An entirely typical exchange at work:

PM: How long would it take to build an application that collates Gubblefluffs and exports them as a PDF?

ME: Hard to say. What’s a Gubblefluff?

PM: Nothing complex. Its basically an object with some stuff in.

ME: Erm, okay. So I’ll define a Gubblefluff object plus methods to add edit and delete, then for each Gubblefluff have it write a line to a PDF.

PM: It will need to email that PDF to somebody.

ME: Okay, cool. “Gubblefluffs-by-email” should take about a day.

6 hours later…

ME: I’ve done Gubblefluffs-to-pdf, I’m not clear on what’s in a Gubblefluff but I’ve made it flexible so it can take almost anything.

PM: No, a Gubblefluff can ONLY be one of 4 Snigglefingers plus a timestamp and some JSON.

ME: What? Right. Okay. What’s a Snigglefinger?

PM: (sighs) A Snigglefinger is the collection of relevant Babelsets.

ME: Babelsets?

PM: Yeah, a user can have any number of Babelsets but they must correspond to one of the four types of Snigglefingers.

ME: There are users!?

PM: Of course!

ME: But I’ve not coded anything for users.

PM: Shit. I’ve told the client they can have it today. How long to add in users?

ME: And Babelsets, and Snigglefingers and the new Gubblefluff rules?

PM: Yeah.

6 days later…

ME: This is done now. It’s a beast but it works. Who should it email the PDFs to?

PM: Client X, plus cc to Y and bcc to Z.

ME: What? It doesn't support CC and BCC!

1 hour later…

ME: This is done. I’ve tested it and sent you a copy of the PDF it generates.

PM: Okay thanks. Is the cron running daily?

ME: What cron?

…

ME: Okay, so the cron’s running once a day at 8pm.

PM: Oh, it’ll need to be at 3:15pm. That’s when we’ve told the client they’ll get it.

ME: Right. I’ll change it...

PM: Also, the PDF you sent me looks nothing like the visual.

ME: What visual?
...

Started talking with someone about general IT stuff. At some point we came to the subject of SSL certificates and he mentioned that 'that stuff is expensive' and so on.

Kindly told him about Let's Encrypt and also that it's free and he reacted: "Then I'd rather have no SSL, free certificates make you look like you're a cheap ass".

So I told him the principle of login/registration thingies and said that they really need SSL, whether it's free or not.

"Nahhh, then I'd still rather don't use SSL, it just looks so cheap when you're using a free certificate".

Hey you know what, what about you write that sentence on a whole fucking pack of paper, dip it into some sambal, maybe add some firecrackers and shove it up your ass? Hopefully that will bring some sense into your very empty head.

Not putting a secure connection on a website, (at all) especially when it has a FUCKING LOGIN/REGISTRATION FUNCTION (!?!?!?!!?!) is simply not fucking done in the year of TWO THOUSAND FUCKING SEVENTEEN.

'Ohh but the NSA etc won't do anything with that data'.

Has it, for one tiny motherfucking second, come to mind that there's also a thing called hackers? Malicious hackers? If your users are on hacked networks, it's easy as fuck to steal their credentials, inject shit and even deliver fucking EXPLOIT KITS.
Oh and you bet your ass the NSA will save that data, they have a whole motherfucking database of passwords they can search through with XKeyScore (snowden leaks).

Motherfucker.

Lamer rant

For a really long time I said to myself that this is too basic to rant about but lately it became so frequent and extreme that here is my rant about completely clueless users that ask me IT related questions.

Disclaimer: Said users are people that I generally can't avoid. Distant family members, neighbors and etc.

Case 0:
U: I don't know what's happening!! The computer doesn't work!!
M: What do you mean?
U: There's no Facebook! And everything is stuck and no messenger!!!
M: The WiFi on your laptop was off. I turned it on. Still, this doesn't mean that the pc wasn't working.
U: I don't understand this shit!!!

Case 1:
U: I hate this computer!!! It never works!!! Help meeee!!!
M: What now?
U: Where did the internet disappear?!
M: (assuming it's wifi or browser related)
Actually user moved the Chrome window to bottom-right corner and lost it.

Every time I try to show the user how I resolve the issue the user yells that there are too many steps, that they are complicated and that I'm a bad teacher and doing it too fast.

Case 2:
U: My computer is so slow! It barely can load google translate! And I can't listen to music on youtube!! Shitty laptop! It's you! Your computers in the apartment drain everything!!!
M: You have no idea what you are talking about.
U: My husband told me that your computers are heavy and drain everything!
M: What exactly did he tell you that my devices drain?
U: I don't know! All the energy! I believe him! He knows!
M: My computers drain less electricity than your vacuum and I have a separate internet connection. Not only we share nothing but also I drain nothing.
U: Since you appeared all the computers are slow!!!!

Fkk...

Case 3:
U: I don't understand, where is my whatsapp?
M: You can't locate the app on your phone?
U: Yes! F*ck, help me! I'm so angry and I really need this NOW!!!
M: Shut up. I'm already here and helping.
(I open users phone and whatsapp is the active app...)
U: I can' t find my whatsapp with Clara!

F*ck you! F*ck you! Ghckjfshij!!!

Case 4:
(crazy hitting on my door)
U: I don't have THE internet!!!
It's you again! You took all of THE internet!!!
M: No, it doesn't work like that. Your provider is bad, your package is cheap and your cables are of low quality.
U: I need THE internet immediately!!! Stop playing with your typing and fix the facebook or I'll cut the power cables to the house!!

I can go on, just don't think that recalling all those events is healthy for me.

Every day.

I am a PHP developer.

Yeah, "another PHP is awful" rant... no, not really.

It's just unsuitable for some ambitious projects, just like Ruby and Python are.

First of all, DO NOT EVER use Laravel for large enterprise applications. The same goes for RoR, Django, and other ActiveRecord MVCs.

They are all neat frameworks for writing a todo app, as a better-than-wordpress flexible blogging solution, even as a custom webshop.

Beyond 50k daily users, Active Record becomes hell due to it's lazy fat querying habits. At more than a million users... *depressed sigh*.

PHP is also completely unsuitable for projects beyond 5M lines of code in my opinion. At more than 25M lines... *another depressed sigh*.

You can let your devs read Clean Code and books about architecture patterns, you can teach them about SOLID & DRY, you can write thousands of tests... it doesn't matter.

PHP is scaffolding, it's made of bamboo and rope. It's not brick or concrete. You can build quickly, but it only scales up to a certain point before it breaks in multiple places.

Eventually you run into patterns where even 100% test coverage still doesn't guarantee shit, because the real-life edge cases are just too complex and numerous.

When you're working on a multi-party invoicing system with adapters for various tax codes, or an availability/planning system working across timezones, or systems which implement geographical routefinding coupled to traffic, event & weather prediction...

PHP, Python, Ruby, etc are just missing types.

Every day I run into bugs which could have been prevented if you could use ADTs in a generic way in PHP. PHP7 has pretty good typehints, and they prevent a lot of messy behavior, but they aren't composable. There is no way to tell PHP "this method accepts a Collection of Users", or "this methods returns maybe either an Apple or a Pear, and I want to force the caller to handle both Apple/Pear and null".

Well, you could do that, but it requires a lot of custom classes and trickery, and you have to rewrite the same logic if you want to typehint a "Collection of Departments" instead of "Collection of Users" -- i.e., it's not composable.

Probably the biggest issue is that languages with a (mostly) structural type system (Haskell, Rust, even C#/JVM languages to some degree, etc) are much slower to develop in for the "startup" era of a project, so you grab a weak, quick prototyping language to get started.

Then, when you reach a more grown up phase, you wish you had a better type system at your disposal...

My biggest dev blunder. I haven't told a single soul about this, until now.

👻👻👻👻👻👻

So, I was working as a full stack dev at a small consulting company. By this time I had about 3 years of experience and started to get pretty comfortable with my tools and the systems I worked with.

I was the person in charge of a system dealing with interactions between people in different roles. Some of this data could be sensitive in nature and users had a legal right to have data permanently removed from our system. In this case it meant remoting into the production database server and manually issuing DELETE statements against the db. Ugh.

As soon as my brain finishes processing the request to venture into that binary minefield and perform rocket surgery on that cursed database my sympathetic nervous system goes into high alert, palms sweaty. Mom's spaghetti.

Alright. Let's do this the safe way. I write the statements needed and do a test run on my machine. Works like a charm 😎

Time to get this over with. I remote into the server. I paste the code into Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio. I read through the code again and again and again. It's solid. I hit run.

....

Wait. I ran it?

....

With the IDs from my local run?

...

I stare at the confirmation message: "Nice job dude, you just deleted some stuff. Cool. See ya. - Your old pal SQL Server".

What did I just delete? What ramifications will this have? Am I sweating? My life is over. Fuck! Think, think, think.

You're a professional. Handle it like one, goddammit.

I think about doing a rollback but the server dudes are even more incompetent than me and we'd lose all the transactions that occurred after my little slip. No, that won't fly.

I do the only sensible thing: I run the statements again with the correct IDs, disconnect my remote session, and BOTTLE THAT SHIT UP FOREVER.

I tell no one. The next few days I await some kind of bug report or maybe a SWAT team. Days pass. Nothing. My anxiety slowly dissipates. That fateful day fades into oblivion and I feel confident my secret will die with me. Cool ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

A quite severe vulnerability was found in Skype (at least for windows, not sure about other systems) allowing anyone with system access (remote or local) to replace the update files skype downloads before updating itself with malicious versions because skype doesn't check the integrity of local files. This could allow an attacker to, once gaining access to the system, 'inject' any malicious DLL into skype by placing it in the right directory with the right file name and waiting for the user to update (except with auto updates of course).

From a company like Microsoft, taking in mind that skype has hundreds of millions of users worldwide, I'd expect them to take a very serious stance on this and work on a patch as soon as possible.

What they said about this: they won't be fixing it anytime soon as it would require a quite big rewrite of skype.

This kinda shit makes me so fucking angry, especially when it comes from big ass companies 😡. Take your fucking responsibility, Microsoft.

>be me.
>never understood jokes about linux users fucking shit up
>starts using linux
>day 3 manages to fuck shit up
>ooooohhh

The sheer stupidity of so many Apple supporters is so fucking annoying. I'm not saying everyone that uses Apple is stupid, but I've heard so many fucking people say "Android is awful because it doesn't have iMessage." NO SHIT IT DOESN'T HAVE IMESSAGE, BECAUSE APPLE WANTS TO MAKE IT SUPER FUCKING COMPLICATED TO TALK TO ANYONE THAT DOESN'T USE APPLE. When an iPhone sends a regular SMS message, they revoke all features that Android phones could use for that message (read receipts, using Wi-Fi for SMS, etc...) because Apple doesn't fucking care about anyone that doesn't use Apple. Fuck making their own users' lives easier, the person they are talking to doesn't support Apple!!

Apple, fuck yourself with a chainsaw. And no, not gently.

So I had my exams recently and I thought I'd post some of the most hacky shit I've done there over here. One thing to keep in mind, I'm a backender so I always have to hack my way around frontend!

- Had a user level authentication library which fucked up for some reason so I literally made an array with all pages and user levels allowed so I pretty much had a hardcoded user level authentication feature/function. Hey, it worked!

- CSS. Gave every page a hight of 110 percent because that made sure that you couldn't see part of the white background under the 'background' picture. Used !important about everywhere but it worked :P.

- Completey forgot (stress, time pressure etc) to make the user ID's auto incremented. 'Fixed' that by randomly generating a user id and really hoping during every registration that that user ID did not exist in the database already. Was dirty as fuck but hey it worked!

- My 'client' insisted on using Windows server.Although I wouldn't even mind using it for once, I'd never worked with it before so that would have been fucked for me. Next to that fact, you could hear swearing from about everyone who had to use Windows server in that room, even the die hard windows users rather had linux servers. So, I just told a lot of stuff about security, stability etc and actually making half of all that shit up and my client was like 'good idea, let's go for linux server then!'. Saved myself there big time.

- CHMOD'd everything 777. It just worked that way and I was in too much time pressure to spend time on that!

- Had to use VMWare instead of VirtulBox which always fucks up for me and this time it did again. Windows 10 enjoyed corrupting the virtual network adapters after every reboot of my host so I had to re-create the whole adapter about 20 times again (and removing it again) in order to get it to work. Even the administrator had no fucking clue why that was happening.

- Used project_1.0.zip etc for version control :P.

Yup, fun times!

Where do I even start?

Personal projects?
So many. Shouldn't count.

Unpaid game dev intern?
Unpaid game dev volunteer?
Both worthwhile, if stressful. Shouldn't count either.

Freelancing where clients refused to pay?
That's happened a few times. One of them paid me in product instead of cash (WonderSoil, a company that [apparently still] makes and sells some expanding super potting soil thing). The product turned out to be defective and killed all of the plants I used it on. I'd have preferred getting stiffed instead. Their "factory" (small, almost tiny) was quite cool. The owner was a bitch. Probably still is.

Companies that have screwed me out of pay?
So many. I still curse their names at least once a month. I've been screwed out of about $13k now, maybe more. I've lost track.

I have two stories in particular that really piss me off.

The first: I was working at a large robotics company, and mostly enjoyed my job, though the drive was awful. The pay wasn't high either, but I still enjoyed the work. Schedule was nice, too: 28 hours (four 7-hour days) per week. Regardless, I got a job offer for double my salary, same schedule, and the drive was 11 minutes instead of 40. I took it. My new boss ended up tricking me into being a contractor -- refused to give me a W2, no contracts, etc. Later, he also increased my hours to 40 with no pay increase. He also took forever to pay (weeks to months), and eventually refused to pay me to my face, in front of my cowokers. Asshole still owes me about $5k. Should owe me the the difference in taxes, too (w2 vs 1099) since he lied about it and forced me into it when it was too late to back out.

I talked to the BBB, the labor board, legal council, the IRS (because he was actively evading taxes), the fire inspector (because he installed doors taht locked if the power went out, installed the exit buttons on the fucking ceiling, and later disconnected all of said exit buttons). Nobody gave a single shit. Asshole completely got away with everything. Including several shady as hell things I can't list here because they're too easy to find.

The second one:
The economy was shit, and I was out of a job. I had been looking for quite awhile, and an ex-coworker (who had worked at google, interestingly) suggested I work for this new startup. It was a "reverse search engine," meaning it aggregated news and articles and whatnot, and used machine learning to figure out what its users are interested in, and provided them with exactly that. It would also help with scheduling, reminders of birthdays, mesh peoples' friends' travel plans and life events, etc. (You and a friend are going on vacation to the same place, and your mutual friend there is having a birthday! You should go to ___ special event that's going on while you're all there! Here's a coupon.) It was pretty cool. The owner was not. He delayed my payments a few times, and screwed me over on pay a few more times, despite promising me many times that he was "not one of those people." He ended up paying me less than fucking minimum wage. Fake, smiling, backstabbing asshole.

The first one still pisses me off more, though, because of all the shit I went through trying to get my missing back pay, and how he conned me every chance he got. And how he yelled at me and told me, to my face, that he wasn't ever going to pay me. Fucking goddamn hell I hate that guy.

Worst dev team failure I've experienced?

One of several.

Around 2012, a team of devs were tasked to convert a ASPX service to WCF that had one responsibility, returning product data (description, price, availability, etc...simple stuff)
No complex searching, just pass the ID, you get the response.

I was the original developer of the ASPX service, which API was an XML request and returned an XML response. The 'powers-that-be' decided anything XML was evil and had to be purged from the planet. If this thought bubble popped up over your head "Wait a sec...doesn't WCF transmit everything via SOAP, which is XML?", yes, but in their minds SOAP wasn't XML. That's not the worst WTF of this story.

The team, 3 developers, 2 DBAs, network administrators, several web developers, worked on the conversion for about 9 months using the Waterfall method (3~5 months was mostly in meetings and very basic prototyping) and using a test-first approach (their own flavor of TDD). The 'go live' day was to occur at 3:00AM and mandatory that nearly the entire department be on-sight (including the department VP) and available to help troubleshoot any system issues.

3:00AM - Teams start their deployments
3:05AM - Thousands and thousands of errors from all kinds of sources (web exceptions, database exceptions, server exceptions, etc), site goes down, teams roll everything back.

3:30AM - The primary developer remembered he made a last minute change to a stored procedure parameter that hadn't been pushed to production, which caused a side-affect across several layers of their stack.

4:00AM - The developer found his bug, but the manager decided it would be better if everyone went home and get a fresh look at the problem at 8:00AM (yes, he expected everyone to be back in the office at 8:00AM).

About a month later, the team scheduled another 3:00AM deployment (VP was present again), confident that introducing mocking into their testing pipeline would fix any database related errors.

3:00AM - Team starts their deployments.
3:30AM - No major errors, things seem to be going well. High fives, cheers..manager tells everyone to head home.
3:35AM - Site crashes, like white page, no response from the servers kind of crash. Resetting IIS on the servers works, but only for around 10 minutes or so.
4:00AM - Team rolls back, manager is clearly pissed at this point, "Nobody is going fucking home until we figure this out!!"
6:00AM - Diagnostics found the WCF client was causing the server to run out of resources, with a mix of clogging up server bandwidth, and a sprinkle of N+1 scaling problem. Manager lets everyone go home, but be back in the office at 8:00AM to develop a plan so this *never* happens again.

About 2 months later, a 'real' development+integration environment (previously, any+all integration tests were on the developer's machine) and the team scheduled a 6:00AM deployment, but at a much, much smaller scale with just the 3 development team members.

Why? Because the manager 'froze' changes to the ASPX service, the web team still needed various enhancements, so they bypassed the service (not using the ASPX service at all) and wrote their own SQL scripts that hit the database directly and utilized AppFabric/Velocity caching to allow the site to scale. There were only a couple client application using the ASPX service that needed to be converted, so deploying at 6:00AM gave everyone a couple of hours before users got into the office. Service deployed, worked like a champ.

A week later the VP schedules a celebration for the successful migration to WCF. Pizza, cake, the works. The 3 team members received awards (and a envelope, which probably equaled some $$$) and the entire team received a custom Benchmade pocket knife to remember this project's success. Myself and several others just stared at each other, not knowing what to say.

Later, my manager pulls several of us into a conference room
Me: "What the hell? This is one of the biggest failures I've been apart of. We got rewarded for thousands and thousands of dollars of wasted time."
<others expressed the same and expletive sediments>
Mgr: "I know..I know...but that's the story we have to stick with. If the company realizes what a fucking mess this is, we could all be fired."
Me: "What?!! All of us?!"
Mgr: "Well, shit rolls downhill. Dept-Mgr-John is ready to fire anyone he felt could make him look bad, which is why I pulled you guys in here. The other sheep out there will go along with anything he says and more than happy to throw you under the bus. Keep your head down until this blows over. Say nothing."

Well, here's the OS rant I promised. Also apologies for no blog posts the past few weeks, working on one but I want to have all the information correct and time isn't my best friend right now :/

Anyways, let's talk about operating systems. They serve a purpose which is the goal which the user has.
So, as everyone says (or, loads of people), every system is good for a purpose and you can't call the mainstream systems shit because they all have their use.

Last part is true (that they all have their use) but defining a good system is up to an individual. So, a system which I'd be able to call good, had at least the following 'features':
- it gives the user freedom. If someone just wants to use it for emailing and webbrowsing, fair enough. If someone wants to produce music on it, fair enough. If someone wants to rebuild the entire system to suit their needs, fair enough. If someone wants to check the source code to see what's actually running on their hardware, fair enough. It should be up to the user to decide what they want to/can do and not up to the maker of that system.
- it tries it's best to keep the security/privacy of its users protected. Meaning, by default, no calling home, no integrating users within mass surveillance programs and no unnecessary data collection.
- Open. Especially in an age of mass surveillance, it's very important that one has the option to check the underlying code for vulnerabilities/backdoors. Can everyone do that, nope. But that doesn't mean that the option shouldn't be there because it's also about transparency so you don't HAVE to trust a software vendor on their blue eyes.
- stability. A system should be stable enough for home users to use. For people who like to tweak around? Also, but tweaking *can* lead to instability and crashes, that's not the systems' responsibility.

