Just told my dad that python 3.6 launched yesterday, he asked me if i wanted it for christmas 😅

Today my current company fuck itself.

We were in negotiations about the end of my contract/mission, I want to quit to create a company around AI.

And the actual chairman said to me "You think too highly of yourself. I could find a tenth of people to replace you so shut up and take what we offer".

30 minutes later they received my resignation. 1h after that, the 15 dev under me resigned (after two year working with us they are clearly under paid). At the end of the day, the Head of product and the two good PO resigned.

This morning I get an email, talking about suing me as I made everyone resigned and asking for a meeting.
So I went to the meeting with a lawyer, they weren't expecting it. Boring legal stuff came after that.

And the funny fact: at the end of the meeting the CIO, chief ops and the SRE resigned as well.... As they didn't want to have the run it without all the team...

Funny day :)

Last month the main product, 90% of the company use it, was launched. And in three months 80% if the IT profiles will be out...

A devRant Update!

Hey everyone,

We thought now would be a great time for a devRant summer update on what we've added recently and what we've been working on.

Highlights since our last update:

- We launched devRant++, a supporter program for people who want to help us cover our costs while getting some cool extra features (a supporter badge on rants/comments/profile, reserved spot on our in-app supporter list, ability to edit rants/comments for up to 30 minutes instead of 5, and thanks to immediate user feedback, we also added the ability to post a rant every 1 hour instead of 2, and post comments that are up to 2,000 characters instead of 1,000!) We are extremely happy and thankful for the great response the program has gotten and we plan to continue to improve it using your feedback.

- We added the ability to subscribe to a user's rants. This makes it so you get a notification whenever that user posts a new rant!

- We added an "active discussions" feature (available in the "more" tab on the right). If you're looking to join a conversation happening in the moment, then this feature will help you discover those rants. It shows rants that have recently been commented on so if it's a topic that interests you, you can easily get in on the discussion!

Some stuff we have in the pipeline:

- More fun avatar stuff, including fun new OS/language-themed pets
- More perks for the devRant++ subscriber program - if you have anything you'd like to see, please let us know and we will try to make it happen!
- We will be testing some stuff to help classify rant types (rants, jokes, questions, etc.) in order to create a more personalized experience
- On that note, we're also going to take some more time to do some work on the algo as we haven't done much in terms of improvement since the initial smart algo launched
- Community projects page update - we've been slacking on updating the page and apologize for that. If you have created a devRant-related project and it's not on the community page, please resend it to david@hexicallabs.com (even if you sent it already) so we can make sure it gets added. Sorry about that!

A note on community etiquite regarding voting on content:

We've always believed that one of the most important and awesome experiences on devRant is getting your content noticed and appreciated by others. If you enjoy a piece of content, you should upvote it. If you enjoy 500 pieces of content, you should upvote them all. People really appreciate others enjoying their rants and comments so let them know if you do! If you don't like content, you can downvote it with the relevant reason. What we don't encourage is voting on content that you haven't actually looked at or spamming upvotes in mass for content you're not even actually reading/viewing. While we don't encourage that, it's not explicitly disallowed so we won't impose any penalty for it.

What is strictly prohibited and enforced is using scripts or automated procedures for voting on content. Anyone who is caught doing that will have their account deleted without warning. While very rare, we caught a couple of people doing that this week and both accounts in question were immediately deleted once discovered. To be clear, this is the practice of explicitly using a script or automation to mass vote on content. You will NEVER be banned/deleted for voting on a lot of content manually, even if you vote quickly and on lots of stuff. We just want to make that clear becuase this is not meant to discourage people from voting, it is only regarding votes not placed by humans. So if you're a human voting on content, you have nothing to worry about, we promise!

Please feel free to let us know if you have any questions or feedback on any of this. We love constructive feedback and in the past it has gone a very long way to improving and advancing the devRant community. And as always, thank you to everyone who contributed to the community in any way, we really appreciate it and want to keep making your experienfce better.

Happy ranting,
~David and Tim (Team devRant)
@dfox @trogus

Good Morning!, its time for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!

Todays contestant is a very special one.

*sitcom audience: WHY?*

Glad you asked, you see if you were to look at his linkedin profile, you would see a job title unlike any you've seen before.

*sitcom audience oooooooohhhhhh*

were not talking software developer, engineer, tech lead, designer, CTO, CEO or anything like that, No No our new entrant "G" surpasses all of those with the title ..... "Software extraordinaire".

*sitcom audience laughs hysterically*

I KNOW!, wtf does that even mean! as a previous dev-ranter pointed out does this mean he IS quality code? I'd say he's more like a trash can ... where his code belongs

*ba dum tsssss*

Ok ok, lets get on with the show, heres some reasons why "G" is on the show:

One of G's tasks was to build an analytics gathering library for iOS, similar to google analytics where you track pages and events (we couldn't use google's). G was SO good at this job he implemented 2 features we didn't even ask for:

- If the library was unable to load its config file (for any reason) it would throw an uncatchable system integrity error, crashing the app.
- If anything was passed into any of the functions that wasn't expected (null, empty array etc.) it would crash the app as it was "more efficient" to not do any sanity checks inside the library.

This caused a lot of issues as some of the data needed to come from the clients server. The day we launched the app, within the first 3 hours we had over 40k crash logs and a VERY angry client.

Now, what makes this story important is not the bugs themselves, come on how many times have we all done something stupid? No the issue here was G defended all of this as the right thing to do!

.. and no he wasn't stoned or drunk!

G claimed if he couldn't get the right settings / params he wouldn't be able to track the event and then our CEO wouldn't have our usage data. To which I replied:

"So your solution was to not give the client an app instead? ... which also doesn't give the CEO his data".

He got very angry and asked me "what would you do then?". I offered a solution something like why not have a default tag for "error" or "unknown" where if theres an issue, we send up whatever we have, plus the file name and store it somewhere else. I was told I was being ridiculous as it wasn't built to track anything like that and that would never work ... his solution? ... pull the library out of the app and forget it.

... once again giving everyone no data.

G later moved onto another cross-platform style project. Backend team were particularly unhappy as they got no spec of what needed to be done. All they knew was it was a single endpoint dealing with very complex model. There was no Java classes, super classes, abstract classes or even interfaces, just this huge chunk of mocked data. So myself and the lead sat down with him, and asked where the interfaces for the backend where, or designs / architecture for them etc.

His response, to this day frightens me ... not makes me angry, not bewilders me ... scares the living shit out of me that people like this exist in the world and have successful careers.

G: "hhhmmm, I know how to build an interface, but i've never understood them ... Like lets say I have an interface, what now? how does that help me in any way? I can't physically use it, does it not just use up time building it for no reason?"

us: "... ... how are the backend team suppose to understand the model, its types, integrate it into the other systems?"

G: "Can I not just tell them and they can write it down?"

**
I'll just pause here for a moment, as you'll likely need to read that again out of sheer disbelief
**

I've never seen someone die inside the way the lead did. He started a syllable and his face just dropped, eyes glazed over and he instantly lost all the will to live. He replied:

" wel ............... it doesn't matter ... its not important ... I have to go, good luck with the project"

*killed the screen share and left the room*

now I know you are all dying in suspense to know what happened to that project, I can drop the shocking bombshell that it was in fact cancelled. Thankfully only ~350 man hours were spent on it

... yep, not a typo.

G's crowning achievement however will go down in history. VERY long story short, backend got deployed to the server and EVERYTHING broke. Lead investigated, found mistakes and config issues on every second line, load balancer wasn't even starting up. When asked had this been tested before it was deployed:

G: "Yeah I tested it on my machine, it worked fine"

lead: "... and on the server?"

G: "no, my machine will do the same thing"

lead: "do you have a load balancer and multiple VM's?"

G: "no, but Java is Java"

... and with that its time to end todays episode. Will G be our most incompetent? ... maybe.

Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

This happened at my previous job where I worked for a dating app. It was at a time where the CEO was trying to turn the dating app into “more than a dating app” by adding tons of social features. We always had “interests” which allowed users to see what interests they had in common with another person, but he wanted to take the social component even further.

So with that, he decided we needed an “activity feed.” The activity feed would show what various Facebook connected users were liking on Facebook, posting on Facebook, etc. On a dating app. Where the majority of the audience was > 50 years old. The idea was absolutely ridiculous and everyone but the CEO knew it was destined for failure before we started building it.

But that’s not the best part. The best part was when we launched the activity feed component. We launched it late on day and went home shortly after. The next morning, we came in, and checked on the activity feed to see what was doing. It was literally all spammers liking porn/sex related stuff on Facebook. It was a complete disaster. All garbage but not just boring garbage - completely obscene garbage.

And just like that, the activity feature came and went in the course of a few days.

Myself 1 week into programming
"I can build a website!!"

Myself 2 years later and multiple web and mobile apps launched
"I know nothing"

The story of the $500,000,000 error.

In 1996, an unmanned Ariane 5 model rocket was launched by the European Space Agency.

Onboard was software written to analyze the horizontal velocity of the spacecraft. A conversion between a 64-bit floating point value and a 16-bit signed integer within this software ultimately caused an overflow error just forty seconds after launch, leading to a catastrophic failure of the spacecraft.

That day, $7 billion of development met it's match: a data type conversion.

When the senior Linux engineer puts a terminal game on a server everyone uses which launched at login and after a little you start hearing oh's, wtf's, laughing and everything and then you suddenly have a whole room of Linux engineers playing some kinda terminal space invaders game while doing customer support.

😆

Confessions of a Programmer

#1
If a client is an unbearable asshole during the initial communication, I look for every excuse to pad on the hours for the estimate to get paid more. If a client goes above and beyond in their douchbaggery, I tack on an additional $40/hour.

#2
Sometimes I will present an elaborate solution to a client, but really I'm just reading off the features of a plugin or library I'm going to download or buy after the call. Not because I can't build it myself, but because I'd rather spend more time on other/my own projects.

#3
Clients assume because I know one language, I know them all. Rather than turning down the work, I take a crash course to work in that language, or outsource the work and clean it up afterwards, whichever is more practical at the time.

#4
I use cPanel on a dedicated to manage our client websites. I'm not paid enough to bother with setting up everything manually.

#5
Certain projects I build have a 3-day backdoor built into it. If the client doesn't pay upon completion, a unique hash triggered as a GET variable deletes a core file in my work, rendering the work useless. If it wasn't triggered by the 4th day, the file allowing me to trigger this backdoor is removed. This is only used for clients where the project must be launched on their servers, or if there has been a previous issue collecting payment.

#6
I slip in the initial contract that all preceeding phone calls will be monitored and recorded, and that they acknowledge the recordings are admissable in court. This has saved me from losing money twice now.

#7
I have never used an IDE. (I know, I know, it's really inefficient and dumb, but I'm just more comfortable with Sublime. Plus I often find myself mobile and without my computer, so I have to program from my phone.)

#8
Each day resembles a betting spectacle of which work will be late, which will be rushed out and which will never see the light of day.

#9
I have used "sick" and "family emergency" as an excuse to just sleep in far more than I can count.

#10
When a client from hell crosses over the line in their conduct (such as getting very nasty and personal, or sending threats), I anonymously report them to the BBB and on RipOffReport.

LONG RANT AHEAD!

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

mvn clean && mvn install

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

mvn clean && mvn install

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

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

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

We just launched our new stories feature! If you go to the "stories" section, you'll see only rants that are over 70 words and you'll be able to easily enjoy the best long-form rants on devRant!

