Yesterday, in a meeting with project stakeholders and a dev was demoing his software when an un-handled exception occurred, causing the app to crash.

Dev: “Oh..that’s weird. Doesn’t do that on my machine. Better look at the log”
- Dev looks at the log and sees the exception was a divide by zero error.
Dev: “Ohhh…yea…the average price calculation, it’s a bug in the database.”
<I burst out laughing>
Me: “That’s funny.”
<Dev manager was not laughing>
DevMgr: “What’s funny about bugs in the database?”
Me: “Divide by zero exceptions are not an indication of a data error, it’s a bug in the code.”
Dev: “Uhh…how so? The price factor is zero, which comes from a table, so that’s a bug in the database”
Me: “Jim, will you have sales with a price factor of zero?”
StakeholderJim: “Yea, for add-on items that we’re not putting on sale. Hats, gloves, things like that.”
Dev: “Steve, did anyone tell you the factor could be zero?”
DBA-Steve: “Uh...no…just that the value couldn’t be null. You guys can put whatever you want.”
DevMgr: “So, how will you fix this bug?”
DBA-Steve: “Bug? …oh…um…I guess I could default the value to 1.”
Dev: “What if the user types in a zero? Can you switch it to a 1?”
Me: “Or you check the factor value before you try to divide. That will fix the exception and Steve won’t have to do anything.”
<awkward couple of seconds of silence>
DevMgr: “Lets wrap this up. Steve, go ahead and make the necessary database changes to make sure the factor is never zero.”
StakeholderJim: “That doesn’t sound right. Add-on items should never have a factor. A value of 1 could screw up the average.”
Dev: “Don’t worry, we’ll know the difference.”
<everyone seems happy and leaves the meeting>

I completely lost any sort of brain power to say anything after Dev said that. All the little voices kept saying were ‘WTF? WTF just happened? No really…W T F just happened!?’ over and over. I still have no idea on how to articulate to anyone with any sort of sense about what happened. Thanks DevRant for letting me rant.

Was lead developer at a small startup, I was hiring and had a budget to add 3 new people to my team to develop a new product for the company.

Some context first and then the rant!

Candidate 1 - Amazing, a dev I worked with before who was under utilized at the previous company. Still a junior, but, she was a quick learner and eager to expand her knowledge, never an issue.

Candidate 2 - Kickass dev with back end skills and extras, he was always eager to work a bit more than what was expected. I use to send him home early to annoy him. haha!

Candidate 3 - Lets call him P.

In the interview he answers every question perfectly, he asks all the right questions and suggests some things I havent even thought of. CTO goes ahead and says we should skip the technical test and just hire the guy, his smart and knows what his talking about, I agree and we hire him. (We where a bit desperate at this stage as well.)

He comes in a week early to pick up his work laptop to get setup before he starts the next week, awesome! This guy is going to be an asset to the company, cant wait to have him join the team - The CTO at this stage is getting ready to leave the company and I will be taking over the division and need someone to take over lead position, he seems like the guys to do it.

The guys starts the next week, he comes in and the laptop we gave him is now a local server for testing and he will be working off his own laptop, no issue, we are small so needed a testing stack, but wasnt really needed since we had procedures in place for this already.

Here is where everything goes wrong!!! First day goes great... Next day he gets in early 6:30am (Nice! NO!), he absolutely smells, no stinks, of weed, not a light smell, the entire fucking office smells of weed! (I have no problem with weed, just dont make it my problem to deal with). I get called by boss and told to sort this out people are complaining! I drive to office and have a meeting with him, he says its all good he understands. (This was Friday).

Monday comes around - Get a call from Boss at 7:30am. Whole office smells like weed, please talk to P again, this cannot happen again. I drive to office again, and he again says it wont happen again, he has some issues with back pain and the weed helps.

Tuesday - Same fucking thing! And now he doesnt want to sign for the laptop("server") that was given to him, and has moved to code in the boardroom, WHERE OUR FUCKING CLIENTS WILL BE VIEWING A DEMO THAT DAY OF THE PRODUCT!! Now that whole room smells like weed, FML!

Wednesday - We send P a formal letter that he is under probation, P calls me to have a meeting. In the meeting he blames me for not understanding "new age" medicine, I ask for his doctors prescription and ask why he didnt tell me this in the interview so I could make arrangements, we dont care if you are stoned, just do good work and be considerate to your co-workers. P cant provide these and keeps ranting, I suggest he takes pain killers, he has none of it only "new age" medicine for him.

Thursday - I ask him to rather "work" from home till we can get this sorted, he comes in for code reviews for 2 weeks. I can clearly see he has no idea how the system works but is trying, I thought I will dive deeper and look at all of his code. Its a mess, nothing makes sense and 50% of it is hard coded (We are building a decentralized API for huge data sets so this makes no sense).

Friday - In code review I confront him about this, he has excuses for everything, I start asking him harder questions about the project and to explain what we are building - he goes quiet and quits on the spot with a shitty apology.

From what I could make out he was really smart when it came to theory but interpreting the theory to actual practice wasnt possible for him, probably would have been easier if he wasnt high all the time.

I hate interview code tests, but learned a valuable lesson that day! Always test for some code knowledge as well even if you hate doing it, ask the right questions and be careful who you hire! You can only bullshit for so long in coding before someone figures out that you are a fraud.

!rant

This was over a year ago now, but my first PR at my current job was +6,249/-1,545,334 loc. Here is how that happened... When I joined the company and saw the code I was supposed to work on I kind of freaked out. The project was set up in the most ass-backward way with some sort of bootstrap boilerplate sample app thing with its own build process inside a subfolder of the main angular project. The angular app used all the CSS, fonts, icons, etc. from the boilerplate app and referenced the assets directly. If you needed to make changes to the CSS, fonts, icons, etc you would need to cd into the boilerplate app directory, make the changes, run a Gulp build that compiled things there, then cd back to the main directory and run Grunt build (thats right, both grunt and gulp) that then built the angular app and referenced the compiled assets inside the boilerplate directory. One simple CSS change would take 2 minutes to test at minimum.

I told them I needed at least a week to overhaul the app before I felt like I could do any real work. Here were the horrors I found along the way.

- All compiled (unminified) assets (both CSS and JS) were committed to git, including vendor code such as jQuery and Bootstrap.
- All bower components were committed to git (ALL their source code, documentation, etc, not just the one dist/minified JS file we referenced).
- The Grunt build was set up by someone who had no idea what they were doing. Every SINGLE file or dependency that needed to be copied to the build folder was listed one by one in a HUGE config.json file instead of using pattern matching like `assets/images/*`.
- All the example code from the boilerplate and multiple jQuery spaghetti sample apps from the boilerplate were committed to git, as well as ALL the documentation too. There was literally a `git clone` of the boilerplate repo inside a folder in the app.
- There were two separate copies of Bootstrap 3 being compiled from source. One inside the boilerplate folder and one at the angular app level. They were both included on the page, so literally every single CSS rule was overridden by the second copy of bootstrap. Oh, and because bootstrap source was included and commited and built from source, the actual bootstrap source files had been edited by developers to change styles (instead of overriding them) so there was no replacing it with an OOTB minified version.
- It is an angular app but there were multiple jQuery libraries included and relied upon and used for actual in-app functionality behavior. And, beyond that, even though angular includes many native ways to do XHR requests (using $resource or $http), there were numerous places in the app where there were `XMLHttpRequest`s intermixed with angular code.
- There was no live reloading for local development, meaning if I wanted to make one CSS change I had to stop my server, run a build, start again (about 2 minutes total). They seemed to think this was fine.
- All this monstrosity was handled by a single massive Gruntfile that was over 2000loc. When all my hacking and slashing was done, I reduced this to ~140loc.
- There were developer's (I use that term loosely) *PERSONAL AWS ACCESS KEYS* hardcoded into the source code (remember, this is a web end app, so this was in every user's browser) in order to do file uploads. Of course when I checked in AWS, those keys had full admin access to absolutely everything in AWS.
- The entire unminified AWS Javascript SDK was included on the page and not used or referenced (~1.5mb)
- There was no error handling or reporting. An API error would just result in nothing happening on the front end, so the user would usually just click and click again, re-triggering the same error. There was also no error reporting software installed (NewRelic, Rollbar, etc) so we had no idea when our users encountered errors on the front end. The previous developers would literally guide users who were experiencing issues through opening their console in dev tools and have them screenshot the error and send it to them.
- I could go on and on...

This is why you hire a real front-end engineer to build your web app instead of the cheapest contractors you can find from Ukraine.

!rant
A few days ago a friend of mine rang me up complaining about internet issues with his computer. As usual I did the "is it plugged in, turn it off then on again" sort of thing to waste time while my pasta was cooking. After a while he asked if I had another bogus solution, so I suggested flushing his toilet.

He runs off, I hear the flush, comes back and viola - it fucking worked.

The point of this is: if it don't work, flush the toilet. You're welcome, tech support out ✌️

One week, and it turned out to be worse than that.

I was put on a project for a COVID-19 program in America (The CARES Act). The financial team came to us on Monday morning and said they need to give away a couple thousand dollars.

No big deal. All they wanted was a single form that people could submit with some critical info. Didn't need a login/ registration flow or anything. You could have basically used Google Forms for this project.

The project landed in my lap just before lunch on Monday morning. I was a junior in a team with a senior and another junior on standby. It was going to go live the next Monday.

The scope of the project made it seem like the one week deadline wasn't too awful. We just had to send some high priority emails to get some prod servers and app keys and we were fine.

Now is the time where I pause the rant to express to you just how fine we were decidedly **not**: we were not fine.

Tuesday rolls around and what a bad Tuesday it was. It was the first of many requirement changes. There was going to need to be a review process. Instead of the team just reading submissions from the site, they needed accept and reject buttons. They needed a way to deny people for specific reasons. Meaning the employee dashboard just got a little more complicated.

Wednesday came around and yeah, we need a registration and login flow. Yikes.

Thursday came and the couple-thousand dollars turned into a tens of millions. The amount of users we expected just blew up.

Friday, and they needed a way for users to edit their submissions and re-submit if they were rejected. And we needed to send out emails for the status of their applications.

Every day, a new meeting. Every meeting, new requirements that were devastating given our timeframe.

We put in overtime. Came in on the weekend. And by Monday, we had a form that users could submit and a registration/ login flow. No reviewer dashboard. We figured we could take in user input on time and then finish the dashboard later.

Well, financial team has some qualms. They wanted a more complicated review process. They wanted roles; managers assign to assistants. Assistants review assigned items.

The deadline that we worked so hard on whizzed by without so much as a thought, much less the funeral it deserved.

Then, they wanted multiple people to review an application before it was final. Then, they needed different landing pages for a few more departments to be able to review different steps of the applications.

Ended up going live on Friday, close to a month after that faithful Monday which disrupted everything else I was working on, effective immediately.

I don't know why, but we always go live on a Friday for some reason. It must be some sort of conspiracy to force overtime out of our managers. I'm baffled.

But I worked support after the launch.

And there's a funny story about support too: we were asked to create a "submit an issue" form. Me and the other junior worked on it on a wednesday three weeks into the project. Finished it. And the next day it was scrapped and moved to another service we already had running. Poor management like that plagued the project and worked in tandem with the dynamic and ridiculous requirements to make this project hell.

Back to support.

Phone calls give me bad anxiety. But Friday, just before lunch, I was put on the support team. Sure, we have a department that makes calls and deal with users. But they can't be trained on this program: it didn't exist just a month ago, and three days ago it worked differently (the slippery requirements never stopped).

So all of Friday and then all of Saturday and all of Monday (...) I had extended panic attacks calling hundreds of people. And the team that was calling people was only two people. We had over 400 tickets in the first two days.

And fuck me, stupid me, for doing a good job. Because I was put on the call team for **another** COVID project afterwards. I knew nothing about this project. I have hated my job recently. But I'm a junior. What am I gonna say, no?

The inevitable happened, the user that I've answered tons of questions about freelancing deleted his account, thankfully I took backups and will recreate it [together with a killed joke] in the comments below (should've just webarchived it, meh)

I'll keep adding questions & answers I come across to make this a useful resource for people that want to get into freelancing, want to ask me something in the comments, you name it.

Might compile it into a better searchable resource eventually (some sort of blog with TOC), but right now neither do I have the time nor will to do that.

Wish I could have taken over the link that has been now posted a lot, but every post has an ID and I doubt it's possible, will tag dfox to clarify though and also floydian and devtea, that have been so nice to always post a link to that one rant.

I've had my share of incompetent coworkers. In order of appearance:

1. A full stack dev. This one guy never, and I mean NEVER uses relationships in their tables. No indexing, no keys, nada. Couple of months later he was baffled why his page took ten seconds to load.

2. The same dev as (1). Requirement was to create some sort of "theme" feature for a web app. Hacked it by putting !important all over the place.

3. The same dev again. He creates several functions that if the data exists returns a view, and if it doesn't, "echo '0'". No, not return 0 or return false or anything, but fucking echo. This was PHP. If posted a rant about this a few months ago.

4. Same dev, has no idea what clean code is. No, not just reusable functions, he doesn't even get indenting right. Some functions have 4 spaces, some 2 tabs, some 6 tabs! And this is inside the same function. God wait until he tries Python...

5. Same dev now suggests that he become the PM. GM approves (very small company). Assigns me to travel to a client since they needed "technical assistance about the API". Was actually there to lead a UAT session.

Intermezzo, that guy went from fullstack dev to PM to sales (yes, one who calls clients to offer products) to business development, to product analyst in the span of two years.

After a year and a half there, I quit.

6. New company, a "QA engineer" who also assumes the role as the product owner. Does absolutely no tests other than "functional tests" in which he NEVER produces any form of documentation. Not even a set of test cases. He goes by "intuition".

7. Same guy as (6), hands me requirements for a feature. By "hands me" I mean he did that verbally. No spec documents, no slack chat, no Trello card. I ended up writing it as a card in Trello. Fast forward to the due date, he flips out because that wasn't what he wanted. Showed him the card. He walked away, without thinking of a solution how this mess should be handled.

Despite all this, I really don't want him (6&7) to leave the company. The devs get really stressed out at this job and he does make a really good person to laugh with/at.

I’m so mad I’m fighting back anger tears. This is a long rant and I apologize but I’m so freaking mad.

So a few weeks ago I was asked by my lead staff person to do a data analysis project for the director of our dept. It was a pretty big project, spanning thousands of users. I was excited because I love this sort of thing and I really don’t have anything else to do. Well I don’t have access to the dataset, so I had to get it from my lead and he said he’d do it when he had a chance. Three days later he hadn’t given it to me yet. I approach him and he follows me to my desk, gives me his login and password to login to the secure freaking database, then has me clone it and put it on my computer.

So, I start working on it. It took me about six hours to clean the database, 2 to set up the parameters and plan of attack, and two or three to visualize the data. I realized about halfway through that my lead wasn’t sure about the parameters of the analysis, and I mentioned to him that the director had asked for more information than what he was having me do. He tells me he will speak with director.

So, our director is never there, so I give my lead about a week to speak with her, in the mean time I finish the project to the specifications that the director gave. I even included notes about information that I would need to make more accurate predictions, to draw conclusions, etc. It was really well documented.

Finally, exasperated, and with the project finished but just sitting on my computer for a week, I approached my director on a Saturday when I was working overtime. She confirmed that I needed to what she said in the project specs (duh), and also mentioned she needed a bigger data set than what I was working with if we had one. She told me to speak to my lead on Monday about this, but said that my work looked great.

Monday came and my lead wasn’t there so I spoke with my supervisor and she said that what I was using was the entire dataset, and that my work looked great and I could just send it off. So, at this point 2/3 of my bosses have seen the project, reviewed it, told me it was great, and confirmed that I was doing the right thing.

I sent it off to the director to disseminate to the appropriate people. Again, she looked at it and said it was great.

A week later (today) one of the people that the project was sent to approaches me and tells me that i did a great job and thank you so much for blah blah blah. She then asks me if the dataset I used included blahblah, and I said no, that I used what was given to me but that I’d be happy to go in and fix it if given the necessary data.

She tells me, “yeah the director was under the impression that these numbers were all about blahblah, so I think there was some kind of misunderstanding.” And then implied that I would not be the one fixing the mistake.

I’m being taken off of the project for two reasons: 1. it took to long to get the project out in the first place,
2. It didn’t even answer the questions that they needed answered.

I fucking told them in the notes and ALL THROUGH THE VISUALIZATIONS that I needed additional data to compare these things I’m so fucking mad. I’m so mad.

Took me a week to realize that "!rant" just means "not rant".

I thought it was some sort of post front-matter that was no longer supported by the app (like a Duck Duck Go "bang").

😅

Story Time. Inspired by another rant.

Context: I'm In a coding camp years ago, it's the first day.

We're doing introductions (name, why you're here, etc). Always fun to do that....

The folks running the camp are excited to introduce a student who also at one point was a teacher for some sort of girl power coding organization. So this raises questions, why would someone who teaches be a student in this camp?? And even a bigger question is raised when this person introduces themselves for a long time, and as an aside puts down the girls she taught in this program they taught ... like who does that?

horribleLady does that ...

A few hours later horribleLady asks her 12th question of the day (we haven't even started talking about code). Before she asks her question actually says:

“I know, I’m going to be a problem.” -laugh-

🚨🚨🚨 ヽ ( ꒪д꒪ )ﾉ 🚨🚨🚨

Fast forward to group projects and she's this sort of emotional storm, tears, and a sort of angry shouting that isn't angry enough for some folks to say she's yelling at people ... but she is. Fortunately I'm not in the first group project with her, but because we're all working in the same room we all get to see the train-wreck unfold.

The moment she doesn't get something (all the time) everyone in her group has to STOP and figure out what they're going to do about it, then again STOP because she thinks someone is doing something different than what was planned. STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP.

In a way, everything had to go through her, she didn’t declare it that way, she didn't present herself as any sort of authority, she would just stop everyone the moment she thought anything was wrong, or she didn't understand it (all the time), and either inject herself or demand help from her team. Everyone around her had to be drawn into whatever problem she had. It was horrific to watch.

