I'm going for longest rant. TL:DR; version here:

http://pastebin.com/0Bp4jX9y

then:

http://pastebin.com/FfUiTzsh

Twat Client,

As per our conversation, here is an invoice for the work you requested on behalf of U.S. Bloom. I realize that you ended up going with another designer, but you did request samples of what my take on the logo design would be. The following line item is indicative of 1 hour of graphic design consultation as per your request via Skype.

As I recall, you mentioned that this is not how Upwork "works" but considering it was you who requested that I converse with you via Skype instead of via the Upwork messenger, and since there were no clear instructions on how to proceed with Upwork after our initial consultation, It is assumed that you were foregoing Upwork altogether to work with me directly, thus the invoice from me directly for my time involved in the project. I would have reached out to you via Skype, but it seems that you may have severed our connection there.

After spending a little time researching your company, I could not find current information for Basic Media Marketing, but I was able to reach out to your former partner Not A. Twat, who was more than helpful and suggested that he would encourage you to pay for the services rendered.

It is discouraging that you asked for my help and I delivered, but when I ask for compensation in return for my skills, you refused to pay and have now taken your site offline and removed me as a contact from Skype.

{[CLIENT of CLIENT]},

I am sorry that I have bothered you with this email. I copied you on it merely for transparency's sake. I am sure that your logo is great and I am sure whatever decision was made is awesome for your decision. I just wanted to make sure that you weren't getting "samples" of other people's work passed off as original work by Twat Media Marketing.

I can't speak for any of the other candidates, but since Twat asked me to conduct work with him via Skype rather than through Upwork, and since he's pretty much a ghost online now, (Site Offline, LinkedIn Removed or Blocked, and now Skype blocked as well) one has to think this was a hit and run to either crowdsource your logo inexpensively or pass off other artist's work as his own. That may not be the case, but from my perspective all signs are pointing to that scenario.

Here is a transcript. Some of his messages have been redacted.

As you can clearly see, requests and edits to the logo were being made from Jon to me, but he thinks it's a joke when I ask about invoicing and tries to pass it off as an interview. Do you see any interview questions in there? There were no questions about how long I have been designing, what are my rates, who have I done work for in the past, or examples of my previous work. There were none because he didn't need them at this point.

He'd already seen my proposal and my Behance.net portfolio as well as my rates on Upwork.com. This was a cut to the chase request for my ideas for your logo. It was not just ideas, but mock designs with criticism and approval awaiting. Not only that, but I only asked for an hour of compensation. After looking at the timestamps on our conversation, you can clearly see that I spent at least 3 hours corresponding with Twat on this project. That's three hours of work I could have spent on an honest paying customer.

I trust that TWATCLIENT will do the right thing. I just wanted you guys to know that I was in it to do the best design I could for you. I didn't know I was in it to waste three hours of my life in an "interview" I wasn't aware I was participating in.

Reply from ClientClient:

Hello Sir,
This message is very confusing?
We do not owe your company any money and have never worked with you before.
Therefore, I am going to disregard that invoice.

Reply from TWATCLIENT's boss via phone:

I have two problems with this. One I don't think your business practices are ethical, especially calling MY client directly and sending them an invoice.

Two why didn't you call or email Jon before copying my client on the email invoice?

Me: Probably because he's purposely avoiding me and I had no way to find him. I only got his email address today and that was from a WHOIS lookup.

Really, you don't think my business practices are ethical? What about slavery? Is that ethical? Is it ethical to pass of my designs to your client for critique, but not pay me for doing them?

... I'LL HAVE TO CALL YOU BACK!

My email follow up:

http://pastebin.com/hMYPGtxV

I got paid. The power of CCing the right combination of people is greater than most things on Earth.

Alright, so my previous rant got a way better response than I expected! (https://devrant.io/rants/832897)

Hereby the first project that I cannot seem to get started on too badly :/.

DISCLAIMER: I AM NOT PROMOTING PIRACY, I JUST CAN'T FIND A SUITABLE SERVICE WHICH HAS ALL THE MUSIC I WANT. I REGULARLY BUY ALBUMS. before everyone starts to go batshit crazy regarding piracy, this is legal in The Netherlands for personal use. I think that supporting the artists you love is very good and I actually regularly pay for albums and so on but:
- I want all the music from about every artist in my scene. Either on Deezer or on Spotify this is not available and I'm not gonna get them both (they both have about half of the music I want). Their services are awesome but I'm not going to pay for something if I can't listen to all the music I like, hell even some artists (on deezer mostly) only have half their music on there and it's mostly not better on Spotify.
- I'd happily buy all albums because I love supporting the artists I love but buying everything is just way too fucking much."Get a premium music streaming subscription!" - see the first point.

