"I keep telling you, I'm not a pilot"
"and I keep telling you, you fly boys crack me up!"

I'm not a developer, but I'm doing some complex things and I need the benefit of computers to work things out, so I know enough programming to get me by. Recently one of the uppers decided that all the amateur spaghetti python programs I'd quickly slapped together should be developed into tools that the clients engineers can use!

"How long do you need!."
" I have no idea how to make something like that",
"but it's all just maths right! you can figure it out",
"probably, given long enough bu.. "
"okay get started and we'll check in in a couple of weeks" "hold o.." "I'll give your pride and joy to the graduate to fuck up while you're working on that" "wai.. " "anyway got take this call, good luck"
┗|｀O′|┛

So here I am.. I have no idea what I'm doing.

So since I have a working knowledge of python, fortran and VBA, someone suggested I learn nim, which was not what he sold it as. Then a software engineer that went to the same uni as me, suggested RUST! you can't mess up rust, and look at this I created (shows me a decent looking desktop application) "I'll help you out". But it wasn't really that easy.

Then I asked some questions... that was my first mistake, that's not acceptable until you know what you're doing apparently. Especially when the answers are in the docs you can't find in a topic you don't understand for a version you're not using solved with a tool you've never heard of for an operating system you forgot existed. Look at this moron asking a question.

Okay to be fair, I went through the rust docs and it was well written, and I do really like this language. But I do not have a degree in computer science, and so many docs for crates are just written with an expectation of a certain level of knowledge. As soon as there's a build error, it's at least 3 -4 days of me faffing about trying to decipher hieroglyphics.

..and the graduate is about to unwittingly commit manslaughter..

I'm sure whoever needs to fix this mess in the future will post a rant about this train wreck.

So rewind back about 24 years. I was a little kid who thought computers were the coolest thing evar, and our family had just gotten our first machine (a monstrous tower from a company named CyberMax, running Win 3.11 on DOS 6, 33MHz and a 250MB hard drive).

My aunt (big into coding at the time) came by with a box full of disks and loaded the machine up with all kinds of games and fun stuff. One of the thing she installed was Hoyle Classic Card Games (https://playclassic.games/games/...)

My parents fell in love with this and played it for hours. The problem was, the process to get it started, while not complicated, was still a pain in the ass. You had to either hammer F6 to get the startup menu and type a bunch of commands to switch to the directory and start the game, or let it boot into windows, then leave windows for DOS and do the same thing.

On a lark, when we had gotten the machine, mom had also bought this little dos programming handbook. I can't find it nowadays, but it went into very exhaustive detail on the cool things you could do with batch files. I was a voracious reader, especially on anything to do with computers, and one of the things the book covered was how to write startup menus using the CHOICE command! Little me figured out that you could write this into the AUTOEXEC.bat, and have a menu come up on every start!

It took me a couple days of piddling around (again, I was like 6 or 7, and this was the first "program" I'd ever written), but I eventually got it to the point where you'd turn the computer on, and the first thing it would do is ask if you wanted to go into windows, or if you wanted to play cards. I was proud as hell when this was set up and working!

I didn't do much writing of programs since then (I was more interested in games at the time), but yeaaaarrrs later, I encountered Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby, fell in love, and I've been hacking code ever since

Ffs, HOW!?!? Fuck! I need to get this rotten bs out.

RDS at its max capabilities from the top shelf, works OK until you scale it down and back up again. Code is the same, data is the same, load is the same, even the kitchen sink is the same, ffs, EVERYTHING is the same! Except the aws-managed db is torn down and created anew. From the SAME snapshots! But the db decides to stop performing - io tpt is shit, concurrency goes through the roof.

Re-scale it a few more times and the performance gets back to normal.

And aws folks are no better. Girish comes - says we have to optimize our queries. Rajesh comes - we are hitting the iops limit. Ankur comes - you're out of cpu. Vinod thinks it's gotta be the application to blame.

Come on guys, you are a complete waste of time for a premium fucking support!

Not to mention that 2 enhanced monitoring graphs show anythung but the read throughput.

Ffs, Amazon, even my 12yo netbook is more predictable than your enterprise paas! And that support..... BS!

We're now down to troubleshooting aws perf issues rather than our client's....

Today my manager asked me about my research into using RabbitMQ as a backup in case Azure Service Bus ever goes down.

Me: "Good. The way we designed the framework, all we have to do is drop the DLLs into the directory, update the config, and the services will start using RabbitMQ."
Mgr: "Excellent. Probably should be looking into using RabbitMQ as a permanent replacement for Azure"
Me: "What? The whole reason we moved to Azure was to eliminate the problems with having an on prem service bus. Since we've switched, there has been zero downtime."
Mgr: "That's what VP-Joe is afraid of. If Azure ever goes down, he won't know how to explain Azure to the president as to why we're not taking orders or can't ship packages."
Me: "That makes no sense. What did VP-Joe tell the president when a database goes down or a server mis-configuration?"
Mgr: "President understands internal outages, its just the whole 'cloud' thing he doesn't understand."
Me: "Um..then VP-Joe needs to explain it to him?"
Mgr: "The decision has already been made. Are you on board? Lets look at this move as a cost savings."
Me: "You mean the $10 a month? How much hardware will we need to support RabbitMQ?"
Mgr: "Yea, nobody probably thought of that."
Me: "I'm on board with whatever decision, but I'd like a little more than VP-Joe being afraid of the president."
Mgr: "I'm sure its not being afraid."
Me: "..."
Mgr: "OK, lets wait and see if VP-Joe forgets about this and moves on to something new."

