My first job: The Mystery of The Powered-Down Server

I paid my way through college by working every-other-semester in the Cooperative-Education Program my school provided. My first job was with a small company (now defunct) which made some of the very first optical-storage robotic storage systems. I honestly forgot what I was "officially" hired for at first, but I quickly moved up into the kernel device-driver team and was quite happy there.

It was primarily a Solaris shop, with a smattering of IBM AIX RS/6000. It was one of these ill-fated RS/6000 machines which (by no fault of its own) plays a major role in this story.

One day, I came to work to find my team-leader in quite a tizzy -- cursing and ranting about our VAR selling us bad equipment; about how IBM just doesn't make good hardware like they did in the good old days; about how back when _he_ was in charge of buying equipment this wouldn't happen, and on and on and on.

Our primary AIX dev server was powered off when he arrived. He booted it up, checked logs and was running self-diagnostics, but absolutely nothing so far indicated why the machine had shut down. We blew a couple of hours trying to figure out what happened, to no avail. Eventually, with other deadlines looming, we just chalked it up be something we'll look into more later.

Several days went by, with the usual day-to-day comings and goings; no surprises.

Then, next week, it happened again.

My team-leader was LIVID. The same server was hard-down again when he came in; no explanation. He opened a ticket with IBM and put in a call to our VAR rep, demanding answers -- how could they sell us bad equipment -- why isn't there any indication of what's failing -- someone must come out here and fix this NOW, and on and on and on.

(As a quick aside, in case it's not clearly coming through between-the-lines, our team leader was always a little bit "over to top" for me. He was the kind of person who "got things done," and as long as you stayed on his good side, you could just watch the fireworks most days - but it became pretty exhausting sometimes).

Back our story -
An IBM CE comes out and does a full on-site hardware diagnostic -- tears the whole server down, runs through everything one part a time. Absolutely. Nothing. Wrong.

I recall, at some point of all this, making the comment "It's almost like someone just pulls the plug on it -- like the power just, poof, goes away."

My team-leader demands the CE replace the power supply, even though it appeared to be operating normally. He does, at our cost, of course.

Another weeks goes by and all is forgotten in the swamp of work we have to do.

Until one day, the next week... Yes, you guessed it... It happens again. The server is down. Heads are exploding (will at least one head we all know by now). With all the screaming going on, the entire office staff should have comped some Advil.

My team-leader demands the facilities team do a full diagnostic on the UPS system and assure we aren't getting drop-outs on the power system. They do the diagnostic. They also review the logs for the power/load distribution to the entire lab and office spaces. Nothing is amiss.

This would also be a good time draw the picture of where this server is -- this particular server is not in the actual server room, it's out in the office area. That's on purpose, since it is connected to a demo robotics cabinet we use for testing and POC work. And customer demos. This will date me, but these were the days when robotic storage was new and VERY exciting to watch...

So, this is basically a couple of big boxes out on the office floor, with power cables running into a special power-drop near the middle of the room. That information might seem superfluous now, but will come into play shortly in our story.

So, we still have no answer to what's causing the server problems, but we all have work to do, so we keep plugging away, hoping for the best.

The team leader is insisting the VAR swap in a new server.

One night, we (the device-driver team) are working late, burning the midnight oil, right there in the office, and we bear witness to something I will never forget.

The cleaning staff came in.

Anxious for a brief distraction from our marathon of debugging, we stopped to watch them set up and start cleaning the office for a bit.

Then, friends, I Am Not Making This Up(tm)... I watched one of the cleaning staff walk right over to that beautiful RS/6000 dev server, dwarfed in shadow beside that huge robotic disc enclosure... and yank the server power cable right out of the dedicated power drop. And plug in their vacuum cleaner. And vacuum the floor.

We each looked at one-another, slowly, in bewilderment... and then went home, after a brief discussion on the way out the door.

You see, our team-leader wasn't with us that night; so before we left, we all agreed to come in late the next day. Very late indeed.

