!rant

After over 20 years as a Software Engineer, Architect, and Manager, I want to pass along some unsolicited advice to junior developers either because I grew through it, or I've had to deal with developers who behaved poorly:

1) Your ego will hurt you FAR more than your junior coding skills. Nobody expects you to be the best early in your career, so don't act like you are.

2) Working independently is a must. It's okay to ask questions, but ask sparingly. Remember, mid and senior level guys need to focus just as much as you do, so before interrupting them, exhaust your resources (Google, Stack Overflow, books, etc..)

3) Working code != good code. You are an author. Write your code so that it can be read. Accept criticism that may seem trivial such as renaming a variable or method. If someone is suggesting it, it's because they didn't know what it did without further investigation.

4) Ask for peer reviews and LISTEN to the critique. Even after 20+ years, I send my code to more junior developers and often get good corrections sent back. (remember the ego thing from tip #1?) Even if they have no critiques for me, sometimes they will see a technique I used and learn from that. Peer reviews are win-win-win.

5) When in doubt, do NOT BS your way out. Refer to someone who knows, or offer to get back to them. Often times, persons other than engineers will take what you said as gospel. If that later turns out to be wrong, a bunch of people will have to get involved to clean up the expectations.

6) Slow down in order to speed up. Always start a task by thinking about the very high level use cases, then slowly work through your logic to achieve that. Rushing to complete, even for senior engineers, usually means less-than-ideal code that somebody will have to maintain.

7) Write documentation, always! Even if your company doesn't take documentation seriously, other engineers will remember how well documented your code is, and they will appreciate you for it/think of you next time that sweet job opens up.

8) Good code is important, but good impressions are better. I have code that is the most embarrassing crap ever still in production to this day. People don't think of me as "that shitty developer who wrote that ugly ass code that one time a decade ago," They think of me as "that developer who was fun to work with and busted his ass." Because of that, I've never been unemployed for more than a day. It's critical to have a good network and good references.

9) Don't shy away from the unknown. It's easy to hope somebody else picks up that task that you don't understand, but you wont learn it if they do. The daunting, unknown tasks are the most rewarding to complete (and trust me, other devs will notice.)

10) Learning is up to you. I can't tell you the number of engineers I passed on hiring because their answer to what they know about PHP7 was: "Nothing. I haven't learned it yet because my current company is still using PHP5." This is YOUR craft. It's not up to your employer to keep you relevant in the job market, it's up to YOU. You don't always need to be a pro at the latest and greatest, but at least read the changelog. Stay abreast of current technology, security threats, etc...

These are just a few quick tips from my experience. Others may chime in with theirs, and some may dispute mine. I wish you all fruitful careers!

Busted

I'm busted... 🐎💨

So, recently, a person in the US was arrested for stalking people.

The evidence was some data from google, a work computer and from a VPN provider.

Let's take a quick look at that VPN provider. It (PureVPN) says on their privacy policy page that they do NOT store logs.

Guess from what VPN provider the FBI got those logs? Yes, PureVPN!

Althouh I'm happy they got this creep off the street, it still means that PureVPN has been lying to its entire customer base.

I personally hope that their reputation will be destroyed now because this should never happen.

A screenshot I took from their privacy policy page is attached below.

Keep your eyes open when choosing a VPN provider!

😤😤😤 People need to stop believing these sheets in fortune cookies, they are printed using a Linux binary!

Look... I know I'm just a newbie. I started a year ago as a junior. Sure. No one wants to do code review, so I got chosen to do it. People don't like it when their code gets criticised. And you know what? I get it, I should probably be a bit nicer with my comments. I should not suggest I'll make a fork and split internal library into two streams if things continue this way. I should not ask questions that can be understood as me being passive-aggressive.

But holy fucking shit, you're a senior developer. Don't treat Java as a fucking scripting language. Don't have a method that has 600 lines of code, because you're repeating the code! You've already copy pasted this shit, and modified it slightly. Like, couldn't you have created some architecture around the code? How can a senior dev copy-paste code?

