Client : pls put the disclaimer that the site uses cookies.
Me: but we don't use cookies this is a static page
Client: Still, the pop up makes the site look more professional, kindly add the feature asap
Me: :/

Most embarrassing and lucky moment on the first week of job.

Me and my best friend were selected in the same company as developers. I was having some trouble with my system. So I mailed the description to our support department. Pop up was displayed from our chat client and person on the other end happened to be a lady. She wanted me to share a team viewer link with click access. So I did it and within 2 minutes of efforts she solved it. I thanked her, closed the chat conversation and started installing few packages. Meanwhile, I was curious to see her as she was really nice throughout the conversation. So I opened LinkedIn, searched for her name and found her profile. I zoomed in her photo and she was a pretty chick. I didn't stop and found her on FB too, and quickly saw all her DPs. I just copied her profile URL and sent it to my friend ( the one that got selected with me ) and told him about my conversation with her. Then I asked my friend
"She's hot. Should I send her a friend request or have to find some more troubles in my pc and talk to her few more times ? :P "
He replied "Dude what are you wanting for ? "
Out of no where, a pop up showed up. It was the girl we were talking about. The exact message was

"You can now close your team viewer session, and we can talk over FB :)"

Embarrassing AF!

So I just got one of those pop ups saying YOUR COMPUTER HAS BEEN HACKED.

I decided to call the number, while firing up a Linux virtual machine, running Linux Mint. I customized the home button to look like the Windows start menu logo, and proceeded to let that scammer connect to it.

He was so confused, considering the script he was reading off of was meant for windows. He opened up terminal, and started typing in "tree" and told me that's how many viruses I have.

😂😂😂

Friend: *deletes something from the internet*
"Thank god, now it's gone forever!"

Me: *Laughs in French*
"Hahahaha!"

Friend: "What?"

Me: "No, I'm pretty sure almost everything you put on the internet stays on the internet."

Friend: "ARE YOU STUPID??! The button says fucking DELETE. What else would it to do? Please use your brain for once."

Me: "You realize that text in the button is just a string right?"

Friend: *Looks confused*
"Stop trying to be such a smartass. Why would it be called 'delete' if it doesn't delete? Your logic make no sense whatsoever."

Me: *Makes quick simple app in order to prove my point*

App has 4 buttons:

-Play Music: Shows a picture of a dog

-Stop Music: Starts playing music video of Never gonna give you up

-Close App: Changes the interface to a random color

-Delete App: Pop up that says "The app has been deleted"

Friend: *Installs and tries the app*
"Dude! Did you even test your app before sending me?? Your buttons are broken as hell. None of them works. They all do things they're not supposed to do. How do you even call yourself a programmer? Sorry dude, nothing personal but this app sucks."

Me: *I need a new friend*
*sigh*

"Did you enjoy using our product?"

- I did until you showed this pop-up

Little Hack
It annoys me whenever I encounter a website like quora which hides the real content with a overlay and a pop up to sign in. Little do they know I just delete the overlay element from the Dom 😁😁.
Who else does this?

So my Girlfriend bought a new iPhone at Verizon today. Cool story, I know, but here's where it's gone from there.

Firstly her debit wouldn't run as credit, so we used mine but that's the least of it (but began it).

So she has 16,000 photos... Alot, sure, but not the issue. Obviously with that amount of data she wasn't about to reasonably use iCloud to back it up (understandable only by me) so she was confronted both by me and the Verizon employee about this issue to where we both (the Verizon employee and I) agreed that an iTunes backup/restore was the only way to preserve her data. She was confused. No worry, told her I had it handled and the Verizon employee agreed. Great. Yet we get home and begin the process. My girlfriend was not on the latest iOS (understandable given the battery scenario and she was on an iPhone 6) and this was ridiculous to her because she had to update in order to do the iTunes back up. Whatever, I brushed it off. Her phone was updated, and backed up... Which took a while but we are talking 30gb (of which she had no understanding of how much that was). After the back up we discovered her new phone wasn't working due to a bad sim, great, no problem we have the old one... But oh no. "I don't want that shitty old sim" she said. Uhmm what... I say, and say let me get an earring (to switch the Sims) and she gave one to me and as soon as I went to pop the tray, she had a fucking heart attack as if I was demolishing her phone. I talk her down, get it switched, get the phone to restore (slow process as she's complaining... 30gb mind you) and it works. She goes to bed. Comes back, texts aren't working. I say imessages or texts (now she has no idea) I troubleshoot, seems nothing's working, and that's okay Verizon must of reinstated the new sim and deactivated the old (fine). I switch them and it works. She proceeds to berate me about the SIM cards because she didn't want the 'old shitty one' (the one that got us to the place of a functioning phone).

Now everything works and she claims a Genius bar employee would of done this in minutes.

I (obviously) lose my shit, now I'm sleeping on the couch.

Im an IT professional / programmer..... this shit really ticked me off.

You know who sucks at developing APIs?

Facebook.

I mean, how are so high paid guys with so great ideas manage to come up with apis THAT shitty?

Let's have a look. They took MVC and invented flux. It was so complicated that there were so many overhyped articles that stated "Flux is just X", "Flux is just Y", and exactly when Redux comes to the stage, flux is forgotten. Nobody uses it anymore.

They took declarative cursors and created Relay, but again, Apollo GraphQL comes and relay just goes away. When i tried just to get started with relay, it seemed so complicated that i just closed the tab. I mean, i get the idea, it's simple yet brilliant, but the api...

Immutable.js. Shitload of fuck. Explain WHY should i mess with shit like getIn(path: Iterable<string | number>): any and class List<T> { push(value: T): this }? Clojurescript offers Om, the React wrapper that works about three times faster! How is it even possible? Clojure's immutable data structures! They're even opensourced as standalone library, Mori js, and api is great! Just use it! Why reinvent the wheel?

It seems like when i just need to develop a simple react app, i should configure webpack (huge fuckload of work by itself) to get hot reload, modern es and jsx to work, then add redux, redux-saga, redux-thunk, react-redux and immutable.js, and if i just want my simple component to communicate with state, i need to define a component, a container, fucking mapStateToProps and mapDispatchToProps, and that's all just for "hello world" to pop out. And make sure you didn't forget to type that this.handler = this.handler.bind(this) for every handler function. Or use ev closure fucked up hack that requires just a bit more webpack tweaks. We haven't even started to communicate to the server! Fuck!

I bet there is savage ass overengineer sitting there at facebook, and he of course knows everything about how good api should look, and he also has huge ass ego and he just allowed to ban everything that he doesn't like. And he just bans everything with good simple api because it "isn't flexible enough".

"React is heavier than preact because we offer isomorphic multiple rendering targets", oh, how hard want i to slap your face, you fuckface. You know what i offered your mom and she agreed?

They even created create-react-app, but state management is still up to you. And react-boierplate is just too complicated.

When i need web app, i type "lein new re-frame", then "lein dev", and boom, live reload server started. No config. Every action is just (dispatch) away, works from any component. State subscription? (subscribe). Isolated side-effects? (reg-fx). Organize files as you want. File size? Around 30k, maybe 60 if you use some clojure libs.

If you don't care about massive market support, just use hyperapp. It's way simpler.

Dear developers, PLEASE, don't forget about api. Take it serious, it's very important. You may even design api first, and only then implement the actual logic. That's even better.

And facebook, sincerelly,

Fuck you.

6pm - arrive home from work, log into my computer and start working on side projects.

4am - Finally go to sleep after staying up all night setting up arch in a vm.

7am - Start drive to work in the snow and ice.

7:20am - car runs out of wiper fluid.

7:30am - round corner so that I’m driving towards the sun, windshield is covered in mud and I have 2% visibility.

7:35am - take off ramp towards gas station so I can buy fluid and wash window.

7:36am - Car mysteriously parked in center of off ramp, nearly smash it but have a narrow miss.

7:40am - can’t find the freaking pully in new car to pop hood

7:41am - found it.

7:50am - drove the back way to work because it cuts out traffic, but includes many steep hills that I forgot existed, come to a skid at bottom of one and am pushed out into the main road, luckily nobody is coming and I’m able to continue on my merry way.

8:01am - sit down in desk, lead staff person comes over evoking Lumbergh from Office Space and lets me know I need to be on time to work and that the snow doesn’t give me an excuse. I agree and smile and suck up and he leaves.

8:02am - pull out phone to write down notes about personal project that I thought of on drive here, phone dies. I forgot to plug it in last night.

8:04am - found power bank charger thing in desk but it uses a micro-b type usb and I only have usb type c on me.

8:10am - borrow usb from old headset in office surplus.

8:11am - writing notes. Have sudden realization that I didn’t shut down my vm and that when my computer went to sleep and subsequently locked it probably halted virtualbox and everything would be lost for the second time.

8:12am - got on devRant.

I was 15 years old and the first year of high school. Everything was new to me and I was such a newbie. At that time I had 2-3 year of programming behind me at an institution where they taught competitive programming. And I knew something about computers. Not much but more than most of my school mates. At that time I wanted to become "super cool hacker".

So we had this very very thought teacher for history which was also our form master. She really knows how to explained everything about history and in an interesting way. But while she was teaching we also had to write down notes from her powerpoints that were on a projector. And occasionally she would wait for us to copy everything and then move on with her lecture. But sometimes she didn't. This was frustrating as hell. The whole class would complain about this because you couldn't take notes down normal, you had to do it at double speed.

But she got one weak spot. She was not very good with computers. Our school computers were locked in some kinda closet so that students didn't have physical access to a computer and were also password protected. So I came up with the plan to plant wireless mouse in her computer so that I could control her mouse. At that time it seemed like SUPER HACKER MASTER PLAN.

So I got an opportunity one time when she left the classroom and let closet where the computer was open. I quickly sneaked the USB of the wireless mouse in the computer and then go back to the seat.

So THE FUN began.

Firstly I would only go back in powerpoint so that all my schoolmates could write down notes including me. And it was hilarious to watch when she didn't know what is happening. So then I would move her mouse when she tried to close some window. I would just move it slightly so she wouldn't notice that somebody else is controlling mouse. And by missing X button just by slight she would click other things and other things would pop up and now she had to close this thing so it became a nightmare for her. And she would become angry at the mouse and start complaining how the computer doesn't work and that mouse doesn't obey her.

One time when she didn't pay attention to her computer and projector I went to paint program and drew a heart and wrote we love you (In Slovenian Imamo vas radi -> See the picture below) and one of my school mates has the picture of it. We were all giggling and she didn't know what is was for. And I managed to close everything before she even noticed.

So it got to the point where she couldn't hand it more so she called our school IT guy so that he would check her computer (2 or 3 weeks passed before she called IT guy). And he didn't find anything. He was really crappy IT guy in general. So one week passed by and I still had messed with her mouse. So she got a replacement computer. Who would guessed all the problems went away (because I didn't have another mouse like that). I guess when our IT guy took the computer to his room and really thoroughly check it he found my USB.

So he told her what was the problem she was so pissed off really I didn't see her pissed off so much in all my 4 years in high school. She demanded the apology from whom did it. And at that moment my mind went through all possible scenarios... And the most likely one was that I was going to be expelled... And I didn't have the balls to say that I did it and I was too afraid... Thanks to God nobody from my school mates didn't tell that it was me.

While she waited that somebody would come forward there was one moment when our looks met and at that moment both of us knew that I was the one that did it.

Next day the whole class wrote the apology letter and she accepted it. But for the rest of 4 years whenever was there a problem with the computer I had to fixed it and she didn't trust anybody not even our IT guy at school. It was our unwritten contract that I would repair her computer to pay off my sin that I did. And she once even trusted me with her personal laptop.

So to end this story I have really high respect for her because she is a great teacher and great persons that guide me through my teen years. And we stayed in contact.

We were all 16 once right? When I was 16, my school had a network of Windows 2000 machines. Since I was learning java at the time, I thought learning batch scripting would be fun.

One day I wrote a script that froze input from the mouse and displayed a pop up with a scary “Critical System Error: please correct before data deletion!!”. It also displayed a five minute countdown timer, after which the computer restarted.

I may or may not have replaced the internet explorer icon on the desktop with a link to my program on the entire student lab of computers. Chaos.

The day I send myself about 76k mails
> be me
> be working on a rest api
> implement an error handler that would send me a mail with exception details
> use same error handler in mail send error handler
> Summoned the recursion devil by accident
> Test error handler
> Forgot port forwarding to SMTP server
> keep the debug session open
> throw new UnexpectedInterruptionException()
> get back to work
> Add the missing port forwarding rule to putty
> The error handler starts doing it's thing
> The handler chain starts to pop
> handler after handler executes
> PCFreeze.png
> WhatTheFuckIsGoingOn.gif
> VS finally accepts stop debugging
> PhoneVibrationSpam.mp3
> Peek into webmail
> WowFinallySomeFanMail
> Look into it
> Realizing what I have done
> Delete mailbox
> Remove recursion
> Wow that's how randy must have felt in southpark
> Feel weird
> Shutdown, go outside
> What's up anon?
> Nothing, really

I wouldn't say magically when describing a pop-up.

Okay okay here's another one

Client:pls put a pop up that asks the users weather they are sure about leaving the page.
Me: I think that would be redundant
Since he clicked the close button to close the page.
Client: what if he is unsure of leaving the page now he will stay.
Me: :/
Client:And another one when his login fails.
Me: pop ups can be disabled it's not good to use them especially for login screen.
Client (now slightly annoyed): Well,put a pop up warning them not to, isn't it obvious.God!!! I thought you were the smart one.
Me:;/

Saw my uncle using Microsoft Edge today.

Me: Uncle, you should use Chrome or Firefox. They are better.
Uncle: Windows 10 showed a pop up few days back that chrome drains battery faster. So I uninstalled chrome.
Me: But Windows is fooling you to use its product. Edge is horrible and useless.
Uncle: So you think you are smarter than Windows people? Are they idiots who designed this whole software?

Microsoft u got 1 more Edge user. Enjoy, you lying and misleading company.

It was fun to watch my entire high school (~1200 people) freak out when I ran "net send * Big brother is watching you..." on what I found to be an insecure computer in my high school's library. Every single computer in the building displayed the pop up message. The town's IT director even showed up to figure out what happened.

I was caught, but they were more happy it wasn't a hacker, and that I discovered that the IT firm the town hired totally botched properly implementing network security, so I was let off the hook.

Just watched a Microsoft Visual Academy course where the instructor uses sublime and has the pop up that they haven't payed for it. 😂

Talking to Best Buy customer support live chat trying to price match using friend’s laptop.