Adding some <br> or &nbsp; for spacing... we all have done it. Admit it.

Man in the event of some newcomers to the development game, those that will mostly work in the web domain or sys admins that are in training I want to offer some small advice:

Do not neglect vim

I know it might be a bitch to use at first. And I will never use it as a replacement to vs code. But fuuuuuck me I cannot count the number of times that vim wizardry has helped me when dealing with servers when dealing on a machine with windows and nothing but putty.

The thing is a lifesaver yo, and it makes for an impressive show when doing something in front of senior executives.

Learn it, love it, live by it

And exit is :q, save is :w, to copy and paste is :v then surround the text and then y to yank it and p to paste it.
:vsplit and :split are your friends and to move around splits is ctrl w and direction.

Good luck my friends. Stay classy.

these are the kinds of commits i have to deal with :|
like "it's already past 5 o'clock! i have to leave!"

Just found out you can take Screenshots of a webpage right from the firefox console... neat! You can even select specific elements to screenshot.

Just throw :screenshot into the console - Ff v62 (--selector [css-selector], --fullpage, and some other params you can look up)

Have a good Monday :)

When the comment is longer/harder to understand than the actual code

Grr the feeling when one of your interviewers has a hard-on for trying to find ways to sink your boat.

Went to a job interview yesterday during my lunch break for a mid level dev job in central London , i have been trying to transition from a junior role.

First were two senior devs , that went quiet well...

Next up was the tech lead and a team lead, lets call the latter Mc-douche for some problem

The tech lead was fine, very relaxed and clam guy more interested in seeing the logic of my answers and questions as to why i did certain things in this or that manner....

Mc-douche, he would always try to find something wrong then smile smugly and do that sideways head waggle thing

His tech lead is like " yup that's correct"
But he would be like " yeeess but you didn't think about bla bla bla" then talk about shit not even present in the context of the question

Ah also he would ask a question then cut me off as soon as I begin to say that i didnt mention or take into account x or y even though literally my next sentence is about address those details he wanted.
let me fucking finish you dickbag 😡

Had a js question, simple stuff about dom manipulation, told not to bother with code... yet McD starts asking me to write the code for it....managed it , quite easy stuff

Then a sql and db test , again technlead was happy with the answers and the logic am approaching the question when writing my query, yet mc d Is bitching about SQL syntax....
Ok fine, i made a simple mistake, I forgot and used WHERE instead of HAVING in a group by but really?! Thats his focus ?!

Most devs I know look up syntax to do stuff , they focus on their logic first the do the impl.

Then a general question on some math and how i would code to impl a solution on paper
That was a 20 mins one, the question said they didn't expect me to finish it totally so
I approached it like an exam question.

First
I focussed on my general flow of my process, listing out each step.

Then elaborated each step with pseudo code showing my logic for each of the key steps.

Then went deeper and started on some of the classes and methods , was about to finish before it was time up.

Mc douch went through my solution
And grudgingly admitted my logic was "robust enough" it was like he really had to yank that deep out of his colon.

I didn't really respond to any of his rudeness throughout the whole interview,i either smiled politely or put on a keen looking poker face.

Really felt awful the rest of the day, skipped the gym and went home after work, really sucks to have a hostile interviewer.

Pretty sure i wont be hearing anything good from them even though the three other interviewers were happy with me I felt.

