Apple beta testing new product in India!

When you catch Facebook Devs testing in prod (beta app though)

COVID variants should adopt a semantic versioning, rather than using greek alphabetics.
COVID v.19.2.34
COVID V.22.1 Beta (testing in US)
COVID v.22 release 1 (being tested somewhere in London)
COVID v.22 nightly builds (still brewing in China)

Fuck today.

Today I was supposed to go into work and set up a dozen or so units for beta testing (its been a year and a half coming)..

Got up nice and early to get a head start on things. Stubbed (and broke) my motherfucking toe, then spilled my cereal milk on my laptop.. subsequently spend the following 2 hours tearing down and cleaning my poor little lappy. Get her all put back together, starting to feel a little better about the day. Push the power button, and fucking nothing but a tiny little fan noise for half a damn second.

With this luck I don't even want to move, lest a magic falling anvil decides to adorn my head..

Finally got ceph up and running, so far it does look really great!
At the moment we have 45 TB in the cluster, but we are able to expand it extremely easy.

Two servers with 256 GB RAM and 24 cores, three more with 32 GB and 12 cores.
Dedicated gigabit WAN connection.

The project is going forward strong, I'll let you know when it is time for beta testing.

Beginning Open Beta testing for a chatbot in a thursday

Friend: What the fuck are these inputs?

Me: just filter them out

Friend: Good fucking lord I was right to disable unsupervised learning

Me:Now you know

I am a people people pleaser.

Especially when it comes to deadlines. I struggle heavily with them. For example:

My boss: 'Will the app be done by Friday?'

Me: 'well some features won't be ready but overall yes.'

The truth: "No even if I work on it 24/7 there are just so many things in the background that are too technical to explain to my boss that it will be impossible for me to hit that deadline. It will most likely take over a month to be ready for beta testing...."

I just don't know how to deal with those kinds of questions. I don't want to say 'most likely over a month' because it makes me look like a bad dev but at the same time I know that that is way more realistic than 'it will be done by Friday'

The truth is: even if it just looks like 3 buttons to you, in reality I need to change thousands of lines of code to accomplish the expected goals...

P.S:

I wanted to write this rant for a long time. Now I am drunk. There will be a sober more ordered version of this rant.

Out of necessity (or rather: lack of support) I've been neglecting my test suite for the past ~month. Now that one of the beta versions of RSpec has better Rails 6 support, I can finally get back to writing tests. Yay!

I just merged staging into my testing branch, and it's now 344 commits ahead of origin! eep.

So, I've got lots of tests to write. yay.

Worst collaboration experience story?

I was not directly involved, it was a Delphi -> C# conversion of our customer returns application.

The dev manager was out to prove waterfall was the only development methodology that could make convert the monolith app to a lean, multi-tier, enterprise-worthy application.

Starting out with a team of 7 (3 devs, 2 dbas, team mgr, and the dev department mgr), they spent around 3 months designing, meetings, and more meetings. Armed with 50+ page specification Word document (not counting the countless Visio workflow diagrams and Microsoft Project timeline/ghantt charts), the team was ready to start coding.
The database design, workflow, and UI design (using Visio), was well done/thought out, but problems started on day one.
- Team mgr and Dev mgr split up the 3 devs, 1 dev wrote the database access library tier, 1 wrote the service tier, the other dev wrote the UI (I'll add this was the dev's first experience with WPF).
- Per the specification, all the layers wouldn't be integrated until all of them met the standards (unit tested, free from errors from VS's code analyzer, etc)
- By the time the devs where ready to code, the DBAs were already tasked with other projects, so the Returns app was prioritized to "when we get around to it"

Fast forward 6 months later, all the devs were 'done' coding, having very little/no communication with one another, then the integration. The service and database layers assumed different design patterns and different database relationships and the UI layer required functionality neither layers anticipated (ex. multi-users and the service maintaining some sort of state between them).

Those issues took about a month to work out, then the app began beta testing with real end users. App didn't make it 10 minutes before users gave up. Numerous UI logic errors, runtime errors, and overall app stability. Because the UI was so bad, the dev mgr brought in one of the web developers (she was pretty good at UI design). You might guess how useful someone is being dropped in on complex project , months after-the-fact and being told "Fix it!".

