I used to work with a guy who had 2 PH.Ds, in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering and over 600 patents but I kid you not the guy could not use the coffee machine. Now it's not like this coffee machine was as easy as a Keurig, it was some $20,000 espresso machine that took a while to figure out but I tried teaching him how to use it a few dozen times and still he couldn't get it right. It got to the point where I thought he was faking it so that others would make it for him so I offered him $500 if he could figure it out. Still nope. So for the remaining 2 years we worked together I made him coffee whenever he wanted, 2-4 times a day, and he bought me lunch everyday. Before I left the company I bought him a Keurig so that when I left he'd still have coffee.

Fixing a parents iPhone, episode 1.

Problem: "Whatsapp is gone off my phone"

Debugging:

Me: *unlocks phone and sees whatsapp*, it's right here.

Mam: no, I no that I can't see my messages.

Me: ok, that is definitely not what "whatsapp is gone off my phone means".

*opens whatsapp*
*inside add contact screen*

App seems ok, your trying to add a contact?

Mam: that's a problem, whenever I open it I only see that page.

Me: *taps cancel button with shocked face*

Mam: omg there's my messages, how did you do that?

Me: ... ... ... I tapped the very easy to see, large cancel button in the top right hand corner.

Mam: but why was it opened there?

Me: *looks at opened message from unknown number*

If I was to hazard a guess, now stay with me on this one as it's a bit complex. I think ... I THINK ... you clicked the "add to contacts" button on the screen in front of you.

I am suspicious of one thing though.

Mam: what's that?

Me: how you managed to click the add contacts button, and when brought to the add contacts screen, you assume the app is broken.

Mam: oh will you **** off you sarcastic little ****. Thank you very much.

Me: no prob, 4 year computer science course put to great use.

So, since I hear from a lot of people (on here and irl) that Linux has a 'very high learning curve', let me share my experiences with the first time my dad touched Linux (Elementary OS) without me interfering at all! (keep in mind that he is very a-technical)

*le me boots the system* (I already did setup a user account for him and gave him the password).

Dad: *enters password and presses enter*
Me: "Hmm that went faster than expected."
Dad: "Uhm I know how to login son, it's not that hard and pretty obvious".
Me: "Alright, why don't you try to open up the default word documents editor on here! I'll be right back!"
Me: *Goes away and returns after a minute*.
Dad: *already a few test sentences typed in LibreOffice writer* it's going pretty well :)!
Me: "Oo how did you find that?!"
Dad: "Well, there's a thingy that says 'applications' so I clicked in and found it in the "Office" section, do you think I am blind or something?!"
Me: 😐. uhm no but I just didn't think you'd find it that quickly. Now try to install Chromium browser! *thinking: he'll fail this one for sure* I'll be right back :).
Me: *returns again after a minute or so*
Dad: *already searching for stuff through Chromium*
Me: "wait, how the hell did you do that so quickly, it's not the easiest thingy for most people".
Dad: "Jesus, it's not that hard! I went to the application browsing thingy, typed 'software' and then a sorta software store icon showed up so I clicked it and it opened a windows with a search bar saying something like 'search for applications/software'. clicked in it, typed 'chromium', saw it coming up, there was a very clear 'install' button, it asked for my password, I put it in and after a little it gave a notification that it was installed. Then I went to that application browsing thingy again and typed Chromium. Then I hit enter because it selected an icon called chromium...."
Me: O.o. Okay this is going very good, now open an email client and login to your email address!
Dad: *goes to application browsing thingy, types 'email', evolution icon shows up, dad clicks it, email address setup steps show up and dad follows them quickly. After about a minute, everything is setup.

I expected this to be a hard process for someone who dealt with Windows his entire life but damn, I underestimated it.
Asked him if he found it easy/what he liked about it:
"Well, it's very clear where I can find everything, default browser/email/word document editor programs are easy to find and that's about all I need so yeah, great system!"

I am proud of you, dad!

I fucking love people like this.

Yesterday I met a 'friend' who I hadn't seen in a very long time. Just a guy I used to know tbh but let's call him Friend anyway. After a while in the conversation this happened...

*Friend doesn't know I have a degree in CS*

Friend: "WHAT?? YOU LIKE PROGRAMMING? NO WAY! ME TOO!"

Me: "THAT'S AWESOME! You've been programming for long?"

Friend: "A little over a year now. I know almost all languages now. C++, C#, Python, Java and HTML. Still a couple left to go. Once you're on the level I achieved programming becomes really, really easy. How long have you been programming?"

Me: "Almost a decade now"

Friend: "Damn dude you must know all languages by now I suppose?"

Me: "I've been mainly doing C++ so not really haha"

Friend: "I can always help when you're struggling with one language. C++ is pretty easy tbh. You should learn others too btw. HTML for example is pretty important because you can program websites with it"

Me: "Yeah... Thanks... So... What project are you working on right now?"

Friend: "I'm making a register page for my very own forum. The only problem I have is that PHP won't save the login details"

Me: "Hahaha I know the feeling. MySQL?"

Friend: "What?"

Me: "What do you use to save your data"

Friend: "Just a txt file. It's easier that way."

Me: "Hahaha true. Who needs safety right? *smiles*"

Friend: "Actually it's 100% safe because only I can see the txt file so other people can not hack other users."

Me: "Yes! That's great! Cya!"

Friend: "I'm working on a mmorpg too btw! I can learn you to make games if you want. Just call me. Here's my number"

Me: "Alright... Thanks... Bye!"

*Arrives at home*

*Deletes number*

I do not make this up.

I can understand that someone who isn't in the CS industry doesn't take it too seriously and gets hyped when their "Hello World" program works.
I'm fine with that.

The thing that really triggers me is big headed ass holes like this. Like how much more like a absolute dickhead could you possibly more act? Fucking hate people like that.

Making libraries work together. Gluing things together is easy, right?

There is this salesman right across from me that always brags about how rich his parents are and how lucky us tech guys are for having such an easy job. He told me one day that he was going to quit and make his own software company currently having no developing experience at all because "I've seen some of these developers. If those guys can do it, it'll be a breeze." I convinced him that the best language to learn in order to make your own websites/apps is Linux command line. Hilariously enough, the other 2 devs heard me say that and when Glenn the sales douche followed up with them one of them told him "Yeah, If you think you're really going to be quick with it then Linux will be your best bet, but if you have trouble just learn C++ instead and you'll still be able to make websites." Best of luck on your new Venture, you spoiled jizz stain.

Prospective client: “I have a website through which I sell music, both physical copies and downloads, but am having all kinds of issues with it”.

Me: “Like what? Tell me more.”

Client: “Go to www... I’ll go through them with you”.

So I go, and client proceeds to rattle off a list of totally random shit for the next 26 and a half minutes without even stopping for breath, telling me what he’d prefer, talking through how easy other “similar” websites are and comparing his own website to them, as well as all the things that flat out just don’t work. He ended with the line “I just paid my developer who told me it was all good, but now he’s telling me he’s too busy to work on it”.

Meanwhile I’ve had a gander at “view source” and can see it’s been “built” with Wordpress, and with a fuck ton of plugins and shit to boot... you can only imagine the sense of euphoria I’m feeling at this point.

Me: “Did you have a contract with your developer?”

Client: “Nah”.

Me: “Do you have a budget in mind, either for just making right or for ongoing development?”

Client: “Yes, but minimal”.

Me: “So what do you want from me?”

Client: “I want to know how much it’s going to cost to fix!!!!” (apparently irritated by my question).

Me: “Oooook... Is there any way I can have access to your website to investigate, or clone it so I can recreate what’s going on?”

Client: “Yes” (gives me details of how to log in to his hosting, and WP admin).

Turns out, he had over 50 active plugins for literally EVERY. SINGLE. FUCKING. PIECE of functionality on his website. Furthermore, it was pretty clear that some plugin functionality overlapped, because... well, if you don’t know how to do something, install a plugin or seven to get it done, right?

Me: “So can I ask, what exactly is your budget? Just to give me ballpark as to how best move forward?”

Client: After going into how he’s already spent a lot of money on it already, “If we could we agree on below £200?”

Me: “...what, a month?”

Client: “No! In total. To make it right. Once it’s done it’s done, surely?!?!”

*a long silence*

Client: “So... what do you think?”

Me: “Burn it. Burn it all down”.

My first day in a Linux admin and security course. I went all confident and cocky waiting for some bullshit like "type in your term: ls, cd, pwd, see you tomorrow"
Suddenly the teacher starts to configure lampp, then jumps to bind, and thirty minutes leater , when everyone has their ssl keys under control, I was still struggling to correctly forward my mate. The rest of the day was smooth and easy for those who finished their servers, and there I was, unable to find my own ass in the middle of that mess made of bad assigned permissions and wrong placed addresses. Even worse, he came to me when I asked for help, took my chair and fixed everything in one beautiful single bash line. I started to ask "what's this? Where is that? Is it a config file or a directory?" And with all his patience he keep telling me the obvious answers that where right there at the screen but I couldn't see. Took me two weeks to catch his pace, and another two weeks to understand fully his classes. He never said a word about my terrible first day (first couple weeks). When course finished, I saw he was going to teach a really hard security module, and I signed up without hesitate.

My boss isn't really a developer. He isn't part of the development team and doesn't know any technical details about the product. He doesn't want to code, "too much effort", he just wants to boss. But he wrote some php in the early 2000's and is really, really proud of his codecademy html/css badge...

And that makes him dangerous.

Today I hear him talk from behind his laptop: "Right, we have this page for creating management groups, but we can't edit them yet. I can fix that!"

This task is literally on the current sprint, but he doesn't know that because he doesn't attend scrum meetings and ignores everything people say to him.

Me: This smells like probable cause, let's look with suspicion over his shoulder.

Boss:
"OK, right-click create.blade.php -> copy.
then right-click directory -> paste.
now just rename file to edit.blade.php!"

I start walking to the office kitchen.

Boss mumbling in the background:
"Now all I need to do is just copy the whole method in the controller, change the post url in the form, and modify the <h4> at the top, so it says edit instead of create."

Boss, looking at me now:
"This is so easy... creating and editing is almost the same thing, you can just copy paste all the code from one template to the other! I don't understand what you developers are always complaining about!"

Me: *Hands him a roll of paper towels*

Boss: "What is that for?"

Me: *points at code*

Client : your design is not cool. See this ^
*showed me some pretty neat designs pattern*

Me: which type do you want for your application.?

Client : All are pretty cool. Isn't it?

Me : Yes. But you do not need all of them. Right?

Client : Yes.

Me : So, which one.

Client : I'm confused But, this will do.

Me : Sure?

Client : Yes, very much.

After 3 days.

Client : you know what, earlier one was simple one but, best one. Easy to understand. This is (new design) making it complex. I need previous one.

Me : (I knew you'll say that, a**hole.) Just go to setting and select theme section to earlier version.

Client : thank you man.

Me : (You are red listed in my book you a**hole. Say anything else to add/edit and then see.) You are welcome.

Back when I was in college I had this CS professor who was by far the worst I can remember. The class was some bullshit 100 level required intro to CS course, and the guy tried to make it as difficult as possible. Beyond that, he was just a bad professor and did stupid things.

One of the most memorable things he did was give homework assignments, and then in order to collect them (it was a lecture class of about 150 people), he would have everyone pass their printed assignments to the right, and these sheets of paper traveled all the way across the lecture hall in every row of seats. It was a complete mess.

As you can probably guess, he frequently misplaced homework assignments, and many were probably lost through this ridiculous method of turning them in. Some people almost failed this ridiculously easy class because he lost their homework assignments. I think he lost like one of mine so it didn't matter much, but some other people in the class almost failed because of this. I think in the end he had to make a lot of exceptions because of this obvious trend.

Beyond that, he was an older guy who had worked for IBM, and he made that known at least once per class, usually more. "IBM this, IBM that!" So fucking annoying.

I'm glad to be long done with college.

This happened a month or so ago. I wanted a tablet for more easy/portable server management (JuiceSSH) so I went to a second hand tech store (a good/reliable one) and this guy asked me right away what I was looking for.

"a tablet!"

I pointed at a specific one and he grabbed it and walked me to the cash desk to take a look at it.

"what do you want to use it for?"
"server management mostly"

Then this other guy behind the desk looked at me with this view in his eyes like:

"fucking try-hard"

The employee helping me also looked strangeish at me

😅

At one of my former jobs, I had a four-day-week. I remember once being called on my free Friday by an agitated colleague of mine arguing that I crashed the entire application on the staging environment and I shall fix it that very day.

I refused. It was my free day after all and I had made plans. Yet I told him: OK, I take a look at it in Sunday and see what all the fuzz is all about. Because I honestly could fathom what big issue I could have caused.

On that Sunday, I realized that the feature I implemented worked as expected. And it took me two minutes to realize the problem: It was a minor thing, as it so often is: If the user was not logged in, instead of a user object, null got passed somewhere and boom -- 500 error screen. Some older feature broke due to some of my changes and I never noticed it as while I was developing I was always in a logged in state and I never bothered to test that feature as I assumed it working. Only my boss was not logged in when testing on the stage environment, and so he ran into it.

So what really pushed my buttons was:

It was not a bug. It was a regression.

Why is that distinction important?

My boss tried to guilt me into admitting that I did not deliver quality software. Yet he was the one explicitly forbidding me to write tests for that software. Well, this is what you get then! You pay in the long run by strange bugs, hotfixes, and annoyed developers. I salute you! :/

Yet I did not fix the bug right away. I could have. It would have just taken me just another two minutes again. Yet for once, instead of doing it quickly, I did it right: I, albeit unfamiliar with writing tests, searched for a way to write a test for that case. It came not easy for me as I was not accustomed to writing tests, and the solution I came up with a functional test not that ideal, as it required certain content to be in the database. But in the end, it worked good enough: I had a failing test. And then I made it pass again. That made the whole ordeal worthwhile to me. (Also the realization that that very Sunday, alone in that office, was one of the most productive since a long while really made me reflect my job choice.)

At the following Monday I just entered the office for the stand-up to declare that I fixed the regression and that I won't take responsibility for that crash on the staging environment. If you don't let me write test, don't expect me to test the entire application again and again. I don't want to ensure that the existing software doesn't break. That's what tests are for. Don't try to blame me for not having tests on critical infrastructure. And that's all I did on Monday. I have a policy to not do long hours, and when I do due to an "emergency", I will get my free time back another day. And so I went home that Monday right after the stand-up.

Do I even need to spell it out that I made a requirement for my next job to have a culture that requires testing? I did, and never looked back and I grew a lot as a developer.

I have familiarized myself with both the wonderful world of unit and acceptance testing. And deploying suddenly becomes cheap and easy. Sure, there sometimes are problems. But almost always they are related to infrastructure and not the underlying code base. (And yeah, sometimes you have randomly failing tests, but that's for another rant.)

I'm a week into my new job right now. What do I love the most about it?

