Things have been a little too quiet on my side here, so its time for an exciting new series:

practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 1: Dealing with the new backend team

It's great to be back folks. Since our last series where we delved into the mind numbing idiocy of former colleagues, a lot has changed. I've moved to a new company and taken a step up as a Dev manager / Tech lead. Now I know what you are all thinking, sounds more dull and boring right? Well it wouldn't be a practiseSafeHex series if we weren't ...

<audience-shouting>
DEALING! ... WITH! ... IDIOTS!
</audience-shouting>

Bingo! so lets jump right in and kick us off with a good one.

So for the past few months i've been on an on-boarding / fact finding / figuring out this shit-storm, mission to understand more about what it is i'm suppose to do and how to do it. Last week, as part of this, I had the esteemed pleasure of meeting face to face with the remote backend team i've been working with. Lets rattle off a few facts to catch us all up:

- 8 hour time difference to me
- No documentation other than a non-maintained swagger doc
- Swagger is reporting errors and several of the input models are just `Type: String`
- The one model that seems accurate, has every property listed as optional, including what must be the primary key
- Properties go missing and get removed at the drop of a hat and we are never told.
- First email I sent them took 27 days to reply, my response to that hasn't been answered so far 31 days later (new record! way to go team, I knew we could do it!!!)
- I deal directly with 2 of them, the manager and the tech lead. Based on how things have gone so far, i've nick named them:
1) Ass
2) Hole

So lets look at some example of their work:

- I was trying to test the new backend, I saw no data in QA. They said it wouldn't show up until mid day their time, which is middle of the night for us. I said we need data in our timezone and I was told: a) "You don't understand how big this system is" (which is their new catch phrase) b) "Your timezone is not my concern"

- The whole org started testing 2 days later. The next day a member from each team was on a call and I was asked to give an update of how the testing was going on the mobile side. I said I was completely blocked because I can't get test data. Backend were asked to respond. They acknowledged they were aware, but that mobile don't understand how big the system is, and that the mobile team need to come up with ideas for the backend team, as to how mobile can test it. I said we can't do anything without test data, they said ... can you guess what? ... correct "you don't understand how big the system is"

- We eventually got something going and I noticed that only 1 of the 5 API changes due on their side was done. Opened tickets. 2 days later asked them for progress and was told that "new findings" always go to the bottom of the backlog, and they are busy with other things. I said these were suppose to be done days ago. They said you can't give us 2 days notice and expect everything done. I said the original ticket was opened a month a go *sends link* ......... *long silence* ...... "ok, but you don't understand how big the system is, this is a lot of work"

- We were on a call. Product was asking the backend manager (aka "Ass") a question about a slight upgrade to the new feature. While trying to talk, the tech lead (aka "Hole") kept cutting everyone off by saying loudly "but thats not in scope". The question was "is this possible in the future" and "how long would it take", coming from management and product development. Hole just kept saying "its not in scope", until he was told to be quiet by several people.

- An API was sending down JSON with a string containing a message for the user with 2 bits of data inside it. We asked for one of those pieces to also come down as a property as the string can change and we needed it client side. We got that. A few days later we found an edge case and asked for the second piece of data to be a property too. Now keep in mind, they clearly already have access to them in order to make the string. We were told "If you keep requesting changes like this, you are going to delay the release of the backend by up to 2 weeks"

Yes folks, there you have it, the most minuscule JSON modifications, can delay your release by up to 2 weeks ........ maybe I should just tell product, that they don't understand how big the app is, and claim we can't build it on our side? Seems to work for them

Thats all the time we have for today,

Tune in for more, where we'll be looking into such topics as:

- If god himself was an iOS developer ... not
- Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand
- Its more time-efficient to just give everything a story point of 5
- Why waste time replying to emails ... when you can do nothing instead

See you all next week,
practiseSafeHex

How I went from loving my job to wishing i dont wake up tomorrow just to avoid it.

Ive been a backend dev in the company im at for 2 years now.

First year was a blast, i loved my work so much, I used to get so many random features to do, bug fixes, campaigns, analytics, etc..

Second year i started getting familiar with the part of the code that has to do with Search in our music streaming app. Nobody wanted to work on it, so i wanted to take initiative and start doing a few tasks.

A few tasks turned into sprints, and sprints turned into months worth of sprints. And because the code was the definition of tech debt, and because it was so messed up that changing one thing can blow up everything else, working on Search was not too fun.

However, people seemed to be happy search tasks are no longer piling up and someone is handling them so that used to make me feel good about it. They also gave me so much freedom and i felt like my own manager because no one told me what to do (not even my actual manager) they just let me be and were happy i was handling the part they want nothing to do with. I was also given an intern to mentor and have her work on Search tasks with me which turned out amazing.

During the last few months, I completely rewrote search, made it 10 times more performant in such a neat way, made an inhouse dashboard to automate certain tasks so we wont need to waste developers on them (all of which were extra effort on my own time without being asked), all meanwhile still tending to the fixes of the old implementation.

I felt so accomplished, and in a way, i felt like a lead (even tho im not managing any employees, i had so much freedom and I was literally responsible for everything about Search and if i decide to play with the sprint task order i can even do that).