Typed in “<b>Hello</b>”

Oh cool.. it comes out as bold. Let’s get a scary as fuck screamer gif and img src it.

Me: *Posts picture*
Me: *Waits a few seconds*

Me: “Did you see that picture?”
Support: “No. Sir, could you tell me the item you want to price match?”
Me: “Okay hold on.”

Typed in “<script type=‘text/javascript’>window.alert(‘OOGA BOOGA BITCH’);</script>”

Me: “Did you see that?”
Friend: “Dude stop.”

I push my friend away since I’m on his Best Buy account.

Me: “Did you see a pop up?”
Support: “No.”
Me: “Okay okay hold on.”

You have left the chat.

When you're preparing to go to sleep and a bug decides to pop up

OPPO sure has the BALLS to fucking install ads on MY FUCKING PHONE, first they force installed “Hot Apps” and “Hot Games” and I can’t remove it. I was like “Yeah sure whatever”. Then they installed sticker ads on THE BUILT IN KEYBOARD. “Ok”. This fucking shit actually installed ads on my fucking notification panel, and pop up a warning every once in two days asking me to”🔥 Update your software to latest version 💢” WITH THAT KIND OF TEXT AND EMOTICONS

FUCK YOU OPPO

So i've been put in charge of bringing the devs together to form a small dev team, instead of having 3 separate devs (including me) sitting apart on separate projects. The idea was to have us talk more, work together more, learn more about the other projects, reuse more code etc.

(I've been arguing to let us do this for a while)

So I asked my manager could we move to the 4 desks in the corner, so we can have our own space, talk without having to book a meeting room each time etc. Its also a bit quieter over there and we all really need that in our noisy office.

Manager sent me an IM today while I was working from home to tell me we can have the desks. Was super happy, messaged the devs to tell them they can start moving.

Just got a message from one of them to say our manager has started moving his stuff over too. Seems he agreed with me that it is quieter over there and he doesn't like the noise either ... so he's joining us.

A huge part of the move was us wanting to work on side projects to automate and speed up various things in the team, that he has been against. We know we can make huge improvements but he doesn't see it. He's only interested in Word, Excel and Powerpoint.

So now we have our space, and anytime we try to work on something we are actually interested in, we'll have a little voice in the corner to pop up and point out what other things he deems more important and tell us to stop wasting our time.

Pretty fucking annoyed to be so happy and then get shot down like that. Happy weekend everyone!!

Dev: “Ughh..look at this –bleep- code! When I execute the service call, it returns null, but the service received a database error.”
Me: “Yea, that service was written during a time when the mentality was ‘Why return a service error if the client can’t do anything about it?’”
Dev: “I would say that’s a misunderstanding of that philosophy.”
Me: “I would say it’s a perfectly executed example of a deeply flawed philosophy.”
Dev: “No, the service should just return something that tells the client the operation failed.”
Me: “They did. It was supposed to return a valid result, and the developer indicated a null response means the operation failed. How you deal with the null response is up to you.”
Dev: “That is stupid. How am I supposed to know a null response means the operation failed?”
Me: “OK, how did you know the operation failed?”
Dev: “I had to look at the service error logs.”
Me: “Bingo.”
Dev: “This whole service is just a –bleep-ing mess. There are so many things that can go wrong and the only thing the service returns is null when the service raises an exception.”
Me: “OK, what should the service return?”
Dev: ”I don’t know. Error 500 would be nice.”
Me: “Would you know what to do with error 500?”
Dev: ”Yea, I would look at the error log”
Me: “Just like you did when the service returned null?”
<couple of seconds of silence>
Dev: “I don’t know, it’s a –bleep-ing mess.”
Me: “You’re in the code, change it.”
Dev: “Ooohhh no, not me. The whole thing will have to be re-written. It should have been done correctly the first time. If we had time to do code reviews, I would have caught this –bleep- before the service was deployed.”
Me: “Um, you did.”
<a shocked look from Dev>
Dev: “What…no, I’ve never seen this code.”
Me: “I sat next to Chuck when you were telling him he needed to change the service to return null if an exception was raised. I remember you telling him specifically to pop-up an error dialog ‘Service request failed’ to the user when the service returned null.”
Dev: “I don’t remember any of that.”
Me: “Well, Chuck did. He even put it in the check-in comments. See…”
<check in comments stated Dev’s code review and dictated the service return null on exceptions>
Dev: “Hmm…I guess I did. –bleep- are you a –bleep-ing elephant? You –bleep-ing remember everything.”

<what I wanted to say>
No, I don’t remember everything, but I remember all the drive-by <bleep>-ed up coding philosophies you tried to push to the interns and we’re now having all kinds of problems I spend waaaaay too much time fixing.
<what I said, and lied a little bit>
Me: “No, I was helping Nancy last week troubleshoot the client application last week with the pop-up error. Since the service returned a null, she didn’t know where to begin to look for the actual error.”
Dev: “Oh.”

One more reason I love devRant..
Never seen rate this app annoying pop up ...

My first internship was unpaid. "For the experience" and shit. My first task was to clear out an entire office full to the literal ceiling with the phones of people who had been laid off or quit. There were now just three old guys in the entire office. And me. Go figure. I need to find that picture, it's truly unbelievable.
My next task was to sort cables in the store room. Mind you, this was supposed to be a software dev internship.

I consistently had to ASK for work to do. If I didn't, I would just sit in my new office all day doing homework and playing with linux liveCDs and nobody cared.

So the third task they gave me was to try to restore a very old (like XP old) computer that had a broken hard drive, literally broken. Said they wanted to "repurpose it." As busy work I guess.

So I scrounged around the cleptomaniacal cesspool of dated and neglected tech and found a hard drive. Pop it in, chkdsk, fdisk, good to go. Spend hours installing XP while sorting more random cables and doing my homework because honestly writing a history paper is more valuable to my dev career than this complete bullshit. Finally get the thing working and go to report the miracle of rebirth to my higher-up. He says "oh cool," doesn't smile, and hands me a list of software to install.

I come back 20 minutes later - "Hey, most of these require corporate licenses."

Guy says "yup" and goes back to ignoring me. Never gives me a company card to buy licenses, or a list of ones already bought. I've revived the computer equivalent of Moses from the computer equivalent of permadeath just for this asshole to completely disregard that and give me an(other) impossible task, just to get me off his back. Excuse me for imposing with free (then-child) labor, you ass.
I spend maybe another week there doing homework in the office I cleaned and contemplating stealing everything of value. I guarantee they wouldn't have noticed though, which somehow made the idea less appealing.

I quit by texting my boss.

He never replied.

I wish I had stolen their laptop RAM.
It's probably still sitting on boss's shelf collecting dust and being a miserable, outdated fucking waste of space, just like him and his two remaining coworkers.

Friend: Hey can you check my code, can't seen to find this one error, and i have been trying for hours now.
Me: Just one error?
Friend: Ya, just one. And it i am not in a hurry, check it whenever you can.
Me: *understanding the pain of not finding that one fucking error*
Cool, just send me the code i ll check it tonight.

Later that night i check the code, debugg that error, shit ton of more error pop up.
Me: Well i have solved the one error, now i can just hand over the rest of the code to the guy so he can take care of the rest, its not like i am responsible or aything. HOWEVER, maybe i can solve few more, just for fun, i can't just let this code get the better of me.

*ends up clearing all the error after a lomg night*

Part of the new hire process was all salaried employees had to work all hourly position jobs for a day (over a several week period, not all in one day) to really understand what we do.

I once hazed a new network admin who was working in the call center and I sent his station a pop-up message:
“Ha! Fire me will you!! I planted this virus and if you don’t enter the password in 60 seconds I will erase the database.” The pop-up had a counter counting down from 60.

This was over the lunch hour, so all the supervisors and managers were away and ‘Mark’ in a panic ran into our office (I was hiding under my desk)

Mark: GUYS!!...GUYS!!!....OMG!….Where the frack is everybody?!!!”

He runs out.

I peek out the door window and about a second later he’s running down the hall with one of the vice presidents. Mark shows the VP the message, VP looks over at our office, sees me…laughs and walks back to his office (not saying much to Mark).

Mark not knowing what’s going on watches the counter…3...2…1….
”Just kidding. Welcome to the company!”

Ahhh…the repeated sounds of “You son of a -bleep-!!” never sounded so sweet.

The only thing I disabled was this pop up.

This one isn't as interesting.

I was probably 6 years old when I first used a computer. A commercial played on the TV about an online game called Fantage.

I wanted to play, so I begged my mom if I could use her Dell inspiron 5100. After hours of begging, she finally said yes.

I've never touched a computer before, so when my mom typed her password and left me alone I was confused.

I didn't know how to get to the game so I stared at the screen until my mom returned. She was annoyed and said to go on the internet and I stared at her. She was about to yell, but refrained herself from doing so, and clicked on IE before typing in the game.

She made me an account and then left.

I figured out how to use the trackpad and keyboard so I was really excited. Then there was a pop up box that said something like, "click OK if you promise not to give anyone your personnel information."

As the stupid kid I was, thought I was going to give her a virus if I clicked OK, so I stared at the screen until my mom said computer time was over.

I never got to play Fantage.

I once created a pop up video modal for a client.

A 'bug' was then logged:

"When you click and open the video modal, and then close the tab when finished, it closes the whole site and you have to start over again."

:|

One step through the door my wife whips around, a look so disgusted she barely seems human. "What's that smell?" she cries. "It's you! You smell like...like bad code!"

Indeed, I am covered with the scent of the forbidden love child of a man who read half a chapter on if-then statements and then pushed out into the world, earthworm-like, a mangled misshapened gelatinous mass that my employer gave the title of line-of-business application purely out of pity.

For more days than I'd like to count I have been porting a ColdFusion 5 application to .NET. Initially written in 2000 and last touched in 2006, it has a data architecture comparable to Dresden after the second world war. It features a table solely comprised of seven columns of IDs so that joins can be made between other tables lacking a common key. Columns that should be contained within a single table spread out among multiple tables. Single columns containing data that should be multiple columns (with handy flags to separate the subsets). A view with 14 joins that playfully displays unintended results. And so much more spread out over almost 200 stored procedures, views, triggers, and tables on the SQL server, and dozens of additional ADO-like SQL statements within the ColdFusion itself. Fortunately, the application overcomes these issues by having absolutely no data validation while allowing nulls pretty much everywhere.

When I am done this will be a very nice ASP.NET MVC app with at least 150 less stored procs, views, and tables. Auto-generated duplicate entries will be a thing of the past. Pop-up windows that inexplicably refresh the underlying screen to display a different part of the program than the one the user wants will be eliminated. And a UI based on the colors of a Rubik's Cube with usability that Mr. Rubik would find challenging will disappear with only the trauma of using it left behind.

Sadly, this is not my worse legacy code experience. Just the most recent. Just the most recent stench added to a lifetime of bathing in code rot.

This is my most ridiculous meeting in my long career. The crazy thing is I have witnessed this scenario play out many times during my career. Sometimes it sits in waiting for a few years but then BOOM there it is again and again. In each case the person that fell into the insidious trap was smart and savvy but somehow it just happened. The outcomes were really embarrassing and in some cases career damaging. Other times, it was sort of humorous. I could see this happening to me and I never want it to happen to you.

Once upon a time in a land not so far away there was a Kickoff Meeting for an offsite work area recovery exercise being planned for our Oklahoma locations. Eleven Oklahoma high ranking senior executives were on this webinar plus three Enterprise IT Directors (Ellen, Jim and Bob) who would support the business from the systems side throughout the exercise.

The plan was for Sam Otto, our Midwest Director of Business Continuity to host this webinar. Sam had hands-on experience recovering to our third party recovery site vendor and he always did a great job. He motivated people to attend the exercise with the coolest breakfasts and lunches you could imagine. Donuts, bagels, pizza, wings, scrumptious salads, sandwiches, beverages and desserts. He was great with people and made it a lot of fun.

At the last minute Charles 'Don't Call Me Charlie' Ego-Smith, the Global Business Continuity Senior Vice President, decided to grand-stand Sam. He demanded the reins to the webinar. Pulled a last-minute power-play and made himself the host and presenter. You have probably seen the move at some point in your career. I guess the old saying, 'be careful what you wish for' has some truth to it - read on and let me know if you devRanters agree...

So, Charlie, I mean Charles, begins hosting the session and greets all of the attendees. Hey, good so far! He starts showing some slides in the PowerPoint presentation and he fields a few questions, comments and requests from the Oklahoma executives. The usual easy to handle requests such as, 'what if we are too busy to do recover all systems', 'what if we recover all of our processes from home', 'what if we have high profile visitors that month?' Hey you can't blame them for trying. You are probably thinking to yourself, 'been there - heard that!' But luckily our experienced team had anticipated the push-back. Fortunately, Senior Management 'had our backs' and committed that all processes and systems must participate and test - so these were just softball requests, 'easy-peasy' to handle. But wait, we are just getting started!

Now the fireworks begin. Bob, one if the Enterprise IT directors started asking a bunch of questions. Well, Charles had somewhat of a history with Bob from previous exercises and did not take kindly to Bob's string of questions. Charles started getting defensive and while Bob was speaking Charles started IM'ing. He's firing off one filthy message after another to me and our teammate Sam.

'This idiot Bob is the biggest pain in the ass that I ever worked with'; 'he doesn't know shit', 'he never shuts the f up', 'I wanna go over to his office and kick his f'in ass...!'

Unfortunately...the idiot Charles had control of the webinar and was sharing his screen so every message he sent was seen by all of the attendees! Yeah, everyone including Bob and the Senior Oklahoma executives! We could not instant message him to stop as everyone would have seen our warnings, so we tried to call Charles' cell phone and text him but he did not pick up. He just kept firing ridiculously embarrassing dirty IM messages and I guess we were all so stunned we just sat there bewildered. We finally bit the bullet and IM'ed him to STOP ALREADY!!! Whoa, talk about an embarrassing silence!

I really felt sorry for Bob. He is a good guy. Deservedly, Charlie 'Yes I am going to call you CHARLIE' got in big time hot water after the webinar with upper management. For one reason or another he only lasted another year or so at our company. Maybe this event played a part in his demise.

So, the morale is, if you use IM - turn it off during a webinar if you are the host. If you must use it, be really careful what you say, who you say it to and pray nothing embarrassing or personal is sent to you for everyone to see.

Quick Update - During the past couple of months I participated on many webinars with enterprise software vendors trying to sell me expensive solutions. Most of the vendors had their IM going while doing webinars and training. Some very embarrassing things came flying across our screens. You learn a lot reading those messages when they pop-up on the presenters' screen, both personal and business related. Some even complaints from customers!

