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Oh, man, I just realized I haven't ranted one of my best stories on here!
So, here goes!
A few years back the company I work for was contacted by an older client regarding a new project.
The guy was now pitching to build the website for the Parliament of another country (not gonna name it, NDAs and stuff), and was planning on outsourcing the development, as he had no team and he was only aiming on taking care of the client service/project management side of the project.
Out of principle (and also to preserve our mental integrity), we have purposely avoided working with government bodies of any kind, in any country, but he was a friend of our CEO and pleaded until we singed on board.
Now, the project itself was way bigger than we expected, as the wanted more of an internal CRM, centralized document archive, event management, internal planning, multiple interfaced, role based access restricted monster of an administration interface, complete with regular user website, also packed with all kind of features, dashboards and so on.
Long story short, a lot bigger than what we were expecting based on the initial brief.
The development period was hell. New features were coming in on a weekly basis. Already implemented functionality was constantly being changed or redefined. No requests we ever made about clarifications and/or materials or information were ever answered on time.
They also somehow bullied the guy that brought us the project into also including the data migration from the old website into the new one we were building and we somehow ended up having to extract meaningful, formatted, sanitized content parsing static HTML files and connecting them to download-able files (almost every page in the old website had files available to download) we needed to also include in a sane way.
Now, don't think the files were simple URL paths we can trace to a folder/file path, oh no!!! The links were some form of hash combination that had to be exploded and tested against some king of database relationship tables that only had hashed indexes relating to other tables, that also only had hashed indexes relating to some other tables that kept a database of the website pages HTML file naming. So what we had to do is identify the files based on a combination of hashed indexes and re-hashed HTML file names that in the end would give us a filename for a real file that we had to then search for inside a list of over 20 folders not related to one another.
So we did this. Created a script that processed the hell out of over 10000 HTML files, database entries and files and re-indexed and re-named all this shit into a meaningful database of sane data and well organized files.
So, with this we were nearing the finish line for the project, which by now exceeded the estimated time by over to times.
We test everything, retest it all again for good measure, pack everything up for deployment, simulate on a staging environment, give the final client access to the staging version, get them to accept that all requirements are met, finish writing the documentation for the codebase, write detailed deployment procedure, include some automation and testing tools also for good measure, recommend production setup, hardware specs, software versions, server side optimization like caching, load balancing and all that we could think would ever be useful, all with more documentation and instructions.
As the project was built on PHP/MySQL (as requested), we recommended a Linux environment for production. Oh, I forgot to tell you that over the development period they kept asking us to also include steps for Windows procedures along with our regular documentation. Was a bit strange, but we added it in there just so we can finish and close the damn project.
So, we send them all the above and go get drunk as fuck in celebration of getting rid of them once and for all...
Next day: hung over, I get to the office, open my laptop and see on new email. I only had the one new mail, so I open it to see what it's about.
Lo and behold! The fuckers over in the other country that called themselves "IT guys", and were the ones making all the changes and additions to our requirements, were not capable enough to follow step by step instructions in order to deploy the project on their servers!!!
[Continues in the comments]26 -
Not my mom, but my wife's whole family. I'm a software developer.
So we're invited to her grandmother's 85th birthday celebration with pretty much every family member they could think to invite. 100+ people, and we all sit down in a circle in a huge room to watch a video that my wife's father and aunts/uncles put together.
They start the video and there's no sound. I'm a software developer, so I'm not an expert in hardware issues. I try to turn invisible, because every tech person knows what comes next, and this is in the center of a room of people I don't know.
After about 15 minutes of people struggling to get the audio working, one of the people remembers I "work with computer". Soon I have a dozen people calling me to the center of the room.
I begrudgingly make my way to the computer and projector. Upon inspection, I find that the computer is connected via VGA to the projector.
Me: "This cable only carries video. You need a different kind of cable, or you can hook up an AUX cable--the kind you use for headphones."
Other Guy: "I used this cable earlier and the audio was working."
Me: "...that's weird. Well, can we try plugging in an AUX cable?"
Yet Another Guy: "Will this help?" Holds up an HDMI cable
Me: "Oh, yeah! That should do it."
Other Guy: "I tried plugging that in, but it didn't change anything."
Me: "Hmmm..." Quickly unplug VGA and plug in HDMI, then click play.
The sound comes out in its full cheesy music glory. Everybody cheers, and I walk back to my seat. Throughout the rest of party, I'm approached by various other family members who ask me if I can fix X since I'm a "computer guy". Isn't it great to work in tech?12 -
Worst dev team failure I've experienced?
