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Search - "bug turned into a feature"
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Hey guys,
this rant will be long again. I'm sorry for any grammar errors or something like that, english isn't my native language. Furthermore I'm actually very sad and not in a good mood.
Why? What happened? Some of you may already know - I'm doing my apprenticeship / education in a smal company.
There I'm learning a lot, I'm developing awesome features directly for the clients, experience of which other in my age (I'm only 19 years old) can only dream.
Working in such a small company is very exhausting, but I love my job, I love programming. I turned my hobby into a profession and I'm very proud of it.
But then there are moments like the last time, when I had to present something for a client - the first presentation was good, the last was a disaster, nothing worked - but I learned from it.
But this time everything is worse than bad - I mean really, really worse than bad.
I've worked the whole week on a cool new feature - I've done everything that it works yesterday, that everything gets done before the deadline of yesterday.
To achieve this I've coded thursday till 10pm ! At home! Friday I tested the whole day everything to ensure that everything is working properly. I fixed several bugs and then at the end of the day everything seems to be working. Even my boss said that it looks good and he thinks that the rollout to all clients will become good and without any issues.
But unfortunately deceived.
Yesterday evening I wrote a long mail to my boss - with a "manual". He was very proud and said that he is confident that everything will work fine. He trusts me completly.
Then, this morning I received a mail from him - nothing works anymore - all clients have issues, everything stays blank - because I've forgotten to ensure that the new feature (a plugin) and its functionality is supported by the device (needs a installation).
First - I was very shoked - but in the same moment I thought - one moment - you've written an if statement, if the plugin is installed - so why the fuck should it broken everything?!
I looked instant to the code via git. This has to be a very bad joke from my boss I thought. But then I saw the fucking bug - I've written:
if(plugin) { // do shit }
but it has to be if(typeof plugin !== 'undefined')
I fucked up everything - due to this fucking mistake. This little piece of shit I've forgotten on one single line fucked up everything. I'm sorry for this mode of expression but I thought - no this can not be true - it must be a bad bad nightmare.
I've tested this so long, every scenario, everything. Worked till the night so it gets finished. No one, no one from my classmates would ever think of working so long. But I did it, because I love my job. I've implemented a check to ensure that the plugin is installed - but implemented it wrong - exactly this line which caused all the errors should prevent exactly this - what an irony of fate.
I've instantly called my boss and apologized for this mistake. The mistake can't be undone. My boss now has to go to all clients to fix it. This will be very expensive...
Oh my goodnes, I just cried.
I'm only working about half a year in this company - they trust me so much - but I'm not perfect - I make mistakes - like everyone else. This time my boss didn't looked over my code, didn't review it, because he trusted me completly - now this happens. I think this destroyed the trust :( I'm so sad.
He only said that we will talk on monday, how we can prevent such things in the feature..
Oh guys, I don't know - I've fucked up everything, we were so overhelmed that everything would work :(
Now I'm the looser who fucked up - because not testing enough - even when I tested it for days, even at home - worked at home - till the night - for free, for nothing - voluntary.
This is the thanks for that.
Thousand good things - but one mistake and you're the little asshole. You - a 19 year old guy, which works since 6 months in a company. A boss which trusts you and don't look over your code. One line which should prevent crashing, crashed everything.
I'm sorry that this rant is so long, I just need to talk to you guys because I'm so sad. Again. This has happend to frequently lately.16 -
Tldr; my "this is not bug, its a feature" moment actually turned my bug into a feature.
Today we were presenting a project which has imposible deadline. I am developing this small project alone (which is probably good). I implemented core features first but I know project still have bugs and a lot of tech debts. Another friend started to presenting our demo and a wild bug appeared as expected. He was adding rows to a table. To add a new you gotta open new modal by clicking + button and fill the form. One of the fields had a bug. When you add row by clicking Ok button, the value of the field stayed there after you open modal again. So its basically a state problem in React. I forgot to clear previous state of modal. When they see that and my friend said "oh we got a bug there". Then I enabled my mic and said "thats not a bug, thats a feature. I didn't want to enter that field again and again when I adding multiple rows and made it persistent." and you know what? They liked the idea! They requested to add that bug to two more fields. I was just joking and my "this is not bug, its a feature" moment actually turned my bug into a feature. Instead of fixing it, I'm creating more of this bug. LOL!5 -
So what was originally some issue for my dual booting laptop has turned into something awesome, originally I'd boot and get into grub and choose windows or mint but with a need to get bluetooth to work I went to check some settings in the bios and after no changes I left to reboot and use mint.
Anyways it would only boot to Windows and I got a little annoyed but was able to, with the boot order changer, load up grub.
So now my laptop has a hidden boot option into mint :D thought it was a neat little feature (because I don't know how to fix it lol), completely hidden from my windows partition (unless you check disk manager).8 -
I had written a feature that stored some data for all methods in a code base. And it worked in 99.9% of all cases, but for some projects, somehow there were errors in the logs that I couldn't understand.
After hours of debugging, it turned out that I inserted the method objects into a map, and the (existing) base class for these objects used the character offsets for the method's start & end in the hashCode() implementation. This meant that in the (extremely rare) case of two methods in two files with the exact same start and end offsets, inserting them into a map would overwrite the previous value.
