There once was a bright young engineer who was hired by a company to design their new light ship.
Like 50 seconds after getting inside the company, the engineer was approached by a douchebag in a business suite.
"Hey, can you make us a mock up of the ship's design in the next hour or so? Nothing fancy, it must be very simple! To not overcomplicate it! Just a simple mock up so we can all see what are we talking about in this project! Please do not overthink this!"
The engineer, young and naive, just folded some piece of paper and gave the douchebag a paper boat.
"Fantastic! That's all we need for the presentation for the investors!"
A couple hours later the suite was back screaming.
"YOUR FUCKING FARSE! YOUR SHITTY SHIP EMBARRASED US ALL! THE VERY MOMENT OUR CEO TRIED TO STEP ON IT IT SANK! YOU ARE FIRED AND WE WILL SUE YOU FOR INCOMPETENCE! I ASKED YOU SOMETHING SIMPLE AND YOU CAME UP WITH THIS OVER ENGINEERED PIECE OF CRAP, YOU SON OF A.. [many, maaany expletives suppressed for brevity sake]"

This is how I feel everytime someone asks for "a tiny change" or some "very simple solution".
If it was so simple that it could be done in such short notice, than why the fuck do it at all, instead of buying it? I heard people sell all sorts of things in the internet nowadays. Software fucking included.

Today I discovered that we have a CSV export button for an order transaction system, on a page which is completely disconnected from the rest of the website.

It is only being called by an internal server, used by our Data department.

They run selenium to click the button.

Then they import the CSV into a database.

That database is accessed by an admin panel.

That admin panel has an excel export button.

Which is clicked by our CFO. But he got bored of clicking, so he uses IFTTT to schedule a download of the XLS and import it in Google Sheets.

That sheet uses a Salesforce data connector.

Marketing then sends email campaigns based on that Salesforce data...

😒

I was hired as a senior software engineer. During handover I found out I'm actually replacing the CTO.

I queried why he was leaving and got a simple "just want a break from working" which I found odd.

Fast forward and now I also just want a break from work, permanently. This place has followed every bad practise and big no-no out there. Every bit of software is a built in house knockoff janky piece of crap that doesn't work and makes people's jobs 5000 times harder.

The UI looks worse than Windows 3.1, absolutely horrendous code formatting, worst database structure I've ever seen.

The mere mention of using a team communication tool results in being yelled at from the CEO whom communicates purely via email, who then gets annoyed when you don't reply because they sent the email to a client instead of you.

We get handed printed out "tickets" to work instead of the so called "amazing in house ticket system" built using PHP 5 and is literally crammed into an 800x600 IFrame. Yes a F$*#ing IFRAME!

It's not like we have an outdated TFS server that has work items we can use...

Why not push for changes you say. I have, many times, tried to suggest better tools. The only approval I've gotten is using PhpStorm. Everything else is shutdown immediately and you get the silent treatment.

The CEO hired me to do a job, then micromanages like crazy. I can't make UI changes, I can't make database changes, why? They insists they know best, but has admitted multiple times to not knowing SQL and literally uses a drag and drop database table builder.

Every page in the webapps we make are crammed into 800x600 iframes with more iframes inside iframes. And every time it's pointed out we need to do something, be it from internal staff or client suggestions, the CEO goes off about how the UI is industry leading and follows standards.. what in the actual f....

Literally holding on by a thread here. Why hire a CTO under the guise of being a senior developer but then reduce the work that can be done down to the level of a junior?

Sure the paycheck is really nice but no job is worth the stress, harassment and incompetent leadership from the CEO.

They've verbally abused people to the point they resign, best part is that was simply because the CEO made serious legal mistakes, was told about it by the employee then blamed it on others.

Since I think last update I can't start the entire project via docker's GUI because it can't handle WSL paths - but I still can turn on each containerone by one.

I was working in a manufacturing facility where I had hundreds of industrial computers and printers that were between 0 and 20 years old. They were running on their own clean network so that someone has to be in the manufacturing network to access them. The boss announced that the executives will be pushing a “zero trust” security model because they need IoT devices. I told him “A computer running Windows 98 can’t be on the same VLAN as office computers. We can’t harden most of the systems or patch the vulnerabilities. We also can’t reprogram all of the devices to communicate using TLS or encrypt communications.“ Executives got offended that I would even question the decision and be so vocal about it. They hired a team to remove the network hardware and told me that I was overreacting. All of our system support was contracted to India so I was going to be the on-site support person.