Then 6 or so weeks ago my manager left the company, and while i thought id be a standalone team / person (single person teams are not uncommon in the company) i was instead put under someone else. Someone who likes to micro manage the fuck out of me. I have been happy working on shit code because it was my baby, my project, no one interferes and no one tells me what to do and everyone would call me the search lead (unofficially). now if i dont report to that guy every two hours he calls to see if im working. preplans sprints i no longer have a say in, and im the only dev who knows the code so all tasks go to me. I feel i got demoted so fucking much. I felt like a lead on a project and now im back to being a normal code minion. From deciding everything about a project to blindly following a some irrelevant manager's opinion. (who btw is making Search worse) And after all the extra effort i put in, after actually caring, after actually embracing Search as my responsibility i get rewarded with losing everything i liked about my job...My Independence. From feeling like a lead to feeling demoted. I am so demotivated.

I love the company, but this is hell for me and this made me hate a job i always loved. I am thinking of talking to the CTO asking to work on other stuff because i no longer want this. If i am to be a code minion at least let it be on code i like, let me go back to dealing with PMs, fuck my new manager I dont wanna work with that guy he can take the project along with all its poopoo.

Welcome back to practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 2: Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand

This is a particularly special episode for me, as these problems are taking up so much of my time with non-sensical bullshit, that i'm delayed with everything else. Some badly require tooling or new products. Some are just unnecessary processes or annoyances that should not need to be handled by another human. So lets jump right in, in no particular order:

- Jira ... nuff said? not quite because somehow some blue moon, planets aligning, act of god style set of circumstances lined up to allow this team to somehow make Jira worse. On one hand we have a gigantic Jira project containing 7 separate sub teams, a million different labels / epics and 4.2 million possible assignees, all making sure the loading page takes as long as possible to open. But the new country we've added support for in the app gets a separate project. So we have product, backend, mobile, design, management etc on one, and mobile-country2 on another. This delightfully means a lot of duplication and copy pasting from one to the other, for literally no reason what so ever.

- Everything on Jira is found through a label. Every time something happens, a new one is created. So I need to check for "iOS", "Android", "iOS-country2", "Android-country2", "mobile-<feature>", "mobile-<feature>-issues", "mobile-<feature>-prod-issues", "mobile-<feature>-existing-issues" and "<project>-July31" ... why July31? Because some fucking moron decided to do a round of testing, and tag all the issues with the current date (despite the fact Jira does that anyway), which somehow still gets used from time to time because nobody pays attention to what they are doing. This means creating and modifying filters on a daily basis ... after spending time trying to figure out what its not in the first one.

- One of my favourite morning rituals I like to call "Jira dumpster diving". This involves me removing all the filters and reading all the tickets. Why would I do such a thing? oh remember the 9000 labels I mentioned earlier? right well its very likely that they actually won't use any of them ... or the wrong ones ... or assign to the wrong person, so I have to go find them and fix them. If I don't, i'll get yelled at, because clearly it's my fault.

- Moving on from Jira. As some of you might have seen in your companies, if you use things like TestFlight, HockeyApp, AppCenter, BuddyBuild etc. that when you release a new app version for testing, each version comes with an automated change-log, listing ticket numbers addressed ...... yeah we don't do that. No we use this shitty service, which is effectively an FTP server and a webpage, that only allows you to host the new versions. Sending out those emails is all manual ... distribution groups?? ... whats that?

- Moving back to Jira. Can't even automate the changelog with a script, because I can't even make sense of the tickets, in order to translate that to a script.

- Moving on from Jira. Me and one of the remote testers play this great game I like to call "tag team ticketing". It's so much fun. Right heres how to play, you'll need a QA and a PM.

*QA creates a ticket, and puts nothing of any use inside it, and assigns to the PM.
*PM fires it back asking for clarification.
*QA adds in what he feels is clarification (hes wrong) and assigns it back to the PM.
*PM sends detailed instructions, with examples as to what is needed and assigns it back.
*QA adds 1 of the 3 things required and assigns it back.
*PM assigns it back saying the one thing added is from the wrong day, and reminds him about the other 2 items.
*QA adds some random piece of unrelated info to the ticket instead, forgetting about the 3 things and assigns it back.

and you just continue doing this for the whole dev / release cycle hahaha. Oh you guys have no idea how much fun it is, seriously give it a go, you'll thank me later ... or kill yourselves, each to their own.

- Moving back to Jira. I decided to take an action of creating a new project for my team (the mobile team) and set it up the way we want and just ignore everything going on around us. Use proper automation, and a kanban board. Maybe only give product a slack bot interface that won't allow them to create a ticket without what we need etc. Spent 25 minutes looking for the "create new project" button before finding the link which says I need to open a ticket with support and wait ... 5 ... fucking ... long ... painful ... unnecessary ... business days.

... Heres hoping my head continues to not have a bullet hole in it by then.

Id love to talk more, but those filters ain't gonna fix themselves. So we'll have to leave it here for today. Tune in again for another episode soon.

And remember to always practiseSafeHex

Aaaah...I just got back from a meeting because of a production data problem caused by an analyst who keeps making mistakes that screw up client data. I wrote a program to automate most of it and everybody initially accused me of having a buggy program, only to find out she wasn't using it, never did.

"Why aren't you using the program then?" was asked. "Oh, well, I just understand my way better," she replies, "When I make a mistake at least I understand why."

Pause....

"Then, um, if you know you're making a mistake, why don't you fix it?"
"Because my process is so manual and labor intensive sometimes it's not worth it to go back and fix it, because I'd have to do everything over again, and you guys are much better at fixing this stuff than I am."