Private slack channels would light up like crazy with "OMG", "WTF", "I DON'T UNDERSTAND HER", "FUCK" and "SHE"S HOW OLD!?!?"

So finally it happens to me and guyWhoDoesPotConstantly (capable guy, nice dude, pretty sure he was high all the time).... we're teamed up to work with horribleLady. Thankfully for just one day. I accept this because I figure one day with her is enough penance to try to avoid any further contact later on.

My approach is straight stone face. I refuse to respond to her sulking, or sighing, or general emotional bait she throws out constantly. I saw other students unwittingly take her bait (they were trying to be helpful) only to have her crap all over them with her frustrations or whatever it is is going on.

Still we're teamed up with her her for the day so I'm going to be a good team member and I explain what guyWhoDoesPotConstantly and I are doing / trying.... and so forth. But she's just too upset that she's even assigned to work with us, and tells me I'm just not doing it right, and her explanations about how we're not doing it right makes less than 0 sense. I ask her to show me what she means but she won't type anything on her keyboard, she'd just talk about how she’s thinking conceptually in circles and sulk about it rather than listen. I don't respond to any of her shit and say "I'm going to try this." and guyWhoDoesPotConstantly and I just keep working.

She would later call the instructor over and complain to him for a while and say: "These guys just get it, they're not helping me, I want to be assigned to another group." She doesn't get her way so she just moves to another table in front of us.

After that day I figured it was a great time to ask .... to NEVER be assigned to anything with her because "If I told her what I thought it would just get a lot worse." I got my way ;)

Other students weren't so lucky. Tears, sulking, her special way of yelling at people that somehow never got her in trouble (she should have been kicked out of the program) just kept going on. She refused to even present one group project she deemed not good enough despite the fact that she contributed nothing functional to the project that the TA's didn't write for her...

Amidst the stories she would tell to students was one of how she sued her totally sexist/racist/evil former employer. She never said what came of it, but that combined with her inability to do things reminded me of a rant I read on here.

I sometimes fear being hired someplace and walking in my first day to find I'm assigned to work with .... horribleLady. In this scenario she managed to get hired and they're too afraid to fire her so they assign the new guy to work with horribleLady...

I've no idea what happened to her after the camp.

(I rewrote this rant a few times because it kept circling back to a larger story about the coding camp I wrote about a few years ago, so if this seemed sort of broken up and wonky, yeah it was / is / yeah)

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.

Not a rant about anything in particular. Just a summary of some feelings stored in the hateful part of my heart.

Developing for Android: Add this third-party library to your Gradle build. Use (this) built-in Android class to make the thing work.

*Clicks link

Deprecated since API version SUCKMYDICK-7. Use (this) instead

*Clicks link

Deprecated since API version LICKMYBALLS-32. Use...

Developing for Windows: Please use (this) API call. It was literally already available before Bill Gates was born. Carbon dating has placed this item to older than the universe itself and it is likely the entry point for the big bang. It is also still the best way to accomplish (task).

Developing for Linux: "Hmm, I wonder how to use this"

> > > Some shitty mailing list in small blue monospace font tells you to reference a man page that is three versions behind but the only version available.

What? Those three sentences didn't explain it enough? Well, maybe you aren't cut out for this type of thing.

JavaScript: you know how it is.

SQL: You expect a decent-quality answer from stack overflow but you always get an outdated and hacky response and it's using syntax from Microsoft SQL. You need MySQL.

C#: A surprising number of Microsoft forum results ranking high on Google. You click on one in hopes that it will be of any sort of quality. You quickly close the tab and wonder why you ever even had hope.

Literally any REST API: Is it "query" or "q"? "UserID" or "user_id"? Oh, fuck, where's the docs again?

You thought you escaped JavaScript, but it was a trick!: Some bullshit library you downloaded to make your other library work redefined one of the global variables in the project you inherited. Now you get 347 "<x> is not a function" errors in your console. Good luck, asshole.

FontAwesome/ Material fonts/ Any icon font pack: You search "Close" for a close button icon. No results. You search "Simplified railroad crossing sign without the railroad". You get a close icon.

I think that's all of my pent up rage. Each of them were too small for an individual rant so I had to do this essay.

I'm working on a programming language with a "bytecode" interpreter and a compiler that translates source code to said bytecode and... it sort of actually works!

I want to recreate an Erlang-style environment, currently you can write functions, call C++ functions via wrappers, have immutable-only values, and it has no explicit control structure apart from statement sequencing and the if-expression because I want to make it as functional as possible. Next thing on the list is to add a green threads implementation and ability to spawn and send messages to processes.

Still a WIP and heck even design-in-progress.

Now for the rant:
I'm using CMake for building C++ (interpreter) and Stack for Haskell (compiler) and I've been trying to get them to talk to each other for hours because I want CMake to manage the Stack build too and shove all the executables into one place. CMake documentation is weird and Stack isn't too helpful either, so I guess I'll just spend another few hours trying to get Stack to fuckin reveal its build directory to CMake and/or build to a given directory. Ugh.

Spent two days debugging my algo to figure it was a problem with the colors they picked and my logic was fucking flawless!

Sweetest feeling ever :D

I'm sort of color blind so I never check colors and I'm really straight about it with everyone: I don't pick colors.

Its a rant with a happy ending :)

This has been said countless times before me, and way better than me that’s supper tired, but I need to rant out

And what I’m ranting out today, is Apple. Its essence, its core, the reason it still exists: the ECOSYSTEM!

The problem with Apple ecosystem is that it’s the ecosystem of a fucking PRISON!

People like it because it works well together , but it’s sure that in a prison, the path from your cell to the cantine is pretty optimized; you get forced there! And you might try to get your food elsewhere, but the walls of the prison are made to be difficult to cross. Especially on mobile, where they’re making it harder and harder to escape, to make a jailbreak (pun-intended). Keeping you the loyal little sheep, or the forcing you to it.

That prison is also made private, a little club, to attract people to it. They even got their own little system to talk to each other, but oh god protect them from their little messages to pass the walls of the prison.

And all that prison is guarded by the warden, watching from high in the cloud. Forcing you to report yourself to him to be part of that prison.

That prison, also, can only be entered with specific vehicles, provided by the prison, to ensure maximum compatibility and efficiency. Good luck entering with a disguised vehicle if you find the official ones too pricey for their parts.

They also provided pressure tubes to send things from one cell to another. While being only simple pressure tubes like any other, they’re acclaimed because they’re apparently easier to use than the other 3rd party pressure tubes that can send things to the outside. Why? Because, oh yes it’s already in everybody’s cells (of that prison, outside is dangerous) and the other tubes have been conveniently being placed somewhere harder to reach.

Another thing they have are those windows that can view the outside. While being maybe less clear than some other windows, they are ok. But if you ever consider going mobile to enjoy that safari with lions, then man do they love bringing you back to that window.

Ok so I’m done with the prison metaphor, or I won’t sleep.

The ecosystem is probably the major reason Apple is still there. You buy from there because you’re a prisoner (I guess I’m not finished with the metaphor after all).

This is a prime example of RMS’s quote “If the user doesn’t control the software, the software controls the user”

AirDrop isn’t some sort of revolutionary tech, it uses a well established protocol that other implementations use to do the same thing. They could really easily open source the protocol and allow everyone to profit, but they won’t, because that would mean you don’t have to buy Apple.

That’s why I militate for open source, decentralized and standardized protocols. Because that way, we control the software, and it doesn’t control us.

All the things I said aren’t so bad because when you buy Apple, you make a choice. But I don’t have a choice, I am typing this on an Apple device, because I need to (I won’t elaborate on that) because of that fucking *ecosystem*

I am really tired, so half the sentences probably don’t make sense, but thanks for coming to my stupid TED talk.

The last person who might have taken offense at this recently quit, so time for a consequence-free rant. I just want to say...

Fuck absolutely every single one of my teammates who quit this year. Fuck your shitty, undocumented spaghetti code from hell that the rest of us will have to rewrite because it's utterly broken and functions mostly on prayer and luck. Fuck the 1000+ git repos we'll have to rename so we can even begin to tell them apart. Fuck your complete lack of any sort of processes or procedures or standards. Fuck the person who hated tickets and decided we could just have hundreds of people ask us for help on Slack whenever they need it. Fuck the people who quit because we got a new manager who told us we need to support the applications we build. Fuck the person who said "I'm leaving because I want to move forwards instead of backwards" as if fixing bugs in the code YOU WROTE TWO WEEKS AGO is really moving backwards. Fuck the two people who designed their own separate pipelines and then used both without bothering to debate and pick the better one (spoiler: both are completely undocumented and broken as hell).

I hope your various new employers figure out that your strategy of covering shit with gold paint doesn't change the smell.

Now the rest of us have to fix it all, and we're probably going to start by demolishing most of it so we can rebuild it from scratch.

This is more of a wishful thinking scenario......but language/tech stack/whatever bashing.

Look, I get it, we like development, we would not be here if we didn't like it. But as my good friend @Stuxnet has mentioned in the past, making this a personality trait is fucking retarded, lame, small, and overall pathetic. I agree with this sentiment 100%

Because of this a lot of people have form some sort of elitist viewpoint concerning the technologies that people use, be it Java, C#, C++, Rust, PHP, JS, whatever, the same circle jerk of bashing on shit just seems completely fucking retarded. I am hoping for a new mentality being that most of us are younger, even if you are a 50+ year old developer, maturity should give you a different perspective, but alas, immaturity and a bitchy attitude carried throughout years of self dick sucking implications would render this null.

I could not give two fucks if the dude next to me is coding his shit in whatever as long as best practices are followed, proper documentation is enforced, results are being brought to our customers(which regardless of how much you try to convince us, none of your customers are fucking elite level) and happiness is ensured, then so fucking be it.

Gripes bitches and complaints are understandable, I dislike a couple of things about my favorite tools, and often wish certain features be involved in my particular tech stacks, does this make stuff bad? no, does it make me or anyone else less of a developer,? no so why give a fuck? bitch when shit bites you in the ass when someone does not know what the fuck they are doing with a language that permits writing bullshit. Which to be honest ALL of them fucking allow. Not one is saved from this. But NOT knowing how to work a solution, or NOT understanding a tech stack does not give you AUTOMATIC FULL insight on how x technology operates, thinking as such is so fucking arrogant and annoying.

But I am getting tired of looking at posts from Timmy, a 18 year old "dev" from whothefuckcares bitch about shit when they have never even made a fucking penny out of their "development" endeavors just because they read some dickhead's opinion on the internet regarding x tech stack and believes that adopting their bullshit troll ass virgin ideas makes them l337.

Get your own fucking opinion on things, be aggressive and stand fucking straight, maybe get some fucking pussy(or dick, whatever) and for fucks's sake learn to interact with other fucking human beings, take a fucking run, play games, break out from your whinny bitch ass shell, talk to that person that intimidates you, take a run, do yoga, martial arts anything that would break you out from being such a small little bitch.

Just fucking do something that keeps you from shitting on people 24/7 365/ a year.

We used to bitch about incompetent managers, shit bosses, fucking ludicrous assignments. Retarded shit that some other dev did, etc, etc. Seems like every other fucking retard getting into this community starts with stupid ass JS/PHP/Python/Java/C#/ whatever jokes and you idiots keep upvoting that shit. Makes those n00bs gain credability. Fuck me shit is so pathetic.

basically, make dev rant great again.

No fuck off and have a beer, or tea or whatever y'all drink.

Rant #1:
Why everyone and their toy cars gotta be jumping on the bed when I’m trying to sleep?

Rant #2:
For months now, I get bleary eyed and tired every time I look at work. Focusing and being productive is almost impossible. I’m cheery and alert, then sit down, open my editor, and find I can’t focus. Moments later I feel like I need a nap.

Rant #3:
I get interrupted an average of every 3-5 minutes, basically every day, all day long. The more this happens, the more tired and angry I become. I often have to resort to yelling, throwing toys that appear on my desk/keyboard, and blasting loud music I don’t want to hear through noise canceling headphones.

—————

Is it any wonder I can’t focus or think or do anything but feel like I’m falling asleep? Is it any wonder I’m perpetually angry and frustrated?

I can sort of fix the interruptions by locking myself away in my monster’s room. But I’m still so tired and bleary and can’t focus. I don’t know what to do, or even what I can do. Vacation didn’t help. Another would doubtlessly be just as effective, and certainly wouldn’t improve my boss’s view of my performance.

Ugh.

!rant

Apparently everyone else has some sort of inanimate object they use for debugging. Am I the only dev that just using all the other voices in my head for a souding board?

I’ve just talked to my cousin (24 yo) about smartphones, since I saw that he has an old phone and I asked him if he wanted to buy my old S6 (for reasonable price), he declined this offer moreover he said that he is not planning to change his current device. I was kinda shocked tbh how one can live like that (being online only when using PC), a while after that I realised that he was the one who was smart in this conversation, the one that does not get influenced by others in this matter. I wish I could live like that, when he is not available, he’s just not available. I mean this rant is not purely dev related, but, quite a lot of us here are maintaining some projects, maybe need to talk to managers after their work to make some decisions, doing some side projects. I know that we sort of agreed with those rules at the beginning, but don’t forget to stay offline for some time, especially now when holidays are coming and there will be occasions to spend some time with our families. Just a friendly reminder :)

This is going to be a rant, but personally, I'm pleased with the outcome of my life now.

I was part of a community for a few years and decided to help them out with my knowledge of programming Lua nearly 2 years ago since they lacked developers for the project itself.

Since it was sort of a custom language that they modified how Lua worked on it, it took me a bit to adapt, but within a few weeks, I was pretty fluent in this so-called custom language they had. Began working on some major updates, additions, removals, and just optimizing this code base. It was a pretty old code base and needed a good chunk of love.

A few months later, I've implemented loads of features, optimized the base whenever I could, and then things start taking a turn for the worse. We get new 'developers' who haven't ever coded the language, and worse they couldn't afford to provide them development servers thus they ended up breaking my servers. I helped them and they learned, they were decent, but now the Seniors and CEO's of the project began to take a toll on me.

I was told that this community had a reputation of driving out developers, ruining their reputations, and that is what started happening. I started getting questioned if I was loyal to helping them, that I've become lazy, even though they were explained I've had mental health issues for a few years and have been hospitalized multiple times.

These sort of attacks kept happening for months, and then they finally pushed my buttons, where I was talking to another Senior of how we should redo the base since it's just so massive and a few tiny updates to the base take a few days to implement across the entire code. What instead happened was that I went to sleep, and this Senior told the CEO I was going to steal the code base and go sell it...

I woke up to messages of how the CEO is all pissed off, and that this what the Senior said. At this point, I started responding with, fuck it. I was so sick and fucking tired of their bullshit. I was the only fucking competent developer, and I did more work in the few months I was there then some people did in 2 or 3 years.

A few hours later I decided to go chat with the CEO and explained what was truly brought up, and he just brushed it off like I was lying. At that point, I lost it. I told him why the code base was horrible since he hired stupid ass developers. He didn't know how to code. People wanted certain items, and he wouldn't be able to add them for fucking months and players sit there making fun of it. Some people state the only differences they see within the code is the code I've done. Basically, he was an incompetent fuck that said he knew what he was doing, and had all these big plans for the future yet couldn't listen to the only competent developer and fucking claimed bullshit.

Now a few months have gone by, I'm looking at their community and it's basically dead with no proper updates except for copy and paste updates claiming to be custom coded. While I'm working on my real life businesses (Which are currently being a headache, but within the year should resolve its issues), starting University for my Computer Science degree here soon, and even considering building my own game here.

Basically, karma is a bitch and that's why when you get loyal people in your life, keep them. (Writing this at 3 am after a few drinks, hopefully, it made sense, I think it does.)

Anyways, goodnight everyone.

Taking IT classes in college. The school bought us all lynda and office365 accounts but we can't use them because the classroom's network has been severed from the Active Directory server that holds our credentials. Because "hackers." (The non-IT classrooms don't have this problem, but they also don't need lynda accounts. What gives?)

So, I got bored, and irritated, so I decided to see just how secure the classroom really was.

It wasn't.

So I created a text file with the following rant and put it on the desktop of the "locked" admin account. Cheers. :)

1. don't make a show of "beefing up security" because that only makes people curious.
I'm referring of course to isolating the network. This wouldn't be a problem except:

2. don't restrict the good guys. only the bad guys.
I can't access resources for THIS CLASS that I use in THIS CLASS. That's a hassle.
It also gives me legitimate motivation to try to break your security.

3. don't secure it if you don't care. that is ALSO a hassle.
I know you don't care because you left secure boot off, no BIOS password, and nothing
stopping someone from using a different OS with fewer restrictions, or USB tethering,
or some sort malware, probably, in addition to security practices that are
wildly inconsistent, which leads me to the final and largest grievance:

4. don't give admin priveledges to an account without a password.

seriously. why would you do this? I don't understand.
you at least bothered to secure the accounts that don't even matter,
albeit with weak and publicly known passwords (that are the same on all machines),
but then you went and left the LEAST secure account with the MOST priveledges?
I could understand if it were just a single-user machine. Auto login as admin.
Lots of people do that and have a reason for it. But... no. I just... why?

anyway, don't worry, all I did was install python so I could play with scripting
during class. if that bothers you, trust me, you have much bigger problems.

I mean you no malice. just trying to help.

For real. Don't kick me out of school for being helpful. That would be unproductive.
Plus, maybe I'd be a good candidate for your cybersec track. haven't decided yet.

-- a guy who isn't very good at this and didn't have to be
have a nice day <3

oh, and I fixed the clock. you're welcome.

(Warning: kinda long && somewhat of a political rant)

Every time I tell someone I work with AI, the first thing to come out of their mouth is "oh but AI is going to take over the world!"

No.

It was only somewhat recently that it started being able to recognize what was in a picture from over 3 million images, and that too it's not that great at. Honestly people always say "AI is just if-else" ironically, but it isn't really that far from the truth, we just multiply an input by weights and check the output.

It isn't some magical sauce, it's not being born and then exploring a problem, it's just glorified-probability prediction. Even in "unsupervised" learning, the domain set is provided; in "reinforcement learning" which has gotten super popular lately we just have the computer decide which policy is optimal and apply that to an environment. It's a glorified decision tree (and technically tree models like XGBoost outperform neural networks and deep learning on a large number of problems) and it isn't going to "decide" to take over the planet.

