Root ain't givin' no fucks no mo'

My boss just demanded that I join a conference call. So, I call in, and there's three other people there.

He starts chewing me out for talking with some vendor directly (their VP emailed me directly and asked for a few things, and i was instructed to make him happy). Apparently I used "confusing wording" and "did not talk his language." Bossman was really getting into gear for a ten-minute berating.

It turns out that the guy in question only read half of my first email, and totally ignored the second email where I told him everything was finished and live and working. I told my boss quite bluntly that the guy should have read what I had written, and that he was an idiot. The boss's defense of the guy? "Well, he's a sales guy." I just laughed at him.

Later, bossman started in on me (once again) for not making enough progress on this ridiculous shared-spreadsheet sales tool he wants, saying "We discussed this a week ago!"

I casually reminded him that we had talked about it for the first time ever on Friday night (today is Tuesday), and he had said it wasn't going to be a priority for the next three weeks(!). Again he stopped in his tracks. Again, I laughed at him.

Guy's a tool and I'm so done with caring.

Root's going to be flippant and angry. Root's going to have fun (:

What's he gonna do, fire me? 😂

Client: “Hey this thing isn’t working correctly.”
Me: “Hmm, looks like there was a bug in the last update. The team and I are going to work on a fix. In the meantime here’s a tool to help you get what you need.”
Client:”Yay!”

*A little while later*
Same Client:”Hey this thing isn’t working.”
Me:”Hey, yeah, it’s the same thing. That bug I told you about? Yeah, we’re still working on it. We’ll let you know when it’s finished I promise but we’re trying to fix it without introducing more bugs.”
Client:”Ok sounds good.”

*A little while later*
Same Client:”Hey this thing isn’t working.”
Me:”Bro...we just went over this...”

*A little while later*
Same Client:”Hey seems like there’s a bug in our system that was found by -insert random coworker’s name here-. Are we looking into to this?”
Me:”Wtf dude.”

*A little while later*
Same Client:”Hey this thing isn’t working.”
Me: -smashes my face against keyboard-

Notice :
We strongly advise people to use Windows as their primary operating system as it provides a totally free and a great tool or a utility known as Backdoors.

Here's a simple explanation of a backdoor for the people who don't know what a great tool it is :
Just as most of the citizens have a secondary door to their home through the yard, similarly a backdoor is a secondary access to your Computer which you (not us) can use it in cases of emergencies when you forget the passwords.

Please cooperate
Have a great day :)

One day, someone at Google decided that what their search engine was really missing was a dice rolling tool, complete with text that says 'Rolling...'

Stocks are up 600% since then.

Interviewer: Do you know what Kubernetes is?

Dev: Yeah, that’s the greek god of spending money in the cloud.

Interviewer: Actually Kubernetes is an orchestration tool. Have you not been on a project that uses it yet?

Dev: …

So you poor devs... you have to be strong now, hr has a new tool to torture you: Skype has a new coding interview function.
What do you think about that? Good or even more abuse?

The network starts slowing down, transactions start to fail across the 450+ stores, the website starts to spit 500 errors what is going on?

Queue a frantic running around the office working out what was going wrong... Calls from all 3 data centres, nothing is going in or out of the network.

Notice the network admin come back to his desk, his eyebrows raise and he looks left and right before unplugging his laptop ethernet from one of the server access points

The network rushes back to life, everything is fine.

That particular network mapping tool is now banned for use on production.

Me: *Installs travis*

Dev: oh what's travis?

Me: it's a continuous integration tool I wanna setup.

Dev: ... contin.... ?

Me: continuous integration, a tool that performs builds.

Dev: ah!, is it the new version of that deprecated tool we were using "client access"?

Me: ... no ... that's an authentication service that generates and stores oauth tokens. This is the continuous integration tool I told you about yesterday (and last week and the week before).

Dev: ... contin....

Me: ... con ........ continuous integration. It listens to branches on GitHub, downloads, builds, tests and then deploys the code.

Dev: ah ok ok, cool.

I would bet my monthly fucking salary he can not repeat what I said, tell me what oauth is, or explain what he's working on at the minute.

Jesus at this rate I'd bet my salary he can't tell me my name.

They made a full fucking application in MICROSOFT EXCEL!!!!!!!
who the fuck makes an app in Excel? Though it's used internally, it has over 100 users and Everytime there's an update a new file is sent to all of them by mail. They use different excel files as DBs and tables as sheets. It's even got a fucking UI with check boxes and drop-downs and shit

Now guess what my task is?
Understand that entire application from the Excel files and make a webapp to cater to those requirements.

Fuck documentation, there are bugs in the Excel file and I need to fix the bugs in my app

Some good soul please tell me how must one start analyzing an Excel sheet to understand the logic behind it. Or a tool that magically converts "excel applications" to webapps

TLDR: In defense of Powershell - the rant:

I don’t get the Powershell hate.

You don’t hate a screwdriver for not being able to turn a nut, you just *don’t use a screwdriver to turn a nut*

Once you recognize what the tool is good for and you don’t try to use it like Bash, it’s wildly powerful, and satisfying to use in a way Cmd.exe never was.

Cygwin or a Linux Subsystem can only go so far on a Windows computer. You’re dealing with two fundamentally different OS architectures. It makes sense you’d need different tools.

And like it or not, Microsoft owns the non-tech-user desktop , corners the non-tech server business market, and Active Directory is THE tool for managing Windows desktops on a large scale - So Wanblows is not going away anytime soon.

Automation without some weird ass sysVol batch login script is finally possible. Anyone who knows .Net classes can leverage their methods from directly within Powershell. Remote management of headless Windows servers is now a reality. If you have an Office 365 Exchange server you can literally Powershell remote to it for management, just like your favorite cloud hosted Linux distribution.

No one said Windows is a better OS, but an object based shell on an object based OS *makes sense*. It’s useful for its environment. Let it be.

April 30, 2058

GNU? Linux? Ha! How ancient! Everyone uses systemd-coreutils and systemd-kernel. Nobody needs those useless old programs. In fact, systemd is so good that even Microsoft recently released their own systemd distro, and adopted the motto: “We Really Do Love Open Source This Time”. To show their love for open source, they’ve released the source for Snipping Tool under a BSD license.

systemd is super lightweight! My system uses around 600 gigs of RAM, whereas Windows uses upwards of a terabyte! I currently use the systemd-gnome desktop environment. I used to use KDE Plasma 18, but it didn’t integrate well with the rest of my operating system. systemd-braininterface doesn’t work very well with my Nvidia graphics card, so I use systemd-x11 like a hipster.

I’ve had no regrets switching to systemd. I feel bad for those BSD nerds. What a laughing stock, sticking to POSIX. Nobody writes POSIX programs anymore.

I wonder what lies in the future for systemd... I hope they fix systemd-oomd.

Internal support article to get access to a tool:

"To get access click 'NO' in the 'was this article helpful section' and open a support ticket, making sure to mention the tool you are looking to get access to"

What fucking fresh hell is this? Why not have the article, contain the fucking link to open the ticket.

You have intentionally put up a useless article, in order to hack your way around this stupid system.

I saw this as a ./ comment a while back on a discussion about dev tools (sorry... don't have a link to the actual post...) It was so good that I printed it off and pinned it to my cube. Thought I'd share it here--

"The pain in programming doesn't come from the tools. Yeah, it's a pain to learn the tools, but that's short lived. The real pain comes from the nature of programming. It's caused by having to tell the computer in excruciating detail exactly what you want it to do without glossing over any of the 'you know what I mean' steps, because the computer certainly doesn't know what you mean. And not only do you have to tell it how to do the job when everything is working as it should, you have to anticipate all the ways in which things could fail and tell the computer what to do in those cases, too. THAT'S the painful part of programming--the programming. No tool is going to fix that."

Just now saw an email from Support after I asked them to run some cleanup commands on 4 servers.

Support: u need to give us an automated job for this.

WELL FUCK YOU, Y DON'T YOU JUST DO IT URSELF.

I JUST SPENT 2HRS INVESTIGATING A PROD ISSUE WHICH GOT ESCALATED CUZ UR A BUNCH OF USELESS INCOMPETENT MONKEYS... THE LEAST YOU CAN DO IS HELP... AND WHAT I HOPE WOULD BE YOU BUILD UR OWN TOOL... BEING SUPPORT UR SUPPOSED TO HELP ME REDUCE MY WORK NOT INCREASE IT

It fucking staggers me how many backend/devops-y people don't understand what a client side "request timeout" is, versus a server side one.

What does it mean:

The client was fed up with the servers bullshit, and decided to piss off and not wait around for the server to take forever to respond, because life's too short.

How not to solve/debug this issue:

- "I've checked the API request in tool xyz, and it works fine for me"

Congratulations, you've figured out how to call an API once, in isolation to the rest of the application, and without any excessive load. And using a different client to me, with a different configuration. Lets get back to actually looking at the issue shall we?

- "I only see HTTP 200's in the logs"

Yep, you probably will in most circumstances, because its the client complaining about it taking too long, not the server. If the server was telepathetic and knew what the client was thinking/doing at all times, we wouldn't have half of the errors we do.

- "Ah ok, I understand ... so how do I solve this?"

Your asking me? I don't fucking know, I didn't build the server! Put better logging in place and figure out why sometimes it takes forever.

Jesus fucking christ

A colleague of mine from the administration department suddenly enters my room where my team and me are all busy and, without considering I'm talking with someone else, interrupts us.
he: "I needed to call you but your phone is in do-not-disturb mode"
me: "that's because I'm busy working on something urgent and I don't want to be disturbed"
he: "but I need your help!"
me: "we're working on a urgent thing, but, anyway, what's the problem"
he: "I need help with digital invoicing"
me: "I deal with programming, I don't think I can help..."
he (interrupting): "I created a digital invoice but I need to send a printable version to a customer"
me: "digital invoices should be XML files so you can't simply take the file's content and paste into Word and print..."
he: "in fact that's what I did and the result was horrible"
me: "I was saying just that. I'm sure, anyway, there should be some online tool for producing a well-formatted PDF from a digital invoice"
he doesn't say anything
me: "you can try with a search on Google..."
he: "but I'm not an IT guy, that's not my business"
me: "this has nothing to do with programming, you simply need to find a tool online for doing this"
he (disappointed): "ok, but this is computer stuff, I'll try..."

- Hey I have to add new field, but this class is autogenerated, I do not know what tool generates it"
- Your fingers
- But this class has over 20k lines of codes and the header says it is autogenerated.
- It is a inside joke, it was generated by hand

I was engaged as a contractor to help a major bank convert its servers from physical to virtual. It was 2010, when virtual was starting to eclipse physical. The consulting firm the bank hired to oversee the project had already decided that the conversions would be performed by a piece of software made by another company with whom the consulting firm was in bed.

I was brought in as a Linux expert, and told to, "make it work." The selected software, I found out without a lot of effort or exposure, eats shit. With whip cream. Part of the plan was to, "right-size" filesystems down to new desired sizes, and we found out that was one of the many things it could not do. Also, it required root SSH access to the server being converted. Just garbage.

I was very frustrated by the imposition of this terrible software, and started to butt heads with the consulting firm's project manager assigned to our team. Finally, during project planning meetings, I put together a P2V solution made with a customized Linux Rescue CD, perl, rsync, and LVM.

The selected software took about 45 minutes to do an initial conversion to the VM, and about 25 minutes to do a subsequent sync, which was part of the plan, for the final sync before cutover.

