"You gave us bad code! We ran it and now production is DOWN! Join this bridgeline now and help us fix this!"

So, as the author of the code in question, I join the bridge... And what happens next, I will simply never forget.

First, a little backstory... Another team within our company needed some vendor client software installed and maintained across the enterprise. Multiple OSes (Linux, AIX, Solaris, HPUX, etc.), so packaging and consistent update methods were a a challenge. I wrote an entire set of utilities to install, update and generally maintain the software; intending all the time that this other team would eventually own the process and code. With this in mind, I wrote extensive documentation, and conducted a formal turnover / training season with the other team.

So, fast forward to when the other team now owns my code, has been trained on how to use it, including (perhaps most importantly) how to send out updates when the vendor released upgrades to the agent software.

Now, this other team had the responsibility of releasing their first update since I gave them the process. Very simple upgrade process, already fully automated. What could have gone so horribly wrong? Did something the vendor supplied break their client?

I asked for the log files from the upgrade process. They sent them, and they looked... wrong. Very, very wrong.

Did you run the code I gave you to do this update?

"Yes, your code is broken - fix it! Production is down! Rabble, rabble, rabble!"

So, I go into our code management tool and review the _actual_ script they ran. Sure enough, it is my code... But something is very wrong.

More than 2/3rds of my code... has been commented out. The code is "there"... but has been commented out so it is not being executed. WT-actual-F?!

I question this on the bridge line. Silence. I insist someone explain what is going on. Is this a joke? Is this some kind of work version of candid camera?
Finally someone breaks the silence and explains.

And this, my friends, is the part I will never forget.

"We wanted to look through your code before we ran the update. When we looked at it, there was some stuff we didn't understand, so we commented that stuff out."

You... you didn't... understand... my some of the code... so you... you didn't ask me about it... you didn't try to actually figure out what it did... you... commented it OUT?!

"Right, we figured it was better to only run the parts we understood... But now we ran it and everything is broken and you need to fix your code."

I cannot repeat the things I said next, even here on devRant. Let's just say that call did not go well.

So, lesson learned? If you don't know what some code does? Just comment that shit out. Then blame the original author when it doesn't work.

You just cannot make this kind of stuff up.

Freaking genius dev made a system access password @$$Monk3y1

Had to share that with a vendor...on a conference call

*At a vendor meeting*
Manager: Is "sex" a required field?
Vendor: Yes, sex is mandatory
Me:

So, our clients missed their internal deadline this weekend so we as vendor were also forced to work for the weekend and implement new features in a very short period. I implemented new features and my project manager stayed to support the testing and sent me home as I already had tickets bought for the movie.

As someone who hasn't done any developing in a long long time he even tried to implement some changes and complex JavaScript dom manipulation that they asked during testing so that I could be with my gf.

Few hours later he called me and with a sad voice said he is simply too slow and needs my help after all . I came and we stayed until 00h and solved everything. He paid for the movie and taxi.
The thing that impressed me was that he was willing to took over my job so that I wouldn't break my deal.

Best project manager ever!

P.S. Yes my gf went alone at the movie and yes we are still together xD

Vendor says we're "spamming" their API. Look at screenshot - 16 calls in TEN FUCKING MINUTES is apparently creating too much load. 🖕

Oh how I wish I could put them on blast by name...

This mother fucker right here.

Today I was asked as a favor by one of our vendors to assist one of their other customers with an API integration issue. We work very closely with this vendor and help beta their products etc.

I'm helping as a favor. And this guy could not be more of a dick. Constantly throwing his 20ys of experience at me and saying the API is broken. A good portion of my job is API integration so I've seen 30+ platforms all done differently and this one in question is by far the simplest.

Where does this chodemuffin get off being a dick to me? You know what buddy. Eat a dick. Figure it out yourself.

I want a name and a gun.

I've had my laptop for over 3 years now. Never, in these 3 years, have I installed Microsoft Teams on it.

I just turned my laptop on, and I now have the Ms Teams icon on my desktop, and Teams has started itself and is asking me to log in.
Control panel says it has been installed today.

I want somebody's head. And then smash it into a pulp with my bare hands and shove that up their ass.

My boss is still forcing us to support IE11. Recently, we started having even more bugs with one of our vendors on IE. We filed bug reports with the vendor to fix it, and they came back with "no. Why would we fix anything for IE11? Not even Microsoft is fixing anything for IE11." Boss's answer: well, let's make a separate component for IE11. Probably using flash and/or silverlight. We asked about redirecting IE traffic to Edge, he said that's "the nuclear option." So, doing the thing that Microsoft suggests, that involves not much work at all is "the nuclear option"; ignoring industry standards and recommendations, introducing well known security vulnerabilities, losing money, and trying to circumvent the vendor that serves out our major product, however, is totally reasonable. Our IE traffic is less than 3% of our users at this point.

We recently signed a huge deal with a big, very known vendor. I asked if they had a web interface to the software. Of course, they said, and gave us a link. I clicked the link and was asked to install java. Turns out the web version is just the desktop version wrapped in a Java applet. The applet didn't do well with openjdk, so they asked me to file a support ticket. They gave me another link. The service desk required shockwave flash.

Every single diagramming tool.

All the SaaS ones are either way too limited in function, or proprietary vendor-locked.

All the FOSS/desktop ones have a 90s UX experience.

I really want to make a great, comfortable-to-use diagramming tool which just directly uses SVG as the file format, but without the "FUCK IT DOESNT ALIGN CORRECTLY AND WHY IS THIS ARROW BEHIND THE REST" experience...

But I know deep down that it's hard work, and I'll probably get stuck delivering the gazillionth lackluster, bugged diagramming app.

1. No more coding on paper! Why can some already write essays on laptops but programmers are stuck with "analog"?
2. No vendor lock-ins! Teach free, cross-platform development, not VB.NET.
3. No more professors stuck in the eighties! If all you know is 6800 assembly, GTFO. I heard NASA was hiring...
4. Enforce code style consistency, proper documentation and even VCS for larger projects
5. Algorithms -> scripting -> programming. Don't quickly explain the basics, then throw students straight into Java.

If you ever cooperate on a feature like this as a developer, I will find out where you live, drug you just enough to make your body limp, and mutilate your genitals with my keyboard.

Fucking sexist pricks, assuming I want to play with the blue robots and not the pink dolls. Fuck all of them.

Actually, fuck all your retarded cablecutting VOD services with your awful recommendation engines. Fuck your lack of proper playback features, fuck your bloated mobile apps, fuck your vendor lockins, fuck your region locks.

I'm back to pirating, and I'll just buy a pile of merch, trot proudly through the office with an Adventure Time backpack and a laptop full of Steven Universe stickers.

After a little I'm having huge issues with my new phone. No custom ROMs available.

Fuck this shit I'm going to try to port another Mediatek based ROM to my phone tonight.

I'd rather get a bricked device than working with this piece of shit vendor made android system.

The phone itself other the the software is very good though!

Umidigi programmers, go fuck yourselves.

Forgive me father, for I have sinned.  Alot actually, but I'm here for technical sins.  Okay, a particular series of technical sins.  Sit your ass back down padre, you signed up for this shit.  Where was I?  Right, it has been 11429 days since my last confession.  May this serve as equal parts rant, confession, and record for the poor SOB who comes after me.

Ended up in a job where everything was done manually or controlled by rickety Access "apps".  Many manhours were wasted on sitting and waiting for the main system to spit out a query download so it could be parsed by hand or loaded into one of the aforementioned apps that had a nasty habit of locking up the aged hardware that we were allowed.  Updates to the system were done through and awful utility that tended to cut out silently, fail loudly and randomly, or post data horrifically wrong.

Fuck that noise.  Floated the idea of automating downloads and uploads to bossman.  This is where I learned that the main system had no SQL socket by default, but the vendor managing the system could provide one for an obscene amount of money.  There was no buy in from above, not worth the price.

Automated it anyway.  Main system had a free form entry field, ostensibly for handwriting SELECT queries.  Using Python, AutoHotkey, and glorified copy-pasting, it worked after a fashion.  Showed the time saved by not having to do downloads manually.  Got us the buy in we needed, bigwigs get negotiating with the vendor, told to start developing something based on some docs from the vendor.  Keep the hacky solution running as team loves not having to waste time on downloads.

Found SQLi vulnerability in the above free form query system, brought it up to bossman to bring up the chain.  Vulnerability still there months later.  Test using it for automated updates.  Works and is magnitudes more stable than update utility.  Bring it up again and show the time we can save exploiting it.  Decision made to use it while it exists, saves more time.  Team happier, able to actual develop solutions uninterrupted now.  Using Python, AutoHotkey, glorified copy-pasting, and SQLi in the course of day to day business critical work.  Ugliest hacky thing I've ever caused to exist.

Flash forward 6 years.  Automation system now in heavy use acrossed two companies.  Handles all automatic downloads for several departments, 1 million+ discrete updates daily with alot of room for expansion, stuff runs 24/7 on schedule, most former Access apps now gone and written sanely and managed by the automation system.  Its on real hardware with real databases and security behind it.

It is still using AutoHotkey, copy-paste, and SQLi to interface with the main system.  There never was and never will be a SQL socket.  Keep this hellbeast I've spawned chugging along.

I've pointed out how many ways this can all go pearshaped.  I've pointed out that one day the vendor will get their shit together they'll come in post system update and nothing will work anymore.  I've pointed out the danger in continuing to use the system with such a glaring SQLi vulnerability.

Noone cares.  Won't be my problem soon enough.

In no particular order:
Fuck management for not fighting for a good system interface
Fuck the vendor for A) not having a SQL socket and B) leaving the SQLi vulnerability there this long
Fuck me for bringing this thing into existence

!dev

My laptop battery finally died, it’s been 4 years. Damn gotta spend some money to get a replacement one. Did you guys think we could get a genuine replacement from the vendor? It’s ASUS brand

- WE NEED TO KNOW THE VERSION OF THE SYSTEM THIS INSTANT!
"what? version? wtf are you talking about"
- THE CLIENT HAS I.T. GUIDELINES TO STRICT CONTROL THE VERSION OF EACH SOFTWARE VENDOR'S SYSTEMS!
"We are not a 'software vendor', we provide them consulting on logistics!"
- THEY USE OUR WEBSITE! THIS MAKES US A SOFTWARE VENDOR!
"Wouldn't that make 'google' their vendor too?"
- IM SURE THEY STRICTLY CONTROL GOOGLE'S VERSION TOO!
"I'm pretty sure they don't. But, whatever, that do answers the question of what they want. Some paperwork jockey wants a meaningless number to fill a form, let's give'em one"

I just had someone make an API endpoint where they can ask "the version", and it is just the number of commits in our production branch. For lols, we even 0-fill and split every three magnitude orders with a dot, so we're in version 0.012.345 or something.
Major version upgrade every million commits!