They moved all the manufacturing devices to the office network. Then the attacks started. Printers dumped thousands of pages of memes. Ransomware shut down manufacturing computers. Our central database had someone change a serial number for a product to “hello world” and that device got shipped to a customer. SharePoint was attacked in many many ways. VNC servers were running on most computers and occasionally I would see someone remotely poking around and I knew it wasn’t from our team because we were all there.

I bought a case of cheap consumer routers and used them in manufacturing cells to block port traffic. I used Kali on an old computer to scan and patch network vulnerabilities daily.

The worst part was executives didn’t “believe” that there were security incidents. You don’t believe in what you don’t understand right?

After 8 months of responding to security incident after security incident I quit to avoid burning out. This is a company that manufactures and sells devices to big companies like apple and google to install in their network. This isn’t an insignificant company. Security negligence on a level I get angry thinking about.

Great systemctl isn't supported in Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)....just great.

Thought this was funny, thought I’d share.

Most Softwares is written like an onion.
the more layers you peel off, the more you want to cry

You know what I hate? Websites that run so much scripted internet-connected shit in the background that you'll either get a fat error message or even a "failed to load site" screen from the browser if you lose the connection for a few seconds.

What's the motherfucking point of a website when its requirements make it effectively a livestreaming service, despite the content being less dynamic than Zuckerberg's face in US congress?

I don't give a shit whether I have internet when I'm fucking reading, you asshats. And you don't need to remind me when my internet connection is disrupted, I think I'll notice that by myself the next time I click on something and your garbage site will take more than the usual 5 seconds to fucking load the background color.

I have to build a database migration that generates user handles. The user handles are unique within an organization. The user can change them. The auto generated handles are either the first name + last name, or the business name depending on which user type it is. Unless it would be a duplicate. Duplicates auto increment if the handle is taken. The character limit for a user handle is the same length as first name plus last name so I have to check for possible overflow if I add digits. I also have to see if the generated name is in the DB already because a user could have custom entered the result of the auto generation.

This has to be programmed async. The DB driver is using a transaction but multiple calls have to be made to check if the generated handle exists for that organization. Also I have to check the migration script itself for possible duplicates. 3/4 of the users have a handle and with the scale there will definitely be duplicate names.

My idea is if there is a collision, use a UUID and let the users pick something nicer next time they log in. Business says “Reeeeeee!!!! The users shouldn’t see a UUID!!! You can do this!!!” Absurd uniqueness requirements. Absurd backfill procedure. Absurd business rules.

So a few months ago I started dating. I love my girlfriend with all my heart, but something has been bothering me a bit. I can no longer easily do my day-to-day work. Whereas previously I would be productive at any time I want, now it's more of a "I can work whenever she wants to work". It's hard to balance and even harder to actually get to it.

Previously I would stay with her during the day, and then wake up in the night to do all the household chores, learn her language and if I can get to it, even improve some of my shitty code. Needless to say, she didn't like that I didn't sleep with her and it's not exactly healthy either - I barely slept at all.

How do you balance work/relationship without throwing sleep time in the mix? Both work and girlfriend are at home for me.

Luck, grinding leetcode and using the hottest buzzwords in your resume to spark recruiters. Or having Yale in your resume in spite of your major being deer fecal biology and a minor in chemical analysis of deer semen (with doctoral experience in manual extraction of semenical fluid from bucks during rutting season...and no it doesn’t count as beastiality bc it’s science and it’s an Ivy League study so it’s a-ok)

Standby... We are checking your browser.

Me:

Every single diagramming tool.

All the SaaS ones are either way too limited in function, or proprietary vendor-locked.

All the FOSS/desktop ones have a 90s UX experience.

I really want to make a great, comfortable-to-use diagramming tool which just directly uses SVG as the file format, but without the "FUCK IT DOESNT ALIGN CORRECTLY AND WHY IS THIS ARROW BEHIND THE REST" experience...

But I know deep down that it's hard work, and I'll probably get stuck delivering the gazillionth lackluster, bugged diagramming app.

Microsoft Fucking Sharepoint for development

Just a regular Indian street.

Notice something in the lower right corner?

18000 duplicate lines that were manually copy pasted by the previous programmer.

I replaced them with a for loop.

I don’t think it was that hard…

On my former job we once bought a competing company that was failing.