Especially the security and privacy AND open parts are why I wouldn't ever voluntarily (if my job would depend on it, sure, I kinda need money to stay alive so I'll take that) use windows or macos. Sure, apple seems to care about user privacy way more than other vendors but as long as nobody can verify that through source code, no offense, I won't believe a thing they say about that because no one can technically verify it anyways.

Some people have told me that Linux is hard to use for new/(highly) a-technical people but looking at my own family and friends who adapted fast as hell and don't want to go back to windows now (and mac, for that matter), I highly doubt that. Sure, they'll have to learn something new. But that was also the case when they started to use any other system for the first time. Possibly try a different distro if one doesn't fit?

Problems - sometimes hard to solve on Linux, no doubt about that. But, at least its open. Meaning that someone can dive in as deep as possible/necessary to solve the problem. That's something which is very difficult with closed systems.

The best example in this case for me (don't remember how I did it by the way) was when I mounted a network drive at boot on windows and Linux (two systems using the same webDav drive). I changed the authentication and both systems weren't in for booting anymore. Hours of searching how to unfuck this on windows - I ended up reinstalling it because I just couldn't find a solution.
On linux, i found some article quite quickly telling to remove the entry for the webdav thingy from fstab. Booted into a root recovery shell, chrooted to the harddrive, removed the entry in fstab and rebooted. BAM. Everything worked again.

So yeah, that's my view on this, I guess ;P

Ranting about a meme lol

This type of shit is what I fucking hate most iPhone users.

Samsung was founded in 1938... Apple was founded in 1976.

Most iPhone users are a walking L these days with their ignorance and false sense of superiority. Fucking assholes

I have been a mobile developer working with Android for about 6 years now. In that time, I have endured countless annoyances in the Android development space. I will endure them no more.
My complaints are:

1. Ridiculous build times. In what universe is it acceptable for us to wait 30 seconds for a build to complete. Yes, I've done all the optimisations mentioned on this page and then some. Don't even mention hot reload as it doesn't work fast enough or just does not work at all. Also, buying better hardware should not be a requirement to build a simple Android app, Xcode builds in 2 seconds with a 8GB Macbook Air. A Macbook Air!

2. IDE. Android Studio is a memory hog even if you throw 32GB of RAM at it. The visual editors are janky as hell. If you use Eclipse, you may as well just chop off your fingers right now because you will have no use for them after you try and build an app from afresh. I mean, just look at some of the posts in this subreddit where the common response is to invalidate caches and restart. That should only be used as a last resort, but it's thrown about like as if it solves everything. Truth be told, it's Gradle's fault. Gradle is so annoying I've dedicated the next point to it.

3. Gradle. I am convinced that Gradle causes 50% of an Android developer's pain. From the build times to the integration into various IDEs to its insane package management system. Why do I need to manually exclude dependencies from other dependencies, the build tool should just handle it for me. C'mon it's 2019. Gradle is so bad that it requires approx 54GB of RAM to work out that I have removed a dependency from the list of dependencies. Also I cannot work out what properties I need to put in what block.
4. API. Android API is over-bloated and hellish. How do I schedule a recurring notification? Oh use an AlarmManager. Yes you heard right, an AlarmManager... Not a NotificationManager because that would be too easy. Also has anyone ever tried running a long running task? Or done an asynchronous task? Or dealt with closing/opening a keyboard? Or handling clicks from a RecyclerView? Yes, I know Android Jetpack aims to solve these issues but over the years I have become so jaded by things that have meant to solve other broken things, that there isn't much hope for Jetpack in my mind 😤

5. API 2. A non-insignificant number of Android users are still on Jelly Bean or KitKat! That means we, as developers, have to support some of your shitty API decisions (Fragments, Activities, ListView) from all the way back then!

6. Not reactive enough. Android has support for Databinding recently but this kind of stuff should have been introduced from the very start. Look at React or Flutter as to how easy it is to make shit happen without any effort.

7. Layouts. What the actual hell is going on here. MDPI, XHDPI, XXHDPI, mipmap, drawable. Fuck it, just chuck it all in the drawable folder. Seriously, Android should handle this for me. If I am designing for a larger screen then it should be responsive. I don't want to deal with 50 different layouts spread over 6 different folders.

8. Permission system. Why was this not included from the very start? Rogue apps have abused this and abused your user's privacy and security. Yet you ban us and not them from the Play Store. What's going on? We need answers.

9. In Android, building an app took me 3 months and I had a lot of work left to do but I got so sick of Android dev I dropped it in favour of Flutter. I built the same app in Flutter and it took me around a month and I completed it all.
10. XML.

If you're a new dev, for the love of all that is good in this world, do NOT get into Android development. Start with Flutter or even iOS. On Flutter and build times are insanely fast and the hot reload is under 500ms constantly. It's a breath of fresh air and will save you a lot of headaches AND it builds for iOS flawlessly.

To the people who build Android, advocate it and work on it, sorry to swear, but fuck you! You have created a mess that we have to work with on a day-to-day basis only for us to get banned from the app store! You have sold us a lie that Android development is amazing with all the sweet treat names and conferences that look bubbly and fun. You have allowed to get it so bad that we can't target an API higher than 18 because some Android users are still using devices that support that!

End this misery. End our pain. End our suffering. Throw this abomination away like you do with some of your other projects and migrate your efforts over to Flutter. Please!

#NoToGoogleIO #AndroidSummitBoycott #FlutterDev #ReactNative

More sysadmin focused but y’all get this stuff and I need a rant.

TLDR: Got the wrong internship.

Start working as a sysadmin/dev intern/man-of-many-hats at a small finance company (I’m still in school). Day 1: “Oh new IT guy? Just grab a PC from an empty cubicle and here’s a flash drive with Fedora, go ahead and manually install your operating system. Oh shit also your desktop has 2g of ram, a core2 duo, and we scavenged your hard drive for another dev so just go find one in the server room. And also your monitor is broken so just take one from another cubicle.”

Am shown our server room and see that someone is storing random personal shit in there (golf clubs propped against the server racks with heads mixed into the cabling, etc.). Ask why the golf clubs etc. are mixed in with the cabling and server racks and am given the silent treatment. Learn later that my boss is the owners son, and he is storing his personal stuff in our server room.

Do desktop support for end users. Another manager asks for her employees to receive copies of office 2010 (they’re running 2003 an 2007). Ask boss about licensing plans in place and upgrade schedules, he says he’ll get back to me. I explain to other manager we are working on a licensing scheme and I will keep her informed.

Next day other manager tells me (*the intern*) that she spoke with a rich business friend whose company uses fake/cracked license keys and we should do the same to keep costs down. I nod and smile. IT manager tells me we have no upgrade schedule or licensing agreement. I suggest purchasing an Office 365 subscription. Boss says $150 a year per employee is too expensive (Company pulls good money, has ~25 employees, owner is just cheap) I suggest freeware alternatives. Other manager refuses to use anything other than office 2010 as that is what she is familiar with. Boss refuses to spend any money on license keys. Learn other manager is owners wife and mother of my boss. Stalemate. No upgrades happen.

Company is running an active directory Windows Server 2003 instance that needs upgrading. I suggest 2012R2. Boss says “sure”. I ask how he will purchase the license key and he tells me he won’t.

I suggest running an Ubuntu server with LDAP functionality instead with the understanding that this will add IT employee hours for maintenance. Bosses eyes glaze over at the mention of Linux. The upgrade is put off.

Start cleaning out server room of the personal junk, labeling server racks and cables, and creating a network map. Boss asks what I’m doing. I show him the organized side of the server room and he says “okay but don’t do any more”.

... *sigh* ...

Worst of 2020:

Seeing company get stuck in an organizational swamp. Devs tend to be reasonably good at working from home...

Management isn't. Meeting quality has gone down the drain, half of management thinks "if the boss can't see me why work at all?", the other half has constant calls with tiny working groups where nothing is final and everyone is left confused.

I'm convinced: Everything management is afraid of about allowing devs to work from home is based on projection of their own weaknesses.

They're not passionate enough to work without oversight. They might not be introverts, but extroverts are perfectly able to communicate poorly, especially when a few digital hurdles get in the way.

The average developer might actually be more attuned to the intricacies of emotionless text chats, and preventing disruptive elements in video calls.

Also, unless someone physically helps a manager to remove their head from their own ass once in a while, their "gut feelings" about the market and products are actually just amplified bias caused by their endless self-absorbed yelling into the echo chamber that is their stretched out rectum.

Holy motherfucking hell, have I seen some weird projects float by in 2020, pooped out by isolated product managers whose brain clearly has melted when they had to survive without office fruitbaskets and organizational post-it walls.

Yeah let's promote our international character, by giving away travels and hotel bookings, using pictures of happy hugging people in foreign countries... Great promo during a pandemic.

Or let's get "woke" and promote the "colored users" on our platforms, by training ML to categorize people by skin pigment (Apart from how illegal and ethically insane that is on multiple levels, about 85% of our users pick shit like anime characters and memes for their avatar).

Or how about we make a Microsoft Store app, even though the vast majority of our end users are students using cheap Android phones, older iPhones, Macbooks and Chromebooks.

😡

Anyway, now that I have dressed up my Christmas tree with some manager intestines...

Best of 2020:

I got to play through my Steam backlog, work on hobby projects, and watch a lot of YouTube.

All this pandemic insanity has convinced me all the more that I want to work way more in Rust, and publish way more on open source projects.

I became maintainer/collaborator on a bunch of semi-prominent libraries & frameworks, and while no community is perfect, I enjoy my laid-back coffee-fueled debugging on those packages much more than listening to another crack addicted cocksucker in a suit explain their half-assed A/B test idea to me at 9AM.

So, 2021 will be me half-assing through the spaghetti at my official fuckfest of a job so I can keep filling my bank account — and investing way more time and effort into stuff I find truly engaging, into projects with a heart and a soul.

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

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

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

I... uhm... I... I can't... I ... I can't even.... THIS IS LIVE IN THE CLIENT'S SITE WHERE ANYONE CAN CREATE A LOGIN WITH NO VERIFICATION WHATSOEVER AND SEE THIS WHICH IS LINKED TO A BIG RED BUTTON THAT RESETS THE WHOLE DATABASE, YOU FUCKING DUMB PIECE OF SHIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

// This event clears the entire solution in all active clients, truncates the database and also removes any stored PDFs in the server folder
$(document).on('click', '#resetDB', function () {
// This event only happens if the user correctly enters the password, this is to prevent other users than the admin from performing this action
var answer = prompt("Please enter the password required to perform this action.");
if(answer == "-REDACTEDBECAUSEHOLYSHIT-") {
socket.emit('resetDB');
} else {
alert("The password is incorrect, please try again!");
}
});

AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!111!!1!!11!1!!1!1one!one!!!11

(I'm not inventing this, even though the "site" is internal only and not accessible through the web. That does *not* make it any less stupid!)

C#? Should have used Java
Java? So much boilerplate, use node
JavaScript? Terrible language, get some types
Typescript? Lipstick on a pig
PHP? Gross
React? Should have used Angular
Angular? Should have used Vue
Vue? Why aren't you using jQuery + HTML
VSCode? Use vim instead

Stfu, no one gives a shit about your biased closed minded opinion. Your users really don't care what technology you use, so long as they're happy.

Never have I been so furious whilst at work as yesterday, I am still super pissed about going back today but knowing it's only for another few weeks makes it baerable.

I have been the lead developer on a project for the last 3~ months and our CTO is the product owner. So every now and then he decides to just work on a feature he is interested in- fair enough I guess. But everything I have to go and clean up his horrendous code. Everything he writes is an absolute joke, it's like he is constantly in Hackathon mode "let's just copy and paste some code here, hardcoded shit there and forgot about separation of code- it all goes in 1 file".

So yesterday he added a application to the project and instead of reusing a shared data access layer he added an entirely new ORM, which is near identical to the existing ORM in use, for this one application.

Being anal about these things, the first thing I did was delete his shit and simply reference the shared library then refactor a little code to make it compatible.

WELL!! I certainly hit a nerve, he went crazy spamming messages on Slack demanding I revert as it broke ONE SINGLE QUERY that he hadn't checked in (he does 1 huge commit for 10 of everyone else's). I stuck to my principals and explained both ORM's are similar and that we only needed one, the second would cause a fragmented codebase for no benefit whatsoever.

The lead Dev was then forced to come and convince me to revert, again I refused and called out the shit quality of their code. The battle raged on via the public slack group and I could hear colleagues enjoying the heated debate, new users even started joining the group just to get in on mine and the cto's difference of opinion.

I even offered to fix his code for him if he were to commit it, obviously that was not taken well ;).

Once I finally got a luck at the cluster fuck of shit he had written it took me around 5 minutes to fix and I ever improved performance. Regardless he was having none of it. Still the demands to revert continued.

I left the office steaming after long discussions with the lead Dev caught in the middle.

Fortunately my day was salvages with a positive technical discussion that evening at a company with whome I had a job offer from.

I really hate burning bridges and have never left a company under bad terms but this dictator is making me look forward to breaking the news today I will be gone in 4 weeks.

So I finally got my head out of my ass and decided to install some OS on that 500MB RAM legacy craptop from earlier.

*installs Tiny Core Linux*

Hmm.. how do I install extra packages into this thing again? *Googles how to install packages*
Aha, extensions it's called.. and you install them through their little package manager GUI, and then you also have to dick around with some TCE directory, and boot options for that. Well I ain't gonna do that. Why the fuck would I need to dick around with that? Just install the fucking files in /bin, /var, /etc and whatever the fuck you need to like a decent distro. I'll fucking load them whenever I need them, BY EXECUTING THE FUCKING BINARY. But no, apparently that's not how TCL works.

Also, why the fuck is this keyboard still set to US? I'm using a Belgian keyboard for fuck's sake.. "loadkeys be-latin1"
> Command not found.

Okay... (fucking piece of shit) how do I change the fucking keyboard layout for this shit?!
*does the jazz hand routine required for that*
So apparently I need to install a package for that as well. Oh wait, an EXTENSION!! My bad. And then you can use "loadkmap < /usr/share/kmap/something/something" to load the keyboard layout. Except that it doesn't change the fucking keymap at all! ONE FUCKING JOB, YOU PIECE OF SHIT!!!

That's fucking it. No more dicking around in TCL. If I wanted to fuck around with the system this much, I'd have compiled my own custom Linux system. Maybe I can settle with Arch Linux, that's a familiar distro to me.. I can easily install openbox in that and call it a day. But this is an i686 machine.. Arch doesn't support that anymore, does it?

*does another jazz hand routine on Arch Linux 32 and sees that there's a community-maintained project just for that*

Oh God bless you fine Arch Linux users for making a community fork!! I fucking love you.. thank you so much!! Arch it'll be then <3

Buckle up kids, this one gets saucy.

At work, we have a stress test machine that trests tensile, puncture and breaking strength for different materials used (wood construction). It had a controller software update that was supposed to be installed. I was called into the office because the folks there were unable to install it, they told me the executable just crashed, and wanted me to take a look as I am the most tech-savvy person there.

I go to the computer and open up the firmware download folder. I see a couple folders, some random VBScript file, and Installation.txt. I open the TXT, and find the first round of bullshit.

"Do not run the installer executable directly as it will not work. Run install.vbs instead."

Now, excuse me for a moment, but what kind of dick-cheese-sniffing cockmonger has end users run VBScript files to install something in 2018?! Shame I didn't think of opening it up and examining it for myself to find out what that piece of boiled dogshit did.

I suspend my cringe and run it, and lo and behold, it installs. I open the program and am faced with entering a license key. I'm given the key by the folks at the office, but quickly conclude no ways of entering it work. I reboot the program and there is an autofilled key I didn't notice previously. Whatever, I think, and hit OK.

The program starts fine, and I try with the login they had previously used. Now it doesn't work for some reason. I try it several times to no avail. Then I check the network inspector and notice that when I hit login, no network activity happens in the program, so I conclude the check must be local against some database.

I browse to the program installation directory for clues. Then I see a folder called "Databases".

"This can't be this easy", I think to myself, expecting to find some kind of JSON or something inside that I can crawl for clues. I open the folder and find something much worse. Oh, so much worse.

I find <SOFTWARE NAME>.accdb in the folder. At this point cold sweat is already running down my back at the sheer thought of using Microsoft Access for any program, but curiosity takes over and I open it anyway.

I find the database for the entire program inside. I also notice at this point that I have read/write access to the database, another thing that sent my alarm bells ringing like St. Pauls cathedral. Then I notice a table called "tUser" in the left panel.

Fearing the worst, I click over and find... And you knew it was coming...

Usernames and passwords in plain text.

Not only that, they're all in the format "admin - admin", "user - user", "tester - tester".

I suspend my will to die, login to the program and re-add the account they used previously. I leave the office and inform the peeps that the program works as intended again.

I wish I was making this shit up, but I really am not. What is the fucking point of having a login system at all when your users can just open the database with a program that nowadays comes bundled with every Windows install and easily read the logins? It's not even like the data structure is confusing like minified JSON or something, it's literally a spreadsheet in a program that a trained monkey could read.

God bless them and Satan condemn the developers of this fuckawful program.

Wow... this is the perfect week for this topic.

Thursday, is the most fucked off I’ve ever been at work.

I’ll preface this story by saying that I won’t name names in the public domain to avoid anyone having something to use against me in court. But, I’m all for the freedom of information so please DM if you want to know who I’m talking about.

Yesterday I handed in my resignation, to the company that looked after me for my first 5 years out of university.

Thursday was my breaking point but to understand why I resigned you need a little back story.

I’m a developer for a corporate in a team of 10 or so.

The company that I work for is systemically incompetent and have shown me this without fail over the last 6 months.

For the last year we’ve had a brilliant contracted, AWS Certified developer who writes clean as hell hybrid mobile apps in Ion3, node, couch and a tonne of other up to the minute technologies. Shout out to Morpheus you legend, I know you’re here.

At its core my job as a developer is to develop and get a product into the end users hands.

Morpheus was taking some shit, and coming back to his desk angry as fuck over the last few months... as one of the more experienced devs and someone who gives a fuck I asked him what was up.

He told me, company want their mobile app that he’s developed on internal infrastructure... and that that wasn’t going to work.

Que a week of me validating his opinion, looking through his work and bringing myself up to speed.

I came to the conclusion that he’d done exactly what he was asked to, brilliant Work, clean code, great consideration to performance and UX in his design. He did really well. Crucially, the infrastructure proposed was self-contradicting, it wouldn’t work and if they tried to fudge it in it would barely fucking run.

So I told everyone I had the same opinion as him.

4 months of fucking arguing with internal PMs, managers and the project team go by... me and morpheus are told we’re not on the project.

The breaking point for me came last Wednesday, given no knowledge of the tech, some project fannies said Morpheus should be removed and his contract terminated.

I was up in fucking arms. He’d done everything really well, to see a fellow developer take shit for doing his job better than anyone else in [company] could was soul destroying.

That was the straw on the camels back. We don’t come to work to take shit for doing a good job. We don’t allow our superiors to give people shit in our team when they’re doing nothing but a good job. And you know what: the opinion of the person that knows what they’re talking about is worth 10 times that of the fools who don’t.

My manager told me to hold off, the person supposed to be supporting us told me to stand down. I told him I was going to get the app to the business lead because he fucking loves it and can tell us if there’s anything to change whilst architecture sorts out their outdated fucking ideas.

Stand down James. Do nothing. Don’t do your job. Don’t back Morpheus with his skills and abilities well beyond any of ours. Do nothing.

That was the deciding point for me, I said if Morpheus goes... I go... but then they continued their nonsense, so I’m going anyway.

