12

Our team - if ever existed - is falling apart. Pressure raising. Release deadline probably failing. No release ready for Big Sur.

Almost seemed we were getting somewhere: More focus on code quality, unit tests, proper design, smaller classes. But somehow we now ended up in "microservice" hell; a gazillion classes, mostly tested in isolation, but together they just fail to do their job. A cheap and dirty proof of concept from March is still more capable than this pile. I really start to doubt all that "Clean code", TDD, Agility rhetorics. What does it help you, if nobody cares for the end result? It's like a month I try to hammer down that message: we have to have testable artifacts, we have to ensure code signing works, our artifact is packaged and installable, we have to give QA something they can test - but time just passes and this piece of shit software is still being killed or does nothing.

Now my knee is broken and can do no sports and are tied to my chair even more. To top it all my coffee machine broke and my internet connection was abysmal this week. Not the usual small disconnects, after which it would recover, but more annoying and enduring: often being throttled to 1.7 MB/s (ranking my connection in the slowest 7% even in Germany). My RDP sessions had compression artifacts all over the screen and a mouse click would only take effect 5 sec later.

But my Esspresso machine was just repaired. Not all hope is lost.

Comments
  • 3
    Hallelujah! At least one person realized that all that uncle bob bullshit doesn’t work and coverage doesn’t translate into quality! Welcome to the club mate!
  • 2
    This sounds like my ultimate nightmare.

    No irony.

    No coffee, non good internet and work place steaming pile of shit burning... Ouch.

    And the microservice part... It is extremely important in microservices to combine powers of several very different, highly specialized fields of IT to get it working.

    It's like captain planet - by the power of VCS, software architecture, service architecture, operations and project management combined WE have a working product.
  • 2
    https://joelonsoftware.com/2009/09/...

    This is also wrong but this is way less wrong than uncle bob.

    I used to be an architectural astronaut, then I was a duct tape apologist and now I created The Pragmatic Beauty while studying graphic design and I merged it with my CS background and it worked like magic. I don’t even read books anymore.
  • 0
    @IntrusionCM I'm only 8 years in, but have already taken part in worse suicide missions: legacy application, that were coded by one mad physicist not leaving the factory for a month, and we had to write new features into that undocumented mess of C with some classes and self implemented libraries. - Somehow I stood it through, with some inner scars and close to taking anti-depressants.

    This here is different in, and what enrages me:

    * that it might actually the first project I participate in and we fail by missing deadline

    * failing is totally unneeded, we had enough resources
  • 2
    @phorkyas

    I'm gonna turn momma on.

    8 years is a _fucking_ long time.
    Never ever put again an only in that sentence! Don't sell yourself cheap.

    That single word has a huge negative impact.

    Don't. do. this. ever. again.

    Understood?

    And to the last part. I know this moment where you see everything crumble apart... Just because some people can't get their shit together.

    It's like Alfred Hitchcocks shower scene....

    The important part is to make a hard cut between you and the rest of the team. It's not about fault or finger pointing.

    It's about a simple question: Did you try your best to prevent the obvious meltdown?

    And from what I've read - you did.

    You should answer that for yourself - sometimes you will have to let the shit hit the fan. It's just important that you are "confident" in accepting that there's nothing else you could do.
  • 1
    @uyouthe Joel also gives me warmer feelings than this clean pattern buzzword corporate dick sucker manifester. Sometimes wanna nuke them like Samuel/Zed: http://programming-motherfucker.com/...

    Sometimes I'm also a bit split on it. A lot in Clean Code is not so far from the Duct Tape Programmer, from a pragmatism that I try to develop to write simple, good code.

    But then I remember the anecdote Uncle Bow was telling as main motivation in that book: a comparison between two teams working together on a project. His team working their arses off, to ship a shiny and great product and the others seen as the "pros" weren't doubted to deliver, but then just didn't because of some "paperworks".

    And so all this fuzz is just about seeming to be the "pro", because you employ/deploy newest shit. As if following pattern XY or using tool Z makes your shit any better. You just need to sell it that way.
  • 0
    @IntrusionCM Thanks. Trying to get there.
Add Comment