fork() can fail: this is important

Ah, fork(). The way processes make more processes. Well, one of them, anyway. It seems I have another story to tell about it.

It can fail. Got that? Are you taking this seriously? You should. fork can fail. Just like malloc, it can fail. Neither of them fail often, but when they do, you can't just ignore it. You have to do something intelligent about it.

People seem to know that fork will return 0 if you're the child and some positive number if you're the parent -- that number is the child's pid. They sock this number away and then use it later.

Guess what happens when you don't test for failure? Yep, that's right, you probably treat "-1" (fork's error result) as a pid.

That's the beginning of the pain. The true pain comes later when it's time to send a signal. Maybe you want to shut down a child process.

Do you kill(pid, signal)? Maybe you do kill(pid, 9).

Do you know what happens when pid is -1? You really should. It's Important. Yes, with a capital I.

...

...

...

Here, I'll paste from the kill(2) man page on my Linux box.

If pid equals -1, then sig is sent to every process for which the calling process has permission to send signals, except for process 1 (init), ...

See that? Killing "pid -1" is equivalent to massacring every other process you are permitted to signal. If you're root, that's probably everything. You live and init lives, but that's it. Everything else is gone gone gone.

Do you have code which manages processes? Have you ever found a machine totally dead except for the text console getty/login (which are respawned by init, naturally) and the process manager? Did you blame the oomkiller in the kernel?

It might not be the guilty party here. Go see if you killed -1.

Unix: just enough potholes and bear traps to keep an entire valley going.

Source: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2014/...

Normal human: Visits web store -> orders for product -> leaves store.

Me: Visits web store -> Stares at header -> Stares at logo -> Check if colors match -> Scroll to footer -> Frowns at ads -> Scroll back up -> Multi click product item for debounce -> Fuck i clicked twice but it added the product thrice -> Closes tab -> Drives to local store -> Purchase product -> leaves store.

That's a unique skill

I coded the app so good
I optimized the UX SO GOOD
I made the UI look GOOD
I made the error handling and input validation ROCK HARD SOLID BULLETPROOF

NO FUCKING WAY COULD YOU FUCK THIS UP

NO WAY COULD YOU BE DUMB ENOUGH NOT TO KNOW HOW TO USE IT AND NOT FUCK IT UP

I GAVE IT TO MY DAD AS A NORMAL USER TO TEST THE APP AND HE FUCKED IT UP ON THE FIRST TRY

HE DIDNT UNDERSTAND THE UX.

.

~rant
I think we need to change way how websites deliver themselves to its users. This HTML CSS JS clusterfuck is just a huge PITA in the ass.

What is a website?
It's an application where users find, communicate or share information, can buy or sell their penis pumps and loads of shady stuff.
Why must a website (the delivered application) be split into multiple languages/scripts and lots of HTTP requests?
In my opinion, PWA is a start to make us look at websites more like apps as we are used to on the machine, but they don't solve the mess.
Per my experience, many people working on websites regularly confuse what's executed on the server and what is on the client. They send data to the client via XHR, for example full DB tables of private data, just to then filter it in their beloved Array.filter function.
You can tell those people again and again and this is why I start thinking that the Web, as we know it, needs a big change.

I just gave a 20 minute presentation in front of fifty people, and apparently did well enough that I got five private compliments afterwards, including one from the vice president. 🥳

And all of that without a single drop of rum!

anyone knows someone like this...?

Yo mama so fat she can't store files larger than 4 gigabytes.

01010010 01100101 01100001 01100100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01100010 01101001 01101110 01100001 01110010 01111001 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01101101 01101111 01110010 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100001 01101110 00100000 01100001 00100000 01110011 01101011 01101001 01101100 01101100 00101100 00100000 01101001 01110100 00100111 01110011 00100000 01100001 00100000 01101100 01101001 01100110 01100101 00100000 01100001 01101100 01110100 01100101 01110010 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01100001 01100010 01101001 01101100 01101001 01110100 01111001 00101110 00001101 00001010 01000011 01101000 01100001 01101110 01100111 01100101 00100000 01101101 01111001 00100000 01101101 01101001 01101110 01100100

I just want to throw out there for Javascript developers, async and await are the two best things to ever happen to promises.