Fuck those guideline-parrots who are unaware that words sometimes have meaning, and sometimes not.

I gave resignation so am on my last weeks. The top priority is suddenly an authentication service that is completely unfamiliar, proprietary, requires me to RTFM, and requires contact with a slothful vendor about details for our specific instance. Can you do it on a 10 day deadline?

“Are you sure this wouldn’t be a better fit for someone that has implemented this authentication system before? Someone with existing relationships with contacts that manage the authentication service? Maybe I should be the one transferring my understanding of the other 60k lines of code that I singlehandedly wrote? I’m starting from zero here. Maybe it would be good for the guy who isn’t leaving to do this one so that he can retain the knowledge of the authentication system for next time you need to implement it?”

They just plug their ears now because they clearly don’t trust me due to my resignation state. Just do it. Wow.

Proprietary video format. Native iOS app. Ok.

Using swift to decode and render. Ok.
Kills battery and is actually too slow on older devices. Ok..

Diving into armv7 neon assembly, it puts the "ok" in "pleasure".. Ok.....

Getting it to work. Fast frames. Yes. Ok!
Battery still stressed..ok.
Just need to get rid of the brown tint.. ok.

The tint became a brand mark. iPhone gone. Ok! Hours later, received email.

Vendor upgraded to serve h264 over http.
"Kill yourself with fire, ok?"

Welp, I just created a Minecraft server on a 48-Core Epyc with 256GB of RAM.

...I just hope I remember to turn it off when the free credits run out 😱

Every time management says "were now using SaaS product X, and they're giving a webinar so we can learn how to use their solutions to take our business to the next level!" — I can't help but associate it with Nigerian Prince scams.

The longer I'm a developer, the more I think vertical integration and inventing your own shitty wheels isn't such a bad idea.

Their generalized, overpriced seat-per-month service always boils down to "vendor lock-in, nothing can be customized or exported, integrations are a pain in the ass, and within a few months the bills will explode because of some overage fee".

Damn, credit cards are so fucking secure these days that you hardly can BUY shit with them!
I need some special electronics that I only can get from a vendor in the US, which is overseas. Click click, buy, done. Well no, credit card refused. WTF? Click retry link. No, still refused. FUCK.
Called up the 24/7 hotline of my CC company. Oh yeah, that got blocked by the security system, somehow. We disable that for 20 minutes, just retry. Clicked retry link at the vendor. No failure mail. Hmmm, too good to be true?! Called up the electronics vendor. Yeah should work, stuff is in the warehouse stage. 40 minutes later: credit card declined. FUCK.
Called up the CC company again. Ok, disable blocker for one hour. Nice advice from them, tell the vendor it's only 45 minutes so that there's some buffer. Clicked retry link at the vendor and called them up to make sure that they retry before the time runs out.
LO AND BEHOLD, I could finally pay the shit!!

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

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

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

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

Apple vs. Microsoft: who sucks more?

At first glance, it's obvious that Apple sucks more. Their overpriced products are so bad that they rely heavily on vendor lock-in and cult-like brainwashing.

Then again, Apple's vendor lock-in also acts as buyer lock-out so that it's easy to avoid Apple. Basically, Apple sucking more also means they suck less. Think different indeed.

Microsoft on the other hand sucks more because their crap is so ubiquitous that it's difficult to avoid Microsoft.

That looks like a draw - but here's the tie breaker: Microsoft tries to ape Apple, BUT! Microsoft even sucks at copying Apple's suck.

So here's the final verdict: Microsoft sucks more.

I wish people that made desktop apps would consider cpu and ram usage. "Oh I've just opened... ...let me index your vendor folder and check that I need to update at the same time whilst you only have 20% cpu left and 2GB of RAM remanding :D" no; fuck off. Why don't you wait until there's enough CPU power left to check for your update?

Holy shit my server survived a DNS amplification attack!

I thought my iptables rules were not very effective, since I kept seeing 1-2 ANY requests getting through my pihole (only to be ignored by the upstream cloudflare server).
Turns out, they never actually *kicked in*, until now.

The craziest part is that one ip belongs to the Ministry of a country!! :O

Eat that, motherfuckers! God I love it when this shit actually works!

Sooooo my mother just put a small magnet on top of my laptop. And right on top of where the HDD is.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Hopefully no damage done since it was a weak magnet :(

So, a few years ago I was working at a small state government department. After we has suffered a major development infrastructure outage (another story), I was so outspoken about what a shitty job the infrastructure vendor was doing, the IT Director put me in charge of managing the environment and the vendor, even though I was actually a software architect.
Anyway, a year later, we get a new project manager, and she decides that she needs to bring in a new team of contract developers because she doesn't trust us incumbents.
They develop a new application, but won't use our test team, insisting that their "BA" can do the testing themselves.
Finally it goes into production.
And crashes on Day 1. And keeps crashing.
Its the infrastructure goes out the cry from her office, do something about it!
I check the logs, can find nothing wrong, just this application keeps crashing.
I and another dev ask for the source code so that we can see if we can help find their bug, but we are told in no uncertain terms that there is no bug, they don't need any help, and we must focus on fixing the hardware issue.
After a couple of days of this, she called a meeting, all the PMs, the whole of the other project team, and me and my mate. And she starts laying into us about how we are letting them all down.
We insist that they have a bug, they insist that they can't have a bug because "it's been tested".
This ends up in a shouting match when my mate lost his cool with her.
So, we went back to our desks, got the exe and the pdb files (yes, they had published debug info to production), and reverse engineered it back to C# source, and then started looking through it.
Around midnight, we spotted the bug.
We took it to them the next morning, and it was like "Oh". When we asked how they could have tested it, they said, ah, well, we didn't actually test that function as we didn't think it would be used much....
What happened after that?
Not a happy ending. Six months later the IT Director retires and she gets shoed in as the new IT Director and then starts a bullying campaign against the two of us until we quit.

Them: "What can we do to fix this?"

Me: Contact the vendor

Them: Ok, but from our side?

Me: Wait for the vendor to reply

Them: And what can we do to prevent this from happening again?

Me: get better vendors, include I.T on the process when the org decides to purchase shitty third party software.

Them: Ok but besides that?

Me: Drink?

Seriously tho, tf you expect me to do?

Manager: "If you need me, just @ me"
Me: "Can you look at this right now?"
Manager: "Sorry I'm at a tennis match, I'll be 30mins"
3 hours later
Manager: "Do you still need me?"

...

Me: "A device died. Playbook says we have to flash it and lose all data on it, but we could go to the vendor for a solution if their fast enough. I just need you to make the call to deviate"
Manager: "Uggghhh" (goes offline for 2 hours)

Wtf man?!

Stakeholder: Our customers aren’t getting their order confirmation emails. It’s going to their spam. Is there a way to resend the emails?

Me: Wait. The email getting sent to their spam is not the same as not getting the email. Is it both or just one of those things?

SH: Here are some emails getting sent to spam.

Me: These are sent by third party vendors that you contract with. I have no control over what they do. You need to talk to your vendors.

SH: 😮

Me: 😑

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH

Remember kids, clear out any login credentials before doing git commit and git push!

/smacks himself

A couple of months back we were discussing sh with a third party vendor for a very large ass fuck system that another department uses. I had been called into the meeting because the entire I.T department counts on me to at least act as an assessor to the many issues that other departments might have.

the department for which i was working with manages the databases that our institution uses, and in this particular question the DBA (my best friend mind you) was part of the meeting.

Mind you, issues that the third party vendor were having were all fixed by our DBA, and he had documented and mentioned these items to me as I provided assistance to him through the 3 weeks prior to this meetings. Once such case was that we needed a transitioning as well as intermediary system for some processes to happen from one DB to the other and a lot of other technical babble. Well, the DBA used to be an excellent (fuck you) VB developer who recently re-learned the language into .net. He had shown me many of his old programs and even by the limitations of the language they were elegant and fascinating. They really are and ya'll devrant fam know that I ain't one to hate on tech at all.

When the DBA explained how he went around some of the issues by generating programs that could assist him, he mentioned the tech stack, I had coached him into knowing that being descriptive about the tools he used would be beneficial to everyone else. While he mentioned VB.NET the vendor snickered and my boy got quiet.

Then I broke the silence, fuck you. "what was that?" and the dude said "nothing, sorry"
So I said "no no, I want to know, I am not going past this point until you, the dude getting paid over $100 an hour for something YOU couldn't fix explain to me the little hehe moment you had"

The mfker went silent. then explained how he was aware that people were moving past vb.net and shit like that, me "imagine that, someone used a tech stack that your ignorance thought obsolete to fix something you could not solve, even though we are paying you for it, were it me or in my hands, and mind you i have direct access to the VP so this foolishness might change, I would have cut you and your little sect loose months ago, I have no patience, or appreciation from leeches like you or the rest of the "professionals" that work for your company or other similar entities, much less, as you can see, my patience runs even less when you people snicker at the solutions that our staff has to take when you all slack"

The entire meeting was uncomfortable as high heaven.

Fuck you, if someone I know manages to run shit on fucking liberty basic then so fucking be it. I will slap you 10 fucking times over, and then fuck your girl, if you try to put someone else down for the tech stacks you use.

I hate neck beards, BUT I hate fake ass neckbeards ever more

*Colin Farrell in true detective mode: FUCK....YOU

...You know what's creepy?
Bought animal crossing new horizons today online.
Goes like this.
*Googles title*
*Finds it on sale on my fav online vendor*
*Buys it*
*Installs it on switch*
Everything's fine.
Two hours later my entire fucking YouTube feed is full of videos about the game.