Just to clarify - all functionality is remaining the same. The main feed will still show all rants. Stories just makes it easier to find fun rants that involve more detailed stories/ranting and helps give them some more exposure.

We hope you enjoy! Feel free to comment here if you have any questions/suggestions about this.

rant? rant!

I work for a company that develops a variety of software solutions for companies of varying sizes. The company has three people in charge, and small teams that each worked on a certain project. 9 months ago I joined the company as a junior developer, and coincidentally, we also started working on our biggest project so far - an online platform for buying groceries from a variety of vendors/merchants and having them be delivered to your doorstep on the same day (hadn't been done to this scale in Estonia yet). One of the people from management joined the team working on that. The company that ordered this is coincidentally being run by one of the richest men in Estonia. The platform included both the actual website for customers to use, a logistics system for routing between the merchants, the warehouse, and the customers, as well as a bunch of mobile apps for the couriers, warehouse personnel, etc. It was built on Node.js with Hapi (for the backend stuff), Angular 2 (for all the UIs, including the apps which are run through a WebView wrapper), and PostgreSQL (for the database). The deadline for the MVP we (read: the management) gave them, but we finished it in about 7 months in a team of five.

The hours were insane, from 10 AM to 10 PM if lucky. When we weren't lucky (which was half of the time, if not more), we had to work until anywhere from 12 PM to 3 AM, sometimes even the whole night. The weekends weren't any better, for the majority of the time we had to put in even more extra hours on the weekends. Luckily, we were paid extra for them, but the salary was no way near fair (the majority of the team earned about 1000€/mo after taxes in a country where junior developers usually earn 1500€/month). Also because of the short deadline given to us, we skipped all the important parts like writing tests, doing CI, code reviews, feature branching/PR's, etc. I tried pushing the team and the management to at least write tests and make feature branches/PRs, but the management always told me that there wasn't enough time to coordinate and work on all that, that we'll do that after launching the MVP, etc. We basically just wrote features, tested them by hand, and pushed into the "test" branch which would later get tested and merged into master.

During development, one of the other juniors managed to write the worst kind of Angular code you could imagine - enormous amounts of duplication, no reusable components (every view contained the everything used in the view, so popups and other parts that should logically be reusable were in every view separately), fuck - even the HTML was broken (the most memorable for me were the "table > tr > div > td" ones, but that's barely scratching the surface). He left a few months into the project, and we had to build upon his shit, ever so slightly trying to fix the shit he produced. This could have definitely been avoided if we did code reviews.

A month after launching the MVP for internal testing, the guy working on the logistics system had burned out and left the company (he's earning more than twice the salary he got here, happy for him, he is a great coder and an even better team player). This could have been avoided if this project had been planned better, but I can't really blame them, since it was the first project they had at this scale (even though they had given longer deadlines for projects way smaller than this).

After we finished and launched the MVP, the second guy from management joined, because he saw we needed extra help. Again I tried to push us into investing the time to write tests for the system (because at this point we had created an unstable cluster fuck of a codebase), but again to no avail. The same "no time, just test it manually for now, we'll do that later when we have time" bullshit from management.

Now, a few weeks ago, the third guy from management joined. He saw what a disaster our whole project was. Him joining was simply a blessing from the skies. He started off by writing migrations using sequelize. I talked to him about writing tests and everything, and he actually listened. He told me that I'm gonna be the one writing them, and also talked to the rest of management about it. I was overjoyed. I could actually hear the bitterness in the voices of the rest of management when they told me how to write the tests, what to test, etc. But I didn't give a flying rat's ass, I was hapi.

I was told to start off by writing a smoke test for the whole client flow using Puppeteer. I got even happier, since I was finally able to again learn new things (this stopped at about 4 or 5 months into the project).

I'm using jest as the framework and started writing the tests in TypeScript. Later I found a library called jest-extended, but it didn't have type defs, so I decided to write them and, for the first time in my life, contribute to the open source community.

Maybe it's just me, but since devRant launched, Twitter has been much less interesting.

I know I have ranted here before about how I hate this client and the changes they are always making, but today the app was officially launched with a big media presence! I have never felt such kind of joy as a dev before!

Great news, our company's has a brand new security-first product, with an easy to use API and a beautiful web interface.

It is SQL-injection-enabled, XSS-compatible, logins are optional (if you do not provide a password, you are logged in as admin).

The json-api has custom-date formats, bools are any of "1", "0", 1, 0, false or null (but never true). Numbers are strings or numbers. Utf-8 is not supported. Most of our customers use special characters.

The web interface is using plain bootstrap, and because of XSS it is really easy to customize everything.

How the hell this product got launched is beyond me.

Ex-coworker of mine fixed this bug a week after the site was launched and has gathered several thousand users in database.

Yep its exactly what you think it is, each time one user would update its infos, it would update his infos to all the users in the database.

Luckily I was not in charge of the project in that time, so it was really fun to watch how everyone's name was changing every couple of minutes for a whole week :D

!rant
The change log from notepad++ update. The last paragraph is the cream!

" The issue of a hijacked DLL concerns scilexer.dll (needed by Notepad++) on a compromised PC, which is replaced by a modified scilexer.dll built by the CIA. When Notepad++ is launched, the modified scilexer.dll is loaded instead of the original one.
It doesn't mean that CIA is interested in your coding skill or in your sex message content typed in Notepad++, but rather it prevents raising any red flags while the DLL does data collection in the background.

It's not a vulnerability/security issue in Notepad++, but for remedying this issue, from this release (v7.3.3) forward, notepad++.exe checks the certificate validation in scilexer.dll before loading it. If the certificate is missing or invalid, then it just won't be loaded, and Notepad++ will fail to launch.

Checking the certificate of DLL makes it harder to hack. Note that once users’ PCs are compromised, the hackers can do anything on the PCs. This solution only prevents from Notepad++ loading a CIA homemade DLL. It doesn't prevent your original notepad++.exe from being replaced by modified notepad++.exe while the CIA is controlling your PC.

Just like knowing the lock is useless for people who are willing to go into my house, I still shut the door and lock it every morning when I leave home. We are in a f**king corrupted world, unfortunately. "

At my first job, I got tired of having to type a user name and password every time I debugged the web application. Thinking I was clever, I put in a hack so that if you launched the application with the query string "?user=Administrator" it would log you in as the administrator. So much typing saved!

A couple days after the next release, I realized it shipped like that. In absolute horror, I walked into my boss' office, closed the door, and told him the tale of my mistake.

He just looked back at me, and after a moment or two said, "Loose lips sink ships."

And that was it.

When pandemic hit in 2020 I found myself out of work. Until then I used to have a java based pirate gameserver of a MMORPG as a hobby.

When pandemic hit I noticed that online players count increased from like 70 to 200 without much advertising because purely of people being stuck in home. So i decided to scale and spent 2 years with that. What a wild ride it was.

So i invested a bit in ads, managed to reach around 500 online players, opened my own company and launched a couple other successful spinoffs of that gameserver.

First year it was a goldmine but I was doing 10-14 hour days because I had to take care of everything (web, advertising, payment integrations, player support and also developing the server itself, ddos protections and etc.). I made quite a bit of money, saved for a downpayment for mortgage and got an apartment.

Second year I noticed that there was a lot of competition and online players count dropped, but I double downed on this and invested a lot into the product itself and spent most of the time developing a perfect gameserver that would be the big bang while also maintaining existing ones. Clasic overengineering mistake. As you can guess, I crashed and burned on all levels, never even managed to launch my final project because simply the scope was too big and I had trouble finding decent devs to outsource it to, since it was a very niche gameserver.

In the end I learned a lot especially about my own limits and ownership, now Im back to being a dev but working as a contractor.

I believe having actual business owner experience allows me to have different perspective and I can bring more to the table rather than focusing on crunching tasks.

tl;dr; I've worked 117.5h/week for a month because of a project lead that doesn't understand what I do despite countless attempts at explaining

So, once a year I do this large project for a voluntary organization, it takes me about 80h (and this is of course on top of my normal work and voluntary engagement (60-80h/week))

This year, I realized I don't have as much spare time as I used to, so I emailed the project lead several months in advance like "hey, you know that I do all my work on this before the rest of you start working on it, and you know I need you to sit down for about an hour and put together the list of things I need to know to get this done properly. Could you please do that a bit earlier than usual, a week or two extra would make a big difference", they replied "absolutely, no problem!"

Time went by, and about two weeks before I wanted that info I emailed a small reminder. Shit me not, a month later, after a countless amount of reminders I finally get a half finnished version of the list I need, note that this is two weeks before I'm supposed to be done. Which is fine, it's the usual timespan, not what I hoped for as I hoped for an extra two weeks, but not too late either.

Then shit starts to happen

I reply to the list I've gotten with some requests for the project lead to complete some of the information, to which I receive multiple replies with different answers to the same questions, okay, that's fine, I'll just use the last answer.(?)

So, I finnish the thing on time, clocking out on a total of 117.5h of work per week, two weeks in a row. Still fine, it's just two weeks.

Release day!

I arrive at the release meeting, and is greeted by the project lead handing me two papers with the words "we haven't been able to look through your work yet to make sure it's like we want it, but we sat down yesterday and here's a list of how we want things to be". So I remind them that the thing is supposed to be done that day, and that it takes me 80h to redo, and those papers will require me to redo everything from scratch. To which the project lead responds "but it doesn't have to be finnished until December, right?"

That is not true, not at all, in any way.

See, there are 600 people that depend on this project, and they need, yes, need to be able to access it from the day it's launched every year. That is an absolute requirement.

So after trying to tell this project lead, for multiple years, how much time I devote to this project (for free) every year, during a short period of time, and after trying countless times to explain why it has to be done when the project is released, I became quite irritated.

So, during the two weeks that have passed since, I've been receiving about 200 emails from people wondering why the thing isn't finished yet and why they can't use it. (forwarded every single one of them to the project lead) and have been redoing it all during the past two weeks, from scratch.

I'm finally done, I released it yesterday, finally! I accompanied it with a bitter email to the project lead.

Because seriously, this is the worst respect for both my time and the people that should use the project's time in all of those years I've been doing this. This year, I've been ignored multiple times; they've shat on my work because it didn't live up to their expectations, even tough they never told me their expectations; I've been misinformed etc.

And now it's starting to get to me, this is the first weekend in a month when I've been able to shut down my laptop, sit down, drink a cup of tea, read a fricking book, chat with some friends etc, and most importantly, sleep. Signs of the stress I've had for a month now is starting to remind themselves.

And there's this little though nagging me in the back of my head: if the project lead would've worked for an hour in September I would've had to do half the job I ended up doing, on double the time. I hate realizing that they don't give a shit about my part of this, even tough I do half the work.

Then why do I continue, year after year? Because I feel that those 600 people that benefit from this really deserve it! But why does there have to be a dick project lead in the middle that makes me feel sick working on the thing I love the most!

So, as I'm not really used to ranting like this, i have to add that I really have no point with this rant. Just had to get it off my chest!

I played a lot of Command & Conquer when I was younger, and I remember going through the files for C&C: Red Alert. I found one that had all the units names and properties, and wondered what happened if I changed a value. So I changed grenadiers attack speed to something ridiculously fast, and found that it actually changed it in the game!

The light bulb went off in my head, and I then created new units:
- Albert Einstein that shot electricity
- Attack dogs that launched missiles

Granted the animations didn't exist for these so it defaulted to playing their death animations when attacking, which was amusing.

That was the ah-ha moment for me that lead me to pursue programming. It was just so much fun!