The tool I built took about 5 minutes to do the initial conversion, and about 30-45 seconds to do the final sync, and was able to satisfy every business requirement the selected software was unable to meet, and about which the consultants just shrugged.

The project manager got wind of this, and tried to get them to release my contract. He told management what I had built, against his instructions. They did not release my contract. They hired more people and assigned them to me to help build this tool.

They traveled to me and we refined it down to a simple portable ISO that remained in use as the default method for Linux for years after I left.

Fast forward to 2015. I'm interviewing for the position I have now, and one of the guys on the tech screen call says he worked for the same bank later and used that tool I wrote, and loved it. I think it was his endorsement that pushed me over and got me an offer for $15K more than I asked for.

The amount of much political correctness in the dev community just pisses me off sometimes.

I've watched "Use the right tool / language for the job" has become *THE* excuse for shitty tools and languages. 

Case in point -- JavaScript. If you want to make a website that interacts with the end user, the right tool is JavaScript. But that's because IT'S THE ONLY TOOL. Does that make it a *good* tool?

HELL NO.

/midranttimeout

Brendan Eich, I forgive you. You had 10 days and a corporation on your case.

That's not saying JavaScript doesn't have some good things in it. It does. But "Javascript the good parts" is a fucking thin book.

Sure, some amazing things have been written in JavaScript. Great communities have coalesced around this cancer.

BUT THATS IN SPITE OF JAVASCRIPT, NOT BECAUSE OF IT. AS A LANGAUGE IT'S STILL A STEAMING PILE OF DOGSHIT.

A master can draw great art with a shitty piece of charcoal. That doesn't make charcoal THE BEST DRAWING TOOL EVARRR. It's just a testament to the master's craft.

If you started your programming journey with JavaScript, do expand your horizons.

Break free from Stockholm's syndrome.

Discard your cognitive dissonance.

See JavaScript for what it is -- a shitty language everyone was forced to use. 

PS: Don't even get me started on Java ...

Apple you drove of delusional suckers! When will your retarded fashion devices finally support WEBP?!

A gallery page with images, and thanks to WEBP, it's 408 kB. Because Google made WEBP and handed out a well documented CLI FOSS compression tool that even can convert the source PNGs to lossy WEBP with bloody transparency. Well done, Google!

Except that Apple's shitty management can't take it that Google actually made something nice, so no WEBP. Instead, JPEG-2000 that enjoys nearly no fucking tool support. The free tools that even can deal with that mostly don't support transparency, and the encoder sucks donkeys so that JPEG still fucks JPEG-2000 big time.

So it's JPEG with matching background for iOS. Fine, but since JPEG's blocky artifacts are much more visible, the compression can't be that high, and it's 769 kB. That's 88% more image data for Shittari than for non-retarded browsers and even Edge! EDGE!!

Oh and if the user changes light/dark system mode according to surrounding light conditions, guess what happens? Yep, since JPEG doesn't support transparency, now it's different JPEGs with dark background via the media query in the "picture" element, and it's another 754 kB download. Bloody 1523 kB instead of 408 kB, that's a factor of 3.7!

Fuck your ass Crapple, with an electric eel!

Client asks for a *simple* form in his page. I do the job. He likes it. But turns out what he really wants is a tool to create forms, with editable questions-answers and A/B testing capabilities. FUCK!

Step 1: try a third party defragmentation tool as windows' one is shit
Step 2: go to sleep while shit is getting done
Step 3: ???
Step 4: prof- Wait what ? Fuuuuu

Why the absolute fuck do I need to have nvidia membership to download cudnn? What evil do these mofos think people achieve with free access to a fucking programming tool?

Jesus on a bike! I nag about open science and all I end up with is always these spying morons, who purposefully disable scientists. Fuck!

If👏you👏need👏my👏info,👏then it's👏not👏free.👏

Another real-world argument for why I always say git is worth learning properly.

Had to track a really weird bug down today. Had no idea where it came from, how long it'd been in the code and hadn't the foggiest what was causing it. Realistically it could have been introduced any time in the last year or two, and that's tens of thousands of commits in this repo.

Git to the rescue. Knocked up a quick script to test the case in question, fed it into "git bisect run", and 30 seconds later git found the exact (small) commit that caused the issue.

It's a brilliant part of git, yet it seems like almost no-one I know uses it. Some use "git bisect", but using "git bisect run" and passing a script to it seems to be alien to most - yet it's probably my most used tool when it comes to tracking down bugs like these.

A friend of mine bought a new laptop with an ssd and called me over since it behaved weirdly. All the icons on the desktop would turn to white squares and slowly reload their images. Also the laptop was pretty slow.
She said she had brought it to the store to show that behaviour and the only advice they would give was to reinstall windows...
So I started checking on what processes are running...
The thing was constantly running an "optimization" tool... which, you guessed it, was constantly defragmentating... the ssd... are you fkn serious who set up that shit this way...

So I was very bored in IT class and I asked my teacher to give me some extra exercises. What did he gave me??? Scratch. A Tool for 8 year old kids to learn some programming basics.. fml

Admin Access

Have you ever been in a position where you become the de-facto person who works with a certain tool, but are denied full admin access to that tool for no real reason?

Two years ago I was put on the Observability squad and quickly discovered it was my thing, implementing tracking and running queries on this third-party tool, building custom stuff to monitor our client-side successes and failures.

About a year ago I hit the point where if you asked anyone "Who is the go-to person for help/questions/queries/etc. for this tool", the answer was just me lol. It was nice to have that solid and clear role, but a year later, that's still the case, and I'm still not an admin on this platform. I've asked, in an extremely professional way armed with some pretty good reasons, but every time I'm given some lame non-answer that amounts to No.

As far as I'm aware, I'm the only dev on our team at all who uses custom/beta features on this site, but every time I want to use them I have to go find an admin and ask for an individual permission. Every time. At the end of 2020 it was happening once a month and it was so demoralizing hitting up people who never even log into this site to ask them to go out of their way to give me a new single permission.

People reach out to me frequently to request things I don't have the permissions to do, assuming I'm one of the 64 admins, but I have to DM someone else to actually do the thing.

At this point it feels very much like having to tug on the sleeve of a person taller than me to get what I need, and I'm out of ways to convince myself this isn't demoralizing. I know this is a pretty common thing in large companies, meaningless permissions protocols, and maybe it's because I came from IT originally that it's especially irritating. In IT you have admin access to everything and somehow nobody gets hurt lol-- It still blows my mind that software devs who make significantly more money and are considered "higher up" the chain (which i think is dumb btw) are given less trust when it comes to permissions.

Has anyone figured out a trick that works to convince someone to grant you access when you're getting stonewalled? Or maybe a story of this happening to you to distract me from my frustration?

What the hell is wrong with you guys taking screenshots with your goddamn phone?! Ever heard of that small magical programm called "snipping tool"? It's like fucking screenshot porn! And yes, there is a screenshot programm on Linux too. Goddammit. Are you devs or fucking newbie users?

Cs Student. We currently have a course on algorithms, where we have to implement something in Java, test it with some sample inputs and in the end submit it to an online judge, so far so good. So why a rant? Well there's this one person, who strugles with programing and asks me a lot of questions. Usually I tell her, could you send me your code, so I can have a look at what doesn't work/where you made a typo/what ever. My thoughts: let's just copy it my IDE, take a look at the error message, and that should do it.

Guess how I got the code: As a few photos, taken by her mobile phone (as the code doesn't fit on one screen...)! Just send me the fucking file, or post it to gist.github.com or pastie.org or what ever fucking code sharing tool you want! Make a fucking git repo, I'll even live with SVN or just a .txt file by mail. But for the love of Linus Torvalds, stop sending me crapy pictures of your crappy code! For fucks sake!

I don't like interview questions that ask about which libraries you use or what libraries you like. I think these questions are stupid. I'm not supposed to like a library. I'm supposed to use the most suitable tool for the project at hand.

In 15+ years of full time work as a C++ software engineer there is one tool that I always hated: CMAKE. What a fucking pile of shit, seriously, every time there is project that uses it I simply cannot build said project with one click. In all these 15 years working in different companies the only reason people speak about cmake is to avoid adding source files to multiple projects (VS, XCode, Android).

I'm not some kind of newbie: I've make cmake projects myself, I've build hundrends of projects that use cmake and I even contributed fixes to their code. I still believe that cmake is garbage that should stop to exist.

So new PM is forcing everyone to use Google sheets as our main project management tool as it's free and does what she likes... Was so close to just quitting.

More rage: how the fudge does she think it's acceptable for every 'to-do' no matter how big or small needs to be recorded in a sheet with roughly 30 columns @#&#&£ work is going to grind to a halt whilst we fill it in. So many better tools to use! Oh it gets worse it's 1 sheet per a person so the longer you work there the bigger the sheet gets the more time you need to spend to find, record and even open the freaking document up.

noob misconception #527: during my first hackathon i didn't know what version control was (i thought github was this magical elite hacker tool), so id copy my code into a google doc every few minutes along with a timestamp 😫

In the past, we used skype, hipchat, slack and now ... Microsoft Teams. What a tool.

Yes Teams, it makes total sense to tell me that my message is too long. I totally get it that you want me to rewrite my message and yes Teams, I should have rather attached it as a file to my message to begin with. Yes Teams, I wait for you to finish uploading those files before I can send the message. I'm sure there would be disastrous consequences if you send the message with my attached files as soon as you finished uploading. I don't even want to be productive. Thanks for helping me out.

You know what Linux has taught me? That above anything, a computer is just a tool. There is a lot you can do with the tool, but do not depend on it so much that you fear losing it.

Yesterday I experienced a developer related situation in a completely different scenario. Let me explain:

A friend asked me if he can borrow my angle-grinder. As I was curious, I asked what he needs it for. As he is not that experienced in woodworking he wanted to cut small piece of wood with it. Of course I told him, that this tool is a complete overkill and recommend him to use a small saw.

Now what makes this programmingrelated:

I believe that often unexperienced programmers tend to use to heavy tools for small tasks. His lack of experience let him choose the most powerful tool, but made him blind for analysis of the actual problem.

Context: we analyzed data from the past 10 years.

So the fuckface who calls himself head of research tried to put blame on me again, what a surprise. He asked for a tool what basically adds a lot of numbers together with some tweakable stuff, doesnt really matter. Now of course all the datanwas available already so i just grabbed it off of our api, and did the math thing. Then this turdnugget spends 4 literal weeks, tryna feed a local csv file into the program, because he 'wanted to change some values'. One, this isnt what we agreed on, he wanted the data from the original. When i told him this, he denied it so i had to dig out a year old email. Two, he never explicitly specified anything so i didnt use a local file because why the fuck would i do that. Three, i clearly told him that it pulls data from the server. Four, what the fuck does he wanna change past values for, getting ready for time travel? Five, he ranted for like 3 pages, when a change can be done by currentVal - changedVal + newVal, even a fucking 10 year old could figure that out. Also, when i allowed changes in a temporary api, he bitched about how the additional info, what was calculated from yet another original dataset, doesnt get updated, when he fucking just randimly changes values in the end set. Pinnacle of professionalism.

Crazy code.

You know when you come across some code, where you think: “I kinda see what you were going for, but it’s still hella dumb though...” right?

Currently doing some work on an F# backend, and the dev clearly knew enough of the language, but their code makes me question a lot.

The problem is simple: use a third party tool to generate images of each page in a pdf.

Said tool supports:

1. Querying the number of pages
2. Getting all pages as separate images in a single invocation

Can you guess how the dev solved it?