Learning things all day long and getting paid for it!

I'm learning about hosting things, DNS, cyber security, configurations, Linux (although my current skill set with Linux has been enough for now) and so on!

Hell, easy day today (not that many tickets) so decided to start learning Ansible! Next to that I've gotta learn vim (it just autocorrected that to cum.... O.o), work with hosting panels, mail stuffs (dns, debugging etc etc) and so fucking on.

The boss hasn't been at location yet which will happen tomorrow but he seemed like a very chill guy.

I love this!

Laravel is the worst framework ever.

Everything has to be made convenient and easy. That sounds amazing, because developers want to save time, worry less about boilerplate code, right? No more constructors, no more dependency injection, fuck all the tedious OOP shit... RIGHT?

It does one thing well: Make PHP syntax uniform and concise through easily integrated libraries such as Collection and Carbon. But those are actually not really part of the framework... just commonly integrated and associated with Laravel.

The framework itself is completely derailed: You can define code in a callback in the routes file. You can define a controller in the routes file. You can define middleware as a parameter to the route, as a fluent method to the route, you can stack them up in a service provider. Validators can be made in controllers, Request objects, service providers, etc. You can send mail inline, through Mailable objects, through Notification objects, etc.

Everything is macroable, injectable, and definable in a million different places. Ultimate freedom!

Guess what happens when you give 50 developers of various seniority a swiss army knife?

One hammers in a screw with a nail file, the other clips the head from the screw using scissors, and you end up with an unworkable mess and blunt tools.

And don't get me started about Eloquent, the Active Record ORM. It's cute for the simple blog/article/author/comment queries, but starts choking when you want more selective and performant queries or more complex aggregates, and provides such an opaque apple-esque interface which lets people think everything is OK, when in reality it's forcing the SQL server to slowly commit suicide.

"Fuck JavaScript, its such a shitty language" seems to be quite a common rant today. It seems as if JS is actually getting more hate than PHP, which is certainly odd, considering the stereotype.

So, as someone who has spent a lot of time in JS and a lot of time elsewhere, here are my views. Please, discuss your opinions with me as well. I am genuinely interested in an intelligent conversation about this topic.

So here's my background: learned HTML/CSS/JS in that order when I was 12 because I liked computers. I was pretty shitty at JS until U was at least 15, but you get the point, Ive had it sploshing about in my brain for a while.

Now, JS certainly has its quirks, no doubt, but theres nothing about the language itself that I would say makes it shitty. Its a very easy leanguage to use, but isn't overdeveloped like VB.net (Or, as I like to call it, TheresAFunctionForThat)

Most of the hate is centered around JS being used for a very broad range of systems. I doubt JS would be in the rant feed so often if it were to stay in its native ecosystem of web browsers. JS can be used in server backend, web frontent, desktop and mobile applications, and even in some system services (Although this isn't very popular as of yet). People seem to be terrified that one very easy to learn language can go so far. And, oh god, its interpreted... How can a system app run off an interpreted language? That's absurd.

My opinion on JSEverything is that it's progress. Thats what we're all about, right? The technologies already in place are unthreatened by JS, it isn't a gamechanger. The only thing JS integration is doing is making tedius and simple tasks easier. Big companies with large systems aren't going to jump ship and migrate to JS. A startup, however, could save a fucking ton of development time by using a JS framework, however. I want to live in a world where startups can become the next Google, because technology will stagnate when youre trying to protect your fortune, (Look at Apple for fucks sake) but innovation is born of small people with big ideas.

I have a feeling the hate for JS is coming from fear of abandoning what you're already doing. You don't have to do that. JS is only another option (And a very good one, which is why it's becoming so popular).

As for my personal opinion from my experiences... I've left this part til the end on purpose. I love programming and learning and creating, so I've never hated a lamguage, really. It all depends on what I want to do. In the times i've played arpund with JS, I've loved it. Very very easy. The idea of having it on both ends of web development makes a lot of sense too, no conversion, just direct communication. I would imagine this really helps with speed, as well. I wouldn't use it in a complicated system, though. Small things, medium size projects: perfect. Running a bank? No.

So what do you think about this JSUniverse?

I realize I've ranted about this before, but...

Fuck APIs.

First the fact that external services can throw back 500 errors or timeouts when their maintainer did a drunk deploy (but you properly handled that using caching, workers, retry handlers, etc, right? RIGHT?)...

Then the fact that they all speak a variety of languages and dialects (Oh fuck why does that endpoint return a JSON object with int keys instead of a simple array... wait the params are separated with pipe characters? And the other endpoint uses SOAP? Fuck I need to write another wrapper class around the client...)

But the worst thing: It makes developers live in this happy imaginary universe where "malicious" is not a word.

"I found this cloud service which checks our code style" — hmm ok, they seem trustworthy. Hope they don't sell our code, but whatever.

"And look at this thing, it automatically makes database backups, just have to connect to it to DigitalOcean" — uhhh wait...

"And I just built this API client which sends these forms to be OCR processed" — Fuck... stop it... there are bank accounts numbers on those forms... Where's that API even located? What company?

* read their privacy policy *

"We can not guarantee the safety of your personal data, use at your own risk [...] we are located in Russia".

I fucking hate these millennial devs who literally fail to get their head out of the cloud.

Somehow they think it's easier to write all these NodeJS handlers and layers around some API, which probably just calls ImageMagick + Tesseract on the other side.

If I wasn't so fucking exhausted, I'd chop of their heads... but they're like hydra, you seal one privacy breach and another is waiting to be merged, these kids just keep spewing their crap into easy packages, they keep deploying shitty heroku apps... ugh.

😖

Today, I was told to investigate why the software doesn't work on "some" computers. I had no previous experience with that particular software but I just had to make some tests... easy, right? As soon as I ran the software, my computer crashed (I literally had to restart the pc). I asked my colleagues if I did something wrong but the set up seemed ok.

Later, in a random discussion about the software I found out it does "a little memory allocation". I opened the performance tab in task manager and ran the software again. In an instant, the RAM went from 1.3GB to 7.66GB (my pc has 8GB of RAM).

In an attempt to find how such a monstrosity was creater, I found out the developer that made the software had 16GB of RAM on his pc.

I have found something that eats RAM more than Chrome... brace yourselves.

It's easy to make jokes about this whole Google assistant thing, but can we just take a second to appreciate what they've done here?

Ethics and morals aside, this tech is incredible, we are truly living in the future. Right here, right now.

!!rant
!!ANGER

Micromanager: "Hey, Root!

Since you're back, and still not feeling well, we have an easy ticket for you: Rewrite the slack integration gem! Oh, you don't have to re-implement all of it, just make sure it all works the same way it does now. That bitch you worked with once over a year ago who kept throwing you under the bus to management and stealing credit for your work? Yeah, she wrote the original code like four years ago. It's perfect, so don't touch it. but she can fill you in on all the details you need and get you up to speed on how to test it.

But yep! It should be simple. and I just knew you would love this ticket, so I saved it just for you. Nice and quick, too, to get you an easy win.

You know, since you have to repair your reputation with product. and management. and the execs. and the rest of the team. and me. Yeah, product doesn't trust you so they don't want to give you any tickets. They just can't trust you to get them out and have them work. So you have a lot of hard work to do."

Spoiler: The bus-thrower wasn't much help. (Surprise.)
Spoiler: The ticket was already in my backlog -- one of a grand total of two tickets.
Spoiler: I don't find the ticket fun. Maybe if I was to write the entire implementation with a nice DSL? but no, "don't touch the perfect code." Fuck you.
Spoiler: It isn't going to be nice or quick. But, she (micromanager) is looking to lose me, so that really is an easy win. for her.

And. just. argh. fuck you. i've been exhausted and dying for well over a year, but you've kept ignoring that (and still are, despite me providing goddamn legal forms from fucking doctors stating it in plain fucking english, which you also fucking ignore), and you just keep piling on the work and demanding the ridiculous of me despite it. Yeah I can pull it off sometimes. No, I really shouldn't, and I'm surprised I can. (also, "Time off? What, and lower your productivity even more? ____ doesn't even take vacations. And how are you doing on that ticket?") And no, none of my tickets have ever had any fucking problems. Not even when there are upstream service outages. Not. a. single. fucking. one. Ever. And the only things I've ever missed were things that bloody product never put in the fucking ticket, so fuck you with your "repair your reputation" bullshit.

god, i fuckiNG HATE THESESTUPOID ANWETLJAF SAJEWTKW BITCHFACEDUCKFUCKERS

Why the FUCK am I still fucking working here?
Right, because I've been burned out and dying so much I can't pass a fucking interview so I can fucking leave.

jasdkl;fk

ugh. Anyway. If you ever find yourself starting work at a Cali fintech company whose internal mascot is a very fine duck? Just run. I absolutely guarantee you will be miserable.

I love how most of my friends that said they "like computers because its easy and you get a high paying job doing nothing" are quitting college in less than a year because "its too hard!"

“Can’t you just open up my iPhone right now and check what’s wrong with it??”

My response: “See, you already know what to do! Since it’s so easy, why don’t you just do it yourself?”

The list would be quite long.

I think Google is still making good tools, but just like Apple the integrations get all so tight and constricting... And with their data, if it goes wrong, it will go wrong hard.

I feel like YouTube is gliding into a state where cheap clickbait floats to the top and finding quality gets more difficult as well, their algorithm is more and more tuned to choose recent popular stuff over good older gems.

Microsoft is all pretend lovey dovey cuddling open source, but I'm still suspicious it's all a hug of death. I was never a big fan, but they're seriously dropping balls when it comes to windows-as-a-service, taking away so much personal control from end users even though they can't be trusted to babysit either.

Amazon is creeping it's way through the internet, charging $10/m to join the vip club infesting houses with spytubes to sell more plastic crap. Bezos' only right to keep wasting oxygen is BlueOrigin, but he'll probably fuck that up as well turning spaceflight into a decadent prime consumer orgy instead of something inspiring.

Facebook... Well, that's self explanatory. Fuck it, everything it pretends to be, and everyone who still has an account with a rusty spike.

Uber and AirBnB, with their fake ass mission of a green shared economy, but they trample over employees, customers and neighbors to build their ivory towers of progressive illusions.

Then there's a million declining brands.

I liked Skype for example when it was first released, Just like how I started out liking (and then hating) Discord, Slack, etc... They're all tools which seem fast and easy, but then they get us further away from solid protocols, get us entrenched into limiting, bloated and sometimes even dangerous tools. As my dad used to say: "Companies are like women, if you go for cheap, fast and easy you'll end up with a burning dick and half your savings gone"

You know what, fuck all tech companies.

OK, devrant is still pretty nice... For now.

I don't want to write clean code anymore :(

I read Clean Code, Clean Coder, and watched many uncle bob's videos, and I was able to apply best practices and design patterns
I created many systems that really stood the test of time...

Management was kind enough to introduce me to uncle bob clean code in the first place, letting us watch it during work hours. after like one year, my code improved 400% minimum because I am new and I needed guidance from veterans...

That said, to management I am very slow, compared to this other guy, they ask me for a feature and my answer would be like "sure, we need to update the system because it just doesn't support that right now, it is easy though it would take 2 days tops"

they ask the same thing for the other guy : "ok let me see what I can do", 1 hour later, on slack, he writes : done. he slaps bunch of if-statement and make special case that will serve the thing they asked for.

oh 'cool' they say -> but it doesn't do this -> it needs to do that -> ok there is a new bug,-> it doesn't work in build mode-> it doesn't work if you are logged in as a guest, now its perfect ! -> it doesn't work on Android -> ok it works on android but now its not perfect anymore.

and they feel like he is fast (and to be fair he is), this feature? done. ok new bugs? solved. Android compatibility ? just one day ... it looks like he is doing doing doing.

it ends up taking double the time I asked for, and that is not to mention the other system affected during this entire process, extra clean up that I have to do, even my systems that stood the test of time are now ruined and cannot be extracted to other projects. because he just slaps whatever bools and if statements he needs inside any system, uses nothing but Singleton pattern on everything. our app will never be ready-for-business, this I can swear. its very buggy. and to fix it, it needs a change in mentality, not in code.
---------------

uncle bob said : write your code the right way, and the management will see that your code generates less errors, with time, you will earn respect even though they will feel you are slow at first.

well sorry uncle, I've been doing it for a year, my image got bad, you are absolutely right, only when there is no one else allowed to drop a giant shit inside your clean code.

note: we don't really have a technical lead.
-------------------
its been only two days since my new "hack n' slash" meta, the management is already kind of "impressed" ... so I'll keep hacking and slashing until I find a better job.

@dfox, feature request: swipe left/right to get to the next/previous rant. Sometimes I feel too lazy to press back button and go to the next rant. Swiping is easy.

(Edit: Not sure if it's been asked before. I'm kinda new here)

No, MD5 hash is not a safe way to store our users' passwords. I don't care if its been written in the past and still works. I've demonstrated how easy it is to reverse engineer and rainbow attack. I've told you your own password for the site! Now please let me fix it before someone else forces you to. We're too busy with other projects right now? Oh, ok then, I'll just be quiet and ignore our poor security. Whilst I'm busy getting on with my other work, could you figure out what we're gonna do with the tatters of our client's business (in which our company owns a stake) in the aftermath of the attack?

There are things that i wish i didn't see.

Yesterday, i went to a coffee shop to relax and reviewing my works. And suddenly a college friend of mine approach me and we started talking about work.

Me: So, What do you do at work? What's your stack?
Him: Not much of a new. Still working with wordpress, html,css and jquery.

So he started talking about how cool wordpress is and how he generates money doing sites.

Me: Can i see your sample works?
Him: Sure, *opens his shitty windows laptop with Web Tech stickers*. and handover his laptop to me.
Me: Woah. the design is so neat (I'm lying). But it's freaking slow man(REALLY FVCKING SLOW).

* I decided to open the devTools and inspected the source code. And I can't believe what i saw.

- 20+ images with 2~4mb file size
- 13 unminified javascript files with variable declarations that looks like minified.
- CDN's of bootstrap, foundation and semantic UI
- LOTS OF FVCKING PLUGINS

* I didn't told him what i saw. I just turn over the laptop to him and finish my coffee.

Him: My sites are cool right? I have a lot of pending projects right now. Easy money Bruh!
Me: Wow. *sips* coffee. and say goodbye to him and walkout.

I FEEL BAD FOR HIS CLIENTS!