You've got to love Android development.. :D Just grabbed my laptop to start working on an idea I just had. Launched Android Studio to do some quick coding..

Update for the repo's..
Update for the IDE itself..
Update for gradle..

Started project. Need to update my build tools..

I.. I.. I just wanted to do some quick coding :D

*edit* Just tried to run the project.. "Acceleration driver is out of date, please update Haxm" .. Damnit..

Story of every failing tech startup (from personal experience, but a bit exaggerated):

Step 1: Come up with AMAZING idea that blows your mind!

Step 2: Run to investors to do presentation, continue to constantly repeat CLOUD, CLOUD, AI, CLOUD, MACHINE-LEARNING, MUCH WOW, MORE AI until investors are confused but mesmerized as fuck and decide to give you a shit ton of money.

Step 3: Hire all the developers you can find, a JAVA dev, a Python dev, a PHP dev, a Ruby dev, and ask them to get along with each other! I mean hey, they're adults right, they'll figure it out.

Step 4: Ask devs to launch the app, meanwhile, throw a LAUCH PARTY! HELLS YEA WE'RE ABOUT TO BE RICH BITCHES!

Step 5: Find out the hard way that no one needs a product that was launched! :/

Step 6: Pivot, and pivot next month again, and pivot again, and pivot in a middle of a pivot, and pivot pivot pivot pivot... and OH FUCK WE RAN OUT OF MONEY!

I applied for a flutter position at a company.They asked me if I have 5+ years of experience programming with flutter.
I left the room at that very instant.

Flutter was launched in 2017.

Before I continue, I should mention that I have a quality: I observe, find repetitive patterns and find ways to automate them. It just happens naturally, hardly ever intentionally.

I have been in this role for quite a while now. Most of my colleagues are of nationality X (I guess we all know what X is in IT projects). Naturally, there are lots of repetitions all over the place. So I started the automation.

The Frontend of the automation is a slack bot. It's just like another member of our team. And my goal was to make it as human-like as I could.

I launched the bot a few months ago.

Today I start my shift and see other employees of nationality X persistently asking my bot to join the conference call. Apparently, they assumed that the bot is just another X fellow...

Took them a while to give up.

What does that tell us about X.....

P.S. I have coded human-like conversation capability to keep on chatting even when the bot doesn't understand what it's asked to do.

So razer just launched their new game store and the CEO accidentally posted a code which gave you 50% off xD
Talk about having a bad day

"devRantron has been launched a total of 16620 times.
433 so far this month and 17 times today.
31.4% use Linux, 57.7% use Windows and 10.8% use macOS"

I assume the 31.4% Linux users are the most active.

PS : congratulations devRantron devs and nice work with the theme update.

Allright, I'm pissed.

Warning: more than 4k characters written by a non native english speaker ahead.

Legend:
Storytelling
> Short summary of the current situation
> "Something being said"
> (Something being thought)
* Actions *

-- Background --
In an attempt to reorganize my desktop I accidentally deleted a folder I called "development". In there I stored links to all my IDEs (Not sure how you call these in english), but also some workspaces like unity (Not much stuff there, processing (just some hobby stuff) AND Eclipse (FUCKING EVERYTHING RELATED TO SCHOOL WEB DEVELOPMENT). Now 3 days have passed and I realized this important folder was missing. Cleared that windows trash the instant I deleted the trash on my desktop.

> Shit, Regret

Install a file restore programm. Do every possible search. Nothing found.

> Big shit

Deadline was in like 3 days. Week was fucking rough so:
> "Screw this, the teacher nevet corrects the assignments and also fuck JSP"

Fast forward 2 months to last week. Teacher starts checking assignments.

> Fuck

* Sees pattern: Only students with missing or bad marks are checked. *

* Feels save *

Teacher approaching me while working on current projects.
* Doesn't feel save anymore *
> "Well, I'ld like to see your THAT programm"
> Well fuck
* Tells the truth *
> "Well that's unfortunate, but I must write a mark. Do you really have nothing to show?"
* Remember that I worked on the school pcs when I started *
> (Better than nothing. Gotta try it)
* Teacher checks programm, not pleased *

> (Fuck me, but at least it's over...)

> Nope

* Teacher calls me over *
> "With the mark I had to write today you can't reach that good mark even with a good examination, what are we gonna do about this?"

> "Well, there were other assignments that were never checked. Could we replace that mark with one of those?"

* Teacher agrees *
> (Srly bless this guy for that support)

My best choice was an Android app we had to develop during December in pairs. I did the front end (90% of the whole work) and my partner the backend (10 %). I also did 30 % of these 10 %, because I had to review the shit he wasn't able to debug himself.

> brainlogic.exe provided by windows vista

This distribution was partly my fault since I overestimated the work needed for the backend, but also the fault of that fucker. I mean, he didn't tell me the professor already provided 90 % of the backend...

Rest of the week was really busy (always 1 or 2 things to study for each day, workout and family stuff).

Yesterday (It's past 12 already) I arrived at ~9 pm in the dorm I could finally start reviewing my code.
Internet gets shut down at 10 pm.
Gotta hurry.

* Opens project *
* Sees half a year old code *
* Fights urge to puke *
> (Alright I gotta do this. For the mark!)
* waits for gradle to index files *
* Remembers the fact that I haven't opened Android Studio in the last 2 months *

For those who don't develop with android studio: This is an equivalent to ~10k windows updates waiting to be installed

> (Well, gotta work with this kinda old version)

"gradle sync failed"
> ( Ok, just restart it. You're fine )
* Android Studio doesn't react anymore and/or renders *
* Waits 5 min *
* Restarts laptop *
* Android Studio is reacting again*
"gradle is synching"
9:45 pm: gradle is done and I can finally compile my app

> FML

* Sees App launched on phone *
* Almost pukes again *

> (This was the assigment for the UX chapter, so design doesn't matter)

UX is decent. Proceeds with testing stuff. Save paths work, but some bugs can be caused by going of it

* fixes as much as possible *

* Takes quick look at backend *

Date date = new Date (GregorianCalender.getInstance().getTimeInMillis());

C'mon, I asked you to be the backend. You got 90% of the methods already written by the teacher and had 2 months to write the interfaces to my Front end AND you come up with shits like that.

Note: this example is a minor example of brainlogic.exe

I did what I could to make improve my situation. Hopefully he doesn't discover the bugs. And If it's a backend bug then I could't care less, since that was not my job!

Wish me luck for today!

Apple just launched a $5999 cheese grater

Launched my product yesterday. Been working hard on it for a year.

Got a bunch of day 0 signups from all over the world. I’m super delighted. Then I see a bunch of them “broken” in my database.

I dig in and... long story short:

Twilio are cunts. I thought they were a world beater. THEEE messaging api on the market.

Well it turns out you can’t sms North American numbers without setting up special provisions.

I can sms fucking Botswana and Ghana and Iceland and fucking KUWAIT (I actually got a member from Kuwait), but Twilio can’t fucking sms A-CUNTING-MERI-FUCKING-CA

Continuation of the story with Linux Mint 20 Cinnamon on the old Core2 Duo with 2 GB RAM and HDD. The guy has had that PC under Linux for 1.5 months now, had never had Linux before, has no IT background, and is over 70.

Upon visit, I checked how the machine was doing. OK, he had forgotten to apply the updates, so I highlighted paying attention to the red icon in the tray. Launched the updates, all ran through.

Otherwise, he had managed to install Skype all by himself (network effect because of his family...) and had bought a webcam plus a microphone. Linux had just recognised everything without any fuzz. Even his Skype buddies were impressed, he said.

On top of that, he likes how much faster that PC is compared to his much more current Win 10 laptop and actually uses the old Linux PC more than the laptop.

He also enjoys that Linux doesn't do weird things all by itself all the time. That's not his experience with Win 10.

My personal android app project started at android 1.5 and actually went to google play when android 4.2 was launched... With the look and feel of android 1.5...

Prior to that I spent about 2 years trying to make an Adobe Air app out of it.

I feel proud of my perseverance.

A meeting, non-technical PM to me:
"Could you borrow me your laptop? I haven't taken mine and want to make some notes."
"Yeah sure" I said, launched some text editor and turned the laptop to her side. During this motion other colleague had chance to glance at the screen. His eyes opened wide with mix of horror and WTF look:
"What the... That's really not good idea."

Turned out I was in complete autopilot mode and pressed Win key, entered "gvim", accepted by enter.

I've launched Vim.
To a non-technical person.

When you learn your project will be launched Monday in an email sent to the whole company, just before the weekend...

I'm not even kidding. No one on our team was consulted if the app was ready or not.

There was no infrastructure in place to even deploy the app. Everything had to be done in a hurry over the weekend to deploy something half baked, thanks to that idiot project manager who told his boss everything was ready.

Two colleagues ended up doing this work over the weekend, but looking back, if I was the one having to get something deployed over the weekend, I would have just refused and come back to work as usual on Monday and watch that idiot explain why it's not live.

Myself along with an artist and business entertainment guy met at a pub in October 2016 to discuss an idea for an app based company.

Launched version 1 in December 2016, had nothing.
Launched version 2 in August 2017, by the end of the year we were state-wide and partnered with numerous companies in the space. We also experimented with interstate.
This year we are aiming for country wide.

Today I launched a WordPress Page for a customer. Now I feel dirty and want to take a shower...

Launched my own GitLab today with fully functional SSL/TLS <3 loving it

Launched a CMS-site for a customer, created a 5-page "manual" (with screenshots) on how to update basic things like adding/removing employees from the site. One week later, I receive an email: "Could you please remove Paula from our site?"... Sure, it'll take me 2 minutes and you'll be billed for half an hour instead of you just RTFM!

Pseudo-rant:

I'm worn out from working a full-time job, working on my app, and having a family.

My app has potential, I launched it in July (iOS only so far) and am already well over 1000 active users. It's first week in the app store, it was in the top 100 for it's category.

It has some bugs that I'm working out, and some features that are in high demand.

I'm currently completely refactoring the API because I let it become spaghetti as I went from concept to v1.

That refactor means a rewrite of the website, and a major refactor of the iOS app, which is all fine and dandy.

On to the question: I am an engineer/architect, not a business major. I know I could really use help, and I know the perfect people to try to bring on, but also know I have nothing real to offer them other than a stake in the company.

As a developer, does a stake in a promising, but unproven company have enough prospect to sacrifice your time for?

Am I just being impatient, and should I continue nibbling at it myself until I get there, even if it takes a long time?

How do you determine the stake to give up, when you know that you COULD do it all yourself and keep all the monies?

I should have taken some business classes.

Thanks to Devrant I've learned about rubber duck debugging. Never heard of it before! It reminds me of a story many moons ago when I worked for a certain multinational company as a business analyst. The company brought in some consultants who basically stole the work my team was already doing on a big project (a horrendous series of spreadsheets linked to data coming from the core systems) and sold it back to the company for an insane amount of money as their idea.

When they launched the new product, the team I was in was asked to test and review it. It took my colleague ten seconds to bring the whole thing to its knees and trigger a corrupt data export back into the core systems. Bearing in mind this external company somehow managed to charge tens of thousands of pounds. So what did my colleague do? Hack the system? Some kind of complicated sabotage? Nope. He typed "FISH" into one of the spreadsheet cells! Thus the FISH test was born.

That day I learned several things: it's easy to break things with a fish; the importance of validating your input; and the satisfaction of showing up the smug bastards who stole your ideas and work.

