Today my cat, my oldest girlfriend, passed away. She chose to be in the sun for her passing. I'm happy she had a good life in the end with all the space she needed. She did not suffer. It was sudden and just a cardiac arrest.

May she hunt many more mice and little birds in the afterlife.

Current workload as dev lead:
- 1% actual development
- 2,5% waiting for SaaS to load
- 2,5% cursing company server network connectivity issues
- 5% switching VPNs
- 7,5% pkg management & deploys
- 10% writing JIRA and support tickets
- 12,5% filling in timesheets
- 15% coaching & reviewing a bot coworker
- 19% doing 2FA, refreshing expired passwords
- give up and spend the remaining 25% doing something meaningful

I'm trying to stand up a docker container to read a storage queue with dotnet and invoke ffmpeg to convert some videos. For a whole day I fought with this wrapper (FFMpegCore) which kept throwing file not found errors on the ffmpeg binary itself. Locally (windows) it worked fine.

I spent a ton of time trying to install the Debian package, trying to add it to the path manually, trying to just use the wrapper just to generate the arguments I wanted (I'm not an ffmpeg pro, so the fluent API the wrapper has is super useful) and running it manually, nothing worked. Finally, I realized it wasn't getting to the part where I ran it manually: just using the fluent API to get the arguments was invoking ffmpeg and throwing.

I took away the wrapper completely, start ffmpeg manually and it works...

Ay carumba. Things just can't be easy.

The global joke of Information Security

So I broke my iPhone because the nuclear adhesive turned my display into a shopping bag.

This started the ride for my character arc in this boring dystopia novel:

Amazon is preventing me from accessing my account because they want my password, email AND mobile phone number in their TWO.STEP Verifivation.
Just because one too many scammers managed to woo one too many 90+y/o's into bailing their long lost WW2 comrades from a nigerian jail with Amazon gift cards and Amazon doesn't know what to do about anymore,

DHL is keeping my new phone in a "highly secure" vault 200m away from my place, waiting for a letter to register some device with a camera because you need to verify your identity with an app,

all the while my former car insurance is making regress claims of about 7k€ against me for a minor car accident (no-one hurt fortunately, but was my fault).

Every rep from each of the above had the same stupid bitchass scapegoat to create high-tech supra chargers to the account deletion request:

- Amazon: We need to verify your password, whether the email was yours and whether the phone number is yours.

They call it 2-step-verification.

Guess what Amazon requests to verify you before contacting customer support since you dont have access to your number? Your passwoooooord. While youre at it, click on that button we sent you will ya? ...

I call this design pattern the "dement Tupi-Guarani"

- DHL: We need an ID to verify your identity for the request for changing the delivery address you just made. Oh you wanted to give us ANOTHER address than the one written on your ID? Too bad bro, we can't help, GDPR

- Car Insurance: We are making regress claims against you, which might throw you back to mom's basement, oh and also we compensated the injured party for something else, it doesn't matter what it is but it's definitely something, so our claims against you just raised by 1.2k. Wait you want proof we compensated something to the injured at all? Nah mate we cant do that , GDPR. But trust me, those numbers are legit, my quant forecasted the cost of childrens' christmas wishes. You have 14 days or we'll see you in court haha

I am also their customer in a pension scheme. Something special to Germany, where you save some taxes but have to pay them back once you get the fund paid out. I have sent them a letter to terminate the contract.

Funniest thing is, the whole rant is my second take. Because when I hit the post button, devrant made me verify my e-mail. The text was gone afterwards. If someone from devRant reads this, you are free to quote this in the ticket description.

Fuck losing your virginity, or filing your first tax return, or by God get your first car, living through this sad Truman dystopia without going batshit insane is what becoming a true adult is.

I am grateful for all this though:

Amazon's safety measures prevented me from spending the money I can use to conclude the insurance odyssey, and DHLs "giving a fuck about customers" prevention policies made me support local businesses. And having ranted all this here does feel healthy too. So there's that.