One of several.
Around 2012, a team of devs were tasked to convert a ASPX service to WCF that had one responsibility, returning product data (description, price, availability, etc...simple stuff)
No complex searching, just pass the ID, you get the response.
I was the original developer of the ASPX service, which API was an XML request and returned an XML response. The 'powers-that-be' decided anything XML was evil and had to be purged from the planet. If this thought bubble popped up over your head "Wait a sec...doesn't WCF transmit everything via SOAP, which is XML?", yes, but in their minds SOAP wasn't XML. That's not the worst WTF of this story.
The team, 3 developers, 2 DBAs, network administrators, several web developers, worked on the conversion for about 9 months using the Waterfall method (3~5 months was mostly in meetings and very basic prototyping) and using a test-first approach (their own flavor of TDD). The 'go live' day was to occur at 3:00AM and mandatory that nearly the entire department be on-sight (including the department VP) and available to help troubleshoot any system issues.
3:00AM - Teams start their deployments
3:05AM - Thousands and thousands of errors from all kinds of sources (web exceptions, database exceptions, server exceptions, etc), site goes down, teams roll everything back.
3:30AM - The primary developer remembered he made a last minute change to a stored procedure parameter that hadn't been pushed to production, which caused a side-affect across several layers of their stack.
4:00AM - The developer found his bug, but the manager decided it would be better if everyone went home and get a fresh look at the problem at 8:00AM (yes, he expected everyone to be back in the office at 8:00AM).
About a month later, the team scheduled another 3:00AM deployment (VP was present again), confident that introducing mocking into their testing pipeline would fix any database related errors.
3:00AM - Team starts their deployments.
3:30AM - No major errors, things seem to be going well. High fives, cheers..manager tells everyone to head home.
3:35AM - Site crashes, like white page, no response from the servers kind of crash. Resetting IIS on the servers works, but only for around 10 minutes or so.
4:00AM - Team rolls back, manager is clearly pissed at this point, "Nobody is going fucking home until we figure this out!!"
6:00AM - Diagnostics found the WCF client was causing the server to run out of resources, with a mix of clogging up server bandwidth, and a sprinkle of N+1 scaling problem. Manager lets everyone go home, but be back in the office at 8:00AM to develop a plan so this *never* happens again.
About 2 months later, a 'real' development+integration environment (previously, any+all integration tests were on the developer's machine) and the team scheduled a 6:00AM deployment, but at a much, much smaller scale with just the 3 development team members.
Why? Because the manager 'froze' changes to the ASPX service, the web team still needed various enhancements, so they bypassed the service (not using the ASPX service at all) and wrote their own SQL scripts that hit the database directly and utilized AppFabric/Velocity caching to allow the site to scale. There were only a couple client application using the ASPX service that needed to be converted, so deploying at 6:00AM gave everyone a couple of hours before users got into the office. Service deployed, worked like a champ.
A week later the VP schedules a celebration for the successful migration to WCF. Pizza, cake, the works. The 3 team members received awards (and a envelope, which probably equaled some $$$) and the entire team received a custom Benchmade pocket knife to remember this project's success. Myself and several others just stared at each other, not knowing what to say.
Later, my manager pulls several of us into a conference room
Me: "What the hell? This is one of the biggest failures I've been apart of. We got rewarded for thousands and thousands of dollars of wasted time."
<others expressed the same and expletive sediments>
Mgr: "I know..I know...but that's the story we have to stick with. If the company realizes what a fucking mess this is, we could all be fired."
Me: "What?!! All of us?!"
Mgr: "Well, shit rolls downhill. Dept-Mgr-John is ready to fire anyone he felt could make him look bad, which is why I pulled you guys in here. The other sheep out there will go along with anything he says and more than happy to throw you under the bus. Keep your head down until this blows over. Say nothing."11 -
Still haven't thought of a proper rant to celebrate my achievement but for now, what about a selfie of me with a celebration special beer!53
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And HR looked upon the company and said "let there be no dress-code", all devs cheered in celebration and vowed to make the day a holiday5
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I found my people. We're going to start late night drunken security certification studying. Germany is fucking awesome. I haven't had anything to rant about since my flight here.