Client: We want an application such that our users can view the 3D rendering of the building we are constructing for them
PM: That's quite easy, we'll get it done
Client: Oh, and the output should be a PDF document, such that they can view the 3D rendering on a PDF reader on the go
PM: That's not a problem, it'll be done

--Right back at the office--
PM: Hey guys, this is our new project....(rants on)
Lead Dev: (in a world of indescribable world) You mean you agreed to that? That's impossible
PM: Just get it done

I wish non coding PM's asked their devs before agreeing to some alien like features

!warning could be longer.
I must something let go:
Im now 24 ,my life was not easy .
I got bullied all the time in school from 1 to 10 degree. I had a dream since i was 6:"no i dont wanna be a police man, fire fighter, astronaut....i want to be a programmer "..
My father did me to make an apprenticeship with Volkswagen after i finished my "middle school" (10th class);
2 years of mobbing and be sad i leaved that motherfucking "-aship"
After a while my father again wanted to ,i must to an "-aship" .yeah hes been right, but i dont want to do and work like you do!!!.. then again after "fighting" my dad (parents), i was reliant to social help for a year..
(U must know,my dream was always in my mind)
I met a girl in a different federal state in germany and moved up to her.
I worked as a daywage man to get us money.
1 year was over and then i found out the apprenticeship as web and mobile developer (computer scientist) . I applied for this an got a place.
Now my fucking dream comes true in a few months!
Just wanna say that you never should give up your interests or dreams, doesnt matter how old you are!!!!
My journey begins 2017 and yours?:))))

Ticket: Add <feature> to <thing>. It works in <other things> so just copy it over. Easy.

Thing: tangled, over-complicated mess.
Feature: tangled and broken, and winds much too deep to refactor. Gets an almost-right answer by doing lots of things that shouldn't work but somehow manage to.

I write a quick patch that avoids the decent into madness and duplicates the broken behavior in a simple way for consistency and ease of fixing later. I inform my boss of my findings and push the code.

He gets angry and mildly chews me out for it. During the code review, he calls my patch naive, and says the original feature is obviously not broken or convoluted. During the course of proving me wrong, he has trouble following it, and eventually finds out that it really is broken -- and refuses to admit i was right about any of it. I'm still in trouble for taking too long, doing it naively, and not doing it correctly.

He schedules a meeting with product to see if we should do it correctly. He tells product to say no. Product says no. He then tells me to duplicate the broken behavior. ... which I already did.

At this point I'm in trouble for:
1) Taking too long copying a simple feature over.
2) Showing said feature is not simple, but convoluted and broken.
3) Reimplementing the broken feature in a simpler way.
4) Not making my new implementation correct despite it not working anywhere else, and despite how that would be inconsistent.

Did everything right, still in the wrong.

Also, they decided I'm not allowed to fix the original, that it should stay broken, and that I should make sure it's broken here, too.

You just have to admire the sound reasoning and mutual respect on display. Best in class.

I met a guy on facebook group, where was post asking how to make easy platformer game in a week. And I tried to explain post author how to start. Everything was good untill this guy came in. He commented my comment "Yoo you are wrong, he can learn it in one day". My comment was about starting with unity and programming, and that need time to learn (without copying tutorial, everything made by himself). So I started to gently explaining him why it is unachivable in 1 day. Of course his respond was like "Omg you are so fooking stupid, It's sooo easyyy" this conversarion took good 15 minutes, and I ended it with "Ok, you are right" just to end thid. I hate people like that.

When a Coursera course is way better than the one offered by your university…
A university student's rant...

I study Electrical and Computer Engineering and during the first semester of the second year I selected an optional course: Web Programming. It was believed among students that the course would be really easy, and it was. All the student had to do was build a very simple website using HTML, CSS and a few line of JS. A website containing three or four pages all of which had to be validated using a markup validation service.

Yeah, sure, I passed the course just like everyone else who bothered enough to spend an hour or two working on the project. Oh, I almost forgot! We had an one-hour workshop on Dreamweaver!
So, by that point, everybody was a front-end developer, right?!

That happened over three years ago, and because of that course web-development didn’t impress me…

Thankfully, the last few months I’ve became interested in Web Development, and I’ve been reading some articles, spending time on smashing magazine, making some progress on FreeCodeCamp and taking relevant courses on Coursera!
In fact, a few days ago I completed the Coursera course “HTML, CSS and Javascript for Web Developers”.
Oh boy, the things I didn’t know that I didn’t know…

<sarcasm>Did you know there was a term called “responsive design” and that there are frameworks like bootstrap?</sarcasm>
Well, I d i d n ’ t k n o w ! ! ! (even though I had taken the university’s course).

I understand that bootstrap was introduced in 2011 and I took the university course in late 2012, but by that time, bootstrap was quite popular and also there were other frameworks available before bootstrap that could have been included in the course! (even today, there is no reference in responsive design in the university’s course).
In just five weeks the coursera course managed to teach me more, in a more organized and meaningful way than my university’s course in a whole semester!

When I started the coursera course I shared it with a friend of mine. His response: “yeah, sure, but web development is pretty easy… I didn’t spend much time to complete that project three years ago!”

That course three years ago gave birth to misconceptions in students' minds that web development is easy! Yeah, sure, it can be easy to built a simple, non responsive, non interactive website! But that's not how the world works nowadays , right?!

A few months ago, in the early days of August, I attended Flock, the Fedora community conference. During a break I spent some time speaking with a Red Hat employee about student internships. He told me, and I paraphrase: “We know that students don’t have a solid background and that they haven’t learned in the university what we need them to!”

Currently I’m planning to apply for a front-end developer internship position here in Greece.
Yesterday I wrote my CV, added university courses relevant to that position and listed coursera courses under independent coursework… While writing those I made these thoughts…

What if that course 3 years ago was as good as the coursera course… all the things I’d know by now…

Windows, God damn you piece of fucking shit.

Why the fuck can't you make networking fucking easy like literally every other fucking operating system in the goddamn fucking world?

Why the fuck can't I spoof mac addresses so that I have the same IP address regardless of if I'm on a hard line or wireless?

Who in their fucking right mind thought that the pro version of Windows wouldn't need to do that?

I don't even like using you at this point, I'm forced to use you for work.

There's literally not enough explicitives that I can chain together to sufficiently convey how much I fucking hate you Microsoft. So enjoy this seizure inducing tourette's mode compilation.

Fuck shit cock piss mother fucker asshole bitch mother fucker sick and tired of your fucking shit Microsoft you fucking cuck piece of shit nobody fucking likes you they only have to use you because no fucking business in their right mind is going to spend the millions of dollars it cost to fucking switch over to fucking Mac or Linux I hope you fucking choking a bag of HIV riddled flaming dicks you fucking piece of shit.

My code review nightmare part 2

Team responsible for code 'quality' dictated in their 18+ page coding standard document that all the references in the 'using' block be sorted alphabetically. Easy enough in Visual Studio with the right-click -> 'Remove and Sort Usings', so I thought.

Called into a conference room with other devs and the area manager (because 'Toby' needed an audience) focusing on my lack of code quality and not adhering to the coding standard.

The numerous files in question were unit tests files

using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
<the rest of the usings>

T: "As you can see, none of these files' usings are in alphabetical order"
Me: "Um, I think they are. M comes before S"
T: "The standards clearly dictate system level references are to be sorted first."
Mgr: "Yes, why didn't you sort before checking this code in? T couldn't have made the standards any easier to follow. All you had to do is right-click and sort."
Me: "I did. M comes before S."
T: "No You Didn't! That is not a system reference!"
Me: "I disagree. MSTest references are considered a system level reference, but whatever, I'll move that one line if it upsets you that much."
Mgr: "OK smartass, that's enough disrespect. Just follow the fucking standard."
T: "And learn to sort. It's easy. You should have learned that in college"
<Mgr and T have a laugh>
Me: "Are all your unit tests up to standard? I mean, are the usings sorted correctly?"
T:"Um..well..of course they are!"
Me: "Lets take a look."

I had no idea, a sorted usings seems like a detail no one cares about that much and something people do when bored. I navigate to project I knew T was working on and found nearly all the file's usings weren't sorted. I pick on one..

using NUnit;
using Microsoft.Something.Other;
using System;
<the rest of the usings>

Me: "These aren't sorted..."
T: "Uh..um...hey...this file is sorted. N comes before M!"
Me: "Say that again. A little louder please."
Mgr: "NUnit is a system level nuget package. It's fine. We're not wasting time fixing some bug in how Visual Studio sorts"
Me: "Bug? What?..wait...and having me update 10 or so files isn't a waste of time?"
Mgr: "No! Coding standards are never a waste of time! We're done here. This meeting is to review your code and not T's. Fix your bugs and re-submit the code for review..today!"

made a password sniffer in python it was really easy how many of you took #100DaysOfCode i took the challenge 8 days today every day i am doing one project what do you think of the sniffer? it currently doesn't support SSL response but working on that right now this is good

Oh right! This function has only 1 line, this will be easy to fix.
Wait...
What!?
It's a mile long!

Team leader: hey why this bug is taking too much time? You could fix it hours ago let me try to fix it. I really fuckin hate juniors ...

*Hours later*
Me: could you fix it ?

Team leader: ....

*Couple of years later*

Me: ah i see it's not an easy but could you find any solution bro?

Team leader: no it's not a straight forward bug. You are right am sorry i shouldn't prejudge

Once went for an interview for a senior web developer role. The first interview was a coding test ( not a problem, been coding for years and know I can do it). The company boasted that it supported pair programming.

I was sat at in an open plan office In front of a machine and given a question sheet of 10 code questions/puzzles and asked to solve them. Then out of nowhere 5 other senior devs appeared and stood behind me and proceeded to comment /question every single line I typed (so no pressure then).

I did questions 1-5 (fairly easy tbh) but all the devs behind me critiquing every single line started to drive me crazy so I asked if it was normal for them to interview this way and was told 'yes' and that after a year of trying to find someone they had been unsuccessful.

I told them that I wanted to leave the interview at that point; I don't mind my code being critiqued just prefer it when I've at least finished the line. Forcing you into a pair programming scenario in the interview really didn't feel right.

To this day (2years later) I still see ads for that very same job

Me: Hey, I need to know when the user double clicked this.

B: It's easy, just put a try catch with DoubleClickException

Me: ...

B: ...

Me: and how about right click?

B: RightClickExce...

Me: Ok. I'm out

Business User [1 PM]: So I know every month you’ve been using your dark magic SQL skills to transform my monthly data into better monthly data.

Well I know it’s the middle of the month, and this is totally random... but... I have some other data formatted totally differently, almost totally different data! You can just run this through your magic SQL Proc right?? Easy! Also, I need this by end of day... thank you for your support.

Me [1:01 PM]: K.

Hello! A tiny update on the privacy site thingy. (linuxxx here yas).

I've finished the preview page (description of what will be on the site really) and slowly preparing for deployment.
In the mean time, since @ewpratten is very busy at the moment, I'm giving the frontend part a shot myself! Working on the general layout/presentation right now and I will show a preview as soon as I have anything solid enough to show :).

Also working on the custom CMS which is going well!

I am kind of hestitant to publish the preview page because I am not a frontender and I know that I'll get all criticism on here so please, please go easy on me! Also, just in general, if you find any kind of flaws in the web app or wherever, please report them to me! As for frontend, I won't fix anything because I've got bigger priorities (like creating the actual site itself xD) but general feedback would be appreciated :). And as I said, I'm a backender so don't judge me too hard on the frontend!

Alright now let's gather some courage to actually publish this thing 😅

That's actually something that happened fairly recently.. just that I didn't have the energy left at the time to write it down. That, or I got my ass too drunk to properly write anything.. not sure actually.

So on paper I'm unemployed, but I do spend some time still on pretty much voluntary work for HackingVision, along with a handful of other people.

At the time, we were just doing the usual chit-chat in the admin channel, me still sick in my bed (actually that means that I wasn't drunk but really tired for once.. amazing!) and catching up to what happened, but unable to do any useful work in this sick state. So, tablet, typing on glass, right. I didn't have any keyboard attached at the time.

One of the staff members (a wanketeer from India) apparently had an assignment in a few hours for which he needed to write a server application in Java. Now, performance issues aside, I figured.. well I've got quite a bit of experience with servers, as well as some with client-server protocols. So I got thinking.. mail servers, way too overengineered. Web servers.. well that could work, I've done some basic netcat webservers that just sent an HTTP 200 OK and the file, those worked fine.. although super basic of course. And then there's IRC, which I've actually talked to an InspIRCd server through telnet before (which by the way is pretty much the only thing that telnet is still useful for, something that was never its purpose, lol) and realized that that protocol is actually quite easy to develop around. That's why I like it so much over modern chat protocols like XMPP, MQTT and whatnot. So I recommended that he'd write a little IRC server in Java. Or even just a chatbot like I attempted to at the time, considering that that's - with a stretch of course - a sort-of server too.

His fucking response however, so goddamn fucking infuriating. "If the protocol is so easy, then please write me down how to implement it in Java."

Essentially do his fucking work for him. I don't know Java, but as a fucking HackingVision admin, YOU SHOULD FUCKING KNOW THAT HACKERS CAN'T STAND LAZY CUNTS THAT CAN'T EVEN BE ASSED TO GOOGLE SHIT!!! If I wanted to deal with cunts like that, I'd have opened the page inbox with all its Fb h4xx0ring questions, not the fucking admin chat!

And type it on a goddamn fucking piece of glass, while fucking sick?! Get your ass fucked by a bobs and vegana horny fuck from the untouchable caste, because that's where you fucking belong for expecting THAT from me, you fucking bhenchod.

But at least I didn't get my ass enraged like that to say that to him in the admin chat. Although that probably wouldn't have been a bad thing, to get his feet right back on the ground again.

An old company contacted me, seemed remorseful and said I probably didn't want to work there again but kept pushing. Eventually he said a high salary and I figured ok they had easy projects and the overpaying would beat the underpaying they did while I was there, right?

The new lead dev at the place took a month to give me work, tried to pressure me by saying she was going to tell management they are behind because of me, and then progressively stopped assigning tickets to me and assign-then-reassign them from me according to my schedule/predictions I revealed during the daily stand-ups. Why hire me at all. Then they said they changed their business direction at 3 months and let me go. What a waste of everyone's time.

Internship Rant #2

I can't believe I'm hating my job right now. It sucks because I have never coded in javascript and they expect me to code in javascript. I don't even know what I am doing, but I'm trying my best. I kinda have something already, but the worst part of it is that my boss comes in once in a while and sits beside me looking at my screen and of course, he expects me to tell him what I have been doing and what progress I have done. It's stressful cause I specifically told him that I have never coded in JavaScript and he still thinks I can get things done in a few days.

Perks of new job:
- I can take a bath there whenever I want
- gr8 bathroom 11/10
- gr8 heater, no need to have my hands shaking all the time
- workspace is nice and everyone has an extension so my phone and laptop are always on full charge
- flexible work schedule
- easy access to company files hehehe including credentials

Anyways, so I have to deal with this for three months.

Explaining coding to my tech lead. Easy right !!

By heavens creating your own api server with the Go standard lib is so easy it should be fucking criminal.

Now....on to add authentication and a nice frontend stack(prob React) to make it all spiffy and show it to my manager and see if she lets me put this shit to use at work.