Honestly all of this is just born out of Elon Musk fans who take his word as truth and have been led to believe that AI is going to take over the world. There are a billion reasons why it can't! And to top it off this takes away a lot of public attention from VERY concerning ethical issues with AI.

Am I the only one who saw Google Duplex being unveiled and immediately thought "fraud"? Forget phone scammers, if you trained duplex on the mannerisms of, for example, a famous politician's voice, you could impersonate them in an audio clip (or even video clip with deepfakes). Or for example the widespread use of object detection and facial recognition in surveillance systems deployed by DoD. Or the use of AI combined with location tracking and browsing analytics for targeted marketing.

The list of ethics breaches are endless, and I find it super suspicious that those profiting the most off of unethical AI are all too eager to shift public concern to some science fiction Terminator style takeover that, if ever possible, would be a long way out and is not any sort of a priority issue right now.

I think I want to quit my first applicantion developer job 6 months in because of just how bad the code and deployment and.. Just everything, is.

I'm a C#/.net developer. Currently I'm working on some asp.net and sql stuff for this company.

We have no code standards. Our project manager is somewhere between useless and determinental. Our clients are unreasonable (its the government, so im a bit stifled on what I can say.) and expect absurd things from us. We have 0 automated tests and before I arrived all our infrastructure wasn't correct to our documentation... And we barely had any documentation to begin with.

The code is another horror story. It's out sourced C# asp.net, js and SQL code.. And to very bad programmers in India, no offense to the good ones, I know you exist. Its all spagheti. And half of it isn't spelled correctly.

We have a single, massive constant class that probably has over 2000 constants, I don't care to count. Our SQL projects are a mess with tons of quick fix scripts to run pre and post publishing. Our folder structure makes no sense (We have root/js and root/js1 to make you cringe.) our javascript is majoritly on the asp.net pages themselves inline, so we don't even have minification most of the time.

It's... God awful. The result of a billion and one quick fixes that nobody documented. The configuration alone has to have the same value put multiple times. And now our senior developer is getting the outsourced department to work on moving every SINGLE NORMAL STRING INTO THE DATABASE. That's right. Rather then putting them into some local resource file or anything sane, our website will now be drawing every single standard string from the database. Our SENIOR DEVELOPER thinks this is a good idea. I don't need to go into detail about how slow this is. Want to do it on boot? Fine. But they do it every time the page loads. It's absurd.

Our sql database design is an absolute atrocity. You have to join several tables together just to get anything done. Half of our SP's are failing all the time because nobody really understands the design. Its gloriously awful its like.. The epitome of failed database designs.

But rather then taking a step back and dealing with all the issues, we keep adding new features and other ones get left in the dust. Hell, we don't even have complete browser support yet. There were things on the website that were still running SILVERLIGHT. In 2019. I don't even know how to feel about it.

I brought up our insane technical debt to our PM who told me that we don't have time to worry about things like technical debt. They also wouldn't spend the time to teach me anything, saying they would rather outsource everything then take the time to teach me. So i did. I learned a huge chunk of it myself.

But calling this a developer job was a sick, twisted joke. All our lives revolve around bugnet. Our work is our BN's. So every issue the client emails about becomes BN's. I haven't developed anything. All I've done is clean up others mess.

Except for the one time they did have me develop something. And I did it right and took my time. And then they told me it took too long, forced me to release before it was ready, even though I had never worked on what I was doing before. And it worked. I did it.

They then told me it likely wouldn't even be used anyway. I wasn't very happy at all.

I then discovered quickly the horrors of wanting to make changes on production. In order to make changes to it, we have to... Get this

Write a huge document explaining why. Not to our management. To the customer. The customer wants us to 'request' to fix our application.

I feel like I am literally against a wall. A huge massive wall. I can't get constent from my PM to fix the shitty code they have as a result of outsourcing. I can't make changes without the customer asking why I would work on something that doesn't add something new for them. And I can't ask for any sort of help, and half of the people I have to ask help from don't even speak english very well so it makes it double hard to understand anything.

But what can I do? If I leave my job it leaves a lasting stain on my record that I am unsure if I can shake off.

... Well, thats my tl;dr rant. Im a junior, so maybe idk what the hell im talking about.

I tried writing this rant before, but I was (and still am) in too good of a mood so it was lengthy, meandering, and over-specific. so I'll summarize(ish).

summary:
* miscommunication
* working weekends
* incompetence and/or screwy integrations

summary of the summary:
* I can't fix someone else's mess if you don't talk to me!

Summary^3: #TODO: learn telepathy

Shortened rant:
Bossman at work signed up a very lucrative client by promising them something he couldn't deliver because he misunderstood and miscommunicated scope -- anti-fraud, if you've been following my rants.

Their signup (all four...) are screwy and cause issues and nobody knows why. I didn't write the code, have barely even glanced through it, and it uses a third-party (Clover) that's rather screwy.

Bossman has been asking me to do various things concerning the merchant, but has never been around to provide specifics, so I'm left to guess. I've done my best, but due to the aforementioned screwiness, I really have no idea what's going on. I just sort of muddled my way through.

Bossman also asked me, super late on Friday night (after 8:30pm), to rename one of the merchants because there are two with the same name (with different Clover creds, etc.) and that's just confusing. I didn't see the message because late and tired, and he didn't follow up or text/call me until two days later (today, Sunday). I also thought these were strictly for diagnosing and were de-listed. I had no idea the merchant was live and people were actually purchasing things for it. Had I known this I would have freaked out and demanded specifics on Thursday/Friday because wtf? debugging in production? with broken merchants? selling things for real money? scary bad? hello?

Anyway, I didn't see his message until he texted me about it at like 5pm today while I was about 2 hours from my computer. He's understandably frustrated, and I totally don't blame him, but fuck, miscommunication is a serious problem in this company, and that's amazing because it's so freaking small.

But the short version is that I'm likely going to get blamed for all this, Clover screwiness included. Bossman and I set up a call for 10am tomorrow and I'm positive he's going to try pinning it on me. Totally not going to let him, but his social is lv16+ while mine's like. 2 or 3. 😕 I'll see how it goes.

Really though, I should read @rutee07's book and just roast these fuckers.

!dev

This may be a petty rant, but It's been grinding my gears for a few months now... I fucking hate ads, it's starting to be incredibly ridiculous. You start a video... 2 ads... you watch for 2 minutes, another 2 ads (and no, adblock isn't a solution, that only works on PC, not devices)?!!! You start an App... ads, you listen to music... ads... you go to google... ads, you click a website... ads... you look out of your window... ads... you walk down the street... ads... ads.. ads...
Seriously, what the fuck have we done?!! As a society we fucked up so badly... Look, no matter how many times you offer me an ad for a furniture, I'm not going to buy a fucking furniture on just any random day. You are completely wasting my already limited time... If you don't have any ads to show me, then don't show me ads, fuck you, you fucking piece of shit software... How is it that it used to be enough to click away one static, non-intrusive ad, but now 6-8 15-20 second ads, popups and intrusive, mid-content ads are the norm?! And then a piece of shit like MoviePass DARES, FUCKING DARES, To work on some sort of camera-enabled check that you actually LOOK at the ads?!!!! ARE YOU FUCKING SHITTING ME?! WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE YOU RETARDED PIECE OF BLACK MIRROR SHIT, FUCK OFF WITH THIS BRAINWASHING BULLSHIT, I'M ALLERGIC TO IT, FUCK ALL OF THIS.

I fucking promise that any software I'll make will be either free and open source, or paid only by alternative means, no ads, not ever. I will never fucking add to this retarded bullshit. Never fucking ever will I lower myself on a level where I need to actively waste the time and psyche of thousands or millions of people to get money. Fucking hell.... As if the world doesn't suck enough already, we treat humans as cattle, and It's pissing me off... In the past I used to just delete any app that annoyed me with ads, but what the fuck do I do about youtube since it's the de-facto content source on the internet? And worse, my friends and family watch youtube.. even if I avoid it that doesn't mean the problem is solved... There needs to be an alternative, and paying subscriptions for every single fucking service on the web isn't a solution. Even worse with the current economy... I'd rather eat real food, than buy shit like premium on ShitTube, Fuckify, all the random news website I might read and every app or game I start once every two months... Shit like ad-less premium accounts aren't giving me an alternative, just a way to shoot myself in the foot longterm...

Godbless everyone that releases open source software, apps, tools, websites and such. I hope to god decentralized alternatives to youtube need to happen and not in the web3 way, because that's also retarded...

Fuck, Fuck, Fuck, Shit, Fuck Shit, Piss, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, Retards, Fucking absolutely disgusting pieces of shit... ... alright, I got it out of my system, but It's gonna be right back the next time YouTube forces me to look at 20 seconds of something I already skipped 48 times today...

Did a bunch more cowboy coding today as I call it (coding in vi on production). Gather 'round kiddies, uncle Logan's got a story fer ya…

First things first, disclaimer: I'm no sysadmin. I respect sysadmins and the work they do, but I'm the first to admit my strengths definitely lie more in writing programs rather than running servers.

Anyhow, I recently inherited someone else's codebase (the story of my profession career, but I digress) and let me tell you this thing has amateur hour written all over it. It's written in PHP and JavaScript by a self-taught programmer who apparently discovered procedural programming and decided there was nothing left to learn and stopped there (no disrespect to self-taught programmers).

I could rant for days about the various problems this codebase has, but today I have a very specific story to tell. A story about errors and logs.

And it all started when I noticed the disk space on our server was gradually decreasing.

So today I logged onto our API server (Ubuntu running Apache/PHP) and did a df -h to check the disk space, and was surprised to see that it had noticeably decreased since the last time I'd checked when everything was running smoothly. But seeing as this server does not store any persistent customer data (we have a separate db server) and purely hosts the stateless API, it should NOT be consuming disk space over time at all.

The only thing I could think of was the logs, but the logs were very quiet, just the odd benign message that was fully expected. Just to be sure I did an ls -Sh to check the size of the logs, and while some of them were a little big, nothing over a few megs. Nothing to account for gigabytes of disk space gradually disappearing.

What could it be? I wondered.

cd ../..
du . | sort --sort=numeric

What's this? 2671132 K in some log folder buried in the api source code? I cd into it and it turns out there are separate PHP log files in there, split up by customer, so that each customer of ours (we have 120) has their own respective error log! (Why??)

Armed with this newfound piece of (still rather unbelievable) evidence I perform a mad scramble to search the codebase for where this extra logging is happening and sure enough I find a custom PHP error handler that is capturing (most) errors and redirecting them to these individualized log files.

Conveniently enough, not ALL errors were being absorbed though, so I still knew the main error_log was working (and any time I explicitly error_logged it would go there, so I was none the wiser that this other error-catching was even happening).

Needless to say I removed the code as quickly as I found it, tail -f'd the error_log and to my dismay it was being absolutely flooded with syntax errors, runtime PHP exceptions, warnings galore, and all sorts of other things.

My jaw almost hit the floor. I've been with this company for 6 months and had no idea these errors were even happening!

The sad thing was how easy to fix all the errors ended up being. Most of them were "undefined index" errors that could have been completely avoided with a simple isset() check, but instead ended up throwing an exception, nullifying any code that came after it.

Anyway kids, the moral of the story is don't split up your log files. It makes absolutely no sense and can end up obscuring easily fixable bugs for half a year or more!

Happy coding.

I know I rant about how bad the app is I have to update on at work is but seriously first week into this job I found skeleton code from a taxi app, it wasn't in English and lately I found some code from some sort of funeral app wtf!

This just takes copying and pasting to a whole new fucking level!

University Final Viva for OOP with C++
(Yeah, that first line is a rant in itself for the likes of me and Mr. Torvalds)
Assistant Professor:
Tell me a few "functions" in C++ STL algorithm header
Me:
*starts off with the first one that came to my mind*
sort()
AP: Huh? a I'm asking the Algorithms in C++ STL
Me: Yes, this is one of them Ma'am.
She looked at me as if I told her that I'm dating her daughter. It became clear she doesn't know about it and she'll gladly deduct my marks for getting it wrong. So I explained how Sort() is a hybrid of quicksort, heap sort and insertion sort. (Read about it an hour ago while doing a competitive programming question)
AP: Tell me the ones we did in class.
I haven't attended those classes, so I just told her the ones I knew.

After a couple more infuriating questions, which themselves sounded right from a book published in the 90's, she gave me 10/15.

This is what's wrong with India's Education system, even the teachers know only the stuff mentioned in the course hand-outs. Forget brownie points, you get screwed over by the teachers for actually knowing stuff and using it.

!rant
... so... maybe not that much of a thing, but i think it is:

a gal (27 years old) i started teaching programming two weeks ago, who had literally no previous experience with programming, algoritmization nor c#...
... just now, after 3 lessons of 6 hours altogether, and after yesterday when i explained to her what arrays are and reminded her what loops do...

... invented bubble sort. on her own. no googling. on paper. no "trial and error code typing and running".

i'm actually pretty proud of her :)

... putting the algo concept into actual code will still be a bit of a struggle, but yeah, hell, can't help thinking that she's actually pretty smart :)

(p. s. fist lesson was i drew uml of a fibonacci algo and forced her to understand what it does, second lesson was i explained the minimum required c# syntax for her to be able to implement it and forced her to write it (with as little help as i could), third lesson was the concept of array and "okay, now here's array of numbers, make a function that will sort them")

looking forward to what will happen when i explain recursion and nudge her towards quicksort O:-)

Has anyone ever ordered off RedBubble? Are they even a legitimate company?

Rant...

20 days ago I ordered a package from redbubble.com

They shipped the package, without an apartment number. So the delivery was refused and it was sent back to them.

I reach out to support and they ask me to send them a complete mailing address and my order number.

I send them my exact mailing address and the order number as they requested. They inform me that the package is being sent out again ASAP.

This morning I see that the new package has shipped, WITH NO FUCKING APARTMENT NUMBER.

I email them to let them know this. They inform me that since it has my zip code it will be fine (which is a ridiculously stupid this to say).

So I actually call the post service and ask them if the address will work, they let me know that of course, it will not get to me if there is no apartment. Duh!

So, I email RedBubble support again to let them know this.

I expect some sort of answer as to why this is happening. But the following happens.

They send me a refund.

Let's be clear, I did not as for a refund. I asked for the order I made to be shipped to me.

So it seems that putting an apartment number on a shipping address is completely impossible for this very unprofessional company.

After 2 weeks of bullshit, I will be receiving nothing at all from these shady cunts.

Fuck RedBubble it seems.

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

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

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

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

FLASHY FLASH FLASH MOFO!

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

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

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

Me: So you have no work experience, and majored in liberal arts, but you did go through a 6 months bootcamp, right?
Candidate: Yeah.
Me: sounds good, we will have to work together with you for a long while until you become independent, but I think you can definitely do this. What are you salary expectations?
Candidate: I'm thinking of 5000.
Me: Aight, thanks for your time! We'll send you more details later

Around here, 5000 (arbitrary made up number) is what you pay someone with around 3 years of experience at least. It's always these pampered fucks from rich countries that want to earn a shitton of money for the grand effort of going to a goddamn bootcamp for some months. That is their definition of effort and hard work, because it seems they've never once in their lives had any sort of hardship or struggle beyond crying that dad got them an Android instead of an iPhone. If you leave them alone they can't do jack shit because they've never worked in real, big projects, so you gotta invest a lot of time in them. Which is fine, everyone starts from somewhere. But what kinda balls do you have to demand a mid level salary when you have done basically nothing so far, and your knowledge is superficial at best?

I know that a lot of jobs and recruiters give bottom of the barrel shit, but I swear some candidates are insane. Unpopular rant I assume but I just needed to scream a bit.

About a year ago I was doing work for a client that hired a separate contractor for SEO consultation. I could easily end the rant here.

This lady was trying to convince my client to write the same page or blog article several times over and merely change their physical address at the bottom of the page to one of their many respective clinics.

When I told them not to do this because they would suffer for stuffing and duplicating content, their response was to ask me to be respectful of the other contractor's skills and knowledge regarding digital marketing and to call her and sort it out.

I called. We argued. I called the client back and asked if they should respect the skills of an auto mechanic with pliers to remove a teenager's braces rather than send them to one of their orthodontic clinics.

!rant

Ok dev's, im proposing a small movement for windows 10 mobile, if you have used windows 10 mobile personally, you will know it is actually a fantastic operating system that is super snappy and easy to develop for (No i'm not a microsoft fan boy, far from actually).

The only downfall of the OS is the app support, so im proposing devs come together and create quality apps and games for win 10 mobile.

Hopefully this can sort of persuade others into a revolution of sorts (And hopefully change microsofts mind of abandoning it), I personally will support windows 10 mobile for every game I create, within reason.

Since memes have become an integral part of our community, I propose a way to handle them without affecting the actual Ranters.

Everyone adding a meme or a gag picture can do so under a particular tag, and the Algo can handle your meme needs by exposing you to that particular tag based on your activity with such posts.

Or you could just make the users search for memes if they wanted to see them.

This could also be done vice versa by ranters using a RANT tag, I would keep my RANT filter on so anything without that tag won't show up

To make it better you can provide a sort of suggested tags option :

|gag|¦¦¦|meme|¦¦¦Ranf|¦¦ scroll to the right for more... Kinda thing

@dfox @trogus please tell us what you think about this

How do you deal with massively poorly-performing and unknowledgeable teams?

For background, I've been in my current position for ~7 months now.

A new manager joined recently and he's just floored at the reality of the team.

I mean, a large portion of my interview (and his) was the existing manager explicitly warning about how much of a dumpster fire everything is.

But still, nothing prepares you for it.

We're talking things like:
- Sequential integer user ids that are passable as query string args to anonymous endpoints, thus enabling you to view the data read by that view *for any* user.
- God-like lookup tables that all manner of pieces of data are shoved into as a catch-all
- A continued focus on unnecessary stored procedures despite us being a Linq shop
- Complete lack of awareness of SOLID principles
- Actual FUD around the simplest of things like interfaces, inversion of control, dependency injection (and the list goes on).

