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Search - "#facepalm #really?"
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I absolutely HATE "web developers" who call you in to fix their FooBar'd mess, yet can't stop themselves from dictating what you should and shouldn't do, especially when they have no idea what they're doing.
So I get called in to a job improving the performance of a Magento site (and let's just say I have no love for Magento for a number of reasons) because this "developer" enabled Redis and expected everything to be lightning fast. Maybe he thought "Redis" was the name of a magical sorcerer living in the server. A master conjurer capable of weaving mystical time-altering spells to inexplicably improve the performance. Who knows?
This guy claims he spent "months" trying to figure out why the website couldn't load faster than 7 seconds at best, and his employer is demanding a resolution so he stops losing conversions. I usually try to avoid Magento because of all the headaches that come with it, but I figured "sure, why not?" I mean, he built the website less than a year ago, so how bad can it really be? Well...let's see how fast you all can facepalm:
1.) The website was built brand new on Magento 1.9.2.4...what? I mean, if this were built a few years back, that would be a different story, but building a fresh Magento website in 2017 in 1.x? I asked him why he did that...his answer absolutely floored me: "because PHP 5.5 was the best choice at the time for speed and performance..." What?!
2.) The ONLY optimization done on the website was Redis cache being enabled. No merged CSS/JS, no use of a CDN, no image optimization, no gzip, no expires rules. Just Redis...
3.) Now to say the website was poorly coded was an understatement. This wasn't the worst coding I've seen, but it was far from acceptable. There was no organization whatsoever. Templates and skin assets are being called from across 12 different locations on the server, making tracking down and finding a snippet to fix downright annoying.
But not only that, the home page itself had 83 custom database queries to load the products on the page. He said this was so he could load products from several different categories and custom tables to show on the page. I asked him why he didn't just call a few join queries, and he had no idea what I was talking about.
4.) Almost every image on the website was a .PNG file, 2000x2000 px and lossless. The home page alone was 22MB just from images.
There were several other issues, but those 4 should be enough to paint a good picture. The client wanted this all done in a week for less than $500. We laughed. But we agreed on the price only because of a long relationship and because they have some referrals they got us in the door with. But we told them it would get done on our time, not theirs. So I copied the website to our server as a test bed and got to work.
After numerous hours of bug fixes, recoding queries, disabling Redis and opting for higher innodb cache (more on that later), image optimization, js/css/html combining, render-unblocking and minification, lazyloading images tweaking Magento to work with PHP7, installing OpCache and setting up basic htaccess optimizations, we smash the loading time down to 1.2 seconds total, and most of that time was for external JavaScript plugins deemed "necessary". Time to First Byte went from a staggering 2.2 seconds to about 45ms. Needless to say, we kicked its ass.
So I show their developer the changes and he's stunned. He says he'll tell the hosting provider create a new server set up to migrate the optimized site over and cut over to, because taking the live website down for maintenance for even an hour or two in the middle of the night is "unacceptable".
So trying to be cool about it, I tell him I'd be happy to configure the server to the exact specifications needed. He says "we can't do that". I look at him confused. "What do you mean we 'can't'?" He tells me that even though this is a dedicated server, the provider doesn't allow any access other than a jailed shell account and cPanel access. What?! This is a company averaging 3 million+ per year in revenue. Why don't they have an IT manager overseeing everything? Apparently for them, they're too cheap for that, so they went with a "managed dedicated server", "managed" apparently meaning "you only get to use it like a shared host".
So after countless phone calls arguing with the hosting provider, they agree to make our changes. Then the client's developer starts getting nasty out of nowhere. He says my optimizations are not acceptable because I'm not using Redis cache, and now the client is threatening to walk away without paying us.
So I guess the overall message from this rant is not so much about the situation, but the developer and countless others like him that are clueless, but try to speak from a position of authority.
If we as developers don't stop challenging each other in a measuring contest and learn to let go when we need help, we can get a lot more done and prevent losing clients. </rant>14 -
Me and a friend are having a bite and drink in a park.
Friend takes a picture of the donut he bought to send it to a friend. The picture takes a really long time to send so I ask how big the picture is (obviously as in size (KB/MB) and he's an it guy/programmer as well).
Friend: uhm, the donut is... Idk... *shows size with hands* this big?
Me: *facepalm*
Friend: oh, that size 😅3 -
Story time! Promised this, so making good on the promise. Eh-hem.