My advice to employees and vendors is to sign-out of IM before hosting a webinar. Otherwise, it just might destroy your credibility and possibly your career.

This one time I aliased a coworkers 'sudo' with 'sl' (sl shows a train running across the screen)

And then I removed him from the sudoers group and sudoers list.

I then magnified his screen 200%

Changed his background to a shitty narwhal.

And then full screened a terminal with the 'sl' train stuck in a while loop.

You can't control c out of the terminal.

He solved the first part really quickly, fixing the full screened terminal and exiting out of it, magnification and the background.

But took him 4 days to find that I had fucked up his sudo. Apparently, he didn't need to use sudo in those 4days. It wasn't until he mentioned it out of the blue.

How did he find out about it? He was running an important script that had sudo in it. When he ran the script a train would pop up and his script would terminate early.

He came to me and cursed me to Satan's anus. He then asked me to fix it, but then changed his mind and said that he'd do it himself. After a while he couldn't figure out what I had done.

I walked him through it. Told him that he had to go to his .bashrc file and remove the alias.

Later he comes back to me and curses me to the 12th circle of hell. He found that he was no longer a sudoer. At this point he gave me access to his computer and told me to reverse everything that I had done.
Added him back into the sudoers group and called it a day.

Lesson to be learned? Don't leave your machine unlocked.

Background: I'm not drunk yet, BUT I'M WORKING ON IT.

okay.

I just finished a second sprint on my React app. The first was to build a merchant onboarding flow. The second was to do substantial cleanup as I learned more about react/redux, and to create a "supply order" flow -- basically purchasing marketing materials and services. I finished that in a week, and I'm pretty proud. api-guy wanted it done in a day. i laughed. he probably could have, but it would have been a copy of the code in a new repo with some lines changed.

ANYWAY. it's all done and It's super pretty and works amazingly well. It has both the onboarding flow and the ordering flow, with a nice pop-out sidebar for navigation, namespaced actions, etc. Everything is pretty clean. I even added a cart to the ordering (despite everyone telling me not to) because wtf, what if someone wants to order TWO items? dumbasses. So I made that. it's sexy.

Anyway, it's all done and shiny and fancy and wonderful and I'd *love* to share screenshots if only it didn't give away where I worked. :<

... but the point of the rant!

After the first sprint, I made a copy of the repo so I could rework it and add more functionality without touching the original. (Hey! That's what a branch is for, right? Why didn't I branch it up?
well, read on)

I knew we were going to have multiple separate flows for this app: onboard, ordering, merchant tools, admin tools, support, etc. So, I wrote its server portion (the webpack builder + http server) so it would serve the same app at whatever url the user hit, and set a cookie containing that host+url. This allows the app to serve different content (basically showing/hiding content) based on the URL and future login roles. If someone hits /order, it would hide everything but the order flow. If they're a merchant, it would show all the merchant views plus ordering, etc.

tl;dr This way I can use the same codebase for multiple sites, drastically simplifying development, branding, and what have you. This new app could obv also be a drop-in replacement for the original onboarding project because of the above.

HOWEVER. this apparently isn't good enough for api-guy. He's terrified that adding/updating future components will affect all the existing content somehow.

so.

now we have three repos for basically the same codebase. 1) onboard aka "surfboard", 2) ordering, 3) merchant tools, aka "ferrari" (the "future" app).

Except.
1) "surfboard" is a very old version of the code. 3) "ferrari" is also old, since 2) "ordering" has newer content in it now.

... and somehow this is better?
fuck if i can figure out how.

His reasoning is "well, you won't be touching surfboard or ordering for 6 months, so now you don't have to worry about it." Sure, except, you know, it'll be a pain in the ass in 6 months now when I have a crapton of code and branding to redo. ffs.

Oh. We also have three Heroku pipelines for these three repos. for the same codebase.

and now you know why i'm drinking.

Lord forgive me for laughing too hard at this person/situation... I kid you NOT!

So today while everything was going well, we suddenly had network issues at work. We worked to get everything back up online asap and then sent out an email for those affected to either restart their machines or refresh their desktops but we recommend restarting... After some few client calls, this special call came in..

Riiing, riiiiiing, ring....
Me: hi, how can help you?

Client: *laughing.. This is probably a stupid question but I forgot how to "refresh" my desk top..the thing is, I have Febreeze but I don't think that's for desk tops.

Me: Wait, what? 🤔 Febreeze for what?😕

Client: You guys sent an email to refresh our desk tops and I said I have Febreeze so how will that get my things in the computer back to show again?

Me: Ohhh, no no. We meant your computer desktop. You don't need Febreeze. Right click anywhere on your computer in the screen and select refresh from the pop up menu. We meant your computer "desktop" not your actual "desk top".

Client: *starts laughing...I told you it was a stupid question

Me: don't worry.. It wasn't stupid.

After I hang up, some of my team members asked me why someone is asking about Febreeze...I told them and they all started laughing hysterically

I was still trying to digest the conversation I had just have on the phone. 😂😂😂

!code

I literally cannot get this computer to boot from ANYTHING other than its hard drive.

I want to boot from a usb flash drive, but the bios doesn't support that. it supports standard and 120mb floppies, ZIP drives, usb floppies, usb cd drives, etc. but not a generic USB drive. You'd think the bios developers would have heard of them back in 2012, but they also refer to Windows as "window os", so who knows.

I changed the boot order multiple times to include everything that might possibly include a usb flash drive, and then just tried all of the other options as well. No luck. Everything just booted straight to Windows.

Okay, that's not exactly unexpected, so I found a boot manager that allows booting to usb drives, and burned that to a cd. I made sure the boot order included "CDDRIVE" first (and "USB-CD" second just to be sure), and tried again. The bios refused to boot from the cd because it's in a cd/dvd drive, and cd drives are VASTLY different beasts than dvd drives, apparently. Like, it didn't even ask the drive to spin up! It just booted straight into Windows.

After a few more reboots (and quite a few middle fingers), my dvd drive magically appeared in the list of allowed boot devices. Why did it just show up now? No clue :/ I'm just happy it's there.

So, I pick that, save and exit, and wait for my shiny new boot manager to pop up. The cursor flashes a bit, moves around, and flashes some more. Then Windows starts loading.

what the crap? why?

So this time I disable booting from the hard drive altogether. In fact, I disable everything except the dvd drive, because screw this, and save/restart for the twelfth time.

Windows greets me.
Again.

What the hell?

At this point I'm tempted to unplug the friggin' drive. If Windows still greets me after that, I'm just going to check myself into an asylum and call it a life.

But seriously.
Either the boot manager in question is triple-faulting and the bios is transparently failing-over to the previous boot config (Windows), or said boot manager is just like "yolo!" and picks Windows anyway.

If a different boot manager doesn't work, I'm totally out of ideas.

Edit: disabling HD boot entirely and removing the boot manager cd also results in Windows loading. It's like the bios is completely ignoring my settings. :/

That weird moment when you write a Python script and errors pop up everywhere, only after an hour of debugging (pulling hair out) to find that you started putting a semicolon at the end of each statement again.

Most common UX blunder: Icons

FUCK icons. The big problem with them is they assume a level of familiarity with the product. Someone who has never seen a folder before won't know what a button with a folder icon on it does!

This can be remedied with text NEXT to the icon, giving the button a readable purpose. But guess what? THAT SHIT AIN'T COMMON ENOUGH.

Here's a good example for you; cars. I am familiar with cars, but there's some fucking icons that I can't even figure out. And imagine if you aren't familiar with cars? That's what happens all the time; there's a hundred unused buttons on a car's interior these days because painted upon them is an icon, and only an icon! And who the hell cares enough to take out the manual and finger through it until you find that specific icon. In my experience, almost nobody.

Let's bring it back to software. It's the most overlooked UX sin to have icons without labels or some sort of describing text. As programmers, you and me have seen and can instantly recognize thousands of icons. But to get the typical user's experience, load up a complex program like Blender (assuming you aren't familiar with it yet) and see if you can tell me what all of the icons mean. Or don't, here's a screenshot from Blender 2.8 Beta. None of these icons have any labels.

Fucking frustrating, isn't it?

Don't rely on tooltips! Nobody wants to hover over every fucking icon and wait for it to pop up just to find what they're fucking looking for! Don't forget that a lot of users DON'T EVEN KNOW THEY EXIST! (This number isn't shrinking as fast as you'd expect with the newer generations, because many of the newer generations use touch devices where tooltips don't exist at all)

There's my UX rant. Remember that users are afraid to click things which they don't know what they do. For the most positive user experience, give users something to read; a way to understand what the fuck is going on without experimenting, and without waiting for the tooltip to appear.

Ever have a feeling that there is so many interesting stuff out there - Angular, React.js, TypeScript, Rust, ELM, FRP, Machine Learning, Neuronal Networks, Robotics, Category theory... But no way to ever figure out what are all those about? And there is too little time to even get a good grasp of any single one of those. IT seems to be like hydra - one learns one thing and 10 new concepts pop up in the meantime.

Okay, question;

Can I use ANY phone number in my game?

According to Wikipidia:
"Numbers between (555)-0100 & (555)-0199 are reserved for fictional use."
But.. I'm wanting to have a little phone pop up in my game that you can enter phone numbers into and text the corresponding player (and i hope to have more than 99 players) I would just have contact names, but I want players ti be able to dick around with other players.. Like, post their number to in-game telemarketers and such. What fo you think I should do?

How the fuck can this happen?
It might be a malware. I did not do a scan yet, but I guess that it has to do with Google Chrome itself.
I think that a pop up once appeared and ever since I get these windows alerts every 1 hour or something like that.

People complaining about Microsoft pushing MS-Edge are clearly not using the YouTube mobile app, this shit pushes their premium shit and YouTube music every fucking day. MS you get ONE pop up when you change default browser and they are done! Also Google products one concurrent browsers ? You get that nice yellow message telling you you're not using chrome but people just like to tell shit about MS like it's the national sport or something well fuck you and fuck Google

Felt bad for everyone working on Christmas, so I just pushed an update to all my programs which will pop up random Christmas jokes to the working users on Christmas day. Hope that brightens their day!

Not really a fired moment because it was a university project.

A colleague of mine decided it'd be nice to set placeholder images to Hitler wearing a hello Kitty Nazi uniform. Oh without telling anyone, of course.

I go into the lab that a couple lecturers share, one of them was interested in the project we were working on and to our surprise the placeholder images pop up. I immediately say sorry, I didn't set that image and the guy looks at me with judging eyes.

Same guy has to take meds daily otherwise he acts up, not sure what it was he had, may have been ADHD, anyways we were staying late and he forgot his meds, and while our client is in the same room this guy starts doing the macarana behind the room separator, while we're supposed to give him a live preview of what we had accomplished in three months of work. Needless to say he didn't see him dancing like a moron but wow :/ learn to control yourself.

Same guy also never commented his code and used the two letter variable principal because it's such a great idea >.> Me and the other guy spent 6 hours rewriting his code, which should have been less time but he wasn't there to help nor was he available to yell.. I mean ask for help.

I hate University group projects....

My wife wouldn't stop asking me to help her with FB. As a joke I told her if she didn't quit, I'd delete it (Tech stuff goes over her head like a 747). Well, she kept on so I opened up the Dev tools. I started by adding just some non sense to one of the divs. She saw it pop up on screen and was like "Wait...you can really do that?" then I highlighted the body tag and hit backspace. The whole thing disappeared, it was great. She legit freaked out for a minute and begged me to fix it. I popped up the console and started typing random things. Created an array with some mumbo-jumbo, a couple of quick, meaningless functions and snuck hitting Ctrl+R in there, refreshing the page. She was so happy that Facebook worked again, that she stopped asking me how to do whatever it was

Five US quarters are about 1oz in weight and should hold down most keys on most keyboards.

I knew this because we had an error on a server with a pop up window that was only "ok". We couldn't kill the process because critical so we left a stack of change on enter until it it was done running and we could leave for the night.

FUCKING PEOPLE THAT USE PUBLIC TRANSPORT! THIS SHIT RANT IS FOR YOU CUNTS!

I mean, IF YOU ARE FUCKING DEAF DONT USE FUCKING EARPHONES AND TURN THE FUCKING VOLUME UP SO HIGH THAT EVERYONE CAN HEAR YOUR SHITTY
Dubstep, EDM, K-Pop OR ANY OTHER FUCKING MUSIC! thank you AND FUCK OFF!

And also IF YOU WANT TO GET ON THE FUCKING BUS, MAKE ROOM FOR PEOPLE TO GET OUT FIRST! I mean, the entrance STAYS FUCKING OPEN! AND FUCKING OTHER PEOPLE ALSO HAVE TO LEAVE THE FUCKING BUS FIRST!
I LEARNED THAT IN FUCKING KINDERGARTEN!

Microsoft be like :
"Oh, you're moving away from your computer for a while with all this stuff open? It would a shame if some were to.. UPDATE it!"

It asks with a pop up, and if you don't answer it, it thinks "Oh, you're not telling me if I should update now or not, but I think you probably want me to update. UPDATE!"

For me, if I keep ignoring the update, it starts to create problems for me out of nowhere. It starts to lag and then the task manager starts to lag. EVERYTHING IS NOT RESPONDING.
When I finally update it, it acts like there were no issues at all. Everything is fine..

Even with Xbox, if it wants to update, it doesn't let you go online until you do. If it loses connection mid-update for some reason, it begins the update again from the friggin START. All that time updating gone to waste. Recently, I'm having a lot of issues with it. It doesn't let me sign in a lot of times. "We couldn't sign you in" for some reason. It JUST CAN'T. If you have a slow internet connection, you can't play any game at all. I contacted Microsoft Support about that issue and they concluded that it was all because of the slow internet connection and there were no issues on their end and they told me to GIT GOOD (Not exactly those words). If it does sign you in, it kicks you out mid-game for some reason with the evil pop up saying "Bye User_Name". The game says that YOU signed out (Dumb game, doesn't understand Microsoft shenanigans) and returns you to the main menu. If your game didn't save, well, GOOD luck to you!
Everything takes forever to load, if it decides it's not gonna load, it gives me a really helpful error saying "Something went wrong".
Maybe it's just me, it just hates me particularly. It makes me think that Microsoft intentionally acts like a douche just to get attention..

(In the end I think, maybe, this all is not a big deal if you surrender and accept Microsoft as your overlord)

I tried a few ways to stop Windows from updating automatically, but nothing worked (Maybe, I should try again).

Maybe I should dual boot Linux, but that brings a whole new set of things that I'd have to deal with, doesn't it?