I feel so dirty rn. Been struggling with webpack all day to just generate some pages based on the object a js script exports. The issue was that I needed a path to an image and the path webpack's require returned was a relative path (it started with a .), which wouldn't work because my generated page wasn't in the root folder. I tried making it work "the right way" all day, nothing worked. So in the end I just removed the . from the fucking path using substr and that's that.

Also, why the fuck does webpack's require return a fucking relative path anyway?

One week, and it turned out to be worse than that.

I was put on a project for a COVID-19 program in America (The CARES Act). The financial team came to us on Monday morning and said they need to give away a couple thousand dollars.

No big deal. All they wanted was a single form that people could submit with some critical info. Didn't need a login/ registration flow or anything. You could have basically used Google Forms for this project.

The project landed in my lap just before lunch on Monday morning. I was a junior in a team with a senior and another junior on standby. It was going to go live the next Monday.

The scope of the project made it seem like the one week deadline wasn't too awful. We just had to send some high priority emails to get some prod servers and app keys and we were fine.

Now is the time where I pause the rant to express to you just how fine we were decidedly **not**: we were not fine.

Tuesday rolls around and what a bad Tuesday it was. It was the first of many requirement changes. There was going to need to be a review process. Instead of the team just reading submissions from the site, they needed accept and reject buttons. They needed a way to deny people for specific reasons. Meaning the employee dashboard just got a little more complicated.

Wednesday came around and yeah, we need a registration and login flow. Yikes.

Thursday came and the couple-thousand dollars turned into a tens of millions. The amount of users we expected just blew up.

Friday, and they needed a way for users to edit their submissions and re-submit if they were rejected. And we needed to send out emails for the status of their applications.

Every day, a new meeting. Every meeting, new requirements that were devastating given our timeframe.

We put in overtime. Came in on the weekend. And by Monday, we had a form that users could submit and a registration/ login flow. No reviewer dashboard. We figured we could take in user input on time and then finish the dashboard later.

Well, financial team has some qualms. They wanted a more complicated review process. They wanted roles; managers assign to assistants. Assistants review assigned items.

The deadline that we worked so hard on whizzed by without so much as a thought, much less the funeral it deserved.

Then, they wanted multiple people to review an application before it was final. Then, they needed different landing pages for a few more departments to be able to review different steps of the applications.

Ended up going live on Friday, close to a month after that faithful Monday which disrupted everything else I was working on, effective immediately.

I don't know why, but we always go live on a Friday for some reason. It must be some sort of conspiracy to force overtime out of our managers. I'm baffled.

But I worked support after the launch.

And there's a funny story about support too: we were asked to create a "submit an issue" form. Me and the other junior worked on it on a wednesday three weeks into the project. Finished it. And the next day it was scrapped and moved to another service we already had running. Poor management like that plagued the project and worked in tandem with the dynamic and ridiculous requirements to make this project hell.

Back to support.

Phone calls give me bad anxiety. But Friday, just before lunch, I was put on the support team. Sure, we have a department that makes calls and deal with users. But they can't be trained on this program: it didn't exist just a month ago, and three days ago it worked differently (the slippery requirements never stopped).

So all of Friday and then all of Saturday and all of Monday (...) I had extended panic attacks calling hundreds of people. And the team that was calling people was only two people. We had over 400 tickets in the first two days.

And fuck me, stupid me, for doing a good job. Because I was put on the call team for **another** COVID project afterwards. I knew nothing about this project. I have hated my job recently. But I'm a junior. What am I gonna say, no?

Once we were going to present a web service to governmental firm. All is going well so far and my boss asks me to host the web application the day before the presentation.

I hosted it and all was good with demo production tests, but I had a bad feeling.

While it was running on our server, I also ran it locally with a reverse proxy just in case.

* Meeting starts *

* Ice broken and down to business *

"And now our developer will run the demo for you..."

* Run the demo from my laptop to double check --> 500 Internal Server Error *

Holy shit!!!

* Opens reverse proxy link on my laptop. Present demo during meeting. Demo works like a charm. *

Firm representative: "Great! Looking forward to go live."

*Our team walks out*

GM: "Good job guys"

ME: