So a few days ago I felt pretty h*ckin professional.

I'm an intern and my job was to get the last 2003 server off the racks (It's a government job, so it's a wonder we only have one 2003 server left). The problem being that the service running on that server cannot just be placed on a new OS. It's some custom engineering document server that was built in 2003 on a 1995 tech stack and it had been abandoned for so long that it was apparently lost to time with no hope of recovery.

"Please redesign the system. Use a modern tech stack. Have at it, she's your project, do as you wish."

Music to my ears.

First challenge is getting the data off the old server. It's a 1995 .mdb file, so the most recent version of Access that would be able to open it is 2010.

Option two: There's an "export" button that literally just vomits all 16,644 records into a tab-delimited text file. Since this option didn't require scavenging up an old version of Access, I wrote a Python script to just read the export file.

And something like 30% of the records were invalid. Why? Well, one of the fields allowed for newline characters. This was an issue because records were separated by newline. So any record with a field containing newline became invalid.

Although, this did not stop me. Not even close. I figured it out and fixed it in about 10 minutes. All records read into the program without issue.

Next for designing the database. My stack is MySQL and NodeJS, which my supervisors approved of. There was a lot of data that looked like it would fit into an integer, but one or two odd records would have something like "1050b" which mean that just a few items prevented me from having as slick of a database design as I wanted. I designed the tables, about 18 columns per record, mostly varchar(64).

Next challenge was putting the exported data into the database. At first I thought of doing it record by record from my python script. Connect to the MySQL server and just iterate over all the data I had. But what I ended up actually doing was generating a .sql file and running that on the server. This took a few tries thanks to a lot of inconsistencies in the data, but eventually, I got all 16k records in the new database and I had never been so happy.

The next two hours were very productive, designing a front end which was very clean. I had just enough time to design a rough prototype that works totally off ajax requests. I want to keep it that way so that other services can contact this data, as it may be useful to have an engineering data API.

Anyways, that was my win story of the week. I was handed a challenge; an old, decaying server full of important data, and despite the hitches one might expect from archaic data, I was able to rescue every byte. I will probably be presenting my prototype to the higher ups in Engineering sometime this week.

Happy Algo!

CC: StackOverflow

“Yeah but you’re not a *real* developer”

Fuck. you.

I wrote 80% of this code base. I do 80% of the tickets/storyboard points. I do all of the QA. My nose is to the grindstone every fucking day honing this craft and sweating my balls off like a blacksmith staring into the red hot kiln while the sores of previous mistakes scream bloody murder from the unrelenting exposure to heat. I saw this amazing industry of opportunity, freedom and self examination and wanted in no matter what it took. I glued myself to every pithy resource I could possibly get my hands on and crawled through the muck and filth of it all until I could keep myself warm with the smallest spark of my own making. I stoked that spark until it became a fire and stoked that fire until I could set entire forests ablaze. I listened to the ungrateful people keeping warm by my combustion saying it “wasn’t hot enough” or “would have been a nicer colour if they did it” or “could have warmed up just fine jogging on the spot”. I made painstaking alterations to my ignition and watched my undeserving benefactors gradually be silenced and begin to sit quietly by the heat. I jumped into that inferno daily, was reduced to ash daily and emerged reborn daily. But you are right! I didn’t get scammed out of $40k+ studying technology in an archaic institution from instructors who don’t give a shit and answering “D all of the above” for 4+ years straight therefor my opinion doesn’t mean shit. Push your bullshit to prod and watch the server come burning out of the cloud as the apocalyptic swarm of angry tickets come flooding in why don’t you? Bet they didn’t teach you that in school. You’ve never poked around inside an open source codebase in your life. They are just a mystery boxes of magic that unless someone holds your hands with finely crafted instructions containing a 50/50 picture to word ratio you throw a hissy fit. Every problem that comes up instead of working to solve it you reflexively point to the first person in the room while thinking with your pea brain how you can possibly scapegoat them into taking the fall for whatever it is that’s come up today you couldn’t possibly understand.