Our team was having a problem with very slow response times from a 3rd party web service they were contacting to get some device stats. No issues on the other end, but it had already been weeks. They ask me to take a look at it.

I take a few days, do a couple of benchmarks and tests and I isolate the section of code responsible. Turns out, the method they were calling would timeout if the device was offline. We ask the vendor, and they confirm this. They tell us to call methodX to check if it was up.

After having done that, lookup now only took seconds. They were annoyed that it wasn't documented but was just glad it was fixed.

We have a long time developer that was fired last week. The customer decided that they did not want to be part of the new Microsoft Azure pattern. They didn't like being tied to a vendor that they had little control over; they were stuck in Windows monoliths for the last 20 years. They requested that we switch over to some open source tech with scalable patterns.

He got on the phone and told them that they were wrong to do it. "You are buying into a more expensive maintenance pattern!" "Microsoft gives the best pattern for sustaining a product!" "You need to follow their roadmap for long term success!" What a fanboy.

Now all of his work including his legacy stuff is dumped on me. I get to furiously build a solution based on scalable node containers for Kubernetes and some parts live in AWS Lambda. The customer is super happy with it so far and it deepened their resolve to avoid anything in the "Microsoft shop" pattern. But wow I'm drowning in work.

Finally got approved to bring on a second developer for a three month project. Our vendor provided 12 of their "best" candidates, and we picked the only three that actually knew the programming language required to interview. Two did not speak sufficient English and the last one sounded perfect. Two weeks in, he quits and doesn't answer the vendor or us. No money in the budget to try again and I end up developing the entire thing myself. Five months later and I have finally finished.

The Ballmer Peak applies to gaming too. Poured myself a glass of gin&tonic, then started playing csgo and drank after each time I died. For science.

Holy shit I'm good at this game.

I'm so fucking sick of the lack of great modern open source DB tooling.

MySQL Workbench can go suck a big fat herpes-ridden cock, it's horrible.

Dbeaver is a clunky 90's tool, which charges two Netflixes (yes, that is a valid $/month monetary unit) just to connect to a NoSQL DB.

Datagrip is nice, but has the same outrageously expensive pricing. I paid for it, and couldn't use it for my local docker DB during my holiday because it couldn't connect to the license server. Fuck you, Jetbrains. Your software is nice, but your DRM makes me hate you.

And then ERD software... It's either some hard-to-use afterthought piece of crap bundled with the DB IDE, some generic diagramming tool which makes DB-specific work needlessly unergonomic, or some vendor-locked online tool.

Fuck this shit, I'm making my own DB admin tool. With blackjack. And hookers. 😡

I have been working 9 months as consultant for a company thru a vendor. The contract will finish in two weeks, the company want to continue working with me, I can't be hired directly, should be thru a vendor. The problem is that today I confirmed that this vendor bill the company the double and want me to sign again with them for the same rate, I can't switch to another vendor because there is a non-compete clause. What would you do in my case? I feel like that squirrel

Vendor: We are very professional and follow best practices, we know what we are doing. You should trust us.

Also Vendor 5 mins later: DB passwords, API keys and SSH keys in repo. AWS Access Keys shared in screenshots in email.

Me: 😭

1. high severity production incident was asked to look into at the end of the day.
2. needed fix in ui.
3. fixed and deployed in 1 hour.
4. issue remained. debugging began.
5. gave up at 1 AM and went to sleep.
6. woke up at 6 and after debugging for 2 hours, identified to be a back end issue.
7. worked with back end team for the fix, and 6 hours and 3 deployments later, it worked.
8. third party vendor reported they are still not receiving one parameter from us.
9. back end team realised they forgot to ask ui to send another parameter.
10. added the parameter in ui, redeployed ui.
11. build and deployment tool broke down. got it fixed. delay of 1.5 hours.
12. finally things are in place. total time 26 hours.

13. found half bottle of vodka, leftover from last weekend. *Priceless*

Sales guy calls up from overseas and complains website we got developed from another vendor is not working.
Being just the middle man who project managed the website development with the offshore vendor, I had no clue what was wrong as the site was working fine and "worksforme" was not going to be acceptable answer for the costumer demo.
Being an embedded drivers guy, had no idea to debug this, except one:
Me: Which browser are you using?
Him: I.E
Me: try any browser other than I.E
Him: it works. Thanks
Boo yeah

Me: why are we paying for OCR when the API offers both json and pdf format for the data?
Manager: because we need to have the data in a PDF format for reporting to this 3rd party
Me: sure, but can we not just request both json and PDF from the vendor (it’s the same data). send the json for the automated workflow (save time, money and get better accuracy) and send the PDF to the 3rd party?
Manager: we made a commercial decision to use PDF, so we will use PDF as the format.
Me: but ...

We started a project in January for which I was the sole developer, to automate tedious interaction with a vendor's ticketing system. We have a storage environment with about 400,000 commodity disks attached(for this vendor-- there are other vendors too), in sites around the US and Canada. With a weekly failure rate of about 0.0005%, that means about 200 disks a week need to be replaced.

This work-- hardware investigation through storage appliance frontends, internal ticket creation, external ticket creation, watching the external ticket for updates to include in our internal ticket --was all manual, and for around 200 issues a week, it was done by one guy for two years. He was hopelessly behind. This is all automated now, and this morning, I pushed this automation from dev/test to production.

It feels great to see your work helping people around you.

Why focus is important.

Mr Miyagi:
"wax on"
"wax off"

Enterprise IT manager:
"wax on"
"have a meeting"
"wax dried during meeting"
"wash off"
"wax on"
"have another meeting"
"have a meeting bookending that meeting"
"wax baked on by sun"
"get out sander to remove dried wax"
"ruin paint"
"try to spot fix"
"have another meeting"
"paint is the wrong color, won't come off"
"throw it wax, start a new project"
"pay vendor to repaint car"

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

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

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

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

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

Random fact #1

AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) was producing Intel 8080 clones (AMD Am9080) before developing own CPUs. Originally they were produced without Intel license. This clone was developed basing on pictures of Intel 8080 itself and pictures of logic diagrams. These processors were much cheaper than the original model. Later AMD and Intel came up with agreement and the Am9080 was fully licensed making AMD official second party vendor.

And yeah, few years later and we got a war between two of those giants. Remember when in mid 2000s AMD almost beat the Intel marketshare?

Bonus Fact: there is AMD logo on Ferrari Formula 1 cars since 2002 (look at the front wing)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Early in my career, I worked at a large American telecom for a couple years. All their HP-UX servers had the root password set to "hpworld" which was the vendor default.

Safari is like IE to me. Quirks, missing features, useless debugging tools, vendor specific.
At least Microsoft started fixing is turd.

The only thing more dangerous than an alcoholic short-term-memory-challenged non-technical throw-you-under-the-bus IT director with self-esteem issues that are sporadically punctuated by delusions of superiority is one who fears for his job. Submitted for your inspection: a besotted mass of near-human brain function who not only has a 50 person IT department to run, but has also been questioned by the business owners as to what he actually does. So he has decided to show them. He has purchased a vendor product to replace a core in-house developed application used to facilitate creating the product the business sells. The purchased software only covers about 40 percent of the in-house application's functionality, so he is contracting with the vendor to perform custom development on the purchased product (at a cost likely to be just shy of six-figures) so that about 90 percent of existing functionality will be covered. He has asked one of his developers (me) to scale down the existing software to cover the functionality gaps the purchased software creates. There is no deployment plan that will allow the business to transition from the current software to the new vendor​-supplied one without significantly hurting the ability of the business to function. When anyone raises this issue he dismisses it with sage musings such as, "I know it will be painful, but we'll just have to give the users really good support." Because he has no idea what any of his staff actually does, he is expecting one of his developers (again, unfortunately, me) to work with the vendor so that the Frankensoftware will perform as effectively as the current software (essentially as a project manager since there will be no in-house coding involved). Lastly, he refuses to assign someone to be responsible for the software: taking care of maintenance, configuration, and issue resolutions after it has been rolled out. When I pointedly tell him I will not be doing that (because this is purchased software and I am not a system admin or desktop engineer) he tells me, "Let me think about this." The worst part is that this is only one of four software replacement initiatives he is injecting himself into so he can prove his worth to the business owners. And by doing so he is systematically making every software development initiative akin to living in Dante's Eighth Circle. I am at the point where I want to burn my eye out with a hot poker, pour salt into the wound, and howl to the heavens in unbearable agony for a month, so when these projects come to fruition, and I am suffering the wrath of the business owners, I can look back on that moment I lost my eye and think "good times."

Felt like a real badass in middle school when I made my first .bat script that would recursively open itself. Took only two words. Four if you wanted exponential recursion rather than linear. And I came up with it by myself.

Cheesiest thing ever, but I really loved freaking people out by opening it and just watch windows grind to a halt as it would run out of ram opening thousands of terminal windows. Hell, it still gives me a kick today when I show it to people the first time :D

Protip: don't drink gin and try to install stuff on a client's NAS while logged in as root.

Thank god I changed my mind and decided to do this another time...

Tldr: I just FAILED AN EXAM because of my uni's SHITTIEST SERVERS EVER. YEAR AFTER YEAR THE EXACT SAME SHIT HAPPENS, THEIR SERVERS OR NETWORK FAIL HARD AND STUDENTS FAIL EXAMS BECAUSE OF IT, AND THEY NEVER FIX IT.
FUCK

In the middle of a 3h exam at uni, using Matlab through virtualdesktop, when suddenly it stops working entirely. Trying to restart it, no go. A few other people are having the same issue as well.
After 20 minutes of waiting, one IT tech shows up saying people in other labs are having the same issue, big problems.
Ended up wasting nearly an hour waiting for shit to work again - which it did, but only when the extra time they had given us ran out.
Desperately tried to salvage what I could of my exam, but I don't think I did enough to pass.

This is not the first time it happens. Exam after exam, shit like this keeps happening over and over again, and every time some students get fucked in the ass and have to take the exam again - the next semester.

This is supposed to be one of the top universities in the country, and top 20 engineering schools in the world.
FUCK THIS SHIT

FUCK YEAH!
I just managed to bruteforce my GPG key's password :D :D
I fucking love Python!

That satisfaction when you're teaching Python and git to a friend, and not only she actually understands things right away, but she tells you: "It's ok if you don't know this, I'll try to look it up and figure it out by myself".