Couple of months of UI re-design and many other changes, the app was ready for beta testing.

In the mean time, the company hired a new customer service manager. When he saw the application, he rejected the app because he re-designed the entire returns process to be more efficient. The application UI was written to the exact step-by-step old returns process with little/no deviation.

With a tremendous amount of push-back (TL;DR), the dev mgr promised to change the app, but only after it was deployed into production (using "we can fix it later" excuse).

Still plagued with numerous bugs, the app was finally deployed. In attempts to save face, there was a company-wide party to celebrate the 'death' of the "old Delphi returns app" and the birth of the new. Cake, drinks, certificates of achievements for the devs, etc.

By the end of the project, the devs hated each other. Finger pointing, petty squabbles, out-right "FU!"s across the cube walls, etc. All the team members were re-assigned to other teams to separate them, leaving a single new hire to fix all the issues.

Gaming community of mine launched their slick new website with their new "ticket system" where people could put in tickets to get help by volunteers.

2 hours and an approval by one of the admins later I managed to inject forge http request into literally every form on that side. Modify permissions, delete users, edit tickets, put invalid values into every attribute of them... In other words break everything.
Turns out the whole thing was coded as a first time project by a person who has no clue about web development and noone is in charge of anything really. There are no requirements, no beta testing, no version control or backups, but at least they had a hard deadline. 🤣

Still not sure if I wanna fix their shit and do it properly or just enjoy seeing it crash and burn.

When you accidentally publish the testing version of your app to the production channel instead of the beta channel... 😣

At my previous job I used to deal directly with a client. This client wasn't particularly tech savvy although he was the head of IT department.

During the beta testing phase of the project. The client would regularly send me emails with snapshots of his laptop with application open accompanied by some amount of text to explain what the error/problem he was facing.

One fine day I got an email with a very wierd error. It was a module for attendance of employees based on which salaries were calculated. The mail had a snapshot and some text saying that he was unable to see the attendance for the dates 22, 23, 24 and so on...

I immediately replied with a snapshot of the calendar highlighting the date, which was the 21st of the month. Those attendance are empty because they haven't been marked yet.

No reply untill the next day with more "errors" 😂

trying out this hot new VPS host named Skysilk, aside from the EAI_AGAIN networking issues and a too basic dashboard, it works fine. Other than that its a good host. Would recommend

Me: Does Microsoft does beta testing before launching updates?
MS: YOU ARE THE NEW BETA TESTER, WELCOME!

So, I work in a game development studio, right?
We're trying to launch the title on as many platforms as reasonable, because as a social VR app we're kinda rowing upstream.
So far, Steam and Oculus have been fairly reasonable, if oddly broken and inconsistent.
Enter store 3.
Basically no in-game transaction support (our asking prompted them to *start* developing it. No, it's not very complete). No patch-update system (You want an update? Gotta download the whole fsckin' thing!). No beta-testing functionality for most of their stuff ("Just write the code like the example, it will work, trust us!"). No tools besides the buggy SDK (Wanna upload that new build? Say hello to this page in your web browser!).
So, in other words: Fun.

We've been trying to get actively launched for two months now. Keep in mind that the build has been up on Steam and Oculus for over a year and half a year (respectively), so the actual binary functionality is, presumably fine.

The best feedback we get back tends to be "Well, when we click the Launch button it crashes, so fail."
Meanwhile we're going back and forth, dealing with other-side-of-the-world timezone lag, trying to figure out what is so different from their machines as ours. Eventually we get them to start sending logs (and no, Windows Event logs are not sufficient for GAMES, where did you even get that idea????) except the logs indicate that the program is getting killed so terribly that the engine's built-in crash handler can't even kick in to generate memory dumps or even know it died.

All this boils down to today, where I get a screenshot of their latest attempt.

I just can't even right now.

Built an entire web application and while it's ready for beta testing, I realized I forgot to add a logout function...

Welp, this made my night and sorta ruined my night at the same time.

