But the other day, she casually mentioned something that really surprised me. "I kind of wish I learned to write code".
I'm kind of a horrible mentor, and I tend to figure things out on my own after hours and hours of digging around / experimenting.

I guess my question is, how did you guys get started as dev's, and what language? Was it a curiosity thing? Did you have a mentor? Self taught? I don't want to start off somewhere that risks discouraging her from pursuing it.
I'd like to provide her somewhere to start, just to see if it peaks her interest.

Any thoughts would be appreciated :)

My best project was a digital forensics project back in uni, digging through raw data the police forensic guy / professor gave us. Rarely Ive been so enveloped by anything as digging through raw data finding the clues as to what the guy had been up to and how he hid it.

"When designing an interface, imagine that your program is all that stands between the user and hot, sweaty, tangled-bedsheets-fingertips-digging-into-the-back sex." - Randall Munroe

Let me run something by all of you. Let's say you once started freelancing as a "Plan B" in case your full-time gig dropped you. Over 12 years you've managed to build a long-standing personal brand around that occasional freelancing. You have several clients who adore you and the work you do and they tell you they would be lost without your talent and have nowhere else to go and nobody else they trust. You know, because in the past you tried to send them elsewhere (for various reasons) and they just kept coming back.

You get laid off from the full-time gig and ACME Company calls and interviews you as a top candidate they're really interested in for that same type of work for a full-time job they're offering.

Here's the catch...if hired, you have two months to basically erase your personal brand and agree never to do any freelancing work as before, even on your own time on evenings and weekends. ACME wants your full focus and attention. Additionally, you find out that the person you'd be replacing is being let go because they weren't sufficiently tech-skilled for the job. And, with a little digging, you find out that person _also_ had several freelancing gigs going on the side. Probably for the same "Plan B" reason. Which is probably why ACME is demanding exclusivity.

Your client base is small. ACME says "we don't care". The work you do is 90% automated and easily achievable in just minutes a day on a weekend or evening. ACME says "doesn't matter". You already had full-time work to begin with so you weren't doing a ton on the side. ACME couldn't be less interested in this "excuse". And you're not keen on the idea of burning down your brand, especially with no guarantees of any kind in the present IT industry hiring/firing/layoffs climate. ACME says this issue is make or break for them.

If you get to the offer stage do you:
a) Flip the bird to your brand and clients you've built up for over a decade and memory-hole it?
b) Negotiate a non-compete clause with ACME, agreeing not to take on any new clients while working full time for them?
c) Flip the bird to ACME and look for something else?

Asking for a friend. ;)

digging the JS hole

Whelp, I made the switch to android about a week ago. Didn't go two days without getting malware on it. I only browse hacker news and used devRant, standard messaging app, no root, so no shady things, just fairly standard things besides devRant. When I called Samsung support, they said it was a known issue and sent me some links to some forums where people were having the same issues. After digging through those threads, there was an official answer from Samsung saying they weren't going to fix the issue (at least in any foreseeable future). That's unacceptable for a phone that was released less than a year ago.

I'm done with Samsung phones for good. I might come back to Android on a google phone.

I hate how Android is distributed and the manufacturers don't take ownership of their issues. They just work on the new phone without caring for anything older than 6 months. If I had to get a new phone every time a major security issue was found and the company refused to fix it, I'd spend more money than on an iPhone.

It seems like Google keeps their devices up to date better, presumably because they have better control of OS releases. But non-google Android devices are dead to me.

Back to my iPhone for now...

🎵sad Charlie Brown music🎵

Anyone here currently employed as a perl developer? I wanted to know how your experience with the language and the environment has been? I have been going on and off in the perl world for a while know. Currently some interesting perl jobs have been comming up. I have always liked the language but I know that there is a major difference between liking a language for basic scripts and using it in a work environment.

Currently, I have experimented with a few web projects using Perl and I am really digging what I see, the code can be as hacky as you want it to be or as elegant and readable as you make it, such freedom and flexibility is great.

Digging its own grave

After nearly 4 weeks, my account has finally been generated to access the VDIs for our development environment. I tried to authenticate with my smartcard and kept getting errors with very bland messages. after hours of digging through (useless) windows logs, someone told me that the certificate authority that signed my card isn't in the trust store for the VDI backend. Based on the current pace of things, I'm guessing it's going to be a while before this gets sorted out. My internship ends in 2 weeks and I haven't been able to do anything yet :/

I need to add new feature into the program which I wrote years ago so I start digging up the source code. The project is written in a language which I no longer code in.

That code is really poorly written with most of them don't have tests. I also find out that previous self is really a genius since he can keep track of huge project with almost no documentation.

To make matter worst, there are unused components (class,feature) in the source code. "Current me" have a policy of "just adding only a feature you need and remove unused feature" but it seem the "previous me" don't agree with the "current me".

The previous me also have the habit of using writing insane logic. I can remember what particular class and methods is doing but I can't figure out the details.

For example one method only have 5 line of code but it is very hard to figure out what those do.

The saving grace is that he know the important for method signature and using immutable data structure everywhere.