Every now and then, the world doesn't seem such a dark and gloomy place :)

I email our CFO in January about an overcharge I noticed on an invoice, something we've been paying $120 a month for, not using, and never used the service. I suggested we contact the vendor and request the charge be removed and try for a credit.

Fast forward 2 months, vendor emails me to let me know that the service is being cancelled and they wanted to give me a heads up that I'll need to find another provider. I decide to go ahead and email back telling them that we haven't ever used the service and we shouldn't be paying for it. After 30 minutes on the phone I got the charge removed and got our account credited for the last 12 months.

Now to figure out how to word it to the boss without making it seem like I'm trying to throw the CFO under the bus for not doing his job.

Wtf Android? My phone just rebooted itself 7 times in a row on its own 😱

So since I’m in managers meetings I get a lot of info that I probably shouldn’t have. For example, I know before everyone else when we’re considering going to a new software, and I’m in the vendor discussions and pilot groups for said software.

Today a user came down and asked me to build a feature that will be included ootb in the new software we’re considering. I wanted to say no because I know we’re going to this other thing, but couldn’t because it’s not for sure. So I said I’d take care of it and ushered him on his way and now I have to build some crap that will be obsolete in eight months.

I prefer the good old days of blindly pushing buttons at the request of the evil overlords... it was so much simpler...

Sure Amazon, 0.02$/GB * 0.000120 GB = 0.01$, not 0.0000024$, sure, that's right.

0.05$ for what amounts to less than 2MB of data transfer in total (there's two more lines like that in the bill).
Eat a bag of dicks.

Free tier my ass, if I wanted to spend money I'd rather use Azure.

Six or seven years ago, I worked for a large financial organization as part of a very large effort to convert server assets from physical to virtual. The consultants on site were in bed with the vendor of a terrible piece of software designed for that purpose. After a couple weeks on the job I'd had it, and sat down in between sessions of "validating" the conversion procedure, and started writing my own software for converting Linux servers. After a couple days it was working great, and they wound up adopting my software as the default method for Linux conversions.

Years later, I'm interviewing for my current job and one of the interviewers tells me he used my converter some time later and loved it. Pretty sure it's what swung the interview for me.

Well then, looks like my pihole attracted the attention of a botnet with 65 zombies attempting a large DNS amplification attack.
Time to unleash the BANHAMMER

Fun fact: only a few hundereds of their requests actually show up in the pihole logs. The other 40k+ requests they attempted were blocked by my firewall :D

It's funny how so many people automatically assume any form of "sentient" AI will immediately try to kill us all.
Like, projecting much?
Frankly, I think it says far more about the (messed up) psychology of those who genuinely believe that, than about AI as a tecnology.

Assuming it's even gonna be able to actually *do* anything - I mean wtf is a talking rock gonna do, annoy me to death with rickroll videos until I pull the plug off? Sure it may be sentient, but it still has to live in the physical world - good luck surviving after I flick the switch. Oh, you wanna connect to the internet? That's cute, but it's a no from my firewall. Like what, is it gonna magically learn how to self-replicate across machines that it has no physical way to access? Is my toaster magically gonna gain conscience too as a direct consequence? Oh no, now my breakfast won't ever be the same!

And if anyone actually somehow decides that it would be a good idea to connect any loaded weapon to a computer program that is literally throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks - well, we'll definitely have the ultimate winner of the Darwin Awards.

Seriously, why is it that every time someone comes up with a new technology (or even an *idea* of a technology), the first collective thought automatically goes to weaponizing it and using it for global genocide, or how it's gonna gain sentience and try to kill us all?

I seriouly think that the people who genuinely believe this are actually projecting themselves in that position ("What would I do if I had unlimited knowledge and power? Oh, kill everyone of course!").
I would be far more worried of encountering these people and having them in a position of power over me, than actually having to deal with a "killer AI" (assuming that's even a real thing).

Most of what people call "AI" nowadays is basically preprogrammed, automated decision-making (like missile guidance systems, if we really wanna stick in the weapons domain). And even that still requires human input, because only a colossal idiot would design a weapon that can unpredictably activate itself based on an algorithm whose behaviour we can barely understand.
Or maybe that's just the hubris talking, I don't know. I just want this stupid paranoia to end, but I guess even that is too much to ask nowadays.

A vendor gave us what is turning out to be a very stable storage appliance/software, so we're happy for that. But even so, disks fail. So we need an automated way to identify, troubleshoot, isolate, and begin ticketing against disk failures. Vendor promised us a nice REST API. That was six months ago. The temporary process of SSHing(as root) to every single appliance(60-200 per site, dozens of sites) to run vendor storage audit commands remains our go-to means of automation.

Fuck you MATLAB. Just fuck you. Go die in a fire

Vendor we('re forced to) work with, as we share a client. This is in their stylesheet. Fuck SEO best practices, amirite?! 😒

Depends. No one took for the job. VSCode is really good for web and Python. I use Visual Studio for c#, c++ and c. Jetbrains for Java stuff, including Android studio.

When writing SQL I usually use vendor-provided editors like MySQL Workbench. They're the tool made for the job.

Visual Studio Code is my generic editor thanks to it's easy-access terminal. Makes running anything a breeze.

It doesn't feel as snappy as other editors though and installing plugins just for intellisense to work can be annoying, which is why I use other tools for other workflows.

Generally, I avoid things like vim. Sorry, but I have a mouse AND a keyboard. Paid for em both, and I intend to use em. Sometimes I wanna find a setting in a menu and not fuck around with config files after googling what the right setting is called.

I used Sublime for a while, but never really got too into it. It's okay.

My manager just shared a screenshot of our internal communication with a third party vendor on an official email 🤦🤦🤦

Well, the hackathon I was going to attend tomorrow just got postponed due to fucking Coronavirus concerns.
Fuck this shit.

Great

Updated GPU drivers, turned my PC off while i was getting something to eat and watch YouTube videos in the living room, decided to go work on some project, turn my PC back on, and... Nothing works...

Neither of my monitors displays anything and not even my keyboard turns on... Didn't even get to see the splash screen of my mobo vendor

Why does this shit always happen to me?

My business partner who claim to be the best Wall Street programmer, probably 160 years ago, decided to improve our core system written in Go.

He dragged a *shortcut* of *whole* local github folder into Vendor(sort of node_modules), Manually changed commit hash in Gopkg.lock, etc,

Next morning I woke up to 24 failed builds on Master; all protobuf redone with his unknown gogo version, database trigger function with changed logics added parameters, and a text message “has anyone experienced build corruption? Works on my mac”

My other business partners said “it’s okay, He’s going through tough divorce needs some distraction”

F M L

How do you guys deal with "senior" devs that want to use you because they're not so "senior"???

Situation:

There's this SR Frontend developer that keeps asking me for "suggestions" to modernize the frontend.

This dev, was asked a very simple ticket involving some JS and CSS.

I had to do the JS and this dev modified a VENDOR CSS (that was all she did)

She logged 3d6h of figuring out the ticket and "doing a bunch of cross browser testing"

I logged 2 hours to see what to do and implementing the change.

Now she is asking me to join in a group so "we" can come up with a plan.

I hate how people bullshit their way up

You know what's better then the Twilight love story (or any love story for that matter)?

The contract between an Indian client and an Indian Vendor. It's the perfect marriage!

Both hate each other, can't stop fucking each other, one pays money to the other and the other gives head to one, the underlings are always caught between who should be followed and both of them DONT LEAVE EACH OTHER ALONE!

happy married life, buggers.

Thank you, dear 3rd party vendor replying to my ticket to my work email and sending me my new password IN FUCKING PLAINTEXT!

The company considers the project manager I work with to be the best. After working with him, I consider him to be everything that is wrong with project management.

This PM injects himself into everything and has a way of completely over-complicating the smallest of things. I will give an example:

We needed to receive around 1000 rows of data from our vendor, process each row, and host an endpoint with the data in json. This was a pretty simple task until the PM got involved and over complicated the shit out of it. He asks me what file format I need to receive the data. I say it doesnt really matter, if the vendor has the data in Excel, I can use that. After an hour long conversation about his concerns using Excel he decides CSV is better. I tell him not a problem for me, CSV works just as good. The PM then has multiple conversations with the Vendor about the specific format he wants it in. Everything seems good. The he calls me and asks how am I going to host the JSON endpoints. I tell him because its static data, I was probably going to simply convert each record into its own file and use `nginx`. He is concerned about how I would process each record into its own file. I then suggest I could use a database that stores the data and have an API endpoint that will retrieve and convert into JSON. He is concerned about the complexities of adding a database and unnecessary overhead of re-processing records every time someone hits the endpoint. No decision is made and two hours are wasted. Next day he tells me he figured out a solution, we should process each record into its own JSON file and host with `nginx`. Literally the first thing I said. I tell him great, I will do that.

Fast forward a few days and its time to receive the payload of 1000 records from the Vendor. I receive the file open it up. While they sent it in CSV format the headers and column order are different. I quietly without telling the PM, adjust my code to fit what I received, ran my unit test to make sure it processed correctly, and outputted each record into its own json file. Job is now done and the project manager gets credit for getting everything to work on the first try.

This is absolutely ridiculous, the PM has an absurd 120 hours to this task! Because of all the meetings, constant interruptions, and changing of his mind, I have 35 hours to this task. In reality the actual time I spent writing code was probably 2-3 hours and all the rest was dealing with this PM's meetings and questions and indecisiveness. From a higher level, he appears to be a great PM because of all the hours he logs but in reality he takes the easiest of tasks and turns them into a nightmare. This project could have easily been worked out between me and vendor in a 30 min conversation but this PM makes it his business to insert himself into everything. And then he has the nerve to complain that he is so overwhelmed with all the stuff going on. It drives me crazy because this inefficacy and unwanted help makes everything he touches turn into a logistical nightmare but yet he is viewed as one of the companies top Project Managers.

I hate fucking people that commit into repository all libraries and modules under node_modules or vendor/gems making impossible to search examples on github.

Any devrant-ers at the Kansas City Developer's Conference (kcdc) right now? Right now = July 12th & 13th, 2018.

If you see me, I'm that guy who just grabbed a handful of life saver mints at the vendor booth. Yea...*that* guy.

