Google: Don't use a password from another site, or something too obvious like your pet's name.
Me: 5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99

Rekked/insulted a client so hard today in a way which was obvious for me/colleagues but not for the client that the colleague sitting next to me completely fucking lost it. (client did not detect/notice it)

That's entirely fine as he was not too loud but his laughter is so fucking contagious that he went outside to make sure that I wouldn't catch it any worse while on the phone.

God damn it took some serious self control to not completely lose my shit xD (it only partly worked 😅)

Smart India Hackathon: Horrible experience
Background:- Our task was to do load forecasting for a given area. Hourly energy consumption data for past 5 years was given to us.

One government official asks the following questions:-
1. Why are you using deep learning for the project? Why are you not doing data analysis?
2. Which neural network "algorithm" you are using? He wanted to ask which model we are using, but he didn't have a single clue about Neural Networks.

3. Why are you using libraries? Why not your own code?

Here comes the biggest one,

4. Why haven't you developed your own "algorithm" (again, he meant model)? All you have done is used sone library. Where is "novelty" in your project?

I just want to say that if you don't know anything about ML/AI, then don't comment anything about it. And worst thing was, he was not ready to accept the fact that for capturing temporal dependencies where underlying probability distribution ia unknown, deep learning performs much better than traditional data analysis techniques.
After hearing his first question, second one was not a surprise for us. We were expecting something like that. For a few moments, we were speechless. Then one of us started by showing neural network architecture. But after some time, he rudely repeated the same question, "where is the algorithm". We told him every fucking thing used in the project, ranging from RMSprop optimizer to Backpropagation through time algorithm to mean squared loss error function.

Then very calmly, he asked third question, why are you using libraries? That moron wanted us to write a whole fucking optimized library. We were speechless at this question. Finally, one of us told him the "obvious" answer. We were completely demotivated. But it didnt end here. The real question was waiting. At the end, after listening to all of us, he dropped the final bomb, WHY HAVE YOU USED A NEURAL NETWORK "ALGORITHM" WHICH HAS ALREADY BEEN IMPLEMENTED? WHY DIDN'T YOU MAKE YOU OWN "ALGORITHM"? We again stated the obvious answer that it takes atleast an year or two of continuous hardwork to develop a state of art algorithm, that too when gou build it on top of some existing "algorithm". After listening to this, he left. His final response was "Try to make a new "algorithm"".

Needless to say, we were completely demotivated after this evaluation. We all had worked too hard for this. And we had ability to explain each and every part of the project intuitively and mathematically, but he was not even ready to listen.
Now, all of us are sitting aimlessly, waiting for Hackathon to end.😢😢😢😢😢

I really hate this company.

The code is a disaster. Every single other employee is a salesperson. Nobody has any bloody clue what I do or how difficult it is. They don't care about stability (unless things are crashing), maintenance (until crashing), code quality (until it delays features), or anything apart from shiny new features they can sell. The boss (the king salesman, if ever there was one) doesn't know how to manage, but tries to by acting like his "nice asshole" self -- he's an asshole that gives you passes, makes sure it's bloody obvious that he's doing it begrudgingly, yet everything is still absolutely your fault. If he arbitrarily decides it's too much your fault, he stops being "nice" and flips out on you in front of everyone. That's a "nice asshole": an asshole who can barely even pretend to be nice.

Fuck him.

And you know what? I really hate having to work next to these fucking birds, too.

Today was our weekly conference call, and I was both late and unprepared. I was too focused on my work, and got a ping 4 minutes into the meeting, so I obv didn't have time to prepare. Boss was also pissy today, and I didn't have much to show for my week, thanks to lots of little "OMG NEED ASAP" shit projects that all took too long, pushing back what I was actually supposed to work on. Which didn't get finished, of course, and today that project was "the most important" -- I suspect simply because it wasn't finished. AGADJFSKL. Cue the birds fucking screaming and never fucking shutting up no matter what I did. Blanket? No effect. Spray bottle? SCREAM MORE! Boss was yelling at me, the birds were screaming, and I couldn't think. Goddamn fucking disaster.

and yes, we have a macaw. A macaw and over 20 cockatiels. Said macaw decided today was a lovely day to just fucking SCREAM non-stop, and the tiels were doing their best to keep up. Thinking clearly during this cacophony? Not gonna happen.

Wait, "go elsewhere," you say? Somewhere quieter? Where is this "elsewhere?" We live in a fucking tiny house, and during the call it was (and still is) filled with sleeping people, and surrounded by a fucking desert. Who the fuck thought living in the desert was a good idea, anyway? Like, seriously. What brainless moron thought "You know what? This is a great place! Let's settle down right here," while trudging through the scorching sand and dust, looking at the basically lifeless horizon filled with large, hot, dry, dusty, barren rocks (aka "mountains"), and fucking dying from thirst? Probably someone so delirious from heatstroke they never actually recovered, and continued raving that it's a goddamn paradise to their heat-addled imbecile followers. I really hope they hallucinated a la-z-boy in place of a hedge of teddybear cholla and died an excruciating and prickly death. Fuck that guy/girl, too.

But I digress.

I seriously need an office that isn't a 30 min drive into gang-central. I'd work outside, but I live in the middle of the bloody fucking desert, and get heat exhaustion within about half an hour. Everywhere else in the house people bother me almost incessantly.

just. FUCKING FJASKLDFJGAG.
I HATE THIS PLACE SO SO SO MUCH.

'I've had such Zen lately,' Alex said. Maybe then, but lately? I've just been too exhausted and burned out from putting up with all this shit to get angry. Days like today? I could pour kerosene over everything and laugh as it all just burned to ash.

( rant || !rant ) && idiots
console.info( this.isLongRant );
console.warn( "contains strong language and wordpress" );

A friend of mine sent two of his "friends" to me because they wanted me to build a website for their new business (~idea).

So I had a meeting with them.

First of all they wanted me to have a look on the current (work in progress) site.
First impression of the frontend:
OH BOY!?

Well, imagine this:

- a 90s/2k background (dotted/pixelated cloud in baby-blueish as backgroud with repeat)

- the logo was made by the sister of one of the guys, it wasn't too bad, but badly aligned, asymmetrical

- some obvious $offTheShelfShopPlugin with $randomStockContent

- the fucking slider had a small loading bar to indicate changes, it appears like an hyperanxious child on ADHS

- below the logo TWO FUCKING GIF SPINNERS to indicate nothing else but how fucking brain amputated these two dudes are, including the dev who is responsible for adding this. (to this point, they only told me, that a webagency did the setup and some basic work on the site, more on that later)

- no styling concept at all, random fonts and stuff everywhere including default styles of the shop plugin.

- FUUUUUCK WTF wil come furtherin this meeting?

After seeing a pile of binary puke fisted out of a 60yo nonstop-intern who changed his jobtitle from dildo-traveling-salesman to fullstack-frontend-dev by wrinting it on a post-it-note, I imagined, there has to be something wrong with the backend as well.

Boy was I right!
Yes, you guessed it! A random Wordpress adminpanel login appeared! OH NO....
I really wanted to levae this meeting immediately.
I was not able to hold my disgust back and I told them right in their face, what a shit pile of nutty squirrel turds this current page is. And that Wordpress is not the right choice at all for a shop.

Then came the best part: They basically told me, that they terminated the previous contract with the webagency because they were too expensive (they are cheap, compared to others, I know people who know their prices) and that they wanted to create A BIG MARKETPKACE with multiple ressellers who can have their shop in their website. Something similar to FUCKING AMAZON. ON FUCKING WORDPRESS!?!?!?
They even asked me if I wanted to be their partner & developer and that they can't pay much at the moment until the marketplace starts to grow.

I more or less told them to go fuck themselves with a rusty pitchfork.

HR really are the scum of the earth. Especially Indian HR.

I tech interviewed this guy on Friday and rejected him. And I told HR to tell him so. Apparently he was "too busy" to type a darn message.

This poor sod who was apparently laid off and was pretty desperate and so he'd been calling every HR he'd interviewed with the past week and no one picked up, including my HR.

Now this lad had my work number because that's what I did my phone interview on. I don't attend work calls on the weekend, especially not interviewees but I had to tell this poor sod that he didn't make it (it was a bit obvious).

This is the exact same HR who rejected a candidate just because they were 2 minutes late to a video call.

Junior dev complained about my request to remove unnecessary comments because they're too obvious. "They may be obvious to you, but not to others" he said.

The codes and the comments:
// Sort the array
arr.Sort()

// Return the first element of the array
return arr[0]

Isn’t that too obvious to ask ?!

Not laughing.

Not cursing.

Both for interviewing and being interviewed.

Some interviews could have been taken straight from a mexican telenovela.......

"Yeah, I worked for a year in the Walmart IT administration."

"Ok, what did you do?"

"Oh I had the high responsibility of taking care of swapping printer cartridges, programming the registers, stuff like that..."

"You apply for a senior database management role, you're aware of that?"

"Yeah. I took a bootcamp for 3 months in the evening after work. I'm up for the job and expect a payment of <lol, even having a stroke while writing a payment check that number will never happen>".

I made that up - but we had these cases... The story is just rewritten and mixed up for obvious reasons.

When I'm being interviewed, the same thing can happen by the way, too.

IMHO a interview is made not only for the company, but for me as an employee, too. I don't sugar coat it. I want to know what type of shit I'm getting into and how much I'm drowning in it.

Some "types" of interviewers react kinda funny when I start roasting them with questions...

For example, the authoritarian type usually reacts with disrespect. How dare u piss on my front lawn.... Kind of reaction. Which makes it hard not too laugh, because who wants to work for someone who throws a tamper tantrum during a interview? Even harder when the same guy promised you heaveb before (the flowery kind of bullshit, like everything's peaceful and fine and teams great and they have such a great leadership...)

Even worse is the patsy.

When you're sitting in an interview and the only answers you get are:

- Sorry, I don't know.
- I'm not allowed to ....
- Not in my area of expertise....

All just nice ways of saying: I will say nothing cause then I'd need to take some responsibility.

:)

The most Mexican telenovela stuff though in being interviewed is when I managed to divide a team of interviewers and it starts to become a "Judge Judy" or similar freaked out justice show...

A: "No, our team doesn't work that way".
B: "But you will in the short future, WE committed to it".
C: "Not that I'm aware of".

And me, an obvious sinner and person who enjoys entertainment and schadenfreude, just keeps adding kerosene to the fire.

"So, it seems like the team of A has its own rules which do not apply to B and C, do they also have greater funding?".

Oh it makes just fun to spur a good blood bath.

Every time I post a question to SO I feel so anxious.
Did I provide enough code samples and information?
Did I provide TOO MUCH information?
Is my English alright?
Did I really try everything else or will someone point out something totally obvious after that I feel that I need to delete my post because it's just dumb?

Feeling anxious right now... Worst of all: it's an important work related question, so I have to think about a new task because this issue was my only one and a road blocker.

AAAARRGGHHH!

I like memory hungry desktop applications.

I do not like sluggish desktop applications.

Allow me to explain (although, this may already be obvious to quite a few of you)

Memory usage is stigmatized quite a lot today, and for good reason. Not only is it an indication of poor optimization, but not too many years ago, memory was a much more scarce resource.

And something that started as a joke in that era is true in this era: free memory is wasted memory. You may argue, correctly, that free memory is not wasted; it is reserved for future potential tasks. However, if you have 16GB of free memory and don't have any plans to begin rendering a 3D animation anytime soon, that memory is wasted.

Linux understands this. Linux actually has three States for memory to be in: used, free, and available. Used and free memory are the usual. However, Linux automatically caches files that you use and places them in ram as "available" memory. Available memory can be used at any time by programs, simply dumping out whatever was previously occupying the memory.

And as you well know, ram is much faster than even an SSD. Programs which are memory heavy COULD (< important) be holding things in memory rather than having them sit on the HDD, waiting to be slowly retrieved. I much rather a web browser take up 4 GB of RAM than sit around waiting for it to read the caches image off my had drive.

Now, allow me to reiterate: unoptimized programs still piss me off. There's no need for that electron-based webcam image capture app to take three gigs of memory upon launch. But I love it when programs use the hardware I spent money on to run smoother.

Don't hate a program simply because it's at the top of task manager.

- If I buy x amount of ram | hard drive space | cpu power I will never need more.
- No need for version control | Tests. This is a small project
- git commit -m "changes" (its a small change. I will remember why I did it)
- It is too obvious that I put a lot of personal time in this so my boss will definitely notice!
- Why comment this simple method? Anyone should know what it does. Especially me!
- "this should never happen"
- This call can't be from work. Everyone knows I am on vacation.
- I will back up next week. It's not like it is going to crush today.
- It’s 11:30 already? I will work on this for only a half hour more and then I will definitely go to bed!
- This project will take x amount of time!

The nightmare continues.

Currently dealing with a code review from a “principal” dev (one step above senior), who is unironically called a “legendary dev” by some coworkers. It’s painfully obvious he didn’t read the code, and just started complaining and nitpicking.

It’s full of requests to do things that make absolutely no sense, and would make the code an unmaintainable mess.
• Ex: moving the logic and data collection from the module’s many callers into the module instead of just passing in the data.
• Ex: hiding api endpoint declarations by placing them in the module itself, and using magic instance variables to pass data to it. Basically: using global functions and variables instead of explicit declarations and calls.
• Ex: moving the logic to determine which api endpoint to use, for all callers, into the view.

More comments about methods being “too complex” (barely holds water) right next to comments saying “why are these separate? merge them together!”

Incredulously asking how many times I’m checking permissions and how ridiculous it all is. (The answer? Twice.)

Conflating my “permissions” param and method names with a supposedly forthcoming permissions system overhaul, and saying I shouldn’t use permissions because my code will all have to get rewritten. Even if that were true, and it’s likely not, the ticket still needs to use the current permissions. I can’t just ignore them because they might be rewritten someday.

Requests to revert some code cleanup because the reviewer thought the previous heavily-nested and uncommented versions (with code duplication) were easier to read. Unsurprisingly, he wrote them.

On the same ticket, my boss wants me to remove all styling and clientside validation, debouncing, and error messages from a form. Says “success” and “connection failed” messages are good enough. The form in question sends SMS and email using arbitrary user input for addresses. He also says it shouldn’t be denounced on the server, and doesn’t want me to bother checking permissions. Hello, spam!

Related: the legendary dev reviewer says he can’t think of a reason why we would want to disable the feature for consumers, so I should remove the consumer feature flag.

You can’t make this stuff up.

I am DONE with this woman CONTINUED!