Not for the code but for their customers.

But to make the transition easy we needed to understand their code and database to make a migration script.

And that was a real deep dive.

Their system was built on top of a home grown platform intended to let customers design their own business flows which meant it contained solutions for forms and workflow path design. But that never hit of so instead they used their own platform to design a new system for a more specific purpose.

This required some extra functionality and had it been for their customers to use that functionality would have been added to the platform.

But since they had given up on that they took an easy route and started adding direct references between the code and the configuration.

That is, in the configuration they added explicit class names and method names to be used as data store or for actions.

This was of cause never documented in any way.

And it also was a big contributing cause to their downfall as they hit a complexity they could not handle.

Even the slightest change required synchronizing between the config in the db and the compiled code, which meant you could not see mistakes in compilation but only by trying out every form and action that touched what you changed.

And without documentation or search tools that also meant that no one new could work the code, you had to know what used what to make any changes.

Luckily for us we mostly only needed to understand the storage in the database but even that took about a month to map out WITH the help of their developer ;)

It was not only the “inner platform” it was abusing and breaking the inner platform in more was I can count.

If you are going down the inner platform, at least make sure you go all the way and build it as if it was for the customers, then you at least keep it consistent and keep a clear border between platform and how it is used.

Every design change in windows 11:
- All that could have been achieved in win 10 with an update 🙂

Every new feature in windows 11:
- All that could have been achieved in win 10 with an update 🙂

Just another way to trash our older PCs. Planned obsolescence.

Google said, free forever photo storage, takes it back.
Microsoft said, last verison of windows 'll be the 10, takes it back.

😊 Everything's friking nice.

........

I always fall for it ...

!dev

So after 5 months of complaining and ISP denying that the modem was at fault for the issues ("because they'd get more complaints if it was") while trying to rip us off as well[1], they finally gave in to sending us one of the modems "intended for their business users"[2].

Low and behold... I haven't had any issues yet in the past few days (as opposed to having issues between 3 and 8 times a day).
Nah lads, surely wasn't the piece of shit old modem that is known to have a severe design flaw right? :^)
Must have been my router and devices behind it right? :^)

References:
1: https://devrant.com/rants/4378988/...
2: https://devrant.com/rants/4399477/...

"read the code" he said
"all the requirements and business process is in there"

Knok knok...who is there...................
VB6

This is how 1 Gbit/s internet looks like here in Russia. It’s amazingly stable and it costs $4/mo

The Onedrive Experience

!dev

Last year, we got a new DOCSIS modem from our ISP (Puma6-chipset, nuff said, not allowed to replace it with a proper one).
With this replacement modem came a splitter (to split internet signals from TV signals), keep this in mind for later.
It worked alright for a while, but fast forward to last Januari, our internet started acting up because the modem kept randomly rebooting.

So we had 3 maintenance workers come by already.
The first one replaced the wallplug.
The second one replaced the wallplug, saying that the previous maintenance worker did a shit job.
The third one replaced the splitter.

Now, later that evening, we got an email... stating that the costs would be 50 euro...
Ehm... what?

So I went to contact their customer servers and they said "but the splitter is part of the indoor installation. So if this splitter causes a malfunction, the maintenance worker will charge you for the visit".

So these fucking assholes give me a defective splitter and charge us to have it replaced?
They can suck my big black.

Still going on with the dispute now because that is some top level bullshit.
"What if it wasn't the fault of the splitter? Am I gonna get my money back?"

I shall single handedly increase the market price of freelance labor by going full on suicide squad.

I AM SO FUCKING HAPPY!

Just had an interview and it went fucking awesome!

At some point we just talked about games like Cyberpunk and Minecraft with the developers.

Can't wait to work there!

Fuck my ISP....
Can't access my PC via SSH/nor my website! Fuck Dual NAT🤦

Dear Product Owners,

If you tell me how I need to architect my software again I'm going to ask you to provide a network topology of the architecture you want me to build.

I'll also need you to request the new servers, work with the ops teams to setup credentials, provision the NAT, register the domains and document the routes that the proxy will need to use.

then I'll need you to hook the repo up to our non-existent pipeline so that I can make sure I won't do all that testing I already can't do.

I hope you're paying attention, because that framework you told me I needed to use is going to be a pain to setup correctly.

after you're done with that, please attach any documentation you shit out to the ticket you never created.

Enragedly yours,
Looking for a new job

PS: get fucked