Today I have encountered some interesting piece of code:
In order to make a button disabled, the text of that button is assigned a grey color.
And in the click handler, there is a check if the color of the text of that button is grey, then return from it and do nothing.

That might be the ugliest hack that I had ever encountered 😆

Did you know 8.8.8.8 has a TXT Record to xkcd?

The real way struct fields should be organized. So satisfying 😍

Person at work, staring at my keyboard: How much was it?
Me: The keyboard? Oh it's a cheap one for around $30.
Person: Huh... I'll never get you rich boys and your fads.

Well, I don't fucking judge you for your $600 phone, or your $80 shoes or shirts, you cuntwaffle. Fuckin' asshole has the face of a horse's left testicle, is always on his phone, which is arguably fine since he's not a dev but still fuck him, and has the gall to call me bringing my mechanical keyboard to work a 'rich fad'. Oh, that's rich coming from you. Ever seen your ugly mug in your undeserved branded clothing, you unloved, shit-gobbling piece of shit?

"You type so loud." And you breathe too loud but I don't tell you to stop but maybe I ought to.

Go suck on your daddy-uncle's chode for a couple more bucks and stop hanging around me, you judgemental cum-snorting piece of shit.

P.s. it's a cheap keyboard with blue switches but the office is normally noisy and busy enough that no one gives a shit about it. Planning on buying an Anne Pro sometime next month.

So I was asked to help migrate an application to AWS, asked for the codebase. Received a GitHub link in my mail (Usually is a zip file). Satisfied I open the link to see a repo with a hundred zip files time-stamped with version numbers

WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE?

Me: double taps a rant to upvote.

Popup: Hint. You can double tap a rant to upvote.

Umm, sure. Thanks..

Looking around the directory, i noticed these log files.
He sure have a rough time testing it.

Apologies if my work station is running on Windows.

How do you eat an elepant?
One small bits at a time.

My manager doesn't get it.

If you hold a Unix shell up to your ear you can hear the C.

My friend said "I googled it on duck duck go"

Me: Dude what?

------------ Programmer's Fact -----------

The root is at the top of the Tree🌳.

.

YOUR MAMA SO FAT SHE CAN'T STORE FILES LARGER THAN 4 GB.

I'll show myself out.

I'm currently tired, stressed, anguish and frustrated.

I have a live issue(a bug to hot fix asap), 7 files to reprocess to be finished by tomorow, 2 enhancements( 1 under pre-live testing, 1 for live release), and an unstable internet connection today. Tomorrow is saturday. Clock is ticking.

How am i suppose to finish everything on time? :(

And also the education loan

I think I've shown in my past rants and comments that I'm pretty experienced. Looking back though, I was really fucking stupid. Since I haven't posted a rant yet on the weekly topics, I figure I would share this humbling little gem.

Way back in the ancient era known as 2009, I was working my first desk job as a "web designer". Apparently the owner of this company didn't know the difference between "designer", which I'm not, and "developer", which I am, nor the responsibilities of each role.

It was a shitty job paying $12/hour. It was such a nightmare to work at. I guess the silver lining is that this company now no longer exists as it was because of my mistake, but it was definitely a learning experience I hold in high regard even today. Okay, enough filler...

I was told to wipe the Dev server in order to start fresh and set up an entirely new distro of Linux. I was to swap out the drives with whatever was available from the non-production machines, set up the RAID 5 array and route it through the router and firewall, as we needed to bring this Dev server online to allow clients to monitor the work. I had no idea what any of this meant, but I was expected to learn it that day because the next day I would be commencing with the task.

Astonishingly, I managed to set up the server and everything worked great! I got a pat on the back and the boss offered me a 4 day weekend with pay to get some R&R. I decided to take the time to go camping. I let him know I would be out of town and possibly unreachable because of cell service, to which he said no problem.

Tuesday afternoon I walked into work and noticed two of the field techs messing with the Dev server I built. One was holding a drive while the other was holding a clipboard. I was immediately called into the boss's office.

He told me the drives on the production server failed during the weekend, resulting in the loss of the data. He then asked me where I got the drives from for the Dev server upgrade. I told him that they came from one of the inactive systems on the shelf. What he told me next through the deafening screams rendered me speechless.

I had gutted the drives from our backup server that was just set up the week prior. Every Friday at midnight, it would turn on through a remote power switch on a schedule, then the system would boot and proceed to copy over the production server's files into an archive for that night and shutdown when it completed. Well, that last Friday night/Saturday morning, the machine kicked on, but guess what didn't happen? The files weren't copied. Not only were they not copied, but the existing files that got backed up previously we're gone. Why? Because I wiped those drives when I put them into the Dev server.