They’ve recursively incremented a page number, called the external tool to grab the image of that page.

“But how does it know when it’s run out of pages?” I hear you ask.

Simple. Catch the inevitable exception, and check against a hardcoded string literal to see whether it says “must be before the end of the document”.

I shit you not.

I nearly had an actual seizure when I was debugging some semi-related code and ended up in this wonderland of fuckery.

The recursion and pattern matching was flawless though, yet the tool’s website clearly states the supported functionality.

The whole thing feels like they tried to do it the right way, but couldn’t be bothered / couldn’t get it right, so they ended up creating this insane bit of madness.

So I'm in the market for a laptop and my friends don't understand why I'm being so picky. They don't understand why a laptop that weighs more than 2.0kg is heavy or why a 1366 x 768 isn't good if they have one with the same resolution and it's perfect. This mind might sound really "deep" but I feel like our laptop ends being the same as a canvas is for a painter. We spend 8 hours a day looking and working in these machines trying to create solutions for stuff that the "other people" - non-techies - take for granted. If they can be bloody picky about the pen the use to take notes in their classes and it's just a pen, why can't I be with the tool that's responsible for what I do on a daily basis and love doing?

— I got bored and built a CLI tool for fetching movie subtitles yesterday night.
— What for?
— Well, to get movie subtitles.
— Alright...
...
—... I, I built it...

Last week one of my clients asked me to visit their HQ to take a look at some report tool that has stopped to generate reports. This tool was not made by me, it has zero documentation, but WTH, I can take a look.
So I went to the HQ. When a guy that has called me told me that someone else will be here any second to talk to me, I began to be a little suspicius.
It turned out they want a new app. Not going into detail something that will read bar codes, do some stuff in a database, generate some reports etc. And he need it made in 2 weeks. I have reminded him I am involved in another project that I need to deliver in a month, and it is virutally impossible for me to develop what they want in this time. I offered them that maybe we should hire a team or at least another developer. Hi nodded and ignored what I've said. Well, he said we have maybe 2 weeks more, but that's it. Ok..
So, while working on the other project wich ramained a priority for me, I've began to do some thinking, some research on how to deliver what they want as fast as possible.
Today morning I went to the HQ again to finally take care of that report tool. But never mind that, I also had a chance to talk about the new app. So we made some Agile, wrote down epics, stories, talked about hardware etc. After two hours, it turned out, that more than this bardcode reading app the need something else! Barcode reading yes, but even more they need a scheduler for their emloyees, custom functionalities, plus some HR tools, other fancy stuff. But they don't even have a full concept yet. And it needs to be done until end of the month (9 days), maybe two weeks later.
So again I told them I will not be able to deliver this in set timeframe. That possibly we need to hire someone and even then it's questionable if this will be possible given all circumstances, time needed test, to deploy (in 14 diffrent locations all over the country). Actually if I had all software ready today the deployment, tests, training... So I offered that maybe we can figure out some temporary solution based on third party software.
At this point my requests and suggestions have been ignored again. Sadly my contract with them states I can not pass this to someone else, it all have to go trough them. And tehy don't want to spend extra money (??) etc.
Also from what I understand, this whole company's (~1000 employees) be or not to be can be affected by this project.
Sometimes I just don't understand business.

in the past 48 hours my partner must have asked me 50 times to create an "AI" that can get the data we need off of wikipedia.

Background: I am in AP Computer Science AB but I have been programming long enough that this class is a joke. We were assigned to partners with the task of creating a search engine that finds informations on wikipedia("which is dumb because thats what the search tool is for") so I created a Java Web-Scraping program in probably 30 minutes and showed my partner. He told me I am completely wrong because it would be "cool" to incorporate machine learning into the assignment.

Do I even tell his what machine learning is or should I just let his figure it out?

This drawing was commented on my PR to explain the flow of a bug I need to fix, what da fuck does this means. I already told him to use a mock up tool like Adobe XD or some shit like that. Dudes answer's was "It's easier for me just to draw it"

Tools don't matter. Use what is comfortable and don't listen to all the brand, OS, editor and tabs/spaces crap. They all do the job and you will find the right ones once you really understand what you are doing. "Tools can be just a way to procrastinate". If you become tool agnostic you can do the job no matter the environment.

I'm sick to death of hiring people from other companies and explaining GitFlow and why its useful (what are you people doing?).

Then watching them doing it wrong, pointing out its easier to use something like sourcetree. Which leads to "... well see, the terminal is just more efficient, tools like sourcetree are bloated".

Ok fair enough, well heres the deal i'll make with you, while using your "efficient tool", stop breaking our workflow and i'm fine for you to keep using it. Otherwise, stop being a dick and be a team player.

Been on a conference call with some coworkers and a huge company which is trying to sell us a new tool for our CI environment. Sales guys ask us sensible questions about our requirements and try to find out our needs. No one of my coworkers says a word. Sales guys rephrase their questions but STILL: Crickets on the line from our side and this call gets embarrassing. So I try to explain our SW dev process and explain what we need for our CI and suddenly Mr. Manager sends me a text msg telling me to to "STFU!"....Oh well THANK YOU, I just tried to be polite to these sales guys who were invited by US and took their time to present us their really good tool. I mean cmon...what is F*CKING WRONG with you?

Working on my Google Foo Bar level 4 challenge.

9 days past figuring out how to solve this problem..

And finally reached on a working solution. When started compiling my solution.

And then i Find out, the fucking Google tool is facing some bug and not allowing compilation. Tried hard to do everything but still getting errors...
And after searching on Google just found I'm fucked up.. It's on Google's end and they are not fixing it since so many days..

Just 5 days left to complete.. And i have no idea what should i do...

4 month work just fucked up

Our HR guy is a tool. He requested I help him extract some data from our database. Which based on what he requested I supplied he then started trying to bully me because the data I gave him wasn’t what he wanted. Ringing me every 5 mins asking if it was ready, comparing me to another colleague who wrote the system.

When we blew up at him telling him to back off he continued. Anyway he still works here and persists in being a tool. i on the other hand ignore him.

I’m pretty sure that the HR bullying an employee is wrong, not massively worried about it just annoyed

"I found this tool that we should use because I'm a manager and its simple enough that my tiny little manager brain could set it up!"

Oh wow good for you, Mr. Manager! And what, praytell, does the tool require?

"All proprietary and cost-ineffecient products: MSSQL Server and Windows IIS! What do you mean we have to get the data out in order for it to be scalable? Look at it! I set up a website by clicking on an EXE i downloaded from github!"

Amazing, Mr. Manager. So you violated our security practices AND want to pocket even MORE of our budget?

Kindly fuck right off and start suggesting things instead of making people embarrass you into stoping your fight for your tool (has happened on more than one occassion).

when you find a tool or library that does exactly what you need, but it's not documented at all

or worse, when it's "cross-platform" but all the build/install steps are made assuming you're using a Mac
"brew install my-shiny-metal-ass"

If you are working on multiple projects a great tool to make you very productive and keep organized is a simple checklist.

For many years I have jotted one down each and every morning listing what I want to accomplish that day. I even include simple items. Crossing each task out as I complete it gives me a sense of accomplishment.

Checklists have enabled me to complete projects at work and many free and commercial side projects including software and technical books.

Do you use checklists? If there is a particular type you like?

#heavyrant

AGAIN !!! MICROSOFT (MAY GOD SEND THEM TO HELL) GAVE A DEADLY BLOW TO SOMETHING I USED TO LOVE !!

This new UI update is just aweful, i mean, i love github, i work using github, i do so many things with it, or should i say that i used to ....

This update seems so un-natural, it just doesn't fit.

Why would the collabs be shown so obviously ??
Why would the main window be so narrow while the rest is widescreen ????

My eyes get tired so quickly when i use it now.

It used to be something nice, easy to use, but now it is more like a social media than a professional coding tool.

I HATE YOU MISCROSOT WHAT EVER YOU TOUCH TURNS TO BE A SHIT HOLE

A big shout out to all the polyglot developers out there who understand that languages and frameworks are just tools with trade offs.

May we always evaluate thoroughly and choose the best tool for the job at hand.

Cheers 🍻

Bonus Round:

What tools are you currently wielding while reading this rant?

Soo, my manager asked me to create tool for CSI. Sort of ticketing tool for service improvements.

So I spent a few months working on it including design, websocket based real time statistics, exports to their belowed excel, easy to use, fast and so on.
I've presented it to mgmt, told them that deployment was easy and just need a simple linux virtual and all is automated.

They told me that they don't have a server. Company where main business is cloud services. Didn't pay me a penny for my effort even though worked on that mostly in my free time.
I didn't even want anything for the tool, just for my time.

Then a month later they've introduced similar thing based on Sharepoint with 1/10th of fuctionality, slow as hell, buggy, unintuitive.

And guess what, I can't open source my tool because it is a company property.

So, fuck it, never gonna do anything again without proper contract, even if for the same department.

I've already left that hell hole, but thought I would share my story.

I don't know why I am a programmer. I went into engineering because I wanted to make video games. I did controls engineering to make physical systems go vroom. Now I mainly write software to make specialized physical systems go vroom. When I was a kid this was not what I would have wanted to do with my life. My 10 year old version of me is standing over me looking down saying "Pathetic". I feel like I need to do something about this before I die.

I want to make a game system for RPGs that is similar to an authoring tool to allow me to make games with some very specific features. Think creation kit for arbitrary RPG games. I am thinking I could make the authoring tool a product as well. If people want to make their own games. But I also want to make moddable RPG games using the authoring tool. I want to give people the ability to mod the game. So I am struggling with how to allow modding and sell an authoring tool. License to distribute unique games? I dunno, maybe I will just keep it as a modding tool for the games I make. I feel like good quality games are moddable. I hardly want to play anything that isn't.

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.

!(!(!(!rant)))

When you're using a sophisticated software and you've shown your work to your non-dev friends and they say "Wow! What APP did u use?"

Furk it! App sounds like a small icon on your mobile phone to take a selfie putting a dog filter to post for everyone to see! You call this tool just an "APP"? May Zeus forgive this blasphemy.

destroy(rant);

Not just Stack Overflow, but all help forums:

If someone asks a question, and you think you might know the answer based on its subject or context, please spare a thought for others and instead of dragging the post on for pages and pages without an answer in order to show the poster up for being inadequately articulate, please make the first post a link to at least seemingly relevant reference material.

Nothing more frustrating looking for some undocumented api syntax, finding a similar question that you might be able to gleam from, and then only seeing pages of "aaah, but what OS are you on? What colour is your desktop? What is the average velocity of a..."

You can see they are struggling with an api, and you clearly know where to find the answer, so just quit the cocksure jostling of pretending you're any good at support and just be useful. The poster may be a tool, but the thousands of hits from Google will just think you're a twat.

It's 28°C and the fucking (2015)macbook's metal body is running at atleast 70, burning my legs and making the inside temperature even worse ..

And Im only running Idea and Chrome...

Why have you designed a hellish tool like this instead of a normal laptop? What good is it to me that It's so slim and mobile if I have to have it on a table to avoid having 2nd degree burns on a daily basis?!

Seriously, what the fuck... I didn't ask for this shit, but my company requires me to use this "secure" laptop... Fuck everyone that was involved in this laptops design!!!

