I don't advocate low code solutions. But what Microsoft is doing with Power Fx is legit pretty cool.

If anything it would expose people to learn about proper development since the formulas can grow bigger than standard small Excel formulas while simultaneously exposing them to a declarative and functional style of coding. According to what I am seeing, and y'all correct me if I am wrong, but this seems to be made to let pro devs jump in and help with more complex code while at the same time exposing it to non devs in an easy way.

I kinda dig this one

Cleaned up my email and deleted 45k emails and unsubscribed from ~80+ services and added ~100+ filters to sort and auto-delete new emails. Now I have no unread messages.

Look, if I send you an email, don't just immediately ping me via IM to answer. I sent you an email because (a) I was too busy to chat in the first place, and (b) it wasn't a super-critical question requiring an immediate interaction. I was, in fact, trying to do YOU a favor by using a medium that almost by design doesn't dictate an instant reply. You basically defeated the entire purpose of me CHOOSING to send an email in the first place.

Yeah, I know, I should just be happy that you are a helpful person who respects me and so wanted to get to me ASAP rather than one of the dinguses that never answer anything... but I'm a dick too, so I'm not.

Honor the "Importance Code of the Communication Mechanisms", damn it!

TabError: inconsistent use of tabs and spaces in indentation

Me: *slams head against keyboard*

When I joined devRant 4 years ago, still in University, every other rant here seemed so high level.

Now that I'm in the industry for a little more tha. 2 years, every other rant seems University level xD

Hey everyone,

We have a few pieces of news we're very excited to share with everyone today. Apologies for the long post, but there's a lot to cover!

First, as some of you might have already seen, we just launched the "subscribed" tab in the devRant app on iOS and Android. This feature shows you a feed of the most recent rant posts, likes, and comments from all of the people you subscribe to. This activity feed is updated in real-time (although you have to manually refresh it right now), so you can quickly see the latest activity. Additionally, the feed also shows recommended users (based on your tastes) that you might want to subscribe to. We think both of these aspects of the feed will greatly improve the devRant content discovery experience.

This new feature leads directly into this next announcement. Tim (@trogus) and I just launched a public SaaS API service that powers the features above (and can power many more use-cases across recommendations and activity feeds, with more to come). The service is called Pipeless (https://pipeless.io) and it is currently live (beta), and we encourage everyone to check it out. All feedback is greatly appreciated. It is called Pipeless because it removes the need to create complicated pipelines to power features/algorithms, by instead utilizing the flexibility of graph databases.

Pipeless was born out of the years of experience Tim and I have had working on devRant and from the desire we've seen from the community to have more insight into our technology. One of my favorite (and earliest) devRant memories is from around when we launched, and we instantly had many questions from the community about what tech stack we were using. That interest is what encouraged us to create the "about" page in the app that gives an overview of what technologies we use for devRant.

Since launch, the biggest technology powering devRant has always been our graph database. It's been fun discussing that technology with many of you. Now, we're excited to bring this technology to everyone in the form of a very simple REST API that you can use to quickly build projects that include real-time recommendations and activity feeds. Tim and I are really looking forward to hopefully seeing members of the community make really cool and unique things with the API.

Pipeless has a free plan where you get 75,000 API calls/month and 75,000 items stored. We think this is a solid amount of calls/storage to test out and even build cool projects/features with the API. Additionally, as a thanks for continued support, for devRant++ subscribers who were subscribed before this announcement was posted, we will give some bonus calls/data storage. If you'd like that special bonus, you can just let me know in the comments (as long as your devRant email is the same as Pipeless account email) or feel free to email me (david@hexicallabs.com).

Lastly, and also related, we think Pipeless is going to help us fulfill one of the biggest pieces of feedback we’ve heard from the community. Now, it is going to be our goal to open source the various components of devRant. Although there’s been a few reasons stated in the past for why we haven’t done that, one of the biggest reasons was always the highly proprietary and complicated nature of our backend storage systems. But now, with Pipeless, it will allow us to start moving data there, and then everyone has access to the same system/technology that is powering the devRant backend. The first step for this transition was building the new “subscribed” feed completely on top of Pipeless. We will be following up with more details about this open sourcing effort soon, and we’re very excited for it and we think the community will be too.