I didn't think I'd have to put another rant about this stupidity at least not this soon but she just keeps on giving!

I have my noise canceling headphones on most of the time and when I want to hear the people around, I just put the right earcup of it to the side of my ear so the music pauses. Today we had a huge disrupt on our services because of a network switch error on the hub. I was also trying to focus on my coding as I didn't wanna do a stupid mistake on the last working day and be sorry about it in the next week.

So this woman sneaks up on me from behind calling my name - meaning she has a question, surprise! -, I say 'yes' moving my head to her side ever so slightly without getting my eyes off of my screen stating subtly that I'm also listening to her while trying to focus on my shit. She starts yelling at me 'look at me!' out of nowhere! I turn my head and ask what the problem is and she asks why I'm not looking at her face! Stupid moron, I might not be too good in understanding your way of communication but you are the one asking so you WILL wait if you'd like to hear answers.

I say I'm working on something and her answer is again 'Why aren't you looking at my face it's going to be quick bla bla did we do this like that?' and I answered I didn't remember because there's no way I'd ever remember without looking further and it was no lie.

This woman clearly has stability issues and everyone else seem to be tolerating it. It's now obvious as I'm not tolerating the nonsense I'll be the one that 'she only has ever had a problem with'.

I was quick to de escalate the situation but now I'm thinking maybe I should've responded in a way that she could understand. I wouldn't ever give a shit about it but this is getting ridiculous.

The solution for this one isn't nearly as amusing as the journey.

I was working for one of the largest retailers in NA as an architect. Said retailer had over a thousand big box stores, IT maintenance budget of $200M/year. The kind of place that just reeks of waste and mismanagement at every level.

They had installed a system to distribute training and instructional videos to every store, as well as recorded daily broadcasts to all store employees as a way of reducing management time spend with employees in the morning. This system had cost a cool 400M USD, not including labor and upgrades for round 1. Round 2 was another 100M to add a storage buffer to each store because they'd failed to account for the fact that their internet connections at the store and the outbound pipe from the DC wasn't capable of running the public facing e-commerce and streaming all the video data to every store in realtime. Typical massive enterprise clusterfuck.

Then security gets involved. Each device at stores had a different address on a private megawan. The stores didn't generally phone home, home phoned them as an access control measure; stores calling the DC was verboten. This presented an obvious problem for the video system because it needed to pull updates.

The brilliant Infosys resources had a bright idea to solve this problem:

- Treat each device IP as an access key for that device (avg 15 per store per store).
- Verify the request ip, then issue a redirect with ANOTHER ip unique to that device that the firewall would ingress only to the video subnet
- Do it all with the F5

A few months later, the networking team comes back and announces that after months of work and 10s of people years they can't implement the solution because iRules have a size limit and they would need more than 60,000 lines or 15,000 rules to implement it. Sad trombones all around.

Then, a wild DBA appears, steps up to the plate and says he can solve the problem with the power of ORACLE! Few months later he comes back with some absolutely batshit solution that stored the individual octets of an IPV4, multiple nested queries to the same table to emulate subnet masking through some temp table spanning voodoo. Time to complete: 2-4 minutes per request. He too eventually gives up the fight, sort of, in that backhanded way DBAs tend to do everything. I wish I would have paid more attention to that abortion because the rationale and its mechanics were just staggeringly rube goldberg and should have been documented for posterity.

So I catch wind of this sitting in a CAB meeting. I hear them talking about how there's "no way to solve this problem, it's too complex, we're going to need a lot more databases to handle this." I tune in and gather all it really needs to do, since the ingress firewall is handling the origin IP checks, is convert the request IP to video ingress IP, 302 and call it a day.

While they're all grandstanding and pontificating, I fire up visual studio and:

- write a method that encodes the incoming request IP into a single uint32
- write an http module that keeps an in-memory dictionary of uint32,string for the request, response, converts the request ip and 302s the call with blackhole support
- convert all the mappings in the spreadsheet attached to the meetings into a csv, dump to disk
- write a wpf application to allow for easily managing the IP database in the short term
- deploy the solution one of our stage boxes
- add a TODO to eventually move this to a database

All this took about 5 minutes. I interrupt their conversation to ask them to retarget their test to the port I exposed on the stage box. Then watch them stare in stunned silence as the crow grows cold.

According to a friend who still works there, that code is still running in production on a single node to this day. And still running on the same static file database.

#TheValueOfEngineers

So I ve been clinically depressed for about 10 years now. Been really great at hiding it. My illness and loneliness was so severe that i made up imaginary friends and that got so severe i couldn't tell what s real and what s not. Then about 5 years ago, i met a girl. As the cliche goes, everything felt better. Sunshine and stuff. I opened up to her. Shared stuff. I started becoming normal. The pain became bearable and manageable. Turned to entrepreneurship. Had goals and stuff. Had 7 failed startups but kept on going. Raised investment for an 8th. It went better than anyother. Was going to become the next big thing bla bla. She became the reason i turned from being a loner weirdo to someone awesome. Anyway, as nothing tends to last, my best friend who had been through thick and thin in my work, quit last year in October. He messed up some work from big client nd we had a fight. He left. In the meantime i scored a big multinational company. I was gonna propose to my girlfriend in March this year. But instead she decided to leave for someone better who left her in 3 weeks lol. Anyways, we broke up. During that time, my second friend decided to fuck up my work with the big company so hard that they were about to blacklist my company. And then he left too. I had a small team. 4 5 people doing their best. By that time, i was the only one left. On 28th feb i had my breakup, on 1st march i was sitting 700 km away from home in an office trying to talk the company out of blacklisting us. It took me around 20 days to make that happen. All the while dealing with the obvious, my depression getting stronger than ever. My imaginations taking shape and fucking up my reality. The voices in my head getting stronget and stronger. 4 months now since she left. I dont think i miss her anymore. She tried coming back once but i didn't let her. In the 4 months, i m at my worst. I am getting government contracts now. But i have no desire to do anything. The pain is unbearable. So much that on its good days it sucks the life right out of me. So much that when it gets severe the urge to harm myself in any way goes of the charts. My best friend and i, we became friends again after my ex left. He s been helping me as much as he can. I have all the good oppurtunities and chances that any entrepreneur who has been busting his ass for 5 years straight would kill to have. But i cant do anything. I m the only one left on my team. I have to handle the business, dev, marketing etc etc ends on my own. I tried hiring and scaling up but i messed that up because of obvious reasons. And now my company has 2 months of runway left. And i know if i bust my ass i can make it to 8 months more and even raise a round a. But its really hard to do when either you re sleeping 20 hrs a day or you re sleeping 3 4 hrs because you re afraid of the nightmares. Or when even you ve had a good day, the pain becomes so much that you lay on the floor having a breakdown. Yeah, i m trying professional help. I m hoping it helps me. Because right now, i dont care about being happy. I just want my sanity. Something i m clinging to with every fiber of my being. Something that s burning out like a candle burning from both ends. I cant give up my work. I dont want to. That s all i have. That s all what i love doing and now i cant even do that. I just want this to end somehow. Either i get better and the pain and the void and silence and everything else goes away, or i do. I dont know what will happen first. And i dont care. I just want to be normal. But i guess that s too much to ask.

I could bitch about XSLT again, as that was certainly painful, but that’s less about learning a skill and more about understanding someone else’s mental diarrhea, so let me pick something else.

My most painful learning experience was probably pointers, but not pointers in the usual sense of `char *ptr` in C and how they’re totally confusing at first. I mean, it was that too, but in addition it was how I had absolutely none of the background needed to understand them, not having any learning material (nor guidance), nor even a typical compiler to tell me what i was doing wrong — and on top of all of that, only being able to run code on a device that would crash/halt/freak out whenever i made a mistake. It was an absolute nightmare.

Here’s the story:

Someone gave me the game RACE for my TI-83 calculator, but it turned out to be an unlocked version, which means I could edit it and see the code. I discovered this later on by accident while trying to play it during class, and when I looked at it, all I saw was incomprehensible garbage. I closed it, and the game no longer worked. Looking back I must have changed something, but then I thought it was just magic. It took me a long time to get curious enough to look at it again.

But in the meantime, I ended up played with these “programs” a little, and made some really simple ones, and later some somewhat complex ones. So the next time I opened RACE again I kind of understood what it was doing.

Moving on, I spent a year learning TI-Basic, and eventually reached the limit of what it could do. Along the way, I learned that all of the really amazing games/utilities that were incredibly fast, had greyscale graphics, lowercase text, no runtime indicator, etc. were written in “Assembly,” so naturally I wanted to use that, too.

I had no idea what it was, but it was the obvious next step for me, so I started teaching myself. It was z80 Assembly, and there was practically no documents, resources, nothing helpful online.

I found the specs, and a few terrible docs and other sources, but with only one year of programming experience, I didn’t really understand what they were telling me. This was before stackoverflow, etc., too, so what little help I found was mostly from forum posts, IRC (mostly got ignored or made fun of), and reading other people’s source when I could find it. And usually that was less than clear.

And here’s where we dive into the specifics. Starting with so little experience, and in TI-Basic of all things, meant I had zero understanding of pointers, memory and addresses, the stack, heap, data structures, interrupts, clocks, etc. I had mastered everything TI-Basic offered, which astoundingly included arrays and matrices (six of each), but it hid everything else except basic logic and flow control. (No, there weren’t even functions; it has labels and goto.) It has 27 numeric variables (A-Z and theta, can store either float or complex numbers), 8 Lists (numeric arrays), 6 matricies (2d numeric arrays), 10 strings, and a few other things like “equations” and literal bitmap pictures.

Soo… I went from knowing only that to learning pointers. And pointer math. And data structures. And pointers to pointers, and the stack, and function calls, and all that goodness. And remember, I was learning and writing all of this in plain Assembly, in notepad (or on paper at school), not in C or C++ with a teacher, a textbook, SO, and an intelligent compiler with its incredibly helpful type checking and warnings. Just raw trial and error. I learned what I could from whatever cryptic sources I could find (and understand) online, and applied it.

But actually using what I learned? If a pointer was wrong, it resulted in unexpected behavior, memory corruption, freezes, etc. I didn’t have a debugger, an emulator, etc. I had notepad, the barebones compiler, and my calculator.

Also, iterating meant changing my code, recompiling, factory resetting my calculator (removing the battery for 30+ sec) because bugs usually froze it or corrupted something, then transferring the new program over, and finally running it. It was soo slowwwww. But I made steady progress.

Painful learning experience? Check.
Pointer hell? Absolutely.

So I have that custom-made wifi router I've built. And it uses a USB wifi adapter with AC (wifi5) capability - the fastest one I could find in AliExpress.

I set it up a while ago - the internet access works fine, although speeds are somewhat sluggish. But hey, what to expect from a cheapo on Ali! Not to mention it's USB, not a PCIe...

A few days ago I ran a few speedtest.net tests with my actual AC router and the one I've built. Results were so different I wanted to cry :( some pathetic 23Mbps with my custom router :(

This evening I had some time on my hands and finally decided to have an umpteenth look.

nmcli d wifi
this is what caught my eye first. The RATE column listed my custom router as 54Mbps, whereas the actual router had 195Mbps.

I have reviewed the hostapd configuration sooo many times - this time nothing caught my eye as well.

Googling did not give anything obvious as well.

What do we do next? Yes, that's right - enable debug and read the logs.

> VHT (IEEE 802.11ac) with WPA/WPA2 requires CCMP/GCMP to be enabled, disabling VHT capabilities

This is one of the lines at the top of the log. Waaaaiiitttt.. VHT is something I definitely want with ac -- why does it disable that??? Sounds like a configuration fuckup rather than the HW limitation! And config fuckups CAN be fixed!

Turns out, an innocently looking
`wpa_pairwise=TKIP`
change into
`wpa_pairwise=TKIP CCMP`

made a world of a difference!

:wq
!hostapd
connect to the hostapd hotspot and run that iperf3 test again, and... Oh my. Oh boi! My pants fell off -- the speed increased >3x times!

A quick speedtest.net test deems my custom router's download speeds hardly any worse than the speeds obtained using my LInksys!!

The moral of the story: no matter how innocent some configurations look, they might make a huge difference. And RTFL [read the fucking logs]

In the pic -- left - my actual router, right - my custom-built router with a USB wifi adapter. Not too shabby!

!rant
!!pride

I tried finding a gem that would give me a nice, simple diff between two hashes, and also report any missing keys between them. (In an effort to reduce the ridiculous number of update api calls sent out at work.)

I found a few gems that give way too complicated diffs, and they're all several hundred lines long. One of them even writes the diff out in freaking html with colors and everything. it's crazy. Several of the simpler ones don't even support nesting, and another only diffs strings. I found a few possibly-okay choices, but their output is crazy long, and they are none too short, either.

Also, only a few of them support missing keys (since hashes in Ruby return `nil` by default for non-defined keys), which would lead to false negatives.

So... I wrote my own.
It supports diffing anything with anything else, and recurses into anything enumerable. It also supports missing keys/indexes, mixed n-level nesting, missing branches, nil vs "nil" with obvious output, comparing mixed types, empty objects, etc. Returns a simple [a,b] diff array for simple objects, or for nested objects: a flat hash with full paths (like "[key][subkey][12][sub-subkey]") as top-level keys and the diff arrays as values. Tiny output. Took 36 lines and a little over an hour.

I'm pretty happy with myself. 😁

It works.

How I hate that sentence.

Whenever that sentence pops up, I wanna take a frying pan, make some bacon, eat the bacon and slam the still hot pan with grease through someone's face till the skull breaks.

Why has he so many anger issues, one might ask.

Usually the sentence "It works" means that after looking at "working thing" it works wrong in 95 % of all cases, but hey - for 5 % it at least does *something* right. Not everything, don't get ya hope up.

We had this fun topic happening again today and I'm still too angry to sleep.

Lucene analysis of texts in Elasticsearch.

Stopword list? Multiple word n-grams per line, duplicates, not lower cased, not properly encoded.

Tokenizers? Duh. Why should one put them in proper order.... Or more realistic: There is an order in tokenizers necessary *devs with shocked faces*.

Language specific details... UHM. Wait. Languages are different? There are edge cases in languages? *more shocked faces*.

Even more shocking that if an text processing pipeline is implemented horribly wrong, it delivers wrong results. *mind blown*.

But our unit tests (this goes out to @kiki) were working.

Yeah. You dumb nuggets who even an amoeba would be ashamed of, when you only do positive tests in unit tests with the most obvious working examples, then your unit tests are just useless waste of nibbles.