It will make it more interesting. It took me nearly 1 hour to get what I needed from the docs, build it using the net package first(das right babe, pure TCP) and just a couple of minutes more for net/http and boom. Ferching info and shit left and right

Man I love this shit. Wish I could do this for a living. Stuck fucking around with css, Java and php at work instead ;____;

Quote dumbledore: "Soon we all have to choose between what is right and what is easy"

So very true in programming aswell :p

Non CS friend: I want to learn Hacking, and Hack Facebook.

Me: That's pretty easy, We'll start with Hacking Twitter today, then tomorrow Facebook.

F: Ya, thats ok.

Me: 1. Login into your Twitter account,
2. Open the account you want to hack,
3. Right click on the tweet, and click inspect element, and Change the tweet as you want.

F: Wowww... Man that's amazing...

*** He believed that he is a hacker for one whole day ***

Fuck Apple and its review system

So, this started in december. We wanted to publsih an app, after years of development.

Submit to review, and passes on the first try. Well, what do you know. We are on manual release option, so we can release together with the android counterpart. Well yes, but someone notices that the app name is not what was aggreed (App Name instead of AppName). Okay, should be easy, submit the same app, just the name changed. If it passed once, it will pass again, right? HAH

Rejected, because the description, why we use the device’s camera is too general. Well... its the purpose of the app... but whatever, i read the guidelines, okay, its actually documented with exapmles. BUT THEN WHY THE FUCK COULDNT YOU SAY THAT ON THE FIRST UPLOAD?

Whatever, fix it, new version, accepted, ready to release just in time.

It doesindeed roll out,but of course, we notice that the app has a giant issue, but only on specific phones. None of our test phones had this problem, but those who have, essentially cannot use our program. Nasty as it is, the fix is really easy, done in 5 minutes. Upload it asap, literally nothing changed from user point of view, except now it doesnt crash on said devices. Meanwhile 1 star reviews are arriving from these users - of course with all the right. Apple should allow this patch quickly, right? HAH

THE REAL BULLSHIT COMES NOW

With only config files changed, the same binary uploaded we get rejected? What now? Lets read it. “Metadata rejected, no need to upload new binary”.... oh fine only the store page is wrong? Easy. Read the message, what went wrong. “Referencing third party content is nit permitted on the app store” meaning that no android test device should be shown. Fine, your rules. They even send a picutre of the offending element. BUT ITS NOT EVEN ON THE STORE. THATS A SCREENSHOT OF THE APP. HOW IS THAT METADATA? I ask about this, and i get a reply, from either a bot, or a person who cant speak or read english, and only pasted a sample answer, repeating the previous message. WTF. Fine, i guess you are dumb, but since they stop replying to our queries, do the only sensible thing, re-record the offending tutorial video that actually contained an android device. This is about 2 weeks, after the first try to apply a simple patch to a broken app. And still, how did it pass the review 2 times?

Whatever, reupload again, play the waiting game for a week, when the promised average wait time is 2 days, they hit us with a message, that they want to know what patent we use in our apps core functionality. WTF WHY NOW? It didnt bother you for a month, let it release ti production and now you delay a simple patch for this? We send them what they know. Aaaaand they reply: sorry we need more time to review your app. FUUUUUUCKKK YOUUU. You are reviewing a PATCH with close to zero functional change!!! Then, this shit goes on, every week we ask about an ETA, always asking for patience... at the end it took another 3 weeks... so december 15 to jan 21 in total...

FOR. A. SINGLE. FUCKING. PATCH

Bottom line is what is infurating, apple cares that there is an android device in the tutorial video, but they dont care that a significant percentage of our users simply cannot use the app.

Im done

Mid-Friday: Boss: Start programming this application.
Me: Cool, how will it be setup? what lang-
Boss: Everything's already setup, just start programming in PHP. Check in and make sure it's done by Wednesday morning before 9.
Mid-Tuesday:
Me: Cool, it's done. Had some trouble with connecting our database to the clients, some permissions were conflicting.
Boss: Now I need you to pull it, publish it to our other azure portal, change it to ASP.NET Core 2.1 MVC and install it to teams. Also change the database to MySQL.
Me: I thought everything was already setup.
Boss: things change.
Me: Cool.
*Pulls an all nighter*
Me: Something isn't right...
Wednesday
Me*hasn't slept yet*: It's done.
Boss: Why do you look so tired?
Me: I was working last night
Boss: Well you shouldn't do that.
Me: The deadline is today. only way it was going to get done before 9 was to do it last night.
Boss: Doesn't matter.
9am Meeting:
Boss: it was easy, no hassle, it's up and running.
Me: no hassle?

I am having fun building a captured wifi portal. It shows up as "Virus Distribution Point" as an open AP. If you connect to the AP it brings up a page that looks like the picture.

It does nothing except show the page. The page will eventually do some limited javascript animation to make it look like it is doing something.

Right now it is an embedded webpage. Strings in a source file. Eventually I would like to turn this into a product of sorts that would make it easy for someone to use for advertising/pranks. So I expect I will need to create some sort of simple toolset for updating the pages and changing the SSID and the passcode (if any).

>On a call with Manager
>he's showing off some code
>oh cool he's finally assigning me some real work

PM: So yeah, just wanted to have you on a call to show you how easy it was to fix this.

Me: ... Oh... OK.

PM: yeah so this was completely broken. The last guy that was working on this didn't do a great job. Like seriously, what is this? Amateur hour? Hahaha

Me:... Haha... Yeah, right... 🫠

PM: anyways I figured I would go ahead and do this because it would take me 10 minutes to figure out. It would probably would have taken you 3 hours or something to figure out.

Me: ok... <why tf am on this call other than for you to shit on my skills?>

PM: anyways just wanted to walk you through what I did and show you how easy it was to fix.

Me: ok.

When you're sitting in front of a problem the whole day and cannot put your finger on a solution. Stay 45m longer than necessary, implement and push - yet something tickles your brain - something's just not ... right ... although it works .. but

Get out, walk to the subway, wait for your train - and immediately see the solution as clear as day. Hammer perfect Pseudocode in your phone, get strange looks as you laugh out loud - it was soooo easy and right there in front of you the whole time.You even have already used the exact same function today.
So happy, now you can sleep without a brain-tickle

Apple iPhone testing without being on the app store is so annoying, I had to sign up some people to test the app I've been working on and had issues on my end, it really is this whole security bullshit, really it isn't needed.

I couldn't get the team provisional certificate thing to show up because when I clicked the account the team certificate settings would disappear, only after right clicking and hitting help then clicking the team while it was selected could I go to the right window.

I don't see why it's so damn hard to do this crap.

Yet with Android, it's so easy.

I really have issues with the testing for this iPhone app, I went through so many different ways to try and get it to work.

Anyways all done, crashlytics is an awesome testing tool if you can get around that small issue I had.

I hate asking questions but I need to right now.

Any suggestions for an easy installable email server like mailinabox? Multiple domains is a requirement :)

So I would really like to see a devrant like app where devs can share design ideas for problems that are greater than a function call, or topical questions found on stack overflow.

As I have gotten older, I have realized that actual implementation is typically easy, the design approach is typically harder to get right from the first go, so open critique can be very useful.

Holy fuck this new GitHub feature is amazing!!!
It's called GitHub Actions and you can easy automate your work flow using a simple graphical editor!
I need to test this out right fucking now!

Once I've worked in a start-up located in an engineering university "incubator", so we had a lot of engineer-to-be students applying for part-time jobs.
One of these kids was hired by my boss who labeled him "highly technical, very skilled in IT".

One day, while very busy with my own upcoming release, I had to help him finding a bug in his (horrible) code.

Me: Oh, that's easy, you need to load the image from the parent directory
Guy: ...
Me: You know how to do this, right? You're 1 exam away from being a computer engineer
Guy: ...
Me: Ok, ok, don't worry. Just type "../" right before the path

The guy starts typing, literally, "dotdotslash" into the path.

I immediately stopped him, almost crying. Then, I asked him to go for a walk.
"Don't mind about your bug, I'll take care"

Co-worker - "We need to have this added just like this, you should be able to do that right, it looks easy"

Me - "HA we'd have to redesign the whole architecture to make that work, and you still can't even figure out how to take a screenshot after I've showed you 20 times, so maybe don't tell me how easy something does or doesn't look"

so im deciding to byte the bullet and roll down the angular road.

install node they say, its quick and easy they say... 1 hour later after

./configure
make

im starting to wonder if i made the right decision.

I had just started as an SDE intern, and was fiddling around with the code base.

Me: Hey, can you send me the link to our version control system?
Mentor: Umm, what!?
Me: You know, where we keep our code backup...
Mentor: Hmm, is there a need for that?
Me: Yeah, I mean, my past experience tells me to always backup code, just in case something goes wrong.
Mentor: Ohh, that's easy. I'll teach you how I do it.

So, he comes to my workplace, and does this:
1. Go to your workspace folder.
2. Right click it.
3. Zip it.
4. Open outlook.
5. Compose email.
6. Attach the zip file.
7. Mail to yourself.
8. That's how it's done!

I was like what the hell!?!?! Is this really happening?? And then he started basking in his glory, as if he had taught me some secret hack! Seeing this, I couldn't even get myself to introduce him to git. That was the worst part.

Do you guys know about the Windows 10 operating system?

I highly recommend it.

It is so easy to get done whatever you want in just a few clicks or.. several.

It has a great web browser called Internet Explorer that comes pre-installed with it. If you love animations, it will even sometimes show you that beautiful loading animation for as long as it wants. If you have a habit of wasting time on the Internet, it will intelligently slow things down and become unresponsive to help you get rid of that bad habit. It's just that great.

It has a lot of great features pre-enabled for you like sending data to Microsoft to improve your experience on a personal level. The operating system cares so much about you, unlike other operating systems that represent a flightless bird.

It's so smart, it even keeps you from doing stupid things like customizing the operating system. It makes sure that you live in the given box and don't break anything. So caring, right?!

At random times, it shows you a blue screen and a sad face to remind you that life can be sad at times but you gotta keep going. It is profound.

It comes with great useless software that you absolutely don't even need! How great is that!

I use Windows 10 and I recommend that you do too.

Have a good day..

Dear developers who create an electron based app... Yes it's easy to make custom titlebars but please... Please please please give us the option to use the system default title bars... Looking at you itch!

(Also stop assuming everyone uses windows and use the minimise > maximise > close to the right of the window, not everyone does)

Big title games

Console to Mobile: redesign the game to make it easy to play

Console to PC: just port the game, keep the console keys but remap them... randomly so it makes no logical sense and is impossible to remember or easy to press when needed (at least to me)

I guess ditching games on PC years ago was the right move but now I have A way overpowered computer... (Gonna take a while to get around to that ML stuff I had planned... Prolly taking a React/Native die first and maybe do some also for interviewing)

I spent almost 10 hours coming up with this RegEx. Trial and erroring my way to hell. First I had get rid of the HTML tags (which was easy-ish) then I spent most of my time trying to figure out how to remove the god damn dash but keep hyphenated words ....... Then I found \B and look behinds...

I am making it a point to get good at this shit... Because right now I am petrified of it... Fuck you Regular expression you have taken away all my emotions...

When I wasn’t the lead yet there are so many things I want to do and improve. I have asked and judged my lead’s choices a thousand times for choosing the easy and fast way instead of the right way.

Now that he left and his role was given to me, I can now sense the same judgements from my members to the decisions I make (or not make).
I now understand. We don’t always have the luxury of time. If I say yes to improving everything at once then our app will never be done. (That our bosses will blame me for)

If you are completely new to coding, no problem at all! All of the concepts are fully explained throughout the exploration. Just keep in mind that it might be tough and frustrating and times. But don't give up! Coding isn't always easy, but it sure is fun when you get it right.

How clients tend to not understand how much work developing a "simple" or "small" feature can be.

Hey add live chat, that's easy right?

My first post here, be merciful please.

So, I participate in game jams now and then. About two years ago, I was participating in one, and we where near the deadline. Our game was pretty much done, so we where posted a "alpha" version waiting for feedback.

Just half an hour before the deadline, we got a comment on our alpha alerting us of a rather important typo: The instruction screen said "Press X to shoot" while X did nothing and Z was the correct key. "Good thing we caught that in time, thankfully a easy fix" I thought.

This project was written in python, and built using py2exe. If you know py2exe, the least error-prone method outputs a folder containing the .exe, plus ginormous amounts of dll's, pyc files, and various other crap. We would put the entire folder together with graphics and other resources into a .zip and tell the judges to look for the .exe.

Anyway, on this occasion I committed to source control ran the build, it seemed to work on my quick test. I uploaded the zip, right before the deadline and sat back waiting for the results.

I had forgotten one final step.

I had not copied my updated files to the zip, which still contained the old version.

Anyway, I ended up losing a lot of points in "user friendliness" since the judges had trouble figuring out how to shoot. After I figured out why and how it happened, I had a embarrassing story to tell my teammates.

AAARGH ELECTRON IS SO FUCKING...decently pleasant to use?

So I've been working on a FPGA based synthesizer on a Xilinx Arty A7 board (that little Artix 35T chip is surprisingly capable), and since I hate typing commands into a serial stream for anything even decently complex just like any sane person should, I needed something to build a UI for controlling it and other synth projects while I make the Eurorack compatible enclosure and knobs and stuff. I chose Electron because they said it was simple and easy to make cool looking stuff, fast.

And they were right. In like two hours, with Electron and p5.js, starting from zero since I don't know jack about frontend, I had a pretty nice UI driving the hardware synth and effects modules. Not bad. I should use this more often.

At work, an idiot who has never worked on machine learning before and understands nothing about it: "You know what, machine learning isn't actually hard. It is just basic statistics and then you download the model online and that's it! There's nothing else you are doing!"

STFU, you moron! Do you think just any model can work for your use case? Do you fucking think it is easy to come up with new architecture for a very specific use case and test it accurately? Do you think it's easy to effectively train a model and do hyper-parameter optimization?Do you fucking think it is easy to retrieve the right data for your use case? Do you think it's easy to keep up with research papers on arXiv being released daily? Do you think this is fucking javascript and there's a framework for everything? Stfu!
Honestly, i hate ignorant morons who generalize stuff they don't clearly understand.

Metaprogramming maybe easy to write but is so fucking hard to read and harder to maintain. Why do people even like these dynamic languages anyway :-/

*a very loud and miserable groan which may be cry for help*

I hate my life right now.

Started work: 9:30am
Finished work: 9:30pm

Finally finished my "basically done" ticket from two days ago, though I'm still not sure if it's behaving correctly. It deals with the Apple wallet and iPhone notifications, and all I have is an emulator, so. 😕 Things work as expected maybe half the time? and idfk why. I'm going to leave the actual testing to QA since they have actual iPhones and it'll run on staging on actual servers with actual connectivity and actual pushes, so maybe then things will actually make sense. Until then? So done.

Started drinking: 9:30pm
Finished drinking: TBD

<media lyrics="I don't know what the fuck just happened but I don't really care, imma get the fuck up outta here. Fuck this shit i'm out" />

Just wanted to leave a little encouragement that can be hard to find on a 'rant' board: As a 40 year old dev doing this for 16 or more years... I'm not jaded, I still have a burning enthusiasm for software dev, I'm lucky to be able to pursue this career. Have I been in some shitty situations and health damaging levels of stress? Yes at times, and I've ranted about them here. This career isn't an easy ride, ultimately there's a reason it's well paid - for all of its physical ease it's mentally and often emotionally hard. But, I still find the highs match the lows, there's still thrill in the chase to make the project and product work right. Only advice I would give is be prepared to shift down a career gear for a while when you have kids. That shit is hard. Keep having fun people, we work with machines that extend and force-multiply our minds, what a time to be alive!

My first rant...

Every time a coworker asks for an enhancement, the request is followed by "it should be easy to implement".

1) If you think it's easy, then you obviously know the code better than me, right?
2) The idea of the enhancement may be easy, but you don't think about how a small change can have a cascading effect throughout the entire process... and potentially in a catastrophic way.

Happens every time. Maybe I'm just bitch eating crackers at this point, but it annoys me when people analyze something they have no idea how to write themselves.

Let me just get right down to it.
FUCK YOU Hewlett-fucking-Packard FOR YOUR SHITTY LAPTOPS! Don't you even keep your customer's needs in mind when you design these things? Besides all the bloatware you stuff into the Windows you ship it with, at least make the quality of your shit better. These flimsy screens and loose hinges, I've had to get that shit replaced multiple times in just the past year.
Want to upgrade to an SSD or plug in more RAM? Guess what! I've to tear the whole thing apart! Keyboard, palm rest, all if it! What even happened to just popping a cover at the bottom to swap out the hard drive!? I have to fucking congratulate you, you fucking cunts, for making an easy process as difficult as it can fuckin possibly get. You guys deserve an award for this, preferably presented to you, shoved up your asses.

!dev

My toxic father. Seriously man. It's my 4th day of learning to drive with an instructor. He sits besides and never knew how to drive. I think I am driving good wrt to being very new in it. He thinks just because I slow myself down on the road and cannot take a turn properly, let me say it again, on the 4th day of driving a manual car, he thinks I can never drive. What a fucking douchebag. What a fucking coward, impatient human says that. I am in rage because now I'm like 27, but in my childhood he was at his worst behaviour. That's why I was always scared of doing complex things, I stick with easy because I will make no mistakes. He has fucking no right in being proud of me. He's so fucking bad, I hate him. But more than hating him I want to find a way not to give a fuck about his fucking small discouraging shameful opinions. Fucker cannot do anything by himself. He's the most messed up fucking person I have ever seen. And oh god I fucking resent this guy.
I should start calling him a fucking retard that way I can devalue him as a person. I could never thought that I will think about a person like this but this retard left me no choice.
The thing is even a person is a retard I will try to understand them so give me a good word that just devalues a person instantly.

Languages like python and R are some-what high level languages, with an easy syntax and very readable code. This useful essentially to make it easier for non-programmers to use it. For me as a software developer with +4 years of professional programming. I started with Assembly, Quick-Basic to C++, Java then C#, I found Python super convenient, and at times way too convenient.
At first it felt like I was cheating, and would not consider myself actually writing code, more like pseudo-coding.
After a year or so, I got used to it and it became my default, but it still does not feel right .. is anyone else feeling the same?
I do believe that coding the hard way is not always the right way, but I am just wired that way.

Java. AGAIN. 😡

so, I am trying to get a csv opened and read, and then search through it based on values. Easy peasy lemon squeezy in python, right?

Well, damned be java. You need a buffered reader to read the file. Then you have to "while(has next)" the whole damn thing, then you have to do something with the data that you read one by one, right? Well, not to be disappointed, they do have json libraries, but you **have to install** the plugins for it. Aka you have to manually add the libraries or use some backwards manager like maven.

Gotta admit, jdbc is neat if you're anal about your sql statements, but bring the same jazz to csv, and all the hell will break loose.

Now, if you just read your json data into multiple objects and throw them in an array... Kiss shorthand search's ass goodbye, because this mofo can't search through lists without licking the arse of every object. And now, you have to find another way because this way, you can't group shit you just read from csv. (or, I haven't found a way after 5 hours of dealing with the godforsaken shitshow that java libraries are.)

Like, I'm devastated. If this rant doesn't make much sense to you, blame some java library for it.
Shouldn't be too hard.

It would have been back in the 90s 🤫
I was about 8 years old I guess when I had a friend who had a Commodore64 and he loaded up the good old floppy, typed some things in and the screen started doing things, my mind was instantly triggered for “how did you do that?”.

Moving forward after that I was into gaming on consoles (sega, snes, Atari ect) and always wondered how the games were made (being pre-internet) that was not easy to find info for, otherwise I think inprobably would have ended up in the game dev world.

It wasn’t until I was about 10-11 that I finally got a PC in the house ( good old IBM 386 with 10mb HDD.. yes MB not GB for you young folk) and I was addicted from day one, MS paint, changing settings left right and Center in windows 3.11 and then when we upgraded to W95 and then W98 things got more and more interesting.

God the memories, and games (MAME32 was the best)😆
Shit now I want to find some old school games for a trip up memory lane 😂

When I was 15, I made my first website in front page (don’t judge), was a nice big walkthrough with photos and map locations for GTA 3, and since then I’ve never looked back.

Director: hey, we need this new functionality that I saw somewhere else... Easy right? Just copy & paste!!!

Copy & paste... It works every time... Right? No!

I'm not going to have a lot of new friends here but I am fed up with all those guys complaining about CSS on devRant.

CSS is damn easy. Get over it. Take some lessons, learn it the right way and shut your mouth.

I'd prefer you share your enlighten opinion on CSS in JS with React Native or CSS compositing with ReactJS which are both huge pain in the ass.

Plain CSS isn't the cause of all your pain. You are.

So I joined this financial institution back in Nov. Selling themselves as looking for a developer to code micro-services for a Spring based project and deploying on Cloud. I packed my stuff, drove and moved to the big city 3500 km away. New start in life I thought!
Turns out that micro-services code is an old outdated 20 year old JBoss code, that was ported over to Spring 10 years ago, then let to rot and fester into a giant undocumented Spaghetti code. Microservices? Forget about that. And whats worse? This code is responsible for processing thousands of transactions every month and is currently deployed in PROD. Now its your responsibility and now you have to get new features complied on the damn thing. Whats even worse? They made 4 replicas of that project with different functionalities and now you're responsible for all. Ma'am, this project needs serious refactoring, if not a total redesign/build. Nope! Not doing this! Now go work at it.
It took me 2-3 months just to wrap my mind around this thing and implement some form of working unit tests. I have to work on all that code base by myself and deliver all by myself! naturally, I was delayed in my delivery but I finally managed to deliver.
Time for relief I thought! I wont be looking at this for a while. So they assign me the next project: Automate environment sync between PROD and QA server that is manually done so far. Easy beans right? And surely enough, the automation process is simple and straightforward...except it isnt! Why? Because I am not allowed access to the user Ids and 3rd party software used in the sync process. Database and Data WareHouse data manipulation part is same story too. I ask for access and I get denied over and over again. I try to think of workarounds and I managed to do two using jenkins pipeline and local scripts. But those processes that need 3rd party software access? I cannot do anything! How am I supposed to automate job schedule import on autosys when I DONT HAVE ACCESS!! But noo! I must think of plan B! There is no plan B! Rather than thinking of workarounds, how about getting your access privileges right and get it right the first time!!
They pay relatively well but damn, you will lose your sanity as a programmer.
God, oh god, please bless me with a better job soon so I can escape this programming hell hole.
I will never work in finance again. I don't recommend it, unless you're on the tail end of your career and you want something stable & don't give a damn about proper software engineering principles anymore.

Me at the start of making first Wordpress theme: "I don't know why people complain about this?! It's great fun and easy!"

Me a week into developing said WordPress theme: "Damn it, they were right."

I am curious to know， where people get their tech news from?

I use:

- TopGitHub app to check the github trends (star growth in days，weeks or months)
- Geek app， which has 1 to 2 articles every 2 days on random tech， hacking stuff.
- Security app， which aggregates news from various tech sources.

I mostly get my news from apps right now as its an easy go when i am on the loo (like right now ;))

My god the wall looks really punchable right now. Let me tell you why.

So I’m working on a data mining project, and I’m trying to get data from google trends. Unfortunately, there have been a lot of roadblocks for what should have been an easy task.

First it won’t give a raw search volume, only relative “interest”.
Fortunately it lets me compare search terms, which would work for my needs however it will only let me compare a few at a time. I need to compare 300.

So my solution is simple: compare all the terms relative to one term. Simple enough, but it would be time consuming so I figured I’d write a program to get the data.

But then I learned that they don’t have an official api. There’s a node module for this very thing based on a python module that reverse engineers the api endpoints. I thought as long as it works I’d use it.

It does work... But then I discovered that google heavily rate limits the endpoints.

So... I figured I’d build a system to route the requests through different tor nodes to get around the rate limit. Good solution right? Well like a slap to the face, after spending way to much time getting requests through tor working, I discovered that THEY FUCKING BLOCKED TOR IPS.

So I gave up, and resigned to wait 5 hours for my program to get the data... 1 comparison at a time... 60s interval between requests. They, of course, don’t tell you the rate limit threshold, so this is more or less a guess (I verified that 30s interval was too short and another person using the module suggested 60s).

Remember when I said the discovery that the blocked tor came like a slap to the face? This came as a sledge hammer to the face: for some reason my program didn’t dump the data at the end. I waited 5 fucking hours to get nothing.

I am so mad right now. I am so fucking mad.

Depends. No one took for the job. VSCode is really good for web and Python. I use Visual Studio for c#, c++ and c. Jetbrains for Java stuff, including Android studio.

When writing SQL I usually use vendor-provided editors like MySQL Workbench. They're the tool made for the job.

Visual Studio Code is my generic editor thanks to it's easy-access terminal. Makes running anything a breeze.

It doesn't feel as snappy as other editors though and installing plugins just for intellisense to work can be annoying, which is why I use other tools for other workflows.

Generally, I avoid things like vim. Sorry, but I have a mouse AND a keyboard. Paid for em both, and I intend to use em. Sometimes I wanna find a setting in a menu and not fuck around with config files after googling what the right setting is called.

I used Sublime for a while, but never really got too into it. It's okay.

When I just started making things in PHP, I always taught that md5 encryption was the best thing out there.. Once I learned that it was the most easy way to break I changed to SHA1. What were I thinking? I now use a custom generated SALT for each user and encrypt with SHA512, should be safe for a while, right?

Maybe not a new rant but: When someone asks you for a feature and always says "its easy and simple" ... Yeah right... 😡

caution: just some dude sharing a random story.

started my own small business around half a year now. a month earlier from that my cousin also started his career as a self employed dev with his own small business and we work together.

next year we we will start a company together, where we merge our existing small businesses into one. we are developing software on our own and we design and implement software for our customers.

seems like we are doing something right because we are reaching our capacities almost all of the time.

we plan to hire apprentices (hope it's the right word) and to teach them all we know to be able to then increase our possible workload.

you know, I do not have a degree or some form of education in the field of IT. And here in germany it was almost impossible to land a job as a dev. needed my cousin who studied cs to get me my first position in that field - and even with his reputation it was not easy.

this shit will not happen on my watch. If I see someone with fire for development I will give them a chance, irrespective of their background. And I will be more than happy to let that person grow and to give every kind of support I can.

we also plan to have something like "if the employee has a good idea for software that sells, we will support it and share revenue". got to figure out the details on that one, but I want to give the employee the possibility to grow some passive income out of their normal job - because for me this was never an option. and I think that this will motivate in some way 😅

just wanted to get this out of my head 😣

Damn! I never thought resigning from first company is not easy.
The team was amazing, overall culture was great. But after working for 2 years and making product stable enough, the learning curve started to flatten.
Decided to move on, last day was most painful. Sitting on the chair, wondering whether I did the right thing. All the memories flash black on that day. Nervous but little bit excited. Kinda mixed feelings

But turned out that job switch was even better. Good pay + one hell of learning to build product from scratch.

PM: this is our super fancy new CI/CD pipeline, it's the greatest. i expect you to learn and understand all this in no time.
devs: so i have to spend some more time on this topic because it's completely new to me and requires some learning...
PM: nooo, that's a super easy task with zero effort, my braindead hamster can do that in no time, so can i, and so can you! let's assign 1 story point for that.

~ 3 months latèr ~

also PM, after he has started developing as well: so i'm realizing there are many things that i have to learn, and it takes me some time. i haven't developed with C++ and <other tool stack> for a longer time. by the way, you guys don't need to check for any quality right now, we need to deliver fast. it's okay, when you have memory overflows, your code is completely crappy, poor architecture or memory overflows, it doesn't matter.

he even has a subtask for migrating his code from VS project to our new project structure, since he refused to learn our pipeline right from the beginning and created VS project instead. シ why is this a subtask? this job can be done in no time, my left vanishing twin named Klaus who has dislexia and hates vim can solve this task in 20 seconds!!!!11

(and still no PR, not even a feature branch in our repo)

Upgrading RAM in a customer's laptop, pretty easy, right?

Well not in the Asus VivoBook Max. You have to disassemble everything just to get to the slot under the motherboard because it was too hard to put a fucking hole in the bottom for that. 20 minutes to complete the job and you know what? I also managed to break a flex cable so now I have to fix that or buy a replacement for the whole keyboard/mousepad assembly.

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK

That moment when you teaching your coworkers about vba:
Me: and you close the formula with a curly bracket
Co-worker: Wow that's easy, and you say coding is hard
Me: you're right, here try to learn Java

Note to self: never EVER buy iPhone again. “It won’t stutter after a year”, they’ve said.
Right now my 6s is just one big overheating piece of mess. Right now I have to charge it 3 times a day. Resprings randomly. Very often discharges 2% per minute. All the time lacks memory. iCloud picture syncing SUCKS. The Lightning cable is the worst excuse for buying overpriced cables which will break after a half of year. The only plus is a camera, how easy it is to update the iOS, included earbuds, iMesssage (but I use WhatsApp nonetheless) and battery widget.

And that’s it.

If someone says ever again that “iOS is the best operating system, it doesn’t have any issues whatsoever”, I would say “stop doping”, because I don’t see why it’s so great. Just while typing this rant my battery decreased from 25% to 15%

I thought SQL was supposed to be very easy? I'd like to jump off a balcony right now because of it ...
I don't know if I'm just dumb or if my sources for learning are bad or idk
maybe I'm just tired and dislike SQL

I'm fed up with you guys ranting about what you SHOULD HAVE said, but instead just walked out, said something cowardly, or nothing at all...

For fuck sake, grow a pair and stand up for yourself! Noone else will...