So this happened when i was developing the iOS app for the company I work in. I was given half boiled code written by the previous employee to work on. The app was laid around a webview. Now in iOS, there are 2 kind of webviews, the UIWebView that works on all iOS versions, and the WKWebview that works only on iOS 8+.
The app was coded using UIWebview, I brouht that up with my boss, and he asked me to continue using it, even after I repeatedly informed him that the javascript engine of this webview is subpar and we could be better off with WKWebview. Fast forward to 12 weeks later. The application is ready and is given to the boss for testing. He runs the app and plays around for a day. The next day, he comes up to me and says "The javascripts aren't working that well, can we switch to WKWebview instead?" In the inside of my mind, I have already murdered him three times, on his face, however I say, "We can look into it."
So, basically I rewrote the whole app with WKWebView, retargetting the app to iOS 8+.
The app is tested and launched. Everythings fine. AND NOW, he comes up to me and says, "Can we switch it back to UIWebView? We really need the app to be universally available on the app store and 6% of our customers, still use iOS7."
You know how I felt and what I had to do. Goes without saying, that the application is available on the AppStore, targetting iOS 7+.

TLDR, iOS Dev, given half boiled code with UIWebview, tells boss about WKWebview (iOS8+) and advantages. He asks me to continue UIWebView. App developed, 12 weeks. He comes up and points to problems and asks me to retarget with WKWebview. Developed and App launched.
He comes up and says, we need iOS7+, retarget the app to UIWebview. FML.

** interview call**
HR: we are recruiting flutter developers.
me: ok...I am interested
HR: how many years of experience are you having with flutter ? we are looking for someone with a minimum of 3 yrs.
me: can you tell me when was flutter launched? (with a lame smile)
HR: ok thank you for your time. 🙂

FB launched profile picture guard feature recently for Indian users ( well, we Indian men deserve these kind of publicity. -.- anyone being on Indian forums knows what I am talking about )

Anyway it claims that othersa CANT download your profile picture. But. I just did inspect element and found the image and saved it (and deleted of course. This was for research purposes). How effective do you think this can be?

A cable company in my home country recently launched their cloud hosting solution.

Their cheapest plan is $125 and it comes with a 1vCPU, 1GB of RAM and 50 GB HDD. ARE YOU KIDDING ME. That's the equivalent of a $10 plan in DigitalOcean.

P.S.
Picking Linux or Windows does not change the price 😐

Successfully launched after 9 hours of bug fixing and patching. Let's se what will happen tomorrow. It's now 01.56, and I wanna sleep... Good night.

I have a Windows machine sitting behind the TV, hooked to two controllers, set up as basically a console for the big TV. It doesn't get a lot of use, and mostly just churns out folding@home work units lately. It's connected by ethernet via a wired connection, and it has a local static IP for the sake of simplicity.

In January, Windows Update started throwing a nonspecific error and failing. After a couple weeks I decided to look up the error, and all the recommendations I found online said to make sure several critical services were running. I did, but it appeared to make no difference.

Yesterday, I finally engaged MS support. Priyank remoted into my machine and attempted all the steps I had already tried. I just let him go, so he could get through his checklist and get to the resolution steps. Well, his checklist began and ended with those steps, and he started rather insistently telling me that I had to reinstall, and that he had to do it for me. I told him no thank you, "I know how to reinstall windows, and I'll do it when I'm ready."

In his investigation though, I did notice that he opened MS Edge and tried to load Bing to search for something. But Edge had no connection. No pages would load. I didn't take any special notice of it at the time though, because of the argument I was having with him about reinstalling. And it was no great loss to me that Edge wasn't working, because that was literally the first time it'd ever been launched on that computer.

We got off the phone and I gave him top marks in the CS survey that was sent, as it appeared there was nothing he could do. It wasn't until a couple hours later that I remembered the connectivity problem. I went back and checked again. Edge couldn't load anything. Firefox, the ping command, Steam, Vivaldi, parsec and RDP all worked fine. The Windows Store couldn't connect either. That was when it occurred to me that its was likely that Windows Update was just unable to reach the internet.

As I have no problem whatsoever with MS services being unable to call home, I began trying to set up an on-demand proxy for use when I want to update, and I noticed that when I fill out the proxy details in Internet Options, or in Windows 10's more windows10-ish UI for a system proxy, the "save" button didn't respond to clicks. So I looked that problem up, and saw that it depends on a service called WinHttpAutoProxySvc, which I found itself depends on something called IP Helper, which led me to the root cause of all my issues: IP Helper now depends on the DHCP Client service, which I have explicitly disabled on non-wifi Windows installs since the '90s.

Just to see, I re-enabled DHCP Client, and boom! Everything came back on. Edge, the MS Store, and Windows Update all worked. So I updated, went through a couple reboots-- because that's the name of the game with windows update --and had a fully updated machine.

It occurred to me then that this is probably how MS sends all its spy data too, and since the things I actually use work just fine, I disabled DHCP Client again. I figure that's easier than navigating an intentionally annoying menu tree of privacy options that changes and resets with every major update.

But holy shit, microsoft! How can you hinge the entire system's OS connectivity on something that not everybody uses?

Email: "We just launched our new web interface! It's so much easier to use, and should make life a lot easier for our users."

Me: Oh good this thing has been unusable since I've been working here. How do I get on the new version? Better read on...

"Download this PDF for more information!"

Erm... ok.

In the (20 page) PDF: "Email this address@example.com to get the URL!"

ffs ok

email: "Thank you for emailing us, you username is benoliver999, your password is 'passow0rd' and the url is in this attached PDF

god help me

(50 page) PDF: "Remember to disable pop up blocker, ad-block and to install Flash"

Today I have started building my own version of this product so we can stop using these idiots.

As an aside, the username 'admin' also had a password of 'passow0rd'...

A client of mine who has a competitor that launched android app this January. Now my client wants me to clone the app to her companies branding. I told her that's it's the best idea to make something unique and gives different experience to the user. She started arguing with me for shitty reason.

So I agreed to work on the app.

PS: She is beautiful, I will bang her for sure someday. She is the one who will take my virginity.

Breakup really kills the mood to work for a long time eh?

I have a multiplayer minesweeper project in the works. It's great, everything is super slick. Using SASS, Node.JS, MVC design, WebGL... It's a super great, modern project and I am very proud of it.

But I just can't continue it. I open my editor and I just ignore it. I play video games, go outside... Anything except code. It hurts to see myself do this.

I have some great designs for it. You're allowed to play anonymously or logged in. VS mode and everything.

I was going to share the discord link when I launched the alpha... But I think maybe I need to start building a community now so that I can gain my motivation back.

Before the breakup I worked on it daily. I was learning new technologies left and right (SASS being the largest, and WebGL is the next frontier)

It hurts to see. Today after I get off work maybe I will try harder.

That moment when you realise you just pushed a major bug whilst fixing another to the production website that launched earlier today.

Rolled back to working version, all within 30 seconds.

10 seconds later, client on phone... I just tried to load a page, why is my website broken?

They had to be loading it in that 30 seconds didn't they...?

As a developer, I constantly feel like I'm lagging behind.

Long rant incoming.

Whenever I join a new company or team, I always feel like I'm the worst developer there. No matter how much studying I do, it never seems to be enough.

Feeling inadequate is nothing new for me, I've been struggling with a severe inferiority complex for most of my life. But starting a career as a developer launched that shit into overdrive.

About 10 years ago, I started my college education as a developer. At first things were fine, I felt equal to my peers. It lasted about a day or two, until I saw a guy working on a website in notepad. Nothing too special of course, but back then as a guy whose scripting experience did not go much farther than modifying some .ini files, it blew my mind. It went downhill from there.

What followed were several stressful, yet strangely enjoyable, years in college where I constantly felt like I was lagging behind, even though my grades were acceptable. On top of college stress, I had a number of setbacks, including the fallout of divorcing parents, childhood pets, family and friends dying, little to no money coming in and my mother being in a coma for a few weeks. She's fine now, thankfully.

Through hard work, a bit of luck, and a girlfriend who helped me to study, I managed to graduate college in 2012 and found a starter job as an Asp.Net developer.
My knowledge on the topic was limited, but it was a good learning experience, I had a good mentor and some great colleagues. To teach myself, I launched a programming tutorial channel. All in all, life was good. I had a steady income, a relationship that was already going for a few years, some good friends and I was learning a lot.

Then, 3 months in, I got diagnosed with cancer.

This ruined pretty much everything I had built up so far. I spend the next 6 months in a hospital, going through very rough chemo.

When I got back to working again, my previous Asp.Net position had been (understandably) given to another colleague. While I was grateful to the company that I could come back after such a long absence, the only position available was that of a junior database manager. Not something I studied for and not something I wanted to do each day neither.

Because I was grateful for the company's support, I kept working there for another 12 - 18 months. It didn't go well. The number of times I was able to do C# jobs can be counted on both hands, while new hires got the assignments, I regularly begged my PM for.

On top of that, the stress and anxiety that going through cancer brings comes AFTER the treatment. During the treatment, the only important things were surviving and spending my potentially last days as best as I could. Those months working was spent mostly living in fear and having to come to terms with the fact that my own body tried to kill me. It caused me severe anger issues which in time cost me my relationship and some friendships.

Keeping up to date was hard in these times. I was not honing my developer skills and studying was not something I'd regularly do. 'Why spend all this time working if tomorrow the cancer might come back?'

After much soul-searching, I quit that job and pursued a career in consultancy. At first things went well. There was not a lot to do so I could do a lot of self-study. A month went by like that. Then another. Then about 4 months into the new job, still no work was there to be done. My motivation quickly dwindled.

To recuperate the costs, the company had me do shit jobs which had little to nothing to do with coding like creating labels or writing blogs. Zero coding experience required. Although I was getting a lot of self-study done, my amount of field experience remained pretty much zip.

My prayers asking for work must have been heard because suddenly the sales department started finding clients for me. Unfortunately, as salespeople do, they looked only at my theoretical years of experience, most of which were spent in a hospital or not doing .Net related tasks.
Ka-ching. Here's a developer with four years of experience. Have fun.

Those jobs never went well. My lack of experience was always an issue, no matter how many times I told the salespeople not to exaggerate my experience. In the end, I ended up resigning there too.

After all the issues a consultancy job brings, I went out to find a job I actually wanted to do. I found a .Net job in an area little traffic. I even warned them during my intake that my experience was limited, and I did my very best every day that I worked here.

It didn't help. I still feel like the worst developer on the team, even superseded by someone who took photography in college. Now on Monday, they want me to come in earlier for a talk.

Should I just quit being a developer? I really want to make this work, but it seems like every turn I take, every choice I make, stuff just won't improve. Any suggestions on how I can get out of this psychological hell?

Two years ago, I developed an security app for Android as a school project. I didn't like teamwork at school (you know, you do all the work and everyone else is getting the same grade you receive, specially if you are the nerd of the class), actually I hated it, so I made it alone.

Its name was "Alex" and was a simple "panic button". You can configure two emergency emails and phone numbers (contacts only, not police) and, if you're in danger, you just have to press the button and the app is gonna send two messages/emails to your contacts: the first one, to tell where are you (GPS, only the name of the place) and that you're in problems. The second one with an audio/photo file of the situation.

Sounds like a great app, and I tested it few times. The reason I didn't continue with this is that I got my first job and I had not time, and that, tree or four months later, the government (of the city) launched a similar app. Less sophisticated, but I think it's still useful: "No estoy sola"(I'm not alone). I haven't tested it cause I don't trust on the authorities, I'd preffer to send my location to a friend through messenger app instead.