Not a real developer?

Fuck. You.

Senior Management: We are severely disappointed in the timeliness of the two apps you built this year. You had budgeted 3 months for one and it took 4 months and the other was budgeted to take 4 months and took 5 months. We understand that we doubled the requirements halfway through and but that doesn’t take away from our need for you to deliver on time. We provided you with two extra devs on the project! We know they were novices and you had to train them from the ground up during the project, that doesn’t matter. The extra resources should have helped you but your lack of leadership ability is what caused them to hold you back. We know our other team with a budget of 6 months took 2 years on their project and was still unsuccessful but that is a different scenario! That was a pre-built 3rd party ERP plugin, way more complicated and nuanced than simply building and deploying something from scratch. Yes we’re aware your projects were the only successful tech projects at the company this year, that’s just luck and coincidence. The next app we need you to build in 6 months, no questions asked. It needs to consolidate and tie together our 3 different ERPs. Everything that we need out of these products that they don’t do out of the box we need you to wire up. We will decide the exact requirements in a month or so, for now just get started. Yes your apps changed the way we do business and allowed us to complete projects smoother than ever before while saving millions of dollars in wasteful and archaic processes that is OLD NEWS. Stop bringing it up. The successes of yesterday are the status quo of today. Don’t expect any new resources either, you clearly can’t handle them. You will now be giving status updates to 3 different managers as a corrective action to your missed deadlines in order to ensure the timeliness of future deliverables.

Dev: …

When you graduate from coding bootcamp

Manager: You can’t define an async function without using await.

Dev: Yes you can.

Manager: Well you shouldn’t, there’s no point!

Dev: Yes there is. It can turn blocking synchronous logic into work performed concurrently. In this case the perform—

Manager: It’s called async *await*. Async *AWAIT*! Did you hear the two parts to that? You shouldn’t ever have one without the other. THEY GO TOGETHER. Worrying about concurrency is for people who use callbacks which just goes to show how out of date your skills are. I’m reading a book on javascript and there are so many advanced techniques out there that I haven’t even seen you use ONCE!

Dev: …

*I looked at the book he’s reading, it’s from the < ES6 era… no wonder he doesn’t see me using any of those archaic patterns/hacks/workarounds…*

Me today

Visual Studio summarized

Friday Feels

I bet some day we'll have robots tell us where bugs in our code are instantly and our kids will say "How did you ever write code without them?" And we will say "We had to use this archaic thing called Google and do research... It took forever!"

One day, this ex-boss of mine dropped the following bomb:

“Stop using switch statements, the switch statement is archaic.”

The if statement should be even more archaic, right? So, should we stop using ifs as well?

Let me tell you how shit flies in Aerospace&Defense companies in certain place in on earth

1. Your dev. PC is isolated from the internet. You can not download any software/library etc directly. "Legal" way takes literally days and you must all effort for it to work. I will not discuss the details of legal way but it is not asking IT team to download it for you, you do it yourself.

2. You use an archaic requirement standard that is somehow used by all other similar companies too. These companies f*ck each other in the arse when they are working on projects together(hiding details from each other which is necessary most of the times etc.) but they were kind to each other when it came to share shitty req. standard.

3. When you try to switch to new requirement standard, you waste weeks only to amend the old one, because everyone is using old one for all projects, so changing it would upset old guards in the company(which are people works in same project for 10 years, no personal development)
4. You came 1 minutes late, you fill the "minutely permission" form.

5. You already work long hours per day and they remove your small breaks during day, because developers use those breaks longer than intended(I wonder what might be the reason...)

6. A technology can not be adopted into current projects even it has objective advantages proven many times in the outer world, because old guards(developers), IT team and configuration management guys(poor man's dev ops role sometimes) can not change their ways.

I hate this shit...

Happens all too often

It's surprising how fast current project code becomes ancient archaic code….

Everyone talks about their hate of js but like python is honestly just as bad.

