@retoor > "Who do cats without tail do fine while it's always claimed to be for balance"

A local taxidermist (we had a deer head mounted) had a side business of cutting off the tails of cats so you could have a tailless cat (a "bob cat").

Me: "OMG!, doesn't that hurt them!? Doesn't that screw up their balance?"

T: "I only do kittens, but yea, they squeal and whine for a while, but they eventually deal with it and cats don't need tails for balance."

At that moment I never wanted to slash the throat of another human being more in my life. I had my hand on my pocket knife thinking "Did I sharpen it? Yea, it's sharp. All it would take is a swipe, he won't see it coming. Swipe, step back, don't get blood on you...no jury would convict...dang, unless they are dog people and I'm screwed. Just pay the man and go home."

@lungdart > "Wtf are programmer socks?"

I think they are what some marketing department sold to tech companies that programmers like colorful/cartoonish socks. I don't know when the trend started, but every conference I've been to in the past 5 or so years, the vendor booth(s) hand out socks.

I use them as my 'outside' socks (what I wear when I work outside, exercise, etc), since they are typically very low quality and I don't care if they get tore up.

@Demolishun > "This is how bad these POS tech companies have gotten"

Facebook 'banned' my 18 year old daughter from Marketplace a couple of weeks ago because they couldn't verify her age. She's been on Facebook for a couple of years now, been buying and selling on Marketplace with no problems.

She sent the required video selfie and a picture of her driver's license. About three days later she gets a DM from Facebook saying they could not verify her age and she would not be allowed to access Marketplace. WTF!!?

I care 0% about FB, but everyday it's "Dad, I need to sell these cloths....can you fix Facebook?"

Facebook is a billion dollar *technical* company, they have zero technical support, no phone number, and no way to resolve *their* screw up.

@Demolishun > "Musk has been under fire"

I still laugh when the left attack Musk for essentially duping liberals/socialists into the "electric cars will reverse climate change" craze. They already mandated by law electric cars by an arbitrary date, tax rebates, etc before realizing it was all a scam. Not saying I wouldn't own an electric car, but it's a rich man's game I'm not qualified to play.

@Demolishun > "The fishy part is the MSM praising this great breakthrough"

I want to upvote this 100 times.

I don't remember the book, a Polish police officer during WWII was asked how could did they round up thousands and thousands of Jews and put them on the trains to concentration camps when the vast majority knew what was going on. He said, "It was easy, we lied to them."

Fast forward to today, has anything changed?

Good or bad, lies are how those in power get people to do things against their nature. The trick isn't necessarily believing or not believing, it's understanding motives and the 'why?'.

Trump lies to build up his ego. Biden (or his puppeteers, he's never been in power) lied to keep people in the dark to their real agenda to destroy and re-imagine America in a socialist+fascist utopia.

History has already shown what happens at the end of that story.

I don't remember the book, a Polish police officer during WWII was asked how could did they round up thousands and thousands of Jews and put them on the trains to concentration camps when the vast majority knew what was going on. He said, "It was easy, we lied to them."

Fast forward to today, has anything changed?

Good or bad, lies are how those in power get people to do things against their nature. The trick isn't necessarily believing or not believing, it's understanding motives and the 'why?'.

Trump lies to build up his ego. Biden (or his puppeteers, he's never been in power) lied to keep people in the dark to their real agenda to destroy and re-imagine America in a socialist+fascist utopia.

History has already shown what happens at the end of that story.

@Demolishun > "I write c++ plugins for skyrim for fun."

Nerd. :)

I looked into mods for the 'Total War' games, it's a different world of thinking as compared to writing business apps.

"Let me try to draw a tree, looking at this sample...10,000 lines of code!? Nope."

@Demolishun > "exercise equipment"

Yea, I get that, I was curious what link between the game and the treadmill is doing.

My 2 second google search looks like a niche only for treadmills.

