Partner of ours claimed they are going to update their api. No breakage. My hopes were low and they did not disappoint.

Soon after the new version of their api went live, of course, loads of breakage. And the email contact with them is really fun.

Me: "Hello, since your update we get the issue A. Here's the complete communication."

Them: "We did not change the existing behavior. You are doing X wrong. Repeat that one call during the step and you should be fine."

Me: "Thank you, if I repeat the call, it does indeed work, albeit slower, since we are now repeating calls. Furthermore, our application was consuming your api for years and we did not change anything. So why is that step necessary now? Only after your update do our logs show errors from your API. And by the way, we now also have a issue with B. Why is that?"

Them: "Oh that's because your query the endpoint with "Fnord", try "Baz".

Me: "Yes, I do know that we query it with "Fnord" as that is what a previous endpoint of yours is responding to us. Why are we getting "Fnord"? What request do I have to make to get a "Baz" back?"

It feels like a game of wackamole. Squash one issue, ten more will pop up. I am one step away from becoming active-aggressive.

I fucking hate when someone says something broke the internet! Is it fucking down? Can I fucking play my games? Read my fucking email?

If so, the pictures of Kim's ass, or Nicki's assumed sex tape didn't break the fucking internet!

I learned about this supposed breakage after the fact, from news outlets talking about how is broke!

Has anyone ever worked on a project with no architect or team lead? And where no team member has knowledge of OOP or functional, or restful design, or deep framework knowledge or deep language knowledge? And where the accepted best practice for all devs is to copy paste everything so that there is no area you can change and cause breakage elsewhere? And people regularly commit 1000s of lines methods and have never unit tested before?

Because I do right now. Feel free to ask questions of you want.

It's interesting how netscape was one among to start the dotcom bubble, and how the breakage of said bubble gave Douglas Crockford some time to read ECMA script standards, and really drove him to write the 'good parts' and JSLint. Which then lead millions of js frameworks to bloom; then node, react, now flutter; and what not!

Time travellers should be really careful not to step on that netscape fly!

I know I have a problem with asking for help. I'm aware it's a problem, I want to solve it, and I'm trying, but this is easier said than done.

In my defense however, the issues I'd need to ask for help with are completely absurd. We have a shared Feature environment with a shared database. A push to any feature branch auto-applies migrations to this database, so it's full of broken script output. Tests are supposed to use this database. We do not have full rights to edit this database so we can't try and fix the issues. Instead, the database is reset from production once a week, discarding all changes including anything we deliberately put there for testing. I asked who broke the database and if they could fix it please, somebody responded with freeform text roughly describing the fixes _I should apply to fix HIS TEAM'S mess_, which didn't include any technical identifiers and referred to tables and columns exclusively via vague approximate names.

He then posted a screenshot of an e-mail from about a month ago in which HE complained to MY team lead about how "some people" keep breaking the database, which contained no examples and no suggestions, but was sent immediately after the first time this year that we actually properly broke the shared database. By that point they were past their 10th broken migration that warranted an early restore.