I made the decision Thursday, and Friday had recruiters chomping at the bit to put the proper “senior” back in my title, and pay me what I’m worth.

The other issues that caused me to see this company in it’s true form:
- I raised a key security issue, documented it, and passed it over to the security team.
- they understood, and told the business users “we cannot use ArcGIS’ mobile apps, they don’t even pretend to be secure”
- the business users are still using the apps going into the GDPR because they don’t understand the ramifications of the decisions they’re making.

I noticed recently that [company] is completely unable to finish a project to time or budget... and that it’s always the developers put to blame.

I also noticed that middle management is in a constant state of flux with reorganisations because in truth the upper managers know they need to sack them.

For me though, it was that developers in [company], the people that know what they’re talking about; are never listened to.

Fuck being resigned to doing a shit job.

Fuck this company. On to one that can do it right.

Morpheus you beautiful bastard I know you’ll be off soon too but I also feel I’ve made a friend for life. “Private cloud” my arse.

Since making the decision Thursday I feel a lot more free, I have open job offers at places that do this well. I have a position of power in the company to demand what I need and get it. And I have the CEO and CTO’s ears perking up because their department is absolutely shocking.

Freedom is a wonderful feeling.

So, some time ago, I was working for a complete puckered anus of a cosmetics company on their ecommerce product. Won't name names, but they're shitty and known for MLM. If you're clever, go you ;)

Anyways, over the course of years they brought in a competent firm to implement their service layer. I'd even worked with them in the past and it was designed to handle a frankly ridiculous-scale load. After they got the 1.0 released, the manager was replaced with some absolutely talentless, chauvinist cuntrag from a phone company that is well known for having 99% indian devs and not being able to heard now. He of course brought in his number two, worked on making life miserable and running everyone on the team off; inside of a year the entire team was ex-said-phone-company.

Watching the decay of this product was a sheer joy. They cratered the database numerous times during peak-load periods, caused $20M in redis-cluster cost overrun, ended up submitting hundreds of erroneous and duplicate orders, and mailed almost $40K worth of product to a random guy in outer mongolia who is , we can only hope, now enjoying his new life as an instagram influencer. They even terminally broke the automatic metadata, and hired THIRTY PEOPLE to sit there and do nothing but edit swagger. And it was still both wrong and unusable.

Over the course of two years, I ended up rewriting large portions of their infra surrounding the centralized service cancer to do things like, "implement security," as well as cut memory usage and runtimes down by quite literally 100x in the worst cases.

It was during this time I discovered a rather critical flaw. This is the story of what, how and how can you fucking even be that stupid. The issue relates to users and their reports and their ability to order.

I first found this issue looking at some erroneous data for a low value order and went, "There's no fucking way, they're fucking stupid, but this is borderline criminal." It was easy to miss, but someone in a top down reporting chain had submitted an order for someone else in a different org. Shouldn't be possible, but here was that order staring me in the face.

So I set to work seeing if we'd pwned ourselves as an org. I spend a few hours poring over logs from the log service and dynatrace trying to recreate what happened. I first tested to see if I could get a user, not something that was usually done because auth identity was pervasive. I discover the users are INCREMENTAL int values they used for ids in the database when requesting from the API, so naturally I have a full list of users and their title and relative position, as well as reports and descendants in about 10 minutes.

I try the happy path of setting values for random, known payment methods and org structures similar to the impossible order, and submitting as a normal user, no dice. Several more tries and I'm confident this isn't the vector.

Exhausting that option, I look at the protocol for a type of order in the system that allowed higher level people to impersonate people below them and use their own payment info for descendant report orders. I see that all of the data for this transaction is stored in a cookie. Few tests later, I discover the UI has no forgery checks, hashing, etc, and just fucking trusts whatever is present in that cookie.

An hour of tweaking later, I'm impersonating a director as a bottom rung employee. Score. So I fill a cart with a bunch of test items and proceed to checkout. There, in all its glory are the director's payment options. I select one and am presented with:

"please reenter card number to validate."

Bupkiss. Dead end.

OR SO YOU WOULD THINK.

One unimportant detail I noticed during my log investigations that the shit slinging GUI monkeys who butchered the system didn't was, on a failed attempt to submit payment in the DB, the logs were filled with messages like:

"Failed to submit order for [userid] with credit card id [id], number [FULL CREDIT CARD NUMBER]"

One submit click later and the user's credit card number drops into lnav like a gatcha prize. I dutifully rerun the checkout and got an email send notification in the logs for successful transfer to fulfillment. Order placed. Some continued experimentation later and the truth is evident:

With an authenticated user or any privilege, you could place any order, as anyone, using anyon's payment methods and have it sent anywhere.

So naturally, I pack the crucifixion-worthy body of evidence up and walk it into the IT director's office. I show him the defect, and he turns sheet fucking white. He knows there's no recovering from it, and there's no way his shitstick service team can handle fixing it. Somewhere in his tiny little grinchly manager's heart he knew they'd caused it, and he was to blame for being a shit captain to the SS Failboat. He replies quietly, "You will never speak of this to anyone, fix this discretely." Straight up hitler's bunker meme rage.

They made a full fucking application in MICROSOFT EXCEL!!!!!!!
who the fuck makes an app in Excel? Though it's used internally, it has over 100 users and Everytime there's an update a new file is sent to all of them by mail. They use different excel files as DBs and tables as sheets. It's even got a fucking UI with check boxes and drop-downs and shit

Now guess what my task is?
Understand that entire application from the Excel files and make a webapp to cater to those requirements.

Fuck documentation, there are bugs in the Excel file and I need to fix the bugs in my app

Some good soul please tell me how must one start analyzing an Excel sheet to understand the logic behind it. Or a tool that magically converts "excel applications" to webapps

Well, it all started off with hardware-level programming involving jumpers and stuff like that... Then came Assembly, which was good.. B, C compilers. Finally came the interpreted languages, and that's where in my opinion the abstraction should've ended. But no, we needed more frameworks, more libraries, even more abstraction! Where does it end? As it seems to be going, I guess that users will have kid toys - no iToys! - for electronics and we'll be programming on with bloated Scratch GUI's. Nothing against Scratch, but that shit ain't proper programming anymore. God I can't wait for the future.

ABSTRACT ALL THE THINGS!!!

Oh and not to mention that all software will be governed in political correctness by some Alex SJW AI shit that became sentient. Not a single programming term will be non-offensive anymore, no matter how hard you try to not offend anyone, or God forbid - don't care about it because you just want to make something that's readable, usable and working!! Terms, UI names for buttons, heck even icons! REMOVE IT BECAUSE IT OFFENDS SOMEONE THAT I DON'T EVEN KNOW JACK SHIT ABOUT!!!

So there's a recent rant, about making a website work for IE.

I get it, you don't want to make it work for IE because you don't use IE.

But get this: you're not doing the site FOR YOU. You're doing it for the intended user, which is a lot of users that use all kinds of shit. If you don't want to do that, get the fuck out of web development, or from development overall. It's not for you.

I remember when I started my career, I had to make a web app that was intended to be used by, say, 100 people. As a developer I had the best tools for that - cool new 19" monitors, good GPU able to spit out a humongous resolution, and I designed that portal to look great. You know what my superior did then? He took away my 19" monitor and gave me a 14" monitor instead, saying that I became a spoiled brat that totally ignored the customer. I was angry at that, but immediately realized that he was completely right.

It doesn't matter! that it works on your machine. Who the fuck cares about your machine?

Does the software work for the intended user? If not, then you're a shitty developer.

Warning: contains swearwords!

Do you guy's also have coder-"friend" that:
- Always asks how to do things
- ask for code snippets
- steals your fucking code from Anydesk
- steals your passwords while testing
- steals your code from deobfuscated jar
- steals your jar and deobfuscate it
- steals your database to store stolen passphrases
- tries to convince you to build RATs for your users
- tries to convince you to build RATs for his users
- and so on...

??FOR FUCKING REAL THIS ISN'T EVEN ALL THAT HAPPENED TO ME!

HE IS A FUCKING SUCKER CUNT! HE PROMISED ME MULTIPLE TIMES THAT HE DELETED MY PROJECTS AND TELLS ME HE IS STILL USING THEM TO RESEARCH MY CODE FOR HIS CODE!!!

HE FUCKING RECORDED ME WHILE CODING WITH AN API I AM NOT USED TO WHILE I ASK HIM FREQUENTLY BECAUSE I HAVE NO CLUE AND HE THEN SENDS IT TO HIS FRIENDS TO PISS ME OF AND LAUGH ABOUT ME!!

WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE WHY THE FUCK ARE ASSHOLES LIKE HIM NOT IN FUCKING PSYCHIATRY!

AND I CAN'T GET RID OF HIM BECAUSE I AM TOO FUCKING NICE!!

FOR GODS SAKE PLS LET A LIGHTNING STRIKE HIT HIM IN HIS FUCKING FACE!

AT FUCKING LEAST I GOT SENT AN IMAGE OF HIS ADDRESS SO I WILL SHIT IN A FUCKING BOX AND SEND IT TO THAT CUNT!

hate it when Linux users talk like they own the cyber world.. linux is bla bla windows is shit shit..
I am not a linux fan, nor a Windows fan. just I use what is the best for the requirements

!rant
I just started to use Fira Code as my main font because another awesome user recommended it and I must say, this shit is beautiful. This is what I love about this community. I learn more and get to know more cool shit because of what users say in here than the 5 years I spent at uni. You ninjas rock!

Stupid shitheads among the web designers, fucking listen up. Your fucking design is not the point of websites - the content is. You are not supposed to shove the content away to have your moron design shine in its purest debility.

Yeah I know, white space minimalism yadda yadda, clean interface - and you dumbasses just remove functionality to simulate a clean interface, to the point of using hamburger fuckups on desktop. Pull your heads out of your asses, that's not how to design an interface! Not to mention that you idiots still guzzle through the megabytes and dozens of domain lookups for your chickenshit minimalism.

While we're at it, not everyone is 20 years old like you youngsters - you won't believe it, but there is life beyond 40, and while such age is unthinkable to you because you are so dumb that you will hardly reach that age anyway, others on this planet have managed to get there. No 20/20 laser sight, you know.

Fuck you with your light grey thin fonts on white background because it looks "clean", it just SUCKS you wankers. Fuck you with your stupid ghost buttons that don't even look like a button. You know how to operate the shit you made, but reality check here, users spend most of their time on fucking other websites than on the abomination you have designed!

Get that into the shit bubble that you call your brain and read WCAG 2.1! That's not only for disabled people, but everyone will be able to use that shit better!

In my current work, I have two systems to work on (let's name em Systems A and B). Both basically do the same thing; both allow users to book facilities available to them.

System A is already in production. My job is to fix any bugs that come up on said system. System B is an improved version that they wanted me to develop. This would follow a different framework etc. I am already halfway through this system.

Now, here's the fucked up part. The code for system A is a massive clusterfuck. It has unused commented code dated back to ancient times where men had the brain of an ape.

And don't get me started on the fucking logic. One part of the code was to retrieve and display the timeslots available for a chosen facility. The code to do that alone takes up 500++ fucking lines, filled with ajax commands, html manipulation and commented, unused codes..AND THAT'S JUST THE FRONTEND!

The fucking backend was not a problem of smelly code anymore. Nope. It was like a programmer had code diarrhea and shat his backend code all over the project. If I had a pin board, I would have made a crazy wall just to understand what some fucknut was trying to achieve.

Anyway, my supervisor told me to fix some bugs on System A. Knowing how the code was, I told her that I could refactor the code. Since I've already achieved that function on System B, with a shorter and cleaner code, I could just copy that and use on System A. But nope. She SPECIFICALLY told me to just "do whatever to fix the bugs. I don't want to waste time on System A." Okay. Makes sense to me. Whatever. I didn't wanna fuck my head up looking through that mess of a cesspool. So, I came up with a few hacks, not thinking of clean code and fixed whatever bugs there was. I then just pushed to the repo (after testing of course).

This bloody morning, supervisor came in and gave me more bugs to fix. When I thought she was done, she said "Hey. I saw the fix you made to the system. The bugs are fixed but the retrieval of the timeslots is now pretty slow. Could you see what is the problem?"

Slow.. She said that it was slow. And asked if I could fix it. I already told her what the problem was and she did not want me to waste time on it. But she wants me to fix it. WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG IN HER BLOODY HEAD! I SWEAR TO GOD... UGHHHHH I swear I was already waterboarding her in my head. YOU WANT FAST?? How bout fucking allowing me to refactor the code?? Fucking shit head. I think I should take up yoga.

"Thank you for choosing Microsoft!"

No Microsoft, I really didn't choose you. This crappy hardware made you the inevitable, not a choice.

And like hell do I want to run your crappy shit OS. I tried to reset my PC, got all my programs removed (because that's obviously where the errors are, not the OS, right? Certified motherfuckers). Yet the shit still didn't get resolved even after a reset. Installing Windows freshly again, because "I chose this".

Give me a break, Microshaft. If it wasn't for your crappy OS, I would've gone to sleep hours ago. Yet me disabling your shitty telemetry brought this shit upon me, by disabling me to get Insider updates just because I added a registry key and disabled a service. Just how much are you going to force data collection out of your "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" users, Microsoft?

Honestly, at this point I think that Microsoft under Ballmer might've been better. Because while Linux was apparently cancer back then, at least this shitty data collection for "a free OS" wasn't yet a thing back then.

My mother still runs Vista, an OS that has since a few months ago reached EOL. Last time she visited me I recommended her to switch to Windows 7, because it looks the same but is better in terms of performance and is still supported. She refused, because it might damage her configurations. Granted, that's probably full of malware but at this point I'm glad she did.

Even Windows 7 has telemetry forcibly enabled at this point. Vista may be unsupported, but at least it didn't fall victim to the current status quo - data mining on every Microshaft OS that's still supported.

Microsoft may have been shady ever since they pursued manufacturers into defaulting to their OS, and GPU manufacturers will probably also have been lobbied into supporting Windows exclusively. But this data mining shit? Not even the Ballmer era was as horrible as this. My mother may not realize it, but she unknowingly avoided it.

Yesterday,
I was a bit drunk.
But I wanted to improve security of the company. So, I went in Azure and activated “Security defaults” which forces MFA for all users in the company. (Because RH always forget to enable MFA for new employees, and I actually care about security)
Then I went in office 365 management and instead of resetting MFA for all users (Forcing everyone to redo MFA setup), I (by mistake) clicked on reset all passwords.
I tested my own account it was fine and went to sleep.
Got a call from CEO at 7am, all 30 employees cannot login in, cannot work.
What a shit show I made…
I have a call with CEO in about 2 hours, I don’t even know how to justify myself…
So children: don’t activate company wide options while drunk. Ever.

*tries to SSH into my laptop to see how that third kernel compilation attempt went*
… From my Windows box.

Windows: aah nope.

"Oh God maybe the bloody HP thing overheated again"
*takes laptop from beneath the desk indent*
… Logs in perfectly. What the hell... Maybe it's SSH service went down?

$ systemctl status sshd
> active (running)

Well.. okay. Can I log in from my phone?

*fires up Termux*
*logs in just fine*

What the fuck... Literally just now I added the laptop's ECDSA key into the WSL known_hosts by trying to log into it, so it can't be blocked by that shitty firewall (come to think of it, did I disable that featureful piece of junk yet? A NAT router * takes care of that shit just fine Redmond certified mofos).. so what is it again.. yet another one of those fucking WanBLowS features?!!

condor@desktop $ nc -vz 192.168.10.30 22
Connection to 192.168.10.30 22 port [tcp/ssh] succeeded!

ARE YOU FUCKING FOR REAL?!

Fucking Heisen-feature-infested piece of garbage!!! Good for gaming and that's fucking it!

Edit: (*) this assumes that your internal network doesn't have any untrusted hosts. Public networks or home networks from regular users that don't audit their hosts all the time might very well need a firewall to be present on the host itself as well.

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.

I'm fixing a security exploit, and it's a goddamn mountain of fuckups.

First, some idiot (read: the legendary dev himself) decided to use a gem to do some basic fucking searching instead of writing a simple fucking query.

Second, security ... didn't just drop the ball, they shit on it and flushed it down the toilet. The gem in question allows users to search by FUCKING EVERYTHING on EVERY FUCKING TABLE IN THE DB using really nice tools, actually, that let you do fancy things like traverse all the internal associations to find the users table, then list all users whose password reset hashes begin with "a" then "ab" then "abc" ... Want to steal an account? Hell, want to automate stealing all accounts? Only takes a few hundred requests apiece! Oooh, there's CC data, too, and its encryption keys!

Third, the gem does actually allow whitelisting associations, methods, etc. but ... well, the documentation actually recommends against it for whatever fucking reason, and that whitelisting is about as fine-grained as a club. You wanna restrict it to accessing the "name" column, but it needs to access both the "site" and "user" tables? Cool, users can now access site.name AND user.name... which is PII and totally leads to hefty fines. Thanks!

Fourth. If the gem can't access something thanks to the whitelist, it doesn't catch the exception and give you a useful error message or anything, no way. It just throws NoMethodErrors because fuck you. Good luck figuring out what they mean, especially if you have no idea you're even using the fucking thing.

Fifth. Thanks to the follower mentality prevalent in this hellhole, this shit is now used in a lot of places (and all indirectly!) so there's no searching for uses. Once I banhammer everything... well, loads of shit is going to break, and I won't have a fucking clue where because very few of these brainless sheep write decent test coverage (or even fucking write view tests), so I'll be doing tons of manual fucking testing. Oh, and I only have a week to finish everything, because fucking of course.

So, in summary. The stupid and lazy (and legendary!) dev fucked up. The stupid gem's author fucked up, and kept fucking up. The stupid devs followed the first fuckup's lead and repeated his fuck up, and fucked up on their own some more. It's fuckups all the fucking way down.

There was a time I made an update on one of our client's e-commerce website sign-up page. The update caused a bug that allowed new users to create an account without actually creating an account.

The code block meant to save user credentials (i.e email address and password) to the database was commented out for some reasons I still can't remember to this day. After registration new users had their session created just as normal but in reality they have no recorded account on the platform. This shit went on like this for a whole week affecting over 350 new customers before the devil sent me a DM.

I got a call from my boss on that weekend that some users who had made purchases recently can't access their account from a different device and cannot also update their password. Nobody likes duty calls on a weekend, I grudgingly and sluggishly opened up my PC to create a quick fix but when I saw what the problem was I shut down my PC immediately, I ran into the shower like I was being chased by a ghost, I kept screaming "what tha fuck! what tha fuck!!" cus I knew hell was about to break loose.

At that moment everything seemed off as if I could feel everything, I felt the water dripping down my spine, I could hear the tiniest of sound. I thought about the 350 new customers the client just lost, I imagined the raving anger on the face of my boss, I thought about how dumb my colleagues would think I was for such a stupid long running bug.

I wondered through all possible solutions that could save me from this embarrassment.
-- "If this shitty client would have just allowed us verify users email before usage things wouldn't have gotten to this extent"
-- "Should I call the customers to get their email address using their provided telephone?... No they'd think I'm a scammer"
-- "Should I tell my boss the database was hacked? Pffft hack my a**",
-- "Should I create a page for the affected users to re-verify their email address and password? No, some sessions may have expired"
-- "Or maybe this the best time to quit this f*ckn job!"
... Different thoughts from all four corners of the bathroom made it a really long bath. Finally, I decided it was best I told my boss what had happened. So I fixed the code, called my boss the next day and explained the situation on ground to him and yes he was furious. "What a silly mistake..!" he raged and raged. See me in my office by Monday.
That night felt longer than usual, I couldn't sleep properly. I felt pity for the client and I blamed it all on myself... yeah the "silly mistake", I could have been more careful.

Monday came boss wasn't at the office, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday not available. Next week he was around and when we both met the discussion was about a different project. I tried briefing him about last week incident, he seems not to recall and demands we focus on the current project.