Wouldn't the game (or any software) have to send the specific commands to the exercise equipment? Ex. If you start running, the game would have to send 'Increase speed to 4' command.

Sad to say, unless the pron industry adopts and perfects the technology, I'll bet it'll die on the vine.

oy, I didn't do the math, my raise was only 1.5%. Still a decent raise at my level, but same as me, my boss assumed the 3% was standard. The new "standard" will be 1.5% with any market adjustments when the company sees fit to apply them.

The senior leaders just fired the president/CEO. Its fine, nothing to see, move along.

> "I so want this connected to Skyrim."

What would Skyrim do with bluetooth?

@retoor > "Three lines of python."

Fumbled around and got a C# example working. Pretty easy. Not three lines, I'm not a madman. With enough refactoring, might be worth posting.

@retoor > "I will see what I can do."

I found the java client repo (JavaRant). Pretty sure I can translate that to C#.

@retoor > "@kiki has written a solution in node that doesn't require dependencies (good job!) to download the rants."

Node? That seems like a big dependency. I'm looking for something simple.

https://devrantapi/rants/...

Not "Install Node, first install Linux, then learn all the obscure linux commands, configure the memory for this ...update the drive mounts for that...don't forget to update network drivers, and follow these 64 easy steps to get Node running..."

Great question (s).

Is there an easy way to download all of my rants?

@cafecortado > "You can say it's already encrypted, they won't notice the difference"

Base64 encode/decode. A bit ashamed I've used it to (lie?) convince users that data was 'secure'.

I haven't updated mine in over 10 years.

Back then, LinkedIn was the only 'social network' allowed at work. Facebook, etc were all blocked at the firewall. Any+all attempts to access blocked social networks were logged and reported to supervisors and managers. Luckily devRant wasn't flagged as a 'social network'. Whew!

Even then, LinkedIn traffic/posts were monitored and if you, for example, updated a job skill, managers questioned if you were updating your skills to be more attractive to other employers.

The catch 22 was they (upper-mgmt) wanted more LinkedIn activity to make us more 'attractive' for LinkedIn's searches, but didn't want to look too attractive for head hunters to make job offers to devs/DBAs (which did occur).

All that changed when the owner+CEO started getting requests from other CEOs asking why he wasn't on the socials. When 99% of the employees were on their phones anyway at these sites, it was dumb to take system resources to restrict it.

Hilarious, well done.

Add some sound-deadening material to get rid of the room echo and you got a podcast studio worth listening to.

@Demolishun > "we are using it at work"

Ditto. My simple lizard brain can't wrap around it.

We have a couple of what I would call 'WPF experts'. Ex. 'Brian' wrote a WPF data grid from scratch because of the bugs we ran into with DevExpress. His grid is good enough to rival "the big boys". Its almost magical to see him use WPF as a golden hammer.

> WPF isn't terrible

Let's agree to disagree. :)

I get what MS was trying to do with WPF, but not everything has to be 6 layers of MVVM "mud".

They shouldn't have used their own flavor of XML. The whole architecture reeks of know-it-alls who think devs love complexity.

Yep. Played X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter on a 386 with the turbo button. Those were the days.

Advice? You asked. Show some integrity and be a man.

Quit and walk out being the hardest working SOB in building. Who cares what they think. When you land the next job, you're going to walk a little taller, and others will say "Damn...gotta stay out Tounai's way...he's on a mission!"

"Quiet quitting" is for sissies! Now drop and give me 50 push-ups!!!

@Definition7 > "Respect! Lucky that those folk has gone away"

Or stupidity. My mental health struggled, but I knew if I quit, they'd win.

https://youtube.com/watch/...

@Definition7 > "You stay there for 10 years?!"

Coming up on my 27th anniversary.

Lots of ups and downs, that time frame was the lowest. Upside is all those folks have quit or been fired.

Started my CYA journey when users would say (verbally) "Change the button caption to XYZ". I change the caption. A month later "Why is the button caption XYZ? It is supposed to be ABC?" then I get lectured by a VP how I need to do a better job in listening to our users.