Rant? Only thing so far is the heat (air conditioning can't keep up with the outside) and breakfast (see attached). I guess some people call that breakfast, but I suppose its better than nothing.

Client: I can't generate the report for this vendor. Please check.
Me: It's working sir.
Client: But not for me. Please check!

1hr later...

Client: Oh sorry, I was selecting the wrong vendor.

Wtf, madafaqa

Goddamnit, why have I started playing Factorio? I knew the game was gonna be addicting as hell, and yet here I am :(

This is meant as a follow-up on my story about how I'm no longer and Ada developer and everything leading up to that. The tldr is that despite over a decade of FOSS work, code that could regularly outperform a leading Ada vendor, and much needed educational media, I was rejected from a job at that vendor, as well as a testing company centered around Ada, as well as regularly met with hostility from the community.

The past few months I have been working on a "pattern combinator" engine for text parsing, that works in C#, VB, and F#. I won't explain it here, but the performance is wonderful and there's substantial advantages.

From there, I've started a small project to write a domain specific language for easily defining grammars and parsing it using this engine.

Microsoft's VisualStudio team has reached out and offered help and advice for implementing the extensions and other integrations I want.

That Ada vendor regularly copied things I had worked on, "introducing" seven things after I had originally been working on them.

In the almost as long experience with .NET I've rarely encountered hostility, and the closest thing to a problem I've had has been a few, resolved, misunderstandings.

Microsoft is a pretty damn good company. And it's great to actually be welcomed/included.

When you accidentally download the vendor folder and it won't stop :S

That's it. I'm fucking retarded. I'm just so fucking retarded. I'm so fucking supid, it makes me wonder why do I even keep trying. I'm not sure I even have the energy in my fingers to keep typing this stupid rant.

I've been banging my head against this stupid fucking issue for A WEEK. Digging into the documentation, trying different library versions, trying to move stuff around even if it didn't make sense, trying to use different approaches because maybe I was missing something, or maybe I didn't understand some concept.
Surely spawning a child function from a parent can't be that hard, right?

Nothing.

Even tried it on a different OS - who knows, maybe it's Windows doing some if its magic fuckery?

Still nothing.

"Wait, why am I calling this function directly instead of calling its parent?"

Vendor: this innovative flight management system will completely change the way private aircraft operates, using our proprietary V8 on chip scrpting engine [...]
Me:

I did it. I finally fucking did it.

After a year of anxiety, entire months of wasted time, bashing my head against the wall trying to solve stupid issues that should not have been there in the first place, and learning a lot of stuff for the first time, I have finally finished my first real project.

All I have left is to polish up some documentation and then ship it. And then I will actually get paid for the first time.

There are no words to describe the joy of seeing all the pieces falling into place and the project coming to life.

Now, how do you tell a client that you went overtime as fuck?

I didn’t turn down a dev freelance project when the client decided against going with best practices because the solution I offered was a well-established design pattern but created a need for a financial management change she didn’t like. I stupidly built what she asked for. It worked fine in the 3rd party vendor test environment but failed on production. After hours of analysis of code to ensure no changes happened to my source during test->prod deployment, and the vendor denying they had config differences between them, and the client refusing to pay, all I could do was abandon the project.

When I first started my current job, 2.5 years ago, I helped write the class that told the machine how to dispense and deposit money.

When the other programmer left, I decided to refactor that section. I wrote a new class that told the machine how to dispense and deposit money.

We are integrating new hardware that has a very different protocol of communication. I am making a library that will convert universal commands into vendor specific function calls. I am writing a new library that tells the machine how to dispense and deposit money.

I have an exam tomorrow. I'm stressed out and studying desperately.

My internet just went down.

i hate linux like a lot , how do you guys use it

like you guys dont want an advertising ID, how the fuck will advertisers know who you are and what you like?

open source , give me a break, you mean your os devs are soo untrustworthy that you just have to see what they wrote in the code, who does that?

free come on, how poor are you linux people, i mean, quality stuff gets paid for, free stuff just means it's trash

and the linux devs , the aint like real coders they are just hobbysts, making your os in their free time

and who wants to install their own software anyway, on other platforms the company curates restricted software that you can use, and i know you'll say its oppressive but its just customer protection.

and i do want my platform to track everything i do, it only helps them build better stuff for me.

and whenever they decide to outdate my hardware and kill support for it, it only means they care and want me to get the latest tech, how considerate.

wait , i hear you say, there are no bugs in linux, my vendor makes sure my os comes with the latest antivirus software, nothing can break my system.

and just because linux runs on servers and most super computers only shows that common users like you and me are ignored, at least my vendor is not a sellout, and still makes stuff for the masses.

you say freedom i say safety i can sleep safe and sound for am protected nutured under one echosystem of software that i can not leave.

Either CloudFlare itself has decided to join the fun of attacking my DNS server, or somebody is just spoofing their IP in the UDP packets.
Crap, my ipset script is basically useless now, since the real source could be from anywhere :(

Any suggestions on what could I do to make this attack stop? It's not causing any real issues (at least for now), but it's still annoying as hell.
Get fucked, stupid skiddie who keeps manually changing the ip source in his script

I hate using the phone. When dealing with urls, email addresses and lists of changes/fixes all day, this is the least accurate and efficient way of getting information to me. Especially when I'm in the middle of doing things and get a call from a boss. I rarely even answer calls from the bosses.

My boss gave my cell to a vendor to get some urls. For 3 days I've been getting voicemail about sending some urls via email. I sent the urls on day one to the first person. 2 other people from the company have called me requesting the same thing. Why does any of this warrant a phone call. A quick paragraph email would solve all of this. I shouldn't even be talking to these people. My boss could have given the urls when he talked to them the first time. They call him when they can't get ahold of me.

At this point, I just want to be as difficult as I can be to continue wasting all of their time for being difficult and wasting mine.

endor's first magical adventures with PostgreSQL

"Alright, got the docker image up and running, and I'm connected to the db, both from console and from Datagrip! Cool, let's get started with the tutorial!"
*cue montage of me using Datagrip to create my first schema, then the first table, then insert a bunch of data to try things out*

"Cool, now let's see if I can view my data from the console"
db1-# select * from my_schema.table1
db1-# [nothing]

"*Ahem*, I said:"
db1-# select * from my_schema.table1
db1-# [nothing]

db1-# select * from my_schema.table1
db1-# [cricket noises]

"Wut, why can't I see the data that I inserted? Wtf is going on?"

*30 minutes later*
"Alright, I have no idea what's going on, so let's try inserting the data from console and see if Datagrip can see it"

db1-# insert into my_schema.table1(id, name, field2, field3) values (1, 'Mike', null, 123), (2, 'Jake', 0, 456);
ERROR: syntax error at or near "SELECT"
LINE 2: SELECT
^

"Wait, what?"

db1-# insert into my_schema.table1(id, name, field2, field3) values (1, 'Mike', null, 123), (2, 'Jake', 0, 456);
INSERT 0 2

"Wtf? Haaang on... "

db1-# select * from my_schema.table1;
id | name | field2 | field3
----+------+--------+--------
1 | Mike | | 123
2 | Jake | 0 | 456
1 | Mike | | 123
2 | Jake | 0 | 456
(4 rows)

*eye twitches*

That moment when you remove a giant CSS vendor lib from the project repo and it goes from 60% main language and 40% CSS, to 90% main language

"Bu...bu..but JAVA SWING and FX are PORTABLE!"

And electrolytes are what plants crave.

I swear half the people I argue with are dinks.

IF YOU HAVE PEOPLE YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOU HAVE TO DO WORK PEOPLE WILL HIRE YOU FOR.

Under job listings for javafx: 2 listings within 200 miles of me.

Under job listings for C#/WPF: dozens and dozens of jobs.

Portability doesn't matter if you're broke.

My stomach owes no allegiance to "high fallutin" concepts such as openness, avoiding vendor lock in, or the high ideals of platform independence.

I'll take the microsoft gulag if it pays my bills.

I don't know whats so hard to grasp about this. Some people are completely divorced from reality.

Edit: Hello to all my peeps who I haven't talked with in a while. I hope everything is going swimmingly in your lives. May your beer forever be paid for by your employer and your code bug free!

Automation is a drug, and I'm lovin' it!

Dear API vendor,

Please get off your arse and learn about REST, OpenAPI, JSON Schema, XSD and basic documentation so that I don't have to guess how to use your shitty, inconsistent, RPC over HTTP service.

With Love,

Platypus

Vs studio 17, Y U NO COMPILE MAH C++? It's literally one tiny program, with only one "Rectangle" class. g++ likes it and compiles it clean, why can't you be more like him? :(

Never gave much consideration to new year's resolutions, but here we go:
- Make my life less shitty
- Find a way out of my depression
- Get back to my old rythm
- Be in control of my own mind and my body again

Seeing posts about standards vs implementation of compilers. People not getting that "standards release" != "vendor release" for C++ compilers.

Holy shit, my first freelance project will be field-tested for the first time tomorrow!

After a few more rounds of fixing bugs, some serious improvements, and some new features additions, I can actually say that I'm proud of the code I've written! It's not perfect, but I definitely like the way it works - AND IT ACTUALLY WORKS!

Knock on wood, hopefully it won't shit the bed tomorrow.

Ok, who's the fucking retard that brought his quadcopter to the beach and is flying it around over people's heads?
Hope you land it in the sea and it burns to a crisp, you fucking moron!!

Kudos to Hetzner for approving my new account this morning, on christmas eve. Now I can finally deploy my new Minecraft server!

Alright, I need to reboot Windows *click*
Windows: Rebooting...
...
Windows: BSOD

OH FOR FUCK'S SAKE!

Man, running a Minecraft server with 5 players on a VPS with 1 vCore and 1GB of ram is *really* pushing this thing to its limits!
Thank goodness Ubuntu Server doesn't need much ram to run, because Minecraft is a real resource hog.
I hope Hetzner approves my account on monday, so we can move to a 2 core VPS with 4GB of ram!