I indicated that everyone is too busy to stop and fix her mistakes, to which she then asks:

"So if you can't fix my mistakes, what am I supposed to do?"

Automate everything

I live in the terminal. I write lots of scripts (Shell, Python, node js) to automate tasks that would take hours to do by my teammates. Recently, I started automating everything that I put my hands on using Ansile: from pointing DNS server to continuons deployment, provisionning a fully customized infrastructure on the cloud using just a single command!

This is because automation gives you super power, the feeling that what you do help tl increase the productivity, reduce bugs etc.. Simply, once mastered, automation is ausome!

Update on my student job :

Today they put me on a new project.
Basically, I have to update a database of buildings owned or rented by the company. They provided me a lot of data including the address of each building but I need the GPS coordinates.
They wanted me to do it manually, copy pasting from Google maps (info: there's 75 buildings).
So I wrote a small script using an API to automate that, took me 20 minutes.

My colleagues were like "how the fuck is that possible ? We always do it manually, always takes ages !"

1. Just because it sounds cool doesn't mean it is.
2. Automate all the things. If you can see everything from cli all the better.
3. If it isn't commited and pushed, it doesn't exist or won't after a hard drive burnout
4. Everything on your workstation should be quickly reproduceable or in a git repo.
5. Murphy is a bitch

I was recuited to do devops work for a client. The project started in late '14. Until mid '15 I was forced to just sit there and do nothing. And I mean nothing. The ops team needed my help but the project lead didn't allow that (endless discussions). Somewhere around the end of '15 I could start to work and quickly learned that I had to report to two leads that couldn't disagree more on what to do and how to do it. I also learned that the companies mentality is "Clean me but don't get me wet". So the ops team demands a lot but is really uncooperative with everything. So I am currently sitting between three grindstones and everything I do is worthless. Because nobody agrees with anybody and I cannot fulfill my job for which I have been hired: Make ops more efficient because they are drowning in manual work. My job is further complicated by the following facts: This company uses no standard whatsoever but their own. Thru this they have created a Rube-Goldberg-Machine. But they think their system is the greatest in the world and the only one that makes sense. Which makes automation pointless because it is not maintainable. They call it diversity and they say that it is the clear reason why automation is not for them even though they schedule meeting after meeting in which they discuss about how to automate things. But in general they do just block everything useful and sabotage my work. And behind my back they make me the reason for the fail. Every real decision is blocked anyway. Also the ops guys think they are the leetest in the world. And everything they invent is above and beyond. If you ask them why they have over 400 VLANs for example (in a company of unter a thousand employees) they stutter and stumble because they cannot explain their complicated shit. They also change their decisions like underwear. Another really "kewl" thing they just did: They hired a devops engineer and everybody loves him. During the interview he said that he has no prior experience with devops whatsoever and it will take him around six month to get started on the basics of devops. I could go on for hours here about the insanity of this company that in my opinion will cease to exist within the next 5 years, if you ask me.
Long story short I am getting out of there by the end of march and will be on sabbatical shortly after because I am burned out. And I mean burned out. Not like "Oh I am burned out". I mean really burned out, with health problems and everything. Another external guy got out here last month because of the same health conditions.

I'm fixing a security exploit, and it's a goddamn mountain of fuckups.

First, some idiot (read: the legendary dev himself) decided to use a gem to do some basic fucking searching instead of writing a simple fucking query.

Second, security ... didn't just drop the ball, they shit on it and flushed it down the toilet. The gem in question allows users to search by FUCKING EVERYTHING on EVERY FUCKING TABLE IN THE DB using really nice tools, actually, that let you do fancy things like traverse all the internal associations to find the users table, then list all users whose password reset hashes begin with "a" then "ab" then "abc" ... Want to steal an account? Hell, want to automate stealing all accounts? Only takes a few hundred requests apiece! Oooh, there's CC data, too, and its encryption keys!

Third, the gem does actually allow whitelisting associations, methods, etc. but ... well, the documentation actually recommends against it for whatever fucking reason, and that whitelisting is about as fine-grained as a club. You wanna restrict it to accessing the "name" column, but it needs to access both the "site" and "user" tables? Cool, users can now access site.name AND user.name... which is PII and totally leads to hefty fines. Thanks!

Fourth. If the gem can't access something thanks to the whitelist, it doesn't catch the exception and give you a useful error message or anything, no way. It just throws NoMethodErrors because fuck you. Good luck figuring out what they mean, especially if you have no idea you're even using the fucking thing.

Fifth. Thanks to the follower mentality prevalent in this hellhole, this shit is now used in a lot of places (and all indirectly!) so there's no searching for uses. Once I banhammer everything... well, loads of shit is going to break, and I won't have a fucking clue where because very few of these brainless sheep write decent test coverage (or even fucking write view tests), so I'll be doing tons of manual fucking testing. Oh, and I only have a week to finish everything, because fucking of course.

So, in summary. The stupid and lazy (and legendary!) dev fucked up. The stupid gem's author fucked up, and kept fucking up. The stupid devs followed the first fuckup's lead and repeated his fuck up, and fucked up on their own some more. It's fuckups all the fucking way down.

Ah finally, the moment when being a web developer is full of joy.