A few weeks ago a client came to us asking for edits on their site. They had a developer in their office but they fired him a few days prior. After some looking at the piece of garbage they called a website I told my supervisors that it was built in Adobe Muse and from what I could find in a few quick searches it's shit and I didn't want to learn to use a shit tool. Apparently as a company we decided to hire a freelancer to handle this despite the fact that we didn't build the site and the client isn't paying for maintenance so I'm not sure why it's our fault.

Fast forward to today:
I've been in the office for 19 hours straight trying to learn how to use Muse and fix the client's site because somehow the freelancer managed to delete the mobile version of the site. When I ask my supervisors why I'm fixing and supporting a site we didn't build and don't have experience working in and the response is: we're presenting the client with a $50k proposal and we need all the good graces we can get.

Unless I'm gonna see some of the commission it doesn't really matter what we charge for the site, I make the same whether it's a free site or a $100k site.

** PSA to all programming language and tool maintainers **

Please for the love of god have a dedicated examples section on your website where people can quickly evaluate what the thing even looks like

So often the next best thing is going to the docs where they tell you that the turboblub option should be set to 12 in these specific usecases whEN I DON'T eVEN KNoW WHETHER THIS IS A PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE OR A LAWN MOWER

would software product companies plz start describing what the product *actually* does on their homepages? if u say ur product/framework/tool will help me leverage this or collaborate that, it's an almost zero entropy statement, because everyone says so. Are u selling coffee or a .net gui library? because both can help me make my software better and leverage whatever it's supposed to leverage .. so, pleaaase, just say what ur product does, if that doesn't sell it, using hyped catch all phrases won't either ...

oh, and stop calling ur products somethingfy or somethingly .. just stop

That guy who thinks he know exactly what I'm doing better than me... Oh, you meant a different type of tool.

So someone posted their btc wallet details (system automated message through a custom tool) to a paste in alternative.

Was the login for an ssh. Wont confirm or deny ssh-ing into it, but another guy who saw the same thing messaged me, sent a screenshot. Account had 127k usd worth of btc in it.

Called the radio station it belonged to and gave them a heads up. Probably should reported it as well but people already seen it so it'll get taken down soon enough.

Here I am broke, busting my ass and reality throws this in my lap. But I ain't never been no god damn thief. Hope the radio station it belongs to doesnt get robbed by someone less honest though.

Honesty is probably half the reason I've spent half my life broke trying to find or make opportunities.

And frankly I've heard real horror stories of good faith reports (whitehat style pentesting, etc) and the people that report it get fucked hard by authorities. What can you do though.

Enough navel gazing though.
What the fuck is wrong with the people who build these sort of account reset tools anyway?

Most succesful project was around this time last year.

A scary club of privacy haters made a 'webapp' to advise people what to vote for in the national elections.

The tool was really bad in multiple ways. For instance, if two parties would score the same amount of points, one would, at random take second place without conveying this to the user.

Oh and it also collected all the data people entered "for scientific purposes". A very sketchy practice, a non profit, funded by the government and George Soros (I kid you not, illuminatie confirmed ;) ).

The tool had this disclaimer on the bottom, saying this webapp needs cookies to function. So that triggered me to make a copy of the tool that works better and ... offline, and without cookies. You could download a html file and turn of your wifi (for the paranoid ppl among us), use the tool, delete the file. No trace.

It was a little bit of tung and cheek project, a gimick, the original was called stemwijzer, mine was called offline stemwijzer.

It was a one day build and a day after launching I got a call of the original stemwijzer project leader. Demanding to take the thing offline for infringing copyright (yeah sort of was). I tried to explain him why I made this and why privacy for such things should be held in high regard. He basicly told me I was talking shit and did not want to discuss, I told him I don't take stuff offline because of phone calls. I told him to email me a seist and desist.

So that guy prolly had a stressful day (because of the launch of his tool), had a few glasses of wine, and wrote an email. He wrote me I was a pathtic kid and I should do more useful stuff. He wrote that anyone could program a tool like that. And he wrote me I should do him a favour not share this email with my measly amount of twitter followers. Super professional email.

So I did him that favour, I did not share it with my twitter followers, I shared it with one of the largest political blogs in the country.

My tool sort of took of after that. To stop infringing copy right I changed the name and I removed their content from the script and wrote instructions on how to copy and paste in the json content yourself and "make your own tool".

The response was great, people actually emailed me job offers and I think that the current job I have is due to the succes of said project. So be balsy, challenge giants, start riots, it will get you places.

18 commits later, the unofficial documentation has been ported over to GitBook.

The documentation now lives in a private repo on GitHub which is hooked up to a CI tool to build the book when a commit is pushed.

This will make maintaining the documentation much easier and also allow for collaboration which was previously not possible.

Because this documentation contains some endpoints some of you might not even know about, access is provided on a invite-only basis which is controlled by @dfox.

For new requests, contact @dfox with your name and what you are planning to build.

If you have already created something with the API email me at support@nblackburn.uk with your name and a link and I will send you a invite.

As a dev, I never want to personally talk to Clients anymore.

I had this Client for whom I developed a website for a tool he was making. I did the front-end work, did the backend, added the shop and everything he asked for. I showed him everything so he could see for himself what was done and how it all works. He went ahead and tested the finished product to see if there were any bugs.
He came back to me and wanted a call on skype and I joined the call. He shared his screen to show me that when he resizes the browser, the content of it gets bigger and smaller according to scale. I worked so hard to get it responsive and whatnot, and he tells me that it is doing what it is supposed to do. I die inside every time I think about it

Frustrated that my build system wasn't recognizing a file change I added to my code. It kept telling me that a function didn't exist in the linked object (linker error). I checked everything and stared at this shit for about 15 minutes or more. The signature matched, the function existed, the relevant source files existed. I was starting to imagine impossible scenarios. I cleaned the project and recompiled. No errors, everything linked just fine. Fuck you? I guess...

So I decided to needed to walk around so I went into my bosses office.

me: I don't want to program anymore.
boss: What do you want to do?
me: Shovel shit.
boss: They are the same thing.
me: True...

TLDR: Tool and possibly skill issue results in frustration and humor.

I tried a tool for analysing mobile applications, since then I keep receiving emails from them.. and this is what I received this morning. the thing is getting serious 🤨

So, these guys came to me at work, asking if I knew how the "Low Orbit Scanner" worked...
I said: "no, what's that?"
They said: "It's that tool used for DDoS attacks"
So I replied: "Oh you mean Low Orbit Ion Cannon"
them: "yea that, you know how it works?"
me: "ye, but what do you want to use it for?"
them: "just want to learn how it works"
me: "you download it, run it then fill out the things?"
them: "but I tried it and it doesn't take out the server I tried"
me: "Means your PC is to much of a filthy casual, buy a new one"
them: "can't you help us getting it more effective"
me: "yes, but I rather not end up in jail... I have a job and a clean document..."

The looks of their faces, love to see that disappointment of my colleagues when I say (or atleast hint): "go figure it out yourself"

tldr: maintainers can be assholes

So there's this python package+cli tool that I found interesting while browsing github and thought of contributing to it. Now this repo has around 2000 issues and multiple open PRs so seemed like a good start.

So i submit 2 PRs implementing similar features on different sites (it is a scraping repo). This douche of a maintainer marks comments various errors in the code convention not being followed without specifying what they actually were. Now I had specified that i was new to this repo so and would need his help (I guess this is one of the jobs of the reviewer). This piece of shit comments changes in the pr with one or two word sentences like "again", "wtf" and occasionally psycopathic replies. That son of a bitch can't tell what's wrong like wtf dude, instead of having a long discussion over the comments section of the fucking pr why can't you just point out what exactly is wrong and I'll happily fix that shit, but no, you have to be a douche about out it and employ sarcasm. Well FUCK YOU TOO.

!Rant

TLDR: What's your favorite REST API Documentation tool?

I'm about to start developing a really large REST API. I have never really had need to document my previous API's since they were small, self explanatory and had only me using them. Aside from this one being too large for me to keep track of there is also a remote team that will need to integrate with it.

Basically I need write exceptional documentation while using as little time as possible. I love postman and am planning to use it for documentation since I currently use it to test during development anyway but I have seen some really neat looking tools like swagger and apiary so I figured I would check for some other suggestions.

What is your current / preferred REST API documentation method?

Back when I started my career (12 months ago lol), I was in IT support. Having to deal with people who have hard times locating and reading off a sticker, let alone telling me their IP adress, only to realize it's the whole store that's offline, not only their PC (gosh do they ever talk with each other). So I decided to code a small tool that shows your hostname and IP adress, and pings the router, firewall and Google DNS. Aaand just in case the number for the IT hotline. Plan was that we could just tell them to double-click on that one icon on their desktop and read out what it says. We deployed it and I was happily waiting for it's time to shine (still a trainee I was also kinda proud of it), but when the network engineer found out, he wasn't happy about it at all. He was afraid too many people would open that new tool without us telling them to do so and/or forget to close it, producing a number of pings to the router, firewall and google. He went on about Google maybe blocking our IP if we produce too many pings and so on.
In my opinion he was kinda overreacting, but he wasn't that wrong and is a nice guy and responsible for our network, so we recalled the tool and never actually used it.

Apart from the usuals like K&R, John McCarthy, Simon Peyton-Jones, Joe Armstrong, Bjarne Stroustroup, and so on, I'd like to mention one more, sort of different from the rest.

Ton Roosendaal.

He started Blender and oversaw its crowdfunded release as an open source project (look it up, it's pretty cool), provides excellent leadership at the Blender Foundation, is a crack programmer, very nice dude and down to earth. His leadership, vision, and handling of Blender's growth as FOSS software and artist-focused DCC tool is amazing. He might not be the brains behind Blender's technical advances all that much (now) but he's a great example of what one can do for software beyond just programming.

What I need is an automatic banner that pops up at the top of the screen, saying:
YOU'RE ON THE WRONG BRANCH YOU RETARD
In big red letters.
No idea how to go about automating that, and I suspect it would probably be on the screen more or less permanently, but I reckon it's a useful tool.

so, flexbox.

and my only question is: why did it take CSS 30 years to get the features which it should have had from the start? now because of that, even this awesome thing is messy due to how the old features collide (or don't collide, i'm not entirely sure tbh) with it.

but maan, flexbox! now at least a part of css feels like a tool made to solve the problem it's supposed to solve, instead of layers of hacks that you can somehow hack into having the side effects which result in it doing what you want it to do!

So you heard from that awesome tool that apparantly everybody uses.

Go to the web page:
One single continuous page in 90ies style with random blahblah targetting expert users and various edge cases without context. Some lines about arcane build commands in an unfamiliar language.

Not even a single, comprehensive line, what it does, what it is good for, no minimal example or hint even how to run it.

So you write thousands of lines of dense code, but are not able to drop some first lines of plain, understandable english for people just visiting the first time? How hard could it be? Fuck you, srsly.

I hate hate hate React! Sorry but to me it's just such a bloated pos of a framework. I realize it was pretty revolutionary at first, the idea of having everything "reactive" and all of that - but newer things like Svelte.js are a dream to work with, whereas trudging through the poorly coded React app I'm supposed to be testing for work is making me want to pull my hair out! I installed a vscode tool so everybody could see what the import "cost" is on everything - a simple INPUT is 50KB of pure BLOAT for something that should and can be way simpler.

I realize there are probably better coded apps out there that wouldn't drive me so crazy, but anybody importing hundreds of KB of 3rd party crap just to get a select box, some inputs, and a date picker are really out of their mind.

What is Internet Explorer?

It is a tool to download a better browser.

