Happy Halloween :)

My mom died when I was 7, after which my dad bought me a Commodore 64 so I had something to lose myself in during the mourning process.

I learned everything about that system, from my first GOTO statement to sprite buffers, to soldering my own EPROM cartridges. My dad didn't deal with the loss so well, and became a missing person 5 years later when I was 12.

I got into foster care with a bunch of strict religious cultists who wouldn't allow electronics in the house.

So I ran away at 14, sub-rented a closet in a student apartment using my orphan benefits and bought a secondhand IBM computer. I spent about 16 hours a day learning about BSD and Linux, C, C++, Fortran, ADA, Haskell, Livescript and even more awful things like Visual Basic, ASP, Windows NT, and Active Directory.

I faked my ID (back then it was just a laminated sheet of paper), and got a job at 15-pretending-to-be-17 at one of the first ISPs in my country. I wrote the firmware and admin panel for their router, full of shitty CGI-bin ASP code and vulnerabilities.

That somehow got me into a job at Microsoft, building the MS Office language pack for my country, and as an official "conflict resolver" for their shitty version control system. Yes, they had fulltime people employed just to resolve VCS conflicts.

After that I worked at Arianespace (X-ray NDT, visualizing/tagging dicom scans, image recognition of faulty propellant tank welds), and after that I switched to biotech, first phytogenetics, then immunology, then pharmacokynetics.

In between I have grown & synthesized and sold large quantities of recreational drugs, taken care of some big felines, got a pilot license, taught IT at an elementary school, renovated a house, and procreated.

A lot of it was to prove myself to the world -- prove that a nearly-broke-orphan-high-school-dropout could succeed at life.

But hey, now I work for a "startup", so I guess I failed after all.

I’m just new here...
Don’t know why I made an account here, just to read a single post, but yeah...

I’m a big Pokémon fan by the way...

While on this, let's Break for a laugh 😂😂😂😂😂..

Last year I built the platform 'Tindex'. It was an index of Tinder profiles so people could search by name, gender and age.

We scraped the Tinder profiles through a Tinder API which was discontinued not long ago, but weird enough it was still intact and one of my friends who was also working on it found out how to get api keys (somewhere in network tab at Tinder Online).

Except name, gender and age we also got 3 distances so we could calculate each users' location, then save the location each 15 minutes and put the coordinates on a map so users of Tindex could easily see the current location of a specific Tinder user.

Fun note: we also got the Spotify data of each Tinder user, so we could actually know on which time and which location a user listened to a specific Spotify track.

Later on we started building it out: A chatbot which connected to Tinder so Tindex users could automatically send a pick up line to their new matches (Was kinda buggy, sometimes it sent 3 pick up lines at ones).

Right when we started building a revenue model we stopped the entire project because a friend of ours had found out that we basically violated almost all terms.

Was a great project, learned a lot from it and actually had me thinking twice or more about online dating platforms.

Below an image of the user overview design I prototyped. The data is mock-data.

I challenged my girlfriend (and myself) for the FizzBuzz thingy. I did it in js (because I suck at js) and she in Java. I never saw such a way to write FizzBuzz. Turns out she forgot there is a thing called modulo operator.

I know there are more elegant ways to solve it! Feel free to post your favorites.

! Worst thing another dev did in our NodeJS code.

1. No indentation. Literally.
2. A single function in a module worth 1000 lines. I'm not even kidding. No breaking into smaller functions. Just a large rock with a lot of js mess scribbled.
3. No comments at all
4. Sending stray values to promises which were not required at all.
5. No jsdoc. Using camelCase and uppercase interchangeably.

100% Real. And it's not even the worst on the site.

Appreciation post.

Fucking love Amazon even more now.

Story -
I created a new Aws account and they asked me to pay ₹2 (0.031$) as part of the verification process.

No big deal right?

2 days later, I got a notification saying - "Your account has been credited with ₹2.66"

Not only they returned me my money, but they also paid a certain interest with it too.

And the fact that they are taking care of their dev community (as if we are their customers) is appreciable.

Amazon - you bloody have my respect. I trust you.