Sigh

I hereby salute every JS-wanking web dev who uses a pop-up type of dialog *and* display yet hugging blur the actual hugging content behind it, only to become completely visible when you allow JavaScript and allow those hugging cookies.

With my middle finger I salute you, motherhuggers. You filthy hugging pieces of hugging shit.

7 hugs so far, oh wait 8! Will this rant defeat my current record on amount of hugs given that apparently stands at 18 (which is hugging incredible, if I may say so myself)? Not that that's really the hugging point though, the hugging GDPR that's responded at by those motherhugging hugwads is. I hugging salute you, hugging pieces of hugging shit!!!

HUG!!!

I fucking hate the web guy.
He says - make a pop-up of the raw text you're receiving (in the app) so that I can test it easily while I fix it.
I did it.
Now he laughs and says - I think you searched for it and simply copied from wrong example. All you had to do was handle the text and parse it and display it blablabla instead of simply popping up the raw text.
Thank you I flipping KNOW all of that, you stuck up obnoxious frog. I did it that way initially and uploaded it coz you SAID so! Why do you ALWAYS have to talk like I know nothing!?

Useless feature I've built?

Too many to mention. Here's #25.

Modified an existing "Are you sure..?" dialog pop-up (Yes/No buttons) to Yes/No/Cancel. Why? Managers claimed users were "accidentally" clicking 'Yes' when they should have clicked 'No' and causing all kinds of chaos, costing the company money, etc. Managers believed giving the user two chances instead of one would make it easier to avoid the problems they caused.

The meeting:
Me: "Users can click 'No', hit the 'Esc' key, or click the close 'X' button on the window, how will an extra button make it more foolproof?"
Mgr1: "It just will. Andy accidentally deleted inventory and when I asked him if an extra button would have saved them a days worth of re-counts, he said yes."
Mgr2: "Barb accidentally credited a customer $1,500. She promised me she clicked 'No', but the system credited the account anyway. An extra button would have saved us thousands of dollars!"
Me: "Um...these sound like training issues, not an extra button issue."
MyMgr: "PaperTrail, how hard is it to add an extra button?"
Dev1: "Oh yea, adding buttons is easy."
Dev2: "I can do it 5 minutes"
Dev3: "We'll save the company thousands and thousands of dollars!"
<lots of head-knodding and smiles>
MyMgr: "That settles it. PaperTrail, add the extra button!"

Users still screwed things up, but at least they couldn't blame it on not having an extra button.

You know what really grinds my gears?

When a manager writes up some bullshit "this doesn't work".

Then you waste your time following up, and they say, "oh yeah, this so and so pop up came up with validation error X".

YEAH? AND I'M SUPPOSED TO KNOW THAT WHEN YOU WRITE ABSOLUTELY NO STEPS TO REPRODUCE, JUST COMING TO ME WITH "HEY, X IS BROKEN" GOD JUST GET FUCKING 1% TECHNICALLY LITERATE THATS ALL I ASK FOR I'M SO SICK OF YOUR SHIT

Some of y'all talk way too much shit about web development tools/libs without being web devs yourselves......

I don't know enough about OS development to talk shit, you see me doing it? no

fk me I am getting so fucking fed up with this community, it used to be cool rants about the shit that we go through, now is just pop wannabe dev ranting meme bullshit

My company's build engine is like a shopping cart with two fucked up wheels. Yeah, it works if you pop a wheelie with it...but should you really have to?

Just had Windows pop up with a notification saying “We’ve turned on storage sense for you”. Love it how the default is “When Windows Decides”. Was that why countless users lost their data back in October 2018???

I think I’ll turn that off permanently 😂😂😂

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'...

This is what happens when you make style more important than function.

Pop quiz: when you lift the handle, what temperature water do you expect to come out? (This isn’t a trick question; assume you have an awesome water heater with instant warm-up time)

“Hot,” you might say, because the “H” is pointed towards you and aligned with the faucet.

“Cold,” you might say, because the handle is turned in the direction of the “C”.

There wouldn’t be any ambiguity if the H/C markings were on an immobile part of the fixture so that the relative position of the handle made the answer obvious.

(If you instinctively answered “cold” then congrats this is the perfect faucet for you.)

YouTube. Hate and love for it just like I would for an abusive partner.

Ads!
Wanna build a website with Wix? Fuck no!
Wanna manage WordPress over SSH? Fuck no!
.. well I kind of do but a turd remains a turd regardless of how it's maintained. WordPress can go die from a torture as long as the time everyone has wasted on it loading already. So no, I don't give a flying fuck about WordPress' new interface.
Wanna buy a new Samsung phone despite just having bought a OnePlus already? YOUTUBE, HOW ABOUT YOU GO FUCK YOURSELF AND YOUR SHITTY ALGO?!!

Quality videos though, so many engineering videos and all for free. How amazing is that? I quite like them.

But if I try to like a video and particularly the fucking comments on it, don't you fucking dare putting your fat fingers 1 pixel next to the like button, because then obviously you want to reply to the comment and have a pop-up with the whole comment and all its replies, and an automatically popped up text input field, just so you have to tap back 2 times just to try liking the bloody comment again. Rinse and repeat that 2 times at best, 5 times at worst. What's not to like, right?!

God fucking dammit. At least now I know why those random mentions without any meaningful other text are there in most comment sections. Usability over 9000!!!

Fucking surprise payment pop-ups in apps!

I've just accidentally bought an app, because it randomly showed the "buy pro version" pop up...

My friend, Gavin, an air steward (a job that he had done for decades), told me about an incident at work. He said that (shockingly to me) passengers occasionally die on a flight (particularly long-haul), just as a matter of course. This can be because people sometimes travel to visit loved ones BECAUSE they are dying, people sometimes find travelling itself stressful (so it can exacerbate an existing medical condition), or simply that, if you took a large number of people and shut them up in a space together for some considerable time, some of them would pop off through sheer statistical probability. Cabin crew are, apparently, fully trained to deal within this eventually in a calm, almost routine manner.

This particular flight, Gavin was working with another gay man: Peter, who was actually a VERY funny personality. Camp, extravagant and loud, Peter really lit up the place. But naturally, when the very elderly male passenger in seat 38b died peacefully in his sleep halfway across the Atlantic, Peter acted (like the entire crew), with decorum and dignity. As per the protocol, all the lights in the cabin were dimmed. A hush fell over the passengers (Gavin told me that, although no announcement is ever made, the other passengers nearly always instinctively know what's happened, with the news spreading via the media of hushed whispers and nudges). Then, as per standing instructions, two of the crew carefully lifted the deceased out of his seat and gently carried him to the crew station where he was laid down on a bed for the remainder of the flight.

After the late gentleman disappeared behind the discreetly drawn curtain, you could have heard a pin drop. There was a demure pause during which, slowly, the lights went back up.

Suddenly Peter's cheery face appeared, poking through the gap in the drapes. He looked around, blinking brightly with curiosity at the seated passengers, and said, in a voice that echoed around the whole cabin:

"SO! Anyone else have the fish?"

He narrowly avoided getting sacked.

My friends computer had a dead motherboard, so I chucked his disk into my PC to copy his files to USB.
We turned on the computer after plugging the drive in, and it showed up in Windows explorer. At which point I was thinking sweet this will be easy. But when I clicked on the drive to open it, the screen immediately blacked out with a pop. I look down at the PC and see smoke pouring out of the hard drive 🤔😯. I didn't know it was possible to literally fry a hard drive, I think I'll just stick to software after this...maybe I should be booted from Linux USB in the first place \_(ツ)_/¯

Thankfully my friend wasn't too annoyed as he had a recent backup!

Not commenting enough, using if instead of switch, messing (and breaking) the IDE, not reading pop up messages, thinking and not doing, watching Netflix, starting on new projects before finishing old ones, complaining about certain languages, googling instead of figuring it for myself (sometimes), let my friends persuade me into making something for them, run-on sentences, not enough comments, giving up quickly, not doing adequate research, and of course, not writing down good ideas I have.

For the love of God. Please stop trying to make me download your shitty mobile app. I don’t have room, and I don’t want it. I just want to read the content that YOU SENT TO ME (looking at you, Quora). Nice way to make sure I unsubscribe and never come back. An unclosable pop up on mobile that just has a button to your mobile app while I have limited data and patience doesn’t do it for me. Fuck whoever came up with THAT brilliant decision.

"Systems open to all, but closed to intruders"

HEY, HP, PACK YOUR WHOLE FAMILY OF TRASH SOFTWARE INTO YOUR TRAILER HOME AND DRIVE IT OFF A CLIFF. WHAT THE __FUCK__ DOES THAT EVEN MEAN YOU LITERAL BLOAT FLIES. HOW ABOUT WE START WITH THE FACT THAT ALL IT TAKES IS ONE DUMB MOTHER FUCKER ANYWHERE IN A COMPANY GIVING AWAY ONE LOGIN IN A SOCIAL ENGINEERING ATTACK TO POP THIS NICE FART FILLED BALLOON YOUR DRUNK SALES AND MARKETING MORON PARADE CAME UP WITH.

STOP FUCKING ADVERTISING ON MR. ROBOT AND LET ME PRETEND IT'S NOT A PRODUCT FOR JUST ONE MOMENT FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU

Ya know I don't mind Windows updates, I get it the OS needs its updates, so last night a pop up asked to when to do the update I thought hmm maybe Sunday (probably be driving my motorbike so I'll be out of the house), set the time and done.

Afterwards I go to shut my computer down and accidentally hit update and restart out of shear annoyance. So I wait it out, I thought well okay now it's done I won't have to wait. I go to shut down and it says "update and shut down", ... Right after I just updated...

I thought okay at least I'll be going to be knowing tomorrow I can just turn my computer on and play some games to chill for the night.

Oh but no, nope not gonna happen, I have to wait for it to "actually" update. Been waiting for about 30ish minutes :/

I think I'll make sure that updates don't happen anymore, I'm pretty annoyed at this waiting :/

Honestly wouldn't have had Windows 10 in the first place but somehow my computer decided to just install Windows 10 after I kept saying nope to it's damn pop-up, I just turned it on and boom "we're fucking​your day up by installing Windows 10"

I actually take off anything that makes Windows 10 look like it and make it look more like win7.

70% done :/

Dogecoin hit USD $0.40 recently, which means it's time for the Crypto Rant.

TL;DR: Dogecoin is shit and is logically guaranteed to eventually fall unless it is fundamentally changed.

===========================

If you know how Crypto works under the hood, you can skip to the next section. If you don't, here's the general xyz-coin formula:

Money is sent via transactions, which are validated by *anybody*.

Since transactions are validated by anybody, the system needs to make sure you're not fucking it up on purpose.

The current idea (that most coins use today) is called proof-of-work. In short, you're given an extremely difficult task, and the general idea is you wouldn't be willing to do that work if you were just going to fuck up the system.

For validating these transactions, you are rewarded twofold:

1) You are given a fixed-size prize of the currency from the system itself. This is how new currency is introduced, or "minted" if you prefer.
2) You are given variable-size and user-determined prize called "transaction fees", but it could be more accurately called a "bribe" since it's sole purpose is to entice miners to add YOUR transaction to their block.

This system of validation and reward is called mining.

===========================

This smaller section compares the design o f BTC to Dogecoin - which will lead to my final argument

In BTC, the time between blocks (chunks of data which record transactions and are added to the chain, hence blockchain) is ten minutes. Every ten minutes, BTC transactions are validated and new Bitcoins are born.

In Dogecoin, the time between blocks is only one minute. In Theory, this means that mining Dogecoin is about ten times easier, because the system expects you to be able to solve the proof of work in an average of one minute.

The huge difference between BTC and Doge is the block reward (Fixed amount; new coins minted). The block reward for BTC is somewhat complicated compared to Doge: It started as 50 BTC per block and every 4 years it is halved ("the great halving"). Right now it's 6.25 BTC per block. Soon, the block reward will be almost nothing until BTC hits it's max of 21 million bitcoins "minted".

Dogecoin reward is 10,000 coins per block. And it will be that way for the end of time - no maximum, no great halving. And remember, for every 1 BTC block mined, 10 Doge blocks are mined.

===========================

Bitcoin and Dogecoin are now the two most popular coins in pop culture. What makes me angry is the widespread misunderstanding of the differences between the two. It is likely that most investors buy Dogecoin thinking they're getting in "early" because it's so cheap. They think it's cheap because it isn't as popular as Bitcoin yet. They're wrong. It's cheap because of what's outlined in section two of this rant.

Dogecoin is actually not very far off Bitcoin. Do the math: there's a bit over 100 billion Dogecoin in circulation (130b). There's about 20 million BTC. Calculate their total CURRENT values:

130b * $0.40 = 52b
20m * $60k = 1.2t

...and Doge is rising much, much faster than BTC because of the aforementioned lack of understanding.

The most common thing I hear about Doge is that "nobody expects it to reach Bitcoin levels" (referring to being worth 60k a fucking coin). They don't realize that if Doge gets to be worth just $10 a coin, it will not just reach Bitcoin levels but overtake Bitcoin in value ($1.3T).

===========================

It's worth highlighting that Dogecoin is literally designed to fail. Since it lacks a cap on new coins being introduced, it's just simple math that no matter how much Doge rises, it will eventually be worthless. And it won't take centuries, remember that 100k new Doge are mined EVERY TEN MINUTES. 1,440 minutes in a day * 10K per minute is 14.4 million new coins per day. That's damn near every Bitcoin to ever exist mined every day in Dogecoin

Recently started at a new job. Things were going fine, getting along with everyone, everything seems good and running smoothly, a few odd things here and there but for the most part fine.

Then I decided to take a look at our (public facing) website... What's this? Outdated plugins from 2013? Okay, that's an easy fix I guess? All of these are free and the way we're using them wouldn't require a lot of refactoring...

Apparently not. Apparently, we can't even update them ourselves, we have to request that an external company does it (which we pay, by the way, SHITELOADS of money to). A week goes past, and we finally get a response.

No, we won't update it, you'll have to pay for it. Doesn't matter that there's a CVE list a bloody mile long and straight up no input validation in several areas, doesn't matter that tens of thousands of users are at risk, pay us or it stays broken. Boggles the fuckin' mind.

I dug into it a bit more than I probably should have (didn't break no laws though I'm not a complete dumbass, I just work for em) and it turns out it's not just us getting fucked over, it's literally EVERYONE using their service which is the vast majority of people within the industry in my country. It also turns out that the entirety of our region is running off a single bloody IP which if you do a quick search on shodan for, you guessed it, also has a CVE list pop up a fuckin' mile long. Don't get me started on password security (there is none). I hate this, there's fucking nothing I can do and everyone else is just fine sitting on their hands because "nobody would target us because we're not a bank!!", as if it bloody matters and as if peoples names, addresses, phone numbers and assuming someone got into our actual database, which wouldn't be a fuckin' stretch of the imagination let me tell you, far more personal details, that these aren't enticing to anyone.