Oh, cherry on top. I cant check my balance, because I can only verify my login requests to my banking account wiiiiiiith...?

Microsoft should start to hire some real web developers, because their websites keep being awful.
Slow data loading, inconsistent UI and UX, just a pain in the ass to use.

Why the fuck does a company put such crappy antivirus software on your PC you can't even compile code.

When I go to bed, I power off my laptop instead of just closing the lid. I don't bring my phone with me. I don't have a smartwatch. I sleep with no electronic devices with me.

Anyone can solve a lot of their problems by conversing with themselves one on one. Instead, they prefer a feed algorithm taking away their pain. But the nature of pain-relieving addictions is that they always intensify the pain in the long run.

Listen to yourself. Speak to yourself quietly, one on one, without mark zuckerberg in your room listening to your every word. The overwhelming pain will be no more after mere minutes. Only then can you be free.

white house props up "memory safe" languages

cloudflare releases all in one network connections library pingora as open source (for rust, a memory safe language)

cloudflare is sus. they were hosting that Ukranian kill-list that was routed through Langley/FBI. when contacted by multiple people, they ignored the violations and complaints to take down the website

SEE IT WAS SUS

so I guess if you can put spyware on the low level and convince everyone to move to it it'll give you an Intel advantage

cloudflare being a CDN sure would give the American gov a lot of metadata to work with

and ofc businesses just want something that works, so on we go

The main reason I moved from Linux to macOS was that I grew up. If we count not just Linux experiments but prolonged usage, I was an avid Crunchbang fan. After it died, I moved to elementaryos.

What I want to say is, Linux can be very fun and educational when you're still in the uni. You have all the energy in the world, and you can afford to diverge from your daily routine for an hour to debug GPU drivers.
Now, the backbone of my life is keeping a very tight sleep schedule, taking meds on time, avoid infohazards, avoid scrolling on the web, all to remain in a very fragile state of balance that keeps the bipolar disorder away. I'm in the middle of all this, earning derealization (yes, I'm also autistic) every time I design a data model. All I want from my computer is to be treated like a careless, regular user, not like someone with a CS degree.

I use Sublime Merge instead of command line Git. I use Postico to explore PostgreSQL databases, not psql from my terminal. By the way, my terminal is not iTerm, Alacritty or some other such thing, my terminal is whatever came with my Mac, with whatever default settings.

Linux is crawling into a non-street-legal racecar's cockpit and strapping yourself in, ready to blast off. MacOS is your chauffeur, holding your old shaking hand as he helps you into your Maybach's backseat. They're different, and that's okay.
Can Maybach race? Well, it has a 621 HP V12, so if _you_ can race, it probably can too, but we all know it's not a racecar.

Windows? Windows is an SS officer, wearing the all too familiar Windows logo for swastika, throwing you into a gaswagen.

Long time no rant.

Rant::beginRant();

How do people who are, I think, supposed to have a knowledge of what the fuck they're doing, keep their work without knowing what the fuck they're doing?
You're telling me that you have been hired as a "full-stack developer", yet you can't build a motherfucking Vue page over SSH (not even talking about automated deployment, just the most bare bones approach)? You don't know how to deploy a Laravel project? You don't know that Linux server paths are case sensitive? You can't read the log files?!

Rant::commitRant();

“Huddles don't work in safari 🤡,” Slack said.
Develop → User Agent → Google Chrome.
Boom, huddles suddenly work in Safari, and my today's huddle went absolutely fine.

Yep, I switched to Safari as my default browser. Previously, I didn't use it solely because YouTube's full-screen mode acted weird, but now I quit watching YouTube altogether.