I've been elevated into this sort of quasi-senior position (in all but title - and salary), and I find myself having to navigate a daily struggle of trying to not have an absolute shit fit every time I have to dive into the depths of some of the code.

Compounded onto that is the knowledge that most of the team are on comparable salaries (within a couple thousand) of mine, purely owing to length of service.

We're talking salaries for mid-senior level devs, for people that at market rates would command no more (if even close) than a junior rate.

The problem is that I'm aware of how bad things are, but then somehow I'm constantly surprised and confronted with ever more insane levels of shitfuckery, and... I'm getting tired.

It's been 7 months, I love the job, I'm working in the charity sector and I love the fact that the things I'm working on are directly improving people's lives, rather than lining some fintech fatcat's pockets.

I guess this was more a rant than a question, and also long time no see...

So my question is this:

- How do you deal with this?
- How do you go on without just dying inside every single day?

Progress since my last post - quite like where the iterations since the cold design got me, next is the actual rant view and then will implement all sort of auth things like posting comments.

Have also figured out a way to have style and script plugins, haven't tried it yet though, especially with storage rulesets it might not be as smooth as I imagine it to be.

Another screenshot in the comments.

(I'll give some context before the rant: I'm part if the IT department of a manufacturing company (actually I'm 1/2 of the department), and all the applications (old an new - except the ones used on production line) used in the company are my responsibility, that including most of databases too... Also, English isn't my native language so there will be some words or phrases that I'll probably write wrong... Sorry for that, if there are any corrections, I'll be glad to hear them)

So...

There will be an implementation of new "control point" on the "shipping department" which consists on a electromechanical equipment controlled by a PLC. And despite the original concept was a collaboration between 2 departments (we, IT, and Production Control), I was never taken in consideration about anything of the project... To be fair, I forget about its existence until two weeks ago.

So, a few days I learned that there are a huge delay regarding the original deadline (mainly because the supplier was delayed with the delivery of their system), and since two weeks (less, actually, because some holydays in between) I'm learning how to integrate that "P.o.S" into an existing application on a PC using a serial communication (not the main problem, as I've done that before... With another brand of PLC's) while avoiding buying any additional software (to get the communication done and in a easy way) and that sort of things... But discovering in the process that it will be necessary to acquire such additional SW in order to finish the job ASAP.

When suddenly I get the "news" that it's almost all my duty (and responsibility) to meet the original deadline, because it doesn't matter how the other departments screw all the schedule, it's the job of IT to get the shit done in time... And what is worst: they didn't said that in such straight manner, no, the implied it while making a quick test with the general manager.

I mean, WTF? Besides doing a "respectable" number of "user support" activities in a dialy basis, I also need to manage the activities of other departments? And also fix their screw ups on a schedule that I just learned days before?

And also there is a coworker (one of whom screwed up) that, almost every time she see me, is asking "how much until you'll finish?"

As I read on a meme years ago: "please, give patience, because if you give strength, I'll need bail money too..."

Damn... I don't know of the benefits of this work are worth all this nonsense

Rant from a previous gig I just remembered that reignited my fury lol

Suddenly, CSV exports became massively critical to our product's success. "They were always part of the plan, if we don't have them the product is a failure". Plot twist, they were NOT always part of the plan. And our backend is not at all designed for querying the combinations of data you're asking for.

Nevermind we've been entirely focused these last few months on making the new user experience as slick as possible because "our customers want cake, not meat and potatoes". Forget the fact that, in order to meet the deadlines, my team coupled the backend a little too much with the needs of the frontend because otherwise integrations took too long. We NEED fucking CSV exports of everything you can fucking imagine.

No. Fuck you. If you want it, it's gonna take at least 2 engineers and a month, and according to you we only have a few weeks of runway. No, I'm not compromising jack shit, this is the reality we live in. This is going to go nuclear in production if we don't do it right. Either give us the month and bankrupt the company, or fucking drop it.

Or...you could go cry to the frontend team for solutions. And convince them to page through ALL of the data and generate CSVs in the fucking browser. Sure, it sort of works in QA with the miniscule amount of data we have there, but how'd that work out for you in prod?

Jesus fucking christ why are you people such incompetent morons, and how the fuck did you become executives??

So technical interview today but woke up (6am) and started thinking about it and it led to this rant about algorithms. This is probably going into a Medium post if I ever get around to finishing it but sort of just wanted to share the rant that literally just went off in my mind.

*The problem with Algorithms Technical Interviews Is They don't test Real skills*

Real world problems are complex and often cross domain combining experience in multiple areas. Often the best way is not obvious unless you're a polymath and familiar with different areas, paradigms, designs. And intuitively can understand, reason, and combine them.

I don't think this is something a specific algorithm problem is designed to show. And the problem is the optimal solution to some of these and to algorithm design itself is that unless you train for it or are an algorithm designer (practice and experience), you can only brute force it in the amount of time given.

And quite frankly the algorithms I think we rely on daily weren't thought of in 30 minutes. The designers did this stuff for a living, thought about these problems for days and several iterations… at least. A lot were mathematicians. The matrix algorithm that had a Big O of 7N required a flash of insight that only someone constantly looking and thinking about the equations could see.

TBA
-system design
-clean readable coding practices
...

TLDR: I could probably go on and on about this stuff for hours jumping from item/example/area to the next and back again... But I don't think you can test these (~20) years of experience in a 1 hr technical interview focused on algorithms...

- Launch the new version of the system I have been refactoring for 2 years and counting, then ceremoniously burn (literally) the legacy code as well as the cluster fuck of hardware it runs on.

- Decrease my stress + bus factor by bringing another up to speed on my code & the new version (his cluster fuck now).

- Pay attention to & take better care of health, my wrists in patricular.

- Find a mentor and mentor someone else.

- Get out of crisis management mode and find the time to write tuts, experiment and live a little.

- Find & join a local dev meetup, maybe make a local dev friend.

- Book leave and actually take it, preferabbly without having to take my laptop to the beach - actually, preferabbly at least have the choice to take a offline vacation.

- Sort through the drives containing ALL the code I have ever written, migrate the usefull interesting bits to Github.

Phew, that bit of self reflection was intense! I'm adding a cron to my server to sms & email me this rant in a year to remind me what hope looks like.

Saw this sent into a Discord chat today:

"Warning, look out for a Discord user by the name of "shaian" with the tag #2974. He is going around sending friend requests to random Discord users, and those who accept his friend requests will have their accounts DDoSed and their groups exposed with the members inside it becoming a victim as well. Spread the word and send this to as many discord servers as you can. If you see this user, DO NOT accept his friend request and immediately block him. Discord is currently working on it. SEND THIS TO ALL THE SERVERS YOU ARE IN. This is IMPORTANT: Do not accept a friend request from shaian#2974. He is a hacker.

Tell everyone on your friends list because if somebody on your list adds one of them, they'll be on your list too. They will figure out your personal computer's IP and address, so copy & paste this message where ever you can. He is going around sending friend requests to random discord users, and those who accept his requests will have their accounts and their IP Addresses revealed to him. Spread the word and send this to as many discord servers as you can. If you see this user, DO NOT accept his friend request and immediately block him. Saw this somewhere"

I was so angry I typed up an entire feature-length rant about it (just wanted to share my anger):

"1. Unless they have access to Discord data centres or third-party data centres storing Discord user information I doubt they can obtain the IP just by sending friend requests.

2. Judging by the wording, for example, 'copy & paste this message where ever you can' and 'Spread the word and send this to as many discord servers as you can. If you see this user, DO NOT accept his friend request and immediately block him.' this is most likely BS, prob just someone pissed off at that user and is trying to ruin their reputation etc.. Sentences equivalent to 'spread the word' are literally everywhere in this wall of text.

3. So what if you block the user? You don't even have their user ID, they can change their username and discrim if they want. Also, are you assuming they won't create any alts?

4. Accounts DDoSed? Does the creator of this wall of text even understand what that means? Wouldn't it be more likely that 'shaian' will be DDoSing your computer rather than your Discord account? How would the account even be DDoSed? Does that mean DDoSing Discord's servers themselves?

5. If 'shaian' really had access to Discord's information, they wouldn't need to send friend requests in order to 'DDoS accounts'. Why whould they need to friend you? It doesn't make sense. If they already had access to Discord user IP addresses, they won't even have to interact with the users themselves. Although you could argue that they are trolling and want to get to know the victim first or smth, that would just be inefficient and pointless. If they were DDoSing lots of users it would be a waste of time and resources.

6. The phrase 'Saw this somewhere' at the end just makes it worse. There is absolutely no proof/evidence of any kind provided, let along witnesses.

How do you expect me to believe this copypasta BS scam? This is like that 'Discord will be shutting down' scam a while back.

Why do people even believe this? Do you just blindly follow what others are doing and without thinking, copy and paste random walls of text?

Spreading this false information is pointless and harmful. It only provides benefits to whoever started this whole thing, trying to bring down whoever 'shaian' is.

I don't think people who copy & paste this sort of stuff are ready to use the internet yet.

Would you really believe everything people on the internet tell you?

You would probably say 'no'.

Then why copy & paste this? Do you have a reason?

Or is it 'just because of 'spread the word''?

I'm just sick of seeing people reposting this sort of stuff

People who send this are probably like the people who click 'Yes' to allow an app to make changes in the User Account Control window without reading the information about the publisher's certificate, or the people who click 'Agree' without actually reading the terms and conditions."

!dev

Long time, no rant. Why is facial hair so difficult to control? How do people even grow beards without looking like hobos all the time? Do I have to make some sort of sacrifice to a dark and malevolent entity?

Believe me, it's so much easier to keep on top of shaving body hair than taming face fur. Especially because your facial hair is, you know, on your *face* which means it's very visible. You can't hide it if you mess up. Unless you decide that wearing a balaclava is a good idea when going outside, like when going grocery shopping. Generally that isn't received too well though.

So first of all merry delayed Xmas and of course wishing you all a happy new year.

Now...

I always loved designing and coding, yes I actually like it, I must be absolutely mental or something.. I finally after pushing myself through hours upon hours of courses, finishing most within 15% of the allotted time, and doing more then was requested, I finally found a job, related to front-end development. You might think "Gee; good for you buddy, you filthy commoner.." Well; it didn't last all too long, I basically after nailing the interview process got my first day there within a few days, now I am absolutely stoked and my nerves are shot, plus the 4 cups of coffee aren't helping. I literally was so nervous to do well on my first day, that I slept for only one hour, literally one bloody hour.

I get into the office where I am greeted by an amazing laptop, I mean high-end gaming 360 no-scope all over the place gaming. I sit down and start on getting all my tools ready to go (they let us use whatever IDE we wanted, which I thought was amazing) after getting my IDE and the plugins and all the emails/Slack etc setup, I then get told to get a Dropbox account. I assumed the Dropbox account was just there to share things quickly with the designers, we would obviously be using Git right?! Well; no not exactly, actually not at all - we all used the Dropbox account of one of the bosses, I swear everybody pushed and pulled stuff all the time, a copy of the boss's passport was in there as well, and they had projects from and up to 3 years ago, still in there... It took my Dropbox 3 bloody hours to grab as much as it could to actually allow me to get started...

I then to my absolute dismay notice that I would be working on a prefab of a prefab, basically the only thing I would be responsible for, is to adjust the animations and aligning elements.... Aligning and animations.... Fine, I guess it could be worse right? Started going along with it, using a framework that I never heard of before, till like a good 3 days before starting there called "Greensock" which is amazing I must admit, could've helped me allot on my solo-projects. Problem was; we had designers who wanted things, that just looked plain horrible, it was never 'on-point' so to say, maybe it's just me being a perfectionist but it just looked wrong.

Finally got it done after struggling with the prefabs and what not, then the day was almost over and I finally got to go home, fortunately dodging the drinking that was occurring around 4 in the afternoon in the middle of the office, it wasn't beers or anything of the sort - but hard liquor along the lines of Wodka and straight up Gin. I fortunately had a personal issue I had to attend too, so I got out of there before things got too crazy and they went out for dinner stumbling all over the place.

Well this wen't for a few more days (minus the drinking), with 8 being the exact number of days and my grievance list only kept growing. I was for one a junior-developer and thus with them knowing was supposed to get training from our lead, however; that never occurred instead said 'lead' would leave early or be completely absent on most days, leaving me to mess around with prefabs that did my head in, with no comments nor any indication what it did or should've done, I spent hours just adjusting one line of code at a time to see what would happen.

Eventually they told us to work from home only, so I did - did a project here and there and then got told they wouldn't keep me on board any longer, stating I was too inexperienced and they didn't have enough work (which was a load of bs) and that I lacked "office experience" whatever the heck that means, I was always sociable and hell I ever cracked people up, kept a neat and orderly list of things that needed doing, I even contrary to most commented on my code, so the next poor sod wouldn't be going through 'try by error' hell that I wen't through.

Either way; I currently have been feeling absolutely wrecked in terms of motivation, that job would've solved my financial situation and allowed me to finally do what I wanted to do. Instead of doing some random dead-end job each week or month, I would've had a steady income and something I could've built on.

But to add some positivism to this endless and too long of a rant... I'm currently going through a boot-camp and doing a small Linux based course on the side, this little thing isn't going to hold me back; yeah it will be tough, but then again most things don't come easy..

Thank you for reading and I hope you have allot and I mean allot more luck on your first job.

It was funny. But when I told the head of my dptmnt that I was getting bored at work they kinda freaked out. I really love my workplace. The people are nice everywhere and this is something I am not used to.
I started working when I was 13 at one of my dad's business. It was a lot of manual labor and every day my hands would be bruised because of all the cleaning and shit I had to do. Then he moved me to another one of his businesses and it was worse but I continued doing it for only 1 year. By 16 I had moved to simpler things, I was a waiter and even tho I hated it I was making enough money to go out on dates and buy whatever a 16 year old wanted. I continued being a waiter until I was 17(changed to two other places) and before I turned 18 I joined the U.S Army. That broke my body in ways that I would normally not believe a 18 year old capable of. It was around the time that I discovered programming but even after I left the military(at 22 I believe) I never worked on a programming job. Back at home I worked in retail. And believe you me....it is far more pleasant to be constantly getting blown up and broken than dealing with the most retarded people imaginable(this is what made me hate Mexican people even tho I am Mexican myself)

Fast forward at 23 and I landed my first programming jobs. As stated in other initial rant it was surrounded by assholes. Assholes everywhere that would cower at the idea of speaking to me face to face due to the possibility of being left as physically broken as I am.

But at 27 now I found myself in a happy place. With nice people, good coworkers, an amazing manager that also serves as eye candy and good benefits. But the job is boring, boring beyond belief and this is due to the fact that they have a self taught and academically trained computer scientist doing the most menial things on a daily basis. The shit that I do would be more becoming of a designer, which has a different set of mental skills that would probably engage them more. But I really don't want to work on the web unless I am doing something that actually takes some challenge, even tho I maintain Java and PHP web services, the shit is so boring that anyone would be able to finish the proceadures in hours on a day leaving one with nothing engaging to do. Sometimes I let shit get close to the deadline just to feel some sort of pressure that would keep me awake.

I just wanted to vent on how ceremoniously BORED i really am.

I want more shit to do. Can't really have much patience for the freelance shit since it doesn't make sense to hire me in exchange of having some indian dude doing it for a quarter of the price.

Why is it that virtually all new languages in the last 25 years or so have a C-like syntax?

- Java wanted to sort-of knock off C++.
- C# wanted to be Java but on Microsoft's proprietary stack instead of SUN's (now Oracle's).
- Several other languages such as Vala, Scala, Swift, etc. do only careful evolution, seemingly so as to not alienate the devs used to previous C-like languages.
- Not to speak of everyone's favourite enemy, JavaScript…
- Then there is ReasonML which is basically an alternate, more C-like, syntax for OCaml, and is then compiled to JavaScript.

Now we're slowly arriving at the meat of this rant: back when I started university, the first semester programming lecture used Scheme, and provided a fine introduction to (functional) programming. Scheme, like other variants of Lisp, is a fine language, very flexible, code is data, data is code, but you get somewhat lost in a sea of parentheses, probably worse than the C-like languages' salad of curly braces. But it was a refreshing change from the likes of C, C++, and Java in terms of approach.

But the real enlightenment came when I read through Okasaki's paper on purely functional data structures. The author uses Standard ML in the paper, and after the initial shock (because it's different than most everything else I had seen), and getting used to the notation, I loved the crisp clarity it brings with almost no ceremony at all!

After looking around a bit, I found that nobody seems to use SML anymore, but there are viable alternatives, depending on your taste:

- Pragmatic programmers can use OCaml, which has immutability by default, and tries to guide the programmer to a functional programming mindset, but can accommodate imperative constructs easily when necessary.
- F# was born as OCaml on .NET but has now evolved into its own great thing with many upsides and very few downsides; I recommend every C# developer should give it a try.
- Somewhat more extreme is Haskell, with its ideology of pure functions and lazy evaluation that makes introducing side effects, I/O, and other imperative constructs rather a pain in the arse, and not quite my piece of cake, but learning it can still help you be a better programmer in whatever language you use on a day-to-day basis.

Anyway, the point is that after working with several of these languages developed out of the original Meta Language, it baffles me how anyone can be happy being a curly-braces-language developer without craving something more succinct and to-the-point. Especially when it comes to JavaScript: all the above mentioned ML-like languages can be compiled to JavaScript, so developing directly in JavaScript should hardly be a necessity.

Obviously these curly-braces languages will still be needed for a long time coming, legacy systems and all—just look at COBOL—, but my point stands.

let RANT = $state(true);

Don't even get me started on frontend engineering right now. It's like the wild wild west out here, with no rules or regulations.

I mean seriously, what is going on with frontend engineering these days? It's like we're stuck in some sort of weird limbo state where nothing seems to make sense and everything is a struggle. And to top it all off, the project I've been working on for the past two years has the same damn issues as an existing codebase that I was hoping to leave behind.

For some reason the npm build runs when container starts. Are you kidding me? Every time I have to restart the app, I have to wait for 30+ minutes just for the damn thing to build. And what's worse, it's not even a complex app. It's a simple frontend for a research website. So why the heck does it take so long to build?