I get it, this place is a nice vent, people understand, it's not face-to-face, it's easy. But the sheer number of you that had a clear chance to be grow, and ran for the door is alarming.

I also get it, it's mostly difficult to talk back to a client/boss/professor. But there's a few steps between FUCK YOUR FUCKING DIPSHIT FACE and running to the corner to post a rant here.

Find the right words. You don't have to sware, be civilized, but take a stand, present your arguments, present facts and proofs. Don't give in to their scare tactics, earn that respect you need and deserve! Then come here like a winner and share it with us.

It has become quite a tradition here to sware in all caps and then say that's what you should have said, but didn't. From now on, I'm -- these posts to give my two cents in an attempt to make this a community of winners ranting about a stupid world. Not a community of cowards ranting how world is scary.

Everyone here deserves the worst.

No, really, you all deserve those dark juicy stories. So here's why I hate password systems that don't have the user experience in mind.

Recently my university went under a huge update, most of it good, but this is DevRant, so let me tell you what's just the worst.

They asked me to change my password, they do this every month or two. So I did it, but as I clicked "Ok" a wild error appeared! It told me I had to use a password that was not one of the FIFTEEN that I'd used previously...

I tried everything, and despite everything else being poorly programmed, or what not, I thought it would be easy to spoof. Nope. Unfortunately this seems to be the ONE thing they did right. Looks like I'll have to go back to basics. Just add a number on the end of my previous password, up to fifteen, and reset :]

I think this rant needs to turn into an email headed straight to them :)

Hey there 👋

I am more or less throwing any burden (WhatsApp, Facebook, Google etc.) out of my life. Of course I will continue using the Google account for YouTube and some games that need it.

That's what it looks like right now:

Raspberry Pi 3B+
✅ webserver
- forum - complete (atm just for me)
- blog - no ideas and just installed october cms and nothing done yet
- nextcloud - complete and filled with my porn... eeh... data

✅ mailserver
(missing spamassassin, clam or sth. like this but it's working 😂)

✅ matrix-synapse
(as an additional alternative to messengers)

______________

Raspberry Pi 2
✅ catches dust
(any ideas?)

Of course, many more configurations and the like are necessary before everything is ready... but what then or what else is there?

At the moment I still use WhatsApp. Just wanna take time before sending everyone a message about changing the messenger and that it should be important for thinking about the own privacy, which alternatives there are bla...

Edit: For passwords I'm using Myki - didn't hear anything bad about it yet and it's very easy to use (Firefox add-on, Android app).
I love my passwords with 200 characters 😂
Maybe someone's knowing more about them?

Hope I didn't forget a thing... thanks in advance aaaaaaand... I'm gone. ☺

!rant, probably, even though kind of yes, but not overt

i just realized something: software doesn't take lot of effort and time to change because it would be difficult to make a change.

it takes lot of effort and time to change because making the change is easy, but inspecting and debugging what other things the change affects takes most of the time and effort.

it would be nice if project managers were able to wrap their head around this.

tl;dr i can make the change right now in 5 minutes, but it's going to take me an hour to check if me changing that didn't break something else.

"Yes, the work could have finished way earlier. But it's easy, and I would have probably been bored of it and left earlier"

Finally got the reason why our fucking CTO couldn't create a fucking stable Backend for almost a year while the frontend team got all the slack because certain things are still not functioning well and while the marketing team every fucking time got their face red while showing the demo because the fucking api is not stable. Seriously, we wasted a whole year just because you could write something more interesting and enjoyable. Fuck you. Never been this willing to murder someone.

Context: A simple booking platform. No need for creating a complex distributed system while our userbase may not even be in million even on a peak season.

And he laughily commented maintaining it would be a headache.

I could seriously kill someone right now.

"Pokemon Let's Go" review:

I knew it would be a very easy game, made to transition Pokemon Go players to the core series of games, but this game is just poorly thought out. The multiplayer was obviously an afterthought; there is no split-screen. When the other player goes off-screen, they are lost off camera. Player 2 cannot interact with anything: they cannot talk to people, collect items, or initiate battles (They walk right through Pokemon)

The game is too easy by design. You cannot fight wild Pokemon, so you end up having 6 Pokemon by the beginning of the game all at full health (And everything gets XP when you catch something, so most of your Pokemon will be up to level 6-10 by your first battles) and the opposition will only have one level 3-4 Pokemon.

This trend continues throughout the game.

The map is tiny. You could walk the whole thing in an hour. Even Gameboy Pokemon maps were larger.

I knew this going into it, but it only has gen 1, which means pretty much no Pokemon, and they're the ones that I'm bored of. Every shitty game starts with generation 1 pokemon then ever introduces anything else. I'm sick of pidgeys!

Plus the hefty price tag of $60 just makes this game not worth much, despite the hype they tried to give it. That's probably why they were to secretive about the gameplay before launch: they knew it was bad,

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.

So yeah XML is still not solved in year 2018. Or so did I realize the last days.
I use jackson to serialize generic data to JSON.

Now I also want to provide serialization to XML. Easy right? Jackson also provides XML serialization facitlity similar to JAXB.

Works out of the box (more or less). Wait what? *rubbing eyes*

<User>
<pk>234235</pk>
<groups typeCode="usergroup">
<pk>6356679041773291286</pk>
</groups>
<groups typeCode="usergroup">
<pk>1095682275514732543</pk>
</groups>
</User>

Why is my groups property (java.util.Set) rendered as two separate elements? Who the fuck every though this is the way to go?

So OK *reading the docs* there is a way to create a collection wrapper. That must be it, I thought ...

<User typeCode="user">
<pk>2540591810712846915</pk>
<groups>
<groups typeCode="usergroup">
<pk>6356679041773291286</pk>
</groups>
<groups typeCode="usergroup">
<pk>1095682275514732543</pk>
</groups>
</groups>
</User>

What the fuck is this now? This is still not right!!!

I know XML offers a lot of flexibility on how to represent your data. But this is just wrong ...

The only logical way to display that data is:
<User typeCode="user">
<pk>2540591810712846915</pk>
<groups>
<groupsEntry typeCode="usergroup">
<pk>6356679041773291286</pk>
</groupsEntry>
<groupsEntry typeCode="usergroup">
<pk>1095682275514732543</pk>
</groupsEntry>
</groups>
</User>

It would be better if the individual entries would be just called "group" but I guess implementing such a logic would be pretty hard (finding a singular of an arbitrary word?).

So yeah theres a way for that * implementing a custom collection serializer* ... wait is that really the way to go? I mean common, am I the only one who just whants this fucking shit just work as expected, with the least amount of suprise?
Why do I have to customize that ...

So ok it renders fine now ... *writes test for it+
FUCK FUCK FUCK. why can't jackson not deserialize it properly anymore? The two groups are just not being picked up anymore ...

SO WHY, WHY WHY are you guys over at jackson, JAXB and the like not able to implement that in the right manner. AND NOT THERE IS ONLY ONE RIGHT WAY TO DO IT!

*looks at an apple PLIST file* *scratches head* OK, gues I'll stick to the jackson defaults, at least it's not as broken as the fucking apple XML:

<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>PayloadOrganization</key>
<string>Example Inc.</string>
<key>PayloadDisplayName</key>
<string>Profile Service</string>
<key>PayloadVersion</key>
<integer>1</integer>
</dict>
</plist

I really wonder who at apple has this briliant idea ...

It's easy to see what a person in my company do just by looking at their clothing. Money-guys with blue shirts and shiny shoes, tech guys with washed out jeans and a t-shirt with print. Then there's the bosses of tech guys, a hybrid with washed out jeans, sneakers and a poorly fit blazer for meetings. And then we have the designers, with their neatly trimmed beards, wearing a scarf all year round. And at last, project managers.. kinda like the money-guys but with sneakers for better mobility, and their right arm locked in a "holding cup of coffee" posture as they move from desk to desk like vultures overlooking others work.

And they say there is no dress code

Anyone reading these emails we are sending?

I work at a small place. A few users are using an application at our place that I develop and maintain. We all work remotely.

I announce by email to these few users a new version release of said application because of low level changes in the database, send the timeline for the upgrade, I include the new executable, with an easy illustrated 2 minutes *howto* to update painlessly.

Yet, past the date of the upgrade, 100% of the application users emailed me because they were not able to use the software anymore.

----------------

Or I have this issue where we identified a vulnerability in our systems - and I send out an email asking (as soon as possible) for which client version users are using to access the database, so that I patch everything swiftly right. Else everything may crash. Like a clean summary, 2 lines. Easy. A 30 second thing.

A week pass, no answer, I send again.

Then a second week pass, one user answers, saying:

> well I am busy, I will have time to check this out in February.

----------------

Then I am asking myself:
* Why sending email at all in the first place?

* Who wrote these 'best practices textbooks about warning users on schedule/expected downtime?'

*How about I just patch and release first and then expect the emails from the users *after* because 'something is broken', right? Whatever I do, they don't read it.

Oh and before anyone suggest that I should talk to my boss about this behavior from the users, my boss is included in the aforementioned 'users'.

Catch-22 much ? Haha thanks for reading

/rant

The client doesn't want to give me her PIN code from GoDaddy but I need it to make changes for her.

She told me that GoDaddy's Customer Support told her she can't give her PIN to anyone. I understand that. I told her what to do but she still wants me to do it.

She came up with the idea of teleconference between me, her and GoDaddy (is that even possible?). We live in two different countries.

She could just do it by herself (as I told her what and how to do) or give me the PIN... Nope, she thinks that it's my business to make things up.

Boss wants me to carry on this because she's difficult and may make us bad PR even if she's not right. He doesn't want a shitstorm to handle.

We made few projects for her in the past, she gave us access to all her WordPresses, FTPs, backups, authinfo codes etc but still doesn't trust us. She always thinks dozen times before she gave us some data.

And she's not even a business client. She runs a few blogs about her hobbies. She doesn't make money from them. It's not a big deal but she treats it like a treasure.

It's not easy to be gentle and kind :)

*cracks knuckles*

Boy was I happy to see this when I opened devRant up.

So for starters, more group projects are necessary. Many reasons why. To begin with, it allows for more complex programs than getting some input and printing some shit out. It also develops interpersonal skills (I hate people too, but when you go out to look for work you'll be with them, so better get used to it soon). If a platform like GitHub is used, it's easy to track who did what, and see what each person in the group did, so it should be fairly easy to discourage lazy asses.

Beyond that, stop giving us half completed assignments and asking us to fill in a function/method. Yes, it will take longer. But one doesn't learn to program by doing the minimum required work, you've got to crash and burn a lot in order to git gud. So ffs, let us do all the work. We're like AI, we learn through reinforcement learning.

Stop giving us a spec to follow. We'll do plenty of that in the future, right now we need to make mistakes, not be held by the hand all the way. Let us do dumb shit so you can fail us and tell us our code is repulsive, and this other way was better. Explain why. That's how people learn, not by telling us what each function should return, what can and can't be used, etc. And if you can't come up with a scenario in which what you're teaching is useful, then maybe you're not teaching us the right material.

I'll leave it at that for today... But I'll be back 😈

Years ago, one of my friends in college was taking an intro to CS class. He asked me for help on one of his assignments. It was a simple Python program, but it wasn't running as expected. I go in figuring it will be easy to fix. But everything looks exactly right. An hour later I'm tearing my hair out! It isn't even entering the function although it's clearly called. I'm beginning to feel very self conscious, as a CS major who can't even debug a 15 line program for a friend.

Then it hit me. This is Python. I used an editor macro to convert all indentation to tabs, lined them up, and it ran on the first try. Turns out, he had somehow ended up with a mixture of tabs and spaces.

I'm not sure what the takeaway is, but I think he got a surprisingly honest introduction to the life of a developer...

Things I’m learning from my accounting job that will help me in my future dev career:

Today I have really, truly understood the need to sometimes just walk away.
I couldn’t figure out how to fix something, I kept fucking up, and at 16:40 I realized I can just stop, do something else that’s easy and doable, and come back to the fucked up mess I made in the morning. We’ll see how it goes, but it’s a lesson I’ve been continuously learning over the last few years, not to stubbornly brute-force my way into doing something when I’m not in the right mindset and able to do it, and instead just calm myself down and come back to it later.

can we all take a moment to appreciate the developers of flutter. they're smart, and they took the time to make flutter the *right* way.

they used an easy to learn language that's ideal for mobile development, which means hot reload/restart is possible (because dart supports aot and jit compilation)

the way it's designed is beautiful. everything is a widget, and it's easy to customize them via named parameters.

the community is great. it's not large, but it's supportive, with two active subreddits. yesterday i asked a question on r/flutterdev, and a member of the flutter team at google answered the question with a comprehensive answer.

flutter is very consistent across platforms. if it works on android or ios, you can bet it'll work on the other just as well, with the exception of platform-specific code.

it is VERY performant. unless you write a major bottleneck, 60fps is easy to achieve.

animations are EASY. define a tween and animation controller and then write a callback function. not to mention it's straightforward, and complex/combined animations are easy, too.

you can get almost direct access to the canvas, should you need it, with custompainter.

oh my god, this is revolutionary in the programming world. development is quicker than it is with native android alone, and for people who have no access to a mac, like me, i can develop for ios and compile via code magic. if you haven't checked it out and you develop for mobile, check it out.

oh yeah, did i mention it's not just mobile. hummingbird - flutter compiled to web - is already in experimental public betas, and will likely be released by the end of the year. there's also experimental desktop support, which is amazing, and much better than electron. not to mention flutter is the future, as it will be the primary way to make apps on fuchsia os.

Anybody can rant about stuff and get angry - that's easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not within everybody's power and is not easy.

- Aristotele

I am learning the job "Developer". I have to go to a school, where my classmades think, developing a application is easy AS playing computer games. I call the guys stupid. Is that right?

This is a guide for technology noobies who wants to buy a laptop but have no idea what the SPECS are meaning.

1. Brand
If you like Apple, and love their !sleek design, go to the nearest Apple store and tell them "I want to buy one. Recommendations?"
If you don't like Apple, well, buy anything that fits you. Read more below.

2. Size
There are 11~15 inches, weight is 850g ~ 2+kg. Very many options. Buy whatever you like.

//Fun part coming

3. CPU
This is the power of the brain.
For example,
Pentium is Elementary Schoolers
i3 is Middle Schoolers
i5 is High Schoolers
i7 is University People

Dual-core is 2 people
Quad-core is 4 people

Quiz! What is i5 Dual-core?
A) 2 High Schoolers.

Easy peasy, right?

Now if you have a smartphone and ONLY use Messaging, Phone, and Whatsapp (lol), you can buy Pentium laptops.
If not, I recommend at least i3

Also, there are numbers behind those CPU, like i3-6100
6 means 6th generaton.
If the numbers are bigger, it is the most recent generation.

Think of 6xxx as Stone age people
7xxx as Bronze age people
8xxx as Iron age people
and so one.