☑️ Server-side rendering
☑️ Inline critical css
☑️ Add progressive image loading
☑️ Minify everything
☑️ Automate release process in CI
☑️ Lint everything

Now that the strucutre is up, time to code the actual website. This is gonna be good!

The day I discovered Schrödinger's lesser known paradox of simultaneously being fired and not fired.

This isn't really much of a dev story, but I figured I'd share it anyway.

About two minutes into signing into all my stuff, I suddenly was kicked out of everything. I tried logging in a few more times, and then suddenly started getting the error, "Your account has been disabled for security reasons." I couldn't sign into chat, and co-workers confirmed that I was missing from the company directory. My manager didn't come in for another two hours, and we couldn't get anyone else to answer what the hell was going on. So I was kinda panicking.

Eventually, we found out from one of our coordinators that someone else with the same name as me was leaving the company, and they had deactivated the wrong person.

It ended up getting a lot better. They told me that it could take up to 48 hours to restore my access (it took longer), so I found stuff to do so I could maintain my paycheck. One of those things was assisting someone with data collection and processing, where I eventually said, "Dude, I could totally automate this," and now that's what I'm getting paid to do.

"Take an extra paid day off"

"You are right. This will automate that boring task."

"You did everything that was tasked to you in this sprint? You can rest or help in testing something. "

+ Death of Wix and WordPress (hopefully)
+ Abandonment of Java
- Bajillion JavaScript frameworks
- Software engineers trying to automate everything
+ Cloud blockchain AI containers that mine bitcoin with machine learning technology in high demand

Writing a script to do my job

Ideas for future weekly question:

- Where will you see yourself in 5 years?
- Do you automate tasks when developing and what kind of automation do you write yourself or use?
- What do you think about hooking up with someone from work?
- What are your thoughts about books in IT?
- How do you make your workplace comfortable?
- How would you change your company if you became the boss today?
- What are your thoughts about the future of computer input devices (kb & mice)?
- What are your prevention measures agains Skynet?
- When will HL3 be released?
- What's the solution to everything?

Things I wish people had said at my first job (in light of lots of the people I see starting their first dev gig on here). Please add yours.

Congrats!
Take a breath, you will be fine.
If you get frustrated, take a moment to collect your thoughts.
Don't be afraid to say you don't know, you are not expected to know everything.
Your workday needs to end at a decent time. Don't overdo it or you will be useless for more of your hours.
Always take whatever length of time you think something will take and double it. If you think it will take 15 minutes, it'll probably take your 4 hours.
Concentrate on networking and personal relationships.
Pick the smartest people who have moved the most vertically and pay attention to what they say, they might know a lot.
When management makes an "unwise" or "crazy" decision, ask them why or what the context or motive is that made then arrive at that course of action. Some of them might surprise you in their bigger picture motives or dumbassedness.
Six sigma may be in your future, learn what it is.
Automate as much of your own job as possible.

Um, that's all I've got for now. Hopefully that's helpful to people just starting out. Feel free to add yours.

automate literally everything! (very ambiguous and overly ambitious. please read it all.)

Proudest bug squash? Probably the time I fixed a few bugs by accident when I was just trying to clean up an ex-coworker's messy code.

So I used to work with a guy who was not a very good programmer. It's hard to explain exactly why other than to say that he never really grew out of the college mindset. He never really learned the importance of critical thinking and problem-solving. He did everything "by the book" to a point where if he ran into an issue that had no textbook solution, he would spin his wheels for weeks while constantly lying to us about his progress until one of us would finally notice and take the problem off his plate. His code was technically functional, but still very bad.

Quick Background: Our team is responsible for deploying and maintaining cloud resources in AWS and Azure. We do this with Terraform, a domain-specific language that lets us define all our infrastructure as code and automate everything.

After he left, I took on the work to modify some of the Terraform code he'd written. In the process, I discovered what I like to call "The Übervariable", a map of at least 80 items, many of them completely unrelated to each other, which were all referenced exactly once in his code and never modified. Basically it was a dynamic collection variable holding 80+ constants. Some of these constants were only used in mathematical expressions with multiple other constants from the same data structure, resulting in a new value that would also be a constant. Some of the constants were identical values that could never possibly differ, but were still stored as separate values in the map.

After I made the modification I was supposed to make, I decided I was so bothered by his shitty code that I would spend some extra time fixing and optimizing it. The end result: one week of work, 800 lines of code deleted, 30 lines added, and a massive increase in efficiency. I deleted the Übervariable and hardcoded most of the values it contained since there was no possible reason for any of them to change in the future. In the process, I accidentally fixed three bugs that had been printing ominous-sounding warnings to the console whenever the code was run.

I have a lot of stories about this guy. I should post some more of them eventually.

Corporations... huge, old, monolithic
We want you to automate but will do everything we can to prevent you from getting resources to do it. Restricting policies, decisions by managers on "what they do not want". No procedures on how to achieve the result within policies. Half the business lives in a gray zone and sea of policy exceptions.
We finally decided to get at least Azure subscription instead of trying to develop similar framework internally, but wE DoNT WANt YOu to dEPlOY thERE As WE Don't cOnSIDEr it sAfE ENough.
Like pissing against wind.

I'm tempted at some point to get a non-dev job. After about 2 weeks I could automate everything then just slack off.