I would up quitting because the conversation was very hostile and I couldn't deal with it. The next week, I was served with a suit for damages to this company. Long story short, the employer was found in the wrong from emails I saved of him giving me the task and not once stating that machine was excluded in the inactive machines I could salvage drives from. The company sued me because they were being sued by a client, whose entire company presence was hosted by us and we lost the data. In total just shy of 1TB of data was lost, all because of my mistake. The company filed for bankruptcy as a result of the lawsuit against them and someone bought the company name and location, putting my boss and its employees out of a job.

If there's one lesson I have learned that I take with the utmost respect to even this day, it's this: Know your infrastructure front to back before you change it, especially when it comes to data.

Not a rant but Ubuntu Mate 18.04 is Freaking Awesome!

Client : pls put the disclaimer that the site uses cookies.
Me: but we don't use cookies this is a static page
Client: Still, the pop up makes the site look more professional, kindly add the feature asap
Me: :/

Owner of company I freelance for: I need you to find out what CMS [website] is running in.

[Checking...]

Me: It's running in Drupal

Owner: Prove to me that it's running in Drupal, because she's saying you're wrong.

Me: Who the hell is "she"?

Owner: The boss over at [PR Company we do work for]

Me: Is she a developer?

Owner: No, of course not. She barely knows how to run a computer.

Me: Then tell I said it's running in Drupal, and if she wants proof, tell her I'm the developer she has begged to fix two other failing projects and I have delivered both times ahead of schedule.

Owner: If you don't show me proof, I'll fire you. I don't need attitude from my employees.

Me: A.) I'm not your employee, you are my client. I don't clock in for you and you don't withhold taxes from my pay. B.) If that's how you want to be, tell her to use terminal and cURL the website for the response header, as well as cross-reference folder structure for CSS/JS file inclusion to show it's running in Drupal.

Owner: What the fuck is terminal?

Me: If you don't know what terminal is, neither will she, meaning you have no business telling me how to do my job. Stick with assigning me tasks and let me use my expertise to get them done. Micromanaging need not apply here, mmm'kay pumpkin?

Owner: You sure are grouchy today.

Me: Yep...

Temporary coworker with 10+ years experience, working on C++ codebase with me since 3 months, just asked me what the continue-statement in C/C++ does.

That must be either a sign of an upcoming apocalypse, or me being heavily underpaid.

Keeping up with new JS frameworks is like keeping up with celebrity gossip. It really isn't useful on it's own but you can talk to other people about it and be perceived as woke.

I was starting a new job and asked if developers had a choice between a PC, Linux or a Mac. I didn't get a response so I sent an e-mail saying I'd prefer a PC/Linux if that was allowed, or a PC/Windows. First day I get a Mac. Boss says something about how you have to have a Mac to develop on; the company doesn't have good Windows laptops with 16GB of ram.

I really do not like macOS. I wouldn't care if it wasn't for the fact that for the past three jobs, I have always been able to use a Linux machine at work (since 2012). So over the weekend I got it dual booting. It was not easy. Apple's hardware is fucking awful. The keyboard, mouse and bluetooth are all connected to the serial bus.

I got it all working though, at least well enough for my job. It feels so good to have a tiling window manager. (I know Mac does have some now, but I really love i3). I made a guide in case another developer finds themselves in my spot:

https://penguindreams.org/images/...

TL;DR: One of my coworkers is a genius engineer and doesn't get as much recognition as he deserves, whereas another extremely mediocre engineer on the team gets praised for his crappy applications.

We have one engineer on our team (let's call him Hank) who started with me at the company when we were interns, and man is he a freaking genius. I swear, you could give this guy any language/library/framework, and he'll be fluent in it in less than a week. He's singlehandedly written two of our most complex applications by himself, and has a great sense of UX as well. All of his apps look fantastic.

The problem is, I feel like he doesn't get anywhere near as much recognition as he should. I try to talk him up to our manager, and our manager knows that Hank is smart, but he also overlooks him for promotions and praise because he's a little spacey (he's got quite the case of ADD) and doesn't speak up very often. He's got trouble focusing sometimes, but when he's in the zone, he can write an exponentially better and more complex application in 2 days than some of our other engineers can do in 4 months.

For example, we have another engineer on our team (let's call him Phil,) and the entire team has their heads so far up Phil's butt that I'm surprised they haven't suffocated yet. Don't get me wrong, he's a smart guy. He's great with the more basic aspects of our job, but when it comes to writing an application, he has no idea what he's doing, and he takes months to write something that should have taken him days. Then when he finally releases it, it's riddled with bugs. But everybody praises and bows down to him for it. "Oh Phil, this app is amazing. You're a genius, you deserve to be a Lead." Then we have Hank sitting quietly at his desk, banging out his 3rd big application of the month, and people say "Eh, nobody's going to use those apps anyway. He's wasting time." And I'm standing there thinking, "You asshats, we already have a solution for the app that Phil wrote, and the entire company is already using it. It's exponentially better, why did you let him waste time writing this when there's already an existing solution?!"

Oh well, I hope Hank gets some recognition soon. He certainly deserves it.