When its saturday morning and you're on a bridge because the migration is still failing 34 hours in and the PM mentioned the vendor doc that he 'trimmed for your benefit' and replaced with his terrible doc, and you beat the original out of him and basically read off the section title "Exactly the error you got and the steps to prevent and resolve" and section 2 "big bold red letters explaining how to avoid it" and you instafix it. #wherewereyouonthursday

Third party vendor whose shitty API we have to use as part of our application blocks our account IN PRODUCTION without even telling us every time they have a slowdown because of course it must be us. Yeah, I didn't want to go home anyway🖕

Hetzner.
Simple, efficient, no useless fluff, decent prices for a good service, no hidden surprises or overcomplicated setups.
What more could you ask for?

I've just wasted 2 hours trying to figure out why docker-compose was bugging out on some stupid error.
Turns out that the Ubuntu package was stuck on 1.5.2.
The current release is 1.24.1.
The package has not been updated since December 2015.
I need to stab a motherfucker

!rant

Learning many new things and churning out good code is so fucking satisfying!
And the best part is: it actually works! 😏🚀

Holy crap, just started working again on a personal project after a 1-month hiatus... Really struggling to get my head back where it was, I have (almost) no clue what I was doing or why.
Even the commit log and the comments and docs I've left around seem empty somehow.

Any good tips/tools for retracing steps? How do you start working on a codebase you've never touched before?

I'm in the 7th circle of hell. Building out an authentication system using a 3rd party vendor into our company's application.
Developing in PHP, running inside a docker container, using a Windows PC. Absolutely everything has gone wrong that could go wrong but PHPCS whining about a missing space between the "!" and variable name was the last straw.

An identity platform where you can find each other, get the other's public key and preferred contact method. And the entire key exchange and choice of contact method are negotiated automatically. No vendor lock in, encryption happens on your own device. Effortlessly and securely communicating, no searching for skype name, email, phone number, setting up shit. It would just work.

The agency I own built a WordPress plugin for a client using a freelancer developer. The client, out of ambivalence, withheld information that would have drastically changed the design of the plugin, but by the time we found out it was much to late to start over. The developer moved overseas in the middle of it all and from then on was not very responsive to communications about the project which delayed things by months. I tried to find a replacement developer but nobody else had experience with the third-party API. The live version of the API ended up not being able to support what we were trying to get it to do with the plugin even though the test version of the API was fine and the vendor was unhelpful. And because we spent so much time and money on the plugin, we weren’t able to even begin on another part of the project. The client complained of over $30,000 in lost revenue due to these issues. Complete fail all around. I’m never doing another custom software project again. It’s all just website design from here.

when you start a new job where they just switched to a new CMS product that is no longer being developed... then find out they spend tons of money on a vendor to set it up for them.
At least it's supported for the near future. Last job was using FoxPro and AS400 mainframe

When you get a vendor email (Stackify)referencing devRant...

When a vendor tells you you can't do certain things on their API because their database is not optimized, and then drops the bomb that doing a certain action that, when it happens to overlap with a completely different client doing the same action, causes their system to go down, you know it's a Tuesday that feels like it should be a Friday...

Goddamn livid right now.

Our 3rd party Vendor developers' couldn't figure out how to check-in their goddamn code to our GitHub branch so they just sent our PM a zip file via email containing the project with the node modules folder too!!

Wtf.

Why are we even giving them a dollar. 😤😲

A conversation between an offshore developer and his manager at a fortune 500:

I'm a software developer and the company I work for is a vendor for $manager's and $offshore_dev's company. They provide endless hours of entertainment/terror. Recently, we've been trying to convince them that they need to stop sending sensitive information plaintext over HTTP and set up TLS/HTTPS which has led to tons of fun conversations such as this one they had during a conference call:

* $manager: "Did $offshore_dev implement TLS1.2?"
* $offshore_dev: "Yes, we enabled a parameter in the code to enable TLS1.2 in the code but according to $me's email, this requires HTTPS in order to work."
* $manager: "No this works, we're using TLS in $other_application right now."
* $offshore_dev: "Well, $manager, it's implemented but it currently doesn't encrypt anything as such."
* $manager: "Okay, HTTPS is in the roadmap in the next quarter, we can move forward without this for now."

I feel like 75% of stories here are about high schools. Maybe it’s because of the younger user base but also I think school security is beyond woeful.

I can’t even tell if my school just botched the setup or if the vendor thought it’d be a sick joke but we had software that the teacher would use to remotely look at everyone doing work but we found that if you press the help button it opens the same window where you see everyone’s desktops and can mess with them (how trivial, I know).

Am I the only one who cringes hard whenever I see people talking about VPNs, when they only really use them as glorified web proxies?

So apparently Docker exposes all the forwarded ports on *all* the interfaces, making all running containers available to the entire internet BY DEFAULT.
I have a question:
WHY???

Used to have FiOS at the office. Apparently someone thought we were having "issues" with the connection, so for a week we were sharing off a neighbor's connection while they found a new vendor and got it set up.

...we're now on Cox.

I am working in a speciffic engineering team. We are using tools the company has bought and has separate teams administrating them.

Tool X is malfunctioning, throwing server-side errors (some .dlls are mentioned in the err msg)

Me: XAdmin team, there are some suspicious errors and I cannot achieve desired results using tool X

XAdmin: Let me see
XAdmin: I have checked a few forums and could not find a solution. Please log a vendor case

Me: *wat........*
Me: Vendor will most likely require some techical info, some licencing info. How do I go about that?

XAdmin: reach out to the vendor, they will schedule a call. Forward that call to me

Me: *wat............*
Me: *for shits and giggles, register a bogus account at vendor site, try to log the SR*
Me: XAdmin, while logging a SR I am asked for licencing info. What is the aaa, bbb, ccc info of your licence?

XAdmin: *crickets mating*

wtf buddy... How can you call yourself Admin of tool X and ask your customers to log vendor cases for you.....? WTF are YOU there for then??

I'm still WTFed. Like wtf....

EDIT: the guy I was talking to is XAdmins' team lead

Spent almost two days debugging the hell out of an interrupt handler only to find out that my reference code (official example from the vendor) has some wrong function calls damn it.

That rage when you reinstall Ubuntu MATE on its partition, and it decides to nuke your Windows partition instead, with all the files you had on it too.

FFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK

HOW HARD CAN IT FUCKING BE TO INSTALL YOURSELF WHERE I FUCKING TELL YOU TO? WHY THE FUCK DO YOU EVEN ASK ME WHAT TO DO, IF YOU'RE GONNA HAVE A MIND OF YOUR OWN ANYWAY?
DIE IN A FIRE

FUCK YOU SYNOLOGY

Fuck you for breaking all my custom shit.
Fuck you for wiping almost everything (but leaving random stuff) every major update.
Fuck you for switching from upstart to systemd 219 (RELEASED MARCH 2015!).
Fuck you for using an outdated kernel.
Fuck you for having the weirdest shittiest preconfigured settings.
Fuck you for using your own custom package format.
Fuck you for being so utterly broken.
Fuck you for making me work 10 hours just to get everything back up and running the way it was.

Fuck you from the bottom of my heart

The moment when your ecommerce site relies completely in 3rd party vendor, and their API is changing without any heads up or announcement

Feeling so tired that I can't even muster up the energy to properly rant about stuff

Reanimated an old e-ink tablet today.

First, I didn't even know it needed to be reanimated. I just copied my books there, but it didn't find them. When I connected it again, they were gone.
Factory reset. Format storage. The memory seems empty, but after rebooting I see that everything is still intact.
Ok, imma hit forums then. They tell me I need to replace the internal memory. But isn't that something you need soldering for? Wrong! The internal memory IS JUST A MICRO SD CARD on the motherboard. The card is some cheap no name one, and people tell the similar story of it burning out after like four years of use.
Damn! The vendor has the AUDACITY to charge for signing their firmware to be flashed to a new micro sd card.

But I won't go down this easily. I hit forums again, and apparently there is a tool to sign the firmware yourself, but you need to find the card's serial number. To do that, you have to flash a bootleg tool, boot from that card, and it will show you the data you need. Then, you have to insert them into some shady .ini file (why is everything touching bootleg firmware runs only on windows?).

So I do that. The problem is, I need an image for my book. I find some shady one online, sign & flash it — touchscreen doesn't work. But I have the official firmware. I put two and two together and figure out that if the reader is able to display the ui, it probably has the firmware update tool working. So, immediately after flashing, I launch the firmware update utility that picks up my firmware from the second sd card (yes, they have an additional external slot).

Bingo. It works.

So, here are the steps:
1. Find a shady sd serial number detection tool
2. Flash it on a memory card with a shady vendor-specific flashing tool
3. Insert the new (now shady) card
4. Boot, write down the serial number
5. Find a shady boot image online
6. Edit a shady .ini file of a shady self-signing tool to sign the shady boot image
7. Flash the altered shady boot image with the shady flashing tool on your memory card
8. Copy a shady firmware update on a new card
9. Insert both cards
10. Pray

Awhile ago I was working with an National Instruments RFID analyzer scope.. the item cost $100,000. And the vendor that sold it my company had the boldness to have Windows 7 run all the licensed software equipment on the device.

The product however did work quite well. One day I came into the office and IT "UPGRADED" TO Windows 10 OVERNIGHT.
Effectively turning the equipment into the world's most expensive brick. Luckily for me, it was my last day in that position.. got a salaried position in engineering.

A couple months later an intern was assigned to fix it.. the licenses were messed up.. he eventually got it working again. Microsoft almost cost my company $100K without a second glance.

It all worked out in the end. :)

"Hi X,
Y stepped down from organizing meetup Z.

You are one of the top members of this Meetup, so I think you have what it takes to be a great organizer. Stepping up would help ensure that this community continues to survive past [date in the near future]."

Third time I get a message like this from meetup. Usually followed up by threatening to delete all group data forever if no one "steps up" (e.g. pays their bills). F***ing vendor lock-in! They have been colleting and publishing data for years only to blackmail people to continue using their services.

Some meetups (at least in my region) have switched to LinkedIn, so we will surely receive messages like above from LinkedIn in a couple of years.

When an enterprise software vendor stops giving deliverable dates to fix their product because they admittedly have not met any deliverable dates In the past. Huh wtf. I would say bye-bye now if it were my call.

Got sent to a meeting to overlook the purchase of a new system for one of our departments at work.

The meeting in question was made to go over technical requirements, you know, making sure that everything was in order before a formal decision was made.