What would you do in my situation?
What can I even do?
I don't want to piss anyone senior off but honestly, I'm thinkin' they might deserve it. I mean yeah there's nothing we can do but at least make a fuss 'cause they ain't gunna listen to my green ass.

F@#$% ANDROID STUDIO! You should definitely add a feature of giving a Pop-up window asking if the user REALLY WANTS TO OPEN THE SOFTWARE OR NOT!
You should see my face when I click on android studio icon by accident 😩 on my Windows...

When you want to filter Android studio by exceptions for your app and the exceptions that pop-up are from another app lol, in this case SoundCloud.

!rant
print("Hello World!")

Erm..... Here goes nothing.
Hello everyone, I'm [REDACTED] from [REDACTED] in the SEA region. I'm a highschool student, 17, with a hobby of programming in Python 3 as a self-taught trial-and-error script kiddy, mostly small scripts from random "Yea I should do that, how long will it take?! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"-moments. I found DevRant while talking with people in a few programming Discord servers. Hope this is enough for a "Hello World!" post....and yea, welcome me to DevRant *pop confetti and hope not forced to clean up later*

Partner of ours claimed they are going to update their api. No breakage. My hopes were low and they did not disappoint.

Soon after the new version of their api went live, of course, loads of breakage. And the email contact with them is really fun.

Me: "Hello, since your update we get the issue A. Here's the complete communication."

Them: "We did not change the existing behavior. You are doing X wrong. Repeat that one call during the step and you should be fine."

Me: "Thank you, if I repeat the call, it does indeed work, albeit slower, since we are now repeating calls. Furthermore, our application was consuming your api for years and we did not change anything. So why is that step necessary now? Only after your update do our logs show errors from your API. And by the way, we now also have a issue with B. Why is that?"

Them: "Oh that's because your query the endpoint with "Fnord", try "Baz".

Me: "Yes, I do know that we query it with "Fnord" as that is what a previous endpoint of yours is responding to us. Why are we getting "Fnord"? What request do I have to make to get a "Baz" back?"

It feels like a game of wackamole. Squash one issue, ten more will pop up. I am one step away from becoming active-aggressive.

I finally gave in into the peer pressure and made myself a Twitter account.

WHAT A FUCKING SHIT SITE.

When registering the only thing I provided was my email and username. Nothing more.

One day later when visiting Twitter I get a big ass pop-up that briefly tells me my account is locked for 'unusual behavior', 'suspicious activity' and 'not following of Twitter's rules'.

I want to remind you that my account was barely one day old, and had no activity whatsoever.

So if getting your account locked for no single reason isn't bad enough. The only and ONLY way to unlock my account was TO PROVIDE MY FUCKING PHONE NUMBER. No other single way to unlock my account.

YOU WANT MY PERSONAL DATA SO BADLY?

On top of that I didn't receive a single email from them for this 'suspicious activity' or 'breaking of Twitter's rules'.

THIS IS SCAREWARE. Lying to people in order to get more personal data. My account was perfectly fine. And without providing your phone number you can't even delete your account.

GO FUCK YOURSELF FUCKING ASSHOLES WITH YOUR ASSHOLE DESIGN

FUCKING SHITSITE

Feeling powerful by disabling simply with developers tools that big and bad pop-up.

Which asks to deactivate my precious Ad-Blocker to be able to read this tiny article on your expired https newspaper site xD

The things we take for granted... I was laughing my tits off at my mate taking a screenshot this is how it transcribed :)

My mate:
morning!

Me:
morning mate 🙂

My mate:
how are you getting on?

Me:
not bad thanks, bit knackered but good 🙂

My mate:
the band was good then lol. how do i take a screen shot buddy?

Me:
there's print screen button on the top right of the keyboard
My mate:
what will it be under?

Me:
it's a button
on the keyboard
print screen
prt scr or something

My mate:
no when i want to use it

Me:
??

My mate:
what file/folder

Me:
you have to open something like paint
paste it in
save it 🙂

My mate:
urghh
fuck doing all that
you do it

Me:
hahaha
My mate:
haha

Me:
I'm all good 😀
just open paint
ctrl+v
save
that's it

My mate:
i just got a killer score on wows lol i want to post it to the group
so i go to the game screen take a shot by pressing that button then go to paint and do what?
i dont even have paint lol

Me:
don't know what it's called in Windows 10

My mate:
ahh fuck it

Me:
burger nipples

My mate:
why doesnt it just pop up on your downloads or pictures ffs

Me:
it might do in Windows 10 I don't know 😀
doubtful though

My mate:
it has done for other ones
for other games it has

Me:
sometimes the game has it built in
depends on so many things haha

My mate:
nailed it!!
i just hit the right click then hit paste and it came on to the post haha
no fucking about

Me:
Congrats ;)

I swear upon the gods of the internet! Any time I am trying to read an article/blog post/anything and the site puts a god damn pop-up form asking me to sign up for something, I leave the site. ESPECIALLY ON MOBILE WHEN YOU CANT CLOSE THE DAMN WINDOW WITHOUT GIVING UP YOUR INFO.

And every time a client asks me to do this I nicely explain how much people hate pop-ups, 99% of the time I've closed the window or tab before I even read what the box is asking for, I don't care.

If the user is trying to read something, then they are trying to read something, and they don't want to be bothered with your ridiculous attempts for information gathering so you can spam them later.

My most satisfying bug fix?

I found a core concurrency issue in this gnarly homegrown ORM and reported it to the lead devs, who (very defensively, having written the damn thing) argued that it would never pop up in a prod environment and I was stupid for even bringing it up. Theoretically, this bug could cause pretty much every foreign key to be assigned to the wrong parent, but only if multiple instances of the application were open/running at once. They were so certain it would never happen on live that they explicitly instructed me not to fix it. After all, this bug had been active for many years on a previous project and nobody complained.

Problem was, that previous project was something that only a single user had open most of the time (think: a manager). The new project was something that would be used by multiple people at the same time (think: all the employees). Once we released this new-project-with-old-orm, it didn't take long at all for our customers to start complaining.

After that, they let me fix the bug. :)

GRANDPAFUCKING RETARDS!
I HOPE YOU ALL DIE ON SOME ELEPHANT DICKS TURNED AROUND YOUR HEADS WHILE GETTING RAPED BY THOUSANDS OF GIRAFFES (EACH OF THEM BEING SO HORNY THAT THEY ALSO COULD FUCK YOUR WIFE AT THE SAME TIME!)

THEY ASK ME A FUCKING QUESTION AND ONLY GIVE ME THE OPTION TO AGREE ON THE COOKIE POP-UP TO ENTER THE WEBSITE! YOU DIPSHITS!
YOU SISTERFUCKING ASSHOLES!

WELL... I FUCKING CLICKED "AGREE" AND WHEN I FINALLY FOUND THE PRIVACY CENTER (LOL) THE SAME FUCKING POP-UP DID APPEAR!
HOW ABOUT YOU FUCKING FUCK YOURSELF, DISTROWATCH?!

Btw. they really still use tables instead of proper css styling.
DO WE LIVE IN THE FUCKING STONE AGE?!

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

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

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

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

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

Semi rant/ opinion
I have been wondering a bit about what my fellow devs think about adblockers

I have been using an adblocker for years.
I am guessing we got a good mix of both people who are pro and against them

I do get the site's owner point of view wanting to get a little bit of cash out of their site buts its the ad publisher that come in and royally screw things up with their garish flashy shit.

I wouldn't really mind 2-3 small static adverts on a page, little ones that don't disrupt the flow of the page or clash with the page colour scheme (i know that one is a bit far fetched but anyone who loaded up a dark page in the comfort of a darkened room only to have a big bright ad turn up in the middle of the page force them to squint ). Sadly publishers don't give a damn, their only concern is to
GRAB YOUR ATTENTION...

FLASHY FLASH FLASH MOFO!

OH AND HERE IS AN AUDIO ENABLED ONE FOR YA, GOOD LUCK MUTING IT YOU POOR SHMUCK , ONE CLICK ON THE DAMN THING WILL TAKE YOU TO THE LAND OF POP-UPS

AH YOU WANNA DOWNLOAD SOMETHING BUDDY ? AH WELL I HOPE YOU LIKE INDIANA JONES' SCENE WITH HOLY GRAIL
CUZ HERE ARE 10 DOWNLOAD BUTTONS, ONE IS THE REAL THING THE REST WILL ARE TOOLBARS

They are the biggest culprit here yet moan the loudest about adblockers.
Sort yourselves out then complain to us about ad blocking

Building my own accounting software because everything else is overly complicated and is trying to compete with enterprise accounting tools. All I want is some budgeting, some bill tracking, and categorization.

Writing in Ruby because I'm a masochist. Using built-in minitest because again 😈.

I have currently around 62 assertions. As soon as I add ANY new test that's literally asserting true, everything comes unglued and 20+ failures pop up. Take it out, 62 passes.

I feel like I'm going crazy at this point. The errors also don't make ANY sense. Shit like, "that record doesn't exist" when it's clearly a part of fixtures and is only used in ONE test(the one that's breaking).

Installed minitest bisect, and it's like 🤷‍♀️"lol get fucked bro!"

So I came here to rant about this before my battery dies and I go drink myself to sleep.

Thank you for coming to my dev-talk.

Reinstalling Android Studio.
It takes a while.
So you take a rest, exercise a little. Sure, it will installed when you'll come back ready to throw yourself into deep work, with fresh energy.

You come back.
There is a pop up: Do you want to send usage data to google ? Nothing installed yet.

Only Yes/No option. Where is the "Fuck you" option?

Well, this is awkward!

(Had this notification pop up on my lock screen a few days back (OnePlus 5 user))

For our office secret Santa one year I drew the boss's name. I don't know him very well as he's a pretty unsociable person, for the first six months of my employment was introduced to clients as the web developer's "little buddy." So I really wanted to do something passive agressive.

I spent a few days trying to find the best prank gifts. I landed on a glitter bomb. I filled a balloon with glitter, puffed just enough air in it so it fit in the box, and rigged it up with an x-acto blade inside which would pop the balloon when you open the top flaps.

It worked fantastically. The balloon popped, glitter went everywhere, the entire office was laughing except the boss. It was days before the glitter started to dissipate from his beard.

A rubber duck plugin for all ide that reminds the programer to drink water ( I usually forget to drink water while coding) and more than a few errors it should pop up automatically

For our iOS app, our project manager wanted an alert to pop up and ask the user to rate the app. Even if the user tapped 'no' or had already rated it.
And it was supposed to be in the settings view so the user would see it every time they used the app.

Implementing something that annoys me to death in every other mobile app blergh 😷

i made a mock code that wouldn't close to prank my colleagues. this boy tried the x button and it didn't work, so he went for ctrl alt del and the pop up showed up to confirm and when pressing yes it still wouldn't close

I was just writing a long rant about how my rant style changed, and how I could fix anything that annoys me in a heartbeat by just putting my mind to implementing a change. Then YouTube once again paused the synth mix that was playing on my laptop in the background, with that stupid "Video paused. Continue watching?" pop-up. I even installed an add-on for it in Firefox to make it automatically click that away. I guess that YouTube did yet another bullshit update to break that, for "totally legitimate user interface improvements" or whatever. Youtube-dl faces similar challenges all the time, and it's definitely not alone in that either. I also had issues with that on Facebook when I wanted to develop on top of that, where the UI changes every other day and the API even changes every other week. And as far as backwards compatibility goes, our way or the highway!

So I did the whole "replace and move on" type of thing. I use youtube-dl often now to get my content off YouTube into a media player that doesn't fuck me over for stupid reasons like "ad fraud" (I use an ad blocker you twats, what ads am I gonna fraud against), or "battery savings" (the damn laptop is plugged in and fully topped up for fucks sake, and you do this crap even on desktop computers). Gee I wonder why creators are moving on to Floatplane and Nebula nowadays, and why people like yours truly use "highly illegal" youtube-dl. Oh and thank you for putting me in Saudi Arabia again. Pinnacle of data mining, machine learning and other such wank could not do GeoIP. for a server that used to be in a datacenter in Italy for years, and recently has been moved to another hosting provider in Germany. It's about as unchanging and static, and as easy to geolocate as you can possibly get. But hey, kill off another Google+ when?

Like seriously, yes I'm taking your Foobar challenges and you may very well be the company I end up working for. But if anything it feels like there's a shitton of stuff to fix. And the challenges themselves still using Python 2.7 honestly feels like the seldom seen tip of the iceberg.

tl;dr - install ‘Pop!_os’ and try it out if you haven’t yet, it’s pretty damn good!

Heavy Micro$haft user here, have tried using ubuntu a bunch of times in the past and fucking regretted it every time. Ran into issues with stupid shit like the apt cache growing exponentially until the drive was full, or something like the the system python getting borked.

To be fair, I’m 120% certain my dumb-assery is what caused the problems. I’m definitely not trying to blame the OS. But my experience was shitty, even if it was at my own hands lol.

Started playing around with Pop!_os from the system76 team. And I’m seriously in freakin’ love with this OS. It’s clean, is performant, feels way less buggy or just feels more stable somehow. I know it’s based on ubuntu, but I’ve had a great time thus far using it. I’ve got ansible, docker, aws toolkit, aws cli, sam-cli, vscode, dynamodb-local, serverless, npm, brew, and working on steam now.

Everything has been a breeze and again the system feels really fast and snappy. It feels a lot like mac on the smoothness scale, but snappy like a windows box with beefy hardware specs.

I’m still just in the testing phase on a VM, but I’m seriously thinking about blowing away my windows install for Pop!_os.

(I’ll try arch someday when I’m up for some hardcore masochism)

So... Lots of rants about hacking.
Let me yell you a story...
Two decades ago I was asked to fix the school library computers and block then from using mIRC.
I cleaned all the machines, reinstalled the pirate copy of windows I was provided, blocked installing programs, blocked running of programs except the ones required (office, Netscape) and vnc in every computer, that I could access in a off-site computer.
Next day all the computers had mIRC... Just to show how kids are smart... Someone changed the MIRC.exe to iexplore.exe and that way could execute any program he wanted...
Invisible hard drive? Just use command line (so he could copy mIRC to a hidden folder)
Still, scared lots of kids, wen watching porn and a message would pop up , asking to not watch porn in school, but never couth the guy

I've been using devRantron recently to try it out. It's hard enough to be productive when I just get notifications on my phone, but getting desktop notifications that pop up over my code... how can I not immediately go look who commented on what??