Anyway, thank you for reading this and we are really looking forward to everyone’s feedback and seeing what members of the community create with the service. If you’re looking for a very simple way to get started, we have a full sample dataset (1 click to import!) with a tutorial that Tim put together (https://docs.pipeless.io/docs/...) and a full dev portal/documentation (https://docs.pipeless.io).

Let us know if you have any questions and thanks everyone!
- David & Tim (@dfox & @trogus)

almost everything work related. especially filtering a csv export file with a python executable to open a word serial letter to open a email for some entries with vba. or writing a js object file with vba from an excel 'database'. my proudness is ambivalent.

Well, after lurking in the dark for years, I finally created an account just so I could downvote a certain security related post.
However, I am lacking the necessary ++.
So a "hello, world!" with a sprinkle of rant it is:

Be me:
Show WIP Feature, state that it will be probably done by tomorrow, excluding time for peer review
Be my PM:
"Can we release this today?"

This happend so often that "Can we release this yesterday?" became a common phrase among my coworkers and me if someone is ranting about something broken in their feature. Probably gonna try using it here as well :D

Things I'm half decent at: Writing code
Things I am absolutely the worst at: Managing projects

Things I got employed for: Writing code
Things I do: Managing projects

Mark.

Mark was a support guy who could have been replaced by a robot. Nearly every support request that came in, whether it made sense or not, had a reply saying:

"Thank you for your query, I will escalate with the development team"

...and then I would have a message saying:

"Hi Almond urgent issue case xxx - I think you need to PLEASE CHECK LOGS" (yes, with that capitalisation.)

I'd then look at the case, take 10 seconds to work out the customer had done something stupid when calling our API (often forgetting their authentication details, despite a clear message telling them as such) and tell Mark what the issue was, and how to find it for himself next time. I'd then usually get:

"Thank you but PLEASE CHECK LOGS to see if there is any more info we can provide to customer"

...there would be more back and forth, and then eventually something like the following would reach the customer...

"Very sorry the development team have a major issue they will fix very soon but in the meantime a workaround is (instructions for using authentication details)"

🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

["hip", "hip"]

hip hip array

Damnit onion, this is a little on the nose. But hey, code complete is always worth reading.

https://theonion.com/hopefully-neig...

This is gonna be a long one....
A lesson I learnt the hard way - never go out of your way to help friends with their coding. I helped her always, sat with her on the phone and explained and taught and solved her problems for hourssss while delaying my own work, while losing my sleep, even during pregnancy, I helped somehow as much as was possible even when I was drowning in my own work, even when I’m was not okay myself. But, once in a while I am too full, I also have work, now I also have an infant to take care of as well, and yeah sometimes I CAN be too busy to help!!!!! I have my own life too!! At these times she says “oh you don’t help me anymore”. It’s so annoying seriously What the fuckkkkk and after this shit happened a few times, I expressed my annoyance and she says, oh it was a joke. But then repeated it. And I still feel bad in refusing to help when asked. But lesson learnt that I won’t put myself behind, I’ll help only when I have nothing else to do.

Just finished moving all my python code documenation from hand-written wikis to API docstrings and set it up to autodeploy to github pages with each commit. Feeling really hopeful about this, although its going to be frustrating going back to other languages that dont have inline docstrings.

"I need these permissions that J has"

J has those permissions because he worked on a different team that was granted those, you do not.

"I need it"

No

"I need it"

Its not within my power to allow you access, you have to talk with R and M.

"Okay well guess what I'm gonna escalate this up thr chain and its gonna come down on you"

*sigh* what do i do when i literally have no authority to give someone something and am clearly doing my jobb right, but someone thinks they can get me... idk... in trouble? Threaten me??? Logic, meet the window

I believe this was the last attempt I had at doing a project for this customer before I just stopped replying to emails. I cannot emphasise enough how brutal it was communicating with this person. This was years ago. I'll keep it simple:

Customer: "Yeah so we need this page to look *exactly* like this. I've attached a picture, and I'll need this done soon because we're running a newsletter campaign soon."