Safari is a stellar browser. First, it wipes the floor with everything, even including Thorium, in the performance department (on Apple Silicon at least). Second, it's really beautiful with its new inline tab panel, where you have just one line of icons on top, instead of having two (tabs and url bar). DevTools are amazing. It can also connect to my iPhone's Safari via Wi-Fi and inspect the opened page — a must-have for heavy layouts. Plus, if my website works fine in Safari, it sure as hell will work fine everywhere. Safari is a great hack detector, as it won't tolerate dirty hacks. Works wonders for your code discipline.

A new version of COBOL was released in 2023.

do you have a CV driven software engineer(s) in your team/squad?
if yes, how do you deal with their dramatic changes in codebase every quarter?

Who needs clarity and maintainability when you can have the adrenaline rush of debugging spaghetti code? 💻🦸‍♂️

Core ball is an addicting online game that you won't be able to put down! Zigzag your way to the high score! Coreball (also named “Core Ball”) is a classic little arcade game that can be played online.

My hot blonde gf was asked on tiktok live by a random viewer "do u ever want to have children" and she replied the wildest statement ever recorded in mankind "only if i can profit off of them"

I’m getting really tired of all these junior-turn-senior devs who can’t write simple code asking ChatGPT to solve everything for them.

I’m having to untangle everything from bizarre organization/flow to obvious gotchas / missed edge cases to ridiculously long math chains (that could be 1/10th the length), or — and I feel so dirty for this — resorting to asking ChatGPT wtf it was thinking when it obviously wrote some of these monstrosities. Which it gets wrong much of the time.

“ALL HAIL CHATGPT!” Proclaims the head of Engineering. “IT’S OUR PRODUCTIVITY SAVIOR! LEVERAGING AI WILL LET US OUTPERFORM THE ENTIRE INDUSTRY!”

Jesus fucking christ.

Germans get made fun of for being focused on work and not wanting to have fun (at work).

But it's exactly what I like about them. I would join and work at a German company in a split second.

Fuck all the small talks and fun Fridays, let's just get the work done, get paid and go home and have fun at home.

Did I ever tell you kids about the time I worked for a company that got a contract to develop an iOS application around some object detection software that had been developed by another team?

Company I was working for was a tiny software consultancy, and this was my first ever dev job (I’m at my second now 😅). Nobody at the company has experience building mobile applications but CEO decides that the app should be written in React Native because _he_ knows React Native.

During a meeting with the client, CEO jokes about how easy the ask is and says he could finish it in a weekend. Please note that Head of Engineering had already budgeted a quarter for the work. CEO says we can do it in a week! And moves up the deadline. And only assigns two engineers to project. I am not one of those engineers.

The two engineers that are put on it struggle. A lot. They can’t seem to get the object detection to work at all, and the code that’s already written is in Objective-C. I realize one of the issues is that the engineers on the project can’t read Objective-C because they have no experience with Objective-C or even C. I have experience with C, so I volunteer to take a look at it to try to see what’s going on.

Turns out the problem is that the models are trained on one type of image format and the iPhone camera takes images in a different format.

The end of the week comes, they do not succeed in figuring out the image conversion in React Native. There’s an in-person demo with the customers scheduled for the next Monday. CEO spends the weekend trying to build the app. Only succeeds in locking literally every other engineer out of the project.

They manage to negotiate a second chance where we deliver what we were supposed to deliver at the original schedule.

I spent the weekend looking up how to convert images and figure it would be a lot easier to interface with the Objective-C if we used Swift. Taught myself enough Swift over the weekend to feel dangerous. Spoke to Head of Engineering on Monday and proposed solution — start over in Swift. Volunteer to lead effort. Eventually convince them it’s a good idea (and really, what’s the worst that can happen? If this solves our main problem at the moment, that’s still more progress than the original team made)

Spend the next week working 16 hour days building out application. Meet requirements for next deadline. Save contract.

And that’s ONE of the stories of my first dev job that got me hired as a senior engineer despite only having 10 months of work experience in the industry.

Psychotherapy revealed that EVERY. SINGLE. PAIN I have goes back to my mother in one way or another. Not just her, but her betraying me as a kid.

