My very first rant. I will try to make it count!

Recently my company had restructured with new GM who fired those who he didn't like and hired those who he did.

All ok I guess. And then...

We did a project for a big sportswear brand, interactive installation using WebSocket. My team developed the server with game engine and we also developed "shell front-end" with example code how to connect and interact with server.

Then we realized that our company was actually not hired by sportswear brand, rather by GM buddy-from-the-army tech vendor, who was hired by actual client.

Then, we also realized there is another company, that GM hired as freelancers, sitting at our office doing 'something'. And this 'other company' actually has same employees and address as GM's buddy company (meaning they are one entity with two names).

So.. what happened is that we get paid by party A, then we pay exactly the same amount to party B (which is actually same party A), and at the end... all our work was for free.

And then, this GM tells me I have to fire 2 developers from my team because we don't have enough business.

How did this guy even get to a position of this level?

Getting really sick of brand naming conventions these days, Youtube just suggested me a video called "Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra vs iPhone 11 Pro Max!"

Like what are those, Transformer names? 🙄

I have an unpopular opinion. I think laptop stickers are ugly in general. They make a cacophony of brand names and colors on an otherwise sleek device! Why!

Back in the day, I joined a little agency in Cape Town, small team small office with big projects, projects they weren’t really supposed to take on but hey when the owner of a tech business is not a tech person they do weird things.
A month had passed and it was all good, then came a project from Europe, Poland to be specific. The manager introduced me to the project, it was a big brand - a segment of Lego, built on Umbraco (they should change the name to slowbraco or uhmmm..braco somewhere there) the manager was like so this one is gonna be quite a challenge and I remember you said you are keen on that, I was like hell yeah bring it on (genuinely I got excited) now the challenge was not even about complexity of the problem or code or algorithms etc you get my point… the challenge was that the fucking site was in polish - face palm 1 - so I am like okay code is code, its just content, and I already speak/familiar with 13 human languages so I can’t fail here ill get around it somehow. So I spin up IIS, do the things and boom dev environment is ready for some kick ass McCoding. I start to run through the project to dig into the previous dev’s soul. I could not relate, I could not understand. I could not read, I could not, I could not. - face palm 2 - This dude straight up coded this project in polish variable names in polish, class names in polish, comments in freaking polish. Look, I have no beef with the initial guy, its his language so why not right? sure. But not hey this is my life and now I should learn polish, so screw it, new tab - google translate, new notes, I create a dictionary of variables and class etc 
3 days go by and I am fucking polish bro. Come at me. I get to read the previous devs soul through his comments, what a cool dude, his code wasn’t shit either - huge relief. So I rock on and make the required changes and further functionality. 

The project manager is like really, you did it? I am like yeah dude, there it is. Then I realise I wasn’t the first on this, this dude done tried others and it didn’t go down well, they refused. - face palm 3 -

Anyway, now I am a rock star in the office, and to project managers this win means okay throw him in the deep - they move me to huge project that is already late of course and apparently since I am able to use google translate, I can now defeat time, let the travelling begin. - face palm 4 - I start on the project and they love me on it as they can see major progress however poland was knocking on the door again, they need a whole chunk of work done. I can’t leave the bigger project, so it was decided that the new guy on Monday will start his polish lessons - he has no idea, probably excited to start a new job, meanwhile a shit storm is being prepared for him.

Monday comes, hello x - meet the team, team meets x

Manager - please join our meeting.

I join the meeting, the manager tells me to assist the new dev to get set up.

Me: Sure, did you tell him about he site?

Manager: Yes, I told him you knocked it out the park and now we just need to keep going

Me: in my head (hmm… that’s not what I was asking but cool I guess he will see soon enough -internal face palm 5 - )

New dev is setup, he looks at the project, I am ask him if he is good after like an hour he is like yeah all good. But his face is pink so I figured, no brother man is not okay. But I let him be and give him space.

Lunch time comes, he heads out for lunch. 

1hr 15mins later, project manager is like, is the new dude still at lunch.

We are all like yeah probably. 

2hrs pass 

3hrs pass

Now we are like okay maybe something happened to him, hit by a car? Emergency? Something… 

So I am legit worried now, I ask the manager to maybe give him a ring. 

Manager tries to call. NOTHING, no response. nada.

Next day, 8am, 9am, 10am no sign of the dude. 

I go to the manager, ask him what’s up. 

Manager: he is okay. However he said he is not coming back. 


Felt so awkward today. Bare in mind I am still a junior. I was on a pull request reviewing session on a repo I use. I was being super super pedantic with variable names, data types etc as the people who wrote it are brand new to the company. I then realise I had just reviewed the companies lead developers PR to a different repo. Every time someone comments on a PR on this repo all developers in the company get an email notification. I sat there litrually sweating, bright red with the words 'oh ****' on an infinite loop in my head, staring at the screen waiting to see what was to happen.

Thankfully he was ok with the comments. But now people keep calling me the lead developer (teasing) fml I hate anxiaty

Just me who cringes when people replace brand names they don't like with things like "winshit" or "shitter"?

Not defending any brands though, obviously.

Hey everyone.. I am a Graphic and Web Designer plus developer and I am going to create brand identity for myself but I am looking for something creative and good names. I like something like GraphicOwl or GeekyOwl.. Also suggest a slogan or tagline.

Here is a gem I found when looking at the previous offshore team's database.

So apparently they didn't know that SQL has an ALTER TABLE command to add new columns. So they created a brand new table, version 2, THEN migrated all the data over, every single time a new field was needed.

Then of course they had to update all their code that previously looked at the original table and the clients had to resync data onto the tablets as well.

Maybe they thought it was a good solution since they don't know what database versioning is (something they also manually implemented) or that ORMs exist.

**Sanitized the table names but kept the general structure, casing, etc

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[TVP_NameHere] AS TABLE(
[NameTime] [datetime] NULL,
[NameId] [int] NULL,
[somethingId] [int] NULL,
[fooId] [int] NULL,
[Time] [int] NULL
)

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[TVP_NameHereV002] AS TABLE(
[NewColumnHere] [int] NULL,
[NameTime] [datetime] NULL,
[NameId] [int] NULL,
[somethingId] [int] NULL,
[fooId] [int] NULL,
[Time] [int] NULL
)

WTF?
W_T_F?
W-T-F?
W$T$F?

how the fuck do you brand codebases?

say you've got a brand called dicks,

and you've got a website, api server, some SDK's, and whatever else. How do you format the codebase names so it's A, usable as a variable name, B clickable at the variable part of the name, C, that's fucking it

dicks-website can't be used in js because

dicks-website = require('dicks-website') won't work

dicks_website can't be used in url's and in general because double clicking any part will select the whole word, so you can't replace dicks_X easily.

dicks$api seems to work, dicks and api are seperately clickable, and usable as a variable in javascript. I already know that the $ sign probably fucks up many many systems so that's probably a no go

has this question been addressed already?