You can either agree or disagree with me but that's not what this rant is about so here we go:

The idea is to create a commandline program (basically only needs to be called by a cron job every day or so) which will check your favourite youtube (sorry, haven't found a suitable non-google youtube replacement yet) channels every day through a cronjob and look for new uploads. If there are, it will download them, convert them to MP3 or whatever music format you'd like and place them in the right folder. Example with a favourite artist of mine:

1. Script checks if there are any new uploads from Gearbox Digital (underground raw hardstyle label).
2. Script detects two new uploads.
3. Script downloads the files (I managed to get that done through the (linux only or also mac?) youtube-dl software) and converts them to mp3 in my case (through FFMPEG maybe?).
4. Script copies them to the music library folder but then the specific sub-folder for Gearbox Digital in this case.

You should be able to put as many channels in there as you want, I've tried this with the official YouTube Data API which worked pretty fine tbh (the data gathering through that API). The ideal case would be to work without API as youtube-dl and youtube-dlg do. This is just too complicated for me :).

So, thoughts?

About 18 months ago my non-technical Manager of Applications Development asked me to do the technical interviews for a .NET web developer position that needed to be filled. Because I don't believe in white board interviewing (that's another rant), but I do need to see if the prospective dev can actually code, for the initial interview I prepare a couple of coding problems on paper and ask that they solve them using any language or pseudo code they want. I tell them that after they're done we'll discuss their thought process. While they work the other interviewing dev and I silently do our own stuff.

About half way through the first round of technical interviews the aforementioned manager insisted we interview a dev from his previous company. This guy was top notch. Excellent. Will fit right in.

The manager's applicant comes in to interview and after some initial questions about his resume and experience I give him the first programming problem: a straightforward fizzbuzz (http://wiki.c2.com/?FizzBuzzTest). He looked as if the gamesters of Triskelion had dropped him into the arena. He demurs. Comments on the unexpectedness of the request. Explains that he has a little book he usually refers to to help him with such problems (can't make this stuff up). I again offer that he could use any language or pseudo code. We just want to see how he thinks. He decides he will do the fizzbuzz problem in SQL. My co-interviewer and I are surprised at this choice, but recover quickly and tell him to go ahead. Twenty minutes later he hands me a blank piece of paper. Of the 18 or so candidates we interview, he is the only one who cannot write a single line of code or pseudo code.

I receive an email from this applicant a couple of weeks after his interview. He has given the fizzbuzz problem some more thought. He writes that it occurs to him that the code could be placed into a function. That is the culmination of his cogitation over two weeks. We shake our heads and shortly thereafter attend the scheduled meeting to discuss the applicants.

At the meeting the manager asks about his former co-worker. I inartfully, though accurately, tell him that his candidate does not know how to code. He calls me irrational. After the requisite shocked silence of five people​ not knowing how to respond to this outburst we all sing Kumbaya and elect to hire someone else.

Interviews are fraught for both sides of the table. I use Fizzbuzz because if the applicant knows how to code it's an early win in the process and we all need that. And if the applicant can't solve it, cut bait and go home.

Fizzbuzz. Best. Interview. Question. Ever.

I’m back for a fucking rant.

My previous post I was happy, I’ve had an interview today and I felt the interviewer acted with integrity and made the role seem worthwhile. Fuck it, here’s the link:
https://www.devrant.io/rants/889363

So, since then; the recruiter got in touch: “smashed it son, sending the tech demo your way, if you can get it done this evening that would be amazing”

Obviously I said based on the exact brief I think that’s possible, I’ll take a look and let them know if it isn’t.

Having done loads of these, I know I can usually knock them out and impress in an evening with no trouble.

Here’s where shit gets fucked up; i opened the brief.

I was met with a brief for an MVP using best practice patterns and flexing every muscle with the tech available...

Then I see the requirements, these fucking dicks are after 10 functional requirements averaging an hour a piece.

+TDD so * 1.25,
+DI and dependency inversion principle * 1.1
+CI setup (1h on this platform)
+One ill requirement to use a stored proc in SQL server to return a view (1h)
+UX/UI design consideration using an old tech (1-2h)
+unobtrusive jquery form post validation (2h)
+AES-256 encryption in the db... add 2h for proper testing.

These cunts want me to knock 15-20h of Work into their interview tech demo.

I’ve done a lot of these recently, all of them topped out at 3h max.

The job is middling: average package, old tech, not the most exciting or decent work.

The interviewer alluded to his lead being a bit of a dick; one of those “the code comes first” devs.