However, over three hundred and fifty customers swept under the carpet courtesy of me. I still felt the guilt of that f*ck up till this day.

Boss insisted that verification link needs to be clicked from same IP address as account registration. Many arguments later, decision is final, we will ignore the numerous ways that this will be a burden to our users.

*Code code, test test, deploy*

We're getting a lot of traffic, we need this bitch to scale! *auto-scale and load balance all the things*

Account creation begins breaking at random, some people receiving the "Your IP address doesn't match" error. Look at login history table, what the shit... All recent logins coming from internal IP addressohfuckmylife need to look at X-Forwarded-For header for actual IP behind load balancer.

IP address matching feature stays. I am sad, drink away sadness.

I love Linux, but its community can be so full of incompetent assholes..

Just now I asked in Freenode ##linux how to get the process ID of my current running process in bash. I got my answer - it's a shell built-in called "$$".

Then people start to nitpick some more - why do you need it? How is that different from an exit? - to which my response was.. well I know the whole idea behind exit codes, and I'd use it whenever possible, in all defined behavior that allows my program to terminate itself whenever it can. This pidfile however would be used to exit itself and provide diagnostic information whenever the program enters undefined behavior - a segfault in C language. Scenarios in which I don't have full control over the script's behavior anymore, such as the system entering an unworkable state where the system stalled, still got some binaries in RAM but the rootfs got unwritable, such as now - very helpfully, thanks HP! - when my laptop likely overheated and shat itself. I issued sudo reboot into it, but even that wouldn't issue properly anymore due to the /sbin/poweroff binary becoming inaccessible too. I had to issue a hard power cycle.. one of the few times in which I'm thankful to HP for actually causing shit like this, lol.

Point is, that undefined behavior is what I'm trying to mitigate against. I certainly can't let any files other than diagnostics remain in nonvolatile storage like that, especially when their state should be predictable in order to ensure good operation (like files expressing whether the script is already running or not, i.e. lock files).

Back to that IRC chat. Aside from the answer, I got ridicule from people who probably don't even know how to properly compile a kernel. Ubuntu users, overconfident scum. Sometimes I feel like I should ask questions in channels like #archlinux only, where such incompetency is ridiculed on its own.

Call me old-fashioned, but... I kinda liked it back in the day, when Microsoft made proprietary software, the Community made free software and everyone's "cui bono" was quite easy to answer - even those corporations involved in FLOSS did have a clear way to finance themselves.

Now, we have Microsoft coming into open source, seemingly making projects better and offering more and more "free" stuff.

You know.

"Free" Windows 10.
"Free" SaaS Office.
"Free" "Private" Repos on Github.

In general - what happened to clear and concise "I give you money, you give me stuff" capitalism like we had it in the 2000s?

I'd rather pay 20 bucks for a game on Steam than get it "free" and with ads or microtransactions - yet, many games, especially mobile, don't even offer me that option. It wouldn't be that hard now, would it?

The same goes for software. That Canonical would need to fuck their users over after Ubuntu One went to shit was obvious - they didn't offer the kind of commercial/enterprise OS'es that Redhat or SuSE sell.

What people seem to forget is that everyone needs to make a profit somehow. You don't get "free" stuff. Even the volunteers in the Open Source Community get something out of it - an opportunity to pad their CV at least, if nothing else.

Nowadays, software manufacturers have the same legitimacy as the "free" financial "advisors" you find at banks - and who could be dumb enough to trust them? Oh yeah: Almost the entire fucking society is who.

But then again, sell something and noone will want it - because they all want it for free, with annoying, privacy-invading ads or with equally annoying microtransactions, or financing based on commission - so you don't only pay ONCE, you pay until you realize you got fucked over and quit.

Capitalism used to work until all those idiots stepped in. How the fuck don't people realize that there's no free lunch in life? When have we stopped being functional people and turned into idiots.

Even worse: Those idiots think that they're entitled to something! They, who volunteered to become merchandise instead of customers, think that they have rights! Do cattle have rights? Nope. They get their "free" hay everyday and I get to buy beef, that's how it works. Moo!

Hell, they are surprised when they get fucked over by bank salespeople or their data stolen by corporations, intelligence agencies or something... What did they expect, goodwill?

Can we please make Adam Smith mandatory reading in school?! I mean, give people a chance to understand capitalism? The nonexistent "goodwill" of traders in general?

So, I had a friend who hated VS Code like a fuckton alot however, most of my friends are VS Code users and he's the only one who uses atom. He say that it's greater than VS Code and code then would die sooner.

Fast forward to today, he now ranted at my Discord DM about atom ahving slow startups, extensions that doesn't work, that kind of shit, not to mention hentried to commit improperly indented code (we have nazi style enforcement in out projects regarding codestyle) and made CodeClimate ranted over it.

"That's what you get for shitting VS Code" I said. Hours later, he tried VS Code and he instantly fell in love with it.

One down, more to go

WordPress related, get ready for some disgust.

So today early in the morning my boss forwarded me an email from a client, it was about a bug, and asked me if I can have a look at it and fix it.
"Yaay, WordPress!" I thought and opened the page containing the mentioned bug. She wrote that in the italian version of the page, users can select dates in the calendar, which should be disabled, like in the german version.

So yeah, I opened the code. Everything in the function looked perfect. Really. And the Data was also correctly set in the backend of WP.

The function was only 3 lines of code:

- Get the german post ID of the current post (german or italian) by its ID (using a Polylang function)

- Get an Advanced Custom Fields field by name and from a post with the ID from before

- json_encode its content and echo it to a JS var for initialization and later use in some AngularJS.

No fucking missing semicolon, it was fucking perfect like a sunset with your soulmate.

So I tried to find the bug with my personal way of debugging:

"Shitstream Debugging"
When a creek suddenly is full of water mixed with shit, walk upstream through the turds until you reach clear water. This is where the bug is.

=> So I first looked at the HTML source: Turds.
=> Then the ACF field content: Still turds.
=> Then the ID of the german post: Shit stain and turds (var_dump: null)
=> Please god at least $post->ID? Nope, fart smell and turds.
=> Nothing more to check: Clear fucking water and the flowery smell of 99 devVirgins

So it replaced $post->IT with get_the_ID() and it worked like a charm.

Afterwards I feel stupid, but $post->IT worked all the times before...

Conclusion:
FUCK YOU WORDPRESS YOU UGLY PIECE OF HUMAN-CENTIPEDE-PROCESSED-DOGFART.

Thanks for your patience.
Only one beer was sucked dry during the writing of this fucking rant.

What an absolute fucking disaster of a day. Strap in, folks; it's time for a bumpy ride!

I got a whole hour of work done today. The first hour of my morning because I went to work a bit early. Then people started complaining about Jenkins jobs failing on that one Jenkins server our team has been wanting to decom for two years but management won't let us force people to move to new servers. It's a single server with over four thousand projects, some of which run massive data processing jobs that last DAYS. The server was originally set up by people who have since quit, of course, and left it behind for my team to adopt with zero documentation.

Anyway, the 500GB disk is 100% full. The memory (all 64GB of it) is fully consumed by stuck jobs. We can't track down large old files to delete because du chokes on the workspace folder with thousands of subfolders with no Ram to spare. We decide to basically take a hacksaw to it, deleting the workspace for every job not currently in progress. This of course fucked up some really poorly-designed pipelines that relied on workspaces persisting between jobs, so we had to deal with complaints about that as well.

So we get the Jenkins server up and running again just in time for AWS to have a major incident affecting EC2 instance provisioning in our primary region. People keep bugging me to fix it, I keep telling them that it's Amazon's problem to solve, they wait a few minutes and ask me to fix it again. Emails flying back and forth until that was done.

Lunch time already. But the fun isn't over yet!

I get back to my desk to find out that new hires or people who got new Mac laptops recently can't even install our toolchain, because management has started handing out M1 Macs without telling us and all our tools are compiled solely for x86_64. That took some troubleshooting to even figure out what the problem was because the only error people got from homebrew was that the formula was empty when it clearly wasn't.

After figuring out that problem (but not fully solving it yet), one team starts complaining to us about a Github problem because we manage the github org. Except it's not a github problem and I already knew this because they are a Problem Team that uses some technical authoring software with Git integration but they only have even the barest understanding of what Git actually does. Turns out it's a Git problem. An update for Git was pushed out recently that patches a big bad vulnerability and the way it was patched causes problems because they're using Git wrong (multiple users accessing the same local repo on a samba share). It's a huge vulnerability so my entire conversation with them went sort of like:

"Please don't."
"We have to."
"Fine, here's a workaround, this will allow arbitrary code execution by anyone with physical or virtual access to this computer that you have sitting in an unlocked office somewhere."
"How do I run a Git command I don't use Git."

So that dealt with, I start taking a look at our toolchain, trying to figure out if I can easily just cross-compile it to arm64 for the M1 macbooks or if it will be a more involved fix. And I find all kinds of horrendous shit left behind by the people who wrote the tools that, naturally, they left for us to adopt when they quit over a year ago. I'm talking entire functions in a tool used by hundreds of people that were put in as a joke, poorly documented functions I am still trying to puzzle out, and exactly zero comments in the code and abbreviated function names like "gars", "snh", and "jgajawwawstai".

While I'm looking into that, the person from our team who is responsible for incident communication finally gets the AWS EC2 provisioning issue reported to IT Operations, who sent out an alert to affected users that should have gone out hours earlier.

Meanwhile, according to the health dashboard in AWS, the issue had already been resolved three hours before the communication went out and the ticket remains open at this moment, as far as I know.

writing library code is hard.

there are sooo many details that go into writing good libraries:

designing intuitive and powerful apis
deciding good api option defaults, disallowing or warning for illegal operations

knowing when to throw, knowing when to warn/log
handling edge cases
having good code coverage with tests that doesn't suck shit, while ensuring thry don't take a hundred years to run

making the code easy to read, to maintain, robust
and also not vulnerable, which is probably the most overlooked quality.

"too many classes, too little classes"

the functions do too much it's hard to follow them
or the functions are so well abstracted, that every function has 1 line of code, resulting in code that is even harder to understand or debug (have fun drowning in those immense stack traces)

don't forget to be disciplined about the documentation.

most of these things are
deeply affected by the ecosystem, the tools of the language you're writing this in:

like 5 years ago I hated coding in nodejs, because I didn't know about linters, and now we have tools like eslint or babel, so it's more passable now

but now dealing with webpack/babel configs and plugins can literally obliterate your asshole.

some languages don't even have a stable line by line debugger (hard pass for me)

then there's also the several phases of the project:

you first conceive the idea, the api, and try to implement it, write some md's of usage examples.

as you do that, you iterate on the api, you notice that it could better, so you redesign it. once, twice, thrice.

so at that point you're spending days, weeks on this side project, and your boss is like "what the fuck are you doing right now?"

then, you reach fuckinnnnng 0.1.0, with a "frozen" api, put it on github with a shitton of badges like the badge whore you are.

then you drop it on forums, and slack communities and irc, and what do you get?

half of the community wants to ban you for doing self promotion

the other half thinks either
a) your library api is shitty
b) has no real need for it
c) "why reinvent the wheel bruh"

that's one scenario,

the other scenario is the project starts to get traction.

people start to star it and shit.
but now you have one peoblem you didn't have before: humans.

all sorts of shit:

people treating you like shit as if they were premium users.

people posting majestically written issues with titles like "people help, me no work, here" with bodies like "HAAAAAAAAAALP".

and if you have the blessing to work in the current js ecosystem, issues like "this doesn't work with esm, unpkg, cdnjs, babel, webpack, parcel, buble, A BROWSER".
with some occasional lunatic complaining about IE 4 having a very weird, obscure bug.

not the best prospect either.

Believe it or not… This means shit is doing what it is supposed to…

EDIT: Sorry for length web client users .-.

You know, I am getting really fucking irate posting them rants about how shitty my job is.

I'm more than fucking competant, but this company is turning me into a blithering, raging, frothing maniac.

I am sitting doing my devOps at the moment. On top of that I am the network admin, the sys admin, the sec admin, the fucking fuck admin (you get the point) and now I am being told to go out and work in the field because "The technician is busy with calls, and doesn't have time". These calls are ALL FUCKING PRINTER CALLS. SET UP USERS TO PRINT AND FUCKING SCAN.

I am not being a shithead by saying no. I have spent the last year or so doing favours for these bastards, I don't get any compensation in any form for it, and it is just making my life hell. The reason I went into devOps is so that I don't have to fucking deal with shit like this. I spent years in the field, and I fucking hated it. I was good at what I did, but I fucking hated it.

Now I am back there. They earn more than i do, those printer techs, but I am doing their fucking work for them. I have even made them simple little fucking scripts so that 90% of their work is done in two clicks.

Fucksakes. Now my motherfucking right shift key doesn't want to operate properly. Been using this keyboard for about 6 years now, and now it decides to fuck out. Fuck.

As standing, I am fucking sick and fucking tired. I am drinking energy drinks and mass amounts of coffee just to stay functional (because I sit up until 12AM trying to get through all my work - everyday of the week). Reported to tech director, doesnt give a single fuck. "Stick around, things will get better".

Yeah, fuck you.

Seriously thinking about freelancing.

Don't know if it pays well though.

So instead of using the budget of 7k$ to buy all the plugins the old developer needed, he torrented more than half of them and deployed the system

which ended up in 20 thousand users including companies reporting a breach, because avira etc reported some kind of drive-by scripts on the new website

what a fucking buffoon, the most annoying thing about this is, that all the plugins had a "license file", so I didn't even first get, where all that shit is coming from

Oh man. Mine are the REASON why people dislike PHP.

Biggest Concern: Intranet application for 3 staff members that allows them to set the admin data for an application that our userbase utilizes. Everything was fucking horrible, 300+ php files of spaghetti that did not escape user input, did not handle proper redirects, bad algo big O shit and then some. My pain point? I was testing some functionality when upon clicking 3 random check boxes you would get an error message that reads something like this "hi <SENSITIVE USERNAME DATA> you are attempting to use <SERVER IP ADDRESS> using <PASSWORD> but something went wrong! Call <OLD DEVELOPER's PHONE NUMBER> to provide him this <ERROR CODE>"

I panicked, closed that shit and rewrote it in an afternoon, that fucking retard had a tendency to use over 400 files of php for the simplest of fucking things.

Another one, that still baffles me and the other dev (an employee that has been there since the dawn of time) we have this massive application that we just can't rewrite due to time constraints. there is one file with (shit you not) a php include function that when you reach the file it is including it is just......a php closing tag. Removing it breaks down the application. This one is over 6000 files (I know) and we cannot understand what in the love of Lerdorf and baby Torvalds is happening.

From a previous job we had this massive in-house Javascript "framework" for ajax shit that for whatever reason unknown to me had a bunch of function and object names prefixed with "hotDog<rest of the function name>", this was used by two applications. One still in classic ASP and the other in php version 4.something

Legacy apps written in Apache Velocity, which in itself is not that bad, but I, even as a PHP developer, do not EVER mix views with logic. I like my shit separated AF thank you very much.

A large mobile application that interfaced with fucking everything via webviews. Shit was absolutley fucking disgusting, and I felt we were cheating our users.

A rails app with 1000 controller methods.

An express app with 1000 router methods with callbacks instead of async await even though async await was already a thing.

ultraFuckingLarge Delphi project with really no consideration for best practices. I, to this day enjoy Object Pascal, but the way in which people do delphi can scare me.

ASP.NET Application in wich there seemed to be a large portion of bolted in self made ioc framework from the lead dev, absolute shitfest, homie refused to use an actual ioc framework for it, they did pay the price after I left.

My own projects when I have to maintain them.

PSA: if, for whatever shit reason your brain comes up with, you decide to run a webminer in your retarded useless piece of shit website, at least HAVE THE DECENCY TO WARN USERS ABOUT IT. And while you're at it, implement some basic monitoring and safety functions. If you don't, you can set yourself on fire and jump from the top of the tallest building you can find.

Some basic tips:
1) don't run that shit on phones. The fraction of a fraction of a cent you're gonna earn from them is not worth the risk of overheating them and draining their batteries.

2) add low battery/overheating protection: the last thing you want to do is kill some poor sucker's laptop (and potential unsaved work) just because they forgot a tab open. Every time a laptop dies because of you, a knife will slit your throat.

3) WARN YOUR USERS ABOUT IT! You are straining someone else's resources for your own profit: at least have the balls to be open about it. If you try to run a miner silently in the background, I will make you eat whatever is left of your fucking brain, then drown you in the shit that comes out of your ass.

Some young kid taking his first steps into compsci was being straight-up fucking harassed on SO. No one answered, instead users with really high rep just said shit like "if you tried to hang yourself with that code it'd come apart but you should check anyway" in the comments. I flagged the comments and got fucking banned from the entire Stack Exchange network. I created a new account to help the kid, posted an answer, and was banned and had my answer removed within 5 minutes.

SE can burn in hell.

FUCK OFF, YOU FUCKING USELESS PILES OF CRAP

WHY THE FUCK CAN'T COMPANIES JUST TEST THEIR FUCKING APPS FOR ONCE?!?

LINKEDIN GOES INTO A FUCKING CAPTCHA LOOP

SNAPCHAT/INSTAGRAM ARE AS SLOW AND ATTRACTIVE AS A SLIGHTLY RUNNY SHIT

ROCKSTAR IS FULL OF MONGS WHO DON'T KNOW HOW TO MAKE A WORKING FUCKING GAME

GOOGLE IS FULL OF PERVERTED FUCKERS WHO TRACK YOU EVERYTIME YOU LOOK UP A FUCKING RECIPE.

FUCK THIS WORLD, WHY THE FUCK CAN'T BIG COMPANIES JUST MAKE SOFTWARE WITH THE USERS IN FUCKING MIND?!?!?

FUCK ME, I'M ANGRY

Yesterday I spent some time on the meta site for dba.stackexchange.com and found this one guy with 1 rep raging about how his questions aren't getting answered and how is answers are the best etc...

"I have 17 years of experience as a dba, blah, blah, blah, my answers are correct, blah, blah"

He got pretty destroyed by the mods and other users about how shit his answers were and how they weren't factually correct etc...

This just continues to show that no matter how much experience you have you won't always be right.

Same goes for my senior at work, he has 10 years more experience than me (I have 2) and he still asks for my point of view and help without being a dick about it.

I hope we'll all keep being nice people unlike that Stackexchange guy...

A brief, and biased opinion of what love is in the dev world:

Love is my employees bringing me something to eat when they know I stay back so that they can all go out do whatever they can do.

Love is my CMS admin getting his ass up and walking all the way to my office when the director walks in to say some STUPID FUCKING SHIT to me that he(CMS Admin) knows would have me 2 fucking seconds away from getting out of my chair and drop kicking the fuck out of him.

Love is the rest of my employees getting up to follow along in case(certainly) one dude is not able to hold me down.

Love is them knowing that I know that their mere presence there will make me chill the fuck out and not choke the fucking director

Love is the CMS Admin proof reading every email I send to a bitch that was trying to get smart, to make sure that I was not being agressive.

Love is said CMS Admin bringing me coffee or a coke congratulating me on listening to him about X email not being aggressive (there is no passive in my vocabulary, just balls out "isn't this your fucking job" aggressive)

Love is my lead developer showing to work after medical treatment fucked up as all hell because he knows that if he is not there I will do a billion things myself in order to give him some rest.

Love is taking my CMS admin and lead dev out to eat when a major stakeholder shits on something I damn well know it took them a while to finish. Love is also letting me open up to said stakeholder to tell them how much of a fucktard they are, sometimes they let me loose, and I appreciate that.

Love is every small person in the company approaching you to tell you of their issues, becuase they care more about the productivity they give to their users, rather than the bullshit numbers their managers care about.

Love is the staff of other places taking care of you because you are not a VP dickhead that treats them like shit.