So thanks guys, the app is great, but I have a love/hate relationship with the desktop notifs due to my lack of self-control.

When I started off working on this particular project under a new technical manager, I used to love working overtime because the work and the problem we were trying to solve was really interesting. My technical lead was also a really awesome dude and I was able to learn a lot of things under his guidance. A couple of times, I didn't even mind working on the weekends too in case we wanted to meet some strict deadlines. I wanted to make sure that my team's brand name does not get spoiled and we deliver on what we promise.

It was all good until all the management started taking our overtime and weekend work for granted. It took me some time to realize this. Now it almost became a part of standard expectations. It was getting irritating. Managers could see this uneasiness but chose to do nothing.

The work increased, so did the team and the communication channels. The newbies in the team now worked overtime and on weekends. And everybody started acting as if it was normal. That's when it stuck me that I am responsible for inculcating this unsustainable and life sucking culture in the team. I stopped working overtime and started questioning the set deadlines, often asking them to postpone things. Management got furious and changed their focus on the newbies who'd work overtime, often rewarding them to reinforce the behavior.

I tried undoing it, asking managers that the team will not work on weekends. There was friction and managers would agree but the old bad habited cultural spore would pop up tume and again and the team would go back to the regular overtime and working weekends thing. As more time passed, the managers would circumvent me and start talking to others in the team, giving them work and deadlines directly because I started to say 'No' when I felt the need to do so. I tried to protect some folks in the team who would not be able to speak up but were frustrated. I started caring less about the team's brand and more about colleagues who were suffering due to such unethical (and illegal?) practices being normalised in the team.

Trying again and again to get back to 'normal', I failed everytime. Unsure of how far I'll be able to go on with this without getting severly burnt in the process and seeing no respite, I decided to move on. I put in my resignation two weeks back and want to start a fresh in another company.

I feel I am responsible for bringing this into the team without realizing the repurcussions of my working overtime. Staying in the team for more than 3.5 years, I could actually feel how managers have no fucks about your personal life and work life balance (despite showing oh so much concern about the well being of my family) and would reward anyone who works as per their whims and fancies. I wish I never get to work for a management such as this.

It was 1987. I was 13. My first dev project started with a $1,300 IBM PC XT clone I bought from a relative who was a “dealer” of PCs for some company. It took all the savings I had from birthday money and mowing lawns for several summers at $5 a pop.

My mom wanted to encourage me to learn it more in depth, and she also wanted to know more for her job as a librarian, so she bought us a bunch of books about DOS, BASIC, and Assembler.

I first got familiar with DOS and then dove into Assembler without realizing what it really was (and how much easier BASIC would be). After hours and hours of typing in what, to me, then, was complete gibberish, I grabbed the BASIC book to see what it had to offer.

I never went back to the Assembler book.

A kid at school had given me a BASIC program he had typed in from a magazine. It was a flight simulator of sorts but with a helicopter, IIRC. I loaded up that bad boy and got to hacking. I didn’t get much done with it but I did build a few other menu navigation programs to explore the language more.

That led to PROLOG, C, PASCAL, Visual Basic, Perl, ASP, ColdFusion, and now PHP.

So im a programming student at university, tasked with a small group project to make a simple 3d platformer in ue4.
End up with 3 games design students where I'm doing all of the technical stuff while they do sound, graphics and design.
So I make a simpe all purpose ai that can do everything they need and hand it over. The next day I get a call saying it doesn't work. Takes me an hour to realise they don't have a navmesh. Now, that wasn't too unreasonable mistake as they didn't know what one was but a few hours later they call me again saying it doesn't deal any damage.

I'm going through the blueprints and can't find out what isn't working until an idea pops into my head.

Me "Click the damage variable for me"
Them "What's a variable?"
Me "That thing on the bottom left that says damage. Then the world value should pop up on the right with a number, tell me that number."
Them "0"

So apparently they fucked with the variable and set damage dealt to 0. Dunno why, they didn't even know what it was nor what it did.

This is my life at the moment. I hope a real job ain't this bad :(

This is driving me nuts. Anyone know of this malware or whatever shit it is? Every now and then ads pop up. Usually in the launcher, but sometimes also in other apps. It'd be nice to get rid of... Usually when I look in the activity manager theres nothing, but this time I managed to capture it.

Issue or Error? Rant story time!

I was working on a windows desktop app, and everything was ok, you know, tests completed succesfully, all in time, etc. The problem was when we showed the demo to one of our clients. He saw several screens and we explained all the features to him.

Client: *Sees a Error pop-up indicating that a remote service is temporarly unavailable (what it has to happen in order to show him how the system would warn him when an external service is out of service)
Client: What’s that?
Lead dev: What do you mean?
Client: Yes. That’s an error pop-up
Lead dev: Yes, it’s a message that tells you that there was an issue connecting to the bank service
C: No, no and no. Please change it
L: Why? Don’t you want the system to tell you when there is a connection issue and why is that happening?
C: Yes, but my employees could lost their minds because of this class of messages!
L: So...?
C: You have to change it
L: Ok. What do you want to change?
C: First of all, don’t put an “Error” icon, put an “Warning” icon, and instead of “Error” title, put... “Issue”
L: “Issue?”
C: Yeah. Don’t put the “E” word, if the users see an “Error” message, they could think that the program doesn’t work, even if it does work.

We all though “WTF?!”

To make the story shorter, we changed all the pop-ups. That took two days.

Is that correct? I know that “Error” sounds hard but, seriously? “Issue: The remote service is not available, contact your bank?”

I fucking hate the Internet

day before Yesterday, I was searching for a software on internet(which is not free) I found a site (unofficial) giving me both free full & trial version. so I thought, why not get the full version. I downloaded it, installed it. awesome.

everything was going great until I found out that all of my files in a folder were encrypted by some WankDecrypt. I was lucky the files in that folder were useless. but next day some mysterious links started to pop up into my browser. and today some fucking wank decentralized shit started eating up my ram. FML

Somebody fucking stuck his shit with cracked version of software. so beware devs.

Joined a new project and started messing with the application...Greeted with a blank web page and a pop-up **please enable flash**

Fuck Homestead.

For the fortune of you not to know, Homestead is a sad attempt at a Wix-like build your own website platform.

However, Homestead is the most unusable piece of shit platform that humans have ever had the misery of interacting with

Lets start off with the login page. The login page is small, unresponsive and half the time just deletes your input whenever you press submit.

It's important to note that unless you're running MacOS or Windows, Homestead will send to an error page on which there's a link to contact support, but pressing that link requires MacOS or Windows.

Fine, I'll fiddle around with my user-agent, and we'll be in soon enough. But now we come to the joy that is the website editor itself.

The website editor is clunky, hard to use, and has enough menus and submenus and sidebars to make the Jira UI shake with fear. Each interface option label is either ridiculously ambiguous or just straight up wrong. The built-in HTML editor doesn't support HTML5, in the name of "browser compatibility".

CSS? Pah! Who needs it! Our psuedo-90s skeuomorphic ugly-as-shit prebuilt styles will work just fine. Responsive design? Bullshit! Nobody uses a smartphone to browse the web, so why do we need to handle it?

Uploading a file? Good fucking luck buddy. There's a complicated dance among the minefield of pop-ups that ask you to confirm some shit or modify some shit and you gotta click the right option each time or else the file won't upload.

Wanna use https like 86% of the entire web and all modern websites? That's a premium feature. Fork over an extra $10 a month

Ok ok, I made it through all that. Dig through the thousands of menus to find the 'publish changes' button, and sigh with relief.

Open up a private browser tab to check my work, and nope. The site looks like shit, even by Homestead's standards. That's because Homestead claims to be a WYSIWYG editor, but it's a damn lie. The site looks like shit, so it's time do dive back into the hellhole that is this damn site editor.

And rinse and repeat. Deal with the shitty editor, publish, and pray it doesn't look like garbage. Be too scared to test on other devices because this flaming pile of dog shit pretending to be a website is bad enough on my device.

Two more months, then I'm done with this client. Someone get me a drink

Interviewer: so why should we hirer you?
Me: I think the real question is: how much will you pay me if I can make "Hello World!" pop up on the console?

Last year my boss made me develop a way to "creatively" feature ads on our online magazine.

It was a piano keyboard. Yes, I created a pure HTML and CSS piano. Every key had a small title, when HOVERED emitted a sound (tuned on D btw ) and when clicked opened a pop up with the ad content. We tried a black and white piano and also a rainbow-like coloured one.

I strongly advised against everything. We're small and I have a good relationship that soured because he thought I was just being lazy.

Guess what happened? Advertisers saw the live piano and ran away. Hours and hours of development thrown away.

Please. Trust your front-end developer.

I feel as useful as the chrome pop-up blocker

I hate trying to shop on sites powered by services like Shopify. Especially sites that have so many fucking plugins that pop up every 3 to 5 seconds asking me a fuck ton of questions.

Just go to GPT and get me the code today!!!

Like wtf why does every non-tech guy thinks GPT is the solution for each problem.
So, a workmate wanted a fullstack system ready in 2 days and argues that its too easy with GPT. I mean yeah GPT helps, sometimes, on frequent rare occasions. But, that can't be the solution to everything, like ask it to setup the whole backend frontend integration, will it? ask it to manage assets will it? ask it to write complex code, it fails, miserably, okay like me but that's the point. Just because random transformers pop up each week containing some random shitty weights (not always agreed) that can't replace a full stack developer. These 'attention' seeking models are as good as another tool, a bit efficient, but at the end of the day its just a tool, all it does is lessen the typing time but gives more errors too. The average time remains the same. And my non-tech manager can't understand he can't do it himself earlier using GPT. Succkkkkkkssss!

They say: Luck is when you have somebody you love next to you.

I say: Luck is when I run code and no errors pop up...

So this very random thought pop up just now.

What if Satoshi is on devrant? 🤔

Spent the last half hour helping my wife over text trying to "fix" FireFox. She said any site she tries to go to just "spins and spins". Chrome, Edge, all work fine. Tried the trusty 'ipconfig /flushdns'.

Me: "Open the command line, by selecting Start and start typing cmd. You'll see the Command Prompt application. Right click and run it as an administrator"
<15 seconds later>
Her: "Do I left click or right click to run as adminstrator?"
Me: "Left click. You'll get a pop message, just click yes"
<about 10 seconds later>
Her: "This thing popped up, what do I do?"
Me: "Click yes"
<more waiting>
Her: "Says something about making changes to my computer, what do I do?"
Me: "Click yes"
Her: "Is it going to make changes? Are you sure I should click yes?"
Me: "YES!!"
Her: "Don't yell at me. You're supposed to know how to do this, not me. What do I do now?"
Me: "Type ipconfig /flushdns"
Her: "OK, is this right.."
<sends a screenshot of 'Type ipconfig/flushdns'>
Me: "No, just ipconfig /flushdns"
Her: "OK, is this right.."
<sends a screenshot of 'ipconfig/flushdns'>
Me: "Yep, just put a space between ipconfig /flushdns and press enter"
Her: "Is this right.."
<sends a screenshot of ' ipconfig/flushdns'>
Me: "No, the space goes between ipconfig /flushdns, not before."
Her: "You're not making yourself clear. OK, now what?"
Me: "Press enter"
Her: "It didn't do anything."
Me: "Did you press enter?"
<more waiting>
Her: "OK, it's done. Now what?"
Me: "Restart FireFox"
Her: "Still not working. Just spins and spins."
<not 100% sure restarted FireFox>
Me: "I'll look at it when I get home."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I placed a Virus Found pop-up message at all the schools computer and run the program at start when I was at High School. It was fun :)

I was so mad at work today that I started singing to "Icona Pop - I love it" during lunch but altered the lyrics to match how I felt... Just sing along when your day is as bad as mine:

"I crashed my project into a wall, I watched, I let it burn" ... "I don't care, I love it"

"I threw this shit into a file and pushed it up to GIT" ... "I don't care, I love it"

"I got this feeling on the summer day when I'm gone" ... "I don't care, I love it"

Perk of being a web developer.

When a website tries to hide its content behind a pop-up become I have an ad-blocker. I can "display:none" that stuff away.

We spent a lot of time creating these CSS animated pop-ups that described parts of the product. They looked great, but the client called and said they were "flickering" on her computer. We debugged and could not for the life of us figure out what she meant by flicker. The code was so simple that we couldn't imagine how it could be flickering. It was just a jQuery fadeIn(). It worked fine for us in every browser we tried. So we just gave up. The next day, the client called back and said,"Hey, it looks great. You fixed the flickering. How did you do it?" And our dev replied, "Uh, we set the flicker to 0".

Bugfixing is like whack-a-mole... For every one you squash, 3 more pop up.

I'm really into coding now for half a year. I really love that kinda flow when there pop up no errors and you work yourself through the code writing using trial and error. It's really addicting and the perfect evening.
But here comes my question: There are sometimes unsolvable errors for me (still not figuring out how to use firebase properly 😞). Is this stuff going to be fewer as I advance in coding, or am I just terrible at googling? To other beginners: Do you have often errors to that feel unsolvable for you?

I am so addicted to Ctrl+E (End) and Ctrl+A (Home) that I accidentally tried in Gmail Compose pop up and it worked!

I haven’t tried it on other text box but it should probably work...

Here I am just tryna browse a site and this stupid attempt to trick me into falling for a scam pops up. There is no way to stop the pop up because I can’t tap anything fast enough. Not even restarting the browser because it remembers this as the last URL it had accessed. Looks like I have to uninstall and reinstall chrome. Honestly, if you’re a scammer, what the hell is the point of doing this? What idiot is going to call the number? All it does is annoy you to the point of suspicion. Or maybe there are people stupid enough!?

A semiconductor company wants a custom desktop program to graph the data from their machines.

Company: We want to get a trial version before buying it.

Me: *Just staring at them*

In my mind: Soooooo you want me to invest my time in creating a custom made software specific to your machines and you might end up being happy with a trial version and leaving me empty handed?

Might as well create the program and put so many pop ups to annoy them no? 😂😂😂

That's it. I'm inventing a new position :

"Dev support".

Why do people ask me "Hey, visual studio has a pop up saying I'm missing a .net4.6 framework. What should I do ?"

Or "Hey powershell says script execution is disabled, what should I do ?"

Google motherfucker, do you use it ?!

Pirated MS office was so much better than the paid one. I never once had a banner pop-up and tell me that i didn't have a license 😖

Now, that i do have the license, the banner has made it a habit to pop-up whenever i work on something important 🤦

One Pro Tip for all developers :

(in my experience - a short story)

Our team chose agile development. We have items to deliver each sprint.