Misunderstandings [A slice of life short play that actually happened]
Dramatis Personae (anonymized, bc of course):
Moi ........ me, myself and possibly some lint
Robert ..... co-architect
Daisy ...... line dev
Lisa ....... also line dev
Prologue: the beginninning
[A project is starting up, new devs are coming on, including the two individuals who drive this story.
Daisy, of Indian origin, an exceptional dev and lovely person. Mother, wife, very conservative by upbringing in her early 40s.
Lisa, also exceptional dev, lovely person. Mother, also wife, self-made immigrant with liberal views derived from personal pride and self-bootstrapping]
Enter the office, We introduce everyone, off to a nice start, everyone is happy and excited to be working on [large bank project].
Lisa and Daisy form a friendship of commonality, they have similar backgrounds by all appearances and similar concerns due to children the same age and shared employment. They seem to become fast friends and things proceed normally for some months. Smooth sailing, all is well.
The fuse is lit.
Scene: Lunchtime gossip
[Robert, middle 40s architect adjacent Moi, also architect, age is my own damn business [old, so very old].]
Robert: "So, it seems like Daisy and Lisa are getting along great."
Moi: *snerfs a little, almost chokes on enchilada* Yes, yes they are, It's nice to see...
Robert: *eyebrow, having learned to read my expressions* "Aaaaaaand..."
Moi: "I adore both of them, but they are primarily friends because they don't actually understand most of what the other says"
[Lisa has a thick Taiwanese accent, Daisy has a standard northern indian accent. Never the two shall meet]
Robert: "Are you sure, they seem to have a lot of conversations?"
Moi: "Positive, you weren't at lunch with the three of us. They're polar opposite in terms of values, it'll be fine so long as that never comes up"
Robert: "I'm not even digging into that"
Moi: *flan*
Sizzle.
Scene: This is bat country
[More months pass, everything is fine, project is humming along nicely, save a few blips of personality conflicts. Moi takes a vacation. A gas station, somewhere in the middle of Wyoming, a snowstorm, a sports car full of luggage]
*phone rings*
Moi: *looks down, sees it's Robert, eyebrow raises, answer* What's on fire?
Robert: "We had to let Lisa go"
Moi: "Ah, they finally understood each other."
Robert: "Yes..." *deep sigh*
[Fade to flashback]
Bang.
Scene: The office, Lisa's desk
[Daisy and Lisa are discussing non-descript conversation. Daisy broaches the subject of Lisa's past divorce and being a single mother]
Daisy: "It must have been hard, how did you manage?"
Lisa: "I had my daughter, she was my motivation. We made it here, I met my current partner"
Daisy: "That's good! It is so hard, coming to something new. I could never imagine leaving my husband."
Lisa: "He left us, we weren't important, I don't want to marry every again"
Daisy: "Surely you do though? Marriage is great for a woman, my parents found a great husband for me."
Lisa: "Haha, lucky you. Most indian marriage is like prostitution."
[At this moment, Daisy's demeanor takes a nose dive. Whatever was actually said, what she heard was, "Indian marriage is prostitution"]
Daisy: *tears begin pouring down her face, she flings herself back in her chair, head shaking violently she screams* "I AM AN HONORABLE WOMAN!"
[Daisy runs out of the room, straight to HR. Lisa sits there, stunned, not really understanding what just happened or the consequences]
Scene: Back in bat country
[Robert finishes the story, the emotions are a mixture of hilarity at the absurdity of the situation and frustration in the work void it has created]
Moi: "Satan, well. Fuck me. Fuck us. Fuck. Is Daisy alright, is she at least staying? We can't lose two devs at the same time."
Robert: "She got a few days off, she seems fine now, but she's... yeah, I never laughed so hard"
Moi: *double facepalm* "Yeah, the word choice was a bit outrageous. It's not like we didn't know it was coming. I'm going to get back on the road."
Robert: "Alright, enjoy yourself, I'll try and prevent any other forest fires."19 -
Manual Data Entry: Most boring job
This reminds me of one conversation with one of my faculty..
Faculty: Why not try some Machine Learning Project?
Me: Cool. Any ideas you have already thought
Faculty: Comes up with a really noble idea
Me: Awesome idea. But we need data
Faculty: Don't worry. I will get it. Just help me setup Hadoop (see the irony.. no data yet, and he wants big data setup)
Me: But we don't have data. Let's focus of data collection, Sir
Faculty: I will get it. Don't worry. Trust me.
( I did setup for him twice coz he formatted the system on which I did the setup first time)
After 6 months,
Me: (same question) Sir, Data??