Oh and why the fuck did you create a new utility class for functionality I already provide? Look, I admit, yours is a lot better, ok? It has extra functionality. But why the fuck didn't you enhance my utility class? Why did you create a new one? Did you just not want to touch my code, or did you not see it right below your newly created class?

Am I the only one who fucking cares about maintainable code in this company? When I got hired, I was in tears by how frustrating a lot of the things were. No documentation anywhere, not even fucking comments. No processes in place. Want to do something? Source code is your documentation. Fuck you! I busted my ass of to force everyone to document every little bullshit, to re-factor their MRs that I reviewed, and I won't let even a senior fucking dev pollute the code base!

Fuuuuuck... Me...

Norway's largest cinema, busted in the act.

He : You're the " ; " to my code.

She : sorry, I use python.

Busted!

So I host a few mining pools and some of the stories we hear from miners can be quite interesting. One of our miners recently had his front door busted off the hinges and a drug bust team go into his house and turn the house upside down. How did they determine that he was a threat for growing illegal drugs? Well he had a high power bill because of the miners and he grows flowers and food inside of his house and that was enough for THE NYPD to get a warrant.

Now he is responsible for cleaning up the mess the police made. What scares me the most is that they are tracking soil you buy online along with high power bills. What the hell USA im a proud Canadian

Changed the HTML of my school site locally to say we went back to school on the Tuesday not the Monday and blagged an extra lay in.

My auntie then called my mum and told her my cousins were at school why aren't me and my sister? BUSTED.

So worth it though!

Before I left for vacation two weeks ago, I busted my butt to build out another portion of my frontend testing framework and get it in place (and spec’d) to unblock a coworker on a semi-high-priority ticket. I sent him detailed notes on which areas of the product it covers, how to use it, and copied one of his (blocked) tests over and updated it to use the new methods, pattern, namespacing, etc.

I came back today and discovered … he hasn’t even touched it. Everything is exactly as I left it.

Wheeeeeee.

I've been working on a thing and running on 5 hours of sleep daily.

* This morning in class*
Friend: Look at the dark circles! You need to quit playing PUBG. You are addicted.

Me: Busted! *🤯😠😤*

SeniorDev: “OMFG..MalwareBytes is taking up almost 50% of my CPU!”
Me: “Didn’t you have a virus on your machine couple of days ago?”
SeniorDev: “Uh..yea..but it was cleaned up.”
Me: “Your OS might have been compromised. If your antivirus is still busy doing something, then it may be time to start over with a fresh re-install.”
SeniorDev: “No, that’s not it. This is just BS our Network admins don’t want to fix because I’m not a VP”
Me: “I’m pretty sure they don’t care.”
-in as much of a ‘I’m kidding’ tone as I could -
Me: “They would care more if you stopped going to inappropriate web sites on the company computer.”
SeniorDev: “I never go to those sites. It was a link to a charity web site my wife sent me. You know how those sites are. They are built by college kids, so they have no security and was hijacked. That’s how I got the virus.”
Me: “You actually said that to Jim and he believed it?”
SeniorDev: “Well ...yea because….oh …–bleep- you.”
"Jim" sits about 50 feet away, popped his head over the cube wall and smiled. It was awesome.

So apparently some genius motherfucker managed to allow Androids that are missing or have a bad/inaccurate/busted gyro to run VR apps as long as they have a magnetic sensor (compass) and an accelerometer, using both to spoof the gyro. It requires root, but goddamn is that smart... It's even potentially more accurate than a gyro in quite a few situations, since it uses the compass and can even be used to override the ACTUAL gyro, so if the gyro is busted, drifts like a motherfucker, is inaccurate, etc. it can alleviate the issue!

and google's always like "well this shit is impossible to do" then the community comes along a month later and does it

This happened with one of our senior profs during the first year of my college. I wouldn't call him a dev if my life depended on calling him a dev but regardless, I narrate the story here.