How do you guys deal with work that doesnt really care about what you do?
I mean everyday i come to work i make my own schedule and think of things to do, then do them and at the end of the day noone really cares.

I’ve created a huge inhouse analysis tool and that was my job for a long while untill the project was mostly done. Now it feels like i just go to work to sit there for the hours and collect the paycheck, i watch youtube for half of the day and noone cares. Noone really knows what i do there. I feel like shit because i need to fight with myself everyday that i didnt finish something, but noone besides me really even knows of what i do though. I work alone and I think thats a big part of it. What should I do?

You know, I really like my Redmi 4x. It's a nice and inexpensive phone and perfect for me. Now I wanted to get the most out of my phone by rooting it, which was going to be easy.

I thought. And lord almighty was I wrong.

First of all, to even get to root it you have to unlock the bootloader. To do that you have to use a tool that they've made. Good! An official way to do so would surely be good, I thought. But to actually use the tool you have to be logged in to their service on both the tool and your phone. Then, and get this, you have to submit a written application as to why you would want to unluck the bootloader.

Ohh but it didn't stop there. I did so and months passed without me getting any info from them what so ever. When trying the tool it would just tell me that they hadn't reviewed my application.

Today I tried again, and something new happened. It told me that I hadn't synced my accounts. Which I promptly did because it's progress.

I tried for what should be the final time, aaaand I get this. This according to the forums means I have to wait 72 hours to be able to do it.

But it's progress, right?

Uuugggghhhh

So, by a cruel twist of fate I ended up on the front line of tech support for the app we've built. It's aimed at non-IT professionals, in general people who are not expected to know too much about computers but who should have at least two neurons to bash together in their pretty little heads.

No.

It really makes me drop my faith in humanity considerably. Clicking a confirmation link is too much. Filtering an excel sheet is too hard, despite it being their technically main work tool. Tickets are basically "shit's broken go fix". What is broken? How to reproduce it? Why do you expect the person on the other side of the screen to be a fucking diviner? I recently ran all out of dove guts to search for the answers of your questions.

Freelancing is modern slavery...

Al this greedy fuckers searching for the cheapest tool for their super urgent project.
Even if you write you consider the payment on the expenditure you fucking snail will still debate on it cause you consider your time more valuable. You consider my life isn't worth your money. You want a service but don't want to pay for it.

This get all for fucking free mentality is what ruins this planet.

My favourite dev tool? I would't be able to do my work without any tool, which's in the list. I love IntelliJ IDEA & Webstorm, Java, JavaFX, Maven, Git & Gitlab, TeamCity, Upsource, YouTrack, Artifactory, wtf that list's kinda the complete tech stack. But I completly hate AWT & Swing (AWT fucks up on my Linux install, such a frame creates in about 10-20 seconds, if you test the app locally, you loose approximately 15 seconds per minute, and Swing uses AWT internally too), I hate Gradle (screw Google for standardizing it), and so on. Wow that's like my complete tech stack, what the fuck happend? The question was one tool, help me.

I’ve spent 2 weeks trying to simply automate logging into my damn school’s blackboard but this ducking popup won’t freaking let me access it. I’ve tried selenium. I’ve used beautifulsoup and requests. I’ve even tried a tool called mechanize with python
But I’ve now realized I simply have no damn idea what I’m doing. I’ve read and tried way too many stack overflow articles and I’m just sick of this damn popup

If I can’t figure it out by the end of the upcoming thanksgiving break I’m dropping this damn project until I learn enough to utilize the blackboard API’s. I’m a little sure those will help

Was hating my new job. Turns out my PM is new and was assigning me tasks outside the scope of what I do. But yeah PM, keep pushing for a shiny front end to an internal tool. Not. Happening.

Most recently... taking something previous devs had failed at and knocking it out of the park.

Best example was a statistical regression and graphing tool on ASP MVC.

The devs were doing a massive brute force recalculation on the server layer. It would take 24h then fail to save (Entity framework brute force).

We moved it to the database layer and got it down to a passable time.

The same devs were outputting charts to ie 9, chrome, firefox... same deal, half an hour on the initial request (parser churn in the browser)... then failure.

Again got it into a passable time by switching to web sockets and long polling then outputting 1000 or so points at a time to give the browser time to render.

Taking those two cock ups and making them a workable solution was awesome.

Since then, teaching. We have apprentices, newcomers, interns all jumping in and looking to get working. They're all different, what works to teach one person won't the next, each of them so far has caught on to what I was teaching. It's a proud moment to be able to impart knowledge and see someone pick it up, enthusiastically... it's also awesome to see someone excited about what you do.

To those of you who have IT degrees, what exactly did you learn?

I've got the opportunity to double major in CS and IT, with it taking a total of 5 years. It's basically 1 extra year for the IT degree, since the CS takes 4 years with my general education classes. (It's a total of 13 extra class to get the IT degree.)

Part of me wants to just because it seems fun to learn my biggest tool if I'm going to program. And part of me acknowledges it's also a potential job if I'm unable to get a programming job at some point.

Goes on teams, since it got shoved down my throat because everyone has to use this malware. Might at least clock around to see what free shit it has to offer.

Oh cool, visio? Thats the architecture diagramming tool isnt it? Thats perfect I could use it for my presentation, let me just drag this UML class...

YoU HaVe DiScOvErEd A PrEmIuM FeAtUrE! BuY ViSiO NoW!!

Sometimes, I wish the times of companies simply barring you from access completely to come back. Freemium is the worst bullshit piece of shit business model ever.

I'm so fucking done with all the hate the modern web is getting. If you don't need it, don't use it. Shut the fuck up if somebody else uses it, because he needs it.
And that whole war between libraries is so fucking ridiculous. Why do I have to feel bad for using a tool that does exactly what I want, and provides me a great dev experience.
No I am not going to use a stack of 4 technologies because "native is faster". Fuck you. I don't care, and you shouldn't either.

I shouldn't even have the need to rant about this, but I'm just in this constant rut, because I feel like no matter what I'm doing, I'm doing it wrong. I hate it.

A client asked for a tool for his website. So I built it for him and he was satisfied with the thing, cause it did what it should. Nevertheless I was not, because it kind of had a messy backend. I made it working and charged my time. Now I am wondering if I should rebuild the thing to satisfy my code quality for free, or just keep that thing as ugly as it is....

What your opinion on this?

Microsoft Excel, what a beautiful beautiful tool. Absolutely wonderful and insanely powerful.

But it annoys the fuck out of me whenever I see a poorly formated sheet.

How fucking difficult it is to format few cells and be consistent with it?!!

Presentation does matter and if you cannot format a single spreadsheet, I am judging you for sure.

On the other hand, a well formatted email/excel or anything, is a huge turn on.

Aesthetically pleasing things are good (which don't serve any underlying functional purpose).

Fiddling with the UiPath RPA tool. What the fuck is this monster?

So, you create apps by drawing a flowchart, like some kid using Scratch. Then, suddenly, you have to create a .NET object just to get a random number!

Who the fuck is the target audience that can create objects, call a directory read function, etc, but can't write a loop?! Show me that fucking person.

Then I have to debug the fucking selectors when they don't work correct. All this requires is understanding how UIs are structured under the hood. So, you know that a menu bar is a window, but you need to draw a fucking if statement?!

And how would you debug and manage this monstrosity?

It like we learned nothing from all the Excel apps we build for decades.

I mean, it's an impressive app. But, why does it exist?

Someone needs to stop this before it gets out into the wild or we'll all be debugging flowchart a created by business analysts.

You have been warned. Join the fight or accept the consequences.

When you have to get app thread dumps using tools provided to you: a rock, a hammer and a steel rod.

Fuck it. I'm building my own tools.

I'm pissed.
Step aside and let me show how it's done. And STOP GIVING TASKS "TO DEVELOP A TOOL X" TO TEAMS WHICH HAVE NO IDEA HOW THE TOOL IS TO BE USED, WHAT VARIATIONS MIGHT BE REQUIRED, WHAT PRECISION IS NEEDED, ETC.

Who would be interested in reviewing an old peice of Python code I wrote..? It's a few years old, and it uses basic procedual generation to cypher text (entry, or ASCII files) using a hashed password. It's a command line tool.

I used to brag about how "secure" it was, and now I'm curious if it is secure or not.

I plan on picking it back up and open-sourcing it, but I want to know what problems might be wrong with it now.

XCode you fucking piece of shit...

So I just wanted to process my ios app to the app store and start the archive process. All of the sudden:
Command CodeSign failed with a nonzero exit code

What? So there is an error and you cannot tell me the error code? All information you give me that it isn't zero!? Wow... Amazing... What a great user experience. Maybe it cannot resolve the error? Maybe it is some external tool Apple has no access to and that is the only valid error they can throw at us?

Oh hell no! It has something to do with the keychain access! But why tell the user? That wouldn't be as much fun as just tell it is a nonzero error, isn't it apple?!

In the end locking and unlocking my key chain solved the problem... Thanks for nothing XCode!

Some people just don't get it. When you meet friends who are either non technical or very new to programming, all they ask you is what language do you use.

The language is important but not everything. It's what you do with it that matters. Just because you know python, doesn't mean that you can do machine learning. Even simply asking what do I do is better than that!

The language is just a tool! Learn to be language agnostic please. Be a programmer, not a code monkey

Somewhere out there, a middle manager looked at SAP's time tracking tool and thought, "This, yes, this is exactly what we need in our organisation"

Potentially hot take : If you're making a video course on a tool that supports multiple languages you should show examples in a language with explicit typing whenever possible.
Weakly typed and implicitly typed languages make it harder to know what the results of a particular statement are and therefore what you can do with them.

when KhronosGroup anounced Vulkan back then, they also announced a whole set of software, that can handle all the new formats, that they introduced.

One format in particular peaked my interest recently, which is ktx2. It's an image format, that can be multilayered, and supercompressed, has inline mipmapping, and most importantly: streamed directly to the GPU, without involving the CPU basically at all.

Now here comes the kicker. If i want to use this format (mind you: Vulkan is around for a while now) for creating Skyboxes, there is only a single tool, that can properly convert hdr images to ktx2, and it only works on windows. Oh and there are no binaries, so in every case you have to compile it yourself.

Ah and then i thought, okay what if i then already render the cubemap faces and assemble them by hand into the cubemap, because _some_ ktx tools work on linux, then that should work right? wrong. When assembling it, it turns out, that now it's a 2D image instead of a 2DArray image with one element (which apparently is not the same for skyboxes)

Why is this shit such a pain in the ass?

Like.. I'm currently rendering equirectangular hdr images on my linux machine, then move these (usually 100MB) files over to some windows PC, convert it there into ktx2 cubemaps and then move it back. And everytime i need to do a change on the skybox, i have to repeat this whole nonsense. Ah.. and this tool doesn't even properly work on Windows, like you can't just disable mipmaps or change the filtering, because then the skybox is just black for some reason.

The funniest thing is, at the end of the day, these ktx2 files work on linux, as well as windows, mac and even mobile platform, so there's really no reason, that the conversion tool only works on one of them systems.

But hey, at long last i got them working, and this stuff looks quite nice now 👌

All day emails are flying with executives, managers and leads jerking each other off after a "successful" migration from old, weird ass in-house custom java build tool that took hours to build anything and required the dependencies to be downloaded manually, to mainstream tool that also takes hours to build anything aka. Gradle.

What the code monkeys responsible for this migration actually did, was write Gradle plugins that still call that old weird ass tool in the background.