Here’s where shit gets realer:
They’ve included mock ups in the tech demo brief’s zip... I looked at them to confirm I wasn’t over estimating the job... I wasn’t.

Then I looked at the other files in the fucking zip.

I found 3 of the images they wanted to use were copyright withheld... there’s no way these guys have the right to distribute these.

Then I look in the font folder, it’s a single ttf, downloaded from fucking DA Font... it was published less than 2mo ago, the license file had been removed: free for Personal, anything else; contact me.

There’s no way these guys have any rights to this font, and I’ve never seen a font redistributed legally without it’s accompanying licence files.

This fucking company is constantly talking about its ethical behaviours.

Given that I know what I’m doing; I know it would have taken less time to find free-for-commercial images and use a google font... this sloppy bullshit is beyond me.

Anyway, I said I’d get back to the recruiter, he wasn’t to know and he’s a good guy. I let him know I’d complete the tech demo over the weekend, he’s looked after me and I don’t want him having trouble with his client...

I’ll substitute the copyright fuckery with images I have a license for because there’s no way I’m pushing copyright stolen material to a public github repo.

I’ll also be substituting the topic and leaving a few js bombs in there to ensure they don’t just steal my shit.

Here’s my hypotheses, anyone with any more would be greatly welcomed...
1: the lead dev is just a stuck up arsehole, with no real care for his work and a relaxed view on stealing other people’s.
2: they are looking for 15-20h free work on an MVP they can modify and take to market
3: they are looking for people to turn down this job so they can support someone’s fucking visa.

In any case, it’s a shit show and I’ll just be seeing this as box checking and interview practice...

Arguments for 1: the head told me about his lead’s problems within 20mn of the interview.
2: he said his biggest problem was getting products out quickly enough.
3: the recruiter told me they’d been “picky”, and they’re making themselves people who can’t be worked for.

I’m going to knock out the demo, keep it private and protect my work well. It’s going to smash their tits off because I’m a fucking great developer... I’ll make sure I get the offer to keep the recruiter looked after.

Then fuck those guys, I’m fucking livid.

After a wonderful interview experience and a nice introduction to the company I’ve been completely put off...

So here’s the update: if you’re interviewing for a shitty middle level dev position, amongst difficult people, on an out of date stack... you need people to want you, don’t fuck them off.

If they want my time to rush out MVPs, they can pay my day rate.

Fuuuuuuuuck... I typed this out whilst listening to the podcast, I’m glad I’m not the only one dealing with shit.

Oh also; I had a lovely discriminatory as fuck application, personality test and disability request email sent to me from a company that seems like it’s still in the 90s. Fuck those guys too, I reported them to the relevant authorities and hope they’re made to look at how morally reprehensible their recruitment process is. The law is you don’t ask if the job can be done by anyone.

Warning: Long rant ahead!

So we built an amazing system for managing swarms of drones, and we have flown hundreds of hours, testing, etc.

Comes a client and says, that he wants to buy our system, but he wants to integrate it in a bigger system that is supposed to orchestrate many small systems.

Sounds like a deal.

So they send me on a week course (see previous rant: https://devrant.com/rants/2049071/...) to learn how to integrate our system in theirs.

I was sure that they have some API or something and it should be a breeze. but apparently they give us an SDK that includes all their files, and we have to build and run their entire system, and then build our own API inside of it!

And the reason we needed a week-long course, was to know all the paths where the XML configuration files exist!

So for the last month, I am hacking away inside this huge program, navigating thousands of files in a language I don't know, in order to build an API for their system, so that I can use it on our side.

Yesterday they informed us that a new version is available.

And sure enough, waiting in my inbox this morning was a link to download a new SDK.

No Changelog, No Instructions, Just a zip file with over 25,000 files.

So I phone my contact in their company to ask how exactly I am supposed to update their files, and his answer was: diff them!

WHAT! 25,000 files, half of them built by the c++ compiler, tens of configuration files scattered in different places, linking all the new libraries from scratch, are they crazy or what?

And then he tells me that they are working for 15 years this way. That's why everyone hates them I guess.

going to have a long day...

P.S. many more rants to come from this integration.

In my previous rant about IPv6 (https://devrant.com/rants/2184688 if you're interested) I got a lot of very valuable insights in the comments and I figured that I might as well summarize what I've learned from them.

