I spent the week or so building out a sandbox site for the day job. This is NOT normally something that takes this long, but since I didn't have an available backup server, or budget, or any tools to automate any part of this, it did.
So, I had to cobble the fucking thing together using a spare hosting account I had laying around, and glue all of the frameworks, databases, and plug-in modules by hand. While doing other "useful" stuff, obviously.
Today, I got it finished to the point where bugs we started seeing on the production site were also being replicated on the sandbox. Success! I was also able to find fixes for a few of these, and apply them to the company site.
I took a minute to grab the boss and explain what a neat thing we now had: here's a place where I can test out patches to things without fucking up the company website! This is a Good Thing because I don't pull my hair out trying to test things in production when our customers are, you know, using the site.
Naturally, 20 minutes after I showed him this, I nuked the thing into oblivion when an update patch went off the rails, and spent a half-hour restoring the damn thing.
But! That's what it's there for. If this thing blows up in the middle of the day, I don't have an office full of screaming lunatics and pissed off customers. We get to keep making money and everyone else can keep working.
I've been doing web stuff for over a decade, and this is only the second time I've worked with a development sandbox. If you ever wonder why most of the stuff on the internet sucks, this should be a big clue.
Tuesday, December 16, 2014
Tuesday, December 9, 2014
I grabbed a fresh beer and stopped playing Red Faction to write this
So, since it seems to have died down a bunch by now, I feel OK about writing about gamergate.
No, I ain't capitalizing or "hash-tagging" any of that.
From the distance where I'm viewing it, the whole thing is the natural fallout of a bunch of internet shitbags getting clobbered for being the same horrible fuckjobs they always have been online.
I'm a gamer. I've been doing this since the NES came out, I hacked my way into E3 back when it was still cool, and I've written for more gaming publications than you. I still hold world record scores on a few games. I also absolutely hate gamers. I play everything offline, because the online community has ALWAYS sucked. Every goddamned minute being exposed to those fucking goblins drives me up a wall. By now, I have been called a faggot in game chats about four hundred thousand times, and again: I Very Rarely play anything online.
So. My initial response when hearing about this garbage was "Oh? Well, yeah. That's what they do. They're assholes." At this point, I imagine that I feel a lot like a Log Cabin Republican. I really like this one thing, and everyone else involved with it is an overstuffed dumpster of cocks that I wouldn't piss on if they were on fire.
There ain't shit going on here about "games journalism", it's just doxxing, slut-shaming, and the bog-standard violent stupidity of the entire fucking community. People online are monsters, gamers are not exempt, and we've been doing this for a long time. Except now, it's all about death and rape threats with directions to people's homes. Progress!
The cost of entry for the new media is zero, ya'll want a better "games journalism" platform? Fucking start one. But, because it's more fun to move the goalposts and harass women online, we get gamergate. Going back to my offline games now, where I don't have to be associated with any of those idiots.
No, I ain't capitalizing or "hash-tagging" any of that.
From the distance where I'm viewing it, the whole thing is the natural fallout of a bunch of internet shitbags getting clobbered for being the same horrible fuckjobs they always have been online.
I'm a gamer. I've been doing this since the NES came out, I hacked my way into E3 back when it was still cool, and I've written for more gaming publications than you. I still hold world record scores on a few games. I also absolutely hate gamers. I play everything offline, because the online community has ALWAYS sucked. Every goddamned minute being exposed to those fucking goblins drives me up a wall. By now, I have been called a faggot in game chats about four hundred thousand times, and again: I Very Rarely play anything online.
So. My initial response when hearing about this garbage was "Oh? Well, yeah. That's what they do. They're assholes." At this point, I imagine that I feel a lot like a Log Cabin Republican. I really like this one thing, and everyone else involved with it is an overstuffed dumpster of cocks that I wouldn't piss on if they were on fire.
There ain't shit going on here about "games journalism", it's just doxxing, slut-shaming, and the bog-standard violent stupidity of the entire fucking community. People online are monsters, gamers are not exempt, and we've been doing this for a long time. Except now, it's all about death and rape threats with directions to people's homes. Progress!
The cost of entry for the new media is zero, ya'll want a better "games journalism" platform? Fucking start one. But, because it's more fun to move the goalposts and harass women online, we get gamergate. Going back to my offline games now, where I don't have to be associated with any of those idiots.
Friday, December 5, 2014
Yet another reason I hate everyone in my profession
Because, truly, programmers are awful, awful people. Web developers are the worst, but I could be biased here, since I get exposed to more of them.