So I had been developing a real estate website and developing a MLS feed parser. I had only 1 year experience at that time and parsing a XML feed was already complex enough. On top of it, the client wanted to automate feed download from the MLS provider through HTTP authentication. Managed to do it. Everything worked for 15 days and on 16th day the property location markers stopped appearing on Google maps. Turned out that address to lat-long reverse geocoding was failing because API limit exhausted. My bad, I coded it on view instead of caching the lat-long in database. Fixed it in a day and viola!

I've been a gamer since I was a child.

But today, my games play themselves thanks to Python automation. I can enjoy life whilst the bots do the work.

"Automate the boring stuff", I bought this book in 2018 and never touched it but it's like I discovered gold. I've never felt so much joy programming and learning.

It's like my life has been leading just to this very moment. I've been mid-life crisis for 1-2 years now. But no more. I feel like a kid again. Gonna automate everything.

When I was a high school, I did an internship at IT department for a local "center for student guidance".

The IT department consisted of one guy that started to automate everything the first year he worked there. He ended up being low on work and got flak from people above him for not working enough. He threw all his scripts away and the bosses/managers were happy he worked more... But his work was of course slower with more mistakes.

Also, he had an excel sheet of everyone username + password. The excel file was secured with a password. When he went to the coffee machine, he never locked his computer nor the spreadsheet.

Real story:
Started fixing one file in one repo, build, doesn't build, go into other repo fix just one file there, but first I need to make myself a toolchain, making of toolchain fails because it depends on some dirty fix in the file I was fixing, refactor and clean that to a proper state, fuck yeah toolchain builds, source toolchain run make now, breaks with undefined reference, no time to debug plus fuck this automake, remove it, make a makefile, builds fuck yeah, shit now unittest are failing because why not, refactored that makefile as well, everything compiles, automate the test fully so that they are ran on the target out of make just because I'm a nice guy, fuck yeah everything works, commit this repo, commit other repo, review time, one of the guys gave up, the other one did it properly, found some shit there, fix that, done, merge, triggers CI fucking pass

All of this was done in 3h, Talk about efficiency

Have a question about my career:

So far my career out of uni has been like this:

8 months in first place working as C# .NET dev, creating native desktop apps for windows. job was shitty, was not getting any best practices skills so I left.

12 months in 2nd place working as android dev in a startup. was working all alone and had to rebuilt my app up to 5-6 times to learn best practices. startup didnt care about android app at all so I left and now doing just some small freelance work for them.

3 months in new startup as android dev.Today I was told that its decided to focus on iOS and do all marketing (also uplift of new design) only on iOS. basically for next 3-4 months they don't plan to do much on android side. they saw that I showed some interest in backend and now they are asking me to talk with two other senior guys about starting with some small tasks for me on backend.

Our backend is mainly using python. Also backend guys will be pretty busy for next few months because they will have to deliver many new features in next few upcoming months. I've talked with one of them and he said that this is a bad idea to force frontend to start working on backend. However I feel that he's sort of gateekeping and probably just doesn't want to help me with getting up to speed.

In my defense, my knowledge doesn't end with C# .NET desktop apps and native mobile apps for android.

I have hobbie projects (gameservers) where I worked on websites (php,html,css,javascript,mysql) and also was taking care of a java based gameserver which is hosted in a linux vps.

Also I've had a small hosting "company" where with available tools I've managed to automate VPS(virtual private server) ordering, web hosting ordering and domain ordering. Basically I owned a dedicated server and did everything using whmcs, cpanel and proxmox virtualization.

I trust myself in learning this backend stuff and doing whats required, however I learned everything by myself and I won't follow all of these best practices.

Should I accept more responsibility on backend or should I continue focusing on android?

<<prev. #wk235 advices>>

~ Study the Error log deeply, Google each line if needed. Don't give up.
~ Learn by doing. Don't just read/watch.
~ Practice breaking down the problem statement first in different components and hierarchies. Don't jump into coding right away.
~ Write some, review some. Don't put off review for later.
~ Even if you don't exactly follow the best security practices - always ensure that your program is safe for use. Especially for user-inputs, etc, pay attention.
~ Never distribute code with passwords/keys written in it.
~ Don't hard code stuff, use Config file, environment variables, etc.
~ Try to automate repetitive stuff like build and deploy etc
~ Save and backup you code.
~ No one knows everything, also, today's knowledge gets outdated tomorrow. Continuous learning is synonymous with this field.

<<next #wk235 advices>>

I am put to the task of creating a Chat Robot in ChatFuel.

Cool, I thought at first.

Cool is not what I would call it at this point..one week later.

The size is a factor at play, for sure, it needs to point to 27 cities and give individual information, handle e-mails, phone, automate e-mails.. a bunch of stuff.

Now, I am located in Sweden.
{{city}} as a set user attribute acknowledges Gothenburg and geolocation thusly worked fine for my boss. But not for me, and won't work for any other city.

So..Global AI calling for static blocks it is... 27 blocks...

For two languages.. 54 blocks...
Static pointing to the first answer for every individual block multiplies this by a factor of two. 108 static blocks. Fine.

I have since realized that my ChatFuel-Luddite ways were limiting the expected performance of the end result and learned that most other set attributes in ChatFuel work fine. Yay.

So we set up everything the last 54 blocks need to do with user attributes and to my surprise it works, really well at that. The answer from a user that is a correct city puts you into a block that is a series of questions using user attributes, both {{first_name}} and {{last_name}}, asks for e-mail and phone, displays an image and stuff like that.