- shitty package manager,
* need to recreate python environments to keep workflows seperate as oppose to just mapping dependencies like in maven, npm, cargo, go-get
* Can't fix python version number to project I.e specify it in requirements
- dynamic typing that gets fixed with shitty duck typing too many times
- no first class functions
- limited lambda expressions
- def def def
- overly archaic error messages, rarely have I gotten a good error message and didn't have to dive into package code to figure it out
- people still use 2.7 ... Honestly I blame the difficulty of changing versions for this. It's just not trivial to even specify another python version
- inconsistent import system. When in module use . When outside don't.
- SLOW so SLOW
- BLOCKING making things concurrent has only recently got easier, but it still needs lots of work. Like it would be nice to do

runasync some_async_fcn()
Or just running asynchronous functions on the global scope will make it know to go to some default runtime. Or heck. Just let me run it like that...

- private methods aren't really private. They just hide them in intelisense but you can still override them....

I know my username is ironic :P

Being a c# junkie moving to c++, I hated the archaic practice of declaring things in one file, then implementing them in another.

I have been using c++ as my main language for about two months straight now, and I went back to a c# project and I HATE not having them in separate files.

Funny, eh?

While in the banking world, I had a project where I had to automate an import into a shit system called CRAWiz. The data had to come from multiple archaic loan systems with no API and tons of shit data.

After implementing, the shit data came to light. Instead of fixing shit data (and using their loan systems correctly), they decided to go back to digging through physical files and manually importing. They blamed CRAWiz and decided to go with a new system to import their shit data into. I warned them repeatedly that a new system would not fix the shit data but they couldn't accept it. I left at that point. 😂

Ohhhhhh shit, this is a good topic.

Well, I just expected more... Better.

Like maybe the programming lecture could have been Java 1.6 rather than 1.2, and taught rather than read from an archaic time of dusty powerpoints.

Maybe we could have used Spice or a reputable circuit modelling tool rather than CircuitMaker; a tool no longer being maintained that barely makes it past install because it was written in a time before circuits.

Maybe day fucking one of the first year, happy clappy, let's teach you HTML lecture the tutor could have just shown us a copy-pasted hello world. Rather than the ugly, mixed-case, no-end-tag-having, broke ass HTML 4 scribble she felt the need to go over every detail of.

Why are banks so absolutely archaic and stupid when it comes to tech? I work in a Services based company and currently engaged with a very famous bank to build accounting software for Mutual Funds. The day to day stupidity of this client is driving me absolutely crazy.

They couldn't give us proper requirements, and my company was stupid enough to kickoff the project without official sign off. Not only did they change the requirements, but they added a shit ton MORE features, and essentially bullied us into completing it all in the same timeline. Their attitude is pathetic, they shit talk our dev team, they make us build the worst possible UX, and then complain that it's not looking good and not working well. They have absolutely no idea about any of the technical stuff and think that software is a magic box that will give them what they want.

I swear I have a lot of examples but I'm so angry right now that my words are fumbling and I can't think straight. Stand up is in 45 minutes and I'm just dreading it. Idk how to tell everything, it's just... AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Writing hebrew in Latex using a template that doesn't support UTF-8 is the most archaic shit I've done lately. I feel like some sort of a caveman.
This fucking encoding inverts all letters so it can support right to left. 😓

Anyone else get called cute nicknames working in IT?

My favourite is one of the VPs at my company calls me a warlock, because I can read code that he calls "archaic scribble"

Having exams on paper sounds ... archaic.

I am for paper exams. It's not practically efficient but I find myself learning a lot from it!

People who think programming is just copy+paste, haven't programmed using COBOL, REXX or JCL (or similar "archaic" languages).

Best of luck finding all the answers on Google/SO. This is the world where RTFM is a daily task.

RTFM = Read The Fucking Manual

I worked on a project that used an archaic homegrown library written by a consultant that had zero documentation, tons of reflection and here is the kicker... the consultant refused to give us the source code as it was "his intellectual property" so we couldn't make any sense of how to actually use it. Moreover, he worked remotely so the timezone difference between us meant that any questions we had took ages to get answered. Glad to be away from that project now.