4. RAM
This is the size of the desk.
There are 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, and so one.
Think of 4GB as small desk to only put one book on it.
8GB as a desk to put a laptop with a keyboard and a mouse.
16GB as a normal sized desk to put some books, laptop, and food.
32GB as a boss sized desk.
And so one.

When you do multitasking, and the desk is too small...
You don't feel comfortable right?
It is good when there are spacious space.
Same with RAM.

But when the desk becomes larger, it gets expensive, so buy the one with the affordable price.

If you watch some YouTube videos in Chrome and do some document words with Office, buy at least 8GB. 16GB is recommended.

5. HDD/SSD
You take out the stuffs such as books and laptop from the basket (HDD/SSD), and put in your desk (RAM).

There are two kinds of baskets.
The super big ones, but because it is so big, it is bulky and hard to get stuffs out of the basket. But it is cheap. (HDD)
There are a bit smaller ones but expensive compared to the HDD, it is called SSD. This basket is right next to you, and it is super easy to get stuffs out of this basket. The opening time is faster as well.

SSDs were expensive, but as times go, it gets bigger as well, and cheaper. So most laptops are SSD these days.
There are 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1024GB(=1TB), and so one. You can buy what you want. Recommend 256GB for normal use.
Game guy? At least 512GB.

6. Graphics
It is the eyesight.
Most computers doesn't have dedicated graphics card, it comes with the CPU. Intel CPUs has CPU + graphics, but the graphics powered by Intel isn't that good.
But NVIDIA graphics cards are great. Recommended for gamers. But it is a bit more expensive.

So TL;DR

Buying a laptop is
- Pick the person and the person's clothes (brand and design)
- Pick the space for the person to stay (RAM, SSD/HDD)
- Pick how smart they are (CPU)
- Pick how many (Core)
- Pick the generation (6xxx, 7xxx ....)
- Pick their eyesight (graphics)

And that's pretty much it.
Super easy to buy a laptop right?

If you have suggestions or questions, make sure to leave a comment, upvote this rant, and share to your friends!

You know, I really like my Redmi 4x. It's a nice and inexpensive phone and perfect for me. Now I wanted to get the most out of my phone by rooting it, which was going to be easy.

I thought. And lord almighty was I wrong.

First of all, to even get to root it you have to unlock the bootloader. To do that you have to use a tool that they've made. Good! An official way to do so would surely be good, I thought. But to actually use the tool you have to be logged in to their service on both the tool and your phone. Then, and get this, you have to submit a written application as to why you would want to unluck the bootloader.

Ohh but it didn't stop there. I did so and months passed without me getting any info from them what so ever. When trying the tool it would just tell me that they hadn't reviewed my application.

Today I tried again, and something new happened. It told me that I hadn't synced my accounts. Which I promptly did because it's progress.

I tried for what should be the final time, aaaand I get this. This according to the forums means I have to wait 72 hours to be able to do it.

But it's progress, right?

Uuugggghhhh

Lua is one of the stupidest languages to ever exist.

Oh, the language is easy to learn? The syntax is friendly? There's only like negative 10 functions you ever need to know? Everything is a table?

EVERYTHING IS A TABLE?! WTF CARES? WHAT ABOUT NIL?!

The arrogance this language has is extraordinary, literally. No lang, except Lua, imposes such an opinionated dichotomy. Everything is a fucking table, or, it's nil. -- That's so fucking stupid.

And look, I get it, this lang (oh sorry, scripting language (?)) CAN be good and fun and whatever... the moment you start to do IO is the literal end of days.

Everything is nil. Except, if it's defined... then it's not nil. -- OK. That sounds sensible/reasonable enough. -- What if it's not defined? You get nil. What if it's not the right data? You get nil. Do I get errors/exceptions or whatever? No, absolutely not, you get nil... unless the application you're using with Lua with has a lib that handles that.

There are so many more issues I have with this lang, but honestly... Am I fucking missing something? Is this lang like actually super dooper awesome and I'm missing something? -- I can't not look at this language as just dumb and arrogant. -- It's literally a language where you have to manage and remember ALL conceivable state at ALL times.

On Friday. Client and Project Managers arranged a meeting and wanted me to be there. Client said the meeting will be max 15 Minutes but it was around 2 hours. This client project was due the following week. I was happy because everything was done and excited that the client might be coming down to say how awesome the work was.

The table turned around. They came changed the designed and functionalities. The client said, it won't take long to do it, right? and my Project Manager said No! No! No! don't worry its very easy thing. It will take him around 1 day to do it, it's just all cosmetic changes.

It took me more than a week to get it done, test again, check on browsers. The client was pissed and they fired us. Guess who was blamed for it?

I'm tired of "agile" development. Sure the concept of a hacky POC that gets thrown out for a real implemention sounds great. But it never gets thrown out. That shitty POC become the foundation for a horrible mangled mess of hacky improvement after improvement. I'm tired of my boss telling me "do it the easy quick way and fix it later", like fuck off no. I can save man weeks worth of bug hunting a year down the road by actually taking an extra day to do it right. Like fuck does no one care about quality engineering anymore?

Sometimes that extra day to write a general vs a specific implementation is worth it.

A user calls me an hour after I'm supposed to have logged off.
"Hey, ahh, like, something is not good with, like, some thing"
Oh, snap! What happened?
"There is, like, this report, and it's, like, not right?"
Oh, the report is showing wrong data? Let me try to get a fresh version and...
"No, like,the data is right, but, like, there is many reports and , like, should be only one?"
Oh, you mean the report consolidation feature? It should only happen if the reports are fully compatible, and since it's automatic if the reports are not already grouped it means that they cannot be grouped. Probably due to this shopping season, we've seen a high uptick in demand.
"But, like, it should be, like, one! If not I will have to type in each report, like, by hand! I usually talk to this guy XYZ and he, like, does something that I, like, have no idea what it is. Can you call him up?"
(The dude the user mentioned logged off hours ago, and is in a different timezone. It's now about 11PM for him.)
It might not be possible. The system should add observations to each report it cannot consolidate. What do those say?
(the user takes two seconds to respond. I don't think they checked anything)
"It doesn't say anything. Can you cal XYZ, please?"
...

Shit, why do people wait until the last few hours of the last day of the month to do something that should have been done days ago and then demand that everybody everywhere just adjust to their late-ass schedule?
And then to demand I wake up a hardworking dev because someone is to lazy to use the system as it was custom designed for them? Because it had no problems but just wasn't making all things easy?

That's why users have to pay - they don't pay us to code, they pay us to put up with their bullshit.

Management: "You are the DBA and BI head right?"
Me: "yes..."
Management: "Awesome, so that means you can develop a quick software for me to use? It's really easy!"
Me: "Awesome, here are two options since its easy, you go make it yourself or..."
Management: "Is that sarcasm?"
Me: "...or you can ask the accountant to make it"
IT Director: "you deserved that bob."

I like to right justify my comments to save space and make it easy to see what's happening on a line by line basis

Building a website using Wordpress and Visual Composer for a client is pretty easy, right?!

Until the clients wants to change one of the icons to sofa “you can’t use image, and visual composer has a list of only 5 icon libraries and none of them has a fucking sofa icon”.

Manager says just do it today!
Ok no problem.. just had to figure how visual composer communicate with the libraries to show them in the module area, edit the function, create the font/svg files for the new icon, edit the css file of one of the libraries to add the icon. And boom its working fine!

No tutorial about this stuff so had to figure it out by reading the code and see how they did it so I can do it.

After finishing this, they just gave me few more changes as I have done nothing.

Thank you

Let me begin by saying I knew the jist of the announcment before even reading the CeO's LeTteR... though it's comically and ironically far worse than I could have even expected

this is absolutely an 100% genuine rant from the bottom of my heart

Just go absolutely fuck yourself, your devs, and your entire org. Imma call it right now and say Udemy as a company won't be around in a mere 10 years. (easy to say this actually; the average lifetime of a company in general on the stock market is 18 years, with a garbage shit pile like Udemy i can guarantee its less than that)

oh, but their stock was up 38% on friday on good earnings... wonder how they did that

"But why!?!?!? Why are all creators going to tiktok and youtube?!?!?" - Udemy CEO mouthbreather

stupid fuck, maybe take a lesson from a 1st grader and get educated

people think devs are bad? Oh, its about to get a whole lot worse. there's no motivation anymore for skilled devs to build valuable courses, more and more junior devs using outdated spit out shit information from IdiotGPT, and a destruction of number of people on stackoverflow, asking the same 10 questions over and over again...

oh how the times have changed...

!rant + !story

I hate every human on the planet that says WFH is just people pretending to work or are slackers looking for an easy way out.

Now the story bit.

In 2021, I joined a company (I really wish I could name-drop the company), where the micromanagement was OFF THE CHARTS.

The company got a client who pitched a product they wanted built and gave us a super reasonable 3 months to complete it. I was really happy about the timeline and kept working under keystroke monitoring, which I didn't really mind at the time.

3 days into the development, the client informed us that they are pulling the funding i.e. they don't have money to pay us.

So at that point the client gave us two choices:

1. Stop the development right away and get paid for the time that we put in already.
2. Finish the project under 9 days. We would still get paid for the 12 days total, mind you. Not the original budget set.

So the motherfucking boss chose the second option and then the chaos ensued.

Devs screaming at each other on calls/slack. The boss yelled at us all the time about the completion. It was wild.

I had to wake up at 7:30 AM and start coding and log off at 11 PM for literally the next 9 days including Saturday and Sunday. No holidays allowed for the timeline. This was all at a WFH job.

So fuck anyone that says WFH is easy and just for slackers.

I am so 😢🤒😡 right now. I applied for a remote job, so they gave me an assessment and the language was c++. The funny thing is that c++ was not in my resume.
So I decided to explore c++. "I don't know what the fuss is, C++ is not so hard". It was very easy for me to grasp. It took me two days to understand it.
Then I did one of those online test and I scored 58/60.
Now I went back to take the assessment test on C++ but lo and behold the assessment is now on Rest API.
But Rest API is also not on my resume. They are not assessing me on my strengths like Java or kotlin or python or my my lesser strengths like C# or JavaScript.

Ok so I have done some work with crypto currency mining pools and recently a client requested for me to make a splash page that showed data from multiple instances of these pools APIs. I went to find some documentation for this open source api and to my surprise there is none. I thought of querying the public API from the clients side and it worked, however it's so slow that the data shows up roughly 20 seconds after the page loads.

Easy fix right? Make a PHP server get the data every 5 seconds, cache it and serve the data with the page and use a websocket for live updates! Until I found out that there is no practical way in this garbage framework to get the damn API data without making an HTTP request or mutilating the original source code. I'm so done with this garbage framework. It literally loads pages based on a page and action parameter on the index.php. I quit.

I think JavaScript is great actually

Though I don't like the community

But that's not saying much, aside from maybe c++ people (who I don't actually understand so maybe that's what's going on there) I don't seem to like any communities

Mostly because they're wrong and fight over irrelevant things and don't realize they're wrong so they just keep going wrong and it makes me cringe

But javascript is nice because it's intuitive, and if it isn't intuitive to you right now just look into the thing and it'll be a second language to you later... Isn't that a skill issue?
Easy to start hard to master, perfect difficulty curve. Exploits that sunk cost fallacy. It isn't overwhelming either you only run into the edge cases slowly over time.

But there can be a point made that an easily accessible anything is just always going to turn into a cesspool because unskilled people keep contributing and thinking themselves experts, so it over time reduces quality of secondary tooling =[

So im pretty sure I made the biggest/dumbest fuckup for the year already...
Deleting the majority of our RHEL server's root partition.

Blonde mistake for sure.

Technically i didn't actually delete it... just fucked up the block device so it's no longer recognised as existing.

I could go fishing for data and put it back together... but since i have the boot par and all the uset account configs... plus i actually documented all remarkable server updates cuz im trying to get better at the whole 'having a team' thing... im just gonna play it safe and go through it all like old school video games when you die right before the checkpoint so you need to go through the same paths again and again... but not too fast or youll fuck up somewhere easy and itll drive u nuts when u gotta reiterate again.

@jestdotty here you go. Always saying I just mention positives about myself... cant get much worse than this.

being a sheep over the last years I just recently started to overthink my software choices in terms of privacy. but hell it's far from easy!
just now I realize how dependent I am from all of these services. I mean no problem ditching Facebook for example, it's not essential to me. but what about WhatsApp and GoogleDrive? I'm using these services on a daily basis...
any advices on what software or providers to use alternatively? especially browser, messaging app, email provider and cloud service?
please keep in mind that although I am willing to bring sacrifices I by no means want to neither could live like Richard Stallman. so an argument like "sell your MacBook because macOS is spyware" is not that helpful to me - more like what can I do to increase my privacy within the boundaries given to me. I have to find some sort of compromise. so curious about your advices, stories and opinions right now!

// first rant

So this isn't really a "dev" rant but I'm a developer taking my first ever design class. It's a senior level, group based class where we design a mobile OS from the ground up, using any inspiration we like. I love it because I'm the developer and designer for all of the Android apps I've worked on so far. I get to practice my design skills and have a portfolio addition. Neat! It's a pretty easy class too.

But my group. Oh God my group.

I spent a week and a half designing the style guide and it was jam packed with anything we'd need. Typography, icons, rationales, you name it!

But noooo, they can't use it because it's not in sketch. As a Windows user, this is infuriating. So three weeks go by and all this work is done that's SUPER INCONSISTENT. Bad colors, elements off by 3px... I mean even the font sizes are just 1 or 2 off. Seriously, I wish I could just be frank with them and tell them to put in the 1% effort to make it right. It's really not that hard. I just don't want to screw up the peace in my group..

Unreal Engine fun continues...
so I need to set limits to rotations within a skeletal mesh. So in other programms, like blender, you can specify a limit per axis, setting max and min angle. Makes sense, right?

Unreal Engine:
1. Let's call rotations sometimes xyz, sometimes roll pitch yaw, and sometimes swing1 swing2 and twist so that nobody knows what it is anymore.
2. IK node 1: limits? what are limits?
3. IK node 2: ok, you can set angular limits but they are all symmetrical to god knows what and to all axis apperently.
4. Physics: yeah you can define joint constraints but we give you only symmetrical constraints also
....
WHY. Were does this make any sense? One node is not like the other, and they talk rotations but use 100 different terms for them, since, hey, why the f not. And let's limit everything symmetricly so you can only set one value or have to fiddle with offsets to achive the range of movement you want.

I mean, one could just stick to xyz (or even roll/pitch/yaw, whatever) and min/max but hey, that's one extra field and then it would be easy to use. Who would want that? ....

Important memos to future self:

If the specs the client gave you seem written by a confused pre-teen, run.
If the client says something like "this can't possibly take THAT long", run.
If the client can't pay you enough, but reassures that (in return) he won't stress you and let you work in peace without imposing deadlines: he's lying, run.
If he politely asks to do something but then when you say no he keeps insisting, Don't. Give. In. Ever.
If the project seems shitty and not likely to have success, but hey, seems also simple and easy: it's not. But it's shitty anyways.