I don't know if I should re-work this app (I didn't released it, I just have the beta) or work on something else. I'm afraid that, if I release it, someone could die or get kidnapped because of a bug or something going wrong with the app :c What do you think?

Dealing with other technical professionals who cannot think outside their respective boxes.

Here is an example.

A QA (who is very good at her job) said this...

Her:
“We need to get one customer who is willing to pay us a lot of money to make the features they want!”

Me:
“But you realize we are a SaaS company and that means we need lots of customers and constant growth”

Her:
“No, we need to find a customer who is willing to pay us, like a million, to make the features they want. Then we make them for that customer. Then we do that again.”

Me:
“We sell software to small businesses, none of them have a million dollars to pay us, and even if they did then why wouldn’t they build it themselves?

Her:
“Well, when I worked for my last company this is what we did...”

Me:
“So you worked for a contracting company who built software for individual companies. We are not that type of company. We are a SaaS company.”

Her:
“It’s the same thing”

Me:
~Facepalm~

As a software developer and entrepreneur it frustrates me when everyone think everything is the same.

You’ll here things like...

“All we need is to get lucky with one big hit and then we will ride that wave to success, just like Facebook or Amazon!”

Holy fucking shit balls, how stupid can you be!

FB and AZ run thousands of tests a day to see what works. They do not get “lucky”. They dark launched FB messenger with thousands of messages and then rolled it out to their internal team first, they did not get lucky!

Honestly though, I can’t blame them. Most people just want a good job that pays. They aren’t looking to challenge their assumptions.

Personally I know I will be in situations again where my pride, my assumption, my fears are realized and crushed by the market place and I do not want to live in a world of willful ignorance.

I’d rather get it right than feel good.

Finally launched the product I was working on :D

Gaming community of mine launched their slick new website with their new "ticket system" where people could put in tickets to get help by volunteers.

2 hours and an approval by one of the admins later I managed to inject forge http request into literally every form on that side. Modify permissions, delete users, edit tickets, put invalid values into every attribute of them... In other words break everything.
Turns out the whole thing was coded as a first time project by a person who has no clue about web development and noone is in charge of anything really. There are no requirements, no beta testing, no version control or backups, but at least they had a hard deadline. 🤣

Still not sure if I wanna fix their shit and do it properly or just enjoy seeing it crash and burn.

The Hungarian public transport company launched an online shop (created by T-Systems), which was clearly rushed. Within the first days people found out that you could modify the headers and buy tickets for whatever price you set, and you could login as anyone else without knowing their password. And they sent out password reminders in plain text in non-encrypted emails. People reported these to the company which claims to have fixed the problems.

Instead of being ashamed of themselves now they're suing those who pointed out the flaws. Fucking dicks, if anyone they should be sued for treating confidential user data (such as national ID numbers) like idiots.

Lads, this DDoS attack on DYN is must be getting pretty bad, the Department of Homeland security just launched an emergency investigation into the source and apparently Amazon has started being interrupted

You know you’ve been putting in too many extra hours when you try to use your house key on the office lock and it takes you 30 seconds to realize what’s wrong...

So you launched a new app/website. And you can't enjoj it because you expect it to break after each tap/click like it did during debugging. 😤

Not about favorite language but about why PHP is not my favorite language.

I recently launched a web shop built on Prestashop. I found that some product pages are so god damn slow, like taking 50 fuckin' seconds to load. So I started investigating and analyzing the problem. Turns out that for some products we have so many different combinations that it results in a cartesian product totalling about 75K of unique combinations.

Prestashop did a real bad job coding the product controller because for every combination they fetch additional data. So that results in 75K queries being executed for just 1 product detail page. Crazy, even more when you know that the query that loads all these combinations, before iterating through them, takes 7 fuckin' seconds to execute on my dev machine which is a very very fast high end machine.

That said I analyzed the query and now I broke the query down into 3 smaller queries that execute in a much faster 400 ms (in total!) fetching the exact same data.

So what does this have to do with PHP? As PHP is also OO why the fuck would you always put stuff in these god damn associative arrays, that in turn contain associative arrays that contain more arrays containing even more arrays of arrays.

Yes I could do the same in C# and other languages as well but I have never ever encountered that in other languages but always seem to find this in PHP. That's why I hate PHP. Not because of the language but all those fucking retarded assholes putting everything in arrays. Nothing OO about that.

Man I love VM's!

I'm on a very tight deadline and my laptop died this morning and needs a reformat, usually this would be a very dire situation... Luckily I use a virtual machine for my dev env so I just remoted into a pc at my office using my phone, launched an instance of my vm and forwarded a public IP to it.

I'm currently working on my rasberry pi while machines installing linux. The only noticeable difference so far is that I only have enough ram to keep open around 5 browser tabs. :-D

Client has an "urgent" release that needs to be launched immediately... So they keep changing the spec every few minutes with new changes, but are upset that the product isn't launched yet. Lol. Got to love clients.

We developed an application and deployed on production (but not launched)
And business team already created lot of garbage or dummy data. Reporting systems are huge pile of bars, stats and shit.

Now, has to destroy and clean production.

Already advise them to do experiments or testing dev or staging.

Damn. First time in my career experienced this. Has to delete production.

So this is less of a rant and more of a "I'm very excited" post

For the past 8 months I have been working on a redesign of a magazines Wordpress website. I could've completed this site but I wanted every detail to be perfect. I was the only developer / designer working on this project

Now after 8 months, WE WILL BE LAUNCHING THE REDESIGN FOR THE FIRST TIME NEXT WEEK!!!!!!! EVERYONE LOVES THE REDESIGN AND THIS IS THE FIRST MAJOR REDESIGN FOR THIS COMPANY EVER SINCE THEY LAUNCHED A WEBSITE 8 YEARS AGO!

Rant!

Been working on 'MVP' features of a new product for the past 14 months. Customer has no f**king clue on how to design for performance. An uncomfortable amount of faith was placed on the ORM (ORMs are not bad as long as you know what you are doing) and the magic that the current framework provides. (Again, magic is good so long as you understand what happens behind the smoke and mirrors - but f**k all that... coz hey, productivity, right?). Customer was so focussed on features that no one ever thought of giving any attention to subtler things like 'hey, my transaction is doing a gazillion joins across trizillion tables while making a million calls to the db - maybe I should put more f**king thought into my design.' We foresaw performance and concurrency issues and raised them way ahead of the release. How did the customer respond? By hiring a performance tester. Fair enough - but what did that translate into? Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Hiring a perf tester doesn't automagically fix issues. The perf tester did not have a stable environment, a stable build or anything that is required to do a test with meaningful results. As the release date approached, the customer launched a pilot and things started failing spectacularly with the system not able to support more than 15 concurrent users. WTF! (My 'I told you so' moment) Emails started flying in all directions and the hunt for the scapegoat was on (I'm a sucker for CYA so I was covered). People started pointing in all directions but no one bothered to take a step back and understand what was causing the issues. Numero uno reason for transaction failure was deadlocks. We were using a proprietary DB with kickass tooling. No one bothered to use the tooling to understand what was the resource in contention let alone how to fix the contention. Absolute panic - its like they just froze. Debugging shit and doing the same thing again and again just so that management knew they were upto something. Most of the indexes had a fragmentation of 99.8% - I shit you not. Anywho, we now have a 'war room' where the perf tester needs to script the entire project by tonight and come up with some numbers that will amount to nothing while we stay up and keep profiling the shit out of the application under load.

Lessons learnt - When you foresee a problem make a LOT of noise to get people to act upon it and not wait till it comes back and bites you in the ass. Better yet, try not to get into a team where people can't understand the implications of shitty design choices. War room my ass!

Dragon on falcon 9. First re-use of a commercial orbit-class space-craft!

Launched successfully
*giggles*

The solution to a long running bug hit me while I was ironing my shirt today. I took to my heels running upstairs to make the update on my PC and with my haste provoked a shock in the living room causing everyone to run after me.

Finally I got to my PC ignoring the puzzled crowd behind me. Turned it on, launched my VS and was about to make the update when my dad from behind patted my shoulder:

Dad: Hey, what made you ran that way? You got us all scared.
Me: * short gibberish explanation *
Dad: Next time be cautious of the people around you.
Me: * apologized to everyone *

Now back to my PC:
VS Code: (⊙_⊙)
Me: (⊙_⊙)
VS Code: (⊙_⊙)
Me: (⊙_⊙)

ヽ(°〇°)ﾉ Fuck I forgot the code. I forgot the fucking code!
Everyone back in the room... Me still screaming *fuck*

Lels

Before I was unceremoniously laid off by a shit company in which they tried to blame shit on me I was working on a opencv implementation of a proprietary document scanner.

I finished the Android prototype and was working on the ios implementation. It was left unfinished in the ios version because I was building it in swift and obj c to compare code bases.

They launched a shit unfinished Android app of their product without the scanner (they could not add the scanner lels) and have not been able to do shit on the ios version.

I did not give them the Android prototype. There was no binding contract that specified that what I developed was theirs. There is no record of anything.

The scanner? Is still in my phone and I still have the built project in my mac.
Unless them cheap assholes decide to pay another engineer for the opencv implementation, their vbscript php non theory knowing shit lead will have to figure out the required mat obj c swift java cpp code needed to build it.

Top kek

Identified the origin of the DDoS attack. Apparently, the person was just hopping through 3 IPs so looked like a targeted attack likely from a competitor. I sent the logs with incident notification to the abuse@hostprovider.com to ask them to suspend them.

Got a prompt response but took them a week to suspend this.

We were a very small team and had to stop everything to fix this-iptables and firewall etc.

We had not even launched the product and was still under development.

Product gets launched in 2 hours. Just casually updating the documentation. Nice chill day. Everything tested and validated.

Then some random f**king designer comes barging in vomiting all these "necessary" features to the product owner.

This was yesterday. The designer and product owner are currently complaining to us devs that there are bugs everywhere...

I need a beer.

You never know what you have till you lose it, I learned this after I launched my Ubuntu and I found my cursor to be absent :p

You guys work from home because of coronavirus?
Me on the other hand, have to work on weekend on my desk to finish an urgent project, it’s for the ministry of education (who closed all schools and launched an online courses) to monitor the effectiveness of the new platform and fix some bugs on it.

project launched and everything is going smoothly so far. since I have some time, I started writing documentation and I put this at the start of the document.

"So have you launched any apps on the app store? Or do you have any projects you're actively working on that you can share with us?"

Yeah because everyone likes to code for fun after coding at their 9-5...

Worked nights and weekends for a month to launch v1 of a fixed cost client project(ie, we lost money). Launched it successfully with a few 15 hour days at the end. Three days later the client tells us they are outsourcing the rest of the work to India.

Completely felt spurned like I worked super hard to impress a girl and then she ran off with some other guy.

so after several hours of irritated detective work, I've finally found out what is the thing that periodically, every about 10-15 seconds, starts two PowerShell processes which run for about a second or two and during that time take about 20% of my CPU capacity...

They're being launched from a commandline, to do GetPackages with name of OmenLightStudio, and the result is then piped into find.exe to find InstallLocation part.

...for whatever reason.
and this is done every 10 seconds by... *drumroll*
HP SYSTEM OPTIMIZER.

GOD. FUCKING. DAMMIT. YOU. MORONS.