We were "taught" C++ by some really dumb professors during our first year of college and it was mandatory that everyone cleared the subject regardless of what field of engineering the students chose. Having already done 2 years of C++, it was quite a breeze for me. But during the final lab exam, one of my friends requested my help in solving the quite tough question (for those beginners). Thinking the exam and teaching was unfair, I stupidly wrote the answer on a piece of paper and passed it to him. One of our teachers, who had seen him ask me, was lying low waiting to catch me in the act and she swooped in and busted our asses kicking us out of the exam hall and sending us to the HoDs office like some prize from her war against academic corruption.
In the end, I failed the exam for cheating and had to redo (not only the exam but the entire lab course).

When I returned to college during the summer vacations to redo the course, I first met the antagonist of our story. Having a huge head that looked like a deformed watermelon and an ego the size of a building, he assaulted us first with a verbal diarrhoea of his achievements as a CS professor. I quickly realised that I was in a class of people who had failed to grasp how to make a program that printed "Hello World". To make things shorter, every question the prof gave us, I managed to solve in a mere matter of minutes, several better than his own solutions. Not having expected a student who knew his shit, he was determined to play me down. He hurled tougher question at me and I knocked them over his enormous head piercing his ego. He asked me such questions as how to reverse 1000 and get 0001 and wasn't satisfied with the several ways I gave because none of it were what he had in mind (which turned out to be storing them in a fucking array and printing them in reverse. That's printing not reversing you dung beetle). I kept my calm throughout but on the day of the final exam, he set quite a tough paper for a class of people who had already failed once. To his utter shock and dismay, I aced that too and I produced flawless code. This man who has an MTech from one of the most reputed colleges of my country then proceeded to tell me that he had to cut my marks because I had used more than one function when the question had asked for one function ( it never said only one). I lost my shit and pointed out that since I was the programmer, it was my wish how I coded. I also explained to him how repeating code is a bad practice and one should use functions to reduce redundancy and keep the code clean. Nevertheless, he lost his shit and he threatened me with consequences as apparently "I didn't know who I was messing with". I handed over the paper and stormed out of the class (though he called me back and tried to argue more with me. I apologized for losing my shit and left when he was done talking). I ended up getting a 'C'. Totally worth it.

Oh don't worry I just wasted a whole day, it's not like I had homework to do, projects to finish and VM's to install and I busted my sick ass trying to make it all work on my Linux machine which is now tainted with software I didn't even want to install and useless docs while having a 105 fever. It's all fucking worth it because at the end, of the next day, oh wait...you didn't even install the updates properly, fuck you windows! I swear the first thing I'll do after graduation will be getting rid of you!!

At the first company I worked for out of college, the CEO was a bit like a child. Whenever he came up with a new feature he wanted to add to the product, it had to be done asap otherwise we were going to "miss the boat." Every single time.

So rewind to a few years ago. It's a normal day at work and then suddenly my team lead and the CEO call my team into the conference room. The CEO starts telling us about this industry conference (we were in online dating) that was happening and this flashy new company dating company was going to be showing off this awesome search feature.

Naturally, our CEO concocted a Hail Mary plan of how our company was going to upstage this company and get all of the press to write about us instead. Basically, the "plan" was for us to build a brand new search feature of our own, in the week before the conference, and then he stated that the press would "have to write about us because ours will be better."

Everyone on my team knew it was ridiculous but we were pretty young and naive so we busted our asses to get this search feature out the door in the short week. The Friday before we stayed until like 2 AM. It was a little bit fun because the people on my team were cool, but the whole situation was absurd and no one, except the CEO, thought this had any chance of working.

Annnnddd in the end we didn't get an ounce of press, the search feature was pulled from our site, and the "awesome" company that we were so worried about getting all the press is out of business. But hey, we did get it done!