He once sent me to a summer camp. There, I was bullied and routinely beaten. I once was beaten by a group of girls. I begged my mother to take me back home, but she refused. She told me beatings were no big deal.

This is what ultimately tipped the scales and lead to a chain reaction that ultimately made me disown her.
Here’s the incomplete list of things she did to me: https://devrant.com/rants/9940652/...

nextjs is cancer framework. Shit so muddied together u cant maintain this shit. Random errors u have no idea where they coming from. Oh my God the hydration and useContext errors! Fuck them. Fuck nextjs

dispatch(utterDisgust())

Wait... HTMX is not just a meme?

After I picked up cooking, I dialed in a classic Russian pancakes recipe of my grandma (the babushka) and made it sugar-free. I cook those pancakes for my wife every Saturday, and she says they taste heavenly.

So, here’s the recipe of kiki’s pancakes:
- 8 eggs, 150g of 82% butter, 300g of flour, baking powder, 800ml of 3.2% fat milk. If you have a blender, it’ll make things easier
- let them sit and make all of them the same temperature
- take 8 eggs, add milk, stir
- liquify the butter in the microwave, add, stir
- sift the flour in while stirring continuously
- let it sit for 30 minutes
- take a pan, add little butter or sunflower seed oil, make it scary hot
- after you pour, flip the pancake when its top gets dry

to flip them easily, spread pastry wide when pouring, overlapping frying pan edges. Then, use those edges (now bone dry) to flip the pancake. After you’re done, those edges (now almost black) will break away, leaving a perfect pancake. This works especially well if you don’t have a good non-stick frying pan.

enjoy!

Your guide to passive-aggressive false apologies:

- I’m sorry you’re so sensitive
- I’m sorry that you think I did something wrong
- I’m sorry if you’re mad
- I’m sorry that you made me do it
- I’m sorry you feel that way

And, my most favorite:

- I’m sorry that you’re making such a big deal out of this.

God damn, the most beautiful thing I've read in probably two years. It *moved* me.

https://fortressofdoors.com/four-ma...

Good to see you all.

To be honest with you, I’ve never had a bad experience with PHP.

Yes, it’s “dirty” compared to something like Haskell, but it’s not a bad thing. Dirty things usually bring simplicity and allow implementing the intended case super quickly, at the cost of breaking apart at scale. There are no bad tools, there are wrong tools for the job.

Premature optimization is the root of all evil. The more I launch new projects for me/other companies, the more I come to the realization that the vast majority of the projects out there will never see scale. They will be proven non-viable/impractical and deemed obsolete way before they outgrow the $20 VPS they were hosted on.

Sometimes (all the time, really) launching quickly like there is no tomorrow is the most viable business strategy. If (yes, “if”, not “when”) your project outgrows PHP and gets to the point when PHPs abstraction model is the bottleneck, you’ll have the money to rewrite the project in any language out there, trust me.

As someone said on biking subreddit to a person that asked how to buy the newest super-aero helmet, “if the aerodynamics of the old helmet is what holds you back, someone will be sending you the new one for free”.

the real truth is that web dev has been running around in circles on itself for over a decade now

"but every framework is 'new' and 'shiny'!!!!"

nah, just more sugar on the same exact concepts that have been around since day 1

Childhood dementia is the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.
You’re fourteen. You don’t have mental disorders. You used to be sharp. Yet, you’re not really there anymore. But your mother didn’t smoke during pregnancy, and you did nothing to deserve it.

Your personality, memories, everything that makes you “you” just rots away. There is no cure. You’ll never fall in love, never have your first kiss, your first boyfriend, never travel the world, never be a prom queen, never marry, never have kids.

You’re dying, and you’re too far gone to realize it.

Hard pill to swallow:

If you get hired as a full stack dev and then complain that you're doing 3 people's (or more) jobs while getting paid for 1,

You had it coming.