I was under the influence of caffeine and have a constant sleep deprivation at the time (only sleeping about 4 hour every day) so I can't blame him too hard.

I can't blame him too hard, right?

Could someone invent a time machine already? Invent time machine not to save the world but to save the developers from himself.

One time, i would put a random stacktrace / error log containing fake server credentials/ card info etc on a page/ action letting those "hackers" waste their time digging into it.. only to found out that the server is just a repo of (i would like to say porn butthats still a win situation) useless things

Oh mighty how I hate Windows 10
1. It will run that "antimalware" malware killing your CPU
2. Fucking shit will auto restart for updates so if you run some 24h process you are doomed, and there is nothing you can do to stop it, unless maybe deep shit digging in MS god only knows registry values
3. Will be your fucking daddy showing you blue box, "oh we detected you may be a pussy, so we prevented this exe from running, please click 50 times to allow it because we care about you by creating virus prone OS in 1990 and we continue to do so"

NO Microshit horsefuckeers stop developing this garbage OS, let it die and force the world to use Linux, yes harder at first for every day Joe, but once learned it's state of the art OS, even your Azure cloud runs of Linux so for fuk sake stop develping WinDOS!
Or let the user to configure "fuck off mode" I don't want your virus scanner I don't want your protection, just fuck off and let people to whatever the duck the want!

Are airwaves cast by WiFi and cell towers dangerous. Please link a credible source for it. During lunch my father brought up the fact that a actress sued the Indian government asking them to announce of 5g is dangerous or not. I said that it is not dangerous since we get higher amounts of radiation at us every day so 5g should not be anything dangerous for us. I should have said that it is non ionising radiation though. He also brought up that fact that there have been numerous instances of misleading advertising saying that what we use at our home is bad like saying ghee causes cholesterol which is bad and then a few years later saying that ghee is actually good. He just believes that companies could be doing false advertising saying that 5g is good when it actually is not. Can't blame him since he has seen multiple instances of false advertising.

Digging up on Google landed me on a nytimes article which basically said radiation 5g airwaves not effect us since our skin reflects that off and the small amount that does not get reflected heats up our skin to a negligible amount

Fuckadoodling finally!
After 3 days of digging through the documentation of CraftCMS and Yii Framework I got the hang out of how these Controllers, Actions and other RESTful api stuff works on Craft3.

As some of you may have noticed, I am a big fan of CraftCMS (v2) since it was introduced to me. A few days ago we discussed a new project and the option go for Craft3, as it has been released for some time now.

The changes from v2 to v3 are huge... I didn't expect to almost reach my limit to give up on it!
But since the RESTful routes finally work, with proper data serializing and all, I will now go drink a Whiskey or ten and wish you all an awesome, client-disturbance-free, decadent, beerful weekend!

Cheers mateys!
🎉🎊🍭🥃🥃🥃🍻🍺🥂

"A designer, like an archaeologist or geologist; researches, uncovers and adds context to precious, overlooked treasures by digging deep beneath the surface." - Scott Theisen

Spent quite some time debugging an odd problem.

A null check failed to trigger correctly, and when checking in eclipse I saw the null value.

Much digging later I finally noticed that the value wasn't null, it was "null", but eclipse doesn't quote strings...

The problem was that somebody at one time decided to convert an Integer to String by prepending an empty string...

Integer val=getInt()
return "" + val;

I. Fucking. Hate. Tests.

I am writing a module according to a standard and this standard has a test suite. Awesome...this should make development go pretty smoothly especially since their human-readable "specification" is severely lacking.

I get the module passing most of the tests...however there are few I just can't get my module to pass, no matter what...well fuck.

I go digging deeper into the test cases, compare it to source code. What's this? The tests are fucking wrong. There are several other implementations that use this test suite, how the fuck have they not caught this?

Also come to find out, it is not possible to pass *all* the tests in the suite because some are for older versions that have different functionality.

Got to love a test suite that is incorrect and can't be passed 100%

Maybe they need tests to make sure the tests are working correctly.

Long post, TLDR: Given a large team building large enterprise apps with many parts (mini-projects/processes), how do you reduce the bus-factor and the # of Brent's (Phoenix Project)?

# The detailed version #

We have a lot of people making changes, building in new processes to support new flows or changes in the requirements and data.

But we also have to support these except when it gets into Production there is little information to quickly understand:
- how it works
- what it does/supposed to do
- what the inputs and dependencies are

So often times, if there's an issue, I have to reverse engineer whatever logic I can find out of a huge mess.

I guess the saying goes: the only people that know how it works is whoever wrote it and God.

I'm a senior dev but i spend a lot of time digging thru source code and PROD issues to figure out why ... is broken and how to maybe fix it.

I think in Agile there's supposed to be artifacts during development but never seen em.

Personally whenever i work on a new project, I write down notes and create design diagrams so i can confirm things and have easy to use references while working.

I don't think anyone else does that. And afterwards, I don't have anywhere to put it/share it. There is no central repo for this stuff other than our Wiki but for the most part, is like a dumping ground. You have to dig for information and hoping there's something useful.

And when people leave, information is lost forever and well... we hire a lot of monkeys... so again I feel a lot of times i m trying to recover information from a corrupted hard drive...