Some of the devs are really a fucking waste of genetic information, should have probably ended better in a sock.

If this sounds too harsh, they had 2 weeks.
In just 3 hours I found out that they can redo that with supervision.

-.-

I'm getting too old for that shit. Seriously.

OK, so we had a session in which a so called Company (Some ecorise.in ) came to give Internship-Training-Program. Ok, he said it'll take 5-8 minutes, and then it took fucking 75 minutes for the session to end. Horrible blunders he made.
1) Did not tell about the company and important stuff for the first 50-60 minutes. Instead, was just focusing on why you should do an Internship, what is it's benefit, what does a company want from you. And why this Internship-Training Program is important... I mean seriously? - A training for Internship. 🤦🏻‍♂️
2) Said all the Web Developers can be Mobile App Developers with the help of just HTML and CSS.... Wow, so XAML/XML is shit now, and we will call APIs with the help of CSS rules. 🤦🏻‍♂️

OK, still I tolerated all that, then was the part when he said how much will be the stipend. It was fucking nothing, they said. That for first three months they will not give a single penny as it is training, and then IF the performance is good, then they will give stipend, and then Placement assurance. OK, that's good that they are assuring placement, but wait. Package of 2LPA INR... WTF Man, it's like $3107.28 for a whole Year.

OK, that too tolerated, then was the part when they said that they'll take the written test, I was like OK, let's see. We moved to a classroom, it went over-the-full capacity, so we moved back to the seminar hall. (Arrrrgggghhhhhhhhh), still tolerable. But then that guy realised that there were no question papers to take the test, then sent someone to get the print outs. Wasted 15+ minutes, I was burning inside.

In the whole seminar hall, I stood up and said, that when you knew there will be a test, why didn't you pre-prepared the sheets beforehand, he was like, that we didn't knew the count. But his tone was. like he got offended and Get-Lost-ed me out of the seminar.

Then even I said:
🙏🏻 - Nahi chaahiye aapki Company
(🙏🏻 - I don't want your Company).
And moved out.

But my point, I am a third Year College Student, and this Company came for our benefit, but I did so (and I am not sorry), so that's pretty obvious that the Company guy will talk (bitch) to the teachers about me, and tomorrow will be a bad day for me... But isn't it wrong on the side of the company also?
I mean, there was an attendance sheet passed in the beginning of the session, had he taken count from that and got the sheets printed, (He had almost an hour for that).
Secondly, when they knew that the count of students is more than expected, then why didn't they check for the classroom that whether the class can accommodate so many students or not. If not then something would have been planned accordingly... But no, the Guy (I guess, that small Company's Owner) got offended that a Student back-chat-ted a CEO of a so-called company, and so he just had to "Get-Lost" me. Checked the website of his Company, they have hardly done 3 Static Websites... I mean, WoW, I have done at-least 10X the work of the Company, alone!

I don't know, I feel happy that I kept my point, but I feel sad because I generally don't do this kind of thing (may be my tone was also wrong, I had other issues also, may be because of them and they all combined and this happened). I feel scared too, that I don't know what the Company guy will say to my teachers and what action will they take against me...

Because I know, none of my friends will stand with me when I go down, it's all fake here, everyone can just give sympathy, but nothing else.

I don't know why I am posting this here, and if you have read this till here, thank you. I just wanted to share my heart out... :-)

Is it just me who sees this? JS development in a somewhat more complex setting (like vue-storefront) is just a horrible mess.
I have 10+ experience in java, c# and python, and I've never needed more than a a few hours to get into a new codebase, understanding the overall system, being able to guess where to fix a given problem.
But with JS (and also TS for that matter) I'm at my limits. Most of the files look like they don't do anything. There seems to be no structure, both from a file system point of view, nor from a code point of view.
It start with little things like 300 char long lines including various lambdas, closures and ifs with useless variables names, over overly generic and minified method/function names to inconsistent naming of files, classes and basically everything else.
I used to just set a breakpoint somewhere in my code (or in a compiled dependency) wait this it is being hit and go back and forth to learn how the system state changes.
This seems to be highly limited in JS. I didn't find the one way to just being able to debug, everything that is. There are weird things like transpilers, compiler, minifiers, bablers and what not else. There is an error? Go f... yourself ...
And what do I find as the number one tipp all across the internet? Console.log?? are you kidding me, sure just tell me, your kidding me right?
If I would have to describe the JS world in one word, I would use "inconsistency". It's all just a pain in the ass.

I remember when I switcher from VisualStudio/C# to Eclipse/Java I felt like traveling back in time for about 10 years. Everyting seemd so ... old-schoolish, buggy, weird.
When I now switch from java to JS it makes me feel the same way. It's all so highly unproductive, inconsistent, undeterministic, cobbled together.
For one inconveinience the JS communinity seems to like to build huge shitloads of stuff around it, instead of fixing the obvious. And noone seems to see that.
It's like they are all blinded somehow. Currently I'm also trying to implement a small react app based on react-admin. The simplest things to develop and debug are a nightmare. There is so much boilerplate that to write that most people in the internet just keep copying stuff, without even trying to understand what it actually does.
I've always been a guy that tries to understand what the fuck this code actuall does. And for most of the parts I just thing, that the stuff there is useless or could be done in a way more readable way. But instead, all the devs out there just seem to chose the "copy and fix somehow-ish" way.
I'm all in for component-izing stuff. I like encapsulation, I'm a OOP guy by heart. But what react and similar frameworks do is just insane. It's just not right (for some part).
Especially when you have to remember so much stuff that is just mechanics/boilerplate without having any actual "business logical function".

People always say java is so verbose. I don't think it is, there is so few syntax that it almost reads like a prose story. When I look at JS and TS instead, I'm overwhelmed by all the syntax, almost wondering every second line, what the actual fuck this could mean. The boilerplate/logic ration seems way to off ..

So it really makes me wonder, if all you JS devs out there are just so used to that stuff, that you cannot imagine how it could be done better? I still remember my C# days, but I admin that I just got used to java. So I can somehow understand that all. But JS is just another few levels less deeper.
But maybe I'm just lazy and too old ...

Vim is super easy, guys! You don't use arrows to navigate around the text, that's too obvious! Instead you use HJKL keys, because it goes Hup, Jleft, Kright and Ldown. You can also use B to go Beginning and E to go to End of the word, oh and W to go to the WstartOfNextWord.

So Patanjali(aka Ramdev Baba trying to sell you even a fucking underwear as ayurvedic and locally made) released their chat application "Kimbho" and was taken down within 24 hours because of major security flaws.

Some obvious ironies I would like to point out here.

1. Coming up with a chat application with gaping security flaws at this stage when privacy related discussions are happening at every nook and corner, worst move ever.

2. There are elections in 2019 and 1 year would be the right amount of time to gather data on public and start targetting and influencing people. It shouldn't be so obvious and everyone knows which political party Patanjali leans towards.

3. You are promoting an app citing Make In India initiative. You are the biggest Indian based FMCG operating in India, courtesy exploiting nationalist sentiments. Whatever you aim of doing, at least invest a decent amount of money in hiring good developers and designers. If not anything get a content writer who will write you an original description of your app for as low as ₹1000.

4. Promoting a competitor of whatsapp on whatsapp is a brilliant move. Give that marketting fellow a big raise.

5. Replacing the phone icon with a shankh is not innovation. Also, everyone knows about spam farms in Bangladesh and many places in India. So boasting about 1.5 lakh downloads in less than an hour only speaks more about your ignorance and lack of technical knowledge.

6. If you really are promoting "swadeshi app", why are you offering logging in through facebook? I mean even a blind person can clearly see your agenda here.

7. Hike is a messaging app made in India and they are here since long and still it are nowhere near the usage of whatsapp. Selling shit in the name of Make in India is not cool and its high time Patanjali realises this. But then again, it is their only marketting strategy because how else can you sell something as gross as cow urine and that too people buying it voluntarily.

8. If this stunt was carried out to be in the news, well played. You are getting a good amount of publicity, but this time a bad publicity will do more harm than good. People are calling out your bluff and you will get to see the results.

Mr. Baba Ramdev, fraud karo, itna blatant mat karo. India ki public sentimental hai chutiya nahi.

Psst, tech world, fuck you and your so called April fucking Fools jokes. They are anticipated, way too obvious and are not even remotely funny.

Question everything!

Comments lie.. sometimes code does too.. Customers..they lie the most..and are sloppy..

Don't be like customers, don't be sloppy. If you were sloppy own it & don't lie about it!

Pick your fights (trying to fix vs rewrite the shit out of it)..you will know what to do more with experience..

RTFM & docs.. If things still unclear, ask before your dick gets stuck in a toaster!

Ask away, learn about the customers & how they use your product.. you'll be surprised how something intuitive to you might be a rocket science for them..meaning more room to fuck things up when using it..more ways you can adapt & prevent things..

Most of all, don't fuckin lie.. ever!!
If you lie on you're CV, we will find out.. If you fuck up something & lie about it, we will find out.. but it will cost us precious time when solving it from scratch.. People fuck up..that's a fact..how you go about it is what makes/breaks it for me. So don't ever fuckin lie to me!!

And don't be arogant.. if you complain about fixing bugs, this is not a job for you.. if you can't even fix the obvious ones you've put there in the first place..twice as bad..

So think before you code..what do you want to do, how you want to accomplish this, is it reusable, can it be extended, does it introduce new technology into the project, will it fuck up current setup.. once you have this shit figured out, code will write itself..

Did I mention already you're not to lie to me, ever?!

And don't try talking about me behind my back either..I've seen it backfire before, results were not good..

Today's project was answering the question: "Can I update tables in a Microsoft Word document programmatically?"

(spoiler: YES)

My coworker got the ball rolling by showing that the docx file is just a zip archive with a bunch of XML in it.

The thing I needed to update were a pair of tables. Not knowing anything about Word's XML schema, I investigated things like:
- what tag is the table declared with?
- is the table paginated within the table?
- where is the cell background color specified?

Fortunately this wasn't too cumbersome.

For the data, CSV was the obvious choice. And I quickly confirmed that I could use OpenCSV easily within gradle.

The Word XML segments were far too verbose to put into constants, so I made a series of templates with tokens to use for replacement.

In creating the templates, I had to analyze the word xml to see what changed between cells (thankfully, very little). This then informed the design of the CSV parsing loops to make sure the dynamic stuff got injected properly.

I got my proof of concept working in less than a day. Have some more polishing to do, but I'm pretty happy with the initial results!

Background: Since last 3-4 months, was working with a senior engineer remotely on a project.
Present: Currently, I am Out of Office and yesterday late night, I opened my official mail and after sometime I got an email with subject: GOODBYE!

It was from him. The same senior engineer with whom I was working. I thought it was a joke. But people don't joke when they send such emails to a huge group of people.

I never knew he was going to leave so soon. I wanted to learn so many things working with him. I used to ask him the silliest doubts ever.
I still wonder why he left the company. I have so many questions to ask him.
I am sad. I am feeling left alone.

It's awkward that today, this very moment, I can't ping him anymore forever.

It's obvious to be more professional and such things are normal.
But, I am fresher and my first project was with him. So, it's kind of tough for me too.

I know this will help me to grow up stronger and teach me that time isn't constant and we need to always be ready and use the right time preciously and deal with the "constant change".

And also, wherever he goes, my best wishes to him and I hope I will meet him some day.

Fml... you keep getting the weekly discussions right on point.

I started with the last guys right out of university... just out of Hospital.

With a brand new degree and a Crohn’s diagnosis I stepped into the first place I found hiring. They were good guys, after a junior dev... to get stuck in their muck.

I did! I nailed project after project, tricky development after tricky development. I spent 5 years with them and over those years things changed.

They had a mass cull... the original idea was to get rid of the useless middle managers, the ones managing other managers being managed by another manager for no real reason.... the ones that do fuck all with their day.

But the fucking idiots upstairs put the job of working out the cull in the shitty middle managers hands.

So, instead, they cut the titles senior, junior and everything in between. Everyone was just a thing, no senior things, no junior things. Just things.

Once they’d done that they said “we’ll we have this many things, they’re all the same, let’s get rid of the things with the highest pay checks because the other things can do it just as well for less money”...

And that’s how they cut 50% of their senior techs.

I was one of the ones left behind but the damage became obvious quick. The middle managers barked out orders at people who couldn’t complete them, and everything went to shit.

My team was rebranded twice in as many years... an obvious ploy for funding, but the cost of the team fluctuated like hell because contractors had to fill the senior positions at 3 times the cost.

Then the managers started barking out Self contradictory orders. Do this, but this way...

This would work, but not that way... try explaining that to a group of non-technical, useless as fuck middle managers. It took months, and shit flows downstream so we got the bulk of the hassle for it.

Then my boy Morpheus, got a warning... they threatened his contract for saying “this will work, but not that way”.

He kept the contract, and the manager giving him the warning said he didn’t think he should... but he, and all the middle fuckwits don’t have the balls to stand up against nonsense.

That was the breaking point for me, I handed in my notice and told them a month was what they could have.

I didn’t have a position or an idea of where to go, a few long-standing offers as back up in a pinch but not the perfect job.

On the Thursday I decided I was done, I let my manager know. Then I boshed the fuck out of my CV and updated my profiles.

My phone started ringing off the hook, a senior NG2/MEAN/Ionic dev on the market is like candy to recruiters. They’re lovely too.

I went to a few interviews that were okay but not great. Then a company got in touch... one that I immediately recognised as an IT book publisher. They said they were looking for NG/NG2 devs, senior. winner! Set up the interview.

So I’d spent the weekend with the missus, about an hour away from mine and 2 from the interview. I hadn’t planned on staying there but at 6ish she looked over at me and said “do you have to go” <- imagine that with puppy dog eyes from a gorgeous Slovenian lass.

I folded quicker than a shitty pancake toss.

We spent the night together but that meant I had to be up at 6, to go back to mine, iron my interview clothes and make it to the train to manage the interview. Fuck. I did it, but I was at the interview wired on caffeine and struggling to be awake and coherent. I still managed, that’s what I do, I make do and try to do well regardless of the situation.

That comes from being ill btw, when you’re dealt a shitty hand you learn to play it well.

They were good guys, the heads all knew what they were on about, not the middle management bs I was used to.

They demoed me live with an ng1 test, which was awesome as hell to play with.

We chatted, friendly and cool guys! I loved the place.

The end of the week they got me in for second round. Ng2 and competence test, again I went for it!

Positive feedback and a “we’ll get back to you ASAP, should be by Tuesday”...