A peeve of mine is when someone in the software industry denigrates a technology/tool/framework outside of his role eg webdevs on sysadmin stuff or viceversa.

I'm not trying to shame anyone for having subjective experiences, I just think that if you're gonna talk about tools that are not on your domain, then you need to be twice as humble as usual.

I'm a webdev and I don't post around how I KNOW how to make ssh secure, while other people devote their entire careers to that and all related matters.

What prompted me is seeing some not webdevs do this here that seem to be sysadmins/devops (can't tell for sure since I don't know them), but in real life, I've seen people from any role do this, webdevs too, even testers!

Imagine you had cancer, and you had a tumor extraction, and the oncologist said to the surgeon "step aside son, let me show you how to deal with cancer".

Have to so a presentation tomorrow about a non dev topic.
While googling stuff I randomly find that cool amazing lib or new tool. Watching a video about it and end up codeing a hello world with it because it's so cool !
3h later: oh wait what was that tab about I opened 3h ago. Fuck.

Anyone else knows ?

For the last 2.5 weeks I have been working on a application for a client that essentially amounts up to a glorified asset management tool. This project had a crazy deadline and I was tasked to solo dev. Because I could choose what to build the application with I thought I would try out Bun and Elysia. Loved it. Thats not the point of the story. I spent about 130 hours in 2.5 weeks on the project, slept 3 hours last night delivered the project after multiple QA rounds. Clients response on slack: This is unusable. We can not test. Client shares screenshot of design and my implementation. I went off script with a silly input field that they designed that never got used in any other place in the app but in this one model, so I decided to rather reuse a working component than creating a stray one. Oh and obviously the panel that the comments live in is full hight and not 80% like the designs. So the app is unusable. FML. How does that make the app unusable? Can you post comments. Yes tard, can you upload assets, yes tard. So what about constructive feedback. *constructive feedback left the building* THE APP IS UNUASABLE. FIX NOW.

I worked with this hack of a backend dev that was too lazy to add a complex(ish) object to our CMS tool. His solution?

One giant-ass text box with the label "put JSON here".

If tech people were using it I wouldn't mind, but our poor content managers have no idea what json is. Plus like... no examples, no schema... they would have to change shit then go look at the website to see if it worked. Fucking asshole.

Plus.. I mean SHIT, MAN! This was in a Node.js tool... if you have the Json parser you could just GENERATE the respective form fields. DO YOUR JOB

Trying to re-type a massive essay I lost because the app refreshed for some reason. I'll try to keep it short (spoiler: I lied).

Recently, I had a conversation with a couple of non-tech people about AI and the fear of computers making humans obsolete. I have some strong (borderline ranty) opinions about this, and thought I'd post here to see what reaction is get.

This is not a "machines will destroy us" post, it's more about the very legitimate great of losing jobs.

- AI is a tool. It's main use would to be help optimise the more complex routine tasks and free up people's time to be more creative in their jobs. Basically, it's the next step of automation.
- Human intuition can never be replaced. Sometimes, things just seem a bit off. Sure, an AI would avoid ever getting in that situation, but only if it had learnt it in the past. A human will always have to be at the helm of any such system.
- Achieving true intelligence and sentience is like trying to travel at the speed of light. The closer you get, the more challenges you face.
- Getting hyped by sensationalist news that claims the end is nigh because two computers optimised the language they used to communicate when trying to reach a goal is stupid. All this shows is that the tech is working as expected and the systems can optimise on the fly. To me, this was a pretty awesome moment.

Now, I'm not saying dystopia is impossible, neither am I saying that it is inevitable. Just like any tool presented to us, if we use it responsibly, we can make life and society a lot better.

Company is replacing "[insert software tool here]" with one that is "better", that "helps us scale", etc. Coincidentally, this always happens when the management muckety muck in charge of that area is replaced by someone from outside the company. While new ideas are good and sometimes needed, I honestly have not ever seen any manager in that position do anything but a "replace what you have with what I used at my last company" exercise. Every day that goes by lowers my expectations of any management figure or exercise. After 3 decades, you'd think those expectations would be low enough to not be surprised anymore. And yet, that's not the case.

Project manager: "What is a micro service? I'm dating a girl and she mentioned it and I want to impress her."

Me: "Well, you have monolithic services which tend to serve many different functions whereas a micro service tends to serve a single function or a few related functions. They are usually easier to scale and can be optimized to be faster. Still, right tool for the job."

Project manager: "Oh nice! So I can ask her 'Hey, want to see my micro service? It's quick and scalable.'"

-face palm-

He's leaving this week. I'm going to miss him though.

Seriously though, in that context, would scalability mean you're bringing friends?

On the most serious of notes, and i need yall to think hard about this.

What makes you a good developer whether Backend or Frontend or Web or mobile.

What qualities actually make you a good developer?

I mean, we all use google, github, stack overflow etc. So what makes Programmer A better than Programmer B.

and in a more practical sense, ive been coding for two years now and i have deployed an API written in node and an instagram automation tool in PHP (which is down now due to lack of funds), i lack frontend knowldge (but i want to make up for that) and i have projects that when i finish, with my connections can and will blow up in terms of income. now you on the other hand, what makes you better than me?

and lastly, how much code do you have to change from an existing project, lets say from github for you to comfortably say, yes this is mine.

This fucking internal tool does not have any CLI capabilities, so to open each file i need to and get the data i have to manually hit 'File -> Open' select the file, then double click

Then high light the data i want and copy out what I need

If there was even just a cli to cycle over the fucking files to open each in their own instance it would be a good deal less fucking tedious and annoying

Like how the fuck do you not allow passing in a file name on cli to open like fuck i have to do this 40 fucking times FUCK i get this tool is originally from the fucking 90's but still you push updates every 3 months for the databases it accesses at least let me fucking pass in a fucking file to open it from cli

What paradoxes taught me.

Perhaps each time a paradox is encountered in mathematics, there is a useful distinction or mathematical tool hiding in plain sight, one that hasn't be discovered or utilized. For cursory evidence I give you: division by zero, the speed of an arrow at any point in flight, and calculus.

Maybe this isn't true for some paradoxes, or even most, but as time goes on I suspect people will discover it is more true than they might have thought.

Undefined behavior and results aren't nonsense: They look to me like golden seams to be explored for possible utility when approached from uncommon angles with uncommon problems.

Firefox is getting better and better!
The improvements that came with 57 and Quantum were awesome! And now with 58 there are mayor performance improvements like Off-Main-Thread Painting and a new Javascript caching.
There are even some nice new features like the screenshot tool (in 58 available for the private mode, too!) that are really exciting.
I am looking forward that Firefox could maybe become again what it was back then! It's so cool!

So I love how for the last what now, 20 years companies that don't seem to have the most obvious sources of income build huge data servers, and make the general public push to digitization and lack of physical ownership *cough google cough* and then they, after encouraging dependency for storage say 'yeah well, we're going to press the reset button anyone who is being detained for 2 years or so or eating dogshit in the street by deleting all the photos attached to an account that is not logged into for that long'..... seriously.

So I developed a tool to download everything.. a few times now. Why should I have to hop from one foot to the other so much ? Thats what I'm asking.

I tell you, for such a rich company their api's are very poorly documented and there is so much goddamn documentation that is competing with other versions.

(Ok, I love js in general (specially with es6), but here's something I hate about the "ecosystem". Dont take this too srsly also)

Holy fucking gagged shit, these project readmes that start out for too long about the project objective instead of stating the actual thing/s the software does.

WHAT DOES IT FUCKING DO!?
STOP BEING FUCKING FANCY ABOUT YOUR PROJECT.

Jesus christ, people jacking off about their awesome tool and how it will make everyone happy. No one cares.

"shitsmoke.js is a framework that focuses on delivering truly reliable data with static checking enabled on deployment."

WHAT THE SHIT DOES THAT MEAN?

Gimme a bullet point with the goddamn features (not the fucking BENEFITS) and I'm done.

These are like layers of marketing bullshit texts you have get through, getting more technical as you go on.

But sometimes they never do a technical summary, THEY GO STRAIGHT INTO THE GODDAMN API. And the API docs belong to a docs site, there is github.io and packages that take care of that.

You're like a goddamn linguistic detective, trying to disect the meaning of these words to understand if some package is what you're looking for.

And I don't wanna visit another website to understand what it does either!

No Rant:

I guess I will start a religous discussion with it but I want your opinion on what tool I should learn.
Vim or Emacs (or stay with my IDE)?

For all of my programmer life I used IDEs... From Eclipse over CodeBlocks over VS to IntelliJ.
But now I realized that I want to be one of the cool kids. And using plain IntelliJ is uncool. No matter how much I love this tool.

So now I want to invest some time into learning. I never managed to do much in Vim since all code-completions sucked ass, feedback on syntax errors was bad and I never saw how I could be any faster with that shit compared to what IntelliJ does for me.
Will Emacs solve all those problems? Will Emacs make me code 1000 times faster and make having a mouse useless?
Or am I just too dumb for Vim? Can Vim itself do what my IDE does for me? Will it make me look as cool as I want to be?
Or should I stick to IntelliJ and just install Vim bindings?

What is your opinion on Vim vs Emacs vs any IDE?

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

So, I've been asked to build a tool that scrape's one's Facebook friends and their friends. I (surprisingly) managed to get it done.

I don't know what to feel about this.

There is a tool in my job that creates web pages by giving him what to display as content, and with that system, we can call applications from other web apps instead of re-implementing it.

But it has some flaws. Some that are natural, like its complexity.

And others.

I was calling an application from another webapp. I got an error 500. So I used a tool made by the enterprise to see the error in detail.

And the error 500 is in fact a 404 hidden.

Well, good job.

Man, I love how G++ (and every other Gnu tool for that matter) makes 0 effort to understand what you fucked up, and they only tell you where they got stuck. What am I supposed to do with this error that doesn't contain a single reference to my project?

Why are project/tool webpages so useless...?

I mean, whenever I hear of a new tool/project I google its name. Of course, its dedicated webpage pops up as result #1. And EVERY TIME I find them looking nice, but quite confusing, riddled with all the buzzwords, nice phrases, promises of a better tomorrow,... but I'm yet to find a tool's webpage that explains what's that tool for and how to use it at least half as concisely and clearly as that tool's README.md in its GH/GL repo.

I mean, I can read every single word in the webpage, look at every picture/diagram, every fancy gif and still in absolute majority of cases I have no clue what that tool does.
Then I go to its GH/GL repo, read the first 2 sections of its README.md (takes me what, 2-4 minutes?) and I know all I need to now about the tool.

What's the point of those fancy webpages apart from containing docs and an SEO-tuned link to a README.md...?

Useless waste of storage and computing power if you asked me.

I have been wondering if there is a way to use social media in a positive way.

Since high school (when Facebook first started) I knew that this social media was a cancer.

From what I know there is no positive use for cancer, and I’m pretty sure that the same is true for social media.

But to be honest, it is a tool that is very effective in manipulating the masses. In fact, it is likely the greatest tool for leading sheep to slaughter since religion. I’m always looking to take advantage of every tool at my disposal.

Tools shouldn’t be seen as good of bad, so I am going to have to accept it is a tool of great power and use it. Hopefully I can use it in a positive way, but that doesn’t look likely...

