I worked on a greenfield project a couple of years ago. The company had an old solution written in Omnis (heard of it? Yeah, me neither) with an SQL database. My team was to create a completely new web based system... on top of the old database, so the customers could keep their existing stuff.

The dba was an intelligent man, one of the nicest people I've met, and over the course of fifteen years he had made a remarkably terrifying monstrosity of a database. Some years before me they wanted to "future proof" the system and make it "easier to switch to new technologies". So they moved the entire business logic into the database...

I used a tool to create a visualization of said database when we started. It had no views, only tables and sprocs. Look at it! Tables and sprocs are rectangles (well, dots) and any connections are drawn in grey lines. There were no foreign keys, so a tables only visualization only yielded a collection of independent rectangles without a single line.

Now, the stored procedures were bloody MASSIVE. A single procedure that only registered a new interested party and attached them to a property had 2500+ lines and over 150 parameters.

Also, this dba added features and fixed bugs by logging into the respective customers production server and writing SQL.

That database is the stupidest thing I've ever seen a developer do.

I'm glad I'm a dev with flexible work hours...

Free talks with free food is always a win!

I didn't... Some of y'all might argue I'm not even a proper dev.. and I'd agree..
I'm fixing bugz & implementing a thing or two.. but all within how project was done.. you give me a blank project, I'd probably spend days reading up on how to do it properly and still couldn't decide what sounds good to me.

"Why don't you look for a new job?"

I have a monthly coffee meetup with an ex colleague, where we rant about each others frustrations at work. Since she used to be part of my team she knows everybody and can relate to my stories and updates. In short: she was the kick in the boot I needed to start looking, and after the summer break I'll start a new job making 45% more.

It some point in the future we will have smart enough AIs that they can create the tools an applications for us by just telling them what features we want.

We'll still be the only ones who know _how_ to tell them.

Hello NDC! Three days of conference, learning stuff, coffee, motivation, meeting people, coffee, good food, coffee!

I love NDC (Norwegian Developer Conference), it's my ninth time. I just watched Jon Skeet talk about C#8, up next is some Azure stuff. Anybody else here?

Do (hold? perform?) a talk at a developers conference.

!rant

I had a second stage technical interview for a job today. I met three devs who prodded my experience and gave me a task to do (design a complete system architecture for registering sheep, I got ten minutes). I think it went well because after the interview they invited me out for dinner!

Feels good! I might become a consultant soon.

Find a bug 5 minutes before you leave the office, spend 5 hours that evening fixing it unpaid. The next morning you continue how you were from 5 minutes before you left the previous day with that "my code no have bugz" vibe.