Master Foo and the Script Kiddie
(from the Rootless Root Unix Koans of Master Foo)

A stranger from the land of Woot came to Master Foo as he was eating the morning meal with his students.

“I hear y00 are very l33t,” he said. “Pl33z teach m3 all y00 know.”

Master Foo's students looked at each other, confused by the stranger's barbarous language. Master Foo just smiled and replied: “You wish to learn the Way of Unix?”

“I want to b3 a wizard hax0r,” the stranger replied, “and 0wn ever3one's b0xen.”

“I do not teach that Way,” replied Master Foo.

The stranger grew agitated. “D00d, y00 r nothing but a p0ser,” he said. “If y00 n00 anything, y00 wud t33ch m3.”

“There is a path,” said Master Foo, “that might bring you to wisdom.” The master scribbled an IP address on a piece of paper. “Cracking this box should pose you little difficulty, as its guardians are incompetent. Return and tell me what you find.”

The stranger bowed and left. Master Foo finished his meal.

Days passed, then months. The stranger was forgotten.

Years later, the stranger from the land of Woot returned.

“Damn you!” he said, “I cracked that box, and it was easy like you said. But I got busted by the FBI and thrown in jail.”

“Good,” said Master Foo. “You are ready for the next lesson.” He scribbled an IP address on another piece of paper and handed it to the stranger.

“Are you crazy?” the stranger yelled. “After what I've been through, I'm never going to break into a computer again!”

Master Foo smiled. “Here,” he said, “is the beginning of wisdom.”

On hearing this, the stranger was enlightened.

Every time I tell someone my major they respond the same way: “I know your job prospects look good! I need my computer fixed right now...”

Yeah, let me write you a script real quick that will fix the screen you busted when yo sat on your laptop.

A guy rants a client of mine "anonymously" via his website contact form. How stupid is that. Even worst. He used his static IP connection. Busted! IP forwarded to my client. Turns out he is one of my client's client and has unpaid bills to him :>

Make me do almost everything and then call me during my vacation to quiz me on why the shit I DIDN'T do is broken. All while complaining about me and my objections undercommitting the rest of the team (whose busted shit I'll be on the hook to fix) every sprint.

But remember guys we fail as a team :^)

Suck my dick you fucking pricks.

I accidentally let some malware on my computer and it installed drivers so i couldn't delete the reg Keys or the program itself because I didn't have the proper permissions (super administrator account )

I busted out Linux, used a piece of software to open the register, manually deleted the register key entries, because Linux doesn't care what level of admin you are on Windows, he just sudos that shit.

Rebooted, malware gone.

Today's finished projects :
Mini vacuum cleaner:
Works. Just need better patles to be really effective.
Portable lighter wire solderer :
Busted.
Works but the flame must be always on. Takes time to heat. Good for a tight spot and you can buy the tools for it anywhere.
Many if the coil is more open... I'll check on beta 2 (not quitting yet)

And a big fuck you to sony mobile, I hope you die soon.
TLDR: sent a weeks old phone for repair to Sony, they asked 450€ because according to their "experts" chassis was bent and main board was busted besides the obvious screen and touch being broken.
It costed less than 400€ including vat.
Out of spite I ordered a replacement screen for 55€, and it's fucking working again, thanks a lot for the offer but I still can replace an lcd myself. Screw your warranty policies, you made a phone that slips like a wet soap.
I've owned xperias all my life, Arc, U, M, Z1 besides all the dumb phones manufactured by Sony/Ericsson.
Guess I'm finding a new brand very soon.

What are the chances that you get busted by your manager and 3 team leaders you personally know when you are going to a job interview?

We have poor men’s silicon valley near universities. Our company’s one office moves to another university. By the one in a million luck, interview takes at the same building where our next office of my current company will be. Managers and team leaders are there to inspect the new office. I enter the building, see them near elevator. One of them see me, with panic i wave my hand to him. There is a distance of ten meters, I hide behind a column. The team leader who sees me waving thinks I am with them to inspect new office. He asks others why am I not coming with them as I learn later. I can not pretend to play along and catch up with them, due to panic and time of interview is soon already. They get into elevator and finally I dont have to hide anymore 😂.