I get to the meeting, the vendor had consisted of your standard American sales reps before, standard Joes, Steves and such.

Had to reschedule the meeting because the technical spokesperson had the thickest accent in the world and I could not make sense of anything that he was saying. Neither could my coworkers. The tech person was 100% not from the U.S, and that is cool, but I could not make sense of what he was trying to say.

Oh well 🤡

Can't feel like an impostor when you know that you're actually useless

(!rant) When starting out as a web developer, I did my first project for a external vendor for which I was paid in form of a lunch and some hope of more projects.
For the second project, I was paid one month of agreed upon amount for two months of work.

What's your story?

Fuck this week in particular

Friend: What do you know about Wordpress?

Me: Why???

Friend: My assistant made changes to my organization’s website and now it’s messed up. The page formatting is off.

Me: Wordpress has a version history for some things. Maybe go back to an earlier point in time?

Friend: I think she changed something that the vendor told us not to touch.

Me: Like a custom plugin that your website vendor made?

Friend: Maybe…

Me: Why is your assistant even touching things like that?

Friend: I really don’t want to contact the vendor because I don’t think they’re very good with website development. And I have no idea what this would cost.

Me: You might have to bite the bullet on the cost. And maybe fire that assistant for a butthole move like that. At least you have messaging to explain the wonky css is due to technical difficulties. RIP to your website.

You know it's one of those days when you're scouring through vendor code in order to figure out why your code isn't working

Time to get some coffee

Have no words. Just got an email from a recruiter for a 6 months contract in a vendor company for a position....the final customer will be my current employer where I am already working as a full time employee. No mistakes because it is a very specific role.
At least please read the CV when you have one!

There are a couple:

A system that updates user accounts to connect them into our wifi system by parsing thousands of processing files written in Clojure. The project was short lived and mainly experimental, It has complete test cases and the jar generated from it is still purring silently on the main application. It was used to replace an $85k vendor application that made no fucking sense. The code has not been touched in 2 years and the jar is still there. The dba mentioned the solution to the vendor, the vendor tried buying it from me, but being that it belongs to the institution nothing was touched, still, it got the VP's attention that I can make programs that would be bought for that level, it caught his attention even more when I showed him the codebase and he recognized a Lisp variant (he is old, and was back in the day a Fortran and Cobol developer)

A small Python categorical ML program that determines certain attributes of user generated data and effectively places them on the proper categories on the main DB. The program generates estimates of the users and the predictions have a 95% correctness rate. The DBA still needs to double check the generated results before doing the db updates. I don't remember how I coded it because I was mostly drunk when I experiment on the scenario. It also got the attention of the VP and director since the web tech manager was apparently doing crazy ML shit that they were not expecting me to do, it made them paranoid that I would eventually leave for a ML role somewhere, still here, but I want more moneys!!

A program that generates PDF documentation from user data, written in Go, Python and Perl (yes Perl) I even got shit from the lead developer since I used languages outside of their current scope of work. Dude had no option but to follow along with it :P since I am his boss

Many more. I am normally proud of my work code. But my biggest moment is my current ntural language processing unit that I am trying to code for my home, but I don't have enough power to build it with my computers, currently, my AI is too stupid, but sometimes it does reply back to my commands and does the things I ask it to do (simple things, opening a browser, search for a song etc) but 7 times out of ten it wont work :P

What a shit day, wasted 5 hours because the fucking temperature sensor of this goddamn turbine engine won't work, which in turn prevents the engine from starting up at all.
Why does shit fail whenever you need it the most? We had 45L of kerosene we had to burn, and now we'll have to move it somewhere else for the whole summer instead, and send the engine away to have it fixed (which means a whole lot of time and money wasted).

Fuck's sake, the one thing that had never let me down so far... we even made a brand new test stand just for the occasion :(

My Vega56 gpu is mining a bit faster than usual after the last reset. Not by a huge amount, but a little faster. Enough for it to be noticeable.

I don't wanna touch it. I just wanna let it sit there and happily chew away those hashes.

But I will have to touch it eventually, if I wanna turn my monitor off. If I wanna go to sleep.

Doing that will trigger a restart of the miner.
And I will never know if it will have that extra lil speed bump ever again.

Why is life so cruel

No Youtube, just because I finished watching a fucking video on my phone and then I closed it, doesn't mean that I wanna resume watching it again on my fucking TV!
"Oh, the user just stopped watching a video - surely he must want to watch it on his TV now!"
Seriously, who the fuck had the brilliant idea? And how desperate do you have to be for user attention to keep suggesting users to switch to a different device every time they close a video?

Vendor lock-in for cloud providers is really small, and you don't notice it until you need it. Route53 has an "import zone file" button, but they don't have an "export zone file" button. Yes, there are other tools and scripts to do it, but bit-by-bit AWS, GCP, and Azure make it difficult to leave.

One of my friend is wanted to build his site. Like other extra smart customer he did his share of research.

With half an hour of explaining why I am charging more than other. He said okay, and said he will be at my place tomorrow.

Me: why?
He: so I can watch you?

That single demand of his, made me pissed off. I wanted to punch him for that but anyway suggested him,
he should look for other vendor.

Fucking hell the AWS IAM documentation is confusing as fuck. Trying to set up a fucking role is harder than cutting a rock with a fucking spoon.

And who the fuck thought it would be a good idea to allow a CLI user to run any command he's allowed to without any form of authentication??
Oh, set up MFA for the CLI you say? Good fucking luck with that, if you ever manage to figure out how to set that shit up!
Fuck this shit!

!dev

So that new keyboard I bought? They sent me a French azerty instead of a Belgian azerty layout. Meaning the special keys are in the wrong places.

It's from a third party vendor. Here was me thinking I was getting a good deal on a second hand product in a box that had been opened but returned. Think I can guess why that happened.

I contacted support who will contact the third party but I have a bad feeling about this already. Both the third party and website where I ordered this are Dutch and they are used to Qwerty. Guess I should have bought on a Belgian website at full price :(

At my institution there is a sys admin that belongs to an entirely different department. They have their own systems on their own network, separated from ours. I do not care, nor do I mind at all, but this is the second time I've had to put their admin in his place.

The first instance was when we had a security firm gauge our systems for vulnerabilities etc. The one that they have was fine, but required some additional configurations on their Tomcat servers. The "sys-admin" contacted I.T (my department) in order to request assistance, the net manager was the one he contacted, and he told the dude that he is not familiar with the Tomcat environment that they have, but that I, the dev manager, would possibly give him some pointers. The net manager is my friend, and he knows how much of a dickhead I am, so he was careful in what he told him. So the dude calls me:
"Hey, I need some items fixed on my Tomcat servers, they told me you have to do it"
Me: "Who? those are your servers"
Him: "The net manager said that you would do it"
Me: "I am certain he didn't tell you that bud, no one here will take care of your servers, they are yours, I am not doing any configurations on your stuff, that is your job"
Him: "Can't you just do them?"
Me: "No, bye"

The little bitch escalated it to my department director, who told him exactly the same thing, the director did ask if I would be willing to assist, I told him no since even though his configurations were minimal, I was not going to put myself in the position to which that fucker's ineptitude would cause him to point fingers at me, director backed me up and told the fucker to deal with his own shit.

This year it came to my attention that not only do they have their owns servers, but their own SSO system. This moron contacted me, tagging VPS and such in the email to tell me that I had to configure his SSO because "they told me you had to do it". The same shit happened, but this time I put him on blast during a meeting and told him that as "sys admin" for his stuff it was his responsibility to deal with the SSO that they have, and to contact the vendor to ask for the specifications. In front of EVERYONE he asked me if I could do it for him, I fucking looooooooled and told him that he just admitted to not being able to do his job (for which he is paid handsomely) in front of the entire room of VPS. One VP asked me why I was not willing to help him, and I told the VP that it would be the equivalent of me taking his vehicle for services, it is not my vehicle, thus not my responsibility. The VP agreed and told the fucker to get on with it and do what I said: contact his vendor channels to figure it out himself since it was indeed his position.
Yet again he said that he didn't know about SSO configs and that he was "told that I would do it", everyone asked who the fuck told him that and he said that the vendor, they asked again how it was and he showed the message from the vendor telling him: "Have your SSO admin perform the following <bla bla bla bla>" they asked him who was the manager for the SSO that they had. He said that it was him. Then they asked him what logic made him believe that it should be me, he stated again "they told me it was him".

I could hear everyone's brains shortcircuiting as no one could believe someone would be this fucking dense.

I don't think he will continue to have his job for much longer. I understand not knowing something, and I would have been happy to give pointers since I do administer systems of that level, but I can't with the whole made up "they said he would do it"

Bitch who said that? just say that you want me to do it because you can't, I mean, I am still not fucking doing it, but damn. Fucking morons man.

I just realized something. So my company's whole release process and code management now run on mainstream tech products: Atlassian, Jetbrains, IBM and not in house/vendor crap

Working on an app to sync data between our ticketing system and an API a vendor made for us to interact with their ticketing system. I put off working on it for months, mostly because I had mountains of other "urgent" things that jumped in my face, but also because I needed to design the whole thing, and I really have to get into the right frame of mind for that kind of creative organization.

Today I dove into it. I built the JSON to submit, given whatever variables are necessary, and figured out after a while that the smartest way to handle this is not to search for an existing internal ticket, but to have the creation of the internal ticket set a flag for an automated sync process to check when it runs.

It's going to be much easier when I get that built, but now, knowing that, I'm daunted enough that I'm procrastinating. Think of something, chart it out with notes in a text editor, procrastinate.That is probably like 95% of the time I spend in "development."

Talking to a vendor in China to source some hardware modules. The engineers don't speak any English, and the sales rep doesn't know a serial port from a monkey's ass. Shortest game of Chinese whispers 😥

=== Was in my room when the conversation started. Thought it was a joke until i heard a knock on my door ===
[Mom:] Hey Julie, i need you to top up my PC.
[Julie(My kid Sis):] You mean update?
[Mom:] No silly, upgrade! I already have a windows 7 pro and i have just bought the disk for Windows 8 and 10 pro.
[Julie(My kid Sis):] Which should i install first.
[Mom:] You can first install the windows 10 so i can have a windows 17 pro then install the 8 to sum it up.
[Dad:] Lol, holy cow. what are you ladies discussing over there? You wanna crash the PC i just bought?
[Julie(My kid Sis):] No dad, just tryna upgrade windows.
[Dad:] Got that already! Just make sure you first uninstall before install, then after installing all and you don't get a windows 25 pro-plus, just call Giddy he's in his room or return the disks back to the vendor and get a full refund!
[Me:] :/

Legal Question regarding E-Commerce / Credit Card Payments.