Faculty: I got it.
Me: Great. Give me, I can start looking into it from today.
Faculty: Actually, it's in a register written manually in a different language (which even I can't understand) I will hire data entry guys to convert it into English digital contents.
Me: *facepalm*
Road to Manual data entry to Big Data
Dedicating this pencil to the individuals keeping the register up to date and Sir in hopes of converting it into big data..
Long way to go..4 -
Old boss story. This guy was nice but a terrible boss. Also relevant, he has a background in IT so should know better.
Him: So when you wanna check a password is correct you just unhash it in the database?
Me: *facepalm*
Me: Hey we should be doing unit and integration testing at a minimum to lower bugs.
Him: We don't need those, we're not a bank. If a problem comes up we just fix it and push to production.
(A while later)
Him(in email): Why do we keep getting bugs reported. Don't you devs test your code.
I was mildly annoyed at that one.
Him: We're always over budget on projects, how can we fix this.
Me: What if we increase our quotes.(technically there are other ways as well but not really possible at that time)
Him: We can't do that, clients won't want to pay.
Me: *finishing off my handover as I'm leaving for a new job*
Him: Wow you do a lot of work2 -
What really grinds my gears.
When a co-worker gives me feedback from a review of my code be like "you should use if..elseif..else instead of switch, because it performs much better.
in this case performing much better means it is only 25 pikosecond instead of 30 pikosecond in a function which is called apprx. 3 times a month in production *facepalm*
I'm always with "let's get maximum performance from our software", but c'mon... really?!???4 -
I am a firmware developer with 4 years experience. C and sometimes assembly is my bread and butter.
Like 2 years ago, I was really interested to make a switch to application development. Got referred by my friend to her startup.
But I was a bit rusty with my data structures, high level languages and interpersonal skills.
The first question was to find the number of occurences for each word in a paragraph. The language choice was Java. But I was allowed to use C++ since it was the closest relative to Java that I knew.
And I started implementing a binary search tree from scratch and started inserting each tokenised word into it, wrote a traversal algorithm.
The interviewer, luckily, was a patient guy. After I completed my whole mess, he asked is it possible to do this in a slightly better way with constant time access without traversal.
I said yes, we can with a hash table but I dont know how to implement one. He replied I dont expect you to implement the hash table but see you use it. I asked him if I am allowed to used the standard library, for which he said ofcourse.
*facepalm*.
Finally I understood his expectation, referred cppreference.com and used an unordered_map.
Later there were some quesion on databases for which I tried my best to answer. And I frankly replied that I am not comfortable with JS frameworks as of now. Got rejected.
So the mistake is I never asked basic questions like what is the time complexity expects, if I was allowed to use standard library, didnt spend some extra time on studying stuffs needed for the domain switch and most importantly I panicked.7 -
The spokesman of an international corporate published a LinkedIn post about why people should work for this company.
Clause 1 was: "Here you get almost 3 monthly salaries as bonus. My wife loves it!"
Right, because he doesn't enjoy the money at all - the PR guy who sold his Ferrari, really. Just his greedy wife, spending his hard-earned money.
This sexist, 50's vibe approach to women is expressed publicly and formally by a spokesman of a corporate that claims to adopt values such as equality, diversity, etc. *facepalm*52 -
Friend: You're good with computers right?
Me: well...yeah why?
Friend: can you have a look at my microwave? something's wrong with it...
Me: ::face palm::2 -
So ok here it is, as asked in the comments.
Setting: customer (huge electronics chain) wants a huge migration from custom software to SAP erp, hybris commere for b2b and ... azure cloud
Timeframe: ~10 months….
My colleague and me had the glorious task to make the evaluation result of the B2B approval process (like you can only buy up till € 1000, then someone has to approve) available in the cart view, not just the end of the checkout. Well I though, easy, we have the results, just put them in the cart … hmm :-\
The whole thing is that the the storefront - called accelerator (although it should rather be called decelerator) is a 10-year old (looking) buggy interface, that promises to the customers, that it solves all their problems and just needs some minor customization. Fact is, it’s an abomination, which makes us spend 2 months in every project to „ripp it apart“ and fix/repair/rebuild major functionality (which changes every 6 months because of „updates“.