Anyhow. This article recently went up on Model View Culture. It's penned by a recent college grad whining that technical interviews are "bullshit." They are bullshit because they are confrontational, and they make women uncomfortable, and "There are so many questions that technical interviews can’t answer: Are they able to work on a diverse team? Are they passionate about the job they’re interviewing for? Can they read and debug pre-existing code? How quickly are they able to learn new technologies? Are they a jerk?"
Technical interviews, you see, require you to write code on a whiteboard, in front of people.
As a Crotchety Industry Veteran, if I was interviewing someone that struggled with the concept of writing code, they would be out the door so fucking fast their own personal universe would red-shift. I don't give two tugs of a dead dog's cock if you're a really nice person or get along well with others, or have a super-cute kitten calender for your office if you can't write code: You Do Not Get to be a Programmer.
These interviews exist because so many people can't fucking code. I have worked with these people. I have fired these people. They keep fucking applying to jobs that they cannot do. So Now: we have to check. If I hurt someone's feelings by expecting them to demonstrate the core skill for their job, I get warm fuzzy feelings all day long. You're a shitty test taker? The test is called Employment, and you just got an(other) F.
All code is awful. I don't care if someone writes a really ugly function on the spot, or if they forgot a semi-colon, I just need to know that this person does, in fact, know how to write code at all.
I know that this will sound insane to anyone in a real profession, but this is actually a serious problem that our young graduate above appears unaware of. Go read that article, it is short, and it's about a very simple programming problem frequently used in "technical interviews." The interview-ee manages about 2 pages of crazy person scrawl before crashing and burning.
For reference, here's a solution in C#:
For all I know, that interview-ee was a super-duper guy, and always buys a round for the team at the bar. The next time your computer crashes or app freezes? Think of that guy. Technical interviews are a Good Thing.
Anyhow. This article recently went up on Model View Culture. It's penned by a recent college grad whining that technical interviews are "bullshit." They are bullshit because they are confrontational, and they make women uncomfortable, and "There are so many questions that technical interviews can’t answer: Are they able to work on a diverse team? Are they passionate about the job they’re interviewing for? Can they read and debug pre-existing code? How quickly are they able to learn new technologies? Are they a jerk?"
Technical interviews, you see, require you to write code on a whiteboard, in front of people.
As a Crotchety Industry Veteran, if I was interviewing someone that struggled with the concept of writing code, they would be out the door so fucking fast their own personal universe would red-shift. I don't give two tugs of a dead dog's cock if you're a really nice person or get along well with others, or have a super-cute kitten calender for your office if you can't write code: You Do Not Get to be a Programmer.
These interviews exist because so many people can't fucking code. I have worked with these people. I have fired these people. They keep fucking applying to jobs that they cannot do. So Now: we have to check. If I hurt someone's feelings by expecting them to demonstrate the core skill for their job, I get warm fuzzy feelings all day long. You're a shitty test taker? The test is called Employment, and you just got an(other) F.
All code is awful. I don't care if someone writes a really ugly function on the spot, or if they forgot a semi-colon, I just need to know that this person does, in fact, know how to write code at all.
I know that this will sound insane to anyone in a real profession, but this is actually a serious problem that our young graduate above appears unaware of. Go read that article, it is short, and it's about a very simple programming problem frequently used in "technical interviews." The interview-ee manages about 2 pages of crazy person scrawl before crashing and burning.
For reference, here's a solution in C#:
for(int x = 1; x <= 100; x++) {
string output = "";
if(x%3 == 0) output += "Fizz";
if(x%5 == 0) output += "Buzz";
if(output == "") output = x.ToString?();
Console.WriteLine?(output);
}
For all I know, that interview-ee was a super-duper guy, and always buys a round for the team at the bar. The next time your computer crashes or app freezes? Think of that guy. Technical interviews are a Good Thing.
Monday, December 1, 2014
Internets browser stuff
A side effect of doing a lot of work on the Inter-Tubes is that I tend to have a lot of browsers installed and use them all frequently, just to make sure things are behaving. I do a lot of dev-type stuff, so the built-in tools and available extensions are also pretty important to me, although admittedly most people aren't going to care much.
Since I'm a few drinks into the evening, here's where I give my picks along with why. I do realize that with the uber-frequent release cycle on Chrome and FireFox, this is all going to be irrelevant in a month, forward your hatemail to Google and Mozilla if none of this makes sense by the time you read it.
The Duke of New York, A #1 is still Opera. I am not a patient man, when I click a browser icon, it's because I have Shit to Do. Opera starts up a hell of a lot faster than anything else, and hauls screaming ass when loading sites and pages that aren't written by morons. Right-clicking and hitting Inspect Element on anything on a web page gets you access to the fantastic Dragonfly tool, and if you've ever needed to debug some CSS, JavaScript or network issue, this thing is indispensable.