I was the guy who would always slip in my tasks due to issues that would pop up.
It was due to my own faults, I was less careful and failed to concentrate on one single item when I was working.
I started slipping a lot and my manager started questioning me on my performance. I tried a lot of productivity apps and other methods. Nothing seemed to change my life.

One day, An experienced person in the team said to me,
"Start Going to the gym" and it'll change everything.

I enrolled to the nearest gym and started working out every morning. Had sore arms /legs in the first few days. Nothing seemed to change.

After one week, my work patterns changed. I automatically started to work with a lot of concentration. I still don't know how things changed.
After 2 weeks, everything was completely different.

I was able to complete my sprint tasks in the first few days and started contributing to others work. Got a lot of recognition. My work was recognized a lot and my manager appreciated me.

So this is a real life changer folks.

"start hitting the GYM", and it'll change your life.

Please try it out and tell me how your work patterns change.

*turns on the TV*
*pop-up blows up in my face: "you have a new message"*
Me: ??
*confusingly presses "View"*
Msg: *Do you know why *some random shit show of a movie* is the most viewed? You can rent it in our video store*

YOU MOTHER FUCKING BRAINLESS ASSHOLES!!! I'M PAYING FOR THAT FUCKING SUBSCRIPTION! MY FUCKING MONEY!! MINE! WHICH I CHOSE TO GIVE TO YOU FOR A VERY SPECIFIC SERVICE!! DO NOT PUSH YOUR BRAINDEAD, GREEDY BULLSHIT ON ME!!! IF I'LL WANT TO WATCH A GOOD MOVIE I'LL FIND IT MY SELF! YOU ARE TO FUCKING RETARDED TO TELL WHAT A GOOD MOVIE IS!!!
GOD DAMN ADS PUSHING SHIT HEADED PEASANTS!!

When Musk lands us on mars and we set up WiFi please don't send us links with those pop-up ads

The largest ISP in my country, a government backed service, hijacks URLs randomly and injects pop up into web browser!

Imagine if getting hijacked during an online transaction... Glad it never happened yet.

But Fuck them for doing this.

Please take note : I don't want a "subscribe to our newsletter" pop-up to cover the entire fucking screen whenever I visit your website; nor do I want that damn video to auto-play.

I HATE pop-up signup forms! Why do they show up on EVERY single site I visit! 😡

So few of you will know that I was a bit wasted last night (Monday night). Few of you will also know I was having trouble with my new linux installation. (POP!_OS)

After troubleshooting this and that, I gave up. I believe my hardware just doesn't wanna pop. So I installed manjaro xfce.

This morning I woke up with my laptop beside me with a locked screen. I entered the password I remember I setup. Wrong. I entered all usual passwords I normally use. All wrong.

😖 😖 😖

When you are asked to test the whole website and you found a pop-up so deep after a series of conditions that it show a video of Homer Simpsons doing the ice bucket challenge

Ahh yes my good friend null

I don't know how Airbnb keeps having weird little bugs pop up across their apps. Don't they test?

Nothing like Facebook devs saying:
"If there's an error, just pop it up in an alert on production!"

I can't decide on a linux distro because all I've tried are great. Seriously.

I'd call myself a novice-to-intermediate linux user (heavy on the novice part) and since I work as a web developer it's been a great learning experience to use the same OS on my workstation as the webservers my projects run on. (Ie I started out with Ubuntu and a LAMP setup).

The thing is I distrohop ad infinitum... Feels like I've tried out every desktop environment known to mankind (I just can't stop myself when I see a new one or a new take on an old one) and I've dipped my toes in Arch territory to. Loved Antergos when that still was a thing. Found EndeavourOS this weekend, kernel panic ensued. I'm a noob with sudo and that's never a good thing. 😆 (Try out in a virtual machine first you say? Bah. Where's the fun in that?!)

So now I'm on Linux Mint w Cinnamon because why not. (Because it's sluggish and boring, that's why...) I had to just get something up and running quickly so I could get back to work. 😬

But one day in and I'm realising I actually miss GNOME. And Ubuntu feels like home. I would feel much cooler using Arch but honestly I don't think I can be trusted with it. I love tinkering with settings, look and feel and whatnot but I can honestly do that just as well in an Ubuntu/GNOME environment.

Maybe Pop!_OS... could be something for me. 😏

So the company decided to go agile. I am now a scrum master. And we have the local product owners and all. They made us do daily stand-ups.

I don't know what is a scrum master. Nobody knows what the hell is a stand-up. It seems to be an akward 30 minutes every day, when local product owner asks questions and demands status reports.

I did some googling and it seems that the scrum master is supposed to just support the team and solve problems. In our version the scrum master finds out the system architecture and requirements, fills the backlog, does the system design and reports to the project manager(s). Also reports to the clients about the general project status in an executive meetings. I also do the sprint planning, in which we fit the vague features that we are told into time tables with ready told dates.

Oh yeah, the team is just 2 guys. One of them is me. And the other guy relies completely on me to daily tell what to do, review the work and also answer all the project and company level questions that pop into his mind. He gets angry if he doesn't receive ready-thought solutions to all problems, since "you're the boss and it's your job to tell us what to do".

This is going to be a great year.

My GOTG pop figures are my favorite items on my desk. Whenever I have a bad day at work, I make their heads move and that cheers me up :P Drax is missing though

Holy shit what a Monday of a Monday! I ain’t trying to stay late I got other shit to do! If new and unusual errors can wait til tomorrow to pop up that’d be greaaaaaaattttt!

During one of our 'pop-up' meetings last week.

Ralph: "The test code the developers are checking in is a mess. They don't know what they are doing."

ex.
var foo = SomeLibrary.GetFoo();
Assert.IsNotNull(foo);

Fred: "Ha ha..someone should talk to HR about our hiring practices. These people are literally driving the company backwards."
Me: "I think unit testing is complete waste of time."
- You could almost see the truck hit the wall and splatter watermelon everwhere..took Ralph and Fred a couple of seconds to respond
Fred: "Uh..unit testing is industry best practice. There is scientific evidence that prove testing reduces bugs and increases code quality"
Ralph: "Over 90% of our deployments are rolled back because of bugs. Unit testing will eliminate that."
Me: "Sorry, I disagree."
- Stepping on kittens wouldn't have gotten a worse look from Fred and Ralph
Fred: 'Pretty sure if you ask any professional developer, they'll tell you unit testing and code coverage reduces bugs.'
Me: "I'm not asking anyone else, I'm asking you. Find one failed deployment, just one, over the past 6 months that unit testing or code coverage would have prevented."
- good 3 seconds of awkward silence.
Ralph: "Well, those rollbacks are all mostly due to server mis-configurations. That's not a fair comparison."
Me: "I'm using your words. Unit tests reduces bugs and lack of good tests is the direct reason why we have so many failed deployments"
Boss: "Yea, Ralph...you and Fred kinda said that."
Fred: "No...we need to write good tests. Not this mess."
Me: "Like I said, show me one test you've written that would have prevented a rollback. Just one."
Ralph: "So, what? We do nothing?"
Me: "No, we have to stop worshiping this made up 80% code coverage idol. If not, developers are going to keep writing useless test code just to meet some percent. If we wrote device drivers or frameworks for other developers maybe, but we write CRUD apps. We execute a stored procedure or call a service. This 80% rule doesn't fit for code we write."
Fred: "If the developers took their head out of their ass.."
Me: "Hey!..uh..no, they are doing exactly what they are being told. Meet the 80% requirement, even if doesn't make sense."
Ralph: "Nobody told them to write *that* code."
Boss: "My gosh, what have you and Fred been complaining about for the past hour?"
- Ralph looks at his monitor and brilliantly changes the subject
Ralph: "Oh my f-king god...Trump said something stupid again ..."

At that point I put my headphones on went back to what I was doing. I'm pretty sure Fred and Ralph spent the rest of the day messaging back-n-forth, making fun of me or some random code I wrote 3 years ago (lots of typing and giggling). How can highly educated grown men (one has a masters in CS) get so petty and insecure?

Fix one bug, two more pop up. Just like gremlins 🙄

The whole CSS "centering" thing is so funny because that problem is easy per se but it can pop up in ways you've never seen before and you have to learn how to center your stuff for 9832 different situations

Embarrassing screenshare story? Yeah, I've got couple of those.

- Showing one client a VSCode workspace of another client's. I was lucky they didn't escalate or anything.

- YouTube open in PIP mode and accidentally showing that to the higher-ups in company. What made it more embarrassing is that they informed me about it, I thought I was sharing a window not Entire screen.

- WhatsApp open in one window and I accidentally shared it on screen, thinking I wasn't sharing my screen, but I was, and everyone saw my texts with a girl I was "dating" at the time.

- Presenting my entire screen to a client and out of nowhere Epic Games pop up with a notification saying ""Your buddy sent you a message - Ready to start playing?". But that was 11pm so I got off easy.

- Opening sentry to show one thing to the client but they notice many new bugs and I got slammed by my boss for it.

Good job reCaptcha for not fully displaying the pop-up!

So… I prefer nano over other terminal editors (Mainly because I don’t understand how to use others properly) and I wasn’t really aware of the VISUAL and EDITOR environment variables. So on my Arch machine most things would default to vi. Vi to me is like an annoying pop-up that really doesn’t want you to close it (Tho, one thing I did learn eventually was how to close it ). So at some point I quickly wanted to edit crontab as root and I just couldn't manage to get crontab to use nano. So what did I do?

sudo pacman -R vi

ln -s /usr/bin/nano /usr/bin/vi

I symlinked nano to vi and it finally worked. I know that there are probably countless ways this could’ve been done better but in that case I wouldn't have posted it here under wk81 ;)

The Hydra regrows three heads for every head chopped off. Just like fixing bugs. For every fixed bug three new pop up.

If you are a mobile game developer and you make those stupid interactive ads that pop up in the middle of another game and try to make me play it. I dont like you and would sooner leave a bad review on your game for having the audacity to invade my other games. Stop it. It is the most annoying type of ad I have ever seen and actively discourages me from downloading your game. Mobile games are already basically a cancer without that horrendous experience.

I'm never going to downvote again. It's just too big of decision to make.. *just clicks away the pop up*

!rant

Today came 2 girls to the office for an interview. Except we didn't invited them but another company in the building... (non tech)
Later we thought we should have started to interview them and ask dev questions and so on. Would have been interesting when they noticed they are in the wrong interview...

Why do such nasty ideas always pop up later?
😁

To be honest I forgot completely about the ducks and was kind of disappointed to see them, don't understand me wrong, its a great addition to the shop (especially to support devrant more when buying them and I will probably do too) and trogus (wow it's pronounced t-rogus) deserves a lot of respect for going through the very hard process of developing it, getting somebody to do a decent quality result etc. but I was hoping for the new site that got hyped up some time ago or some update to the app that fixes design issues on phones that have 2k resolution and no statusbar and more. ("just open a github issue" - I don't have one right now and it didn't get much attention anyway, since I am in the niche of people with those kind of setups, most people it seems have phones that can even barely run the app lol). The login still pops up each time you visit the site (basically just click it away, but it's rather annoying to have it pop up), it's nowhere near to the original app (although the native app is written in some sort of wrapper anyway?) - especially what comes to options, customizing, deactivating things, posting into categories (newest feature), getting notifications etc

There is some community builds that try to recreate a better desktop experience, but sadly fail to do so (sorry to devrantron and others, but what the fuck were you thinking when you rounded only the top right and left corner?) - since they always have something that is just thrown out to "be there" or design fails (which devrant just lacks and looks good across the board), that makes me rather cautious if that program doesn't send my credentials to some african prince. ("just look at the sourcecode", yes I have better things to do, thanks)

I could just create my own build, having to reverse engineer the whole website and app (granted, most of it are just api calls), but I simply lack the time (so I understand why my mentioned problems aren't getting really any attention or can't be implemented that fast, yet still its somewhat bugging)

I have listened to the Q&A and I know you guys are working full time at for example adobe (amazing that you both have time to be putting it towards devrant), so its not as much of a rant, just wanted to get out my disappointment about the event I felt personally. Still nice to have seen you and talk with the community a bit (although the time I feel was picked more towards your US audience rather than EU?).

I love git stash.

It's helps a lot for doing refactors to me. I guess it's not the most complex workflow, but it wasn't obvious to me when I started with git. Let me explain.

Refactors. As you start writing the first lines of a refactor, you start to notice something: you're changing too many things, your next commit is going to be huge.

That tends to be the very nature of refactors, they usually affect different parts of code.

So, there you are, with a shitload changes, and you figure "hey, I have a better idea, let me first do a smaller cohesive commit (let's call it subcommit) that changes a smaller specific thing, and then I'll continue with the upper parts of the refactor".

Good idea, but you have a shitload of changes nearly touching every file in your working copy, what do you do with these changes? You git stash them.

Let's say you stash and try to do that smaller "subcommit". What sometimes happens to me at this point is that I notice that I could do an even smaller change inside this current "subcommit". So I do the same thing, I git stash and I work on that even smaller thing.

At some point I end up `git stash pop`ing up all these levels. And it it shows that git stash is powerful for this.

* You never lose a single bit of work you did.
* Every commit is clean.
* After every commit you can run tests (automated or manual) to see shit is still working.
* If you don't like some changes that you had git stashed, you can just erase them with git reset --hard.
* If a change overlaps between a stash you're applying and the last "subcommit", then
if they differ, git shows conflicts on the files,
if they are identical, nothing happens.

with this workflow things just flow and you don't need to wipe out all your changes when doing simpler things,
and you don't need to go around creating new branches with temp commits (which results in bloated temp commits and the work of switching branches).

After you finish the refactor, you can decide to squash things with git rebase.

(Note: I don't use git stash pop, because it annoys the fuck out of me when I pop and you I get conflicts, I rather apply and drop)

C# has become shit.

I work since 2013 with C# (and the whole .NET stack) and I was so happy with it.
Compared to Java it was much lean, compared to all shitty new edge framework that looked like a unfinished midschool project, it was solid and mature.

It had his problems,. but compared to everything else that I tried, it was the quickes and most robust solution.

All went in a downhill leading to a rotten shit lake when all this javascript frenzy began to pop up and everyone wanted to get on the trendy bandwagon.

First they introduced MVC, then .NET Core, now .NET 5-6-7-8.

Now I'm literally engulfed with all these tiny bits of terror javascript provoked and they've implemented in all the parts of their framework.

Everything has to be null checked at compilation time, everything pops up errors "this might be nulll heyyyyy it's important put a ! or a ? you silly!!!" everywhere.