I'll tell you why, because some genius thought it would be a good idea to build the entire codebase every time the container starts. And I have no doubt that this same genius probably thought it would be efficient and time-saving. Well let me tell you, it's neither efficient nor time-saving. It's just plain infuriating.

And don't even get me started on the codebase itself. It's like a labyrinth of tangled and convoluted code (multiple versions of React and now rewriting on Nextjs). Trying to make even the simplest changes feels like unraveling a giant knot (every freaking component have it's only style and everything from React is being used - hooks, Redux, whatever else is popular). And heaven forbid you make a mistake, because then you have to wait another 30 minutes for the whole thing to build and see if your change even worked.

And let's not forget about the old codebase that is still being used, because the new one wasn't ready in time. So we're constantly having to switch back and forth between two different codebases, trying to remember which one has which functionality, and hoping that we don't break anything in the process.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against rewrites. In fact, sometimes they are necessary for a project to move forward. But when frontend engineers can't seem to make up their mind and constantly want to rewrite the code, it's a recipe for disaster.

And don't even get me started on the experience level of the frontend engineers who started this project. Most of them only had 2-3 years of experience (at the time of inception some of them has less than 1 year of experience), and yet they managed to convince management to approve this mess. It's like the blind leading the blind.

But hey, who needs experience and expertise when you have shiny new technologies and frameworks to play with, right? Isn't that what matters most in frontend engineering these days? Keeping up with the latest trends and constantly jumping on the "hype train" without any real understanding of how it will impact the project in the long run.

As a backend engineer (so I kinda don't give a flying freak about frontend) with almost two decades of experience and who was doing frontend with jQuery back in 2005 - that's frustrating and all the inconsistency is literally killing people (a couple of clients literally dropped the contract because of frontend quality).

RANT = false;

PS: why I used Svelte runes? Because some freaking genius suggested to port new (unreleased, only beta version) frontend UI to Svelte 5 because of runes.

It is the time for the proper long personal rant.

Im a fresh student, i started few months ago and the life is going as predicted: badly or even worse...
Before the university i had similar problems but i had them under control (i was able to cope with them and with some dose of "luck" i graduated from high school and managed to get into uni). I thought by leaving the town and starting over i would change myself and give myself a boost to keep going. But things turned out as expected. Currently i waste time everyday playing pc games or if im too stressed to play, i watch yt videos. Few years ago i thought i was addicted, im not. It might be a effect of something greater. I have plans, for countess inventions, projects, personal, for university and others and ALL of them are frozen, stopped, non existant. No motivation. I had few moments when i was motivated but it was short, hours or only minutes. Long term goals dont give me any motivation. They give as much short lived joy, happines as goals in games and other things... (no substance abuse problems, dont worry). I just dont see point of my projects anymore. Im sure that my projects are the only thing that will give me experience and teach me something but... i passed the magic barrier of univercity, all my projects are becoming less and less impressive... TV and other sources show people, briliant people, students, even children that were more succesful than me

if they are better than me why do i even bother? companies care more for them, especialy the prestigious ones, they have all the fame, money, funding, help, gear without question!
of course they hardworked for ther positions, they could had better beggining or worse but only hard work matters right?

As i said. None of my work matters, i worked hard for my whole life, studing, crafting, understanding: programming, multiple launguages, enviorements, proper and most effcient algorithms, electronic circuits, mechanical contraptions. I have knowlege about nearly every machine and i would be able to create nearly everything with just access to those tools and few days worth of practice. (im sort of omnibus, know everything) But because had lived in a small town i didnt have any chances of getting the right equpment. All of my electronical projects are crap. Mechanical projects are made out of scrap. Even when i was in high school, nobody was impressed or if they were they couldnt help me.
Now im at university. My projects are stagnant, mostly because of my mental problems. Even my lifestyle took a big hit. I neglect a lot of things i shouldnt. Of course greg, you should go out with friends! You cant dedicate 100% of your life to science!
I fucking tried. All of them are busy or there are other things that prevent that... So no friends for me. I even tried doing something togheter! Nope, same reasons or in most cases they dont even do anything...
Science clubs? Mostly formal, nobody has time, tools are limited unless you designed you thing before... (i want to learn!, i dont have time to design!), and in addition to that i have to make a recrutment project... => lack of motivation to do shit.

The biggest obstacle is money. Parts require money, you can make your parts but tools are money too. I have enough to live in decent apartment and cook decently as well but not enough to buy shit for projects. (some of them require a lot or knowlege... and nobody is willing to give me the second thing). Ok i found a decent job oppurtunity. C# corporation, very nice location, perfect for me because i have a lot of time, not only i can practice but i can earn for stuff. I have a CV or resume just waiting for my friend to give me the email (long story, we have been to that corp because they had open days and only he has the email to the guy, just a easier way)
But there are issiues with it as well so it is not that easy.

If nobody have noticed im dedicated to the science. Basicly 100% scientist that want to make a world a better place.

I messaged a uni specialist so i hope he will be able to help me.
For long time i have thought that i was normal, parent were neglecting my mental health and i had some situations that didnt have good infuence on me as well. I might have some issiues with my brain as well, 96% of aspargers symptoms match, with other links included. I dont want to say i have it but it is a exciuse for a test. In addition to that i cant CANT stop thinking, i even tried not thinking for few minutes, nope i had to think about something everytime. On top of that my biological timer is flipped. I go to sleep at 5 am and wake up at 5pm (when i dont have lectures).
I prefer working at night, at that time my brain at least works normaly but i dont want to disrupt roommates...
And at the day my brain starts the usual, depression, lack of motivation, other bullshit thing.

I might add something later, that is all for now.

Was at a Saturn (tech store) a while ago, just in the area and browsing a bit, and then this: (see image, thanks C0D4)

This sort of shit happens all the time around here.

There was also my local Karlchens Backstube (bakery and café) where the drive-thru display had a green screen of death; I don't know why they used an insider build of windows. Or windows in general for a fucking DISPLAY SIGN. A FUCKING DISPLAY SIGN WITH JUST A STATIC IMAGE DISPLAYED.
(Image not revant)

Rant over.
Fucking hell.

Short angry rant
What the fuck is wrong with the SalesForce Authenticator logic?! How in the hell do you fuck up a simple 2FA system this hard?!!

Login -> Waiting for Notification... nothing... -> Reload Page -> Login -> Waiting for Notification... nothing -> Click "Use Code instead"... nothing happens... -> Reload Page -> "Login -> don't even wait for notification and just pres "Use Code instead"... nothing -> Reload Page -> Notice there's a "Use Code" button on this page as well -> Finally be able to log into the fucking Aloha piece of shit...

How TF is it, that Duo is able to send me a push notification within 1 second and it ALWAYS works... and THIS FUCKING SHIT NEVER FUCKING WORKS THE FIRST TIME AND AT WORST JUST DOESN'T WORK AT ALL!!!!!

Fucking hell.... Don't offer me a push notification service if you don't know how to make one... jesus fucking christ... All of Salesforce security is fucking stupid, but at least the others mostly work, but this retarded piece of crap is making me actively surprised when it works on first try... Maybe it's because I'm on a slow connection, but again Duo Mobile doesn't have this problem and works *instantly*... so what sort of retarded monkey coded the SF one I don't know, but I hope they are making better products now, because this is a disgrace to programming and security

It's been a while DevRant!

Straight back into it with a rant that no doubt many of us have experienced.

I've been in my current job for a year and a half & accepted the role on lower pay than I normally would as it's in my home town, and jobs in development are scarce.

My background is in Full Stack Development & have a wealth of AWS experience, secure SaaS stacks etc.

My current role is a PHP Systems Developer, a step down from a senior role I was in, but a much bigger company, closer to home, with seemingly a lot more career progression.

My job role/descriptions states the following as desired:

PHP, T-SQL, MySQL, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Jquery, XML

I am also well versed in various JS frameworks, PHP Frameworks, JAVA, C# as well as other things such as:

Xamarin, Unity3D, Vue, React, Ionic, S3, Cognito, ECS, EBS, EC2, RDS, DynamoDB etc etc.

A couple of months in, I took on all of the external web sites/apps, which historically sit with our Marketing department.

This was all over the place, and I brought it into some sort of control. The previous marketing developer hadn't left and AWS access key, so our GitLabs instance was buggered... that's one example of many many many that I had to work out and piece together, above and beyond my job role.

Done with a smile.

Did a handover to the new Marketing Dev, who still avoid certain work, meaning it gets put onto me. I have had a many a conversation with my line manager about how this is above and beyond what I was hired for and he agrees.

For the last 9 months, I have been working on a JAVA application with ML on the back end, completely separate from what the colleagues in my team do daily (tickets, reports, BI, MI etc.) and in a multi-threaded languages doing much more complicated work.

This is a prototype, been in development for 2 years before I go my hands on it. I needed to redo the entire UI, as well as add in soo many new features it was untrue (in 2 years there was no proper requirements gathering).

I was tasked initially with optimising the original code which utilised a single model & controller :o then after the first discussion with the product owner, it was clear they wanted a lot more features adding in, and that no requirement gathering had every been done effectively.

Throughout the last 9 month, arbitrary deadlines have been set, and I have pulled out all the stops, often doing work in my own time without compensation to meet deadlines set by our director (who is under the C-Suite, CEO, CTO etc.)

During this time, it became apparent that they want to take this product to market, and make it as a SaaS solution, so, given my experience, I was excited for this, and have developed quite a robust but high level view of the infrastructure we need, the Lambda / serverless functions/services we would want to set up, how we would use an API gateway and Cognito with custom claims etc etc etc.

Tomorrow, I go to London to speak with a major cloud company (one of the big ones) to discuss potential approaches & ways to stream the data we require etc.

I love this type of work, however, it is 100% so far above my current job role, and the current level (junior/mid level PHP dev at best) of pay we are given is no where near suitable for what I am doing, and have been doing for all this time, proven, consistent work.

Every conversation I have had with my line manager he tells me how I'm his best employee and how he doesn't want to lose me, and how I am worth the pay rise, (carrot dangling maybe?).

Generally I do believe him, as I too have lived in the culture of this company and there is ALOT of technical debt. Especially so with our Director who has no technical background at all.

Appraisal/review time comes around, I put in a request for a pay rise, along with market rates, lots of details, rates sources from multiple places.

As well that, I also had a job offer, and I rejected it despite it being on a lot more money for the same role as my job description (I rejected due to certain things that didn't sit well with me during the interview).

I used this in my review, and stated I had already rejected it as this is where I want to be, but wanted to use this offer as part of my research for market rates for the role I am employed to do, not the one I am doing.

My pay rise, which was only a small one really (5k, we bring in millions) to bring me in line with what is more suitable for my skills in the job I was employed to do alone.

This was rejected due to a period of sickness, despite, having made up ALL that time without compensation as mentioned.

I'm now unsure what to do, as this was rejected by my director, after my line manager agreed it, before it got to the COO etc.

Even though he sits behind me, sees all the work I put in, creates the arbitrary deadlines that I do work without compensation for, because I was sick, I'm not allowed a pay rise (doctors notes etc supplied).

What would you do in this situation?

I think I'm a good developer. I have pretty decent debugging skills, including pulling apart disassembled x86 and other architecture code.

I'm fascinated by how things work.

But almost everything is catered for by a library. Or has already been done.

I find it enjoyable to create a library or program myself, but get disheartened when I find some library or program that is written seemingly very well, compared to my own code. And then I start to think I'm not a good developer after all.

Sort of relates to my previous rant about repeatedly rewriting code.

Applies to me doing programming as a hobby but probably affects my code at work as well... I just can't help but think my code is probably awful compared to what someone else might write.

...then I see incredibly ugly, messy, badly written code by other people and I feel better...

I suppose it is like an artist who sees amazing works but cannot paint to that standard, but is well beyond drawing stick figures with crayons.

Sounds like a trivial problem but it probably impedes my progress with a lot of things.

!rant

Just finished my first game jam officially, it was fun and our game though being not working 100% was well done, we had art people and a sound guy, who btw made some amazing music for the game. A couple of us plan to work on the game after the jam (because we have time) and since it's more of a local jam our deadline for submission is extended until a week after the jam finishes. (Game broke after merge issues :D)

Glad I decided to go and try it out.

Hah but my issue was that moreso my time was spent on getting unity and a git gui or some sort to work on Linux mint, by half way through Saturday I did lol. Also not much for me to do since we had a total of six programmers.

So if I don't get a new laptop for the next game jam, it's setup to work, which is awesome.

Stack Overflow is a great resource for all sorts of programming hints and tips, information and...sadly, desinformation. But if you want to comment on something someone's said you need 50 reputation points. How to achieve that when you need rep points to do anything that could earn you rep points? It's a catch 22 for newcomers that are like totally excluded from any discussions at SO which is more sort of a read-only community to me. This is where devRant shines. Anyone can rant about anything and comment on anyone's rant. Some rants and comments are stupid, and some are great. In the end of the day, freedom of speech is a great thing.

!rant !dev

I was just on my way to work back from the University cafeteria when a guy in a black car - who I thought was moving the car out of a parking lot - stopped the car and asked if I had a second.
Naive me, thinking he might need directions or something decided to listen to him.
He looked older, around 60ish, with sunglasses on ( making it harder for me to read him).
He said that he had a stroke (or something) a few years ago and got damage to his brain, so that sometimes it can happen that he would faint. Therefore, he cannot go swimming unsupervised, and was asking if I would have the time to accompany him to the university lake, so that he could swim for an hour or so. He offered to pay me 40 bucks.
Me, being paranoid af, declined politely, saying I have to go to work ( which was actually true).
He goes on to say how he was a teacher, how he worked at the university before, how I look trustworthy, how I am the first person he asks today, and asked if he could have my number, so that he could call me sometime to supervise the swimming. I would just need to look out for him not to drown and if anything looks weird I should alarm the people working at the lake ( lookouts? not sure what they are called).
I kept declining politely and he backed off, letting me go without any fuzz.
Previously he also mentioned how some students are rich, others are poor, and how he would have done anything for 20 bucks back in the day. But also said that he accepts a no and won't bother me further.

He also mentioned he wouldn't lay a hand on me, that he is not a creep, since I could see his car and license plate, and if I gave him my number, I would also have his. That I shouldn't worry about anything, if I later decided to say no he would delete my number, and that he is not big on the technology and Internet so nothing would happen.

Uhh... well if he was genuine I'm sorry for him, but then you can just ask authorities at the beach to pay more attention to you, no?
Mentioning "all my worries" raised a red flag for me sort of.
Also, if you keep on fainting occasionally, even if you haven't fainted in 2 years, how are you allowed to drive? Or actually, why do you even drive then?
I don't know. The more I think about it, the more I think I should have taken a picture of the car or license plate.
And there are literal services for this kind of thing. Pretty sure you can get one of these if you are willing to pay even.
Jeez now I'm worried for the entire population of my university...

Somebody ranted about his teacher showing windows presentation and teaching nothing. I wanted to comment that post but i have enough material to make the whole rant out of it.

Well at least you have those presentations! In my school we have 2 IT classrooms one with win xp, 1ghz cpu, 0,5gb ram computers and one with win vista, 2 core 2ghz cpu and 2gb of ram PCs.

Guess what room our teacher is using... of course the worse one! The second one is fine, few years ago another theacher had been using it!

I tried to convince him to change rooms but he is coming up with silly exciuses! (like "server is not working here!", well i fixed it with my friend but why are you even talking about it when you are not using yours in old class!)

PS. That server is useless anyway, every pc is connected to router that is connected to internet so supervisor pc is not mandatory, only acces restriction is enforced by win accounts.

I heard from students from my class (that picked that optional IT course) (i'm in high school) that gimp is not working because pc's are so bad!
Sometimes even notepad frezzes.🤔

Not only class is shite but teacher clearly has no idea what is he doing. (in order to pass the final from IT you need to learn simple C++, up to simple foo objects) and of course he isn not even talking about that! On one lesson about sorting algorithms he gave everybody 10 small pieces of paper with numbers on them and told everybody to sort them manualy, because he didnt know how to do it himself! So there is no doubt they wont be able code it.

I need to mention that i volontered to "clean, fix" that classroom (in order to convince teacher to move). And in that class i saw programms written in c++ on every computer! That means somebody was teaching propely before! 😣

I feel sorry for those guys, they are just waisting time. I would fall for it as well but i decided i can learn coding in home ;).
Well, results are shocking, after 1 month of coding i learned C# and i can basicly make any algorithm i ever wish. I learned about computer operation so well that i can nearly teach computer science. (i helped my friend in usa that is a electronic student with that and i'm very proud of it 😁) and it class still can't even use all 3 loops correctly... 😥 Ok i must admit i have been coding for a looooong while so i had time to learn basic c,c++ and pc operations before, but point still stands.

Why the hell are you wasting life of those studends? Why are you giving them a choice to learn coding WHEN YOU CANT EVEN USE PC YOURSELF?! (that it course is optional so you can apply if you want so)

I dont regret not bothering about it.

Just a quick rant on JavaScript,
So there’s a lot of people hating javascript, and while not a long time ago i was part of them, but I changed my opinion a little.

I think JavaScript is a great way to deal with website programming as it is quick and efficient, but I would not say to program directly on it, use a js-compilable language (CoffeScript, TypeScript, Kotlin(I think), etc.), but then you might say: “Well, no need for js then, compile it in byte code”. That would break the point of how I see web design/dev. The main intent behind webpages is to have an easy and fast way to send code to other computers to render them, that’s why it is interpreted: “Easy to send” and “*All* computers can handle it” with the proper browser. You need to be able to change the way the website is rendered and/or works sometimes, for diverse reasons like copy/pasting data, make it render properly or use plugins/add-ons to change that code to suit your needs.

I think js should be kept as a “readable byte-code”, so that means: {

Keep comments when compiling the js-compilable code,

Add standardized machine-readable comments that will indicate to smart code viewers how to show a particular thing (Like have a higher-end function compiled in js shown as a minimized code with explanations of the function)

Keep it nicely formated and don’t obfuscate (coz that’s annoying)

Etc.
}

So you bypass the quirks and all that pesky js stuff, while keeping it’s good sides.