Now.. as I attempt to copy these blocks..

THEY JUST POOP OUT CHUNKS OF THE ORIGINAL BLOCK. IT'S INCONSISTENCY IS STAGGERING. IT NEVER REALLY COMPLETES THE DUPLICATION, NO ERROR MESSAGE OR ANYTHING.

Which then reminded me of when my boss asked why everything was botched earlier in the project, at that point I copied the entire bot as a fallback and worked with my change in the copy first for safety reasons, didn't work, copy wasn't entire.

Wasted fucking hours on this.
I'm glad my boss is cool, and the job is easily worth it. I actually think that the design aspect of ChatFuel is nice, and the people behind it are kind in the facebook group and all. I don't think they're trying to be mean. But holy shit.

This has been a mental anguish that levels pissing bleach filled with fire ants.

" You could've easily solved this with APIs and third-party geofencing services ", yeah, but their services won't stack for the customer, nice attempt though.

Deep breaths.

If I ever got a job and they mainly make me use Excel for whatever reason I’m just writing a python script to do whatever they’re asking me to do then just do whatever the rest of the day.

Our owner's other company sells products online (or has the ability to anyways). Their current site is 7+ years old WordPress/Woocommerce and is seriously outdated because the site breaks if you update anything so we've been told to make a new site (finally). They also said they were going to release a whole new line up of products. So the first thing I tried to do was get them to nail down their product line and how shipping was going to be configured. I was told to just use the shipping from the previous site.

Turns out those shipping rates don't use any sort of math or automation at all, there is literally a manually set shipping value for every single product for every single shipping location (30*60) and even values for different quantities. And there's no way to export these rates into a readable table because the plugins they use shove all the data into the postmeta table, I'm forced to go through and put the data into a spreadsheet so that I can attempt to organize it and hopefully find someone way to automate it. Owner claims at one point that he has a similar spreadsheet that's more up to date but for some reason refuses to send it over or put me in touch with the right people in the shipping department.

I've gone through the shipping rates with the old products and the new products and organized them as best I can and each time I've gotten done and shown them the spreadsheet with their products and shipping, they add or change something which requires me to basically wipe the slate clean and start over eating another 50 or so hours of my time, which with everything else really means another month+ to find time to work on it between other projects.

After about a year they finished their products and I finally finished the planning and got approval to build it out for the site. Small victory!!

After about 60 hours plugging these values into the database (only about 1/3 done) I get an email from their head of shipping who tells me the values in my spreadsheet are "terribly inaccurate, in some areas by $100+" and that the data should not be used anywhere.

So after something like a year and a half and 200+ hours of work, the data I've been using to plan all this isn't even accurate. I'm trying not to go crazy here but this kind of shit is unacceptable. When we're done with this I'm going to send the owner an invoice to show him how much money he wasted on this because nothing was planned and he just wanted it built. There's a fucking process for a reason, when you don't follow the process you fuck everything up. If a client had pulled this shit and turned their simple site into this much work they would have been dropped. I get constant emails asking when the new site will be done and every time my answer is "I'm still waiting for x items that I asked for last time you asked where we were." He gets a couple things on the list and sends them back and then goes unresponsive for weeks at a time.

Management has been telling me that I seem more stressed lately but only one of them understands what's going on here when I explain it. The rest say stupid shit like "why don't you automate it" or "make an intern do it." You won't let me hire an intern and even if I did, I'm not sure I could explain how the shipping works now to even trust someone else to do it. I'm hoping when the shipping guy gives me the new sheet that maybe there's some easier solution here because I'm ready to start shooting people.

Currently having very funny project lead, who gives on the spot estimates for 9 years old very pathetic quality code having Android app in security domain. Memory leaks, bad practices, typos, CVEs etc. you name it we have it in our source of the app.

Since 5-6 sprints of our project, almost 50% of user stories were incomplete due to under estimations.

Basically everyone in management were almost sleeping since last 7-8 years about code quality & now suddenly when new Dev & QA team is here they wanted us to fix everything ASAP.

Most humourous thing is product owner is aware about importance of unit test cases, but don't want to allocate user stories for that at the time of sprint planning as code is almost freezed according to him for current release.

Actually, since last release he had done the same thing for each sprint, around 18 months were passed still he hadn't spared single day for unit testing.

Recently app crash issue was found in version upgrade scenario as QAs were much tired by testing hundreds of basic trivial test cases manually & server side testing too, so they can't do actual needful testing & which is tougher to automate for Dev.

Recently when team's old Macbook Pros got expired higher management has allocated Intel Mac minis by saying that few people of organization are misusing Macbooks. So for just few people everyone has to suffer now as there is no flexibility in frequent changing between WFH & WFO. 1 out of those Mac minis faced overheating & in repair since 6 months.

Out of 4 Devs & 3 QAs, all 3 QAs & 2 Devs had left gradually.

I think it's time to say goodbye 😔

!rant

Finally managed to implement a proper E2E testing solution for our app with Protractor and Jasmine. Some basic tests (login and dashboard) are already working.

I'm just so happy to automate everything, going to cut down our manual testing time from 2h to about 20 to 30min if I'm estimating this correctly.