...now only to find how the fuck do I uninstall that, since it's some plugin-ish kind of stuff for Omen Studio, and I can't find uninstall for it anywhere in the system nor Omen Studio itself...

So Minecraft Dunegons launched today.

Not my style of game, but I did purchase hero edition because fuck, the price is LOW given the IP attached and the fact that it was developed by Mojang. $20 for the full game and $30 for full game + extras? Incredibly refreshing in a market where $60 is standard for full game, and up to $75-80 for extras (like "I paid too much money" skins and such. I got a chicken pet and promise of two upcoming DLC with my extra $10)

Anyways I was happy with the price of a game for once and wanted to share!

So we're seating in our small dev room where nothing else and no one else can fit in. I'm sitting next to the door so whenever anyone want to get in or out I need to do it first.
It's middle of the day and one of our dev friends. You don't believe what he did.
He fixed bug. So I pushed the red button to signalise that the bug was fixed and at the same time the alarm siren has launched and red lights starts to blink. Next minute couple of strippers wants to enter. Since the room is small they started dancing on our desks. Waitress opens champagne that's pouring on my leg and then I woke up and my dog is pissing on me.

Company's HR team has launched a eco drive. As part of the initiative they're asking everyone to use only one tissue paper (among other things) to save trees.
.
.
So they've printed that message on thick glossy papers and pasted them, at least four per washroom among other places.

Okay, I guess.

Biggest regret is not what I have done, but what I haven't. A long long time ago, in the early 90s, I had a great idea for a game, but somehow I never made it come true. A few years later, Maxis launched a game very similar to my idea, and it was called The Sims.

So this company wanted their site launched early..so I coded for 3 days straight, hardly a wink of sleep and I launched it by the new deadline they gave me. Then they send me screenshots of a million problems with CSS and I'm like...THATS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU RUSH YOU STUPID PRICKS

So, I work in a game development studio, right?
We're trying to launch the title on as many platforms as reasonable, because as a social VR app we're kinda rowing upstream.
So far, Steam and Oculus have been fairly reasonable, if oddly broken and inconsistent.
Enter store 3.
Basically no in-game transaction support (our asking prompted them to *start* developing it. No, it's not very complete). No patch-update system (You want an update? Gotta download the whole fsckin' thing!). No beta-testing functionality for most of their stuff ("Just write the code like the example, it will work, trust us!"). No tools besides the buggy SDK (Wanna upload that new build? Say hello to this page in your web browser!).
So, in other words: Fun.

We've been trying to get actively launched for two months now. Keep in mind that the build has been up on Steam and Oculus for over a year and half a year (respectively), so the actual binary functionality is, presumably fine.

The best feedback we get back tends to be "Well, when we click the Launch button it crashes, so fail."
Meanwhile we're going back and forth, dealing with other-side-of-the-world timezone lag, trying to figure out what is so different from their machines as ours. Eventually we get them to start sending logs (and no, Windows Event logs are not sufficient for GAMES, where did you even get that idea????) except the logs indicate that the program is getting killed so terribly that the engine's built-in crash handler can't even kick in to generate memory dumps or even know it died.

All this boils down to today, where I get a screenshot of their latest attempt.

I just can't even right now.

I have nothing to play recently so I started playing old games.

Today I launched gta vice city on my old pc. Got more than 200 hours in that game during my childhood. Game from 2002 and I laughed when driving a car. It was so natural and fun. Michael Jackson singing Billy Jean and police chasing my ass when I’m trying to find a bribe in the city. That was fun.

For me most of today’s games can’t compete in gameplay mechanics with that game from 20 years ago.
Maybe we have better graphics but gaming fun got worse.

I think it’s cause most of games are made on commercial engines to save money and game studios focus on graphics cause it’s cheaper than paying software developer.

They focus on games to be competitive between players so ai got worse.

Big studio games became generic like movies, they don’t want you to have fun but they want to give you a story around by delivering lots of content in game, achievements, stars but the gameplay itself is bugged and meh.

They don’t focus on things people want to do but they focus on target groups. Most today’s big title games are meh cause they’re made by people who don’t play them.

They don’t play them cause they don’t have time cause of management that changes requirements cause they asked target groups and that would sell. Well if I play a game I’m not interested in story despite some basic stuff to keep the progress forward, if I wanted a big story I would watch a movie or tv show. I play games to explore, feel the world and have fun. I don’t need a linear deep story for that cause I’m in game so give me good gameplay so I can feel the world.

Most of classic game hits didn’t had tons of text and tons of stuff to do but they somehow wanted you to play more. Cause they were competitive between player and computer, the controls felt natural and while progressing you was eaten by the game mechanics more and more not by the story but by amount of stuff you could do as you progress or difficulty increase or enemies behavior change.

Now we’re getting all at once, mostly pointed and with detailed tutorial what you can do. There’s no explanation there’s no discovery what you can and what you can’t do at start. You get all and you decide to throw game away because the moment you launched it you got everything so you spent money just to get stuff you won’t play cause it’s meh and you go back to cs or other looter shooter to kill people cause you’re pissed off that the game was meh.

Well I’m glad I was a kid in 90s and 2000s cause I could enjoy gaming before it was targeted to broader public and become another shallow mass media industry that don’t give a fuck about gameplay cause they want to tell you so many things, they want you to know them cause they’re so important that they forgot that I can read a book and I came to play game to get a different feeling then reading book.

Modern games are like books filled with small stories and nice graphics where you can open it on every page and read a little piece of shitty crap.

Just take this piece and go to toilet so you can wipe your ass with that story and begin other one, look around, puke and go to toilet to take a dump again. I lost my hope to get something fresh or filled with nice gameplay from gaming industry. It’s dead.

Computer won't boot when I launched it this morning. Checked the post LEDs on the mobo and it's reading 00. It's not even reaching POST. Ideas?

!rant

My project is finally officially launched, it is a though and hard move since it's not yet finished.
Now for the next step, i need to find investors to fund our project. We got our publicity from news media, i hope i can get investors attention.

Nonetheless i'm proud from what i've created. I hope this company last

This is one of the picture from local news post about our launching.

When Facebook launched an all-out battle against Apple last year, little did they know that the war would be two-fronts.

Here we go again. Months have passed since this client first wanted their website launched. But because they were suddenly and inexplicably in no real hurry to make it go live, we are now waiting for them to get back to us on whether to push to Production. Meanwhile, I have bills to pay and as soon as I told them I need the check by no later than April 1st, everyone over there is no longer answering phone calls or emails. Voicemail box is full and not accepting any more messages.

I think this would be the part where I call "Big Nick" and ask him to pay them a little "visit". If I knew someone like that.

A few months a couple of my colleagues, a business consultant and a developer, worked on a big project. The project capsized because the client is an A-hole and the developer was way over his head.

To save the project I was brought on board. The entire code base was a fucking mess of duplicated code. Shortly after, the developer called in sick with stress, simply because the whole thing was too much.

Fast forward to now; we just launched. The client is expressing concerns about the quality of the work because of the bumpy road (rightly so). I try to explain why my way of doing things is better, but to "paint the picture" I had to compare my approach to my predecessor. This results in the business consultant shooting me down, right in front of the client.

I fucking saved your job, your project, and about $1M in profits. I'm allowed to tell the story of why my incompetent coworker messed everything up.

I'm so done walking on egg shells because some just don't realize they are not cut out for software development.

So a team of 3 went to a hackathon. One of us didn't know how to code, the other just front end and I back end.
So we started with some ideas and choose one, starting to code it.
After we were about 80 precent into it at the end of day 2 (the event had 3 days) one of the coaches came to us, saying our idea is already a launched startup out there and we had to have a change of idea at the beginning of the third day.
Other two completed the simple front-end of the new idea about 7am and went to sleep.
And I, while was awake for 50 hours already, had to code backend of a minipay app from scratch in 10 hours.
That was HARD for a newbie like me, but in the end I did it.
We didn't win anything. But that was a really great experience for me. Plus coffee was provided infinitely there ;)

Social Media. I have had the same message for 16 years from Linkedin ‘4 people visited your profile’. I still don’t give a fuck. Got a twitter account shortly after it launched, I still think it’s totally pointless. Recently looked at Instagram as everyone keeps asking me for it. There is no point to that either. It’s all fucking pointless and just a way to pretend you have a superior life to other sad mother fuckers. God I hate social fucking media!

On Tuesday my client states she will get me one more piece of info I need to launch the site.

On Wednesday, nothing.

On Thursday, nothing.

On Friday she berates me that the site is overdue and demands it be launched before Saturday so she can send the announcement email.

I remind her that I was waiting for the information.

She responds, testily, that the info wasn't mission critical after all and to just insert something as a placeholder. Oh, and that there had been a religious holiday and so nobody would have been available to respond to the information request anyways. Like I'm just supposed to know all that without anyone telling me.

I'm now trying to get the attention of our overseas developer, who is the only person who can pull this off, but he's likely clocked out for the weekend.

I'm so mad right now I'm about ready to burn the whole site to the ground, cut my losses, and just walk away. But that would damage my reputation.

I decided I should finally relocate from Russia. As one of the people I value much once said, it’s not about grass being greener, it’s about grass being alive.

I’m not going to buy a property here. Instead, I do this all at the same time:

- fixing my health (eye surgery done, quit smoking half a year ago, quit sugar several months ago, now through dental care and an obesity treatment with newest novo-nordisk stuff and sports, so far so good)

- gaining some momentum (newsletter launched, articles and open source stuff are published on a regular basis, it all gonna assembly to make my new website and a v2.0 media presence)

- learning (hands-on management and a11y experience on my current job as a tech evangelist, also a11y courses, bleeding edge JavaScript and css)

- saving money. Fuck rouble, just converting everything into usd covers up all commissions and taxes and basically makes me money

I’m going to accomplish all this and finally relocate.

Being attached to my city is a bias and a mind game. I just need to leave.

Hooray! Just launched prod!
So what does the team do?
Immediatly start testing on prod!
Facepalm.

Is it just me, or are the media / journalists once again putting a stupidly unfair pessimistic spin on that SpaceX launch?

"SpaceX rocket launches but explodes shortly into flight"
"Musk's SpaceX big rocket explodes on test flight"
"SpaceX rocket explosion: None injured or killed"

They've said time and time again, it's the first test of a massively complex rocket that's bigger than anything that's ever gone before it, and success is just defined as "getting off the launch pad" and collecting data. They did that and then some.

But instead of spreading excitement about the data, the fact it launched, that it's a world first, etc. - it's all doom and gloom, implying that the whole thing was a failure and people could have died 🙄

And people wonder why I have a low opinion of journalists.

Oh come on... they said the new website will be launched on 18 december because the old one will go down. So I was checking the result...

404

Anyone else have people that seem to constantly try to "prove" themselves to you in this weird, competitive way that only makes them seem... very annoying? I'll call him Bob here, but it's always something like:

Bob: Hi Almond, how's it going?
Almond: Ah not bad thanks, PSU blew up in the PC over the weekend though so that was a bit of a faff!
Bob: Ah no! How old's your PC?
Almond: Oh, like 7-8 years old now. I don't replace it often.
Bob: Really?! I replace mine completely every year.
Almond: Ah, cool.
Bob: Yeah, I'm a dev so I feel I need to. It's like my tool, you know.
Almond: Sure thing!
Bob: I actually spend quite a lot on it. I make sure it's got the fastest memory I can afford. Like, DDR5 stuff. That's really important, you know.

...etc., while I try to get out of said conversation for the next eternity.