Tuesday was the Tuesday before the Friday I was due to leave the old company... I was cutting it close.

On the Monday the offers started rolling in, a few C# ASP MVC positions, cool but I was holding out for the guys I’d interviewed with.

Then Tuesday comes around, I’m nervous as fuck but it’s okay because I knew regardless I can pay the rent in December with one of the offers.

Then said yes!

The thing that seemed most important in the process was my ability to talk to any fucker. If you’re coming up to interview, talk to everyone, the grocer, your barista, the binmen, anyone. Practice that skill above all others.

I start tomorrow morning! I can’t wait.

Final thought: middle managers are taints.

I swear to god if I see another goddamn todo list tutorial im gonna fucking switch careers. JS fanboys with their blogs... jesus christ i thought npm was spoiled but god, try googling angular tutorials... Seriously, you pick a framework and write a useless shitty blog article about the most obvious implementation? Is that your thing now? Write a tutorial on how to make a mailchimp clone? too hard? I thought so. Your mum must be very proud of you crackhead

On the game front, I see so much conflicting advice. "Start getting feedback" as soon as possible. "Donnt soft launch on steam! The algol will wreck you.", "soft launch on itch to get feedback", "dont soft launch on itch!"

"Start marketing today", "focus on influencers", "get to know communities *before* you advertise", "dont get to know communities beforehand if you're just planning on self prompting", "dont self promote".
"CPM is important.", "CPA is important". Etc.

Sounds a lot like "have a bunch of money upfront." The solution is just to succeed from the start! It's so obvious. Just invent the next gta. The next facebook. Get a small loan of 50,000 dollars, or a million. Donate for a year to other kickstarter projects so people will know you and reciprocate! But also dont ebeg!

How about no. How about fuck all this advice by silver spoon assholes that didnt have to work on shoestring budgets. The advice is the equivalent of having a 300 page tonedeaf book, every page blank except page 150, where the words "fuck you. I got mine." Are printed in times new Roman, 14pt font, neatly in the center of the page.

The truth is most of the "indies" already made it in the software industry proper, before switching over. $5k kickstarter videos, with $15k marketing budgets, no doubt funded in part through their own money funneled through services that provide shell donations, because KS is being used as a glorified advertising service. People buying off steam curators for promotions, youtubers making sponsored videos without disclosing they're sponsored. Fake viralility. Fake campaigns. Predetermined success for those who could *already* afford to develop and go commercial without a publisher. And they came into the market and cannibalized the opportunity, raising the bar for everyone that wasnt them. I guess that's actually a good thing, because we wouldnt have half the amazing games we do, and the pressure to produce quality. But then I see fantastic games utterly ignored or flailing in an attempt to compete for eyeballs in an industry frequently dominated by gatekeeping marketeers and influencers, where human grace determines success or complete oblivion. And I'm just disgusted with it.

Also buy my game. Preorder NOW! And you'll get a REAL canvas bag, I'll go to like the goodwill and buy one and screen print the game logo on it or some shit. Buy the special collectors edition and get pictures of my feet. Buy the game of the year edition and get a real gasmask. Preorder now and I'll fucking suck your di k right now. No lie. Preorder the diamond edition RIGHT NOW in the next six minutes and I will send you one hundred thousand dollars in gold plated bottle caps. Limited supply. one million per customer. Offer expires soon. This is not a scam. I repeat. This is NOT a scam.

In other news I'm soft launching Atom Ranger in six months (assuming the nuclear apocalypse hasn't *actually* started by then). Its state of decay and fallout meets rimworld. Build and manage a sprawling base, resolving conflicts, exploring post apocalyptic Colorado and surrounding territories of no-mans-land. Navigate hazardous weather, radioactive terrain, collapsed bridges, dangerous rivers, and deal with cultists, bandits, slavers, and hungry cannibals. Broker peace between not just the factions outside your settlements, but within your base too. Manage conflicts, settle disputes, avert disasters, barter, scavenge, and survive in a fully dynamic world, where buildings slowly crumble, grass and trees sprout up in the road and vacant lots, fires burn out of control, and factions loot, ruin, and takeover settlements. Watch the world and the survivors in it change and survive. Help them to survive, or become a warlord and rule over the wastes.

Lets be honest. It's basically kenshi but less complicated.

If you want to volunteer to test (instead of paying to be a glorified tester, aka "alpha") let me know in the comments.

I'm currently setting up a discord and mailing list.

Ohh man i fucked up bad. 5 days as intern, and i fuck up really bad with my ego and ignorance.

I love my this company. A great environment, lots of people to learn from , i am given reasonable tasks and i feel happy to complete them. But what happened today was weird and fucked up.

I have never worked at a place with seniors designers tech leads and more people with positions. I have also worked with a lot of competitive people who are always in a race to be first.
And how do we come first? Have a lot of knowledge, hear the smallest of detail and sprint towards goal (because the combination your knowledge, assumptions and speed is enough to make you reach to the top). You don't ask for specific details, because they are obvious. And that's me in short.

Today i fucked up.
Mistake #1 ) first i was given a small task by my senior. It was a 20 mins task max if i had done it the normal noobie way . But i am a pro in mind , i have to do it with all the architecture , even if i don't understand why. So i asked for 50 mins. They gave it and did not had a problem with my time, but with the way i wrote my code.

He was like "who told you to make it like this ? Why did you made it like this?" And was visibly irritated. And i was like super chill saying "i don't know the why, but i know its correct way of using it" , pissing him even more. In my eyes he's just a super friendly sr, more like a bro and wouldn't mind some cheeky answers. And he didnt show any
consequences for that time.

Mistake #2 this is super fucked up. Our office is going under some renovation & interns were asked to sit in the co-working spaces (outside of the office). It was already very disturbing and i had to go to office every few minutes.

So after lunch this happens : We are working on a new module that already has a tonne of screens and logics. I have made a small part which is from the middle and now we can go both in the forward or in the backward direction.(Also, its quite a new module whose idea was recently discussed and decided. And weirdly i am also being treated like a core member as the ceo once himself asked what would he my flow for doing things in this. i am in direct contact and under direction of backend , designers , ceo and My senior and many ppl are giving me tasks ) And... Aagh fuck it. .. its a long story and i don't feel like repeating it but

inshort :

got a task,

didn't understood it completely and thought its my task to figure it out, took a long time figuring it my self ,

techlead/designer somehow changed my and my sr. direction of flow even tho we were taking a different approach

I sit in a noisy and irritating place

Techlead/designer comes during the time when i am figuring out the solution(already overtime the one in point #2) nags for result.

I get in an argument with him, justifying for my time and arguing that it's difficult to think technical logics for that design
( truth be told, it WAS a difficult logic which he thought was too easy. It consisted of 3 variables and 8 states we were doing different works for 4 of them and rejecting 2 and ... I don't know, i had got that wrong . But that shouldn't had been my problem to solve. I should have gone to my senior and didn't get into argument with tech lead ). It think i might have offended him too.

After he left, i am so angry on him that after sometime my senior comes and i misbehave with him. He just asks to meet me before i go, and i do so. During the meeting we discuss this whole fuck up and how many times i showed him my ego and indiscipline. And then i realise what a fuckup i did due to my ego and lack of asking, blindly following my own over confidence and blindly following or arguing with others.

Fuck fuck fuck

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm going on vacation next week, and all I need to do before then is finish up my three tickets. Two of them are done save a code review comment that amounts to combining two migrations -- 30 seconds of work. The other amounts to some research, then including some new images and passing it off to QA.

I finish the migrations, and run the fast migration script -- should take 10 minutes. I come back half an hour later, and it's sitting there, frozen. Whatever; I'll kill it and start it again. Failure: database doesn't exist. whatever, `mysql` `create database misery;` rerun. Frozen. FINE. I'll do the proper, longer script. Recreate the db, run the script.... STILL GODDAMN FREEZING.

WHATEVER.

Research time.
I switch branches, follow the code, and look for any reference to the images, asset directory, anything. There are none. I analyze the data we're sending to the third party (Apple); no references there either, yet they appear on-device. I scour the code for references for hours; none except for one ref in google-specific code. I grep every file in the entire codebase for any reference (another half hour) and find only that one ref. I give up. It works, somehow, and the how doesn't matter. I can just replace the images and all should be well. If it isn't, it will be super obvious during QA.

So... I'll just bug product for the new images, add them, and push. No need to run specs if all that's changed is some assets. I ask the lead product goon, and .... Slack shits the bed. The outage lasts for two hours and change.

Meanwhile, I'm still trying to run db migrations. shit keeps hanging.

Slack eventually comes back, and ... Mr. Product is long gone. fine, it's late, and I can't blame him for leaving for the night. I'll just do it tomorrow.

I make a drink. and another.
hard horchata is amazing. Sheelin white chocolate is amazing. Rum and Kahlua and milk is kind of amazing too. I'm on an alcoholic milk kick; sue me.

I randomly decide to switch branches and start the migration script again, because why not? I'm not doing anything else anyway. and while I'm at it, I randomly Slack again.

Hey, Product dude messaged me. He's totally confused as to what i want, and says "All I created was {exact thing i fucking asked for}". sfjaskfj. He asks for the current images so he can "noodle" on it and ofc realize that they're the same fucking things, and that all he needs to provide is the new "hero" banner. Just like I asked him for. whatever. I comply and send him the archive. he's offline for the night, and won't have the images "compiled" until tomorrow anyway. Back to drinking.

But before then, what about that migration I started? I check on it. it's fucking frozen. Because of course it fucking is.

I HAD FIFTEEN MINUTES OF FUCKING WORK TODAY, AND I WOULD BE DONE FOR NEARLY THREE FUCKING WEEKS.

UGH!

Every time I tell a more senior dev I need help, they tell me to try the obvious things, I tell them I tried those things already, and they think I must have just done it wrong. So they spend an hour explaining to me how to do something I literally just did, and then more time trying the exact same things I just tried. Nobody wins.

Except for me when I find the correct solution while they’re re-implementing the failed solutions because nobody trusted me.

Sadly, this happens all the time. “Did you try a and b?” “Yeah, no luck.” “Okay, so when you try a, you have to remember to call c and d. Let me explain...”

So much wasted time. But the silver lining is in getting to be the one who found the solution (until they wonder ‘why’d she even come to me anyway if she knew the answer?’ ... 🙄) Because I trusted you to know what “team” means, and it’s not too late to learn ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

A guy with a pretty fucked up aggressive personality.

At that point I already had ...more than a few issues with bald headed aggressive men for other reasons.

So from the beginning I was very wary around him... And his behaviour - sweet talking while you could _feel_ the knifes raining down your neck - made me even more defensive. I avoided him like the plague.

But for better or worse I became his supervisor. I had to work with him.

He made it very evident what he thought of having me as a supervisor - from day one there were very non subtle hints.

Every question turned into a discussion... Every discussion turned into screaming... Every screaming from his side turned into me leaving the room. I've had my anger issues and I don't tolerate such behaviour.

The tip of the iceberg was not only his behaviour, but also his limited knowledge.

He worked > 15 years in the company, me 2.

Guess that played a role, too.

But his knowledge was somewhere between junior to average.

Some of the tasks exploded not only in time because of all the rage tantrums he had - but more because he didn't solve them properly, despite given clear guidance.

Since at that time it was obvious that he either quits or will get fired, we had to look at previous projects.

It wasn't pretty - to state it in a polite way.

Non polite way: A shitfest of the worst kind possible.

All in all - he didn't quit.

Nearly half a year later he had to be fired.

Company couldn't fire him earlier for various (eg law) reasons.

But damn he made that time a living hell.

Rarely a day without screaming, door slamming, discussions that went like "I've checked all my literature, what you're saying is wrong." (without stating what literature, the discussion just turned round and round...) and so on...

Buffer usage for simple file operation in python.

What the code "should" do, was using I think open or write a stream with a specific buffer size.

Buffer size should be specific, as it was a stream of a multiple gigabyte file over a direct interlink network connection.

Which should have speed things up tremendously, due to fewer syscalls and the machine having beefy resources for a large buffer.

So far the theory.

In practical, the devs made one very very very very very very very very stupid error.

They used dicts for configurations... With extremely bad naming.

configuration = {}
buffer_size = configuration.get("buffering", int(DEFAULT_BUFFERING))

You might immediately guess what has happened here.

DEFAULT_BUFFERING was set to true, evaluating to 1.

Yeah. Writing in 1 byte size chunks results in enormous speed deficiency, as the system is basically bombing itself with syscalls per nanoseconds.

Kinda obvious when you look at it in the raw pure form.

But I guess you can imagine how configuration actually looked....

Wild. Pretty wild. It was the main dict, hard coded, I think 200 entries plus and of course it looked like my toilet after having an spicy food evening and eating too much....

What's even worse is that none made the connection to the buffer size.

This simple and trivial thing entertained us for 2-3 weeks because *drumrolls please* none of the devs tested with large files.

So as usual there was the deployment and then "the sudden miraculous it works totally slow, must be admin / it fault" game.

At some time it landed then on my desk as pretty much everyone who had to deal with it was confused and angry, for understandable reasons (blame game).

It took me and the admin / devs then a few days to track it down, as we really started at the entirely wrong end of the problem, the network...

So much joy for such a stupid thing.

"CTO" here.
Two week ago the CEO informs me that the "investor" want to put me in contact urgently with an external software house to help me with my "bottlenecks".
The investor goes immediately on holiday, so it's not available for explanations. The CEO doesn't know much.

Today I meet the software house CTO and CEO.
They tell me that I should do a transfer of knowledge with them. That they will respect my requirements, my schedule and that they want to help me.

During the meeting the business consultant explains "his" vision. Some new development nobody understand. Not even the CEO. The other cofounder is probably in disagreement but stay silent.

I agree to cooperate with them in due time and with due scope and planning.

It appears they already signed a contract with the investor. The investor is offering to us 40 days of a senior developer, for "free".
The CEO doesn't even know the economical details of the contract and he is surprised that has been signed.He also didn't know that a person will come over for 40 (?) days and that we will have to pay the transfer expenses.

I try to be friendly. I explain to them the issues I need to solve. I say specifically that I need help on certain tasks and that my wish is that nothing "new" will start until we fix some obvious problems.

After leaving, in the evening I receive an email from the software house guy, telling me that next week I MUST allocate a slot for technical transfer and the 2 weeks after for on site training. Like that. He also mention we "agreed" on that which is false. We agreed on me deciding the timing.

We are only 2 developers, at the moment and the other one will be on holiday next week, so I'm trying to get from him a lot of things I don't know because I don't know everything.