He decided to work on a new gaming community but has limited programming knowledge, but has enough to patch and repair minor issues. He's waiting for an old friend of his to come back to start helping him again, so this leads to me. He needed a custom backend made for his server, which required pulling data from an SQL/API and syncing with the server, and he was falling behind pace and asked for my help. He's a good friend that I've known for a while, and I knew it wouldn't take to long to create this, so I decided to help him. Which lead to an interesting find, and sorta made my night.

It wasn't really difficult, got it done within an hour, took some time to test and fix any bugs with his SQL database. But this is where it get's interesting, at least for me. He had roughly a few hundred people that did beta testing of the server, anyways, once the new backend was hooked in and working, I realized that the other developer he works with had created a 'custom' script to make sure there are no leaks of the database. Well, that 'custom' script actually begins wiping rows/tables (Depends on the sub-table, some get wiped row by row, some just get completely dropped), I just couldn't comprehend what had happened, as rows/tables just slowly started disappearing. It took me a while of checking, before checking his SQL query logs (At least the custom script did that properly and logged every query), to realize it just basically wiped the database.

Welp, after that, it began to restrict the API I was using, and due to this it identified the server as foreign access (Since it wasn't using the same key as his plugin, even though I had an API key created just so it could only access ranks and such, to prevent abuse) and begin responding not with denied, but with a lovely "Fuck you hacker!" This really made my night, I don't know why, but I was genuinely laughing pretty hard at this response.

God, I love his developer. Luckily, I had created a backup earlier, so I patched it and just worked around the plugin/API to get it working. (Hopefully, it's not a clusterfuck to read, writing this at 2 am with less than an hour of sleep, bedtime! Goodnight everyone.)

Just took Google up on their beta-testing offer for Android N.

Instant regret.

rant="""
It's too many features for me to keep up with. And the client just bounces between this matrix of all the possible permutations of them, refusing to admit that he is asking for mutually exclusive behavior in more than one place. I have mentioned to him at least 12 times a year that there is too much going on, not organized, we need to simplify, prioritize, or we will have 100 half baked untested features.

Of course it is more or less made it out to be that this is all my fault, or at least it's hard not to feel that way when I say:

It will be a long time before X will be working, we need 25 other things first.;

Next day he asks:
Have you made any progress on X;

I reply: Now we need 24 things to be done at this rate it will be a month.;

He replies:
Ok but I need this yesterday. How about if you add a new feature Y that does everything X does without those 24 things?;

I reply: That will not work at all like X. Y is just X + 1 more feature.

He replies: Ok well I need Y so when you're done with X I need a way to do it like Y also. I just thought it'd be easier.

EASIER TO ADD MORE FUCKING FEATURES YEAH SURE THATS EASY AS FUCK YOU FUCK FUCK FUCK. He's a nice enough guy, pretty smart compared to my first few paying gigs, but wtf really? How do I come out and tell you I need 25 days and you ADD more work? This was one example.

IN TWO days he has added 12 features. And during the week has asked for 29 UI interfaces to be COMPLETELY different. This is becoming COMMONPLACE. Every week there is either a huge change, or a conversation like about that finds its way into the entire business flow inside an dout.

The worst thing is: I TOTALLY understand what he needs. I feel that HE doesn't. This weekend I spent literally HALF of his retainer on getting equipment into my hands to bring it back to find out it DOESNT WORK. Why aisn't HE doing this so I can finish the features from NOVEMBER that HE NEEDS in order to PROCESS SALES.

I've tried and tried but I just can't get through to this client what a tremendous waste of time his \"process\" is, for lack of a better word. Constant changes, contsant additions, lack of clarity, needless repetition and contradictions, constantly adding moonshot ideas to compete with every industry in the region, and not beta testing anything until something goes wrong.

Fuck this guy! His business is failing and I felt responsible for the longest time but it is clear to me that if I wanted to save his business I would have to ignore 95% of his feature requests. I ignore 50% now because of the stress in trying to determine which of the 3 different paradigms he is talking about changing. I will lose this client, and I feel like he will sue me to get all of his money back. He holds me to very little honestly - BUT WEEKLY reminds me that he won't be able to pay me next month if feature XY and Z arent ready!