DO !!!NOT!!!!! USE 'X' AND 'P' TO 'CUT AND PASTE' A LOT OF LINES ACROSS FILES IN VIM!!! HOLY SHIT I JUST PWNED MYSELF SO HARD I LOST SO MUCH CODE HOLY FUCK IT'S NOT EVEN FUNNY! WHERE DID AT ALL GO YOU ASK, WHY THE FUCKING REGISTER, OK LET'S CHECK THE REGISTER, COOL THERE IT IS, BUT WAIT, THERE'S ONLY LIKE 20% OF IT BECAUSE WE CUT A SHIT LOAD OF LINES AT ONCE, AND THE REGISTER OVERFILLED.... Ok let's calm down, doesn't Vim have a recovery option? Yes it does, but WAIT A FUCKING MINUTE, MY CHANGES ARE NOT IN THE SWAP FILE BECAUSE IT'S NOT LIKE VIM CRASHED OR ANYTHING, MY DUMB-FUCK-ASS WILLFULLY WROTE THE CHANGES WHEN I SWITCHED OVER TO THE NEW FILE, AND NOW, WELL THAT'S IT, YOU'RE DEAD KIDDO, YOU WROTE THE CHANGES TO DISK, NOTHING YOU CAN DO, AND I AM SO SCREWED I SPECIFICALLY MADE A DEVRANT ACCOUNT TO MAKE SURE NO ONE ELSE PWNS HIMSELF AS HARD AS I JUST DID HOLY FUCK

Wrote myself a flight stability controller for a drone I built - used an ultrasonic sensor for altitude so it should've maintained a constant altitude, but I had the throttle increments too high...
Hooked up the battery - off it fucked, hit the ceiling, bounced off a wall, and broke 2 props before I could grab it and yank the battery off.

Protip - if you're building a drone, tie it to a heavy fucking rock for your first flight test!

Heh :3
Duckling not included, he just curious.

Yes, I will definitely consider that Microsoft.
Windows is such a mess... Fucking hate it. Let's see for how long this fresh install will keep its shit together -.-

Data Disinformation: the Next Big Problem

Automatic code generation LLMs like ChatGPT are capable of producing SQL snippets. Regardless of quality, those are capable of retrieving data (from prepared datasets) based on user prompts.
That data may, however, be garbage. This will lead to garbage decisions by lowly literate stakeholders.
Like with network neutrality and pii/psi ownership, we must act now to avoid yet another calamity.

Imagine a scenario where a middle-manager level illiterate barks some prompts to the corporate AI and it writes and runs an SQL query in company databases.
The AI outputs some interactive charts that show that the average worker spends 92.4 minutes on lunch daily.
The middle manager gets furious and enacts an Orwellian policy of facial recognition punch clock in the office.
Two months and millions of dollars in contractors later, and the middle manager checks the same prompt again... and the average lunch time is now 107.2 minutes!
Finally the middle manager gets a literate person to check the data... and the piece of shit SQL behind the number is sourcing from the "off-site scheduled meetings" database.
Why? because the dataset that does have the data for lunch breaks is labeled "labour board compliance 3", and the LLM thought that the metadata for the wrong dataset better matched the user's prompt.

This, given the very real world scenario of mislabeled data and LLMs' inability to understand what they are saying or accessing, and the average manager's complete data illiteracy, we might have to wrangle some actions to prepare for this type of tomfoolery.

I don't think that access restriction will save our souls here, decision-flumberers usually have the authority to overrule RACI/ACL restrictions anyway.
Making "data analysis" an AI-GMO-Free zone is laughable, that is simply not how the tech market works. Auto tools are coming to make our jobs harder and less productive, tech people!
I thought about detecting new automation-enhanced data access and visualization, and enacting awareness policies. But it would be of poor help, after a shithead middle manager gets hooked on a surreal indicator value it is nigh impossible to yank them out of it.

Gotta get this snowball rolling, we must have some idea of future AI housetraining best practices if we are to avoid a complete social-media style meltdown of data-driven processes.
Someone cares to pitch in?

kind of happy i got my firstname.dev domain :)

Coworkers.

Sitting here with my headphones + cap + hoodie on, and guess what... it’s working. No one disturbing me. I ... I feel like I’m a stone.