Love is the HR reps sending you personal e-mails asking you for help because their shitbag of a boss does not count for help and leaves them in the blank with shit software, for which said HR go above and beyond for you later on even though said shitbag manager said no.

Love is your team getting angry and responding respectfully at people when they talk shit about their manager on their emails (manager being me)

Love is your employees closing your door for you when they know you are overwhelmed and you need a quick second to pull yourself up.

Love is not wanting to leave this miserable place because you know some dickweed will be left in charge of the people that care for you, trust you, work for you regardless of the date, and confide in you.

They got me locked in, this shitty institution, for now. Until I find a way to bring my entire team with me.

I work for "a" company. This company has completely broken my desire to improve user experiences.

For instance, they have fetishized reducing the amount of clicks users have to go through to improve user productivity. Normally this is good, in their grossly mutated views, not so much.

They want ALL the data on a single page, and want people to use ctrl+f to find whatever they want on these pages instead of, ya know, a site-wide search(which fucking exists).

So this makes page times and UX horrible, some pages will take upwards of 2 minutes to completely load. 2 fucking minutes! My team and I had reduced these down to 15 seconds by reducing the data displayed and paginating it using some awesome JS lazy load functions. Not great by any real metric, but still a huge improvement.

You know who uses it out of 400 employees? Me. You know who still constantly gets complaints that the pages load really fuckin slowly? Still me!

Fuck these dumb asses and their retarded ideologies. They are stuck so far up 1990s ass they can practically TASTE Clintons' taint.

The culture is so toxic for developers it's absolutely abhorrent and depressing.

There is no freedom to do what you need to do because you're too busy doing the things they ask you to do. Follow that up with quarterly performance reports that bring up questions like, "What do you do for us?".

The only positive to working in this shithole is that they wouldn't dare fire you because they would never find anyone that would stay long enough to become an expert on this pile of shit. Over the last year we have gone through an entire 16 dev team, twice. That's 36 developers that just straight up quit in 12 months, and it's not like any of them worked together either. I would say 3-4 out of the first group met the second group, and 1-2 stuck around for the current group.

I don't normally rant like this, but I've been holding this shit in for a very long time and I can't hold it in.

God damn fucking Windows bullshit.

Why is the fuck does Microsoft HATE its users?

Latest updates, and no fuck Windows 11, completely BREAKS all of my WSL environments.

Home directories are gone, or the environments are corrupt and won't even run.

99% of the issues these dense shit-fucks cause are because they RaNdOmLy reboot for their dumbass updates instead of scheduling them with the end user. During these rebots, do you thing they wait for everything to shut down?

HELL NO!

They just shut that shit down like they fucking own it. Editors? Gone. Browsers? Gone. WSL Consoles? Gone. Docker containers? Gone. IEdge? Hey, we have great news, we made IE your default browser again! BTW, your upgrade to Windows 11 is free until we force you to upgrade!

I'm so fed up with it.....so fucking tired of it...

The only reason why I even use WSL these days is to ssh into my Linux devices or run some quick dev tests in containers. Why not use PuTTY for SSH? Because it fucking SUCKS that's why.

I'm feeling so many emotions right now over bullshit that shouldn't even be happening. I'm literally at the point that I'm just going to install Linux on this device and just create a Windows VM on one of my hosts so I can still do "work" things that involve leadership.

Got a complaint from users of my project. It’s finally happened: people give a shit to tell me I’m doing a bad job. Let’s fucking gooooo

Fuck Apple and its review system

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

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

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

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

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

THE REAL BULLSHIT COMES NOW

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

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

FOR. A. SINGLE. FUCKING. PATCH

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

Im done

OK< been a long time user of Unity.

Tried the latest update as I and others were enthusiastic about creating a joint project of gamers and developers.

As I was building up a started website and we were getting things with Unity ready...BOOM,. They Fuck up the installs.

Not just a minor thing here or there but not finding its own Fucking file locations where it installs shit. You try and say, Hey Unity you fucking twat, install here in this folder.

Boom again, it installs part of it there, and then continues installing shit everywhere else it wants to. Then the assholes at Unity give this Bullshit claim "the bug has been fixed."

Just reinstall.

Fuck you, its never that simple, You have to delete all sorts of fucking files to make sure conflicts from a previous corruption isn't just loaded on top of so it does not fuck up later.

So we did all that from programs, program data, program(x86), AppData Local, Local Low, and Roaming.

For added measure we manually removed all the crap from the registry folders (that was a pain but necessary), and then ran a cleaner to make sure all the left over shit was gone.

Thinking, OK you shit tech MoFo's we are clean and here we go.

HOLY SHIT BALLS, Its fucking worse with the LTS version it recommends and Slow as Fuck with their most recent version which is like 2020 itself, and insane piece of fucking bloated garbage and slower than a brick hard shit without fruit.

So we were going to all go post on the forums, and complain the fix section isn't fixed for shit.

Fuck us running backwards naked through a field of razor grass. Its so overloaded with complaints that they shut down further posts.

What makes this shit worse is we cannot even get the previous fucking versions of the editor before all this to work where our only option is without using the fucking Hub demand is just install 2018.

great if we started coding and testing in that. We cannot get shit where we were at back on track because you cannot fucking backward load an exported saved asset file.

Unity's suggestion? Start over.

Our Suggestion? Stop fucking smoking or using whatever fucking drug you assholes are on, you fucking disabled the gear options so we can resolve shit ourselves, and admit you did that shit and other sneaky piece of shit back stabby, security vulnerable data leak bullshit things to your end users.

Listen to your fucking experienced and long time users and get rid of the Fucking backward stepped hub piece of shit everyone with more brains than whatever piss ant pieces of shit praised that the rest of us have hated from day fucking one!

And while fixing this shit like it should be fucking fixed if you shit head bastards want to continue to exist as a fucking company, overhaul the fucking website or get the fuck out of business with now completely worthless SHIT.

Phew:
Suffice it to say....

We are now considering dealing with the learning curve and post pone our project going with unreal just because of these all around complete fuck ups that herald back to shit games of versions 3.0 and earlier.

LONG RANT ALERT, no TL;DR

* Writes an email to colleague about why I can't create a page on our CMS without at least a H1 title. She wants to me to put up an image with text on it (like a flyer), for multiple reasons, I say I need a textless image. *

30 minutes later:
* Casually plans a frontend optimization project, by looking at files on the CMS, in order to make further development easier and less time-taking*

*** EMAIL NOTIFICATION ***
* clicks *

"Hello, this is [Graphic designer] from the company who created the image with text on it. I do not understand why you can't put display:none on your <h1> tag. Also, being a web company, we are used to making themes and my solution of display:none will work. It's pityful to work on a design only to have it stripped out from most of its concept. If you can't do that, do tell me what resolution you need."

My first reaction:

"Dear [Graphic designer], I am managing our corporate identity, our backend and frontend codebase, I am a graphic designer myself, and am also SEO-aware. For at least 8 reasons (redacted, 'cuse too long), I will need an image without text. As told to my colleagues, I need a 72/96 DPI 16:9 ratio image, 1920x1080 is a good start but may be bigger. Also, looking at the image, it'll have to be in JPG, at 100% quality, exported for the web. Our database software will optimize the image by itself."

Reasons are about SEO issues, responsiveness issues, CMS tools issues, backend and frontend issues.

Instead, I sent following email "We can't. Image please."

I mean seriously. A bit of clarity for you:

In my company, nobody has the slightest idea what I do. They don't understand how a computer works (we all know it works by magic, right?). So of course, when one thinks what we don't know, we know it better than the one who knows, my colleague thought our CMS was like a word document, and began telling me how I should display her bible-length text-infected image, by using some inline css styling display:none.

I tell her "nope, because of my 8 reasons". She transmits that to the agency who's done the visual, now I have this [Graphic designer] not understanding that there are other CMSs than Wordpress on the web, and she tells me, me being one of the most aware on this CMS we have, how I should optimize my site?

Fucking shit, she connects on our CMS for 1 second and she'll get cancer since it's so bad. I'm in the process of planning a whole new rewrite so the website is well designed (currently I am modifying a base theme made by an incompetent designer). I know the system by heart and I know what you can, or can't do.

Now I just received an answer: "so it's only a pure technical problem". NO, OUR WEBSITE WAS CODED BY A CHIMPANZEE WHO THOUGHT WEB DEV WAS AS EASY AS WRITING "HELLO WORLD" ON A SHITTY CMS THAT FORCES DEV USERS TO USE A FUCKING CUM-WHITE-THEMED EDITOR TO EDIT THE WHOLE SITE!!!

I can't just sneeze and "oh look, it's working!"

Developers created IDEs with intelligent code completion and languages provide users with an annotation syntax to document their methods.

And then there is Python, nuking all the efforts of our ancestors by dynamic typing. And they are smug enough to call this laziness duck typing. "If it squawks like a duck, swims like a duck, walks like a duck its a duck".
Shit no, it ain't a duck because a fucking goose does all the same but is a mean bastard compared to a duck. You might pet a duck but only the craziest will attempt to pet a goose.

Fuck python and undocumented methods in particular!

Having pets is a good way to prepare yourself for working in a brown-field environment.

When your cat or dog shits on the floor, you get the same feeling as when you need to dive into a legacy code base.

You know you can't just leave it there, and yet you still want to find anything else to do except for touch the pile of shit in the middle of the room.

Meanwhile you know your users are going to end up trampling over it and mashing it into your carpet.

Finally after one year I understood how to carry out my job. I should do exactly NOTHING. I stopped completely organizing the team, solving bugs, helping the team developing and solving problems, explore and try stupid things said by CEO, PM and consultants.
I stopped for 2 months now and nothing happened.
I work remotely, nobody knows if I'm working or not, because nobody cares really about priorities, bugs, customers or products development.

I gain 10K$ (ten thousand) per month.

I attend skype meeting once per week or less. I say yes to everything, nobody gives a shit to what I say, even if they consider me the technical director. Actually in the meetings I only take care of being considered the technical director.
I achieved the mythical 4 hours working week.

I keep skype open in all my devices in order to answer promptly in case of problem, wherever I'm am, that's the most important thing right now.

I attended some meeting from the toilet or from the bedroom.

It was hard. To understand that the board is only after the next funding and not looking to develop a real product. It's hard to pretend helping people while thinking inside you "fuck you".
You have to let go the "guilt": if you can't login, I KNOW that is my fault, that there is a bug, that is possible to solve it, that resources and planning are needed etc. That's guilt. Just let go and say "next release" and never include it in the next release.
In this way I discovered that some users are paying the application even if they can't login.

The company is not going to disappear in the next 5 years. On the contrary, it's going to receive more money.

So the only "bad" thing is, what will I write in my CV in 5 years?

I'm going to kill management.
After a serious migration fiasco at one of our biggest costumers the platform was finally usable again (after two days instead of 10 hours) and, of course, users started to report bugs. So good old po came in ranting that we as qa did a horrible job and basically tried to fault us for a fucked up update (because we produced user pain, which of course not being able to log in didn't do). Among the issues: If the user has more than a hundred web pages the menu starts looking ugly, the translation to dutch in one string on the third submenu of a widget doesn't work and a certain functionality isn't available even if it's activated.
Short, they were either not a use case or very much minor except for that missing function. So today we've looked through the entire test code, testing lists, change logs and so on only to discover that the function was removed actively during the last major update one and a half years ago.

Now it's just waiting for the review meeting with the wonderful talking point "How could effective QA prevent something like this in the future" and throwing that shit into his face.

I mean seriously, if you fuck shit up stand by it. We all make mistakes but trying to pin it on other people is just really, really low.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why you need properly tested backups!

TL;DR: user blocked on old gitlab instance cascade deleted all projects the user was set as owner.

So, at my customer, collegue "j" reviews gitlab users and groups, notices an user who left the organisation
"j" : ill block this user
> "j" blocks user
> minutes pass away, working, minding our own business
> a wild team devops leader "k" appears
k: where are all the git projects?
> waitwut?.jpg
> k: yeah all git projects where user was owner of, are deleted
> j.feeling.despair() ; me.feeling.despair();
> checks logs on server, notices it cascade deletes all projects to that user
> lmgt log line
> is a bugreport reported 3(!) years ago
> gitlab hasnt been updated since 3 years
> gitlab system owner is not present, backup contact doesnt know shit about it
> i investigate further, no daily backup cron tasks, no backup has been made whatsoever.
> only 'backups' are on file system level, trying to restore those
> gitlab requires restore of postgres db
> backup does not contain postgres since the backup product does not support that (wtf???)
> fubar.scene
> filesystem restore finished...
> backup product did not back up all files from git tree, like none of refs were stored since the product cannot handle such filenames .. Git repo's completely broken

Fuck my life

I'm starting to get sick of people calling out js for being what it is, a terrible pile of shit, without taking any effort learning the language. just because you wrote an app in java or python doesn't mean you're entitled to a free certificate in any language with a name that makes it sound easier.

in fact, I'd claim that for an experienced programmer, Java is much easier to pick up than JavaScript.

but, if all you want to do is sit here and complain, and you can find no joy in reading pages on end of documentation... well then, the only thing you're missing out on is the biggest fucking platform of the world. so don't worry I guess. it'll be fine. right? eventually the users will see that the web is just a nuisance for developers and they'll all start using native apps...

iPhones are ridiculously picky when it comes to finding a mate- um charger. And knowing why doesn't really make it any easier to understand why. If anything it baffles me more.

So, let's start with appliances that are not phones. Think Bluetooth headsets, keyboards, earbuds, whatever. Those are simple devices. They see 5V on the VCC line and 0V on ground, and they will charge at whatever current they are meant to. Usually it will not exceed 200mA, and the USB 2.0 spec allows for up to 500mA from any USB outlet. So that's perfectly reasonable to be done without any fuss whatsoever.

Phones on the other hand are smarter.. some might say too smart for their own good. In this case I will only cover Android phones, because while they are smarter than they perhaps should be, they are still reasonable.

So if you connect an Android phone to the same 5V VCC and 0V ground, while leaving the data lines floating, the phone will charge at 500mA. This is exactly to be within USB 2.0 spec, as mentioned earlier. Without the data lines, the phone has no way to tell whether it *can* pull more, without *actually* trying to pull more (potentially frying a charger that's not rated for it). Now in an Android phone you can tell it to pull more, in a fairly straightforward way. You just short the data lines together, and the phone will recognize this as a simple charger that it can pull 1A from. Note that shorting data lines is not a bad thing, we do it all the time. It is just another term for making a connection between 2 points. Android does this right. Also note that shorted data lines cannot be used to send data. They are inherently pulled to the same voltage level, probably 0V but not sure.

And then the iPhones come in, Thinking Different. The iPhones require you to pull the data lines to some very specific voltage levels. And of course it's terribly documented because iSheep just trying to use their Apple original white nugget charger overseas and shit like that. I do not know which voltage levels they are (please let me know!), but it is certainly not a regular short. Now you connect the iPhone to, say, a laptop or something to charge. An Android phone would just charge while keeping data transmission disabled (because they can be left floating or shorted). This is for security reasons mostly, preventing e.g. a malicious computer from messing with it. An iPhone needs to be unlocked to just charge the damn thing. I'm fairly sure that that's because the data lines need to be pulled up, which could in theory enable a malicious computer to still get some information in or out of it. USB data transmission works at at least 200mV difference between the data lines. It could be more than that. So you need to unlock it.

Apple, how about you just short your goddamn data lines too like everyone else? And while you're at it, get rid of this Lightning connector. I get it, micro USB was too hard for your users. I guess they are blind pigs after all. But USB-C solved all of that and more. The only difference I can think of is that the Lightning connector can be a single board with pads on either side on the connector, while in USB-C that could be at the socket end (socket being less common to be replaced). And at the end of the day, that really doesn't matter with all the other things that will break first.

Think Different. Think Retarded. Such tiny batteries and you can't even fucking charge them properly.

NO FUCKING GOOD NIGHT FOR FLOYD.

THIS MULTI FACTOR AUTHENTICATION IS A FUCKING NIGHTMARE.

So my organisation uses some MFA app as an SSO to access any and everything. Fantastic. Absolutely wonderful. No VPN shit and one password to rule them all.

But, for some reason I accidentally deleted the app from my phone and as any normal human being would do, I also reinstalled the app.

Well, post reinstalling, the app does not detect the linked Org account.

I was cool, when I'll login, the system will throw a prompt to map the phone.

So I login to org URL from my machine and lo and behold, the URL says that MFA is already linked to the phone and I have to enter the Citrix type code to login.

But phone does not show the code because account is no longer linked and web does not have option to change/re-register the phone.

What the actual unholy fuck?????? Bloody retards. How am I suppose to get in now?

So after a Googling for a bit, a thread mentioned that this is most common issue faced by users with this MFA app. The only way to get this resolved is to contact your IT team.

Cool. Let's do that.

I opened the link to my IT portal and it asks me to login via SSO which is what I need help with in first place.

I can't login to Slack because fuckers ask SSO every time the app is exited. So no contact there.

Thankfully bastards allow Outlook so was able to drop a note to one of my team member, whom I connected recently and is very nice, asking her to help me sort this IT team.

If this is the most common use case then why the fuck not add a feature to help people overcome this shit?

And my IT team is absolute nuts. No other way allowed to reset the linking or connect them or any help links provided on login page.

Whoever was behind this design should be dipped in donkey shit and deep fried in pig urine.

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

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

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

*Android New version released*

Users: Wow! Let's see what are the new features are...

Developers: Shit! Let's see what are the things they DEPRECATED.

My level of frustration with Microsoft is growing to a point that I'm unable to contain it.

They buy Github, it was a great tool for developers because is FUCKING WORKED! New features were never beta tested on users unless they requested it.

Why in the absolute fuck am I getting all these new experimental bullshit features that literally make it harder for me to do my god damned job?

They provide me NOTHING but grief and sleepless weekends while I fix the god damned pipeline that's worked perfectly fine for YEARS.

Your business model is bad and your products are SHIT.

Fuck you Microsoft, I cannot even stress it enough. If I had a time machine that could go back 5 years and my options were: Tell the world about Covid, make sure Trump never became president, or stop the Github purchse. I would hunt down and brutally attack the team of executives that decided to buy Microsoft.

Words cannot adequately describe how much I want Microsoft to fuck off. If the company was a person and they died in a house fire it wouldn't be enough.

I just want a VCS that does what it's supposed to do. I don't need pipelines, I don't need image repos, I don't need static code analysis.

I JUST NEED A FUCKING VCS THAT CONTROLS VERSIONS OF SOFTWARE YOU IGNORANT FUCKS.

Well, the impossible needs to become possible again.

"you will shit out a full website for this customer in two days! Fully responsive, 16 pages, and it better be good!"

Yeah. Ok. Fuck you. My attitude stinks, but your expectations and temperament kind of forge my attitude. Now tell me how in fucks name i am supposed to just stop administering over 3000 users and god only knows the ever growing amount of servers, stop all my server side development, so that I can make a site for a customer paying the company the equivalent of $100 for it (because sales people here are retarded) and get zero fucking commission or even a thank you for it.

Nah. Fuck this.

Tired of complaining, and I'm sure you guys are just as tired of it.

Flash has made Java programs look desirable. And anyone keeping up with me knows I despise Java and C#, despite having written C# and currently working on deciphering a Java server to create documentation.

Before I begin, I want to make this clear: IT IS TWO THOUSAND AND FUCKING EIGHTEEN. 2018. WE HAVE BETTER TECH. JAVASCRIPT HAS TAKEN OVER THIS BITCH. So, firstly, FUCK FLASH. Seriously, that shit's a security liability. If you work for a company that uses it, find a new job and then fucking quit, or go mutany and get several devs to begin a JS-based implementation that has the same functionality. There is no excuse. "I'm fired?" That's not an excuse - if there is a way to stop the madness, then fucking hit the brakes on that shit or begin job hunting. Oh, and all you PMs who are reading this and have mandated or helped someone else to mandate work on an enterprise flash program, FUCK YOU. You are part of the problem.