Me: "Alright, I'll have it done by the end of the week." (I paid a student to do it, their work was impressive, it looked *EXACTLY* like the picture, but was now a functional web page)

*end of week*

Customer: "This is too exact!! I was hoping you guys would have some creativity, and have it do this and that!"

Me: "You said exact, we made it exact. I can do additional work to it."

Customer: "Well, we're not paying for additional work!!"

I left it at that.

Losing weight (in the particular - belly fat) has an adverse impact on my WFH experience :( I can no longer lay on my back with my legs bent and have my lappy rest on my belly comfortably...

I can't reach the touchpad any more as it's now hiding behind my ribcage :(

I didn't think this through. damn it!

This is how I feel most of my client proposal start:

* It's simple, I'd like to re-invent <the wheel>.

* All I want to do is use <rocketship engine> on <old typewriter>.

* I'm too cheap to hire a full-time < DBA, DevOps engineer, development team>. Can I pay you pennies?

* I'm poor and broke, can you do this for free?

* I'd like to <commit illegal act> and be <legal compliant standard>.

* I heard it was possible to <fly 30 people to the moon> using <Ford Model-T>. Please do this for us.

* I <sold my house>, but now <I'm locked out by the new owners>. Please help.

Focus stealing - it winds me up more than is probably reasonable.

I'm there, typing away in my text entry UI widget of choice, purposefully entering text to do some thing as expediently as possible and then... oh, well I'm not any more, am I?

No, because some other window has decided that it needs the keyboard focus for usually no reason whatsoever, other than poor programming manners. Sometimes the same app will keep stealing the focus - oi, mate, I was typing over here? Could you not get the current focus and see that I'm busy?

This happens in chrome's dev tools _a lot_ but dev tools needs a rant all of its own.

So, a few years ago I was working at a small state government department. After we has suffered a major development infrastructure outage (another story), I was so outspoken about what a shitty job the infrastructure vendor was doing, the IT Director put me in charge of managing the environment and the vendor, even though I was actually a software architect.
Anyway, a year later, we get a new project manager, and she decides that she needs to bring in a new team of contract developers because she doesn't trust us incumbents.
They develop a new application, but won't use our test team, insisting that their "BA" can do the testing themselves.
Finally it goes into production.
And crashes on Day 1. And keeps crashing.
Its the infrastructure goes out the cry from her office, do something about it!
I check the logs, can find nothing wrong, just this application keeps crashing.
I and another dev ask for the source code so that we can see if we can help find their bug, but we are told in no uncertain terms that there is no bug, they don't need any help, and we must focus on fixing the hardware issue.
After a couple of days of this, she called a meeting, all the PMs, the whole of the other project team, and me and my mate. And she starts laying into us about how we are letting them all down.
We insist that they have a bug, they insist that they can't have a bug because "it's been tested".
This ends up in a shouting match when my mate lost his cool with her.
So, we went back to our desks, got the exe and the pdb files (yes, they had published debug info to production), and reverse engineered it back to C# source, and then started looking through it.
Around midnight, we spotted the bug.
We took it to them the next morning, and it was like "Oh". When we asked how they could have tested it, they said, ah, well, we didn't actually test that function as we didn't think it would be used much....
What happened after that?
Not a happy ending. Six months later the IT Director retires and she gets shoed in as the new IT Director and then starts a bullying campaign against the two of us until we quit.

Interviewer asked me how to find the best move in Tic Tac Toe game.

We discussed several ideas and ended up playing Tic Tac Toe for nearly 10 minutes.

It turns out HR was keeping an eye and they had to interrupt.

I was straight out of uni so I didn't mind recruiters getting in touch, I just wanted a job.

The whole conversation was just generally awkward, it was just as if he hated his job, being there, and me. He had a wordpress project lined up which I was extremely ambivalent about, but I didn't want to rule anything out. We talked about my experiences with VueJS, React, material styling, how I had done a project which is live in production more or less solo fullstack, and some of my side projects.

He nods knowingly through it all while taking notes, before asking if I had heard of javascript or if I'd be willing to look at it until next time.

That's when you just get struck with this sense of "what can I do to leave this room as soon as possible without making a scene".

It's official. I'm making multiplayer Minesweeper.

There's a Trello board, Discord server, and GitHub repo.

Initial gamemodes will be singleplayer, public (like agar.io) and vs (2+ players, support for teams is planned).

My big idea besides that is to have interesting powerups you can buy or find, adding a component of luck and some exciting new rules to the game.

And I may even put ads on it and try to feed myself.

XML.

That's it that's the rant.

More adventures in fixing specs.

This particular failing spec is in an included spec helper; I cannot run the spec itself because rubymine is stupid and doesn't know how. Not kidding. I also don't know the codepath it's actually testing because it's fucking convoluted, so I need (rather: want) a debugger to progress. I put breakpoints everywhere I thought it could be, and... nothing.

The stacktrace shows the calling spec in the helper module, a generic `process` method that just calls `super` (from where? who knows!), and a `wrap_every_action` in the ApplicationController. in other words: absolutely nothing helpful. I stepped through the code for most of an hour and didn't get anywhere; just saw lots of rails internals.

ugh,

I'm going to keep bashing my head against this, but what the fuck, why can't you give me something goddamn useful!?

Would you like to smile for 10 seconds? Read this short story:
*Story begins*
During World War II, numerous fighter planes were getting hit by anti-aircraft guns. Air Force officers wanted to add some protective armour/shield to the planes.
The question was "where"?
The planes could only support few more kilos of weight. Mathematicians were called for a short consulting project.
Fighter planes returning from missions were analysed for bullet holes per square foot.
They found 1.93 bullet holes/sq. foot near the tail of planes whereas only 1.11 bullet holes/sq. foot close to the engine.
The officers thought that since the tail portion had the greatest density of bullets, it would be the logical location for putting an anti-bullet shield.
A mathematician said exactly the opposite; more protection is needed where the bullet holes aren't - that is -around the engines.
His judgement surprised everyone. He said "He said We are counting the planes that returned from a mission. Planes with lots of bullet holes in the engine did not return at all".

Moral: Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts.

Source: From the book -
"How Not To Be Wrong", by Jordan Ellenberg.

I had a short gig for a startup where I was meant to migrate the entire backend to serverless. It was my first time learning what serverless was and I had just been working on the app for around 2-3 weeks.

Boss rolls in with his leased Tesla and sort of hints at me being finished with a certain area by the next day, giving me a wink as if he's just trying to motivate me to keep on struggling.

Turns out he decided that he wanted a fully fledged demo and went off on me because I hadn't finished migrating the UI for that certain section (just the backend). I decided that there were better things to work on while I was at it migrating the backend. Had I known that he expected some form of fancy demo, maybe I would have done things differently.

He then proceeded by letting me know that he could have finished my work in half the time it took me and decided to remind me that I had a probationary employment. I left the company two weeks later and the app never got released.

When I say I'm in "DevOps" what I really mean is that I'm a full-stack engineer, DBA, system administrator, security engineer, auditor, cloud custodian, cost optimization expert, and everything else that doesn't get its own dedicated staff member here. Pretty much the catch all between developers and customer.

Hey guys!
Just joined devRant! Can't wait to get more involved!
Bored in the lockdown, I built an app which lets you chat with people around you.
Its called Cyrcl!
Built in over ~40 days, I was the sole developer.
Here is the tech stack - React native for the android and ios apps, mongodb and redis for the database, nodejs for the server and aws ec2 for the hosting!
I'd love to get some feedback, or discuss some of the hacks!
- Ardy

Prod was down for 15 minutes due to failed DB connection attempts. Contacted DBA after the fact for an explanation. Response: We don't know, but it was probably temporary.

You think?????