Once uncovered, this bug was trivial to fix ;) -
So I'm writing my compiler and I decide to test error handling, see if I'm catching unexpected tokens and whatnot. I try duplicating a semi-colon at the end of a line, for sure it'll give me an error since that's an unexpected token, isn't it? So I run the compiler and... No errors? I start debugging for a few minutes, snoop around, everything seems ok... "Huh, that's weird" and then it dawns on me, a semi-colon only marks the end of a statement. So, technically, it's not an unexpected token if you have an empty statement (which wouldn't break any rules about statements). I decide to try out my theory. I put ;;;;;;;; at the end of a random line in my rust code, hit compile and... it compiles! So that means it is not a bug anymore! I mean, if the big guys that actually know a tad about language design, compilers and all that cool stuff allow it in their languages, why shouldn't it? So I did it, I turned a bug into a feature and now I can go to sleep in peace and stop dreaming about fucking abstract syntax trees (don't mind my kinks >:) ).
Yeah anyways thanks for reading, till next time! Bye!1 -
How do you deal when you are overpromising and underdelivering due to really shitty unpredictable codebase? Im having 2-3 bad sprints in a row now.
For context: Im working on this point of sale app for the past 4 months and for the last 3 sprints I am strugglig with surprises and edgecases. I swear to god each time I want to implement something more complex, I have to create another 4-5 tickets just to fix the constraints or old bugs that prevent my feature implementation just so I could squeeze my feature in. That offsets my original given deadlines and its so fucking draining to explain myself to my teamlead about why feature has to be reverted why it was delayed again and so on.
So last time basically it went like this: Got assigned a feature, estimated 2 weeks to do it. I did the feature in time, got reviewed and approved by devs, got approved by QA and feature got merged to develop.
Then, during regression testing 3 blockers came up so I had to revert the feature from develop. Because QA took a very long time to test the feature and discover the blockers, now its like 3 days left until the end of the sprint. My teamlead instantly started shitting bricks, asked me to fix the blockers asap.
Now to deal with 3 blockers I had to reimplement the whole feature and create like 3 extra tickets to fix existing bugs. Feature refactor got moved to yet another sprint and 3 tickets turned into like 8 tickets. Most of them are done, I created them just to for papertrail purposes so that they would be aware of how complex this is.
It taking me already extra 2 weeks or so and I am almost done with it but Im going into really deep rabbithole here. I would ask for help but out of other 7 devs in the team only one is actually competent and helpful so I tried to avoid going to him and instead chose to do 16 hour days for 2 weeks in a row.
Guess what I cant sustain it anymore. I get it that its my fault maybe I should have asked for help sooner.
But its so fucking frustrating trying to do mental gymnastics over here while majority of my team is picking low hanging fruit tasks and sitting for 2 weeks on them but they manage to look good infront of everyone.
Meanwhile Im tryharding here and its no enough, I guess I still look incompetent infront of everyone because my 2 weeks task turned into 6 weeks and I was too stubborn to ask for help. Whats even worse now is that teamlead wants me to lead a new initiative what stresses me even more because I havent finished the current one yet. So basically Im tryharding so much and I will get even extra work on top. Fucking perfect.
My frustration comes from the point that I kinda overpromised and underdelivered. But the thing is, at this point its nearly impossible to predict how much a complex feature implementation might take. I can estimate that for example 2 weeks should be enough to implement a popup, but I cant forsee the weird edgecases that can be discovered only during development.
My frustration comes from devs just reviewing the code and not launching the app on their emulator to test it. Also what frustrates me is that we dont have enough QA resources so sometimes feature stands for extra 1-2 weeks just to be tested. So we run into a situation where long delays for testing causes late bug discovery that causes late refactors which causes late deliveries and for some reason I am the one who takes all the pressure and I have to puloff 16 hour workdays to get something done on time.
I am so fucking tired from last 2 sprints. Basically each day fucking explaining that I am still refactoring/fixing the blocker. I am so tired of feeling behind.
Now I know what you will say: always underpromise and overdeliver. But how? Explain to me how? Ok example. A feature thats add a new popup? Shouldnt take usually more than 2 weeks to do my part. What I cant promise is that devs will do a proper review, that QA wont take 2 extra weeks just to test the feature and I wont need another extra 2 weeks just to fix the blockers.
I see other scrum team devs picking low hanging fruit tasks and sitting for 2 weeks on them. Meanwhile Im doing mental gymnastics here and trying to implement something complex (which initially seemed like an easy task). For the last 2 weeks Im working until 4am.
Im fucking done. I need a break and I will start asking other devs for help. I dont care about saving my face anymore. I will start just spamming people if anything takes longer than a day to implement. Fuck it.
I am setting boundaries. 8 hours a day and In out. New blockers and 2 days left till end of the sprint? Sorry teamlead we will move fixes to another sprint.
It doesnt help that my teamlead is pressuring me and asking the same shit over and over. I dont want them to think that I am incompetent. I dont know how to deal with this shit. Im tired of explaining myself again and again. Should I just fucking pick low hanging fruit tasks but deliver them in a steady pace? Fucking hell.4