-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-
Part 2:

Web design for non-web:

Ok so things like node.js, electron, react-native and all that stuff; I won’t say they’re bad but...

Why we have this is because web designers wanted to make desktop apps and were like “Hey! Making web pages is easy! Let’s port it to desktop”, the problem is: Web technologies were made to work on a restricted canvas, aka a browser. It’s good on web for reasons mention earlier and more. But it’s not on desktop! You’re trying to push it outside of those boundaries. It’s difficult to make it break that canvas and go outside, make something that really works! For social media clients and that kind of stuff that you want to make a little more inclusive, yes! it’s a great idea (hello devrantron ;), but not if it’s an exact same copy of the website, just use the website. But for things that are supposed to really make use of YOUR computer; no!

I see those PWA (progressive webapps aka mobile app, but it’s an offline website”), I stand for the same positions, social media and those sort of things: yes, great idea! Games? 🤢.

I have way more to say but I have difficulties to remember them while reading, so feel free to comment your thoughts

Lol, “just a quick rant”

//rant

So i ordered myself a web server and am trying to get access to phpmyadmin.
I got generated username and password for the phpmyadmin login.
So i created mysql databases and database users, outside the interface, but that's fucking it, i need to create tables as well, can't do that without the interface, cuz NO ACCESS!

Fucking piece of shit service provider, they had one thing to do and they can't even fucking do it right. How dare they call themselves web hosts at all...

It's probably a badly configured config file but i can't access the file myself to start sorting this shit out, so i got to wait at least 12 hours till work hours to be able to contact with them and sort this shit out.

I think I've reached some kind of job nirvana. My coworkers and I all complain about our work. We're overworked, underappreciated, underpaid, and and have to deal with all sorts of bullshit all the time. Pretty much everyone who has been on the team longer than a year is talking about quitting.

But I started at this company as a level 1 tech support phone technician before I transferred into the DevOps side of things, and that tech support job was SO much worse. Way more stressful, way less pay, mandatory overtime, horrible scheduling, being forced to remain calm while people hurl insults at you over the phone, and it was a dead-end job with a high turnover rate and almost no opportunities for advancement of any kind.

And every time I think back on that job, I realize that what I have now is actually pretty great. I'm paid well (still underpaid for the job I do, but catching up really fast due to my current boss giving me several big raises to keep me from quitting lol). I deal only with other tech people like developers and data scientists so no more listening to salesmen insult me on the phone. I'm not in any sort of customer service role so I can call people on their bullshit as long as I'm professional about it. I'm salaried so they can't make me work horrible shifts. 99% of my days are a normal 9-5 workday. I actually have a reliable schedule to plan around.

People treat me like the adult that I am.

I'd get a similar experience at other, better-paying companies, for sure, but what I have now is still pretty great.

I'm sure I'll be back in a few days to rant about more nonsensical bullshit and stress, but for now I'm feeling the zen.

context: I'm sort of a self-deprecating guy and I really don't look for validation.

So, i decided to fuck it. I tried to provide the best decisions in terms of money-wise/biz-wise but apparently this guys rather choose what he believes is best for the code... (he knows shit of coding and that's coming from someone who is not a software engineer but rather a physicist who happens to code).
So, now i let him make all decisions. no opinion from me. a few things are going to shit because of him... fuck it. i had it. as long as I get paid. fuck him.

this is probably common... sorry for the rant.

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

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

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

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

Multi User, One Account, and other shit

I'm gonna rant about something as a user, and someone who makes stupid web stuff.

My bank has been updating their web banking over time and they decided that every individual on an account, should have their own login. They really want to push this on their users, I suspect specifically folks like me and my wife who share one login for the joint accounts we have at the bank together.

Why share one login, because it's the only sure fire way I know that I and my wife can see all the same shit no doubt about it.

The banks never tell you what you can see or can't with joint accounts, I doubt it is even documented on their end, but in every damn case something is hidden or different in some weird way.

Messages to the bank people? If I send it, my wife often can't. I get that for security reasons that's a thing, but it makes no sense for a joint account.

ANY difference to me breaks online banking ENTIRELY. Joint accounts are supposed to be... well one account that is the same.

Other banks we used where we had different logins for the joint account, each login actually had separate bill pay accounts per user. So if I went to bill pay and scheduled something to be paid, my wife had no idea, same if she did.

Right fucking there, banking is just broken entirely!

So no Mr. Bank, fuck you we're both logging in via the same login.

Fast forward to N00bPancakes making a thing.

So my employer has a customer (Direct Customer). Direct Customer wants a thing that makes communication with their customer (Indirect Customer) easier.

The worst thing about making something for your customer's customer is that Direct Customer always imagines that Indirect Customer is gonna be super ninja power users....

But no, that's not the case... in fact almost nobody is a power user, and absolutely nobody WANTS to be a power users.

Worse yet in my case the only reason this tool exists is because Direct Customer and Indirect Customer can't communicate well enough anyway... that should tell you something about the amount of effort Indirect Customer is willing to expend.

So with that tool, this situation constantly comes up:

Direct Customer thinks it would be great if every user from Indirect Company had some sort of custom messaging, views, and etc in of Cool Communication Tool. The reason is because that's what Direct Customer loves about Ultra Complex Primary Tool that they use ....

Then I have to fight the constant fight of:

NOBODY WANTS TO BE A POWER USER, NOBODY EVEN WANTS TO DO MUCH OF ANYTHING ON THE INTERNET THAT ISN'T SCREAMING AT OTHER PEOPLE OR POST MEMES OR WATCH SHITTY VIDEOS. THE MOMENT ANYONE AT INDIRECT COMPANY LOGS IN AND SEES ANY INFO THAT IS DIFFERENT FROM THEIR COWORKER THEY'LL SHIT THEMSELVES, FLOOD EVERYONE WITH 'OH GAWD SOME NON SPECIFIED THING IS WRONG' AND RESPOND TO EMAILS LIKE A JELLYFISH DROPPED OFF IN NEW MEXICO... AND NOTHING WILL GET DONE!!!

God damn it people.

Also side rant while I'm busy fighting the good fight to keep shit simple and etc:

People bitch about how horrible the modern web is and then bitch at web devs like we're rulers of the internet or something.... What really pisses me off about that is other devs who do that.... like bro, do you make policy at your company? You decide not to sell some info or whatever shit your company sells? Like fuck off with your 'man I miss html' because you got scared by some shitty JS error and ran back to your language of choice and just poked your head out of the the basement and got scared... and you shit on another developer about that? Fuck you.

Ugh time for my first google chrome rant... thing...

Ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, finished an arch linux install, fixed my slow internet connection in linux, installed only the things I need, vs code and google chrome but fuck me!

Google chromes performance is sinking like a rock, dropping about 25-40% of frames in youtube, slow page loading and the sort.

Installed firefox to ensure it wasn't my system and its all running perfect, I don't like using firefox and want to go back to the warmth of chrome, anyone able to help on this one :-(

@dfox New excellent algo sort makes lots of old threads bumb which means better notifications is suddenly more important.

I'm wishing for notifications grouped per thread and with a line or two of the rant/comment the notifications is about.

Just signed up for this site, took me three minutes to figure out how to post a rant.

Do the designers know what a call to action is? Where in this screenshot tells me "post a rant here" or "click here to write your first" or "new rant" or even a plus symbol, pencil, paper, or any sort of symbology?

Nope. It's in a vague, almost invisible menu with a symbol of three dots that usually means "things you don't normally use might be in here". The main function of the site. Tucked away where nobody can see it.

Bad UX has no excuse in 2020.

My Gripe With Implicit Returns

In my experience I've found that wherever possible code should be WYSIWYG in terms of the effects per statement. Intent and the effects thereof should always be explicit per statement, not implicit, otherwise effects not intended will eventually slip in, and be missed.
It's hard to catch, and fix the effects of a statement intent where the statement in question is *implicit* because the effect is a *byproduct* of another statement.

Worse still, this sort of design encourages 'pyramid coding recursion hell', where some users will first decompose their program into respective scopes, and then return and compose them..atomically as possible, meaning execution flow becomes distorted, run time state becomes dependent not on obvious plain-at-sight code, but on the run time state itself. This I've found is a symptom of people who have spent too much time with LISP or other eye-stabbingly fucky abominations. Finally implicit returns encourage a form of thinking where programmers attempt to write code that 'just works' without thinking about how it *looks* or reads. The problem with opaque-programming is that while it may or may not be effortless, much more time is spent in reading, debugging, understanding, and maintaining code than is spent writing it--which is obviously problematic if we have a bunch of invisible returns everywhere, which requires new developers reading it to stop each and every time to decide whether to mentally 'insert' a return statement.

This really isn't a rant, as much as an old bitter gripe from the guy that got stuck with the job of debugging. And admittedly I've admired lisp from afar, but I didn't want to catch the "everything is functional, DOWN WITH THE STATE" fever, I'm no radical.

Just god damn, think of the future programmer who may have to read your code eventually.

@dfox, is there a "@everyone" sort of function that mentions everyone who commented on a particular rant?

!rant
Back to my old true self ~ ^^
(except now I have a yellow background, what looks like some sort of beverage, and a slightly darker skin because the Sun is a deadly lazer).

(I changed my avatar hours ago, already, but I couldn't rant about it then because of the 2h cooldown, so yeeeaah)

G'day lads and lass',

Just jumping in as I seem to have been inactive for a few weeks and thought I'd update those who care, things have sort of taken a steep fall down when it comes to programming, seem to have fallen into a bit of a depression with it as every time I get the urge to do anything, by the time I actually start; I've already just lost interest and have no motivation anymore, so in light I'm taking another break from most things dev related (Might start some super minor and bullshit projects that'll probably be abandoned on github after like 5 commits)

But on the other side things have never been better, just about to finalise purchasing a block of land start building my first house with my fiance and my job has been secured after 6 months of probation, starting to gain traction with starting up my food business and seem to have a lot less 'real life' stress on my shoulders.

That being said I probably will still browse dev rant on the occasion but don't expect anymore half assed rants from me for a fair while..

Plan on throwing some of my already abandoned projects on github for anyone who might want to start picking up the pieces and finish what I never could.

(Don't worry Jilano, I'll never stop wearing the flanny and will still always have a beer in one hand, I'm not going anywhere mate)

!rant

So I'm looking for advice.
I'm 16 and I'd like to eventually work at some sort of tech startup, probably doing something like web development as that's what I've done the most of. I have been teaching myself and practicing programming for years and have experience with HTML, CSS, JS, NodeJS, Socket.io etc. but don't necessarily have a lot of experience with some necessary frameworks such as ReactJS or AngularJS, so I couldn't really apply for any of the job listings I've seen so far. I currently work in retail so it's possible that I could work somewhere such as an Apple Store.

What's the best next step? Is a university course the right option or should I be trying to find something such as work experience?

If you got to the end, thanks for reading my long winded and badly written post. Looking forward to hearing the advice of some fellow devs.

if (rant !== story)
System.out.println("Dev rant story time")

A coworker mentioned to me that I might have depression as part of my personality. They think this because I always feel at my best when I'm being active/productive (programming) or doing meditation practice. I thought that was strange.

Bit of a brief background, I've had depression since I was about 12 and I still get small bouts of it into my late 20's. I've been on antidepressiants for a very short time and I've been through talk therapy multiple times. It was a lot worse then it is now and I believed I have it under control.

My coworker thinks that I ended up dealing with it for so long that it has become a part of my personality so I don't notice it actively. The whole thing has left me sort of, I don't know, jaded. Or maybe just afraid that it could be true?

I thought about how I have a very all or nothing attitude in life. I don't think about getting a house because I don't put too much faith in myself towards having a family. Or how I have to make very radical changes to my life immediately if something starts triggering the new depressive episode. If I can't code or read at night I'll hope in the car and drive with no destination in mind for several hours just to keep my mind at ease.

I don't know. It sorta upsets me because I always thought of depression as something you need to "get out of", but now I wonder if my case was severe enough that I've adapted my life around it.

!dev

So last week I sort of unfriended a friend from college that i guess is more like a "chat buddy". After college we've never hung out. Part of it maybe because I'm deaf so there's a communication barrier, I lost most college "friends" after that... but then are they really friends?

The reason was though, he talks to me every night (usually 1-2 hrs online chatting on and off), we do have some laughs but recently he's been complaining about his year end bonus, how it's not enough. And also about how he deserves to match with better girls than the ones he's getting now. He's on those online dating sites and went out with a few. And he's been on a few dates but with my looks and health issues, online dating is pretty much useless. He was the only reason I even tried

He makes twice as much as me already but "he comes from a poor background" so he needs more. Honestly I make enough, but the job isn''t great (not really learning anything new, lot's of things that could be better... obviously) but it's very flexible and near where I now live... should I even choose to go into the office (I sort of work remotely from the rest of the team).

I probably haven't spoken too him for a week now and I don't feel problems, frees up more time but wondering if I sort of withdrawing/unanchored from reality and ignoring problems, settling for less.

Nowadays it really feels like, when I'm in my own apartment or just alone, I'm in my own world, I can do whatever I want... thought most of the time is spent with my devices... so I'm not sure though if that's good or not... Am I a Bachelor or a hermit?

Now i've been rambling for the last 1hr and have no idea what I wanted to say.... guess I just needed to rant...

Ah I remember now sorta... Is this relationship worth keeping or should I find new friends that are more similar to me?

Maybe I've been moving in the wrong direction in life... I shouldn't do things the normal way... Think about what's actually important to me/people like me... not what what everyone normally does...

So since starting my new role I have had nothing to rant about. That changed today.

HR waited til one day past payroll cut off to issue my paperwork. Meaning I get paid at my old rate this month and then get back pay in my November pay slip.

Those mother cunting bastards waited one day extra to screw me for the whole month.

I've been waiting since the end of September for these twat monkeys to get off their rotting arses and sort this and they do it one day late.

It's a good job that I don't know where they are located, nothing good would be waiting for them if I did.

Edit:

As this got cut from the tags:

HR please kindly go find a rotting puss filled dick and shove it up your lazy fucking arse you pitiful wastes of human meat bags.

I see Amazon taking a lot of flak and being called a monopoly, but they aren't. Sure, Amazon sells branded items, but the majority of items are sold by small mom-and-pop businesses that have access to markets that they would not have without Amazon. Case in point, I've ordered items that have come not just from the US, where in live, but Europe and Asia. I just ordered some 4711 cologne, and was sort of expecting that it would come from Germany. Nope, it's coming from a small seller in Japan. Amazon is a global equalizer that enables people from all over the world to sell to people from all over the world. The politicians messing with that are going to remove that ability, and we will all be the poorer for it. Maybe this is a rant after all.

My family literally knows nothing about development, programming, computer science. It's bad. The closest anyone in my family has come to understanding is a distant cousin, who is an IT lead in Healthcare. His mother told him to call me because some fucking piece of shit at his job purposefully mucked up an internal ASP.net app on his way out. Sure, I had nothing better to do than to phone debug your shitty app with zero context. Great.

My wife is the one who comes closest to understanding in my immediate family* but even she admits when I come home ranting that she has absolutely zero idea what I'm saying.

It great though because I get to use her as a living rubber duck that just stares at me with a blank expression. Then at the end of describing a complex problem I'm trying to sort out she just replies with some encouraging thing like, "I'm certain you'll figure it out."

Fuck this is a long rant. Sorry. I better get back to work.

Not a rant but sort of a rant.

Getting REAL fucking tired of the corporate rat race.

Thought Bubble ...

{If I quit this stupid job I could do freelance sites}

Then I realized that I have no idea what skill set it takes to be a freelance developer. I only know my one little corner. Once I commit my code it goes off down the assembly line for others to worry about testing, deployment, hosting, security and other things I have no idea about.

So tell me freelancers, is the grass greener? What additonal skills do you have to have the us enterprise folks would have no idea about?

Or are you making huge bucks where you overcharge for Wix sites that do not suck?

Was talking to a friend of mine and he was very expressive about companies (Especially tech companies) just wanting money...

Turned to him and said that wasn't true because if it was Motorola would make a gen 3 of the Moto 360...

(This is sort of a mini rant for me because they are too busy copying the iphone design instead of giving the people what they want and will earn them a shit tonne of money)

I'm going to build a PC. Everything is done besides of the GPU.

I wanted to go full team red, but it turns out that the RX 5700 XT has a lot of driver issues.
I watched a hell lot of YouTube videos, benchmarks, forum posts, reddit, ...
Everyone is complaining about driver issues that haven't been fixed since the launch of the product.

That makes me want to go to team green and buy the NVIDIA 2070 SUPER GPU.

I post this as some sort of rant, but also as some sort of advice seeking post to double check my decision before I buy the 2070 SUPER.

**random rant**

So next week I have a technical interview with TripleByte and I'm supposed to spent the next 2 days sorta preparing. Just woke up and had this thought tho:

What's the point? Yes I think I could try to get a better job but been trying for years (banking tech area) but now it feels like I'm at a "local optimum" sort of a sweet spot. Team/company could be smarter/more efficient but...

I've got my own place in a city that's also near NYC. It takes me 20 minutes to get to my current office, fairly flexible with the 9-5 work day, I can work remotely. I get enough money.

And then finding a new job === technical interviews about stuff you will rarely use and usually with no feedback like a pass-fail test where they only tell you if you pass or fail (and for me it always feels skewed towards fail the moment i walk since I'm deaf).

But at this point, I feel more like "you need to convince me to work for you". In my head, the plan is mostly to just have a nice chat and wing the technical questions just to see how good i am without any prep (i.e. poring thru Cracking the Coding Interview or Big O concepts, sorting...).

!rant

You know, I sort of hope that open-plan offices become illegal after this Corona crisis.

We all know most companies don't give a flying fuck about the productivity, opinion or wellbeing of their "lowly work force". OTOH maybe, just maybe, do politicians care about lowering the risk of such a pandemic repeating. Pass some laws for reasonable working conditions already!

Another rant got me thinking about this.

There must be plenty of us on here who have worked as part of or with a customer support department at some point in our careers.