The reason for this outburst seems unreasonable until you realize the hell I went through today. At my University, there is a basic entry-level psychology course I'm taking. Pearson, a company I already fucking hate for some of the ethically sketchy shit they pulled with PARCC as well as overreach in publishing to the point they produce state tests here in the US - has a product called "My PsychLab" and from here on out, I'm referring to it as MPL. MPL has an issue - it is entirely fucking Flash. Homework assignments, the textbook, FUCKING EVERYTHING. So, because of that, you need to waste time finding a browser that works. Now let me remind all of you that just because something SHOULD WORK does NOT mean that it actually does.

I'm sitting on my Antergos box a few days ago: Chromium and Firefox won't load Flash. I don't know why, and don't care to find out. NPAPI and whatnot are deprecated but should still run in a limited mode or some shit. No go on Antergos.

So, today I went to the lab in the desolated basement of an old building which is where it's usually empty except a student hired by the university to make sure nobody fucks things up. I decided - because y'all know I fuckin' hate this - to try Windows. No go in Chrome still - it loaded Flash but couldn't download the content. So I tried Firefox - which worked. My hopes were up, but not too long - because there was no way to input. The window had buttons and shit - but they were COMPLETELY UNRESPONSIVE.

So the homework is also Flash-based. It's all due by 1/31/18 - FOUR CHAPTERS AND THE ACCOMPANYING HOMEWORK - which I believe is Tuesday, and the University bookstore is closed both Saturday and Sunday. No way to get a physical copy of the book. And I have other classes - this isn't the only one.

Also, the copyright on the program was 2017 - so whoever modded or maintained that Flash code - FUCK YOU AND THE IRRESPONSIBLE SHIT YOUR TEAM PULLED. FUCK THE SUPERIORS MAKING DECISIONS AS WELL. Yeah, you guys have deadlines? So do the end users, and when you have to jump through hoops only to realize you're fucked? That's a failure of management and a failure of a product.

How many people are gonna hate me for this? Haters gonna hate, and I'm past the point of caring.

I’m tired of all these profane “frontend developers” who do nothing but get cheap internet points by shitting on web technologies.

Bitch, NPM is just a package manager. That’s what it is. Anyone who ever used a package manager already knows how to use NPM.

Here on devrant, there at your workplace, people hear nothing but bitching when you open your mouth. You always need a “solid task description” and “best practices”. You always need somebody else to do your job for you. Frontend is the area where you have to constantly switch between heavy, performance-oriented coding, UX and graphic design while remaining in a dynamic environment that is called “web”, no wonder why you can’t do that. Instead of bitching, you could just present your own solution you designed with just a little bit of product-oriented thinking. But noooo, you fucking bother designers whenever you’re not sure about “how many pixels is that padding”.

You can only be barely productive (and only with a frozen spec) but can never take the lead just once.

In the 80s your kind of approaches were doubted, by the 90s they were dead. In 2020s they’re straight up laughable.

And don’t get me started on CSS. You have to be an absolute buffoon of a developer to not know how to use a DECLARATIVE tool that don’t even require real structural thinking.

No wonder why you praise php. You throw shit all over the place and tell everybody that you’re a “sociopath” and you don’t need that “stupid frontend” and “stupid users”. But you know what? Any real backend or embedded dev would’ve laughed at your face.

Because backend developers are respected.

You’re not.

What the hell happened to devRant?

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

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

Glad someone is suing them. Why the fuck would apple treat devs like shit. Why do you want 30% of every penny I make? Then why the fuck do I have to pay you $100 every year? And what about not allowing me to choose my own payment system? Some are understandable but you still can't threaten to remove app from store if the dev don't want to do what's profitable for you.

So many examples of victims - Hey, Spotify and there's a ton of independent devs out there who have been exploited so far.

Your platform is attractive to users because of those thousands of devs who build apps despite your greedy policies, so fucking treat them with respect.

FUCK ALL THOSE MONKEYS THAT WROTE ALL THE SHITTY CODE WHICH I'VE SPENT THE MAJORITY OF MY DAYS HAVING TO FIGURE OUT WHAT THE SHIT IT DOES AND WHY I CAN'T JUST BURN IT....

AND WHY THE FUCK DO BUSINESS USERS SEEM TO THINK THAT DEVELOPERS CAN UNDERSTAND ALL THEIR BUSINESS TALK...

IF I UNDERSTAND ALL OF WHAT YOU DO, YOU WILL BE OUT OF A JOB....

P.S. APPARENTLY ONE OF MY MEDS SIDE EFFECTS ARE INCREASED IRRATIBILTY. THE SLIGHTEST ANNOYANCES NOW PISS ME OFF...

SO APPARENTLY THAT MEANS I HAVE A FREE LICENSE TO BLOW UP N RANT ON THE JOB RIGHT?

... 🖕

FUCK ME!!

For a job, I have to create a form with more than 20 fields!! FUCK!!

The most shitty part is that I need to gather all the shit users fill in (if they even fill it in) and place in a shitty e-mail and send that to the client!! FUCK!!

In-app browsers in mobile apps are so fucking pointless. People have default browsers for a reason. Why the fuck would I want to open external links in your shitty in-app browser?

- Deep-linking wouldn’t work.
- Users might not be authenticated to view the external links so they’ll need to sign the fuck in again - through your app.

Why the fuck do people do this shit?

"Smart" home gym equipment: expensive hardware for some grand, proprietary software, and ongoing subscription fees in the $50/mo ballpark.

The SW is usually designed so that even shit that could have been local is instead stored remote as to make the subscription look more worthwhile. The large front-up cost serves not only as revenue, but also to anchor the vendor lock-in.

Open source hackers could potentially unchain the HW so that users would actually own what they purchased, but there is a catch: the HW is sold at a loss, and the subscription is the business model.

Freeing up the HW would render the subscription rather useless, and ramping up the HW sales prices to profitability would destroy any demand.

Basically, it's products that are technically feasible, but not economically viable. Which is why they are not the future of home gyms.

Got pulled out of bed at 6 am again this morning, our VMs were acting up again. Not booting, running extremely slow, high disk usage, etc.

This was the 6 time in as many weeks this happened. And always the marching orders were the same. Find the bug, smash the bug, get it working with the least effort. I've dumped hundreds of hours maintaining this broken shitheap of a system, putting off other duties to keep mission critical stations running.

The culprits? Scummy consultants, Windows 10 1709, and Citrix Studio.

Xen Server performed well enough, likely due to its open source origins and Centos architecture.

Whelp. DasSeahawks was good and pissed. Nothing like getting rousted out of bed after a few scant hours rest for patching the same broken system.

DasSeahawks lost his temper. Things went flying. Exorcists were dispatched and promptly eaten.

Enough. No consultants, no analysts, and no experts touched it. No phone calls, no manuals, not even a google search. Just a very pissed admin and his minion declaring blitzkrieg.

We made our game plan, moved the users out, smoked our cigs, chugged monster, and queued a gnu-metal playlist on spotify.

Then we took a wrecking ball to the whole setup. User docs were saved, all else was rm -r * && shred && summon -u Poseidon -beast Land_Cracken.

Started at 3pm and finished just after midnight. Rebuilt all the vms with RDP, murdered citrix studio (and their bullshit licenses), completely blocked Windows 10 updates after 1607, and load balanced the network.

So what do we get when all the experts are fired? Stabbed lightning. VMs boot in less than 10 seconds, apps open instantly, and server resources are half their previous usage state. My VMs are now the fastest stations in our complex, as they should be.

Next to do: install our mxgpu, script up snapshots and heartbeat, destroy Windows ads/telemetry, and setup PDQ. damn its good to be good!

What i learned --> never allow testing to go to production, consultants will fuck up your shit for a buck, and vendors are half as reliable over consultants. Windows works great without Microsoft, thin clients are overpriced, and getting pissed gets things done.

This my friends, is why admins are assholes.

I hate some parts of this company.

They literally have a "Designer" which made a mockup for our new UI and honestly when I first saw it I almost threw up.

Having made a lot of designs myself for personal projects and for fun I LITERALLY SAW he barely put any effort into it he just threw some stuff together took a shit on it and called it a UI.

For that interview we were actually expecting wireframes and not mockups since we were not sure what workflow we wanted for the UI.
Of course this would have come with feedback from us and then would have been reiterated and this was clear from our last talk with him.

Maybe he didn't know what wireframes were ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If this wasn't enough, he was also consistently misspelling words all over the place, not aligning parts of the UI, misplacing common UI elements and stupid stuff like having a GIGANTIC + button for adding a object to a list for a NO TOUCH SCREEN UI.

(The plus button was all the way to the bottom left of the screen as far away from the list so users get a good hand workout).

But everyone just loved it because "We have known him for a long time and he has a big portfolio so he must know what he's doing".

I couldn't bring in anything, you truly notice the difference between "I don't agree with your opinion but you are heard" and "Shutup my buddy the designer is amazing".

I was not being an asshole I was giving critique on specific parts of the UI and not just saying "it's shit" hoping we could improve on it. Still having naive hope for the future of this project.

He even looked kinda mad and irritated by my opinion and just looked at the people previously mentioned.

I truly hate people who just keep using the exact same worthless piece of garbage people because they have known them for a long time.

Personally I wanted to grab him off his chair and throw him out through the window, 2 floors down, straight into the garbage bin, making damn sure he doesn't accidentally fall into the recycle bin.

Never ever would I enjoy or like this application's UI if I had to work with it as a user.

Our team really needs some workflow arrangement, and this time it was me who screwed up.
So we have to push an update to the Play Store and the App Store the Friday, the app is well tested on test environment then production environment, we got the ok so I uploaded a build, the app management team then continued the process of publishing..

During the weekend the app was approved and live to almost 500k user that can receive the update.

I got a phone call from the Project Manager at almost midnight, the time was really suspicious so I answered.
- Me: Hello.
- PM: Hi, sorry to call you now but the app is live and we have a problem.
- Me: what kind of problem? Let me check.

So I updated the app on my phone and opened it while I am on call.. I almost had heart attack!! WE PUBLISHED A VERSION POINTING TO THE TEST ENVIRONMENT. Holly shit

- Me: shit call the app management team NOW.

Eventually we removed the app from sale (unpublished it) and we submitted a new version immediately, once it was approved the next day we made the app available again (so for those who didn’t update yet, there will be no update to a faulted version, and no new users landing to a version with test data), I received one or two calls from friends telling me why the app is not on the store (our app is used nationally, so it’s really important).

Thank God there was no big show on twitter or other social media.. but it’s really a good lesson to learn.

I understand this is totally my fault, thankfully I didn’t get fired 😅

Just finished a project that was estimated to be 8 weeks long with 2 devs. I was given the project 2 weeks ago with no one else to work with. It's going to a few hundred thousand users tomorrow.

Still underpaid and stressing over rent.

Definitely still not getting that salary adjustment...

Fuck this shit. 😐

Send over the entire directory for a WordPress site we completely overhauled with new plugins, custom theme, redid content with visual composer, etc. I tell him to backup his site and then put everything I give you as fresh. He tells me he can't just wipe out his entire site that's unacceptable. I ask him what's the problem? he rambles on and says a lot of words that don't really mean anything then says security. so I call him out on it, what security issues do you have? well we have users and permissions setup he says. I explain That I copied his users table over when we did the redesign, so it's the exact same stuff. so I say again, why can't we just replace everything? well that's just not acceptable he says. I ask him again, what EXACTLY is your problem with replacing the site since I already addressed your security concern. he couldn't answer me so now we have another conference call tomorrow morning with more people from their team. I'll let you know how it goes.

tldr; clients are idiots, call them out for the dumb shit they say and have no response.

I’m LOLing at the audacity of one of our vendors.

We contract with a vendor to build and maintain a website. Our network security team noticed there was a security breach of the vendor’s website. Our team saw that malicious users gained access to our Google Search console by completing a challenge that was issued to the vendor’s site.

At first, the vendor tried to convince us that their site wasn’t comprised and it was the Google search Console that was compromised. Nah dude. Our Search Console got compromised via the website you maintain for us. Luckily our network team was able to remove the malicious users from our search console.

That vendor site accepts credit card payments and displays the user’s contact info like address, email, and phone. The vendor uses keys that are tied to our payment gateway. So now my employer is demanding a full incident report from the vendor because their dropping the ball could have compromised our users’ data and we might be responsible for PCI issues.

And the vendor tried to shit on us even more. The vendor also generates vanity urls for our users. My employer decided to temporarily redirect users to our main site (non vendor) because users already received those links and in order to not lose revenue. The vendor’s solution is to build a service that will redirect their vanity urls to our main site. And they wanted to charge us $5000 usd for this. We already pay them $1000 a month already.

WTAF we are not stupid. Our network service team said we could make the argument that they do this without extra charge because it falls in the scope of our contract with them. Our network team also said that we could terminate the contract because the security breach means they didn’t render the service they were contracted to do. Guess it’s time for us to get our lawyer’s take on this.

So now it looks like my stakeholders want me to rebuild all of this in house. I already have a lot on my plate, but I’m going to be open to their requests because we are still in the debrief phase.

While reviewing a PR from one of our newer FE devs, I ended up spending more time than I would like mulling over its composition. The work was acceptable for the most part; the code worked. The part that got me was the heavy usage of options objects.

When encountering the options object pattern (or anti-pattern, at times) in complex scenarios, I have to resist the urge to stop whatever I'm doing and convert it to the builder pattern/smack them in the head with a software design manual. As much as I would like to, code janitor is one of the least valuable activities I engage in daily, and consistently telling someone to go back to the drawing board for work that is functional, but not excellent is a great way to kill morale. Usually, I'll add a note on the PR, approve it, add a brown bag or two on that sort of thing, and make attendance mandatory for repeat slackers. Skills building and catharsis all rolled up in a tiny ball of investing in your people.

Builders make things so much cleaner; they inform users what actions are available in a context; they tend to be immutable, and when done well, provide an intuitive fluent interface for configuration that removes the guesswork. As a bonus, they're naturally compositional, so you can pass it around and accumulate data and only execute the heavy lifting bits when you need to. As a bonus, with typescript, the boilerplate is generally reduced as well, even without any code generation. And they're not just a dumping ground for whatever shit someone was too lazy to figure out how to integrate into the API neatly.

They're more work in js-land, sure; you can't annotate @builder like with Lombok, but they're generally not all that much work and friendlier to use.

I know being hostile to new users is not ok.

But have you seen the shit new users post? Who wants to be part of a community of simple minded and unexperienced idiots?

New users do it all: awful english, strawman, meme reposts, and now, advertising.

I wished there was a "above certain karma" filter, so I could avoid the trash.

But there's not, so the only tool I have is telling them their arguments are stupid.

I don't mind someone BEING a beginner. But as such I would expect them stfu a bit.

"It works on our end", the sentence that made me lose my shit.

I've been working on a project were we're supposed to integrate an API into our system.

When trying to get some user id's (UUID) from said API, we got a type-error in the response (???), so I called their integration support and asked what the fuck they were doing (not really, i was kinda calm at this point).

The answer I got was following:

Integration guy: "Uh, bro, like, I don't even know, it's probably on your end"

Me: "We literally used this endpoint with the same parameters yesterday, and got a result we expected. I noticed you updated your API this morning, did you make any major changes?"

Integration guy: "Yeah we changed the type of user id from string to number"

Me: "So, you changed the type of a UUID (uuid4) from string to number? How did you not think that would be an issue? I can see in your forums that everyone else is having the same issue."

Integration guy: "Nah, it's probably a bug in your code, it works on our end"

Me in my mind: *IT WORKS ON YOUR END?!? IT DOESN'T FUCKING MATTER IF IT WORKS ON YOUR END, FUCKTARD.*

What I actually said: "Uhm, I'm not sure if works on your end either, I'm not even sure how this change made it to production. But hey, thanks I guess, bye."

WHY AM I NOT ABLE TO YELL AT PEOPLE WHEN THEY ARE BEING RETARDED???

But really though, when you're maintaining an API, you shouldn't fucking care if things work on your end in your dev environment. What matters is how it works in production, for the end user/users.

And I know that 99% of cases it's the users fault by entering the wrong parameters or trying to request with wrongly setup auth and what not, but still.

Don't ASSUME nothing's wrong on your end. It's your fucking job to fix the issues.

And guess what? The problem was on their side.
I'm going fucking bald.

Dear software developers, I realise, as a dev myself, the need for auto updates for security and stability, but, outside of only a few niche circumstances, are they really necessary on a fucking *daily* or even *hourly* basis? Congratulations for fixing that minor specific non-crucial bug that 99% of users have never encountered, and I'm happy you're maintaining your code so diligently, but couldn't it wait until next Sunday? By that time I'm sure you could combine the update with all the other minor fixes you'll come up with the interim.

And I wouldn't have to click my way through this shit every time I open the app

At work we have a....err....pool of usefulness awareness situation.

You see. The school does not know all that me and the lead developer does. Our head of department does. Our manager used to do(fore she left) but as far as the rest of the 2 fucking campuses are concerned, all of our shit works through magical dwarves that live inside the servers in our server rooms.

Normally, we are fine with this. But whenever one of us misses, or decides to take the day off and some shit hits the fan...THEN and only then do our users know what we do.

So we have a "pool" of items that seem to be picked every time one of us is not there. The more it gets picked, the more people are aware of us, the more they figure out what we do...the more they start to ask for customization and shit like that.

Such a funny situation. Wonder if this will get in the way of friday morning coffee and magic the Gathering at the office.

Or me and the cms admin playing videogames together.

Oh well

Reasons why I hate the hospital I work for...

1. NO fucking budget, for fuck sakes our telecom system is still running Merlin Magix. (I’ve been working on getting the trunk and everything to at least push FreePBX out... Configuration configuration.) but, that requires a decent server to host said system... But guess what? We’ve still got a few servers online that are running server 2012 r2. NO FUCKING BUDGET.

2. Training. They don’t have the budget to send me to training, but the doctors here are rolling in Mercedes... Must be fucking nice.

3. I have 5 f-I-v-e job descriptions. I’m a bio medical technician, network admin, system admin, programmer, and help desk... I fucked up allowing them to know I program.

4. On call 365 days a year. That’s nice and all, but when I’ve got shit to do and the nearest Walmart is an hour away I don’t want a call from Louis “oh the printer has a jam” FUCK OFF LOUIS! Get the paper out, we’ve been over this, I believe in you!

5. Some of the FUCKING (l)users.... You wouldn’t imagine some of the calls I receive, some of my favorite being late late “Hey *anonyops* I know it’s late but we’re needing a chair moved from one room to the other.” FUCK YOU YOU CHEEKY FUCKING CUNT.

The only reason I’m still here is my direct supervisor and a hand full of people that I’ve grown to love. Also, because any computer related job here is either outsourced or filled by a YouTubing god. - reason 1 why I started my own business. Supply and demand.

Rural Kansas Hospitals = shit, inb4 thanks —insert president to blame—

Rant!

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

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

Google

I used to be a fan, but recently they really stopped listening to users. No one asked for a wide angle selfie cam. If you give us that huge notch at least provide a FaceID equivalent or something that makes up for the notch.

Remove the headphone jack, cool. But then make the adapter and Bluetooth reliable. Even after a year the adapter isn’t working and the Bluetooth doesn’t connect on the first attempt. Never. The fix is constantly “coming”.

Google copies Apple without thinking. Apple gets away with shit because they provide something in return.

I was an Android user for almost 10 years, and I’ll say this: I bought the iPhone XS (I’m a purist, non-stock OS is a massive no-no) and it’s a much more usable device than the Pixels or other Android devices I used. It’s lacking in a lot of ways, but overall it’s a much better phone.

Google really needs to hire people who understand what people actually want. An amazing camera on its own isn’t enough these days.