There are a good chunk of sites that don't work quite right, but the keyboard shortcuts and overwhelmingly awesome performance keep Opera as my favorite day to day thing I use.
The number 2 spot is a tie. Chrome and Internet Explorer 11, to be exact. If anyone wants to talk shit about I.E., go get a modern version first. I started using the thing back when Netscape Navigator was the new hotness, and fucking Lynx was the installed browser on the terminals at my college's C.S. lab. The latest version of I.E. is robust, and has an overhauled and surprisingly sexy set of onboard tools for the dev kids out there. The current team working on I.E. knows all the cool kids hate them, and they're kicking some serious ass to make all those people look pants-on-head retarded.
Chrome is a solid piece of work, and I don't really hate anything about it, but there's nothing that makes me love the thing. It performs well, shit generally "just works", and there's not a lot I have to complain about. On the other hand, I loathe most Google stuff, and the UI never, ever fucking puts stuff where I can find it quickly since Google Knows Better. I imagine Apple kids would be right at home with this one, it's just not a great fit for me.
#4 is FireFox. When I installed FireFox 1 point something-or-other, I thought it was the coolest fucking thing ever. 2 was good as well. When 3 came out, it started feeling sluggish and bloated, and by then tabbed browsing was no longer the shiny new reason to lose 3 hours on wikipedia. For the last couple years, FireFox has limped along by having a kick-ass set of extensions (Greasemonkey! Firebug!) to let me get shit done, but the UI changes in the last few versions have started to hobble even those benefits. Mozilla, if I wanted a shitty version of Chrome, I would use Chrome. If I wanted to be a hard-core open source hippy, I would use Konqueror or Ice Monkey or any of the dozen other shitty versions floating out in Linux-land. These days, I ain't got much time for FireFox.
Everything else? I don't care. Safari is hot garbage. Lynx is old and busted. wget is used by Stallman and like 5 other people. I kinda miss Off By One, but only after a lot of drinks and I can't configure Opera to do the same stuff even better.
Since I'm a few drinks into the evening, here's where I give my picks along with why. I do realize that with the uber-frequent release cycle on Chrome and FireFox, this is all going to be irrelevant in a month, forward your hatemail to Google and Mozilla if none of this makes sense by the time you read it.
The Duke of New York, A #1 is still Opera. I am not a patient man, when I click a browser icon, it's because I have Shit to Do. Opera starts up a hell of a lot faster than anything else, and hauls screaming ass when loading sites and pages that aren't written by morons. Right-clicking and hitting Inspect Element on anything on a web page gets you access to the fantastic Dragonfly tool, and if you've ever needed to debug some CSS, JavaScript or network issue, this thing is indispensable.
There are a good chunk of sites that don't work quite right, but the keyboard shortcuts and overwhelmingly awesome performance keep Opera as my favorite day to day thing I use.
The number 2 spot is a tie. Chrome and Internet Explorer 11, to be exact. If anyone wants to talk shit about I.E., go get a modern version first. I started using the thing back when Netscape Navigator was the new hotness, and fucking Lynx was the installed browser on the terminals at my college's C.S. lab. The latest version of I.E. is robust, and has an overhauled and surprisingly sexy set of onboard tools for the dev kids out there. The current team working on I.E. knows all the cool kids hate them, and they're kicking some serious ass to make all those people look pants-on-head retarded.
Chrome is a solid piece of work, and I don't really hate anything about it, but there's nothing that makes me love the thing. It performs well, shit generally "just works", and there's not a lot I have to complain about. On the other hand, I loathe most Google stuff, and the UI never, ever fucking puts stuff where I can find it quickly since Google Knows Better. I imagine Apple kids would be right at home with this one, it's just not a great fit for me.
#4 is FireFox. When I installed FireFox 1 point something-or-other, I thought it was the coolest fucking thing ever. 2 was good as well. When 3 came out, it started feeling sluggish and bloated, and by then tabbed browsing was no longer the shiny new reason to lose 3 hours on wikipedia. For the last couple years, FireFox has limped along by having a kick-ass set of extensions (Greasemonkey! Firebug!) to let me get shit done, but the UI changes in the last few versions have started to hobble even those benefits. Mozilla, if I wanted a shitty version of Chrome, I would use Chrome. If I wanted to be a hard-core open source hippy, I would use Konqueror or Ice Monkey or any of the dozen other shitty versions floating out in Linux-land. These days, I ain't got much time for FireFox.
Everything else? I don't care. Safari is hot garbage. Lynx is old and busted. wget is used by Stallman and like 5 other people. I kinda miss Off By One, but only after a lot of drinks and I can't configure Opera to do the same stuff even better.
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