No big deal

Hey ranters so have been doing this long course video tutorial on Node, and sometimes i just get bored cause some videos are very long. Does anyone have any tips on how to deal with this cause i want to learn as much as possible

Somehow I hope that we will continue with wka0 instead of wk100...

FULLSTACK DEVELOPER
- A buzzword that startup companies use when they can't hire a lot of people. Multitasking all the way sucker!

Anyone seeing this rant from Sydney? If yes, why is it so hard to get any IT/Dev jobs for an international student? Sucks.

Well I asked what Wednesday could bring in my last rant.

Potential redundancy apparently. Company I work for has just been bought and no one knows if any jobs are safe.

The question is do I still have a interviewing suit? (One that fits)

So last night a friend randomly found a raw not-yet-installed WordPress instance on a public domain that he found on a Facebook site (it was already linked for I don't know how long, but just not installed).

He told me about it and, being the guy I am, I signed up an account on some free MySQL hosting website, set up a database and used it for that WordPress site.

I then left a kind little note on the front page for the admin telling him that I just saved his ass since others could've done the same but posted racist shit or something and, also, told him not to use WordPress.

Even though I had no bad intentions, I used proxies and VPN connectsions because you never know how these people might react.

Hopefully they'll learn from it 😇

Thank you, GIT. Thank you. Your reflog saved work of months after someone deleted the wrong branch.

Client: Hey, you're the IT guy right?
Me: Hey, how can I help?
Client: Yeah for some reason I've lost power to my computer
Me: *Checks power, all computers are down due to a power cut*
Me: You'll have to contact your power supplier as you've lost power to all computers and lights.
Client: What, but the computers are not working right? - that's you're job not mine
Me: That's not how it works.
Client: Fix this or I'll bill you for the loss of money we've encountered during this and report this to your boss.
Me: How about I bill you for my time and advice and inform by boss that you tried to blame me for a power cut.
Client: You can try.
Me: *walks off and puts time in the ticket, requests purchasing to send an invoice*

2 Days later:
The client does not pay the invoice.
Me: (phone call) Hi, an invoice has been sent to you and we haven't received payment yet.
Client: were not paying that, you broke our power and made our computers break
Me: null

TL;DR: I “hacked” my thermostat.

I’m stuck with an annoying roommate in college dorms who apparently always keeps the FUCKING thermostat at 80F. LIKE WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK IS WRONG WITH HIM. Every time I change it to like 73F, he changes it back to 80F Heat.
Getting tired of his shit for over a semester, I decided to do something about it. I looked up the thermostat made by HoneyWell and downloaded the product manual of it. Turns out, they have a system override ability to remove the heating mode and change the maximum and minimum values of temperature.
BOOM! I removed the heating mode and changed the minimum value to 70 and max to 74.
It’s 2AM here and I can finally go to sleep without sweating my balls off. I’ll keep you guys updated on his reaction hahahaha.

Most favorite: Intellij IDEA
Least favorite: Intellij IDEA
I mean, once Maven and stuff are set it's perfect. But, damn, configuring it on a new computer...

When you're teaching your friend how to code via text and miss how simple the bugs were sometimes...

I've seen a lot of hate to Macbooks and Apple products in general, and although I agree that iphone could be dramatically improved in terms of hardware I think that OSX is the best platform to do Web development.
Which one would you pick and why? Windows, OSX or Linux.

can we get devrant shirts? i would buy a shirt at this point.

When coding is not just your passion or work, but your entire lifestyle..
Maybe that's why still single?

Just updated devrant. Hooray for favorites!

I'm kind of a Drupal fanatic. Oh and I vape.

The shitty trainticket-app doesn't sell me any tickets. Who the fuck coded this crap. I really tried hard to pay for a fucking ticket...

When you just can't dumb down what you did so PM can understand..

"Oh wow. Linux just copied Macs OS... the file structure is almost identical." - IT at my old company

Rantberry PI

Thinking about making this into a terminal that accepts a serial connection from my IBM 5150 PC for that Chroma Green authentic text based experience. ;)

Seriously though. How awesome would it be to use a circa 1981 IBM 5150 as your terminal? Lol!

Not a rant just a question, can I change my profile name? I like my name and all but I didn't think about anonymity when I created it.