Also, celebration: my terrible boss declined the job offer from the company that bought us out. Life fucking rocks10 -
Eid Mubarak everyone. For those who are not familiar with Eid, we have two Eids in a year, this Eid is called Eid Al fitr, which is the celebration day after 30 days of fasting in Ramadan. In this day everyone celebrates by wearing new dresses and visiting their relatives and friends. Also kids get 'Eidiyah', which could an amount of money or candies.8
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The other day we had a little celebration because a website went live.
It’s weird
Somehow it’s easy to spent €100 on celebration food and drinks but it’s hard to sign a €90 paper and allow me to upgrade my computer just a tiny bit.4 -
Oh look, Facebook released yet another thing...
*half arsed celebration*
It hasn't been out 10 minutes but it's already the "BEST THING THAT EVER HAPPENED EVER"
Am i the only one that sees what they are doing. They are creating their own versions of popular projects to gain a monopoly on open source...what a bunch of cunts.
P.S - OPEN SOURCE SHOULDN'T INCLUDE FUCKING PATENTS.
*cue whiney piss babies*5 -
10 year anniversary 'celebration' for a couple of employees (one dev, one a DBA) and the VP of the department was saying kind words about them, talking about the 'good old days'.
VP to the DBA: "I apologize, when you started, you walked into my database architecture. I didn't know that much back then and never thought about the architecture much beyond a few years. Its amazing my design has lasted over 20 years and triple digit business growth..blah blah blah"
Inner voice: "Mother F-er!...My database was designed IN SPITE of your meddling and demanding to create 1,500 field tables. Shut the F up you egotistical bastard!"
I can't even count how many times I had to stop him from, for example, adding a 'ProductID' field to a Customer table.
Me: "Why did you add a product id field?"
VP: "How else will we know what product the customer wants to buy?"
Me: "You mean like a wish list? What if the customer wants more than one product?"
VP: "Oh, that’s easy, we'll create more fields when that happens. ProductID2. Microsoft made it really easy to add fields."
Me: "We already have a wish list table schema. Customer can have as many wish lists and as many products as they want."
VP: "I don't understand. All I want is a field for me to store the product I'm buying. I don't know why you make this so hard, its just one more field."
Now the VP is bragging all the success was due to his expertise?! Gaaaaahhhh!
I quelled my rage with ample quantities of donuts, juice, and chocolate milk.1 -
(From a previous rant I made)
As a note to all of my brothers from India. I am not happy with the current state in which your country is in regards to this bothersome pandemic. I do not feel happy, I am not jumping around singing to the doom you are all facing. I am sad. I know your people are good and your engineers outstanding.
Were it for me you would all be here in the U.S with me chilling with some good bourbon in celebration to how strong you can make our tech be.
My previous post was in regards to scammers, and I am very well aware that you are not at fault.
Be strong brothers, you will all survive this, just as India has survived generations of struggles.5 -
Most awkward work event story?
I haven't had many of those tbh. because I've been WFH last 3 years.
One that I remember was my birthday celebration at a company I worked at in 2019. The boss was hostile towards everybody and paid dog shit salaries. So the work environment wasn't the most uplifting and positive.
So anyway, The boss got a cake and rounded everybody up around me chanting Happy Birthday song to me.
Already awkward, but what made it more awkward was the fact that nobody else was clapping/singing other than the boss.
I looked at everybody and saw the depressed smiles on their faces. I'm glad it only lasted 5 mins.3 -
*packing for a school-hosted graduation celebration with friends*
let's see, first rule of packing for a trip, count on every slim chance happening...
List of things now in backpack:
3 changes of clothes (1-night trip for an all night party in <100-MILE-AWAY MAJOR CITY>)
Laptop
3DS
3x 4-port USB Hubs
10-port power strip (not fully in bag, but mostly so.)
Extra pair of shoes
3.5" external floppy drive
First aid kit
SAK
precision driver set
soldering set
multitool
pliers (1x farmer's, 1x bent needlenose)
multimeter
empty laptop HDD (250GB)
magnet in Altoids tin (can't have it trashing the HDD!)
VGA to RGB (Composite ends) adapter
Composite/S-VIDEO USB capture card
Portable USB chargers (1x 30k mAh 2-port, 1x superslim 3k mAh 1-port)
Enough phone chargers to replace all chargers within 30 miles
Smelling salts
2x 16GB thumbdrives
Boot disc set
$200
School IDs (for bag's ID slot)
3 pairs of decent earbuds (no el cheapo $1 ones because they break trying to get them out of the package)
Serial to USB adapter
Rehydration salts
Magnesium fire striker
Plenty of pens and pencils
Emergency radio locator beacon
Emergency cellular locator beacon
SD/eMMC/CF/TF/MCP(D) USB reader
external HDD reader (2.5" IDE/3.5" IDE/SATA, external power)
am i missing anything?11 -
Continuation of https://devrant.com/rants/4725253/...