What is the stupidest idea you've ever heard with regards to support?

To start things off my last place had problems with support, over worked, under staffed and expected to support 12+ versions of the same software, some clients were running installations over 15 years old without ever having applied an upgrade.

The management decided that they would get rid of the conventional triage system for tickets, you know the sort priority 1 would be system down etc.

Instead we had to log tickets at whatever priority the client said it was. Customer report written by the client has a spelling mistake? Yep that's a P1.

Client wants to change the colour of their menu? Yep P1

As you can imagine that went down like a shit sandwich

I actually do have something to rant about!

The people I've decided to work with... are complete and utter fools. They don't want to keep updated with new practices and merely talk about awesome stuff... Let me elaborate.

The first person is someone I spent really many hours just writing with, I've helped him build on his personal project, which has now become our project (which I've done most of the work on now). He keeps writing about things that aren't fucking relevant for the current task - furthermore, he completely refuses to use any type of collaboration software in order to keep an eye on tasks we want to, and already have completed. He likes Git but doesn't provide helpful git messages, sometimes even stuff like 'forgot this'.. never any freaking description of what's actually been done! Not even after agreeing it should be done, he just doesn't understand what a helpful message is apparently.
I might be a bit special regarding wanting to follow practices, but how the fuck do you make any amount of money by being so ignorant!? He was a WP 'developer' a while ago, and has since changed to JS and are using a framework which he doesn't understand - he can't even remember what the documentation states.

So why do I 'work' with him? He knows a lot of phrases he's read in books, blogs, and the likes. That makes him really inspirational and positive and he really wants to become successful(like me!). But over the last few months, I've realized how bad he is at programming - he doesn't know basic programming concepts and have a hard time applying any sort of knowledge to his programming. If it's not pre-built, he can't use it, not even if the documentation has specific examples. He barely grasps the concept of binding data to a variable. He wouldn't know how to access it again though, it's just for the sake of binding it to some existing functionality.

The other guy really likes his old style. He hired me to maintain some application. Which has turned out to be a hell of several small tasks he needs to be finished or reworked - with no clear definition of the task. Most of the time, he'll do some initial changes, show the changes to me, vaguely explain what they do (not what he's trying to achieve) and first THEN ask me to do these changes, most often in some files that don't exist (he uses the wrong filenames so I have to guess/ask where the changes need to be made).
To top it all off, old syntax is used and don't get me started on the spaces+tabs for indenting lines... Because I've already added a great ESLint+Prettier conf and everything should be nicely formatted according to pre-defined rules.
But he won't take the time to install some plugins in his editor and I'm left with sometimes buggy, badly formatted code (the code I have to make changes with!) - that's while he several times have agreed that I can do what I want and that he even questions his own ways when looking at my changes which he calls by-the-book.
So why the motherfucking fuck do I keep working with him?

Well, he keeps paying so that's really nice - I haven't been able to properly execute the bigger tasks(which pays more) though, due to a lack of information or some badly written code I couldn't quite figure out how works (at a glance).

He also keeps talking about these new projects he wants to make.. he even has these freaking papers with descriptions and data-structures and we converse really good about these new awesome projects. He also likes cryptocurrencies(which is an interest of mine he has inflamed quite a bit) and lastly, he seems like a genuinely nice guy who I'd like to spend some time with even besides coding and work.

So now I stand here - stuck with people that make me feel like a demi-god or something because I use a git style-guide and ESLint+Prettier with the Airbnb style-guide.

What should I do? I'd really like some remote work and have a desperate need for money... So much so, that I might even have to pick up a fulltime job, in order to save my sorry ass - all because I like speaking with people who just like the thought of programming...

I'm actually quite lonely with my thoughts and they are the two only people I've had some sort of relationship with - who has an invested interest in programming/dev... I really like that, despite having to follow their thoughts as they surely can't follow mine.

Please be my friend or give me some paid work lol.

Also, I've been moving the last couple weeks - those weeks has been the most stressful of my life and have not contributed to my overall wellbeing and relations with people... It's good to be back at the computer again and be reading some devRant though!

Today I had to spend the whole day fixing a stupid bug in a legacy application in a completely different tech stack than I'm used to...

At my company we have an Internet application running where we can upload a word document and using some mailmerge variables magic, can set those vars and receive the personalised word doc back...

Now this is great, when it's working, and is used in various projects we have up and running... Suddenly the application decides to crap out for no apparent reason and guess who drew the short straw....

Anyhow I ask our sys admin for the password to the server, I remote desktop to it, turns out its a fucking Windows 2008 server...

But wait it gets better, the application, a shoddy mess of c# code, is not under any sort of version control, has to be developed on that same server and to top it all of, I have to follow some obscure barely documented deployment precedure to get my changes live....

So after a lot of cursing on the dev (not working at the company any more) who did the original setup, and hours of painstakingly piecing together how it works and what went wrong and how to fix it, I finally managed to get it working....

After this rant, I'm mailing my technical lead about this in the hopes we can get someone to do it right (yes, I'm that naive)

I guess it's a sort of a mix of depression and burnout right now. I want to do nothing and I am constantly procrastinating. Also, very frequent sleepiness.

PS: was going to post in rants, but it's sort of random stuff rather than a rant.

Im having a sort of dilema. I recently started taking freelance work for web developement (and design ack) and Im uncomfortable with the state of the industry. Ill explain: Say if I bid a client for a simple 1-3 page site w contact form (a new page, not migration) My suggestion is to use djangocms, django, or just static html/css/js (ie bootstrap), which produces clean, fairly secure, and fast sites. Of course I can throw a templated unoriginal wordpress site together in a few hours 2 days latest, so I offer that option as a sidenote on the bid, charging almost 2x more. For some reason I dont understand they choose the wp shitshow. I explain all the reasons that not the way to go( which I wont list, if u dont know, u never used it. google up) but they dont care abt the details, they rather pay more for shit job. OFC I reluctantly deliver what they want, but as a result my portfolio is full of unoriginal shit Im not happy showing off. I have a few sites Ive done on the side my prefered way, but they not deployed and sit in my github for all intents n purposes unviewable to potential clients.
I want to be proud of my portfolio, and it to be a representation of what Im capable of. BUT, I gotta eat, and work is better than no work.

There are so many "wordpress designers" oversaturaring the field and it lowering the overall standard of what we are capable of. I just begining my dev journey, but if I cant have a body of work Im proud of, theres no way I can see doing this the rest of my life, and that makes me really sad. My love of developing, coding, and IT/computers in general drove me to change careers from audio engineering to web development, and the fact that this fucking mr. potatoe head of a CMS is slowly turning that love into hate really pisses me off. So Im ending this !rant looking for hope.
Your thoughts?

!rant
Question: If you are making an API for your Android App. Let say you have total of 50 rows currently and you have to sort a table column by price in ASC order.

Will you do the sorting in the Android App or Server side?

So I wonder if anybody on here has ever come across the LG G3 flickering screen issue.

I bought a LG G3 about 2 years ago. Fantastic phone.. Until all the issues started appearing.
First of all, the glass started lifting off on the left side of the phone, exposing the backlight layer, because the phone somehow managed to bend (insert iphone joke) inside my pocket. I was okay with it since it was a minor visual thing and didn't affect anything.
About 6 months ago the phone started lagging like crazy, and it kept getting worse and worse. It's so bad right now that Twitter will rarely fullscreen images, apps crash all the time, and occasionally the phone freezes to the point where it won't even react to the lock button.
About 2 weeks ago I started getting messages that my sim card was removed, and the phone starts rebooting itself. This would sometimes happen 10 times a day.
I was already pissed at all of these issues and in a desperate need of a new phone, but on Sunday a brand new issue appeared!
The phone's display randomly shut off, then wouldn't want to turn on, and occasionally turn on just to fade out or flicker away.
I of course went to google to see if anybody else has this issue... And it turns out that youtube is full of videos about it. Apparently the overheating issue these phones have slowly ruins the solder on the chips, which in turn creates a poor connection and causes these issues. The only way to solve it seems to be to reflow the chip, but others that tested that only got it to work for around 2 weeks before the issues started reappearing. I haven't tested it myself yet, but after disassembling, fucking around with it, and putting it all back together 3 times I sort of got it to work to the point where I can use it for several minuted before the displays fails. While writing this rant the display only quit on me once at the very beginning.

What I'm wondering is, why is it that nobody at LG decided to address the heating issue by perhaps throttling the CPU more? And I heard the G3 isn't the only LG phone with these issues?
This crap made me lose all my trust in the company. I wanted to upgrade to a G6 or V30, but because of this crap I think my next phone might be a Xiaomi.

This rant is now so long that it's barely even a rant or on topic. I think I should end it here since I have nothing more to say other than the LG G3 is a beautiful but crap phone, oh, and the new iPhone 8 is a flop

Can there be a happy rant?

This is going to be a bit of a rambling semi coherent story here:

So this customer who just doesn't know what their data schema is or how they use it (they're a conglomeration of companies so maybe you get how that works out in a database). For every record there's like a ton of reference number type things mapped all over the DB to fit each companies needs needs.

To each company the data means something different, they use the data differently, and despite their claims otherwise, I think there are some logical conflicts in there regarding things like "This widget is owned by company A, division B, user C.". I'm also pretty sure different companies actually don't agree on who owns what... but when I show them they just sort of dance around what they've said in the past...

So I write a report (just an SQL query that outputs ... somewhere ... I mean what isn't that?) that tells them about all the things that happened given X, Y, Z.

Then every damn morning they'd get all up in arms about how some things are 'missing' but sometimes they don't know what or why because they've no clue what the underlying data actually is / their own people don't enter the data in a consistent way. (garbage in garbage out man...)

So I've struggled with this for a few weeks and been really frustrated. Every morning when I'm trying to do something else ... emails about how something isn't working / missing.

In the meantime I'm also frustrated by inquiries about "hey this is just a simple report right?" (to be clear folks asking that aren't being jerks, and they're not wrong ... it really should be simple)

Anyway my boss being the good guy he is offers to take it over, so I can do some things. Also sometimes it helps just to have someone else own something / not just look it over.

So a few days into this.... yup, emails coming in about things 'missing' or 'wrong' every day.

Like it sucks, but it's nice to see it suck for someone else too as validation.

Maxi-Rant, rest in the first comment!

Yay, I've caught up with my "watch later" list on YouTube! Next thing: Just quickly go through my subscribed channels and add old videos that I haven't seen yet to the watch later list so that I have more stuff to watch the next months. The easiest way to do that is to go to the "all uploads" playlist of the channel (that is luckily always linked now, it used to be hidden sometimes) and use "add all to" to get them on my playlist. Then sort out the stuff that I've already seen and turn on automatic sorting by date, easy. Yeah...
Firstly, in the new design there's no "add all to", I have to go to the old design. For my own playlists, there's a handy "edit" button to do that, but on other pages I have to do it manually. Luckily I have set Ctrl+Shift+1 as a shortcut for "&disable_polymer=true" long ago.
Next surprise: On "all uploads" playlists, there is no "add all to" button. It's on every single other playlist on YouTube, including "liked", "watch later", "favourites" and so on, just not there.
Fine, I'll just abuse my subscription playlist script that I already have by making a copy of it, putting the channel IDs in it and setting the last execution date to 1.1.2001. Little problem with that: Google apps scripts can run for at most 5 minutes and the YouTube API restricts it to add one video per second. So it doesn't work for more than 300 videos. I could now try to split it up by dates, but I didn't write the script myself and I don't know how it sorts the videos to add, so I'll just google for another solution instead.
Found one: Go to the video overview of the channel in the old layout, Ctrl+Shift+I, paste this little Javascript thing and it automatically clicks all the little clocks that add the video to the watch later list. Yay, that works! Ok, i'm restricted to 5000 videos, because that's the maximum size of a YouTube playlist, so I can't immediately add all 8000+, but whatever, that's a minor problem and I'll sort out later anyway. Still another little problem: For some reason I can't automatically sort the watch later list. Because that would be too easy.
But whatever, I'll just use "add all to" from there to add it to my creatively named "WL" list. If that thing is restricted by the same rate limit of 1 video per second, it should be done in about 1½ hours. A bit long, but hey, I'm dealing with 5000 videos. Waiting 2 hours... Waiting 3 hours... Nothing happens. It would be nice if it at least added them one by one, but no, it waits an eternity and then adds all at once. At least in theory, right now it does absolutely nothing.
Shortly considered running it for more hours or even days on my Raspberry Pi, but that thing already struggles when using Chromium normally, I shouldn't bother it with anything that has to do with 5000 videos.
Ok, what else can I do then? Googling, trying out different things, mainly external services that have their own concept of "playlists" and can then add them to an arbitrary playlist later...
Even tried writing my own Java program with the YouTube API, but after about an hour not even the example program in the YouTube API tutorial worked (50 errors and even more open questions, woohoo), so I discarded that idea.
Then I discovered "DiskYT". Everything looked like it would work and I'm still convinced that I can do it with that little pile of shit. Why is it a pile of shit? Well, for example the site reloads itself after a while, so it can at most add 700 videos to a playlist. Also I can't just paste the channel link (even though it recognises those links, but just to show an error message that it can't copy from channels). I can't enter/paste URLs, I have to drag them. The site saves absolutely nothing (should in theory work, but in practise it doesn't), so I have to re-drag everything on every try. In one network, the "authorise YouTube" button (that I have to press again on every computer) does absolutely nothing ("inspect" reveals that there isn't even any action bound to the button), in another network the page mostly doesn't work at all or the button to copy from playlists is suddenly gone or other weird stuff. Luckily I have the WiFi at home, there it works in theory. But just on my desktop PC, no other device, wow. I tried to run it on my new laptop, but it's so new that it still has the preinstalled OS and there I can't deactivate going to standby when closing the laptop, so while I expected it to add 5000 videos, it instead added 4 and went to standby. But doesn't matter, because it would have failed at about 700 anyway. Every time I try to use this website, I get new problems, but it seems to still be the best option, because everything else just doesn't do anything. This page at least got to 700 before.

Continuing in first comment!

!dev, just rant

what the fuck is wrong with these people. yesterday i wrote him if we can meet to sort out my medication, no response,
ok, normal.

this morning he writes me "i wasn't home yesterday, i am today".
wow, actually a a proactive and early info! that's... unusual.
so i go "hmm, maybe even right now?"
he's like "no, sometime from 14:00 or 14:30"
ok.

so i wait until 15:00 to give him a bit of extra time, i hate rushing people. "so can i stop by?"
he's like "i'm going out in a short while, i'll let you know"
okay.
i hate these "bind a listener to me and wait until i ping you", but okay short while is fine.
so I wait. for half an hour. I mean... i'm bad with time management, but even I don't call half an hour a "short while" anymore. so I'm like okay, I think I know where he's gonna tell me to meet, it's gonna take me about 10 minutes to get there, they tend to be impatient so if if start walking there, by the time i get there he's gonna write me to come, and i'll already be there so he won't have to wait for me, because surely even for him "a short while" can't be more than 45 minutes.

so i get there, wait for 5 minutes... 10 minutes...
so i write him again "approx how much longer? i'm waiting nearby".

and he's like "i didn't call you, i have no idea why you came here, who told you to"

so i tell him "okay, sorry, i'm gonna get myself not nearby and wait there, i thought by the time i get here you're gonna call me anyway, sorry"

nothing.

i wait for half an hour more.
then (two and half hours after he said he's gonna go out "in a short while" and he'll let me know. at the same time 5 hours after the time he said he's gonna be available from), i write him: "so will we actually manage to sort this out today?"

no answer. most likely for the rest of the day.

what the fuck is so difficult about conveying actual information in communication? what the fuck is so difficult about a single fuckin message "at this time, at this place", so i can just be there, he can intersect his route through there, and in a literal minute we're sorted out? instead of fuckin nothingmessages which waste me three hours and make me have to bother him to at least have a chance at getting an idea what the fuck is going on, and him being annoyed at me trying to cover for his fuckin inability to do it like any other sane dude, with one fuckin message in the fuckin form of "this time, this place", which would fuckin sort out the whole thing in two messages and 5 minutes net time invested into the whole thing by both sides, instead of fuckin 3 hours?

fuck.
i miss my old dude.

!rant. Story:

There are a lot of things I would like to do, but the lack of enough money makes it hard.

My goals are to become more active on YouTube, find clients and hold them, try to learn how to sell products convincingly, become better at web design, understand university-level mathematics, leave Germany (one particular reason for this is the need of the redundant imprint), help people around the world, become more fit bodywise (by doing e.g. swimming, jogging and going to the gym), eat healthy and drink a lot of water, work on my emotional intelligence, learn peoples' behaviours and why they do what they do, write my own book, finally start practicing yoga and muay thai, live on my own, make a world tour for a year, learn the skill of powered paragliding, getting the license for powered paragliding, glide with a powered paraglider the whole day, build a house in the woods, create my own satellite and launch it, develop new things (like building some sort of vehicle that can fly in a special way), learn about biology, chemistry, physics (I hate it, but I believe in the power of what is going to happen once you learn it), become more aware of what is happening, live on the streets with no money to learn the ability to survive in more extreme situations, learn how to use guns, bombs, snipers and knifes properly (don't assume that I am a terrorist now haha, I am just interested in that type of stuff. That's all to it) ...

But all of that, obviously, not in 2020. More like within 10 years.

!rant
C++ / OOP QUESTION

I have a uni assignment / project (Data Structures class), where I have to implement the ins-n-outs of 1D arrays, by creating a dynamically allocated array class, which can accept any type of data (using templates). But there's a problem.

I'd like to implement sorting the elements of the array. But given the fact, that I'm using templates, I cannot treat the elements as integers, nor as strings, or other types...
Also, let's say that the elements of the array are elements of class T, where T looks like this:

class T {
private:
double height;
int age;
string name;
public:
double getH() { return height; }
int getAge() { return age; }
string getName() { return name; }
};

(It's just a random example, pls don't judge for code quality...)

Let's say that I'd like to sort the T elements based on height, print out, sort by age, print out, then sort by name and print out. How can I do this? Is this possible?

First let me start this rant by saying: Don't use SharePoint lists as your primary data store if you can avoid it. You're gonna have a bad time.