From now on I am administrating multiple servers in our company and monitoring is one thing our infrastucture lacks...almost completely. At least, useful monitoring.
Installing netdata or Grafana and integrate it with chat is definitely a solution, but what happens if the whole server just shuts down (very stupid scenario I know)? Well, it is easy, there will be no alert about the failure.
So, that's where I was wondering if there is a tool or even better plugin for netdata or Grafana, that enables remote monitoring from another server? I surely can write a simple script to check the server availability but having the whole monitoring tool on a single server instead of 5+ would be also easier to maintain and setup.

Awesome tool imapsync, now moving a 47gb account without problem, what other tool do you use to migrate emails account without to much hassle?, +1 lml

pure genius! Ubuntu's firmware-xx-installer installation package for legacy network adapters doesn't install diddly. it *downloads* the firmware for you.
because yeah, people installing network adapter firmware obviously are doing it because they have a working network connection and what they really need help with is downloading the file 9_9

another 30min down the hole finding the actual firmware and the cutter tool for it

I love learning by doing.

Building MVPs and prototypes is the best way. Even better if you have a chance to show and share them in front of an audience (peer pressure can be good!).

Share the lessons you've learned and what you've done wrong, it will help many more people than just yourself.

I've been working for an eLearning company for the last 4 years (CloudAcademy.com) and I'm in love with the idea of learning something new every day. And not just coding. Code is "only" a tool to solve problems, and learning something about those problems and fields will make you a better developer.

If you ever decide to make a software, contact the DBeaver developer team and ask them what they did, then do everything exactly the opposite and I'm sure your software will be the most complete, beautiful, bug-free software in the world. Because I am convinced DBeaver is the most incomplete, ugliest
software full of bugs. And also, did these people ever actually use a database administration tool before they decided to make one? It seems like they haven't to me, otherwise it wouldn't be so user-unfriendly.

Note: I am writing this in my calmest, had I written it 30 minutes ago, you would have seen some ugly words.

Stepping through the source code of a no-code-graphical-programming-tool (or however you call that) to understand why my stuff isn't doing its thing or at least see what it wants from me.
Very intuitive

"What is going on... this should work?!
Is my maths wrong?
My maths is wrong...
Oh no!
It's a model view projection matrix?!
I'm shit if I'm failing at this, it's 3D dev 101!
I got a first class degree... I don't deserve any of this or this job!!"

<2 seconds later>

uniforms.viewMatrix.set(camera.matrixWorldInverse.elements);
uniforms.viewMatrix.set(camera.projectionMatrix.elements);

"You set the same uniform twice you tool, due to copy and paste..."

Imposter syndrome in my early days put myself into a roller coaster of emotions. I always compared myself to others to the detriment of myself.
Thankfully overcame that working with some great guys.

But yeah, coding has impacted life for the best though. The challenge, creativity and constant learning is beautiful.

Just fixing a broken build due to another bad merge by SVN. There was no reason it should have fucked that merge up but somehow it did.

Of course I didn't double check by building locally so that was my screwup but what I wouldn't give to use a decent source control tool

!rant

Guys, Im curious, what you would say about situation if you are in need of some quite simple tool and you write it but becouse you need it today, not tommorow, you just dont give a heck about all the fancy stuff and (lets say for php) you start to write all in 2-3 files like you was back beginner?

Or you just nope out of situation?
Do you refactor that when you bored just becouse this cant be on my disk, noone can see this abomination?
Or you delete after usage (only to relaize 5 minutes latter you need it back :P )

Im curious your opinion.

PS.
nope, if you came to bitch about any of opinions even opinion "well, i wouldnt give a fuck and just not do it", go away and get lost.

E: typo

So a guy told me about a problem he has, and I showed him a tool that I have built that solve his exact problem, but he answered "Nah thanks I am good".

What ? Why ? Are you stupid ? It's free

Killing people is bad. But, there should be a law to allow killing people who don't write proper unit tests for their code. And also those "team leaders" who approve and merge code without unit tests.

Little backstory. Starts with a question.

What is the most critical part of a quoting tool (tool for resellers to set discounts and margins and create quotations)? The calculations, right?
If one formula is incorrect in one use case, people lose real money. This is the component which the user should be able to trust 100%. Right?

Okay. So this team was supposed to create a calculation engine to support all these calculations. The development was done, and the system was given to the QA team. For the last two months, the QA team finds bugs and assigns those to the development team and the development team fix those and assigns it back to the QA team. But then the QA team realizes that something else has been broken, a different calculation.

Upon investigation, today, I found out that the developers did not write a single unit test for the entire engine. There are at least 2000 different test cases involving the formulas and the QA team was doing all of that manually.

Now, Our continuous integration tool mandates coverage of 75%. What the developer did was to write a dummy test case, so that the entire code was covered.

I really really really really really think that developers should write unit tests, and proper unit tests, for each of the code lines (or, “logical blocks of code”) they write.

Curious what you guys think about the creator of Node.js saying that he does not think Node is the best tool for servers and that Go is a much better option.

For me at least, I think it is great that people like him become aware of the shortcommings of the technology they devised, but wonder if it is such a good move to say such things (even tho apparently he is not the head of the Node.js project anymore)

I have always been fascinated by Node and the whole JS ecosystem. I think it did wonders for JS developers and it pushed the whole JS experience to a whole new level, but I am also aware of the shortcommings of it just as I am of the other environments that I use.

So, what do you guys think about his statements? Would you consider investing time in Go as a Node developer? Do you think that it will be possible to do a switch or would you rather stay in and advance the state ot Node development?

So our Chief Test Engineer left the company because of overwhelming frustration and stress. We working on new stuffs so we test our partly done product with partly done test tool developed be another of our team. His successor started to drop most of the 3rd party tools and workflows and documentations to trash expect this one unfinished test software.
Now he wants that we add more features to this software so it can replace everything he trashed already: run tests, generate test reports, generate documentations and so on.
On top of that he organized a workshop to read all this software's source code together, understand how it's works so we can rewrite the whole software from scratch.
WHAT?!

Working with government contracts...

Them: We want an agile environment!
What they mean: Waterfall with bits and pieces of agile.

Them: We want to modernize our code!
What they mean: Oh, that is open source code from Russia or a country we don't like? No, even though it is a norm and a very powerful tool, we can't have communism here.

Them: We have a new task order for you.
What they mean: We won't approve you the money till you have a month left of the task order.

what the fuck I can't edit the rant after 5 minutes I am fucking posting a new rant which have that last rant ...Why they update the fucking x code in every fucking 15 days . Well some libraries are deprecated oh cool I can use my shit as an object. And why third party libraries don't provide some good documentation of their sdk's . What the fuck is that and I will personally kill auto layout by entering in the mac myself. What is the use of that fucking debugging tool if I know don't the crap of my code that in which class I have done something terribly wrong what the fuck . Oh cool I am having that clang error and I don't know how to wipe my ass. And please fucking don't tell me to use xib code in xcode for my project if there will be 600 screens I will still fucking use storyboard for that. I don't fuck with xib files do you hear me. And fucking stackoverflow ..what the fuck is wrong if I forget an single comma during posting a question ..what the fuck..and you know what the real feeling is when I post a issue on stackoverflow and I got nothing from them expect some minus points...and then the holy fucking coder inside me tells me to solve that fucking problem and I feel like having dope bitch. FUCCKKKK..

ESRI's ArcMap...

Run a geoprocessing tool, now don't dare move the map, or click ANYWHERE on the interface! Don't even breath on the mouse pad! Oh... wait... too late... "ArcMap is not responding". At this point it's a 50/50 of whether it freezes for a long period then successfully completes the task, or it crashes.

Doesn't matter what you are doing - open the editor tool bar, create a database connection, make a table join. All will result in the same issue, such an unstable piece of software with no real market competitors to make the organisation build anything better (ArcGIS Pro wasn't much of an improvement, just another GPU Junkie).

I once wrote an http interceptor for which was supposed to check the internal cache for user data and only do some work with it if they were (we manually controlled what and who was in cache). There were two methods on the service cGetUser and dGetUser I of course called d which it turned out loaded the user profile from the database which would be fine if it weren't done in an interceptor .. on a web service... With a little over 25000 requests per minute.. on each node..

Tldr. I accidentally wrote a database ddos tool into our app...

I will never fully understand why some people think command line package managers are "more complicated" than searching for and downloading software through the web browser.

I feel like the only reason why they think this is because the command line is not a user-friendly tool to them. All of my friends on Discord use Windows, and after showing them what a fantastic tool the Chocolatey package manager is, they don't want to have anything to do with it, because it involves entering commands.

I give up. If they don't want to use this amazing tool, that's their loss, not mine. I will just continue to run

> choco upgrade outdated -y

and update all of my programs with a single command, while they have to download installers and manually go through the setups.

Without a doubt it has to be the internal company search engine/file finding tool @thewamz and I wrote.

The company has a wide UNC network with files scattered all over the place and they need a way to keep track of where the files get moved to (they can and do get moved). The original tool was written in Java/Tomcat and didn't use any frameworks or utilities beyond custom written ones, no orms, and the SQL was just raw strings. The program didn't take into account that files might be moved or deleted so it never removed anything from the database, it just kept adding files and never removing them.

It however never stores files itself, just links to files elsewhere on the UNC network.

It took six months to get it into what might be a stable beta or release candidate state. The user interface is good, very simple and intuitive, the whole thing was rewritten in python/django, there were issues with utf 8 (and mysql not fully supporting utf 8 in its own utf 8 mode), we added a regex search mode (which was sorely lacking), the search used to take up to fifteen minutes however we sped it up to less than a minute (worst case when a user simply puts "^$" as the regex search). It has a multi threaded design which does some checks to ensure it doesn't spawn too many threads and get stuck in constant Gil switching. Still some bugs to fix, like moving the processing of results returned by the server in a web worker so that the content widget doesn't lock up processing millions of search results and moving the back end to use asynchronous python might gain a performance boost. But on the whole I think the system is ready to replace the older system that all the users are frustrated with and constantly complain about.

However the annoying bit is... How to actually get the new system online, while I am responsible for the development of tools and their maintenance, I am not responsible for their initial deployment and that means I have no idea when (or even if) my new tool will even ever be released :/

So I'm apparently not allowed to work with what I've learned in my work in my free time.

My boss gave me the job to create modifications for an already existing tool. I always wanted to do that and I started to collect ideas a long time ago what I want to have. So I kindly shared my ideas with my boss and started working on it. Since I'm leaving the company I now longer work on these things and now I started continue working on MY ideas in my free time.

And for protocol: I didn't take any of my code I wrote in my working time and I didn't apply anything else that clearly belongs to the company.

Now I have a problem with my boss. I shared him my ideas so now they belong to the company. And I learned how to create modifications for this tool in my working time so now I'm not allowed to use this knowledge for anything else. I had an argument with my boss but he persists on the idea that since he gave me this little feedback that my ideas are great, they now belong to his company and he wants to put me into big trouble now...

I have finally done a crash course on ChatGPT. And what I discovered was that, it is basically Google with straight forward answers. It is a handy tool to use and get familiar with.

When your frontend does not really get what your backend is trying to say...

This is oalley.net. Apart from the fact that their frontend and backend do not work together very well, it is a nice tool to mark reachable areas on a map based on the starting point, the means of transportation and the maximum time.

More than 50% of my work is due to the fact people don't do what they are suppose to do.

"Joe is suppose to submit report X every week. He hasnt been keeping up so make a script that reminds him if he's late. Better yet make a tool so Joe doesn't waste those 3 minutes every week."

Me: Tell him to do his job.

"But we need you to do it"

Me: Fine

"Suzie is complaining she does this menial task"

Me: She was hired to do that.