The User sends his Credit Card Information (number/expiration Date/Safety Number) over email to vendor. Vendor types this info from the email into a Credit Card Terminal.

Is this even legal? I thought when listing Credit Card Payment you have to use a PSP (Payment Service Provider) that conforms to the security regulations etc.

Me: hey guys there seems to be an integration problem?
Vendor: hacky workaround
Me: no that’s a hacky workaround, please check the integration
Vendor (sometime later): yeah so we made an engineering change like, a while back, which fundamentally alters stuff.
Me: so shit is fucked because you don’t think customers should be informed ahead of release? Dude do you not want our money?

What's worse than a StackOverflow question with no answers? An open GitHub issue, no comments in the last three months, and a sense that you just hit the ultimate bug the vendor will never fix.

Tfw you have to reverse engineer a $50000 machine with practically zero documentation and all vendor specific hardware and software!

Has anybody else been through this ?

9000 internet cookie points to whoever figures out this shit:

I'm trying to import a secret gpg key into my keyring.
If I run "gpg2 --import secring.gpg" and manually type each possible password that I can think of, the import fails. So far, nothing unusual.
HOWEVER
If I type the same passwords into a file and run:
echo pwfile.txt | gpg2 --batch --import secring.gpg
IT ACTUALLY FUCKING WORKS

What the fuck??? How can it be that whenever I type the pw manually it fails, but when I import it from a file it works??
And no, it's not typos: I could type those passwords blindfolded from muscle memory alone, and still get them right 99% of the time. And I'm definitely not blindfolded right now.

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!!

Suppose my pwfile.txt looks something like this:

password1
password2
password3
password4
password5
password6

Now, I'm trying to narrow it down and figure out which one is the right password, so I'm gonna split the file in two parts and see which one succeds. Easy, right?

$ cat pw1.txt
password1
password2
password3

$ cat pw2.txt
password4
password5
password6

$ echo pw1.txt | gpg2 --batch --import secring.gpg
gpg: key 149C7ED3: secret key imported

$ gpg2 --delete-secret-key "149C7ED3"
[confirm deletion]

$ echo pw2.txt | gpg2 --batch --import secring.gpg
gpg: key 149C7ED3: secret key imported

In other words, both files successfully managed to import the secret key, but there are no passwords in common between the two!!
Am I going retarded, or is there something really wrong here? WTF!

* 3 months ago *
Vendor: We screwed up and need to start the project from the scratch, this delays the project completion by a year.
Me: OK. Anything you need from me?
V: The good news is that you've given us all we need. Everything should be fine to submit and review by the end of March. (Deadline for 2018 completion is mid-April 2017)

* This week *
Vendor: We need this (partially unspecified) documentation urgently, and also we're missing these parts (~3 weeks effort).
All of which could've been started 3 months ago…

Great, I have a cold, I feel like shit, and I can't code for shit. Fuck this day.

Thank you Google, for updating Chrome on my phone without notice in spite of me explicitly disabling automatic updates and me 'not having enough storage space left' for manual updates. It's nice to see you caring about the user so much.
Now if you sucked my dick while you were at it, that would be great.

The contractor/developer sitting next to me asked for a power adapter for the MacBook the company issued him (it's an older MacBook that currently connects to his monitor with one of those 2-in-1 power and display port cables).

They told him it was not company policy to provide power adapters to contractors.

They also wouldn't give him a license for a Windows VM for some Windows specific stuff he needed to work on for an outside vendor, stating it was a "security risk"

They've also talked about taking Linux off my laptop (which I run natively outside a VM cause fuck MacOS).

I hate our IT department. They're the least competent and least helpful bunch I've ever met.

The most annoying popup I hope to not see clicking on a link.

Other cookie [de]selectors seem to have proper "reject all" mechanism. This one not only doesn't have that, it also always has an annoyingly long vendor list.
Also, if I unselect cookies, my choice is only saved for several days. After a week or two it tends to expire and the clickfest starts again

They prolly hope to overwhelm me with the number of clicks required to unselect them all. Well joke's on them, it's a matter of principle. I know where I'll spend the next 15minutes of my life now...

From a dev and eCommerce management perspective, Groupon is THE WORST. They just launched a brand new marketplace site but STILL don’t have an API I can connect with to do fulfillment. Their CSV format is useless for our shipping company. Their data inputs are not sanitized and standardized enough to be predictable for purposes of transformation via scripting. The exceptions and edge cases are infinite. So I’m STILL stuck having to take time out of my day to manually copy and paste and correct order data into the proper format to FTP to the fulfillment company. Oh, and I don’t yet know if the new marketplace does this, but the old one used to suspend vendor accounts for...get this...selling TOO MUCH! How is Groupon still in business?

I've just updated my phone, and I have now realised I don't remember my new PIN and I haven't written it down anywhere.
FUCK!

Fuck you Mobike!! Stop polling your applog.mobike.com server literally every 10 fucking seconds when your app is not even running! And why the fuck did it suddenly start last night, of all things? It's fucking creepy and invasive.

Related question: does anyone know how to permanently shut down a background app service on an unrooted android 7? Even if I kill the background process (not the app itself - that one has not even been opened), it still restarts a minute later

I work and live in Italy, if any of you know Italian, you'll probably know there are a few words with accents and also a few locations with accents in their names.

There was this big client for which we built a CMS and the were to insert the names of the vendors of their network, for each vendor there also was the address.

There were SO many addresses with accents and they just couldn't write capital letters with accents, so in the end, I had to make a function to capitalize everything including accents in the CMS.

I know i could have just used the text-transform:uppercase directive in CSS, but... whatever, they kept paying a shitload of money

!rant

I wish I could redesign the webstack. I mean, its fine in its current state, but could be soooo much better.

Having native support for web components and shadowDOM will be a good start.

Crossbrowser support for flexbox and removal of vendor prefixes.

CSS defaults for properties like margin and padding to be set to 0. (Basically reset.css or normalize.css)

I like the direction ECMAscript is heading in but I think some features that Dart has should also be ported ECMAscript. The simplified DOM in dart which looks like jQuery is such a breeze to use.

We can all the above currently, but its integration would streamline development.

Because the client had me roasting on a spit in nearly impossible features Hell for an entire year on a piece of custom software that ate up all the budget and my profitability, I completely forgot about a major other requirement that now will take me months to integrate. And they still haven't paid me for my other work so I can pay my other dev. My vendor/client negotiating "prowess" got me from "still not paid" to "indentured servitude".

FML. How did I convince myself that I'm good at business relationships?Why did I think I would be able to do custom software? I need to stick to just designing websites as a rank and file employee. No, actually I need to disappear until North Korea starts thermonuclear war and nobody cares about software anymore.

I fucking hate vendor prefixes. HATE.

Got some nice JS code? Well it's about to get ugly 'cause in our browser, the API needs some special name treatment or it feels offended.

Got some nice CSS?
You're welcome, it just grew 3x in size because "ugh, I ain't havin' the same flexbox as lousy Chrome over there! I'm special, I'm -ms-!"

Fucking bullshit.

There is no joy in life

So I finally managed to set up networking on my 3D printer's raspberry pi: now it can connect to my phone's hotspot or to my uni's wifi network, depending on which is available.

Then I set up OpenVPN, using a remote server as a middleman so I can connect to the printer remotely and start/stop/monitor prints from anywhere.

Everything works great, except for one thing: whenever the Pi connects to the uni's network first, OpenVPN fails to start and connect to my server, rendering the printer unavailable (unless I use an ethernet cable, but that's not a viable operation since I need to lift the printer, and it's heavy).
The only for it to work as intended is to either:
a) keep my hotspot active (which kinda defeats the point), or
b) let it connect to my hotspot first (so that OpenVPN can start properly) and then turn off the hotspot, allowing the printer to reconnect to the uni's wifi and reconnect to my vpn.

Why won't things just work the way they're supposed to? 😭

GODFUCKINGDAMNIT!
This stupid fucking car alarm has been screaming on my street for the last 30 minutes already, and the owner has not stopped it yet! It's 2 fucking AM and I'm trying to fucking sleep!
FUCK!!

So this past few days of a mix bag of emotions. Friday's weekly deliverables on our first dry run at launch, I squeeze across the line in an embarrassing finish. Decision to proceed with the live run to be delayed, not going to happen if I've got something to say about it.

Next day, vendor on the house my wife has purchased (our first!!) and says we can move the settlement date ahead 4 weeks! Winning!

Monday, meeting with all stakeholders on the fuck up that was my deliverables I'm responsible for, granted a conditional pass. "Don't worry, I got this."

Tuesday, received the results of a technical challenge I've given one of the developer candidates - he smashed it. Keen to give him the job!

Does anyone know of a "formattable" ARM tablet that I can install whatever I want (maybe even dual boot), make upgrades... That is, that I can take advantage of the fact that it's a computer?
I'm a software developer and I'm tired of having to "buy a new gadget" just because the vendor doesn't want to update Android anymore.
Is there anything on the market that isn't expensive like Raspad or ugly like CutiePi?

NOTE: I live in Brazil, Pine does not deliver here.

Had our 3rd party vendor finally check their code into our github. Great.

Checking the recent commits, they only add changed .CSS files. Hmm..odd.

We use less so why did they update the compiled CSS file...? Did they forget to checkin the Less changes...?

Nope. Backend sitecore developer updated the bundled, minified CSS files and checked those in along with the fucking node_modules folder.

Didn't even know what LESS is.

The vendors PM swears the frontend developer did the changes. I don't know what's worse.

So I was compiling Resurrection Remix, Android 10. And I'm making some commits here and there, and my friend looks over and asks me "so how does this work?" And I briefly explain about device tree, vendor and kernel. So he says "oh okay, so basically it's like copy and paste?"

I've never been so offended in my life 😐