I'm not even sure I'll be able to explain how to prepare all the environment.
Worst thing is that I don't know what will be the scope of the project.

I really don't know how to behave.
I wrote back setting my conditions. I have holiday too. I have to prepare "documentation", explanation, etc.

I don't want the "senior dev" coming when I'm not present.
Maybe I was too weak answering and I should have started a fight immediately. Because he actually AGREED to let me decide and after that he set conditions on me immediately.

I don't know.
My stomach is burning, I had a very bad digestion with fever and headache, feel like puking, plus I spent several evening hours fixing the fucking Linux kernel bug.

I want to survive. I don't want to let them oust me in this stupid way. I want to fight.
I know that if I will explode, scream or whatever I will be at fault and I'll accelerate my demise.
When I try to be "diplomatic" actually I end up being weak.
When I try to be assertive I'm in fact rude and hysterical.
I can't think anything else.

This is what burnout looks like.

In January this year, I began working in the office three days a week. Since last year, I have been engaged in text conversations with a girl, primarily about work-related matters as she was looking to pursue higher studies.
As someone who appreciates goal-oriented individuals, I maintained a conversation with her without appearing too needy.
Since our interactions were limited to chat, they remained somewhat superficial. However, ever since I saw her in person at the office, I started developing feelings for her. At the time, I was going through some personal challenges, which led to overwhelming and irrational thoughts.
Gradually, our casual chats progressed, and by February , I confessed my feelings to her. It was a mistake on my part because we had never been on a proper date before that day, and I hadn't even confirmed if she was already in a committed relationship.
We went out together and had a long conversation, during which it became clear that she was already committed to someone else, and that she had never thought of me in a romantic way.

This realization left me kind of sad, and I didn't do much work that day.
At the end of that day, I noticed someone sitting in the office lobby—a stranger to me, but someone who worked for the same company.
Guess who? Correct. A random girl.
She approached me and invited me to spend time at a nearby DJ event. She had a preference for taller men, and you know, as I am naturally tall and hairy, she found me attractive, I guess or not.
I felt like I had just experienced a breakup. Should I go with another woman ? I didn't feel quite right about that.
I did the obvious thing. I hesitated but ultimately decided to go with her to the DJ event without much thought.
We spent some time together, and afterward, I dropped her off at her place. However, I didn't have any strong feelings for this second girl. It could have been because she made the first move.
and it felt like something I didn't have to work hard for.

Fast forward to a sports day where I was feeling so happy after losing most of the games I participated in. I didnt even count the games I disqualified, by the way
Guess who is with me this time ?
Another girl, again a stranger to me, sat near me and started talking. She spoke about herself and her past relationships, displaying a remarkable ability to understand and use sarcasm—an uncommon trait among girls in my experience. It seemed like she really wanted someone to talk to.
She kept talking, and the next day, I asked her out for lunch. However, she said she wasn't interested in me romantically, which caught me off guard. It was perplexing that a simple lunch invitation led to such a defensive reaction from her.

The following day or some other day, or month , one of my colleagues pointed out a girl and mentioned that he didn't think he could ever date her as she seemed solely interested in long-term relationships.
I thought he might be right and that maybe it was best to let such people go for now. So I let her go. Yeah, you wish.
I approached her and learned about her family. We had a few encounters during the sports day, mostly revolving around sports and how badly i messed up games in the events.
Returning to the present, I asked her out. However, she expressed concerns that things could become uncomfortable if we went out. Since then, I haven't seen her because she moved to another office a few blocks away.

The next morning, a newcomer joined the team. She was slightly older, and by that time, I was confident in my ability to make anyone uncomfortable with lame jokes. So, I decided not to disturb her. Surprisingly, the same jokes that previously had mixed results were well-received by her. One thing led to another, and we went out. Unfortunately, she was dealing with depression, so I let her go after a few dates.

Now, let's go back to the first girl I mentioned, the one who stirred up my "feelings."
I decided to approach her, but she became furious and threatened to complain about me or have others take action against me.
I stormed out of her cabin. Later, I asked her for the reason behind her response. She said it was because she noticed me flirting with others around the office after I left her. She didn't appreciate that.
Unexpectedly, the Head of HR contacted me, and they wanted to have a talk, which happened yesterday.
Guess what?

Good question, what wasn't bad about 2020?

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think that two criterias are important:

- don't block my productivity
- author should have his userbase in mind

1) Some simple anti examples:

- Windows popping up a big fat blue screen screaming for updates. Like... Go suck some donkey balls you stupid shit that's totally irritating you arsehole.
- Graphical tools having no UI concept. E.g. Adobes PDF reader - which was minimalized in it's UI and it became just unbearable pain. When the concept is to castrate the user in it's abilities and call the concept intuitive, it's not a concept it's shit. Other examples are e.g. GEdit - which was severely massacred in Gnome 3 if I remember correctly (never touched Gnome ever again. I was really put off because their concept just alienated me)
- Having an UI concept but no consistency. Eg. looking at a lot of large web apps, especially Atlassian software.
Too many times I had e.g. a simple HTML form. In menu 1 you could use enter. In menu 2 Enter does not work. in another menu Enter works, but it doesn't submit the form it instead submits the whole page... Which can end in clusterfuck.
Yaaayyyy.
- Keyboard usage not possible at all.
It becomes a sad majority.... Pressing tab, not switching between form fields. Looking for keyboard shortcuts, not finding any. Yes, it's a graphical interface. But the charm of 16 bit interfaces (YES. I'm praising DOS interfaces) was that once you memorized the necessary keyboard strokes... You were faster than lightning. Ever seen e.g. a good pharmacist, receptionist or warehouse clerk... most of the software is completely based on short keyboard strokes, eg. for a receptionist at a doctor for the ICD code / pharmaceutical search et cetera.
- don't poop rainbows. I mean it.
I love colors. When they make sense. but when I use some software, e.g. netdata, I think an epilepsy warning would be fair. Too. Many. Neon. Colors. -.-

2) It should be obvious... But it's become a burden.

E.g. when asked for a release as there were some fixes... Don't point to the install from master script. Maybe you like it rolling release style - but don't enforce it please. It's hard to use SHA256 hash as a version number and shortening the hash might be a bad idea.

Don't start experiments. If it works - don't throw everything over board without good reasons. E.g. my previous example of GEdit: Turning a valuable text editor into a minimalistic unusable piece of crap and calling it a genius idea for the sake of simplicity... Nope. You murdered a successful product.
Gnome 3 felt like a complete experiment and judging from the last years of changes in the news it was an rather unsuccessful one... As they gave up quite a few of their ideas.

When doing design stuff or other big changes make it a community event or at least put a poll up on the github page. Even If it's an small user base, listen to them instead of just randomly fucking them over.
--
One of my favorite projects is a texteditor called Kate from KDE.

It has a ton of features, could even be seen as a small IDE. The reason I love it because one of the original authors still cares for his creation and ... It never failed me. I use Kate since over 20 years now I think... Oo

Another example is the git cli. It's simple and yet powerful. git add -i is e.g. a thing I really really really love. (memorize the keyboard shortcuts and you'll chunk up large commits faster than flash.

Curl. Yes. The (http) download tool. It's author still cares. It's another tool I use since 20 years. And it has given me a deep insight of how HTTP worked, new protocols and again. It never failed me. It is such a fucking versatile thing. TLS debugging / performance measurements / what the frigging fuck is going on here. Take curl. Find it out.

My worst enemies....

Git based clients. I just hate them. Mostly because they fill the niche of explaining things (good) but completely nuke the learning of git (very bad). You can do any git action without understanding what you do and even worse... They encourage bad workflows.
I've seen great devs completely fucking up git and crying because they had really no fucking clue what git actually does. The UI lead them on the worst and darkest path imaginable. :(

Atlassian products. On the one hand... They're not total shit. But the mass of bugs and the complete lack of interest of Atlassian towards their customers and the cloud movement.... Ouch. Just ouch.

I had to deal with a lot of completely borked up instances and could trace it back to a bug tracking entry / atlassian, 2 - 3 years old with the comment: vote for this, we'll work on a Bugfix. Go fuck yourself you pisswads.

Microsoft Office / Windows. Oh boy.
I could fill entire days of monologues.
It's bad, hmkay?

XEN.
This is not bad.
This is more like kill it before it lays eggs.
The deeper I got into XEN, the more I wanted to lay in a bathtub full of acid to scrub of the feelings of shame... How could anyone call this good?!?????

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This was the best hack when I was 11. My computer had a too small fan that was always on max speed, and thus really loud. To overcome this issue I wrapped a thick blanket around the entire computer case. A week later it broke down due to the obvious heating problem, and when it came back from service the repair technician just looked at me saying "Someone has had this computer fucked up intentionally, everything is melted from within. What have you done to it?!" Me being the piece of shit that I was just denied and got a brand new PC for free, nobody ever knew..

In only I were 1.15 times faster or had better planning (why didn’t I use the Saturday Sunday at the end of the first week 🤦🏼‍♂️), things would’ve happened differently. I think I’m becoming stupid and my tolerance levels are going down too.

So this happened a while back ..

I was given a code base which didn’t have any changes in the last two years and I was asked to add a feature to this. This was my first task in this new group I was part of. I had two weeks to do this starting on a Monday.

Partway through implementation I realised that the code base is a pile of shit and I wasn’t doing myself or anyone else any favours by shitting on it.

It’s Wednesday. I’ve dealt with many other codebases before but the urge to rewrite this particular one was just unlike anything else. And so I started changing code and before I realised, I modified almost all the important files.
I got sick of this mixed up code and started a rewrite from scratch. It was Friday and I finally had just the basic mechanics of the whole thing working. Now I needed to add all the functionalities and also my new feature.

It should be noted that at no point did I tell any of the superiors I was doing this fearing what they might say and also fearing going back to adding shit to shit.

By the end of the second week, the rewrite was complete and I only had the new feature to add. The rewrite was significantly smaller, compartmentalised and well commented because I did the bloody commenting (where it was not obvious from the code). So on Friday, I was asked about the progress and I told them that it needed some more work and that I need a couple more days. And I got shit for it. I was told it was a mistake giving this task to me and that I am not competent enough. One of the superiors told the other superior about perhaps giving me something more suited to my level. To be fair to them, they were expecting the work in the two weeks to be for the new feature.

And in two days’ time, on Monday (I worked on Saturday and half of Sunday), I finished the whole thing and gave it to them. New feature was working. And I still did not tell them what I did. The tool worked fine so they had no idea what happened because this project had no version control and I pointed them to a new directory with the new code with a first commit.

Warning: this is not a rant. I'm too happy and excited to rant right now.

Today I "finished" my first webpage!!!

Wohooo!

It's the blog I'll use. It's currently offline for obvious reasons but I intend to put it out there when I have more confidence on my skills and some content to put in it. I only used django, html and css, and I really dig the looks of it. My gf liked it so it can't be that ugly.

I still have a lot to learn with django, and I will add a thing or two to this
webpage but now I feel confident enough to make the backbone of my first real project : a platform to ease essay writing for history students. It's something simple for students to keep track of their essays thesis and ideas but also the bibliography they'll use and the thesis and ideas they think each text they read for the essay has. I intend later to extend the functionality so it can store all the texts the user has used in some useful and atractive manner so they can keep track of everything they've read, share it and use it for later works.

I'm so fucking excited I can't fucking sleep (it's 3 am right now).

A bug is born
... and it's sneaky and slimy. Mr. Senior-been-doing-it-for-ears commits some half-assed shitty code, blames failed tests on availability of CI licenses. I decided to check what's causing this shit nevertheless, turns out he forgot to flag parts of the code consistently using his new compiler defines, and some parts would get compiled while others needed wouldn't .. Not a big deal, we all make mistakes, but he rushes to Teams chat directing a message to me (after some earlier non-sensible argument about merits of cherry picking vs re-base):
Now all tests pass, except ones that need CI license. The PR is done, you can use your preferred way to take my changes.

So after I spot those missing checks causing the tests to fail, as well as another bug in yet another test case, and yet another disastrous memory related bug, which weren't detected by the tests of course .. I ponder my options .. especially based on our history .. if I say anything he will get offended, or at best the PR will get delayed while he is in denial arguing back even longer and dependent tasks will get delayed and the rest of the team will be forced to watch this show in agony, he also just created a bottleneck putting so many things at stake in one PR ..

I am in a pickle here .. should I just put review comments and risk opening a can of worms, or should I just mention the very obvious bugs, or even should I do nothing .. I end up reaching for the PM and explained the situation. In complete denial, he still believes it's a license problem and goes on ranting about how another project suffering the same fate .. bla bla bla chipset ... bla bla bla project .. bla bla bla back in whatever team .. then only when I started telling him:
These issues are even spotted by "Bob" earlier, since for some reason you just dismissed whatever I just said ..
("Bob" is another more sane senior developer in the team, and speaks the same language as the PM)
Only now I get his attention! He then starts going through the issues with me (for some reason he thinks he is technical enough to get them) .. He now to some extent believes the first few obvious bugs .. now the more disastrous bug he is having really hard time wrapping his head around it .. Then the desperate I became, I suggest let's just get this PR merged for the sake of the other tasks after may be fixing the obvious issues and meanwhile we create another task to fix the bug later .. here he chips in:
You know what, that memory bug seems like a corner case, if it won't cause issues down the road after merging let's see if we need even to open an internal fix or defect for it later. Only customers can report bugs.

I am in awe how low the bar can get, I try again and suggest let's at least leave a comment for the next poor soul running into that bug so they won't be banging their heads in the wall 2hrs straight trying to figure out why store X isn't there unless you call something last or never call it or shit like that (the sneaky slimy nature of that memory bug) .. He even dismissed that and rather went on saying (almost literally again): It is just that Mr. Senior had to rush things and communication can be problematic sometimes .. (bla bla bla) back in "Sunken Ship Co." days, we had a team from open source community .. then he makes a very weird statement:
Stuff like what Richard Stallman writes in Linux kernel code reviews can offend people ..

Feeling too grossed and having weird taste in my mouth I only get in a bad hangover day, all sorts of swear words and profanity running in my head like a wild hungry squirrel on hot asphalt chasing a leaky chestnut transport ... I tell him whatever floats your boat but I just feel really sorry for whoever might have to deal with this bug in the future ..

I just witnessed the team giving birth to a sneaky slimy bug .. heard it screaming and saw it kicking .. and I might live enough to see it a grown up having a feast with other bug buddies in this stinky swamp of Uruk-hai piss and Orcs feces.