"Can we automate it?"

Me: No

"X is broken"

Me: I know. Group Y isn't doing what they are suppose to.

"Go talk to them so you can see why they aren't doing it. Then bend over backwards so you can handle these kinds of issues due to their laziness in the future."

Me: Fine...

Build a tool two years ago that I used to download anime of a website.
Buggers now broke it by encrypting(?) a URL I need and using obfuscated JS so I can't find what I need D:

FUCK XCODE. FUCK AUTOLAYOUT. I have been working on my app for eight months, perfecting every detail and making the UI absolutely stunning. Today, Apple rejected my app for not supporting iPad. My app was not supposed to support iPad, I would hate for a user to install on an iPad. So, I said whatever and tried to autolayout the app. This didn't work, so I turned off autolayout. Guess what. My entire layout was destroyed and when I tried to click the undo button, nothing happened. This is classic Xcode. I am so fucking pissed, I want to scream. I just lost months of hard work because they can't fucking get their developer tool working, but they can release a phone with no headphone jack.

Question: We are planning to transition our old ES5 codebase to modern ES6/ES7 and even typescript.

What would be the build tool you would recommend if we want to start supporting ES6/ES7 and even Typescript?

Webpack, Vite some other?

This is a vanilla Javascript Project with large codebase it's been built using custom build tools like UglifyJS and UglifyCSS and of after lots of begging it finally got the green light to move to a more modern build tool and start supporting a more standard JavaScript Features.

Mainly I want to move to TypeScript but transition would be slow so the build tool would need to support .ts and .js as well, that is traspile both the .ts and .js into one final production build.

What build tool would you recommend for that?

My little brother started college this year. He hasn't decided what he wants to do, so he took classes in finance and computer science. During finals week, he comes to me ranting about GitHub. "It has to be the most useless tool ever made", he said.

His teachers made him use it without any explanation on HOW to use it. His whole team was working out of a single branch, downloading the zip every time, and struggling to fix merge conflicts. At no point was this ever corrected. This has been going on for an entire year!!!

Safe to say, I spent the afternoon walking him through more productive ways to use GitHub and showing him why it's not "the most useless tool ever made". I don't get why teachers for students to use tools but fail to ever explain how. All that is going to do is deter kids from using tools that could save them when they get a real job.

Bought myself a new graphics card as my old one died. After i got my system runnning again ( Linux Mint 17), by fixing the video drivers i concluded that i may want to get into gaming again.
I have a free Windows 10 Pro licence lying around so lets try to get dual boot running.
Hmm seems like i cant install windows after linux without installing grub2 again through a recovery disc. Well okay wanted to try out mint 19 anyway.

Downloaded both Isos. Linux mint is 1,5Gb and Windows 10 is 4,3Gb. MS what are you doing ?!
Only have a 4GB USB-Drive and dont want to buy a new one. GOD FUCKING DAMNIT MICROSOFT.
So at a forum i found a software to remove packages from windows isos and now i'm sitting here removing windows bloatware for 4 FUCKING HOURS, JUST TO INSTALL WINDOWS.

Ofc that tool was only windows specific so i had to install windows in a vm first.
Fucking tired of this shit.

Is part of being intermediate/fluent in a tool, language or framework that you've just unwillingly memorized all the error messages you've come across?

'Hey I got error X' -> Just change Z and C and it will work
'Do you know what this stacktrace is trying to tell me?' -> Yeah you forgot a space
'What does this mean?' -> Just add the host to the hostfile

Not that it immediately makes you an expert ofcourse

There a times I love python for its quick way of writing things. But there are more times that python makes me angry or just frustrates me with its indentation logic.🤪
When the indentation in my project lets the code either accidentally run a million times more or a tab/spaces inconsistency that no tool warns me about except runtime error.
What about a language that combines pythons easy way with brackets on top?😪 I guess it already exists?😅
For my project C++ would be a viable alternative, but so far the language seems very weird to write.

I've had this idea for some time now. How about a website that gathers some of the most well written open-source code and allows you to easily read it for educational purposes? Everyone says that reading source code can be a great learning tool but directly jumping into github is not very friendly to newcomers. I saw what underscore.js has done with the annotated code link and I think it's great. What do you think?

Finally convinced the senior engineer I'm working with to let me use Angular CLI for our front end because of all the added things we get compared to what he had originally setup for our Angular project (plus it's a phenomenal tool). I was slowly adding in things to make the app better (more like a PWA), but what pushed him over the edge was the platform-webworker package letting us off load some heavy tasks into a web worker. I'm excited for the improvements coming!

Note to self:
Close off ALL ways things could go wrong..

Long story short; I released a new feature, to be able to better follow up on any stock moves, their amounts, locations and even expiry dates. An older tool just bypassed that very verification and nothing was logged or taken out of stock.

~

Taking out an amount for a certain orderline has a shortcut in place to mitigate some of the mandatory steps that pickers need to take in order to verify what's being taken. This little tool only available, visible and possible for a very few select users.

I assigned some orders to one of these people, which made him think it was an urgent batch. It's only one product, for multiple orders, so he went to the location, took out the amount needed and then used the tool to quickly be able to prepare them for shipping.

This bypassed the new methods to check if the location actually had stock to take, which I had just enabled for 1 account.

Luckily I caught the miss-hap as I was monitoring that product first-hand and noticed the batch of orders was collected but the stock amount didn't update.

It was 5min before I was leaving work, so I investigated and then ran to the person in question to ask what he did; which was "I used that tool"

I facepalmed myself internally while blaming myself, as he couldn't know that it wasn't ready to use for that purpose.

The tools to fix this up are there already.. so I used that to fix some missing stock-takes manually.. Though I'll need to close that little tool for these kind of orders for sure, asap, probably when I get home, at least until I bring over its new logic to it.

Happy Tuesday? (:

Tech people should have a codeword. So that I don't have to explain to every data provider showing off their own crappy limited analytics tool that "I do know what SQL means and I just need the ODBC user/pass, thanks".

I wish I could just say "hey, &0x00A0 = 1337;" out loud and he would be like "oh, thanks! I needed the break. Here is the ODBC crap, I'm gonna grab some coffee."

I hate it when people name fancy new techniques but don't actually know what it is. Today I had the following conversation with some of my ClassMates:

Me: Whe should bundle the js and css files of our app
CM1: I used Gulp before, maybe we could use that
CM2: I used Grunt in the past, but thats kinda old-school webpack is what everybody uses now
CM3: I heard Docker is also a great tool for doing webstuff, let's use Docker

Safari's developer tools. What a tool. (Pun intended)

Not entirely sure if it counts, but Postman.

Used to be a simple, yet efficient tool for integration testing. And nothing more. Now it's a bloated, convoluted resource eating piece of bling-bling that tries to do a shitload of stuff, but only does them in a mediocre way.

Meh, while I was typing this I realized what a comfortable life I lead if I complain about something like this. Oh, the perks of being a middle class white man working in the tech sector...

Well, my first project was to replicate something I saw somewhere: connect a pen to a potentiometer and to the serial port of an Apple II in such a way that you could replicate the movement of the pen on screen and also draw.

Apple II . Mouse, touch screens, tablet, etc didn't exist.
It worked.

However, a part from feeling old, I feel also stupid now, because I didn't understand at all the potentiality of such a tool nor what was going to happen in few years.

I could have invented a mouse. Or the concept of GUI. It was just in front of me.

Instead, I think I just draw some tits an some dick.

So I'm here.
Wondering, what is there now in front of my eyes, that I don't see?

There were many issues that came about during my entire employment, but I woke up today with some, honestly, quite bizarre questions from my manager that made me open an account here. This is just the latest in many frustrations I have had.

For context, my manager is more of a "tech lead" who maintains a few projects, the number can probably be counted in one hand. So he does have the knowledge to make changes when needed.

A few weeks ago, I was asked to develop a utility tool to retrieve users from Active Directory and insert them into a MSSQL Database, pretty straight forward and there were no other requirements.

I developed it, tested it, pushed it to our repository, then deployed the latest build to the server that had Active Directory, told my manager that I had done so and left it at that.

A few weeks later,
Manager: "Can you update the tool to now support inserting to both MSSQL and MySQL?"

Me: "Sure." (Would've been nice to know that beforehand since I'm already working on something else but I understand that maybe it wasn't in the original scope)

I do that and redeploy it, even wrote documentation explaining what it did and how it worked. And as per his request, a technical documentation as well that explains more in depth how it works. The documents were uploaded as well.

A few days after I have done so,
Manager: "Can you send me the built program with the documentation directly?"

I said nothing and just did as he asked even though I know he could've just retrieved it himself considering I've uploaded and deployed them all.

This morning,
Manager: "When I click on this thing, I receive this error."

Me: "Where are you running the tool?"

Manager: "My own laptop."

Me: "Does your laptop have Active Directory?"

Manager: "Nope, but I am connected to the server with Active Directory."

Me: "Well the tool can only retrieve Active Directory information on a PC with it."

Manager: "Oh you mean it has to run on the PC with Active Directory?"

Me: "Yeah?"

Manager: "Alright. Also, what is the valid value for this configuration? You mentioned it is the Database connection string."

After that I just gave up and stopped responding. Not long after, he sent me a screenshot of the configuration file where he finally figured out what to put in.

A few minutes later,
Manager: "Got this error." And sends a screenshot that tells you what the error is.

Me: "The connection string you set is pointing to the wrong database schema."

Manager: "Oh whoops. Now it works. Anyway, what are these attribute values you retrieve from Active Directory? Also, what is the method you used to connect/query/retrieve the users? I need to document it down for the higher ups."

Me: "The values are the username, name and email? And as mentioned in the technical documentation, it's retrieving using this method."

The 2+ years I have been working with this company has been some of the most frustrating in my entire life. But thankfully, this is the final month I will be working with them.

Working on a new tool idea. It's a long & boring process of checking domain availability for multiple name ideas. That's what I'm trying to solve in here ⚡Are you excited?

Couldn't be arsed with all the conditional compilation that angelscript required, so I dumped right back to good ol' lua for now.

Got lua in, vm started, loading strings and pushing/popping the stack.

Got SDL actually drawing as intended.

I don't know even half of what I'm doing.
Apparently header files that end in ".hpp" are specific to c++, while .h are for c headers.

I like the new SDL2 though, little bit different than SDL1. Not a lot of tutorials cover the difference, but I could kinda suss out from the documentation where I needed to adapt, even though I'm still pretty loose on the library, on the docs, and on c++ itself.

Still just a learning project.

Also, I'm continually surprised there isn't a portable, platform independent tool or little language just for replacing all pseudo-languages out there like .bat and .sh, and .zsh

Maybe even just a tool that standardizes it all, then takes config files that map the new standard to system dependant commands, so you can download the damn thing, configure the relevant environment variables, drop in the platform dependent configuration (or your browser or package tool detects what platform you are on and chooses the relevant package/download for your platform), write a console script and the tool automatically translates, and emits the system-relevant commands to that platform's console (so you don't even need much platform-specific code to do things like file access).

Question for devs who work in large multi-team environments:

A) What is your code review process like? Does a senior review it once and then it's off to QA or do you have "levels" of approval?

B) If you're launching a feature that depends on another team how are you coordinating it? Do you just talk over a ticket and then hit merge and deploy at the same time or like what's your process like?

C) What CI/CD tool do you use? Also what code hosting platform do you use? Github/GItlab/etc.

D) Are you currently happy with the CI tool you're using? If not what are some common issues you're facing?