That's all. Just wanted to say I'm very happy with the results 😊

Recently I completed a whole year in programming. Holy jebus, I have no idea I could make it through.
I started thinking I was "decent" at this because I had taken a half dozen courses in python plus some algorithm logic in school lol @ innocent me
I'm an applied math student and I hereby declare I was the most incompetent dude you'll ever see.
I've been through so much shit I didn't realize I had a shitty boss, because one would think it's normal for a beginner to approach everything in programming because I was told to do so. Full blown restful apis, stateful redux react apps with responsive CSS using Google's material design. Don't forget to dockerize everything and deploy the swarm on Amazon cloud all the while having to run integration unit tests, make sure all the rules on your nginx are correct we don't want exposure do you know how to write a visualization tool on JavaScript so we can 3d-fy some x-ray prints and good luck balancing tight schedules with your school and girlfriend ye right lul
My manager would ask me to deliver new shit to an app I was developing mostly by my self in react (I barely even knew what RFC or ES6 was by the time I started).
I got fired from this project because I couldn't deliver by myself what 5 experienced dudes could (debatable, but still... Cuz they couldn't when they took over. Boss wanted to rewrite the whole app in a week and a half)
Turns out I got called back by the same company but to contribute in another project. This time to automate some shizzle with python.
Feelsgoodman but I want out ASAP can't stay sane for longer

/me trying to automate stuff with fancy tools

colleague: you are going to fast. We want to have everything in control by hand (ssh -> cron * 1000 servers)

I could go programming drones to kill my own people for money, like at least then I'd have a connection to my job

also programming drones sounds kind of fun

I used to really like pvp games. I also love unconventional RTS games. who wouldn't wanna make a real-world pvp RTS game interface, or automate an army of autonomous drones that could act on their own like it's a game of screeps

literally just so fun

if I was @ostream and an accelerationist...

either case if I go work somewhere and build them something great I have weird confusing PTSD emotions about it. to be honest making war machines somehow makes me less anxious about the idea. isn't it strange. I can't figure it out

you help people but they fuck you. at least if you're fucking people you'd accept being fucked in the process so you don't end up feeling anxious? I don't know why I feel like I do

you'd expect if you help people they would help you back. then when they don't it ruins everything, it ruins your core. you also can't know if who you are committing to will help you back or not. so you can only lose. if you help you'll get fucked. so why help?

in which case just doing something you love like optimizing pwn machines is what I'm built for. is that all I got? how does that make sense? it just doesn't to me. you'd think it would be clear but something is fighting

We Introverts are going to look back to these days, Don't forget to make some memories...

... No one is asking to go out, Employers are offering work from home, to many of us it's the same old same old, in the mean time I wish y'all the best time...
to do amazing things, complete your pending projects, gist some funny/important stuff, read/write a little, organize you machine/room/life, take on some DIV projects, code better and automate the boring stuff (basically everything and anything)

I am planning to make my own version of our beloved Jarvis (just in case If I get my hands onto mind stone :p)

I have planned how to automate everything in my life but don't have the money to do it, I count from 0, if I ever need to count in my fingers for whatever reason, I do it binary, I find tv hacking and programming very stupid and condescending most of the time, and I'm somehow even more of a cynical asshole according to my friends, but that last part might just be from leaving high school

Yo, DevRat! Python is basically the rockstar of programming languages. Here's why it's so dope:

1. **Readability Rules**: Python's code is like super neat handwriting; you don't need a decoder ring. Forget those curly braces and semicolons – Python uses indents to keep things tidy.

2. **Zen Vibes**: Python has its own philosophy called "The Zen of Python." It's like Python's personal horoscope, telling you to keep it simple and readable. Can't argue with cosmic coding wisdom, right?

3. **Tools Galore**: Python's got this massive toolbox with tools for everything – web scraping, AI, web development, you name it. It's like a programming Swiss Army knife.

4. **Party with the Community**: Python peeps are like the coolest party crew. Stuck on a problem? Hit up Stack Overflow. Wanna hang out? GitHub's where it's at. PyCon? It's like the Woodstock of coding, man!

5. **All-in-One Language**: Python isn't a one-trick pony. You can code websites, automate stuff, do data science, make games, and even boss around robots. Talk about versatility!

6. **Learn It in Your Sleep**: Python's like that subject in school that's just a breeze. It's beginner-friendly, but it also scales up for the big stuff.

So, DevRat, Python's the way to go – it's like the coolest buddy in the coding world. Time to rock and code! 🚀🐍💻

So I've been using Duet on my iPad Pro for a couple years now (lets me use it as an external monitor via Lightning cable) and without issue. Shit, I've been quite happy with it. Then the other day, whilst hooked up to my work laptop, there was a power fluctuation that caused my laptop to stop sending power to connected devices. Which is fine - I have it plugged into a surge protector so these fluctuations shouldn't matter. After a few seconds the laptop resumed normal operation and my connected devices were up and running again.

But the iPad Pro, for some reason, went into an infinite boot loop sequence. It reboots, gets to the white Apple logo, then reboots again.

In the end, after putting the iPad into recovery mode and running Apple's update in iTunes (as they recommend), it proceeds to wipe all my data. Without warning. I lost more than a couple of years of notes, illustrations and photos. All in one fucking swoop.

To be clear, you get 2 options in iTunes when performing a device update:

1. UPDATE - will not mess with your data, will just update the OS (in this case iPadOS)
2. RESTORE - will delete everything, basically a factory reset

I clicked UPDATE. After the first attempt, it still kept bootlooping. So I did it again, I made sure I clicked UPDATE because I had not yet backed up my data. It then proceeds to do a RESTORE even though I clicked UPDATE.