Or:

(while in a conversation about a frontend bug I was looking at in Chrome devtools)
Bob: Hey Almond, you know Firefox actually had a plugin that did all this stuff before everything else?
Almond: Err, yeah, I think so. Used it back in the day.
Bob: It was called firebug. It was really good. Revolutionary.
Almond: Certainly was.
Bob: It was launched in January 2006 you know.
Almond: Right...
Bob: I used it back then.

...I mean damn, I'm all for being civil, but no-one cares you replace your PC every year, or that you know the year firebug was released, or that you once set up 5 identical PCs with different versions of Linux to run some benchmarks...

Started about 4 years ago after losing my job in social work. Realized I liked computers more than talking to people. Picked up a beginning Java text book, and worked through it in a month. I moved over to web development to help a buddy of mine and kill time while unemployed.

Since then, I've run a small web dev business and am currently director of technology for a company with an international presence. I still code on the side an recently launched a new mobile app with a buddy of mine from grade school.

I do not miss social work even a little bit.

Voice in my head: You should do something good this weekend.
My body: Yeah let's code up a community fostering app for the neighborhood.....

Two Nights later:
Amidst a half empty bottle of Jack ...
Voice in my head: dude why isn't this shit working, you've done this billions of times.
My body: It's your fault...time to drink you away.

And like that,
At the break of day,
A hungover and glazed developer,
Debugged! as they say.
Community app launched
On memorial holiday,

I built a fairly simple database and website to showcase school curriculum “reader” books searchable and sortable by levels of difficulty and other metadata. I didn’t think much of it when I was building it but apparently it won the company a few million bucks in revenues once it launched. The big wigs rewarded that by selecting me as one of a few folks that got to go to a big corporate retreat in the Bahamas. This was before the company management went to crap and stopped incentivizing innovations at the employee level.

Today we launched the website that I’ve been working on for months. But the stress and fatigue of everything else (my personal life, the sleepless nights) got to me. Even though I got it done and it looks great, all I can focus on is how I ended the project. How I let the frustration of everything get to me. I just needed to get that off my chest.

My first project, ever, was a very unproud thing that was developed...

A little detail - I was 12 back then.

So, a distant family member had a business of selling things that they brought to the country. They, of course, needed a website and my parents knew that I had some skills in development so suggested them my services.

Discussion started and well, what came out was this:

1. They need a site with items list.
2. It had no actual design plans, no actual requirements, just a list.
3. Oh. It had to work perfectly on IE4 or IE5 (can't remember).

So what was actually done, was a site full of divs, clearfixes and so buggy that opening in any other browser than IE - resulted in a total failure.
We have sat down and I, with all the respect told them that my skills are not sufficient to make all of the browsers work equally (I've been on HTML/CSS for more than 6 months back then. And all of it was after school). They calmed me down and said that it's ok, they can give me as much time as I need to figure things out. Yet, my English wasn't good back then so I couldn't... (I was 12, with 3 years of basic English as a non-native speaker).

We sat around the table, discussed what could be done and if I could investigate that and re-do when I'm fully ready. I agreed. The site was launched for IE only as it worked fine and others were just throwing an error to visit it with IE.

They were happy, people were using it and they didn't say that anything was bad. Of course, management was thru FTP and editing LIVE files because, well, no php, no control panels, nothing... I felt ashamed that the site wasn't what they wanted but they were ultra happy with it - first customers rolled in from there. They paid me around 60EUR at that time (it was ~12 years ago) and I've spent a month there. (minimum monthly wage here was around 90-120EUR at that time...

So, all in all, this project that I still think I failed - pushed me to the world of devs and... I've never regretted it. Of course, when I actually met with them after years - they have dropped the site as it was not needed anymore but they said that it was exactly what they needed and there was nothing wrong, even if it didn't work perfectly.

Laziest thing ever done - Launched a website without a big feature I had to work on.

Neither my superiors nor the client have realised it yet. And by the time they do, it will be too late 😈

Okay so my brother in law has a laptop that is... To put it mildly, chockful of viruses of all sort, as it's an old machine still running w7 while still being online and an av about 7 years out of date.

So my bro in law (let's just call him my bro) asked me to install an adblock.

As I launched chrome and went to install it, how ever, the addon page said something like "Cannot install, chrome is managed by your company" - wtf?

Also, the out of date AV couldn't even be updated as its main service just wouldn't start.

Okay, something fishy going on... Uninstalled the old av, downloaded malware bytes and went to scan the whole pc.

Before I went to bed, it'd already found >150 detections. Though as the computer is so old, the progress was slow.

Thinking it would have enough time over night, I went to bed... Only to find out the next morning... It BSoD'd over night, and so none of the finds were removed.

Uuugh! Okay, so... Scanning out of a live booted linux it is I thought! Little did I know how much it'd infuriate me!

Looking through google, I found several live rescue images from popular AV brands. But:
1 - Kaspersky Sys Rescue -- Doesn't even support non-EFI systems

2 - Eset SysRescue -- Doesn't mount the system drive, terminal emulator is X64 while the CPU of the laptop is X86 meaning I cannot run that. Doesn't provide any info on username and passwords, had to dig around the image from the laptop I used to burn it to the USB drive to find the user was, in fact, called eset and had an empty password. Root had pass set but not in the image shadow file, so no idea really. Couldn't sudo as the eset user, except for the terminal emulator, which crashes thanks to the architecture mismatch.
3 - avast - live usb / cd cannot be downloaded from web, has to be installed through avast, which I really didn't want to install on my laptop just to make a rescue flash drive
4 - comodo - didn't even boot due to architecture mismatch

Fuck it! Sick and tired of this, I'm downloading Debian with XFCE. Switched to a tty1 after kernel loads, killed lightdm and Xserver to minimize usb drive reads, downloaded clamav (which got stuck on man-db update. After 20 minutes... I just killed it from a second tty, and the install finished successfully)

A definitions update, short manual skimover, and finally, got scanning!

Only... It's taking forever and not printing anything. Stracing the clamscan command showed it was... Loading the virus definitions lol... Okay, it's doing its thing, I can finally go have dinner

Man I didn't know x86 support got so weak in the couple years I haven't used Linux on a laptop lol.

I reached out to a developer who's site was being contracted out to Amazon devs, because when their site launched it had a couple of security issues. This was his response:

"An additional thought/opinion... Just because a college freshman from Arizona wasn't too hungover to make the effort to notify us and take the liberty of classifying this as a security issue for us doesn't mean we need to take their word for it."

Got tangled up on some routing issue with my Rails project yesterday morning so I democratically decided I was allowed to take a break... I launched Diablo 3 and that was the rest of the day...

I just sat there dungeon crawling, eating pizza, ice cream and drinking Monster like a fucking pig... Shame on me.

What I already knew: hard disks made of crystal exist which can store 360TB of data for billions of years, they're just really slow.

What I didn't know: Elon musk owns the first and second disks and one of them was launched into space alongside is Tesla roadster! (He personally has the second)

I think the sleep deprived me is finally cracking under the weight of incompetent assholes.

We just launched a major project in some weird cocktail of Agile slapped with MVP and release to the wild in a waterfall, but it was premature, premature in the sense QA hasn't even finished their side of things, but because some fuck with with "manager" in their title decided they have burnt through the budget with incompetence and scrapped an entire element of the project and outsourced just so they could make a shittier version that doesn't even fucking work.

How hard do you want to fail before you will start listening to the people that now have to work around the fucking clock to clean up this horse shit of a mess.

I'm literally arguing over field mapping with multiple 3rd parties, when the fucking requirements state WTF this is suppose to look like. All because they didn't validate or test their own shit.

Why is EVERY FUCKING cock head in this industry a waste of space and cash! Is it really to much to ask for 1 fucking project to fucking go live that actually fucking works where I don't need to work 2 weeks straight (including weekends) after going live just to be sure that what shit does hit the fan isn't going to create a SEV 1 issue...

Sorry, I'm pissed at the incompetence of others I need to deal with on a daily basis. It's not like this field is insanely hard. A little attention to detail and self validation, verification goes a long way. But clearly that's a rarity.

Once this shit is stable and actually works, I'll be pulling out the mop to clean up half this shit just so it actually works.

Oof, I'm getting to old for this bullshit.

Has devRant had to scale anything since it got launched or is it still stable enough?

Spending 2 days trying to figure out why code signing wasn’t working when deployment is started from teamcity. Every time I tried manually it worked, but through teamcity it just kept telling me that no certificate could be found.

I finally twigged what the problem was, my code signing certificate is smart card based and you can’t access it if is requested from a RDP session. I had launched the teamcity build agent from an RDP session a few days back without thinking…

Rebooted and started the buildagent via VirtIO VNC and low and behold it started working again.

Created a github open source project for voice recognition for react native Android.

Needed help developing some features and did my research with links to some articles.

Then some guy that showed interest in the specific issue just copied my repo and launched his own npm package with the new features.

Just threw my code in the garbage and just felt so irritated. I did all the research and shared the research links and he just duped me and left me to rot. No credit given.

Fuck that guy. This is not open source.

Rant over

I am working on a project which I want to make open source. The problem is, I have never launched any open source project and I do not know any platform to reach people (I am not talking about hosting the project, I am talking about making people know, use and take part in the project). I believe this project will help a lot of people who works on IoT, chat services or distributed real time servers.

Can anyone help? Thanks in advance.

Warning long rambling story cause sleep deprivation

I never really bothered with ssh outside of using putty to remote into my servers and rpi's from my desktop to run updates, install something, or whatever else.

But today I was on a call with my cousin bored cause she was just rambling, so I opened vscode to clean my install of unnecessary extensions I installed and haven't used more than once or twice.

I saw Remote - SSH and as I was bored listening to a teenager complain about high school just like I used to (lol) and responding when she asked me something. I scrolled through the page, then the documentation just casually skimming the text

I setup an ssh key on an rpi I threw manjaro arm following the instructions on their tips and tricks page
I then moved the key to my desktop using winscp (cause lazy)
leading to having a minor hicup of rsa not being an accepted keytype (thanks 'your favorite search engine' for the help)
Finally, I was able to connect using the private key

at this point my cousin went to bed cause she has school tomorrow. But I was still doing stuff with ssh, I created a new ssh connection in VSCode, but had to go to the documentation to figure out how to make it use my fancy new key file, not hard took 30 seconds of looking to get it working.

Now that I was in, I moved to my development folder, created a folder for PiHole, created a compose yml, created a pihole-data folder.
I opened the yml and pasted in a compose from dockerhub.

at this point I thought 'i can't just run this from terminal can I'. and Obviously it worked cause there's literally no reason it wouldn't I'm just stupid to think it might not.

So I created folders and files on a remote system, launched a docker container, checked for package updates after on a linux machine. All from VS-Code on a windows machine.

I know this is simple for some people, i know some people are like 'where's the interesting part'. but ehhh I thought it was cool to get it setup, I now really regret not getting into ssh sooner, and I'm definitely going to uninstall vscode on all my smaller graphical VM's in favor of doing this. and this will definitely help with my headless vm's.

I also will have to thank my cousin, might not have done this if I wasn't stuck at my computer on messenger call with her lol

I'm gonna go to bed now, But I feel accomplished for the first time in a while even if it's for something so simple as setting up anssh key for the first time

I decided to upgrade my intellij ultimate from 2019.3 to 2020.2 and I saw there is update button.
I clicked on it.
As I expected it didn’t work and it was 30 minutes waiting looking at progress bar going back and forth couple of times before I decided just to download latest version and drag and drop it to applications folder ( took me 5 minutes) - I use mac so it replaces all crap ( I think ).