I got into interview and c++ exam with that physcology. Little did they knew that I just completed CPP PRIMER book. I both rock interview and exam but lets see if they will return with a job offer. What a rollercoaster of emotions.
Note: I am on mobile now so can not give more juicy details for now, fingers are tired.

Trying to troubleshoot this busted ass code for a client. Meanwhile, my wife is in class and my two daughters are blowing chunks.

Staring at devRant isn't fixing anything either. Lol

When you catch developers rolling out untested changes to production that have a huge impact on your clients workflow... And they don't tell anyone so you find out because your clients are yelling on the phone about some change affecting their work flow.

Replaced a colleague's busted HDD and gave him the old one to copy over stuff.

When I came back, the guy was about to copy over the root folder of the old one over the new one .... And I mean 'drag and drop' not even 'cp -r'

I’m currently working with a devops team in the company to migrate our old ass jboss servers architecture to kubernetes.

They’ve been working in this for about a year now, and it was supposed to be delivered a few months back, no one knew what’s going on and last week they manage to have something to see at least.

I’ve never seen anything so bad in my short life as a developer, at the point that the main devops guy can’t even understand his own documentation to add ci/cd to a project.

It goes from trigger manually pipelines in multiple branches for configuration and secrets, a million unnecessary env variables to set, to docker images lacking almost all requisites necessary to run the apps.

You can clearly see the dude goes around internet copy pasting stuff without actually understanding what going on behind as every time you ask him for the guts of the architecture he changes the topic.

And the worst of all this, as my team is their counterpart on development we’ve fighting for weeks to make them understand that is impossible the proceed with this process with over 100 apps and 50+ developers.

Long story short, last two weeks I’ve been fixing the “dev ops” guy mess in terms of processes and documentation but I think this is gonna end really bad, not to sound cocky or anything but developers level is really low, add docker and k8s in top of that and you have a recipe for disaster.

Still enjoying as I have no fault there, and dude got busted.

I started at a what is now called a brogrammer shop. While the three owners were probably 50 and older, there was little design outside of the owner's dreams. We busted out programs in the new language C# in three tier architecture with an Access backend. It was fun but when the economy went south I got laid off after about a year.

College broke my school VM by "accidentally" pushing a policy to just me that disables being able to start anything after logging in (no DWM or Explorer, either, so just login, then infinite abyss.) Fine, nothing I can't fix, i got around shit like this in middle school. Reboot... can't get to the school's webpage. No DNS...?

No.

Windows disabled all the network services. Why? Defender didn't start, is why. Why not? School broke it. Goddammit. Gotta fix that.

There, are we ready now? NO, OFFICE ATE SHIT. FUCK, LEMME REBOOT AGAIN...

How about now? Everything works? Cool, let's get some work done. Download assignment, and... file's busted. Redownload? Nope. One more try? Nothing.

I am going to flip my shit I swear to fuck

Today I basically threatened my whole team that if they weren't going to help me take a backup (somehow don't have access issues to the machines) I would just deploy the thing and if it crashes then just fck it...

I already busted my ass for a whole week on top of other issues and you can't even help me run a few simple commands...

First thing Monday morning, get a group text about our upcoming release. Boss says there's nothing important, nothing to release, we can maybe skip.

I just busted my ass last week implementing things that need to be released this week. Good to know the rest of my team have been doing nothing productive for the last month.

People who are too cool for old-and-busted OOP, but want to build microservices: networks of independent, encapsulated systems that look after their own data and communicate by passing messages.

Yup, that's totally not OOP you're doing there, kiddo.

@dfox

Notifications are busted again!
++ still come through, but mentions are dead 🥲

Anyone seeing the same thing?