Why, Apple? WHY.

After a solemn weekend lamenting my lost data, I've come a conclusion: fuck you Apple for designing very shitty software. I mean, why can't I access my device data over a cabled connection in the event I can't boot into the OS? If you need some form of authentication to keep out thieves, surely the mutltiple times you ask me to log in with my Apple ID on iTunes upon connecting the damn thing is more than sufficient?! You keep spouting that you have a secure boot chain and shit, surely it can verify a legitimate user using authenticated hardware without having to boot into the device OS?

And on the subject of backing up my data, you really only have 2 manual options here. Either (a) open iTunes, select your device, select the installed app, then selectively download the files onto my system; or (b) do a full device backup. Neither of those procedures is time-efficient nor straightforward. And if you want to do option b wirelessly, it can only be on iCloud. Which is bullshit. And you can't even access the files in the device backup - you can only get to them by restoring to your device. Even MORE bullshit.

Conversely, on my Android phone I can automate backups of individual apps, directories or files to my cloud provider of choice, or even to an external microSD card. I can schedule when the backups happen. I can access my files ANYTIME.

I got the iPad Pro because I wanted the best drawing experience, and Apple Pencil at the time was really the best you could get. But I see now it's not worth compromise of having shitty software. I mean, It's already 2021 but these dated piles of excrement that are iOS and iPadOS still act like it's 2011; they need to be seriously reviewed and re-engineered, because eventually they're going to end up as nothing but all UI fluff to hide these extremely glaring problems.

FML so I have recently learned I am mandated (nodoby asked me if I wanted to do it, management just assumed I would) to help and train an offshore SQA team with 10 hours of jet lag to automate their tests on physical hardware because everything they do is manual and their environment is all mocked including hardware... there is barely any doc on how they test their shit or on what they even do. I need them to show me their shit work on goddamn zoom. And then once I manage to do this by some fucking miracle, I need to show them how to take over my already automated project.

Dudes cannot even code, how the fuck am I supposed to do this? Worse is I was told I can't impose our tested infrastructure and libs on them because "we have to give them flexibility" or some bullshit.

Fucking pay cheaply 5 people offshore to get fuck all done and then put the weight on my shoulders when you are surprised it does not work? You bunch of management fucks, eh?

Lucky I am getting some shiny offers elsewhere.

So trunk-based is the new approach everyone is using, because it is so cool.
I used gitflow for the last projects with azure devops, set up the pipelines like tipically in 1 week if I had other things to do with the help of the portal clicking through things. PR-s triggered pipelines, everything worked cool.
But then trunk-based got momentum, so I worked with this client where 2 developers worked for !!!3 months!!! to setup trunk-based pipeline. It was not my money, so I did not say a thing. They were using infrastructure as code.
I am all in for automation, but seriously? Then again, another project where a DevOps team took 1 dev-month to setup the pipeline + meetings. And what do you get in the end? So that the same image goes on all environments? Like how many releases do you have for prod in a year. Lets say 24. 24 x 5 minutes of manual work for the release, that is 2 hours. So my question is why would you spend 2 hours of manual work while you can automate it merely in a month? Everyone loves to code, but using the ui on the DevOps portal saves you so much time. I don't get this. Maybe I am getting old :D

Since a friend of mine owns a domain for an open-source project and manages pretty much everything, including dealing with a db for registered accounts, I'm currently not really able to help when it comes to UI/UX things and frontend, besides the "main editor", which is like the core functionality of the project. I would like to set up smth like docker (on Windows 10 home, which is already not suitable, great start🤦) for some kind of pseudo-db all inclusive functionality thingy to be able to run a working example locally. Also a goal would be to switch to Typescript, include testing, to use webpack and to automate as much as possible.
Sad part is, I don't even know where to start and I'm also 100% sure that I will do almost everything wrong from research to implementation.😐

oh dear the stocktaking i did (maybe am still doing? don't know whether it's done yet🤷) with my dad for his little shop😩
his pc/office skills had begun with microsoft excel (he taught me how to use a pc all together) ... and have stopped there. Excel for almost everything. To be fair, he uses PCs like a normal user and isn't of that metier, ok fine🤷.
but when i saw the table he uses, which he copied over the years from the previous versions (still ok), i quickly found out that his table entries were written by him FOR HIM. it was very hard for me to help him (he tells me the article he sees in his storage, i have to include, so i look it up in the table and do stuff) as he had nicknames for his articles that only he associated with😐.
next he prints out a list a company has given to him where he buys some products from, which is ordered by id number ... my dad works with the correspnding names instead so of course all product names are random😑, so every time i need a price for an article he has to scan every list item. you've guessed it, n² search😪😒.
i tell him multiple times to call the company and send him a list in alphabetical order but he refuses as "we've almost finished" ... 🙄 (i'm not allowed to ask for him, as the company will only talk with the responsible one😑)
so I'm tied to a pc, talking to my dad over phone, who has to walk around and has to help me very often to find the article he's meaning to, at the end, do a n² search to add all the prices....😩
I absolutely want to help him automate things for sanity's sake🤔😅
install databases, connect via internet, connect to companies databases for up-to-date prices etc., make some desktop/web app/i don't know for fast access and boom...
and i don't even know where to start and where to find the time for it and whether it's even all possible😅🤔😐🤷