So I didn't get the time to post an update this morning, so an afternoon post will have to do. Today's walk was just a little past 12km, giving us all some hope to get it done in a reasonable time. The first six or so kilometers were quite harsh with winds reaching speeds of at least 15 m/s, probably closer to 20. With the rain smattering like tiny bullets our morale was pretty low. What kept us going was the knowledge that just a few kilometers ahead lay a valley a few hundred meters below our current altitude, promising warmer air, and most importantly, less wind.
As we approached the valley we could see trees appearing over the horizon, a good sign as the Swedish Fjäll generally isn't very inviting to trees, and from this point on our walk became more and more pleasant. During lunch everyone could feel the feeling of achievement lingering between us, and another three kilometers later we arrived at our cabins.
So here I am, sitting in a couch in a cozy cabin. Most of us just left the sauna, and in an hour or so we'll have a great meal and probably some celebration. Tomorrow I think we'll just chill out, perhaps pick some mushrooms, and then head to the train to wake up the next day in Malmö, ready for another week of work. Who knows, perhaps I'll even have time to squeeze in another update.
Cheers, time for a nap.
6 -
A report from The Register :
ICANN has halted the proposed $1.1 billion sale of the .org registry to a private equity firm. The DNS overseer has been under growing pressure to use its authority to refuse the planned transfer of the top-level domain from the Internet Society to Ethos Capital. "ICANN ultimately bowed to the US state's top lawyer when it concluded today it "finds the public interest is better served in withholding consent."
The decision will likely spark a mixture of relief and celebration from millions of .org domain holders, including some of the world's largest non-profit organizations, many of which were certain that their long-standing online addresses were going to be milked for profit by an organization that never fully revealed who its directors or investors were.2 -
Whats your celebration step after a piece of code that you debugged for hours finally starts working? Do you clap, do you hurl a mouthfull at the code, do you do a moonwalk?6
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Give me an example of a cool thing your PM/team leader did for your dev team.
Our douche PM got sacked so i need ideas for my fellow dev team 🤓
*chuggs coffe in celebration*2 -
DevRant-Stats Site Update:
Fullscreen Score View
You can click on the button on the top right of the user's score to view it fullscreen.
(Live of course)
Useful for celebration or screenshots.
Have fun!6 -
Turn on colorful lights
Fire up some crackers
Consume sweets
Browse places with friends
Debug darkness
Reboot your inner system
😀 HAPPY DIWALI 😀
✨✨🎈🎊🎋🎑🎊🎏🎀🎁2 -
! rant
after about three months of unsuccessful attempts, my windows just managed to install the "create falls update", or whatever is it called.
anyone up for a celebration? 🎉2 -
This is one of my really passionate issue with the world, ** Food waste **
Isn't it the most dumbest problem? Every time a marriage, celebration, event happens at the end of the day a huge portion of the high quality food is just thrown into a dump. Does just picking up the trash or disposing the waste solve anything or is it just a way corporation schemed us to believe we are doing something for the world by disposing waste.5 -
Devs out there.. what is your celebration / how do you celebrate when your task / code works as you expected .9
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Well, Halloween or Hallowe'en (a contraction of All Hallows' Evening), also known as Allhalloween, All Hallows' Eve, or All Saints' Eve, is a spooky celebration observed every year in a number of countries on October 31 - the eve of the Western Christian feast of All Hallows' Day, also known as All Saints' Day. In 2017, Halloween falls on a Tuesday
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Knew it was a bad idea to work on my project over the break, and I am stuck for a day and have to spend the new year celebration being stuck.
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while(!Success)
{
finals.toStudyFor();
if(Dead||!(finals.toStudyFor))
{
up.wake;
finals.toStudyFor();
}
else
{
home--;
family.disown();
life.fail();
}
if(Success)
{
down.lie();
notToCry.try();
cryALot.do();
celebration==true;
}
} -
Hi guys! Last time you gave me a lot of good advice about my gophers. Thanks! Kubernetes Contributor Celebration is coming soon so I have these cute gophers
If you liked it and want to support me on Redbubble
https://redbubble.com/people/...
or TeePublic https://teepublic.com/user/...
Thanks!
5
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