So, started working in a nodejs/react personal project with an old friend. I code in linux mint, my pal always at windows 7 never worked in something different from php. From the very beginning I advised him to move to linux

Me: hey man, the backend is running now, pull the changes and `npm start`

Friend: ok so I need to install dependencies right?
Me: yup, easy peasy lemon squeezy

So after a brief(one week period) until my friend could install visual studio to get some deps installed

Friend: hey I ran `npm start`, it got stuck. backend does not start at all, no output messages, no error, no nothing

Me: FFS, that's why I told you from the start, "use any linux distro for this project" :(

Then for a couple of hours(4) trying to install a distro in his 7 years old laptop...

Me: Ok, let's call it a day, 7 tries to install this thing in your old machine is enough. did you not realize your HDD was really busted? in your 7 years with your laptop? this is BS that's why I could not install linux :|

Friend: I didn't, windows never showed me any problem, maybe windows is better than linux in that matter.

Me: GTFO

Got bit by a hacked repo. It was compromised for all of like 30-some seconds. No intrusions, but now I can't set my root password (passwd goes "oh, yeah, we got this" then it does... nothing...) and Weyland/X/Gnome/Cinnamon/KDE/whatever the kids use nowadays are all busted (they all start, but they just hang tty1 and whatever other console invoked it). Tried reinstalling all those kinds of things, didn't help.

fml

Got a scammer on my hook. Ideas welcome to fuck him/her over.

He/she confused me with someone else and messaged me acting as a support person of an exchange. I acted along and s/he is insisting on sharing account details.

Played along like a dumb internet noob and I think I got him to share his fake email id.

Now I'm thinking of ways to extract more details about him via email.

From top of my mind, these are some ideas I have:
- get his IP address
- zip bomb or something like that? But g mail is probably gonna detect that.

Ideally, If I could social engineer him to give his phone number, I could easily report him to police and find his identity.

Have you busted some scammers? Would appreciate some tips.

After all this time I’m still confused, why was Cambridge Analytica such a huge deal? I feel like a lot of people knew this in years prior, that Facebook/Google were scraping user data and activities to use for personal profiles and hence more directed as placement. Stuff like Ghostery, Privacy Badger, Disconnect, Ad Nauseum (rip it’s Chrome plug-in) etc. all focused on not allowing these same trackers to get information, so not like this case just magically busted the doors wide open screaming that all those websites you visited are now in Facebook’s database and no one knew.

I just can’t quite understand why everyone got up in arms after this.

I'll monitor our helpdesk ticket system from time-to-time and HR will send their employee termination request so the accounts are deactivated. I notice an odd name I hadn't seen in a long while (names have been changed)

<thought bubble> "Ketsup? Hmmm...wonder if they're related to ol' Brad Ketsup?"

Brad was a bully who would shove me in the bathroom when I would pee so I would tip over and hit the urinal. He was part of pack of older bullies who enjoyed torturing people in the stalls by throwing wet paper towels over the wall or one time in my case, busted the door open (Brad: "Look everybody! PaperTrail is pooping! Look at his little pee-pee...ha ha ha..") Incidentally, the school didn't fix the door, they removed all the doors so the problem wouldn't happen again, but I digress.

I look at the individual's pic, and it was like going back in time. There he was, the near perfect round face, pinned back ears...not Brad, but I'd bet my paycheck at Vegas it was his son. All the vent up frustrations started to bubble up...then...sadness.

Brad moved away in high school and unless the good Lord moved mountains in Brad's life, this poor kid likely lived the same abusive life as Brad. Brad's dad was a drunk and known to be abusive. Statistically speaking, no reason to believe the the apple wouldn't fall far from the tree.

Makes me wonder what happened to all those guys from back then. I know two of em' ended up in prison, but I wonder what I would say if I came across any of them in the wild?

I'm sure most of you had perfect lives growing up and no feelings of mass carnage when you think of the bullies in your early life.

Everything I did was wrong with a CTO because I didn't format identically to him, balls were busted daily.