The only way real information is transferred is thru word of mouth, special knowledge transfer sessions.

Ideally I would like anything that goes into PROD to have design docs as well as usage instructions in order for anyone to be able to quickly pick it up as needed but I'm not sure if that's realistic.

Even unit tests don't seem to help much as they just test specific functions but don't give much detail about how a whole process is supposed to work.

Like 4 years ago I worked in a company as IT that used a windows desktop app with SQL Server 2008 (yep that old) to manage their sales, this app was written in WPF, the app was good because it was customizable with reports

One day the boss wanted to keep extra some data in the customer invoice, so they contacted the app developers to add this data to the invoice, so they they did it, but it in their own way, because the didn't modify the app itself(even if it was an useful idea for the app and companies that use it) they just used other unused fields in the invoice to keep this data and one of the field that the boss was interested was currency rate, later I verified in the DB this rate was saved as string in the database

The boss was not interested in reports because he just wanted to test it first and let time to know what the boss will need in the reports, so at the of the year they will contact again the devs to talk about the reports

So is the end of that year and the boss contacted the devs to talk about the reports of the invoices using the currency rate, this rate was just printed in the invoice nothing more, that's what the boss wanted that's what's the devs did, but when asked to do the reports they said they could'nt because the data was saved as string in the DB o_O

Well, that was one the most stupid excuses I ever heard...

So I started to digging on it and I found why... and the reason is that they were just lazy, at the end I did it but it took some work and the main the problem was that the rate was saved like this 1,01 here we use comma for decimal separator but in SQL you must use the dot (.) as decimal separator like this 1.01, also there was a problem with exact numbers, for example if the rate was exactly 1, that data must be saved just 1 in the field, but it was saved as 1,00 so not just replace all the commas with dots, it's also delete all ,00 and with all that I did the reports for my boss and everyone was happy

Some programmers just want to do easy things...

Some times I feel like um surrounded by Monsters

{When digging through Cod3}

Digging through some ancient code... Why is it called common sense when it's not common at all?

From mobile dev to mobile dev. I'm really digging the smooth transitions in the double filter in the app @devRant.

Smooooooth

Just installed lineage +FK on my 6p and I'm digging it so far

I was just playing with Eventbridge for research for a potential project, and I wanted to test setting up a Cloudwatch Logs target. I go to set up my target, click save, and am presented with "Resource limit exceeded".

After some digging in my browser's network inspector, and some googling, I discover that the account has reached its quota of Cloudwatch Logs resource policies, which can't even be viewed in the console, only the API and CLI.

Is network debugging and StackOverflow really the intended method of troubleshooting this issue? What the hell was I supposed to do with "Resource limit exceeded" and no further info?

All of my programming knowledge (more like 95% of it) have been gathered by myself. I've started learning during secondary school - the basics everyone has to go through. But it was so awesome that I wanted more. So I've started digging through vast space of internets and books only to find that I know very little. I've had help in the university and high school (the other 5%), but it wasn't enough.

The best thing is - the feeling has never worn off. And I still want more, because it feels like learning magic - the only difference is magic doesn't exist 😃

Once and a while a smarty pants developer I like will mention something and I'll assume they use it often and have vetted it. In this case, I'm pretty sure the person only used WordPress Pods once on some very specific thing - because after digging into it and using it on a project, I can't imagine this being a good idea... This is definitely its own path... It sure is a lot of extra work to get some basic relationships going. I'm sure it's great for some people, but for me - it's a lot of fighting what is supposed to be helpful.

So, my simulations started to take about a week to complete.
Productively invested the time in getting into Python!

I'm really liking its syntax and relative simplicity (coming from c++) and I'm kinda digging it at a sort of proof-of-concept producer: instead of talking in pseudocode I can just put down a python script to show what I mean.

Maybe noob question here, but what's the added value of using graph db like neo4js compared to regular RDBMS like PostgreSQL ? I see our beloved devrant uses neo4js so I am wondering if it's worth spending some time digging into this, just that (ok, actually it would be too cool to also have dfox and trogus appear in comments notifications)

Working on a web API project in C#, our frontend is another company, the body gets to them but they claim that the json is incorrectly formatted... I'm sure that it isn't but whatever...
I keep digging around to see what can be done, a "helpful" colleague offers to help, only to start asking about everything from scratch and after frustrating and distracting me like... 10 fold, I leave him to play as he wants, then hard reset and move on...
fire postman and focus on the logs... nothing! database... nothing!
couple of minutes later, I look at that far small laptop screen to find out that he has drenched my code with break points and the IDE is blinking its tabs off over there on the screen I rarely look at!

Tell me again why do we work in open spaces?!!

Just spent 1 week following the upgrade tutorial from one framework to the next. Using their upgrade tool and following the documentation.
Finally finish the work, most things are working it just doesn't seem to work quite right. Must have missed something.
After some digging it turns out they completely removed a function that I rely heavily upon. No mention in the upgrade document, no possible work around. Every forum post about it either has no replies or it says "it's a new feature".
Well fuck you.
The whole project is now useless.
Fml 😭