After a week of reading the scarce (aka non-existing) docs and decompiling and debugging hybris code, we found out (besides dozends of bugs) that this is not going to be easy. The domain model is fucked up - both CartModel and OrderModel extend AbstractOrderModel. Though we only need functionality that is in the AbstractOrderModel, the hybris guys decided (for an unknown reason) to use OrderModel in every single fucking method (about 30 nested calls ….). So what shall we do, we don’t have an order yet, only a cart. Fuck lets fake an order, push it through use the results and dismiss the order … good idea!? BAD IDEA (don’t ask …). So after a week or two we changed our strategy: create duplicate interface for nearly all (spring) services with changed method signatures that override the hybris beans and allow to use CartModels (which is possible, because within the super methods, they actually „cast" it to AbstractOrderModel *facepalm*).
After about 2 months (2 people full time) we have a working „prototype“. It works with the default-sample-accelerator data. Unfortunately the customer wanted to have it’s own dateset in the system (what a shock). Well you guess it … everything collapsed. The way the customer wanted to "have it working“ was just incompatible with the way hybris wants it (yeah yeah SAP, hybris is sooo customizable …). Well we basically had to rewrite everything again.
Just in case your wondering … the requirements were clear in the beginning (stick to the standard! [configuration/functinonality]). Well, then the customer found out that this is shit … and well …
So some months later, next big thing. I was appointed technical sublead (is that a word)/sub pm for the topics‚delivery service‘ (cart, delivery time calculation, u name it) and customerregistration - a reward for my great work with the b2b approval process???
Customer's office: 20+ people, mostly SAP related, a few c# guys, and drumrole .... the main (external) overall superhero ‚im the greates and ur shit‘ architect.
Aberage age 45+, me - the ‚hybris guy’ (he really just called me that all the time), age 32.
He powerpoints his „ tables" and other weird out of this world stuff on the wall, talks and talks. Everyone is in awe (or fear?). Everything he says is just bullshit and I see it in the eyes of the others. Finally the hybris guy interrups him, as he explains the overall architecture (which is just wrong) and points out how it should be (according to my docs which very more up to date. From now on he didn't just "not like" me anymore. (good first day)
I remember the looks of the other guys - they were releaved that someone pointed that out - saved the weeks of useless work ...
Instead of talking the customer's tongue he just spoke gibberish SAP … arg (common in SAP land as I had to learn the hard way).
Outcome of about (useless) 5 meetings later: we are going to blow out data from informatica to sap to azure to datahub to hybris ... hmpf needless to say its fucking super slow.
But who cares, I‘ll get my own rest endpoint that‘ll do all I need.
First try: error 500, 2. try: 20 seconds later, error message in html, content type json, a few days later the c# guy manages to deliver a kinda working still slow service, only the results are wrong, customer blames the hybris team, hmm we r just using their fucking results ...
The sap guys (customer service) just don't seem to be able to activate/configure the OOTB odata service, so I was told)
Several email rounds, meetings later, about 2 months, still no working hybris integration (all my emails with detailed checklists for every participent and deadlines were unanswered/ignored or answered with unrelated stuff). Customer pissed at us (god knows why, I tried, I really did!). So I decide to fly up there to handle it all by myself16 -
Fun issue
Swedish client is unable to enter a currency conversion rate in a field and submit. 'Not a float' well we can clearly see that it is a float when he does it (0.5 for example), not an issue for us though.
Reproducing was a nightmare, eventually it boiled down to the fact that the framework we were using had automatic locale checks. Now because our numeric fields are actually weird text fields (front end nonsense), it was converting the period to be a comma (Swedish people would write 0,5 normally). And if you actually entered 0,5 the range check (0.01-1000) failed because it couldn't parse the comma (no locale check on that one)
Godamn facepalm. Really confused the hell out of us when we saw the error, had to go diving through library code. To top this off, locale checks are supposed to be disabled as of about 2 years ago
In revenge against our oppressor :PHP: on slack is now an alias for the shit emoji5 -
So i was talking to my client the other day and this is what happened....
Me: So what features do you want in the Progress Tracker in the app.
Client: (takes his IPAD out and opens the FitBit app) This is a really nice progress tracker.
Me: Alright so what features would you like in Progress Tracker, eg: would you maybe like them to check in everyday making sure that they have done exercise or something.
Client: *Shows me his goal in steps (which was 10,000 if anyone was wondering) and shows me other features of the app and not telling me what to do in his own one* These look nice.
Me: Alright so do you want a Step Tracker, Calories Tracker etc.
Client: Nooooo, I want other things.