Just too obvious PsyOps accounts spamming this platform.

Heya,
College is no place to chill and be laid back as shown in movies. The reality is that it is more challenging than school with peer pressure being no stranger to us.
Being a newbie in the tech domain, and being a girl, I felt the gender gap and the intimidation newbies like me go through when we see legit programmers who flaunt their skills and make it obvious that they exactly know what they are doing.
But along with all this ranting, for all the newbies out there, remember that this phase too shall pass and its not as scary as it seems (I kept convincing myself).
Always start with something easy and take baby steps, one good coding language to start with would be python, as it is more understandable and less intimidating and complex-looking than languages like C and C++.
I still struggle, but there are times when it gave me great joy like the time I developed an app with Flutter or when I managed to grab a free tee from hacktoberfest 2019.
Stay home and Stay safe buddy ;)
P.S: If you a dev and want some cool swags check the website devswag, you won't be disappointed :)

This is a long post and if someone comments without reading carefully I don't care about that person's opinion.

I have 3 accounts here, and that is a must have for me. Let me explain:

Let's think of people and who they are in layers.

The innermost layers are made of private and intimate things: fears, dreams, shames, basically things that are mostly shared with very close people, like family, best friends, and specially significant others.

On the other hand, outermost layers are the public persona, who you are as a citizen, who you are in your profesion, and so on.

So, you wouldn't normally tell your boss about your favorite sex positions.

Let's also say there can be layers in the middle, and all the layers sometimes overlap, but let's not get too deep into this as I think I got the point across.

Here on I explain the original thesis.

I am a developer, and as such I want to fulfill my needs on dev communities, one of them being devrant.
I wish to learn from other devs, I expose my (sometimes controversial) points of view. I rant about annoying shit in the workplace.

But also, at some level, I wish to be taken seriously as a developer, I wish to build a reputation, and I wish to be accepted, even in a shallow social level. There is a social factor to what we do and it's totally normal.

Now, the problem is that I also would want to express my inner self.

So what I do is I don't use my main account for that, I use another, in fact 2 other accounts.

There are several reasons for that:

* I want to hide intimate shit from trolls.

Imagine I griefpost about a loved one that died, then later found myself in a heated discussion about some language, and then some troll comments something like "I'm glad your x died". i wouldn't react very well.

* I want to keep my posts consistent.

If people become interested in what I post as a dev, then they are going to expect dev related stuff from me. If I start posting like controversial points of view, that's not very cool because I'd be doing like a bait n switch on them.

* I want to maintain a reputation, and I want to not get banned on the main account

Reputation as a profesional is a real thing, and it shouldn't be affected by your personal shit.
Also sometimes you argue, and things get heated, and sometimes you get suspended or banned.

You try your hardest to be respectful, but in some communities, some mods are trigger happy.

By restricting this on your alt account, you're in a way promising that you'll have the upmost behaviour on your dev account because that means being professional.

Now, I said I had 2 other accounts.

The reason for having 2 is because I separate two layers:

In the 2nd account I am open and direct regarding my points of view, and more argumentative, but still trying to be relatively civil. I would also post things that might be controversial or not popular. I try to be real basically.

You can conclude that the 2nd account is the one posting this, since this post could trigger some people.

In the 3rd account, I talk about intimate shit like traumas, fears, emotional pain, things I know I'll get support for (the same support I give others when in need) and are not controversial in any way.
This way I can vent painful things and avoid trolls.

Cool people appreciate it when you're transparent about your shortcoming and dark thoughts.

But it takes one asshole in a high horse to judge you. And sometimes you need to give that asshole the middle finger without being afraid of ruining your reputation
or getting banned,
or being scared of that asshole laughing about your intimate shit (again, I use this account for that)

I know it sounds like I have multiple personalities but I swear I'm ok, and hopefully what I said makes sense. People might say "don't use alt accounts, go to another site", but I find that devrant has some interesting people.

The obvious downside is that you end up knowing people more than what they assume, because you interact with them through different accounts.

This is kinda shady, but I'm not interested in taking advantage of others anyway so...

I recently tried to apply the same data analytics rationale that I use at work to my personal life. This is not a rant, it is more like an data storytelling of an actual use case I would like some input on.

I set a goal - gotta thin up a bit and calm down my ticker - and got a (almost unreasonably expensive) field expert consultant to yell at me about it for a couple hours.

I unravel the metrics - there is like a million weight-related KPIs and most say nothing at all. I have never seen an non-infrastructure measurable subject that could not be resumed to 2-5 performance metrics. I got overall weight, how well my nine-years-old business suit fits me, heart rate, and day-after relative muscle pain (it will make sense soon).

Then its data-pipeline time. I bought a cheap weight scale and smartwatch, and every morning I input the data in an app. Yes, I try to put on the suit every morning. It still does not fit.

After establishing a baseline, I tried to fit different approaches. Doing equipment-free exercises, going to the gym, dieting. None was actually feasible in the long run, but trying different approaches does highlight the impacts and the handling profile of each method.

Looking at the now-gathered data, one thing was obvious - can't do dieting because it is not doable to have a shopping list and meals for me and another for the family.
Gym is also off the table - too much overhead. I spend more time on the trip there and back than actually there.
And home exercise equipment is either super crappy or very expensive. But it is also the most reasonable approach.

So it is solutions time. I got a nice exercise bycicle (not a peloton), an yoga mat (the wife already had that one) and an exercise program that uses only those two resources. Not as efficient without dieting, not as measurable and broad as the gym, but it fits my workflow. Deploy to production!

A few months pass and the dataset grows. The signal is subtle but has support - it works! The handling, however, needs improvement, since I cannot often enough get with the exercise program. Some mornings are just after some hard days.

I start thinking about what else I can improve in the program, but it is already pretty lean and full of compromises.
So I pull an engineer and start thinking about the support systems and draft profile. What else could be draining my willpower and morning time?

Chores. Getting the kids ready for school, firing up the moka pot, setting the off-brand roomba, folding the overnight-dried clothes, cooking breakfast, doing the dishes, cleaning the toilets. All part of my morning routine. It might benefit from some automation.

Last month I got that machine our elders call "wasteful" and "useless crap lazy entitled Americans invented because they feel oh-so-insulted for simply doing something by hand like everyone always did" - a "dish-washer".
Heh, I remember how hard was to convince my mother-in-law that an remote-controled electric garage door would not make she look like an spoiled brat.
Still to early to call, but I think that the dishwasher just saved me about 25 mins every morning. It might be enough to save willpower for me to do more exercise.

This is all so reflective of all data analytics cases really are out in the wild - the analytics phase seems so small compared to the gathering and practical problem-solving all around. And yet d.a. is what tells you that you are doing the wrong thing all along. Or on what you should work next.

So, we've been on Deutsche Telekom for about 9 months. Shitty connection in the countryside but literally not one outage.

For the last 6 weeks our internet has been dropping out with no obvious cause.

Just this week we start getting calls if we'd like to upgrade to a package with LTE...

I'm finding the coincidence just a little too convenient.

I have a problem!

I used to love programming and I really had a passion for it! I was a fast learner and realized quickly that I had a talent for this. It felt obvious that I should go for a career as a software developer! I have now been working with this professionally for about 2.5 years and I already hate it! I'm not sure if it's the job or the career that I hate but all my creativity and passion for this is gone! I feel like it's way too early to get tired of a career!

Has anyone else been through something similar? Is it a phase? Should I get a new job? Should I change career completely?

Hello and welcome, to a presentation in which I will tell you my thoughts on the shortcomings of modern day computers and programming practices.

Computers are based on a very fundamental and old idea, folders, and files, a file is basically a concrete amount of data, whereas a folder is a group of files, and it comes from the real life concept of files and folders, now it might be quite obvious already that using a concept invented in 1898 by a guy called Edwin G. Seibels, might not be the best way for computers to function in the year 2020, but alas, it is.

Unless of course, you step into the world of a programmer.

A programmer’s world is much different, they use this idea of a data structure, or in simpler terms, an object. An Object is just like what you would think of as an object in your head, something with different properties that you can think about in different ways, for example your mobile phone, it has a battery percentage, it has a screen size, it has free space available. Programmers use these data structures to analyse data very quickly, like finding all phones with a screen size bigger than a certain size for example.

The problem is that programmers still use files and folders to create the programs that use these objects.

Consider this example.

Let’s say you want to create a virtual version of a drink bottle, consider what properties it will have, colour, volume, height, width, depth, material, etc..

As a programmer, you can leverage programming features and change the properties of a drink bottle directly, if you wanted to change the colour, you just say, drink bottle “dot” colour, equals blue, or red.

But if the drink bottle was represented as a file, all the drink bottles data would be inside the one file, so you would have to open the whole file, find the line or section of the file that has the colour data of the drink bottle, and select it, highlight it, delete what’s there, and type in your new value.

One way to explain this better is to imagine a folder that now represents the drink bottle, imagine adding a new file into that folder that represents each property I described before, colour, volume, etc.., well now, you could just open that folder, find the file for colour, either by looking with your eyes or you could do a file search in the folder for a file called colour, open it, and edit the value inside. This way of editing objects is the one that more closely represents the way programmers and a program itself interacts with objects inside a running programming language.

But the thing is, programmers don’t use the folder/file way of creating objects and putting them into programs, because it would be too cumbersome, they just create 1 file for an object, or have lots of objects in a file, and create all the objects in 1 file, and then run the program which creates the objects, then when they stop the program, it deletes the objects. So there is no actual link between the object in a file and the object that the program creates by reading the data from that file, if you change the object in your program, it does not get saved to the file.

So programmers created databases to house these objects, but there is still a flaw in databases, they are hard to interface with, and mostly databases are just used to send data or retrieve data from, programmatically, you can’t really browse a database the way you can browse the files on your computer. You can, but database interfaces are not made to be easily navigated the way files and folders are.

As it stands, there is no way to store objects instead of files on your computer and interact with them in complex ways the way programmers can inside the programs they create.

If the idea of an object became standard the way a file and folder is standard, I think it would empower human’s a great deal to express things far more easily and fluidly than they can today.

Thanks for reading.

you want a bigger dick because you think women care/it’ll get you chicks/you can win a dick-measuring contest on the internet.
I want a smaller one because mine is too obvious when I’m wearing fishnets, and I have to wear them with jean shorts.
we are not the same.

Okay, so yesterday was crazy. So crazy, in fact, that I'm not even typing this on my phone. I'm typing it on an LG G4.

So, I took an Uber out to a Sprint store I'd been told did repairs. My phone's vibrator was broken. So, basically I thought just like that R&M episode "20 minutes adventure in and out" - only to find out they'd need to wipe my goddamn phone, and then send it to Texas. I now have to wait 6 days for my phone lmfao.

So, in the meantime, they took an hour to get me this G4 which makes me miss all the finer things in life - I miss my USB-C and not having to give a damn about how I plug it in and I miss my fingerprint reader (I know, I'm a lazy fuck with first-world problems. I don't care to hear about how fucking stupid I am for either of those thoughts, STFU). Also the G4 is prone to hardware failures, so they said they weren't too happy about giving me this, but it's the only one with NFC.

So in the middle of setup, the Sprint store's power went out. FUUUUUUCK. The phone was pretty much at 5% battery and was being slow as hell, so you can just about imagine the irritation me and this guy had when the phone died in the middle of setup.

The next thing is an unrelated story, but I'm sure some of you older guys here will love this. I was at a place called Triangle Park last night. I go there for burgers, but they also have a bar. Sometimes I get sent to the bar and the bartender gets me my food. So last night I went to pick the food up from the bar for takeout.

The bartender must've had an accident and messed something up, so she told me to sit at the bar. I thought it was obvious I was only 19, so I barely sat. I'm literally not old enough to sit at the bar, even though when I was younger my dad and his friends used to let me sit with them because I had a history of saying stupid shit that made his friends laugh. Nonetheless, I sat with my ass hanging off the edge because I knew it was wrong :/

She comes back and asks what type of drink I want. I had to tell her that I was 19. I wasn't gonna sit here and lie because I'm pretty sure she could've lost her job for serving a minor. I exited and waited in the lobby.

But are we at the point where 19-year-olds look like 25-year-olds? I don't want to think about this because it means I'm getting older. That's a lot to take in. Later in the night it was still gnawing at my gut.

Yesterday was one hella day man.

I love git stash.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

## building my own router

I hoped things would go more smoothly :)
Anyway, my new miniPC easily accepted CentOS 8 - no fuss here. And I've got to say - I love CentOS8 so far! Shell has amazing nifty tricks, UI (gnome3) is also snappy, video/audio/ethernet,.. everything works.

What I did NOT expect is hardware being off. Well okay, the price was low - it was obvious smth is not right. But still.. I decided to build my own router so that I could swap wifi card whenever I want. So that I could run my own network services in there. Turns out - the card swapping is not as easy as one might think.

I got the AX200 WiFi6 card for that very purpose. But once plugged in the OS can only see it's bluetooth module. Weird... What's even weirder is that even though the card is PCIe, the OS uses btusb module to talk to that device. What? USB?? emm.. What??

And there it is. After opening it up again I noticed that the mPCIe area is marked with a label: "USB WIFI / WWAN". USB? Does that mean this PCIe slot is wired into the USB bus? Not impossible I guess.

Googling for a "pcie wifi over usb" or smth like that brought me to one reddit (I think?) where someone wanted to build a DIY wifi mPCIe -> USB adapter and someone else adviced hime that (for some reason) at best he could only get bluetooth working (hey! just like me!). It's got to do smth with pcie channels and USB being too weak to handle all that load, or smth.. IDK, I'm not a HW guy.

Well that sucks then! I have a mPCIe slot that does not work as a PCIe. Shit! So I guess the best I could do is to plug back in the same wifi card that came with the device. It smells like 2003 - supports only g protocol. Fine, let's try that. Maybe I'll find a way to work around this mPCIe limitation later on (USB adapter or smth... except there are no USB WIFI6 dongles yet :( ). So I plug it back in and start turning it into a router. Disable NetworkManager, configure static NCs' settings, install dhcpd, hostapd, bind and others. Looks like all is done! Now it's time to start it all. systemctl start hostapd --> FAILED. wtf? journalctl says it could not initialize a driver. umm okay? Why? Forums say I should airodump-ng check and kill whatever's using that device. Fine. airodumo reveals avahi and wpa_suppl are still using it. kill, kill, GOTTA KILL 'EM ALL!! Starting hostapd again -- same shit... wtf?

iw list

My gawd... That shitty network card does not even support AP mode :( I mean.. My USB wifi dongle for 2€ supports 2x more modes, is faster, has better range and is easier to work with than this old tart!