My coworkers and I work on a system where we need to pull tons of data down from a SharePoint site and run various algorithms and operations on it. Generate reports, that sort of thing. This is all done in the browser using a Typescript React SPFX webpart. Basically using SharePoint as a DB/DAL.

Because of the sheer amount of data we end up pulling down (our system in production is the single source of truth for one of the largest companies in Canada, and they're currently building a pipeline as we speak), in order to maintain a reasonable speed while using it, we have some pretty intense caching logic implemented, logic that ensures we get new items when new items are detected, and merges changes to already exisiting objects. It's pretty brilliant, and that's before we even consider the custom paging that my coworker implemented in order to get around the IndexedDB max size of 100MB.

Well that's all well and good, and works great in production, but it is a horror to work with. Because EVERYTHING we touch on the server is cached locally, it can be IMPOSSIBLE to detect data anomalies, be they local or server side -.- You don't know how many hours I have completely WASTED fixing a "bug" that didn't really exist... Just incorrect data in the cache

This is more of a story than an actual rant, but here it goes.

I was at my class and we were doing a small introduction about JavaScript. Our teacher tells us to build a small website using buttons and text boxes in order to make a calculator. He then says that, afterwards, we must copy and paste a segment of JavaScript code which he supplied on the PDF file (our teacher uses PDF files as some sort of worksheets).

I paste his code correctly on my HTML document and I try to test it. On the first box, I put 10, and on the second box, I also put 10. I was expecting that in the result box there would appear 20, but, to my surprise, nothing happened.

Instead of asking my teacher what was wrong, I decided to pay a visit to my good old friend Stack Overflow and I learned how to use getElementById().

I had some experience with coding earlier so I just sorted myself out. When my teacher comes to check my work, I said that his code wasn't working so I googled a solution and eventually came up with one.

He said: "Well, that's weird. That code is right, at least it worked for me."

I outsmarted my teacher.

I also realised why there are so much "it worked on my machine" jokes.

Just need to vent out a bit. There's already been a few times at work where the senior developer asks me why I take so long to do something, and I'm unable to fully explain why.

Now, I could think of several reasons. Maybe it's my lack of experience; I just start researching on Google for solutions, start putting things together, and then I guess things start to get too complicated for me to be able to explain clearly. Maybe I end up "over-engineering" to solve problems that could be solved in a simpler way.

And this leads to my second reason, and that is there's no code review going on. I've wanted to just tell him, "If you'd just take a long look at my code, you'd understand why it's taking me so long! So you can tell me if I'm doing it right or wrong, or if I'm making it too complicated!" But, of course, being the junior developer, I also think that when he's explaining how to do something, I'm just not understanding it right.

I could ask for clarifications, and believe I've done that on some things, but my third reason is that he's just not good at explaining things, or that there's some miscommunication happening. English isn't his first language. His English is ok, but I know there's a lot of room for improvement. I also notice that our other co-workers are also having a bit of a hard time but it seems they already developed some sort of adaptation to communicate with him.

So yeah, there's my rant, and I'd love to know everyone's input on this.

!rant
Experienced devs please tell help me.

Learning software development has been a challenge. Many times it's frustrating.

I also learn languages and I find them to share one trait with software development, which is complexity.

At first I looked at languages the way I'm currently doing with software. I'd look in a new language and after decided it's cool to learn it, I would stare at it for a few weeks trying to realize what the heck I was going to do. I wouldn't even know how to get started.

Eventually this stage goes away and I think that is about to happen with me with software.

But then a new challenge would come, which is me not making progress as I wanted. That's sort of happening with me by learning software as well, bit in language I now know how to deal with it.
That's because I work full time with something that isn't in my interests and when I arrive home Im tired and want to relax. So I decided my language learning had to go slower as long as I have this job, meaning no hours spent in front of books or a pc studying - that's what I could do with English, I was a teenager and had 12 hours a day to do whatever I wanted.

So I usually spent 5 minutes here and there learning something in my target language when I can, no frustration needed, my only rule is: practice everyday, even if I don't learn anything new.

With software, that doesn't apply though.

So, what I mean by tracing a parallel between these to fields is that I have a strong conviction is that once you get the principles on how a certain kind of learning works, you can apply it everywhere in the field. But with software it's been harder.
Anyways, I see that are some principles that apply, cause trying to learn software is changinge and teaching a lot of things like:

*you have to read a lot (of documentation) . At first I thought all documentation was painful to read and understand, but I found out some software are well documented and one can use those only to get used with it.

*immersion / discipline are important. I'm not very disciplined, I'm better with immersion but both are important if you need to acquire complex subjects/skills

*how to deal with complexity. I installed Arch Linux a few days ago. Just to install it I ended up reading more than 20 pages of documentation (install guide, Wpa supplicant, systemd, networkd, xorg, etc etc). Gradually I'm realizing that when you have to install/tweak something in that distro you necessarily spend a bunch of time trying to understand how it works, otherwise you don't get too far like in Ubuntu or Debian.

*and lastly the one that bothers me. Constantly getting frustrated and feeling crap about my poor skills. No matter how much I progress, it still seems like I'm stuck.
(that's when I ask your help/opinion :) )

Least favorite enterprise software (so far) is Oracle JD Edwards (but more specifically the integration between systems).
Unfortunately a board member was friends with an employee who recommended JDE. It required full time maintenance and a few years later that employee left and the company wrote off over a million dollars to go back to the old (but slightly updated) system.
Following that, a board member (the same one I think) agreed to have another friend's security business install CCTV across the branches. The project was not scoped and no thought had gone into it, making a real mess for the IT department to sort out (provided hardware was under spec'd, existing networking equipment needed replacing, etc)

Who do these upper management people think they are that they can make decisions based on little fact or research and expect the people beneath them to just magically make work.
The huge salaries of those people is not justified. We're the real workers who actually get stuff done so the pay and appreciation should be spread accordingy.

Rant over.

#Suphle Rant 3: Road to PHP8, Flow travails

Some primer: Flows is a feature that causes the framework to bypass handling the request now but read it from cache. This cache entry is meant to be populated without warming, based on the preceding request. It's sort of like prefetching but done on the back end

While building Suphle, I made some notes on some chapters about caveats and gotchas I may forget while documenting. One such note was that when users make the Flow request, the framework will attempt to determine who user is, using authentication mechanism defined on the first module (of the modular monolith)

Now, I got to this point during documentation and started wondering whether it's impossible for the originating request to have used a different authentication mechanism, which would result in an empty entry for returning user. I *think* it's possible cuz I've got something else called "route mirroring", where web based routes can be converted to API routes. They'll then return JSON, get served under defined API path, use JWT, all automatically. But I just couldn't connect the dots for the life of me, regarding how any of this could impact authentication on the Flow request

While trying to figure out how to write the test for this or whether it was even necessary (since I had no use case), it struck me that since Flow requests are not triggered by an actual user, any code attempting to read authenticated user will see nothing!

I HATE it when I realize there's ambiguity or an oversight, after the amount of attention and suffering devoted. This, along with a chain of personal troubles set off despondency for a couple of days. No appetite for food or talk. Grudgingly refactored in this update over some days. Wrote some tests, not all passed. More pain. May have to convert them to unit tests

For clarity, my expectation is, I built this. Nothing should be impossible for me

Surprisingly, I caught a somewhat lucky break –an ex colleague referred me to the 1st gig I'm getting in 1+ year. It's about writing a plugin for some obscure forum software. I'm not too excited cuz it's poorly documented and I'll have to do a lot of groping, they use arrays instead of objects etc. There's no guarantee I'll find how to implement all client's requirements

While brooding last night, surfing the PHP subreddit, stumbled on a post about using Rector to downgrade a codebase. I've always been interested in the reverse but didn't have any incentive to fret over it. Randomly googled and saw a post promising a codebase can be upgraded with 3 commands in 5 minutes to PHP 8. Piqued my interest around 12:something AM. Stayed up all night upgrading it, replacing PHPSTAN with Psalm, initializing the guy's project, merging Flow auth with master etc. I think it may have taken 5 minutes without the challenge of getting local dev environment to PHP 8

My mood is much lighter than it was, although the battle is not won yet –image tests are failing. For some weird reason, PHP8 can't read generated test images. Hope I can ride on that newfound lease on life to study the forum and get the features working

I have some other rant but this is already a lot to digest in one sitting. See you in rant #4

!rant

So just saw a video about the surface go, now as someone who firmly hates Microsoft and especially windows, this has me almost tempted at that sort of price... What's your guys opinion on it?

This is not a developer-related rant, but honestly, I'm annoyed, and this felt like the best place to vent.

My Twitter account has been suspended/restricted. I can still log in, but I can't tweet, follow people, anything.
No reason was given to me at all for my restriction, other than an automated reply when I attempted to appeal it stating they suspected my account of being hacked - an account I hadn't used in about a month, has a randomly generated 12 character password and has 2FA.

Here's the thing - I didn't grow up with Twitter, I've never really taken an interest in it, I only have my account to post dev stuff now and then as I know some over devs do - It felt like a good place to easily log what I'm currently working on and show off my work that I was proud of.

There aren't any other platforms I know of where I can do that, other than here (but my work consists of things that are also not dev related, so...)

I have no idea if I will get my Twitter account back; it's been over a week now since I attempted to appeal it with absolutely no response.

If anyone knows decent platforms where I can share my work and progress (dev, art, level design, etc.) and can use it sort of like a dev blog, I would greatly appreciate it.

"Longest you worked without rest + why?" (2)

Oh, I am an idiot 🙂! 7 hours isn't nearly the longest I've worked without rest (see my previous rant.) I just remembered working non-stop almost for a day in the past.
It was for an annual 48-hour hackathon where people gathered to make games.
It made me promise myself not to work excessively long hours non-stop. My creativity level was way below the ground, and during the after-party, my body sort of kernel-panicked, and I started to become incoherent. I had to call a taxi to find my way home that day.
For the following years, I made sure to get some rest (e.g., go home at night to sleep, spend the lunch break time actually having 'lunch break' and not coding while you're at it, etc.) because I did not want to wreck myself any further.

sort of an update on my midterm project read my last rant to catch up.

Progress so far has been absolutely phenomenal I have a sign up and login page, a profile page, home page, and can post to the app now in real time. for my first time using Kotlin I'm insanely surprised at what I've accomplished so far.

That moment when you get started as a junior frontend and end up having to design a couple databases. I dont know shit about that. 😱 also in between I happen to become sort of unofficial IT staff in this music school. I'm confused. Not a proper rant, but just wtf? At least I'm getting money... someday. Maybe. 😲
At least I'll have my voice and piano lessons covered. 🌟

Not really a programming rant, but still very annoying. It is almost 2017 and so I will need to get my health insurance sort out. You would think that it isn't that big of a deal, but almost everything can only be done by calling the insurance company. Even when you can log in with digID (a dutch digital identification system), you still can't change the insurance on the internet.
Come on guys we live in 2016! Something simple like insurances should you be able to fix online!

Oh let the rant time begin…

So previous post I mentioned about this dev who has resigned and how I was going to see about a Snr. position.

Management is now scrambling to figure out what to do as this dev managed all the migration to AWS etc, I know servers but haven’t got too much familiarity with AWS.

Anyways so I finally get a 1:1 with my new line manager. I ask about the position and he says they don’t know what there going to do yet. Hire a new dev in India to offset and with the same knowledge even though the guy leaving is in the U.K. Bad idea as the servers are in the U.K. so if we get downtime or the server crashes we have no one in the U.K. to reset or access to the servers. India are very cagey who gets access which is annoying to say the least even though us (three devs) in the U.K. are the principal engineering team so there looking at all options.

Anyways we have a back and fourth, we discuss some of the plans for the app, some of which we are nowhere near ready to even conceptualise as the app in its current state sucks, (ruby 2.2.6 and rails 5 but not really). Needs major refactoring and rewrite, one thing they want to do is multi tendency which again given the state is laughable.

So, as my manager is speaking my head is screaming being like “this is just going to be a massive disaster”. Then we go onto that he’s seeing what everyone’s strengths are etc. And then we get onto the upgrade and that he wants me to work on it.

Yes.. the upgrade I’ve been trying to do for the past 4+ months but I keep getting told to stop and getting pushed backed.

I’ve been told we have devOps looking into restructuring the app, not possible as how the app is written, we have India trying to multi tenant again disaster incoming as they’ll end up rushing it. Legal are going to have a field day. Every time I say the issues are the fundamentals with the app, here’s how we can sort it. In one ear out the other basically there patching the ship even though it’s still leaking.

I have so many ideas, and things I can do to improve the app and get it back to not only working order, fix the performance issues, data issues and everything else. Brick wall.

So rants ensue where I basically say I would love to do the upgrade but management gives me no time in the roadmap (we have no say in planning). At this point I’m just speaking to a brick wall.

After the meeting I have a chat with the BAs, we all have the same issues so honestly it sucks we end up ranting to each other for an hour.

I’m being under-utilised, being told do this, do that even though I’ve had two stabs but told to stop and pushed back, I know what benefits I can bring to the app with a refactoring, ideas and how to properly lead the team because honestly we’re working on an old legacy app, and management are clueless and there priorities are all wrong, the company is getting frustrated and it’s a sinking ship. They would rather patch issues without solving them and everything I say goes in one ear and out the other.

Frustrating is not the word.

Piggy backing off an earlier rant about Linux. Let's talk about time wasted fixing Linux.

One time for me was I couldn't get Ubuntu to boot. Whenever it booted through UEFI it would go straight to the EFI bash like command line boot screen, not allowing me to access Ubuntu.

I tried for almost a full day to fix it, Googling solutions, resetting my BIOS and fixing Boot using a Ubuntu Live USB.

In the end I found it was an issue with setting my filesystem as XFS. I reinstalled using EXT4 and it booted right up. Must've been some sort of bug. Strange because XFS boot worked with Fedora. A day wasted trying to set up Ubuntu.

!rant

Right now i'm working as a volunteer developer for a discord server. I've recently been learning JDA (a Discord API java wrapper) and I wanted to get some experience in a more real world environment by working on a Discord Bot. What a mistake

The owner of the server has written some pretty messy, but solid code, and I was asked to build as sort of “punishment system” (warns, kicks, mutes, bans, all of which timed). It started off fine, me doing some work, getting some critic, all good. Soon, it started to get worse. At every point of the way, while i’m working I have him trying to make me add new features, and change massive existing ones even after i’ve done them and moved on with his permission! I keep telling him, “it’s a work in progress, please wait”, but it never stops.

I’m planning to resign, but I have to continue to dodge him and his “suggestions” as I simply want to finish my work, and get out. The reason I need to avoid his as, I feel that if I was to alert him I was to leave in advance, things would only get worse in the time while I stayed.

:/

For a little background on the sort of stuff I'm dealing with, check out my last rant.

Anyways, I'm testing this pipeline at work and was just reminded of the fucktarded way a "software engineer", who had a bachelor's biology degree, decided to handle a json file.

The script is question is loading a json file containing an array of objects. The script is written in perl. There's a JSON module. Use that? Fuck no! Let's rather perform an in-place sed command on the file substituting the commas separating objects in the array with newlines, then proceed to read the file line-by-line and parse out the tokens manually. Mind you, in the process of adding the newlines he didn't keep the commas, so now all of these json files his bullshit handled are invalid json that cannot be parsed.

The dumb ass was lucky the data in the file is always output upstream as a single line and the tokens for each object are always in the same order, so that never led to problems. But now, months later after I fixed his stupidity I am being reminded of it again as I'm testing and debugging some old projects as part of regression testing new changes I'm making.

TL;DR Fuck dumbwit motherfuckers who can't even google search "parsing a json file" and doing literally anything that is less fucktarded than manually parsing a json file

!Rant
New to the whole front end world so pardon me for such a question.

I have a huge set of data about 5-10k records flowing in which needs to be displayed in a tabular form with sorting, filtering, selection addition and deletion.

Is it wise to sort and filter in the front end? Or make multiple calls to backend and perform the operations there?

If in front end what is the best way to perform these operations?

The application is going to be loaded on a screen and left there for users to view. So even local storage could be am option.

Using polymer for frontend so any special tool for this in polymer?

Not exactly a rant, but I'm wondering where to go next with my learning.
I'm a c# dev and I want to get more into massive, scalable, distributed application development.
I sort of want to be with the "cool kids" i.e. open source, node.js, docker, scala, you name it. I get that open source moves quickly, but I get the feeling that every new framework is a fad.
Then again there is the corporate world with shitloads of money who are invested in .net and will very soon want people who can redesign their software so that their management can use all the buzz words.
I'm thinking into get into consulting and claim my slice of pie there by designing their solutions to go on the cloud so they can throw even more money at microsoft.
Anyway, I'm doing a bit of soul searching so feel free to throw in your 2 cents

!=rant

So, my company wants to use MadCap Flare to build our help center. This project is a nightmare so far. I've been trying to push for some better alternatives for down the road. Any recommendations? Preferably a
Some sort of free open source framework. I've seen a couple of developer friendly CMS frameworks pop up lately but just want to get a consensus from my good devrant ppls.

Why does snapchat on android suck so badly?
Lemme get this out of me.
They admitted to focusing on the iOS variant more from now on. Why? Becuase it has a larger user base.
That means they will not give many fucks about the ONE BILLION ANDROID USERS.

But about the app itself...
With quite normal usage (let's say around 30 minutes opened in total, daily) snapchat uses more battery than my screen. What the fuck?
It is literally at the very top.
It might go up to 800mAh calculated drain. I don't know how they did it.

Anyways, it doesn't even work well.
It has a lot of lag, crahses, and makes my phone as hot as a cup of tea.
I suspect that's becuase it keeps using the camera. That is, keeps it on even when you are on a different screen. This is bullshit. I do sometimes chat with people on SC but I try to minimise it for this reason.

The UI itself is okayish but still lags beyond comprehension in comparison to other apps (wow, I love the android discord client, it has full functionality at low resource cost).
As far as I'm concerned it uses some sort of web technology mix. It does use chromium so I suspect HTML, CSS and JS is also present in the source code.

Also, let's make this a terrible mobile apps rant - feel free to contribute.