There are JS-ish constructs and syntax shit everywhere.

It's unbearable.
I avoid js like a plague whenever I can (and you know it's not a luxury you get often in the current state of a developer life) and they're slowly turning in some shit js hybrid deformed creature

I miss 2013-2018, when it wass all up to me to decide what to do with code and I did some big projects for big companies (200-300k lines of code without unit tests and yes for me it's a lot) without all this hassle.

I literally feel the need c# had to have some compiler rule you can quickly switch called "Senior developer mode" that doesn't trigger alarms and bells for every little stupid thing.

I'm sure you can' turn on/off these craps by some hidden settings somewhere, but heck I feel the need to be an option, so whoever keeps it on should see a big red label on top of the IDE saying "YOU HAVE RETARDED DEV MODE ON"

So they get a reminder that if they use it they are either some fresh junior dev or they are mentally challenged.

when you're reading an article on a site and a big pop up shows with no way out. then you don't know where is the thing you're reading so u just close the tab. that's productivity.

People: "Nobody is doing what we say!!!!"

Me: "Even when you the person who pays their bills tells them to?"

People: "Nope! We want a modal pop up when they login!"

Me: "You know they can just click past that and ignore you....? How about we actually wait until they fill out some stuff and have a required field when they do a thing?"

People: "No, we want a modal!"

-jebus fuck-

!rant
So...i have lost the count of the number of posts ranting about W10 sudden restarts because of the updates. Many people lost their valuable work and many more were just annoyed by this occurence...
But it has NEVER happened to me. Every time there was a pop-up message asking me if it was an appropriate time to update. On some occassions i would postpone the same update for numerous times, and it still did not force-restart my laptop.

Question: Is my machine buggy or do people do not know how to set working hours on their machines and postpone their updates?

Over the summer I was recruited to be a supplement instructor for a data structures course. As a result of that I was asked (separately by the professor) to be a grader for the course. Because of pay limitations I've mostly been grading homework project assignments. In any case, it's a great job to get my foot into the department and get recognized.

Over the course of the semester I've had this one person, OSX, named after their operating system of choice, who has been giving me awkward submissions. On the first assignment they asked the professor for extra time for some reason or the other, and that's perfectly fine.

So I finally receive OSX's submission, and it's a .py file as per course of the course. So I pop up a terminal in the working directory and type "python OSX_hw1.py". Get some error spit out about the file not being the right encoding. I know that I can tell python to read it in a different encoding, so I open it up in a text editor. To my surprise it's totally not a text file, but rather a .zip file!

I've seen weirder things done before, so no big deal. I rename the file extension, and open it up to extract the files when I see that there's no python files. "Okay, what's goin on here OSX..." I think to myself.

Poking around in the files it appears to be some sort of meta-data. To what, I had no clue, but what I did find was picture files containing what appeared to be some auto-generated screenshots of incomplete code. Since I'm one to give people the benefit of doubt even when they've long exhausted other peoples', I thought that it must be some fluke, and emailed OSX along with the professor detailing my issue.

I got back a rather standard reply, one of which was so un-notable I could not remember it if my life depended on it. However, that also meant I didn't have to worry about that anymore. Which when you're juggling 50 bazillion things is quite a relief. Tragically, this relief was short lived with the introduction of assignment 2.

Assignment 2 comes around, and I get the same type of submission from OSX. At this time I also notice that all their submissions are *very* close to the due time of 11:59pm (which I don't care about as long as it's in before people start waking up the next morning). I email OSX and the professor again, and receive a similar response. I also get an email from OSX worried about points being deducted. I reply, "No issue. You know what's wrong. Go and submit the right file on $CentralGradingCenter. Just submit over your old assignment".

To my frustration OSX claimed to not know how to do this. I write up a quick response explaining the process, and email it. In response OSX then asks if I can show them if they comes to my supplemental lesson. I tell OSX that if they are the only person, sure, otherwise no because it would not be a fair use of time to the other students.

OSX ends up showing up before anyone else, so I guide them through the process. It's pretty easy, so I'm surprised that they were having issues. Another person then shows up, so I go through relevant material and ask them if they have any questions about recent material in class. That said, afterwards OSX was being somewhat awkward and pushy trying to shake my hand a lot to the point of making me uncomfortable and telling them that there's no reason to be so formal.

Despite that chat, I still did not see a resubmission of either of those two assignments, and assignment 3 began to show it's head. Obviously, this time, as one might expect after all those conversations, I get another broken submission in the same format. Finally pissed off, I document exactly how everything looks on my end, how the file fails to run, how it's actually a zip file, etc, all with screenshots. That then gets emailed to the professor and OSX.

In response, I get an email from OSX panicking asking me how to submit it right, etc, etc. However, they also removed the professor from the CC field. In response I state that I do not know how to use whatever editor they are using, and that they should refer to the documentation in order to get a proper runnable file. I also re-CC the professor, making sure OSX's email to me is included in my reply.

OSX then shows up for one of my lessons, and since no one had shown up yet, I reiterate through what I had sent in the email. OSX's response was astonished that they could ever screw up that bad, but also admits that they had yet to install python(!!!). Obviously, the next thing that comes from my mouth is asking OSX how they write their code. Their response was that they use a website that lets them run python code.

At this point I'm honestly baffled and explain that a lot of websites like those can have limitations which might make code run differently then it should (maybe it's a simple interpreter written on JavaScript, or maybe it is real python, but how are you supposed to do file I/O?) .

After that I finally get a submission for assignment 1!

*laughing maniacally*

Okidoky you lil fucker where you've been hiding...

*streaming tcpdump via SSH to other box, feeding tshark with input filters*

Finally finding a request with an ominous dissector warning about headers...

Not finding anything with silversearcher / ag in the project...

*getting even more pissed causr I've been looking for lil fucker since 2 days*

*generating possible splits of the header name, piping to silversearcher*

*I/O looks like clusterfuck*

Common, it are just dozen gigabytes of text, don't choke just because you have to suck on all the sucking projects this company owns... Don't drown now, lil bukkake princess.

*half an hour later*

Oh... Interesting. Bukkake princess survived and even spilled the tea.

Someone was trying to be overly "eager" to avoid magic numbers...

They concatenated a header name out of several const vars which stem from a static class with like... 300? 400? vars of which I can make no fucking sense at all.

Class literally looks like the most braindamaged thing one could imagine.

And yes... Coming back to the network error I'm debugging since 2 days as it is occuring at erratic intervals and noone knew of course why...

One of the devs changed the const value of one of the variables to have UTF 8 characters. For "cleaner meaning".

Sometimes I just want to electrocute people ...

The reason this didn't pop up all the time was because the test system triggered one call with the header - whenever said dev pushed changes...

And yeah. Test failures can be ignored.
Why bother? Just continue meddling in shit.

I'm glad for the dev that I'm in home office... :@

TLDR: Dev changed const value without thinking, ignoring test failures and I had the fun of debunking for 2 days a mysterious HAProxy failure due to HTTP header validation...

CAUTION: possibly NSFL

There was a war. We lived in a leftist camp inside an abandoned railway station. The only thing that could break the siege was BLA

[dream fragment lost]

So they lined us up. There were ten of us.
— Do you want the leftist future?
— No…, they made me say.
— Do you love capitalism?
— Yes…, they made me say.
— Ты готова присниться?, they asked my female comrade ("are you ready to come to our soldiers in their dreams to support them?")
— Yes.
— Ты готов расшибиться?, they asked me ("are you ready to work your ass off, dying in the process if necessary?". It also makes a perfect rhyme with the previous Russian sentence)
— Yes.
Then, they tied our hands and hung us onto a rack. They doused us with gasoline.
— Look. Czechoslovakia had Jan Palach. We have ten Jan Palachs now!
They set us on fire. I feel an unimaginable pain. I wake up for ten minutes.
When I fell asleep again, I found out I survived. But, my body underwent modifications: first, I now had a vinyl shell instead of my skin. Underneath it were raw muscles. Second, I no longer had vocal cords. I no longer had voice.
In this world, we were slaves ("Тяговые люди") ruled by BLA. There were no prisons. Instead, there were only two punishments: the "light" one and the "heavy" one. First one is your shell getting ripped off. You die in around 20 minutes of agonizing pain, like mink that is skinned alive in Chinese leather tanneries. But, compared to the second one, that was a slap on the wrist.
The "heavy" punishment was them injecting you with "The Ferment". Immediately, your mind is altered into total obedience. Then, your body begins to turn into corpse juice. To outside observers, you die in 30 days. But for you, it feels like forever, as time speeds up indefinitely, and you're drifting into endless sorrow. When you die, no one notices, as your shell is still there. But instead of you, there's now nothing but corpse juice inside.

I now worked in some location that resembled Duke Nukem 3D's first map. My job was to remove those plastic shells. I had no bottom — it was replaced with a concrete cube that felt pain just like damaged tooth enamel does. An endless queue of shells moved in front of me. I had to remove their shells, to peel them off like vinyl.
Some people were alive underneath. They still had their skin. They thanked me, smile at me and wander away.
Some of them were alive, but had no skin. That means I was the one to execute a "light" punishment on them.
Some of them weren't there. I pop the shell open, and it deflates as corpse juice pours out.

One of my previous dreams was the following:
"— We arrange surgeries when in-person interventions are _not recommended_.
— So…, — I press the pause button on the handrail.
— The perfect maiden. Inside a plastic shell. 80 years old underneath."

Now I understand it. The first speaker was a BLA researcher. "I" was an investor. The "perfect maiden" was me, but way in the future from my today's dream. It all fits together.
Now, here's the discovered part of kiki universe so far:
- rotten meat house
- swine gray gel battleground
- horizontal elevators network
- united paper island
- baseball bat nightclub
- anxiety-inducing multidimensional pizzeria
- NEW! BLA headquarters
- NEW! demilitarized burning ground abandoned train station
- NEW! Duke Nukem 3D people skinning ground

something i love about pop os is that light mode just doesn’t work. it’s straight broken at least for me. i mean sure i have like 5 conflicting desktops installed but yeah, i like the idea that the light theme just straight up doesn’t work. it gives me comfort knowing that the developers who made it and the testers who tested it weren’t subjected to the cruelty of creating and testing a [functional] light theme.

Here, a full retrospective of my Apple products ownership.

iPhone SE – after Android, I was absolutely amazed by how fast it worked. No UI lags, camera works absolutely instantly no matter the light conditions, all the GPU-heavy games work butter smooth.

After camera and charging port failures on Xperia flagship and CPU literally melting through screen rendering it unusable on Meizu, it was enough to make me interested in Apple products.

When I was using Meizu, I actually got a twitching eye which was triggered by UI lags. After two months of using iPhone, I noticed that something was missing – my eye wasn't twitching anymore.

iPhone actually cured me.

MacBook 12 – a 900 grams laptop with passive-cooled mobile CPU running many Chrome tabs, heavy Webpack HMR build, VSCode and Slack just fine. Yes, you can't play games, but I don't even require it from a laptop this tiny.

Butterfly keyboard that internet hates so much actually increased my typing speed and comfort compared to MX Red mechanical keyboard, and ForceTouch trackpad made me forget about mouse. I learned how to disassemble the Butterfly keyboard if I ever need this but the keyboard never failed.

I use this laptop to this day and it still even smells like the day one, a beautiful smell of a new Apple product.

iPhone X – got it because of the camera, stayed for great battery life and amazing OLED display. I use telephoto lens exclusively and it made me lay off my Canon DSLR with Helios lens which stays on my bookshelf covered in dust to this day.

True black of OLED display which is undistinguishable from the screen bezel is stunning. To this day, battery surely works for one and a half days and I watch youtube really often.

I sometimes struggled to unlock iPhone SE with wet fingers, but with FaceID, as soon as I look at the screen the phone is unlocked. Works perfect every time, never had an issue with this.

Stainless steel body feels premium compared to aluminum. Stereo sound is a major selling point if you're like watching videos and playing games on your phone. Overall amazing product and a huge improvement over SE.

Apple Watch series 4 – really comfortable fit. Nice battery life, once I forgot about it for like ten days during lockdown and it was still working, even though on power reserve mode. Really reliable in terms of battery life and liquid protection. Very satisfying Taptic Engine crown clicks. I run every day and Apple watch always measure my heart rate correctly, and the running app is well designed and a pleasure to use. Overall a nice accessory to have if you use iPhone.

Powerbeats Pro – great sound and battery life. I switched from Shure SE215 which was great, but it had wires. I listen to a lot of music so the sound quality is important for me. When I was choosing earphones I visited a store where you can listen to them all. I listened through earphones like Noble Audio Kaiser Encore and JH Audio Layla, and of course $4000 Laylas sound better than $249 bluetooth earphones, but the difference in sound doesn't justify the difference in price to me.

Powerbeats pro is the Apple H1 chip true wireless earphones with largest driver of them all which makes them sound better than AirPods Pro – it's just physics. Bass in Powerbeats is amazing, which is also true for my Shures, but Powerbeats also win in clarity.

It connects seamlessly to both my MacBook and my iPhone, and everyone in voice chats can hear me really good.

Huge case is a major throwback compared to AirPods, but the battery life of earphones themselves is so great that I just leave the case at home and only carry earphones and it works for me.

Apple Link bracelet in space black – really better than I expected. Intricate detailing, literally the steel that Rolex uses, top-notch finishing and polishing – all that for just 450 dollars. I only used it for several days now, but it already feels like a really satisfying product.

Before all that I was using Linux. It took a year for elementaryos devs to fix wifi for my laptop. Ubuntu looks and feels ugly. Pop OS felt like garbage. Manjaro was also just that – garbage. KDE Plasma – I don't even want to talk about that. A monstrocity where you accidentally click a wrong switch in the settings and your system won't boot up again. Also, PulseAudio. Struggles with proprietary drivers and software updates.

Windows? I serviced a lot of Windows PCs through my career and it never, never worked as intended. I'm no dumbass, I always managed the rights correctly and never installed sketchy apps. My latest ryzen gaming build with a lot of ram also lags somehow even in Windows 10 UI.

Before I switched, I defended Linux.

My life was a lie.

I'm sorry to everyone who I offended based on their opinion on Linux.

Ads on youtube,
Pop up Ads on games,
Ads on torrent sites,
Pop up Ads on porn pages,

There are people who are happy that they get money out of them,

And, there are People who think it is unfair to have so much ads.

Which person are you?

Any one else who uses visual studio find them self pressing Ctrl + . When there is a typo in an office document or email and it is underlined in red with a swiggly line thinking it’s intlisense? Then get pissed for that it doesn’t pop up!?