And on top of all: trust your fucking guts, you've been right tons of times by now. You didn't want to do this but you forced yourself, because "it's still an opportunity" and stupid slogans like that. Never again.

I'm ashamed of it, but I want to share my tifu-story:
My colleague asked me if I could rename his windows user name because he married and changed his last name. I changed it in the Active Directory, but he got some problems when he wants to log on. On every startup his old name appears. Simpliest task. Let me google that.
Easy going, let me just change this registry entry. Reboot. Old behaviour. Okay, I changed some of the other entries. Reboot. Yeah, his new name appears. But wait a moment. Windows just nulled his entire user profile and deleted all the data. "oh, haha you have a backup, right?" - "no, I saved everything on the desktop, all my work is gone!"
But at the end, the boss was mad at HIM, because he doesn't used the file server or any backup system.

i am not a smart man

I think, right now, it's bitting more than I can chew.

I get my hands on way too many projects because they're easy and then problems pile and I end up being behind schedule on everything.

That, and maybe sometimes subconsciously thinking I'm invincible. It's a direct psych response to those telling me I can't do shit, and then I do shit out of pure stubbornness, and then I have super-confidence for a short while. (Even if I don't show it)
I just don't think it's healthy.

Do what’s right, not what is easy!

You win Linux. That was the last straw. I will never install ANY linux distribution ever again.

Setup a simple FTP server. What can possibly go wrong ?

Ok now I want it to point to /media/ftp

Easy, right ?

Just add local_root=/media/ftp

Weeeeellll nop.

Not working. Completly ingnoring this setting, all users log to home directory.

#chroot_local_user=YES

tried, no effect.

I'm wiping this server and installing windows server there.

Too bad, the process started very well, the machine is fully confiogured, ready to go, DNS working every thing working. Except this shitty FTP.

So FUCK YOU linux wioth config files, WELCOME windows with nice GUI where I can just SELECT the default ftp folder

Going on vacation for a couple of days next week. So, apparently, the people scheduling the on-call rotation think it's a great idea to assign me on-call duty next week.

ME: ...you know I'm going on vacation, right?

THEM: Oh don't worry, nothing ever happens, and 95% of the time it's just this easy stuff that can be dealt with quickly.

ME (internally): ...I was taking this vacation time to get *away* from having to think about work. Now I'm going to have to keep this in the back of my mind the entire time I'm away, checking for alerts, and potentially interrupt my flow to deal with work, defeating the point of why I'm taking the down time.

Fuck this. If I'd known earlier I'd have tried to get the time rescheduled, but of course this happens on the weekend, the day before.

Coding chalenge.
So... Spent almost two hours to put this little device to work with the keypad.
The device is a arduino micro, special one that can work as mouse /keyboard or any kind of input on most devices (pc, Android phone,...)
The objective is to make a macro keypad to:
- Fast insert text
- Play sounds in games over voice chat.

Think of it like this, you start a new html file, press one key and all the base code is inserted.

So... Why so long? Tought was the hardware, tought the keypad could be set differently that most, code mistakes...

My error was all here, masked from the debugger by a if:

char keys[ROWS][COLS] = {
{'1','2','3','4'},
{'5','6','7','8'},
{'9','10','11','12'},
{'13','14','15','16'}
};

Easy to figure right? Only saw it after reading all the code twice.

I've added front-end development to my professional profiles. I've described myself as a "junior" developer given that my useful experience is measured more in weeks and months.

I've been advised to drop the "junior" and just describe myself as a "web developer". Presumably potential employers will read in the "junior" bit when they consider my experience and abilities.

What's the best way to handle this?

I don't want to cripple my chances right out of the gate. At the same time, it's pointless to mislead people about my capabilities - it's easy enough to test them.

Today I had a casual chat with my friend and we were discussing how human mind limits the things one can achieve. Like giving up after constant failures, or lack of determination, blaming destiny for failures. I told him I am never easy about the fact that your destiny is pre-written and you can't do anything about it. If you are willing, you can change it. You just need to have the right mindset.
He said I am going to do MBA after engineering. You can't be rich with just engineering. I told him if you work smart and hard enough, and just follow your passion, there is no need for an MBA. And he went on to tell me how top richest persons mostly comprise of businessmen.

I fear for the future. People like this with no goals when take up engineering, they blame everyone but themselves and the stream gets the bad name. People want money, but they don't want to work from the beginning. Even after that they give up too easy.

People like Bill and Mark were not pre-destined. They made themselves. They were just like us, but they never got satisfied with themselves. We all have the capabilities to be them or even better. We just need to keep driving ourselves until we reach there, we don't have to get satisfied. We have to keep improving and learn from our mistakes, then try again.

Average social media experience

Post: Guys, I have such a headache right now ughh.

Comments:

#1. Omg, so relatable haha.
#2. Yeah I literally have a migraine rn. LITERALLY.
#3. I am in the MRI room while I read this thread. You have no idea how easy you've got.
#4. Backenders are only about being an asshole. Also, JS rules and you know it.
#5. I like trains.

Here's a nightmarish tale that happened to me not long ago:
One of our stores was moving, so they asked me for help with the systems. Thinking it'd be fun, I said yes, and went. All I had to do was unplug everything and reorder it at the new location, sounds really easy right?
They hadn't cleaned the computer area in ten years.
Each time something broke, they replaced it...and left the old cables there. But that was nothing compared to just a little later, when I tackled the network situation.
For two stations, they had:
2 routers. 5 switches. A wi-fi adapter, even though the routers had that capability, an adsl modem backup and a...56k modem. ALL plugged. ALL linked.
Turns out they switched providers, and they didn't bother removing the old equipment. They just linked everything together.
Man, what a night it was -_-

Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than *right* now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!

I can't remember the last time I had THIS MUCH FUN developing an Android app! 😳 Have a paper due, but learning RN is actually making this pet project a huge distraction! 😳 This is a whole new world of mobile development 😆, but what if another framework takes it's place 😵. But there's still people who know Angular, and that's widely used...right 😓 and moble dev has never been this easy, so maybe it'll stick around like Node...

who cares... I'M FUCKING LOVING React Native now!!! 😆

sitting at work handjamming xml, turn around and tell my senior dev"it would be great if i could write a program to just search this folder and grab all the names for me..." he looks at me like like i have about 20 heads and am an idiot, after about 2 minutes of staring at me he remembers im fairly new and just tells me its super easy in C#... so i learned C# real quick. Anything to make my job easier right?

Well well well.
Story time.

Since we are working from home for the past 4 months, I finally decided to install a Microsoft SQL server on my home server. (Mostly was using Azure)

My server is running Windows Server 2012 R2.
Tried installing SQL 2019 : fail, 2016 : Fail, 2012 : Fail. Some obscure message about some DLLs not being at right version. (And a warning that it is no recommended to install SQL server on domain controller, but I know, it is my home setup, not roduction)

“Ok fine, I’ll install it on my PC instead”. Windows 10 PC. NOPE. “Cannot install on a compressed drive”. Welp, wtf ? (Of course you cannot select destination install folder, I could’ve put it on another drive).

So here I am. Working 100% on Windows, installed Ubuntu server 20 LTS in Hyper-V, Installed Microsoft SQL server on it (BTW, install is very easy compared to windows). And that shit is working. And new “Terminal” app does support SSH out of box, no need to add Putty !

So as a Windows user, I needed Linux to make Microsoft SQL techno work.

Nothing will ever surprise me anymore. (BTW it’s fucking fast. I like SQL server on Linux)

I just had such a forfilling moment.

Normally, i often (force myself) go to bed at night, after i worked on a project of mine, with these thought saying "oh man i wanted to get that feature done today" or "i want to finish this and that part of my code".I am sure everyone of you knows the feeling, when your brain communicates that you are just not done for today.

Today it was different. I got a project of mine working in it's first state, where i put much heart, love and time in.Just a few minutes before i finished for today i got my server responding the expected numbers(some kind of pin-code). It's a very easy system: Someone(at the time only me and my debug mode :3) on a android phone request a verification which is checked and processed by the server. The server creates a random six-digit number, returns it encoded to the client and sends an email to the user, which currently sends it in plain text(shame on me).
Yeah, the user enters the number and voilà
And of course, all the Pincodes can only be used once.
I got to bed with this feeling of luck and succes.

I hope tomorrow is going to be a productive day!

I am so lucky right now.

Have a good day everyone!

So I've been working a project while now. last week we got a lot of changes from the client and the boss suggest we pull one of the senior devs from another project to help out. All good...until I checked the code...WTF!
For ex we have a method that checks and update weather info, if required, and returns a view(100 lines of code). so the client wants the weather to display differently in certain areas. exactly same data and everything just the view to look different. easy right..? Mr "senior" dev duplicates the method each time and just change the return statement to a different view...Fuck me right? Oh and 90% of CSS statements ends with !important. senior my fucking ass!

I have a junior friend living in same building where I used to live. I used to help him in small doubts related to college and in some random stuff.

I once typed an application in a language which does not have its fonts in ms word by default. I used Google typing tools and Google docs to type and format it. I even taught him the process which is easy to understand.

Out of blue, after few years, this SOB pings me today and asks same thing to do again since it's urgent. I told him that I am middle of something and told him to use same tools as I used and give it a try. This fucker says he forgot how to do it. Well no problems, I told him how to do it and I will not be able to do it for him right now.
He said then try doing it after coming back to home.

Mind you that he is an engineering student.
You asshole, if it is so much urgent then use your brain and figure out this small thing yourself. If you can wait till I come back home then in which fucking way it's urgent? Go fuck yourself. I am done with your shitty attitude and on next offense you are going on my block list.

After playing et and wow a few year it all started when I hosted my own ts2 server with npo license. Rented a server for 90 bucks as a highschool student (13) with no job. (Who the fuck rented to me? I had my own bank account and lied about my age. Had a credit card at 14 but that's another story)

*Shit is expensive*

How does one get some value out of a server? Oh right, let's host Webspace and ftp accounts.

That got me into server administration and bash.

After dropping wow in bc i started playing on private servers.

*Shit is buggy*

How do you fix wow server? Let's learn c++ and push patches to arcemu. Why is this part crashing on this one server? Let's look at the binary. Wtf is this? Oh assembler?!? Ok let's try to read this. Ok I get it now. Let's fix the code.

Ok let's host my own wow private server. We need a website for account creation.
Let's learn php. Wait php is easy compared to mastering c++? I need an app for my first smartphone (iPhone 3g) to manage the server on the go. Let's learn how to do that. Why is this so easy? Switching to Android: wait java is even easier?

And that's how I learned that if you start with the hard part and grasp the concept, everything more abstract is significantly easier. If you start to read code to learn any language it's easier then following books (for me at least). If you get an error, track it down, you might learn amazing things in the way.

And if you want to get into reverse engineering, start by being passionate for the thing you want the reverse. It will be hard before it gets easier and you will need all the willpower you can muster not the just stop.

Programming for me is not a job but my passion. It's like I'm on vacation every day of the year (expect meetings, fuck meetings)

Anyone ever just get seriously discouraged about peoples view on how easy/difficult it is to code?

A client has requested that they want a system built so they can create surveys and send them to people via email all in one tool. Im not a good front end designer but I know how to develop it. So they hired a designer to send me screen mockups and I will develop them. Easy enough.

This is where the bullshit starts... The designer was supposed to send me the V1 designs last Friday so I could begin building. I told them that I could have a rough version of some pages (with placeholder text and whatnot) ready for the following Friday (tomorrow). However the designer didn't send me the designs until 5 minutes before we were all meeting yesterday. We were all going over the designs in the meeting and this is how the conversation went (roughly):

Client: Wow these designs are amazing, I cant wait to see what it looks like when it functions. Are we still going to have a demo version by Friday?

Me: Well seeing as I just got the designs today, Ill have to look them over and get back to you on a new timeline.

Designer: Yah sorry about the delay, designing can be tricky sometimes.

Client: No worries, I understand. However I want to stick to the same timeline and have the demo by Friday.

Me: Well as I said, Im only getting the designs now, this is the first time I'm seeing them so I'll have to look them over and re-evaluate.

Client: Yeah but the designs are done so it will be easy for you to code it by then. It's all right there in front of you. I need to run, excited for Friday! Bye!

Designer: Bye!

Me: ...........

-- I know its partially my fault for saying I could have a demo done by Friday assuming the designer would have it done on time but COME ON. I hate when people say something is easy when they have no idea what it entails or how to even do it.

God I fucking hate macs.
I got a mac at work. I tried to install ubuntu, with rather questionable results (unfortunately, I expected that) - so I tried to get mac work for me the way I like a system to work. I needed to download slack, simple enough, right? Ha, you wish. It's gotta be done through Apple store, so I went to create an Apple ID inside the Apple Store form. And, well, it just errored out on the submission. Great start. I went then to the settings and created an account there, great success, went back to Apple Store. Unfortunately being logged in at the system level doesn't mean you are logged in to the store. So, I went to log in to the store, simple enough, right? No, nothing's simple with Apple. After logging in I got a message that the Apple ID has not yet been used with Apple Store and that I need to review the account's setting. So, I click the "review" button and... I'm presented with a log in form. Yep, a perfect log in loop. I can't log in because I can't review the account but I can't review the account because I can't log in. Fun :)

You can't just go to the web admin panel for your account to review it for Apple Store, that would too be too easy. After a bit of searching I've found an answer on StackOverflow. You need to log in to iTunes. Through a fucking MUSIC APP. To install a free application from the store you need to log in to a music app. Yes, we're all mad here.

Then, after finding out that to be able to use side buttons on my mouse I need an app that I need to manually restart every time I restart the machine and that I need to have an app to fucking transfer files from an android I need another fucking app, because reading a storage of a linux-based system would be too standards compliant - something in me broke. I found out that installing windows on a mac is officially supported.

Supported doesn't mean that it's easy. I tried to install it trying different solutions from SO, but each time I would get an error that Windows couldn't modify the boot partition. Turns out that even wiping the drive and reinstalling OSX doesn't remove residual files on a boot partition and Windows installer is not allowed to modify them. It took me hunting into some shady looking site to actually find this answer. I have no fucking idea how long it all took me, but, finally, great success, Windows, WSL, side buttons working, I can even install slack from an installer. I just wish I could have those hours of my life back.

Got a Student job during July. When I arrived the first day they gave me the project they need me to work on.

They want me to create an intranet for the department based on a SharePoint infrastructure.
After 3 days of working on it, I'm starting to realize how hard it'll be since I don't have any admin access (would have been too easy). It's a multinational company so I have limited access to everything. No access to Sharepoint designer, neither to Sharepoint Admin Center and on top of everything, I don't even have the right to embed scripts to the pages.

Oh, and did I mention that I'm learning Sharepoint from scratch ?

It's fun to learn and to try to overcome problems and limitations but I'm really starting to stress about the final result ...