Yeah. That was an interesting day. When enfironment engineers break my testing environments at work I'm glad I have where to spend my time now.

BTW any ideas how to bypass this mPCIe nonsense? Come on, there are USB GPUs out there.. Why can't they make a USB (or dual-USB if they really need to) mPCIe adapter?

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.

"The Perils of Overzealous Code Commenting"

In the land of code, where bugs roam free,
There lived a developer, a comment enthusiast, you see.
Their code was a masterpiece, a work of art,
But the comments? Oh, they took it too far!

For every line of code, a comment did appear,
Explaining the obvious with a touch of fear.
Their obsession with comments, though well-intentioned,
Left fellow developers scratching their heads, bewildered and pensioned.

way back in highschool, for recitation i fixed a bug in the code written on the board with a very small change. feeling proud of my work, i did a 'mic drop'-esque thing on the marker i used.

my prof apparently did not see the change i made, said to the class something about 'having guts,stagefright,etc. he thought i really did not do anything, and just erased the whole thing. i almost lost interest in programming after that.

after college though, graduating top of the class and all, the school asked me to do their website, it was kickass and the board liked it.

months after golive, i came across the same prof in a party for celebrating the success of the website.
i will never forget that "in your face" smug smile i gave him, and the obvious stumped look on his face.

sorry if its too long, here's a rant potato (:/)

So a team at on-site sent a OOM(Out of Memory) issue in our morning.
Everyone analysed the issue as being code issue since we were bringing too much data into the runtime process. The analysis was done on the heap dumps. The number of records reported by user were 1k. At the end of the day it turns the number of records were actually 100k+.
Why do people jump.to conclusions without thinking about the obvious. :-(

I joined a project that has been in development for four years. After a couple of weeks of getting used to what has already been done I saw some strange coding.
One thing that struck me in particular was how often I saw pointers to pointers of objects being passed as arguments without any obvious reasons.
Only after I got to write a new functionality myself did I see why that was done.. as I needed to do it too. I had to allocate the memory for an object that was given as the parameter.
C is a hell of a language.. just as I thought I was good at it things like this happen.

Rant!!!

Fuck!!!

Clowns!!!

And it is only Monday!!!!

Involved in a pretty large it project. Several years endevour. Global. Tens and tens of millions of dollar budget.

It is obvious for all that this waterfall approach will cause enormous pain. Pain and suffering.

Multiple consultant firms involved. Loads of management, leads and the likes. Several with no it background.

🙄

Yes. No real concept of a database or what not. I mean. It is an actual IT project.

Several leads. One of the managers have no idea what he is doing. None. One would guess he should have his shit together regarding NON-it stuff. But no. And they work with this full-time and can’t even setup a descent way of working in a sub-sub-sub-project.

Clowns.

One would imagine in a waterfall setup that things is…formal. But no. It’s just people doing their thing. Lots of words. Lots of words.

I think there are nice problems to solve at the end. When it is delivered and done. So I will plan to stay and learn as much as possible. But I have to do the clowns work. Which sucks so much I can’t believe. But there are so many people involved so I guess I can get away with it in one piece without too much effort.

I am not even going to write a single line of code. 😬

All is fine.

Fucking Monday.

VR/AR - inferior interaction with the computer, just like touchscreen are inferior to physical buttons
Microservices - having a stew of different coding standards will in the end introduce performance issues due to layers needed to reduce code entropy
Agile - programming was and always will be creation on existing technologies. Every library writer who follows Agile is making a hellhole for anyone above the layer of abstraction
Web freedom and Anonymity - At this point it should be obvious already, this fad took 30 years too long

I got a REALLY nice compliment from my dev team today. But first, the setup...

Tuesday night, I pushed some changes before I left that totally borked the build today when my team pulled changes (this is an off-shore team, so we more or less work opposite hours). Fortunately, my team dealt with it easy enough since (a) it was pretty obvious what happened, and (b) my commit message had enough information to help them know for sure, and they just reverted one file and were good to go for the day (they didn't fix the problem, left that for me to do, which is proper).

It was an absolutely stupid, careless mistake: I somehow copied the contents of a JS file into a JSP and pushed it. Just a simple case of too many tabs open at once and too many interruptions while I'm trying to code (which is typical most days, unfortunately, but this day it had an impact other than just slowing me down).

But, those are the reasons it happened, they aren't excuses. It was carelessness, plain and simple.

So, once I fixed it, I sent a note to the team explaining it. It basically said "Look, that was a dumb, careless mistake on my part, my bad, sorry for the inconvenience, it's fixed now."

I had a message waiting for me in my inbox this morning that said how I'm an inspiration because despite all my knowledge and experience, despite being a long-time lead, they (a) appreciate the fact that I'm human and still make mistakes, and (b) I stand up and take responsibility when it happens and then do what's necessary to reverse the mistake.

That made my day :)

To me, it's just the right way to be (I credit my parents 100%), never occurs to me to do otherwise, but the truth is not everyone can say the same. Some people are insecure and play the CYA game right away, every time. Some people act like they never make mistakes in the first place.

I don't care if you're an experienced dev or a junior, always take responsibility for your actions, especially your mistakes. Don't try and bullshit your way out of them. Sure, it's fine to explain why it happened if there were factors beyond your control, but at the end of the day, own up to them, apologize where necessary, and then put in the effort to make it right. Most people have no problem with people who make mistakes every so often - everyone does, whether everyone admits to it or not - but those who try and shirk responsibility don't last long in this or any endeavor (you know, putting aside the professional bullshitters who build their careers around it... that's not most people, thankfully).

I'm studying atm and I survived Haskell, SKI, ... now, in the second semester we started with Python (yeay ♡) and Java (that's fine).

One of the first exercises is about installing Jython ('cause it's good, right? /sarcasm off), using the lecturer's module and write some code for it. It's about painting some shitty graphics *gasp*...

I use PyCharm (not really necessary for these crappy exercises) and programming on Windows and/or Linux.

Downloaded Jython, installed it, set it as interpreter - works fine (win10, pycharm).
Some students got weird errors using linux - for me it's the same but meh Idc.

Today I tried using Jython on my notebook, too (win10, pycharm). Downloaded it from the Jython Project website. Can't update pip, can't run modules - error is about fckin charsets...

Some other student figured out - wrong version of Jython. The newer version has some bug fixes.
2.7.1 is the one and only - the download section of their website offers 2.7.0 as latest release...

So - how to know there is a version 2.7.1?
#1 version control website = Wikipedia

So... there is a blog, guy's writing about this release - this installer is hosted at maven central. Yeay. Obvious. Thanks.

Can't describe such stupidity - maybe it's the user again 😂

/rambling

Arghhh!

Okay, so have just been having a play with Mailgun's webhook functionality (a client finally has a decent use for these).

I setup a test endpoint that sends a mail via Mailgun and then handles the POST data too. It emails myself the raw POST request response from Mailgun when I open the email. Mailgun fire an event their end when they detect the message has been opened.

All is good apart from Mailgun are posting multiple requests for each event, which is annoying.

After an hour messing around and getting annoyed I have a complete face palm moment.

In my test script Mailgun is called is send my notification email! So I'm creating multiple events for the same test message.

i.e. send original message, receive post back from Mailgun to my endpoint, my script then emails me the result using Mailgun. The latter itself generates its own events again.

Sooooo stupid of me to not notice something so obvious :(

There was this tech guy in our project. I don't really know how techy nor what his role was, but I do know he was a techie.

Lately we'd noticed he was behaving more and more managerish. Orchestrating resources over slack, scheduling meetings, the managerial slang... Bulletpoints... It was obvious what's going to happen - he was striving for a manager's chair. Cool. He seemed like a guy who can indeed do this well. And the fact that he's a techie was promising - he should understand so many things.

Boy did that come around and bite us in our asses. Turns out this guy is a googler. If we are working on some case [as we always are] he jumps in and offers his opinion, although he is far from our technical area. We explain how/why it is not a good idea. Then he does some googling and comes back with a different idea! And insists on testing it out... FTR, a single test in our project could take from 1 to 6 hours. And he's a manager now!! We can't just ignore his requests...

Allright, we do that testing. Results are far from satisfying. We continue investigating. He does as well. We'd like to try something out, but there he comes with a new idea! And ofc we are asked to test it out as well.

Our own testing is postponed again.

A few days like this one pass by. In a daily meeting we are blamed for taking that long to do our investigation and we are questioned as engineers.

Superb...

Honestly? I'm having second thoughts about this new role. It's supposed to be fun and challenging and all, but this kind of shit is just too much...

When Do You Stop Taking Responsibility?

Let me clarify by describing four scenarios in which you are tasked with some software development. It could be a large or small task. The fourth scenario is the one I'm interested in. The first three are just for contrast.

1. You either decide how to implement the requirements, or you're given directions or constraints you agree with. (If you hadn't been given those specific directions you probably would have done the same thing anyway.) **You feel accountable for the outcome**, such as whether it works correctly or is delivered on time. And, of course, the team feels collectively accountable. (We could call this the "happy path.")

2. You would prefer to do the work one way, but you're instructed to do it a different way, either by a manager, team lead, or team consensus. You disagree with the approach, but you're not a stubborn know-it-all. You understand that their way is valid, or you don't fully understand it but you trust that someone else does. You're probably going to learn something. **You feel accountable for the outcome** in a normal, non-blaming sort of way.

3. You're instructed to do something so horribly wrong that it's guaranteed to fail badly. You're in a position to refuse or push back, and you do.

4. You're given instructions that you know are bad, you raise your objections, and then you follow them anyway. It could be a really awful technical approach, use of copy-pasted code, the wrong tools, wrong library, no unit testing, or anything similar. The negative consequences you expect could include technical failure, technical debt, or significant delays. **You do not feel accountable for the outcome.** If it doesn't work, takes too long, or the users hate it, you expect the individual(s) who gave you instructions to take full responsibility. It's not that you want to point fingers, but you will if it comes to that.

---

That fourth scenario could provoke all sorts of reactions. I'm interested in it for what you might call research purposes.

The final outcome is irrelevant. If it failed, whether someone else ultimately took responsibility or you were blamed is irrelevant. That it is the opposite of team accountability is obvious and also irrelevant.

Here is the question (finally!)

Have you experienced scenario number four, in which you develop software (big as an application, small as a class or method) in a way you believe to be so incorrect that it will have consequences, because someone required you to do so, and you complied *with the expectation that they, not you, would be accountable for the outcome?*

Emphasis is not on the outcome or who was held accountable, but on whether you *felt* accountable when you developed the software.

If you just want to answer yes or no, or "yes, several times," that's great. If you'd like to describe the scenario with any amount of detail, that's great too. If it's something you'd rather not share publicly you can contact me privately - my profile name at gmail.com.

The point is not judgment. I'll go first. My answer is yes, I have experienced scenario #4. For example, I've been told to copy/paste/edit code which I know will be incomprehensible, unmaintainable, buggy, and give future developers nightmares. I've had to build features I know users will hate. Sometimes I've been wrong. I usually raised objections or shared concerns with the team. Sometimes the environment made that impractical. If the problems persisted I looked for other work. But the point is that sometimes I did what I was told, and I felt that if it went horribly wrong I could say, "Yes, I understand, but this was not my decision." *I did not feel accountable.*.

I plan on writing more about this, but I'd like to start by gathering some perspective and understanding beyond just my own experience.

Thanks

I think alot of things supposedly already being done and the profit based bent of the world discourages young developers who don't know that half of the touted projects are crap in many cases and there is still large amounts of room for development.

Not to mention the glaringly obvious security hole and the need to build teams that understand the comp from top to bottom so certain scheisters can't push bullshit on us that would take a single person too long to understand every aspect of.

Sydochen has posted a rant where he is nt really sure why people hate Java, and I decided to publicly post my explanation of this phenomenon, please, from my point of view.
So there is this quite large domain, on which one or two academical studies are built, such as business informatics and applied system engineering which I find extremely interesting and fun, that is called, ironically, SAD. And then there are videos on youtube, by programmers who just can't settle the fuck down. Those videos I am talking about are rants about OOP in general, which, as we all know, is a huge part of studies in the aforementioned domain. What these people are even talking about?
Absolutely obvious, there is no sense in making a software in a linear pattern. Since Bikelsoft has conveniently patched consumers up with GUI based software, the core concept of which is EDP (event driven programming or alternatively, at least OS events queue-ing), the completely functional, linear approach in such environment does not make much sense in terms of the maintainability of the software. Uhm, raise your hand if you ever tried to linearly build a complex GUI system in a single function call on GTK, which does allow you to disregard any responsibility separation pattern of SAD, such as long loved MVC...
Additionally, OOP is mandatory in business because it does allow us to mount abstraction levels and encapsulate actual dataflow behind them, which, of course, lowers the costs of the development.
What happy programmers are talking about usually is the complexity of the task of doing the OOP right in the sense of an overflow of straight composition classes (that do nothing but forward data from lower to upper abstraction levels and vice versa) and the situation of responsibility chain break (this is when a class from lower level directly!! notifies a class of a higher level about something ignoring the fact that there is a chain of other classes between them). And that's it. These guys also do vouch for functional programming, and it's a completely different argument, and there is no reason not to do it in algorithmical, implementational part of the project, of course, but yeah...
So where does Java kick in you think?
Well, guess what language popularized programming in general and OOP in particular. Java is doing a lot of things in a modern way. Of course, if it's 1995 outside *lenny face*. Yeah, fuck AOT, fuck memory management responsibility, all to the maximum towards solving the real applicative tasks.
Have you ever tried to learn to apply Text Watchers in Android with Java? Then you know about inline overloading and inline abstract class implementation. This is not right. This reduces readability and reusability.
Have you ever used Volley on Android? Newbies to Android programming surely should have. Quite verbose boilerplate in google docs, huh?
Have you seen intents? The Android API is, little said, messy with all the support libs and Context class ancestors. Remember how many times the language has helped you to properly orient in all of this hierarchy, when overloading method declaration requires you to use 2 lines instead of 1. Too verbose, too hesitant, distracting - that's what the lang and the api is. Fucking toString() is hilarious. Reference comparison is unintuitive. Obviously poor practices are not banned. Ancient tools. Import hell. Slow evolution.
C# has ripped Java off like an utter cunt, yet it's a piece of cake to maintain a solid patternization and structure, and keep your code clean and readable. Yet, Cs6 already was okay featuring optionally nullable fields and safe optional dereferencing, while we get finally get lambda expressions in J8, in 20-fucking-14.
Java did good back then, but when we joke about dumb indian developers, they are coding it in Java. So yeah.
To sum up, it's easy to make code unreadable with Java, and Java is a tool with which developers usually disregard the patterns of SAD.