Linux is shit, OSX and iOS are trash, windows is the only OS that actually works, open source is always inferior to closed source, if you use VPN or encryption youre a criminal, java is slow, vim worse than nano, ..

Now that I've got your attention and you probably raged and downvoted.

Downvotes don't actually work on devrant. (not a bug)

This has been going on for months already - why have that function to begin with, if its just not fucking working? The usual answer to people throwing a fit is "just downvote it", WHY? it doesnt fucking work.

For a while specific options while downvoting DID actually work, but now any of the downvote options are just straight trashed and ignored, they are saved, dont get me wrong (or else it would be too obvious), but they dont affect any of the scores at all.

I understand mass bot downvoting should be prevented, but why take away anyones voice by completely ignoring downvotes. I really dont get it, its not "punishing" the creator of said post or comment, its simply reflecting what the users actually think of said comment or post, it boils my blood how thats even a thing, I am honestly disappointed.

Why should also downvoting something hide it from the feed (especially on the "recent" filter), let me fucking decide what I want on my feed via option then atleast. What if I don't agree with a rant, downvote it, but then want to see what others thought of it? how am I supposed to find it again?

Windows is so bad, their users are actually upset instead of happy with every new software update. What kind of masochistic shit is this?

1. Manage my time better.
2. Find motivation to wake up and go to work.
3. Fake more smiles.
4. Kick ass hole (L)users in the throat when they piss me off...
5. Attend anger management.
6. Stop making shit lists.

In all honestly I need to dedicate more time to my personal clients and stop allowing my primary job’s frustration to drain my motivation to take care of their needs. It’s not fair to them that I chose the life I have. Find myself and attempt to love myself again. Create more time to focus on my health and goals. Surround myself with people that have goals and want to better their life. Find someone to share life with.

Then, with my luck; throw it all away and repeat these steps like a broken record.

When people think you're addicted to gaming, but you're just really keen on developing that next feature. People just don't understand the underappreciated life of an add-on developer. We're shit on by the game developer, and users alike.

Dev team: This part of the app has a shitty ux. We want to fix it after we finish this feature.
Business: hey guys we think we lack data so we got some users to check our page with shitty ux and see if they think it is shit
User: yeah it’s shit

Great use of resources you chucklefucks

Gender Bending For Fun and Profit.

I love how in the 'make your avatar' area, if you select female, and then click facial hair, theres nothing to select from.

Like a massive fuck you to every gender bending "down with meritocracy" purple haired dicksniffer in sanfran.

Also I'm sorely disappoint for desk items, theres no

1. giant dildos

2. anime figures/weeb shit

3. mini monoliths (I asked the site devs about this, they replied "we can't do that dave.")

4. a shirtless option for my female avatar

5. edgy scrolling numbers and code, like in the matrix

6. hoodies. They're the modern leather jacket.

7. Big nasty gnarly biker beard which I'm currently in the process of growing. How am I supposed to intimidate other anonymous cowards and mock them over the size of their beard compared to my own avatar's e-beard size? It's quiet girthy and lengthy, I assure you!

This is completely unrelated, but I thought devducks were like quick one-off debug sessions that could be bought from other devrant users.

I was disappointed when I discovered it was just merch.

On the otherhand I'm glad as fuck it's not. Site would be flooded by broken-english speaking goat humping dickheads.

How am I supposed to show off my ability to code with completely unrelated avatar change ups when no one will allow me to emasculate my avatar?

more of my favorite "about" sections from various users:

Jilano
"nothing."

Humble like a monk.

kindawonderful
"This user likes to keep secrets about himself."

Aw, hes shy!

molaram
"Part time evil corporation hater & armed infidel trying to blow off some steam."

Is that you Elliot?

dmonkey
"Computer Science student and Math lover."

Your love of math is suspect. I have not seen you participate in any of my math shitposting.

And under his skills
"I was ending up becoming a front-end developer, now I'm thinking to become a farmer after uni."

The total state of frontend in 2021. "Fuck it, I'd rather shovel horse shit than learn another
framework!"

Have you tried Horseshit.JS for that?

What about shove.js?

Fucking fuck you 'executive' sales director.

You come into my office when I'm not here, and then force people to prioritise your shitty fucking customer above a high priority one that I need to go to. I get phoned and told, "You will go there".

Basically, he just prioritised a shitty fucking issue of 3 users over a high priority SLA customer of 140 users.

Getting shat out as I speak about why the high priority is not being done (I need to do DR there, because their server crashed).

Basically said - I am fucked. I either choose to go to the SLA call and then the 'director' fucking loses his shit and hits me, or I go to the call and the MD loses his shit and fucks me up (again).

Fuck this.
Fuck.

Time to get to work!

TL;DR - the doctor is a lazy cunt and I hope he steps on a lego.

We’ve got a user authentication portal for all the users in our network. Well, we have it set to where you can only have two active log ins on two different machines, anything else will give the error message “you need to log out elsewhere” or whatever it is...
This god damn doctor has been told to log out several times and still calls us to ask why it’s “not working”.

I just received a call because the lazy cock sucker didn’t want to walk from the clinic to the hospital to sign out, are you fucking kidding me you lazy fucking ass hole? It’s not my job to be your mother fucking slave dude, get the fuck up and do it yourself!

I’ll take a lot of shit from anyone but when you refuse to retain the information to preform your job and want someone else to do it because you’re too fucking lazy, that’s when we’ve got problems.

I hope you step on a fucking LEGO.

I’m heavily medicated so if this doesn’t make sense I... don’t care.

You'll be surprised, but it's Microsoft for me.
When I started out, windows(95, yes I'm old, thanks for noticing) was the shit for me and I was quite a fanboy of it.
However, when a friend of mine introduced me to Linux, I quickly changed my mind because so many small things were way better. Then, when Vista came out, I switched completely.
That, on its own, was an adventure, but that's another rant for another time(Me and my pal were the only Linux users in the town we lived in, so without online shopping, perusing the local hardware vendors was like meeting a Neolithic tribe. It's definitely rantworthy on its own, if only for nostalgia).
The more I learned about Free Software and what Corporations could do with their power, the more I came to despise the companies I used to advocate for.
Now, it's 2018 and people bitch about what Facebook, Microsoft and their equally evil buddies do. Yet, 2013, when PRISM hit the fan, they once again ran to their arms instead of fixing the problem properly. That's about when I lost the last bit of respect for people.
And now I'm sitting here playing the world's tiniest open source violin, singing "won't get fooled again" by The Who.

Good question, what wasn't bad about 2020?

As far as good things go.. well, COVID-19 actually. Back in February the lockdown began in Belgium, and while many people got bored out of their minds, I actually became a lot more productive. So many projects started back then, and I got a lot better at programming because of it. Now I can confidently write most bash stuff without ever looking anything up. And the code is maintainable, on account of putting everything into functions. You can literally navigate the code just by looking at it. On older code I always had issues with that.

I'm very glad that essential travel even back then wasn't really restricted. Because my bank is retarded about online banking, I have to go to the bank every so often to check my balance. At the time I tended to do that late in the evening, when nobody else was outside and I had the entire town to myself. That was one of the travels considered essential. So I kept doing it and made that my biweekly walk. I really enjoyed that. Gets your mind off things.

Bad things would be the utter stupidity that the general public had shown me during that pandemic. Burning down 5G antennas and not even getting the right ones, toilet paper, 5G death beams in street lamps?! They even sent death threats to telco workers over sensationalist bullshit from what IIRC was just a random Twitch streamer. Those people should just fucking kill themselves, choke yourselves in that pile of toilet paper you got yourself and then called yourself financially challenged. You braindead fucking retards!

Another dev-related thing is the normalization of SJW terminology. Now even "blind playthrough" gets your ass banned on Twitch. I saw a tweet about a Twitch employee (I think) proudly saying that they implemented it. Most upvoted comment on it was from a blind person, asking why they did this and not made the Twitch app more friendly to use for blind users. They too thought this was bullshit. Yet it still got added in, and more and more people are starting to think that "this is fine". Hell even that "this is necessary".

What annoys me the most is that this mostly comes from the US, where around that time they laid their knee on George Floyd, and didn't fix their legal system at all. As a European it baffles me since we have many immigrants here (the Drumpf even called Belgium a hellhole over it) and we just don't give a shit about whether or not they are "truly Belgian". We just let them live their daily lives like everyone else. Imagine just not giving a shit. Imagine not bothering them, not with racism, not with reverse racism, not with anything. Just let them do their thing and that's it. Yet despite Belgium being one of the most inclusive countries in the fucking world, I still got called a racist many times for asking.. why did you implement this? Why this, and not tackling the problem at its actual and pretty fucking obvious core?

So all in all I can only hope that 2021 will get a little bit better. But that's the same thing I said in 2019, and it didn't quite come true.

you wanna know what the most hilarious shit is? hackernews users AKA the 6 figure startup bros that "rule the world" in terms of code and software...

trying to argue the best way to build a website 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

here's some select quotes:

"I believe the most minimalistic and productive way is to just use php"

^ this guy must not know its 2023 now

"Unless you are a web developer I don't see the point of a CSS framework, it's much easier to roll your own."

^ this guy must not know the pain and suffering that is 'rolling your own' in CSS

"Sadly, I just don't have the time to generate the content I wanted to do, so the site sits."

^ this guy just... wait, what?

but you know what? these guys clearly know WAY more than me in terms of software, it's good they get infinite salad bar and prime rib every day at silicon valley's best and brightest!

please fucking kill me i want it to end

Ever dealt with people who don’t understand a damn thing they’re coding and just copy and paste stuff around and say that it works? It’s amazing how long people can skate by with only knowing 50% of how what they’re working on works.

We had some dumb know it all on our team who would regularly ship half-done stuff to production and then scramble to fix it after the users bitched about how it didn’t meet the requirements.

This stupid person changed an else to an if having no idea what any of the logic did in this section of code, didn’t adequately test it, and it somehow made it through code review because the better devs were out of office.

This bullshit goes to production, fucks up 200,000 records, and users start complaining about it. Shitty developer refuses to revert the offending code until multiple people on the team overrule them. They spend the next week unfucking the data and decides to just take a day off on Wednesday because it’s been “too much mental energy to fix.” The shit wasn’t even fully resolved yet.

Some people seriously do not belong in this industry. This person’s thought process was:
“Changing an else to an if can’t possibly have significant consequences. Let’s just change this so my code change executes to see what happens.”

Still not sure how they weren’t fired when this happened. They unfortunately got to quit on their own two months later.

I am making an LDAP user manager and porting application for my workplace.

The thing is, i made the first version of it in PHP already. Shit works fine and it without an issue.

But

I had an itch to redesign it using another tech stack that would be speedier, more tested and using a more established platform.

Enter Clojure, a Lisp dialect for the JVM. In a single day I managed to get 80% of the application done. We have about 80k users inside of our ldap system(maybe more) and I tested it with 150 accounts, so far so good.

If this works I will be the first person to deploy a Clojure application, not only for my organization, but for the city as a whole while simultaneously being able to say that I got a Lisp app deployed and working :D

I am loving this. Really wanna have a Lisp app out there and add it to my resume.

The head of my department, an old timer and really ancient dev smiled heavily when I showed him the codebase. Not only is it minimal, it is concise and elegant :D

I love Clojure

And Texas

!dev

WTF YOUTUBE, WTFFFFFFF!!!!!!

YOU PIECE OF SHIT MONEY HUNGRY SOULLESS CORPORATE CUNT OF A COMPANY.

I already hated all your shitty algorithms and your way of giving the middle finger to creators I love.

You want to be a trend following bitch and have "Stories" on users feeds, fine.

WHY THE FUCKING SON OF A CUNTIFICENT BITCH ARE YOU RECOMMENDING ME CHANNELS I KNOW NOTHING OF!!!!!!

Look at this shit... the fact that I am living in Brazil does not mean I give two fucks about youtubers here, I barely know the language.

I'M SUBSCRIBED TO 20 PEOPLE. IF THEY HAVE FUCKING STORIES, SHOW ME THEIRS. IF THEY DON'T, DON'T SHOW ME ANYTHINGGGGGGG.

I have a VP constantly harassing my people about some reports that we need to do as per federal law.

The thing is, these live inside of such system that I get to see exactly how many "hits" they get on a yearly basis. The only traffic we have on those sections is of people going ahead and putting the information from our reports there.

That's it, literally. Our user base does not go there. Federal agencies do not go there. No one gives two blips of shit about those sections. Yet she continuously acts like they are the most important thing in the fucking world. To make it better, I was told not to generate actual analytical data from said reports, since people with PHDs will come down on me to ask me who the fuck do I think I am from gauging them with such systems. So shit is a mute point on all fucking accounts.

I told my VP I can generate traffic information to let them know that shit is not really the most important thing in the fucking universe. His eyes glowed.

I don't want to see head rolls, but from staying till the next morning awake trying to give the best to our userbase, and just to be called out on shit like this as if I did not do enough for our people just.....well....it fucking hits man.

The worse part was me literally getting 30 minutes of sitting down after an all nighter, doing something for my users, to get to a meeting the next morning (I should not have driven there honestly) to hear this bitch complain about us not doing enough or not caring or whatever other bullshit she would spew.

I was livid, lack of sleep makes me dangerous. I turned to say something when my boss stopped me and took care of business. I seriously love this man. By all accounts and generational gaps a boomer, but one of the few good golden ones.

I just hate how unappreciated the realm of software development is by people that think that our shit is as simple as making a fucking powerpoint presentation.

Consolidate that with a director from another department taking all fucking glory during a major event of an application that I built by myself with 2 fucking weeks of no sleeping. And shit just gets glorious.

I have considered moving to other places, and heck, have gotten amazing offers, what with having a degree with a big fucking GPA and having the credentials of a senior, lead, full stack and manager role, the sky is the limit. But i know that if I leave then my users suffer, and I just can't fucking have that.

I have heard them speaking about doing something with X app that I built (with my department) I have even heard one of them saying "how is this made?" and a part of me hoped that it would be a good time to grab them and tell them of the field and the things that they can do. But I don't like announcing myself that way, always seemed to presumptuous, so I just smile, fuck yeah, my users are doing their thing with what I built to better their lives, what more can I have?

I have gotten criticisms from them, one recognized me, told me about his pain points and how it makes it hard for him to do what he must. Getting the data from the user base in an effort to make shit better for them drives me, my challenge being "how about this? better eh?"

But fucking execs man, think only of themselves, not the users, they forget about the users. Much like a shitty rock band forgetting about the music, about the fans.

I can't let that slide. But this fucking field. I sometimes fucking hate it, and I hate it because of the normies that don't understand and do not want to understand.

I do way too much, my guys do way too much and all I want is for the recognition to go to them. They do not need the ego boost, but to see my guys sitting in a meeting in which some dumb fuck is trying to drill us for taking to long, not doing something and what not, it fucking pisses me off. As their boss I always stand up and tell bitches off, but instead of learning, the bitches just keep pressing on their already defeated points.

Everything in human life gets fucking erradicated by: humans. People really do fucking suck.

I sometimes wish to go back, redo my diesel tech license and just work there, where I think one would be better of talking to an engine. But no, even then you get people, you have to interact with people, deal with people, and I am so far up my game and in my field that starting from scratch is a fucking mute point.

Maybe I need to keep fucking with stocks, get rich and just keep investing on bullshit. Whatever the fuck it takes me from having to feel the urge to choke a motherfucker in public.

What happened to the warm welcome that new users received back in the day? Now when someone posts their first rant people bash on details and give them no chance. I remember posting half-dumb rants, but no one gave me shit for that. It takes time to grow into a community, you can't just expect people to behave identically to the rest. Makes me a bit disappointed to be fair.

For the last week or so I've been writing a userbot for Telegram. Completely from scratch, plus Telethon to not reinvent the wheel entirely. I'm coming from the codebase of an existing userbot.

That userbot is written by a good friend of mine, who makes 6 figures, and whom I respect greatly. However the code is a steaming pile of shit. Now that is not his fault, he largely inherited that code too, tried to fix it, failed, gave up.

I am reimplementing it entirely. I'm only looking at the modules, trying to understand them, and copying over the necessary bits and changing them where necessary. But I've come across some nasty shit.

Userbots often edit existing messages from real Telegram clients. They're kind of like a login to your account, but with a program rather than a regular client. You send a message from a real client, it sees it and does whatever it needs to, and edits your message to give you feedback. Which is great.

However, there's no need to do simple string edits by importing "re". So why do you? Because you're an idiot, that's why. The old bot is based on Paperplane, which in turn is based on Telethon. Why do I see function calls to Telethon in some places and Paperplane in others? Because you're an idiot, that's why. Why does the dig module fail to even give correct answers? Because you know nothing about the DNS, that's why. And you didn't learn about RRs before implementing it.

And don't you tell me that this code is shit, and this bot is slow only when I run it on a fucking Pentium. I run this shit on an i7 and CPU isn't even the issue - memory, disk and such are. If you had any clue whatsoever about efficiency, you would've known because it's blatantly obvious. There's a reason why my machines rarely go past 5% CPU utilization. It's the fastest component in the entire fucking system.

When users come and say.. hmm this application of yours, it consumes a lot of memory. It takes a long time to do X and Y and I don't quite understand why, it seems illogical. Then maybe you should go look at your code, like you would look at yourself in the mirror. And then you fucking go fix it so that I don't have to. You're an engineer just like I am. And I am not even a dev proper - I'm a sysadmin by trade. Why should I have to fix your shit for you?

I've known that users are stupid and should keep that in mind when designing a website. But holy shit that's ridiculous!!!

He said that "when something is not on the middle of the screen flashing then we are not seeing it!"

How the fuck would it look like if I will place the fucking menubar on the middle of the screen with flashing red and blue colors for you dumbass to see?? If you are that incompetent to look on the top (not to mention it's fixed) of the layout where 99% of main menus are placed then you shouldn't use a computer in the first place.

Or maybe my design is bad I am getting uncertain.

In a forum far far away...
<user> I need help understanding something about this library.
<various users> This is how it works. This is something to consider. Here is a good way to learn all of this. etc Really helpful people.
<user> I would say more about what I want to do, but I don't want to receive any more "mouthful of unsolicited advises ".

Really? You fucking ask a question on a forum about what you want to learn. Everyone there takes it seriously and provides some really golden shit on how to learn the topic. Then you shit on them for daring to provide ways to learn the topic?

I don't know if this is a language barrier, or if they are using Google translate. I have no idea. But they come across as an asshole.

A real chef will rant about a freaking knife sharpness and weight and handle and all that shit. Because a real chef knows what he is holding.

Us? We are happy as long as the knives in our hands can cut some stuffs or stab some people.

// Disclaimer : I just left this comment on a rant where OP claimed many users (average users) have no issues with a particular OS while a bunch of self proclaimed developers have lots of trouble with that particular OS.

!rant

The efficiency of every dev stack in the world will never compare to just dropping my folder of php code into a server, with proper configurations, routes envs and everything else into a folder and watch it run.

I a pops shop wants me to build something for them? php

If an enterprise grade with a lot of users comes about? php

I have yet to have a single issue with it as most of you evee poluted, herd ready, mob mentality mfkers want to make believe.

Legit, the language is flawed, but has yet to fuck with me, i have memorized the quirks and fuckups of the language (much like I have done with JS) to know that a lot of you just bandwaggon over shit.

"It DoeSnt hAve proPer geNerics"

boom, deployed a form to a customer for his site, charged $2k for a one day job with no issue. But go ahead, setup an entire fucking pipeline of dependencies, a .net app and/or an entire bs app in node or rails(which I love btw) or an entire fuckState centric app in Go that gets messier the more you look at it and it would not be as easy or as simple to deploy.

Legit, in my entire career, nothing makes my life simpler for the web.

I have an Android phone. Pixel 2 to be exact, and I love it. Many family members and friends of mine have iPhones. To each their own.