Me: Ok lets get discussing what are these "other things"
Client: *Continues to show me the FitBit app*
Me: *facepalm* -
We receive an email from Splunk when errors go above a certain threshold, and a particular service has been especially problematic this week (throwing hundreds of exceptions). Email response from the team mgr responsible for the service.
"We are working to address these errors. We don’t currently have a way to prevent a user who’s account is locked from logging into the service and performing work."
The exception? NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
The code? (paraphrasing)
var user = GetUser(request.Login);
if (user.CanPerformWork) ...
<facepalm>
I'm doing my best not to reply .."Really? No way? You do realize we can read code, right?"4 -
Overconfidence is striking again. Some companies are really begging for it... Found this cup in the kitchen of a client. And it is the slogan of an external contractor. It says: this network is unavailable for hackers. I think this is worth at least a triple facepalm1
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Facepalm moment - When the boss tasked me with a backend rewrite (or writing a backend in the first place really...) but only looked disappointedly at frontend stuff during the presentation.
"But this looks just like before?"4 -
I just finished up an absolute cesspool of a project. I was seriously reconsidering a career change to something less stressful, like welding on a high-rise building, or capturing Somali pirates.
Next project is supposed to be a walk in the park, and probably still will be.
MGR: You're starting a new project next week. Prismic for the CMS, and NextJS.
ME: Oh, okay, cool. Well, let me get up to speed on Prismic and Next since I haven't used either of those.
Spent some time last week - easy enough, nothing really new/ground breaking here.
Sprint 0.5 Kick off meeting today
MGR: By the way, we're still using Prismic for the CMS, but we're gonna go ahead and use Gatsby instead of Next.
Me: ... *facepalm5 -
I swear to god, if I read another medium post on how you managed to be focused and productive I will fucking... well... roll my eyes, make a facepalm and rant about it on devRant!
Who gives a shit if I'm unproductive and unfocused?!
Well, look at me now, I'm fucking productive while I write about you, you fucking peace off shit! And guess what? I'm not even using any of your 40 todo apps or time trackers. There is no pomodoro timer next to me or framed quotes from Steve Jobs hanging on the wall. Oh, I must be a fucking genius!
But what if YOU became unproductive?
What will happen when YOU start to procrastinate?
Do you really think the world would care?
Oh, but you are not really a writer are you? you're a developer building your app!?
Well fuck, I guess you're going to change the world than?
It's your big project. Your life's work, your legacy.
Let me remind you...
All apps will be abandoned!
All blog post will be forgotten!
Productive people will die!
Focused people will die!
Enthusiastic bloggers writing about productivity will die!
All CEOs and CTOs will die!
All developers will die!
Steve Jobs is dead!
In x years, you and I will also be dead!
Whatever you do, it's not really that important!
It's really not.
You're not going to change the world.
The world doesn't need another app.
The world doesn't need your advice on how to be productive.
You are not special.
Deal with it!8 -
Trained model with L2 regularisation. Didn't really see much of a difference to L1. Checked everything again... turned out I had re-run the L1 setup instead of the L2. *facepalm*1
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So I am a Ruby guy since I don't now when. Probably forever. Lately I have to code Groovy. People are telling me all the time that Groovy is like Ruby. Let me tell you: No! Groovy is not like Ruby. Groovy is shitty Java with a slightly more usable syntax. Nothing more. It is so so tedious to code and reminds me why I stopped coding Java like 8 years ago. The fact that some features resemble Ruby syntax makes it even harder for me because I cannot code and facepalm at the same time. And I automatically type Ruby code all the time because it looks so similar in some places. I don't have that problem with other languages. Just Groovy. And the fact that Java people like it tells me how bad Java really is. It's just dirty. Guys, I feel so dirty now. And showering this morning didn't help. Had to get that off my chest. Thanks for "listening"9
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Facepalm Monday...
My collegue denies to provide breaking changes in our login API in a separate version to the other teams depending on it.
What is the reason for his stubborn rejection?
It's scrum. We haven't planned the effort for realising a versioning concept for our API.
Let's build it in the next sprint as a part of live deployment strategy.
The point he miss is that the ProductOwner wants his API change deployed during the next sprint.
Additionally, it is best practice, having a compatible, deployable product after each sprint, without any risks.
Furthermore, another best practice to provide your API is one URI without a version part holding the current development of the API. And URIs with a version part in it to keep a specific request/response structure and behavior.
What really grind my gears are sayings like 'if the other teams had well programmed their software, modifying our API won't have any effect on them'
C'mon dude. That's far from reality, as anybody knows.
I can't accept, we provide unprofessional API builds, as he is going to do.