If a developer is CLEARLY overwhelmed, it makes NO sense at all to continue to PILE ON feature after feature
"""
try:
while true:
rant+=", after feature"
except DevHeadExplodes as inevitable:
raise YourDevsRatesOrLookElsewhere(inevitable)

¡rant|rant

Nice to do some refactoring of the whole data access layer of our core logistics software, let me tell an story.

The project is around 80k lines of code, with a lot of integrations with an ERP system and an sql database.

The ERP system is old, shitty api for it also, only static methods through an wrapper to an c++ library

imagine an order table.

To access an order, you would first need to open the database by calling Api.Open(...file paths) (yes, it's an fucking flat file type database)

Now the database is open, now you would open the orders table with method Api.Table(int tableId) and in return you would get an integer value, the pointer.

Now for the actual order. first you need to search for it by setting the search parameter to the column ID of the order number while checking all calls for some BS error code

Api.SetInt(int pointer, int column, int query Value)
Then call the find method.

Api.Find(int pointer)

Then to top this shitcake of an api of: if it doesn't find your shit it will use the "close enough" method of search.

And now to read a singe string 😑

First you will look in the outdated and incorrect documentation given to you from the devil himself and look for the column ID to find the length of the column.

Then you create a string variable with ALL FUCKING SPACES.

Now you call the Api.GetStr(int pointer, int column, ref string emptyString, int length)

Now you have passed your poor string to the api's demon orgy by reference.

Then some more BS error code checking.

Now you have read an string value 😀

Now keep in mind to repeat these steps for all 300+ columns in the order table.

News from the creators: SQL server? yes, sql is good so everything will be better?

Now imagine the poor developers that got tasked to convert this shitcake to use a MS SQL server, that they did.

Now I can honestly say that I found the best SQL server benchmark tool. This sucker creams out just above ~105K sql statements per second on peak and ~15K per second for 1.5 second to read an order. 1.5 second to read less than 4 fucking kilobytes!

Right at that moment I released that our software would grind to an fucking halt before even thinking about starting it. And that me & myself and I would be tasked to fix it.

4 months later and two weeks until functional beta, here I am. We created our own api with the SQL server 😀

And the outcome of all this...

Fixes bugs older than a year, Forces rewriting part of code base. Forces removal of dirty fixes. allows proper unit and integration testing and even database testing with snapshot feature.

The whole ERP system could be replaced with ~10 lines of code (provided same relational structure) on the application while adding it to our own API library.

Best part is probably the performance improvements 😀. Up to 4500 times faster and 60 times less memory usage also with only managed memory.

Beta testing of LinkedIn by Microsoft.

Most of the CS engineers don't make it to developers for their server fails in the "internship" beta testing phase :P

!rant

My mobile game is going live soon, but I need beta testers to give me feedback about the game. It’s a simple mobile game, think Ketchapp style. If you’re interested in testing and have an iPhone (😱), please either contact me here or on my website or wherever so I can invite you to TestFlight. Thanks!

Went to a food stall, ordered the dishes(very simple and must have dishes in any food stall) in menu, and they replied it not yet available.. coming soon...
I immediately thought that IT world has affected the food industry too..
Now, they have coming soon and TODO in their Menu..
Imagine, waiters telling:
"Sir, the dish you ordered is currently in beta testing phase, and we are working to push it into prod soon. Meanwhile, enjoy the existing features(dishes) provided by our restaurant"

Alright, it's been a while since I expressed my thoughts/feelings but here is what I'm dealing with.

Ever since I was a kid I've played games and even ended up enjoying the testing of new beta games more than actually playing games. The first games I played were atomic bomberman and worms. I was 4 at the time and lived in Denmark. By the age of 6 I moved to The Netherlands and have dealt with 8 years of being bullied for a reason I do not know. So as you can imagine I've dealt with a serious depression for a while and have always felt out of place.

Later after a few failed attempts of following an education I got into development. This was after I wasn't accepted into an education of game design. The course I follow now describes itself as application development but all we're doing there is building websites and not learning a proper way to keep code clean.

In the second year of the three year course we had to follow our first internship. This was the first positive thing I've had with school in my entire life. I ended up working for a company that had a game which tested your skill, the game was used by recruiters for bigger companies to pre select the right people for interviews. I had a look at the code of the game and it was a mess, after a couple of meetings further I managed to get them far enough that I could start working on a complete rewrite of their game.