So, there's 128 bits of IP space to go around in IPv6, where 64 bits are assigned to the internet, and 64 bits to the private network of end users. Private as in, behind a router of some kind, equivalent to the bogon address spaces in IPv4. Which is nice, it ensures that everyone has the same address space to play with.. but it should've been (in my opinion) differently assigned. The internet is orders of magnitude larger than private networks. Most SOHO networks only have a handful of devices in them that need addressing. The internet on the other hand has, well, billions of devices in it. As mentioned before I doubt that this total number will be more than a multiple of the total world population. Not many people or companies use more than a few public IP addresses (again, what's inside the SOHO networks is separate from that). Consider this the equivalent of the amount of public IP's you currently control. In my case that would be 4, one for my home network and 3 for the internet-facing servers I own.

There's various ways in which overall network complexity is reduced in IPv6. This includes IPSec which is now part of the protocol suite and thus no longer an extension. Standardizing this is a good thing, and honestly I'm surprised that this wasn't the case before.

Many people seem to oppose the way IPv6 is presented, hexadecimal is not something many people use every day. Personally I've grown quite fond of the decimal representation of IPv4. Then again, there is a binary conversion involved in classless IPv4. Hexadecimal makes this conversion easier.

There seems to be opposition to memorizing IPv6 addresses, for which DNS can be used. I agree, I use this for my IPv4 network already. Makes life easier when you can just address devices by a domain name. For any developers out there with no experience with administration that think that this is bullshit - imagine having to remember the IP address of Facebook, Google, Stack Overflow and every other website you visit. Add to the list however many devices you want to be present in the imaginary network. For me right now that's between 20 and 30 hosts, and gradually increasing. Scalability can be a bitch.

Any other things.. Oh yeah. The average amount of devices in a SOHO network is not quite 1 anymore - there are currently about half a dozen devices in a home network that need to be addressed. This number increases as more devices become smart devices. That said of course, it's nowhere close to needing 64 bits and will likely never need it. Again, for any devs that think that this is bullshit - prove me wrong. I happen to know in one particular instance that they have centralized all their resources into a single PC. This seems to be common with developers and I think it's normal. But it also reduces the chances to see what networks with many devices in it are like. Again, scalability can be a bitch.

Thanks a lot everyone for your comments on the matter, I've learned a lot and really appreciate it. Do check out the previous rant and particularly the comments on it if you're interested. See ya!

The wage for the publishing company is too low to my liking (see previous rant), has so many asterisks when it comes to payment that it's downright shady, and I'd rather work for a company that follows European standards and is located in Europe anyway. So I've started to look again for sysadmin jobs.

Came across this fucking site, because apparently Glassdoor is down for maintenance (maybe those guys could use another sysadmin as well, hmm? 🤔)
https://totaljobs.com/jobs/...

"5 Linux Systems Administrator jobs in Belgium + 10 miles"

Alright, excellent! Let's see what they are!!!
- Active Directory administrator, wage unspecified.
- Senior VMware administrator, wage unspecified.
- Freelance Windows administrator, wage unspecified.
- Application services PM (i.e. DevOps), freelance, €500/day.
- System applications manager, requirements clearly noting Windows systems but why on Earth would you put that in the title?

Well thank you mate, useless shitsite. Do you see that none of these jobs have anything to do with Linux? Thanks you bastard, totaljobs.com! Time well spent, don't you think? 😑

Sorta related to previous rant
https://devrant.com/rants/2961085/...

Get message from recruiter on LinkedIn around 10 last night "Are you available immediately? I need a Java dev urgently based in [my city]. Please to [email address]"

I reply, send email, accept connect request

See the post they made about position , literally says "Apply today, interview tomorrow, start Monday"

I could really do with this. Made sure to be up and about by 9 in case phone rings/to reply promptly

Hear nothing back. Check in around mid day "Yes, I got your CV. My emails have been flooded. Will get to it asap" Well, that was yesterday, still nada

Linked post is about other challenges in my job hunt with a different recruiter

While attempting to quit smoking and after spending a full day trying to understand why the previous devs took this approach to encrypting a string and my lack of nicotine addled brain not allowing me to see that this was a “Secure”String and so uses a machine specific key (that’s why the code that worked locally wouldn’t run on production 😑) this is my rant on comments added to the helper I had to write

/// <summary>
/// If you are using this class and it's not for backward compatibility - then you probably shouldn't be using it
/// Nothing good comes from "Secure" strings
/// Further to this Secure strings are only "useful" for single user crypto as the encryption uses the login creds, transferring
/// this data to another client will result in them never being able to decrypt it
///
/// Windows uses the user's login password to generate a master key.
/// This master key is protected using the user's password and then stored along with the user's profile.
/// This master key then gets used to derive a number of other keys and it's these other keys that are used to protect the data.
///
/// This is also a broken crypto method via injection (see Hawkeye http://hawkeye.codeplex.com/) plus the string is stored in plain
/// text in memory, along with numerous other reasons not to use it.
/// </summary>
public class SecureStringHelper
{

As a following to my previous rant

https://devrant.com/rants/3180332/...