Parenting 101. take it or leave it.

must be a hell of a front-end.....
Yes this is a Frontend Dev Job :)

Now I feel a bit bad about the guy I ranted about before, who did all the talk but none of the work. I started to tell my colleagues and even my boss about my impression. And my boss concurred, was actually so fed up with him that he confronted him...
Later on turned out he was the only one able to repair our mangled git history. Dunno how it'll pan out. The guy is also our 'scrum master'. Maybe doesn't always have to be love, peace and harmony. Time to explore our darker sides and yank out some motherfucking code.

I find myself making a Scooby Doo 'yoink' every time I hit 'y' to yank (aka copy) in vim.

If I was in an office it could be an issue but not now...

waking up at 11 o'clock... feeling like a lazy fuck. But then doing the math thing and end up with 5 hours sleep. dont know how to feel about it :D code wont refactor itself

we are organizer of really big trade fair and wanted to place a new product. It was a landing page for exhibitors especially for the fair, the exhibitor would get a subdomain with his company name. This landingpage had some highly requested features such as a calender for scheduling meetings, some floorplan features and other stuff... long story short: not a single exhibitor booked it. it was just trash and huge waste of time. dont get me wrong, this was actually a really great idea but the endproduct just sucked... now 4 resignations later we may start a new try :D

wish i would be a more passionsted ranter/writer... i have a ton load of such things i could rant about... but most of the time i get my consolation by reading your rants here.

obligatory: fuck, shit, cunt

My setup. That’s where i sleep and pet my duck :)
... I’m looking for a horizontal monitor slide which I can mount to my desk but can’t find one :/ suggestions?

In the mood of doing nothing because I have so much shit going on. Anyone knows that feeling?

Also so many (cool) projects I would like to do but no motivation to start anything... I have no real reason to... I’m just waiting for motivation to come back one day - but it has been a long time.. :(

Me at interview ->

Imagine the frustration you may go writing code in a different platform not having your vimrc. Than imagine the suicidal thoughts you have after you finish your program and have tabs mixed with spaces and indent errors, well on top of that imagine losing all the code highlighting all the code using X to yank it and P to paste in another file

Well, i shut down the vim session and lost all the code i wrote in 2 hrs

github counts the contributions made with an email you associated afterwards - yay :D

Today i faced a "bug" which caused an element not to trigger a Bootstrap 3 accordion by klicking on it. Only on iOS/iPhone - Desktop and Android worked fine.
The actual problem was that almost the same structure worked fine on another website...
took me about 3 hours to figure out that the element which was supposed to trigger the accordion needs the css property 'cursor: pointer;'.
why the hell does a touch device, which got no coursor, need this property?!

After 1hour of live chat they were able to help me find the actual page content (green mark) ... speechless

All results for GDPR on my "spam mail adress" (NO results for DSGVO!) ... seems like GDPR doesnt apply for spam :D but this email is also registered to sooo many services and websites... i think the search is broken :|

I spent 2 weeks at work building a dashbord (not a feature but...) wich provided an overview of projects and tasks managed in redmine (Kanban tool) by using its API. After i finished it we started using it till my boss found out that it was completly "useless" for him - it had all the features he asked for! -.- ...
three days later the redmine server crashed and we changed the provider, nobody missed my dashboard and so it got abandoned :( sometimes i miss it, it looked fancy af and stuff!!
But at least i learned a lot of js and API stuff. I was verry new to js back then :)

Boss asked -> I deliver -> and *pooff* down the river it goes. seems like my tasks have not changed much since then.

yank it.

I hate meetings where we watch other teams yank each other’s dicks for an hour. We get it, you love your team. I don’t care. I have shit to do guys.

Continuation (no. 2): So because of my bad conscience I was very polite and friendly to the colleague I pestered about... but my boss was not. Instead he broke loose his second fight with Mr. git master. He's joking about that he now already had a fight with almost anybody (mostly team leads). He's leaving the company anyway, so he needn't care, but I start to love his love for conflicts. Some PM or upper boss already said something along the lines: "If something's wrong, I know you'll escalate." Of course you should not for every triviality, but nothing is worse than those lingering, dormant time bombs of projects that went so awry they're just waiting to explode... or silently be canceled.
Well, so they clashed again, and Mr git / scrum master fought for his concern that my boss, who's also product owner, must not enter the team. I looked at the git logs: Mr git master's only contribution - he's supposed to be a member of the team - since joining (like over a month) were 300 LOC, which was actually copy pasting our old copy right form, peppering it with some html tags to ensure it would not work without recompiling the 3rd party lib with a fucking webengine.