Command Prompt is archaic and useless. The most I can do with it (without using other programs) is copy files and overwrite user passwords. Both useful, granted, but nothing compared to the Windows GUI - or, like, any other command line? Heck, I'd rather just have a python shell and nothing else.

When the new owner of the company decide to regroup every branches of the business to use a disastrous unoptimised .NET software. When the current one is very fast, the interface kinda UX-friendly. Now its, a home hosted .NET software with Windows forms elements with multi-windows inside the main software. Just to help you create yourself an image of the situation. It cannot be installed if there is more languages then only En-US. It will freeze the updater.

The time between switching tabs is in average a 3-4-5 seconds each time.

Being asked if you have access to the archaic raid array machine in the corner of the data-centre.

Step 1. Log-in in front of the person asking

Step 2. Deleting ssh key from the .ssh/authorized_keys

Step 3. Replying "Nope I know nothing of it"

How do you do bootstrapping of blanko machines?
Imagine you get a linux/BSD/osx machine and you want it set it up to a defined state to be prepared for further setup.
Like users
ssh config
Sudoers file
Config management client or credentials
Software like vim, htop and tmux

A simple shell script sounds a bit archaic to me and i was wondering, if there is a better way...

Makefiles also came to my mind but still... Unsatisfactual

Just a friendly note: If you use the same technique as I i.e. local GIT repositories backed up on cloud, ALWAYS make sure there is still at least as much free space as the largest repo shallow clone.

It may happen that some really really archaic "commits" will disappear and git won't work as usual, but mostly you'll have an access to the branches, which you can diff against the master and make patches. Then just clone, make branches from patches and code happily ever after.

Also... you really really shouldn't push when you discover(git fsck --all) such an issue in your local repo, although I think git won't even allow you to do so.

"Use remote EJBs. REST is too complicated", said my archaic boss of his late 40's. Remote EJBs we wrote. Suffering we endured.

archaic jsp (java servlet pages) making life hard to do some fucking widget you gotta populate with some dynamic data

upgrading to a modern front end framework is not something the company is interested in doing (react, angular, whatever the hell's popular these days)

we can hack around it on the backend but we'd have to shuffle a boolean down to get used in one place at the bottom only (straightforward but ugly solution)

i hate my job and i don't know what im doing, fuck front end

If only more devs would use short, yet concise, modern constructs instead of archaic ones.

For example in C#: using lambdas, extension methods, LinQ,.. much easier to read through if you know how these work, rather than having to spend all day scanning tedious for-loops and over-engineered classes your colleagues wrote who don't know any better.

Examples:

vs.foreach(v => console.write(v));

initialList = secondList.Where(p => initialList.Contains(p, valueComparer))
.Concat(initialList.Where(p => !secondList.Contains(p, valueComparer))).ToList();

Why can’t my brain grasp ASP MVC?

typical dev offer

they look for a dev that should migrate their existing system to a new one

the old dev wrote a system that is archaic now and he wants to quit developing

and if you "want" to do more than just coding they would like you to support them in
- managing social media
- layouting / photoshop
- creating videos

they search ONE developer to do this
and are not really planing on expanding - I got only very vague respones regarding this topic

typical We search an "allrounder / one man show"...

what do you guys think? they invited me for a meeting next week. I think i will go for the impression and see afterwards how I should proceed. But kinda iffy and the fact that I will be the only dev makes me wonder about the fact that I may feel lonely fast, stressed aaaand no real option to educate myself because I will have no free time and if potentially I (the whole dev team) don't work, then no work gets done.

TFW the only thing stopping you from using Chrome on an archaic application is one-hundred lines of JavaScript. The typical user-agent switcher didn't even work.

At my old job, using a simple text editor and a separate terminal was touted as being "archaic." "Why not use emacs or intellij?" They'd say... is anyone else also a fan of simplicity?