I cleared the old cache that growed to 2 gigabytes leaving some configuration files.
Next as always crash on startup cause of incompatible plugins with long java stacktrace - at least I could click the close button or popup closed itself I can’t remember ( one version I remember this button couldn’t be clicked cause it was off the screen and you need to do some cheating to launch ide )
The font has changed and I see that it at least work a little faster - that is nice. Indexing is finally fixed after all those years - probably thanks to visual studio code intellisense pushing those lazy bastards to deal with this.
But the preloader on first logo disappears so I think they decided to remove it cause it’s so fast - no it loads the same time or maybe little longer when I launch it on my old macbook.

After that as always I looked at plugins to see if there’s something interesting, so to find ability to scroll over whole plugins I needed to click couple of times. I think they assume I remember all the nice plugins in their marketplace and I only type search.
Maybe I should be type of user who reads best 2020 plugins for your best ide crap articles filled with advertising or even waste more time to watch all of this great videos about ide ( are there any kind of this stuff ? )

After a few operations I unfortunately clicked apply instead of restart ide and it hanged up on uninstalling some plugin I’m no longer interested in for 5 minutes so I decided to use always working ‘kill -9’ from command line.

Launched again and this time success.
Fortunately indexing finished for this workspace and I can work.

I’m intellij ultimate subscriber for 7+ years and I see those craps are not changing from like forever.
What’s the point of automate something that you can’t regression test ?
I started thinking that now when most people are facebook wall scrolling zombies companies assume that when new software comes out everyone is installing it right away and if not they’re probably not our customers cause they’re dead.
What a surprise they have when I pay for another year I can only imagine ( to be fair probably they even don’t know who I am ).
Yeah for sure I am subscribed to newsletters and I have jetbrains as a start page cause I shit myself with money and have nothing better to do then be grupie ( is there corporate grupies already a big community? )

Well I am a guy who likes to spend some time when installing anything and especially software that is responsible for my main source of income and productivity speed up.

Anyway I decided to upgrade cause editing es7 and typescript got to be pain in the ass and I see it’s working fine now. I don’t know if I like the font but at least the editor it’s working the same or maybe faster then the original that is huge improvement as developers lose most of their time between keyboard and screen communication protocol.

I don’t write it to discourage intellij as it’s great independent ide that I love and support for such a long time but they should focus on code editor and developers efficiency not on things that doesn’t make sense.

Congratulations if you reached this point of this meaningless post.

Now I started thinking that maybe it’s working faster cause I removed 2 gigs of crap from it.

Well we’ll see.

So i was working on an android app that communicate with restfull web service. I setup everything , started the web service api at localhost and launched the app on genymotion (virtual machine android) .Nothing seems to work . I checked the code , debugged some stuff and it turns out i couldn't communicate with the api server. I tested the api on my browser and nothing is wrong ,I tried to test on the phone vm browser and voila 404 not found . How the hell it's working on my windows and not on the vm (with localhost url :/ ) .I kept debugging for more then 3 hours with no solution to be found .
The moment I realised wtf I'm doing and how stupid I was => shut down my laptop went to coffee shop and bought a lifeless dark espresso .

In case you didn't understand what the issue is, I was running the api on my windows localhost and testing it with same url on my android vm (I should've changed localhost with my machine IP )

The last eight years were fun, but I ran out of space while trying to compile a project, and, well, your number came up. I'm sorry...

I need a bigger SSD. I launched Visual Studio (which I rarely use so it only had the default extensions installed) to clone and build the new Windows Terminal to see what it's like. Had to download over 10GB of extensions and features first, and then compiling the project ate up every last byte of remaining space.

Hi all!
Its been a month now since I launched my first app on Play Store.
It has now got 2000 downloads with about 600 active installs. I also got some downloads on the paid version of the app (which is basically a donate version of the app).

I know there is always a room for improvement, but still, how am I doing?
And Merry Christmas to you all!

Okay this is 3.30 AM . Just woke up from bad geeky dreams. My heart is pounding so fast that I could nose bleed and I can't sleep as I am remembering I had the same dream last night.

Dream was about : me being astronaut. Everything was usual. From rocket launch to be in space. Scary part was my ship in orbit of moon.

Seeing dead land from that height chocked me. Imagine you are looking out of the window and all you see a big grey land and pitch black in background. Realising there is no one out there was spooky.

The scary part was I launched some satellite but crash on surface. It was scary seeing something going smaller every time. Crashing on deserted land was one plus on adding fear.

Then my ship leave the orbit (from the reverse shock of that satellite dittachment ) and it flow away in the vastness of space......

Away from the moon and away from the earth in long loneliness.

I wish I could erase this from my memory but I am not gonna watch space exploration video anymore.

I got to say, landing on moon is one thing but being out there knowing one accident and you will be forever there. You need balls to be on such missions.

Around a year ago I launched my first site in rails.

Even though the site didn't took off, I learned from it, and it was an enjoyable experience.
Well, at least some of it.

As a web developer, I enjoyed doing the web development.

Then came hosting and deployment. Pretty stressful since I'm no sysadmin/devops person, but you could say it's still in the realm of software. So I managed.

But the one part I couldn't stomach is marketing.

Partly because I have zero experience and interest in the subject, and also because I don't to be an annoying marketing whore asking people to check my site.

I have never seen a bigger cesspool than the google results of the query "how to get people to know my site".

I have seen the shadiest shit, I have read of people saying you should befriend subreddits mods/admins and then ask them the favour to let you post your stuff.

I know that contacts are important, but taking advantage to get traffic on your product? No thanks, I'll rather have a dead site.

This was pretty much the experience when googling about marketing, unethical shit everywhere.

In fact, even calling it marketing makes me feel kinda sick, but it's a thing and it's pretty much necessary to get people to know your site.

Anyhow, in a company, everyone does their role, but this is just a one man thing.

So the ideal thing would be if a marketing person (hopefully an ethical one) took care of that. How does one find one though?

I guess you either partner with one or you hire on.

The problem with partnering is that I don't know someone like that. Do people partner up with "strangers" on the internet?

I could hire too, but I'm not as affluent as being able to employ a single person for 50k a year. And I don't know how feasible it is to hire someone when your site has no revenue anyways.

Maybe there's some company that offers such servicwe? I dunno...

What are your thoughts on this?
I'll be thankful of any feedback.

I started xampp, atom, chrome at once and my windows launched xampp in 10 seconds, chrome in 23 seconds and guess what atom was up in just 2 minutes....
Still trying to figure out whether to throw my pc or the windows.

At my last place we launched a new payment page and added logging.

Who ever set the logging up didn't obfuscate the user card details and stored them in the db for anyone with access to see. :-O

Just launched a successful deployment today. Took 4 months to build everything. It's probably not a big deal but I'm just really happy today that everything worked right away, and almost no deployment hiccups at all.

Only one issue popped up, but come to find out it's a particular thing about the Prod environment and nothing to do with my code.

Gonna go celebrate now, before more work comes in. (hey, can you refactor this for me?)

These days, it seems like every new startup builds their entire development on top of the OpenAI API and be like: "We've just launched a revolutionary AI platform!"
Whereas the 99,000 others:

"Gmail was launched as an invitation-only beta release on April 1, 2004 and it became available to the general public on February 7, 2007, though still with beta status."

Then read this, and consider the date. And the fact about how blatant the intent was. I can't believe I never thought about it.

Thursday: Made an appointment with doctor for (painful because no anesthesia) outpatient procedure. Sent message to team slack saying appointment would interrupt part of my day.

Friday: Boss decides to launch website. Launched.

Saturday: Fixed many broken things.

Sunday: Fixed more broken things.

Monday morning: Texted team about fixing more broken things WHILE BEING OPERATED ON!!!!!!!!!

Monday afternoon and evening: STILL WORKING ON MORE BUG FIXES!!!!!!!

I'm in a team of 3 in a small to medium sized company (over 50 engineers). We all work as full stack engineers.. but I think the definition of full stack here is getting super bloated. Let me give u an example. My team hold a few production apps, and we just launched a new one. The whole team (the 3 of us) are fully responsible on it from planning, design, database model, api, frontend (a react page spa), an extra client. Ok, so all this seems normal to a full stack dev.

Now, we also handle provisioning infra in aws using terraform, doing deployments, building a CI/CD pipeline using jenkins, monitoring, writing tests, building an analytics dashboard.

Recently our tech writer also left, so now we are also handling writing feature releases.

Few days ago, we also had a meeting where they sort of discussed that the maintenance of the engineering shared services, e.g. jenkins servers, (and about 2-3 other services) will now be split between teams in a shared board, previously this was handled only be team leads, but now they want to delegate it down.

And ofcourse not to mention supporting the app itself and updating bug tickets with findings.

I feel like my daily responsiblities are becoming the job responsibilities of at least 3 jobs.

Is this what full stack engineering looks like in your company? Do u handle everything from app design, building, cloud, ops, analytics etc..

I'm most excited about Smart Contracts & Distributed Applications.

In early January I started learning Solidity thinking it would be super difficult but was pleasantly surprised when I'd completed my first DApp in a couple days. Two months on and I've finished 3 major projects and launched my own Udemy course.

I'm not a big follower of Crypto Currencies at all and haven't become financially invested in anything really. I just love the way development works on a blockchain; it is quite interesting and It feels really fresh solving problems using code that will become immutable.

Mobvoi just launched the new Ticwatch S2/E2. Currently have the S1.

This FAQ page has me scratching my head. Guess their documentation team wrote part of this before they decided to pull the NFC feature?

Maybe?

If so, that's something in common with my company 🤣

GitHub has launched Codespaces : A feature that lets you code directly on the web {as a virtual Integrated Development Environment (IDE) on the cloud}.

According to the Github Blog: Earlier, to contribute to a project you would need to make a pull request and set up the environment on your local machine according to the requirements of a project. With Codespaces, you don't need to do that anymore. As soon as you click on the code button, the website sets up the environment in seconds.

In addition to Codespaces, GitHub is also launching Discussions : A forum-like feature that lives under your project that allows others to engage with you and other contributors.

Code scanning : With code scanning enabled, every git push is scanned for new potential security vulnerabilities, and results are displayed directly in your pull request.

I now have further proof that Android 9's fancy Battery Management is shit:
The compass on my new (flagship) smartphone uses the air pressure sensor and the air pressure at sea level to display your current elevation. The air pressure at sea level is fetched from the weather app. And of course, the weather app has its battery policies set to auto-managed.
Can you guess what happened? "Weather app could not be found" and an elevation of -17m
Because no one thought the battery manager could decide that the weather app should not be launched by other apps. Has no one thought this through? Good thing I figured out what was happening pretty quickly.

!dev

Decided to spend more time on LinkedIn to familiarise myself and start looking for potential employment opportunities.

For past month or so, I've seen few decent opportunities, which is a nice start. However, for every decent post, I've come across:

- About a hundred of posts by self-proclaimed crypto experts who spout absolute gibberish and somehow get thousands of likes. 5 min google search and absolute minimum knowledge of economic theory discards 99% of their claims and statements
- Handful of idiotic "career advice" blog posts
- Numerous posts, both bashing and helplessly supporting shitty recruiter practices
- more crypto nonsense
- People jerking themselves off for running a profitable business (company launched a 1-5months ago)

Really starting to hate the platform, seems like all the integrity it had before becoming fully mainstream, has gone down the drain and it's become a straight up corporate circle jerk