So far it's been a rough road to becoming a game dev but I most certainly hope to own a studio one day. Now I only need to manage until I've got there

Should I be even be testing if no one cares.

I keep asking Devs regarding the functionalities of their system for testing and then, realize it's already on Prod even before I test in beta or enable to test in beta.

Do I exist!!!

Now, for the nth time, I have started to test when things are almost there or already there in Prod.

I should keep myself in adrenaline mode always on from now on.

Need to do something worthy.

The worst way to start a new job.

Is it worth it to upgrade to Android P beta? Using a Pixel 2. Is it stable enough to warrant testing, or should I wait until more updates/releases come along?

first some background. I'm an intern coming in on the end of my internship (tomorrow's my last day). I've been working on a reasonably important project, more specifically a restful API. We have automation set up so that any commits to master on GitHub are pushed out into a live, accessible version. Some guy (let's call him dumbass) joined our team last week, and has had a few ideas

Dumbass: *opens pull request to my repo*
My boss: *requests changes*
Me: *requests different changes*
(All this before even testing his code, mind you)
Dumbass: *makes requested changes*
Me: *approves changes*

A day passes

My boss: *approves changes*
Me (not even 10 seconds after my boss approved changes): *requests more changes*
(Still haven't tested his code, I just ran A PEP8 compliance test)
Dumbass: *MERGES CHANGES TO MASTER*

Literally EVERYTHING breaks because he was importing a module that's not available

We don't notice until later that day (I'm still working on writing the tests for the automation, for now changes get put on live version even if everything breaks -- tool is still in beta, so everyone working on it (a whole 3 people) knows to TEST THEIR SHIT BEFORE MERGING TO MASTER.)

WHY EVEN BOTHER WITH THE PULL REQUEST IF YOU WERE GOING TO MERGE TO MASTER YOURSELF ANYWAY??!??!??

My frustration cannot be properly conveyed through text, but let's just say this guy's been there a week, I already didn't like him, and then he fucking does this.

Ionic be like: Testing? Fuck that lets just bring out ionic 3.0 beta and let our testing example repo die with a few pull requests from one dude who actually tries to keep it updated

So we have spent the last ~3 weeks creating workarounds for bugs that were found during testing against iOS 11 beta 1.
Today I had to go in and undo all the merges because as of beta 7 Apple have fixed the issues we were seeing.
Weeks of effort wasted that could have been spent upskilling or fixing build issues with an app that will have a release due in the coming weeks and we currently know little about.

Have you guys tried Chrome-beta (build 74)?
I downloaded the beta because of some automated testing and I feel blessed with such smoothness in the UI. I barely even notice these frontend / design things, but I did notice some really good (small) changes!

Hate when a new feature requested by betatester require to change the datastructure. Those feature that force you to start a refactoring while u still in betatesting. Are good in a way, but so much frustrating to get back to alfa or in dev phase while u were just happy that this project came to an end and delivered

Google play console is so fucking confusing, I'm trying to get my app to open beta testing stage, I've completed all the steps and done the full roll out, but the status of the app is still pending publication (3 days), wtf does "Pending publication" means do I need to publish the app for production in order for beta testing release to work, or I have to wait for google to approve the beta release for publish?
I'm lost

In google play store we enabled internal testing track of my app for my testing account. when I visit the page with testing account it says "Internal beta", and few lines below it says I am a "beta tester". Is beta tester the same as internal tester? can't google even consolidate the terms?

In my initial days as a web developer, i was assigned a task, to implement a cart share functionality in an e commerce company.
I made the functionality and tested on my system.
Result: working good.

Pushed it to beta testing environment.
Resilt: working good.

Pushed to pre production environment.
Result: working good.

Pushed to live site.
Result: 😀 Error in live site..
So a call comes to me from my team lead..
Asks what was the issue...

Me: i dont know either.
....

After 3-4 hrs:
I found the reason.
My system, beta test env, pre prod env are all having latest php version (5.6 i guess)
But the live server had old version of php.

Me: laughed like anything.
I didn't know that these things would matter in such a great level.

Moral of the story:
Be one with the force (server in this case)