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I used to be on Demonoid and some other JAV trackers but they shut down and I’m too lazy to bother with waiting to join another. Never really was into music enough to track (hah!) a private tracker and honestly I think it’s not in the spirit of torrents. But I appreciate the recommendations nonetheless :)
I left Monday last week after a crash had occurred in prod. Had happened during the weekend because of a colleague fumbling on the Friday. Noticed it Monday morning. Notified the boss who didn’t care much and left for his afternoon off anyway, trusting me to do what i could. Which I did. Stabilised the bleeding, explained others what they had done and what to do, how to mitigate, how to temporise till I was back, then fucked off at 5pm sharp, for one of the best romantic weeks in years. Not a one phone call or message. I had even taken my laptop just in case they were really stuck. Nothing.
Vive la France 🇫🇷 is what I’m saying.
It’s pretty tiny, but as long as you’re happy that’s the main thing. My colleague at work is a sysadmin by thread so built a server with all the bells and whistles, then put it online and opened it to some friends and family. I forget the size but we’re talking somewhere near 100 Tb easy. I find it a bit excessive, if you ask me :P
JsonSchema is a way to validate some JSON. A great thing when you want to stop any sort of malformed data from coming in. Instead of wrecking your head in your code testing whether this bit here is not null, or is that string a valid boolean (I still remember that shitty piece of code they had, ugh!) or that bit is empty or that one is an actual number, or a string that can only have such and such value, well, you can formalise all this in one place, as a data file instead of code. Very convenient.
Except when it turns out you’re using a JSON library that’s not one, not two, but six major versions behind, and the security department won’t greenlight you using anything recent because… fuck you, that’s why. And to add insult to injury, we were the Quality department. Responsible for analysing the code quality of thousands of coders, around a hundred thousand programs (mostly COBOL but also C#), of a European banking group… The JSON schema was for adding a layer of non existant security to our API. But no, let’s keep accepting shitty malformed JSON (because of course we kept receiving shitty JSON; that’s why we wanted to implement this)
So I had to rewrite a lot of custom code to patch the bugs we found in the library, and none of the nifty tools that let you put in json and generate json schema would work for us. Heck, they even have JsonSchema to validate your JsonSchema but those wouldn’t work either, so far behind our version was.
Fucking awesome experience. I’m glad it’s behind me.
I feel this in my bones. As an OG dev, I had this incredible urge to smack people when I was working for my last job and I saw the API specs with everything being sent as strings through JSON. Boolean? Sure, let’s use a string. Integers? Sure we’ll do conversion in our code, that’ll be more efficient… So fucking infuriating. Oh and don’t get me started on JsonSchema T_T
I worked for a big Euro bank for a bit and that was exactly it. JS timeouts were forbidden, so no animation to tell you something was finished, you had to keep clicking a Refresh button to know. In 2022.
And the colleagues who had been there a few years were actually defending this shit. Stockholm Syndrome is what it is. There wasn’t a day I didn’t complain about their piece of garbage of an intranet.
I’m so glad it’s behind me.
I agree! There really should be no excuses at this point… you’d think. Even in 2008 I already felt we were behind the loop, but apparently I was vastly underestimating how bigger companies just dgaf.
It’s the kind of testing my colleague would do. “well, nobody would be idiotic enough to enter something weird when they are asked for a number”. And so he’d only write tests for numbers. That kind of stuff.
The unit tests I’m looking at in this latest jobs are some primo “dev testing” bullshit. Their sole purpose clearly was to be able to say “we unit test our code in our pipeline and it all passed” and that’s about it. Ugh.
My favourite one was when I asked the user “can this happen?” (Some value being negative) and they reply “no never”.
Then, of course, I get an occurrence the day of the live demo with the user and her boss.
I ask again, “uh, so is this normal? Has it ever occured before? Because I asked you if it could happen and you said never.”
Now the boss replies “oh, we meant it’s extremely uncommon. Almost never happens”.
Turns out it happens once every few months, amongst hundreds and hundreds of transactions.
So I gently explained that the computer doesn’t care how often it happens. If it can happen, I need to code it in otherwise things go wrong!
Thankfully I had planned the eventuality, so I had a nice error message, but still. A lesson was learnt that day.
Its not a joke. I worked for a big european bank network and the software there didn’t know how to translate from EBCDIC to UTF8 because none of the devs writing the software knew enough of the other side (mainframe vs PC) to realise this was an issue.
Their solution was “if the file has a ? in it when we receive it, it’s probably a £”. Which of course completely breaks down the day you have any other untranslated character.
I spent fucking weeks explaining this issue and why this was abominable, but apparently this wasn’t enough of an issue for people to fix it. Go figure…
Then when it’s a job, you can replace that with weeks. But instead of a silly syntax error, it’s a slow memory leak that nobody seems to have noticed for years, but that now forces you to restart your service every day at the very least. And we just spent an afternoon, six people, looking at it and only making it worse.
Don’t you love programming? I sure do!
Sure, but I think Venerable Jorge would have 100% approved of copyright laws and violently enforcing them, somehow.