So, i have to spend my time and energy to change his mind, together with other software-architects, planning the big thing API-Gateway *sigh*2 -
On the introduction day of my Computer science course, we all were to sit in "welcome groups" and tell a little bit about our programming background.
Most of us were beginners, but one of the guys told me he'd been "messing around with some Java a while back", so I thought I'd ask him about help when we had our first real Java programming assignment. I was surprised to learn that he wasn't able to help me at all. He seemed to know less than me, a complete beginner, on the different OO concepts and Java syntax. Furthermore, he seemed to have zero interest in anything development related.
It was later revealed that he meant that he had been messing around with INSTALLING Java on his computer a while back, but never really made it work. *facepalm*
Needless to say, he was a great group member in the assignments that followed. /s2 -
I just really want to pluck my eyes out...
My sister is abroad for a music festival where she is attending as a speaker.
Her speech got almost ready at the last moment. The slideshow presentation was sloppy cause she gave some half-assed points to put. I saved the files (PDF and PPT) on her laptop and on her USB stick, I didn't keep any copies for me. She rehearsed her speech and I added some more points to enrich it and fill a bit more time. When she got there, she messaged me if it was possible to add those extra points to the presentation. I asked her to e-mail me the new points and the presentation on time (which it didn't happen), expecting a file attached to the e-mail. And guess what:
SHE FREAKIN' TYPED EVERYTHING EXCEPT OF THE TITLE!!!
AND NOW I HAVE TO REDO THE WHOLE PRESENTATION!!!
I can't facepalm myself hard enough to hop onto another universe... -
So, I work as a sysadmin junior (6 months and going), and in the past few months, I learned what my boss warned me about - Devs don't understand us admins, and we don't understand the devs.
We have this huge client who is about to migrate to our company (We do mostly server managment/Housing/Renting), and I am so gald I don't have to work on the migration myself!
Just hearing what the company devs say makes me facepalm: No, it won't work. It cannot work on just 3 machines (They use like... 20 in total), no, we won't get rid of our docker swarm, that's essential (Doing the absolute minimum in their infrastructure, just a fancy buzzword to lure people on. Though they've spent like 2 years developing the app that uses it, so they my not want to give it up).
I kid you not, once, they replied to an email that contained the phrase "To be afraid of/worried about" something during the migration, that something could break, not work, be unstable. 7 times.
Might not sound as bad, but it was a rather short mail, and when they're so afraid of everything, its kinda hard to cooperate with them.
My colleague literally spent this entire week mapping out /their/ infrastructure, because they were unable to provide us with the description themselves.
And as a cherry on top, they sent us a "graph" of relationships of all the parts of their infrastructure that was this jumbled mess of rectangles and arrows. Oh, and half of all the machines were not even in the graph at all! Stating that "We also have all this, but I really don't know how to ilustracte the interactions anymore"
Why do companies like that exist? If you build an infrastructure yourself, shouldn't at least someone know exactly how it works?1 -
Databases and LDAP down since 1 1/2 days...so embarrassing...am i really working in an it company???
luckily there are options beside work...hello amazon, spotify, devrant...:D
if we got Server/DB issues it always takes about at least half a day to fix it! *facepalm*1 -
I need to tell you the story of my MOAB (Mother of all bugs).
I need to write some stuff in C (which i am fairly used to) and have a function that allocates memory for a Matrix on the heap. The matrix has a rows and columns property and an associated data array, so it looks like this
struct Matrix{
uint8_t rows;
uint8_t columns;
uint8_t data[];
}
I allocate rows*columns + 2 bytes of memory for it.
I also have a function to zero it out which does something like this
for(int i=0; i < rows*columns;i++){
data[i]=0;}
Let‘s come to the problem:
On my Mac the whole stuff works and passes all tests. We tried the code on a Linux machine and suddenly the code crashed in various places, sometimes a realloc got an invalid pointer, sometimes free got an invalid pointer and basically the code crashed at arbitrary points randomly.
I was confused af because did i really make THAT many errors?
I found out that all errors occured when testing my matrices so i looked more into it and observed it through the debugger.
Eventually i came to the function that zeroes out my matrix and it went unusually high and wondered if my matrix really was that big.
Then i saw it
The matrix wasn‘t initialised yet
It had arbitrary data that was previously in the heap.
It zeroed out a huge chunk of the heap space.
It literally wrote a zero to a shitload of addresses which invalidated many pointer.
You can imagine my facepalm2