> "Your boss is NOT always your friend, don't trust them 100%"

And document *everything*, preferably off-site.

Emails, DMs, anything that could come back as "I never said that!?"

Cleaning up old CYA folders (10+ years old) and I found an email where the mgr was upset that I was taking off the week of Christmas saying he never approved that time off (which he has the authority to cancel).

I pulled the email I'd backed up from October where *he* approved the request (at that time requests were via email).

Not taking it lying down, he replied (in a new email) it was company policy that I re-request time off requests within 7 days of the time off (basically saying I violated policy and my vacation would be canceled)

I reply, cc-ing HR, (screen-shot the original convo), and a copy of the time off policy asking HR to clarify the new '7 day' policy I was not aware of.

I never got a reply from anyone.

> Is it just me?

No. I tend to focus more on error handling+logging.

When you access an external resource (web api, database, etc), are you logging enough information to troubleshoot the issue *when* it fails? What do you want to tell your future self about this area of code, because 6 months from now and a phone call at 3:00AM, you won't remember any of this.

Ex. This morning our access to Oracle cloud was broken. The only error logged was the JSON serialization exception. No context, nothing to indicate that service was the problem. Took about an hour for the dev to figure out it was a 404 response. He didn't ensure a 200 response before trying to deserialize. Oops.

If he had logged what the actual response was, the URL resource, he could have figured out the problem in about 3 seconds (and keep about 6 other techs from scrambling around pointing fingers at each other)

@retoor > "I love coverage"

I do as well. I believe if the code can be tested, it should be tested.

If the code can't or doesn't need testing (why would anyone test a method that sets a=b?), then don't.

We've had our share of TDD zealots that created quagmires of complexity just to say "My code testable!"

Creating an IDatamanager with 100+ methods and mocking this&that, or worse unit testing POCOs/models,

ex. customer.firstname = "foo", Assert.IsTrue(customer.firstname == "foo"),

does not serve the customer.

One of the worst examples is our web team created their own testing framework. It enabled them to have before/after scenarios (TL;DR) and "easily" have hundreds of tests. All was good until a .Net upgrade broke "something" and none of the original developers were here that knew how to fix it. For a long time (they had to re-write all the tests), our site had zero testing before deployment. "If it builds, ship it!" was the process.

@PaperTrail > Part 2:

Mgr: "but..but...if we have 100% code coverage, making changes is easy!"

T: "Two words. Technical debt. Test code is debt. Nobody, I mean nobody wants to change someone else's 5 year old test code. 100% code coverage is a lot of debt few are willing to pay. I've worked with Cerner and 100% code coverage is non-negotiable. People's lives are at stake, so they are willing to pay the price. Here? You guys write CRUD apps. I'm sorry, trying to get 100% is a feel-good number."

<Mgr, pissed off, walks out>

I almost wanted to give him a hug. I've been saying that ever since the dev mgr came back from some big shot Gartner Group training. My guess is he ate lunch with someone who asked him about code coverage and the mgr couldn't answer him.

We've been fortunate that all our in-house trainers have been working developers that 'teach on the side'. They had the "this is the theory, but this is what works ..." mindset. YMMV

Boring history lesson part 1:

Ex. many years ago we had a trainer come in to teach the 'proper way' to unit test (the dept mgr was pushing for 100% code coverage, TL;DR, and he believed a 'professional' could come in and shame us into shape)

Day 1, the dept mgr was trying to nudge the trainer into preaching the glory of 100% code coverage.

T: "Yes, 100% is the ultimate goal of TDD, but I've rarely seen it in practice. You have to set the goal to what works best for your team. If your coverage is 20% and you're stakeholders are happy, then that's fine. If it's 100% and developers are afraid to make changes because of broken tests, then that's bad."

@tosensei > "having money is no indicator of having any kind of qualification. only of 'being lucky'"

100%. #iamafraud