My boss now rather wants to remove "agile" as it's not fitting. Just let the three or four of us yank out the code so we actually have a chance to deliver in three months. He told the upper boss that we can take our tasks ourselves so independently we even need no team lead, but could report directly to him. It's still not clear what's gonna happen, but it's like they could let us loose, free radical elements who just do motherfucking programming. Feels awesome.

17h for 5 Days working on a 3D Animation for an App Award. tough days but it was quite fun. 8/10 would work like a slave again

!dev
when one of your best domains were taken for a long time and you didn't considered about buying or hijacking it or even thought about what you would even do with it because its taken anyway and you are not an asshole. But then out of nowhere you get an offer to get this domain. and you start thinking... what cool project you could do with it and what it may becomes - and what if your project fails and you wasted a great domainname... but ofcurse you stuggle for too long and the old owner bought it already back again, like he just forgot to renew it and didnt even cared about it that much.

congratulations. you now cant stop thinking about this cool project and what it could may be. instead you see someone else wasting it...

as if dev life is not depressing enough. back to localhost :(

Any Typo3 devs around here?
I want to know why would one go for this cms nowadays?? I had to deal with it for almost 3 years and cant figure out why it is still used :| does it really have any pros compared to other cms? words cant describe my hate for typo3 right now - and since we have more than enough of swear words on DevRant i wont go into detail :) (in my defence i dont have that much experience with cms‘s)

i wonder if dark themes lower monitor heat? ...maybe on an amoled display? :D

Any suggestion for a good free mail client for windows (&android)?

Just started my first small laravel project (a chat app). current state: i can chat with myself -awesome! Almost forgot about this good feeling learning great new stuff :)

where do you guys register your domains? :) i plan to seperated mine from my hosting provider.
namecheap looks good - any pros/cons i have to consider?

I’m a bit scared that we as developers will replace ourselves with AI - sure there must be developers for AI and special stuff AI can’t handle at that time, but... I think that not so many developers are needed in the future?

Stupid isp - no internet for more than 13h now. This happens way too often (once or twice a month for a whole day) I’m trying to keep calm and don’t explode in fuckery language but there are people who can’t run their business or really relying on working internet connection. (Unitymedia - stay aware of these fcktards) Wuuusaaa... but I found out that the chrome trex got a nice little party hat.

Finished vocational training! :) Fulltime front-end guy now. #happy no hassle with shitty school or something anymore - lets focus on side projects again :)

my goal is to actually start doing something again damn it! :|

my recents WTFs
1. Typo3 in general 2. Outlook ignoring „margin“ with a lower m ... capital M works fine.

Why asking your dev team for any suggestions or solutions when you can easily say „make new website! Fast!“... now we have a new Website providing the exact same features as the so desired App... no further words for this.

"Nope, its a feat... I mean its the username!"

feels good to have my debug buddy with me now :3 I used the opportunity to get my avatar a pair of short pants too... its getting realllly hot in here. - 38°C

all this fucking cloud sync bullshit on mac, iOS, and windows is driving me nuts... would all be fine if it only would work as expected -.-

Do you Place Easter eggs in your projects? If so, where and how do you place them on web projects? :P

I just finished typing a config file and ran into a problem with being able to save the file. I highlight the lines in vi yank them close vi re run it as sudo to see if that would resolve the issue with being unable to save read "E353: Nothing in register". Remember yank doesn't function like copy-paste on windows so it doesn't save to clip board.

Well there goes 20 minutes of work!