Having said that, I absolutely HAAAATE the stupid iPhone feature that lets users react to text messages. Today all those iPhone users added me to literally 5 different SMS groups (which by themselves are their own sin), chatting up a storm all evening. I already hate group texts, please, leave me alone. But it gets so much worse when my phone blows up with twice as many messages because so-and-so "liked" this message, and so-and-so "laughed" at that message. It sends you their chosen verb alongside the ENTIRE original text AGAIN.

Such a stupid feature, leave Facebook on Facebook, why the hell do text messages need reactions? I don't give a shit that you liked or laughed or loved that so and so said they will be there at 9 o clock.

At least i have the ability to mute notifications for each group otherwise I'd be replying to every group text I get with a trolling big trigger item or something super inappropriate until they stop. Don't want this to continue? Stop group texting me, stop reacting to texts, and don't do it again.

Github 101 (many of these things pertain to other places, but Github is what I'll focus on)

- Even the best still get their shit closed - PRs, issues, whatever. It's a part of the process; learn from it and move on.

- Not every maintainer is nice. Not every maintainer wants X feature. Not every maintainer will give you the time of day. You will never change this, so don't take it personally.

- Asking questions is okay. The trackers aren't just for bug reports/feature requests/PRs. Some maintainers will point you toward StackOverflow but that's usually code for "I don't have time to help you", not "you did something wrong".

- If you open an issue (or ask a question) and it receives a response and then it's closed, don't be upset - that's just how that works. An open issue means something actionable can still happen. If your question has been answered or issue has been resolved, the issue being closed helps maintainers keep things un-cluttered. It's not a middle finger to the face.

- Further, on especially noisy or popular repositories, locking the issue might happen when it's closed. Again, while it might feel like it, it's not a middle finger. It just prevents certain types of wrongdoing from the less... courteous or common-sense-having users.

- Never assume anything about who you're talking to, ever. Even recently, I made this mistake when correcting someone about calling what I thought was "powerpc" just "power". I told them "hey, it's called powerpc by the way" and they (kindly) let me know it's "power" and why, and also that they're on the Power team. Needless to say, they had the authority in that situation. Some people aren't as nice, but the best way to avoid heated discussion is....

- ... don't assume malice. Often I've come across what I perceived to be a rude or pushy comment. Sometimes, it feels as though the person is demanding something. As a native English speaker, I naturally tried to read between the lines as English speakers love to tuck away hidden meanings and emotions into finely crafted sentences. However, in many cases, it turns out that the other person didn't speak English well enough at all and that the easiest and most accurate way for them to convey something was bluntly and directly in English (since, of course, that's the easiest way). Cultures differ, priorities differ, patience tolerances differ. We're all people after all - so don't assume someone is being mean or is trying to start a fight. Insinuating such might actually make things worse.

- Please, PLEASE, search issues first before you open a new one. Explaining why one of my packages will not be re-written as an ESM module is almost muscle memory at this point.

- If you put in the effort, so will I (as a maintainer). Oftentimes, when you're opening an issue on a repository, the owner hasn't looked at the code in a while. If you give them a lot of hints as to how to solve a problem or answer your question, you're going to make them super, duper happy. Provide stack traces, reproduction cases, links to the source code - even open a PR if you can. I can respond to issues and approve PRs from anywhere, but can't always investigate an issue on a computer as readily. This is especially true when filing bugs - if you don't help me solve it, it simply won't be solved.

- [warning: controversial] Emojis dillute your content. It's not often I see it, but sometimes I see someone use emojis every few words to "accent" the word before it. It's annoying, counterproductive, and makes you look like an idiot. It also makes me want to help you way less.

- Github's code search is awful. If you're really looking for something, clone (--depth=1) the repository into /tmp or something and [rip]grep it yourself. Believe me, it will save you time looking for things that clearly exist but don't show up in the search results (or is buried behind an ocean of test files).

- Thanking a maintainer goes a very long way in making connections, especially when you're interacting somewhat heavily with a repository. It almost never happens and having talked with several very famous OSSers about this in the past it really makes our week when it happens. If you ever feel as though you're being noisy or anxious about interacting with a repository, remember that ending your comment with a quick "btw thanks for a cool repo, it's really helpful" always sets things off on a Good Note.

- If you open an issue or a PR, don't close it if it doesn't receive attention. It's really annoying, causes ambiguity in licensing, and doesn't solve anything. It also makes you look overdramatic. OSS is by and large supported by peoples' free time. Life gets in the way a LOT, especially right now, so it's not unusual for an issue (or even a PR) to go untouched for a few weeks, months, or (in some cases) a year or so. If it's urgent, fork :)

I'll leave it at that. I hear about a lot of people too anxious to contribute or interact on Github, but it really isn't so bad!

What a day! yesterday i submited a new version of our mobile app and the shit began.
The app was validated during the night (AppStore), when i wake up this morning my inbox was full! Basically every users who updated the app was stuck i tried to figure out whats going on. After few hours our customer service called me to help one of our client who was very angry, the funniest part is that the client recognize me... i was his teacher few years ago...
Guys i feel raped... really

A server application pulled off some sort of listings as table. Problem was, it crashed with some thousand data files after one and a half hours. I looked into that, and couldn't stop WTFing.

A stupid server side script fetched the data in XML (WTF!) and then inserted shit node-wise (WTF!!), which was O(n^2) - in PHP and on XML! Then it converted the whole shebang into HTML for browser display although users would finally copy/paste the result into Excel anyway.

The original developer even had written a note on the application page that pulling the data "could take long". Yeah because it's so fucking STUPID that Clippy is an Einstein in comparison, that's why!

So I pulled the raw data via batch file without XML wrapping and wrote a little C program for merging the dumped stuff client-side in O(n), spitting out a final CSV for Excel import.

Instead of fucking the server for 1.5 hours and then crashing, shit is done after 7 seconds, out of which the actual data processing takes 40 bloody milliseconds!

Probably had my worst half-week ever this week.

Customer's CRM system, the read and edit masks just...stopped existing on last week friday. CRM fell back on some default masks for the dataset. No way to create new masks directly without putting the whole system upside down.
We couldn't do anything anyway because they reported the issue literally as we all were about to leave for weekend and our boss was like "Ah nah, well do it next week."
Our brains were already fried anyway...
I mail the reporter that we've registered their issue, will investigate and report back ASAP once we've got news.

Monday rolls around, I'm whacking my head against their system trying to figure the fuck out, what went wrong and how to solve it, I come up empty; Not that terrible since the masks only stopped existing in the webclient version of the system and they can still use the windows client, so they can still work.

Tuesday rolls around, I'm at an on site training for an ERP system with my boss at a remote company. Get an email in midst of the training, I was doing protocol.
Guy from the afflicted company goes and tells me that the issue has somehow spread to his colleague and him...IN THE WINDOWS CLIENT.

I'm fucking flabbergasted, so to speak, since the masks for the windows client and the web client are totally isolated from one another.
After we're back at our company, I investigate, less efficiently this time because my brain got fried at the training. I come up empty again.

NOW TODAY: Discuss further proceedings with my boss, he's not pissed at me or anything, just to say, but we're both worried, obviously.

Then at 10:20, a guy from the afflicted company mails me in an annoyed tone that the masks are still broken.

11:00, we figure out a workaround so the windows client users can at least work again, albeit limited.

11:10, I mail the guy, telling him that although we're still not able to fully work everything out and are still investigating, we've made a workaround so they can at least work again.

11:20, the guy mails me in a pissed tone around the lines of "This is very very important and must be fixed ASAP or else we'll not be able to work at all [...]"
And I think like "Dude I literally just told you like 8 minutes ago that there's are workaround so you'll be able to at least work again..."

Forward the mail to boss, we meet up quickly to discuss how in God's name we can deescalate this mfer.

11:31, the guy mails me again, all apologetically this time "Stop! All is good, I just now fully read you mail, thanks for implementing the workaround, nothing will come to a standstill [...]"

BRUH CAN YOU NOT FUCKING READ BEFORE ESCALATING SHIT

Fuck customers. Dumb fucking cretins unable to fucking read.

The issue is still unresolved. Support of the CRM software lets us sit on our collective asses and wait.

There is no such thing as stable software, it's a myth.

Every corporate software is like an ever-decaying semi-corpse of a brain dead patient slowly getting worse and worse but not fucking dying.

Rant over.

Senior Dev Idiot: "Ugh, I have another meeting with my business users because they forgot how to use my app. I JUST had a training session with them last week too. Users are soo stupid!"

Yeah... No. If your users can't remember how to use your app after a damn week, that means your app is shit and not intuitive or user-friendly enough. YOU are the stupid one.

I'm trying to explain to this dumb mf-er why we can't use send data simply.
It's a mobile platform I said, you can't rely on having network I said, the dumbass users might try it on 2% battery I said.
DO'H BUT MY INTERZ CAN DO IT IN 5 MINUTES.
Yeah, enjoy crashing the app with asynctask like a stupid bitch. When it fails under nearly every possible condition that deviates from the ideal, you can go write down how great your interns are, eat it up, shit it out and when you grow a flower from that, then I might help you again.
Retard server people.

So, in my company we where initially about 20 programmers doing two big projects.

The client (who also is the owner of the company) keep asking more and more and more things. Each 3 months we update the site but the client doesn't start the marketing or anything else, so the app don't have any users.

After two years of development, 26 micro services, one big web platform in Python (web2py, bad decision) and a hybrid mobile app the client decide to shut down the project because it was "a little bit illegal".

The second project have the same problems, but this project does have marketing, the shitty part is after two year and a lot of development now the project isn't viable because the market is gone.

The boss calls, says he have some problems and he will fire 18 persons and reduce the payment of the rest, he ask us to "hold" for the good times.

The great idea he had for earn money is rewriting a WordPress app that have 4 years in production to angular (because he, who knows why, thinks angular is the best shit out there)

I want to quit but even with the reduced payment I know he pays way more than the market average, plus I'm still student.

Does your team also tend to get stuck in the MVP Trap?

You ship a barebones version of a feature. Zero polish. That’ll be done later if it’s successful.

When the stats roll in it seems the feature got a lukewarm reception. A few users liked it, but it wasn’t a hit.

Next sprint starts and everyone asks if we should spend more time on it

The PM argues ”Why would we spend time polishing something no one uses?”

The designer argues ”Well of course no one used it, it looks like shit, we gotta spend some time polishing it!”

It becomes a chicken or the egg scenario.

Your product ends up with a bunch of half assed features. not bad enough to remove, not good enough to spend more time on.

Headhunter: "For this new role you would be the first developer in the company responsible for both the back and frontend, you will also have to test your deliverables, give support to users and report to the..."

*CLICK*

Had to hang up on dat shit 🙉

I love it when asshats, that wear testicles for sunglasses, like to ask me a question about my past experience with a given technology. Let's call it "X". After I've said my piece about the desired effect "X" was supposed to achieve, and describe the environment/scope where "X" was used, and describe the pain points I've encountered with it or the headaches "X" has caused in those environments, these camel spunk garglers then try to immediately rebut me by saying that every one of the times they've set "X" technology up it's worked just fine.

So, I kindly remind them that my past experience was in large enterprises where "X" technology just doesn't scale well so I've seen some issues with it.

Spunk Gargler: "Hmmm, must've just not been setup correctly."

I lose my shit (internally of course because I can't afford to be without a job right now.) and say, "I'm not so sure that it wasn't setup correctly, I just don't think that 'X' works properly at the scale of 500+ employee environments well. You've only ever set it up in small offices of like - what, 20 users?"

Shitlord McHerp-a-Derp who's Drunk on Spunk: "Maybe, but it just sounds like a bad configuration was causing those issues to me."

He shuffled back into his office shortly after I basically told him he's a fucking chump playing small team tactics and I've seen shit at scale so I've seen first hand what does and does not work well.

I'm writing this because this is the same fucking imbecile that has only ever encountered a /23 network once before from a client they inherited from a previous MSP team and they didn't know how to "safely change it" to a /24 so they just left it in place.

(BTW, just for the non-networking guys/gals out there, I'm sure you've already guessed it, but a /23 network is NOT a fucking problem!)

These puffy cancerous taint boils that call themselves IT engineers are the fucking problem!

I'm not a dev by trade or training, but trying to learn DevOps, and I can totally see why Dev teams can/sometimes get pissed with infrastructure teams... infrastructure/helpdesk side of IT is full of these fucking meat heads.

There is this dude called Richard Eng which is sort of famous for 2 things:
First: he is known as *the* Smalltall evangelist of mothern times. And he constantly writes about it. Which is fine since he tries to attract new users to this beautiful and simple little language.

Second: his constant bashing of other technologies, mainly Javascript stating that it is the most harmful tech known to man.

The thing is, saying "use this because that is shit" is never going to convince a community, specifically one as potent as that of the JS community. And to make it worse...the dude links his reasoning about bad languages to articles he wrote. As in "this is shit, look at my completely biased article regarding why its shit"

Once he is confronted about it he links back to his own writings. Much like christian fanatics do
"good is real because it says so in the bible"
"but how can you trust that resource?"
"Because the bible is the word of God"
"and how do you know?"
"Because it is in the bible"

Circular arguments like that cannot be taken seriously. And what this guy does for the Smalltalk community hurts more than it helps really.

Claims like those are all around us. If we were to believe or consider them depending on who said what then we would never have the amazing cluster of tech choices that we have.

Take c++. It is absolutely powerful and gives you the ability to do pretty much anything. If we were to take Linus Torvalds's word about it being shit and only having subpar development we would miss on absolutely powerful tools.

The same came to me from Evee, writer of "PHP a fractal of bad design" or the "Node.js is cancer" article.

You are never going to please anyone with anything. I go by live and let live, and whilst I don't like some technologies I certainly don't look down on those that do.

So I am a part of this volunteering initiative where one of our tasks is to assist people in distress (virtually).

Now this activity is led by two chipmunks. One claims to be a therapist who themselves is seeking professional therapy from someone else and the other is a corporate HR.

Well that information should be enough for you to understand how chaotic the situation would be.

But allow me to continue...

So they decide to go about an activity in the group where everyone has to share a meme. Some of the cringest memes I have seen in my life. One of them went to an extent of sharing a husband wife joke as a dark joke.

Next day, someone spammed in the group and one user sent a sticker of some character hanging from a rope. It was evidently a fun and sarcastic sticker which they all use.

But all of a sudden the chipmunks got offended and went on a delete spree warning and banning users.

Most of the time, the group is dead and another group where they plan shit is more active. Full of mindless opinions and worthless conversations.

All they are doing is spamming everyone and forcing people to participate in the name of volunteering.

What's more exciting is, they control it so rigidly that no one, except the two chipmunks, is allowed to even have an opinion or disagree with them. If you do, they'll belittle you in front of everyone.

Yes, you guessed it right, the entire initiative is a massive failure and being dragged in the name of hElPiNg pEoPlE iN dIsTrEsS

(Hopefully this is the meta rant to kill meta rants)

I'm fucking sick of devrant.

New users posting shit memes with the wrong tags.

But worse are old users complaining about said new users, or just beginner devs from other sites

Yes, some people need stack overflow every 5 minutes.
Not everyone has the capacity to understand every documentation.
Not every documentation is updated or entirely correct.
Not everyone has more than a year or two of experience.

Don't be part of the dumb circlejerk. Just complain about your bullshit boss, coworker or tech.

Things that make you regret you are not a normal grunt in any other fucking job outside of software development...

Few years back we had the biggest customer ever close to signing contact with us (b2b). They had a CRM they wanted to connect to our CRM because their users didn't want to use IE with ActiveX anymore, the old software was a fucking RDP over IE to a server behind a VPN.

Boss brags how we can implement every API on Earth with our team and gets the contract signed. Technically not a lie but we agreed on a company meeting a few month prior to not implement each API for every customer but expose one ourselves because we had enough big customers on that one software to not want 100+ unique API connectors in our code.

So we apparently agreed to not only build our side of the API but also pay 2/3 of the bill of the other company for implement their shitty excuse of an API...

Fast forward a few month, talking to the other companies dev daily to get their API up and running, our part is long done. Finally get things set up and data flows... suddenly shit hits the fan. That shitty excuse of CRM can't expose the created and modified timestamps to the API. Webhooks never got implement and now we have no way of knowing which data changed because their side is completely passive.

Fast forward to a few weeks back. Still no solution. Shit is running, barely. Data inconsistency is low because everyone knows they should never change things in the old CRM because the changes might not be synced. (Only one indictor is a custom modified date on the main customer data that only updates if the main data was changed but there are 20+ different possible subsets. Can't get changes in subsets detected, like ever)

One fucking grunt updated 129 customer-profiles in the old CRM. Nothing was synced.

They still use the old shit for billing.

Their it-crowd-guy calls me up:
"Sorry but we need to generate the bills tomorrow and there seems to be some kind of desynchronization between the databases"

No shit? Someone did exactly what we told you not to do and now that one thing we warned you about happened but now it's our fault? Use the fucking force sync button we built for that purpose and that purpose alone. It will only take 7 days because that fucking SOAP API is slow as fuck and you have millions of datasets to sync...

Fml I might just try and jump out the window, sounds like a lot of fun in days like this.

tl;dr never implant against dynamics ax aif soap API if you want to keep some basic level of sanity

A lot of people give Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. shit for "selling" user data although in my opinion acting as a matchmaker between advertisers and users does not really constitute selling data.

In contrast there seem to be a lot of companies that actually do sell user data that I never hear anyone here talking about.

Todays story: conversation between me and my brain about a app that i have planned for a long while.

The application is just a huge, specyfic json editor/manager for a game that i like. The game uses json files to determine unit charactetistics. So in order to make modding easier i want to make a tool for that that is fancier and easier to use than a notepad.

Brain> Lets make a app that allows you to mod the game easier!
Me> Good idea. How would you want to make it?
Brain> Lets use C# cause you main that lang currently and you have experience with json parser lib.
Me> That is true. So what do you wanna implement first?
Brain> Oh. I have thought about it before! I want to implement: (10 000 features) and maybe few more later!
Me> It sounds like a infinity project, shouldnt you implement like 1 or 2 features at first and then jump to other ones?
Brain> Yes... but i dont wanna refactor those features latter so let just implement them all at once!
Me> Dammit brain! Let just implement just one feature now! Like a simple json editor. You can use inhieritance to reuse the code later.
Brain> Ok...
* Starts with that one feature but one day later starts coding 6 more *
* Cant publish the app yet, the code looks like shit, gui is unfinished because brain wanted only to test those 6 unfinished features without propely implementing them *
Me> Brain WTF! You said that you are going to focus on one feature at the time!
Brain> I got carried a bit...
Me> ...
Me> Ok. I understand. Let just refactor the code and clean the project out of those unfinished features.
Brain> No. I have a depression now...
Me> FUCK.

* 2 month passes by without any progress on ANY of my projects*

current day

Brain> I still have depression...
Me> Ok i dont care about that anymore! Tell me something that i dont know!
Brain> Oh I have good news as well!
Me> ???
Brain> What about the home server that is going to store all mods made by the users so they can share it? It would be a good practice with networking!
Me> * Gives up *

PCs are a clusterfuck these days. Microsoft has abandoned the niceness of Win-7 and opted for Win-10 - with spyware, untested forced updates and forced online licence checks to make sure you have to get the shit. Macs are total crap, and Apple doesn't care because they instead prefer to milk customers with overpriced iShit. Linux sucks and looks like a Soviet tractor, but at least, it doesn't fuck up itself just by switching it on.

I had Linux as only OS from 2001 to 2010, and while I obviously can deal with it, I finally hated it enough to switch over to Win-7. From 2020 on, it looks like I will be back because Microsoft has managed to fuck up Windows even worse (and then these suckers wonder why Github users don't trust them). Maybe I'll buy a Tux when I install Linux so that I can punch it in the face.

Progress was yesterday - today it's about damage control. Welcome to a world where the brightest CS guys are thinking about how not only to shove up even more ads into peoples' asses, but how to also transmit lab data of the poo.