Meditation. Or Awareness Meditation to be precise. It enables me to regain control over my mind, because I get distracted really fast. It really helps sorting things out, taking a step back and getting an overview where I actually am and if what I'm doing right now is actually relevant/has priority. I mostly find that it's not, so I have to return to the important stuff.

For those interested: meditation sounds weird, even obvious at first or you just don't get what's it all about. You actually have to practice meditation for a long time and study the concepts until you start to understand what all these phrases and talking means. Behind them lies great wisdom/huge amount of concepts which is easily underestimated. So don't be frustrated too much if you don't feel it working right away. Be assured I've been there too. Also don't start with meditations like 'just stop thinking or think nothing' because in my opinion this is highly complex shit and frustrating at first. Start with awareness or breathing meditations or even get an app to support your daily habit.

!rant && load('epilogue');

So I saw my little brother yesterday and... Hell, I don't know. The addiction thing is less a thing that I expected, it's just that he can't find anything else to do than going on minecraft multiplayer servers and play, play, play. Gotta be honest, his life outside high school is pretty boring.

I mean, if I were him with this the few responsibilities, I'd be even worst than him, so how can I blame him?

Still, I had a big discussion with him where I tried to make him see what could go wrong if he fails (in a soft way), and helped him with french and english homeworks (french is our native language but a pain in the ass to learn 😁).

I do believe that saying all this "plz don't ruin your life this early plz" stuff had made him react, I just can't tell how deep and for how long. My main goal was to make sure that he won't feel helpless if he ever struggles for whatever reason.

However, since kids don't get shipped with a README.md, I just hope I did the right thing at the right time, and that he'll actually remember this discussion. But fuuuuck, he's 11 years old 😓😓

Side notes, I asked him about being a developer but it's pretty obvious that it was too early to speak with him about this. Might try again next year or the year after.

Thoughts ? I'll try to answee to you all

Oh China, you still continue to amuse me... in that special way where i somehow both expect it and am hilariously, breifly shocked... then it's somber, confirming what we know is real/continues to be a societal and cognitive decline trend with no apparent rock bottom, without all-out demise as a near certainty... nor a hail mary play.

... but hey, what better way to digest the real-time info, indicative of something that should be terrifying, but is all too expected, than this unique type of format?

Seriously though, even if it worked amazingly, why would anyone be using it outside in public? Does it require several hours a day? If not, and it was a worthwhile result for you... wouldn't you just make it part of your morning and/or evening routine...even if it had nothing to do with aesthetics, that cant be sanitary... unless you also carry it in a water-tight container or disinfectant and typically bring/use your toothbrush and toothpaste mid-day or at unusual intervals.

I have sooo many more questions about this... and none are relative to who designed/mass produced this, nor the quality of the silicone. As it was developed/produced by the silicone factory ive done great, professional, no bs, business with for about a decade... which is why i waited years to publicly ridicule this contraption.

Fyi- their primary product lines are things like bongs and dab containers; im on the fence of it that makes this better or worse.

Creepy personal truth... i reeeeally wanna know how much that woman got paid... and do to my skill set (ie. Im near utter certainty that i could find her and ask her... likely easily abd definitely without being caught doing anything suspicious. Pro tip: publicly declaring things like this makes it a bit easier to not end up doing it... obvious premeditation adding significantly more to any sentencing.

How do you know ML and AI has gone too far? You rely on the algorithm instead of the obvious.

Google will translate comments, etc. At times when you click on an English video to language around your location. This is so obvious, if I didn't understand English if would not have clicked on the video!!
#BringBackThePreMLdevs

so maxdn got bought out - by some company called stackshit - *path - there site looks like crap who the hell did they sell too cause its obvious its a not an innovative company more like a data driven hungry company about the all mighty data oil

The Surface RT failed because of the lack of apps available. At least that’s what I heard.

Why didn’t Microsoft make a x86 compatibility emulator like Apple did when they were moving away from the PowerPC architecture?

Sure x86 apps would be slower, but if they distributed the ARM version of windows as well, made it available for the Raspberry Pi and all sorts of devices, I fell that would be a huge drive from ARM based processors.

The DirectX, Windows forms..etc. libraries could be recompiled by Microsoft, which would make graphically intensive programs run faster too. Did Microsoft just not think of a compatibility layer? Or is there some obvious reason I’m missing?

Had someone report a bug that we did not provide an error page for someone using IE8 trying to use our site. My suggestion was to create a page that simply said:
"Hi we noticed you are using IE8, you should immediately turn off your computer because it's obvious that you are too out of touch with reality to be using the internet. Please come back when you pull your head out of your arse."

The product owner did not find my suggestion as funny as I did.

Static Vision.

Exactly what you think it is. But maybe lighter than that.

Basically if I unfocus my eyes every so slightly, I can see what looks like really fast drizzling rain, except it looks like light, faintly though. Like I kind of have to look for it, but it's there. Sometimes really obvious, sometimes not.

It's as though being in front of a monitor too much fucked up my eyes, or something.

More pronounced if I've been awake coding for maybe more than a day...

Just me? or anyone else?

Kind of caused me problems a few times, thinking it was something else....

I really want to know if anyone else has experienced this.

making a self driving go kart controlled with a rpi, should i use python, java, dart, or something else? python seems like the obvious choice.

i plan on making it have google maps integrated, with netflix and music player, with a touchscreen.

i was thinking c++, but a gui with c++ didn't seem ideal.

what would you use?

also is an rpi too slow to make the go kart be *relatively* safe?

There needs to be a new (MOOC) class for people like me.

Hi, I'm William. I can't get my head around designing systems. I've read GoF and a few breakdowns of it as well. I find some patterns obvious for my field of interest (game dev, woot!) while I'm reading through the stuff, but have a pretty hard time retaining much of it. I'm aware of the danger of over using patterns, so I don't worry that much about it. I'll look something up when I'm sure I need it.

Still, I'm tired of the tutorial blues. I can watch a few different people write entire games, usually not in the language of choice, but that only helps me so much.

How do I fight scope creep? In the meantime, how can I make things extensible? Scope does need to creep some, after all.

People joke about starting with (visual) BASIC ruining you forever. I don't believe in that crap, but is this just denial? Am I too dumb for this? Not that I'd ever seriously blame a language for that.

I've been a hobbyist for well over 10 years, please don't make me count exactly how long I've been unsuccessful.

I'm baffled by Löve. I think it's the coolest shit I've seen, maybe ever (unless we're counting IPFS).

I think what really prompted this rant, apart from the obvious degradation of my mental health, was my search for an entity component system for Löve/Lua. Hold your replies. I know there's a few of them, and I'm positive that they're fantastic. I'd roll my own, but that requires actual Lua specific knowledge that I just haven't dug all that deep into yet. I can't wrap my head around the ones that exist, even though I can tell their complexity is next to none really.

I have severe tool anxiety, I'm shocked that I've stuck with ZeroBrane Studio as long as I have. It feels good though.

Sorry to use this as "Devs Anonymous", but I think that's how this community helps (me) best.

I feel like I should stop now and just say: Advice? before this gets much deeper/less readable.

There are times when I'm too tired I forget what I changed in the code so I write just "regular" in the title and nothing at all in the description even though it's very obvious i refactored large chunks of the code and added new ones... Regular riight

This tuesday I saw a really badly made PHP web application. Two actually. I was giving a time estimate for how long it would take to transfer these applications to our servers. While I was reading the code it became apparent that they had more security holes than Emmental cheese. Most views had obvious SQL-injection vulnerabilities and most probably XSS too. Although I didn't think too look for XSS in the moment. It just puzzled me that this bad code even exists.

But cherry on top was that the password wasn't checked at all. The login form was on the organization's website and was sent to the selected application. But the password wasn't checked in the application. And this was made by a real Finnish software development firm, like what the fuck.

Time to redo the applications I guess. Not like there's anything wrong in that if they pay for it.

After years of using an android wear on a regular basis I've gotten used to it, I use pujie black for a simplistic watch face and love it, I answer calls on it (although it doesn't have a speaker), and reading texts has been a lifesaver at times. I initially had an issue with the battery life but that was probably my fault for creating a really animation heavy watch face on watchmaker. Anyways while I love the thing it's really excessive (i know original argument huh?), I would love a smart band that can do all the simple things ( tell time make calls and display/read notifications ) and some awesome IoT remote functionality. After some research I found the nex band (I had actually seen this band often prior on Amazon but always just skipped over it cause I assumed that it was a fitness tracker, lesson learned again, don't assume). It looked promising, unfortunately it lacked a few key points that are essential to me. It was missing the most obvious thing, a clock, the band is split up into 4-5 rgb displays so there isn't much room for a clock. Second there is a proprietary clip on micro usb adapter (Ughhhhhh). Finally it it looks too niche and bulky. I'm keeping an eye on it cause i would love it if they at least fixed the clock and appearance issue as I don't travel much so the adapter would just sit on my nightstand anyways. Does anyone know of anything similar to the nex, everytime I search anywhere I get nothing but fitness or motion trackers.

I remember one interview. He asked me to get in and take a seat. It was followed by a very obvious question asked too often "about yourself".

I litrally talked about my self (he was very responsive) for about 150-180 seconds and when I just ended. He was like "Dear, you should always start with your name" [LOL] dafaq!

rant.author != this

Christ people. This is just sh*t.

The conflict I get is due to stupid new gcc header file crap. But what
makes me upset is that the crap is for completely bogus reasons.

This is the old code in net/ipv6/ip6_output.c:

mtu -= hlen + sizeof(struct frag_hdr);

and this is the new "improved" code that uses fancy stuff that wants
magical built-in compiler support and has silly wrapper functions for
when it doesn't exist:

if (overflow_usub(mtu, hlen + sizeof(struct frag_hdr), &mtu) ||
mtu <= 7)
goto fail_toobig;

and anybody who thinks that the above is

(a) legible
(b) efficient (even with the magical compiler support)
(c) particularly safe

is just incompetent and out to lunch.

The above code is sh*t, and it generates shit code. It looks bad, and
there's no reason for it.

The code could *easily* have been done with just a single and
understandable conditional, and the compiler would actually have
generated better code, and the code would look better and more
understandable. Why is this not

if (mtu < hlen + sizeof(struct frag_hdr) + 8)
goto fail_toobig;
mtu -= hlen + sizeof(struct frag_hdr);

which is the same number of lines, doesn't use crazy helper functions
that nobody knows what they do, and is much more obvious what it
actually does.

I guarantee that the second more obvious version is easier to read and
understand. Does anybody really want to dispute this?

Really. Give me *one* reason why it was written in that idiotic way
with two different conditionals, and a shiny new nonstandard function
that wants particular compiler support to generate even half-way sane
code, and even then generates worse code? A shiny function that we
have never ever needed anywhere else, and that is just
compiler-masturbation.

And yes, you still could have overflow issues if the whole "hlen +
xyz" expression overflows, but quite frankly, the "overflow_usub()"
code had that too. So if you worry about that, then you damn well
didn't do the right thing to begin with.

So I really see no reason for this kind of complete idiotic crap.

Tell me why. Because I'm not pulling this kind of completely insane
stuff that generates conflicts at rc7 time, and that seems to have
absolutely no reason for being anm idiotic unreadable mess.

The code seems *designed* to use that new "overflow_usub()" code. It
seems to be an excuse to use that function.

And it's a f*cking bad excuse for that braindamage.

I'm sorry, but we don't add idiotic new interfaces like this for
idiotic new code like that.

Yes, yes, if this had stayed inside the network layer I would never
have noticed. But since I *did* notice, I really don't want to pull
this. In fact, I want to make it clear to *everybody* that code like
this is completely unacceptable. Anybody who thinks that code like
this is "safe" and "secure" because it uses fancy overflow detection
functions is so far out to lunch that it's not even funny. All this
kind of crap does is to make the code a unreadable mess with code that
no sane person will ever really understand what it actually does.

Get rid of it. And I don't *ever* want to see that shit again.

I have actually two, but I'll write the other one in the week.

So we had classes about software engineering. The class was interesting but the teacher wasn't. Too soft, too slow, too low, too monochord (usual french), it was boring. So we ended up not listening to him. Kinda regret this.

We got a first exam, where we were in group to develop a Test Manager for Unit Test (yep.)
We had instructions, like the note would be multiplied by the percentage of coverage of code, etc.

The thing is, we really didn't get the point of the project. Now that I think of it, it seems obvious, but it wasn't back then as it was too new. In the four people of our group, one worked real hard on it, I tried to do my best, the others too.

But like I said, I didn't get back then the point of the topic, which is to apply design pattern, unit testing, etc. It was furstating af and we ended up with a 9/20.

I got the point of the topic only for the second exam, the most classic one, on a paper sheet with questions to answer. (We were allowed only one cheatsheet, I understood the topic while doing it. Sad, huh ?)

hey uh, this is a rant about phantom forces, if you don't know what it is, look it up, anyways, that's really it.

so, i've been playing this game very actively called phantom forces and its a good game but its been ruined and the fun has pretty much been taken away. the community is dead and terrible, the developers don't care and the game is just falling off.

what i consider community is the youtube scene, and now as of january 1st, 2022, there's nothing left that's actually interesting besides godstatus and moons fps studio. honestly, its so dry and i'm sick of it.

i'm tired of seeing shitty best setup videos and gun reviews. i hate somesteven and strider and then, there's nothing to actually watch so i just watch brain-numbing shitty videos about stuff.

and then theres the developers, stylis studios is a great development team, i'll give you that but the sheer ignorance of their team is so fucking much.

its kinda obvious they don't really care about adding new features or anything new that isn't guns and its fucking sickening. just to see the same old updates, every fucking month man, its annoying and tiring.

i'm fucking tired of just seeing ape shit guns that are too high for regular players to actually unlock. like i know they're trying to please the growing number of 200+ rank users but its terrible, they haven't done a gun below rank 200 or 100 in forever. the last time they did it was like 6 months ago or something.

we've been asking for shit for years and they haven't given it to us and its fucking tiring. asking for daily quests, new features, more grips, vehicles and shit like that is obviously never gonna happen and thats the fucking problem. they don't care about their community.

but anyways, thats really all i want to say, might make a follow up post later. if you want to add your 2 cents down in the comments, you can do that. bye