I ended up staying because because the outsourced company(where I’m hired) got called out by the company we’re providing devices for letting me leave and underpaying me

As it it was not enough they also threatened them to stop outsourcing with their company.

At the end I got a 2x salary rise, way better benefits and the promise(still to see) of getting hired directly on the company I’m working in.

So yeah, don’t underestimate your value.

based on my previous rant about dataset I downloaded
https://devrant.com/rants/9870922/...

I filtered data from single language and removed duplicates.

The first problem I spotted are advertisements and kudos at movie start and at end in the subtitles.

The second is that some text files with subtitles don’t have extensions.

However I managed to extract text files with subtitles and it turned out there is only 2.8gb of data in my native language.

I postponed model training for now as it will be long, painful process and will try to get some nice results faster by leveraging different approach.

I figured out I can try to load this data to vector database and see if I can query it with text fragment. 2.8gb will easily fit into ram so queries should be fast.

Output I want is time of this text fragment, movie name and couple lines before and after.

It will be faster and simpler test to find out if dataset is ok.

Will try to make it this week as I don’t have much todo besides sending CVs and talking with people.

i am feeling angry and frustrated. not sure if it's a person ,or codebase or this bloody job. i have been into the company for 8 months and i feel like someone taking a lot of load while not getting enough team support to do it or any appreciation if i do it right.

i am not a senior by designation, but i do think my manager and my seniors have got their work easy when they see my work . like for eg, if on first release, they told me that i have to update unit tests and documentation, then on every subsequent release i did them by default and mentioning that with a small tick .

but they sure as hell don't make my work easy for me. their codebase is shitty and they don't give me KT, rather expect me to read everything on my own, understand on my own and then do everything on my own, then raise a pr , then merge that pr (once reviewed) , then create a release, then update the docs and finally publish the release and send the notification to the team
well fine, as a beginner dev, i think that's a good exercise, but if not in the coding step, their intervention would be needed in other steps like reviewing merging and releasing. but for those steps they again cause unnecessary delay. my senior is so shitty guy, he will just reply to any of my message after 2-3 hours

and his pr review process is also frustrating. he will keep me on call while reviewing each and every file of my pr and then suggest changes. that's good i guess, but why tf do you need to suggest something every fucking time? if i am doing such a shitty coding that you want me to redo some approach that i thought was correct , why don't you intervene beforehand? when i was messaging you for advice and when you ignored me for 3 hours? another eg : check my comment on root's rant https://devrant.com/rants/5845126/ (am talking about my tl there but he's also similar)

the tasks they give are also very frustrating. i am an android dev by profession, my previous company was a b2c edtech app that used kotlin, java11, a proper hierarchy and other latest Android advancements.

this company's main Android product is a java sdk that other android apps uses. the java code is verbose , repetitive and with a messed up architecture. for one api, the client is able to attach a listener to some service that is 4 layers down the hierarchy , while got other api, the client provides a listener which is kept as a weak reference while internal listeners come back with the values and update this weak reference . neither my team lead nor my seniors have been able to answer about logic for seperation among various files/classes/internal classes and unnecessary division of code makes me puke.

so by now you might have an idea of my situation: ugly codebase, unavailable/ignorant codeowners (my sr and TL) and tight deadlines.
but i haven't told you about the tasks, coz they get even more shittier

- in addition to adding features/ maintaining this horrible codebase , i would sometimes get task to fix queries by client . note that we have tons of customer representatives that would easily get those stupid queries resolced if they did their job correctly

- we also have hybrid and 3rd party sdks like react, flutter etc in total 7 hybrid sdks which uses this Android library as a dependency and have a wrapper written on its public facing apis in an equally horrible code style. that i have to maintain. i did not got much time/kt to learn these techs, but once my sr. half heartedly explained the code and now every thing about those awful sdls is my responsibility. thank god they don't give me the ios and web SDK too

- the worst is the shitty user side docs. I don't know what shit is going there, but we got like 4 people in the docs team and they are supposed to maintain the documentation of sdk, client side. however they have rasied 20 tickets about 20 pages for me to add more stuff there. like what are you guys supposed to do? we create the changelog, release notes , comments in pr , comments in codebase , test cases, test scenarios, fucking working sample apps and their code bases... then why tf are we supposed to do the documentation on an html based website too?? can't you just have a basic knowledge of running the sample, reading the docs and understand what is going around? do i need to be a master of english too in addition to being a frustrated coder?

just.... fml